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Faith in Economic Growth and Technofixes Undermines Conservation

Last updated on 2013.04.12

Bob Mercer mistakes Ken Blanchard's sporadic narrow-minded only-ism for the deepest thinking in the state. Dr. Blanchard says past performance does not indicate future climate results:

I have been skeptical of world climate modeling projected into the future for the same reason as I am skeptical of anyone who claims to have discovered a formula that will predict the next winner of the World Series. It is possible to build a formula that corresponds to what has happened so far; it is another thing to guess what will happen next [Ken Blanchard, "Global Warming Flatlines," South Dakota Politics, 2013.04.06].

That sounds familiar.

Then Dr. Blanchard then asserts that past performance of technology and economic growth does predict future results :

One thing that we cannot project into the future is the nature of technological development. New sources of energy under the ocean floor will be exploitable very soon and it may be possible to put some of the carbon back when we got the energy. If we really want to solve the problems that our environment poses, the only hope lies in new technologies. The only way to get those is to promote economic growth. This is a lesson that the environmental left desperately wants not to learn [Blanchard, 2013.04.06].

Um... economic growth is also the only way to create environmental problems—eat more stuff, make more poop. Technology can make things cleaner (cars reduce manure on street; antibiotics reduce disease); it can also make things dirtier (cars make smog, antibiotics on dairies promote more resistant bacteria).

Technology and economic growth don't solve environmental problems; values do. Assuming that not-yet-invented technology will someday clean up our messes disinclines some of us from making less of a mess in the first place. Promoting economic growth as the only salvation for the ecosphere keeps us from seeing that we can remedy or avoid some messes by consuming less.

You can get rid of all the junk accumulating in your house and yard by inventing a Mr. Fusion to turn all your trash into energy. Or you can just buy less junk. You can use less gas by buying a Prius. Or you can choose a lifestyle in which you can depend on your feet and a sturdy bicycle to get you where you want to go. You can increase GDP by buying a bigger Case IH tractor and more Monsanto seed, hoping that those corporations will invest that money in research on miracle food pills. Or you can choose to farm organically and conscientiously to conserve the land and water for future generations.

Economic growth and technology are not the only ways to solve environmental problems. Without the right values, economic growth and technology can just as likely be our ruin.

Related Reading:

  1. I wrote a similar critique of commentary from Dusty Johnson in 2008.
  2. Wendell Berry's farmer-father said you can't plow your way out of debt. Berry says much more about conservation and economy in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture. A key passage:

The problem that ought to concern us first is the fairly recent dismantling of our old understanding and acceptance of human limits. For a long time we knew that we were not, and could never be, “as gods.” We knew, or retained the capacity to learn, that our intelligence could get us into trouble that it could not get us out of. We were intelligent enough to know that our intelligence, like our world, is limited. We seem to have known and feared the possibility of irreparable damage. But beginning in science and engineering, and continuing, by imitation, into other disciplines, we have progressed to the belief that humans are intelligent enough, or soon will be, to transcend all limits and to forestall or correct all bad results of the misuse of intelligence. Upon this belief rests the further belief that we can have “economic growth” without limit [Wendell Berry, "It All Turns on Affection," National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture, 2012].

10 Comments

  1. Curt Jopling 2013.04.07

    Let's keep shitting in our nest. Surely ideology will clean it up.

  2. David Newquist 2013.04.07

    It is always dismaying when a professor gives up the tedious but necessary business of carefully representing what is known and said to participate in partisan cant. Blanchard passes on The Economist's quotation of Dr. Hansen that global warming has flatlined. Neither The Economist nor Dr. Blanchard bothers to pursue what Dr. Hansen found significant in that.

    For those who might not know, Dr. James Hansen is the NASA climatologist who has been particularly assertive and active in warning about the dangers of climate change--to the point that NASA considered him a bit of an embarrassment. Dr. Hansen retired last week and told The New York Times that he will "press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands."
    [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/science/james-e-hansen-retiring-from-nasa-to-fight-global-warming.html?pagewanted=all]

    Blanchard has been dismissive and often derisive about the conversion to clean energy through wind generators and solar cells, but still both of those forms of energy production are making up significantly increasing percentages of energy sources. Their biggest drawback is that corporations have not figured out a way to make them objects of restrictive licensing, as Monsanto has with its GMO seeds.

