Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
fusion—testing how they felt, not about energy's human-harming risks and wastes but its pure transform-
ative power. What did they say?
There are some quotes from a story in the
Los Angeles Times
called “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?”
Leading environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin: “It's the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”
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Paul Ehrlich: Developing fusion for human beings would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot
child.”
14
Amory Lovins was already on record as saying, “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on hu-
man dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant
energy, because of what we might do with it.”
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Heistalkinghereaboutsomethingthat,ifithadworked,wouldhavebeenabletoempowereverysingle
individual on the globe and that undoubtedly would have given
him
a longer life through the increased
scientific and technological progress a fusion-powered society would make. He's talking about something
that could take someone who had never had access to a lightbulb for more than an hour, and give him all
the light he needed for the rest of his life. He's talking about something that would have given that hospital
in The Gambia the power that it needed to save the two dead babies in the story, who could have been
thriving eight-year-olds as I write this, instead of painful memories for would-be parents.
That is what Amory Lovins regards as disastrous “because of what we might do with it.”
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Well, we've
seen what we do with energy—we make our lives amazing. We go from physically helpless to physical
supermen. We build skyscrapers and hospitals. We take vacations and go on honeymoons. We visit our
families and tour the world. We relieve drought and vanquish disease. We transform the planet for the bet-
ter.
Better—by a human standard of value.
But if your standard of value is unaltered nature, then Lovins is right to worry. With more energy, we
have the ability to alter nature more, and we will do so—because transforming our environment, trans-
forming nature, is our means of survival and flourishing.
To the antihumanist, that's precisely the problem. Have you ever heard mankind described as a cancer
on the planet? Prince Philip, former head of the World Wildlife Fund, has said, “In the event that I am
reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopu-
lation.”
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Remember that in chapter 1, David M. Graber, in praising the theme of Bill McKibben's topic,
said, “Until such time as
Homo sapiens
should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the
right virus to come along.”
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This is the logical end of holding human nonimpact as your standard of value; the best way to achieve it
is to do nothing at all, to not exist. Of course, few hold that standard of value consistently, and even these
men do not depopulate the world of themselves. But to the extent that we hold human nonimpact as our
standard of value, we are going against what our
survival requires.
And our culture has accepted this toxic standard in large doses under the friendly label “Green.”
OUR PREJUDICED CULTURE
In the last section, about the thought leaders, I observed that on every single issue pertaining to fossil fuels
they would greatly exaggerate the negatives of fossil fuels and ignore or greatly understate the positives.
