Powering Down: Beyond Growth, Toward Simplicity
We are joined in this episode by Richard Heinberg, one of the world’s foremost experts on energy and sustainability. Using his latest book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival as the basis of our conversation, we unpack how humans have come to overpower Earth's natural systems and oppress one another and how we might address this. Richard challenges the techno-utopian absurdity of “green growth” and explains how unfettered human expansionism, even with a “green” tint, is incompatible with natural limits. We discuss how we might deliberately rein in our power, starting with an urgent transition away from fossil fuels, and move from a culture of unabated growth toward a culture of sufficiency, simplicity, and resilience.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Richard Heinberg 0:00
We need to build as much renewable energy capacity as we can in the years ahead so that we can maintain a working grid, but not so that we can maintain a consumer industrial society where everybody is living, like the average middle class suburban American. That's a foolish goal. And I get a little irate. environmentalists who put forth this promise of green growth that will build solar panels and wind turbines and grow the economy, create lots of jobs, and we'll be living basically just the way we are now, except we will be driving electric cars. I think that's a false promise. And it's unrealistic. It's simply unrealistic.
Alan Ware 0:41
That's Richard Heinberg, author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. We'll talk with Richard about the very big picture of how humans have come to overpower the Earth's natural systems and oppress one another and how we might fix it in this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 1:08
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:31
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offer solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals.
Nandita Bajaj 1:50
And before we begin our interview today, we've got listener feedback from Akash, who is originally from India and lives with his wife in Switzerland. He said, I deeply enjoyed listening to your most recent interview with Dr. Amirtha Nandi from India on patriarchy, motherhood and the search for meaning. Recently, my wife had her tubes removed for a number of reasons, chief of which was we didn't want a kid and she wanted a permanent solution to her reproductive capacities. I organized for her a not a baby shower to celebrate this moment in our lives. We had friends over to shower her and gifts and perform a host of rituals from washing her feet, feeding her spoonfuls of her favorite foods to hosting a quiz themed on her life as well as fun uterus and reproductive facts. For everyone who showed up it was the first party of its kind that they attended, because these parties don't just exist yet, but I think awareness is growing and I'm grateful for people like yourself for spreading the word. I'm also grateful that we live in a part of the world that enables such decisions. Though truth be told, doctors were reluctant at first citing her age as a factor. But nonetheless, the medical world did help her take control of her reproductive choices. And we also are surrounded by those who not just accept, but support and encourage these choices. Not everyone is as privileged. Well, thank you so much, Akash for sharing this really intimate and interesting story. We've also never heard of such a party to celebrate the choice to be childfree. Although I am tempted to throw one for myself and my husband now. I hope that with examples like yours, these parties do become more popular. And for our listeners who may have been confused by the washing of feet and the spoon feeding references in Akasha story, they are a part of Indian rituals that often accompany significant life events such as weddings and baby showers. Alright, and with that, moving on to today's guest.
Alan Ware 3:54
Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute and is regarded as one of the world's foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. He is the author of fourteen books including some of the seminal works on society's current energy and environmental sustainability crises, including: Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, and The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, and The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. Richard's work has appeared in such media outlets as Nature, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, and National Geographic, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Al Jazeera, NPR and C-SPAN. Richard has delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences on six continents, addressing policymakers at many levels from local city councils to members of the European Parliament. Richard has appeared in many film and television documentaries, including Leonardo DiCaprio's 11th hour. He is a recipient of the Atlas Award for Climate Heroes in 2012 and the M King Hubbert Award for Excellence in Energy Education in 2006. In 2012, Richard was appointed to His Majesty the King of Bhutan's international expert working group for the New Development Paradigm Initiative. Richard wrote and narrated Post Carbon Institute's animated video 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds, winner of a YouTube's Do-Gooder 2011 Video of the Year Award, which has been viewed by nearly two million people and translated into multiple languages. He's also the author and narrator of Post Carbon Institute's twenty-two video Think Resilience online course.
Nandita Bajaj 5:38
Well Richard, it is such an honor to have you with us today. You are a prolific author, and over the last few decades, you've written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion. You're widely recognized as one of the world's most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels, and your latest book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival is a fascinating read, one that garnered praise from high profile authors like Dennis Meadows, co-author of the Limits to Growth, Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, and also our much admired adviser and friend, Dr. Bill Rees, co-author of Our Ecological Footprint. And we know you're a busy guy, so we're thrilled that we get this opportunity to meet with you. So thank you for being with us today, Richard.
Richard Heinberg 6:33
Well, it's a pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.
Nandita Bajaj 6:35
Well, let's dive right into our conversation. So the premise of your latest book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, is that the multitude of social and ecological crises happening around the world are due to the pursuit, overuse, and abuse of power. And of course, the basis of your book is the question, "How have humans become powerful enough to disrupt the world's climate, trigger the sixth mass extinction, and cause serious harm to the biosphere? And with all the abilities and technologies we've accrued, why do we so often oppress instead of uplift one another?" And in your book, you propose that for the sake of a more socially and ecologically just future, we need to think more critically about power and how we use it. So in your discussion of power, you differentiate between physical power and social power, and you make it clear that both types of power are closely related. For example, the large differences in physical power between human groups can lead to large differences in social power. So why don't we start with the basic definition of physical power? What is physical power?
