We Are the Threat: Reflections on Near-Term Human Extinction
criticaltheoryresearchnetwork.com
criticaltheoryresearchnetwork.com
'A mountain had gone into labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours excited great expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain gave birth to a mouse.'
[0] I haven't seen anything nearly so bad in critical theory-type philosophy, but in, say, post-modern writing and the art world, it's not uncommon. That's why the Sokal hoax worked.
The Fukushima Daichi crisis is _still_ happening, and I think there's enough known by now about the risks associated with nuclear fission power that it's essentially off the table. [2]
[1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...
We have no reliably accurate data on deaths and illnesses caused by the nuclear power industry. From the mining to the waste disposal, and the plant operation - they all have very significant mishaps putting cancer-causing radioactive materials into the environment where it circulates for generations. There is no way you can honestly make such a statement because we have no way of knowing how many of the people dead from e.g. thyroid cancer are the result of nuclear energy related activities.
Also: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-te...
I strongly encourage you to watch [1]. Nuclear is such a disaster it's mind-boggling that anyone would still argue in favor of it today over the alternatives.
If motor vehicles were held to the safety standards of nuclear power, we would all be riding bicycles.
Coal is a problem today.
It can replace fossil fuel power for electricity. Not all fossil fuel power.
> It would take a decade of serious dedication and leaving behind a "safety first" culture, but no major technical advances are needed.
Strangely enough, it's the clean energy lobby, not the fossil fuel lobby that is the biggest hurdle to nuclear energy. It's so strange to hear the solar, wind, etc advocates claiming they want to save the environment railing against nuclear power.
Yes, basically.
Peak oil did happen in the 1970s. American peak oil, that's it. The reason we have had the last couple of decades of Middle East adventurism is because the US stopped being the largest oil producer back then. OPEC would not even exist if that was not the case.
Conventional Oil has supposedly peaked sometime in the 2005-2010 timeframe, though you are correct that more innovative extraction techniques have compensated the lost of conventional sources so far. However, you grossly overestimate the capacity of price signals to conjure up solutions out of thin air. Instead, what has allowed a more or less sustained living standard on the face of steady per capita oil consumption are countless hours of engineering devoted to efficiency.
At the end of day, the tragedy of the Peak Oil movement of the past decade is something that happens to a lot of geeks. They were able to calculate a fairly accurate mathematic model of the raise and fall of production, but their predictions of doom failed to grasp the fact that society adapts to changing conditions. Their economic models turned out to be too simple, and both private and public sector reacted by taking measures that would have been imposible to predict on a quarterly profits only analysis.
All-in-all problem is far from being solved.
However- if we're able to at least accept that we can't keep growing the economy exponentially forever- we do have access to a fusion power generator outputting 384.6 yottawatts of power. I'm not saying we're safe from near term human extinction but it's by no means certain. Far term, of course, as I said, every species goes extinct.
Basically I've done enough research that I know this fear is well founded but not for the reasons presented in this paper. A much better and more specific argument could be made.
Searching for that phrase led me to http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02604027.2017.135...
which rationalizes the claim with
"Solar energy may be unlimited, but this does not guarantee system sustainability for RE. Instead, we run the risk of replacing non-renewable fossil fuels with another set of non-renewable metals and minerals (Vidal, Goffé, & Arndt, 2013). Greatly increased use of RE, especially wind and solar, will require similar increases in many rare minerals (Bardi, 2014)."
This is a reference to Ugo Bardi's book "Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet." I don't doubt that Bardi has made such statements in his book. He'd be far from the first to propagate this nonsense. Wind turbines and solar cells can be made with rare minerals, but they do not require rare minerals. The vast majority of solar cells do not require gallium, indium, or tellurium (the usual rare elements cited for solar), and the majority of wind turbines do not require rare earth elements. Some wind generators use rare-earth-containing permanent magnet generators, but most use electromagnets made with common copper.
