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Are the tradeoffs between economic and environmental policies really a zero-sum game? How concerned should we be about the rate at which we burn through natural resources? Can societies manage to perform the delicate balancing-act of preserving the planet while continuing to grow economically? Today, Andrew McAfee is on the podcast to talk about these issues, addressed in his new book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources ― and What Happens Next.
Andrew McAfee is the co-founder and co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world. He has also written The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.
Pethokoukis: I don’t know if you’ve been following the global voyages of the Swedish teen activist, Greta Thunberg, who’s very worried about global warming. When she came to America and was talking about climate change, she said one phrase that really stuck in my brain. She was very worried about these “fairy–tales of infinite economic growth.”
Your book actually gets at that issue. One reason that you have people who are concerned about economic growth is because they feel that we are running out of earth. That there’s no way that we can have a planet where everybody lives like Americans. It’s a very common criticism that I hear when I talk about economic growth: “We only have one earth, and unless you’re going to bring in asteroids full of resources, we will run out of earth.”
McAfee: Which people do talk about. Asteroid mining is a topic these days.
Yes, I think we may have talked about it on one of our recent podcasts, actually. But the focus of your book is that we’re really not running out of earth, are we?
That’s exactly the focus of my book. In particular, there’s a weird new chapter, I believe, in the debates that go back and forth about resources, economic growth, and the using up of the planet. And more fundamentally, it’s about the nature of the relationship with the planet that we live on. That’s why I wrote More from Less.
But, Jim, I want to back up about half a century, because that was the first time where people really started to get worried about using up the earth. As you know, it was 1968 when Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, we had the first Earth Day in 1970, the book Limits to Growth came out in 1972, and man, there was a lot of alarmism about very fast population growth in many parts of the world.
You could look ahead and see what the earth’s population was going to do, those new people would probably want to improve their standard of living, and you could look at the resource-use trajectories and come to some really dire conclusions. That was the first weave of us thinking we were going to use up the earth. And when you read Limits to Growth, it is an unbelievably bleak book because the MIT modelers that wrote it modeled the entire world economy and said, “Hey, we can’t model a version of the economy where the world doesn’t run out of resources and crash sometime in the mid–21st century.”
But they did something important in Limits to Growth: they listed what the known global reserves were of many important resources. You know, aluminum, gold, petroleum, iron ore, and things like that. But the known global reserves were from 1972.
Fast-forward, here we are just about 50 years later — the weird part of the story is that known global reserves of just about all of those resources are much bigger today than in 1972, even though we’ve had a half–century of very rapid global economic growth.
And we’ve not imported any asteroids filled with stuff.
That’s correct, we’ve landed zero asteroids on the Earth, and we’ve mined nothing from Mars yet. So the only explanation for what happened there is that those initial estimates were way, way too conservative because they underestimated what Julian Simon got right: as things become scarce, we go looking very hard for more resources. The price of copper rises because it’s scarcer, for example. And then we can go prospecting around the world for copper.
While we do live on a finite planet, our planet is huge — the crust of the Earth weighs 5 trillion tons, which is the weight of all of humanity put together. So there was this notion in the 60s of a Spaceship Earth that was really thinly supplied as it hurtled through the cosmos. It’s a really compelling image, but I think it’s wrong. And I think it’s extremely unhelpful.
Especially because of what I write about it More from Less, which is one version of us becoming smarter in the rich world, particularly in America where the data is really clear. We are now using less resources year after year even as we grow our economy.
Now, this is one of your key findings, so let’s make sure that people are exactly clear about what you’re saying. It’s not that the rate of usage is declining, but that we’re actually using less stuff even though the economy is much bigger.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. So you can think of two ways that resource–use could slow down. We could either be using less per person, or, more strikingly, we could be using less by all people put together. That’s what I’m saying, and I think the evidence is really clear on this.
Jim, to be clear, I am not the first person to point this out. I got started on the project of this book because Jesse Ausubel started pointing this out a few years ago. And I looked at his essay and I said, “Look, that can’t be right. Economies grow, and they need more stuff — more resources, molecules, and materials in order to generate all of this prosperity that we enjoy year after year.”
