Green Options » James Lovelock

Save Amazon With Nuke Waste, Says Environmentalist

Susan Kraemer — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:45:40 +0000

In desperate times, people look at desperate measures.

James Lovelock - - who is one of the leading environmentalists on the planet has made a startling proposal: that the best way to save the Amazon from being destroyed is to turn it into a repository for nuclear waste.

He argues in “The Revenge of Gaia” that animals and plants don’t perceive radioactivity as a danger. What is far more threatening to ecosystems are people — who create extensive farming or mining and construction sites. So to keep humans out of valuable ecosystems, we could dump our nuclear waste there.

That will keep people out.

Oddly, both plants and animals have increased around the areas of Belarus that were heavily radiated after the accident at Chernobyl, although radiation reduces their lifespan.

The lack of human intervention may make nuclear wildlife refuges more beneficial overall:

Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

Richard Elen — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:11:00 +0000

According to an interview with James Lovelock, published in the UK journal New Scientist recently, the outlook for humanity is bleak, with at least 90% of the world’s population dying before the end of the century as a direct result of climate change. This suggests that even if Obama acts at once with the level of measures suggested by Jim Hansen, it will be nowhere near enough to save us.

>> Search Green Options for more on James Lovelock

In the interview, Lovelock, originator of the “Gaia Hypothesis”, which suggests that the Earth can be treated as a self-regulating system like a living organism, and whose work on chlorofluorocarbons led to the ban on CFCs, insists that there is no time to reduce carbon emissions through an international agreement as was the case with the CFC ban. “Most of the ‘green’ stuff is verging on a gigantic scam,” he believes. “Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning,” he says. He also regards CO2 sequestering as “crazy” and “dangerous”.

Having caused consternation in some circles for advocating nuclear power as a more practical low-carbon generation process than renewables as far as Britain was concerned, he now says that while nuclear “is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems… it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.”

The only way, Lovelock claims, that the human race can be saved is by the large-scale burying of charcoal made from agricultural vegetable waste. This usually rots down and releases most of the CO2 fixed by the plants when they are growing, but if it were burned with low oxygen levels it would produce charcoal which could be ploughed back into the ground and would not be able to be broken down in the same way. The process would produce a biofuel which farmers could sell, and as a result a subsidy would not be necessary. “This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference,” Lovelock says, “but I bet they won’t do it.”

Lovelock is deeply pessimistic about the future of the human race. He believes there are already too many people on Earth to survive two degrees of warming, while with four degrees of warming, the planet would not be able to sustain more than a tenth of its current human population, because it would be impossible to grow enough food. “The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less,” he says. “I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.”

You can read the entire interview with James Lovelock by Gaia Vince in New Scientist, January 23 issue.

Photo of James Lovelock from Wikimedia by Bruno Comby.

Human Industry and Human Responsibility in the Life of Gaia

Justin Van Kleeck — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:00:12 +0000

James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, that the Earth is a single living organism, has been invoked countless times by environmentalists. In their uses (and abuses) of it, the theory becomes evidence for humanity’s connection with nature and so our responsibility to treat nature with care.

In fact, Lovelock is anything but an “environmentalist” in the traditional sense. Nor is he a staunch advocate for rigorous conservation and “dehumanization” of the planet, at least in his first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). He quite often criticizes as fatuous and downright silly many environmentalists’ claims, using evidence gathered from his work in the sciences.

One passage in Gaia struck me as extremely provocative despite being written nearly thirty years ago. Discussing the atmospheric gases, specifically those produced by human industry, Lovelock writes,

In our persistent self-imposed alienation from nature, we tend to think that our industrial products are not ‘natural’. In fact, they are just as natural as all the other chemicals of the Earth, for they have been made by us, who surely are living creatures. They may of course be aggressive and dangerous, like nerve gases, but no more so than the toxin manufactured by the botulinus bacillus.1

Time’s Up! Climate Change Wins

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:43:08 +0000

Renowned climate scientist James Lovelock says humanity has now passed the point of no return when it comes to climate change. There’s nothing we can do to stop the climate train, he believes, so we should start getting ready to adapt to life on a hotter, more forbidding planet.