What's sustainable?

Nov. 17, 2014
Sustainability is eternally important and perpetually enigmatic. It's like justice: widely seen as embodying transcendent value yet defined in disparate ways.

Sustainability is eternally important and perpetually enigmatic. It's like justice: widely seen as embodying transcendent value yet defined in disparate ways.

A 2003 editorial in Oil & Gas Journal suggested the terminology originated in a 1987 report by the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development (OGJ, July 7, 2003, p. 17). The report defined "sustainable development" as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

That definition is helpful but subject to broad interpretation, often skewed in support of one political agenda or another.

Interpreting sustainability

To some observers, concern about sustainability argues against development of finite energy resources such as oil, gas, and coal. How, these observers ask, can the extraction and use of irreplaceable hydrocarbons not be said to compromise the ability of future generations to meet needs of their time for hydrocarbons? The question suffers from the impossibility of knowing either the extent of hydrocarbon need at some indistinct point in the future or the technological advances of intervening years.

In any event, sustainability problems don't end with the unfortunate habit of hydrocarbon supplies to shrink upon use. The combustion of hydrocarbons generates precursors to ozone and other air pollutants, a category that the US Supreme Court and Environmental Protection Agency say includes greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Rigidly applied, the now-vs.-future framework for interpreting sustainability can treat the introduction of any pollutant into the atmosphere as an offense against generations to come. But that condemns even human breathing, the cessation of which certainly would lower CO2 emissions but hardly bode well for the yet unborn.

Resource depletion and environmental consequence are not the only dimensions of sustainability. Large among others is economics. People naturally yearn to bequeath to their offspring prosperity beyond their own. The desire comes with parental love. It can't be denied or resisted.

To address sustainability without accounting for cultural inclinations toward economic growth is, therefore, futile. Attempts to solve problems related to resource depletion and pollution solve nothing if they ignore economics. Solutions few can afford are as unsustainable as ecosystems beset by human carelessness.

Experience offers useful lessons about these interrelated dimensions of sustainability.

It teaches, for example, that hydrocarbon depletion isn't the constraint it was thought to be as recently as a few years ago. While oil and gas remain finite resources, technology has greatly expanded recoverable amounts of them. They'll help meet human energy needs beyond any reasonable planning horizon.

Just as ingenuity has made this so, it also will ensure replacement energy is affordably available when it's truly needed. Governments should trust and not force the process. The immediate challenge is to promote environmentally responsible economic growth, which is essential to the support of requisite learning and experimentation.

Experience also illuminates the futility of economically negligent efforts to rush carbon-free energy into markets. Those efforts are unaffordable. Leaping energy costs and deteriorating economies in Europe are just the latest examples.

Inevitably, the economic dimension of sustainability takes political shape. Resistance thus grows to European climate ambitions, for example, as the costs of subsidizing carbon-free energy become intolerable.

With political resistance, moreover, comes new scrutiny of favored energy. The environmental disadvantages of solar and wind power, such as land-use conflicts and the slaughter of birds, thus receive more attention than they did earlier. And recognition grows that renewable vehicle fuel is not the air-quality panacea touted in early-day political marketing.

Evolving meaning

That the meaning of sustainability has evolved is nothing to regret. It's in the nature of transcendent values to stretch human comprehension, encourage inquiry, and challenge the adaptability of individuals and cultures.

A measure of human progress is the desire to leave subsequent generations not only material well-being surpassing present conditions but also habitat tidier than the one at hand. Aspiration to both values, mediated by the politics of sustainability, is possible; in fact, it's imperative.