Yesterday I made a guest apperance in the radioshow “Uillustrert vitenskap” at the local station “Radio revolt”. The theme of the show was “disputed” science, particularly focusing on climate science.  I’ve listened to it, shivered in horror at some of the things I said, but my inner masochist still sort of wants to show it off. The show can be read about here, and listened to here.

…or you can watch this muppets re-enactment of queens bohemian rhapsody in stead:

Yesterday Gard Hopsdal Hansen and I had another small article on print, this time in the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet. Again – it’s not published online, so I’ll paste it here.

I won’t be writing anything in the newspaper for quite some time now, promise!

In todays Dagens Næringsliv Gard H. Hansen, Jøran Solli and I encourage the establishment of a Norwegian  ministry of the climate, or a ministry of renewable energy and environmental technology. Unfortunately DN doesn’t publish these things online. Thus,  to boost our 2.0-presence slightly I’ll paste the article here. I might return with something on this in English at some point in the future, for now you can read the article in Norwegian below.

Last week I attended the 15th annual sustainable development research conference in Utrecht, Holland. The delegates at the conference seemed to be a nice blend of various types of social scientists, (ranging from hardcore economic modellers to very qualitatively oriented anthropologists), as well as a few technically minded researchers and some consultants and others in the miscellaneous category. All had in common that their work and/or research in some way or another was related to the concept of sustainable development, and the conference motto: “Taking up the Global Challenge: Analysing the implementation of innovations and governance for sustainable development“.

The conference had an impressive lineup when it came to plenary speakers. Most notably, I guess, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the IPCC addressed the audience via satellite from India. His main points where not very different from those he made when I saw him speak in Copenhagen a few months ago. In addition to giving a general overview on the current state of climate science (as the IPCC sees it) and what we as individuals and societies should change (hint: meat is murder…), he announced that the IPCC would have it’s 5th assessment report ready by 2014 (..so don’t hold your breath). He also spoke a bit in general about TERI, a research institute he is heavily involved in, and played a video (as he did in Copenhagen) on their “lighting a billion lives project” (good project, pretty cheesy video, though).

Other plenary speakers included Dutch minister of the environment, Jacqueline Cramer, who interestingly discussed the relationship between humans and nature. Her main point was that we needed to find the right balance between “People, planet and profit”. This balance we would find, she suspected, if we take a “third way”, crafting a society where we both regulate and harvest the powers of the markets. Not very controversial, but good talk.

Another interesting keynote was given by Tariq Banuri from the UN division for sustainable development. One of his points was that if we looked at the world today as one nation – “Earthland” – it would actually be the one nation in the world where different types of wealth is most unevenly distributed. Earthland, he claimed, would in fact be a less fair place than for example South-Africa under apartheid. He had the numbers to back this up, too..

One of the themes of the conference was “climate change and energy”, a theme with three track sessions, one of which I presented in (in the track “impacts of large scale implications of biomass for energy”). On the first day of the conference I followed a track entitled “strategies for mitigating climate change and emissions trading”. The temperature of the session was extremely high [1]. One of the presenters was Phillip Vergragt, a pretty experienced fellow, very much inspired by STS, it seemed. He gave a presentation on carbon capture and storage (CCS), arguing that it was basically a niche aimed at perpetuating the old carbon regime, and that it would probably lead to what he labeled “enhanced carbon lock-in”. In other words: not good. This approach seemed to take parts of the audience by surprise, and a number of them were extremely infuriated by his provocative “unscientific slander”. It was really an excellent presentation, though.

Another session I found very interesting was one dealing with “long term change towards sustainable societies: scenarios, forecasting and backcasting”. The session was dominated by quantitatively oriented economists in the business of making energy scenarios for the future. It was all very impressive, but they all had a common complaint; they did not know how to quantify things like policies, behavioral change and public perception of energy technologies in good ways. I guess that means there is still work for us  qualitative-heads, then..

In-between these sessions I managed to catch various snippets of other things. Talks on law, someone arguing for the precautionary principle, discussions on innovation.. most of it pretty interesting, although the quality was variable. On the third day my focus was directed towards my own session. The night before and the morning of my presentation I was extremely nervous, but I think I managed pretty ok. I got some useful feedback and some nice comments, so I’m fairly happy. The session was, however, perhaps not the most fitting for my presentation – although it was related to the use of biomass for energy. The other people in the session were all pretty quantitatively oriented, either doing life cycle analysis, or assessments of the “sustainability” of various types of bioenergy in different localities.

