What’s Wrong With Biomass Burning? Everything!

BY GEORGE WUERTHNER  APRIL 25, 2023

 APRIL 25, 2023

Biomass plant, Boardman, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Presently around the West, the Forest Service, timber advocates, and far too many conservation organizations are promoting biofuels and biomass energy as “Green Energy.” The FS and its allies want to cut more wood (which they term fuels or “waste” while I call it wildlife habitat and carbon storage) from the forest and use it to produce some products that society values, like jet fuel or even heating buildings.

But the only thing “green” about biomass energy or fuel is the subsidies that government agencies bestow.

Those promoting the biomass fuel and energy juggernaut suggest that burning wood is “clean energy “and carbon neutral. However, biofuels and biomass energy are not clean, not carbon neutral, and not sustainable.

For instance, the City of Prineville, Oregon, promotes the construction of a 20 MW biomass burner. In their promotional literature, the city says: “The City and County will utilize the PREP to reduce the risk of severe wildfires, reinvent jobs in the natural resources/forest products industries, diversify energy supplies, reduce CO2 emissions, and reinvigorate the community and local economy, all while offering a clean, renewable energy source.”

In announcing its intention to construct biomass burners, Mount Bachelor  Ski Resort makes the same happy talk about the benefits of wood-burning biomass.

And just this week in California, another biomass burner is about to be constructed in Birney–with the same delusional remarks about “clean” energy and how it will convert “waste” wood into electrical power.

Prineville, Mount Bachelor, and other promoters of biomass are feeding the public timber and biomass industry propaganda. I am sure they believe what they are saying but ignore contrary information.

SUBSIDIES AND ECONOMICS

Most biomass burners are not economical. They often receive massive subsidies of two kinds—direct funding from government agencies and the environmental damage they promote.

In most cases in the West, the wood source or “fuel” for biomass operations results from deforestation. These deforestation projects destroy biodiversity, pollute the land and air, and worsen climate change. And like almost all Forest Service logging projects, they also lose money, so they are yet another form of subsidy.

The other subsidies are direct grants and funding that biomass projects receive from government sources.

Recently the City of Prineville received a million-dollar grant from the Forest Service to help construct its proposed biomass burner.

The biomass burner being constructed in Burney, California received a $5 million dollar grant.

Like other projects, Mount Bachelor’s proposed biomass burner is subsidized with state and federal government grants. So why should taxpayers be funding a private business?

An even worse waste of tax dollars is the Red Rocks Biofuel plant in Lakeview, Oregon which has received over $350 million in public funding. Making these subsidies all the more disastrous is that the Red Rocks plant has never opened and recently went bankrupt.

The Red Rocks proposal was supported by a $75 million funding award from the Department of Defense, more than $2 million in infrastructure improvement from the town of Lakeview, and about $300 million in tax-exempt economic development bonds issued in 2018 through the state of Oregon. Unfortunately, all of these taxpayers and bondholders are losers.

The only good thing about the demise of the Red Rocks Biofuel project is that it means fewer trees will be logged to supply the plant with its biomas from the Fremont National Forest.

Due to the cost of transportation, cutting trees for wood burner operations typically is only economical for a 25–35-mile radius. Two things occur as a result.

First, biomass burners must bring fuel from more distant sources, which adds to their costs, often absorbed by ratepayers or government subsidies. The burner operations put more pressure on federal and state forests to provide more local fuel, which can lead to even more significant deforestation.

Furthermore, they remove funding from less polluting and destructive projects like distributed solar.

POLLUTION

Another problem with the moniker that biomass is “clean” is that they pollute the atmosphere with carbon and toxins that are damaging to health. Participant matter from burner emissions is continuous throughout the year rather than associated with one-time seasonal events like wildfires. People with asthma and other breathing issues are vulnerable to emissions.

Proponents argue that biomass burners operate at high temperatures that eliminate most toxins. But they don’t tell the public that during the start-up and shutdown phase, burners operate at far lower temperatures and emit significant amounts of pollutants during these periods.

Even worse for the atmosphere and human health is that biomass burners often consume the available nearby wood and then start to include building waste, railroad ties, tires, and other materials that contain numerous toxic materials in the mix.

