(Foreword to Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks , October 2011)
This is a question that often comes up in our dealings with global policy makers who spend huge sums on scientific research while simultaneously being fearful of its consequences. Many believe that it is somehow important for the economy in an undefined and non-quantifiable manner, or that it is some kind of logical next step along the path that starts with scientific curiosity. Perhaps a better way of viewing technology would be as a mechanism through which science is applied to meet the needs of society, and that holds true whether the needs of society are getting rich quick, curing cancer, or both.
But there is another less beneficial view of technology. The idea that technology is responsible for environmental degradation, especially when coupled with population growth, is a powerful one that has held true since the industrial revolution. It is human nature to fondly imagine an agrarian pre-industrial utopia, while forgetting the regular plagues and famines that resulted in an average life expectancy of 35 years in pre-industrial Britain. The idea that technology is a bad thing is a situation that has existed for much of the 20th century and persists into the 21st, partly as a result of confusion between technology itself and those individuals and corporations who control and exploit it.
But it is time for a change. In fact a change is inevitable. Human history is littered with technological advances that have changed everything, and much faster than anyone could have imagined. The agricultural, industrial and information revolutions have resulted in massive changes to the economy, society and the way in which we interact with the environment.
Since the second world war, science and technology have moved faster and had a more profound impact on human society than at any other point in human history. We have moved from black and white television exploding onto the market in the early 1950s to more than 800 million people using Facebook within 60 years. While television took 3 decades to diffuse around the world, Facebook did it in 3 years. Technology has driven economic growth around the world and led to vast improvements in the quality of life for much of the global population, but it has come at a price: the rise of consumerism has resulted in environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale.
It is time to reappraise our relationship with technology and take control of its direction. With an increasing global population becoming ever more affluent, the pressure on resources coupled with climate change will inevitably lead to more wars, water shortages, famines and mass migration. Or will it?
If profound economic, societal and environmental changes are inevitable then why do we still address them in the same way we have for millennia, by being helplessly reactive? In the 21st century, science and technology has advanced to a stage where we can start taking control of the fruits of scientific progress rather than being powerless in the face of their development and exploitation.
We already have many of the technologies we need to address major global problems such as water shortages and disease, and there is no reason why inevitable environmental disasters such as oil spills still have to be tackled using antiquated technology when a hundred million dollars could give us the technologies to reduce the impact of oil spills to almost zero. Many other emerging technologies are being developed that would allow the world to support 10 billion people without compromising the tremendous growth in quality of life that has taken place over the last century.
At Cientifica we establish how we can harness technologies for the global good. While we still lack the political will and necessary international institutions, we now have the knowledge and the tools to make the transition from being mere consumers of, and in some respect slaves to technology, to making use of the new scientific revolution to mitigate and minimise global risks.
While it would be foolish to claim that the wise use of science and technology will usher in a utopian age, there is little doubt that we now have the tools to create a sustainable and responsible world where human suffering and environmental degradation can be alleviated while maintaining economic growth.
According to JP Morgan, flying to 21186 miles to Melbourne and back for a clean tech conference generated 5.63 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but unlike most conferences on this subject the hot air emissions were negligible.
The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.
Megatrends
From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”
I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.
Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.
So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act. We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.
The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.
No worries!
The Sir Mark Olifant Cleantech conference has been a lot of fun so far, from Eric Isaac’s opening overview of the the issues (and solutions) to Stefan Hajkowicz’s analysis of megatrends that will shape our future technology development.
I’m still struck by how much cleantech seems to be focused in a few rather obvious areas, something which effectively prices a lot of technologies out of the market, and the excessive valuations thus generated tend to make it almost impossible to get a return for most investors. Sometimes meeting the problem head on isn’t the best strategy, and it is better to wait until a problem has been cracked and then capitalise on the myriad opportunities that spin out – as with mobile phones you don’t have to invent the device to make money from it.
My focus is more on how nanotechnology, by its nature is more akin to what nature does. As Eric Isaacs mentioned this morning, we are almost at the stage where we can create materials by design, or in his his words ‘we can almost taste it’ – something that opens up a whole new world of sustainable everything.
A preview of my presentation is available here – with the caveat that it works better if you hear me tell the story behind it!
