A Case Study In The Social Contagion of Pseudoscience

This is Hippocampus, the seahorse. I could say a lot about them at this point, and have done at length in ‘Here Be Dragons’, but for now I want to focus on the one in the brain, because this has come up in something in the last couple of days. I resisted the temptation to do the obvious thing and have AI generate an image of hippopotami at university, mainly because AI in its current popular form is distinctly dodgy. Don’t worry: I won’t let this get away from me.

Yesterday I came across the book ‘The Indoctrinated Brain’ by Dr Michael Nehls. I want to be fair. He is a genuine doctor and has authored papers with Nobel Prize nominates. The guy is not just a quack. That said, there are many examples of respected scientists going seriously off the rails. One of the oldest examples I can think of is the renowned Lord Kelvin, who came to insist that Earth was much younger than other, younger scientists claimed, because it didn’t seem to have an internal heat source yet was still molten inside. He estimated it as less than 400 million years old and perhaps as little as 20 million, which wouldn’t seem to give undirected evolution time to produce humans and he was a theistic evolutionist. The crucial missing piece of information was that nobody at the time knew about radioactivity, which is how the inside of this planet stays molten. Three other examples are Fred Hoyle, who denied the Big Bang (and actually, ironically, named it), David Bellamy whom I’ve blogged about who denied climate change, and Nigel Calder, who predicted an ice age in the near future. Just being justifiably renowned as an expert in one’s field does not imply that all one’s ideas will be acceptable or worthwhile, particularly when one comments on something outside one’s field of expertise. So there’s that.

Another problem is that I can’t read the book without making a financial contribution and perhaps boost the algorithms. I can, however, look at what’s available on Amazon for free, which includes the table of contents. That said, the sheer difficulty with engaging with such things just now is that one is forced to reinforce one’s own echo chamber because attention feeds the algorithm and simply looking at stuff from the “Other Side” is likely to draw disproportionately more attention to it. That said, I feel that this book occupies a middle ground, which is often the case with these materials. This can be illustrated with the reptilian conspiracy idea. This touches on an apparent truth about powerful people being uncaring and being led by selfish and perhaps base desires, but isn’t literally so. This happens a lot with such things. A general impression which may well be true either gets misdirected or the metaphor is taken literally.

Enough of this preamble. The basic assertions Nehls makes include the following. Vaccinations against Covid-19 as they were designed reduce neurogenesis in the hippocampus, which makes people more compliant to persuasion. He also, very strangely, claims that lithium should be recognised as a nutrient. There may also be an element of denial of anthropogenic climate change but it isn’t clear from what I’ve read so far that that’s what he’s doing. If that’s there, it places everything he says in doubt because it makes him an unreliable source of information. It does not, however, mean that he’s wrong about everything.

At this point I need to interrupt and describe my apparent about face about vaccination. I was never against vaccinations per se. I had several issues, foremost amongst which was the probability that pathogens transmitted via droplet infection would be best defended against by the increased production of the relevant alpha globulins since it was these which would constitute the first line of defence against them. This objection was addressed when they started to be given by nasal spray, as this would constitute the exact solution to this problem. I had some other objections. For instance, I don’t trust that attenuated viruses are less virulent in the long term than fully-active viruses and am not aware that they’re tested as potential slow viruses. However, the Covid-19 vaccine also resolves this problem as it uses mRNA to induce human body cells to synthesise the spike proteins on the virion, to which the specific immune response then develops antibodies in one case. Another provides the spike protein itself, which is again absolutely fine. The other approach is to modify an adenovirus, that is a cold virus, either affecting chimps or a human one, once again to produce the spike protein. In each of these cases, none of the problems I’ve outlined arise and therefore my objections to anti-viral vaccines in the 1990s CE simply don’t apply any more. There’s more to be said about this, but this is the relevant bit to my apparent change of mind. The vaccines changed, so I did too. It’s like being happier with EVs than with petrol-driven vehicles, which to a certain extent I am, though not so much as I would be with better public transport. There’s also no transcription of RNA into the nuclear genome this way, which is good too.

Turning to Nehls’s claim that neurogenesis in the hippocampus is impaired by the Covid-19 vaccines, the problem with this issue is that good quality research by scientists in the relevant field without a conflict of interest shows the opposite to be so. Here is a link to such a study, which shows that vaccination of animals (unfortunately not humans) against respiratory infections such as influenza actually encourages hippocampal neurogenesis whereas acquiring Covid-19 itself impairs them. This seems to be borne out by the apparent memory impairment which can follow recovery from a Covid-19 infection, as seen here. Incidentally, as a vegan I’m not at all happy with the vivisection these involve, but post-mortem studies in humans show the same effect. So the evidence shown is actually in the opposite direction to Nehls’s claim.

