Is Techno-optimism Enough?

Ethan Goffman
 
Can technology solve all of our problems? Amory Lovins, Chair of the Rocky Mountain Institute, expressed such profound techno-optimism in his remarks opening “Environment and Security,” the 2012 National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment (discussed here last week). Lovins outlined a human progression ushered in by the discovery of fire, with a qualitative leap during the fossil-fuel era. He argued that, given the harmful effects of fossil fuels, we need a “new fire,” a renewable energy and efficiency era that will provide all the benefits of fossil fuels without the numerous harmful impacts. Indeed, for much of the conference the predominant view was that technological programs—together with wise policy—are the main route to solving climate change and other environmental challenges. By contrast, sustainable consumption advocates (myself included) believe that technology alone will not be sufficient, that we also need to make profound lifestyle and value changes.

Lovins offered a comprehensive technological solution that, he claims, will allow $5 trillion in savings, yet support a 158% bigger economy by 2050, using no energy from oil, coal, or nuclear (detailed in his new book Reinventing Fire). He argues that we are on the verge of “one of most profound transformations in the history of our species.” How? Vehicle fitness can triple efficiency; streamlined vehicles made of high-tech alloys will enable electric engines. Lovins also claims we can triple or quadruple efficiency for air travel, with military innovations leading the way. Smart vehicles can flatten traffic congestion, leading to free-flowing highways. Electricity use can also be drastically lessened, with buildings three to four times as efficient and industry twice as efficient. For instance, just changing pipes to improve pumping loops can save 86% in energy. In addition, Lovins asserts, wind and solar are rapidly becoming economically competitive, a trend that will only improve over time. Renewables already added half of the world’s new capacity in the last four years. Diversifying renewables by type and location, along with a more connected, smarter grid can drastically curtail the intermittency problem. To the common environmental “pervasive dread,” Lovins argues for a message of “applied hope—not just optimism, but applied hope.” For Lovins, we must act immediately and decisively, but if we do so technology will solve our problems.

An alternative argument goes something like this: there are now seven billion people on Earth, soon to be 9 billion or even more. We are already in a condition of overshoot, where we need to drastically lower our resource and energy usage. Furthermore, although it is often agreed that we need to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the world is heading in the opposite direction. Prior to the Great Recession, trends in the United States and elsewhere were toward ever larger houses and cars. China, India, and Brazil, among other countries, continue to emulate the developed world, for instance in car dependency and in the amount of meat eaten per person, both of which have huge environmental impacts. The United States and other developed nations, therefore, have to lead the way in profound individual and social changes, including reducing the amount of housing space per person, moving toward urban living and smart growth, using more public transit, repairing and reusing rather than throwing away, and eating more vegetable-based diets. Since material goods, beyond a certain point, don’t make people happier, we can make these changes without harming our quality of life.

In his forthcoming book entitled The Conundrum (shortly to be reviewed in a future SSPP blog post), David Owen takes issue with Lovins’ techno-optimism. Much of Owen’s argument is based on of the idea of rebound—also known as the Jevons Paradox—that energy efficiency and other technological improvements inevitably lead to greater use of energy, at times more than undoing the good they’ve accomplished. Lovins is skeptical, arguing that the great majority of energy savings do, in fact, save energy, since, for instance, once your house reaches a certain temperature you won’t make it hotter simply because it’s cheap to do so. Owen replies that humans will find other environmentally harmful ways to spend the money saved from lower energy bills—often in ways difficult to track. To Owen, human nature is such that, as goods become cheaper and more accessible, we’ll simply use them in greater abundance. He explains,

Amory Lovins once wrote that, if Jevons’s argument is correct, “we should mandate inefficient equipment to save energy.” As Lovins intended, this seems laughably illogical—but is it? If the only motor vehicles available today were 1920 Model Ts, how many miles do you think you’d drive each year. . . No one is going to “mandate inefficient equipment,” but unless we’re willing to do the equivalent—by mandating costlier energy or finding other ways to dramatically reduce our total consumption—increased efficiency. . .can only make our predicament worse.

Technological improvement, by itself, will not be enough. Government intervention is needed to encourage lifestyle changes, such as driving less. Yet deep social transformation is also needed to enable government to make these changes and encourage citizens to comply.

This isn’t to say we can succeed without dramatic technological changes—clearly we need these as well. Technological and social adjustments can and must abet and mutually reinforce one another. Techno-optimism does, of course, have the advantage of being an easier sell than lifestyle changes. Unfortunately, it’s also an inadequate solution. Contradicting Lovins’ vision, an early release of the Annual Energy Outlook 2012 published by the Energy Information Agency (divison of the U.S. Department of Energy) projects that “Energy-related carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions [will] grow by 3 percent from 2010 to 2035,” despite a 42% decline in energy intensity and an increase in renewables from 10 to 16% during that period. I have no doubt that, with a serious program such as that proposed by Lovins, we can do far better than these projections. Yet, with a growing population and a fragile environment facing systemic change, we also need to drastically alter our lifestyles. This doesn’t need to be promoted through the “pervasive dread” that Lovins decries in environmentalists, but through a commitment to an equitable society free of extreme materialism. Such a philosophy may already be amenable to the millennial generation. Threatened by economic calamity, our youth may very well embrace a more egalitarian vision in which everyone has enough, but not too much.

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Ethan Goffman is Associate Editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. His publications have appeared in E: The Environmental Magazine, Grist, and elsewhere. He is the author of Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (State University of New York Press, 2000) and coeditor of The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond (Purdue University Press, 2009) and Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (Purdue University Press, 2010). Ethan is a member of the Executive Committee of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Chapter of the Sierra Club.