Dangerous Curves Ahead

Hey everyone! 

Fun hottake on recent science news, but first, a quick housekeeping update.

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Now let’s get into it…

Note: Just a few hours after I finished writing this essay, we received a last minute invite to a private screening of Oscar winning director Oliver Stone’s new documentary on nuclear power,. His thesis and comments afterwards both challenged and supported what I’ve written. My response is a coda at the end.

Can We Invent Our Way to Utopia?

The Department of Energy announced this week that researchers had finally produced a viable test of nuclear fusion!

Fusion is the opposite of "splitting the atom" fission, which got us the A-Bomb, the H-Bomb, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

For decades nuclear fusion's been the holy grail of renewable energy.

It's the process that makes our sun shine and beams all those friendly photons at us. #photosynthesisFTW

It's also the stuff of paranoid conspiracies (riddled with tales of breakaway states funneling trillions of dollars into bunker cities that are already powered by hidden fusion technologies).

And it's been a legitimately thorny engineering and physics problem for those actually working on it.

While this initial proof of concept in a lab worked, we're still trillions of dollars and decades away from a cost-effective global rollout.

But it does revive a tantalizing question...

What if we can invent our way out of this current sh*tshow?

"I mean, that quasi-mystical Free Energy that we've been hearing about for decades is finally here!

We don't need to get our knickers twisted about all that peak oil and global warming stuff!

After all, in the 1890's the streets of New York and Chicago were literally knee deep in horseshit...it was the most pressing pollution problem of its age until...

TA DAAAA...

Henry Ford and the motor carriage saved the day!!!

See? We can innovate our way out of damn near anything, if we only keep that Can Do American spirit alive!"

***

That, at least, is the story that many techno-utopians hold onto.

The conviction, often bordering on dogma, that there's a fix for every fail. A solution to the problem that was once upon a time, a solution itself. (Looking at you Zoom meetings. And Crocs.)

But this week's news about nuclear fusion resurfaces the hope that ground-breaking new tech can remedy the worst excesses and unintended consequences of our current civilizational arc.

And it might. It just might!

If it's going to, though, it's gonna have to nail this key transition.

For those folks playing X-risk Bingo back home, mark this one on your checkerboards. It's arguably the most important move civilization has to execute to survive.

You probably won't hear about it in your newsfeeds. Politicians, publishers and pundits don’t touch it. But it's the foundational issue beneath all the others...

In a nutshell: Can we navigate our way off a carbon based economy (AKA fossil fuels) quickly enough to step onto the next growth curve, without crashing our socio-political-economic systems as we do it?

Because, here's the thing:

If we can't, then as we exhaust the energy abundance we've enjoyed this last century we run the very real risk that we degrade our capacity to invent the impossibly hard stuff (like space laser fusion, low voltage desalinization, or "safe" geo-engineering) that we're gonna need to engineer our way out of this mess.

As Einstein cautioned, "if World War III is fought with nuclear bombs, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

By which, he meant that if we overshoot our limits (in his case, with totalizing nuclear war) then we will have effectively bombed ourselves back into the Stone Age (i.e. fighting the next war with "sticks and stones").

But the analogue is also true: if we burn ourselves back into the Stone Age via relentless carbon combustion, then we might be heading into an energy winter, instead of a nuclear winter.

And then we won't even have two sticks to rub together to stay warm. Let alone scale cool stuff like nuclear fusion.

If that happens, via economic depression, political conflicts, food insecurity, migrant crises, ecosystem collapse etc., it's gonna be a whole lot harder to host Silicon Valley hackathons, or secure DARPA funding, or brainstorm MIT Media Lab breakthroughs.

So that's the jam friends and neighbors.

As we have clearly crested the hill of the carbon boom and are heading down the backside at a startling clip, can we leap to the upside of the next curve without spilling our kombucha?

Two Key Curves to (Help) Make Sense of It All

To get a better bead on this conundrum, we need to dip into the work of mid-century economist Simon Kuznets and anthropologist Joseph Tainter.

You might not have heard of Nobel-winning Simon and his "Kuznets Curve" but you've almost certainly heard inspiring TED talks based on his work.

In a nutshell, the environmental version of the Kuznets Curve (EKC) posits that the more technologically advanced a society gets, the less it pollutes.

The opposite is also true––take a super simple hunting or farming society on the front end of the curve. Their carbon footprint is tiny. They have neither the numbers nor the hunger to make much of a dent.

But the real polluters are the ones climbing towards progress. They have enough population growth and energy demands to develop a voracious appetite, but not enough technological capacity to create clean solutions.

So Scandinavia, IKEA, wind farms and electric Volvos = Good.

India, China, coal and kerosene = Bad.

This related argument you've almost certainly heard of before–even if it didn’t reference Kuznets by name.

