[ARCHIVE] Getting rich to save the world

“this is NOT a criticism at all just curiosity! In my geology class we’re talking about sustainability and all of the scientists are like yeahhhh the earth is kind of screwed because were eating up all the resources faster than they replenish (but in a very scholarly and academic way) and I’m just curious in with engineering at A and M and in your own projects, is this an emphasis/ are you (like in your city planning and things) trying to reverse this or are you like nope okay let’s accept that eventually the earth is going to be screwed so what are our other options that we can start working on now once resources are too scarce to go around???” -An anonymous reader

Modern sustainability/environmentalism does far more harm than good imo. It certainly started out admirably, but the modern form is pessimistic, defeatist, and misanthropic. It has deeply settled into academia across the world. A&M has contracted the meme, but I think less than other schools. It featured prominently in my environmental change class (which I took to fill the required social justice adjacent credit requirement than every A&M undergrad has to take, which is an odd thing in itself). Sustainability isn’t really brought up in my technical engineering classes, but there are certain appease-the-administration classes that focus more on “engineering ethics” etc that talk about it. Most professors probably agree with its importance. It is fashionable and sophisticated to say humans stink and the earth is doomed. Part of the classic dynamic where pessimists sound smart while optimists sound naive. And sounding smart is imperative in academia, maybe even more important than being smart. It is oddly rare to say, “No, humans are incredible, we’ve solved many problems before and every year we get better at doing that, we can solve the environmental problems that currently face us.” I would guess engineering is more optimistic than average, because your job is solving problems. Confident engineers believe in a technical solution to most anything.

The earth is not screwed as far as I know. Earth, the planet, will be fine. There is little we can do to affect it. Our worst nuclear war and engineered plague would reduce civilization to a unique layer in the rock strata with lots of weird things like plastics and radioactive isotopes. Bad for humans; the planet is indifferent. Life on the planet is significantly more vulnerable. Individual species can and have been wiped out. We should do our best to make this not happen. In a similar way to earth itself, there is almost nothing we can do to completely eliminate life on this planet however.

We don’t really “eat up resources” (Conservation of Mass). This is a pessimistic view that many people take, but the truth allows for considerably more creativity in looking for solutions. Nearly11Except for the things we shot out of Earth’s orbit every atom we’ve ever used is still on earth, just in a different place and form from where we originally got them. If the resources are no longer being used or have been consumed/eaten up, they are generally in a form that is a more stable chemical energy state (think fossil fuels vs their combusted end products) and higher entropy state (physically/energetically more spread out. Think paint going from pigment to a canvas or a broken window) so it is expensive to reuse them or bring them back to their original form. We generally keep extracting new resources from the earth because of the difficulty of reuse. Some disposed resources are helpfully gathered in landfills and similar (which will be useful soon) and others are left to disperse like the trillions of microplastics in the ocean (these will be basically impossible to retrieve without nanobots or something).

If the resources are still being used, they would be considered “stored” in civilization. We took a bit of metal from the ground to make a sword, for example, and now that sword is in a museum. We used a block of stone that is now in the Washington Monument. There are a bajillion thing like this, where we took resources out of the ground and have not disposed of them. All resources we’ve ever used are either being stored or have been disposed. I’m unsure whether there are more disposed resources or stored resources.

We have never in history run out of a resource. At least not any material. Ed, the author of Material World, started out thinking that we can and have, and eventually concluded that this isn’t really a thing that can happen. Economics dictates that as supply decreases relative to demand the price will rise, which makes new, more difficult, reserves economical to extract (gold, copper are good examples) or make substitute materials more attractive (polyester vs wool as sheep got scarce relative to the number of humans). Once we extract enough of these new types of reserves, we get really good at it, which drops the cost which drops the price again (learning curves). This is basically what has happened for all of history, and as far as I know, most economists believe this.

Also, space. Approximately all of the atoms in the universe are not on earth. It is possible that in the future we will need a number of gold atoms greater than that which is on earth. Thankfully, most gold atoms are not on earth! They cost a lot of money to extract from asteroids etc, but once gold is sufficiently scarce on earth, the price will rise enough that we will take to the stars in pursuit of basically endless materials.

They don’t tell you this, but we can make literally any molecule/material we want given the atoms and enough energy. This is an alternative to space mining. A landfill is in theory a superb place to get resources. Think about it, every single atom in a landfill has proven itself useful to somebody and gotten itself used and discarded. There is hardly an equivalent volume of space anywhere on earth with more interesting materials as a landfill. What a treasure trove! Unfortunately, most of those atoms require a lot of energy to turn into a useful form. In a world of relatively expensive energy, like today, we can’t recycle most of it. In a world of cheap, abundant solar energy, the economics will likely work out to recycle nearly everything.22Turn it into a plasma and sort by atomic weight in a magnetic field! Similar thing with the molecules in the atmosphere and dissolved in the oceans, all of it gets more attractive in a world of cheap energy. 33Obviously mining gets cheaper in a world of cheap energy as well, so we’ll have to see how the economics work out. In general, if a high percent of the cost of something is energy, like turning a landfill into a plasma and sorting it by atomic weight, it will get more attractive, whereas if a low percent of the cost of something is energy, like strip mining, it will get less attractive. How these work out relative to each other is hard to predict.

is this an emphasis/ are you (like in your city planning and things) trying to reverse this or are you like nope okay let’s accept that eventually the earth is going to be screwed so what are our other options that we can start working on now once resources are too scarce to go around???”

