Who is Rod Adams? Environmentalist, Humanitarian…Nuke?
I am a nuke. There, I got that out into the open. I am also an environmentalist in the sense that I care very deeply about the planet that we all share, want to use it resources wisely so that many future generations can also enjoy it and believe that humans have the power to make the world essentially uninhabitable. I do not have faith in humans, but I do understand that they can be incredibly good, incredibly bad and are generally somewhere in between on the spectrum.
“Belief” and faith are also not words that I apply to our inventions or creations. Some of them are good and beautiful and some that share many of the same basic building blocks are ugly or useful only for evil purposes. Our job as people who want to live on a clean planet and to share the joy in doing so is to think, evaluate and choose, not to “believe”. We should not accept other people’s lists of dogmas at face value; there are many people in the world who are not particularly upfront about their agendas when they suggest that we make certain important choice.
Whenever I hear someone tell me that I need to spend my money a certain way, I am immediately suspicious. In my 48 years on the planet, I have often found that those people have sales or marketing jobs and are looking for a way to “close a deal” even if they have to resort to scaring their potential customers.
Back to the nuke thing. I spent about 5 and a half years in an intensive environmental learning environment where I worked my way up to a position where I was the guy in charge of most of the systems that kept a crew of 150 people breathing clean air, drinking clean water, carefully compacting and disposing our trash, and moving about the world’s oceans without leaving any discernable traces. That time as an engineering officer on submarines taught me many things about cause and effect, about using real math to make difficult choices and about the fact that atomic fission is a beautiful natural phenomenon that produces massive amounts of controllable heat without releasing any noxious emissions.
My boat had an emergency diesel engine and a large storage battery, so I learned quite a bit about the limitations and disadvantages some of the competition. In another part of my life, I have been a real sailor who had to spend a lot of exhausting hours on the open ocean waiting for a gentle breeze so that I could make progress towards a destination so I learned first hand about the beauty and inescapable limitations of wind power.
What I hope to be able to do as a contributor to CleanTechnia is to engage in conversations with people that really want to make a measurable difference in the world’s environment and share what I have learned about some very powerful tools. I also want to share what I have learned about how to recognize the difference between a real solution to a problem and a sales pitch from someone who simply wants to find a “forcing function” that will help him to persuade me to part with my hard earned money.
Please participate in the conversation - I may sometimes come off as a know it all, but I honestly love to learn and enjoy being convinced to change my mind. I will warn you, however, that appeals to authorities who have earned their reputation though the use of shady computational skills will not be very convincing.
Image credit: US government stock photo of USS Von Steuben SSBN 632
Just weighing in as a “friend of the court” to encourage you to continue your efforts to make a difference and let you know that someone is paying attention.
For those of us in the choir, the only question is how severe are the effects of warming going to be. A member of my extended family is dir. of the Tree Ring Lab @ the U of A in Tucson, AZ. He reads on the subject constantly and is worried that the computer models used to predict such things have been fed input that understates the growth of greenhouse emissions in the developing world. And therefore are understating the effects.
I’m heartened by all the efforts I’m seeing to reverse warming, but I fear for the worst.
Best wishes,
Wally
Hey Rod, Great to see you on Green Options!
I wanted to do something different today, and with no particular thing in mind this is where I ended up coming for a fleeting visit.
I would like to know the total carbon cost of a Nuke and it’s weapons. From the manufacture of the specialist equipment needed to source all the raw material, including nuclear, through design, build, operation, decommissioning and disposal, taking into account the carbon cost of the human activity needed to make it all happen. For only by doing this (for all things) can we know of their true environmental impact. I fear though, that such undertakings border on the intractable, requiring false assumptions, like human activity (in carbon terms) being the same for all endeavors, no matter what.
Nukes will persist while mankind retains it’s will to wage war, their very existence being to assure mutual annihilation, with no guaranteed recovery for the planet. There is irony in considering Nukes to be environmentally friendly, especially given how their alternative role as a deterrent forces highly damaging conventional warfare, though you could argue that anything is better than ceasing to exist. You could also argue that conventional warfare might be even be environmentally neutral through offsets from the cessation of the activities of it’s victims. Who knows, maybe war is a normalizing process, one that keeps population growth under control when resources are scarce.
