Hard Green

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An Interview with Peter Huber.

Matt Scanlon for MOTHER:Could you describe what the term "hard green"means?

PH: Well, I am using the term in response to a phrasing that was invented by Amory Lovins in describing what he called the "soft energy path." He was specifically advocating a move away from what he described as the "hard fuels"...fossil fuels, generally, and toward what he described as the "soft fuels," namely solar and wind. He emphasized conservation a lot. It was quite an influential thesis [Foreign Affairs, 1976], and it's been quite widely embraced. Not by policy-makers or people who actually generate most of our energy, but by many lifestyle advocates, I suppose.

MOTHER: Do you refute what Amory Lovins said about the benefits of conservation?

PH: No, but I recognize that his philosophy is only one piece of the puzzle. He seems to have spent much less time on the macroenvironment and macroconservation...how you preserve forests, and watersheds, arid lakes and streams. It's much more concerned about the microassaults and very long-term effects and elaborate computer models.

MOTHER: Can you give an example of what you term "microscopic assaults?" Do you believe them to be imaginary?

PH: Oh, imaginary, no. We're talking about real things. They range from the trace level issues that are of much concern, such as dioxins, trace metals, PCBs, and so on, to the very long-term model surrounding such things as carbon monoxide in the atmosphere. On the microassaults, you can pick your pollutant of the week and it'll be in the headlines. Particulates, lead, mercury. By no means are these imaginary things. What is very much open to debate is at what levels, and in what circumstances, their impacts are real and important.

MOTHER: So by picking an enemy "pollutant of the week," we're distracting ourselves from the central issue?

PH: Yes. One of the most striking things about modern environmentalism is how little it has to say about what many of us would think of as the much more traditional environmentalism. The old conservation movement, crystallized at the federal level by Teddy Roosevelt, said "Look, we have magnificent prairies, forests, lakes and coastal areas, and we ought to be conserving them, because they're magnificent." We don't need elaborate computer models to say why we wantto conserve redwoods.

MOTHER: Throughout the book, you seem to demonize the school of environmental mathematics, suggesting that it engenders in us a feeling of helpless inevitability. What, in your opinion, is the central fallacy of, say, Thomas Malthus' assessment of the ...disastrous consequences of the human population explosion and how that affects the environment?

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