Why the annoying climate activists and degrowthers are wrong
There is a phrase that goes like this: No food: one problem. Lots of food: lots of problems.
We live in a world in which we have solved the food problem. At least, we’ve gotten to a point where there are fewer people experiencing hunger than at any point in human history. (There is a controversial idea that hunter/gatherers had it better. If that were true, then update my last sentence to “at any point since the dawn of civilization.” But I don’t think it’s true.)
So we live in the second type of world: lots of food, lots of problems. And yet, my guess is that, given the choice, most people would prefer this world. We worry about climate change, AI risk, and nuclear war because we are not worrying about food. If we didn’t have food, those things wouldn’t be problems.
My problem with the “stop all drilling right now” people is that they don’t have a backup plan. And our lives are so dependent on oil, and becoming less so thanks to things like the IRA, that if we cut them out, its downstream effects will be so catastrophic that we will be living in the No Food, One Problem world, which, as I’ve mentioned, is worse.
So as bad as the effects of climate change are, I still think they are better than the degrowther world we would be living in. I think we should continue on the path of investing in renewable energy so that we can replace oil-powered products without sending our society into the stone age, where we’ll still be living with the effects of climate change plus we’ll be poor and hungry.
