ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 489

Why We Keep Dreaming of Little Green Men

By George Johnson

Conspiracy theorists tend to cluster at the right and left of the political spectrum, so perhaps Hillary Clinton will attract at least a few voters from both the Trump and Sanders camps with her recent pledge to release documents about Area 51, the top secret military base in Nevada.

Some of her critics have been dubious, suspecting that her vow, made on forums like Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show, was intended to distract attention from her emails and Goldman Sachs speeches. But among the electorate, the antennas of some U.F.O. seekers must have perked up — polls have found that more than a third of Americans are believers — when they heard a presidential candidate actually talking about Area 51.

Suspecting that deep secrets are hidden there — in the form of captured aliens (dead or alive), crashed extraterrestrial spaceships and futuristic weaponry — U.F.O. die-hards have long pushed the government to come clean about the facility, which was established in 1955 as an annex of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Test Site. The official story — that Area 51 has been used for secret activities like testing the prototype of the U-2 spy plane and other experimental aircraft — seems to them like a cover-up, a suspicion fed by the government’s refusal to acknowledge the place’s existence until the release of a classified report in 2013.

There was no mention of extraterrestrials, of course. What else are our leaders, who may be aliens themselves, going to say?

The number of people fixated on Area 51 to the exclusion of other issues is probably not enough to swing more than a precinct here and there. But the fascination with alien cover-ups taps into a deeper vein. Maybe it’s different for the 0.1 percent at the top of the pyramid (you with your shining eye on the back of the dollar bill), but for most of us the world is a confusing, complicated, mind-numbing place over which we feel a dismaying lack of control.

Sometimes one suspects that a piece of the puzzle must be missing, or dangling cruelly beyond our reach. You can either muddle along without it, as most of us try to do, or put your mind into hyperdrive, making connection after connection and piecing together a hidden order — a conspiracy so immense that it threatens to be more convoluted and complex than what it seeks to explain.

The truth is out there or in there. Open the gates to the inner sanctum — whether it’s the Vatican, the Federal Reserve, the Masonic lodges or Area 51 — and suddenly everything will make sense.

Masters of the craft (there is no good word, at least in English, for conspiracy theorizing) could be found in the 18th century, busily writing tracts and tomes concluding that the French Revolution was plotted by Freemasons working with the Bavarian Illuminati. The hypothesis quickly grew to include the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Cathars and ancient Egyptian religious cults — ingredients that Dan Brown made lucrative use of in “The Da Vinci Code.” All were said to be players in a secret world history that had been unfolding backstage for centuries, while the masses were distracted like children with shadow plays.

From Europe this spider web of memes spread to the United States, where the existence of Masonic lodges led to suspicions of an Illuminati plot to surrender the country to France, a land teeming with Enlightenment philosophers with godless beliefs and cosmopolitan ways — the original secular humanists.

Protected in its cocoon, this style of thinking — the “paranoid style,” the historian Richard Hofstadter memorably called it — was carried intact into modern times, with the nexus of evil moving to the Soviet Union, the Trilateral Commission and other suspected agents of One World Government. The next step was surely surrender to the Galactic Empire. No wall — it would have to be a planetary shell — could stop the ultimate aliens. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was both a warning and a diversion. No wonder there are strange lights in the sky.

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Political Atheism: The Last Taboo

By Herb Silverman

In “The Last Taboo: Why America Needs Atheism,” published in the New Republic in 1996, Wendy Kaminer wrote, “Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles. But, while pedophilia may at least be characterized as a disease, atheism is a choice, a willful rejection of beliefs to which vast majorities of people cling.” I have one small quibble: Atheism is not a “choice.” For me, the only choice is whether to be open about my atheism or pretend to believe in a deity for which there is not a scintilla of evidence.

The situation has improved significantly since Kaminer’s piece twenty years ago. Much has been written about atheism, including best-selling books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others. A number of popular blogs now promote atheism and secularism. In the Internet age, people hear about many worldviews, not just the one in which they were raised. Every new national survey shows a rapid increase of atheists, agnostics, and those who claim no religious affiliation.

