By Keith Kloor, a freelance journalist whose stories have appeared in a range of publications, from Science to Smithsonian. Since 2004, he’s been an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University. This piece is a follow-up from a post on his blog, Collide-a-Scape.
In Sleeper, Woody Allen finds that socializing is different after the 70′s.
Environmentalism? Not so much.
If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.
Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.
For example, you may have heard that a bunch of scientists produced a landmark report that concludes the earth is destined for ecological collapse, unless global population and consumption rates are restrained. No, I’m not talking about the UK’s just-published Royal Society report, which, among other things, recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth. I’m talking about that other landmark report from 1972, the one that became a totem of the environmental movement.
I mention the 40-year old Limits to Growth book in connection with the new Royal Society report not just to point up their Malthusian similarities (which Mark Lynas flags here), but also to demonstrate what a time warp the collective environmental mindset is stuck in. Even some British greens have recoiled in disgust at the outdated assumptions underlying the Royal Society’s report. Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, told the Guardian: “What an astonishingly weak, cliché ridden report this is…’Consumption’ to blame for all our problems? Growth is evil? A rich economy with technological advances is needed for radical decarbonisation. I do wish scientists would stop using their hatred of capitalism as an argument for cutting consumption.”
Goodall, it turns out, is exactly the kind of greenie (along with Lynas) I had in mind when I argued last week that only forward-thinking modernists could save environmentalism from being consigned to junkshop irrelevance. I juxtaposed today’s green modernist with the backward thinking “green traditionalist,” who I said remained wedded to environmentalism’s doom and gloom narrative and resistant to the notion that economic growth was good for the planet. Modernists, I wrote, offered the more viable blueprint for sustainability:
“Pro-technology, pro-city, pro-growth, the green modernist has emerged in recent years to advance an alternative vision for the future. His mission is to remake environmentalism: Strip it of outdated mythologies and dogmas, make it less apocalyptic and more optimistic, broaden its constituency. In this vision, the Anthropocene is not something to rail against, but to embrace. It is about welcoming that world, not dreading it. It is about creating a future that environmentalists will help shape for the better.”
The piece seemed to strike a chord. It was pinged around a lot on Twitter and generated some heated micro-conversations. A number of people said it was a breath of fresh air. Plenty others were critical. Some complained that I set up a false dichotomy, that I painted a simplistic, cartoonish picture of the green traditionalist, and that it was unfair to the many grassroots greens working at a local level, who have embraced technological and pro-market solutions.
I can’t speak to that last charge, since my post was written on a large canvass, with environmentalism’s representative voices—the leading writers, scientists, and big NGO’s—in mind. Collectively, these are the driving forces that shape attitudes, public discourse, green politics and policy.
If you pay close enough attention to media stories, what is said by mainstream green groups, and of course to big splashy reports put out by esteemed institutions like the Royal Society, you will notice that the beating heart of environmentalism belongs to the traditionalist, as I have characterized him/her.
For example, let’s look at Worldwatch Institute’s 2012 State of the Earth, in a chapter titled, “The path to degrowth in overdeveloped countries.” I’m assuming this path is suggested for nations such as the United States, whose citizens are fond of big cars, big box stores, and Big Gulps at the 7/11. Though Americans are still recovering from the worldwide economic meltdown, here’s how the Worldwatch Institute aims to win them over:
“The rapidly warming Earth and the collapse of ecosystem services show that economic “degrowth” in overdeveloped countries is essential and urgent. Degrowth is the intentional contraction of overly inflated economies and the dispelling of the myth that perpetual pursuit of growth is good for economies or the societies of which they are a part.”
Yes, mainstream greens are actually running on a platform of intentional economic contraction. Now, you might say, well, that’s just one environmental group. Fair enough. Let’s go to this manifesto by James Gustave Speth, in a recent issue of Orion magazine. Speth has been a leading American environmentalist for decades. He is the founder of the World Resources Institute, a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and currently on the faculty at Vermont law school. In his Orion essay, he writes:
“Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines families and communities; it is leading us to environmental calamity; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting our deepest human needs.”
To understand why this is a pinched view of economic growth that also conflates a number of legitimate issues, read this piece by Robert Reich. In truth, he writes, “economic growth isn’t just about more stuff. Growth is different from consumerism. Growth is really about the capacity of a nation to produce everything that’s wanted and needed by its inhabitants. That includes better stewardship of the environment as well as improved public health and better schools. (The Gross Domestic Product is a crude way of gauging this but it’s a guide. Nations with high and growing GDPs have more overall capacity; those with low or slowing GDPs have less.)”
Poor countries tend to be more polluted than richer ones, Reich says, “because they don’t have the capacity both to keep their people fed and clothed and also to keep their land, air and water clean.” Oh, and by the way, Reich is a longtime liberal luminary and currently a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkley.
The way I see it, Speth is a green traditionalist, the kind who demonizes economic growth based on faulty reasoning and perhaps an ideology that associates growth with environmental plunder. Reich is a green modernist (though I’m not sure he’d call himself a green), the kind who recognizes that irresponsible resource extraction “isn’t an indictment of growth itself. Growth doesn’t depend on plunder. Rich nations have the capacity to extract resources responsibly.”
Do green traditionalists have the capacity to shed their long-standing anti-economic growth bias? Do they have the capacity to incorporate some of the modernist outlook and embrace nuclear power and genetically modified crops, two technologies that experts say will be necessary to expand if the worst of climate change is to be avoided? Probably not anytime soon.
In the comment thread to my post from last week, a reader recalled watching (several years ago) counterculture icon Stewart Brand in a BBC ‘Newsnight’ debate with mainstream environmentalists: ”He was pro-city, pro-nuclear and pro-tech. He was also virtually shouted down.”
April 27th, 2012 at 12:29 pm
[...] the whole piece over at [...]
April 27th, 2012 at 1:11 pm
I’m so glad you mentioned the importance of nuclear power to our future. While we can’t ignore solar and wind, the only way that we could ever bring online a few terawatts of carbon “free” electricity is with nuclear.
April 27th, 2012 at 1:16 pm
As staunchly pro-nuclear, I have learned that I should probably just have another pint rather than say something when the subject comes up. I still grind my teeth to hear some of the comments coming from friends of mine who are otherwise relatively well informed.