The ash cloud heads south east....
While the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland is bad news for some people, it is actually quite interesting from an emerging technologies point of view, and bordering on fascinating if, like me, you somehow managed to shoehorn a big chunk of geology and geomorphology into you education (It’s a frightening thought, but I could have ended up as a geographer!) as well as spending time working at the European Space Agency.
One of the more frequently proposed geoengineering solutions to climate change is to eject large amounts of aerosols into the upper atmosphere which then cut down the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo and the twenty million tons of sulphur dioxide it blasted into the stratosphere was thought to have caused a global cooling of half a degree centigrade, more than offsetting human induced climate change.
One of the key arguments against geoengineering is that we don’t know what the effects would be – and it is also a good idea to know how much the earth is warming by and what is causing it before you start to try to reverse it – but in this case we are learning fast, and collecting huge amounts of data from dozens of earth observation satellites, many of which were launched in response to concerns about climate change and designed specifically to measure it. So this particular eruption may be the one which helps us make that (hopefully) rational and evidence backed decision to use geoengineering should if ever become necessary.
While Eyjafjallajokull is estimated to be spewing ten thousand times less sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere than Pinatubo, the highly sophisticated earth observation satellites launched since Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption means that we are far better placed to study the effects of the eruption, both on the planet as a whole, and as a result of the particular composition of material ejected.
Ash sweeps across Europe, as seen from Envisat
This animation from the European Space Agency shows both the spread of the cloud, and its concentrations of sulphur dioxide, and ESA already has a project named Globvolcano which will “define, implement and validate information services to support volcanological observatories in their daily work by integration of Earth Observation data, with emphasis on observation and early warning.”
The other interesting bit of science we can do this week is investigate the effect of aircraft vapour trails. The water vapour emitted by jet engines has a similar effect to high altitude cud, reducing the amount if radiation reaching the earth during the day and acting as an insulating layer during the night. Work carried outwhen all aircraft were grounded in the US after the September 11th attacks concluded that “Sept. 11-14, 2001, had the biggest diurnal temperature range of any three-day period in the past 30 years.” As with all science, taking a single data point doesn’t prove anything, so having another crack at it might help us understand the effect of aircraft on the climate.
All in all, it’s pretty exciting stuff, and armed with half a dozen earth observation satellites like Envisat bristling with spectrometers there is the opportunity to do some great science.
There’s nothing like the mention of Geoengineering to get environmental groups even madder than putting a wasps nest down their trousers and beating them with a cricket bat, and for good reason. The idea that we could do something about climate change that didn’t involve re-engineering the political system would mean that we don’t have to live in caves, grow beards and ride bicycles. More annoyingly, some kind of techno fix would deprive some groups of a platform for the various other anti capitalist/globalisation/consumer agendas that have somehow got mixed up with sustainability.
Our old friends the ETC group, who spent the last ten years objecting to nanotechnology on rather questionable grounds, have reactivated their global network to write an open letter to “the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California” which aims to look at a voluntary code “for the least harmful and lowest risk conduct of research and testing of proposed climate intervention and geoengineering technologies.”
What really gives the game away is their objection, or rather their outrage on behalf of a number of Philippines farmers groups, to the “almost exclusively white male scientists from industrialized countries” who will be at the conference.
Come on guys, why don’t you just come out and say that you are outraged by the lack of ethnic diversity in science, peeved about people making money out of it and hopping mad about not being seen as being important enough to be invited? What’s geoengineering, synthetic biology, nanotechnology or biotech got to do with it? Apparently absolutely nothing.
I tweeted yesterday that I wondered how NGO’s would try to pop the geoengineering genie back in the bottle, now that it is being actively discussed by the Royal Society. It hasn’t taken the ETC group long to develop a strategy that involves dismissing geoengineering as pure fantasy – just like banning all technology would lead to a perfect world then? But, boy are they angry?
The Royal Society will play an important role in this performance by offering a prestigious platform and global microphone to some modern-day tricksters. The emperor in the children’s fable, encouraged by dishonest tailors, pretends he can see the invisible threads of his fancy new clothes just as the political establishment, aided by scientists, will pretend that technology will save us from the climate crisis. In order to get us all to have faith in this fallacy, they need first to engineer momentum and then get us to believe in fairy tales.
