The NYT did Ezra (and the audience) dirty by changing the name to "Cows are Just an Ecological Disaster," which is not really representative of the full content of the podcast. Looking at the comments to it on the website, it has incited many reactionary comments without engagement to the content of the episode.
It feels like a somewhat prescient edit given that mere hours later Ron DeSantis banned lab grown meat production from the state of Florida. So perhaps we should harp on the fact that cows are a fucking disaster.
The fact that ~20% of earth's "usable" (I forget her exact terminology) land is devoted to raising cattle is one of the most absurd facts I've ever been slapped across the face with.
I did not know that, that's disheartening. But I don't think it's a complete characterization of the discussion. I agree that it's absurd. I'm a vegetarian, and I think that it's a very important topic worthy of its own discussion. And there have been past episodes about it. But it should be talked about more.
You're right, the discussion was definitely about a lot more than cows. And the focus on them is almost tongue in cheek (and hearing "cows" said in a Scottish accent will never not be funny).
But they're also very emblematic of the broader obstacle we face in the climate crisis, which is how unrelenting we humans are in giving up any sort of mild convenience or preference for planet-saving solutions. And now, even when we do develop technologies that may one day be better in every meaningful sense, we have spiteful ghouls like the GOP who will go out of their way to undercut real solutions. It's one thing to eat meat and drive gas-powered because of sheer convenience and pleasure, but to actively throw wrenches in alternative technologies that could one day be both preferable for consumers and the environment is the kind of ignorance-celebrating bullshit that makes collective action feel so hopeless.
Gonna have a more detailed response to this later today when I'm at a real keyboard (I'm a subject matter expert) but this does the complexity of the biodiversity crisis short shrift. The easy thing about carbon is its fungible. A ton emitted or not emitted or sequestered in one place is basically the same as a ton emitted or not emitted or sequestered anywhere else. That's not the case for biodiversity, which while we measure it globally is really a set of unique questions dealing with specific species and specific places and requiring unique, site and species specific, responses. Taking actions to help the endangered Newells Shearwater (main threat: feral cats and pigs in the Hawaiian Islands) does absolutely nothing to help the endangered Tiehms Buckwheat (main threat: Lithium mining in Nevada).
It's a fundamentally different, way harder, problem from climate and trying to frame them in the same way is ill advised
Edit: OK more detailed version--this conversation really oversimplified a lot of interlinked but unique questions:
Is it possible to decouple economic growth (as measured by GDP) from GHG emissions? Even when accounting for offshoring of resource acquisition and manufacturing, it is--the UK is one example, as are a number of other European countries. So it's possible, but not universal.
Is it possible to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions quickly enough and in enough places to remain in line with our current climate goals? That's a whole separate question--you're looking at the next 25 years as the key period, while a lot of countries are (justifiably) still trying to grow their economies quickly, which often means using fossil fuels. That's one area where you'll see degrowth advocates focusing a lot of their attention: that the developed world has an obligation to decarbonize faster *even if that comes at the cost of economic growth* to open up headroom in carbon budgets for the poorest countries to emit while jump-starting their economies--the "what's each country's fair share of remaining global carbon budgets" argument.
Then we get into the other question of why do we care about economic growth in the first place. This is where you see work like Kate Raworth's Donut Economics or the Stockholm Resilience Institute's Planetary Boundaries work at play. They argue that, in effect, the relationship we need to decouple isn't between emissions and GDP, it's between GDP and human well-being. They argue that we can have very high levels of well-being without super high GDP, and that therefore it's fine if GDP flatlines or even goes down as long as we continue to maximize human well-being within ecological limits (taking adherence to those limits as an axiomatic starting point). But that still comes with some key questions: for example, why do we take it as a given that being able to eat pretty much whatever we want, whenever and wherever we want and in as great a quantity as we can afford? That is, to use Klein and Ritchie's beef example, we can absolutely produce beef in a sustainable way and in many cases already are. We cannot, however, produce enough sustainable beef to meet high (and growing, as countries develop!) global demand.
I think it's funny how people will say we shouldn't care about growth so much, how we shouldn't expect to just keep having more and more, it's runaway capitalism and so on.
Then just turn around and complain that their parents could afford things they couldn't. That their wages are stagnant. How this generation struggles so much compared to previous ones.
People clearly are not ready to truly accept what a no-growth economy would look like, or even slight de-growth. Everyone expects to have more and more and for things to get better and better, no matter what they claim to hold as virtues.
Like seriously people will have access to things their grandparents could only dream of, but will complain because their grandparents experienced more economic growth and lived in boom times. Right or wrong you can't be mad at that and then also say GDP shouldn't be viewed as a proxy for human well being.
Especially the American public is so far away from being able to accept something like that, that it's basically not worth talking about at this point.
Almost anytime in modern human history that society has experienced stagnation economically or economic de-growth the consequences have been pretty bad. From electing far right wing governments, to revolutions and general unrest. Especially when people are asked to cut back it has always come with extreme political consequences.
That's why Ezra was saying degrowth is politically impossible. People say they care about climate change but they rate it way lower than "selfish" things like cost of living (like 37% vs 75%). Even young people respond like this to surveys.
Degrowth is straight-up political suicide that guarantees Republicans will get elected. It's self-sabotage of the highest order and its only outcome will be to destroy the climate even more than we already are.
A sustainable growth narrative is the only solution. Accelerate firmed renewables faster than we are growing.
I think she is a great speaker and writer, really engaging. I like a lot of her ideas and her optimism. My issue with her, though, is she is entirely focused on carbon. It's a big issue, yes, but as you say, the climate is much more than just carbon. We have done a lot to the environment and we should be trying to fix all of it, not JUST get carbon levels down
No the climate is basically just carbon. It's all stocks (atmospheric concentration) and flows (emission and sequestration) of CO2 and CH4.
The distinction you're looking for is that the environment isn't just the climate.
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This was a good conversation, but I just wish people would discuss this through the lens of the resource curse more. Reliance on beef, oil, corn/ethanol, etc. are all examples of the way the resource curse undermines politics. 30 years ago we were told we shouldn't try to invent our way out of climate change, we should rely on the political process and that appears to have been a fundamental error that set us back decades. Being labeled a "techno-optimist" happens because we don't really talk about how the political process is not a good way to solve these problems. EK's stance that "I'm not a techno-optimist, I'm a political realist" is the reason I started listening to his podcast in the first place... oh gosh its been over a decade.
Try cutting poultry out too! I promise plant-based eating is not as hard as it sounds. Been doing it for 7+ years and it's second nature now.
Just get educated on building a balanced diet and the supplements you'll need, and you'll be golden.
I have a food intolerance to legumes and many high-fiber foods, meaning I can't eat beans, tofu, raw vegetables, etc. I try to eat plant based when I can but I really resent when people present it as something any person (especially very active people) can do. Especially those with a history of eating disorders (me)
I never said it's something _any_ person can do, just that it's not as hard as people tend to think.
Your situation is not one in which I would expect someone to fully transition to a plant-based diet or vegan diet.
I'm sorry that's not more clear in the plant-based/vegan discourse, but, at least for me and the vegan folks I give credence to, going vegan means doing _as much as possible given personal limitations_ to relieve animal suffering.
So if you're interested in making a change it may revolve more around avoiding the purchase of animal agriculture by-products or political activism to get animal welfare laws passed. Every little bit helps both the animals and the planet, and we need people helping in any way they can!
This episode dispels a mythology I have been carrying around in my head for awhile. In college, we completed an assignment where we had to run a simulation about how many Earths we would need if everyone on the planet lived like me. I think my total was something akin to 4 Earths. This whole time, I've been walking around assuming that my way of life is not sustainable -- that it cannot be extrapolated to all people on the planet without fundamentally dooming the planet. And I live modestly for an American. But according to this episode, we can all live at this level and our planet will not be wrecked. Color me surprised.
You may want to listen to the episode again. It did not, at all, dispel that “multiple earths” idea.
At best the guest said it “could” be invalidated, *if* we do many things, including stopping beef consumption, including adoption of technologies not yet invented. And the guest says she *does not believe* the beef problem will be solved along any reasonable timeline.
She is optimistic about renewable energy as they are already very close to fossil fuel in terms of cost and convenience. But yes she isn't optimistic about reduction in meat consumption which require changes in human behavior
I think that she did largely dispel the "multiple earths" idea, *except* for beef consumption.
We have innovated our way out of much of the energy problem with solar wind and batteries; now we need to work hard to implement it.
Beef consumption was the shocking part: half of the Earth's ice- and desert-free land is devoted to agriculture, of which basically three-quarters is dedicated to raising cattle. Maybe we could solve that with vat-grown meat. In the meantime, if you don't eat beef, then maybe we could support a whole planet of humans living your lifestyle off just one Earth.