April 27th, 2012 at 2:14 pm
[...] Discovery Magazine: The Limits to Environmentalism [...]
April 27th, 2012 at 3:29 pm
A lot of people advocate zero-growth (AKA steady-state) economies for the developed world and, ultimately, for everyone everywhere. Has anyone ever suggested any plausible mechanisms for how to get there without the developed world’s bicycle toppling over as soon as it stops pedalling (and perhaps the developing world’s bicycle toppling over shortly thereafter)?
I dislike consumerism as much as the next man who owns a lot of gadgets and think that (once we’re out of recession) a steady-state economy would be terrific. But if such a thing is possible, I’ve yet to see anyone explain how. Pointers?
April 27th, 2012 at 3:53 pm
As it’s currently in vogue I’ll make reference to the latest book by social psychologist Jon Haidt and suggest that you “follow the sacredness”. The difference between modern and traditionalist greens is the ability to parse the evidence while setting aside strong moral intuitions. The sacralized vision of a pristine and untouched by the sinful hand of man, ‘Nature’ is obviously as old as the book of Genesis and likely older. It will be a joyful day when this false but ubiquitous dichotomy of “Nature- Pure, Good, Clean” and “Man-Dirty, Bad, Foreign” is finally laid to rest with the other irrational curiosities of human history.
April 27th, 2012 at 4:39 pm
If you look at big NGOs like Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund, you’ll find that Kloor’s critique has no basis whatsoever.
People confuse anti-nuclear with anti-technology. I’m not especially anti-nuclear and think some of the opposition to it isn’t well-founded, but that’s just one small area.
April 27th, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Here’s a second to Brian Schmidt’s comment #5, with some evidence.
I am one of those who had a heated twitter conversation with Mr. Kloor after his last piece. I predicted he might find some academic types who would argue along the lines of his green traditionalist cartoon — and here he has. But the fact is that the mainstream environmental groups — national, as well as many regional and local groups — who are actually working on climate and other major energy issues — are all vigorously advocating the kind of positive, technology-based agenda that Mr. Kloor accuses them of disfavoring.
Since Mr. Kloor seems not to have the time to actually research what the mainstream environmental groups are recommending, let me provide some links:
Union of Concerned Scientists Climate 2030 Blueprint (on which I worked):
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/big_picture_solutions/climate-2030-blueprint.html
Natural Resources Defense Council: An Economic Blueprint for Solving Global Warming
http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/blueprint/methodology.asp
Greenpeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/energyrevolution/
World Wildlife Fund: http://www.worldwildlife.org/climate/Publications/WWFBinaryitem4911.pdf
Sierra Club: http://www.sierraclub.org/crp/downloads/SierraClub-CRP-Prospectus.pdf
Environment America:http://www.environmentamerica.org/reports/ame/way-forward-global-warming
I don’t believe you’ll find any of them recommending economic contraction or “back to the land” movements as “solutions.” They are all full of serious proposals to transform our energy system to support a modern, growing, clean energy, job-creating, economy. The UCS study includes a detailed economic analysis, using a modified version of the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s National Energy Modeling System, of clean energy scenarios.
What Mr. Kloor really seems to object to is the general lack of inclusion of new nuclear plants in the scenarios recommended by mainstream greens. It is strange that Mr. Kloor seems to regard support for this 50 year old technology as the prerequisite for being a green modernist, despite the fact that the industry’s economic predictions for this technology have never been borne out. More on that some other time.
Alan Nogee, Clean Energy Consulting
former Director, Clean Energy Program, Union of Concerned Scientists
@alannogee
April 27th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
[...] A Critique of the Broken-Record Message of 'Green Traditionalists' – NYTimes.comtry{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}/**//**/ /**/// if ((typeof adxpos_Header1 == "undefined") || (typeof adxads[adxpos_Header1] == "undefined")) { if($("Header1")) { $("Header1").hide(); } } ///**/// if ((typeof adxpos_Header2 == "undefined") || (typeof adxads[adxpos_Header2] == "undefined")) { if($("Header2")) { $("Header2").hide(); } } ///**/// if ((typeof adxpos_Header3 == "undefined") || (typeof adxads[adxpos_Header3] == "undefined")) { if($("Header3")) { $("Header3").hide(); } } //NYTD.Blogs.user.fillInMemberTools();Home PageToday's PaperVideoMost PopularTimes Topics/**/// if ((typeof adxpos_Middle1C == "undefined") || (typeof adxads[adxpos_Middle1C] == "undefined")) { if($("Middle1C")) { $("Middle1C").hide(); } } //Search All NYTimes.comThe Opinion PagesWorldU.S.N.Y. / RegionBusinessTechnologyScienceHealthSportsOpinionEditorialsColumnistsContributorsLettersThe Public EditorGlobal OpinionArtsStyleTravelJobsReal EstateAutosmodifyNavigationDisplay();/**//**//**/// if ((typeof adxpos_TopAd == "undefined") || (typeof adxads[adxpos_TopAd] == "undefined")) { if($("TopAd")) { $("TopAd").hide(); } } ///**/// if ((typeof adxpos_PushDown == "undefined") || (typeof adxads[adxpos_PushDown] == "undefined")) { if($("PushDown")) { $("PushDown").hide(); } } // April 27, 2012, 5:20 pmA Critique of the Broken-Record Message of ‘Green Traditionalists’ By ANDREW C. REVKINAndrew Revkin Demonstrators at 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen.Keith Kloor, building on a post on his blog, Collide-a-Scape, has an essay posted on Discover, titled “The Limits to Environmentalism,” that is well worth reading. Here’s the introduction and a link to the rest: If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.For example, you may have heard that a bunch of scientists produced a landmark report that concludes the earth is destined for ecological collapse, unless global population and consumption rates are restrained. No, I’m not talking about the UK’s just-published Royal Society report, which, among other things, recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth. I’m talking about that other landmark report from 1972, the one that became a totem of the environmental movement. [Read the rest.] [...]
April 27th, 2012 at 6:11 pm
Brian, have you ever tried to find people at NRDC or EDF with whom to discuss new developments in environmentally relevant science and technology ?
They seem rather thin on the ground, but that may just be degrowth in action.
April 27th, 2012 at 6:40 pm
@Alan Nogee: which of those organizations support GMOs?
