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Joining me today is Zion Lights, an award-winning science communicator who is known for her vision of a high-energy, low-carbon future. Her latest book is titled Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear.
Zion, tell me, what inspired this book?
There are a lot of good nuclear energy books out there, but they tend to focus on the technology. That’s good, but people who read technical books tend to already agree that nuclear energy is good. I’m trying to convince people to think differently. So, I’ve written this book as a narrative following my journey as an anti-nuclear environmental activist to where I am now, while also explaining things like waste and accidents. Ultimately, I wanted to write something that would have changed my mind if I had read this book 15 years ago when I was out blocking roads.
We recorded an earlier podcast about your journey. But for people who aren’t familiar, could you just quickly summarize your history as an activist?
I’m what you might call a former radical environmentalist. I was very active in the major groups, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, taking part in protests, organizing protests, and lobbying. I was doing all of that from quite a young age, from my teenage years and even before. And part and parcel of that was being anti-nuclear. I went on anti-nuclear protests and signed anti-nuclear petitions.
Over time—and this is a long story, I won’t get into it, but it’s all in the book—I changed my mind and realized how good this technology actually is for the environment. I decided I need to make amends for my own sake, but also because I believe in having clean air and a better future for my children.
Let’s dive into the book. You argue that “Energy is life.” That’s right in the title. What do you mean by that?
When I was in Extinction Rebellion, one of the things that we pushed for was net zero. This idea was influential everywhere, not just in Britain, where the group was founded. All over the world, people were suddenly setting net-zero goals, even in countries with very little capacity to actually meet them. And I’m not saying that the reasons were wrong. Climate change is an issue, and air pollution is an issue. The problem was that net zero or decarbonization became synonymous with renewable energy. That was a huge mistake. It should have been not just clean energy, but what’s cleaner? Gas is cleaner than coal, so really, it should have been a phasing out coal initiative.
I think the reason why net zero was tied to renewables was that activists were really trying to promote energy scarcity. How do we use less? This is an old idea that was present in environmentalism well before I was born. Less stuff, less consumerism, less energy. Even when I was growing up, I remember campaigns on TV about not leaving your lights on when you leave the room and not wasting your tap water. It was really drummed into us. So, net zero got lumped in with “We need to live with less.”
On various panels, I’ve been asked by people in the audience, “Isn’t there a danger of too much?” I think that’s really interesting. Why would there be a danger of having too much? Then, I started to realize it’s because those people aren’t connecting their everyday life with energy. They never had to live with scarcity.
I wrote the book to challenge a lot of those ideas. I’ve tried to have readers imagine their lives without access to reliable electricity. What’s that life like? And do you really want to live that life? Because millions of people don’t.
My parents’ family in the Punjab in India live in a very poor rural area, although it’s not extreme poverty. They have food. They’re rice farmers. But here’s where the issues come in: they’re dependent on rain. If it doesn’t rain enough, then they don’t eat, and they don’t make any money. It’s so hard to imagine having that kind of lifestyle where you can’t just go to the shop and buy whatever you need.
I had friends who’ve gone to India, and they just go to the tourist sites and say, “Oh, it’s so peaceful, and I love how it’s not materialistic. They don’t have that stress of capitalism.” In reality, they don’t have the privilege. They are just trying to get through the day and make sure everybody’s fed, and nobody dies of a preventable disease. In the village, if you get bitten by a snake or a dog, which is very common, you’ll probably just die. The nearest hospital will be hours away by car, which nobody has. A lot of people have bikes. You think you can get to a hospital on a bicycle carrying a sick child when it takes four hours by car? All this impacts education as well. I remember my parents trying to pay for a teacher to live in the village. They’re very well off compared to most people in India, so they had a building built, thinking they were giving something back to a community, and they couldn’t find a teacher, even after offering a really good salary, who’d be willing to live in a village where they might die of a snakebite.
So they don’t have those privileges that we have, and spreading those privileges will require burning a lot of fossil fuels. It is going to be coal, then gas, to enable access to things like public transport, hospitals, and schools. And then if you have a school, you could have people there who know how to administer antivenom. You’ll have all of those incremental things that we developed over time that come with having access to energy.
So, it’s the people who grew up with abundant energy that protest that same benefit and say, “Well, we’ve had too much.” And I think some of that comes from guilt. But feeling guilty doesn’t help my family in India. You trying to get people to use less is actually detrimental to them because then you have things like COP, where poor countries get pressured to sign agreements to burn less fossil fuels.
Many energy discussions, you point out, focus almost entirely on emissions targets. Why do you think people take that approach, and how can we improve upon that?
For quite a few people, climate change equals the apocalypse, so that is the sole problem they think we should be focused on. They also seem to not pay much attention to human wellbeing. In a way, they think people are part of the problem. And that’s where the scarcity argument comes from, the idea that we need to have less. That kind of self-flagellation might make activists feel less guilty, but it doesn’t really help those who are impacted by climate change.
For me, it’s a bit different. I want the planet to be healthy because I care about people. I want my neighbor to be healthy. I want people to be well-fed and not struggling.
