[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF NASSER: Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. So a couple of weeks ago, we put up a brand new episode called "Growth." We talked about pumpkins and a finger and some slugs, and every single person on our planet. But there was one growth-y, you know, currently growing thing we did not talk about, which is the economy. Now what got me thinking about economic growth was not all the stuff that's in the news—the tariffs, the fear of the recession, all that stuff that everybody's talking about. What started it was a lecture I heard a little while back by, of all people, an astrophysicist.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: So I'm going to sketch what we know about Earth's history, cosmically speaking.]

LATIF: Her name is Sandra Faber. She goes by Sandy. Brilliant scientist. She co-authored the standard model for thinking about how galaxies form. She won a National Medal of Science back in 2011. And she started the lecture by saying, "We have a pretty happy little planet to live on."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: Earth is a good place to live for let's say, of order, 100 million years, at least.]

LATIF: Should be livable for a really, really long time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: Okay.]

LATIF: Except, she goes on to say, for us.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: Over the last century or so, we've been seeing planetwide GDP growing exponentially. Now ...]

LATIF: So what she did is she took the average gross domestic product worldwide—and that's a rough measure of economic growth—and that had been growing recently around three percent, which for economists is like a happy little growth number.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: You will recognize 1.03, three percent as the holy grail.]

LATIF: But Sandra took that three percent, and with some quick math she started to just play it out year after year. And in her lecture, she's showing this chart where you can see this curve just shooting up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: We can see this number is completely ridiculous.]

LATIF: And she was basically like, "Look at all that growth. That's eating up Earth's resources."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: A large number here is bad because it means that we want more of that product.]

LATIF: And so even though Earth should be good for a hundred million years, we're gonna just eat the planet up. We're gonna devour the physical, material level of this planet. We're gonna eat it up more like a couple thousand years.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandra Faber: And my concern is that we're not talking about this.]

LATIF: And when I heard that, that was—that was breathtaking and horrifying. And honestly, I haven't been able to stop thinking about that number—three percent. It sounds like a specific thing, but also it's kind of abstract and math-y. And I wanted help. I wanted help to parse this out. It's like, how bad is that, really? How bad could that possibly be? And so I turned to someone whose job it is to literally make sense of this exact kind of thing.

JEFF GUO: Hello!

LATIF: Hi. How you doing?

JEFF GUO: Hi. I'm doing well. How are you?

LATIF: And we had what I felt like was kind of a rollercoaster of a conversation.

JEFF GUO: [laughs]

LATIF: So I'm just gonna play it for you right now.

JEFF GUO: Yeah, okay. So I am Jeff Guo. I'm one of the hosts of the Planet Money podcast at NPR.

LATIF: Terrific show.

JEFF GUO: Thank you. And I guess, what do I do? I talk about economics all day. That's ...

LATIF: Oh my God.

JEFF GUO: I guess that's what I do.

LATIF: I'm—I need you. I need you to help me. It's more than scratch an itch. I need you to help me ...

JEFF GUO: Cure this existential dread that you have now.

LATIF: That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Okay. Well, I mean, I guess where I would start is in—you know, I would hate to contradict a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Which sounds like, you know, starting out on dangerous territory there.

LATIF: I mean, she won the National Medal of Science, not the Nobel. But ...

JEFF GUO: She's gonna. She's gonna. It sounds like she's gonna win.

LATIF: Okay, yeah. Sure. Fair.

JEFF GUO: But you did ask me to kind of look into what things are we gonna run out of?

LATIF: Yes, yes, yes. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited!

JEFF GUO: Okay. Yeah, yeah. So ...

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Okay, so I did—so I looked at a bunch of things that people are kind of worried about.

LATIF: Great.

JEFF GUO: And I just did some very rough back-of-the-envelope math. Like, this is so totally not precise.

LATIF: Excellent. My favorite kind of math. My favorite kind of math.

JEFF GUO: It's so hand-wavy.

LATIF: Great. I love it.

JEFF GUO: Okay, so I don't know, what should we start with? Copper?

LATIF: Yeah, that's a big one.

JEFF GUO: Copper—copper's a big deal, right?

LATIF: Very big deal.

JEFF GUO: So if you look at copper consumption over the past centuries since the Industrial Revolution.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: You know, our demand for copper has grown about three percent every year.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: Like, you know, in recent years, it's—we've consumed about 26, 27 million tons a year of copper.

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah.

