If only Jonathan Porritt knew what a technology is

Jonathan Porritt wants us all to understand that it will be renewables, not nuclear or hydrogen, that will power our future world. Well, maybe, possibly that is the way that it will pan out. We don’t particularly mind either, our concern is that civilisation does get powered and at the least overall cost. Which may or may not coincide with the exclusive use of renewables.

However, buried within the argument is a horrible piece of ignorance:

Rather than being the solution we have been waiting for, this nuclear/hydrogen development would actually be a disastrous techno-fix.

There’s nothing wrong with a techno-fix, indeed there’s everything right with one. For a technology is simply a way of doing something. Capitalism is a technology, it’s a way of doing the ownership and financing of productive assets. Socialism is a technology, a useful way of making sure there are too few productive assets to be owned and or financed. Nuclear is a technology, hydrogen is a technology, windmills, solar cells, dams, they’re all technologies, as is doing without anything other than animal and human muscle power a technology.

That is, every approach to doing anything is a techno-fix. All that Porritt is offering is a different techno-fix and one that we should evaluate on that basis alone. Does this technology fix the problem better than that other one?

We strongly suspect not which is why the scary words he’s offering about the alternatives but the base point still remains. Methods of fixing problems are, by definition, technologies, thus everything is indeed a techno-fix.