We are thinking about climate change wrong

I'm not worried about climate change. I don't think it will lead to catastrophic events and great suffering for humanity. Of course, it will be bad (possibly an existential threat) if we do nothing. However, I'm optimistic that we will innovate our way through and end up with energy abundance and environmental security.

Why conservation is the wrong approach

This might seem contradictory to what I just said, but I don't think the current approach to climate change is the right one—especially in the field of policy.

Many of our current policies addressing climate change focus on reducing consumption. The recent Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits for energy-efficient water heaters, heat pumps, and AC systems. The Paris Agreement's primary objective is to reduce emissions. Public attention and taxpayer dollars overwhelmingly flow to mitigatory initiatives that, in a best-case scenario, reduce our emissions to some non-zero amount. These policies are also unpopular because companies don't want to spend money to go green and are less effective than they seem because emitters can simply move operations to less-regulated countries.

It is a useful exercise to imagine what the endgame for these policies might look like. If all goes to plan, we will live in a world where the technology we use would be highly-efficient but not necessarily offer a better quality of life. We might drive electric cars, eat plant-based diets, and use water-efficient shower heads. But is this the best we can do? And what about developing countries? Restrictive policies will send many polluters overseas. Even if clean energy sources like wind and solar scale in the US, how will poorer nations make the switch without using fossil fuels to support their transition?

Today's climate issues are interesting because most result from high and rapidly growing consumption. A better approach is to focus on solutions rooted in abundance rather than conservation. We will not make the world more sustainable through hyper-efficiency and decreased resource usage. A solution that relies on people consuming less is unpalatable for consumers and not economically viable.

Energy and emissions are good examples. People need to consume energy. The energy the world needs to consume will probably increase over the next 50 years. Our current policies (Kyoto Protocol, Paris Accords, etc) are difficult for countries to adopt and face opposition from the private sector. To pass and successfully execute a global emission reduction referendum, you will need cooperation from private companies, developing nations, and everyday people. On the other hand, by investing in carbon removal technology, you can increase the ceiling on consumption, allowing for more productivity and quality of life improvements.

See this video that has informed some of my thinking:

I also consider this to be a fairer and more moral approach. The US and Europe (and more recently China) have historically been the greatest emitters. We used tremendous amounts of energy to industrialize, develop, and increase living standards for hundreds of millions of people. Today, countries like India are doing the same in an effort to improve the lives of their people.

However, with a conservationist approach, this means the burden of emission reduction would fall largely on developing countries who are counting on fossil fuels and energy consumption to life them out of poverty. Carbon removal rebalances the burden back onto the countries who caused the problem in the first place.

A better endgame would be to create and scale technologies that enable the world to consume more in ways that don't jeopardize the planet's health. A world where we can eat what we want and use energy to raise the standard of living. To do so, we will need to invest in things like nuclear energy, synthetic animal proteins, and decarbonization tools. The endgame of climate tech should be sustainable abundance.

A techno-optimist approach

Is sustainable abundance possible, and can we do it before the world burns up? I think so.

Everything we consume is definable. We are sufficiently advanced to understand the molecular makeup of everything from crops to water to proteins to energy. We also know how they are synthesized in nature.

Since we understand these key first principles, we can also create consumable resources on our own. We already do this for almost every resource we consider "in danger of running out." Synthesizing water and animal protein are relatively mature processes. Nuclear fission has been scaled, and genetically modified crops are already widespread. With effective solutions, we should be able to consume as much as we want without worrying about the supply of our resources.

The other half of the problem is reversing our climate impact, which we also have ways to do. The base technology for things like desalination and carbon removal exist. The hurdle we are facing is engineering solutions at scale.

Given the current bottleneck is scaling technologies, we already understand, a more effective approach would be to funnel resources and design policies to enable more research and experimentation.

I'm confident we can do this. Even though the current policy meta hasn't adopted an abundance mindset, there are enough talented people (supported by enough venture funding) working on climate solutions for the outlook to be positive.

Past success

History has examples of the abundance approach working. In the 19th century, the dwindling nitrogen supply was a serious problem. Nitrogen is an essential component of fertilizer, and without it, the global agricultural system would not produce enough food. William Crookes famously said, "England and all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat."

Throughout the 19th century, the primary nitrogen source was from mining saltpeter deposits in Chile. By the end of the 1800s, it was estimated that the global demand for nitrogen would exceed the current extractable supply. The problem was not solved by rationing nitrogen or passing conservationist policies. It was solved with science and innovation.

This techno-optimist view was not just blind hope. We understood the necessary first principles to solve the problem: we understood the atmosphere was abundant with nitrogen, and we knew the physical mechanism behind fixating that nitrogen. It was only a matter of developing and scaling the technology.

Ultimately, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a method for fixating atmospheric nitrogen. Since then, the Haber-Bosch process has been the main way of producing ammonia for fertilizer.

In hindsight, conservation clearly would have been the wrong approach for solving the dwindling nitrogen supply. Why are we content with policies to limit energy consumption in the face of climate change? The solutions, back then and today, are much closer than we think.