Lovers of technology tend to love quantitative analysis. But when it comes to the accounting of Earth’s biocapacity and our ecological footprint, these same technophiles are often wont to ignore simple arithmetic. While increasingly rigorous and reliable, the
“overshoot” accounting they dismiss does include some difficult-to-measure variables. It will always be imperfect.
But for many nearsighted techno-optimists, this is beside the point. They argue that modern scientists have engineered such technological marvels that we should only expect more, with increasingly miraculous potential. These evangelists of innovation contend that we need not fret. They say the overshoot solution is “just around the corner,” firmly in the hands of the world’s inventors and engineers.
The Alluring Promise of Technology
Technological breakthroughs have increased our resource-use efficiency. Over the last half-century, U.S. energy productivity—or economic output per unit of energy—has increased by about 50 percent. In the United States, despite rapidly increasing digital processing demands, innovations had—until the dawn of AI-cryptocurrency grid-busting mania—kept associated energy demand in check.
Despite markedly greater efficiency in energy use, most developed nations still use more energy with each passing year. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Energy Institute, Our World in Data; CC BY 4.0. Click on the image to enlarge.
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Many societies have figured out ingenious ways to recycle, re-use, and reduce, shrinking the ecological footprint of key production processes. A majority of the world’s steel, for example, is now a product of recycling rather than mining new ore. Almost a third of the world’s tungsten demand is met with recycling. Much is manufactured today with less waste and less throughput than before.
Further “green” innovations appear close at hand. More streamlined nuclear energy production (not without safety concerns) or wider deployment of geothermal energy may lessen our fossil fuel dependence. Solar energy—still comparatively costly and unreliable as a base fuel for energy systems—has become much more practical at the residential level than once imagined. Prospective battery-storage improvements promise greater feasibility for all intermittent energy sources.
Tradeoffs and Limits
If history is any indicator, however, these breakthroughs come with significant tradeoffs. Nuclear energy will likely remain relatively costly and risky. Intermittent availability will always limit the broad usefulness of solar power. Energy returned on energy invested (EROI) is declining rapidly for fossil fuels, and no substitute, renewable or not, appears likely to revive the old, higher EROI.
The agricultural Green Revolution, full of technological marvels, helped us feed more citizens at a lower cost overall. It offered promises of abundant food supplies for a growing population. But productivity increases required a massive infusion of fertilizer and water, which poisoned the Earth and depleted critical freshwater supplies. Regrettably, Green Revolution innovations have even compromised inexpensive oceanic food sources, on which much of the world still depends.
Norman Borlaug, whose critical work in high-yield agriculture sparked the Green Revolution, reminded us just prior to his death in 2009 that the revolution was a humanitarian emergency response. As such, it came with difficult-to-avoid compromises. Its returns were limited and would diminish rapidly if population pressure were left unaddressed. Indeed, by the time of Borlaug’s death, the revolution’s returns were already diminishing noticeably.
In a similar vein, metastasizing cryptocurrency and AI use have overwhelmed computer chip processing efficiencies.
Whether their gains are offset by population pressure, reinvestment of financial savings, Jevons Paradox, or the mindless GDP bulldozer, new technologies alone promise little relief from overshoot.
It’s no surprise, then, that our ecological footprint continues to overshoot Earth’s biocapacity, despite the cavalcade of technological wonders. Against a rising population and the inefficiency of our conventional trickle-down economics, the footprint-biocapacity reckoning remains untenable. Nor has our ballooning footprint resulted in substantial progress against global poverty outside of South and East Asia.
If technophiles can add and subtract, they must realize that without changed population and wealth-distribution dynamics, technological innovation can do little to deliver sustainable, broadly shared prosperity.
A Steady-State Riddle
Humanity faces an insurmountable predicament and an important riddle. In both cases, the potential of technology as a solution is overstated. Our predicament? The cheap hydrocarbon basis of modern prosperity is fading away. At our current economic scale, or anything close to it, fossil fuels cannot continue to function as the heart of a healthy economy. There may simply be no way to reconcile our need for cheap energy, our current population, and widespread well-being.
