Beyond Economics

In a recent article in The Huffington Post, Bill gates suggests that we should focus on innovation rather than conservation in order to bring about the CO2 reductions needed to stave off climate change. I think he does make some good points here.

Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation (1/20/2010)

If the goal is to get the transportation and electrical sectors down to zero emissions you clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power.  Should society spend a lot of time trying to insulate houses and telling people to turn off lights or should it spend time on accelerating innovation?… you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero no matter what advocates of resource efficiency say. You can never reduce consumerism to anything close to zero…In fact it is doubtful that any such efforts in the rich countries will even offset the increase coming from richer lifestyles in places like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.

With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed…There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.

What I am afraid of is that Gates’ point will be misinterpreted and misused. Americans, especially, are afraid that the implications of climate change mean a great sacrifice in our way of life. I think that this is why the denial campaign has been so successful of late. If climate change isn’t really happening or is a hoax, we won’t have to change afterall. However, when it soon becomes unavoidably obvious that the earth is warming and the climate is being disrupted, the denial campaign will change its tune and latch on to part of Gates’ logic, i.e. that conservation won’t actually help very much so let’s just wait for a technological fix or geoengineering to save us, no point in undue sacrifice.

This article from TreeHuggar makes a few other countervailing points.

Bill Gates’ Vision of Combating Climate Change is Mostly Myopic (1/21/2010)

I’m not sure any advocate of energy efficiency would say it can get you to zero emissions…What some of the most vocal of them do say though is that we could reduce electricity demand by 34% through efficiency improvements in the United States. That alone could replace 62% of coal fired electricity.

…there’s a huge difference between a standard of consumption based on human need and ecological sustainability and the dominant paradigm of consumerism-based, aggregate-growth-fetish culture spreading around the world.

The scale of the conjoined issues of climate change, peak fossil energy, population growth, biodiversity loss, and natural resource overconsumption are such that even those of us who deal with them on a day in day out basis have trouble grasping the big picture all at once…We’re talking massive paradigm shift, behavioral changes, economic changes, even changes in consciousness I’d argue, to deal with them.

…but there is no one solution…no silver bullet.