“If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be – you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a women – if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now.” – Barack Obama, 2016

“Mothers and children trapped in poverty… an education system which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge … and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen to many lives. … We are at outright war that is expanding and metastasizing. …. The blame for this nightmare may be placed on a global power structure, that has eroded the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity”  – Donald Trump

• Environmental problems are grim, and climate change is very real, but these problems are solvable given the right knowledge.
• This idea, that environmental protection is a problem to be solved, is commonly dismissed as the “faith that technology will save us.” In fact, it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us — that knowledge and behavior will remain frozen in their current state for perpetuity.
• A naive faith in stasis has repeatedly let to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened. Overpopulation did not lead to mass famines, and resources refused to run out. None of the predictions in the 1972 bestseller the Limits of Growth did happen.
• Again and again, environmental improvements once deemed impossible have taken place. Since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide emissions have turned a corner. These diverging curves refute both the left-wing claim that only degrowth can curb pollution and the right-wing claim that environmental protection must sabotage economic growth and standard of living.
• The world’s progress on environmental protection can be tracked in a report card called the Environmental Performance Index, a composite of indicators of the quality of air, water, forests, fisheries, farms, and natural habitats. Out of 180 countries that have been tracked for a decade or more, all but two show an improvement. Oil spills are going down, the number of protected areas is going up, the rate of extinction of species is going down, deforestation is declining, the ozone layer is expected to heal by the middle of the 21st century,
• Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax.
• As countries get out of poverty, they start polluting more at first. But once they get rich enough, they start tackling environmental problems and things start improving again.
• One key to accelerating conservation is to decouple productivity from resources: to get more human benefit from less matter and energy. This puts a premium on density. As crops are bred or engineered to produce more protein, calories, and fiber with less land, water, and fertilizer, farmland is spared, and it can morph back to natural habitats. As people move to cities, they not only free up land in the countryside but need fewer resources for commuting, building, and heating. As trees are harvested from dense plantations, which have five to ten times the yield of natural forests, forestland is spared, together with its feathered, furry, and scaly inhabitants.
• Another friend of the earth is dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. Indeed, we may be reaching “Peak Stuff”: of a hundred commodities the environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel has plotted, 36 have peaked in absolute use in the United States, and another 53 may be poised to drop, including water, nitrogen, and electricity.
• Climate change is a moral issue because it has the potential to harm billions, particularly the world’s poor. But morality is different from moralizing, and is often poorly served by it. It may be satisfying to demonize fossil fuel corporations, but that won’t prevent destructive climate change.
• The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. There is, to be sure, a tragic view of modernity in which this is impossible: industrial society, powered by flaming carbon, contains the fuel of its own destruction. But the tragic view is incorrect. The modern world has been progressively decarbonizing. When rich countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom first industrialized, they emitted more and more CO2 to produce a dollar of GDP, but they turned a corner in the 1950s and since then have been emitting less and less. China and India are following suit, cresting in the late 1970s and mid-1990s, respectively. Carbon intensity for the world as a whole has been declining for half a century.
• The success of deep decarbonization will hinge on technological breakthroughs on many frontiers, including advanced nuclear technologies that are cheaper, safer, and more efficient than today’s light-water reactors; batteries to store intermittent energy from renewables; Internet-like smart grids that distribute electricity from scattered sources to scattered users at scattered times; technologies that electrify and decarbonize industrial processes such as the production of cement, fertilizer, and steel; liquid biofuels for heavy trucks and planes that need dense, portable energy; and methods of capturing and storing CO2.
• Humanity is not on an irrevocable path to ecological suicide. As the world gets richer and more tech-savvy, it dematerializes, decarbonizes, and densifies, sparing land and species. As people get richer and better educated, they care more about the environment, figure out ways to protect it, and are better able to pay the costs. Many parts of the environment are rebounding, emboldening us to deal with the admittedly severe problems that remain.
• We cannot be complacently optimistic about climate change, but we can be conditionally optimistic. We have some practicable ways to prevent the harms and we have the means to learn more. Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology. Far from licensing complacency, our progress at solving environmental problems emboldens us to strive for more.