An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored.

Another response to my essay has been to claim that a libertarian country really did exist once in the real world, in the form of the United States between Reconstruction and the New Deal. Robert Tracinski writes that I am “astonishingly ignorant of history” for failing to note that the “libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.”

It is Tracinski who is astonishingly ignorant of history. To begin with, the majority of the countries that adopted the “libertarian” gold standard were authoritarian monarchies or military dictatorships. With the exception of Imperial Britain, an authoritarian government outside of the home islands, where most Britons were denied the vote for most of this period, most of the independent countries of the pre-World War I gold standard epoch, including the United States, Germany, France, Russia and many Latin American republics, rejected free trade in favor of varying degrees of economic protectionism.

For its part, the United States between Lincoln and FDR was hardly laissez-faire. Ever since colonial times, states had engaged in public poor relief and sometimes created public hospitals and asylums. Tracinski to the contrary, there were also two massive federal welfare programs before the New Deal: the Homestead Act, a colossal redistribution of government land to farmers, and generous pension benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War and their families. Much earlier, the 1798 act that taxed sailors to fund a small system of government-run sailors’ hospitals was supported by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton alike.

State and local licensing rules and trade laws governed economic life in detail, down to the size of spigots in wine casks, in some cases.

It was precisely these state and local regulations that the Supreme Court struck down, in Lochner v. New York (1905) and other cases, to promote the goal of creating a single national market. At the same time, sharing their racism with most white Americans, federal judges in Tracinski’s “libertarian” America permitted the most massive system of labor market distortion of all: racial segregation, which artificially boosted the incomes and property values of whites.

The single national market that Lochner-era courts sought to protect from being Balkanized by state and local regulations (other than racial segregation) was walled off by the highest protective tariffs of any major industrial nation. The US government between Lincoln and FDR engaged in a version of modern East Asian-style mercantilism, protecting American industrial corporations from import competition, while showering subsidies including land grants on railroad companies and using federal troops to crush protesting workers.  This government-business mercantilism was anti-worker but it was hardly libertarian.

High tariffs to protect American companies in Tracinski’s alleged Golden Age of American libertarianism were joined by racist immigration restrictions that further boosted the incomes of white workers already boosted by de jure or de facto racial segregation. The 1790 Naturalization Act barred immigrants from becoming citizens unless they were “free white persons” and had to be amended by the 1870 Naturalization Act to bestow citizenship on former slaves of “African nativity” and “African descent.” Although the Supreme Court in 1898 ruled that the children of Asians born in the U.S. were citizens by birth, Tracinski’s libertarian utopia was characterized by increasingly restrictive immigration laws which curtailed first Asian immigration and then, after World War I, most European immigration.

Calvin Coolidge, the subject of a hero-worshiping new biography by the libertarian conservative Amity Shlaes, defended both high tariffs and restrictive immigration. Here is an excerpt from President Coolidge’s second annual address in 1924:

Two very important policies have been adopted by this country which, while extending their benefits also in other directions, have been of the utmost importance to the wage earners. One of these is the protective tariff, which enables our people to live according to a better standard and receive a better rate of compensation than any people, any time, anywhere on earth, ever enjoyed. This saves the American market for the products of the American workmen. The other is a policy of more recent origin and seeks to shield our wage earners from the disastrous competition of a great influx of foreign peoples. This has been done by the restrictive immigration law. This saves the American job for the American workmen.

In 1921 then Vice President Coolidge wrote an article entitled “Whose Country is This?” in Good Housekeeping, in which he declared:

“Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” (Amity Shlaes’s hero evidently believed racist pseudoscience about dangerous and inferior “half-breeds.”)

Protectionist, nativist paleoconservatives of the Patrick Buchanan school might have reason to idealize the United States as it existed between 1865 and 1932. But libertarians who want to prove that a country based on libertarian ideology can exist in the real world cannot point to the United States at any period in its history from the Founding to the present.

This article originally appeared on Salon.

I recently spent four months as a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy where I studied McKibben’s writing and career, assessing his impact on American environmental debates. In doing so, I developed a deep admiration for his ability to convey the urgency of climate change and to articulate a better approach to life that includes more time for family, reflection, and nature. His work as an activist is equally impressive. From his start in 2006 working with a handful of college students to his leadership of 350.org today, McKibben has helped shift the U.S. environmental movement from an almost exclusive focus on insider lobbying, legal strategies, and think tank-style influence to focus greater resources on grassroots organizing and mobilization.

Yet as a public intellectual, McKibben has failed to offer pragmatic and achievable policy ideas.  Instead, reflecting his intellectual roots in the deep ecology movement, McKibben’s goal has been to generate a mass consciousness in support of limiting economic growth and consumption, with the hope of shifting the United States towards localized economies, food systems, and “soft” energy sources.  In particular, his ability to appeal to Yankee virtues and to provoke abolitionist-style outrage over the practices of the fossil fuel industry resonates with many upper-income Baby Boomers and young people living in regions like New England or the Pacific Northwest.

But I wonder how many of the people turning out to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, working on behalf of divestment, or following along on Twitter and Facebook are aware of McKibben’s long standing vision of societal change first detailed in The End of Nature and most recently in Deep Economy and Eaarth. In this pastoral future free of consumerism or material ambition, Americans would rarely travel, experiencing the world instead via the Internet, grow much of their own food, power their communities through solar and wind, and divert their wealth to developing countries. Only under these transformational conditions, argues McKibben, would we be able to set a moral example for countries like China to change course, all in the hope that these countries will accept a “grand bargain” towards a cleaner energy path.

No Compromise: Defending a Romanticized Nature

To jump-start this hoped-for transformation of society, McKibben advocates on behalf of conventional policy approaches such as a cap and dividend bill, a carbon tax, and a binding international agreement on emissions, while insisting that there can be no compromise on the Keystone XL pipeline or fossil fuel industry divestment. Yet each of these legislative or international policy approaches has proved politically elusive, despite years of lobbying and advocacy. The response to legislative failure from McKibben and other environmentalists has been to double-down in their commitment to their policy paradigm, attributing failure to the political prowess of conservatives and industry, and to a corresponding lack of grassroots pressure and moral outrage. 

Yet McKibben’s romantic vision of a New England-style utopia and pursuit of a narrow set of policy goals have blinded him to considering alternative approaches that may not only be more effective at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and providing for the material needs of large, diverse populations but also more politically probable. Moreover, McKibben’s line-in-the-sand organizing strategies may in fact be only deepening polarization and making it that much more difficult for President Obama to broker support for policy even among members of his own political party.

“If we pursue the route of seeking ever larger and grander solutions to climate change we will continue to end up frustrated and disillusioned,” warns Mike Hulme in Why We Disagree About Climate Change. “Global deals will be stymied, science and economics will remain battlegrounds for rearguard actions, global emissions will continue to rise, and vulnerabilities to climate risks will remain."¹ As alternatives, Hulme points to the framework put forward by the London School of Economics’ Gwyn Prins, Oxford University’s Steve Rayner, and others who argue that climate change requires a portfolio of “clumsy” policy solutions, implemented across levels of government and through the private and nonprofit sectors.² 

In this approach, by breaking down the wicked nature of climate change into smaller, interconnected problems, achieving progress on these smaller challenges becomes more likely. At the international level, examples include reducing especially powerful greenhouse gases like black carbon (or soot) from diesel cars and dirty stoves and methane from leaky gas pipes. A similar strategy focuses on slowing the rate of deforestation. In contrast to endless international summits, these goals can be pursued through bi-lateral negotiations with specific countries like Indonesia, China, India or Russia.³

The Keystone Fixation and the Energy Innovation Challenge

In the United States, carbon dioxide emissions from power plants dropped in 2011 from the previous year’s level, a decline driven by the revolution in natural gas drilling, which has shifted energy production away from coal and towards cleaner burning natural gas.⁴ A recent analysis by the Clean Air Task Force argues that Obama can meet his Administration’s goals for reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions without the need for major legislation. These strategies include finalizing Environmental Protection Agency rules on emissions from new power plants, proposing limits on existing power plants, and by aggressively regulating methane leaks and environmental risks from natural gas drilling.⁵

In combination with these limits to emissions, analysts from the Brookings Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and Breakthrough Institute argue that the Obama Administration should also aggressively pursue increased research and development and procurement spending on clean energy technology, including carbon capture and storage and advanced nuclear technologies.⁶ Others have argued for greater investment in regionally tailored adaptation initiatives that protect, prepare, and defend people and communities from current and future climate change-related risks.⁷

“I think we’ve gotten stuck because we expect old solutions are going to solve our new problems. We try the same things, again and again, and they just don’t seem to work. So we try them again, hoping that this time they will,” wrote Jonathon Foley recently, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. “But we should all remember the old definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.”⁸

To be sure, pursuit of more incremental policy approaches can benefit from the grassroots pressure generated by 350.org. Yet today, McKibben and allies like Van Jones appear to have little tolerance for political pragmatism, as they voice extreme dissatisfaction with Obama’s track record on climate policy. In this case, McKibben’s work as an advocate risks distracting from progress on the problem. The controversy over the XL pipeline is a leading example, as the editors at the journal Nature and others have argued.⁹ “I’m not a fan of the pipeline and would rather it wasn’t built, but it’s hardly the top priority for addressing climate change that many have claimed,” wrote Foley. “At best, it’s a bit of a sideshow. At worst, it’s a distraction from the bigger issues that contribute to climate change.”¹⁰

Techno-Pessimism

McKibben can also be faulted for his quasi-religious opposition to specific forms of technology. In The End of Nature and in later works, he warned strongly against pursuing technologies like genetic engineering that might allow us to better adapt to climate change impacts, a path that would result in an “artificial world, a space station.”¹¹ In doing so, he drew an analogy to the years following the Civil War, in which slavery was no longer an acceptable method for whites to exercise control over blacks. But rather than converting to “new notions of universal fellowship and equality, white Americans invented segregation.” Using technologies like genetic engineering to cope with climate change, according to McKibben, was the moral equivalent of segregation: “Just as the old methods of dominating the world have become unworkable, a new set of tools is emerging that may allow us to continue that domination by different, expanded, and even more destructive means….”¹²

Today, as journalist Keith Kloor has detailed in a series of articles at Slate magazine, McKibben’s techno-skepticism is echoed by many environmentalists, local food enthusiasts, and writers like Michael Pollan, as they advocate on behalf of organic farming and against genetically-altered crops in the United States and abroad, presenting barriers to the development of the technology as a means to cope with climate change-related impacts.¹³

McKibben is perhaps at even greater fault for downplaying the need for “hard” technological approaches like nuclear energy or carbon capture and storage, focusing instead on “soft” technologies like solar, wind, and efficiency. These technologies, however, are unlikely to alter the dynamics of fossil-fuel energy use and dependency worldwide. Consider that globally, an estimated 1,200 coal power plants are scheduled for construction, with China and India accounting for three-quarters of this number.¹⁴ Compounding the challenge, according to University of Manitoba energy analyst Vaclav Smil, solar and wind energy sources are unlikely to be able to overcome the problems of intermittency, storage capacity, cost, and be scalable in time to compete with coal power worldwide.¹⁵

In other words, innovative technologies are needed that can not only power the mega-cities of Asia, but that can also limit emissions from the thousands of coal plants already in place and scheduled to be built around the world. In advocating for nuclear energy, NASA scientist James Hansen puts it even more bluntly: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”¹⁶ Both nuclear and carbon capture and storage have significant trade-offs – and face a great deal of uncertainty in their development and eventual deployment, but for McKibben and others to ignore the need for alternatives to solar, wind, and efficiency misleads both themselves and the public. As Keith Kloor writes at Slate: “Bill McKibben says we need to ‘do the math,’ … It’s a powerfully frightening equation. But we also need to do the math for the energy equation, which should be equally frightening.”¹⁷

According to Arizona State University’s Dan Sarewitz, the techno-pessimism of environmentalists like McKibben represents a “misplaced reverence for science that increasingly, and with ever-greater precision, documents the problems associated with a technology-dependent society.” Sarewitz argues that this outlook limits the ability of environmentalists and their liberal allies to achieve their political and social goals, as they become overly preoccupied with “small risks to individuals rather than the potential for very large benefits to society” from technology.¹⁸

In this case, useful comparisons can be made between McKibben and environmentalists like Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas who have urged their peers to adopt a new outlook on technological innovation. Sharing many of the same political aims as McKibben, over the course of his career, Lynas has developed a very different perspective about technology and humans’ relation to nature. In his most recent book The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive The Age of Humans, Lynas argued that “we cannot afford to foreclose powerful technological options like nuclear, synthetic biology, and [genetic engineering] because of Luddite prejudice and ideological inertia.”¹⁹ Specific to geo-engineering, Lynas warned environmentalists of repeating the mistakes of genetic engineering, “where opposing a technology a priori meant that lots of potential benefits were stopped or delayed for no good cause.” Most importantly, he wrote, “Environmentalists need to remind themselves that humans are not all bad … we can nurture and protect as well as dominate and conquer.”²⁰

What’s clear from the analysis of McKibben’s writing and career is that multiple discourses about climate change exist, even among the most visible voices arguing on behalf of societal action. As New York University’s Jay Rosen noted in a 2011 speech to the UK Conference of Science Journalists, this is to be expected, since on wicked problems: “There is no kumbaya moment. You never get everyone on the same page,” and you never reach consensus. Yet as he argues, “What’s possible is a world where different stakeholders ‘get’ that the world looks different to people who hold different stakes.”²¹ Similarly, as Andrew Revkin writes, citing the work of Hulme and others: “Confusion and division over ‘global warming’ often grows out of the meaninglessness of the phrase on its own. The result is that people with very different world views, in essence, create their own definitions of the term.”²²

Against Polarization

In a recent essay titled “Wicked Polarization,” Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus describe progress on climate change and similarly complex social problems as obstructed by experts and public intellectuals who have “come to frame virtually every national problem as a consequence of the irrationality, ignorance, and immorality of the political Other.” Arguments for action on climate change that evoke idealized visions of small-scale, hyper-efficient agrarian communities powered by wind and solar reflect the priorities and values of environmentalists like McKibben, rather than a pragmatic set of choices designed to both effectively manage the problem and to align a diversity of political interests in support of compromise. “The problem is not that we are in a post-truth age but rather that we have not learned to adapt to it,” write Shellenberger and Nordhaus. “Perhaps a good place to begin is by recognizing our own biases, perspectives, and agendas and attempting to hold them more lightly … bringing an end to our ideological arms race will ultimately require that we force partisans out of their comfort zone by redefining those problems in ways to which partisans do not already know the answers.”²³

As a complement to journalists and public intellectuals like McKibben, there is therefore a strong need for writers and forums which serve as bridges between discourses and perspectives. On this function, “The idea here is not just to highlight points of communality and sites for compromise,” writes political scientist John Dryzek and co-author Hayley Stevenson, “but also to provide possibilities for contestation and the reflection it can induce.”²⁴ Similarly, as the University of Michigan’s Andrew Hoffman concludes, what’s needed are initiatives that offer “broker frames,” discourses and contexts that expand, diversify, and blur perspectives on the issue, beyond the mostly left-leaning, affluent, older and white segment of Americans who are currently alarmed by climate change.²⁵

As news organizations expand digital and social media initiatives, an ideally organized beat for covering a problem like climate change would depend on a socially diverse network of contributors, rather than relying on the expertise of a single journalist and a few sources. Since the people who have the most expertise on climate change are unevenly distributed across the planet, this form of networked journalism would be guided by a philosophy that “my readers know more than I do,” argues Jay Rosen.²⁶ In all, a networked approach to journalism that features a plurality of perspectives is a philosophical approach that challenges directly the outlook offered by Walter Lippmann, who assumed his readers lacked the capacity to contribute substantively to expert-level discussion. The networked approach also contrasts with the traditional model of book author, essayist, and columnist employed by most contemporary knowledge journalists.

A New Challenge for the Public Intellectual: Convene and Question

Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog at The New York Times is a leading example of a networked approach to knowledge journalism that expands and blends discourses about climate change. Drawing on his experience as a science reporter, Revkin is not only able to function as an explainer and informed critic of science, but he also serves as a convener, facilitating discussions among a diversity of experts, advocates, and various publics, while contextualizing the uncertainty relative to specific claims, technologies, and policy approaches.

He also brings a different perspective to the wicked nature of climate change, arguing for a broader definition of the societal challenge and to a broader menu of political and technological approaches than most environmentalists might prefer. At Dot Earth, Revkin writes, “If I had to choose one of two bumper stickers for our car — CLIMATE CRISIS or ENERGY QUEST — I’d choose the latter.” As he continues: “This doesn’t mean I reject the idea that we face a climate crisis. I just don’t think that phrase is a productive way to frame this challenge.”²⁷

Revkin has described his views on climate change as a sub-set of the bigger sustainability challenge, defined as “how we manage our infinite aspirations on a finite planet.”²⁸ For his students at Pace University, he explains this challenge by referencing the expected population in the year 2050: 9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ? According to Revkin, sustainability is about managing the key questions we face “on a trajectory towards 9 billion people: how many people are too many, how much nature is not enough, how much poverty is too much?”²⁹ Similarly, in a 2012 profile of McKibben at Outside magazine, Revkin said he considered McKibben “an incredible organizer and motivator, particularly for young people. But we’ve drawn different conclusions about several important aspects of the science and approaches to getting traction on related energy issues. I prefer 350’s days of action to its focus on a number, which I think doesn’t have sufficient meaning unless it’s accompanied by ‘350 when’ and ‘350 how.’”

Revkin explains that his ultimate focus at Dot Earth is the “broader exploration of new ways to make information work – to give ideas the best chance of getting where they are needed to help advance our relationships to the environment and each other.” Rather than frequently advocating for a position, he prefers posing questions, describing answers from experts and others, an approach that McKibben has criticized as “relentlessly middle-seeking.”³⁰ But as Revkin writes, he views his role mainly as “interrogatory – exploring questions, not giving you my answer … I think anyone who tells you they know the answer on some of these complex issues is not being particularly honest.”31

As Revkin described his goals in a 2011 interview: “The blog is very different than most in that most blogs are built to provide a comfort zone for a particular ideological camp … I’m not here to provide you with a soft couch and free drinks if you’re an enviro or if you are a conservative. It’s a place to challenge yourself.”  In doing so, Revkin recognizes his departure from peers like McKibben who have combined their journalism with advocacy, or those in the tradition of Walter Lippmann like Tom Friedman who speak to their readers from the position of enlightened authority. Instead, Revkin views himself as providing a “service akin to that of a mountain guide after an avalanche. Follow me and I can guarantee an honest search for a safe path. This is a big contrast from the dominant journalism paradigm of the last century, crystallized in Walter Cronkite’s "That’s the way it is’ signoff."³²

Further Reading

Matthew Nisbet, "Nature's Prophet: Bill McKibben as Journalist, Public Intellectual and Activist," Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. Discussion Paper Series, D-78 March. Cambridge, MA: Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2013. 

Matthew Nisbet, "The Opponent: How Bill McKibben Changed Environmental Politics and Took on the Oil Patch," Policy Options (Canada), 2013.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "It's Not About the Climate," The Breakthrough, April 29, 2013

The paper, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and based on collaborative efforts of an international, interdisciplinary team of scientists including myself, demonstrates that the Anthropocene — “the age of humans” — was not born yesterday: it was created by the long-sustained efforts of our ancestors. 

At stake are profound questions about the extent of human influence over the planet and the effects of large-scale ecological change on human wellbeing, environmental health, and biodiversity. Our research shows that human impact in at least one area of environmental change, land use, is much older than is generally thought and also indicative of humanity’s capacity to innovate and adapt, gaining higher yields from less land. In other words, humans have gradually diminished their use of land per capita over time. 

The early history of human transformation of Earth’s ecology has long been known by archaeologists to be rich, deep, and global. Humans began profoundly altering ecosystems on most continents many thousands of years ago — even before the last ice age. Yet global change science, with its emphasis on recent rapid changes in climate caused by the burning of fossil fuels, has focused on the industrial revolution as the central cause of Earth’s transformation by humanity.  

By investigating the early history of human land use quantitatively at global scale for the first time, we show that human engineering of ecosystems to sustain human populations likely changed the biosphere at globally significant levels by 3000 years ago or earlier.  Long before the emergence of agriculture, human populations had already begun adapting to denser populations by increasing the productivity of their land use systems, burning forests to attract game, consuming broader diets, and propagating favored species. The emergence of agriculture only continued the trend towards increasingly productive and intensive use of the same land.