Richard Heinberg 7:48
Well, the most basic definition of power is the one that physicists would use, which is the rate of transfer of energy. So the advantage of using this definition is that you're talking about something that's measurable, and we measure power, in this sense, in watts, or in horsepower, it's possible to use other units, but you're basically measuring the same thing. So the significance is that the transfer of energy is the basis of everything that happens in the universe. Quite literally, we can't do anything without energy. And energy, if it's just sitting there as potential, is not doing anything. What really matters is energy that's transferred in a process of, of doing something. So whether you're talking about astrophysics or cell biology or economics, it's all about energy transfer. So understanding that is really a good place to start. Because I think, you know, most people, when they think about energy, they just think of it as, "It's useful; we put gasoline in our car, and we plug things into these outlets in the wall, you know, and it charges our batteries or whatever." And that's the extent of our thought about the matter. But really, energy is everything. And once you start thinking in those terms, and following the power, you can understand how things work, whether it's an ecosystem, an organism, a society - if you want to understand it, you have to follow the power. And so some other authors granted me that insight many years ago, and it's changed my life, changed the way I think, changed the way I view the world. And so I wanted to base a whole book just on that insight, really, and that's how Power came about.
Nandita Bajaj 9:29
It's a really fascinating distinction that you make, because I've heard you say that, you know, all of these siloed approaches to power have existed in all different fields. I used to be an engineer in my past career, and I used to be a physics teacher, so I, I've talked about this energy transfer and the definition of power in kind of this physical way, but what you've done with bringing together the physical power and its relationship to social power is really interesting and fascinating.
Richard Heinberg 10:00
Yeah, I thought it was important to bring together the discussion of physical and social power, which it's easier to do in English than in some other languages. In French and German, for example, there are different words for physical power and social power. In English, we use the same word: power. And it's helpful because, as you say, these things are related. Physical power can be defined as the ability to do something. And of course, doing something requires energy. So when we use energy to do something, that gives us power, like the power of flight, the power of speech, and so on. Well, if that's physical power, than what social power? Well social power is the ability to get someone else to do something. And that's not unique to humans, there are other animals that are socially organized, but we've built social power to enormous heights and degrees of subtlety, using what I call the power tools unique to humanity, namely, communication technologies, starting with writing, money, and weapons. So these are tools that we use to organize human behavior to get other people to do things. Money, for example, economists talk about money as if it were just a neutral medium of exchange. Well, we know in our daily lives that it's much more than that. Money is social power. If you have lots of money, you can get other people to do all kinds of things. This has real world implications that all of us experience all the time, and yet somehow the discipline of economics just glosses over that dimension of money and ignores its power implications. So when I say if you want to understand a society, follow the power, well, yeah, follow the money too, but understand the role of money in the exchange and application of power within society.
Alan Ware 11:57
And you've talked about the Maximum Power Principle as being very important in the world of ecology when we talk about living organisms. How would you define the Maximum Power Principle as it applies to living organisms and including us humans?
Richard Heinberg 12:13
Sure. Well, Maximum Power Principle is really just a simple observation that the organisms that are able to gain and use the most power tend to prevail within ecosystems. Now, living things are extremely good at aggregating energy, deriving energy from their environment, conserving it, using it. And in fact, one factoid that I came across in researching the book is that the average organism is ten thousand times as powerful as the sun on a gram per gram basis. Now, obviously, the sun is vastly more powerful than any organism on Earth. But if you do the division of mass and luminosity, it turns out that living things are just amazingly powerful for their size, for their their mass, and the ones that have evolved to be best at doing that, at getting energy from the environment and using it in energy transfer to gain power, they tend to survive the longest. Well, we see exactly the same thing in human societies. I mean, once early state societies arose that had kings and money and metal weapons and communication technologies, writing, they out-competed the still existing hunter-gatherer societies all around the world. That doesn't mean they were better than hunter-gatherers, of course, they thought so in their own minds. They believed that their religion was better and and they were superior in all sorts of ways. They're only superiority was that they had more power, more physical power, by means of weapons and the ability to organize themselves in larger social units as a result of having, as we said, agriculture and all these other things. So the Maximum Power Principle has worked just as much in human cultural evolution, as it has in global biological evolution in producing the world we see today.
Alan Ware 14:06
And you describe in the book how a lot of humans use of power started with fire, tools, and language were major elements in increasing our physical power. What would be an overview of how those abilities helped us expand our physical power?
