Apocalyptic nihilism and tax avoidance

February 19th, 2010

Views: 55

Posted in: political, usa
by ChrisG at 12:51 pm

Bound to be a big tussle over the body, I suspect, mainly to do with getting accusations to stick: was he a teabagger or a closet anti-capitalist? More of a poujadiste I guess, given the contempt shown in his note for the interlocking segments of the power elite. That is, being out for the little people against the big ones (including amongst the “big ones” anything that smacks of the establishment, and therefore also perhaps anything that represents or supports the “stealing of our enjoyment”, including anything that can be associated with political correctness).

And the inevitable question: what is it about the culture of “these people” that creates a worldview in which the wholesale murder of strangers is seen as a legitimate act of political protest? I mean, suicide bombing! You just can’t reason with this sort of barbarian, can you…? Etc.

Joseph Stack was a software engineer, so another data point in support of this thesis.

What’s the French for Schadenfreude?

February 10th, 2010

Views: 67

Posted in: art and media, kant, philosophische
by ChrisG at 10:50 am

Latest from la gauche décente.

Mr Pagès kept up the joke last night, saying: “It has never been firmly established that Botul didn’t exist and it cannot thus be ruled out that one day history will prove Bernard-Henri Lévy right.”

Just like the moral case for the invasion of Iraq. Ba-dum tish.

God is dead, but my hair is perfect

National Gridlocked (Again)

February 3rd, 2010

Views: 102

Posted in: environment, gas
by ChrisG at 2:28 pm

Latest on the South Wales Gas Pipeline: National Grid’s resubmitted planning application for an above-ground installation in Gloucestershire has been thrown out once again, this time by Tewkesbury council. The initial application was rejected by Forest of Dean, following a tenacious campaign by local campaigners CAPRI, after a planning inquiry in which the Grid was criticised by planning officers for providing misleading information, and during which an essential risk assessment document, to borrow a laconic comment from one of those involved, “proved impossible to locate”.

House of Lords Lashes Industry and Government over Nanofoods

January 8th, 2010

Views: 102

Posted in: art and media, environment, nanotechnology, political, uk
by ChrisG at 10:00 am

Report here [PDF]. Food companies are not being open enough about their research into nanotechnology, according to the House of Lords select committee on science and technology – their findings get a lot of attention in the news today, but the report is – perhaps more importantly – also critical of the government for not being active enough in sponsoring toxicological research to address the formidable complexities involved in assessing any potential hazards associated with food-related nanomaterials sloshing around in the body (and later, in the environment), and for not pursuing actively enough public consultation on what social needs people actually think are pressing enough to warrant the use of nanotechnology (solar energy or better tasting chocolate?).

The legacy of GM, when it comes to debates over food uses of nanotech, is notable when public opinion is canvassed: studies in the US, UK and Germany have all shown that people are notably less enthusiastic about nano when nano-enabled “functional foods” or “nutraceuticals” are mentioned. Secrecy is not going to help (although transparency is, by itself, not enough – active public consultation influencing the future directions of the technology according to explicitly chosen social priorities is far more important – a couple of quotations from me to this effect are buried somewhere in section 7 of the report), although there is plenty of fear in the food industry about the possibility of a public backlash against the technology – and also plenty of paralysis, married with worries about whether the kinds of life-cycle risk assessment necessary to understand potential hazards of nanofoods are even possible.

Which is not likely to be helped by efforts like this from – who else? – the Daily Mail.

Pushing the wrong buttons

Nice use of “swamping” from the Mail’s style guide there, as recommended for describing anything that involved the threatening and anxiety-producing crossing of reassuringly rigid boundaries (paging Klaus Theweleit…). The weirdly stubborn use of “grey goo” (in the belief, presumably, that this is the only phrase associated with nanotechnology that most people will have heard – and the Mail has good form on this particular bit of stupidity: see here and here) is perplexing, particularly given that for some reason the writer appears to think (judging by the concatenation in the headline and in the first paragraph) that nanoparticles just are grey goo. Even Michael Crichton didn’t make that mistake.

Future Matters Online

December 17th, 2009

Views: 106

Posted in: any other business?, philosophische, responsibility & future
by ChrisG at 3:30 pm

Just discovered the book I wrote two years ago with Barbara Adam is now on Google Books. Which is nice, particularly seeing as it’s still retailing for over £50 a pop.

