The American Library Association’s current celebration of “Choose Privacy Week” highlights the diminishing scope – yet increased importance – of this choice.  After all, privacy is a fundamental human right, preserving space for thinking, reading, writing, bodily integrity, identity, individual autonomy, and self-and-community development — free from use, abuse, discrimination, exploitation or interference by the government, companies, or other people.  Privacy is integrally related to other fundamental rights, ranging from free expression, association, and assembly, to freedom from coercive interrogation or torture or extrajudicial killings by drones or otherwise.

With ubiquitous surveillance, however, and the privacy violations by major corporations like Facebook (whose very business model has involved fooling people into giving up their privacy), or Google (whose Street View cars sucked up email content as well as passwords), truly voluntary choice recedes.  All the more important, then, to understand and assert your rights to “choose privacy” wherever possible.

Facebook and Google are only the most familiar businesses premised on scooping up personal data and manipulating it (and you) in order to make more money by selling “you” to their advertisers.  “You” are defined by your “data exhaust” (i.e. the digital trails and datapoints you leave).  Readers should know that E-book readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, are increasingly doing the same thing with your reading habits, notes, highlights, and preferences.  Beyond mere marketing, the potential harms include identity theft and more insidious manipulation and rights violations.

Such companies have ongoing relationships with government, with the better ones (e.g. Google) transparently disclosing requests and insisting on privacy and due process protections like a warrant beforehand, but the worst in this regard (e.g. Apple, Amazon, mobile phone companies Verizon and AT&T) routinely failing to protect users’ data, essentially allowing government to sometimes “outsource” illegal, warrantless searches.

The unfolding “Big Data” trend, built on exponential increases in computing power and decreases in storage and processing cost, also unleashes social value beyond profit.  Google’s use of search terms to predict flu epidemics comes to mind (although that didn’t work so well this past flu season).

In their new book on the Big Data “Revolution,” however, Vicktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier acknowledge that Big Data dramatically increases risks to privacy (and separate risks of “Minority Report”-type harms from probabilistic prediction as well).  They note that prior protective approaches don’t work given the realities and scale of the new data trend.

The “notice and consent” approach falls short when people don’t read the ever-changing privacy policies, or when data holders routinely engage in mission creep:  often beneficial new uses not contemplated let alone consented to at the outset, yet defensible in context.  (Note however that many would still insist on user’s rights to consent, at least to materially different secondary uses of personal information, and not merely for sensitive health, financial, geolocation, or children’s information).  The “Big Data” authors also note that “opt-out” approaches can be unfamiliar and difficult, sometimes leaving traces that could still harm users.  And anonymization fails when it’s so much easier than thought to identify or re-identify someone from their data.

Instead of such approaches, they thus propose in essence a corporate responsibility/accountability approach (applicable to government also):

We envision a very different privacy framework for the big-data age, one focused less on individual consent at the time of collection and more on holding data users accountable for what they do.  In such a world, firms will formally assess a particular reuse of data based on the impact is has on individuals . . .

. . . sloppy assessments or poor implementation of safeguards will expose data users to legal liability, and regulatory actions such as mandates, fines, and perhaps even criminal prosecution.

External and internal enforcers (“Algorithmists”) within governments and corporations would help protect privacy.  Though the authors seem not to know it, this proactive risk-management approach resembles that of the recent UN Framework for Business and Human Rights and Guiding Principles, which require “Human Rights Risk Assessments” and corporate “due diligence.”

The problem is that companies like Facebook and Google, while trumpeting the “shared responsibility” of users, government, and companies to protect privacy, in fact push responsibility onto users (to “leverage” the privacy “tools” companies given them but which we’ve seen aren’t fairly presented, understood, or used in practice).  The companies tend to rationalize that privacy is already, essentially, dead.  Aside from Mark Zuckerberg’s famous pronouncement to that effect, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s new book (written with Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, which probably accounts for its sometimes schizophrenic character) argues:

Since information wants to be free, don’t write anything down you don’t want read back to you in court or printed on the front page of a newspaper . . . In the future this adage will broaden to include not just what you say and write, but the websites you visit, who you include in your online network, what you “like,” and what others who are connected to you do, say, and share.

Whereas the above UN Framework and Guiding Principles put the “due diligence” obligation on companies, Schmidt and Cohen (at 65) put it on citizens and consumers — to read and rely on those horrendous policies!  And they cave in on such principles as the right to be forgotten at some point (“you cannot assume there is a simple delete button”).  This is unsurprising, since losing that data would cost Google much money.

Not a pretty picture.  So in the meantime, what to do?  Don’t give up just yet.  Here are some of my personal high-level tips, none foolproof but all worthwhile:

What do we mean, in this context, by the word “work”? Combining physical science and economic definitions, WORK is the dissipation of energy within material systems in order to create utility (for someone).

Every living organism must have an external source of energy.  It may be photons from the sun, high-energy molecules from the Earth, or high-energy molecules from eating other organisms.