Richard Heinberg 14:21
Right. Well, tools were useful in leveraging the physical power we already had through food. And by leveraging that metabolic energy, we were able to get even more energy, tools like weapons, especially ones that could kill or maim at a distance, you know, slings and arrows. So if a group of humans wanted to bring down a really big animal like a mastodon or a bison or something like that, well, that's really dangerous business. If you've got to approach the animal direct one to one and somehow try to strike or strangle or you know, but if you can throw spears, if you can kill at a distance, well suddenly big animal like that a bison or Mastodon could feed a whole community for days and even weeks, so what an opportunity! So tools did that for us. Then fire actually increased our energy metabolism instead of just relying on the energy from food, we could use the energy from firewood to do all kinds of things for us: to keep us warm at night, to chase away predators, if you slept near the campfire, you are much less likely to be picked off by a lion in the middle of the night, you know, something like that. We could also change our environment in various ways using fire to burn forests or underbrush to create the kinds of grasslands that would support the kinds of animals that we wanted to hunt. So fire transformed environments all around the planet as soon as people arrived with fire. You know, we see that in Australia, in the Americas, even in Europe. Formerly densely forested areas change very rapidly as a result of humans arriving using fire to alter landscapes. Then language, of course, we've already talked about social power as the ability to get somebody else to do something. Well, language was absolutely the key for all human social power. It's where it all came from. It allowed us to coordinate our behavior over space and time, it enabled us to teach other people how to make tools and more ever more sophisticated tools, it enabled us to work together in larger projects, projects that would take, in some cases, many generations. So these three things together, fire, tools, and language made us, you know, much more formidable than any other species on the planet. And so we started taking habitat away from other species a long time ago. We've done a lot more of that just recently, for reasons we'll talk about. But it's a process that began tens of thousands of years ago when we first started using fire, tools, and language.
Alan Ware 17:08
Yeah, and as you mention in chapter five, in terms of physical power, that it's titled Fossil Fuels Changed Everything. And I've gotten fairly deep into some of the research from people like you and Nate Hagens and others about this enormous physical power that fossil fuels unleashed. And one of my favorite examples is the fact that a single gallon of gasoline has thirty-one thousand calories embodied in it, which would be ten days of a three thousand calorie diet, which would be quite a high diet, is embodied in that single gallon of gasoline. Another example that I've heard is pushing the car, if you drive it twenty-five, thirty-five miles on a gallon, and then try to push it back, the amount of work that that gasoline has done is enormous and it's so easily taken for granted by virtually everybody. So could you give us an overview of how fossil fuels changed everything in terms of this physical power?
Richard Heinberg 18:00
Yeah, well, I think the most dramatic example is how it changed the way society is organized economically. At the start of the fossil fuel revolution, let's say arbitrary date 1800, 90% of the population in any given agrarian society was working at producing foods so that the other 10% could live in cities and have specialized occupations as whatever: writers, printers, soldiers, lawyers, whatever you needed. So again, 90% of the people working the land, living rurally, growing food, keeping domesticated animals, and so on. So what happens - we use fossil fuels for agriculture every phase of the way. We've developed tractors and combines and all sorts of agricultural machinery that enabled a few people to do as much work as it formerly took lots of people. So today, in the United States, typical industrial nation, only one or 2% of the population has to work at farming in order to provide enough food for everybody else. So that's an enormous difference. What happened to those other 89% of the population? They didn't just go away. What happened was, over time, they moved to cities. The biggest demographic shift of the last few decades has been urbanization, people moving from the countryside to cities. So people move to cities, and what did they do there? Well, they got jobs. This was a way of organizing people's work that virtually didn't exist before. I mean, you can find examples in the literature of people getting paid to do this and that, but it was always a very small minority of the population that had paid employment. But today, we take it for granted that everybody has to have a job, you know, or a profession. And so what are some of those professions? There are thousands of professions and jobs available and a lot of them have to do with manufacturing or marketing or sales. Again, this way of organizing the economy around fossil fuels, and around flows of money from fossil fuels is very recent. It's so easy to take it for granted and assume that people have always sort of lived this way. Yeah, things have changed. But no, it's a complete game changer. The introduction of fossil fuels altered the way we think about society and the way it works, and the economy. Nobody talked about the economy in the year 1800. It wasn't a concept except for a very, very few people who were just beginning to develop the ideas that would ultimately become the discipline of economics. For everybody else, it was just daily life of growing food and going to the market once in a while, and that was it. But now the economy is this thing that we all talk about, that we measure using GDP, Gross Domestic Product, and it's all calculated and measured on a daily and annual basis. And it's all based on the assumption of growth. We assume that the economy can always grow, because it always has - always well, since when? Since the Industrial Revolution, since we started using fossil fuels. So again, economic growth is another artifact of fossil fuels. It's changed the way we live, the way we think, our assumptions. And we tend to think it's all because human beings just got really smart a couple of hundred years ago and started inventing stuff. But all of those inventions were just ways of using energy, ways of leveraging energy. And that energy suddenly was much more abundant because we had fossil fuels rather than just firewood and draft animals.
Alan Ware 21:39
Right, that population and consumption explosion of the last two hundred years is on the back of that fossil fuel explosion. And as you've gone deeply into looking at how we have to transition to renewable energies because that these are nonrenewable resources that took hundreds of millions of years to form the coal, oil, and natural gas, and we're using the low hanging fruit, so to speak, the oil under natural pressure going to tar sands and deep sea and fracking and things that are much more expensive over time. So in a book that you co-authored, called Our Renewable Future, you've outlined the challenges and opportunities of transitioning to renewable energy. You've mentioned that we should be building out wind and solar now and using these depleting fossil fuels that we'll need for that build out while we still have affordable access to them. Could you summarize that huge study that you've done? Some of the challenges we'll face in a transition to renewable energy?
