There are so many natural systems that we barely understand, especially in the field of health and medicine. And there are so many incentives to flatten the models we do have and oversimplify how we intervene in these systems, often causing harm.
For example, we only just confirmed a decade ago that Pitocin, the synthetic hormone that hospitals give almost all birthing mothers to prevent or treat hemorrhage or in higher doses to induce or intensify labor, obstructs mother-baby bonding, causing postpartum depression. Oops!
Evolution spent all this time figuring out how to make the birth process jumpstart maternal instincts and motivation, especially for mammals, and especially for comparatively premature human infants. And then we go and mess up those hormones and make motherhood harder and less fulfilling. Then we wonder why people don't have more kids.
And hospitals probably won't change those protocols, because the non-pharmaceutical ways of boosting the brain's endogenous oxytocin that drives labor, prevents hemorrhage, and causes bonding are expensive or impossible to implement in hospitals. They basically amount to making sure the laboring mother feels at home and constantly supported in person by safe, snuggly, and familiar people, not bothered by unfamiliar places or people, lights, noises, paperwork, or hostility. Those things are what make hospitals operate efficiently, but they're what tank endogenous oxytocin production and labor progress and safety. That's why, in developed countries, and for low-risk mothers, home birth with a licensed midwife is safer than hospital birth. Regulatory capture is why home birth midwifery is not more common in the US.
Of course I appreciate the field of medicine in general, including prenatal ultrasounds, screening tests, Pitocin used to stop hemorrhage when it does occur, etc., all of which home birth midwives also do as a matter of course. High-risk interventions like Pitocin or C-sections are sometimes the best solution, they're just used more often than ideal because we're sabotaging labor earlier in the process.
My point is that some complex natural processes, like labor, are poorly understood, poorly taught (unlike midwives, OBs are surgeons foremost and have typically never witnessed an entire labor without drugs), and very inconvenient to scale for financial efficiency. Birth is my area of expertise, but I'm going to remember Gell-Mann and infer that there are many other such systems that we could inadvertently mess up.
Evolution has figured out some things that we haven't. We can certainly make some improvements - maternal and infant mortality is lower now than it was 10,000 years ago - but we need to always refer back to nature to make sure we're preserving the good as well as we can while preventing the bad. That requires ongoing scientific inquiry and a foundational respect for nature.
If anyone's wondering how exogenous Pitocin and endogenous oxytocin work similarly for contracting the uterus (which both drives labor and prevents/stops hemorrhage), but have opposite effects on bonding, here's how. I didn't include it above because it was tangential to my point, but since readers here like to know how things work, I'll explain.
The meaningful difference isn't in the chemical formulation; they're basically the same thing. It's in the method of administration. Pitocin doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. Injected into the bloodstream, Pitocin/oxytocin will act upon the uterus. But it doesn't reach the brain. Endogenous oxytocin, however, is created in the brain's hypothalamus and stored in the pituitary gland. It does all of its emotional work in the brain before also going to the uterus.
When you add exogenous Pitocin/oxytocin to the bloodstream, it down-regulates the brain's production of oxytocin, so there is even less oxytocin in the brain than if you had done nothing.
I’ve done some research and they’re actively seeking improvements in nasal applications of oxytocin and similar substances. This aligns perfectly with Tomas’s point.
Regarding birth support, it’s likely not the high dosage of oxytocin itself but the absence of natural pulsation that’s problematic.
Returning to the broader discussion, they conduct extensive research to improve these treatments, which is precisely what Tomas is highlighting in his post.
I'm glad to hear this is a promising and active line of research!
The absence of natural pulsation is indeed a problem with IV Pitocin during labor. It contributes to Pitocin contractions being more painful for the mother, more risky for her uterus, more stressful and risky for the baby, and less effective at helping the baby out, compared to natural contractions. And Pitocin during labor actually raises the post-birth hemorrhage risk because it tires the uterus out. I wonder how we could sync it up with natural contractions given that those are not always of consistent frequency and intensity.
But I'm not sure I understand your suggestion that the lack of natural pulsation could also be contributing to how Pitocin undermines the bonding aspect of birth, causing postpartum depression. I'm intrigued if you want to share more.
Speaking outside my area of expertise now, it does seem plausible that Earth systems are simpler than medicine.
But social science is a mess, which suggests to me that that's even more complicated.
And it's hard to draw a firm line between physical engineering and health. E.g. what exactly is in proprietary fracking chemicals, and are we sure it's not PFAS or something nearly as bad for human health? Who knows; the financial incentives prevail. It is quicker to invent new engineering solutions than to test them for safety against human health.
In the case of fracking's lack of transparency, it's a legislation problem, not an engineering / science issue. Or more to the point, a corrupt legislation problem.
It occurs to me you(r comments) are saying the same thing as mine are, albeit since you are a true SME (subject matter expert) you are able to navigate a very specific arena much more capably and knowledgeably than I can. I love your skillfully communication and how, in a very specific area (child-birthing, motherhood) you are able, from your very learned experience, to articulate precisely the issues that occur when we apply a science-medicine approach to a system we do not completely understand (but think we do).
I truly believe this pattern does apply to [most things worth applying it to, eg how we birth our young, how and where we spend our time, what we should/nt put in our bodies, etc], and the question then becomes, I think as you and Tomas allude to, = given this is a Legitimate Pattern, DOES IT ALSO APPLY to this other area of Life?
As an earnest believer in TOE (theory of everything), I find that my thinking tends toward: if we have found the True-to-TOE pattern(s), the answer is usually (some form of) Yes.
This feels deeply short-sighted and classically techno-optimist. It assumes that technology can indefinitely decouple growth from ecological limits, despite decades of systems research showing that efficiency gains tend to trigger rebound effects and shift pressures rather than remove them. Abundance narratives also flatten complex socio-ecological systems into engineering problems, ignoring feedbacks, material limits, power, and distribution. Technology matters, but without changes in consumption, governance, and underlying growth paradigms, it risks accelerating overshoot rather than delivering sustainability.
Ecological limits are captured pretty well by the planetary boundaries framework, which sets safe thresholds for climate, biodiversity, freshwater, and biogeochemical cycles—many of which we are already crossing. One example: electric vehicles reduce emissions and help address the climate change boundary, but they increase demand for lithium, cobalt, and nickel, putting pressure on boundaries like freshwater use, land-system change, and biosphere integrity. Efficiency in one boundary often shifts impacts to others.
The issue with planetary boundaries is that most of the literature on the topic is super hand-wavy, and when you get into the specifics, they break down. So let's dive into your example of EVs. Have you quantified their impact of ICE cars vs EVs, all in?
The tradeoff is:
- ICE: mining for the materials to build the car + CO2 from emissions
- EVs: mining for the materials to build the car + pollution from electricity generation
In your comment you're implying that the additional materials to build the car might offset the CO2 emissions benefit.
Of course, this is not true. First, because of incentives.
EVs eliminate the tragedy of the commons of pollution: CO2 emissions are shared by the world, but mining pollution is not. This is much better, of course, because the ones making money from it are also the ones paying the costs. If your mining destroys your environment, you have an incentive to clean it up in a way that you don't with CO2.
Also, of course, CO2 is diluted in the air, so very hard to clean up, whereas mining pollution is extremely localized, so much easier to clean up.
Second, EVs are only 10-15% heavier than ICE cars, so not much worse in terms of materials. As you say, this is concentrated in lithium, cobalt, and nickel, but let's break that down. These elements generate 5 types of pollution:
a. A bit more CO2. This is paid off within 1-2 years of operation, and the only reason why they're so high right now to begin with is because a lot of China's electricity comes from coal. But that is falling precipitously thanks to their solar electricity push, so that every year, EV cosntruction is less and less CO2 intensive.
For the same reason, the electricity from EVs will also generate less and less CO2. As renewables become a bigger and bigger share of electricity production worldwide, EVs become more and more environmentally friendly, reducing further their CO2 footprint.
b. EVs emit no NOₓ, CO, VOCs, SO2
c. Regenerative breaking reduces dramatically the pollution from tires—of course, it's a no brainer in electric cars, but it's so much more expensive in ICE cars that many don't have it.
d. Lithium, cobalt, and nickel are >90% recyclable, so it's not like you use them once and then you need to mine the same amount of stuff. It can be reused 10x
e. The mining of these elements. Here, you have to compare them to the extraction of oil and gas. Of course, since the volumes aare much smaller, the impact is much smaller. Also, they are easy to cap, stabilize, and restore. Water tables are not a problem of mining, they are a much broader problem of human activity, which is solvable through this
So in summary, EVs are muuuuch better than ICEs because:
1. They correct misaligned incentives of pollution, so there's less of it
2. They concentrate the pollution, which is easier to clean up
3. Most of the downsides are much easier to manage than for ICE
4. The concerns that ppl claim today (eg, lots of CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a car, through electricity) are a consequence of our current electricity generation, which is greening fast, so EVs will green accordingly
5. They bring many other benefits that are not very commonly recognized, such as dramatically less air pollution in cities, which kills today millions of people
So that's for EVs, and every time I've actually dug deep in one of these topics, I see the same pattern. Hand-wavy cynicism answered with optimistic hard facts.
