This story was originally published by dark and appears here as part of the Climatic desk collaboration.
Throughout history, human societies have depended on technological progress to solve their challenges. In the early days of the technology, this worked well. It is difficult to discuss, for example, the invention of the wheel help alleviate hunger through more efficient agriculture. But as both societal challenges and technology have become more complex, the line between “problem” and “solution” has become blurred.
The Cold War is perhaps the most prominent contemporary example. Leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain came to see nuclear weapons as a way to achieve peaceful coexistence in a world of incompatible ideologies. The doctrine of mutual assured destructionpossible thanks to the majority powerful weapons ever done, was to guarantee peace. And although their defenders would argue that it worked (the Cold War never erupted into World War III), nuclear weapons did not erase nationalist sentiments, historical grievances, or expansionist tendencies, of which the war in Ukraine It is a painful reminder. Technology can, at its best, eliminate conflict. Peace cannot be designed.
Environmental sustainability cannot be designed either. Like peace, it is a social and political challenge. The key principles of the economic and political systems of Western civilization are based on the commodification of nature. A dead tree has economic value; a living tree usually does not. Nature conservation is only considered a good idea to the extent that it benefits economic growth. The notion that nature has a intrinsic value They might exist in philosophy classrooms, but not in conventional legal, political, and economic systems. Achieving sustainability requires confronting these uncomfortable truths about Western civilization.
During the Cold War, building more (and more powerful) weapons than the enemy became synonymous with peacebuilding. Today, decarbonization, the effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions throughout the economy, has become virtually synonymous with environmental sustainability, as reflected in the Biden administration’s environmental policy. legislationthe net zero of the European Union planor from Australia Long-term emissions reduction plan. According to the United Nations, the goal is a net-zero world where all emissions released are offset by emissions removed. Under these policies, this destination is clear and the only thing that matters is how quickly we can get there. But what if the destination is wrong? What if, just as a mutually destructive world could not guarantee real peace, a net zero world could not guarantee real sustainability?
Scholars increasingly point to ways in which an overwhelming focus on emissions reductions – known as carbon tunnel vision – can hinder a comprehensive approach to the numerous sources of environmental deterioration. Focusing on a specific issue has the effect of neglecting other challenges, such as biodiversity loss, particulate air pollutioneither groundwater depletion, in the shadows. While these problems are exacerbated by climate change, they are caused by a much broader range of underlying mechanisms, from changes in land use to global international trade and the removal of large amounts of natural resources (known as extractivism). Flattening the environmental polycrisis in a supposedly singular crisis of greenhouse gas emissions obscures the many ways in which Western civilization degrades the environment, ways that often do not lend themselves as easily to engineering solutions or economic gains that can be obtained from the transition to “green” technologies and that demand a more fundamental analysis of the unbalanced relationship of our civilization with nature.
The current conversation around net zero focuses on engineering questions such as how to quickly replace fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives or how to build cost-effective carbon capture solutions. As important as addressing these issues may be to achieve progress in specific areas of climate adaptation and mitigation, they do not address the underlying political dimensions of environmental deterioration. When these technical issues come to dominate the public conversation about the environment, this can obscure, among other things, environmental justice concerns related to decarbonization. In his scathing exposition of the latter, Cobalt red: how the blood of the Congo fuels our lives, Siddharth Kara pointed out the landscapes stripped bare and lives ruined by the global hunger for cobalt, one of the metals needed for electric vehicle batteries and other decarbonization efforts. Evidence of such devastation is mounting in other parts of the world.
in his essay let them drown, Naomi Klein points out that the extraction of fossil fuels on which the current economy is built depends on the “sacrifice of people and places” whose ruin is justified by the march of progress. Decarbonization has not transformed this underlying logic. It also depends on ruthless extraction, the reification of nature, and the annihilation of communities unlucky enough to possess minerals currently in demand. Can such an ideology really achieve an environmentally sustainable world?
History offers some clues. In February 1946, U.S. Navy Commodore Ben H. Wyatt met with the inhabitants of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific. He asked them if they would be willing to resettle temporarily so that the United States could continue its nuclear bomb testing “for the good of humanity and to end all world wars,” as Jack Niedenthal wrote in his account of the meeting. The Bikinians gave up and abandoned their ancestral lands, never come back permanently.
The Cold War shows that environmental sustainability, like #peace, cannot be achieved by focusing solely on #technology. #Climate Crisis #Sustainability #Decarbonization #NetZero
His sacrifice did not end all wars. Just as nuclear weapons cannot address the psychosociopolitical reasons why countries go to war with each other, decarbonization and “clean technology” cannot rebalance Western civilization’s relationship with the natural world, even though both have a high price for marginalized communities. While technological change and decarbonization are likely to be part of the solution, it matters whether they are pursued as ends in themselves or as elements of a more holistic approach to environmental sustainability, such as decreasethat seeks to rebalance the economy away from environmentally destructive production and excessive consumption, or donut economy, which is a development model that meets the essential needs of people without exceeding the ecological limits of the Earth. If we are truly serious about sustainability, we must put these approaches at the center of our collective imagination about liveable futures and the policies we create to achieve them.