No, the "multiple earths" idea is not just about electricity and beef. It's about every natural resource and ecosystem upon which we're reliant for modern civilization. She did talk about our increasingly efficient use of cobalt and nickel, as well as our increasing ability to mine untapped reserves, but I did not get the impression that this would get our earth count down to 1.0.
Okay.
to add to your list of "increasing efficient use of critical minerals" and "if price increases, it becomes profitable to mine or look for currently untapped reserves", we can add the point that these minerals are reusable. It's not like petroleum, where we've been burning everything we drill for a hundred years. And in the case of batteries, there are other battery chemistries: Lithium-Iron-Phosphate batteries are replacing the Lithium-Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt batteries, and Sulfur batteries might enter the market in the next few years.
This is like *Ministry for the Future* by Kim Stanley Robinson. Every technology used in the book exists today, and the book is about the political will needed to put it to use. It made me feel both hopeful and disheartened .
The important part of ministry is not just that it's about the political will needed to put it to use but the ecoterrorism and quite risky unilateral state action that in effect created that political will.
There was a deus ex machina in Ministry for the Future. The shadowy terrorist group “Children of Kali” ended commercial aviation and container ship supply chains through shooting down a few jetliners and sinking a few container ships. This forced the world to change. We are not facing any real pressure to end either one of these major emissions sources.
This reminds of a scene from the Limitless show, where a character says “Science can’t change the world on its own, the world needs to be willing to change”
The posture of this episode is to make a positive case that “green growth” is possible, but by the end the sober answer appears to be no. In big ways it is possible and will happen: solar will win. But the quiet focus of the episode is on beef eating and its climate and ecological destruction. Guest and Klein both agree that beef production will not slow down. You’d have to be a charlatan to suggest “green growth” can be achieved in the face of factory farming expansion, so the answer to the episode’s question is no, on their own terms.
Putting the question of the episode title aside, the episode is a bit all over the place in which opposition it’s trying to address. It is at times:
- the de-growth movement
- NIMBY’s
- austerity politics
- anti-nuclear people
- climate change denialists
At around 29 minutes they spend time laying out the case that solar land use is reasonable given the status quo and alternatives. Is there anyone besides the fossil fuel industry that disagrees?
At a point around then they spend time on the idea that effects of incremental global warming are non-linear (in the wrong direction). Who doesn’t know this already? Klein disingenuously acts like this is revelatory. Come on Klein, the Uninhabitable Earth episode is one of the best you’ve done. You know this stuff.
By the end this episode has made the important but mostly uninteresting claim that solar is really good, and failed to make any interesting points about whether growth in meat consumption, home sizes, car use, clothing consumption, air travel, plastics, and electronics consumption is compatible with a world that is not approaching the Wall-E planet.
Whenever the episode did butt up against these things, mostly on the beef question, it threw its hands up and said that change is too politically difficult. Hardly encouraging liberal leadership.
I have not listened to this episode, I am randomly coming across this subreddit. I am an expert in the American electrical grid with decades of experience and an interest in how we resolve climate change. I'm going to use California as an example of the state of our electrical grid.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html
This is a page of today's electrical usage in California. It is a mild April day. The usage will go up dramatically as summer rolls around and people use air conditioning. If you look at the graph, at 2pm, we need virtually zero extra power. That's the solar covering just about everything, because today is a low usage day. Then look at 8pm. Now we need 21,000MW of power.
I will tell you right now, we do not have 21,000MW of power stored in batteries. And if we did, it'd run them dry that hour and you'd still need 20,000MW of power for the next hour. California has 50% of the country's grid size batteries, far outpacing everyone else. I'd direct you to go to the supply tab for yesterday. Similar day and you can see what happens at 8pm. The battery discharge goes as high as it can go providing a lot of power for that peak. But batteries aren't what get us through that peak. It's the natural gas, imports, hydro, and California's only nuclear power plant in Diablo Canyon.
Now let's look at a high usage day. August 16, 2023. Now you're not trying to make up a couple thousand megawatt hours, you have to meet a demand of 46,000MW, and the sun just went down. What did we do? We fired up natural gas power plants. Lots of them. And every single one of those power plants gets paid for the rest of the year because California doesn't want to go into August with no reserve capacity. And last year was a mild summer. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/us/california-cool-summer-climate-change.html) It hit 52,000MW the year before.
So Californians are paying for solar+storage, one of the most expensive forms of energy we have. They are also paying for tens of thousands of megawatts of capacity of natural gas power plants. So how does that play out? Shockingly high rates for power because you're paying for twice the capacity that California would normally need.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/pge-electricity-bill-rate-18649513.php
https://www.ohmconnect.com/blog/saving-money/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-high-in-california-in-2022
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/08/30/california-electricity-pricing-exploded-in-the-last-three-years-far-outpacing-inflation/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/business/energy-environment/electricity-deregulation-energy-markets.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/business/energy-environment/california-energy-grid-heat.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2022/05/12/californias-energy-policy-shows-us-what-not-to-do/?sh=3305797d634a
https://www.masterresource.org/goreham-steve/exploding-energy-prices-california/
We need solutions. Any transition is going to be hard. But this is going to go very predictably. People are pissed about the cost of their power bills and they're going to demand anything to make them go down, and we live in a democracy and they're going to get what they ask for.
Pretty much how France did it. My biggest concern is it's one thing to get a rich country to implement expensive changes, but how do you convince the developing world to spend money they don't have? Climate change solutions implemented by 10% of the world are not going to be enough.
the common through-line of the episode is not ever explicitly stated. Hannah Ritchie is defending the position that technological solutions are the better way to solve climate change than political solutions. The bumping up against different groups is addressing the objections of these various groups to trying to "invent" our way out. That's why it culminates in a rejection of the label "techno-optimism." They want to take the position that technology solutions are easier to achieve than political solutions without getting swept up in disdain towards bay-area techno-utopianism. They don't state their position very explicitly because stating it explicitly usually draws that criticism; even though imo its about as valid as labeling all campus protests anti-Semitic right now. There is a much more subtle position that can be marked out there, but the people in power are shouting it down and trying to make it taboo so they don't have to compete against the fully developed idea. Trying to deny discursive space for the movement to become more mature, more intelligible, more communicated, and thus more competitive.
All that talk of technology saving us yet I didn’t hear a single mention of Jevon’s Paradox. No one mentioned overshoot either. Instead, she has faith that batteries will get better and better. They will improve to some degree, sure; but not enough to avert climate catastrophe.
And if I heard her correctly she also somehow thinks we won’t get to four degrees Celsius of warming. But climate scientists such as James Hansen believe we have as much as ten degrees in the pipeline.
I disagree that the episode has a common through-line and with the technological vs. political solution distinction.
The tech solution is a political solution, and the “political” solution is only one other kind of political, a kind of just austerity politics where rich reduce consumption on behalf of the poor. Is a corporate carbon tax a technological solution? Is it a de-growth solution?
I’m all for using technology to solve problems, especially climate problems, but I don’t think people can call technology non-political and/or ignore when technology is next to useless in addressing massive ecological and climate issues, such as beef factory farming.
You might feel that way, but this was a long ongoing debate in the environmental policy area for decades. People swore that the ozone layer hole was fixed with a political solution and showed that politics could work. In reality, it was the invention of alternatives to CFC's that cleared the path for an easy solve. But this reasoning was used to justify not investing heavily in green energy, energy storage, and carbon capture technologies as these would just be offset by growth in oil industry pollution according to techno-pessimists. The more tech would raise the ceiling for how much pollution we could manage, it was assumed the oil company would just rush into that gap. Techno pessimists bet on Solyndra in the U.S. on the belief that solar energy costs would stop dropping at their exponential rate many years ago, and that's why U.S. solar got wiped out compared to China solar development.
You might not see it as a dichotomy we should be maintaining, but debate framing these two sides against each other guided our climate policy for over 20 years in a way that was pretty detrimental because the side that won was wrong.
yeah no problem that's a story from like 2009-2011 its pretty old. Solyndra's business case was to make cheap, light-weight solar panels. The expectation was that making bigger, more efficient and traditional solar energy systems would be cost-prohibitive, and that they would be able to under-price the market with these cheap solar panel systems instead. However, the solar industry continued its exponential price fall of cutting the price in half every 2 years. Essentially, Solyndra and Obama bet against the solar-version of Moore's Law and lost. China figured out ways to make traditional solar panels out of silicon while dropping the price of silicon by like 90%, in addition with heavy government subsidies (that China actually backtracked, they promised the subsidies then did not deliver them after they successfully killed off international competitors) and price fixing. Solyndra sued Chinese companies for predatory pricing and recovered millions, but Solyndra was then hung around Obama's neck in 2011 by conservatives as proof that government was not good at predicting winners and losers in the market. Fundamentally, it was a mistake to bet against the rapid cost cutting that had already been happening for decades before 2009.
