Is Zeke Hausfather right, is Degrowth dumb?

Degrowth is dumb, you heard it here first!

Thank God for Zeke Hausfather! Where would be all be without this man?

Imagine you had a magic wand that would allow you to change the laws of physics, to make it so that CO2 and methane in the atmosphere do not actually cause global warming. Wouldn’t that be great?

Well, a degrowther would argue we would still find ourselves faced with big problems during this century, because the real problem we face, is the overall size of the human economy, the overall demands that we place on the Earth. But that is nonsense of course! As long as we just make sure to keep global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius, everything else will turn out alright on its own!

Today, I want to take a look with you at some of the non-climate problems that we face, that will require us to reduce the size of our economy do things a little differently. Just a little tiny bit, I promise!

Something has to replace fossil fuels, especially oil

Even if fossil fuels did not cause global warming, we would still have to stop using them, for the simple reason that they are finite. It is becoming increasingly expensive, to dig them up out of the Earth. That is a bigger problem than it may seem, because we don’t really have a good sustainable alternative for most of the ways we use them.

What you probably think to yourself is that we can stop using oil, because you’ve seen electric vehicles. Imagine if every van and every passenger vehicle, stopped using oil as fuel and became electric. That would solve just 25% of global oil use. Most of our oil use, is in ways that are much more difficult to replace.

For example, we need fuel for our airplanes. Can’t we turn plants into fuel for our airplanes? Yes we can, but that’s going to require a lot of plants. If we wanted to meet 2050 level demand for air travel with biofuels, we would need to be using 30% of total globally sustainable biomass. That’s not going to happen, because people also need to eat.

But there are other uses of fossil fuels, that also have to be replaced. Around 14% of the oil we use, is used to produce petrochemicals, including plastics. Again, the plastic manufacturers are looking towards our crop production, to produce “bioplastics”. Like biofuels for air travel, this will also be competing with land we use to produce food. And we will need biofuels for heavy duty trucks, which will also require land.

So, in the world where global warming is not a thing, we’re still going to need to stop using oil at some point. And that’s not going to be easy. In fact, it is going to be competing with our need to use our farmland for food.

We don’t have enough fresh water left

This is another big problem for which we don’t have a solution. In large parts of the world, we get our water for food production and other human uses, from water that we pump up from the ground. There is however only limited amounts of water available in the ground below our feet. Globally, 35% of all the fresh water we use, comes from stored groundwater.

Large parts of the world are depleting their groundwater faster than it can be replaced by nature. This is true for India, where the situation is particularly acute, as well as for the United States.

Can’t we just solve this problem with desalination plants? No we can’t, for multiple reasons. To start with, desalination requires a lot of electricity. If India wanted to stop using groundwater and start using desalinated water, they would need to figure out how to produce 122% more electricity than they currently do.

The real cost in some parts of the world is not so much in desalinating the water, as it is in transporting the water. If you could produce the desalinated water and teleport it to the farmland where it is needed, that would quadruple the cost of producing wheat. But we can’t teleport the desalinated water, we have to transport it from the coast, to the place where it is needed. Transporting water is expensive.

Approximately 1% of global freshwater use comes from desalinated water. Desalination will never play more than a minor role in meeting our water needs. It’s simply too expensive for most purposes for which we use freshwater in most of the world.

We don’t have enough copper available in the ground

The world will face a 30% shortage in the amount of copper we need, by 2035. Because of droughts in Chile, it’s currently hard to produce enough copper to meet the world’s global need, as certain methods of copper mining and refining use a lot of water. We also simply face a massive problem with declining core copper grades. Average copper ore grades globally have deteriorated from approximately 1.5% in the 1990s to around 0.6-0.7%.

We don’t have the right iron ore left to produce steel without using fossil fuels.

We don’t have enough of the high quality iron ore we need, to produce steel without using fossil fuels. The world has already exhausted the best iron ore that was available.

We’re losing our soils faster than nature can regenerate them for us

In some parts of the world, we’re making our soils unsuitable for agriculture by polluting them. That is the case in China, where the share of polluted soil grew from 5% in the 1980’s, to 19.4% today. The three main causes are use of pesticides, use of fertilizer and use of mulch. Together this results in the buildup of heavy metal pollutants in the soil, that reduce the growth rate of plants and make those plants unhealthy for human consumption.

In other parts of the world, soils are being lost to erosion. Estimates are that 16% of our soils will be lost within 100 years to erosion.

We’re damaging our soils by polluting them with microplastics

As I explain here, current estimates are that our overall global harvests are reduced by 5.5% by microplastics in our soil. As long as we continue using plastics, we will cause further buildup of microplastics in our soils, thus further reducing agricultural yields.

We’re eating so much fish that the global ocean ecosystem is changing

Because humanity is eating too much fish, jellyfish are taking over the ocean. The jellyfish also eat the eggs and larvae of fish, thus making the problem self-reinforcing. The ocean is approaching a global state shift, towards a jellyfish-bacteria dominated ocean. Jellyfish are not generally eaten by other animals, so the jellyfish blooms just decay, feeding blooms of bacteria. Other factors in the transformation to a jellyfish-bacteria soup ocean, are climate change and the human introduction of pollutants into the ocean, like human sewage and manure from the animals we raise for food.

A jellyfish dominated ocean is bad news, for a number of reasons. For starters, it means we won’t have fish to eat. Second, jellyfish clog our pipes. Jellyfish blooms are already constantly shutting down our nuclear reactors. This will only get worse, as we transition to a global jellyfish-microbial ocean soup. They are also shutting down our desalination plants.

We’re at serious risk of triggering a chain-reaction that destroys all our satellites and makes it impossible to navigate space

We have too many satellites in the air. A Kessler syndrome is now a real possibility, which would leave us without all the different functions satellites deliver to us. According to the experts, we need to start launching fewer satellites into outer space.

