The cmcee.net blog publishes articles about the media, culture and environmental education.
You have reached the older site, which has now been replaced by a new one at cmcee.net/blog. This site will remain up for the next couple of months while users make the transition. My apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Nils Lindahl Elliot
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all articles in this blog Copyright © 2008-2012 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
After many delays, and after it seemed that I might not be able to get any site up whatsoever, I’ve finally been able to fulfil my promise of setting up a new CMCEE website. The new website includes a new address for the blog (cmcee.net/blog).
My main reason for changing the address is that I discovered at some point that institutions such as Land Rover were advertising on the cmcee.wordpress.com site. There is, as the trite old saying goes, no such thing as a free lunch, so I can’t really complain: the people at WordPress (or rather the company behind it) wanted to make some money, and so the quid pro quo of free blog hosting was that they would get to use my content for their advertising. Fair enough, but when the subject is environmental criticism, and when ads appear that sell 4×4′s, then there is the kind of contradiction that I’ve noted vis-a-vis the corporate media in a number of my essays. So I’ve now used the excellent WordPress.org software to install a version of the old cmcee.org blog at the new cmcee site.
A word about that site. It’s still in its infancy. If you go, for example, to the Projects page, you’ll find that there is no link for the different projects. The same is true for the Publications page. I will get there eventually; unfortunately, the time I have for this kind of work is now severely curtailed. Faced with a choice of not putting anything up (which is what I’ve been doing for some months now) or starting from a frustratingly incomplete site, I’ve gone for the latter, with apologies. I do hope to add lots of content over the next months and year(s), including video, but I’m afraid it will be slow going – if you’re interested probably the best way to keep abreast of any additions (or changes) will be by checking this blog, but at the cmcee.net/blog address, as no new posts will appear at cmcee.wordpress.com.
Which leads me to the content of this blog. In the past I’ve used this blog to publish essay-length posts. This was an act of deliberate foolishness; I was shamelessly using the blog keyword flagging system, and Google’s search engines to draw readers to my work. Alas, this was not simply naive self promotion; ever since I decided to leave the UK’s higher education ‘market’, I’ve become more and more aware of how academic writing is being made less and less widely available by the ridiculous prices charged by publishing houses for access to journals. Unless you are a student or staff member at a university, and one with fairly deep pockets, you’ll find that any academic article is likely to cost you in excess of US $20. I was, and still am hoping to beat that system, however infinitesimally, by publishing articles here (at cmcee.net) that are free of charge.
There will, however, be some changes with respect to the old site’s modus operandi. First, the posts for the new version of the blog will seldom be more than 1000 words. Moreover, while they will be based on new or existing research, they will usually be written as a relatively gentle way in to the more technical or ‘wonkish’ (to use Paul Krugman’s expression) writings (the few that are themselves ‘technical’ will be labeled with a capital ‘T’!).
Full articles/essays will also be available at cmcee.net (unless published elsewhere), but users will need to request them via email. This is ‘a bit of a pain’, but I’d like to try to build up a picture of whom (if anyone!) is interested in the research, with an eye to making a bid in the next five years or so for a proper non-profit organisation.
Any feedback for this blog, or for the cmcee.net site will, as always, be most welcome. But also as always, I will only publish comments in which the contributor has a strong critical point to make (in favour or hopefully against the post’s arguments or theories). The idea is to prevent the blog from becoming either self-congratulatory, or the victim of the kind of ideological attacks launched by trolls.
Many thanks for your interest, and please do keep in touch!
Nils Lindahl Elliot
Last updated 12 April 2011 at 7.00 BST (please scroll down for update)
by Nils Lindahl Elliot
The Guardian article ‘The Unpalatable Truth is that the Anti-Nuclear Lobby has Misled us All’ is vintage George Monbiot. In it Monbiot combines ‘evidence-based’ arguments with an explicit ethical standpoint—an ethical standpoint that combines a ‘duty to attend to the facts’, with a duty to be profoundly sceptical of claims made by anyone with respect to those facts, or alleged facts.
This scepticism is a key dimension of Monbiot’s work, and is part of what has led many to admire his writing over the last years. Here in Britain, scientific ‘illiteracy’ and aggressive propaganda campaigns have often made it very difficult to cut through spin. Despite decades of critiques, and government-led invocations of the need for a greater public understanding of scientific methods, it is still very easy for private and public institutions to make claims which appear to be factual, indeed may actually be factual (in the sense that they refer to ‘facts’), but actually interpret those facts in ways that are utterly convenient. In this context, Monbiot has been one of the few people who has mastered the combination of the critical and writing skills required to cut through the spin, and to do so in relatively short newspaper articles.
