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# Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

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If electricity sounds relatively unimportant, consider this: in the early twenty-first century hundreds of millions of women still face the risk of dying in childbirth because they have the misfortune of going into labour at night, surrounded by darkness and miles away from medical care. Even worse, 3 billion people still cook or access heat and light from biomass, primarily the burning of wood, dung and crop residue. According to the WHO this accounted for 36 per cent of global upper respiratory infections in 2002, 22 per cent of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and almost 2 per cent of all cancers. In other words, transitioning to clean, renewable energy will, even just in the short term, save millions of lives a year – before it begins to play a decisive role in elevating the living standards of the world’s poorest like never before.

Wind

Given as much as 80 per cent of the world’s population inhabits areas with suficient sunlight to rely exclusively on solar, it is obvious that in any transition beyond fossil fuels the focus will be on that particular form of energy.

But what about those colder countries with relatively large populations such as Russia, Canada and much of Northern Europe? Faced with the double-edged problem of far less sunlight and far higher energy requirements, particularly for heating, how can they make a similar shift to that which has already been outlined?

Part of the answer is energy conservation – and this holds true for all places regardless of solar exposure. While for now we might associate the idea of conservation with frugality and rationing, we shouldn’t. In just a few years, saving energy – in your home, car and workplace – will be entirely automated.

The main reason why is the arrival of the internet of things.

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Electric goods, including your car, won’t just be communicating with one another, but distributing and storing energy in real time. If that sounds like an analogue to the internet, it is. Energy internets will soon be operating within and between households, and even everyday objects.

This will be centred around the car, the fulcrum of the transition to renewables in its earliest stages and the leading edge of the clean, autonomous economy. Cars won’t just be data processors on wheels, they’ll be giant portable batteries. And because the average electric vehicle uses around a sixth of its battery each day, there will be such an abundance of storage capacity that the majority of energy will still come from solar even in countries with little sunlight during the winter months. The same will apply to an increasing number of gadgets, not to mention homes, schools and workplaces. And where solar exposure makes that dificult, in places like Britain, increasingly eficient wind farms will make up the diference.

Indeed this is already starting to happen. In 2016 wind farms across the UK generated more electricity than coal power plants for the first time. That’s all the more impressive when you consider the latter was responsible for more than two-thirds of the UK’s electricity as recently as 1990. The following October, wind power in Scotland produced twice that nation’s entire electricity needs.

Underpinning these shifts is the same thing powering the rise of solar energy – the experience curve. Just like progress with solar cells, development in wind turbine technology isn’t showing any sign of abating. In 2017 the British government announced energy from ofshore wind farms would be cheaper than that generated from new nuclear power stations as soon as the early 2020s. The implications of that announcement are hard to overstate. As recently as 2014, ofshore wind in the UK was priced at £150 per megawatt hour, yet less than a decade later its price is set to more than halve, making it cheaper than Hinkley Point C – Britain’s proposed new nuclear power station – before the foundations have even been laid.

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And it doesn’t end there. At some point during the 2020s, ofshore British wind won’t just be cheaper than nuclear power – it’ll be cheaper than any alternative. One leading CEO predicted that Britain would soon generate half of its electricity from renewables, adding, ‘When you look back ten years from now, we ’ll see this period around 2016–17 as an inflection point. The cost of ofshore wind, also solar and onshore wind, is coming down at such speed that nobody could have predicted.

Keeping Warm

Something else matters as much as energy – whether it’s wind or solar – getting cheaper forever and vital storage technologies seeing dramatic falls in cost. That something relates again to energy insulation. Particularly for colder countries, the majority of household energy is expended on simply staying warm. In the UK, the average household heating system uses four times more energy than light and electricity combined. From a renewables perspective this is particularly concerning because energy demand peaks at the precise moment solar potential is at its weakest.

Yet even here the solution is relatively straightforward. Internal energy insulation – when done properly – means little to no energy need be expended on heating at all. Indeed, remarkably, we ’ve known how to create buildings to such a standard for more than forty years.

In 1977, a group of Canadian researchers was contacted by the Saskatchewan provincial government to build a ‘solar home ’ suitable to the local climate. Nearly airtight with tripleglazed windows, thick walls, roof insulation and one of the world’s first heat-recovery ventilators, it remained cool in the summer and warm in the winter using virtually no energy. The Passivhaus was born.

