Another excellent article by Bill McKibben — a voice of integrity, truth, vision, wisdom, and warning that we are long, long overdue in listening to, absorbing, and acting upon. 🙏 Molly
.jpg) |
| Illustration by Maria Contreras |
John Maynard Keynes once observed that dating from “say, to two thousand years before Christ—down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change.” At best, he calculated, the average standard of living had no more than doubled in the previous four millennia, essentially because, when that epoch began, we already knew about fire, banking, the sail, the plow, mathematics; we learned little new that would have accelerated economic growth; and throughout that stretch the planet mostly ran on the muscles of people and animals, supplemented by the power of wind and water. Then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, we started to harness the combustion of coal, gas, and oil, and everything changed. That’s because a barrel of oil contains 5.8 million British thermal units’ worth of energy. Nate Hagens, the director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, ran the numbers: “One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel.” A barrel of oil costs about seventy dollars at this week’s market price.
To call that energy revolution liberating hardly suffices. Suddenly, people could easily venture beyond their villages, or build dwellings large enough to afford some privacy, or stay up all night if they wanted to read. After four thousand years of economic stasis, we were suddenly in a world where the average standard of living doubled in a matter of decades, and then doubled again and again and again and again. And we liked it so much that it became the raison d’être of our political life. In the United States, the per-capita G.N.P. grew twenty-four per cent between 1947 and 1960, when Jack Kennedy, campaigning for President, pointed out that Russia’s growth rate was “three times as fast,” a gap he tried to narrow while in office. Between 1961 and 1965, the G.N.P. grew at a rate greater than five per cent a year, and the percentage of Americans living in poverty dropped by nearly half by the end of the decade. If there was anything Americans agreed on, it was that they wanted more, please. In the 1996 campaign, for instance, the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Jack Kemp, demanded that we double the rate of growth, while Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, said that we “cannot and will not accept any ‘speed limit’ on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy.”
But a critique of growth was emerging in the postwar years as well, most concisely in a 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome titled “The Limits to Growth.” A team of M.I.T. economists used computer models (then something of a novelty) to show that, if we kept growing at the then-current rate, the planet could expect ecological collapse sometime toward the middle of the twenty-first century. That prediction turns out to have been spot-on: a report published in Nature on the last day of May concluded that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” that it studied—from groundwater supplies and fertilizer overuse to temperature. “We are moving in the wrong direction on basically all of these,” Johan Rockström, the paper’s lead author and the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters.
And so the “Limits to Growth” critique has reëmerged, fifty years on, and with new vigor. In May, twenty members of the European Parliament sponsored a three-day Beyond Growth workshop in Brussels. As The Economist pointed out, while a similar gathering five years ago was “sparsely attended” and confined to a few committee rooms, this time “thousands packed into the EU’s vast hemicycle and beyond,” and “the big beasts of Brussels came to pay homage,” beginning with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who offered the opening address. When the “Limits to Growth” report came out, she said, “Our predecessors chose to stick to the old shores and not lose sight of them. They did not change their growth paradigm but relied on oil. And the following generations have paid the price.”
The Economist’s take was predictably sardonic, quoting a participant who called the gathering a “Woodstock for system-changers” that came in “50 shades of red.” But the article did raise a reasonable point—indeed, a crucial one: Isn’t the only way “to mitigate the effects of human activity” to invest in green technologies that actually take us beyond the world of fossil fuels? Shouldn’t we make an all-out push for electric vehicles, heat pumps, and cooktops, not to mention solar panels and wind turbines to supply the necessary electricity? The degrowth movement’s answer is, at the least, a muted no. A green-energy boom, the Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk wrote, would come with “monstrous ecological costs,” because of the mining for the minerals needed to produce and use electricity at the required scale. He cited the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil, who recommends that we return “to living standards of the 1960s” so that we can “consume less, travel less, build less, eat less wastefully.” It’s a view with power: those opposed to new lithium mines or transmission corridors or solar farms are increasingly basing some of their argument on the idea that we should consume less. “If we are to avoid ecological collapse,” the journalist Christopher Ketcham maintains, we must pursue “contraction and simplification, a downsizing of the economy and population, so that Homo sapiens can prosper within the regenerative and assimilative capacity of the biosphere. In other words, we must live within our planet’s biophysical limits.”
