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Recent Posts by Brad Allenby
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Perhaps the most common query a lecturer on sustainability gets is also the most difficult: "what can I as an individual do?" It's a deceptively simple question to which some respond with platitudes about recycling or buying local, while others go into convoluted discussions about global systems. But either response is just rearranging deck chairs, although whether the ship is doomed or not, or for that matter is even a ship at all, remains unclear.
The underlying dilemma is illustrated by a case I participated in several years ago. The goal was to preserve an old growth North American forest, and the means selected by the environmental activists involved was to get companies to agree not to purchase any forest products from the Canadian province involved until
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The cliché has it that there is no environment in Los Angeles, but as a mythical city facing hordes of environmental, economic and social challenges, there are a multitude of lessons there that we can use in developing and sustaining the environmental movement. Apologies to James Lowell, but books praising Los Angeles are about that rare -- actually, rarer. That's one reason Rayner Banham's book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, is so thought provoking. He applauds L.A., arguing at the end that "This sense of possibilities still ahead is part of the basic life-style of Los Angeles . . . [which] by comparison with the general body of official Western culture at the moment, increasingly given over to facile, evasive and self-regarding pessimism, can be a very
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Since Western technocratic culture has globalized so effectively, it is worth reflecting on what that culture considers the "routes to truth," and how they have evolved over the centuries. This is especially pertinent if one has a sneaking suspicion that the grounds are shifting, perhaps even being re-negotiated, in ways that have serious implications for environmentalism, sustainability, and indeed, science generally. At a very high level, there is an historical interplay in Western culture of two different models of truth. In medieval Europe, how an observation aligned with revealed authority -- the Church Fathers, and to some extent Plato and Aristotle -- was in large part determinative of validity: Faith based on authority trumped observation. It was not that
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Several years ago, Dan Sarewitz and Dave Guston wrote an influential article about "real time technology assessment," or RTAA. They understood technology as a complex phenomenon combining elements of engineering, economics, and social science, demanding an appropriately flexible approach. It is increasingly apparent that a similar approach needs to be developed to be able to work rationally, responsibly and ethically with the integrated human/built/natural systems that increasingly characterize the anthropogenic world -- in short, that we also need a "real time macroethical assessment" capability, or RTMA. While there are many subtleties to RTMA, its essential importance is evident. We have developed ethical systems appropriate for conditions where either a
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Plato in his Republic celebrates the state lucky enough to be ruled by philosopher-kings, lovers of wisdom who avoid both the lure of money and military glory, and the call of the mob, governing by expertise, intelligence, and not a little Skinnerian behavioral modification. Many scientists, perceiving fundamental shortcomings in democratic processes, find themselves ideally suited to this role.
History, however, indicates that, while most authoritarianism is unfortunate, scientific and technocratic authoritarianism is even more so. This is especially true in a world increasingly characterized by new and unanticipated emergent behaviors that arise from integrated human/natural/built complex adaptive systems reflecting a profound multiculturalism.
The inclination towards
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Are Plug-In Hybrids a Path to Salvation? Be Careful What You Wish For
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Several years ago, it was hard to find anyone who had a bad word for biofuels. They were "renewable," "natural," and "sustainable," and were widely embraced as the means by which a nasty fossil fuel based economy could be transitioned to a more moral and righteous state. In short, everyone fell in love with them.
But love is fickle, and nothing is harder on fantasy than reality. And so it is that those who were demanding renewables and biofuels at any cost now suddenly face the price: land use and biodiversity impacts; accelerating perturbations of other critical systems such as the nitrogen, phosphorus, and hydrologic cycles; increases in food prices as agricultural production shifts to biofuel end-use.
Moreover, because the relevant markets are global, so too the impacts: European and American policy decisions rapidly ramping up demand for biofuel do not just affect their citizens, but the food prices and well-being of people around the world -- cruelly, especially the very poor. These are complex systems, and pretending they are simple doesn't cut it.
The critical lessons, although often overlooked, are not complicated. Most important, don't fall in love with anything -- not an ideology, not a buzzword like "renewables" (we're still in love with that one), not a technology. Anticipate that any system worth considering -- including biofuels -- exhibits non-linear behavior, especially if scaled up rapidly without allowing for adjustments throughout all the other systems coupled to it.
At some scale, technologies like these are generally good ideas; but at the higher scale of widespread implementation, they are quite likely to cause ugly complications, especially if demand is not eased in, but spiked (corn-based ethanol is a good, current example). Further complicating the issues is that over time, technologies become technically, economically and politically locked-in: trying to change America's corn ethanol policy has become far more difficult now. With interests including Midwest farmers, construction workers and venture capitalists recognizing the potential benefits, these groups have changed farming patterns and investing in developing a corn ethanol infrastructure, and thus have a strong and vested interest in continuation of the program.
Problematic though it is, and even despite the backlash against corn ethanol on many fronts, we're in the midst of repeating the same problem. The hysteria over climate change, combined with the success of hybrid automotive technologies, is generating huge pressure for plug-in hybrid vehicles, which require no petroleum at all -- locally, at least. Such vehicles are seen, and presented by their proponents, as "emissions free," "carbon neutral," "important moral statements" and otherwise worthy of falling in love with. Embracing this technology with wide-ranging policy measures may work, but it is just as likely, especially given the lack of systems understanding and analysis, that we will find ourselves facing corn ethanol déjà vu.
There's no question that plug-in technology is cool. Despite the technology issues -- most notably finding batteries appropriate to automotive power demands and usage, figuring out viable combinations of on-board power, rapid recharge and in-depth charging infrastructure -- the idea of using clean electricity to phase out one of the most obvious and intractable uses of fossil fuel, without having to do the difficult job of weaning people off cars completely, seems too appealing to pass up.
But there's a much bigger problem, and it's not discussed much. What happens if the activists succeed, and we suddenly lurch towards plug-ins? What kind of electric power production and distribution infrastructure does this demand spike imply (note that coal plants are the most likely and cheap addition to base load capacity under such a scenario)? At what point does the difference in technology time cycles (new car technology can cycle at a couple of years once the technologies are proven; energy infrastructure has half-lives of many decades) break the electric generation and grid systems? And as developed world technology tends to create powerful paths for future technological evolution, does this put countries such as China and India, already struggling to generate sufficient electricity for their development, yet further behind Europe and America? The simplistic answers one gets so far -- "just use solar" -- do not inspire confidence.
It's not that plug-in technology may not be useful at some scale. It's that, by falling in love with the technology, we once again blind ourselves to the questions we need to ask. And because it's not the first time -- cf. biofuel -- we need to ask ourselves some very basic, and very critical, questions about how we intend to rationally, ethically and responsibly face an increasingly complex and challenging anthropogenic planet.
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