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Herman Daly: Towards A Steady-State Economy
Posted by nate hagens on May 5, 2008 - 9:21am
It is doubtful we can adequately inform energy policy without addressing the linkages between equity, the environment, finance, and our end goals. I post this on theoildrum not only because Herman is one of my tribal elders but because his eloquence, courage and foresight on these issues have historically been, and continue to be, ahead of the curve. During his resignation speech from the World Bank, Herman recommended the Bank take "a few antacids and laxatives to cure the combination of managerial flatulence and organizational constipation giving rise to such a high-pressure internal environment." To improve interactions with the external world he prescribed "new eyeglasses and a hearing aid."
Nearly 15 years later, here is Professor Daly's current synopsis of the state of economics and his prescriptions for change.
Sustainable Development Commission, UK (April 24, 2008)
A Steady-State Economy
(Editors note: underlined words are in original; bold, italicized, hyperlinks and images added)
A failed growth economy and a steady-state economy are not the same
thing; they are the very different alternatives we face.
The Earth as a whole is approximately a steady state. Neither the
surface nor the mass of the earth is growing or shrinking; the inflow of
radiant energy to the Earth is equal to the outflow; and material imports
from space are roughly equal to exports (both negligible). None of this
means that the earth is static—a great deal of qualitative change can
happen inside a steady state, and certainly has happened on Earth. The
most important change in recent times has been the enormous growth of
one subsystem of the Earth, namely the economy, relative to the total
system, the ecosphere. This huge shift from an “empty” to a “full” world
is truly “something new under the sun” as historian J. R. McNeil calls it in
his book of that title. The closer the economy approaches the scale of the
whole Earth the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior
mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state—a system that
permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth.
Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of
better stuff (or at least different stuff). The remaining natural world no
longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic
throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much
less a growing one.
Economists have focused too much on the economy’s
circulatory system and have neglected to study its digestive tract.
Throughput growth means pushing more of the same food through an
ever larger digestive tract; development means eating better food and
digesting it more thoroughly. Clearly the economy must conform to the
rules of a steady state—seek qualitative development, but stop
aggregate quantitative growth. GDP increase conflates these two very
different things.
We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. That makes it
hard to imagine what a steady-state economy (SSE) would be like, even
though for most of our history mankind has lived in an economy in which
annual growth was negligible. Some think a SSE would mean freezing in
the dark under communist tyranny. Some say that huge improvements in
technology (energy efficiency, recycling) are so easy that it will make the
adjustment both profitable and fun.
Regardless of whether it will be hard or easy we have to attempt a
SSE because we cannot continue growing, and in fact so-called
“economic” growth already has become uneconomic. The growth
economy is failing. In other words, the quantitative expansion of the
economic subsystem increases environmental and social costs faster than
production benefits, making us poorer not richer, at least in high consumption
countries. Given the laws of diminishing marginal utility and
increasing marginal costs this should not have been unexpected. And
even new technology sometimes makes it worse. For example, tetraethyl
lead provided the benefit of reducing engine knock, but at the cost
spreading a toxic heavy metal into the biosphere; chlorofluorocarbons
gave us the benefit of a nontoxic propellant and refrigerant, but at the
cost of creating a hole in the ozone layer and a resulting increase in
ultraviolet radiation. It is hard to know for sure that growth now increases
costs faster than benefits since we do not bother to separate costs from
benefits in our national accounts. Instead we lump them together as
“activity” in the calculation of GDP.
Ecological economists have offered empirical evidence that growth
is already uneconomic in high consumption countries (see ISEW, GPI,
Ecological Footprint, Happy Planet Index). Since neoclassical economists
are unable to demonstrate that growth, either in throughput or GDP, is
currently making us better off rather than worse off, it is blind arrogance
on their part to continue preaching aggregate growth as the solution to
our problems. Yes, most of our problems (poverty, unemployment,
environmental degradation) would be easier to solve if we were richer--
that is not the issue. The issue is: Does growth in GDP any longer really
make us richer? Or is it now making us poorer?
The classical steady state takes the biophysical dimensions—
population and capital stock (all durable producer and consumer goods)—
as given and adapts technology and tastes to these objective conditions.
The neoclassical “steady state” (proportional growth of capital stock and
population) takes tastes and technology as given and adapts by growth in
biophysical dimensions, since it considers wants as unlimited, and
technology as powerful enough to make the world effectively infinite. At a
more profound level the classical view is that man is a creature who must
ultimately adapt to the limits (finitude, entropy, ecological
interdependence) of the Creation of which he is a part. The neoclassical
view is that man, the creator, will surpass all limits and remake Creation to
suit his subjective individualistic preferences, which are considered the
root of all value. In the end economics is religion.
Accepting the necessity of a SSE, along with John Stuart Mill and
the other classical economists, let us imagine what it might look like. First
a caution—a steady-state economy is not a failed growth economy. An
airplane is designed for forward motion. If it tries to hover it crashes. It is
not fruitful to conceive of a helicopter as an airplane that fails to move
forward. It is a different thing designed to hover. Likewise a SSE is not
designed to grow.
Following Mill we might define a SSE as an economy with constant
population and constant stock of capital, maintained by a low rate of
throughput that is within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of
the ecosystem. This means low birth equal to low death rates, and low
production equal to low depreciation rates. Low throughput means high
life expectancy for people and high durability for goods. Alternatively, and
more operationally, we might define the SSE in terms of a constant flow
of throughput at a sustainable (low) level, with population and capital
stock free to adjust to whatever size can be maintained by the constant
throughput that begins with depletion of low-entropy resources and ends
with pollution by high-entropy wastes.
How could we limit throughput, and thus indirectly limit stocks of
capital and people in a SSE? Since depletion is spatially more
concentrated than pollution the main controls should be at the depletion
or input end. Raising resource prices at the depletion end will indirectly
limit pollution, and force greater efficiency at all upstream stages of
production. A cap-auction-trade system for depletion of basic resources,
especially fossil fuels, could accomplish a lot, as could ecological tax
reform, about which more later.
If we must stop aggregate growth because it is uneconomic, then
how do we deal with poverty in the SSE? The simple answer is by
redistribution—by limits to the range of permissible inequality, by a
minimum income and a maximum income. What is the proper range of
inequality—one that rewards real differences and contributions rather
than just multiplying privilege? Plato thought it was a factor of four.
Universities, civil services and the military seem to manage with a factor
of ten to twenty. In the US corporate sector it is over 500. As a first step
could we not try to lower the overall range to a factor of, say, one
hundred? Remember, we are no longer trying to provide massive
incentives to stimulate (uneconomic) growth! Also, since we are not
trying to stimulate aggregate growth, we no longer need to spend billions
on advertising. Instead of treating advertising as a tax-deductible cost of
production we should tax it heavily as a public nuisance. If economists
really believe that the consumer is sovereign then she should be obeyed
rather than manipulated, cajoled, badgered, and lied to.
Free trade would not be feasible for a SSE, since its producers
would necessarily count many costs to the environment and the future
that foreign firms located in growth economies are allowed to ignore. The
foreign firms would win in competition, not because they were more
efficient, but simply because they did not pay the cost of sustainability.
Regulated international trade under rules that compensated for these
differences (compensating tariffs) could exist, as could “free trade”
among nations that were equally committed to sustainability in their
domestic cost accounting. One might expect the IMF, the World Bank, and
the WTO to be working toward such regulations. Instead they vigorously
push both free trade and free capital mobility (i.e., deregulation of
international commerce). Protecting an efficient national policy of cost
internalization is very different from protecting an inefficient firm.
The case for guaranteed mutual benefit in international trade, and
hence the reason for leaving it “free”, is based on Ricardo’s comparative
advantage argument. A country is supposed to produce the goods that it
can produce more cheaply relative to other goods, than is the case in
other countries. By specializing according to their comparative advantage
both trading partners gain, regardless of absolute costs (one country
could produce all goods more cheaply, but it would still benefit by
specializing in what it produced relatively more cheaply and trading for
other goods). This is logical, but like all logical arguments comparative
advantage is based on premises. The key premise is that while capital
(and other factors) moves freely between industries within a nation, it
does not move between nations. If capital could move abroad it would
have no reason to be content with a mere comparative advantage at
home, but would seek absolute advantage—the absolutely lowest cost of
production anywhere in the world. Why not? With free trade the product
could be sold anywhere in the world, including the nation the capital just
left. While there are certainly global gains from trade under absolute
advantage there is no guarantee of mutual benefit. Some countries could
lose.
