Efficiency
In the past man has been first.
In the future the system must be first.1
—Frederick Winslow Taylor
Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologize, financialize, privatize, and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.2
—Vandana Shiva
In 2007, Google began to invest heavily in “renewable” energy technology, especially in startups and research. Their goal was to generate electricity more cheaply than could a coal-fired power plant, and to do so within a few years.
In 2011, the project was shut down.
Two Google renewable energy engineers who worked on the project, Ross Koningstein and David Fork (each of whom holds a PhD from Stanford), later stated they “came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions.”
In other words, they’d realized that the premise of their work—that cheap green energy would significantly reduce emissions—was false.
They explained further: “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work.... Our study’s best-case scenario modeled our most optimistic assumptions about cost reductions in solar power, wind power, energy storage, and electric vehicles. In this scenario, the United States would cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically: Emissions could be 55 percent below the business-as-usual projection for 2050. While a large cut in emissions sure sounded good, this scenario still showed substantial use of natural gas in the electricity sector. That’s because today’s renewable energy sources are limited by suitable geography and their own intermittent power production. Wind farms, for example, make economic sense only in parts of the country with strong and steady winds. The study also showed continued fossil fuel use in transportation, agriculture, and construction. Even if our best-case scenario were achievable, we wondered: Would it really be a climate victory?”
They continued, “Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use.... Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.”3
And yet bright green energy enthusiasts, liberal politicians, business leaders, and major nonprofits, along with the millions of ordinary people they’ve duped, continue to promote green energy as the solution to global warming.
While the Google engineers do suggest reforestation as a partial answer to global warming, their primary hope seems to be the technological equivalent of wishing upon a star: “technologies [that] haven’t been invented yet.”
Part of the foundation of any plan for a green economy is “efficiency.” Again, we could have predicted these headlines: “EVs Will Save the World (With Help From Energy Efficiency & Renewables),”4 “Save Energy, Save the World,”5 and “Save the World by Saving Energy in Your Home.”6
As part of his “100 percent clean energy transition,” Mark Jacobson calls for a 40 percent improvement in overall energy efficiency in the global economy. The word efficiency appears 33 times in his widely applauded 16-page Energy Policy article from 2010.7 The word nature appears not at all. We’ve seen some of the problems with other parts of his plan. What about efficiency?
Here’s a question that gets to the heart of the efficiency question: Which scenario would cause less harm to the planet: all cars traveling 100 miles per gallon of gasoline or all cars traveling one mile per gallon?
Jacobson rests comfortably (in the driver’s seat of his $100,000 Tesla Roadster) in the more-miles-per-unit-of-energy club. Most mainstream environmentalists, bright greens, and indeed most people in general, have by now joined him in this not-very-exclusive club. A car that gets 100 mpg is more efficient, more cost effective, more advanced. It’s clearly so much better for the planet that the question seems absurd.
From the perspective of a salmon, however, or an old-growth forest, things look much different. A car that gets only one mpg would probably be far less harmful to the planet, because low efficiency creates a disincentive for driving, and indeed for the existence of cars at all.
If you get one mpg, and gas costs $3 per gallon, you’re paying three bucks a mile. Suddenly, walking starts to look a lot more attractive. For example, recently I (Derrick) drove five miles each way to eat at a wonderful taqueria, but there’s no way I would have paid an extra $30 for the admittedly delicious tacos.
If every car got one mile per gallon, why would any of us buy a car in the first place? Why pay thousands of dollars for what essentially amounts to a pricey motorized wheelbarrow?
If cars are that inefficient, why build them?
Building highly efficient cars, on the other hand, reduces the cost of driving and lowers barriers to commerce. More cars will be built, and with economies of scale, the cost of each car will fall. This makes the technology accessible to more people, accelerating the cycle of production and consumption. More car sales drive car culture as a whole by creating greater need for asphalt, roads, parking lots, and so on. Suburban sprawl becomes not only feasible but inevitable. Politics follows this momentum. Government budgets shift, adding trillions of dollars in road construction to the subsidies for car manufacturers. More land is bulldozed, more factories are built, and more concrete, steel, and plastics produced. Toxins and global warming increase, and biodiversity declines.
If you value technological escalation and human mobility for those who can afford it, then 100 mpg sounds great. If, on the other hand, you value the millions of animals (more than a trillion, including insects) killed by cars each year, the mountains destroyed for mineral extraction, the habitat fragmented by roads, or the air polluted by the manufacture, distribution, operation, and disposal of cars, then one mpg—a level of efficiency that disincentivizes car culture itself—might seem a better option.
Earlier, we cited Richard York saying that for every unit of green energy brought online, only a tenth as much fossil-fuel generated electricity is taken offline. He’s a sociologist and co-author of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, and author of articles with titles like, “Do Alternative Energy Sources Displace Fossil Fuels?” (spoiler: no) and “Choking on Modernity: A Human Ecology of Air Pollution” (spoiler: yes, we are). In an interview, he told us: “Efficiency sets in motion certain models of development that can have unintended consequences.... Look at whaling. It was the main source of oil for lamps for a long time. But whaling expanded after the rise of petroleum oil, not because there was a demand for whale oil but because fossil fuels expanded the reach and effectiveness of the whaling fleets. Then the whalers found markets in which to sell their whale oil. Production drove demand.”
A core reason technological efficiency is harmful to the land is that low efficiency limits growth. For example, in desert regions such as Las Vegas, there isn’t enough water to keep building new homes and businesses indefinitely, and real estate without water is monetarily almost worthless. As long as the number of households remains the same, efficiency might be good for the land, since greater efficiency means less water taken for use by humans. But that isn’t what happens. Instead of reducing overall water demand, efficiency in arid areas frees up water for new subdivisions, leading to more urban sprawl and habitat destruction. As before, all the water is stolen for human use, only now the situation is worse than it would have been otherwise.
The efficiency of American homes tells the same story. Between 1970 and 2014, American homes became almost a third more energy efficient, but average house size grew by 28 percent. The average home today uses the same amount of energy it did 40 years ago, but the extra size also means more embodied energy, greater material demands for construction, and more rooms to be filled with cheap Ikea furniture.8 Did efficiency advances—in production of raw materials, labor, construction, and so on—enable the size increases, or did size increases drive a greater need for efficiency? The truth is that growth and efficiency are all wrapped together. And through all of this, the earth loses.
Productivity and efficiency go together outside of individual home construction, too. In business, increased efficiency lowers costs and raises profits. Since businesses in capitalism have a growth imperative, a portion of the profits or savings from any efficiency increase will be reinvested in growth. On a macroeconomic scale, increased efficiency leads directly to growth.
Economists have understood this since at least 1865, when William Stanley Jevons, a British mathematician and pioneer in economic theory, published his book The Coal Question. This was in the midst of the industrial revolution, and the U.K.’s economy depended on coal. Coal-fired steam engines pumped water, ground grain, propelled trains and boats, excavated canals, powered factories, and dug more coal. Jevons wrote, “[Coal] is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do.”9
Prior to the publication of The Coal Question, several new steam engine designs and improvements, starting with Boulton’s and Watt’s improvements in the 1790s, had boosted efficiency. A key section of The Coal Question examined the impact of this increased efficiency on coal consumption. Jevons concluded, “The economical use of coal [will not] reduce its consumption. On the contrary, economy renders the employment of coal more profitable, and thus the present demand for coal is increased.”
This is crucial: Increased efficiency not only doesn’t generally reduce demand, but instead increases it. This is called “the rebound effect,” and we see it all the time.
Total global energy use by human beings has been increasing for at least the several hundred years for which data is available, and almost certainly for 10,000 years, since the beginning of civilization. During this time, the efficiency with which human civilizations use both energy and materials has also risen more or less steadily. Today, farms feed 10 times as many people per acre as in early agricultural societies. Has that increase in efficiency meant less land under cultivation or, instead, greater population? Of course, it’s the latter. Likewise, has the increase in water-use efficiency meant more water left in rivers, or more land under irrigation? Of course, once again, it’s the latter. Has the near doubling in automobile fuel efficiency standards over the last 40 years meant less gasoline is burned? Of course not.
