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The founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, recently announced an extremely ambitious plan to place up to 1 trillion humans in vast colonies of cylindrical space near the Earth .
But although the goal is too ambitious, the justification is both absurd and hypocritical. Bezos at length explained on Thursday at a major presentation at the Washington Convention Center that we needed such a future to save the Earth "if the world's economy and people must continue to grow . "
The fundamental argument of Bezos is that this endless growth will lead to an unsustainable doubling of energy consumption every 25 years, which will cause a power failure of humanity in 200 years old. But the leader of the Amazon has apparently missed the recent trends in population and energy efficiency, which shows that the growth rate of energy consumption has already slowed down. Independent projections suggest that Bezos overestimates its energy growth by a factor of three.
More importantly, well before the year 2219, much of the planet will be virtually uninhabitable due to catastrophic climate change, which largely depends on monomaniac research for growth at all costs.
And hypocritically, while Bezos opposes an unsustainable future in the long run, he himself contributes to the destruction of this planet right now. Amazon Web Services, the world's largest provider of cloud computing, has its own Oil & Gas division, which should allow Big Oil to "unleash innovation to optimize production and profitability." He is already working with oil giants such as Royal Dutch Shell and BP.
This will allow the industry to continue to burn fossil fuels contrary to science recommendations; Most of the world's fossil fuels must remain in the ground, warned scientists, if it was possible to avoid dangerous climate change.
Yet Bezos never mentioned climate change in his 50-minute presentation on the urgent and long-term problems of the Earth. The solution he proposes to meet these long-term challenges is to install a permanent lunar base and an ever-increasing number of space colonies each containing one million people living on giant cylinders between the Earth and the Moon.
This omission is blatant, given Bezos' long-standing belief in endless growth in population and energy consumption.
As Bezos explained, he is passionate about traveling in space since he watched the lunar landing in 1969 at the age of five. Showing a newspaper article with an interview with him in high school, Bezos said: "The Earth is over, and if the world's economy and population must continue to expand, the space is the only solution. "
He immediately adds, "I still believe that."
It's really an amazing worldview for the world's richest man.
The notion that endless growth – and possibly a trillion people – is both inevitable and desirable, is controversial to say the least. As environmentalist writer Edward Abbey said, "Growth for development is the ideology of the cancer cell."
Scientists have repeatedly explained that the world can not sustainably support the existing population, which is now close to $ 8 billion. And if we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions abruptly over the next decade, billions of people would be deprived for decades or even centuries.
In addition, many economists have explained that the goal was not to maintain an expanding economic growth, narrowly defined by GDP, but to increase economic welfare, which included factors such as health, pollution and sustainability.
But, as the richest man in the world focuses on a future in 200 years, he ignores actual climate change. Recent research has shown that global warming has "exacerbated" global economic inequality since the 1960s. Global warming has slowed economic growth in warmer countries than in colder countries, widening the gap between countries. rich of poor countries.
In fact, as population growth in some regions has begun to slow down and economic growth has become less energy intensive, the world is moving towards sustainability – we are progressing too slowly to avoid catastrophic effects on the climate.
Bezos seems oblivious to this. His argument in favor of his gigantic space plan is summed up as an affirmation: "We will run out of energy on Earth. It's just arithmetic. This will happen. "
Unfortunately, Bezos is wrong with arithmetic. He says, "the historical rate of [growth] 3% per year of global energy consumption, "he explains," equates to a doubling of human energy consumption every 25 years. "
According to him, the problem is that if you can meet the current global energy demand "by covering Nevada with solar cells", that would mean that in 200 years, with a growth rate of 3%, "we will have to cover all Earth's surface". in solar cells. Now it will happen.
There are many flaws in its analysis (in addition to the fact that there are many sustainable sources of energy other than solar energy), but the most fundamental is that global energy consumption does not grow by 3% per year. year. It's much closer to 2%. And it slows down.
Most major energy forecasters estimate that growth will be close to 1% over the next two decades, without averting catastrophic climate change.
That's the conclusion of BP, an Amazon customer, in its Energy Outlook 2019 report. (The black line continues in the graph below shows the growth in net energy demand.)
What has helped keep the United States' total energy demand at bay for more than two decades is a major asset for efficiency in this country.
As shown in the BP chart, continued improvement in energy intensity (energy consumption per dollar of GDP) and slower population growth are largely responsible for slowing energy demand.
If Bezos focused on helping the world avoid catastrophic climate change over the next two decades – rather than preparing for an imaginary future that was not going to happen – then we could actually make the planet sustainable.
This does not mean that returning to the moon and a renewed space program are not worth it. There are clearly many reasons for doing so. But Bezos' claim that we will run out of energy in 200 years is not one of them.
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