Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Today is Earth Day 2013, apparently.  This would be a good day for everyone on Earth to accept that, given the incontrovertible operational reality of the exponential function in Nature, technological optimism is not a good idea.

I am grateful to a couple of my regular readers who have, completely independently, directed me towards complementary sources of information that go right to the core of what this blog is all about.  Before getting into the detail, I will start by simply stating what these two sources of information are, as follows:

1.  Thanks to Pendantry, I have discovered an incisive presentation (circa 2002) of Dr Albert A. Bartlett, entitled ‘Arithmetic, Population and Energy’, which High School science teacher Greg Craven (who gave the World the ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ video) has been posted on You Tube as a series of eight 9-minute videos.

2. Thanks to Mike (of uknowispeaksense fame), I have been alerted to the very recent publication of a paper by economist Partha S. Dasgupta and biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, entitled ‘Pervasive Externalities at the Population, Consumption, and Environment Nexus’.  The abstract is viewable on the Science journal website but, having done a quick Google search, I found the entire paper published as a PDF by Dasgupta on the website of Cambridge University.

Although a daunting task, I will now attempt to summarise both works; starting today with the presentation by Bartlett.  So as to do both works justice, I will publish my summary of Dasgupta and Ehrlich separately.

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‘Arithmetic, Population and Energy’ by Albert A. Bartlett

Even if you have watched them before, I would encourage all readers to defy the viewing statistics and watch all eight videos.  However, here is a summary:  Bartlett starts and finishes his presentation by asserting that, “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”.  Somewhat incongruously, he repeatedly describes exponential growth as “steady growth”.  This is a shame because exponential growth is anything but “steady”.  Exponential growth describes any situation “where the time that is required for the growing quantity to increase by a fixed fraction is a constant”.  This is most commonly expressed as percentage growth on an annual basis.  Bartlett then goes on to highlight the curious coincidence of many things that have historically doubled every 10 years by growing at a rate of 7% per annum (including crime in Colorado, inflation in the USA, and the global consumption of oil).  Having carefully explained all the mathematics, Bartlett spends a very large proportion of his presentation quoting from a bewildering array of journalists, economists and politicians who are either completely ignorant of – or deeply disingenuous about – the consequences of exponential growth.

Chillingly, Bartlett highlights the reality that, if the human population of planet Earth does not stop growing exponentially, Nature will intervene to stop it.  We can either choose to stop it or it will be stopped; and doing the former (whilst involving some very difficult choices) will be a lot better than allowing the latter to happen.  Bartlett’s presentation of population dynamics has been repeated many times before and since (but people are still ignoring it).  Even more devastating, however, is Bartlett’s presentation of the history of global fossil fuel consumption (which has given rise to many misleading statements and a great deal of misplaced optimism).  He points out that, even if it were safe to extract them, all the hydrocarbons that lie beneath the Arctic will be consumed by the USA in one year.  There is so much in Bartlett’s presentation that I could mention but I will focus on his examination of resource depletion in the face of exponential growth of consumption – it requires the perpetual discovery of double the cumulative total resource consumed.  On a finite planet, this is quite simply impossible.  Bartlett dismisses the proposition that biofuels could solve this problem by pointing out that Agriculture is an industry that uses land and oil to produce food.  Therefore, using agriculture to produce biofuels is likely to be a zero sum game.

However, most sobering of all, is Bartlett’s presentation of Dr M. King Hubbert’s predictions regarding Peak Oil. With regard to US production, history has found Hubbert was correct – production peaked in 1970 and exhaustion can be expected by 2050.  Furthermore, since global oil production has now peaked, it is guaranteed to be exhausted by 2100 (because we cannot continue to find double what we have already historically used).

Hubbert (1956) [N.B. Civil nuclear power has not developed in the way Hubbert expected.]

Bartlett’s discussion of Growthmania is devastating and, to me, the logic is incontrovertible:  The First Law of Sustainability is that population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.  There can therefore be no such thing as sustainable growth.  This is not an opinion.  On a finite planet, this is mathematical fact.  Somewhat surprisingly, in a roundabout way, this leads Bartlett to point out that the country with the World’s greatest problem with regard to population growth is the USA.  This is because, in the USA, the per-capita consumption of the World’s resources is four times global average (and some thirty times that of the World’s poorest people).

Towards the end of his presentation, Bartlett counters all the misinformation and misplaced optimism with some telling quotes from a variety of people including Galileo Galileii and Aldous Huxley.  However, perhaps the most telling quotation of all is that from Martin Luther King Jr:

Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we posses. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victim.

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At the best part of 1000 words, this may seem like a long summary but, in truth, I have barely scratched the surface of all the information Bartlett presents.  Therefore, if any of this is unclear or, in your mind, appears to be unjustified pessimism, please watch the videos.

As promised, my summary of Dasgupta and Ehrlich’s new paper will appear later this week.

Can technology save us?

I happened to stumble across a BBC TV Horizon special, entitled ‘Tomorrow’s World’ last Thursday.  It begins with a fascinating review of humankind’s history of – and propensity for – invention. It also explains some truly fascinating – and inspiring – developments in the spheres of space exploration, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and power generation.

