[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," we'll look at competing visions for the future of humanity.

- Obsession with growth detracts us from the things that really do lead to flourishing.

And there's often these hidden costs you don't understand.

And one of my big problems is those hidden costs tend to be paid by the lower income groups, and the overwhelming share of the benefits tend to go to the folks at the top.

- I think we agree that energy is the lifeblood of modern economies and you can't produce surplus without consuming much more energy.

Ecomodernists just love nuclear energy for this reason.

There's all sorts of quite remarkable things you can do when you have lots of cheap clean energy.

[Scott] Coming up, ecomodernism, increasing abundance, versus degrowth, living within Earth's perceived capacity.

[Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by Arizona State University.

Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

Arizona State, The New American University.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Degrowth says that Earth's resources are fixed and we're over consuming them, which will degrade living standards and harm the environment.

Instead, we should lower consumption.

Eco modernism asserts that earth's resources are not fixed, and technology, agriculture, and energy will continue to lift the global population to modern living standards while also demanding less of nature.

I'll discuss with Ted Nordhaus, he's co-founder and executive director of Breakthrough Institute, researching technological solutions for environmental challenges and co-author of the "Ecomodernist Manifesto."

Josh Farley is an economist and professor at the University of Vermont and co-author of "Ecological Economics: Striving to Balance Earth's Biophysical Limits with our Economic Goals."

On this episode of "Energy Switch," the battle of two philosophies, ecomodernism versus degrowth.

Let's just start for our listeners with real punchy high-level overview of things we're gonna dive into as we go.

What's ecomodernism?

- Well, ecomodernists believe that growth, development, and technology are the keys to saving the environment in the 21st century.

- Got it.

Nicely done.

I'm gonna come over to you, Josh.

What's degrowth?

All right, so degrowth is basically the understanding that the ecological and social costs of growth currently overwhelm the economic benefits and the rededication of our economy towards the mutual flourishing of humans and the rest of nature.

- Ted, how can ecomodernism lead to more human flourishing?

- Eco modernists believe that the key to human flourishing is surplus.

Another word that a lot of people are using a lot these days is abundance.

- Gotcha.

Josh, let me come back to you.

Do you think Earth has a finite kind of carrying capacity, if you will?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So I think that our global ecosystems capture solar energy to create more material flows of timber and fish and the life support functions we need.

And if we exceed the rate at which nature creates new resources and absorbs our waste, we are exceeding our carrying capacity.

- Ted, can we increase the carrying capacity of Earth?

- Well, we already have.

The planet that we started with could support through its primary productivity, perhaps a few million human beings.

Today, we live on a planet that supports eight billion people, many of them, increasing numbers of them, living modern lives and much longer and healthier lives.

- Both of you, what's your ideal end goal?

- So I think both of us probably agree that what we really want is human flourishing.

And in my perspective, that depends on preserving the global ecosystems that generate the life support functions that humans and all of the species depend on.

And that obsession with growth detracts us from the things that really do lead to flourishing.

- Ted, your ideal end goal.

- An ideal ecomodern end goal, certainly in my view, is a world with seven or eight or nine billion people living prosperous modern lives on an ecologically vibrant planet.

- Well, it sounds like you guys have a pretty similar view of intention out there, but different approaches to get there.

Josh, explain in a little bit more detail kind of the degrowth philosophy.

- Probably the easiest way to explain it is with an analogy.

So degrowth looks at, we have to live within our income.

And our income is the capacity for ecosystems to capture stroller energy and generate all the raw materials required for any economic production and to absorb the waste from our economic production.

So right now, we are living well beyond our income, which is evidence that our CO2 emissions dramatically exceed waste absorption capacity.

Our, you know, eroding our soils faster than the soils can be regenerated.

We're using up aquifers faster than they can regenerate.

So we're living well beyond our income.

And it's not just that we have a finite income.

If you think of it as we have a natural trust we inherited, just like you inherited a trust fund, we inherited a natural trust.

Live off your income, it can persist forever.

So the basic idea is that we have to live within our means.

What we're doing is kind of blowing that trust fund on Ferrari's and yachts and other things that really don't add much to our quality of life.

And what we should be doing is focusing on those things, the human relationships and the human culture that allows us to, you know, give meaning to life and thrive.

- That's a nice summary.

Ted, talk in more detail about the ecomodernist philosophy.

- Well, Josh describes this idea very well as the environment is this kind of fixed annuity and we can only take so much out.

And if we take too much out, we sort of bankrupt that, we all go broke, everything collapses, bad things happen.

And ecomodernism says no, the earth system is an open system.

We have terraform the earth to make it a far more habitable place for humans, which is why the earth can today support eight billion people.

It couldn't do that, you know, even 200 years ago.