The IMF-WB-WTO ( Washington Consensus) contradict themselves in service to the interests
of transnational corporations. International capital mobility, coupled with
free trade, allows corporations to escape from national regulation in the
public interest, playing one nation off against another. Since there is no
global government they are in effect uncontrolled. The nearest thing we
have to a global government (IMF-WB-WTO) has shown no interest in
regulating transnational capital for the common good. Their goal is to help
these corporations grow, because growth is presumed good for all—end
of story. If the IMF wanted to limit international capital mobility to keep
the world safe for comparative advantage, there are several things they
could do. They could promote minimum residence times for foreign
investment to limit capital flight and speculation, and they could propose
a small tax on all foreign exchange transactions (Tobin tax). Most of all
they could revive Keynes’ proposal for an international multilateral
clearing union that would directly penalize persistent imbalances in
current account (both deficit and surplus), and thereby indirectly promote
balance in the compensating capital account, reducing international
capital movements.
One problem for the SSE already raised by the demographic
transition to a non growing population is that it necessarily results in an
increase in the average age of the population—more retirees relative to
workers. Adjustment requires either higher taxes, older retirement age, or
reduced retirement pensions. The system is hardly in “crisis”, but these
adjustments are surely needed to achieve sustainability. For many
countries net immigration has become a larger source of population
growth than natural increase. Immigration may temporarily ease the age
structure problem, but the steady-state population requires that births
plus in-migrants equal deaths plus out-migrants. It is hard to say which is
more politically incorrect, birth limits or immigration limits? Many prefer
denial of arithmetic to facing either one.
The SSE will also require a “demographic transition” in populations
of products towards longer-lived, more durable goods, maintained by
lower rates of throughput. A population of 1000 cars that last 10 years
requires new production of 100 cars per year. If more durable cars are
made to last 20 years then we need new production of only 50 cars per
year. To see the latter as in improvement requires a change in perspective
from emphasizing production as benefit to emphasizing production as a
cost of maintenance. Consider that if we can maintain 1000 cars and the
transportation services thereof by replacing only 50 cars per year rather
than 100 we are surely better off—the same capital stock yielding the
same service with half the throughput. Yet the idea that production is a
maintenance cost to be minimized is strange to most economists. Shifting
taxes from value added to throughput would promote this minimizing
effort. One adaptation in this direction is the service contract that leases
the service of equipment (ranging from carpets to copying machines),
which the lessor/owner maintains, reclaims, and recycles at the end of its
useful life.
Although the main thrust of reforms for the SSE is to bring newly
scarce and truly rival natural capital and services under the market
discipline, we should not overlook the opposite problem, namely, freeing
truly non rival goods from their artificial enclosure by the market. There
are some goods that are by nature non-rival, and should be freed from
illegitimate enclosure by the price system. I refer especially to knowledge.
Knowledge, unlike throughput, is not divided in the sharing, but multiplied.
Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost of sharing it is zero and its
allocative price should be zero. International development aid should more
and more take the form of freely and actively shared knowledge, along
with small grants, and less and less the form of large interest-bearing
loans. Sharing knowledge costs little, does not create unrepayable debts,
and it increases the productivity of the truly rival and scarce factors of
production. Existing knowledge is the most important input to the
production of new knowledge, and keeping it artificially scarce and
expensive is perverse. Patent monopolies (aka “intellectual property
rights”) should be given for fewer “inventions”, and for fewer years.
What would happen to the interest rate in a SSE? Would it not fall
to zero without growth? Not likely, because capital would still be scarce,
there would still be a positive time preference, and the value of total
production may still increase without growth in physical throughput—as a
result of qualitative development. Investment in qualitative improvement
may yield a value increase out of which interest could be paid. However,
the productivity of capital would surely be less without throughput
growth, so one would expect low interest rates in a SSE, though not a
zero rate.
Would it be possible to have qualitative improvement (e.g.
increasing efficiency) forever, resulting in GDP growth forever? GDP would
become ever less material-intensive. Environmentalists would be happy
because throughput is not growing; economists would be happy because
GDP is growing. I think this should be pushed as far as it will go, but how
far is that likely to be? Consider that sectors of the economy generally
thought to be more qualitative, such as information technology, turn out
on closer inspection to have a substantial physical base, including a
number of toxic metals.
Also, if expansion is to be mainly for the sake of the poor it must
be comprised of goods the poor need—clothing, shelter, and food on the
plate, not ten thousand recipes on the Internet. In addition, as a larger
proportion of GDP becomes less material-intensive, the terms of trade
between more and less material-intensive goods will move against the less
material-intensive, limiting incentive to produce them. Even providers of
information services spend most of their income on cars, houses, and
trips, rather than the immaterial product of other symbol manipulators.
Can a SSE maintain full employment? A tough question, but in
fairness one must also ask if full employment is achievable in a growth
economy driven by free trade, off-shoring practices, easy immigration of
cheap labor, and widespread automation? In a SSE maintenance and repair
become more important. Being more labor intensive than new production
and relatively protected from off-shoring, these services may provide
more employment. Yet a more radical rethinking of how people earn
income may be required. If automation and off-shoring of jobs increase
profits but not wages, then the principle of distributing income through
jobs becomes less tenable. A practical solution (in addition to slowing
automation and off-shoring) may be to have wider participation in the
ownership of businesses, so that individuals earn income through their
share of the business instead of through fulltime employment. Also the
gains from technical progress should be taken in the form of more leisure
rather than more production—a long expected but under-realized
possibility.
What sort of tax system would best fit a SSE? Ecological tax
reform, already mentioned, suggests shifting the tax base away from
value added (income earned by labor and capital), and on to “that to
which value is added”, namely the throughput flow, preferably at the
depletion end (at the mine-mouth or well-head, the point of “severance”
from the ground). Many states have severance taxes. Taxing the origin
and narrowest point in the throughput flow induces more efficient
resource use in production as well as consumption, and facilitates
monitoring and collection. Taxing what we want less of (depletion and
pollution), and ceasing to tax what we want more of (income, value
added) would seem reasonable—as the bumper sticker puts it, “tax bads,
not goods”. The shift could be revenue neutral and gradual. Begin for
example by forgoing $x revenue from the worst income tax we have.
Simultaneously collect $x from the best resource severance tax we could
devise. Next period get rid of the second worst income tax, and
substitute the second best resource tax, etc. Such a policy would raise
resource prices and induce efficiency in resource use. The regressivity of
such a consumption tax could be offset by spending the proceeds
progressively, by the limited range of inequality already mentioned, and
by the fact that the mafia and other former income tax cheaters would
have to pay it. Cap-auction–trade systems will also increase government
revenue, and auction revenue can be distributed progressively.
Could a SSE support the enormous superstructure of finance built
around future growth expectations? Probably not, since interest rates and
growth rates would be low. Investment would be mainly for replacement
and qualitative improvement. There would likely be a healthy shrinkage of
the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real
economy, threatening to crash. Additionally the SSE could benefit from a
move away from our fractional reserve banking system toward 100%
reserve requirements.
One hundred percent reserves would put our money supply back
under the control of the government rather than the private banking
sector. Money would be a true public utility, rather than the by-product of
commercial lending and borrowing in pursuit of growth. Under the existing
fractional reserve system the money supply expands during a boom, and
contracts during a slump, reinforcing the cyclical tendency of the
economy. The profit (seigniorage) from creating (at negligible cost) and
being the first to spend new money and receive its full exchange value,
would accrue to the public rather than the private sector. The reserve
requirement, something the Central Bank manipulates anyway, could be
raised from current very low levels gradually to 100%. Commercial banks
would make their income by financial intermediation (lending savers’
money for them) as well as by service charges on checking accounts,
rather than by lending at interest money they create out of nothing.
Lending only money that has actually been saved by someone
reestablishes the classical balance between abstinence and investment.
This extra discipline in lending and borrowing likely would prevent such
debacles as the current “sub-prime mortgage” crisis. 100% reserves
would both stabilize the economy and slow down the Ponzi-like credit
leveraging.
A SSE should not have a system of national income accounts, GDP,
in which nothing is ever subtracted. Ideally we should have two accounts,
one that measures the benefits of physical growth in scale, and one that
measures the costs of that growth. Our policy should be to stop growing
where marginal costs equal marginal benefits. Or if we want to maintain
the single national income concept we should adopt Nobel laureate
economist J. R. Hicks’ concept of income, namely, the maximum amount
that a community can consume in a year, and still be able to produce and
consume the same amount next year. In other words, income is the
maximum that can be consumed while keeping productive capacity
(capital) intact. Any consumption of capital, manmade or natural, must be
subtracted in the calculation of income. Also we must stop the
asymmetry of adding to GDP the production of anti-bads without first
having subtracted the generation of the bads that made the anti-bads
necessary. Note that Hicks’ conception of income is sustainable by
definition. National accounts in a sustainable economy should try to
approximate Hicksian income and abandon GDP. Correcting GDP to
measure income is less ambitious than converting it into a measure of
welfare, discussed earlier.
The logic of the SSE is reinforced by the recent finding of
economists and psychologists that the correlation between absolute
income and happiness extends only up to some threshold of “sufficiency,”
and beyond that point only relative income influences self-evaluated
happiness. This result seems to hold both for cross-section data
(comparing rich to poor countries at a given date), and for time series
(comparing a single country before and after significant growth in
income). Growth cannot increase everyone’s relative income. The welfare
gain of people whose relative income increases as a result of further
growth would be offset by the loss of others whose relative income falls.