But I double–checked to make sure that he was really clear about his sources, and sure enough he was right. If anything, he was being very circumspect about the phenomenon. I think it is a big phenomenon, and it’s pretty clear in the United States. Other researchers have found it in the United Kingdom, and I think it is a rich-world phenomenon, and what I want is for the rest of the world to get rich so that it also goes through this resource transition.
They’ll start treading more lightly on the planet in just about all of the ways that I can think to care about. We Americans have a shrinking total footprint on the planet year after year. Now, maybe it should be shrinking more quickly when it comes to carbon and greenhouse gases, but we are not fouling up the Earth and stripping it bare to fuel our growth anymore.
Give me a few examples of commodities that we’ve already peaked usage on and now are going the other way.
The data are super clear about resources or commodities where we don’t import and export a lot of finished goods that contain those resources. For example, we can’t account for all of the steel that shows up in car bodies that we import form Germany and Japan. Now, I still think that we’re post-peak steel, but let me not talk about that.
Let me talk about, for example, timber, and all other wood products put together. I think we’re 30 percent below our 1990 peak in timber. We are about, at least, 20 percent below our 1999 or 2000 peak in paper. When you look at the data for paper, you can just see the smartphone age appear. For about the past ten years — again, not per person, but our total use of paper has been declining really quickly.
Our total use of fertilizer in America is now going down even as our agricultural output measured in tons continues to go up. In fact, agriculture is a great microcosm of this phenomenon. American crop tonnage goes up while water used for agriculture and irrigation goes down. Fertilizer goes down, and crop land goes down, too. We have returned an amount of crop land to nature equal in size to the state of Washington since the early 1980s.
We are just trading more lightly on the planet. Total energy use in this country has been basically flat for about a decade, even though our economy is, I think, at least 15 to 20 percent bigger.
So it’s not just the Great Recession?
No, it’s not at all — we can just throw that hypothesis out. A lot of this started before then, and a lot has also started since then as well.
A lot of this book is about the role of technological progress and capitalism. When we started, you talked about the emergence of these environmental concerns starting in the late 1960s, early 1970s. The sorts of solutions suggested back then weren’t “We need to have more capitalism.”
No, they were not! [laughs]
So what were the solutions on offer at that time?
Well, we should be clear, here. If you look at the evidence at about 1970, you could get alarmed. Because the use of these resources was accelerating as quickly as the economy was, and in some cases it was growing more quickly than the economy.
So in the book I’ve got a chart of the American economy from 1800 to 1970, and there’s a second line on that chart which is total energy use, year by year. Those two lines are almost indistinguishable, it’s like a one-for-one relationship. So you could look around 1970 and say, “Look, this really can’t continue. If we continue to grow exponentially, we’re going to strip the earth bare, and I know enough math to know that that’s not going to work out forever.”
But Jim, like you point out, the proposed solutions at the time had almost nothing to do with having more capitalism and more powerful technology, because it was that one-two punch that was causing us to strip the Earth bare all through the industrial era.
So instead, around the time of Earth Day, there was a set of recommendations or strategies for dealing with our planet better that I abbreviate with CRIB. We were told that we needed to voluntarily “Consume less,” we needed to “Recycle” rather than using new resources, we had to “Impose limits” on pollution or even on the size of the population, and then the “B” was that we had to “turn our Back,” literally, on industrial capitalism and advanced technologies by going back to the land. We needed to live in closer harmony with nature.
The Walden Pond scenario, then?
Yeah, which is what gave us the Whole Earth Catalog. I’ve talked to [Whole Earth editor] Stewart Brand about this, and he said, “All of these urban-dwelling, idealistic young people wanted to go back to the land but they had no idea how to do it and stay alive. So I needed to give them access to tools and ideas.”
Or as P. J. O’Rourke said, people didn’t realize just how “itchy” going back to the land was. Comfort is really important.