‘The Unpalatable Truth…’ is a good example of this skill. But it is also an example of the devious rhetoric—perhaps ‘misleading’ is a better word—that Monbiot himself has attacked. To begin with, Monbiot portrays himself as a ‘believer’ in the knowledge of the leading anti-nuclear activist, Helen Caldicott. By portraying himself as such, Monbiot works to establish at once a kind of shared identity, and a shared naiveté: like you, I also believed in Helen, I also believed in the horrors of nuclear energy. It is only after this ‘prep’ that the critical claw comes out, albeit sheathed in the velvet of a reluctance to accept that such a revered figure (Caldicott) could be wrong: it is with great regret that Monbiot must report that, when asked, Caldicott cannot provide a shred, or so Monbiot claims, of scientific evidence to support her criticism of nuclear energy. Far from being pleased at this discovery, the article suggests that Monbiot is horrified: ‘Caldicott’s response has profoundly shaken me’. Evidently, Monbiot intends for his readers to be shaken too.
* * *
Back to what I said about scientific ‘illiteracy’: this last term is actually a very problematic one in so far as it implies that we all should be scientists. Any such assumption shows the extent to which we live in a world in which the hypothetico-deductive method of reasoning, and with it the kind of logic associated with positive science, is ‘king’. This gendered metaphor is quite deliberate; as many scholars have shown, both the history of science, and much of its contemporary practice are still informed by a masculinity that assigns for men the role of discovering the secrets of an implicitly female nature (if this seems far-fetched, have a look at my post NASA’s Nature). As part of this discourse, debates over the relative merits of scientific arguments and their evidence tend to be portrayed, indeed lived as sparring matches, as contests in which human agents, and all too often more-than-human actants, are conceived as winners or losers, predators and prey in the kind of social Darwinian struggles which sociobiologists have long used to legitimise the various isms: racism, ethnocentrism, and of course, sexism. In my view, part of what has made Monbiot such an effective critic of the establishment is that he excels in this kind of combativeness. Conglomerates such as Shell regularly accuse their critics of being ‘sentimental’ and ‘emotional’ about the environment, but in Monbiot’s case any such accusation seems particularly baseless; in Monbiot, the Goliaths find a David that has been itching to punch back, and punch back hard.
That disposition is evident, however much Monbiot tries to dissimulate it, in his attack on what he describes as his ‘anti-nuclear opponents’. If you read through the rest of the aforementioned Guardian article, you will find that Monbiot soon abandons the language of shock and surprise, and gets down to what he does best: explaining, on the one hand, how Caldicott cannot support her claims; and showing, on the other hand, how all of the reputable research has shown, to the contrary, that nuclear energy is, if not safe, then certainly not the dangerous thing that it has been portrayed as being. Here as in other such ‘contests’, Monbiot wins, or tries to win, by combining three skills which have proved to be extraordinarily effective antidotes to the spin of the different corporations, politicians, and their climate change nay-sayers.
First, he does what virtually none of the public relationists do, which is that he goes to the actual scientific sources, and in so doing makes them available for readers to check them themselves. Second, he actually interrogates those sources, in order to assess their validity. And third, he frames this process in a discourse that is relatively explicit about his own ethics, and the ethics of those who try to use the ‘facts’ for propaganda purposes. In this case, he repeats over and over again that the problem is no longer to choose between coal and renewables, but to switch, as quickly as possible, to any relatively safe mix that stops runaway climate change. To do otherwise is, effectively, to ignore the real issues, and to do so at a time when hundreds of millions of people across the world stand to drown, starve, or be otherwise displaced by the looming environmental catastrophe.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this combination of evidence and ethics. When I spoke earlier of a scientific ‘illiteracy’, I meant to refer not to a general ignorance about science, full stop—the kind of ignorance that entities such as the Royal Society have assiduously trumpeted for reasons that were not always as disinterested as they might appear to be—but to the kind of poor common sense that leads people to assume that science is entirely based on fact—so if a scientist says something is true, then it’s probably true. What is missing in our educational system is not a curriculum that makes scientists out of all of us, but instead, a curriculum that enables people to be critical readers or users of scientific discourse. By this I mean people who, in much the manner of Monbiot, can not only ‘find the facts’, but question the ways in which the facts have been produced, and crucially, interpreted. At the risk of being dismissed as a relativist, a fact is never just a fact; as soon as it is represented as such, it becomes part of a discursive train which always reflects, however implicitly or indirectly, a certain set of values, a certain set of interests. That does not mean that the fact, or alleged fact, is necessarily wrong; it does mean that there is always a value involved, and if that is true, then there is always also an ethics, and a power/knowledge dimension to so-called ‘evidence-based’ forms of communication.
