Want to Save Nature? Leave It Behind

by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, coauthors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto

But protecting the environment and saving more nature in the 21st century will not require that we get closer to nature. Rather, it requires that we get farther from it, through better technologies. Getting off of fossil fuels will require that we shift to better energy technologies, such as nuclear and solar energy which are clean, power-dense and abundant. Growing more food on less land with fewer environmental impacts will require better seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and things such as vertical greenhouses and laboratory meat that make us less dependent on land and water to grow food.

Ultimately, nature made useless is nature spared. On this 45th anniversary of Earth Day, let us resolve to leave nostalgic dreams of recoupling with nature behind and embrace instead an ecologically vibrant future in which all of humanity thrives by increasingly leaving nature alone.

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The Technofix Is In

A Response from Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint center of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne

The ecomoderns’ techno-fetishism is possible only because they don’t think about politics. It is true that thinking about the politics of climate change is depressing. For those who “embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future,” the easiest path is to ignore the messy world of politics and focus one’s gaze on humankind’s amazing technological achievements.

And so in the manifesto, which tells a story of how we got here and where we should go, there is no mention of the forces, national and international, that have given us rising carbon dioxide concentrations, acidifying oceans and all the rest. We look in vain to find reference to the proven power of corporations and lobbyists to stop environmental laws, or to the total victory of money politics in the United States, now entrenched after Citizens United. Exxon and organized denialism do not appear even between the lines.

For the ecomoderns, the story of the past and the story of the future revolve around one thing: “Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge.” It’s an entire historiography in which the human relationship to the natural world depends essentially on human ingenuity and entrepreneurship. It is not kings, presidents, proletarians or generals who make history — but rather scientists, inventors and engineers, and it is they who will save us.
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If you believe that solving the climate change problem “is fundamentally a technological challenge,” then we are in this mess not because of the power of the fossil fuel lobby, not because of the influence of the campaign of denial, not because of money politics, not because persuading consumers to accept a price on carbon seems too hard, and not because getting international cooperation has been fraught. No, we are in this mess because technology has not evolved quickly enough to avoid it.

Read the full response here.

Saving Wildlife by Embracing New Tech

by Barry Brook, coauthor of An Ecomodernist Manifesto

Intensifying resource use can decouple environmental impacts from human development. There are many successful examples of intensification and decoupling.

For instance, large swathes of North America and Europe have reverted to forest, after substitutions and technology-driven enhancements in agricultural productivity led to the abandonment of marginal farmland.

This trend might be further enhanced by the adoption of vertical farms and bio-engineered crops. Emerging plasma-arc torch technology can almost completely recycle and recover materials from solid waste.

There are also many instances where decoupling has not (yet) occurred, or where technological progress has enabled increasingly destructive environmental practices. Examples include the ongoing clearance of primary rainforest for biofuel production and the link between growing national wealth and net environmental impact. This has fueled critiques of the “techno-fix.”

Ecomodernists admit that technology itself is not a panacea, but we do hold that its judicious application and associated knowledge transfer can be incredibly effective. The alternative, “power down” solutions have proven to have limited social and political traction.

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Decoupled Ideals

Humanity faces two fundamental challenges this century. The first is to lift billions of people out of poverty and give them the opportunity to live healthy and dignified lives. The second is to ensure that this development does not destabilize the climatic and ecological systems that have enabled the rise of humans and other life on Earth. The problem is that these two goals are increasingly at odds.

Reconciling the twin imperatives of conservation and development is not easy. ‘Sustainable development’ is a catchphrase that neatly defines what the world must ultimately achieve, but nobody knows precisely what it looks like at full scale. Later this year, governments will finalize a set of sustainable development goals to guide international aid, and in December global leaders will gather to discuss the latest climate agreement at a summit in Paris. Any deal will be burdened by inevitable compromises that allow space for polluting development as the world seeks better and cheaper solutions.