That’s one thing. The other is the issue of lithium. Studies show that the brains of patients who had Alzheimers are lower in lithium post mortem than those of other people. This doesn’t mean, though, that there’s a link, for several reasons, and here I’m open to being proven wrong just as I have been with vaccines. A few decades ago, aluminium was considered to be a factor in causing Alzheimers. The metal was higher in the tap water where the prevalence of Alzheimers was higher and again, post mortem studies showed that aluminium was higher in the brains of Alzheimers patients. My own diet is in fact particularly high in aluminium because I eat a lot of basil although I don’t drink tea, which is another source of dietary aluminium, so I might be expected to have a higher risk of Alzheimers if that’s so. I should point out at this stage that Dr Nehls is primarily an Alzheimers researcher. Although I am experiencing cognitive impairment, I don’t believe this is to do with aluminium excess. It may be due to an excess in tau protein or related to some kind of dietary deficiency, and I’m hoping it’s reversible and am taking steps to do so. Anyway, the explanation for the aluminium excess in Alzheimers is that the blood-brain barrier lets through more aluminium and is already impaired. In the case of lithium, the situation is the reverse. The low levels of lithium in the Alzheimers brain may be due to slower passage of the metal across the blood-brain barrier and the loss of neuronal ability to maintain ion gradients, and the poorer diets of Alzheimers patients may also contribute to lower lithium. As for the rodent studies, and bear in mind that the very fact that they’re in rodents renders them suspect as they’re not humans, the murine body moves lithium around differently than the human one and the relationship between different minerals is often complex, such as the see-saw relationship between zinc and copper levels in the diet. However, lithium is involved in brain function, which is very obvious from the use of lithium compounds in medication for bipolar disorder.

There’s an irony in the insistence that lithium should be considered a nutrient. It has a pharmacological action, but that doesn’t make it a nutrient. In the ’90s, there were attempts to declare fluoride an essential mineral because of its perceived benefit to teeth and bones, something which the fluoridation lobby strongly objected to. Now we have the opposite: a “maverick” scientist advocates for declaring lithium an essential mineral. I wonder how people feel about lithium fluoride! But this is interesting because it’s an effect of the reputation of the person advocating for the change more than being led by evidence.

Nehls has in fact published a book on this too: ‘The Conspiracy Against Lithium: The Suppressed Essential Nutrient and its Benefits for Mental Health’. I haven’t read this either, for the same reason as before, but also note that the blurb implies that autism is a form of developmental pathology or brain damage which doesn’t exactly engender sympathy or put him on the side of the angels. It gets worse: he explicitly states he’s going to use generic “he” in a book published next year! Even Roger Scruton used to have to insist on this in the 1980s. It’s not feasible to access more of this book without paying for it, which I’m obviously not going to do.

Lithium is an odd element. It’s the third in the periodic table and in general, the lighter an atom is, the more common it is. 74% of the atomic matter in the Universe is hydrogen, the first element, followed by 24% for helium, one percent oxygen, 4.6 permille carbon and so forth, and all of these are light. Lithium might therefore be expected to be the third most common (and beryllium the fourth), but this is not so. Only traces of lithium formed in the ostensible early Universe (don’t get me started) and lithium which forms in stars falls into the interiors and is destroyed by fusion and disintegration of that nucleus into two helium nuclei. As far as Earth is concerned, the small amounts of lithium making it up tend not to integrate well in crystal lattices in rocks and are therefore thinly spread. Only rare geological processes concentrate it after that point, which is also why using lithium batteries is less than ideal. Once it comes to being included in biological systems, sodium and potassium, similar but heavier and much more abundant alkali metals, are more available to organisms, so they use those. There are scarce elements in biochemistry, such as iodine in thyroid hormones and cobalt in B12, but lithium doesn’t seem to fulfil a role because if it did, life would be confined to specialised environments rather than occurring all over the planet. This means that reasoning would seem to suggest that lithium lacks an essential role in living organisms and the human diet.

Nonetheless, it is medically useful, as I’ve said, in bipolar disorder. People on it, though, need to be carefully monitored due to side-effects like kidney damage. There is an unexplained negative correlation between lithium levels in drinking water and prevalence of dementia, but we’ve been here before with aluminium and that came to nothing. Here’s one study, for example. However, there’s also this, which was conducted here rather than in “proper” Scandinavia as it were. I’m guessing (not going to look because it’s not 100% germane) that the negative correlation between depression and lithium levels was probably related to the development of the various lithium compounds for bipolar. There are a couple of other tit-bits I really have to stick in here. One is that 7-Up used to have lithium in it, which is why it’s called that, and it was marketed as a hangover cure. The other is that it’s occasionally been advocated that lithium be added to tap water to reduce crime and anxiety. This was in the now-discredited future scenario of extreme population growth and overcrowding. It’s now known that if anything, removing lead from petrol was a better idea and that the real problem is population collapse.

