Brighter: Optimism, Progress, and the Future of Environmentalism

by Adam Dorr

We cannot solve this crisis by taking shorter showers, driving a bit less, and not eating meat on Mondays. The situation is much too serious for that now.

Degrowth is a can’t-do worldview, whereas decoupling is a can-do worldview.

the recipe for success is: innovation, mitigation, and restoration.

It is crucially important that readers understand why the premise of this book is not just that technology is our best hope, but that it is our only hope.

To actually solve climate change and save our world as we know it, we must withdraw the better part of two centuries’ worth of carbon emissions – something on the order of 500 billion tons – from the atmosphere and oceans within the next few decades.14,15 This is an absolutely monumental challenge, and the only possible hope we have of meeting it is with the help of advanced technology.

if we are wise enough to make the right choices today.

we cannot think seriously about the decades ahead without a clear understanding of the nature and trajectory of technological progress.

For example, it might surprise some readers to learn that automobiles were originally celebrated as a solution to urban environmental problems – namely, that the streets of densely populated cities like New York and London were often covered in several feet of horse manure and rotting carcasses which posed a grave threat to public health and killed hundreds of thousands worldwide each year in the absence of modern sanitation systems.17

but it is important to recognize that traditional practices can seldom successfully scale to meet the needs of 8 billion people – if they easily could, then there would have been little incentive to develop modern alternatives in the first place.

Concerns about environmental issues, however, are different. Life is not better for the world’s ecosystems today than it was in the past. By nearly every measure, the health of the biosphere really is in steep decline.

Why do we not solve environmental problems today? The answer is simple: cost.

But the solution to problems created by knowledge is never ignorance. The solution is always more and better knowledge.

It is widely believed, for example, that the availability of freshwater will become a grave concern over the course of this century. In fact the opposite is true: automation together with cheap clean energy will make desalination, purification, and distribution of water much more affordable and accessible in the future.

Instead of a world defined by scarcity, degradation, and dependency, new technologies will allow us to create a future of abundance, healing, and freedom.

This miraculous achievement is not a testament to any inherent goodness of technology, but rather to the inherent decency of (most) human beings.

First, in order for any new technology to continue growing exponentially as described above, it must have the potential to become significantly cheaper than the older technologies it is disrupting.

new technology must be a comprehensive substitute for them, meaning that it is better in virtually every respect and not just in a few select ways.

Indeed, it would be prudent to outlaw the creation of synthetic self-repairing and self-replicating machines, given the risks that such devices could pose if they were ever to escape our control.

The Earth receives more energy from the sun in an hour than our entire civilization consumes in a year,

It is therefore labor which is ultimately the limiting factor of production.

It follows that if we had an unlimited supply of dirt-cheap labor, almost everything else would be dirt cheap too.

Why do we not pick up all litter before it reaches our rivers and seas? Why do we not recycle all waste instead of sending it to landfills? Why do we not pull weeds manually rather than blanketing entire fields with herbicide? The answer is because the labor necessary to do so is simply too expensive – today.

Today, over 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from just three economic sectors: energy, transportation, and food.48

My team’s research has shown that clean technology disruptions are already underway in each of these sectors, which will enable us reach net zero emissions worldwide before 2040.

In energy, the technologies are solar photovoltaics, wind power, and batteries, and these will disrupt coal, oil, and natural gas.

In transportation, the technologies are electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and ride sharing, which will disrupt internal combustion engines and private vehicle ownership.

In food, the technologies are precision fermentation and cellular agriculture, which will disrupt meat, milk, and other l...

Inconvenient Truth #1: Even if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, many of the worst impacts of climate change would still occur.

Inconvenient Truth #2: It is not enough just to stop emitting greenhouse gases.

Mitigation alone is not enough. If we are to prevent climate catastrophe, we also have a huge amount of restoration to do, which means actively repairing the damage. And soon. Not slowly over centuries, but within the next few decades.

Inconvenient Truth #3: It is physically impossible to solve climate change by reducing consumption alone.

My analysis showed that we must rapidly achieve not just net zero emissions but also dive deep into an aggressive carbon withdrawal regime. Accordingly, my analysis distinguishes mitigation and restoration as two distinct stages of solving climate change.

idea of returning our climate to anything close to a pre-industrial state, and instead is focusing on limiting warming to 2 ºC. But this is extremely risky, because even the 1.1 ºC of warming we have already caused will very likely to lead to catastrophic impacts.

In short, the IPCC scenarios suggest that the climate science community believes it is already too late to really solve climate change, and that the best we can hope for at this point is damage control.

Thankfully, this defeatist view is dead wrong, and is purely the result of technological ignorance. We can solve climate change. Fully. And the technologies that will disrupt energy, transportation, food, and labor are the key to understanding how.

At the time of this writing, the energy sector itself accounts for 57% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.48

The energy disruption is already underway, and all available evidence points to solar, wind, and batteries unfolding as a textbook case of technology disruption in energy.

2014 IPCC report I mentioned before, the ‘best case’ scenario (i.e. the scenario with the lowest cumulative emissions and thus the smallest global temperature increase) assumed that less than 5% of the world’s primary energy would come from solar, wind, and geothermal power combined by the year 2100.

By 2030, solar and wind power will exceed the IPCC’s ‘best case’ scenario for the year 2100 – 70 years ahead of schedule.

It is why solar and wind power leapt from providing just 3.5% of all electricity in the United States in 2012 to 25% of all electricity a decade later.

The energy disruption has an additional extraordinary feature: as solar, wind, and batteries adoption accelerates, these technologies will produce an increasingly large surplus of energy at near-zero marginal cost. We call this surplus of electricity Clean Energy Super Power (or just super power for short).

The upshot of super power is that energy will become not only clean, but cheap and superabundant as well.

As energy changes from being dirty and expensive to clean and cheap, we will need to fundamentally rethink our relationship with it.

Energy systems based on solar, wind, and batteries will also enable poorer countries and communities to close poverty and equity gaps by leapfrogging over previous barriers to human development.

The sooner any community, region, or nation adopts solar, wind, and batteries, the sooner they can level the playing field.

1) as energy gets cleaner, so does everything else; and 2) as energy gets cheaper, so does everything else. The energy disruption will therefore help lift billions of people out of poverty and into prosperity.

At the time of this writing, the transportation sector accounts for about 16% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and 29% of emissions in the United States.48,66

These combustion engine cars and trucks will be disrupted by electric vehicles whose motors and batteries burn no fuels and therefore produce no emissions.

Electric vehicles were initially introduced alongside combustion engine vehicles around the turn of the 20th Century, but their real limitation since then has been battery technology.

Electric vehicles require no fuel, need far less maintenance, and last much longer than combustion vehicles. This will slash the cost per mile over the life of the vehicle in applications like taxis where vehicles are in service