In the introduction, the programme presenter and narrator Liz Bronnin explains how, after 100s of thousands of years of technological stagnation, the fast-moving world of technological innovation is very definitely a modern invention.

She then looks at how, since our governments announced they were not going to do so, private investors are now involved in a race to return to the Moon (and win a $US 20 million prize). Just after 11 minutes in, however, economist Marianna Mazzucato makes the point that private sector development would never happen unless governments first spent money innovating (just look at your Computer, iPhone, or SatNav).

This is followed by an examination of the invention of graphene (i.e. the repeated use of sellotape to produce a film of graphite comprised of only one layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal matrix). It is truly astonishing what graphene can do – including carry the weight of a cat…

After 23 minutes, a variety of talking heads demonstrate the complexity of modern science and the impossibility of any one person understanding it all. However, Bronnin then presents the example of Professor Robert Langer at MIT. What he is doing – and enabling others to do – is truly amazing; including potentially doing away with the need for chemotherapy to treat cancer.

After about 32 minutes, Bronnin introduces the power of the Internet to promote innovation – crowd-sourcing research funding and the concept of open-source technology – the complete abrogation of intellectual copyright… It is a fundamental challenge to globalised Capitalism; but it may well be the solution to many of our problems…

However, to me, the final third of the programme is by far the most fascinating… It looks at the challenges of finding a replacement for fossil fuels. It provides a very clear message that this is a technological challenge driven by the reality of physics – not by ideology.

It presents the case for synthetic biology, which has now succeeded in genetically modifying cyanobacteria so that they use photosynthesis to produce ethanol. This is brilliant, but, it is still only recycling CO2 (it is not removing it from the biosphere). With this technology, we could stop the CO2 content of the atmosphere from rising (but it will not help get it down again).

In the final 10 minutes of the programme, Bronnin presents the inspiring case of the British inventor, Michael Pritchard, who miniaturised water treatment technology as a result of watching the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004; when people were surrounded by water they could not drink…   Indeed, to prove that it works, he even gets Bronnin (at 54 minutes) to drink water extracted from a tank including all kinds of unpleasant things including dog pooh…

For all these reasons, if you have not seen it, I would recommend that you watch the programme:

Re-engineering nature for our benefit will, without doubt, be very very useful. However, I still think the optimism of the comment at the very end of the programme “…I never worry about the future of the human race, because I think we are totally capable of solving problems…” is very unwise. This is because anthropogenic climate disruption is a problem that is getting harder to solve the longer we fail to address it effectively.

Bronnin concludes by saying that, “it is an exciting time to be alive…” However, I remain very nervous. This is because, as Professor Peter Styles of Keele University – a strong supporter of the hydraulic fracturing industry – recently acknowledged, it will be impossible for carbon capture and storage to remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to prevent very significant changes to our climate. This is because of the collective hypnosis that deludes most people into seeing perpetual economic growth as the solution to all our problems.

In short, I am certain that technology alone cannot save us. In order to avoid the ecological catastrophe that all but the most ideologically-prejudiced and wilfully-blind can see developing all around us… we need to modify our behaviour: This primarily means that we need to acknowledge the injustice of a “use it up and wear it out” mentality and, as individuals, all learn to use an awful lot less energy.

Climate change “sceptics” have picked a fight with history and science – primarily with the concept of Entropy - and they will lose. The only question that remains is this: Are we going to let them put us all in (what xraymike79 recently called) ‘the dustbin of failed evolutionary experiments’.

Why we will probably fail to prevent catastrophe

Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland, was interviewed by offbeat TV presenter Eddie Mair on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday on BBC1.

Salmond’s comments about energy policy highlight the intellectual incoherence and dishonesty to which our politicians are driven by growthmania.

Although Salmond should be commended for standing up to Donald Trump’s opposition to offshore wind farms, he still appears to be basing his aspiration for a future independent Scotland on future revenue from extracting crude oil and gas from beneath what would be its territorial waters.

Scotland may well already be near the top of the international list of countries with the greatest percentages of installed renewable energy generation, it may well be the home of European research and development into Tidal power, but, its would-be independent government still appears to be assuming it will be OK to generate revenue from oil production over the next 50 years equivalent to those of the last 50 years.

This does not sound like a good idea to me.  It is one very good reason not to vote for Scottish independence.

Scottish independence does not look like it will be compatible with preventing anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).  Furthermore,  ACD is probably making its presence felt right now across the UK in the form of unusually cold weather.  Sure, it is not possible to attribute any single event to ACD but, all the same, ACD was predicted (from a basic understanding of atmospheric physics) to give rise to wider range of more extreme weather events of increased frequency and intensity.  This is exactly what we are now observing.  In fact, we have been observing it for about 50 years but, until quite recently, it had not been that obvious.  This is what James Hansen and his colleagues showed us last August:  The climate dice are now loaded – which means we get double-six a lot more often (and a few more double ones than we used to as well).

http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/the-reason-we-keep-getting-double-six/

A cornucopia of Prometheanism

This post has been prompted by an exchange of comments I have been having with Patrice Ayme – on my previous post (i.e. here) – that I feel deserves wider exposure and/or appreciation. However, if you have not the faintest idea what I might be on about, please be patient:  This post is not too long and, if you read to the end, I believe all will become clear.