For example, the photosynthetic bacterium captures and dissipates some of the energy of a photon to build the energy molecule ATP.  The ATP molecule is broken apart, dissipating energy, when and where needed in the structures of the bacterium cell so that the bacterium can grow and replicate.  The bacterium is controlling the release of energy to perform work.

A signature feature of Life, therefore, is metabolism:  the ongoing process of energy acquisition and controlled dissipation inside a living organism. Energy as food of some sort comes into the system; energy as body heat and body waste exit the system.  If the dissipated energy is a tiny bit less than the energy coming in, the biological system is growing.

So every organism works for a living, and, in every species but one, all controlled work on behalf of an organism comes from energy dissipated inside a living organism.  Not necessarily the same organism.  If a snake finds a cosy home in a gopher’s tunnel, it would be fair to say that the gopher’s work of digging created utility for the snake. But still, the metabolic work to dig that tunnel came from inside a living organism.

Of course, many species take advantage not just of work done by other animals, but of “work” done for them by uncontrolled natural phenomenon such as wind, water, gravity, and fire.  Baboons, for example, will follow in the wake of a brush fire, scavenging for the roasted bodies of small creatures caught by the fire.  No baboon, however, has been known to build, tend, or even carry fire.

Our hominid ancestors almost certainly chased fire as well.  Not only was there meat for the picking, that meat had been partially cooked, which made it more easily digested.  And so it went, until one curious and brave soul piled unburned branches onto a still burning branch, put a dead antelope on top, and hosted the Earth’s first Asado.

In Catching Fire, How Cooking made us Human, Richard Wrangham puts forth a strong inferential argument that cooking with fire dates back to Homo Habilis.  Cooking their food greatly reduced the time spent eating, yet provided more calories. Jaws and teeth got smaller, guts got shorter and used less energy, and that allowed energy-intensive brains to get bigger.  Essentially, our ancestors used fire to pre-digest food outside of our bodies.  This pre-digestion is work, done under our control and on our behalf, but outside of any living organism.  And that was something very new under the sun. I concur with Wrangham; my opinion is that is when our ancestors became human.

In taming fire, our ancestors created the world’s first exo-metabolism. In doing so, they lay claim to the greatest differentiator between humans and all other species.  Other species have large brains, other species can use simple tools, other species build external structures, and other species have language and social customs.  What have we got that they don’t? An exometabolism!

Definition:

Exo-metabolism [or exometabolism]:  A system of controlled processes, external to any living organism, whereby energy is released to perform work on behalf of an organism or entity.  Example: the automobile engine is an exometabolic process in which energy is converted into rapid physical movement of the driver, passengers, and cargo.

At first, and for a long time, our ancestor’s exometabolism was limited to burning wood to cook food.  But that gave them a big advantage in survival; populations grew spread across and out of Africa.  And so it went until about ten thousands years ago, when modern humans learned to cultivate grain, build hearths and ovens, and fire clay pots for storage and cooking.  Beginning around the same time, we learned to smelt metals in furnaces.

So our use of fire broadened, but even at the beginning of the modern era, a couple of thousand years ago, the majority of externally-focused human work was powered by the muscles of humans and our animals.  Most of the rest was cooking food.

A tipping point occurred at some point in the past thousand years, when the total energy dissipated in exometabolic processes exceeded the total energy dissipated inside humans and their domesticated animals. The industrial revolution over the past 300 years then magnified that difference many-fold.

Today, in 2013, total world energy dissipated in human exometabolic processes is in excess of 500 Quadrillion BTUs per year.  That is about 70 Million BTUs for each human on Earth.  By contrast, the internal metabolism of a human dissipates about 3 Million BTUs in a year. So on average, the total energy release in our exometabolism is more than 20 times greater than the total energy release in our combined internal metabolisms!

Of course, the benefits of our exometabolism are not distributed evenly. According to World Bank estimates, the richest 10% of the world’s population consume 59% of world energy production, while the world’s poorest 10% consume only one-half of one percent.  That means the exometabolic energy consumption of the average member of the top 10% is about 140 times greater than her internal metabolism energy. The exometabolic energy consumption of the average member of the bottom 10%, on the other hand, is only about 1½ times greater than her internal metabolism.

Regardless of unequal distribution of benefit, I suggest that the development of an exometabolism can be taken as the signature of an advanced technological culture, such as our own.

When I went to University, it was, by far, the most efficient way to become literate across a broad range of arts and sciences.  The alternatives of attending a trade school or learning on the job offered some early rewards, but the typical University graduate immediately earned more, and the gap widened as time went on.

Without a broad education, one lacked the perspective and knowledge to converse with other “well-educated” people.  It was more difficult to synthesize the visible social trends in order to anticipate the future and make smart career or business moves.  Since employers knew this, they required a University degree for most management track jobs.  A University degree was highly respected by society, and the social network provided by University provided a resource for new opportunities.   It has always been possible to become a tycoon or a celebrity without a University degree, or to become an intellectual through individual study, but the best chances of long-term career success came with a University diploma.