If that’s not enough, then why not comprehensively spoil your Sunday morning by listening to me pontificate about high-level nuclear waste, the digitization of information and obligations to future generations on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this week (20th December, 9-10am)?

Our Benefits, Your Costs

November 26th, 2009

Views: 121

Posted in: environment, nuclear power
by ChrisG at 2:47 pm

On the subject of the imposition of risk – and matters of consent – check out this post from Justin McKeating over at Greenpeace’s Nuclear Reaction blog.

The negative impacts of uranium mining – through the impact of tailings and other forms of waste on watercourses, and other forms of contamination – on the (generally impoverished) communities near mining operations have long been pointed to by activists. Wherever uranium is mined, these impacts are felt – from Africa to Central Asia to Australia.

For the industry, the risks of such impacts are externalities, i.e. costs which others are made to bear. Managing the risks of power generation by redistributing them – in space and in time – so that those who gain the benefits never have to worry about running the risks, is a structurally necessary element of centralised approaches to energy provision, and piggybacks on the legacy of imperialism to boot.

This is what we must accept if we are to continue using nuclear power for our energy needs. The uranium from Niger is used to keep the lights on in France. Nuclear reactors must have uranium. To obtain that uranium it seems that people must suffer.

AREVA has a track record of making others pay for the energy security of France – villagers who live near to the mines in Niger as Justin points out, and also the workers who extract the uranium in the first place: [PDF]

The French state-owned company mines uranium in northern Niger under scandalous conditions: Mine workers are not informed about health risks, and analysis shows radioactive contamination of air, water and soil. In his address, Almoustapha Alhacen, president of the local organization Aghirin’man that represents those affected, spoke of “suspicious deaths among the workers, caused by radioactive dust and contaminated groundwater.”

Campaigners’ tenacity pays off

November 19th, 2009

Views: 177

Posted in: environment, europe, gas, political, uk
by ChrisG at 2:48 pm

Lack of transparency about risk often underlies environmental injustice.

Look at any planning issue with an environmental impact, and this becomes apparent – especially where there is a trade-off between some definition of “national interest” and local impact, as with energy infrastructure (wind turbines as much as nuclear power stations). Risk has, for example, been at the heart of so many of the conflicts which sprang up along the length of the South Wales Gas Pipeline while it was being built.

It’s important to understand that risks are not free-floating objects with which we simply collide. They are created through social relationships, and are impossible to understand outside these relationships, which are themselves inflected by inequalities of power. For example, I am a “financial innovator”, and so get to run a risk, if I choose to; whereas, you, as a homeowner, get to have one imposed on you when my flush is busted. Risks which are imposed are typically viewed as less acceptable than ones which are chosen – and the consequences of imposing risks can be individually and socially serious harms: creating social conflicts further down the line (splitting communities, breaking implicit links of trust and so on), and entrenching exploitative and oppressive relationships (testified to by the history of environmental racism and environmental justice more widely, and nicely summed up by William Freudenberg’s remark regarding how often technical planning criteria tend to be satisfied “on the poor side of town”). The sociological and psychological evidence for the damage done by the imposition of risk and the attendant everyday uncertainty it brings is contained in, for example, the work of Peter Marris, Michael Edelstein and Kai Erikson.

This is why it is vital to ensure that there is some kind of mechanism through which explicit consent from those who will bear the risk can be sought and given. But here it is vital that there is transparency about what risks are actually involved. And here the problem of planning often gets entangled with the discourse of “security”, especially when it is energy security that is at issue. Information about installations of “national importance” is now held to be highly sensitive, and is subject to the DA-Notice system, where these installations come under the definition of Critical National Infrastructure. Consequently, transparency – before the issue of whether democratic means of seeking consent are in place – tends to falter at the first hurdle.

This has undoubtedly been the experience of campaigners against the LNG terminals at Milford Haven and those fighting the South Wales Gas Pipeline. In particular, the tortuous battle fought by campaigners at Milford to get the authorities to release copies of risk assessments undertaken on the full spectrum of risks (and uncertainties) surrounding the use of LNG tankers in the Cleddau estuary demonstrates that the basic elements of proper consent are ignored and suppressed by the conjunction of corporate and political interests that defines energy policy in terms of “energy security”. But now, the long, hard-fought campaign has struck a major blow thanks to a demand by the European Court of Human Rights.