The image shown here is the cover of one of the two main course texts I had to buy in order to do my MA in Environmental Politics at Keele University in 2010-11.  It is an excellent introduction to the subject of environmental politics and the concept of discourse analysis.

It is in this book that John Dryzek puts forward his own particular method of discourse analysis – analysing the things people say or have written – suggesting examination of: (a) the basic entities people recognise or appear to construct; (b) the assumptions they make about natural relationships; (c) the agents they recognise and motivations they assume; and (d) the key metaphors and rhetorical devices they use.

In the sphere of environmental politics, Dryzek suggests that it is possible to classify people on the basis of whether they appear to believe sustainability can be achieved by reformation of the status quo; and the extent to which they are thinking “outside the box”; as follows:

	Reformist	Radical
Prosaic	Economic rationalists	Environmental alarmists
Imaginative	Ecological modernisers	Green revolutionaries

After Dryzek Box 1.1 on page 15 of The Politics of the Earth (2005).

In essence, economic rationalists assume market forces can be used to solve environmental problems; whereas ecological modernisers think it will take more than that.

This then was the starting point for my discourse analysis of climate change scepticism, which I have now published as The Denial of Science.  However, in order to propose a similar classification of climate change scepticism, it was necessary to take Dryzek’s basic idea and combine it with what I have called the ‘Six Pillars of Climate Change Denial’ that I extracted from Robert Henson’s The Rough Guide to Climate Change:

The atmosphere may not be warming; but if it is, this is probably due to natural variation; but if it isn’t, the amount of warming is probably not significant; but if it is, the benefits should outweigh the disadvantages; but if they don’t, technology should be able to solve problems as they arise; but if it can’t, we shouldn’t wreck the economy to fix the problem (after Henson 2008: 257).

As I explain in my book, I simplified this summary of the positions adopted by those who are supposedly sceptical, in order to produce my Dryzek-style classification of climate change denial, as follows:

	Laissez-faire	Reformist
Prosaic	Contrarians (1 – ACD is not happening)	Economic rationalists (4 – ACD is not worth fixing)
Imaginative	Cornucopians (2 – ACD is not significant)	Prometheans (3 – ACD is not problematic)

Contrarians are those refuse to acknowledge the nature of reality.

Cornucopians are those (like Julian Simon) who do not believe action is yet required to address any anticipated effects of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).  They are named after Cornucopia, the horn of the goat Amalthea in Greek mythology, which Zeus endowed with a supernatural power to provide an unlimited supply of food etc..  As such, Cornucopians have unlimited confidence in the abundant supply of natural resources; the ability of natural systems to absorb pollutants; and their corrective capacity to mitigate human activities.

Economic Rationalists are defined and discussed by Dryzek (2005: 121-42) but, for the sake of argument, can here be taken to be synonymous with Karl Marx’s “money fetishism” as cited in Elster (1986); and/or Herman Daly’s “growthmania” (1974).

Prometheans are those (like Bjorn Lomborg) who propose radical technological solutions including environmental stabilisation of the atmosphere by means of geo-engineering.  They are named after Prometheus, one of the Titans of Greek mythology, who stole fire from Zeus and so vastly increased the human capacity to manipulate the world.  As such, Prometheans have unlimited confidence in the ability of technology to overcome environmental problems.

In a nutshell, my discourse analysis of climate change scepticism (i.e. the most prominent climate change sceptics in the UK) appears to suggest that the majority of these “sceptics” are either contrarians or economic rationalists.  However, I suspect that as the outright denial of reality and the need to address the problem of ACD both become increasingly untenable, I think more and more people will try and find solace in either cornucopian or promethean beliefs.

In the discussion that I alluded to at the outset of this post, Patrice Ayme did not like the way in which I appeared to disparage the importance of human ingenuity (by suggesting that people who believe in both Cornucopianism and Prometheanism are deluded).  I am pleased to say that we have now resolved any misunderstanding by agreeing that Prometheanism is the best option.  However, crucially, we also agree that, in order to avert an ecological catastrophe, we will also need to modify our behaviour.  That is to say, neither faith in Nature’s bounty (Cornucopianism) nor faith in human ingenuity (Prometheanism) should be used to deny our responsibility for causing the problem or to abdicate responsibility for doing everything we can to minimise its consequences.

Great stuff, hey?  All we need to do now is get those with the power to make policy decisions to do the right thing.

Memo to Osborne, Merkel, Cyprus and the World

Dear George Osborne, Chancellor Merkel, EU Commission, Citizens of Cyprus, and people everywhere,

I would like to hereby remind you of what Richard Heinberg said in his book The End of Growth.  Here is a quick audio-visual summary:

Please accept my condolences for your loss(es) and my sincerest wish that you will now stop lying to yourselves; and face-up to the nature of reality.

