Our Obsession with Zero

Net Zero, Zero Risk, Zero Waste…

Today we are told our sustainability goal must be zero impact on the environment. This then gets interpreted as many zero-driven nouns: zero emissions, zero waste, zero risk… If we don’t reach zero (or very close), then we need to stop what we’re doing.

This though is a recent, activist interpretation of sustainability and runs against our traditional scientific approach.

Western societies developed and gained prosperity through an innovative culture (one that sought discovery, invention and continuous improvement). While there were some significant revolutions, most innovations followed a path of incremental advances (who can still remember booting up a 48K RAM computer?).

In the face of this obsession with zero, we seem to be losing the innovative mindset and expect nothing less than perfection. We are unwilling to wait for technologies to improve and if they are not perfect, then these innovative projects must be abandoned (ie, regulators must take precaution).

This precautionary culture dominates our regulatory framework as incremental iterations and technological developments are being abandoned in favor of a zero risk mindset: net zero emissions, zero waste, zero impact… Such puritan idealism comes at a cost to continued Western innovation and prosperity.

Precaution is dominating the EU policy arena and is showing up more and more in American regulatory agencies. But should our regulators be getting their advice from activists demanding zero emissions and zero risk or should they concentrate on promoting the innovative tools that have succeeded over the past two hundred years?

The Zero-Risk Fallacy

What is wrong with promoting zero risk? First of all, it does not exist. The precautionary principle demands that any substance or process must be 100% safe and certain. But as an emotional concept, there is no such thing as “safe” and what one person might consider as “safe enough” might terrify the next person. The iterative approach of the innovative culture has always aimed at making technologies “safer” in a process of continuous improvement (product stewardship).

But activists have done a good job convincing (scaring) the public into demanding zero risk. If you cannot prove some product, substance or process is safe, then we don’t want your solutions (and these activists are assuring us we don’t need those solutions in any case). Many regulators have not dared to challenge this emerging risk averse culture and have adopted the “nanny role”. It is also far easier to manage uncertainties (taking precaution) than managing risks.

So the solution to our problems today is to remove what has been deemed as the problems. Go to zero.

• Plastic pollution is an issue?
  Then ban all plastics within a zero-waste economy.

• Climate change is a serious threat?
  Then stop using fossil fuels and demand net-zero emissions.

• Pesticides pose a health risk?
  Then go organic and impose a zero pesticides limitation on farmers.

• Industry and capitalism are the source of these problems?
  Time then to promote a degrowth or zero growth economy.

COVID-19 should have woken Western societies out of this risk-averse slumber. The demand for populations to be kept safe as the pandemic spread meant locking everyone up in their homes (precaution) rather than managing exposures and protecting the most vulnerable (risk management). After more than a year of suffering the consequences of state imposed risk aversion, people were ready to stick anything into their arms just to go out to the bars and get their lives back to normal.

But this obsession with zero may run deeper. In a social media world presenting purity and perfection, the pressure to have zero flaws is dictating our social lives.

Idealistagram

Instagram presents a perfect world, where blemishes are air-brushed away and everyone is living an ideal world you only dream of. And a dream it is.

This perfection applies also to the idealistic world of environmental campaigns. If there are any transgressions from the perfect ideals of the tribe, any questioning the orthodoxy of the campaigns, the dissenting voices are quickly air-brushed away. Cancel culture means the only air that I breathe has been disinfected from dissent, the blemishes blocked and the misinformed deplatformed.

So while nuclear energy, for example, should have fit perfectly into the climate activist demand for zero emissions, its corporate model, meltdown risk and waste issues meant it had to be air brushed from the climate campaign rhetoric. Anyone who insisted nuclear was a reasonable solution had to be canceled (often in the most savage manner). No blemishes could be allowed on their renewables-only campaign.

Zero risk means zero exposure to other ideas that may interrupt a campaign’s sense of certainty. While this is how activists think, it is clearly not the mindset of innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs.

“Better” is Better

The scientific methodology is a process of continuous improvement, of challenging hypotheses and seeking better. Better what? Better products, better processes, better (less) impact on people and the environment. Innovation is about “better”.

Every new technology, as a breakthrough, is followed by an endless series of improvements and refinements. Many of the early chemicals and pesticides were quite toxic and over endless cycles of innovations, their efficacy increased while their toxicity declined, with more prosperity, fewer famines and greater options for humanity.

Medical treatments and pharmaceutical developments have progressed in the last 50 years with life expectancy shooting up and increased quality of life our grandparents could never have dreamt of. Science has brought humanity a progressive world of betterment – not perfect but so much better. Writing this article in Manila, the Philippines, the improvements seen here in my lifetime have been impressive (despite the endemic corruption).

But to the idealistic zero-risk zealot, better is not good enough. In fact, for anti-capitalists, “better” is not good at all (but rather the source of all of our problems).

• They condemn recent digital communications innovations (while using them to destroy dialogue);

• Decades of chemical developments in lowering toxicity levels are refuted by unprovable claims of long-term, low-dose cocktail exposures;

• Innovations in medical practices that save lives and improve the quality of life are dismissed as corporate greed;

• Agricultural technologies that have continued to feed a growing global population are seen as an industrial colonization of nature and sustenance;

• Economic advances are presented as an ecological Armageddon.

Their solution is to go back to some mythical world before all of these risks and uncertainties were developed: deindustrialized, peasant agriculture communities supported by state subsidies.

Scientific innovations have done so much to help the sick, poor and hungry to attain better lives and hope for the future, only for this arrogant class of healthy, rich and well-fed zealots to condemn them in the name of their activist idealism. If the world is not perfect, if there are still uncertainties, then activists demand radical change: systemic transitions. Heaven help us if they are allowed to continue to spread this bile.

The Intolerance of Absolutism

It is hard to get a mob excited and on the streets demanding “Meatless Mondays” so campaigns aim for blanket consumer bans. Demanding absolutes like “Ban all meat”, “Go Plastics-Free” or “Stop all fossil fuels” make for clear messages and campaign slogans. But they do nothing but create headaches for regulators who feel they have to assuage the loudest minority of punks in the room. Their absolutes are non-negotiable and no compromise that might appeal to all stakeholders would satisfy the small group of loud activists chanting outside of government windows. Too often policymakers relent and the silent majority suffer.

This perfect world that most activists seek is built on a multitude of irrational narrative inputs. Built on a rejection of capitalism, these idealists need to refute the evidence of progressive improvement in humanity’s well-being. It is remarkable that the better our innovative technologies move us to a cleaner, greener world, the more these activists campaign against them.

And the more influence they impress upon our listless leaders, the more the environment, consumers and the economy will suffer. We could be making significant, incremental steps in lowering carbon emissions today, but the zero tolerance toward nuclear has led to an increase in coal generation going forward.

So the more I hear the term “zero” in sustainability debates, the more activists will accept nothing else but zero, the more I expect that Western societies will soon have nothing but zero (regarding their future prosperity).