That is not so true anymore.  Cross-disciplinary knowledge is still very important, but it is more important to be selective.  A course of study that includes Biology, Math, Chemistry and Computer Science is essential to a career in biotechnology, but time spent learning history, literature, and psychology may just slow you down.  It might be better to get your career going as a biotech worker, and then pursue other fields of knowledge as you feel the need for them.  It used to be that educating yourself after your time at University was a difficult task involving many trips to the library (which generally didn’t have all the best books for your quest), or finding and getting the time of experts.  Now a daily educational supplement is at your fingertips. Interested in a job that requires a basic literacy in European history?  A few days on the Internet will do the trick.  Your boyfriend is interested in cosmology?  Start with http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/index.htm.   Found yourself in a media company and need to get more literate?  MIT offers more than 40 online courses, free.   Starting a business and need to learn accounting and finance?  Check out the free online courses from the MIT Sloan School of Management, one of the best business schools in the world.

It is no longer necessary to try to cram all your scholarly learning into four years at University.  The Internet creates a “long-tail” of learning opportunity.  Whether general or specific, popular or obscure, knowledge is available to you when you need it, throughout your life.  In the new model of lifetime learning, the front-loaded hours of study at University and graduate school is replaced with a faster integration into employment and frequent bursts of study throughout life.

With lifetime or long-term employment by one company now more the exception than the rule, employers are more focused on whether you have the right skills for the job you are hired for, rather than whether you are properly educated for a “management track.”  As for the value of the social network provided by attending University?  That’s still true of the elite Universities, but not so much true of the lesser institutions. LinkedIn, and Facebook, used well, provide a good substitute.

Critics will counter that statistics show a steady increase in income with more years of education, as shown in this recent chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Source:  Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2013.

Statistics, however, can mislead to false conclusions.  The chart above reflects average incomes.  Since income generally grows with age and seniority, the results are biased towards the over-40 workers, who certainly did limit their career if they didn’t go to University and on to graduate school. Second, University remains the most efficient and sometimes only way to pursue many high-income careers.  You can’t be a MD without medical school, and you can’t get into a good medical school without a degree from a good University.  The same is true for Law.

The same is not so true for computer geeks.  It isn’t just Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg (all college drop-outs).  It includes thousands of young technical geeks who earn a two year Associates degree from their local community college, then get a good job with advancement potential based upon demonstrations of their skills.  Down the line, of course, they may need to learn some business management skills, but they won’t be uncomfortable spending time with their computer to learn what they need from the best instructors in the world.

So, with the exceptions of institutionally controlled professions like medicine and law, what you study and your level of motivation probably matter more than what what degree you get.

Consider a new high-school graduate with an interest in physical infrastructure.   A couple of years of community college, leveraging online free courses on urban planning and robotics from MIT or other top institutions (for credit towards her associates degree), combined with an unpaid internship at a small company working on pipeline repair robots, and that young woman is going to have her choice of high-paying jobs.

Perhaps her high-school girlfriend wants to be a K-12 teacher.  She could take the traditional path of a 4-year degree at some mediocre University, because her parents can’t afford the better ones and she doesn’t want to saddle herself with a mountain of debt.  Alternatively, she could go to community college, emphasizing childhood education and child psychology.  She can follow that with Internet study and some facilitation workshops,  while interning at an alternative K-12 school that uses the “lectures at home, group-work at school” approach promoted by the Khan Academy.   Her personality and facilitation skills will matter more than most of what she would have learned from a four-year degree, and she will likely earn more, sooner, than she would as a teacher in our stagnant traditional school system.  If she is ambitious, she might soon be an expert on alternative education methods, and help start a new school, or become a world-traveling consultant.  Some people may dismiss her because she “doesn’t even have a University degree,”  but the forward-thinkers most likely to put her recommendations to use will look at her experience and publications, not her diplomas.

Attending University right after high school prolongs childhood, keeping us free from responsibility while we continue what we were doing in high school:  learning in the classes we like, listening to boring teachers in required courses we don’t care about, and partying like it’s 1999.   But it isn’t 1999, and more focus and less partying will serve us better.  Those who attend community college are more likely to be working to support themselves, or at least much more conscious of the opportunity cost of not working.  They are more likely to be a bit older, with some crappy work experience behind them that gives them motivation to accomplish more.  They are more likely to be focused:  choosing classes that will be most useful in a specific career that they have in mind.  They are less likely to major in Medieval Music and more likely to major in business.  They are less likely to go on to graduate school to write a thesis on economic conditions of 18th Century Russia, and more likely to go directly to work or start a business.  It is not surprising that recent reports suggest that many community college grads earn more than the average for graduates from 4-year programs.  After having paid about a tenth of the cost of attending a University.

