The conversation about energy and population continues at Dot Earth. Here is my latest post there:
Dear Steven,
Thank you for your challenging assignment (post #151) to think about growth vs. development. I agree with your association of growth with bigger and development with better. Ed Abbey put it this way: "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
I also look at growth as the ideology of the predator class. If you are a wolf you will favor unrestrained growth of the sheep. If you are a master you will bank on the proliferation of your slaves. Capitalism justifies the growth ideology in Ponzi scheme terms: if the growth is great enough, a little of it will trickle down to everyone.
So, we understand now that infinite growth on a finite planet is madness. What then, is the alternative? What is development and can it substitute as an economic driver for physical growth?
We already see that a lot of what constitutes GNP is not growth in any beneficial sense. The example of the Exxon Valdez oil spill is a good one. Exxon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a "clean-up" of Prince William Sound. A lot of idled fishermen were employed and a lot of filthy crude was pushed around, but nothing was produced and nothing was even really cleaned up, yet those dollars all counted toward the Gross National Product that year.
Given that "growth" doesn't always produce anything useful, what would constitute "development?" I used the term "de-development" as a prescription for the "over-developed" nations like the US. But perhaps "re-development" is more inline with our needs. For instance, heating, cooling and powering 100 million US residences accounts for 20 percent of our energy use. Our houses are less efficient than they were 40 years ago. Re-development would retrofit these houses with better insulation and energy efficient appliances. This would put a lot of people to work. The Obama administration is counting on it.
But we have to go a lot further down the re-development path than that. We need to re-localize and build community at the neighborhood scale because village level organization of food and energy production is the level at which the best efficiencies can be had. For example, a small combined heat and power system could provide a city block of houses with heating, hot water and backup electricity on a couple hundred pounds of wood chips a day. Central power plants would just waste the heat. And electricity generated right at home has no transmission cost.
Another opportunity to re-develop America into networked neighborhood virtual villages is the current foreclosure epidemic. About 15 percent of housing stands vacant now. Neighborhood associations should get ownership of some of those houses so they can be turned into community centers and communal kitchens. Neighborhoods that grow some of their own fresh vegetables and dedicate space to preparation and sharing of home-cooked whole foods will produce healthier people.
The eco-village is the green development path that I hope that both rich and poor worlds can converge upon. Perhaps that seems wildly unrealistic, but what if we stopped assuming that population was going to reach 9 billion by 2050? What if we assumed instead that population is going to peak at 7 billion in the next few years and drop back down to 6 billion or less by 2050? We should not treat growth as inevitable. People in the US are already starting to choose a different "small is beautiful" path. Here is one small but telling example: watching videos on cell phones is now just as "cool" as watching them on giant energy hog plasma screens.
By 2050 we need to provide 5 billion people each with a cell phone, access to a computer and the electricity to run it, good quality food, water, health care and shelter, along with some leisure to enjoy life. To me, that is the goal we are aiming for, not unlimited energy and growth.
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