The Revenge of Gaia
The Revenge of Gaia – Review
While Lovelock’s career primarily focusing on Gaia may annoy a number of scientists, he clearly has been influential in shaping the views of a large part of the public. His message on climate change, though potentially frightening, is more or less the scientific consensus: the planet is in for massive and terrible changes and these have come about because of human addiction to slowly burning stuff and leveling forests. Lovelock becomes more than most scientists are willing to do by currently exploring the consequences – the main one being that most of the planet will become scrub desert and what is eventually left of humanity will have to escape to the polar latitudes – and waxing philosophical about individual greed, ignorance and hubris that have eventually led us to this situation. I have one large bone to pick with the book. Lovelock’s perspectives on electricity create to come directly from a nuclear energy lobbying group: “I believe that nuclear power is the only supply of energy that will satisfy our demands and yet not be a hazard to Gaia”. This is dangerous because in effectively making arrogant statements like this he dismisses much of the range of technologies and approaches that are critical for addressing the causes of anthropogenic climate change. First of all, his focus is almost exclusively on the supply-side, ignoring the fact that conserving energy is much more cost-effective than gradually building and fueling power plants. There’s reason to believe that double reductions in energy and resource consumption are well within reach with no destructive impacts to value of life. (Google “factor four” for example). Lovelock puts great faith in nuclear fusion – a technology that has widely consumed over 30 billions of dollars over half a century and is still unable to produce any practical energy. The obstacles to practical fusion energy remain not only in the physics of keeping fusion fuel at 100 million degrees C or more, but in the advances in materials science required to securely contain what amounts to a miniature sun. Grudgingly recognizing that fusion is at greatest couple decades away, Lovelock paints a glowing recommendation for nuclear fission in the brief/medium term, mostly ignoring the most difficult pieces of this technology: that nuclear fission requires a extremely complicated commodity chain (fuel mining, fuel-fabrication, reactors, reprocessing, and disposal) that is exceptionally unforgiving when it comes to error or malice. It’s way too easy to make a very big toxic mess, and increasingly there are groups with the intention and ability to do this. Strangely, Lovelock is very quiet on the rise of terrorism and nuclear fission, although he does raise terrorism to help in his case against natural gas pipelines. Similarly, he omits mention of the very vital link between nuclear electricity and nuclear weapons proliferation: the stuff that goes into and comes out of nuclear reactors can make the world’s deadliest weapons, and it just takes a few kilograms. His arguments about nuclear safety and cost ring hollow when one considers that in the USA nuclear power has only been possible through peaceful restitution of the Price Anderson Act which subsidizes the nuclear industry by limiting its liability in the result of a major accident. The UK has comparable laws, as do a host of other countries. If nuclear energy is so safe and cheap, the industry should abolish these subsidies and accept the consequences. Lovelock’s pro-nuclear arguments are usually combined with a release of renewable energy that borders on the ridiculous. He sets his sights particularly on wind power, alternately presenting it as frighteningly industrial (”what was gave of the German landscape has been greatly diminished by eventually becoming the site for 17,000 massive wind turbines”) and pathetically undeveloped (”at present wind energy… is not much more efficient than were those experimental biplanes together with wire”). These silly sideswipes are perfectly complemented by two points: “wind is intermittent” and “wind is costly”. Sure, windpower is intermittent, but that doesn’t keep Denmark from usually relying on it for twenty per cents of its electricity – and the lights aren’t going out for Danish homes. Meanwhile, wind energy only accounts for one per cent of electricity production in the UK, despite that fact that the UK has some of the greatest wind sites in Europe. With a few pointers from Danish transmission engineers, the UK could simply put in a lot more wind without the need for recent backup generation as Lovelock claims. Lovelocks claims that wind power is “two and a half times more expensive than gas or nuclear” are highly contested, as any Google search will show. Lovelock’s action of solar electricity is about 20 years out of date, and he fails to mention very promising technologies like biogas that reduce methane emissions (20 times more potent than CO2) while automatically generating large electricity.