Mr. Nordhaus says this is the vision of the post-apocalyptic world I fear. It is a lived experience for many and to get us past this, energy needs to be worked with rather than fought.
“The great Existential Environmental Threat that we keep hearing about where we all live in a post-apocalyptic world is basically what the average Somali lives like now. What that is is poverty, what that is is energy poverty.” Mr. Nordhaus, Chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, ended his presentation at last night’s Aquatic Academy with this answer to a participant’s question. That startled me. That startled me partially because I believe that he is right in asserting that globally we are striving for more than that. It also startled me because I can’t imagine that I, as a wealthy Westerner, am so blind to not understand that that feared world is not one of a lack of (or polluted) natural resources but a world that is too poor to access those natural resources. That is too simplistic a view for the plight of an East African famine but it does spark a thought within my head that the causes are only partially environmental and more a case of tribal terrorism, gangsterism, corporate and foreign exploitation, wealth inequality, political corruption, the all-too biological characteristic of congregating and reproducing en masse, and the geographic luck of the draw as far as natural resources go. It makes me think that with better technologies of political development and more wealth for more people, the environmental concerns are exactly what Mr. Shellenberger described as “trade-offs” that will be addressed.
Mr. Nordhaus followed Mr. Steve Chazen, president of Occidental Petroleum. Both individuals shared that there is a growing global trend of oil and gas consumption that will not stop anytime soon. This has nothing to say about morality or whether it is “right or wrong” that this trend is growing but that it is the reality. In fact, the only morality presented by either speaker was whether it is “right” to deny anybody in the world access to energy needs that are available to everyone else. I had to write down my question because I have difficulty understanding how I feel about this information. Here is the question that took me four weeks to articulate: “To get to a ‘green’ planet that addresses environmental concerns and raises the basic needs for 9 billion people, a cheap and clean energy is required. With our best science now, your position is that cheap and clean energy is nuclear and solar. To get there, to get away from high emissions, we need a good transition fuel and that is shale gas or fracking. Mr. Shellenberger mentioned last week that we need to consciously address the “environmental trade-offs” along the way but if we continue down this path, wont the environmental trade-offs become too large? Wont events like the Deepwater blowout and Fukishima hit a tipping point that will destroy the Earth before we get to that point?” His response was perfect: there is little to no scientific evidence that those large-scale events did much lasting harm. Additionally, there is little evidence that there has ever been a tipping point that we as humans haven’t been able to innovate ourselves past. Dr. Schubel carried the response further by saying that the organics from agriculture coming down the Mississippi for over two hundred years has done far, far worse to the Gulf than the Deepwater blowout. His response is that we’ve found that nature is not fragile and we have found that it responds well to anomalies and resiliently bounces back but does not respond well to chronic problems. Dr. Schubel ended by saying that environmentalists are losing this effort and we are losing it big. My question to that is: what are we losing then? And that goes to the heart of the discussion presented by this Aquatic Academy. These new paradigms are waking up to a reality that no matter what, consumer trends are not changing and even if they do, it is absolute fantasy, a mathematical impossibility to believe that we will achieve 350 ppm Carbon in the atmosphere. Our focus needs to be to save our biodiversity, keep our wild-lands wild, raise the global wealth and access to basic needs, and work toward transitioning to cheap and clean energy. In the science fiction parlance that I know, this means taking us to a Type 1 Civilization on the Kardashev scale. And as David Deutsch points out, this is the only way to achieve humanity’s Beginning of Infinity.
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this graphic is awesome and is from the Breakthrough Institute Facebook Page
I'm going to start with summary of what an Eco Modernist wants first:
The reason I want to start with it is because the way those come about is through the non-environmental-orthodoxy strategy of supporting the exploration of fracking and nuclear energy. The Aquarium of the Pacific hosted another speaker at the Aquatic Academy course last night. The talk was as controversial as the previous two classes. Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute spoke about using a new narrative to understand the human relationship with nature and specifically the human relationship with exploiting natural resources. Creatively, Mr. Shellenberger made parallels between the Judeo-Christian trope of a morality that promotes more austerity to achieve harmony. Using the tenets of the religious idea that if we a)recognize we are sinful, b) repent for our sinful ways, c) discipline our sinful desires toward more praising of the Ideal, then we will achieve Heaven. He then compared this to the findings of Cognitive Therapy, where Dr. Aaron Beck found that depressed people have the same three things in common: a)My world is bleak, b) I'm no good, c) My future is hopeless. And to tie it all together, Mr. Shellenberger used both of those narratives to explain the dominating paradigm in the Environmental Movement since the 1970's: human behavior is a greedy consumption-based exploitation that is virus-like and that we need to consume less and be less so that we can live in harmony with nature. Using the Eco-Modernist label that Slate gave him and his colleague, Ted Nordhaus, Mr. Shellenberger states that the orthodox environmental movement is anything but orthodox. Using the the Tennessee Valley Authority as his first of several examples, he shows that what were termed 'environmental efforts' involved a paradigm that benefited humans as well. In essence, he is talking about the Nature vs Humans binary that I have grown up with in my own understanding of the environmental paradigm in ten years of conservation work. He exposes the dubious foundation of the development of this binary and discusses, although not explicitly, William Denevan's discussion of the idea of the Pristine Myth - the myth that indigenous cultures lived in harmony with their surroundings. This is Daniel Quinn's idea of Leavers and Takers presented through his talking primate, Ishamel. The reason this is a myth is that hunter and gatherer/nomad/tribal people did not live in harmony with their surroundings. Instead, they did anything they could to survive because conditions no matter where you live are harsh. For example, evidence is shown that many of the East Coast forests were planted by native peoples, that regular large-scale burning was utilized to hunt game, and damming of rivers and tributaries was a regular occurrence. People did what they needed to to survive. And, as Robert Wright and Steve Pinker point out, the world was more violent as well partially because of the scarcity of resources. Shellenberger mentions that the Environmental Movement has had two accomplishments. First, it has put in our heads that we need to reduce the environmental footprint and, second, that we can live in harmony with nature. His thesis is that while reducing our footprint is exactly what we need to do, the second accomplishment is not possible and that it actually undermines the first. If we are to apply the Nature Vs Humans binary for a second (to understand his argument in terms I can understand), it seems his focus from an environmental perspective is saving as much wild-lands as possible and the rest stems from that. Intuited in this sentiment is the restoration of degraded lands, the consolidation of 'human-influenced' lands (cities, agriculture, etc) and conversion of under-utilized production land toward more wild-lands - primarily, low/non producing agricultural fields. Of the Big Nine Planetary Boundaries that Jared Diamond talks about in Collapse and that were identified by Johan Rockstram's team from the Stockholm Resilience Center, this perspective deals easily with only a couple of them. Not explicit though is how to deal with air, water, and land pollution, and from what I understand he terms those issues as "trade-offs." 
I scanned this from a magazine a long time ago but cannot remember which one. It most likely is an old Scientific American but could easily be from National Geographic.
I have yet to process the information that Mr. Shellenberger presented but I like the foundation that he works from. Particularly, I am uncertain whether minimizing the 'human' footprint should be the number one priority of the environmental movement. But I do understand and enjoy the logic that the 'trade-offs' of pollution can be solved if our footprint becomes our focus. This is an admirable thread that is found from Thoreau to Gary Snyder, where Snyder wanted to the massive consolidation of cities and urban planning that involves 500 years. For the Eco Modernist, the primary goal is a greater and faster energy transition. The paradigm that would entail what I started with:
I'm curious to see how the Breathrough Institute plays with these thoughts more and I will definitely be following their innovative thought. |
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