I’m sympathetic to both viewpoints. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book, “Deep Economy,” arguing against endless economic growth both on ecological grounds and because there’s considerable evidence it doesn’t make us happier, and I’ve campaigned against wasteful consumerism, helping organize one of the first protests against the S.U.V. But I have also argued for a major-scale build-out of renewable energy. So I wonder if there isn’t a way to do both: to see green technology as a way to reduce the deadly hangover of the fossil-fuel era and also to help us move toward a more stable and stabilized civilization.
Let’s begin with the question of whether it’s even possible to construct a green future: basically, can we mine and build enough stuff to make it happen? The degrowth evangelists quote various estimates—for example, that we’d need to mine more copper, which has superior electrical conductivity, in the next two decades than we have in the past four thousand years—as proof that this is essentially an impossible task. Andrew Nikiforuk wrote a few years ago that those who foresee a transition to green technology “imagine the construction of millions of batteries, wind mills, solar panels, transmission lines and associated technologies, but they downplay the required intensification of mining for copper, nickel, cobalt and rare minerals you’ve probably never heard of such as dysprosium and neodymium. One of the great lies of modern technological society is that of endless mineral abundance.” But a decade ago a fair number of growth skeptics were insisting that the planet was about to run out of oil, when, instead, new fracking technology drove the supply up and the price down. It’s possible that the same thing is now under way with these minerals.
In January, a team led by a researcher at the Breakthrough Institute, in Berkeley, released a study assessing “75 different climate-energy scenarios,” and concluded that, although mining for certain metals would need to increase significantly, geological reserves were sufficient. One of the study’s authors, Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the tech company Stripe, wrote, “Decarbonization is going to be big and messy, but at the same time we can do it.” He added that the study’s calculations show that it will take considerable fossil-fuel energy to mine this wave of metals, but not so much as to endanger climate targets. And, just a couple of years ago, Nikiforuk’s prediction that we shouldn’t count on an abundant supply of cobalt seemed reasonable: the price had soared to eighty-two thousand dollars a ton. But new supplies have become available; mines opened in Indonesia, and other miners started separating out what was left in tailings piles. Within a year, the price was down to thirty-five thousand dollars a ton, “not far from historic lows,” The Economist noted. The price will rise slowly through 2025, the magazine predicts, at which point the first wave of E.V. batteries will become available for recycling, dampening new demand. Capitalism has innumerable flaws, but its ability to produce supply in the face of demand is hard to deny.
But will that supply come at too high an environmental and social cost? Or, as people often put it on Twitter, aren’t we just trading one disaster—climate change—for another? Nikiforuk writes, “A so-called green world would look a lot like China, a leader in rare earth production and refining and so-called green technologies. But in championing China as a green pioneer, western environmentalists have neglected the hidden ecological costs: polluted villages, cancer-plagued citizens and piles of electronic waste.” That’s true enough—I’ve seen some of those Chinese villages, not to mention mountains of imported e-waste in Ghana, and a dozen other such calamities. And it’s also true that unpainted wind turbines might endanger bird populations, and that solar panels require considerable ground space. I recently spoke in the liberal ski town of Telluride, Colorado, where the county commissioners had just put a six-month moratorium on solar farms after a meeting in which residents said they feared the area would come to look like “an industrial park.”
Still, this kind of damage is, by definition, localized. It affects real people, animals, and places, but is confined mostly to those people, animals, and places. Whereas the damage that comes from fossil fuels is global and existential: you can’t see carbon dioxide the same way you can see acid mine drainage, but climate change is already eating away at the most basic processes of the Earth: the jet stream, the Gulf Stream, the hydrological cycle. Biologists say that this rapid warming has, above all, triggered the Earth’s sixth great extinction; the U.N. predicts that it could evict more than a billion people from their homes this century. And fossil fuels come with other human costs that are almost incomprehensible: the latest data indicate that, worldwide, one in five deaths comes from breathing particulates produced from the combustion of coal, gas, and oil. Reporters, academics, and human-rights advocates tend not to focus on these deaths, because the people who die do so one by one and not all in one place. But their numbers dwarf the numbers of people imperilled by mining, and the only way to reduce such deaths is to stop burning fossil fuels.
