Newsgroup: it.discussioni.energie-alternative
Titolo: Cina e i tre nati diventa la prova del peccato originale del NO nucleare


 
Funziona. Ampliando in modo esagerato la portata dell'incidente
di Three Mile Island nel 1979, con l'aiuto anche del potere
mediatico dei petrolieri, vedi film Sindrome Cinese con Jane
Fonda e Jack Lemmon, un colpo di fortuna (?) mediatico,
perche' il film esce il 16 marzo 1979, e il 28 marzo 1979
a Three Mile Island avviene il noto guaio, riescono infine
a fare breccia. Notare che l'aumento dei soci "isterici"
che si iscrivono nel Sierra Club porta poi Brower ad essere
riaccolto nel 1983 il Sierra Club e torna nel consiglio fino al
1988. Viene poi rieletto ancora una volta tra il 1995 e il 2000.
 
Di fatto, dal 1983 il Sierra Club diventa antinuclearista.
 
Quanto sopra dovrebbe anche spiegare come mai anche l'antinuclerismo
in Europa pare avere molto personaggi "elitari" piu' che popolari.
Provate a guardare le biografie del chi e' chi dell'antinuclearismo
politico, gente altolocata, nobili, alta borghesia, etc.
 
Riguardo al 27 marzo 1979, utilizzando un metodo non convenzionale
di ripulitura dei filtri usando acqua sotto pressione invece di
aria compressa, non fanno alcun controllo di eventuali effetti
collaterali (in questo caso una valvola di controllo bloccata in
posizione aperta ... giusto quello che servivaa alla campagna del
sig.Brower) come acqua che entra nella linea strumentale ad aria
compressa. 11 ore dopo, 28 marzo 1979, le pompe di alimentazion acqua,
le pompe di spinta del condensato, le pompe del condensato
si fermano tutte verso le 4 del mattino, causando una fermata
di emergenza della turbina a vapore. Tutto questo e' avvenuto
nella sezione vapore della centrale, non nel reattore nucleare.
Naturalmente, il calore del reattore non poteva piu' uscire
e cosi' l'aumento di temperatura e pressione e' stato subito
rilevato dagli strumenti che lanciano la procedura di SCRAM,
spegnimento rapido del rettore. Fin qui, nulla di straordinario.
Che in una centrale "termoelettrica", la turbina possa andare
in blocco non e' un evento raro, e l'evento era stato
previsto con un blocco conseguente del reattore.
Il blocco del reattore, lo SCRAM, attiva anche tre pompe ausiliarie,
il cui compito e' quello di smaltire il calore residuo del
reattore, pari a circa un decimo della potenza al momento
dello SCRAM, per poi scendere nei giorni successiv.
Stranamente (?), in totale spregio di una norma chiave del NRC,
tutte e tre le valvole di controllo (una per ogni pompa
ausiliaria) erano chiuse per manutenzione. La norma, per chi
non avesse capito, e' che per la sicurezza nucleare, in ogni
momento almeno una delle pompe ausiliarie deve avere la
valvola aperta, pronta per eventuale SCRAM. Altrimenti a che
serve "duplicare" i sistemi di sicurezza, se poi vengono
disattivati tutti insieme ? E qui inizia la catena delle
anomalie. Puo' accadere che si debba fare manutenzione a tutti
e tre i sistemi di emergenza in contemporanea, ma la norma NRC
e' cristallina: tale manutenzione si fa solo con il reattore
spento e disattivato (quindi durante la ricarica periodica
del combustibile).
E qui ancora una anomalia: a seguito della fermata di tutte
le pompe e la mancata entrata in fuzione delle "disattivate"
pompe di raffreddamento post-SCRAM, la pressione aumenta ancora
e si apre una valvola di scarico pressione in eccesso. Questa
valvola avrebbe tutto chiudere appena la pressione fosse scesa
sotto il livello massimo, ma invece resta inchiodata aperta,
continuando a scaricare vapore anche se la pressione era scesa
a valori normali. Questo causa una perdite di acqua nel circuito
primario, che e' la causa poi della parziale fusione del nocciolo.
E un segnalatore doveva segnalare in sala controllo che la valvola
era aperta, ma continuo' ad indicare la valvola come "chiusa".
Questo e' stato per un errore di posizione, perche' la spia
indicava la posizione del solenoide di comando (che era disattivato
al ritorno della pressione a valori normali) ma non quella
effettiva della valvola. E cosi' per ore preziose, gli operatori
non capiscono il problema e solo la squadra di sostituti capisce
l'origine dei guai, ma per il nocciolo e' gia' tardi, i primi
danni sono gia' stati causati.
 
Cosa c'entra tutto questo con la Cina di questi giorni ?
 
Dunque, il timore dei Bower e soci, veri e proprio maltusiani
(aumento delle risorse a basso costo farebbe aumentare la
popolazione senza limiti), era quello che l'energia nucleare,
essendo priva di controindicazioni (ripeto: se togliamo
l'isteria collettiva contro la radioattivita', riportando quindi
la forma mentis collettiva al 1969, l'energia nucleare non ha
vere controindicazioni) e con la capacita' di fornire energia
elettrica a basso costo (evidente nei 2-4 centesimi al kW·h
dell'energia offerta fino a poco tempo fa dalla Francia, ora
meno perche' sono aumentati i consumi elettrici interni)
temevano una esplosione della popolazione che avrebbe travolto
i loro amati parchi naturali.
 
Insomma, una esplosione geometrica, quanto inarrestabile,
della natalita' avrebbe portato alla fine della umanita'.
Non hanno invece considerato che avere abbondante energia
elettrica (e  non fossile) avrebbe invece aumentato il
benessere medio, e che il benessere avrebbe avuto portato
ad un declino della natalita' a lungo termine.
 
