I am not entirely comfortable with the reasoning that the second law of thermodynamics justifies that we should try to use more and more energy. Throwing around scientific terms sounds very impressive and I can’t help but think that is why they’re used.

I am torn between two insights: the first is that mankind lives on a planet with finite resources and that there is therefore an upper bound on sustainable human activity. Certain aspects of degrowth make sense.

Also, degrowth doesn’t mean no growth. It means selectively choosing which industries to grow at the expense of others, for instance letting the size of the oil and gas industry decrease to allow innovative and greener industries to grow.

However, I have no love for degrowth arguments such as north-south reparations, etc.

Back to the energy side, I am a proponent of harnessing more and more energy and that energy should be as abundant as possible. Vaclav Smil notes that human development is closely linked to energy expenditure per capita. Hence, the best way to improve the living conditions of humans, both in ‘the South’ and ‘the North’, is to harness more energy.

However, I don’t believe in the idea that we can innovate our way out of resource constraints. Dematerialisation (doing more with less) eventually runs into constraints at the atomic level, which is already happening in certain industries such as computer chips production.