When we know so little, some eco-skepticism is in order

It’s good to think green. For one, it’s a pleasing colour. For another, it will help us lead better lives.

But thinking green has its costs. It has become a fad, with newspapers and TV channels devoting full pages and airtime to hector us on it. Green has, in short, become a religious belief system. If you are an environmental skeptic — as I am — they may not burn you at the stake, but that’s only because it will contribute to global warming.

To be an eco-skeptic is not the same as being opposed to ecological sensitivity. But there is a difference between having sensible laws for ensuring clean air and water and trying to legislate changes to reduce global warming.

The former directly affects us. If we don’t stop emptying putrid wastes into our rivers and water sources, our children will fall sick or even die. If we don’t reduce automobile pollution, we are going to choke and fall prey to lung diseases. But if we hasten slowly on climate change, we are only going to get better solutions.

We need a two-speed ecological roadmap — a quick one for issues that directly affect us, and a slow one for problems that we can’t possibly understand right now. I can’t work up a lather over global warming. Even the eco-nuts haven’t a clue on what to do about it.

There are four fundamental points to consider before we abandon eco-skepticism on issues like the hole in the ozone layer. First, evolution, and the role technology has played in it. Homo sapiens rose to predominance primarily by defying nature and harnessing technology. The ascent of man was predicated on the belief that nature can be tamed and forced to serve human ends.

Technological progress — from the invention of stone-age tools to agriculture to space missions and nuclear fission — has surely contributed to environmental degradation, but the same technology can be used to reverse the process.

So rather than ask humans to go back to the stone age to prevent ecological damage, we need to invest in technologies that can rectify this.

If greenhouse gases are causing a hole in the ozone layer, surely we can invent technologies to patch it up?

Second, the sheer growth of human population will not allow us to return to nature — however romantic the idea sounds. With a population approaching seven billion, and with significant billions teetering on the edge of poverty in Asia and Africa, the green approaches of well-to-do Scandinavians will be completely different from that of dirt-poor Indians. We cannot feed our millions without some ecological damage. The focus should be on technology-driven solutions.

Example: we can’t have another green revolution without genetically-modified (GM) seeds — howsoever risky that may be. We need fast agricultural growth in the shortest possible time, and we cannot afford to delay decisions on GM crops endlessly. We need to set up a transparent mechanism to do pilot projects, learn from them, and expand quickly once the results are acceptable. India can’t be fed through organic farming alone. Sure, GM crops may have their downside. But so does eco-farming. Millions will die before we reach anywhere near self-sufficiency on the organic food front — assuming it is at all possible.

Third, there’s the consumption economy to think about. The expansion of humankind and the modern world economy has been built on steady increases in consumption.

Asking overconsumers to eat and spend less may be good advice at the individual level, but if even 10% of the world population takes this advice, the global economy will see a great depression to rival the one we saw in the 1930s.

The world can escape de-growth only by asking Africa, India and China to consume more to compensate for lower consumption by the US and Europe which account for more than half the world’s GDP. If India and China consume more, that’s more than 2.5 billion people eating more, spending more. That much consumption growth will damage the environment. Only technology — and not green abstinence — can provide an answer here in the short term.

Fourth, the real reason for eco-skepticism is that we can’t really know if the solutions proposed to reduce global warming will really work. Ecology is impacted by hundreds of things. For example, solar power is touted as an eco-friendly source.

But if we really expand solar power phenomenally, the number of solar panels used to tap the Sun’s light for conversion to heat will result in warming up the temperatures.

Meanwhile, natural phenomena contribute as much to global cooling as warming. In Super Freakonomics, economists Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner point out that the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 released so much sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere that it absorbed water vapour and diffused the sunlight — causing visible global cooling.

Eco-skepticism is in order when we can’t know much about the systemic effects of what we do.