Another hard task is to beware of the plausible little stories we tell ourselves. In 1998 I was sure that the Y2K bug would be a major problem, and said so in public and to clients of Global Business Network. My wrong prediction was based on a neat little story I told myself. My own PC was pathetically vulnerable to bugs in the software, which could lead to a cascade of problems ending in the blue screen of death. Surely, I presumed, the huge old mainframes of the world and their ancient software would be even more vulnerable to a bug as deeply embedded as I thought Y2K must be. The world was facing the blue screen of death! I should have listened to Danny Hillis, who has designed whole computer platforms. He predicted that Y2K would lead, at worst, to some dog licenses not being renewed on time. I should have listened at a dinner in 1998 with senior Amazon.com engineers. One of them responded to my rant about Y2K by sweetly inquiring, “Do you also believe in fairies?”
Lesson: Question convenient fables; listen most closely to the scientists who know the facts best, have studied them longest, and aren’t biased by an agenda or an employer with an agenda.
Following the publication of his Plows, Plagues and Petroleum, climatologist William Ruddiman found he was suddenly the target of a barrage of propaganda:These newsletters opened a window on a different side of science, a parallel universe of which I had been only partly aware. The content of these newsletters purports to be scientific but actually has more in common with hardball politics.
Most of these articles come from contrarian web sites that receive large amounts of financial support from industry sources. In many cases, the authors are paid directly by industry for the articles they write. . . .
This alternative universe is really quite amazing. In it, you can “learn” that CO2 does not cause any climatic warming at all. You can find out that the world has not become warmer in the last century, or that any warming that has occurred results from the Sun having grown stronger, and not from rising levels of greenhouse gases. One way or another, most of the basic findings of mainstream science are rejected or ignored.
Quasi-scientific propaganda against climate change is no different from quasi-scientific propaganda against genetic engineering. Both try to harness science to a political agenda.
Eliminating “bought” scientists still leaves plenty of legitimate scientists who disagree, sometimes fiercely, on any particular issue. “In science,” John Brockman reminds those confused by the combat, “debate is the way people work together, the way they advance their ideas.” Geneticist Pamela Ronald, in Tomorrow’s Table, offers a short course on how to distinguish science from rumor and how to weigh a scientific debate. Her major points:Examine the primary source of information. . . . Ask if the work was published in a peer-reviewed journal. . . . Check if the journal has a good reputation for scientific research. . . . Determine if there is an independent confirmation by another published study. . . . Assess whether a potential conflict of interest exists. . . .
I would add to that: Watch for trends. Over time, what does the growing preponderance of evidence indicate? Is a consensus among scientists emerging?
• Environmentalists were right to be inspired by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book on pesticides, Silent Spring, but wrong to place DDT in the category of Absolute Evil (which she did not). Most of her scientific assessments proved right, some didn’t—such as her view that DDT causes cancer. In an excess of zeal that Carson did not live to moderate, DDT was banned worldwide, and malaria took off in Africa. Quoted in a 2007 National Geographic article, Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said, “The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.” These days, environmental organizations such as World Wildlife Fund support the judicious antimalaria use of DDT on household walls as one element of “integrated vector management,” along with bed nets, larvicides in standing water, and other measures that could lead to totally eradicating the disease from the world. When malaria disappears, so can DDT.
Science too often gets perverted by politics. You can see it in two exemplary case studies: Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery: A True Crime Story (1998), by Michael Harris, and Degrees of Disaster: Prince William Sound: How Nature Reels and Rebounds (1994), by Jeff Wheelwright. In the cod story, you learn that while independent scientists were predicting the collapse of the declining fishery in the 1980s, Canadian politicians and government scientists pretended all was well, in part because they felt a responsibility to protect the jobs of the fishing communities of Newfoundland. The collapse came in 1989. Fishing for cod was totally banned in 1992, but the cod fishery still has not recovered, and it may never; tens of thousands of jobs were lost permanently in Newfoundland and other Maritime Provinces.
A similar sequence is playing out in one fishery after another—haddock, tuna, salmon, rockfish. Three fishery-preserving strategies that show promise are: ocean reserves that ban all fishing in designated areas and allow stocks to recover; a system of catch shares called “individual transferable quotas,” which has already saved the halibut fishery in Alaska; and carefully managed mariculture. As Jacques Cousteau told me in 1976, “Fishing is hunting. . . . It must be eliminated completely and replaced by farming if we are to be civilized. What we call civilization originated in farming. We are still barbarians in the sea.”
Degrees of Disaster, the close-up story of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, is replete with awkward truths that didn’t make it into the warring scientific reports so sumptuously funded by both sides of the controversy. The massive cleanup efforts did more environmental harm than the spill itself, though they did provide an economic boom for the Prince William Sound region. The biologically richest ocean habitat in the area was inside the emptied cargo holds of the grounded ship: an entire food chain from bacteria up to herring and salmon was feeding on the oil. People were worried about aromatic hydrocarbons in wild salmon after the spill, but it turned out that the highest level reached was one ten-thousandth of what was normally found in the local traditionally smoked salmon. The real lesson of the oil spill at Prince William Sound is how resilient many natural systems are and how rapidly they bounce back when human pressure backs off even a little.
