The thinker you're missing in this overview is Vaclav Smil. Interesting that you've missed him, considering how prolific he is as a writer, and how clear-headed he is as a researcher and futurist. But you aren't alone in leaving him out of the discussion; he's the smartest guy nobody in the general public ever heard of. (Although to be fair, Bill Gates is familiar with his work.)
Vaclav Smil is neither a cheery techno-optimist or a catastrophist doomer degrowther. Above all, he's a Realist. He does, however, recognize an important role for degrowth. And he understands that the sort of optimism that all of our problems are on track to be solved by technological innovation--just because "human ingenuity"--is a faith-based paradigm, not an evidence-based one. Smil also seems to me to have more respect for the natural world, and for keeping the web of life in our interconnected ecosystems healthy, than the economics/business/cybertechhies, who treat the planet ad a bank vault while ignoring its life-giving features in order to spend their time indoors, surrounded by machines and videogame "environments."
Oh, I'm absolutely aware of Vaclav Smil's work, and have read most of his books! (We even corresponded about some things). Like you, I have huge respect for him, and I take him much more seriously than your average degrowthers, because he's extremely down-to-earth and numerically literate, not a tree-hugging hippie. But I still think he's wrong on growth, and steeped in 70ies anti-growthism. I tweeted about it here, agreeing with Ted Nordhaus's critique of his book on growth. https://x.com/mboudry/status/1237056114459623424
I'm a down-to-earth and numerically literate tree-hugging hippie. Not that I don't know who you're referring to, and the problems of their unrealism*, but I do need to make that clear up front. I'll take reverence for the natural world that sustains us over regarding the natural world exclusively as a bank vault any day. But neither of the extremes is responsible or responsive, and a realistic balance of sustainable stewardship and the fulfillment of basic human needs is the goal to be pursued. Which is to say that the people of Africa, the Middle East, and India deserve air conditioning--in their schools, office buildings, and indoor community centers, to begin with. While here in the temperate zone, I'm fine with emphasizing frugality as a means of reducing carbon footprint. I'd prefer that to be a Values shift, of the sort that government policies can encourage without adopting a strict regime of all-pervading coercion . One of the features that interests me about degrowth in the affluent developed regions has to do with how much of it could be accomplished by reducing waste--being more consciously aware of the wastrel consumerism paradigm that's become the default in much of the retail economy, for instance. I don't think the human future will be circumscribed on account of a shift away from gluttony, or by building retail goods to last and to be repairable and easily upgraded instead of predestined to break and end up in a landfill after three years. The amount of energy and material resources devoted to the Disposable Economy is substantial, and much of it is arguably inexcusable.
Ted Nordhaus' article deserves its own post. For now, I'll merely make note of a few of my observations: 1) I can easily find Nordhaus' job history, but I haven't yet found anything about his educational background. I can find the background of his father William Nordhaus, an "environmental economist" at Yale University. But I don't know the focus of Ted Nordhaus' schooling and erudition. I think that's an important thing to know because economists have a way of turning everything into abstractions, and landing on money as the foundational measure of their calculations. And that abstract focus--on the human activities performed by humans, with every other feature of planetary implicitly relegated to an Externality--is what I notice about Ted Nordhaus' essay. That focus is inherently unbalanced. I say this despite agreeing with Nordhaus on some of his policy recommendations. I support nuclear power and small modular reactors, for instance. But I don't want that project in the hands of anyone who would play fast and loose with the requirements for safety and waste storage (which more relate to mining and refining than waste disposal and storage, in my opinion. I endorse robotics as a way to cut the hazards to human miners, for example.) Hand-waving booster optimism is no better than obdurate ignorant pessimism.
One of the reasons that I find Vaclav Smil's opinions so valuable and authoritative is that his educational field of concentration is natural sciences and geography, not Economics. Economics is typically taught and learned as a narrow theoretical discipline, and its abstractions are no match for a more comprehensive knowledge of the natural world that sets the conditions. That's what makes Smil's contributions so singularly important, I think. His focus is on empirical materialism (as opposed to "money", that phantasm) and on the real-world impacts of economic activity, in terms of consequences like resource depletion and negative effects like toxic waste.**
I'm not finding that emphasis in the writings of Ted Nordhaus and his colleague Michael Schellenberger. Although for the best balance, life scientists need to be incorporated into the conversation with earth scientists and economist. All three fields need to be reviewing data and talking WITH each other, not just AT each other, or PAST each other. For instance, the views of ecologists, biologists, and botanists are required to properly parse the crucial differences between boreal forests, alpine forests, temperate rainforests, tropical rainforests, etc. that so often have a way of being elided beneath the general designation "forests."