La Cina e' sicuramente stato un esempio di esplosione della popolazione,
un perfetto esempio maltusiano. E senza lo sviluppo in economia
avanzata, sarebbe entrata in un ciclo di poverta' e carestie
di stile africano. Ma grazie al benessere, a cui ha sicuramente
contribuito anche il ricorso all'energia nucleare (che a parita'
di energia prodotta, richiede molto meno intervento umano) ha
raggiunto quella soglia di benessere per cui la popolazione si
autoregola, non figliano piu' come conigli.
 
Quindi in realta' Brower e soci hanno posto le condizioni per
cui in molte parti del mondo la distruzione dell'ambiente
naturale e' continuata, estendosi a livello geometrici.
 
.../continua/...

 .../continua/...
 
La prima parte di una intervista che potrebbe essere il pensiero
degli "amici della Terra":
 
Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, 
economy and the environment.
 
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” warned that the 
number of people on earth was spiraling out of control.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  We were worried then about the problems of feeding human 
society when there was three and a half billion people on the planet. 
Now we've got way over seven billion people.
 
Announcer: The problem isn’t that there’s not enough to go around, says 
Ehrlich – the problem is that it’s not going around to everyone.
 
Paul Ehrlich: Many people like us consume too much and then there is 
several billion who don't get to consume enough and that's one of the 
huge problems that’s not normally discussed in those terms.
 
Announcer: The Population Bomb. Up next on Climate One.
 
 
Announcer: The world’s population is on the rise. How much is too much?
 
Welcome to Climate One.
 
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s seminal 
best-seller, The Population Bomb. The book warned of the dangers of 
overpopulation, including mass starvation, societal upheaval and 
environmental ruin. While not all of the Ehrlich’s dire predictions have 
come to pass, the world’s population has more than doubled since then, 
straining the planet’s resources and heating up our climate.
 
Paul Ehrlich is now a professor of Population Studies at Stanford 
University. On today’s program, Greg Dalton talks with Ehrlich about how 
we’re coping with our ever-more crowded world, and what we could be 
doing better.
 
 
Greg Dalton:  You had a impactful, traumatic ride in a taxi in Delhi 
that was somewhat of the inspiration for the writing The Population 
Bomb.  Tell us about that taxi ride.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well we wanted something dramatic to start the book.  And 
Anne and I had, I can't remember where we were going, but was back to 
the hotel when I was doing fieldwork in India.  And we got into a car 
that had one function, a taxi that had one functioning gear and the 
seats jumping with lice and went through streets where people were 
living in the streets as you can still find them in many parts of the 
world, cooking over little open fires, relieving themselves in the 
streets and it was a jam.  And so we described that. It was probably a 
mistake because people said, ah you're just racists. Well of course to a 
biologist who's worked in genetics and evolution the whole idea of 
racial differences that are important is just nonsense. But even more 
so, of course the Indians under the classic definitions of race that the 
ones that are wrong are the same race as we are.  So that's quite 
typical; when you get out in the public, you gotta be ready to have 
people totally misinterpret what you do. If we wrote the book again, I'd 
probably describe some real hellhole like Miami for illustrating what's 
wrong with the world.
 
Greg Dalton:  And you wrote it with your wife Anne, but the publisher 
insisted on a single author.  Tell us why, and do you regret that.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well Ian Valentine, who was then the inventor of 
Pocketbooks, the first person to put out the little mass-market 
paperbacks and Dave Brower, who everybody in the Bay Area knows is one 
of the great original environmentalists came to me and said, “Look, if 
you and Anne can write this down quickly, we’ll publish it.”  This was 
in early, it would have been 68. “We’ll publish it and maybe we can 
influence the election.” Which shows, of course, how naïve they were 
just like me. But then when the book was finished. They said, “Look, for 
publicity purposes for getting it around for getting the word out. It 
should only have one author.”  And I'm ashamed to admit that I folded on 
it and said “Go ahead. Don't worry about it and I still worry about it 
because I was a good example of male chauvinism back in those days, 
which I collaborated with as you may know, my latest book has a senior 
author who's a woman. And Anne has been had her name on many books that 
she's written or done all of the brainwork on.  So it was a big mistake 
but I made it.
 
Greg Dalton:  Some people criticized the book for applying an insect 
model to humans who are conscious beings.  Is that fair to think that you –
 
Paul Ehrlich:  It’s not fair at all because of course the mathematics is 
the same, insects or people basically. Insects are very important to us. 
  They are our major competitors for food. But the basic facts given 
have not in any way been disputed by the scientific community. In other 
words, last year a paper was published by a guy named Bill Ripple and 
over 15,000 co-authors backing exactly what I've been saying for a long 
time.  It's the second notice in 1993, about 1500 scientists signed a 
thing called the world scientists warning the humanity saying and other 
things if we don't do something about population growth we’re out of 
luck. And the same year, all the academies of science in the world 
basically said the same thing.  I've had nothing but support from the 
scientific community, which has been a real pleasure I must say.
 
Greg Dalton:  And one of the critiques of the book is often that it is 
overly dark it’s doomsday and what would you say that today?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  It’s much darker today.  And you can prove it. In other 
words, there’s no -- after all, we were worried then about the problems 
of feeding human society when there was 3 1/2 billion people on the 
planet.  Since then, something on the order of 200 to 500 million people 
have starve to death or died of nutrition related illness. Now we've got 
way over 7 billion people. We have something on the order of 800 million 
that's more than double the population of United States, hungry and 
starving and another billion or two who are micronutrient malnourished. 
And people will say well, we don't have any food problem.  Well, the 
people saying that, of course, usually don't. I don't have a food 
problem. I wish I had a little bit more of a food problem. But if you've 
ever traveled in poor countries, you can't miss the undernourished kids. 
And the fact that people are micronutrient malnourished means they can't 
function well in society. So when we try and get society to take action 
on our existential problems we have trouble doing it.
 