Efficiency has risen in production, too. Early factories were powered by mills or steam engines, with this power then transmitted through mechanical straps, gears, and shafts that were only about 25 percent efficient: three-quarters of the energy was lost to friction.10 Later, these mechanical systems were replaced by DC electric lines powering motors, then the more efficient AC. Today, electrical transmission and distribution in the U.S. results in only about a 10 percent loss in energy.11 New high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cables are being used to carry power long distances with even greater efficiency. In the near future, superconducting power lines may reduce transmission losses to almost zero. Has that increase in electrical transmission efficiency meant less electrical generation? Of course not.
The trend has remained constant for hundreds (and probably thousands) of years. As efficiency has increased, so has total energy use.12
One reason that efficiency gains are regularly wiped out by growth is capitalism’s constant creation of new markets. For example, look at marijuana. Since legalization in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, indoor pot growing—which is remarkably energy intensive—has become a major consumer of energy. An indoor grow system for just four plants uses as much electricity as 29 refrigerators. In Colorado, half of all growth in electricity demand between 2012 and 2014 was from grow-ops. In Portland, Oregon, new projects coming online in 2015 caused seven power outages. The industry’s energy use can be expected to continue rising, as California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Maine all legalized marijuana in November 2016. Analysts predict that within a few years the indoor weed industry will use as much electricity as data centers (neither of which existed as significant industries just 50 years ago).13 It already uses 1 percent of electricity across the entire United States.
This is where energy from efficiency, wind farms, and solar panels will be going: to new and expanding industries like growing marijuana.
Here’s the Jevons Paradox at work. Let’s say you’re a small grower in northern California, home to the best marijuana in the world. Let’s say your lights cost you $1,000 per month in electricity; and your other expenses (e.g. fertilizers, pots, soil, and so on) run another $1,000 a month, not including your own labor. Let’s say you grow three pounds of marijuana per month, which you sell for $2,000 per lb.14 Income: $6,000. Expenses: $2,000. You make a decent living at $4,000 a month. But now the new Miracle-Brite™ Light, which will provide the same lumens for $500 a month, comes on the market. You have a choice. One option is that you put that $500 a month toward purchasing second-growth forest to allow it to regrow, become habitat for nonhumans, and sequester carbon. Or you could be a capitalist, double the size of your scene, grow six pounds per month at a cost of $3,000, and make $9,000 a month. You could even use all that extra money as a down payment on a Tesla.
Thus, an increase in lighting efficiency leads to an increase in fossil fuel use to make fertilizers and other associated items. And since the marginal cost of growing marijuana has decreased, you may as well triple or quadruple your grow scene and really rake in the money, thus increasing use of electricity as well.
The Jevons Paradox obviously applies not just to energy use. A 2017 article in MIT News, entitled “Study: Technological progress alone won’t stem resource use: Researchers find no evidence of an overall reduction in the world’s consumption of materials,” discussed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-led study that “gathered data for 57 common goods and services, including widely used chemical components such as ammonia, formaldehyde, polyester fiber, and styrene, along with hardware and energy technologies such as transistors, laser diodes, crude oil, photovoltaics, and wind energy. They worked the data for each product into their equation, and, despite seeing technological improvements in almost all cases, they failed to find a single case in which dematerialization—an overall reduction in materials—was taking place. In follow-up work, the researchers were eventually able to identify six cases in which an absolute decline in materials usage has occurred. However, these cases mostly include toxic chemicals such as asbestos and thallium, whose dematerialization was due not to technological advances, but to government intervention. There was one other case in which researchers observed dematerialization: wool. The material’s usage has significantly fallen, due to innovations in synthetic alternatives, such as nylon and polyester fabrics. In this case, Magee argues that substitution, and not dematerialization, has occurred. In other words, wool has simply been replaced by another material to fill the same function.”
One of the lead authors notes, “There is a techno-optimist’s position that says technological change will fix the environment. This [study] says, probably not.”15
I (Max) am walking in a forest, near the coast of Washington. I come to a broad meadow. Endangered Makah copper butterflies live here. Labrador tea grows in acidic boggy soil. Cedar waxwings gather huckleberries from tall shrubs. Many threatened and sensitive plant species, including Alaska plantain, Vancouver groundcone, swamp gentian, and goldthread live here, too.
The land begins to slope down, and the forest closes back in. The soil is moist, even now in the heart of summer. Skunk cabbages and beargrass grow on either side of the path. I smell the ocean. I hear sea lions barking. The trail is steeper now. After passing through thickets of salal and nettle, I step out of the forest and onto the beach. Rocky, forested islands rise in the offshore mist. The water is still. A heron wades in the tide. Seaweed lies in great mounds, where winter storms piled it.
This place is still rich in life, even in the midst of the biotic cleansing that has been underway for centuries here, millennia around the world. I cannot imagine how fecund it was in the past.
This is Makah land; the word Makah means “generous with food.”
I turn north, and after a time come to the site of an old Makah village. According to their histories, the Makah lived here since the beginning of time. Scientists can carbon-date their existence here to at least 2,500 years ago, and likely 8,000 or more. And if you believe Vine Deloria Jr. and some new archeology, human habitation of the West Coast may be much, much older. Whatever you believe, the Makah lived here a long time.
A slow mudslide destroyed the village around 275 years ago; the people survived, but most families moved elsewhere. The village was finally abandoned in the 1930s when it became illegal to keep children out of school, and the last Makah occupants were forced to move to Neah Bay.
Now, the bluff where the village stood is mostly overgrown. A cedar longhouse built in the 1980s stands as a memorial to the site. Winter storms are slowly eroding the soil of the bluff, exposing layers of history.
I pick my way across driftwood toward the hillside. Shells and small bones are exposed here and there. I spot two whale bones, barely visible, caked in dirt. I look closer and see a vertebra three feet across, and a fin bone with a triangular cross-section.
The Makah were one of a few nations in this region to hunt whales, rowing in cedar canoes to harpoon Gray and Humpback whales, then attaching seal-skin floats and towing their bodies to the village through cold Pacific swells. A single hunt could feed the village for weeks.
The Makah used each part of a whale: oil for rendering, meat for food, bone and sinew for tools, gut for storage containers. Even “trash” served a purpose; bones discarded nearby fed minerals to the trees and served as chews for mammals.
You could call this “efficiency,” but the term doesn’t fit. A better alternative might be “diversity.”
In the natural world, diversity is a functional counterpoint to the industrial idea of efficiency. Most natural communities, looked at in parts, are not efficient at all. Grizzly bears, for example, often eat only the fattiest parts of salmon, leaving behind the rest. But because natural communities have evolved around diversity and not efficiency, there are thousands of other beings—trees, shrubs, mosses, beetles, slugs, coyotes, wolves, eagles, ravens, and so on—who eat the remainder of the salmon. The strength of the community comes not from its efficiency—its ability, to use the dictionary definition, to “achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense”—but from its diversity.
If we’re going to talk about capitalism’s obsession with efficiency and productivity, we need to talk about Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Born to a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1856, Taylor was from childhood fixated on efficiency. A boyhood friend noted that Taylor would “endeavor to discover the step which would cover the greatest distance with the least expenditure of energy; or the easiest method of vaulting a fence; the right length and proportions of a walking staff.” At 17, Taylor went to work at Enterprise Hydraulic Works, a factory that made steam-powered pumps and machinery. He became obsessed with the contrast between the efficient precision of machinery and the wasteful fallibility of human beings. As one history notes, “The industrial revolution had ushered in a new era of technology [, but] the management structures that held everything in place had not changed since the days of artisans, small shops, and guilds: knowledge was largely rule of thumb, acquired through tips and tricks that would trickle down to aspiring craftsmen over the course of long apprenticeships.” As Taylor wrote, this was highly inefficient; “It had no scientific basis.”