We humans in our billions could not be here today if not for the long-sustained efforts of our ancestors to make the Earth work for us. Since prehistory, we have been clearing, grazing, and tilling the soil to produce our daily bread (or daily rice, millet, or tortilla). In the process, our ancestors created the used but still thriving biosphere we now depend on – the agricultural and forested landscapes that we cannot live without.  These landscapes now cover the vast majority of Earth’s surface, more than three quarters by most estimates.

Early in the process of changing ecosystems to support us, we became adapted to the ecological changes wrought by our ancestors. We depended on the management of transformed environments to survive and to thrive, and we continued to change them to meet the challenges of feeding ever greater populations from the same old land. Our species has always made a living by going beyond its environmental limits.

In some ways, little has changed as we move deeper into the Anthropocene. We continue reaping more from the same land, while our ever denser and wealthier urban populations are tending to concentrate human demands for the products of agriculture into Earth’s most productive landscapes. As a result, we stand at the crossroads of a novel opportunity — to guide our use of land towards leaving more habitat for other species.

The idea that industrial civilization has “ended nature” must be replaced by the historical reality: since prehistory our species has survived and prospered only by the engineering of ecosystems to sustain us. We live on a planet transformed by our ancestors to get us to this time of extraordinary achievement and plenty.  

The challenges of our generation and those of the future are nevertheless serious: we have created some massive novel changes in the Earth system – namely rapid anthropogenic climate change driven by fossil fuel combustion – that are unprecedented. There are different paths to the future, and not all lead to a hospitable Anthropocene. But to begin the journey towards an Anthropocene that continues to support vibrant human and nonhuman life, we must embrace our history as ancestral shapers and stewards of the biosphere.

Further Reading

Erle Ellis, “A tale of two planets: The Anthropocene revisited,” April 29, 2013

Erle Ellis, "The Planet of No Return," Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2012

Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalasz, "Conservation in the Anthropocene," Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2012

Erle Ellis, "Environments Are Not Constraints," The Breakthrough, June 20, 2012

Erle Ellis is an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a leading theorist of what scientists increasingly describe as the Anthropocene, the age of humans.
 

Photo Credit: HistoryStuff.net

But, says Rudo Sanyanga, the Africa director of the California-based environmental group International Rivers, there is little likelihood that mega-schemes like Inga Falls will democratize access to power. In the Congo, where only 9 percent of the population has access to the electricity grid, he says, “Grid-based electrification is not a realistic option... Billions of dollars in aid for the energy sector will once again bypass Africa’s rural poor.”

The money should be spent on decentralized power systems using solar and wind energy along with small-scale hydro schemes, says Sanyanga. “Like cell phones in the telecom sector, they can revolutionize the lives of the poor that have been bypassed by the centralized landlines and the electric grid systems.”

Building grid systems is essential to getting the power to people who need it. Most countries have created national grids for their people, before devising international links to export power. In Africa, it seems to be the other way round. For most of its citizens, Africa looks likely to remain a dark continent.
 

FURTHER READING

 

Part 1: It's Not About the Climate

Part 2: How the Left Came to Reject Cheap Energy for the Poor


Part 3: End of the World – or Decline of the West?


 

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is environment consultant for New Scientist magazine and author of numerous books, including Earth Then and Now: Potent Visual Evidence of Our Changing World and The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming. This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Photo Credit: China Daily (left); Global Alliance (right)

Hailed as “compelling,” “essential viewing,” and “the most important movie about the environment since ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’” “Pandora’s Promise” is inspiring antinuclear environmentalists to reconsider their views and call for greater discussion about nuclear power. The film, by Academy-Award-nominated director Robert Stone, charts the personal stories of five leading environmentalists who were once against nuclear but have since come to support the technology: Stewart Brand, Richard Rhodes, Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas and Michael Shellenberger.

Writing about the documentary in the New Yorker, Michael Specter traced his own opposition to nuclear energy to Three Mile Island: “To be for nuclear power after Three Mile Island (and, even worse, after the accident at Chernobyl, in 1986) was to be for corporations; for lying, callous governments; and for the inane notion that the benefits of new technologies always outweigh the risks.”

Seeing “Pandora’s Promise” forced him to reassess his position.

“Life is about choices, and we need to make one,” Specter writes. “Being opposed to nuclear power, as [Richard] Rhodes points out [in the film], means being in favor of burning fossil fuel. It’s that simple. Nuclear energy — now in its fourth generation — is at least as safe as any other form of power.”

After seeing the film, Terry Tempest Williams, a 30-year antinuclear activist and self-proclaimed descendant of the “Clan of One-Breasted Women” (a reference to cancers in her family she believes were a result of atomic explosion testing), said in the Nation that renewed discussion of nuclear energy was urgent and necessary.

“I am interested in having an open conversation about nuclear energy,” she said. “Climate change is real. We know we must wean ourselves off fossil fuels. So what are the alternatives? Are renewable energy sources enough for the energy-poor around the world?”

More skeptical viewers appeared less interested in having a debate over the issue at all, much less challenging their antinuclear beliefs. In a conversation with Tempest Williams, Mark Hertsgaard, the Nation’s environment correspondent, repeatedly sought to foreclose the discussion she desired — about the trade-offs of embracing or rejecting nuclear — preferring instead to try to discredit the film.

Yet, as Michael O’Sullivan points out in the Washington Post, “Pandora’s Promise” is not simply a vehicle for pro-nuclear ideology. “Although the documentary ultimately argues in favor of nuclear power, an energy source that’s anathema to many tree huggers, it does so in a way that’s less strenuous than strenuously ambivalent,” he writes. “In the end, its somewhat equivocal message — that nuclear power might just be the lesser of several evils — is more convincing than you’d think.”

Perhaps that’s why more discerning critics praised “Pandora’s Promise” for seeking to open up a conversation about an issue that can be controversial and ideologically fraught. “Stone and the people he focuses on are not afraid to display their ambivalence,” Specter writes. “That makes their decisions even more powerful.” Ben Kenigsberg of AV Club called the film “the most counterintuitive enviro-doc of the year” and said it “offers plenty to discuss.” Amy Michaud of Newsday writes, “This compelling documentary pushed me further along my own conversion path. … ‘No nukes’ is how I felt [in 1979], but now I am open to the possibilities.” Andy Revkin of the New York Times’s Dot Earth calls the movie “provocative,” “important,” and “essential viewing.”

David Ropeik, writing for Scientific American, said “Pandora’s Promise” challenges groupthink psychology and how it can imperceptibly (and indelibly) shape our perceptions of risk. Antinuclear views, he said, are often the result of “automatic tribal acceptance.”

Against thoughtless tribalism, Tempest Williams observes, “Pandora’s Promise” plumbs a philosophical “fracture line” among environmentalists.

There are those who believe that, given the global population of 7 billion and rising, “the only practical way we can sustain an energy-rich future is to commit to more development, more technology,” which will ensure the energy-poor have access to what the United States and Europe enjoy. The other side of the movement, she writes, asks “not how can we further promote a lifestyle of living beyond our energy means, but how can we live more lightly on the planet.” 

“Pandora’s Promise” raises the larger questions of what is at stake for environmentalism in our time: how we will embrace the high-energy planet of our future, and how quickly we can accelerate energy transitions so that all of Earth’s inhabitants can enjoy modern lives while not ravaging the planet. 

Specter puts an even finer point on the discussion: “We can let our ideals suffocate us or we can survive ... This film ought to make anyone who sees it realize that it is not too late for compromise. But we are getting really close.”

NUCLEAR ENERGY

"Frequently Asked Questions About Nuclear Power"


"Planetary Emergency? Then Go Nuclear"

"Cost of German Solar Is Four Times Finnish Nuclear"

Hope came in the form of World War I. Congress authorized the construction of the Wilson dam on the Tennessee River to power an ammunition factory. But the war ended shortly after the project was completed.

Henry Ford declared he would invest millions of dollars, employ one million men, and build a city 75 miles long in the region if the government would only give him the whole complex for $5 million. Though taxpayers had already sunk more than $40 million into the project, President Harding and Congress, believing the government should not be in the business of economic development, were inclined to accept.

George Norris, a progressive senator, attacked the deal and proposed instead that it become a public power utility. Though he was from Nebraska, he was on the agriculture committee and regularly visited the Tennessee Valley. Staying in the unlit shacks of its poor residents, he became sympathetic to their situation. Knowing that Ford was looking to produce electricity and fertilizer that were profitable, not cheap, Norris believed Ford would behave as a monopolist. If approved, Norris warned, the project would be the worst real estate deal “since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.” Three years later Norris had defeated Ford in the realms of public opinion and in Congress.

Over the next 10 years, Norris mobilized the progressive movement to support his sweeping vision of agricultural modernization by the federal government. In 1933 Congress and President Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It mobilized thousands of unemployed men to build hydroelectric dams, produce fertilizer, and lay down irrigation systems. Sensitive to local knowledge, government workers acted as community organizers, empowering local farmers to lead the efforts to improve agricultural techniques and plant trees.

The TVA produced cheap energy and restored the natural environment. Electricity from the dams allowed poor residents to stop burning wood for fuel. It facilitated the cheap production of fertilizer and powered the water pumps for irrigation, allowing farmers to grow more food on less land. These changes lifted incomes and allowed forests to grow back. Although dams displaced thousands of people, they provided electricity for millions.

By the 50s, the TVA was the crown jewel of the New Deal and one of the greatest triumphs of centralized planning in the West. It was viewed around the world as a model for how governments could use modern energy, infrastructure and agricultural assistance to lift up small farmers, grow the economy, and save the environment. Recent research suggests that the TVA accelerated economic development in the region much more than in surrounding and similar regions and proved a boon to the national economy as well.

Perhaps most important, the TVA established the progressive principle that cheap energy for all was a public good, not a private enterprise. When an effort was made in the mid-'50s to privatize part of the TVA, it was beaten back by Senator Al Gore Sr. The TVA implicitly established modern energy as a fundamental human right that should not be denied out of deference to private property and free markets.

The Rejection of the State and Cheap Energy

Just a decade later, as Vietnam descended into quagmire, left-leaning intellectuals started denouncing TVA-type projects as part of the American neocolonial war machine. The TVA’s fertilizer factories had previously produced ammunition; its nuclear power stations came from bomb making. The TVA wasn’t ploughshares from swords, it was a sword in a new scabbard. In her 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson described modern agriculture as a war on nature. The World Bank, USAID, and even the Peace Corps with its TVA-type efforts were, in the writings of Noam Chomsky, mere fig leaves for an imperialistic resource grab. 

Where Marx and Marxists had long viewed industrial capitalism, however terrible, as an improvement over agrarian feudalism, the New Left embraced a more romantic view. Before the arrival of “progress” and “development,” they argued, small farmers lived in harmony with their surroundings. In his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful, economist E.F. Schumacher dismissed the soil erosion caused by peasant farmers as “trifling in comparison with the devastations caused by gigantic groups motivated by greed, envy, and the lust for power.” Anthropologists like Yale University’s James Scott narrated irrigation, road-building, and electrification efforts as sinister, Foucauldian impositions of modernity on local innocents. 

With most rivers in the West already dammed, US and European environmental groups like Friends of the Earth and the International Rivers Network tried to stop, with some success, the expansion of hydroelectricity in India, Brazil and elsewhere. It wasn’t long before environmental groups came to oppose nearly all forms of grid electricity in poor countries, whether from dams, coal or nuclear. “Giving society cheap, abundant energy,” Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1975, “would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” 

Elaborate justifications were offered as to why poor people in other countries wouldn't benefit from cheap electricity, fertilizer and roads in the same way the good people of the Tennessee Valley had. Biomass (eg, wood burning), solar and efficiency “do not carry with them inappropriate cultural patterns or values.” In a 1977 interview, Amory Lovins added: “The whole point of thinking along soft path lines is to do whatever it is you want to do using as little energy — and other resources — as possible.” 

By the time of the United Nations Rio environment conference in 1992, the model for “sustainable development” was of small co-ops in the Amazon forest where peasant farmers and Indians would pick nuts and berries to sell to Ben and Jerry’s for their “Rainforest Crunch” flavor. A year later, in Earth in the Balance, Al Gore wrote, “Power grids themselves are no longer necessarily desirable.” Citing Schumacher, he suggested they might even be “inappropriate” for the Third World.

Over the next 20 years environmental groups constructed economic analyses and models purporting to show that expensive intermittent renewables like solar panels and biomass-burners were in fact cheaper than grid electricity. The catch, of course, was that they were cheaper because they didn’t actually deliver much electricity. Greenpeace and WWF hired educated and upper-middle class professionals in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg to explain why their countrymen did not need new power plants but could just be more efficient instead.

When challenged as to why poor nations should not have what we have, green leaders respond that we should become more like poor nations. In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben argued that developed economies should adopt “appropriate technology” like those used in poor countries and return to small-scale agriculture. One “bonus” that comes with climate change, Naomi Klein says, is that it will require in the rich world a “type of farming [that] is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture.” 

And so the Left went from viewing cheap energy as a fundamental human right and key to environmental restoration to a threat to the planet and harmful to the poor. In the name of “appropriate technology” the revamped Left rejected cheap fertilizers and energy. In the name of democracy it now offers the global poor not what they want — cheap electricity — but more of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power. 

From Anti-Statism to Neo-Liberalism

At the heart of this reversal was the Left’s growing suspicion of both centralized energy and centralized government. Libertarian conservatives have long concocted elaborate counterfactuals to suggest that the TVA and other public electrification efforts actually slowed the expansion of access to electricity. By the early 1980s, progressives were making the same claim. In 1984, William Chandler of the WorldWatch Institute would publish the “The Myth of the TVA,” which claimed that 50 years of public investment had never provided any development benefit whatsoever. In fact, a new analysis by economists at Stanford and Berkeley, Patrick Klein and Enrico Moretti, find that the "TVA boosted national manufacturing productivity by roughly 0.3 percent and that the dollar value of these productivity gains exceeded the program's cost."

Even so, today's progressives signal their sophistication by dismissing statist solutions. Environmentalists demand that we make carbon-based energy more expensive, in order to "harness market forces" to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Global development agencies increasingly reject state-sponsored projects to build dams and large power plants in favor of offering financing to private firms promising to bring solar panels and low-power "microgrids" to the global poor — solutions that might help run a few light bulbs and power cell phones but offer the poor no path to the kinds of high-energy lifestyles Western environmentalists take for granted.

Where senators Norris and Gore Sr. understood that only the government could guarantee cheap energy and fertilizers for poor farmers, environmental leaders today seek policy solutions that give an outsized role to investment banks and private utilities. If the great leap backward was from statist progressivism to anarcho-primitivism, it was but a short step sideways to green neoliberalism.

But if developed-world progressives, comfortably ensconced in their own modernity, today reject the old progressive vision of cheap, abundant, grid electricity for everyone, progressive modernizers in the developing world are under no such illusion. Whether socialists, state capitalists, or, mostly, some combination of the two, developing world leaders like Brazil’s Lula da Silva understand that cheap grid electricity is good for people and good for the environment. That modern energy and fertilizers increase crop yields and allow forests to grow back. That energy poverty causes more harm to the poor than global warming. They view cheap energy as a public good and a human right, and they are well on their way to providing electricity to every one of their citizens. 

The TVA and all modernization efforts bring side effects along with progress. Building dams requires evicting people from their land and putting ecosystems underwater. Burning coal saves trees but causes air pollution and global warming. Fracking for gas prevents coal burning but it can pollute the water. Nuclear energy produces not emissions but toxic waste and can result in major industrial accidents. Nevertheless, these are problems that must be dealt with through more modernization and progress, not less.

Viewed through this lens, climate change is a reason to accelerate rather than slow energy transitions. The 1.3 billion who lack electricity should get it. It will dramatically improve their lives, reduce deforestation, and make them more resilient to climate impacts. The rest of us should move to cleaner sources of energy — from coal to natural gas, from natural gas to nuclear and renewables, and from gasoline to electric cars — as quickly as we can. This is not a low-energy program, it is a high-energy one. Any effort worthy of being called progressive, liberal, or environmental, must embrace a high-energy planet.

THE GREAT PROGRESSIVE REVERSAL
 

Part 1: It's Not About the Climate

Part 2: How the Left Came to Reject Cheap Energy for the Poor


Part 3: End of the World – or Decline of the West?

Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons (right); Blog do Planalto (left)
 

In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Shortly after Ehrlich predicted that, between 1980 and 1989, food shortages would cause 4 billion people to starve to death — 65 million of them in the United States.

Ehrlich’s pessimistic book was followed by a raft of similar predictions. The Club of Rome not long after would publish The Limits to Growth, which claimed its computer models proved the world would soon run out of resources. Former World Bank economist Herman Daly in the 80s argued that the world must forsake further economic growth so as to not exceed the Earth’s environmental carrying capacity. In 2009, a prestigious group of natural scientists argued in the journal Nature for the existence of nine biophysical planetary boundaries, including for things like fertilizer and land use, beyond which human societies risked catastrophe.

In his sizzling new polemic against apocalyptic environmentalism, The Fantacisim of the Apocalypse, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner reminds us that, stripped of scientific trappings, our modern tales of environmental catastrophe are identical in structure to the Christian story of apocalypse. “I am trying through ecology to heal the wound that was opened by humanity’s split with nature thousands of years ago,” the seminal environmental thinker Murray Bookchin wrote in 1974. It is a story of our fall from grace in Genesis leading to the end of the world in Revelations.

Bruckner has long been a darling of the French media and avant-garde. His prior book, The Paradox of Love, was a critically acclaimed best seller, and was published in English earlier this year. But Bruckner’s Apocalypse inspired Le Monde to dedicate four full newspaper pages to denouncing him as a kind of reactionary. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bruckner is an environmentally minded liberal who accepts that global warming is a serious problem that must be addressed. What Bruckner is after in Apocalypse is the religiosity that has become mixed up with legitimate environmental issues, like climate change, turning them into Biblical fables, rather than problems to be solved.

Bruckner argues that there are “two ecologies: one rational, the other nonsensical; one that broadens our outlook while the other narrows it; one democratic, the other totalitarian.” The first views environmental problems as side effects of development that are solvable through human ingenuity. The second views them as signs that human civilization, based on its attempts to control nature, is fundamentally unsustainable.

More psychologist than political scientist, Bruckner sees a kind of self-aggrandizement at the bottom of both post-colonialism and environmentalism. The guilt Europe expresses for its colonialism, Bruckner argued in an earlier book, is a way for it to assert its continuing hegemony in the face of declining influence. That is, Africa is failing not because of bad leaders, geography, culture or internal political dynamics but rather because the West remains so powerful.

Bruckner is after bigger prey than apocalyptic environmentalism per se. In this book and his books on love, happiness and colonialism, he is out to understand the contemporary Western mind. When he writes, “The prevailing anxiety is at once a recognition of real problems and a symptom of the aging of the West: a reflection of its psychic fatigue,” he is describing problems that only afflict those of us at the very top of the global economic heap.

Global warming allows the West in general — and Europe in particular — to put itself back in the center of history at the very moment it is moving to the margins. Writes Bruckner, “What a relief to know that we are not living in a little province of time but in the historic moment when time itself is going to be engulfed! What presumption, and what naïveté, to believe that we are at the pinnacle of history!”

Apocalyptic environmentalism is not simply old Christian wine in new bottles, but rather a uniquely narcissistic variant of it. What makes us special, we Western greens tell ourselves, is not simply that we love and understand nature better, but that our generation has the power to save it. The Greatest Generation got to defeat fascism and Communism while in the post-Cold War era, Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millennials get to defeat an “adversary that is dispersed to the four corners of the earth and that can have all sorts of faces.”

There is thus, in the fanaticism of the apocalypse, equal parts misanthropy and narcissism, self-loathing and self-aggrandizement. “Behind their lamentations,” Bruckner writes sardonically, “the catastrophists are bursting with self-importance.”

In the end, it matters not a whit what we say; the world ignores our cautions. The United States and Europe rose to wealth and power by industrializing agriculture, burning fossil fuels and manufacturing for export. Now, as China, India and Brazil get rich the same way, the West stands in judgment, “The prophet is not a great soul who admonishes us,” writes Bruckner, “but a petty fellow who wishes us many misfortunes if we have the gall not to listen to him.”

The remedy to such nihilism, Bruckner argues, is the celebration of abundance, resilience and life itself. Bruckner demands that we not project our neuroses upon China, India and Brazil, but instead embrace their emergence as modern, powerful nations. Perhaps we have some wisdom to offer. But some humility is probably in order as well.

