Every week Thomas Friedman sounds a bit more like Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. Not only is he using the word “breakthrough” ever-so-often, but he is reaching similar conclusions about where the climate movement should focus its efforts and how it can become powerful enough to solve our energy challenges.
In yesterday’s op-ed, “If I.T. Merged with E.T.,” Friedman declared that breakthroughs in clean energy technologies are the key to unleashing the economic potential of the developing world:
“If only we could make a breakthrough in clean, distributed power — an E.T. revolution — it could drive the I.T. revolution into every forgotten corner of the world to create jobs, light up schools and tap the innovative prowess of rural populations, like India’s 700 million villagers. There is a green Edison growing up out here — if only we can give them the light to learn.”
The link between economic opportunity and climate solutions is what Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been emphasizing ever since they helped found the Apollo Alliance in 2003, and today they are advancing a $300 billion public investment project into clean tech to achieve the breakthroughs necessary for fast, clean, and cheap energy sources to be deployed globally. In their recent New Republic piece, “Second Life: A Manifesto for a New Environmentalism,” they expand upon Friedman’s point:
“How could such a massive undertaking be achieved? Not, as environmental leaders insist, by limiting human power but rather by unleashing it… The highest objective of anyone concerned about global warming must be to bring down the real price of clean energy below the price of dirty energy as quickly as possible – most importantly, in places like China. And, for that to happen, we’ll need a new paradigm centered on technological innovation and economic opportunity.”
As much as Friedman and Shellenberger & Nordhaus agree on climate solutions as economic potential, they also agree on the limits of environmentalism: In a September op-ed, “Doha and Dalian,” Friedman dropped a bomb on environmentalists:
“There is no green revolution, or, if there is, the counter-revolution is trumping it at every turn. Without a transformational technological breakthrough in the energy space, all of the incremental gains we’re making will be devoured by the exponential growth of all the new and old “Americans.”
Indeed, as Shellenberger & Nordhaus put it in “Second Life:”
“Environmentalists can rail against consumption and counsel sacrifice all they want, but neither poor countries like China nor rich countries like the United States are going to dramatically reduce their emissions if doing so slows economic growth.”
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There is an acid sensation that accompanies the apprehension of any and of every truth. That sensation is the imposing spectre of realization - of rendering alive - in the domain of the actual world. Here we do not mean the blogosphere. Here we do not mean intellectual combat that is mediated by journals and, in any case, aloof far away in its own discursive outgrowth. What we literally mean - and recall that anything literal must be predicated upon a general host of verities - is that an “ET” revolution to drive the “IT” revolution would be the very incarnation of a stabilizing counter-revolution.
Let me clarify this. In 1999, Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthew (State University of New York Press)published “Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics.” The most relevent chapter here is “Bringing Nature Back In: geopolitical theory from the Greeks to the Global Era.” The authors write:
“The new literature [1999!] on environmental security and conflict is … generally antirealist in its rhetoric and content. At the same time, neorealists have sought to downplay environmental issues and exclude them from the “security studies” subfield of international relations. Yet the recent environmental conflict and security literature emphasizes CONFLICT as an outcome of natural forces, which is consistent with realism’s assumption that conflict, scarcity, and insecurity are endemic in world politics … Because modern social science began its distinctive intellectual career by rejecting natural causes of social outcomes, the implications of the expulsion of nature from social science must be clarified and rethought.”
That, of course, is intellectual mediation. But let’s pause and think. In fact let’s RE-think. First of all, what is the reason for this “new literature” taking so long to set in with policymakers - or at least with responsible politicians who can WIN elective office. What would it mean to BRING NATURE BACK INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES? To me this is a curious question, but in effect we must wake up and understand that, as a matter of fact, nature always HAS been a part of the social sciences. We must consider ourselves, our bodily selves, as part of - indeed dependent upon - nature. These are the selves that DO things in the world.
One of the notions that Shellenberger and Nordhaus evaluate in Break Through is this nebulous “post-materialism.” They do so positively, and they extend very little normative argument. But there is an aspect of post-materialism that presents itself as a bit deluded and even megalomaniacal. This is the idea, born of the “IT revolution”, that ‘anthropos’ is a radically achieved and independent trajectory made possible BY human beings, and one that will continue unabated without having ever to reiterate (perhaps because it is obvious!) that before human beings can make ANYTHING possible, our solar system - Nature, Science - must make US possible.
Disciplinarins and elitists alike are to some extent responsible for this mad hieroglyphic self-image - that is, for believing that cultural and scholarly warfare are still attached to any reality other than that which we have fashioned out of natural material itself. And who can blame them? We all need to make a “living”, and it’s hard to do so if all we do is just kind of “live” and “let be.” So we teach. We write articles. We make art. We BE human. It is wonderful and heartening.
Especially because our personal gains translate in taxation to the underwriting of war-plans that can be implemented.
But this is not all. We have inherited a cultural and political invention that was inherited BEFORE that, and before THAT, too. The apprehension that an “ET” revolution will be the engine for the “IT” revolution represents a radical resetting of the order of being, if such a thing may be said to exist. For schematic purposes, it does. What we mean by an “ET” revolution is a revolution in the REAL - the eternally natural - world. For humans, this means a revolution that appreciates the natural world and utilizes it toward the end of natural AND social harmony. For what did the IT explosion of the 1990’s produce? Debt. Bankruptcy. Consolidation. It produced a redistribution of wealth and a general econo-quake in the vicissitudes and customs of a democratic market economy gone global.
So is it any surprise that by 1999 it started to become evident that enriched intellectual Americans - AT LEAST these folks - had gone off their rockers? No. And it is a shame that 9/11 and neoconservatism - even neorealism - have led to or encouraged the appropriation of nature as unilateral American power. This is telling. It could well mean that those at the top of our nation’s pyramid really DO possess such control as to be the keepers of the earth. But that is speculation - teleology. It isn’t politics, it isn’t environmentalism, and it certainly isn’t a mild form of humanism, which is the only tenable form of humanism. It is what Carl Jung, and maybe the forgotten Greeks, called “cathexis”.
Shellenberger is right to say that the green revolution, if it exists, is trumped by the counter-revolution. That is because the green revolution does not always realize that it IS a counter-revolution, if it is anything at all. Power is ACTUAL revolution. That is your Iraq war. That is your strafing of Syrian facilities. That is your Turkish eye on Kurdistan. That is 9/11. That is your liquidation of assets and tanking of currencies. That is your acid truth. And it isn’t just America, so masochists should get real. All aspiring politics is a counter-revolution. It is in the best interest of this revolution to marshal a peaceful and incontrovertible reply: innovation (ET), reason, perspective, confidence, and civility.
Then, maybe then, will our broadband disappearance be rectified by the mortal awakening of neglected natural selves, communities, and environments.
Peace.
Nice job, Teryn.
MT,
Could you perhaps, oh I dunno, translate your comment into English from PoMo.
I suppose that I could, Mr. Graves. But then again, for your convenience, it would not mean anything at all. While I recognize what you call “PoMo,” do not consider me so single-minded. If you understood a blink of what I said, then that is frankly enough for a response to an article. I suggest you not be so circumscribed - supposing by chance that you are - in your consideration of the “English language.” I do not, however, believe that you are so limited, and therefore I think you can forgive me my ecstatic trespass.
It isn’t about post-modernism, which for all I know, I agree, WAS a sham. Take it easy, though. Be insulted by WHAT I have said, not by how I have said it.
Yours Truly,
Mike.
If IT Merged with ET