The problems of green tech may be somewhat easier to address. At the moment, about half the world’s cobalt comes from Congo, and up to a fifth of it is mined “artisanally,” which is to say by hand, in small pits—child labor is not uncommon in a practice that has been called “modern-day slavery.” But, as advocates and journalists have reported those stories (Amnesty International released a pair of key studies), change has begun to happen. The Business and Human Rights Center set up a “transition minerals tracker” to investigate supply chains; it’s building on work done in Congo on the “3TG conflict minerals” (tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold), which were being used to support warring factions in the region’s conflicts. Donations have built five schools for children who used to be employed in the mines; after tech companies were sued last fall, Microsoft’s chief of staff for tech and corporate responsibility visited Congo in December to declare that the company would help build a coalition to monitor mining. Tesla has been trying to switch away from cobalt in its car batteries, out of fears both for its supply chain and its image—a move that also puts pressure on the mining industry to improve practices. “If we get this wrong, cobalt probably will cease to be in batteries in twenty years’ time,” the head of communications at the Cobalt Institute said this winter. Mark Dummett, Amnesty International’s director of business, security, and human rights, said, “These are examples of how companies and the government are looking for ways to make artisanal mining safe and responsible and fair. Maybe they haven’t got there yet, but they’re heading in the right direction.” He also notes that simply doing away with artisanal cobalt mining would cut “a lifeline for millions of the world’s poorest people, [so] we don’t want to see it outlawed.”
Again, there’s no way that producing clean tech will be entirely clean. Nikiforuk writes that “if every electric car owner had to accommodate the waste ore needed for the copper and cobalt in their vehicle’s batteries, the entry to their homes would be shrouded in several tonnes of waste rock.” I own a Kia Niro E.V., and that statement sounded bad, though a little Googling revealed that a ton of rock is roughly the size of a truck tire; it’s big, but still a rock. (I once had a ton of crushed rock delivered to my house, and it didn’t come close to filling the bed of a pickup.) An internal-combustion engine, however, takes a gallon of gas, which weighs around six pounds, to propel an average American car twenty-four miles and, when it burns, the carbon mixes with oxygen atoms in the air to make about twenty pounds of carbon dioxide. The average American vehicle, driven the average American distance, produces its own weight in CO2 annually, and that CO2 is not inert, like rock—it’s up in the air, trapping heat, for a long time. The CO2 that came out of the back of the Plymouth Fury that I drove when I got my learner’s permit in 1976 is still up there in the atmosphere, trapping heat; it’s not “shrouding the entrance to my home,” it’s shrouding the Earth.
The most seductive argument that degrowthists make, though, is also the soundest: most of us who live in rich countries could easily make do with less—especially less energy. A study cited by the degrowth advocate Steve Genco calculated that to stabilize the planet’s temperature, we need to decrease the share of passenger-car transport in our cities by eighty-one per cent, “limit per-person air travel to one trip per year,” reduce living space per person by twenty-five per cent, decrease meat consumption in rich nations by sixty per cent, and so on. Those numbers may sound drastic, but in some respects they’re not that far from how many of us lived a half century ago. The median square footage of an American house built in the nineteen-sixties was fifteen hundred square feet, compared with about twenty-two hundred today—and the earlier model was home to more people. Before 1972, more than half of Americans had never taken a plane trip, much less more than one a year. And, since 1960, we’ve increased our total meat and poultry consumption by thirty-five per cent.
People assume that going backward is impossible, but why? There’s little evidence that all this extra consumption has made us particularly satisfied, and more than a sneaking suspicion that it’s done the opposite—social scientists estimate that Britons were at their most content in 1957, and even before the pandemic only a third of Americans said that they were happy, according to one survey. There’s no reason that we can’t head in other directions, and there are signs that we’re already starting to: twenty-five per cent of sixteen-year-olds had a driver’s license in 2020, down from forty-six per cent in 1983, as some combination of cell phones, rideshare services, bike lanes, and environmental concern began to change the teen-age experience. Public policy can push some trends to happen faster: the city of Paris has made enormous investments in public transit, built hundreds of miles of bike paths, and closed many streets to cars. Car trips within the city dropped by almost sixty per cent between 2001 and 2018, car crashes dropped by thirty per cent, and pollution has improved. The city is quieter and calmer; test scores go up as the air around schools cleans up. Underground parking garages have been converted into warehouse space and mushroom farms. So, serious change is possible—France has even banned some airplane trips between cities that are less than two and a half hours apart by train.
But not all of France is Paris. The populist Yellow Vest movement, initially ignited in the provinces by a rise in gas prices and a green tax on diesel, has become a major force in French politics. And imagine what the response would be to most of these proposals in certain quarters of this country; the Green New Deal was widely disparaged owing to a Fox News claim that it would limit hamburger consumption. Here, for instance, is how Marc Morano, a prominent advocate for the fossil-fuel industry, reacted to the news of the French flight ban: “This is what a climate lockdown looks like,” he said. “The climate agenda demands you give up airline travel, car travel, cheap reliable energy, and plentiful food. Net Zero goals are now dictating vehicle shortages to force more people into mass transit. They’re going after your freedom of movement; they’re going after private car ownership, they’re going after everything it means to be a free person and turning it over to the administrative state.”