The court has said it wants more details. It has asked the government which bodies had responsibility for assessing the risks and advising the planning authorities, and how responsibility was divided. In particular, the court wants to know if the relevant authorities “properly assessed the risk and consequences of a collision of LNG vessels, or other escape of LNG from a vessel in Milford Haven harbour or while berthed at the jetty”, and if “relevant information on the nature and extent of the risk posed by the hazardous industrial activities has been disclosed to the public”.

The UK Government has until February to respond, and to enable some of the questions which have gone unaddressed since 2004 to finally get an answer.

(meant to write this up earlier in the week, but have been hit by the lurgy)

Long Exposure

November 12th, 2009

Views: 131

Posted in: environment, nanotechnology
by ChrisG at 10:32 am

Assessing chemical hazards is not easy; this interesting post from Richard Denison over at the EDF’s Chemicals and Nanomaterials blog points out some reasons why, mainly to do with a distinction (which, as I have noted before, is not unproblematic) between intrinsic hazard and the extrinsic, relational properties of chemicals which make a complex temporal procession of exposure scenarios possible.

The difficulties of measuring exposure are based on the complexity of the processes into which a chemical enters over time.

The highly variable nature of exposure poses a major challenge to exposure (and risk) assessment: It means that exposure assessment must be an ongoing activity, with the scope and frequency of its measurement sufficient to characterize the variation (spatial and temporal) in, as well as magnitude of, exposure. That’s but one reason why exposure assessment is often called the “weakest link” in risk assessment.

First, it’s difficult for public agencies to collect, collate and assess the kind of information necessary to establish whether humans or ecologies are undergoing exposure, given the distribution of exposure scenarios in time and space (production of chemicals, transportation, incorporation in products, use of products, disposal, degradation). Second, imagining exposure scenarios often relies on assumptions about the underlying processes which turn out to be wildly inappropriate:

Phthalates are very widely used in products ranging from plastics to cosmetics and other personal care products. They exhibit a range of toxicity, including to the liver, kidney, and male reproductive system. The first CDC National Report demonstrated surprisingly high levels of di-butyl phthalate (DBP) and di-ethyl phthalate (DEP) in U.S. residents in general, and for DBP, in women of child-bearing age in particular (see the first two letters here). Indeed, these data demonstrated high-end levels of DBP that were an order of magnitude higher than a prior estimate that had been developed based on industry-provided use data and expert judgment.

The political angle here is important: producing the required data, interpreting it and setting up appropriate monitoring programmes requires transparent, legally enforceable and long-term relationships between private and public bodies in order to monitor stuff, and thereby promote the common good. But there is a basic and familiar conflict of interest here:

It simply must be acknowledged that industry has a strong interest in maintaining that exposure to its chemicals is low, so the ability to independently measure and verify exposure data is critical. Yet physical access to many exposure “settings” (e.g., workplaces) is very limited and infrequent at best, even for government officials.

In other words, industry has an interest in being irresponsible, in limiting the scope of risk assessment to relatively simple, acute, and short-term scenarios. But such a focus elevates managing short-term uncertainty for competitive advantage by private interests over the need to manage longer-term uncertainty for the common good.

Not that such an approach is endemic to the economic system or anything.

The car is killing the car

November 11th, 2009

Views: 125

Posted in: environment, marx & marxism, philosophische, pol. phil.
by ChrisG at 3:48 pm

Just found this over at Copenhagenize.com, Andre Gorz’s devastating little essay on fossil fuel culture [subscription needed], from all the way back in 1973.

Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the “others,” who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behaviour, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace.

Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

It’s easy to see the parallels here with Ivan Illich (an extract from Energy and Equity is also up). Through their critique of the symbolic potency of the car, both show how managerialism and/or technocracy replace striving for a just political community with the never-ending quest for the most efficient reproduction of the social order. The limits on political freedom appearing as the guarantee of personal liberty.

Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.

Bikes and open-access publishing or death!