That’s all very well and may seem to have questionable relevance to Dr Nehls’s books but in fact I think it reflects his views’ outmodedness. He’s advocating for an element which was suggested as a possible solution to social problems over half a century ago, insists on generic “he” when everyone else switched to “he or she”, “s/he” and so on around the same time as when they stopped advocating for lithium in tap water, but also opposes vaccination, which is a more timeless position.

All that said, as usual there is an annoying core of truth in some of what he says. It is indeed harder to think independently at the moment for several reasons, including chatbots making comments for astroturfing purposes, AI chatbots eroding the ability to think and social media shortening our attention spans. The trouble is that he’s pushing in the wrong direction. This is a puzzlingly common error today. People often start off saying things with which progressive people can agree, then proceed to advocate for a conservative or fascist position there’s plenty of evidence against. I don’t know why this happens. He does also advocate for things like an active lifestyle and good diet to prevent dementia, which is good but may not actually prevent it in the long term. I just hope we can learn something from this.

The Practicality of Greener Technology

There’s a report out at the moment regarding Chinese restrictions on gallium and germanium exports. Now that sentence might make your brain want to shut down in boredom or something. When I heard this on the radio this morning, it was reported as if the listener wasn’t expected to know what those elements were. Since I heard some computer bloke on YouTube yesterday calling the second element “geranium”, maybe they’re right, but reality check here: you do know them well, don’t you? Gallium is the metal in the aluminium group which melts below body temperature, basically due to indecisiveness, and germanium, which I admit I used to call “geranium” as a child, is in the same group as carbon and silicon and used to be the main material transistors were made of. This is now silicon of course. Germanium is also used to make mirrors for infrared cameras if I recall correctly. China extracts three-fifths of germanium and four-fifths of gallium for the global supply. Germanium is around the fiftieth most abundant element in our crust and isn’t found in large amounts in any widespread minerals, although it does accumulate in coal seams, I’m guessing because it’s similar to carbon. Consequently it’s found enriched in fly ash. Gallium is about as abundant as the likes of cobalt and lead but doesn’t form ores like theirs. Like germanium, it can be extracted from sphalerite. Both elements share with water the peculiar property of expanding on freezing.

China’s restriction is part of something called “resource nationalism”, which is also relevant to lithium ion batteries. This is the exertion of control over resources which are concentrated in a territory by that territory’s government, and it’s probably in the news because it conflicts with the interests of multinationals, which need a reliable global supply of such things. Now I would say that whatever’s bad for multinationals must be good for the world but there are a number of other issues here which need to be addressed.

Gallium arsenide can be used to make transistors which can operate at up to 250 GHz without overheating and it’s less noisy in the sense that there’s less unwanted fluctuation in signals passing through it. Hence it’s used in mobile ‘phones, satellite communications and RADAR. Gallium the metal has a number of niche uses. Because it has the longest liquid phase of any element, it’s used in thermometers for measuring high temperatures and it is of course far less toxic than mercury. Germania, which is germanium dioxide, has special optical properties which make it very useful as optical fibres and for wide angle lenses. It’s also used in solar panels and of course electronic chips. The fact that we use relatively rare elements generally makes our civilisation vulnerable to problems in supply chains and sustainability.

But what if I told you that the world has plenty of adequate solar power, intelligent devices, high-definition cameras, batteries, clean power sources, microphones, advanced computers, drones, full-colour displays, self-flying vehicles, and that all of this can be done without using these difficult to obtain raw materials? Because that’s how the living world operates. It has photosynthesis and organisms with vision (solar power), humans (intelligent devices), eyes (high-definition cameras), electric organs (batteries), clean power sources (respiration), microphones (ears), advanced computers (brains), drones (flying animals), full-colour displays (the skins of cephalopods and flatfish), self-flying vehicles (flying animals again). Life uses about two dozen chemical elements and much of the time it’s just riffing on organic compounds, though sometimes manufactured by catalysts which include other elements such as zinc.

One of the first posts I put on this blog was ‘The Plausibility Of Androids‘. You don’t have to follow that link, but basically it goes like this. There are physical objects in this world, also known as humans, which are intelligent and conscious, so we can be confident that it’s possible for there to be sentient objects. Our programming (after all, we’re droids) forces us to see each other as people, which of course we are, but the fact remains that there is a sense prior to that truth in which we’re droids. I say “droid” because we’re not all androids. There are also gynoids, but there’s an issue with that word and how it’s constructed because whereas an android is generally not sexualised, a gynoid is. Hence calling us “droids” is a not entirely marvellous approach I take to this. There is actually a Campaign Against Sex Robots to which I imagine this issue is relevant. The image at the top of this post is what you get if you type “gynoid” into the prompt field of a certain AI text-to-image generator. If you type “Android”, you get this:

. . . and if you type “Droid”, this happens:

That’s obviously based on R2D2, but is probably not gendered to most people.