Taylor didn’t hide his contempt for workers. In his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, he describes the average laborer as “so stupid and phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.... He is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.”16
And Taylor saw himself as that more intelligent man. For the next 25 years, he worked relentlessly to “train” the “oxen.” “Armed with a pen, a ledger, and a stopwatch, Taylor hovered over workers on the shop floor, timing every procedure, tweaking their actions, and timing again. He hired an assistant to catalogue the duration of every variant of every procedure. Determined to be as ‘scientific’ as possible in his optimizing, he followed the reductionist impulses of classical mechanics, breaking every job down to its most granular elements.”17 Based on these measurements, Taylor would prescribe a new set of procedures for each worker, laying out the most efficient actions they should take to carry out their job and time requirements that must be met. Employees who didn’t meet the required speed would be fired.
The results were, for the capitalists, astonishing. “The cost of overhauling boilers dropped from $62 (around $2,000 today) to $11; machining a tire could now be done in one-fifth of the previous time; making a cannon projectile now took just ninety minutes instead of ten hours; 1,200 could now do work that would have taken 2,000 people at any other company.”18
Taylor put in place similar procedures in hundreds of businesses. Scientific management overran the nation, then the world, moving from factories into government, schools, and private homes. “Best practices” for everything—from the best way to lay brick, to the correct way to insert paper into a typewriter, to the most efficient way to sit at a desk—became standardized.
Please note that these increases in productivity did not lead to increases in leisure (which Jevons could have predicted)—as in the laborers doing their jobs in less time and then going home to have fun with their families—but rather to increases in profits and production. For bosses, it was a revelation. But for workers and for the planet, it was a disaster.
Workers who had been trained in a more human workplace, where attitude and experience were valued more highly than raw productivity, went on strike. Managers fired them en masse, since the new standardized procedures meant even skilled workers could be replaced by a smaller force of cheaper unskilled laborers.
It’s hard to overstate the influence of Taylor and his “disciples.” Scientific management deeply influenced American capitalism and shaped Lenin’s economic approach in Soviet Russia. Management expert Peter Drucker ranked Taylor with Freud and Darwin as some of the most influential people who have ever lived. Journalist Ida Tarbell called him “one of the few creative geniuses of our time.”19
Historian Robert Kanigel wrote, “It could seem that all of modern society had [by the late 1920s] come under the sway of a single commanding idea: that waste was wrong and efficiency the highest good.”20
Taylor, a devout Quaker, believed that his efficiency programs would abolish class divisions by raising wages and enabling more efficient production of goods that could be distributed fairly and cheaply. He was, of course, dead wrong. Just like efficiency doesn’t reduce overall consumption, it doesn’t abolish class divisions.
“In my judgement,” Taylor wrote, “the best possible measure of the height in the scale of civilization to which any people has arisen is its productivity.”21
When you’re working for the most powerful businesses in the world, it makes sense to say this. Productivity is what leads nations and corporations to power. Productivity is what manufactures guns, drives factories, enables more resource-extraction from more colonies.
Whether they admit it or not, most bright greens—and others who value production over life on the planet, those who are trying to save civilization and its industrial production even as it grinds away at life—agree with Taylor’s comment above. Productivity does lead to further “progress,” and “progress” defines civilization.
Taylor’s conceit is a common failing. As the great Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan said, “Progress is a sort of madness that is a god to people. Decent people commit horrible crimes that are acceptable because of progress.”
Including, clearly, the murder of the planet.
The results of Taylorism are entirely predictable: efficiency leads to profit, profit leads to growth, and more money goes to managers, owners, and stockholders, not to the poor. Industries expand. The middle class grows, but only in the heart of empire. More forests fall, more mountains are mined, more products are manufactured.
Let’s talk about lightbulbs, which have, like many other technologies, followed a trend of increasing efficiency, complexity, and embodied energy.
Until recently, most lightbulbs were incandescent and worked by running electricity through a small wire filament that heats and glows.
Incandescent light bulbs are remarkably destructive, in part because the wire filaments are made of tungsten. Most ores contain less than 1.5 percent tungsten, so a huge amount of rock must be mined for a small amount of tungsten.22 Tungsten mines produce pollution containing arsenic23, mercury24, thallium25, and other heavy metals.26 Tungsten itself is a poison. Until 2009, it was thought to be almost entirely benign. But new research has found that tungsten reacts with other compounds and moves through bodies quite readily, interfering with basic processes of metabolism shared by all life.27
In 1995, Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) lightbulbs were introduced as the successor to incandescent bulbs. Although they’re more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, they’re still artifacts of the same extractive paradigm.
CFL bulbs have two main parts. The first is an electronic “ballast,” a small circuit board that includes a capacitor, transistors, and a diode bridge. These components regulate the flow of electricity through the second main part of the lamp, which is a gas-filled tube. When you flick the switch, electricity flows through this gas, causing it to glow.
CFLs, like any new industrial technology, have created a whole new class of problems. Perhaps the most serious is that the bulbs contain between two and five milligrams of mercury. Even in small amounts, mercury is extremely toxic. If a CFL lightbulb breaks, the Environmental Protection Agency recommends a multistep cleaning process that includes treating the materials as toxic waste.
Years ago, when I (Max) lived in Bellingham, Washington, my friends and I attended Toastmasters—a sort of training club for public speaking—to practice speaking about political resistance. Most of the attendees were aspiring politicians or businesspeople wearing secondhand blazers. With our political t-shirts and youthful faces, we were the oddballs of the group. For several months we’d rise at 6:00 a.m.—a nearly impossible task for people in their early 20s—to attend the meetings held on the north side of town. Each week, a few members would stand and give brief speeches in front of the group, and we’d grade them and provide feedback. One week, a woman in her early 30s stood to make her speech. She told us how she’d wanted to save money on electricity and “go green,” so she bought CFL bulbs for her house. One day, she came home to find that a lamp in her infant son’s room had fallen to the floor and the bulb had shattered. She found him playing on the carpet among the fragments of the bulb. He wasn’t cut, so she didn’t think much of it. She cleaned up the broken glass, threw it out, and replaced the bulb. In the weeks after the accident, her son began to behave strangely, so she took him to the doctor, who told her that her son had mercury poisoning. There was no treatment. Her son had developed serious brain damage. As she told the story all those years later, she was shaking with grief and anger.
Vaporized mercury can cause mood swings, nervousness, irritability, emotional changes, insomnia, headaches, muscle twitches and atrophy, tremors, weakness, and, to use the distancing language of toxicology, “decreased cognitive functions.” Higher levels of exposure cause kidney and respiratory damage and death.28 Mercury is especially toxic to pregnant mothers and infants.
Mercury is also found in various other lightbulbs, including most fluorescent bulbs, black lights, cold-cathode bulbs, metal and ceramic metal halide bulbs, high pressure sodium bulbs, mercury short-arc bulbs, and neon bulbs.
In response to critiques of CFL lightbulbs because of their mercury content, some environmentalists have made the reasonable argument that using CFL lightbulbs reduces overall mercury pollution, most of which comes from burning coal for electricity. According to some estimates, the average incandescent bulb in the U.S. creates about 10 milligrams of mercury pollution over five years via burning coal. A CFL, because of higher efficiency, is responsible for only about six milligrams, even when you include the mercury in the bulb.29
Would you prefer six milligrams of deadly poison, or 10 milligrams?
Apparently, there’s no other option.
Critiques of CFL lightbulbs are largely moot, because the bulbs are rapidly being superseded by the next-generation lighting technology: LEDs, or Light Emitting Diodes. The average LED requires one-tenth the electricity of an incandescent bulb for a given brightness, and perhaps a third of a CFL bulb. They’re also much more durable than incandescent bulbs or CFLs. So, LEDs are considered the “holy grail” of sustainable lighting technology. The U.S. Department of Energy says LED lighting “has the potential to fundamentally change the future of lighting in the United States.”30 The editors of the website Treehugger describe LED bulbs as one of their “obsessions.”31 Some bright greens have suggested that LEDs are “the” solution to global warming. As if putting LED headlights on a diesel semi-tractor is really going to stop the murder of the planet. (The notion that LEDS are “the” solution to global warming is misleading anyway: only about 7 percent of U.S. electricity (which means 1.4 percent of energy is used for lighting).
