The wider world

17
Jun
2023

Overview effect

“Overview effect” is the name given to something experienced by some, but not all, astronauts, when they see the Earth from space. The view of the whole planet, and hence the whole human race, from a distance can bring about a marked shift in perspective, in attitudes, in thinking, that favours peace and cooperation and values the environment 1. It’s probably more common in those who have seen Earth from a great distance – most famously the Apollo astronauts – than those who have only been to low earth orbit, although it certainly happens there too.

View of the Earth rising over the lunar surface, taken by William Anders on board Apollo 8.
Image: Earthrise, William Anders / NASA, 1968. Public domain. Taken on board Apollo 8.

The famous “Earthrise” photo of 1968 probably helped some people feel the same, although looking at a picture is hardly the same as being there and knowing that the rest of humanity is beneath you.

Carl Sagan’s “Pale blue dot” photo and the powerful accompanying speech were (among other things) presumably an attempt to bring some overview effect to the masses. More recently, some wealthy space tourists have spoken about seeking out the effect.

I mention this now because I’ve recently started reading Becky Chambers’s novel, “Record of a spaceborn few“. In it much of humanity lives, and has lived for generations, on a fleet of huge spaceships. This speech is something like liturgy:

“We destroyed our world, and left it for the skies.
Our numbers were few. Our species had scattered.
We were the last to leave.
We left the ground behind. We left the oceans. We left the air
We watched these things grow small. We watched them shrink into a point of light.
As we watched, we understood. We understood what we were. We understood what we had lost. We understood what we would need to do to survive. We abandoned more than our ancestors’ world. We abandoned our short sight. We abandoned our bloody ways. We made ourselves anew.”

This version of humanity experienced the overview effect en masse, as a species, far too late. Let’s not do the same as them.

[1] As I’m currently between jobs, I don’t have journal access. So these two links have been included on the basis of their abstracts.

Posted by simon in Reflective, The wider world
25
Oct
2022

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

I try to keep this blog focused on the professional, or at least the energy-related, and so I doubt that I’ve ever mentioned my love of speculative fiction (a broader term for what might, in the past, have been named “science fiction and fantasy”). But in the last few days, after many recommendations, I’ve been reading Becky Chambers‘s “A Psalm for the Wild-Built“, and that deserves mention here. So here’s this blog’s first book review. Sort of.

The book is short, and enjoyable, an easy read, and excellent in many ways that I won’t get into here. I’m not going to discuss most of its themes, nor even its plot; what has made me post is the world in which it’s set. It’s “bright green”, but beyond bright green. It’s what some would now call “solarpunk”. It’s a society that has de-industrialised and become sustainable, and has completely changed in order to do so, but rather than doing that by reverting to a pre-industrial way of life it has done something new: it has retained technology, but without consumer culture or (we assume) mass production.

“It was a good computer, given to them on their sixteenth birthday, a customary coming-of-age gift. It had a cream-coloured frame and a pleasingly crisp screen, and Dex had only needed to repair it five times in the years that it had travelled in their clothes. A reliable device built to last a lifetime, as all computers were.”

This is, I assume, the kind of world that many environmentalists yearn for – especially those who want to decentralise, for villages to live locally and within their means, and so forth. This is sometimes expressed, at least by those in the first world, as a yearning for the past, for pre-industrial society, which is something that I can’t get behind for fairly obvious reasons. But some also see it as a brave new future, as something that hasn’t been tried before. The huge missing piece is usually a plan to get from here to there…

Anyway. The book is lovely, and provided me with a calm and enjoyable few hours. You should read it, not just for the setting but also for the many other things it explores.

“Farmers and doctors and artists and plumbers and whatever. Monks of other gods. Old people, young people. Everybody needed a cup of tea sometimes. Just an hour or two to sit and do something nice, and then they could get back to whatever it was.”

A glass cup of herbal tea, presented on a hemp mat.
Photo: rawpixel.com, CC0 public domain
Posted by simon in Reflective, The wider world
16
Oct
2022

The name of natural gas

I’ve seen some recent tweets, and partisan websites, claiming that calling geologically-stored methane “natural gas” was a major greenwashing achievement by the fossil fuel industry – that it’s meant to imply a benign fuel.

I can see why people think that. It’s the sort of steering of language that the modern fossil fuel industry might try to do. But in this case, I don’t think that happened: the term “natural gas” is older than “greenwashing”, older than most of the people using it, and arguably older than the environmental movement as a whole.

When natural gas was introduced, it was called that to distinguish it from “town gas” or “coal gas” – a nasty, noxious and somewhat toxic substance made from coal in each town’s gasworks, which used to cook our food and perhaps heat some homes. When the UK switched to natural gas in the 1970s there was a huge, co-ordinated campaign of technicians visiting every gas-connected home to adjust or replace appliances ready for the switchover… and that shift is why the old, often Victorian, gasworks in most cities – eye-catching for their “gasometer” storage systems – are no more. Calling it natural gas, rather than just gas, is also helpful when in the company of Americans, lest they think that we fry our eggs on petrol 😉.

None of this means, of course, that the fossil industry doesn’t benefit from the terminology. This paper (paywall), reported in Vox, suggests that people feel more positive about “natural gas” than “fossil gas” or “methane”. But in this case, so far as I know, it wasn’t a cynical ploy by the industry to call it that. They just lucked out with what it was already called.