My favourite metaphor for this problem involves photography. A photograph of, say, George Monbiot, might well be a photograph of the ‘real’ George Monbiot. George was there when the picture was taken, and the picture is, in some respects at least, a very faithful representation of aspects of the man himself. But in this account the word ‘aspects’ is key; George Monbiot is not two-dimensional, and he does not normally exist in a state that is framed by a 4×3 aspect ratio, illuminated by one kind of lighting, contextualised in a blurred background, etc. A case can and perhaps must be made that it’s still Monbiot, whatever the frame. But of course, depending on how Monbiot is framed, and how much other knowledge someone has about him, then the kind of picture might well make a huge difference to how Monbiot is perceived, conceived, and interpreted. In his own way, Monbiot has helped many people, myself included, to get a better grasp of how the ‘photographs’ that were being offered by various interested bodies might be skewing a variety of environmental issues.
* * *
My concern is that when it comes to the nuclear debate, Monbiot is, paradoxically, reverting to precisely the kind of discourse employed by the institutions he has usually opposed.
It seems to me that the criteria that he’s applying to determine whether nuclear energy ought to be used are as two-dimensional, which is to say as flat as a photograph taken with the shallowest of depths of field. Monbiot is claiming that nuclear energy is actually fine because it doesn’t really kill/seriously wound people, or at any rate, not as many people as the technology’s critics claim. Part of this argument is certainly a good one, in so far as it highlights what I would describe as the ‘unknown-knowns’ of other sources of energy such as coal, which have far more problems than is generally recognised. But two other aspects of this argument provoke in me the kind of amazement, to not say the horror that Monbiot claims to have experienced when he ‘outed’ Caldicott’s real, or alleged, lack of scientific evidence.
First, a normally hyper-critical Monbiot is quite ready to accept that a lack of evidence to the contrary is tantamount to the truth of the final outcomes of nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl’s. It is truly extraordinary that someone as knowledgeable as Monbiot should have this level of faith in one of the most heavily politicised technologies in the world. This stance seems disingenuous at best, and convenient at worst. Even if we disregard conspiracy theories, or the possibility of statistics that simply lack key data, what are we to do about all those ‘unknown-unknowns’ for which nuclear energy is notorious? The latest news about Fukushima really underscores this dimension of the whole technology: the Japanese government has authorised TEPCO, the private company that runs the plant, to dump over 11.000 tons of water with (presumably) low levels of radioactivity, into the ocean. This is without precedent; we have no way of knowing at this point what the consequences will be, not least because we (the people without a vested interest in the plant) don’t have any fail-safe way of confirming just how radioactive the water was. As if this were not worrisome enough, on April 6 the New York Times published an article about a confidential assessment by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, suggesting that Fukushima ‘is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable’. Yet Monbiot appears to imply that this whole dimension of nuclear energy should really not be a concern in a world with technologies full of other problems.
In a similar vein, and second, Monbiot appears to dismiss over 6,800—6,800!—cases of thyroid cancer in children in the former Soviet Union by suggesting that they are a simply a matter of a ‘failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with Iodine 131’. Here again, the implicit logic and corresponding ethic is deeply worrisome. It is not just that Monbiot seems quite ready to trust the institutions involved in measuring and studying the outcomes of nuclear disasters—perhaps we all must be on some level. It is that he also appears to be prepared to accept the notoriously rationalistic frame of technocrats, for whom such ‘mistakes’ are easily preventable, or easily controlled and corrected when someone ‘slips up’. If the history of nuclear disasters teaches us anything, it is that such assumptions are completely wrong. In a recent article in El País, a member of Spain’s Nuclear Security Council, an engineer with expertise in nuclear energy, argued that, far from being the ‘crappy’ old plant that Monbiot made it out to be, we have to suppose that the plant at Fukushima was actually one with a relatively sound design—what was ‘crappy’ was firstly the parameters for natural forces (earthquakes and tsunamis) which the plant was designed to withstand, and then the manner in which the unfolding crisis was managed. To use the engineer’s metaphor, no one expected to ‘win’ both the European, and the Spanish national lottery at the same time. And yet, far from being an exception in an earthquake-ridden country, these kinds of failures, these supposed ‘lotteries’ are the norm in nuclear and indeed many other technologies. Again, this is true not just in the context of countries with ‘extreme’ geographies such as Japan, but also in the everyday bureaucratic-administrative process required to design, build, and then manage nuclear plants even in ‘stable’ places like Chernobyl. As far as I can tell, cutting corners is not the exception in modern capitalism; it is probably the rule when what are at stake are the profits of unaccountable corporations, or the costs for a government looking to make savings. (For a recent account of this tendency as it applies to both banking and nuclear reactors, see the article by Joseph Stiglitz, Meltdown: not just a metaphor.)
