Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [317]
Equally instructive is the automobile industry’s recent development of fuel-efficient hybrid gas/electric cars, which have been enjoying increasing sales. However, it would be unfair for a believer in switching to mention hybrid cars without also mentioning the automobile industry’s simultaneous development of SUVs, which have been outselling hybrids by a big margin and more than offsetting their fuel savings. The net result of these two technological breakthroughs has been that the fuel consumption and exhaust production of our national car fleet has been going up rather than down. Nobody has figured out a method to ensure that technology will yield only increasingly environment-friendly effects and products (e.g., hybrid cars), without also yielding environment-unfriendly effects and products (e.g., SUVs).
Another example of faith in switching and substitution is the hope that renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, may solve the energy crisis. These technologies do indeed exist; many Californians now use solar energy to heat their swimming pools, and wind generators are already supplying about one-sixth of Denmark’s energy needs. However, wind and solar energy have limited applicability because they can be used only at locations with reliable winds or sunlight. In addition, the recent history of technology shows that conversion times for adoption of major switches—e.g., from candles to oil lamps to gas lamps to electric lights for lighting, or from wood to coal to petroleum for energy—require several decades, because so many institutions and secondary technologies associated with the former technology have to be changed. It is indeed likely that energy sources other than fossil fuels will make increasing contributions to our motor transport and energy generation, but this is a long-term prospect. We’ll also need to solve our fuel and energy problems for the next several decades, before new technologies become widespread. All too often, a focus by politicians or industries on the promise of hydrogen cars and wind energy for the distant future distracts attention from all the obvious measures needed right now to decrease driving and fuel consumption by existing cars, and to decrease consumption by fossil fuel generating plants.
“There really isn’t a world food problem; there is already enough food; we only need to solve the transportation problem of distributing that food to places that need it.” (The same thing could be said for energy.) Or else: “The world’s food problem is already being solved by the Green Revolution, with its new high-yield varieties of rice and other crops, or else it will be solved by genetically modified crops.” This argument notes two things: that First World citizens enjoy on the average greater per-capita food consumption than do Third World citizens; and that some First World countries, such as the United States, do or can produce more food than their citizens consume. If food consumption could be equalized over the world, or if surplus First World food could be exported to the Third World, might that alleviate Third World starvation?
The obvious flaw in the first half of this argument is that First World citizens show no interest in eating less, in order that Third World citizens could eat more. The flaw in the second half of the argument is that, while First World countries are willing occasionally to export food to mitigate starvation occasioned by some crisis (such as a drought or war) in certain Third World countries, First World citizens have shown no interest in paying on a regular basis (via their tax dollars that support foreign aid and subsidies to farmers) to