You know the usual schematic diagram of the greenhouse effect. Here are a couple for reference:

and

What’s missing?

Humans creating power for ourselves creates heat. It happens if we create it through burning fossil fuels, using nuclear power, and even fusion. Using solar panels absorbs extra heat.

I hope you respond that whatever heat we produce is negligible. Today it is, but since industry and our current lifestyles require energy, the amount of heat we produce will scale with the economy. If our economy grows two or three percent per year, that’s exponential, meaning the heat we produce will increase exponentially.

This paper in Nature Physics by podcast guest Tom Murphy, and author of what I consider the science book of the decade, does the math. Note that this effect isn’t trapping more heat from sunlight. It’s creating heat that also gets trapped by greenhouse gases and takes time to radiate into space.

Though industry’s contribution to global warming is negligible today, even assuming all the substitution and alternatives physically possible (you can check his math if you think he did something wrong), industry would warm the globe by amounts comparable to the human greenhouse within a human lifetime or two.

Why changing the diagram matters

We remember images better than equations or scientific facts lectured at us. Until we see power plants and reactors contributing to global warming, we’ll assume they don’t contribute.

It’s easy to say something negligible will remain negligible forever without visual cues. But we keep dooming ourselves with that belief. We didn’t think we’d run out of land to grow into, that we’d fill the ocean with plastic, or that we’d put so much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to cause the greenhouse effect so far. We once didn’t think we could make species go extinct; nowadays we caused a few extinctions in the time you spent reading this post.

Nuclear power won’t save us, nor would fusion if it ever worked, but that doesn’t mean we’re doomed

The way out is to stop growing the economy, as nearly all human cultures that didn’t collapse did.

Economies don’t need to grow. In the words of a guy who loves markets, economist Milton Friedman:

We have no desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow, and those are quite different. I believe that the level of growth in this country ought to be whatever people want it to be. If the people at large—if each and every person separately was satisfied with where he is and didn’t want to grow, fine. I have no objection. I don’t want to impose growth on anyone. I want people to be free to pursue their own objective.

While he implied some benefits to growth, he also noted, “The bigger they are the harder they fall,” then listed corporations larger than many nations that went bankrupt. Growth doesn’t provide immunity from collapse.

Living sustainably is wonderful. Our human ancestors did for hundreds of thousands of years. Our non-human ancestors did for hundreds of millions of years, though we probably don’t want to live like them. What we give up are the things that cause addiction, stress, and disease, like doof, carcinogens, and things that pollute. We gain more of the things we want our gravestones to say, like time with family, culture, and sports.

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