JEFF GUO: So if you just, you know, extrapolate that out, if you just assume copper's gonna keep growing at three percent every single year, right?

LATIF: Fair. Fair assumption.

JEFF GUO: I looked up how much copper people think we have, according to geologists, what we know is out there and could theoretically get to. And that number right now is five to six billion tons.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: It's not nothing, but we're using it pretty quickly. And if you just assume that this number's gonna keep growing at three percent a year ...

LATIF: Yeah, yeah. Sure.

JEFF GUO: ... it would take about maybe another 70 years, and then no more copper.

LATIF: That's it? Seventy years?

JEFF GUO: That's seventy years. Seventy years.

LATIF: Okay, so that sounds terrible.

JEFF GUO: It's true. It's true. That's assuming, of course, that, you know, we do keep consuming copper.

LATIF: Using copper, and needing copper the same way that we are. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. T-minus 70, no copper for anybody.

JEFF GUO: No copper. No copper.

LATIF: Okay. Okay, so then what—but then—so that's—this seems to point exactly to Sandy Faber's point, right?

JEFF GUO: It's true. It's true. It's true.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Do you want to do another one?

LATIF: Oh, that's the end of it? I thought you were gonna be, like, "But there's, like, a giant—there's a copper thing that we're gonna ..." No, there's no "but." That's it. It's just like, "Yeah, she's right about copper."

JEFF GUO: Okay, but there's a "but." There is a "but" coming up. There is a "but."

LATIF: Yeah. Okay, okay, okay. You want to go through more of them before we get to the "but?" Is that the idea?

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Yeah.

LATIF: Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Next one. Okay, next one.

JEFF GUO: Okay, so another one I looked into is sand.

LATIF: Okay. Yeah?

JEFF GUO: Sand ...

LATIF: Which seems like there should be a ton of that.

JEFF GUO: Seems like there should be so much of it.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: And you know the reason why we need sand, right?

LATIF: Why do we need sand?

JEFF GUO: For concrete.

LATIF: Ah!

JEFF GUO: So it's actually so important that we don't know how much we're using.

LATIF: Oh my God!

JEFF GUO: Like, we're using so much.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: We just—we actually don't know. But, like, ballpark estimates, we're using maybe 50 billion tons of sand and gravel every year.

LATIF: Okay, that sounds like a lot.

JEFF GUO: So I don't even—I can't even visualize that. I don't—it's a lot.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: And I couldn't even find how much sand and gravel there is in the world. Like, nobody actually knows.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: This is one of those numbers where it's like, "I don't know." But we're doing, like, back-of-the-envelope math here, right?

LATIF: Right. Right.

JEFF GUO: So—so I was like, well, if we don't know how much sand and gravel there is in the world, surely we know how much rock there is in the world, right?

LATIF: Totally. Totally. Totally.

JEFF GUO: So I looked it up, and according to geologists, the Earth's crust, all of the Earth's crust contains maybe, like, 23 quintillion tons of rock and stuff.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: Okay.

LATIF: But it does seem like the whole point of sand is that it's—it's, like teeny-tiny. It's this—like, it would take a lot of energy to turn that rock into sand.

JEFF GUO: It would. It would, but assuming that we're able to do that, right?

LATIF: Okay. Okay. Great.

JEFF GUO: Assuming—assuming that we're gonna use sand—that we're gonna use sand and gravel at a rate that grows by three percent every year ...

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: ... year after year after year ...

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: ... it would take about—do you want to guess how long it would take to deplete the entire Earth's crust?

LATIF: Wait, so a quintillion—based on the growth rate and the uses now.

JEFF GUO: Yes.

LATIF: I would imagine—this one is gonna be—this one is not on Sandra Faber's side. I'm gonna guess this one is, like, way, way, way far from now. Like—like, this is gonna be like a million years or something.

JEFF GUO: Five to six hundred years.

LATIF: That seems so short again!

JEFF GUO: It does, doesn't it?

LATIF: That is way shorter. For the whole crust?

JEFF GUO: I know.

LATIF: Oh my God! That's not—like, it's long but it's not that long.

JEFF GUO: No.

LATIF: Like, that's like—that is nuts!

JEFF GUO: All right. I got a couple more.

LATIF: This is just making me more and more existentially worried. Okay, but keep going.

JEFF GUO: That's how I felt. That's how I felt when I—when I started on this journey. Right.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: I got a couple more.

LATIF: Okay, great. Love it.