However, atheists continue to be the group people are least likely to vote for. In 1990, I ran an unsuccessful, successful political campaign for governor of South Carolina as the Candidate Without a Prayer. I was unsuccessful in winning the election, of course, but successful in a state Supreme Court victory that overturned the provision in the state Constitution that prohibited atheists from holding public office. A similar provision is in the North Carolina Constitution, and some folks in Asheville tried unsuccessfully in 2009 to remove open atheist Cecil Bothwell from its City Council.

In 2010, Wynne LeGrow was the Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives, running as an open atheist in southern Virginia against Randy Forbes, founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus. LeGrow received 37.5 percent of the vote, the highest percentage for a Democrat running that year against an incumbent Virginia Republican. He details his experience in his book, Last Leper in the Colony.

The complete history of open atheists in Congress is very short: former Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.). He acknowledged being an atheist after the Secular Coalition for America, of which I’m president, sponsored a contest to find the highest-ranking politician who so identified. Stark left Congress in 2012, reducing the number of open atheists in Congress from one to zero.

This brings me to three politicians I assume are atheists, though it must be noted that they don’t so identify.

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Baghdad rocked by blasts as Islamic State claims city’s bloodiest day in months

By Loveday Morris and Mustafa Salim

Islamic State attackers spread chaos and carnage across Baghdad on Wednesday as two suicide bombers struck checkpoints just hours after a car bomb ravaged a busy market, leaving dozens dead in the bloodiest day in the Iraqi capital in months.

At least 46 people were killed, but the full casualty count is likely to increase as rescue officials and hospitals tally the victims. The Associated Press, citing medical and security officials, said the death toll reached at least 88.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for all three blasts in posts on social media.

The bombings appeared to mark an escalation by the Islamic State in its campaign against civilian targets in Baghdad. They also were a stark reminder that the group is still able to launch devastating attacks in the capital, despite setbacks on the battlefield elsewhere.

The group has lost at least a third of its territory in Iraq, including the western town of Hit last month. To the north, security forces have been building for an attack on the militant stronghold of Mosul.

The first bombing burned shops and ripped through market stalls in Sadr City, a mostly Shiite district in eastern Baghdad.

Wooden market carts were used to rush out the dead and injured after the bombing, in a scene that has become gruesomely familiar in the district — a frequent target for the Islamic State militants, who consider Shiite Muslims apostates.

A second blast then struck on the edge of the Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya, Baghdad Operations Command said in a statement. Two policemen and four civilians were killed as a man wearing a suicide belt detonated the explosives at a point where civilians are searched on their way into the area.

The third attack was a car bomb on a road that also leads to Kadhimiya, indicating that the neighborhood, home to Baghdad’s most important Shiite shrine, was the intended target. Shiite pilgrims in the area have been the target of frequent attacks in the past.

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Hard Truths About Race on Campus

By Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim

Imagine that you were the president of an American university at the end of 2015, as student protests over racial concerns swept the country, energized by the Black Lives Matter movement. The president of the University of Missouri resigned over controversies there, and other college leaders were confronted on their campuses. Now it’s your turn. A hundred students march to your office and present their demands. They give you one week to respond. What should you do?

If you had looked to your counterparts at other institutions for guidance, the message was clear. The president of Yale pledged to spend $50 million to increase faculty diversity and to satisfy other demands. The president of Brown pledged $100 million for diversity training and other steps to create a more “just and inclusive campus.”

With such big moves by Yale and Brown, who could blame you for following their lead? After all, much of the students’ agenda was simply an amplification of what American colleges have been doing for decades: They demanded increased affirmative action, more diversity training, more funds to support scholarship and teaching about race and social justice. What harm could it do?

We are social psychologists who study the psychology of morality (Haidt) and the causes and consequences of prejudice and stereotypes (Jussim). As far as we can tell, the existing research literature suggests that such reforms will fail to achieve their stated aims of reducing discrimination and inequality. In fact, we think that they are likely to damage race relations and to make campus life more uncomfortable for everyone, particularly black students.