I find other problems with Nordhaus' essay, of the sort that are unfortunately all too common in economics discussions. Most notable among them is the semantic unclarity of the use of terms like "growth", "degrowth", "technology", and other generalities, often without the modifiers required for precision. It's worth noting that technological advance sometimes implies the ephemeralization of technology; imagine the resource demands that would be required to construct a digital society with 1980s-era chip miniaturization, for example. As Smil and others have noted, advances in efficiency are often negated by subsequent increase in consumption. But it's also worth noting that nothing compels that result--nothing other than mindless inertia, anyway. A feature that economists are loath to address. For one thing, it's a Values question: the "Right to Consume" as much as can be purchased or made is suddenly challenged by another factor, the Responsibility to consume frugally and advisedly, and to be responsible all of the way to the end of the consumption chain. (And to think that there are those who insist that "Sustainability is a myth." What's the alternative--Unsustainability?)
(*typically ill-informed and willfully blinkered by material privilege bias, paradoxically enough.)
[**I'd really like to see Smil--or someone like him--taking a comprehensive approach to the history of real-world effects of pollution and habitat destruction worldwide, including aspects like the ability of the natural world to heal, and to what extent. Books like Junkyard Planet, Fragments: the Remnants of War, Ecocide In The USSR, and Bottomfeeders provide only partial hints of the total global problem of large-scale destructive human impacts. It's also important to look at the time required to heal each of them, which varies between perhaps 20 years for a new housing development, to over a century to properly reforest a riparian mountainside, to some amount of permanent impairment, as the usual case with mining operations. Operations which are nonetheless absolutely necessary for civilization. But not everywhere. ]
I find it mystifying whenever I read a futurist economist simultaneously celebrating technological advance and lamenting the lowering rate of human reproduction and the impacts of impending "depopulation."* Those advances include automation, robotics, and AI utility, no? More production, fewer people: the threshold of saturation affluence, which I'd argue we've reached already in some material goods production. Only a bad idea for the Ideology of CapitalISM, which demands both scarcity and perpetual growth in order to sustain the power and fortunes of the wealthy. That's why so much newly made stuff breaks so easily nowadays, yes? As a great supporter of independent enterprise, personal initiative, ingenuity, and the virtue of Value Addition, I'd like to see markets addressed in more imaginative ways than the default that's generally assumed as axiomatic truism--deference to the Inertial Momentum of Whoever Has The Most Money, as of the most recent Quarter.
I also can't help but find a subtext in some of these discussions: a concern that AI will replace "middle-class jobs"--like economic forecasting--and replace much of the labor demand with the requirement of a larger number of young people to "care for an aging population" (at least until depopulation gets over the hump and ZPG balance is restored.) Oh no, the grandchildren of Millennials will have to go into caregiver occupations, en masse. How declasse!**
It's terribly difficult to know all of the generational, 20-year ramifications of declines in national populations--or an overall decline in global population. And I'm baffled by the insistence that our problems require a 21st century baby boom in order to solve them. It's strange for me to read acknowledgement by economists of the transformations being wrought on civilization by robotics and automation--and productive longevity--existing in the same realm as deference to the same old set of assumptions about productive human lifespan, human labor requirements, and human buyer consumption patterns.
Almost all Traditional economists--whether Capitalist or Marxist--are terribly uneasy with incorporating the factor of voluntary restraint of consumption into their calculations. It's untidy. Worse, it implies the role of restraint due to considerations other than lack of purchasing power or availability; responsibility requires acknowledging other constraints, self-restraint, limitation. The question of Responsibility also has political implications. It's worth noting that while the Radical Green approach championed by people like Derrick Jensen is doomed by its unrealism (and for that reason, a marginal school of thought that even many Greens reject), the Trump administration is currently using its political Power to attempt to abolish the physical reality of global climate change, by no longer funding the research that charts the data. That's a far more pernicious policy than Jensen's romantic ecopessimism. Thank heavens the Chinese appear to be acting like the adults in the game. I wish that the US was leading the way, but the Democrats lacked both a forthrightly ambitious platform and the executive will power to carry one out. Now the US is in the hands of wealthy ignoramuses, bent on Moving and Shaking--and putting all of their governmental power to underwriting the fossil fuels industry.** No vision, and entirely too much reliance on predation and swindling. Not an augury of success.