JEFF GUO: I'm gonna pull up my spreadsheet. I'm gonna talk about lithium.

LATIF: Okay, great. Good one. Good one. And lithium, you imagine there are, like, those giant deserts, filled with those, like, sand flats or whatever, right?

JEFF GUO: Yeah, in Bolivia and Argentina.

LATIF: In Bolivia, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. So this one will be, again—like, I think this one—I feel like there's gonna be a curveball in here where you're like, "No, no, no. We have enough. We have enough for—you know, for—for millions of years." Anyway, okay, keep going.

JEFF GUO: Okay, hang on. Let me see. Let me pull up my—where did my notes go on this? I can't wait when we have to fact-check all of this.

LATIF: [laughs]

JEFF GUO: Okay, lithium. So we are using about 190 to 200,000 tons of lithium every year.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: That's kind of ...

LATIF: Okay, and so that's, like, in—that's in phones, electric cars, da da da da da.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Batteries. Batteries is a big one for lithium.

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Very important.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Lithium consumption, of course, has been exploding. So over the past decade, lithium has been growing—you want to guess how much it's been growing?

LATIF: What, like, five percent or ten percent or something?

JEFF GUO: On average, around 20 percent.

LATIF: Okay. Wow. Okay. Wow.

JEFF GUO: So we need a lot—and we need a lot more lithium, right?

LATIF: Which is good. Which is good. Which means, like, more electric cars, more da da da da da, right? More recyclable batteries and stuff. That's great.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. So geologists think that of all the lithium that we know is out there, there's probably, like, 105 million tons of it, like, out there.

LATIF: That sounds a lot less than the sand you're—like, this doesn't sound—this is gonna get worrying.

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

LATIF: Okay, keep going.

JEFF GUO: Right. And so, you know, if you do this whole—you know, the same math and you just—if you assume—if you assume, just, you know, for the sake of argument, it's only gonna grow at three percent a year, right?

LATIF: Yeah, sure.

JEFF GUO: We'd probably run out of lithium around about ...

LATIF: March. I feel like you're gonna say, like—I feel like you're gonna say, like, so soon. Okay, keep going.

JEFF GUO: Tomorrow. About—about 100 years.

LATIF: Okay, 100 years again.

JEFF GUO: Which is not bad.

LATIF: No, it is bad. It's bad, Jeff. It's bad. We—we need that. Like, we're gonna need that later for even better stuff.

JEFF GUO: It's true.

LATIF: Okay, keep going.

JEFF GUO: I'll do one more. I'll do one more, which is—this is a big one. Oil.

LATIF: Really scary one.

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

LATIF: But hopefully we're weaning off of this one. So maybe this one is a different ...

JEFF GUO: Hopefully.

LATIF: Like, it's going in the opposite direction.

JEFF GUO: Hopefully. Doesn't seem like it's really happening yet.

LATIF: Oh God.

JEFF GUO: But—but ...

LATIF: I don't think you have had a single piece of good news here.

JEFF GUO: Just wait for it.

LATIF: Okay. All right.

JEFF GUO: So if you look at oil, right? How much do we consume every year? About 37 billion barrels of oil ...

LATIF: All right.

JEFF GUO: ... as a world. How much is left? Probably 1.6 trillion barrels.

LATIF: Really?

JEFF GUO: Yeah. So it's not ...

LATIF: That's a lot.

JEFF GUO: It's a lot, but it's maybe less—it's less than I thought. So another way to say 1.6 trillion is sixteen hundred billion.

LATIF: Right. Right.

JEFF GUO: So 37 billion a year, we have about 1,600 billion barrels left out there.

LATIF: Yeah, that—when you say it like that, it sounds quite—quite—quite alarming.

JEFF GUO: Yeah, not great. So, you know, if you do the math again, exponential growth, very scary.

LATIF: But we do want to use less of it anyway. Right, yeah. I'm ambivalent about this one. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

JEFF GUO: I am too.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: About 28 years.

LATIF: No way!

JEFF GUO: Yes. Yes.

LATIF: That is nothing!

JEFF GUO: 2052 might be the day we run out of oil.

LATIF: Wow!

JEFF GUO: Maybe. Maybe.

LATIF: I was worried about—when Sandra Faber said we had thousands of years and you're like—you're taking me even an order of magnitude less than that.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. It's like maybe decades. Yeah. So I started to get, you know, a little nervous. And so I thought well, like, what happened in the past, you know? Like, when we were over-exploiting some resource, and it looked like it was gonna run out. And when I looked into it, there's this funny thing that happens. And so just for example, let me tell you a story.