Greg Dalton:  Some organizations, Oxfam included, say that the world 
produces enough calories.  It's a matter of distribution, getting them 
to the right place. Is that your view?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  At the moment that’s probably true.  That is if we did 
everything right and distributed things fairly, then everybody can have 
a decent diet.  Of course, what do we distribute fairly? In places where 
there's a lot of hunger the food isn't distributed fairly because the 
father has to get more than the kids or everybody starves.  If you look 
at the problems of humanity and that's one of the reasons that I and my 
colleagues have put too much time into it, equity is a huge issue. Money 
isn't distributed fairly in the United States or anywhere else.  Human 
beings don't distribute stuff fairly. So one of our challenges is to 
find a government that will arrange things so that even the people who 
are at the short end of the stick get more than enough to have a decent 
life.  We don't do that, even in the United States.
 
Greg Dalton:  So you’re talking about wealth redistribution?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well if you use the term redistribution, of course you 
get into trouble.  I use it all the time to get into trouble because the 
economists think that growth is the only thing that counts and 
efficiency is the only thing that counts.  Whereas, I know as every 
scientist knows perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell it 
can't occur. And that equity is going to require redistribution. You 
cannot get say 8 billion people, which is where we’re going to be very 
soon, all living like the Koch brothers.  It just can't be done. So we 
obviously need redistribution –
 
Greg Dalton:  Or 8 billion people even living like you and me.  That 
would be the problem.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Oh yeah, by the way, when I say rich versus poor, which I 
may sometime in the program.  I'm counting us in the rich. And the 
problem of overconsumption of course is the other side of the coin. 
Other words the big problem for our life support systems is the 
aggregate consumption. The stuff that we extract from nature to use and 
that's clearly the product of the number of people and the average per 
capita consumption.  Saying it's only consumption is like saying well 
the area of a rectangle is only the width. It turns out when you 
multiply two things together they both are equally important. And in 
this case population and per capita consumption are what really 
important.  And one of the huge things is people, many people like us 
consume too much and then there is several billion who don't get to 
consume enough and that's one of the huge problems that’s not normally 
discussed in those terms.
 
Greg Dalton:  Some people talk about voluntary restraint or virtuous 
restraint.  You know consuming less, not buying things on impulse, 
driving smaller cars, smaller houses.  Do you think that kind of 
virtuous restraint is going to make a meaningful difference, that humans 
will really do that?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  It may make a little difference but it's not going to 
make a lot.  We need joint social action. For example, just to give you 
an idea of the magnitude of things.  People, when I was involved in one 
environmental organization they were crazy about recycling. And 
recycling can be good.  It can be bad also; it depends on where you are 
and what you're recycling. But the claim would be made if we push 
recycling then people will get more involved in the environment and I 
would say true.  It’s also true that they could wheel their recycling 
bins pass the three Humvees in the garage to the curb and feel that 
they're being very environmentally sound. And the answer is we need huge 
changes.
 
To give you an example from the demographic side from population. 
Having one less child is the equivalent if you have one less child of 
you giving up driving entirely 20 times.  In other words giving up 
driving only saves the environment and climate area this is in climate _____
 
at all that if you give up having a child, you save 20 times as much 
greenhouse gas not going into the atmosphere as you would if you gave up 
driving entirely.
 
Greg Dalton:  For your whole life?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  For your whole life.
 
Greg Dalton:  So let's talk about climate.  How has climate affected 
your projections looking into the future?  Because you were pretty dark 
in 1968 and you say it’s darker now. How has climate figured into that?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well in 1968 we did discuss in The Population Bomb the 
fact is crystal clear to anybody who's thought about it.  If you put 
crap into the atmosphere, you’re gonna change the climate. There was a 
lot of debate back then about whether it was going to be largely cooling 
or largely heating which was coming.  That's because in 1968 various 
people hadn't done the research to show that carbon dioxide, the main 
greenhouse gas, was accompanied by another bunch of gases that almost 
accounted for another half of the warming and that's what shifted things 
in the direction of warming.
 
Sadly, of course, then we thought that climate was going to be a big 
problem may be around 2100, of course it’s a big problem today and it’s 
getting worse and worse.  And again the morons in Washington are pulling 
out of the inadequate climate arrangement that went on in Paris. This is 
the trouble with having people who are totally ignorant and greedy 
running a country and that's our caucustocracy and other countries are 
almost as bad, but the U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world and 
it is winning its war on the environment with the present administration.
 
Greg Dalton:  You say impacts today.  How is climate affecting food 
production, you know, it’s often thought of as a future concern.  How is 
it an immediate concern?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well, a lot of the emphasis given in the mass media is on 
sea level rise, even here at Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California 
we’ll be able to out walk sea level rise.  It’s a relatively gradual 
process unless we’re extraordinarily unlucky with the dynamics of the 
glaciers in Antarctica, but my guess is we won't be. What we know for 
sure is places like Miami are going bye-bye in the relatively near 
future, going right now.  In other words, they can’t keep the water out 
coming up through the rocks.
 
Greg Dalton:  Sunny day flooding, right?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Yeah, right.  But much more critical is the impact of 
climate disruption on agricultural systems.  We’re already seeing we 
were doing very well increasing the yields on basic crops. Humanity’s 
feeding base for non-protein is largely wheat, maize, corn and rice and 
they are affected by higher temperatures.  We’re already seeing 
reductions in the rate of improvement there. They may even going 
further, a lot of people at Stanford like David Lobell are working on 
this huge problem. Agriculture is utterly dependent upon climate.  We do 
irrigate a lot and that's very important, but the water for irrigation 
has to come somewhere. You may in California for example, the snowpack 
is getting in more and more trouble in Sierra. That's the water storage 
for our summer agriculture.  If it comes down as rain in the winter, 
doesn’t do any good for the farmers at all. So we’re seeing impacts 
around the world on agriculture already from the amount of climate 
change we've seen from a relatively small influx of greenhouse gases 
into the atmosphere.  And it’s gonna get worse and worse because we’re 
not taking the steps to do it. We’re reversing it; we have again a 
government that’s trying to destroy the environment because it has no 
clue that the environment is what supports them.
 
