Our Glass Is Half Full
FACED WITH THE EMERGENCY DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE, CHANGES IN OUR BEHAVIOR MUST BE ACCELERATED. HOWEVER, AS ANDREW MCAFEE RECOUNTS IN 'MORE FROM LESS', WE SHOULD LOOK AT THE IMPACT OF OUR GROWTH WITH MORE OPTIMISM. TODAY, FOR EXAMPLE, WE CONSUME FEWER RESOURCES THAN IN THE PASTWhat if global economic growth could continue even though advanced economies used fewer and fewer natural resources? This is already happening, argues Andrew McAfee, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT in “More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next.” His argument is based on evidence that the U.S. economy’s environmental footprint contracts year after year through an interaction between capitalism, technology, good governance and public awareness. Rather than belt tightening and radically changing course, we need keep doing what we are already doing – only much more of it.
A lot of people are convinced that the human race is on a fast track to oblivion because of climate change. Your book “More From Less” is more optimistic. What is your message?
I try to say early and often that global warming is real, it’s serious, it’s getting worse, and it’s caused by us. I want to make the point that addressing it will be challenging, but it won’t be mysterious. We know how to deal with it. We are just not doing enough of the things that we know work effectively to solve the problem.
I don’t want to give the impression your book is about global warming.
I am looking at our footprint on the planet that we all live on in terms of pollution, resource use, and habitat destruction. A lot of the most important trends show we are consuming less resources rather than more. We must acknowledge what we have accomplished. And our unwillingness to do that and our desire to pessimism is a little bit strange for me at times.
What are some of the reasons driving this pessimism?
I think there are a few things going on. One is that bad news makes a bigger impression on our brains than good news does. I also think that the media tends to focus on big flashy negative stories. If it bleeds, it leads. And then finally if you look around at academic conversation, it tends to emphasize the negative instead of the positive.
I’m curious to know how you got the idea for this book. Did you notice a pattern in the data?
I read an update in 2015 by a scholar named Jesse Ausubel who made the argument that the U.S. economy was dematerializing, and that we were consuming fewer tons every year of all sorts of different resources. It didn’t square with our idea of growth. And yet we went from being a country that used more and more resources over the years to an economy that used less, even as it continued to grow. That’s a really important and really big reversal. And I wanted to understand it.
Can you give some examples of how capitalism or technology are helping us use fewer resources?
My favorite example is the smart phone. Think of how many devices we would have built and thrown away without smartphones. I don’t own a fax machine, an answering machine, a camcorder, an atlas full of maps, an alarm clock, a transistor radio. Nor do hundreds of millions if not billions of other people around the world. This is happening not just in consumer electronics, it’s happening all over the place, and it makes me start to get pretty optimistic.
Is there not some sort of limit for the world’s population?
Yes, there is. We don’t know what it is, and all of our previous estimates have been badly wrong. If you go back 50 years to the start of the environmental movement, there were dire predictions about the year 2000. Instead of mass famine, we have more people around the world with access to more calories. We have maternal and child mortality rates that are going down quite quickly, and famines have almost vanished. We have been worried about that for over 200 years. We need to retire that worry.
What about China? Won’t billions of new consumers put a strain on the Earth’s resources?
Low-income countries are probably not dematerializing yet like rich countries are. The data are not yet clear. But China, India and Nigeria are probably eventually going to reach a plateau just like the U.S., and then they will start dematerializing too. If anything, they will get there more quickly. Nigeria is never ever going to build a big copper telecoms network. I am pretty confident that China will never have as many vehicles as America did per capita at its peak. Pakistan is walking away from plans to build more coal fueled electricity plants in decades to come, because it is more economical to build solar powered ones.
In what way if any has Covid changed the arguments you make? The book was written before the pandemic.
I did not talk about pandemics as a category of threat. Do pandemics mean we are not getting more from less? It doesn’t mean that. It probably accelerates things. Think of how much of our interactions became virtual during 2020 out of necessity.
You talk about the “four horsemen of the optimist”: effective capitalism, technological progress, public awareness, and effective government. Regarding technological progress, we are seeing how it can be a double-edged sword. What do you have to say about the tradeoffs?
I am not aware of any kinds of progress that are not double-edged swords. We can all look at some of the worst things that happen on the internet or social media. And we are concerned about that. Does that mean that the internet or social media the smart phone revolution are net negative for the world? I don’t believe that for a second. We have gone from a disconnected world where most people lived in isolation to a world where most people have escaped that isolation. I agree with you there are negative consequences of that. But if you think that in general that was a negative development, you have a very dark view of human nature.
Government is another of your “four horsemen.” What can governments do to be more effective to meet these challenges?
Every good economics text book tells us that there are some things the private sector does really well, and other things called “negative externalities.” The first example textbooks almost always give is pollution. A factory does not have any direct incentive to stop belching smoke into the air. Governments should deal with these externalities. And if we look at the huge pollution reductions in the rich world that are now spreading to lower income countries, businesses didn’t magically decide on their own to stop polluting.
Government mandated these reductions, and they have been extraordinarily successful.
What can be done to counteract what you call the “decline in social capital”? Are we moving in the right direction there too?
Unfortunately, this is the area where I am the most pessimistic. The U.S. is very polarized society and the trend is getting worse. We are at the point now where wearing a mask in a viral pandemic has become part of our cultural war. We have a presidential election that was contested by one of the two parties for no reason based in actual evidence. I can’t tell an optimistic story about that. Our political parties have grown very far apart, and in tandem we are losing our shared grasp of reality; that makes it hard to get anything done.
Let’s look at “effective capitalism.” Capitalism does have some built-in defects in terms of vested interests. How can it be made to work better for everyone?
We can rely on the private sector to dematerialize the economy for the really simple reason that materials cost money, and companies don’t want to spend money. What we can’t rely on it to do, and we should not take the word of their lobbying organization or their public relations department, is to stop polluting. To magically fix externalities. Or to make inequality go away. This is not the job of the private sector. If we want to reduce inequality, we have ways to do that. Education is a very good one. Taxes and transfers and a social safety net are a very good way. We have tools to meet that set of challenges.
What would you say to Joe Biden as he starts his term in office? What would be at the top of his to do list?
We need more proposals, and we need a portfolio approach. To use a football or a hockey analogy, we need lots of shots on goal. In particular, two things I feel are not featured enough are carbon pricing and nuclear energy. They are both unpopular for lots of different reasons. But to me the evidence is overwhelming that they are two of the most effective things we can do to fight global warming. And the other thing is we have to keep the pace of innovation high in general, developing technologies and approaches that let us live more prosperous and better lives while treading more lightly on the planet. We know how to do it. We just need to do more of it.
by Jennifer Clark