LATIF: Please.

JEFF GUO: It's about medieval England.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: So it's the 1400s, okay? It's, like, medieval England, it's the 1400s. And this amazing new technology has just arrived on the shores of Ye Olde England. And it is this new way of making iron.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: It's called the blast furnace. So just, like, very briefly, like, before the blast furnace, you kind of had these backyard ovens, basically, where you kind of baked the iron ore to make the iron, and they were, like, super-inefficient and really slow and not great.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: But this blast furnace, the scientific innovation was that if you blew air onto the fire you could get it really hot, and then it gets so hot that you could just melt the iron, and it was amazing.

LATIF: Got it.

JEFF GUO: And this, like, revolutionized ironmaking. So these blast furnaces, they're these huge 20-foot-tall stone towers. You would have these giant bellows at the bottom blowing air.

LATIF: I was just imagining the bellows.

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

LATIF: I was just imagining the bellows.

JEFF GUO: Yes.

LATIF: Okay, cool. Okay. So that's the key innovation, here.

JEFF GUO: Yes. And medieval England, iron was so precious, so important. You needed it for ploughs and spades, horseshoes, pots, kettles, nails, hammers. Yeah, whatever. And so now you had this technology that you could make—these blast furnaces, they could make a ton of iron a day.

LATIF: A ton? A literal ton?

JEFF GUO: A literal ton, which is, like, just unprecedented.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: The problem with all of this is what was the fuel that went into this blast furnace? At the time it was charcoal.

LATIF: Which is—which is—charcoal is made out of wood, is that right? No.

JEFF GUO: Yes.

LATIF: Yes.

JEFF GUO: Yes. So—so this was not good.

LATIF: So they're, like, slurping down forests, basically?

JEFF GUO: Yes. Yes. Just picture the English countryside, right? You've got these blast furnaces sending up these huge plumes of smoke. And everyone's just chopping down trees as fast as they can to feed these giant blast furnaces. It's ...

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: And it makes people really concerned.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Like, really concerned. They're, like, "Oh my God, where are all the trees going?" But it got so bad that by the late 1500s, you have Parliament banning new iron mills from starting up in different places. They're like, "We cannot do this. We just cannot deal with this."

LATIF: Because we have one tree left, and ...

JEFF GUO: We've gotta save the tree.

LATIF: ... everyone's about to—everyone's about to cut it down.

JEFF GUO: We've gotta save the trees.

LATIF: The tree. Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. You even have Queen Elizabeth I—not the second, the first.

LATIF: Okay. All right.

JEFF GUO: You have Queen Elizabeth I. She is issuing royal edicts, saying, "No more charcoal making in my royal forests."

LATIF: Wow.

JEFF GUO: "Like, we just can't—we can't do this anymore." But then something happened.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: So in 1709, this English guy named Abraham Darby, he figured out how to use a different kind of fuel. So not charcoal. So maybe you want to guess what he figured out.

LATIF: Oil, probably. Right?

JEFF GUO: Coal. He figured out ...

LATIF: Coal, all right.

JEFF GUO: He figured out you use this sort of modified coal to run these blast furnaces. And this changed everything. I'm not exaggerating. The iron industry took off. This led to the Industrial Revolution. We avoided the problem. We avoided the shortage. And it's not an isolated example. This is a pattern that comes up. We did this with whales when we stopped using whale oil for lamps and started using kerosene. We did this with rubber when we started making synthetic rubber instead of getting all our rubber from trees. It's happened over and over again where we have stood at the edge of the cliff, where it looked like, oh crap, if we keep doing what we're doing, we are gonna run out of some precious resource.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: And then somehow, at the last minute, catastrophe is averted. I mean, this has happened so often, I feel like we should give it a name.

LATIF: I know. I was gonna say, do economists have some kind of, like, wonky name for this?

JEFF GUO: Not that I could find, so I'm going to take the—the opportunity to give this a name.

LATIF: I love it. Jeff, it is yours, yours to name. Please.

JEFF GUO: Okay. Okay. I think we should call this the Malthusian swerve.

LATIF: Swerve? Malthusian swerve?

JEFF GUO: Swerve. Mm-hmm.

LATIF: Okay. Okay. Okay. And why is that?

JEFF GUO: Because remember—do you remember Thomas Malthus?