A basic principle of psychology is that people pay more attention to information that predicts important outcomes in their lives. A key social factor that we human beings track is who is “us” and who is “them.” In classic studies, researchers divided people into groups based on arbitrary factors such as a coin toss. They found that, even with such trivial distinctions, people discriminated in favor of their in-group members.

None of this means that we are doomed to discriminate by race. A 2001 study by Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that race was much less prominent in how people categorized each other when individuals also shared some other prominent social characteristic, like membership on a team. If you set things up so that race conveys less important information than some other salient factor, then people pay less attention to race.

A second principle of psychology is the power of cooperation. When groups face a common threat or challenge, it tends to dissolve enmity and create a mind-set of “one for all, all for one.” Conversely, when groups are put into competition with each other, people readily shift into zero-sum thinking and hostility.

With these principles in mind, it is hard to see how the programs now being adopted by many universities will serve to create campuses where students of color feel more welcome and less marginalized.

Of all the demands made to university presidents—for a comprehensive list, from some 80 schools, see TheDemands.org—the most common is that universities admit more black students and hire more black faculty. Sometimes a specific target, like 15%, is mentioned, to mirror the proportion of blacks in the U.S. population. But what will happen if these targets are met using methods that increase the importance or value of individuals’ tracking each other by race?

Since its introduction during the Kennedy administration, affirmative action has referred to a variety of initiatives to improve the recruitment, training and retention of talented minority candidates. Such programs are not colorblind, and we strongly support taking such deliberate steps to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups.

But as practiced in most of the top American universities, affirmative action also involves using different admissions standards for applicants of different races, which automatically creates differences in academic readiness and achievement. Although these gaps vary from college to college, studies have found that Asian students enter with combined math/verbal SAT scores on the order of 80 points higher than white students and 200 points higher than black students. A similar pattern occurs for high-school grades. These differences are large, and they matter: High-school grades and SAT scores predict later success as measured by college grades and graduation rates.

As a result of these disparate admissions standards, many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about the academic capacity of their peers. People notice useful social cues, and one of the strongest causes of stereotypes is exposure to real group differences. If a school commits to doubling the number of black students, it will have to reach deeper into its pool of black applicants, admitting those with weaker qualifications, particularly if most other schools are doing the same thing. This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of color find when they arrive on campus.

And racial gaps in classroom performance create other problems. A 2013 study by the economist Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University found that students tend to befriend those who are similar to themselves in academic achievement. This is a big contributor to the patterns of racial and ethnic self-segregation visible on many campuses. If a school increases its affirmative-action efforts in ways that expand these gaps, it is likely to end up with more self-segregation and fewer cross-race friendships, and therefore with even stronger feelings of alienation among black students.

Another common student demand is to commit money to programs and departments devoted to specific ethnic or identity groups. Such centers may provide many benefits, but will expanding them advance the protesters’ stated goal of reducing feelings of marginalization?

In a 2004 study designed to examine the effects of “ethnic enclaves,” a team of social psychologists led by Jim Sidanius (now at Harvard) tracked most of the incoming freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles. They measured attitudes in the week before classes started and surveyed the same students each spring for the next four years. The study allowed the researchers to see how joining an organization based on ethnic identity changed students’ attitudes.

The results were mostly grim. For black, Asian and Latino students, “membership in ethnically oriented student organizations actually increased the perception that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum competition with one another and the feeling of victimization by virtue of one’s ethnicity.” The authors also examined the effect on white students of joining fraternities and sororities and found similar effects, including an increased sense of ethnic victimization and opposition to intergroup dating.

There may be academic reasons for creating these ethnic centers, but if the goal of expanding such programs is to foster a welcoming and inclusive culture on campus, the best current research suggests that the effort will backfire.

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Maybe You’re Not an Atheist–Maybe You’re a Naturalist Like Sean Carroll

By Eric Niller

Science and religion have never gotten along very well. But both strive to answer one fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? Are we here thanks to a random sequence of events—just an organized blob of mud—or destined to follow a path laid down for us by a higher power? There is a middle path, though, that borrows elements from both systems of thought—a way of understanding the world that gives our inner lives and the universe meaning without a theistic belief system.

