The Real Marin Taliban: Stewart Brand's Nuclear Revival

Stewart Brand, a fellow Marin-ite who is internationally famous for leading the nuclear industry revival in the United States over the past decade, and helping President Obama embrace Dr. Strangelove, embodies the odd combination of cool hippy and self-hating liberal that defines Marin's post-hippy, über-yuppy chic. After the Fukushima disaster Brand was asked by interviewer Arnie Cooper if his pro-nuclear remarks still stand from his interview with The Sun, and Mr. Brand insisted he was unmoved by the meltdowns of Tokyo Power's plants. So was the Obama administration, coincidentally, which recently announced its continued support for nuclear power  at the United Nations after the Fukushima disaster. Even though many Americans oppose plants here, this apparent refusal to learn from Fukushima has caused a nuclear rush by China, India and Russia, portending 125 new nuclear plants there and causing a global uranium mining boom.

So the stakes of Brand's nuclear vanguard are high, and real. As the Marin Energy Authority is now the first big effort of a California county to go solar under California's Community Choice Law, AB117 (San Francisco and Sonoma not far behind), and Brand has likely been offered (as I am) 100% renewable energy from that new service, I am compelled to examine Brand's repeated statements in his Sun interview that renewable energy is unfeasible, and that only nuclear power can save the world from climate change:

"Solar doesn't add a whole lot of power to the grid, but it's valuable in individual situations. We have a solar electric fence." (p.11, the Sun, 9/13/11)

Indeed, Brand's attitude emerges from monotonal platitudes to a kind of noir chic. In one moment he complains that solar farms take up too much desert; in the next he proclaims that nuclear power is....perfectly safe. The outraged silence surrounding his expressions appear as poetry, as the gesture of a liberated mind. As with much New Age thought, Brand's has a mesmeric quality, and with great success. Stewart Brand has done more than perhaps any other American to raise nuclear power to respectability, much as he has brought similar legitimacy to the companies seeking to sell Genetically Modified foods (GMOs) in the U.S. (Europe bans them), while opposing even labeling. In many ways his posture is the classic self-hating liberal,  poo-pooing his former allies the environmentalists - you can't handle the truth, etc.. Crowded with eco-intelligentsia, it is shocking that Marin accepts America's nuclear revival preacher still today as a cool sort of New Ager rather than an apostate Taliban - and that there is so little controversy here about his decisive role in selling nuclear revival to the world. Did he refuse Marin Energy Authority service? Is he still a PG&E customer? Will he similarly ignore San Francisco's efforts to localize power supply and secede from PG&E's power plants, all while giving world tours on the impossibility of green power? Of energy localization, energy independence? Did he bother to vote against Prop 16 last year - the PG&E ballot initiative that would have blocked California's energy localization movement?

The political naiivety of Brand's nuclear revival is particularly shocking unless you consider its casualness - with a New Age lightness, even cavalier, about the causes of global economic and ecological meltdown. "So I don't buy the idea of profit being evil," he told interviewer Arnie Cooper of The Sun. "The same goes for large corporations. Size isn't everything. There are lots of mean, harmful, little companies that are not public and have no real accountability to anyone. They're dumping poisons in the ground, and nobody tries to stop them because they're just little companies."

Trained in his futurist art by the author of The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich), the "co-evolutionist" blames human over-population, not industrial and political collusion, as causing the ecological problems of our time. Never mind Occupy Wall Street - deforestation in the Amazon, he says, is caused by small subsistence farmers, not the longstanding imperial prerogative of global corporations to exploit the regions for cheap food, rubber, oil or jungle DNA. Like Alice in Wonderland, Brand ate from the mushroom and cannot ascertain scale or size - it is all the same, depending on the moment.

Brand's grand solution is ultimately very similar to Obama's - put sulfure dioxide into the atmosphere to offset warming, a global nuclearization, and GMOs. His implicit directive is, how must society adapt to allow continued hyper-growth. Rather than question the technologies and more importantly the hyper-growth, corporate-controlled and globalist energy policies of America during the decades of Brand's tenure in American intellectual life, the very policies that have caused the mass extinction, climate collapse, ocean death, human displacement, social and cultural collapse of the past half century, Brand says implicitly there is nothing to be done (the patient is addicted, administering opium) - but turn it to ten BABY! 

On the other hand Brand's idea of public opinion is naively oblivious to the role of corporations in preventing energy independence and green power, localization. "Unfortunately climate change has become a partisan issue," he says to explain American doubt about climate change. "If liberals and environmentalists think something is critically important, conservatives automatically dismiss it. They're blinded by the mistaken idea that climatologists have some sort of hidden liberal agenda." In other words Brand regards the economic policy choices of governments in the context of Climate Collapse to be defined by psychological misrepresentations rather than propaganda by corporations larger than most governments in revenue and political power - rather like my own experience - aka California's Community Choice movement - being attacked with $68 M by Pacific Gas & Electric through Proposition 16 last year. The largest industrial sector, energy corporations are the embodiment of corporatism following decades of globalization, deregulation, off-shoring, financialization, and oil diplomacy (war). So this is no small oversight.

