More from less
Technology and capitalism are pushing us to be more sustainable, writes TIMOTHY LYDON
For just about all of human history, our prosperity has been coupled with our ability to take resources from the Earth.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution there was a hard ceiling on how prosperous or numerous we could become; however, by unlocking the energy in fossil fuels, the human intellect changed the story of civilization. Through industrialization we grew healthier, lived longer and became richer, yet our spectacular economic growth has had calamitous effects on the natural world.
It’s technological progress that has both despoiled the Earth and ensured that people are better housed, better clothed and better cared for. Air pollution continues to choke cities in China and India while severe poverty in those countries has been declining for decades. The threat of ecosystem and species losses loom large, yet fewer people are dying from war and preventable diseases.
There are clear signs, however, that “a great reversal of our Industrial Age is taking place,” author Andrew McAfee writes. Lives are getting better in material terms while we’ve learned how to decouple growth from resource use. Mr. McAfee’s new book, “More From Less,” is a concise guide to this ongoing reformation of the U.S. economy. He lays out the distinctive and counterintuitive pattern of dematerialization, which means that we are using less stuff each year to produce the same amount.
Mr. McAfee writes and speaks with a pugnacious spirit dispelling the myth that a sustainable economy has to be one without growth. Small may be beautiful, but the American population is forecast to increase by over 100 million by 2050. Therefore, growth is imperative to sustain a growing labor force.
Making the most
Dematerialization means getting more from less, and we can see this in every sector of the economy. Every year, more food is grown on less American land. Crop yields were once tightly linked to water and fertilizer use, but now more corn, wheat, soybeans and other crops are grown from the same acre of land, pound of fertilizer and gallon of water.
Fertilizer use is down almost 25% from its 1999 peak, and by 2014, total water use for irrigation had decreased by more than 22% from its maximum in 1984. Between 1982 and 2015, over 45 million acres — an amount of cropland equal in size to the state of Washington — was returned to nature. Meanwhile, the total tonnage of crops produced in America increased by more than 35% during the same time.
Despite a decline in manufacturing employment in America, output has increased every non-recession year. In 2015 (the most recent year for which U.S. Geological Survey data are available), our total use of steel was down more than 15% from its high point in 2000; aluminum consumption was down more than 32% from its peak and copper use 40%. Up until the time of the original Earth Day in 1970, consumption of metals in America grew in lockstep with the overall economy. The economy has continued to grow, but consumption of metals has decreased. “We’re now getting more ‘economy’ from less metal year after year,” Mr. McAfee writes.
Competition and innovation
What Mr. McAfee calls the “four horsemen of the optimist” — capitalism, tech progress, public awareness and responsive government — have improved human prosperity and brought us to post-peak in resource consumption. One may argue that public awareness is the force that ensures the other three, but the public is not required to be aware the way government is required to be responsive. While the first principle of economics is that markets should be left alone, the second principle is that unregulated markets will not put a price on negative externalities like air pollution. Businesses will dump waste into the environment if there is no cost for them to do so.
The Clean Air Act, signed into law in 1970, and amended by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, drastically reduced the amount of atmospheric pollution in our forests and waterways at a cost to industry that was far less than originally forecast. Atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide in the U.S. have dropped to lows not seen since the early 20th century. The Clean Water Act of 1972 is also considered a great success. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that two-thirds of America’s rivers and half of its lakes had met the goal of making our waters fishable and swimmable. One regional example: the Cuyahoga River in northeast Ohio, which caught fire in the ’70s, is now a trout-fishing stream again.
A clean environment has to come not only from the laws of a responsive government but also from its investments. The U.S. has made huge visionary investments in technology before, from railroads and interstate highways to computer chips and the internet (Google got its start with federal funding), and it must continue to invest in clean energy today. There will be no significant action to address climate change until alternatives to fossil fuels are better and cheaper.
Making clean energy cheap requires substantial investments in research and development to encourage technological breakthroughs.
Almost 90% of economic growth comes from technological innovation, and capitalism provides incentives for the kind of scientific advances that improve lives. The U.S. Army is looking for a company to develop wearable coronavirus sensors. This is a $25 million contract that will be awarded to ingenuity, and its success would yield large benefits to the entire society.
Mr. McAfee argues that by combining technological progress with capitalism we got better at doing the things we’d already been doing. Fewer resources are being used because raw materials cost money, and companies, locked in competition with one another, are keen to find ways to use fewer of them. Competition drives economic progress, disciplines businesses and spurs dematerialization, and tech progress now offers competitors “many ways to slim, swap, evaporate, and optimize their way out of using resources,” Mr. McAfee writes.
Taking bets
One of the main themes of Mr. McAfee’s book is that companies in a market system are sensitive to price changes, so making pollution expensive is one way to reduce it. By putting a price on pollution — and categorizing greenhouse gases as another category of air pollution — and making it a cost like any other material, companies will be compelled to invest and innovate to reduce those costs. “If pollution is costly instead of free,” Mr. McAfee writes, “companies will work hard to “depollute,” just as they work hard to dematerialize.”
Mr. McAfee is a champion of William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2018, in large part for his work on greenhouse gases. What does Mr. Nordhaus say? Put a tax on carbon, but don’t let the government have the tax. Instead, refund it back to citizens. This would give Americans a direct stake in the system by providing them with dividend checks based on the amount of carbon emitted. Corporations therefore would no longer be able to see their interests as separate from the American people.
A letter published in The Wall Street Journal last year had more than 3,500 signatures from economists, including 27 Nobel laureates, and four former chairs of the Federal Reserve, supporting the idea of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. This was the largest public statement of economists in history.
As it stands, those who produce the emissions are not paying for the privilege, and those who are harmed are not duly compensated. A tax would make carbon-intensive products and energy sources more expensive. Increasing the tax over time would give people incentives to shift to cheaper, lower-carbon alternatives, while giving producers incentives to find and develop new low-carbon products and processes. “Putting a price on carbon,” Mr. Nordhaus writes, “represents a societal decision about the priority of reducing CO2 emissions.”
A study by the Climate Leadership Council estimates that by setting a carbon tax rate at $40 per ton, a family of four would receive $2,000 per year. According to the U.S Treasury Department, the bottom 70% of Americans would receive more in dividends than they would pay in increased energy prices, and the amount of the dividend would grow as the carbon tax rate increases.
Mr. Nordhaus compares climate outcomes to the spin of a roulette wheel, where the precise outcome cannot be known but the odds compel action to reduce emissions of CO2. Investing in alternatives to fossil fuels would be one such action.
In an article in The New York Times last month, Brad Plumer reported that the U.S. is on track to produce more electricity this year from renewable power than from coal for the first time. The cost of building large wind farms has declined by more than 40% since 2010, while solar costs have dropped more than 80%. “In just the first four and a half months of this year,” Mr. Plumer wrote, “America’s fleet of wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectric dams have produced more electricity than coal on 90 separate days — shattering last year’s record of 38 days for the entire year.”
Here we can invert Nietzsche’s maxim from, “If you see something slipping, push it,” to “If you see something improving, advance it.” More investment in clean tech will fund improvements that build on one another until we have a scalable solution.
Mr. McAfee places some 10-year bets for the reader: In 2029, he argues, the U.S. will consume less total energy than it did in 2019; will produce less total CO2 emissions than it did in 2019; and, compared with 2019, in 2029, will consume in total: fewer metals, fewer industrial materials, less timber, less paper, less fertilizer and less water for agriculture, while using less cropland. Does anyone want to wager?
The Next Page is different every week: Will Tomer, wtomer@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1932.