Shitao/environment

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the best green writers out there--and in her recent joint book review of the controversy-ridden SuperFreakonomics and the maligned-by-default-by-Gore-haters Our Choice, she proves why. One book scoffs at our fears of climate change, and suggests that a miraculous silver bullet will be delivered unto us via geoengineering. The other meticulously outlines the challenges we face in fighting climate change, and the difficult choice we must collectively make to improve our behavior as a species. One of these books is horseshit.

Okay, that's not just me being crass (though, for the record, no, I am not above that). It's the so-called Horseshit Parable that refers to the plight faced in urban areas like London and New York around the turn of the century: horse-drawn craft was the primary form of transportation, and the cities were growing to be knee deep in horse poop. No solution was in sight, world leaders threw their hands up in the air, and everyone assumed the cities to be doomed to a fecal fate. Then, out of nowhere, someone invented the automobile, and the cities were saved.

Point of the parable as drawn by Mr. Levitt and Mr. Dubner, authors of SuperFreakonomics: technology offers unforeseen, cheap solutions to expensive problems, and that some form of technology will come along to save us from climate change. You know, without us having to go through that pesky process of reducing emissions or modifying our consumption of fossil fuels. Kolbert writes:

Levitt and Dubner have in mind a very particular kind of "technological fix." Wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels--these are all, in their view, more trouble than they're worth. Such technologies are aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is the wrong goal, they say. Cutting back is difficult and, finally, annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? This sounds, the pair write, "like wearing sackcloth." Wouldn't it be simpler just to reëngineer the planet?