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PODCAST

Decouple

Dr. Chris Keefer

There are technologies that decouple human well-being from its ecological impacts. There are politics that enable these technologies. Join me as I interview world experts to uncover hope in this time of planetary crisis.

science

All Episodes

00:59:06

Canada, Climate, CANDU & Canoes feat. Jeremy Whitlock

Decouple ·

2021/02/17

Due to the global geopolitics of the 1940's Canada became the unlikely centre for the world's second largest nuclear research infrastructure at the end of World War II. Devoting itself to the peaceful use of the atom It went on to develop a unique power reactor design, the CANDU, based on the use of heavy water to avoid the need for uranium enrichment and pressure tubes to get around the need for a heavy forging industry for reactor vessels. These features make the CANDU ideal for export and

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00:18:43

Trouble in Texas feat. Mark Nelson

Decouple ·

2021/02/16

The Texan grid AKA the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is a house of cards. It is an energy only, deregulated market which does not reward keeping spare generation capacity on board and keeps a razor thin cushion to buffer against unpredictable surges in demand. It has isolated its grid from the rest of the conry in order to avoid federal reguation. Texas has made the decision to invest heavily in wind and natural gas, pairing an unpredictable and intermittent energy source with a

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01:10:18

The Other Energy Transition feat. Dr. Scott Tinker

Decouple ·

2021/02/10

While wealthy countries in the West are engaged in an energy transition obstensibly away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy the developing world is emerging from energy poverty largely through the use of fossil fuels. Four million people die every year as a consequence of indoor air pollution from cooking using biomass in poorly ventilated homes. This is more lives lost year after year, every year than COVID in 2020 and more than Malaria and HIV/AIDS combined. The transition away from

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01:18:36

Wizards and Prophets, Ecomodernists and...

Decouple ·

2021/02/06

Just as the political spectrum is divided between left and right, thinking on environmental problem solving is similarly split into two rival camps exemplified by the archetypes of the Wizard and the Prophet. Award winning science writer Charles Mann explores these archetypes as personified by the father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug and the intellectual godfather of the environmental movement, William Vogt. Crudely put wizards are foremost humanists who eschew limits believeing that our

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00:13:40

Greenpeace selling Vegan natural gas? feat. Simon Wakter

Decouple ·

2021/02/01

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. When environmental NGO's morph into fossil fuel companies something is very wrong with environmentalism. The company Greenpeace NRG sells a product they label as ProWindGas made of 99% fossil methane and less than 1% hydrogen from water electrolysis. "Our long-term goal is to increase the proportion of wind. Since the production of renewable hydrogen is still comparatively expensive today and we want to keep our gas price competitive, we can only

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00:55:52

The Rise of Nuclear Fear feat. Spencer Weart

Decouple ·

2021/01/30

Is part of our rejection of expertise, distrust of science and weaponization of the precautionary principle tied to how suicidally close we came to mutually assured destruction during the cold war? What are the cultural drivers that have led the modern left to reject nuclear energy? How did we come to exaggerate the potential harms from a nuclear accident to biblical proportions? How is the idea of nuclear apocalypse different from climate apocalypse in terms of its imagery and cultural framing? I

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01:04:33

Means, Motive, Opportunity: Fossil Fueled Radiophobia...

Decouple ·

2021/01/26

There is money to be made in Nuclear Fear. Consider this. In Japan over the last 10 years since the Fukushima accident, approximately 50 billion USD a year in additional fossil fuels have been traded to supply energy demands that would have been provided by Japan's shuttered nuclear plants. The ability to terrify people with the prospect of serious health harms from low dose radiation has kept most of the Japanese nuclear fleet idle and created an enormous market for LNG and Coal as well as a

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01:03:52

The Politics of Energy Transition feat. Robert Bryce

Decouple ·

2021/01/20

I am joined by Robert Bryce, an American author, journalist, filmmaker and podcaster in a wide ranging discussion of the politics of the world's unfolding energy transitions. Energy illiteracy is epidemic and basic concepts such as power density and scale are absent from most policy discussions. We discuss the impacts of fracking on the nuclear renaissance and the mounting resistance to wind and solar farms in rural America. Big decisions lie before our government representatives and the

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01:00:09

The Nuclear Fusion Energy Delusion? feat. Gerrit Bruhaug

Decouple ·

2021/01/06

Fusion is supposed to be even more powerful than fission but without the baggage. It resonates with the appeal to nature fallacy with notions of bringing the power of the sun down to earth. 39 years ago Dr. L. Lidsky wrote that "The scientific goal of fusion energy turns out to be an engineer's nightmare." Building a reliable, affordable power plant that requires achieving temperatures hotter than the sun and as cold as physically possible within several meters of each other all under the materially

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00:56:28

Gaia, Technology, and the Anthropocene feat. Lewis...

Decouple ·

2020/12/29

Decouple is a show which is fundamentally about attitudes to technology and the role that decoupling technologies, so called technofixes, can play in mitigating and solving our environmental challenges. As we are becoming increasingly aware, geology and its earth systems have not just shaped us, we are shaping the earth through our technologies and indeed our most current geologic epoch, the anthropocene, bears our name as a result. In this episode we dive deep into geologic determinism and a

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01:13:29

Hope, Hype, Hubris, and Deep Decarbonisation feat....

