Prickly When Whetted
Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.
Second Witch, Act 4, Scene 1, The Tragedy of Macbeth, William Shakespeare
In this edition, as well as updating you on my most recent publications I also want to help you see how they all fit together. If you bear with me I will show you a very broad and complete picture that will become fleshed out in the coming weeks and months. The quotation above is sometimes interpreted differently but I take it to mean the hedgehog whined for times. This is edition 4 and the line follows from the one I used for edition 3. Don't worry, I am not going to step line by line through the Scottish play, but I have a few more in mind. Later (and this may not be very interesting) I will tell you why the story of Macbeth is relevant.
Saturday 24 June
Yesterday I published the primer for Series 10: Carbon Captives on Substack.
Of the very many things that distinguishes humans is our ability to develop technology. In the infancy of our species, even the most basic tools provided advantage and increased the chance of an individual's survival. Technology allowed us to leverage our effectiveness in the environment and that success fed forward into a developmental loop.
The case I make is that humans the natural stewards of nature, because our ability to devise technology means that it is our responsibility, if the term has any meaning at all. I argue against the nihilistic view that humans are inherently bad and the Earth would be better without us. I make the point that if we do not correct our mistakes then nothing else will or indeed, possibly could. I explain why unaided nature-based recovery is not only a non-solution it is a dangerous infantile indulgence.
To paraphrase what I say in the article; humans are not an offence to nature because we are a product of it, and in any case, nature has no morality. Humans are natural and so is everything about us. Everything that is beautiful, kind or truly empathetic is seen through the lens of our particular type of consciousness. The environment shaped us and we survived, not only in spite of nature and it's accidental cruelty, but also because of it too.
Of Meaning
Nature doesn't have the capacity to be malicious, benevolent or indifferent. In S8,E1 The Emergence of Beauty (12 June), I suggested that beauty is not 'out there' it only exists in our consciousness. We project beauty onto nature. Nature does not care.
Why are such ethereal musings of any value at all?
I would say if our civilisation doesn’t persist, for whatever reason, and it might be an external event or it might be our own action, nuclear war, whatever it is we decide to inflict on ourselves, it is possible that whoever presses that button eliminates meaning in a galaxy for ever.
Physicist Brian Cox, "Earth’s demise could rid galaxy of meaning, warns Brian Cox ahead of Cop26", The Guardian, Tara Conlan, 19 October 2021
This is what Brian Cox refers to as the 'Goldilocks Principle': our situation might be so rare in a galaxy, that for us to go all meaning would disappear with us. Maybe that seems solipsistic, perhaps even suggesting that makes us to be a contemptible species; yet our self-hatred will have no meaning on an Earth where we don't exist.
Thursday 22 June
I published the second in the Information Arising series: S8, E2, In Defence of Mr Gradgrind.
In?Hard Times,?Thomas Gradgrind?was an educational experimentalist and his hypothesis was based on a reductionist view of people. This was Dickens’ proxy for a critique of a dehumanising Industrial Revolution. Gradgrind recognised the mechanistic aspects of being human but not the emergent properties of humanity.
S8, E2, In Defence of Mr Gradgrind, Deja Review, The Vigne Intervention, Substack
Whatever your view on the Industrial Revolution, it was inevitable outcome of continuous development and rationalising the use of resources, it's not that I take a revisionist view of the human cost or feel able to say that it was all worth it. I'm saying there was no choice. No choice in the same sense that 'degrowth' is not a choice now.
Technology, the scientific method and experimental evidence are becoming unfashionable at the time when we need them most. Facts are subjective, culture is relativistic and science is descending into abstraction that lacks purpose.
Engineering concedes to dogma and hyperbole.
Consequently, the focus has turned to a type of engineering-lite, whereby in place of -
A Vehicle
Using a review of a popular science book may be an odd and circuitous way to talk about the threat to energy transition efforts and climate mitigation, but it enables me to discuss the issues in the abstract. Daniel Sharp originally published his article, ‘On Literary Science and the Bounds of Knowledge’, on?Merion West. This not only reviewed?The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos, by?Lawrence M. Krauss, but was also an exposition of his romanticised vision of science literature. Because I think much of engineering is now been romanticised where 'energy experts' have zero interest in technology, to the point that parts of engineering are morphing into a specialised branch of the humanities.
The Connective Tissue
Mentioned in this edition I discussed my primer for the Carbon Captives series that deals with climate nihilism. It discusses the tendency for what is almost a pagan view of nature, with all the superstitions and non-specific concepts that bear no scrutiny. I referred to a piece that deconstructed (line by line) an attempt by what was/became the Hydrogen Science Coalition to lobby the UK government. In the article explain why it was completely wrong and in another series I will outline how they have since changed tactics.