Abundance will save the Earth, not sustainability.
Actually, the planetary boundaries framework is far from hand-wavy. Each boundary is defined by quantified control variables. These thresholds are grounded in decades of Earth system research, modeling, and observational data, and the 2023 update rigorously quantified all nine boundaries. Six are already exceeded. These are real, measurable limits, not vague concepts.
Thanks for the detailed EV breakdown, Tomas. My point isn’t about EVs versus ICEs at the unit level—I agree that EVs are cleaner—but about the limits of growth on a finite planet. EVs highlight the boundary-shifting effect: efficiency gains in one domain cannot make growth limitless, because pressures are simply redistributed across other ecological boundaries. While an abundance agenda is appealing, it risks overlooking the systemic constraints that define true sustainability.
I heard that concern about planetary boundaries a lot, and so I got into the details. And by hand-wavy, I don't mean quantified. They are quantified indeed! So maybe it's not the right term. What they do is apply complex models to hide the stupidity of their assumptions. Garbage in, garbage out.
The reason why I told you to pick well your example is because I was going to debunk it, and I was confident I could debunk any example, because they're all trash. It just takes too long to debunk them all in comments.
So you can't now say "Oh this is just an example, the entire thing still stands." No, it stands on hand-wavy complexity that hides stupidity inside, and the EV example shows that. The fact that I was willing to debunk ANY example, and that I debunked the EV one so quickly, should give you pause.
For thousands of years obsidian was traded over long distances. It was in many ways to human being prior to 5,000 BCE what oil is to us now.
There was a crisis around 5,000 BCE. Readily available sources of obsidian had become depleted. Obsidian became scarce and, consequently, expensive.
Humanity did not become extinct. Tools made of copper were used as a substitute for those made of obsidian, Then bronze. Then iron. Then steel. We haven't looked back.
The moral of this story is that we should worry less about depleting resources on which we depend and considerably more about discouraging or outright preventing the innovation that encourages substituting depleted resources with those we still have.
Yeah, on the other hand if we don't want to relive a crisis like that of 5000 BCE it's important to have a bit foresight on finite resource depletion. Free markets are the most efficient within a time horizon of 15 years. Beyond that, need a non-corrupt government.
I am reminded of the (popularized, not sure how deeply true, since I haven't done my own diligence) story of the tragedy of Easter Island, how their consumption of natural resources (trees/wood especially) outpaced their ability to innovate past/through it.
Cool but you may be fighting the last war Tomas. With the current breakdown of world order nobody serious is giving up opportunities for growth for a green future - our concern with fossil fuels and nuclear are critical dependencies on foreign power, maritime security, and nuclear proliferation.
Also am afraid you're unintentionally taking part in this blame shifting. Roughly we say the West is in decline because unlike the Chinese we care about the environment. Bullshit. Boeing sucks, can't innovate and its airplanes fall off the sky not because of a hippie takeover but because of a takeover by physics-illiterate finance and MBA. Enshitification of all US products after IPO is because all the power to anonymous shareholders whose 1D algorithm is just optimising short-term profit.
The stories abound of US companies starting up well and ending up shitty because the power is in Wall Street and not in the engineering department. That's not because of the green and the hippies.
I wish you were right. Alas, the vast majority of the population in Western countries is still in the mindset of "let's not grow too much, it's bad for the environment". Just look at the comments!
Just looked. You may have a point, although how representative a sample this is is not clear.
To me though it is still clear that the poor performance of the West's industry in the XXI tech is only very mildly impacted by misplaced fears on ecology. A much bigger culprit is a corporate governance that prevents any gain in productivity to be further invested for more gains - instead it's siphoned up to Wall Street, where it may or may not be reinvested productively. A sort of neo-malthusian trap, except instead of feeding children, the gains in productivity feed capital.
Not sure it's true that most people think "let's not grow too much, it's bad for the environment". IT's more like let's pollute less, it's bad for the environment. Which is true. And we are polluting less, but too slowly. Temperature are increasing. We should do better and we are doing better, but not fast enough. Why? Also because of bad or terrible politics. The most powerful individual on the planet does not believe that temperature are increasing and that are increasing because of our pollution of CO2. So techno-optimism is great on average, but at the moment we are not doing well. Then of course Trump might go and democracy might survive. But science that is the source of TP optimism and of mine is stronger and more creative in a democracy and the world is going all in the opposite direction. That's why on top of technooptimism we also need to stop the return of fascism, as we argued here www.stopreturnfascism.org
No need to discourage growth--it's happening all by itself. As it happens, fertility rates have been declining for decades. In developed countries, fertility rates are incredibly low and below replacement for most developing countries, with the exception of Africa.
(i) We have the power to destroy or make sustainable, it is up to us - except of course for major natural disaster beyond our control (major eruptions can have major global effects).
(ii) We do see signs of the path to sustainable abundance (e.g. decouplings).
But two comments:
1. Real question is timing: How to reach that state BEFORE damages become so catastrophic we have major loss of life, ensuing major political conflicts, all derailing the effort.
2. Real debate is share of two levers in achieving that goal - technology vs. sobriety: 100/0? 90/10? 70/30?
Ddi you read the same article I read? I have watched the "decades of research argument" devolve into another reframing of arguments that are cloaked in heavy techno-language that only ends up changing the narrative when the climate alarmists go from annew ice age to global warming. From zero population growth to what is the opposite. But that won't deter the climate pessimists.. the narrative will simply change. Notice that this year at Davos, it us slowly sinking in ..no Greta and Al Gore booing a speaker. It is devolving, but surely will be back in another incantation.
I happen to agree with the the premise that we have evolved to a point that abundance can be our future. It us a hard thing to grasp because it upends our mental framework we were born with, but I agree with Tomas...the future can be and will likely be one of abundance.
A great article, very good, and the approach is very interesting. I would just add that it does not go into numerical details about diets, although it does implicitly raise the issue of excessive consumption: the focus on producing and “optimizing” food and materials without questioning what we consume or how much land and emissions this requires. Its techno-centric abundance framework does not address the fact that many countries with high consumption of animal protein also have very high per-capita emissions footprints, linked to the expansion of pastures and agricultural land for livestock, which is one of the main sources of emissions and deforestation when scaled globally. I would also note that the increase in forest cover in Europe captures only part of the global story. This European recovery does not repair the massive historical deforestation since the Middle Ages, nor does it compensate for the net loss of old-growth forests that will never return, due to the expansion of agricultural frontiers and, more recently, urban areas.
The forests are going back very fast. If we continue this way, there will be more forest than in the middle ages (when lots of forests were cut to get cropland). This is BECAUSE Europe has abundance!
Old-growth forest is not a problem we can solve anymore. Here, the only places where we should slow this down are Brazil and Indonesia (and even then, in Brazil it's mostly not the Amazon forest).
As noted, we produce more food with less cropland!
What’s going on, Tomás, is that in ecology abundance doesn’t get along very well with diversity. I’m not one of those who fully agrees with the idea of conservation and restoration; on the contrary, I think those concepts need to be thermodynamically adjusted. It’s very important to know what the “equilibrium” state of the ecosystems is, the state we need to aim for when rehabilitating degraded ones, and whatever that state may be, the forests and ecosystems we seek to protect generally require a level of biodiversity that makes the system resilient (quality) in the face of the changes that are surely coming, rather than the abundance of just a few species (quantity). Biodiversity needs space and time.
What is happening in tropical rainforests is truly dramatic. If Brazil aspires to raise the socioeconomic levels of its population to those of the European middle class, within the consumption patterns of our global society, then unfortunately we are in trouble. As you rightly point out, there are two factors that could help, but they would pose a problem for the economy: the human population tends to decline or stabilize, and areas devoted to crops and livestock production tend to contract. But even so, if the goal is to eradicate extreme poverty while maintaining protein consumption levels like those of countries such as the United States or Germany, we are facing very serious problems in the future.
Another big part of the story of forest recovery in Europe is that most of this animal protein is from Brazilian soy beans - the forest area lost there to feed Europeans beef is certainly far larger than the gains over here.
Still, doesn't take away the merit and impact of recovery programs in Europe (or lack thereof in certain countries),
I am a little puzzled by this. In the first part you show how CO2 has been “catastrophically depleted”, with only a tiny fraction of the original amount left in the atmosphere, so plants are close to starvation. Then towards the end you show a graph that China’s CO2 emissions are stabilising and imply this is a sign of progress. Do we need more CO2 to help plants grow, or should we limit the amount we produce?
The reality is much less clear than what current debates would suggest.
The truth is more CO2 is MUCH BETTER for plants. They're growing 40% faster I think thanks to it.
The fear is that the SPEED of CO2 increase has been fast, and it might change environments too fast for living things to adapt easily—including humans.
Turns out for plants and animals it's mostly OK (eg there's more pola bears than decades ago; the rate of extinction has slowed down since the 19th C). The remaining issue is unforeseen consequences like the AMOC overturning.
