The Limits and Power of Technology to Solve Political Problems

Climate change edition

Hamilton Nolan writes an excellent newsletter about labor, politics, and power that is widely read. And deservedly so! You should subscribe if you don’t already.

But (I mean, if that wasn’t telegraphed…) I wanted to quibble with his post from Sunday as it relates to climate change.

Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems

His thesis is spot on, especially when directed at the broligarchy with its software and attention-plundering focus:

That’s because the tech industry is uncommonly consequential to all of us—and the techno-utopian vision prevalent within the industry, which assumes that the world’s problems are a series of technological problems to be solved, and that technological progress is the key driver of increased human well-being, can therefore lead to uncommonly bad outcomes for society, when it turns out to be a critically incomplete understanding of how things work.

And, the post is really a call for workers in those industries to unionize. Which would be a transformative win and change the way that these firms operated in a more serious fashion than it seems government (at least the US government) will be able to manage through regulation or other legal maneuvers.

But the title went big and it pushed me to think of the need for a few more caveats here. Agriculture, despite the recently departed Jim Scott’s Against the Grain perspective, helped humanity thrive. As did fire, and the wheel, and language, and writing. And medical science and vaccines. The post gestures at early technologies as being deformed for the purposes of the powerful, most obviously the possibility of weaponizing new inventions. Developments in metallurgy that take us from stone to iron to bronze to steel make far better plowshares but also allow for deadlier swords. Even chemical medical advances have been turned into chemical warfare and the possibility of bioweapons should not be ignored. On the whole, however, these advances have improved the human condition. Even if they lay bare some of the weaknesses of our civilization, which is the key point of Everything Is Tuberculosis by Jon Green. We’ve known how to cure this scourge for decades. And we’ve actually cured it in most of the developed world, yet we allow it to ravage populations of the poor to this day.

Changing Climate Politics

I’m on the record that the massive cost declines and efficiency improvements of solar, wind, and batteries have radically altered the politics of climate change. Essentially, by making clean energy more affordable, the cost of reducing most greenhouse gas emissions is much much lower than prior estimates. Some models even have the cost of an energy transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner sources saves money as an energy system, not even including all of the local and global benefits from reduced pollution. As such the political situation has shifted from a collective action game where we all agree to accept less in order to survive the climate crisis to a game of racing to transition and claim some slice of the industries of the future. Obviously the Trump administration doesn’t care at all about this shift even if it costs more for everyone and burns the planet, just like it doesn’t care about basic science and health.

To be clear though, and again returning to Hamilton’s post, these technologies do not solve the political problem of fighting climate change. They’ve simply changed the nature of the game away from the wicked problem conundrum that felt impossible to grapple with to something much more manageable. The politics and economics of transitioning all of our energy system isn’t easy, but it’s certainly easier to do so if you also don’t have to convince everyone to do so with a lot less of everything.

Chinese megabase with horsey. See my piece in The Wire China on Megabases.

And I will agree with Hamilton that even in the climate world, there are some technologically-minded folks who think that innovation wipes away the need for politics, that the market will simply solve all of these problems without difficulty. I find these views naive. Perhaps in the rich world, market and state operations will smoothly reduce electricity emissions to near zero while electrifying more and more of society in ways that barely feel political to most citizens [I’m dubious, but it’s possible!]. But that would just get us into a situation like we have with TB, where other parts of the world are still suffering. Energy poverty is a real problem, as are emissions. We need to solve them all and doing so is going to take real political action and solidarity.

So, while it is true that technology doesn’t solve political problems, in the world of climate change, technological developments have made the problems that we have to solve much easier. And for that, I’m grateful.