Sorry for the rather long absence. My mind has been more than a little preoccupied, but I will now be returning to the blogging like a starved hyena to rotting flesh. Hopefully you'll forgive the delay, as well as that terrible simile.
Technology has been on my mind recently, particularly in relation to the increasingly voluble argument that adaptation is key to our battle against climate change. Now, perhaps contrary to what I said in a post some time back, adaptation is a necessary consequence of changes which we have already unleashed in the earth's climate. Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to adapt to an extent. What I want to emphasise now is that whilst this is true, it in no way provides an alternative to the need to try to mitigate climate change by limiting our carbon emissions.
It was recently revealed that ice in the Arctic had melted to unprecedented levels with time still remaining of summer for it to shrink even further. On the same day, the most prominent story around was Tim Yeo's insistence that what we need to get out of our economic mess is to build another runway at Heathrow. I wasn't the only one amazed by this as George Monbiot went on a highly entertaining rant on twitter culminating in attacks on Libertarians. Quite why he bothers trying to reason with Libertarians is anybodies guess. His point, though, is that we seem to have some sort of collective cognitive dissonance when it comes to climate change. On a day when the worst excesses of fossil-fuel driven capitalism were laid bare for all to see, we were fixated on the possibility of pumping yet more CO2 into the atmosphere.
As chair of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, you might have thought that Yeo might be aware that planes tend to produce rather a lot of harmful emissions but he seemed convinced that regulations put in place by the European emissions trading scheme (ETS) would nullify any potential increase in CO2. As James Murray of Business Green points out, however, Yeo's argument is flawed both because the ETS is currently ineffective due to an unrealistically low carbon price, and because if the carbon price was at the correct level an increase in flights would necessarily lead to huge hikes in ticket prices. Moreover, it rests on the notion that other sectors will significantly lower their own carbon emissions, something that has been rather sorely lacking to date.
This brings me to the point about technology. Louise Mensch, the now redundant Tory MP and self-promoter extraordinaire, chimed in by suggesting that the real way to pursue environmental goals was not by changing 'human behaviour' (which apparently involves flying to Alicante) but by investing our hopes in technology. The problem with this position is that it not only ignores the magnitude of the task we face, but also because it places faith in a highly uncertain solution.
Whilst it is plausible that technological development might happen to the extent that we might reverse some of the damage caused by emissions, or adapt sufficiently to handle large temperature increases, it really is putting a lot of eggs in one basket. What happens exactly if such a technology does not present itself? Don't worry, they say, human ingenuity is such that we will overcome this challenge. As a plan that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
The problem is amplified by the fact that many of those that campaign most vociferously for adaptation, rather than mitigation, are those least in favour of government investment in low carbon industry. Mitigation and adaptation are united in the sense that it is investment in mitigation technologies that will give us the tools to adapt to necessary changes. Government funding for research and development of renewable energy, for example, may help to create exactly the technologies to help extract us from our predicament. But those who most loudly exult man's creative capacity are also those most vehemently opposed to subsidies for the renewable sector. These people are in a position in which they claim technology to be our saviour, whilst simultaneously refusing the means by which such a technology might be born. This is why I've come to the conclusion that those promoting adaptation alone are basically promoting another form of denial.
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