LATIF: Yeah. And if I remember he—his whole thing was, like—no, you tell me what his whole thing was like.

JEFF GUO: Yeah, so he was this famous English philosopher type. He lived—you know, he grew up in the 1700s, pretty much around the time that coal was taking over England.

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JEFF GUO: Right? So he was seeing a lot of this happen. And he's famous for predicting that humanity's growth would hit a limit, that, you know, populations would grow faster than we could provide food for them, right? And so the future of humanity was to be limited and trapped by our own lack of resources, and that everybody would just be miserable and sad and poor and hungry forever.

LATIF: He—he does not sound like he would have been fun at parties.

JEFF GUO: Yeah, yeah. He was a real bummer. But maybe what he's more famous for is that none of that happened. The reason that Malthus's prophecy didn't come true ...

LATIF: Yeah?

JEFF GUO: ... is due to what I would say is the most important Malthusian swerve of all time.

LATIF: Okay.

JEFF GUO: And this one is fertilizer.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: Right?

LATIF: It was, like, the green revolution or whatever, right? Is that right?

JEFF GUO: The fertilizer revolution.

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

JEFF GUO: So I don't know if you want to hear the guano story.

LATIF: Please. I love the guano story.

JEFF GUO: Quickly. We can do it quickly.

LATIF: I know the guano story, but I love the guano story, and I want to hear you tell me the guano story.

JEFF GUO: Okay, let's do it together then.

LATIF: Okay, let's do it together.

JEFF GUO: Yeah so, like, the most—so this is, like, the 1800s, a little bit after Malthus's time. In the 1800s, Europeans are starting to realize you can really supercharge food production if you use better fertilizer.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Right? And specifically there's this one fertilizer that Indigenous people in South America were using that was amazing.

LATIF: Guano.

JEFF GUO: Guano!

LATIF: Which is basically just bird poop.

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: Okay, so basically you have all these seabirds, and they would poop on these rocky islands and coastlines along South America. And the poop would just accumulate. So the Europeans—so, like, in the 1800s, the Europeans are importing hundreds and thousands of tons. They're literally fighting wars over control of these guano islands. Like, Spain is getting into wars with Peru and Chile.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Like, just who—who gets to seize the poop islands.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: But the problem is we were using guano way faster than the birds could, you know, make the guano.

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JEFF GUO: And then in the 1900s, in the early 1900s, some German chemists figured out a way to ...

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: ... basically make synthetic guano. They invented an industrial process to literally pull nitrates ...

LATIF: Nitrogen.

JEFF GUO: Yeah, that's, like the key ingredient in guano.

LATIF: Right. Right. Right.

JEFF GUO: To pull it out of the air and make synthetic fertilizer.

LATIF: And that is—that is on the order of a, like, alchemy discovery.

JEFF GUO: Yes.

LATIF: Like, that is, like, this thing that is super-abundant in the air all around us. It is literally the majority of the air. But it was unusable, and then we—there was a hack where we then figured out how to make it usable. That—that seems like ...

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

LATIF: That's, like, a miraculous technological breakthrough.

JEFF GUO: Yeah, it's a miraculous story. And it is, like, maybe one of the best examples of this thing that I'm gonna call the Malthusian swerve.

LATIF: Swerve. I like it. I like it. And so the swerve is like—it's like, when you say "swerve" I'm picturing, like, it's like a car about to collide into a cliff, and then right at the last second—whoop!—it swerves out of the way.

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

LATIF: And Malthus is driving the car, thinking that, of course, we're gonna hit the cliff. And then—really, it's like the passenger who then just, like—just, like ...

JEFF GUO: Takes the wheel.

LATIF: ... just, like, yanks the steering wheel.

JEFF GUO: Yes. Yeah.

LATIF: It's like, "No, not gonna happen." Right at the last second we figured it out.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. And if you look at human history, this is a pattern that happens over and over again.

LATIF: I find this somewhat of a relief.

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

LATIF: It is sort of encouraging. But it also seems like—like, there's so much drama here. And there might be a time where we can't swerve in time. Like, what happens if and when we can't swerve in time? And also, I would argue, sometimes the swerves—sometimes we swerve right into another cliff. So for example, this—the example you talked about, from charcoal to coal, which is great for the trees, except after a while it's also bad for the trees, right? Like, it's like global rising temperatures lead to wildfires, lead to trees not able to grow where they once were able to grow.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. That's true.