Since Ehrlich made his famous prediction, the global death rate declined from 13 to 9 deaths per 1,000 lives, and India’s fertility rate declined from 5.5 to 2.5, thanks not to forced streilizations and cutting off food aid, as Ehrlich advocated, but due to the continuing development and modernization of Indian society.

If there is to be a solution to global warming, then it is as likely to come from the rising powers of the global East and South than the superannuated precincts of the West. “Old men like to offer good advice,” Bruckner writes, quoting the 18th-century philosopher François de la Rouchefoucauld, “in order to console themselves for no longer being in a position to give bad examples.”

Reprinted with permission from the San Francisco Chronicle.

THE GREAT PROGRESSIVE REVERSAL
 

Part 1: It's Not About the Climate

Part 2: How the Left Came to Reject Cheap Energy for the Poor


Part 3: End of the World – or Decline of the West?

Photo Credit: John Martin, "Angry God"

Breakthrough Generation Fellows will work closely with policy teams in the Breakthrough Institute’s Energy and Climate and Conservation and Development programs as they seek to understand a range of issues from decarbonization to energy access, transportation-sector transformation, and relationships between socioeconomic trends and environmental impacts.

Fellows will conduct substantive research in service of unvarnished assessments of the ways in which energy efficiency measures alter the way societies use energy, contemporary proposals to address climate change and meet rising global energy demand with today’s renewable technologies, and the merits of new technologies in advancing a low-carbon transportation sector.

In keeping with the Breakthrough Institute’s efforts to bring global perspectives to environmental questions, fellows will also explore possible roles for international collaboration and technology transfer in expanding access to energy in the developing world, as well as how socioeconomic conditions affect natural resource consumption and their effects on land and water use and nitrogen cycles.

Now in its sixth year, the Breakthrough Generation Fellowship Program has helped send 50 alumni on to exciting careers in policy, academics, government service, the private sector, and advocacy. 

This year’s cohort brings fellows from top graduate and undergraduate institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, with backgrounds in such subjects as international energy economics, physics, East Asian energy transformations, ecology, political science, and evolutionary biology.  Fellows have distinguished themselves from their peers by excelling in research and scholarship as well as professional endeavors at think tanks, non-profit organizations, and government and multilateral institutions, and are sure to go on to become leaders on the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century.

The Breakthrough Institute is proud to welcome the 2013 Breakthrough Generation Fellows.

Alex Aki

Alex Aki is currently pursuing an M.A. at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies where she is concentrating in international economics and energy policy. She is completing her first year of studies in Bologna, Italy and will return to Washington, DC in fall 2013 for her second year. 

Prior to graduate school, Alex worked as an analyst for the US federal government during which time she deployed overseas for four months. Her deployment piqued her interest in the role of the US military and Department of Defense in advancing the development and demonstration of clean energy technologies. In 2009 Alex interned in the US Senate where she shadowed the energy legislative assistant during the debate over ‘cap and trade’ legislation. Her graduate school research has focused on the intersection of foreign affairs and energy policy, with an emphasis on the geopolitical implications of the US unconventional oil and gas boom and resource governance in conflict zones.

Alex graduated with a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 2010 where she concentrated in international politics and security studies. She is an avid lover of theatre, having most recently worked on a stage adaptation of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In her spare time she enjoys traveling and rooting for Hoyas basketball and the Washington Nationals.

Amy Meyer

Amy Meyer graduated from University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2013 with a degree in Environmental Studies and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She has worked with a number of environmentally-oriented organizations, including Natural Capitalism Solutions, SustainUS and the Center for Energy and Environmental Security at her school’s Law School. Amy wrote her honors thesis on the Green Climate Fund, crafting a proposal for using climate change resources for sustainable energy projects as a way of achieving both climate change and development goals across the globe. Her research interests include evaluating international institutions for their effectiveness in addressing environmental issues, and avenues for approaching development with an environmental lens. In her free time Amy enjoys reading, outdoor sports, and being around animals.

Dina Abdulhadi

Dina Abdulhadi graduated from the University of Georgia in 2013 with a B.S. in Ecology. Through the Roosevelt Institute and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, she conducted policy research on national science funding and biofuel development in Georgia. She has also worked at laboratories at UGA and the Environmental Protection Agency. Conservation policy, international development, and applications of science research are her main interests, but she also enjoys dancing (swing, tango, blues, randomly flailing around) and photography.

Erik Funkhouser

Erik Funkhouser is a Master of Public Affairs candidate at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. Erik is a McNair Scholar from Portland, Oregon. He received B.S. degrees in Sociology and Political Science from Portland State University. Erik is an affiliated student with UT’s Graduate Portfolio in Applied Statistical Modeling and a research associate with the Energy Systems Transformation Research Group (EST). In his work with EST, Erik contributed to multiple publications on the dynamics of international technology transfer, system transformation, and innovation in the energy space. Moving forward, Erik will focus on commercialization and deployment of GHG-mitigating technologies. Erik was raised on a subsistence ranch in Idaho, where he logged thousands of hours in the rural wilderness. Over the seven years he lived in Portland, Erik logged over 1,000 hours reading and shopping at his favorite west coast institution—Powell’s Books.

Luke Lavin

Luke Lavin recently graduated with honors from Amherst College with a B.A. in physics and anthropology. At Amherst his wide-ranging interests across the physical and social sciences led him to focus on questions related to climate, energy, and nuclear power. His recently completed senior honors thesis analyzing claims on democracy, risk, and scientific knowledge in debates over the contentious continuing operation of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant (VT) won the Amherst Anthropology and Sociology department prize for best thesis. In the past Luke has worked doing research at the National Institutes of Health, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and for science journalist Charles C. Mann. Still, his best job was probably a few summers spent driving a pedicab in his hometown of Washington, D.C. In his free time Luke enjoys running, cycling, reading, traveling, and being an avid fan of the Washington Nationals baseball team.

Marian Swain

Marian Swain graduated from Tufts University in 2012 with a B.A. in International Relations and German. She has spent significant time studying and working in Germany, where she has focused on Germany’s Energiewende and the energy and emissions challenges facing the European Union. In Berlin, she worked at a sustainability consulting firm on projects including the German National Sustainability Strategy and Young Ideas for Europe, a project to connect European youth on the subject of the EU’s energy future. During her time at Tufts, she interned at the German Consulate in Boston for the Consulate’s Transatlantic Climate Bridge program. She writes about urban sustainability issues for the blog This Big City and maintains a Tumblr about energy and climate issues in Germany and the US called Transatlantic Energy. In her free time, Marian enjoys cooking, modern dance, mountain biking, and reading contemporary fiction.

Oliver Kerr

Oliver Kerr arrives at the Breakthrough Institute after completing his master’s degree at Harvard University, where his research focused on China’s efforts to move away from coal and towards a cleaner energy mix. In addition to his regional expertise in East Asia, he has spent time spent studying energy and environmental policy from a broader perspective—from international climate negotiations to urban energy systems. While at Harvard, his interest in sustainability extended beyond the classroom into both campus activism and work with the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council to design a new energy efficiency financing mechanism for municipal utilities in Massachusetts. Originally from the United Kingdom, Oliver has a background in East Asian studies at the University of Oxford and experience living and working in China. He is particularly interested in the intersection of cities and climate change and after Breakthrough will be working on sustainable urban development for the World Bank in Washington DC.  As a native of the perennially overcast northwest of England, Oliver looks forward to spending some time soaking up the west coast ambiance and taking advantage of all its hiking and musical offerings.

Tom Keen

Tom Keen is a science graduate from Adelaide, South Australia. His background is primarily in ecology and evolutionary biology, but he also has a grounding in various other earth science disciplines. His interests include biodiversity conservation, climate change and energy, environmental economics, and science communication.

The San Onofre station, located near population hubs San Diego and Los Angeles, supplied about one-tenth of the state’s electricity needs, generating carbon-free electricity to the equivalent of 2.3 million homes each year.[1] Meeting the same demand with natural gas, which emits roughly 1.12 lbs of CO₂ per kWh, would generate an additional 17.7 billion lbs, or 8 million metric tons, of CO₂.[2]

In preparation for the closure, California’s grid operator (CAISO) added 2,502 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity in June, with 891 MW coming online this month.[3] The majority of this new capacity has been gas-fired power plants. Solar and wind have contributed to the added capacity, but to a much smaller degree.

Because of its strategic position between two urban centers and the quality of electricity it provided, replacing the electricity lost at San Onofre will not be as simple as building an equal amount of new gas, solar, and wind capacity. As the Energy Information Administration reported today,[4] new transmission upgrades will be needed to carry electricity from areas outside of the San Diego-Los Angeles area to those cities.

The fact that San Onofre has been replaced mainly by gas has significant implications for the Golden State’s climate goals. The additional emissions from replacement gas-fired electricity will make it more difficult for the state to meet its emissions targets and will encumber the state’s newly enacted cap and trade program.

The retirement of the two reactors, which make up about half of the state’s nuclear capacity, may signal a zero-carbon energy crunch in coming years around the country. The United States currently meets 20 percent of its electricity needs with nuclear, but the looming closures of plants licensed in the 1960s and 1970s in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and other states raise questions about how the country will be able to supply clean, baseload energy at the same or higher levels.

The two SONGS reactors were taken offline in January 2012: Unit 2 for a planned service outage and Unit 3 because of a small tube leak inside a steam generator.

The closure of San Onofre station could have been avoided if not for delays in the restart approval process. According to Southern California Edison, a restart plan for Unit 2 was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in October 2012 but got held up in the review process by an adjudicatory arm of the NRC, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. Additional administrative processes and appeals would have resulted in further delays of more than a year, and the costs of keeping SONGS offline would have created major additional losses for the power company.[5]

The SONGS closure may also add to recent increases in the cost of electricity. The United States Energy Information Administration reports that the closure of Units 2 and 3 in January 2012 created a persistent spread in wholesale power prices between the Northern and Southern parts of the state.[6] On average since January 2012, Southern Californians have paid an additional $4.15 per MWh compared to Northerners.

FURTHER READING

"Cost of German Solar Is Four Times Finnish Nuclear"


"Frequently Asked Questions About Nuclear Power"


"Planetary Emergency? Then Go Nuclear"

So it came as a shock to many and an offense to some to learn that new nuclear plants still cost substantially less than solar. Solar advocates have challenged our recent analysis finding that the electricity from Finland's beleaguered Olkiluoto plant is still four times cheaper than electricity from Germany's solar program, claiming that we cherry-picked cases to make nuclear look good and solar look bad.

It is an odd objection, given that we selected perhaps the most expensive nuclear power plant ever built for our comparison. The complaint is odder still because many of the same critics who accused us of cherry-picking then turned around and, without any apparent irony, cherry-picked small, one-off solar projects as evidence that our analysis is slanted toward nuclear. 

The reason we compared the Finnish plant to the German solar program is not just because renewables advocates have long claimed that the two examples prove that solar is cheap and nuclear is expensive. We also compared the two because both projects exist in the real world at significant scale, which helps avoid the cherry-picking problem of overgeneralizing from particular cases. Thanks to generous subsidies, Germany generated 5 percent of its electricity from solar last year — a huge amount compared to other nations. By contrast, last year the United States produced just 0.18 percent of its electricity from solar, according to the EIA.

Some have reasonably asked if there aren't broader surveys of the costs of new solar and new nuclear. There are. Both the International Energy Agency and the EIA have done them, and both find that solar costs substantially more than new nuclear construction.

While those figures represent the cost of the average solar installation today, they don't tell us what it costs for a major industrial economy to scale up solar rapidly, such that it gets a significant percentage of its electricity from solar. To date, Germany is the only major economy in the world that has done so. The costs of Germany's solar feed-in tariff represent the only real world figure we have. 

As solar has scaled up in Germany, the costs have declined. But the dynamics are not dissimilar with nuclear. France saw significant cost declines as it scaled up standardized plant designs in the 70s and 80s. The new plant in Finland is a first-of-kind design. Subsequent builds are already showing significantly lower costs. The EPR under construction in France, initiated around the same time as the one in Finland, is expected to cost slightly less. The third and fourth versions of the EPR, currently under construction in China, will be a third the cost of the Finnish plant.

Had we chosen to use the two new Chinese plants, solar would have cost twelve times more than nuclear, rather than just four times more. Of course this comparison would almost certainly have raised further objections that we had compared German apples to Chinese oranges. Yet it turns out that the German solar program has benefited enormously from the scaling up of Chinese solar manufacturing — or in the eyes of the US Solar Energy Association, the US Trade Commission, and the European Union, the outright dumping of solar panels by Chinese firms. Indeed the flood of Chinese solar panels, which take up as much as 80 percent of market share in Europe, has depressed the cost of solar panels by as much as 88 percent according to EU officials.

Surely, if it is appropriate to tout solar cost reductions that have been driven by Chinese mercantilism and industrial policy it is also appropriate to consider the cost benefits that Chinese manufacturing and construction costs are bringing to nuclear ­— even more so given that the vast majority of future carbon emissions will come from places like China, not Finland or Germany.   

Our analysis was further biased toward solar over nuclear by not accounting for the high costs of backing up and integrating intermittent solar electricity. Leading anti-nuclear greens, including Bill McKibben and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., note that for a few hours during a sunny weekend day, solar provided 50 percent of Germany's electricity; at the same time, as we pointed out, only five percent of the country's total electricity came from solar in 2012. What that means is that if Germany doubled the amount of solar, as it intends to do, there might be a few hours or even days every year where the country gets 100 percent of its electricity from solar, even though solar only provides 10 percent of its annual electricity needs.

What happens beyond that is anyone's guess. Some say Germany could sell its power to other countries, but this would mean other countries couldn't move to solar since Germany would provide electricity at the same hours it would seek to unload it on their neighbors. Solar advocates say cheap utility-scale storage is just around the corner; in fact, choices are extremely limited and expensive. As a result, analysis by the Clean Air Task Force suggest that integration costs for solar and wind are likely to surge dramatically should renewables rise much above 20 or 30 percent of total electrical generation (see graph below).

Are you recoiling in horror, perhaps even wishing the Japanese child welfare authorities would seize custody of our kids? If so, you are the ideal audience member for a provocative new film, titled Pandora’s Promise. This documentary focuses on five thoughtful environmentalists who were once terrified of radiation, and thought nuclear power was imperiling the planet’s future, but after educating themselves, they gradually realized that their assumptions were wrong. For people who are instinctively opposed to nuclear power but open-minded enough to consider evidence that goes against their predilections, this film will, and should, force them to question their certitude.

The five people whose intellectual journeys are chronicled admit the superficial incongruity between their environmentalism and their enthusiasm for nuclear power.

Thus, in some of the early scenes the five establish their Green bona fides. “The slogan was ‘No compromise in defense of Mother Earth.’ That was the original Earth First slogan. And it’s one that I still subscribe to at a very deep level,” says Mark Lynas, a British author and journalist, recalling his “hardcore activist” days. “Well, I [thought] nuclear power was evil. No doubt about it.”

Likewise, Gwyneth Cravens, a writer who participated in protests against the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, recounts the fear she felt when news broke in 1979 of the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania: “Are those rays coming out of Three Mile Island going to come to New York and harm my daughter?” And Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, tells how he wrote a number of articles about the dangers of nuclear power for national magazines some years ago, but changed his mind by talking to physicists and other experts in the field “until it finally got through my head” that his basic premise was mistaken.

Making slick use of a pulsing sound track and camera shots of scenes from bustling metropolises in Asia and Latin America, the film engagingly explains why nuclear power, which is greenhouse-gas free, is so essential to the prevention of climate change. Michael Shellenberger, a consultant to major environmental groups who co-founded a center-left think tank based in Oakland, California recalls having “gotten the religion” as a student that energy efficiency and renewable sources could save the planet.

After scrutinizing the numbers, “I ended up feeling like a sucker. The idea that we’re going to replace oil and natural gas with solar and wind, and nothing else, is a hallucinatory delusion,” Shellenberger says, citing projections that global energy demand will likely double by 2050, and triple or even quadruple by the end of the century, as countries such as China, India and Brazil grow richer. “Most people kind of think that somehow we’re going to be reducing our energy consumption. Actually, we just find more and more uses for it. If you look at all the energy that is used by an iPhone, not just to make it and to power it, but also to power all the servers, all of the stuff that you don’t see that the iPhone is connected to, it uses as much energy as a refrigerator.”

The film doesn’t shrink from acknowledging the factors that arouse visceral fears about nuclear energy. It harks back to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and includes footage from The China Syndrome, the 1979 movie (released, coincidentally, 12 days before Three Mile Island) in which Jane Fonda plays a TV reporter who investigates safety cover-ups at a nuclear plant that comes dangerously close to melting down.

Noting that one of the beneficiaries of radiation hysteria is the fossil fuel industry, the film shows a newspaper ad, paid for by an organization called the Oil Heat Institute, criticizing the construction of the Shoreham nuclear facility as a menace to human health. For the most part, though, the anti-nuclear movement is depicted as motivated by genuine angst rather than venality. As Lynas puts it, nuclear power “is this strange, invisible presence, which you know is potentially deadly.”

As someone who had to learn about radiation in a hurry after Fukushima, I was gratified to see how the educational process worked with these five environmentalists. Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, recalls being bewildered at first by the plethora of radiation exposure measurements (in millirems, microrems, millisieverts, microsieverts etc.). “You’re looking and squinting. ‘Okay, that looks like a large number. Is that a number I should worry about?’ Compared to what? What’s the background radiation level relative to all this?”

Like me, the enviros in the film were astonished to come across extensive evidence about the minimal physiological impact of contamination from major nuclear accidents. The best example is Chernobyl, where the radiation emissions in 1986 were by far the largest in history; nearly three decades later, studies show that the main effects on the general population in the area have overwhelmingly been on the mental and emotional health of people who thought they were doomed to cancer and succumbed as a result to maladies such as depression and substance abuse. (The chief documented exception is the 6,000-odd cases of thyroid cancer contracted by children after drinking milk from cows fed on grass contaminated with radioactive iodine. Soviet authorities failed to warn people of this danger, though only a handful of the victims have reportedly died of the ailment, which is one of the least lethal forms of cancer.)

“It was a complete shock to me,” Shellenberger says in the film. “There was a period where I’m reading all the Chernobyl stuff and I kind of am not believing it, because it was so out of sync with what I had come to believe.” As for Fukushima, Lynas sums up the most authoritative studies as predicting that the risks of increased cancer among the Japanese public are “somewhere between infinitesimal and completely nonexistent.”

Such claims are subject to furious controversy, of course, which raises the question of how laypeople are supposed to decide which experts to trust. In my case, I came across example after example of anti-nuclear advocates making assertions that were manifestly exaggerated, or based on such junk-science statistics as to preclude my attaching any credibility to their findings.

That point comes across brilliantly in the film when Robert Stone, the writer, director, and producer, confronts Helen Caldicott, a leading anti-nuclear activist, at one of her rallies, to question why she and others claim that Chernobyl-caused cancer is killing or has killed one million people, a figure exponentially greater than other estimates. “This is the biggest cover-up in the history of medicine!” Caldicott bellows, but she throws up her hands when asked for the reason. That’s because there isn’t one, as Shellenberger observes: “In order to believe that more than 56 people were killed at Chernobyl, or more than the maybe 4,000 who could eventually die of cancer—in order to believe that a million people will be killed by Chernobyl…you have to believe that there was a cover-up of just massive proportions by the World Health Organization, by the United Nations, by literally hundreds of the world’s top public health experts. It’s so absurd.”

The camera travels around the globe to show how dramatically radiation can vary from place to place. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as natural background radiation, actually,” confesses Lynas, who goes on to cite the example of Guarapari Beach in Brazil, where background radiation “is way above permitted levels in terms of what the public can be exposed to. And that’s what’s coming out of the soil. It’s on the beach….What’s really striking is that there’s no correlation between levels of background radioactivity, which vary by such enormous amounts, and high levels of cancer.”

As he speaks, the camera zooms in on a Brazilian lying on that beach, covering himself in radioactive sand. The man says this helps cure his body pains.

My kind of guy! That Brazilian would presumably eat Fukushima produce without the slightest hesitation. So perhaps he doesn’t need the enlightenment that comes from watching this film. But a lot of other people do.

Paul Blustein is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He was formerly a Tokyo correspondent for the Washington Post. This article originally appeared on Quartz, a new kind of business publication.
 

Photo Credit: pandoraspromise.com

In fact, they farmed large areas that today look like virgin forests. But we now know that as much as a tenth of the trees in the Amazon rainforest grow on man-made “dark earths,” or terra preta, which archaeologists believe were created by pre-Columbian farmers who added organic wastes and charcoal to improve nutrient supply and boost yields.