Passing the Peak

November 10th, 2009

Views: 120

Posted in: environment, europe, oil, political, uk, usa
by ChrisG at 9:49 am

Has the IEA been playing down peak oil to keep the markets from going nutzoid? Ex-Agency people are reporting that it has, suggesting that we are closer to the end of cheap oil than governments have been willing to admit.

A report by the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC) last month said worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could “peak” and go into terminal decline before 2020 – but that the government was not facing up to the risk. Steve Sorrell, chief author of the report, said forecasts suggesting oil production will not peak before 2030 were “at best optimistic and at worst implausible”.

“Modernisation”: Just Say Yes

November 9th, 2009

Views: 122

Posted in: environment, gas, nuclear power, political, uk
by ChrisG at 10:06 pm

Two energy-related developments today: first, Ed Miliband continues to believe that gutting the planning system of its last vestiges of accountability is a price worth paying for getting some new nuclear capacity by (maybe) 2018.

“The truth is we’re not going to be able to deliver a 21st-century energy system with a 20th-century planning system,” said Miliband. “Saying no everywhere would not be in the national interest.”

The great leap forward, coming soon to the neighbourhood of an knackered nuclear facility near you (for us that’s Hinkley Point, just across the Bristol Channel).

Second, LNG developments across the Irish Sea. The long-running saga of the Co Mayo Corrib gas field pipeline has produced a victory for campaigners against the pipeline and associated Shannon LNG terminal who have been seeking to have the gas pipeline rerouted away from their homes.

In a letter to Shell yesterday, the board said documentation provided by the oil and gas giant did not present a “complete, transparent and adequate demonstration that the pipeline does not pose an unacceptable risk to the public”. It said that more than half the route, or 5.6km, ran too close to homes, which was “unacceptable”, and that it must be re-routed.

Debates over siting decisions often do not turn around differences of opinion between experts over the probability of an accident, i.e. debates over the correct way to interpret current scientific evidence concerning recognised safety factors. Often, the key issue is acceptability of risk, which can have nothing to do with probability – for example, the nature of possible consequences and the degree to which a risk has been imposed on someone without their consent may be cited. In other words, siting conflicts tend to turn on ethical and political questions of value, which debates that restrict themselves to issues of risk probabilities cannot address. The unacceptability for local residents of many of the siting decisions taken around the South Wales Gas Pipeline and Milford Haven LNG terminals concerned precisely the nature of the potential consequences of placing potentially dangerous infrastructure (and in Milford, with its existing petrochemical industries, of cascading risks) in close proximity to communities, and also the failure to seek the consent of those living there who would suffer these consequences should they materialise.

The decision on the Corrib pipeline is interesting (and welcome) because it locates the siting decision in its proper social and political context: consequences and consent matter more than mere probability. It’s unfortunate that Miliband and the UK Government have decided that they should base their future energy policy on doing their utmost to continue undermining this principle.

Stirrings

October 13th, 2009

Views: 162

Posted in: environment, gas, political, uk
by ChrisG at 3:10 pm

A few visits this morning to SW from National Grid’s buddies-formerly-known-as-Advantica (now apparently part of Germanischer Lloyd) over in Loughborough, checking on some of the posts here on the potential safety flaws resulting from alleged dubious practices engaged in by contractors during the laying of the South Wales Gas Pipeline.

Which gives me an opportunity to point up the latest update from CAPRI over in Gloucestershire provide on the progress of their ongoing campaign to stop National Grid completing the (still unfinished) pipeline by building intrusive and potentially hazardous infrastructure in their vicinity.

Following a well-conducted campaign back in 2007, CAPRI succeeded in getting the original planning proposal thrown out. The planning tribunal’s judgement included harsh criticism of National Grid for engaging in deceptive practices, especially concerning the existence of detailed risk assessments. On being asked to produce the appropriate assessment documentation for the proposed installation, a very brief – and generic – summary document was brought out. When the tribunal asked for the original, “it proved impossible to locate it” (as a member of CAPRI I interviewed last year wryly put it).

Seems the Grid have now issued an entirely speculative compulsory purchase order for land on which their installation would be built – should the planning proposal they have (re)submitted be allowed. Whilst doing so, they appear to have indulged once again their predilection for misrepresentation, stating that they have engaged in “extensive discussions” with CAPRI (which the group vehemently denies). This is perhaps not surprising given their insistence earlier on in the re-submission process that they had consulted “at each stage” with CAPRI in narrowing down the number of possible sites – something which CAPRI pointed out angrily was an outright fabrication, designed presumably to make the resubmission process appear vaguely legitimate.