Richard Heinberg 22:36
Sure, yeah. This was a wonderful project. I was able to work with David Fridley, who's on the Energy Analysis Team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I'm just a writer. I write about technical stuff, but I don't have a lot of technical background in terms of training, engineering, physics, and so on. David does, that's his work and that's his profession. So we spent a year together, you know, he did the technical analysis, and I wrote the thing up. And by the way, the book, Our Renewable Future is all online, you can access it for free, just go to ourrenewablefuture.org. And so what did we look at? We looked at what the transition from a fossil fueled energy regime to an all renewable energy regime would look like, what would be the difficulties, how could they be overcome, and so on. In short, what we found was that all of the challenges can be dealt with, can be overcome, in essence, at a laboratory scale. For example, airliners. That's a huge problem for transitioning to renewable energy. Why? Because the power density of jet fuel is so much greater than the power density, pound for pound, kilogram for kilogram, of batteries. So we take for granted an airliner with three hundred people being able to fly for fifteen hours and go from Asia to the Americas. But you can't do that with batteries. It's just physically not possible. So how do you solve that problem? Well, there are various ways. You could use renewable electricity to electrolyze water, produce hydrogen. Hydrogen is very hard to store because its volume density is so low. So you could create synthetic jet fuel using hydrogen and combine it with carbon from the atmosphere, plenty of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of all the carbon emissions we've done burning fossil fuels, so hey, why not just capture some of that CO2, which we can do that, there are machines that will do that, then combine it cleverly with the hydrogen from water and produce synthetic jet fuel? Okay, it's technically possible, you can do it in the laboratory, but that's going to be very expensive fuel as compared to current kerosene prices. Kerosene is what we use as jet fuel. And there are other instances like that that we encountered. Another one is making cement. Now, cement is the key ingredient of concrete and concrete is literally the foundation of modern industrial civilization, whether you're talking buildings or highways, even wind turbines have to be anchored in concrete. So we need a lot of concrete, we use a lot of concrete in the billions of tons per year. So cement, how is cement made? Well, it's made in giant kilns that operate at fifteen hundred degrees Celsius 24/7, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and they burn fuels, often natural gas, in order to produce that high temperature. Well, can you produce temperatures that high using electricity? Yes, theoretically, you could also once again, produce synthetic fuels using electricity and do the same process. But once again, it would be very expensive. So all these problems can be solved at laboratory scale. But doing this stuff at the global industrial scale that we're operating at right now, it's going to be expensive and difficult. It's going to take time to transition these industries. Now, my wife Janet and I live in in house we've inhabited for twenty-five years now. And we've experimented with a lot of technologies that are available at the household scale. We have solar panels, we have a solar hot water heater, solar cookers, electric air source heat pump for heating and cooling, all this stuff. It works great, I recommend everybody invest in these things. We've spent tens of thousands of dollars in reducing our carbon emissions. We have an electric car, I could go on. So yeah, everybody could do these things. It would, it's going to be expensive, you know, but if the government helps out, everybody can do these things. But there's a lot of things that we can't do in our little household. We don't make glass, we don't make concrete, we don't do heavy manufacturing in our house. There are other people who do those things for us. And those people are using energy in ways that are going to be very difficult, costly, to transition and it's going to take some time. So I'm a skeptic about the energy transition in this sense. If we need to get off of fossil fuels by 2050, if we need to decarbonize by 2035 in order to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we're not going to do it just by substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels, the physical practical impediments are just too great. So we're going to have to reduce our energy usage fairly substantially if we're going to meet those kinds of goals. And especially for high energy usage countries like the United States, we're talking about really significant reductions in per capita energy usage. Now, if we're talking about another country like Ghana, or even some Central and South American countries that have very low per capita energy usage rates, it's not so much a reduction in that case, but for really high energy usage countries. And of course, countries like China use enormous amounts of energy to produce stuff that's then used in United States and Europe, the highly industrialized countries. So it's going to be a global transition. And it has to be a transition that is founded as much on efficiency, conservation, and reduction, as it is just on building a lot of new solar panels and wind turbines.
Alan Ware 28:26
Right. And the crux of it seems to be partly the energy density of fossil fuels has been created by natural processes, the time and pressure of tens and hundreds of millions of years. So we have that nice concentrated energy versus the sun and the wind or these diffuse energies, and we're trying to concentrate them through technology and materials, wind turbines and solar panels, and you talk quite a bit about the intermittency, the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't shine. So then you need to have storage and you need to overbuild storage, you have to have more than you need, because sometimes there's not much sun. So you need that much more backup power, so. And then the transmission, we've heard estimates of three or four times the amount of transmission lines to have a fully renewable grid, a lot more land being used for all the solar panels and wind turbines combined with all the mining that would have to take place.
Richard Heinberg 29:19
And materials.
Alan Ware 29:20
Yeah, yeah.
Richard Heinberg 29:21
Yeah. All together, the impediments are so great that one might almost you know, just give up and say, well, we can't do it. But I don't go there. I think over the last few decades, we have made the electric power grid an absolute lifeline for modern humanity. We've put not only all our financial information, but technical information, cultural artifacts, music - everything is on the grid. So if the grid goes down altogether permanently, it's a tragedy of immense proportions. Not only would there be massive mortality as a result -
Alan Ware 29:57
Yeah.