So is biomass for energy a sustainable approach you ask? The answer seems to be very dependent on the local context and the case in question, so there is no easy “yes” available to sell to the policy makers, and in quite a few cases the answer seems to be a definite “no”.

All in all I realy enjoyed the conference. Utrecht was a nice place, and there were many interesting sessions. I might return in more detail with something related to specific presentations later, but for now this will suffice.

[1] Literally, as well as academically. While the temperature in the room was close to 40 degrees Celsius, some of the debates were extremely heated.

A while back some colleagues from my institute returned from a workshop in Copenhagen. A number of STS-”hotshots” attended the event, including Sheila Jasanoff. Upon return, a couple of them (not the hotshots, but my collegues) noted how Anthony Giddens had been rather aggressively attacked (not literally of course, he was not there..) during the proceedings.

I haven’t read Giddens for some time, but when I realized his most recent work deals with climate change and energy policy, I felt sort of obligated.  Thus, I have started reading ”The politics of climate change” (2009). I have only finished a couple of chapters, though,  so I can’t really comment much on the book in general. The first pages, however,  have reminded me of how Giddens has dealt with “nature” in his past work, and how this stands in stark contrast to how nature is perceived and described in the STS-literature (most notably by Bruno Latour, I guess). Perhaps this is part of the reason why he (apparently) is so loathed by (at least some) STS-scholars?

In “Modernity and Self-Identity” (1991) for example, it is clear that Giddens believes an original, pure, virgin-like nature to have existed at some point in history. This “natural world” was of an entirely different character than the social (modern) world we inhabit today. As such there is a visible and explicit dichotomy between nature, the “natural world” and the “social world” in Giddens account. He writes:

Technological intervention into nature is the condition of the development of abstract systems (…) but of course affects many other aspects of Modern social life as well. The ’socialization of nature’ has helped stabilize a variety of previously irregular or unpredictable influences on human behaviour (p.135)

On another instance he goes further, and argues with Bill McKibben that nature, as it at some point existed in it’s pure form has been abolished:

Socialized nature provides a telling (…). MicKibben argues, with great plausibility that human intervention in the natural world has been so profound, and so encompassing, that today we can speak of the ‘end of nature’. Socialized nature is quite different from the old natural environment, which existed separately from human endeavours and formed a relatively unchanging backdrop to them (pp. 136-137)

This view of “real nature” as a thing of the past is also repeated in “The politics of climate change”, allthough it has not been a major focal point in what little I have read of it so far. On page 29 Giddens briefly touches the subject:

(…) the distiguished scientist Martin Rees speaks seriously of the possibility that we – the human race – might not survive the twenty-first century, because of the quantity of dangers built up through the diverse interventions into (what used to be[1]) nature

In other words Giddens’ view basically seems to be that at some point the “human” or the “social” co-existed with the “natural”, but that the two were separate worlds,  not interfering much with each other. The natural was an “unchanging backdrop”, merely a context over which the social could unfold. I guess this is quite typical of sociologists (shame on us!), giving privilege to the social over the material.

From an STS-point of view the Giddens-account of nature would be problematic, to say the least. At what point did we begin to “socialize” nature? Was it when we started making tools that we utilized to hunt or harvest? Perhaps it was when we tamed fire? Possibly when we started cooperating to bring down large animals? Did it happen with feudalism, or was it a result of western industrialization? This very idea of a starting point, of a “before” and an “after” distinguishing “true nature” from a socialized counterpart is indeed problematic.

Of course, one can argue that this is of theoretical importance only to a relatively small group of people, and that the practical implications in terms of “real life” policy-suggestions wouldn’t necessarily be too large. If avoiding (or limiting)climate changes is the goal, I guess finding the best practical solutions would be the overarching task, not pondering the theoretical and philosophical relationship between humans and non-humans(the obvious counterargument is that this understanding is essential to reach the policies which best serves all, both humans and non-humans – and I guess that is a valid argument in the climate debate).  As I said, I haven’t read much of Giddens book yet, so I don’t really know which suggestions he raises. None the less I think the following is a valid question: if he reaches more or less the same types of conclusions that “we” (STS) do and give more or less the same types of advice – does it really matter if he “over-sociologizes” to a certain degree, and over-simplifies on some points? Scientific quarrells are just part of the game, I guess, but I hope they aren’t counter-productive…

[1] My bold..

[2] He discusses some ideas on nature in this lecture (interesting and quite entertaining at times).