LEDs work because of electroluminescence: some substances emit light when electricity passes through them. The basic principle has been understood since 1927, but early LED designs emitted only infrared. These found their way into, among other applications, remote controls, which means that the technology now lauded by the mainstream environmental movement first found commercial use in allowing people to change the channel without getting off the couch.
In 1968, Monsanto became the first company to mass produce LEDs. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that white LEDs became available, making standard lighting applications possible. Today, they’re taking over the industry. Cities and businesses are investing millions to switch to LEDs to save money on their electricity bills. Utilities are pushing for individual renters and homeowners to make the switch by offering free or discounted LEDs. It’s billed as a win-win; you get lower electric bills, the utilities save money since they don’t have to generate as much power, and less fossil fuels have to be burnt, reducing the acceleration of global warming.
But as always, it’s not a win for the planet. One of the things we’re trying to do in this book is model the process of asking where products come from, and who is harmed by their production.
The production of LEDs is much more complex than that of incandescent and CFL bulbs. LEDs are built around a silicon chip called a “die.” Each die consists of layers of high-purity crystalline semiconductor usually made from gallium arsenide, gallium phosphide, or gallium arsenide phosphide. As the name implies, two of these elemental combinations contain arsenic, a known carcinogen and environmental toxin.
These semiconductor crystals are created in much the same way as silicon wafers for solar panels. First, a high-pressure, high-temperature chamber is used to mix the ingredients of the die, turning them from solid to liquid. Liquid boron oxide is added to seal the materials together. A rod is dipped into the solution and withdrawn slowly, and the solution solidifies into a pure crystal on its surface. After the crystal is formed, the rod is sliced into thin wafers which are polished until the surface has a roughness of less than one nanometer, and it is cleaned using a variety of chemical solvents and high-frequency sound waves. At this stage, impurities must be added to produce layers with different mechanisms of conductivity. These additives include zinc, nitrogen, silicon, germanium, indium, selenium, and tellurium, each of which has its own supply chain leading back to destructive, polluting mines.
A common method of adding impurities (or doping) is called “liquid phase epitaxy.” In this process, the semiconductor wafers are drawn underneath reservoirs containing the same molten base material used to form the original crystal, but with impurities added. Each time a wafer is drawn through, an additional layer of the molten material is deposited on top by a nozzle. With each pass, a different doping agent is added to achieve the desired electronic effects. The final doping step involves placing the wafers back in a high-temperature furnace and immersing them in a gas containing the final agent. This final agent is known as the “phosphor.” The most common phosphor is YAG, or yttrium aluminum garnet (Y3Al5O12), which is sometimes mixed with cerium or gadolinium. This is the key step in the process, since it results in LEDs that emit white light.
But we’re not quite done. The final step in the creation of LED dies involves applying gold and silver compounds to the surface of the chip for attaching wires, a multistep process involving a photosensitive liquid called “photoresist” which is applied to each chip in a pattern and then baked into place in another furnace. Ultraviolet light further hardens the substance, and then the unhardened material is washed away. Next, “contact metal” can be applied. The chips are placed in a vacuum-sealed chamber, where a “chunk of [gold or silver] is heated to temperatures that cause it to vaporize.” This vapor sticks to the exposed semiconductor. Now, acetone can be used to remove the photoresist, and the metal contacts which remain behind are further bonded by baking in a hydrogen/nitrogen atmosphere furnace at several hundred degrees for several hours.
The LED dies are now complete. Each wafer created in this process may contain many individual LEDs, which now must be cut apart. Then the LEDs move to assembly, where they’re heated and plasma-cleaned again to prevent them from delaminating later in the process. The chips are bonded onto metal leads, connected with tiny gold wires, and soldered in place. The final step (for real this time) involves sealing all this inside a plastic or epoxy package for durability.32
When manufacturing something this small and precise, a single speck of dust can ruin an entire batch of chips. Therefore, LED manufacturing takes place in “clean” facilities with sophisticated air filters and circulation systems. Production is mostly automated, with machines controlling nearly every operation. The fewer humans present, the better.
Seeing a plant, animal, fungus, or any other living being inside an LED production facility means a grievous error has taken place. A single LED production factory can also cost $100 million or more. So much for community-scale implementation.
Can you spot the environmental problems inherent in this process? Reread this description, and this time consider the supply chain of every material, and its costs to the natural world.
The bright green future is a corporate future, a centralized future, a robotic, mechanized future emerging from factories like new LED bulbs in plastic blister cases. What appears to be a simple lightbulb—flick the switch and it turns on—is the result of a long chain of industrial technologies and processes involving mining, factories, complex chemistry, robotics, research laboratories at corporate and government facilities around the world, and billions of dollars in investment. It’s all tied together. LEDs would be impossible to create without globalization, imperialism, resource theft, and war.
Components of LEDs are easily traced to atrocities. Yttrium, cerium, and gadolinium are rare-earth elements which naturally occur together, and they are mined in aggregate. As you may recall, the massive open-pit Bayan Obo mine near Baotou, China, is the single-largest source of rare-earth metals, and it has ruined everything nearby. Local fields can no longer grow crops, and livestock grow sick and die. One local resident told journalists that “all the families are affected by illness ... diabetes, osteoporosis, and chest problems.” Many have been reduced to such poverty that selling sludge from tailings ponds to reprocessing plants is their only income.33
Purified yttrium, besides being used in LEDs, is also used in spark plugs, lasers, televisions, superconductors, medical devices, missile defense systems, fighter-jet engines, and fake diamonds. In the environment, yttrium is exceptionally toxic to humans and other animals. Low levels of exposure cause lung disease, while large amounts cause cyanosis—your extremities turn blue from lack of oxygenated blood—chest pain, breathing problems, and death.34
Cerium is known for being easy to produce. But the standards of the mining industry are probably different from yours and mine. Cerium processing begins by using hydrochloric acid to remove impurities. Then the ore is roasted in a furnace to oxidize it before a further acid treatment isolates the cerium. The process is supposedly simple, but “simple” in this case means only a few tens of millions of dollars of equipment are required, not hundreds of millions—unless you’re starting with the monazite variety of ore, which is more complex. Monazite processing involves hot concentrated sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide (which can readily decompose proteins, lipids and living tissues), and ammonium oxalate. Further heat treatment is applied to increase the hardness of the metal, and then nitric acid can be applied to precipitate cerium oxide.
Monazite is also a common source rock for gadolinium, which besides being used for LEDs, is used in nuclear reactors (especially nuclear submarines), in fuel cells, and for nuclear medicine.
As for the LEDs themselves, their levels of copper, lead, nickel, and silver have gotten California to declare all but the low-intensity yellow diodes “hazardous.”35
Whatever the starting ore, cerium processing produces radioactive waste containing isotopes of radium that release gamma radiation, which strikes directly at the genetic material of living beings.
Here’s an excerpt from an article in Quartz by reporter Akshat Rathi about using algae to capture carbon from a cement factory. It begins, “Degerhamn, Sweden. As far as the eye can see, the only thing polluting our pristine environment is the gas-guzzling car I’m riding in. It’s a chilly April morning in Kalmar county in southern Sweden, and as we drive past pastel-colored wooden houses separated by acres of farmland, Martin Olofsson, a researcher at Linnaeus University, tells me that only 5 percent of the electricity Swedes consume comes from burning fossil fuels. That’s nothing compared to, say, the U.S., where two-thirds of electricity are fossil-fuel derived.”
Of course, electricity is only 20 percent of total energy usage. It’s not where the real action is. And keep in mind that much electricity in Sweden comes from hydro and biomass—including burning trash—which are dreadfully harmful and certainly not carbon neutral.