Regards,

Martin Lack.

Further to the comment by Lionel Smith (below), this is what page 159 of Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell looks like:

This is the problem that we have with exponential growth.

How can resource depletion be sustainable?

(In conversation with a “technological optimist”)

I was so impressed by the ‘Growth Delusion’ article by Nick Reeves (published on this blog on Monday), that I decided to bring it to the attention of members of my extended family and to one person in particular (who has asked to remain anonymous).  What follows is just over 2000 words in length but it made no sense to me to arbitrarily divide it up into pieces (you will either be interested or you won’t)…

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I started by pointing out what I feel sets this article by Nick Reeves apart – the facts and figures that he has compiled in order to back-up his argument that human civilisation cannot survive in the long term unless it acknowledges that technology alone cannot solve our problems.  Here are two examples:
– Agriculture: It is true that, globally, we waste an awful lot of food.  Therefore, we could feed a lot more people if we eliminated this waste.  However, as Nick Reeves points out, global agriculture today is an industry that converts oil into food.  Therefore, what will it do when the Earth runs out of hydrocarbons (and phosphorus)?
– Industry:  The era of cheap energy has come – or is coming – to an end.   Meanwhile: how can China consuming 53% of the World’s cement production; 48% of the World’s iron ore; and/or 47% of the World’s coal… be described as anything other than unsustainable?

In response, my anonymous relative insisted that Nick Reeves facts were nothing of the sort; and implied that he/she thinks I am misanthropic and unduly pessimistic.  My anonymous relative is very clearly a technological optimist, but I prefer to think of myself as an environmental realist.

What follows are 10 points made by my anonymous relative; with my refutation appended to each one in bold text:

1. He [Reeves] claims that the economic crisis was a consequence of dangerous speculation on the part of the banks. This is not a fact. The alternative hypothesis is that it was a consequence of rotten policy-making by government leaders who believed that they knew what was best for society at large.  I hope this is not a statement of faith in some vague global conspiracy to install global socialist government (of which I too would disapprove).  I hope also that you are not suggesting that the solution would have been weaker regulation.

2. He attributes short-term trends in commodity prices solely to demand considerations, but gives no corresponding analysis to what might happen on the supply side, simply taking it as a given that reserves will wither and making no reference to the possibility of finding new reserves at any point.  Thankfully, Antarctica is protected from exploration (which I am sure will one day become viable).  Sadly, the Arctic is not so protected.  I hope your faith in technology and human ingenuity can keep pace with increasing demand.

3. His “facts” about the growth of China are also disingenuous. He refers to a historical growth rate of 10% pa and then projects that this will continue, even though the available evidence shows that this growth has not continued and may well soften further over the coming years. Thankfully, China’s growth rate has dropped from 10%pa to 7%pa, which means the doubling time for its economy has increased from 7 to 10 years.  This is still nowhere near being environmentally sustainable.

4. Likewise, his estimates of Chinese cement, iron ore, and coal use are all based upon an enormously imbalanced economy in China, where government policies have long repressed consumption and incomes among ordinary Chinese workers in order to drive through massive infrastructure projects, many of dubious value – a model of uncertain merit, but which some experts have deemed to be economically unsustainable. Consumption of resources is the problem – it does not matter who is doing the consuming.  Think of all the rare earth metals required to give everyone in China a new mobile phone.

5. The claim that lost-cost hydrocarbons will be a distant memory by 2050 may prove true, but until we get a little closer to that date, this is not a fact, but rather an assertion, and one with considerable uncertainty attached given the volume of known coal reserves in the world. Higher retail prices for hydrocarbons increases oil company turnover but a fivefold reduction in EROEI for unconventional fossil fuels does beg the question as to when you stop flogging a dead horse.

6. The idea likewise that a depleted supply of hydrocarbons risks global economic collapse is also open to debate. Even if one agreed with his view (unproven) that we are about to run out of hydrocarbons, I would still question the inevitability of economic collapse. Everything would depend upon the timeframe and upon the extent to which prices throughout the journey are left to reflect the realities of supply and demand, as opposed to the political priorities of people who think they know better.  Your questioning of it does not make it any less likely to happen.  The last financial meltdown was triggered by lending money to risky people.  The next one will be a global debt crisis resulting from the end of the era of “cheap” energy (which has made the success of the last 200 years possible).  If we do not plan – and put into place – a transition, collapse is almost inevitable.  This is a lesson we should learn from population dynamics in biology.

7. Similarly, his point about the recycling of metals is hardly a statement of facts. If these commodities were so precious as he makes out the fact is we would be recycling more of them, and many of our consumer products would have much shorter replacement cycles. To make these claims with no consideration either of the estimated reserves of un-mined metals still under the ground or of the history of metals exploration is surely a significant oversight?  Please remember that I am a geologist, [name redacted]. I find it deeply depressing to admit that much of what my fellow geologists do is, in effect, treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.  However, denial is not a river in Egypt; and a business that is selling its assets to generate turnover will eventually be bankrupted.

