By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
When I first studied environmental policy with Lester Milbrath at SUNY/Buffalo from 1975 to 1979, I was taught to be mistrustful of “technological fixes” to environmental problems. To Les, the solution to our environmental crisis was to study, understand, and then change the public’s environmental perceptions and values. That would result in less consumptive and destructive lifestyles and a public living in harmony with nature. While Professor Milbrath was correct about the need for a change in values and ultimately, culture, he was completely wrong about technology. Much of the progress we’ve made in cleaning our environment has been the result of technology forcing environmental regulations put into place in the 1970s. Of course, the world’s ecosystems are in much more trouble than we experienced back in the 1970s. In 1975 the world’s population was about four billion people, today it is over eight billion. Climate change and biodiversity losses have created a global environmental crisis that has added to the complexity of air, water, and toxic pollution created and experienced locally.
Still, the air and the water in America, though not clean, are cleaner than in 1970 when the EPA was first created. Fewer people are in the pathway of exposure to toxic waste than when Superfund was passed in December 1980. How were we able to make this progress? We applied new technologies to reduce the problems caused by older technologies. It is difficult to predict the rate that new technologies emerge or are adopted, but the last century has been characterized by continuous technological innovation. Predictions of doom from Malthus to the present have typically underestimated the impact of human ingenuity in the form of transformative technology.
The air became cleaner as cars became more fuel-efficient and were filtered by catalytic converters. Power plants utilized stack scrubbers and shifted fuels from coal to oil and oil to gas, and today, are slowly adopting non-fossil fuel sources of energy. We have many more motor vehicles and power plants today than we had in 1970, but the air is cleaner. Some people argue that deindustrialization simply exported our air pollution abroad, but the largest sources of air pollution in 1970 were from motor vehicles and power plants. We applied technology to the problem of air pollution. The same is true of sewage treatment. In Manhattan before the mid-1980s, we dumped raw sewage into the Hudson River. The solution to pollution was thought to be dilution. With the opening of the North River sewage treatment plant in 1984, the open-air Hudson River sewer was cleaned up, and the Hudson waterfront finally became open to residential development and recreational use. In that case, it was new sewage treatment technology to the rescue.
Today, we face issues of resource depletion and greenhouse gas pollution. We continue to mine the planet for resources, in the process degrading the planet’s capacity to produce ecosystem services. It’s not that we are running out of resources to mine, but our linear model of production to consumption to dumping results in valuable resources being buried in landfills or burned in waste-to-energy plants. Ultimately, we will need to use artificial intelligence and automation to mine our waste stream for resources. Those technologies will make garbage mining more cost-effective than mining the earth.
Which brings us to the problem of energy and the continued use of fossil fuels. We have an American president convinced that America’s wealth is in the form of oil and gas, something he has termed “liquid gold.” It would probably be better to call it fool’s gold. Its value will diminish as renewable energy technology advances. Energy is central to modern economic life: from artificial intelligence to streaming video, transportation, climate control, and every part of our lifestyle, energy is required for just about everything we do. Fossil fuels will not simply disappear because the transition to a carbon free energy system is going to take time, given the sheer size of our energy system and the huge amount of invested capital that needs to be recovered.
Decarbonization will require new technologies and massive investments of capital. But the investments will make money, and the new technologies will come. The current renewable energy technology is appropriate for some users but is not without limits. Large-scale solar and wind farms occupy lots of valuable and sometimes fragile land. The power lines to transmit energy from those farms are inadequate. Home solar arrays are expensive and inefficient, and home batteries are large and expensive. But remember the first mobile phones were the size of a briefcase, and before we had streaming videos and music, we had record players and video cassettes. The computer I used in graduate school was the size of a couple of SUVs and had far less computing power than my iPhone. The pace of technological advances is difficult to predict, but the fact of advancing technology is irrefutable. Imagine a more efficient solar array embedded in an apartment’s windows and a battery the size of your laptop that stored a week’s supply of energy. Imagine the entire system for the cost of your big screen TV.
The sun, the source of renewable energy, will outlast our species and is free and clean. In contrast, fossil fuels are finite, and the more we “drill baby drill,” the deeper we will need to drill. Moreover, let’s contrast the production processes of solar and fossil fuel technologies. Fossil fuels must be extracted from the planet, which costs money and pollutes. Then, they must be transported to the place where they will be burned. That also costs money and pollutes. Then they must be burned. Yup, that costs money and pollutes the planet. In contrast, wherever solar energy is absorbed, it can be transformed into heat or electricity and then stored for later use in a battery. The solar cells continue to get smaller and cheaper, as do the batteries. The technological development of renewable energy resembles what we saw with computers. In the 20th century, computers were maintained in central facilities by highly trained operators, and data analysis required high levels of technical expertise. Computing power was expensive and inaccessible to the average person. Today, we carry computers in our pockets, they are maintained by young technicians at “genius bars,” and can be operated by third graders.
My prediction is that, just as young people discarded landline phones and cable television, eventually they will disconnect from the electric grid. For that to happen, the technology of solar energy will need to get better, cheaper, and more convenient. The only competition to that decentralized source of energy might be an electric grid that runs on either renewable or nuclear energy that can somehow beat a home energy system on price. Fossil fuels will be unable to compete with lower-priced renewable energy. Those advanced energy technologies are not here yet, but energy is so important and, with so many brilliant scientists and engineers working on it, I am betting that breakthroughs will come.
With a scientific skeptic in the White House, it is easy to be pessimistic about the development of a circular, renewable resource-based economy. Certainly, there is a danger that America’s typical role as a leader in science and technology is endangered by threatened cuts to basic scientific research in our world-class research universities. I am hopeful that the research universities in red states will prevent any dismantling of NIH and NSF. The military-funded research that created the internet, GPS, microchips, and thousands of other critical inventions must continue, and I suspect it will under the philosophy of “America First.” Still, even if America doesn’t lead in this effort, Europe, China, and Japan also are working on the development of these new technologies.
While technological fixes are required, Professor Milbrath was correct when he identified the need for value change. No, we are not going to get back to the earth and live in harmony with nature. There are simply too many people and there is not enough nature. Our future is in sustainable cities and in sustainably managed organizations that minimize their negative environmental impacts. The demand for these cities and organizations is coming from young people who have grown up on our crowded and warming planet. There has been a value change and a change in our culture as more and more people are aware of the damage being done to the planet and our need to pay more attention to our personal and institutional impacts. The demand for renewable energy and a circular economy is a result of that cultural paradigm shift. The fossil fuel industry and their political allies in Washington will not be able to stop the drive to renewable energy. It will happen with or without them. But it will happen.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
