1. Prediction or prophesy?

One might reasonably suspect that the promise of infinite economic growth would only be plausible for a sufficiently advanced civilisation — particularly one that has managed to wean itself off fossil fuels. We should therefore ask if decoupling economic growth from resource use is likely to be feasible given our relatively primitive level of technological development.

On Hickel’s account, things are not looking good. He cites several studies which suggest there is no way to avoid running out of resources if we continue with our current rate of economic growth.

The main problem with these studies is that they tend to presume a certain fixed ‘biocapacity’ of the Earth. This concept and the corresponding notion of humanity’s ‘ecological footprint’ have many problems, the most fundamental of which is that they depend arbitrarily on our current level of scientific and technological development. This is because the maximum level of human consumption that our planet can support is not fixed by some natural law — it depends entirely on the sophistication of our technology to convert raw materials efficiently into life-supporting forms.

The very same lump of matter and energy has vastly different properties to us humans depending on the level of and quality of our knowledge. Major scientific breakthroughs therefore allow us to do dramatically more with less. One kilogram of uranium contains two to three million times more energy than the same amount of coal or oil, but this fact went completely unnoticed by everyone up until fundamental breakthroughs in physics in the 20th century.

Similarly, the invention of desalination techniques unlocked the effectively boundless supply of seawater. While the rest of the Middle East suffers water shortages, Israel has a surplus — thanks to advances that have reduced the costs of desalination by two-thirds since 1990.

One study mentioned by Hickel calculated that we’ll be using 95 billion metric tons of resources globally in 2050. But this figure is meaningless without a corresponding estimate of what fraction that is of the Earth’s total resources. And we can’t know what Earth’s total resources are because we cannot predict future fundamental technological advances.

At one point Hickel declares that the sustainable level of global resource use is about 50 billion metric tons a year, without citing any source or justification. The authors of the 2012 study he references cited this same figure as a possible upper limit on global resource extraction, being roughly the level of extraction there was in 1992. But why choose this year? Because that was the year of the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. In other words, it was picked out of a hat.

Even where these studies make allowances for future improvements in how efficiently we use resources, they only allow for greater efficiency in the use of resources we currently know about. If the future is anything like the past, we will discover whole new ways to build and power things, and replace whole classes of raw materials we currently depend upon.

Then there’s the fact that these studies’ predicted improvements in resource efficiency are themselves woefully pessimistic. The most optimistic prediction in the studies Hickel mentions is that resource efficiency will double by 2050. But almost any consumer product we use today requires far fewer resources to build and run than their equivalent 32 years ago. While it’s a somewhat trite example, take the iPhone. This one product has replaced landline push-button phones, pagers, cameras and camcorders, calendars, alarm clocks, audio-recorders, flashlights, maps, GPS, credit cards, and more. We should only expect this kind of dematerialization to accelerate over the next 32 years, given the rapid advances being made in nanotechnology and materials science.

This fundamental fallacy driving the pessimism of these studies was eloquently captured by David Deutsh in his book The Beginning of Infinity. In the chapter ‘Unsustainable’, Deutsch reflects on Paul Erlich warning his high school class in 1971 of the impending global ecological collapse, a tragedy which never came to pass:

‘Ehrlich thought that he was investigating a planet’s physical resources and predicting their rate of decline. In fact he was prophesying the content of future knowledge. And, by envisaging a future in which only the best knowledge of 1971 was deployed, he was implicitly assuming that only a small and rapidly dwindling set of problems would ever be solved again.’