It made you really glad for industrial capitalism in most cases. But the point I make in the book is that you can go look at the evidence — we didn’t follow the CRIB strategies. Americans have not renounced prosperity and a growing economy. We do recycle, but that’s a separate phenomenon from dematerialization, from just using less stuff.
China imposed a one-child policy, and it was a massive moral and demographic mistake for the country. And we did go back to the land a little bit, but most people turned right back around and went right back to the city fairly quickly.
Some people might be old enough to recall the famous speech by President Carter called the “Malaise Speech,” which was about how we needed to conserve energy. We needed to turn down thermostats because we were living too well.
And Jimmy Carter wore a cardigan around the White House and turned down the temperature in the wintertime down to, you know, 66 degrees, which is actually kind of uncomfortable. We haven’t done that in the decades since — we go right back up to 72 or whatever.
No, we don’t do suffering. So, if you’re concerned about the environment, that we’re using too much stuff, the problems with the air, carbon emissions, but you don’t do suffering, then what’s the alternative?
The super weird alternative is to embrace exactly the two forces that gave us the voracious appetites of the industrial era, and the voracious resource consumption — capitalism and tech progress. And the point I try to make in the book as thoroughly as I can is that something really fundamental changed.
Because for the first 200 years of the industrial era, those two forces — capitalism and tech progress — gave us growth at the expense of our planet. But now they’re letting us tread more lightly on the planet. So what the heck happened?
My super short answer is that we invented all of these amazing digital tools. And what these digital tools’ software networks — in cell phones, CAD systems, and artificial intelligence — what they offer companies is the ability to sap out an atom of one kind or another, and to replace it for a bit.
And because companies are profit-hungry, and a penny saved is a penny earned, they’re taking the digital toolkit up on that offer over and over again throughout the economy. To the point that we are now lightening our resource demands throughout the American economy on the planet.
Two things: One, the exact things causing the problem are now the solutions. It reminds me of the Simpsons line: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
So capitalism and tech progress are the Duff Beer of our relationship with the planet, right.
But I also think of the phrase from Marc Andreessen about “software eating the world.” Actually, it was traditional, old industrial capitalism that was eating the world, and really it’s software and digital technologies that are allowing the world to not be eaten by more efficient usage.
And Mark was talking, of course, about business model disruption, and I think he was dead flat right about that. But you’re exactly correct, that software is letting us not eat the world these days.
You begin the book by talking about Malthus, and the limits on growth. I’ll often bring up charts showing that from 1900 onwards that we’ve had economic growth, and before we never did. We brought so many people out of poverty. But again, here is capitalism creating this environmental degradation, so we need to do something — what young Greta Thunberg is getting at.
But the message you’re sending is that what we actually need is a more dynamic, technologically-advanced capitalism unless we want to go back to nature. That’s a tough message to sell to people, though.
Well, if 7 billion of us decide to go back to the land, burning coal, and chopping down trees, we will exhaust the planet — I haven’t done the calculation — probably in a matter of months. So that’s a terrible idea. But we need to acknowledge that we did use up the planet and degrade it in a pretty wanton way throughout the industrial era.
So in the book, in addition to capitalism and tech progress, I also talk about another pair of forces that is critically important for lightening our footprint. And the markets and technologies won’t take care of this by themselves.
We need an aware public — aware and worked up about the fact that, for instance, that we were going to kill all of the whales. We really were going to kill all of them through the course of the 20th century, just like we did with all of the passenger pigeons around the turn of the century.
But we developed an awareness that we needed to be better stewards of the creatures that we share our planet with, and that they couldn’t be inputs in the capitalist process. And bravo, thank you for that so much, because I like whales. But the other piece of awareness is that maybe all of this pollution that’s generated by the industrial era is more than just a nuisance. Maybe this is an actual health hazard.
And when I was researching the book, it was weird for me to learn that right up until about 1950, that’s how pollution was considered — “Okay, you get a scratchy throat.” We didn’t understand the dire health effects of smog, SO2, and all of this particulate pollution that we had, and it was getting much worse in American urban areas. So I am a huge cheerleader for public awareness of these kinds of issues in addition to capitalism and tech progress.
