[A-List] Destructive creation: structural barriers to techno-optimism

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Henry writes:

As for Mark's concern about a properous China consuming energy, I have two
comments.  I have calculated that at the rate of the past two decades, it will take
China two centuries to catch up with the US in per capita consumption. Secondly,
China's romance with market captalism will be very short lived as reality will fail
to deliver the fancy promises of market fundamentalism.  My view is that pretro
energy will be replaced within the next century.  There was a time when it was
thought that if the world kept building fireplaces, there won't be any trees left
to fuel them. Then the world found coal, and oil and gas and nuclear power.   We
have not even began to tap geo-thermal enegery.  The energy problem is a sunk
investment problem, totally solvable but not without some serious Schumpeterean
creative destruction.

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Many thanks to you and others for helping to invigorate discussion here.
While I agree with you regarding the US productivity mirage, I've got my
doubts about your technological optimism. It's not that ingenuity
doesn't exist, but in addition to the structural barrier of sunk costs
you mention above, there is the matter of time and how little there
seems to be, given the accelerating levels of consumption of
non-renewable resources. And while the history of capitalist development
is filled with happy stories of one substitute found after another,
these came with a high price -- the devastation of acres of rain forest,
the extinction of untold quantities of plant and animal species, and the
progressive erosion of soil: told in excruciating detail in Richard
Tucker's "Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological
Degradation of the Tropical World" (University of California Press, 2000
-- incidentally, a good source of case studies of export-led development
folly). And the neoclassical answer to this, that the increasing expense
of extracting/exploiting/expropriating increasingly rare and/or
inaccessible resources incentivises the search for substitutes is
exactly the problem, rather than reason for hope -- it's only when
irreparable, irreversible depletion and damage has been done that the
incentives become strong enough, while the "externalities" resulting
from that exploitation remain factored out. Hence kerosene was
"discovered" just at the point when the global whale population was on
its last legs and no longer sufficiently plentiful for happy harpoonists
to kill at random.

If I remember, nuclear power was supposed to be the "safe" answer to
carbon-based energy. Meanwhile, the fruits of destructive creation are
presently visiting themselves upon East Asia, with consequences for the
rest of the globe...


'Brown haze' is blanketing Asia and changing weather, warn scientists
By Charles Arthur Technology Editor
The Independent, 12 August 2002

A two-mile-high "brown haze" of human-generated soot and greenhouse
gases is blanketing Asia, threatening hundreds of thousands of lives and
altering rainfall patterns, scientists warn today.

But the effects are being felt around the world, because the particles
in the haze can travel halfway around the globe in a week, reinforcing
the patterns elsewhere.

The findings come on the eve of the World Summit on Sustainable
Development, which opens in Johannesburg on 24 August. But it is
unlikely to be debated at the conference table.

Over Asia, the effect is damaging the monsoon by reducing rainfall,
because it cuts evaporation from the oceans - and without urgent action
it will worsen as the area's cities enlarge and its jungles are razed.
It is already disrupting weather systems, triggering droughts in some
areas and floods in others, preliminary findings suggest.

The "Asian Brown Cloud", as they call it, extends as far east as China,
though the latest study was restricted to south Asia.

The pollution - which has been recognised anecdotally for decades - may
be leading to "several hundreds of thousands" of premature deaths due to
respiratory disease. Results from seven Indian cities suggest that by
the mid-1990s air pollution was responsible for an estimated 37,000
premature deaths each year.

Klaus Töpfer, the executive director of the United Nations Environment
Programme, said the initial findings just published "clearly indicate
that this growing cocktail of soot, particles, aerosols and other
pollutants, is becoming a major environmental hazard for Asia".

Kate Hampton, a climate co-ordinator at Friends of the Earth
International, called for urgent action to tackle the causes. "This
illustrates the consequences of torching forests and burning fossil
fuels in vehicles and power stations," she said.