In my view, covid is a very dramatic counter-example to the benefits of technological stagnation/degrowth for the climate. Millions of people died, billions of people were locked in their homes for months on end and travel was massively reduced. In spite of that, emissions in 2020 merely fell to 2011 levels. The climate challenge is to get to net zero emissions. A truly enormous humanitarian cataclysm would be required to make that happen without improved technology.
On your last paragraph, the instinct you characterise as techno-utopian here just seems to me to be clearly correct. It just seems true that we are more likely to solve climate change by making better low carbon tech than we are to get everyone to get all countries to agree to stop all technological progress. Consider emissions from cars. Suppose for the sake of argument that electric cars were as advanced as they were ten years ago and were not going to improve. What, then, would be involved in getting car emissions to zero? On your approach, the only option seems to be for billions of people to give up their cars, and for them only to be accessible to people who can afford a $100k Tesla. That approach is obviously less likely to succeed than the ‘techno-optimist’ one of making electric cars better (which is the path we have taken, with significant success)
It just seems true that we are more likely to solve climate change by making better low carbon tech than we are to get everyone to get all countries to agree to stop all technological progress.
That’s obviously a false dilemma. Investing in better use of technology and new technology is great, but doesn’t help without reforms that internalize the externalities of climate change. If we don’t subsidize CCS or tax net carbon, unless it’s somehow cheaper to capture it than to let it remain in the air, we won’t reduce CO2 in the atmosphere just with technology, and we’ll end up with tons of additional warming.
“I’m saying that the instinct to judge coming up with a magic technology to allow economic growth and the current state of life while fixing climate change as more likely than global coordination to use existing technology in more sustainable ways feels techno-utopian to me.”
So, the author was saying that s/he thinks we are more likely to solve climate change by global coordination with zero technological progress than we are through continued economic growth and technological progress. I argued that this wasn’t true. This isn’t a false dichotomy, I was discussing the dichotomy explicitly made by the author in the first place.
My claim is that without technological progress in electricity, industry and transport we are extremely unlikely to solve climate change, which is the point that luke kemp seems to disagree with.
Ah. Yes, that makes sense. And it seems pretty clear that I don’t disagree with you on the factual question of what is likely to work, but I also don’t know what Luke thinks other than what he wrote in this paper, and I was confused about why it was being brought up.
Technically it omits a third option (technological progress in areas other than low carbon technology) but it certainly seems to cover all the relevant possibilities to me. Whether we have carbon taxes and so on is a somewhat separate issue: Halstead is arguing that without technological progress, sufficiently high carbon taxes would be ruinously expensive.
The presented dilemma omits the possibility that we can allow for technological progress while limiting the deployment of some technologies—like coal power plants and fossil fuel burning cars. That’s what makes it a false dilemma—it presupposes that the only alternative is to stop all technology, which isn’t the only alternative.
but this is differential technological development, which the authors strongly reject. The author and commenter explicitly ask us to consider how well we would fare if we stopped technological progress entirely
The authors don’t reject differential technological development as much as they claim that no real case has been made for it in the relevant domains. Specifically, “why this is more tractable or effective than bans, moratoriums and other measures has not been fully explained and defended.”
But that statement by the authors, and others I have found, aren’t claims that all technological progress should be stopped. So I think this is a false dilemma. For example, their suggested approach applies to the way that the world has managed previous dangerous technologies like nuclear weapons and bioweapons—we ban use and testing, largely successfully, instead of the idea they reject, which would be, I guess, differentially preferring to fund defense-dominant technology because use of nuclear and bioweapons is inevitable, and assuming that due to the technological completion hypothesis, the technology can’t be stopped.
In my view, covid is a very dramatic counter-example to the benefits of technological stagnation/degrowth for the climate. Millions of people died, billions of people were locked in their homes for months on end and travel was massively reduced. In spite of that, emissions in 2020 merely fell to 2011 levels. The climate challenge is to get to net zero emissions. A truly enormous humanitarian cataclysm would be required to make that happen without improved technology.
On your last paragraph, the instinct you characterise as techno-utopian here just seems to me to be clearly correct. It just seems true that we are more likely to solve climate change by making better low carbon tech than we are to get everyone to get all countries to agree to stop all technological progress. Consider emissions from cars. Suppose for the sake of argument that electric cars were as advanced as they were ten years ago and were not going to improve. What, then, would be involved in getting car emissions to zero? On your approach, the only option seems to be for billions of people to give up their cars, and for them only to be accessible to people who can afford a $100k Tesla. That approach is obviously less likely to succeed than the ‘techno-optimist’ one of making electric cars better (which is the path we have taken, with significant success)
That’s obviously a false dilemma. Investing in better use of technology and new technology is great, but doesn’t help without reforms that internalize the externalities of climate change. If we don’t subsidize CCS or tax net carbon, unless it’s somehow cheaper to capture it than to let it remain in the air, we won’t reduce CO2 in the atmosphere just with technology, and we’ll end up with tons of additional warming.
Hi David, I was arguing against this point:
“I’m saying that the instinct to judge coming up with a magic technology to allow economic growth and the current state of life while fixing climate change as more likely than global coordination to use existing technology in more sustainable ways feels techno-utopian to me.”
So, the author was saying that s/he thinks we are more likely to solve climate change by global coordination with zero technological progress than we are through continued economic growth and technological progress. I argued that this wasn’t true. This isn’t a false dichotomy, I was discussing the dichotomy explicitly made by the author in the first place.
My claim is that without technological progress in electricity, industry and transport we are extremely unlikely to solve climate change, which is the point that luke kemp seems to disagree with.
Ah. Yes, that makes sense. And it seems pretty clear that I don’t disagree with you on the factual question of what is likely to work, but I also don’t know what Luke thinks other than what he wrote in this paper, and I was confused about why it was being brought up.
How is this a false dilemma?
Stop all technological progress
Advance low carbon technology
Technically it omits a third option (technological progress in areas other than low carbon technology) but it certainly seems to cover all the relevant possibilities to me. Whether we have carbon taxes and so on is a somewhat separate issue: Halstead is arguing that without technological progress, sufficiently high carbon taxes would be ruinously expensive.
The presented dilemma omits the possibility that we can allow for technological progress while limiting the deployment of some technologies—like coal power plants and fossil fuel burning cars. That’s what makes it a false dilemma—it presupposes that the only alternative is to stop all technology, which isn’t the only alternative.
but this is differential technological development, which the authors strongly reject. The author and commenter explicitly ask us to consider how well we would fare if we stopped technological progress entirely
The authors don’t reject differential technological development as much as they claim that no real case has been made for it in the relevant domains. Specifically, “why this is more tractable or effective than bans, moratoriums and other measures has not been fully explained and defended.”
But that statement by the authors, and others I have found, aren’t claims that all technological progress should be stopped. So I think this is a false dilemma. For example, their suggested approach applies to the way that the world has managed previous dangerous technologies like nuclear weapons and bioweapons—we ban use and testing, largely successfully, instead of the idea they reject, which would be, I guess, differentially preferring to fund defense-dominant technology because use of nuclear and bioweapons is inevitable, and assuming that due to the technological completion hypothesis, the technology can’t be stopped.