• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Most of all, advances in technology just increase our ability to do things, which may be either for the better or for the worse. All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems: that’s why we’re in the situation in which we now find ourselves. What makes you think that, as of January 1, 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problems while it just solves the problems that it previously produced?

From thousands of examples of unforeseen harmful side effects of new technological solutions, two must suffice: CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and motor vehicles. The coolant gases formerly used in refrigerators and air conditioners were toxic ones (like ammonia) that could prove fatal if those appliances leaked while the homeowner was asleep at night. Hence it was hailed as a great advance when CFCs (alias freons) were developed as synthetic refrigerant gases. They are odorless, non-toxic, and highly stable under ordinary conditions at the Earth’s surface, so that initially no bad side effects were observed or expected. Within a short time they became viewed as miracle substances and adopted throughout the world as refrigerator and air-conditioner coolants, foam-blowing agents, solvents, and propellants in aerosol cans. But in 1974 it was discovered that in the stratosphere they are broken down by intense ultraviolet radiation to yield highly reactive chlorine atoms that destroy a significant fraction of the ozone layer protecting us and all other living things against lethal ultraviolet effects. That discovery provoked vigorous denial by some corporate interests, fueled not only by the $200 billion value of CFC-based industrial efforts but also by genuine doubts because of scientific complications involved. Hence the phasing-out of CFCs has taken a long time: not until 1988 did the DuPont Company (the largest manufacturer of CFCs) decide to stop manufacturing them, in 1992 industrialized countries agreed to cease CFC production by 1995, and China and some other developing countries are still producing them. Unfortunately, the amounts of CFCs already in the atmosphere are sufficiently large, and their breakdown sufficiently slow, that they will continue to be present for many decades after the eventual end of all CFC production.

The other example involves the introduction of the motor vehicle. When I was a child in the 1940s, some of my teachers were old enough to remember the first decades of the 20th century, when motor vehicles were in the process of replacing horse-drawn carriages and trams on city streets of the United States. The two biggest immediate consequences experienced by urban Americans, my teachers recall, were that American cities became wonderfully cleaner and quieter. No longer were streets constantly polluted with horse manure and urine, and no longer was there the constant din of horse hoofs clicking on the pavement. Today, after a century’s experience of cars and buses, it strikes us as ludicrous or inconceivable that anyone could praise them for being non-polluting and quiet. While no one is advocating a return to the horse as a solution to smog from engine emissions, the example does serve to illustrate the unanticipated negative side effects even of technologies that (unlike CFCs) we choose to retain.

“If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource meeting the same need.” Optimists who make such claims ignore the unforeseen difficulties and long transition times regularly involved. For instance, one area in which switching based on not-yet-perfected new technologies has repeatedly been touted as promising to solve a major environmental problem is automobiles. The current hope for breakthrough involves hydrogen cars and fuel cells, which are technologically in their infancy as applied to motor transport.