The environmentalist movement has a large cohort of anti-capitalists in it. Unfortunately for them, capitalism and well-regulated markets are usually the best tools to solve big complex problems.
Adopt a carbon tax and let markets work their magic. Adopt scientifically-based regulations around GMOs and nuclear power, then allow companies to profit by pursuing solutions. For too many in the green movement, though, profit is as horrifying (or more horrifying) than any environmental damage.
There are plenty of places where markets work, and places were markets have serious problems that cause issues up the supply chain. Energy production is one of them.
One of the reasons why nuclear power is not popular with private enterprise is not just regulation (but that is a big part of it!) it's that the capital expenses are massive and in order to get the ROI they want they need energy prices to go up not down, and if you are doing a huge electrical power build out the prices will....probably go down. Great for consumers of power (literally everyone in society), bad for power generation companies.
There is an government body that's been running nuclear reactors for decades with 0 accidents, it's called the U.S. Navy. It might seem silly to have the U.S. navy building nuclear reactors in Richmond, VA or suburban NY, but it's even more silly to keep sitting on our hands hoping a hypothetical private nuclear breakout is just around the corner. An added bonus is the military is also one of the few institutions left in America that the population broadly trusts, which helps mitigate peoples wariness's of the technology
Yes. Capitalism has been… uh, revolutionary — that is, it has caused a revolution, of sorts, in our environment, ever since the first coal-powered steam engine was started, and ever since the first gas lamp was lit.
An economic system which prioritizes the accumulation of status by way of a socially contrived metric like "wealth", above all else — above treachery, above the exploitation of *most* of the world's people and yes, without even the slightest shred of respect for the natural world — has been an *unqualified catastrophe* for the environment. Have you ever seen footage of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, while it was literally *on fire* — burning, because of the ignition of the great quantities of flammable toxins which were dumped there, to save money, by *capitalistic enterprise*, in 1969 — and on over a *dozen* previous occasions before that? This is exactly the sort of "magic" which capitalism offers to our environment.
The only remedy for this ethical perversion of a system has only ever been public intervention. Trusting capitalism to do anything except accumulate wealth at any and all cost — its purpose-built function — would be like trusting a pyromanic arsonist not to start a fire, after handing it a book of matches. And a crate of Molotov cocktails.
* * *
Having stated this, I also want to also admit that I'm not a strict anti-capitalist. I believe capitalism has its uses. However, as leadership considers the best way to deploy its array of world changing tools, it would be wise to take into account which of these tools has been purpose-built to be best suited to the task at hand, and it's been clear since the early 19th century that capitalism is definitely *not* the right tool to achieve a goal whose importance is shared by more than an individual person, or an exclusive clique of individuals, but by a whole society.
Communism is not the opposite of capitalism, it's more like the state assuming the role of capitalists, as an even more elitist and more exclusive clique of robber barons, who abuse even more power.
Nevertheless, I'm still curious to know just what it is about communism that guaranteed environmental problems, in the places where it existed/exists.
The environmental abuses of the Soviet Union are well know, for example, but please share the ways which Cuba's communist governments have abused its environment.
I grew up in a time of flammable rivers and unacceptable air days, so I understand the importance of environmentalism. But the myth of the Garden of Eden--that once upon a time everything was perfect, and that humans ruined that perfection because we're bad--ended up perverting it like it's perverted our worldview in so many other ways.
It's not so much that humans are bad, I don't think, but that our motives may be bad while we're focused on achieving the goals of an inherently solipsistic, individualistic socio-economic system which disregards the well-being of others, and of the natural world.
We need to confine this impulse, segregating it from influence on matters which affect us all, such as our environment.
Fwiw scale does matter here. The number of species driven to extinction in the industrial and post industrial age both by direct environmental destruction and global warming is many, many orders of magnitude greater than the number of species we hunted to extinction.
For the same reason why we don't excuse murder because "well [insert 20th century dictator here] killed millions!", I don't think we should sneer at those that show concern for the rate species are going extinct because we haven't beaten the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs high score.
