Through the canyon

The recent spate of postings here on Rawls & Me has brought back some familiar themes, not least the contested role of technology in securing environmental sustainability. As in the past, I find myself discussing policy measures while sensing that much of the debate actually concerns far more fundamental questions.

Looking toward the future, I believe the stage is set for a grand debate about the direction of the human enterprise. While there are already ample signs of a growing planetary consciousness, much of its focus remains on the global challenges we face rather than on the solutions we might develop.

If humanity is to make it through the mid-century canyon of environmental stress, as the world adopts Western lifestyles, we need to reflect seriously on what brought us here. Rather than viewing escalating environmental destruction as the ultimate evidence of social and political failure, it may be more productive to see it as a painful feedback signal within a longer process of civilizational learning. After all, it is difficult to imagine how a planetary civilization could develop without at some point confronting its biophysical limitations. The real question is whether we will, in time, be able to overcome the traumatic character of our initial encounter with modernity and use the knowledge we have gained to chart a more sustainable trajectory into the future.

In searching for such a trajectory, we should be careful not to fall victim either to romanticized notions of a pastoral past or to utopian visions of some advanced, Star Trek–like future. At the same time, we must recognize that given the unsustainable nature of current trends, any viable response to the ecological crisis will almost certainly need to be radical in scope.

One key fault line in the coming debate concerns our relationship to the natural world. As Martin Lewis already noted in 1993, “the central theme of modern environmentalism may well be the idea that humanity’s separation from nature lies at the root of the ecological crisis.” Among environmentalists, it is commonly believed that the only way to heal this rift is by re-immersing ourselves in nature: by relying on locally produced natural materials (such as wood) and by “treading softly” on the planet. As is evident not least from this weblog, I hold almost the opposite view. In order to protect the natural environment, I believe we should seek to decouple ourselves from it.

Recognizing that any attempt to “return to nature” in a world of seven billion people would quite literally destroy nature as we know it, I argue instead that we should return nature to itself and begin a process of ecological restoration. While nanotechnologies may hold part of the key to such decoupling, it seems clear that only space industrialization on a massive scale can truly allow us to disengage from the sensitive ecological systems that we currently occupy with our buildings, roads, and mines. This does not mean that I fail to appreciate the spiritual value of nature. On the contrary, it is precisely because I recognize this value that I believe nature should be preserved, and that direct human contact with it should largely be limited to recreational purposes.

A second fault line concerns the legacy of the Enlightenment. As Stephen Eric Bronner argues in Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, there is today a deep confusion among intellectuals on the Left regarding the origins and objectives of progressive politics. According to a widely held view, the Enlightenment is the source of all exploitation, and its values are inherently racist, sexist, and Eurocentric. What such a view overlooks is that the very yardstick used to judge the Enlightenment is itself a product of the Enlightenment. While it is impossible to deny that individual Enlightenment thinkers harboured the prejudices of their time, it is – as Bronner persuasively argues – wholly unsustainable to reduce the ethos of the Enlightenment to those prejudices alone.

I believe that the true legacy of the Enlightenment lies in its emphasis on critical reflection, its cosmopolitan sensibility, and its enduring commitment to social reform. If progressive politics is to offer any real hope for the future, it must reconnect with this legacy and point toward a world of universal democracy and freedom.

Finally, and closely related to the previous point, I believe capitalism represents a third – and potentially very dangerous – fault line in the debate to come. When living in a money-obsessed society like Hong Kong, capitalism can easily appear as an unstoppable force. Driven both by powerful economic interests and by billions of individual aspirations, the accelerating process of capital accumulation that began in Europe in the seventeenth century is now unmistakably global in character.

There is no doubt that this process has done much good: it has unleashed human productivity, enabled unprecedented levels of functional differentiation, and given a majority of the world’s population a far richer material life than their ancestors could ever have imagined. At the same time, the human and ecological toll of capitalism has been catastrophic. Child labour, maimed workers, and animals confined in factory farms all provide ample reasons to resist capitalism in its current form.

Yet, as I have repeatedly argued, it is a mistake to equate capitalism as such with exploitation. As economies become more sophisticated, value creation increasingly depends on high levels of human ingenuity and creativity. While it was once possible to grow rich primarily through the exploitation of labour, a mature capitalist economy instead relies on access to a highly educated workforce – and, not least, on consumers who can afford to buy what is produced. It is my belief that a social-democratic system is uniquely equipped to provide this broader context for growth.