Oh yeah and while we’re at it: We’re now having so many old satellites crash back into our atmosphere, that all the aluminum being vaporized is starting to cause significant damage to our ozone layer.

We have to stop using light at night

Global insect populations are declining by 1-2% a year. In Germany they found a 75% decline in insect populations in 27 years. At least part of the reason insect populations are declining, is because we are confusing them with our light pollution at night.

Who cares about the disappearance of the insects, right? Well, ninety percent of all our bird species do. Ninety percent of all bird species depend on insects at least during some part of their life cycle.

Well, who the hell cares about the disappearance of the birds, right? I will just sit inside, staring at my computer screen and not worry about what goes on around me. I just don’t care if 90% of all bird species were to go extinct!

Well, more than 70% of all plants that produce flowers depend on birds to disperse their seeds. But I just hate flowers, alright? Well, birds disperse the seeds of 90% of plants in tropical ecosystems. So, we lose the rain forests without the birds. Well, who the hell cares about the rain forests, right?

The insects, the flowering plants, the birds, the rain forests, let them all die on the altar of our Gross Domestic Product! Well, here’s the problem: We depend on the Amazon rain forest for 20 billion dollar worth of agricultural products every year, because the forest generates so much rain.

And I will admit, I kind of don’t want to die of hunger. As you can see, everything is interconnected. We screw with the insects, we screw with the birds. We screw with the birds, we screw with the plants whose seeds they distribute. We screw with the seeds, we screw with the rain forests. We screw with the rain forests, we screw with the rain we need for our own crops.

So yeah, I am of course not one of those crazy progress-hating degrowthers, but I think we have to reconsider using light at night. I don’t want to get trapped in a global chain reaction of extinctions that leads me to die of hunger.

We have to stop driving our cars everywhere

For one third of species of mammal studied, being hit by cars is the number one cause of death.

This man saved us all, by figuring out a way to reduce global oil consumption by at most 25%!

This may shock some of you to hear, but when a zero-carbon electric vehicle like a Tesla encounters a hedgehog, the hedgehog will still respond to the threat by rolling up. This may shock you when I tell you this too, but that results in the hedgehog being flattened.

As Ben Goldfarb puts it: “We’re living in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history, and roadkill is truly one of the major reasons for that.” The estimates are that for 50% of endangered species in North America, roads are part of the reason why they are endangered.

You might want to start shutting down your nuclear power plants too

So yeah, we already figured out that in the jellyfish-dominated global ocean soup, nuclear power plants that get their water from the ocean regularly start struggling with the filters being clogged by massive jellyfish blooms, I already showed you this.

But what about the nuclear power plants that get their cooling water from the rivers? Well, they are endangering the species that live in the rivers, like the fish that live in them. You see, the water that is returned into the river, is hotter than the water that was taken from the river. This kills your fish.

Well who cares alright? Let’s just kill everything that lives in the river, we need the electricity!

Yeah I agree, let’s kill everything in the river. We have to take one thing into consideration however: The warm water in the river from the nuclear power plants also triggers harmful algae blooms. Higher water temperatures can accelerate the growth of various waterborne pathogens, including bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. In other words, when we warm up our rivers too much with our nuclear power plants, we are left without safe drinking water.

We might want to start shutting them down at some point, at least during heatwaves in summer. Those crazy hysterical European greens may have been onto something.

My conclusion

So, I agree with Hausfather. Degrowth is dumb. We should not stop growing the economy.

What a silly idea! No, we simply need a simple technofix. Just make sure we keep global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius, build a bunch of nuclear power plants, solar panels and wind turbines and everything will be alright!

And alright, I guess we should simply:

-Start flying less

-Start driving less cars

-Start using less water for agriculture

-Start producing less plastics

-Start producing less copper

-Start producing less steel

-Start launching less satellites into the air

-Start getting used to shutting down our nuclear power plants when the river gets too warm

-Start eating less fish

-Stop dumping our livestock manure into the ocean

-Stop using lights everywhere during the night

But let’s not call that Degrowth. I get it, Degrowth is a forbidden word. Too European in style. No, let’s call what we need to do something else. Let’s call it: Cool growth. Or hey, how about this one? Patriotic Growth. No? How about American Growth?

And finally, I have to be serious for a moment and mention that I have in fact heard of the “decoupling” idea. The idea means effectively nothing to me, I consider it a rhetorical trick. I would recommend anyone who seriously believes in the idea of decoupling, to walk into a local pub in the future and explain to some of the guys sitting there drinking beer, that although they can no longer afford to eat meat, drive a car or fly, the economy has actually grown according to your charts. They would tell you: “Get outta here!” It is not an idea I feel like dignifying with a serious response.

My proposal to Zeke Hausfather

Since degrowth is of course very dumb, my proposal to Zeke Hausfather is as following:

Please explain to people how to increase the size of the global economy and deliver everyone an abundant and equitable future while everyone will have to:

-Start flying less.

-Start driving our cars less.

-Start using less water in agriculture

-Start producing less plastics

-Produce less copper

-Produce less steel

-Launch less satellites into the air

-Start reducing overall electricity consumption, as we will increasingly often have to shut down our nuclear power plants

-Start eating less fish

-Stop dumping our animal manure in the ocean

-Stop using light everywhere during the night

My suspicion is that achieving all of these objectives, would probably require us to engage in fewer economic activities, which would then result in a smaller overall economy.

But that is degrowth, which is dumb. So my question to Mr. Hausfather is: Please show how we can achieve these goals, without reducing the overall size of our economy.

I know you can do it!

Let’s put more people into the world! Let’s further increase the size of our economy! There’s no way this can go wrong!