There, the principle is: Fuck around and find out. Better not do that, so let's keep CO2 levels at pre-industrial levels or not much more.
As we get more info on how the world works, we can have more advanced interventions. Eg, increase CO2 but counterbalance in other ways.
Yeah i basically really vibe with this, but i also think that biodiversity is a very valuable thing, and basically a fossil resource that can stand to be deliberately maintained through intelligent systems design.
I'm confused what you mean by "the more we develop, the more of it we have" ? The more human civilization develops and designates certain areas as "wildlife preserves", the more biodiversity we have? But what about the (admittedly just headline news, I don't Truly Know) alerts from other parts of the Spaceship Earth that (say) we're losing thousands of species annually to (say) deforestation in the Amazon? But that net balances out because we "save" (or generate? Hope we're not talking about the wooly mammoth mouse approach, that's a Wildly separate convo anyway) tens or even hundreds of species annually through our preserves and reservations?
Explicit assumption that # species is a sufficient proxy to biodiversity health...
I'm pretty techno optimist as far as it goes, but you happen to have left out the pretty material fact that each of those major shifts you discussed resulted in mass extinctions, especially of the larger animals, and took many millions of years for a vibrant ecosphere to recover. Seems bad! I'm a large animal and also would rather not live in a wasteland for millions of years!
"We" understand how the world works. "We" can engineer it. "We" can become gods. Who is "we?" Elon Musk? No thank you!
The people who understand the earth have never been listened to when there's money to be made. Rivers flood and meander. Deforestatron causes landslides. Soil eorsion leads to destruction of farmland. These facts have been known for centuries, but they don't change behavior very much.
Why would your new techno-kings work for the good of all and not just for themselves?
Good points but there's also cases where we can act. CFCs obsolescence, and now renewable energy, are examples of earth science influencing policy successfully. In fact much of construction code does reflect landslide risk, so do insurance primia - albeit unperfectly. Agreed that markets alone are usually not able to do systemic changes.
Gaia is a chaotic system, not a complex one so whereas it is tempting to retrospectively infer coherence, it is not possible to optimize. Otherwise an interesting and thought provoking article as always!
To expand, the article's thesis is, I posit, just wrong. "The world is a chaotic system we can improve" is a nonsensical statement.
Chaotic does not equal Delicate - it means unpredictable and *by definition* means that it can't be improved or optimized. Consequently preservation is not about "preserving limited resources", it is about preserving the current state of the system by trying not to mess too much with variables that we cannot hope to fully understand. First Do No Harm!!
The article concludes "As we mindlessly tinkered with the planet, our excesses surfaced these mechanisms. We thought the answer was “Don’t touch it!” But that lesson is outdated. “Sustainable” is defeatist because it says “I don’t know how this works, I can’t know, just don’t touch it.” It’s a bit like an old religion that tries to placate the gods."
On the contrary, however, "Don't touch it" is the right strategy, because no, we don't understand it, can't understand it, and the cost of getting it wrong is extinction.
Came to the comments section to more or less echo @Reinout H's thinking re: flawed techo-optimism, with my own (each has our own) nuance: As a STEMmy engineer I am tantalized verymuch by the idea of "The Earth is just a system we can and will learn to master and therefore optimize", but as a student of Ishmael (by Daniel Quinn; TLDR it is the very (civilizational, Human-based) culture that underpins the way we live that is itself not sustainable, and any effort(s) built on top of that will ultimately fail for all the trite and familiar man-is-flawed reasons), I draw back in a bit of horror as I see Tomas ride the road towards the techno-optimist conclusion, albeit on data-bricks of best intentions.
First and foremost: is not one central trope of so many (all?) techno-opti cautionary tales, one of the Hubris of humanity? "I think I understand all of this, certainly enough to master it," Man says to herself... jump to Act 3, where clearly we did not fully understand all of the complete, complex system that is [a particular ecosystem or] the Earth (never-yet-mind the solar system, nevermind the galaxy, nevermind the...), as we reap the consequences of a system that seems contained (or even ultra-Productive!) in one sector but strained to catastrophically bursting in another, unanticipated arena.
Don't we ALWAYS think to ourselves, "Now, we know much better how it works. And that’s why we can finally optimize for abundance. We can engineer the world. We can have more food, more forests, more money, more people, more animals, more houses, more nature. But only if we strive for abundance instead of sustainability." ?
I suspect at least one of Tomas' rebuttals might be, "yes, but who were the people writing those stories? Ones who didn't fully understand the full system enough to fully conquer and exploit and master it" - and that's a valid one, the other side of the opti/pessimistic coin: where one sees despair and caution, another sees potential and the chance to make things Better - the Truth / True Way probably lies somewhere in between, or perhaps more precisely, in a (not necessarily equal) blend of both mindsets.
Something more concrete (not sure if testable?), since I know you will ask :) - I truly believe that we can (and will, if we make it there) increase GDPs, increase efficiency of farming, power-generation, et al technologies, so that we truly have infinite abundance of these things (as you have discussed in other pieces)...
however, if we dont change our CULTURE (that is, the mindset that is both implicitly and explicitly taught to every baby born - that WE (humans) were meant to rule the Earth, and therefore we can do what we damn well please with all of it), then we are always going to be "doomed" to repeating the same cautionary tale mistakes, effing around + finding out that, somehow, there are still chinks in the dam, cracks in the foundation, fraying edges of the fabric. And sure, maybe the engineer's response is, "those are just further problems/errors to solve; errors are inevitable, but errors are soluble" - but I worry with this mindset we descend into a Zeno's Paradox of infinitely attempting to stomp out new errors, much like how in the children's story The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (by Dr. Seuss) the mess is never fully mitigated or managed, just moved around from one place to another (and who is to say the scale of the "collateral damage" of such errors + their attempts at mitigation? Just in "routine error cleanup" we could wipe out say a tenth or a quarter or even 3% of the entire population, and call that "acceptable losses"?)
Here in the "more aware" 21st century, this cultural mindset isn't blind to needing what we call "nature" (a word/concept which itself is implicitly bound up in our cultural thinking that there is some distinct separation between "out there [among plants]" and "in here in our Civilized World") - for example, the very concept of a "zoo" or a "park" or "protected area" is the quintessential expression of this mindset, it assumes humans are the landlords of the planet, deciding which fragments of the community of life are permitted to remain 'wild'. It is this type of cultural thinking that I fear undermines everything we do and, if not dealt with directly (tougher than one might think), will continue to yield the same not-quite-there-yet-but-maybe-if-we-only-pedal-harder-oh-dear-catastrophe-yet-again results.
Again, as an engineer both in trade and identity, I do enjoy++ viewing everything around us as a system with the same kind of inputs/outputs framework. And that framework is very useful for solving all sorts of problems. But I'm not sure it scales infinitely all the way up - Or perhaps, rather, taken too literally for all problems, it is insufficient, because:
But as a wet, messy, organic human, standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilizational experience, - but on top of (below) THAT is hundreds of thousands (if not a million or two) years of even more "true" experience in the form of bodies identical to ours that figured out an entire rainbow of Best Practices of living WITHIN (instead of above and apart from) the community of Life, - BPs that we, The Civilized, have most definitely forgotten and only re-discovered (a colorless sliver of) through our Science and Tech (not knocking the Scientific Method itself; absolutely unquestioningly one of our best meta-innovations)... - as one of these, I enjoy the very comforts of Civilization while screaming - sometimes silently, sometimes more loudly, as here -, unsure exactly why, but knowing deeply that the Way We Live currently is not wholly, completely, the True Way that we could or should be living.
"apologies" for the long-winded comment, thanks, as always, for engaging :) UT is absolutely fascinating and as I've said before, I do trust that you, Tomas, are one of the Good Guys "just" looking for the light of Truth, like so many of us are.
I would buy it if the culture of sustainability had solved our problems. It hasn't.
The most glaring example is that CO2 emissions are going to be solved not by a culture of sustainability, but by Chinese solar panels and EVs.
The thing about sustainability is that it asks billions of people to stop hoping, and start shrinking their goals, ambitions, and mindsets instead. This might work for a few people, but it doesn't for the vast majority of humans. Go tell a Sudanese, a Mongol, or an Indonesian that they should stop yearning for a clean and secure home, a car, or electricity 24/7. They're going to tell you to go fuck yourself.
Sustainability is structurally anti-human, and against human psychology. You can fight it all you want, you'll keep losing.
So sustainability is bad theoretically and practically: It can't work with humans, and it turns out in practice it works worse than abundance!
I’m confused, Chinese solar panels and EVs ARE more sustainable than fossil fuels. China adopted and rapidly developed that technology because it’s the more sustainable option. How is that not solving co2 emissions with sustainability?
I'm talking about mindsets here. The sustainability one is one of conservation, or reducing the human footprint.
Abundance is a mindset of improving the world directly, rather than through shrinking everything. When you install millions of m2 of solar panels, the mindset is one of "Let's give everybody lots of electricity for cheap, and it has the benefit of being good for the Earth!"
