That was my suggested headline for my latest opinion piece, which ran in Australian online magazine Crikey under the sub-editors (blander IMO) choice of “We don’t need a nuclear renaissance. We need a solid plan on renewables”

The idea of the piece was to respond to Exhibit A in the case for nuclear power, the successful French construction program of the 1970s and 1980s, under the Messmer Plan. I’ve previously written about the way this program depended on the power of the French state at the time, which can’t easily be replicated today. A little while ago, I was suddenly struck by the thought that the Messmer Plan would have been much more effective if it were applied to solar and wind energy rather than nuclear. It’s over the fold (I’ve removed the lead, linking to current Australian politics)

Nuclear industry has gone nowhere in the past 20 years, with old plants closing as fast as new ones opened. But nuclear advocates’ hopes remain undimmed. Central to their faith is the example of the French nuclear build in the 1970s and ’80s. From a standing start, France built 56 power stations in 15 years, most of which still operate today.
Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Bianca De Marchi)
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But nuclear advocates have drawn the wrong lesson from the French experience. The crucial factor was not the merits of nuclear technology, but the strength of the French state and the determination of Prime Minister Pierre Messmer, embodied in the “Messmer plan”.

What we need today is not a nuclear renaissance but an Australian Messmer plan for solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind.

The Messmer plan had its origins in the immediate aftermath of the OPEC oil shock of October 1973. Less than six months later, on March 6, 1974, Messmer announced that France would go “all electric, all nuclear” to free itself from dependence on fuel imports.

The speed with which the plan was implemented seems unbelievable now. There was no debate in Parliament and scientific critics were brushed aside. By November 1974, the first concrete was being poured at three power stations. There was no time for environmental impact statements, community consultation or economic analysis. The project was undertaken entirely within the public sector, with access to low-cost finance and unpriced resources.

The Messmer plan eventually ran out of steam. Escalating costs of power plant construction and a decline in the price of oil meant that the “all electric” part of the plan never happened. But at least in electricity, France remains a standout case of a rapid energy transition driven by government action.

The critical point is that the success of the Messmer plan didn’t depend in any way on the fact that the chosen technology was nuclear power. Even with the power of the French state to override obstacles, nuclear plants still took an average of six years to build. By contrast, once the lengthy permitting phase is over, a wind turbine project can be completed in six or seven months. Under favourable conditions, solar PV can be installed even faster.
A nuclear power plant in Dampierre-en-Burly, France (Image: Adobe)
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An Australian Messmer plan would override all the obstacles that prevent a rapid transition to carbon-free energy. The complexities of the national electricity market and its pricing schemes would be swept away. Nimby objections to the appearance of wind turbines and claims about undetectable health effects would be ignored. Transmission lines would be built where and when they were needed, with no need to consult landowners.

The original Messmer plan failed to electrify transport, but that would be much easier today. Importing internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles would be banned, and existing vehicles would be subjected to increasingly stringent requirements. Industry would similarly be pushed to electrify as fast as possible.

Obviously nothing like this is going to happen in the Australia of 2023. We have environmental impact assessments and community consultation for good reasons, and that isn’t going to change. Concerns about public debt still limit the scope of public investment. And since the departure of Kevin Rudd (whose announcement of the NBN was almost as abrupt as that of the Messmer plan), there is no-one on the national political scene with anything like the drive of Messmer.

Still, it is important to understand that all these processes come at a cost. Every day the world delays decarbonisation, the climate gets hotter and resulting catastrophes get worse. When the now-inevitable catastrophes of flood and fire return this summer or next, we should consider whether the France of the 1970s has something to teach us about energy transitions.

(On vacation this month, hence lack of blogging ...)

Apparently archaeologists have discovered the eearliest known wooden structure in Kalambo Falls, Zambia: two cut logs bearing tool marks that were shaped and joined to form part of a structure—476,000 years ago. Click through the link above for details as to how they dated it, and why it appears to have survived: it's being reported in Nature so this looks pretty solid, and it's a jaw-dropper. Wood tends to rot, and most wooden structures more than a few centuries old are known to archaeology from the holes they leave in the soil rather than from actual structural remains (much like the lack of paleontological evidence of organisms that don't have a bony skeleton, such as octopi or jellyfish: there are rare imprints but soft tissue seldom fossilizes).

This isn't the only evidence of pre-Sapiens hominids building wooden structures: there's some suggestion that H. Heidelbergensis may have built small villages in France about 400ky ago: small huts surrounding a long, thin building approximately 15 metres long by 3 metres wide. (Cited here but I can't follow the link because it's been hit by Hacker News; it met with considerable disbelief, but the report from Zambia makes it seem more plausible.)

