The Political Ecology of Technological Utopianism

Abstract

In 2010, the Bank of America opened a 55-story skyscraper in Manhattan Island, New York, which in the press was praised as “the most sustainable in the country” and as one of the “most environmentally responsible high-rise office buildings” in the world (Roudman 2013). The building had been given a Platinum certification by the so-called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and was applauded by Al Gore as a model for combating climate change. However, according to an assessment by New York City in 2012, the same building “produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan” and “uses more than twice as much energy per square foot as the 80-year-old Empire State Building” (ibid.). The main function of certification schemes like LEED, the journalist Sam Roudman concludes, is to create a market for sustainability and green publicity, rather than to save energy. In this chapter we shall consider how globalized technological systems, like the economic systems which make them possible, tend to promote social opacity. From the vantage point of individual participants, the aggregate consequences of technologies are virtually impossible to assess. Technologies designed to solve specific problems are routinely revealed to generate other problems, often for other categories of people (cf. McNeill 2000). The global implications of a particular technology can rarely be predicted at the local level where it is designed and applied. The paradigmatic example is the turn to steam power and fossil fuels in early industrial Britain, which was a local strategy for increasing profits, the long-term global implications of which could not be anticipated by individual factory owners (Malm 2016). In this book we have reviewed several of these implications, including fundamental transformations of global political economy and of the mainstream European worldview, but