Our public policy should reflect this new reality.  President Obama’s policy goal of making college education more affordable to more Americans is well-intended, but misses the urgent need for a structural overhaul of our post high-school education system.  States should maintain a few premier Universities, and fund them well.  But second-rate Universities should probably be gradually pared down in academic scope, emphasizing high-demand technical degrees and trade certifications.  Excess space on these campuses could be leased to businesses who wish to work in partnership with the colleges, gaining labor from and giving experience to the students.   Meanwhile, the taxpayer money freed up from downsizing the second-rate universities could be reallocated to improving the state’s network of community colleges, and to funding alternative charter schools that will explore and define the future of K-12 education.

The astronaut orbiting Earth sees a thin blue line on the planet’s horizon, separating our Earth from the blackness of space. This blue line is our atmosphere, just a few kilometers of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor and other gaseous molecules. Together with a few kilometers of the Earth’s rocky crust, the “skin” of our Earth is comparatively as thin as the skin of an apple.  This skin, however, is our biosphere, a dynamic zone where life thrives and evolves, fed from below by geothermal energy and from above by solar radiation.

The diversity of life on Earth is densely interconnected.  It is a gloriously complex system of systems, which we are only beginning to understand.  Every form of life, excepting perhaps a few exotic microbes, is dependent on the processes and activities of many others, as well as on the dynamics of the land, oceans, and atmosphere.  We humans are part of that web of interconnections.  All of our activities – whether biological, cultural, or economic in nature – are activities within a larger dynamic ecosystem.   We are not independent.

In just a blink of geological time, humans have transformed the Earth’s biosphere.  We are no longer tribal societies within an encompassing wilderness.  Now wilderness exists only as islands of lower impact within an encompassing human landscape.   Not the oceans, not the mountains, not even the atmosphere and planetary climate have escaped our impact.  We have made forests into deserts, deserts and forests into farmland, and prairies into cities of concrete and steel. We have conquered nature, and made it ours, for better or for worse.

We can no longer leave the biosphere out of our economic calculations.  Traditional economics presumes a closed loop of activity within human society, taking in only resources from the “natural world”  and the economy to be a system always tending towards equilibrium Economics, which studies how we exchange value with each other, must give way to Econosystemics, which studies the creation and flow of value not only within human society, but between human society and the larger biosphere.  To do otherwise invites catastrophe.

Econosystemics reframes economics to focus on the creation and accumulation of value, not only in human society, but also in this gloriously complex biosphere we are part of.  We’re all in this together, and it isn’t a zero-sum game.  There is hope for us all.

That is a very different approach from the economics that is taught in our universities and business schools, in which the emphasis is on the pricing and allocation and of scarce resources.  Not only in the textbooks, but also in popular discourse, the focus is on a consumption-driven, human-only economy.   Corporations, in this paradigm, compete to satisfy the pre-existing consumption demands of households.  Households return investment and labor to the corporations, and aside from resource scarcity and waste, that’s the closed loop.  Economic growth, deemed essential to a healthy economy, is about continually increasing production and consumption.  Running faster and faster in the rat-race; the devil take the hindmost.

But life isn’t that neat and simple, nor so bleak..  Life on Earth is an open thermodynamic system, receiving energy from the sun and converting it, somewhat chaotically,  into more life — or into things which have value for life.  Life on Earth is a complex, dynamic system that keeps on evolving.  Human economic activity is not fundamentally different from all the rest of life, we just take it to a different level.  We channel energy from various sources through our economic infrastructure to create value: the things that we need or want.  We consume much of that value, but a substantial fraction gets reinvested into our ever-evolving infrastructure.  In that regard, it is a virtuous cycle of value accumulation.

We are, however, destroying value within the larger ecosystem.  Humans are now a dominant force of change, responsible for environmental disruption and rapid biodiversity loss.   Econosystemics, therefore, looks at our value creation in context: what value is, and how it is created and destroyed in a complex dynamic system that includes not only what we call “the economy”, but also our quality of life and all of what we call our “environment”.  Econosystemics considers not just a flow of value from “nature” to human society, but examines the flows of value in all directions within the whole ecosystem web.

Econosystemics doesn’t ignore consumption, but it notices that new value creation precedes demand.  For a company like Apple, for example, the marketing mantra isn’t “Find a need and fill it,” but “Create a new need.”  In econosystemics, what matters is not economic growth but economic development, which can be defined as the net accumulation of value within our entire biosphere — made thermodynamically possible by a flow of energy.  If economics is the “dismal science” focused on scarcity, econosystemics is a “hopeful science” that offers the promise of human “progress” without deprivation of the many for the sake of the few, and without the destruction of our vital biosphere.

It is very important for modern corporations to internalize this viewpoint as part of their culture.  The most successful corporations, in the long run, are not those that focus on building today’s products more cheaply, but those that are inventing new technologies and new ways to create and accumulate value.  The most successful companies, in the long run, are not those that exploit their employees and communities, but those that invest in their employees,  communities, and the environment.  You see this in the trend towards corporate co-opetition, in the success of companies like Google and Apple, and in the movement towards multi-stakeholder, environmental and social responsibility.

