More energy would solve a lot of environmental problems

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More energy would solve a lot of environmental problems

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 14 minutes

Adele Peters’ recent story in Fast Company titled “The Vertical Farming Bubble Is Finally Popping” outlines how even though lots of people have tried various versions of this idea, none of them have made money and investors are losing interest.

The most basic problem with vertical farming is kind of obvious: if you’re trying to farm in a large indoor structure you need to build it, which is expensive, and at the end of the day you’re still selling low-margin agricultural commodities. But even though that’s a daunting obstacle, there are offsetting reasons to think it could be a good business idea. The real killer turns out to be energy. Plants are, in effect, really good solar panels that capture the sun’s rays for free and use that energy to grow. If you want to grow plants inside, though, you need to use electricity to power lights that then power the plants. There are a lot of ways to make electricity, of course, including solar panels, but using solar panels to make electricity to power lights to provide energy to plants merely underscores how efficient the old-fashioned “let the plants grow outside” method of harnessing solar power really is:

    “In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce,” says Kale Harbick, a USDA researcher who studies controlled-environment agriculture. A hypothetical skyscraper filled with lettuce would require solar panels covering an area the size of Manhattan.

In Peters’ telling, this is the explanation for why vertical farming doesn’t work.

But vertical farming has become one of my go-to examples of how people underrate the environmental virtues of energy abundance. The canonical text for energy abundance fans is J. Storrs Hall’s book “Where’s My Flying Car?” which was revived by Patrick Collison’s Stripe Press and framed a recent Ezra Klein column. My guess, though, is that neo-pastoralist environmental types are actually very comfortable with people not having flying cars.

What’s interesting about the vertical farm idea is that if you could pull it off, it would improve virtually everybody’s daily life in a pretty obvious way (fresher, tastier food) and also solve environmental problems. Of course that’s not necessarily true if you’re replacing one acre of lettuce with five acres of solar panels. But if you’re able to generate ample electricity from higher-density sources of energy — nuclear or geothermal, for example — then vertical farming could free up tremendous amounts of land, letting us have more housing and more parks and more totally unspoiled wilderness.

Midjourney

It turns out that while “grow the plants outside” is a very efficient energy strategy compared to vertical farming, it’s incredibly profligate in terms of basically everything else.

For starters, a vertical farm uses 5-10% of the water of a traditional farm. And that’s a huge deal. Whenever I talk about tripling the American population or just legalizing more apartment buildings in California, someone always asks about water. But urban areas only account for about 10% of California’s water use — agriculture is where all the water is going, and cutting the farm sector’s water requirements would be a huge deal for sustainability.

Last year, before the vertical farming bubble popped, Amanda Little wrote a hype piece about a vertical farming operation where “plants are grown without herbicides, fungicides or insecticides.”

That is, again, a huge deal for the environment. Right now there’s broad awareness that pesticides are harmful to people’s health, which promotes a decent amount of interest in organic food. But as Hannah Ritchie writes, organic agriculture has a lot of other downsides in terms of land use and eutrophication (the algae blooms that can kill off bodies of water).

Vertical farming provides a solution to this that would make water cleaner and more abundant everywhere, in addition to freeing up hundreds of millions of acres of what’s currently cropland.

Right now, the U.S. has 69.4 million acres of urban/suburban residential and commercial land, 64.4 million acres of wilderness, 44.4 million acres of state and national parks, and 391.5 million acres of farmland. If you could densify all that cropland, you’d have a bounty of new parks, wilderness, and plenty of space for dwellings.

Pasture and rangeland, of course, have an even larger footprint. But in large part, this also turns out to be an energy issue. Scientists have made a decent amount of progress growing meat in a lab, which would free up a ton of land as well as solve the enormous humanitarian issues associated with chicken and livestock. But the energy requirements of lab-grown meat are enormous, to the point where (per a different Fast Company article) there are perennial questions about its actual environmental impact. The basic upshot, though, is that lab-grown meat is good if you happen to have a giant pile of zero-carbon energy lying around:

    If a large new production facility runs on renewable energy, the carbon footprint of cultivated meat would be lower than conventional beef, pork, and chicken. The analysis calculates that the footprint is roughly 92% lower than beef, 52% lower than pork, and 17% lower than chicken, even if the conventional meat is produced in ways that are more sustainable than what’s standard now—for example, changing feed so cattle burp less methane, a potent greenhouse gas. (Cultivated meat also shrinks land and water use, avoids the use of antibiotics, and can help avoid other problems, such as future pandemics that could spread from farms.) But if a manufacturing plant doesn’t use renewable energy, cultivated pork or chicken could actually have a larger carbon footprint than meat from some farms. Beef, on the other hand, is so resource-intensive to raise that its footprint is higher no matter what kind of power the cultivated meat factory uses.

