Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper

by Robert Bryce

  Thanks to better agricultural techniques, we are producing more food. The combination of hybrid seeds, better pest control, and more accurate application of fertilizers allows farmers to produce more food per acre of farmland than ever before. Between 1950 and 2010, global grain yields increased by an average of nearly 1.9 percent per year.32 Those increasing yields cause more people in the developing world to give up subsistence farming and seek better opportunities in cities.

  The growth of cities along with increasing availability of low-cost, high-speed Internet connectivity and satellite television are making the world Smaller. News and information are traveling Faster than ever before. The result: we live in a highly networked planet in which people living in repressed conditions are more able to see what life is like for those who have liberty.

  For millennia, women were considered second-class citizens. Today, women are more free and better educated than ever before. At the 2012 Olympics, for the first time, all of the countries taking part in the Games included women on their teams.33 Two women from Saudi Arabia, long one of the world’s most repressive and backward regimes, were allowed to compete. With a handful of exceptions—Saudi Arabia is one—women are allowed to vote in nearly every country. A century ago, the situation was just the opposite, and women’s suffrage was rare, with New Zealand, Finland, and Norway the notable exceptions.34 In US colleges, women are no longer rare. Instead, they are the majority. In 2012, 54 percent of all first-time, full-time freshman students entering college were women.35

  The facts are simply indisputable: never have so many lived so well, or so free. Yet despite this astounding progress, there remains an entrenched and powerful interest group that believes we humans are doing too much, that we must reduce our consumption of everything, return to our agrarian past and employ what one prominent catastrophist calls “a new civilizational paradigm.”

  Following such a path would be disastrous. Just as we are accelerating the trend toward Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper in nearly every sector, some people want to turn back the clock and wrench defeat from the grasping fingertips of victory. And that poses the essential question: will we continue innovating, embracing technology, and getting richer, or will we listen to those who are advocating degrowth?

  4

  BACK TO THE PAST

  THE PUSH FOR “DEGROWTH”

  In September 2011, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the founders of the Oakland-based center-left think tank Breakthrough Institute, wrote an essay for Orion magazine in which they coined a phrase that neatly sums up the worldview of many environmentalists and environmental groups. Nordhaus and Shellenberger called this view “nihilistic ecotheology.”

  That worldview, they said, comprises “apocalyptic fears of ecological collapse, disenchanting notions of living in a fallen world, and the growing conviction that some kind of collective sacrifice is needed to avoid the end of the world.” The eco-nihilists have “nostalgic visions of a transcendent future in which humans might, once again, live in harmony with nature through a return to small-scale agriculture, or even to hunter-gatherer life.”1

  Other analysts have described this same worldview. In 2013, David Deming, a geologist and professor at the University of Oklahoma published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that declared that “modern environmentalism is based on emotionalism . . . and the myth of primitive harmony.”2

  There are plenty of examples from the Green Left that reflect the worldview described by Nordhaus, Shellenberger, and Deming.

  The myth of primitive harmony that pervades much of modern environmentalism has deep historical roots in Western culture. It can be traced back to Rousseau in the eighteenth century, to Thoreau in the nineteenth century, to Edward Abbey in the twentieth century, and is readily apparent in the present-day rhetoric of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and numerous other environmental groups and leaders. Many modern advocates for conservation and preservation see a world swirling toward disaster and the need for drastic action that would curtail nearly every activity of modern life in order to save the planet, and presumably, ourselves.

  They contend that we ignore their warning at our peril. As the French writer Pascal Bruckner explains, the catastrophists alone “see the future clearly while others vegetate in the darkness.” These predictors of apocalypse, says Bruckner, are trying “desperately to awaken us, to convince us of planetary chaos.” Or as the advertisements for Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, warned: “Humanity is sitting on a time bomb.” Only by taking dramatic action—forsaking hydrocarbons for renewable energy—will humanity be able to avoid a “tail-spin of epic destruction.”3 Since the release of his film, Gore has frequently referred to what he calls the “climate crisis.”4 He’s also said we are facing a “planetary emergency.”5

  Averting the looming (pick your favorite term) catastrophe, time bomb, crisis, or emergency, requires us to hew to their worldview, one in which we humans are the problem and the Earth is the object to be saved. The biggest and most influential environmental groups routinely preach a message of doom. They regularly claim, for instance, that technology is dangerous (their opposition to nuclear and GMOs are obvious examples of this mindset) and that industrial development must be stopped in order to the save the planet. However, the painful paradox is that they are aiming to stop many of the innovations that are helping to improve the environment and raise the living standards of millions of people. They are also promoting energy policies that would be ruinous for the environment they say they want to protect.

  Let’s start with Greenpeace, one of the world’s biggest environmental groups, which has an annual operating budget of more than $300 million.6 Throughout its history, Greenpeace has been stridently antinuclear. It is also opposed to the use of hydrocarbons. Rex Weyler, a founder of Greenpeace International, has been among the leaders of the degrowth movement, an effort to stop economic growth in order to—in theory—save the planet.