LATIF: Like, it's ...

JEFF GUO: It's true. It's true. But we've bought ourselves more time.

LATIF: Fair.

JEFF GUO: Right? We've bought ourselves more time.

LATIF: But then we just always use that time to step on the gas to the next thing, right? And then maybe when we do swerve then we swerve into something worse, something that causes, you know, war or exploitation, or just messes up the planet in a way that you—that is unswervebackable from.

JEFF GUO: I mean, yes. That is all totally right. It is a mess. But, you know, to help us unpack it, I think we should talk about a swerve that we are in the middle of right now.

LATIF: Actually, first we're gonna swerve to break—but only for a minute. Then we'll swerve back and step on the gas directly towards a currently oncoming cliff.

LATIF: Radiolab. Latif. Back with Jeff Guo from Planet Money, telling us about a thing he has noticed called the Malthusian swerve, where we're about to run out of some resource, but at the last minute some new resource or idea or innovation comes along and saves the day. And just before the break, Jeff had been telling us about how he had been looking for examples of this swerve back in the past.

JEFF GUO: And I was like okay, but is there a more recent example? Is there, like, an example of a Malthusian swerve that—that happened, you know, in the past couple of years? And there is one. Oil.

LATIF: Oh, we're in the middle of the Malthusian oil swerve?

JEFF GUO: We are. Yes.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: Remember—do you remember, like, in the '80s and '90s, all of the talk about peak oil?

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Do you remember?

LATIF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and even before that. Like, I think in the '70s and stuff. Like, it's like we keep having this conversation over and over again. Peak oil, peak oil, peak oil.

JEFF GUO: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you have people—you have geologists, distinguished geologists saying—warning us that, you know, we're gonna run out of oil, that we're gonna reach peak oil very soon, and that ...

LATIF: Well, you just told—you just said it—in 52 years or whatever. Like, you just said it.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Yeah.

LATIF: Same thing. Yeah.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Well, back in the 1990s, they were saying it's gonna happen in the 2000s. They were saying, "Oh crap. Like, we're gonna start running out in the year, like, 2000-something."

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: And if you look at oil production, like yeah, it does—especially in the US, yeah, it does kind of start to slow down in the 2000s.

LATIF: Hmm.

JEFF GUO: A lot of people were wondering about what are we gonna do? How are we gonna adapt? How are we gonna move away from oil? And if you look at the chart, you'll see that oil production, it goes—it kind of starts to dip in the 2000s, and then it starts to rise again, more and more and more. There's a—there's a swerve. And that was caused by the fracking revolution.

LATIF: But is that a swerve? Like, I mean, if we're—now we just found another way to get more fossil fuels. Like, is that even really a—that feels like we swerved and swerved right back in the same direction.

JEFF GUO: That is one way to think about it. The way I think about it is, like, it's a mini-swerve, you know? Like, "Oh crap, we're running into the cliff! We can't find any alternatives!" But we did find a way to get a little bit more oil out of the ground in the meantime.

LATIF: But in a way, running out of oil isn't even necessarily the problem here. The problem is the thing it's doing for everything else.

JEFF GUO: It's—it's true. The problem with fossil fuels, it's not that we're gonna run out of them. We have too much of them. It's too easy to go and find oil in the ground.

LATIF: Yeah, that's funny.

JEFF GUO: It's too easy. We have a problem. It's not a scarcity problem. It's an anti-scarcity problem, right?

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: And then we can burn them, and then there are these horrible side effects for the environment. And then the world's getting hotter and wildfires are popping up. Like, that's the problem.

LATIF: It's a much harder sell, though. It's a much harder sell to tell people, "We have too much of this thing that's gonna hurt you," as opposed to, "We have not enough of this thing, so take care of it."

JEFF GUO: Yes! That is the key thing here, I think. Like, you look at how these Malthusian swerves, if we're gonna call it that, how they happened.

LATIF: I love it. I love it. Keep doing it.

JEFF GUO: How did they happen, right? And it was people who were motivated by the terror of we're gonna crash into this giant problem.

LATIF: Right.

JEFF GUO: In so many years. And we need to figure out ...

LATIF: Necessity is the mother of invention—kind of thing.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

LATIF: Desperation is the inventor's best friend.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Yeah, right? And you look at how an economy works. I'm not saying this is the ideal way to operate, but an economy works through incentives.