Richard Heinberg 29:58
But we would lose so much of what we have created over the last couple of hundred years as a result of having cheap energy, we've learned a lot about the universe and about the human body about history, that's hard won knowledge and information. If the grid goes down, we lose all of that. So we need to build as much renewable energy capacity as we can in the years ahead so that we can maintain a working grid, but not so that we can maintain a consumer industrial society where everybody is living like the average middle class, suburban American. That's a foolish goal. And I get a little irate at environmentalists who put forth this promise of green growth that we'll build solar panels and wind turbines and grow the economy, create lots of jobs, and we'll be living basically just the way we are now, except we will be driving electric cars. I think that's a false promise. And it's unrealistic. It's simply unrealistic.
Nandita Bajaj 30:57
We completely agree with you. And I think what are the key things you talked about, a reduction. It's not just creating more efficiency and a transition to renewable energy, but also a proportional reduction in energy use. And of course, the environmentalists that you're talking about, the techno-fundamentalists who believe that just shifting over to renewable energies and cool technologies will totally help us address the climate crisis. Of course, one fallacy there being that the climate crisis is the only crisis that we're experiencing right now. There's of course, the, you mention in your book, the sixth mass extinction. And also a lack of understanding that this transition in order to maintain, if it's even possible, the current levels of our energy use will accelerate extinctions due to the demands for space and minerals to drive these technologies. And our fate is intertwined with the fate of the biosphere, we're not separate from it even if we don't want to respect other species in nature. So the reduction piece is so important, you know, what you speak about down powering both in consumption and in population, especially as more and more people from non-industrialized countries are aspiring to this standard of living. We're already way past, you know, our carrying capacity. The planet simply cannot sustain more middle class consumers like Americans and Canadians and other industrialized countries.
Richard Heinberg 32:34
Yes, I couldn't agree more. We haven't talked about population yet. But of course, that's the feature of your podcast. And I'm sad to see so many prominent environmentalists either soft peddle the subject or even proclaim that it's not a problem at all. I mean, they say, well, "The rate of population growth has declined from roughly 2% in the 1970s to around 1% now, so the problem is solving itself." Well, yeah, the problem will solve itself ultimately in very brutal ways if we don't intervene deliberately. Back in the 1970s, we were adding a billion people every twelve years. Today, we're still adding a billion people every twelve years. Just do the math - in the seventies, it was 2%, annual growth, 2% of four billion. So today, it's eight billion, and 1% of eight billion is the same as 2% of four billion. So we're still adding a billion people every twelve years, and we're still putting so much pressure on ecosystems that have to provide space and food and materials for this extra billion people every twelve years. Now China's population has just started to decline, big announcement from the Chinese government just in January this year. And you know, you read the newspapers and listen to the radio broadcasts and so on. They say, "Oh, this is a tragedy."
Nandita Bajaj 34:02
Yeah.
Richard Heinberg 34:03
"There won't be as many workers and consumers in China. So what's going to happen to China's economy?" Well, you look at other countries that are already seeing population declines like Japan and South Korea and a few European countries. Most of them have very high wages and stable wages and very low unemployment. So I'm having trouble seeing what the problem is. If China's population is declining, they won't have to keep building more cities and highways at incredibly furious pace that they've been doing for the past few decades. It'll be easier to make sure that everybody has housing and has basic necessities. Yes, I know. Realistically, the fact is that China's economic policies are all based on economic growth and the end of growth is going to pose a lot of problems for the Chinese economy, which will undoubtedly end up as suffering for many people, but it's inevitable anyway, sooner or later, what goes up must come down. We cannot keep growing population and consumption on a finite planet forever. So we have to plan for the end of growth, and not just China, but we all have to do that. Every country should have a post-growth strategy for human development, for supplying human needs in a situation where population and production are declining, because that's where we're going, one way or another.
Nandita Bajaj 35:30
We couldn't agree more. And to the point that you made earlier about the stratification of power, the more power a certain minority has, the more they can get other people to do things for them. And I think that's part of the depopulation panic that's happening, is with China's population declining, part of the big worry is we're not going to be able to get the cheap material, the cheap labor costs that we were able to leverage through lots of human rights violations. And it's kind of shocking that even environmentalists who are so social justice minded are not able to see that there is a very small minority of elites who actually benefit from population growth; majority of the people are actually experiencing degradation of living conditions, especially where population growth is the highest. And you're one of the few sustainability thinkers and writers that truly understands that population absolutely has to be part of the equation if we're speaking about a truly just framework for humanity and for nonhuman animals in nature. What's your experience been like talking with people throughout the ecological sustainability movement, in terms of the responses you get when you bring up the issue of population growth or overpopulation?