There is an argument I made frequently in my environmental science class: The best way to protect the environment and the planet is for all of humanity to get rich and advanced enough to do so easily. This is a worthwhile move, even at the short term cost of some destruction to grow very quickly.

The earth is not screwed.

This argument can be made both in the present time and comparing the present to our past and future.

Consider the richest and poorest countries today and where most environmental damage occurs. In general, the earliest-industrialized and richest countries are America and Western Europe, which are now the most environmentally responsible countries in the world. Their past versions were probably worse than any developing country today, but are now among the most admired in this respect.

In general, the poorer the country, the more environmentally destructive the country. A poor country will obliterate its natural resources trying to claw itself out of poverty (a noble goal). But a rich country has the money to set aside national parks and maintain them and enact responsible extraction rules like don’t strip mine and don’t cut down an entire forest at the same time and don’t dump toxic wastes into rivers and definitely do not set that river on fire 12 times. Poor countries don’t have the extra money or strong institutions to make this happen.

Everyone thinks protecting the environment is worth something.It costs roughly the same amount to preserve and restore the environment in both rich and poor countries. In poor countries, it might be half of somebody’s yearly income to protect the environment, whereas in rich countries, it could be a trivial 1/50th of their yearly income. Given the choice between your kids going to school or running water or elimination of disease and building wildlife bridges for migrating animals, nearly everybody would choose any of the former over the latter. This is the tradeoff that has to be made in poor countries. In rich countries however, this become a question of “and” not “or”, and protecting the environment becomes relatively easy.

Take deforestation.

In this FAO report, the industrialized world is doing far better than the less industrialized world. It is actually reforesting! (Asia is obviously complicated, more on that later)

Brazil famously has the most deforestation of any country. (It also has the most forest to deforest, save for Russia, but that’s beside the point). Much of this is to clear land for ranching.

However, the US, not Brazil, produces the most beef of any country, and has negligible deforestation.

Aside from differences in geography, this is largely due to factory farms. 75% of US cows are raised in factory farms. While far from a moral high ground, factory farms are undeniably much less environmentally destructive than deforestation + ranching.

Factory farms require large capital investments that are easy for wealthy countries to finance but much harder for those with less developed financial infrastructure like Brazil.

The next evolution of this will be synthetically grown meat, requiring even larger capital investments in bioreactor factories and at scale producing humanely sourced meat cheaply. Environmental badness level: Obliterating the rainforest > factory farm > lab grown meat. Amount of capital to build a production facility: lab grown meat > factory farm > obliterating the rainforest.

A similar story with fishing. The classic villain of any trip to the aquarium is the fisherman and their trawl nets from hell. Generally, the most egregious fishing practices occur in the poorest countries. The more developed countries are using aquaculture to farm fish without raiding wild habitats, with farming recently overtaking hunting.

A similar argument plays out comparing humanity in the past to humanity in the present to humanity in the future.

Some of our most egregious destruction ever was hunting megafauna to extinction because we didn’t have the know-how to farm/do animal husbandry at the time. This all occurred before the industrial revolution.

A quick chatgpt list of animals preindustrial humans have extincted.

Mammals - Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) - Mastodon (Mammut americanum) - Saber-Toothed Cats (e.g., Smilodon fatalis) - Giant Ground Sloths (e.g., Megatherium, Eremotherium) - Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) - Diprotodon (a giant wombat-like marsupial from Australia) - Short-Faced Bears (Arctodus simus) - Giant Beavers (Castoroides) - Glyptodon (giant armadillo-like creatures) - American Lion (Panthera atrox) - Steller’s Sea Cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) - Aurochs (wild ancestor of modern cattle, though some survived until historical times)

Birds - Moa (large flightless birds from New Zealand, Dinornithiformes) - Elephant Birds (giant flightless birds from Madagascar, Aepyornis) - Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) - Haast’s Eagle (Harpagornis moorei, which likely became extinct after the moa vanished)

Reptiles - Megalania (Varanus priscus, a giant monitor lizard from Australia) - Giant Tortoises (various species across islands like the Galápagos, Seychelles, and Madagascar)

Certainly a quite a few minor species go extinct today, but few of the major keystone species do, because today we have the luxury to care and the resources to do something about it. It isn’t a question of killing the last mammoth so my kids can survive anymore. It’s hey, the California Condor is a really important bird and as the richest state in the richest country, we can afford to save it. And we did.

