Human Progress Logo Human Progress

01 / 05
The Land of Ice, Fire, and Innovation

Blog Post | Innovation

The Land of Ice, Fire, and Innovation

Innovation has served Iceland for 1,150 years. Why change a working recipe?

Gale L. Pooley —

Summary: Iceland has long thrived through innovation and freedom. Its history is one of transforming scarcity into strength and discovery. Joining the European Union could trade entrepreneurial vitality for bureaucratic constraint and regulation. Iceland’s story proves that wealth flows not from the ground, but from the boundless resource of human imagination.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Iceland, a country of about 390,000 people. The place feels like a mash-up of Hawaii and Alaska, with a land area roughly the size of Kentucky. Iceland has around 130 volcanoes, with about 30 considered active. Along with the volcanoes there are around 500 earthquakes per week. Many of these are microquakes (below a magnitude of 2.0) that go unnoticed, but about 44 a year register a magnitude of 4.0 or higher within 180 miles of the island.

The statue of Leif Erikson and the Hallgrímskirkja church in Reykjavík, Iceland

The International Monetary Fund projects Iceland’s GDP per capita to reach $81,220 in 2025, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP). This compares to $89,110 for the US and $64,550 for the European Union (EU).

The purpose of my visit was to talk about why Iceland should or should not join the EU. The event was hosted by Students for Liberty Europe and RSE, the Icelandic Centre for Social and Economic Research. What does this topic have to do with our book, Superabundance?

In our book we argue that we’re experiencing a period of superabundance, where personal resource abundance is increasing faster than population growth. This period started about 200 years ago after millennia of stagnation. We attribute this in large part to people recognizing that the freedom to innovate lifts humanity out of poverty. Innovation is the discovering and sharing of valuable new knowledge in markets. Around 1820, the planet’s dormant entrepreneurs began to blossom and bear fruit. But Iceland has been innovating much longer than 200 years.

Iceland can be considered a creation of entrepreneurs. It was first settled around 874 CE by Norse explorers, primarily from Norway, led by Ingólfr Arnarson, who is traditionally recognized as the island’s first permanent settler. He established his homestead in what is now Reykjavík (“Smoky Bay”), named after the steam rising from nearby hot springs.

Throughout history, the creators have fled the takers—escaping oppression to found new realms of freedom where ideas could multiply and wealth could grow. This is the ancient rhythm of renewal that gave birth to America. The settlers of Iceland were largely Vikings, along with some Celtic slaves (it was typical of the times to enslave defeated peoples) and settlers from the British Isles. Drawn by the island’s fish and grazing land, they sought independence from Norway’s consolidating monarchy.

By 930 CE, the settlers established the Althing, one of the world’s oldest parliaments, at Þingvellir, creating a system of governance where chieftains met annually to settle disputes and make laws. This marked the start of the Icelandic Commonwealth, a decentralized society without a king.

Iceland’s Parliament House

The population grew to around 50,000 by the 11th century, sustained by farming, fishing, and trade. The Commonwealth lasted 332 years, until 1262, when internal conflicts and external pressure from Norway led Iceland to pledge allegiance to the Norwegian crown, ending its independence. This set the stage for centuries of foreign rule, first by Norway and later Denmark. Iceland finally achieved full independence 682 years later, in 1944, establishing the modern Republic of Iceland.

Wealth Is Knowledge and Growth Is Learning

Superabundance is based on the ideas of Julian Simon and George Gilder. Two of the book’s key principles are that wealth is knowledge and growth is learning. These apply directly to Iceland—a nation that turned scarcity into strength and desolation into discovery. With little arable land and few natural endowments, Icelanders learned that the ultimate resource was not in the soil or the waters but in the capacity to imagine and create.

When oil shocks hit in the 1970s, Iceland had little domestic energy. Rather than surrender to scarcity, Icelanders turned to what they had in superabundance. They drilled not for fossil fuels but for fire beneath the earth, turning volcanic fury into light and heat. Today, nearly all of Iceland’s power flows from geothermal and hydroelectric abundance—proof that energy, like wealth, begins not with matter but with knowledge.

And from this same well of ingenuity emerged a national symbol—the Blue Lagoon. The world-famous pools and spa were born from the overflow of the Svartsengi geothermal power station, where geothermal brine spilled into a lava field and transformed an industrial by-product into a national treasure. What began as an accident became an emblem of Icelandic creativity—a living harmony of mind and matter, fire and water.

The Blue Lagoon reminds us that wealth is not drawn from the ground but flows from the fountain of human imagination, where even the castoffs of creation can shimmer with new light. In Iceland, energy is not merely harnessed—it is redeemed.

In the early 20th century, Iceland was a country primarily reliant on imported coal to meet its energy needs. The first hydropower station was built in 1904, and today there are 15 stations producing 73 percent of the nation’s electricity. Geothermal represents the other 27 percent.