Speaking of auguries of success, the ideal source of global energy appears to me to be Deep Geothermal Power. I'd venture that we might be well on our way to implementing it by now, if the Bush administration hadn't squandered $3 trillion on the geopolitics of Petroleum. Squandering continues to be an underrated problem in the realm of human economic activities.
(*A Longtermist Utilitarian would of course opt for some means to dispense--or anyway reduce--the population of the superannuated. Based on objective measurements of their diminished productivity versus their resource-depleting, labor-intensive requirements.)
[**Elder care isn't the worst; it's what I'm doing right now, for a 98-year old family member. While knowing I'm fortunate that our household can afford it. So far. ]
[***I would have preferred US energy policy to commit to a program of safely sited small modular nuclear reactors and grid interconnection, back around the year 2000. They'd already be up and running, now. But it's a very different world nowadays. And the 20 year lead time argues against a nuclear power program that ambitious. ]
I don't think I can really disagree with this article. But how can we know that:
-despite the successes of growth in improving the situation of humanity in the last decades, growth will keep improving humanity? Is it just plain optimism and extrapolation (which is fine in its own I guess) or is there a mechanism to point out?
And:
-isn't just pointing out the doomsday-prophets where wrong and extrapolate that into a vision for the future exactly the same mistake as they were making?
Is this view dissident in universities? Paul elrich still doubles down and says his theories are correct and we just delayed the damage, i was never interested in politics the years i spent in uni so i don't know what the consensus is, and im not sure the media portrays an accurate view in topics that have been politicises( such as green energy and climate change as you discuss here)
The thinker you're missing in this overview is Vaclav Smil. Interesting that you've missed him, considering how prolific he is as a writer, and how clear-headed he is as a researcher and futurist. But you aren't alone in leaving him out of the discussion; he's the smartest guy nobody in the general public ever heard of. (Although to be fair, Bill Gates is familiar with his work.)
Vaclav Smil is neither a cheery techno-optimist or a catastrophist doomer degrowther. Above all, he's a Realist. He does, however, recognize an important role for degrowth. And he understands that the sort of optimism that all of our problems are on track to be solved by technological innovation--just because "human ingenuity"--is a faith-based paradigm, not an evidence-based one. Smil also seems to me to have more respect for the natural world, and for keeping the web of life in our interconnected ecosystems healthy, than the economics/business/cybertechhies, who treat the planet ad a bank vault while ignoring its life-giving features in order to spend their time indoors, surrounded by machines and videogame "environments."
I guarantee, Vaclav Smil has out-written all of us. https://vaclavsmil.com/books/
Oh, I'm absolutely aware of Vaclav Smil's work, and have read most of his books! (We even corresponded about some things). Like you, I have huge respect for him, and I take him much more seriously than your average degrowthers, because he's extremely down-to-earth and numerically literate, not a tree-hugging hippie. But I still think he's wrong on growth, and steeped in 70ies anti-growthism. I tweeted about it here, agreeing with Ted Nordhaus's critique of his book on growth. https://x.com/mboudry/status/1237056114459623424
I'm a down-to-earth and numerically literate tree-hugging hippie. Not that I don't know who you're referring to, and the problems of their unrealism*, but I do need to make that clear up front. I'll take reverence for the natural world that sustains us over regarding the natural world exclusively as a bank vault any day. But neither of the extremes is responsible or responsive, and a realistic balance of sustainable stewardship and the fulfillment of basic human needs is the goal to be pursued. Which is to say that the people of Africa, the Middle East, and India deserve air conditioning--in their schools, office buildings, and indoor community centers, to begin with. While here in the temperate zone, I'm fine with emphasizing frugality as a means of reducing carbon footprint. I'd prefer that to be a Values shift, of the sort that government policies can encourage without adopting a strict regime of all-pervading coercion . One of the features that interests me about degrowth in the affluent developed regions has to do with how much of it could be accomplished by reducing waste--being more consciously aware of the wastrel consumerism paradigm that's become the default in much of the retail economy, for instance. I don't think the human future will be circumscribed on account of a shift away from gluttony, or by building retail goods to last and to be repairable and easily upgraded instead of predestined to break and end up in a landfill after three years. The amount of energy and material resources devoted to the Disposable Economy is substantial, and much of it is arguably inexcusable.
