Max Gladwell

What would happen if we took a tunnel-vision approach to climate change? That’s the basis of this month’s “Wired” cover story.

What’s the opposite of forest green? How about neon orange? That appears to be what went through the mind of Wired magazine’s creative director when picking a color for this month’s cover. Set against that distinctly non-green background, the magazine calls out greenies with the following: “Attention Environmentalists: Keep your SUV, Forget organics, Go nuclear, Screw the spotted owl.” The tone appears squarely aimed at the uptight TreeHugger crowd, though they’ve yet to take the bait. EcoGeek responded quickly with a point-by-point, true-or-false breakdown of the arguments. And here we are. Evidently, the sensational tactics are working.

Here’s the setup: “Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism’s sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. We need to take advantage of the energy efficiencies offered by urban density. We must accept that the world’s fastest-growing economies won’t forgo a higher standard of living in the name of climate science — and that, on the way up, countries like India and China might actually help devise the solutions the planet so desperately needs.”

Let’s be clear about one thing. Discourse on “the environment” often seems to ignore the fact that it’s wholly and exclusively about us. No sound argument can be made to save “the planet” for its own sake. There is no inherent value in preserving the earth, and we have no moral obligation to do so, except in so far as it’s in our best interest. Make no mistake, it most certainly is. But the planet does not have a problem. We do. The planet does not care whether the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt and displace a billion people. It is not phased by drought, extreme weather, and mass species extinction. It’s weathered much worse. And besides, the planet has a date with destiny in the form of a close encounter with our sun, and there’s nothing we can do to avert or hasten that fate.

Preserving and maintaining a healthy, sustainable environment is a moral imperative for ourselves and future generations. The arguments constructed by many environmentalists, though, hold water no better than a colander. We recall a book from college called Should Trees Have Standing in which the author makes a case that trees (i.e. big plants) should achieve legal standing based simply on the fact that some animals had. It was quite a good laugh. So it appears that Wired gets this distinction between preserving the earth for its own sake versus maintaining it for our own selfish reasons, which is why they’re challenging many of the backward tenants of environmentalism. But their single-minded approach–reduce carbon at all costs– leaves much to be desired and even comes across as somewhat contrived.

As a counterpoint to this position, WorldChanging editor Alex Steffen wrote about the “Dangers of Focusing Solely on Climate Change.” So it appears to us that Wired said to Alex, “We’re going to take this unorthodox and unreasonable position on climate change and argue from an extreme position where CO2 is the only factor that matters. Will you argue against it so we can balance it out?” Nevertheless, it’s all good fodder for debate.

Wired points out a few softballs. Urban living is less wasteful than suburban. For the most part, buying used cars (recycling) is better than buying new ones, even when they’re hybrids. Carbon trading doesn’t work (yet), but a stiff carbon tax will. China’s solar industry is promising…though it won’t come close to countering the number of coal-fired power plants coming online or the 1,000 new cars entering the streets of Bejing every day. They also touch on hot-button topics like nuclear power and organic farming.

Nuclear is as close to carbon-free energy as any other form. Conservatives love to goad liberals on this issue in an effort to lure them toward hypocricy. If your only goal is to reduce carbon, it presents a compelling case. In principle, we agree. France is a shining example of how nuclear can be safely and effectively utilized on a nationwide scale. But there are two big problems, neither of which has to do with waste disposal or security. First, nuclear is expensive. One of the reasons we don’t have more nuclear power is because it requires huge taxpayer subsidies. These could be offset by a carbon tax, which would effectively bring down the cost per megawatt to that of fossil fuels. The other problem is supply. We have a pretty good idea what the world’s non-renewable uranium reserves look like, and there isn’t nearly enough. If nuclear is a solution, it will be a small one. We saw Professor Nate Lewis of Cal Tech make a presentation a couple years back that illustrated the carbon-energy problem very clearly with a tremendous wealth of data. What we need is innovation.

The agriculture issue, as we recently covered, is directly tied to human health and wellbeing; looking only at carbon ignores this fact. Still, we’ve seen compelling evidence that regenerative organic farming sequesters carbon in the soil, requires considerably less fossil fuel resources to produce, and competes on a yield basis with synthetic farming and GMO crops. Organic farming also doesn’t require nitrogen fertilizers, which destroy the soil and lead to dead zones. Most of all, we still have no idea about the health effects of genetically modified foods. This is in part because the GMO industry and US government work so closely together to block any type of significant studies in this area…presumably from fear of what they’ll discover. They certainly don’t want another tobacco conspiracy, so instead of doing the studies and burying the findings, it’s easier to have no studies at all and claim ignorance.

The most glaring omission from Wired‘s somewhat contrived top-10 list is efficiency. It’s perhaps the single best way to universally reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Living in cities is one way to live more efficiently, but new technologies and policies to reduce energy consumption and get more bang out of every megawatt are too obvious and promising to ignore…unless you’re goal is to manufacture controversy and sell magazines.

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