But there’s more tomfoolery here. The only polluting thing Rathi says he can see is his car, and he mentions gas guzzling. He also calls the landscape “pristine.” First, in many cases, the manufacture of cars causes more pollution than does their gasoline use, so his emphasis shouldn’t be on the gas-guzzling—as if an electric car would be good for the world—but rather on the existence of the car itself. And are we co-authors the only people who can see the absurdity of saying houses and farmland crossed by roads are a “pristine environment”? I don’t think the nonhumans who used to live on those farmlands would agree they’re “pristine.” And does this journalist really not understand embodied pollution: the pollution that comes from the fabrication of materials for the houses, and their construction and maintenance, as well as everything in those houses? And does runoff from the farms not count as pollution? Only one harm—pollution from the tailpipe—seems to count.
But we haven’t even gotten to the real tomfoolery. Rathi is all excited because they’re going to use algae to capture carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of a cement factory. The cement is made of limestone which comes from a local quarry. He writes, “Over the past 130 years, the cement factory has consumed huge amounts of limestone, leaving behind a flat piece of land, about 1 km (0.6 miles) in each direction, without a single tree in the expanse. As we approach the quarry, I spot a large excavator filling a haul truck—a vehicle engineered for heavy-duty mining and construction—with rubble. Every few months, Urban says, a team comes with explosives and blasts a large portion of the 10-meter-high limestone wall standing tall in front of us. The trucks then go back and forth between the quarry and the cement plant all day, almost nonstop, feeding the plant with limestone.”
This is what they’re excited about?
The low concentrations of sodium and potassium in this particular limestone means the cement can withstand the corrosive effects of saltwater and therefore lasts longer in the ocean. So, the cement in this environmental victory—where the only polluting thing the journalist can see is his car—is used for underwater construction.36
It’s often said that Taylor “rationalized” the workplace. Certainly, the common definition of rationalization—the attempt to justify inappropriate behavior—is true, but another definition is meant here, which is to ignore or remove all considerations extraneous to the stated goal.
This is what bright greens are doing. In their quest for a (fraudulently accounted) carbon-neutrality, they ignore horrors perpetrated along the way. So, a cement factory that destroys a biome to facilitate the destruction of undersea biomes is suddenly an environmental success story. How? Simple. Ignore everything but the fact that algae are going to scrub carbon dioxide from the smokestacks. Ignore even that the algae will presumably be fed to cows or turned into fuel and burned, releasing the carbon anyway. Ignore the real world. Then the only polluting thing you’ll remark is exhaust from the car you drove up in.
That’s the story we’re debunking over and over in this book. That’s the story of bright green lies.
What happens to LED manufacturers when everyone’s sockets are full of LEDs that last 30 years? If you’re in the business of making lightbulbs, this is a problem that has come up before. In 1924, several lightbulb manufacturers, including General Electric, Osram, and Philips, formed a trade cartel called Phoebus (side note: great secret cabal name). In a series of clandestine meetings, members of Phoebus decided to reduce the operational duration of their incandescent bulbs to a uniform 1,000-hour average to ensure continued healthy sales. Their scheme worked for 15 profitable years before competition forced them to improve the operational duration of their products.
Today, some LED manufacturers are moving in the same direction, deliberately reducing the operational duration of bulbs, but now it’s in the open. These manufacturers are offering cheaper LEDs with substantially reduced operational duration in order to spark sales.37
There are other problems with LEDs. A June 2016 report from the American Medical Association found that high-brightness LED streetlights (already 10 percent of U.S. streetlights at the time the report was released) create a driving hazard. They found that LEDs emitting blue-rich light “have a five times greater impact on circadian sleep rhythms than conventional lamps” and that outdoor LEDs disrupt nonhuman species who need a dark environment, including birds, insects, turtles, and fish.38
We’re not the first to say technology doesn’t solve problems created by technology. At best it displaces them.
Even leaving aside the toxic components and processes involved in the manufacture of LEDs, LEDs are a great example of what happens when you attempt to ignore the Jevons Paradox. Here’s a headline: “The Switch to Outdoor LED Lighting Has Completely Backfired.” The article begins, “To reduce energy consumption, many jurisdictions around the world are transitioning to outdoor LED lighting. But as new research shows, this solid-state solution hasn’t yielded the expected energy savings, and potentially worse, it’s resulted in more light pollution than ever before.” And, “With the introduction of solid-state lighting—such as LEDs ... —it was thought (and hoped) that the transition to it from conventional lighting—like electrical filaments, gas, and plasma—would result in big energy savings. According to the latest research, however, the use of LEDs has resulted in a ‘rebound’ effect whereby many jurisdictions have opted to use even more light owing to the associated energy savings.”39
That’s the Jevons Paradox.
Why is anyone surprised?
What comes after LEDs? Experts say it’s a technology called “laser diodes.” According to some predictions, this technology could replace LEDs entirely by about 2025—which leads to this question: What’s the point of making bulbs that last 30 years if they’re going to be obsolete in 10?40
Nearly all bright greens speak of economic growth as positive, or at the very least don’t speak against it. And the case for “greening the global economy” is made every day by many of these same people.
There’s a book with that very title, Greening the Global Economy, by economist Robert Pollin. He claims economic contraction would be a disaster for the planet, because it undercuts the “necessary investments” in “green energy.” Never mind the evidence that the only significant drops in greenhouse gas emissions have occurred during major depressions,41 or that the cutting of the Amazon rainforest has declined only during recessions,42 or that the only oceanic dead zone to recover—in the Black Sea—disappeared because of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Given that the global economy is killing the planet, “growing the economy” will not help the planet.
Bright greens and the corporate press like to claim the economy can grow without a corresponding increase in energy usage. Joe Romm, for example, who has done important work advancing public understanding of global warming, has also written approvingly that “electricity sales in [the U.S.] have been flat for nearly a decade even as the economy has kept growing.”
Electricity consumption may be flat in the United States, but in the same period—2004 to 2014—annual electricity generation in China more than doubled, from 2.2 billion GWh to more than 5.6 billion GWh. Coal-fired power plants were responsible for about 75 percent of that increase.43 Given that the U.S. annually imports about $500 billion worth of products from China, it’s not a stretch to call this “pollution outsourcing.” And it’s not just an issue with China. Take a look at U.S. imports from Indonesia (clothing and shoes, rubber, electronics), South Korea (cars, electronics, machinery, oil, steel), Taiwan (electronics, machinery, cars, steel, plastic), and Singapore (chemicals, machinery, electronics).44 All these nations export billions of dollars of goods to the United States, and the responsible industries are a roll call of despoilers. From 1990 to 2010, East Asian carbon emissions rose 142 percent while Southeast Asia’s emissions rose 227 percent.45 Combined emissions from Asia-Pacific nations rose another 18 percent between 2010 and 2019.46
Pollution outsourcing is an open secret. One article notes that “Britain, for instance, slashed domestic emissions within its own borders by one-third between 1990 and 2015. But it has done so as energy-intensive industries have migrated abroad. If you included all the global emissions produced in the course of making things like the imported steel used in London’s skyscrapers and cars, then Britain’s total carbon footprint has actually increased slightly over that time.”47 Green think-tank Heinrich Böll Foundation names “a move away from energy-intensive manufacturing towards less energy-intensive service sector work”—with the manufacturing moved elsewhere (if manufacturing is going to happen, it has to happen somewhere)—as one of the primary factors underlying decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in rich nations.48
The assumption of the bright green paradigm is that renewable energy production displaces fossil fuels energy production. This assumption underlies just about every calculation used to promote green energy.
The failure of displacement was recently quantified by Richard York, whom we’ve met twice so far in this book. After analyzing data from 128 nations, York found that “the average pattern ... is one where each unit of total national energy from nonfossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focusing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by nonfossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel generated electricity.”49
Given that expansion is essential to the system, believing that new solar energy facilities can lead to the closure of coal power plants on a wide scale is a tragic misperception.
With all the world at stake, we need to be as clear as possible: new energy sources usually don’t displace old; instead, new energy piles on top of the old energy sources. That extra energy is used to “grow the system,” and any opportunity for growth is not to be missed.50
It’s not like any of this is unexpected. Below is a graph of primary (human) world energy consumption—separated by fuel type. Until about 1850, essentially all of (human) world energy consumption—excluding human and nonhuman slavery—came from burning wood. Coal use rose around that time, and total energy consumption climbed higher. Oil came next, becoming a significant energy source starting in the early 1900s, followed by natural gas and hydropower in the mid-20th century. Nuclear power was added in the 1960s.
