Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. -Archimedes
I often find myself in discussions with people who think that relying on technology to reverse climate change is a bad idea. Some people think that technology got us into this mess, so we shouldn’t trust more technology to get us out. Some people think that technology papers over the underlying problem, which is Capitalism™, and we should get rid of Capitalism™, and then we’d be fine. This argument was most recently made to me by the CEO of a technology company, which I found confusing1. Anyway, I think his anti-capitalism cred is a bit lacking.
My framework for thinking about this topic is drawn from a talk I gave at Engineers for a Sustainable World.
Climate interventions basically break down into three types:
Personal choice
Cooperative action
Technological improvements
Put simply: Personal choice is not a solution to the climate crisis. The main reason is that personal choice isn’t a scalable or equitable solution. Oil companies invented the marketing around “personal carbon footprint” to deflect responsibility for climate change onto consumers. And, EVs are very expensive! A lot of people can’t afford to buy EVs, especially people in lower income brackets, who are also the people who will suffer the most from the climate crisis. And choosing to bike to work might be a nice thing to do for yourself, but it’s not a global prescription for mitigating climate change, especially for people who have to supercommute because of high housing costs.
So, instead, we generally use cooperative action as a more scalable mechanism. Cooperative action can be anything from community organizing up to international treaties. It’s a way for us to collectively express our values, and create systems that try to spread the burden equitably. For instance, the Biden administration is moving to regulate fleet emissions, and use tax incentives to encourage EV adoption. These systems are pretty imperfect, and our government suffers from regulatory capture and incompetence at every level. But, per Sturgeon’s Law, “99% of everything is crap,” and this extends to our human institutions. They are imperfect, but they are the mechanisms we currently have, and they attempt to scale up “personal choice” by circumventing the prisoners’ dilemma: everybody moves in the same direction, at the same time, in a coordinated fashion.
What does technology bring to the table? Technology acts like the fulcrum of Archimedes’ lever, by making the transition to carbon neutral less expensive and painful. EVs may not be the ideal solution to every transportation problem, but they have the advantage of requiring the least amount of change, by fitting into our existing systems of e.g. roadways, licensing, distribution, financing, etc. This lowers the burden of transitioning to carbon neutrality for everyone, by using our existing infrastructure and capital. And people like cars! People are crazy about cars. There are entire decades long movie franchises that are just about how much people love their cars2.
That’s not a moral judgment on the value of cars, or their externalities. It’s just an observation about how difficult it would be to get people to give up on cars. With only about 10 or 20 years left to really unbork things, it seems like a bad idea to bet on long shots.
Using our EV example again, the last 20 years of development in EVs is a way in which technology can move the fulcrum of carbon neutrality, so that it simply costs us less and greases the rails towards carbon neutrality. New battery technologies, hybrid engines, regenerative braking, and advances in manufacturing mean we can start to move away from internal combustion engines that use fossil fuels and towards EVs, without having to collectively sacrifice as much.
There are a lot of arguments to be made about the ethics of how we apply technology, and in particular, to the ways in which climate technology risks shifting the burden onto others. This September, I invite you to join us at a CTAN event that we are co-hosting with the Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (details forthcoming) called EVs and Equity, on how to navigate the transition to EVs in ways that don’t disproportionally disadvantage low-income Californians. We should discuss and struggle with these questions, and demand (collectively!) that our governments ethically source raw materials, respect labor rights and human rights.
But, we also live in a world of near-constant genocide, and looming climate apocalypse, and heartless oppression.
“Capitalism” and “Technology” are not autonomous actors, and we can’t blame them for our problems. Technology is a vast collection of human endeavors, from knife making to nuclear war, it amplifies both the best and the worst of our human nature.
BLM was a turning point in my life, helping me see that I and many other Americans had turned our eyes away for too long from the violence visited upon black communities. Technology helped shed light on the darkness and ignorance that let that happen. Building tools is one of the most fundamentally human endeavors, and you cannot reject technology without rejecting part of human nature. Our calling, as engineers, scientists, and climate activists, is to keep our eye on the most important part of our human existence, and steer our technology and ourselves towards it: “God dammit, you’ve gotta be kind.”
His explanation involved the fact that their product was “natural”, and “a well known solution”, and therefore wasn’t technology, or capitalism, or was the good kind of technology and/or capitalism, and/or some version of “Hate the player, not the game”. As I said, I found it confusing.
Full disclosure: I work at Toyota Research Institute on battery manufacturing research. My views are not those of Toyota or TRI, and honestly, I’m really not that into cars, and I hate driving. However, I admit to being disappointed that the latest Fast and Furious movie was not named The Fastest and the Furiousest.