Opinion – Ezra Klein: Flying car and end of energy inequality fit in the same package

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, announced in December that they had accomplished on Earth something that is common in stars: they fused isotopes of hydrogen, releasing more energy in the reaction than the energy spent in ignition. The announcement was accompanied by caveats to make it clear that usable nuclear fusion is still decades away.

But the fact that nuclear fusion won’t change our energy system next year doesn’t mean it shouldn’t change our energy ambitions for years to come.

There are three goals a society can have for its energy use. One is to consume less. Arguably, it gained traction in the 1970s. The overarching slogan is “reduce, reuse, recycle,” accompanied by the often-ignored instruction that there’s a reason “reduce” comes first. Today this ambition persists in the thinking of proponents of degrowth and others for whom humanity will be flirting with calamity if we do not respect our limits and give up the fantasies of eternal growth.

The second goal is to consume what we consume today, but do it better. Modern climate policy today focuses on it. The vision of decarbonization –which is currently being promoted through public policies such as the Inflation Reduction Law— is to maintain more or less the same energy standards as today, but switch to non-polluting sources such as wind and solar.

Decarbonizing at this speed and scale is such a tremendous undertaking that it’s hard to look beyond it to the third possible goal: a world of energy abundance.

In his fascinating and frustrating book “Where Is My Flying Car?”, J. Storrs Hall argues that we don’t realize how much our diminished energetic ambitions have cost us. In the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the energy that humanity could harness grew by 7% each year. Hall writes that humanity’s consolidated energetic strength fueled “the optimism and constant improvement of life in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century”.

But this curve began to flatten from about 1970 onwards, especially in rich countries, which began to produce more while spending less. In 1979, Americans consumed 10.8 kilowatts per capita. In 2019, we consumed 9.2. A conservationist will see this as progress, although it is far from enough, as carbon dioxide emissions will confirm. For Hall, it was a civilizational catastrophe.

The flying car to which the title of the book alludes symbolizes everything that was promised to us in the mid-20th century, but that we still don’t have: flying cars, of course, but also moon bases, nuclear rockets, atomic batteries, nanotechnology, underwater cities, affordable supersonic air travel and so on.

Hall collects these predictions and many others from mid-century science fiction writers and prophets and ranks them by energy cost. What he finds is that, by and large, the wonders we’ve managed to accomplish—the internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, Wikipedia, flat-panel TVs, streaming, mRNA vaccines, AI—consume relatively little energy, while the wonders we we don’t accomplish would require energy on an enormous scale.

But they are possible. We’ve put many flying car prototypes in the air over the decades. The water crises of the future could be solved by large-scale desalination. Supersonic air transport is a technological problem solved. Lunar bases are perfectly within the limits of the possible. The path that Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman outlined for nanotechnology – building machines capable of building smaller machines, which will be able to build smaller machines, which will be able … Well, you get the idea – still seems plausible.

What we need is energy – much, much more energy. But Hall thinks we’ve become an “ergophobic” society, which he defines as a society dominated “by the almost inexplicable idea that there’s something wrong with using energy.”

At this point Hall’s book exudes disdain for anyone who doesn’t stray from the path of today’s industrialists. He searches ancient texts by HG Wells for the right metaphor to describe where our civilization began to move sideways and finds it in the lazy Elois, a post-human race that collapsed in the comforts of plenty. For him, the real conflict is not between those who have wealth and those who don’t, but those who achieve and those who don’t.

“Those who do nothing are in favor of stagnation and are content to convert our civilization into a collective of idlers who don’t leave the couch”, he writes. And, for him, those who do nothing are winning.

I would describe “Where Is My Flying Car?” as reactionary futurism. The book defends the progress that technology can provide; can’t stand squishy humans who are obstacles to the future. There is nothing inexplicable about how one country after another has sought to conserve energy and why it remains a goal. A partial list of explanations would include polluted rivers, smog-choked cities, the crashing arrival of climate change, the ongoing mass extinction, and the geopolitical costs of dependence on Saudi Arabian oil and Russian gas.

