Why is Exponential Growth bad for the environment?
Here it the text of my talk:
today we're looking at exponential growth our current world the paradigm we live in at the moment depends on something called exponential growth so something is one one 1 then 2 4 8 16 32 and so it grows and we expect businesses to grow like this with exponential curves that get more and more and more and the problem with this kind of growth is that it needs constantly new mines constant new resources people are currently complaining that lithium mines are dirty because of lithium batteries and there are hundreds of billions plus probably trillions of batteries already before electric cars came along and now there's you know even more lithium being mined not just for electric batteries but not just for electric car batteries but for all kinds of batteries and there's more coal being mined there's more uranium being mined there's more copper being mined there's more titanium being mined there's more mines being opened than ever before in the history of our planet as we seek to build new cell phones that come out every year new cars that come in every year but we don't reuse we don't recycle and as i said before in one of the slides and as you're going to see tomorrow with the learning curve when you buy a new car it's got a new light fitting why doesn't it have the same light fitting for 20 years yes the light inside the light fitting can change you know sometimes i say why do cars set up windscreen wipers if we've had so much progress so the problem with the growth system that we have right at the moment is that it absorbs more and more materials and it needs more and more you know someone bought a nokia 2110 cell phone they had it for 10 years nowadays the new apple phones 2022 don't have 3g in them anymore
so in africa which is only phasing out 2g now which is edge e 3g will be at least for the next 10 years and 3g uses between a quarter and a third of the electricity of 5g for example so in a country in a continent
even in europe with shortage of electricity it doesn't make sense to be forcing people to upgrade hardware and software i've got a 10 year old mac book pro come september i need to get a newer version because the operating system that this runs will not be supported anymore but there's nothing wrong with the machine
at least from my point of view why should i be forced to buy newer machines constantly why should i be forced to upgrade myself in every two or three years why should i be forced to need to add more and more material why do we have to live in this particular system listen to more presentations and see the answers thank you and god bless you
good evening everybody i'm pleased to be bringing you the next episode in the series about crises and we've had an introduction a number of slides and now we're going to do a brainstorming session together and let's get the show on the road
brainstorm is where we have ideas and we try to find solutions and we ask questions and i'm going to ask some questions and i'm going to present some ideas and at the end of this you'd have a nice slide that you can use for brainstorming you're welcome to copy it and anything in the presentations that i do you can copy them but just please note that you got them from me and refer to me in your processes so let's go and look at the first question this went backwards of course here we go what is the most important thing we need right now so some people might say i need my cell phone
i need my computer i need electricity could be a whole lot of things but what in the next three minutes even in the next minute what is one thing that you have to have in order to live in order to survive what is it
so the first thing that you need is oxygen and the way that we get oxygen is we get it through air part of air is oxygen and we want the air to be clean fresh environmentally friendly so this what we need in the next minute two minutes three minutes in order to live on planet earth above water because we're not fish even fish need oxygen most fish and they have gills which take the oxygen out of the sea water we didn't have gills we have lungs which takes oxygen out of the air and puts the oxygen into our blood and into our body
so first thing we need is oxygen and because we need this in three minutes and it's got to be clean and fresh and all that stuff it informs not only the experiments from view it informs our entire paradigm it informs the way we think the way i think at least so i have to think about 100 years time that i want my environment to be clean because i know that if i plan for the future of clean environment then my environment is going to be clean my air will be clean
and there we have it the first thing i want is i want to be enlivening everybody wants to be alive in three minutes i want to be healthy and alive
so i need fresh clean oxygenated a and this must inform everything we do
every strategy we do every strategy session every product we make every idea we have every service we generate
must all come back to making sure that our air is clean
so we breathe clean air we do this all the time breathe in breathe out through our nose through our mouth maybe into our nose out through our mouth all kinds of combinations
so i want my energy system to be clean so that my air is clean
the next thing that we need to look at is what's the next thing after air and some people might say water and i would say yes if you lived on a farm or you lived in the 18th century then i would say that water is the most important thing you need but we don't live on a farm at least i don't i live in the middle of a city a metropolis and most of my water 80 percent of my water if i don't have my own on-site water rain collection system if i buy all my water from the council from the city from the municipality from the government from the water provider or the water utility eighty percent of my water in cape town is coming from a big dam a hundred kilometers away 60 miles away and how do you think that water gets to me gets pumped and if the pumps aren't working because there's no electricity i don't have water and therefore the next thing i need after fresh air is i need electricity and even before i might want to drink my water i might want to use my cell phone i might want to send an email i might want to charge some batteries
