We are living in a fog of information overload which seems to parallel the manic production of goods that litter our lives and so it is refreshing to listen to the straightforward and incisive analysis that Jean-Baptiste sets out.
The Degrowth agenda is gaining some ground and Jason Hickel has been very clear about how this can be achieved in a way that is not about returning to the Stone Age although the lack of many luxury items would no doubt cause a good deal of distress amongst those for whom such things have replaced any curiosity in - let alone belief in - something more than ourselves.
I would probably rename 'Degrowth' as it is beginning to outlast its shock value and go for something more like an Equilibrium Economy. "Yes!" cry the classical economists. Strangely, they may have happened on the right idea but imagined it in too narrow a way. If we take into account all the ripple effects of our actions - all the 'externalities' and more that are currently ignored, we could go some way to living on this planet in a way in which it can accommodate our misteps and allow us to retreat where needed in an ebb and flow that is not unlike the throb of the natural world.
The real 'energy transition' has always been for a society to exist more efficiently on less energy, that in design terms would be a more elegant solution.
It is possible too. In design terms, it means highly insulated homes and buildings using materials like waste straw bales for insulation, with all roofs of solar panels. And making lightweight and much more simple and elegant electric cars and small vans, easily fixed and designed to last forever. It means communities designed around 'local', with local food gardens and rooftop greenhouses, and so walkable and cyclable.... in short, all the kind of stuff we already know about but so rarely do.
How to get there? The start would be to end all subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel production and processing, and declare a 20% tax on usage of all fossil fuels that would increase by, say, 3% every year, but zero tax on zero-carbon energy, so people understand the financial benefits of immediate transfer and investment in future renewable energies. Those two steps would transform the energy scene overnight.
But the ultimate transition is to accelerate the humane solutions to the 'Overshoot' problems of too many humans, especially Western humans that use 10 or 100 times more energy than others. Already birth rates are collapsing and, in America, life expectancy is falling, and Trump's policies seem to be to collapse the American life expectancy - that will be the effect in any case, although currently aimed at Blacks, Hispanics and poor people who are far less of an issue than the rich ones.
Of course, none of this will actually happen because current humans seem determined to ignore the most basic needs of their own children and grandchildren, and in their greed are determined to selfishly destroy the only planet we have ever discovered that can support human life. Oh well.
But hey, at least now you can't say to your kids, "We had no choice, this was the only way we knew how to live!" Because now you know that it is a lie.
Alternative Lives ARE Available! (And always have been.)
Electric vehicles are not the answer to anything. Projections are for 2.5 billion vehicles by 2050. If they are to be electric, it will be simply devastating for the environment. Solar panels are the current solution which will be the new problem in 20 to 39 years as we try to dispose of hundreds of millions of Solar PVs per year. Circular economy defies the laws of thermodynamics. Imagine how much hay would be required to insulate more than 1 billion homes? Where is the hay going to be grown? Not on existing agricultural land. So where?
Prof Lisa Krall has argued that our modern Civilization emerging out of the discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago has been slowly setting like a massive mouse trap. Our current te h o-industrial Civilization will soon spring that trap shut. We are consuming 1.7 earths. The so-called renewable transition will drive that closer to 2 earths and ensure that the 6 planetary boundaries we have crossed will never be addressed because the fundamental problem is ecological overshoot and Solar PVs and electric vehicles do NOT address that issue but ensure business as usual.
Firstly, it is straw, not hay. Very different things. And as long as we continue to grow cereal crops and rice, then we have plenty.
Secondly, if humans survive at all, it will be at levels of 2 or maximum 3 billion if they are to have any chance of being sustainable. And as long as they don't drive 2 ton 4x4's!
Thirdly, if such a society is to have an technology beyond horsepower, then solar, wind, wave and geothermal- based technologies are our only current answers, so we would need to invest all those subsidies and investments that are currently ploughed into fossil fuels into developing better technologies, including recycling solar panels, of course.
If you have no better solutions, then the remaining 'solution' is extinction.
Techno-optimism is simply ratcheting up the mouse trap. The embodied carbon in so-called renewables is NEVER spoken about and NO ONE DOES FULL LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENTS of these so called solutions. How are the blades of wind turbines to be dealt with? Exported to poor African nations so that we can poison their environments?