The latest attempt to create a framework for thinking about this dilemma comes from 18 environmental activists and academics, who published an ‘Ecomodernist Manifesto’ last week. The essay paints a hopeful picture of technological progress while placing importance on the kind of intensive development that has characterized humanity’s rise so far. Only by concentrating our impact within the urban, industrial and agricultural context can we achieve a “good Anthropocene,” or age of human influence, the authors argue.

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Manifesto Calls for an End to “People Are Bad” Environmentalism

by Eric Holthaus

Thanks to abundant energy, the ecomodernists argue, humanity has done wonderful things: Life expectancy is on the rise, infectious disease risk has plummeted, natural disasters kill fewer people, and abject poverty is on the decline. Of course, those gains have not come without sacrifice: We’re losing species at an incredible rate, and climate change could add ever more stress on human and natural systems.

The answer, according to the authors of the new document, is to “liberate the environment from the economy.” Ecomodernists argue that by focusing the human footprint into cities and prioritizing high-efficiency agriculture and energy production, we'll be able to retreat from nature and let it recover. Now, that’s easier said than done, and likely to come with a whole set of unintended consequences, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for discussion purposes. They list “urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination” as technologies that can reduce the overall human footprint and leave “more room for non-human species.”

Whether humanity will decouple the economy from our environmental overreach in time to maintain a planet worth preserving is another question. Confronted with this reality, humans of the 21st century have a choice, according to ecomodernists: further intensify our low-carbon-energy use and hope for a technological breakthrough (like sucking carbon out of the air) or retreat from modernity and risk civilizational backsliding. Their choice is clear: “We embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future.”

Read the full article here.

An Ecomodernist Manifesto: A View from a Lapsed Sustainability Professional

A Response from Ben Heard, founder of Decarbonise SA

Sustainability practitioners need to love humanity again, and I use the word “love” advisedly. Lots of environmentalists/sustainability professionals fall out of love with humanity. When as a sustainability practitioner you have fallen in love with humanity again as a species, as well as all the other ones you care about, it provides a powerful change in perspective. Suddenly every human soul is an exciting possibility, not a frightening threat. Our science, culture, and the other advents of our civilisation provide genuine consolation for some of the losses we incur along the journey because they are, truly, wondrous.

We must open our eyes to the possibilities of restoration and return. The future of our planet’s biodiversity cannot be the same as its past. Yet it can be radically different from our current state if we want it to be. It can be denser, richer and more supportive. Ecomodernists acknowledge this. They embrace the responsibility and the potential for wonderful outcomes.

We must welcome and embrace science and its child, technology, without bias. It is out major tool. With our wits, wiles and intellects we can find the pressure points on the juggernaut. But it is unquestionably technology that will let us activate them most powerfully to redirect the momentum of civilisation and bring us to a safer, softer landing as we reach the peak of our population and plan for what is to follow. An Ecomodernist Manifesto treats this as a basic starting point, and it is the more powerful for it.

Read the full response here.

What Can We Do to Save the Birds?

by Margaret Wente

“Lots of environmental problems have got much better as people have gotten richer,” says Canadian environmental scientist David Keith, who’s one of the scientists who backs the manifesto. I don’t have space here to list all his credentials, but let’s just say he’s among the smartest guys in the world. “Air pollution is substantially better in the last 40 years because of the Clean Air Act. Clean air has added about a year and a half to the lives of the average Canadian or American,” he told me. “We understand how to do these things. Wealth and good governance matter.”

Economic development, the manifesto argues, is indispensable to save the planet. The key is to “decouple” development from nature by using nature more intensively. We must intensify human activities such as farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement – as we are already doing – so that we can leave more of the natural world, and the spaces we love, alone. The most productive and efficient way for people to live is not in some rural Edenic paradise (where small numbers of hunter-gatherers, it should be noted, were very good at wiping out whole species) It’s in densely packed cities.

The public seldom hears this perspective, because the media tend to give the airtime to folks like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben. And that’s a shame, because these thinkers offer a far more creative, rational and optimistic way to move forward.

Read the full article here.