Richard Heinberg 36:54
It's kind of strange. Most of the people I talked to get it. It's the organizations that seem skittish about mentioning population and talking about it. Big environmental organizations, very, very few of them are willing to discuss the subject. I've read a little bit about the history of this going back to the Cairo Conference in the early 1990s. Because before then, population was discussed very, very widely. There was Paul Ehrlich's famous book, The Population Bomb, and so on. And so there was a lot of discussion about overpopulation, high rates of population growth, and how that would have not only detrimental environmental impacts, but also for human welfare. Okay, so, in the early nineties, apparently, there was a high level discussion within environmental groups that various groups, religious groups, and others felt threatened by discussion of overpopulation. And then the wealthy countries felt threatened by discussion of overconsumption. So they decided, well, "If we just stopped talking about either one of those things, then everybody will be happy, nobody will be threatened, and we can just go on about our business promoting marginally more ecologically benign chemicals and products and sources of energy, and so on, as though all of our problems can be solved that way." And I think that was a very sad way of addressing the situation, because what it really did was it hid the two main levers by which we can address the crisis of civilization in the twenty-first century: overpopulation and overconsumption. If we take those two things off the table, then all we can do is nibble around the margins of the environmental damage that we're causing and the problems for future generations. So I admire the few organizations like Global Footprint Network and Population Balance and other organizations that still talk about these subjects because I think it takes some courage to do so in the context of today's, not only the environmental community, but also the funding community. The foundations that fund nonprofit organizations, many of them are very skittish about talking about these subjects as well. So it does take some courage.
Nandita Bajaj 39:13
Well, thank you. The admiration is absolutely mutual with the work you're doing personally and also PCI that there is a clear understanding of bringing these issues to the fore. For us, it's a no-brainer to talk about population. Our position is that population growth itself is premised on a great degree of social and reproductive injustice. Population growth is happening on the backs of folks, women primarily, who have very little personal or reproductive autonomy. We really cannot address our issues without discussing both population and consumption, and it's an easy way out for people to just ignore them and talk about as you said, cloth bags and paper straws.
Richard Heinberg 40:02
That'll save the earth.
Nandita Bajaj 40:04
And feel good. And Richard, another thing you mentioned from an ecological standpoint is family size is one of the most important decisions that people make. And we are strong advocates of the childfree choice and destigmatizing of alternative family models. And we just would love to hear how did you and your wife decide to arrive at that decision.
Richard Heinberg 40:29
It's a very personal decision. And it's a complicated decision. So I can't say that our decision was made 100% on the basis of, you know, thinking about the Earth and future generations and so on. We were also thinking about our own personal lives, what would give us the most fulfillment in our lives. At the time, both my wife and I had very little money and we realized that if we were going to have children, we would have to redirect our priorities toward making sure that whatever children we had had education and food and all the other stuff. And that would take more of our attention away from doing the kinds of work that we were doing at the time. I was struggling as an environmental writer and that's not a, usually not a very highly paid vocation, and it's a very time consuming occupation. I love what I do. But you really have to spend a lot of time staying on top of the information and becoming as well informed a person as you possibly can so that you can do a good job at reporting. That was a bigger priority for us. Doing that work was a bigger priority than raising children. We saw that there were already plenty of children around. I taught college for ten years and so we had young people in our lives, and that that sort of fulfilled that need and I was very thankful for that. But we didn't feel that we had to have children of our own in order to scratch that itch to put it crudely. And there were other sides to that conversation, I mean, who is going to take care of us when we're really old, when we're in our eighties and nineties? Not having children, that's a sacrifice. It does reduce our social network in a very intimate, tangible way. So there are costs to being childfree. I wouldn't want to say that it's the best thing for everyone. And as you say, when you don't have children, and especially if you choose not to have children, there is a stigma attached. And sometimes people think that you're being selfish.
Nandita Bajaj 42:26
We totally agree. And you know, in our work, we are trying to expose pronatalism so more people could arrive at more authentic decisions, whether it is to become parents or not become parents or to become parents in many different ways to different young people in our lives, or even animals in our lives. So thank you for sharing that experience. We already started talking a bit about social power. One of the things in your book you do is you differentiate between vertical and horizontal social power. With vertical social power being the power to get others to do something through threat or incentive. And some of the things we've discussed in terms of vertical abusive social power are patriarchy, classism, ableism, sexism, slavery, and you've mentioned that a counterbalance to extreme vertical social power that characterizes many organizations and societies around the world needs to be horizontal social power, the ability of the group to self organize to accomplish something. What are some of the main channels for building the horizontal social power that you think might be needed in order to create greater social equality and justice in the coming decades?