Standing firmly behind this “poetic naturalism” is Sean Carroll, the theoretical physicist who’s taken readers on a journey through time in From Eternity to Here and the hunt for the Higgs-Boson in The Particle At the End of the Universe. Now he’s put together a big sprawling work of philosophy to examine that one big question. Also: whether God exists, and what happens after you die.

In his new book out tomorrow, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself, the 49 year-old Caltech professor assembles a framework to help him find answers to these questions. He borrows freely from great thinkers of the past and his current research in cosmology, all the while dropping in anecdotes about his own mortality on an LA Freeway near-miss, or contemplating the meaning of the transport malfunction in Star Trek’s “The Enemy Within.” WIRED talked with Carroll about what these ideas mean to him as a scientist, a self-described naturalist, and a human.

In The Big Picture, you talk a lot about poetic naturalism. What is that and how is it different than plain old atheism?

Atheism is a reaction against theism. It is purely a rejection of an idea. It’s not a positive substantive idea about how the world is. Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there’s the physical world and god. Naturalism says there’s only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else. Poetic naturalism emphasizes that there are many ways of talking about the natural world. The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can’t talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will. So poetic naturalism is one way of reconciling what we are sure about the world at an intuitive level. A world that has children. Reconciling that with all the wonderful counterintuitive things about modern science.

The book draws upon elements of your own life, of popular culture, particle physics, history, philosophy and cosmology. What’s the thread that binds all these themes?

It is a long book [Ed. note: 464 pages]. I cut some of it. There are two threads. One is an apologia for naturalism. I’m saying that despite appearances to the contrary in our everyday life, this world we live in is governed by laws that don’t have goals or purpose that are not sustained by anything outside the world. It is just stuff obeying the laws of physics over and over again. The other thread is that that is OK. The fact that you were not put here for any purpose, that we are collections of atoms that always obey the laws of physics is not reason to despair that life is meaningless.

Naturalism says that we were not put here for any purpose. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t such thing as purpose. It just means that purpose isn’t imposed from outside. We human beings have the creative ability to give our lives purposes and meanings. Just as we have the ability to determine what is right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. That point of view is not only allowed, it is challenging and breathtaking in its scope.

Did you change your mind about anything after writing The Big Picture?

Not very much. I think what I believe now is what I’ve always believed. I think the closest I came to changing my mind is I got a renewed appreciation for the subtlety and persuasiveness of the anti-naturalism argument. It’s always easy to hold in your mind a straw man, a vision of people that disagree with you. These are smart people who disagree with you. I tried my best to give them the benefit of the doubt and put forward the best version. I understand more why people would disagree with me.

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Loretta Lynch Just Became the World’s Most Powerful Advocate for Trans Rights

By Mark Joseph Stern

On paper, the current conflict between the U.S. Department of Justice and North Carolina can seem dry, academic even. North Carolina passed a law forbidding trans people from using certain bathrooms that align with their gender identity. The Department of Justice notified the state that its measure violates several federal civil rights laws; North Carolina threw a tantrum, filing a lawsuit against the agency. Then, on Monday, the DOJ struck back, filing suit against North Carolina for infringing on trans residents’ federal civil rights.

The DOJ’s suit is a wonderfully tough, clear-headed document that carefully explains why “sex discrimination”—which is barred in employment and education under federal civil rights law— encompasses gender identity discrimination. Sex, the suit notes, is an incredibly complex concept: “An individual’s ‘sex’ consists of multiple factors, which may not always be in alignment,” including chromosomes, hormones, and gender identity. By distilling sex to the label a hospital put on one’s birth certificate—then restricting bathroom access based on that label—North Carolina “stigmatizes and singles out transgender employees, results in their isolation and exclusion, and perpetuates a sense that they are not worthy of equal treatment and respect.”

