This confusion we cause ourselves

 September 10, 2022

This confusion we cause ourselves

This confused world... confused about the object of its own necessity. Confused about survival imperatives.

There is a confusion walking in the areas of future solar energy options. The cause is that every scientific discipline wants a piece of the pie of climate change mitigation. Nevertheless, they are balking at recognizing the real problem and they are chasing the money and the "cool" as their goal. The proximate situation is that each standard scientific discipline that wants to break into the mix is promising its own brand of utopia as an all-encompassing solution to climate change.

Foucault notes for us: "Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverse of analogy with the real space of society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal places."

The full schema of this solar energy confusion is a problem of decreasing margins.

There is, if you can imagine it, a pie chart of the total practicable methods of gathering solar energy. Number one, in terms of the most useful, practicable and scalable, is solar photovoltaic. Your standard solar panel, that is. Number two is some variation of solar thermal, which includes solar chemical applications: there are some use cases for this, but it is limited in comparison. Solar energy can almost entirely only be chemically accumulated as heat; solar chemical is essentially a subset of solar thermal, an inherent limit on its use cases. Number three is the practically negligible solar organic biological niche: organic solar cells, which are existing and makes sense at first, but degrade over time as you try to make them efficient and workable and last long enough. They are basically a toy.

To follow up Foucault in this alternate vein, Billy Bragg's song has these lines that come to mind, when these kinds of disciplinary rivalries infiltrate the narrative people perceive about the market. From "Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted":

"Be nice if we could have a cake and eat it
Though that's impossible to do, but
Too many have been invested in this outcome
They simply can't afford to for it not to come true."

The recurrence, the "there it is, again" is that speech by China Mieville from 2014 previously mentioned, here. Climate change causes an existential panic. And for that we need some measure of inspiration. But the commonplace from that speech is:

"But to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can't afford."

Every scientific discipline is proposing to solve climate change for us now. But the clamor of their utopias is betraying the fact that the deployment of the solution is not in their hands - advice, proposal, but not the disposition of the forces marshalled to the solution. The power to decide what we need lies elsewhere. The notion of scientific hegemony is the inconvenient belief of familiarity postponing the necessary attitude we need to take these utopic designs being proposed under the rubric of scientific leadership, an evaporated notion stemming from the aberration of the mid-19th century.

This artificial photosynthesis kick that organic solar is leading up to, is the new canard of our scientific moment. The new hubris without end…

Artificial photosynthesis is the structure behind the brutal mistake of burning hydrogen, for example. Fuel cells from the green electrolysis of hydrogen are a fine idea but fuel cells do not involve combusting hydrogen, and the power in-to-power out ratio is below the level of feasibility. But it's the endless drive toward this foolish ideal unreachable by technical work, namely artificial photosynthesis, that's creating this systemic excess of hydrogen that's feeding back into this antiquated system. On the radio today: an ad from Enbridge, the evil qua evil of mid-Michigan environmental history, about them burning hydrogen and even tonally foolish glory.

Billy Bragg's lyric again coming to mind:

"All opinions are equal in the free market of ideas,
Truth is nothing more than opinion,
That garners the most likes, provokes the loudest cheers."

Perhaps Mr. Mieville's words mean, at this moment, that all this desire for utopia is what creates the feeling of dystopia. Utopianism, after all, is opposed to the idea of progress: it is a stasis, presumed to be perfect. Perhaps that is now, or soon to be, what deserves to be mocked.

Anyway - the commonsense assumption that burning hydrogen en masse produces the exact problem we are trying to fix, somehow hasn't sunk in to the skulls of people. In this case, nitrogen oxides, the acid rain pollution, and stuff we haven't studied. It's alternative energy, but it's not green energy. It's no solution.

"Not everything that counts can be counted
Who holds the markets to account?
Not everything that counts can be counted,
Not everything that can be counted counts."