And if everyone’s income increases proportionally, no one’s relative
income would rise and no one would feel happier. Growth becomes like an
arms race in which the two sides cancel each other’s gains. A happy
corollary is that for societies that have reached sufficiency, moving to a
SSE may cost little in terms of forgone happiness. The “political
impossibility” of a SSE may be less than it previously appeared.
Nevertheless it is one thing to imagine the possibility of a SSE, but
something else to chart a transition thereto from a failed growth
economy. Can one transform an airplane into a helicopter without first
landing, or perhaps crashing? In order even to take such a task seriously
one has to realize that the growth economy is heading for a big crash.
Whether the measures suggested above are sufficient to convert the
growth airplane to a steady-state helicopter is hard to say, but I do think
they are probably necessary, and at a minimum would be useful guides for
reconstruction after the crash. They also may prove capable of being
applied gradually in mid air. For example, a cap-auction-trade system
could begin with a generous cap followed by a gradual pre-announced
schedule of tightening. The limits to income inequality could begin far
apart, and be gradually tightened. Ecological tax reform could substitute
at first only the worst value added taxes by the best throughput taxes, as
mentioned earlier. Compensatory tariffs to protect national costinternalization
policies could be imposed and raised gradually. Reserve
requirements for banks could be raised gradually to one hundred percent.
Patent monopolies could be gradually reduced and knowledge gradually
restored to its proper status as a non rival good. Downsizing of the IMFWB-
WTO from a servant of global integration in the interests of
transnational capitalist growth to something closer to Keynes’ nationbased
multilateral clearing union for international payments—this would
be more difficult to do gradually. But nations may begin individually to
withdraw from these institutions as it becomes more evident that they
have abandoned the federated internationalist nature of their Bretton
Woods Charter in favor of an economically integrated globalist vision of
capital-dominated growth, and are as yet incapable of conceiving the
possibility, much less recognizing the reality, of uneconomic growth.
While these transitional policies will appear radical to many, it is worth remembering that, in addition to being amenable to gradual application, they are based on the conservative institutions of private property and decentralized market allocation. They simply recognize that private property loses its legitimacy if too unequally distributed, and that markets lose their legitimacy if prices do not tell the whole truth about costs. In addition, the macro-economy becomes an absurdity if its scale is structurally required to grow beyond the biophysical limits of the Earth. And well before that radical physical limit we are encountering the conservative economic limit in which extra costs of growth become greater than the extra benefits.
Ten Point Policy Summary
1. Cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources. Cap limits to biophysical scale according to source or sink constraint, whichever is more stringent. Auction captures scarcity rents for equitable redistribution. Trade allows efficient allocation to highest uses.2. Ecological tax reform—shift tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), through the economy, and back to nature (pollution). Internalizes external costs as well as raises revenue more equitably. Prices the scarce but previously unpriced contribution of nature.
3. Limit the range of inequality in income distribution—a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to inequality.
4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year—allow greater option for leisure or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard to provide without growth.
5. Re-regulate international commerce—move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, adopt compensating tariffs to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition from other countries.
6. Downgrade the IMF-WB-WTO to something like Keynes’ plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances—seek balance on current account, avoid large capital transfers and foreign debts.
7. Move to 100% reserve requirements instead of fractional reserve banking. Put control of money supply and seigniorage in hands of the government rather than private banks.
8. Enclose the remaining commons of rival natural capital in public trusts, and price it, while freeing from private enclosure and prices the non rival commonwealth of knowledge and information. Stop treating the scarce as if it were non scarce, and the non scarce as if it were scarce.
9. Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus immigrants equals deaths plus out-migrants.
10. Reform national accounts—separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop growing when marginal costs equal marginal benefits. Never add the two accounts.
Herman E. Daly
School of Public Policy
University of Maryland
College Park MD 20742 USA
(**Editor's Note: the Sustainable Development Commission is a body set up to advise the UK Government on sustainable development. Herman's essay was commissioned as part of their ongoing ‘Redefining Prosperity’ efforts.
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This is my first comment - long time lurker here (great site). I don’t know Prof Daly but did meet him once at a conference – a great thinker and from what I've heard a gracious man.
The above piece is good, and about as far as one can go without getting too politically uncomfortable. It’s logical and methodical which is probably why it won’t work. My favorite line in the paper is the one highlighted, "Growth cannot increase everyone's relative income." Pareto optimality is incongruent with our biology, and Prof Daly recognizes this – his arbitrary 100:1 max-min may make sense on paper but how do we convince the ones currently in power to give up their relative advantages?
Here are my brief comments on the rest of paper:
-An ‘economics’ that puts high values on resources at the beginning would be an improvement, yet cap-auction-trade suggests that a pricetag can be put on everything – certainly many things should not be ‘sold.
-Limiting throughput, and thereby achieving low birth and death rates, strikes me as difficult to reconcile with human nature unless done in a sneaky way.
-Redistribution seems to be a recurring theme in ecological economics and some environmental circles. “Fairness”, as our society markets it might be our biggest stumbling block in the end. It’s odd that we harp about how much inequity there is yet as individuals constantly strive for it. “Human fairness" is a red herring which may sabotage many very logical possibilities. Indeed, I wonder whether the drive to achieve fairness on a finite planet with unlimited reproduction isn't the least fair thing possible. Discussion of the "proper range of inequity", be it 4 or 100, is to some extent -- just human wankery. The universe isn't fair, and never will be. Even among wretches with no physical possessions, one will have better vision, another a longer dick, another a more pleasing balance of brain chemicals, etc. Abandoning the pursuit of perceived fairness could be the best thing which could be done... and probably one of the least likely.
-Regarding competing for knowledge –this is a great idea, provided people don’t use the knowledge to compete for throughput. I get the sense that many if not most of this websites readership are trying to obtain knowledge here that will increase their own relative fitness, either through investments, or better preparation for collapse by knowing timing and magnitude.
-I liked his mention of going for fewer but more durable goods – you are investing low cost energy and making it still 'exist' in the future in embodied goods. This means less profits in the discounted cash flow models though, so convincing economists of this is probably hardly worth doing...
-Taxing at the mine or wellhead is a good idea. Good luck with that. A lot of this gets close to utopianism... laddering into saner taxes also tends to strike me that way...
While Daly may have been ahead of his time with ideas, time has past the feasibility of most of them by - there are now far fewer options left and most are heretical from standpoint of established institutions. (certainly not his fault - he's been saying these things for a long time and no one has listened) But he does make clear that money itself has become "unsustainable" because it can cross borders and cause depletion of resources just like people (or locusts) can. The only answer is to stop the flow of money and people -- and re-allocate assets.
Cornelius, you write:
That's a very perceptive comment. My only fear is that many readers may have missed it because of the average blogger's limited attention span -- even at the TOD echelon. I think people tend to skip over any comment that takes up more than one screen, and that's why I'm quoting it above. But I wouldn't be too cynical about our motives --- besides, there's nothing wrong about trying to improve one's chances of survival provided one isn't banking on the failure of others as part of one's strategy (like selling short, for example).
Now I'll get around to reading the rest of your comment ...
Historically there are almost zero cases of achieving what you ask. Therefore you can draw whatever conclusions you think are probable based upon the answer to your question being "they won't give up those advantages willingly."
Back where I come from, there are men who do nothing all day but good deeds. They are called phila-, er, er, philanth-er, yes, er, good-deed doers, and their hearts are no bigger than yours. But they have one thing you haven't got - a testimonial. --The Wizard
We mock Walmart or other examples of giving out employee recognition in place of an adequate living but Daly points to the military where pay disparity is not so large as 100:1. Why is this? The top ranks are payed in respect rather than money. When you are at the top, you have a chest full of testimonials. Military effectiveness depends crucially on force cohesion and too large a pay disparity gives the impression that the officers are not looking out for the troops which reduces morale and cohesion.
We have on-going examples of limiting pay disparity. Some automakers do it deliberately to get a more loyal workforce which provides a competitive advantage. The thrill of beating the competition seems to be pay enough in those cases.
Money is actually a surogate for respect and recognition after a certain point and the present too high compensation is actually a sign of distrust and disrespect, an attempt to buy loyalty to a company from those who lack the character to be loyal otherwise.
Chris
The two paragraphs below were written by Garrett Hardin for a speech he delivered on June 25 1968. The speech was the basis for the article "Tragedy of the Commons" published in Science on December 13, 1968. The elegant and extremely radical notion embodied in the article and his other writings as well explain why he was marginalized as ferociously and maliciously as was.
His writings posed then and pose today a threat to the existence of every economic, political, environmental and any other power center you can name.
The truth of what he writes is undiminished by time, only the urgency for accepting what he is saying has changed.
Hardin writes:
At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York (1) concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are ... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation."
