https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2017-11331-2
Regular Article
The magic of money and the illusion of biofuels: toward an interdisciplinary understanding of technology
Human Ecology Division, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
* e-mail: alf.hornborg@hek.lu.se
Received:
23
December
2016
Accepted:
5
January
2017
Published online:
16
February
2017
For several centuries, the dominant worldview in industrial societies has held that various problems --such as those recently identified as relating to sustainability-- can be solved through technological progress. Technological progress has been conceived as the fruits of engineering science, new knowledge, and innovation. While knowledge of the principles of physics is certainly a necessary condition for technological development, it is not a sufficient condition. Technology is not only a product of engineering, but, ultimately, also of asymmetric transfers of biophysical resources. In other words, the feasibility of technological progress is contingent on world market prices. The history of technology has been written from the perspective of advancing ingenuity, rather than that of unequal global exchange. The implicit world view underlying dominant historiography and economic science ignores the deepening global inequalities which are prerequisite to what some sectors of world society can celebrate as technological progress, including visions of replacing fossil fuels with biofuels and other renewable energy sources. This observation should prompt us to conceptualize technological progress as an inherently unequal capacity to locally save time and space at the expense of human time and natural space lost elsewhere. It implies that the physical agency of technology ultimately rests on prices, i.e. subjective human conceptions about the value of market commodities, and thus finally on the magical artifact we know as money. The purpose of this article is to show how current deliberations on biofuels illustrate the insufficiencies of mainstream understandings of the phenomenon of technology, and to indicate why an adequate understanding of technology must be interdisciplinary, combining insights on both Nature and Society.
© The Author(s), 2017