Ted Nordhaus' article deserves its own post. For now, I'll merely make note of a few of my observations: 1) I can easily find Nordhaus' job history, but I haven't yet found anything about his educational background. I can find the background of his father William Nordhaus, an "environmental economist" at Yale University. But I don't know the focus of Ted Nordhaus' schooling and erudition. I think that's an important thing to know because economists have a way of turning everything into abstractions, and landing on money as the foundational measure of their calculations. And that abstract focus--on the human activities performed by humans, with every other feature of planetary implicitly relegated to an Externality--is what I notice about Ted Nordhaus' essay. That focus is inherently unbalanced. I say this despite agreeing with Nordhaus on some of his policy recommendations. I support nuclear power and small modular reactors, for instance. But I don't want that project in the hands of anyone who would play fast and loose with the requirements for safety and waste storage (which more relate to mining and refining than waste disposal and storage, in my opinion. I endorse robotics as a way to cut the hazards to human miners, for example.) Hand-waving booster optimism is no better than obdurate ignorant pessimism.
One of the reasons that I find Vaclav Smil's opinions so valuable and authoritative is that his educational field of concentration is natural sciences and geography, not Economics. Economics is typically taught and learned as a narrow theoretical discipline, and its abstractions are no match for a more comprehensive knowledge of the natural world that sets the conditions. That's what makes Smil's contributions so singularly important, I think. His focus is on empirical materialism (as opposed to "money", that phantasm) and on the real-world impacts of economic activity, in terms of consequences like resource depletion and negative effects like toxic waste.**
I'm not finding that emphasis in the writings of Ted Nordhaus and his colleague Michael Schellenberger. Although for the best balance, life scientists need to be incorporated into the conversation with earth scientists and economist. All three fields need to be reviewing data and talking WITH each other, not just AT each other, or PAST each other. For instance, the views of ecologists, biologists, and botanists are required to properly parse the crucial differences between boreal forests, alpine forests, temperate rainforests, tropical rainforests, etc. that so often have a way of being elided beneath the general designation "forests."
I find other problems with Nordhaus' essay, of the sort that are unfortunately all too common in economics discussions. Most notable among them is the semantic unclarity of the use of terms like "growth", "degrowth", "technology", and other generalities, often without the modifiers required for precision. It's worth noting that technological advance sometimes implies the ephemeralization of technology; imagine the resource demands that would be required to construct a digital society with 1980s-era chip miniaturization, for example. As Smil and others have noted, advances in efficiency are often negated by subsequent increase in consumption. But it's also worth noting that nothing compels that result--nothing other than mindless inertia, anyway. A feature that economists are loath to address. For one thing, it's a Values question: the "Right to Consume" as much as can be purchased or made is suddenly challenged by another factor, the Responsibility to consume frugally and advisedly, and to be responsible all of the way to the end of the consumption chain. (And to think that there are those who insist that "Sustainability is a myth." What's the alternative--Unsustainability?)
(*typically ill-informed and willfully blinkered by material privilege bias, paradoxically enough.)