One-Shotism: The Case of Tidal Power

October 8th, 2009

Views: 155

Posted in: environment, political, uk
by ChrisG at 9:07 am

Down to the Cardiff Bay Barrage last Friday for this event, which I’d hoped was going to examine in something like forensic detail the different shortlisted options for developing tidal power in the Severn Estuary. In the end, the morning was dominated by the Big Barrage, mainly thanks to Roger Falconer’s robustly presented arguments for the Cardiff-Western Super Mare option.

Perhaps the morning was a fair sample of how the public debate (due to officially open again next year, with the next public consultation) will probably go: framing the issues primarily in terms of “one-shotism”, and then struggling to stay on top of the massive problems that will follow – trying to get the finances sorted out, the impact on communities at either end of the project of ten years of being surrounded by massive building sites, the effects on biodiversity (by no means unambiguously bad, but given the metrics used to assess damage under EU law, there may be a requirement to compensate for up to 14,000Ha of habitat loss).

Tidal power implies a UK strategy: but what we have here is a reduction of this strategy to a debate which promises to be about a one shot Severn-based project. Expect to witness a mega-barrage being set up opposite some mega-lagoons for a winner-takes-all scrap. The Welsh Assembly will talk it up as the most iconic of iconic projects, putting Wales on the global sustainability map, etc. etc., and whoever is in Westminster at the time will no doubt do the same for the UK. The symbolic capital that can be leveraged by a massive, £20bn+ project of this kind would be huge. The figures that back it up are on the face of it, impressive: 5% of the UK’s total energy needs supplied in one go.

Backing up this kind of argument is, I think, a kind of moralism in energy policy, supplementing the inevitable managerialism of neo-liberal government: renewable energy is good, the more of it the better. Government’s role is to ensure that the right “signals” are sent to those with the money to make it happen (international constructors like McAlpine, etc.). Massive signature projects are more attractive, as a result. But the impulse to centralisation continues to dominate: one shot or nothing. What about other estuaries around the country? The development of tidal flow technologies which may be more suited to distributed construction around the coastline? Where are these options, and where is the wider strategy?

Here, once again, the question of what technology we want comes tied up with political questions about what kind of society we want to live in. A decentralised, more democratic one, in which networked, localised power generation, redundancy in infrastructure, and distributed, community based ownership of generating capacity is pursued? Or one dominated by massive projects which take on equally massive inertia, and which will probably override democratic decision making processes, and result in more opportunities for interpenetration of private industry and government?

And what happens if the whole thing fails? If no-one wants to invest in a project which might take 20 years (after planning processes and engineering setbacks) to finish? Despair, cynicism, ressentiment at the impotent moral ideals which the project was supposed to embody. We might follow Andre Gorz at this point, and see moralism as a possible factor within the evolution of an ecofascist response to crisis – along with the corporate ownership of energy production, and managerialist government.

The problem with failed one-shot solutions, is that, as the dust settles, the state of emergency (rumbling along at the moment in the form of discussions of “energy security”) may make a serious comeback.

A Little Appreciation

September 18th, 2009

Views: 136

Posted in: political, uk, usa
by ChrisG at 8:41 am

Quote of the week from Phila (though to really appreciate it, you’ll need to read the whole post):

At which point, we’ll finally be able to move our country forward, and affirm those timeless values on which the far right and the center can agree.

Meanwhile, with more than a little synchronicity, over at the Encyclopaedia we find an apology on behalf of the Decently Concerned everywhere:

Nobody is more shocked than we are that this abhorrent crowd of violent racists have suddenly sprung up, as if from nowhere, with no encouragement from anyone. We have spent years warning that politically correct attitudes were opening the country to a dire threat from a very small number of Islamic extremists, and we are disgusted by these demonstrations by thugs warning that politically correct attitudes are opening the country to a dire threat from a very large number of Islamic extremists while chanting racist slogans.

UPDATE [12.17pm]: Lenin weighs in too.