“Gender identity is innate,” the suit declares, “and external efforts to change a person’s gender identity can be harmful to a person’s health and well-being.” Then the lawsuit affirms a simple truth that North Carolina has spent months attempting to deny: “A transgender man’s sex is male and a transgender woman’s sex is female.”

That’s all strong and necessary stuff. But you can’t understand the full import of the DOJ’s actions until you watch Lynch’s astonishing speech announcing the lawsuit. Lynch is wry and unassuming in person; on Monday, she was as fierce and passionate as any member of the pantheon of American civil rights defenders. Lynch joined that pantheon on Monday. Her remarks are certainly the most important speech ever delivered on the topic of trans rights by any government official. They are a turning point in the history of LGBTQ rights in the United States, a resounding declaration of the equal dignity of trans Americans.

“This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms,” Lynch explained. “This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them—indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country—haltingly but inexorably—in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans.”

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Huge New Bounty of Exoplanets Found, Including Nine in the Goldilocks Zone

By Phil Plait

Astronomers working with data from the Kepler space telescope have announced the verification of a stunning 1,284 new exoplanets, worlds orbiting other stars. Even better, nine of them are at the right distance from their host stars (the “Goldilocks zone”) to have liquid water on their surface; that is, they’re potentially (so kinda maybe) habitable.

I want to be very careful here. These planets have been verified using a statistical analysis, and each has been found to have a greater than 99 percent chance of being real. That’s very high confidence, but I’ll note that given how many were found, even a 99 percent chance means that some of them will likely turn out to be false positives. But that number will be low, and this new harvest is still huge, the largest single group of validated planets to date.

So how was this done?

Kepler orbits the Sun, on a path very similar to Earth’s orbit but just outside ours. During its main mission, it stared at a single spot in space, observing 150,000 stars all the time. It looked for slight dips in the light from each star, which could be due to the planet passing directly between the star and us (if this sounds familiar, it’s precisely what Mercury did a few days ago, transiting the Sun).

These transits only occur for planets whose orbits are nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, which means that for every one we see, there are probably quite a few we miss. So Kepler puts a lower limit on how many planets are out there.

Even so, quite a few have been found! Up until this latest release, more than 1,000 such transiting verified exoplanets had been dug up from the Kepler data.

The problem is that word: “verified.” How do you know what you’re seeing is an actual planet? A lot of astronomical sources can muck with the data, creating false positives: things that look like planets, but are spurious. For example, some stars are binary, two stars orbiting each other. Some of these are eclipsing binaries; we see their orbit edge-on, so each star passes in front of the other every orbit. If they’re far enough away they look like a single star that goes up and down in brightness, just like an exoplanet transit.

Some of those can be eliminated using various methods. But that still leaves a big passel of candidate planets—ones that might be real—that needs to be verified. Most of these stars are too faint to get reliable results from the ground (that’s why Kepler was launched into space!), so observatories on Earth can’t always follow up. And looking at thousands of stars for the length of time needed to confirm the planets would take years. Decades.

This is where the astronomers in the new study were clever. They took all the candidate planets in the catalog—7,470 “Kepler Objects of Interest”—and ran a statistical analysis on them. This included fitting a simple model to the transit plot, fitting various characteristics of the host star, and assigning predetermined probabilities that the transit is from some spurious source like an eclipsing binary.

Out of the 7,470 input stars, their software ran successfully on 7,056 (the remaining 414 had other problems that made the software results untrustworthy). Of these stars, they found that 1,935 had a 99 percent chance or greater of being real, live transiting exoplanets. Of those, 651 had previously been determined to be real in the Kepler database.

That left 1,284 possible exoplanets with a very high chance indeed of being real. As I said, a handful of these may yet turn out to be false positives, but the overwhelming majority are very likely to be real.

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Why Sex May Be the Greatest Threat to Christianity

By Neil Carter

I recently tweeted something of an epiphany and I’d like to take a minute to unpack what I meant when I said it:

Some days I wonder if an honest look at human sexuality isn’t the strongest counterapologetic to the Christian faith anywhere.

