The End of Doom (11 page)

As increases in efficiency make goods cheaper, people demand more of them. Initially this calculation makes it appear that people are using more resources rather than less, but this is likely wrong. Consider that billions of smartphone users living in poorer countries have skipped over the resource-intensive phase of building out millions of miles of wire phone lines, deploying tens of millions of clunky desktop computers and printers for both the home and the office, cameras and film processing, and so many other capabilities that are now embodied in four-ounce phones.

Nevertheless, Smil doubts that the current trajectory of dematerialization will speed up enough so that relative declines in material consumption translate into aggregate declines—that is, using absolutely less material while creating more value in goods and services. “The pursuit of endless growth is, obviously, an unsustainable strategy,” he asserts. But what is “endless growth”? People don't want electricity, grain, housing, automobiles, and so forth. What they want is lighting, tasty food, comfortable lodging, and convenient transportation.

As a plausible scenario of how demand for materials could rise, Smil calculates that if automobile ownership in currently poor countries rises to just a third of the level in Japan (600 vehicles per 1,000 people), that would double the global fleet to 2.2 billion vehicles. However, the advent of self-driving vehicles could provide a technological end run around such projections of a growing vehicle fleet. Instead of sitting idle for most of every day, as the vast majority of automobiles do now, cars could be rented on demand.

Researchers at the University of Texas, devising a realistic simulation of vehicle use in cities that took into account issues like congestion and rush-hour usage, found that each shared autonomous vehicle could replace eleven conventional vehicles. Notionally then, it would take only about 800 million vehicles to supply all the transportation services for 9 billion people. That figure is 200 million vehicles fewer than the current world fleet of 1 billion automobiles.

In the Texas simulations, riders waited an average of 18 seconds for a driverless vehicle to show up, and each vehicle served 31 to 41 travelers per day. Less than half of 1 percent of travelers waited more than five minutes for a vehicle. In addition, shared autonomous vehicles would also cut an individual's average cost of travel by as much as 75 percent in comparison to conventional driver-owned vehicles. This could actually lead to the contraction of the world's vehicle fleet as more people forgo the costs and hassles of ownership.

In addition, a shift to fleets of autonomous vehicles makes the clean electrification of transportation much more feasible, since such automobiles could drive themselves off for recharging and cleaning during periods of low demand. Such vehicles would also be much smaller and packed more tightly on roads, since they can travel safely at higher speeds than human-driven automobiles. Such a switch would imply the construction of far less material-heavy transportation infrastructure. And fewer vehicles means that much of the 20 percent of urban land devoted to parking can be transformed into housing and businesses.

Smil worries that energy production and consumption technologies are so capital intensive that humanity will be locked into dependence on increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuels for decades to come. Previous energy supply and consumption transformations have indeed taken decades to play out, but perhaps the energy future will follow a deployment path similar to that of information technologies.

Two decades ago, most prognosticators did not foresee how the world would skip over building landline telephone infrastructure to cellular phones. In fact, worldwide, there are in 2014 only about 1.1 billion fixed telephone landlines compared to more than 7 billion cellular phone subscriptions. I make no predictions, but increasingly cheap solar panels attached to cheap high efficiency batteries powering miserly lights, appliances, and infotech is not out of the question. Trying to forecast how much energy people living in 2100 will be using and what technologies they will be powering is like assembling a committee composed of luminaries like Thomas Edison, Madame Curie, and Albert Einstein in 1900 to accurately project how much energy we use today and how we use it.

Some trends do, in fact, indicate that humanity is withdrawing from the natural world.

In a 2014 analysis, Iddo Wernick, a researcher at Rockefeller University's Program for the Human Environment, presented data on resource consumption trends that suggests that improving efficiency and changing consumer preferences are outrunning the demands from rising population and affluence to actually reduce in many cases the amounts of material that Americans and the rest of the world use.

Wernick and his colleagues collected consumption data on a hundred materials that have long been used in the US economy. The commodities were sorted into three categories: those in which both intensity of use (kilograms per dollar of GDP) and absolute consumption (kilograms overall) are falling; those in which intensity of use is falling but absolute consumption is still increasing; and those in which both intensity of use and absolute consumption are increasing.

Thirty-six of these materials fall into the first category, including chromium, iron ore, pig iron, copper, lead, and asbestos. Fifty-three fell into the second group, among them corn, electricity, nitrogen, beef, nickel, and petroleum. Wernick believes that many of these commodities will soon reach their absolute peak—that is, the point where an economy decreases its consumption of a material resource even as economic growth and increases in wealth continue to multiply. For example, nitrogen fertilizer use has been essentially flat since the 1980s even as crop yields have risen. US population increased 80 million since 1980, yet the country uses no more water than it did then.

And then there are the eleven commodities for which both intensity of use and absolute amounts are still increasing. These include diamonds, gallium, rhenium, niobium, helium, garnets, and chicken. Wernick pointed out that while the absolute amounts of these eleven commodities are still increasing, the actual tonnage is quite small. Except for chicken, most of the commodities in this group function as technological “vitamins” that enhance the efficiency of many other industrial processes and technologies.

Why chicken? In part, because Americans are substituting it for beef. Program for the Human Environment director Jesse Ausubel outlined an input productivity hierarchy of meats, analogizing beef to getting 12 miles per gallon, pork 40 mpg, chicken 60 mpg, and tilapia and catfish 80 mpg.