LATIF: So it's one of those things where the more you use the less you have, the less you have, the higher the price. The higher the price, then all of a sudden, new pockets of that resource that would have been too expensive before to get now become unlocked.

JEFF GUO: Yeah, exactly. Or also, we might try to innovate, right? Like, now there's an incentive to invent something newer, cheaper, better than what we had before. Like, I would bring up the example of, like, lithium, right? Now there's so much money, and if you can invent a battery that doesn't need lithium, you will, like, I don't know, win the Nobel Prize, right? Like, you will—like, there is a lot of energy and motivation to solve that problem.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: And if we were all just gonna be, like, "Well, we just—we don't need that much lithium because we're just gonna conserve it and recycle it and we're not gonna grow," then what's the point of trying to make anything more efficient or better? There's no incentive.

LATIF: Yeah, but it feels like a trap. Like, and an especially capitalist kind of trap where the only thing that will inspire us to innovate or to swerve, to use your word, is the immediate danger of the cliff. Like, I mean, we're talking about resources and economics, GDP and blah, blah, blah. But really this is all like a head game. It's, like, all, like, people's minds work in this very specific way, and long-term thinking is so hard for us. And it's like we've got this system that leans into a thing that is already a problem with us and the way we think. Like, we're just gonna use it as long as it's there, and when it starts to almost not be there, we'll figure out something else.

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Right. How do we get people to actually do the thing that is in the long-term interests of everybody? Is the solution to have, like, some intergalactic Queen Elizabeth come down and say, "No, no, no, no, guys. You're using way too much oil. You gotta stop. You gotta stop. You gotta put a pause on it." Right? Is it that? Or is it sort of we're all left to our own devices, and some combination of the free market and also government leaders worrying about this thing, hash out some kind of, you know, compromise? That's kind of what we're stuck in right now.

LATIF: But, like, we're also smart enough to—can't we figure out a system where we don't have to just drive into the cliff and swerve at the last minute every time, you know?

JEFF GUO: Yeah. Yeah.

LATIF: If this was your car and there was—I mean, this is such a weird analogy. There's only one car. And you, whoever, is in the driver's seat—really, it's all of us, but whoever's in the driver's seat keeps driving, pedal to the metal, accelerating faster and faster, at cliffs.

JEFF GUO: Yes.

LATIF: You would take their keys away. You'd be, like, "Sorry. This—you are not fit to drive."

JEFF GUO: It's scary.

LATIF: Yeah, I don't know. Why do we keep doing that, then? Like, do you think growth is inevitable? Do you think growth is good? What do you—after all this, what is your take on growth, in particular?

JEFF GUO: I think that growth is—maybe we should talk about what growth even is. Like, there are always gonna be parts of the economy that we point at and we're gonna say, "That's bad growth. We don't want that." But growth is not just us burning a lot of fossil fuels and polluting the planet, right? Growth can be good. Like, growth could be starting a new business mentoring kids, inventing a new kind of medicine that saves lives. That is also growth. And so for me, I guess, it's hard for me to say that growth is bad, and maybe it's because I've just been too economics-pilled, but when people say the word "growth" to me, I think of a country like China.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

JEFF GUO: You know, China's economy grew so fast that it lifted 800 million people out of poverty.

LATIF: Incredible.

JEFF GUO: Right? It's, like, hard to say that.

LATIF: Impossible-seeming, yeah.

JEFF GUO: It's hard to say that's bad.

LATIF: That's funny. That was probably the population of the entire Earth in Malthus's time.

JEFF GUO: Right? Yeah. And that's amazing. And so I think it's about figuring out specific things that we can do to be smarter about it, to make it less harmful.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: But ...

LATIF: Yeah, I agree with that. Like, we all have needs. And there are increasingly more of us. But I do think that taking—like, I still am sort of struck by the—Sandy Faber's, like, stone cold, like, zoom-out.

JEFF GUO: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: There's nothing that's wrong about that logic either. She just has a—seemingly a different priority than most economists, which is, like, she's thinking in a—at a different scale.

JEFF GUO: Yeah.

SANDY FABER: We have been given the gift of cosmic time. We have hundreds of millions of years, if not another billion years. But we have not solved the problem of combining human nature with living in abundance.

LATIF: So I should tell you we actually ended up talking to Sandy Faber.

SANDY FABER: My cosmic point of view at this moment is to try to figure out how people will live the best possible life on Earth after cheap energy has passed away.

LATIF: And telling her about your Malthusian swerve idea.

