Author: drmarchudson

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Australia

Australian films “The Coal Question” and “What to do about C02” – interview with Russell Porter

The Australian documentary maker Russell Porter kindly agreed to an interview about two of his films for the CSIRO, “the Coal Question” (1982) and “What to do about C02” (1984).

The short version (though you really would benefit from reading the whole thing) is this – we knew. We really did. Skilled communicators got hold of scientists who knew how to communicate.

The Coal Question: (watch here)

Can you remember, did Film Unit ‘pitch’ to energy institute’, or did the energy unit come knocking and say ‘we’d like you to do a film about coal’

1. The film project selection system worked in various ways. In some cases we would identify a subject that looked interesting and then discuss it with the relevant experts, and if it was broadcastable in theme and scope, we would talk perhaps to the ABC Science commissioning editors. In other cases, the Institutes (or Divisions as they became) within CSIRO would express interest in having a film made about their work, and my job would be to liaise with the scientists involved and prepare a script, which was then sent back in a few stages to be revised and refined. I was always keen to avoid them looking too “institutional” and boring. 

In this case I think the energy Institute expressed an interest in publicising their work, I developed the script and, once it was approved, it formed the basic blueprint for making the film. Shooting and post-production on 16 mm was expensive, so we used to aim for a ratio of about ten to one (of material shot to the final edited length), so pre-scripting was essential. (Ratios these days are often 50 or 100 to one – false economy because the saving by shooting on inexpensive digital video are lost in lengthy post-production, and the craft and quality elements that come from careful preparation also suffer.)

Where did your information re: climate come from (did you already know Graeme Pearman from, say, the 1980 climate conference he organised)

2. The film unit was located in the old Information and Media (or some such) Centre in Albert St East Melbourne. which also housed a large library full of journals and editorial departments for specialist publications. It also housed the very experimental computing research division (where they were trying out a kind of prototype internet/electronic data-base sharing system, in collaboration with Harvard and Oxford). I tried to keep on top of interesting-looking developments or program as they came through the internal bulletins and publications like New Scientist (which I still subscribe to). CSIRO was a big and highly respected organisation in those days, with over 7,000 very bright employees engaged in often pure and original science. The climate conference was before my time (I joined in 1982), but the subject was beginning to create some lively debates within the organization. 

 

Was there any attempt to control the script/content before it was released? 

3. I don’t remember there being any attempt to “control” the content,  but as I say they had to approve the final draft of the script. The heads of the Divisions and their scientists were the experts, and I deferred to them. But they were all also pretty smart characters with considerable social awareness and sense of responsibility. I loved the fact that they would not say or allow any opinions that were not based on hard empirical evidence. Proper old-school scientific rigour. With films for a general audience I used to say that if they could make me understand what they were doing, I could interpret that for the public. 

Was there any overt ‘push back’ from anyone (within coal industry, government CSIRO etc) after it was released? If so, from who, what kind of push back?

4. I can’t remember any negative reaction to the coal film – there may have been some, but it would have been at a level that didn’t reach me. The industry lobby groups were also fairly docile in those days, and the politicians were less obsessed  with pleasing their neo-liberal constituencies – that came later I think. I remember feeling that I had to be careful not to be promoting an industry that to me, even back then, I saw as environmentally destructive, so the  “balance” in it, regarding emissions etc, was at my instigation – and they went along with it.

Are there other, earlier films I should be aware of? Or films about renewable energy?

5.  In terms of other CSIRO films, if you go to the website http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/ you can search by subject,and it will then give you the option of images or videos. “Climate” + “videos” for example yields this: http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/search/?tags=&newkeyword=climate&keyword=&library=&assettype=video&rgb=&deviation=30&page=1 

I made “Mysteries of the Lleeuwin” which is mainly about oceanography rather than energy / climate issues per se, and “The Heat is On” (2001) was after my time, but seems to be one of the “Sci-Files” shorts, which replaced the old “Researchers” series which were originally screened as fillers on commercial TV. There is another two-minuter in the series called “Oil from Plants”. A search on the site for “solar” yields these:

http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/search/?tags=&newkeyword=solar+&keyword=&library=&assettype=video&rgb=&deviation=30&page=1 HIAF was the only one I worked on.