That is more the abundance mindset than the sustainability mindset
This is a great response, and I thank you for earnestly engaging (as you usually do!) but i feel like you didn't address my core (albeit kind of abstract) point about the underlying CULTURE of man-rules-the-world-and-can-do-whatever-we-want -- to my eyes/brain this isn't merely a "sustainability" arg in a different hippie dress, but really a more foundational worldview that pollutes everything we do.
At the risk of shock, I will hazard a completely fabricated (with some Gemini help for speed and conciseness and tailoring to audience) analogy to try to make this core point clear:
"Imagine a society of one race ("Takers") that claims total ownership of the Earth, then designates 'preserves' where other races are permitted to live. The insult isn't the size of the reservation; it’s the underlying Taker assumption that one group has the sovereign right to 'allocate' existence to everyone else. A 'park' for nature is just a reservation where we allow the community of life to exist on our terms, implicitly asserting that the rest of the planet is ours to exploit."
Gemini then advises, since I am engaging with a Data Science professional (and which I am most certainly not), that I frame this as a "Domain Violation" :
"Defining a 'park' is a Taker error in global state management: it treats the community of life as a subset of human property rather than the parent system humans inhabit.
I am curious your thoughts/rebuttals to THIS argument specifically, about this underlying Taker mindset that I feel our entire civilization was founded upon, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution ~10k ya (a revolution which has not yet ended, btw)
PS: I do think you are onto something though, in musing about what "actually works with humans"
I am also curious what Tomas (or anyone making it this far - thank you 🙏 - thinks about this absolutely amazing book i stumbled upon mere hours after posting in here last month:
Farmacy: Manifesto on the Future of Food.
It connects so many dots about Whats Wrong With Ultramodern Society, and gives some very clear (to me; definitely want to hear others' takes) causation to some of the very specific flowering epidemics of the past ~30 years.
It connects and aligns how the full stack of Industrial Agricultural (barely a century old) --> hyperprocessed production --> shelf-stable items for global shipping
= Modern day epidemics of (eg) obesity, diabetes, gut health, inflammation, even mental disorders and fertility issues.
It explains not only the proliferation of "food-like substances " (e.g. most things in the snackfood aisle of the grocery store, but thats just the beginning...), but also the why-how they are so harmful to our bodies.
It just makes so much sense to me, that because we literally stopped growing plants in the soil (which by the way is way more alive/biomass than most Common Sense notions believe it is; soil is NOT "just dirt"), and started trying to Scale Out of nature -- perhaps even with good intentions; im sure Haber/Bosch weren't intending to poison the world, maybe they even saw themselves as saviors helping to feed the people! And yet didnt fully understand the FULL ramifications of the entire system impact. -- because of this chain of events, millions if not billions of us regularly (and many unknowingly!) ingest "food" that is actually not food, is actually net harmful to their own bodies (via racking damage to the massive ecosystem inside each of us)
Now it is known that the (massively scaled and industrialized, Out of Balance) factory farming methods do cause issues in the overall ecosystem, both locally in the place where plants are grown (eg toxic pesticides / if they are still grown outside; monoculture), and globally with how the entire human food chain is impacted (eg glyphosate)
And this brings me round back to the point I (and others too i believe, in other words) have been trying to make here: we Civilized Humans constantly think we understand "enough" (when we think this far/wide at all) about the Entire Earth System (including our own bodies!) that we can Take Full Control of it all and engineer-scale our way into abundance and comfort and Happy/Profitable Times. And yet even with these noblest of intentions, there is (potentially always will be) still more of the complex system we do not yet know, nevermind understand fully. Which means (un-imagined, nevermind unaccounted-for) negative externalities, uncorrected errors that we dont even yet know exist, unhandled exceptions.. freezing ecological debt we (continue to) simply pass on to our children.
That doesn't mean we raise our hands to the sky, beat our breast, and give up. It doesn't mean we cling to some draconian, even Victorian notion of "sustainability= scarcity and therefore we must aim for Less"
It means we need to in fact look deeper within ourselves, our very foundational MINDSET that underpins literally everything we think, to everything we do.
We need to recalibrate our thinking to less of a "take over and take control" and more "how can we live in harmony with what is already here and has worked for millions of years?" Homo Sapiens' ingenuity, innovation is absolutely to be nourished! We too are part of it all, and that includes our cleverness and our meta-adaptations to craft better tools. It's the kinds of tools we choose to craft and HOW we deploy them that becomes the trickier part, to be wiser about.
All things in balance is really the major meta-pattern. Human "abundance"-seeking, EVEN when best-intentioned and "truly" un-tainted with the deprabed toxic/selfish predatory capitalism predilections, can still go too-far out of balance and itself be the cause of net harm, whether it is to humans or something(s) else in the community of Life - of which Homo Sapiens is absolutely a part of! And hence would always come back to bite us anyway.
(This is why I am also very firmly against cloud-seeding which I suspect is another point of contention w Tomas, but that's a convo for another time/article lol)
Does any of that make sense?
Please check out the book and let me know what you think of its thesis. In my rant above i am synthesizing my thoughts from both Ishmael+ Farmacy Manifesto.
Farmacy: Manifesto on the Future of Food itself is purely about why+how (runaway) Industrial Agricultural has in fact caused widespread damage over the past half-century, more damage than it has helped. And offers another way, another story to enact, another (proven, valuable, successful) paradigm to optimize around: Regenerative Agriculture.
--
100pg Paperback isnt available easily in the US (UK only) but you can get the audiobook (narrated by Woody Harrelson!) or, like me go on ebay and get it shipped stateside anyways 😊
I’m curious what Tomas and others think of Farmacy: Manifesto on the Future of Food. It connects the "full stack" of industrial agriculture and shelf-stable production to modern epidemics like obesity and mental health. Synthesizing this with Ishmael, I’d argue our "control and scale" mindset creates massive ecological debt and unintended harm. We need to shift from "taking over" to regenerative harmony. Does the book's thesis on the failure of industrial farming resonate with your views on the Earth System?
"Why, then, are so many people fearful of running out of everything, of exhausting the Earth?"
Because so many uber-rich people are hoarding the wealth, Tomas.
I admire your writing, but this piece in particular highlights a blind spot you have; you are looking at *averages*.
You are ignoring or missing that while most people are moderately better off than, say, 100 or 300 years ago, the reality is that *some* people have benefited MASSIVELY and some have benefited a large amount but there's still a significant, significant number of people who are barely treading water.
"Our GDP is up and we work less" and yet real wages have been stagnant for decades for a majority of Americans. "We are healthier and live longer" globally and yet some areas have seen their health and longevity get worse.
You're laying out very, very good arguments for why we should be optimistic; the opposing view is that there's a lot of examples of why things are getting worse for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people.
If Musk's vision of AI-driven (or even AGI-driven!) robots replacing the vast majority of human manual labor comes true, what hope do people in the "global south" have? Screwing iphones together or working in a shoe factory or at a cobalt extraction facility might be the highest aspiration and "a pretty good job" for those people... and now they're going to be replaced by a freakin' robot, and the value gains from that activity aren't going to be shared by them; they don't own the robot, they don't have stock in the robot's company.
Instead, a guy who's already worth hundreds of billions of dollars and who's stacked the board of directors of his companies with his brother and cronies is going to get the wealth.
And when we run the average, we say "look! The number of hours worked is even less and the average wealth of the humans and GDP per capita has increased!"
Put Elon Musk into, say, an ICE holding facility with another 500 people awaiting deportation to Venezuela, and their average wealth is a billion dollars each... but plainly they're not the same.
And I think that's where the central question fails, because more and more there's a feeling that a very tiny percentage of people are benefiting from all this, and the rest of us are just happy if we can send our kid to college and get health insurance with a deductible less than $10,000 a year.
"Because so many uber-rich people are hoarding the wealth, Tomas."
Let me fix this for you:
"Because so many people have created massive value for others that the 5% of the value they capture makes them billionaires. The rest of us are the beneficiaries of the other 95%, Tomas."
There are so many natural systems that we barely understand, especially in the field of health and medicine. And there are so many incentives to flatten the models we do have and oversimplify how we intervene in these systems, often causing harm.
For example, we only just confirmed a decade ago that Pitocin, the synthetic hormone that hospitals give almost all birthing mothers to prevent or treat hemorrhage or in higher doses to induce or intensify labor, obstructs mother-baby bonding, causing postpartum depression. Oops!
Evolution spent all this time figuring out how to make the birth process jumpstart maternal instincts and motivation, especially for mammals, and especially for comparatively premature human infants. And then we go and mess up those hormones and make motherhood harder and less fulfilling. Then we wonder why people don't have more kids.
And hospitals probably won't change those protocols, because the non-pharmaceutical ways of boosting the brain's endogenous oxytocin that drives labor, prevents hemorrhage, and causes bonding are expensive or impossible to implement in hospitals. They basically amount to making sure the laboring mother feels at home and constantly supported in person by safe, snuggly, and familiar people, not bothered by unfamiliar places or people, lights, noises, paperwork, or hostility. Those things are what make hospitals operate efficiently, but they're what tank endogenous oxytocin production and labor progress and safety. That's why, in developed countries, and for low-risk mothers, home birth with a licensed midwife is safer than hospital birth. Regulatory capture is why home birth midwifery is not more common in the US.
