Education for the Transition? My 2nd Seminar in Paris

There I am, together with Gaell Mainguy, Directeur du développement et des relations internationales du Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires in Paris. It was on Wednesday, Oct 11 and we are on the 21 floor of the "Tour de Montparnasse", spectacular view of Paris and of the Eiffel Tower.

We had a good hour or more of discussion about the role of education in shaping our future. I was truly impressed by the competence and the dedication of the people who participated in the debate. Yet, I remain somewhat skeptical about the possibility for education - at any level - to change society.

On this point, I have some personal experience as a teacher, but more than my limited record I tend to trust Jorgen Randers, one of the original authors of "The Limits To Growth" who defined himself as "a depressed man with a smiling face." That was for various reasons, one was that after, maybe, 40 years of teaching his students about sustainability, he observed that when they moved into the real world, outside the university, they behaved exactly in the same way as the people who had not been taught these matters. Dennis Meadows told me something very similar regarding his own experience. And all that fits well with my personal experience.

Basically, people normally tend to go along the path of lowest resistance and in a society that does not reward sustainability-oriented actions, they will rapidly learn how to maximize their utility function, even though that means forgetting what they learned in school.

That doesn't mean it is useless to teach sustainability and, of course, no rule is without exception. Maybe the kind of creativity that people can develop after a certain training remains an asset all over their life. It means, however, that as long as society remains what it is, the lofty principles that we learn from the science of ecosystems will not be put into practice. So, what is the solution? Well, a good Seneca Cliff can do wonders in terms of changing things!


Apart from lofty principles and Seneca cliffs, a good beer in Paris is always a good thing! Here I am, after the seminar, in a bistrot of Montparnasse together with Jean Pierre Dieterlen, a member of the Adrastia association.

H/t Jacques Chartier-Kastler for the organization of this meeting

Do we really want the coal industry to teach renewable energy to our children?

From "Minerals Education Coalition"


So, here is a "fact sheet" titled "Metals & Mineral Products used to make a Solar Panel." If you know something about how solar panels are made, you can have a good laugh at reading this list. Without going into the details, let me just mention that they manage to list at least one element (lead) which is NOT used in any kind of solar panels, while they completely miss the only rare metal that IS actually used in standard silicon solar cells: silver. And, if you know something about sputtering and thin films, read their "interesting facts" about molybdenum at page 2. That will give you a good feeling of what the acronym ROFLMAO means.

Apart from the plain mistakes, the trouble with this list is that it gives the impression that "a solar panel" would have to contain ALL these minerals, whereas most of them are used only for special application and the. All this makes the depletion of rare metals look like a fundamental problem for solar energy; there has to be a reason why I am continuously confronting people telling me that solar panels use rare earths or some other rare and exhaustible mineral. This is exactly the kind of confusion that obscures the fact that, in order to make a solar panel, all you need is aluminum and silicon, a little silver (not strictly necessary) and traces of boron and phosphorous.

So, what do we have here? It is just a show of incompetence or something worse, a specific attempt at disinformation? What we can say that it comes from a purportedly "educational" organization that lists its purposes as:

The Minerals Education Coalition’s (MEC) mission is to identify, produce and disseminate fact-based K-12 minerals education lessons and activities and to inform and educate the general public about the importance of mining in their everyday lives.

This "Mineral Education Coalition" is a spinoff of the SME Foundation, the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration. They seem to be mainly a corporate lobbying group and surely they are perfectly honest in listing their sponsor on their site

Pinnacle Partner:
Freeport-McMoRan, Inc.

Champion Partners:
Caterpillar, Inc.
Newmont Mining Corp.

Benefactor Partners:
RioTinto
Alliance Resource Partners, L.P.
JoyGlobal, Inc.
Royal Gold

Patron Partners:
Bechtel
Cloud Peak Energy
Kinross Gold USA
MMSA
Vulcan Materials Company Foundation

These are all mining companies, including coal mining ones. This being the case, it is not surprising that their site shows a clear anti-renewable, anti-climate science streak, as you see. Just a couple of examples, for instance at this link for the anti-renewable bias, and at this link for the anti-climate science attitude. And, certainly, their president has ideas about coal that don't seem to agree with the need of reducing emissions (boldface mine)
  

Another challenge facing coal, and other mining sectors as well, are government efforts in the United States and other countries to combat climate change. We have already seen significant impacts on mining. In the November 2014 issue of Mining Engineering, John Marsden’s column on climate change stirred up some debate. We all know that climate change has natural causes, but human activities can contribute to the change. This issue is a major challenge to not only the mining industry, but to the public that we serve because now it is primarily a political issue. Regardless of one’s position on the issue of climate change, its causes or its consequences, the reality is the movement to reduce emissions linked to climate change is growing in the United States and in other countries. I agree with John’s analysis and reiterate that regardless of the accuracy of climate change predictions, SME needs to be part of the conversation so that, we can continue to use our coal resources in a carbon-constrained world.

Of course, SME and its members have the right to think to publicly express whatever they like about climate science. But do we really want the mining lobby to create a spinoff dedicated to "educate children?"