Much of the Amazon, Ellis concludes, is actually forest regrowth. Or — judging by the profusion of fruit trees and other valuable species still growing in terra preta areas – perhaps overgrown gardens.

Other tropical rainforests also seem to have been farmed. In the past couple of years, James Fraser of Lancaster University in England has found dark earths in until-recently forested West Africa. And last year Doug Sheil and colleagues reported similar findings from Borneo. Other studies have found oil-palm nuts over wide areas of the central African jungle, suggesting the place was covered in palm-oil plantations 2,000 years ago.

Nor is this just about rainforests. The bison-grazed plains of North America were remade by Native Americans long before Europeans showed up. Many of the mist-shrouded treeless grasslands of the tropical Andes, known as the paramos, are the result of burning and grazing after locals cut down the natural forests centuries ago. In colder climes, the Scottish highlands tell a similar story.

Just as geographers and archaeologists are hard-pressed to find untouched landscapes, so biologists are having similar trouble locating pristine ecosystems.

A new book, Novel Ecosystems, edited by Richard Hobbs of the University of Western Australia and others, shows how many superficially natural ecosystems are heavily influenced by the introduction of alien species. Whether intentional or accidental, most introductions seem to have human origins.

This is disconcerting. “Over large parts of the globe, the ‘wilderness’ that people refer back to never existed,” says one of the book’s authors, Michael Perring, also of the University of Western Australia.

Nature has always had open borders for alien species on the move. Those itinerants may have been a driving force of evolution. But human activity has dramatically increased their travel options. We move many deliberately, as commercial crops or domesticated animals, for instance. Today, others can hitch a ride on ship hulls or in ballast tanks, aboard planes or on the wheels of trucks or the backs of domesticated animals. This phenomenon seems to have been going on for much longer than we sometimes imagine.

Conventionally, we regard these unwanted interlopers as a curse, destabilizing ecosystems and devouring indigenous species. Sometimes this is true, as Hobbs and his co-authors acknowledge. But they point out that, in the 21st century, aliens make up a substantial fraction of the planet’s biodiversity, and many are actively useful, even essential parts of ecosystems.

Extinctions caused by new arrivals happen and can sometimes be devastating. The brown tree snake from New Guinea is eating its way through the wildlife of Guam, after arriving on a military plane. The zebra mussel, which came from the Black Sea region in the ballast water of ships, is notorious in the U.S., which returned the favor by inadvertently sending the Black Sea a jellyfish that devastated that ecosystem. But actually, such events are rare. Mostly, invaders swiftly settle down and become model eco-citizens, pollinating crops, spreading seeds, controlling predators, and providing food and habitat for native species. After a while we forget about them, or learn to love them. Where would North American be without the European honeybee?

Usually, invaded ecosystems end up with more species than they had before. Places like New Zealand, Hawaii, even the Galapagos islands — all notorious for species invasions due to human activities — are actually all more biodiverse than before. Ellis calls them “anthropogenic melting pots.”

Scientists who research the invaders and their hosts are discovering much that is intriguing. British researchers recently reported finding two species of native tits that have learned to eat the larvae of a wasp that was introduced to the country from the Middle East 180 years ago and that lays its eggs on the Turkey oak, another introduced species. The tits are spending more and more time in the trees, eating the larvae, especially in spring because climate change means their young now hatch before their previous food source, leaf-eating moth caterpillars appear.

Novel ecosystems are different, but not necessarily worse. San Francisco Bay, for instance, is widely regarded as the most invaded estuary on the planet. But that didn’t stop the U.S. government submitting it in January to the Ramsar Convention as a wetland of international importance, because of is a “key habitat for a broad suite of flora and fauna and a range of ecological services.” Much of its rich biodioversity — and some of its ecological services — is due to its alien species.

Aliens may even contribute to rewilding those parts of the planet we no longer need. In Puerto Rico, abandoned sugarcane fields across half the island have sprouted new forest ecosystems, largely thanks to the invasive power of non-native species such as the African tulip tree, says Ariel Lugo of the International Institute of tropical Forestry. The tulip tree proved attractive to native birds and insects and now, after a few decades, native trees species have started to recover too.

The case that we have to accommodate the alien and novel when trying to conserve nature and restore ecosystems was made by Emma Marris in her 2011 book Rambunctious Garden. But the new analysis goes beyond that simple pragmatism, because it suggests we need to rethink many ideas about how nature works, too.

For instance, it calls into question the conventional view that ecosystems such as rainforests are complex machines, or super-organisms, that have emerged through a long process of co-evolution of species to fill ecological niches. But, if that is so, asks ecologist James Rosindell of Imperial College London, how come alien species are so good at invading other ecosystems, frequently becoming fully integrated neighbors?

Ecosystems begin to look a lot more accidental, random, and transient than niche theory would suggest. They are constantly being remade by fire and flood, disease, and the arrival of new species. They are a hodgepodge of native and alien species. This fits a rival model for how ecosystems work called “ecological fitting,” first articulated by the legendary U.S. ecologist Daniel Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania. He said that co-evolution is a bit-part player in ecosystems; most of the time, species muddle along and fit in as best they can.

Far from reaching some equilibrium state with niches filled, ecosystems have always been in a constant state of flux, says Stephen Jackson, of the Southwest Climate Science Center in Arizona, in Novel Ecosystems. “Change, including rapid and disruptive change, is a natural feature of the world.” Humans may have dramatically speeded that up, but novelty is the norm.

In that light, we need to look afresh at conservation priorities. Novel ecosystems cannot be dismissed as degraded versions of proper ecosystems, nor can alien species be demonized simply for not belonging. If novelty and change is the norm, Hobbs and colleagues ask, does it make sense for the growing business of ecosystem restoration to try and recreate static historic ecosystems? By doing that, you are not creating a functioning ecosystem; you are creating a museum exhibit that will require constant attention if it is to survive.

Conservationists, others argue, also need to be more positive about the ecological benefits of traditional farming. A widely held view is that we need more intensive industrial farming in order to provide the food the world needs while leaving land for nature. But that assumes farms can have no ecological value. Yet traditional farming methods are often better seen as novel ecosystems rich in biodiversity — havens for wildlife that is worth protecting.

Christian Kull of Monash University in Australia recently called for the protection of novel farming systems that operate within forests, such as the rubber gardens of Indonesia and the cacao farms of Cameroon, which “blur boundaries between human and natural, native and non-native, production and conservation.”

The good news from all this is that nature emerges as resilient and adaptable, able to bounce back from the worst we can throw at it. And that raises a final heretical question. In an era of coming rapid climate change, if any species are going to thrive surely it will be the desperadoes, stowaways, and vagabonds that have been hitching a ride around the world with humans — species that, in some respects, closely resemble us. So if novel is the new normal, should we be encouraging their travels, rather than stopping them at the border?

Further Reading

Erle Ellis, "The Long Anthropocene," The Breakthrough, May 1, 2013

Jim Proctor, "We Have Never Been Natural," The Breakthrough, April 5, 2013

Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalazs, "Conservation in the Anthropocene," Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2012

Emma Marris, "Love Your Pythons," The Breakthrough, August 17, 2012

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is environment consultant for New Scientist magazine and author of numerous books, including Earth Then and Now: Potent Visual Evidence of Our Changing World and The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming. This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

 

Photo Credit: BYU's Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies

“I 'got rich' from Zip2 & PayPal w zero govt anything, put 100% of that into SpaceX, Tesla & SolarCity," he tweeted. A carbon tax is better than subsidies, he continued. “Market will then achieve best solution.”

In a new piece for the New Republic, we show just how curious this statement is when it comes from a man whose fortune comes from companies that greatly benefitted from government support:

The argument for a carbon tax is that it corrects distortions in the market due to the externalized costs of emitting carbon, which in turn would allow companies that produce zero-emission vehicles, like Tesla, to compete on a level playing field without further public assistance. This argument allows Musk to elide just how dependent his companies—both those that offer low carbon benefits and those, like SpaceX, that don’t—have been on direct public support for the development and commercialization of the technologies upon which they were built. 

While a carbon tax might have provided some benefit to Tesla or Musk's residential solar company, Solar City, there is no imaginable carbon tax that would begin to approximate the value of the $7,500 tax credit that the federal government offers to buyers of electric cars. Or the $2.4 billion dollars that the federal government invested in battery manufacturing through the 2009 stimulus. Or the half-billion dollar loan that financed the factory in which Tesla manufactures the Model S. Or the 20 years of funding from the American and Japanese governments that have resulted in dramatic advances in the lithium batteries that power the Model S.

Nor would any seriously imaginable carbon price make Solar City economically viable. Without the federal investment tax credit and state deployment mandates, which functionally require utility ratepayers to subsidize solar panels, companies like Solar City would not be in business. Moreover, the panels that Solar City sells would not exist were it not for 40 years of government R&D. Those panels have gotten much cheaper over that time thanks to enormous deployment subsidies in the U.S., Japan, and Germany. And Solar City currently sells panels manufactured in China, where huge government subsidies for solar panel factories have helped solar prices fall further still.

Given that Tesla has been the whipping boy for critics of federal investment in low-carbon technology, Musk's defensiveness about the help that his businesses have received from the federal government is perhaps understandable. But the debt that Musk owes to public investment in new technology goes well beyond recent federal investments in low-carbon technologies.

Read the rest here.

Photo Credit: Solidsmack.com

Detailed reports from energy analysts and consulting groups — including the International Energy Agency, McKinsey and Company, and the Rocky Mountain Institute — lend legitimacy to bullish efficiency prospects. IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook touts energy efficiency’s potential to “realize huge gains for energy security, economic growth, and the environment.” It claims an $11.8 trillion global investment in efficiency through 2035 would yield $18 trillion in higher economic output, while allowing global carbon dioxide emissions to peak by 2020. An influential 2009 report from McKinsey analysts argued that the United States could cut its annual energy use by 23 percent through 2020, abate one-sixth of US carbon emissions and yield a net savings of roughly $700 billion. And, Reinventing Fire, an efficiency-centered roadmap for the United States authored by Amory Lovins and published by RMI in 2012, promises to cut projected energy consumption 40 percent while delivering $5 trillion in net energy savings by mid-century.

But behind the scenes a growing number of economists and energy analysts are challenging the assumptions and methods behind these studies. None of them argues against seizing truly cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities. Rather, they caution against overestimating their energy and carbon savings potential. As such, it is time to rethink the privileged place efficiency has taken in the climate and energy strategies of national governments and international agencies.

Historical Perspective
 

Between 1860 and 1990, the global economy “decarbonized” — reduced how much carbon is required to produce a given unit of economic output — at a rate of 1.3 percent per year. Over the last decade, as coal and heavy industry fueled rapid growth in China and other nations, decarbonization slowed to 0.4 percent per year.

If the world hopes to stabilize atmospheric carbon emissions at 450 parts per million, the target for preventing global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the decarbonization rate must accelerate to at least 4 percent annually — a tenfold increase above the last decade’s rate, or three times more than the rate from 1860-1990, which is an enormous challenge.

There are two ways to accelerate decarbonization. The first is to reduce the energy intensity of the economy — how much energy is required to produce a unit of economic activity. Over the last century, energy intensity has improved worldwide by about 1 percent per year. The second is to decrease the carbon intensity of the energy supply — carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced. This rate has improved more modestly, at about 0.3 percent per year in the 20th century, slowing to about zero over the last decade. 

The rapid global efficiency gains posited by RMI, McKinsey, or IEA are unprecedented. IEA places more than half of the burden of decarbonization on improving energy intensity, about 2.4 percentage points of an overall 4.2 percent annual decarbonization rate. To achieve that target, global energy intensity would need to decline 2.4 times faster than it has over the past century.

Only four of the 26 developed (OECD) nations we studied— Ireland, the U.K., the United States and Poland — achieved energy intensity declines of 2 percent per year or greater between 1971 and 2006, a period that began with energy price shocks and strong measures by nations to increase energy efficiency. Moreover, much of the energy intensity decline in these countries was the result of broad economic changes unrelated to energy efficiency policies.

In the United States, California is often held up as the real world proof that efficiency can be radically increased at a profit, because per capita electricity use in California has fallen flat since the early 1970s, while energy demand in the rest of the United States continued to rise.

In fact, a variety of factors unrelated to the state’s efficiency policies explain more than three-quarters of the divergence, according to a study by Anant Sudarshan and James Sweeney of Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center.

A 2007 study of energy intensity by Soham Baksi and Christopher Green reinforces that finding. After accounting for ongoing changes in the share of global economic activity derived from manufacturing, agriculture, and services, the two economists found that simply increasing the global rate of energy intensity decline from the historic rate of 1 percent to 1.25 percent would require increasing efficiency within the residential and commercial sectors sevenfold and efficiency in the transportation and industrial sectors fivefold between 1990 and 2100.

So not only are such efficiency gains unprecedented, given that a substantial share of historical energy intensity declines are due to factors outside the domain of energy efficiency policy, they also appear highly unrealistic.
 

Double Counting
 

In order to claim that energy efficiency can dramatically reduce emissions, both IEA and IPCC assume that energy intensity will decline faster in the future than it has in the past. In the 2012 World Energy Outlook, IEA assumes in its core reference scenario that energy intensity gains will spontaneously — that is, without any additional policy intervention — increase to 1.9 percent annually through 2035, meaning that some of the fastest national rates observed over the last 40 years will all of a sudden happen globally. This allows IEA to assume away about two-thirds of their projected increase in energy intensity relative to the long-term global trend and focus their detailed plans only on that final 0.5 percentage point increase. 

IPCC, too, makes similarly heroic assumptions about energy efficiency, which provoked a reaction from leading energy and climate scientists. In a 2008 article for Nature, Roger Pielke Jr., Tom Wigley, and Christopher Green faulted IPCC for assuming in its business-as-usual scenarios that two-thirds or more of the overall decarbonization rate required to stabilize greenhouse gases this century will occur automatically, with energy intensity improvements constituting the largest portion of these projected gains.

Making matters worse, even after IPCC and IEA assume higher-than-normal energy intensity declines in their scenarios, their modelers went on to assume there are substantial additional efficiency opportunities left waiting to be unlocked — at a profit — by the right policy actions.

Unfortunately, few models rigorously account for what part of the finite pool of cost-effective efficiency opportunities account for the big gains baked into baseline scenarios — such as swapping old incandescent bulbs for efficient new fluorescents or LEDs, an efficiency opportunity likely to be taken up under business-as-usual scenarios — and which are left over to be captured by policy, raising the risk of substantial double counting. 

Hidden Costs

According to RMI, McKinsey, IEA, and others, trillions of dollars in untapped efficiency gains await the savvy businessman or policymaker. In practice, private actors have been perfectly happy to leave these trillion-dollar-bills sitting on the sidewalk.

Obstacles to greater energy efficiency include split incentives (the people paying for efficiency are often not the same people who receive the benefits) and imperfect information (people often do not know that greater efficiency can pay for itself). And economists warn that there are often hidden challenges associated with overcoming these obstacles. 

First are transaction and implementation costs, such as rebates, policy implementation and hired consultants, which can raise the cost of efficiency upgrades 40 percent or more, and which are ignored by the efficiency strategies published by IEA, McKinsey, and RMI. In a recent paper, economists Hunt Alcott and Michael Greenstone found that the literature “on the magnitude of profitable unexploited energy efficiency investments … frequently does not meet modern standards for credibly estimating the net present value of energy cost savings and often leaves other benefits and costs unmeasured.”

Another challenge is the assumed rate at which consumers and firms discount future earnings relative to current wealth — what economists call the “discount rate.” McKinsey assumes an across-the-board discount rate of 7 percent per year when determining which investments are profitable. RMI applies a range of rate-of-return hurdles necessary to overcome discount rates in various sectors, ranging from 5 to 33 percent.

But due to opportunity costs, corporate executives are often looking for returns on investments in the range of 20 percent, and individual consumers even higher still. Likewise, efficiency investment today means less money available to invest in other opportunities tomorrow, which can increase the hurdle rate by 10 percentage points.

When more realistic numbers are applied the amount of cost-effective efficiency measures dramatically shrinks — by 21 percent with the industry-appropriate discount rate of 20 percent, and by 43 percent with a discount rate consistent with the two- to three-year minimum payback period typically needed to entice household efficiency investments.
 

Beware Rebound

A third reason to question potential efficiency gains is the rebound effect, which posits that efficiency improvements that lower the cost of energy services trigger an increase in energy demand that can erode much of the expected energy savings and climate benefits. 

This is because to the extent that energy efficiency measures lower the effective price of energy services, consumers and firms are likely to demand more of them. And when consumers save money through energy efficiency measures, they will likely spend some of those savings on goods or services that require still more energy. Finally, getting more economic activity out of each unit of energy drives economic growth, which further expands energy demand.

Collectively, these economic mechanisms can erode much — and in some situations all — of the reduction in energy consumption predicted by engineering-level analyses. And indeed, economists have documented myriad examples of the rebound effect. A 2007 review commissioned by the UK Energy Research Centre, drawing from more than 500 studies on the topic, found typical rebound levels ranging from 10 percent to as high as 80 percent, depending on the sector in question.

Surprisingly, most efficiency scenarios disregard the possibility of a significant rebound effect. McKinsey, for instance, completely disregards rebound effects and, in Reinventing Fire, RMI dismisses the possibility of significant economy-wide rebound, while the IEA’s 2012 World Energy Outlook assumes that rebound effects erode only 9 percent of energy savings.

Perhaps most importantly, in emerging economies where energy demand is growing most rapidly and consumers are just starting to acquire many modern conveniences such as air conditioning, personal transportation or even reliable lighting, rebound effects are much larger and can even lead to “backfire,” or a net increase in energy consumption following energy efficiency improvements.

To be clear, rebound effects, particularly in emerging economies, mean consumers and firms are using energy efficiency to enhance their economic welfare, getting more energy services out of the same or less overall energy use. That’s a fundamentally good thing. That said, the developing world is projected to account for virtually all energy demand growth in the coming decades. Accurately estimating how much rebound effects erode lasting energy savings is essential to depict the contribution of efficiency to long-term climate and energy strategies.
 

A Way Forward
 

Despite the bullish efficiency strategies promoted by IEA and respected consultants such as McKinsey and RMI, economists and energy analysts provide plenty of reason to be cautious about overestimating the potential contribution of profitable efficiency opportunities to global climate mitigation. After avoiding double counting and taking full account of the hidden costs required to unlock efficiency opportunities, the quantity of “low-hanging efficiency fruit” shrinks dramatically. Meanwhile, what truly profitable efficiency opportunities remain will trigger rebound effects, which further erode the delivered long-term energy savings.

If policy makers cannot count on energy efficiency to deliver the lion’s share of the roughly 4 percent per year global decarbonization rate needed to avoid dangerous climate change, are climate mitigation efforts sunk? Fortunately, there is still another big lever left to drive global decarbonization: accelerating the transition to low and zero-carbon energy sources, including renewables like wind and solar as well as nuclear energy.

In fact, history suggests reason for hope: Sweden and France each sustained greater than 4 percent annual improvements to the carbon intensity of their energy supplies for more than a decade (from 1974 to 1991 in Sweden and 1976 to 1988 in France) by deploying large amounts of nuclear power, which at the time, was the only zero-carbon energy source ready for global prime time. Iceland achieved similar rates from 1971 to 1985 by tapping the island’s localized geothermal resources.

Today, the world has an expanded suite of low-carbon power sources at its disposal, from increasingly competitive wind and solar energy technologies to safer new nuclear power plants. A set of challenges must be overcome to ensure that each of these technologies can truly scale to meet the needs of an energy-hungry planet, and new technologies must be readied for market, particularly in the transportation sector. National governments and industry leaders must now invest the necessary resources in advanced energy innovation and deployment.

Global energy consumption will likely more than double by mid-century, as the population expands towards 10 billion people and billions more global citizens are lifted out of poverty. If we are to stabilize carbon emissions below 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all of that new energy must be clean. If human civilization can reduce energy intensity faster than it has over the last century, then this effort will be made all the easier. But if it turns out that efficiency’s potential has been exaggerated, then we will be glad that strong efforts were made to move rapidly towards cleaner sources of energy.

Further Reading

Breakthrough Staff, "Amory Lovins' Efficiency Fantasy," The Breakthrough, February 22, 2013

Breakthrough Staff, "World Energy Agency Exaggerates Climate Potential of Efficiency," The Breakthrough, April 18, 2013

Photo Credit: Wordpress User AlaskaBibleTeacher

Over the last several decades, the cost of electricity from solar panels has declined dramatically, while the cost of building new nuclear plants has risen steadily. This has reaffirmed the long-standing view of many environmentalists that it will be cheaper and easier to reduce global warming emissions through solar electricity than with new nuclear plants. But while continuing price declines might someday make solar cheaper than nuclear, it's not true today. Yet the mythmaking persists.