i might want to turn on the light i might want to run a heater or an air conditioner i might want to make coffee and these are all things that i need to do or want to do right after i've made sure that my air is clean and then electricity enables everything we do let's go to the next thing in a city even water comes out of a taps because of electricity so the water pressure is pressurized because of electricity from the dam into my gears boil in my house heat it to the right temperature and then i switch on the tap and the pressure from the console pushing the water into the tank pushes the water out the other side of the tank and so the more cold water goes in more hot water goes out and i have the mixture the pressure created from the pumps in the city system to give me water
and not only do i want electricity so that i can have water but electricity's price must be coming down all the time due to something called the learning curve later on we're going to look at the learning curve in detail but you think about this every time you learn something you learn how to do something next time you do it it's cheaper so the first time you do it it could cost could take 10 years to do the first thing could take five years it could take 20 years it might take a lifetime to do something the first time and that's very expensive but the second time you do it it's cheaper it's quicker and the third time it's even quicker and the fourth time it's even quicker and the fifth sixth seventh eighth etcetera time it's quicker and quicker so an extra the seventh point here is electricity's price must be coming down all the time due to the learning curve due to learning as i learn price comes out but if you look at coal or nuclear power or even cars prices are going up all the time if i buy a car in 19 1980 when i buy that kind of car in 2020 40 years later the price should be half or a quarter and maybe you can say well it's going up because of inflation but even with inflation the price of the car should be coming down
how do we make that happen what about renewable energy energy from the sun in 1960 it cost 60 dollars a watt for the installation now it costs about 10 u.s per watt so that price has come down 99.97
in the past 60 years in the past 10 years price of renewable energy has come down 90 and including batteries also 90 up to 95 including batteries because the batteries are getting more efficient they're getting cheaper to make we're finding more resources it's getting cheaper so we want our electricity price to come down and we want our electricity cost to come down not just in terms of our cost but in terms of the environmental cost there should be less smoke less pollution less mining
if we're mining coal we're mining uranium then we want to cut that yes i know we're mining lithium at the moment but there are newer techniques of making batteries but right now there are scarce resources in computers this case resources in batteries just as coal is a scarce resource or oil is a sketch resource because there's a finite amount because it takes billions of years to make more coal billions of years to make more oil billions of years to make more uranium but the sun is shining all the time 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year the sun is shining
i want my electricity cost to come down all the time
and not only must the cost be coming down but the abandonments are going up because as the price comes down i can make more and i need more electricity and this is called jevon's paradox j-e-v-o-n jevon's paradox where not only is the electricity price coming down all the time and the environmental quality is going up all the time but the electricity's abundance is going up all the time and the quant quality must be improving constantly and if electricity's price is coming down then water price comes down pumping the water the price comes down desalinating the water the price comes down if electricity and water's price are coming down food prices come down transport prices come down everything comes down and the quantity goes up their health goes up the benefits go up and so we end up with this brainstorm this mind map and we start off with what is the most important thing we need in the next three minutes and that is to be alive and for that i need clean oxygenated air
and then i realize in a city the next thing i need is electricity because water is pumped with electricity so even if i need water i need electricity and then i want the electricity's cost to come down for me and for the environment all the time and i want it to ban and stick up all the time and i want its quality to improving constantly the electricity quality the resources quality the power station quality and then i note that every electricity price comes down water price comes down food prices come down to prices come down living costs come down and as a result of that my quality of life goes up my health improves and we're going to look at that all of that in the next part of the presentation and the whole presentation as always please like this video please subscribe to the channel no need to click the bell if you want to see if i've made a video you can go to your list of the latest videos in this year a blue dot on your screen maybe which will say that there's a new video and you can watch it i don't like being interrupted in my work i don't turn the bed on it's up to you you can turn the bell on for me i like to subscribe because then i look at my list of subscriptions and i see who's got a new video that i can watch and please share please comment please ask questions if you don't like the video dislike the video and post why you dislike it what you'd like to me to do to make things better thank you very much and it's evening here in south africa i wish other good evening a good morning a good afternoon a good week and i send blessings and health and love and happiness and abundance and i bless you that all of your costs may come down soon and forever amen
Fix things? Contact me and my team and I will run a 15 or 40 minute eductional and self-esteem-scaffolding presentation for your execs, or a half day workshop for your senior team, helping you navigate these treacherous waters, and providing Q&A and ongoing support.
