If you ask the average Silicon Valley wunderkind, he (more than likely a he) will tell you that the problems facing the survival of our species on this planet can and will be solved by science and technology. It’s the mantra of technological solutionism.
After all, technological advancements in agriculture practices have drastically increased crop yields to support a growing global population. The quality of durable consumer goods continues to increase while the price continues to decrease. Automation and artificial intelligence are combining forces to perform many mundane and mind-numbing tasks that formerly only humans could perform.
We are creating enough data to fill 250,000 Libraries of Congress every day. In 2017 alone, we will have created more data than in the last 5,000 year of human existence. This is non-linear progress, often exponential (or geometric) growth, as opposed to that straight linear line we we’ve come to expect from most of human progress, measuring such things as life expectancy, wage growth, or overall quality of life.
In 1969, the whole of NASA’s computing power would not equal the average smart phone of today. And there is no question that the growth in computing and many other technologies will continue ever-accelerating along this geometric path upward. The efficiency of human flight, electrical efficiency of per KWh of computing, computer memory, or the quality of digital cameras, among many other technologies, are all experiencing this explosive growth.
Why shouldn’t, then, technologists and futurists across the spectrum – from Silicon Valley coders to university research professors – be sanguine, if not outright Pollyannaish, about the possibility of technology tackling the endemic problems facing world civilizations?
Well, Houston, we have a problem. We’re not technology, we’re human, and our very biology makes it very difficult to process the implications exponential growth. For most of human existence our lives were not much different from the lives of our parents. And until the Industrial Revolution, we experienced only very slow, linear progress – we’re preprogramed by evolution for slow change, not detonations of civilizational change that are not happening every generation, but rather every decade, or in many cases, every year.
The problem that technologists forget too easily is that technology is not government, which is made up of people carrying around 3 lbs. of grey matter with the salinity of the ocean from which they came. They are the ones making policy decisions about how these technologies will be used to better mankind, if at all. And what little wisdom they may possess is not increasing exponentially.
Despite our mind boggling technological and scientific advancement, we are not-so-slowly destroying our planet. Yet one of the many well-known nonpolitical causes of climate skepticism (paywall) is that day to day change is essentially unobservable, and given our biologically based psychological bias toward incremental change it is easy to intuit that it is not happening at all (one might recall the Senator with the snowball who had the epiphany that the climate debate was settled because it snowed in D.C.). Nonetheless, the rate of this destruction, like that of technology, is accelerating geometrically. While Tech gurus titillate the population with their armchair musings about colonizing Mars (viz. Elon Musk) or building floating Libertarian utopian nation states on the high seas (viz. Peter Thiel), we mere mortals occupy ourselves with quotidian chicken-cackling about the utility of the latest app, the battery life of the newest laptop, or how intuitive the controls are for our Internet of Things devices. Indeed, I expect that the tech world will be bickering about some banality of a tech issue on social media when global warming really gets its groove on and we begin to boil in our own excrement.
Perhaps the best nonscientific piece written about the science of manmade climate change appeared in the July 10 issue of New York Magazine, entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” David Wallace-Wells strips the scientific literature of its neutral academic tone and talks about the real life implications of the drastic acceleration of global warming as the Arctic permafrost warms and releases its 1.8 trillion tons of carbon as methane, which on a two-decade timescale is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Forget for the moment about rising sea levels: vast swaths or our planet will not be uncomfortable, they will be uninhabitable. Deserts would be too hot and too dry for Mad Max. In humid semi-tropical regions, including portions of America’s Deep South, walking around in 105-degree heat with 90 percent humidity would be lethal. At an 11-degree increase in mean global temperature, about half of the world’s population would simply cook to death. For those fortunate to live in cooler climes, there’s the crop failures, plagues, poison air, poison oceans, perpetual wars, mass migrations, and economic collapse to look forward to.
Of course some of my rural conservative friends (I come from good hillbilly stock) who have internet connections or AM radio like to point out that the Earth has heated up before because of greenhouse gases unrelated to human activity. Sure is has, most notably 252 million years ago when temperatures rose by 5 degrees, causing the extinction of 97 percent of all species on the planet. Wallace-Wells notes that we’re adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere 10 times faster.
The rapid abandoning of fossil fuels and the adoption of clean energy technologies could of course save us, but as I said, politicians must make these public policy decisions: technology can’t make the decision for itself, and the free market simply won’t, as it doesn’t like disruption, and likes the current energy situation just fine, thank you very much (after all conservatism is mostly about conserving the status quo). Adding local insult to global injury, America’s knuckle-dragger-in-Chief pulled us out of the Paris Agreement, is committed to increasing fossil fuel extraction, and is vehemently against any kind of carbon tax. Ironically, Trump’s imbecilic supporters in red states will cook to death in their Barcaloungers and wife-beaters (“Honey, does it feel hot to you?”). Schadenfreude aside, though, they’re more likely to try to escape illegally over Trump’s southern border wall to reach the cooler highlands of Mexico, as the Northwest will be plumb full of Easterners flooded out of their coastal cities.
In three words – public policy matters.
The Obama administration took climate change seriously, as it did the fact that weening ourselves from fossil fuels and investing in clean energy technologies would be a win-win trifecta: a win for our environment, a win for the future human habitation of our Earth, and a win for our economy.
Of course one would not expect such forward looking (I dare say progressive) approach from an administration led by an insufferable moron, and the Tangerine Tornado does not disappoint. He has systematically walked back the furtive baby steps taken toward making the planet sustainable much to the glee of polluters and climate change deniers, and not just by gutting the EPA. (Scott Pruitt, the current EPA administrator from Oklahoma, is friends with his fellow climate-change-denying yokel from the same state, Jim Inhofe – the Senator with the snowball.) There’s a long list of entities and people who are chomping at the bit to roll back government support of renewables – from ALEC to the Koch brothers to ExxonMobil – and the Trump administration is all ears.
As I’ve said before, if there is single policy issue that we must get right, it is climate change. Without that, nothing else matters because our species simply won’t be long for this world. To put it another way, there are no wealth inequality policy discussions, infrastructure spending plans, or transgender bathroom debates on a dead planet.
Don’t get me wrong – feel free to applaud the possibilities of technological progress, attend TED Talks given by the Silicon Valley’s idiot-savants, quants, and futurists, and wonder slack-jawed at the possibilities of artificial intelligence at your pleasure. But make no mistake: we’re already beyond the point of reversing man-make global warming. Things are going to get uncomfortable and most of our lives are going to be disrupted in some way. The relevant question now is: Are we going to survive as a species?
That question won’t be answered by a technological breakthrough – clean energy technology is already here and economically viable. If it is going to be answered at all, it will be through political action.