In substantive terms, I agree with the thrust of this piece and am pro-GMO and pro-nuclear power precisely for the reasons outlined here.
But I think the mistake here is to frame this as a conflict between "activists" on one side (the anti-GMO and anti-nuclear side) and the "scientists" on the other. In reality, there are activists and scientists on *both* sides; the problem is that the debate is too scientized.
Consider GMOs. What does it mean whether GMOs are safe or not? The problem is that safety can have many definitions. There's the question of whether eating Golden Rice harms the eater. That's often the focus of some scientists when they say Golden Rice is safe. But some other scientists might focus on whether Golden Rice is safe in terms of whether its genes "leak" into other species. This is a very different concern which gets into questions of biodiversity (i.e., the GMOs unintended consequences) and invasive species, etc.
The problem here is that there is too much uncertainty if the debate only happens over the value of "safety" framed in this scientistic way. There are other values that matter: Golden Rice is good for poor people's health; nuclear power can be helpful for decarbonization. It would be much better if there was an honest debate about tradeoffs (would you be prepared to accept less risk of blindness for people at the expense of some decrease in biodiversity?) rather than arguing that the issue is that the "activists" fear-monger while the scientists only report the facts.
Engineers and builders of nuclear reactors have always ever taken the utmost care in their practice. They've done this, because they're so well aware of how *inherently dangerous* nuclear power is. There are too many points of failure within a reactor to mention without publishing a book-length catalog. Can't do it here.
Suffice it to say that while the architects, engineers, and builders have truly done an amazing job over the past 75 years to create facilities which are as safe as humanly possible, people make mistakes. Those who are entrusted with the operation of such facilities sometimes use bad judgement — perhaps while abusing their responsibility to pursue selfish objectives, as was the case in Chernobyl. Also, there are occasional force majure events to take into account, such as tsunamis. Consequently, it is accurate to assume, despite all commendable efforts, that nuclear power will never, ever, ever be completely safe.
It takes only a minor slip up with this technology, to cause catastrophic damage to the natural world. Radiation in north-central Ukraine and southeast Belarus will remain so toxic as to render these areas uninhabitable for humans who wish to live long lives, for the next 20,000+ years (!!) So please don't gaslight us by presenting misleading and/or erroneous statistics which rely on accounts of fatalities which have been ascribed to nuclear disasters, as evidence of the safety of nuclear power — as if such statistics could be trusted not to exclude deaths which have been left out of certain official reports put forward by the Soviet Union and perhaps other governments, for fear of embarrassment — and which have omitted all other ill-effects of radiation contamination, apart from direct human fatalities.
Sure, it's very tempting to build facilities able to create gigawatts of carbon neutral electricity, but this temptation should absolutely be avoided while much safer methods such as solar power exist. It's disingenuous to imply that fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear power, while stating how much pollution and how many pollution-related deaths might be saved by reverting to such an inherently dangerous practice (also, just who conflates nuclear energy with *nuclear weapons*… ?).
But the Soviet engineers under the communist government (a system which you seem to implicitly approve) designed a plant that would never have been approved in the West. Leaving aside the inherent design flaws of the RBMK reactor, they built it without a containment structure. Because, not being capitalists, they were poor and couldn’t afford one.
The ironic aspect of this is that most nuclear power plants were built with 1970s technology. They have a great safety record, all things considered, but we basically had a thirty year hiatus of new designs. More modern design concepts would include “passive safety” — designs that would allow plants to fail gracefully, to coast to a stop if there is a mistake. Greenpeace and the activists cost decades of technological development.
I absolutely do not approve of communism. It's inherently problematic, if sincere — and it's rarely been sincere. It's most commonly been either a Trojan horse or an outright euphemism for dictatorship. I find communists to be untrustworthy and recalcitrant.
The Soviet Union could have absolutely built containment structures around its nuclear reactors, if they wanted to. They were absolutely not too poor. Think of the expense of designing and building the reactors they built. Do you think the addition of a containment structure would have been unaffordable to them? They omitted containment structures because they felt they were not needed.
