| TOO MUCH MAGIC Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation James Howard Kunstler New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2012 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-0-8021-2030-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8021-2030-X | 245pp. | HC | $25.00 | |
One of the things this author deplores is a wishful reliance on the prospects for magical future technological fixes. He cites several examples: the current national push for a high-speed rail system, which he feels is unaffordable;1 Amory Lovins's advocacy of the Hypercar, a vehicle capable of remarkable fuel efficiency (and indeed the quest for energy efficiency in general); the hubris of employees of Google Corporation, who he feels have a totally unfocused and uncritical faith that some undefined technology will come along at some future date to solve any problem that crops up.
Regarding the unfocused faith of the lay public in future technological breakthroughs, or in the imminent radical transformation of society by some recently made breakthrough, he has a valid point. Consider the reaction to Neil Armstrong's first step onto our Moon; the worldwide adulation for the heroic astronauts who made this awesome journey and the momentary (as international affairs go) hope that brotherhood and amity would replace Cold War rivalries.
Marina Benjamin, in her book Rocket Dreams, tells of another such hoped-for transformation. When the airplane was developed, a school of thought appeared that forecast the appearance of a new, superior class of human who would take charge and run the world more smoothly and fairly.2 And Kunstler mentions Ray Kurzweil, whose prediction of the Singularity posits humanity's evolution into immortal, even godlike entities.
It goes without saying that the airplane worked no edifying transformation on H. sapiens. Reaching the Moon, as wonderful as that was as pure achievement, never did so either (in fairness, I know of no serious claims that it would; there was for a few weeks a worldwide exaltation inspired by shared pride, but that quickly faded.) Nor will Kurzweil's Singularity do so, even if it or anything remotely like it comes to pass — an unlikely prospect in my opinion.
But there is another sort of faith in technology, and Kunstler is wrong not to appreciate its existence. I can best explain the distinction by invoking Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." This is quite true — but only for those who did not create the advanced technology. In promulgating this law, of course, the late Arthur C. Clarke meant to apply it to alien technology: something like the Black Monolith in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he did with Stanley Kubrick. This was, in that fictional reality, the proverbial stargate: a means of transcending the limitations of ordinary three-dimensional space to enable near-instantaneous travel across the stars.
Such a technology would seem equivalent to magic to us, today — but only because we did not create it. If we had, or even if we only discovered how to use a stargate built by someone else, it would quickly lose its mystique. (A good portrayal of this is the science fiction series Stargate SG-1.)
Returning to the realm of existing technologies, consider Kunstler's objection to alternative energy sources such as wind power. Wind turbines exist in large numbers. They are the fastest growing form of renewable energy, and in some states they provide a large fraction of total power consumed (about 20 percent in Iowa, for example.) There is an abundant literature that shows many states have so far tapped only a miniscule portion of the potential wind energy they have available.3 Trained as an electrical engineer, I understand how wind turbines work and can readily appreciate their potential contribution to the nation's electricity supply. Kunstler, however, dismisses all forms of renewable energy out of hand because he does not understand them. Perhaps his objection is rooted in the fact that they cannot immediately take over America's entire electrical burden. Many defenders of fossil-fuel power make this argument, but it is a straw man because no renewable-power advocate suggests it is possible or desirable.
Or consider power generated by means of commercial nuclear fission power plants. This too exists. It has since 1959. True, it has its problems; but Kunstler drops it from consideration because of those problems without (AFAIK) being aware that there are new reactor designs which promise to obviate many of these defects. Will they in reality do so? Perhaps not; but they certainly will not if design studies are not funded and prototypes are not built and tested. There are applications for dozens of new fission power plants in America, but all of them are for current, problematical designs.
Kunstler also raises cost issues, of course; and he is right to do so. But cost is an area rife with assumptions having enormous impact on the final numbers. Current nuclear power plants cost more than coal-fired plants, but this is not necessarily true of all fourth-generation designs. Burning coal also has a number of health and safety impacts on the American populace: impacts which are not factored in to the life-cycle costs of the plants.
