Foster points out that a delegation of Soviet scientists led by Nikolai
Bukharin to a British conference in 1931 had a major influence on
Haldane, Joseph Needham and JD Bernal, the big three of the British
scientific left--the Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin of their day.
As I have stated in the past, Bukharin had a much better grasp of
ecology than Trotsky. I cite Foster just below, followed by Trotsky from
"Radio, Science, Technique and Society".
Foster:
In his early daring work Daedalus: Science and the Future (1924) Haldane
had reflected on the eventual exhaustion of coal and oil fields and of
an economy based on fossil fuels. He did not perceive this as a tragedy,
however, since the pollution from fossil fuels was very great. Instead,
he looked forward to an energy economy based on solar, wind, and
hydrogen energy. Demonstrating enormous foresight and ecological
concern, he wrote:
Ultimately, we shall have to tap those intermittent but
inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The
problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as
convenient as coal or petrol. If a windmill in one's back garden
could produce a hundredweight of coal directly (and it can produce
its equivalent in energy), our coal mines would shut down tomorrow.
Even tomorrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be
invented, which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy
of the wind into continuous electric power.
Trotsky:
The atom contains within itself a mighty hidden energy, and the greatest
task of physics consists in pumping out this energy, pulling out the
cork so that this hidden energy may burst forth in a fountain. Then the
possibility will be opened up of replacing coal and oil by atomic
energy, which will also become the basic motive power. This is not at
all a hopeless task. And what prospects it opens before us! This alone
gives us the right to declare that scientific and technical thought is
approaching a great turning-point, that the revolutionary epoch in the
development of human society will be accompanied by a revolutionary
epoch in the sphere of the cognition of matter and the mastering of it
... Unbounded technical possibilities will open out before liberated
mankind.
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