In the program Brand advocates, the "comprehensive designer" - intellectuals who transcend specialized knowledge and taking a systemic approach to making technological breakthroughs into "tools for human happiness,"  Brand's platitudinousness resurfaces, a latter day, post-industrial Jeremy Bentham, embracing whatever technology develops, viewing it as a tool, like the global nuclear industry revival he champions and has successfully finessed here and in the developing world. The nuclear happiness machine even extends to Iran's nuclear program in the interview, so divorced from military realities associated with uranium enrichment.

Like Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the thought of so many market fundamentalists of the last twenty years, Stewart Brand's thought is product and producer of his era and assigns permanence to the hypergrowth of recent decades - it is part and parcel of his political naivety.  "People who live in the developing world are moving towards more grid power and electricity, thus putting more carbon into the atmosphere." This is the hyper-growth capitalism version of "shit happens." Brand glides effortlessly from bland platitude to yawning directive; "that's why nuclear power, which doesn't create much carbon pollution, looks good to me. Climate change is a planetary problem, and the responses need to be planetary."  Rather than question globalization as the official policy of the United States government for decades, Brand snores through his economic fundamentalism; ultimately he finishes his tune with the little ditty that a planetary problem needs a planetary - that is to say, "big" - solution. And nuclear plants are big. Solar panels and building retrofits are small, so cannot address big problems. 

In light conflations, Brand falls waking forward into a sleep of the Zeitgeist - of historical political and philosophical history, humanity's consciousness of itself, in this case a sleep of Death - ultimately the worship of Death. Brand appears to regard Mexico City-size giga-cities and depopulation of the countryside to be an ecological restoration policy. Displacement is thus reinterpreted as green - here Brand shows the kinds of syllogism that makes some people fear ecologists as anti-human - 'eco-nazi'. The ghetto-ization of America is interpreted as "adaptive" behavior, rather than a failure of civilization, and an evil to be feared and avoided. Brand is ultimately a dystopian thinker, highlighting a future darkness so as to elicit fear and thus lower expectations, making pliable and compliant those who once boasted to be an enlightened democracy - the United States of America. All boats drop with Brand's tide, embracing catastrophe on a great death-centric view which he has christened The Long Now - a longer term thinking beyond the horizon of written human history.  

Mr. Brand's Buddhist rhetoric appeals to Catholic pessimism, an obsession with human sinfulness, failure, and the need for cruelty and ultimately war and holocaust. This mind would accept any lowering of the cultural or aesthetic bar, would smile upon dictators and toast war generals. He has no feeling, is disembodied; beneath the LSD countenance is a cold, hard steel. The new hippy vision is thus ultimately a strain of eco-dandy-ism, as I have pointed out in longer pieces on Brand and the other leading nuclear revivalists - "Philosopher Pawns"(2011) as well as "Climate Panic" (2004).

The Jim Jones-ist wacko-plex of my childhood, from Sausalito to Berkeley, or Oakland, where I was born, and have worked in politics during the past 20 years, has included spending some time with Brand's contemporaries and green capitalist ilk, including Paul Hawken. I would once have counted these people as allies, but environmentalism must mature into more coherent ideas that redefine "green" friends as opponents who would embrace nuclear, or war, or GMOs, in the name of green. As with other ciphers of other crusades, Brand's syllogisms include valuable victims, including the re-introduction of wild nature into urban areas, and more effort to conserve water, but he conflates these simple accouterments of public utilities with provocatively mad extremisms, appealing to the intellectual anti-political types (why he is successful?) but ultimately daft.

The lightness of Brand's being is, indeed, unbearable. There is no they there, in this futurist vision - it has a stoned Turkish quality, to recycle a discarded expression. A "let them eat cake" hurled at the collapse of modernity, a shrug to nuclear catastrophes, and ipods for refugees. He obviously does not care very much for anything in particular at the great Archimedian distance from which he speaks, and as with many other Bay Aryan sorts, regards this emotional detachment as an intellectual virtue - the maniacal transcendence of the New Ager, EST variety - the karmic absence of desire or connectedness to the living world - and lording this attitude over those of us who are afraid and want actual solutions to the fundamental problems now facing us all.  

Nuclear Revivalism - Sleepwalking into Oblivion

This sent in from Charles Schultz - "In the golden age of science, at the time when society had its most optimistic view of science, it basically had a wrong headed view of science. It had the view that this form of the technology was the inevitable form it had to take; and if that was the form it took, it must be the right form.  Forty years later we have a similarly naive view, it is no longed tinged by hope and optimism it's tinged by pessism and fear, but we still have this view that society can't shape technology: that the form technology takes is the form we must accept.  Just as it wasn't true in 1950, it's not true today.  This is not a story of technology run amok, though that is how many people would understand it to be.  The history of nuclear power is a history of political and economic and social decisions being made about a technology.  And the key decisions weren't made by the technologists; they were done in the business realm. What science and technologies give you are a range of possibilities. And those possibilities can take you in any number of directions. It is potentially a liberating force, but to get there, society has to stop sleep walking, and start realizing that it's not a scientific choice, it's not an economic choice, it's a moral choice." - Joseph Morone, historian

Japan's Radiation Nightmare - Fallout for the Nuclear Industry Revival

The Nuclear Industry revival began in the late 1990's, when I wrote an article republished in The Workbook, poking fun at the absurd, even hysterical marketing efforts of the the nuclear industry as it began to exploit climate change as a new opportunity to promote nuclear power, then presumed by nearly all Americans to be politically DOA, as a new kind of "green" power. At the time I did not appreciate the power of money to engineer American opinion. I thought of nuclear revivalists as a kind of latter-day Orwellians who should be laughed off of the international stage.

