Apology of degrowth

Few scientists in Spain like the physicist Antonio Turiel have informed and warned us for many years regarding the current energy crisis. Although current or circumstantial, it has little. Rather, it is an ‘announced energy collapse’. That’s why the news that comes to us lately is hardly surprising. His book ‘Petrocalipsis’ is a good summary of this, and how the false promises of alternatives to fossil fuels are utopian. A slap in the face of reality that explains the impossible substitutability of petroleum derivatives such as diesel to move heavy machinery or obtain enough heat to manufacture many materials such as cement or steel, pillars of our world. The entire Green Revolution that is intended to be carried out, the ecological transition, is based on a desperate and hasty massive construction of renewable macro-parks, and giving a ‘green’ license to gas and nuclear, all-in extremis, despite the fact that electricity is just a minority part of what makes this world of oil addicts moving. Certainly, his second book in collaboration with the journalist Juan Bordera, ‘El otoño de la civilización’ (‘The autumn (fall) of civilization’), delves deeper into that utopia because it is locked in a system addicted to ‘black gold’ and that inevitably collides with the limits of growth.

Whoever denies global warming, already at this point, or has a very powerful subconscious for not facing reality and thus avoiding that feeling of bad vibes, is peeling the future of their children and grandchildren, or accepting it goes against his/her whatever interests. The reasons are not only easy to understand, but, out of common sense, watching a column of gases come out is intuited that it will not be good for the air.

Then, why do we burn things? Simply so that the explosion and that subsequent ‘smoke’ make an engine work and thus move things, such as a vehicle, or a turbine and thus generate electricity. The latter is an old physical principle, but it revolutionized the 19^th century and allowed the technological advances that we currently enjoy. The problem is that thermodynamics sentences our universe to any transformation of energy that generates losses in the form of heat, waste, disorder... we found here the entropy. We prosper because we heat the external environment through the residual gases that escape into the atmosphere, and coincidentally those that generate the greenhouse effect.

Of course, technology has improved to reduce these energy losses and make processes more efficient, but I reiterate once again that, no matter how much emissions are reduced, the overall effect will not be appreciated and will even get worse, because every time we will be more mouths in the world. Yes, overpopulation is a growing problem which must also be recognized, since no species can grow indefinitely. Inflection points such as agriculture in the Neolithic, the Industrial Revolution or the Haber-Bosch process, well allowed for exponential growth leaps because they entered virgin territory in human history. Before each tipping point there was more physical space, and the air and water were less polluted than the next step. If we travelled back in time and told our great-grandparents that 47 million inhabitants could be fed (and even of more!) in Spain, would not give them the calculations for so little land. We must recognize the important role of technology, but also of trade and market liberalization. The problem is that we now have much less margin for the next technological revolution – if it really comes – in which energy and material resources are the main limiting factors.

Without pretending to enter into ideological biases, the global system in which we are is not going to change. Quite simply because it has worked to feed more mouths and allow us a more comfortable life. With few exceptions, no one is going to change their lifestyle in the long-term. Just consider a few examples: will you comfortably stop shopping on Amazon knowing that Bezos imposes working conditions that make his employees have to urinate in bottles? Or will you delete yourself from Twitter, the Musk’s new toy, knowing that he vehemently defends 80-hour work weeks? Yes, the regular European citizen can eat less meat, shower less, or buy an electric vehicle, but that will not change anything if we put it in the global perspective of the industry and the conflict of interest with emerging economic powers. However, the gradual depletion of resources to sustain us will make the decrease inevitable. We are going to decrease, by hook or by crook, and I bet that by the latter. The sooner we become aware of a world in a climate, energy and social crisis, with all that this involves, the better. And it wouldn’t hurt to take a more stoic stance on it.