I don’t really believe in the Precautionary Principle. The honest truth is that our next major technological developments are going to involve massive, uninsurable environmental risk, if we are going to continue our roughly linear/exponential path (with epicycles) into technological transcendence and posthumanity. The attempts by greenies to demand that technology be “sustainable” is nothing other than an attempt to impose a dreary, eternal, “sustainable” sameness upon the human race. Self-replicating machines and radical genetic engineering of reproducing life-forms are the next technological bleeding edge. We either risk “grey goo” (although probably not) or proceed into decline and a slow, boring extinction, perhaps to be replaced in a few million years by a more adventurous lot—-who would have to make do without as much fossil fuel, so for their nonexistent sakes we should really make good on our sunk costs, as it were.

In any case, any kind of robust precautionary principle has to go. Onward and upward!

(This actually the third in a long-suspended series of “bad environmentalist” posts).