Science & Climate Change - Closing Thought: Myopic Fears, Transformative Solutions

 

These climate discussions we've been discussing this week are about a complex set of considerations involving assessing trade-offs, allocation of resources, forecasting, and so on – and one thing we know for sure from history is that present day analyses that fail to factor in this complex suite of considerations are always woefully sub-standard in their analysis, leaving their protagonists ill-equipped to make prudent decisions and sensible forecasting.

Here’s what else we know. We do know that virtually every time we’ve tried to solve problems without foresight for how we are growing in knowledge and enhancing our capabilities we make errors. For example, in the late 19th century, Manhattan faced a serious "horse problem." Horses were the primary means of transportation, pulling carriages, wagons, and streetcars, and their population created significant issues, like massive amounts of manure, filthy, smelly streets, a disposal of dead horses problem, and the spread of diseases due to the unsanitary conditions. What those concerned didn't foresee was the advent of a transformative technology: the automobile. By the early 20th century, motor vehicles began to replace horses, effectively solving the horse problem in a relatively short period. By the 1920s, cars had become the dominant mode of transportation, and horses were largely relegated to recreational or ceremonial roles.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and societal collapse, due to insufficient food supply – being myopic about advances in agricultural technologies, including high-yield crops, synthetic fertilisers, and modern irrigation – and how they dramatically increased food production, and ensured sufficient food for growing populations in many parts of the world. And we all know about Malthus’s similarly miscalculated prophecies of doom in the late 18th century, inaccurately predicting that population growth would outpace food production, leading to global famine and societal collapse.

There are so many more examples of this kind. People have thought there was a potential wood crisis without understanding the transition to coal (and later coal and electricity). People have feared urban darkness by failing to see the transition from oil lamps or candles to gas and electric lighting. People have been concerned about a potential telecommunications saturation with increasing population, with not enough insight into how a digital telecommunications revolution made communication scalable on a global level. Early computer scientists worried that the memory storage and processing power of early computers could never scale to meet the needs of more complex tasks – overlooking the invention of transistors, followed by integrated circuits and modern semiconductor technology, that enabled exponential growth in computing power.

These examples, and countless more, reflect exactly what is inadequate about extreme environmentalism, which continues to spread unremittingly like an unhealthy social contagion. It’s not that we need speculative faith that the trajectory of technological and scientific innovation will just eliminate all problems that once seemed insurmountable. But the balance of analysis and reaction is way too far on the myopic side of failing to account for the transformative power of present breakthroughs and of potential of future breakthroughs – largely because the whole thing has been politicised and manipulated to pay scant regard to them. These truths don’t serve politicians’ interests well, they don’t make splashy headlines for the media, they don’t enable the narcissism of virtue-signalling, and they are thinly spread so they are harder to apprehend for people whose considerations and agendas lack sufficient balance, perspective, wisdom and historical knowledge.