My View: The downside of development

By Leigh Pomeroy

July 04, 2009 08:01 pm

— In recent opinion pieces on these pages, a guest “My View” and letter writers have expressed doubts about the practicability of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act recently passed recently by the U.S. House of Representatives.
I too have serious doubts, but from a different point of view.
They opine it is based on bad science and will cost too much. I say it is too weak, too full of compromise and too full of sellouts to the vested economic interests that have created the need for the legislation.
I’m not going to lambaste the coal, oil and car industries, or industrialized farming. For decades they have supplied us with a steadily improving quality of life.
But it’s only been within the last few decades that we have begun to realize the hidden costs of industrialization and reliance on fossil fuels. One of these costs is the effect that burning carbon has brought to the ecosystem of our planet — a change that the overwhelming majority of scientists say is already causing significant impacts on its biological balance.
The history of humankind is also a history of scientific discovery and technological development. Yet the good brought by science and technology has an “evil twin,” a downside, that often isn’t apparent for decades.
When the humans first learned they could create fire, they also quickly learned that fire could get out of control with devastating effect.
When the first civilizations in Mesopotamia realized they could increase crop yields with irrigation, little did they know that irrigation would eventually lead to the salinization of their lands and the ultimate destruction of their society.
When the Indians of Chaco Canyon in America’s southwest took all the timber from the surrounding tablelands, little did they know that without a nearby forest their society became vulnerable to drought, which caused their society to collapse.
The excitement of developing nuclear fission brought great scientific minds together in Los Alamos in the 1940s, but the horrible destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and later nuclear accidents at Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl have caused many to wonder if we can really control this Frankenstein’s monster.
There is an inherent cost to technology that isn’t always built into accounting balance sheets. The short-term profits are there, but the long-term costs are often pushed off for future generations to deal with.
It is important to listen to those who doubt climate change and to those who claim that addressing it will be prohibitively expensive. But it is more important to realize the fact that an overwhelming majority of scientists, researchers, economists and security policy analysts view climate change as a consequential threat to civilization as we know it.
Doing something about climate change now, even if far from perfect, is better than doing nothing. Unless, of course, we want to end up like the Mesopotamians or the Indians of Chaco Canyon.

Leigh Pomeroy worked in the wine and film businesses in California and Colorado before moving to Minnesota in 1986. In 2004 he was the DFL candidate in Minnesota's 1st Congressional District. Today he teaches film at Minnesota State University while advocating for clean energy and environment issues.