The Divergence of Information and Energy

Human history sped up dramatically a few hundred years ago. First, the printing press around 1440 sparked an exponential increase in knowledge sharing. That explosion of knowledge paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1700s with mechanized spinning and then expanded into steam engines and mining. 

As industrialization enabled mass production of books, knowledge spread even more widely. At the same time, energy extraction techniques grew ever more efficient, from biomass to coal to gas and oil to nuclear. Both energy production and knowledge production flourished in the 1800s and 1900s.  

And then the internet arose. Within a decade or two, knowledge availability skyrocketed. For most of human history, people had struggled to get and share enough information. But now people struggle to filter through too much information. We are flooded with it. Statista estimates that in 2022, 97 zettabytes¹ of information will be “created, captured, copied, and consumed” worldwide.² In 2010, that figure was 2 zettabytes. Has your brain gotten 50 times bigger since 2010? Mine hasn’t.

On top of this sea change, we are facing a great divergence. Information availability will likely continue soaring. But energy extracted from fossil fuels needs to plateau and ultimately decline to meet emissions targets, in an effort to stop global warming from reaching levels over 4 degrees Celsius that are “not compatible with prosperity or health or civilization,” as MIT professor John Sterman put it in a speech at Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in 2019.

Put simply, barring massive technological breakthroughs, we cannot afford to continue consuming energy resources at the pace of the recent past. If we do, we risk overshoot and collapse, as a recent data comparison of 2019 empirical data and the World3 model (the famous “Limits to Growth” model) showed.

I hear the cries of nuclear advocates.

Yes, nuclear energy offers a promise of massive energy production, but it’s not clear that ramping nuclear will mitigate warming much, based on the EN-ROADS climate model. There are likely higher-leverage points. Also, there’s a tradeoff of existential risk. If something goes wrong at a nuclear power plant, large regions of the world could suffer damage. And the more nuclear plants we build, the higher the chance something will go wrong at one or more of them. 

Also, the more common nuclear energy production becomes, and the more revenue it generates, the more pressure will likely build to ease oversight regulations, likely on the premise that major incidents are rare. Yes, they are rare—maybe because nuclear energy is highly regulated—but can be catastrophic when they occur.³

Moreover, catastrophe or not, all nuclear energy production produces nuclear waste. So-called high-level waste must be stored and monitored to prevent it from seeping into our environment, poisoning plants, animals, soil, and groundwater. Although nuclear offers compelling efficiency, and practically speaking may need to be used as a bridge technology in some areas until renewables ramp up, it is not a panacea for our energy needs.

The great divergence is at hand

In short, the prospect of ramping up energy use to meet future needs is fraught. Although it’s reasonable to believe a full transition to renewables is possible over time, that shift is unlikely to be completely smooth, and hoping for breakthrough technologies to make it easy isn’t a good strategy. There’s a reasonably high chance we’ll have to reduce energy use, at least temporarily, to make it through the transition.

Meanwhile, information availability continues storming upward, limited only by the amount of data that humans can directly and indirectly generate and consume.

The setup for this divergence between energy availability and knowledge availability is something we’ve never experienced before. For most of humanity’s history, we lived in an abundant world ecologically, but our energy and information consumption were limited by our technological capabilities (or lack thereof). Then, for a brief window of a few hundred years, knowledge and energy availability both increased, and human societies made phenomenal productivity leaps that eventually landed us… here. 

Going forward, we will navigate an environment of scarcity on one hand and over-abundance on the other. How will this divergence affect our planetary, cultural, economic, and political systems? We have no idea. 

That’s scary, but it also offers opportunity if we can understand what’s happening and consciously react in positive ways, leveraging our information capabilities—the area of abundance—to improve renewable energy production and availability—the area of scarcity—while implementing guardrails to safeguard the planet and its ecosystems for future generations. 

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Extra, Extra!

Tangential extras for curious readers: 

1. Common Earth Insights: Developing a Systemic Understanding of Climate Change - by Common Earth - I’m attending this free seminar-style course and it’s enlightening and wonderful with participants from around the world.

2. The Limits to Growth at 50: From Scenarios to Unfolding Reality - by Richard Heinberg in Resilience.org - an overview of Limits to Growth from a modern-day perspective.

1. What the zounds is a zettabyte? It’s a trillion gigabytes or, in mathematical terms, 10 to the 21st (10^21) bytes.

2. Importantly, not all of this is new information; a lot is replicated information.

3. Traditional ROI calculations using net present value can be misleading when it comes to existential risk, since net present value (NPV) equations weight present costs heavier than future costs. To account for the risk of unlikely but potentially catastrophic future events, we could weight future costs of unacceptable outcomes more heavily than future costs of acceptable outcomes, which would require tweaks to the usual equation. We might refer to this as a consequence-weighted ROI.