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Neighborliness, Innovation and Sustainability
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
Two approaches have tended to define the debate about sustainable prosperity in recent years. The first is conscious consumption, which manifests at the shallow end as green shopping (even greenwashing) but can prove out at a deeper level as strategic consumption. The second is green technology, which is a topic that we tend to cover here in great depth, and which covers everything from energy to transportation, housing to product design. Sometimes that technology is trivial, sometimes it is profound.
These approaches are complimentary, and both have a lot to offer as we try to negotiate our way to a bright green future. But there is a danger in thinking that all we have to do is design better substitutes for the products we already consume, and then convince people to buy them.
I call this idea “the Swap.” It’s sort of a middle stage on the road to a better future, where people have accepted that something must change, but have not really gotten their heads around the idea that everything must change. Therefore, the Swap is a form of denial.
… No, if we’re going to avert ecological destruction, we need to to not only do things differently, we need to do different things. We need to work to build dense, walkable neighborhoods composed of green buildings served by bike infrastructure and transit and green infrastructure, suffused with good design choices and smart technologies that let us live in a different set of relationships with our stuff, the materials we use and the energy that powers our lives. By embracing innovation in technology, design, planning and policy, we can transform the systems around us, and provide ourselves with a whole new array of much more sustainable choices.
Bright green lives will not look like the lives we live today.
… We stay pretty far from the woo-woo here on Worldchanging, but I also believe that to ignore the intangible, creative, emotional, even spiritual aspects of this transformation is to fail.
Many of the unsustainable systems we’re trying to change offer as their major solace the idea of individual independence, substituting a layer of things and commercialism between the citizen and his or her community. This is not a new insight.
However, as we change those systems, we’re going to have to embrace new ways of pleasurably re-establishing the reality of interdependence in people’s minds. We need to remind people how to be good neighbors, how to build friendships, how to share, how to see their enlightened self-interest in public goods, how to be a good citizen.
(7 April 2008)
I’ve come to look forward to Alex’s posts. Also posted today is his critique of Al Gore’s highly funded climate campaign: Can We Solve It Like This? Why the We Campaign Needs Change.. -BA
The Economist Has No Clothes
Robert Nadeau, Scientific American
Unscientific assumptions in economic theory are undermining efforts to solve environmental problems
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The 19th-century creators of neoclassical economics—the theory that now serves as the basis for coordinating activities in the global market system—are credited with transforming their field into a scientific discipline. But what is not widely known is that these now legendary economists—William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Maria Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto—developed their theories by adapting equations from 19th-century physics that eventually became obsolete.
Unfortunately, it is clear that neoclassical economics has also become outdated. The theory is based on unscientific assumptions that are hindering the implementation of viable economic solutions for global warming and other menacing environmental problems.
… Because neoclassical economics does not even acknowledge the costs of environmental problems and the limits to economic growth, it constitutes one of the greatest barriers to combating climate change and other threats to the planet. It is imperative that economists devise new theories that will take all the realities of our global system into account.
(April 2008 issue)
Reads like a battle cry for Ecological economics. The extended article by Robert Nadea is online: Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet?.
There are many other criticisms of neoclassical economics (e.g.. from Keynes and Left economists), which are ignored during prosperous times but which experience a resurgence during economic turmoil. -BA
A Manhattan or Apollo Project for Energy? What Nonsense
Dan Greenberg, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A delusion persists that we can research our way out of the energy predicament and simultaneously do away with global warming. What’s needed, it’s claimed, is a great mobilization of scientific and engineering brains and resources, a la the bomb-building Manhattan Project or the Apollo moon landing.
… As handy metaphors for all-out government concentration on a clearly identified technological goal, Manhattan and Apollo are winners. But care should be taken in extrapolating their success to today’s energy problems. The big difference is that Manhattan had one customer, the U.S. Army, and Apollo also had only one, NASA (with a pork-happy Congress cheering it on). The goals were clear: Beat the Nazis to the bomb and the Soviets to the moon. Financed with blank checks, run by chiefs appropriately referred to as “czars,” and unimpeded by diverse political and economic interests, the two projects decisively proceeded to their successful conclusions.