Environmentalists do a public service when they help to depoliticize science. In 2008, Britain’s Labour government was poised to ban plastic grocery bags because they were thought to get into the sea and entangle marine birds and mammals. A marine biologist at Greenpeace, David Santillo, spoke up: “It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. On a global basis, plastic bags aren’t an issue.” The government action, it turned out, was based on a misreading of a Canadian report that 100,000 marine animals were killed by entanglement in discarded fishing gear and nets in a period of four years. Grocery bags had nothing to do with the problem.
Scientists freely criticize each other and lambaste anti-Darwinians, but they are weirdly polite with environmentalists. It smells of condescension. Every biologist I know is dismayed by the Green campaign against genetic engineering, but the only one who speaks out is Peter Raven. Climatologists see the need for nuclear power, but the only ones who publicly criticize environmentalists for their opposition are Jim Lovelock and James Hansen. It’s time to stop coddling environmentalists. Their motivation is not fragile. Their effectiveness will increase to the degree that they are armed with scientific sophistication and discipline. If they are treated as peers by scientists—which means harshly—they might become peers.
Years ago, environmentalists hated cars and always tried to ban them. Then Amory Lovins came along. He decided that the automobile was the perfect leverage point for large-scale energy conservation, and he set about designing and promoting radically more efficient cars. Lovins singlehandedly converted the environmental movement from loathing the auto industry to fruitfully engaging with it. That’s the engineering approach. Instead of yelling “Stop!” engineers figure out what the problem is, and then make it go away. They don’t have to argue about what is wrong; th
ey show what is right.
Another Green issue that responded well to an engineering approach is the design of buildings. Paul Hawken describes how the LEED rating system came into existence:Buildings . . . use 40 percent of all material and 48 percent of the energy in the United States alone. In 1993 David Gottfried, a successful but disillusioned developer, and Rick Fedrizzi, an executive at the Carrier corporation, gathered a small group of architects, suppliers, builders, and designers in order to create a rigorous set of green building standards. Today, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) comprises 6,200 institutional members and 85,000 active participants, and green building councils exist in Japan, Spain, Canada, India, and Mexico. No one has done the metrics, but in its short life USGBC may have had a greater impact than any other single organization in the world on materials saved, toxins eliminated, greenhouse gases avoided, and human health enhanced. It collaborates with designers, architects, and businesses—not always easy, because their movement means the company’s products must change—in order to define and incrementally raise the environmental standards of green buildings by means of a rating system called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
Now developers and city planners compete to earn the highest LEED ratings—Silver, Gold, or Platinum. The bragging rights are worth the extra money they spend.
• For many environmentalists, the entry to an engineer’s way of thinking came with a book by Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997). The book is meant to inspire engineers to study nature for design ideas, but along the way, it teaches nonengineers to respect engineering. “Unlike the Industrial Revolution,” Benyus writes, “the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.” Among the examples she explores aresolar cells copied from leaves, steely fibers woven spider-style, shatterproof ceramics drawn from mother-of-pearl, cancer cures compliments of chimpanzees, perennial grains inspired by tallgrass, computers that signal like cells, and a closed-loop economy that takes its lessons from redwoods, coral reefs, and oak-hickory forests.
And she extracts nine basic principles:Nature runs on sunlight. Nature uses only the energy it needs. Nature fits form to function. Nature recycles everything. Nature rewards cooperation. Nature banks on diversity. Nature demands local expertise. Nature curbs excesses from within. Nature taps the power of limits.
(In this formulation, Nature looks suspiciously like a liberal Democrat. Since Benyus got her degree in forestry, she could probably compile a fine Devil’s Dictionary version of her list. Here’s mine:Nature rewards efficiency: The most efficient way of life is that of a parasite. Nature is merciless: The best way to control your niche is to annihilate competitors. Nature honors property: Stake out your turf and defend it with your life, or starve. Nature favors opportunistic invaders, such as kudzu and humans. Nature is parsimonious: Eat excess children.
Through the success of the book and a campaign of lectures and work-shops by Benyus and coworkers, biomimicry established itself firmly and effectively. A 2008 book from the National Academy of Sciences noted:In the last decade, there has been an explosion of information about unusual natural structures that are superstrong, superadhesive, superhydrophobic, superhydrophilic, superefficient, self-cleaning, self-healing, and self-replicating, with superior designs and intricate shapes. Biological materials are also often multifunctional, a characteristic highly desirable in artificial materials and processes.