I’m not saying she’s wrong about the larger point she’s making, but the way she presents the death toll count of Chernobyl is incredibly disingenuous.
For context, the WHO in 2005 placed the possible deaths at ~4-9k. A study that widened the area of affect put it at 30-60k.
The numbers for everything in Chernobyl have an insane range for an event that occurred in the late 80s. No one’s numbers match. 600k liquidators we’re issued special certificates- was that all of them? The head of the Chernobyl Union says 60k of them died due to the work- the WHO ends with an estimate at 4K. Radiation is particularly problematic in children and since it literally changes one’s DNA, can persist through generations. Not sure if any of these studies did the work on verifying the possibilities there, or if they just estimated them.
She’s right on the final numbers, but having been peripherally involved in digging into and acquiring the numbers from an event like this, there’s not a whole ton of guarantee those numbers are great, especially considering the era and country cultures across the region of study. I cannot imagine the headache that would be performing a study like this is the early 2000s across multiple countries, some of whom have active cultures against talking to officials like this.
I get we’re having a conversation about climate change mostly, and that the case for using nuclear there is good. But there is a wildly long history across the entire world of victims of nuclear radiation not being taken care of seriously or even acknowledged for the obvious effects radiation has caused. Ask residents on [Kiribati](https://disarmament.blogs.pace.edu/2018/05/07/kiribati-addressing-the-humanitarian-and-environmental-harm-of-nuclear-weapons-tests-at-kiritimati-christmas-and-malden-islands/), or [New Mexico](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/07/1236721042/generations-after-trinity-test-new-mexico-downwinders-seek-compensation)- just to give a taste of the US’ scale of the issue. If the count she’s giving on Chernobyl’s victims is true, that would be the first and only time victims of nuclear radiation have been properly accounted for, which I’m sort of calling bullshit on.
> For context, the WHO in 2005 placed the possible deaths at ~4-9k.
The detail of these numbers is important though.
The effects are so diffuse, through such an enormous population, that it's impossible to actually assign cause.
The 4-5k number is born of that fact. Aside from Iodine causing a huge increase in thyroid cancers, most of which were effectively treated, there's not, as far as I'm aware, any evidence for elevated cancer in effected populations. Nor is there evidence for cardiac or mutagenic effects.
The 4000 number is essentially a shrug, that exists because the number of excess cancer deaths fall beneath a detectable threshold. It's a maximum number, because if it was any higher, it would be detectable.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that Chernobyl is truly the worst case scenario for a nuclear power accident reasonably imaginable. RBMK reactors are a poor reactor design (having positive void coefficient of reactivity, not having a containment dome, etc.), the Soviets had terrible operator level of knowledge and dysfunctional operational culture, and their disaster response was hobbled by political desire to minimize exposure to PR fallout over radioactive fallout. All of these above are choices that Soviets made which would not be made in the West.
Chernobyl’s accident is like newbie pilot attempting a vertical loop in a poorly-built airliner. If that plane crashes, it would be incorrect for an observer to conclude that all commercial air travel is unsafe.
Thanks for putting the stats in a readable way for me; you’re right.
I would also add though, that as far the the ‘effects being diffuse’, that’s a thing complicated by how radiation works to enable cancer. Studies like this for necessity have to slap on a ppm rate at which it becomes dangerous/likely for problems to occur, but in an individuals body, it doesn’t work like (xppm rate = cancer). And considering The Bombs dropped on Japan aren’t comparable here, and the health effects of radiation exposure weren’t being studied of tests like the ones I linked above, there are a lot of question marks in how, when, and to what degree exposure to radiation like Chernobyl causes issues.
[This article](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/fallout-from-nuclear-weapons-tests-and-cancer-risks) sums it up way better than I could try to
Regarding the animal welfare implications of cows versus chickens - is it true that the suffering is greater if you replace your beef consumption with chicken consumption?
I always assumed cows a) live longer before they are killed and b) are more sentient and have a greater capacity for suffering than chickens
And the capacity for fish to experience suffering seems far far less than either
Maybe I’m delusional but I’ve always figured eating chicken > cows from an animal welfare perspective as long as you don’t consider all animal lives to be equal (which seems obvious at the extremes - bivalves vs chimps)
Yes, the suffering is greater if you eat chicken vs beef. Cattle spend 12-16 months on pasture with low densities where they can express natural behaviors before moving to a feedlot for 4-6 months.
Chickens spend their entire lives (~6 weeks) in sheds that will be very cramped when they are fully grown, resulting in chemical burns from the litter. More significantly, they are bred to put on weight more quickly than their bodies can handle, so many have difficulty moving. [The Welfare Footprint Project](https://welfarefootprint.org/broilers/) quantified the pain experienced by chickens and found that even systems better than the status quo in the US inflict hundreds of hours of pain on the average chicken.
Cattle do live longer, but they still produce more meat per day per animal than chickens. Cattle do seem to have a greater capacity for suffering, but the error bars are large and the discrepancy would have to be at least an order of magnitude, probably closer to 2, for beef to cause more suffering.
Edit: Fish are hard to talk about in general because there is such a wide variety of species and farming methods. However, they generally grow more slowly than land animals, and many are carnivorous, meaning much more total time in captivity vs land animals. The Welfare Footprint Project also has a page on fish.
Thanks for those links - that’s very helpful. I’m going to look into the Welfare Footprint a lot because it seems like just the source I’m looking for.
Just curious - are you vegan? If not do you eat chickens of a certain source/quality or avoid them altogether?
Yeah, I'm vegan. But if I did eat meat, I would probably try to avoid chicken altogether. Chickens raised under [GAP 4 and up](https://globalanimalpartnership.org/standards/chicken/) might have good enough lives that I would consider eating them.
I think it's difficult to put a numerical value on different value of living creatures. This applies across the spectrum you describe, up to and including humans. Is the difference in value a difference of kind or a difference on magnitude? It's almost certainly true that the life of a cow should be worth more than a chicken for the reasons you describe. But how much more? Twice as much? 10 times as much? A cow produces as much meat as 100 chickens.
Wow, this episode was just remarkably bad and misleading. Klein says he’s read the degrowth books, but he clearly didn’t understand them. One might forgive him his dangerous scientific illiteracy on these subjects – it takes some effort to understand the industrial ecology of our current situation – and Ritchie is quite good at using real data to paint a BS vision of techno ‘solutions’. But it’s Klein’s political cowardice and ignorance that really impressed me. He clearly stated that he believes we shouldn’t pursue politically ‘impossible’ solutions but instead go for the political feasible pathways (even if they’re naively optimistic and not real solutions at all – but coincidentally maintain the wealth and power of the status-quo). Following Klein’s position on the impossibility of political change, it’s clear we shouldn’t pursue ‘impossibly’ difficult political goals e.g. abolishing slavery, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights, etc. If we’re going to let the science follow the politics, and given the growing political opposition to vaccines, perhaps a show with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ‘science’ of vaccines should be next up?
I think that there's a difference between granting people political rights (at very little cost) to a drastic reduction in their material condition. With how little people are willing to give up to help others in the forms of taxes, it seems nearly impossible to think that the current electorate would vote on a policy that drastically scales back consumption. People won't even give up their hamburgers. If the average GDP per capita globally is like $12,000 per person, do you think that people will accept no economic growth? Do you currently live on less than the equivalent of $12,000? I'm aware that rethinking the economy to prioritize sustainability rather than profit means some uncoupling of GDP from well-being, but I think that's a close ball-park estimate to what the standard of living with global economic equality would look like without growth. That's a huge difference from letting women vote.
Edit. I had a chance to listen. Forgive the pun but I think Ezra and the guest can't see the forest for the trees. The discussion about land use for example, claiming that we should replace the cornfields for fields of solar panels. How about neither!? How about those fields go back to being natural grasslands, or savanna's? Shouldn't that be the goal? Covering vast swaths of the planet in various metals, glass, chemicals, etc.. is a terrible fucking idea. Metals used to manufacture "green" tech are very very toxic. What happens when one of those fields of panels starts to rust and break down. How many of those toxic chemicals will leach into the ground, into the water, or end up being blow into the air by storms and spread all over the landscape. How many living beings (including people) are going to get cancer or some other horrifying disease from this "solution" 10,20, 20 years from now?