8. The risks to food supply, to a greater extent than is true of other resources, I am inclined to take seriously. However, many of the issues here are not about resource constraints, they are about political constraints – immoral European subsidies, an unwillingness to support the development or application of GM crops, the shameful subsidies to turn sugar and corn into ethanol, and the diversion of water resources away from agriculture for environmental purposes are all excellent examples from the developed world. As a hydrogeologist, I am already aware that groundwater mining is a reality in almost every arid country in the World.  Food supply problems are a little more distant but, just as a spike in food prices contributed to the Arab Spring uprisings two years ago, increased extreme weather events of all kinds are going to make such spikes more frequent in the future.

9. And his solution to the food problem – organic farming – is just hilarious. Every serious scientific study I have ever seen on this subject tells me that global-scale organic farming would lead to mass starvation. What is wrong, I ask with just letting prices do their work? In a resource-starved world, I would expect a much greater proportion of the world simply to go vegetarian. Now I have no problem with organic practices, but you tell me that the facts here speak for themselves. So where is his evidence that organic farming can do the trick? His comment here is again just an assertion.   I am not opposed to GMOs because they could damage the environment. I am opposed to them for the same reason I disapproved of Nestle selling powdered baby milk to mothers perfectly capable of breast-feeding their babies.  Technology may be very useful but it is useless if you have no fuel to use it.  On a global scale, therefore, low-tech solutions locally-sourced may well prove more resilient.

10. The fact is, at every turn, he is looking for the angle, not the fact. Arctic ice levels are indeed very low – and lower than some (but not all) models predicted 15 years ago. But if he is going down this route, why just pick this piece of evidence? Why not also talk about the trends in temperature? Are they tracking ahead of schedule too? When one reads something like this, and detects zero scope for uncertainty, it is hard to take the presentation of his “facts” seriously.  I am not sure what models predicted faster collapse of Arctic sea ice.  The reasons for the hiatus in global surface temperature rise in the last 14 years (or so) are well understood.  You are just parroting junk science peddled by merchants of doubt.  I would like to see you dismiss all the other positive feedback mechanisms now starting to make their presence felt – such as thawing permafrost which last year released more CO2e that humans did in 2010.

I could go on, but I am not sure much would be served by it. Martin, you and I come at the world with very different world views, and also with different knowledge sets. When I read something like this piece, I am afraid I don’t see facts and logic. I see emotion and anger. I also see a lack of faith in humanity as a whole, a distaste for our species and for our civilisation that is frankly not only misguided but also profoundly depressing. I do not presume to understand your world view (apart from that imposed on you by your chosen career).  However, for the record, I am neither a progressive nor a liberal, and I do not believe in ‘big government’. I just believe humans should take more responsibility for their actions.  I am socially and politically conservative with the sole exception that I do not believe in the delusion of growthmania or that technology can and will invalidate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  What I find depressing is that so many think we can win the fight modernity has picked with science.  The history of human civilisation is replete with examples of those who – whether they understood it or not – lost just such a fight.

Despite having rebutted all the points made, my anonymous relative responded by ignoring the opinions of the vast majority of climate scientists; focussing on what he/she repeatedly referred to as significant uncertainty; and personalising all predictions of near-term problems as if they were merely my opinions.

And so it went on, with emails backwards and forwards.  I tried very hard to point out that: I am merely reflecting the opinions of the vast majority of climate scientists; the uncertainty is now vanishingly small; the IPCC has spent decades under-reporting the scale of the problem we face; and there is an ongoing business-led campaign to discredit the science and the scientists.  However, the harder I tried to do this, the more (it seems to me) my anonymous relative appeared to feel I was attacking him/her personally.

I was told my moral certainty (about the need to act) was a cause for concern:  I responded each time by referring to the facts of history and the opinions of the World’s professional bodies.  However, each time, it was as if I was accusing my anonymous relative of personally orchestrating the campaign of denial.

When I highlighted my concerns regarding Richard Lindzen’s misleading and hypocritical presentation in the Palace of Westminster over a year ago (of which I had first-hand experience), I was told I was being “preposterous”.  My suspicion of Lindzen was countered with suspicion of some (un-named) mainstream scientists.

When I cited the Geological Society’s carefully-worded public statement regarding climate change, I was told that believing my “doomsday scenario” to be suspicious did not require the invocation of conspiracy theory.  What I never got, however, was any valid reason to dispute the scientific consensus.

Finally, my anonymous relative suggested that it would be best to bring our exchanges to a close but only after once more insisting that climate science is uncertain and/or corrupted and that I am misanthropic (with my final observations added [in square brackets]):

Nonetheless, climate science has implications that are clearly political rather than scientific [I agree].  This is true really of any area of science where the stakes are high and the uncertainties are significant [repetition of a lie does not make it true]; and this, unfortunately, does tend to encourage people to talk about things that are really based upon personal value judgements [yes it sure does], as if they were scientific fact.  I have seen this, not just within the public domain, but in scientific establishments and within professional scientific bodies [i.e. equating consensus with the corruption of science].  You do it too, by discounting uncertainties [what uncertainties?], by interpreting everything as a contest of two polar-opposite world views [because they very probably are], and in your distaste for modernity [my distaste is for the collateral damage modernity has caused].