Anything else you’d like to say about the Coal Question

6. I think “The Coal Question”  was aired on the ABC Quantum programme, as was my film on Australian trees called “Green Envoys“, shot in Zimbabwe and Southern China in 1986, funded by the Fed government as part of the Australian contribution to the International Year of Peace. (1986)It was originally planned to make it about two CSIRO research projects in Africa, trees in Zimbabwe and dry land soil farming techniques in Kenya. I went over to research it in February, returned with the crew in June, shot the trees project and then discovered that the Kenyans had withdrawn our permission to film at the last minute. It was due to go to air in September so we had to frantically re-schedule and re-write, and decided to make it all about trees. We had to get the then Foreign Affair Minister (Bill Hayden) to fast-track permits and visas etc, and off we flew to remote areas of southern China (Guangxi and Leizhou).  http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/video/12230/green-envoys/

What to do About CO2? (watch here)

Where did the impetus for “What to do about C02?” come from?

1. “The Greenhouse effect” as it was known then, was certainly an emerging interest of mine, and I think the ABC also wanted to do something on it. Much of the research was coming out of Atmospheric Physics Division in Aspendale so I went there first and met Graeme Pearman and I think Barrie Pittock, They were both keen to spread the word, and very charismatic interview “talent” (unlike many scientists). 

You interviewed Bert Bolin – did he happen to be in Australia at the time?

2.Bert Bolin was in Australia at the time, I´m not sure why, but he was already internationally renowned for his work on climate change, so we took him to a Melbourne beach and interviewed him there. Similarly I heard that botanist and broadcaster David Bellamy was addressing a crowd at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, we ran down there from the Unit´s base and grabbed him after the talk. He was quite a famous figure in those days for his arrest during protests against the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania. He became an all-purpose environmental issue commentator, so  we got the interview opportunistically. He was discredited  (and banned  by the BBC a least) when he became a denier of anthropogenic climate change, calling it “poppycock”. https://www.azquotes.com/author/30827-David_Bellamy).

Was there any attempt to control script/content?

3 No I don´t think there was any attempt to control the content. CSIRO and its scientists were kind of national sacred cows in those days, a source of national pride. This was before the whittling away and push to commercialize and downsize the organisation. This was also before the age of the internet, so here was much less official manipulation of media and ideas. Fake news, and the rot of anti-science and anti-intellectualism that has since taken over Australia, at least in terms of the people in power, were still decades away.

Can you recall any effort to get a politician (e.g. Barry Jones) to talk in the show about carbon dioxide as a problem?

4. No we didn´t approach the sainted Barry Jones. The Film Unit was intended and I think mandated to be non-partisan politically, and the feeling was that our brief was to stick to scientists, but in retrospect he would have been good value. The choice of Jeff Watson as the presenter was made by the ABC I think. He had a lot of cred as the founder of Beyond 2000, and he was a good choice.

What was the response? Positive? Negative? Any attempt to ‘push back’ from anyone?

5. The response to the film was generally good, it got a few positive reviews in the press and was deemed suitable by the Education department to be distributed to high schools. My own kids saw it at school. The Unit never promoted the films we made much, apart from within CSIRO´s general educational outreach through magazines etc. I don´t recall any pushback, but I can imagine the outcry from the conservative heads-in-the-sand brigade if it was made today with government money. Bob Hawke and Keating were in government for most of the time I was there.

Anything else you’d like to say about the film?