Poverty is one of the many issues where I think we could have moved forward a bit more than we have. We’ve got brilliant thinkers crunching out reports explaining how we can alleviate poverty, and it hasn’t happened because we’re over-focused on environmental targets. I have spoken to people who do this work independently, trying to alleviate poverty, and they have said to me privately, “The climate thing’s just taken over. It’s hard to get funded for anything because all anyone cares about is climate.” I’m not saying climate change is not an issue, I’m just saying it’s not the only issue.
How do you respond to the idea that prosperity must mean restraint and degrowth?
Someone I knew in Extinction Rebellion was going to go and live in this community with some other degrowthers. He’s one of the most well-off people I know. He’s an academic professor, he’s got a country house, he’s got everything that might create a perfect life, but obviously, he didn’t feel like that, otherwise he wouldn’t be saying, “Well, I need to go and live on the land.” It’s almost because he has everything that he wanted that he believes he’s unhappy because of modern society.
It’s almost because he has everything that he wanted that he believes he’s unhappy because of modern society. That’s a very common argument. “Our mental health is bad because of how we live.” I’ve had people say that to me, and I’ve said, “Well, do you think that people living in poverty have good mental health?” Where’s that assumption coming from? You just think that they’re happy every day because they can’t go to a shop and buy whatever they want or have whatever they want to eat for dinner?
When I visited India, I would ask people, “What would you do if you could leave?” When I asked my cousin, she said, “Well, I can’t leave. I’ve got to support my brother, who’s disabled. I’ve got to help my mum cook.” I couldn’t even get her to imagine having these choices. This academic and these Degrowth people would say, “Oh, they’re so selfless.” No, they just don’t have a choice. They don’t have the choice to think about their own needs. They don’t think in terms of choice because poverty takes away their choices. I remember saying to her, “You could be a doctor.” And she just said, “No, I could never. I don’t have the money to do it. I don’t even know how to fill in the forms.” All of those things were true. There are so many barriers that she couldn’t even think of it as a possibility. And that made me sad because even on the hardest day, I still think, “How can tomorrow be better? What could I do differently? What are my choices?” They are endless.
If I wanted to, I could go and live on the land and embrace degrowth and grow my own food, but I’d only be pretending. If I got sick, I could still go to a hospital. The people who really live in the situation of degrowth, where they have a very low carbon footprint, also have very little agency.
If you look at it honestly, the idyllic idea of “living on the land” is not actually better for the environment on any metric. People in dense cities consume much less than those in the country. When lots of people live in one place, when they are connected to a grid and have public transport or can walk to places, they become really efficient. And people are already moving to the cities, so all the policy needs to do is make sure that the cities are well-connected and that we have access to everything we need to.
I live in what you’d call a 15-minute city. I know that’s taken on negative connotations with people, but everything I need is within 15 minutes. There is a primary school, a secondary school, several supermarkets, and a post office that I use regularly. I moved here specifically because I wanted to be somewhere where I could get to these things on foot. It’s much easier and also definitely much better for the environment. To live this way, I need the grid, and I would like the grid to be clean and reliable and not reliant on gas from Russia.
I would like it to be better than that. Our electricity is very expensive. It’s not the most expensive in Europe, but it’s up there. We could do what France did. In 10 years, we could build 58 reactors and decarbonize the grid. That would tick the box on our climate goals, but most importantly, it would make electricity cheaper at home. I have been told several times that it’s too ambitious, but I think it’s less ambitious to do what France did than to try and do what Germany did, which is decarbonize with just wind and solar. For some reason, that’s not seen as ambitious, but that’s the thing that we know doesn’t work.
Why do you think there is so much skepticism toward nuclear power? And why is it so misunderstood by the public?
The reason that I was afraid of nuclear technology for quite a long time was that it was conflated with weapons. Once I started thinking about energy, and then separating the military and civil technology, I realized that there’s not as much crossover as they’ve made out. And actually, it’s very, very difficult to develop nuclear weapons.
And then there are scary stories that we hear all the time. Like, there’s a new Chernobyl series, right? They’re constantly pumping these out. Just the word is enough to scare people. One story I was told by some of these activist organizations was that loads of people died because of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant meltdown. Now, if you look into it, they actually died because of the tsunami and the earthquake, not the meltdown. I mean, I even got it from The Simpsons. The most evil person in The Simpsons is Mr. Burns, the nuclear industry owner. And what’s a nuclear plant worker like? Homer Simpson. Lazy and irresponsible. One of the worst caricatures of a person. Even in the intro, there’s nuclear fuel portrayed as green, goopy waste just lying around.
These stories caused entire populations to associate nuclear energy with a bad feeling, and environmentalists used that fear and pushed it further.
If listeners take away just one idea from your book, what should it be?
I would like people to stop thinking in terms of scarcity. We’ve always been told, “You’re wasteful. Are you wasting food? Are you wasting electricity? Do you need to buy that thing?” That message, which is pushed all the time, makes us feel guilty for our prosperity, and in the extreme, it leads people to believe we should give it all up.
So, instead of saying, “these people have too much,” we should ask, “How do we get this to more people? How do we make this thing more efficient? How can we make better technology?” The reason we got to where we are today is that we kept pushing for more. That is the space in which human progress happens.
The best word for it is abundance. I want to see abundance for everybody, and I want to get rid of this old Malthusian idea that we can’t have it for everybody, or the planet will die.
