[pp.int.general] Global heating: 2 degrees of heating is 16 years away

[Maxime Rouquet]

On 07/24/2012 12:49 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Agreed. Next question: what we can do from a pirate POV without being a
>     Green spin-off?
> 
> If other parties are concerned about an issue, does that make it
> desirable for the Pirate Parties to be silent on that issue?  It does
> not follow.

In France, the Green party is appreciated by some because it takes the
right position on most subjects. But it is criticized for two reasons :
being a bad pedagogue, and eventually oversimplifying most problems.

We should first focus on identifying and explain the causes and
consequences of human activity on Earth.

If there is no or not enough independent data on the subject, we should
defend that means are given to scientists without conflict of interest
to make studies.

If there is no or not enough international cooperation on the subject,
we should defend that no restrictive copyright is put on scientific data
(at least from public-funded research), and that no patent or anything
of that kind is used to prevent or limit such research.

If there is evidence that there is an ecological problem (hint : there
is), we should make sure the impact on short and long term will be
taught to the public (on Wikipedia, in schools, etc.), depending on how
the humanity behaves. Everybody should know what we are going to deal
with from a wide and complete perspective.

This is the first part of being a good pedagogue : explaining causes of
consequences of our current and potential behaviour on Earth.

Then we have to identify rightly the problems we have to fix, and the
way we propose to fix them.

Global warming can be a problem, coming from a very large variety of
causes, to which most of the time pirates could find very good solutions.

I was once in a debate with Greens supporters who challenged me on the
fact that technology can have dramatic impact on ecology, in particular
global warming. They took the example of Google or Facebook servers that
have a huge consummation of energy : pirate are "pro" technology, so
they advocate such bad behaviour, right... ?

... wrong ! We pirates like decentralization, so we do not support
massive concentration of servers that generate global warming. More : we
defend privacy, so we do not advocate blindly cloud computing and
everything that makes citizens give their private data to big companies
and put it under legislation of foreign more-or-less democratic states.

I explained we would mostly promote things like the FreedomBox project
where everybody would install a basic micro-server at his home where he
could stock the data he might like to share on Internet, while keeping
total control over it. Such box could be built without cutting up
mountains to get silicon or make 12 year old children work 70 hours a
week in factories, just by recycling existing electronic components.

It would not need particular amount of energy, in fact most of our
modems already waste more energy than would be needed, and at the level
of a house the warming effect would be negligible (if not simply
compensated by a decrease in the house heating system use).

I then wanted to go deeper and present the PP-FR vision on "nuclear
energy". This is a hot topic in France as a large majority of our
electricity comes from nuclear energy. Most people advocate it because
it makes us "independent" from other countries, but "putting an end to
nuclear power" is almost Greens' slogan since 50 years. But they forget
to teach people why, and they fail because of that.

In last elections I wrote on my program that I promoted "energy
independence", by using energy that does not depend on any foreign
producer (and nuclear energy comes from Uranium which we mostly buy from
Nigeria...). I spoke about renewable energy, and in particular of
geothermal energy.

Isn't the idea of producing energy from heat particularly interesting ?
Well, there are many places where we could develop geothermal energy,
but curiously no big energy company is promoting it. Why ? Because they
all sell a consumable product (petrol, gas, coal, etc.), not simply the
power plant. Buying a power plant to them is ensuring them we will also
buy their energy for the next fifty years or so... Therefore, we think
we should develop such energy sources, even if big energy company do not
promote them.

We also want to decentralise the energy production. Citizens and local
communities should be encouraged to exploit geothermal or wind turbine
energy at their scale, rather than depending on big power plants. (By
the way, we could get rid of most of the big power lines too...)

In this direction, you would quickly face (at least in France) monopoly
problems. You can indeed produce electricity but... you have to sell it
to Électricité de France before buying it back ! This is how EDF keeps
its monopoly on electricity distribution. If you want to buy gaz, you
legally cannot buy a cylnder from Germany or another country where it
would be less expensive, it is forbidden by law. There are a lot of
things made in the law to protect what have become giant monopolistic
private companies that do not help that much ecology (apart from in
their cute good looking advertisements of course...)

Such a decentralized renewable energy production can be told in a few
words that are plainly compatible with the pirate spirit.

Decentralization, privacy, fight against monopolies, copyright
softening, patent abolishment... these fundamentally pirate topics can
lead to positions that are the same than the Green movement (or should
be), but with a very different approach.

I think taking a global approach of ecological problems is not a good
way of doing. We must not fight global warming because "it is in our
program" or "we are against it". Greens did not really succeed in
fighting nuclear energy because of such a negative approach.

Instead, we should promote better knowledge of the citizens of
environment considerations, and promote good behaviour, all by
explaining them with our core ideas. As long as ecology is a consequence
of our ideas, nobody can discard us as a Greens spin-off.

My 2 cents,

Maxime

PS : There are a lot of examples of good policy we could promote that
would have positive environmental effects. Think about the deployment of
optical fibre that we could promote in order to strengthen the access to
information and the ease of communication : it is made of glass, coming
from sand (low cost + no negative impact on environment) instead of
copper (increasing cost + huge thermal dissipation)...