April 27th, 2012 at 7:17 pm
i see that exporting waste to the developing world was conveniently left unaddressed. also robert reich is a neoliberal economist from effing yale. of course, he would prescribe IMPF friendly pro-growth economic policy.
word to the wise, keith kloor, just because critics of growth trade in descriptive (instead of prescriptive) rhetoric, it’s very easy to be dismissive, but only masochists (or the 1%?) would argue that industrial capitalism is working out very well.
April 27th, 2012 at 8:02 pm
The International Energy Agency is gravely concerned about the limits to growth and the constraints that greenhouse warming places on fossil fuel use. They are alarmed at the slow shift to renewables. The IEA has never been seen hugging trees or wearing love beads.
http://www.iea.org/press/pressdetail.asp?PRESS_REL_ID=436
yours
Frank Johnston
April 27th, 2012 at 8:09 pm
@7. Alan Nogee,
You can quote all the examples you want, but there are scads of counter-examples too.
I consider myself an environmentalist but there are focus and attitudinal differences where I find myself at odds with many environmentalists and their messages. For instance I find that hard-core environmentalists like to talk about first principles and seems to have little flexibility to account for circumstances.
What do I mean? Well, for one thing, the planet is facing a huge population bulge. Authoritarian and control oriented measures to do something about this have failed everywhere except China. What has worked? Ironically, growth. As in, raise the standard of living, raise educational levels, increase GDP, increase lifespan, provision better healthcare.
So the reality is, until our population levels stabilize and start to decline a bit, the environment is going to take a hit. Yet rather than focus on the fact that rates of population increase are falling, environmentalists invariably focus on the absolute growth. As though we had a humane choice!
Here’s another example. Our energy needs cannot be quickly or easily switched to renewables. It’s such a huge problem, with no ideal choices, that we’d cause more hardship by conducting a forced march to change. It’s a worthy problem for discussion but what it really needs are demonstration projects, pilot plants and the like. Focus on what can be done and become enablers for the change you want.
I can easily reel off examples where environmentalists wind up sounding like the Voice of Doom. Most of the organizations you list have fallen into that trap at one time or another.
Here’s a message of hope. The Earth is strong and adaptable. If we only make a few changes, she will stay strong. Here’s what you can do…
April 27th, 2012 at 8:53 pm
Mary, Sorry I don’t work in that area. But also don’t see how whether mainstream environmental groups support or oppose a couple of specific technologies justifies a broad brush characterization as ‘traditionalists’ as defined by Kloor.
Brian, Yes, you and Mr. Kloor may find any number of examples of individual environmentalists painting gloomy pictures or advocating economic contraction. But if one is going to broadly critique the mainstream environmental movement in this way, surely the fact that virtually every national (and regional) environmental group working on climate policy has put together hopeful scenarios, based on advanced technology and continued economic growth, and is actually working to implement them, must be relevant. There may be individual environmental leaders advocating no-growth, but so far, not a single national advocacy organization has made such a recommendation part of their policy prescription or agenda.
With respect to the realism of those scenarios, I’d welcome specific critiques of any assumptions in UCS’s Blueprint, which I spent several years working on. UCS went to great effort to benchmark technology cost and performance assumptions based on real-world experience. Interestingly, however, the cost of wind and solar technologies has decreased faster than UCS projected in 2008/9. Analysis by collaborative projects involving the Department of Energy labs, utilities, and renewable energy industries have found that even higher renewable energy penetration targets are feasible. And leading states are achieving greater rates of efficiency improvements than in the UCS scenario.
Personally, I would also like to see more positive messaging from DC enviro groups. Years of experience has shown them, however, that the most effective communication strategy is not to focus on either gloom and doom, or to lead with solutions alone, but to pair clear assessment of problems together with workable solutions. Anyone who takes the time to look will find lots of both.
Alan
April 27th, 2012 at 9:00 pm
@Alan Nogee: I see, only YOUR tech of interest counts. Gotcha.
See, now as a supporter of plant science, I feel entirely isolated from the mainstream enviro organizations. But who cares.
April 27th, 2012 at 9:58 pm
Its funny that you use the word modern. One of the places that environmentalism would be unrecognizable vis-a-vis the 70s is in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Perhaps landscape architecture especially – all fields concerned with modernity and technology. Today, there is a dynamic and creative embrace of technology in these fields. I’m not saying there aren’t problems in green building, but if your ‘sleeper’ environmentalist was an architect she would wake up to a very different world.
Also funny you quote Speth, someone active in the 70s, to characterize contemporary thinking. Reich as well – he actually co-wrote an article with a UC Berkeley architect on architecture and environmentalism in 1969. Certainly there are numerous economists and policy-makers thinking creatively about a technological post-environmentalism – why not talk about/to them? I’m not sure the question is wether ‘traditionalists’ will become ‘modern’, but when we stop identifying environmentalism with the traditionalists.
April 28th, 2012 at 1:02 am
Reference: “The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart. The fear started thousands or millions of years ago with the fear of witches, wizardry, magic etc. The design of the human brain is very bad. See “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer.
“The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart needs “Religion Explained” as background. A lot of modern first world people do magical thinking rather than logical or scientific thinking [not all logical thinking is scientific]. That is, they think of technology and things they don’t understand as magic. That is especially true of anything “nuclear.”
The US government did a lot of propagandizing about nuclear things in the 1950s. Some US government officials used secrecy as an instrument of political power at the same time. The secret is:
THERE ARE NO SECRETS.
Nature is an open book. Nature is the same everywhere. Any country with enough money, sanity, scientists and uranium can make a nuclear bomb. Most that could, chose not to. Iran seems to be stuck by a lack of something cultural. Uranium is mineable in many countries.
The following seems to be too complicated for many people:
Bomb = bad
Reactor = good
There is no possible way that a reactor could ever become a nuclear bomb. Chernobyl did not. I will have to tell you a little about how to make a bomb to explain the difference. Nothing classified. See:
http://clearnuclear.blogspot.com
April 28th, 2012 at 1:45 am
Earth abides.