If we posit that wooden structures go back to pre-Sapiens times, then what else could be out there but not obvious to us from this remove? One logical possibility would be written records of some sort, using a substrate that hasn't survived—prone to waterlogging or insects, modern paper would certainly not survive across tens of kiloyears. Our earliest modern "written" records mostly date to settled cities in relatively arid regions, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, aside from worked stone inscriptions, baked clay tablets (which imply a perceived requirement for permanence), and cave paintings. Textiles are notoriously fragile on a time scale of centuries, for that matter. There's some evidence of worked beads and jewellery going back up to 70ky; there's no reason to suspect that fabric may not be similarly old, or even older—it's simply labour-intensive to manufacture (so scarce to begin with) and doesn't last much longer than a human lifetime.

Looking around, I see that very few of our artefacts are designed with permanence in mind beyond the scale of a human lifetime. We are reasonably confident that pre-neolithic societies mostly didn't form permanent agricultural settlements, so their population density remained low and the human tendency to amass possessions would be limited by their ability to carry them without beasts of burden—further reducing the number of artefacts that could be discovered today. But none of this precludes the possibility of complex societies with buildings, literature, and culture in pre-Sapiens time.

So that's the opening for fiction about complex societies pretty much any time after genus Homo emerged, two million years ago.

Now for the real question: how far back into deep time do you have to go to posit a non-hominid civilization for which little or no evidence has survived to the present day?

As I already noted, most of our structures are impermanent. Smartphones are designed with a lifespan of 2-6 years in mind: cars for 5-15 years: houses for 30-100 years. Pre-stressed/reinforced concrete only last for decades, as witness the current schools/hospitals scandal in the UK. Most of our civil engineering (bridges, roads, railways, sewers) wears out within a century or so and would be hard to detect after a few millennia. Only a few of our structures (mines, reclaimed low-lying land, dams) are likely to leave an imprint lasting longer: perhaps our most durable relics will be the depleted oil and gas deposits and the cores of abandoned nuclear reactors (which are deposits of unusual isotopes encased in ridiculously durable steel capsules, that could plausibly survive anything short of tectonic subduction as a detectable imprint).

Intelligent dinosaurs: would we be able to detect the imprints of their cities and research hubs? Or, push it forward a few tens of millions of years: what about the giant flightless birds of South America? What if the whales in the sea today are the evolved descendants of a genus that at one time, 40My ago, spawned boat-building tool users and a thalassic civilization that is mostly submerged? How hard would it be to detect an 18th century peak age-of-sail civilization (gunpowder, cast iron cannon, printing presses) at that remove in time?

Discuss.

Two years ago, I found myself wearing a medical gown in a suburban outpatient surgical center, being prepped for general anesthesia and thinking to myself “I’m going to feel really stupid about this if I die.”

Because my surgery was completely discretionary. I was there for endoscopic gastroplasty, a relatively new form of bariatric surgery in which a laser scope is inserted down your throat and your stomach is stitched-up from the inside to become a smaller organ.

Relative to traditional bariatric surgery, the big advantage is that with no abdominal incision, the recovery is much easier. That was a huge selling point. The whole idea of getting this surgery that wasn’t medically necessary was a huge source of shame for me. After all, everyone knows that you can lose weight by eating less. If I was halfway honest with myself, it’s not like I’d gotten fat by exclusively eating when I was hungry and I just had no idea, intellectually, how to lose the weight. What I needed to do was eat meals when I was hungry and stop eating after that — not gorge on between-meal or late-night snacks, and not go back for seconds just because something was tasty.

But I couldn’t do that, so there I was getting surgery.

When I first considered bariatric surgery, the recovery time was a deal-breaker. I couldn’t find myself unable to care for my son for days because I needed weight loss surgery. I couldn’t have Kate telling people that I was out of commission because I needed weight loss surgery. The endoscopic option was a game-changer. We’d drive out to the surgical center, Kate would drive me home, and then the next day I’d drive myself back out for a follow up. After that, it would be two weeks of a liquid diet but I’d be fully cleared for all activities. I even had a short trip planned three days after the surgery.

The doctor who performed it was an entrepreneurial type. No insurance, just cash on the barrelhead, so no need for too much pre-surgical screening and evaluation — I was a paying customer, and he was there to do the procedure. I didn’t have diabetes or “prediabetes,” I was just fat and wanted to not be fat. So there I was, preparing to go under general anesthesia. It’s safe, obviously, or they wouldn’t let people do it. But people do die, and in this case I could hardly say I rolled the dice to save my life. I just wanted to lose weight.

And I did! I weighed 272.1 points on September 19, 2021, and 202.6 pounds on September 19, 2023.