I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality." (emphasis added)
the full article can be found at http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/index.html
I haven't read the linked article yet but the part that you pulled out reminds me of the distinction between change and transformation and how change so often is used, mostly ineffectively.
Here is how I shall define the two terms:
Change is past-based because it takes an existing system and modifies it. Thus it often brings many of the consequences of the old system with it.
Transformation is future-based because it is created from what the future contains — which is nothing. With transformation, something wholly new is created.
It is common to hear people calling for change. A politician often finds the message of change a useful one to win an election. But even when the politician is successfully elected, embarks on change and change occurs, why does the system always become something that looks remarkably like what was there before?
I assert that's because the politician used the wrong tool for the job. When transformation was called for, they used change instead.
To be fair, it's not entirely the politician's fault. Ask them what transformation is and they are unlikely to give you a meaningful response because it is not a concept the West is familiar with. It certainly isn't embedded in our culture like it is in some others. When it does come up, most times it will sound like change done to the extreme. Even asking experts in transformation will bring forth several different concepts. In the paper here, the author says:
That is all well and good, but what does he mean by a "fundamental internal transformation of all mental activity?" To what? From what? Isn't that scary?
This is an involved topic but starts to point at, I believe, what will be required to achieve what Hardin wrote. The difficulty is that in my view we largely have run out of time to disseminate the concept of transformation before collapse occurs.
Of course, inside of transformation, there is nothing wrong with collapse. It is just the universe doing its universe thing.
If you see that as callous because of the untold numbers of people who will likely suffer and die, you will also see the difficulty the teachers of transformation have. But they will not see it as difficult because that is not an empowering context in which to operate. It is just as it is and is not any other way. It is neither good nor bad. It just is.
-Andre'
(smile)
This is wonderful, André. Transformation is precisely what will be needed as the world goes through the change. I'm convinced that human transformation is the only reasonable (and perhaps the only possible) way of successfully addressing the converging crisis.
It's interesting to watch the growing awareness and the rising tide of consciousness out there. I mean, Oprah Winfrey working with Eckhart Tolle?? It's simply remarkable.
Fear of the idea of collapse is just the ego's fear of annihilation. The more violent the objections to even thinking about the possibility become, the more you can be sure the egos are speaking.
We need to live Now. Destiny will take care of itself.
Hi, GliderGuilder.
Yes, I often fall into the trap of becoming worried about my own annihilation when I think of peak oil. As far as I can tell, it's something evolution selected for otherwise my ancestors wouldn't have survived and I wouldn't be here. That doesn't change the fact that it's a pure physiological/mental response that makes sense for the perpetuation of the species but can make my life uncomfortable right now.
When I can quiet the chatter in my head, I can get to "I am now, then I won't be" — and then interrupt the mechanism that makes that mean anything other than "I am now, then I won't be." I don't have a religious practice so I think that's all there is. (Many religious practices, in my view, are responses to people's discomfort with confronting the eventuality of "not being.")
It is true that destiny will take care of itself. It always seems to. Despite that, I do see something for myself in taking action on the issues facing us. Occasionally I bump into people who make transformation mean that there is no reason to "work on our problems." (This is not so many, actually.) This is the flip side of people who devote their life to solving problems, but suffer immensely because life has become heavy and significant for them. Though a representative of each camp would look at the other as though the other were crazy, both approaches are entirely valid ways of living life.
But what is possible if one were to combine the two approaches? What if one were to play the biggest games available, but play them with ease and fun?
Couldn't we then enjoy life as we improve the conditions of humanity the planet? Even in the face of the calamity before us?
Isn't that what Viktor Frankl saw possible? The German title to his book seems to convey more than the English one: "...saying yes to life regardless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp" (...trotzdem ja zum Leben sagen (Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager).
That seems to be a worthy practice to take on and one that I do for myself: to live life regardless — while playing the big games that inspire me.
-André
P.S. I've gotten value from Eckhart Tolle's books. I'm up to chapter six of his latest.
Excuse me while I push past all these angels dancing on the head of a pin.
Too bad you didn't take the 15 minutes it would have taken someone obviously as erudite and well read as yourself to read the 13 pages written in 1968.
Had you, you would have recognized an eloquent—and ground breaking— argument making the case for transformation (a thorough or dramatic , change in form or appearance) that you feel a need to make distinct from change (make or become different; make or become a different substance entirely; transform) though there is no difference in meaning in common english usage.
Describing angels at play on pin heads I guess transforms language into what ever we want it to mean.
While it is nice to have the comfort of a spiritual belief to condone all our human behaviors the point Hardin was making in this article and through out his works is that absence a fundamental internal change within us all you simply can't get there from here.
We all suffer Dukkha.
In the words of a long dead and anonymous Zen master—"We are the ignorance that blocks out reality."
Yes and no. Of course I want to improve my own prospects. But the way in which I'd like to improve them need not be at the expense of another. As the article says, knowledge is a thing which does not become less as it's shared out. So by improving my knowledge, I'm improving my fitness, but not necessarily my relative fitness.
I'm also very interested in everyone being able to improve their fitness. Some people have fantasies of sitting on their cases of ammo and spam and gunning down hordes of suburban cannibals made desperate by overnight collapse. I don't. I have fantasies of a better future for the world, one where everyone has water, locally-grown food, shelter and clothing, productive employment, access to education, where the rich-poor gap is not too great, and so on.
I think we can achieve my little fantasy, some places are already moving towards it. But it requires knowledge.
I have to agree in practice and disagree... in practice. It is only in modern times that the idea of sharing has been considered heretical. We put labels on sharing by calling it communism, collectivism and socialism. Yet, this is the only way societies exist in a steady-state economy. What is really amazing is that people assume such societies exist only in the fevered imaginations of wild-eyed liberals, socialists and communisits (etc.). This is far from the truth. What is truthful, however, is that we have never managed to do this on a large scale. (That does not mean area, but population/complexity.)
On smaller scales, small populations do exist this way. I posted an example in a recent DrumBeat. Diamond also offers examples. Others exist, of course, if you're of a mind to google. Many North American Indians lived this way, at least within the breadth of their own tribes. On an even smaller scale, and a little less apt an anology, Americans lived this way to an extent as they went West. Barn raisings and other such activities were seemingly altruistic actions that actually were a matter of self-preservation as small communities counted on neighbors more than modern Americans do.
Human greed for power and money are the root of all evil. This idea that one person not only can have more than others, but that it is our inalienable right to have more than others pervades the current paradigm. And in the end, that right is backed by might, whether it be physical or economic. (This despite most people considering themselves to be religious and being told to live in service to one's brother; to give half your cover to the naked one you meet in the road. Ah, the irony...) A steady-state economy is nothing more than learning to share at a societal level without demonizing that by naming it with some pejorative term. Were politicians to successfully drop the huge weight of pejorative labels we have allowed ourselves to be labeled with, the change might be enormous. Why should feeding the poor be "socialism" when capitalism creates an eternal underclass? Why is capitalism not called parasitism, since that is exactly what it is? It is the shark/lamprey relationship in reverse. Capitalism cannot exist without cheap labor. Cheap labor = an eternal underclass. In the end, the ideas espoused above are about as close as we may get to transitioning the current civilization's basic structure to something resembling equality because we will certainly never overcome human greed - or any other of our vices - so long as we live in groups large enough to allow us to demonize/objectify our neighbors. Dunbar's number and all that.
The great weakness in the essay is this: it requries a slow transition on a global level from a parasitic to a cooperative society. When has this ever happened before? In truth, we have not lived in such a way since we left the Stone Age. We live that way now only in those societies that never left the Stone Age. We abandoned cooperative living yea these many thousands of years ago. How realistic is it that we can successfully transition back while keeping the best of what we have created since then?
To do so would require us to, indeed, relocalize. To learn to share again, and like it. To live with others closely. To abandon the self to the whole in the greater degree while reserving some small portion for ourselves where it does not conflict with the survival of the whole. And to like it. To not only live in balance with nature, but to seek to do so. And like it. Etc.
Most of all, it requires us to repudiate forever the idea of leadership that does not arise directly from the people, and is directly answerable to same. Not over 2 to 6 years, but immedaitely. The end of "leaders" in favor of nominal chiefs/big men as decribed in aboriginal societies is a must. For greed is what it is. The love of power does, indeed, corrupt. And it is the lack of bonds between us that allows the community to accept immoral and unethical acts upon our neighbors - and to commit them. Whether it be rape, usury, price gouging, theft or exploitation of workers, this is not possible when we are a close-knit community if the community stands on the principle of fairness and good for all. It is not possible if we know and have some degree of bond with our neighbors. This does not mean immorality or unethcial behavior will not exist, only that a cohesive community can check such behaviors either by punishment or by providing the external stimulus to control our impulses. The combination of human nature and a lack of community creates a vacuum into which the powerful sweep and build their power bases.