And that's because we're always bringing various forms of exogenous energy into the system.

And sometimes that involves digging up fossilized plants or it involves making solar panels or wind turbines to capture some of these natural energy flows, or it involves splitting atoms.

Or some day, it may involve actually fusing atoms, which is a virtually unlimited source of energy.

And Josh talks a lot about the idea of carrying capacity and it's worth taking a moment to understand where this idea comes from, which is that it was originally a description of how much cargo you could put on a seafaring ship.

And then it was borrowed by ecologists to describe how much livestock you could keep alive on a game reserve.

And now this idea starting in the mid 20th century gets applied to humans.

And so now we are the game and we just reject that view of humans as being no different than antelope.

And we reject this idea of the earth as a closed system.

We don't think it's actually scientifically supportable.

- Okay.

Josh, lot to unpack here.

What is, if carrying capacity, what is ecological overshoot then?

What is that concept?

- So going back to the idea of what I mentioned earlier of a trust fund.

- Right?

- Ecological overshoot is when you stop living off the interest and you start using the capital.

So if I inherited millions of dollars, I could live off the interest indefinitely, leave it to my children, they could live off it indefinitely.

I could also plow through the capital itself.

- Right.

- And that means there's less of a flow in the future.

What Ted is saying though, basically, and you know, the technologies, and you know, we can have these new ways of using that, and a way you could think of it is I inherited a bunch of government bonds and the ecomodernists are saying, "Well, we could withdraw some from the government bonds and invest in other stocks that have higher yields."

So we can increase the yield of our initial trust fund.

And we do this constantly, but there's also many of these new investments have hidden fees.

So we develop, you know, tetraethyl lead and really makes our cars more efficient, but it has a hidden fee that people of my generation apparently lost about seven points of IQ from inhaling all that lead.

So there's often these hidden costs we don't understand.

And one of my big problems is those hidden costs tend to be paid by the lower income groups, and the overwhelming share of the benefits tend to go to the folks at the top.

- Interesting.

- So it's wildly inequitable.

- If I could actually, like if you take the lead example, yes, you can find various studies about the kind of negative consequences of lead on various things and IQ being one of them.

But if you take this in the broader context of these various modernization processes, better nutrition, better healthcare, prenatal, postnatal, all through life, higher incomes, more significant resources to provide public education, all sorts of things.

And all of those things actually are driving this increase in IQ despite these lead exposures.

So I think most people would say, "Yeah, good thing that we got rid of the lead," but I wouldn't trade the automobiles or the trains or the various other technologies that really just totally expanded the horizon of human possibility for the seven points of IQ.

- Mm-hmm.

Both philosophies are really concerned with human wellbeing and flourishing.

You both said that clearly.

How do ecomodernists and degrowthers define human flourishing?

What is that?

- So up to a certain point, flourishing is synonymous with increasing our consumption.

But once we have secure sufficiency, so in my view, what we really need is knowing we have everything we need for a happy life, guaranteed.

And I think it's quite a low level.

- Okay.

- And then beyond that, I really do think it's the human interactions.

- Okay.

- It's the amazing cultural output.

It's the non-material output that I-- that gives me a rich and rewarding life anyway.

I can't speak for everybody.

- Okay, and how about you Ted?

- Well, I'll go back to what I said at the top, which is it's surplus.

It's having choices, it's having agency in your world.

It's being able to decide who you wanna marry, where you want to live, what kind of sort of career or profession you wanna pursue.

Your work has meaning to you, your community has meaning to you.

And actually, having the ability to make those choices and to leave home or travel across the country as I did to sort of find your way in the world.

That's to me what human flourishing really looks like.

- Where and how have we achieved wellbeing in the sense that you would think of human flourishing, Josh?

Where has that happened?

- Yeah, yeah, so I think for, you know, for a huge share of the world, we really have, you know, we have pretty secure sufficiency.

The problem is that with additional growth, which, you know, if the idea of expanding our economy and growing is to provide that flourishing of, and I agree with Ted's, you know, a lot of your definition of what flourishing is.

But I look at an economy in which like 2/3 of our increased output, increased income goes to 1% of the population.

And so that doesn't in any way contribute to increased flourishing.

- It's almost as much degrowth as almost distribution.

Is that fair?

- Yeah, yeah.

So the idea is that people say, "Oh, degrowth would be horrible 'cause poor countries aren't meeting their basic needs."

Of course, people need to meet their basic needs and need to secure sufficiency.

The problem with their current system is it's not actually helping those people.

And that's partly because the sole goal of most of our decisions these days is the profit motive.

And I think the idea of relying on the profit motive instead of really having a goal of improving human wellbeing.

So we've entrusted our economy to the profit motive, and one way you can ensure to increase your profits is to avoid paying the costs.

