Jesse Ausubel thinks "compact high-rise cities could be a huge benefit to the natural environment. They save land and allow mass transport to work. I imagine future pedestrianised super-dense settlements with 100,000 people all within 1 square kilometre, connected by high-speed underground maglev trains. People like living close to each other if the urban design is good. Look at medieval cities: they are dense and people love them. But since the start of the 20th century, the architectural profession has mostly been a disaster, with design that pleases only other architects." New Scientist.
Jesse Ausubel is director of the Program for the Human Environment and senior research associate at The Rockefeller University in New York City. He has been director of studies for the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, and was one of the main organisers of the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979, which substantially raised scientific and political awareness of global warming.

Interview: Be green, think big
28 January 2006 • NewScientist.com • Fred Pearce

Jesse Ausubel believes technology has the potential to save the world and give everyone more prosperous lives. His vision would be anathema to most greens. So where, Fred Pearce asks, does his big thinking come from?

What makes you such an optimist?

Working in The Rockefeller University here in New York, I am overwhelmed every week by what people are learning. Genetics offers the most dramatic example, but in materials science and so many fields it's almost as astonishing. Modern science is very young. Even if you go back to Galileo, it's only 400 years old. Large-scale organised research is less than 100 years old. The chance to do things much better is enormous.

Take energy. It's a big cause for environmental concern. But if you look at the whole system from mining fuel to powering my desk lamp, right now it is about 5 per cent efficient. The other 95 per cent of the energy in the fuel gets wasted along the way. We can't jump quickly to 50 per cent. But we have centuries of opportunity ahead of us. Whether you look at transport or energy or food systems, they all look juvenile to me. I mean that in a positive sense: they have great potential.

You began your career as an environmental scientist. Do you think environmentalists are part of the problem or part of the solution now?

The greens themselves are part of a dynamic ecology, raising the alarms. Functionally, they are Earth-sensing instruments. They are absolutely necessary. I started my career in the mid-1970s in marine pollution, and then in 1977 I became one of the first people to work full-time on global warming. I felt my main job was raising the alarm.

That's important. But after seven or eight years, I thought if I am going to have a long career in the environment, I'd like to provide solutions too. So I spent five years as director of programmes at the National Academy of Engineering. Engineers have a different mindset from greens. They like machines that work, and they do enormously important environmental work. A problem is that the two groups don't talk to each other much.

Greens are not very good at taking a long view. They see that forests are disappearing or emissions are rising, and they see disaster looming. But I have an enthusiasm for history, especially the history of technology. My father was a historian of the 19th-century industrial revolution in Britain. History is very powerful at showing that things fall as well as rise, including technologies. In fact, the history of technology is largely the history of substitution.

For example?

Here in New York, the density of horses a century ago was environmentally disastrous. Their replacement by automobiles had a huge environmental benefit. But of course every system has fallout. Cars were dangerous. If they had stayed as dangerous as they were in the 1930s, the automotive system could not have grown. They needed headlights and windshield wipers and seat belts. Then other problems grew, like urban air pollution. So we developed catalytic converters. And as pollution gets worse, there are hybrid vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells. They might allow a world with, say, 2 billion cars, compared with the 600 million we have right now.

It's not so much that there are limits to growth, in the famous phrase, but rather that any technology, like any empire, contains the seeds of its end. Instead of the technology growing exponentially and destroying everything around it, some other technology will generally take over that is superior. I agree that in some senses technology is a Faustian bargain. But there is no turning back. At 1 billion people in the world, there might have been an alternative way of living. But at 6.4 billion - and with 4 or 5 billion who don't have much but want more - then you have no choice but to get better at providing the services people want. I don't think my green colleagues have enough faith in their own scientific and technical peers.

So what do you say to people who think that climate change will overwhelm us? Even if a solution is technically achievable, can we make the changes?

The climate change problem is very simple. It requires favouring natural gas, nuclear and energy efficiency, as well as some adaptations. Intellectually the problem was solved in the early to mid-1980s. But making the necessary social change is different.

And we shouldn't be surprised at the problems. Quite a few of my friends who were involved in the international Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, whose report came out last spring, were furious because they felt it received inadequate media attention. But the newspapers were covering the death of the pope and the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. People are like dogs sniffing each other's genitals. Social status and sexuality are what interest us. That's not going to change. The trick is to come up with technologies that are digestible, that slip into the way we live, the way iPods and laptops do.