Two things about this graph are particularly important. First and most obvious is that total world energy consumption has risen steeply from about 15 exajoules/year in 1850 to more than 500 exajoules/year today. We are living in gluttonous times; this level of energy consumption could never be sustainable. The second important point is that despite the addition of new sources of energy throughout this period, none of the previous energy sources have ever declined significantly in total consumption. Even wood as an energy source is burned at nearly double the rate today as in 1850. And “renewables”? There has certainly been no displacement because of them. For 170 years, each new energy source has simply been added on top of the others.51
Adding more energy to the mix, no matter where it comes from, is not a solution. We’ve appropriated too much of the world’s energy; it’s time to give back.
In Europe, even a record increase in “renewable” energy, which you’d think would overwhelm the displacement problem, hasn’t been enough to lower carbon emissions. In 2015, “renewable” electricity grew 2.5 percent to supply 29 percent of total European electricity. However, “a fall in nuclear and hydro levels, and an increase in total electricity demand, meant that fossil [fuel] generation was roughly unchanged in 2015.... German and Italian fossil generation barely moved, despite record renewables growth.”52 And of course, we mustn’t forget that much of Europe’s 29 percent “renewable” power comes from biomass, in part the practice of cutting down and burning forests entire.
As Richard York writes of displacement, “These results challenge conventional thinking ... they indicate that suppressing the use of fossil fuel will require changes other than simply technical ones, such as expanding nonfossil-fuel energy production.” In other words, strategies based on providing cheap, plentiful green energy won’t work. We have to stop fossil fuels directly.
We cannot count on efficiency to reduce the rate at which the planet is being destroyed, nor can we depend on green energy. Our only hope is to directly stop the burning of fossil fuels and all the other destructive activities of the industrial economy, from industrial logging to mining to international trade.
This is hard because, among other reasons, the legal system is set up to protect corporate interests at all cost. Back when I (Max) lived in Bellingham, Washington, a friend told me about an oil pipeline running underneath the city that carries crude oil from the Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, to nearby refineries. We researched and found out the pipeline was up for renewal with the city. The previous agreement was $10,000 for a 10-year lease.
The people of Bellingham know how dangerous pipelines can be. On June 10, 1999, a gasoline pipeline running across Whatcom Falls Park ruptured. Downstream, an 18-year-old boy was overcome by the vapors while fishing and drowned. Ninety-seven minutes after the leak began, the vapors ignited, causing a massive explosion and sending towering plumes of flames and black smoke into the sky. A pair of 10-year-old boys playing in the creek were severely burned in the explosion, and both died in the hospital the next day.
A group of us began educating local residents on the issue and lobbying the city council. We held public forums, gathered allies, and spoke to hundreds of people about the destructiveness of the tar sands. The city council started to come around. But the city attorney told council members that if they failed to renew the pipeline lease, the pipeline company, Trans Mountain, would sue the city, and the law would be on their side. “It comes down to the Commerce Clause,” the council told us, referencing a section in the U.S. Constitution that reserves to the Federal government the power to regulate interstate and international trade. Because the pipeline crossed an international border, local governments cannot legally stop the pipeline from continuing to operate when the gas was already flowing.
Every person in Bellingham voting on our side wouldn’t have stopped the pipeline.
After more than a hundred years of Supreme Court rulings, corporations have protection under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, as well as under the Contracts Clause. As corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris writes, “Corporate persons have constitutional rights to due process and equal protection that human persons, affected citizens, don’t have. For noncorporate human citizens there’s a democracy theme park where we can pull levers on voting machines and talk into microphones at hearings. But don’t worry, they’re not connected to anything and nobody is listening except for us. What regulatory law regulates is citizen input, not corporate behavior.”53
We already knew this when we started organizing against the pipeline.54 But we organized anyway, partly because we wanted to experience failure for ourselves. We wanted to test the democratic process and see if we could use the system to make the change we wanted. And we couldn’t, despite the fact that Bellingham had already at that time passed one of the most progressive municipal climate action plans in the nation, demonstrating some level of community commitment to sustainability, and also despite the fact that the population and the city council were both on our side.
In the end, the council passed two symbolic, nonbinding resolutions with tepid language saying that “Bellingham doesn’t approve of the Tar Sands project in Alberta and would like to avoid burning these fuels in our city.”55 The local business journal described the resolutions as being intended to “gently steer” the city away from tar sands oil.56
This leads to two points. First, the legal system will not save us. It’s certainly an important battleground, but alone it’s likely to be a largely defensive battleground. Second, in the midst of a mass extinction event, “gently steering” isn’t good enough.
Environmentalists have often championed two other economic approaches to stopping climate change. The first is called “cap and trade,” and the second is a carbon tax. Both approaches impose costs on companies for releasing greenhouse gas emissions, but in different ways.
Cap-and-trade laws impose a gradually declining upper limit—a cap—on the allowable rate of carbon emissions from a given industry or nation as a whole, then give “credits” based on how much a given entity is polluting at the beginning of the program. Moving forward, these corporations and other large polluters can buy and sell these “pollution credits” among themselves. The idea is that the free market will determine the appropriate “cost” of pollution, creating an economic incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The first problem with this is pollution outsourcing. Absent other changes, introducing these costs for polluting industries may simply cause businesses to move to more lenient jurisdictions. This dovetails with the second problem, carbon-laundering. Consider, for example, the Volkswagen scandal a few years ago involving covering up the true emissions from their cars. Hell, consider the bogus accounting that characterizes biomass and dams. This is undoubtedly taking place in many other businesses, and a cap-and-trade model would further incentivize this behavior.
The carbon tax method is simpler. It establishes a fixed tax on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions and requires polluters to pay for what they emit. That money is then often earmarked for “climate-related” spending (usually subsidies for industrial technologies like electric cars, wind, and solar, none of which of course help the planet) or used to reduce taxes on individuals. Both the pollution outsourcing problem and the carbon laundering problem apply here as well, for the same reasons and by the same mechanisms as under cap and trade.
Some regions have already put in place carbon tax or cap-and-trade schemes. How have these projects worked? The European Union (which, ironically, evolved from an organization called the “European Coal and Steel Community”) runs the largest cap-and-trade system in the world. These regulations have, according to their own calculations, reduced total EU greenhouse gas emissions by about 2.25 percent from 2013 to 2015.57 But even these underwhelming reductions are questionable. For example, Facebook announced plans in January 2017 to open a major new data center in Denmark, where data centers consume about 15 percent of the national electricity supply. Facebook promoted the new project as being “powered by 100 percent clean and renewable energy.” But this is a lie; as one article notes, “[the data center will] actually be substantially boosting the country’s carbon output. Under the European Union’s carbon emissions quota system, the server-powered increase in Denmark’s emissions is supposed to be balanced by reductions in other countries’ emissions. But that won’t happen.... Peter Birch Sørensen, chair of the Danish government’s Climate Council, explains, ‘There is still a huge surplus of allowances, so increased emissions from Denmark will not cause lower emissions from other EU countries.’”
The market is flooded with allowances, making the whole system worthless.
Overall, efforts to slow global warming via economic means aren’t working. And one September 2015 analysis predicted that even fully meeting the existing emissions reductions targets would be inadequate—leading, in fact, to “catastrophic” warming.58 And here’s a truth most bright greens won’t acknowledge: one reason these efforts aren’t working is that they aren’t disrupting the overall business model of industrial capitalism.
After the Paris Climate Accord was reached in late 2015, a lobbyist representing the largest industries in Britain called it “an exciting opportunity for business.” Some analysts predict that if carbon prices become too high for the market to bear, regulators may be pressured into releasing more “emissions credits,” driving down the price and making the whole system, again, essentially worthless in terms of stopping carbon emissions.
Even anti-capitalists seem mostly unwilling to question industrialism. For the most part, they don’t even question continued dependence on fossil fuels. Oil financed the socialist governments of Gaddafi and Chavez, and Norway, for that matter. In most socialist nations, as well as capitalist ones, neither indigenous sovereignty nor the health of the land have been allowed to stand in the way of industrialization.
When anti-capitalists do oppose fossil fuels, “green energy” is a mainstay of their political platforms—especially in rich nations. There are only a few who acknowledge green technology’s problems, and even fewer who oppose economic growth.
Degrowth socialists are one example of this sort of rare intellectual. The idea of “degrowth” as a serious economic approach has existed since at least the 1970s, when the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen proposed it. After years of dormancy, these ideas surfaced again in 2001 and began to gain credence among French activists. The degrowth model calls for a planned economic contraction, mainly in rich nations, to a steady-state sustainable way of life.
It’s a saner proposal than the ideas put forth by the likes of Mark Z. Jacobson, but even within socialist thought, it’s a fringe idea.
Danny Chivers, an activist from the U.K., is another example of a leftist activist grappling with the impacts of green technology. Writing in New Internationalist, Chivers asks: “How much material would we need to transition to a 100-percent renewable world? ... It’s irresponsible to advocate a renewably powered planet without being open and honest about what the real-world impacts of such a transition might be.”
To answer his question, Chivers makes a number of calculations. To create a renewable electricity generation infrastructure, he estimates that 160 million metric tonnes59 of aluminum, 110 million tonnes of copper, nearly 3 billion of iron, and 840 million tonnes of cement would be needed. Those are net material figures, so total extraction before refining would be more like 50 billion tonnes. Another 10 billion tonnes of extraction would be required for passive solar and other needs, and electric vehicle production would add another 20 billion metric tonnes of raw material demand. In total, Chivers’s ballpark calculations are that about 80 billion metric tonnes of extraction would be required for this transition.
In Chivers’s view, this economic transition could prevent around 1.8 trillion metric tons of fossil fuel extraction. When that’s the comparison, it sounds like a great deal. But there are a number of problems with these calculations. First, the idea that 9 billion people can sustainably live “an eco-efficient version of the modern lifestyle” is nuts. Most human ecologists believe a population an order of magnitude lower than that still might be unsustainable. Second, Chivers makes a number of false assumptions about recycling—for example, the idea that 100 percent materials reclamation is possible (let alone desirable). The biggest problem with his vision, however, is that it presupposes governments being willing to cooperate in reducing the standard of living in rich nations and transitioning away from a capitalist model. That’s not happening voluntarily in the real world, at least not on a meaningful timeline. Whatever movement we’re seeing toward “renewable” energy is driven mostly by desires for profit and new sources of energy, not a real (or, for that matter, bogus) commitment to scaling down our current way of life. As we’ve learned, new energy sources are mostly stacked on top of old rather than replacing them.
At the end of his article, Chivers writes that mining “is one of the most notoriously destructive, poisonous and corrupt industries in the world,” and notes “another serious issue here. This is one of those moments where it’s easy to slip accidentally into a colonialist mindset, when referring casually to ‘reserves’ of minerals ‘available’ to the world. Whether or not those materials are dug out of the ground should not be a decision for someone like me, a white guy typing on a computer in Europe; it should be up to the communities that live in the area concerned and would be affected by the extraction.” He concludes, “Will it be possible to obtain enough lithium for an electrified world without trampling over the rights of local communities? If not, then we’ll need to find a different path to our renewably powered future.”60
The moral calculus here is straightforward. Calling for 80 billion metric tons of extraction and locking in society to a future requiring an ongoing mining infrastructure to maintain the resulting machines is an atrocity of its own. Regardless of whether local communities give their permission for extraction to take place, destroying the land is a crime. If we democratically decide to destroy the planet, is it somehow a better decision? Is it worth laying waste to a certain landbase if it will provide one species—ours—with an “eco-efficient version of the modern lifestyle?” On such calculations are the lives of entire species, entire watersheds, entire mountain ranges balanced.
A recent report from the United Nations Environment Program states that “consumption of earth’s natural resources has more than tripled in 40 years.”61 The report looks at “primary resources:” metals, fossil fuels, forests, grains, fish, and so on. In 1970, primary extraction accounted for 22 billion tons of material per year. By 2010, it was 70 billion tons per year and by 2019 had reached 92 billion tons.62 By 2050, the rate is forecast to grow to 180 billion tons. That represents a staggering increase in the speed of the destruction of the planet. According to the report, the solution is to “significantly improve resource efficiency” and “decouple economic growth ... from ever-increasing use of natural resources.”63
Even if this decoupling were possible, which of course it’s not, it’s not happening. The latest report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, called the Annual Energy Outlook, shows this. It models the energy future of the United States through 2050. Even with a wide range of assumptions about economic growth and energy prices, “energy consumption varies minimally” across their range of projections, and greenhouse gas emissions look unlikely to decline significantly.64
Decoupling economic growth from “natural resource consumption”—the destruction of the planet—isn’t possible, and the sooner we face that, the better. A 2018 analysis compared the GDP of every nation in the world to annual corporate revenues, and from the list calculated the largest economies in the world. Of the top 100, 69 were corporations.65 Walmart is currently the biggest corporation on the planet. Next is State Grid, the government-owned electric utility in China. Five of the 20 largest corporations are oil and gas conglomerates. Four more are car manufacturers. Two are tech giants. Several are banks. And one (Glencore) is a commodities trader, specializing in zinc, copper, grain, and oil.66 Each of these businesses makes its fortune by either directly destroying the planet through extraction and “development,” or by facilitating these processes. “Decoupling” these businesses from the destruction of the planet would mean dismantling them whole.
The best way to estimate how much greenhouse gases are being released by a nation or a corporation is to use GDP as a proxy. Some, however, believe this linkage between GDP and greenhouse gas emissions is changing. The relevant term is “carbon intensity,” which is a measure of the amount of greenhouse gases released per unit of economic activity. Late 2015 brought headlines such as “Global emissions to fall for first time during a period of economic growth.”67 The authors of the study explained that this delinkage was likely to be temporary. And indeed, it was. A March 2016 news release from NOAA showed that carbon levels jumped by their highest amount ever in 2015. The head researcher said that “carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years.”68 A paper in Nature Geoscience stated that carbon emissions were at their highest level not only in history, but in the past 66 million years.69
In 2018, carbon emissions climbed by 2 percent, faster than any year since 2011.70 And for 2019, carbon emissions hit an all-time high, smashing the previous record of 2018.71
There was no decline and there was no delinking.
Remember that it’s possible to have a carbon-neutral civilization and still destroy the planet. Remember this as if your life depends on it, because it does. Global warming plays a role in only a small percentage of the two hundred species driven extinct every day. Salmon were nearly exterminated before climate change became significant. So were bison. So were old-growth forests and ancient grasslands and so many rivers. Fossil fuel is an accelerant, but it’s not the reason. The catastrophe is civilization itself.
The roll is so long and so grim. The Syrian elephant was hunted to death for its ivory before 100 bce. The Roman Empire sent the Atlas bear into decline, capturing them by the thousands so their deaths could be enjoyed in the Coliseum. The Mauritius blue pigeon was rare by 1755 and extinct by the 1830s when its island was deforested; its scientific name, Columba nitidissima, means “most brilliant pigeon” for its metallic blue feathers, and three taxidermic specimens are all that remain. The casualty list of species taken with the Mauritius blue pigeon is harrowing: an owl, a parrot, a duck, a heron, two giant tortoises, a small flying fox—the list goes on, an utterly senseless requiem. The Japanese Hokkaido white wolf was exterminated in 1889, killed en masse with strychnine, which is “an atrocious death.”72 It wasn’t always thus. The indigenous Ainu called the wolf Horkew Kamuy, or “howling god.” Many Ainu believe the wolves were the descendants of a goddess who mated with a wolf, and their culture requires respect and care for wolves. In case it needs saying, you care for your family; you don’t torture them to death.
The choice before us is stark. We can try to find more fuel sources to devour the last of the living, or we can fight to save our wild and blessed kin.
1 Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911), 7.
2 Earth at Risk press release. Fertile Ground Institute for Social and Environmental Justice, 2014.
3 Ross Koningstein and David Fork, “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?” IEEE Spectrum, November 18, 2014.
4 James Fenton, “EVs Will Save the World (With Help From Energy Efficiency & Renewables),” Clean Technica, November 28, 2016.
5 Kristen Brown, “Save Energy, Save the World,” Envirobites, October 2, 2019.
6 “Save the World by Saving Energy in Your Home,” Community Infographics, visually by Rock Content.
7 Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials,” Energy Policy 39, no. 2011 (December 2010): 1154–1169.
8 Drew DeSilver, “As American homes get bigger, energy efficiency gains are wiped out,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2015.
9 William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (London: Macmillan & Co., 1866), 14.
10 Kris De Decker, “The mechanical transmission of power: endless rope drives,” Low Tech Magazine, March 2013.
11 Jordan Wirfs-Brock, “Lost in transmission: how much electricity disappears between a power plant and your plug?” Inside Energy, November 6, 2015. Site visited 07/26/2016.
12 Many bright greens pretend the Jevons Paradox is bunk, but their refutations rely on vast oversimplifications—essentially looking at small parts of the global economy in isolation. By separating a single minor portion of the global economy (such as air conditioners) for their analysis, they distort the focus of the Jevons Paradox. In the 1860s, coal was core to the British economy. In an increasingly globalized, integrated world, the Jevons Paradox can’t be applied in isolation. Its lessons are systemic. Yes; in isolation, energy efficiency can lead to lower proximal energy use. But there is no isolation in today’s economy.
13 Melanie Sevcenko, “Pot is power hungry: why the marijuana industry’s energy footprint is growing,” The Guardian, February 27, 2016.
14 With legalization, the wholesale price has dropped dramatically, but the point remains.
15 Jennifer Chu, “Study: Technological progress alone won’t stem resource use: Researchers find no evidence of an overall reduction in the world’s consumption of materials,” MIT News, January 19, 2017.
16 Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1911).
17 Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Penguin, 2015).
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 “Tungsten mining and beneficiation,” International Tungsten Industry Association, 2011.
23 Chuan-ping Liu et al., “Arsenic contamination and potential health risk implications at an abandoned tungsten mine, southern China,” Environmental Pollution 158, no. 3 (March 2010): 820–826.
24 Wenjie Lin et al., “Heavy metal contamination and environmental concerns on orchard at abandoned tungsten mine, southern China,” Applied Mechanics and Materials, vols. 295–298 (2013), 1609–1614.
25 Hongguang Cheng et al., “Thallium, arsenic, and mercury contamination of soil near the World’s largest and longest-operating tungsten mine,” Polish Journal of Environmental Studies 22, no. 1 (2013), 301–305.
26 Myung Chae Jung and Iain Thornton, “Heavy metal contamination in soils and plants around a copper-tungsten mine in South Korea,” Environmental Geochemistry and Health (1994) 16:92.
27 “Surprising new health and environmental concerns about tungsten,” ScienceDaily, January 19, 2009.
28 Charles Patrick Davis, “Mercury Poisoning,” eMedicineHealth, December 17, 2015.
29 Michael Graham Richard, “What about mercury from compact fluorescents?” Treehugger, June 17, 2005.
30 “LED Lighting,” U.S. Department of Energy.
31 Lloyd Alter, “Cree revamps entire LED line of better bulbs,” Treehugger, September 13, 2016.
32 “Light-Emitting Diode (LED),” How Products Are Made, vol. 1, Madehow.com.
33 Cécile Bontron, “Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages,” The Guardian, August 7, 2012.
34 “Yttrium, Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards,” National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
35 Seong-Rin Lim et al., “Potential environmental impacts of light-emitting diodes (LEDs): metallic resources, toxicity, and hazardous waste classification,” Environmental Science and Technology, 2011, 45, 1, 320–327, December 7, 2010.
36 Akshat Rathi, “The revolutionary technology pushing Sweden toward the seemingly impossible goal of zero emissions,” Quartz, June 21, 2017.
37 Lloyd Alter, “Cree revamps entire LED line of better bulbs,” Treehugger, September 13, 2016.
38 “AMA adopts community guidance to reduce the harmful human and environmental effects of high intensity street lighting,” American Medical Association,” June 14, 2016.
39 George Dvorsky, “The Switch to Outdoor LED Lighting Has Completely Backfired,” Gizmodo, November 22, 2017.
40 Christopher Mims, “Forget LED bulbs—the future of interior lighting is lasers,” Quartz, November 13, 2013.
41 Ben Geman, “EPA: Greenhouse gas emissions fell during recession,” The Hill, February 23, 2011.
42 “The economy booms, the trees vanish,” The Economist, May 19, 2005.
43 “China, People’s Republic of: Electricity and Heat for 2004,” International Energy Agency.
44 “Countries and Regions,” Office of the United States Trade Representative.
45 Karl Lester M. Yap, “Southeast Asia burns up the ranks of global polluters,” Bloomberg, January 13, 2016.
46 “World carbon dioxide emissions from 2009 to 2019, by region (in million metric tons of carbon dioxide),” Statista Research & Analysis, 2020.
47 Brad Plumer, “You’ve Heard of Outsourced Jobs, But Outsourced Pollution? It’s Real, and Tough to Tally Up,” New York Times, September 4, 2018.
48 Bruce Watson, “Cutting greenhouse gas emissions won’t slow global economic growth – report,” The Guardian, September 26, 2015.
49 Richard York, op. cit.
50 Even if renewable energy displaced fossil fuels at a one-to-one ratio, something that is possible through government restrictions, the killing of the planet would still not be stopped.
51 Richard Heinberg, “Our Renewable Future: Introduction,” Museletter #289, June 2016.
52 “Record increase renewables in Europe, but emissions stay level,” Energy Post, January 29, 2016.
53 Jane Anne Morris, “Help! I’ve Been Colonized and I Can’t Get Up,” Rachel’s Newsletter.
54 With gratitude to Paul Cienfuegos and Thomas Linzey.
55 “Bellingham Municipal Code 2010–18 and 2010–19.”
56 Ryan Wynne, “City of Bellingham steers away from tar sands oil,” Bellingham Business Journal, June 9, 2010.
57 “The EU Emissions Trading System,” European Commission Climate Action, July 22, 2016.
58 Brian Merchant, “Even if every nation meets its pledge to fight climate change, we’re still fried,” Vice, September 28, 2015.
59 A metric tonne equals 1,000 kilograms; a North American ton equals approximately 2,000 pounds or 907 kilos.
60 Danny Chivers, “COPPRO: ‘The stuff problem,’” New Internationalist, September 15, 2015.
61 Dominique Mosbergen, “Our consumption of Earth’s natural resources has more than tripled in 40 years,” Huffington Post, August 2, 2016.
62 “Global Resources Outlook 2019,” United Nations Environment Programme, 2019.
63 “Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity,” United Nations Environment Programme, International Resource Panel, July 2016.
64 Bobby Magill, “U.S. on track to become net energy exporter by 2026,” Climate Central, January 5, 2017.
65 Nicholas Freudenberg, “The 100 largest governments and corporations by revenue,” Corporations and Health, August 27, 2015.
66 “Global 500,” Fortune, 2016.
67 Adam Vaughan, “Global emissions to fall for first time during a period of economic growth,” The Guardian, December 7, 2015.
68 “Record annual increase of carbon dioxide observed at Mauna Loa for 2015,” NOAA Climate Research, March 9, 2016.
69 “Climate: carbon emissions highest in 66 million years,” Al Jazeera, March 2016.
70 Jillian Ambrose, “Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011,” The Guardian, June 11, 2019.
71 Chelsea Harvey and Nathanial Gronewold, “CO2 Emissions Will Break Another Record in 2019,” Scientific American, December 4, 2019.
72 Gustav Schenk, The Book of Poisons (New York: Rhinehart & Company, 1955).