If the reader wants to spend Carnival in the company of a good book on the environment, a suggestion is “More with Less”, by economist Andrew McAfee. The book is from 2019 but has just won a Brazilian edition.
A scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), McAfee does not share the alarmism that usually surrounds sustainability issues.
On the contrary, he considers himself an environmental optimist. He believes that humanity is finally managing to prosper without interfering so much with nature.
For much of history, says McAfee, the curves on the prosperity and environmental impact graph have been parallel. The more comfort we sought, the more we had to advance over forests, minerals, animals and water sources.
The Industrial Revolution, at first, potentiated the damage. Not just because machines made us able to act on biomass more intensively, but because the drastic reduction in mortality caused the human population to explode. More people, and more prosperous, multiplied the impact.
However, the same technological advance today makes us independent of natural resources. It causes the opposite effect: we are producing more using less matter (a phenomenon known as “dematerialization”).
The prosperity and impact curves are no longer parallel and now undergo a dissociation, as in the image above. The scientist demonstrates this dissociation with several graphs of reduced consumption of metals, raw materials for construction, energy and agricultural inputs.
There are also very inspiring examples. Cars are lighter and much more economical than decades ago. A beer can today uses six times less aluminum than it did in 1994.
Selective weed spraying, done with tractors equipped with cameras and sensors, reduces herbicide use by an incredible 90%. A smartphone brings together equipment that would occupy an entire office two decades ago.
“We invented the computer, the internet and a handful of other digital technologies that would lead us to dematerialize our consumption: over time, they allowed us to consume more and more while taking less and less from the planet.”
“This was because digital technologies offered cost savings by replacing atoms with bits, and the intense cost-lowering pressure of capitalism has led companies to accept this offer time and time again.”
McAfee does not agree with the belief, which prevails among most Brazilian environmentalists, that in order to preserve the environment it would be necessary to abandon capitalism or at least stop worrying so much about the growth of the economy.
He considers capitalism one of the “four horsemen of environmental optimism”, alongside technological progress, public awareness and responsive government.
With these knights in action, it is possible to prevent the thirst for profits from harming nature (like the company that throws industrial waste into the river to reduce costs). And at the same time take advantage of the good incentives of capitalism — investment in innovation to reduce spending on raw materials.
To preserve the environment, “we don’t need to pull the wheel of the economy and society in another direction; we just need to step on the accelerator”, says the economist.
