Technology in the 1920s and Technology in the 2020s: Cleaning up the Mess of the Last 100 Years

Last week, New Mexico suffered its 5000^th death from COVID-19. That’s slightly more people than the population of Tucumcari. It’s a staggering number, especially in a state that’s nationally praised for its handling of the pandemic, both in terms of social measures — like masking, closures, social distancing — and vaccinations, with over 70% of New Mexicans being fully “jabbed.” The grief that’s devastated so many families in New Mexico touches almost everyone, in one way or another, in our huge state with its tiny, interconnected population and bridgeable, though deep, political divides.

We know the pandemic is, in part, the result of another catastrophe building around the world for the last 100 years or more — the heating of our planet and the terrible disruptions it’s causing.

Where can we go for guidance and new sustenance for hope in times like these? We’re clearly in need of a massive infusion of positive energy, along with models of innovation and change, and precedents that motivate us with workable goals. I’ve found some of that in the 1920s, a time not only of “roaring” and “gilded” folly and Depression, but also of unprecedented technological innovation. The assembly line and mass-produced automobile began to reshape cities and our whole culture in the 1920s. Radio became a global means of public communication. The telephone connected more and more of us individually. Film became a new art form. The first commercial airlines were formed. And a stream of countless inventions for the home went on the market — from frozen food, washing machines, electric toasters to bread slicers, vacuum cleaners and electric irons. It’s a painful irony that many of these inventions are playing their largely invisible but potent part in climate change. No one in the 1920s thought about what would happen if billions and billions of people wanted and used these conveniences and paid for the electricity generated from fossil fuels to power them.

The 1920s saw tumultuous, but largely hopeful change. Innovation was the hallmark. New ideas were being realized all at once. It’s good to remember that such a time can happen. And we need it to happen again now, if we’re to avoid even more drastic hurricane-force nor’easters, reservoir-shrinking droughts, devastating pandemics, massive power blackouts and life-changing floods.

But of course, climate change innovation in the 2020s is happening at a snail’s pace, if at all. Nothing seems to be helping much. There had been hopes that the pandemic itself might slow down carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, but this year saw the atmosphere rising to an average 419 parts per million of CO₂, the most in 4 million years. And just as it seems that the world is finally getting some kind of control over COVID, we are reminded that our failure to confront climate change leaves us vulnerable to more and more pandemics in the future.

When we contemplate the major technological and social innovations we need in the 2020s, the example of the 1920s seems ridiculously beyond our current state of mind, our present political sensibilities, our will power and our crippling negativity. But leaps of trust, effort and invention mark the technological history of our species and the evolution of the tools and equipment we need to survive. “No” rules the day until “yes” is undeniable. And then everything changes, albeit often with an agony of resistance and unforeseen consequences.

Over at least the last 30 years or so the world’s scientific community has pretty much known what is happening with climate change and what we need to do about it. But as observed in the 2004 novel, “The Collapse of Western Civilization,” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, written from the perspective of a historian in the “Second People’s Republic of China,” in a sizzling hot world in 2393, we have failed to act on that knowledge.

The leaps in innovation we need in the 2020s include “re-engineering” most businesses away from using fossil fuels; creating technologies that capture carbon dioxide, pulling it out of the atmosphere and storing it safely or using it as fuel; techniques to capture CO₂ before it is released into the atmosphere; the social and communication strategies that finally convince large numbers of our 7.5 plus billion world population that there are ways they can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ramping up R and D investment and government incentives for renewable energy production.

The awful truth is that even though we know something about what needs to be done, we have spent almost no human energy and capital, relative to the severity of climate change, to actually explore the various ways of keeping ourselves safe, while understanding the potential unintended consequences of doing so. As the fictional Chinese historian of 2393 asks, “Why did ‘the children of the Enlightenment’ do nothing to save themselves?”

Take carbon capture as one of the possible leaps of innovation in the 2020s. I say possible because we really know nothing about the side effects of such an effort nor about the geologic forms necessary for safe storage of the CO₂ underground. We do know, human nature being what it is, that relying solely on reducing the human population’s carbon footprint through economic and political persuasion is never going to get us where we need to be, fast enough, and sure enough. We need innovation in seemingly inexpensive but worrisome solar shading to keep the earth’s albedo, or the amount of sunlight reflected back into space, as vigorous as we can make it. But then again, apparently, no one has done the research needed to see if such efforts have insidious or calamitous unintended consequences.

In the long run innovation in the 2020s needs the same kind of capital investment, with the hope of high returns, that stimulated the technology and gadgetry of the 1920s. From my perspective, carbon capture, carbon reduction, and solar protection could become like investing in toilet paper, Kleenex and toothpaste, products for which there will never not be a need. It seems possible that survival investing would prove to be as profitable as convenience investing. But investment isn’t moving that way. It’s more likely that chronic problems plaguing R and D that have diminished our economy since the 1970s are still constraining the kind of manufacturing and governmental response we need to cope with climate change. “Capital scarcity” and declining disposable incomes for most of us limits investment on “higher risk new products,” to quote economist Hazel Henderson in her 1978 book, “Creating Alternative Futures.” The recent call from many liberal sources for “war-time funding” of anti-climate change technology has not struck a chord with voters or politicians yet in this country, though Australia, India, Iceland and Costa Rica are early examples pioneering anti-warming countries.

It’s probably not possible, nor desirable, completely to convert a consumer/military industrial economy to a climate sustainability economy, but it’s not at all beyond the scope of realistic political persuasion to keep on pressuring public and private leadership to accept the obvious equation that too much heat means not only a ruined economy for everyone, but a ruined world that can never be restored or revived. It’s not beyond a reasonable hope that we can divert our creativity from distraction and convenience to sustainability and survival. But what’s the mysterious motive that will bring that about? So far, survival doesn’t seem to be it.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image: Huntington Beach, CA, 1926, Orange County Archives)