As an engineer, I understand just how expensive the so-called renewable energy sector will become and the massive challenges involved which actually do not address ecological overshoot but drive it even further. At some point, we need to admit that our techno-industrial Civilization is simply unsustainable, so-called contemporary solutions do not and will not address this root issue because our whole Civilization is based on a model of economics that is false, as the great American agrarian pointed out in his article, THE TWO ECONOMIES.
Wendell Berry, “Two Economies”, is available at world wisdom.com. The natural world is NOT an EXTERNALITY, as classical economics contends. It is the only real economy and because we ignore the nomos of the oikos, our Civilization is doomed. That is, because we ignore the laws that govern our common home, we destroy it through ignorance, arrogance, or both because of our obsession with our anthropocentric worldview.
Solar panels CAN be completely recycled - even the silicon (I believe this is being done, at least to some extent, in Germany). PV recycling is beginning to happen in quite a few places.
Obviously, it's not some perfect magic answer. Energy still gets used collecting, dismantling and reconstructing everything. Pollution is still created. But it is far less than what occurs constructing panels ab initio.
The main impediment seems to be financial and impediments of that kind can always be legislated away.
So it's not inevitable that a vast tsunami of old panels will swamp our landfills and thereby bury huge amounts of embodied energy.
None of this removes the need to reduce population (as quickly as decently possible) and reduce - and relocate- energy and resource use.
But you can't just crash land systems and economies like ours without the most horrendous suffering humanity has ever known. We have to try to find a way to keep the thing in the air while we endeavour to bring it down as safely as we can.
Things like EVs and PVs are not a final solution, but they are probably the best transition technologies available - to try to keep some science and civilisation alive in the interim.
Crashing the system won't work. Trying to ease it down MIGHT.
You make some valid points BUT no one is talking about “bringing it down safely” because they don’t understand that we are NOT addressing the fundamental problem.
The only way to reduce consumption on the planet is to reverse asymptotic population growth. Wherever demographics show declining birth rates, economists and politicians are alarmed and try to understand the “crisis”. Growing populations has always been associated with robust economies, ignoring that there are limits to what the earth can sustain. Energy sources will be perpetually required to not just heat homes and drive cars, but vast quantities will be consumed sustaining infrastructure; processing asphalt and concrete for roads, bridges, buildings and food production industries - none of which is permanent and will always need to be replaced.
Im baffled by how same economists then know perfectly well job market needs skillful people, not just any people. Thus market mechanics has through centuries siphoned out some people and given others chance to prosper when they offered some great value to society. This way more true now than in agri medieval societies where amount of land was rough measure. Although renewable energy and other trends now point back towards more space, more land.
In case resources get more expensive and thus rarer in sense, more population is bad. We already see many trends in west signaling that. Low skill jobs are paid worse than social benefits. Although society is so technology and energy driven that things can flip quickly, sometimes overnight.
This is the type of message we need to hear more of. The so-called solutions that are being given to us are just hype. We'll never be able to simultaneously control what is essentially an over-expansion if we refuse to contract, if we refuse to become smaller. Fewer people living much less materialistic and wasteful lives. It has to be legislated into existence, and we have to hit the rich the hardest. It is so obvious, yet all we ever hear is "that's not politically feasible" so okay, then we're done. Finished. The more people who know this, the more likely a stand-off between the people and the powerful will occur.
Allow an ole doc to break it down to its essentials: TOO MANY HUMANS are using too many natural resources (including fossil fuels, carbon in any form, nuclear energy, etc.) and producing too much pollution, including global heating and climate collapse. Two recent article from esteemed researchers have reported that GAST is rising 0.2 degC ANNUALLY on a trend line, so 2 degC by 2027, 3 degC by 2032, when some believe 50% of humanity will perish. Don't believe me, then read C3S "Hottest May on record spurs call for climate action", 6-5-24; and Hansen, et.al., "Global Warming Has Accelerated". Don't believe highly regarded sources, then to hell with ya and the mule ya rode in on.