Misleading claims about solar's readiness might be excused as the exaggerations of enthusiasts if the claims weren't coming from environmentalists who believe that global warming is a planetary emergency. If they were really serious about the need to move to zero carbon energy, they would see nuclear energy as the obvious answer.
 

The only nations in the world that have achieved emissions reductions at a pace and scale that begins to approach what will be necessary to mitigate global warming are France and Sweden. Both did so by switching to nuclear energy. France shifted over 80% of its electricity to nuclear in about two decades. Renewable energy, despite decades of public subsidies, can make no such claim.

Warning of the end of the world and delivering the good news about solar and wind plays well with green audiences, but anyone truly concerned about climate change will need to reconsider their opposition to nuclear. It is the best chance we have to make big reductions in carbon emissions quickly. 

Such comments reflect a conventional wisdom in the climate debate. Climate skeptics, or deniers as they are often called, are presented as all-powerful forces bankrolled by rich corporations who have wielded their awesome power to block efforts to deal with the threat of human caused climate change. How do we know that climate skeptics have such power? As Martin Wolf explains, it is the "world's inaction" on climate policy which reveals their power.

From this perspective then, a key challenge of securing action on climate change is to defeat the skeptics – to drive back the forces of darkness so that the forces of good might prevail. Victory will be achieved by winning the battle for public opinion on the state of climate science.

However, a closer look at the logic underlying such arguments reveals a chain of causality which scholars of the public understanding of science have long critiqued as the ineffectual "deficit model" of science. Even more troubling, there is reason to believe that the focus of attention by climate campaigners on skeptics actually works against effective action.

The so-called "deficit model" suggests that the public lacks certain knowledge that if it were known properly (so closing the deficit) would lead them to favor certain policy actions. In other words, if only you understood the "facts" as I understand them, then you would come to share my policy preferences.

The deficit model helps to explain why people argue so passionately about "facts" in public debates over policies with scientific components. If you believe that acceptance of certain scientific views is a precondition for, or a causal factor in determining what policy views people hold, then arguments over facts serve as political debate by proxy.

Dan Kahan, professor of psychology at Yale Law School, has conducted several studies of public views on climate change and finds that the causal mechanisms of the "deficit model" actually work in reverse: people typically "form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values." Our political views shape how we interpret facts. On an issue as complex as climate, there are enough data and interpretations to offer support to almost any political agenda. Thus we have arguments over the degree or lack of consensus among scientists, and see efforts to delegitimise outlier positions in order to assert one true and proper interpretation. Added to the mix is the temptation to push "facts" beyond what science can support, which offers each side the opportunity for legitimate critique of the excesses of their opponents. These dynamics can (and do) go on forever.

In the first half of the 20th century, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann recognized that uniformity of perspective was not necessary for action to take place in democracies. He explained that the goal of politics is not to make everyone think alike, but to help people who think differently to act alike. A vast body of scholarship supports the limitations of the deficit model, yet it remains a defining feature of debates over climate policy today.

It is bad enough that those operating under the assumptions of the deficit model are wasting their time, or working against their own interests. What is worse is that such strategies fail to recognize that the battle over public opinion on climate change has long been over – it has been won, decisively in fact, by those favoring action.

Data on public opinion on climate change has been collected, in some cases for several decades, in countries around the world. What it shows is remarkably strong support for the so-called scientific consensus, as well as strong support for policy action. Even in the notoriously climate sceptical United States, Gallup finds: "trends throughout the past decade - and some stretching back to 1989 – have shown generally consistent majority support for the idea that global warming is real, that human activities cause it, and that news reports on it are correct, if not underestimated."

Another Gallup poll of 128 countries in 2007 and 2008 found strong majorities in most countries - including most large emitters of carbon dioxide – believe that global warming is a result of human activities. Public opinion does vary a great deal, often literally with the weather, but it has overall been remarkably consistent over many years in support of action. Far from being an obstacle to action on climate change, public opinion is in fact a resource to be capitalized upon.

Studies of the relationship of public opinion and political action on a wide range of subjects show nothing unique or very interesting about the state of public opinion on climate change. Significant policy action has occurred on other issues with less public support on many occasions (as I documented in my recent book, The Climate Fix). Instead of motivating further support for action, efforts to intensify public opinion through apocalyptic visions or appeals to authority, have instead led to a loss of trust in campaigning scientists and a deep politicization of the climate issue. Citing the ample evidence of the ineffectiveness of such approaches, Dan Kahan complains of climate campaigners: "They keep pounding the data, and with a rhetorical hammer that drives home all the symbolism that generates distrust and resistance in larger parts of the population … Why?"

If public opinion is not an obstacle to action on climate change, then what is? The first is a failure of imagination. Conventional wisdom on climate policy has long been that energy prices need to be made more expensive. Dearer energy fits into a complex causal chain of policy action as follows:

Win public opinion via closing the science deficit, defeating the skeptics→then the public will pressure politicians for action→politicians respond by passing laws, and signing international treaties→dirty fossil energy then becomes more expensive→people consequently feel economic pain→not liking economic pain, people demand additional actions on energy efficiency and fossil fuel alternatives→such actions will stimulate innovation in the public and private sectors, as well as in civil society→ these innovations then deliver low carbon alternatives→problem solved.

Laid out from start to finish, this entire causal chain seems like a Rube Goldberg invention. If the causal chain founders at the first step where the deficit model shows up, it completely collapses at the point where energy is supposed to become more expensive in order to create incentives (experienced by voters as economic pain) to propel efficiency and innovation.

The idea that higher priced energy can be used as a lever to transform the global energy system may work in abstract economic models, but fails spectacularly in real world politics. As Martin Wolf explains, "A necessary, albeit not sufficient condition, then, is a politically sellable vision of a prosperous low-carbon economy. That is not what people now see."

A second obstacle to action is the pathological obsession of many environmental campaigners with the climate skeptics. By concluding that the skeptics are the main obstacle to action, campaigners are not only demonstrating a spectacularly circular logic, but they are also devoting their energies to a fruitless fight. Make no mistake, fighting skeptics has its benefits – it reinforces a simplistic good versus evil view of the world, it gives a sense of doing something, and privileges scientific expertise in policy debates. However, one thing that it does not do is contribute towards effective action on climate change.

The battle over public opinion on climate change has long been won, and not by the skeptics. But simply by virtue of their continued existence, the climate skeptics may have the last laugh, because many climate campaigners seem to be able to see nothing else in the debate. Climate skeptics are not all powerful and may not even be much relevant to efforts to decarbonise the global economy. They have, however, cast a spell upon their opponents.

This essay originally appeared at the Guardian and has been republished with permission. Photo credit: the Center for Strategic and International Studies (right) and Neil Palmer/International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

Preventing dangerous warming of the planet due to human emissions of greenhouse gases will require that we cut our emissions by 80 percent over the next 40 years at the same time that global energy demand is expected to double or triple. Doing so will require that we produce vast amounts of zero carbon energy. At present, the only way we know how to do that is with nuclear energy.

Isn’t the real problem that we simply consume too much energy?

Most people on the planet actually need to consume more energy, not less. Energy consumption is highly correlated with better health outcomes, longer life spans, and higher living standards.¹High-energy societies have liberated billions of us from lives of hard agricultural labor. More than a billion people around the world still do not have access to electricity at all. Ensuring there is abundant energy to power the planet over the coming century promises to unleash the creative potential of billions more. But the basic math of global development and global warming is unforgiving. If we are going to meet the needs of a growing global population while keeping global warming in check, we will need technologies that can produce enormous amounts of energy without emitting carbon.

Let me explain. First, so you don’t mistake me for a GMO basher, let me introduce myself. I’m a computer scientist by training. I’m also the author of three books, all of which endorse the use of biotechnology to improve the human condition.

In the most recent of these, The Infinite Resource, I talk about the power of innovation to save the world. In between chapters on climate change and fresh water depletion, solar power and desalination, I make a forceful argument that genetically engineered crops and animals can help us grow more food, with better nutrition, and less impact on the planet.

I believe that. In the last two weeks I’ve written about the scientific consensus that GMOs are safe and the many reasons that advocates of organic food should love GMOs. And recently I went on MSNBC to make that case on national television.

In short, I believe in science, and I believe that science tells us that our currently approved GMOs are safe for humans and good for the planet, and that next generation GMOs will be even better.

So why label them?

The short answer is this: by fighting labeling we’re feeding energy to the opponents of GMOs. We’re inducing more fear and paranoia of the technology, rather than less. We’re persuading those who might otherwise have no opinion on GMOs that there must be something to hide, otherwise, why would we fight so hard to avoid labeling?

My conversion to this point of view began in January, when Keith Kloor posted a letter he’d received from Jonathan Gilligan, an associate professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Gilligan made several good points. It’s worth reading the whole letter.

Will Labels Kill GMOs?

Let me add to Gilligan’s points:

First, it’s undeniable that a large fraction of Americans want labels on GM food.  An ABC News poll found that 93 percent of Americans want GMO labels. A more recent HuffPost/YouGov poll put the number at 82 percent.

These are overwhelming numbers. They don’t reflect the scientific consensus on GMOs, but they do reflect the very real public fear and uncertainty around the technology. And more than that, they reflect a public view that labeling is common sense.

GMO proponents (including me) look at this and worry, quite frankly, that GMO labels on food will massively drive down sales of genetically engineered foods, which would lead to less planting of genetically engineered fields and less research into new and better GMOs. If true, this would be a tragedy, for it would undo all the environmental benefits of genetically engineered crops that I’ve outlined previously.

Those are extremely hard arguments to fight against. Replying “We’re worried that if Americans see a GMO label, they’ll be less likely to buy it” only strengthens the anti-GMO argument. At best it’s condescending to consumers, sending a signal that “we know better than you what you should eat.” And at worst it adds fuel to pseudoscience and conspiracy theorists who believe that labels are being withheld because Monsanto and other agribusiness concerns know that GMOs are harmful.

Even the response that states, ‘The FDA doesn’t require a label because GMO food is functionally identical to non-GMO, and has absolutely no health risk” (which I used on MSNBC) falls flat in the face of this response. Orange juice from concentrate is labeled. Food coloring Red #5 is labeled. Fish are labeled as to whether they’ve been previously frozen. To a consumer, there’s no plausible reason why these factors should be on a food ingredient label while the presence of GMOs shouldn’t be.

Or rather, the only plausible reason most consumers can devise is that information is being intentionally withheld from them. That’s not the conclusion anyone who supports better crops through biotechnology should want to see consumers come to.

Lead or Be Dragged

Sooner or later, GMO labels are coming to the United States. With an overwhelming majority of Americans supporting labels, with prominent legislators introducing federal GMO labeling bills, as happened last week, and with more than 20 states considering measures to label GMOs, it’s only a matter of time.

The only question now is: Do GMO advocates want to be dragged along in this wave? Or do they want to help direct it?  There’s a substantial difference between a patchwork of potentially conflicting state labeling laws and a unified system, between a bad labeling measure and one that’s sensible.

The only reasonable choice for GMO proponents now is to embrace labeling and help lead the process. We should embrace it to help dampen consumer fear of GMOs. We should embrace it to help shape the labeling system into a sensible one. And we should embrace it because we have absolutely nothing to hide.

Further Reading

Keith Kloor, "The GMO Labeling Debate," Discover, May 12, 2013

Mark Lynas, "The Truth About Genetically Modified Food," The Breakthrough, May 6, 2013
 

Ramez Naam is the author of The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, a book about the power of innovation to overcome the environmental and natural resource challenges that face us, and the decisions we need to make to win the race between innovation and consumption. This guest post originally appeared on Keith Kloor’s blog Collide-a-Scape at Discover.

Photo Credit: Treehugger.com (left); Flickr User Steve Rhodes (right)

In the 1950s, less than 10 percent of the US population was obese on standard measures; being overweight was viewed as a risk factor for some diseases; and weight control was considered a matter of individual responsibility. Today, more than a third of Americans are classed as obese. Meanwhile, obesity is widely described as a disease in its own right, which is blamed on companies seeking to sell us pre-prepared food and drink. If those claims were true, then the lawyers would make like thieves. But are they true?

Let’s start with the claim that food and drink companies have made us fat. In The End of Overeating, published in 2010, former FDA commissioner David Kessler argued that we live in an “obesogenic” society in which companies are constantly tempting us with products high in salt, sugar, and fat. This meme has caught on: in Salt, Sugar Fat, released in February, New York Times journalist Michael Moss repeats Kessler’s accusation that food manufacturers seek to ensure that their products approach our “bliss point” by loading them with—you guessed it—salt, sugar, and fat.

It does appear that the main cause of our expanded girths is that we have been consuming more calories. Most of the increase in obesity has occurred since the mid-1980s (rates rose to around 13 percent in the 1960s, but stayed more or less constant until the early 1980s), which coincides with a sustained binge on the part of a significant portion of the American public. The amount of calories consumed per day by an average American man rose from about 2,080 calories per day in the late-1970s to 2,400 in the mid-1990s to 2,600 in the early 2000s. Equivalent figures for women are 1,500, 1,650, and 1,850, respectively. Meanwhile, we seem to be expending about the same amount of energy as we did in the 1970s: In a 2003 paper, Harvard economists David Cutler, Edward Glaeser, and Jesse Shapiro concluded that, “The available evidence suggests that calories expended have not changed significantly since 1980.”

OK—so we’ve been eating too much. But are those food and drink companies to blame? Well, most of the increase in calories does seem to have come from pre-prepared snacks. Cutler et al. explain that the increase in availability of pre-prepared food and drink made it easier for us to eat more by lowering the “time costs” of preparation. That makes sense. In 1913, we certainly could have eaten lots of chips and cake and drunk lots of juice but it would have taken considerably more time to prepare them than it takes to open a few packages, so most of us would not have had the time to snack in the way that we do today.

But there is a twist. Cutler et al. calculated that even taking into account the consequences of our increasing girth, we have benefitted on net from the wider availability of pre-prepared foods and drink because they have reduced the amount of time we have to spend in the process of preparation. In that light, all the efforts made by food and drink companies to identify our “bliss point” seem benign, not malign as in the Moss account.

Moreover, it turns out that obesity is not quite the health disaster the tort lawyers would like it to be. In a 2005 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Katherine Flegal and her coauthors showed that people who are “overweight” but not obese are less likely to die of any cause than people of “normal” weight. Meanwhile, people who are “grade 1” obese are as likely to die as “normal” people. Only people who are underweight or have grade 2 or 3 obesity are more likely to die. In other words, obesity can lead to health problems but does not necessarily do so—and is only a serious concern for people who are very obese. These results were confirmed in a follow-up study by Flegal published in JAMA in January, which analyzed 97 studies giving a sample size of more than 2.88 million individuals.

Now, the proportion of people with grade 2 or 3 obesity did increase significantly in the 1980s and 1990s, rising from about 5 percent of the population in 1980 to about 15 percent in 2000. But over the same period, the proportion of those with grade 2 or 3 obesity who died from all causes fell. The most likely explanation for this is some combination of the following: First, improvements in medical interventions addressing a range of obesity-related problems, from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, mean that people suffering these obesity-related ailments fare better today than they would have done 30 years ago. Second, whereas previously obese people tended not to get much exercise, many more are now both physically fit and obese. Most likely, the group that really do suffer substantial increases in health problems are those who are “grade 3” obese; and this may in part be because above a certain weight there seems to be a vicious circle of declining exercise and increasing weight—even though those who are most obese are likely to benefit most from exercise.

And so to “solutions.” In an influential study published in Science in 2003, James Hill of the University of Colorado and three coauthors estimated that a reduction in calorie consumption—or increase in energy use—of 100 calories per day would be enough to keep most of us trim. Many health advocates argue that taxes or even regulation are the simplest way to achieve that objective. But would those policies work?

Soda taxes have been extensively studied. Initially, it looked like they would work. Several studies found that a tax would reduce consumption of the beverage in question. However, these studies failed to factor in offsetting behavior by consumers. In particular, when faced with a tax many consumers either buy a cheaper (own-brand) variety, or switch to other drinks that are equally calorific, such as juice or milk. In a 2010 paper in Contemporary Economic Policy, Jason Fletcher of Yale, and colleagues David Frisvold of Emory University and Nathan Teft of of Bates College, found that increases in taxes on sugary beverages do reduce the number of calories adults consume but, because of these offsetting behaviors, the effect is very small. In a subsequent paper published in the Journal of Pubic Economics, Fletcher and co. looked at purchasing habits of schoolchildren and found that “the decrease in calories from soft drinks in response to an increase in the soft drink tax rate is completely offset by the increase in calories from whole milk.”

If taxes don’t work, what about regulation? The main regulation promoted by health advocates is calorific labeling at restaurants. This might work if people paid attention to such labels—but most don’t. In a detailed study of the impact of NYC’s food labeling law published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2010, Tamara Dumanovsky and co. found that only about 20 percent of consumers used the calorie information. This probably explains why such labeling has little impact on calorie consumption at restaurants. Moreover, since most of the extra energy people consume (now about one third of all calories) is in the form of snacks rather than meals at restaurants, such a regulation is unlikely to have a significant effect on most people’s waistlines. The same goes for regulations limiting the size of soda beverages sold in restaurants.

At this point, you may be throwing up your hands in despair. And maybe you should. But not at me. You should throw up your hands in despair at the false bill of goods you have been sold by the public health researchers who, as Helen Lee observes in a fascinating study recently published by the Breakthrough Institute, “set about defining the causes of obesity in ways that they believed would predispose the public to support societal action to bring the industry to account.” Lee observes that this involved, first, redefining obesity as an “epidemic” (it isn’t—because it is not a disease) and, second, defining obesity as an “involuntary risk” (it isn’t—otherwise we’d all be obese, given that the alleged risk factors are so ubiquitous).

Unfortunately, this distortion of the nature of “obesity” has led us down a blind alley from which we must now retreat. The government is incompetent to decide what and how much each of us should eat and drink. Its attempts to influence our decisions have mostly been futile and sometimes counterproductive: for example, at least one study found that college-age men increased their energy intake when purchasing food at restaurants where the energy content was displayed. At the same time, government regulations and taxes distort our consumption decisions in ways that may reduce our level of satisfaction: for example, soda taxes encourage us to consume lower quality unbranded sodas—or reduce the amount of money we have to spend on other items.

What we eat and drink is, first and foremost, a matter of individual responsibility. Fortunately, some researchers have been investigating the real reasons some of us consume too many calories—and this research is yielding practical advice. Brian Wansink and his colleagues at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Laboratory have been investigating practical measures that can be taken by individuals and organizations to encourage us to eat fewer calories. Many of Wansink’s findings, detailed in his book, Mindless Eating, focus on addressing various cognitive biases that lead us to consume more calories than we intend. So, for example, when we eat off a large plate, we tend to underestimate the amount of food we’re eating. Solution: eat off smaller plates. Likewise, when we drink out of shallow glasses. Solution: drink from tall glasses. When we eat chips straight from a giant container, we consume more than if we portion out chips into small bowls. And so on.

Meanwhile, contrary to the dire assessments of people like David Kessler and Michael Moss, companies are beginning to realize that they can provide nutritious food and beverages in ways that enable people to maintain a healthy weight. A group of CEOs of food and beverage companies has created the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which seeks to encourage the public to manage their weight better by “balancing calories in with calories out.” Because of the significant presence of member companies in the supply of food and beverages, the Foundation has great potential to communicate important messages about how most effectively to maintain this healthy balance. Beyond that the Foundation is reaching out directly to teachers, who have the potential to influence how kids think about diet and exercise. According to its website, the Foundation has so far reached over half of all U.S. elementary schools; that’s pretty impressive.  

Unfortunately, Coca Cola’s decision to “market responsibly” might not help and could even be counterproductive. While the small-print qualifies the company’s apparent blanket prohibition on marketing to children, saying that it will “not buy advertising directly targeted at audiences that are more than 35% children under 12,” that still means it will have difficulty marketing healthy products and healthful messages to kids.

But there are also things the government can do. Or, rather, there are things the government can stop doing, such as distorting our consumption decisions. Among other things, the federal government could end its subsidies to food production, distribution, and consumption. That includes food stamps, which may only be used to purchase foods and beverages and has been linked to increased obesity; if instead people simply received a cash transfer, they could then make decisions themselves about how to spend their money. And governments at all levels could stop imposing arbitrary, discriminatory taxes on food and beverages. To the extent that these taxes incentivize consumers to avoid brand products, they may actually reduce access to the kinds of information that the brand companies seek to provide about maintaining a healthy weight.

