Month 6, Day 1: A Sign Of Personal Virtue.

I am a great fan of appropriate technology, and as such I don’t respond in a reflexively negative way to people like Nathan Myhrvold — even when he comes off as dismissive of environmental concerns, as in his interview with Fareed Zakaria in this week’s Newsweek:

Zakaria: Why do you think that people in the environmental community dismiss geoengineering?

Myhrvold: They have this attitude for two reasons. One is that much of the environmental movement is anti-technology. They’ll say, “Isn’t there going to be an unintended consequence?” And I say, yes there is! When a heart surgeon does bypass surgery on you, you’re left with a big scar—but it saves your damn life. I think another reason is more political. A lot of environmentalists feel that if everyone believes there’s a simple fix, they’ll demand that. And then they’re never going to get rid of their SUVs and they’re never going to tax carbon.

The interview reads like the transcription of a television appearance, further illustrating the inability of our media (even with someone as perspicacious as Zakaria involved) to handle intellectual complexity. But to me, what was significant was a word that never appeared. This is the first time to my knowledge that I have used the phrase “vocabula non grata” in my discourse. I am pleased.

Nathan Myhrvold is correct in stating that America’s energy needs can never be met completely through the use of renewable sources, but his interview with Fareed Zakaria is notable for a significant omission: neither man ever mentions energy efficiency and waste reduction. Ever since Ronald Reagan took the solar panels off the White House roof, discussion of conservation has been ridiculed by politicians and the media, and the word is now vocabula non grata in “serious” discussion. Which is, to put it bluntly, stupid. In every single area of our national patterns of energy usage there are opportunities for significant reduction in demand, most of which would actually improve our quality of life. If Americans decided to make carpooling into the rule rather than the exception, petroleum use would diminish drastically and traffic congestion would ease. The fact that these measures are not now the norm in our country shows how the disdain for conservation has crippled our ability to respond to circumstances like B.P.’s destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. When Dick Cheney sneered, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy,” he illuminated the mindset that has brought us to this pass. The likelihood of catastrophic climate change may not be a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive conservation policy, but it should be.

Warren Senders