Greg Dalton:  But isn’t it possible also that the grain belt, the corn 
belt could reach up into Canada, that Russia could have arable land; new 
land comes into agricultural production because of the warming climate.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  In some areas you may get more production because the 
climate change.  If the corn belt moves into Canada, the corn plants are 
going to have a lot of trouble growing on the Canadian Shield.  You got 
to develop the soil first before a belt of good agricultural land will 
actually shift. Developing the soils only take 10 or 20,000 years and so 
after that, maybe we’ll be able to grow a lot of corn in Hudson Bay or 
on the Canadian Shield, but basically I wouldn't wait around for it.
 
And of course as it gets warmer in places like the United States we’re 
moving more and more to tropical agriculture.  Tropical agriculture is 
traditionally less productive than temperate zone agriculture. Among 
other things, the pests go all year round in the tropics, whereas in the 
temperate zones we have the benefit of a pest controlled period called 
the winter which allows us that a lot of stuff grown better than we can 
in the tropics.  The prospects for doing better with food in terms of 
production are I would say very shaky. And in terms of distribution, I 
see things going in the wrong direction. We’re caring less and less; 
we’re putting less into redistribution of food even though we've 
improved the systems for doing it, but there's less interest 
particularly in our government in helping other people.
 
Greg Dalton:  And there's estimates of about 50% of food in this country 
ends up as waste.  Both from the farm to the store to the plate.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Yeah, we get – it’s interesting.  People say oh well we 
can do it. We can distribute food better.  We can stop wasting food. 
Well, I hate to tell you, you're a young man, but in the 1950s and 60s 
we were saying, you know, we could feed a lot more people if we didn't 
waste so much food.  We’re wasting more now than we did then. In other 
words, when you look at the trends in how we’re behaving, we’re wrapping 
more -- after all, in 1960 we didn't have Texas size chunks of plastic 
debris floating around in the oceans.  With now within the next few 
years we’ll have more plastic in the oceans than we have weight of fish, 
weight of plastic. The plastic gets ground into tiny little fragments on 
the surface they’re collected persistent organic pollutants, POPs, and 
they are now small enough, those fragments, to go through the blood 
brain barrier.  Our seafood is loaded with them. We are one of the 
things that’s not recognize at all is the toxification of our entire planet.
 
You know, if you do individual studies, you find if you look at the IQs 
of kids raised upwind of the lead smelter versus downwind the upwind 
kids had two or three more IQ points than the downwind kids.  If you 
look at the same the ones raised upwind of the farm fields that are 
being treated with pesticides versus downwind, the smarter kids are 
always upwind. So a lot of scientists think we’re actually dumbing down 
humanity.  Now, I didn't think there was any empirical evidence of this 
until I watch the 2016 Republican debates then you could see we are 
dumbing down humanity.
 
 
Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with Paul 
Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University.  Coming 
up, did China’s one-child policy go too far?
 
Paul Ehrlich: The Chinese policy was not as coercive as it was painted 
over here.
 
Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.
 
 
Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking 
about solutions for an overcrowded planet, with Paul Ehrlich. He 
co-authored the 1968 best-seller, “The Population Bomb” with his wife, 
Anne Ehrlich. In the book, the Ehrlichs advocated for a “green 
revolution” as a way to avoid world-wide famine.
 
Greg Dalton: Professor Ehrlich, you talked about the capacity to grow 
more food but that was the main critique of The Population Bomb is you 
underestimated the productivity gains, the green revolution.  Isn’t that 
fair to say that you underestimated the world's capacity to feed to 
generate a lot more food with new technology?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  It’s fair and unfair because first of all the estimates 
we took and cited were from agricultural economists.  And I think the 
general mistake which I certainly shared because I didn't know anything 
about it. I was talking to people that we cited that knew, I’m no 
agricultural economist I’m more of one now than I used to be.  But the 
technology was clear what we were worried about more than anything else 
was how rapidly it could spread and what was underestimated was the 
brilliance of many subsistence farmers who knew a lot more about what 
they could do on their land than a lot of the people at industrial 
agriculture.  But it certainly there are a bunch of mistakes in The 
Population Bomb. Any scientist who is asked about his work 50 years 
before who still and particularly one it’s a broad thing, who still 
thinks exactly the same thing he thought 50 years before is a pretty 
weak scientist.
 
Greg Dalton:  Lot of people who are critical of the green revolution the 
industrial scale agriculture cite organics as organic food as a hopeful 
prospect.  Yet, can organic food scale and feed the world? Because there 
are some concern that it would actually it can't happen with organics.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  It's complicated.  There’s some wonderful work by Claire 
Kremen and others at Berkeley that certainly suggests that you can scale 
up organic agriculture, but you might not be able to scale up the 
profits that go with it.  Remember for the last couple hundred years we 
have adopted something brand-new in the society of Homo Sapiens. And I 
mean all the way back through the hunter gatherers and so on, and that 
is money has become the standard of everything.  And so what we managed 
to do depends on who's getting rich at it. And that's a, you know, 
perpetual growth of the GDP is still in the minds of many ignorant 
politicians and economists a really important thing that's possible and 
it isn't.
 
So yes, I think organic farming has huge potential, but there's also 
huge dangers there are huge dangers in what we’re doing with our soils 
which where is a resource we’re getting rid of at too rapid a rate.  The 
whole situation leads me and I think all of my close colleagues to 
believe that we’re headed for some form of a collapse in the next few 
decades. We can't keep going the direction we’re going and not have 
shall we say the lifestyles of the people listening to this program 
dramatically altered in a way they don't want to have them altered.
 
