Bishop Hill Ecomodernism
Apr 15, 2015 Climate: WG3 Greens Sometimes you find support for your position in the most unlikely places. In the New York Times, Eduardo Porter has been looking at the "Eco-modernist Manifesto", a document produced by a group of (mainly) academics including several from the Breakthrough Institute and Mark Lynas as well.
Here's the introduction to the manifesto.
To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day. Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands. Many earth scientists express this by stating that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.
As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.
In this, we affirm one long-standing environmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature, while we reject another, that human societies must harmonize with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse.
Remarkably, Porter seems to accept these views and even suggest that depriving destitute Africans of the benefits of fossil fuels is not actually a good thing to do.
Exciting times.
Reader Comments (31)
"A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their . . . powers to . . . stabilize the climate" etc.
Always remember Rule 1: You can't do just one thing.
Everything has flow-on effects, which are often unexpected and worse than you can imagine.
Well, it reads to me like intellectualised gobbledigook.
"Harmonising" bad - "Shrinking impact" good.
Wow! Talk about having a God complex.
Forgive me if I have this wrong, but from memory, the only "scientists" referring to today's world as the "Anthropocene", came from FoE, RedWar, & WWF, & they were scientivists through & through! On top of which I hadn't heard anyone use the term "Anthropocene" for some time now. Is this an effort to re-establish the term as some genuine form of "scientific" nomenclature, perhaps?
Surely we are in the age of the Hymenopterocene.
Ant species are more numerous than humans; occupy every continent and environment naturally except the Antarctic; change their environment to suit themselves and have been here a lot longer than humans. There is no competition. Have you seen termites remove houses in the Aussie Outback? Have you ever tried to get rid of ants? I think the likes of Mark Lynas should rethink their place on the evolutionary scale.
Alan the Brit: see this and this. Especially the comments.
Ivor Ward: great comment. I loved 'Hymenopterocene'.
"stabilize the climate"
The Babylonian Delusion continues.
Spare us.
"Stabilize the climate" gives another meaning to Anthropocene, the age in which some Men see themselves as being able to control nature. Good to see that the age of comedy continues.
Before getting too excited about moderate environmentalism, be aware that the BBC (especially the extremely fundamentalist World Service) is giving enthusiastic platforms to those who intend public shaming of anyone, company or country that they disapprove of, with climate and pollution always getting mentioned first or second.
@ Robin Guenier: Thanks for that. I agree that is has not been scientifically assessed as such. I genuienly hadn't heard the term used for some time in the general media, & had quietly hoped it had died a death, a rather long & painfully slow one at that! I would certainly agree about our influences upon the planet in general. We may have indeed spread seeds & the like to other lands unintentionally, but so do migrating birds. As far as I am concerned, I still live in the Holocene, which may not last an awful lot longer. Question for you Robin, as a geologist, can you point me to some actual science that actually suggests we may not have another Ice-Age for many thousands of years yet? All I can find is some general comments that "some scientists say", sort of thing & referring to orbital mechanics.
Talking about humans shaping, affecting or harming the planet is akin to discussing the tooth fairy in a serious way. We do not even live on the planet we live on the skin of a lumpy sphere of custard that we call the earth's crust. The total crust (which is up to 75 km thick) represents just 1.8% of the total mass of the planet and it would take 100 years before we could say we know what resources it contains. The rest of the planet is still a mystery to us, we could certainly blow off the whole crust in a nuclear holocaust and maybe; just maybe the earth might notice.
Someone has a really large ego here, putting humans in the center of the Universe once again. Earth is a ball of stone and iron and we're barely scratching its surface. Even if we reduce that to biosphere, we're just scratching the surface and majority of it has not even noticed us yet. We're declaring this planet ours while all we can see is bananas.
I suggest third approach: that humanity must do its best to survive in this biosphere.
If we remove our impact on environment, if we let it do what it's been doing billions of years, it will kill us. We'll be removed from the Earth's surface exactly how 99.9% of species that ever appeared on Earth were removed.
"As scholars, scientists, campaigners and citizens......."...... ie none of them have ever done any useful paid employment, but believe themselves to have the expertise to dictate to others.
And they do dictate to others, especially when elected to political office, irrespective of the colour of their flag.
They prefer to think of us as guardians of a fragile planet rather than survivors on a hostile planet. While there is no doubt industry pollutes if unchecked, without the home comforts that industry provides we will die off a hell of a lot sooner. The biggest enviro shock to come is still the overdue ice age. The biggest manmade threat is still nuclear war started by some mad dictator.