No containment structure could have stopped the Chernobyl accident, following a steam explosion which was powerful enough to lift a 2000-ton (!!!) concrete containment lid from the top of reactor 4 like a champagne cork. Oxygen would have entered the reactor core under this circumstance, no matter what.
Nevertheless, I accept your observation that modern reactors are even safer than the 1950s-era RMBKs. I'm sure they are. My point is that no design — no design which exists, or will ever exist — is completely safe because there is no such thing as "completely" in our reality. Even the Chernobyl reactor, just like the many other RMBK reactors in the USSR, was safe enough to operate for years and decades, even with its flaws. The flaw which doomed it is the same flaw which endangers all nuclear reactors everywhere — flaw of human bad judgment and errors.
Any risk at all is too much of a risk when it comes to nuclear, because the consequences are so severe.
Just use solar. Seriously. I thought this would have been a no-brainer.
The United States isn't the only country in the world, as we all know. Just because no fatalities have happened here, yet, doesn't mean none ever will. Look to the obvious examples in Japan and in the Soviet Union for instances of death by nuclear power.
Also, don't forget that direct loss of life isn't the only metric for danger. Irradiating whole regions of what are now two separate countries, making them unsafe to inhabit for 20,000+ years is a… it's a titanic loss. To say the least. Additionally, radioactive contamination has been the cause of untold thousands of cancers, birth defects, shortened lives, disabilities, and other sub-lethal casualties both near the sites of these disasters, and up to and including hundreds of miles away. This is another great and horrifying loss, of course, which a directly body count does not include. Moreover, there is little reason to trust the accuracy of body counts in this matter — especially those coming from the Soviet Union, which was well known for reporting fictional data on matters which may have embarrassed the state — and Chernobyl was definitely no exception to this.
Why risk it? I mean — the chances that nuclear will remain safe indefinitely are zero. Nothing is literally "forever" in our reality. Something will happen eventually for some reason — be it human error, bad judgment, or force majeure — and with nuclear, the consequences of any mishap is inherently catastrophic.
Why?
Seriously — using nuclear power when solar is available is an absolutely terrible idea.
The unsuitability of the NW coast for solar farms (or the Great Lakes area, et al.) won't prevent an adequate volume of power for the world overall, from being collected in the many sunny areas in the American SW, or in northern Chile, or Australia, or the Sahara, or Central Asia, or Arabia, or southern Europe, or the Indo-Iranian region, or the east Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, etc. Solar could create enough power to make using nuclear unnecessary — and especially so if we stopped wasting so much of our power on useless "technologies" like crypto mining or "AI" (I know the merits of these pursuits are debatable).
The carbon footprint of solar is higher than other green power sources because solar panels need to be manufactured in a process which involves some emissions, but solar's still something like 95% less than coal (and maybe 90% less than natural gas). If we used solar at scale, and stopped burning fossil fuels, we'd solve our greenhouse gas problem — and this is the goal, yes? It doesn't matter that the solar footprint is a little bit higher than wind or nuclear, as long as it's 1/10 or 1/20 the size of burning fossil fuels.
I realize how tempting nuclear power is, and I've noticed how so many people have been hoping it's somehow now safe in a way that it might not have been in the past, but the fact is that any demonstrated safety still does not change its fundamentally dangerous, inherent characteristics. It's safe, due only to the persistent flawless execution of a great safety effort — but it's only safe until something in its safety scheme fails, which will be *at some point*. And the cost of what happens next, when this does happen, is just… monstrously high. It's a bad idea.
The benefits of Golden Rice are known and respected. They're easily understood, even when described within an economically-phrased short essay such as this. The detriments of creating, planting, cultivating, and harvesting Golden Rice remain opaque however. Nowhere in this article are details of the complaints regarding the safety of a widespread adoption of this manufactured new variety stated. It's difficult to form a reasoned judgment about the wisdom of adopting a new technology, or not, when the arguments against doing so are unknown.