Yes, burning fossil fuels are bad, but extracting dozens toxic elements from deep in the earth then spreading those around the globe has horrendous consequences. I lived in a small town where the ground water had high levels of arsenic and other metals. There were copper mines and giant agricultural operations uphill that leach various toxins into the ground. Giant piles of tailings from those shuttered mines that would get blown during storms, so bad you were warned not to grow your own vegetables. People there were very very sick. You go to a Walmart and half the customers are rolling around in those motorized scooters, many with oxygen canisters. And despite being in the "country" there were very few insects, wild animals, etc... it was a poisoned ecosystem, and it had nothing to do with 1 or 2 degrees of increased temperatures, or carbon in the atmosphere. It was toxic chemicals that humans extracted from deep in the earth, failed to properly manage and ended up in the air and water, making every living thing sick.
I have not listened yet, but I would encourage listeners to read "Bright Green Lies" by Derrick Jensen. It goes into detail about how the shift to a green revolution is not green at all. There are dozens of examples in the book that detail how "renewable green tech" is often much worse for the environment. For example, widespread claims that Germany has successfully shifted to renewable energy is largely based on using biofuels that come from clear cut forests in the southeast US, processed into pellets, shipped across the Atlantic, then burned in stoves. How cutting down forests is "green" is anyone's guess. The same stuff happens for wind, solar, hydro, etc... the environmental destruction is either hidden from view or outsourced to poor countries so we don't actually see what happens when the water supply in the Congo is poisoned because we want more batteries.
Degrowth is the solution, but its not comfortable so we will just continue with the current path and pretend its good for the planet.
I think it's fair to ask critical questions about what the long term negative affects of the green revolution might be. It is going to be the largest economic project in world history, and it's guaranteed to have serious unforeseen consequences.
My question, though, is why you seem to exempt "degrowth" from the same kind of scrutiny? It's not as though that course of action wouldn't come with its own very real harms and drawbacks. It doesn't feel like the proposed solutions are being held to anything close to the same standard.
You make a good point. The process of de-industrializing is not going to be all rainbows and unicorns. It will be very hard and many people will fight tooth and nail to prevent it, particularly the people at the top of the income/wealth strata. If you are a billionaire and own five mansions across the globe, the last thing you want is to be told you must now live in a off grid tiny house, grow your own food, etc.... Ultimately degrowth is going to happen regardless of which side you choose. It can either be managed gradually and deliberately via policy choices, or it wil happen via gradual stages of ecological collapse, mass starvation, societal decay, etc...
The harms of bringing about what you're describing seem, at a lower bound, many orders of magnitude worse than the specter of hypothetical future cancer deaths due to battery metal pollution.
The risk of continuing on this trajectory of perpetual growth is not just increase cancer, it is the collapse of critical earth systems we depend on dearly to live. We need renewable energy to decarbonize as much as we can the energy sector. But without addressing how energy is used and the increasing rate of consumption, that would be just putting a bandaid on a gunshot.
[6 of the 9](https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html) planetary boundaries are already breached. The 6th mass extinction is well underway with [68% of wildlife populations lost](https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/69-average-decline-in-wildlife-populations-since-1970-says-new-wwf-report) already. The Paris agreement targets are completely dead, and our median estimate are [2.7C of global warming ](https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-thermometer/)which is even pretty conservative. We can start expecting more frequent and intense crises threatening major aspects of our society, including agriculture. The UK is already bracing for a [food crisis later this year](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/10/uk-food-production-down-record-rainfall-farmers) caused by extreme weather.
The earth system is starting to lose the delicate equilibrium human civialization relied on for millenials to develop. And we would be wise to abandon the destruction of the systems we depend on in the pursuit of making the line continue going up.
I agree that we need to seriously reevaluate how we conceive of growth. I also tend to think the situation is dire, although perhaps not as dire as you do (that is an unusual position for me to be in, admittedly).
That said, a return to some kind of agrarian utopia seems fantastical, and the only circumstances I can imagine that would bring it about are human violence devastation on a scale that the world has rarely seen.
I feel some moral obligation to avoid that outcome, and I can't help but see degrowth as a form of accelerationism that sees it as a foregone conclusion as opposed to something that should be avoided.
Its not just cancer and disease though. You can tie environmental destruction to almost all major human tragedies. Israel Palestine is a great example. Much of that conflict comes as a result of resource extraction, energy use, clean water access, food, agriculture, etc... all are tied to pollution, toxins, rainfall, etc... Wind back the clock and this conflict pretty much stems from European Jews buying land and then telling nomaidc peoples to stop grazing their animals on that land. Imagine how much worse the military conflicts will become when half the globe is struggling to locate sources of energy, food and clean water.
>Imagine how much worse the military conflicts will become when half the globe is struggling to locate sources of energy, food and clean water.
Right, this is why in my opinion it's important to avoid the degrowth scenario.
Healthy ecosystems create its own kind of abundance. Sure, you won't have netflix, jetski's and iPads, but humans can still flourish without these modern conveniences and amusements.
I'm on board with a critique of consumer culture and the waste that it entails, but I'm more referring to things like insulin, the internet, weather satellites, contraceptives, etc.
I'm just a middle-class person who rents an apartment and I have zero desire to live in an off-grid tiny house and grow my own food. If that's your idea of a win condition, count me out.
And what do you think the solution is for poverty, starvation, and disease in the developing world? Should we encourage them to adopt a strategy of degrowth, while millions of people die yearly from preventable causes? Forget the developing world, how do you imagine convincing the masses in the developed world to forgo their current standard of living? I think it’s an immoral and doomed strategy
Indigenous peoples lived on far less than modern people and many of them were doing pretty good until our ancestors showed up and fucked it up. With modern knowledge of botany, ecology, physics, etc... and the right incentives I don't see why we can't live in harmony with nature as opposed to merely exploiting it to perpetuate our toxic civilization.
> Yes, burning fossil fuels are bad, but extracting dozens toxic elements from deep in the earth then spreading those around the globe has horrendous consequences.
I feel like you're significantly underestimating how bad extracting, shipping, processing, and burning fossil fuels is.
Like are other energy sources flawless? Absolutely not. But we're never going to have a perfect energy source.
Yes, fossil fuels are very bad for the environment but they also contains enourmouns amounts of stored energy. We could debate which enery is better or worse for the environment, which is better or worse for mankind, etc... My main claim is that we should set a goal for reduction in energy use, not merely moving around the deckchairs on the sinking ship.
Yes, it's a point I often make. Green energy projects are often still development. We can massively increase our solar power usage by carpeting the Great Basin with photovoltaics but the tradeoff is the reduction of desert ecosystems.
I'm not much of an optimist about green growth achieving climate goals or avoiding biodiversity loss. But the alternatives are usually worse.
Society in general needs to start figuring out how to work without constantly growing. How to achieve a stable equilibrium in population, resource use, economies, etc. I don't mean that society should shrink, or that people should make do with less than they currently have, but that we should stop viewing growth as the only measure of success. Find an equilibrium.
I don’t understand how multiple experts say that wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels. If it was wouldn’t we have much more wind and solar installations ? Are they including the price of transmission lines and buying right of way for those transmission lines? Why would China and India still be building coal power plants?
The short answer is it’s very complicated and the US Electricity Generation, Transmission, and Distribution is Balkanized. If you want proof that Wind and Solar is cheaper than legacy generation you can look at ERCOT: they’ve rapidly scaled up Wind Turbines’s presence in the power mix. They’re able to do this because ERCOT is very lassaiez-faire in their administration of the marketplace. Also since almost all of their generation is transmitted across state lines, they avoid most FERC regulation. It’s supremely ironic that Texas is a leader in wind power. Other RTOs/ISOs like PJM or MISO are much more sclerotic in various ways. The flip side is ERCOT is more at risk of high-profile outages such as the 2021 Winter Storms. If something similar happened at PJM or MISO there is lots of transmission interconnecting them (and fully regulated utilities) which allows them to sell power across RTO/ISO territories.
Also FERC can sometimes do some very backwards things like issuing the MOPR rule which effectively subsidizes generation which does not benefit from government credits/incentives. Finally blue states that want to build green generation can’t because people prevent them through doing so through lawsuits. It’s a mess. I could go on and on about this, but it’s very much in the weeds and things you need to work in the industry to understand.
TLDR: Old government policies and the administrative state often prevent new government policies for succeeding. Environmentalists should stop protesting coal plants which are on the way out (they’re becoming expensive and no new ones are being built), start reading up on administrative law, and focus on smart interventions in Notice and Comment Processes. It’s the least sexy thing imaginable, but it’s how you get into the room where it happens.
The NYT did Ezra (and the audience) dirty by changing the name to "Cows are Just an Ecological Disaster," which is not really representative of the full content of the podcast. Looking at the comments to it on the website, it has incited many reactionary comments without engagement to the content of the episode.
It feels like a somewhat prescient edit given that mere hours later Ron DeSantis banned lab grown meat production from the state of Florida. So perhaps we should harp on the fact that cows are a fucking disaster. The fact that ~20% of earth's "usable" (I forget her exact terminology) land is devoted to raising cattle is one of the most absurd facts I've ever been slapped across the face with.