Can’t see why historical analogies and analysis therefore prove replacing fossil with a clean energy system is false. If he thinks he’s right then he’s got to take e.g. Hoekstra, Jacobsen, Leibreich, Griffiths system analysis and show why he thinks their calculations are wrong. There are multiple plausible pathways to a clean energy system that don’t rely on specious technology, they require building a lot of solar. A couple of weeks ago Greenpeace denounced Morocco planning to trade its abundant solar electricity with UK as ‘green colonialism.’ Isn’t the battle between public and private ownership of clean energy?
Interesting discussion, a lot of good points made by everybody. But really just a lot of talk. Yes, solar panels will become waste, and yes, they can be recycled. However, to build those panels, and recycle them, will require the creation of massive new industries, with all their infrastructure and supply chains, etc., etc. Nothing remotely like this, to the necessary scale, is being done, anywhere, even in China. And so it is with all the tech and technocratic solutions to the various dimensions of the polycrisis. Many brilliant ideas and even innovative new developments in tech, but everything, at this late date, in a nascent state, far from ready for prime time. Nothing in the current state of the world indicates that this will change anytime soon. Even solar and wind, after decades, only account for 3% of the world's energy, or some similarly tiny amount.
I think this is the case because the task of de-carbonisation, and a full transition to so-called green tech is impossible, not just because of the toll it will take on the earth, but because we humans are just not up to the job--it's too complex, too vast, too expensive, too unprecedented. No real progress at the level needed has been made so far because nobody really knows what the hell to do. And nobody ever will--we have worked ourselves into a mare's nest of complexity that we are simply incapable of unraveling.
So, it looks to me that degrowth is not a choice, but an inevitability, as the full consequences of ecological overshoot come home to roost. This is how we will achieve de-carbonization. This will entail a likely unplanned drastic devolution of industrial production and capacity. In the shorter term, there will be no soft landing from this, the next century will be horrific. In the long term this could be a good thing, leaving the field open for the species to develop other potentials than those that capitalist industrial development called upon.
Obviously, I don't believe this means that extinction is inevitable. So it behooves us to stop worrying so much about how many solar panels we can get onto how many roofs before it's "too late", or even if that is a good idea or not, and start thinking more about what a truly post-industrial future could look like.
Having studied policy for a while and 'sustainability' for a very long time...
"The only meaningful policy that will protect the planet is reducing our pollution and consumption." But this is never a meaningful policy! You cannot limit what is freely available!
The only meaningful policy is based on the principle 'the polluter pays'. You cannot forbid use, but you can influence choice(!) among the various options. Make polluting options more expensive.
There is one reason why established polluters didn't want a carbon tax, because it is effective! Instead, we (were allowed to) get things that are ineffective (e.g. carbon 'trading'). I wonder why.
HOMO SAPIENS PARADOX: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS EMERGING AS SLOTH'S SPRINGBOARD PAR (WANT OF) EXCELLENCE —AND RELEGATING THE HUMAN RACE TO HORDES OF FREE-RIDING SLACKERS
Against this decaying cognitive backdrop, there is every indication that AI is going to be in education —and across the board— what the Jevons Paradox is in chrematistics. Rephrased in SCIENTIA IN STABLEM CAELUM's [philosophy-science of climate stabilisation] parlance, the Jevons Paradox consistently confirms that whenever there is an efficient improvement in the use —and abuse— of NOSTRI RELIGANDI LOCI STANDI [our binding pool of firm-cum-symbiotic standings]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/long-term-climate-stability-nostri-religandi-loci-thomas-pellicer-swbze/ —the latter indeed downgraded to mere input resources, the improvement at hand does not lead to a reduction in the use —and abuse— of NOSTRI RELIGANDI LOCI STANDI. Rather, any increases in efficiency are automatically offset by spikes in demand.
Bucky Fuller counseled “When you design in harmony with Nature you will do more and more with less and less…my personal experiential evidence supports this view of PROPER energy transition…I am merely stating that availability of sufficient energy to support carbon based life forms on Earth is not the issue.
Strange remark if you listened to the interview but, no humanity won't use up the sun before degradation of the ecosystems with climate change and excessive consumption/pollution or pandemic wars and disease eliminate humanity.