Bertrand Russell said “either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man” , so clearly man has to abolish war, however, Einstein renowned for his astuteness, left us between a rock and a hard place, by informing us that “the problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them”. Therefore, to save the planet man must persist, which it turn requires the cessation of war, and let’s say some attempt at recycling the weapons of war. However, that would bring about a consequential growth in population, and with it, demands for more resources. Thereafter, left with no way of un-inventing ways of harnessing and using the atom, they will continue to be used, and so you can be certain that someone will eventually misuse them.
Andrew:
The life cycle analysis that you seek would be pretty challenging, but many of the items that you list are not specific to the type of propulsion that the ship has.
it is a difficult thing to explain, and I am sure that there are millions who disagree with me, but I think that there is a case to be made for the beneficial effects of weapons so damaging that they threaten the lives of even the people who want to direct the triggers to be pulled.
In my experience, wars become far less likely, and maybe even impossible when the leaders of countries realize that their decisions to enter into battle put themselves and their families at severe risk. It is only when they can sit in a comfortable location unaffected by the war and in a position where they are pretty sure that their families are unaffected that they will decide to start killing others.
I find it quite distressing to talk about using warfare as a means of controlling human populations. Perhaps that is because I have served in the military for about 30 years and because both my daughter and her husband are also currently serving. As you might imagine, I have hundreds of friends and acquaintances that also wear uniforms and are some of the first people put at risk in that kind of environment.
Humans are a resource, not a burden.
@Rod
I am a War Veteran who has risked all (like many millions before me) so that others may enjoy what it is that they have today, so I’m far from naive. Now, like you, I’m fully aware of the combat role taking priority over welfare, so I understand and share your concerns for you serving family members and oppo’s, and wish them well.
Received wisdom points to humans being a present burden on biosphere 1, but if you can argue that more would be kinder to the environment, then I’m sure given their one couple one child policy that China would be very interested. Otherwise, with respect, a humanitarian environmentalist appears to qualify as an oxymoron.
If you think science can formulate the tools needed to make a difference then you’ll find a lesson from history in the futile experiments at engineered control that led to the demise of biosphere 2.
I consider your case for the beneficial effect from weapons so damaging to be flawed, because a) they have only been used to end one war, yet wars continue, b) everyone that is against those who have them, actually want them, so a situation where everyone has them (perish the thought) would not be good, unless man-not-so-kind can somehow change overnight from being driven more by what he stands to loose that what he stands to gain, and c) if those who had them were to give them all up, then those who were seeking them would in all likelihood continue to do so.
Andrew:
If you think carefully about it, you will realize war turned especially terrible for humanity after man learned how to use first steam, then oil, as energy for war with the American Civil War being the first demonstration of steam-powered warfare and World War II being the best example to date of what kind of war oil power can bring us.
In the context of WWII, the actual harm nuclear weapons did was almost undectable. In the context of easy, comfortable modern living - the 20% or so of the world’s electricity we are enjoying - nuclear energy’s contribution, while unnoticed, is substantial and good indeed.
Contemplating the consequences of total nuclear war - by all the potential participants - led to the realization of the possibility of a “Nuclear Winter.” It was AFTER this awareness that man could possibly influence global climatic outcomes that the much more subtle idea of Global Warming crystalized.
Along with thousands of other issues, mankind is continuing to learn to deal with constraints imposed by the threats of both Nuclear Winters and Global Warming’s perpetual Jurassic Summer.
Rod,
Great that there are people like you who draw the line between the “sales” and true environment concerns - which lots and lots of politicians, journalists, and even some of the environmentalists never do in the West world (and in the East as well, although we are not as capitalistically minded so far :)) Just reminds me the awful feeling when you hear people claiming they are environmentalists and ending up selling ORDINARY apples with a mark “ecological” but for 1 crown more expensive (typical Swedish example). It’s good to be able to see whenever you become a marketing object…