To your right, you'll see the cover of this month's Wired magazine.
The premise of the issue is that climate change is now the only eco-problem that matters, but to solve it, we'll have to slaughter the sacred cows of environmentalism. (2001 called. It wants its framing device back.) So what are these heresies that Wired's Strawman Enviro so clings to?
The Tired:
Yes, yes, nuclear power is the only way to stop climate change and enviros who don't embrace nukes are like silly children. So counterintuitive! (See also: Prius not the end-all be-all!)
The Ill-informed:
Carbon offsets are a complicated subject. Counter-intuitively, Wired skips the analysis and goes straight for a grab-bag of factoids, red herrings, and false choices, leading to a blanket dismissal. (See also: if it attempted to replicate the industrial food system, organic ag would have a big footprint too!)
The Fake:
Guess what? Environmentalists are just going to have to accept that dense, vibrant cities are the best way for people to live together sustainably! (2001, can I put you on hold? The late '70s are calling about their controversy.) (See also: China is important!)
Zzz ...
This techno-futurist, hipster-libertarian, self-consciously contrarian shtick was fresh and interesting ... back in 1996, when Wired was founded. Since then, it has congealed into a set of knee-jerk mannerisms and affectations. It has lost its edge. At this point it just makes me yawn.
It's telling that the best thing in the issue is written by Alex Steffen, proprietor of Worldchanging. It's clear at this point that the cultural energy that once infused Wired, and the techno-go-go culture it represented, has now moved on. You want creativity, entrepreneurial energy, and innovative thinking? Look to the bright green movement, which is, judging by this issue, about 10 steps ahead of Wired on this stuff.
Since the whole issue reads like something discovered in founder Louis Rossetto's recycling bin, it's appropriate that Rossetto has an essay in it, looking back over the last 15 years and pondering what the mag has gotten right and wrong. This says it all:
We recognized a world in transition, but we missed the danger in front of us. We eschewed conventional wisdom, but we couldn't escape it. Takeaway: Be contrarian, and then be contrarian again.
No. Really. Please. Quit positioning yourself relative to what other people are saying. Stop primping yourself in your intellectual mirror. Take a clear-eyed look at the world. Let the world inform you.
Two senators push to ramp up nuclear energy
Nuclear companies face reactor design problems, ethics questions
Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:33 am
21 May 2008
I loathe that Nineties-child-Marshall-McLuhan-on-Pentiums magazine that I once loved (and wrote an essay for, Issue 1.3, look it up).
Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:39 am
21 May 2008
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David Roberts Posted 3:06 am
21 May 2008
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/1.3_invisible.html
grist.org
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KenG Posted 3:38 am
21 May 2008
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Jerome Woody Posted 4:22 am
21 May 2008
Technological determinism is a myth. Problems like climate change gets solved by people using science, pragmatism, and common sense, not by Moore's Law.
grist.org
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greentiger Posted 5:18 am
21 May 2008
That said, I understand criticisms of the particulars (e.g. the blithe nuclear endorsement that could use more nitty gritty (or IMO, at least a plug for pebble beds..)). But on the whole, I believe the article is admirable in debunking widespread simplistic conceptions of 'carbon emissions'. Two responses in the green laity (those not reading this post...) may come from this article: a 'contrarian' viewpoint that refuses to trust any conventional wisdom, or a more pragmatic approach that relies less on detailed analysis and a systems-based analytical approach to climate change. I consider the latter response highly desirable... While the IPCC has only demonstrated increasing confidence in anthropogenic CC, I feel that recent years have shown that its causes are much more nuanced than we thought.
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Michael Shellenberger Posted 5:53 am
21 May 2008
We can always tell when something excites you because you go on and on about how boring something is.
The Wired special issue is the opposite of boring. It's totally provocative and interesting. While I don't agree with all of it (I'd like our few remaining old-growth forests to remain standing!) Wired nails a bunch of hugely important issues that greens still haven't grappled with.