I think, in other words, that this is going to be a fairly slow cultural shift, not just in the U.S. but in much of the world, and particularly in places where many people are just starting to eat meat in quantity and have every reason to want a larger home. Climate change, by contrast, is not happening slowly—we’ve been told by climate scientists around the world that we have to cut emissions in half in six years in order to meet the Paris targets. If we don’t, the toll on the poorest and the most vulnerable people will rise sharply.
Three of the most interesting conversations I’ve had this year have been with people who are working on different parts of this conundrum. The first was with Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College, in Rhode Island, who earlier this year led a team researching how various scenarios would affect the demand for lithium. Riofrancos has been studying mining communities, especially in South America, and says straightforwardly that she’s “in solidarity” with the people living in places where mining has often meant environmental despoliation and human-rights abuse. But she’s also aware that the taxes and royalties paid by mining companies are vital to social services in those countries. There’s no perfect way to make the solutions to all those problems mesh, but making a few basic changes could help. In particular, she told me, if we drove somewhat smaller cars, built more mass transit, increased the density of cities and suburbs, and worked hard from the start on battery recycling, then “lithium demand can be reduced by up to ninety-two per cent in 2050, in comparison to the most lithium-intensive scenarios.” That’s likely unrealistic—best-case scenarios are called that for a reason—but it’s a good list to work from, even if that work is likely to be slower than building E.V. chargers. “We’re at the beginning of an energy transition, and we want to ask what type of energy transition it should be, and how it should be organized,” she said. “What makes it most just and most rapid.” A world that needs less lithium might be a world that can prioritize the least contentious sites, and give the people living there the attention they deserve.
The second conversation was in New Haven, Connecticut, at a weekend workshop with Yale Divinity School students. I served as a co-facilitator with Leticia Colon de Mejias, the founder and C.E.O. of Energy Efficiencies Solutions, a company that retrofits homes and apartments with insulation and other efficiency improvements across the region. It was a fascinating conversation because the Divinity School is getting ready to break ground on a Living Village, a series of dorms whose design is “driven by our growing recognition that humans are part of nature, not lords over it.” It aims at satisfying the standards of the Living Building Challenge, which only a few dozen buildings meet worldwide, and it would be among the first to do so on an American college campus. It will also cost a projected hundred and fifty million dollars, and will create just a hundred and fifty-five apartments—call it a million dollars a unit. Whereas, Leticia Colon de Meijas said, it costs about twenty thousand dollars to refit an old home in a low-income neighborhood in the area, so that it uses far less energy, and the heating bills are dramatically reduced. There are already programs in place in some states to help homeowners with retrofitting, and more are planned. But there’s nothing stopping Yale from using some portion of its building budget to help its neighbors; those humans are “part of nature,” too.
The third conversation was last month, at a conference on Cape Cod, with Søren Hermansen, who more than anyone else was responsible for transforming Denmark’s Samsø Island into one of the first places in the world run entirely on renewable power. He’s a big advocate of renewable energy, but, he said, it’s fairer—and so easier to make happen—when there’s shared coöperative ownership of a utility and the profits can be used for community centers, infrastructure, and schools. “When they own it, if you see what I mean.” In an ideal world, we would have staged all this work. We would have already reformed our cities so that they were more efficient and our corporate structures so that they were less avaricious before we mined the lithium and built the E.Vs. But we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in a world where we’re going to be very lucky to make it through the next decades with a climate system more or less intact. We have no choice but to build renewable energy, and its attendant appliances, and to do it fast. But it would be a shame to waste the vast effort entailed simply trying to re-create our current society on a lower-carbon basis, because we’d soon run into the other barriers that the degrowth activists warn of, from too much nitrogen to too little solidarity. Instead of halting the build-out of green energy, it would be wise to use that enormous process, one of the biggest economic shifts in human history, to nudge our societies toward greater equality and greater conviviality. An E.V. is a good way to cut carbon emissions, but so, it turns out, is a four-day workweek. Do them both, and a thousand other things—and fast—and we might have a shot. ♦
Please go here for the original article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/to-save-the-planet-should-we-really-be-moving-slower
No comments:
Post a Comment