Science Quote by Barry Commoner

Economics is doing rhetorical heavy lifting here: not a neutral ledger, but a veto. Barry Commoner’s line frames “zero” as an engineering fantasy and, more pointedly, a political trap. By calling near-zero emissions “simply economically impossible,” he’s not denying environmental damage; he’s warning against demands so absolute they guarantee defeat, either by paralyzing regulators or handing industry an easy talking point: we’d love to comply, but reality won’t allow it.

Commoner wrote as a scientist who spent much of his public life arguing that pollution is not an unfortunate side effect but a design choice baked into industrial systems. That makes the quote feel less like concession and more like strategy. It’s an attempt to shift environmentalism from moral purity to material leverage: set standards that can actually be enforced, ratcheted, and funded. “Controls” is the key word. He’s talking about end-of-pipe fixes, the add-on scrubbers and filters that let factories keep their basic logic intact. If you insist those controls achieve “even approach zero,” you’re implicitly accepting the underlying system and asking it to perform miracles at the margins.

The subtext is a critique of both technocratic optimism and absolutist activism. Technocrats like to promise that better gadgets will painlessly reconcile growth with nature; purists like to demand total elimination. Commoner threads a narrower needle: if you want results, you need standards calibrated to what firms can’t easily evade, paired with deeper changes in production that make emissions fall because the process changes, not because you tried to bolt “zero” onto a smokestack.