I've written a longer post at Breakthrough Blog, but here's my take.
Invest in mass, clean energy manufacturing in China. How do we create a win-win economic relationship with China that drives down the price of clean energy as quickly as possible? Wired points out that China has the potential to radically drive down the price of manufacturing clean technologies like wind and solar. The problem, as we argue in a forthcoming issue of Democracy Journal, neither Kyoto nor any other cap-centered plan will do this. A better U.S.-China accord would be centered on technology and infrastructure investments, not pollution limits.
Get over your agrarian nostalgia. Enviros need to get over their agrarian nostalgia. Dave insists they already have. I'd say that many post-boomer greens have. But not all. This nostalgic quote below is typical of the discussion at the youth climate web site, It's Getting Hot In Here:
Why is electricity necessary to lift people out of poverty? Have you considered that people can live rich, fulfilling lives without electricity or with subsistence, agrarian lifestyles?
Over the last three years I've visited a couple of dozen colleges and universities, and spoken to hundreds of students. I'd say that the climate and student movement is about evenly split between those focused on limits and possibility. What sometimes gets expressed as an anti-capitalism is often more a farrago of anti-modern views than the Grundrisse. It goes something like this: indigenous people were closer to Nature. Our distance from the land makes us incapable of dealing with ecological problems. We all need to do with less. If only we lived on farms.
Which leads to other item Wired says greens need to get over:
Biotech. We need to invent things that will burn clean or eat carbon.
Organics. Conventional ag often emits less carbon (though I must say it's not clear to me how thoroughly Wired sourced this one).
Four Fault Lines on Climate
I believe climate change will creating new fault lines in the society and in politics, ones that no longer fall along the "environmentalist/anti-environmentalist" dichotomy.
Wired -- whose whole special issue is motivated by the threat of climate change the failure of greens to deal with it -- arrives at a similar place.
I would define these fault lines as:
1. Limits to Growth vs. Green Growth. If you think economic growth is only a problem and not also a solution, you are a limits-person. If you think we can limit our way to 50 percent emissions reductions worldwide by 2050 -- a time we are expected to have doubled our energy consumption -- you are a limits-person. If you think China will slow its growth because of climate change, you are a limits-person.
But, if you think that the only way out of the crisis is to grow our way out of the crisis -- both with markets and government investment, regulation, and adaptation -- then you are a green growth person.
2. Investment-centered or regulation-centered. If you think we can price and regulate our way to a clean energy economy, you're regulation-centered. Regulation-types like Romm and Roberts believe in some modest public investment in technology and infrastructure. Both believe investment should be a small part of the equation, and a low political priority. Both see emissions caps as the main policy play.
Breakthrough Institute holds a different perspective. For us, investment in tech and infrastructure is the main play. Regulation can help, but ultimately what's required are massive public investments, on the order of $30 to $80 billion per year from the U.S., and somewhere closer to $150 billion from all developed countries, every year. And it's far better politics to invest to make clean energy cheap rather than regulate to make dirty energy expensive.
3. Technology. Some of us -- like Breakthrough and Romm -- are open to coal or natural gas with carbon capture and storage, nuclear, and GMOs. Others -- at least half if not more of the environmental movement is against these things.
4. Adaptation as Important as Mitigation. Most greens don't, like Romm, sees adaptation as little more than a delaying tactic. But few environmentalists see it as just as important as mitigation. Happily, this is changing. It turns out that Lieberman Warner would give a whopping $20 billion a year to it, showing that the national environmental groups who wrote Lieberman-Warner have embraced adaptation but still haven't embraced investment (which gets a measly $10 billion per year).
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:22 am
21 May 2008
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Michael Shellenberger Posted 8:23 am
21 May 2008
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:50 am
21 May 2008
Adaptation will become important in time, however right now it isn't.
And when Adaptation does become important, Mitigation will be near worthless.