    One must wonder if what Mr. Mercer finds such deep thought in this piece is Dr. Blanchard's statement that "New sources of energy under the ocean floor will be exploitable very soon and it may be possible to put some of the carbon back when we got the energy."

    Huh?

  3. John 2013.04.07

    Dr. Hansen is a scientist. Dr. Blanchard is not, obviously. Blanchard addresses climate change with the authority between a high school graduate and someone who took a minimal smattering of college science. In other words, move along folks, nothing to see here. Ditto for Mercer.

    We know the earth's evolved and is evolving. We live with cold-blooded dinosaur, warm-blooded mammoth bones, and glacial moraines. Archaeologist Dr. Brian Fagan's work chronicles climate changes in recorded history: "The Little Ice Age"; "The Long Summer"; "The Great Warming"; "Floods, Famines, and Emporers"; "Cro-Magnon". Scientists like Dr. Hansen show the present changes are outside the scientific rationales for past climatic changes. This eludes deniers.

  4. David Newquist 2013.04.07

    For the record, here is how Dr. Hansen actually interpreted the "flat-lining:"

    Last year was one of the ten warmest years on record with temperatures significantly above the long-term average according to official assessments by American scientists released tonight.

    The average global surface temperature in 2012 was 0.56C warmer than the average for the period 1951 to 1980 and, overall, the year was nominally the ninth warmest on record, although it was barely indistinguishable in rank from several other years, said James Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

    Although global temperatures have been flat for about a decade, all of the top ten warmest years have occurred since 1998 and the “climate dice” are now sufficiently loaded for people to notice that unusually warm seasons are occurring much more frequently than they did a few decades ago, Dr Hansen said.

    Temperature extremes that go beyond what is expected occurred in 2010 over a large region of Eastern Europe including Moscow, over Oklahoma, Texas and Northern Mexico in 2011 and in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains of the US in 2012, Dr Hansen said.

    The analysis of global temperatures in 2012 by scientists at Nasa and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that the rate of increase in warming has continued to flatline, although Dr Hansen said that this does not mean that global warming has “stopped” as some climate sceptics have claimed.

    “The 5-year running mean of global temperature has been flat for the past decade. It should be noted that the ‘standstill’ temperature is at a much higher level than existed at any year in the prior decade except for the single year 1998, which had the strongest El Nino of the century,” Dr Hansen said.

    “We conclude that the background global warming is continuing, consistent with the known planetary energy imbalance, even though it is likely that the slowdown in climate forcing growth rate contributed to the recent apparent standstill in global temperature,” he said.

    Nasa said that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, the first year in the Goddard Institute’s temperature record. By 1960, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, measured at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory, was about 315 parts per million. Today, that measurement exceeds 390 parts per million.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/2012-was-ninth-warmest-year-on-record-with-temperatures-significantly-above-longterm-average-8452937.html

  5. Robert Klein 2013.04.07

    If carbon use isn't causing an increase in global temperatures, why would we be interested in putting it back under the ocean floor? (whatever that means)

  6. caheidelberger Post author | 2013.04.07

    Robert, I think Dr. Blanchard is extending the benefit of the doubt and saying that, even if he's wrong about industrial-CO2-induced global warming, the only way to fight it is through technological means like undersea carbon sequestration.

    I can understand the technofix mindset. I love my Star Trek; I'd like to believe we could solve a lot of problems by getting our butts off this planet and spreading out through the galaxy (not just the solar system: that still leaves us one unexpected solar fluctuation away from extinction). Lifting lots of keesters off this planet and seating them comfortably elsewhere will require lots of new tech that I'd really like to have. (Then again, rocket launches deplete the ozone layer. Grrr—is nothing externality-free?)

  7. Donald Pay 2013.04.07

    There's nothing wrong with sequestration as a part of the solution. But there's also nothing wrong with thoughtful conservation of resources either. Just as there is nothing wrong with scaling up wind and solar.

    The problem with Blanchard and other "skeptics" and with some greens is they have the idea that there is one magic solution, whether technological or change in lifestyle, that will be magically scaled up to solve the greenhouse gas problem. Not gonna happen.

    First, it is unlikely that one solution will be "magic" and make all greenhouse gases or their impacts on climate disappear. Anyone who has studied the issue knows it is going to take a number of large, but doable, changes phased in over quite a long while. Second, scaling up usually is done with subsidies or regulations. Establishing a cap and trade system would actually allow for the sorts of tech fixes Blanchard feels are necessary.

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