Where this is heading is towards a responsible society of corporations, in which an informal and formal social contract emerges that enforces norms and disciplines corporations that are blatantly destroying value, whether by environmental destruction or by promoting and profiting on war and social conflicts.    This isn’t just about morality; it’s about business, too. Companies that can refocus their activities away from debt-fueled, unsustainable consumption and towards an ongoing accumulation of value within the econosystem will be the most successful companies of the next decades.

Gregor argues that despite coal being much more dangerous than nuclear, the public’s irrationality will always react more strongly against rare but spectacular nuclear accidents. Combine that irrational fear with the cold hard economic fact that coal energy is much cheaper than nuclear energy (externalities excluded), and nuclear doesn’t stand a chance.

In the short run, this is a very strong argument, and I wouldn’t advise making short-term financial bets against Gregor’s analysis. But if we take a longer run view, in which corporate interests dominate political decisions and exponentially improving technologies dominate the Technium, the energy density of nuclear will win out over digging coal, fracking for gas, or covering every possible surface with photovoltaics.

Exponential technological improvements will be applied to all energy sources, of course, as well as to energy efficiency. Solar energy harvesting, in particular, will become much cheaper and efficient. Energy storage and transmission also will improve, allowing us to better utilize the solar energy we collect. Robot mining and carbon sequestration could make “clean coal” more of a reality. But nuclear energy will always beat out everything else in terms of energy density. And here is the time-tested rule: Life, writ large, has never failed to exploit the highest density energy potentials it can crack open.

At present, coal and gas have more billionaires, and thus more political power, than does any alternative for electricity generation. But the Technium’s thirst for more energy is unslakeable. Not only do six billion people want to come up to the consumption zone of the top billion, but exponential technologies will demand exponentially more energy, even as they become exponentially more efficient. Just consider computer processing: while it has become millions of times more energy-efficient over time, total power consumption due to computing has simultaneously increased exponentially.

Coal and gas can’t keep up with that trend for more than another decade. Ray Kurtzweil is sanguine that solar will meet all our energy needs in 20 years, but I think he is underestimating exponential growth in energy demand, and the exponentially increasing surface areas solar will require. Nuclear, however, can provide an intense, steady energy gradient within a very small footprint, scalable to any conceivable demand. That’s what the Technium wants; and what the Technium wants, it finds a way to get.

Political power in the United States supposedly rests in a democratic social contract, a government of, by and for the people. In reality,however, democracy is at best only a safety valve for political control by the powerful. Public opinion is shaped by money flow and media control. The influence of billionaires and large corporations manipulates public opinion to serve their own competing interests. It is the society of corporations, not the society of voters, which will decide the fate of nuclear energy.

Here is what I think will play out in the next two decades. In the short term, competition among powerful corporations and individuals, and concerns over nuclear terrorism, will outweigh concerns over climate change and biodiversity collapse. Natural gas, temporarily plentiful and cheap, will be the ascendant energy source of the decade. Coal plants will continue to proliferate like bacteria on a forgotten pot of chicken soup.

But along about 2015, the balance will shift. New capabilities for compact, factory-sealed, rail-transportable nuclear cores will completely change the economics of building nuclear plants. A next-generation of thorium-based reactors will be in development. A few large thorium –or, potentially, fusion– reactors will be able to serve as “incinerators” consuming nuclear waste from other reactors, from weapons, and from other sources. Increasingly sophisticated global surveillance and response systems will help guard against nuclear weapons proliferation and terrorism (sorry, privacy advocates). The accelerating impacts of climate change and biodiversity will foster more international cooperation among the powerful. Around about 2015-2018, the society of corporations will reach a consensus: the Technium needs nuclear.

When the society of corporations, expressing the unconscious but irresistible will of the Technium, decides to pursue nuclear energy, you can be sure that public opinion will follow right along. Factory-style production and improved safety and security systems will enable an extremely rapid deployment over the decade following that. Modular will be used as “drop-in” replacements for aging coal plants, leveraging existing power distribution systems. Economies of scale will rapidly reduce costs of deployment.

Gregor says he’ll bet that nuclear never cracks 10% of total world energy supply. Kurtzweil says in 20 years solar will provide all of our energy supply. I say they are both wrong. I’ll bet that nuclear (fission and/or fusion) is 10% of world energy supply by 2025, and 50% by 2030.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster gives rise to many consequences, for the people and country of Japan, but also globally: consequences for the nuclear power industry, for energy more broadly, and for our ability to effectively address the challenge of climate change.  Politics will play at least as large a role as pragmatics.

