Bristol Events

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

"We are gods and we have to
get good at it"

Environmental "heretic" Stewart Brand came to Bristol Monday evening to present the case for "ecopragmatism" in the face of potentially catastrophic global climate change.

Brand's long-term friend and collaborator, musician Brian Eno, praised him for his untiring commitment to the planet at the evening talk in St. George's.

Eno welcomed the fact that in a field such as environmentalism that often attracts religious fervour, Brand's approach was "unideological".

Eno said that Brand's successful campaign in the 1960s to have NASA publish colour images of Earth from the Apollo missions "did more for environmentalism than any other one single picture".

Speaking to a nearly full house, Brand croaked with a voice like static owing to a recent cold, "The climate problem is global, so the solutions must be global."

He presented the ideas in his new book, "Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto", which build upon what he called his four environmental heresies, proclaimed to the not-for-profit TED organisation in 2009.

The four heresies were: cities are green, nuclear power is green, genetic engineering is green and geoengineering is probably necessary.

Five-sixths of the world's population lives in the developing world and they are abandoning their villages in the millions: Brand estimates 1.3 million people a week move from the countryside into cities.

Brand sees this development as a good thing as it is much easier to provide services for people who are densely packed together, and when they leave subsistence farming behind in the countryside, it returns to a more natural state.

Turning to power, Brand noted that the world currently produces 16 terawatts (TW), two-thirds of which comes from burning fossil fuels.

In order to maintain carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million, Brand says we would need to replace 13TW of the 16TW total with green energy.

Splitting the 13TW up between wind, hydroelectric, tidal, solar and geothermal would still result in the loss of an area of land the size of North America, a mythical place he dubbed Renewistan.

The 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 450ppm would result in a global rise in average temperature of 2.8 to 3.2 degrees and a rise in sea level of between 0.6 and 1.9 metres.

Nuclear energy is the way to go, Brand said, pointing to a range of new-generation small modular reactors, like the SSTAR (small, sealed, transportable, autonomous reactor), coming on the market from manufacturers like Toshiba, Hyperion Power, Babcock & Wilcox and NuScale Power that cost relatively little and produce between 10MW and 100MW of electricity.

When questioned about limited uranium resources, he said there was plenty of uranium, not only in friendly countries like Canada and Australia, but also in decommissioned nuclear warheads.

He also said the next generation of reactor should use waste from the previous generation as fuel, and companies like TerraPower had also produced reactors that use the more abundant mineral thorium.

Brand is a firm advocate of organic food, but he said it could be enhanced with genetic modification.

Brand was scathing about Western organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that had opposed genetically modified crops for Africa.

Quoting the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, he spoke of the "moral imperative" of providing GM staples like cassava, sorghum and golden rice, or rice enhanced with vitamin A, to developing countries.

On the final topic of geoengineering, Brand said he was relectant to support it, but said the planet may be forced into it.

When the Philippine volcano Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it pumped 20 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, resulting in a drop in global temperatures.

"If we have one Pinatubo every year, the climate would cool by three degree Centigrade," Brand said.

For a fraction of the cost of switching to green energy, we could pump SO2 into the atmosphere, Brand said.

UK scientist Stephen Salter has also suggested spraying seawater from peripatetic vessels on the oceans into the atmosphere to enhance the albedo of clouds, increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back into space.

Brand concluded by saying, "We are gods and we have to get good at it."

Lifelong environmentalist Brand, 71, founded, edited and published the "Whole Earth Catalog" in the late 1960s, followed by the CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974.

Brand also founded the Hackers Conference and the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), a precursor of the internet, in 1984.

He set up the Global Business Network in 1988 and the Long Now Foundation in 1996, which aims to promote "slower/better" thinking and which is building a clock that will run for 10,000 years.

Green Party Policy

The Green Party is opposed to nuclear power, GM crops and geoengineering.