On why technology is not the answer.

Julio F. Campos

Recently I was asked about which environmental friendly technologies or products we need to invent for a more sustainable society.

Although a simple question, with a simple answer but complex explanation, it is indeed the single most important question that one could ask.

The answer is plain simple: none.

The reason behind both the question and the answer, however, demands a not so simple explanation.
 
Let's start with the question that is the root of what was asked:   

Why do we need more technology?

The concept that the technology development could improve human society development was introduced in the first two decades of the twentieth century and later used to describe the works of the economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen.
 
Its idea was resumed by the engineer William H. Smyth with the introduction of the technocracy concept, which was could be resume to  "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists, and engineers".

It translates by the proposal that through the knowledge of technically skilled people most of the social problems could be solved by the technology development approach.

Technocracy  = The belief that through the technical knowledge most of the problems could be solved by the technology development.

After the 1929 crisis, the technocratic idea was given the necessary impetus, turning the search for the solution to the unemployment in the technology the main factor for the popularization of the concept within the decision makers.
 
It the 29 crisis was the driven factor for the politicians adopt the technological solutions concept, the post second world war period, with both the US industrial development and Europe reconstruction effort, made the technocratic though popular amongst the public.
 
The resulted technological development boom in the middle twentieth century, with new cars, airplanes, television, telecommunications, housing appliances, nuclear energy, the space program and computers in the late 60's consolidated the perception that no matter the problem a technology could be developed to deal with it.
 
It's not so surprising that when the first concerns about the environmental issues, initially focused on the pollution problem, arose in the 70's the concept that more technology could solve social problems was easily applied to the environmental problems as well.
 
The 70's oil crisis was the most important driving force to the ramification of the technocracy into the technoenvironmentalism movement as new technologies brought solutions that could help solve, or at least cope with, both the energy crisis and the environmental pollution.
 
Those technologies are still being pursued today in the form of more efficient cars, renewable energy/fuel sources and alternate transportation ways.
 
With the popularization internet, the concern with the environment spread widely and more and more person started to search for ways to try to help deal with the problem.
 
As a result, we have new technological solutions being proposed on a daily basis by well-intentioned people and startups, which are still restrained from understanding the real problem origin due to the paradigm of technological solutions.

After a century observing the technology present fantastic and miraculous solutions to our problems, it's no surprise that we are still attached to that though model.

That explains why we still think that the solution for our problems is into new technologies, but not why that's not the answer.

Why is no new technology the answer?

The answer has three interdependent aspects:

1 - The mistaken belief in efficiency. 

The increase in efficiency, whether for energy use or other resources use, is believed to allow us to develop with reduced environmental impacts.
 
There are two caveats to that belief.
 

• The Jevons' Paradox
  
  As demonstrated by the Jevons' Paradox, the increase in efficiency (either for energy or consumer goods production) does reduce the resources consumption, and as consequence environmental impacts, if, and only if, the increased efficiency doesn't result in reduced consumer prices which leads to increase in energy/good consumption by the population. 
  
  If that happens, the benefits of the increase in efficiency are canceled due to increasing consumer demand.
   
• The technological substitution delay:
  
  Even if a new technology doesn't fall under the Jevon's Paradox and indeed results in a reduced environmental impact, there is no such thing as zero environmental impact (due to thermodynamics entropy law). Therefore it will have an impact, although smaller than it's previous technology. 
  
  The problem lies in the problem that while the new technology is not widely used, it will be used concomitantly with the previous technology, which will keep impacting the environment. Yes, its impact will be continuously reduced over time as the new technology takes place.
  
  However, when we consider that today, on average, a new technology takes 35 years to reach 50 million people (average considering only the population from developed or under development countries), a miraculous problem-solving technology would take centuries to reach the whole earth population.
  
  When one remembers that most of Earth population still don't have the most simple, basic, sanitation systems, this delay becomes clear.

Since we are already overshooting the Earth resources, it's not a problem of asking if we need more 
technological solutions, but if we can wait for them.

2 - The mistaken belief on the need of more technology. 

The reason on why we don't need more technology is simple, we already have all the needed technology.
 
We already produce more than enough food for the entire planet population, but it's concentrated in a few countries. While developed countries have outrageous levels of food being wasted, only that wasted food could save millions of people from starvation. 

Many populations, given access to well know traditional agricultural technologies could solve their problems.

Hunger, however, is a well-known method for governments to exert control over its population.
 
One may point the wealth distribution problem. That leads to two basic issues:
 

• How much wealth the poor countries need to reach an adequate level of development?
  
  Here we face the great problem of sustainable development proposals: Which is an adequate level of development? The US level? European level? Latin America level?
  
  It's not a simple problem as we must remember that every developed country is at the top of a pyramid sustained by the less developed ones, and Earth can't sustain their levels of resource consumption.
   
• The lack of adequate wealth distribution is due to the lack of local technologies.
  
  Poor countries are poor because they provide cheap labor for developed countries industries and easily manipulated population for their more and more richer, rulers. So their development through local solutions is neither economically nor politically interesting.
  
  It's clear when we know that huge western companies use child labor in its production chain for a few cents/day.

3 - It's not the technology, stupid. 

As seen, technological efficiency won't help and new technologies aren't in fact needed.
 
So if it won't solve the problem, are we looking for the real problem? No
 
The real problem can be derived from both 1 and 2 topics and it's based on economic and political 
issues.
 

• For the economy wheel keep spinning it need to maintain products and money flowing. The only way to achieve that is encouraging people to consume. The more is consumed, the more is produced, jobs are created and the economy keeps moving. That's what economists believe.
  
  So what is needed is to maintain the consumerism levels growing so the economy can grow. It does apply to circular economics and it's the reason why it won't work.
  
  For the economy to grow the population need to consume more. For the population consume more the productive sector need to consume more resources, and so on.
  
  From that (plus Jevons' Paradox and a careful analysis of corporate sustainability reports) it's no difficult to observe that the "new", "green", "sustainable" solutions are only used until a well-defined limit. Those solutions can't impact the corporate profitability or there is no economic growth.

  Therefore actual sustainability is bad for business.

   
• Poverty is the most well-known method for politicians to control it's population, making improvement promises and giving scraps to keep them happy. However, there's another aspect of the problem.
  
  Under the proposal to help poor countries to develop (to which level?) and leave the poverty, there is an international agreement that developed countries should provide technical and knowledge aid.
  
  Although that aid is received by poor countries through several initiatives, their inherent corruption keeps the solutions from reaching the population.
  
  Also, the technocratic mentality ensures that the simplest, cheaper solutions won't be made available, and worse, the solutions that could be locally developed will remain unknown.
  
  So, it's up to the developed countries to provide their own solutions to aid the poor countries. Solutions that comes with a price tag to keep the economic dependence and the global economy wheel spinning.

Why more technology is not the answer? 

Because our current social and environmental problems are caused by population consumerism supported by economic interest.

We don't need more technology, we need to consume less. 

Only that move by the people will drive the economy to a sustainable direction.
 
Until there, we'll keeping overshooting Earth resources, until none is left.
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