Of course I appreciate the field of medicine in general, including prenatal ultrasounds, screening tests, Pitocin used to stop hemorrhage when it does occur, etc., all of which home birth midwives also do as a matter of course. High-risk interventions like Pitocin or C-sections are sometimes the best solution, they're just used more often than ideal because we're sabotaging labor earlier in the process.
My point is that some complex natural processes, like labor, are poorly understood, poorly taught (unlike midwives, OBs are surgeons foremost and have typically never witnessed an entire labor without drugs), and very inconvenient to scale for financial efficiency. Birth is my area of expertise, but I'm going to remember Gell-Mann and infer that there are many other such systems that we could inadvertently mess up.
Evolution has figured out some things that we haven't. We can certainly make some improvements - maternal and infant mortality is lower now than it was 10,000 years ago - but we need to always refer back to nature to make sure we're preserving the good as well as we can while preventing the bad. That requires ongoing scientific inquiry and a foundational respect for nature.
If anyone's wondering how exogenous Pitocin and endogenous oxytocin work similarly for contracting the uterus (which both drives labor and prevents/stops hemorrhage), but have opposite effects on bonding, here's how. I didn't include it above because it was tangential to my point, but since readers here like to know how things work, I'll explain.
The meaningful difference isn't in the chemical formulation; they're basically the same thing. It's in the method of administration. Pitocin doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. Injected into the bloodstream, Pitocin/oxytocin will act upon the uterus. But it doesn't reach the brain. Endogenous oxytocin, however, is created in the brain's hypothalamus and stored in the pituitary gland. It does all of its emotional work in the brain before also going to the uterus.
When you add exogenous Pitocin/oxytocin to the bloodstream, it down-regulates the brain's production of oxytocin, so there is even less oxytocin in the brain than if you had done nothing.
Why not apply it nasally to bypass the blood-brain barrier?
Great question! I've heard of that but I'm not familiar with how well it works.
I’ve done some research and they’re actively seeking improvements in nasal applications of oxytocin and similar substances. This aligns perfectly with Tomas’s point.
Regarding birth support, it’s likely not the high dosage of oxytocin itself but the absence of natural pulsation that’s problematic.
Returning to the broader discussion, they conduct extensive research to improve these treatments, which is precisely what Tomas is highlighting in his post.
I'm glad to hear this is a promising and active line of research!
The absence of natural pulsation is indeed a problem with IV Pitocin during labor. It contributes to Pitocin contractions being more painful for the mother, more risky for her uterus, more stressful and risky for the baby, and less effective at helping the baby out, compared to natural contractions. And Pitocin during labor actually raises the post-birth hemorrhage risk because it tires the uterus out. I wonder how we could sync it up with natural contractions given that those are not always of consistent frequency and intensity.
But I'm not sure I understand your suggestion that the lack of natural pulsation could also be contributing to how Pitocin undermines the bonding aspect of birth, causing postpartum depression. I'm intrigued if you want to share more.
I agree!
For medicine.
Because these are very complex molecules with lots of interactions with each other.
Not the case for most Earth systems!
Speaking outside my area of expertise now, it does seem plausible that Earth systems are simpler than medicine.
But social science is a mess, which suggests to me that that's even more complicated.
And it's hard to draw a firm line between physical engineering and health. E.g. what exactly is in proprietary fracking chemicals, and are we sure it's not PFAS or something nearly as bad for human health? Who knows; the financial incentives prevail. It is quicker to invent new engineering solutions than to test them for safety against human health.
In the case of fracking's lack of transparency, it's a legislation problem, not an engineering / science issue. Or more to the point, a corrupt legislation problem.
It occurs to me you(r comments) are saying the same thing as mine are, albeit since you are a true SME (subject matter expert) you are able to navigate a very specific arena much more capably and knowledgeably than I can. I love your skillfully communication and how, in a very specific area (child-birthing, motherhood) you are able, from your very learned experience, to articulate precisely the issues that occur when we apply a science-medicine approach to a system we do not completely understand (but think we do).
I truly believe this pattern does apply to [most things worth applying it to, eg how we birth our young, how and where we spend our time, what we should/nt put in our bodies, etc], and the question then becomes, I think as you and Tomas allude to, = given this is a Legitimate Pattern, DOES IT ALSO APPLY to this other area of Life?
As an earnest believer in TOE (theory of everything), I find that my thinking tends toward: if we have found the True-to-TOE pattern(s), the answer is usually (some form of) Yes.
This feels deeply short-sighted and classically techno-optimist. It assumes that technology can indefinitely decouple growth from ecological limits, despite decades of systems research showing that efficiency gains tend to trigger rebound effects and shift pressures rather than remove them. Abundance narratives also flatten complex socio-ecological systems into engineering problems, ignoring feedbacks, material limits, power, and distribution. Technology matters, but without changes in consumption, governance, and underlying growth paradigms, it risks accelerating overshoot rather than delivering sustainability.
Give me a concrete example of these ecological limits so I can debunk it.
Use wisely as I won't debunk more.
Ecological limits are captured pretty well by the planetary boundaries framework, which sets safe thresholds for climate, biodiversity, freshwater, and biogeochemical cycles—many of which we are already crossing. One example: electric vehicles reduce emissions and help address the climate change boundary, but they increase demand for lithium, cobalt, and nickel, putting pressure on boundaries like freshwater use, land-system change, and biosphere integrity. Efficiency in one boundary often shifts impacts to others.
Covered here
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/what-is-the-earths-carrying-capacity
The issue with planetary boundaries is that most of the literature on the topic is super hand-wavy, and when you get into the specifics, they break down. So let's dive into your example of EVs. Have you quantified their impact of ICE cars vs EVs, all in?
The tradeoff is:
- ICE: mining for the materials to build the car + CO2 from emissions
- EVs: mining for the materials to build the car + pollution from electricity generation
In your comment you're implying that the additional materials to build the car might offset the CO2 emissions benefit.
Of course, this is not true. First, because of incentives.
EVs eliminate the tragedy of the commons of pollution: CO2 emissions are shared by the world, but mining pollution is not. This is much better, of course, because the ones making money from it are also the ones paying the costs. If your mining destroys your environment, you have an incentive to clean it up in a way that you don't with CO2.
Also, of course, CO2 is diluted in the air, so very hard to clean up, whereas mining pollution is extremely localized, so much easier to clean up.
Second, EVs are only 10-15% heavier than ICE cars, so not much worse in terms of materials. As you say, this is concentrated in lithium, cobalt, and nickel, but let's break that down. These elements generate 5 types of pollution:
a. A bit more CO2. This is paid off within 1-2 years of operation, and the only reason why they're so high right now to begin with is because a lot of China's electricity comes from coal. But that is falling precipitously thanks to their solar electricity push, so that every year, EV cosntruction is less and less CO2 intensive.
For the same reason, the electricity from EVs will also generate less and less CO2. As renewables become a bigger and bigger share of electricity production worldwide, EVs become more and more environmentally friendly, reducing further their CO2 footprint.
b. EVs emit no NOₓ, CO, VOCs, SO2
c. Regenerative breaking reduces dramatically the pollution from tires—of course, it's a no brainer in electric cars, but it's so much more expensive in ICE cars that many don't have it.
d. Lithium, cobalt, and nickel are >90% recyclable, so it's not like you use them once and then you need to mine the same amount of stuff. It can be reused 10x
e. The mining of these elements. Here, you have to compare them to the extraction of oil and gas. Of course, since the volumes aare much smaller, the impact is much smaller. Also, they are easy to cap, stabilize, and restore. Water tables are not a problem of mining, they are a much broader problem of human activity, which is solvable through this
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/does-desalination-promise-a-future
So in summary, EVs are muuuuch better than ICEs because:
1. They correct misaligned incentives of pollution, so there's less of it
2. They concentrate the pollution, which is easier to clean up
3. Most of the downsides are much easier to manage than for ICE
4. The concerns that ppl claim today (eg, lots of CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a car, through electricity) are a consequence of our current electricity generation, which is greening fast, so EVs will green accordingly
5. They bring many other benefits that are not very commonly recognized, such as dramatically less air pollution in cities, which kills today millions of people
So that's for EVs, and every time I've actually dug deep in one of these topics, I see the same pattern. Hand-wavy cynicism answered with optimistic hard facts.
Abundance will save the Earth, not sustainability.
Actually, the planetary boundaries framework is far from hand-wavy. Each boundary is defined by quantified control variables. These thresholds are grounded in decades of Earth system research, modeling, and observational data, and the 2023 update rigorously quantified all nine boundaries. Six are already exceeded. These are real, measurable limits, not vague concepts.
Thanks for the detailed EV breakdown, Tomas. My point isn’t about EVs versus ICEs at the unit level—I agree that EVs are cleaner—but about the limits of growth on a finite planet. EVs highlight the boundary-shifting effect: efficiency gains in one domain cannot make growth limitless, because pressures are simply redistributed across other ecological boundaries. While an abundance agenda is appealing, it risks overlooking the systemic constraints that define true sustainability.