6. Not much more to say about it, other than I have used it quite a bit when teaching documentary in the USA and elsewhere, usually to positive feedback. It is old fashioned didactic filmmaking in a way, which has almost disappeared in the current digital point and squirt observational/reality style filmmaking. I´m currently working at the Uni of Tasmania making a series of films/online courses about identifying, living with and managing dementia (via the Wicking centre). Some of my colleagues there have seen it, and one said it is the best film they have seen on climate change issues, despite being made over three decades ago. 

For more about the CSIRO’s Film Unit, see

Hughes, J. 2018. From cold war to hot planet: Australia’s CSIRO film unit. Studies in Documentary Film., Vol 12, no 1.

Categories
United States of America

February 1, 1978 – US TV show MacNeill Lehrer hosts discussion about climate change

Forty five years ago, on this day, February 1 1978  the PBS “MacNeill Lehrer Report” had various smart people talking about the climate problems ahead (Robert Jastrow, Gordon MacDonald, Stephen Schneider, Clairborne Pell). They let Jastrow go first, shilling his Ice Age is Coming book. Then Gordon MacDonald, who had been warning about carbon dioxide build-up since 1968, and had helped write the first public facing report on it in 1970,  was able to respond –

“GORDON MacDONALD: Bob Jastrow talked about the natural fluctuations in climate. I think that basically the picture he drew is correct, except he left out one important factor, that is, man. Man has been doing lots of things that are going to change climate in very significant ways. For example, he`s burning oil, gas, coal, putting the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He`s also clearing forests, turning lands that were once covered with biologically active material into areas that are no longer biologically active. That means that the carbon that was once fixed in those forests is now released into the atmosphere. These two effects plus a very important effect, that is, natural gas coming from deep within the earth, coming into the atmosphere and being oxidized, all lead to the greenhouse that you described.”

https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_507-ms3jw87f1f

And yes, that is Stephen Schneider with hair –

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 333ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

In 1977 the National Academy of Sciences had released a big fat report saying there was probably a problem about carbon dioxide buildup, and other books had been written in the mid 70s (e.g. Wilcox). So television producers, who were always needing to fill up space and to seem to have their finger on the pulse, will have looked upon this as a good topic. Schneider was a no-brainer. MacDonald and Jastrow were among the JASONs who had been up to their necks as well in ozone discussions, and MacDonald was at the time of this television appearance leading work on a JASON Technical Report “The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate.”

What I think we can learn from this

These sorts of chin-stroking documentaries and discussion panels have been going on a long time. And at one point, certainly up to this point, they had their place. But since then they have become an opportunity for middle-class people who don’t want to get off their fat asses to say “oh, there’s still a debate going on.”

What is amusing about some of the denialists is they don’t admit (or perhaps even know) that some of the people they pointed to as ‘Big Scientists Who Disagree’ in the 1990s were Ice Agers. That doesn’t fit their narrative (though they never forget to cite the paper Stephen Schneider co-authored with Rasool in 1971…)

What happened next

The contestation over whether carbon dioxide buildup mattered led to a process in 1979 known as the Charney report, which said there’s no reason to think otherwise.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
Australia Science Scientists

Vale Will Steffen: gutsy, intelligent, compassionate climate scientist

I will add obituaries and appreciations to the man as they appear (please alert me to any you know of that aren’t on this list.)

Here’s a really good piece by Graham Readfern of the Guardian Australia.

Here’s a lovely tribute by former Chief Scientist Penny Sackett

Here’s a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Here’s his Wikipedia page.

Here’s a tribute page on the Climate Council website. If you ever met him, or were influenced by him, please do leave a message.

Short version: he moved to Australia from the US in 1977, and spent the rest of his life there. He was a KEY communicator of the science, as well as being a very good scientist indeed. I think of him in the same bracket as the late Stephen Schneider (that’s about as high as praise goes, btw).

I remember him at the 2011 climate conference in Melbourne, during the white hot debates on Gillard’s so-called “carbon tax.” I spoke to him briefly, and watched him engage with other people who he didn’t know from Adam. He was courteous, thoughtful, calm (and this was at the time of lunatics brandishing nooses), and his answers to questions were supremely rich in fact and insight. He did this without ever ever seeming pompous or condescending.