The other half of this pair is government responsiveness. It’s important that government respond to the will of their people, and that they respond to good ideas. My Exhibit A for this is the cap and trade program put in place in America to deal with particulate pollution from industry and electricity generation. Cap and trade is a kind of market mechanism that puts a price on pollution. So companies will try really hard to lower that cost, just like they lower other costs.
Cap and trade has been this huge success. The air over American skies is 90 percent cleaner than half a century ago, and the cost of that abatement is about a fifth of what the original estimates were. So as much as I cheerlead for capitalism and tech progress, I don’t stop there. I don’t think it’s honest to stop there, because there are two other things that are critically important if we do want to take care of our planet.
So the issue isn’t just using up too much stuff, and capitalism and technology have allowed us to turn that around. There are, of course, climate and carbon emission issues. And if we’re going to need more energy planet-wide as other countries, will we be using more energy in total?
Oh, yeah.
So how are we going to do that without more carbon emissions in the air? Is it even possible to be a high-energy planet without being a high-carbon emission planet?
Jim, I have one word for you: Nukes.
We have one energy source right now that is scalable, plentiful, and safe — I know people are going to freak out at that word, but the evidence is overwhelming that nuclear power is actually the safest form of power when you look at all of the deaths associated with it. Compare it to generating coal, burning natural gas, or anything.
And nukes are non-intermittent. The problem with solar and wind is that it isn’t always sunny or windy. We have this amazing technology, and one of my great frustrations is that most of the people advocating for action on climate — and I wholeheartedly support the idea that we need to stop cooking the planet — are not advocating for nukes. I honestly don’t get that.
Don’t you think that that’s a holdover from the 1970s? And you’re saying that not only can nuclear energy power our devices, but it can fuel capitalism. If you don’t much like capitalism, why would you want a power source that will enable it? I think there’s some of that attitude in there as well.
Yeah, I think all of that is accurate. Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech to the UN, I think in 1953, called Atoms for Peace. He said, “Look, let’s stop making bombs and blowing each other up. Let’s take this astonishingly powerful thing that we’ve discovered and apply it to the peaceful pursuits of humankind.” He got a 30-second standing ovation at the United Nations for that.
But there were people who said, “The worst thing we could do is essentially give poor people unlimited, free power. Humanity would just use that to strip every single resource on the planet, pave everything with tarmac, and just ruin the earth if we had cheap power.” I find that to be such a deep, deep mistake. But I think that’s part of the anti-nuke legacy out there.
The other thing is that if nuclear power is the technological silver bullet, or the most powerful thing we’re not doing, on the policy and economic side there’s an equally powerful thing we’re not doing. That’s putting a carbon tax or dividend in place. Bill Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize last year, advocated for that in a really powerful, intelligent way.
We have solved bad pollution problems before, and when you think about greenhouse gases as pollution, everything becomes a lot clearer. Of course we should be using the low-pollution energy sources, great, but we should also put a price on that pollution. We know that this playbook works — why we’re not all reaching for it is something of a mystery to me.
What are some other innovations that you think will likely further the drive towards dematerialization?
I think artificial intelligence is absolutely going to be huge, and that it’s underestimated.
For example, I was talking to some of the teams at Google DeepMind, and they tell a story about turning over operations of a Google data center to a machine-learning system that had been trained on a bunch of data generated by that center. And the story that I heard was essentially that the existing data center teams said, “You can run that experiment, but don’t expect much from it. We’re pretty confident that we’re close to optimized on the energy usage of this data center.” They turned it over to the machine learning controls, and the overall energy efficiency of the center improved by about 15 percent.
Now, the old economists’ joke is, “Don’t pick up a $100 bill from the sidewalk, because if it was real, someone would’ve picked it up by now.” I hear examples like that and I think that there are a lot of $100 bills lying around in this age of deep interconnection, tons of sensors all over the place, and finally the promises made by the AI community coming true.