Environmentalists often forget that products need to be maintenance-free. The solar panels that were heavily subsidised in the US and elsewhere in the early 1980s turned out to be a big nuisance for people who put them on their roofs. They got dirty and needed to be cleaned every other weekend. So they didn't catch on.

Is that why you think building big is the key to clean energy - because it is more convenient than all those solar panels and wind turbines?

In the last decade or so, big has been out of fashion. I've tried to draw people's attention to the big opportunities. For instance, it's a lot easier to capture emissions from a few very powerful plants than from lots of small ones. Renewable technologies like wind and solar power take too much land.

Big is beautiful?

I am a New Yorker. Of course I think big is beautiful. But it is beautiful in context. I don't favour putting the Empire State Building in the middle of the Mojave desert.

Often your ideas seem to go with the grain of technological development. But you also want denser cities when everyone is moving out. How come?

Once people can afford automobiles, urban sprawl is a big problem, because people instinctively maximise their range. You find in every society that people spend about an hour a day travelling, whether they are walking or driving or flying; it's almost an immutable law. Sprawl follows from a rise in average travel speed.

But compact high-rise cities could be a huge benefit to the natural environment. They save land and allow mass transport to work. I imagine future pedestrianised super-dense settlements with 100,000 people all within 1 square kilometre, connected by high-speed underground maglev trains.

People like living close to each other if the urban design is good. Look at medieval cities: they are dense and people love them. But since the start of the 20th century, the architectural profession has mostly been a disaster, with design that pleases only other architects. I'd look to eastern China, where they are building very dense, vertical urban agglomerations that look more like fantastical video games than modernist machines for living.

What would you do with the land that freed up?

The opportunity for a great restoration of nature, putting back the rainforests and so on, is there. Land used for growing food is shrinking. We are growing calories and protein much more efficiently. Yields are growing by 2 per cent a year, and that is faster than population growth in most places. If all the world's farms could meet US farmers' current yields, we would need only half as much farmland.

And what we can do on the land, we should try and do in the oceans as well. A decade ago, I started to wonder what was happening there. I helped set up the Census of Marine Life in 2000; it's like a Domesday Book of the ocean. One thing that's clear is that for almost every species that is tradable, or anything that lives near the shore or the surface, humans are behaving largely as we did on land up until 100 years ago: we are hunting rather than farming, and to excess.

You have talked about farming the oceans. How would that work?

The total amount of seafood sold in markets round the world is only around 100 million tonnes a year. You can imagine that, if people continue to want seafood, there would be a moderate wild fishery. There would be a large land-based aquaculture industry, and maybe 20 or 30 million tonnes a year of seafood might be raised by true ocean farming: we would add ingredients like iron to fertilise the ocean and create phytoplankton, and see what grew, whether tuna or whatever. Aquaculture can spare marine life, which is splendid beyond belief.

You once asked: will the whole world be able to live like Americans? Will they?

On average, people have been living better than ever for the past 200 years, as measured by life expectancy and in material ways, and I expect that rise to continue in the big population concentrations like China, India and south-east Asia. I'm not saying people are happier or treat each other with greater dignity. But when I visit China or Singapore, the acceptance of modernity makes it feel more like America than Europe, say, where the emphasis is on preservation.

What about Europe?

Europe is becoming profoundly conservative. It has the world's greatest heritage and hence the most to lose. People like the hedgerows and vineyards and don't want change. But Europe is becoming uncompetitive, and its population is ageing. Europeans don't seem to be replacing themselves.

Isn't the US equally guilty of turning against science, with growing opposition to Darwinism and reproductive technologies?

In the US, some on the right appear to reject science, but they don't reject the fruits of science. The politics are more symmetrical than academics admit. The left wants to ban genetic modification, the right stem cells. They are the same. Overall, I am not fearful for science in the US. It has a youthful feel. But giving up on science is probably the biggest threat to modern civilisation. It's not something that would happen overnight. But if we stop the R&D enterprise, and stopped improving farming or transport or scores of other activities, then after 20 or 50 years the chances for human misery, and for destruction of the environment, would be huge.