Nanotech: The Next Generation

September 15th, 2009

Views: 179

Posted in: environment, ethics, nanotechnology, philosophische, responsibility & future
by ChrisG at 4:08 pm

At this event last week, I had to leave early and so missed Andrew Maynard’s contribution to the closing debate on the difficulties of regulating the “next generation” of nanotechnology. The grand vision that has been promulgated for a long time by advocates of long-term revolutionary nanotech is for atomically precise control over matter, with the aim of producing systems which can engineer functional structures of various kinds on the nanoscale. Among the functions and capacities which might be possible (it’s said) is autonomy, ranging in scope from the ability of a system to modify itself in response to environmental changes to more refined forms of artificial intelligence and self-directed activity. Instances of the former already exist, in the form of nano and micro scale encapsulation of drugs, producing tiny drug-transporting “bombs” (possibly the most popular metaphor for this tech among researchers, though I’m open to correction) which can be conveyed to a particular site in the body and then triggered with e.g. infrared light.

Maynard has very helpfully written up his presentation from the day, which revolves around the observation that a the problem of how to regulate passive nanomaterials (like the sort of things that end up in toothpastes, facecreams and socks) has to date been “how materials engineered at a nanometer scale might behave differently to more conventional materials, and how this might affect their safe use.”

And indeed, this is at the heart of the continuing vicious regulatory circle in which nanotech finds itself, where regulators wait for more data from researchers and companies so they can frame laws, and researchers and companies wait for regulatory guidance before they develop new technologies and release data.

Read on »

Østerbrogade

September 2nd, 2009

Views: 134

Posted in: any other business?, art and media
by ChrisG at 6:59 pm

A trollish figure, wall-mounted by some Danish Banksy, shows us the kind of cartoonish bliss that awaits us all upon attaining OTIII and beyond.

Technology and commercial fixes

September 1st, 2009

Views: 267

Posted in: environment, nanotechnology
by ChrisG at 6:47 pm

Am currently in Copenhagen at this event, giving a talk on nanotech and corporate social responsibility to an audience composed of nanotech researchers, nano-industrialists, investment managers and so on. Hmmm, tough crowd.

The remorseless efficiency of the private sector hasn’t been much in evidence thus far – chairing of sessions is amongst the worst I’ve seen, with one session going half an hour into the afternoon coffee break, and none as yet finishing on time.

Some scattered observations:

- Best quotation from an abstract (concerning the advantages of nano-engineered foods):

This would allow people to consume more modern convenience food while simultaneously and significantly increasing nutrient intake and reducing energy intake per meal and per day. Thus, reduce mental ill health, obesity and other postprandial insults. Emergent technologies can and must help correct the food system to stem the production of a human race with yet more diet induced diseased/obese morons.

Yay, tech fix!

- Number of keynotes to mention nanotechnology as contributing to a solution to a suite of “global problems” (water shortages, energy, AGW, disease etc.): all of them.

- Percentage of applications-related abstracts that focus on (especially colorectal) cancer treatments: 14%

- Percentage of applications-related abstracts which mention water purification: 1.4% (that is, exactly 1).

I’m casting something of an unfair picture there, of course. There have, for instance, also been a number of excellent, and very interesting, presentations on the potential contribution of nanotech to solar energy – such as printable solar cells. The standard model for a solar revolution often implies centralised solar farms, one per continent (or two in Africa’s case, as Europe isn’t sunny enough), for a total of 160000km² coverage of solar cells. Obviously such a programme would involve stratospheric resource use, if it were based on standard PV cells. But printable solar cells, based on polymer films of a few nanometres thickness on a substrate, would be a different story (although the question of supplying feedstock and hence resource use – as well as disposal and recycling – inevitably arises).

Such a technique would also potentially get us away from the centralised model, with any building – or indeed, anything with three dimensions – being able to go off-grid, so long as it incorporates a coating of printed PV. Disruptive, certainly. But the big questions around this involve non-technical issues – or rather, issues which concern the enrolment of techniques within socially constituted technologies [PDF, 441Kb]. For instance, a recurrent assumption among commentators who take a radical view of emerging technologies – especially nanotech – is that the market will be a virtuous selector of applications which will bring the most (revolutionary) benefits. Private and public good in perfect harmony, the technology strategist’s version of the invisible hand. But this assumption is also often shared by researchers and industrialists who just want to get products to market – there’s no need to tell people about the benefits of a technology, just build it (the product) and (if it’s any good) they will come, and market-based natural selection will distribute benefits – and further innovation – far and wide.