The actions of humanity are entirely driven by our nature and so it is entirely natural to evolve and exploit fossil fuels in order to survive. Our instinct is always to improve and move forwards and to deny this is to deny our very nature.
I might not be the most-articulate here but this is quite a fundamental point and I hope I managed to get it across!
So the "Breakthrough Institute" is in danger of breaking through to reality. Or is reality just breaking in?
Either way, it probably helps wash down the hypocrisy. Those who will genuinely and generally put themselves and their family 2nd or 3rd tend to get called saints or are awarded the highest orders of decoration. The NYT is lucky indeed if they have saints writing for them.
The "Job Titles" for some of those contributers!
"Reader in Global Change Science"
"Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics"
"Lecturer in Complex Systems Simulation"
My taxes are going to pay for this lot?
Many have already sounded the theme, but I've long thought that although Galileo's demonstration against anthrocentrism in cosmology had more profound intellectual consequences, the revelation that man is relatively impuissant in climate control will have much more vast social, political, and economic consequences.
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Alan the Brit: I'd love to help, but unfortunately (perhaps) I'm a lawyer not a geologist.
You should be a climate scientist there's probably even more money in that than there is in the law! Thanks anyway!
It will be really interesting when these buffoons finally get to the point of realization that humans and what we do are as much a part of nature as a 3 toed sloth.
"[W]e affirm one long-standing environmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature"
In this context it may not be amiss again to mention Alex Epstein's book, "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels," in which he cogently questions that idea.
A recent interview: http://10xtalk.com/53/.
I can see Obama, Cameron, Miliband and just about every senior politician nodding their approval, as they read this paper. When will these stupid law makers wake up and just doubt a little? When will one go against the flow and deliver a sceptical speech? We cannot go on like this for much longer.
Interesting - the rational and optimistic second paragraph sounds very Ridleyan! (As noted by Roddy on twitter)
Legends in their own Anthropocene, every one of them.
Yawn.
I got an e-mail from Amazon UK a few days ago. The company recommended a number of books to me. They included "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet" by Mark Lynas and Institutional Bias by A.W Montford. One is a fairy story, the other a less than fair story. I will leave readers to decide which is which.
GC
Red? As in 'The people's flag is deepest ...'
10,000 years ago the terminal moraine of the southernmost glacier of the current Pleistocene Ice Age was a mile north of my front door. We humans were in the Stone Age. And now we can control the climate, and prevent the return of massive Northern Hemisphere ice sheets at the end of this Holocene Interglacial!
Such progress. Who would have thought it possible?
I keep telling my warmist friends that we've only had computers and mobile phones for 20 years and you think we can stabilize the climate of a planet, get real!
I've just got around to reading the article referred to above and the so-called 'Eco-modernist Manifesto'. And I've concluded that much of the comment above is misplaced. A theme of the article, that it's absurd that the US - relying on coal, natural gas, hydroelectricity and nuclear power for 95% of its electricity - should try to stop the world's impoverished people from getting access to the same power sources, is not something you'd expect to find in the New York Times. Note this for example:
Moreover it notes that blocking poor countries from access to energy is unsurprisingly causing dozens of them to 'flock to join China's new infrastructure investment bank' - thus playing into China's hands as it fights for greater influence on the world stage.Sensible stuff. But it's a position that's diametrically different from Obama's attempts to get the world to agree to GHG emission cuts in time for the UNFCCC's Paris jamboree in November/December.
Then there's the 'Manifesto'. Ignore the dopey references to the 'Anthropocene' and the pretentiously flowery language and you find it contains a lot of good sense. For example:
As the Bish says: exciting times.
How about this: the US has done more to reduce CO2 emissions than any of these brilliant EU worshipping yahoos by simply doing nothing!
NOTHING works through being FREE from these Eco-fascist schemes.
The US fracking economy has created a booming supply in natural gas, thereby reducing CO2 emissions; Obama and the federal government strenuosuly opposed this exercise of freedom on private and state lands, however. Fortunately, they failed.
It seems these "Savants" could learn something from the US and get the UK government to get the Hell Out of The Way so that market forces can do nothing for the environment and save the earth by doing nothing for Gaia - at all!
Anyone wanna join me in betting that these yahoos learn nothing from the US example of responsible management of our planet's scarce resources and the envrionment?
That rejection of dependence on nature worked real well with Biosphere 2