Thoughts for August 28, 2022
Good afternoon. Topics are the Hundred Years’ War, environmental impacts of electricity, and geothermal energy.
Hundred Years’ War
I am continuing with Philip Daileader’s series, now on the Late Middle Ages. I found his treatment of the Hundred Years’ War to be particularly interesting.
The Hundred Years’ War was not a single war so much as a long period (1337-1453, 116 years) of nearly continuous conflict between England and France. They had been at war many times before 1337 and have been many times since 1453. The wars broke out when Edward III claimed (with some validity) to be the rightful heir to the French throne after the French Capetian dynasty died out. But an assembly of French barons didn’t like the idea of being ruled by an English king and instead determined that Philip, Count of Valois was the rightful heir.
The war initially went very badly for the French, with the English capturing key coastal territory and launching successful hit-and-run raids that devastated France. The French tried to counterattack by forcing battles at Crécy in 1346, Poitiers in 1356, and Agincourt in 1415, all of which were major English victories. The tide turned with the emergence of Joan of Arc, who led the successful Siege of Orléans, which began the turnaround that led to ultimate French victory.
Daileader argues that the Hundred Years’ War led to important and permanent transformation of both the English and French states. First, due to fighting in Scotland and Wales, the English had been the first of the two to deploy longbows. A longbow combined the rapidity of fire of a shortbow and the power of a crossbow, and a longbowman could fight with less training and expensive equipment than a knight. This advantage played a major role in the early wave of English victories. Longbows also eroded the military importance of knights and thus contributed to the end of the feudal system (which, by the 14th century, was already in major decline) and development of standing armies, something that had mostly not been seen in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire.
A second major transformation was in the power of the state. Prior to 1337, English and French kings financed the government primarily through their own private wealth, and they had limited taxation authority they they could exercise only in emergencies. To illustrate what a contrast this is to the modern state of affairs, imagine if under the Trump administration, the U. S. Federal Government had been funded primarily through profits from the Trump Organization, and that there were no federal taxes. This system was inadequate for the needs of the states during the war, and taxation became a permanent feature, along with standing armies for which the taxes paid.
Listening to Daileader’s comments, I couldn’t help but be reminded of President Eisenhower’s farewell address, where he famously warned of the “military-industrial complex”. Eisenhower argued that the chronic state of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union necessitated a major investment in military readiness and research, transforming society permanently.
At the time of Eisenhower’s address, U.S. Cold War-era defense spending was near its sustained peak (outside of the Korean War) of around 8% and would decline in subsequent decades. Figures are less reliable for the Soviet Union, but military spending might have been around 20% of GDP in the 1950s and 1960s. I haven’t found comparable figures for England and France during the Hundred Years’ War; I would suspect it would be much less because neither sophisticated public finance nor the surplus of an industrial state existed yet, but the strain was enough to cause England financial ruin. (The paper cited here explores finance and war from the Battle of Marathon through World War II, and it is most interesting and informative.)
Warfare can be a distasteful subject, but the modern world owes as much to the wars that have been fought in past centuries as it does to the scientific and technological advancements.
Environmental Impacts of Electricity
There was a report earlier year reviewing the impacts of various modes of electricity. The results won’t be shocking to anyone who has been following the issue, but there are interesting points nonetheless.
For ionizing radiation, it is coal-fired power, not nuclear, that has the greatest impact. Or possibly geothermal; there the range is quite wide.
Nuclear advocates such as myself like to highlight this fact, but one also observes that the radiation impact of nuclear, coal, and geothermal are also far greater than the impact of other technologies. The units are “man-seiverts per gigawatt-year”, which requires some unpacking. According to this, an exposure to 1 sievert poses a 5% excess risk of death from cancer. A large nuclear plant might produce 5 GW, so if I understand this properly, that would be about 0.11 excess deaths per year. World electricity production is just under 3 TW, so in theory, if that all came from nuclear power, I guess that would be 145 deaths per year. This is all based on the controversial linear no-threshold model.
As far as overall health impacts go,
Ionizing radiation, which I just emphasized, is hard to see on this plot. I am surprised to see climate change have such a prominent role; I had thought that particulates were the greater health impact from coal-fired power. If all the world’s power came from coal, we’d be talking about millions of excess deaths here, not hundreds.
There’s tons of data in this report, but I’ll just share one more. This is the overall normalized impact.
I don’t know how this normalization was done, and how they compare, say, land use with climate change with eutrophication, etc., but it’s done. People get into endless arguments about whether solar power, wind power, nuclear power, etc. is the better low-carbon option. Here nuclear looks slightly better than most alternatives. On some other metrics, it is slightly worse. But what’s far and away more important is the difference between coal—with or without carbon capture and sequestration—and all other mainstream options. Actually, coal with CCS turns out worse than coal without. I presume that’s because CCS carries a major efficiency penalty—perhaps around 11-23 percentage points—and thus more coal has to be burned in a plant with CCS to produce the same electricity for the outside world than in a plant without. Thus the non-climate impacts of this extra coal burning more than makes up for the reduction in CO2 emissions. Environmental policy should focus on replacing coal-fired power with other options, and not expend much energy on what those other options would be.
All energy sources have negative impacts, and this will remain true no matter what. To say that there ought to be no negative impacts whatsoever is tantamount to saying that humans should not exist.
Geothermal Energy
A couple of interesting readings on geothermal energy. In 2019, the Department of Energy conducted a study on the potential of geothermal power and observed that whether or not enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) develop commercially could be decisive in how much of a role geothermal plays in the future energy mix.
This report goes into some details about how development of EGS might occur. They cover several topics, but I would highlight permitting reform again as the most significant. They note that, because the Bureau of Land Management has much more experience with oil and gas projects than with geothermal projects, the former tend to have an easier time and some categorical exclusions. There is no good reason for geothermal development, which is much more environmentally friendly than oil and gas, to face stricter permitting.
In 2015, this paper on supervolcano risk was published. From a planetary defense perspective, the authors argue that supervolcanoes pose a greater risk over the next 100 years than asteroid impacts, especially now that most civilization-threatening, near-Earth asteroids have been mapped. As a multi-decade or multi-millennium project, wells could be drilled over or near caldera hotspots to cool them and neutralize the risk of a catastrophic eruption. In the latter scenario, the well could be drilled as EGS for usable energy. There is still much to be determined on how such an operation would affect the geology, so whether this would work physically remains an open question, to say nothing of how a multi-millennium project would be managed.