My observation of prior corporate disasters suggests that the immediate pronouncements (e.g. nuclear power is dead) may be overstated.  We’re still drilling offshore after last year’s BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, for example.  And climate change realities, barring some amazing new technological discovery, could mean that nuclear power remains a necessary part of the mix despite these resurgent safety concerns and the high cost.  Solar, by contrast, requires more land and at least currently seems to hold less promise for efficiently meeting the rapidly growing global energy demand.

The possibility of fuel rods igniting, newly raised by the incident in Japan, has elevated the risk profile of nuclear power in the minds of many experts.  The NYT and other media outlets are linking nuclear safety risks from acts of terrorism to the recent reminders of vulnerability from natural disasters.  Waste disposal remains an issue.  Although France and other countries using nuclear to a larger degree than the US have managed to handle spent fuel using a variety of storage approaches, the perceptions and the political dimensions of safety and waste disposal issues may be more significant than the substantive concerns in terms of whether and to what extent nuclear power proceeds.

In the short term and medium term, natural gas looks relatively better to most decision makers (since it’s cheaper and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future), despite being a finite resource subject to its own environmental and other risks.  The delay in climate change legislation only makes this more the case.  Japan will likely turn to natural gas to make up gaps in electricity generation.  At least natural gas involves lower emissions than coal. US policymakers have more flexibility than, say, French policymakers on this score (given the 80% dependency of France on nuclear energy at present).  They will thus find natural gas persistently attractive given the recent discovered US supplies – despite residual concerns over hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

The rest of the world is reviewing pending nuclear plant projects and viewing the industry more skeptically, but it is frankly hard to see how large nations like China can conceivably meet their burgeoning demand for energy without relying in substantial part on nuclear.  The pragmatic truth is that not just China but all of the developing world needs lots more energy.  Even with substantial gains in efficiency, a full tilt deployment of wind and solar wherever financially and politically feasible, and rapid increases in the use of natural gas, a large gap is likely to remain.  That gap will be filled either by nuclear energy or by coal.

Of the two, coal is the more dangerous:  more climate impact, more habitat destruction, more pollution, and many more industry deaths. If we can avoid Chernobyl-scale accidents, radiation exposure from nuclear energy is surprisingly negligible from a social standpoint (though perhaps not to individual victims, of course).   A recent chart by Randall Munroe shows just how negligible, even in the case of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima.

The disaster in Japan does suggest corporate overconfidence and possibly even negligence, however.  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concerns would counsel greater due diligence and both human rights and environmental risk assessments in light of the Japanese disaster, as contemplated by the recent UN Framework on Business and Human Rights and the UN Special Representative’s recently released draft Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Core CSR principles – including integrated decision-making, stakeholder engagement, transparency, consistent best practices, precautionary risk management, accountability, and community investment — all apply with great force to these issues of nuclear power. Integrated decision-making requires a look at environmental and social sustainability issues as well as economic issues. Stakeholder engagement is essential at all levels in order to proactively address the concerns of affected communities.  This in turn depends on greater transparency on the part of governments as well as utility and energy companies, including regarding design parameters, resilience, and safety plans.  Without such public processes, there’s little hope of restoring public trust and confidence and the reputation of nuclear power.

The latest best practices must be adopted and consistently adhered to, including construction and siting practices and safety improvement features such as having reactors widely separated on site and stronger containment vessels, as well as new approaches such as modular nuclear that are accompanied by equal or greater attention to safety.  In some cases, decisions to site plants over existing fault lines, for example, should be reconsidered.  Passive cooling (where systems don’t need external power to function) provides an additional margin of safety in the latest generation of nuclear power plants.  Aging reactors may need to be completely replaced instead of being repaired.  Disaster response plans should be reviewed to take into account lessons from Japan.

These issues should be considered now, instead of waiting for decades after the initial operation period until relicensing is considered.  Sensible application of a reasonable version of the precautionary principle and effective risk management is now more needed than ever – not such a strong version that all progress would be halted, but a more cautious assessment and modifications of current approaches to nuclear power.

Society also deserves a look at accountability mechanisms, given what’s happened in Japan.  As with the pre-BP oil drilling laws, the nuclear industry globally operates under capped liability for impacts caused by the reactors.  New approaches that take into account compensating victims for damages are overdue.  Regulators should also review the relevant planning zones (ten miles in the US).

None of the above, however, suggests that we should stop using nuclear energy.  The petroleum and coal industries have been guilty of much greater negligence regarding safety and environmental damage, and even willful and systemic violation of human rights in numerous cases. The Japanese disaster certainly places new imperatives on confirming that public concerns about this source of energy be addressed and not dismissed.   Rather than ban nuclear power or completely stop technological refinement, however, the incident in Japan should prompt renewed investment in safer and even more reliable and cost-effective nuclear power.

——————-

Chip Pitts teaches corporate social responsibility and sustainable development at Stanford Law School and Oxford University.