However, the effects of assigning exclusive license for such a crop to a corporation, empowering it with leverage to subsume rice production generally, by competing to exclude competing crops, are readily understood.
This issue is easily solved, however: take away exclusive licensing for Golden Rice, and the incentive for corporations to control something so vital to us all — this significant component of our *food supply* — also goes away.
I'm relieved to hear that Golden Rice is in the public domain — that makes a huge difference. If growing it has no effect on other crops, or other parts of the environment, as you say, then that's also a great relief. These facts should have been presented in the essay, I think, to avoid the need for clarifying them in the comments, but thank you for this.
Separately, I'm not quite sure it's fair to state that Greenpeace has "blood on its hands", as though they stabbed someone in the face with a knife. I wish this hyperbole were used less frequently but, semantics aside, I wonder whether the Filipino court of appeals mentioned in the essay, which halted the approval of Golden Rice cultivation, might share culpability — or perhaps be even more culpable than Greenpeace in this matter. After all, Greenpeace only presented an argument. It was this court of appeals which bears responsibility for the judgment.
I have issues with Greenpeace, by the way. I disapprove of what they do sometimes. Frequently. Not always, though. Perhaps they share some culpability, here.
The way to reverse this bad judgment, I think, is to share emphasis on the two points which you mentioned just now. Their uncertainty were major barriers for many, from what the essay states.
Opposition to self-driving cars from the left (often driven by unions) would fit in here.
A fair amount of NIMBYism is driven by "environmental" concerns - loss of greenspace.
I think the most high profile politician to actually introduce a bill to ban self driving cars is Josh Hawley (R-MO)
The environmentalist movement has a large cohort of anti-capitalists in it. Unfortunately for them, capitalism and well-regulated markets are usually the best tools to solve big complex problems.
Adopt a carbon tax and let markets work their magic. Adopt scientifically-based regulations around GMOs and nuclear power, then allow companies to profit by pursuing solutions. For too many in the green movement, though, profit is as horrifying (or more horrifying) than any environmental damage.
There are plenty of places where markets work, and places were markets have serious problems that cause issues up the supply chain. Energy production is one of them.
One of the reasons why nuclear power is not popular with private enterprise is not just regulation (but that is a big part of it!) it's that the capital expenses are massive and in order to get the ROI they want they need energy prices to go up not down, and if you are doing a huge electrical power build out the prices will....probably go down. Great for consumers of power (literally everyone in society), bad for power generation companies.
There is an government body that's been running nuclear reactors for decades with 0 accidents, it's called the U.S. Navy. It might seem silly to have the U.S. navy building nuclear reactors in Richmond, VA or suburban NY, but it's even more silly to keep sitting on our hands hoping a hypothetical private nuclear breakout is just around the corner. An added bonus is the military is also one of the few institutions left in America that the population broadly trusts, which helps mitigate peoples wariness's of the technology
Heinlein suggested that. Putting the Navy in charge of nuclear reactors, that is.
Yes. Capitalism has been… uh, revolutionary — that is, it has caused a revolution, of sorts, in our environment, ever since the first coal-powered steam engine was started, and ever since the first gas lamp was lit.
An economic system which prioritizes the accumulation of status by way of a socially contrived metric like "wealth", above all else — above treachery, above the exploitation of *most* of the world's people and yes, without even the slightest shred of respect for the natural world — has been an *unqualified catastrophe* for the environment. Have you ever seen footage of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, while it was literally *on fire* — burning, because of the ignition of the great quantities of flammable toxins which were dumped there, to save money, by *capitalistic enterprise*, in 1969 — and on over a *dozen* previous occasions before that? This is exactly the sort of "magic" which capitalism offers to our environment.
The only remedy for this ethical perversion of a system has only ever been public intervention. Trusting capitalism to do anything except accumulate wealth at any and all cost — its purpose-built function — would be like trusting a pyromanic arsonist not to start a fire, after handing it a book of matches. And a crate of Molotov cocktails.