Of course there’s more to the story, but that’s the bottom line: I did not die, and I lost a lot of weight. I also gained some lean muscle. Pain in my left knee and right heel improved. It worked. And I thought I might share my story because it could be helpful to others.1

Two years of weight loss

They say the typical patient can expect to lose between 15–20% of their body weight during the first year.

My experience was both better and worse than that. I came out of the surgical center groggy, of course, due to anesthesia, and just trying to follow the guidelines to avoid dehydration with a bruised and healing stomach. That meant small, frequent sips of water and nothing else for a couple of days. After that it was a week of clear liquids, then a week of only mushy foods. And it turns out that if you don’t eat anything, you lose weight very quickly — less than two weeks after the procedure, I was down to 258 pounds.

I think most people are aware that not eating will result in weight loss,2 but severe restriction isn’t tolerable for most people. A while back I had oral surgery to remove my wisdom teeth and repair a large abscess in my jaw. After that I was on a clear liquids diet for a while, and I was constantly hungry (except when doped up on painkillers). I spent a lot of time experimenting with different jello flavors, and when I was cleared to switch to soup, I ate a lot of soup. The bariatric surgery experience was different. It was socially awkward to tell people I couldn’t eat anything, especially since I didn’t want to discuss the surgery, but I wasn’t hungry at all. I wasn’t even craving different flavors. I would get physically weak and lightheaded while going out on walks and need to sit down and take a break — but I never felt the physical pangs of hunger.

After the jaw surgery and weeks of deprivation, I was ravenous once cleared to chew again. After the bariatric surgery, I was cautious. I didn’t want to upset my stomach, so I ate small portions in small bites, and I didn’t snack. And I felt fine. By December 1, I was 231 pounds. And I wasn’t derailed by the holiday season either — by January 1, my weight was 223 pounds.

None of this, to be clear, is an alternative to diet and exercise. What happened is that I was systematically eating much less food than I did before the surgery. Not severe calorie restrictions like in the first couple of weeks, just a pretty normal diet: I’d eat a healthy lunch and a reasonable portion of whatever was on offer for dinner while avoiding snacks and desserts. If I went out to a restaurant, I’d order whatever seemed like the healthy option, usually a fish. In terms of dieting philosophy, I leaned toward the high-fat/low-carb concept, but I wasn’t maniacal about it. There are a lot of disputes about this in the nutrition space, but I think most of us who become overweight do things that everyone knows aren’t good for you, like scarf down a sleeve of Ritz crackers while watching TV. I also wanted to make sure I was losing weight in a healthy way, so I started working out twice a week with a trainer who had me do High-Intensity Interval Training, and I’d also lift weights once or twice a week on my own. Is that the optimal exercise routine? I have no idea. But again, disputes aside, I think everyone knows it’s better to be active than not.

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The point isn’t that lifestyle changes don’t require a super-genius — it’s that thanks to the surgery, the changes were easy to adopt. If you don’t struggle with your weight, this is probably hard to empathize with, but those who do struggle generally understand that it’s easy to know intellectually what you should do, but nearly impossible to actually do it. Yet suddenly, it was easy.

Until it wasn’t.

On March 1, 2022, I weighed 211.6 points — I’d lost over 20% of my body weight in less than six months — and it stopped being easy.

• If I ate an abstemious lunch, I’d be really hungry all afternoon, fighting the urge to snack.

• If I successfully fought the urge to snack, I’d be super hungry at dinner time and tend to overeat.

• Excuses to order the tastiest entree on the menu rather than the healthiest started to multiply — we’re celebrating, we’re on vacation, it’s been a long week, etc.

I was counting calories as rigorously as I could with the MyFitnessPal app and I wasn’t gaining weight, but I was plateauing and finding it nearly impossible to drop additional pounds. Over the summer we went with another family to Italy for two weeks and in order to not be a pain in the butt, I just let all that go. I was surprised (but not too surprised, actually, because you hear this all the time) to discover when I got back to America that I didn’t gain any weight in Italy. So I got stupid and decided my vacation experience meant I’d reached a new equilibrium of the promised results and could just chill and stop counting calories.

Within six months of not counting, I’d gained over 20 pounds.

In January of this year, I went back on the program — time-restricted eating, counting calories, 10,000 steps per day, and a new exercise regime with super slow weightlifting — and again found that I could pretty easily get back down to ~210, but it was a struggle to get from there to 200. I think most doctors would say the surgery successfully revised my body’s weight setpoint downward by a large factor, but now I’m just in the regular struggle zone.

The limits of acceptance

I’ve read a decent amount of “fat acceptance” literature and takedowns of diet culture, and if I just thumb through the books and articles produced by that community, I’m more likely than not to agree with what they’ve written.

