Whether or not Barack
Obama wins the
presidency, now that
he has virtually
clinched the
Democratic nomination, his talk of
creative change must encourage
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's
summiteering.
After the foggy decades of cultural
conservatism in the West, we are
now permitted to imagine novel
remedies to remake the world from
global climate change to the Murray-
Darling, from terrorism to spiralling
health care costs, from taxation to
federation.
The usual assumptions when elites
climb towards a summit is that when
they get there a technologist will be
there already, upgrading the light on
yonder hill. It goes without saying
that more technology means more
progress and you can't have too
much of a good thing, and so it is
never said and never debated. This is
almost the definition of modernity
and development.
Our experience of work and social
life is so saturated in rapidly
changing technologies that it is easy
to assume we understand them and
that we are in control. But as Albert
Einstein asked, ''What does a fish
know about the water in which it
swims all its life?''
Einstein counsels that the things
and ideas which surround us
constantly become invisible. The
unpalatable truth is that many of the
big problems of the age, such as the
rising ''bads'' of carbon dioxide,
health costs and stress, come about
because of the progress equals
technology equation. We claim to
always be shocked when the
combined effect of all these
improvements seems to drag us in
quite the other direction. It is as if
there is some bedevilling ghost in the
machines.
As our standards of living rise, we
acquire more ways to get, display,
send, create and order information.
This addicts us to to the
''Crackberry'' and we suffer stress,
but we can't say no.
As our economy booms off the
back of modernisation in China and
India, we get to consume more cheap
imported gadgets and need more
electricity to power them. This
means an increasingly obese carbon
footprint, even though we switch off
every Earth Hour.
So what on earth is going on? How
can the ''goods'' of progress generate
such overwhelming ''bads'' as side-
effects? There are some sound
philosophical explanations for these
contradictions, but in pragmatic,
hands-on Australia, with our fear of
pesky European intellectuals, who
would be interested?
Luckily, pop culture is game to
engage this problem, with a passion
that makes policy wonks coy. Science
fiction films have long shown
Frankensteins or even whole
dystopian futures that are concocted
by science. The explanations given
are either some sort of mad/evil
scientists, corporate manipulation or
just plain old Sod's Law. And the
audiences lap it up, transfixed by the
on-screen nightmare. This is why
environmentalists have taken to
labelling genetically engineered
crops ''Frankenfoods'', saying in a
word what would take an essay to
prove by data alone.
Writer Frank Dexter gives us one of
the most amusing autopsies of naive
techno-progress. He says technology
is literally the Devil's own work, ''a
kind of mania for short-cuts which
leads to enormous and irreversible
detours'', the enemy of true
enlightenment.
< p> As optimistic as I am about the
2020 Summit, I side with the critics
who warn that the ''clean'' coal genie
will only lead us up a 20-year, multi-
billion dollar detour to nowhere. If
we wait until 2020 and it fails to
materialise, the legacy will be dirty
coal plants that have to be hastily
switched off, leaving us all in the
dark.
How ironic that after 20 years of
accusations from conservatives that
the green movement would dispatch
humanity to the stone age, it is their
technological dreams condemning
us to an otherwise avoidable gloom.
Thirty years ago, long before green
was the new black, there was a
fashion for ''alternative technology''
among the counterculture. The goal
was to design the future we deserve
by steeping technology in new
values. So instead of engineering for
fast, big, complex and centralised, we
would aim for what is appropriate,
local, simple and ecological.
For example, rather than splurge
billions to invent clean coal, whether
by subsidy or the hidden hand of the
carbon market, the government
should enforce the much cheaper
option of humble, available
technologies. We all know that solar
hot water can saving about one
quarter of household emissions and
that massive savings can also be
made by industry from easy and
cheap efficiency gains. By
comparison, one single clean coal
project, FutureGen, was budgeted at
$2 billion, before it collapsed in
February this year.
Anyone who has wrestled to
program a DVD recorder will
appreciate that sometimes, less is
more. Who remembers the urban
legend of the space pen? The story is
that when NASA realised the humble
pen would not work in Zero-G, it
embarked on a long and expensive
R&D project to invent a new pen
technology that would write in orbit.
The Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile,
just took pencils into space.
The 2020 Summit's solutions to
climate change will hopefully find
some big technological solutions,
substituting wind and solar plants in
the place of big coal. But my hope is
that PM Rudd will also promote the
modest ways to improve how we live
and also to diminish emissions. We
can be innovative with technologies
we already have, doing with a bit less,
slowing down the fury of so-called
progress, to live simpler, more
connected lives. This would make us
happier and more socially inclusive
as well as improving energy security
and lowering emissions.
Let's plan a reunion summit on
climate change in 2020 and invite
some of those talking Happy Feet
penguins. They can applaud
renewable technologies that are not
even on the drawing board in 2008:
grand, muscular machines that re-
engineer the energy flows of the
planet to power the human
economy. But my wager is that some
of their ovations will be saved for the
simple things we can already do
today, if only they were the exciting
stuff of summits.
See you in 2020. BYO pencil.
Dan Cass is a science historian and has
worked in the environment movement.