Could Energy Success Explode The Population Bomb ?  

Andy Revkin has a post at the NYT wondering if a clean energy breakthrough could remove a limit on population growth and thus have unfortunate results as increased population levels wreak havoc on the environment - Could Energy Success Backfire in the End?. The problem with this theory is that, as Bucky Fuller pointed out, increased energy use is highly correlated with reductions in population growth - so a solar power breakthrough would likely be a good thing from the point of view of stabilising the population.

One aim of this blog is to explore efforts to expand the menu of cheap, non-polluting, renewable energy options. That’s a pretty clearcut need given the risks attending the unfettered use of fossil fuels and the reality that 2 billion people today cook on guttering fires using fuelwood or dung harvested mainly by girls who are not going to school as a result.

But I had a dream about energy one fitful night not long ago and it left me a little cold. I pondered what kind of world might result if Nate Lewis at Caltech or Dan Nocera at M.I.T. or Shi Zhengrong at Suntech Power Systems in China had a breakthrough that made solar panels as cheap as paint?

We could synthesize food, even meat, in solar-powered factories. We could render water from the sea or briny aquifers drinkable in endless amounts (as is being done with wind power in sere parts of Australia even now).

And we could, in essence, vastly increase the carrying capacity of the planet. Fossil fuels were a big part of the growth spurt from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion people in two short centuries. On a finite planet, where would limitless energy, combined with humanity’s infinite aspirations, take us? This leads to a question that’s been touched on here periodically. Does a shift in values and aspirations have to accompany the technological leaps that will assuredly be made in the coming decades?

There have been heaps of warnings for a very long time about unintended consequences from a rush to new technologies. (If you haven’t read Bill Joy’s 2000 essay for Wired, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” I encourage you to do so — possibly with a stiff drink nearby.)

But even Mr. Joy and others sounding this alarm have pointed out that, on the whole, technology has given humans longer, better lives — so far. And while he wrote about “knowledge-enabled mass destruction” from advances in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, Mr. Joy continues to invest in new technologies as a partner, along with Al Gore and others, at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (At the firm, he helped set up a $200 million “pandemic and biodefense fund” — the ultimate hedge?

I’ll ask Mr. Joy and others their views on the consequences of humans getting boundless energy. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University has often asserted that technological advances will inevitably lead to more space for nature, allowing forests to expand, fisheries to rebuild and the last refuges for wild things to persist.

But others warn that creeping deterioration of the world’s biological patrimony is happening in parallel with our creeping disinterest in the diversity of life and ecosystems. As Edward O. Wilson explained here in laying out “Wilson’s Law,” if we focus too much on the physical infrastructure that sustains us, without sustaining the planet’s variegated veneer of life, we’re in deep trouble. Arthur Koestler and others didn’t have confidence that our values could catch up with our runaway explosion of technological capacity. What’s your view?