I went with anticipation to a ‘Bristol Festival of Ideas’ talk earlier this week, where Stewart Brand, chaired by Brian Eno, was talking about his new book Whole Earth Discipline. I left feeling rather dispirited.

For those of you who don’t know Brand, he is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a grand old man of the US environmental movement.

His central message was that the problems facing the world are so great that we have to do “whatever works” in order to tackle them. That means concentrating people in cities, and embracing GM, nuclear power and geo-engineering. We are changing the earth so profoundly anyway, he argued, that we might as well do more of it.

I am a big technological optimist myself and am certainly on the eco-pragmatist side of the movement. But I found Brand’s recipe – at least as he dished it out in Bristol - unfulfilling.

His was a totally technocratic version of the world, encouraging us to “focus on the numbers” and “just do what works”. There was no room for vision or values, just a managerial approach to engineering the status quo.

Brand told us to “put aside ideology” and ridiculed most environmentalists as luddites who “would have opposed the wheel”.

While I liked Brand’s willingness to slaughter sacred cows, I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Surely we need both technological answers and changed values? Surely the environment movement shouldn’t be shorn of all sense of vision? Is more of the same, just better managed, really enough?

Read more about Whole Earth Discipline (publishers website)

It was Teddy Goldsmith’s “Memorial Celebration” on Tuesday last week. 

I think everyone thought it was extraordinarily important to have a chance to think back over the life’s work of this extraordinary man.  From the mid-1960s onwards, he was often the first to raise big sustainability issues, to pursue them ferociously through the pages of The Ecologist (established in 1969 and “virtualised” 40 years later in 2009), and to keep confronting people with the often uncomfortable logic of what it means to fashion genuinely sustainable lives for an ever-expanding number of human beings on an ever-shrinking planet. 

Sadly, I didn’t see much of Teddy in his last few years.  But he was often present in my thinking about different issues, particularly in terms of his views on population, economic growth, agriculture, GM and so on.  And nowhere more powerfully than in the renewed debate about the potential role of nuclear power in a more sustainable world. 

Right now, those who still feel that nuclear power has no role to play in a genuinely sustainable world are completely downcast at having to fight those same old battles all over again – this time with the added problem of a growing number of serious environmentalists who’ve thrown in their lot (holding their noses as they go) with the nuclear option.

It has to be said that there’s no enthusiasm for the fight.  How could there be?  And at the moment, there’s no clear sense of where the leadership is going to come from. 

More than ever, we’re going to miss that utterly uncompromising, forensic focus that Teddy brought to bear on the nuclear industry – especially in terms of Windscale/Sellafield, Dounreay, Sizewell and so on.

Without Teddy, who is going to rub people’s noses in the continuing scandal of nuclear waste mismanagement, and remind people that this government promised time after time that there would be no expansion of nuclear power in this country until it had sorted out the problems of nuclear waste?

Who is going to hold to account politicians and industry leaders for whom secrecy remains the default mindset?

Who is going to expose the near-fraudulent accounting practices endemic within the nuclear industry that continue to blind people to the true economic costs and penalties involved in nuclear power?

Who is going to interrogate the philosophical and moral implications of one generation imposing on the next a set of problems and security hazards for which they themselves have absolutely no solution?

And who is going to take on those sincere but utterly misguided environmentalists who’ve “gone nuclear” over the last few years because they feel there’s no alternative?

Sustainable development activists can’t afford to be absolutist about new technology developments.  When the facts change, we should indeed change our minds.  Even in the Green Party (after very lively discussions with Teddy himself!), I argued that we should be open to the theoretical possibility that evolved nuclear technologies, at some point in the future, might have a contribution to make to a genuinely sustainable energy mix.

And who can tell what lies ahead in that regard.  Once issues regarding cost, public subsidy, waste, decommissioning, proliferation, vulnerability to terrorism and availability of uranium have all been addressed and sorted, maybe that day will dawn.

But it hasn’t dawned yet.  And there’s nothing in the latest reactor designs currently under consideration that tells me that it’s going to dawn any time soon.

As Teddy would be pointing out right now, by the time that day does dawn, it will almost certainly be too late anyway.  And we will have wasted all that time and all that money fixated on our nuclear fantasies, and failing to do the obvious sustainable stuff on efficiency and renewables.

So I don’t doubt that those still opposed to the nuclear option will be drawing down on Teddy’s astonishing life work, as they reluctantly pick up their cudgels all over again.

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Credit: Terry Kettlewell /Shutterstock

The Cheltenham Science Festival is now in full swing, and on Wednesday I went along to listen to Jeremy Leggett of Solar Century. Great talk.

However, we didn’t get the full value of Jeremy’s insights, as the festival organisers had stuck him on a panel with four other people, one each for nuclear, coal, wind and Energy from Waste industries. The last two did well (yes, there really is a good sustainability case for the kind of Energy from Waste technologies), but our friends from the coal and nuclear industries were just dreadful. They’d clearly been sent on media training courses, which produced a weird amalgam of the patronising, the banal and the downright dishonest.

But at least we know where we are these days. Not so long ago, the nuclear industry would disdainfully acknowledge that there was a role for renewables alongside nuclear. Not a big role, but at least something to add to the overall supply picture. In the last few months, however, they’ve decided to move into full battle mode, on a 'them or us' basis. As Jeremy puts it:

“Those reluctant to abandon the nuclear and fossil-fuel status-quo have been reacting to all this with a fresh candour.  In March, both EDF and EON advised the UK Government to cut back on renewables in favour of nuclear.  The energy giants declared efforts to get 35% renewables into the UK’s electricity mix – as the Government intends – to be not only unrealistic, but damaging to nuclear plans.  They said additional carbon-generating plants would be needed because of the intermittency of renewables.”
I’m sorry, but this is truly pathetic. Little more a year ago, these nuclear zealots were telling the world (including any prospective investors who would listen) that any new nuclear in the UK would require zero public subsidies. Hardened anti-nuclear campaigners such as myself and Jeremy fell about laughing – not one kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity has ever gone onto the grid, anywhere in the world, over forty years, without some kind of public subsidy.  So why does anybody suppose that it’s going to be any different this time round?

At least the big energy companies have now had the decency to come out and tell us at least part of the truth about their nuclear ambitions.