Excerpts from Poverty and Human Rights by Thomas Pogge, 2007:

“The  statistics are appalling. Out of a total of 6575 million human beings, 830 million are reportedly chronically undernourished, 1100 billion lack access to safe water and 2600 million lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006: 174, 33). About 2000 million lack access to essential drugs (www.fic.nih.gov/about/summary.html). Some 1000 million have no adequate shelter and 2000 million lacked electricity (UNDP 1998: 49). Some 799 million adults are illiterate (www.uis.unesco.org).

“Roughly 1/3 of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, are due to poverty related causes, easily preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, mosquito nets, re-hydration packs, vaccines and other medicines. This sums up to over 300 million deaths in just 17 years since the end of the Cold War–many more than were caused by all the wars, civil wars, and government repression of the entire 20th century. Children under five account for nearly 60% or 10.6 million of the annual death toll from poverty related causes (UNICEF 2005: inside front cover).

Systemic Poverty:  Poverty which is pervasive with a geographical region over multiple generations, or pervasive within a particular social, ethnic, or religious class within a geographic region.  Systemic poverty is reinforced by persistent cultural divisions, exploitation under dominant sociopolitical powers, ongoing environmental degradation, or persistent armed conflict or occupation within a region.

Circumstantial Poverty: Poverty of individuals or families due to misfortunes of health, career, mental disabilities, natural disasters, or other factors outside of a context of systemic poverty.

The greatest number of people living in near absolute poverty, of course, falls into the category of systemic, emerging nation poverty. Of these, around 60% live in rural areas, and on average suffer more absolute poverty than do the urban poor.

World Poverty Map:   Percent of Population Living Below Poverty Line  (as defined by each country)

Source:   http://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=69

On the map above, China looks as rich as the United States, and India looks no worse than Argentina, while much of Africa and Latin America look the worst.  This is both because in differences in how poverty is defined, and also because the percentage of a nation’s population in poverty is not the same as the percentage of the world’s poor living in that nation.

The world looks very different if we look at absolute numbers of people living in absolute poverty (in this case defined as $2 per day or less.  This map below, from Worldmapper (http://www.worldpopulationatlas.org/), distorts the size of each nation according to the number of people in that country living on $2 per day or less.  While in the previous map above we saw various sub-saharan African nations with the highest percentage of their population in poverty, the map below shows that China and India have the greatest number of people in absolute poverty.

Worldmapper Poverty Map: Country size distorted in proportion to number of people in absolute poverty.

Exponential Wealth:

It is very difficult to accurately assess wealth holding globally, but the chart below shows the result of one careful attempt to estimate the distribution of global wealth. [Data for chart taken from UNU-WIDER World Distribution of Household Wealth, 2008]

But so what? Is concentration of wealth a problem, or a solution? If we replace the dollar signs in the chart above with loaves of bread, then it would obscene to have two people with forty loaves and one hundred people sharing a single loaf. Substituting in mansions and yachts versus hovels and rickshaws would hardly change the perspective. But what of Warren Buffett, who lives in a modest home despite his vast wealth? Most of the world’s wealth is not embodied in currency or consumables, but in productive assets — or more accurately, in organized systems of technology and social institutions that use energy and create valued products and services. These organized systems not only create wealth, they are wealth. The chart above illustrates, in large measure, the degree of ownership over the socio-technical systems of human society — what author Kevin Kelley calls “the Technium.”

The Econosystem Pyramid:

source:  Bryan Long, Econosystemics.com

Econosystem:  The global system of value production and exchange, including human individuals, human social entities, technologic systems, managed biosystems, and wild biosystems. The econosystem, like all adaptive dynamic systems, develops and utilizes available energy sources in order to make material and organizational transformations.

Each node in the diagram above can be considered a representative individual (or entity) within the econosystem.  Prior to the industrial revolution, the econosystem was powered primarily by biomass collected by the human population, using basic technologies (low-technium).  With the industrial revolution, beginning around 1775, large flows of energy and resources began to bypass the majority of humans under control of the higher sociopolitical layers.  As represented by the dark arrows, fossil fuel and mineral resource flows fed a rapidly developing “high-technium”, implemented by engineers, architects, and managerial talent, and controlled by “capitalists” or political leaders.  The lower social majority had to find a way to serve the Technium as “labor”, or continue basic subsistence largely outside the transformational processes of the Technium.

At the present time, approximately ten to twenty times more energy flows into the Technium from fossil or other non-biological sources than flows into it from biological systems.   Furthermore, the greater percentage of biological resources also bypasses people at the bottom of the pyramid:  large landholders using highly mechanized methods and lots of fossil-fuel-based inputs (illustrated by downward reaching dark arrows) feed bioresources into the middle and upper classes.

In the diagram above, a “highly developed” nation is depicted in the central vertical portion of the pyramid. A disproportionate percentage of energy and material resources flow to the members of the developed nation. The majority of the population lives fully within the Technium (including those “upper layer” individuals enjoying ownership and control of the Technium).  For the most part, the Technium is their environment — they make only recreational visits to “enjoy nature”.  The “middle class” is well-developed. Relatively few individuals in live in absolute poverty, and those few are mostly circumstantial rather than systemic.  Considerable numbers, however, live in relative poverty compared to the majority of citizens in their nation  — but their circumstances would generally be seen as fortunate by the absolute poor in underdeveloped nations.