Hall brushes this off, describing climate change as a minor issue and focusing instead on the villainy of lawyers, regulators and hippies. He laments that the advent of nuclear weapons has made warfare so costly that it “short-circuited the evolutionary process” in which “a society that lapses into inefficient cultural or governmental practices is likely to be quickly conquered by the neighboring baron.”

Hall’s sociopolitical theories are as fragile as his technical analysis is careful. His book suggests that countries with small public sectors would surpass their statesman peers in terms of innovation and that countries threatened by violent neighbors would be better governed and more technologically advanced than the US.

One of his central arguments is that, paradoxically, government resources and attention create obstacles to technologies. However – interestingly, for an energy book – it has little to say about the astounding advances in solar, wind and battery power that are being driven by public policy. He predicts that if solar and wind energy “really turn out to be usable on a large scale,” environmentalists will turn against it.

“Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, radiation, hazards or global warming,” he writes. “They aim to keep abundant and cheap energy inaccessible to ordinary people.”

But in this part of the multiverse nearly every major environmental organization fought to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which was in reality the law “to use solar and wind energy everywhere and to invest in every possible energy technology.” And, if the entities had succeeded in their intent, the law would have been much more comprehensive and well funded.

Still, it’s worth the effort to read Hall’s book, because he’s right about two important things. First, that the flattening of the energy curve was a moment of great cultural significance and one that deserves to be reanalyzed. Second, that many politicians have abandoned any real vision of the long-term future. Too often the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, while the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our public policies mainly to give form to our fears and urgency to our agendas. We have lost sight of the world that would be made possible by abundant, clean energy.

The remarkable explosion of prosperity and potential that has defined the last few hundred years has been defined by energy. “Think of any human well-being variable—longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, total population—and graph its value over time,” writes Charles Mann in “The Wizard and the Prophet.” “In almost all cases it will have remained more or less the same, at a low level, for thousands of years, and then suddenly rise in the 18th and 19th centuries, when humans learned to use the solar energy contained in coal, oil and natural gas.”

Without energy, even material splendor has great limitations. Mann points out that in February 1695, people visiting the Palace of Versailles admired the fur coats worn by those who dined with the king and were surprised by the ice that formed on the glass goblets. The temperature in Versailles was freezing, and no amount of wealth could solve the problem. One hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a huge wine cellar and library in his Monticello, Virginia home, and relied on the forced labor of hundreds of slaves, but the ink still froze in his inkwells in winter.

Today heating is a solved problem for many. But not for everyone. There are few inequalities more basic than energy inequality. Demographer Hans Rosling exemplifies this interestingly. He argued in 2010 that it would be possible to separate humanity into groups according to the energy people had access to. At the time, 2 billion people had little or no access to electricity and still used firewood for cooking and heating water. Three billion people had access to enough electricity to run electric lights. About 1 billion had enough energy and income to use manual labor-saving devices such as washing machines. Only the richest billion could afford to travel by air, and those people – us – consumed half of global energy.

The first reason to aim for energetic abundance is to make energy and the gifts it brings available to everyone. Rosling explained this very well, describing how his mother would put his dirty clothes in the washing machine and then take him to the library, using the time he spent in the past washing clothes by hand to study English. “That’s the magic,” he said. “You fill the machine with dirty laundry, and what comes out of the machine? Books.” There is no global assistance strategy that we could use that would have as much effect as making energy radically cheaper, more constant and more available.

And there’s all we could do if we had the cheap, clean, plentiful energy we needed. In an article imagining the “energy overabundance”, Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado outline some of the near-term possibilities. “Flights that take 15 hours in a 747 jet could be done in an hour in a rocket,” they write. Vertical greenhouses could feed many more people, and desalination, which today contributes to an important portion of the water consumed in Singapore and Israel, would become accessible to the poorest and most populous countries that most need new sources of fresh water. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more feasible, offering us a path to reversing climate change over time.

The definition that Vernon and Dourado make of energy superabundance is modest: for them, it would be that each person on Earth has access to twice the energy consumed annually by the inhabitants of Iceland. But what if fusion or other technologies give us energy that becomes functionally unlimited?

“A hundred or two hundred years from now, everything will be radically different,” Melissa Lott, director of research at Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy, told me. “People will look back and be amazed at how we use energy today. They’ll say, ‘Really, did you just burn it?'”