I heard that concern about planetary boundaries a lot, and so I got into the details. And by hand-wavy, I don't mean quantified. They are quantified indeed! So maybe it's not the right term. What they do is apply complex models to hide the stupidity of their assumptions. Garbage in, garbage out.
The reason why I told you to pick well your example is because I was going to debunk it, and I was confident I could debunk any example, because they're all trash. It just takes too long to debunk them all in comments.
So you can't now say "Oh this is just an example, the entire thing still stands." No, it stands on hand-wavy complexity that hides stupidity inside, and the EV example shows that. The fact that I was willing to debunk ANY example, and that I debunked the EV one so quickly, should give you pause.
You didn’t debunk anything
I wanted to add a comment to your story.
For thousands of years obsidian was traded over long distances. It was in many ways to human being prior to 5,000 BCE what oil is to us now.
There was a crisis around 5,000 BCE. Readily available sources of obsidian had become depleted. Obsidian became scarce and, consequently, expensive.
Humanity did not become extinct. Tools made of copper were used as a substitute for those made of obsidian, Then bronze. Then iron. Then steel. We haven't looked back.
The moral of this story is that we should worry less about depleting resources on which we depend and considerably more about discouraging or outright preventing the innovation that encourages substituting depleted resources with those we still have.
Great one!
Yeah, on the other hand if we don't want to relive a crisis like that of 5000 BCE it's important to have a bit foresight on finite resource depletion. Free markets are the most efficient within a time horizon of 15 years. Beyond that, need a non-corrupt government.
I am reminded of the (popularized, not sure how deeply true, since I haven't done my own diligence) story of the tragedy of Easter Island, how their consumption of natural resources (trees/wood especially) outpaced their ability to innovate past/through it.
I heard that's a myth? https://hayadan.com/Exposing-the-myth-of-self-destruction-of-the-environment-e
Nauro and the resource curse (in their case phosphate mining) ?
Yes Nauru is a good example. But that's a small island. You can indeed exhaust some type of mineral wealth in a localized area. Not globally.
Fossil fuels? Fresh water reserves?
Cool but you may be fighting the last war Tomas. With the current breakdown of world order nobody serious is giving up opportunities for growth for a green future - our concern with fossil fuels and nuclear are critical dependencies on foreign power, maritime security, and nuclear proliferation.
Also am afraid you're unintentionally taking part in this blame shifting. Roughly we say the West is in decline because unlike the Chinese we care about the environment. Bullshit. Boeing sucks, can't innovate and its airplanes fall off the sky not because of a hippie takeover but because of a takeover by physics-illiterate finance and MBA. Enshitification of all US products after IPO is because all the power to anonymous shareholders whose 1D algorithm is just optimising short-term profit.
The stories abound of US companies starting up well and ending up shitty because the power is in Wall Street and not in the engineering department. That's not because of the green and the hippies.
I wish you were right. Alas, the vast majority of the population in Western countries is still in the mindset of "let's not grow too much, it's bad for the environment". Just look at the comments!
Just looked. You may have a point, although how representative a sample this is is not clear.
To me though it is still clear that the poor performance of the West's industry in the XXI tech is only very mildly impacted by misplaced fears on ecology. A much bigger culprit is a corporate governance that prevents any gain in productivity to be further invested for more gains - instead it's siphoned up to Wall Street, where it may or may not be reinvested productively. A sort of neo-malthusian trap, except instead of feeding children, the gains in productivity feed capital.
Not sure it's true that most people think "let's not grow too much, it's bad for the environment". IT's more like let's pollute less, it's bad for the environment. Which is true. And we are polluting less, but too slowly. Temperature are increasing. We should do better and we are doing better, but not fast enough. Why? Also because of bad or terrible politics. The most powerful individual on the planet does not believe that temperature are increasing and that are increasing because of our pollution of CO2. So techno-optimism is great on average, but at the moment we are not doing well. Then of course Trump might go and democracy might survive. But science that is the source of TP optimism and of mine is stronger and more creative in a democracy and the world is going all in the opposite direction. That's why on top of technooptimism we also need to stop the return of fascism, as we argued here www.stopreturnfascism.org
For sure, yeah, no war or fascism is sort of a pre-requisite. We may soon find ourself in a position where concerns about pollution look quaint.
No need to discourage growth--it's happening all by itself. As it happens, fertility rates have been declining for decades. In developed countries, fertility rates are incredibly low and below replacement for most developing countries, with the exception of Africa.
FERTILITY RATES (CIA WORLD FACTBOOK 2025)
China: 1.20
Italy: 1.27
Japan: 1.41
Canada: 1.43
Russia: 1.52
Germany: 1.59
USA: 1.63
UK: 1.64
Brazil: 1.73
Saudi Arabia: 1.84
France: 1.90
Indonesia: 1.93
India: 2.00
South Africa: 2.23
I agree with the overall analysis:
(i) We have the power to destroy or make sustainable, it is up to us - except of course for major natural disaster beyond our control (major eruptions can have major global effects).
(ii) We do see signs of the path to sustainable abundance (e.g. decouplings).
But two comments:
1. Real question is timing: How to reach that state BEFORE damages become so catastrophic we have major loss of life, ensuing major political conflicts, all derailing the effort.
2. Real debate is share of two levers in achieving that goal - technology vs. sobriety: 100/0? 90/10? 70/30?
These are not mutually exclusive. The opposite. For example, releasing SO2 to stop global warming is a tech solution to solve an ecological problem
True, it should be tested more, but given limitations of the tech this needs to be a framework which ensures emission reductions fast enough.
Ddi you read the same article I read? I have watched the "decades of research argument" devolve into another reframing of arguments that are cloaked in heavy techno-language that only ends up changing the narrative when the climate alarmists go from annew ice age to global warming. From zero population growth to what is the opposite. But that won't deter the climate pessimists.. the narrative will simply change. Notice that this year at Davos, it us slowly sinking in ..no Greta and Al Gore booing a speaker. It is devolving, but surely will be back in another incantation.
I happen to agree with the the premise that we have evolved to a point that abundance can be our future. It us a hard thing to grasp because it upends our mental framework we were born with, but I agree with Tomas...the future can be and will likely be one of abundance.
TP is a extreme optimist. But surely the reality of Trump must give you pause?
It does!
A great article, very good, and the approach is very interesting. I would just add that it does not go into numerical details about diets, although it does implicitly raise the issue of excessive consumption: the focus on producing and “optimizing” food and materials without questioning what we consume or how much land and emissions this requires. Its techno-centric abundance framework does not address the fact that many countries with high consumption of animal protein also have very high per-capita emissions footprints, linked to the expansion of pastures and agricultural land for livestock, which is one of the main sources of emissions and deforestation when scaled globally. I would also note that the increase in forest cover in Europe captures only part of the global story. This European recovery does not repair the massive historical deforestation since the Middle Ages, nor does it compensate for the net loss of old-growth forests that will never return, due to the expansion of agricultural frontiers and, more recently, urban areas.
The forests are going back very fast. If we continue this way, there will be more forest than in the middle ages (when lots of forests were cut to get cropland). This is BECAUSE Europe has abundance!
Old-growth forest is not a problem we can solve anymore. Here, the only places where we should slow this down are Brazil and Indonesia (and even then, in Brazil it's mostly not the Amazon forest).
As noted, we produce more food with less cropland!
What’s going on, Tomás, is that in ecology abundance doesn’t get along very well with diversity. I’m not one of those who fully agrees with the idea of conservation and restoration; on the contrary, I think those concepts need to be thermodynamically adjusted. It’s very important to know what the “equilibrium” state of the ecosystems is, the state we need to aim for when rehabilitating degraded ones, and whatever that state may be, the forests and ecosystems we seek to protect generally require a level of biodiversity that makes the system resilient (quality) in the face of the changes that are surely coming, rather than the abundance of just a few species (quantity). Biodiversity needs space and time.
What is happening in tropical rainforests is truly dramatic. If Brazil aspires to raise the socioeconomic levels of its population to those of the European middle class, within the consumption patterns of our global society, then unfortunately we are in trouble. As you rightly point out, there are two factors that could help, but they would pose a problem for the economy: the human population tends to decline or stabilize, and areas devoted to crops and livestock production tend to contract. But even so, if the goal is to eradicate extreme poverty while maintaining protein consumption levels like those of countries such as the United States or Germany, we are facing very serious problems in the future.
Forest is 250 yo diverse stable system. What you see growing fast starts as green desert
Another big part of the story of forest recovery in Europe is that most of this animal protein is from Brazilian soy beans - the forest area lost there to feed Europeans beef is certainly far larger than the gains over here.
Still, doesn't take away the merit and impact of recovery programs in Europe (or lack thereof in certain countries),
I am a little puzzled by this. In the first part you show how CO2 has been “catastrophically depleted”, with only a tiny fraction of the original amount left in the atmosphere, so plants are close to starvation. Then towards the end you show a graph that China’s CO2 emissions are stabilising and imply this is a sign of progress. Do we need more CO2 to help plants grow, or should we limit the amount we produce?
Exactly!
The reality is much less clear than what current debates would suggest.
The truth is more CO2 is MUCH BETTER for plants. They're growing 40% faster I think thanks to it.
The fear is that the SPEED of CO2 increase has been fast, and it might change environments too fast for living things to adapt easily—including humans.
Turns out for plants and animals it's mostly OK (eg there's more pola bears than decades ago; the rate of extinction has slowed down since the 19th C). The remaining issue is unforeseen consequences like the AMOC overturning.
There, the principle is: Fuck around and find out. Better not do that, so let's keep CO2 levels at pre-industrial levels or not much more.
As we get more info on how the world works, we can have more advanced interventions. Eg, increase CO2 but counterbalance in other ways.
Yeah i basically really vibe with this, but i also think that biodiversity is a very valuable thing, and basically a fossil resource that can stand to be deliberately maintained through intelligent systems design.
Biodiversity is great! The more we develop, the more of it we have, like in Europe!
I'm confused what you mean by "the more we develop, the more of it we have" ? The more human civilization develops and designates certain areas as "wildlife preserves", the more biodiversity we have? But what about the (admittedly just headline news, I don't Truly Know) alerts from other parts of the Spaceship Earth that (say) we're losing thousands of species annually to (say) deforestation in the Amazon? But that net balances out because we "save" (or generate? Hope we're not talking about the wooly mammoth mouse approach, that's a Wildly separate convo anyway) tens or even hundreds of species annually through our preserves and reservations?
Explicit assumption that # species is a sufficient proxy to biodiversity health...
I'm pretty techno optimist as far as it goes, but you happen to have left out the pretty material fact that each of those major shifts you discussed resulted in mass extinctions, especially of the larger animals, and took many millions of years for a vibrant ecosphere to recover. Seems bad! I'm a large animal and also would rather not live in a wasteland for millions of years!
"We" understand how the world works. "We" can engineer it. "We" can become gods. Who is "we?" Elon Musk? No thank you!
The people who understand the earth have never been listened to when there's money to be made. Rivers flood and meander. Deforestatron causes landslides. Soil eorsion leads to destruction of farmland. These facts have been known for centuries, but they don't change behavior very much.
Why would your new techno-kings work for the good of all and not just for themselves?
Good points but there's also cases where we can act. CFCs obsolescence, and now renewable energy, are examples of earth science influencing policy successfully. In fact much of construction code does reflect landslide risk, so do insurance primia - albeit unperfectly. Agreed that markets alone are usually not able to do systemic changes.
Gaia is a chaotic system, not a complex one so whereas it is tempting to retrospectively infer coherence, it is not possible to optimize. Otherwise an interesting and thought provoking article as always!
To expand, the article's thesis is, I posit, just wrong. "The world is a chaotic system we can improve" is a nonsensical statement.
Chaotic does not equal Delicate - it means unpredictable and *by definition* means that it can't be improved or optimized. Consequently preservation is not about "preserving limited resources", it is about preserving the current state of the system by trying not to mess too much with variables that we cannot hope to fully understand. First Do No Harm!!
The article concludes "As we mindlessly tinkered with the planet, our excesses surfaced these mechanisms. We thought the answer was “Don’t touch it!” But that lesson is outdated. “Sustainable” is defeatist because it says “I don’t know how this works, I can’t know, just don’t touch it.” It’s a bit like an old religion that tries to placate the gods."
On the contrary, however, "Don't touch it" is the right strategy, because no, we don't understand it, can't understand it, and the cost of getting it wrong is extinction.
Came to the comments section to more or less echo @Reinout H's thinking re: flawed techo-optimism, with my own (each has our own) nuance: As a STEMmy engineer I am tantalized verymuch by the idea of "The Earth is just a system we can and will learn to master and therefore optimize", but as a student of Ishmael (by Daniel Quinn; TLDR it is the very (civilizational, Human-based) culture that underpins the way we live that is itself not sustainable, and any effort(s) built on top of that will ultimately fail for all the trite and familiar man-is-flawed reasons), I draw back in a bit of horror as I see Tomas ride the road towards the techno-optimist conclusion, albeit on data-bricks of best intentions.
First and foremost: is not one central trope of so many (all?) techno-opti cautionary tales, one of the Hubris of humanity? "I think I understand all of this, certainly enough to master it," Man says to herself... jump to Act 3, where clearly we did not fully understand all of the complete, complex system that is [a particular ecosystem or] the Earth (never-yet-mind the solar system, nevermind the galaxy, nevermind the...), as we reap the consequences of a system that seems contained (or even ultra-Productive!) in one sector but strained to catastrophically bursting in another, unanticipated arena.
Don't we ALWAYS think to ourselves, "Now, we know much better how it works. And that’s why we can finally optimize for abundance. We can engineer the world. We can have more food, more forests, more money, more people, more animals, more houses, more nature. But only if we strive for abundance instead of sustainability." ?
I suspect at least one of Tomas' rebuttals might be, "yes, but who were the people writing those stories? Ones who didn't fully understand the full system enough to fully conquer and exploit and master it" - and that's a valid one, the other side of the opti/pessimistic coin: where one sees despair and caution, another sees potential and the chance to make things Better - the Truth / True Way probably lies somewhere in between, or perhaps more precisely, in a (not necessarily equal) blend of both mindsets.
Something more concrete (not sure if testable?), since I know you will ask :) - I truly believe that we can (and will, if we make it there) increase GDPs, increase efficiency of farming, power-generation, et al technologies, so that we truly have infinite abundance of these things (as you have discussed in other pieces)...
however, if we dont change our CULTURE (that is, the mindset that is both implicitly and explicitly taught to every baby born - that WE (humans) were meant to rule the Earth, and therefore we can do what we damn well please with all of it), then we are always going to be "doomed" to repeating the same cautionary tale mistakes, effing around + finding out that, somehow, there are still chinks in the dam, cracks in the foundation, fraying edges of the fabric. And sure, maybe the engineer's response is, "those are just further problems/errors to solve; errors are inevitable, but errors are soluble" - but I worry with this mindset we descend into a Zeno's Paradox of infinitely attempting to stomp out new errors, much like how in the children's story The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (by Dr. Seuss) the mess is never fully mitigated or managed, just moved around from one place to another (and who is to say the scale of the "collateral damage" of such errors + their attempts at mitigation? Just in "routine error cleanup" we could wipe out say a tenth or a quarter or even 3% of the entire population, and call that "acceptable losses"?)
Here in the "more aware" 21st century, this cultural mindset isn't blind to needing what we call "nature" (a word/concept which itself is implicitly bound up in our cultural thinking that there is some distinct separation between "out there [among plants]" and "in here in our Civilized World") - for example, the very concept of a "zoo" or a "park" or "protected area" is the quintessential expression of this mindset, it assumes humans are the landlords of the planet, deciding which fragments of the community of life are permitted to remain 'wild'. It is this type of cultural thinking that I fear undermines everything we do and, if not dealt with directly (tougher than one might think), will continue to yield the same not-quite-there-yet-but-maybe-if-we-only-pedal-harder-oh-dear-catastrophe-yet-again results.
Again, as an engineer both in trade and identity, I do enjoy++ viewing everything around us as a system with the same kind of inputs/outputs framework. And that framework is very useful for solving all sorts of problems. But I'm not sure it scales infinitely all the way up - Or perhaps, rather, taken too literally for all problems, it is insufficient, because:
But as a wet, messy, organic human, standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilizational experience, - but on top of (below) THAT is hundreds of thousands (if not a million or two) years of even more "true" experience in the form of bodies identical to ours that figured out an entire rainbow of Best Practices of living WITHIN (instead of above and apart from) the community of Life, - BPs that we, The Civilized, have most definitely forgotten and only re-discovered (a colorless sliver of) through our Science and Tech (not knocking the Scientific Method itself; absolutely unquestioningly one of our best meta-innovations)... - as one of these, I enjoy the very comforts of Civilization while screaming - sometimes silently, sometimes more loudly, as here -, unsure exactly why, but knowing deeply that the Way We Live currently is not wholly, completely, the True Way that we could or should be living.
"apologies" for the long-winded comment, thanks, as always, for engaging :) UT is absolutely fascinating and as I've said before, I do trust that you, Tomas, are one of the Good Guys "just" looking for the light of Truth, like so many of us are.
I would buy it if the culture of sustainability had solved our problems. It hasn't.
The most glaring example is that CO2 emissions are going to be solved not by a culture of sustainability, but by Chinese solar panels and EVs.
The thing about sustainability is that it asks billions of people to stop hoping, and start shrinking their goals, ambitions, and mindsets instead. This might work for a few people, but it doesn't for the vast majority of humans. Go tell a Sudanese, a Mongol, or an Indonesian that they should stop yearning for a clean and secure home, a car, or electricity 24/7. They're going to tell you to go fuck yourself.
Sustainability is structurally anti-human, and against human psychology. You can fight it all you want, you'll keep losing.
