Stan Cox: It's good to be with you, Dan.
(26:09) Dan Young: How did you come to be a plant breeder and an environmental writer.
Stan Cox: I worked for the U.S. Dept of Agriculture Research Service for 13 years as a research geneticist. During the last few years of that job, the world was waking up to the fact of greenhouse warming. Then I started working for the Land Institute in 2000 and have worked there since then. The Land Institute has had a long tradition of critiquing growth and the ecological overshoot and technological fundamentalism. So when I wasn't working in the greenhouse, I was working on writing. So about 6 years ago, I wrote a book about rationing--the rationing of food, water, medical care, and carbon emission. I was making the case that we not only have to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, but when we do that, we will have to live in a world that lives on lower energy levels. We cannot completely replace the bonanza we have had with oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy. There will have to be some plan to deal with that and probably the best idea is what's called "tradable energy quotas" that was developed in the UK and debated there in Parliament. It involves capping fossil fuel use, a hard cap (but no cap and trade--nothing like that) and having fair shares of energy for people in business.
Dan Young: Why don't you say more about a worldview based on the idea of infinite economic growth and about technological fundamentalism, which is probably a term a lot of people haven't heard. Talk about that kind of mindset and the mindset that you are promoting.
(29:01) Stan Cox: It should be obvious to everyone that there is no such thing as infinite growth for any organism, population, or ecosystem. There are ecological limits. The goal of the present day economy is infinite growth. In capitalism, if there is no growth, it [the business] cannot function. The GND wants the economy to grow as rapidly as possible, and that cannot happen. They talk about decarbonization of the economy, getting more GDP out of a given amount of carbon that's put into the atmosphere, and that's where the technological fundamentalism comes in: We don't know how, but we know we're going to come up with miraculous technologies that are going to be able to supply a growing income for the wealthy and growing incomes for the not wealthy without increasing our carbon output. In fact, by decreasing it. But there is no such technologies available, and to simply trust that they will be invented is foolhardy.
The times we have seen deep reductions in greenhouse emissions throughout history has always been times of economic depression or after the fall of the Soviet Union, and during our recession of the past decade. That's one way to reduce emissions. But we don't want to do that. We need to do it in an orderly and fair way so that people do not have suffer.
Dan Young: Why don't you flesh out how that fair way [to reduce greenhouse emissions] will look like?
Stan Cox: The situation that we are in that the Green New Deal is not addressing is: They are talking about the need for rapid growth in renewable energy generation capacity--which is absolutely needed. That's where we do need growth--extrapolating that to the economy as a whole. But the reality that we are facing is that the need for a rapid reduction in greenhouse emissions will mean that we need to reduce our fossil fuel burning and fossil-fueled electric capacity much faster than it is possible for the renewable energy to grow, to replace it. (32:16) That means that we are facing a reduced energy supply if we are really serious about keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
So there is going to be less energy available, which means there will not be enough to launch into this manufacturing boom that they are talking about. And a good part of our energy and resources are going to have to be walled off for building up of the renewable energy capacity, which is necessary, which will further reduce the pool of energy that we have to work with to run the rest of the economy. So then that means we are going to be manufacturing less, traveling less, etc. There is really no way around it. The main concern then will have to be in making sure (33:09) it is the production of wasteful and superfluous products that is reduced. And that the production that is used for meeting the needs of everyone is maintained and shared fairly.
(33:30) Dan Young: It seems like if they found a way to develop new technologies that would allow them to generate the same amount of energy for the American or European lifestyle while switching off from fossil fuels, even if that was possible, you are still talking about a product consumption lifestyle that uses a huge amount of resources of other kinds that seems like if it continues to grow, you are still headed for maybe a more distant collapse down the road.
(34:11) Stan Cox: There are estimates that if we were to generate the same amount of energy with wind and solar that we do now globally, the quantities of copper and other minerals that would be required--it is not clear that there are enough reserves in the ground to support those things.
These analyses that we have seen out there that are claiming to show a strategy by which we could replace 100 percent of current and growing energy demands with entirely renewable sources. I have written before on [this]. But based on published critiques of those plans--on all of the problems that they have--and [all]this [will be] 100 percent renewable: [it] is a cornucopian pipe dream. These predictions are all based on best-case-scenario assumptions, envisioning these technologies that are only speculative--and have never been tried on anything but the smallest scale--they are very unrealistic (35:49) improvements on the efficiencies of everything. They calculate the potential for wind and solar. The thing about these plans is that they are assuming that the global energy inequality that we see today--where some of us have access to pretty much unlimited energy and other people are living on much less energy that they need to survive--that inequality will stay there. We will just convert from fossil fuel to renewable energy rather than redistribute access to energy.
(36:41) Dan Young: It seems like there are a lot of other problems that demand looking seriously at the amount of resource usage beyond fossil fuels. The anthropogenic mass extinction caused by habitat destruction, the loss of arable land, the loss of clear drinkable water--these things are not entirely generated by global warming. And global warming will continue even if they were to do the best-case scenario changeover.
Stan Cox: Yes, that's an excellent point. We could completely eliminate our fossil fuel use, and if we could run our society the way we do now entirely on renewable energy, we would still be causing all the problems that you just mentioned, including the imbalance of nitrogen in the atmosphere, water, and soil that we have created through agriculture and industry. There are these so-called 9 planetary boundaries that we are in danger of crossing, all of them--fresh water availability, and so forth.
We could easily keep transgressing those boundaries using renewable energy. That's why it's growth and not fossil fuels that is the fundamental problem here.
(38:26) Dan Young: So in the non-binding House Resolution recently brought forward by various Democrats that's being referred to as the GND, there are several places it refers to a goal of major economic and industrial growth. It calls for exporting this model abroad by promoting the international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding, and services. And then there is this frequently-asked-questions document that had a lot more very emphatic references to a goal of massive economic and industrial development, and even possibly to an international competition for this development--even if it is feasible--it sounds terrible for the environment. Do you have any more thoughts about this?
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