In 1926, Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon coined the term homeostasis, which described life processes that varied but remained relatively constant. Source: Welcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Click on the image to enlarge.
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The vexing riddle stems from the inevitable reversal of economic growth. How can the world welcome the fertility transition—already in motion—and manage economic activities so that this transition generates prosperity rather than deprivation? Conventional efforts to redistribute wealth, built mostly on meager “safety nets,” are not up to the task. Without better sharing of the income and leisure from our immense productivity, hoarding and speculation will make this riddle impossible to solve.
There may be an optimal homeostasis on the horizon, but we will not reach it with technology alone or with unregulated market forces. We can reach it with better economic distribution and less population pressure.
The Delusion and Its Origins: Economic Theory and Practice
Few are willing to recognize our predicament or consider the factors that play into the end-of-growth riddle. Most ignore planetary boundaries and rising inequality, imagining that technological innovation will always provide an escape hatch. From what odd source does this willful delusion originate?
On one level, it is a logical extension of popular neoclassical equilibrium economics. This brand of economics consists of exotic and enticing mathematical expressions built on imaginary scaffolding. As defined in Entropy Economics, equilibrium theory states that we (in developed nations) live in the best possible world, and that we can keep it so long as we do little to disturb it. In this world, scientific breakthroughs and the free-market sorting of their relative merits combine to elicit, without fail, an optimum status quo, including a GDP growth rate typical of the late 20th century.
Like all other fusion-reactor dream machines, this one—at the Lawrence Livermore Lab—was eventually abandoned. Source: Nuclear Fusion Reactor, CC BY 2.0.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Yet, time and again, economies based on this approach threaten sustainability and, more and more, prosperity. With little need to recognize the ecological foundation of the economy, equilibrium-theory followers also tend to be suckers for wasteful and unsettling investment bubbles. From Florida real estate in the 1920s to cold-fusion dreams and AI flackery today, these Ponzi schemes can keep reality at bay long enough to pump, profit, and dump. And then it’s on to the next speculative adventure.
As the Dutch proved with the 17th-century “tulip mania” bubble, frenzied speculation is not limited to techno-dreams. The tech world, nevertheless, tends to generate speculation, with ease and with a large ecological footprint. If your paradigm is economic theory that ignores ecological reality, it is difficult to avoid this recurring brand of unreality, especially when the allure of short-term personal gain is so palpable. “Get the machine that goes ‘ping!’” our favorite Monty Python actors once reminded us.
The Delusion and Its Origins: Human Psychology
Basic human psychology also contributes to groundless techno-optimism. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman illustrated, we conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort. Efficiency gains from some technologies are easy to observe. Our ecological footprint is diffuse and not so easy to see or feel. We’re reluctant to deduce the particular from the general (my lifestyle contributes to ecological overshoot). But we’re quite willing to infer the general from the particular (this technology helps me, so it must be good for the world).
As Daniel Kahneman illustrated, common “heuristics,” our ingrained “rules of thumb,” often divorce us from reality. Source: Alfred Kiefer, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Kahneman also discovered a widespread prejudice when people sized up a new and bracing technology. They consistently rated it as offering exaggerated benefits and understated its perils. This prejudice makes it difficult to grasp what Robert Gordon illustrated in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: No technological innovation of the last century has advanced productivity and efficiency as much as the 1920s electric-power revolution. Diminishing returns to capital and to technological advance are baked into modernity, but most of us never recognize this.
Kahneman also illustrated a tendency with important implications for economic de-growth: Negotiations over a shrinking pie produce outsized psychological discomfort. Our perverted and unrealistic conception of optimal business-firm practices serves as an additional blind spot. Based on a purposeful mischaracterization of actual corporate behavior and case law, the prevailing business ethos supplants optimum profits with maximum profits. Compelling a chase for ever-rising profitability, “the firm” finds it difficult to countenance anything but perpetual growth. Seeking more becomes a principled practice, underwritten most effectively by techno-fantasies.
