David Owen

David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.

From his Q & A with Belinda G at Galvanize Press:

I know nothing of science and have to trust what I'm told about the environment--how we have damaged it and how to limit our damage. An introduction for your book, The Conundrum, says, "Everything you've been told about living green is wrong." How can the average citizen, like me, know what information to trust for a green, sustainable future?

You shouldn’t necessarily trust me, either, of course. But I think we should all be generally suspicious, especially of approaches that seem easy or that consist primarily of substituting one product for another. It’s easy to look busy on a long list of environmental issues; it’s much harder to have an unambiguously positive impact. The measures that even environmentally enlightened Americans and Australians favor tend to be either ones that are cost-free and easy to implement (more recycling, different shopping bags) or that seem like lifestyle upgrades (a new car, a remodeled kitchen, better-tasting tomatoes). A good test of any activity or product that’s described as sustainable is to multiply it by 9 or 10 billion (the expected population of the world by midcentury) and see if it still seems green. This is not an easy test to pass.

Could you briefly explain how our efforts towards efficiency have exacerbated the problems they aim to solve?

It seems obvious that redesigning a machine to make it use less energy to perform the same amount of work should cause energy consumption to go down. In the long run, though, at the macroeconomic level, it has the opposite effect. Enthusiasts tend to talk about efficiency as though it were something we’d just invented—a promising new tool for addressing environmental problems. But it’s actually something we’ve been doing, quite successfully, ever since our species moved out of caves. Steady increases in efficiencies of all kinds have made us immeasurably wealthier, healthier, and more numerous, among other extraordinary benefits, but they have also created the environmental problems we’re wrestling with now. The main part of the Industrial Revolution was inaugurated by an increase in energy efficiency: James Watt’s invention of an improved steam engine. That technological breakthrough did not, in the long run (or even in the short run) cause overall energy consumption to fall. On the contrary. The problem with efficiency gains, from an environmental point of view, is that we reinvest them in additional consumption. As we get better at making things, we make more things. Worldwide, energy consumption is expected to at least double by mid-century. It’s growing faster than population, and it’s growing in every income category.

If total energy consumption is constrained in some way—by taxes, by legal caps, by rationing—then efficiency gains can...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue