As noted last month, communication between the technological and environmental discourses is still fairly minimal. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons, a point made yet again by a recent National Academy of Engineering workshop on technology and climate change. And opportunities for technological initiatives are being missed as parties fixate on increasingly anachronistic policy initiatives.
Thus, for example, it is increasingly clear that carbon sequestration — capturing CO2 from fossil fuel power plants, liquefying it, and injecting it into deep geologic formations — is a relatively proven technology. Moreover, it can be done at acceptable economic and energetic costs — but only if it is original build; as a retrofit, its economics and energy efficiency degrade sharply. Given that major developing economies have little practical choice but to rely on fossil fuels (especially coal) and that they are building power plants now that will function for half a century, there is a significant opportunity to build energy efficiency into global energy production . . . but only if properly designed and sited.
But the time is now. One cannot help but wonder if shifting a small fraction of the political energy and funding from increasingly dubious climate change negotiations into carbon sequestration programs would not serve the climate and humanity more effectively. Thus, for example, if the European Union is indeed interested in mitigating climate change, it would subsidize carbon-sequestering Chinese coal-fired power plants now.
Beyond such proven technologies, however, are those that, though still speculative, might enable atmospheric “cleansing” on a global scale — for example, those that could enable the extraction of carbon dioxide from ambient air on an industrial scale, allowing whatever carbon concentration one wished. The implications are staggering: the entire climate change negotiation process would be, in effect, rendered obsolete.
But that only raises a new, more profound, issue that has generally been ignored, for the technology makes it clear that the real question we face is not how much economic activity to restrict, as the problem is currently posed. Rather, it is what world we will choose. For rather than a mental model of simply powering down until the world returns to some imaginary prehuman state, the technology makes it clear that all climate change efforts are, in fact, moral choices. The atmosphere has been for centuries, is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, a product of human activity, intention and, at a systems level, design.
These examples, only two of many discussed at the workshop, raise a number of critical policy issues. But they do something else: they warn of a social and cultural blind spot that, while it may have had some negative impacts in the past, has become critically dysfunctional. The problem, quite simply, is that we lack a robust theory of technological evolution, despite recent work by scholars such as Robert Nelson at Columbia University. And the discipline that one would expect to be prominent in this effort — economics — has made surprisingly little progress since the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who died in 1950, and Karl Marx before him. Perhaps this is because the discipline of economics views itself as “scientific,” and technology, as a quintessentially human (and therefore contingent and messy) activity, does not lend itself to easy quantitative treatment. To understand technology is to understand the human, and we aren’t there yet.
But it is increasingly apparent that it will be technology, not environmentalism, that will determine the shape of our world. To the extent we don’t understand (and, for some, take pride in not understanding) technology, we lose the opportunity — indeed, the moral responsibility — to participate in that process ethically and rationally. A robust theory of technological evolution would do far more for the environment than most of the environmental projects we are so earnestly working on today. That is an uncomfortable and fundamental truth that most academic environmental programs, regardless of focus, have yet to understand, much less begin to teach. Their students are much the poorer for it.
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Brad Allenby is VP, Environment, Health and Safety at AT&T; an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Virginia Engineering School; and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. The opinions expressed are those of the author, and not necessarily of any institution with which he is associated.