by Oliver Waters
In the final moments of the film Don’t Look Up (2021), a group of family and friends sit around a dinner table laughing together while enjoying some delicious organic produce. Leonardo DeCaprio looks up from his heirloom tomatoes with nostalgic despair.
‘We really did have everything, didn’t we?’ he laments, just before the meteor hits Earth, killing billions of its ungrateful, arrogant human guests. The same fate awaits the audience – so the cinematic metaphor goes – if we keep destroying the global ecosystem.
Many promote economic ‘degrowth’ as a way of avoiding such a calamity, notably anthropologist Jason Hickel and climate activist Naomi Klein. In his book Less is More (2020), Hickel asserts that for approximately 97% of our 300,000 years as the human species, ‘our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems,’ before there was any such thing as economic growth.
In This Changes Everything (2015), Klein diagnoses our existential climate crisis as starting with Sir Francis Bacon back in the 16th century, when he kicked off all that nonsense about systematically controlling natural forces for our own material wellbeing. This was apparently the beginning of a toxic, ‘extractive’ relationship with the Earth, which we need grow out of immediately.
Such critics of growth tend to believe we have collectively amassed more than enough wealth at this stage in history, and that any future growth in wealth via technological innovation will be optional and decadent by comparison. Space travel, for instance, is just a plaything for the rich. And we certainly don’t need any more energy here on Earth: we can just be more efficient with the energy we have.
In The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016), the economist Robert Gordon lends credence to this view with the historical claim that the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of technological breakthroughs have already been picked:
“In America growth slowed down after 1970 not because inventors had lost their spark or were devoid of new ideas, but because the basic elements of a modern standard of living had by then already been achieved along so many dimensions, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, communication, health, and working conditions.”
But this supposedly empirical statement is actually a profoundly pessimistic theory of human potential in disguise. Consider first how arbitrary it is to hold this perspective at any given moment in history. A 19th century British labourer, for instance, could not have been aware that they were desperately poor by our standards today. On the contrary, many thought they were much better off than their ancestors. After all, for the first time in history, they were able to work in a lively metropolis at a coal-powered factory producing textiles, instead of toiling in the fields under the beating sun or pouring rain.
As David Deutch has compellingly argued, there are no fundamental natural plateaus or barriers on the upward journey of technological progress. Rather it’s an eternal adventure that we can simply either choose to embrace or reject. This leads one to the ‘techno-optimist’ vision: one of indefinitely and exponentially improving and expanding human civilisation.
In reality there is no upper limit to the majestical technologies we might invent, and no such limit to how much better our lives could become. We think we live comfortably in the most developed parts of the world – and indeed we do, but we are also living abject, miserable lives compared to those of our potential descendants.
This is why the pessimistic view that we have solved all of our ‘basic’ economic problems is not merely false, but also dangerous, since it fosters a strong aversion to further technological breakthroughs. After all, why allow any new non-essential product or service to be thrust into the market if doing so could cause harm?
It’s easy to assume that the choice between the ‘degrowth/steady-state’ vision and the ‘techno-optimistic’ vision represents a deep clash of moral values:
“Those tech-bros simply don’t value nature or humanity as much as I do. They are greedy, arrogant, power-hungry aggressors, whereas I value social connection, humility before nature’s complexity, and compassion for the vulnerable.”
But this isn’t a fair characterisation for the most part. Deep down, most of us want everyone on Earth to live the most prosperous, connected, safe, love-filled lives as possible. We just have different assumptions about how best to achieve those values. We have different ideas about how reality works, including which interventions will lead to which outcomes.
For instance, the steady-state vision derives from a very plausible yet false claim: it’s crazy to seek infinite economic growth on a finite planet. This seems sensible because when we hear ‘economic growth’, we tend to think of more and more stuff being produced out of natural raw materials. This is why degrowthers argue that economic growth is necessarily extractive and destructive, and that acquiring resources is a zero-sum game with the natural environment.
What they don’t understand is that economic growth, properly conceived, is not necessarily about using increasing quantities of matter or energy. It is fundamentally about producing more valuable economic goods and services, which is more often about using the same amount of physical stuff far more efficiently.