SANDY FABER: Where is the next swerve? That's—that's the thing. That's the thing, specifically with regard to energy.

LATIF: And the thing that she was most concerned about was that energy is just so wrapped up in all these different parts of our lives. Basically, everything we do. And it has these huge effects on the environment. She says we're actually dealing with a bunch of different cliffs and a bunch of different kinds of cliffs all at the same time.

SANDY FABER: Some people call it the "polycrisis," and some people call it the "metacrisis."

LATIF: Basically, we're facing a crisis of crises.

SANDY FABER: A crisis of crises. Yeah. So every time we think of one of these possible swerves—I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue them, but they leave a large fraction—every one leaves a gigantic fraction of the problem unsolved. So I would say a huge issue for a long-term happy human history in the future is having a more mature picture of wealth, how it should be managed, and how growth should be managed.

JEFF GUO: Hmm. I think Sandy and I, we're totally in agreement about what we want for the world, for the future.

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: It's just about how we get there. So can I give you—can I give you my silly galaxy brain way of thinking about all of this?

LATIF: Yeah, please. Please.

JEFF GUO: So you're talking about, like, why can't we—this is—you know, the Earth is our home, so why can't we all, you know, get together and take care of it?

LATIF: Yeah!

JEFF GUO: And cooperate and all of that, right? And if you're just a household of, like, a couple people, you have a relationship. If you're just a village, you, like, know everybody. You—you know, you can help each other out ...

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: ... give each other things. You know, all of that. But ...

LATIF: Yeah.

JEFF GUO: ... when you get bigger and bigger, when you get to the scale of countries and, like, the world, right? It's very hard to get people to cooperate. It's very, very hard. Everybody has different opinions. No one's gonna agree. Everybody's gonna have different motives. And what an economy is is a way of turning all of that, of organizing us at a global scale, into something productive. And obviously, you know, the economy is not perfect. There are all kinds of problems we didn't even have the time to talk about today. But when it comes to dealing with issues of scarcity, like running out of some resource, markets are a tool that, you know, historically have kind of worked, even if it's been super messy and dramatic and swervy and may have created way bigger problems down the road. I'm not saying that the economy is the answer, right? But it does give me a little bit of hope that the economy finds a way—most of the time, hopefully.

LATIF: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Like, is—are we talking about a swerve away from resources, or should we really be talking about a swerve away from a certain kind of thinking, or a certain kind of economy? Or—or just thinking about growth in general? Like—like, it's true, you're right, that an economy is a way to organize a globe. But, like—but maybe we need to be acting more like a household, because—because we only have this one house.

JEFF GUO: If you can figure out a way to do that, they will give you a Nobel Prize, like, on the spot, I guarantee.

LATIF: [laughs] Okay. Well, thank you, Jeff. I don't know if you exactly chased away my existential dread, but I appreciate you sort of holding my hand through it.

JEFF GUO: It's all we have in the end—each other.

LATIF: That's right. Thank you so much.

JEFF GUO: Thanks, Latif. This has been a lot of fun.

LATIF: That was Jeff Guo, host and reporter over at NPR's Planet Money podcast. Thank you to them for loaning us Jeff, for how game he was, his research, his charm and his back-of-the-envelope math. Really appreciate all of that. In fact, we produced this story in collaboration not just with Jeff, but also with the editorial team over there at Planet Money, including Alex Goldmark and Jess Jiang. And so they are actually playing the same conversation on their feed, too, which is very exciting for us.

LATIF: If you don't already know it, Planet Money is a—I mean, it's money. It says it in the title. There are so many smart people, it's full of surprises and adventure. Go check it out on Apple or Spotify or NPR or wherever you get your podcasts. Obviously, you don't need to relisten to this conversation over there, but they did just do a great episode that is a deep dive into GDP. They did another one about synthetic diamonds, which are not a critical Earth resource, but there is kind of a swerve happening there.

LATIF: Anyway, on our side, this episode was produced and edited by Pat Walters and Soren Wheeler. Fact-checked by Natalie Middleton. Special thanks to Jennifer Brendell, and of course thank you, massive thank you to Sandy Faber, her math, her thoughtfulness, her cosmic perspectives, which of course prompted this conversation. And here's hoping it prompts a lot more conversation, maybe even action, as we all move into the next hundred million years of life—hopefully—on this planet.

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser. Thank you for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Keegan, and I'm from Longmont, Colorado. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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