— Neil Carter (@godlessindixie) January 27, 2016

That statement reflects a growing conviction in me that talking about sex triggers something among the religious, something which no other discussion will provoke. There is a fierce protectiveness, a visceral knee-jerk derision which you won’t get when talking about any other topic. This touches a nerve.

Of course, everyone is interested in sex by nature. That’s nothing new. But I’m suggesting that an open and honest discussion about sex threatens something fundamental to the Christian faith. It may very well be that a whole blog about sexuality jeopardizes something which mere argumentation and debate could never touch.

Unless I am wrong (and I am never wrong)* the core of the Christian faith (and of most religions in general) is emotional, not intellectual. It originates with and draws its power from emotions like fear, trust, guilt, hope, ambition, the need to survive, and the need to belong. So try as we may to address the philosophical and theological underpinnings of this religious worldview, we don’t “get through” to them because they already have centuries of intellectual defenses built up against the usual criticisms of their belief system.

I’m not just talking about apologetics, though. I’m also talking about a personal, existential awareness among those of us who deconvert. Many of us, whether gay or straight, gender fluid, trans, or cisgender, encounter this same peculiar discovery: Our growing awareness of our own sexuality drives us further into discovering who we are, and simultaneously away from being able to identify with the Christian faith.

And no, I’m not suggesting that subjective emotional things like sexual attraction and the need to “get your rocks off” are an adequate basis—in and of themselves—for rejecting a worldview which makes claims as grave and consequential as Christianity makes. There are plenty of other, more substantial and objective reasons for doing that. What I’m talking about is more epiphenomenal, like a secondary layer of signals which our own psyches have been sending us, warning us that something about what we were taught just isn’t right.

The Story We Were Told

Put simply, the standard Christian narrative about sexuality is this:

God designed human beings to be heterosexual and sexually dimorphic (distinctively male or female). He designed sex to occur strictly between members of the opposite sex who have entered into lifelong, exclusively monogamous relationships. No other context for sexual intimacy is legitimate. All other contexts produce harm.

Furthermore, sex is either primarily for procreation (if you’re Catholic) or else it is for procreation and pleasure (if you’re anything else), but it still shouldn’t get too kinky, because that is a perversion of what God wants. And when done right, sex is great but it still should never be allowed to rival more spiritual pursuits like prayer, worship, evangelism, and service to others. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all of that, yada yada.

This is the narrative we were taught. It was, quite frankly, beaten into us from our youngest days. And I’m not just describing one or two outlying factions of the historic Christian faith. I’m talking about a standard narrative that has dominated every major stream of this religion since its inception. Anyone who suggests otherwise has not done his homework.

It may be true that today you will find people who have essentially left historic Christianity and are reimagining newer, more progressive ways to reframe their understanding of their religion. More power to them. They may very well find more sex-positive ways to embrace the rich diversity of natural, healthy human sexuality we discover when we aren’t so compelled to shoehorn everyone into this preconceived mold. But they will have to do so in spite of the rest of their Christian brothers and sisters, who will cry foul and label them heretics. These folks will probably feel more at home talking about sex with non-believers than they will with “their own kind.”

In the space that remains, I want to enumerate five different ways that a healthy view and experience of human sexuality creates cognitive dissonance within the mind of a devout Christian. I trust that as I work my way through the list you will see that these are the very reasons why an open and honest discussion about sex feels threatening to the defenders of this religion.

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Electric Cars Are Not Necessarily Clean

Tesla Motors has received more than 325,000 preorders for its hot new Model 3 electric car even though it will not be available for at least another year. That almost equals the 340,000 electric cars and plug-in hybrids now on American roads. Tesla has advertised its vehicles as having zero emissions, helping fuel the mania for the fun-driving sedan, but that’s not necessarily true. Although the battery-powered car itself doesn’t produce any emissions, the power plant that generates the electricity used to charge those batteries probably does. Low emissions, much less zero emissions, are only true in certain places where most of the electricity comes from a mix of low-carbon sources such as the sun, wind or nuclear reactors.