One final thought: For all this to work, we must also include a simplification of the legal process. It must be pared down to a short list of principles by which a jury judges right and wrong, guilt and fault. Put the power back in the hands of the people. The extreme complexity of the legal system favors those in power (of whatever form.) Juries must be in position to protect the community from laws being twisted. The greater the number of laws, the greater the number of loopholes. The current president, for example, could not possibly avoid impeachment were the legal system and the congress of the mind that the Constitution, as *the* law of the land, must be enforced. To wit: in referring to the Chief Executive, "...he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed..." By failing to do this, the president is in violation of the law of the land. One need know no more than this to see that impeachment is not only justified, it is necessary to restore the balance of power to the people. This priciple should apply at every level. When a company dumps toxic waste, when a teller embezzles money, when Exxon knowingly lies that Climate Change is bunk, when Enron manipulates power supplies... etc.
For example: did Enron manipluate (manipulate = lie)? Yes. Guilty. Anyone who knew this and did not act to stop it is also guilty. Anyone. Did BuCheney mislead about Saddam/al Queda (mislead = lie)? Yes. Guilty.
Let the jury decide their fates.
So.... can we make this transition peacefully? No. I do not think so. Walk outside and look at the nighbors around you. How many of them would you sacrifice for? How many of them would sacrifice for you? How many of them can you trust? How many of them **do** you trust?
How many of them are not a product of this age? How many of us are? How many of us, here, could make this transition?
How many are?
If it is possible, relocalizing and the end of strong governments at every level are musts. The end of usury and the fractional banking system is a must. A willingness to live within the bounds of the natural system is a must. (This list is not exhaustive.)
Cheers
The recommendation on the World Bank does not go far enough. Spectacles, hearing aids and flatulance drugs don't help when the bank is in thrall to the fossil fuel interests. Funding 4 GW of coal generation in India shows that the problems run much deeper. Perhaps a downgrade would cause the bank to do less damage, but it needs more than that I think.
Chris
SSE provides the essential impetus to creating a system the rewards sustaining behavior, though halting population growth is still not fully addressed from the above description. I expect most economists to simply outright dismiss such a policy, though many are shocked that Malthus' predictions may indeed be coming true. Perhaps that's enough to shake them from their obeisance to infinite growth economics.
It's not clear how SSE would treat certain renewable resources that still need protection, such as rainforests (clearcutting/burning) and streams (mountaintop coal extraction).
Any libertarians have comments on SSE?
What about the Maximum Power Principle (Howard Odum's proposed 4th Law of Thermodynamics) ? According to the MPP living systems (including cells, fruit flies, alligators, dogs, humans, etc., etc.) tend to organize in a way that uses the maximum available energy as fast as possible. NOT as efficiently as possible. AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. We are living systems and we are simply born to behave in a "growth" way. Perhaps being aware of the problem (like an addict who stays away from a bottle of whiskey) may help for a while, but can this basic biology be changed??? We are biological beings, whether we like it or not. If available energy is curtailed, as peak oil says, then people may die when they're not in their 80s, but instead in their 60s and start families when they are younger. But sticking to a plan to stabilize population and dictate no growth seems like it would not be popular (look at China). People want growth (even if it is denied they'll try to get it or die trying to get it) and they'll still fight wars to get resources to support their own group's (nation's, tribe's, etc,) growth even if it's just the tribe across the river and they're just fighting with sticks and rocks. Anthropologists even characterize war as something that relieves population pressure.
It doesn't matter if you think you're above the MPP, or that you don't like it and don't want to play by its rules. Perhaps certain segments of society (Henry David Thoreau, some ascetics, religious figures, etc.) have opted out of the MPP but most people (99.99%) wouldn't dream of acting contrary to the MPP.
Huh, I hadn't heard of it. Its quite inappropriate to include in the laws of thermodynamics because its not predictive the way the other laws are, and it doesn't have the same rules of the dismal game analogy.
Even though I don't think much of it, its the opposite of what you describe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
It basically states that systems tend to extract the maximum work out of energy transformation.
Im writing a post on the linkages between MPP, Hubbert Linearization and our overall predisposition to deplete resources to maximize current utility. There are some problems with that Wiki entry (though not many) -best to read some of Odums/Halls/Schneider original work.
And I agree with first poster that this is one of fundamental laws of how ecosystems and organism were organized (and continue to be so). We abhor a gradient, and free energy stored in fossil fuels is about one of the steepest gradients imaginable. We couldn't use it all at once, neither will we use it efficiently, but at intermediate rate and intermediate efficiency (with huge waste). Its amazing that other organisms follow this rule, which makes it more robust that humans carry the genetic wiring, at least for the mechanism. More soon.
I got this far (my emphasis)...
...and sprayed coffee all over my keyboard. Is this guy really a professional economist?
What made you spray the coffee is the typical run-of-the-mill economist concept. They consider "steady state" to be an economy maintaining a fairly constant ratio between labor, capital, etc... even as it grows. And yes, unlimited wants - that's why economics is the (pseudo)science of scarcity, because one can never satisfy all the human wants.
From last year, a discussion with Brian Czech (mp3) addresses exactly this point toward the end.
Scale, distribution and allocation. The market only handles allocation. Scale is killing us and distribution is why most of us have so little power to change matters in a positive dimension. Someone upthread suggested it be done sneakily; I'd advocate doing it as broadly and openly as possible. "What will be fair and who will decide?"
cfm in Gray, ME
We WILL end up with a steady state (or sustainable) economy. Once we've depleted all of the non-renewable resources, we will have no choice but to live within the carrying capacity provided by renewable resources. This is true IF we manage to avoid outright extinction, that is.
There are policies that could be followed to make the transition easier, less painful, and less deadly for more people. Prof. Daly has prescribed many of them, though we could probably add to his list, especially with regard to energy. Unfortunately, I am not optimistic when it comes to governments making wise and timely policy decisions.
Agree, WNC. In the "land of droughts and flooding rain" (Australia), after thousands of discussion hours and millions of tax-dollars, the government still can't decide whether to ban plastic shopping bags or not... So if PO gets on par with Global Warming as a so-called "urgent" issue, what faith can we have in politicions doing the right thing?
But what the heck, it's probably time for a decent global shake-down and I'd rather watch a decent sunset than the latest block-buster on a Hi Def plasma anyway.
Sure, but 10^26 watts of solar power is a steady state economy just a tad bit larger than our current one. The notion that we're close to the end of growth is obviously silly.
Yes, but where is the plan to get us from here to there --- and the capital funding that would be required -- and the wise and effective leadership to make it all happen? It is getting VERY late in the game, way past time for mere talk, and urgently in need of action.
Seriously? One might wonder how we industrialized to begin with when there was far less capital, everything cost more in every possible sense and the leaders of the day were all looking for any possible way to butcher each other at any possible excuse. The way forward today looks far more credible. Of course there will be problems on the way but the end of growth just isn't in the cards for centuries.
we industrialized at a time when there were huge surpluses of raw materials, and much smaller populations
we've used up a mind-boggling amount of those resources (and there aren't more being created i.e. abiotic oil) - and we have ever-increasing populations
so explain where the growth will come from as we have peak in crude oil production, are close to nat gas peak, not far from a coal peak - experiencing peaks in many other materials and foods - I just don't see it
and further more I am hoping not to get it - since more industrial growth just means a steeper cliff, more AGW and the potential for a bigger die-off
Where will we ever get more whale oil?
Our limits aren't what you think they are.
I'd like to be polite - but the whole "whale oil" argument is really really inane - in fact, we DID over-fish the whales, and if crude oil hadn't been a cheap and convenient replacement, it would have been back to tallow and wax candles (btw, whale oil for the 19th century was NOT the equivalent to crude now - coal was - whale oil was a specialty item for lamps and some industrial lubrication - hardly the energy foundation for the whole civilization like crude is for us) now our populations have grown even larger on a steady diet of crude oil, natural gas and coal - which are all running out quickly - and you, without any attempt to explain expect me to simply believe that something will just turn up?
unless whale oil is the replacement for crude - bringing it up is as stupid as the equally dumb "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones" argument.
point out a replacement for crude oil and natural gas that is waiting in the wings
"Our limits aren't what you think they are" - oh really? surprise me with some sort of explanation of this statement - where is the replacement for liquid fuels?
You really think there aren't replacements? 120 trillion tons of fissionables in the ground and 10^16 watts of solar energy from the sky with hydrogen from the seas and carbon from the rocks and the air you can make as much liquid fuel as you want.
Likely true, but at what cost, over what time frame, at what social equity level, and what social freedom level?
I agree with Nate and the others Dezakin. Clearly you have swallowed the neoclassical economics line whole, despite its inherent implausibility. The problem with oil is scale - no combination of all of the alternatives, either singly or together will or can replace the energy contribution of oil anytime soon, either in time or in volume. That is why this site exists.
If you want to enter into a circular discussion about unlimited growth I suggest you go to the high priests of neoclassical economics - The Mises Institute.
In the mean time, just to demonstrate that you are not alone I will leave you with a favourite quote that Jay Hanson also likes:
BTW, Herman Daly is not only an economics professor, he is highly celebrated. His work comprised a significant amount of my reading for my Masters degree (Sustainability Sciences). I have the utmost respect for him and his economics.
