The crisis of scientific authority

When I was a kid, and even into my teenage years, the larger ethos was one of unquestioning acceptance of scientific expertise and authority.  Even back then, jokes were in plenty about accountants fudging numbers or lawyers enabling cheaters. But, scientists and science were nothing to be joked about.

What a difference over the years!

Now, whether it is in India or in the US, the public--even the college educated--seems to pick and choose whatever appeals to them as scientific, while denying whatever they disagree with as unsettled science:

One common story is that this conflict is a societal one, between factions with sharply divergent affinities for science—left versus right, secular versus religious, technocratic versus traditionalist. But there is little stability as to which side proclaims itself pro-science and which the bold challenger to an ideologically exhausted establishment. The capitalist conservative who is skeptical about climate change may have no trouble tarring his environmentalist foes as anti-science for opposing nuclear power. The coastal bobo who sees creationism in Texas classrooms as a harbinger of a new Dark Age may be contributing to keeping childhood vaccination rates in his city below those of Third World countries, owing to beliefs the Texas parent regards as voodoo.

I have blogged in plenty on this (like here or here.)  Many of those continue on without any resolution of sorts.

Consider, for instance, James Hansen.  The American Association of Geographers recently honored Hansen, "known for his climate research and his Congressional testimony on climate change that raised awareness of global warming" as "the 2017 AAG Honorary Geographer."  At the annual meeting, Hansen "Hansen addressed a packed house and talked about climate change."

Caption at the source:
James Hansen received the Honorary Geographer Award.

There is a good chance that a good number of the members of the association, perhaps even a majority, would sharply criticize Hansen--even the extent of practically discrediting him--because of his take on nuclear energy.  Hansen writes in a recent Scientific American commentary:

study after study finds that keeping existing nuclear plants—our largest and most reliable source of clean energy—operating is one of the most important and cost-effective ways to prevent carbon emissions from increasing.

So, here is James Hansen the celebrated NASA climate scientist arguing in favor of nuclear power plants.  Will we accept Hansen's expertise and authority on his bottom-line on nuclear energy?

Hansen even frames nuclear energy against the renewables:

But another reason for nuclear’s woes is that it is excluded from most state and federal subsidies for clean energy, which is why solar and wind have boomed during a time of low natural gas prices.
A recent study by the nonpartisan federal Congressional Budget Office found that renewables received 114 times more than nuclear per unit electricity in 2016, and similarly high amounts since 2005.
And over 30 states, including those whose governors criticized Trump, have clean energy mandates that exclude nuclear.

A few days ago, when a student asked me--in a different context--what my concerns are, I told her that what worries me most is that we do not have honest conversations on various public policy issues.  We engage in all kinds of shenanigans.  I told her that politicians lying and cheating and distorting the truth is not new.  But, when even within university campuses when we refuse to engage in honest conversations, well, it is game over.

Whether it is about nuclear energy or vaccines or GMO, "These are not only political but also philosophical, even metaphysical, disputes far larger than the particular question":

 It seems that what are required are pluralisms not only of norms, interests, psychological orientations, and scientific views of nature, but, much more crucially, an understanding that each of these is intertwined with the other. I am suggesting, in other words, that some revival of the classical understanding of science as natural philosophy is urgently required if we are to extricate ourselves from our current morass. There is little hope that our scientific debates will become coherent so long as we labor under the illusion that our stances can be cleanly partitioned up, made other than the wholes they are.

Of course, I agree with that bottom-line of "science as natural philosophy."  But then, ahem, nobody listens to me! ;)

Nuke coal: Poverty, electricity, and the environment

The few days that I spent in Tanzania were eye-opening in many ways, including how energy-starved people were.  There was no electricity grid network in the village small town--the house where we stayed had its own generator--and women were hunched over smoke as they cooked.  It was no surprise, therefore, that upper-respiratory infections were high in the community.

Poverty and low energy consumption are highly correlated.  But, even worse is how expensive the energy that the poor consume is--the out-of-pocket expenses and the price they pay in terms of health problems.

If only electricity can be generated and delivered to them, right?  Inexpensive at that.  I wonder what that least expensive route is!  Of course, we know that answer, don't we?

While the United States is just now finding ways to try to keep coal a viable part of its power system, the rest of the world is riding even greater technological advances to a brighter future for the dark fuel.