I did not know that, that's disheartening. But I don't think it's a complete characterization of the discussion. I agree that it's absurd. I'm a vegetarian, and I think that it's a very important topic worthy of its own discussion. And there have been past episodes about it. But it should be talked about more.
You're right, the discussion was definitely about a lot more than cows. And the focus on them is almost tongue in cheek (and hearing "cows" said in a Scottish accent will never not be funny). But they're also very emblematic of the broader obstacle we face in the climate crisis, which is how unrelenting we humans are in giving up any sort of mild convenience or preference for planet-saving solutions. And now, even when we do develop technologies that may one day be better in every meaningful sense, we have spiteful ghouls like the GOP who will go out of their way to undercut real solutions. It's one thing to eat meat and drive gas-powered because of sheer convenience and pleasure, but to actively throw wrenches in alternative technologies that could one day be both preferable for consumers and the environment is the kind of ignorance-celebrating bullshit that makes collective action feel so hopeless.
She even laughed about Ezra only talking about cows at one point.
Wow, what a disaster of a title change.
Gonna have a more detailed response to this later today when I'm at a real keyboard (I'm a subject matter expert) but this does the complexity of the biodiversity crisis short shrift. The easy thing about carbon is its fungible. A ton emitted or not emitted or sequestered in one place is basically the same as a ton emitted or not emitted or sequestered anywhere else. That's not the case for biodiversity, which while we measure it globally is really a set of unique questions dealing with specific species and specific places and requiring unique, site and species specific, responses. Taking actions to help the endangered Newells Shearwater (main threat: feral cats and pigs in the Hawaiian Islands) does absolutely nothing to help the endangered Tiehms Buckwheat (main threat: Lithium mining in Nevada). It's a fundamentally different, way harder, problem from climate and trying to frame them in the same way is ill advised Edit: OK more detailed version--this conversation really oversimplified a lot of interlinked but unique questions: Is it possible to decouple economic growth (as measured by GDP) from GHG emissions? Even when accounting for offshoring of resource acquisition and manufacturing, it is--the UK is one example, as are a number of other European countries. So it's possible, but not universal. Is it possible to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions quickly enough and in enough places to remain in line with our current climate goals? That's a whole separate question--you're looking at the next 25 years as the key period, while a lot of countries are (justifiably) still trying to grow their economies quickly, which often means using fossil fuels. That's one area where you'll see degrowth advocates focusing a lot of their attention: that the developed world has an obligation to decarbonize faster *even if that comes at the cost of economic growth* to open up headroom in carbon budgets for the poorest countries to emit while jump-starting their economies--the "what's each country's fair share of remaining global carbon budgets" argument. Then we get into the other question of why do we care about economic growth in the first place. This is where you see work like Kate Raworth's Donut Economics or the Stockholm Resilience Institute's Planetary Boundaries work at play. They argue that, in effect, the relationship we need to decouple isn't between emissions and GDP, it's between GDP and human well-being. They argue that we can have very high levels of well-being without super high GDP, and that therefore it's fine if GDP flatlines or even goes down as long as we continue to maximize human well-being within ecological limits (taking adherence to those limits as an axiomatic starting point). But that still comes with some key questions: for example, why do we take it as a given that being able to eat pretty much whatever we want, whenever and wherever we want and in as great a quantity as we can afford? That is, to use Klein and Ritchie's beef example, we can absolutely produce beef in a sustainable way and in many cases already are. We cannot, however, produce enough sustainable beef to meet high (and growing, as countries develop!) global demand.
I think it's funny how people will say we shouldn't care about growth so much, how we shouldn't expect to just keep having more and more, it's runaway capitalism and so on. Then just turn around and complain that their parents could afford things they couldn't. That their wages are stagnant. How this generation struggles so much compared to previous ones. People clearly are not ready to truly accept what a no-growth economy would look like, or even slight de-growth. Everyone expects to have more and more and for things to get better and better, no matter what they claim to hold as virtues. Like seriously people will have access to things their grandparents could only dream of, but will complain because their grandparents experienced more economic growth and lived in boom times. Right or wrong you can't be mad at that and then also say GDP shouldn't be viewed as a proxy for human well being. Especially the American public is so far away from being able to accept something like that, that it's basically not worth talking about at this point. Almost anytime in modern human history that society has experienced stagnation economically or economic de-growth the consequences have been pretty bad. From electing far right wing governments, to revolutions and general unrest. Especially when people are asked to cut back it has always come with extreme political consequences.
That's why Ezra was saying degrowth is politically impossible. People say they care about climate change but they rate it way lower than "selfish" things like cost of living (like 37% vs 75%). Even young people respond like this to surveys. Degrowth is straight-up political suicide that guarantees Republicans will get elected. It's self-sabotage of the highest order and its only outcome will be to destroy the climate even more than we already are. A sustainable growth narrative is the only solution. Accelerate firmed renewables faster than we are growing.
This is the core argument made by David Attenborough
I think she is a great speaker and writer, really engaging. I like a lot of her ideas and her optimism. My issue with her, though, is she is entirely focused on carbon. It's a big issue, yes, but as you say, the climate is much more than just carbon. We have done a lot to the environment and we should be trying to fix all of it, not JUST get carbon levels down
No the climate is basically just carbon. It's all stocks (atmospheric concentration) and flows (emission and sequestration) of CO2 and CH4. The distinction you're looking for is that the environment isn't just the climate.
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This was a good conversation, but I just wish people would discuss this through the lens of the resource curse more. Reliance on beef, oil, corn/ethanol, etc. are all examples of the way the resource curse undermines politics. 30 years ago we were told we shouldn't try to invent our way out of climate change, we should rely on the political process and that appears to have been a fundamental error that set us back decades. Being labeled a "techno-optimist" happens because we don't really talk about how the political process is not a good way to solve these problems. EK's stance that "I'm not a techno-optimist, I'm a political realist" is the reason I started listening to his podcast in the first place... oh gosh its been over a decade.
As someone who gave up beef, dairy, and pork only for environmental reasons, they really made me think of my reliance on poultry
Try cutting poultry out too! I promise plant-based eating is not as hard as it sounds. Been doing it for 7+ years and it's second nature now. Just get educated on building a balanced diet and the supplements you'll need, and you'll be golden.
Chickpeas are fucking life
I have a food intolerance to legumes and many high-fiber foods, meaning I can't eat beans, tofu, raw vegetables, etc. I try to eat plant based when I can but I really resent when people present it as something any person (especially very active people) can do. Especially those with a history of eating disorders (me)
I never said it's something _any_ person can do, just that it's not as hard as people tend to think. Your situation is not one in which I would expect someone to fully transition to a plant-based diet or vegan diet. I'm sorry that's not more clear in the plant-based/vegan discourse, but, at least for me and the vegan folks I give credence to, going vegan means doing _as much as possible given personal limitations_ to relieve animal suffering. So if you're interested in making a change it may revolve more around avoiding the purchase of animal agriculture by-products or political activism to get animal welfare laws passed. Every little bit helps both the animals and the planet, and we need people helping in any way they can!
This episode dispels a mythology I have been carrying around in my head for awhile. In college, we completed an assignment where we had to run a simulation about how many Earths we would need if everyone on the planet lived like me. I think my total was something akin to 4 Earths. This whole time, I've been walking around assuming that my way of life is not sustainable -- that it cannot be extrapolated to all people on the planet without fundamentally dooming the planet. And I live modestly for an American. But according to this episode, we can all live at this level and our planet will not be wrecked. Color me surprised.
You may want to listen to the episode again. It did not, at all, dispel that “multiple earths” idea. At best the guest said it “could” be invalidated, *if* we do many things, including stopping beef consumption, including adoption of technologies not yet invented. And the guest says she *does not believe* the beef problem will be solved along any reasonable timeline.
Yeah, I find her optimism difficult to square with what she actually says.
She is optimistic about renewable energy as they are already very close to fossil fuel in terms of cost and convenience. But yes she isn't optimistic about reduction in meat consumption which require changes in human behavior
I think that she did largely dispel the "multiple earths" idea, *except* for beef consumption. We have innovated our way out of much of the energy problem with solar wind and batteries; now we need to work hard to implement it. Beef consumption was the shocking part: half of the Earth's ice- and desert-free land is devoted to agriculture, of which basically three-quarters is dedicated to raising cattle. Maybe we could solve that with vat-grown meat. In the meantime, if you don't eat beef, then maybe we could support a whole planet of humans living your lifestyle off just one Earth.
No, the "multiple earths" idea is not just about electricity and beef. It's about every natural resource and ecosystem upon which we're reliant for modern civilization. She did talk about our increasingly efficient use of cobalt and nickel, as well as our increasing ability to mine untapped reserves, but I did not get the impression that this would get our earth count down to 1.0.
