Topic: Ecomodernism

The Magical Thinking of Ecomodernism. Jason Hickel, April 4, 2018.

I recently wrote an article for Fast Company explaining why “green growth” is not a thing. I looked at three high-profile studies showing that even aggressive taxes and rapid improvements in technological efficiency will not be enough to cut global resource use as long as we keep growing the world economy. Right now we are consuming about 85 billion tons of material stuff per year, exceeding the sustainable threshold by 70%. According to the UN, our resource use will rise to at least 132 billion tons per year by 2050, and possibly as high as 180 billion tons. 

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It is on this basis that scientists have concluded that absolute decoupling of GDP from aggregate resource use is not possible. But the ecomodernists at the Breakthrough Institute aren’t convinced.If absolute decoupling isn’t a thing, then ultimately we’re going to have to scale down global economic activity. Blomqvist doesn’t actually explain why he dislikes this conclusion so much. All he says is that degrowth “seems far-fetched.” I have no idea what he means by this. But could it really be more far-fetched than achieving what is physically impossible? Perhaps Blomqvist – or anyone at the Breakthrough Institute – could explain why they think that rich, high-consuming nations (like the US, for instance) need to keep growing their GDP (forever?), when we know that additional growth is not generating any better social outcomes. Given how powerful the scale effect of growth is when it comes to driving ecological breakdown, it just doesn’t make sense to take it off the table.

An engineer, an economist, and an ecomodernist walk into a bar and order a free lunch . . .  Stan Cox. Climate and Capitalism. July 30, 2018.

The ecomoderns foresee humanity retreating entirely into high-tech, self-sufficient, nominally carbon-neutral urban areas connected only by bullet-train corridors, while ostensibly turning the rest of the Earth’s surface over to “nature.” They seem to assume that in the ecomodern world, industry will have a miraculously small geographic and ecological footprint, almost all energy demand will be met through deployment of nuclear power plants, and food will come from . . . well, that’s not entirely clear, if humanity retreats from the Earth’s landscapes. It’s expected, seemingly, that most or all food will be supplied by urban and periurban farming, augmented by food factories. (I suspect that voice-activated drones, self-driving food trucks and 3D printing of lab-cultured steaks will somehow be involved.) 

In making their free-lunch assumptions, ecomodernists must be carefully keeping their calculators in the back of their desk drawers while at the same time working very hard not to think about what happens to people in countries or regions that can’t begin to afford the cost of ecomodernity. 

This vision must be opposed not only because of its dependence on nuclear power, geoengineering, and other dangerous technologies but also because it can appeal seductively to people who are worried about imminent climatic chaos and ecospheric breakdown but don’t know much about the ecosphere or agriculture — and that is a lot of people in all walks of life. And like many bright shiny climate “solutions”, ecomodernism can create false expectations and suck support and resources away from what we really need to do.