Richard Heinberg 43:45
Well, as we said earlier, the main power tools, the main tools of social power are money and debt, communication technologies, and weapons. So if we're serious about reducing vertical social power, we have to tackle those three sets of tools. They have to be regulated. The influence of them in our lives has to be reduced. So that can happen. Human societies through history have had either more or less reliance on money and debt. Some societies are completely moneyless. Some societies are entirely structured by money. We happen to live in one today that's in the latter category. Everything is monetized, we've made money essential to virtually every human interaction. Everything we do during the day is monetized in one way or another. We need to undo that and it's a process, it's going to take time, it's going to take consciousness, thought, and effort. But we have to make human life once again human-centered so that our provisioning of ourselves from nature is a process that isn't just mediated by money and we'll be much better off as a result, because as we've monetized human society, interactions of all kinds, we've distanced ourselves from one another as well as from the natural world. Money distances us. It turns other people into tools that we use, we see each other as dollar signs rather than, you know, unique personalities and people we want to get to know or spend time with. Life becomes much less enjoyable and much more a series of transactions. So that's something that we have to do in various ways. And there's a lot of people thinking about strategies for doing that. Basically, anything that gets you to working together with people in a non-monetized way, whether it's through church work, or volunteering, or spending more time with family and friends, intentional community. My wife and I have lived in intentional communities, and it was a very valuable experience for part of our lives. Same thing with communication technologies, you know, they've really taken over. It used to be just writing and newspapers. And now we have social media. As communication technologies become more sophisticated and more powerful, our behavior gets more and more entrained and dictated by the ideas of people who want to change how we think. Now, whether it's advertising or public relations, or now it's taken the form of deep fake video and other forms of changing how we think with conspiracy theories. It's everywhere all around us. And it's, it's subverting our democracy, it's making us miserable. Ultimately, we just have to stop using these technologies so much, and maybe get rid of them altogether. Certainly, we need to regulate them more. I mean, that's the first step. That's the obvious first step, is just to regulate communication technologies much more. But ultimately, I think we're going to have to decide that this is something that's just not good for us. That communication in ways that we can individually control to a greater degree are far better for us in the long run. I don't want to get rid of books. I like books I like, you know, writing has done a lot of good things for us. But when you get up to even television, my friend Jerry Manda wrote a book back in the 1970s for arguments for the elimination of television - that's actually a very good book. We didn't eliminate television. But you know, if we had started thinking more along those lines, I think we could have avoided a lot of social travail that we're experiencing right now. And then, of course, weapons. This is such a no brainer, but we've got to do it. Guns, the proliferation of guns in America particularly is just turning the country into a place where mass shootings are so routine that we just inure ourselves to them, we don't even bother to read about them anymore. Because you can expect that, you know, every few days, a bunch of people are going to be gunned down by somebody who's just experiencing some kind of life crisis. But it's not just guns. It's weapons at all levels, you know, because look at what's happening in Russia and Ukraine right now. And the potential for much greater violence if even more weapons are used. We have to deweaponize our societies from top to bottom. And we know how to do that, there are lots of organizations that are working on conflict resolution, on deescalation, on game theory as a way of how do we negotiate to give up weapons, you know, if you're afraid that the other person has hostile intentions, then, you know, you don't want to give up your weapons. But there are ways through this. And we have to, as countries, as societies, put much more of our attention into giving up weapons because those weapons are getting much more sophisticated as time goes on. Robotic weapons, space weapons, you know, we get to the point where unless we give up weapons, then it's just one more avenue by which human beings could become obsolete by sometime during this century.
Alan Ware 49:07
Yeah, money, weapons and communication tech keep growing within this growth-based economic system in theory that we've built over the past two hundred years on the back of these expectations of fossil fuels supplying this enormous amount of surplus energy. So we've been acting kind of according to the Maximum Power Principle as a global civilization. And you make a great case though, in order to move towards ecological sustainability and social justice for the long term, we need to move from the Maximum Power Principle toward what you're calling the Optimum Power Principle. How would you describe that Optimum Power Principle?
Richard Heinberg 49:40
Well, the Optimum Power Principle is maximizing power over the long run. So not just right now in this moment, but what about future generations? So it turns out nature is very good at this. It's not something we have to invent from scratch. There's something called Prudent Predator Theory, and a lot of ecologists and animal behavior theorists have converged on this through observation that predators don't just kill all the prey they possibly can so they have as much food as they possibly can right now. Evolution has taught them that they have to predate, kill their prey, in sufficiently small numbers that the prey species maintains itself, survives. And human societies have done the same thing from time immemorial, as well. Indigenous societies are societies of people who have lived in one place for a long time. They're not just recent invaders or colonists, they're people who have lived in one place long enough to learn the rules of the game - that there are limits, you can only kill this animal in this season, otherwise, it can't reproduce and you'll have problems next season. You can't take too many of this particular kind of plant, because even though it's really useful, it's also very slow growing, and if you take them all, you won't have any. So Indigenous societies have learned to adapt to natural limits over the long term, and they should be our teachers. Because our Western industrial society, which rules the world right now, is a society of colonists. It's a society of people who believe that there are no limits. Literally, if you look at what our politicians tell us, and our economists, they tell us growth can go on forever - that there are no hard limits to the expansion of human numbers or human consumption. That's ridiculous. It's a mindset that is driving us toward extinction. We need the Indigenous worldview that understands the limits of nature, and understands that for the long term, for our optimum happiness and survival, we need to adapt to those limits rather than deny them. So that's what the Optimum Power Principle is all about. Again, it's not inventing something that doesn't exist. It's relearning the rules of the game that we've recently forgotten.
Alan Ware 51:55
Yeah, I hadn't thought of it quite cleanly, the colonists mindset, especially if you can overpower it with your fossil fueled power, you don't have to learn limits. And the Indigenous people, as you mentioned, they moved in and often hunted megafauna, and other resources to the tipping points. They had to learn the hard way, but they did learn.
Richard Heinberg 52:16
Right, it's not that somehow Native Americans are genetically superior to the colonists. They learned these things. They learned them through mistakes, as you say, they hunted the megafauna in many cases to extinction. Happened in Australia, it happened in North and South America, happened in Europe. These are places that used to have animals - in the Pacific Islands, a thousand bird species were hunted to extinction by the first Pacific Islanders. But if especially if you're living on an island, if you stay there long enough, you realize this is a limited place, and Island Earth is a limited place too, and as a global species, now we have to learn that.
Alan Ware 52:55
What do you see as some of the most promising developments for how we might limit power in the future?
