A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development
By Eduardo Porter

The average citizen of Nepal consumes about 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year. Cambodians make do with 160. Bangladeshis are better off, consuming, on average, 260.

Then there is the fridge in your kitchen. A typical 20-cubic-foot refrigerator — Energy Star-certified, to fit our environmentally conscious times — runs through 300 to 600 kilowatt-hours a year.

American diplomats are upset that dozens of countries — including Nepal, Cambodia and Bangladesh — have flocked to join China’s new infrastructure investment bank, a potential rival to the World Bank and other financial institutions backed by the United States.

The reason for the defiance is not hard to find: The West’s environmental priorities are blocking their access to energy.

A typical American consumes, on average, about 13,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. The citizens of poor countries — including Nepalis, Cambodians and Bangladeshis — may not aspire to that level of use, which includes a great deal of waste. But they would appreciate assistance from developed nations, and the financial institutions they control, to build up the kind of energy infrastructure that could deliver the comfort and abundance that Americans and Europeans enjoy.

Too often, the United States and its allies have said no.

The United States relies on coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear power for about 95 percent of its electricity, said Todd Moss, from the Center for Global Development. “Yet we place major restrictions on financing all four of these sources of power overseas.”

This conflict is not merely playing out in the strategic maneuvering of the United States and China as they engage in a struggle for influence on the global stage.

Of far greater consequence is the way the West’s environmental agenda undermines the very goals it professes to achieve and threatens to advance devastating climate change rather than retard it.

“It is about pragmatism, about trade-offs,” said Barry Brook, professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania in Australia. “Most societies will not follow low-energy, low-development paths, regardless of whether they work or not to protect the environment.”

If billions of impoverished humans are not offered a shot at genuine development, the environment will not be saved. And that requires not just help in financing low-carbon energy sources, but also a lot of new energy, period. Offering a solar panel for every thatched roof is not going to cut it.

“We shouldn’t be talking about 10 villages that got power for a light bulb,” said Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University in India who was among the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

“What we should be talking about,” she said, “is how the village got a power connection for a cold storage facility or an industrial park.”

Changing the conversation will not be easy. Our world of seven billion people — expected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century — will require an entirely different environmental paradigm.

On Tuesday, a group of scholars involved in the environmental debate, including Professor Roy and Professor Brook, Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., issued what they are calling the “Eco-modernist Manifesto.”

The “eco-modernists” propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of “sustainable development,” supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using nature more intensively.

“Natural systems will not, as a general rule, be protected or enhanced by the expansion of humankind’s dependence upon them for sustenance and well-being,” they wrote.

To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than “intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world.”

As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature “by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it.”

This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world’s surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.

As the manifesto notes, as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity was supposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half.

“If we want the developing world to reach even half our level of development we can’t do it without strategies to intensify production,” said Harvard’s David Keith, a signer of the new manifesto.

The eminent Australian conservationist William Laurance, who is not involved with the eco-modernists, put it this way, “We need to intensify agriculture in places that we have already developed rather than develop new places,” he said. “What is happening today is much more chaotic.”

Development would allow people in the world’s poorest countries to move into cities — as they did decades ago in rich nations — and get better educations and jobs. Urban living would accelerate demographic transitions, lowering infant mortality rates and allowing fertility rates to decline, taking further pressure off the planet.

“By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends,” the manifesto argues.

This, whether we like it or not, would require lots of energy. Windmills or biofuels would put large swaths of the earth’s surface in the service of energy production, so they have only limited usefulness. Solar panels and nuclear plants, by contrast, could eventually provide carbon-free energy on a very large scale.

The new strategy, of course, presents big challenges. Notably, it requires improving the safety of nuclear reactors and bringing down their price. Solar energy at scale requires new energy storage technologies.

“Decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutions alongside those changes,” says the manifesto.

Until they are developed, poor countries will require access to other forms of energy — including hydroelectric power from dams, natural gas, perhaps even coal.

“There are enormous energy demands,” Professor DeFries noted. “It will be some time before we can fulfill them with wind and solar energy. It is only realistic that there will be a lot of coal and gas along the way.”

For all the environment-related objections one could pose to these paths, the alternative seems indefensible: Let the poor of the world burn dung and wood, further degrading the world’s forests. Or put solar panels on their huts so they can recharge their cellphones.

“Sustainable development” has been around for over a quarter century, since the United Nations’ Bruntland Commission proposed it in 1987.

Even then, it acknowledged its energy problem. “A safe and sustainable energy pathway is crucial to sustainable development,” it stated. “We have not yet found it.”

A quarter of a century on, the discourse has changed little. Today, the International Energy Agency states that it is within our grasp to provide modern energy access to everyone. What does it mean? Five hundred kilowatt-hours per year to urban households and 250 for rural ones.

Maybe enough to power a fridge.

新環保宣言：集中資源 減少用地

紐約時報報導，美國主導的世界銀行援助開發中國家時，往往過度強調環保，許多極度缺電的開發中國家要求世銀貸款協助興建電廠，卻被世銀設下嚴格的環保條件而打回票，以致這些國家群起加入中國大陸主導的「亞洲基礎設施投資銀行」。

報導中說，尼泊爾、孟加拉、柬埔寨等國非常缺電，平均每人用電量不到美國的百分之二，美國自己使用大量火力、水力和核能發電，世銀卻常以環保理由拒絕幫這些缺電國家興建電廠，難怪這些國家要加入亞投行，希望獲得大陸協助。

有鑑於此，環保運動近日出現一股反省聲浪。十八名學者、社運人士和公民十四日發表「現代派環保宣言」，主張人們應先發展經濟，才能真正保護環境，別再堅持「永續發展」的目標，而是要集中使用自然資源，減少人類活動的面積，才能騰出空間給大自然。

這十八人在宣言中說，要遏制氣候變遷、保護自然環境、解決全球貧困問題，必須「讓許多人類活動集中進行，尤其是農業、能源提取、林業和聚落，才能少用些土地，少干擾大自然」。

例如，如果要讓在地小規模農業餵飽全球七十億人，地表每吋土地都得用來耕作，但如果是大規模農場使用化學肥料和現代生產技術，就能用更少的土地和水餵飽更多人。

宣言寫道，世人普遍以為工業革命前，人類與大自然和諧相處，但其實這段期間全球有四分之三森林消失；而過去五十年，由於生產技術進步，平均每人需要用來耕作和畜牧的土地減少了一半。

宣言作者、美國哈佛大學教授凱斯說：「如果我們希望開發中國家的生活水準至少達到我們的一半，一定要集中生產才行。」

澳洲知名環保運動人士勞倫斯並不是宣言作者，但他贊成這種主張，他說：「我們必須在已開發的田地提高農業生產效率，不是去開墾新地方，我們現在做的簡直一團亂。」

這十八人認為，風力發電機組和生質能源的生產過程會占用大片土地，用處不大，太陽能板和核電廠才能提供許多人潔淨能源，但推廣這兩種發電方式前，必須讓核電機組更安全、更便宜，並發展新的太陽能儲存技術。

宣言作者、美國哥倫比亞大學教授露絲．德福萊斯說：「窮國需要大量能源。要完全用風力和太陽能滿足用電需求需要一些時間，在這之前，大量燒煤、天然氣是一種務實的作法。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/business/an-environmentalist-call-to-look-past-sustainable-development.html

2015-04-22．聯合報．A17．國際．編譯李京倫