This is unbelievably frustrating, it is as if I have just wasted a fortnight trying to explain something to someone who is physically incapable of listening.

The nonsense of “Sustainable Growth”*

* “Sustainable Growth” is a term invented by World Leaders last year at the Rio+20 Summit in Brazil.  On a finite planet with finite resources, it is a physical impossibility; it is an oxymoron; to talk about it is as delusional as pretending you will live for ever.  I’m sorry, but, as with climate change, denying the nature of reality changes nothing.

As an experienced geologist and hydrogeologist, I am a Fellow of the Geological Society of London (GSL) and a Member of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM).  As such, the GSL has previously published a 500-word “soapbox” item written by me, entitled ‘Know Your Limits!’, in their Geoscientist magazine.

However, I believe this has now been surpassed by an article written by CIWEM’s Executive Director, Nick Reeves, just published in CIWEM’s monthly WEM magazine.  Having obtained the permission of both author and publisher, I am delighted to reproduce the article, entitled ‘The Growth Delusion and Handlebar Tape’, in full below.

Other than to say that Nick Reeves has an admirable track-record for speaking his mind and saying things very few people in positions like his are willing to say – such as his support for Latin American style environmentalism in ‘The Human Rights of Mother Earth’ (July 2011) – I do not really want to comment further at this point.  However, the conflict between notions of sustainable development and resource depletion will be picked-up in another longer-than-normal post later this week.  Therefore, without further ado, here is the 1800-word article by Nick Reeves:

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THE GROWTH DELUSION AND HANDLEBAR TAPE 

The world is running on empty says CIWEM executive director Nick Reeves

How do you successfully break a mistaken and destructive intellectual and economic consensus? How do you persuade world leaders that 21^st century problems cannot be fixed with 20^th century economics?

The UK is no longer a front-line developed nation and has fallen behind Brazil in the league table of economic powers.  It will take a lot more than handlebar tape to get a grip on things.  We need to think in different terms and get a proper fix on our place in a world that is running on empty.

The economic crisis of 2007 was a car crash in slow-motion.  The driver wasn’t fit.  And it was frustrating because nobody warned us and the banks danced to the speculative tune.  Now economists can calculate a much more dangerous event that is being greeted with even less concern: our world is rapidly running out of resources – of water, energy, metals, phosphorous and food.  The data is not in dispute.  The market is reflecting what our leaders ignore.

The Industrial Revolution allowed us to make technological progress in delivering resources, outweighing the increasing marginal effort to dig ever deeper and chase lower-quality ores, for instance.  The average price of 33 commodities (equally weighted) declined by 70 per cent (after inflation) between 1900 and 2002.  Then, abruptly and without any particular crisis, prices reversed and in ten years the average commodity tripled to give back the advantage of the previous 100 years.  It is perhaps the most important ‘phase’ change of modern times, yet it attracted, remarkably, little attention or concern.

The causes are not hidden: there has been an explosion in population and consumption since 1800 and the birth of the ‘Hydrocarbon Age’.  Global population has increased from one billion to seven billion, tripling even in my lifetime.  At the same time, consumption of hydrocarbons and some metals increased one hundredfold.  Initially, with few people and extensive high-grade resources, this did not show in prices, but more recently, with population growing still faster than ever in absolute terms, we have had to absorb an unprecedented surge in demand per capita from India, with its 1.2 billion people (growing at over seven per cent a year) and China, with almost 1.3 billion (growing for over 20 years at ten per cent a year), a rate that will double consumption every seven years.  China last year accounted for a jaw-dropping 53 per cent of the world’s cement use, 48 per cent of its iron ore and 47 per cent of all the coal used.  How could reserves not wither away under this attack and prices not rise? We have every reason to be fearful.

Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas – the backbone of the Industrial Revolution – will be a distant memory by 2050.  Much higher cost remnants will still be available but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply, as before.  Conventional food production is dependent desperately on oil for insecticide, pesticide and fertiliser, and for transportation over thousands of miles.  Modern agriculture is an industry that converts oil into food.

It will require brave political decisions to survive the loss of depleted hydrocarbons without risking economic collapse.  If we permit the population to grow to the levels predicted, and if we don’t curb our greed, we must find the capital – while we still have it – to build very large-scale, very smart electricity grids, across Europe and North America, fed by increasingly efficient wind and solar power and other renewables that may come on stream.

Once they are built, the marginal operating cost will be much lower than our present hydrocarbon-dependent system and, critically, cost will be constantly falling while hydrocarbon costs rise.  This will be a great threat to the giant hydrocarbon multi-nationals, several of which fund well-organised obfuscation and propaganda campaigns to reinforce our wishful thinking.  Carbon dioxide has lost its greenhouse effect, they say, and coal is clean! In the US, even larger investments are made: Congress is bribed (legally) to ignore both climate science and the logic of finite resources.