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Today Passivhaus is a voluntary standard for energy eficiency in construction, the objective being to reduce the environmental footprint of the building as much as possible. More recently developed in Germany and Scandinavia, passive design is not a supplementary detail to home building but a holistic approach seeking to integrate aesthetics, function and eficiency. It took of in the shadow of an insurgent green movement in 1980’s Germany, with engineers and architects taking inspiration from the eforts of North American designers as they themselves responded to the oil crisis a decade earlier.

While we will always need energy for light, gadgets, transport and industry, the same isn’t true for heating – certainly not on the scale we see today. Just because the transition to renewables will mean cleaner, more abundant energy than ever, that’s no excuse to ignore potential improvements in energy eficiency. That’s not to mention a big public health incentive. Across England and Wales every winter there are tens of thousands of ‘excess deaths’, primarily resulting from cold weather. Most of these could be avoided by implementing simple changes in homes and workplaces. Unlike renewable generation and storage what has stopped this from happening already isn’t technology, but political priorities.

Another area which demonstrates how innovation isn’t limited to energy generation and storage is light. At present, lighting accounts for one-fifth of UK electricity consumption. With LEDs, just as with improvements in solar cell, wind turbine and lithium-ion technology, we see the dividend of the experience curve in action once more, with the cost per lumen (the standard measure of visible light) falling 90 per cent between 2010 and 2016 alone. Indeed if all UK lighting was switched to LEDs, illumination would account for 3–4 per cent of overall electricity consumption compared to the 20 per cent it does at present.

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The Solutions to Climate Change Are Here

There is no doubt about it – man-made climate change is a crisis whose magnitude is without precedent in human history. Equally true, however, is that we now stand on the brink of an energy revolution set to take us beyond the fuels which have so rapidly warmed our planet.

To mitigate the worst excesses of climate change, that revolution must now be accelerated. Not only is the enduring survival of our species at stake, but the very capacity of the Earth to sustain life. What is more, this opportunity extends beyond simply avoiding catastrophe, with extreme supply in energy potentially critical in severing the chains of under-development which, for so long, has held back the Global South. Riding the experience curve, technologies like solar cells, lithium-ion batteries, wind turbines and LEDs will mean permanently cheaper energy, ultimately not just outdoing fossil fuels but, as with information and labour, taking us beyond scarcity altogether. That is before we even develop the next generation of renewable technologies.

But as we ’ve already seen, this is at odds with the essence of capitalist social relations, a system where ‘the most basic condition for economic eficiency … [is] that price equal marginal cost’ – that is, where things must be made for profit if they are to be made at all. That means one likely response to extreme supply in energy is that companies will try to make the appropriate technology artificially scarce, market rationality requiring that at some point in the commodity chain rationing (what is called excludability) has to be inserted. If that sounds bizarre, it shouldn’t. After all it was the very issue that Larry Summers wrote about in 2001, and his recommendations would ultimately inform how the entertainment industries adapted to the challenges of extreme supply with peer-to-peer distribution and file-sharing as they pursued new business models like Spotify and Netflix. As the price of energy, like labour and information, moves ever closer to zero, there too it is likely we will pay through rents rather than purchasing the good itself.

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The evidence increasingly suggests that a transition to renewables is coming. If that is accepted, the central question then becomes: how quickly, and with what ownership models? Because it turns out that under the Third Disruption it isn’t just information and labour which want to be free – it’s energy, too.

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6 Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources

The Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources.

Peter Diamandis

A Finite World

The issue of resource scarcity and depletion is, alongside climate change, one of the central challenges of our age. While the sun may furnish us with more energy than we can possibly use, minerals like lithium and cobalt – needed to store solar energy in any post-carbon system – are ultimately limited. Which means that for any comparative advantages renewable energy does possess, it ultimately sufers the same problem as fossil fuels: ours is a finite world and we are fast approaching its limits. Regardless of the experience curve for solar cells, LEDs and lithium-ion batteries, without more minerals to build them, our future will still be one defined by scarcity.

Regardless of where our energy comes from, the problem of diminishing resources is now more pressing than ever. As a report by the Club of Rome, an organization that researches global limits, ominously noted in 2014: ‘The production of many mineral commodities appears to be on the verge of decline … we may be going through a century-long cycle that will lead to the disappearance of mining as we know it.’

