Alternative Futures in a Post-Stimulus World

There’s an air of unreality surrounding this week’s passage of economic stimulus legislation. I suspect that many are expecting things to “get back to normal”, if we just fix the foreclosure crisis, get the banks lending again, and get consumers buying stuff again. In the mainstream media I sample, I don’t get a sense that with the economic downturn we’ve turned a corner to a considerably different future.

One vision of that future is the crash of our energy intensive way of life, with scenarios that range from a post-Peak Oil collapse (the progressive version of the Rapture) to a sort of post-industrial feudalism as envisioned in James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. In this future, the Amish may be the epitome of high technology.

There’s a Green crowd which feels that if you shout “no clean coal” loud enough, this and a lot of hard work will create a vision where life is much better by moving to cleaner production, mass transit and renewable energy. These are the kinds of investments that should be made, because building windmills, weatherizing buildings and restoring strip-mined mountaintops are more useful ways to create jobs than building freeways, but I’m no longer convinced this path alone is going to save us, particularly from adverse climate change. Take John Sterman’s greenhouse gas simulator for a spin and see. You have to drag emissions down quite a bit, very quickly, to have a meaningful impact. However, we’re having a hard time even getting started – people still seem to be confused about the imminence and magnitude of the risk, and long lead time needed to produce any changes, with a significant fraction taking a wait and see attitude on greenhouse gas reductions.

And, according to Dr. Sterman, even smart people are kind of clueless about stock and flow kinds of problems in general (look at the wishful thinking many people engage in when trying to manage their weight), misjudging how feedback loops work with climate change – it seems that people expect climate change to abate quickly once emissions are reduced. The most recent evidence suggests otherwise – we’re stuck with adverse climate change. The challenge is to keep from making it worse.

In contrast to the hunker-down philosophy of getting through the next few centuries (see The Long Emergency), James Lovelock argues in a new book that preserving civilization in the face of adverse climate change will require a massive infusion of high technology. This is seemingly contrary advice from the author of the Gaia hypothesis, but it really is consistent with his message that we’ve now made ourselves stewards of the Earth – wish us luck. You can argue over the details (I think he overstates the effectiveness of nuclear power) but he does make me wonder if the Green crowd is thinking hard enough about what it takes to save us as a species.

This wanders away a bit from the economic stimulus package, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves about what it’s accomplishing. The economic stimulus is really focused on trying to regain our past rather than take us into the future, and the consequences of that choice aren’t pleasant to contemplate.