April 28th, 2012 at 5:38 am
Alan Nogee,
It’s disingenuous to suggest that there is an important distinction to be made between environmental think tanks and advocacy groups. There is not. You suggest that such think tanks and “academic types” (as I have cited) don’t characterize environmentalist thought or have much sway with environmental advocates. That’s like saying conservative think tanks and conservative thought leaders don’t influence conservatives or conservative rhetoric.
I also find it curious that you would downplay the importance of environmental writers and academics/scholars/thinkers, which belies the history of environmentalism. From its origins, the environmental movement has been hugely influenced by a number of scholar/scientists, from Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner to E.O. Wilson and Bill McKibben.
The fact is this: In recent years, the “de-growth” movement has gained currency in environmental circles, both in the U.S. and Europe. Here is an article in NRDC’s magazine on the influential British economist, Tim Jackson, the author of the book, Prosperity Without Growth. (Oh, hey, as I discussed above, it so happens that a major report just released from the UK’s eminent science institution recommends economic contraction in developed countries.) http://www.onearth.org/article/the-sweet-spot
And look here, another article on the virtues of “de-growth” at Greenpeace’s site, from one of it’s founders: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/deep-green-why-de-growth-an-interview/blog/35467/
More to come. While I’m at it, I’ll also see if I can find a few encouraging words about the environmental and health benefits of genetically modified crops. I know environmental groups and green advocates have so much to say about that, too.
April 28th, 2012 at 6:13 am
Rachel Carson is still right that Pesticides are dangerous to all life including ours. John Muir is still right that we need to stay connected to the natural world. Global Warming is the first evidence of Limits to Growth. More will soon come. Economically we will be forced into negative growth whether we like it or not.
We’ve thought we’ve proved Malthus wrong by 200 years of technological and agricultural progress. But it was all contingent on cheap fossil fuels. When energy becomes more expensive and harder to extract we are on the descending side of peak oil. We will no longer be able to choose to increase energy consumption we will be faced instead with using less and less energy.
Yes, let’s use more renewable energy, and let’s conserve energy. We need to do bothfor our health as well as a way of keeping sustainable. But renewables cannot replace our prolifigate use of fossil fuels which are far more concentrated forms of energy. We will have get healthier and reduce car use. This is not going to kill us. Everyone will benefit in terms of less obesity, better hearts and lungs, reduced diabetes, and longer more fufilling lives.
We can’t base our principles on wishful thinking. The Earth is a finite planet, it cannot sustain infinite growth. So let’s learn to live with those consequences while we can still learn.
April 28th, 2012 at 9:18 am
What a lot of people forget about what Rachel Carson also said (hat tip to Pam Ronald) http://bit.ly/CarsonBio :
“A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing–entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists–all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.”
I happen to think that putting the best tech tools in farmers hands around the world is even more important that the nuclear discussion–because we need these tools with or without that wrestling match. In fact, we will need faster and more precise tools in a more rapidly changing climate.
And it’s remarkable how one’s position aligned with Rachel Carson, and eager to see reduced chemical inputs, and pest controls based on natural tools like proteins and plant hormones–gets ones ass kicked right out of the discussion. Try to show up at a UCS group meeting with that perspective and see how far that gets you. Nevermind Greenpeace actually mowing down projects that included nitrogen-efficient wheat.
How would you feel about Greenpeace if they were destroying climate science experiments and recording devices? It’s not just benign dislike–it’s active and willful hindrance. And it’s not based on science, it’s based on ideology.
April 28th, 2012 at 9:21 am
Oh my, in this published rant Keith Kloor exhibits the very same human arrogance that stimulated the varying mixture of growth and destruction over the past 200 years. The quote in the article says it all: “the Anthropocene is not something to rail against, but to embrace. It is about welcoming that world, not dreading it. It is about creating a future that environmentalists will help shape for the better.” The author might as well have evoked the term “white man’s burden” to boot.
The fact of the matter is that humans have been very fortunate over the past 200 years, having been able to apply their limited understanding of nature to pick the low-hanging fruit that nature provided to increase their presence on Earth. In so doing, they lost track of the fact that in the long run we humans must live in, not exploit, our natural environment. We cannot shape it to our wishes. We just do not have enough technology to transform enough resources to gain enough power over nature to make it conform to our precise wishes, provided, of course, that 7 billion people could ever agree on what we want from nature. We are just not that smart, folks.
It is the kind of mind-boggling arrogance displayed in this article that effectively justifies and encourages the most self-serving business interests and let’s them capture the easiest resources for their personal profits, while the rest of human society, and the rest 0f the natural world, is forced to deal with the uncertain consequences. For example, these business interests (and apparently Kloor too) see no problem manufacturing highly potent radioactive materials fuel our foolish consumption binge and then leaving them simmering in easily damaged pools of water next to nuclear plants all over the world. This is not very likely to work out very well. To see these accidents to happen justified here is stunning, to say the least. I would urge a bit of humility and caution before we plow ahead with such blind faith in humanity’s very limited abilities.
I suppose that in the eyes of Kloor and other pro-business interests, such a call for caution makes me one of those luddite traditional environmentalists. So be it. But we traditional environmentalists are not going away because after years of evidence and experience, we have a much more realistic understanding of nature and the complexities of the ecosystem. We understand that the Anthropocene is a dangerous time, and we had better move around carefully if we are to survive, much less flourish. We have not found solutions to all the problems humanity has encountered as it enters the Antrhopocene, and there is no reason to believe we will find them as our growing footprint multiplies the problems relative to the diminishing gains from more material consumption.
April 28th, 2012 at 9:26 am
Kloor, as most cornucopians do, offers no proof that perpetual economic growth is possible. Charles Justice’s comment above is on the mark. We are at the end of growth, whether we like it or not. It just remains to be seen whether…
… we gracefully embrace the end of growth and align our societal goals with something more meaningful that is physically possible and can really deliver good lives, or
…we go down fighting.
It’s not looking good at present, primarily because Kloor and millions of others cling to their blind faith in growth everlasting, and refuse to see the evidence that technology is not solving our problems. Oceans are acidifying. Fisheries have collapsed and continue to do so. Fertile soil is being depleted. Fresh water crises are forecast by all, not just environmentalists. One billion people are malnourished or starving.
Technology has a role, and none of the environmentalist Kloor disparages in this piece have advocated turning our back on technology. But blindly believing we can just party on and technology will clean up our mess is a naive and unproven approach. If technology is working out so well, how come we can’t eat the fish? How come we can’t feed 7 billion? How come we can’t stop desertification? How come we can’t get the Colorado River to flow all the way to the sea?