So sustainability is bad theoretically and practically: It can't work with humans, and it turns out in practice it works worse than abundance!
I’m confused, Chinese solar panels and EVs ARE more sustainable than fossil fuels. China adopted and rapidly developed that technology because it’s the more sustainable option. How is that not solving co2 emissions with sustainability?
I'm talking about mindsets here. The sustainability one is one of conservation, or reducing the human footprint.
Abundance is a mindset of improving the world directly, rather than through shrinking everything. When you install millions of m2 of solar panels, the mindset is one of "Let's give everybody lots of electricity for cheap, and it has the benefit of being good for the Earth!"
That is more the abundance mindset than the sustainability mindset
Oh well sure, I guess I always thought sustainability and abundance should go hand in hand, not as adversaries.
“Let's give everybody lots of electricity for cheap” with fossil fuels would be bad.
But “Let's give everybody lots of electricity for cheap,and it has the benefit of being good for the Earth!" Is good.
In this way sustainability is the path to abundance.
This is a great response, and I thank you for earnestly engaging (as you usually do!) but i feel like you didn't address my core (albeit kind of abstract) point about the underlying CULTURE of man-rules-the-world-and-can-do-whatever-we-want -- to my eyes/brain this isn't merely a "sustainability" arg in a different hippie dress, but really a more foundational worldview that pollutes everything we do.
At the risk of shock, I will hazard a completely fabricated (with some Gemini help for speed and conciseness and tailoring to audience) analogy to try to make this core point clear:
"Imagine a society of one race ("Takers") that claims total ownership of the Earth, then designates 'preserves' where other races are permitted to live. The insult isn't the size of the reservation; it’s the underlying Taker assumption that one group has the sovereign right to 'allocate' existence to everyone else. A 'park' for nature is just a reservation where we allow the community of life to exist on our terms, implicitly asserting that the rest of the planet is ours to exploit."
Gemini then advises, since I am engaging with a Data Science professional (and which I am most certainly not), that I frame this as a "Domain Violation" :
"Defining a 'park' is a Taker error in global state management: it treats the community of life as a subset of human property rather than the parent system humans inhabit.
I am curious your thoughts/rebuttals to THIS argument specifically, about this underlying Taker mindset that I feel our entire civilization was founded upon, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution ~10k ya (a revolution which has not yet ended, btw)
PS: I do think you are onto something though, in musing about what "actually works with humans"
I am also curious what Tomas (or anyone making it this far - thank you 🙏 - thinks about this absolutely amazing book i stumbled upon mere hours after posting in here last month:
Farmacy: Manifesto on the Future of Food.
It connects so many dots about Whats Wrong With Ultramodern Society, and gives some very clear (to me; definitely want to hear others' takes) causation to some of the very specific flowering epidemics of the past ~30 years.
It connects and aligns how the full stack of Industrial Agricultural (barely a century old) --> hyperprocessed production --> shelf-stable items for global shipping
= Modern day epidemics of (eg) obesity, diabetes, gut health, inflammation, even mental disorders and fertility issues.
It explains not only the proliferation of "food-like substances " (e.g. most things in the snackfood aisle of the grocery store, but thats just the beginning...), but also the why-how they are so harmful to our bodies.
It just makes so much sense to me, that because we literally stopped growing plants in the soil (which by the way is way more alive/biomass than most Common Sense notions believe it is; soil is NOT "just dirt"), and started trying to Scale Out of nature -- perhaps even with good intentions; im sure Haber/Bosch weren't intending to poison the world, maybe they even saw themselves as saviors helping to feed the people! And yet didnt fully understand the FULL ramifications of the entire system impact. -- because of this chain of events, millions if not billions of us regularly (and many unknowingly!) ingest "food" that is actually not food, is actually net harmful to their own bodies (via racking damage to the massive ecosystem inside each of us)
Now it is known that the (massively scaled and industrialized, Out of Balance) factory farming methods do cause issues in the overall ecosystem, both locally in the place where plants are grown (eg toxic pesticides / if they are still grown outside; monoculture), and globally with how the entire human food chain is impacted (eg glyphosate)
And this brings me round back to the point I (and others too i believe, in other words) have been trying to make here: we Civilized Humans constantly think we understand "enough" (when we think this far/wide at all) about the Entire Earth System (including our own bodies!) that we can Take Full Control of it all and engineer-scale our way into abundance and comfort and Happy/Profitable Times. And yet even with these noblest of intentions, there is (potentially always will be) still more of the complex system we do not yet know, nevermind understand fully. Which means (un-imagined, nevermind unaccounted-for) negative externalities, uncorrected errors that we dont even yet know exist, unhandled exceptions.. freezing ecological debt we (continue to) simply pass on to our children.
That doesn't mean we raise our hands to the sky, beat our breast, and give up. It doesn't mean we cling to some draconian, even Victorian notion of "sustainability= scarcity and therefore we must aim for Less"
It means we need to in fact look deeper within ourselves, our very foundational MINDSET that underpins literally everything we think, to everything we do.
We need to recalibrate our thinking to less of a "take over and take control" and more "how can we live in harmony with what is already here and has worked for millions of years?" Homo Sapiens' ingenuity, innovation is absolutely to be nourished! We too are part of it all, and that includes our cleverness and our meta-adaptations to craft better tools. It's the kinds of tools we choose to craft and HOW we deploy them that becomes the trickier part, to be wiser about.
All things in balance is really the major meta-pattern. Human "abundance"-seeking, EVEN when best-intentioned and "truly" un-tainted with the deprabed toxic/selfish predatory capitalism predilections, can still go too-far out of balance and itself be the cause of net harm, whether it is to humans or something(s) else in the community of Life - of which Homo Sapiens is absolutely a part of! And hence would always come back to bite us anyway.
(This is why I am also very firmly against cloud-seeding which I suspect is another point of contention w Tomas, but that's a convo for another time/article lol)
Does any of that make sense?
Please check out the book and let me know what you think of its thesis. In my rant above i am synthesizing my thoughts from both Ishmael+ Farmacy Manifesto.
Farmacy: Manifesto on the Future of Food itself is purely about why+how (runaway) Industrial Agricultural has in fact caused widespread damage over the past half-century, more damage than it has helped. And offers another way, another story to enact, another (proven, valuable, successful) paradigm to optimize around: Regenerative Agriculture.
--
100pg Paperback isnt available easily in the US (UK only) but you can get the audiobook (narrated by Woody Harrelson!) or, like me go on ebay and get it shipped stateside anyways 😊
https://farmacylondon.com/pages/manifesto
TL;DR [Thanks Gemini!]
I’m curious what Tomas and others think of Farmacy: Manifesto on the Future of Food. It connects the "full stack" of industrial agriculture and shelf-stable production to modern epidemics like obesity and mental health. Synthesizing this with Ishmael, I’d argue our "control and scale" mindset creates massive ecological debt and unintended harm. We need to shift from "taking over" to regenerative harmony. Does the book's thesis on the failure of industrial farming resonate with your views on the Earth System?
"Why, then, are so many people fearful of running out of everything, of exhausting the Earth?"
Because so many uber-rich people are hoarding the wealth, Tomas.
I admire your writing, but this piece in particular highlights a blind spot you have; you are looking at *averages*.
You are ignoring or missing that while most people are moderately better off than, say, 100 or 300 years ago, the reality is that *some* people have benefited MASSIVELY and some have benefited a large amount but there's still a significant, significant number of people who are barely treading water.
"Our GDP is up and we work less" and yet real wages have been stagnant for decades for a majority of Americans. "We are healthier and live longer" globally and yet some areas have seen their health and longevity get worse.
You're laying out very, very good arguments for why we should be optimistic; the opposing view is that there's a lot of examples of why things are getting worse for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people.
If Musk's vision of AI-driven (or even AGI-driven!) robots replacing the vast majority of human manual labor comes true, what hope do people in the "global south" have? Screwing iphones together or working in a shoe factory or at a cobalt extraction facility might be the highest aspiration and "a pretty good job" for those people... and now they're going to be replaced by a freakin' robot, and the value gains from that activity aren't going to be shared by them; they don't own the robot, they don't have stock in the robot's company.
Instead, a guy who's already worth hundreds of billions of dollars and who's stacked the board of directors of his companies with his brother and cronies is going to get the wealth.
And when we run the average, we say "look! The number of hours worked is even less and the average wealth of the humans and GDP per capita has increased!"
Put Elon Musk into, say, an ICE holding facility with another 500 people awaiting deportation to Venezuela, and their average wealth is a billion dollars each... but plainly they're not the same.
And I think that's where the central question fails, because more and more there's a feeling that a very tiny percentage of people are benefiting from all this, and the rest of us are just happy if we can send our kid to college and get health insurance with a deductible less than $10,000 a year.
"Because so many uber-rich people are hoarding the wealth, Tomas."
Let me fix this for you:
"Because so many people have created massive value for others that the 5% of the value they capture makes them billionaires. The rest of us are the beneficiaries of the other 95%, Tomas."
Beautiful
De dónde saldría la energía para sustentar este escenario ?
Cual escenario?