Don't Fall for the Hype of AI and Nuclear. Embrace Degrowth
The tech bro vision of the future will not save us from ecological collapse
In the tradition of reverse Robin Hood (neoliberalism), the UK Government wants to fund AI and miniature nuclear reactors by cutting social programmes. Labour ministers led by Keir Starmer believe following this route will establish the UK as an AI leader. Following, because the UK would be following the delusions of billionaires with religious devotions to technology.
AI is the latest thing, I suppose, and powerful people stand to gain more power from it. I would much rather see rich countries racing to achieve the most comprehensive social and ecological programmes. An obsession technology and the underlying drive for ever more economic growth runs counter to social and ecological objectives, especially in the long term. Frivolously increasing energy demand through AI and meeting that demand with nuclear power will leave a legacy of nuclear waste for future generations.
It's impossible to make a plan to safely store nuclear waste. It persists for hundreds of thousands of years. Completely unknowable climatic, geological, and anthropogenic events will take place before it is properly decomposed. Nuclear waste is more often tucked away in some unfortunate place where few can see it, often on Indigenous land. Leaks can be more easily kept secret from the greater public. We all just get cancer and die. Nuclear waste can be recycled into weapons that should never be used. I pity future archaeologists and geologists who stumble upon long-forgotten nuclear waste depositories and abandoned nuclear weapons storage facilities.
M.V. Ramana's Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change is a much needed crash-course book on the reasons to oppose nuclear energy. He highlights the corruption in the nuclear industry, the offloading of construction costs onto ratepayers, the inability of construction companies to stay on schedule, and the connection of nuclear power plants to the production of weapons. Relevant to the UK's AI/Nuclear plans, the book covers the folly of small modular reactors (SMRs). I assume the UK Government means SMRs when they say “miniature nuclear reactors”.
SMRs cost more per energy produced than regular sized power plants and produce more waste, as it says in Booth's article. Nuclear energy is already the most expensive type of energy. Ramana calls it the caviar of energy. The nuclear appeal has more to do with status, the perception of development, than it does with providing electricity to people. Nuclear energy is greenwashed too (see Dangerous Hype: Big Tech’s Nuclear Lies, also by Ramana). Current energy demand could be met via solar and wind energy. Solar panels can be built quickly for a fraction of the cost of nuclear plants. Solar has the potential to empower communities through decentralized power, rather than leave them dependent on big centralized energy facilities.
Nuclear power's recent resurgence in popularity is likely linked to the waning powers of fossil fuels corporations and the rise of wind and solar. If the public can be convinced that nuclear power solves the problem of meeting energy demand without greenhouse gas emissions, it can effectively slow down the transition away from fossil fuels. Nuclear power plants generally take a long time to plan and build – a minimum of eight years, and there's always a chance the project will not be completed. Ramana provides examples of this and how industry actors secure financial gain even if new plants aren't completed. All the while, people continue consuming oil, gas, and coal, waiting for their nuclear power plant to be ready. That's why nuclear energy spokespersons are often fans of fracked natural gas and other fossil fuels. It's the same people behind fossils fuels and nuclear power.
Projects that consume large quantities of energy, like cryptocurrency and AI, must be avoided to keep energy demand low. Ramana says cryptocurrency. I say AI, but I think Ramana would agree with me on that. The pursuits of individual wealth, status, and power – achieved by owning companies that sell vast quantities of products on the market, energy is no exception – need to be replaced by the pursuit of flourishing ecosystems and a humble humanity that aims to operate within planetary boundaries.
Instead of chasing growth, the UK (and everywhere else) should embrace degrowth. In addition to abandoning AI, which currently accounts for 2% of global energy demand and is expected to grow, and scaling back on the internet (which is estimated to require about 25% of the world's energy this year), energy demand can be cut by switching off unnecessary lights. Artificial lights use 10% of the global amount of energy. Most of it is wasted illuminating unintended surfaces, spilling into the sky, and making it glow at night like perpetual day. Lights from cities and towns pour into the surrounding countryside. Lights serve decorative purposes, act as security (which only helps burglars), or stay on because whoever turned them on forgot about them. Species that rely on darkness to feed, breed, and migrate can't live without night. They face extinction in our ever more illuminated nights. Johan Eklöf explains how every living thing on Earth needs day and night in his excellent book, The Darkness Manifesto: Why The World Needs Night. Solving the problem of light pollution is low hanging fruit as far as environmental issues go. Switch off the lights and that problem is solved.
Berlin is currently in the process of turning off the lights on the city-state's highways. The move follows the conclusions of a study that found highway lighting has no impact, negative or positive, on safety. Cars have their own lights after all. Switching off lights has more benefits than keeping them on: energy savings, financial savings, and nocturnal animals have their night back. We sleep better in darkness too.
Speaking of cars and extinctions, I recently read Ben Goldfarb's Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future Of Our Planets to get an idea of the magnitude of destruction cars and roads have on wildlife. The book discusses roadkill fixes, like wildlife crossings, fences, bridges, and tunnels. These enable animals to cross roads that have cut through their habitats and migration corridors. By the end of the book the need to stop driving is abundantly clear. Goldfarb doesn't explicitly say this, of course. Driving limits is part of the behavioural solution, like banning driving through certain areas during specific times of the day or year, when frogs are mating and migrating from one pond to another, or after during and following rainfall when amphibians and worms might be drawn onto a road.
