Save the Planet With Capitalism

Thanks to economic incentives and tech innovation, societies can ‘dematerialize’—make better stuff while consuming less material

Review of More From Less by Andrew McAfee. Reviewed by David A. Shaywitz. Excerpts:

"Americans are now consuming less total steel, aluminum, copper, fertilizer, water, timber and paper than in previous years, even as our GDP has continued to soar and our agricultural yield has increased dramatically. As a result, asserts Mr. McAfee, a research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of “The Second Machine Age” (2014): “Resource scarcity isn’t something we need to worry about.”

Credit the market, he says, for this environment-sparing miracle. It’s good business to use less aluminum in cans (today’s soda cans weigh roughly half an ounce; the first ones weighed almost 3); or to improve the load factors of expensive physical assets like railcars and aircraft; or to offer consumers a single smartphone instead of, separately, a camera, pocket organizer, calculator, clock and phone.

For Mr. McAfee, the decoupling of economic growth from resource consumption highlights a more general idea: Growth, propelled by capitalism and technology, is good. Growth works, raising people and nations out of poverty, improving sanitation, increasing access to education, reducing infant mortality, and elevating standards of living. Growing economies are also good for the earth, Mr. McAfee contends, citing Indira Gandhi’s observation that “poverty is the biggest polluter.” With prosperity, he notes, the members of modern societies can afford to see themselves, sometimes, as stewards of nature.

Even so, Mr. McAfee acknowledges, capitalism struggles with pollution and other externalities. He is particularly concerned about “human-caused global warning,” saying that it is “both real and bad, and we urgently need to take action to deal with it.” Without some kind of incentive, though, companies may have little reason to address important global concerns. Mr. McAfee argues that, to be true forces for good, tech progress and capitalism must be combined with public awareness and responsive governments, a quartet he terms “the four horsemen of the optimist.”

In such a way, we’ve managed to deal with certain kinds of environmental hazards, profoundly reducing particulate air pollution, for instance, through the use of cap-and-trade measures, or reducing ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by deliberately phasing them out. Here, Mr. McAfee says, a global treaty called the Montreal Protocol played a key role; Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary-general, called it “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.” The hole in the ozone layer closed much more quickly than expected. As Mr. McAfee notes, it helped that CFCs were produced by a relatively small group of companies and industries and that, when it comes to air pollution, particulates tend to befoul certain local regions, spurring action.

Other environmental problems have proved more vexing. Consider ocean trash, such as the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous gyre of plastic detritus between Hawaii and California. While the U.S. accounts for 25% of the world’s overall economy, we contribute less than 1% of its seaborne trash, a tribute to our relatively strict policies and enforcement. China, by contrast, responsible for 15% of the world’s economy, contributes about 28%."

"Yet relying on public sentiment seems a fraught and fragile proposition, as Mr. McAfee himself recognizes. He champions the environmental virtues of nuclear power, genetically modified organisms and capitalism itself even as he notes that each has been restrained by impassioned if dubious criticism. He also has concerns of his own: a rising sense of disconnection in society, for instance, and increasing disparities of income and wealth. But he’s convinced that, on balance, we’re heading the right way: “We need to step on the accelerator, not yank the steering wheel in a different direction.” It is precisely his commitment to societal and planetary health that compels him to call on the generative power of tech and capitalism to elevate humanity, as he stands athwart progress and cries, “More!”"