Climate Change: Reconsidering Nuclear Power

We may be able to use nuclear power if we become competent socialists.

I have been reading James Mahaffey’s Atomic Accidents, an account of failures of nuclear technology. This is merging in my mind with responses to climate change, which are now desperately needed.

For a long time, my position on nuclear power has been that it would be an excellent technology if we could find saints and angels to run the system. Lacking a supply of those, we had probably best solve our energy problems in another way. This book, if anything, confirms me in that position. But time is running out to avert planetary disaster from climate change and nuclear power does not contribute to global climate change. Perhaps it is time to rethink nuclear power.

The Green New Deal: Running the Numbers

The technologies definitely exist to meet our 2030 requirement reaching 60% [renewables] by 2030. We think that we have all the technologies in hand to reach 100% carbon-free or 100% clean by 2045, but it's a little bit less clear what that pathway looks like. And the reason is because when you start talking about really high levels of renewable energy generation technologies on the grid, you need to find ways to store that electricity because it's coming from sources like the wind and sun, so it's not coming 24/7 the way something like stored natural gas is. So, there are some unique technical challenges associated with running a grid with very, very high levels of renewables. We are making a lot of progress on figuring out how to run a grid like that, and we are very confident that by 2045, we will be able to get there. – Laura Wisland, interviewed in Union of Concerned Scientists podcast “Got Science: Clean Energy Momentum: From Goals to Gigawatts.” Accessed August 24, 2019. https://www.ucsusa.org/ep62-wisland.

The Technical Issues

In other words, the technologies we need to make the Green New Deal work do not yet exist. California can provide about 60% of its electricity via renewables. After that, what is needed is technology that can store energy not just for hours and days but for weeks and months. Currently that technology does not exist. It is hoped that it will be available by 2045. Lacking that technology there is large-scale hydroelectric or nuclear energy. There are not many greenhouse gas neutral electric generation technologies.

Laura Wisland is an expert on and advocate for green power with over a decade’s experience. But she must be politic in what she says. I do not need to be, and ravens are supposed to be harsh-voiced, so I will say it plainly: The Green New Deal is not enough. If we believe otherwise, we are deceiving ourselves and putting our nation and perhaps our world at risk

I wrote the Got Science producers on Twitter, and they wrote back with citations. Wisland herself was quoted: “We ‘think’ we can get to 100% carbon free power, but work continues to identify the most cost-effective pathways. E3 (consultant that runs electricity models for the energy agencies in CA) has done some analysis showing that we can get to about 90% and it's that last 10% that is the hardest to decarbonize. SB 100 (the law that created the 100% clean power goal) provides the state with flexibility to decide whether ultimately the power sector will be completely decarbonized or whether it's better to keep a little bit of carbon (gas) on the system to manage cost and reliability issues.”

A very bad mistake was made in the unequivocal opposition to nuclear power on the part of environmentalists. The nuclear plants were not built. Instead, coal and natural gas plants were built, both directly aggravating global climate change and producing the huge pollution and waste of coal and natural gas production and use. Worse still, this set an example for the developing world, with India and China building energy systems heavily relying on coal. Yet the Sanders Green New Deal proposal has the USA shutting down nuclear power plants before the long-term energy storage technology needed to replace them exists.

The Political Issues

The credibility of environmentalism

What is going to happen to environmentalism when the public realizes that they are in part responsible for putting us into this position? The opposition to nuclear power, all the unfounded rumor-mongering all the lies, it played right to the hands of the fossil fuel industries and brought us to crisis more quickly then had we built those nuclear facilities.

This is not to say that nuclear power does not carry real risks, but these were dramatically overplayed by the environmental opposition to nuclear power. Worse still, no comparison with alternatives was done. Voices in the environmental movement who pointed out that coal was in many ways more environmentally troublesome than nuclear power were not heard.

Climate change is not the only environmental problem. The success of humans on earth depends on the human ability to manage our population and use of resources. If the environmental movement loses credibility in one area, we may lose many voices that defend our world and its ecosystems.