  In 2011, Weyler published an article on Greenpeace’s Web site that said, “Degrowth is an important, natural concept that our society needs to understand . . . As we learn to share and live modestly, our ecosystems can recover and provide us with nature’s bounty. The best way for poor nations to avoid deeper poverty is to protect their ecosystems from plunder.” He adds that the degrowth movement “advocates richer, more rewarding lives with less material stuff. Our economic efforts should focus on providing basic needs to everyone in the human family, rather than enriching a few, while others starve.”7

  Weyler’s agenda is similar to what Naomi Klein promoted in a 2011 cover story in the Nation, a magazine that has long been the vanguard for the American Left. In “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” Klein declared that we humans “have pushed nature beyond its limits” and therefore need “a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal.” Klein went on to claim that the solution for saving humankind from global warming “requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.”

  Klein, who has authored several books, including The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, wrote that the solution is to “scale back overconsumption” and “heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them” while recognizing “our debts to the global South.”8 Let’s ignore for a moment the socialist—and even communist—implications of Klein’s essay and instead focus on how she plans to save Mother Earth: The “real climate solutions” she claims, are projects that are controlled at “the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.”

  In 2012, the Worldwatch Institute, a left-leaning environmental research group based in Washington, DC, said it was time for governments to “tax ecologically harmful industries” that make “unhealthy or unsustainable products.” The money from the levy “could curb the growth of harmful i
ndustries and of the worst forms of consumption, while also raising government revenues to build green infrastructure—such as improved water and sanitation systems, public transit, renewable energy, and bicycle lanes.”9 The Worldwatch Institute’s Erik Assadourian explained that a primary goal of the degrowth movement was to shrink the economies of what Worldwatch considers “overdeveloped” countries. In addition, the group wants to create “a steady-state economic system that is in balance with Earth’s limits . . . and restore the planet’s ecological systems.”10

  Bill McKibben, a man the New York Times has called “perhaps the nation’s most effective grass-roots environmental advocate,” is also a proponent of degrowth.11 McKibben has written that “our systems and economies have gotten too large . . . we need to start building them back down. What we need is a new trajectory, toward the smaller and more local.”12 McKibben is a prolific author as well as the founder of 350.org, an organization that aims to drastically cut global carbon dioxide emissions. In a 2012 essay for Rolling Stone magazine, McKibben was even more blunt about his antibusiness stance. The global warming issue, he wrote, is “not an engineering problem . . . it’s a greed problem.”13

  In 2013, Matthew C. Nisbet, a communications professor at American University, wrote a long profile of McKibben, in which he pointed to McKibben’s “roots in the deep ecology movement.” McKibben’s goal, Nisbet says, has been to “generate a mass consciousness in support of limiting economic growth and consumption with the hope of shifting the United States toward localized economies, food systems, and ‘soft’ energy sources.”14

  McKibben justifies his push for degrowth by claiming that we are on the precipice of disaster. In 2013, he told the Atlantic magazine, “In a sense, the world as we knew it is already over. We have heated the Earth, melted the Arctic, and turned seawater 30 percent more acidic.” He continued, saying, “The only question left is how much more fossil fuel we’ll burn, and hence how unfamiliar and inhospitable we’ll make our home planet.”15

  McKibben and his fellow travelers believe that salvation lies in pursuing low density in both energy production and food production. But the precise opposite is true. Density is green. It’s only by increasing the density of our energy and food production that we will be able to meet the demands of our growing population. And yet, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and many other groups want to pave the world with low-density wind turbines. Not only do they insist on renewable energy; they want us all to live on homesteads equipped with a bedraggled organic garden, a compost pile, and maybe a few scrawny chickens. And of course, there’s no Volvo station wagon in the driveway, only a pair of battered 3-speed Sturmey Archer bicycles, and one of them has a flat.

  There’s no doubt that this return-to-nature idea has some appeal. Clearly, we’ve paved parts of paradise and lost beautiful places to development and ruined others with pollution. We need to protect our wild places. I’m a birdwatcher, a beekeeper, an active hiker, and paddler. On a 2013 trip to the Galapagos Islands, I was gobsmacked by the stark beauty of the islands, by the variety and loveliness of Darwin’s finches, by the playfulness and friendliness of the sea lions, the enormity of the whales, and the clarity of the islands’ air and water. The Ecuadorian government has done a wonderful job of protecting the islands even as the tourism industry has grown dramatically. Wild places fortify us. Urban parks and open space allow us to exercise and socialize. It’s beyond debate that we need clean air, drinkable water, wholesome food, and livable cities.

  But our salvation cannot be found in returning to the 40-acres-and-a-mule-Green-Acres plan put forward by McKibben, Klein, and their allies. Nor can it be achieved by imposing degrowth—and all of the unemployment and wrenching poverty that would surely come with such a scheme. Instead, our future depends on embracing technology.