We are living in a fog of information overload which seems to parallel the manic production of goods that litter our lives and so it is refreshing to listen to the straightforward and incisive analysis that Jean-Baptiste sets out.
The Degrowth agenda is gaining some ground and Jason Hickel has been very clear about how this can be achieved in a way that is not about returning to the Stone Age although the lack of many luxury items would no doubt cause a good deal of distress amongst those for whom such things have replaced any curiosity in - let alone belief in - something more than ourselves.
I would probably rename 'Degrowth' as it is beginning to outlast its shock value and go for something more like an Equilibrium Economy. "Yes!" cry the classical economists. Strangely, they may have happened on the right idea but imagined it in too narrow a way. If we take into account all the ripple effects of our actions - all the 'externalities' and more that are currently ignored, we could go some way to living on this planet in a way in which it can accommodate our misteps and allow us to retreat where needed in an ebb and flow that is not unlike the throb of the natural world.
The real 'energy transition' has always been for a society to exist more efficiently on less energy, that in design terms would be a more elegant solution.
It is possible too. In design terms, it means highly insulated homes and buildings using materials like waste straw bales for insulation, with all roofs of solar panels. And making lightweight and much more simple and elegant electric cars and small vans, easily fixed and designed to last forever. It means communities designed around 'local', with local food gardens and rooftop greenhouses, and so walkable and cyclable.... in short, all the kind of stuff we already know about but so rarely do.
How to get there? The start would be to end all subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel production and processing, and declare a 20% tax on usage of all fossil fuels that would increase by, say, 3% every year, but zero tax on zero-carbon energy, so people understand the financial benefits of immediate transfer and investment in future renewable energies. Those two steps would transform the energy scene overnight.
But the ultimate transition is to accelerate the humane solutions to the 'Overshoot' problems of too many humans, especially Western humans that use 10 or 100 times more energy than others. Already birth rates are collapsing and, in America, life expectancy is falling, and Trump's policies seem to be to collapse the American life expectancy - that will be the effect in any case, although currently aimed at Blacks, Hispanics and poor people who are far less of an issue than the rich ones.
Of course, none of this will actually happen because current humans seem determined to ignore the most basic needs of their own children and grandchildren, and in their greed are determined to selfishly destroy the only planet we have ever discovered that can support human life. Oh well.
But hey, at least now you can't say to your kids, "We had no choice, this was the only way we knew how to live!" Because now you know that it is a lie.
Alternative Lives ARE Available! (And always have been.)
Electric vehicles are not the answer to anything. Projections are for 2.5 billion vehicles by 2050. If they are to be electric, it will be simply devastating for the environment. Solar panels are the current solution which will be the new problem in 20 to 39 years as we try to dispose of hundreds of millions of Solar PVs per year. Circular economy defies the laws of thermodynamics. Imagine how much hay would be required to insulate more than 1 billion homes? Where is the hay going to be grown? Not on existing agricultural land. So where?
Prof Lisa Krall has argued that our modern Civilization emerging out of the discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago has been slowly setting like a massive mouse trap. Our current te h o-industrial Civilization will soon spring that trap shut. We are consuming 1.7 earths. The so-called renewable transition will drive that closer to 2 earths and ensure that the 6 planetary boundaries we have crossed will never be addressed because the fundamental problem is ecological overshoot and Solar PVs and electric vehicles do NOT address that issue but ensure business as usual.
Firstly, it is straw, not hay. Very different things. And as long as we continue to grow cereal crops and rice, then we have plenty.
Secondly, if humans survive at all, it will be at levels of 2 or maximum 3 billion if they are to have any chance of being sustainable. And as long as they don't drive 2 ton 4x4's!
Thirdly, if such a society is to have an technology beyond horsepower, then solar, wind, wave and geothermal- based technologies are our only current answers, so we would need to invest all those subsidies and investments that are currently ploughed into fossil fuels into developing better technologies, including recycling solar panels, of course.
If you have no better solutions, then the remaining 'solution' is extinction.
Techno-optimism is simply ratcheting up the mouse trap. The embodied carbon in so-called renewables is NEVER spoken about and NO ONE DOES FULL LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENTS of these so called solutions. How are the blades of wind turbines to be dealt with? Exported to poor African nations so that we can poison their environments?