Since then I have learned my lesson. Hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade later, the Nuclear Energy Institute's efforts to persuade the American voter and politician that nuclear power is the climate change panacea have proven shockingly successful, with public opinion polls on nuclear power turned on their heads in no time, and every Tom Dick and Harry proudly proclaiming unqualified confidence in the safety of nuclear power. The contrarian streak of Americans makes them susceptible to a crude manipulation. Nuclear industry strategists were  immeasurably augmented by the "thought leadership" of self-hating ecologists like New Ager Stewart Brand and climate scientist James Lovelock, whose desperation in the face of pathetic government inaction on climate change converted them to an eco-revisionism defining nuclear power as the "only solution" to a mounting global atmospheric crisis.

It is so effortless, when one is ensconced in a losing fight aginst one evil, to embrace another by persuading onself it is a lesser evil. It is indeed a classic case of the failure of wisdom under duress - the beginning of a deadly folly - the sentimental origin of panic, which I wrote about in my 2006 Lovelock refutation, "Climate Panic."  In this piece, I made, in full recognition of the seriousness of global climate policy collapse, the case against Lovelock's embrace of nuclear power - particularly his failure of perspective, "rushing into the arms of Dr. Strangelove." Throughout the industrialized world, the failure of governments to cope with the economic zero-sum game of Climate Change has led many to water down the policy discussion as if to trivialize it away, such as President Obama's latest "State of the Nation" speech in which he promised us all a "Clean Energy" future...which he then defined as including renewables, gas, coal...and nuclear power. Anything not included in the new definition of "clean?" Today the Obama administration reacted to worldwide reaction to the Japan disaster by re-proclaiming the President's commitment to nuclear power  -even in spite of the meltdowns underway and the death and suffering that will inevitably follow. When did the people decide it was worth dying - even threaten human health worldwide - just to have electricity? The President reaffirms his commitment to nuclear power. Eh? An amnesiac fanaticism yawns its platitudes - meaningless phrases that protect nothing but the profits of a few energy companies. In times like this it would appear that Orwell has won.

With radioactive fallout now being released into the atmosphere in Japan, Tokyo taping its windows against dangerous ambient radiation levels - now meandering across the Pacific Ocean toward my home in Marin County, California not far from Stewart Brand's own home -  I wonder what is come of Mr. Brand's confident announcements regarding the safety of nuclear reactors?  It is so easy to deny the dangers of radiation until you are breathing and drinking it yourself. One would think that the founder of the Long Now Foundation would remember Chernobyl only 25 years ago. Would Mr. Lovelock reassure me that the radiation is harmless to drink? Were there no other way to stop Climate Change, perhaps an argument might be made for humans to be sacrificed to Gaia.  But there is another way, technically and economically feasible, that neither Lovelock nor Brand ever considered, as I seek to prove in my recent book, This is Not a Theory.  Our sacrifice is being made not to Gaia but to the profits of obsolete power and fuel corporations.

"What the hell is going on?" Japanese Prime Minister Kan asked a Tokyo Electric Power Company official by telephone today. We might ask in response, "What the hell is Japan or California doing leaving nuclear plants in the hands of private corporations?" The government's impotence in this crisis is chilling, underscoring the irrationality of corporatism. While my family and friends dread the impacts that the Tokyo Electric Power Company disaster will have for scores of Japanese and ourselves, there is perhaps one consolation. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the electricity company for Northern California, is yet another of the cadre of leading nuclear industry revivalists that have pumped millions of dollars into the Orwellian promotion of nuclear power as a new kind of green power. While spending equal sums to suppress real green power aka the "Community Choice" movement here in Northern California ($50M on Prop 16 last year), PG&E's deep pockets have exploited America's pay-to-play media culture to redefine the very meaning of green to include nuclear power, positioned the nuclear / fossil corporation as "the greenest utility in America," and brainwashed American politicians like the President to repeat the mantra that nuclear power is "clean". While thousands, or millions of Americans and Japanese suffer from the radioactive fallout that is now billowing into the air, perhaps the power of PG&E's cash to mesmerize the Sleeping American will be diminished, and some consciousness created. Perhaps this disaster could make real change possible in an industry that is causing both climate change and nuclear proliferation all over the world today.

It is worse than bittersweet - call it poisonsweet. Only when people realize that there are no cheating answers to the fundamental challenges of our time, will they perhaps finally turn away from the crafted idols of dissemblers and give consideration to the real solutions - like Community Choice Aggregation and energy localization - however unprofitable it may be for the PG&E's of the world.