"So, if the most advanced nations are polluting less, through the magic of free markets voluntarily transitioning to more sustainable technology, then the answer for the rest of the world is more economic development even faster, not hitting the breaks or changing course!"

Which if you remember our recent bit about "motivated reasoning" will sound eerily familiar.

You realize that pro-growth, pro-investment "rising tide lifts all boats" environmental policy paired absolutely wonderfully with the last seventy five odd years of World Bank/International Monetary Fund/Bretton Woods Agreement neoliberal globalism.

Not only was Kuznets a wonderful justification to keep the pedal to the metal of exponential investment, tech and debt, but we got to tell ourselves (and sell to other countries) the Life Changing Magic of Leveraging Up.

There's three critical problems with that argument though:

Thing One: The Kuznets Effect, of lessening pollution with advancing technologies, appears to have been more of a fluke of history than a law of nature.

A recent study from a Thai university found that the Kuznets effect only worked in 9 out of 44 countries studied. And only in three of eight communities of nations––the EU, the OECD and the G7.

In other words, it only showed up in the advanced democratic Western societies that got the first bite of the Kuznets apple.

Results have varied wildly since, and chasing growth can create pollution and degradation even more easily than it pops out Teslas and solar farms.

So when you hear giddy techno-utopians parroting some version of "we'll innovate our way to a green and sustainable planet, and the way is forward faster, despite what all the Luddites and naysayers think" you'll now be able to spot the Kuznets fundamentalism underneath the argument.

But the counter-argument is just as tricky.

"Awfully sorry developing world who've spent decades getting sold on the free-market growth and democracy schtick! If we're all to survive, we've determined that Western Europe and the US have eaten so much of the collective pie that you all can't possibly consume/pollute at the same rates we did. So we want to introduce the wonderful notion of caloric restriction. (yours, not ours). #intermittentfastingFTW. We did the binging but you all are gonna get the purging."

Kinda shitty even if it's also kinda true.

Thing Two: We can slide backwards down the Kuznets Curve.

It's not all a jolly-hockey-sticks ride to the green-washed future. The ratchet can go the other way just as easily.

Back to the Einstein WWIII quip––if we don't nail this transition, and use the last gasps of Late Stage Carbon Capitalism to invent our way to the next lilly pad (or iceberg, depending on your metaphors) we're stuffed.

Possibly for a really long time.

Those much ballyhooed fusion lasers may never arrive.

Thing Three: Our carbon timeline might be shorter than we'd think.

For anyone saying "hmm, these points seem needlessly alarmist and overly dire. Just this month I've seen gas prices at my local pump fall to $2.50/gallon. There must be plenty of oil left or it wouldn't still be so cheap!"

First off, see Scandinavia who is experiencing a 3-5X spike in energy costs this winter. Without a doubt, they're right up against it with the sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipeline and war in Ukraine, but their constraints are coming soon to a reality near you!

One colleague living in Sweden wrote of families keeping the heat just above freezing to avoid bursting pipes, foregoing baking of any kind in electric ovens, and generally low-tech camping indoors during a bitterly cold winter, just to make ends meet. Right now.

h/t Nora Bateson.

But even with stories like that all around us, there's a deeper structural reason why it's so hard to accurately map how much time we have before we run out of the black sticky icky.

This brings us to another dude's curve. Joseph Tainter.

Tainter's theory of civilizational collapse hinges on his observation that the more complex a society gets, the more it benefits (think cool stuff like aqueducts, universities and wifi).

Up to a point where it's now too complicated for its own good, and further efforts to expand get canceled out by growing friction (think taxation, corruption and Twitter).

Then these decadent societies collapse under their own weight. (think barbarians at the gate).

If you look at these two curves, the 0,0 point at the lower left hand corner starts in the same place that Kuznets curve does––a simple low consumption society with abundant natural wealth.

Then the people start exploring and exploiting novel resources.

At first, harvesting that new energy source is all low-hanging fruit.

Easy access ramps the economy and the population.

They're raking in energy credits hand over fist, even and especially as they start depleting those original stockpiles. (that's the part of this graph where we see the Resource line plummet but the Economy line still happily climbing)

But something else is also happening with that economic growth––they're getting better and better at harvesting those energy credits!

Even though the low-hanging fruit is quickly gone, they've invested some of that energy back into building step ladders, and cherry pickers so they can keep harvesting the harder to get apples.

They might even invent grafting and greenhouses to juice production even further.

Someone at the grocery store won't notice the difference. But they're spending more and more of a dollar to make the next dollar.

This is exactly what happened with fossil fuels.

In a blink, we've gone from Jed Clampett of Beverly Hillbillies fame "then one day he was shootin' at some food, and up from the ground came a bubblin' crude" accidental gushers, to today where we are horizontally drilling into low quality tar sands and fracturing (AKA "fracking") seams to unlock increasingly hard to get, hard to refine raw energy.