Along the way, researchers discovered that nature is extremely difficult to mimic in detail. You can fruitfully steal ideas and mechanisms, but natural processes defy simple imitation because they are the irrational product of timeless evolution rather than design. A 2008 article in National Geographic spelled out the problem:The main reason biomimetics hasn’t yet come of age is that from an engineering standpoint, nature is famously, fabulously, wantonly complex. . . . To make the abalone’s shell so hard, 15 different proteins perform a carefully choreographed dance that several teams of top scientists have yet to comprehend. The power of spider silk lies not just in the cocktail of proteins that it is composed of, but in the mysteries of the creature’s spinnerets, where 600 spinning nozzles weave seven different kinds of silk into highly resilient configurations.
Birds showed us that heavier-than-air flight is possible, and their structure suggested two wings at the front of a flying machine and a stabilizer in back. But the bird’s wing flap was too hard to imitate, so for propulsion humans devised rotating wings (the propeller)—something new to nature. (The idea presumably came from the previous invention of windmills. Instead of taking energy out, put energy in; run the vanes backward, and make wind.)
• As the designers and builders of our fabricated infrastructure, engineers are comfortable with taking on natural infrastructure, nudging nature’s processes where needed with human ingenuity. Got a flood-prone river? Moderate it with dams and collect some electricity, free of greenhouse gases, at the same time.
Greens interested in engineering solutions for environmental problems but nervous about their hubris will watch with fascination and horror what happens over the coming decades in China, a nation run by engineers rather than lawyers. New Scientist reported in 2007:Until this year’s 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China . . . every member of the central bastion of power—the Standing Committee of the Politburo—was an engineer by training. President Hu Jintao is a graduate of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, often referred to as China’s MIT, while the premier, Wen Jiabao, trained as a geologist.
When China goes Green, it goes Green big. “The Chinese have purchased 35 million solar water heaters, more than the rest of the world combined,” said a 2007 article in Seed magazine, andChina currently ranks sixth in the world in total wind power production, . . . but by 2020 it aims to increase its share by 1,200 percent, to 30,000 megawatts of power. . . . In 2000, [Beijing] took 26,000 heavily polluting minibuses off the road in a week. . . . Across China, the government is constructing massive solar-and biofuel-powered eco-cities 30 times the size of the largest green communities elsewhere in the world.
When Kevin Kelly was traveling in China in 2006, he found that every elementary school in every village had a sign over the door in Mandarin with the following guidance:LOOK UP TO SCIENCE.
CARE FOR YOUR FAMILY.
RESPECT LIFE.
RESIST CULTY RELIGION.
(That raises the question of whether environmentalism is a culty religion. It clearly won’t be in China.)
• Meanwhile, in North America and Europe, environmental problems are treated as commercial opportunities, and Green entrepreneurs lead the way. Engineers are being hired in droves. They don’t know or care much about environmental traditions, causes, or romantic attitudes. Because they are interested in solving problems, not in changing behavior, technology is the first thing they reach for when looking for a solution. A leading Green venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Vinod Khosla, told New Scientist that improvements in energy efficiency or changes in the laws produce only small, incremental gains. “A new technology, on the other hand, can make a 200 per cent or a 400 per cent or a 1000 per cent difference.”
A notable example of rethinking a whole industrial domain in environmental terms is the discipline of “Green chemistry,” named and defined by Paul Anastas in 1991, when he was head of industrial chemistry at the Environmental Protection Agency. His now-canonical “Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry” are not known to most environmentalists; but they should be, because they outline exactly how to head off the worst form of pollution after greenhouse gases, namely toxic chemicals. (“Minimize waste by using catalytic reactions,” advises one principle. “Maximize atom economy,” says another.)
When environmentalists are wrong, it is frequently technology that they are wrong about, and they wind up supporting parochial Green goals at the cost of comprehensive ones. That happened with space technology, nuclear technology, a
nd genetic engineering. If your default position on a new technology is suspicion, you forfeit the ability to deploy it for your own purposes. “The environmental movement has so far concentrated its attention upon the evils that technology has done rather than upon the good that technology has failed to do,” says Freeman Dyson. But focusing on Green technological opportunity requires a shift in attitude toward novelty.
What a joy it would be to see a new generation of hardcore environmentalists as intrigued by new infrastructure-scale technologies as they are (and as I am) by new ultralight hiking gear made of titanium and Pertex. Their seriousness would be driven not by the romantic love of decline but by a desire to grab progress and direct it toward Green goals. Their potential tools would range from the molecular (genes and atoms) to the cosmic (solar winds and dark energy). They would follow their cellphones into the core of life.
“How you think matters more than what you think,” says political scientist Philip Tetlock. The most important distinction in quality of judgment, he declares, was first expressed by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.” Hedgehogs have a grand theory they are happy to extend into many domains, relishing its parsimony, expressing their views with great confidence. Foxes, on the other hand, are skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events. Hedgehogs don’t notice or care when they’re wrong. Foxes learn. Hedgehogs are great proponents, but foxes are invariably better forecasters and policy makers.
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