A modern smart-phone, for instance, provides the equivalent economic value of a phone, camera, scanner, GPS etc, using a fraction of the material resources that were once required for these devices. The general trend is of technology doing more from less, as Andrew McAfee’s excellent book describes. McAfee is part of a tribe of ‘decouplers’ who advocate that we can and should continue to pursue greater wealth without increasing resource usage and waste.
While decouplers fiercely disagree with degrowthers about whether resource consumption is necessarily tethered to economic growth, they both are in favour of dematerialisation per se. They both tend to think we should consume less stuff. On the other hand, I think we can and should use more and more energy and resources as our economies progress. This is because to reach ever greater heights of human and animal welfare, we will inevitably need to harness ever greater parts of the natural world. For instance, if we’d like to rejuvenate the Sahara into tropical rainforest and fertile farmland, we’ll need to harness huge quantities of energy to power massive desalination and terraforming projects. Likewise, if we want to build ever bigger cities to accommodate larger and thriving populations, we’ll need more and more building materials.
We should be converting much more inert, boring matter into beautiful houses, spaceships, art museums, cultivated gardens, and medical equipment. There’s no moral reason for leaving the Earth’s crust exactly the way we found it. After all, minerals don’t have feelings or distinctive cultures in need of protection. The ideology that any impact we have on the planet is evil is itself an irrational evil. We humans have the unique capacity and responsibility to transform matter and energy into useful technologies that benefit the living world. Perhaps the most evocative of these is an asteroid defence system: without which, all life on Earth is guaranteed to eventually expire.
Of course we must distinguish between the beneficial use of inanimate resources and the immoral destruction of ecosystems or historical anthropological sites. This means designing ever better ways of accessing raw materials that do not require devastating the homes of our fellow sentient beings or shared cultural heritage. Instead of wiping out an ancient forest to get to the platinum beneath it, we should build narrow mining tunnels deep underneath it. By combining the expertise of geologists, biologists and anthropologists with our engineering wizardry, we can increasingly have our cake and eat it too. No need for Avatar-esque massacres of sacred trees to acquire priceless ‘unobtainium’. Nothing precious is unobtainable in principle – doing so just requires enough creative thinking.
Perhaps the closest thing to a Rorschach test for whether you are enthralled to the harmonious steady-state vision or the techno-optimist one is your view on nuclear power. Harnessing nuclear energy certainly doesn’t fit well with the former: being as it is the most intimate violation of mother nature imaginable. We are literally tearing apart her atomic DNA. By contrast, the sun radiates gentle warmth that we can convert into useful energy passively and non-invasively. And the wind doesn’t threaten to poison us if we treat it the wrong way, unlike uranium. The only natural place for toxic, radioactive metals, it would seem, is deep underground, safely away from all living things.
This perspective is most appealing to those with no actual understanding of the specifics of nuclear reactor technologies. Indeed, ‘nuclear power’ is not a single kind of technology at all. There are infinitely many ways one can go about extracting energy from nuclear reactions, some definitely smarter than others.
You could go the Soviet Union route and make a reactor with a graphite moderator and water coolant. This means that when its power increases, more steam is produced, which in turn further increases its power. Place this ticking time-bomb within a corrupt and incompetent chain of command and you’ve got yourself the makings of a hit HBO TV drama: Chernobyl (2019).
Or you could go with a less insane reactor design but then choose to place it on the coast in a tsunami-prone region and put your back-up diesel generators behind a wall not high enough to protect them from predictably giant waves. This was roughly the recipe for disaster in Fukushima in 2011 – though thankfully with no lives lost to radiation exposure. Plenty of people died however in the unnecessarily extreme evacuation. A 2019 study also concluded that the subsequent decision to shut down nuclear plants in Japan contributed to more deaths than the accident itself, as a consequence of prohibitive heating costs caused by the reduced electricity supply.
We seem to forget that nuclear reactors are like any other technology: over time we learn from our mistakes. Imagine if every suggestion to design a new passenger airline jet was met with derisive howls recalling the Hindenburg and Challenger disasters. Yes, every technology has its early phases, and incompetent, amateurish developers – nuclear power is no different.
What about nuclear waste? Far from being a problem, it’s one of the selling points of nuclear energy. Firstly, the extreme energy density of nuclear means there’s just so little of it. The waste produced from powering your entire personal lifetime use of electricity can fit inside a soda can. Secondly, nuclear is one of the only forms of power that safely contains its waste products, mostly in casks on-site, ready for its remaining unexploited energy capacity to be reused by future technologies.
