A headline on the front page of today's New York Times announces "Gas Prices Soar, Posing a Threat to Family Budget," and the details offers a grim outlook on the near and long term energy front. If the prognosticators are correct, the increases in energy prices and the impact of those energy costs on family budgets will make a tough political playing field emissions caps even tougher.
Note: In Part I of this series, we had discussed Gandhian anti-modernism, and its connection to the environmental movement today.
In spite of Gandhi's iconic status in India, his Hind Swaraj world view was never widely accepted by the mainstream. In 1945, Jawaharlal Nehru (who was to become independent India's first Prime Minister in 1947) wrote to Gandhi, "it is many years since I read Hind Swaraj ... but even when I read it twenty years ago it seemed to me completely unreal." He further reminded Gandhi, "the Congress has never considered that picture (portrayed in Hind Swaraj) much less adopted it." It was the nationalist, non-violent, humanist Gandhi who Indians admired and respected - not the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj.
You describe how anti-environmentalists in the rural western US turned populist resentment against environmentalists in the wake of environmental victories which protected forests from logging and wilderness from mining and development. You draw on the philosopher Nietzsche, who famously argued that Christian morality, which valorized sickness, poverty, humility, had simply reversed an older "noble morality," and was motivated by resentment. Is the "ressentiment" that Nietzsche wrote about useful for understanding anti-environmentalism?
This is a guest post from Frank Laird, one of Breakthrough's Senior Fellows. Frank is an associate professor of technology and public policy at the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver.
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In his recent report for the New Rules Project, John Bailey went so far as to claim that neither federal subsidies nor federal R&D have, or could have, any effect on the development or diffusion of renewable energy technologies. I have no idea where he gets his data, since he provides no sources, but both conclusions are wrong.
A guilty liberal finally snaps, swears off plastic, goes organic, becomes a bicycle nut, turns off his power, composts his poop, ... generally turns into a tree hugging lunatic who tries to save polar bears and the rest of the planet from environmental catastrophe. - "No Impact Man" Colin Beavan
The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not every man's greed. - Mahatma Gandhi
The two quotes above are far separated in time and place, and may differ ever so slightly in phraseology, but they articulate a remarkably similar world-view: mankind has sinned against Nature by promoting industrial development, mass production, and mass consumption; the only way out is to abandon our vain attempts to achieve progress and growth, and instead, embrace a society based on limited ambition, limited needs and subsistence production.
When word broke last year that a Komodo dragon in a Kansas zoo had given a virgin birth, I immediately emailed Johns Hopkins philosopher Jane Bennett to offer up more evidence for her enchantment of modern life hypothesis. Since Max Weber, social scientists and philosophers have long declared modern life the enemy of enchantment, mystery, and awe. But starting with her 2001 book, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton) Bennett has been chronicling the ways that enchantment keeps breaking through.
Breakthrough advisory board member Dalton Conley has an incisive op-ed in today's New York Times where he criticizes the $150 billion stimulus package, passed by Congress and signed by Bush, and calls for an "investor society" where every American, especially the poorest Americans, have savings to invest in their future.
After we published Break Through last fall we constantly heard from old-school environmentalists like the Center for American Progress blogger Joe Romm that we don't need technological breakthroughs. (Romm was careful to narrowly define "breakthrough" as the invention of a brand new technology, even though we had explicitly defined it as "breakthroughs in performance and price.")
One of the chief barriers to dealing with global warming is that clean energy remains much more expensive than fossil fuels. As long as that remains the case, neither rich countries like the U.S. nor poor countries like China are going to move to clean energy sources any time soon. What to do? We argue that major federal investments in clean energy are required to scale up the technologies and bring down their price.
Until Brazil's vast socio-economic challenges, as well as its aspirations to economic greatness, are dealt with, more of the same can unfortunately be expected.
As prices for agricultural products have skyrocketed over the past year, thousands of square miles of Amazonian rainforest have fallen. The rate of new deforestation is truly alarming: in the four months between August and December of 2007, 2,500 square miles of forest came down. According to the Brazilian Minister of the Environment Marina Silva, November and December were particularly bad, seeing 740 square miles cleared. All this, despite decades of well-intentioned environmentalists' conservation efforts and wide recognition of the potential disasters from continued deforestation. And while the link between commodity prices and deforestation is apparent, another equally important link - urban poverty and deforestation - doesn't even show up on most environmentalists' radar.
A recent report describes how researchers in the US have invented a yarn that can generate electricity simply by being bent or twisted. Clothes made from the fabric could generate enough electricity to power a mobile phone or iPod, the scientists say.