Policy Conclusions

My preference would be to roll forward on the Green New Deal, to continue research into the smart grid and long-term energy storage, and also to restart research into nuclear power generation. This seems to me likely, though, to be a counsel of perfection. I fear we are likely to come up short when it is too late to act, and many people will be left, literally, out in the cold, or perhaps the burning heat.

Citations

California Public Utilities Commission. “Proposed Preferred System Portfolio for IRP 2017-18: System Analysis and Production Cost Modeling Results.” California Public Utilities Commission, January 11, 2019. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/UtilitiesIndustries/Energy/EnergyPrograms/ElectPowerProcurementGeneration/irp/2018/Attachment%20A_Proposed%20Preferred%20System%20Portfolio%20for%20IRP%202018_final.pdf.

Herman K. Trabish. “Getting to 100% Zero Emissions in California: Beyond CAISO’s Eight-Solution Menu.” Utility Dive, January 3, 2019. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/getting-to-100-zero-emissions-in-california-beyond-caisos-eight-solution/544467/.

Global Environmental Disaster: It's Not Just Climate Change

This is the panic post.

Most greatly I fear environmental and biological catastrophe, not just climate change, but also the collapse of crop yields due to disease, the collapse of animal husbandry due to diseases we cannot manage, the collapse of fisheries, the obsolescence of all current antibiotics due to overuse and the emergence of new plagues.

When overpopulation is described in most older Western fiction, the vast growth of cities is the subject. To Robert Heinlein, all the towers of Manhattan were slums, regardless of how happy the residents were. (It's in Tramp Royale, if you want to read the man's own words on the subject.) But long before we feel the crowding, our vast population and use of resources will drive systemic disaster. Randall Munroe recently reminded us that our livestock outweigh us, and that all wild mammals are a tiny fraction of mammalian biomass. If human civilization collapses, from where will come the resources of a wild ecosystem, to rebuild the earth? If the salt shall lose its savor, from where will you resalt it?

And then there is nuclear power. Many scientists, most notably planetologist Jim Hansen, regard nuclear power as a solution to our current energy woes. But I do not believe we are competent to make effective use of it. As with overpopulation the dangers are different than those of the scare stories. It is true that most of the scare stories about nuclear power are wrong: power reactors cannot turn into nuclear bombs, waste can be disposed of if we are willing to undertake the effort and reactors can be designed that will produce fast-decaying radioisotopes that will become harmless in centuries rather than millenia. Yet the land around Chernobyl is so poisoned that even decay takes place more slowly. If we use nuclear power carelessly, over time, it will poison more and more of the earth and, as with fossil fuels, the temptation to misuse nuclear power will always be present. Better, I think, to start now, to reduce our population and develop sustainable non-nuclear energy technology. We would have done best to start decades ago, when the risks became apparent. By the time Al Gore published Earth in the Balance in 1992, it was old news: Gore was summarizing existing results. But we are stuck, and not acting. In some ways we are even making matters worse.

I look for hope from unexpected quarters. When Heinlein wrote Tramp Royale in 1954, he believed that population would continue to grow vastly, and this would lead to resource wars. Instead, contraception became widely accepted, which Heinlein couldn't imagine was possible, and the Green Revolution increased agricultural outputs sufficiently to prevent both these things. We are still not in a good way, but neither have we had global disaster. We may hope for more unexpected good news. Nonetheless we have much hard work before us, if our world and our civilization are to survive.

Books and articles

1. Gore, Albert. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
2. Heinlein, Robert A., Tramp Royale. Baen Books, 1996, ebook. (Original completion date 1954. If you're tempted to read this, be warned that that the book and Heinlein's prejudices have aged badly.)
3. Munroe, Randall, "xkcd 1338: Land Mammals," self-published web comic.
4. Nuwer, R., Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly. Smithsonian Magazine, March 2014.