You're fighting a strawman in bringing whos economic ideology is best game. Have at it if you like.
Its been illustrated that all the alternatives can replace oil, and nuclear, solar, or wind can each do it singly. The issue is simply cost. I'm simply saying growth wont end, not that there wont be a cost, because the liquid fuel infrastructure replacement cost would run into tens of trillions globally easily. Costs of running all of civilization on nuclear would be some 10000 1 GW plants today, for some 30 trillion, and for wind its similar. Add in grid costs, infrastructure replacement for synfuel plants, rail lines, and the like, and its obviously quite pricy, but well within the realm of affordibility for the globes 60 trillion dollar economy.
I suspect that the transition will be relatively painless, but it could also be a multi-decade long inflationary low growth/recession period as all the capital and labor are sucked out of productivity enhancement and back into infrastructure. But it isn't the end of growth or even close, and this apocalyptic alarmist nonsense about the population crashing and being at the apex of human civilization has got to stop.
The problem Dezakin is time. As Nate wrote above, I also have no doubt that theoretically these energy sources could replace oil, the problem is time, investment, infrastructure and political will. Right now, apart from this site and a few others like it, there is zero understanding of the energy problem we face (with the possible exception of a small and unpleasant cabal surrounding VP Cheney).
Certainly the UK and Australian governments continue to demonstrate an alarming degree of ignorance and indifference to the importance of oil.
I am not so sure you are right though in practical terms. Nuclear? There are problems with Uranium supply - we are already exploiting lower quality reserves. Wind? Huge oil derived infrastructure requirements. Solar? Ditto for wind. Bio-fuels? Finite land (actually arable land is declining). You may have noticed there have been one or two problems with food supply in the last few weeks?
So while I agree in theory, I disagree absolutely in practical terms. "No combination of alternatives....etc"
I don't think it's time. I think it's thermodynamics.
Greer wrote about this last fall, in an article called Solving Fermi's Paradox. It's about why technological progress is not unlimited.
If you think its about thermodynamics, you fail. One side of the sky is 6000 K and the other is 4K.
Agreed Leanan, but in the context of this particular discussion with Dezakin simplicity is important, as is amply demonstrated by his response to your post. He clearly hasn't grasped even the basics of the issues surrounding PO.
Try again. Thermodynamics aren't a limit. Go ahead and try to show they are, you might find you dont actually know anything about thermodynamics.
Actually Dezakin I do not have to prove anything to you, this site is led by an illustrious and intelligent group of people who have done much to educate a large group of readers. It goes without saying that your views are not well supported on this site.
The fact that I come here to learn and to interact with other like minded people is my affair. I expect to do so with robust but polite discussion. I am not only a chartered accountant, but have a Masters degree in Sustainability Sciences - the very stuff of this site. In other words I have undertaken formal academic training in the subject and thus can justifiably claim at least a basic grasp of many of the topics discussed here. Many other people have much more than a basic grasp - they can properly be classed as world class leaders in their subjects.
The one thing that binds us all here is a significant level of concern about the ignorance and indifference our political leadership shows towards these subjects. One overt objective of this site is to raise the level of knowledge and understanding that the general public has about these issues - and that this site achieves admirably.
Neoclassical economic teaching has informed government decisions over the course of the last several years and still is doing so. The disciplines worship of the market is now being questioned and rightly so. Not that I don't believe that the free market is not the best vehicle for allocating all sorts of things - of course it is. But it is also true that there are also significant market failures. Oil is one. Long lead times mean that the market cannot correctly signal investment decisions or even a price that reflects oils scarcity value. Climate change is another - property rights cannot be ascribed to air so this is a true Tragedy of the Commons. Thermodynamics is not catered for anywhere in neoclassical economic thinking and thus much of the discipline is irrelevant in todays world. Economists without a basic understanding of resources are simply not wired to be relevant.
Note that the comment above about climate change is not intended to invite a long thread fighting over climate change. It is enough that a significant group of people want less CO2 pumped into their share of the air - and they have no way of stopping it. That is market failure.
So much for the explanation of why we are here. I would advise you to be more respectful on this site. Sure - we like robust discussion, but remember that most people do not have the time or inclination to write long fully justified comments here. A certain level of knowledge and understanding is presumed.
BTW I am an atheist - I do not subscribe to "end times" or any other religious topic. I am concerned about human overshoot; and that is another well established principle, but this time the subject is ecology.
Nice nonsequiter; Truth isn't a democracy of wild opinions.
Your long winded righteous indignation has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that thermodynamics aren't a limit to civilization, and if you knew anything about thermodynamics you'd realize it. You can argue societal limits of human organization, ecological limits of environmental footprint, anger of the gods or some other untestable proposal that will prevent future growth as well as blovaiting complaints about neoclassical economics or whatever is your favorite devil, but it has absolutely nothing to do with thermodynamics. Sure, you don't have to proove anything, but don't think it actually helps your credibility.
Actually Dezakin I think you will find that "thermodynamics" represents very real limits to growth. All species require usable energy and humans in the modern context need huge amounts of usable energy. Less usable energy is going to be available to humans in the near future and that is going to cause us problems, most likely through the impact on our economies. You may not believe that, but many on this site do. There is also a very significant body of evidence that supports that contention. Usable in this context means the right amount of energy in the right place at the right time and in the the right form. One can die of starvation in the hot sun.
Not exactly sure what you mean, but if you mean population overshoot (of any population of any species in a specified environment) then I think you will find the principles are well established and have been understood for a very long time. They are hardly untestable - in fact the principle is so obvious it should not need testing. Yeast in bottle of wine is a good metaphor for the human population on earth. (Note I have specified which population, species and environment.)
In fact there is/was a long time contributor on this site whose tag line was Are humans smarter than yeast? It is a very good question.
Look, you can keep arguing it if you want, but you arent going to find any support that this is an application of thermodynamics. The usable energy is defined by what you can get out of a heat engine, and has a definite number. You're trying to describe capital and labor shortages that prevent construction of said heat engines, but this isn't an application of thermodynamics! You dont know what you're talking about here.
Sure, and the answer is consistantly yes. I suppose the question 'does human civilization follow the same growth pattern as yeast' just isn't as snappy; Its a nice analogy, with the caveat that civilization isn't static and the size of the petri dish is the size of the universe.
I grow weary of this thread, but I am not sure where heat engines come into this discussion. The laws of thermodynamics have much wider application, specifically as they relate to humans in this context for food, transport fuels and much else besides.
In fact the reference to heat engines is illuminating. Do you think the laws of thermodynamics are specifically and only about heat engines?
No it doesn't. Thermodynamics applies to how heat moves in systems, from hot to cold; The study of thermodynamics grew out of analysis of heat engines and carnot efficiencies is an application of the second law. The sun will be hot for billions of years, and the sky will be colder than other parts of the universe for many trillions. The limits of thermodynamics only say that we can't extract work from the sun at greater than the average temperature of the sun compared to the average temperature of the sky. Applying thermodynamics as a limiting factor is simply ignorant of what thermodynamics describe.
As I said: I grow weary with this.
Wikipedia:
I am not sure how the sky etc is relevant, however energy available to do work for us humans must be in certain forms, or be available and capable of conversion into such forms to be useful (taking entropy and economic costs into account). That depends to a great extent on the systems surrounding us; including human made systems. That in turn implies links with our economy, investment and legacy infrastructure. For instance, I agree that fuel cells can drive cars, they are just not going to drive 800m of them in a meaningful time scale for a whole bunch of reasons.
Wow, you cited an entry without understanding it at all.
The night sky is relevant because its the heat sink that slowly increases in temperature (were the universe not expanding) as heat flows from the stars to the sky. As long as you have something hotter than the the sky you can extract work from it. This is the only time we really consider entropy as a thermodynamic limit. The amount of work you can extract depends on the temperature difference between whatever's warmer than the heat sink (the sun, a fission reactor core, a gravitationally collapsing accresion disk, whatever)
We aren't running into thermodynamic limits when we receive sunlight that's 6000k with an environmental heat rejection limit of 300k and a total solar energy budget of 10^16 watts. The carnot efficiency we can achieve in ideal systems here means we can only extract, hrm, about 10^16 watts. You aren't making arguments based on thermodynamics. If you were you would have a nice equation with our total avaliable energy and a clear unambiguous answer that we couldn't argue about. We can definitavely say we can't get 2.5 gigawatts from a 3 gigawatt thermal light water reactor run on the steam cycle for thermodynamic reasons, and this is the problem domain of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics sets the limit of how much nuclear power we can have on earth, because if you have significantly more than 10^16 watts, the planet gets too hot for human habitation. Thermodynamics tells us that we cant beam in more than 10^16 watts of electric power from solar power satellites for similar reasons. Thermodynamics tells us the limits of how much biofuel can be synthesized by a plant, how much hydrogen can be yielded from a thermochemical process, the energy losses from conversion, and the maximum amount of information that can be processed in a given space by a given mass of matter. Attempting to use thermodynamics to argue that we're facing near term limits to growth for thermodynamic reasons is simply ignorant of what thermodynamics describe, because these limits are clearly defined and orders of magnitude beyond what we'll be facing anytime soon.
