In Engineering 101 (or whatever), the professor introduced us to the engineer-designed modern wonders that made people’s lives more healthy and more comfortable: washing machines, dishwashers, automobiles, tree-climbing deer-hunting stands (yes, you heard me), and air conditioning. The professor proudly regaled us with his technical input into the design of a mechanical okra picker. Two guys from New Jersey sitting to my right looked quizzically at each other and mouthed “okra picker?”
There are always unintended consequences to technology. Workers lose jobs. “Labor-saving” devices don’t provide more free time; they just mean we have more time to pour into being wage slaves. Facebook? Well.
David Owen (The New Yorker) considers what refrigeration has meant to the planet. For one thing, it killed the ice-harvesting business on Bantam Lake, in Connecticut. That ended in 1929. Refrigeration across the planet meant air conditioning. Which meant on a recent day in mid-December there was open water on Bantam Lake and the temperature was sixty-one degrees:
According to a report published in 2018 by the International Energy Agency, refrigeration in 2016 accounted for about six per cent of the world’s energy consumption, and space cooling accounted for about eight per cent. In the same report, the I.E.A. predicted that worldwide energy use by air-conditioners would triple by 2050, “requiring new electricity capacity the equivalent to the combined electricity capacity of the United States, the E.U. and Japan today.” Energy use by refrigerators is on a similar upward path.
There’s no free lunch. As with hydrofluorocarbons.
Here’s how it really goes:
The I.E.A. says that if we successfully implement what it calls an “Efficient Cooling Scenario,” by optimizing the energy efficiency of our cooling machines, we could save almost three trillion dollars by 2050. If we really do that, though, we will have three trillion to spend on something else, and whatever we spend it on will inevitably have climate consequences of its own. The history of civilization is, in many ways, the history of accelerating improvements in energy efficiency. Extracting greater value from smaller inputs is how we’ve made ourselves rich; it’s also how we’ve created the problem that we’re now trying to address with more of the same. Making useful technologies more efficient makes them cheaper, and as they become cheaper we use them more and find more uses for them, just as adding lanes to congested highways makes driving more attractive, not less. In 2011, the D.O.E.’s forecasters presumably didn’t anticipate that improvements in energy efficiency would make it increasingly economical to power and cool the server farms that mine and manage cryptocurrencies. The correlation between growth in efficiency and growth in consumption is not accidental.
One cannot help recalling Mosquito Coast (1986). Allie Fox (Harrison Ford), an inventor disgusted with American consumerism, moves his family to Central America to build himself a utopia along a river in the jungle. But he brings the contagion of civilization with him in the form of an ice machine he’s designed. Building one in the jungle is an itch he cannot help but scratch. An explosion destroys his machine, his home, and the river’s ecosystem.
This weekend, the podcast “Climate One” discussed whether nature should have rights the way “New Zealand granted the Whanganui River the full legal rights of a person. India granted full legal rights to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, and recognized that the Himalayan Glaciers have a right to exist.”
What stands out is that at some point these discussions consider the monetary value of the resources, and whether granting ecosystems personhood rights comes with legal liabilities that have cash value. Capitalism uber alles. The Midas cult reduces every human interaction (in this case an inhuman interaction) to a transaction. We bring that business-centric viewpoint everywhere we go the way Allie Fox brings “civilization” with him into the jungle to ruinous effect. It infects everything:
I frequently refer to the Midas cult, those of a certain economic class who view every human interaction as a potential for-profit transaction, who behave as though anything that might be turned into gold (profit) should be, especially not-for-profit public services such as education. For the Midas cult, anything less than private percentage off the top is a crime against capitalism.
That things have in themselves value that cannot be measured with money has no place in this culture.
We invented that, too.