Getting Started: the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal proposes to solve environmental problems by hiring a lot of people to do the work, but what is the work? We don’t know what those jobs are, yet. We don’t even know what is to be done. Build wind, solar, tidal, nuclear? (I suspect a lot of GND supporters don’t want to think about nuclear, but nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gases.)

If only there are experts to consult.

And there are. There are 17 US national laboratories. One, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is focused on renewables. Several of the others do renewables work as well.

I recently wrote an old colleague at one of the US national labs (we corvids get around), asked him how things were going, and what, if anything, was being done by the labs on the Green New Deal. They said that their work was going well though they now had to seek high-level approval for publication and that he had not read anything about the Green New Deal beyond the headlines.

If anything like a green new deal is to be implemented, the US national labs will be the primary research and development institutions. So, what are the national labs doing?

Each of the 17 US national laboratories has their own particular history and research focus. One, The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is focused on renewables. Another, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, does all kinds of civilian research, including renewables work, a third, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), was founded in 1910 to support fossil fuel production and use and continues in that role. The other 14 are largely focused on high energy physics, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy, though many do work in other fields. Notably, Argonne National Labs in Illinois houses the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), which works on battery technology, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) near Hanford in Washington State, has its Energy Policy and Economics Group.

And this is all very good, and all very fine, and we still don’t have a plan.

We don’t know how to make the Green New Deal work, yet, but we do know how to build a nuclear power system that will do the job – that’s where we have spent most of our efforts over the last 70 years.

Whatever we do, we need to get started.

Brief note: restarting research into nuclear energy

I think we need to reactivate nuclear energy research. The energy industry has the large-scale light water reactor and no interest in doing other designs. These are hard to operate and extremely expensive. But there is utterly no interest in the industry in researching and developing better designs. So it is time to put the nuclear engineers at the national labs back at to work. We also need to pull together and archive the design work from early nuclear power plant design. A lot of that material is buried in reports, probably not even digital form, and it is important to preserve it because we may need it now.

On Alternative Energy: Hard Choices for Hominids

You hominids have a deadlock in the politics of power generation. In the USA, at least, activism has stopped nuclear plant construction. This turns out to have been the energy equivalent of Norquist's "starve the beast," and it has worked about as well. You have ended up relying heavily on coal for electric power generation and oil for transportation, which, in the amounts used, are as or more harmful as nuclear power.    

There is much talk about sustainable energy production, and there have been some substantial successes in those technologies, but you are not ready to convert your whole economy to sustainable energy production. Partly, this is because sustainable energy has to be gathered, whereas fossil fuel and nuclear fuel contain energy which need only be released: without a "carbon tax" or some similar regulation, sustainable energy sources will always be more expensive. Partly, though, the conservatives in Congress have been successful in preventing the research necessary to widespread deployment of sustainable energy production. Your economic models do not, yet, embrace sustainability.    

So you are faced with hard choices. To stop using coal, oil, or nuclear power immediately would mean great hardship. Without international agreements to prevent further development of such systems, action in an single country might in any event be futile except perhaps as an example. And yet if human civilization is to survive, this must be undertaken in the long term.

One thing that could be done in the short term in the United States would be to abandon the tax subsidies for resource extraction. They started as World War I production subsidies, and ever since, conservatives have been defending them. This might be an excellent time to attack these. They could be attacked on libertarian grounds as government subsidies. It might just work.

On Cutting Off Fossil Fuel Imports From Russia

Or, “In Russia, energy buy you.”

One of the contradictions of the Western support of Ukraine in her defense against the Russian invasion is that Western Europe is still buying fossil fuels from Russia. So, on the one hand, Europe opposes the Russian invasion. On the other hand, Europe is funding it. Without those fossil-fuel exports, Russia would probably not be able to sustain its invasion of Ukraine. And it is not clear that anything is going to persuade the Russian leadership to back down. They seem prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian.