Richard Heinberg 53:01
Well, there's a lot of discussion these days about happiness as an indicator for how well society is doing. And I think that's a really good direction to go in. Rather than measuring GDP as an indication of economic and social success, we should be looking at how happy people are. Because what makes people happy? Well, feeling secure in your material situation, feeling engaged with other people in your environment and having healthy interactions with them, having some contact with the natural world, because if you don't, you're gonna be miserable. So just by measuring happiness, you're changing the direction of the whole economic engine, you're saying, "Wait, what matters is not money. What matters is people and the happiness and wellbeing of people." If we just make that shift, it can make an enormous difference. And again, there are a lot of people talking about it. There's a whole country, Bhutan, that's been working on the basis of Gross National Happiness as opposed to GDP for decades now and having a very good time doing it. I was privileged to be at the United Nations on the day when Bhutan proposed Gross National Happiness as a, you know, something for the United Nations to take up. Unfortunately, it didn't go very far. There were a few countries that spoke up like Costa Rica, they had a high level diplomat there from Costa Rica saying, "Yeah, this is a good thing." But the United States didn't send anyone, it was like, "Oh, we don't even want to talk about this." But it's it could make such a difference, and it's naturally appealing to people - who doesn't want to be happier? So I think it's a really promising development.
Alan Ware 54:41
Right. And you make an excellent argument for beauty too; having a greater sensitivity and openness and searching for beauty in the everyday.
Richard Heinberg 54:50
Yeah, beauty is part of evolution. Nature is intentionally beautiful. Evolution has put enormous resources into making the natural world as beautiful as it can possibly be. This goes back to the process of sexual selection in evolution and mate choice and so on. And you know, you could get very technical about it, but the end result is that nature is intentionally beautiful. And so we have this inherent evolutionary drive to produce and enjoy beauty. Well, great, let's maximize that. Let's not commercialize it, let's not make it entirely dependent on money and industrial processes and everything. Make it as simple as possible, but spend more and more of your life, as much of your life as you can, producing and enjoying beauty, whether in music, or art, or martial arts, or there are endless ways of doing it. But the thing is, if it's not commercialized, and if it's in a relatively simple form, this is something that can engage you and give you happiness without using a lot of fossil fuels or energy or ruining a lot of nature. You can make a violin out of a few pieces of wood and give yourself a lifetime of enjoyment. So I'm a big proponent of making the arts a more central part of society.
Alan Ware 56:08
Right. And you've done it in your personal life, right? Practicing tens of thousands of hours on violin?
Richard Heinberg 56:15
Yeah, you know, I had a sad experience a few months ago, about a year and a half ago. Due to a nerve injury in one of my fingers, I can no longer play the violin.
Alan Ware 56:24
Oh!
Nandita Bajaj 56:24
Sorry to hear that.
Richard Heinberg 56:25
So but I can play the piano. It's something about the string and the nerve ending in one of my fingers. I just can't do it. But flat keys of the piano are okay, so I'm teaching myself how to play the piano. And it's great. What could have been a huge tragedy in my life is turning out to be another opportunity. If I can't play the piano, I'll find something else. Kazoo is the last resort.
Alan Ware 56:48
I play guitar and sing, too. So yeah, I know what you mean.
Richard Heinberg 56:51
Good for you! Yeah, what kind of music?
Alan Ware 56:53
Right now more pop and rock. But I have studied classical guitar and jazz guitar and classical voice. And I've sung rock voice and -
Richard Heinberg 57:02
Fantastic! Well it sounds like you've spent some time and effort. And Nandita, you were about to say?
Nandita Bajaj 57:07
Yeah, I've had a very musical proclivity. But I never took any musical lessons or instruments, singing, nothing. Part of growing up in India was the arts was considered inferior to the maths and the sciences. So I really didn't take anything. And just recently, I signed up for piano lessons and I found them to be too difficult. So I actually started taking singing lessons instead.
Richard Heinberg 57:34
Good!
Nandita Bajaj 57:34
I sing informally a lot. And so now I'm just trying to get the right pitch and trying to sing some of my favorite music. So it's been very, very enjoyable to use our own natural instrument and to your point to engage in something beautiful.
Richard Heinberg 57:50
Good for you.
Nandita Bajaj 57:51
Thank you what this was really such an enriching conversation, Richard. Thank you for covering so much ground in such a short amount of time. And we appreciate the lifetime of work that it has taken you to create this synthesis.
Richard Heinberg 58:06
Well, it's been a pleasure, I've really enjoyed the conversation. And for those who are interested in learning more, we have a Power Podcast we've done at Post Carbon Institute, and if you just go to postcarbon.org, you can find the link to that, it's free.
Nandita Bajaj 58:19
And I'll also plug in for you your Think Resilience course. It's a wonderful course. In fact, you can share a bit more about it. I use some of the videos that you've done for my own course that I teach. And I've had students, you know, I've only assigned two or three of the videos and they went through the entire series.
Richard Heinberg 58:37
Yeah, well, it's it's twenty-two short videos on the various dimensions of the human situation in twenty-first century - where we're going and how to build more community resilience as a response to the kinds of you know, systemic threats that we've created for ourselves.
Nandita Bajaj 58:53
Thank you.
Alan Ware 58:54
That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. Also, to help expand our listenership, please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 59:21
And until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
