OK, you may be saying. Maybe Mead is right that the One Big Treaty approach to climate change is a non-starter. And maybe he’s right that the various bills working their way through Congress aren’t going to amount to all that much either. And, just possibly he’s right that the two Green Princes, Al Gore and Charles Windsor, don’t really know what they are doing. But what’s the Mead plan for saving the world? He’s been awfully critical of everybody else — what does he think we should be doing?
In the nature of things I don’t think there’s a sure-fire seven step plan to stop climate change, stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons or cure any of the other urgent problems that we will be wrestling with during this difficult century. But let me tell you why I think that we are going to be making much more progress on this front than the forces of climate panic suspect — even and perhaps especially in the absence of a Big Global Treaty.
The main point is this: every business, every consumer and just about every government on the planet wants to make changes that will reduce the impact of human economic activity on the climate system and indeed on the environment as a whole. This is not because everyone is or will soon be ‘green’, although it is clear that tens of millions of people in all walks of life in many countries are spontaneously becoming more conscious of their environmental footprints and taking steps to reduce it. There’s something bigger involved: reducing the cost of material and energy inputs per unit of output is the essence of what technology seeks to do, and doing this better and faster than other people is one of the most important sources of profitability.
If you can lower your energy bills while accomplishing the same goals, you save money — whether you are a consumer or operating a factory. This is as true of Chinese and Indian factories as it is of American, Japanese and European enterprises. If a car company can find a fundamentally cheaper way to build more fuel efficient cars, that car company will have more customers and better profit margins than its competitors. If a farmer can reduce the cost of fuel and fertilizer while producing the same yield, the farm will make more money. An uncountable ‘army of Davids’ (to use Glenn Reynolds’ phrase) will be out there tinkering, testing and reducing the world’s carbon footprint in ways nobody can anticipate. Successful ideas will spread. Fast. In a Darwinian economic competition, power and wealth will flow to those who figure out and adopt new ways of cutting energy costs; those who fail to change will fade away.
All this will be taking place at the individual and company level, but countries and governments will play a role as well. Especially in the developing world, some countries have adopted subsidy policies that disguise the true cost of energy. If your cost of electricity is artificially low, there is little incentive to conserve. Ditto gasoline. Ditto energy intensive products like fertilizer. But as countries like China and India develop, the cost of these subsidies becomes unsustainable. All over the world, governments are looking for ways to cut wasteful energy subsidies. That pressure will only grow as innovations in non-subsidized countries drive down the general level of energy use per unit of output. More and more countries will be driven to abolish or substantially modify their energy subsidies; as that happens the efficiency of energy use in the developing world will grow by leaps and bounds.
There are other reasons that governments will take an interest in promoting energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy sources. Dependence on imported oil and hydrocarbons is a serious concern for every country in the world, but especially for rising superpowers like India and China. For China, the prospect that the US and others could cut off its access to Middle East oil in an international crisis of some kind is a strategic nightmare. Ditto India, ditto Japan. Increasing naval strength is one way to protect that supply, but it doesn’t work very well. Every ship that, say, China builds to protect its oil looks to Japan and India like a potential threat to their own supply — and to the United States like a threat to its command of the seas. China could spend a lot of money on the navy this way without increasing the security of its supply.
An obviously better way to protect China’s strategic interests is to reduce dependence on foreign hydrocarbons. More efficient energy use at home is cheaper than a large and useless navy. So is the development of renewable resources. There are strategic as well as economic reasons for countries to adopt better energy policies in the years to come.
All this will happen without grand global treaties of any kind, and it is likely that the cumulative effect will be greater than we now expect and that it will grow steadily over time. But there is much more that creative individuals, canny firms and proactive governments can do to reduce our carbon footprint. These steps don’t involve trying to fight the natural tendencies of the economy to grow, or forcing consumers to change their behavior by unpopular new taxes and regulations.
