Make It So!

Here's some news — there's a brouhaha concerning that Ecomodernist Manifesto.

Everybody should calm down. Nothing those ecomodernists and their critics say matters at all.

I can sum up the manifesto in 3 statements (well, OK, 4 statements if you count the "and" in the 2nd one).

• Industrial civilization is a nice thing to have! (Who could disagree?)

• We need to preserve and expand that civilization (have our cake) and decouple it from the natural world (and eat it too).

• Human ingenuity (more & better technology) allows us to have our cake and eat it too.

And I say, with Captain Picard, Make It So!

 

Ahem ... I'm sorry to bring this up ... I know we're all feeling pretty happy right now, but making it so is totally fucking impossible for two reasons:

• physical reality

• human reality

For example, the "degrowth" people talk about the impossibility of making it so.

The manifesto has already received strong criticism from an array of commentators, but none of these assessments has yet critiqued it from the perspective of “degrowth,” which is an approach that sees the transition to sustainability occurring through less environmentally impactful economic activities and a voluntary contraction of material throughput of the economy, to reduce humanity’s aggregate resource demands on the biosphere. From a degrowth perspective, technology is not viewed as a magical savior since many technologies actually accelerate environmental decline.

Whoa! This wonderful perspective deals with physical reality, but, flatland-style, totally ignores human reality. Let me tell you what's going to happen, no matter what anybody says.

• Humans will strive to expand their global civilization until it becomes physically impossible to do so.

Case closed. That's the human reality. Humans, at the species or large population levels, think they make choices. They don't.

Why might it become impossible? Not enough energy? A hostile environment? Pick your favorite civilization-ender. Whatever the cliff is, we're going to drive off it.

And what about these humans? Are people bad? Are people good? From Manifesto calls for and end to "people are bad" environmentalism.

Paul Robbins believes the document is a reflection of a growing subset of environmentalists that the “people are bad” tradition of campaigning on behalf of nature is a tired and worn-out argument. Ideas like those in the manifesto are “taking up a lot of political space, because it’s persuasive and it’s a counterweight,” Robbins said.

People are not bad. People are not good. People are what evolution "designed" them to be.

I mean, I don't like people much, having gotten to know them a little, but hey! that's just me!

And here's the thing about humans—environmentalists never said "people are bad."  They've said over and over again that "some people are bad." At all times, all humans think that "some people are bad."

That's what evolution "designed" them to believe. This phenomenon is called "politics" (intergroup conflict). For example, "degrowth" people think "ecomodernist" people are bad, and vice-versa.

No humans believe "all humans are bad." (Well, except for maybe me and some of my readers.) Again, that's what evolution "designed" them to believe.

And what about technological optimism? Here's a classic passage from the critics page.

Read Clive Hamilton's critique.

I was glad to see Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton weigh in with his thoughts on the recent Ecomodernist Manifesto (link above), but his critique reflects two widely repeated mischaracterizations of the ecomodernist argument. These are the following:

1. Ecomodernists are neoliberal, techno-optimists.

There is a tendency like Hamilton does to equate ecomodernist thinking to a blind belief in the market and technology to drive social change, a "Silicon Valley" mindset as Hamilton argues.

But ecomodernists in fact are strongly critical of the belief that carbon pricing, venture capital, and other market-based instruments can drive social change or innovation.

Instead, they argue the need for big government in the form of strategic planning and spending on research, development, and deployment.

Rather than Silicon Valley thinking, ecomodernists are espousing Tennessee Valley Authority thinking. They advocate big government-funded clean energy projects that have the ability to modernize whole regions of the world, lifting millions out of poverty, and reducing society's environmental footprint in the process.

Here's the key text.

Techno-optimism is also a relative term, subjective in its application.

Who is more of a techno-optimist: Greens who argue that solar, wind, and efficiency are all the technologies we need to address the problem, or ecomodernists who argue that other energy sources are required as part of our arsenal?

Exactly!

All humans are technological optimists. Everybody believes they can have their cake and eat it too, except for maybe 1,457 people (e.g., those "degrowth" weirdos) out of a total population of 7.3 billion.

Again, that's what evolution "designed" humans to believe—

TECHNOLOGY + OPTIMISM = WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR

Now, I could go on in this manner, but I think you get the point.

 

Comments

[Mike Cooper]

Where did 1457 come from?

Hey, I guess if we'd started on the techno decouple green future thing maybe 50 years ago, with an absolute global dictatorship controlling the development of the world, is population, it's technology, and it's growth, we might just have made it to Star Trek land. But, we didn't, so it's all going to go tits up.