And the machines said: “Feed Us Seymour!”

Most of us have seen the map of China showing the dramatic de-pollution of the air produced by the Covid-induced factory shut-downs. Good for the climate… but bad in other ways, at least for the way we live. In fact, it is a live experiment in showing that the only thing we can do to slow down climate change - not cancel it out, even if everything stopped now the carbon-led damages would take centuries to fix - is in fact to un-grow our world. How we do that on a planet populated by billions who feel that somehow the world owes them is beyond my capacity to imagine. At stake, "minor" global issues such as social peace and the stability of political systems...

Our economies are deeply interconnected and just look around, all you hear about is 'growth' 'growth' 'growth'. Makes sense in fact: who wants to not grow? But the cold fact staring us in the eyes seems to be that we must choose between growth and conserving the planet's very ability to sustain (our) life. Now how do we do that, when modern life is essentially made possible by machines, that themselves predominantly require carbon-based energy, and will do so for the foreseeable future? Renewables cannot produce the amount of energy we currently use to keep our millions of machines going, from the fields of agriculture to the factories, transportation systems, health systems, security systems, communication systems, you name it. And building and maintaining solar, wind machines, to name a few, itself requires vast amounts of energy. The laws of thermodynamics have no pity.

And let's not for one second believe that our web communication is carbon free - it is in fact one of the worst offenders, every email, every Tweet, every picture having a massive carbon footprint through servers, to name just those. Netflix is one of the worst among the worst in this picture, a gargantuan eater of server energy. And again, there are billions of us, demanding instantaneity, 24/7 connection to the hive, anything, anywhere, anytime. 

The rise of machines is what has allowed each one of us to live the life of super-heroes. A single fuel tank linked to a machine called a car generates more power than hundreds of humans toiling for a very long time. Let’s just stop and realize what this means… It is machines again that allow our cities to mushroom without producing any food, because the machines (including the ones to produce the fertilizers we use, transport crops, plant, maintain, process, etc) have multiplied our ability to extract calories from agriculture at a scale never achieved before (and most probably not entirely sustainable). And the examples multiply so much that it is estimated that a standard citizen in a developed economy today literally depends on thousands of machines to just go about their modern life. Again, all those machines are mostly fed by fossil fuel, and renewables just cannot pick that up at our rate of frenzied consumption. 

As we stand, the only way is to cut our addiction to easy energy - which currently predominantly comes from oil/coal/natural gas, precisely because those are such amazingly efficient sources of energy. And no, it cannot happen without sacrifice, or rather a whole paradigm shift, because our addiction to energy is fueled by our addiction to growth. Just imagine. If it weren’t for machines, we would not have achieved the amazing productivity gains that make modern life possible, when animal or human power was replaced and then passed a gazillion times by machine power. Look at the picture again. Growth? Life-supporting climate? How? The challenges are bigger than paperless office (see above about electronic communication we think is so clean) or not taking a bag at the store. Those things make us feel good, and in the case of bags, some do help (a tiny bit) with the plasticageddon we have unleashed on nature. What stares us in the face is nothing less than a re-think and re-imagine and re-act of the way we live. Same-same cannot continue, not if we care. And yes, it probably means we need to slow down considerably. Step one is to let that reality sink in, look around at our loved ones, put down the feel-good thingies (the laws of physic are notoriously unimpressed by feel-good moral band-aids) and realize that our definition of a good life must change now. Not disappear, but change deeply. Do I have any good ideas at this stage? Nope, still scratching my head, but convinced already that it requires a mixture of systemic and individual responses. And that technology alone is not the do-all cure-all solution.

DID YOU KNOW (from J-M Jancovici's August 2019 presentation to Sciences Po):

• We have spent 2 centuries replacing renewable energy sources with fossil energy sources. Why? Humans are not stupid: there is a solid physical reason for this...
• There are about 7 billion humans on the planet. To produce the same amount of energy as today - but without machines - we would need to have 1, 400 billion humans around...
• We are absolutely not reducing the consumption of fossil fuels. The media blow out of proportion the growth of renewable energy sources - in fact, renewables remain a tiny fraction of the total energy consumed daily.