How do the trends look in the rest of the world? Those data are much sparser, but Wernick was able to find reliable information in some cases. Japanese aluminum consumption, like US aluminum consumption, peaked in the 1990s. Per capita petroleum consumption peaked in the United States around 1970 and in Japan and South Korea in the 1990s. China and India are both on the early part of their consumption curves for materials, yet Wernick argues that “while Asian countries are at different stages of development, they show similar patterns of eventual saturation.” Ausubel observed that Japan and Europe are paralleling materials consumption patterns identified in the United States. “I expect that in two or three decades it will be the same story in China and India,” he added.

Furthermore, research by Jesse Ausubel and his colleagues suggests that humanity has reached peak farmland. Crop productivity is increasing so much that farmers will increasingly leave more and more land for nature. “The 21st century will see release of vast areas of land, hundreds of millions of hectares, more than twice the area of France for nature,” declared Jesse Ausubel in 2012. In addition, requirements for synthesized nitrogen fertilizer may moderate as crop plants bioengineered to be nitrogen-sparing are deployed.

The development of lab-grown meat could well obviate Smil's advocacy of a more or less vegetarian diet in order to reduce environmentally damaging material flows. Researchers argue that cultured meat would require up to 99 percent less land, 96 percent less water, and 45 percent less energy, and would produce up to 96 percent less greenhouse gas emissions. As a proof of concept, researchers at New Harvest backed by Google founder Sergey Brin produced a lab-grown hamburger in 2013. The team is now forging onward “building a progressive food system that is sustainable, healthy and humane.”

Banning Garrett, founding director of the Atlantic Council's Strategic Foresight Initiative, asserts that additive manufacturing “is likely to play a significant role in dramatically increasing the efficiency of resource use and in lowering overall carbon emissions, from the process of manufacturing and to delivering products to the end user. As only the material needed for parts is used, there is nearly zero waste.” The US Department of Energy's Advanced Manufacturing Office noted, “Additive manufacturing has the potential to vastly accelerate innovation, compress supply chains, minimize materials and energy usage, and reduce waste.” Additive manufacturing is also known as 3-D printing; machines build up new items one layer at a time. The Advanced Manufacturing Office suggested that additive manufacturing can reduce material needs and costs by up to 90 percent. And instead of the replacement of worn-out items, their material can simply be recycled through a printer to return it to good-as-new condition using only 2 to 25 percent of the energy required to make new parts. In addition, 3-D printing on demand will eliminate storage and inventory costs, and significantly cut transportation costs.

Sustainable Development

“The current global development model is unsustainable.” That was the conclusion of the High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, appointed in 2012 by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon to outline the economic and social changes needed to achieve global sustainability. The panel urged world leaders to embrace “a new approach to the political economy of sustainable development.”

The panel's report,
Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing,
specifically cited the definition of sustainable development devised in
Our Common Future,
another UN report from an expert panel headed by former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, issued in 1987. “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” declared the Brundtland report.

It turns out that the only form of society that has so far met this criterion is democratic free-market capitalism. How can that be? Let's take a look at the two terms,
sustainable
and
development
. With regard to most of human history, there has been precious little in the way of development. The vast majority of people lived and died in humanity's natural state of disease-ridden abject poverty and pervasive ignorance. For example, as British economic historian Angus Maddison shows, economic growth proceeded at the stately pace of less than 0.1 percent per year in Western Europe between
AD
1 and 1820, rising in constant dollars from $425 in
AD
1 to $1,200 in 1820. World per capita GDP rose from $467 in
AD
1 to $666 in 1820.

And what about the other term, sustainable? Again, looking across history and the globe, we know for a fact that there have been until now no sustainable societies. All of the earlier civilizations in both the Old and New Worlds collapsed at various times—for example, Babylonia, Rome, the Umayyad Caliphate, Harappan, Gupta, Tang, Songhai, Mayan, Olmec, Anasazi, Moche, just to mention a few. Of course, collapse in this context doesn't mean that everybody died, but that their ways of life radically shifted and often much of the population migrated to other regions. In other words, history provides us with no models of sustainable development other than democratic capitalism.

Every one of these earlier ultimately unsustainable societies was what economics Nobelist Douglass North and his colleagues call, in
Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History
, “natural states.” Natural states are basically organized as hierarchical patron-client networks in which small, militarily potent elites extract resources from a subject population. The basic deal is a Hobbesian contract in which elites promise their subjects an end to the “war of all against all” in exchange for wealth and power.

Natural states operate by limiting access to valuable resources—that is to say, by creating and sharing the rewards of monopolies. One fundamental downside to this form of social organization is that innovation, both social and technological, is stifled because it threatens the monopolies through which elite patrons extract wealth. But why don't extractive elites encourage economic growth? After all, economic growth would mean more wealth for them to loot.

In their 2012 book
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,
MIT economist Daron Acemo
ğ
lu and Harvard economist James Robinson largely concur with the analysis of North and his colleagues. They too find that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most societies have been organized around “extractive” political and economic institutions that funnel resources from the mass of people to small but powerful elites. The economic and political institutions that produce economic growth are inevitable threats to the power of reigning elites. “The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people,” they explain. Thus throughout history, reactionary elites have predictably resisted innovation because of their accurate fear that it would produce rivals for their power.