One thing that really resonates with me is the experience of being a fat person who suffers from some specific medical ailment and wants medical advice about that ailment, but instead receives a lecture about how it would help to lose weight. This is not helpful advice, because it’s not always medically relevant and when it is, most people don’t have a good option to lose weight. But the knowledge that this is what doctors are going to talk to you about sometimes makes you want to avoid seeing a doctor. That makes your health problems worse. So rather than helping people with obesity-related medical ailments, our culture of fat-shaming is generating worse health outcomes for heavy people. This is also true indirectly — stress and isolation are unhealthy, and in people with a tendency to overeat, those factors promote additional overeating. Trying to make people who are overweight feel bad about themselves is a strategy America has been trying for a couple of generations, and it just doesn’t work.

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At the same time, I find the fat acceptance movement to be in some ways profoundly misguided:

• I was very annoyed that doctors consulted about my knee and heel problems would lecture me about weight loss. I was extremely grateful to the third doctor who eventually gave me actionable suggestions for stretches that would help — and they really did help. But the fact is, getting the surgery and losing a bunch of weight helped much more than the stretches.

• Being physically active is an important determinant of health, totally independent of its impact on weight,3 but realistically it is easier to have an active, movement-rich lifestyle if you’re not fat.

• The statistical evidence that being overweight is causally associated with diabetes, heart disease, and other problems is overwhelming.

More broadly, if you look at the large U.S.-European life expectancy gap, I just don’t think it’s possible to explain it without reference to America’s much higher rate of obesity. So this isn’t just a small side thing or a topic of purely personal concern. People will reach incorrect views about important political and economic policy issues if they don’t see Americans’ obesity as a significant headwind to improving our health outcomes.

That’s why I think the rise of the GLP-1 agonistic medications is such an exciting development — it’s clear that a lot more people are comfortable with taking medication than with getting surgery, and precisely because all these critiques of diet culture have a lot of truth to them, it’s really important that we develop better medical interventions.

Why this problem is so hard

Over many years of struggling with my weight, I’ve read a lot of advice and found most of it to be of very limited utility.

One big reason for that is that while imitating the lifestyle habits of healthy people sounds like an intuitive strategy, I think it’s actually a pretty bad one. In other contexts, we get this. I try to imagine an alcoholic who’s just suffered some huge personal setback and is now determined to get his life on track asking me for advice on how to manage alcohol consumption more effectively and I’d tell him … try to drink less alcohol? Except maybe it’s okay to cut loose sometimes… but not too often? Ultimately, I just don’t know; it’s not a problem I have. When I was younger, I used to drink a lot — sometimes to excess — but never in a way that interfered with my life. And as I got older and my body’s resiliency declined and my family responsibilities grew, I just did it less. At this point, I have zero drinks most weeks. And when I do drink, I’ll have one or two, sometimes even less than one. A few weeks ago a good friend wanted to split a bottle of wine, so we did and I got drunk and didn’t feel great the next day, but it was a good time. No problem!

The whole point, though, is that for a lot of people, this is a problem, just like I can never understand the mindset of people who’ll happily order something tasty and then only eat half of it because they’re not hungry anymore. If I’m going to make a healthy choice, I need to make it up front. If food is on the plate and it’s any good, I’m going to eat it.

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A perspective that I found useful, despite a lack of actionable advice, is what Daniel Lieberman calls “evolutionary mismatch” in his book on the evolution of the human body. For hundreds of thousands of years, people lived in circumstances where starvation and malnutrition were very real threats to survival and the ability to reproduce. So the fit and healthy way to live was to be like me — broadly omnivorous, curious about trying new foods, and generally inclined to eat plenty of food when food is available. Storing and preserving food is challenging, but most humans are very good at storing extra food on the body to give you a buffer in lean times. But in modern society, people very rarely face genuine lean times — contemporary Americans spend a dramatically lower share of our income on food than we did a couple of generations ago, to say nothing of pre-industrial or pre-agricultural people.

If you eat extra in times of plenty to balance out weight loss during times of scarcity, but the scarcity never really comes, you will get fat. Food becomes just one more thing on a long list of human behaviors — alcohol, gambling, cocaine — that are good fun enjoyed in moderation by many people but pathologically overconsumed by others. Except with the wrinkle that you can’t just quit food cold turkey.

This is why, again, medical interventions are incredibly useful and why I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ozempic seems to have benefits for compulsive behavior in general.

But I’m also curiously watching to see what the longer-term outcomes are. My experience with a different intervention is that it was miraculous until it wasn’t. I’m extremely grateful to be a merely overweight person now rather than someone with Class 2 obesity. And yet it’s still a bummer to have stalled out at a point where the same basic behavioral issues reassert themselves. We’ll see where I am in a year, and where the medications go.