I wrote this today in an attempt to articulate my feelings about climate change, degrowth, and the common narrative around renewables:
I’m convinced there’s no hope of limiting global warming by any of the methods currently being employed. As a species we just won’t give up our comforts until we’re truly priced out of it.
I don’t say this to mean we shouldn’t try. But I think we need to be realistic about what we are (and aren’t) capable of. Degrowth is like communism: a great idea, but not practical.
As far as westerners go I think I’m somewhat “green” in persuasion. But even still my life is hopelessly emissions-intensive and wasteful. As a society our whole mode of being is built around burnt carbon.
This doesn’t have to be a downer: if we accept that offsets, renewables, and international treaties aren’t going to work, we could busy ourselves with what might. My answer is something like fusion power. That, and moving resource extraction and heavy industry to space. You may think all that sounds fanciful. But it’s no more fanciful than trans-continental rail or international jet travel was two hundred years ago. These things will be commonplace in the near future.
We need something that lets us use more energy without consequences. Energy spend per capita is the holy grail of quality of life.
I rarely expect to see my thinking aligned with someone like Jeff Bezos, but he expressed a similiar sentiment in a 2023 interview with Lex Friedman:
So, it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre-industrial age, the natural world was pristine. It was incredible. And we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both, but to do that, we have to go to space. And the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita. You do want to continue to use more and more energy, it is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that’s not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so, we have to go out into the solar system. And really, you could argue about when you have to do that, but you can’t credibly argue about whether you have to do that.
He then goes on to explain that Blue Origin, his rocket company, is his contribution to this goal in the form of critical infrastructure:
When I started Amazon, I didn’t have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card. I didn’t have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages. It already existed. It was called the Postal Service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post and so on. So all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place and I could stand on its shoulders
[…]
It was already there. And that’s what I want to do. I take my Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure so that the next generation, the generation that’s my children and their children, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure
Assuming we all want to live, and we all want to live comfortably, it seems the only way out is up. Why is this effort only being championed by a handful of billionaires?
On a related note, I just finished The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball. It gives an approachable look at where we’re at with fusion, what needs to be solved, and how we can get there. A common theme throughout is underinvestment. We just haven’t prioritised it, probably because of the popular sentiment that nuclear is bad.
Overall the book left me feeling hopeful. It’s within grasp, we just need an Apollo-style program: fast-tracked and heavily funded. And we need it yesterday.