by Robert Bryce
The McKibben Plan: What a Twentyfold Reduction in Hydrocarbon Use Would Look Like When Compared to Per-capita Energy Use in 2011
Sources: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013; Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Toronto: Vintage, 2010).
The bottom line here is obvious: if the countries of the world decided to embrace McKibben’s antinuclear, antihydrocarbon proposals, the result would be dire poverty for billions of people around the world. McKibben may couch his rhetoric in environmental terms, but his proposals are a prescription for economic suicide.
In 2002, two anthropologists, Richard H. Steckel of Ohio State University, and Jerome C. Rose from the University of Arkansas, published a study based on their analysis of more than 12,500 Native American skeletons that date from the pre-Columbian era. Steckel and Rose found that few people who lived in hunter-gatherer societies in the Americas survived past the age of fifty. And, as John Noble Wilford of the New York Times explained, Steckel and Rose determined that “in the healthiest cultures in the 1,000 years before Columbus, a life span of no more than 35 years might be usual.”26 Yes, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Seminoles, and Apaches may have been noble, but they sure didn’t live long. Even shorter life spans—about 18 years—were common among the ancient Greeks. Among the Romans, it was about 22 years.
The Greeks, Romans, Zunis, and Navajos of yesteryear ate organic food, or they didn’t eat at all. Renewable energy? They had no other choice. The sun provided the energy for the biomass—wood, dung, straw—that they used for their heating needs. The wind provided motive power for their boats. And yet, despite their all-organic, all-renewable diets, nearly all of them were dead by age thirty-five, with no opportunities to even have a mid-life crisis. No motorcycle, Porsche, or mistress for those Ultra-Greens of centuries past, nor even the prospect of them.
Despite the short and brutish living conditions that dominated human settlements for millennia, the myths about primitive harmony are abundant in the literature. The myth is as old as the Garden of Eden, the place described in the book of Genesis where we humans allegedly first fell from grace. In addition to the Bible, the notion of primitive harmony can be seen in medieval times in the Romance of the Rose, written in the thirteenth century by the French poet Jean de Meun. The lengthy poem describes a world in which humans have simple tastes and the earth provides everything that is needed in abundance. People lived in harmony until their paradise was spoiled by the desire for money, power, and property.27
But it was the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who has likely done the most to popularize the notion of primitive harmony. In the 1700s, Rousseau came up with the idea of a “natural man” who was unspoiled by civilization.28 In what may be his most famous work, Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind (written in 1754, published 1755), the philosopher wrote, “As long as men remained satisfied with their rustic cabins; as long as they confined themselves to the use of clothes made of the skins of other animals . . . as long as they undertook such works only as a single person could finish, and stuck to such arts as did not require the joint endeavors of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy.”29
But as soon as “one man began to stand in need of another’s assistance” claimed Rousseau, “all equality vanished” and “slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout out and grow.”30
Exactly 100 years after Rousseau wrote his Discourse, and fifty-six years after Thomas Malthus offered his grim view of the future, Henry David Thoreau published Walden, or Life in the Woods, which told of his two-year stint living in a modest cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau admonished readers to seek “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” Thoreau himself had worked in his family’s business, Thoreau and Company, which was renowned for the quality of its pencils. He’d invented a machine that made fine graphite for use in pencils.31 And yet, Thoreau was antitechnology. He extolled the benefits of walking, and even though railroads were making travel Faster and Cheaper than ever before, he declared, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”32
In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau said that Americans “and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients.” He advised readers to “cultivate poverty like a garden herb . . . Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends . . . Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.”33 (In 2004, John Updike wrote that Thoreau’s Walden has “become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, antibusiness, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”)34
A little more than a century after Thoreau published Walden, Rachel Carson published one of the most famous books of the Green canon: Silent Spring.* And like Walden, it lauds the innocence and purity of the past. Carson’s 1962 book claims that “there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”35
In 1972, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, a report that predicted widespread calamities due to “accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources and a deteriorating environment.” If those trends continue, the report said, “the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”36
Edward Abbey, one of the patron saints of American environmentalism, didn’t soft-pedal his misanthropy. In his 1971 book, Beyond the Wall, Abbey wrote: “We humans swarm over the planet like a plague of locusts, multiplying and devouring. There is no justice, sense or decency in this mindless global breeding spree, this obscene anthropoid fecundity, this industrialized mass production of babies and bodies, ever more bodies and babies.” Abbey declared that we must “learn to control, limit and gradually reduce our human numbers . . . To aid and abet in the destruction of a single species or in the extermination of a single tribe is to commit a crime against God, a mortal sin against Mother Nature.”37
