In The Bottomless Well, authors Huber and Mills establish two important facts that the conventional environmentalist community and much of the general public has yet to accept, much less consider.
Fact 1: The world is in no way running out of oil. Nor is oil becoming more expensive.
Fact 2: Modern technology has the capacity to preserve our environment, and to a certain extent it has been doing so for years.
I picked up this book expecting a long trail of dry facts and figures leading to the conclusion that everything is going to be alright in the end; something along the lines of Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. Instead I found a book that treats the reader to a philosophy built around factual observations. Huber and Mills paint a picture of mankind’s creations and existence in the context of the living world’s unique tendency to overcome the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, at least in closed systems. We are, they argue, constantly engaged in creating higher and higher levels of order out of chaos, beginning with the taming of fire and climaxing, thus far, in the bytes of information flowing through computer processors. In creating this order out of chaos we are creating devices that are simultaneously more efficient in their order and more wasteful in the amount of energy lost in the production of that order. This is a process that is as on-going as it is inevitable, because as the authors point out, raw energy is of no use to human beings: “the order in the energy is the only part that has any value.”
Huber and Mills seem to dig themselves into a hole. How can they claim that modern technology can prevent climate change if it is inherently more wasteful than earlier devices that created less order but lost less energy? They justify their claim by using economics, specifically the principal of opportunity cost. “As late as 1910,” the authors tell us, “some 27% of all U.S. farmland was still devoted to feeding horses used for transportation.” Even now there are environmentalists that would suggest we turn back to a carbohydrates-based energy economy, one where bread powers horses and bicyclists instead of SUVs and motorbikes. Yet Huber and Mills argue that such a change would not benefit the environment because “in terms of land surface occupied to extract and deliver the energy used… crude oil is at least 1000 times more frugal than grain”. So because America no longer uses all its land to grow carbohydrate energy, more room is left for forestry. Indeed the authors suggest that “for the first time in history, a Western nation has halted, and then reversed the decline of its woodlands.”
All of this is quite a leap of logic, and very well in theory, but how does the potential for SUVs to reverse climate change manifest itself in the data? Quite well, according to Huber and Mills. The authors quote a controversial paper published in Science concerning measurements of atmospheric carbon that suggests that “North America as a whole is, apparently, a carbon sink.”
While these carbon testing results provide a fitting conclusion to the logical argument proposed in the book, they are also the least convincing part of the arc. Huber and Mills’ major shortcoming, perhaps, is that they are theorists rather than researchers. And yet the theories put forward in The Bottomless Well, and verified briefly by its authors, ought to be considered and tested to a greater extent by the academic community. The writers may not prove to be entirely correct, but they can at least help the current debate on environmental policy avoid the snares of ‘group think’.
Ultimately the charm of The Bottomless Well is that it provi
des a sensible middle-route through the environmental debate. Huber and Mills do not deny the existence or harm of global warming; nor do they suggest that the renunciation of many of the technologies that make our lives more enjoyable and comfortable would be justifiable or indeed productive. Instead, The Bottomless Well leaves the reader with an optimistic belief that human ingenuity can lead us safely through difficult times ahead. As well as a profound feeling of obligation to create or at least adopt the next wave of technological medication for our bruised planet.