It might be seen as anti-religious to make the claim that living humans are physical objects but, for example, Christian physicalism does exist . I’m not going into dualism or the mind-body problem in any great depth here because in fact the issue here isn’t really consciousness or sentience but the fact that there could be an ecologically sound object with highly sophisticated data processing abilities capable of doing any human work, simply because there are humans.

Moreover, this entails that self-driving vehicles can exist, among many other things. There are motorists. Functionally speaking, a motorist could be replaced with a device which drives a vehicle where the passenger gets in and types, speaks or signs her destination and the machine will simply take her there.

Right now, this device is largely a “black box”, functionally speaking. This may be an extension of the usual sense of the term. A black box is an electronic device whose inputs and outputs are known but whose internal workings are not. The notion is also used in behaviourism, the outmoded psychological and philosophical position that consciousness and the human mind can best be understood in terms of inputs and outputs, i.e. stimuli and responses. This is a very flawed way of approaching psychology, but it’s still true that that’s the main way a healthy mind can be seen as interacting with the world. I say “healthy mind” because the state of a mind can be altered by other things which happen to the body such as head injuries or interruption of blood supply.

We’re used to thinking of data processing as electronic. This needn’t be so. For instance, clockwork and abaci are not electronic, and there’s an hydraulic model of the British economy. We do tend to think of the brain as electrical but it also uses neurotransmitters and hormones and there’s neuroplasticity. It isn’t clear that the entire human brain could be completely replaced by electronic components and maintain its function even given its completely physical nature. Hence we can think of the brain as a computer-like machine but it may not be an electronic computer. Evolution does things in its own way, which has to take things from how they are initially and certain paths are ruled out because it hasn’t started from scratch. Nonetheless, there are many parallels between biological organs, organisms and processes on the one hand and technological devices and procedures on the other.

There are two obvious ways of using biology as technology, neither of which I feel are the right answer. One is simply to go back to old-fashioned technology using living things, such as horse-drawn carriages and wood fires. This is problematic for all sorts of reasons. One is that if it were done on the scale it is today, it probably wouldn’t be sustainable, although there are some things which would be preferable such as simply allowing urine to go stale rather than using the Haber process for ammonia production, if they could be organised properly. The other is that it very often involves exploiting animals in one way or another. I’m typing this in a polyurethane skirt and I wouldn’t want to be wearing a leather one simply because it’s biological because it would’ve been ripped off the back of some unfortunate beast. That doesn’t mean the environmental record of polyurethane is immaculate by any means. I’m sure it’s made using various nasty synthetic chemicals and techniques which harm the environment, and therefore kill animals indirectly.

The other obvious way is genetic modification. Although people talk a lot about the idea of this being harmful, and it is a bad thing, the reason it’s bad is not to do with the harm it might do to people or the environment so much as that the organisms in question are not ours to tinker with. Nonetheless it might sound like it makes sense, for example, to genetically modify an enormous animal who can act like a bus and temporarily swallow passengers while walking around on thirty legs and pooing them out at their stops. This makes sense from a practical perspective but it isn’t ethical, because the animal is purely being used and not respected as an end in themselves. Passengers might also feel like they’re being eaten, digested and excreted, which they might find it hard to get past psychologically. On a smaller scale, biotech without genetic modification seems ethically acceptable, although we might simply be less bothered because we can’t see what’s happening. But the production of ethanol, methane, carbon dioxide and acetic acid, for example, don’t seem problematic, and nor does the bacterial digestion of plastic.

Although all of that might make a contribution, it isn’t really what I had in mind. It’s more that we already realise we can make, for example, a camera from protein and lipids, and that camera wouldn’t use anything which might need a long supply chain anywhere in the world. Its sensors could be made originally from carotenoids, its lens from crystallins, which are proteins, but also silica or calcite as these compounds do exist in biology, and it could be blacked out using melanin. This would also be largely biodegradable. None of the biochemical pathways leading to the synthesis of these materials involves anything else which does have a long supply chain.

The point is really that there clearly do exist a wide variety of different methods whereby technological aims could be achieved which don’t involve mining, cosying up to dodgy régimes or pretending slave labour and war aren’t factors in making our toys and gadgets. If you look at the periodic table in terms of the elements actually used by living things, tungsten is the only metal in the third transition series and the next two heaviest elements are probably tellurium and iodine. Most of them could be extracted from sea water. This isn’t about using biology as such so much as observing that for some reason we seem to have developed the kind of high technology which tends to exploit people and the biosphere even though this must surely be entirely unnecessary. We practically know this is so because examples are all around us.