From the vehemence of this piece, accusing the Royal Society of promoting ‘geopiracy’ the ETC group appears to be severely rattled, but as usual they don’t advance any practical solution, and that’s my real beef with this rather misleading piece, that it entirely negative and pretty much the same kind of scaremongering that we would take the Daily Mail to task for.
Given that climate change is an urgent issue, shouldn’t we be doing everything that we can to evaluate ways to mitigate it? Not according to the ETC group who suggest that releasing huge amounts of hot air into the atmosphere is the only solution. Their response is to call for
an international framework to evaluate new technologies, so that governments, in consultation with civil society and the scientific community, can make reasoned and equitable decisions regarding their possible development and/or deployment. The possibility of “dual-use” geoengineering to be unilaterally deployed and its possible commercial applications call for an urgent global resolution. The current governance gap over geoengineering needs to be closed, which will happen only through serious international discussion under the auspices of the United Nations
I wonder how history will judge some of the environmental movement. Will they be seen as the people who saved us from ourselves, or will they be the Luddites who blocked every attempt to find a solution and made a bad situation even worse?
I spent yesterday evening at a rather interesting, and slightly peculiar, debate on geoengineering between David Keith of the University of Calgary and Paul Johnston on Greenpeace. The debate revolved around whether geoengineering could be useful as an approach to addressing climate change, and whether it is just too radical an idea to be even considered.
Geoengineering isn’t anything new, it’s an idea that has been around for fifty years – and there is plenty of evidence that it may work, for example there is a strong correlation between major volcanic eruptions and global cooling so we know what the effect of adding aerosols to the stratosphere is. There is an argument that the planet is a large, complex and poorly understood system so we shouldn’t fiddle with it in case something goes wrong but David Keith argued that we have been geoengineering for most of the last hundred years, albeit unintentionally by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
What surprised me was the Greenpeace position on geoengineering – which was basically a flat ‘No!” The Greenpeace argument went along the lines that proponents of geoengineering think that they know what they are doing, that it is reversible and, horror of horrors, someone might make some money out of it. Most of the arguments were of the straw man variety in order to portray geoengineering as a dangerous idea, invoking the precautionary principle, health & safety legislation and global poverty – the usual tactics for kicking an issue into the long grass.
It’s worth considering that even if we cut emissions to zero next week, it wouldn’t change the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, and David Keith made the point that atmospheric carbon dioxide has a longer half life than nuclear waste which produced a few gasps.
I recently suggested that we need a New Green Agenda, one based on solving problems not just mitigating them, and drawing on everything that science and technology can offer to create a more sustainable future. Greenpeace, rather surprisingly from a scientific viewpoint but obviously from a political one refused to countenance any funding for geoengineering or any trials, even small scale local ones and put up the rather weak argument that it would take funding away from other areas of environmental science. One of the attractions of geoengineering is that it is cheap and uses mainly existing technologies, so a few tens of millions of dollars spent evaluating options is hardly going to handicap the the rest of the research community. I tend to agree with David Keith and growing number of others that if we are serious about climate change then we should be trying to do something about it rather than delaying research.
Probing further it seems that geoengineering horrifies Greenpeace and other NGOs precisely because it does offer a solution. The real reason Greenpeace dislikes ideas such as this is that it may offer politicians an excuse to stop buying into the sustainable/renewable argument which they have been promoting for thirty years, or to put it their terms “may reduce the political and social impetus to reduce carbon emissions.”
Looking at the options available, geoengineering looks to be possible and, apart from ideas such as placing a solar shade at the Lagrange point, is relatively cheap compared with the economic impact of other ways of tackling climate change. However the major obstacles will be political and moral. Paul Johnston admitted that Greenpeace think that geoengineering is inevitable, but this raises the issue of control – one country seeding clouds to increase rainfall could deny water to neighbouring countries for example and provoke conflict, and this is covered by the 1977 Environmental Modification Convention.
It’s for that very reason that I think we’ll see geoengineering continue to attract attention. Any technology that allows a nation to get a technical, commercial or military edge over another – and these three elements are usually connected – is usually worth funding. It’s an area where international treaties will be required and, like most emerging technologies, we can use it to take the edge of climate change or as an economic weapon. The debate over geoengineering is therefore more likely to be a political and moral one rather than a scientific one.