Julian Morris is vice president of research at the Reason Foundation. This essay was originally published at Reason.

Photo Credit: Mother Nature Network (left); Marketplace.org (right)

The "iron law of climate change" says that this challenge cannot be achieved by making energy substantially more expensive. Across the world in countries rich and poor, people have repeatedly indicated that while they will pay some price for environmental objectives, that willingness has its limits.

Into this context comes The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future, a new book by Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations. In it he notes that in 2012 only 5 percent of Americans favored both expanding fossil fuel supplies and developing alternative energy sources. The vast majority of public opinion on energy development, he reports, is split across predictable partisan lines.

Levi makes a strong case for the 5 percent — for what he calls a “most-of-the-above strategy.” Levi’s tight analysis helps to explain why such an approach has emerged from Washington during the most recent two presidential administrations, if not with the clarity and rationality that Levi would prefer.

At the same time the book’s narrow focus on the United States leaves a big gap in the analysis, which shows up in a rather muddled approach to climate change and neglect of the global energy access challenge.

The book has notable strengths. Throughout The Power Surge Levi summarizes various two-sided debates on energy policy and patiently explains that reality is often more complex. Throughout the book he critiques the strengths and weaknesses of various arguments and counterarguments found at the center of US energy policy discussions. Levi is exceedingly talented at carefully disassembling arguments of others, identifying component strengths and weaknesses. When reassembled, the resulting nuanced argument brings the best of both sides together, tempered by Levi’s realism and ample expertise. 

Shale gas? Not nearly as dangerous to air and water as its critics contend, but also not a game-changer in terms of jobs and growth. Levi concludes, “shale gas development can be done well, it can also be done poorly.” You won’t see that phrase on a placard at a protest any time soon.

US energy independence? Not realistic, Levi tells us. Yet expanding US oil production is accompanied by broad economic benefits, especially when the price of oil is high, and offers some security benefits as well. The largest risks are to the local environment, which have to be evaluated “one development at a time.”

Wind and solar? Despite frothy claims on both sides, these technologies deserve an important role in the energy supply mix but offer “neither huge economic risks, nor world-changing economic opportunities.”  The claims of massive new employment opportunities and massive boondoggles are similarly overstated.

But Levi’s efforts to find a happy medium sometimes left me confused about what exactly he was arguing. For instance in Chapter 4 he describes the mountain pine beetle epidemic in Colorado, explaining that “a small change in climate meant big and devastating consequences on the ground.” He followed that up by explaining that “no corner of the earth, it seemed, was being spared.” And Levi ventures onto the scientific fringe when he writes that “high temperatures could lubricate the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, helping it slowly slip into the ocean” leading to “massively” rising sea levels “over time.”

Yet in Chapter 7 he tells us that “no one knows precisely what the climate dangers out there are,” in a discussion of the possibility that the world might need an emergency program of geoengineering “if climate change soon got out of hand.” I have no doubt that many of those concerned about a climate apocalypse would express some dissonance at Levi’s embrace of such catastrophism while advocating a “most-of-the-above” approach to US energy policy.

Levi rightly concludes that “slashing US emissions requires a second revolution in American energy; one that cuts emissions from power generation by using zero carbon technologies and reduces oil consumption with new cars, trucks and fuels.” But this too is hard to square with his opposition to "quixotic efforts” to address economic, security and climate concerns through supply-side polices.  A revolution in energy technology won’t happen with a focus solely “on the demand side of the equation” as Levi proposes. 

Simple math tells us that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels must approach zero in order to halt its accumulation in the atmosphere. Such a “second revolution” — whether via technological advancements in carbon-free generation or carbon dioxide capture, storage and recycling — will only come via significant investment policies aimed at making clean energy cheap, which today may indeed be viewed as "quixotic."

Elsewhere I (and others) have compared the transformation of the global energy system to be of similar scale to efforts to extend average human lifespans, feeding the world or national defense in that each requires decades of sustained investment in innovation to work towards aspirational, public goals. With respect to energy innovation, Levi is skeptical: “betting on concern about energy to get the government to invest more in innovation is a long shot.” 

Levi ignores the decades of public and private collaborations on energy technology innovation — including those that made possible the shale gas revolution. The federal government polices between 1976 and 2002, including billions of dollars in tax credits, that led to the shale gas boom are a textbook example of the critical role the public sector must play in making clean(er) energy cheap. The shale gas revolution was the result of a decades-long public-private effort, and holds clear lessons for how energy transformations yet to come will most likely occur.

Levi isn’t the first energy analyst to have difficulty reconciling US energy policy with the challenges of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Part of the difficulty results from the book’s narrow focus on the United States, where energy resources are relatively cheap, abundant, accessible and reliable. From a US perspective, a rational approach to fine-tuning business as usual certainly appears to make a lot of sense.

Yet the broader global context cannot be ignored. After invoking some of the concerns about the potential for catastrophic climate change, Levi notes, “yet seven billion people around the world continued to use energy largely as if nothing was amiss.”

Actually Levi is off by several billion. In Africa and south Asia in particular, vast populations lack access to even the most basic of energy resources and cook with coal, wood or even dung. The global energy challenge of securing modern energy access is actually of a much larger scale that than implied by climate. Together climate and energy access concerns provide a broad-shouldered basis for broad and sustained support of energy innovation to make clean energy cheap.

The Power Shift misses what may matter most in the 21^st century for US energy policies: what role the US might play on a high-energy planet. Innovation in energy systems is a global imperative, even if it is not an apparent near-term necessity in the United States. To cite one example, nuclear power plays only a cameo role in The Power Shift but is likely to expand dramatically around the world in coming decades creating both risks and opportunities. How the United States responds to such global trends in a richer, more energy intensive world may be what matters far more for our economy, our security and our contributions to addressing the 21^st century energy technology challenge than our present domestic political squabbles. 

Climate and global energy access issues aside, Levi has produced an excellent overview of current debates over US energy policy.The Power Surge skillfully cuts through much of the noise and ultimately makes a strong case for the importance of a “most-of-the-above” energy supply strategy. After reading it you will have a much better understanding of energy policy debates in recent years in the United States. However, both those debates and the book are focused largely within the nation’s boundaries, while much important action is taking place elsewhere.

Further Reading

Breakthrough Staff, "The State and the Innovation Economy," May 2, 2013

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "It's Not About the Climate," April 29, 2013

Eric Kennedy, "China's National Innovation System," January 16, 2013

Photo Credit: Global Envision

Given this history, it's hard not to see the success India has had feeding its people and slowing population growth as the finale to a Bollywood movie — one most Americans stopped watching in 1970. "In a recent exercise," Stanford's Martin Lewis writes in a new article for The Breakthrough, "most of my students believed that India’s total fertility rate was twice that of the United States. Many of my colleagues believed the same. In actuality, it is only 2.5, barely above the estimated U.S. rate of 2.1 in 2011, and essentially the replacement level."

The findings challenge the idea that solar photovoltaic is a disruptive, scalable, “shelf-ready” technology with a cost advantage over nuclear. Energy analysts frequently point to Finland’s advanced nuclear project at Olkiluoto, which is seven years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, and solar in Germany as indicative of future cost trends working against new nuclear technologies and in favor of solar. 

Proponents of Germany’s Energiewende, which now involves jettisoning the country’s nuclear fleet by 2023, argue that solar and wind can make up the difference in lost capacity. A straightforward cost comparison between the two programs over the same 20-year period, however, reveals the costs of this proposition. 

The Finnish European pressurized reactor (EPR), with an estimated total cost of $15 billion, will generate over half as much energy as the entire existing German solar program, which will run to roughly $130 billion. The total cost of electricity produced by German solar will be 32 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 7 cents per kilowatt-hour for the Areva-Siemens nuclear plant in Finland — a more than four-fold difference. Two such nuclear plants would generate slightly more than Germany’s solar panels, at less than a fourth the total cost.

The $15 billion estimate for Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 reactor is based on fixed¹ and variable costs ($0.02/kWh).² The reactor will generate about 225 TWh in a 20-year timeframe,³ more than half of what all of Germany’s solar panels installed between 2000 and 2011 will generate over their 20-year feed-in tariff contracts.

The construction of Unit 3 of Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear power plant — approved by the Finnish government in 2005 and built by a consortium involving the French company Areva and Germany’s Siemens — has come under fire for construction delays and cost overruns. The 1,600-megawatt project, which aims to meet 10 percent of Finland’s energy demand, is being built on an island in the Baltic Sea.

In a recent exercise, most of my students believed that India’s total fertility rate (TFR) was twice that of the United States. Many of my colleagues believed the same. In actuality, it is only 2.5, barely above the estimated U.S. rate of 2.1 in 2011, and essentially the replacement level. (A more recent study now pegs U.S. fertility at 1.93.) Still, from a global perspective, India and the United States fall in the same general fertility category, as can be seen in the map below.

In today’s world, high fertility rates are increasingly confined to tropical Africa. Birthrates in most so-called Third World countries have dropped precipitously, and some are now well below the replacement rate. Chile (1.85), Brazil (1.81), and Thailand (1.56) now have lower birthrates than France (2.0), Norway (1.95), and Sweden (1.98).

To be sure, moderately elevated fertility is still a problem in several densely populated countries of Asia and Latin America, such as the Philippines (3.1) and Guatemala (3.92). 

But as the Google Public Data chart posted here shows, even the Philippines has been experiencing a steady fall in TFR. The same is true of Afghanistan, the most fecund country outside of Africa, at least for the past 15 years. As can also be seen, TFR declines have been much more modest in such African countries as Niger and Tanzania. It must be acknowledged, however, that reductions in fertility are not necessarily permanent. As the New York Times recently reported, the decline of family planning services has already ticked up the birthrate in Egypt, threatening that country’s already tight demographic squeeze.

I find it extraordinary that the massive global drop in human fertility has been so little noticed by the media, escaping the attention of even highly educated Americans. The outdated idea that Mexico has a crushingly high birthrate continues to inform many discussions of immigration reform in the United States, even though Mexico’s TFR (2.32 in 2010) is only slightly above that of the United States.

It almost seems as though we have collectively decided to ignore this momentous transformation of human behavior. Scholars and journalists alike continue to warn that global population is spiraling out of control. A recent LiveScience article, for example, quotes a co-author of an April 2013 Science report who argues that “the poorest nations are caught in a downward spiral that will deplete resources and cause a population explosion.” The article goes on to argue that “with the world population slated to hit 9 billion by the year 2050, many scientists and others worry that unchecked population growth and increasing consumption of natural resources will cause dire problems in the future.”

Although the LiveScience article notes that the original report focused on sub-Saharan Africa, it does not mention the fact that high birthrates are in fact increasingly confined to that part of the world, or that fertility rates are persistently declining in almost every country in Africa, albeit slowly. Many African states, moreover, are still sparsely settled and can accommodate significantly larger populations. The Central African Republic, for example, has a population of less than 4.5 million in an area almost the size of France.

India is an instructive place for investigating fertility decline. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich* began his pivotal 1968 book The Population Bomb with a vignette of teeming New Delhi and the disasters it portended. Warning that overpopulation would soon spread massive famines across continents, Ehrlich advocated coercion: the “sterilization of all Indian males with three or more children.”

Responding in part to such dire prophesies and advice, India enacted a population campaign in the 1970s tilted toward forced sterilization. This widely despised program was quickly dismantled with little appreciable effect on India’s TFR, which continued along its steady downward path.

It can be deceptive, however, to view India as an undivided whole. As shown on the map posted here, fertility figures for half of India are actually below replacement level. Were it not for the Hindi-speaking heartland, India would already be looking at population stabilization and even decline. All the states of southern India post TFR figures below 1.9. A number of states in the far north and the northeast boast similarly low fertility levels, including West Bengal, noted for its swarming metropolis of Calcutta (Kolkata).

India’s geographical birthrate disparities, coupled with the country’s admirable ability to collect socio-economic data, allow us to carefully examine ideas about fertility decline. The remainder of this post will do so through cartography, comparing the Indian fertility rate map with maps of other social and economic indicators. Where spatial correlations are strong, underlying causes may be indicated. Such a technique is admittedly suggestive rather than conclusive, and it does not take into account institutional variables, such as family planning efforts. Still, some of the implications are intriguing.

Several scholars have linked birthrate decline to female education. Educated women, they reason, generally prefer smaller families, allowing them to pursue their own interests while investing more resources and time in each child. As it turns out, the map of female literacy in India does exhibit striking similarities with the map of fertility. States with educated women, such as Kerala and Goa, have smaller families than those with widespread female illiteracy, such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

But this correlation, although strong, is of limited explanatory power, since Kerala and Goa rank high on every social indicator, just as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh rank low. A number of exceptions, moreover, are evident. Andhra Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, for example, combine low female literacy with low fertility, whereas in Meghalaya and Nagaland the pattern is reversed. Thus while the education of women is no doubt significant in reducing fertility levels, it is not the only factor at play.

General levels of economic development, as reflected in per capita GDP, also fail to fully explain India’s fertility patterns. Again, map comparisons reveal congruencies in some places but deviations in others. Low-fertility Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal are not, by Indian terms, prosperous states. Gujarat in western India is well ahead of them economically, yet its fertility rate remains higher, slightly above the replacement level.

Urbanization often correlates with reduced fertility, and the rapid growth of India’s cities is probably linked to its declining birthrate. India as a whole, however, remains a predominantly rural country, so urbanization itself cannot be the answer. Note also that low-fertility Kerala and especially Himachal Pradesh have low urbanization levels, whereas in Mizoram the opposite situation prevails.

The general level of social development makes another interesting comparison. The somewhat dated Human Development Index map from Wikipedia again deviates from the fertility map, especially in regard to low-HDI-ranking Andhra Pradesh and Odisha (Orissa), and high-ranking Nagaland and Manipur. The mapping of life expectancy, a major social indicator, again reveals both common features and anomalies. States with high life expectancies tend to have low birthrates (Kerala, yet again), whereas those with low life expectancies tend to have high birthrates (Madhya Pradesh, especially). Yet while Odisha lags behind even Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in terms of longevity, its TFR (2.2) is close to replacement, lower even than that of Gujarat.

Technological modernization is also worth examining. Here we use electrification as a proxy. The extent of electricity use varies tremendously across the country. All of southern and far northern India are now almost fully electrified, whereas in impoverished Bihar fewer than 20 percent of households have electric lights. Overall, the general pattern holds here as on the other maps, with interesting exceptions. Nagaland and Chhattisgarh, for example, have relatively high levels of electrification, yet are marked by elevated birthrates.

Some scholars have argued that recent fertility decreases in India and elsewhere in the Third World are more specifically linked to one technological innovation: television. The TV hypothesis is well known in the field, discussed, for example, in the LiveScience article on the African population explosion mentioned above. In regard to India, Robert Jensen and Emily Oster argue persuasively that television works this magic mostly by enhancing the social position of women. As they state in their abstract:

This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on women’s status in rural India. Using a three-year, individual-level panel dataset, we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with significant decreases in the reported acceptability of domestic violence towards women and son preference, as well as increases in women’s autonomy and decreases in fertility. We also find suggestive evidence that exposure to cable increases school enrollment for younger children, perhaps through increased participation of women in household decision-making. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing differential trends.

As it turns out, the map of television ownership in India does bear a particularly close resemblance to the fertility map. Two anomalously low-fertility states with low levels of female education, Andhra Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, score relatively high on TV penetration, as does West Bengal, which lags on several other important socio-economic indicators.

The correlation is far from perfect: Mizoram ranks higher on the TV chart than its fertility figures would indicate, whereas Odisha and Assam rank lower. Odisha and Assam turn out to be a bit less exceptional in a related but broader and more gender-focused metric, that of “female exposure to media.” These figures, which include a television component, seem to provide the best overall correlation with the spatial patterns of Indian fertility.

I suspect that the rapid drop in fertility in such countries as India and Brazil, as well as its association with television, has been missed in mainstream U.S. commentary in part because it flies in the face of deeply ingrained expectations. That television viewing would help generate demographic stabilization would have come as a shock to those who warned of the ticking global population bomb in the 1960s.

Many of these same critics regarded television as inauthentic, mind numbing, and thought controlling, and feared that by inculcating consumerism it would hasten environmental destruction. Jerry Mander’s 1978 book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, was widely embraced by the green movement, and is still approvingly cited in such places as the “primitivist” blog Challenging Civilization. Mander argued not only that television singularly lacks democratic potential, but also that it functions to enhance autocratic control.

Mander currently sits on the board of directors of the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization alongside Vandana Shiva, India’s most prominent environmental activist. Shiva, best known for her campaigns against genetically modified crops, is deeply opposed to most aspects of modernity, calling for a return not just to organic farming but to a broadly traditional way of life, albeit without patriarchy and class (and caste) oppression. She gained global attention earlier this year when she responded to a prominent environmentalist advocating genetic engineering with the following tweet: “Mark Lynas saying farmers shd be free to grow GMOs which can contaminate organic farms is like saying rapists shd have freedom to rape.”

Despite Vandana Shiva’s insistence to the contrary, most experts doubt that India could feed itself through non-modern farming. The “progressive contrarian” blogger Bernie Mooney concludes that Shiva is nothing less than “an elitist, anti-progress menace” whose program, if enacted, would not “help the poor of the world, [but would] only keep them at a subsistence level and more importantly, in their place.” Although Mooney’s assessment is harsh, it does seem likely that a return to traditional lifestyles would bring back high fertility levels, resulting in truly unsustainable population growth.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the transition to a low fertility regime, deemed necessary by almost all environmentalists, requires substantial modernization, particularly in the socio-cultural realm. Television depresses fertility because many of its offerings provide a model of middle class families successfully grappling with the transition from tradition to modernity, helped by the fact that they have few children to support. In a study of declining fertility and television in Brazil, Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea point in particular to the role of soap operas (telenovelas):

We focus on fertility choices in Brazil, a country where soap operas (novelas) portray families that are much smaller than in reality. We exploit differences in the timing of entry into different markets of Rede Globo, the network that has an effective monopoly on novelas production in this country. Using Census data for the period 1970-1991, we find that women living in areas covered by the Globo signal have significantly lower fertility. The effect is strongest for women of lower socioeconomic status and for women in the central and late phases of their fertility cycle, consistent with stopping behavior … Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that novelas, and not just television, affected individual choices.

If it is true that soap operas have played a critical role in Brazil’s spectacular fertility decline — its TFR dropped from 6.25 in 1960 to 1.81 in 2011 — the policy implications are momentous. But it will take a fundamental change in the way we talk about technology, population, and environment for this point to come across. As Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue, old-school environmentalists typically prefer to “wrap the latest scientific research about an ecological calamity in a tragic narrative that conjures nostalgia for Nature while prophesying even worse disasters to come unless human societies repent for their sins against Nature and work for a return to a harmonious relationship with the natural world.” The data presented here confirm that it is time for a new mode of environmental rhetoric.

To return to our first map, fertility rates remain stubbornly high across tropical Africa. The analysis presented here would suggest that the best way to bring them down would be a three-pronged effort: female education, broad-based economic and social development, and mass electrification followed by the dissemination of soap-opera-heavy television. As it is, Africa’s television market is growing rapidly, but much of the programming so far has been heavily oriented toward sports. One can only hope that Nollywood (Nigeria’s Hollywood) and other African entertainment centers can provide the women-focused, locally appealing telenovelas that have been so strongly associated elsewhere with fertility reduction.

Martin Lewis is a senior lecturer in history at Stanford University. This post was originally published at Geocurrents.

*Ehrlich is also one of the co-authors of the Science article referred to above.

Further Reading

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "How Electricity and TV Defused the 'Population Bomb,'" May 13, 2013

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "It's Not About the Climate," The Breakthrough, April 29, 2013

Breakthrough Staff, "Evolve Beyond Planetary Boundaries," The Breakthrough, April 2, 2012

Photo Credit: Flickr User Lee Animal

A bit like the CFC/ozone dilemma, we should by now be enjoying disputes about just how the success came about, and focusing attention on more challenging sources of emissions.

What happened instead? A denial machine that cut its teeth working for the tobacco industry moved on to climate change. Climate change denial took off as the vested interests did what they do best. In this they found a most unexpected ally: environmentalism and the emergent paradigm of sustainability.

With the roots of the movement being more strongly defined as anti-nuclear than anti-fossil fuels, environmentalism effectively pulled uranium from the table. Were it not for their opposition, uranium might have powered the boom of the developing world in the 90s and 00s while also gradually re-powering the developed world towards zero-carbon energy generation.

