There they go again – the repeated delusions of the techno-accelerationists (part two)

In the 1970s, we were told to ignore warnings of environmental and social collapse. Once again, we need to resist the fantasy that technology will resolve our problems.

This is the second part of a three-part post which draws on one chapter of my most recent book. You can find the previous post here, in which we discussed the rise of a critical environmental consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s that had started to challenge foundational ideas about contemporary industrial capitalism. There had to be a fightback, and there was.

The landmark environmental report The Limits to Growth (1972) had provoked particularly strong reactions – from crude dismissals of alleged alarmism, to seemingly more reasoned assertions that technology would save us. Some of the most strident criticisms came from economists, who claimed that the study underestimated the power of the technological fixes humans would invent. If resources ran low, we’d simply discover more or develop alternatives.

For example, writing in The New York Times in April 1972, Peter Passell, Marc Roberts, and Leonard Ross dismissed The Limits to Growth as an “empty and misleading work.” Instead, they argued that previous technological advances had demonstrated that we can deal with scarcity by dramatically reducing exploration and extraction costs, and substituting plentiful materials for scarce ones. So, no problem (or problematique - which was The Limit to Growth’s term for the multiple, inter-related crises it described). 

Coal power plant in the 1970s

In fact, The Limits to Growth team had tested this. They gave their model unlimited, non-polluting nuclear energy and doubled reserves of non-renewables. All the same, the population crashed when industrial pollution soared. Then they reduced pollution significantly; this time, the crash came when we ran out of farmland. Higher farm yields and birth control helped, but soil erosion and pollution were still unavoidable. The core problem remained, that of exponential growth. Only when industry and population growth were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did the model stabilize.

Nonetheless, economists continued to claim that The Limits to Growth ignored how technology can ensure that resources expand to meet demand. For example, the libertarian right leaning economist Julian Simon argued in books such as The Ultimate Resource (1981) that societies have ‘natural’ feedback systems, one of which is technological innovation in the face of scarcity (Simon even claimed we will have enough resources to last 10 billion years).

This story, of The Limits to Growth and the pushback it received, is fairly well known. But what has been neglected is how, in reaction, critical environmentalism helped to bring together the right into a new political force – one that included a strong critique of the left’s supposed anti-technologism, and that argued that a much more optimistic belief in technology is required to create the future.

To begin with, appropriately, many conservatives supported conservation efforts, and as noted, important environmental legislation was passed under a Republican administration. But some thinkers saw something much more sinister in the rising environmental consciousness. For figures such as Ayn Rand, with her strongly anti-statist libertarian philosophy, the environmental left would lead to an immiserated, totalitarian future. In her 1971 essay collection The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Rand argued that ‘ecology’ was a Trojan horse being used to propel the world back to a new Dark Ages. She was also skeptical about environmental peril, calling it an “artificial, PR-manufactured issue, blown up by the bankrupt left”.

Ayn Rand - self-proclaimed “radical for capitalism”

Rand might have been extreme. But as parts of the environmental movement became more critical of contemporary industrial capitalism, more of the right shifted towards to her view. Nor was this interpretation wholly wrong – the logic of environmentalism and analyses such as The Limits to Growth effectively were an emerging challenge to contemporary capitalism, and had to be resisted.

In 1971, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr. sent a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (titled Attack on American Free Enterprise System), urging the ‘apathetic’ business community to organize against spreading anti-corporate feeling (Powell cited Reich’s The Greening of America, discussed in the previous post, as exemplifying this ‘dangerous’ sentiment):

“[W]hat now concerns us is quite new in the history of America. We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.”

The Powell memo

Business needed to engage in politics, shape public opinion, initiate court cases, create think tanks, and influence university courses – all of which they subsequently did. To Powell: “[P]olitical power is necessary; …such power must be assidously [sic] cultivated; and …when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination.”

As a consequence, often funded by extractive, polluting industries, this new right would argue that the environmental left had fabricated an ecological crisis as a means of destroying capitalism and seizing power. By the end of the 1970s, anti-environmentalism had become a defining feature of American conservatism.

What happened next would change the future – the one we’re living in now (as we’ll discuss in the final post).

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out now from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.