NGOs know this and have already begun the process of marshalling public opinion against ‘irresponsible scientists” who, in a blind panic about climate change are tinkering with things they don’t understand- this is from Doug Parr of Greenpeace last year:
While the real climate solutions are blocked by vested interests seeking big bucks from coal, runways and forest destruction, our government tells us that it is taking “tough decisions” by cosying up to them. The scientist’s focus on tinkering with our entire planetary system is not a dynamic new technological and scientific frontier, but an expression of political despair.
Just imagine a world where you could carry on as normal, but technology provides a way of cleaning up the mess so we don’t all have to live in teepees and ride bicycles? To NGOs that seems as appalling as farming whales or fox hunting, but to many people it sounds like a pretty good idea. I wish that Greenpeace would get over this constant linking of capitalism being bad for the environment and then we could all move forward.
In the light of last nights discussion it seems more probable that it is the environmental groups that are panicking, which makes a rational debate on this unfortunately rather improbable.
Yesterday’s meeting started me thinking about why, despite some NGO finding another potential climate related catastrophe almost every day, there is a feeling of frustration and a lack of progress. It looks to be the fault of the Green movement itself.
If we take a look at the history of the environmental movement, most if it sprang from the anti establishment movement of the early seventies, when people were fighting against corporate greed and government inaction. This was inexorably linked with left of centre politics, and into this rainbow coalition were drawn all of the other popular movements demanding an end to war, liberation for Palestine, legalisation of LSD and a whole variety of other causes. As a result, it is hard to get any rational discussion of environmental issues without running into some rather naive anti capitalist rhetoric, and this probabl;y goes some way to explaining the Green movements confrontational stance. In a nutshell, they are a bunch of old hippies, still fighting the battles of 1975 in 2009 because a) that is all they know how to do and b) there is a natural human instinct to try to preserve the status quo even if you started off fighting to overturn it.
If we look at the green leaders we see people such as Lord Jonathon Porrit and George Monbiot, sitting pontificating about how people should live their lives from a position of unimaginable privilege when viewed from most of the developing world. I have been in plenty of meetings with this strata of the green movement where people have had the arrogance to try to deny developing nations the very technology which would allow them to start improving standards of living. “We’d rather let them starve than risk using GMOs” seems to be the rather depressing view, which completely missed the point that while we in the west are rich enough to waffle on about downshifting, and slacking for the several billion other people living in grinding poverty would result in an early death.
Let’s face it, cycling to work or trading tomatoes for lettuces with your neighbour might make you feel better, but isn’t going to save the world, so what is?
Well it has to start with economic growth. Population will continue to rise anyway, and contrasting the living standards in London and Lagos illustrates why money is important. So demanding that x% of GDP be spent on mitigating climate changes isn’t really going to work because that money is being raised through green taxes which just takes more money out of the economy and leaves less of a margin to do good works with. But stimulating economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean pollution, as I mentioned yesterday the environment in the UK is actually getting cleaner and greener while at the same time we have got considerably richer.
It seems that the established Green movement knows only how to use the stick – taxes and scare stories – and not the carrot to change peoples behaviour. Nudge by Richard Thaler would be a good place to start looking for ideas. In addition this obsession with technology being bad is really holding back progress. technology isn’t all bad, as you’ll find out if you ever need to go into hospital.
The other thing that we can do to make a real difference is to encourage the development of, and if safe, the deployment of the whole range of new and emerging technologies that can address climate change. Should we be bothered that an entrepreneur or a company that comes up with a way to make a major difference to carbon dioxide emissions gets rich on the back of it? Of course not, we should applaud it and hope that it it will encourage others to try. There are a huge range of technologies, from nanotechnologies in thin film solar cells, through to engineering carbon capturing microbes using synthetic biology to solar shaded and geoengineering that we need to develop.
Groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC have fought tooth and claw, and in the dirtiest possible way to encourage the wholesale rejection of technologies. It’s these old hippies with their 1975 mindsets that need to be rejected, not technology. Let’s forget the politics and see some action. If their approach is not appropriate for the 21st century then wither replace them or start a movement that is.
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