The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [5]
In this book I take the planetary boundaries concept further into the social, economic, and political realms than the original experts were able to. Although some of the planetary boundaries expert group have generously helped to check my facts and figures, I do not expect them to agree with all my suggestions or arguments regarding the implications of meeting the boundaries. There are substantial caveats and uncertainties, as always, and disagreement can be expected between other experts about whether a “planetary boundary” is truly relevant, and if so, what its limit should be—not to mention how we should meet it. This is first-draft work, Planetary Boundaries 1.0 if you will; there cannot fail to be teething problems. Even so, factual statements in this book are based wherever possible on the peer-reviewed scientific literature—the gold standard for current knowledge. References are at the end of the book, and I urge all readers to make good use of them.
Many will find my analysis and conclusions rather unsettling—not least my colleagues in the Green movement, many of whose current preoccupations are shown to be ecologically wrong. Until now, environmentalism has been mostly about reducing our interference with nature. Central to the standard Green creed is the idea that playing God is dangerous. Hence the reflexive opposition to new technologies from splitting the atom to cloning cattle. My thesis is the reverse: playing God (in the sense of being intelligent designers) at a planetary level is essential if creation is not to be irreparably damaged or even destroyed by humans unwittingly deploying our newfound powers in disastrous ways. At this late stage, false humility is a more urgent danger than hubris. The truth of the Anthropocene is that the Earth is far out of balance, and we must help it regain the stability it needs to function as a self-regulating, highly dynamic, and complex system. It cannot do so alone.
This means jettisoning some fairly sacred cows. Nuclear power is, as many Greens are belatedly realizing, environmentally almost completely benign. (The Fukushima disaster in Japan did nothing to change this sanguine assessment, and perhaps more than anything reconfirmed it; more on that later.) Properly deployed, nuclear fission is one of the strongest weapons in our armory against global warming, and by rejecting it in the past campaigners have unwittingly helped release tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as planned nuclear plants were replaced by coal from the mid-1970s onwards. Anyone who still marches against nuclear today, as many thousands of people did in Germany following the Fukushima accident, is in my view just as bad for the climate as textbook eco-villains like the big oil companies. (Germany’s over-hasty switch-off of seven of its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami will have led to an additional 8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in just three months.3) The same goes for genetic engineering. The genetic manipulation of plants is a powerful technology that can help humanity limit its environmental impact and feed itself better in the process. I personally campaigned against it in the past, and now realize that this was a well-intentioned but ignorant mistake. The potential of synthetic biology I can only begin to guess at today in early 2011. But the lesson is clear: We cannot afford to foreclose powerful technological options like nuclear, synthetic biology, and GE because of Luddite prejudice and ideological inertia.
Indeed, if we apply the metric of the planetary boundaries to the campaigns being run by the big environmental groups, we find that many of them are irrelevant or even counterproductive. Carbon offsetting is a useful short-term palliative that the