We are just getting started with harnessing nuclear power, and it has vastly more applications. Nuclear powered cars, for instance, seem crazy, but that’s only because the technology is at a very primitive stage. Remember that fuelling cars with gasoline was a wildly hazardous idea until engineers reduced the risk of exploding into flames to a tolerable level. Correctly designed miniature reactors could be much safer in collisions than gas tanks. They could be fully contained within the equivalent of ‘black-boxes’ in aircraft today, capable of withstanding tremendous forces and heat. Imagine buying your car from the dealership and never having to refuel it, because it has enough nuclear fuel to last 20 years.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a Star Trek-like future without nuclear energy, where every spacecraft is powered by a ‘fusion-drive’ (details left unspecified). It’s never mentioned why these rockets aren’t solar or battery powered because it’s rather obvious. The incredible energy requirements of interplanetary travel demand an incredibly dense form of fuel, and sunshine and lithium-ion batteries just don’t make the cut.
This brings us to the sustainability of nuclear power. Steady-staters point out that it uses a finite supply of uranium as fuel, which must be mined, whereas the sun and wind are never going to run out. Therefore, it’s a natural assumption that solar and wind power are more sustainable than nuclear in two senses: firstly, they won’t run out of fuel, and secondly, they will have a smaller impact on nature. But in fact, the exact opposite is the case. This is because in assessing the sustainability of different energy sources, we need to focus not on the ultimate source of energy, but rather the process of converting that raw energy into useful energy.
The reality is that solar and wind power require way more raw materials per unit of power produced, precisely because they are so much less power-dense than nuclear. This concept of ‘power-density’ has been developed by energy expert Vaclav Smil – it’s the rate of energy flux per unit of area that a technology can produce. To put it simply, because the energy in sunlight or wind isn’t very concentrated, you need to build a lot more of the mechanism you’re using to capture it. This is why many studies show nuclear has a better ‘Energy Return on Investment’ (EROI) than renewables.
This explains why mining companies are so excited about the ‘renewables revolution’. It will massively expand demand for their product: raw materials dug up from the earth. On the other hand, because of the extreme energy density of uranium, you need to mine far less of it to generate the same amount of energy. This should be great news for people who care about protecting the natural environment.
Some renewables advocates like Saul Griffith worry that we only have at most 1,000 years left of nuclear fuel. But even this implausibly low estimate means that nuclear is renewable for all human intents and purposes. Given the rapid rate of technological progress, that is far more than enough time for us to transition to an alternative that is better than all currently known energy sources, like fusion and beyond. Imagine William the Conqueror worrying about the effect of too much horse manure in London in 2066. That is the same folly as us worrying about what we will do if our nuclear fuel runs out in the year 3023.
However, more reasonable estimates show that the known reserves (let alone unknown) of uranium on Earth would actually provide us, with today’s nuclear reactor technology, many thousands of years of energy. And we will continue to discover more and more efficient ways of extracting the truly gargantuan quantities of energy stored within these atoms, including tapping the huge quantity of uranium in seawater that is constantly replenished from rocks. Perhaps one day we’ll get down to our last vestiges of our uranium supplies, but by that stage, billions of years in the future, we’ll have bigger fish to fry, such as the sun growing into a red giant, engulfing Earth and literally frying all the fish.
What techno-optimists understand is that the survival of human civilisation has always, and will always, depend upon radical technological advancements. Novel technologies always entail novel risks, which cannot all be fully understood ahead of deployment. To attempt to enumerate and mitigate all possible future risks of a technology is to eternally delay its arrival, subjecting everyone on Earth to a future of less wealth, and ultimately less wellbeing.
The best science fiction writers imagine multi-planetary societies harnessing nature in radically new ways to open novel vistas of possibility. The novel and TV show The Expanse, set a few hundred years in the future, depicts political conflict among the nations of Earth, Mars and the asteroid belt. New terrors abound, from asteroid terrorist attacks to potentially life-extinguishing alien threats. But there is an undeniably sense of adventure – of breaking through illusory limits with our powers of creation. This is the true human spirit: boundless, sustainable expansion into the unknown.