Where is the stuff to make ENOUGH "real innovation"?

"If you build it, they will use it". Yes, but build with what?

Cory Doctorow's recent discussion of "Real Innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense" is just great... as far as "Silicon Valley nonsense" is concerned. The "real innovation" parts, instead, is great too but it doesn’t spell out a crucial point, whose omission may mislead people.

On "Silicon Valley nonsense"

Among other things, Doctorow asks "Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation?", and then quotes a great answer from the Apperceptive newsletter:

"Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete."

On that, I couldn't agree more. I have said myself that few things look as obsolete as "innovation" today, that the Metaverse is not progress but a reactionary idea and that the only thing AI Tech Bros created is themselves.

Full cartoon by Tom Fishburne here.

Let's look at "Real Innovation" now

Doctorow observes that "if there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating", but *"there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and _exciting_ innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech", and that is a "green energy revolution - funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act - [that] is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype." Examples of this revolution include:

• 2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022)

• Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

• Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024

• EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

Some image search results for “climate tech”.

What's missing here?

Again, there is no doubt that the biggest problem with "AI non sense and other hype" from Silicon Valley is that it sucks all the oxygen in the room, leaving no time to even consider different issues. However (click on the "(S)" at the end of each quote to see its source):

Detail of “All the Metals We Mined”

1. To get to Net Zero by 2050 we’ll need to utilize from seven to 4.5 times the minerals we used in 2021 - up from 4.4 million metric tons to 30.9 million (S)

2. Smart grids mean higher copper and aluminum use than you could possibly imagine (S)

3. The copper demand alone for building enough solar panels just to maintain steady-state replacement in a full-scale solar deployment would rival present-day global copper extraction indefinitely (S)

4. Seafloor nodules could dramatically reduce the environmental impact of extracting the billions of tons of metals needed for a clean-energy transition (S), but that impact would still be huge, and in any case those nodules are another non-renewable resource that, once taken, could take millions of years to come back (S)

5. If today's demand for EVs is projected to 2050, the lithium requirements of the US EV market alone in 2050 would require triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market (S)

6. Even ignoring "rare" metals... Steel, concrete, plastic, and fertilizer (that is, food) are fundamental to modern civilization yet we have no idea how to make any of them at required scale without fossil fuels (S). The literal stuff of our daily lives-no idea how to manufacture it, at scale, without fossil fuels. (S)

7. A low-carbon power grid requires much more steel (and other materials) than an infrastructure based on fossil fuels. (S)

8. It is impossible to produce all the new steel that would be needed in electric arc furnaces, simply because there is not enough scrap steel available, and there cannot be, by definition, until steel demand continues to grow (S). Besides, a low carbon grid cannot be made from recycled steel S

9. Beyond a certain penetration level (and well below 100%), adding more renewables becomes prohibitively expensive, and eventually stops (S)

10. Renewables only address electricity generation - at least on paper. The main problem is, that the share of electricity in our final energy consumption is around 20%, and the remaining 80% of our energy use still comes from fossil fuels. (S)

11. That is, the energy transition depends entirely on the availability of fossil fuels. And lacking an energy miracle, it will continue to do so (S), but with oil extraction returning ever less net energy over time... to a point (called "called energy cannibalism") that may make any transition to any other energy source impossible (S). The moment when the world starts to be short of financially sustainable oil could be quite close (S), and possibly come at the same time as peak metals (S)

12. The least-impossible, least-unsustainable, less slow, large-scale miracle of that kind should be cheap nuclear power (S), but even doubling the number of plants completed in 2022 every year for the next 27 years would increase nuclear to only 16% of total electric power generation (S). That's unlikely to happen, even if my own "Liberty Plan for Small Nuclear Reactors" was 100% correct and started tomorrow

There is not enough

Source: More key findings from the big IEA report, 2022

Quoting Doctorow, "All of those [climate tech] workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries" and that's the problem. Let's bring in all the real innovation we can in those fields, please, and let's do it as soon as possible! No question about that! Especially if "much of the net zero roadmap is based on technologies that do not exist today". I do agree that "the "social savings" of climate tech are massive. No issue there.

Now, never mind that lots, if not the majority of the raw matter needed to do all that stuff to move around are not inside "first world" countries, but in places like China, Iran, Afghanistan, New Caledonia, the bottom of contested seas and so on. Never mind that "EVs can't be built on a foundation of geopolitical fragility"". Never mind that.

The point is, if even half of those twelve bullets above are true, and even if all the figures they mention were wrong and the real ones were all half bad as that... there would still be simply not enough raw materials in the world to make all that stuff that should be moved around.

Ditto for workers. Doctorow rightly writes that climate tech is "a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops.".

Again: good, but will there be enough such workers to make and deploy all that physical technology he quotes, soon enough? Can that happen, in countries rapidly aging, that already cannot find enough electricians (S) to expand electric grids as expected by climate tech (S) and electrify everything as needed (S)? Can that happen, in countries whose young people are less and less every year, but still too often running after education" myths"?

Then, what?

I think it's likely that Doctorow not only already knows all the problems I mentioned here, but also agrees with their magnitude, and indeed the links at the end of his piece do mention those problems. But this is stuff that is never repeated enough, partly because "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over", and partly because things can still be much better than it may seem by those ominous estimates.

Sensible uses of already existing AI can do a lot of good, but sensible climate tech and a rebooted agriculture are urgently needed, much more than any superhuman artificial "intelligence", and there are not enough raw stuff and people to do both in time. That's it, really. This does not mean that there is no hope and that life can only get worse from now on, no matter what. It only means that there are not enough raw stuff and people to do both in time... until the goal remains "Business as Usual".

It means, to make just the quickest of many examples, acknowledging that keeping the smartphone or computer you are reading this piece on with for twenty more years instead of one or two wouldn't be a big deal at all. Society-wise, it means to tackle, with appropriate tech and policies instead of Sci-Fi dreams, the real problems we already have, with approaches similar to those I outlined at the end of my previous post. The situation is bad, but life can still be good.

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here. And to finish…:

From “Inconvenient Truth, 2018 version”.