Kunstler favors travel by rail over personal automobiles. We once had a truly comprehensive passenger rail network; he would like to see it restored. Yet he sees high-speed rail as unaffordable. I wonder how the two systems would compare in a thoroughgoing cost analysis. A high-speed rail system between major cities, versus rebuilding the widespread conventional rail network of a century past. Without running the numbers, I doubt they would end up very different. Certainly Amtrak, with its constant budget shortfalls, is an indicator of the high costs of conventional rail transport infrastructure. Amtrak would certainly pay its own way if it were not competing with private automobiles. But Kunstler is talking about rebuilding rail transport while "Happy Motoring" (as he derisively calls it) still is possible for most of us.
All of this just goes to say that faith in well-understood technology is seldom misplaced. True, it takes a well-trained and competent engineer to understand a technology well, and engineers do sometimes miss important aspects of their designs. A notorious example is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, where an overlooked resonant coupling with high winds brought disaster. But the engineering professions have developed procedures and rules of thumb to catch these deficient designs before they turn into flawed hardware. Similarly, experienced operators and managers can catch bad construction or operating practices before they cause expensive failures. In my life I have seen quite a few failures of technological systems. Almost always they are due to heedlessness: the proper methods were neglected out of ignorance, or bypassed for reasons of expediency — of getting the job done yesterday. The Brown's Ferry and Davis-Bessie nuclear power plants. The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. These are only a few of hundreds of examples.
Some of Kunstler's ideas make a great deal of sense, and his attitude of irascible skepticism makes even more. One thing we can count on as the crunch begins to bite deep is that a profusion of hare-brained schemes will be bruited about. But Kunstler is too skeptical about alternative energy and biofuels, too biased against energy conservation and high-speed rail, too uninformed about system costs. If he would take the time to look at some of the proposed technological solutions with the relevant expert at his side, I think he would develop a different perspective on some of these ideas.
He does get some things right. Our current methods of raising crops, with their vast fields of monoculture grains, their huge appetite for fertilizers, fuel, and pesticides, and their loss of topsoil, cannot be sustained. As he predicts, labor-intensive small farms will and must replace them. It is much the same with the way we raise food animal: the factory farms with millions of animals crammed together, fed antibiotics to fatten them up for market (and incidentally breeding resistant bacteria), and producing tons of wastes that often are improperly disposed of, have got to go. He describes an alternative.
"The nineteenth-century urban market gardens of Paris occupied 6 percent of the real estate of the city and kept Paris supplied with fresh vegetables year round. The system was composed of plots that averaged less than two acres. It required a lot of human hand labor. It employed cold frames, glass cloches, walls for tempering wind, and large quantities of horse manure—abundantly available in that day—both to fertilize and as a heat source banked under and around cold frame boxes. The system was self-sustaining and called for much thoughtful deployment of material resources, but not what we would consider high tech today in the sense of automated, mechanized, computerized fantasies depending on lavish quantities of electricity. The Parisian small-plot market-garden system was abandoned when mechanical tilling and chemical fertilizers took food production up to greater scale in the early twentieth century, along with the hypergrowth of the city itself, which made centrally located real estate much more profitable for revenue-generating buildings. We are surely headed in the opposite direction now in this period of comprehensive contraction, and we have to rethink the relationship between where we live and how society organizes itself around food production." – Page 58 |
That future world will have to be built, and we will have to build it — or at least establish the political and legal conditions that will enable our children and grandchildren to build it. In the effort to achieve sustainability, pride of place goes to politics; but no form of technology that works safely today should be rejected out of hand. Likewise, promising technologies must not be dismissed for ideological reasons; they deserve a fair assessment and trial. In that proper political and legal environment, new methods will not be blocked by politicians because they threaten the status quo, but only because they fail to deliver what they promise. Of course the mega-corporations, the immense factories, the gigantic central power plants, the continent-spanning expressways and electrical grids, will become rare. Of course people will live on a smaller scale: they will travel less, consume less, work in smaller enterprises. But there will still be a place for the large installation, intelligently designed.
Yes, I'm speculating here. But why not? Has any of these ideas, by cogent analysis or failed prototype test, been shown to be unworkable? In judging what is technically feasible, let demonstrated success be our prime directive.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.