Sure, and it has nothing to do with thermodynamic limits. It has to do with capital flows, financing, cometitive technologies and other things that have nothing to do with thermodynamic limits. Thermodynamics says its entirely possible for 800 million 100kw fuel cars to be constructed and driven continuously fueled by 25% efficient solar thermochemical hydrogen production because its well within the solar energy budget.
As I said I grow weary. Have your universes and your stars. You clearly have some knowledge, but you seem incapable of connecting the dots. Thermodynamics concerns systems however "small" in comparison with the night sky.
And yes, everything is relevant, including capital, economics, investment, ecology etc etc AND thermodynamics.
Give it up! This isn't your field, and you're out of your depth. You're now errecting strawmen and nonsequiters that have nothing to do with my original statement. Of course thermodynamics concerns small systems! Its why you get engine efficiencies of 15% or so in your car and don't get 200 miles to the gallon, why you have to spend energy irreversibly to refine materials that have gotten mixed, why steel costs more than concrete. Thermodynamic limits aren't what is preventing growth. I would argue that economics, capital, investment, and ecology aren't preventing growth either, but we can show that thermodynamics isn't preventing growth because if it were, everything on earth would allready be dead.
I hate to come along and be supportive of anything Dezakin says, but... Dez mate, seriously, this is a fart in a wind tunnel. Don't waste your time on this guy.
I am not sure it is yours either.
All systems suffer from a variety of constraining factors and the laws of thermodynamics definitely play their part in constraining what is possible. You need to connect the dots - everything is connected. There is no point in considering any of the issue discussed on this site in isolation. They may be discussed in separate threads, but they are discussed within a very broad context.
Unless some other source of energy is found and commercialized, or some new technology that somehow delivers energy is invented and commercialized, the lack of growth in oil production will continue to cause distress. Turning full circle - No combination of any of the alternatives can replace oil within a meaningful timescale. That is because the properties of oil are unique. It is the zenith of mans energy equation, at least for the time being. Unless any replacement is seamless, there exists a risk of economic dislocation, quite possibly depression, maybe even outright chaos.
If you do not accept or understand that statement, you have not thought all these issues through and your understanding is limited. You should go away, give up looking at the sky, and get down to some serious reading.
Does thermodynamics tell us how much of that solar budget is not used by the earth's biosphere now, and so is available for our use and what resources are needed to harness that?
I think you're referring to theoretical limits, not practical limits. It is the latter which is of concern to us, not the former.
I'm not disagreeing; Thermodynamics describes no limit that makes it impossible for human civilization to consume galaxies. Suggesting that thermodynamic limits make growth of civilization beyond where we are impossible is simply ignorant of what thermodynamics actually describe.
Dezakin - I have thought about this thread overnight. I think you are either at school or you might just be a first year college student and have just learned about thermodynamics in Physics 101; and therefore "know everything". There can be no other explanation for the responses you give, that are entirely out of context, about heat engines, the sky and and other off-topic stuff.
We are primarily concerned here with the procurement of oil, or a reasonable substitute. That is to ensure that our transport systems, petro-chemical and agriculture industries have a future. We also discuss other forms of energy such as coal, electricity and nuclear along with related topics such as food. Common to all these topics is an understanding of thermodynamics. But that implies an ability to apply the laws of thermodynamics in this context. You clearly have no idea how to do that, or maintain a discussion at a high level.
Okay, since you're making assumptions about my lack of expertise, educate me.
How do the laws of thermodynamics impose a limit to the growth of human civilization? My assertion is that they don't impose near term limits. Show where I'm mistaken, because I'm honestly eager to learn.
I will do so by way of example:
The much touted Hydrogen economy a couple of years ago is a non-starter for several reasons.
The first law of thermodynamics means (in our context here) that energy must be procured - it cannot be "created", at least with current technology. Fusion theoretically could "create" energy (from matter - eg hydrogen, like the sun), but that has been true for as long as fusion has been understood. That means that some or other source of energy is required. That in itself is problematic. Can sufficient energy be procured in the right place, at the right time and in the right form? This is a real question. It is no good pointing at theoretical values for sunlight or uranium ore grades. The energy must be in a useable form which implies we have the capital equipment and know-how to procure it. Just to labour the point, if we cannot procure it, we do not have it; and it cannot be used.
The second law of thermodynamics (entropy) states that there is an energy loss (to heat normally) every time energy is converted from one form to another. That means the efficiency ratio from initial source to useful work is critical. Low efficiency means that more of the original energy source must be procured than for higher efficiency ratios between energy source and the useful work. in our example, if we worked out the ratio from PV to useful work (moving a car) using hydrogen, the overall efficiency would be very low, much lower than the initial output of the PV panels, that itself is much lower than the initial energy value for the sunlight.
Layer in the technical, investment and infrastructural difficulties with hydrogen and it quickly becomes apparent that it is a non-starter. Thus the laws of thermodynamics apply directly in conjunction with other factors, in constraining the development of the so called hydrogen economy. And that point is important too. You cannot think of the laws of thermodynamics in isolation. They are integral in this issue with a large range of other factors.
And that is the end of this discussion, for me anyway.
Sure, but these aren't limitations set by thermodynamics or the first law. These are limitations set by technology, engineering, capital and financing. The first law is silent on what form the energy is in. Thermodynamics doesn't say we can't cover the earth entirely in photovoltaics.
Sure, and it describes whats impossible. When you run the actual numbers of thermodynamic limits, you can come to some conclusions. Thermodynamics says we can extract work in one form or another from sunlight. It says the maximum efficiency you can get is determined by the temperature of the sunlight (6000k) and the temperature of the heat sink (300K at least while the earth has an atmosphere) which gives you a maximum efficiency of 95%. Now the problem is that materials for engineering we currently have today for hydrogen production limit the temperature to some 1200C for thermochemical methods and have heat losses giving a conversion efficiency of some 50%. An good hydrogen turbine can be run at 50% efficiency, while typical turbines or internal combustion engines will have conversion efficiencies of perhaps 20%, giving us a total system efficiency of 10%.
What we can't say is that hydrogen production with its system efficiencies won't be pursued anyways for reasons beyond pure thermodynamic efficiency, such as for synfuel production with all the associated benifits that liquid fuels provide.
This only shows that hydrogen is less competitive than direct photovoltaics from a thermodynamic perspective. I'm not going to disagree here. But this is a doozy of an example, because I don't see what you're trying to argue with it thats related to my thesis that thermodynamics impose no short term limits on human civilization.
Right. Which is still besides the point I've been making all along that there aren't any thermodynamic limits preventing future economic growth. Either address that or stop pretending to disagree with me.
This is alarmingly ignorant of a subject that has literally been beaten to death. The lowest ore grade ore I'm aware that we're exploiting is Rossing mine, which is 300ppm ore that yields 500 times the energy in light water reactors than is consumed by the mine, (or nearly the entire country of Namibia where its located). The cost of nuclear power is less than 1% the cost of uranium, which means there is no incentive to develop breeder reactors unless they can offer something more than fuel efficiency to pay for the development cost. If breeder reactors are pursued they consume less than 1/200th the fuel per GW/year as a comperable light water reactor. We're not going to run out of fuel for light water reactors.
Not in the least bit oil derived infrastructure requirements; The diesel fuel to run the cranes and construction equipment is negligable. For wind and solar the current infrastructure is dependant on coal for refining the aluminium, steel, and concrete. And this chemical refining can be performed just as well by hydrogen produced by electricity or thermochemical techniques. And we're not going to run out of coal anytime soon, least of all for steel and concrete production.
Oh my, an alarming news piece over the course of weeks certainly is reasonable precedent for discussing growth over the centuries.
This is yet another piece of self deception that we're special enough to be at the end times. We're not. There's bad news. People kill each other and economies still weather fierce storms, especially as a vital resource runs dry forcing infrastructure change. But the notion that infrastructure cant change is ridiculously naive, especially when infrastructure was literally built from nothing in the first wave of industrialization.
What on earth does this mean? Uranium is a cost component of nuclear power, not the other way round.
Anyway, fuel cost is the least of the problems. Look at the entire life-cycle energy budget for a nuclear plant. It is only positive with very high grade ore. There is little chance that the life-cycles of nukes built now will be energy positive because ore grades are declining. Some that are in the pre-planning stage now may be built but never commissioned because of fuel problems.
Food - if you have not made the connection between food and fuel........ - uh, I grow weary of this. It is ended.