The solution is SO simple – it’s to get over ourselves and our growth and domination imperative. Just like enjoying a slice of cheesecake, moderation is not a bad way to go.
Dave Gardner
Director of the documentary
GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth
April 28th, 2012 at 9:59 am
When we have availability of a decent amount of food and water for everyone on the planet and aren’t extinguishing species, poisoning our waterways, trampling over the rights of communities to lay pipelines or Frack on farmland, mowing down our forests, fishing out our oceans, then I might be prepared to listen to this. Until then, I think this article is just conveniently avoids little inconveniences like this.
And please stop using science will save us. Until we start using science primarily for things other than to accelerate destruction, it’s a pretty lame argument.
April 28th, 2012 at 10:08 am
As a pragmatic environmentalist from WAY back, I’ve often wondered if the ‘strict’ environmentalists have ever considered what would happen if they got everything they wanted instantly. I do believe the consequences would drive them insane to know the catastrophe they’d brought to the world. (Old saying – You must be careful what you wish for; new saying – unintended consequences.)
It’s nice to begin hearing some voices of reason. Is zero population growth good for the world? Maybe so-maybe not. If we have all we want as a species right here, then, what motivation would we have to reach for the stars… other than curiosity. It’s always best for humans to have some outside stimuli to drive exploration and… the dreaded growth. (Potato famine; religious persecution, et. al.)
There needs to be long-term and short-term plans in the environmental movement. Also, the plans need to be more pragmatic in their approach to climate change. For the US, I’d suggest converting to natural gas and add a tax that’s just spent on renewable energy R & D. (Administered by civilians; not the political hacks.) That alone accomplishes 3 things: 1) drives the economy with the conversion construction 2) diminishes the green house gases long enough for us to find renewable ‘green’ solutions 3) stops sending money to the people that hate us in the Middle East.
Mary’s right… it’s not about science or even logic; it’s ideology.
April 28th, 2012 at 10:31 am
Kloor attempts to contrast the new and old environmentalism. Perhaps a more simple comparison would be that the oldsters want to stop growth and that the newbies want it to head in a different direction. One of the problems in this discussion is the term, “Growth” What is it? How is it measured? Is it measured by relative monetary wealth? Is it measured by human population? Is it measured by our intellectual and scientific understanding of environmental evolution? As all of these measures have continuously increased, sometimes haltingly, so the must all be considered in a discussion of growth, and often they are not. It is impossible to move backward in time, or to stop time in its tracks with the world “out of balance”. It may be best to move in future time to goals which stress a better balance in those measures. With the wide differences in monetary wealth (consumption), population (birth rates, health care), and our understanding of our environment, changes will continue. Is it possible to evaluate and accept directions which would lead to a brighter future? We are getting closer to solutions, but not much closer to acceptance. Do we want the dinosaurs back? Can the world survive without polar bears?
April 28th, 2012 at 10:54 am
> … nuclear power and genetically modified crops, two technologies that experts say will be necessary to expand if the worst of climate change is to be avoided…
All experts, Mr Kloor? Or just a few that share your ideological beliefs, and who are often in the pay of nuclear and GMO corporations? What about the many experts who say we do not need nukes or GMO crops?
How about the International Energy Agency report released a few days ago that said we need to rapidly deploy renewables but said nothing about nukes? Is the IEA now just a bunch of day-dreaming hippies? Or how about Germany abandoning nukes and going 100% renewable? Do you think the Germans are a bunch of anti-technology tree huggers?
And how about the evidence that shows GMO crops repeatedly fail to deliver on promises of higher yields? If the product is so good why did Monsanto need to bribe government officials in Indonesia, or lie in their adverts in France?
Rather than environmentalists being blindly opposed to certain technologies, it’s the ‘free market’, pro-corporate, pro-consumption-at-all-costs gang that are blindly pushing technologies that will not help to reign in the environment-destroying capitalism that is at the root of all the looming crises that face humanity and most life on the planet.
P.S. If the best people you can use to prop up your argument is Lynas, Gooddall and Brand then it’s a testament to how weak your argument is.
April 28th, 2012 at 11:58 am
Keith Kloor,
I see. It’s ok to generalize that “environmentalism” hasn’t changed since the 1970s, and the the “green movement” is “anti-technology” and “anti-industrial” because some environmental groups publish thought pieces and interviews in their newsletters with people who question the nature of growth and how it’s measured, even though:
a) their detailed analyses, recommendations and visions of the future are entirely structured around pro-technology pro-growth industrial assumptions; and
b) the actual policies that they work hard to achieve are all consistent with pro-technology and pro-growth policies.
The modern thing to do, I guess, would be to never even tolerate any discussion of problems associated with traditional ways of defining and measuring growth at all.
Alan
April 28th, 2012 at 12:05 pm
I’m dubious of any model that requires magical thinking, whether that is a harmonic convergence of Aquarian energy fixing our human condition, or a technology fix for an ever-more-consuming society.
I’m especially dubious when it comes along with ad hominem sarcasm, self-promotion, and self-satisfied cynicism.
There is no instance in nature in which continuous growth and increasing consumption in a finite environment ended well. Maybe humans are the exception, and we can magically innovate ourselves into the best of all possible worlds, but in general, ignoring the limits of the natural world seems a fool’s bet.
I’m all for innovation, and recognize that technology and science have the possibility to mitigate what we’ve done to our world. But to believe that science and technology is the answer, while simultaneously ridiculing what many scientists are recommending, seems not just contradictory, but even self-serving for your argument.
We cannot exploit millions of years of accumulation of oil, coal, groundwater, and topsoil in a couple of hundred years, while treating the oceans and atmosphere as a bottomless pit for waste, without serious consequences. To continue with the same basic approach of extract-and-consume-and-grow — the model that got us balancing on the precipice of multiple tipping points — is madness.
To imagine otherwise requires a truly blind faith in God, or the marketplace, or I suppose human ingenuity. Blind faith ignores reality.
The snide assertions embedded in the article makes it pretty clear that the writer cherishes blind belief over rational observation and analysis.