An “emerging” nation is depicted in the left vertical portion of the pyramid.  Here large populations live in or near absolute poverty, both in rural areas and in urban slums.  At the same time a strong middle class is emerging within a rapidly developing technium, strong interconnections exist with developed nation economies, and members of the financial elite are part of a strongly interconnected global elite.

A “low-development” nation is depicted on the right vertical portion of the pyramid.  Here a privileged few enjoy great wealth based upon control of resource extraction, and trade, political systems are generally non-democratic, the middle class is sparse and of low financial strength, and the majority of the population hover near absolute poverty.

It is important to note that the entities in the “control” layer are, more often than not, corporate entities rather than individual humans.  In the future, the upper regions of the pyramid may be occupied as well by “technologicaly enhanced” humans and even fully electronic entities!   The econosystem emerged from homo sapiens, but it will most likely outlast that species!

…Next: Alleviating Absolute Poverty

Traditional aid charities give food, clothing, and medicines. More development-oriented programs try to improve agriculture, education, healthcare and infrastructure.  Microfinance programs let the entrepreneurial poor take the initiative to improve their own lives. Even so, the UN Millennium Development Goals for 2015 seem unlikely to be met. Even so, more than 20,000 children die each day due to poverty.

Meanwhile, this week in the United States, an IBM supercomputer named Watson easily defeated the two most successful past winners of the popular game show Jeopardy.  Watson was able to figure out the convoluted phrasing of the Jeopardy questions and come up with a confident answer, or sometimes an educated guess, faster than the human contestants.

Let’s consider who or what Watson is.  IBM states that:

“Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. “

Wow!  Sounds powerful, and it is.  Each Power 750 server consumes, according to specs, 1950 Watts.  Ninety of those adds up to 175.5 kilowatts.  With all those accessory components, let’s round it up to 200 kW.  By way of comparison, that’s about 10,000 times higher than a laptop computer.

With all that computing power, Watson successfully emulates and outperforms the human brain at finding answers to questions of fact presented in natural language.  Quite an advance for computers, and a sign of things to come.  I have no doubt that we will soon have computers that can converse with us and outperform us in surprising ways.   I have no doubt that some time in the not too distant future there will be computer brains with consciousness, that will far transcend the capabilities of the human brain.

But in the meantime, a human brain is still one heck of a powerful supercomputer. A human brain can process and correlate disparate sensory information, generalize, speculate, initiate, validate and solve a wide variety of problems in ways that are way beyond Watson’s capabilities.  And a brain is SO much more energy efficient.  Watson’s hardware consumes about 200,000 Watts of energy flow.   A human body consumes about 100 Watts.   So the fair comparison based on energy use is not Watson against two humans, but against two thousand!

Watson’s hardware alone costs over $1,000,000; with software its price climbs to multiple millions.  Amortized over seven years, that’s perhaps $1,000 per day, not including power, air conditioning, maintenance, and operator expenses.  Add those in and Watson probably costs about $5000 per day.

Meanwhile, there are three billion brains out there trying to survive on $2.50 per day.  Double their daily income to $5 per day and they could more properly feed and train their brains.  At $5 per day per human, the cost to operate one Watson equals the cost to sustain one thousand humans!  I’m not arguing that Watson is a waste of money. My point is that there is a lot of underutilized and inexpensive brainpower out there. What if we could tap into it?  Can we figure out a way for the poor to earn income through brainwork rather than begging or back-breaking labor?

It’s not as far-fetched as it might seem.  There are now over 5 Billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, with over 70% of them in the developing world.  Mobile phone penetration in the developing world is now about 68 subscriptions per 100 people.  There are also now more Internet users in the developing world than in the developed world.  Most do not own their own computers, but rent time at Internet cafes or retail storefronts.  Over the next five years, it is likely that most developing world subscribers will swap out their old phones for inexpensive smartphones that can provide Internet access. Over the same period, cellular networks will be upgraded to provide limited Internet access even in rural areas.

Cell phones provide many benefits to their owners, but we can also see them as a way to access the information processing capabilities of billions of under-utilized brains.  Consider crowdsourcing, an already popular way to submit a problem or task to anyone “out there” willing to tackle it, for fun or payment.  Consider innovative Internet-based “games” like Foldit and Eterna that tap into the problem solving capabilities of volunteers to assist with significant scientific challenges.  Consider micro-payment schemes that allow users to bank and spend using their cellular phones.  The new answer to poverty alleviation just might be clever ways to “outsource” brainwork to the bottom billion.

Social entrepreneurs, start thinking!

Sources: IBM, GlobalIssues.org, ITU