We have these incredibly powerful tools to help us run to help us work at complicated parts of our infrastructure, and they’re not just a little better, they’re a lot better. I think we’re just getting warmed up with our ability to use fewer resources, use less energy, generate less waste, and just be quantum leaps better with efficiency and productivity with resources and materials.
Let me be briefly be pessimistic about what you call your “Four Horsemen of the Optimist:” tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government.
When I look at tech progress, people are worried about tech, automation, and job loss. On capitalism, it seems that people are down on it because of the financial crisis and globalization. Public awareness, well, the environment seems to rate very low on polls of concerns and even the Democratic candidates have been loath to talk about it in recent years. And with responsive government, we tried cap and trade, but we’re not doing much right now.
Why should we be optimistic about these reasons for optimism?
I hear what you’re saying and I agree with a bit of it, but I think that you and I spend a lot of time listening to and participating in elite, rich-world discussions about these issues. And if you broaden out the aperture globally, I think you’d come to some really different conclusions.
So, globally, how is our enthusiasm for technology doing? There are more mobile phone subscriptions than there are people on the planet. The most popular smartphone in India last year was about as powerful as the MacBook I used in 2006. So even though we fret about valence capitalism and the power of Big Tech in elite American circles, the rest of the world is jumping on this bandwagon with astonishing speed.
And with capitalism, when you look at the advance in the percentage of people living under free-market systems over the past 30 to 40 years, you really have a hard time seeing capitalism in retreat globally. The public is also becoming more aware.
I think that as people become more prosperous, their moral circle expands and they start thinking about taking better care of the animals. The Chinese now have a complete ban on place on rhino and tiger products, and I believe they’re going to introduce a complete ban on the ivory trade as well.
I wanted to focus for a second on that, because we’ve been talking about commodities, carbon emissions, and other things. But our wildlife, our flora and fauna, this is also part of what you want to preserve.
Well, I hope it’s part of what we all want to preserve. Unless Stewart Brand and George Church really hit the ball out of the park, extinctions are going to be irreversible for some time to come, and that’s just a loss for the planet.
The conclusion chapter of my book is a litany of some of the most amazing animals that we’ve wiped off of the face of the earth. I really don’t want to add to that list. And as I said earlier, we almost wiped out the Blue Whale. There were something like 500 of them left in the worlds southern oceans in the early 1970s. There are about 250,000 of them in the year 1900. This was just a moral crime, right?
Stewart Brand, the last time that I listened to him, said something fantastic. He said, “Nature bats last.” And if we’re just smart enough to get out of the way and stop doing these things like trading in animals altogether, and we make hunting of them illegal, or hunting of them in national parks illegal, that’s great. We could do all of these in combination, and the whales are coming back, the North American Bison is coming back.
I didn’t realize this until I started working on the book — we almost wiped out the white-tailed deer, the turkey, the beaver, the black bear — and now they’re coming back in America. So if we’re just smart enough to be good stewards of the Earth and get out of the way, nature bats last, and nature can find a way to come back. That’s not an excuse to wipe out 99 percent of any animal to begin with, but we have to watch that we don’t just become too dour and too fatalistic about things. I think history encourages a great deal of optimism while making us mindful.
And remember, we had millions of schoolkids recently walk out for a day and demand action. So I am not so sure that the climate is going to remain an unappealing or uninteresting issue.
Tom Friedman wrote a great column a while ago about how a smart candidate now would be running, not on the Space Race, but the Earth Race. And I think there’s something to that. I think we could see the environmental movement 2.0, where it does become something that animates and ignites the public.
My only hope is that we are smart about the things we’re asking or advocating for in our government. Because if we get this wrong, we will actually not succeed, and we could have a badly overheated Earth in the decades ahead. We not only have to be passionate, we really have to be smart and evidence-driven about this.
Andy, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Jim, it was a blast — thank you.
Andrew McAfee explores the themes of tech-progress, capitalism, public awareness, and more from his new book, More from Less.
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