saisho ni sekitan ga kesu

The lights are still on in Japan, but a year after Fukushima the question on everyone's mind is how best to keep them on. After experiencing such a massive shock to the system, the whole idea of nuclear power is being approached very skeptically in Japan; it's a vast change from before the tsunami, when government plans were for Japan to continue increasing the nuclear foundation of its generation capacity. Considering the incompetence with which Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner and operator of the Fukushima reactors, approached not only the disaster but disaster planning - ignoring or dismissing multiple opportunities in past years which, if implemented, could have prevented the meltdown - along with the dream of "absolute nuclear safety" being shattered in such a dramatic way, it's absolutely reasonable for people to have second thoughts. Of all the nuclear reactors in Japan, by the end of this month only the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido will still be generating power, with the remainder suspended for checkups and stress-testing.

Utilities across Japan are, therefore, confronting hard choices: not only what to do to keep the lights on for the immediate future, but how to approach power generation in the years and decades to come. Earlier this week the Japan Times reported that the Kansai Electric Power Company, which supplies electricity to Japan's populous Kansai region partially from eleven nuclear reactors, is potentially facing demands from some of its shareholders - namely the cities of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka - to phase out its nuclear generation capacity, accounting for nearly half of its total supply, and replace it with renewables.

When taken in isolation, this is a laudable goal; however, laudable goals don't easily translate into reality, and it's possible that the highly understandable reaction to the Fukushima disaster may end up worsening things in its own way.

The Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido. Photo by Mugu-shisai, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The nuclear power plants that supply the Kansai region are situated in Fukui Prefecture, on the coast of the Sea of Japan and about seventy kilometers as the crow flies from Kyoto. What's significantly closer is the northern coast of Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan and a reservoir used by fifteen million people. A sufficiently bad nuclear accident could contaminate the lake - which, to me, is just another reason for safety measures at the existing plants to be beefed up. It's not as if the plants are going to be decomissioned tomorrow; hell, by the original schedules, Fukushima Daiichi was to have already begun the decomissioning process on the day the tsunami struck.

Japan is in a difficult place when it comes to nuclear power for the very reasons that led it to install nuclear power in the first place; it's a geographically small, relatively resource-poor country. Germany may be trumpeting the fact that it's shutting down all its reactors and increasing the presence of renewable power sources in its mix, but what tends not to be mentioned is how Germany is bringing more and more coal-burning power plants on line to fill the gap - which, if you care about air pollution and the increased deaths it absolutely causes or atmospheric emission of carbon dioxide, is a significant problem. It's hardly the "environmental" choice.

Fortunately, the mayors aren't pulling for coal - however, in addition to their drive for renewables, they want KEPCO to replace its nuclear reactors with liquefied natural gas power plants; granted, they're not as polluting as coal-burning plants, but they still pollute and still emit carbon dioxide.

My own view of this is simple - if KEPCO is to replace its reactors, it should first demonstrate that it's capable of replacing a substantial mix of its generating capacity... how fortunate for my argument that its mix also includes twenty thosuand megawatts worth of "thermal" generating sources. It's unclear which of these are coal-burning plants, since that lovely word "thermal" hides so much, but with more than a quarter of Japan's electricity coming from burning coal I don't think it's a much of a leap to suggest that at least some are.

So - let KEPCO first mothball its existing coal power plants, replacing them with renewables and - if necessary - LNG. If there aren't any problems with that kind of switchover, then the drive toward a local phase-out of nuclear would at least have the precedent of a functional solution. The real enemy here is coal; personally, I would much rather live next door to a nuclear power plant than even within sight of a coal-burner's smokestacks.

Not Evil, Just Irresponsible

People tend to go on about the inevitability of death and taxes, but there is one constant in civilization they're missing; disagreement. In most respects, disagreement and ensuing argument is a beneficial thing in the long term, as it can enable viewpoints to be moderated and consensuses to be reached. This process most definitively goes off the rails, though, when ideology enters the equation.

The Fraser Institute is a Vancouver-based think tank that bills itself as working toward "a free and prosperous world through choice, markets and responsibility," and which supports "greater choice, less government intervention, and more personal responsibility." It's a decidedly conservative think tank, in other words, that counts among its senior fellows former Ontario Premier Mike Harris and ex-Reform Party boss Preston Manning, who loves that word "refooooooorm."

On Thursday, the Fraser Institute put out a press release which urges Canadians to "set a world record" for a movie premiere's attendance by hosting their own release parties of Not Evil Just Wrong, a documentary that "examines the hype and fear-mongering of the environmental movement over global warming."

Oh boy. The sheer weight of the bias in this article is enough to make Atlas shudder. At first I thought the quote from filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who says the movie will "clearly expose the overblown rhetoric and false claims behind... environmental doomsday predictions," was harsh enough, but it's nothing compared to what the Fraser Institute itself has to say about this.

Apparently, sayeth the Fraser Institute, actions to curb carbon dioxide emissions will destroy "Canadians' middle-class lifestyles and dreams for their children," and there's no real problem with the environment anyway because the film will reveal "the deceptions about global warming that scientists, politicians, educators, and the media have been force-feeding the public for years... the same kind of anti-human propaganda that triggered a ban on DDT and condemned millions of children to death by malaria."

The cheek is absolutely outstanding. This press release is so vociferous I can't help but read it as a parody of itself. I simply can't believe that anyone would look at something so charged and consider it perfectly reasonable. So I went to the Not Evil Just Wrong website for an unfiltered look.