Why Would I Care?
The purpose of?The Vigne Intervention?is to challenge and debunk some popular narratives on,?inter alia, climate, emissions, energy and waste. I believe that there are some major threats to our climate mitigation efforts including; misinformation, groupthink, technophobia and what Tim Palmer calls the 'ascientific' - which is what I take to mean, consistent with existing science but without the evidence to support the additional conjectures. In some respects is is like a reverse-Occam's Razor.
To be in a post-truth era is to be in a post-empirical one too. Facts become passé and at best a matter of opinion.
领英推荐
[...]Reflecting on this, if I am ever called a philistine in the future my answer will be, ‘sure but which area of my ignorance are you referring to?
Also 22 June...
This is a slight rewriting of a post published on LinkedIn in March.
This is an in depth critique of an open letter that was sent to the then UK prime minister (Boris Johnson) in 2021, by anti-hydrogen lobby group 'The Hydrogen Science Coalition'. The letter resurfaced on LinkedIn and although not exactly 'current' it was possible to show why the assumptions and conclusions were so hopelessly wrong. I break the letter down paragraph by paragraph to show why it lacks merit, coherence or consistent logic.
An explanation of the title might provide a bit of insight into the flavour of this piece.
A 'green ink letter' is one sent to a newspaper or a politician that expresses eccentric views (term is most common in the UK). The authors set out to make the case that green hydrogen should displace grey hydrogen as a priority and should be used to make green steel. I explain why, apart from 'the colour of the ink', this is not green at all. Some headlines.
Scalability
The proposition that renewable generation could be used to produce green hydrogen and displace grey is not credible, requiring renewable capacity that would damage renewable scaling - I explain why the suggestion is ludicrous.
Opposition to Decarbonisation
The opposition to decarbonisation is based on an irrational objection to blue hydrogen. Why do I say 'irrational'? It's not for lack of awareness of the strength of that claim but because I have noticed how the argument has changed. So for example, in their 2021 letter to Boris Johnson there was no mention of safety concerns.
Let me show you the problem in a graph that I also published here:
The point is not that renewables are not displacing demand but that demand for hydrocarbons is increasing at such a rate that fossil fuels are in greater demand than ever and continue to increase globally. It is what is powering the production of renewable technology and the extraction industries and the development of emerging economies.
The trend is borne out by any statistical source you may trust. There are a list on my homepage if you don't know where to start. The failure to recognise the need to decarbonise existing demand and the future demand from developing nations is unfathomable to me. To believe that renewables can deliver the energy transition unaided is to ignore all the evidence to the contrary.
Series 11: Laundry Service will discuss this in detail how developing nations may grow by laundering the carbon for those in the Northern hemisphere. I have already mentioned some of that here in Series 2:
And also here in the primer for Series 6: Dark Materials
Unqualified steel pilot
The open letter referred to an unproven Japanese steel pilot scheme and used it to suggest this was what the UK should be focusing on. The arguments about qualification, safety and demonstration that would be later applied in its campaign against domestic hydrogen, made no appearance. I debunked the anti-domestic-hydrogen arguments in several standalone articles plus the 11 part Series 1.
Steelmaking with green hydrogen would be extremely damaging to the scalability of self-buffering renewables because it would demand so much capacity.
Hydrogen safety
Series 1 is already available on LinkedIn (look on my profile) but an edited/expanded version is being put up onto Substack. This is also one of the second reference cases that I use as a basis for Series 3 on misinformation.
The economic and thermodynamic arguments are challenged here:
Why The Vigne Intervention on Substack
If you subscribe for free you will have access to all the articles published thus far and in the future I plan to launch a chat channel to generate discussion, answer questions and learn something from you, in a way that is not really possible in comments to posts. Meanwhile, subscribing means you will get my Substack newsletters directly to your inbox, so you can read them on the go, or if you prefer, store them up so you can read binge-read an entire series. The series include deep deconstruction over many episodes that will hopefully give you a deep appreciation of some of the issues that are not being properly addressed. I would argue that this is because detail, nuance and complexity are irrationally avoided, because they are not instantly gratifying. This is a problem.
Series Status
Publication is a matter of scheduling without overloading subscribers and by the end of July I plan to have eight remaining series running in parallel across five separate sections of my website. To that end, over the next few weeks, I will focus on publishing the primers for each of the series to get them underway.
That aside, as a free reader you can access lots of other content, from great writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lawrence Krauss, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie are all on there with free and paid content.