The claim that Nuclear Power can solve the problem of rising sea levels is humbug. Sea levels are complicated. They have to do with Spherical Geometry. Sea levels don’t rise and fall they move around. Twice a day the sea surrounds Vemara and lifts her six feet off the mud. Then it drains away leaving me high and dry on the mud. Meanwhile the waters of my local North Atlantic Ocean swirl around like water in a cooking basin.
A planet moving through space at speed produces tides and currents in its oceans. Untold billions of pounds is being siphoned off to utility bosses, jerry builders, crooked politicians and bloated bankers on the back of fraudulent prospectuses. Only our House of Peers and the Audit Commission puts up any token resistance.
Rising sea levels make Nuclear Plants unfeasible because all the existing sites…the favourite option as they avoid many of the tricky issues in planning inquiries…would be six fathoms deep according to Global Warming Theology.
Feasibility studies will need two contradictory sets of predictions. One lot for building new plants and another to prove they will be safe for 100 years. How much energy will it take to make and move all that construction concrete around and pump those billions of gallons of cooling water to the steam kettles high on the Yorkshire Moors…on the off chance oceans overrun the coastal plains 100 years hence?
The Nuclear Energy account will be millions of gigawatts in the red…and rising…before any Nuclear Plant opens for business. It makes more sense to shut down existing plants, drape black roofing felt over them and run a few hundred miles of water-filled copper coils on top of them. Atomic power…Too Cheap to Meter in the 1950s…is Too Expensive in Energy today. But the root of the problem lies elsewhere…in our 19th century piped energy mentality.
The national Piped Energy Grids…electricity, oil, gas and hydrogen…must be dismantled. Water leaks can be plugged by replacing broken pipes. But leaking energy is what Electricity Grids do…just as leaking oil is what Oil Pipelines do. And who needs to strap explosives round their waist with Gas Pipelines criss-crossing the country.
Each town and every county, each village and every urban parish needs to disconnect from the national piped energy grids. But to ask the nuclear, oil, electricity, hydrogen and utility industries to take the initiative is like expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.
A hundred years ago the world’s leading Economic Geographer predicted that the politics of the 20th Century would pit Locality against Interests. Locality has been losing heavily. There are no adequate theories of locality and the Wealth of Villagers.
There are no examples of viable self-sufficient Village States. The Napoleons of Notting Hill are ridiculed. The Good Life for all the community…real people in real places…never makes it through the Planning Jungle. Without viable alternatives Outside Interests will continue riding roughshod over Local People.
Countervailing power needs harnessing to stop the scientific juggernaut…the Political-Legal-Media (PLM) complex and its Big Banks, Big Industry and Big Government (BIG-BIG) backers. The interests of Homecomers are not those of the Onward and Upward brigade…to use the terms coined by E.F. Schumacher 40 years ago.
A coalition of Gentlemen Scientists and Royal Scientific Societies needs to reclaim The Idea of Science. The Dodgy Climate Dossiers provide the opportunity. The task of the Human Scale Movement is to represent the Inside Interests of real people in real places, to design models for Right Livelihood in the towns and in the countryside.
The movement must furnish Local Fronts with the tools and recipes to bypass the moneylenders and traders and invest in their own solutions to their own problems. Control of Science must pass out of the dead hands of Outside Interests and flow into the life-giving care of Locality.
Another Schumacher innovation…the Soil Association…shows one way forward. The Human Scale Movement…the champions of Locality over Outside Interests…must put our own Mark of Approval on scientific research to discriminate between Good Science and Bad Science just as the Soil Association Mark enables people to distinguish between Good Food and Bad Food.
But as the Organic Movement has discovered this is necessary but not sufficient. A loose-knit world-wide organisation that academics, scientists and activists can join is also needed.
Over the past 40 years the Organic Movement has developed recipes that a Real Science Movement can adopt. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) is a new form of organisation that is neither trade association nor special interests lobby group but a functional democratic confederation of individuals and small societies who share a mutual interest in Good Food, Good Soil and Good Farming. This is what the Real Science Movement needs.
Internally IFOAM provides space for inside interests to resolve their differences and grapple with their mutual problems. Externally IFOAM supplies the ambassadors and the diplomatic function that Good Food interests needs to negotiate effectively with Global Agribusiness. Just as food is too important to be left to the Agriculture Industry, science is too important to be left to the Science Business.
