Songs of Ecomodernism

This week we published the German translation of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. I always like learning how 'ecomodernism' translates into different languages. In German, it's 'Ökomodernisten.'

By my rough calculations, the Manifesto can now be read by about a third of the planet in their native language, and about half the planet in a primary or secondary language.

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Ben Heard has a powerful and sobering reflection on his recent trip to Fukushima. As Ben and others have observed before, the real damage caused by the 2010 nuclear accident was social and psychological, not radiological. This isn't to say that the nuclear accident wasn't serious, but rather to ensure that we learn the right lessons from it. One lesson would be for the media to stop fanning the flames of radiophobia, as Will Boisvert emphasized in a frustrating but teriffic piece last month.

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Manifesto coauthor and University of Tasmania professor Barry Brook has a great op-ed with Jonathan Symons at The Australian. Brook and Symons argue that the "nebulous goals" of international climate negotiations would be greatly improved by the countries like the United States, China, and their native Australia making explicit energy innovation commitments:

If the US, EU, China and a few other high­capacity (and heavily emitting) states — Japan and South Korea — were to put forward explicit research, development and demonstration commitments, the Paris agreement quickly would become a de facto innovation treaty.

Brook and Symon's recommendations resonate strongly with the framework we laid out last year in High-Energy Innovation. Since global emissions are just a function of energy infrastructure (mostly), I don't know why the COP aren't already focusing on energy innovation instead of emissions...

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Janne M. Korhonen, founding member of the Ecomodernist Society of Finland, has a long and beautful essay on his personal ecomodern origins titled 'Songs from the Hungerland.' I'll let him speak for himself:

But we nevertheless need to dream of a world where energy surpluses are abundant enough so that we can think thoughts other than maximising our efficiency. Besides opening more options for everyone and everything, surplus and slack mean our attitude towards our family of Life can be more relaxed. Incentives for conflict between humans and between other members of our family will be lessened. With proper emphasis on efficiency — efficiency as a servant of Life, not master and tyrant — we can begin to gather our tools and toys from the rooms of other family members inhabiting this grand house. Perhaps, some day in the future, millions more may be able to enjoy the great outdoors the way I’ve been privileged to do.

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Last week, MIT made the decision -- after a year of consultation with students, activists, faculty, and other experts -- not to divest its endowment from fossil fuel interests. As MIT President L. Rafael Reif explained, “We’re talking about a global moon shot, and engagement is the only way to get there." Northeastern's Matt Nisbet has a great examination of this particular debate.

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Harvard's Calestous Juma wrote an important rejoinder to the EU's deliberations over GMO bans. As Professor Juma writes, Europeans can make their own decisions over what to grow inside their own borders; but export bans on African agricultural products do real harm to the billions in subsistence and modernizing economies:

Pursuing EU-inspired biosafety policies denies Africa the capacity to leverage biotechnology and use it to meet its own local needs. GM technology has wider application in fields such as medicine and can be used in the development of diagnostics.

Fortunately, the European Parliament has already prevented member nations from imposing unilateral bans on GMO imports. But this battle isn't over yet.

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While European nations are resisting agricultural innovation, African nations are overcoming rich-world superstitions. After being banned in response to extremely spurrious science in 2012, it appeasr Kenya is on the verge of lifting its own national ban on GMOs.

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Three to four times a week I read something along the lines of "poor countries no longer need centralized power plants and grid-based power systems." But no one appears to have consulted poor populations. Last week, the Center for Global Development published the results of a survey of Tanzanians with and without grid access. As Ben Leo notes in his blog post on the survey, "Taken together, roughly 90% of them want a grid connection even though they already have access to alternative sources of electricity" (emphasis added).

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Last week Michael Shellenberger dug up a challenging op-ed by Rick Rowden in 2011 at the Guardian on poverty reduction and development. Specifically, he insists that the latter does not automatically follow from the former:

It's a difficult question that most policy-makers won't wish to answer. If they say "development" doesn't include industrialisation, they will be hard pressed to explain how a country like Malawi can be "developed" while remaining essentially a tea and tobacco plantation. If they say it does include industrialisation, they will be hard pressed to explain how a country is expected to industrialise under Washington consensus rules and trade and investment agreements that have eliminated or outlawed most of the basic industrial policy tools and tactics that would be needed. Nevertheless, aid advocates have an obligation to ask.

We talk a lot about Steve Fuller's distinction between 'up-wingers' and 'down-wingers' in the ecomodernist movement. Here, Rowden gets to a related philosophical schism, that between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. As Erik Reinert once wrote:

...since its founding fathers, the United States has always been torn between two traditions, the activist policies of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) and Thomas Jefferson's (1743-1826) maxim that 'the government that governs least, governs best.' With time and usual American pragmatism, this rivalry has been resolved by putting the Jeffersonians in charge of the rhetoric and the Hamiltonians in charge of the policy.

Unfortunately, as Rowden laments, that American pragmatism does not appear to have been exported to poor countries via either aid or multilateral industrial policy. In fact, just the opposite.

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The ecomodernist Moms are back with another great back-and-forth on how technologies like GMOs can united folks from opposing political backgrounds. Check it out.

Photo credit: Janne M. Korhonen