Metal resources are the stuff of nightmares because entropy is merciless.  Every time you use a metal, some is lost.  European countries recycle between 40 per cent and 80 per cent – the US is worse – yet at even 90 per cent these precious resources will slip through our fingers.  So frugality is needed, because even an economy with zero increase in physical output will slowly lose its metals.  But which politician has the nerve to talk about the necessary zero growth in population and physical output?

The most immediately threatening shortage is in our food supply, and not just from oil constraints.  The bigger threats lie in four limiting inputs: water, soil, potassium and phosphorus.  We build homes and grow food in deserts and over-pump irreplaceable underground water.  (Already, about 300 million Indians and Chinese, among others, are fed by over-pumping reserves that will inevitably run out.) We waste over half our global water supply and we totally mis-price it.  For most countries, all of this can be fixed.  Yet some over-populated, poor nations have a more intractable problem and water scarcity will cause increasing friction for them.  Water wars is here.  It’s happening now.

Land availability and erosion are also limiting our ability to grow food.  Over the millennia, we have lost about one-third of our land, turning it into desert and stone.  We build new cities on our best river valley soil, which is replaceable only with more marginal land.  There are no New Worlds or new Midwests.  The land we have – eroded by wind and water – loses one per cent of its soil each year, about 100 times the rate of natural replacement.  If sustained, this erosion would bring our species to its knees.  But the problem can be solved relatively easily by moving towards no-till, in which crop residues protect the soil against the elements.  We need to move rapidly, though: to 100 per cent from less than ten per cent, globally, today.

The limits on phosphorous and potassium are terminal potentially.  They are elements and cannot be made.  There is no substitute for them.  They are vital for the growth of all living things, vegetable or animal (we humans are one per cent phosphorus by body weight).  And these irreplaceable nutrients on which modern agriculture depends are mined and are steadily depleting.  So what will happen when the reserves run out?

The only glimmer of hope would be if the world went organic – nurturing the soil with worms, fungi and complex micro-organisms and avoiding use of pesticides and insecticides.  Organic farming extends critical fertiliser resources many times, perhaps at best approaching the rate of natural replacement from bedrock.  However, organic farming is just one per cent of the agricultural total, and we will, typically, wait for a greater crisis in fertiliser prices before we move.

Finally, global warming’s most reliable consequence is weather extremes – droughts and floods, which have badly hit production, will continue to do so.  Far from being alarmist, scientists have consistently under-predicted the speed of environmental decline, failed to address population growth, and so we slalom our way to hell.  Scientists, with a few brave exceptions, are fearful of being criticised as doom-sayers and exaggerators – a terrible academic crime – even though underestimating, in this case, is far more dangerous and irresponsible.  (Arctic ice-melt is already at levels that, 15 years ago, were predicted for 2050.)

Both population and yield per acre for grains are growing at 1.2 per cent a year.  A stand-off? You bet.  Population growth will slow, but so will productivity as we approach the limits of each grain species.  How, with no safety margin, will we find the extra grain necessary to produce meat for the growing middle class of developing nations when a single pound of dressed beef displaces 30 pounds of grain?

There will be a single painful answer to all of these questions – rationing through price.  We the rich nations can and will be careless with our resources for decades longer, but only at the cost of pushing prices up unnecessarily fast and thereby inadvertently forcing the poor into malnutrition and outright starvation.  A typical developed country now spends ten per cent of its income on food; Egypt spends 40 per cent.  You can see easily that, if food prices triple again in the next 30 years as they did in the past ten, the numbers will not compute.  A growth-reducing and lifestyle-eroding irritant for us will become life and death for them.

Greater income equality in such countries and better education, especially for women, would help lower population growth and increase productivity.  Less corruption and more efficient distribution of the food available, especially in India, would buy decades of time.  But this is who we are: a species given to corruption, incompetence and self-interest.  Capitalism sucks because it believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits – come hell or high water.

We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.  Perhaps later, as the crisis grows, as failing states threaten to destabilise global politics (resource pricing already played its part in the Arab spring) and China throws its increasing weight around in its correctly perceived great need for more resources, the developed world will act with resolve, as the US, the UK and others did so well in the World War II.  We must hope so.

Fortress North America with (per capita) five times the water and seven times the arable land of China, has the capability and willingness to ignore this global problem for now.  Yet eventually it, too, will be dragged kicking and screaming into world turmoil – just as it feared would happen in the 1930s – and share the pain.

In the meantime, countries such as Egypt, with surging populations, escalating food import bills and widening trade deficits, cannot afford to feed their people.  Who will do it for them? We rich countries cannot even make the tough political decisions required to keep our own resource prices down, let alone worry about others.  This attitude is epitomised by the use of one-third of the US corn crop (the world’s biggest) for desperately inefficient ethanol production as a subsidy for already rich farmers.  To fill a 4×4′s tank once would displace enough maize to feed one Indian farmer for a year.  One day, this will be seen as the moral equivalent of shooting some of the world’s poorest people, but more painful.