Electric cars are great for eliminating oil from transportation, because very little U.S. electricity is generated by burning petroleum. But electric cars may or may not help the country combat climate change—and it all depends on where the electricity comes from.

Thomas Edison and his electric car.

Credit: Scientific American, January 14, 1911

Cars and trucks are responsible for roughly 24 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution—nearly 1.7 billion metric tons per year. Because those emissions come from hundreds of millions of tailpipes, this source of pollution seems difficult to control. Shifting it to hundreds of smokestacks at power plants that supply electricity to charge electric cars therefore seems like a more effective way to clean up the fleet.

But those smokestacks, many attached to coal-fired power plants, are the single-largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S., at two billion metric tons of CO2 per year. That source would grow as electric cars demand more and more electricity, unless tighter pollution controls are placed on power plants or electric utilities shift to less polluting sources such as solar. As it stands, a conventional Toyota Prius hybrid vehicle, which burns gasoline when its batteries are not engaged, and the all-electric Nissan Leaf produce roughly the same amount of greenhouse gas pollution: 200 grams per mile, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy.

That’s an average across the U.S. In California, which has one of the highest proportions of clean electricity in the country, the electric vehicle would produce only 100 grams per mile, half that of the hybrid. Ditto for Texas and even Florida. But in the Midwest and South, where coal fuels the bulk of electricity generation, a hybrid produces less CO2 than an electric car. In fossil fuel–dependent Minnesota an electric car would actually emit 300 grams per mile of greenhouse gases. As a result, some researchers suggest that a regional approach to clean vehicle standards makes more sense than national standards that effectively require electric cars across the board. Minnesota could go for hybrids and California could go for electric vehicles.

 

Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University

What time of day the recharging electrons flow form a wall plug into an electric car’s batteries also matters in this calculation. Nighttime is often when the wind blows but it is also when utilities like to run only their coal-fired power plants. A recent study found that an electric car charged by utilities at night in the regional grid that stretches across Ohio, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia creates more greenhouse gas pollution than if owners plugged in their vehicles at random times throughout the daytime, when the utility fuel mixes are more varied.

The same argument applies worldwide. Driving an electric car in China, where coal is by far the largest power plant fuel, is a catastrophe for climate change. And if the coal plant lacks pollution controls—or fails to turn them on—it can amplify the extent of smog, acid rain, lung-damaging microscopic soot and other ills that arise from burning fossil fuels. The same is true in other major coal-burning countries, such as Australia, India and South Africa.

The good news: the U.S. is making a tectonic shift from burning coal to produce the majority of its electricity to using cleaner natural gas. The changeover produces less CO2, making electric cars cleaner across the country, roughly equivalent to a hybrid. On the other hand, the primary constituent of natural gas—methane—is itself a potent greenhouse gas. If methane leaks from the wells where it is produced, the pipelines that transport it or the power plants that burn it, the climate doesn’t necessarily benefit.

In short, electric cars are only as good as the electricity that charges them. (A fuel’s source also matters for conventional cars; gasoline derived from tar sands is more polluting than that from most other petroleum resources, for example.) In the absence of clean electricity, hybrid cars that can travel 50 or more miles on a gallon of gasoline produce the least emissions.

Electric cars still constitute less than 1 percent of U.S. car sales, and even less of the global fleet that is now approaching two billion vehicles. So their environmental benefit—dubious for now, until more power plants get off coal—is not very worrisome. The current shift back to SUVs that guzzle much more petroleum than other cars, prompted by low gasoline prices, is a more worrisome sign for future climate change. Perhaps by the time electric cars are ubiquitous, pollution from generating electricity will be zero.

The Secret Life of Sadiq Khan, London’s First Muslim Mayor

By Maajid Nawaz

It’s a piece of history. London has gained her first Muslim mayor, a fellow Pakistani-Brit. And though being Muslim bears absolutely no relevance to how Sadiq Khan intends to run London—for Islam is as ambivalent on the difficulties of London’s housing crisis as it is on the human gene sequence—his religion has become relevant.

