350 This book may be distressing for some: a body-slam to hope. The message can be more than some are ready to take in, or of an unacceptable flavor. I myself first approached this subject-when assigned to teach a general-education course on energy and the environment-with great enthusiasm, intending to sort out to my own satisfaction how I thought our gleaming future would migrate to renewable energy. As I “ran the numbers” on various sources, I came to appreciate the tremendous quantitative advantage that solar power has over the alternatives. Being a hands-on person, I started cobbling together various off-grid photovoltaic systems, learning the practical ins and outs of stand-alone solar power1 coupled with storage as a crucial means to mitigate intermittency of the solar resource. My wife and I also bought a plug-in hybrid vehicle in 2013 to learn the pros and cons2 of electric cars, while preserving the ability to do occasional longer trips on gasoline. My commute to work is via an electric-assist bicycle charged by my off-grid solar system for a fossil-free transportation option.3 I have found adventure and delight in challenging myself to live a lower-energy lifestyle, and know from personal experience that dialing down demand does not have to be a crushing defeat for the human race. Our ambitions1 might suffer, but our spirits need not. This book takes an approach that deliberately asks the wrong question, chapter after chapter: how can we keep going in a manner resembling the present form in the face of declining fossil fuel resources and/or a commitment to wean ourselves from fossil fuels as a mitigation strategy for climate change? This approach manifested itself as: can we get 18 TW of power5 from this or that alternative resource? In most cases, the answer was no. Solar is the glaring exception. Also, nuclear breedersbringing a tangle of tough problems-and the perpetually intractable nuclear fusion could offer long term provision of electricity. But none of the abundant resources easily replace liquid fuels for transportation, and effective utilization of the abundant yet intermittent solar resource depends critically on storage capabilities. Thus, pretending that the goal is to keep 18 TW and carry on business as usual after a tidy substitution of energy turns out to be misguided. The real question becomes one of adapting to a new landscape: one in which our ambitions are checked by planetary limits. Indeed, if energy became essentially unlimited by some technology, I shudder to think what it would mean for the rest of the planet." An age-old saying goes: With great power comes great responsibility. Humans have achieved great power, but have not yet demonstrated a respectable degree of responsibility in prioritizing the protection of plants, animals, and ecosystems. 1: … as a miniature model of what society at large may one day hope to do in a solardominated energy landscape 2: We have watched battery capacity drift down to about 65% presently. 3: Charging the car from the off-grid system would require a substantial upgrade in system size and battery capacity, costing approximately $10,000. 4: So far, human ambitions have been for the most part unconstrained by physical limitations. Just as a child must eventually shed fantastical dreams and beliefs, so too might the human race need to reign in unrealistic hopes for our future. 5: or some sizable fraction thereof 6: A children’s story called Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus echoes the sense that great power in the hands of incompetence can be bad news. We would not put a toddler in command of an arsenal. Should attention to planetary limits turn out to be a crucial element in the assessment of our situation, then we owe it to ourselves to get it straight. Imagine that you are running across a rooftop and have to make a quick decision about whether to jump a large gap between buildings. Would you appreciate a lightning-quick analysis of physics concluding that a successful jump is impossible? Certainly, such insight would be valuable, permitting the formation of an alternate plan, and saving yourself from the unfortunate fate of misplaced faith in your jumping abilities or in some fanciful notion of gravity’s weak grip over the chasm.8 Humanity is staring at a leap unlike anything history has prepared us to face, having accelerated ourselves to previously unimaginable speeds by the grace of fossil fuels, but now confronting their inevitable removal from the menu. The past offers little guidance on how to navigate such a situation, so we need to do our level best to soberly assess the challenges and recognize what is and what is not within the realm of practical expectations. I would love to be wrong about the numerous concerns raised in the book, but the asymmetric risk of trying the leap and failing could lead to a devastation that frightens me. Please, let us not risk it all on unfounded hopes or magical thinking." 9 The situation reminds me of the housing bubble in the U.S. in the early 2000s. My wife and I bought a house when we moved to San Diego in 2003, and soon became worried about a potential crash10 leaving us “underwater”-owing more than the reduced worth of the house. I pored over articles on the matter, and found two camps. One camp provided rafts of alarming quantitative analysis of the peril: sub-prime lending, soaring price-to-income ratios, unprecedented unaffordability by average families, vulnerability to any weakness in other sectors. The other camp said that the housing market was manifesting a new normal, that San Diego’s universal appeal would prevent a price drop, that scary lending practices were easily skirted by re-financing before interest payments ballooned. I chose to go with the quantitative analysis over the hand-wavy platitude-based set of beliefs, and am glad that I did. Now consider the quality and nature of common counter-arguments to the core message in this book. Humans are smart, innovative, and will figure out something. People 200 years ago could not have possibly predicted our capabilities today, so we are likewise ill-equipped to predict how amazing the future will be. I get the appeal. I really do. But does that mean we get to dismiss the difficulties exposed by careful analysis? Can we ignore the fact that we are pushing planetary boundaries for the first time ever? I would argue that this time really is different. The facts are inescapable: 11 The world has never before been strained with 8 billion people.12
- Fossil fuels bear tremendous responsibility for our recent climb. 7: as might happen in a movie 8: The Matrix, while an excellent movie, encourages physics-breaking thinking. Not to be a kill-joy, but it probably is air you’re breathing, and that probably is a spoon. 9: More often, lack of critical thought is to blame: unconscious assumptions about how the future will unfold based on recent, anomalous history. 10: Aha! Am I just a recurrent predictor of crashes? Not at all. Numerous times, I had faith in rising markets and prospects for achieving success in difficult endeavors. Meanwhile, I blew off concerns of Y2K (Box 20.1; p. 329) and even downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020-in both cases on the premise that high levels of awareness and fear would trigger massive attention and mitigating actions by responsible governments and stakeholders. In the COVID case, my faith in competence was sadly misplaced: I was too optimistic. 11: The wolf did come in the apocryphal tale. The adults should accept some responsibility for their failures, rather than throwing the “boy who cried” under the bus. 12: … and growing
Fossil fuels are a one-time resource-an inheritance that will not continue propelling the future, and nature does not guarantee a superior substitute. ▸ Wild spaces on the planet are rapidly diminishing as development spreads and resources are culled. Permanent extinction of species accompanies pollution and habitat loss.