That’s again where I plead my case for environmentalists to think harder about nuclear and geothermal energy. Obviously digging radioactive material out of the ground and storing the waste is not a zero-impact activity. Neither is drilling holes in the ground to tap into geothermal power. But the footprint of this kind of activity is much, much smaller than the footprint of cropland and pasture. Alternatives to our standard agriculture are dramatically more efficient and environmentally friendly across multiple dimensions, but they take a lot of energy. It would be well worth our while to go get the energy.

That’s my earnest ecology-focused plea because I think environmental groups are thinking about this topic the wrong way.

But there’s also a lot of cool, fun stuff we could do with more energy. Hall is really into flying cars… me, maybe less so. But the other day, I was browsing Instagram and I saw a friend’s pictures of his visit to some hot springs where you can swim around outdoors in the winter. It looked fun! And it reminded me of when I went to Iceland where that kind of thing is everywhere.

Iceland is full of hot springs for the same reason they have a major aluminum smelting industry: there’s a lot of geothermal energy close to the surface there. That creates natural swimming pools that are usable when the air is cold, and they also use geothermal energy for electricity and home heat.

Washington, D.C. has a great network of outdoor public pools that are open in the summertime when it’s hot but closed for most of the year. But the technology necessary to heat outdoor pools exists outside of Iceland. The problem is that the cost of doing this is prohibitive. Back in the 1950s when nuclear power was new, people thought we might end up with electricity that was “too cheap to meter.” If that dream became a reality, we could have Blue Lagoon-style swimming spots all over the world. I think that sounds like a more fun use of abundant energy than flying cars! But obviously one’s mileage on that may vary. The point is that even though we don’t think about it a lot, even in the very energy-intensive United States, there’s all kinds of goofy stuff we don’t do because electricity is at least somewhat scarce. And by global standards, energy is very affordable here. Even in countries like Italy that are considerably richer than the national average, lots of people make do without air conditioning and sweat the details on their monthly electricity bills.

I doubt the “too cheap to meter” bar will ever be met, though, because there’s so much genuinely useful stuff — stuff that’s more significant than my winter outdoor pools plan — that could soak up electricity if we had it.

Environmental groups now agree that the solution to pollution caused by cars and home appliances is to electrify these things and get people to switch to EVs, e-bikes, electric heat pumps, and induction stoves.

This means that to meet America’s emissions goals, we need to replace more than 100% of the fossil fuels currently used to generate electricity, which is great. But suppose you’re not an environmental monomaniac and you also care about global economic development. In other words, you look forward to a future where more people in India and Nigeria and Guatemala can enjoy modern, climate-controlled buildings and convenient vehicles. Well, they’re going to need a lot of new electricity, too. And back in the developed world, we still have big outstanding questions about things like passenger aviation and maritime shipping.

One idea is we could power airplanes with hydrogen, but this requires a lot of electricity.

Another is that we could actually manufacture jet fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which sounds great but requires even more electricity.

Then there’s a whole other set of environmental issues related to the availability of water. Vertical farming, as noted above, would greatly reduce the world’s need for agricultural water. But it’s also totally possible to turn seawater into salt-free drinking water — it just takes a lot of electricity.

And I think that people who care about environmental issues ought to care more about all of this. Environmental policy in the United States suffers from an enormous bias toward the status quo. If you want to consume 654 million acres for pasturage — much of it on federally-owned land — that’s fine, because that’s the way it’s been for a long time. But if you want to do exploratory drilling for an advanced geothermal project, that requires an elaborate NEPA review because it’s new. If you want to keep burning coal in an existing coal plant, that’s fine. But if you want to build an advanced nuclear reactor on the site of a shuttered coal plant, you need to meet safety standards that ignore the benefits of driving fossil fuels off the grid.

And not only is the legal framework biased toward the status quo, but the advocacy community is mostly organized around the idea that we need to erect even larger barriers to altering the status quo. So a new drilling project that would disrupt some of the unspoiled wilderness in Alaska attracts massive opposition, but there’s very little interest in addressing the energy barriers that currently prevent us from opening up dramatically more land for conservation and parks. The assumption is that something like the status quo is optimal and we should be very worried about departures from it. The truth, though, is that we could build a much better world if we had dramatically more energy, and we should be trying to craft a regulatory state that encourages science and investment in this area. One can’t know in advance what will and won’t pan out.

I keep feeling a little sour about all the generative AI hype — is something like “TikTok, but it’s even more compulsive because the computers are generating clips optimized to keep you watching” really the big breakthrough we’ve been waiting for? There’s so much that could be done to improve the physical world around us if we are more open to change.