As an engineer, I understand just how expensive the so-called renewable energy sector will become and the massive challenges involved which actually do not address ecological overshoot but drive it even further. At some point, we need to admit that our techno-industrial Civilization is simply unsustainable, so-called contemporary solutions do not and will not address this root issue because our whole Civilization is based on a model of economics that is false, as the great American agrarian pointed out in his article, THE TWO ECONOMIES.
Wendell Berry, “Two Economies”, is available at world wisdom.com. The natural world is NOT an EXTERNALITY, as classical economics contends. It is the only real economy and because we ignore the nomos of the oikos, our Civilization is doomed. That is, because we ignore the laws that govern our common home, we destroy it through ignorance, arrogance, or both because of our obsession with our anthropocentric worldview.
Solar panels CAN be completely recycled - even the silicon (I believe this is being done, at least to some extent, in Germany). PV recycling is beginning to happen in quite a few places.
Obviously, it's not some perfect magic answer. Energy still gets used collecting, dismantling and reconstructing everything. Pollution is still created. But it is far less than what occurs constructing panels ab initio.
The main impediment seems to be financial and impediments of that kind can always be legislated away.
So it's not inevitable that a vast tsunami of old panels will swamp our landfills and thereby bury huge amounts of embodied energy.
None of this removes the need to reduce population (as quickly as decently possible) and reduce - and relocate- energy and resource use.
But you can't just crash land systems and economies like ours without the most horrendous suffering humanity has ever known. We have to try to find a way to keep the thing in the air while we endeavour to bring it down as safely as we can.
Things like EVs and PVs are not a final solution, but they are probably the best transition technologies available - to try to keep some science and civilisation alive in the interim.
Crashing the system won't work. Trying to ease it down MIGHT.
You make some valid points BUT no one is talking about “bringing it down safely” because they don’t understand that we are NOT addressing the fundamental problem.
The only way to reduce consumption on the planet is to reverse asymptotic population growth. Wherever demographics show declining birth rates, economists and politicians are alarmed and try to understand the “crisis”. Growing populations has always been associated with robust economies, ignoring that there are limits to what the earth can sustain. Energy sources will be perpetually required to not just heat homes and drive cars, but vast quantities will be consumed sustaining infrastructure; processing asphalt and concrete for roads, bridges, buildings and food production industries - none of which is permanent and will always need to be replaced.
Im baffled by how same economists then know perfectly well job market needs skillful people, not just any people. Thus market mechanics has through centuries siphoned out some people and given others chance to prosper when they offered some great value to society. This way more true now than in agri medieval societies where amount of land was rough measure. Although renewable energy and other trends now point back towards more space, more land.
In case resources get more expensive and thus rarer in sense, more population is bad. We already see many trends in west signaling that. Low skill jobs are paid worse than social benefits. Although society is so technology and energy driven that things can flip quickly, sometimes overnight.
This is the type of message we need to hear more of. The so-called solutions that are being given to us are just hype. We'll never be able to simultaneously control what is essentially an over-expansion if we refuse to contract, if we refuse to become smaller. Fewer people living much less materialistic and wasteful lives. It has to be legislated into existence, and we have to hit the rich the hardest. It is so obvious, yet all we ever hear is "that's not politically feasible" so okay, then we're done. Finished. The more people who know this, the more likely a stand-off between the people and the powerful will occur.
Regretfully, I fear you're right.
How we do that without catastrophic collapse is the tricky bit.
Allow an ole doc to break it down to its essentials: TOO MANY HUMANS are using too many natural resources (including fossil fuels, carbon in any form, nuclear energy, etc.) and producing too much pollution, including global heating and climate collapse. Two recent article from esteemed researchers have reported that GAST is rising 0.2 degC ANNUALLY on a trend line, so 2 degC by 2027, 3 degC by 2032, when some believe 50% of humanity will perish. Don't believe me, then read C3S "Hottest May on record spurs call for climate action", 6-5-24; and Hansen, et.al., "Global Warming Has Accelerated". Don't believe highly regarded sources, then to hell with ya and the mule ya rode in on.