Atmospheric view of gas being flared into an evening sky.
Image: Blake Thornberry, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted by simon in The wider world
24
Aug
2022

How droughts can cause energy shortages

An exposed riverbed rock with carvings of dates visible back to 1616. Some people are resting their bare feet against it.
Image: Libor Elleder (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu), licensed CC-BY-3.0

Today I learned about “hunger stones“. These are rocks in the River Elbe that are submerged in all but the lowest water conditions. Carvings on them commemorate historical droughts back to the fifteenth century and warn that if the stone is visible, famine will follow. One of the most poignant inscriptions translates as “If you see me, weep”. As Europe faces what may be its worst drought in 500 years, these stones are appearing… and while famine is less inevitable in a world of globalised food supply, it’s interesting to see the knock-on effects on energy.

Shipping companies have been warning for some time that water levels on Europe’s rivers have been approaching a level at which cargo traffic would have to stop. Indeed, when I was sitting by the Rhine on holiday two weeks ago I noticed that the laden barges were sitting higher in the water than usual – that they were sailing with reduced loads to cope with a shallower river. Since then parts of the river have effectively closed as predicted, as shipping companies decide that there is not enough water to operate safely or economically.

The closure of major transport routes is concerning for supply chains in general, but one of the major cargos carried by these rivers into inland Europe is coal, for power stations. So a shortage of water can translate to a shortage of energy.

Over in France, meanwhile, the country’s major rivers are at historically low flow rates… and that, combined with high water temperatures from this summer’s heatwave, has obliged nuclear power stations that rely on rivers for cooling to reduce their output to comply with environmental regulations. With reduced outputs on top of a lot of maintenance shutdowns this year, the country most famous for embracing nuclear power has become an energy importer.

Norway is another nation that is traditionally energy-independent: while they do have a lot of oil and gas, they use little of it domestically because their electrical grid runs almost entirely off hydro power, and on top of the fossil fuels they are usually a net exporter of clean electricity. But without rainfall there’s less hydro power, and with their reservoirs at unseasonally low levels the Norwegian authorities are considering restricting electricity exports to protect their domestic supply.

None of that affects the UK directly: we don’t use inland waterways for cargo, our nuclear plants are all on the coast, and we only have a small amount of hydroelectricity. But the knock-on effects of a worsening energy shortage in Europe will certainly be felt here, in the form of higher wholesale energy prices.

I mention all of these things together because they’re a clear demonstration of the interconnectedness of the systems that we take for granted. Our power and other industrial infrastructure was designed for the time in which it was built, plus forseeable changes – and nobody (a figurative nobody) foresaw parts of the Loire running dry, or the Rhine becoming impassable to coal barges.

This is a part of something sometimes referred to as the “Energy-water nexus“: the idea that energy supplies depend on water, and water supplies depend on energy, and that developing more of one usually requires more of the other. It’s interesting to think about whether this interdependence might be weakened by increasing use of renewable energy. Wind and solar probably rely on water less than thermal plants do… but in the future, will we see drought-related curtailment of freshwater hydrogen production?

Posted by simon in The wider world
14
Nov
2021

After Glasgow

I haven’t been following the negotiations at COP26 very closely. And I haven’t examined the eventual agreement in great detail, instead following the insight of commentators I trust. It seems, from what I’ve read, that while there are some incremental steps forward in the detail – strengthening of language, and so forth – mostly the parties have agreed to kick the can down the road another year. If readers have better insight and want to contradict that, they are most welcome to do so, but I think it’s fair to say that any climate summit that ends in its president apologizing and breaking down in tears is not what the world wanted to see.

On social media people have noted that the commentators who, two weeks ago, were talking about a “last chance for humanity” are now praising the small steps forward. Greta Thunburg has, of course, summed up her view with eloquence:

The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah.

@GretaThunberg / Twitter

Twelve years ago, before I had even started studying renewable energy, I wrote a blog post on another site entitled “After Copenhagen”. That was the first COP that was a mainstream media event, and the first one – thanks partly to Barak Obama’s involvement – that felt as though it might get somewhere. In the end it achieved little for various reasons, and there was a temptation to give up. I did a lot of thinking back then, and this is what I concluded:

“I’ve spent a certain amount of time thinking “If I think that the cause is hopeless, why am I wanting to work in the renewable energy and/or energy efficiency fields?”. The answer is that… every little still helps. Yes, low-lying countries are almost certainly doomed. Yes… wars will be caused and exacerbated, many will starve or die of disease… but for every bit that we can reduce our emissions, less of this will happen. The fact that the situation is so terrifying, depressing, and hopeless, even to those of us who probably won’t suffer the worst (or at least the first) of the direct effects, doesn’t mean that we can’t try to lessen it.”

I still believe this. We missed the 350ppm and 400ppm targets that were talked about at Copenhagen. It seems very likely that we will miss the 1.5°C target that is increasingly believed to be important. But it’s still worthwhile to make things better than they otherwise would be. If global efforts get us to 2.6°C, as is suggested by the current NDCs, that’s bad, but it’s better than it could be. As I wrote in some internal training materials recently, under the heading “A note about missing targets”,

“It’s too late to prevent climate change – it’s already happening. It’s probably too late to keep to 1.5°C, and 2°C looks hard as well. But this isn’t a binary thing: it’s wrong to say “we missed the target, may as well give up”. 3°C is better than 4°C, which is better than 6°C. Some harm is locked in, but we can minimise how much more.”

That’s the thought that keeps me going now, as it does on a regular basis away from the COP cycle. In the words of Mary Heglar, “home is always worth it“.

Posted by simon in Reflective, The wider world