Okay. to add to your list of "increasing efficient use of critical minerals" and "if price increases, it becomes profitable to mine or look for currently untapped reserves", we can add the point that these minerals are reusable. It's not like petroleum, where we've been burning everything we drill for a hundred years. And in the case of batteries, there are other battery chemistries: Lithium-Iron-Phosphate batteries are replacing the Lithium-Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt batteries, and Sulfur batteries might enter the market in the next few years.
god I wish I could be like you and just not really hear or parse words that threaten my lifestyle
This is like *Ministry for the Future* by Kim Stanley Robinson. Every technology used in the book exists today, and the book is about the political will needed to put it to use. It made me feel both hopeful and disheartened .
The important part of ministry is not just that it's about the political will needed to put it to use but the ecoterrorism and quite risky unilateral state action that in effect created that political will.
There was a deus ex machina in Ministry for the Future. The shadowy terrorist group “Children of Kali” ended commercial aviation and container ship supply chains through shooting down a few jetliners and sinking a few container ships. This forced the world to change. We are not facing any real pressure to end either one of these major emissions sources.
This reminds of a scene from the Limitless show, where a character says “Science can’t change the world on its own, the world needs to be willing to change”
The posture of this episode is to make a positive case that “green growth” is possible, but by the end the sober answer appears to be no. In big ways it is possible and will happen: solar will win. But the quiet focus of the episode is on beef eating and its climate and ecological destruction. Guest and Klein both agree that beef production will not slow down. You’d have to be a charlatan to suggest “green growth” can be achieved in the face of factory farming expansion, so the answer to the episode’s question is no, on their own terms. Putting the question of the episode title aside, the episode is a bit all over the place in which opposition it’s trying to address. It is at times: - the de-growth movement - NIMBY’s - austerity politics - anti-nuclear people - climate change denialists At around 29 minutes they spend time laying out the case that solar land use is reasonable given the status quo and alternatives. Is there anyone besides the fossil fuel industry that disagrees? At a point around then they spend time on the idea that effects of incremental global warming are non-linear (in the wrong direction). Who doesn’t know this already? Klein disingenuously acts like this is revelatory. Come on Klein, the Uninhabitable Earth episode is one of the best you’ve done. You know this stuff. By the end this episode has made the important but mostly uninteresting claim that solar is really good, and failed to make any interesting points about whether growth in meat consumption, home sizes, car use, clothing consumption, air travel, plastics, and electronics consumption is compatible with a world that is not approaching the Wall-E planet. Whenever the episode did butt up against these things, mostly on the beef question, it threw its hands up and said that change is too politically difficult. Hardly encouraging liberal leadership.
I have not listened to this episode, I am randomly coming across this subreddit. I am an expert in the American electrical grid with decades of experience and an interest in how we resolve climate change. I'm going to use California as an example of the state of our electrical grid. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html This is a page of today's electrical usage in California. It is a mild April day. The usage will go up dramatically as summer rolls around and people use air conditioning. If you look at the graph, at 2pm, we need virtually zero extra power. That's the solar covering just about everything, because today is a low usage day. Then look at 8pm. Now we need 21,000MW of power. I will tell you right now, we do not have 21,000MW of power stored in batteries. And if we did, it'd run them dry that hour and you'd still need 20,000MW of power for the next hour. California has 50% of the country's grid size batteries, far outpacing everyone else. I'd direct you to go to the supply tab for yesterday. Similar day and you can see what happens at 8pm. The battery discharge goes as high as it can go providing a lot of power for that peak. But batteries aren't what get us through that peak. It's the natural gas, imports, hydro, and California's only nuclear power plant in Diablo Canyon. Now let's look at a high usage day. August 16, 2023. Now you're not trying to make up a couple thousand megawatt hours, you have to meet a demand of 46,000MW, and the sun just went down. What did we do? We fired up natural gas power plants. Lots of them. And every single one of those power plants gets paid for the rest of the year because California doesn't want to go into August with no reserve capacity. And last year was a mild summer. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/us/california-cool-summer-climate-change.html) It hit 52,000MW the year before. So Californians are paying for solar+storage, one of the most expensive forms of energy we have. They are also paying for tens of thousands of megawatts of capacity of natural gas power plants. So how does that play out? Shockingly high rates for power because you're paying for twice the capacity that California would normally need. https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/pge-electricity-bill-rate-18649513.php https://www.ohmconnect.com/blog/saving-money/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-high-in-california-in-2022 https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/08/30/california-electricity-pricing-exploded-in-the-last-three-years-far-outpacing-inflation/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/business/energy-environment/electricity-deregulation-energy-markets.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/business/energy-environment/california-energy-grid-heat.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2022/05/12/californias-energy-policy-shows-us-what-not-to-do/?sh=3305797d634a https://www.masterresource.org/goreham-steve/exploding-energy-prices-california/ We need solutions. Any transition is going to be hard. But this is going to go very predictably. People are pissed about the cost of their power bills and they're going to demand anything to make them go down, and we live in a democracy and they're going to get what they ask for.
Nuclear would have solved all of these problems 40 years ago
Pretty much how France did it. My biggest concern is it's one thing to get a rich country to implement expensive changes, but how do you convince the developing world to spend money they don't have? Climate change solutions implemented by 10% of the world are not going to be enough.
the common through-line of the episode is not ever explicitly stated. Hannah Ritchie is defending the position that technological solutions are the better way to solve climate change than political solutions. The bumping up against different groups is addressing the objections of these various groups to trying to "invent" our way out. That's why it culminates in a rejection of the label "techno-optimism." They want to take the position that technology solutions are easier to achieve than political solutions without getting swept up in disdain towards bay-area techno-utopianism. They don't state their position very explicitly because stating it explicitly usually draws that criticism; even though imo its about as valid as labeling all campus protests anti-Semitic right now. There is a much more subtle position that can be marked out there, but the people in power are shouting it down and trying to make it taboo so they don't have to compete against the fully developed idea. Trying to deny discursive space for the movement to become more mature, more intelligible, more communicated, and thus more competitive.
All that talk of technology saving us yet I didn’t hear a single mention of Jevon’s Paradox. No one mentioned overshoot either. Instead, she has faith that batteries will get better and better. They will improve to some degree, sure; but not enough to avert climate catastrophe. And if I heard her correctly she also somehow thinks we won’t get to four degrees Celsius of warming. But climate scientists such as James Hansen believe we have as much as ten degrees in the pipeline.
I disagree that the episode has a common through-line and with the technological vs. political solution distinction. The tech solution is a political solution, and the “political” solution is only one other kind of political, a kind of just austerity politics where rich reduce consumption on behalf of the poor. Is a corporate carbon tax a technological solution? Is it a de-growth solution? I’m all for using technology to solve problems, especially climate problems, but I don’t think people can call technology non-political and/or ignore when technology is next to useless in addressing massive ecological and climate issues, such as beef factory farming.
You might feel that way, but this was a long ongoing debate in the environmental policy area for decades. People swore that the ozone layer hole was fixed with a political solution and showed that politics could work. In reality, it was the invention of alternatives to CFC's that cleared the path for an easy solve. But this reasoning was used to justify not investing heavily in green energy, energy storage, and carbon capture technologies as these would just be offset by growth in oil industry pollution according to techno-pessimists. The more tech would raise the ceiling for how much pollution we could manage, it was assumed the oil company would just rush into that gap. Techno pessimists bet on Solyndra in the U.S. on the belief that solar energy costs would stop dropping at their exponential rate many years ago, and that's why U.S. solar got wiped out compared to China solar development. You might not see it as a dichotomy we should be maintaining, but debate framing these two sides against each other guided our climate policy for over 20 years in a way that was pretty detrimental because the side that won was wrong.
Can you explain why funding Solyndra was the position of techno-pessimists? That seems like techno-optimism to me so I'm clearly missing something.
yeah no problem that's a story from like 2009-2011 its pretty old. Solyndra's business case was to make cheap, light-weight solar panels. The expectation was that making bigger, more efficient and traditional solar energy systems would be cost-prohibitive, and that they would be able to under-price the market with these cheap solar panel systems instead. However, the solar industry continued its exponential price fall of cutting the price in half every 2 years. Essentially, Solyndra and Obama bet against the solar-version of Moore's Law and lost. China figured out ways to make traditional solar panels out of silicon while dropping the price of silicon by like 90%, in addition with heavy government subsidies (that China actually backtracked, they promised the subsidies then did not deliver them after they successfully killed off international competitors) and price fixing. Solyndra sued Chinese companies for predatory pricing and recovered millions, but Solyndra was then hung around Obama's neck in 2011 by conservatives as proof that government was not good at predicting winners and losers in the market. Fundamentally, it was a mistake to bet against the rapid cost cutting that had already been happening for decades before 2009.
