Minimizing Our Waste
Minimizing our energy and materials waste is the surest way to lower our emissions
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There is a recent realization that we are losing the race to prevent climate disasters. Climate change is accelerating and humanity is on the verge of turning Earth unlivable. After all, Earth’s biodiversity is shrinking, soil erosion and deforestation have become common, freshwater shortages are becoming acute, average temperatures are rising and Antarctic sea ice is receding. Did we fail in our efforts to mitigate the worsening of the climate?
Some folks seem to think so and are proposing a radical notion of degrowth. Rich countries should abandon the growth of their economies (i.e. in 2021 average North American emitted 11 times more energy-related CO2 than the average African), reduce energy and materials use, and focus on improving social outcomes. This is naturally accompanied by the introduction of policies and financial incentives to scale down certain industrial sectors, notably fossil fuels, mining, cars, aviation, and meat. The argument is that we have reached the limits of growth because we have overused Earth’s limited resources. Unlimited growth on a limited planet is impossible and the recent past is an anomaly.
This idea of limited resources originates from Thomas Malthus’ writings who in his 1798 work An Essay on the Principles of Population states that ‘’The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.’’ Yet, here we are, over 200 years later still predicting immediate doom.
What happened? Human ingenuity.
Human ingenuity is best illustrated with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. To increase the amount of food that could be grown in preindustrial agriculture, farmers realized that they could improve crop yields by enriching the soil with nitrogen. This was done by applying a natural fertilizer: manure. Depending on the quality of the soil, between 10 and 30 tons of manure per hectare had to be used to provide the much-needed nitrogen. As the population grew, this method quickly ran into a wall. The barrier was decisively broken in 1909 when Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented the industrial production of ammonia and paved the way for synthetic fertilizers, which, in turn, allowed the deployment of high-yielding rice and wheat strains. Without this crucial invention, some estimate that today’s global population would not exceed 4 billion.
Does this mean that human ingenuity will always come to the rescue? Maybe not, but I strictly believe that it should take precedence over limiting our potential. Degrowth is a declaration of the end of progress and, historically, stagnation always ends in regression. Regression gives rise to social inequality, poverty, and a general lowering of the standards of living; the exact things that the degrowth proponents claim to be trying to avoid.
The calls for a global reduction in energy consumption are particularly worrisome as they can easily devolve into calls for energy poverty, and energy poverty leads to mass death. The reduction in energy consumption is acceptable only as a byproduct of increased efficiency of our systems: using less to perform the same task or produce the same result.
In other words, minimizing waste. The 1970s energy crisis in the U.S. drove innovation in energy-saving solutions, such as low-emissivity window coatings, fuel-efficient engines, and viable solar panels. Similarly, minimizing energy and materials waste can help us reduce costs, pollution, and ecological footprint (e.g. recycling aluminum scrap uses only 5% of the energy needed to mine and refine it). Instead of limiting our economic output on a way to disastrous consequences, why not double down on finding practical solutions?
It can all start with simple adjustments to our lives, such as limiting food and water waste, using public transport or bikes, instead of cars, and insulating our homes properly. This is a low-hanging fruit, ripe for the taking and it makes immediate sense when one considers that one-third of food produced for human consumption is wasted globally, resulting in a loss of about 1 trillion USD? This waste is also responsible for the third largest amount of carbon dioxide emitted, after the United States and China.
Minimizing our energy and materials waste is the most practical way to reach the targets of net zero. Instead of waiting for miraculous technologies to be developed and deployed, we ought to improve the efficiency of existing technologies and recapture what is wasted. After all, energy (and by extension mass) cannot be lost, it can only pass from one form to another.
Finally, all of the above falls within the worldview of dealing with nature in a more humane way. Will human ingenuity save us? Who knows, but human kindness just might.
That’s all for now. Until next time 🔋!
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Hey Jasmin!
Firstly, thank you for sharing your thoughts and arguments on the issues we must confront. As you suggest, I advocate changing our way of living and mentality: we should consume resources sensibly and limit our demands and desires, considering the sake of humanity and the whole planet. This way, we can overcome ongoing environmental, social, and economic disasters. This is what I believe. However, one side of me says that it is hard and complicated to change human behaviors and habits. Of course, I am not a social scientist, so I cannot put forward detailed scientific statements here. But as a human being, every day I interact with our kind and observe things happening around us. Many of us believe that we deserve the "best" of everything, and our lives are much more important than others. This is the Zeitgeist of our century. I would like to quote some lines from Chuck Palahniuk's famous novel, Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
Moreover, I believe that there are certain limits to human ingenuity. First of all, the universe has constraints defined by thermodynamics and physics. For instance, we will never devise engines with 100% efficiency, and we will never overcome friction to diminish our energy losses. As far as I see, we have already reached boundaries in some technologies. Secondly, today's academia misleads us. On the lab scale, we can design and test solar cells with high efficiencies, or we can synthesize catalysts with high reaction rates and selectivities. And eventually, we can publish our "promising" findings in Science or Nature. However, most of these are usually impractical: expensive technologies, low long-term stability, difficult to scale up, and inapplicable under realistic conditions, etc. In my opinion, researchers should be responsible for defining and discussing "what is feasible" vs "what is practical" by performing techno-economic analyses (TEA) if they claim "saving the planet." (By the way, there will always be fundamental research to shed light on topics of which we have limited understanding and knowledge. We should keep these separate.)
Mustafa Caglayan