- We mentioned population a little a bit, and I think most demographers are seeing population peaking this century in the world.

How does peak population influence the thinking of degrowth and ecomodernism?

I'm gonna start over here, Ted.

- Well, this idea that there's just this sort of endless exponential growth that's going to result in us consuming all of our seed corn and sort of destroying our natural inheritance and ultimately the basis for human civilization.

I mean, you just have to look at these trends and population.

It'd be like, "That is not going to happen."

Most developed economies have some form or another of a welfare state, and that welfare state is typically dependent upon having a large working age population to support aging, the aging parts of the population pyramid.

And when that reverses and you have many more aging people, older people who at least in our current paradigm have left the workforce and their sort of security, economic security is dependent on a shrinking number of working age people.

That creates all sorts of problems and it creates problems in terms of continuing to sustain the kind of surplus.

- Sure.

- That sustains the human flourish that we both agree is necessary for human flourishing.

- The emerging economies today have young populations going to old and the wealthy ones-- - Yup.

- Look like this.

And you're describing that.

How does peak population impact your thinking on degrowth?

- So here's where I have to separate myself from degrowthers.

I do think a much smaller population is desirable.

And I also think that as we hit peak population, it starts to go down.

Historically, the only time we've actually seen a decrease in equality is when populations are falling.

And when populations are falling, suddenly, you know, where I live right now, there's a housing crisis.

And once you have falling populations, suddenly there's a surplus of housing.

The value of existing assets tends to crash.

And it's the wealthy people who own all the existing assets and the position of the labor versus capital, suddenly they have much more bargaining power.

- Okay.

- So I actually see falling populations as one of the things that can really contribute to greater equality.

[Scott] Yeah, that makes sense.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

So let's dive in now with the energy components of all this.

Let's start with you, Josh.

I mean, in a degrowth philosophy, is energy necessary and what does it look like?

- No, I mean, energy is necessary for every single act of economic production.

It's a law of physics.

You can't do work without energy.

And so energy is essential.

The deal is that we just need to use a lot less.

So I'm of the mind that if we did develop a fusion energy that was clean, unlimited, cheap energy, that we would use it to continue to reconfigure the earth, you know, our natural ecosystems to, you know, overfish the oceans, build more cities in ways that would ultimately be harmful to humans.

And so we just use way too much energy long past the point where it improves our wellbeing.

- Ted, what kind of energy is needed for an ecomodernist?

- Well, I think we agree that energy is the lifeblood of modern economies, and you can't produce surplus without consuming much more energy than agrarian societies consume.

[Scott] Right.

- And ecomodernists just love nuclear energy for this reason.

You know, it's interesting that the version of the sort of, if we had this cheap abundant source of clean energy, we would just use it to destroy the world.

So I just, frankly, and no offense to Josh, but I find it deeply offensive to sort of view human beings in that way as only destroyers of worlds and not creators of worlds.

There are possibilities there that are quite remarkable in terms of restoring the natural world, bringing species back, bringing rivers back.

There's all sorts of quite remarkable things you can do when you have lots of cheap, clean energy.

- So Josh, capitalism in many ways is sort of defined by or underpinned by growth.

Does degrowth mean an end to capitalism?

- So one of the things I do think that this idea of basing everything on the profit motive.

- Yeah.

- And that all our decisions are driven by that is a really bad idea.

And we don't apply that to a lot of things.

You know, there's a lot of elements that is not based on profit motive, but we tend to rely on that for the big decisions.

- Gotcha, gotcha.

Ted, ecomodernism, does it require a rethinking of our current economy in the U.S.

or economies that are better.

- No, it doesn't, it doesn't.

I mean, I think, you know, what I think, you know, I think it's a feature.

Josh probably thinks it's a bug, but I think one of the great things about ecomodernism is that there's pretty plug and play with industrial modernity.

We basically are saying we should be leaning in to these very robust long-term modernization processes and, you know, we can power all of that increasing energy demand with nuclear energy and also solar.

Those are the two things we identified in the "Ecomodernist Manifesto" as energy, clean energy technologies that are virtually unlimited.

And that's a world where people have, you know, more leisure, more surplus, and more opportunities for people to choose their own path without necessarily sort of destroying all of our natural inheritance in the process.

- Josh, what kinds of energy in a degrowth world, policies, culture, types of energy?

- So, I mean, the way I look at it is our current economy is so dependent on energy and even fossil fuels, that if we pulled them away quickly, we would collapse the economy and have horrible hardships.

So what we need to do is ratchet down.

I'm a big believer that efficiency does not lead us to use less.

Efficiency actually leads us to use more.

But frugality does lead to efficiency.

So if we want efficiency, what we need to do is say we're gonna have to use less fossil fuels, and then technology and ingenuity I think we'll really step in and figure out how to use it more efficiently.