He is a HUGE loss to the Australian (and global) science community.

Categories
Antarctica

January 31, 2002 – Antarctic ice shelf “Larsen B” begins to break up.

Twenty one years ago, on this day, January 31, 2002, things began to fall apart.

31 January 2002–7 March 2002- the Larsen B sector collapsed and broke up, 3,250 km² of ice 220 m thick, covering an area comparable to the US state of Rhode Island, disintegrated and collapsed in one season.[6] Larsen B was stable for up to 12,000 years, essentially the entire Holocene period since the last glacial period, according to Queen’s University researchers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larsen_Ice_Shelf

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 371ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.

The context was folks had been talking about the impacts of greenhouse gas build-up on the Antarctic for a looooong time (try January 25, 1978)

What I think we can learn from this

Humans ignore warnings, especially if paying attention would be inconvenient to powerful people who have the ability to ‘help’ everyone else ignore those warnings.  Profound observation, I know – it’s what you have spent all month enjoying, no?

What happened next

It helped the film-makers who gave us “The Day After Tomorrow”(2004)  with their opening scene 

In 2005 British Sea Power’s album Open Season included a song called “Oh Larsen B”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HN0rqVJT4U

You had twelve thousand years and now it’s all over

Five hundred billion tonnes of the purest pack ice and snow

Oh Larsen B , oh won’t you fall on me?

Oh Larsen B , desalinate the barren sea

Oh I think it’s the start of the end

Like saw blades through the air

Your winter overture

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
United States of America

January 30, 1961 – New York Times reports world is cooling

Sixty two years ago, on this day, January 30 1961, in a story that would later be used by incoherent denialists, Walter Sullivan, New York Times science reporter, reported that the world was… cooling.,

You see this clip on various denialist websites.  You don’t see this below, from the same article.

This was in the context of a symposium in New York, attended by Hermann Flohn and Gilbert Plass, among others…

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 317ppm. As of 2023 it is 419. .

The context was that global temperatures had been rising over the last 50 plus years (Guy Callendar had been one of many to spot this – his contribution had been to say it was down to carbon dioxide build-up). However, from about 1940, the amount of dust/smog/sulphur had increased the reflectiveness of the atmosphere, meaning some of the sun’s heat didn’t hit the Earth.  So temperatures started falling…

What I think we can learn from this

The signal did not properly emerge from the noise until the 1970s (though the reason – smog/suplhur was well understood)

Denialists cherry-pick like mad, then project that onto people who… advocate for 19th century physics.

What happened next

The carbon dioxide kept accumulating. Sullivan kept covering it, forming good relationships with working scientists like Stephen Schneider (they met late 1972) and James Hansen.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
United States of America

January 29, 2001 – President Bush announces “energy taskforce” #TaskforceAnnouncementGrift

Twenty-two years ago, on this day, January 29 2001, newly-installed President George “Dubya” Bush announces an “energy taskforce”

The National Energy Policy Development Group was a group, created by Executive Order on January 29, 2001, that was chaired by Vice President Richard Cheney. The group, commonly referred to as the “Cheney Energy Task Force,” produced a National Energy Policy report in May 2001. [1] In a cover note to George W. Bush, Cheney wrote that “we have developed a national energy policy designed to help bring together business, government, local communities and citizens to promote dependable, affordable and environmentally sound energy for the future.” [2] (pdf) The composition of the task force, according to the report, was confined to government officials.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Cheney_Energy_Task_Force

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 371ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.

The context was that Bush had won the Presidency (if not the actual election – but, you know, details) with the help of his Dad’s mates on the Supreme Court. The power behind the throne, Dick Cheney, was clearly interested in coal and nuclear, not this carbon emissions reductions nonsense.  So, there had to be a process for backtracking on loose talk of regulating carbon emissions that had been made during the campaign. A “taskforce” should do the job…

What I think we can learn from this

Taskforces are absolute catnip to liberals.