However, it isn’t as simple as switching just like that, because although it’s clear that the techniques are possible, we still don’t know how to do them. Biochemists, biologists and other scientists will be aware of the processes, to be sure, but only a few of them are used industrially or otherwise in technology. There needs to be another industrial revolution which uses such techniques, but the science isn’t yet there. For some reason, technology is currently biassed towards a kind of “path of least resistance” approach which unfortunately compromises the interests of most of the human race and the planet we live on. If this changes, apart from anything else it would shorten the chains that bind us to currently distant sources and, assuming no political change, would undercut resource nationalism. Nobody in the West would have any grounds for worrying about China or having to kowtow to oppressive governments in the Middle East, there would be no excuses for wars over resources and there wouldn’t be blood on our hands when we use a laptop or mobile ‘phone.

There are various fringe groups which accuse science of bias. This is, for example, used in climate change and vaccine denial, creationism, flat Eartherism, forced-birthing and homophobia. These particular phantoms are without substance and that kind of science bias does not exist. There is, however, bias in science. We are aware that it’s entirely scientifically plausible to replace most of the technology used today by more environmentally sound equivalents. We do not, however, have the whole picture with most of these and there are many steps missing before it would become practical. The way funding and research work, there is an inherent bias against the likelihood of this happening, and in that way yes, science is biassed. It’s like the idea of functional foods. If something is a proper, nutritional food, it just is functional. Food technology to produce items with extra nutrients in it is superfluous. On the other hand, food technology to produce items from vats of microörganisms to reduce our carbon footprint and the impact of agriculture is absent. I’m not going to say “to feed the world” as there just is enough food and the problems there are purely political.

I can’t quite put my finger on why this bias exists, but it seems to me it’d be a good idea to address it pretty urgently.

The Fog Of Misinformation II – Batteries and Hydrogen Power

David Hume’s ‘Treatise On Human Nature’, in his words, “fell stillborn from the press”. I felt similar to how he must’ve felt yesterday about the fact that my stats didn’t record that anyone at all read yesterday’s post. Even so, a fair portion of what I write on here isn’t composed with an eye to a large readership as to stop myself from going on and on online by posting a link to things I’ve written on the topic. If I find that I’m saying the same thing repeatedly, I sometimes just write it up once and for all to save a bit of time, effort and boredom. I doubt anyone actually follows the links, but posting them gets the irritation out of my system.

So today’s post, which may not be read today, is supposed to finish off yesterday’s. There were a few things which came up as questions in my mind which I didn’t feel informed enough to cover. Today, then, I’ll be talking about hydrogen as a fuel, our government’s energy policy and the ethics of batteries. Here we go.

The way I understand it, hydrogen is chiefly useful as, in a sense, a means of storing power. Note that this may not be the reality, simply how I think it works. Although it’s technically a fuel, it’s produced as I understand it by the electrolysis of water and then stored as a metal hydride from which it’s slowly released and burnt, becoming water vapour again in the process. This means that whatever means of producing the electricity to split the oxidane (dihydrogen monoxide) molecules is used is the real point. It’s as if hydrogen, or rather the metal hydride, is a battery used to take that energy and use it elsewhere. As I’m typing this, I’m aware that palladium, and possibly some other metals, are able to absorb and store hydrogen for future use, so maybe that’s done as well. I’m writing this knowing very little about this use of hydrogen. I also wonder if the water vapour released from combustion would contribute significantly to global warming if this were done on a large scale, but I’m aware that hydrocarbons also produce it when they’re burnt, so maybe this is not the main point. One advantage to burning hydrogen is that it’s a lot cleaner than coal, oil and natural gas, which generate sulphur dioxide when burnt as well as carbon dioxide and soot.

That’s how I thought it worked. It isn’t reality, apparently, and I’ll come to that in a bit. Hydrogen is unusual because per mass it’s twice as efficient as petrol but per volume at atmospheric pressure it’s thousands of times less efficient. Filling a car up with a litre of petrol means a mass of around seven hundred grammes. Seven hundred grammes of hydrogen is 642 litres. Therefore, if it’s stored as the gas it needs to be pressurised to something like seven hundred times that of atmospheric pressure (bars) at sea level, which means vehicles running on hydrogen end up heavier than petrol cars due to having a hefty heavily reinforced tank containing the gas. Nor is ordinary metal okay for doing this because of the nature of hydrogen. Consisting of the smallest atoms, hydrogen atoms pass into materials very easily, although molecules cause a different problem known as high temperature hydrogen attack (HTHA). This reduces the flexibility of the metals and causes them to crack. Consequently hydrogen storage tanks have to be coated internally with something which prevents this, which makes them expensive to manufacture. Hydrogen at seven hundred bars is about a sixth the efficiency of petrol, and this is in a heavier vehicle making it still less so. All the pipelines and vessels used to move around and store hydrogen face the same problem if they are at approximate room temperature. Although this could be addressed by warming the hydrogen, with the obvious risks of explosion and inflammability as well as energy use, this leads to hydrogen becoming more atomic and reacting with carbon in steel to form methane, which unlike hydrogen cannot pass through the steel and once again causes cracking.