Let’s take consumers and their cars. The current standard green approach to the problem is rooted in Malthusian assumptions. Just like Malthus assumed that those stupid peasants would breed to the limit of the food supply under all circumstances, today’s greens seem to think that the gas guzzling public will drive us all into extinction by their compulsive driving habits. It’s not, greens think, going to be enough to regulate the types of cars people can buy; stiff new fuel taxes are needed as well. The punitive, ‘hang the peasants to save the pheasants’ side of environmentalism is on full display here; Prince Charles’ ancestors have been ‘conserving’ game by keeping those rascally deer-hunting serfs out of the Royal Forests since the time of William the Conqueror. But now that the peasants have the vote, it is harder than it used to be to make them behave.
A better way to approach this problem is to realize that most people would welcome the opportunity to drive less. Long commutes to work are not America’s favorite pastime. Government policy that worked with companies to encourage telecommuting so that, for example, it became ‘normal’ for people in office jobs to telecommute one or two days a week would dramatically cut fuel use — not only for drivers who stayed home twice a week, but for all drivers as reduced traffic levels enhance the flow of rush hour traffic. Governments would save money on infrastructure and other costs this way; that could help fund tax breaks for employers who developed policies that allowed more employees to spend more days working from home.
There are other ways of reducing commuting time. Improved computer and communications technology makes it much easier for people in different physical locations to work together effectively. The model in which workers drive long distances five days each week to a central work location comes from a time in which physical proximity was necessary for effective supervision and coordination of employees. This is much less necessary now; some face time is still needed, no doubt, but there are intermediary steps between telecommuting from home and making a forty minute drive to the headquarters building. Government could usefully promote the development of more satellite and distributed office locations so that workers from many different companies might end up working in campuses distributed throughout an urban and exurban complex. These campuses (operated as profit making enterprises) could offer a variety of services — including daycare, elder care and basic health clinics — which either companies or individual workers could access. Sprinkling these around the ‘edge cities’ would allow Americans to continue living as they like (with cheaper real estate, more green space) but dramatically cut the energy costs of a dispersing population. To the company and the worker, the result would be lower costs and greater convenience. People might actually rise up and bless legislators who facilitated a transition to this kind of system — and our carbon footprint would appreciably shrink.
The broader point to be made here is that the whole direction of contemporary technology is toward reducing the carbon cost of each unit of economic output. The first phase of industrialization — the substitution of machine power for the traditional power sources of human and animal muscle, plus a bit of wind for milling and shipping — dramatically deepened our carbon footprint. In a sense, that is what it was all about: substituting non-renewable high energy production for renewable but low intensity forms of energy. The current revolution is about something else: the production and distribution of information. The first industrial revolution was about moving large heavy things farther and faster. The new industrial revolution is about moving ideas. It is about doing things in more entertaining and interesting ways. It is not about making more tons of pig iron and mining more tons of coal; it is about making computer software and about video games, 3-D movies and other life-enhancing experiences. Not only are these activities in themselves not very carbon-intensive; some of the ideas and methods the new technologies involve are about using accelerating the rate at which our efficient use of natural resources grow. Thanks to the galloping progress of computer technology, we are able to monitor, organize and price much more efficiently than we once could; that allows us to accelerate the rate at which we reduce waste and identify and implement new ways to conserve the use of scarce resources.
The coming information explosion as hundreds of millions more children spend more time in school across the developing world and South Asia, and as ever cheaper technology allows more and more people to connect to the internet means that more and more people are going to be better informed, better able to learn new methods of solving problems.
The Malthusian mindset assumes that the natural direction of everything is wrong: that left to themselves people will act destructively. That may be true in some circumstances, but not when it comes to environmental policy in the twenty first century. Our economy is becoming greener as our technology develops; that was not true one hundred years ago, but it is today. Greens don’t have to fight the natural tendency of things today; if anything, good environmental policy involves greasing the skids, to make it easier for people to do the things they like and for technological change to restructure the way we live.
Whether these kinds of benign, easy changes will entirely solve the climate problem is not something anybody can know today. The climate system is so complex, and the consequences of innovation and development so difficult to predict, that understanding the interaction of the two forces passes the wit of mortal man. Nevertheless it seems clear that intelligent action by individuals, firms and government can take enormous chunks out of this problem without the grim, puritanical and Malthusian approaches of the gloomy greens.
The Malthusian is always grimly swimming against an inexorable tide; today’s greens are in a much better position, if more of them could only see it. They don’t have to fight the tide; they can surf the waves of change.