Oh boy.

"Global Warming alarmism and the tax increases that go along with it are going to increase costs for working families during one of the worst recessions in living memory." Didn't you read the papers? The recession is over, baybee! Well, okay, I'm being a bit facetious and Canadian there, but the quote is nothing more than the enshrinement of the temporary over the long-term - the same thing that, by the by, got us into this mess in the first place. Ten years from now the recession is going to be a memory, but ten years is only half of the average residence time of a carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere.

"Al Gore and his allies want to ban fossil fuels in the developed world." This is absolutely insane. Though I can't honestly say I wouldn't like to see fossil fuel burning banned, I'm realistic enough to realize that it would make Prohibition look like a triumph of law and order. France and Ontario are the only jurisdictions I can think of, off the top of my head, that do not derive a majority of their electricity from burning fossil fuels. 86% of all electrical generation in the world is derived from fossil fuel sources.

"They want us to change the way we live," says the trailer. My god, says I. Take steps to move away from an isolating, entrapping existence between city and country that puts you at the mercy of a ton of coughing steel? Why would anyone ever want to leave that behind?

"I don't think it would be a bad thing for this Earth to warm up," says a man quoted in the trailer. "In fact, ice is the enemy of life."

What.

If the trailer is any indication, this movie will be full of "rah-rah AMERICA FUCK YEAH," telling people about how environmentalists are wrong and evil because they want to close factories and put millions of people out of work and send the world back to the Dark Ages. Because, you know, there's no chance of the consequences of increased global temperatures working out to the exact same thing.

Let me say, for the record, that I would love for the people behind Not Evil Just Wrong to be right. I can't think of anything I'd rather be able to know for a fact than that climate change is a scientific error, and that Earth isn't threatened by ecological collapse. I would love to live in that kind of world. But we know that carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas, and we're pumping more and more of it into the atmosphere every day. But who cares about increasing the possibility of death when the alternative is TAXES?

To pretend that it doesn't exist might not be evil - the jury's still out on that - but it most definitely is reckless and irresponsible. And the people who made it are definitely not going to be on the invite list for my weather bunker.

Australia, Vanguard of Doom

While at Worldcon in Montreal earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend a couple of panels dealing with the subject of climate change: one explored potential ways to mitigate it through geoengineering, and the other investigated whether or not it was "storyable." Though I did get a few interesting ideas from it, the single overriding concept I left the two panels was this: we're fucked.¹

The news I see after having returned home isn't much better. Australian newspapers have been charting the course of a potential emissions trading scheme in that country for at least the last few weeks, if not more, and nothing of what they're reporting looks good. On August 13th, Australia time, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article entitled "Doubters attend lecture as ETS bill heads for doom," with a simple message: this bill is fucked.

The proposed ETS is the work of Malcolm Turnbull, leader of Australia's Liberal Party and thus Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Parliament. Having never seen him in action, I've got no idea how Mr. Turnbull compares to Stéphane Dion in the charisma department, but I'm already seeing disturbing correspondences with Canada's own wrestling match with environmental legislation, after Canada's Liberal Party fought and lost an election with environmental issues as one of their prominent planks.

Granted, Australian PM Kevin Rudd's no Stephen Harper - though both their Wikipedia pages are, as of this writing, "semi-protected to prevent libelous additions." For one, Rudd actually seems to think that climate change is a problem, and has been making noise about Doing Something. Hell, his first official act as PM was to sign the Kyoto Protocol for Australia.

The problem here is one of coordination and correspondence. Sure, most countries say that climate change is a problem and that they want to do something about it, but none of them actually will until someone makes the first move. Rudd has delayed the introduction of emissions trading in Australia until at least 2011 for this very reason.

Predictably, the coal companies are throwing their weight around in this debate, and Australia is uniquely vulnerable to coal companies. It's a dry continent, so there are few rivers substantial enough to dam for hydroelectric power - only 6.8% of its electricity is from hydro sources, according to the World Nuclear Association - and while it is not quite as crazy as neighboring New Zealand, there is still enough anti-nuclear hysteria in Australia that nuclear power generation has no presence at all.

The end result is that Australia is utterly dependent on coal to a degree practically unmatched anywhere else - even China has a more diversified generation portfolio. According to the Australian Coal Association, more than eighty percent of Australia's electricity is derived from burning coal. Australian coal plants produced nearly 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in 2007. How can anyone down there possibly entertain fantasies of environmental stewardship without totally ignoring that?

The problem with governments is that governments have to, have to, govern with the status quo in mind, because if they rock the boat too much an angry electorate will throw the bums out. The problem with the status quo is that the assumption that goes along with it is that we have unlimited time to change things around, that we could keep burning fossil fuels at our steadily-climbing rate until the 22nd century or beyond, and that nothing bad would happen.

Science does not bear this out. Carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing, the icecaps are melting, and the permafrost is beginning to thaw - and the methane currently sequestered in the permafrost, the methane that has the potential to kick global warming into a seriously high gear, is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about.

At least in places like Canada, the United States, France, and even China, dirty and dysenvironmental coal-based generation is not the only source of power. Australia, handcuffed as it is to the fortunes and filth of burning coal, has a lot further to go.

¹ For example, a solar shade with 8% reflectivity, stationed at the Sol-Earth L1 point to reduce solar impact on Earth by 0.25% and temperatures by 2 degrees Fahrenheit, would be a good way to create a "planetary thermometer" for environmental regulation, if only there was an easy way to build thirty-seven million tons worth of solar shade up there.