Hydrogen sources and extraction methods are colour-coded. Quite rarely, deposits of hydrogen can be found in a similar way to fossil fuel gas. This is white hydrogen and can be mined the same way as the more widespread gas deposits used as fuel. It should also be noted that Jupiter is a vast store of hydrogen which could theoretically be used, although it would either have to be transported or used in situ. It can also be extracted from coal (black), lignite (young coal, brown), and methane (grey). All of these are pretty obviously silly because they’re direct use of fossil fuels, which we’re supposed to be avoiding, except for methane which could be from biomasse or fire ice but isn’t. These methods are not clean anyway as they tend to leak, and they are mainly promoted by oil companies which want us to carry on using their products. Blue hydrogen combines methane extraction with carbon capture and is about one percent of production. All of these methods have about the same emissions as more conventional gas burning because carbon capture takes energy.

There is, though, green hydrogen, which is electrolysis of water using renewable energy. This does actually suffer from the intermitten power source problem mentioned yesterday, so discussing this is substantially linked to the general issue of battery manufacture and use. Finally, there is pink hydrogen, which uses nuclear power. As well as the resources used for actual production, infrastructure is needed too. So the thing I assumed at the start of this bit is actually green hydrogen and is not the usual method for extracting it.

Although it seems fair to assume that a car running on hydrogen simply burns hydrogen in pistons like a petrol car burns petrol aerosol, this is not what happens. Piston engines could be designed to run on hydrogen. However, piston engines are in any case only thirty percent efficient and burning hydrogen in them produces nitrogen oxide emissions because of the pressure and heat, which are one of the types of gases which make petrol engines bad in the first place. The lower efficiency of hydrogen compared to petrol makes the poor efficiency of the internal combustion engine more problematic than it would be were it just burning petrol.

What actually happens in a hydrogen vehicle is basically that a fuel cell is used to generate electricity to run an electric motor, like an electric vehicle but with an extra stage. Fuel cells were invented in the 1950s CE and are popular in spacecraft because they can generate electricity and provide drinking water. They work by placing a membrane made of platinum and iridium between a feed of hydrogen and one of oxygen. When the hydrogen crosses the membrane, it becomes positively charged and gives up electrons which can then be used to run an electric current, then combines with oxygen on the other side to form water. This slower, more controlled method is far more efficient than a hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion engine.

There are a few problems with this. Notable among them is the rarity and cost of platinum and iridium. The main sources of these metals are Zimbabwe, South Africa and Russia, so there is the usual issue of the metals not being available locally and some kind of ethical chain of accountability being very long and prone to being obscured unless you’re actually in Afrika south of the Sahara or Russia itself. Moreover, the water produced by fuel cells needs to be kept warm so as not to damage the fuel cell by freezing, so hydrogen-powered vehicles are either unfeasible or less efficient anywhere the temperature drops below freezing.

Only a dozen hydrogen-powered cars were sold in Britain in 2021, and four dozen buses. There were more buses in Germany but when there were problems with the hydrogen plant, they couldn’t be used. One vehicle in four thousand is currently hydrogen-powered, and as I said, hydrogen-powered cars are really just electric cars whose “batteries” are fuelled by hydrogen. As it stands, they don’t reduce emissions. Things might change a bit if metal hydrides are used to store hydrogen, but the fact remains that hydrogen is really just a way of getting electricity from the place it’s obtained to the vehicles’ internal workings. It’s electric at both ends and hydrogen is just between the two.

Okay, so that’s hydrogen. Now for the ethics of batteries.

The first thing to say about this is that much is made of the intermittent nature of solar and wind power sources. This is because of the ongoing problem of the absence of a way of storing electricity efficiently. I’m not convinced that it’s really that much of a problem here in Britain with our wind and solar power, the latter whereof does function to some extent in overcast conditions. I just wonder if there hasn’t been enough development of facilities which store electricity in batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries. There is a domestic solution involving a power wall, which is a large battery kept in a house storing unused generated power, either from local renewable methods or the grid at low-cost times, i.e. at night. This is a personal solution rather than a collective one though. I just wonder.

Lithium ion batteries are a bit of a kludge. There is an issue with them exploding and causing fires when they drop below a certain level of charge, which has been addressed by including a chip which detects when this happens and closes them down. This gives them a shelf life and means that devices with built-in batteries of this kind need to be periodically recharged even if not currently in use, because the chip itself draws some power which can take it below this threshold and permanently disable the battery. It seems odd to me that lithium batteries are so heavy, suggesting that they’re not just straightforward lithium batteries, which of course they aren’t: they’re lithium ion batteries.