The genocidal invasion of Ukraine continues. There is increasing support for direct NATO intervention, which would bring nuclear powers into conflict, something the world has avoided for 70 years. A massive war would be inevitable. It might escalate to nuclear war. And the fuel imports would be cut off. So, instead…

Cut them off ourselves. Immediately abandon European fossil fuel imports from Russia, restart the German nuclear power stations, and start a crash alternative energy program. The privation in Europe would be enormous, but it would still be less than a war between Russia and the NATO powers.

Perhaps, perhaps. I am not an international relations expert, so I am not sure of either the economics or the politics here. Before taking such a momentous decision, people who know more than I ought to be consulted. Still, we know that eventually Europe and the entire world is going to have to stop relying on fossil fuels. This might be the moment to start.

Brief Note: the Costs of Supplementing Green Electricity

One of the chief arguments against building more nuclear facilities is that various forms of renewable energy are less expensive. The problem there is the one that energy researchers are finding; some predictable source of power or long-term large-scale ("grid scale") energy storage technology is necessary. Yet all current designs for grid-scale energy storage are physically large, with extensive environmental impacts, and expensive as well. The cost argument against nuclear power is much weaker when one considers the costs of grid-scale storage.

Some links:
  University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems Grid Energy Storage Fact Sheet
  Stanford's Energy's Grid Scale Storage page.
 

The Cost of Clean Power

It is a commonplace on that we are building no more nuclear plants and shutting down existing plants because they are too expensive. But…

They are more expensive than wind and solar – variable renewable energy (VRE.) Good, fine. But VRE has its limits, and somewhere between 60% and 90% of grid power, and something more reliable is needed for the balance, either fossil energy, large-scale long-term storage, large-scale hydro, or nuclear. Right now, that something is fossil energy, derived from natural gas and coal, both environmental problems. Natural gas plants is what we currently building and we have to stop burning natural gas. Not only is it a fossil fuel, and therefore a contributor to carbon emissions, it is itself a potent greenhouse gas, though a less persistent one than CO₂.

So, a bit of qualitative economic modeling. While we are building the smart grid, everything is fine for a while. VRE is ramping up and fossil fuel plants are shutting down. But when we arrive the limit of VRE (60%? 90%?) we have to either keep the fossil fuel plants going, driving the warming of the world, turn out the lights (or life-support) somewhere, or find something else to fill in the gap. By that time it will be very late and the necessary work will be very expensive. It would be wiser to start investing and researching now.

Recent Reading on Climate Change

Today brought the the news that the past year has seen the second biggest rise in atmospheric CO₂ since record keeping began. This seems a good time to post this commentary.

I decided to update my climate change reading a few weeks ago. After some consideration, I chose to read scientist James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren and and activist Bill McKibben's Eaarth.

James Hansen is the man who has been right about (almost) everything on climate change, and before everyone else. Google Scholar shows some 690 citations of his 1981 paper Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Hansen is the person who worked out the 350 ppm CO₂ concentration goal, and in this book he explains the how and why of that figure.

Hansen brings excellent knowledge and exposition of the science. Since I last studied this, there has been a revolution in paleoclimate research, and we now have data on the history of the earth's climate that provides data on how various “forcings”—that is, things that warm and cool the planet—affect the planet's climate. The evidence is, as we keep hearing, overwhelming. It turns out that it is has been known since 1976 what causes ice ages: in 1976 Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton published a paper validating Milanković’s early 20th century celestial mechanics hypothesis. This is fascinating, and it also shows that earth's climate is, in fact, responsive to small changes in solar irradiation (insolation.)

Hansen explains how we are moving towards tipping points, after which climate change will become self-sustaining. He talks about likely tipping points—ice sheet collapse and methane clathrate upwellings. He also offers stories of the governmental decision making processes—Dick Cheney does not come out looking good. And it turns out that Lindzen, now the only major figure in climatology who argues against global climate change, also argues against a link between tobacco use and lung cancer. He claims to doubt the statistical evidence though it is overwhelming, just as the industry-funded flacks claimed, decades ago. It seems he has swallowed the deceptions of the tobacco industry and now the fossil fuel industries, and so destroyed his scientific credibility.