The Sceptics’ Creed

For this spoof of the Anglican version of the Nicene Creed I apologise to all those who lack a sense of humour:

———-

[All stand]

We believe in some gods,
like Professor Ian Plimer,
writer of ‘Heaven and Earth’,
of all that is mean and not green.

We believe in some lords; John Christy
and in Richard Lindzen.
Endlessly they are proven wrong and yet still,
from their shite we recite,
true lies from sad guys,
opinions, not facts,
of one thing we are certain,
through them all truths were made.

For us and for our salvation
they came down from science:
by the power of our human folly,
they became embedded in ideology,
and made their plan.

For our sake they were crucified by climate scientists;
they suffered ‘death’ and were ‘buried’.
On the third day they rose again
in accordance with the sceptics;
they returned to their jobs,
and are seated in academic tenure.

They will come again in future to fudge the reason and the facts,
and their soapbox will have no end.

We believe in the wholly spurious, our god, the slither of doubt,
which precedes our judgement of evidence.
With the money and the vice it is worshiped and glorified.
It is supported through the profits…
We believe in one wholly cynical and irrational church.
We acknowledge one purpose; for the pursuance of greed.
We look for the perpetuation of growth,
and the life of the World to shun.

Amen.

[Please be seated]

Copyright © Martin Lack 2013

Best wish for Christmas and New Year

Normal service (whatever that may be) will resume here in January.

Deckchair fight on sinking Titanic

Yesterday, on Learning from Dogs, Paul Handover re-published an essay by Gail Tverberg, who writes the Our Finite World blog.  On her About page, Gail describes herself as… “an actuary interested in finite world issues – oil depletion, natural gas depletion, water shortages, and climate change.”

The post in question, on Gail’s Our Finite World blog is ‘Climate Change: The Standard Fixes Don’t Work’.  It is quite long but well worth a read because, as I have myself commented (on her blog):

It is nice to see someone not shying away from the inconvenient truth that all our environmental problems can be boiled down to Limits to Growth phenomena. A frontier mentality was OK when early European settlers spread out across the New World; today it is not. When you live alone in a wilderness, it is safe to use a passing river as a source of water, a washroom, and a toilet; but when you live in a Mumbai slum, it is not. Over-population is not a magic number; it is a function of our environment. One person per sq.km probably makes a desert over-populated.

To understand why I said this, you could do a lot worse than read the short series of posts I made on this blog, starting exactly a year ago today, regarding the 1996 book by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, entitled The Betrayal of Science and Reason. It could just as easily have been written today because, sadly, very little has changed (apart from our problems have grow far more acute as a result of their generally having been ignored).

With the benefit of her actuarial expertise, Gail summarises all the reasons why our politicians need to wake up; because they (and most of humanity with them) are in the middle of sleepwalking us all into an ecological catastrophe.

• In 1992, the World got together and agreed to start trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.  We failed.  Since 2002, global emissions have accelerated.
• For decades, people have dismissed the idea that oil production might peak soon as foolish nonsense.  It is not dismissed as such today.  Today, Peak Oil is a reality; one that is driving global economic stagnation.
• Echoing the points made by Dr Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Institute, Gail highlights the Perfect Storm of problems arising from the urgent need to decarbonise our economies; and the fact that many of the things we need to do to achieve that ultimate goal will require fossil fuel to be used.
• Echoing the points made by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 ‘ Tragedy of the Commons’ paper, Gail highlights the essential need for a global solution, globally implemented (because otherwise those who do not implement the solution will gain an economic advantage over those that do).

And so Gail goes on…

——————–

I suspect my pessimism is an artefact of my being unemployed and – seemingly – unable to challenge the collective hypnosis with which our politicians (and most people) seem to be afflicted.

Accusing someone of “re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” is a grossly over-used analogy but that is not what we are doing.  Humanity today has gone way beyond just re-arranging the deckchairs.  As more and more of them float off into the icy water, like people involved in some insanely short-sighted game of musical chairs, many of us seem determined to fight over the dwindling number that remain.

I will close by quoting the words of Film Director James Cameron (for context see my post in April this year):

The human population of the Earth today is analogous to the passengers on the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. Due to a combination of arrogance and hubris it was considered ‘too big to fail’; and where have we heard that before?… Firstly, the big machine of the Titanic is like the huge system that is modern civilisation today. The Titanic had huge momentum and could not quickly turn away from disaster [even if the wheel was turned the right way]. Secondly, it carried First, Second and Third Class passengers, which are analogous to citizens of Developed, Emerging, and Less Developed economies; wherein the poorest will be the worst affected by climate change [only 25% of Third Class passengers survived - compared with 60% of First Class]. Thirdly, we can now see the iceberg [i.e. anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD)] very clearly but, even so, we cannot turn away from it because of the political momentum of our fossil fuel based systems. There are too many people making money out of the system the way the system works right now. Those people are in control and until they relinquish control and/or turn the wheel [the right way] we are not going to avoid hitting the iceberg… When we hit it, the rich will still maintain their access to land, food and water; whereas the poorest will lose it… This story [of the Titanic] will always fascinate people because it is such a perfect analogy for our current predicament.