Lithium is unusually electropositive, meaning that it avidly loses an electron. This is the electron on the outside orbital of the lithium atom. Lithium atoms are intercalated between sheets of graphene, single-atom layers of graphite, and repel their outer electrons, which pass along a copper conductor into whatever the battery is powering. The lithium ions are then attracted from within the graphite across a semipermeable layer and a liquid electrolyte into the other layer, which contains a cobalt oxide. Electrons flow through an aluminium conductor to this side, meaning that a current flows through the circuit the battery is supplying power to. When the battery is recharged, electrons are pulled back into the graphite side, attracting the lithium ions back and neutralising them. The semipermeable membrane separates these two sides, preventing fire or an explosion. As the battery ages, SEI – Solid Electrolyte Interphase – forms preventing the flow of lithium ions, and cobalt (II) oxide and lithium oxide form permanently. This is why the capacity of lithium ion batteries reduces over time. This process is of course somewhat reminiscent of a fuel cell’s operation.

A lithium ion battery is a rolled or folded arrangement of several layers, including copper, graphite/lithium, the electrolyte, the semipermeable membrane, the cobalt compound and aluminium.

Considering this design from an environmental perspective, it’s a composite, making it difficult to recycle. It has several layers which cannot be easily separated in bulk. It suffers from entropy too, but what doesn’t? A big issue with it, though, is where the lithium comes from.

I used to wonder why there isn’t more lithium. Hydrogen constitutes something like 74% of the mass of baryonic matter and helium twenty-four percent. Lithium, which is the third element, might be expected to be the third most common element, but it is actually quite rare. It is in fact only about as common as tellurium. This is because although a lot of lithium was produced soon after the Big Bang, there aren’t many processes which produce it apart from that and it’s relatively easily destroyed inside stars. As has already been mentioned, lithium tries really hard to give up its outer electron, so it’s always found in compounds on Earth. It’s also one of the alkali metals along with sodiumand potassium, so it tends to be found where they are as its reactions are somewhat similar, but in much smaller amounts. In the past, lithium has mainly been extracted from two minerals called spodumene and lepidolite, and sourced from Russia, followed by Zimbabwe, China, Canada and Portugal, all of which were way behind. A lot of lithium is from the salt flats of Bolivia and Chile’s Atacama Desert – sodium chloride is, as you might suppose, associated with smaller amounts of lithium. Unsurprisingly, indigenous populations are adversely affected by the extraction of the metal and it uses up a lot of fresh water, which is particularly problematic in a desert where it doesn’t rain for centuries at a time (and has lots of seagulls nesting, but that’s another story). The growth in lithium demand in the past three decades has been enormous. Forty percent of the planet’s output is consumed by China. Most electric vehicle batteries are made in China. This yet again makes much of the global economy dependent on China and means that it could place the same kind of stranglehold on them as Russia has on oil supplies if someone does something they don’t like. This puts a lot of pressure on the South American sources. The alternative might be to develop a battery based on a more abundant resource, and this may in fact be happening in the form of sodium ion batteries.

Obviously sodium is extremely abundant on this planet and many others. They have no explosion risk and have been developed since the ’70s, but were abandoned when lithium ion batteries started to take off. Their energy density is lower. I should explain this. Energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a given volume. This means that these batteries take up more space and are heavier than lithium ion ones, making them less suitable for vehicles but more so for domestic and grid energy storage. They have no cobalt, removing the ethical problem therewith which I haven’t mentioned yet. Instead, they have a variety of designs, including a carbon anode and alloy cathode made from nickel, manganese, magnesium, titanium and oxygen. Another design makes extensive use of Prussian blue, a well-established pigment which has been made for more than three centuries. The batteries can be recharged more times than lithium ones and they work well at a wider temperature range, from -20 to +60°C. However, I have a bit of a nagging doubt about them because Elon Musk is involved and a lot of his stuff is overhyped trash, so I’m just hoping they have a life outside his fantasy world.

I’ve kind of skipped over cobalt here, so I’ll go back to it now. Seventy percent of cobalt originates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where things are, to say the least, not good. War has destroyed the ability to farm safely due to looting, sexual assault and other forms of violence, and consequently many women now work in mining. Due to lack of education, most women and men are not aware that women can work legally in the mines and women are therefore expected to engage in transactional sex to gain access to employment. I am absolutely not a SWERF. Even so, the 25% of women who are sex workers in mining towns might well be able to live happier lives and be productive in different ways if they weren’t doing that, and they need to have greater career flexibility. Forty percent of women have to trade sex to have their basic needs met. The collapse of mining tunnels is a regular occurrence in the country, bringing with it many injuries and deaths, even of teenagers working in the mines. Accompanying that are the health hazards associated with cobalt mining, which are unsurprisingly respiratory issues from the dust and also gastrointestinal and cardiac disease. This is the usual situation of the rich countries in the world exporting their exploitation to the former colonies so that Black people can suffer and die to prop up White people’s lifestyles. And yes, I absolutely am guilty of this, typing this as I am on a laptop powered by lithium ion batteries, as is my mobile, tablet and Walkman. Some families have banded together in the country to prosecute Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google and Tesla for their roles in the injuries and deaths of their children. It will be very surprising if they win, and even if they do I can’t see it making any difference.