Instead environmentalism backed technologies that failed to resemble what they were intended to displace. Instead of commercially mature, high-volume, and highly reliable generators that ran on a dense fuel source, they supported commercially immature, small, and unreliable generators that worked on intermittent energy sources.

With this limited approach, success in battling the climate problem hinged more on a conjoined social/technological/economic revolution than what could have been a relatively straight-forward technology revolution. This engendered a combative stance that regarded the big business of big energy as an enemy, rather than a potentially efficient means to get something done.

In the last 25 years global emissions have sky-rocketed beyond expectations, as the path of least resistance for governments was to become ever more well-oiled and coal-fired. Governments and corporations slapped on the green face paint for a couple of decades while fossil fuels carried on providing more and more energy to a growing world.

The success of fossil fuels was greased by the Merchants of Doubt. But it was helped by mixed messages from some streams of environmentalism. While making loud and sustained calls for market-based solutions (such as carbon pricing), the movement supported market manipulations by refusing to countenance an expanded role for uranium, while simultaneously promoting hard targets for renewables.

Ideas for further research and development, which would improve nuclear fission over fossil combustion regarding cost, were (and remain) heretical. This did not reinforce a message of climate urgency.

Worse, the science of nuclear power, and particularly radiation, was subjected to the same techniques of cherry-picking distortions and deliberate misrepresentations as that of the science of climate change, with appalling and immoral abuses of information.

The impact has been devastating. There still exists a widely held belief that expanding electricity generation from nuclear fission poses a comparable or greater threat than climate change. This is a gross miscalculation of risk.

This erroneous framework has powered absurd politics. The 1994 closure of the United States’ advanced reactor program took down the Integral Fast Reactor when at its final demonstration stage. With a capability to recycle 99% of existing spent nuclear fuel and depleted uranium for zero-carbon generation we could now be powering on waste. But a strongly anti-nuclear administration trumped this possible future.

In 1998, Australia, the world’s largest exporter of uranium, singled out nuclear power for prohibition. Since that time, Australia has implemented a carbon price, a renewable energy target, and all the while kept up our fossil dependence.

The result? Greenhouse emissions from the electricity sector have risen 18%.

In the wake of irrational fears stemming from the Fukushima accident, Germany is shutting down its nuclear capacity. While renewables are growing, these simply cannot keep up with the two-edged sword of a continued growth in demand coupled with the reduction in supply from nuclear. Greenhouse-gas emissions for Germany in 2012 were 1.6% higher than 2011, and they will open 5.3 GW of new coal plants in 2013, while retiring 1 GW of old coal. Is this how environmentalism has come to define success?

As environmentalism fought a two-front war against both nuclear power and climate change, ingenuity in the fossil-fuel sector exploited and shifted towards ever more cheap, carbon-intensive fuel. This powered a period of poverty-reducing economic growth, leaving the developed and developing world alike justifiably loathe to consider a de-powered future. Unfortunately, while objecting stridently to these climate crimes, environmentalism failed to put forward a credible alternate energy pathway.

Now, in 2013, we find ourselves at a new crossroad. The failure is there for all to see in our soaring emissions and warming world. Another 2.5 billion people are in the pipeline: they deserve energy.

Rapid growth in renewable technologies cannot mask the fact that the requirement for energy keeps growing. Coal has barely budged in total global electricity share of around 40% (double that for Australia), while demand grew three and a half times between 1973 and 2010.

That’s why emissions have been soaring despite extraordinary rates of renewable growth. That is why it was sheer folly for environmentalism to preference coal by default. Only embracing nuclear along with renewables can extinguish fossil fuels.

Yet nuclear power remains in the energy no-man’s land of being cheaper than renewables at scale, but more expensive than unabated gas, with large establishment costs. Nuclear power is meeting with success in developing economies.

But the major breakthrough looks increasingly dependent on the success of ‘production line’ small modular reactors (SMR), and the resurgent interest in generation IV fast reactors like the integral fast reactor, or liquid fuelled thorium reactors (LFTR).

As mentioned at the start of this article, we need to see a new global movement of nuclear support. There are a few things that must happen to make this a reality.

First, we need balanced government-led climate strategies with scientific integrity to focus on actual, measurable, and rapid reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, with a target of zero.

Second, we need rapid deployment of high-volume, zero-carbon technology for direct substitution with fossil fuels. That means picking some winners. Our winners of choice are small modular reactors progressing to the integral fast reactor: proven, zero-carbon, safe, constantly recharged with an inexhaustible supply of fuel through recycling and utilising what is currently known as “nuclear waste”.

We must get these reactors turned out by the dozen to answer every energy need being met by fossil fuels.

May the best technology win. But the approach needs to be firm and hands-on, as time is not on our side.

This requires a sustained early injection of money from a coalition of nations in order to create the manufacturing, distribution, education, security, and skills-base that is absolutely necessary for a 21st-century re-imagining of energy.

Finally, to achieve all this we need a popular movement to embrace nuclear power. The consequent pressure will hopefully force government and industry to respond.

If, 25 years from now, our children look back and see a continuance of the present epic failures in climate and energy policies, it is today’s limited views on sustainability that will stand condemned.

Further Reading

Jessica Lovering, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Shellenberger, "Out of the Nuclear Closet," September 2012

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "Fukushima Boosts Green Case for Nuclear," May 2011

Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Jesse Jenkins, "Nuclear as Usual: Why Fukushima Will Change Less Than You Think," March 2011
 

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Photo Credit: Center for Strategic & International Studies (left); the Anti-Yale blog (right)

This matters enormously because these technologies – in particular the various uses of molecular biology to enhance plant breeding potential – are clearly some of our most important tools for addressing food security and future environmental change.

I am a historian, and history surely offers us, from witch trials to eugenics, numerous examples of how when public misunderstanding and superstition becomes widespread on an issue, irrational policymaking is the inevitable consequence, and great damage is done to peoples’ lives as a result.

This is what has happened with the GMOs food scare in Europe, Africa, and many other parts of the world. Allowing anti-GMO activists to dictate policymaking on biotechnology is like putting homeopaths in charge of the health service, or asking anti-vaccine campaigners to take the lead in eradicating polio.

I believe the time has now come for everyone with a commitment to the primacy of the scientific method and evidence-based policy-making to decisively reject the anti-GMO conspiracy theory and to work together to begin to undo the damage that it has caused over the last decade and a half.

On a personal note, let me explain why I am standing here saying this. Believe me, I would much prefer to live a quieter life. However, following my apology for my former anti-GMO activism at my Oxford speech in January, I have been subject to a coordinated campaign of intimidation and hate, mostly via the Internet.

Even when I was at school I didn’t give in to bullies, and at the ripe old age of 40 I am even less inclined to do so now. Moreover, I have been encouraged by emails and other support from globally-renowned scientists who are experts on this issue, and who all said basically the same thing to me: “You think you’ve got hate mail? Welcome to my world.”

I think these scientists are the unsung heroes of this saga. They carried on with their important work and tried year after year to fight against the rising tide of misinformation, while people like me were belittling and undermining them at every turn. I won’t mention names, but they know who they are. Some of them are here today, and I would like to give them my deepest thanks.

So for me there is also a moral dimension to this. The fact that I helped promote unfounded scare stories in the early stages of the anti-GMO movement in the mid 1990s is the reason why I now feel compelled to speak out against them. I have a personal responsibility to help put these myths to rest because I was so complicit in initially promoting them.

My activism, which I wrongly thought of at the time as being ‘environmental,’ has done real damage in the world. For me, apologizing was therefore only the beginning. I am now convinced that many people have died unnecessarily because of mistakes that we in the environmental movement collectively made in promoting anti-GMO fear. With that on your conscience, saying sorry and then moving on is not enough. Some restitution is in order.

Following a decade and a half of scientific and field research, I think we can now say with very high confidence that the key tenets of the anti-GMO case are not just wrong in points of fact, but in large parts the precise opposite of the truth.

This is why I use the term conspiracy theory. Populist ideas about conspiracies do not arise spontaneously in a political and historic vacuum. They result when powerful ideological narratives collide with major world events – rare occasions where even a tiny number of dedicated activists can create a lasting change in public consciousness.

In the 1960s, the conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination reflected the profound feeling that there were shadowy people high up in the CIA and government who were subverting democracy and fighting the Cold War by devious and deadly means. More recently, conspiracy theories about 9/11 reflected the hatred many on the political Left had for the Bush Administration.

Successful conspiracy theories can do real damage. In Nigeria, an outbreak of Muslim conspiracy theorizing against the polio vaccination campaign led to a renewed polio outbreak, which then spread to 20 other countries just when the disease was on the brink of being entirely eradicated.

In South Africa during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, the HIV/AIDS denialist myth became official government policy, just as the anti-GMO denialist myth is official European Union policy today. The result in South Africa was that hundreds of thousands of people were denied life-saving anti-retroviral treatments and died unnecessarily.

The anti-GMO campaign has also undoubtedly led to unnecessary deaths. The best documented example, which is laid out in detail by Robert Paarlberg in his bookStarved for Science, is the refusal of the Zambian government to allow its starving population to eat imported GMO corn during a severe famine in 2002.

Thousands died because the president of Zambia believed the lies of Western environmental groups that genetically modified corn provided by the World Food Programme was somehow poisonous. I have yet to hear an apology from any of the responsible Western groups for their role in this humanitarian atrocity.

Friends of the Earth was one of those responsible, and I note that not only has no apology been forthcoming, but also Friends of the Earth Europe is still actively promoting GMO denialism in the EU in a new campaign called Stop the Crop. Check out their Youtube video to see how they have learned nothing in 10 years.

Another well-known example is that of golden rice, genetically modified to contain high levels of beta-carotene in order to compensate for the vitamin A deficiency that kills hundreds of thousands of children around the world and blinds many more every year. One study on the prospects for golden rice in India found that the burden of vitamin A deficiency could be reduced by 60 percent, saving 1.4 million healthy life years.

Here the actions of Greenpeace in forestalling the use of golden rice to address micronutrient deficiencies in children makes them the moral and indeed practical equivalent of the Nigerian mullahs who preached against the polio vaccine. They too were stopping a lifesaving technology solely to flatter their own fanaticism.

I think this campaign is shameful and has brought the entire environmental movement into disrepute, with damaging consequences for the very beneficial work that many environmentalists do. Greenpeace’s campaign against vitamin A-enhanced golden rice should therefore be cancelled, and I call on everyone concerned about children’s health to lobby Greenpeace and demand that this happens immediately and without delay.

The anti-GMO campaign does not even have the benefit of intellectual coherence. If you truly think that herbicide-tolerant biotech crops are an evil plot by Monsanto to achieve a stranglehold on the entire world’s food supply, why would you also oppose all other non-patented and open-source applications of biotechnology, which have nothing to do with Monsanto, apparently without exception? This is like being against all computer software because you object to the dominant position of Microsoft Office.

On a logical basis, only a case-by-case assessment makes sense for deciding how any technology might best be applied. So if you think that Bt corn is bad for U.S. farmers, despite all the evidence to the contrary, it shouldn’t necessarily follow that you also have to ban virus-resistant papaya or oppose a blight-resistant potato in Ireland.

This matters today more than ever because we are entering an age of increasingly threatening ecological scarcity. The planet is beginning to move outside the envelope of stable temperatures that we have enjoyed for 10,000 years, and into an age of instability and rapid change.

Within just a year from now, global CO2 concentrations will break through the crucial 400 parts per million boundary, marking a change in atmospheric chemistry that is unprecedented for at least three million years.

Moreover, we are now on a global emissions path which puts us on track for 4-5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, a transformation which will leave this planet barely recognizable and considerably more hostile to human and other life.

But what about all those who say that global warming is a hoax, a product of thousands of scientists conspiring with governments and the United Nations to falsify temperature data and usher in a new age of global socialism?

Well, I’ve spent more than a decade arguing with climate skeptics, and in the end I fall back on a single killer argument: that if an overwhelming majority of experts say something is true, then any sensible non-expert should assume that they are probably right.

To make the point, here is the consensus position of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences on climate change:

The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.

Oh, but wait – the AAAS has also released another statement of consensus science on another area concerning us today:

The science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe … The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.

So, my suggestion today is that a sensible baseline position for environmentalists and indeed everyone else is to accept the consensus science in both these areas. Instead, you have the unedifying spectacle of so-called green groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists stoutly defending consensus science in the area of climate change, while just as determinedly undermining it in the area of biotechnology.

Tellingly, the UCS utilizes the exact same techniques as climate skeptics in its enduring and strikingly unscientific campaign against GMOs: it issues impressive reports based on strategic cherry-picking and only referencing its ideological allies in a kind of epistemological closed-loop, it pushes the perspective of a tiny minority of hand-picked pseudo-experts, and it tries to capture and control the public policy agenda to enforce its long-held prejudices.

Many of the most influential denialists like those at the Union of Concerned Scientists sound like experts; indeed they may even be experts. Richard Dawkins tells a story about a professor of geology, who lectured and published papers about stratigraphy in hundred-million year old rocks whilst at the same time being a ‘young-earth’ creationist who really believed the world was only 6,000 years old. His pre-existing religious conviction simply overpowered his scientific evidence-based training.

An even more striking example is Peter Duesberg, the leading light in the AIDS denialist movement, who is a professor of cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Many anti-vaccine campaigners, like Andrew Wakefield, started out as qualified medical professionals. This is why scientific consensus matters – it is the last line of defense we have against the impressive credentials and sciency-sounding language of those who are really on the lunatic fringe.

Speaking of the lunatic fringe, someone else who claims scientific credentials is Vandana Shiva, probably the most prominent Indian anti-biotechnology activist, who incidentally draws much larger audiences than this one to her fiery speeches about the evils of Monsanto and all things new in agriculture. Shiva tweeted after my Oxford speech that me saying that farmers should be free to use GMO crops was like giving rapists the freedom to rape.

That is obscene and offensive, but actually is not the half of it. Let me give you my all-time favorite Vandana Shiva quote, regarding the so-called terminator technology, on which she launches constant blistering attacks without once acknowledging the salient fact that it was never actually developed.

If we continue to bend the rules of nature so that we can provide more and more food for an open-ended expansion of humans on the planet, something eventually will have to give. Would you like to live in a world of 15 billion people? 20 billion? I would not. And while it’s possible you will label my response as New Age-ish, I feel that GE food distracts us from the real question of the carrying capacity of the planet.

Well, I think that calling these sentiments New Age-ish is to give them far too much credit. I would actually call them misanthropic. What Greenberg seems to be suggesting here, as Paul Ehrlich did before him, is the denial of food to hungry people in order to prevent them breeding more children and contributing to overpopulation.

Luckily this modern-day Malthusianism is wrong in point of fact as well as by moral implication. Firstly, the human population is never going to reach 20 billion. Instead, it is forecast to peak at 9-10 billion and then slowly decline.

Secondly, although we are certainly heading for 9 billion people by mid-century, but that is not because people in poor countries are still having too many babies. The main reason is that children who are born today are much more likely to survive and become parents themselves.

It is a little-known fact that the global average fertility rate is now down to about 2.4, not far above natural replacement of 2.1. So pretty much all the increased population growth to 2050 will come from more children surviving into adulthood.

And that is surely a good thing. I want to see child death rates in developing countries continue to plummet thanks to better healthcare, access to clean water and sanitation, and all the other benefits the modern world can and should bring to everyone.

No doubt like all of you, I also want to see an end to the scourge of hunger which today affects more people in an absolute sense than ever before in history. It is surely an abomination that in 2013 we can all go to bed each night knowing that 900 million other people are hungry.

This scourge affects children disproportionately – one third of child deaths are attributable to malnutrition. Among those who survive, nutrient deficiencies like iron, zinc, and vitamin A can lead to cognitive impairment and other health problems, reducing a child’s life chances for his or her entire future.

It is a truism to say that people are hungry not because there is a global shortage of food in an absolute sense, but because they are too poor to afford to eat. But it is a dangerous fallacy to suggest therefore that because the world on average has enough food, we should therefore oppose efforts to improve agricultural productivity in food insecure countries.

In fact probably the best way to address rural poverty is to ensure that subsistence farmers the world over enjoy more reliable and increasingly productive harvests. This will enable them both to feed their own families and to generate a surplus to sell at a profit so their children can go to school.

Is genetic modification a silver bullet way to achieve this? Of course not. It cannot build better roads or chase away corrupt officials. But surely seeds that deliver higher levels of nutrition, which protect the resulting plant against pests without the need for expensive chemical inputs, and which have greater yield resilience in drought years are least worth a try?

And real-world evidence so far gives grounds for optimism. The use of Bt cotton in China has been shown to dramatically improve biodiversity, unlike broad-spectrum insecticides, which kill everything, pests and predators alike. The Bt protein only affects the insects, which bore into the crop. It is entirely safe for us, and has led to insecticide reductions of 60 percent in China and 40 percent in India on cotton.

The introduction of Bt brinjal in India, a project which I know people here in Cornell were closely involved in leading, would have dramatically reduced insecticide poisonings associated with that crop too, had the anti-GMO activists in India not succeeded in preventing its use.

India today seems to be perched on a scientific knife-edge, with a vociferous lobby pushing dark age traditionalism on the brink of permanently capturing the entire political and legal agenda. If they succeed, hundreds of millions of food-insecure Indians will be the losers.

In Africa too there are a multitude of Western-funded NGOs who all claim to be mysteriously protecting biodiversity by keeping cultivated plant genetic improvements permanently out of the continent. In many African countries GMOs are subject to the same kind of de facto ban as is the case in Europe, leaving poorer farmers at the mercy of a changing climate and exhausted soils.

However, a showdown is looming because some of the most exciting biotechnology initiatives are now based in African countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting substantial funding into these efforts – such as improved maize for poorer African soils, a project which is looking to get yield increases of 50 percent even where fertilizer is not available or the farmer cannot afford to buy it.

There’s also the public-private partnership called Water Efficient Maize for Africa, using biotech to produce drought tolerant corn specifically for African smallholders facing the challenges of a changing climate. There’s C4 rice, aiming to improve the photosynthetic capacity of rice and thereby dramatically increase yields.

Another Gates-funded project is based at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom and aims by 2017 to have cereal crops, which fix their own nitrogen available for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The list goes on: there’s biofortified cooking bananas in East Africa, and cassava fortified with iron, protein, and vitamin A in Nigeria and elsewhere.

I haven’t finished! There’s resistance to cassava brown streak disease, which is currently spreading rapidly and threatens the staple crop for two out of every five people in sub-Saharan Africa.

And of course transgenic technology focused on conferring wheat rust resistance at the molecular level to head off the threat of a global pandemic, which could otherwise threaten one of humanity’s most important staple foods.

But if the activists have their way, none of these improved seeds will ever leave the laboratory. And this brings me, by way of conclusion, to the essentially authoritarian nature of the anti-GMO project.

All these activists, strikingly few of whom are themselves smallholder farmers in Africa or India, claim to know exactly which seeds developing country farmers should be allowed to plant. Those that are not ideologically approved by self-appointed campaigners should be banned forever.

The irony here is that predominantly left-wing activists, who are supposedly so concerned about corporate power, are determined to deny the right to choose to the most powerless people in the world – subsistence farmers in developing countries. In fact, this is more than an irony – it is a cruelty. And it is a cruelty that must stop and stop now.

H.G. Wells is often quoted as saying that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. The New Yorker writer Michael Specter, who wrote a great book about anti-science movements called Denialism, updates this, writing that civilization is a race between innovation and catastrophe.

This is surely no truer than today, when civilization is genuinely threatened by the twin catastrophes of climate change and ecological scarcity colliding with vastly greater food demand from a larger and wealthier population.

The solution is the same one that it always was – innovation – the uniquely human capacity to produce new tools which has saved our species so many times before from apparently inevitable Malthusian collapses. Therefore if we reject innovation now of all times we make catastrophe not just likely but probably inevitable.

This was indeed the warning the great Norman Borlaug left us with before he died. To quote:

If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.

The only way that conspiracy theories die is because more and more people begin to wake up to reality and reject them. Then perhaps there comes a tipping point where what was once received wisdom becomes increasingly understood for the foolish nonsense that it always was.

I think – I hope – that we are close to this tipping point today. And now, with just a little extra push, we can all join in consigning anti-GMO denialism to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Further Reading

Christopher Foreman, "On Justice Movements: Why They Fail the Environment and the Poor," Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2013

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "It's Not About the Climate," The Breakthrough, April 29, 2013

Mark Lynas, "How Genetically-Modified Crops Can Save Hundreds of Thousands From Malnutrition," The Breakthrough, March 7, 2013

Mark Lynas is an environmental writer based in the United Kingdom. He is author of The God Species and winner of the 2012 Breakthrough Paradigm Award. This speech was delivered at the 50^th anniversary celebration of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, and was originally posted on his blog.