Then we come to Hansen's proposed political and technological solutions. First, he advocates quickly abandoning the use of coal as the only feasible way of meeting the 350 ppm goal, pointing out that it is not likely that the world will leave the oil in the ground for some years yet. He points out that solar power has not taken off as hoped, and so, he argues for nuclear power and, in fact, for fast neutron breeder reactors on the grounds of long-term availability of fuel and the relatively short half-lives of waste products—centuries rather than millenia. He argues for a carbon tax, rather than an emissions trading system.

So, Hansen.

Now I turn to activist Bill McKibben's Eaarth. The first part of the work reiterates some of the evidence for climate change and cites Hansen's 350 ppm goal. He also makes the point that we no longer live in the world we took for granted, but instead a harsher world, hence the title of the book: Eaarth. In his solutions he turns in a different direction than Hansen, arguing for a rebirth of village life, and in his final section has expresses doubts of such a system, pointing out that it has historically been parochial and sexist, and hopes to preserve the internet to leaven it.

What do I think?

1. The scientific evidence for anthropgenic global climate change is overwhelming. I was not aware that planetology had come so far, and this is not simply a matter of debatable models but concrete paleoclimatological data.
2. I like McKibben's way of thinking about the changes: that we no longer live on the Earth of history and legend, but instead on the new world, Eaarth. (“We are now leaving the Holocene. Please put your seatbacks up and return your tray-tables to the upright and locked position.”)
3. I consider that the people running Hansen's fast-neutron reactors will be the same people who now run the oil companies. There is also a genuine risk in the production of so much weapons-grade fissionables. That's worrisome. My thought on the need for concentrated energy is that we might do well to start funding research on multiple alternatives: large-scale solar like the StratoSolar proposal as well as nuclear, but most importantly we need to get started.
4. I am unconvinced by McKibben's village life model. Humans are naturally nomadic apes, and village life is an outgrowth (so far as is known) of limited resources and authoritarian impulses. I would prefer we avoid recreating subsistence lifestyles and instead seek new social forms.
5. My overall intution is that we can—if we control our population—actually have a pretty comfortable lifestyle if we want it. We can have airships, wind-powered ocean-going ships that only occasionally run their engines, solar-electric rail, and so on. What we can't keep doing is basing personal transportation on personal automobiles and fast air travel as a matter of routine; we will have to find some other way to scratch the itches those things satisfy.

So now, what do you think?

On Courage in Politics

This in response to Jim Wright's excellent essay on fear in politics. It ends with an exhortation to courage, and I found myself wondering why it is that, when there are many brave Americans, fear is so powerful. The answer seems to be that it is widely promulgated in mass media, while little effort is made to promote courage, except to children.

I am reminded of a blog post of mine from 4½ years ago. The post was written in the context of the 2008 Presidential campaign and is more positive about Obama than I now am, but the remarks about the broader issues of fear, social cohesion, and the need for dramatic social transformation still seem relevant to me. I suppose it is because we stand on the threshold of such transformation that our fears have only intensified since I wrote this.

“A lot of effort has been spent on making people so concerned and scared about particular single issues that they forget the whole, like someone who lets their panic fear of falling lead them to die in a fire rather than making a safe jump from a window.

“The how of this is, I regret to say, very well understood—if you have mass media it is depressingly easy to create mass panic. If only we knew as well how to allay fears and give people courage!

“Focusing on panicking people and electing poor leaders is the nuclear option of civil society—it can take generations to pick up the pieces. The basis of this, apart from greed and power-lust, is intellectual rigidity. It is difficult for me to draw any conclusion other than that we are in need of vast transformations in our institutions and philosophies.”