WOOD IS AN INEFFICIENT ENERGY SOURCE

Because wood is less “energy dense” than alternatives from coal to natural gas, it requires more of it to produce the same amount of heat or “work” as producing electricity. So to get the same amount of energy for generators, wood-burning operations release far more carbon per unit of electrical power than alternative fuels. I’m not arguing that we should burn fossil fuels-we need to reduce all forms of carbon fuel sources, but believing that the substitution of wood is better than other fuels is misleading.

Researchers working with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) concluded that a wood-burning plant would have higher net carbon emissions than a comparable coal plant for the first 4 decades or more of operations.

The problem for society is that we must reduce all carbon emissions now. If the ice sheets melt in the next 20-30 years and flood places like Miami or New Orleans, it doesn’t matter if, in 40-50 years, burning wood might have less overall emissions (due to carbon capture by the new growth of trees over decades).

CARBON RELEASES

Logging the forest releases stored carbon. Industry shills suggest that burning wood is different from burning natural gas or other fossil fuels because it is “biogenic carbon,” meaning the growth of trees produces it, thus carbon “neutral.”

Logging in Oregon easily contributes far more carbon into the atmosphere than even the worse large blazes. Indeed, 35% of Oregon’s carbon is the result of logging.

An article in Earth Island Institute provides some clarity on wood and carbon. “About 28 percent of tree carbon is contained in branches, which is emitted when burned after logging operations. An additional 53 percent of the carbon in trees removed from forests is emitted as waste in the manufacturing and milling process. Overall, about two-thirds of the carbon in trees that are logged for lumber quickly become greenhouse gas emissions.” Since biomass operations burn an even greater amount of the tree (like branches), the amount of carbon released is significantly greater.

The green piece of the pie represents the amount of Carbon emissions from logging and wood products in Oregon. 

However, this biocarbon has taken decades to centuries to accumulate but is released immediately when burned. Since most biomass operations use whole trees, they effectively release the bulk of all stored carbon.

Even a forest fire does not release most of the stored carbon. Instead, carbon remains on site as snags, down wood, roots in the ground, and charcoal. Though much of this may be released over time as decomposition occurs, it may take centuries to release all the available carbon in a tree.

FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT “FUELS” AND FIRES

A further complication is that these projects, often subsidized by state and federal government grants, are based on flawed assumptions about logging projects on public lands. For example, most of these biomass proposals argue that we must reduce the density of trees on forestlands to eliminate or at least diminish major wildfires.

For instance, the city of Prineville, Oregon, is building a biomass burner using a grant from the Forest Service. Unfortunately, similar biomass burners or other facilities like biomass fuel production, including a plant by Lakeview, Oregon, are all heavily subsided by federal grants, not to mention the removal of wood from forest ecosystems.

All of these projects are using wood cut on national forest lands predicted on the premise that logging will preclude or slow wildfire spread and reduce carbon emissions. However, there is an abundance of scientific studies that present contrary evidence. Climate and weather are the primary drivers of large western blazes, not fuels.

For instance, in 2018, researchers from Oregon State University in Ecological Applications reported: “Daily fire weather was the most important predictor of fire severity, followed by stand age and ownership, followed by topographic features. Estimates of pre-fire forest biomass were not an important predictor of fire severity.”

They conclude: “Our findings suggest intensive plantation forestry characterized by young forests and spatially homogenized fuels, rather than pre-fire biomass, were significant drivers of wildfire severity.”

Similarly, another review paper that looked at 1500 fires in ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests across the West concluded that active forest management (AKA logging) resulted in higher severity blazes than areas with no logging or other fuel treatments.

Plus logging emissions are far greater than those resulting from wildfires says OSU researcher Bev Law : “When you have a disturbance such as fire, and when wood is removed and harvested and put into wood products, you have to follow the carbon,” she said. “And it turns out that … harvest-related emissions are five to seven times that of the fire emissions in Oregon.”

PROFORESTATION

One of the best ways we can promote carbon storage is through trees. Proforestation provides a bridge for society that will allow us to move from burning fossil fuels to alternative energy sources (including simply energy conservation through the insulation of structures).

Merely allowing trees to mature and grow can store significant amounts of carbon are nearly no cost. The best use of our national forests is not for wood production but for carbon storage. Of course, this would also have ancillary benefits like providing wildlife habitat, preserving wildlands, and reducing government waste (currently going to promote biomass operations).

