12 Technology and Global Warming

Report 12: Oct. 1, 2023

1. Solutions: Technology

A word about looking for solutions through the use of technology. Ways of preventing or moderating global warming have been proposed by many people and organizations. However, I believe that there are no technical solutions that will stop global warming nor prevent a major collapse of modern society. Governmental and most other influential leaders continue to talk of growth of the economy and act to encourage greater use of energy. They do not want to concern themselves with the realities of ecology and its consequences for organic life. Instead, they look to technology and false hopes. To reach Net Zero Emissions by 2050, the IPCC, indicates that Low-carbon technologies are key to necessary reductions. Behaviour changes, changes of attitudes, and the lack of needed materials are largely dismissed.

IPCC role of technology in attaining Net Zero emissions

To try to continue our lives as we have in recent decades is not fruitful. Before making suggestion about how to act in a practical way, I want to dismiss technology as being practical in solving environmental problems.

Technology cannot provide solutions to the problems of global warming, which it has created. Technology has been extraordinarily successful because it can focus on specific problems with little regard to the secondary, tertiary, or more remote ecological effects of the solution to particular problems. Technology has produced great medicines, lots of food, better living conditions but also eight billion people on an Earth that will not be able to support them. Technology has produced the machines and resources to produce a plethora of goods and services, but not ways to limit the pollution of its waste products. Technology has produced plastics that contribute to many beneficial goods and services but now is a contaminant or pollutant throughout the natural environment, even humans. Technology has devised artificial Intelligence, even among computers themselves, but cannot employ wisdom. In fact, technology, no matter how intelligent, cannot be wise. The lack of human wisdom may also not have been possible once political power became rested in organizations larger than subsistence groups or tribes whose wisdom was necessary for group survival. Technology, in its self, is a human creation. It is not part of the biotic world of evolution nor does it exchange information with the natural world.

For most of the last 10,000 years, alleviation of environmental problems for humanity was possible only because new lands and technologies were available. The growth imperative of humans, as with that of all organisms–to maintain and reproduce themselves–could continue until limits within the natural environment restricted expansion. But when technology, science, individualism, and the belief that humans are the masters of the Earth were coupled with the power of fossil fuels, the natural limits to growth were released, swamping any remaining sense of human wisdom with regard to nature.

Modern technology is based on energy that was stored in ancient, fossilized, concentrated carbon deposits. Their burning today has allowed the exuberance of modern times. And we have come to know in the past few decades, its burning has caused many negative results of which global warming is the most frightening. Renewable energy is based on current resources, not those of millions of years ago. But to use renewable sources of energy, almost all of which are based on incoming sunlight, it takes modern technology, which is based on nonrenewable source to use it. Renewable energy, although in continuous supply, cannot support the technology that it takes to harness it to other uses. Its EROEI is far below the energy required for modern society. It is not a perpetual motion machine!

[As a side thought, even if renewable energy were to substitute for fossil fuel energy (So far, it has not. Use of fossil fuel energy continues to grow.), the natural ecological systems of the Earth would continue to be greatly altered. Further, the problem of peak oil would then loom large. With continued use of Fossil Fuels at current rates, a peak in production should occur in the 2040s.]