We're getting close to the point where the cost of extraction and refinement outweigh the calories in a given gallon of this janky fuel. Soon we'll be burning more than a gallon of gas to refine the next gallon of gas.

(don't think we need another graph to explain how that goes)

So what does this all mean? Why is it useful?

Simply, it means that the signals we're using to map our reality (like prices at the pump) are giving us an artificially rosy sense of where we actually are in this story.

It means that the end of the carbon boom is likely to come with a bang and not a whimper, because we've masked the depletion of resources with better and better extraction technologies. 

It’s not that we’re gonna actually run out of oil reserves. It’s that we won’t be able to afford to pump them anymore (the right hand side of that graph where the economy drops below the remaining resource curve)

Same goes for milking the last harvests from depleted topsoils by juicing them with chemical fertilizers and genetically engineered seeds.

Once those farms fail, or dry up and blow away, (as they did in the 1930's Dust Bowl) there's no bringing them back. At least for a really long while. Nature's timeline not ours.

Never mind how cheap the organic arugula at Costco remains for now.

Scary vs. Risky 

It's exciting to see long hoped for breakthroughs like nuclear fusion move from science fiction to science fact. It really is.

And...it's also crucial that we scrutinize the narratives that carry us along, shaping how we see what's going on, what questions we ask, and what hopes we hold about what's to come.

Now back to Oliver Stone and those nifty nukes…

His thesis is fundamentally this:

Somewhere in the 1970’s, the anti-nuke movement fused the concerns of Cold War nuclear destruction with nuclear power.

That was a change, as the Sierra Club and other environmental orgs originally supported nuclear power as a solution to fossil fuels and habitat destruction.

(he floats the case that Big Oil actively funded this narrative behind the scenes).

Bad events like Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, which was more of a near miss than an actual catastrophe, combined with movies like Jane Fonda’s China Syndrome and drilled into everyone’s heads the link between global annihilation and nuclear power.

Chernobyl was a real radioactive disaster, and the only instance of direct fatalities from a nuclear accident (50 souls).  Hundreds more in the region died of longer term exposure. Legit concerning.

Fukushima was the only one of four nuclear plants in the direct path of a one hundred foot tsunami to leak, and demonstrated surprising resilience despite sub-optimal design (backup generators that got flooded).

Meanwhile, coal, kerosene and diesel burning demonstrably kill millions of people worldwide every year.

Because their impacts are slow and diffused, we tolerate them even as we campaign for clean energy.

Despite some overt Russell Conjugating and emotive B-roll imagery to sway the viewer, the bit of Stone’s argument that really landed for me was this: 

the US Navy has been running nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers since 1954 without any serious incident. Millions and millions of miles. No fails.

That’s kind of interesting. And comparable to why we get way more freaked about great white sharks than bees, even though we’re much more likely to die from getting stung than chomped. 

Same with plane crashes vs. car crashes. Cars are statistically lethal. But falling out of the sky is irrationally terrifying.

Risky vs. Scary.  We’re terrible at telling the difference.

Revisiting the Past

So as we’re struggling to stay on the happy side of the Kuznets Curve, and trying desperately to find a replacement for all of that calorie dense carbon we’ve become addicted to, good old nuclear fission might be our counter-intuitive best bet to make up the shortfall.

Not giant smokestack nukes like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. But Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) like the ones that power the naval fleet.

Think Tesla Powerwalls with uranium instead of lithium.

Luke Nosek, one of the original PayPal mafia and board member at SpaceX (as well as an investor in some of these new nuclear companies) said during the panel discussion:

 “when we speak to governments worldwide, they don’t want to hear at all about some new groundbreaking technology! They want to hear that the plant you’re proposing is exactly the same as the tech that’s been around for half a century with a proven track record. The innovation we need right now isn’t in tech, it’s in regulatory approvals and distribution.”

Given that no matter how you slice it, wind and solar can only realistically cover about half of our exponentially growing energy needs, we’re gonna have to come up with some Killer App to cover the spread.

It’s extremely unlikely that we’re going to invent, test and scale something brand new in time.

Even if fusion tech finally gets us a Jetsons Jetpack future, it won’t be fast enough to address our current climate crunch.

In the meantime, we might need to revisit an old technology with a problematic past.

If we don’t, we’re gonna keep burning dirty coal to the bitter end.

And we’re gonna keep throttling the Global South from attaining the same standard of living we’ve been flaunting for decades.

Neither of those seems especially sustainable or politically viable.

To stay on the right side of the Kuznets and Tainter curves, we might have to split the difference, and split a few atoms.

What’s old is new again. Let’s hope we can get it right this time.

J