Ljósafoss Power Station

Abundant, affordable, and reliable energy is one of the fountainheads of modern civilization, turning ingenuity into prosperity. Yet Europe’s leaders, in their zeal to perfect nature, have turned against the very forces that sustain it. By dismantling coal, nuclear, and gas in favor of windmills and solar panels, they are not advancing progress but reversing it, replacing mastery with dependence and innovation with austerity. The continent that once ignited the Industrial Revolution now flirts with a new age of scarcity—an empire of entropy cloaked in virtue. The great tragedy is the belief that prosperity can be preserved by suppressing the freedom that created it. Prosperity follows those who dare to learn from the world, not those who try to silence it.

For Iceland to thrive, it must continue to unleash its creative energy—to innovate, to speak, and to let knowledge flow as freely as its geothermal springs. Iceland is proof that wealth is not in the ground but in the mind. When faced with the scarcity of matter, Icelanders discovered the infinite power of knowledge.

That same spirit of redemption drives Iceland’s modern economy. From deCODE genetics, which unlocked the secrets of the Icelandic genome, to Össur, whose prosthetics restore mobility with grace and precision, Iceland exports ideas more than goods. Its renewable energy now powers data centers and digital frontiers, where bits replace barrels and imagination fuels growth. And in the northern village of Ísafjörður, Kerecis has turned the skin of cod—once discarded as waste—into a life-giving biomaterial that heals human wounds across the world.

Iceland reminds us that every economy is a learning system, and every act of enterprise a revelation. Growth is not a race for resources but a search for truth—the discovery of new knowledge that multiplies as it is shared. In this sense, Iceland has learned its way into wealth, proving that in the long dialogue between man and nature, the mind is the great multiplier.

The story of Iceland is the story of civilization itself. Every act of creation is an act of learning, a small echo of the divine mind that made the world intelligible. Wealth in its truest form is not measured in metals or markets but in moments of revelation—when knowledge transforms scarcities into abundances. Iceland proved the eternal law of creativity: that human learning, illuminated by faith and freedom, can turn even the coldest rock—or the humblest fish—into a beacon of light.

Choose Wisely

So why would a nation of entrepreneurs and innovators want to be subject to a union of regulators and bureaucrats? As of 2024, the number of staff working for the European Commission is over 80,000 across all 76 EU bodies. That would be one regulator for every 4.8 Icelanders. The future of Iceland lies with leaders like Thor Jensen, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, Fertram Sigurjonsson, Heiðar Guðjónsson, and Bala Kamallakharan, not armies of Brussels bureaucrats.

To secure its future, Iceland must remain a beacon of open inquiry and energy creativity. It should champion innovation over ideology—embracing every technology that multiplies human capability rather than constrains it. By coupling free markets with free minds, Iceland can continue to illuminate a path from scarcity to superabundance, showing the world that the greatest renewable resource is human creativity itself.

Choose wisely, Iceland. Your history is watching.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

Semafor | Energy Production

Argentina’s Shale Boom Drives a Shift to Net Energy Exports

“Argentina’s shale output is up 28% year-on-year as the country’s pivot to become an energy supplier — rather than buyer — gathers pace. Shale now represents 71% of Argentina’s total production of both oil and gas, and crude has overtaken corn and soy to become its top export; Buenos Aires had a record energy surplus of $7.8 billion last year, after becoming a net exporter in 2024.”

From Semafor.

Blog Post | Water Use

The AI Land and Water Panic Is Wrong

Bill Maher and Erin Brockovich think we are running out. We are not.

Marian L. Tupy —

Summary: Concerns that AI data centers are exhausting America’s land and water are largely overstated. Data centers occupy relatively little land compared with agriculture and other established uses, while their water consumption reflects temporary displacement rather than permanent loss. New cooling technologies and alternative water sources are also reducing local demand, suggesting that engineering—not scarcity—will shape AI’s environmental impact.

The American consumer advocate Erin Brockovich went on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night to talk about what she has spent the year mapping: American towns that found out a data center was coming only after the bulldozers arrived. She has collected thousands of such reports from all fifty states. A big facility, she says, can consume millions of gallons of water a day. The audience was meant to conclude that artificial intelligence is swallowing the country’s water and land.

Start with the land, because that part is easy to settle. Cushman and Wakefield, the commercial real estate firm that tracks these deals, reports that the average parcel bought for a data center in 2024 ran to a couple hundred acres. Scale that up by the computing capacity the industry expects to have running by 2030, and by my reckoning every data center in America, plus all the ground around the buildings, comes to roughly the area of Rhode Island. The buildings themselves would fit inside a mid-sized city.

Now compare that with how we already use land. The federal government requires refiners to blend corn ethanol into gasoline and growing that corn takes an area about the size of New York State, for a fuel that a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found is probably dirtier than the gasoline it replaces. The Agriculture Department pays farmers to leave a Kentucky-sized area unplanted. Since 2000, American farmland has shrunk by an area larger than Colorado, and output went up anyway. None of this made the evening news.

