Sustainability and Horsesh*t

Here are two items related to climate change that read well next to each other.

One is from a magazine called Tin House—an article by Curtis White skewering the idea of sustainability. A taste:

For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is “sustainable.” Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities. Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways. It’s not, really. The great unspoken assumption of the sustainability movement is the idea that although the economic, political, and social systems that have produced our current environmental calamity are bad, they do not need to be entirely replaced. In fact, the point of sustainability often seems to be to preserve—not overthrow—the economic and social status quo.

This should not be surprising. Sustainability is, after all, a mainstream response to environmental crisis. It may want change, but it does not want what would amount to a fundamental self-confrontation. While it wants to modify existing models of production and consumption, especially of energy, it does not want to abandon what it calls “freedom,” especially the freedom to own and use large accumulations of private property. And certainly it does not want to ask, “What went wrong in the great Western experiment with freedom? Why do we seem to be mostly free to destroy ourselves?”

Read the full article (and admire Tin House‘s design).

The other is from the current issue of The New Yorker—Elizabeth Kolbert gives the Freakonomics guys a well-deserved skewering. Their new book, SuperFreakonomics, sounds even stupider than their first one.

Kolbert (I can’t help pronouncing her last name with a silent “T” as with Stephen Colbert) starts her review with an historical anecdote about how for a while there it looked like horseshit from all the horses used to transport people and goods all around New York City would eventually take over the city:

The problem just kept piling up until, in the eighteen-nineties, it seemed virtually insurmountable. One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows. New York’s troubles were not New York’s alone; in 1894, the Times of London forecast that by the middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure. It was understood that flies were a transmission vector for disease, and a public-health crisis seemed imminent. When the world’s first international urban-planning conference was held, in 1898, it was dominated by discussion of the manure situation. Unable to agree upon any solutions—or to imagine cities without horses—the delegates broke up the meeting, which had been scheduled to last a week and a half, after just three days.

Then, almost overnight, the crisis passed. This was not brought about by regulation or by government policy. Instead, it was technological innovation that made the difference. With electrification and the development of the internal-combustion engine, there were new ways to move people and goods around. By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run. All the anxieties about a metropolis inundated by ordure had been misplaced.

This anecdote, it turns out, is a curtain-raiser to the Steves’ (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, that is) “argument” that we shouldn’t fret about climate change, since someone is sure to come up with some kind of technological fix so that we can keep consuming, growing, and using fossil fuels. Their preferred idea is to cool the earth by shooting tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere using an 18-mile-long hose (hence the title of Kolbert’s review, “Hosed”—if only that could be taken as referring doubly to their idea and the Steve’s careers or reputations). And here are two of the skewering bits, one sober, the other light-hearted:

[W]hat’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain. Meanwhile, as long as the concentration of atmospheric CO2 continued to rise, more and more sulfur dioxide would have to be pumped into the air to counteract it. The amount of direct sunlight reaching the earth would fall, even as the oceans became increasingly acidic.

…

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

She’s probably right, but let’s hope she’s not about the Steves in particular. Maybe the scorn getting heaped on them for this particular pile they’ve produced (e.g. here) will hose their reputations permanently.

Read Kolbert’s review; read White’s article.

No Responses to “Sustainability and Horsesh*t”

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  Dollars and Sense says:

  November 16, 2009 at 5:08 pm

  A postscript–

  I was just reading the excellent post on RealClimate skewering SuperFreakonomics, an open letter from University of Chicago climate scientist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert to his U of C colleague, economist Steve Levitt (co-author of SuperFreakonomics) showing painstakingly that simple arithmetic would have helped him avoid one of his key blunders.

  The comment that made me laugh out loud was this one:

  “Now perhaps we know how most American economists missed the greatest housing bubble/ derivatives superbubble ever unleashed on the American public.”

  Maybe that could be the silver lining of the Steves’ dumb books—they will discredit mainstream economics!