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The other issue about timing is that it takes a gigantic ammount of effort to convince people to act long term, to deal with mitigations.
Adaptation, when a crisis is immediate, it doesn't really take much effort for politicians/money to take action.
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More or less we NEED Mitigation right now.
For Adaptation, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
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anotherID Posted 9:22 am
21 May 2008
Suffering.
less mitigation, more adaptation & suffering
more mitigation, maybe less adaptation & suffering
Hmm, what should us fancy pants wearing apes do?
What will we do?
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:28 am
21 May 2008
Big lump sums of money favor mega-projects like a massive expansion of nuclear power, and coal sequestration. Maybe even Fusion.
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5785236/Nuclear-p ...
Micro-projects, operate incrementally at the margin. And favor quick ROI's, quick building speed, and low risk. This favors renewables, cogeneration, efficiency, and demand destruction.
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php
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Put that together with the adaptation focus, and the nixing on regulating bad activity, and it seems like the idea is to simply focus on "magical technology" solutions like blocking out the sun from space, or mechanically vacuuming carbon out of the sky.
Then again, I know another organization which freaks out any time you mention regulations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGrWGQCxpWA
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Colin Wright Posted 10:01 am
21 May 2008
To have any hope of staving off collapse, we need to move forward with measures that address many interrelated problems at once. We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.
We don't need a War on Carbon. We need a new prosperity that can be shared by all while still respecting a multitude of real ecological limits -- not just atmospheric gas concentrations, but topsoil depth, water supplies, toxic chemical concentrations, and the health of ecosystems, including the diversity of life they depend upon.
Notice he does this without setting up false dichotomies between growth vs. limits, or technology-all-the-time vs. agrarian-technology. It's a complicated equation with no ideological short-cuts.
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:04 am
21 May 2008
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maverick Posted 11:45 am
21 May 2008
It is all things faith, science, business, politics, the state of our planet. Above all more wok than opinion.
Someone please , get on the stupid end of the shovel.
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hapa Posted 12:49 pm
21 May 2008
all the timelines have fallen in on us -- nothing like 40+ years is really available. so it will be one big project.
nuclear and CCS won't scale up affordably. GMO plants are more expensive and less reliable than MAS. wow, look, i'm a luddite.
investment vs regulation. only in america would this false dichotomy be made and debated seriously. thank the stars the europeans and japanese are placing tough standards on their equipment so we'll have affordable refrigeration a few years from now. if it were left up to us we'd be calling spiced meat high tech. never surrender!
limits to growth vs green growth: like we're in a period of stability now, walking into a period of greater stability, and GNP will be a useful measure. go ahead, forecast the next 50 years. or the next 25. i know someone whose house isn't up for auction! his name is michael.
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Sharon Astyk Posted 1:28 am
22 May 2008
"This is an expression of faith about the future, and therefore based upon a supposed track record of technology having solved more problems than it created in the recent past. Underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow on-wards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that the new technologies now under discussion will succeed, and that they will do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon....But actual experience is the opposite of this assumed track record. Some dreamed-of new technologies succeed, while others don't. Those that do succeed typically take a few decades to develop and phase in widely: think of gas heating, electric lighting, cars and airplanes, television, computers and so on. New technologies, whether or not they succeed in solving the problem that they were designed to solve, regularly create unanticipated new problems. Technological solutions to environmental problems are routinely far more expensive than preventative measures to avoid creating the problem in the first place: for example ,the billions of dollars of damages...Most of all advances in technology just increase our ability to do things, which may be either for the better or for the worse. All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems: that's why we're in the situation in which we now find ourselves. What makes you think that, as of January 1 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing unanticipated problems while it just solves the problems that it previously produced?"
Call me a luddite if you will - I prefer that to the magical thinking involved in believing that we are now outside of the history of our technologies, and because we wish the negative consequences away, they will go.
Sharon
Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.
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lorna salzman Posted 3:05 am
22 May 2008
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