In his new book, scientist Vaclav Smil makes an off-putting proposition: that in order to “ensure the habitability of the biosphere,” we must at the very least move away from prioritizing growth and perhaps abandon it entirely
Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: The MIT Press On September 23, the United Nations opened its Climate Action Summit here in New York, three days after the Global Climate Strike, led by Greta Thunberg, swept through thousands of cities worldwide.
That has been always the case. There’s nothing new in this, except many people have been refusing to recognize it.Speaking as an old-fashioned scientist, I think the message is kind of a primitive and, again, old-fashioned message. This is a finite planet. There is a finite amount of energy. There is finite efficiency of converting it by animals and crops. And there are certain sensitivities in terms of biogeochemical cycles, which will tolerate only that much.
It’s actually becoming more and more difficult to wring out even those 3 percent, because there are many things here. We are approaching thermal dynamic or straight pneumatic limits with many of these things. This idea of dematerialization, decreasing the energy intensity — fine, you can keep doing it, but you cannot do it forever. If I built a house, I can make it lighter, but I will still need some steel, some lumber, some tiles, some glass. I cannot make it not using material.
Think of this Chinese tourism now. Before there would be 100 million Chinese tourists flying every year, only something like 40 million of them are flying. I assume that means you don’t think there’s much chance of staying below two degrees of warming, for instance. Yeah, but on some level — I don’t mean to be taking the side of the optimist here, I’m quite pessimistic about things, but on some level you could look at the story of the SUV expansion as a hopeful one. In the sense that in relatively short order, a relatively new technology spread very, very rapidly.
Reading, for instance, has been in great peril for a long time now, because of television and so much visual stuff and everything. But now, even my so-called learned academic friends, I ask them all the time, and they read maybe one book a year. They just scroll through the net.Yeah, no, come on, David. It’s not the same thing. I’m reading very actively, so I’ve been reading this book about the relationship between Sassanid empires and the Roman empire during late antiquity, 500 pages of it.
At the first time that they started, somebody called me and said, “Could you comment about the world’s largest formal-type plants?” I said, “I would if I would know where it is.” They said, “In Bavaria.” I grew up a stone’s throw from there, I couldn’t believe it. And after half a trillion dollars they spent, the electricity generation is now about 30 percent from renewables, fine. But these are still the people who have no speed limit on the Autobahn — where cars go 250 km per hour.
Japan is losing now half a million people every year. All of Europe is below replacement level, Canada and U.S. are below the replacement level. If it wouldn’t be for our legal and illegal immigration, and most of America will be dying out. So that is reason for hope: Years from now, we will not be consuming, because there will be nobody there.This is the thing. This is us, the rich part of the world. But the rich part is only depending how you count it, 1 billion.
On top of which, people don’t want to pay premium buying that house, really. People will not do this unless the price of energy goes up, up. If prices go up, people will start super-insulating and new houses will be better built. That may actually create quite a few jobs. On the other hand, if you don’t have raspberries in January, then, of course, people in Mexico and Nicaragua are losing jobs. Truckers and shippers who are moving them to the U.S. or Canada are losing jobs.
These are transformations on a billion-ton scale, globally: They cannot be done alone by next Monday; they will be wrenching with huge economic consequences; and , what we can do, and the Chinese can do, the Indians can not. The Indians published a new paper a few months ago saying, “Coal will be our No. 1 fuel until 2047.”
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