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.

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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

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