Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [15]
However, Steven Chu and his boss, President Barack Obama, are nationalistic, radical, and more than happy to work with—not against—industry. Their vision of the energy future does not incorporate the countercultural version of environmentalism; instead, it is fundamentally pro-market, pro-technology, and pro-American. “This is the nation that has led the world for two centuries in the pursuit of discovery,” Obama told an MIT crowd in a highly publicized energy speech in October 2009. “This is the nation that will lead the clean energy economy of tomorrow, so long as all of us remember what we have achieved in the past and we use that to inspire us to achieve even more in the future.”20
The vision Chu and Obama present is nearly techno-utopian. But is the rush to build a political coalition to combat climate change and convince investors that betting on green will be profitable overwhelming the lessons of economy and respect for the natural world that Thoreau taught? Or will it take a naïve faith in technological progress to save the flowers of Walden Pond? If profit and salvation part ways, which road will John Doerr and his brethren take?
This book aims to provide a kind of memory and conscience for green-tech entrepreneurs and those who will live with their legacy. In tossing out the hoary truisms of mainline environmentalism, let’s not forget the key critiques of global industrialism that environmentalism’s point of view provided.
The world does have limits, a carrying capacity for human beings. Many of them are being reached at breakneck speed.21 And picking a direction in our energy dilemma won’t solve all the social, water, pollution, biodiversity, and land-depletion problems that come with a human population that’s doubled since the year John F. Kennedy was shot.
Political scientist Langdon Winner argues that Americans created one constitution out of the American Revolution and a second out of the infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution. The paper constitution was argued over and debated from first principles: social welfare, justice, liberty, and so forth. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” the Preamble goes, “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Conversely, our industrial constitution—the one that shapes our material relationships to each other and the environment—has received far less attention and ethical investigation. It has been shaped by politicians, engineers, homebuilders, and investors who only occasionally have thought beyond the narrow profit-making possibilities of a technology. “In the technical realm, we repeatedly enter into a series of social contracts, the terms of which are revealed only after the signing,” Winner wrote. 22
The Obama administration and a host of green-tech proponents call the drive for low-carbon, renewable power nothing less than another industrial revolution. There will be turmoil and unrest and failure in our energy system as we try to rewrite the constitution we signed in concrete and steel more than a hundred years ago and that burst into the sky and out onto the land. This book documents our country’s previous attempts to secure a more perfect power in hopes that future ones will succeed.
II.
What Was
chapter 5
Steam-Powered America
LOWELL AND THE DREAM of problem-free power that it represented faded after the Civil War. In its place, hard-slugging capitalism accelerated. Companies, factories, cities, engines, and farms got bigger. They scaled up. The entire country began to function as a single market, united by railroads, the dominance of the Northeastern economic system, and the resources of the West. Size began to matter and