You didn't really expect me to let this one lie, did you? Mr. Obama seemed interested in thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he studied in a political thought class in his sophomore year. From the...
You didn't really expect me to let this one lie, did you?
Mr. Obama seemed interested in thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he studied in a political thought class in his sophomore year.
From the New York Times piece on how Obama didn't really get high as often as he made it sound like he did in Dreams of My Father.
I'm surprised this hasn't become a bigger issue in the campaign. Just check out the attack ad the Kantians have made attacking Nietzsche:
The development of computer hardware follows a trend called Moore's Law, first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in 1965. He predicted that computer technology would improve at an almost exponential rate. And it has, along with almost every...
The development of computer hardware follows a trend called Moore's Law, first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in 1965. He predicted that computer technology would improve at an almost exponential rate. And it has, along with almost every aspect of the capabilities of computer devices, from processing speed to digital camera resolution.
So it's no great leap for Silicon Valley bigwigs to surmise that Moore's Law extends to another application of silicon -- solar panels. A piece in this weekend's New York Times examines the growing interest in solar among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Some predict that the global market for new energy sources will grow to be larger than the computer chip market.
But all too often promising new ideas end up in the technology valley of death. As renewable energy specialist Lisa Frantzis put it,
We've seen a lot of pipe dreams in the industry over the years, a lot of wild claims never came through.
Government subsidies on computer chips played an central role in keeping Silicon Valley afloat in its early years, and the proliferation of solar power too, will depend on government support.
Cross-Posted from Prometheus. In the New York Times Kenneth Chang reports on a novel application of air capture of carbon dioxide that promises carbon neutral gasoline forever. If commercially viable the technology could prove enormously disruptive to all sorts of...
In the New York Times Kenneth Chang reports on a novel application of air capture of carbon dioxide that promises carbon neutral gasoline forever. If commercially viable the technology could prove enormously disruptive to all sorts of interests.
In recent months, increasing numbers of Brits have called for a new Apollo project on energy have grown louder. Just before last December's U.N. climate change meeting in Bali, the London School of Economics Gwyn Prins and Oxford's Steve Rayner wrote, "Time to Ditch Kyoto" in Nature, which argued for the U.S. to make an $80 billion investment in clean energy. Now, Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman has called for for the U.S. to implement a Manhattan project on energy.
In recent months, increasing numbers of Brits have called for a new Apollo project on energy. Just before last December's U.N. climate change meeting in Bali, the London School of Economics' Gwyn Prins, and Oxford's Steve Rayner, wrote, "Time to Ditch Kyoto" in Nature, which argued for the U.S. to make an $80 billion investment in clean energy. Now, Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman has called for for the U.S. to implement a Manhattan project on energy.
The New York Times' Monday editorial criticizes President Bush for seeming "disconnected from reality" when it comes to climate change. That may be an accurate assessment, but the Times, too, is disconnected - not from the seriousness and urgency of...
The New York Times'Monday editorial criticizes President Bush for seeming "disconnected from reality" when it comes to climate change. That may be an accurate assessment, but the Times, too, is disconnected - not from the seriousness and urgency of the problem, but from the need for breakthrough technologies in dealing with it. It seems the Times believes, as Al Gore has said, that "we have all the technology we need" to deal with global warming. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. Our technology is nowhere near the level it needs to be to make a dent in the global warming problem. They have it backwards:
The error is placing too much faith in grandiose projects and technological leaps to solve a problem that is urgently here and now. The most realistic path to reducing global warming gases is to limit emissions across the economy by putting a price on carbon. That would give private industry strong incentives to develop greater efficiencies and cleaner fuels.
It wasn't enough for Michael and Ted to critique liberal environmentalists - now they've gone and tangled with conservatives too. They recently took Newt Gingrich to task for his modest plan to address climate change, challenging him to put government...
It wasn't enough for Michael and Ted to critique liberal environmentalists - now they've gone and tangled with conservatives too. They recently took Newt Gingrich to task for his modest plan to address climate change, challenging him to put government money where his mouth is:
In recent years, conservatives have talked the talk of technology innovation, but have not, unfortunately, backed it up with strong support for large public investments in clean energy. Republican presidential front-runners, from John McCain to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee, have acknowledged the importance of doing something about global warming, but they all lack plans for major public investment in technology.
In some instances, they found common ground. Gingrich wrote:
We reject, along with Shellenberger and Nordhaus, the approaches of those who insist on a bureaucratic command-and-control structure to oversee our environmental future.
Their four-part exchange, which includes Jonathan Adler in the final entry, is posted on the New Republic.
