Today I was at a TEDx event in Amsterdam. TED is a conference held twice a year (once a year in California and once a year in Oxford) and the TEDx events are independently organized version of the main TED conferences. TED is about ‘ideas worth spreading’ and if this is the first time you’ve heard about TED, make sure to head to TED.com right after reading this blog entry and view some of the videos of the performances there.
One of the more interesting speakers today at TEDx Amsterdam (in the Tropical Institute) was Kevin Kelly. Although I’m not such a big fan of Kevin (he did found the Wired magazine, so what’s not to like about him, you might say), he did have a few good quotes to take away for us; one of them I thought was worth mentioning here, especially since I’m dealing with a lot with something slightly related these days. Kevin’s quote (paraphrased slightly):
The response to a bad should be a better idea, rather than no idea at all. So throw away the precautionary principle
In Europe, we live by the precautionary principle a lot. It states that unless undeniable proof has been given that a certain action will not result in irreversible damage to the environment, society of people, one should not pursue such action, unless the ones advocating such action can actually deliver this undeniable proof.
A good example is the discussion as of late about Carbon Capture and Storage (or CCS). CCS is a technology to capture cabron-dioxide from power plants (amongst others) and storing the carbon-dioxide under ground. This technology (in addition to pursuing other and cleaner technologies such as generating power from wind, solar and tidal sources) could help alleviate the planet from the carbon-dioxide burden. Storing carbon-dioxide under ground is always better than just emitting it into the air.
A lot of projects related to CCS are being developed right now and one of the leaders in this technology is Royal Dutch Shell. The company wants to start capturing CO2 and store it under ground in a village in the Netherlands called Barendrecht. The locals object to this idea on the premise of it not being safe enough. “I don’t want CO2 in my backyard”, is their response (small side note here: the CO2 is actually stored more than 2km under ground, not just meters below the people’s garden terrasses).
While I’m all in favor of renewable energy and I think it’s a shame the Dutch government is planning on constructing multiple new coal-fired powerplants, I think CCS is a technology we absolutely need to avoid the otherwise invetitable; climate change that will ruin the way we occupy this planet.
The precautionary principle works wonderfully in theory; if and only if you have the resources and knowledge to fully predict everything that’s going to happen in the next few hundred years and the problems you’re facing are only of minor scale. The problem we’re facing however is not of a minor scale; it’s major and if we don’t do something now, we’ll ruin our entire planet.
If we would have used the precautionary principle in the early 19th century when the steam engine ignited the industrial revolution, we would have probably never quite put it to use at such a large scale as we did. We could have never predicted or proven in any way with the resources and knowledge we had back then what industrialization would be causing. We’ve filled the air with an amount of CO2 the planet cannot cope with, or at least not without getting a serious fever.
Sometimes, if, with humanity, we face challenges that are greater than your everyday decision, then maybe, sometimes, we have let go of the precautionary principle and for once, take our chances. Note that I’m not saying we should take reckless decisions betting our entire future, rather do everything in our power to make sure nothing goes wrong and then just take our chances.
With CCS, as with many other issues related to climate change, we’ll probably never know entirely for sure how things will work out. We’ll probably never know if the carbon-dioxide we’re going to store underground is never going to come up again.
With electric vehicles, it’s somewhat the same. We know that electric cars in cleaner if we generate the power from renewable sources and the Dutch government recognizes this, by giving lots of subsidies to the sector. If however we continue to generate the power our electric cars need in a polluting manner, it’s not going to work. We also do not have the recycling capacity ready yet for all these batteries electric cars will actually produce. But sitting still and continuing our current habit of burning oil to get us from A to B is not going to be work either.
If it’s a bad idea, or if it’s not immediately clear that in all circumstances we can think of it’s going to work, we’d better come up with something better, rather than no idea at all. Because I for one know for sure that sitting still is not going to help us either.
Climate Change is really scary, now we have super typhoons and a lot of flooding going on some countries..::~