You’re forgiven if you have missed it, but there’s a rhetorical war being waged on blogs and in the tradition media for the soul of the modern environmental movement. I’ve written of this concept before, and as I see it there are two primary groups involved: the conservationists and what the Pragmatists. Conservationists are typified by the old-gaurd environmental organizations the Sierra Club and Greenpeace being the most prominent. Pragmatists are right now championed by one of my favorite organizations TerraPass; some great pragmatic green writing is going on over at their TerraBlog.
I just finished reading a thought-provoking book written by a staunch conservationist, “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage” by Heather Rogers. In it, Rogers lays out the fundamental argument of the Conservationist ethic: waste is immoral. This is certainly a logical argument that follows the simple syllogism that waste causes tremendous environmental degradation, our environment supports our very existence, therefore wanton waste will lead to our destruction. Like I said, simple. Or, maybe not.
The Morality of Waste
The problem with this argument is that I can easily construct a scenario in which it fails. If waste is entirely recycled, and the only requirement is energy input (from a renewable source, feasibly), then waste is not immoral. The environmental degradation caused by our current disposal practices are what cause waste to be harmful. Of course, harm will be caused to the degree that resources are not completely recycled (including any emissions), so really the morality of wasteful production boils down to an engineering question: can we reduce the harmful side-effects to “sustainable” levels?
This is precisely what the green capitalists seek to do. Rogers mentions them in her final chapter before finally dismissing their viewpoint with a fallacy. The green capitalists want to reduce the harmful effects of mass production through market-dominated measures, thus removing the harm of their practices. Rogers, however, believes waste itself to be the problem, rather than the harm caused when it is incompletely recycled. Thus, her dismissal of the green capitalist position, that even if they are successful they will not reduce waste, seems to her entirely appropriate. But that’s just the point, if they are successful, then waste will no longer be a problem!
The feasibility of green capitalism in the form mentioned in her book is certainly dubious. The position she mentions (sorry I don’t have it handy right now to mention the people she discusses) rejects government regulations, favoring voluntary restrictions and consumer pressure exerted by a fully-aware consuming populace. Though this is the subject of a whole lot of discussion, let me just say that unregulated markets value nothing other than profit, not even human life. In order to make capitalism a suitable mechanism for human progress, some fundamental ground rules must be laid. Profit has to then depend on artificial externalities introduced into the market by nation-states, without it, capitalism would be an all-consuming source of destruction. So, governments are required to introduce environmental costs into the market, and we’re already seeing that writing on the wall with cap-and-trade systems in much of the rest of the world.
Conservationists mistakenly believe that there is some deep moral value in their conservation ethic, but unfortunately technological progress erodes their cause. These “techno-fixes” are believed by Conservationists to be all ultimately doomed to failure, as man’s ability to control his environment could never engineer our way out of our current environmental problems. This is an interesting, and ultimately indefensible, position given that we engineered our way into our problems in the first place. Sure, there exists some tipping point beyond which environmental positive-feedback changes overwhelm their negative-feedback restraints and changes come very rapidly. But, there is no magic to the tipping point, and it is entirely possible to engineer ourselves back over it once we’ve passed it.
The Pragmatist Postion
Okay, I’ve argued myself out on a limb here because I’ve claimed that, in effect, engineering will save us all, and conservation is a waste of time. Let me back off that by saying that 1) we are nowhere near being able to completely recycle our waste (and our emissions), and 2) our engineering may not proceed fast enough to prevent massive and catastrophic losses due to environmental degradation. Let me instead state my faith in the exponential power of Progress with a capital P.
This is the position of the green Pragmatist: we don’t need to solve every single environmental problem today, we just need to move in the right direction. I think everyone would agree with this sentiment, but unfortunately Conservationist groups don’t abide by it. They follow an all-or-nothing approach that not only alienates themselves from a sizable group of the public, but prevents any significant progress from occurring. Their moral certitude in their position is so complete that compromise on anything, even if it means setting us in the right direction, is unthinkable. This has left us with thirty years of gridlock on environmental issues, and in the meantime things aren’t going in the right direction.
When Clinton was unable to convince the Republican Congress to pass the Kyoto Protocol, he simply let it languish rather than drafting legislation that would begin the long process of changing national attitudes. We could have ignored the emissions targets specified by the Protocol and enacted a cap-and-trade system with much more generous limits. Then, system in place, everyone would have seen that it wasn’t the economy-destroying measure that the right claimed it to be. At that point, the limits could be reduced further, moving us along the path toward first stabilization, then reduction of emissions.
But that didn’t happen because Clinton’s environmental policy was dominated by the Conservationist old guard. Now, ten years on we are way above 1997 emissions, and no real progress is in sight. The closest we’ve gotten to a real discussion on the matter is a documentary film put out by an ex-politician (if such a creature exists) that everyone loves to hate. This is the future of Conservationism, and it ain’t green.
Time for Progress
Back to the title of this entry: the war between Conservationism and Pragmatism. The NYTimes has carried a series of pieces both in news and op-ed form about the debate over carbon offsets (see my last post) over the last week or so. In an article published last week, the president of the Sierra Club spouts this gem: “People view offsets as papal indulgences that let them make environmentally bad decisions.” Here, Mr. Becker makes a direct analogy between the moral issue of indulgences and the seemingly profligate wastefulness of carbon offsets. The problem with this analogy is that carbon offsets actually offset your emissions with actual emissions reductions elsewhere whereas papal indulgences merely whitewashed bad behavior.
When this point is made to a Conservationist, they have two responses 1) carbon offsets often don’t work (again see my last post) and 2) not everyone can offset their emissions this way because if everyone is offsetting, no-one is reducing. The first response is a matter of accounting, and there are several reputable companies that do it right. The second matter is easily addressed by the fact that not everyone is going to by offsets. In fact, offsets aren’t even the answer. But they do move us in the right direction.
Properly-executed, offsets establish a market-based mechanism similar to cap-and-trade that directly links profit to reducing emissions. Government regulations are absolutely required to move offsets beyond the lilliputian effort they represent today into the massive global exertion that will be required to solve human-caused global warming. Luckily, the markets will do the heavy lifting for us if we set things up right.
Progress is a funny thing, sometimes it expands exponentially beyond even our wildest speculation, while other times it fails us. The Internet permeates our culture and daily lives in ways scarcely imagined even a decade ago, while rocketry remains the realm of the defense contractor. Both of these inventions promised to revolutionize existing at their outset, but only the Internet offered profits. Without profits, the massive fiberoptic pipes needed to support YouTube would not have been laid. Without profits, NASA is still in the game of building new spaceships and justifying the existence of human spaceflight.
Imagine the power for good inherent in a properly-constructed market. Capitalism can flex its mighty powers of efficiency and clean up our wasteful existence far more quickly than more heavy-handed morality measures envisioned by the Conservationists. Instead of urging consumers and corporations to cut back, put environmental costs into the markets. Properly priced, a unit of coal-generated energy will be a hell of a lot more expensive than wind, nuclear, and maybe even solar energy. So instead of turning that thermostat down to save the planet, we can all turn it up to increase the profits for clean renewable energy.
But none of this will happen overnight, and if it is ever to happen we will inevitably falter on the way to a sustainable future. For Pragmatists, that’s okay. But for Conservationists, they demand that future arrives right now, fully formed. The public, and opposing political forces, will never accept that. So, for all of us, and for all of the causes that Conservationists support, lets hope the Pragmatists win this war because the environment just isn’t going to wait.