I took a break from reading the book and went for a walk after a rainfall down a not-so-busy road in the middle of rural Brittany, France. I didn't see any cars, but sure enough I found a squished toad, crushed salamander, and a few worms that appeared to be crushed by maybe the one or two cars that drove down the road that morning. A small stream and forested area runs along the road. The rain must’ve made it seem like a good time to venture across the road.
A chapter I found particularly staggering is about the impact of car noises on wildlife. I've biked through forests toward busy highways, the screaming roar of car noises increasing with every spin of my own noise-producing wheels. I can't imagine being a wild animal forced to endure this constant noise. The fact that I didn't see any birds or the usual forest animals closer to the highway is a testament to that. A study in Crossings tested the impact car noises has on wildlife. The research team set up a speaker system and blasted car noises into a quiet forest. Most of the animals fled and those who stayed behind lost weight. The noise reduced their ability to rely on their hearing to detect predators. They had use their eyes, which made them ineffective at everything else, even eating. The twist was the noises weren't from a busy interstate, but livestreamed from a national park road – a place that's suppose to be a sanctuary for wildlife.
Wheels rubbing against the road surface that makes the screaming noise. It gets louder with speed and its impact can be felt 20 miles (or 32 km) away. Electric cars have been touted as environmental saviours, but the energy to power them still needs to come from somewhere, pushing up energy demand from other sources, like nuclear or even coal and other fossil fuels. The wheels of electric cars are just as noisy as those on conventional cars.
Energy demand can be reduced by curtailing technological addictions and dependencies. A life mediated by technology has decimated social connectivity (although social media has marketed itself as an online place to connect, it's a shallow kind of connection), sparked a decline in empathy, wrecked mental health, killed spontaneity, destroyed our attention spans, and produced a greater proclivity to give up. Christine Rosen covers this topic in her timely book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Tech companies, especially the ones proselytizing AI, are intentionally worsening the conditions of life to make the escape into a virtual reality more appealing. Car noises definitely contribute to a decline in environmental quality. I write this as I'm trying to drown out the roar from the street by listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. If we are spending more and more time in virtual reality, what happens to our inactive bodies, Rosen asks. We become weak and start to decay, creating an opportunity for the technocratic oligarchs to lower the population, once they have their robotic class of slaves.
There is a certain amount of everyday work that needs to be done to maintain society, especially in education, healthcare, and the production of basic necessities. The way society has us work for the sake of work is harmful to the planet, our bodies, and our mental health. Pro-environmental work can lead to environmentally positive outcomes, but environmental work is mostly the undoing of ecological damages caused by work. The removal of toxins from a pond, dumped by a mine, for example. The cleanup costing more than the profit made from the mine. Workers doing essential work (like caregivers) can burn out, have mental breakdowns, and become physically injured at work. Overworking leads to more work. It's important to be active, face challenges, and be able to do difficult things, but work in its current form takes too much from life, preventing people from pursuing life changing challenges, deeper reflections, relationships, and a social life.
Advocates of AI talk about the capacity of AI to replace work. The real goal of AI is to replace human beings. Society can already drastically reduce the amount of time individual people spend working (perhaps by sharing the load of essential work and abandoning superfluous work), but the foundations for a liberated society untethered by a dependency on employment hasn't had its ribbon ceremony. People living paycheque to paycheque need those paycheques. Precariousness thrives because the wealthy want to accumulate more assets and power, and don't care about the ecological consequences of their pursuits. The only way rich people can accumulate assets is by denying people the means of basic subsistence so that they must work to obtain crumbs. In the hypothetical situation of humans being replaced by AI robots, what's going to happen to those who depend on paycheques?
Slowing down the economy, downsizing job dependency, reducing energy demand, and creating universal access to the means of subsistence are aims worth pursuing. Imagine a society that values life above economic growth with social belonging and conviviality as its central aims. A future of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and nuclear energy sets the scene for a horror show. Let's abandon this horrifying vision for one of degrowth.
Note on generative AI and the abuse of women and children
Generative AI has enabled the easy spread of dis/misinformation. Amoral political actors use this to their advantage. The power to generate images on command has opened avenues for predatory men to harm women and children too. A deepfake steals photographs of women from instagram, or other social media platforms, and uses them to create pornographic images without the victim’s knowledge. It's great to learn that woman are fighting back and businesses are cooperating, but the legal framework is lacking. Deepfakes shouldn't exist in the first place. Governments should have anticipated the harms of deepfakes on the advent of generative AI's breakthrough into mainstream popularity. The internet is flooded with generative AI images of child abuse, too. The authorities are overwhelmed and becoming unable to discern fake from real. They are forced to waste time, time they should be using to investigate real abuse against real children. It's heartbreaking that any of this is happening, that predators are out there getting kicks from the abuse of women and children. AI only makes matters worse.
The books I've mentioned don't explicitly advocate for degrowth, but they certainly have degrowth tendencies. Here they are again if you want to add them to your 2025 reading list:
Nuclear is Not the Solution:The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change by R.M Ramana
The Darkness Manifesto: Why The World Needs Night by Johan Eklöf
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future Of Our Planets by Ben Goldfarb
The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen
See if your local library has a copy or feel free to ask me! I’m not getting any kickbacks from the promotion of these books. Please don't buy from Amazon.
Thank you for reading! :D A special thanks to my wife Alexandra for reading this over and giving advice. I always steal ideas from her.