Bev Law of Oregon State University along with colleagues advocates creating strategic forest reserves to promote carbon storage and biodiversity protection.

As Bill Moomaw of Yale University suggests: “The most effective thing that we can do is to allow trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their full ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services,” said Moomaw. “Cutting trees to burn them is not a way to get there.”

George Wuerthner has published 36 books including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. 

The Korean Peninsula and the US Drumbeat to War in East Asia

BY SIMONE CHUNFacebook

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South Korea’s far-right President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was elected by a narrow margin of 0.7% last year, is in Washington, D.C. this week for a state visit at the invitation of President Biden.

According to The New England Korea Peace Campaign, Boston Candlelight Action Committee, and Massachusetts Peace Action which are preparing to hold a protest on Friday, April 28th in Cambridge, MA during Yoon’s visit to Harvard, “Since entering office, Yoon’s right-wing administration has expanded costly and provocative US-ROK military exercises, heightened tensions with North Korea, rolled back workers’ rights, threatened to abolish the ministry of gender equality, and has taken many other actions to undermine struggles for peace and justice in South Korea”.

Indeed, backed by Washington, President Yoon has pursued extreme hawkish policies directly against South Korea’s national interests.

Yoon’s state visit comes at a time when South Korea is experiencing unprecedented crises on the political, economic and national security fronts as a consequence of the Biden Administration’s unrelenting pressure on South Korea to join the US anti-China bloc.

Moreover, domestically, Yoon has installed a new National Security State, which experts refer to as the “republic of prosecution.”

His administration is engaging in a massive political witch-hunt of his opponents, arresting key top officials of the previous Moon administration, and targeting the opposition Democratic Party and progressive political leaders.

Yoon is using South Korea’s national-security laws and red-baiting rhetoric to crack down on unions and those who are working for peace and unification.

For example, on January 28 of this year, Jeong Yu-JIn, Director of Education of the Gyongnam Progressive Alliance and a mother of two, was arrested on charges of being a North Korean spy, an allegation she has steadfastly denied. Having been arrested, detained, and forced to make a false confession without access to an attorney, she engaged in a 40-day hunger strike in detention, which she only ended after 300 Koreans joined her hunger strike in solidarity. Although the hunger strike severely harmed her health, she remains steadfast and is preparing for her trial, with her greatest fear being that her two children remain without the care of their mother indefinitely.

Yoon’s eagerness to prove his administration’s worth as a linchpin in Washington’s new Cold War in Asia means that there will be more repression and prosecution such as this.

Washington’s backing of a repressive political regime under an extreme far-right president whose inexperience in foreign policy and disregard for political norms is ushering in a new era of domestic and international uncertainty and risk for South Korea.

Washington’s policies run directly counter to the sentiments of the majority of South Koreans, who strongly support balanced foreign relations with Russia and China, meaningful reconciliation with Japan, and peace with North Korea.

According to recent polls, 80% of Koreans oppose the degree to which Yoon has capitulated to Washington’s imposition of its anti-China policy on South Korea.

Washington’s endorsement of Yoon and its support for his new National Security State directly contravenes the majority of South Korean public opinion.

According to recent figures, the Yoon administration has an abysmal 19% public approval rating.

While the purpose of Yoon’s state visit is to prove his relevance to US imperial ambitions in Asia, Washington’s increasingly heavy-handed management of its one-sided relationship with South Korea is causing it to lose the battle for the hearts and minds among the South Korean public.

An Evening With Noam Chomsky:

The Korean Peninsula and the US Drumbeat to War in East Asia

Presented by JNC TV

April 26th, 2023, 4:00 PM PST/April 27, 8:00 AM KST

Moderator: Simone Chun, Korea Policy Institute

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Join us for a critical discussion with Noam Chomsky regarding the disastrous implications of Washington’s military encirclement of China on the future of the Korean Peninsula. This forum is endorsed by 35 international peace organizations working to foster global activism to counter the growing danger of US brinkmanship in the Asia-Pacific region.

