Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [32]
Technology will of course continue to do battle with nature in the endless clash of hope and despair that defines human life. Manufacturers have found replacements for ozone-layer-damaging propellants and introduced them with such alacrity—outstripping legislated requirements—that estimates of damage are now being gratefully revised downwards. Government manipulation of market incentives can make a difference. In the domain of minerals, technological innovation in recycling suggests a strategy that can mitigate both resource depletion and the dependency it produces. In 1987, waste stockpiles from American mining, mineral processing, and metallurgical industries were estimated at almost 2 billion tons, and while the varying mineral content of such wastes makes recycling expensive, we are nevertheless doing more and more of it.12 The environmental savings are considerable: the amount of energy required to produce a ton of a given metal by mining, extraction, and refining is anywhere from double to tenfold the energy required to produce the same ton from recycling. Reusing things may not do much for corporate profits but it spares mother earth and leaves more for the generations still to come.13 In the brave new epoch of McWorld, we may yet find a way to refashion our garbage into liberty and wring from our waste products a semblance of our lost independence.14
Technology also holds out the promise of a new age alchemy: contriving from synthetics strange new substitutes for natural metals that eliminate dependency on natural resources while improving performance. It also promises new ways of getting to and processing mineral resources once too low-grade or too far underground or undersea to warrant recovery.15 The Pacific floor is strewn with manganese nodules—a wealth of small nuggets that contain far more cobalt, nickel, and copper than all the world’s known land reserves. They are currently at depths where their recovery is unfeasible but the science of submersibles marches on while robotic vacuums capable of sucking up the treasure are already on the drawing board.16
Yet ultimately, even where technology offsets resource depletion through new discovery techniques and more economical extraction methods or through recycling and substitution, the long-term trends spell ineluctable interdependence for just about everyone in just about everything. Promethean hope may ultimately overcome Malthusian doubt, but Prometheus’s theft of technology’s fire can be exploited only through collaboration. Science and technology, like Prometheus, cannot be bounded: not by frontiers, not by national sovereignty. They are made possible by cooperation and they command interdependence. The world’s nations, having exhausted their natural bounty one by one, may still find a way to survive on the wings of artifice, but they will do so interdependently and together: globally or not at all. The nation-state’s days are numbered.
Petroleum: The Same Old Story, Only Worse
MANY MINERAL RESOURCES can be recycled or replaced by technological surrogates, but energy resources—above all fossil fuels—on the scale they are currently being consumed around the globe surely cannot. There is a little hope to be had from renewable resources. These include solar power obtained from photovoltaic cells, whose production grew an average of 15 percent a year from 1981–91 even as their price fell dramatically; geothermal power—the tapping of the earth’s hot fluids and gases—which in 1950 produced only 239 megawatts of electricity but today produces nearly 10,000 megawatts or