With energy infrastructure, this isn’t going to work. As Seamus Curran pointed out today (to his credit), the inertia oil dependence brings (and which developing economies will inevitably get caught up in, at least in the short term) is a major barrier to alternative energy, and may set back wider uptake of viable cheap PV by decades. Without concerted political action to reshape energy infrastructure, its governance and – we might add – the goals for which it is developed, cheap PV will face serious problems. The market is not enough.

Still, all the evidence of unquestioned priorities and unabandoned dreams of technical fixes aside, we could all do without yet another case of waving hands randomly at a host of familiar nanotech talking points.

Taleb, Ignorance and Action

August 27th, 2009

Views: 183

Posted in: ethics, philosophische, political, responsibility & future, uk
by ChrisG at 3:57 pm

Over at the Guardian, Nassim Nicholas Taleb responds to judgement being passed on him as a representative of “eccentric” views – such as denying the influence of humans on climate change, and stating that burst bubbles and economic crashes tend to be “a good thing”. In doing so, he claims for himself an intrinsically conservative, even precautionary position on risk, based on the centrality of ignorance about the future to human activity.

Climate experts, like banking risk managers, have failed us in the past in foreseeing long-term damage. This is an extension of my general belief: “Do not disturb a complex system.” We do not know the consequences of our actions (this idea also makes me anti-war), and I have explicitly stated the need to leave the planet the way we got it.

As mentioned hereabouts some time ago, Taleb hasn’t written anything terribly original – or for that matter (at least to my tastes) readable – regarding the relationship between uncertainty and risk. Labour spokespersons’ opinions to the contrary, it’s hardly an “eccentric view” to point out that optimistic assumptions about the manageability of risks generated within complex systems tend to rebound on the assumers, and that low-probability, high impact events should inform sensible (and socially just, we might add) approaches to risk. On this, Taleb’s snackthoughts are in agreement with most environmental NGOs you care to mention, the IPCC, the Sustainable Development Commission, and so on and so forth.

But his reaction exposes a recurrent problem for any precautionary approach to uncertainty: how do you stop such an approach retreating into a generalised, risk-averse conservatism? Sure, we do not know the consequences of our actions – yet we must act. And here’s the paradox; we must act in concerted, organised and adventurous ways if we want to avoid tipping over complex systems, and even if we want to “leave the planet the way we got it”. So there has to be a basis for such action in the face of uncertainty, yet it cannot take its sole impetus from the kinds of naturalistic, past-based knowledge that traditional managerial approaches to decision-making tend to rely on, because – when we’re talking about problems like anthropogenic climate change, responsible technological innovation, or the right way to formulate energy policy – we’re talking about future-oriented responsibility, and therefore precisely about anticipating the near- and long-term consequences of our actions. But here, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy points out, the Kantian criterion does not hold. It is no longer a situation where ought implies can. In fact, we ought to do precisely what we cannot do.

An adequate account of the obligations, permissions and prohibitions that should apply in this sphere of action would necessarily be complex. But some of the arguments contained in this paper [PDF] might be an inspiration. Hopefully I’m going to write some more about Stefan Skrimshire’s work in more detail with respect to this action problem, over the next ten days or so.

The Perils of Nanotechnology

August 19th, 2009

Views: 215

Posted in: environment, nanotechnology
by ChrisG at 9:58 am

Or perhaps, the perils of talking carelessly about “nanotechnology”. Andrew Maynard points to a new study (link not yet live at time of writing) which suggests that exposure of Chinese workers to nanoscale particles used in manufacturing paints may have led to several cases of pulmonary fibrosis (with two being fatal).

Meanwhile, the first wave of reporting is, on the surface, relatively restrained. Nonetheless, the way the accounts published by the Telegraph and the Daily Express identify sources of risk here is both inaccurate and potentially inflammatory. In the Express, the article leads with

Fears about a technology in everyday use were raised yesterday after the first evidence it can kill.

In the Telegraph, we have

Nanoparticles, which measure one billionth of a metre, are found in tennis racquets, special non-sweat socks, medicines, sunscreen and paints.