* * *
Having stated this, I also want to also admit that I'm not a strict anti-capitalist. I believe capitalism has its uses. However, as leadership considers the best way to deploy its array of world changing tools, it would be wise to take into account which of these tools has been purpose-built to be best suited to the task at hand, and it's been clear since the early 19th century that capitalism is definitely *not* the right tool to achieve a goal whose importance is shared by more than an individual person, or an exclusive clique of individuals, but by a whole society.
...capitalism and **well-regulated markets**...
Emphasis added.
Communism is not the opposite of capitalism, it's more like the state assuming the role of capitalists, as an even more elitist and more exclusive clique of robber barons, who abuse even more power.
Nevertheless, I'm still curious to know just what it is about communism that guaranteed environmental problems, in the places where it existed/exists.
The environmental abuses of the Soviet Union are well know, for example, but please share the ways which Cuba's communist governments have abused its environment.
https://www.ecoamericas.com/issues/article/1999/1/0DA35317-9403-428F-A43B-C64AE674741F
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article212612094.html
https://havanatimes.org/features/whats-happening-in-moa-cubas-nickel-capital/
https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20240828-trash-overwhelms-havana-as-garbage-trucks-lack-parts-fuel
Yikes.
It's unclear whether this is "far worse", so to say, than capitalist governments in Central America, for example, but this is objectively pretty bad…
The anti-nuclear own goal gets worse and worse over time. I don’t understand how the air pollution deaths were not factored in.
I grew up in a time of flammable rivers and unacceptable air days, so I understand the importance of environmentalism. But the myth of the Garden of Eden--that once upon a time everything was perfect, and that humans ruined that perfection because we're bad--ended up perverting it like it's perverted our worldview in so many other ways.
It's not so much that humans are bad, I don't think, but that our motives may be bad while we're focused on achieving the goals of an inherently solipsistic, individualistic socio-economic system which disregards the well-being of others, and of the natural world.
We need to confine this impulse, segregating it from influence on matters which affect us all, such as our environment.
Two points:
1) Humans have always caused environmental harm, under every economic system. How many species did hunter-gatherers hunt to extinction?
2) Nature is still far more destructive than humans.
Also true. Both points.
Fwiw scale does matter here. The number of species driven to extinction in the industrial and post industrial age both by direct environmental destruction and global warming is many, many orders of magnitude greater than the number of species we hunted to extinction.
For the same reason why we don't excuse murder because "well [insert 20th century dictator here] killed millions!", I don't think we should sneer at those that show concern for the rate species are going extinct because we haven't beaten the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs high score.
In substantive terms, I agree with the thrust of this piece and am pro-GMO and pro-nuclear power precisely for the reasons outlined here.
But I think the mistake here is to frame this as a conflict between "activists" on one side (the anti-GMO and anti-nuclear side) and the "scientists" on the other. In reality, there are activists and scientists on *both* sides; the problem is that the debate is too scientized.
Consider GMOs. What does it mean whether GMOs are safe or not? The problem is that safety can have many definitions. There's the question of whether eating Golden Rice harms the eater. That's often the focus of some scientists when they say Golden Rice is safe. But some other scientists might focus on whether Golden Rice is safe in terms of whether its genes "leak" into other species. This is a very different concern which gets into questions of biodiversity (i.e., the GMOs unintended consequences) and invasive species, etc.
The problem here is that there is too much uncertainty if the debate only happens over the value of "safety" framed in this scientistic way. There are other values that matter: Golden Rice is good for poor people's health; nuclear power can be helpful for decarbonization. It would be much better if there was an honest debate about tradeoffs (would you be prepared to accept less risk of blindness for people at the expense of some decrease in biodiversity?) rather than arguing that the issue is that the "activists" fear-monger while the scientists only report the facts.
Engineers and builders of nuclear reactors have always ever taken the utmost care in their practice. They've done this, because they're so well aware of how *inherently dangerous* nuclear power is. There are too many points of failure within a reactor to mention without publishing a book-length catalog. Can't do it here.
