The man who helped usher in the environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s has been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. This talk at the US State Department is a foretaste of his major new book, sure to provoke widespread debate.
About Stewart Brand
Since the counterculture Sixties, Stewart Brand has been a critical thinker and innovator who helped lay the foundations of our internetworked world. Full bio and more links
Comment by: PT (David Alexander) (Jul-21-2009) Web site
There are too many problems with his talk to list them all here. However, some primary items:
He starts off with "credibility" factors, because much of what he says goes against the best wisdom of thousands of other environmentalists. He tries to sneak in a reference linking opposition to nuclear energy as coming from coal miners, not from his fellow environmentalists. However, only a very few true environmental activists have accepted nuclear energy as an acceptable alternative to clean, renewable sources. The vast majority of those who study the environment, whether from a science or policy viewpoint, are strongly opposed to nuclear energy.
Just to be clear, I would state that nuclear energy is not clean and is not renewable. The disposal problems and leakage problems of nuclear energy are legendary, and can only get worse over time as nuclear contamination lasts a very long time, as in Chernobyl but also in Long Island where it is now in some of the ground water. In addition, nuclear fuel, if depended on for future expanded energy use, is in a limited supply, although there is some debate about how limited (and also, how heroic the efforts would be to get new nuclear fuel at great expense of energy to dig deep mines and release other contaminants in the process).
Another misleading slide states that one person's entire lifetime use of electricity results in one soda can's worth of nuclear waste. Perhaps he is counting only the high intensity actual nuclear material, and not counting the corresponding millions of gallons of radioactive water, and other materials that become contaminated and are mid-level and low-level radioactive, which still requires isolation for very long periods (nuclear physicists feel free to jump in here with more specifics on the various levels of radioactivity). He compares that with coal output by AN ENTIRE COAL PLANT (as opposed to the nuclear output from one person).
Simply slurring over the disastrous risks of nuclear plants indicates intellectual and possibly commercial (i.e. money-making) dishonesty. The idea of floating small nuclear power plants all over the developing world is the worst possible recipe for disaster. Is this psychotic delusion or senility, or something else? Will the crowds of poor people swarming around the mini-power-plant be trained to operate it?
I use strong language here because those wrapped up in the technology dream can have a break with reality that resembles psychosis, and that is what appears to have happened. The friendly author of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a famous, down-to-earth recipe book for using home-brewed and low-tech technologies to enhance natural living, has followed the path to its wrong conclusions, namely, that greater and greater complexity will be our salvation.
Stewart Brand's praise of genetically modified organisms, which seems to come out of nowhere in this TED presentation, would require too much space to discuss here, but I wonder how that topic and advocacy snuck into this talk, as it is not fully discussed here nor is directly connected to the energy issues that occupy most of the talk.
Last, and not least, Stewart Brand's hidden assumption is that perpetual growth is the need for a "good life". His model of the future seems to be a utility pole, shone more than once here, clogged with wires, providing high-speed Internet to billions of young, ambitious, and car-driving inhabitants of the equatorial regions of the world (presumably also air-conditioned).
I hope instead that we simplify, build on the more-than-ample renewable resources, perhaps use less energy at night when renewables are less available, and adapt to the REAL world that nature so generously provides.
Fossil Fuel
TED
[Editor's note: this man is seriously deluded. See 
PT (David Alexander)
