We’re all familiar with what infrastructure looks like at its worst: spending hours in traffic, paying hundreds of dollars for a water bill, or pacing back and forth until the next train comes. But what about when it’s at its best? What does a world look like with unlimited access to clean energy?
That’s what scientist Deb Chachra is envisioning.
In her 2023 debut book, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, Chachra explains the political, cultural, and scientific challenges to unlocking a prosperous future through better infrastructure. Humans are great (for the most part) at understanding our many problems — like how fossil fuels contribute to climate change — she writes, but “most of us don’t have a lot of practice thinking about the shared futures we do want to live in.”
Chachra, a professor at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, is ensuring that changes. She’s training a new generation of material scientists and engineers to lay the groundwork for an optimistic future in the face of profound societal despair.
According to Chachra, the material conditions of our day-to-day lives have depended just as much on the availability of energy as they have on technological innovations and inventions themselves.
Take for example, aluminum, a material essential to making cars, planes, and bikes, preserving canned foods, and so much else. The metal is abundant in the earth, but it takes a lot of energy to separate aluminum molecules from other materials. So for much of human history, it was considered a rare metal. The 19th century boom in aluminum production came not from a smart engineering solution to extract those molecules, but from the scaling up of hydroelectricity projects built during the New Deal. Suddenly, we had more than enough energy to separate aluminum from other metals. (It’s still energy-intensive to extract and separate aluminum — so recycling the material is a must.)
We are now on the precipice of a similar breakthrough with renewable energy. The sun has the potential to provide humanity an unlimited energy supply. How we tap into that energy and transform it into essential infrastructure like transportation, clean water, universal internet access, and more is what material scientists and engineers are trying to figure out for the century ahead. Cheap solar energy could unlock technological possibilities that have been out of our reach, like large-scale, high-speed rail, or desalination plants that can create potable water in coastal cities.
Intrinsic to Chachra’s work is encouraging her students’ sense of hope, agency, and curiosity — that’s the only way forward, she argues. “We have to keep our eyes on the prize,” she said. “The effect of having the ‘I need to keep my head down and stop bad things from happening’ versus the ‘head up, looking forward, using the privilege we have to try to build a world that’s better’ is a very different position. Using that as a framing with how to deal with the social and politics of it all is what resonates to me the most.”
Here’s an excerpt of our conversation, edited for clarity.
Why are we so accustomed to doom and gloom when it comes to thinking about how we could live in the future?
A chunk of it is what I describe as “dystopia bias.” This is high school English literature class, right? There’s conflict. Back in the day, the conflict was man versus self, man versus nature, or man versus other. One of the drivers for media — especially large-scale media, like Hollywood blockbusters — is dystopia bias. We watch lots of movies that are set in a future of scarcity, of conflict. I love Mad Max: Fury Road, but if you think about Elysium, The Hunger Games, and all of this media set in this future, it’s because it’s more fun to watch. If you look at things like Star Trek, the conflict is set at the periphery, not the center of the culture, which is largely a sort of peaceful, post-scarcity Earth.
It’s funny. Somewhere I found a quote that was like, if you write or show media that’s set in the culture where everyone has all their basic needs met and lives in peace and stability, you’re basically writing Jane Austen in space.
That’s fundamentally one of the reasons why we don’t have a lot of practice, because most of our visions of the future are ones that are kind of fun to consume, and they contain conflict as part of the narrative. We don’t really have other models.
More broadly, I think people would say, look, many of us don’t have practice thinking about models of the future at all except in the most limited saving for retirement, your kids are going to go to college type of way. As opposed to doing it as a group.
We don’t really account for innovation. That’s a common human fallacy: Why wouldn’t things in the future be the way that they are now? It’s hard for us to conceptualize these very small, imperceptible changes that happen over time, in addition to coming up with new solutions.
One of the things that I usually use as an example is LED lights.
I’m old enough that I remember that you could bake cupcakes in an Easy-Bake Oven from the heat from incandescent light bulbs. Those light bulbs have essentially been phased out — they’re incredibly inefficient. Then we went through the period of halogen lights, which produced even more heat, and terrible compact fluorescents. And now we just have really good, highly efficient LEDs everywhere. That took a couple of decades of constant policy, funded research, and innovation to get us to light that is both highly energy efficient and also kind of acceptable, or even pleasant. These are nicer to use and you can do many more things with them than you could do with incandescents.
But I don’t think one person in a hundred will actually have noticed that as a significant technological shift, and that it was done deliberately. We can see what’s coming down the pike, but we just kind of absorb the stuff that happens without really realizing that we’ve actually, with a few exceptions, lived through significant shifts.