Greg Dalton:  Steven Pinker at Harvard has a new book called 
Enlightenment Now.  And he’s written a previous book saying that life is 
safer, longer, healthier, more prosperous, people are better educated, 
societies and cultures are more tolerant, more fulfilling, that there's 
more progress in humanity than you give it credit for.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  It's true that a relatively small group of people in 
Western societies with science and certain form of progress, but with 
science with the idea of democracy which was usually democracy for white 
men but let's skip that and so on, did make a lot of “progress" in 
various areas.  And what's not usually mentioned by the Pinkers is for 
instance one of the main things that allowed that was slavery to start 
out with. If you know your history the role of slavery in the 
development of the West absolutely gigantic. So slavery is in there.
 
Then we adopted other people's energy slaves. In other words, it was 
made possible by using up the sun's energy stored and fossil fuels at a 
horrendously rapid rate and taking it from other people in the world. 
You know the old-line about the Middle East. How did our oil get under 
their sand? And they’re suffering to this day over our wars to get oil, 
which is the main thing that the West has fought over for many years. 
That science, it’s still not clear whether it was a smart move. It came 
from agriculture. We moved into agriculture that allowed specialization, 
specialization allowed industrialization. Industrialization allowed a 
moron an absolute moron narcissist to have the power to blow up 
civilization and destroy humanity and most of the animals on the planet. 
  One single person. Is that advantage? You know, I have my, there are 
questions. I live a very good life but I spent a lot of time with people 
who don't have that opportunity.
 
Greg Dalton:  But there are hundreds of millions of people in India and 
China, who’ve moved out of poverty, into the middle class.  Now you 
could say that China and India are paying a big environmental price for 
that material wealth. I lived in China in the late 80s.  I go back now 
and the people are better fed, better clothed, better off. So can't you 
give some recognize that there are have a lot of people, hundreds of 
millions of people have moved out of poverty better life, better health.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  You can recognize that it's certainly true.  There are 
still 600 million people in India who have to defecate outside because 
they don't have toilets.  And the issue is the violence that we have 
committed against those people and all future generations by working so 
hard to destroy our life support systems and to use up the energy slaves 
often for ridiculous reasons that we took from them and that we 
inherited.  It’s a complex thing but just saying everything is better is 
fine, if you’re not too bright, a faculty member at Harvard. But if 
you're an Indian villager or a member of a Chinese minority or are 
living up in the mountains and so on, the world doesn't look quite so 
bright.
 
Greg Dalton:  Humans are very adaptive species.  That's why we’re here. 
What are the prospects that we can adapt to a warmer world with more 
turbulent agriculture?  We've adapted to some pretty big challenges in 
the past. Can we basically ride this out?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well, I'd like to hope we’ll be able to.  And in fact, 
our research is aimed primarily now at figuring how to avoid the same 
mistakes after the collapse.  In other words, we’re hoping the collapse 
won't be caused by a large-scale nuclear war which will basically for 
instance people say, oh don't worry we won’t need currency, we’ll use 
bitcoin.  Use bitcoin without electricity?
 
.../continua/...

 economy and the environment.
 
La seconda parte di quella intervista:
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Greg Dalton:  Bitcoin uses a lot of energy.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Yeah.  I mean, we’re approaching energy limits which we 
may get around with quantum computing and so on and so forth.  But we’re 
not gonna get around the basic distribution and political problems. My 
view has been for a long time that I'm very pessimistic about the future 
but very optimistic about what we could do.  I have to say that over the 
last decade or so, I've become less optimistic about what we could do 
for among other things, of course, because we’re not trying any of it. 
Whereas right now we have deteriorating infrastructure in the United 
States.  Our water handling infrastructure is going downhill fast. Water 
is absolutely essential. We should be not only rebuilding the 
infrastructure, but designing it for flexibility because we don't know 
where the water is going to be needed as the climate change. We’re not 
doing a thing.
 
Greg Dalton:  Right.  The system we built is not adequate for today. 
But just a few years ago a lot of people were running around, peak oil, 
peak oil, peak oil, that there would be peak supply.  And then fracking 
comes along, a technological innovation supported in part by the U.S. 
government and forecast this year 2018 U.S. oil production could surpass 
Saudi Arabia.  That was not foreseen five or 10 years ago. And now the 
peak oil people are pretty much quiet or they’re talking about, peak 
demand, but peak supply, this resource we were gonna run out of is 
suddenly abundant.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  This is absolutely typical thinking, not yours I mean. 
Sure, what about 10 years from now. In other words, the people look at 
timescales that evolutionary biologists and ecologists look at very, 
very differently.  And we're also fracking is moving us towards peak 
environmental destruction. What they're doing in Canada with the oil 
sands and so on destroying a huge portion of the country for the 
temporary use of oil.  Now if they were moving –
 
Greg Dalton:  For one species and one generation.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Exactly.  And of course I don't even want to get into the 
rights of the biodiversity that were destroying people.  I recently saw 
an article saying there is no ethical reason not to destroy 
biodiversity. Well ethics are entirely invented by human beings.  And 
there's a huge portion of our population that thinks it’s unethical. 
They wipe out the songbirds and so on and so forth. Besides the fact 
that it’s killing us at the same time.  So it’s a complex issue, but 
they're always going to be people who say oh well we’re going to come up 
with some magic; we’ll pull the technological rabbit out of the hat to 
save us. And they forget when you look at the last past technological 
rabbits.  They've often had very nasty droppings.
 