So, and again, you know, the ecomodernists tend to believe that technology will step in and solve all the resource constraints.

Great, so let's say, let's put those resource constraints in now and let technology do its thing.

- So Josh, in your view, challenge your own degrowth, you know, what are the major challenges that you see in the degrowth philosophy?

- In terms of a challenge to implementing the degrowth philosophy, I think the biggest challenge is that we have turned most of our airwaves and means of communication over to the profit sector.

So people are inundated with just thousands of advertisements a day saying the only thing that's meaningful in life is ever increasing consumption.

People believe that if, you know, they're told that constantly.

And then I buy a bigger car and I'm still not happy and fulfilled, it's just not big enough a car.

So, you know, we get convinced that if we're told that's the only path to happiness and I'm not happy, I just need more.

And I just think that's a total lie.

Nobody's telling you, you spend more time with your family and friends and, you know, taking your dog for a walk and hanging out in nature, that's gonna make you happy.

You're not gonna get that message.

- Yeah, interesting.

Ted, same thing.

What are the challenges or obstacles?

- Environmentalism.

[Scott chuckles] I mean, if you look at the things that have driven decarbonization and advanced developed economies over the last 60, 70 years, the biggest drivers, nuclear energy, hydro energy, the coal to gas transition, the environmental movement has opposed every one of those things.

So if you kind of went, "Well, what is the biggest obstacle, particularly in the developed world to ecomodernism?"

It's environmentalism.

There's just no question.

- You've heard each other talk, I've listened to you as well.

A lot of components that are powerful in both.

How would you all see agreement?

I'll start over here.

- I mean, I think you get at it in some of these questions and some of the discussion around human flourishing, which is after we've met our needs, after, you know, we've kind of achieved a level of comfort and sort of economic and social security, how do we create meaning?

I think that degrowth is a misguided response to that problem.

But I think the problem is real.

And I think if you kind of look at a lot of the sort of political conflict and polarization that we're dealing with, not only in the U.S., but certainly across the developed world now, in some ways, we're now comfortable and rich enough that the passions are back.

And in some ways, I think that's actually the greatest threat to sort of continuing human flourishing is that we start coming up with all sorts of new reasons to kill each other.

- So one thing I do think we both agree on is that we have some who consume way so much that it's a waste, and that we choose, we can choose what kind of economy we develop.

This is a choice.

We're not, you know, this is some natural system imposed from above.

This is something we can create and we can create it to pursue flourishing.

And I think in one of your writings, you actually said we might be one of the first species capable of directing our own evolution and our cultural evolution.

And I strongly agree with that.

- Well, you got a large audience, highly educated.

You wanna leave them with one or two sort of tight final thoughts?

Start with you, Josh.

- Starting with what I learned through my life is there's been zero correlation between my income and my welfare, my wellbeing.

So I actually think that a lot of empirical evidence that increasing wealth doesn't make us better off and that this idea that our economies are an evolutionary, ever-changing system, and there has been increasing cooperation despite the current polarization that we both dislike.

There's been a trend of collaboration and cooperation that I think is necessary to solve our problems.

And humans are capable.

You know, as they say, we'll always do the right thing once we've exhausted every other possibility.

[Scott chuckles] - Ted, a couple thoughts you wanna-- - Yeah, I mean, the future is open.

It is emergent.

You know, I agree with Josh that we have the ability to make choices.

And so, you know, I think we should both lean into our agency, our ability to kind of build better worlds.

And I think we should have some humility in our ability to sort of predict and understand the future.

And I think balancing those two things is the trick.

Sort of intellectual humility while also sort of having some ambition and aspiration for the future.

- Sure, sure.

Well, look, I've really learned a lot, enjoyed this conversation.

In fact, I appreciate both of your intellectual humility.

Civil dialogue is vital to all these things.

Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Josh, thanks so much.

- Pleasure, my pleasure.

[Scott] Our guests hold very different core beliefs.

Josh believes Earth has finite resources, which we're consuming faster than the planet can replenish.

Ted believes those resources can be expanded.

We've already increased earth carrying capacity through energy, agriculture, and technology and will continue to do so.

Josh believes that profit motive has steered us toward ever more consumption without any further wellbeing.

Ted believes that striving for wealth has produced the benefits of the modern world and longer, healthier lives.

They both strongly agree on increasing human flourishing for all nations.

Ted thinks we'll continue to raise global living standards through more affordable energy and technology and use that wealth to better preserve the natural environment.

Josh hopes as global wellbeing improves, we'll focus more on meaning and connection.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Major funding provided by Arizona State University.

Home to the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, addressing critical challenges toward a future in which all living things thrive.

Arizona State, The New American University.