Suffice it to say that while the architects, engineers, and builders have truly done an amazing job over the past 75 years to create facilities which are as safe as humanly possible, people make mistakes. Those who are entrusted with the operation of such facilities sometimes use bad judgement — perhaps while abusing their responsibility to pursue selfish objectives, as was the case in Chernobyl. Also, there are occasional force majure events to take into account, such as tsunamis. Consequently, it is accurate to assume, despite all commendable efforts, that nuclear power will never, ever, ever be completely safe.
It takes only a minor slip up with this technology, to cause catastrophic damage to the natural world. Radiation in north-central Ukraine and southeast Belarus will remain so toxic as to render these areas uninhabitable for humans who wish to live long lives, for the next 20,000+ years (!!) So please don't gaslight us by presenting misleading and/or erroneous statistics which rely on accounts of fatalities which have been ascribed to nuclear disasters, as evidence of the safety of nuclear power — as if such statistics could be trusted not to exclude deaths which have been left out of certain official reports put forward by the Soviet Union and perhaps other governments, for fear of embarrassment — and which have omitted all other ill-effects of radiation contamination, apart from direct human fatalities.
Sure, it's very tempting to build facilities able to create gigawatts of carbon neutral electricity, but this temptation should absolutely be avoided while much safer methods such as solar power exist. It's disingenuous to imply that fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear power, while stating how much pollution and how many pollution-related deaths might be saved by reverting to such an inherently dangerous practice (also, just who conflates nuclear energy with *nuclear weapons*… ?).
Go solar.
But the Soviet engineers under the communist government (a system which you seem to implicitly approve) designed a plant that would never have been approved in the West. Leaving aside the inherent design flaws of the RBMK reactor, they built it without a containment structure. Because, not being capitalists, they were poor and couldn’t afford one.
The ironic aspect of this is that most nuclear power plants were built with 1970s technology. They have a great safety record, all things considered, but we basically had a thirty year hiatus of new designs. More modern design concepts would include “passive safety” — designs that would allow plants to fail gracefully, to coast to a stop if there is a mistake. Greenpeace and the activists cost decades of technological development.
I absolutely do not approve of communism. It's inherently problematic, if sincere — and it's rarely been sincere. It's most commonly been either a Trojan horse or an outright euphemism for dictatorship. I find communists to be untrustworthy and recalcitrant.
The Soviet Union could have absolutely built containment structures around its nuclear reactors, if they wanted to. They were absolutely not too poor. Think of the expense of designing and building the reactors they built. Do you think the addition of a containment structure would have been unaffordable to them? They omitted containment structures because they felt they were not needed.
No containment structure could have stopped the Chernobyl accident, following a steam explosion which was powerful enough to lift a 2000-ton (!!!) concrete containment lid from the top of reactor 4 like a champagne cork. Oxygen would have entered the reactor core under this circumstance, no matter what.
Nevertheless, I accept your observation that modern reactors are even safer than the 1950s-era RMBKs. I'm sure they are. My point is that no design — no design which exists, or will ever exist — is completely safe because there is no such thing as "completely" in our reality. Even the Chernobyl reactor, just like the many other RMBK reactors in the USSR, was safe enough to operate for years and decades, even with its flaws. The flaw which doomed it is the same flaw which endangers all nuclear reactors everywhere — flaw of human bad judgment and errors.
Any risk at all is too much of a risk when it comes to nuclear, because the consequences are so severe.
Just use solar. Seriously. I thought this would have been a no-brainer.
The United States isn't the only country in the world, as we all know. Just because no fatalities have happened here, yet, doesn't mean none ever will. Look to the obvious examples in Japan and in the Soviet Union for instances of death by nuclear power.
Also, don't forget that direct loss of life isn't the only metric for danger. Irradiating whole regions of what are now two separate countries, making them unsafe to inhabit for 20,000+ years is a… it's a titanic loss. To say the least. Additionally, radioactive contamination has been the cause of untold thousands of cancers, birth defects, shortened lives, disabilities, and other sub-lethal casualties both near the sites of these disasters, and up to and including hundreds of miles away. This is another great and horrifying loss, of course, which a directly body count does not include. Moreover, there is little reason to trust the accuracy of body counts in this matter — especially those coming from the Soviet Union, which was well known for reporting fictional data on matters which may have embarrassed the state — and Chernobyl was definitely no exception to this.