Register: https://bit.ly/3ljXUPh

Youtube Live: https://youtu.be/MWd7G42-uHs

Contact: simonechun@gmail.com

Endorsed By: Action One, Korea Atlanta Civic Action, Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation, Civic Group INDEPENDENCE, CodePink, Justice  & Peace Committee, New York, Korean American Public Action Committee (KAPAC), Koreans for Woori Schools, Korea Policy Institute, Korea International Peace Forum, Korean Progressive Coalition of Seattle, Korean New Zealanders for a Better Future, Massachusetts Peace Action, National Committee for Independent Democracy and Peaceful Reunification, New England Korea Peace Campaign, Peace Action, Peace21, Peace Philosophy Centre, Vancouver, Canada, RootsAction.org, Seattle Evergreen Coalition, The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, The 6.15 US Committee for Reunification of Korea, The National Institute of Hahm Sok Hon Philosophy, People For Peaceful Korean Unification, Toronto Citizens Alliance for Peace, Toronto Chapter for Korean Universal Basic Income, University of Toronto Alumni for Korea Peace, Veterans For Peace, chapter 113 Hawaii, Veterans For Peace, chapter 69, San Francisco, VFP’s Korea Peace Campaign, Women Cross DMZ, World BEYOND War.

TikTok and US National Insecurity

BY MEL GURTOV 

 APRIL 25, 2023

 APRIL 25, 2023

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Photograph Source: Solen Feyissa – CC BY-SA 2.0

High-tech spying is in the news because of the one-sided, hypocritical debate in Congress on whether the popular app TikTok is actually a tool for Chinese government data collection on American users. The sensitivity of the issue has to do not only with rivalry with China but also the fact that the US government has recently been the target of hackers.

In November 2021 President Biden banned use of Pegasus, a powerful Israeli-made surveillance tool, by all US government agencies. His order came in the wake of two developments: hackers who used Pegasus to break into the phones of some State Department employees, and investigative journalism that revealed use of Pegasus by many governments, democratic as well as autocratic, to break into the cell phones of political opponents and human rights activists.

As the New York Times has just found, not all US agencies have apparently gotten the message; an unnamed government agency is said to be using the nearly undetectable surveillance device in Mexico. Meantime, the phones of 50 more US government employees have been hacked.

The US case against TikTok, however, sidesteps two matters: the US government’s own spying on citizens under cover of law, and the questionable political motives that seem to dictate the specific effort to kill TikTok.

Fear of Spying

Congress members are far more concerned about the US government as victim of spying than as perpetrator. We’ve just been reminded of that with the top-secret documents hacked by an Air Force reservist that revealed US spying on various allies as well as on Russia.

That spying is widely considered legitimate, but Congress members prefer to forget the long history of government spying on unsuspecting citizens, a history that goes well beyond the Cold War. Various agencies—Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the State Department—have monitored social media to report on “national security” dangers.

Leaders of Black Lives Matter, left and right political parties and resistance groups, immigrants from Muslim and socialist countries, environmental activists—the list of targeted groups is long. To that list should be added the mainstream social media—Facebook, Twitter, Google—that have given government agencies access to users’ personal information and communications. Their data collection probably exceeds TikTok’s, but somehow they are not considered national security threats.

Legislation passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress has cemented the government’s right to invade privacy, most recently to combat terrorism. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 permits electronic and other means of surveillance of US citizens suspected of being “agents of foreign powers.” A FISA court, consisting of 11 federal district judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, considers applications to carry out surveillance and may issue warrants based on probable cause.

FISA has been amended several times—the USA Freedom Act (2015) is the latest version—but has been challenged as an unconstitutional violation of personal liberty. That’s because catching terrorists was used to justify creation of a huge data base that went well beyond counterterrorism.

The Freedom Act puts some limits on metadata collection, but still has provisions for warrantless surveillance, for instance against whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden. Courts have rarely ruled against US government intrusion, usually when national security is the justification.

But then there’s the 2013 case in which the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, decided that Amnesty International lacked standing to challenge FISA. The case was brought against James Clapper, then director of national intelligence.

The TikTok “Threat”

To judge from the virulence of the rhetoric, TikTok is one of China’s biggest threats to US national security. Congress members actually seem to believe that killing off TikTok would be a major victory over a malevolent foreign power—a way to “protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put it. TikTok is owned by Bytedance, a Chinese technology company, but its CEO claims the company does not share data with the Chinese government, has independent management, and is willing to store its US data in the US.

Now I have to say that I have never used TikTok, nor do I even know anyone who does. But the roughly 150 million Americans who use it swear by it; TikTok has become an icon of US culture.