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In this scenario coal production is forecast to peak by 2050, with ‘peak copper’ a reality a decade earlier. Lithium, a key mineral in what would be the mainstream technology for renewable energy storage, would quickly become strained in the event of wide-scale decarbonisation. While the Earth likely has suficient quantities of it for a complete transition away from fossil fuels, even if global demand doubled, that would still require stockpiles to be continually recycled. While plausible – although at present only 1 per cent of batteries are processed in such a way – and no doubt an improvement, that is still a long way from post-scarcity and permanently cheaper energy.

That same report proceeded to outline how nickel and zinc, widely used in electricity storage, could face similar production peaks in just ‘a few decades’. Though the lifespan of nickel mining might be extended for the best part of a century, it will be ‘increasingly dificult and expensive to invest in and exploit.’

Perhaps the most alarming trend in mineral depletion, however, is phosphorus – an indispensable fertiliser in modern agriculture. While reserves of the chemical are far from low, only a fraction of it can ever be mined, meaning crop yields for 40 per cent of the world’s arable land are already constrained by its limited availability.

Any shortage is particularly problematic in the broader context of declines in land productivity resulting from industrial agricultural methods which, in some places, have seen soil fertility fall by as much as 50 per cent. In 2014, researchers from the University of Shefield claimed British soil had only 100 harvests left as a result of intense over-farming. At the precise moment the Earth’s human population peaks in its demand for resources, the planet looks set to give up in exhaustion.

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The present trajectory means not only will the world run out of fossil fuels, if we continue to use them, but even in the event of completely transitioning to renewable energy we will have to continually recycle multiple mineral resources. That might sound like a good thing, and it is, but it doesn’t fit with what we know about the rapacity of capitalism and profit. In a world of more than 9 billion people, extracting resources as we do – killing people and destroying habitats in the process – simply won’t be viable. Furthermore, mineral scarcity would just as likely give rise to resource conflicts as it would to cooperation and recycling. So even if information, labour and energy became permanently cheaper, the limits of the earth would confine post-capitalism to conditions of abiding scarcity. The realm of freedom would remain out of reach.

Except the limits of the earth won’t matter anymore – because we ’ll mine the sky instead.

Asteroid Mining

In 2017 Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, unveiled the company’s next step in conquering the final frontier. Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress, he announced the launch of the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) – a new architecture consisting of a huge first-stage booster rocket, spaceship and refuelling tanker – all of which would replace the company’s present systems. In a pivot away from commercial satellites and trips to the International Space Station, Musk outlined how the company’s major ambition would be manned missions to other planets.

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While space transportation might feel like the cutting edge of technology, no rocket has yet surpassed NASA’s Saturn V – first launched in 1967. To this day it remains the tallest, heaviest, most powerful vehicle ever built. Its design and construction were overseen by Wernher von Braun, the engineer behind Nazi Germany’s V2 rocket – the first man-made object to reach space. In the fifty years since, we have yet to see a more impressive machine than one whose construction was led by a man born before a plane even crossed the Atlantic.

In order to send humans to Mars, Musk’s SpaceX will have to deliver precisely that. Enter the BFR – short for ‘big fucking rocket’ – the intended successor to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters. Using a new family of Raptor rocket engines, the BFR will finally unseat Saturn V as the most impressive launch vehicle ever constructed. At the same time NASA is working on its Space Launch System which, when completed, will join the BFR in a new super-Saturn V category of spacecraft.

Birth of a Private Space Industry

Musk forecasts the first delivery of cargo to Mars using the ITS as soon as 2022, two years before the first humans set foot on the Red Planet. While his predictions are often right, Musk is notoriously late in delivery. That is partly a function of his business interests – renewables, electric cars and rockets – being at the cutting edge of industrial innovation. In reality, however, it is more an outgrowth of the South African’s knack for raising interest through promising what seems undeliverable. While that is good for grabbing the media spotlight, it is bad for meeting deadlines.

But if you look at the story of SpaceX so far, you soon realise you’d be a fool to bet against him. Musk founded the company at the turn of the millennium, with NASA rudderless in the twilight years of the Space Shuttle programme and the romance of earlier decades drained from the industry. Then, the idea of commercial space transport was widely viewed as outlandish, and Musk a spendthrift eccentric.

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