By Peter Edwards, Fairfield and Woods, P.C.

“F&W Energy — Leadership with Perspective”™

It’s July 20, 1789. Smith and Jones, two English businessmen, are walking down the street. Smith turns to Jones and says, “How about this Industrial Revolution we’re having?” Sounds implausible? Of course it does. Because the industrial revolution was not really a revolution. It spanned at least 70 years. And at the time there was a great deal of unease about the whole thing. Thomas Malthus had a sizeable coterie of believers in his theory that industrialization would engender sufficient famine and disease to constitute a check on itself.

As history has shown, the industrial revolution has, by and large, turned out to be a pretty good thing for the quality of life on earth. Just to name a few of the improvements, the Phillips Curve (percentage of the population vs. wealth) has flattened, life expectancy has increased, and our workforce is more educated and gender-balanced.  We had to make legal and cultural changes to accommodate the transition to an industrial economy - such as laws governing child labor, occupational health and safety, social security and land use. 

If we can just imagine how the industrial revolution appeared to knowledgeable Britishers in 1789, we can draw useful comparisons to today’s sustainability phenomenon. I call it a “phenomenon” and not a “revolution” because it will only be a “revolution” if it succeeds. I suppose the history books may refer to it as the “sustainability revolt” or “sustainability uprising” a century from now if it fails.

But it won’t fail. The sustainability revolution will move us - ponderously, haltingly, but inexorably - into a new cultural paradigm. My hypothesis is that a combination of factors - principally technological developments, popular perceptions and resource constraints - will take us there. Again, a comparison to the industrial revolution is useful.

The changes wrought by the industrial revolution were permanent, one-directional and pervasive. Individual lifestyles changed drastically as millions of people moved from rural to urban environments and a financial system was built on Adam Smith, individual effort and commercial credit.

Similarly, our sustainability revolution during the next 70 years should also engender long-lasting and pervasive changes. One of the key themes of the Recovery Act was the investment in the country’s infrastructure, much of it a “cleantech” infrastructure. This includes $4.5 billion in smart grid technologies and $5.5 billion in transmission improvements (plus equal amounts of matching funds), and as much as $60 billion in various projects funded under Department of Energy loan guarantees. These improvements, like virtually any capital investment in the utilities industry, are spec’d and designed to last on the order of decades, rather than years, and by their very nature they are pervasive.

Other benchmarks in the sustainability revolution are similarly irreversible. As builders and developers adopt new building technologies for energy efficiency, the payback will continue to justify the expenditure. The transition to electric, hybrid, and plug-in vehicles will require substantial capital investment by manufacturers in equipment that is likely to be in use for 5-10 years or more.

The dire predictions of Thomas Malthus were averted in the 18th and 19th centuries by advancements in economic and social policies and technology. The same types of improvements will usher in the sustainability revolution and will avoid the dire predictions of Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), Al Gore (Inconvenient Truth) and Matt Simmons (Peak Oil).

Some argue that the sustainability revolution is not like the industrial revolution because the industrial revolution was motivated by extra-governmental forces (principally technology and economics) that drove the industrial revolution without political intervention. In contrast the sustainability revolution depends on government subsidies for its existence. It’s not a bad argument. 

But I think it loses a lot of its forcefulness because energy independence - and sustainability in general - are founded on necessity. We just can’t go on like this forever. So the government policies in question are not trying to make something happen that wasn’t supposed to happen. They are, for the most part, simply trying to help the inevitable transition happen SOONER and with fewer catastrophic outcomes.

Skepticism over the sustainability revolution is understandable. If you had asked Messrs. Smith and Jones in 1789 whether their society could transform itself economically, culturally and legally in 70 years, they would have been skeptical, no doubt. But when you consider not only the forces driving the sustainability revolution, but the long-lasting changes that are being made in our infrastructure, our economic system and our legal structure to move it along, you realize we are witnessing the beginnings of a major, long-term shift.

Notice I never said “global warming.”