A number of countries, including the European Union, Denmark, New Zealand, and India, have restricted government use of TikTok or banned it altogether. But I have yet to see evidence that TikTok is channeling Chinese propaganda or amassing anyone’s personal data to be offloaded to Beijing.

Yet Congress members, and the Biden administration, are determined either to ban TikTok or force its sale, which the Chinese government opposes on the grounds that would harm investments in the US. The political lineup against TikTok mirrors the bipartisan consensus in Congress that is hostile to most anything Chinese-made or owned.

Allowing TikTok to continue operating but ensuring that its database resides in a US server such as Oracle would seem to be a reasonable answer for those who insist TikTok is a security threat. At one time the administration supported that idea.

But now we learn that Biden has “endorsed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give the Commerce Department the clear power to ban any app that endangered Americans’ security.”

That’s the authoritarian solution, but it would probably satisfy the China hawks, who love the prospect of turning public attention away from America’s real security issues. Their posturing on TikTok may fool some people, but far from strengthening national security, it reveals how insecure government leaders are when dealing with China.

Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Perspective, an international affairs quarterly and blogs at In the Human Interest.

The Promethean Antikythera Computer of Greek Civilization

BY EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS 

APRIL 25, 2023
 APRIL 25, 2023

Painting of the Antikythera Mechanism by the Greek mathematician Dionysios Kriaris. One sees the Cosmos, the front of the computer, and the back with the black spirals of the 19-year Metonic calendar and the 18-year predictive Saros dial. Courtesy Kriaris

Overview

Suppose you could travel back in time to the third century BCE, and visit Alexandria, the capital city of the Greek kingdom of Egypt. Arguably it was the most enlightened, wealthy, and powerful of all the Greek states that flourished after the death of Alexander the Great.

Alexandria was famous for: its Mouseion, university- institute of advanced studies, and the Great Library which was the repository of all the collected wisdom and knowledge of the Greek and Mediterranean world. The Great Library was rather as if you had merged Cambridge, with Harvard, MIT, and the Library of Congress. Among its collections one could find the works of epic poets like Homer and Hesiod, tragic poets like Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides, historians like Herodotos and Thucydides, as well as philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and scientists like Demokritos, Hippokrates, Alkmaion of Croton, Aristarchos of Samos, Eratosthenes, Euclid, Archimedes, Hipparchos, Geminos, Ptolemaios and Galen.

However, if you were to travel forward in time to visit Alexandria 800 years later, in the fifth century of our era, you would find no trace of the Great Library of Alexandria, nor of its sister Mouseion-university. Both had been destroyed by Christian religious zealots. In 415 of our era, a mob of Christian monks told the world that Christianity had no need of the Greeks, nor of their philosophy, science, or literature. To drive home their point, they publicly murdered and tore limb from limb Hypatia, the mathematician and philosopher who headed a leading school of philosophy in Alexandria.

In the 6th century, Justinian, the Christian Emperor of the Eastern Roman empire (Medieval Greece), closed and suppressed the Platonic Academy in Athens, which had existed for more than 900 years. These attacks upon the culture of ancient Greece heralded an enveloping wave of darkness and ignorance for both East and West. This anti-intellectual, Christian fanaticism plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, for almost a thousand years.

These officially sanctioned attacks on Greek philosophy and science gave Christian monks a license to destroy and obliterate treasures of science, including some of the works of Archimedes, the mathematical and engineering genius of the 3rd century BCE. The monks literally scraped the ink from the parchment pages of Archimedes’ scientific texts and then re-filled the erased pages with the texts of religious hymns.

It happened.
Modern dramas with ancient Greek science

In 1998, an American paid $ 2 million for a 769-year-old Christian prayer book known as a palimpsest (a manuscript from which the original text had been scraped-off and which had then been used again). Christian prayer-texts were superimposed over the erased scripts of three works of Archimedes. The slim hope of revealing the lost thoughts of Archimedes was the sole reason why the philanthropist was willing to pay a vast sum of money for the ‘ghost’ of a vanished book.

