A divorce for kids' futures
Back in 1987, when I joined graduate school at Los Angeles, I could not understand why the "natives" were complaining about the bad air quality there. They thought the air was dirty whereas it seemed just fine, thank you.
It didn’t take long before I, too, started complaining about the smoggy haze. The creepy color that enveloped the region was visible to one's eyes as planes descended over the airspace in the daytime.
Over the years, Los Angeles has cleaned up a lot. But, then my frame of reference has also changed, and has changed dramatically thanks to breathing the remarkably clean Oregon air. I have spent more years in the US than I did in India, and of that I have lived more years in Oregon than in California. Oregon has spoiled me with the clean air and water and green all around.
(Well, except during those horrible grass seed season weeks. And during the weeks of wildfires and smoke. Wait, what?!)
Can’t we live affluent lives without messing up the air? Can we have the cake and eat it too?
Intellectually, right from graduate school, I have understood that there is an element of the inverted-U-curve relationship that seems to be the pattern as countries develop. Development is accompanied by a rise in environmental degradation, and then after a level of affluence, there appears to be enough resources to clean up the air, water, and soil. Countries begin the development journey by burning carbon in various forms from trees on before they get to green energy.
Can we somehow speed up the process of decoupling carbon from economic growth and development?
This article at Grist argues that we cannot. “At least, not fast enough to reach international climate targets.”
Why do we need to decouple carbon from growth?
Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.
What if decoupling is a nice argument that simply is not happening, or not happening fast enough?
If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’”
What future do we want to build?
Here’s one part of the future that we are rapidly moving into, a movement that was intensely accelerated by the pandemic: All things virtual. We don’t even store our work files and cat photos in a local hard drive as we used to; instead, they are in the magical cloud. We don’t drive to the mall to buy things, but do online shopping, for which everything resides in the magical cloud. We don’t go to movies or watch television shows, but stream everything that comes from the magical cloud. Pretty much everything that we do these days is cloud-based. Even the worthless activity like me blogging is cloud-based!
But, the cloud is physically located on earth. This cloud is nothing but the massive data centers that require a whole lot of energy.
[The] Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.
(If you are like me, you immediately wonder where those 50,000 homes are located. Are they in the US? In Ethiopia? Makes all the difference, given the massive disparity in per capita energy consumption, right?)
The ecological dynamics we find ourselves in are not entirely a consequence of design limits, but of human practices and choices — among individuals, communities, corporations, and governments — combined with a deficit of will and imagination to bring about a sustainable Cloud. The Cloud is both cultural and technological. Like any aspect of culture, the Cloud’s trajectory — and its ecological impacts — are not predetermined or unchangeable. Like any aspect of culture, they are mutable.
GHG emissions and other environmental impacts are not predetermined. We humans can change the trajectory of the emissions curve. What future do we want to build?
It turns out that the future that we are building is leading the US to consume more and more and more electricity, with very little of it coming from carbon-free sources.
Many power companies were already struggling to keep the lights on, especially during extreme weather, and say the strain on grids will only increase. Peak demand in the summer is projected to grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, according to an analysis by the consulting firm Grid Strategies, which is like adding another California to the grid.
A big reason for the growth in demand?
The growth of remote work, video streaming and online shopping has led to a frenzied expansion of data centers across the nation. The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to accelerate that trend: By 2030, electricity demand at U.S. data centers could triple, using as much power as 40 million homes, according to Boston Consulting Group.
And how will we meet this growing demand?
To meet spiking demand, utilities in states like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia are proposing to build dozens of power plants over the next 15 years that would burn natural gas. In Kansas, one utility has postponed the retirement of a coal plant to help power a giant electric-car battery factory.
Burning more gas and coal runs counter to President Biden’s pledge to halve the nation’s planet-warming greenhouse gases and to generate all of America’s electricity from pollution-free sources such as wind, solar and nuclear by 2035.
So, what future do we want to build, if decoupling emissions from economic growth is merely a fancy scenario?
I like one model proposed by some economists:
They call for a planned, deliberate reduction of carbon- or energy-intensive production and consumption in high-income countries, a concept known as “degrowth.” The rationale is that much of the energy and resources used in high-income countries goes toward carbon-intensive products that don’t contribute to human welfare, like industrial meat and dairy, fast fashion, weapons, and private jets. Tamping down this “less necessary” consumption could slash greenhouse gas emissions, while lower energy demand could make it more feasible to build and maintain enough energy infrastructure. Some research suggests that reducing energy demand could limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C without relying on unproven technologies to draw carbon out of the atmosphere.
I am all for a serious rethink on consumption starting with “industrial meat and dairy, fast fashion, weapons, and private jets.”
How much more material well being do we want? Is there a ceiling at all, or is our material want sky high with no limits?
Almost 70 years ago, in 1958, the economist-thinker John Kenneth Galbraith raised this question of our insatiable appetite. Galbraith warned and worried that this appetite "is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question."
Until we tackle the consumption problem head on, well, everything else is deceptive greenwashing!