Abbey’s 1971 essay repeats a misanthropic view that has been around for decades. It was published just three years after Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book that was commissioned and published by the Sierra Club. In Ehrlich’s telling, population control was absolutely essential to avoid catastrophe. “Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved,” wrote Ehrlich.38 In a foreword to the book, David Brower, who was then the head of the Sierra Club, wrote that environmental groups “have been much too calm about the ultimate threat to mankind.”39 Ehrlich’s book sold more than two million copies. But Ehrlich was merely repeating an idea that was expressed starkly in a 1955 essay published in Science magazine, which famously declared, “The world has cancer and the cancer is Man.”40
That view—that we humans are a cancer—lives on among some of the world’s highest-profile environmentalists. In 2013, David Attenborough, the British naturalist and filmmaker who has gained fame for his many documentaries, declared that humans are “a plague on the Earth.”41
If humans are a plague—of locusts or something else altogether—then the obvious solution for many on the Green Left is that humans must be stopped. More particularly, their economies and businesses must be stopped. As Bolivia’s socialist president, Evo Morales, declared in 2009, “Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies.”42
In 2009, the British author and journalist George Monbiot, who writes a regular column on environmental issues for the Guardian, averred that “an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy” is what is needed. He also said that the planet can only support some two billion people, and even that number “is surely the optimistic extreme.”43
The idea of downsizing the economy and limiting growth—which ultimately means limiting business and innovation as well as human population—lies near the heart of pr
escriptions put forward by some proponents of the “planetary boundaries” theory, which is really just a new name for the concepts put forward in Limits to Growth back in the 1970s, a report that was itself just another bit of rehashed Malthusianism. And yet the neo-Malthusian mindset endures. In 2011, three analysts, Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, and Robert Costanza, published a report in which they claimed to have identified specific boundaries for the planet—on issues like climate change, land use, water use, ozone depletion, and others—“beyond which humanity should not go.” The three believe that the Earth has “intrinsic, nonnegotiable limits” and that we need to begin implementing moves that will allow us to live within those limits. But it’s the implementation part of their prescription that creates the rub. They write:
Ultimately, there will need to be an institution (or institutions) operating, with authority, above the level of individual countries to ensure that the planetary boundaries are respected. In effect, such an institution, acting on behalf of humanity as a whole, would be the ultimate arbiter of the myriad trade-offs that need to be managed as nations and groups of people jockey for economic and social advantage. It would, in essence, become the global referee on the planetary playing field.44
The concept of a “global referee”—call him Big Brother for environmentalists—who has the power to allocate resources on a whim, is plenty scary. Nevertheless, the view that economic growth is bad also pervades the thinking of the Sierra Club. The club, one of America’s oldest and most influential environmental groups, has opposed nuclear energy since 1974 and says it will remain opposed to nuclear, pending “development of adequate national and global policies to curb energy overuse and unnecessary economic growth.”45
It’s unclear what “unnecessary economic growth” might look like to someone who’s unemployed. It’s also unclear what “energy overuse” looks like to a family living without electricity. What is clear is this: the Sierra Club’s opposition to economic growth—and therefore, energy consumption, employment, and human development—stands in stark contrast to what the people of the planet need right now.
Economic growth is essential if we are to have enough tax dollars to fund our schools and universities, which have long been incubators of innovation. Economic growth allows governments to have more revenue, which can be used to support research in health care, energy, and other sectors. Economic growth means more employment, which leads to more optimism about the future. That optimism, in turn, encourages investment in new technologies.
The alternative is pessimism. Believing in degrowth means believing in poverty. Believing in degrowth means rejecting technology. It’s time to move past Ehrlich, the Sierra Club, McKibben, Klein, Greenpeace, and the rest of the neo-Malthusians. At the risk of depleting my quota of hyphens, it’s clear that we need more anti-neo-Malthusians. It’s only by fostering innovation—and the business and research investments that drive it—that we can bring more people out of poverty. It’s time to discard the romantic view of primitive harmony once and for all.
The next section looks at the modern-day innovators who are pursuing Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper. It also tells the story of the individual innovators and companies from years past who brought us Cheaper computers and transportation. It’s about lasers and engines, drill rigs and batteries, cities and farms. The unifying theme for Part II is the never-ending push for Smaller Faster. Indeed, we are already living in a world in which distance can be measured in angstroms and time can be measured in attoseconds.
* Silent Spring was largely responsible for the US-imposed ban on the pesticide DDT, which had proven effective at killing mosquitoes, which spread malaria. But DDT also had many negative consequences on wildlife and in particular on birds of prey. The ban on the insecticide has been credited as a significant factor in the comeback of the bald eagle and other raptors. The ban has also hampered the fight against malaria.
