This was published 8 years ago
Dematerialised world: how technology might save the planet
By Drew Turney
It's a common assumption that the more of us there are on the planet, the more raw materials we extract and consume. In fact, since the year 2000, the opposite has been true in at least one major economy, and it might just save the Earth.
Welcome to the world of dematerialisation. As a species we're enjoying more material comfort, more health and lower poverty than ever, and in some countries we're doing it while consuming less of many of the building blocks of the old economy like iron and phosphate.
The Return of Nature, a research paper from American energy and environment think tank The Breakthrough Institute has this to say; "America may also be experiencing peak use of many other resources. Back in the 1970s, it was thought that America's growing appetite might exhaust Earth's crust of just about every metal and mineral. But a surprising thing happened: even as our population kept growing, the intensity of use of the resources began to fall".
Have we reached 'peak stuff'?
Credit: The Breakthrough Institute/USGS National Minerals Information Center (2013).
Some of the downturn is obvious — we don't use wood for railway sleepers anymore, and first class mail fell a quarter between 2007 and 2012 in the US as more business was done electronically.
But other economic pathways indicating lower resource use are harder to spot. Instead of 100 people owning cars that sit idle for 90 per cent of their lives (and all the associated environmental and financial costs of using and garaging them), ride sharing services like Uber or Lyft mean one person can use one car 90 per cent of the time to ferry those 100 people around, ultimately lowering the overall demand for cars.
If you look again at the above graph, you'll see resource use peaked around the time the web really started to gather steam. It seems too coincidental not to be connected, and Andrew McAfee thinks technology is indeed one of the drivers of dematerialisation.
Along with Erik Brynjolfsson, his co-director at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, McAfee's 2014 book The Second Machine Age exhorts us to be optimistic about technology's power to improve our lives.
He points to another graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis revealing that while investment in hardware has gone down, software investment continues upward. "What I see going on is incredibly straightforward," he says. "It's a substitution of code and data for atoms, which is great news. It costs the planet nothing."
Credit: Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis.
Too little too late?
But while we still hear greenhouse gas emissions are so out of control the planet would need an extended recovery period even if our whole species went carbon neutral tomorrow, will such shifts make a difference?
There's no definitive answer until someone does all the sums, but McAfee points out that species loss and global warming aren't the only things speeding up.
"The progress we're making with different kinds of energy has taken people by surprise," he says. "The speed of increased solar efficiency is remarkable. I'm not an expert, but my gut feeling is that we're going to solve the energy problem in the 21st century. A rational person in many parts of the world would invest in a solar plant as opposed to a coal plant today, even if they didn't care about the planet at all. That's pretty remarkable. In many places solar will be the economically rational thing to do, if it's not already."
The other million-dollar question is that the statistics of declining resource use above are from the US — emerging economies like China and India likely present a very different picture.
The charity-funded Institute for Energy Research reported last year that China is building one coal-fired power plant every 7 to 10 days. Even if we do all we can in more climate-change aware parts of the world, will it be enough?
According to another research paper from The Breakthrough Institute, there's a chance. It claims that well before the point where China consumes as much electricity per capita as America, gas-powered energy plants can generate it. Initial studies claim such plants could achieve efficiency 75 per cent higher than those of today with zero CO2 emissions.
So if the technology's there, is there anything we can do to speed dematerialisation along? McAfee thinks capitalism itself — the driver of overconsumption and traditional enemy of the Earth — is also the means to speed up the replacing of stuff with information.
"We need to encourage intense competition and tech progress," he says. "I used to walk around thinking of it as something we had to guard against, and what's interesting these days is the notion that if tech progress and capitalism do their dance long enough, we might turn a corner and start spontaneously treading more lightly on the planet. Not because we all decide to stop consuming but it becomes the better answer to use less.
"Every good capitalist wants to minimise their inputs and their costs. Tech progress eventually lets us do that."