Fears of exponential population growth in Africa and Asia were widespread (with dark, racist undertones), which seems ironic today given the population crash we’re seeing in the 22nd century. It was said that bringing the world’s poorest into modern levels of consumption would doom the environment.

Ecomodernism taught us the reality that no one enjoys poor sanitation, endless toil in the fields or living without access to clean energy. When offered the choice, everyone prefers modernity.

By decoupling energy use from natural processes, we were able to bring almost everyone out of poverty without damaging the planet. Population growth dropped dramatically when we provided economic opportunity to people in developing countries, particularly women.

It taught us the need for clean, energy-dense fuels

The history of human energy use is mostly one of switching to fuels of increasing energy density: from wood (18MJ/kg) and dung (15.5MJ/kg), to coal (30MJ/kg), to whale oil (40MJ/kg) to mineral oil (45MJ/kg), to gas (55MJ/kg), to uranium (2,000,000MJ/kg) and hydrogen (90,000,000MJ/kg). These energy transitions only take place when there are suitable substitutions available.

England used to be covered in forest. By the end of the 16th century, almost all of it had been cleared away, in large part for fuel. The expansion of coal mining provided a substitute for trees, but there was a problem: coal was dreadfully unpopular.

Coal was strange. Coal was different. It was smelly. It was toxic. Imagine giving a medieval peasant a rock from the ground that you could burn for fuel. Preachers even labelled coal the “devil’s excrement”, dug as it was from the bowels of the Earth. Eventually, there were so few trees left that a switch to coal was inevitable, and the invention of the chimney dealt with the worst of the fumes. That switch allowed the trees to grow back. The rise of coal also laid the foundations for the first Industrial Revolution, which started humanity down a path that has lifted billions out of poverty.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries we killed hundreds of thousands of whales to harvest their oily blubber. The oil went into everything: candles, machine lubricants, soap and even makeup. Again, to quit whale oil we needed a substitute. This time, it was the economic extraction of oil from the ground. Yes: oil wells saved the whale from extinction.

An 1861 cartoon showing sperm whales celebrating the discovery of new petroleum wells in Pennsylvania. The proliferation of mineral oils reduced demand for their species’ oil.

The move in the 2010s and 2020s towards wind, solar and biomass energy broke the golden rule of energy density. After centuries of reducing our impact on natural systems despite rising energy consumption, these energy forms “recoupled” our consumption to sources that had to be harvested over very large areas of planet. Not only that, but these technologies could not fully substitute for oil and gas.

The good news was that we did already have a substitute: nuclear power. The bad news was that nuclear, like coal before it, was seen as the devil’s excrement. The climate crisis, air pollution, carbon taxes, habitat destruction and energy poverty inevitably drove societies towards nuclear, but it took the ideas of ecomodernism to help it along.

When we switched to nuclear we eliminated CO2 pollution and no longer needed damaging fossil fuel extraction industries.

Organisations like Dogwood Alliance eventually succeeded in highlighting the environmental damage caused by biofuel harvesting.

After years of failed attempts by activists to close this coal mine in Germany, it was cheap nuclear power that finally killed off coal and other fossil fuels in the late 2030s.

Endless land-hungry solar farms continued to be constructed way into the 2050s (as the presence of this early flycar suggests).

Ecomodernism urged the world to take a fresh look at nuclear power. It ticked all the boxes: energy-dense and abundant fuel, low land use, no carbon emissions, no other atmospheric pollution, tiny waste volumes, flexible, dispatchable and affordable.

It was a joint Franco-Chinese initiative that made the case for an international, coordinated deployment of nuclear at the UN climate crisis talks of 2034. This led to a relaunch of the UN “Atoms for Peace” programme, and the designing of a series of open-source, factory-built, nuclear reactors to produce electricity, carbon-neutral fuels for cars and planes, district heating for homes and low-carbon desalinated water.

This desert compound is pumping out much-needed carbon-free energy. Central to its operations is a large, advanced reactor with over 1,000 megawatts of capacity that supplies most of the power used by a growing city 25 miles to the east. The reactor is mostly underground, which is an efficient way to help meet rigorous standards for security and safety (courtesy: Third Way).

Before the 2040s, nuclear reactors were deployed away from where people lived. Advanced reactors brought the technology into the heart of the city to supply combined heat and power (courtesy: Third Way).

Before this arctic community got a small advanced reactor in 2052, it was wholly dependent on cripplingly expensive electricity and heat from diesel generators. The diesel fuel had to be trucked many hundreds of miles across the ice (courtesy: Third Way).

It taught us to minimize our material and land footprint

Ecomodernism taught us to use technology to reduce pressure on the land. That meant tackling agricultural land use, both for crop farming and livestock pasture. It’s hard to picture now given the resurgence of global forest cover these last forty years, but by the 2020s around half of all habitable land was being used for agriculture.

Approximate world land use in 2015.

The first ecomodernist win was providing rich countries an alternative to meat and dairy, which are the most land-hungry food groups. Eating less meat became a whole lot easier with the development of synthetic meats based on vegetable proteins. Gene-edited proteins developed in the US lent a really meaty flavour that helped many “carnivores” give up meat almost entirely.

The second ecomodernist win was global acceptance that new technology such as gene-edited crops and indoor vertical farming (powered with clean energy) allowed cropland to be freed up for massive rewilding projects.