Can’t see why historical analogies and analysis therefore prove replacing fossil with a clean energy system is false. If he thinks he’s right then he’s got to take e.g. Hoekstra, Jacobsen, Leibreich, Griffiths system analysis and show why he thinks their calculations are wrong. There are multiple plausible pathways to a clean energy system that don’t rely on specious technology, they require building a lot of solar. A couple of weeks ago Greenpeace denounced Morocco planning to trade its abundant solar electricity with UK as ‘green colonialism.’ Isn’t the battle between public and private ownership of clean energy?
Interesting discussion, a lot of good points made by everybody. But really just a lot of talk. Yes, solar panels will become waste, and yes, they can be recycled. However, to build those panels, and recycle them, will require the creation of massive new industries, with all their infrastructure and supply chains, etc., etc. Nothing remotely like this, to the necessary scale, is being done, anywhere, even in China. And so it is with all the tech and technocratic solutions to the various dimensions of the polycrisis. Many brilliant ideas and even innovative new developments in tech, but everything, at this late date, in a nascent state, far from ready for prime time. Nothing in the current state of the world indicates that this will change anytime soon. Even solar and wind, after decades, only account for 3% of the world's energy, or some similarly tiny amount.
I think this is the case because the task of de-carbonisation, and a full transition to so-called green tech is impossible, not just because of the toll it will take on the earth, but because we humans are just not up to the job--it's too complex, too vast, too expensive, too unprecedented. No real progress at the level needed has been made so far because nobody really knows what the hell to do. And nobody ever will--we have worked ourselves into a mare's nest of complexity that we are simply incapable of unraveling.
So, it looks to me that degrowth is not a choice, but an inevitability, as the full consequences of ecological overshoot come home to roost. This is how we will achieve de-carbonization. This will entail a likely unplanned drastic devolution of industrial production and capacity. In the shorter term, there will be no soft landing from this, the next century will be horrific. In the long term this could be a good thing, leaving the field open for the species to develop other potentials than those that capitalist industrial development called upon.
Obviously, I don't believe this means that extinction is inevitable. So it behooves us to stop worrying so much about how many solar panels we can get onto how many roofs before it's "too late", or even if that is a good idea or not, and start thinking more about what a truly post-industrial future could look like.
Having studied policy for a while and 'sustainability' for a very long time...
"The only meaningful policy that will protect the planet is reducing our pollution and consumption." But this is never a meaningful policy! You cannot limit what is freely available!
The only meaningful policy is based on the principle 'the polluter pays'. You cannot forbid use, but you can influence choice(!) among the various options. Make polluting options more expensive.
There is one reason why established polluters didn't want a carbon tax, because it is effective! Instead, we (were allowed to) get things that are ineffective (e.g. carbon 'trading'). I wonder why.
HOMO SAPIENS PARADOX: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS EMERGING AS SLOTH'S SPRINGBOARD PAR (WANT OF) EXCELLENCE —AND RELEGATING THE HUMAN RACE TO HORDES OF FREE-RIDING SLACKERS
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7306770701452017664/
[...]
Against this decaying cognitive backdrop, there is every indication that AI is going to be in education —and across the board— what the Jevons Paradox is in chrematistics. Rephrased in SCIENTIA IN STABLEM CAELUM's [philosophy-science of climate stabilisation] parlance, the Jevons Paradox consistently confirms that whenever there is an efficient improvement in the use —and abuse— of NOSTRI RELIGANDI LOCI STANDI [our binding pool of firm-cum-symbiotic standings]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/long-term-climate-stability-nostri-religandi-loci-thomas-pellicer-swbze/ —the latter indeed downgraded to mere input resources, the improvement at hand does not lead to a reduction in the use —and abuse— of NOSTRI RELIGANDI LOCI STANDI. Rather, any increases in efficiency are automatically offset by spikes in demand.
[...]
So we are going to use up the Sun?
Bucky Fuller counseled “When you design in harmony with Nature you will do more and more with less and less…my personal experiential evidence supports this view of PROPER energy transition…I am merely stating that availability of sufficient energy to support carbon based life forms on Earth is not the issue.
Strange remark if you listened to the interview but, no humanity won't use up the sun before degradation of the ecosystems with climate change and excessive consumption/pollution or pandemic wars and disease eliminate humanity.