In both cases, the reader is invited to make a link between the exposure of workers to nanoparticles and the exposure of consumers – a cardinal error here, as obviously the degrees of risk are going to be different in either instance. This mistake is then compounded by others: the Express refers to “nanotechnology” (presumably understood as a set of applications of nanoscale science united by – what? Size?) and gives the usual laundry list of applications, while the Telegraph refers to “nanoparticles” as a class of manufactured products (and then causes eyebrows to be raised by stating that all nanoparticles “measure one billionth of a metre”) before trotting out the standard list.

So, we have an implicit conflation of exposure scenarios, accompanied by a tendency to frame nanotech/the use of nanoparticles as some kind of unified technological phenomenon which is present in everything from socks to medical diagnostics (and, by implication, some kind of unified threat, which presents the same characteristic hazards wherever it pops up). Sure, the media haven’t as yet gone berzerk on this one – but assumptions which could light a fire under any impending nano-scare are already operating.

And at this stage, there remain a lot of questions to be asked, as Maynard points out, before we can start talking about either “the next asbestos” or “the next MagicNano“. For example, assuming that there is some causal link here between the health effects and 30nm particles, are the particles actually deliberately manufactured through some application of nanoscale technology, or are they some kind of by-product of another chemical process? And what exposure minimisation measures were undertaken to protect workers? Nature introduces an appropriate level of scepticism into its reporting of the story:

The study says that the symptoms were caused by inhaling fumes produced when the workers heated polystyrene boards to 75–100 °C. The boards had previously been sprayed with a ‘paste material’ made from a plastic identified as a polyacrylate ester. The workroom, of around 70 square metres, had one door and no windows. The ventilation unit had broken down five months before symptoms started to manifest, and the door had been kept closed to keep the room warm. The workers wore cotton gauze masks only on an “occasional basis”.

UPDATE:More analysis from ICON’s Kristen Kulinowski, together with six responses to the paper (including comments from Vicki Stone, Gunther Oberdorster and Ken Donaldson) obtained by Maynard.

Swine Flu Stories

August 17th, 2009

Views: 182

Posted in: political, uk
by ChrisG at 3:13 pm

Looks like the swine flu counter-narrative I listed as missing a couple of weeks ago is now emerging.

The government rejected advice from its expert advisers on swine flu, who said there was no need for the widespread use of Tamiflu and suggested that the public should simply be told to take paracetamol.

You could put this down to assumptions in government about how best to handle risk amplification effects, e.g. the way in which people’s interpretation of the subtexts of communications about risks and uncertainties often have a positive feedback effect, leading them to see said risks as much serious than how they were originally depicted. “Informing the public about risk” therefore becomes, in part, a matter of second-guessing how people will interpret what is not said.

Here, the government appears to have assumed that the public are, essentially, wilful and infantile consumers who will (once the “risk management” approach discussed in my earlier post has failed, and the lurgy has claimed them) clamour for whatever headline treatment can be thrown at them. So, to ensure that things don’t get out of hand, you simply tell people to wash their hands, mention that the (generally undiscussed) consequences of falling ill can be severe for certain groups, and then carpet bomb the UK with Tamiflu anyway – filling nicely the gap between the “individual as rational, dispassionate manager of personal risk” and “individual as shriekingly irrational” bases.

A few mixed messages there, then.

As it became clear that the current outbreak only had mild symptoms, the committee recommended that antivirals should only be given to those in high risk categories, like pregnant women or people with existing respiratory illnesses. It suggested the government explain to people that they would not be given medicine they did not need and should use off-the- shelf flu treatments.

A story about the risk of viral resistance adding to the prospective dangers of a second wave of flu in the autumn is now undoubtedly waiting to be told in more detail, and more stridently.

The problem with the “politics of what works”, as has often been noted, is how it becomes a matter of tinkering behind closed doors. And, once politicians and their advisors have cloaked themselves in a mantle of generalised “expertise”, it becomes harder than ever for them to admit that there are limits to this somewhat nebulous knowledge. And this results in both more (rather than less) suspicion, and attribution of nefarious motives, and worse policy decisions, with more unintended consequences. Which politicians respond to by being more and more cagey, and trying to manage the situation with nervous, ad hoc gestures.

In other words, if we have only the “politics of what works”, it’s a shorter journey than ever to the politics of “erm, will this do?”