Water is the harder argument, and it is where the case goes wrong at the level of chemistry. A data center does not destroy water. Cooling moves heat but does not burn anything. Hydrogen and oxygen do not come apart in a cooling tower. The water molecules leave as vapor, and hydrologists have long put their average stay in the atmosphere at about nine days before they fall again as rain. The word often used, “consumption,” does not mean the water is gone. It means the water left the neighborhood. That is a genuine cost to a neighborhood. It is not a subtraction from the world’s supply, and no amount of AI will make it one.

The problem of local water displacement is one that engineers have been fixing for two years. The scary numbers come from old evaporative towers, but the newer Nvidia chips run at 113 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hotter than the air outside on most summer days. Heat moves from hot to cold on its own, so the liquid sheds its warmth into the open air through a radiator, like the one in a car. Those radiators need fans, and fans need power, so the better chips turn a water problem into an electricity problem. That is a good trade, because building power is something this country knows how to do.

Similarly, Microsoft has announced designs that circle the same fluid through a sealed loop past the chip and back. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft already run some sites on treated city wastewater rather than anything anyone would drink.

Brockovich anticipated this answer. In an essay published two days before the broadcast, she argued that a sealed loop does not remove the water use but only moves it to the power plant that supplies the electricity. She is right that this second, hidden figure is bigger than the water used at the site itself. But the two together still amount to less than one percent of all the water Americans consume. The figures behind it come from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in a study Congress ordered and the Energy Department published. Its lead author, the staff scientist Arman Shehabi, supplies the numbers that both sides of this argument quote.

The comparison with national consumption is drawn by Robin Gaster of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who reviewed the same evidence in July and drew two conclusions. The technology to bring on-site water use near zero already exists. And the upstream share depends on which power plants get built, which means it is not fixed either. A forecast of disaster must assume that nobody will ever build anything different.

For scale, the EPA’s WaterSense program reports that outdoor household water use runs to about nine billion gallons a day, most of it landscape irrigation: suburban sprinklers use more water in two days than all data centers in the country uses directly in a year.

The host pushed back against Brockovich’s more alarmist claims, but he soon went back to his old assumption that there are simply too many of us and that we are using too many resources. In an April 2019 monologue, Maher cheered the falling birth rate, called fewer humans the best gift we could give the planet, and named our numbers as the great unspoken cause of the climate crisis. Last Friday, he repeated those concerns. He was wrong to do so.

In 1980, the economist Julian Simon bet the biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, that a basket of metals would grow cheaper as the population grew. Ehrlich sent the check ten years later. The economist Gale Pooley and I are keeping the score. The Simon Abundance Index we published this April found that the Earth was 536 percent more resource-abundant in 2025 than in 1980, a period in which humanity added nearly four billion people. Every commodity we track is more plentiful per person than it was, because each additional person arrives with a mind as well as a mouth.

Maher has spent three decades treating every new demand on the earth as a bite out of a fixed inheritance. Data centers are only the latest one. The land is plentiful. The water is not leaving the planet, and the engineers cooling these AI machines are already several product cycles into solving the thing he is sure cannot be solved.

Interesting Engineering | Mineral Production

US Hits Jackpot: 1.78 Million Tons of Tungsten in Nevada Desert

“A US critical minerals company has recently confirmed the nation’s largest known tungsten resource at its Railroad Valley Minerals Project in Nye County, Nevada, despite a NASA land withdrawal restricting exploration across part of the site.

In its updated resource report, 3 Proton Lithium (3PL) said that the project hosts an inferred resource of 1.78 million tons of tungsten. The company revealed that the deposit is part of a mineral system that also contains world-class resources of lithium, potash, and boron.

As per 3PL, the deposit is reportedly five times larger than the biggest tungsten resource currently listed in the US and comes at a time when the country relies heavily on imports for the strategic metal…

At current consumption rates, the resources could provide the U.S. with tungsten for hundreds of years, 3PL said.”

From Interesting Engineering.

Yale Environment 360 | Energy Production

The World Adds a Third Terawatt of Solar Power

“In March, the world passed a major energy milestone, adding its third terawatt of solar power. Increasingly, poorer countries are leading the shift to solar, analysts say.

It took nearly seven decades, after the invention of the silicon solar cell in 1954, for the world to install 1 terawatt of solar capacity, conceivably enough to power the entire United States. After passing that milestone in 2022, the world added its second terawatt in 2024 and its third in 2026, Bloomberg reports.

BloombergNEF expects installations will continue apace, with the world hitting 9 terawatts of solar power by 2036. Analysts project that, by that date, poor countries will have installed more solar power than rich countries, China notwithstanding.”

From Yale Environment 360.