And this is my fault. I did try to get a refurbished mobile ‘phone the last time I replaced my old one (which was not a smart ‘phone incidentally but did contain a lithium ion battery), but due to lack of diligence I ended up accidentally buying a new one. The shop I went into sold both new and refurbished devices and I mistook a new one for a used one. Now you might say that my responsibility is diffused by the number of other people who are complicit in this exploitation, but there are also a lot of people being exploited so that doesn’t work as an argument. But wallowing in guilt and shame can substitute for doing something about it, so I’ll move on.

That leaves me with HM govt’s energy policy, bearing in mind that this same policy will doubtless be pursued by the fake Labour administration we’re probably about to vote in next year. I’m used to talking about nuclear energy policy and am quite well-informed about that. The Tories held Uxbridge and South Ruislip on Thursday, much to everyone’s surprise, probably partly due to the electorate’s hatred of Green policies, and consequently they plan to double down on their plan which will wipe out the human race, it being an obvious vote winner. Seriously though, I don’t understand what the motivation is, either for the policy makers or the voters. Perhaps if they were also child-free, it would make sense, because then it would be an «après moi le déluge» type thing.

Okay, so we’re paying a lot more for energy per household nowadays. This is because 40% of our electricity is generated by gas-fired power stations and also 85% of domestic boilers. Gas prices went up due to a rise in demand associated with the pandemic, then the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. It can be addressed by improving energy efficiency, such as with insulation and heat pumps, and the installation of solar panels and other forms of renewable energy such as heat turbines. This would also help us achieve Net Zero. The question of what has not been done is also important. In the 1970s, the UK was a world leader in wave power. Thatcher trashed that. Solar panels need to be on roofs rather than in fields, since they are usually just sitting there unoccupied. Helical wind turbines take up less space than windmill-style ones. Scotland can be self-sufficient in wind power. I am interested in knowing what’s happened with storing electricity in lithium and sodium ion batteries to address this apparently intermittent supply caused by renewables, and also in how tidal and wave power could be intermittent when Cynthia constantly orbits our planet. There is a strong tendency for governments to point out that we are in a situation now and the time for action was years ago. Well, what’s happening now we need to address then? Also, we’ve clearly been beholden to theocracies in the Middle East for decades, leading to us letting them get away with atrocities, and fighting wars against them because they’ve got the oil. Self-sufficiency in energy would very plainly stop this. Maybe there’s a reason why they don’t want to stop it?

Bats and birds are killed by wind turbines. Set against this can be the deaths caused by climate change and the processes whereby fossil fuels are mined, transported and used in power stations, and although I don’t know figures it’s unlikely to be as many as those processes kill. Wind turbines aren’t even as significant a cause of death as domestic cats. The high figure for dinosaurian deaths in the US is 234 000 – it may be much lower. This compares to four billion (short scale) killed by cats, sevenety-two million by pesticides, sixty million by cars, 174 million by power lines and a billion by cars. But every death is the end of the world for the deceased organism and we are as culpable for these deaths as we would be if we went out and shot them, so prevention is still important. Sea birds tend to learn to avoid wind turbines, so that helps. Bats are also casualties, with 600 000 deaths a year in this way caused by pockets of air near the windmill blades which rupture the lungs due to high pressur. White nose syndrome, a fungal infection, kills millions in North America. The problem can be dealt with by keeping turbines at least two kilometres from high bird population areas, the use of ultrasonic sources to disrupt bat sonar, which in fact doesn’t do so but leads to them avoiding the turbines, painting the turbines purple, which repels both prey insects and vertebrates, using ultraviolet light to illuminate the blades at light so they don’t mistake their supporting poles for trees, making the blades shorter and increasing their height, shutting down turbines to allow flocks of animals to fly through the areas by detecting early strikes and/or weather RADAR, which picks them up anyway. Helical wind turbines needn’t be steered, operate at low wind speeds, are quieter, have fewer moving parts, are more suitable for residential areas and therefore microgeneration, are safer for human workers because they’re shorter, can be scaled down to domestic use, cheaper, more easily installed and, crucially, less risky to bats and birds. However, they also have more drag and suffer from the greate turbulence near the ground, which may lead to needing more maintenance.

I’ll just briefly address tidal power. It damages marine environments and life. Other problems include high cost and presumably, and this is a guess, they’re more suitable for islands than continental countries, even those which are not landlocked or lack significantly tidal bodies of water. The British Isles are, however, rather suitable.

So to recap, and suggesting possible feedback, I think I did okay on the hydrogen power thing and the batteries but I still feel rather vague about government energy policy. That’s it really. No pics today apparently.