Greg Dalton:  There’s one to talk about human cognition and climate. 
You’re an evolutionary biologist, you've written about how humans are 
sight-based animals.  Our brains are not wired to recognize and respond 
to this visible threat of climate change. If there's a man with a gun or 
a tiger in the woods, we know what to do.  But this abstract gas, how 
are we challenged to respond to climate change?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  We’re challenged because we have to train to do it.  You 
know scientists always find that people can't read graphs that people 
peering in the microscopes are carefully drawing their own eyes, which 
are reflected back.  People have to be trained to perceive certain 
things because we evolved as you indicated to dodge the car. That's 
easy; when the lion jumps at you, you duck. But with climate change, if 
the climate was changing on Australopithecus, our ancestor, all they 
could do was mutate or migrate.  There was nothing they could really do 
in response. And they weren't causing it. Now we’re causing it and we 
can't perceive it.
 
Greg Dalton:  ‘68, was The Population Bomb came out then it's almost 
around couple years later was Earth Day.  We’re coming up on the 50th 
anniversary of Earth Day. Does Earth Day have much of an impact this 
annual gathering is it kind of a, I think sometimes it's narrowing like 
every day should be Earth Day, but it still has a lot of resonance.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  It had resonance originally but of course you gotta 
remember the political situation at the time.  We were bogged down in 
Vietnam and it was a general movement. There was the sexual revolution 
so it was a revolutionary time.  And Earth Day got a lot of people 
concerned. One of the things that has pleased me though as our 
government is going down the drain, more and more people are becoming 
active.  And I think if you're counting on the politicians saving you, 
take a closer look at them. Just watch the evening news. So political 
activism on the part of people is really necessary. And I think groups 
at least I see a cheery upsurge in that kind of activity.  It may not be 
enough but as my view, the route we’ve got to take.
 
Greg Dalton:  You talk about foregoing population.  Are we headed toward 
what nine or 10 billion people?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  More likely 11.
 
Greg Dalton:  Eleven.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  More likely if we avoid the huge die off.  There's almost 
no way even with billions of people dying prematurely that you're going 
to have fewer than 7 billion people on the planet at the turn of the 
next century unless we have a large-scale nuclear war or absolutely vast 
plagues or famines and I mean losing 15 billion people or something over 
the period.  But not likely to have a very small thing. What we need to 
do obviously and should've started 40 years ago is give women absolutely 
equal rights and opportunities. Make sure everybody has access to modern 
contraception and backup abortion. Teach everybody that you can have 
lots of fun with sex without having lots of children and change our 
entire society.
 
Greg Dalton:  And do you have some regrets for unintended, perhaps, or 
how the population bomb was used to justify things some oppressive one 
child policy in China, sterilization.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Tell me anything social that you try and get done in a 
country like just the United States that will not be taken over by 
racists and used or by crazy economically give me more money people for 
their own purposes.  On the other hand, what we did say and I've always 
said is that the last thing you want to try is coercion and I’ve never 
supported coercive policies.
 
The Chinese policy was not as coercive as it was painted over here. 
There was an incident actually that involve somebody at Stanford saying 
that the Chinese were abusing the one child family thing and giving 
stories of forced abortions and things like that.  Well it turned out 
the reason we know about those were the Chinese themselves, labeled them 
abuses and struggled to correct them. And one of my colleagues at 
Stanford was very close to the person who invented the one child family 
thing; perfectly acceptable to most Chinese.  Anne and I met with a 
group of Chinese women to find out about that and secret meeting it was 
about 20 years ago and there are maybe 35 women. And in the first two 
minutes they said we had to do that it’s a smart policy they’re doing it 
right. And then one of the women said but I'm the best neurosurgeon in 
China and I'll never be head of my service she said because I'm a woman. 
  And the rest of the meeting was discussion of the glass ceiling for 
Chinese women, which shows you a government can do one thing very 
intelligently and yet miss another really critical part of the issue.
 
Greg Dalton:  If you’re just joining us my guest at Climate One is Paul 
Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University.  I'm 
Greg Dalton. Professor Ehrlich, tell us what is the sixth great 
extinction and why should a person care if some funny looking insect in 
Costa Rica goes away?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well the sixth great extinction, the history of life has 
not been uniform.  There have been five times when over 75% of the kinds 
of animals and plants the species have disappeared.  We know the cause 
of the last one 66 million years ago was almost certainly a collision 
with an asteroid on the Yucatán Peninsula, which wiped out the 
dinosaurs, except for the birds.  So why should anybody care? Well, 
we’re in the middle or at the very start, but maybe almost in the middle 
of the sixth great extinction episode caused entirely by human 
activities. Why should you care about the disappearance of little 
insect?  Well, let me give you an example. Most of the focus has been on 
loss of species which from the point of view of a human lifespan is 
going on very slowly; we lose a few each year. Let's suppose -- but what 
we’re losing in huge numbers is the populations of species.  Let's 
suppose that you wiped out a little single bee species in North America 
called Apis Mellifera which is the honeybee. Now if you wiped them out 
entirely in North America, there would be no loss of biodiversity by the 
species count standard, but we lose somewhere between $15 and $20 
billion worth of agricultural production and our diet will become much 
less nutritious.  The point is, all those other organisms are working 
parts of our life support system and when you just have a few of them 
left that doesn't count in the extinction, the number of species 
extinction counters, but it counts a great deal in our very lives. And 
what we’re doing from the sea and from the land is wiping out population 
after population members of our life support systems.  What we’re busily 
doing is sawing off the limb that we’re sitting on.
 
Greg Dalton:  I once heard it described as rivets in an airplane.  You 
can lose one rivet, two rivets, five rivets, but at some point that 
rivet in the airplane –
 
Paul Ehrlich:  The wing comes off. Spoil your whole day.
 