Humans are primed to resist the discord they associate with resource limits. When we bump up against limits, smart scientists and engineers (and their cheerleaders) are positioned to act as “white knights,” riding to the rescue.
If tech experts promise some new form of the productivity miracles they have occasionally delivered, few question their ability to do so. Neither the probability of success nor the likelihood of diminishing returns is carefully considered. Dreams about “absolute decoupling” of economic growth from resource use are only the most fantastic manifestation of this compelling evasion.
As a result, we see little need to shrink our pie (and share it more generously). We ignore the implications of scarcity and expensive energy. And since our brains evolved to punish meanness more readily than reward generosity, this too encourages habitual blindness. We don’t recognize the problem, or consider changes to address it, until it reflects behavior mean enough to unsettle us. And we characterize generosity, a foundational principle of all major religions and a key component of sound economic policy, as a sign of weakness or naiveté.
Seeing Through a Glass Less Darkly
For these reasons, we should neither be surprised nor swayed by the blind faith and willful delusions of technophiles and their free-market economist friends. Technology will continue to mesmerize, and it will bring small and welcome efficiencies. But it will also remain subject—in the face of mounting resource scarcity–to diminishing returns.
The second law of thermodynamics sheds light on the limits to the resource-use efficiency we can achieve via technology. It is the law of entropy: In all living systems, resources dissipate. On a lightly populated planet with a biocapacity greater than the population’s ecological footprint, we could thrive despite entropy, as the sun continuously adds energy to the system. But on a crowded planet, entropy cannot be ignored. Rising scarcity and pollution outflank innovation at every turn.
The projected 2026 Earth Overshoot Day, on which we use up that year’s allocation of resource and waste-absorption biocapacity, is June 5. Source: Global Footprint Network. Click on the image to enlarge.
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Despite all the innovations and efficiencies introduced over the last half-century, our global ecological footprint has steadily outpaced our planet’s biocapacity. This overshoot manifested itself for the first time a little over fifty years ago and has grown steadily. The only exceptions have occurred during recessions (most recently in 2007-08) or because of shocks like the COVID pandemic.
But brutal deprivation cannot be our only spur to action. Without conscious planning and the explicit recognition of planetary boundaries, a prosperous homeostasis may stray increasingly out of reach. Placing continued faith in a magic technological rescue will keep it there. Rising numbers of AI propagandists are dragging us into this familiar corner. They are encouraging business-as-usual economic policy and blinding us to real solutions—not so much connected to technology. Their delusion will become more and more problematic.
We do have viable alternatives. We can transcend our ingrained selfishness and misplaced pro-natalist anxiety. We’re unlikely to overcome these obstacles, however, if we remain dazzled by the technological world. As Canadian rock band The Guess Who famously protested in a recording released only a couple of weeks before the first Earth Day, “Colored lights can hypnotize; sparkle someone else’s eyes.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Shreve is a Senior Economist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) specializing in the development of the Steady State Economy Act. He also serves on the Keep our Counties Great national team. A former professor of economic history at the University of Virginia, David earned a PhD at Louisiana State University. A specialist in national, state, and local economic policy and 20th century U.S. political history, he also served as a consultant to the Center for Survey Research at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Governors Association, and as a budget analyst for the Louisiana legislature. David was a director on the Albemarle County (VA) Economic Development Authority, and has served on numerous non-profit boards of directors, including Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population. He is the author of many publications on economic history, economic theory, presidential history, and tax policy, including the forthcoming books, American Promise: Lyndon Johnson and the Keynesian Revolution, and An Idealized State Tax Structure: Modeling for Equity, Adequacy, and Widely Shared Prosperity.
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