[**I'd really like to see Smil--or someone like him--taking a comprehensive approach to the history of real-world effects of pollution and habitat destruction worldwide, including aspects like the ability of the natural world to heal, and to what extent. Books like Junkyard Planet, Fragments: the Remnants of War, Ecocide In The USSR, and Bottomfeeders provide only partial hints of the total global problem of large-scale destructive human impacts. It's also important to look at the time required to heal each of them, which varies between perhaps 20 years for a new housing development, to over a century to properly reforest a riparian mountainside, to some amount of permanent impairment, as the usual case with mining operations. Operations which are nonetheless absolutely necessary for civilization. But not everywhere. ]
I find it mystifying whenever I read a futurist economist simultaneously celebrating technological advance and lamenting the lowering rate of human reproduction and the impacts of impending "depopulation."* Those advances include automation, robotics, and AI utility, no? More production, fewer people: the threshold of saturation affluence, which I'd argue we've reached already in some material goods production. Only a bad idea for the Ideology of CapitalISM, which demands both scarcity and perpetual growth in order to sustain the power and fortunes of the wealthy. That's why so much newly made stuff breaks so easily nowadays, yes? As a great supporter of independent enterprise, personal initiative, ingenuity, and the virtue of Value Addition, I'd like to see markets addressed in more imaginative ways than the default that's generally assumed as axiomatic truism--deference to the Inertial Momentum of Whoever Has The Most Money, as of the most recent Quarter.
I also can't help but find a subtext in some of these discussions: a concern that AI will replace "middle-class jobs"--like economic forecasting--and replace much of the labor demand with the requirement of a larger number of young people to "care for an aging population" (at least until depopulation gets over the hump and ZPG balance is restored.) Oh no, the grandchildren of Millennials will have to go into caregiver occupations, en masse. How declasse!**
It's terribly difficult to know all of the generational, 20-year ramifications of declines in national populations--or an overall decline in global population. And I'm baffled by the insistence that our problems require a 21st century baby boom in order to solve them. It's strange for me to read acknowledgement by economists of the transformations being wrought on civilization by robotics and automation--and productive longevity--existing in the same realm as deference to the same old set of assumptions about productive human lifespan, human labor requirements, and human buyer consumption patterns.
Almost all Traditional economists--whether Capitalist or Marxist--are terribly uneasy with incorporating the factor of voluntary restraint of consumption into their calculations. It's untidy. Worse, it implies the role of restraint due to considerations other than lack of purchasing power or availability; responsibility requires acknowledging other constraints, self-restraint, limitation. The question of Responsibility also has political implications. It's worth noting that while the Radical Green approach championed by people like Derrick Jensen is doomed by its unrealism (and for that reason, a marginal school of thought that even many Greens reject), the Trump administration is currently using its political Power to attempt to abolish the physical reality of global climate change, by no longer funding the research that charts the data. That's a far more pernicious policy than Jensen's romantic ecopessimism. Thank heavens the Chinese appear to be acting like the adults in the game. I wish that the US was leading the way, but the Democrats lacked both a forthrightly ambitious platform and the executive will power to carry one out. Now the US is in the hands of wealthy ignoramuses, bent on Moving and Shaking--and putting all of their governmental power to underwriting the fossil fuels industry.** No vision, and entirely too much reliance on predation and swindling. Not an augury of success.
Speaking of auguries of success, the ideal source of global energy appears to me to be Deep Geothermal Power. I'd venture that we might be well on our way to implementing it by now, if the Bush administration hadn't squandered $3 trillion on the geopolitics of Petroleum. Squandering continues to be an underrated problem in the realm of human economic activities.
(*A Longtermist Utilitarian would of course opt for some means to dispense--or anyway reduce--the population of the superannuated. Based on objective measurements of their diminished productivity versus their resource-depleting, labor-intensive requirements.)
[**Elder care isn't the worst; it's what I'm doing right now, for a 98-year old family member. While knowing I'm fortunate that our household can afford it. So far. ]
[***I would have preferred US energy policy to commit to a program of safely sited small modular nuclear reactors and grid interconnection, back around the year 2000. They'd already be up and running, now. But it's a very different world nowadays. And the 20 year lead time argues against a nuclear power program that ambitious. ]
I don't think I can really disagree with this article. But how can we know that:
-despite the successes of growth in improving the situation of humanity in the last decades, growth will keep improving humanity? Is it just plain optimism and extrapolation (which is fine in its own I guess) or is there a mechanism to point out?
And:
-isn't just pointing out the doomsday-prophets where wrong and extrapolate that into a vision for the future exactly the same mistake as they were making?
Is this view dissident in universities? Paul elrich still doubles down and says his theories are correct and we just delayed the damage, i was never interested in politics the years i spent in uni so i don't know what the consensus is, and im not sure the media portrays an accurate view in topics that have been politicises( such as green energy and climate change as you discuss here)