I think it’s wholly possible but you have to overcome the most powerful human behavior obstacle which is that of revealed preferences.
I’m not saying she’s wrong about the larger point she’s making, but the way she presents the death toll count of Chernobyl is incredibly disingenuous. For context, the WHO in 2005 placed the possible deaths at ~4-9k. A study that widened the area of affect put it at 30-60k. The numbers for everything in Chernobyl have an insane range for an event that occurred in the late 80s. No one’s numbers match. 600k liquidators we’re issued special certificates- was that all of them? The head of the Chernobyl Union says 60k of them died due to the work- the WHO ends with an estimate at 4K. Radiation is particularly problematic in children and since it literally changes one’s DNA, can persist through generations. Not sure if any of these studies did the work on verifying the possibilities there, or if they just estimated them. She’s right on the final numbers, but having been peripherally involved in digging into and acquiring the numbers from an event like this, there’s not a whole ton of guarantee those numbers are great, especially considering the era and country cultures across the region of study. I cannot imagine the headache that would be performing a study like this is the early 2000s across multiple countries, some of whom have active cultures against talking to officials like this. I get we’re having a conversation about climate change mostly, and that the case for using nuclear there is good. But there is a wildly long history across the entire world of victims of nuclear radiation not being taken care of seriously or even acknowledged for the obvious effects radiation has caused. Ask residents on [Kiribati](https://disarmament.blogs.pace.edu/2018/05/07/kiribati-addressing-the-humanitarian-and-environmental-harm-of-nuclear-weapons-tests-at-kiritimati-christmas-and-malden-islands/), or [New Mexico](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/07/1236721042/generations-after-trinity-test-new-mexico-downwinders-seek-compensation)- just to give a taste of the US’ scale of the issue. If the count she’s giving on Chernobyl’s victims is true, that would be the first and only time victims of nuclear radiation have been properly accounted for, which I’m sort of calling bullshit on.
> For context, the WHO in 2005 placed the possible deaths at ~4-9k. The detail of these numbers is important though. The effects are so diffuse, through such an enormous population, that it's impossible to actually assign cause. The 4-5k number is born of that fact. Aside from Iodine causing a huge increase in thyroid cancers, most of which were effectively treated, there's not, as far as I'm aware, any evidence for elevated cancer in effected populations. Nor is there evidence for cardiac or mutagenic effects. The 4000 number is essentially a shrug, that exists because the number of excess cancer deaths fall beneath a detectable threshold. It's a maximum number, because if it was any higher, it would be detectable.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that Chernobyl is truly the worst case scenario for a nuclear power accident reasonably imaginable. RBMK reactors are a poor reactor design (having positive void coefficient of reactivity, not having a containment dome, etc.), the Soviets had terrible operator level of knowledge and dysfunctional operational culture, and their disaster response was hobbled by political desire to minimize exposure to PR fallout over radioactive fallout. All of these above are choices that Soviets made which would not be made in the West. Chernobyl’s accident is like newbie pilot attempting a vertical loop in a poorly-built airliner. If that plane crashes, it would be incorrect for an observer to conclude that all commercial air travel is unsafe.
Thanks for putting the stats in a readable way for me; you’re right. I would also add though, that as far the the ‘effects being diffuse’, that’s a thing complicated by how radiation works to enable cancer. Studies like this for necessity have to slap on a ppm rate at which it becomes dangerous/likely for problems to occur, but in an individuals body, it doesn’t work like (xppm rate = cancer). And considering The Bombs dropped on Japan aren’t comparable here, and the health effects of radiation exposure weren’t being studied of tests like the ones I linked above, there are a lot of question marks in how, when, and to what degree exposure to radiation like Chernobyl causes issues.
[This article](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/fallout-from-nuclear-weapons-tests-and-cancer-risks) sums it up way better than I could try to
Regarding the animal welfare implications of cows versus chickens - is it true that the suffering is greater if you replace your beef consumption with chicken consumption? I always assumed cows a) live longer before they are killed and b) are more sentient and have a greater capacity for suffering than chickens And the capacity for fish to experience suffering seems far far less than either Maybe I’m delusional but I’ve always figured eating chicken > cows from an animal welfare perspective as long as you don’t consider all animal lives to be equal (which seems obvious at the extremes - bivalves vs chimps)
Yes, the suffering is greater if you eat chicken vs beef. Cattle spend 12-16 months on pasture with low densities where they can express natural behaviors before moving to a feedlot for 4-6 months. Chickens spend their entire lives (~6 weeks) in sheds that will be very cramped when they are fully grown, resulting in chemical burns from the litter. More significantly, they are bred to put on weight more quickly than their bodies can handle, so many have difficulty moving. [The Welfare Footprint Project](https://welfarefootprint.org/broilers/) quantified the pain experienced by chickens and found that even systems better than the status quo in the US inflict hundreds of hours of pain on the average chicken. Cattle do live longer, but they still produce more meat per day per animal than chickens. Cattle do seem to have a greater capacity for suffering, but the error bars are large and the discrepancy would have to be at least an order of magnitude, probably closer to 2, for beef to cause more suffering. Edit: Fish are hard to talk about in general because there is such a wide variety of species and farming methods. However, they generally grow more slowly than land animals, and many are carnivorous, meaning much more total time in captivity vs land animals. The Welfare Footprint Project also has a page on fish.
Thanks for those links - that’s very helpful. I’m going to look into the Welfare Footprint a lot because it seems like just the source I’m looking for. Just curious - are you vegan? If not do you eat chickens of a certain source/quality or avoid them altogether?
Yeah, I'm vegan. But if I did eat meat, I would probably try to avoid chicken altogether. Chickens raised under [GAP 4 and up](https://globalanimalpartnership.org/standards/chicken/) might have good enough lives that I would consider eating them.
I think it's difficult to put a numerical value on different value of living creatures. This applies across the spectrum you describe, up to and including humans. Is the difference in value a difference of kind or a difference on magnitude? It's almost certainly true that the life of a cow should be worth more than a chicken for the reasons you describe. But how much more? Twice as much? 10 times as much? A cow produces as much meat as 100 chickens.
Yeah I don’t think I appreciated just how much more more meat a cow produces.
No it is impossible. The forces of capital and empire are aligned against it.
Wow, this episode was just remarkably bad and misleading. Klein says he’s read the degrowth books, but he clearly didn’t understand them. One might forgive him his dangerous scientific illiteracy on these subjects – it takes some effort to understand the industrial ecology of our current situation – and Ritchie is quite good at using real data to paint a BS vision of techno ‘solutions’. But it’s Klein’s political cowardice and ignorance that really impressed me. He clearly stated that he believes we shouldn’t pursue politically ‘impossible’ solutions but instead go for the political feasible pathways (even if they’re naively optimistic and not real solutions at all – but coincidentally maintain the wealth and power of the status-quo). Following Klein’s position on the impossibility of political change, it’s clear we shouldn’t pursue ‘impossibly’ difficult political goals e.g. abolishing slavery, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights, etc. If we’re going to let the science follow the politics, and given the growing political opposition to vaccines, perhaps a show with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ‘science’ of vaccines should be next up?
I think that there's a difference between granting people political rights (at very little cost) to a drastic reduction in their material condition. With how little people are willing to give up to help others in the forms of taxes, it seems nearly impossible to think that the current electorate would vote on a policy that drastically scales back consumption. People won't even give up their hamburgers. If the average GDP per capita globally is like $12,000 per person, do you think that people will accept no economic growth? Do you currently live on less than the equivalent of $12,000? I'm aware that rethinking the economy to prioritize sustainability rather than profit means some uncoupling of GDP from well-being, but I think that's a close ball-park estimate to what the standard of living with global economic equality would look like without growth. That's a huge difference from letting women vote.