Greg Dalton:  Right.  E.O. Wilson has this idea of setting aside half of 
the world's land as nature preserve.  Is that realistic and what would 
that accomplish?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well, what Ed is saying is basically correct.  Namely if 
we could set aside half of the world then our life support systems would 
be secure or at least relatively secure.  I don't have to tell you the 
practical difficulties of doing it; it’s like the practical difficulties 
of giving women rights, equal rights around the world.  There are lots 
of things we know desperately need to be done. The thing that makes me 
such a pessimist is I see the politicians going mostly in the opposite 
direction; doing things to make things worse rather than better.
 
Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about our exploding 
population, with Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich. Coming up – can humans 
overcome their instinct to crowd the planet?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  What do we know is absolutely programmed into us 
genetically from the theory of evolution? Namely out reproduce your 
buddies, maximize your reproduction.
 
Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.
 
 
Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking with 
Paul Ehrlich about his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb.”
 
Let’s continue with their conversation.
 
Greg Dalton:  You talked about the problem of inexorable growth.  Our 
retirement plans are tied to mutual funds, the stock market; when the 
stock market goes down contributions to the Commonwealth Club and KQED 
and Stanford go down.  We’re all locked into the system of growth. But 
is there really a steady-state economy, something that has less growth 
or no growth?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  I’ve been working hard with the economist pushing more 
work on that.  It was pioneered by Herman Daly, who basically has 
written books on a no growth economy.  The trouble is, first of all few 
politicians and many economists can't read and they certainly can't 
think.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that when you 
have a finite planet you can’t grow on it forever.  You also if you look 
at the history of economics and the history of humanity. This whole, 
everything you mentioned is where is the money going.  That's the 
ultimate value. And we’ve got to find a new system and that's what we 
should be working on. I don't have the answers to these things but every 
economist should have as their first job seeing to it that people 
understand you cannot have perpetual growth on a finite planet.
 
Greg Dalton:  For some people they look to what's called biomimicry. 
They look to nature for solutions and there is no waste in nature.  So 
that waste is always someone else's food or input. So this idea of 
circular economies where things are consumed and then rebuilt, reused 
made into something.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Unfortunately, the second law of thermodynamics tells you 
there's limits to that.  One of the few laws of nature that nobody 
saying thinks we're going to get rid of. But that is a direction we 
should be moving.  We shouldn't be thinking in terms of perpetual we 
should be thinking among other things, of not stealing from our children 
and grandchildren saving as much of the resources that are necessary for 
human life, including the living resources and hoping that they will be 
able to find ways to continue.  If not for a million years may be for 
another thousand years. That would be sustainable enough for me and let 
the Martians take over after that.
 
Greg Dalton: Climate is often framed as a moral issue.  What did you 
think of Laudato si’ or “Our Common Home” from Pope Francis?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  I wrote an article with John Hart at Berkeley, whose 
title was changed by nature, which published it.  They change the title 
to something like the Pope doesn't do enough for women but our title was 
Two Cheers for Pope Francis.  I think he is a more flexible individual 
than this majority of people who have been in that position. He's well 
educated. You have to understand that the Roman Catholic Church has a 
social science and a natural science academy.  They're interested in 
hearing what’s going on in the world. And I think they're changing 
gradually in the right direction but they have the same problems we have 
in the United States, politics, stuffy idiots who don't understand the 
world.  I am personally a fan of the Pope and that will get him in trouble.
 
Greg Dalton:  One of your former students Stewart Brand, I saw a video 
of him looking back at your work and saying that there are some 
countries where there are too few people.  There's Canada, wants to 
import people because the graying of the population. So how about the 
idea still that Japan, Canada, certain countries their population gets 
to a certain age, they need younger people to work and support that 
graying population.  So there is such a thing as –
 
Paul Ehrlich:  No they don’t.  First of all when you look at the 
dependency ratio, which is what’s usually considered.  They worry about 
there being too many older people for the society to support. But of 
course there's fewer, it is easier to make somebody over 70 productive 
economically than it is to make somebody under seven be productive 
economically.  And the number of people under 15, the proportion shrinks 
dramatically, as the number of older people over 60, which is what the 
usual statistic is grows. But of course you gotta stop population 
growth. You cannot continue to grow, be it by importing people, be it by 
increasing birth rates.  No way, cannot continue. It’s math. No trick 
around it
 
Greg Dalton:  You know climate is thought of as this collective action 
problem that no one person, no one country, no one governor can solve it 
together.  It’s the ultimate collective action problem we have to do it 
together. And yet we seem to be with Brexit and our politics devolving 
into more of a fractional fragmented tribal.  And you said something 
really interesting, I love watching you on the Johnny Carson show about 
how we evolved in small groups. You were talking about race. And it 
seems like we’re going back to that tribal history where at a time when 
we need to come together to solve this massive climate collective problem.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  If you look at people in our society, giant society and 
then you look at their Christmas lists or their closest colleagues.  The 
numbers usually are in the vicinity of hundred or 150 people. It's 
called the Dunbar number. And what the estimate is for the size of our 
hunter-gatherer groups way back when.  Hunter-gatherers had several 
advantages over us. They were much more equitable. Their leadership was 
not one leader. There would be a leader for hunting, there would be a 
leader for medicine.  There would be a leader for settling disputes and 
so on. Since they had to carry everything with them you couldn't have 
Koch brothers collecting 5 million times as much as somebody as somebody 
else.  They all spoke the same language. They were all genetically 
related. So if your wife was cheating on you she was probably cheating 
on you with somebody who had very much your genes so there wasn't the 
same problem there.  So in many ways, hunting gathering was a very good 
stage of our existence. We didn't have TV and we didn’t have many of the 
diseases we have today either. But of course we died young. So take your 
choice.
 
