Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [14]
In other words, environmentalism has been forced to go global. There is no retreating to the forest and protecting your patch from mechanized civilization. Environmentalism can’t be a protest movement, a form of societal disobedience for the affluent. Individual nations, let alone people, can’t solve the problem.
If climate scientists are right—and they are within reasonable bounds of uncertainty—the entire world has to start cutting its carbon dioxide emissions within a few years. If peak oil experts are right—and they seem to be within reasonable bounds of uncertainty—we’ll need new clean sources of energy to prevent a worldwide shift to dirty fuels like tar sands and oil shale. We could just ask that the world limit its energy usage, but who would we beg? To what body could we appeal to prescribe for the world?
It’s this suite of problems—fundamentally ecological but practically political—that led Doerr to tell his audience of technoptimists at the TED conference in 2007 that the climate change goal had to be to “make the right outcome the profitable outcome and therefore the likely outcome.”
Environmentalists have to be able to compete, corporations and all. Moral reform may happen, but that hasn’t stopped carbon emissions from rising. The prescription for the world is, in Google’s corporate formulation, RE < C: renewable energy less expensive than coal. Right or wrong, cheap things win, so clean energy has to get cheaper.
It’s an ugly goal. There’s no poetry to it. It is not based in what Melville, following the German poet Goethe, called “the all feeling” of oneness with nature. It seems like no way at all to be an environmentalist.
But high-tech, low-carbon technologies seem to be the only way to preserve Thoreau’s flowers, even if it means building and maintaining naturalized energy systems like the one that powered Lowell and destroyed the Merrimack’s fish stocks.
In the future, environmentalists may be able to trace the roots of their ideas back as much to Etzler as to Thoreau. Already, Silicon Valley advocates have changed the national debate around energy. The highest levels of the Obama administration regularly echo not just the lines of reasoning that John Doerr employed but sometimes his actual applause lines from the TED talk. The head of the Department of Energy, Steven Chu, is one of the Bay Area crew. He went to the DOE after heading the greenest of the national laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley, which perches in the green hills above the site of the radical protests of the ’60s. While announcing new green-tech grant awards, Chu told an audience at Google that
the transistor made possible modern computers, the Internet, and Silicon Valley. The hybrid strains of wheat and the Green Revolution helped us feed a growing planet. Linking our computers together through the Internet unleashed an Information Age—in no small part because of the great ideas that have come out of Google. We are here today because this place reminds us that, occasionally, radical innovation can alter the landscape of an entire industry. And we’re here to announce a portfolio of bold new research projects, any one of which could do for energy what Google did for the Internet.18
Compare Charles A. Reich’s diagnosis of the country’s problems in his best-selling book The Greening of America. “What happened to the American people? In a word, powerlessness,” he wrote. “We lost the ability to control our lives or our society because we had placed ourselves excessively under the domination of the market and technology.” 19 Technology could not have been the answer either for Reich or Barry Commoner,