The last problem I have with Monbiot’s approach is the one that concerns me the most. As I understand it, Monbiot is ultimately grounding his defence of nuclear technology in the following logic-ethic: 1) nuclear energy is no more problematic than other forms of energy such as coal; and 2) given the looming disaster caused by runaway climate change, we must make use of any technology that succeeds in preventing the unimaginable disaster that will result from climate change. Put differently, if it is true that nuclear energy is no different from other equally problematic sources of energy, it is even more true that our failure to use nuclear energy will have an even worse outcome: hundreds of millions of people will starve, or drown, or be displaced by rising sea levels, failing crops, etc. etc.
I have shown why we should not take Monbiot’s arguments about the relative safety of nuclear at face value. But I have no doubt that Monbiot is right to be worried about climate change. What worries me is that the edifice of Monbiot’s argument involves a certain consequentialism. Consequentialism is the doctrine, or the ‘moral’, that what really matters about an action is its consequence, its outcome. Call it, if you will, a big word with which to describe the kind of stance associated with ‘just do whatever it takes’, or ‘the end justifies the means’. Monbiot is, in effect, adopting such a stance by suggesting that we must pretty much do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop climate change: we may not like nuclear energy, nuclear energy may not be perfect, but if the outcome of its use is that we prevent runaway climate change, then we must use it.
As I see understand it, this kind of stance raises two of the most troubling issues for anyone who believes that modern environmentalism—and addressing climate change—is not about technological fixes, however desperate the circumstances. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is that consequentialism can be used to justify anything—in its extreme form, it becomes Machiavellianism. If someone with Monbiot’s stature is ready to adopt a consequentialist frame in this context, then how else might consequentialism be invoked, however implicitly, in future? One person I know is already saying that stopping climate change means that we will have to accept dictatorship.
The second problem follows on from the first, and is that Monbiot appears to be ready to embrace the fundamental ethic of capitalism itself. Part of what has made capitalism so powerful, so creative and so destructive, is precisely a readiness on the part of capitalist institutions and their proxies to ‘do whatever it takes’ to accumulate capital.
Does George Monbiot really believe that he can embrace, however inadvertently, an equivalent ethic in the context of nuclear power, and still oppose the rest of the workings of capitalism? The best parallel that I can think of, from an ethical standpoint, was New Labour’s claim that its semi-secret plans to introduce a universal DNA database were not only required to prevent rape, but also, were not really contradictory of the principle that people are, and ought to remain, innocent until proven guilty. New Labour was as wrong about the universal DNA database as Monbiot is about nuclear energy.
Update 12 April 2011. Japan has finally done what it should have done as soon as its Fukushima reactors began exploding: it’s raised the severity level of the nuclear crisis at the plant from 5 to 7 on the INES scale. 7 is the maximum, and puts the classification of the disaster at Fukushima on a par to that of Chernobyl. (For more on these news, see the Guardian’s article Japan Raises Nuclear Alert Level to 7.) The change vindicates something that many of us had suggested in response to what always seemed like both a premature, naive, and indeed irresponsible suggestion on the part of Monbiot: that if Fukushima was as bad as it got, then we ought to ‘love’ nuclear energy. It now seems increasingly clear that Monbiot has fallen for what, from the start, was rather obviously another disinformation campaign by the nuclear energy sector, with the collaboration, however passive, of the Japanese government itself. TEPCO and the officials in charge of managing the crisis must have known from the start the severity of what is now officially a disaster.
Copyright © 2011 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