In 2005, seven years after the Archimedes palimpsest surfaced in New York, an even greater drama was unfolding in the basement of the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens. A team of Greek, British and American scientists and engineers had been struggling to “decode” the secrets of an ancient Greek astronomical device: the “Antikythera Mechanism.” This ancient astronomical computer had been raised from the waters of the tiny Aegean island of Antikythera by sponge divers in 1900. However, in 1900, the technology which could probe the innermost workings of this eroded and encrusted lump of metal did not exist.

Meanwhile, Greek, and foreign scientists kept photographing and handling the fragile surviving fragments of the ancient device. This precipitated the break-up of the mechanism to some 82 fragments.

Front and back sides of the 7 largest and most important fragments of the Antikythera computer. Fragment A is the governing part of the device, enclosing 27 of the surviving 30 gears. Some of those gears are visible on the back side of Fragment A. The back side of Fragment B shows the spirals of the 235-month 19-year Metonic calendar. Courtesy Tom Malzbender and Hewlett Packard.

The early twentieth-century investigators of the Antikythera device also played a guessing game, calling it different names and proposing wrong explanations of its origins and functions. In general, they were reluctant to admit it was part of Hellenic culture. Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist and historian of science and professor at Yale, rejected those doubts and documented in his 1974 seminal report, Gears from the Greeks, that the Antikythera computer was “a singular artifact, the oldest existing relic of scientific technology.” It took another 30 years or so of technological advances before science was able to confirm and advance Price’s findings.

Using microfocus X-ray computed tomography (X-ray CT) and polynomial texture mapping (PTM), belonging to British and American companies, scientists were shocked to discover an interior mechanism of meshed toothed gears, which pointed to a sophisticated and complex mathematical instrument. From the nearly invisible inscriptions engraved on the front and back plates of the bronze device, the experts estimated that the computer was probably manufactured in the 2nd century BCE. In other words, it was over 2,200 years old.

The gears in the interior of the bronze Antikythera astronomical computer. Most of these surviving gears are inside Fragment A. Painting by the Greek artist Evi Sarantea. Courtesy Sarantea.

How can the sale of a Medieval Christian prayer book, (a palimpsest written over the works of Archimedes), possibly be linked to the x-ray investigation of the Antikythera device? In fact, they are parallel threads of the same narrative, which illuminate the fate of Greek science and civilization.

What happened to the advanced work of scientists like Archimedes during the Dark Ages?

Did the ancient Greeks really develop a sophisticated science and technology more than 2,000 years ago? Moreover, if they did achieve such levels of complexity, is the Antikythera Mechanism the product of those same advanced technologies?

Greek computer of genius

My research for writing my book on the Antikythera Mechanism, reveals that the ancient Greeks did indeed develop an advanced science and advanced metal fabrication technologies, which enabled them to build the Antikythera machine. This is extremely important because, to date some classical scholars and scientists have labored under the illusion that modern science is largely the product of post 15th century European thought. They forget that without the mathematical physics of Archimedes Galileo might have been a priest of barber but not a famous physicist. Moreover, they believe that the Greeks never developed technology, much less the advanced technologies needed to construct a mechanical computer and universe, such as the Antikythera Mechanism. In fact, some of the enemies of Hellenic civilization say the Antikythera Mechanism is a time machine, the handiwork of extraterrestrial astronauts.

This propaganda against the Greeks fits nicely with the hubris of scientists dismissing Greek achievements. They say, modern science has taken us to the moon. How can the ancient Greeks possibly be compared to us, they ask. The Greeks fought their wars with bows and arrows, did they not? We have ICBMs, satellite guided predator drones and nuclear weapons. Why should we care if the Greeks ever developed advanced technology?
Why the Greeks?

“We are all Greeks.” These were the heartfelt words of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821: “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece.”^[1] Shelley was one of many Philhellenes who fought alongside the Greeks during the War of Independence, in the heroic struggle to expel the Turkish occupiers of their homeland.

Jacob Burckhardt, the famous Swiss cultural historian, was grateful to the Greeks for laying the foundations of Western culture, enabling men to become civilized. He said in 1872 that the Europeans see the world through the eyes of the Greeks and to abandon them would be to accept their own decline.^[2]

In 1948, the English poet W. H. Auden suggested that the people of the West owe their very existence to the Greeks. He said the Greeks taught us to think about thinking, that is, to ask questions. Without the Greeks, he said, “we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or worse, fully human.”^[3]

In the late 1950s, E. J. Dijksterhuis, Dutch historian of mathematics and natural sciences, said that any inquiry on the origins of present-day knowledge inevitably leads us back to Hellas, especially in mathematics and natural sciences.^[4]

And in 1999, the English scholar and historian, Charles Freeman, argued that the Greeks “provided the chromosomes of Western civilization.”^[5]

These scholars are right. The Greeks are us. Greek science made the Antikythera astronomical computer. The Greeks thought of science and technology existed mainly for the good of society as well as for understanding nature.