They function either as “cooling out the mark” – the way that a promise can be broken (“we consulted independent experts.. Changed circumstances… therefore…”), or as a way of delaying (perhaps indefinitely) any actual ACTION on promises, while offering CV tokens and grin-and-grip opportunities to would-be trouble-makers, who become obsessed with maintaining their spot at the table, rather than actually keeping tabs on what is (not) being done, or building political power outside ‘the Beltway’/’Westminster’ etc.

What happened next

Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, and started mangling the language in the direction of absurd techno-fantasies. True leadership.

Cheney fought two legal challenges against releasing the records of this Taskforce. Of course he did.

https://www.npr.org/2007/07/18/12067186/cheneys-energy-task-force-records-revealed

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
Energy

January 28, 2013 – Doomed “Green Deal” home insulation scheme launched in the UK

Ten years ago, on this day, January 28, 2013, it all went wrong…

“Energy efficiency policy in the UK is at a watershed. On January 28th 2013, the Green Deal formally began operation. The Green Deal is a market-based, demandled financial mechanism providing up-front loans for energy efficiency measures, which are repaid using the energy savings. A new Energy Company Obligation will run alongside the Green Deal to support vulnerable customers, poorer communities and higher cost insulation measures. A commercial sector Green Deal is also planned”

Sounds great. Um…

“So what went wrong? The Green Deal was an example of a ‘Pay-as-you-save’ type scheme, where loans are taken out to pay for the energy efficiency measures, and repaid over time from the financial savings created by these measures. It seems like a no-cost solution and an obvious winner. But not the British government’s version of it.  One of the reasons for this failure was pointed out right at the start by critics, but ignored by government officials responsible for designing the scheme. This was that the 7-10% APR interest rate on the loan to householders was too high – in fact several percentage points higher than ordinary loans available on the high street. It was simply not affordable.

It also made many measures unaffordable within its own context – the ‘Golden Rule’. This rule was embedded into the legislation and stipulated that the savings generated by energy efficiency measures must lie within the cost of the measures. The Green Deal was initiated in 2013 under the 2011 Energy Act. It came with no target or grants. It combined accredited energy advice and installation with finance to be repaid in a period up to 25 years. Finance was attached to the property, and recouped through extra charges on the electricity bill (even if the savings were made on a different fuel, say gas).

The result? 300,259 total Green Deal assessments resulted in only 1,815 ‘live’ plans – a conversion rate of just 0.6%”

Thorpe, D. (2016) Why the UK Green Deal failed and why it needs a replacement. Energy Post, April 18. https://energypost.eu/uk-green-deal-failed-needs-replacement/

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 396ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.

.

The context was that there was a Coalition government in the UK, and the Liberal Democrats were trying to get the elephants that are Departments of State to tapdance.

What I think we can learn from this

This stuff is difficult. Wicked. Superwicked, superwicked on acid and steroids. And we’re all gonna die.  We are toast, but we are not going to be toasty, at least not in winter…

What happened next

Another, smaller, scheme went tits up in 2021.  And millions were screwed by energy price spikes in 2022, 23 , 24 and so on until the apocalypse…

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

References

Thorpe, D. (2016) Why the UK Green Deal failed and why it needs a replacement. Energy Post, April 18. https://energypost.eu/uk-green-deal-failed-needs-replacement/

Categories
United States of America

January 27, 1986 – Engineers try to stop NASA launching the (doomed) Challenger Space Shuttle

Thirty-seven years ago, on this day, January 27 1986, engineers at the company Morton-Thiokol were begging their own bosses, and NASA administrators, to delay the launch of the Challenger Space Shuttle. They feared it could explode on the launch pad, because seals keeping fuel away from air were not going to work because the rubber they were made of had lost its elasticity, thanks to unexpected sub-zero temperatures in Florida.

As per the Wikipedia entry about one of the engineers, Roger Boisjoly. 