Yep, coal.

the world today faces two contradictory and interrelated challenges: While billions of poor people in the developing world need a lot more energy to pull them out of poverty and drive economic development, improve life expectancies, and bolster human health, the world also faces a looming and possibly existential threat from climate change—caused in large part by greenhouse gas emissions that are the bitter harvest of the world’s reliance on coal and other dirty fossil fuels over the past several centuries.

Yep, all I have to do is picture that Tanzanian community for a real example of the interrelated issues those sentences highlight.

As history shows, without energy there is no economic growth. From 1000 to 1820, global growth averaged about 0.2 percent a year. Since then, growth has been 10 times higher. Modern prosperity, in other words, is built upon the vast amounts of chemical energy first unleashed by coal.

Wait, is that some empty rhetoric based on the old stories of Industrial Revolution in England and the US, or do we have any contemporary ones too?

And there has been no better student of this lesson than China. It has  relied on smoldering coal to achieve a nearly four-decade economic metamorphosis—
lifting more than 600 million people out of poverty, even as it housed them in polluted cities—that has transformed a once-backward agrarian state into the world’s second-largest economy.

But, don't economists say there is no free lunch?  So, any price to pay for that economic miracle?

Meanwhile, this economic miracle has created a large, relatively wealthy Chinese middle class that has brought an ecological consciousness to the Middle Kingdom. Environmental nightmares, especially the choking air pollution fundamentally caused by the country’s overwhelming reliance on coal, have in recent years sparked huge protests by people questioning the legitimacy of the unelected leadership in Beijing.

Damn!  No free lunch, after all.

For the developing world, as India’s struggles show, simply getting power at all is a huge challenge. Globally, for the 1.3 billion people who lack electricity of any sort, shunning a gleaming, new, reliable coal-fired power plant on climate-change grounds is almost an impossible luxury. 

So, let's recap.  There are poor people on this planet.  Their poverty and various aspects of life are interrelated and to untangle them all will require energy.  Coal provides energy at low prices, but then it also generates a whole lot of smog and godawful health issues.  Anything else at this point?

Of course, global climate change, for which burning coal is one awful contributor.  So, can we do anything as we now add climate change to all that interrelated set of issues?  I suppose that will require turning away from coal.  I wonder what the International Energy Agency has to say about this.

The International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency suggest in a report released Thursday that nuclear will have such a significant role to play in climate strategy that nuclear power generation capacity will have to double by 2050 in order for the world to meet the international 2°C (3.6°F) warming goal.
With fossil fuels growing as sources of electricity across the globe, the IEA sees nuclear power as a stable source of low-carbon power helping to take polluting coal-fired plants offline.

No kidding!  Nuclear power.  I am sure that will, oh wait, there was that first paragraph:

Since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan chilled global attitudes toward nuclear power, the world has been slowly reconciling its discomfort with nuclear and the idea that it may have a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change.

Ok, let's recap. There are poor people on this planet.  Their poverty and various aspects of life are interrelated and to untangle them all will require energy.  Coal provides energy at low prices, but then it also generates a whole lot of smog and godawful health issues.  And coal is making things worse for the global climate.  Nuclear power is more expensive, but is a low-carbon alternative.  But then something like the catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi can make people's lives godawful.

Globally, nuclear energy is already making a comeback with 72 nuclear reactors now under construction worldwide, mainly in Asia.“This marked the greatest number of reactors being built in 25 years,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement. “Nuclear energy also remains the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity worldwide. And, indeed, if we are to meet our collective climate goals, nuclear energy is critical.”

You and I, dear reader, don't have to worry about all these, right?  Because, you and I are in comfortable homes, and comfortable temperatures maintained by air-conditioning or heating.  Ours, for all purposes, is merely an intellectual discussion at this point, as we sip wine or coffee: let's talk about coal and nuclear energy.  We are the modern versions of Marie Antoinette!  But, for the global poor, and those who are not poor but are energy-starved, these are real life hassles that they worry about.  

So, at the end of it all, what do you want to tell those poor folks in Tanzania, and Nigeria, and India, and Bangladesh, and ...?

I, for one, have no answer :(

Father, uber-happy, during our visit to Neyveli in 2002
(Lignite is a low-energy coal. Yep, lots of electricity generated there)