Power Shift Away From Green Illusions

[GliderGuider]

Well, there's something in this article to raise everyone's blood pressure. Ozzie Zehner takes on the "productivist" shift in environmentalism, core problems with alternative energy (I hadn't thought about where the capital comes from...), electric cars, biochar and biomass, de-growth - and not not much of it is favourable to the mainstream environmental belief system.

Here's an excerpt:

Power Shift Away From Green Illusions

Mainstream environmental groups are exchanging their principles for power at a suspect rate of exchange. It's not just the alternative energy technologies that rely on fossil fuels. The environmental groups do, too. They rely on funding from the excess wealth accumulated as froth on the top of the fossil fuel economy. But it's not just money. There are other influences too.

Mainstream environmental groups seem transfixed by technological gadgetry and have succumbed to magical thinking surrounding their pet fetishes. The last thing you want to give to a growing population of high consumers is more "green" energy. Even if it did work as advertised, who knows what we would do with it, but it almost certainly wouldn't be good for other species on the planet or, for that matter, long-term human prosperity.

In addition to the money and magic, there are silo effects. That is, asking narrow questions that can be answered with the methods at hand. We've seen a decline in the social science and humanities as ways of knowing something about our world, as if the human spirit and the natural world were materials to be titrated in a test tube. We are afraid to ask questions that can't be answered by the clever methods we've created.

Finally, there's the influence of media, which I spend a whole chapter dissecting in Green Illusions. Green media has become a war of press releases - a contest of half-baked models and glorified science fair experiments. It doesn't have to be this way. We can change it all if we are willing to think and inquire differently as concerned citizens.

[patrice]

1. IMO, what calls itself "the Left" is full of magical thinking, this excerpt nails it, and that kind

thinking is why what calls itself "the Left" will forever be "the Left" - instead of the Left constituting enough political ground to actually have a positive effect on something such as alternative energy.

[GliderGuider]

5. It wouldn't make any difference.

This is not a political problem.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

2. He's right and wrong

He's right that the stuff touted so far won't get us far. But it will get us farther than he gives credit for.
But the real solution is very simple and will never happen in the US: put people in cities as dense as Manhattan island. You get all kinds of benefits from this:

1 - Common walls make heating and cooling a far more efficient process.
2 - Short distances mean walking, bicycling, and transit all become superior to driving a car for everyday needs.
3 - Efficient use of land means more is left undisturbed as countryside, giving the planet larger and more robust lungs.

But we worship the mortgage interest deduction and the car. So it will never happen.

Recommended this book before, but will do so again. It's merciless on this subject: Green Metropolis

[patrice]

3. +1! But wondering if that "will never happen in the US" can be understood in terms of the

"social sciences and the humanities" Zehner mentions "as ways of knowing something about our world", specifically as means to discover if there are conditions under which "the real solution" is achievable through progressive step-wise approximations.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

6. You have to attack it via the huge economic incentives to sprawl we have.

You'd have to eliminate the mortgage interest and property tax deductions, double the tax on gasoline (no reason for it to be as low as it is), eliminate the capital gains exclusion on the proceeds from the sale of a house, get rid completely of Fannie and Freddie, who provide a massive subsidy to suburban sprawl via maintenance of a secondary market for home mortgages, and so on.
Hard hearted, practical stuff. Never happen.

[patrice]

7. Got it. Am still wishing, though, that there were a calculus that could say what a minimal proportio

n of the types of changes you described would be to possibly tilt others systems far enough to make that sort of change useful.

What I'm thinking about here is the global-fuzziness of the objective and how that translates to something like an all or nothing assumption about solutions, which all isn't going to happen, as you point out, so it turns out to be nothing.

And the reason I'm making that point is because of those who have not yet bought into the incentives you sketch here, so they still have options, which they may consider in new ways if qualified outcomes could be at least hypothetically identified well enough to make sense of the changes in their lives.

Just brainstorming here about how sometimes that "Never happen" could be really more a matter of process than we think it is.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

8. Not sure what you're driving at,

no pun intended. The systems we have now are in place because very large amounts of money have been thrown at homebuilders, to take one piece of this large puzzle, and they have used that money to of course make as much as they can. In their case, that means building ever larger houses on as cheap a parcel of land as they can get away with, and that usually means paving over a farm on the edge of some metro area. Besides eliminating a large piece of the countryside, this maximizes the distances people have to travel to get to their jobs and to shopping and to just about anything they want to do. It also makes public transit impractical.
You have to reverse the incentives. I don't think you can ever stop "growth", in the sense of people buying things to make their lives more comfortable and enjoyable. But you can redirect it. One hopeful thing is that young people around the world are less idolatrous of cars because they are far more into their digital devices. That happened spontaneously, and is a good thing. More of that kind of thing has to happen.

[GliderGuider]

4. The real "solution" would be to run out of fossil fuels - soon.

The human race is "addicted" to growth, activity and consumption the way the human body is "addicted" to food, water and air. And fossil fuels put the fire under the growth engine. Unless that engine is stopped, all other tinkering is essentially moot.

Unfortunately the world is going to run out of thermometer long before it runs out of burnable carbon.

So it goes.