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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