Alas, so do many others, especially deniers, energy company shills, and corporate apologists, as well as those they convince to doubt.
April 28th, 2012 at 12:06 pm
[...] who believe in sustainable development also reside here, as Kloor suggests, especially those who are pro-growth, pro-tech, pro-city, and pro-nuclear. Kathy McMahon [...]
April 28th, 2012 at 1:30 pm
Regardless of whether we reach carrying capacity and crash as has been repeatedly predicted by any one paying attention to environmental constraints (Malthus and the limits of growth are not incorrect in their theory, only in their knowledge of technology and available resources) traditional growth on earth cannot continue indefinitely.
All economic activity (and all activity in general) requires a non trivial amount of energy. Regardless of source (fission, fusion, solar, orbital solar, anti matter) all energy use produces waste heat. This heat must all be radiated into space at a rate dependent on the surface temperature of the planet. After four centuries or so of continued exponential growth (at current rates 3%/yr) this energy dissipation requirement results in an average surface temperature high enough to boil water.
In the end it is not a question of whether traditional growth (GDP and all that) on earth will end but rather how it will end. Those convinced that perpetual traditional growth can happen are either planning to live in space, in favor of building really really big radiators, or don’t understand the physics.
April 28th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
As a side note I am not anti growth. Growth has numerous benefits as well as draw backs but in general has been good for the human population and, in some ways, the environment. Manufacturing was becoming cleaner before being out sourced.
However it bothers me that the myth of perpetual growth in the form of ever increasing economic well being is still widely accepted. We live in a universe with absolute physical constraints and in one form or another, this century or the next, they will eventually come into play.
April 28th, 2012 at 7:07 pm
@mr Kloor:
I enjoyed a lot reading this article and by the end of it I could really tell in which of the two categories I would fit. The post raises some relevant points, and some other points to me more questionable.
Some alarmist reports in the past carried similarities with some Malthusian prophecies: very true indeed! I am sure there have been many alarmist prophecies who didn’t turn out to be true, or entirely correct. At the same time, I would also list i) some near-catastrophes that were severely underestimated; ii) some negative events that did happen, despite the warnings; iii) some predictions that turn out to be correct over time, and yet the cries for attention still go unheeded.
i) had humanity not seen the impacts of CFC’s on the ozone layer in time, catastrophic consequences would have come. this post mentions the Anthropocene and not to rail against it but rather “embrace” it. The very realization that we are in an era of our making has happened mostly starting from the evidence of the risk we (as humanity within the biosphere’s capacity to support us) had run to damage the ozone layer to an extent that would severely undermine our quality of life. Even worse would have happened had industrial production adopted bromine instead of CFC’s http://climateandrisk.com/tag/ozone-hole/
ii) At times negative consequences did happen, despite the warnings. Collapse of the cod fisheries in Canada in the early 90′, for example. To listen to the warnings that fisheries were actually at risk would have helped. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/seafood/understanding-the-problem/overfishing-history/cod-fishery-canadian/
iii) Recently a climate prediction from 1981 has been evaluated on the RealClimate blog. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/ And turned out to be quite precise. Legions of scientists have been telling us about the risks of climate change and there is still so much resistance even now to accept its reality. I can easily understand their frustration, then.
–
On the positive vs negative visions, I see that positive visions are essential to get engagement and excitement about a world that we want, not just about a world we want to run away from. On this, I acknowledge there is a broad spectrum of differences in the realm of what the author here would call the “old environmentalist”. I disagree though in saying that nothing has changed since the ’70 (I wasn’t around then) since I see a solutions based approach in a few of the think tanks and influential authors. Among many: Amory Lovins and Greenpeace and its renewable energy transition.
Modern environmentalists are more pro-growth and technology? Good point but you need to acknowledge that it needs unfolding underlying assumptions. The first: growth of what? Growth of our economy (GDP as we have known it) has been linked to negative impacts that as a society we are trying to solve with more growth. It’s since the 70′ies that Jay Forrester uncovered this paradox when he was explaining the drivers of many societal problems: the key problems are unwanted side-effects of economic growth, and to solve them society pushes for ever more growth (by the way, Forrester was an essential mentor of the same Dana Meadows who wrote the Limits to Growth report). Today this paradox comes to the fore again, but just in different terms: to afford eco-efficiencies and breakthrough technologies that can solve today’s sustainability challenge you must first have a high level of prosperity, and to get that prosperity you must keep pushing for economic growth (the same growth that has been a driver of our problems, perhaps?) I would buy the argument of keep growing, only if fundamental issues about the way we measure it were addressed. Only a handful of countries are considering seriously the issue of changing the metrics. That, too, may be a dogma that needs to be demystified. If we all agreed that GDP can change to mean quality of life without environmental destruction, I bet many of the “environmentalists” that I know will be on the new “pro-growth” side.
@mr Alan Nogee: Pretty much echo your views on this. And as a consequence the question of “what we mean by growth” then may be the bigger conversation we may need to have.
April 29th, 2012 at 12:58 am
Why did Revkin publish this bit of nonsense? For example,it’s true we’ve never yet had a global Malthusian collapse, but we’ve experienced a lot of local examples–they ruins of those civilizations give anthropologists and archeologists their daily bread. Rich countries go green by outsourcing their CO2 producing factories to China (or Vietnam), dumping their toxic waste on the shores of Somalia (terrible what those pirates do–eh?) or into China or the black districts of South Africa. Consider this: the biomass of the earth cannot grow (but can shrink by a large factor); the amount of water on the earth is fixed, thus no growth dependent on water is possible. Ca. 200 million years ago, large carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes in Siberia, over a period of 5000 years, raised the temperature of the earth enough to reduce its biomass by ca. 90% and a few million years were required to bring life back to its former level. Revkin keeps telling us at the top of his column that we must find food, water, and shelter of another two Chinas in the next decades. Quite simply, we can’t and we won’t. As one of the commentators noted, earth is resilient and will survive, but it often carries on with mass extinctions–and we are likely to join that common but unpopular mode of adaptation.