EDIT: I was able to peek inside Bardi's book via Google Books, and he actually makes the same point I just did. It's actually the opposite of what Moriarty & Honnery claim in citing him. Page 239: "We have also seen that technologies such as modern wind power, solar concentration, and photovoltaics have reasonably high EROEIs and can be manufactured without a critical need of raw materials."
At the moment there is no technology, that would allow human civilisation move past current overshot predicament. Accept this fact. Before such technology is invented we are on the path to death.
http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M...
"Based simply on the comparison of observed data and the LTG (limits to growth) scenarios presented above, and given the significantly better alignment with the BAU (business as-usual) scenario than the other two scenarios, it would appear that the global economy and population is on the cusp of collapse. This contrasts with other forecasts for the global future (eg. Raskin et al., 2010, Randers, 2012), which indicate a longer or indeterminate period before global collapse; Randers for example forecasts collapse after 2050, largely based around climate change impacts, with features akin to the LTG comprehensive technol- ogy scenario."
Now, there probably arent a lot of collapse sceptics who would do this research in the first place, so in all likelyhood it contains some bias. Then again society seems to have a way of ignoring scientists who report back with too much bad news.
I have 2 further pieces of trivial data to add to this post, 1) I have a general interest in end-of-the-world type literature, probably because my parents were millenium bug preppers (I spent all my high school years eating stored rice hahaha) - and my opinion is that collapse isn't that likely overall. Why/why not is a long debate but I think we're overall probably safe. I think we have some very serious problems that should not be ignored, but they can all be dealt with if push comes to shove, and many are being handled though probably not fast enough. I'm an engineer though so my internal bias probably leans towards coming up with solutions. 2) I recently caught up with an old colleague, another software engineer, and this topic came up. It made me wonder if there might be some internal bias in the way we think that we both maintained these ideas even though objectively we are both doing pretty well at life. We really need more quality research conducted, unfortunately its hard to find.
[1] Shoutout to whoever else from here is on /r/collapse - it's not me cross-posting all the "AI will kill us all but also take all the grocery bagging jobs" articles from HN. If you're not a reader I'll summarise, its 80% paranoid crazies with 20% interesting doomsday porn. Not a place of serioua discussion. The author of this piece posted there and is basically doing an AMA.
As soon as you start to think about the whole cycle, it becomes clear that having electricity form solar panels is not enough.
“Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several
generations of German philosophers and social theorists
in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the
Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a
“critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional”
theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory
is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation
from slavery” [0]
This piece—which reads like a really bad student essay—is so awful for the reasons I stated in my other comment, nothing to do with it being critical theory or not. There are good writings within that, and awful writings without.
Critical theory is philosophy, not science, so your dismissing it for not being science is just confused. (Scientific realism is an attitude towards science/scientific theories, not philosophy. Yes, philosophers write about it, but as philosophers of science.)
Critical theory is generally political philosophy, so no wonder it's concerned with human freedom, 'emancipation from slavery', whatever whoever wrote that meant precisely, and such things. Marcuse, the philosopher/guru of the USA's 60s hippie cultural revolution, was Critical Theory. Read a potted version of what he stood for and it all sounds pretty sensible. A lot of it has just become totally mainstream.
Erich Fromm is my favourite of these guys, my favourite psychologist still, writer of wonderful and inspiring books. In him the critical theorists' mix of Freud and Marx doesn't seem strange or weird. It just means they're very interested in both psychology and politics - life in the mind and in the world, everywhere. Critical theorists write about anything, whatever interests them. And usually they don't quote other writers constantly like this guy! But they're informed by a lot of the thinkers of the past.
I was into Adorno for a while, but gave up. Too often deliberately obscure, although sometimes not, wrote some illuminating stuff. e.g. his essay on jazz, although ignorant and unfair, is pretty classic. Horkheimer I like more.
They're all from the original Frankfurt School of critical theory; there are many later people who might be called critical theorists - e.g. Raymond Williams, of whom I've loved everything I've read.