J.R. McNeill
Georgetown University

If we are to stop loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, we must either find a technological fix or radically reduce energy usage. The history of technological change in modern times is a bit like the punctuated equilibrium model of evolutionary biology: there are periods of minimal change interspersed with moments of torrential change.

Changes tend to come in cluster. The reason for that is that new technologies, to be widely adopted, must fit in with existing and emerging technologies, as well as with existing and emerging institutional, political, economic, and social frameworks. Technologies co-evolve both with other technologies and with the ‘software’ of society.

This is an encouraging perspective in the sense that it means sudden change can occur at any point. It is discouraging in the sense that it is hard to precipitate technological change; it comes when conditions are permissive but not until then. The trick is to make conditions more permissive: to use policy to alter the ‘software’ and tweak the hardware of society so as to raise the probability of new technologies in the arenas of energy use and carbon sequestration.

Indeed, any steps to raise the tempo of technological change would likely be helpful on the climate change front. That is because in times past new technologies were adopted – selected, one might say, in Darwinian terms – for many things, but until very recently not for being environmentally helpful.

Today, however, and in the foreseeable future, new technologies are unlikely to be adopted if they are environmentally malign; there is, for the first time in history, a ‘green filter’ that skews the process of technological change. This filter exists partly as a matter of regulatory policy, but partly as an ideological force felt in most, if not all, spheres of society. It is likely to be durable, unless the problem of climate change, and the environment generally, somehow is resolved.

It is well to remember, however, that the process by which one technological cluster, say that of oil, automobiles, and plastics, replaces an earlier one (iron, coal, railroads), is so complicated that it is impossible to produce on schedule or on demand. And while a new cluster may take shape quickly, its global spread is another matter.40

If technology does not come to the atmosphere’s rescue and our own, might social change do the trick? This would require changes in behaviour that ratchet down energy use, or at least fossil fuel use. History is deeply discouraging on this front. There are very few examples anywhere of societies (as opposed to hermits and monks) voluntarily renouncing the fruits of high-energy society, or embracing a lower standard of living, as lower energy use (apart from gains in efficiency) implies. One might claim that the early Christians embraced poverty, but they were a small minority within Roman society, and the great majority of them were poor anyhow.

Sometimes the abolition of slavery is offered as an example of an altruistic social movement that put moral concerns ahead of economic self-interest. Abolition of the slave trade within the British Empire took about 30 years to achieve; abolition of slavery nearly 60. It took time to build the political coalitions necessary to overcome the self-interest of Caribbean slaveowners, an entrenched lobby well represented in Parliament. The effort involved decades of public relations campaigning, undertaken mainly by men of the cloth, as well as routine pork-barrel politics.

Within the U.S. it took longer and took a war, and as a worldwide movement abolitionism took longer still, and required the forcible imposition of external values and morals upon African and Arab societies in which slavery had a long tradition of moral justification.

Abolition was indeed a remarkable development: slavery existed for at least 5,000 years and was nearly totally eliminated within 150. But the economic logic of slavery had begun to wane for a number of reasons when abolition gathered momentum as a social movement, and its global success required the moral and military dominance of 19th-century Britain, and the self-confidence to force abolition upon unwilling societies and cultures – a constellation of circumstances not easily reproduced.

What this example really shows is how exceptional, and how contingent upon economic and political circumstances, the abolition of slavery really was. We could wait a long time for the stars to align themselves just right so as to permit a social movement that would lead to reduced energy use.

It remains theoretically possible that international accords might be reached that would limit the emission of greenhouse gases, as was done beginning in 1989 with chlorofluorocarbons. But the odds are against it, for a number of reasons. The ozone accords were low-hanging fruit. Technological alternatives proved easy to find, and were manufactured by the biggest CFC-producing firms.

CFCs were useful, but amounted to a tiny part of any economy compared with fossil fuels. Only a handful of countries made them. And atmospheric scientists could make a strong case that ozone depletion formed a direct threat to human health in the form of higher risks of skin cancer. While initially CFC manufacturers denied the truth of the science, this phase lasted only briefly. As the unfruitful negotiations over carbon emissions and climate change since the early 1990s show, this is inherently a tougher diplomatic nut to crack.

40David Egerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).