Why risk it? I mean — the chances that nuclear will remain safe indefinitely are zero. Nothing is literally "forever" in our reality. Something will happen eventually for some reason — be it human error, bad judgment, or force majeure — and with nuclear, the consequences of any mishap is inherently catastrophic.
Why?
Seriously — using nuclear power when solar is available is an absolutely terrible idea.
Check this out:
"[This solar farm] can store solar energy in the form of heated molten salt, allowing for production of electricity into the night."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
The unsuitability of the NW coast for solar farms (or the Great Lakes area, et al.) won't prevent an adequate volume of power for the world overall, from being collected in the many sunny areas in the American SW, or in northern Chile, or Australia, or the Sahara, or Central Asia, or Arabia, or southern Europe, or the Indo-Iranian region, or the east Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, etc. Solar could create enough power to make using nuclear unnecessary — and especially so if we stopped wasting so much of our power on useless "technologies" like crypto mining or "AI" (I know the merits of these pursuits are debatable).
The carbon footprint of solar is higher than other green power sources because solar panels need to be manufactured in a process which involves some emissions, but solar's still something like 95% less than coal (and maybe 90% less than natural gas). If we used solar at scale, and stopped burning fossil fuels, we'd solve our greenhouse gas problem — and this is the goal, yes? It doesn't matter that the solar footprint is a little bit higher than wind or nuclear, as long as it's 1/10 or 1/20 the size of burning fossil fuels.
I realize how tempting nuclear power is, and I've noticed how so many people have been hoping it's somehow now safe in a way that it might not have been in the past, but the fact is that any demonstrated safety still does not change its fundamentally dangerous, inherent characteristics. It's safe, due only to the persistent flawless execution of a great safety effort — but it's only safe until something in its safety scheme fails, which will be *at some point*. And the cost of what happens next, when this does happen, is just… monstrously high. It's a bad idea.
Just use solar.
The benefits of Golden Rice are known and respected. They're easily understood, even when described within an economically-phrased short essay such as this. The detriments of creating, planting, cultivating, and harvesting Golden Rice remain opaque however. Nowhere in this article are details of the complaints regarding the safety of a widespread adoption of this manufactured new variety stated. It's difficult to form a reasoned judgment about the wisdom of adopting a new technology, or not, when the arguments against doing so are unknown.
However, the effects of assigning exclusive license for such a crop to a corporation, empowering it with leverage to subsume rice production generally, by competing to exclude competing crops, are readily understood.
This issue is easily solved, however: take away exclusive licensing for Golden Rice, and the incentive for corporations to control something so vital to us all — this significant component of our *food supply* — also goes away.
I'm relieved to hear that Golden Rice is in the public domain — that makes a huge difference. If growing it has no effect on other crops, or other parts of the environment, as you say, then that's also a great relief. These facts should have been presented in the essay, I think, to avoid the need for clarifying them in the comments, but thank you for this.
Separately, I'm not quite sure it's fair to state that Greenpeace has "blood on its hands", as though they stabbed someone in the face with a knife. I wish this hyperbole were used less frequently but, semantics aside, I wonder whether the Filipino court of appeals mentioned in the essay, which halted the approval of Golden Rice cultivation, might share culpability — or perhaps be even more culpable than Greenpeace in this matter. After all, Greenpeace only presented an argument. It was this court of appeals which bears responsibility for the judgment.
I have issues with Greenpeace, by the way. I disapprove of what they do sometimes. Frequently. Not always, though. Perhaps they share some culpability, here.
The way to reverse this bad judgment, I think, is to share emphasis on the two points which you mentioned just now. Their uncertainty were major barriers for many, from what the essay states.
For a research based look at the politics of these phenomena in the U.S. — www.ClimateOfContempt.com.