Speaking of shifts, your book has this shocking statistic about how it would take 10 times more energy for the rest of the world to catch up to the energy usage of the average person in Canada, where you grew up.
How could a world even use 10 times more energy than we’re using now, considering how we’re getting our energy? What are you envisioning when you’re talking to students or talking to other experts about how we’re going to make this energy revolution more equitable as well as more efficient?
Some people talk about this as [a] “just transition” — that we are in the process of transitioning away from getting our energy basically via matter; by extraction, setting things on fire, transforming those molecules into different molecules, extracting the energy, and then dumping those molecules. That’s essentially what we’re doing when we talk about fossil fuels.
We mine carbon in the form of fossil fuels. We transform it in a way that releases the energy that we use. And then we just dump the CO2 atoms pretty much in the atmosphere. We’re hitting the limit to that. Historically, we have only been able to get rid of energy by passing through matter.
But there are exceptions: Large-scale hydroelectricity is, of course, an excellent example. Renewable energy is broadly about getting energy without having to pass through this extraction phase, without having to pass through matter to get there.
When you talk about everyone having access to 10 times as much energy as they currently do, it’s by leveraging this sort of energy — as a public good — that is everywhere around them. It is not by going through extraction mining. That’s not tenable, even in the places where that’s currently our world. It is absolutely not tenable everywhere else.
One of those underappreciated shifts is that somewhere north of 95 percent of people have access to mobile phones. They might not have their own, but they have access to one through a community phone or other ways of access. They essentially leapfrogged landlines. There are many places in the world that never had telephones by wire and jump-started to mobile data. The energy shift is going to be something similar to that.
Many places are never going to pass through the fossil fuel stage. They’re going to leapfrog the fossil fuel stage and go straight into harvesting the renewable energy that’s available in their local environment and doing that in a decentralized way.
I would love for you to talk a little bit more about what it means to have infrastructure as a public good, especially when it comes to energy.
We all have sort of a deep, intuitive understanding that infrastructure is a public good. That’s why we get outraged when people don’t have access to clean drinking water. We get outraged when there are power failures. We think that having access to broadband is a human right because it’s a necessity to participate in our society. We think that transportation — having access to mobility — is a right. We build systems to make that possible.
Infrastructure works best when we treat it as a public good. In terms of the history of infrastructure, some of it has been about building public goods from scratch, but a chunk of it has been about infrastructure being built out of private goods and that have then been made public. The subway in New York is a great example. It was originally a bunch of separate lines built by private contractors that were then brought in under the umbrella of, “No, actually, this is a network that is beneficial if more people have access to it; they have access to all the systems.” Anything, very quickly, becomes a deep moral hazard when it becomes a network monopoly.
If we do renewables and we treat them as a public good and don’t gate their usage — which we shouldn’t because it’s hard to make money off renewable energy because it’s so cheap — that’s actually not a downside. That’s only a problem if you’re trying to make money, but having incredibly cheap energy for the good of humanity is … I don’t see that as a problem. That’s a feature, not a bug.
My last question for you is the most annoying one — which isn’t the science. It’s the social, political, economic portion: How do we get people on board? Obviously the answer as to why is obvious, but the how is much more interesting.
I teach 18-year-old engineering students. And let me tell you, climate despair is real. If you’re an 18-year-old and you care about the world and you’re interested in technology and you go to engineering school, the message that you’ve heard is essentially that the grown-ups who came before you have messed everything up, and it is now your job to face a future of deprivation and scarcity and try to undo or at least limit the damage. That is ultimately what people are saying when they say, “Look, we have to change, and we have to make sacrifices.”
But what I tell my students is that it’s not their job to stop climate change or to stop these bad things from happening. It’s to build this world of abundant, equitable, resilient, sustainable energy and agency for everyone. It’s where we’re closing the materials loops, where we’re putting solar energy to work to sieve out microplastics from the ocean, or build desalination plants so everyone who lives by the ocean has guaranteed provision of water that’s locally produced, so it doesn’t have to come from somewhere else. It becomes like, “Yeah, of course that’s what we do!”
To me, a huge piece of the social side is recognizing that this is the future that we have all the resources that we need to build. The goal is not to keep bad things from happening. The goal is to build this better future, and we will solve climate change on the way. We will hopefully start remediating our ecosystems along the way. But the actual goal is to build the part of the stories that they write science fiction about: the sort of peaceful, orderly, post-scarcity, abundant, self-actualized energy future.
