Reading Response #9

To understand what sustainable development entails at its core, it is useful to look at chapter 8 of James Speth’s Red Sky at Morning. In this chapter, Speth lays out six ways in which the current world of unsustainable environmental degradation can transition towards a sustainable one. Such transitions are aimed at directly addressing the drivers of deterioration, enhancing the prospects of success for environmental agreements, and facilitating environmental governance (152). While sustainable development is not opposed to economic growth as the means to preserve or enhance the quality of life of human populations, it also underscores the insufficiency of growth alone to facilitate the transitions necessary for sustainability. For instance, in the case of freedom of mass poverty, one of the transitions that Speth looks at, economic growth must be complemented with social welfare measures and international aid programs that can ensure the reduction of poor populations that otherwise are compelled to erode resource bases for their subsistence (154-155). A different aspect of the transition towards sustainability also involves the development and employment of environmentally benign technology that can allow reductions in pollution and resource consumption while maintaining expected growth, such as wind electric generation (157-158).

Even though the transition goals that Speth examine might seem implausible at times, local production efforts such as those described by Winona La Duke show that sustainable practices are not only plausible but already being implemented with considerable success. La Duke points out how locally controlled power production produces a shift from the centralization of energy generation to a more democratic mode of production, where increased accountability and control lead to more efficient production of renewable energy (27). That is not to say that there are no challenges, such as the need to guarantee greater access to markets and power lines for wind energy producers (28). Socolow and Pacala’s work in “Stabilization Wedges” also demonstrates how readily available forms of technology can be used to achieve the stabilization of carbon emissions to less than double of preindustrial levels by 2054 through increases in efficiency and conservation, decarbonization of electricity and fuels, and natural sinks (968-971).

One of the options to decarbonizes fuels is the production of biofuels (971), but this option is challenged by some commentators such as Michael Grunwald, who argues that demand for biofuels has increased the demand for corn, driving its prices up, which has caused production of soybeans to decrease and its own prices to go up as more farmers cultivate corn, expanding agricultural areas and displacing cattle pasture, which in its turn has resulted in increased deforestation of the Amazon (42-43). The result of the deforestation is the reduction of the carbon sink capabilities of the Amazon, thus contributing to higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Moreover, Grunwald argues that higher prices for corn affect the poor and hungry of the world through rising food prices, asserting that the amount of corn needed to fill out an ethanol-fueled SUV could feed a person for a year (41). However, Grunwald does not consider that such use of surplus corn might actually be more efficient, and that if the demand for corn for ethanol production did not exist, that corn would simply not be produced as to be available for his hypothetical corn-loving person. He also argues that carbon emissions caused by the use of corn and soy ethanol coupled with the deforestation that its production allegedly causes is equal to double the amount produced by gasoline emissions (43). Again, his analysis is flawed, for he only takes into account fuel burning for gasoline but in the case of ethanol he considers its production process as well. To be fair, he should also consider the associated environmental costs of production and transport of gasoline, which would cause his equation to look significantly different. Nevertheless, there is much sense to his argument, and it should be taken as a sample of the challenges that need to be resolved in order to achieve the goals of sustainable development.