Greg Dalton:  You wrote in The Dominant Animal about cultural evolution 
as well as genetic evolution.  So can we evolve pass these primal tribal 
instincts?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well we have.  I mean for instance, what do we know is 
absolutely programmed into us genetically from the theory of evolution, 
namely out reproduce your buddies, maximize your reproduction.  Now, 
I've done surveys now on dozens of audiences of thousands of people. 
I've yet to run into a woman who either has or claims she wants 25 
children, which is quite possible biologically.  But we've overridden 
the great genetic code things with contraception and social choice and 
so on. So there’s no question. We can change. We have the ability to change.
 
Greg Dalton:  You also write about a lot of motivations being driven by 
hierarchy within social groups.  Whether it's money or fertility, or 
that sort of thing. So how is that really driving our human behavior 
it's our peer group that’s maybe amplified by social media now?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well yeah.  There’s no question that our satisfaction if 
you do surveys and the way our culture has evolved depends on how you do 
in relation to people you know well.  That is if I was living in an 
obscure Indian village, I'd be an extraordinarily rich person. If I were 
living in Palo Alto, California, I’m almost poor, can’t hardly afford to 
live there.  So it depends on relative situations and that's among other 
things, builds hierarchies. All these things are changeable if we get 
together and try and change them. And there are people moving in that 
direction.  There are degrowth movements in Europe. There are people who 
are actually working hard to change the economic system. So the 
potential is there. What we don't have enough of I’m afraid is time.
 
Greg Dalton:  And there’s also the human development index things. 
These idea to try to come up with alternative measures to GDP or income, 
gross national happiness that sort of thing.  Those things get a lot of 
attention but do they really get any tracks?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  They’re not taking over.
 
Greg Dalton:  They’re not taking off are they?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  All we can do is keep working.
 
Greg Dalton:  Artificial intelligence, very exciting right now.  Silicon 
Valley's all over this. As an evolutionary biologist, how do you view 
the creation, the development of artificial intelligence?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well, originally it was big at Stanford.  And we always 
said artificial intelligence and natural stupidity, and that really 
summarizes the situation with artificial intelligence.  And that is of 
course the people who are going to be dealing with it are going to be 
naturally stupid. And I worry about what they're going to do.  But as a 
general problem –
 
Greg Dalton:  Especially if there are downwind from those coal plants 
we’re talking about.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Yeah, well it’s a general problem with technology. 
Technological change can be excellent or it can be bad and you've got to 
watch it closely and you've got to be what we call adaptive managers. 
That is, if it ain't working, you have a way and a backout so you can 
get rid of it. For example, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had developed 
a way to simply destroy and remove from Earth all nuclear weapons and 
fix it so they can’t be rebuilt.  Technologies are not all good or they 
may be temporarily good. There was a time when a car was a wonderful 
thing. Now if you try and drive in the Bay Area, I don't think the 
impression you'll get is a car is a wonderful thing.
 
Greg Dalton:  Right.  And there’s a number of people here at Stanford 
who spent their careers building up nuclear weapons who then later said 
we should get rid of all of them, right.  The cold warriors who then 
changed their tune.
 
Looking back, since the 50 years of The Population Bomb.  What positive 
things have happened that surprised you?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well I was very pleasantly surprised by the success of 
the racial integration movement by the fact that I've now I was trained 
as a pilot, by a woman pilot.  And I've flown in many airliners that are 
piloted by women. That was an unthinkable thing in the 1930s. My first 
girlfriend in the late 30s had for opportunity she could be a teacher in 
a lower grade, she could be a nurse or she could be a secretary that was 
damn near it.  Now we haven't gotten where we need to be in gender 
equity, but we’ve surely moved or maybe the most surprising thing is the 
speed with which people understood that it’s nobody else’s damn business 
how you enjoy sex as long as you're not hurting somebody. And that took 
place with us almost blinding speed and of course some of the real dopes 
don't get it yet but they will.
 
Greg Dalton:  You have this reputation as Doctor, you know, the prophet 
of doom.  Do people kind of avoid you at cocktail parties or picnics? 
They think oh it’s gonna be that you're a downer?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  I don't talk about these things at cocktail parties.  I 
just drink.
 
Greg Dalton:  Fair enough.  And looking forward, knowing what you know 
about population and climate.  How do you keep hopeful when it looks the 
odds are so long, the hour is late, the time is --
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Drink a lot of good wine.  You’ll keep your internal 
environment in good shape while your external goes down the drain.  All 
of us who share the same concerns also share like being in a band of 
brothers and being social animals.  And the most pleasant thing in my 
life is my social contacts and most of them all of them agree with 
basically what I've said here today and we don’t talk about it we just 
drink.
 
Greg Dalton:  I've heard you like wine and chocolate.  You spent every 
summer since the 1959 I think in the Rockies.  And I think you may have 
spent your last one there, perhaps recently.
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Yes.
 
Greg Dalton:  And one of your academic, the person who describes herself 
as your academic daughter said it might be upsetting to have one's life 
coming to a close here now in history.  You've talked about some of the 
threats. How do you feel about kind of coming to a close, your career 
coming to a close in this time?
 
Paul Ehrlich:  Well it’s an interesting philosophical thing put forth by 
a philosopher named Scheffler who asked the question, if you knew when 
you died the world would end, that would be the end of the universe. 
Would that change your behavior? And my view is it would. That you get a 
certain amount of pleasure while you're alive thinking about what might 
happen in a good way to people you love, to people, very often you 
become very loving of the children and grandchildren of your friends. 
And I think that's enormously important even though I agree completely 
with Vladimir Nabokov, who said if I recall it correctly, “Life is a 
brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” And so you 
just keep going.
 
Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking with Paul Ehrlich, Professor of 
Population Studies at Stanford University, marking the 50th anniversary 
of the seminal book “The Population Bomb,” which he co-authored with his 
wife, Anne Ehrlich.
 
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Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club 
of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos 
Manuel and Tyler Reed are the producers. The audio engineer is Mark 
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Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.