In contrast, our energy and climate-change problems originate more in political, economic, and cultural entanglements than in technological deficiencies.
Sure, laboratory wizardry is needed to make do with less and cleaner energy sources, but the reality is that superior technologies remain undeployed because of the aforementioned impediments.
… Do we need a grand mobilization of physicists, chemists, engineers, and other hardware experts to solve the energy crisis? We surely need a lot of them to work on it.
But perhaps more important would be the potential contributions from the behavioral and social sciences. Better solar panels, improved insulation, and more miles per gallon are attainable if we want them; the lab wizards can be counted on to provide them.
The real problem is that the energy crisis is mainly in our heads — in our habits and comfort preferences.
Dan Greenberg is a longtime observer of science policy and politics. He is the author of “Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism” (University of Chicago Press), as well as other books, and has published widely in newspapers and popular and professional magazines.
(6 April 2008)
The Age of Scarcity?
Rising populations. Skyrocketing commodity prices. Strains on natural resources. Is this our Malthusian moment?
Chris Farrell, Business Week
Is the ghost of Thomas Robert Malthus stalking the global economy? Sad to say, it sure seems like it.
Malthus was a key figure in the 18th and early 19th century in developing modern mainstream economics. … The grim dynamic runs along these lines: Growing incomes lead to increased fertility and reduced mortality. That means there are more mouths to feed on the same land. Growth and income fall. The process repeats itself, over and over again. Little wonder the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle described Malthus as “Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next.”
In the 21st century, the worry revolves around the dramatic expansion of the global economy and consumer purchasing power in China, India, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Russia, and other emerging markets. The rise of the frontier economies is putting too great a strain on natural resources. The price increases we’re witnessing aren’t a temporary market dislocation, but a permanent shift into an Age of Scarcity.
Could the pessimists be right?
They have some evidence in their corner. Certainly, despite some recent declines, commodity prices are at nosebleed heights. The Rogers International Commodities Index, made up of 36 different commodities ranging from agriculture to energy to metals, is up 383% over the past 10 years. Oil prices have jumped from $23 a barrel in 2003 to around $100 currently. Part of that oil price hike could also reflect that the world is near “peak oil,” the term used to define the transformative moment when global oil production starts declining gradually over time.
… Still, there’s good reason to believe the Age of Scarcity isn’t here. For one thing, the long-term impact of steep market prices and technological innovation shouldn’t be underestimated.
… Indeed, instead of Malthus, the touchstone economist for our era is Joseph Schumpeter. He’s best known for his metaphor of “creative destruction,” the process by which new technologies, new markets, and new organizations supplant the old. Knowledge, innovation, and entrepreneurship are what count.
… Talk about unintended consequences. The diversion of food crops into the energy supply—and the attendant runup in prices—has been a disaster for the nearly 1 billion of the world’s poor who are chronically food-insecure.
… Commentators and analysts have periodically predicted a Malthusian nightmare—wrongly. Remember the Club of Rome and its terrible forecast about the limits to growth published during the 1970s oil and food crisis?
Farrell is contributing economics editor for BusinessWeek. You can also hear him on American Public Media’s nationally syndicated finance program, Marketplace Money, as well as on public radio’s business program Marketplace. His Sound Money column appears on BusinessWeek.com.
(7 April 2008)
Nice summary by one of my favorite business journalists. He ends on the requisite cheery note, but nonetheless he presents evidence on both sides. Unfortunately, he repeats the untruth about the “failed predictions” of the Limits to Growth book. See Cassandra’s curse: how “The Limits to Growth” was demonized by Ugo Bardi at The Oil Drum. -BA
Turner talks of global change, cannibalism
UPI
Unchecked global warming and an exploding population could result in cannibalism, controversial U.S. former media mogul Ted Turner says.
If global warming isn’t stemmed, “we’ll be 8 degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow,” Turner said during PBS’ “Charlie Rose.”
(3 April 2008)
Video of Turner’s talk at Gristmill.
