Brighter: Optimism, Progress, and the Future of Environmentalism

by Adam Dorr

In addition, autonomous driving technology will then remove labor from the equation, reducing the cost per mile even further.

Aviation accounts for only about 2% of global emissions, but will nevertheless be disrupted by electrification.

Batteries still need to improve a great deal before they can store enough energy to provide a direct substitute for fuels on long flights, but we are likely to see such capability emerge in the 2030s.

Moreover, trips overnight in sleep-capable cars, vans, and buses that can drive themselves will provide an attractive alternative to air travel for distances of less than about 600 kilometers.

Shipping also makes up only about 2% of global emissions, and although there will be some direct disruption by the electrification of ships, the greater disruptive impact is likely to be indirect via reduction in shipping demand.

This is because more than half of all freight is comprised of crude oil, oil products, coal, natural gas, iron ore, steel, automobiles, animal feed, livestock, and seafood – all of which will see demand plummet as a result of the combine...

This means the same key implications of the energy disruption also logically follow for the transportation disruption: 1) as transportation gets cleaner, so does everything else; and 2) as transportation gets cheaper, so does everything else.

At the time of this writing, food and agriculture account for about 18% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Of those emissions, over half are directly attributable to livestock, their manure, the crops raised to feed them, and the land deforested for their pasture and feed cropland.

Similarly, by the 2030s cellular agriculture will make meat, leather, and other products from cells in the laboratory much more cheaply and at a higher level of quality, safety, and consistency than the traditional animal products they replace.

Compared to livestock, the new technologies will be up to 10 times more water efficient, 10-25 times more input efficient, up to 20 times more time efficient, and up to 100 times more land efficient.50

Perhaps the most astonishing environmental implication of the food disruption will be the staggering amount of land freed up from animal agriculture. It is easy to forget that agriculture has the largest footprint on the Earth’s land surface of any human activity by far.

We use about 40 times more land for farms, pasture, and grazing than we use for all mining, roads, buildings, parking lots, railroads, airports, and other built-environment infrastructure put together. And of the 5.1 billion hectares of total land we devote to agriculture, 3.3 billion hectares are used solely to support livestock.69

The food disruption will free up roughly 2.7 billion hectares of land from animal agriculture – an area the size of the United States, China, and Australia combined.

All of that freed up land will offer an entirely unprecedented opportunity not only for fighting climate change but for conservation, reforestation, and rewilding as well.

even without active efforts to maximize the rate of reforestation, the passive reforestation of these 2.7 billion hectares through natural recovery processes alone will capture and store a quantity of carbon equivalent to up to 20% of today’s global...

Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture facilities can be located in or close to towns and cities just as breweries are today, and this will have the additional benefit of making food systems more resilient worldwide, and thus reducing the vulnerability of poorer communities to the vagaries of global trade. The food disruption, especially in conjunction with the energy and transportation disruptions, will therefore help lift billions out of poverty and into prosperity.

The first of these carbon withdrawal options is reforestation.

My team’s research indicates that the next most feasible option proposed so far is ocean alkalinity enhancement or OAE.

very fancy way of saying “grind up rocks into fine sand and dump them in the ocean”.

But for now, reforestation and OAE are low-tech, low-risk approaches to carbon withdrawal. (Planting trees and smashing rocks are things we humans have known how to do for a very long time).

1. The way to solve climate change is through prosperity, not austerity.

2. We can achieve net zero emissions much more quickly than is widely imagined by deploying and scaling the technology we already have.

The task now is to deploy and scale existing clean technologies as fast as possible:

3. The immense power of markets can now do the heavy lifting in mitigating emissions.

4. A focused approach to solving climate change is better than an all-of-the-above approach.

From now on, the single strategy we should focus on is simple: deploy and scale the disruptive clean technologies in the energy, transportation, and food sectors as quickly as possible.

5. The same technologies that allow us to mitigate emissions will also enable us to withdraw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere affordably.

6. Decarbonizing the global economy will not be costly, it will instead save trillions of dollars.

7. Carbon taxes are no longer strictly necessary.

8. The clean disruption of energy, transportation, and food will help reduce the disparities between wealthy and poor communities, and between the wealthiest and poorest countries.

Agriculture is by far the largest form of land use worldwide. Our farms, pastures, and rangelands cover over one-third of all the land surface of the planet. That fraction rises to fully half of all habitable land, once we exclude glaciers, deserts, bare rock, dunes, salt flats, and beaches.

Regarding land availability, research by my team and others has shown that the disruption of food by precision fermentation and cellular agriculture, and the resulting collapse of industrial animal farming, will reduce the amount of land dedicated to agriculture worldwide by about 75% between now and 2040.

However, as was the case with terrestrial ecosystem degradation, the food disruption in particular will play the dominant role in solving problems of marine ecosystem degradation.

Regulations imposed on commercial fisheries are difficult to monitor and enforce, and so far have proven largely ineffective. What has worked quite well, however, is the establishment of large marine protected areas within the national waters of wealthy countries like the United States and Australia.

then complete disruption and the collapse of commercial fisheries and most aquaculture worldwide is inevitable before 2040.

“To make the world a better place, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”

social stability and peace are reliable results of material prosperity, whereas social unrest and war are frequent if not inevitable results of material deprivation.

Things go terribly wrong whenever societies try to dictate personal preferences and oppress individual choices, whether in the name of decency or piety or sustainability or anything else.

The only reason why we allow waste to turn into air, water, or soil pollution is because waste management is expensive, and that is why wealthier communities and nations manage their waste better than poorer ones – they can afford to.

Instead of propping up doomed companies and industries, our governments should instead focus on helping the affected individuals and communities adapt to the disruption.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.” – Stephen Hawking

progress ought to maximize freedom of choice.

The best way to solve environmental problems is to end the conditions that create them in the first place, and that means overcoming scarcity, degradation, and dependency themselves.

The only way to really achieve escape velocity and free ourselves from the confines of scarcity is to decouple labor from human beings entirely, and that means with automation.

the best way to avoid overexploiting nature is to never need to exploit it at all. That means we must shift from dependence to freedom, both for our sake and for the sake of the planet. The only conceivable way to do so is through technological progress.

Everything is impossible until it isn’t.

In the event that AGI is hostile, there is probably not much we can do about it, just as there is not much that chimpanzees or chickens can do about the hostilities of human beings.

in the event that AGI is friendly, this would be exceedingly good news both for us and for the environment. So, as Stephen Hawking said, AGI will either be the best or the worst thing that ever happens to us. Fingers crossed.

For our purposes here, it is enough just to recognize that if we wish to think seriously about long-term environmental change, then we must also be willing to think seriously about long-term technological change as well.

but we are going to see energy, transportation, food, and labor all disrupted simultaneously over the next two decades.