Following the announcement that the Challenger mission was confirmed for January 28, 1986, Boisjoly and his colleagues tried to stop the flight. Temperatures were due to fall to −1 °C (30 °F) overnight. Boisjoly felt that this would severely compromise the safety of the O-ring and potentially the flight.

The matter was discussed with Morton Thiokol managers, who agreed that the issue was serious enough to recommend delaying the flight. NASA protocols required all shuttle sub-contractors to sign off on each flight. During the go/no-go telephone conference with NASA management the night before the launch, Morton Thiokol notified NASA of their recommendation to postpone. NASA officials strongly questioned the recommendations, and asked (some say pressured) Morton Thiokol to reverse its decision.

The Morton Thiokol managers asked for a few minutes off the phone to discuss their final position again. The management team held a meeting from which the engineering team, including Boisjoly and others, were deliberately excluded. The Morton Thiokol managers advised NASA that their data was inconclusive. NASA asked if there were objections. Hearing none, NASA decided to launch the STS-51-L Challenger mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 348.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.

The context was NASA was under a lot of pressure to launch, because of previous delays and because there was a civilian – a teacher called Christa McAuliffe – on board.

What I think we can learn from this

Hierarchies are “reality distortion fields”. But reality – especially physics and chemistry – will impinge, sooner or later.

It’s probably a good idea to listen to scientists and engineers who say something is really unsafe. 

There is such a thing as “organisational decay” – Organizational decay is a condition of generalized and systemic ineffectiveness. It develops when an organization shifts its activities from coping with reality to presenting a dramatization of its own ideal character. In the decadent organization, flawed decision making of the sort that leads to disaster is normal activity, not an aberration. Three aspects of the development of organizational decay are illustrated in the case of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They are (1) the institutionalization of the fiction, (2) personnel changes in parallel with the institutionalization of the fiction, and (3) the narcissistic loss of reality among management.

What happened next

In case you didn’t know, the Challenger was torn apart 73 seconds into its flight.

Boisjoly spent the rest of his life trying to get other people to learn from what had happened. By all accounts, a mensch.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

References and further reading

30 Years After Explosion, Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself

Schwartz, H. 1989. Organizational disaster and organisational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 3, pp.319-334.

And a blog post of mine, inspired by reading Schwartz

Failing to meet the Challenge(r) – “Organisational decay”
Categories
United States of America

January 26, 1970 – US science bureaucrat writes “what’s going on?” memo about #climate

Fifty three  years ago, on this day, January 26, 1970, a Nixon-era scientist (a professor in Applied Physics no less) called Hubert Heffner  expressed (understandable!) uncertainty about climate change. In September the previous year Daniel Moynihan had written a memo – now famous on the internet – about the possible consequences of carbon dioxide build-up.

“Moynihan received a response in a Jan. 26, 1970, memo from Hubert Heffner, deputy director of the administration’s Office of Science and Technology. Heffner acknowledged that atmospheric temperature rise was an issue that should be looked at.

“The more I get into this, the more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent majority in between,” he wrote. “One group says we will turn into snow-tripping mastodons because of the atmospheric dust and the other says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due to the temperature rise.”

Heffner wrote that he would ask the Environmental Science Services Administration to look further into the issue. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna38070412

Hubert Heffner

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.

The context was the US administration of Nixon was trying to use environmental issues to change the conversation in Europe, away from, well, you know, napalming Vietnamese children.  That’s part of the context of the Moynihan memo. The Germans were underwhelmed by this as a tactic.  Meanwhile, the United Nations bureaucracy was grinding forward with preparations for the Stockholm conference, to be held in June 1972.

What I think we can learn from this

It was still okay at this point to be just not quite sure. We must not allow hindsight to condemn folks for not knowing for sure (I think by late 1970s that argument becomes much much less viable).

What happened next

In August 1970 the first Council on Environmental Quality report came out, with a chapter written by Gordon MacDonald – see here .

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong?  Do comment on this post.

