It felt good. It helped me feel that what I do can make a difference; that it’s worthwhile, on the research side as well as the teaching. Maybe it will lead to future things – there is talk of a possible working group – but if it doesn’t, that’s OK too. It’s given a positive glow to the last couple of days.

“Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one. When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves…but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things. Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.

It is easy to remember that story here, in the Fleet. Every time you touch a bulkhead, every time you tend a garden, every time you watch the water in your hex’s cistern dip a little lower, you remember. You know what the story is here.”

Humans run on stories, not reality. We can see this by looking around us; it’s something that populists and propagandists understand well. But I hadn’t thought about it quite like this before.

There’s optimistic SF out there that shows what a sustainable civilization on Earth could look like. Becky Chambers wrote some of it. This is important. But there’s not much that gives us stories of getting from here to there. That feels like something we’re missing. It’s probably very hard to write those, because it’s not obvious how to do that. Star Trek does offer one narrative if one gets into the backstory, but it involves WW3, so it’s hardly aspirational… perhaps until we have popular / folk narratives that people can relate to that show the sort of change that we need – systemic, disruptive, society-wide change – actually happening, rather than having happened, it’ll continue to be very hard for most of us to really engage on a path of sustainability and transition at more than an intellectual level. We need a story to follow. We need to change our stories to acknowledge reality.

Of course, none of this is new or groundbreaking thought. Humanities folk, and any storytellers and folklorists in particular, who read this will no doubt be saying “duh, obviously”. But it’s some new thinking for me, at least in the sustainability domain.

Perhaps it’s worth noting that a lot of the stories we have about dealing with shorter timescale threats are either historical, or grounded in things that have happened. It’s a challenge to do this with climate change. Science fiction can help us, perhaps. While history doesn’t give much that’s comparable at global scale, it’s hardly the first time that a civilization has been threatened by a self-inflicted change in its environment. But we remember those that fell, not those that successfully changed their behaviour and survived.

“Make sure people don’t forget. Make sure people remember that a closed system is a closed system even when you can’t see the edges”

“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.

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.

The Friday after next will be my last day with the University of Hull; after a bit over 3.5 years, I’m moving on and fulfilling the ambition that I’ve had for a while to move back to Scotland.

In my time here I’ve kept a programme running, with positive evaluations, through a pandemic and then an overnight tripling of student numbers, as programme director and while teaching three modules. I’m proud of that, but it has come at a cost – both to my research trajectory and to my health.

I’ve learned a lot at Hull, and worked with some great people, many of whom I hope to continue collaborating with. Hopefully this will all help me in my new role, as Assistant Professor of Energy Technology at Heriot-Watt University. More specifically, I’ll be based at their Orkney campus, where I’ll be heading up the MSc Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition. I have history there, as it’s where I did my PhD, so it’ll be nice to go “home”, and I’m excited to work with my new colleagues – both those I know from before, and those who have arrived there more recently. The intention is that I will also spend a portion of my time at the main campus in Edinburgh, so for central belt people out there I won’t be far away for all of the time!

I don’t have a Heriot-Watt email address yet, but I’m always available by the routes on the Contact page.

Before I leave Hull I’ll be attending Global Offshore Wind on their behalf – so if you’re going to be there next week and would like to meet up, give me a shout!

I went in without too much in the way of expectations – I’d had an unproductive day for mental health reasons (no big deal, it happens sometimes) so I wasn’t in a great mood, and I was anticipating a slightly boring ceremony, but wanted to support the students.

I was wrong. It was a joyous affair. It was wonderful to see my former students cross the stage and stand in front of their friends and families with proud smiles on their faces. Wonderful to see those who had excelled throughout, and those who had struggled a bit along the way. In the reception afterwards I was able to congratulate them in person (sometimes with difficulty – the music was loud!); many of them introduced me to their families, took selfies with me, etc.. Graduation selfies have worse lighting than field trip selfies, but much smarter clothes

I left after some hours with a big happy smile on my face, lifted up by other people’s celebration. So now I shall look forward to future graduations… and if any of today’s students are reading this, congratulations again!

When I agreed to be the internal examiner I underestimated how much time it would take.

• It took me about one and a half days to read the thesis in detail.
• Probably another half day, spread over a time, to arrange the date and the venue, catering and parking, etc. (catering actually ended up as “I go to B&M and spend a fiver on water and biscuits”. Because although the university should cover it, I gave up on trying to actually get a cost code from anybody)
• The exam itself took a few hours, but it’s intense and mentally draining so the amount of other stuff I was going to get done that day was limited.
• And now I have a fair bit of paperwork to do to follow up.
• Then in a few months time the student will send me his corrections and I’ll have to spend some hours checking that they are satisfactory.

It’s essential work, without which the system would collapse – but there isn’t actually time for it in the diary.

It’s also really enjoyable work, at least with a good candidate who clearly knows their stuff. It was a really rewarding few hours talking about interesting research, and I learned a lot from both the candidate and the more experienced external examiner. Then I spent the evening in the pub with the student, the external examiner, and the supervisor

I’m glad I did it, but I will be careful of agreeing again during the main teaching semesters.

I don’t know yet how much I’ll use it. A lot will depend on how both it and Twitter develop; it’s hard to find time to participate in both. If you are also on Mastodon (or something else in the Fediverse), feel free to give me a follow.

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.”

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.

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?