The Environmentalists' Civil War

by Robert Bryce

The absolutist, pro-sprawl outlook touted by [Bill] McKibben and his allies provides a stark contrast to the pro-human outlook the ecomodernists support. Perhaps the key line of their manifesto is in the concluding sentence, which says they want to “achieve universal human dignity on a biodiverse and thriving planet.”

Toward that end, the 18 signers of the manifesto — a group that includes Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, as well as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, and the University of Tasmania’s Barry Brook — support increased energy use. They note, rightly: “Climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world’s people. Nor should they be. A new coal-fired power station in Bangladesh may bring air pollution and rising carbon dioxide emissions but will also save lives.”

That’s it exactly. While the absolutists want one of America’s most prestigious universities to sell some of its investments — with the only goal being to stigmatize the world’s biggest and single most important business — the ecomodernists are arguing not only that greater global energy consumption is inevitable, but that it’s good, that more energy use will allow more people in the developing world to live fuller, freer lives. As part of that, they are adding, rightly, that nuclear energy must be a central element of climate policy if we are going to reduce the rate of growth in global carbon dioxide emissions.

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Joe Romm of Think Progress on the Manifesto

Joe Romm is a Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Founding Editor and blogger at Think Progress. 

Lots of writers want the freedom to criticize those who defend the 2°C target and the very aggressive deployment of carbon-free power that such a target entails. But they know that if they actually put their own target on the table, they would be conceding humanity’s self-destruction, disputing the scientific literature or requiring the very aggressive deployment of carbon-free power they criticize.

A classic example of such an essay is the “Ecomodernist Manifesto” featured in the NY Times this week. Errors aside, this 31-page tome is a waste of time because it doesn’t tell you what the authors think should be our goal with climate action. They offer no temperature target, no CO2 concentration target, not even a broad one. The first and last mention of any target is on page 20 when the authors explain that while “Nations have also been slowly decarbonizing — that is, reducing the carbon intensity of their economies … they have not been doing so at a rate consistent with keeping cumulative carbon emissions low enough to reliably stay below the international target of less than 2 degrees Centigrade of global warming.” True.

Then the authors immediately say, “Significant climate mitigation, therefore, will require that humans rapidly accelerate existing processes of decarbonization.” Also true. Then they say, “There remains much confusion, however, as to how this might be accomplished.” No, not true at all — certainly not for the 2°C target. And not even for a 3°C target. These sentences are apparently a clever rhetorical bait-and-switch to make you think that the authors endorse the 2°C target, which they never do, while all the time they are recommending a course of action that can’t possibly hit 2°C or even 3°C.
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And the 2°C target means, according to the IEA again, that you have the stop investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure by 2017!

But the ecomodernists want to keep building new fossil fuel plants. They are in no hurry whatsoever, writing things like “In the long run, next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.” Seriously? Nuclear fusion?

Addendum to time-saving secrets: Skip any article that lists nuclear fusion as one of the “most plausible” answers to climate stabilization. How is a technology for which there is no evidence commercial viability will occur in a timescale that matters to humanity one of “the most plausible pathways”?

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‘Pragmatic’ environmentalists pin hopes on a technological fix

by Graham Lloyd

An international group of scientists from some of the world’s leading institutions has declared a new era of environmentalism that is pro-human and pro-nature, and says better use of technology is the answer to conserving the wild world.

The group, which sees nuclear power as a key to tackling climate change and future sustainability, says “old-style” environmental groups must learn the lesson of why developing nations are looking to China to fund future coal-fired power generation.

International support for the creation of a China-led regional infrastructure bank has been widely viewed as a way for regional economies to avoid US restrictions on lending to new coal plants by established bodies such as the World Bank.

The US has been isolated on the China bank initiative, which has the support of Australia and other traditional US allies.

A provocative “Ecomodernist Manifesto” signed by respected scientists and environmentalists from the US, Britain, India and Australia says “plentiful access to modern energy is an essential prerequisite for human development and for decoupling development from nature”.

Barry Brook, professor of envir­onmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania, said: “China and other developing countries need cheap and concentrated energy and today that comes from coal and gas.

“We can’t ignore that reality.”

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