I recognize that this belief is partly shaped by the fact that I grew up in one of the most successful yet egalitarian economies in the world: Sweden. I will not pursue this argument further here, but I strongly suspect that many critics of capitalism (and many capitalists as well) fail to grasp its full long-term implications. In any case, few would deny that our global future will, to a large extent, depend on how the capitalist system evolves – and on the direction it takes in the decades ahead.

Ethical responsibility and climate change

Today at work we were talking about ethical responsibility and climate change. A colleague suggested that the difference between China and the US could be likened to that between a murderer and someone guilty only of manslaughter. His argument was that when America began its industrial development, no one knew about the risks of climate change whereas China began its industrial rise at a time when these risks were already well understood. Recognizing that climate change will, in effect, kill people in the future, my colleague suggested that China was guilty of nothing less than deliberately murdering future people and that only the dishonest practice of “time-discounting” could obscure this fact.

Listening to this argument, I realized that it brings out many of the reasons why I disagree with mainstream views on the ethics of climate change.

Firstly, we have to consider that China has witnessed an unprecedented decline in poverty over the last three decades. The poverty rate has fallen from 85 percent in 1981 to 10 percent today and even if rural poverty remains dire in many places, mass starvation has been averted and countless present lives have been saved. It is clear that fossil fuels, especially inexpensive coal power, have been instrumental in making this rapid export-oriented economic growth possible.

Secondly, when looking at the number of people that are at risk of dying in the future as a result of climate change, we have to compare that number to what the consequences would be if the world were to adopt the kind of socio-economic policies that my colleague and other neo-Malthusians tend to advocate, such as a dramatic reduction in economic activity. The number of people that would be affected if some countries were to fall into spiralling deflation while others (the US comes to mind) would strenuously hold on to their current way of life, especially by the use of military force. In fact, we cannot even begin to imagine how the system of global capitalism, and all the billions of individual aspirations that are tied to it, could be dismantled without risking serious international mayhem and ecological destruction as people would return to self-sufficiency.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we have to look at the long-term implications of current growth patterns. If China succeeds in lifting all of its 1.3 billion people out of poverty and into the global middle class, we would have hundreds of millions of talented people who could contribute to the world with their creativity and productive labour. Instead of only looking at the consumption-side of the economic equation, we should ask what role these people could play in securing the long-term survival of humanity through the development of new energy sources, more advanced recycling technologies and, ultimately, space colonization. If we truly are not to discount the future, then we cannot ignore the simple fact that if humanity were to climb to the stars, millions of years of civilization would lie ahead of us and tens of billions of humans would be able to enjoy the precious gift of consciousness.

Considering all of this, I believe that we have a moral duty to do what we can to mitigate climate change, be it through demand-side reductions or supply-side innovation (see previous post). However, we would indeed be guilty of wilfully murdering future people if we chose to ignore the bigger historical picture of human evolution. As much as we need change, we need change in an intelligent direction, a direction that can inspire rather than frighten people and a direction that has a reasonable chance of securing democratic support not only in individual countries but also in a pluralistic world.

Technology-led climate policy

Today we talked about “Energy and climate change” in the sustainability class. In preparation for this, I stumbled upon a piece by two economists at McGill University entitled “An Analysis of a Technology-led Climate Policy as a Response to Climate Change”. The paper explains why climate change mitigation poses a much more difficult challenge than some economists like Nicholas Stern want us to believe and why the current target-based approach to climate change mitigation is doomed to fail as it puts the “cart” (large cuts in emissions) before the “horse” (the technological means for making the cuts).

Unfortunately, as the authors correctly point out, the debate on climate change has been almost exclusively about the ends (how much emissions are to be cut) rather than the means (how emissions are to be cut). While there is clearly room for demand-side mitigation (such as more energy efficient building codes, more trains instead of cars and less meat consumption), the simple fact that we are now seven billion people on this planet makes it imperative that we develop new means of producing vast quantities of carbon emission-free energy.

Access to such emission-free energy would not only provide immediate mitigation by replacing coal and other fossil primary energy sources, it would also pave the way for electric cars, large-scale desalination of sea water and other crucial components in a more sustainable future world. The list of possible technologies includes things like nuclear fusion, deep geothermal energy and biological hydrogen production. The problem is that such technologies are still decades into the future and will require a lot of basic research and development. Many people will argue that we do not have the time to wait until such new energy sources can be developed. While they may be right that we should immediately do what we can in terms of demand-side mitigation, it is clear that without radical new supply-side technologies, climate stabilization will be nearly impossible:

“On the face of it, attempts to directly control global carbon emissions will not work, and certainly not in the absence of ready-to-deploy, scalable, and transferable carbon emission-free energy technologies. The technology requirements cannot be wished, priced, assumed or targeted away.”