As I head towards Doha where through the World Economic Forum I will be continuing the battle to encourage governments and policy makers to be proactive about technology rather than reactive, Andrew Maynard’s excellent posting on the kerfuffle over using ‘nano’ dispersants to clear up oil is more grist to the mill.
I often despair when policy on environment and health issues seems to be made without any recourse to science, whether on MMR vaccines, GMO’s or the Louisiana clean up. For a background on the alleged dangerous nanotech you can take a look at Andrews blog. But the big issue here is a ridiculous system which often results in us to be unable to make use of technology.
Making wise choices on the dispersants used in the Gulf of Mexico is vitally important, and bad choices could have lasting consequences. And it is right and proper that questions should be asked over the use of one product over another. But if the spill is to be dealt with effectively, these choices must be science-informed – otherwise no-ones interests are served in the long run.
The real question I’ll be looking at in Doha is much longer are we going to have to wade through obfuscation from all sides while the planet dies?
Twenty Four hours ago my colleague Dexter Johnson asked my opinion about what nanotechnology could do to help clean up the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I reluctantly said “not much.”
But this doesn’t have to be the answer, we probably have access to most of the technologies that we would need to make a big dent in the environmental mess that is unfolding, but why haven’t they been used?
The answer, as Andrew Maynard and I found out through our work with the World Economic Forum, is that most governments are reactive rather than proactive. The emphasis is on regulating risk rather than developing technologies that would help us deal more effectively with risk, and this disaster illustrates how, when something goes wrong, governments want to be able to pluck fully formed technologies from a tree. Unfortunately the branches are bare.
So what should we be doing to help us deal with inevitable disasters? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but with a bill estimated at $15 billion for this incident alone, shouldn’t we be spending a few hundred million on making sure that we have the right technologies?
Between nanotechnology, industrial biotech and perhaps even synthetic biology, and not forgetting traditional chemistry I’d bet that we already have 90% of the technology we need. Light, strong, resistant materials for plugging leaks and corralling slicks, enzymes to transform oil into something more manageable, and dispersants to break up the slicks.
It is a certainty that somewhere in the world we will have another oil spill. What is less certain that by then we will have developed the technologies to stop an accident becoming a catastrophe.
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