In successfully integrating their Muslim residents, London, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the wider West have been going through something of an identity crisis.

Islamist Muslims who insist that humanity can only be judged by how Muslim it is, and anti-Muslim bigots who insist that humanity can only be judged by how Muslim it isn’t, have made Islam relevant.

The Regressive Left in Sadiq Khan’s Labour Party, and the Populist Right among Trump’s Republicans have made Islam a hot topic. The only way Islam will cease being an issue is when everyone, Muslim or not, is deemed to share the same rights, and is held to the very same liberal expectations.

Until then, discrimination will continue to feed the poisonous tribalism fueling modern identity politics. This applies whether that discrimination comes in the form of right-wing anti-Muslim bigotry, or in the form of the left-wing bigotry of low expectations that holds Muslims to lesser, illiberal standards. Until these twin bigotries are dealt with, Sadiq Khan’s religious affiliation will, sadly, remain a topic of debate.

In this way, the victory of London’s new mayor as a non-Islamist Muslim is as much a blow to Islamist bigots as it is to anti-Muslim bigots. This victory speaks to the possibilities of integration. It offers hope for our country’s new immigrant families. And as a symbol of social mobility, it provides aspiration to those from humble backgrounds.

Sadiq Khan’s victory is probably the only bit of good news Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left-led Labour Party can truly celebrate this weekend. And celebrate they should. Democracy has spoken. With it, a torn city might be able to begin healing the old wounds of identity and religion re-opened by the muddy campaign to get Khan elected, and the muddy campaign that opposed him.

These muddy campaigns were in fact a microcosm of the identity problems plaguing modern Europe. Is London’s new mayor an Islamist? This question drove a political pendulum swing to both extremes at the expense of a genuine conversation that really needs to be had.

I’ve known Sadiq Khan since 2002 when he was my lawyer while I served as an Islamist political prisoner in Egypt, before he became a Member of Parliament. I’m forever indebted to him for visiting me in Mazra Tora prison, while the world gave up on me.

Due to this history, many in the press asked me for my view on the veracity of the “Islamist” allegations surrounding the new mayor, but I refused to make my views known until after the elections. Yes, this conversation needed to be had, but I preferred to have it only when the tribalisms of left and right, of Muslim and non-Muslim, were left firmly at the door. Election season made that almost impossible.

Sadiq Khan is no Muslim extremist. And it is not only his track record voting for gay rights that proves this. Having known him when I was a Muslim extremist, I know that he did not subscribe to my then-theocratic views.

Many conservatives who desperately opposed Khan jumped the shark when they called him a “radical Islamist,” and linked him to sensationalist headlines that declared he had a “hardcore Islamist past.” Nuance is the friend of truth.

On the other hand many Muslims, and those on the left, preferred to bury their heads in the sand, chastising anyone who dared to challenge Khan on his past Islamist relationships, as “racists.” See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. The Regressive Left’s overuse of the word racism on such matters is as unhelpful as the Populist Right’s overuse of the word “extremist.”

It is as racist to ask these questions, and to have this conversation, as it was when Londoners questioned the white, non-Muslim former Labour mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, about his links to Islamists, or when the press question the white, non-Muslim Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the maverick white politician George Galloway over their ties to extremists.

In other words it’s not racist at all, as Atma Singh—Labour’s own South-Asian Affairs advisor to a former mayor of London—points out. To imply that it is, and to hold Sadiq Khan to a lesser standard than his white colleagues merely because he is a brown Muslim, is the very bigotry of low expectations that fuels identity politics even further. Alongside the environment, extremism is one of the most pressing issues of our day. Of course it will come up in an election campaign.

And in deference to the seriousness of the subject, and the lives lost over it, what came up about Khan’s alleged links to extremists is pertinent. Those questions needed to be asked. I cannot emphasize enough that I write as a liberal, who voted for a Liberal Democrat in this race, and not as a conservative. So now that the election is over, and London has its first Muslim mayor, let us step back and consider the smoke to this conservative fire.

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