Response to Porter’s Opinion Piece
I recently read “A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development” by Eduardo Porter in the New York Times on April 14, 2015. I do not agree with the author on a number of points and cannot fathom why he thinks it clever to headline his piece “past sustainable development,” as if his ideas were startling new. From the initiation of development theory, people have been arguing: leave it to the market place. These are the same people who believe in trickle-down economics and that capitalism will self-correct the growing social inequality that is the shame of contemporary US society.
In a nutshell, Porter, and the “eco-modernists” he cites, pedal an old saw: because rich countries developed rapaciously through massive energy consumption, it would be hypocritical to stand in the way of the developing nations achieving the same advances. Inevitably, the author also backs “big agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques,” expansion of nuclear energy, the blind drive to increased urbanization, and reliance for the foreseeable future on the fossil fuels that threaten to destroy all life on earth. This is called “using nature more intensively.” Perhaps the most bizarre piece of this argument blathers about “decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts.” Huh. What does that mean?
Although I agree the developed world is in no position to lecture poorer countries on how to create a sustainable future, Porter’s fundamental premise is wrong. Free market development (capitalism) has had an abysmal environmental record (which is not to say that nominally “socialist” states have had a good one). The road to a better world is not to double down and do more of the same. The solution is for the developed world to commit to major investment to lower its own energy usage and to support a leap in the developed world to a renewable energy supply structure with the ability to power a “cold storage facility or industrial park,” not merely provide “a solar panel for every thatched roof.”
There is no reason that the per capital kilowatt-hour usage in the United States should be 13,250 kwh/year. That level of use is atrocious. What argument could justify consumption 20 times greater than India’s and Bolivia’s? However, if we aspire to a world in which India and Bolivia equal current US energy consumption, we wish for a short life span for the earth.
In the US, a number of leading-edge companies are constructing buildings using a fraction of the energy of conventional structures through lowered consumption with LED lights, heat pumps, and passive house construction. Our auto and truck fleet could go from the current gas-guzzlers to an average 50 mpg in the immediate future and zero fossil fuel energy soon with new battery technology and electric cars. We can manage urbanization by effective planning to build more vibrant and sustainable cities while avoiding sprawl. We can make our electricity system more efficient thought technological advances in transmission, storage, and infrastructure investment in a new generation of energy based on solar and wind. Why shouldn’t per capita energy usage in the US be lower than Japan’s and Germany’s, and why shouldn’t their consumption lower also. This requires commitment equal or greater than that of the New Deal but given the stakes is that an impossible challenge?
In the same way, should we take it as given that the developed world can afford to be energy hogs? Poorer countries indeed have the right to achieve the same material success that Germany, Japan, and the US have, but that does not support Porter’s conclusions unless we say “development has always been, and must remain, extractive and destructive.”
With large-scale infusion of capital into the developed world, private business will follow the infrastructure and money. The critical question is whether expansion of private investment will serve the poor or become another method to extract profit. Capital is amoral, and the free market has not been very successful in dealing with poverty, income equality, environmental degradation, and climate change. Government intervention, including transfer payments from rich to poor countries is the only sustainable road to the future.
The developed world owes the poorer countries an international Marshall Plan to raise living standards, including adequate energy supply because of historical debt arising from our own profligate use of energy and also, in an interconnected world, we all live or die together. Repeating bad ideas of the past because we cannot envision a different future is a blindness we cannot afford.