Photo Credit: International Rice Research Institute / Shutterstock

Carbon dioxide emissions are the consequence of economic activity and the technologies that we use to produce and consume energy. We measure technological progress with respect to emissions reductions by a decline in the ratio of emissions to economic activity (GDP), called decarbonization.

To achieve aggressive emissions reductions goals – such as a 80 percent reduction by 2050 – requires annual rates of decarbonization of 5 percent or greater. This figure provides a baseline against which to think about the performance of actual policies. 

The European Union ETS was created to put a price on carbon so that industry would factor that price into its decision making. It is the price that does the work in a cap and trade system for emissions reduction. The cap and the trading set the price, and the price creates incentives for innovation in energy consumption and production. The EU explains: “The market price of allowances — the 'carbon price' – creates a greater incentive the higher it is.” 

Conversely, there is a low incentive for innovation with a low market price. For those interested in accelerating the decarbonization of the economy, the collapse of the price of carbon under the ETS is prima facie evidence of the program's ineffectiveness. 

At the same time, price is the program's Achilles’ heel. While people in Europe and around the world have shown a willingness to pay a bit more for energy in support of environmental goals, that willingness has its limits. This reality – what I've called an iron law – means that efforts to motivate innovation through raising the price of energy are ultimately doomed to fail.

There is some evidence that the ETS has simply put a price on business as usual. In The Climate Fix, I showed that Europe's rate of decarbonization was essentially identical before and after the ETS was introduced. If the program has effects, decarbonization has not been detectable beyond historical business-as-usual rates. 

The figure above, based on data from the US Energy Information Agency, shows the comparative performance of the United States and the EU-27 with respect to overall emissions and emissions intensity (C/GDP) since 2000. Both the United States and the EU reduced aggregate emissions by 6.4 percent from 2000 levels and the United States improved its carbon intensity by a slightly larger amount (21 percent vs. 19.5 percent). The similarity of the reductions indicate that, whatever impact the EU ETS has had, the United States achieved similar results with no carbon market (and some might argue, with no climate policy at all).

With the United States and the EU averaging ~2 percent per year since 1990, it is ironic to see otherwise committed environmentalists acting as apologists for the EU ETS. The uncomfortable reality is that no policies have been put in place anywhere in the world that have indicated an ability to accelerate rates of decarbonization to levels approaching 5 percent per year. This includes the EU ETS. If greater progress is to be made, debate will have to move beyond carbon pricing and the relative success or shortfalls of the EU ETS.
 

Further Reading

Clifton Yin, "The Carbon Tax Fantasy," November 29, 2012

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "Beyond Cap and Trade, A New Path to Clean Energy," February 27, 2012

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "The Creative Destruction of Climate Economics," Spring 2011

This post originally appeared on the Interpreter blog from the Lowy Institute for International Policy.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Peter Thiel has become the leading voice of these technology-focused libertarians. He laments a great slowdown in technological innovation — “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” states the manifesto of his venture capital group, Founders Fund. As a solution he urges a greater retreat from government and backs utopian anti-state projects.

“In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy,’” Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, articulating his philosophy behind investing in “new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.”

“Unlike the world of politics,” he continues, “in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

Thiel’s first investment priority is cyberspace: with PayPal, which made his first fortune, he sought to create a world currency, “free from all government control and dilution.” Backing Facebook was a way of supporting communities “not bounded by historical nation-states.”

Thiel admirably urges new frontiers for technology and radical visions for the future. But he fails to acknowledge the deep irony his libertarianism presents for his complaint about technological slowdown: namely the fact that the government created the Internet, as well as many other transformative general purpose technologies, and it is arguably the result of the post-1960s antigovernment Right that has driven the public sector’s declining prominence in advancing innovation. Even more broadly, the public’s loss of trust in government and antipathy toward its ability to secure a better future, whether by technological innovation or other means, has much to do with the same libertarian forces.

The pervasive antigovernment bias among VCs is one of the reasons why William Janeway’s recent book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, is so refreshing. Janeway, a venture capitalist at Warburg Pincus and an economist, articulates a deep and nuanced vision of how innovation happens, one that acknowledges the important roles played by the public sector as well as private actors.

He is quick to remind his fellow tech investors, for example, that “the Department of Defense developed the platform we all danced on.”

Janeway recently spoke with the Breakthrough Institute about “Schumpeterian waste,” the irrelevance of neoclassical economics, and the role of the state in technological innovation.

It is the state’s responsibility, Janeway said, to make transformative investments in innovation, subsidize the creation of new networks, and use its purchasing power to create markets for new products. “Revolutionary innovations are non-linear processes requiring enormous investments over decades,” he said, pointing to the example of electricity: 

It took 80 years — from 1850 to 1930 — to build out and deploy electricity. It took 20 years to do street lighting. It took another 20 years to electrify mass transit. It was only in the 1920s that you finally had it for manufacturing. It was only in the 1950s that you had it for consumer products like washing machines.

One of the reasons why public sector investments have been underappreciated is because economic theories fail to measure the value of major publicly funded projects like the Interstate Highway System, which are justified more often on the basis of political vision or military necessity than economic value. “Economy depends on sources of funding that are decoupled from concern for economic return,” he writes.

“What I worry about is the delegitimation of the state as an economic actor,” Janeway said. “The 2008 crisis reminded people of the role of the state, but it also tightened the grip market fundamentalists have over the Republican Party. It's not just the Tea Party people. It's the deficit doomsayers.”

Janeway’s book was named last year by the Financial Times as one of the “best books of 2012” and by Foreign Affairs as one of the “Best Books on Economic, Social, and Environmental Subjects.”

Read the Breakthrough's interview with Janeway below.

It's unusual to hear a venture capitalist extol the virtues of government investment.

Younger VCs don't have the same institutional memory that I and other VCs my age have. The Department of Defense developed the platform we all danced on. Some younger VCs are starting to get it. [Netscape founder and VC] Marc Andresson hosted a book party for me.

You criticize neoclassical economists for ignoring the critical role played by states in creating the foundations for economic growth.

I think the most underrated economist of the last 200 years was Friedrich List. His 1850 book, The National System of Political Economy, was a study of how Britain got to its leadership role, and what other countries would have to do to catch up. It's all about state power.

List has this wonderful line about how if the English had practiced laissez-faire economics, then England would still have been the sheep yard of the Hanseatic League selling wool to Flanders in return for manufacturing textiles. In other words, had Britain not had a national strategy for economic development there would never have been an industrial revolution.

Is it true your dad advised both President Franklin Roosevelt and President Lyndon Johnson?

My parents never lived in Washington and my father, who was business editor at Time, never had a government job. But my parents were the most junior members of the circle of intellectuals around the second New Deal, which included Bill Douglas, the Supreme Court Justice, and a bunch of the policy architects of the New Deal, like Tim Cohen and many others whose names have faded. Lyndon Johnson was very engaged with this group even though he came from the other end of the earth. My parents knew Lyndon and Lady Bird and were close until Vietnam produced a split that was truly universal around Washington D.C. at the time.

How did this influence you?

I always knew it was only worth talking about political economy, not the economy per se. I always knew there were two powers in the world. The first is where power is distributed according to one dollar one vote. The second is where power is distributed, at least nominally, between one person and one vote. 

The players who were losers in the market economy — whether unemployed workers or businessmen suffering from competition they couldn't handle — would invent a political process for redress. Political losers would seek economic power by, for example, forming unions. And those who had economic power would be expected to use it to extract rents through buying political power. I grew up with an understanding of this two-sided game.

Later, after I read [French historian of capitalism Fernand] Braudel, I realized there was a third, opportunistic player — finance, the possessor of liquid capital who can invest it seeking discontinuities, seeking disruption. That's the case whether it's my friend George Soros betting against the pound or me investing in the distributing computing revolution of the 1980s.

How has your venture capital work influenced how you think about the economy?

It's important to understand the high uncertainty with investments in technology. My last hurrah as a VC is Nuance Communications, which is speech recognition company moving into natural language understanding. The goal is to understand the intent of the speaker, not just what she's saying. The economic consequences of this are totally unknown.

Are bubbles inevitable?

Bubbles are endogenous and inevitable. They are built into the logic of liquid markets. The problem is made worse by the fact of so many investors managing other people's money. This has mostly not been productive. But in some circumstances, like the dot-com bubble, it can be. But it can also shut down the market economy, as we saw in 2007 and 2008.

You offer a defense of the dot-com bubble as productive.

Not all bubbles are! But when it's liquid securities for instruments that are clearly productivity enhancing, as in the dot-com bubble, then let it run!

When are bubbles a problem?

When speculation infects the banking system. Remember the gambler in Guys and Dolls? He was introduced as a guy who would bet on anything — including which sugar cube a fly would land on. That kind of finance is the model of insanity.

When the funding has no potential to increase productivity — think gold and silver mines, real estate, tulip bulbs — the bubble is destructive not productive. That's when the regulators have a positive mandate to take the punch bowl away.

What is the role of the state in that environment — is it to create what you call the "Schumpeterian waste" that drives innovation?

The state needs to make investments in innovation that can transform the market economy. The state needs to be involved in supporting and subsidizing the deployment of new networks. In particular, the state needs to be a creative customer for new products.

How so?

The role the state plays in procurement has been the one most neglected. Of course, the state might not be productive. It can also encourage rent seeking. Is it corruption when we gave away 9 percent of the land mass of the western part of the of the United States to the railroads?

I don't know, was it?

When Robert Fogel [the economic historian] tried to precisely quantify the economic benefit of the railroads in the 1960s, he did so in a manner that demonstrates the utter irrelevance of neoclassical economics. He assumed a counterfactual example where the resources spent on the railroad would instead by spent on other modes of transportation, like expanding roads and canals. He ignored the revolutionary economic impacts of the railroads. He thus massively underestimated the value of the railroads.

This railroad example is a classic example of trying to understand something that is essentially dynamic — innovation — in a static model focused on calculating the optimal or the most efficient allocation of resources.

So economic analyses can't measure the impact of state investments?

Economics misses the point. We didn't do a cost benefit analysis of the Interstate Highway System.

What drives economic growth and these massive public investments is always a transcendent political vision. A theory of market failure can get you $4 billion a year for the National Science Foundation's basic research. But that theory doesn't get you the Interstate Highway System.

In other words, it takes big visions to get big drivers of growth, like railroads and highways and the Internet.

It's not just this way in the United States. The highways model came from Hitler's autobahn to move troops from the eastern to the western fronts. That was for war, not economic development.

After it had been introduced, the Interstate Highway Act was renamed the Interstate Highways and Defense Act. Every bridge had to be high enough so that a missile carrier could pass underneath it. But building to those specs across the wastelands had damn to do with deterring the soviets. It was a rationalization of economic investment.

Same with the railroads?

The states had been making local road building grants, sure. But with the Pacific Railway Act, the mission was to tie California to the Union. It had nothing to do with economics per se. The effort to confine the legitimate scope for the debate to a cost-benefit analysis, and to quantified financial terms. It profoundly misses the historical point.

You argue that economists used OPEC's price hikes to discredit Keynesianism. How so?

OPEC's price shocks of the early seventies can be understood as the greatest excise tax increase in history, raising the cost of production and shifting cash flows from supporting high consumption in the developed world to low consumption by OPEC nations. This resulted in both an increase in inflation and a reduction in aggregate demand — hence stagflation. The problem was that all the econometric models associated with Keynesianism management broke down because the critical variables — inflation rates, exchange rates, unemployment rates — moved into areas not experienced since WWII. That resulted in the discrediting of Keynesian economics. In fact, the episode demonstrated the limits of a particular set of tools. Ironically, Keynes himself warned against constructing econometric models with static values.

The economist Robert Gordon says that the IT revolution is played out, and its impact pales in comparison to indoor plumbing and electricity.

Gordon doesn't compare apples to apples in time scales. He lets his first two industrial revolutions — steam and electricity — run for 100 to 150 years. But he then truncates the IT revolution.

If you applied the short time period to the steam-railroad revolution, you would cut it at when the B&O was built in 1828. If you cut it at 1873 you are only few years after Sears and Montgomery Ward — the killer commercial apps, if you will, of the railroad era — started up.

If you truncate electrification after Pearl St, the first electrified neighborhood in 1882, you would still be forty years from the 1920s, when electricity was just starting to influence manufacturing, and there were still no electrical household appliances to speak of.

Technological revolutions don't happen overnight.

Revolutionary innovations are non-linear processes requiring enormous investments over decades. It took eighty years — from 1850 to 1930 — to build out and deploy electricity. It took 20 years to do street lighting. It took another 20 years to electrify mass transit. It was only in the 1920s that you finally had it for manufacturing. It was only in the fifties that you had it for consumer products like washing machines.

What should the government do to encourage these kinds of innovations?

Providing loan guarantees to start ups [as DOE did with solar panel company, Solyndra] is a really bad idea. Start-ups shouldn’t have debt to anyone. It would be better if the government issued proposals and calls for orders of better batteries and solar cells than if it guaranteed loans. The defense department pulled companies down the learning curve as a customer, not as a bank. Government agencies should act as customers, not as lending agencies.

You note that transformative innovations inspire bubbles. Was there a transformative innovation behind the real estate bubble that popped in 2008?

There were three innovations behind it. The first was big government. In 1930s the public sector was just seven percent of the U.S. economy, and just two percent was the federal government. The massive expansion of the public sector was legitimated by World War II and eventually became 35 percent of the national economy. That larger public sector allowed for financial bubbles and crises — whether the crash of Long-Term Capital Management, the Asian flu, the dot-com — to be absorbed. The public sector was the source of aggregating demand and liquidity for the banking system, and a system offering safe securities for investors who wanted to hold something.

The second was the innovation in financial derivatives. It was an intellectual breakthrough that did not require new technology.

The third was IT. Information technologies allowed for a grotesquely over-leveraged financial system. The banks have an insatiable demand for assets. When they ran out of real assets they manufacturing fake assets to buy and sell to each other.

Wasn't the rise of China a big part of it?

China tried to compress in 30 years what US and Britain did in 120. Stealing patents. Adverse terms of trade. Protectionism. Driving growth with substantial trade surpluses. With such large surpluses you have to invest internationally, which the Chinese wanted to do to protect themselves against the Washington Consensus.

But I don't think there is anything inevitable about productivity increases forcing asset bubbles. The money that went to speculation could have been invested in clean tech or highways and some other carbon-friendly way, for example.

What is so frustrating now is that this should be the discussion around climate change. There are a lot of investments that could be productivity enhancing, including a smart grid. Including the electrification of cars. Including next generation energy sources.

Are Americans losing our willingness to tolerate the public spending on innovation — what you call "Schumpeterian waste" — that's needed for innovation?

What I worry about is the delegitimation of the state as an economic actor. The 2008 crisis reminded people of the role of the state, but it also tightened the grip the market fundamentalists have over the Republican Party. It's not just the Tea Party people. It's the deficit doomsayers, the Pete Petersons, the business confidence fairies. What's happened to the Republican Party will presumably be self-correcting, but it will have caused an enormous amount of destruction by then.

Of course, all of this new development puts big pressures on the environment. While the transition from wood to coal is overwhelmingly positive for forests, coal-burning is now a major contributor to global warming. The challenge for the twenty-first century is thus to triple global energy demand, so that the world's poorest can enjoy modern living standards, while reducing our carbon emissions from energy production to zero.

For the last 20 years, most everyone who cared about global warming hoped for a binding international treaty abroad, and some combination of carbon pricing, pollution regulations, and renewable energy mandates at home. That approach is now in ruins. In 2010, UN negotiations failed to create a successor to the failed Kyoto treaty. A few months later cap and trade died in the Senate. And two weeks ago, the slow motion collapse of the European Emissions Trading Scheme reached its nadir, with carbon prices, already at historic lows, collapsing after EU leaders refused to tighten the cap on emissions. 

What rushed into the vacuum was "climate justice," a movement headed by left-leaning groups like 350.org, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. These groups invoke the vulnerability of the poor to climate change, but elide the reality that more energy makes them more resilient. "Huge swaths of the world have been developing over the last three decades at an unprecedented pace and scale," writes political scientist Christopher Foreman in "On Justice Movements," a new article for Breakthrough Journal. "Contemporary demands for climate justice have been, at best, indifferent to these rather remarkable developments and, at worst, openly hostile."

For the climate justice movement, global warming is not to be dealt with by switching to cleaner forms of energy, but rather by returning to a pastoral, renewable-powered, and low-energy society. "Real climate solutions," writes Klein, "are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture, or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users…" 

Climate change can only be solved by "fixing everything," says McKibben, from how we eat, travel, produce, reproduce, consume, and live. “It’s not an engineering problem," McKibben argued recently in Rolling Stone. "It's a greed problem." Fixing it will require a "new civilizational paradigm," says Klein, "grounded not in dominance over nature, but in respect for natural cycles of renewal." 

Climate skeptics are right, Klein cheerily concludes: the Left is using climate change to advance policies they have long wanted. "In short," says Klein, "climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative."

As such, global warming is our most wicked problem. The end of our world is heralded by ideologues with specific solutions already in mind: de-growth, rural living, low-energy consumption, and renewable energies that will supposedly harmonize us with Nature. The response from the Right was all-too predictable. If climate change "supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand," as conservatives decided long ago, then climate change is either not happening or is not much to worry about.

Wicked problems can only be solved if the ideological discourses that give rise to them are disrupted, and that's what political scientist Foreman does brilliantly in "On Justice Movements." If climate justice activists truly cared about poverty and climate change, Foreman notes, they would advocate things like better cook stoves and helping poor nations accelerate the transition from dirtier to cleaner fuels. Instead they make demands that range from the preposterous (eg, de-growth) to the picayune (eg, organic farming).

Once upon a time, social justice was synonymous with equal access to modern amenities — electric lighting so poor children could read at night, refrigerators so milk could be kept on hand, and washing machines to save the hands and backs of women. Malthus was rightly denounced by generations of socialists as a cruel aristocrat who cloaked his elitism in pseudo-science, and claimed that Nature couldn't possibly feed any more hungry months. 

Now, at the very moment modern energy arrives for global poor — something a prior generation of socialists would have celebrated and, indeed, demanded — today's leading left-wing leaders advocate a return to energy penury. The loudest advocates of cheap energy for the poor are on the libertarian Right, while The Nation dresses up neo-Malthusianism as revolutionary socialism.

Left-wing politics was once about destabilizing power relations between the West and the Rest. Now, under the sign of climate justice, it's about sustaining them.

THE GREAT PROGRESSIVE REVERSAL
 

Part 1: It's Not About the Climate

Part 2: How the Left Came to Reject Cheap Energy for the Poor


Part 3: End of the World – or Decline of the West?

Christopher Foreman, "On Justice Movements," Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2013

Photo Credit: TckTckTck / Truthout.org

Or so claims Amory Lovins in a new piece about renewable energy in Germany. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the level of nuclear power in Germany will recognize this claim is utter nonsense within about two seconds. However, since Lovins appears incapable, or unwilling, to do the basic arithmetic, let’s do it here. A couple minutes on Google can find a summary of German solar and wind installations in 2011:

To make it terse: 7.5 GW of solar and 1.9 GW of wind was installed in 2011. The figures in Lovins piece show that nuclear power generated 130 TWh of juice in 2010, and this is in line with what the International Energy Agency says. How does the annual production of 2011′s new installations of renewables compare?

7.5 GW of solar in one year (assuming a capacity factor of 10 percent, which is roughly the German average) gives us 6.6 TWh.

1.9 GW of wind in one year (assuming a capacity factor of 40 percent, which is generous given the average is currently below 30 percent) gives us another 6.6 TWh.

Added together we have a total of just over 13 TWh each year from Germany’s new installations of renewables in 2011. So, it will take Germany at least 10 years at 2011′s build rate to displace their pre-Fukushima nuclear output with renewables. (Note: ten years of solar additions at 7.5 GW is probably Easter Bunny territory. This will result in over 100 GW of solar on the grid, and in Germany having more solar and wind than it knows what to do with on a sunny day.)

So, the basic math on Germany’s nuclear phaseout is very clear, yet I suspect that Lovins will not be the last person to try to deny it.

Robert Wilson is a PhD candidate in Mathematical Ecology at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He blogs at Carbon Counter, where this article first appeared. You can follow him on Twitter @CountCarbon.

Photo Credit: Holcim Foundation