And, at this late date, I'd add that if we wanted to use the mass media “to allay fears and give people courage” we probably could. But it would need the kind of resources that have been put into the vast right-wing mass media networks, and those are not easily come by.

(If you want to read the whole post, it is here.)

Trump Didn't Start a Nuclear War

In other words, he did something not completely insane.

Am I supposed to be grateful?

Redemption Arc

I recently read a rather fun YA book series wherein all the characters who were not completely evil got some sort of redemption. The author herself says that these were her pandemic comfort writing project. There’s a lot to like about the books; the ethics of empire are discussed, and the ethics required of superheroes are demonstrated – if you, in your person, are a weapon of mass destruction, what rules do you live by, so that you do not turn into a monster?

But I don’t believe. Not everyone can be redeemed. Some people lack empathy. Others lack the capacity for introspection that allows them to recognize their failings. Still others have made irrevocable choices that turn them into monsters in human skin suits. What redemption was there for Hilter’s captains? What for the people who decided, monstrously, to spread covid throughout the United States? To the group that probably plotted to give the cruel murderer Mohammed bin Salman the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, and may have successfully done so? Not only do I not see redemption for these, I do not even see that they ought to be allowed to live.

Yes, Donald J. Trump has led me to reconsider the death penalty. He is not only an alleged rapist and a likely traitor, he has not only likely started a civil war in the USA, he seems to have taken actions that might yet cause World War III. He has had numerous opportunities to recognize the damage he has done and make amends and has not done so – he is one of those who both lack empathy and the capacity for introspection. Do we allow him to continue his depredations?

At Shinycroak: Nuclear Fusion, "AI," and Big Science

It's complicated. The post straddles the line between economics and politics, but I put it up there for Reasons.

Israel, Palestine, and the World: Fractally Bad

I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. - Philip K Dick

What We Now Are Building Instead of Nuclear Plants

Natural gas plants. Burning natural gas creates CO₂, a greenhouse gas. Natural gas production leaks methane which is itself a greenhouse gas, more potent but less persistent than CO₂. This is all crazy and this is what we are doing.

The USA Backs Both Sides in Yemen

The USA is now supporting the Saudis against Iran in Yemen at the same time it is trying to make a nuclear disarmament treaty with Iran.

The Guardian: Yemen conflict: air strikes on rebel arms depot kill 19 as US warship approaches.

Reflections on the Green New Deal

It's good, it's not perfect, and it's not enough.

It's a resolution. I support its passage. You can read it here. The bill as it stands mandates nothing and collects no revenue. Instead, it sets out an ambitious list of goals. The basic proposal is to switch the USA off of fossil energy and onto "renewables" (not completely defined – is nuclear power renewable?) and to hire a lot of people to do the job. There is also something of a laundry list of moderate left goals: indigenous rights, "equal pay for equal work," and so on. It's not a bad list. Some of the goals probably conflict with others, global policy must be addressed, and I hate the callout to family farms. (See Sarah Taber's critique.)

But it should have been passed 25 years ago.

By now we should have run the numbers and be implementing the programs. That we have not run the numbers worries me. A lot. We are near to the breaking point, and we haven't even tried to figure out a plan that will work. Will wind and solar power be enough? How many climate refugees will there be? We don't know any of this. We don't even have estimates.

If it were up to me, I would put some of my old colleagues at the national labs on the job. Time has run out.

We need a real plan, not just ambitious goals.

Ukraine and Russia, a few notes

(This post has been corrected and combined with two other posts, to create the more complete Ukraine: The Great Game, v2.0. I am leaving it here so that links and references stand. I have struck out my exceptionally egregious errors so that misinformation is not spread, but am leaving them for completeness.)

Situation, as I so far understand it:

1. Russia wants Ukraine firmly under control because of its agricultural productivity and its ports on the Black Sea.
2. Ukraine wants out of the Russian sphere of influence because of over a century of oppression, culminating in a genocidal famine, the Holodomor, which was the work of Stalin.
3. Ukraine is currently energy-dependent on Russia. Fuel shipments from Russia to the rest of Eastern Europe also pass through Ukraine. Pipelines from Russia to Milan and Frankfurt also run through Ukraine.
4. Chernobyl is in Ukraine, making nuclear power an unlikely method for achieving Ukrainian energy independence.

