The science is clear — Earth’s climate is evolving, and this transformation is caused by human activity.
But MIT scientist professor Andrew McAfee believes mankind can only cure the planet by embracing the combination of capitalism and technology.
And he believes there is already evidence to show the economics are shifting us from increasing human prosperity at the expense of the Earth, to a period “where we are simultaneously increasing our prosperity and taking better care of the planet.”
He told Express.co.uk: “The trends have been going in the right direction, in most places around the world and in most of the areas that I can think to care about.
The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius
Abraham Lincoln
“And when I say ‘prosperity’, I don’t just mean GDP per capita or income measured in dollar terms.
“I also mean levels of health, access to education and sanitation, and just continuing to elevate the human condition.
“I think our two essential assignments are to improve the human condition and to improve the state of nature.
“And the reason that I wrote my book More From Less, is to try to drive home the point that we now know how to do both of those things simultaneously.
“There does not need absolutely to be a trade-off, where if you are doing better on one, you must be doing worse on the other.”
The research scientist explains his optimism comes from examining the evidence.
He said: “When we look at the richest countries in the world, they are reducing their pollution burdens over time.
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“I want to be clear, they’re not going down quickly enough – we’re not doing enough to fight global warming.
“But that trend is also now headed in the right direction.
“And incomes continue to rise and economic growth continues.
“Most health outcomes for most demographic groups continue to improve.
“So when I look at the evidence, I walk away feeling a lot more optimistic.”
And be believe the combination of capitalism and technological progress is at the heart of this positive development.
He said: “That combination is what allows us to take fewer resources from the earth year after year, even as we continue to grow our economies and even as we continue to increase our prosperity.
“Capitalism and tech progress are at the heart of how we accomplished that.”
The tight relationship between technology and capitalism has been understood ever since the Industrial Revolution kicked-off the industrial era.
That chapter in our history was initiated by a really profound technological development – the steam engine.
This technology put economies and our societies on a completely different trajectory.
Professor McAfee said: “Abraham Lincoln wrote the patent system ‘added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things’.
“For me, the ‘fire of genius’ is technological progress and the ‘fuel of interest’ is capitalism.
“They interact in a self-reinforcing and ever-expanding cycle.
“Companies are really eager to take advantage of the new, the latest and the greatest developments to help them grow their markets, increase profits and reduce costs.
“So capitalism generates technology, capitalism profits from technology, there’s a very close real relationship there.”
He is however, aware that capitalism is far from being perfect system and how it requires “constraint”.
He said: “Capitalism generates inequalities and this has been known since at least Adam Smith.
“Adam Smith said: ‘Whenever there is great property, there is great inequality.’
“One thing to say though, as far as I can tell, almost every other economic system that we’ve tried, has also generated massive inequality.
“To say the Soviet Union was actually an egalitarian paradise is dead flat wrong.”
The reason I wrote the book is to shine a light on the fact that I think the models of capitalism and technology that we have now are sustainable, as long as we don’t stop just with that combination, and we include things like governments that put in place pollution controls, and governments that protect species from exploitation.
“So you have to constrain capitalism in some important areas.”
Professor McAfee, a cofounder of the MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, believes technology has now progressed to a point where “we do not have to accept the trade-off between improving the human condition and improving the state of nature.”
We can do both simultaneously. And we’re not doing that everywhere in the world yet.
“This global trend has started in some of the richest and most technologically-sophisticated countries in the world.
“If we do the right things, this trend will spread around the world.”
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