April 29th, 2012 at 11:39 am
As an environmentalist, it is not the technology, itself, I object to; it is the cultural attitudes which determine the type of technology we develop and the uses we put it to. As long as we in “the West” image ourselves as separate from, superior to, and rightfully in control of the rest of nature — an image which is at odds with the facts — we are doomed to continue down a self-destructive path. The rest of nature was here long before humans put in an appearance, and will be here long after our departure from the scene. However, we might be around a little longer if we recognize our true position within nature — a position of utter dependency — and develop and use technologies that take that dependency into account.
April 29th, 2012 at 4:42 pm
I’m guilty as charged! I believed in the 1970s that the world economy was headed toward economic and environmental overshoot and am more convinced daily of the situation.
Kloor is typical of those who criticize “The Limits To Growth” without ever having read the book. What Dana Meadows hypothesizes is that there are insufficient price signals early enough to permit us to invest capital wisely and thus we will tend toward overshoot.
Two good modern examples of this are the pursuit of deep water oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The major oil companies have invested billions in deep water and are finding either that the risks are higher than anticipated, e.g. the Deep Water Horizon disaster, or that the Returns on Investment are lower than anticipated, e.g. the poor returns on the Thunderhorse platform. Yet, despite these hazards, we’re still pursuing declining returns and riskier investments in even more offshore and deep water drilling, and in arctic exploration where insurance is difficult to come by.
The other example is the current investment bubble associated with shale based natural gas. As been reported by industry insiders (Art Berman), all the major gas companies are producing at about 50% of their cost. Furthermore, every gas well drilled uses the equivalent in steel as 300 cars and yet has a lifespan of 3 years. This sure seems like approaching a limit when one compares the situation to conventional gas plays whose lifespans lasted decades.
Even if we were to commit heavily to nuclear power (which I’m opposed to primarily because it burdens our children and children’s children with the issue of nuclear waste, not the hazard necessarily mind you, but the economic issue), we have decades before we redevelop the engineering knowledge and manufacturing infrastructure to bring nuclear to scale quickly.
Probably the best place to see the near term consequences to limits to growth would be in the price of airplane tickets. The cost of fuel is now 50% of the cost of an airplane flight–less than the cost of the crew, less than the cost of the capital. Who believes in this time of worldwide economic weakness that we’re going to see fuel costs decline lower than this percentage in the future? It isn’t going to happen. We’ve been spoiled over the past two decades about the ease of travel. As the world’s demand for resources increases and the discrepancy in relative wealth decreases, we’ll see our ability to use fuel-hungry pleasures decline.
And this Mr. Kloor is the Limit To Growth.
April 29th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Everyone is defending or attacking environmentalist caricatures that exist largely only in their imaginations. Just as importantly, we need to be asking how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
The arguments against nuclear by people claiming to be scientists remind me of the tactics used by the Discovery Institute to promote intelligent design.
Alan Nogee, former member of the Union of Concerned Citizens says in comment 8:
“…What Mr. Kloor really seems to object to is the general lack of inclusion of new nuclear plants in the scenarios recommended by mainstream greens…”
Nice try Nogee, but that tactic is easily countered with a list of mainstream greens who are very much pro-nuclear power. Go read James Hansen’s “Storms of My Grandchildren.”
Way back in 2005, when your UCS&C was still participating in the lay media’s biofuel love fest, environmental writer, George Monbiot courageously wrote an article called “Worse than Fossil Fuels” and was immediately and viciously denounced by environmentalists. Today, we see the UCS&C has jumped on Monbiot’s band wagon denouncing palm oil biodiesel and corn ethanol. You really need to go read that article:
http://www.monbiot.com/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/
And when you are done reading that, read “The double standards of green anti-nuclear opponents”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/mar/31/double-standards-nuclear
Nogee says:
“…It is strange that Mr. Kloor seems to regard support for this 50 year old technology as the prerequisite for being a green modernist, …”
Stranger still is the fact that airplane technology is over a century old. Using your reasoning, a Sopwith Camel biplane:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/RAF_Sopwith_Camel.jpg/300px-RAF_Sopwith_Camel.jpg
…is the equivalent of an F-22 Raptor:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/07/21/article-1036992-01F26E4100000578-618_468x286.jpg
It would be refreshing to see you come up with an original argument as opposed to parroting what you find on Google searches, which you wouldn’t be parroting if you applied any critical thought to them like a real scientist is trained to do. Would you like to see a list of radically new nuclear designs that are on drawing boards all around the world?
Nogee continues:
“…despite the fact that the industry’s economic predictions for this technology have never been borne out….”
Riiight. Let’s apply the common sense test to that remark. Twenty percent of all of the electrical power in the most energy hungry nation on the planet is being provided at highly competitive rates by nuclear power plants, which, according to your own UCS&C literature, also produce less GHG emissions than solar:
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/photo/GHGnuclear.JPG
April 29th, 2012 at 10:48 pm
Keith Kloor at #20 provides two links that allegedly support his position that major NGOs back some type of primitivist, back to the land, anti-technology position. I urge people to actually read his links. First both of them are interviews, not statements of positions of the organizations themselves. Keith doesn’t like that the organizations are talking to these economists, apparently.
Secondly, if you read what they say, it’s not all that crazy. Things like “Yes, growth is not innately evil. However, growth is not innately ‘good,’ and can become destructive even in nature.” Elsewhere, that renewable resource technology innovation is a good idea, that growth in poor countries is a good idea. These aren’t hippie concepts, coupled with the the idea that unlimited growth is the philosophy of cancer.
I would agree that many on the left are too comprehensive in their opposition to GMOs, just as many on the right are way too knee-jerkingly supportive of them. I don’t know enough about the mainline groups like NRDC and EDF to comment on their position though. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about GMOs, like encouraging overuse of herbicides and genetic contamination of wild relatives of domesticated plants.
If you consider that virtually all big enviro NGOs support public transit, then you’ve got proof Kloor is wrong about them being anti-city. Public transit works far better in dense city environments and is also a good place for technological upgrades.
April 29th, 2012 at 11:00 pm
In my opinion, Keith Kloor’s “Sleeper” experiment would have turned out much differently if one were frozen in the 70′s and then brought back to life much earlier, in the 80′s, that is, during the Reagan administration. I personally was heavily influenced by the rise of environmentalism to pursue a career in analytical chemistry and groundwater geochemistry. Even then, the “greenie” stereotype was only a stereotype, this was a highly technical career choice, and I was certainly not the only one making such a choice. The election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency lead to considerable cutbacks in alternative energy and environmental research, and governmental regulation and oversight. This made my own progress towards my professional goals more difficult. But it wasn’t, of course, just me, the EPA budget for example was cut by 30%, derailing many careers. Because of this slip backwards, never comprehensively addressed by the two Bush administrations or that of Clinton, much alternative energy and environmental progress was cut short and still needs to be revitalized.