- Climate change and habitat destruction threaten a mass extinction and environmental disruption whose full consequences are unpredictable. Modern human constructs13 have not stood the test of time, and are unlikely to do so given that they have not been founded on principles of sustainable harmony within planetary limits. Any convincing counter-argument about why we need not take this seemingly perilous position seriously would itself need to be seriousrelying less on general faith in human abilities and more on nutsand-bolts details: How are we going to supply energy needs without fossil fuels? It isn’t good enough to say “solar and wind,” without specifying how we deal with the glaring mismatch between demand and intermittent energy availability. What would we use to provide sufficient storage? Do we have the materials and means to make enough battery capacity? What is our strategy for battery upkeep and replacement? How will we afford the new scheme and its prohibitive up-front costs? What about agriculture: how do we permanently fix soil degradation; aquifer depletion? How do we halt deforestation, habitat loss, and resulting permanent extinctions? What is the specific global governance plan to protect planetary resources and deal with the consequences of climate change? How do we structure economies to be complacent and functional without a foundation in growth? 14 As it is, we have no credible global plan11 to deal with these foundational global problems. We owe it to ourselves to do a better job than imagine that the future may work out just fine.15 We need to face the challenges, put pencil to paper, and craft a plan that could work-even if it involves some compromise or sacrifice. Let us not forget that we do not have the authority to conjure any reality we might dream: we have no choice but to adapt to the physical world as we find it. Returning to the analogy of receiving quantitative analysis on a contemplated leap across a chasm-having indicated serious shortcomings in the notion of maintaining current luxuries-please think twice about trying to carry our resource-heavy ways into the future in heroic fashion. Ignominious failure, not glory, may lie there. But this does not mean the human endeavor has been all for naught, and that we should just sit down and cry about dashed dreams. Let’s be smart about this: heed the warning signs; alter course; re-imagine the future; design a new adventure. 16 Contrary to what the tone of the book might suggest, I am a fundamentally optimistic person, which has fueled a lifetime of pursuing tough
Epilogue 352 13: … economic, political, societal, agricultural, provision of energy and material resources, manufacturing, buildings, and virtually everything else Those who tend to dismiss collapse perils are unlikely to detail a cogent plan of the sort solicited here, because to do so would require some acknowledgment that the exercise is necessary and valuable. No one yet has produced a comprehensive and widely accepted plan for just how all this is supposed to work out! 14: largely due to lack of consensus that we even need a non-growth plan 15: The burden of proof is on those who argue for continued modernity: ample evidence indicates that humans can live in primitive relation to nature for tens of thousands of years, but no evidence demonstrates that it can survive in anything like the mode of the last century or two for very long. Even the universe fails to deliver evidence (see Sec. 18.4; p. 312). 16: If the dreams were never realistic, then good riddance! Epilogue 353 challenges and succeeding at (some of) them.17 Indeed, my irrational hope is that a textbook like this may help get people thinking proactively about changing the course of humanity. In that spirit of wild-eyed optimism, I leave you with the following upbeat-adjacent thoughts about the world into which we may endeavor to gracefully adapt: Crisis is opportunity: we have a chance to transform the human relationship with this planet. Imagine the relief in shedding an old narrative of growth and faulty ambitions that only seems to be creating increasingly intractable problems instead side-stepping to make a fresh start under a whole new conception of humanity’s future. It’s liberating!
- People alive today get to witness and shape what may turn out to be the most pivotal moment in human history, as we confront the realities of planetary limits.
- Committed pursuit of steady-state principles could set up rewarding lives for countless generations. Nature is truly amazing, and making it a larger part of our world 18 could be very rewarding.
- We, as individuals, are privileged to witness and celebrate the much grander phenomenon of life in this universe: let’s be humble participants and value this role over some misguided, illconsidered, hubristic, and perhaps juvenile attempt at dominance.
- We have learned so much about how the universe works, and have the opportunity for greater insights still if we can find a glide-path to a long-term sustainable existence. We have built much of value that bears preservation. Posterity19 relies on a successful embrace of a new vision. We may yet learn to value nature above ourselves, to the enduring benefit of us all. That would be a fine way to end the book, so pause for a moment to take in that last point. Richard Feynman once mused about what one, compact sentence transmitted to the future would best help a derailed, post-apocalyptic society get back on track.20 He decided: “Everything is made of atoms." Personally, I think that misses the mark-putting too much emphasis on the values of (some small subset of) our present civilization. Think about what you would want to communicate. For me, the final point above might suggest something along the lines of: Treat nature at least as well as we treat ourselves. 17: This is harder for pessimists to pull off: one has to believe in what is possible to get started on years-long ambitious undertakings. 18: …as opposed to hacking it down to ever-smaller parcels 19: Billionaires who strive for immortal recognition by launching the human race into space are likely to fail and be forgotten, while those who set us on a truly sustainable path have by design a better shot at long-term respect. 20: … as if the present track would even be deemed desirable: if such a catastrophic derailment comes to pass, maybe our wisdom is not worth so much.