The Post: This best-selling book on ‘abundance’ has got it wrong

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A minor coincidence this week: Wednesday, New Zealand’s official “Earth Overshoot Day”, was also the day I finished Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best-selling new book Abundance.

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date at which Kiwis have, per capita, consumed more resources than the planet can regenerate in a year; globally, humankind would need 1.8 Earths to sustain its current patterns of consumption (and this is, if anything, an underestimate).

Such facts sit in curious contrast to the Abundance book, which blithely argues that if we just build more essential infrastructure – renewable energy and inner-city housing, in particular – we will solve all our environmental problems.

Sitting atop the American bestseller charts, Abundance has grabbed attention in part because it bracingly confronts a left-wing doomer mindset that can seem to offer only defeatism and negativity in the face of climate change. Thompson and Klein posit instead an apparently positive vision of untrammelled abundance, available immediately if only we seize the opportunities offered by renewable energy and technological innovation.

One colossal drawback in Klein and Thompson’s argument, though, is that they never seriously contemplate its environmental flaws. Other than demolishing the strawman argument for massive economic retrenchment to protect the climate, they don’t deal with the fact that – for one thing – most construction materials must first be dug out of the ground, often at massive cost to the environment.

Rare-earth-mineral reserves, and even potential wind-turbine sites, have a nasty habit of being co-located with precious wetlands and the last remaining populations of endangered species.

Construction itself is environmentally damaging: concrete production alone generates up to 8% of all global carbon emissions. Klein and Thompson speculate hopefully about “green” concrete, but even if – optimistically – its CO2 emissions could be halved, the overall benefit would of course be wiped out by a doubling in concrete production. (Every two years, China consumes more cement than the US did in a century.)

There are echoes here of the so-called Jevons paradox: advances in energy efficiency get wiped out by people increasing their use of the more-efficient thing. Got a car that does more kilometres per litre of petrol? You drive it further.

Of course people can and should switch to electric vehicles. But although they are a marvellous invention, they will – experts estimate – across their life-cycle remove 70% of a traditional car’s emissions – not 100%.

Globally, three-quarters of energy is still produced from fossil fuels. Just replacing that with renewables will be daunting, let alone keeping up with population growth, and increased expectations of affluence, which could easily require twice as much energy. Do we seriously think that can be done while reducing emissions at sufficient speed?

Climate change, what’s more, is only one dimension of the wider environmental crisis. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of species, and breaching most of the planet’s ecosystem limits.

Klein and Thompson vaguely acknowledge these crises, suggesting that if – for instance – we grew synthetic meat in skyscraper factories, we could re-wild vast areas of farmland. But even if feasible, this will never happen quickly enough to address the biodiversity crisis.

So-called “sustainable” aviation fuels and carbon capture and storage, meanwhile, are fine ideas, but currently unproven – and incapable of delivering the 50% emissions reduction by 2030 that’s needed to avoid climate change’s worst effects.

Although asking people to massively curb their lifestyles is political suicide, a more feasible alternative to abundance may lie in a combination of two unsexier words: sufficiency and efficiency.

Psychologically, going backwards is hard, but it might be easier to accept that – at least in the West, and in America in particular – people on average already consume enough material things. Then, greater efficiency could rapidly deliver genuine reductions in energy use, emissions and planetary impact.

When I lived in the UK, I remember officials estimating that an entire power plant could be retired if every Briton making a cup of tea boiled not a full kettle but only the water they needed.

Here, state agencies estimate that, if we just had the will and the technology to use energy off-peak – charging EVs overnight, for instance – we could build far fewer power plants (and save billions of dollars).

These are, of course, big ifs: even this modest behaviour change has long eluded Western societies. But it is the shift we need.

Klein and Thompson are not entirely wrong: there is a role for optimism, for renewables and housing intensification, and for whatever technology can realistically offer. There is, though, something almost arrogant about the intensity of their belief in abundance.

We need, instead, to rediscover our connection to the earth, to live on it more lightly, to be more content with what we have. That reconnection need not be scourging or self-denying: it can be joyful, as when we find delight in nature.

But it relies on a recognition that not everything is abundant, or can be made so. Some things are just plain scarce.