Author: Milan

Meltdown

I watched the four-part Netflix series on the Three Mile Island disaster and found it to be well crafted and emotionally poignant, though only OK as an educational resource on the partial meltdown.

My technical complaint is that they explain almost nothing about why the accident happened and exactly what took place while it was going on. There is a lot of interesting material on how complex systems have interactions which cannot be foreseen, as well as user interface issues in the control room, which would have helped viewers better understand.

In terms of storytelling, my objection is with how the filmmakers basically set up two kinds of interview subjects: forthright and emotional local residents who suffered, and a few wicked representatives of the industry. They quote dismissive claims about culpability and the accident’s severity from the insiders, while uncritically quoting residents on how an unchecked disaster would have destroyed Pensyllvania or the East Coast. To me this all felt like too much handholding about who to believe, coupled with insufficient reference to credible outside accounts.

I wouldn’t especially recommend the series to either people who know a lot about nuclear energy or those who know fairly little. The former are likely to be annoyed at how anecdote-driven the whole thing is, while the latter may be given a false sense of confidence about the correctness of the view expressed. Unlike the remarkable 2019 series on the Chernobyl accident, this is one that can be safely missed.

For better explanations on TMI, I would suggest Nickolas Means’s talk (which also contains some fascinating discussion about what human error means in the context of major industrial accidents and how to investigate them after the fact) or this Inviting Disaster episode from The History Channel.

De Mesquita and Smith on is/ought

But remember, what constitutes doing the right thing must be understood from the perspective of a potential supporter: it may have nothing to do with what is best for a community or nation. Anyone who thinks leaders do what they ought to do—that is, do what is best for their nation or subjects—ought to become an academic rather than enter political life. In politics, coming to power is never about doing the right thing. It is always about doing what is expedient.

De Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Alastair Smith. The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. PublicAffairs, 2012. p. 37 (italics in original)

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Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Cafe

Sounds like a pleasant and useful place:

Customers must write their name, writing goals and the time they plan to finish. They can also ask Kawai to nag them about their progress. Those who ask for the “mild” option will simply be asked how they got on when they pay at the end of the session; others in need of a heavier dose of discipline can expect him to occasionally stand behind them, although he insists he makes no value judgments on the contents of their laptop screen.

The mild-mannered 52-year-old, who is a technical writer when he is not cajoling his customers to buckle down, dismissed concerns among some social media users that his tactics were heavy-handed.

“Instead of monitoring them, I’m here to support them,” he said. “As a result, what they thought would take a day was actually completed in three hours, or tasks that usually take three hours were done in one.”

350 Canada and grassroots organizing

Sources writing about the fossil fuel divestment movement sometimes seem to think that 350.org and “Fossil Free” are distinct organizations, despite the footer at https://gofossilfree.org/ reading “Fossil Free is a project of 350.org”.

In part, this may be because of how easy it can be with 350.org to confuse branding with organizations. The clearest example which I know of is “350 Canada”. It’s an organization in the sense that you can sign up for a newsletter and track their social media channels and other publications, but not in the sense that you can attend a meeting, see the internals of how their strategic planning happens, or take part in that planning yourself. When they hold calls that people from their mailing lists can attend, it is for them to be told what to do using a pre-determined plan and messaging. Their work is grassroots in implementation, and in terms of the aesthetic that motivates 350’s staffers in Canada, but not in the sense of actually giving influence or input to movement members at the ground level. To me, this seems at odds with the long-standing slogan: “350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis”.

That’s by no means entirely a bad thing, since developing a coherent and well-developed political strategy isn’t something amateurs are great at (witness the failure to cohere around a genuinely popular and effective agenda in the Occupy movement). I also don’t think hypocrisy is necessarily a productive thing to focus on. At the same time, an organization controlled by a small group of staff members who share many of the same assumptions and preconceptions about what kind of change is desirable and how to achieve it risks ending up talking only to itself and core supporters, without much influencing the mass public or mainstream political dialog. Being in a vanguard can usefully let you get ahead of the public on an issue they haven’t properly come to terms with, but it can also isolate you from the public in a way that is hard to perceive from the inside and which inhibits the organization’s prospects for achieving real-world change.

Guterres on additional fossil fuel production and stranded assets

United Nations secretary general’s remarks on the ongoing release of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report are remarkable for their directness and candour:

“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres during the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) news conference on Monday. “But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”

“Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at the report’s release Monday. “Such investments will soon be stranded assets, a blot on the landscape, and a blight on investment portfolios.”

Canada’s government, despite taking more action on the issue than its predecessors, remains firmly on the side of the production-increasing radicals. In part that is from how emission statistics treat the GHGs from fuels we export as someone else’s responsibility, along with the GHGs embodied in what we import. Avoiding climatic catastrophe requires an end to such numerical evasions and a firm commitment to fossil fuel abolition, with production falling by a significant percentage every year until the world no longer runs on coal, oil, and gas.

You can blame the government for their inadequacy, but at some level that becomes like blaming corporations for emissions rather than the consumers of their products. By continuing to select governments that misrepresent what the consequences of their climate change plans will be while dodging the question of ending production, Canadians are ensuring that they will be lied to. When both the Liberals and Conservatives promise that climatic stability and a growing fossil fuel sector can be compatible, they perpetuate the cycle where we sacrifice the welfare of all future generations and non-human nature for the sake of our short-term comfort and the temporary perpetuation of unsustainable ways of life.

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