From ‘Energy megaproject in Chile threatens the world’s largest telescopes’, Science, January 10, 2025:
The AES project would occupy several sites totaling 3000 hectares, and the plants making hydrogen and ammonia with renewable energy would be sited just 5 kilometers from the VLT. Construction of the complex will create dust, a threat to delicate optics, but that would be manageable and temporary, Barcons says. More worrying is the permanent loss of the area’s remarkable dark skies. ESO has been using light pollution models developed by researchers in Canada to estimate the impact of AES’s plans. “Even if [AES] do a perfect job, using perfect lights that probably don’t even exist and perfect shielding, there will be an impact and that will be significant,” Barcons says.
This story — i.e. this tale involving the VLT, the AES project, Chile, etc. — is a useful reminder that specific places are important resources for some parts of the scientific enterprise. This is something we saw with opposition to the TMT atop Mauna Kea and in a different yet still similar form in the radio astronomy v. Starlink issue as well, but is otherwise something I think we forget, especially when the need arises beyond the bounds of the combined astronomy + geography setting.
For example, one of the major ways in which the world’s countries are responding to climate change is by trading carbon credits. In the framework of the programme in which these credits are valid, they’re generated by ‘projects’ that establish net carbon sinks. Some countries — almost always economically developing, in the tropics, and with low per capita income — have become hotspots of these projects, by their own initiative or at least by their wilful participation, by protecting old forests and selling the resulting credits to net carbon sources elsewhere.
I’m not convinced how the idea of allowing climate pollutants to accumulate in one area by offsetting them against carbon sinks in another, and far-flung, area could be legitimate. But setting that side: one way to look at it is that the international carbon-trading mechanism has created a new incentive structure wherein some less-wealthy countries could make the maintenance of mature flora within their borders a profitable enterprise that contributes to the local economy.
There’s also another way to look at it, especially because the carbon trading mechanism doesn’t have an implicit incentive and/or sanctions structure that discourages emissions over time: the persistence, even flourishing, of net carbon sources in other countries becomes increasingly dependent on the existence of carbon sinks in these other countries and an entitlement arises on the former’s part to the latter maintaining its forests. Would such an expectation be fair?
Fair to the “greater good” perhaps, but if something exists solely for a “greater good”, there’s a good chance it shouldn’t exist at all. Almost all the economically developing countries of the world have argued at multilateral climate fora for a right to continue to emit more and more carbon dioxide before reaching net-zero so that they’re allowed to pay a similar cost to have their economies grow as the world’s economically developed countries did in the past, without incurring the much greater costs today thanks to the (relatively) technologically immature renewable energy sources, their derivatives and downstream products, and their attendant infrastructure.
One way for a country to respond to this pressure is by converting more forest land for agriculture, industry, and residences. But as long as a country has a handle on this strategy (e.g. the way India is doing it is wrong), cutting part of its forests down is its prerogative and not something for businesses or even other countries to be able to control. Yet such control impulses have already been on display in the form of international banks restructuring national debts on the basis of promises to protect local biodiversity as well as governments — especially those of the US and the EU — including the waiver of loan repayments in climate financing commitments.
Now, I’m curious if we can argue the same way about ground-based telescopes. According to the report in Science, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) “chose the summit of Cerro Paranal” in the Atacama Desert, most of which lies in Chile, for its Very Large Telescope (VLT) because the air is almost completely free of moisture (which refracts light) and there’s no stray light, allowing starlight to reach the telescope’s instruments without much distortion. The AES project threatens to disrupt this state of affairs by throwing up more light into the sky and dispelling the valuable darkness.
… or at least that’s how Science has framed the argument. The problem here is that the interest of the Chilean government — which, by virtue of being democratically elected, represents the interests of the Chilean people — doesn’t find mention in the article until the 11th paragraph (out of 13). The ESO’s issues with the AES project take up most of the narrative; even the AES company’s statement appears before the government’s interests. In fact, the AES statement is (ironically?) the one to reveal the ESO’s ire to be misdirected: “The INNA project will be located in an area that the State of Chile has defined for the development of renewable energies…”.
Where’s the Chilean government in all this? If it approved the AES project’s location while being fully aware of the ESO telescopes nearby, what does AES have to do with this kerfuffle? By this point, in the ninth paragraph, an astronomer named Francesco Pepe has alleged that AES didn’t have an “open discussion” when ESO tried do and that “they did not take into account other interests”. This may be true — I trust Science’s credentials — but it’s still puzzling. If the Government of Chile approved both the VLT and the AES projects, why is the narrative erecting the AES as a bad-faith actor here by accusing it of refusing an “open discussion” here?
(The term “open discussion” is also vague. In fact, paint me cynical because I’m familiar with many instances in India where “open discussion” has been a euphemism for the interests of science and/or scientists to be airdropped into a democratic process. Many scientists and their rationalist groupies have often insisted governments adopt scientifically validated solutions to some problem or emergency without considering the tendency of such solutions — in the absence of suitable policy protections — to disenfranchise some social groups and minimise democratic power. See here and here for examples.)
Governments have special powers by definition. In the current context, the Chilean government wilfully abdicated its ability to wield that power, forgot how, couldn’t make up its mind about how or there’s something more happening here that we don’t know. As Pepe says in the 11th paragraph, “There seems to be some tension within the Chilean government between the ministers of energy and so on, on one side, and the ministers of science on the other side,” i.e. the third possibility. However, another scientists claims in the very last paragraph that AES is “a really, really big company and they have a lot of power”, that “it’s not easy to fight someone that has a lot of power.”
No shit — yet even this statement brings us back to the same question: where o where is the government? What does it want, and why? There’s no mention in the Science article of the author having attempted to get a statement from the Chilean government.
Finally, far be it from me to advocate populism. In fact, I’d sooner root for the view that a democratic government should transcend the populism that got it into power and found its decisions on what’s good for the country, in the long-term, and based on consulting a variety of stakeholders — and not simply on the ephemeral interests of the largest mob. (Ironically, I surmise, such thinking and deliberation would serve the interests of astronomy more than those of a clean-energy company since the latter is more likely to have popular support.) But even this sort of articulation is missing from the Science article, which instead leaves readers with an “astronomy above all” narrative.
Update, 7:27 pm, January 17, 2025: Physics World‘s coverage doesn’t even bother with the word “government”.
Featured image credit: Majestic Lukas/Unsplash.