Categories
Denial Interviews

Of the long 1970s, non-inevitable oil company denialism and “nanobubbles”: interview with Prof Cyrus Mody

One of the reasons I have continued with All Our Yesterdays is because there are definitely lots of smart activists and academics out there doing great work who deserve a signal boost and the chance to cross-fertilise. One such person is Prof. Cyrus Mody… who kindly agreed to this interview. (If you read Dutch, check out this interview too).

1) Who are you and how did you come to be working on the 1970s Oil Industry from a perch in Netherlands?

I’m an historian of science and technology at Maastricht University. A lot of my research wanders into business history, environmental history, energy history – but my PhD is in Science and Technology Studies, and I approach all my research from the direction of science and technology. That’s perhaps my main contribution as a scholar – to get historians of science to think more about business, and to get business, environmental, and energy historians to think more about science (and to get all of them to think more about technology). Until recently, I was making those points mostly with respect to fields related to the microelectronics industry – fields like semiconductor physics, electrical engineering, nanotechnology, materials science. But in the course of that research (and in reading the secondary literature on similar science-oriented industries such as biotechnology) I noticed that the oil industry was absolutely everywhere in high-tech (and yet hardly anyone had pointed out that ubiquity). So around 2012 I started preliminary work on the project that became Managing Scarcity and Sustainability by trying to map all the “spillovers” from the oil industry into other high-tech domains that I could find.

At the time I was at Rice University in Houston – a great place to do oil history and energy humanities, and a wonderful place to be an untenured assistant professor because I had a lot of freedom to teach what I wanted and enough resources for the kind of research I was doing at the time. But I could see that I couldn’t study all the oil spillovers I was uncovering on my own – that would require becoming an expert in the history of too many fields, each of which deserved its own study. For reasons I won’t go into, at Rice I was never going to be able to put together the kind of team needed to tackle this topic. But in the Netherlands, team projects are common. It wasn’t an easy decision to move, but in doing so I’m now surrounded by a much more vibrant local/regional history of science and technology and STS community than I was in Houston, and I’ve been able to hire an incredible team (Odinn Melsted, Jelena Stankovic, and Michiel Bron) to work on Managing Scarcity.

2)  Tell us about , “Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity.” – what is the project, and how might it help us understand what is going on now?

Managing Scarcity and Sustainability (https://managingscarcity.com/) is a five-year project funded by the NWO (usually translated as Dutch Research Council; award VI.C.191.067). Our main focus is oil actors’ involvement in the global debate about resource scarcity, environmentalism, and sustainable growth/development in the “long 1970s” (which we usually define as the years 1968 to 1986). By “oil actors” we mean, firstly, oil firms as well as allied firms and trade associations; but we also mean individual oil executives and scientists and engineers with oil industry experience, as well as the firms (e.g., solar energy start-ups) and organizations (e.g., philanthropic foundations) that those individuals led.

The project is sort of two-pronged: on the one hand, we look at the technologies that oil firms (and the start-ups they invested in) developed in response to growing awareness of resource scarcity and environmental problems. Here, we’re mainly interested in solar, geothermal, and nuclear (both fission and fusion) energy as well as auxiliary technologies such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology; but we’re also trying to draw in researchers who are studying other oil spillovers, e.g., wind energy or fuel cells and advanced batteries. The oil industry was deeply involved in lots of alternative energy in this period, but pulled back (in many cases, abandoned) those investments in the 1980s.

The other prong looks at a network of current and former oil executives who stoked the global debate on resource scarcity, environmental problems (including climate change), and sustainable development. At the center of that network were: Robert O. Anderson (chair of both Atlantic Richfield – a mid-size oil company – and the Aspen Institute, as well as donor to many other environmental organizations and think tanks); Maurice Strong (a Canadian diplomat, chair of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, but also an executive or board member with various oil companies including Ajax, Dome, Petro-Canada, and Tosco); and George Mitchell (often known as the “father of fracking” but also the sponsor of a series of Limits to Growth conferences and other environmental/sustainable development activities). Through collaboration with the Club of Rome, the United Nations, the Nobel Foundation, and an array of think tanks, this network was incredibly influential in the emergence of institutions of global environmental governance from the 1970s until the early 1990s.