Computer of heavens and Earth

The Antikythera Mechanism was not merely a bauble for the elite to educate themselves about the heavens. It was the workhorse of an evolving technology which provided knowledge about the heavens, connecting the Greeks to Nature, their culture. and the gods.

The Antikythera computer illuminates the relevance of Greek thought and engineering to our own times. Our computer-based society is undoubtedly built on the marvels of high technology. However, if technology is not used for the ‘public good’ it can undermine society rather than being a benefit to it, as we see in the current misplaced excitement about Artificial Intelligence.

Galen, the Greek medical genius of the 2nd century of our era and the greatest physician after Hippocrates, put it bluntly. If wealth is put before virtue, he said, it spoils and corrupts science.^[6] In marked contrast, the Antikythera device came into being to serve the public good. It brought the heavens nearer to Earth and into human understanding. It served as an accurate calendar of human events and a calendar of the celestial universe, a moving map of the constellations and a mirror of nature and the heavens.

We admire the ancient Greeks for their invention of Democracy. We celebrate their unsurpassed achievements in providing us with the foundations of: literature, epic poetry, theater, architecture, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and the Olympic Games.

Greek foundations of modern science

It is the fact that the Greeks, laid the foundations of modern science, the ultimate touchstone of knowledge and power, that makes them so important to us. That is why the discovery of a vandalized book of Archimedes was big news and the decoding of a 2200-year-old Greek computer has been of extraordinary importance.

The Antikythera discovery was undoubtedly the key to unlocking a better understanding of ancient Greek science. This ancient computer gives us profound new insights into the science and philosophy of ancient Greece that has reshaped our conception of the origins of Western science. Moreover, on a purely human level, the story of the discovery of the computer, the researchers and scholars who unraveled its secrets is a compelling drama in its own right. Why did Modern Greek scientists wait a century and the initiative of foreign scientists before they embarked on the decoding of this ancient computer? Could it be that the state of Greece could not afford the research? Indebted Greece has been looted by foreigners, so it could not even think of the importance of the Antikythera computer. But the few Greek scientists that grasped the significance of the ancient device value it much more than their British and American colleagues.

Laptop predictive computer

An additional view of the interlocking toothed gears of the Antikythera computer. Modified by Alexander Nicaise of the Skeptical Inquirer. Courtesy Nicaise.

The complicated set of interlocking cogs and wheels of the Antikythera Mechanism were governed by a differential gear. Ιn itself this was a technological marvel of enormous importance. It could accurately predict the phases of the Moon. Throughout the twentieth century and for almost two decades of the twenty-first century, archaeologists, scientists, and historians of science struggled to unlock the true nature of this ancient computer. Finally after the new discoveries of Derek de Solla Price in 1974 and again those discoveries of 2005, the picture is clear.

The Antikythera device played the role of a mechanical universe. In fact, it was a predictive mechanical universe in itself, carrying out the predictive legacy of the Titan god Prometheus (forethought). It predicted eclipses of the Sun and the Moon. It computed the motions and positions of the planets. It provided an accurate calendar for farmers, who were concerned over when to sow and harvests. It enabled priests to make sacrifices to the gods at the correct season, that is, when the gods expected the offerings.

The Antikythera computer also tracked the Panhellenic religious and athletic festivals like the Olympics. It was powered by a simple manual crank. Yet, for all its simplicity, this portable (laptop) astronomical device was a product of an advanced science and technology. Its triumph was to unite the heavens and the Earth, to illuminate the workings of the Cosmos for human inspection and to provide practical knowledge that enriched the lives of its users.