PART II:
Our Attosecond World
How We Got Here, Where We’re Going, and the Companies Leading the Way
5
ANGSTROMS AND ATTOSECONDS
In the 1870s, after years of vigorous debate, the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge settled a debate that had been raging for years. Using a bank of high-speed cameras, Muybridge took a series of photographs that proved once and for all that galloping horses do, in fact, take all of their hooves off of the ground at once. The secret to Muybridge’s images: cameras with shutter speeds of one-thousandth of a second.1
Now fast forward—and I do mean fast forward—to the work being done by Canadian physicist Paul Corkum. Corkum’s imaging machines are a quadrillion times Faster (that’s 1015 times) than the ones used by Muybridge. Corkum is taking pictures of electrons, and in doing so he’s measuring distances in angstroms and time in attoseconds.
Those two terms are not part of our regular vocabulary, so let me pause for a microsecond to explain. By using specially tuned lasers that produce enormously high power densities, Corkum and his colleagues are peering into the inner workings of atoms, a region that is commonly measured in angstroms. (As noted earlier, an angstrom is one-tenth of a nanometer, or 0.1 billionth, 10–10, of a meter.) Corkum and his colleagues are able to peer into the angstrom level by using laser pulses that are measured in attoseconds. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth (10–18) of a second, or a nano-nanosecond.
Corkum’s work exemplifies our quest for Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper. “For centuries science has worked to measure Faster and Faster phenomena,” Corkum said when I visited him at his office at the National Research Council in Ottawa, a beautiful 1930s-era building that sits on the banks of the Ottawa River. The view from his office looked north across the river toward Quebec.
May 6, 2013: Paul Corkum stands inside the Joint Attosecond Science Laboratory in Ottawa, a facility shared by the University of Ottawa and the National Research Council Canada. The instruments in front of him are part of a suite of machines that allow Corkum and his colleagues to produce some of the world’s shortest bursts of light. By mid-2013, the JasLab was generating laser pulses that were about 140 attoseconds. One attosecond is 10–18 second, or a billionth of a billionth of a second. To imagine what an attosecond is, Corkum explains that “comparing one attosecond to one second is like comparing one second to the age of the universe.”2 Source: Photo by author.
“Muybridge looked at horses. That was an important issue of his time,” said Corkum, an affable man in his midsixties. Today, he said, there are many things that move fast that we want to understand better. A prime example, he continued, are the power flows in the circuits in a semiconductor. But what we really want to understand, he continued, is what happens inside atoms and molecules. In the quest to do that, Corkum is using lasers that concentrate a beam of light that is just 100 microns wide, about the thickness of a human hair. (One micron is one-millionth of a meter or 10–6 meter.) The beam is then focused through a series of mirrors and concentrated onto a molecule. The intense burst of energy from the laser momentarily releases an electron that then acts, in effect, like a super-high-speed flash on a camera.
In the 1870s, these images, taken by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, settled one of the big scientific debates of the day. By using cameras with shutter speeds of about 1/1000th of a second, Muybridge proved that sprinting horses take all of their feet off the ground at one time. Today, laser flashes can be measured in attoseconds, or 10–18 second, or 1/1000000000000000000 of a second. Source: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-23778.
Corkum and his colleagues use techniques known as high-harmonic interferometry and high-harmonic spectroscopy. By matching their laser’s wavelength to that of the distances between the objects in a molecule (the electrons, protons, etc.), Corkum and others who work in attosecond science are able to illuminate and measure those interstitial spaces.
For those who are not overly savvy on tomography, ionization, and quantum mechanics, Corkum offered this anal
ogy: imagine that the attosecond pulses of the laser are strobe lights in a discotheque. In his laboratory, those laser light pulses are aimed at atoms and molecules instead of dancers on the disco floor. The result from both the disco and the laser pulse is the same: a freeze-frame image.
Corkum sees a multitude of possibilities that could emerge from his work. “Imagine if we could see what happens inside the molecule during chemical reactions.” But Corkum got fully animated when he began discussing the evolution of lasers and the potential to create a 3-D map of an individual cell, a map that could show the location of every molecule in the cell. That might be possible, he said, because lasers are allowing scientists to manipulate light in ever-finer ways.*
Today, we carry laser pointers in our pockets and rely on laser readers to play the music on our CDs. But much of the work on lasers has focused on making them more powerful. And that brings us back to the continuing desire for Denser, or to be more specific, our push for power density. The areal power density of the lasers in Corkum’s laboratory is 1014 watts per square centimeter.3 To be certain, the laser beam that Corkum is using doesn’t cover an entire square centimeter. Nevertheless, if we translate that areal power density into watts per square meter—the metric that I use for other calculations in this book—the numbers are astonishing. Doing so shows that the lasers in Corkum’s basement-level laboratory have a power density of 1 exawatt (1018) per square meter. For comparison, the power density inside the core of a nuclear reactor is about 300 megawatts (mega is the SI designation for million, or 106) or 300 million watts per square meter. Put another way, the power density of the lasers Corkum is using is about a billion (109) times more powerful than the power flows that are found inside the core of a nuclear reactor.