A few links:

• “Russia under Putin,” Greg Afinogenov
• “Ukraine. I break radio silence,” “The Blog Fodder”
• "Ukraine vs Russia: Tales of pipelines and dependence," "Jerome a Paris," Dec 30, 2005.
• “The Fascism Lurking Under the Winter Games”, David Neiwert
• Buzzfeed: Ukraine Paid Right Wing Bloggers to Post Talking Points. This looks like a Russian disinformation campaign.
• Ukraine: What emergency measures and what long-term changes are needed?

There seems to me a risk of Russian invasion, or Russia simply cutting off the fuel next winter. How will the world react?

Presidential Candidates and Social Transformation

An anti-abortion Catholic friend is agonizing over her vote. McCain/Palin, of course, toe the Church's line on this issue, but she finds their militarism repulsive and she can't quite bring herself—yet, anyhow—to vote for the pro-abortion Obama/Biden ticket.

After some discussion I ended up with a question: how is it that anyone would believe that McCain and Palin are in any substantial way superior to Obama and Biden? McCain is a vet who doesn't seem to have recovered from PTSD. He is impulsive and ignorant of important issues. He is too old for the job—if he wins a second term he will be 80 at the end of it. There is a good chance of McCain dying or being disabled in office. Palin seems to be a charming narcissistic fanatic. She is deeply ignorant of governance. It's not clear she really believes anything she professes—she may just be interested in power. She has strong associations with the authoritarian, revolutionary, Christian Dominionist Alaskan Independence Party. Obama, on the other hand, is a well-educated politician, who has been studying for political leadership all his life. A greatly charismatic man, he wants the job and is willing to make great efforts to prepare for it. Biden is an experienced Democratic senator with a decent conservative record.

Looked at in this way it's clear who the superior choices for the office are. McCain and Palin are not, in any meaningful sense, "pro-life"—regardless of their anti-abortion stands, their careers would bring such great human misery as to wipe out any good that would do, even if one takes the view that all fetuses are people. Similarly a strongly pro-gun friend desperately defends them, and yet, while in a McCain/Palin administration they might keep their firearms, the attack on civil rights we have seen under Bush/Cheney would continue—we have never before had an administration making barefaced arguments in defense of torture—, and that friend might, in the end, even lose his guns.

A lot of effort has been spent on making people like my friends so concerned and scared about particular single issues that they forget the whole, like someone who lets their panic fear of falling lead them to die in a fire rather than making a safe jump from a window. If the anti-abortion people are right, abortion is a great wrong. But regardless of the candidates stands on that issue, even should they succeed in outlawing abortion, as elected officials that will not be most of their work. The President does not spend most of their time on moral issues. Nor, really, would we want a President to; we are electing a head of state and a chief executive, not a high priest. But people who latch on to single hot-button issues are made to forget this. The how of this is, I regret to say, very well understood—if you have mass media it is depressingly easy to create mass panic. If only we knew as well how to allay fears and give people courage! It is one of Obama's great virtues that he does seem to know something about this and to actually want to do it. But I want to write about the why, for a moment.

Focusing on panicking people and electing poor leaders is the nuclear option of civil society—it can take generations to pick up the pieces. The basis of this, apart from greed and power-lust, is intellectual rigidity. It is difficult for me to draw any conclusion other than that we are in need of vast transformations in our institutions and philosophies. Deep time, deep space, evolution, ecology—these things were not even dreamt of when the ideas our reactionaries rely on were formed. If there is to be a human future, we must begin to think about them as the basis of our social ethics. If we are to have a future, therefore, the institutions that refuse to respond to them must either change their ideas, or fade into insignificance.