I simplified earlier. I said poorer countries are worse than richer countries; it’s more nuanced than that. Developing/middle-income countries are worse than the poorest countries are worse than the richest countries. The worst spot to be in is a middle-income industrializing country. Present day Norway has a very large budget to protect its natural endowment. 1970s Burundi was so poor that they could do little to hurt the environment even if they wanted to. An 1880s America or 1960s China is far far worse than either. 1880s America brought the population of bison from 5 million to 541. A more mature industrialized America brought the population back up to 20k or so.44This is maybe not a good example because the massacre was primarily to stick it to the plains Indians more than extracting a resource, but the general case still stands. Colonialism is inherently an ugly thing, not so with industrialization. A 1960s China cut down a quarter of their forests in the Great Leap Forward. A more mature industrialized China is working on the Great Green Wall, the largest “artificial” forest in history.

Growing quickly is an underrated part of this thesis. It is generally accepted that a short and brutal war is far better than a long war. This was the calculus keeping WW1 generals up all night. How brutal can we justify being to end this war quickly and stop the meat grinder? Same with the decision to use the atomic bomb instead of a land invasion of the Japanese mainland. In the same way, it seems to me that the worst thing we could do for our planet is stagnate the world at the current level of development seen today in developing countries. An eternal 00s China with incredible industrial scale and without the wealth of the developed world is a recipe for horrible environmental destruction. We either need to degrow back to hunter gatherers or develop well beyond our current capabilities. As we just saw, hunter-gather humans are still pretty awful for the environment and I’d appreciate >50% of my kids living past 5, so the way I see it is we need to grow hard and fast.

We’re on the cusp of a solar industrial revolution, which will allow entirely new levels of environmental protection, restoration, and engineering. We’ll be able to desalinate rivers of seawater and irrigate deserts and make them like Eden.55Many environmentalists would oppose this saying that the “natural” untouched state is what’s valuable, not biodiversity or life itself. If “naturally” a place is dead and barren or “unnaturally” a place is alive and teeming with life, which is more valuable? Depends on your belief system We can grind up an olivine mountain and draw down all of our CO2 emissions. We’ll have a DNA library of every species on earth and be able to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth. We can pull islands out of the Pacific and engineer Paradise, populated with flora and fauna that don’t yet exist, with the climate held in check by the Weather Machine.

We may need to cut down some trees and fill in some of the SF bay and tile the Sahara in solar panels in the meantime to get there, but this is the best way to maximize both human flourishing and the health of this planet. In roughly 150 years, assuming exponential growth, we’re gonna be terraforming entire planets to make them like earth. It will obviously within our capabilities by this point to make the earth like the earth and clean up our mess. But first we need to grow and grow and grow until we have the ability to do this.

Yes, I am trying to fix this problem. Not through degrowth, but through abundance. 🚀

Post Script

so what are our other options that we can start working on now once resources are too scarce to go around???”

This is interesting because this is actually what happened in the 70s with energy. The world economy and our energy consumption was growing at insanely high rates between 1950 and 1973; this is still the highest sustained growth rates in history, before or since. However, this growth was all built on one resource, petroleum, aka energy, the thing that you need to do anything, that enabled everything to grow at these rates. This was made possible by the continual discovery of huge reserves, most notably in the Middle East, that always kept the supply of oil well above the demand for it. Energy prices were low, so we used a lot of it. However, new reserves were discovered roughly linearly, but the demand for oil increased exponentially, meaning that eventually the two lines would cross. That time happened to be in the early 70s, when all of the surplus of oil was gone, and supply exactly equaled demand. The oil producers in the Middle East noticed this and decided to stick it to the western imperialists for supporting Israel and reduced the supply of oil they exported and embargoed certain countries, which sent the price of oil screaming 4 times higher than it had been in two decades and sent the world spiraling into a depression. This shocked the industrial world, who desperately looked for ways to continue their economic growth without increasing their energy consumption exponentially like they had before. OPEC or not, the world had run into the limits of growth in a hydrocarbon industrial system, and they needed something new to continue their growth. They found it in efficiency, basically, making more with what they had. This meant every energy intensive process got more efficient and shifted their energy costs into capital costs. This meant that the finance industry became ascendant, reorganizing the companies of the world to operate less wastefully. This meant shifting mass employment primarily into services instead of manufacturing. The real miracle that saved the world was computers and Moore’s law, which meant that computation was getting twice as good, every 18-24 months, for the last 5 decades. The digital revolution was a miracle in a world with limited energy; huge amounts of problems could be solved with mere watts of energy.

Interestingly, this is changing as we speak. Moore’s law is hitting its limit in terms of computations per watt. And we have massive new computing demand in AI. Now, energy use in the developed world is growing for the first time in 30 years. Thankfully, we’ve invented an incredible technology that lets us turn light into electricity. And this one’s limit is far higher than oil. The amount of sunlight that hits the earth is roughly 10,000x more power than humans use. That is some serious room to grow. We can grow exponentially again for many many years now.