  It’s only through a pro-business, pro-innovation, and pro-human outlook that we will be able to succeed. It’s only by creating wealth that we will be able to support the scientists, tinkerers and entrepreneurs who will come up with the new technologies we need. It’s only by getting richer that we will be able to afford the adaptive measures we may need to take in the decades ahead as we adjust to the Earth’s ever-changing climate. It’s only by using more energy, not less, that we will be able to provide more clean water and better sanitation to the poorest of the poor. It’s only by accepting the inevitability of what Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado calls a “high-energy planet” that impoverished countries like India, Vietnam, Thailand, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and others will be able to bring their people into the modern world. Put short, we need more innovation, not less. We need new tools and techniques. We need to fan the flames of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.

  Unfortunately, the vanguard of the Green Left continues to promote an antibusiness, anti-innovation, antimodern energy, and in some cases, an anti-human outlook. The Green Left’s romanticization of the past, along with its continuing claim that renewable energy and organic agriculture are the only way forward, ignores the deprivation, lack of social, intellectual, and economic mobility, and short life spans that dominated preindustrial societies.

  Bill McKibben’s Energy-Starvation Plan

  Bill McKibben is on a quest to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere at 350 parts per million, a level that he and some others claim is the ideal. McKibben, the author and environmental activist, is fond of saying “do the math.” Okay. Let’s.

  The arithmetic is laid out in McKibben’s 2010 book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, in which he said that if humans want to “stabilize the planet” and reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million, then “we need to cut our fossil fuel use by a factor of twenty over the next few decades.”16 Let’s consider what McKibben’s twentyfold reduction in hydrocarbon use might look like.

  In 2012, global use of hydrocarbons—coal, oil, and natural gas—averaged about 218 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.17 Reducing that by a factor of 20 would take global hydrocarbon use down to about 11 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, which is roughly the total amount of energy used by India in 2012.18 (For an alternative comparison, consider that in 2010, global gasoline consumption averaged about 22 million barrels per day.)19

  To make doing the math easier, let’s convert those 11 million barrels of oil equivalent per day into liters. The volume of a barrel is 159 liters. Therefore, under McKibben’s plan for a twentyfold cut in hydrocarbon use, the daily ration of hydrocarbons for the entire population of the planet would be 1.75 billion liters of oil equivalent. If we were able to divide that amount of energy equally among seven billion people—not an easy task—you end up with a ration of 0.25 liters (25 centiliters) of oil equivalent per person, per day.

  Let’s put that into perspective. In 2011, the average resident of planet Earth consumed about 4.9 liters (1.3 gallons) of oil-equivalent energy per day from hydrocarbons.20 Therefore, if McKibben’s plan were enacted, each of the seven billion residents of the planet would be allowed a daily ration of hydrocarbons that wouldn’t fill an average-size soda can. And keep in mind all of these calculations assume absolutely no population growth over the coming decades and that the world’s population will stay at seven billion.

  Let’s do the math by considering what McKibben’s energy-starvation diet might mean for some of the world’s poorest people, and further assume that they are allotted the same 25 centiliters of oil equivalent per person per day as every other person on the planet. In 2011, the average resident of Bangladesh used the energy equivalent of about half a liter of oil per day.

  Under McKibben’s prescription, then, the average Bangladeshi would be required to cut his/her energy use by about half. McKibben’s meager diet of hydrocarbons would be equally ruinous for residents of India, a country in which about four hundred million people live without electricity. In 2011, the average Indian consumed about 1.5 liters of oil equivalent per
day and of that, about 1.3 liters came from hydrocarbons.21 Thus, under the McKibben plan, each Indian would have to reduce his/her energy consumption by a factor of five. Or consider China, where the average resident consumed 6.2 liters of oil equivalent per day, of which about 5.5 liters came from hydrocarbons. Meeting McKibben’s goal would require the average Chinese citizen to cut hydrocarbon use by a factor of 22.

  We can also do the math by ignoring the rest of the world and focusing solely on the United States. Current hydrocarbon use in America is about 20 liters per capita per day. Cutting that by a factor of 20 would mean each American could use just 1 liter of hydrocarbons per day. That amount is about half of the current per-capita hydrocarbon consumption in Peru.22

  Yes, these numbers are rather hard to digest. So here’s one more comparison that might drive—pun intended—the point home. On a ration of 1 liter of gasoline per day, a Prius driver in the United States would be limited to no more than 13 miles of driving per day. The driver of a Chevrolet Suburban would be allotted about 4 miles per day.23

  And don’t plan on doing any driving with an electric car, either. McKibben isn’t just opposed to hydrocarbons. He’s also antinuclear. In 2012, McKibben dismissed the potential of nuclear energy, declaring that “It’s too expensive. It’s like burning $20 bills to generate electricity.” He quickly added: “The good news is we are getting really a lot better at using the soft renewables like sun and wind.”24

  Alas, once again, McKibben doesn’t do the math. In 2012, solar and wind energy provided slightly more than 1 percent of all global energy consumption. Together, they provided about 2.8 million barrels of oil equivalent per day while all global energy needs totaled 250 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.25 As I will demonstrate in a later chapter, the critical problem with renewable energy in general—and wind energy and biofuels in particular—is their low power density. Wind and biofuels simply require too much land to be viable on a large scale because land dedicated to renewable energy production cannot be used for housing, food production, or for parkland. Therefore, McKibben’s claim about “soft renewables” getting “a lot better” is little more than spin.