It is also true that too much of the time our media focuses on a false either/or balance. I think that the same issue is apparent here. There really is some great scientific and policy work coming out of mainstream environmental groups. Some of this has been highlighted above by Alan Nogee in his comment #8. As shown in the links that Alan Nogee gives, there is much material that is available should the media choose to report on environmentalism in a more well rounded an intellectually complex way. Additionally of course, on the part of those wishing to discredit the environmental movement, there is real motivation to artificially magnify the extremist “greenie” view and to inhibit more rational discussion.
I do not think that the mainstream environmental groups are beyond reproach. But I believe that “mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age” or the anti growth focus of the Royal Society report mentioned above are only a small facet of the problem. Many groups have been slow to adapt concepts of environmental justice. Some groups do seem elitist. In attempts at forming partnerships with corporations, I think that some groups have come too close to corporate interests and greenwashing. There really are groups with “big splashy” reports and big lobbying effort. We really do have a government that is sometimes more responsive to these sorts of efforts than more citizen driven ones. And these may be the loud voices that are picked up by the media looking for a point/counterpoint presentation. But does that make groups with any of these failings “the beating heart of environmentalism”? I don’t think so.
I can feel some of the dismay that Kloor feels in that I see many issues, fully apparent in the 1970′s or 80′s still have not been more fully addressed. And again, efforts at addressing these issues seems threatened. I believe that we are again at the same sort of critical juncture, in which after a hopeful period in which it seemed progress was being made, corporatist forces may again effectively push back. I do hope that it turns out that “Groundhog Day” is not the appropriate movie metaphor. One of the mechanisms for combating the closing off of environmental progress is an effective media, willing to report on issues in a non-stereotypical and well rounded way.
April 30th, 2012 at 7:34 am
LOL – nice article.
A shame the noise of environmentalists drowns out the real problems. Pollution for example.
I forget who coined the term, but it was said…
“We have entered the Dark Age of physics. Too many physicists are pursuing Dark Energy and Dark Matter and forgetting about the classical science. And in swoops the Environmentalists with their voodoo and apocalyptic prophecies. It is like I am standing beside a huge fire and go to light a cigarette, when the guy next to mee says “Hey Man – put that out. It is too hot”".
Oh wait – now I remember who said that. It was Larry the Cable Guy.
Wiser words never spoken – and by the looks of some of these posts, too many people here who have obviously never taken a Grde 10 physics class.
I cant stop laughing at the post blaming this on Ronald Reagan. I can hardly wait to print this off and show my students.
April 30th, 2012 at 11:13 am
Mr. Russ Finley,
I don’t think it’s appropriate to have a full debate on the side issue of nuclear power here. But some very brief responses to your critique of my comment:
* I’ve read both Monbiot articles and agree with most of them. Yes, UCS and other greens have become more discriminatory over time between “good” and “bad” biomass, and Monbiot was ahead of the curve on this.
* I agree with most of Monbiot’s double standard post. Note that he says:
“Nor did I suggest that nuclear should replace renewables, or produce any higher proportion of our electricity than it does already. But I did point out that most of the countries that might abandon nuclear power are likely to replace it not with renewables but with fossil fuel, and that this is a major change for the worse.”
I had a twitter conversation just this weekend agreeing with this point: that Germany’s accelerated phase out of nuclear will raise carbon emissions, especially since they are planning to build new coal plants as part of the replacement power. (UCS also does not generally support early retirement of existing nuclear plants, except where there are some plant-specific safety issues.)
I am more optimistic than Monbiot on the prospects for renewables. The UCS Climate Blueprint (and subsequent studies by others) show that we could get to at least 40% renewables, and 85% power plant CO2 emissions reductions by 2030. After that, it is agnostic about whether the economically preferable option would be advanced renewables with storage, advanced nuclear, coal or gas with carbon capture and storage, other options, or some combination.
* I have read a fair amount about other nuclear designs and have commented and tweeted consistently that Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), in particular, warrant further research as the best hope for economically viable nuclear plants. It is simply too early to determine whether the traditional diseconomies of smaller size reactors can be outweighed by the potential economies of manufacturing and improved financial prospects of modular reactors.
* Your attempt at “common sense” economics is correct that the operating costs of existing nuclear plants are highly competitive (which is why it doesn’t make economic or carbon sense to phase them out early). However, it ignores the very high construction costs which make new nuclear plants very uncompetitive (and the fact that existing plants were allowed bailouts of over $100 billion in uneconomic capital costs). For a fairer perspective on nuclear economics, you might want to read the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/nuclear-power-dock
or John Rowe, the former CEO of Exelon, the utility with the country’s largest nuclear plant fleet. http://www.exeloncorp.com/assets/newsroom/speeches/docs/spch_Rowe_ANS_110815.pdf
or the recent special issue of The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/21549936
Alan
April 30th, 2012 at 11:13 am
All forms of energy production need to be evaluated on a cradle to grave basis, looking at the total energy budget and resources used. The nuclear power industry is currently operating with “profits” generated without any clear idea as to who is going to be held responsible for waste disposal, and how society develops the political will to determine how safe is safe enough and to implement such a plan and maintain it through the generations necessary to do so.
I personally believe that in looking at current nuclear technology, from mining, through plant building and decommissioning and waste disposal and maintenance, the lines between “how safe is safe enough”, sensible use of scarce resources and a positive energy budget are so narrow as to make nuclear energy an undesirable avenue to pursue relative to some alternatives.
April 30th, 2012 at 11:46 am
The idea that environmentalism is frozen in time is just silly. Yes, some of the same debates exist, and presumably will for a long time, and for good reason.
May 1st, 2012 at 10:06 am
[...] outdated. It has to modernize to keep from wasting away. This is what I recently argued here and here. The sum of these two pieces add up to a general critique of environmentalism, of its [...]
May 1st, 2012 at 3:30 pm
Is now the appropriate time to point people to Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY