Hint: All that material is actually hiding in plain sight
If you are trying to prove something is true and certain facts get in the
way, it's almost always useful to exclude them. This is apparently what
technology cheerleader Andrew McAfee has done in his recent book More
from Less, which claims that advanced economies have been
dematerializing for something like the last 40 years. Simply put, those
economies are producing more output with little or no increase in physical
resources.
There's just one little problem as anthropologist Jason Hickel points out
in his
review of More from Less: McAfee forgot to count the
physical resources used in making products imported from other countries
by all those advanced economies. McAfee only counts those resources
extracted within the boundaries of the advanced countries.
I am highlighting Hickel's piece not so much as a book review. There are
dozens of books making similar ridiculous claims that are contradicted by
the facts. I am highlighting the piece because Hickel provides perhaps the
clearest, most concise refutation of the nonsense that McAfee and others
like him are peddling.
Let me touch on the high points though I encourage you to read the full
article:
- "There has been zero dematerialization. No green growth. It was all an
illusion of accounting."
- Global resource use has actually been accelerating faster than growth
in the global economy. We are becoming more resource-intensive, not
less.
- Ecologists believe human societies are 90 percent over any sustainable
rate of resource consumption.
- The economy can't become infinitely more efficient. There are limits
on how much efficiency can be taken out of any process as each increment
of efficiency in resource use is more costly to implement.
- Increases in efficiency don't reduce resource use in most cases
anyway. They paradoxically increase it as prices decline for goods
affected by the efficiencies and the goods therefore become affordable to more
people who increase the demand. This is often referred to as the Jevons
Paradox.
- "The only fail-safe strategy [to avoid economic collapse] is to impose
legally binding caps on resource use and gradually ratchet it back down
to safe levels." [The caps are necessary because of the aforementioned
Jevons Paradox.]
- Human well-being beyond a certain level of consumption does not rise
linearly with more consumption. In some cases economies with
significantly lower per-capita wealth than the United States have higher
measures of well-being such as life expectancy.
- These higher measures have been achieved in part by redistributing
existing wealth in the form of universal health care, low-cost or free
education, and other public investments in the population.
I have written about various related issues in previous pieces including
The
unbearable lightness of information; Human
well-being, economic growth and so-called decoupling; The
Coal Question Revisited; and Why
Energy Efficiency Won't Matter Without Energy Caps among others. My
point in listing these pieces which date all the way back to 2008 is that
the facts and conclusions that Hickel relies on have been known for some
time. In fact, the Jevons Paradox was formulated in 1865 by economist
William Stanley Jevons in his booklet entitled The
Coal Question. The book suggested that coal supplies in
Great Britain would not last hundreds of years as was widely believed, but
would run out much more quickly as exponential growth in their use
continued. Jevons
turned out to be right. These ideas are nothing new...except
perhaps to McAfee who seems unaware of them.
As you might expect, McAfee's soothing account of a future of continuing
economic growth with less and less environmental impact sits well with the
world's ruling elite. Hickel mentions that More from Less fans
include "the writer Steven Pinker, European Central Bank President
Christine Lagarde, and the economist Larry Summers, plus CEOs, bankers,
and a number of Silicon Valley celebrities." None of those on the list
should be surprising. They have either provided a very sunny, almost Panglossian
view of our contemporary society (Pinker) or they will benefit from
a narrative that does not force them to make hard choices or share their
power.
It turns out that the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't sleight of hand that invokes the
dematerialization idea isn't very clever at all. It only requires that you
ignore the plain facts, accept faulty arguments, and sit back and let the
tech overlords and ruling elite make all the decisions for you. The fact
that indicators for such major environmental problems as climate change,
deforestation, soil depletion, water depletion, toxic pollution of our
land, air and water have continued to get worse and worse is not supposed
to bother you. Any minute now those problems will all start going away as
we move into the bright, light dematerialized future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider, and many other places. He
is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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