An early reproduction of the Antikythera Mechanism by Dionysios Kriaris. The front or Cosmos does not include the planets, but it shows a golden sphere of the Sun at the center and a smaller sphere depicting a phase of the Moon. This Cosmos is surrounded by two spherical zones, the outside representing the 365-day year calendar. The inside circle is the Zodiac of 12 constellations. Behind the Cosmos, we see the upper spiral of the 19-year Metonic calendar. The lower spiral is the 18-year predictive Saros dial. Courtesy Kriaris.

This sophisticated predictive machine embodied the scientific method and philosophy of Aristotle (fourth century BCE), the mathematics of Archimedes (third century BCE), the engineering of Ktesibios and Archimedes (third century BCE), and the mathematical astronomy of Hipparchos (second century BCE). It was Hellenic civilization in miniature.

Notes

1. The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: The Modern Library, 1994) 501. ↑

2. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, tr. Sheila Stern, ed. Oswyn Murray (New York: St. Martin Press, 1998) 12. ↑

3. W.H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1973) 32. ↑

4. E. J. Dijksterhuis, “The Origins of Classical Mechanics from Aristotle to Newton” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) 164. ↑

5. Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement (New York: Penguin Books, 2000) 434. ↑

6. Galen, The Best Doctor is also a Philosopher 57-61, in Selected Works, tr. P. N. Singer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). ↑

Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of seven books, including the latest book, The Antikythera Mechanism.

The Strange Case of the Anti-Earth Day GOP

BY GEORGE OCHENSKI  APRIL 26, 2023

 APRIL 26, 2023

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Georgia-Pacific mill along lower Columbia River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

It’s been 53 years since the first Earth Day in 1970, when a whopping 22 million Americans participated in events centered on taking better care of our beautiful blue planet whirling through the blackness of space. This year, more than 190 nations around the world are now honoring that tradition.

Yet, in both the Montana statehouse and the halls of Congress, Republicans have decided to turn their boiling anger against the very measures our scientists and the majority of our population deem necessary to ensure a livable future on Earth. One can only wonder if they have some secret planet stashed away somewhere since they don’t seem to think this one is worth saving.

Perhaps they have forgotten what prompted Earth Day in the first place. Rivers were on fire from industrial discharges. DDT was killing bald eagles. The Great Lakes, the largest freshwater lakes on the planet, saw a thriving commercial fishery shut down due to toxic pollution from PCBs. We were poisoning our children with exhaust from leaded gasoline.

These horrific abuses of the environment, fisheries, wildlife and humans drove Congress to act — and it did, passing the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency to oversee and enforce those bedrock environmental protection laws. The Superfund law followed, holding polluters responsible for cleaning up their toxic industrial sites.

Yet, today’s GOP also seems to have forgotten that many of those measures were not only passed with broad support from both major political parties, they were signed into law by Republican presidents like Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

In their latest charade of “fiscal conservatism,” the GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives decided they needed to reduce federal spending. Ignoring the $2.3 BILLION a day spent on the military, they instead targeted the tax breaks and incentives in the infrastructure bill for installing solar panels, heat pumps and buying electric vehicles to reduce the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis. Given the ever-mounting toll of extreme climate-driven droughts, floods, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, the old saying of “pennywise and pound foolish” certainly applies.

Closer to home, the GOP supermajority in the Montana Legislature likewise seems to be off the rails in its dogged support for fossil-fuels generation. Despite the much cheaper cost to produce solar energy, NorthWestern Energy is one of the few, perhaps the only, utility in the nation that is actually acquiring more coal and methane generating facilities. In an almost unbelievable move, Montana’s GOP is actually supporting legislation to exempt polluting industries from environmental analysis for greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s well known that the carbon already in the atmosphere will be there for decades and perhaps centuries. The very last thing we need is to prohibit state agencies from regulating new carbon pollution; yet for some reason, our Republican legislators are sticking their heads in the sand by ignoring proven science and logic.

Simply put, a clean future will not happen by wishing and hoping. It takes a serious reduction in new and existing sources of carbon. Likewise, it requires an equally serious investment in technologies to end our dependency on fossil fuels and transition to clean, renewable resources like solar generation.

This is not about political campaigns, culture wars or corporate profits; it’s about having a livable Earth for generations yet to come. But we won’t get there if the anti-Earth Day GOP continues to ignore the climate crisis — and clings to its strange and highly illogical affinity for the fossil fuels that are killing the planet.

George Ochenski is a columnist for the Missoulian, where this essay originally appeared.