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

Tue Jul 24 13:49:04 CEST 2012

There goesw my full support for that point of view, blends in nicely with mine on an awful lot of topics.

Antonio.

> Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 03:31:13 +0200
> From: maxime.rouquet at partipirate.org
> To: pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> Subject: Re: [pp.int.general] Global heating: 2 degrees of heating is 16 years away
> 
> 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)...
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