What can we learn from this? Well, first, that climate denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable. All across the oil industry in the 1970s executives were publicly saying that we would need to rely more on non-fossil fuels: nuclear fission in the short term, geothermal in the medium term, and nuclear fusion and solar in the long term (by which they meant after the year 2000). And their companies invested accordingly. We’ve also known for a while that oil firms were aware of climate change in this period; but members of the Anderson-Strong-Mitchell network weren’t just aware of it, they were some of the loudest voices in the world drawing attention to it and calling for global governance structures to address it. Which means, second, that we have to look for a more complex explanation for why denialism became a more common strategy from the late 1980s onward. Our working hypothesis is that the declining price of oil meant these firms had less cash to invest for the long term. But, perhaps more importantly, the election of neoliberal regimes in the US, UK, Netherlands, Canada, and elsewhere meant those firms could no longer rely on the state as a partner in development of both alternative energy and climate regulation. Neoliberalism also encouraged hostile takeover bids by people like T. Boone Pickens, which forced oil firms both to liquidate assets in order to fend off those bids, and also to refocus on their “core competency” of getting oil out of the ground in order to assure investors that their main priority would be short-term returns rather than responsible long-term development of alternatives.

3) What is the “nanobubbles” project? What inspired it, what has it achieved, what next?

NanoBubbles is a large project funded by the European Research Council’s Synergy program (award 951393). We are a couple dozen researchers across more than a half-dozen universities in the Netherlands and France, drawn from history, sociology, philosophy, library science, computer science, nanoscience, STS, and other fields. The aim is to better understand the difficulties that scientists face in attempting to correct the scientific record, and also to study the systemic inducements to exaggeration, defense of erroneous claims, and even outright fraud in science. Some members of the group have personally experienced damaging repercussions from their attempts to correct errors in the scientific record; others have developed tools and approaches for studying some of the channels through which errors propagate (e.g., journal articles). My own interest stems in part from my earlier work on nanotechnology and in part from my current work (within Managing Scarcity) on climate denialism and on the oil industry’s inflation of “bubbles” in high-tech fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We’re about 18 months into the project, a lot of which was spent on hiring people and getting our infrastructure in place (e.g., ethics protocols), so our achievements thus far are mostly preparatory to what comes next; but I’d point you to work by some members of the project (Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and colleagues) on “tortured phrases” as an example of what we’re working on (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0). Ultimately, at least in the Maastricht corner of the project (i.e., myself, Candida Sanchez Burmester, and Max Rossman), we’d like to do both traditional, labor-intensive qualitative research (participant observation at labs and conferences, historical research at archives) and also develop automated tools for scaling up qualitative research to much larger Ns in order to better understand how claims and counter-claims do or don’t circulate through (and gain traction within) scientific communities.

4) What do you think the main thing academics/politicians/activists/citizens need to understand/do differently around energy to help us miss our climate targets by a smaller margin than we otherwise would?

Well, energy and climate are too complex to point to a single “main thing.” But the lessons I’d draw from Managing Scarcity and NanoBubbles are these: denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable, and at one point a significant portion of the oil industry was working toward some kind of transition in both technology and governance; oil firms bear plenty of blame for their later support of denialism, but there are other actors (particularly neoliberal politicians and economists as well as the financial industry) who bear lots of blame too (and if we only address the oil industry but not those other actors we’ll never actually resolve the core issues); but even if some oil actors of the 1970s (people like Strong and Anderson) were moving in a more positive direction than that of their successors, their program was still too oriented to technological solutionism and economic growth; instead, we need an approach that prioritizes cultural change over (though not necessarily exclusive of) technological innovation, and that is willing to entertain alternatives to economic growth.