E-Commerce, the Internet, and the Environment
A recent special edition of the Journal of Industrial Ecology attempted to pull together and critically examine the research on IT and the environment. The picture that emerged was both ambiguous and enlightening. Read More
“No invention of modern times has extended its influence so rapidly. . . . Its spread is about as wonderful a thing as the noble invention itself.” The Internet? No, the telegraph, described in an 1852 edition of Scientific American magazine. At that time in history, as Tom Standage shows in a book called The Victorian Internet (1998), prophecies about the impacts of the telegraph were rampant: the death of distance, a revolution in business practices, an outbreak of world peace. Today, the Internet and related information technologies confront us with similar broad social effects that pundits describe in similar terms. We can only hope that both science and society are prepared to anticipate and deal with the impacts of this information revolution and the others that are sure to follow.
Despite the recent slowdown and shake out in the dot-com world, a number of inveterate laws and principle’s remain in force and are likely to affect the evolution of information technologies (IT) for at least another decade. These include Moore’s law, which states that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits doubles every 18 months, and derivatives of Moore’s law affecting bandwidth, storage capacity, and graphical image processing. Collectively, these increases in technological efficiency will ensure that factor 10 cost and performance advantages will continue to occur in two- to three-year intervals, providing fertile ground for disruptive effects. Added to these incessant performance increases will be the continuing expansion of electronic commerce, the emergence of new forms of networking, and the possibilities provided by low-cost terascale computing (at 1 trillion operations/sec). Finally, we are witnessing the disappearance of the boundaries between the computational, physical, and biological worlds, a fact underscored by the recent success in linking brain cells with silicon chips at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany.
Certainly such rapid and profound transformations are having, and will have, significant environmental implications. But what exactly do we know about these? A recent special edition of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, which I edited, attempted to pull together and critically examine the research on IT and the environment. The picture that emerged was ambiguous but nonetheless provided an important snapshot of the state of our understanding and our ignorance. It is also a cautionary tale for those who would posit IT as a means of environmental salvation or an easy road to sustainable development.
The research offered no clear answer concerning the effects of information technologies on the environment. These effects, whether positive or negative, are often dependent on a wide range of variables, many of which may be hard to predict a priori or address with traditional environmental policy approaches. One report showed that seemingly small decisions — by consumers, logistics firms, or businesses — can have large outcomes, often shifting environmental impacts from positive to negative or vice versa. When positive effects from information technology occur, they often fall in the range of 5% to 20%, not the factor 4 or 5 improvements that some have advocated (or hoped for) to deal with the increasing environmental burdens imposed by rapid growth in population and economic activity.
One implication is that traditional market forces operating on the information technology realm have not, and will not, automatically result in positive social and environmental outcomes. Public sector policies and targeted business strategies may be very important in securing such public goods as new ITs emerge. The embedded nature of information technologies also makes unintended consequences, spillover, and second or third-order effects hard to predict, let alone analyze in any scientific sense. The best defense against such effects may be a wider awareness of their likelihood — by government, business, and consumers — and more systemic institutional approaches to anticipate and mitigate these impacts beforehand.
Other research emphasized that we should expect new information technologies to complement older technologies, not replace them or immediately ameliorate negative effects. Most technologies exhibit both dark and bright sides, and clearly information technologies are no exception. Emerging technologies, such as digital tags, may offer significant environmental advantages. The challenge for the environmental policy community is gaining an early awareness of future opportunities offered by technology and proactively shaping new applications. Government policies and programs may become a critical variable. In that regard, our guest columns explore public sector and related initiatives in other countries. Clearly, the environmental impacts of the digital revolution are beginning to attract the attention of governments in Asia and Europe, although the question remains as to how far the initial attention will translate into real policies over the coming decade. In the United States, environmental policy makers seemed to have returned to their great faith in the market as the arbiter of all things good, and little has occurred to seriously examine the social and environmental impacts of information technology that go beyond the poster-child debates surrounding the so-called digital divide.
In preparing the volume, it became clear that the amount of research being funded to examine the information technology/environment area in no way matches the challenges to our understanding created by the digital revolution. Probably there is no lack of interested or qualified researchers, but a deficit of research funds that needs to be addressed at both national and international levels. Given the rate of change in the information technology and related sectors, this research needs to start sooner, not later, before technologies with negative environmental or social consequences become widely diffused and effectively locked in.
But maybe the most basic question to arise is the hardest to answer, namely, What is the role of industrial ecology in a postindustrial world? Peter Drucker once noted that the theory of business is no more than a hypothesis that needs to be questioned and tested continually. The same is true of industrial ecology. Industrial ecology has been focused largely on the physical world of atoms and spent far less time exploring the informational world of bits or the critical intersection between the computational and physical worlds and sciences. In a postindustrial economy, the term “industrial ecology,” as well as the theory and practices underlying the field, must be examined and possibly realigned with the new realities of a knowledge-based economy. This will not be an easy task, but one that is likely to result in many new opportunities for the field and its practitioners.
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David Rejeski is the editor of the special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology on e-commerce, the Internet, and the environment and is a member of the journal’s managing board. He is the director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
David Rejeski serves on the Advisory Committee for the Green Business Network.
