i heard a clip of van jones’s powershift keynote while listening to amy goodman while getting out the door yesterday morning. i’m still processing his words, but he said something that i found very important to study:
“our economy runs on death. every day we pull death out of the ground and burn it”…
here’s a video of his keynote:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVNtoAiOh1k&w=480&h=390]
i don’t agree with everything he says. in fact, i strongly disagree with his position on clean coal, among other things. [i think we could easily have this if we are willing to face the true costs of coal mining, combustion, and energy production. our problem is a political and social one, not a technological one, because the technology is credibly being developed right now.]
i do like the attention that he and others have brought to the social and cultural costs of the “pollution-based economy” [his words, not mine]. i’ve had at least two kitchen table conversation where we’ve talked about the non-monetary costs of outsourcing our jobs to economies based on piracy and human exploitation. [i digress again.] but all this distracts from the most important issue in “green” or “sustainability” discussions: the environmental or Earth systemic consequences of our economic activities.
what i have the most trouble with is replacing the urgency of the environmental problems with the urgency of the social and cultural problems. if you listen to van jones, he is not talking about environmental issues–he is emphasizing social issues. the whole reason we are having a “sustainability” discussion at all, though, is the imminent environmental collapse that causes a subsequent social and political collapse. at the foundation of “sustainability” from a scientist’s or engineer’s perspective is the stress of our economies on the Earth’s carrying capacity in thermodynamic terms; however, the foundation of “sustainability” from a lay-citizen’s perspective is the stress of our social institutions and structural injustices on the Earth’s carrying capacity in consequential terms.
so i feel like our discussion in terms of policy implications is at a standoff. we engineers and scientists are dumbfounded by our social and cultural gridlock because it is so obvious that we have a problem that requires certain specific technological investments, that lie currently within our state-of-the-art/science. this problem is not being solved only because we don’t agree on who’s at fault or who should pay.
for now, let’s leave this unresolved. let me know what you think.