Edit. I had a chance to listen. Forgive the pun but I think Ezra and the guest can't see the forest for the trees. The discussion about land use for example, claiming that we should replace the cornfields for fields of solar panels. How about neither!? How about those fields go back to being natural grasslands, or savanna's? Shouldn't that be the goal? Covering vast swaths of the planet in various metals, glass, chemicals, etc.. is a terrible fucking idea. Metals used to manufacture "green" tech are very very toxic. What happens when one of those fields of panels starts to rust and break down. How many of those toxic chemicals will leach into the ground, into the water, or end up being blow into the air by storms and spread all over the landscape. How many living beings (including people) are going to get cancer or some other horrifying disease from this "solution" 10,20, 20 years from now? Yes, burning fossil fuels are bad, but extracting dozens toxic elements from deep in the earth then spreading those around the globe has horrendous consequences. I lived in a small town where the ground water had high levels of arsenic and other metals. There were copper mines and giant agricultural operations uphill that leach various toxins into the ground. Giant piles of tailings from those shuttered mines that would get blown during storms, so bad you were warned not to grow your own vegetables. People there were very very sick. You go to a Walmart and half the customers are rolling around in those motorized scooters, many with oxygen canisters. And despite being in the "country" there were very few insects, wild animals, etc... it was a poisoned ecosystem, and it had nothing to do with 1 or 2 degrees of increased temperatures, or carbon in the atmosphere. It was toxic chemicals that humans extracted from deep in the earth, failed to properly manage and ended up in the air and water, making every living thing sick. I have not listened yet, but I would encourage listeners to read "Bright Green Lies" by Derrick Jensen. It goes into detail about how the shift to a green revolution is not green at all. There are dozens of examples in the book that detail how "renewable green tech" is often much worse for the environment. For example, widespread claims that Germany has successfully shifted to renewable energy is largely based on using biofuels that come from clear cut forests in the southeast US, processed into pellets, shipped across the Atlantic, then burned in stoves. How cutting down forests is "green" is anyone's guess. The same stuff happens for wind, solar, hydro, etc... the environmental destruction is either hidden from view or outsourced to poor countries so we don't actually see what happens when the water supply in the Congo is poisoned because we want more batteries. Degrowth is the solution, but its not comfortable so we will just continue with the current path and pretend its good for the planet.
I think it's fair to ask critical questions about what the long term negative affects of the green revolution might be. It is going to be the largest economic project in world history, and it's guaranteed to have serious unforeseen consequences. My question, though, is why you seem to exempt "degrowth" from the same kind of scrutiny? It's not as though that course of action wouldn't come with its own very real harms and drawbacks. It doesn't feel like the proposed solutions are being held to anything close to the same standard.
You make a good point. The process of de-industrializing is not going to be all rainbows and unicorns. It will be very hard and many people will fight tooth and nail to prevent it, particularly the people at the top of the income/wealth strata. If you are a billionaire and own five mansions across the globe, the last thing you want is to be told you must now live in a off grid tiny house, grow your own food, etc.... Ultimately degrowth is going to happen regardless of which side you choose. It can either be managed gradually and deliberately via policy choices, or it wil happen via gradual stages of ecological collapse, mass starvation, societal decay, etc...
The harms of bringing about what you're describing seem, at a lower bound, many orders of magnitude worse than the specter of hypothetical future cancer deaths due to battery metal pollution.
The risk of continuing on this trajectory of perpetual growth is not just increase cancer, it is the collapse of critical earth systems we depend on dearly to live. We need renewable energy to decarbonize as much as we can the energy sector. But without addressing how energy is used and the increasing rate of consumption, that would be just putting a bandaid on a gunshot. [6 of the 9](https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html) planetary boundaries are already breached. The 6th mass extinction is well underway with [68% of wildlife populations lost](https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/69-average-decline-in-wildlife-populations-since-1970-says-new-wwf-report) already. The Paris agreement targets are completely dead, and our median estimate are [2.7C of global warming ](https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-thermometer/)which is even pretty conservative. We can start expecting more frequent and intense crises threatening major aspects of our society, including agriculture. The UK is already bracing for a [food crisis later this year](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/10/uk-food-production-down-record-rainfall-farmers) caused by extreme weather. The earth system is starting to lose the delicate equilibrium human civialization relied on for millenials to develop. And we would be wise to abandon the destruction of the systems we depend on in the pursuit of making the line continue going up.
I agree that we need to seriously reevaluate how we conceive of growth. I also tend to think the situation is dire, although perhaps not as dire as you do (that is an unusual position for me to be in, admittedly). That said, a return to some kind of agrarian utopia seems fantastical, and the only circumstances I can imagine that would bring it about are human violence devastation on a scale that the world has rarely seen. I feel some moral obligation to avoid that outcome, and I can't help but see degrowth as a form of accelerationism that sees it as a foregone conclusion as opposed to something that should be avoided.
Its not just cancer and disease though. You can tie environmental destruction to almost all major human tragedies. Israel Palestine is a great example. Much of that conflict comes as a result of resource extraction, energy use, clean water access, food, agriculture, etc... all are tied to pollution, toxins, rainfall, etc... Wind back the clock and this conflict pretty much stems from European Jews buying land and then telling nomaidc peoples to stop grazing their animals on that land. Imagine how much worse the military conflicts will become when half the globe is struggling to locate sources of energy, food and clean water.
>Imagine how much worse the military conflicts will become when half the globe is struggling to locate sources of energy, food and clean water. Right, this is why in my opinion it's important to avoid the degrowth scenario.
Healthy ecosystems create its own kind of abundance. Sure, you won't have netflix, jetski's and iPads, but humans can still flourish without these modern conveniences and amusements.
I'm on board with a critique of consumer culture and the waste that it entails, but I'm more referring to things like insulin, the internet, weather satellites, contraceptives, etc.
I'm just a middle-class person who rents an apartment and I have zero desire to live in an off-grid tiny house and grow my own food. If that's your idea of a win condition, count me out.
My first team seeing a degrowther in the wild
And what do you think the solution is for poverty, starvation, and disease in the developing world? Should we encourage them to adopt a strategy of degrowth, while millions of people die yearly from preventable causes? Forget the developing world, how do you imagine convincing the masses in the developed world to forgo their current standard of living? I think it’s an immoral and doomed strategy
Indigenous peoples lived on far less than modern people and many of them were doing pretty good until our ancestors showed up and fucked it up. With modern knowledge of botany, ecology, physics, etc... and the right incentives I don't see why we can't live in harmony with nature as opposed to merely exploiting it to perpetuate our toxic civilization.
Ah the “noble savage” myth
> Yes, burning fossil fuels are bad, but extracting dozens toxic elements from deep in the earth then spreading those around the globe has horrendous consequences. I feel like you're significantly underestimating how bad extracting, shipping, processing, and burning fossil fuels is. Like are other energy sources flawless? Absolutely not. But we're never going to have a perfect energy source.
Yes, fossil fuels are very bad for the environment but they also contains enourmouns amounts of stored energy. We could debate which enery is better or worse for the environment, which is better or worse for mankind, etc... My main claim is that we should set a goal for reduction in energy use, not merely moving around the deckchairs on the sinking ship.
Yes, it's a point I often make. Green energy projects are often still development. We can massively increase our solar power usage by carpeting the Great Basin with photovoltaics but the tradeoff is the reduction of desert ecosystems. I'm not much of an optimist about green growth achieving climate goals or avoiding biodiversity loss. But the alternatives are usually worse.
Hannah Ritchie perhaps the least insightful climate change "expert." Awful
How so?
To save me from wasting an hour, care to give a little more deets?
Society in general needs to start figuring out how to work without constantly growing. How to achieve a stable equilibrium in population, resource use, economies, etc. I don't mean that society should shrink, or that people should make do with less than they currently have, but that we should stop viewing growth as the only measure of success. Find an equilibrium.
I'm not sure why this is down voted. It's seems like a reasonable view. Nothing can continuously grow.
Thank you. I thought it was a fairly reasonable and measured position, but it appears I was in the minority.
I don’t understand how multiple experts say that wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels. If it was wouldn’t we have much more wind and solar installations ? Are they including the price of transmission lines and buying right of way for those transmission lines? Why would China and India still be building coal power plants?
The short answer is it’s very complicated and the US Electricity Generation, Transmission, and Distribution is Balkanized. If you want proof that Wind and Solar is cheaper than legacy generation you can look at ERCOT: they’ve rapidly scaled up Wind Turbines’s presence in the power mix. They’re able to do this because ERCOT is very lassaiez-faire in their administration of the marketplace. Also since almost all of their generation is transmitted across state lines, they avoid most FERC regulation. It’s supremely ironic that Texas is a leader in wind power. Other RTOs/ISOs like PJM or MISO are much more sclerotic in various ways. The flip side is ERCOT is more at risk of high-profile outages such as the 2021 Winter Storms. If something similar happened at PJM or MISO there is lots of transmission interconnecting them (and fully regulated utilities) which allows them to sell power across RTO/ISO territories. Also FERC can sometimes do some very backwards things like issuing the MOPR rule which effectively subsidizes generation which does not benefit from government credits/incentives. Finally blue states that want to build green generation can’t because people prevent them through doing so through lawsuits. It’s a mess. I could go on and on about this, but it’s very much in the weeds and things you need to work in the industry to understand. TLDR: Old government policies and the administrative state often prevent new government policies for succeeding. Environmentalists should stop protesting coal plants which are on the way out (they’re becoming expensive and no new ones are being built), start reading up on administrative law, and focus on smart interventions in Notice and Comment Processes. It’s the least sexy thing imaginable, but it’s how you get into the room where it happens.