Decouple ·

2020/12/20

Nick Touran is a Ph.D. nuclear engineer and advanced reactor designer who runs the science education website whatisnuclear.com. Advanced and Small Modular Reactors have become the only politically safe nuclear power that western politicians are willing to touch with a 10 foot pole. Meanwhile existing plants doing much of the heavy lifting of decarbonisation are facing politically motivated premature closures and new builds of existing designs are seen as politically and financially unfeasible. There

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01:04:37

China’s Great Climate Leap Forward? feat. Seaver Wang

Decouple ·

2020/12/15

"China will cut carbon emissions by over 65% by 2030" according to Chinese President Xi Jinping. In addition two new studies published by the leading and highly influential Chinese Climate research institutes at Tsinghua university model net-zero emissions by 2050 and carbon neutrality by 2060. These models suggest a 10x increase in solar and wind and a 7x increase in nuclear by 2050. By 2050 China is forecasted to have more nuclear capacity then the rest of the world combined. What explains the

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01:12:18

The Heterodox Anthropologist of Nuclear feat. Bret...

Decouple ·

2020/12/08

Sometimes an outsider's perspective can lead to startling conclusions. Bret Kugelmass is a successful tech entrepreneur turned climate activist. His empiric analysis of the problem of climate change led him towards embracing nuclear energy as the only technology capable of scaling to achieve deep decarbonisation and powering negative emissions. After conducting well over 1000 interviews with nuclear engineers, regulators and analysts, Bret has developed some very bold and very controversial policy

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00:59:28

Doctors for Nuclear Energy feat. Dr. Anton Van Der Merwe

Decouple ·

2020/12/01

Dr. Rudolf Virchow, one of the founders of scientific medicine, said that "Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale." Beyond caring for the sick, doctors have played an important role in calling attention to the social determinants of health. International physicians for the prevention of nuclear war (IPPNW) played a pivotal role in the cessation of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the height of the cold war. This anti-weapons activism later

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01:31:34

Reflections on the Decouple Journey feat. Jesse Freeston

Decouple ·

2020/11/26

The host becomes the guest as I hand over the microphone to film maker and long time friend Jesse Freeston. Jesse got the Decouple podcast rolling by interviewing me about my vision for the project for our very first episode. He's back for a check in to explore what I have learned on the Decouple journey so far. Twenty three episodes in we have a lot of ground to cover. We welcome you behind the scenes. https://www.patreon.com/posts/decouple-on-41428860

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01:13:34

Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal feat. Madi Czerwinski

Decouple ·

2020/11/20

The Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal calls for a dramatic increase in nuclear energy to supply 50% of US electricity by 2050. Beyond being a policy proposal for decision makers, the campaign bases itself in a grassroots mobilization of Nuclear energy workers to make a revival of nuclear energy the tool with which to rapidly decarbonize and reindustrialize the US economy. It seeks to bridge the divide between climate concerned Democrats who want to rapidly deploy effective climate solutions and

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01:13:07

Ecomodernism's Arch Pragmatist feat. Ted Nordhaus

Decouple ·

2020/11/16

Ted Nordhaus is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Breakthrough Institute, the world's first and most prominent Ecomodernist think tank. We talk about the origins of the concept of ecological decoupling, the New Left's ceding of class and materialist politics to the right and the empty radicalism of the Green New Dealers. Ted shares his thoughts on the wicked problem of climate change which he compares to a chronic disease like diabetes rather then an acute problem like an asteroid

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01:25:47

The Malthusian Spectre Haunting Environmentalism...

Decouple ·

2020/11/05

A wide ranging conversation with Michael Shellenberger exploring the Malthusian origins of environmentalism and what happened tothe left as it morphed from a promethean movement concerned with material improvement of the living conditions of the masses towards a romantic longing to return to a pre-industrial Eden. Michael explains that modern infrastructure such as flood control systems, weather prediction and modern healthcare have played a decisive role in the 100 fold drop in mortality from

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01:17:46

Russian Gas & Germany's War on Nuclear: EU Energy...

Decouple ·

2020/10/31

The European Union finds itself at an energy crossroads. Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, has been rushing to shut down its nuclear plants as quickly as possible while leashing itself to Russian natural gas via the Nordstream 1&2 pipelines. France's nuclear electricity infrastructure is being eroded through premature political closures and taxes on ultra low carbon nuclear to pay for gas backed renewables which is enticing de-electrification. Green taxonomies are being contorted to

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01:08:25

The Nuclear New Deal feat. Emmet Penney

Decouple ·

2020/10/22

The Green New Deal has become a catch phrase but very few people, including the politicians who envoke its memory, have a solid grasp of the context and pragmatics of the original New Deal. Today I am joined by Emmet Penney, to discuss an article he co-authored with Adrian Calderon titled “Why we need a Nuclear new deal not a Green new deal.” Emmet walks us through the context and consequences of the New Deal and provides a history of US industrialization with an emphasis on the role of the

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318 results

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