You're making opposing arguments. The entire life-cycle energy budget of the nuclear power cycle has fixed costs irrelevant to the ore grade as the largest component (concrete, steel refining, enrichment) and mining costs of the lowest grade ores yield 500 times the energy in light water reactors than are consumed by mining. This is before we delve into breeder reactors (which honestly will have to compete on far more than fuel efficiency because the price of uranium in terms of money or energy is just too insignificant to be a deciding factor) that utilize fuel 200 times more efficiently than light water reactors and can utilize thorium which is three times as plentiful as uranium. The argument against nuclear power sustainability being limited by fuel supplies is trivially wrong.
You mean the fuel thats entirely synthesizable given an energy source? Ammonia based fertilizers are derivable from any hydrogen source which you can produce thermochemically from fission or solar power or via electrolysis from wind, or from coal reformation for the next century.
But you grow weary, run along now.
I am not sure what that means, but no, I mean the ethanol from corn boondoggle in the US that has caused spikes in world grain prices.
But actually the food issue is much bigger than that and it concerns arable land, the loss of rain forests, climate change, various ecological problems etc etc. The ethanol boondoggle was merely the last straw that broke the camels back so to speak.
Anyway the consequence of high grain prices is food riots in many countries. Rice purchases are even being rationed in the US!
Now, why would you want to make ethanol from corn again?
I never did. I thought you were actually concerned about fuel limits restricting the ability to produce food as a limit to economic growth.
Food - if you have not made the connection between food and fuel........ - uh, I grow weary of this. It is ended.
You use fuel to make food. If you're doing it the other way around its because you have more food than you actually need.
No you are wrong.
You turn food into fuel because a political entity has provided an artificial incentive (subsidy) that skews the market.
The market doesn't care if corn is ethanol or chips it cares which one is going to provide the greatest profit—over and out.
Much like all the subsidies to the oil industry—direct and otherwise.
You know all the infrastructure build by taxpayers that are the bedrock of our demand for oil.
You're not even disagreeing with me.
If we didn't have enough food, the price would be too high to turn it into fuel.
did you ever see the monty python movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
you are the black knight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMkth8FWno with whom King Arthur fights and cuts down to nothing more than a head in a helmet claiming to be unscathed...
and no this does not mean I am comparing myself to King Arthur
I'm sorry, what do you think I'm arguing? I don't think we're even disagreeing. Gov agrifuel supports are bad and raises the price of food, theres no argument there. Do you actually disagree with something or are you going to continue calling me names?
If we didn't have enough food, the price would be too high to turn it into fuel.
How so? If the world didn't have enough food, some would starve but that wouldn't necessarily stop some companies turning some of it into fuel, for those that could afford the high prices.
If you spend 10% of your income on food, you may groan at having to spend 11% on it, but "happy" to spend a few more percent on your fuel. But if you spend 90% of your income on food, you might not be able to afford to spend 99% on it, and certainly not afford to buy any fuel at all.
If the world didn't have enough food, everyone would be bidding food out of the price range for fuel production and the poor would just die. It would be a sound argument that the very wealthy would produce fuel from it if there were no substitutes, but there are a variety of ways to synthesize fuel without crops that are just less expensive.
Perhaps we're disagreeing what 'enough' food means; We don't have enough quantified arguments to really state our position. I don't think we'd actually disagree if we did.
I kind of agree with that except that the pricing out of the fuel production range may well take too long to prevent the food reaching biofuel plants and getting it to starving people instead. But, at some point, the rich will just buy most of the conventional fuel, rather than pay even more for the green stuff.
I really doubt there are SCALABLE replacements - in time
as others have mentioned - at what cost, and in what time frame
In an ideal world, with some sort of benevolent philosopher-king ruling the earth - we may see a transition without severe hardship and a die-off - forced conversion to electrified trains, bicycles - moving closer to work
rapid build up of nukes, wind, pv, solar thermal etc.
do you see ANY sign that somebody is building the proverbial 100 x 100 mile solar thermal plant in the Mojave? $6 trillion isn't an unimaginable amount to spend to generate our electricity (although Darwinian would quite rightly point out that this is a)in the southwest and b)only works when the sun is shining and storage is quite a problem and c) it doesn't create fertilizer or drive tractors to grow food) - but I see no sign that anybody is going to do it nearly fast enough to make a difference - and if it doesn't happen fast, then it is unlikely to happen at all - the downslope is going to have a real problem with lack of capitol and the ability to create more industrial capacity
as for all those nukes - I see NO sign they will be built, I have seen serious doubts about the amount of available fissionable material (and don't throw breeders or thorium reactors at me - nobody is using them right now, so they are complete unknowns at this point) - we have problems with storage (Yucca mtn still not open and the need for many more) - and we have serious problems with water availability to cool the reactors (Atlanta's nearby reactors being a prime example from last summer)
it IS possible that humans could take the needed actions to harvest renewable energy sources to preserve what we have - and it looks more and more unlikely that it will happen in time
In time for what? To prevent some alarmist mad max withering of society as five billion starve and the survivors go to live like little house on the prarie or fight zombie hordes or whatever other nonsense seems to be the popular fantasy here?
The worst scenario I see is a massively inflationary economy and wealth destruction as huge amounts of the global capital is transitioned to infrastructure requirements when the supposed resource shock waves hit.
I see this assertion all the time with absolutely nothing to back it up. We had far less industrial capacity, orders of magnitude less, 150 years ago when we built the entire industrial world out of nearly nothing.
Dozens of nukes are being built today, and hundreds are in planning, right. You can have serious doubts about the fuel supply if you want but you'd be willfully ignorant, and as for waste storage, its a nonproblem related to NIMBY that was solved decades ago with onsite dry cask storage. Yucca is a political stunt that serves no purpose.
Why do you have to be such an ass? People with legitimate concerns are alarmists? Bugger off.
People keep mentioning time and you blow it off. Tell us all: if we hit real declines of 4.5% or better - that is, the total production of oil and/or all liquids starts dropping at that rate this year or by 2012 - , then how does *your* Pollyanna future unfold?
Rhetorical question.
IF, as the Hirsch Report and its follow-up state, we hit that degree of decline that soon, your Pollyanna future gets blown out of the water.
Now, quit being an ass about this and just put forth what you have to say without the bullshit insults.
Additionally, your view of things must include denial of the possibility of collapse. Yet, it is an inarguable fact that *every* empire/civilization has known collapse to one degree or another, or of one sort or another. Why are we immune now?
Cheers
Crappy, and I'm worried about what it will do to my bank account and how I'll live my life, but I'm not worried that I won't have a life. Either you think thats being Pollyanna or you're taking a flamethrower to a strawman.
Every 'collapse' scenario isn't the least bit isomorphic to modern civilization, and assuming collapse is at best premature, and most of the collapses have been changes in centralization of power after centuries of stagnation in agrarian command economies; One might reasonably wonder why it took Rome so long to fall. Assuming we're heading for a collapse is more of an article of faith based on our actual experience with industrial civilization. We might as well study the social interaction of gazelle to project the future of the toy industry.
I don't know that we're immune to collapse now, but I wouldn't assume collapse is the least bit likely or unrecoverable.
Yet, you keep insulting those who are worried about collapse.
Criminy...
No time to really answer now. More later.
Stop being an ass.
Cheers
I don't know if the tooth fairy is an agent of Zeus either. Its untestable, but its not something I lose a lot of sleep over. I'm sorry you dont get the warm fuzzies reading my posts, but you're just going to have to deal with it; Anyone that challenges the conventional wisdom of the apocalypse here deals with more abuse than simple disection of nonsense.
I'm only arguing that the notion of collapse of civilization is a ridiculous fear that is popular among neoprimitive granola smokers. I'm not going out of my way to say its not a dumb idea, because really it is. Its a damned looser of a concept when Olduvai Duncan was arguing his nonsense last decade and it still is today because there's no credible scenario that would pave the way for the fall of civilization, and every indication that civilization will continue to advance and grow beyond a resource shift.
Now if you wan't to actually argue a position, have at it. But really all you're doing is being a punk who objects to writing style while erecting strawmen and starting a series of useless flaming content empty venom that doesnt illuminate or illustrate anything new at all. Start over.
My position is that you are an abusive ass and, frankly, a bit of an idiot. The type that gets 1600 on his SAT's but can't apply himself to anything useful. I've read a number of your posts now and not a one of them offers anything but abuse. You keep saying, for example, that thermodynamics don't apply in a thread above, but you have not once explained why nor given an example. You have only insulted.
You are doing the same here. Idiotic. There is no sign of collapse? Are you a moron? Not only do you keep repeating this without any attempt to support the contention, you are staggeringly wrong.
1. Energy depletion is happening. You can keep saying the sun will save us, but as others have pointed out, if that energy cannot be gotten at in a certain period of time in the right form and by enough people, there will be collapse(s.) They are already beginning. Haiti will not long endure the current food crisis there, for example.
2. Food shortages/maldistribution is happening.
3. The US economy is in a shambles and still falling. Not a few are concerned about a fall greater than the great depression, and I do not speak of Peak Oilers.
But there are no signs... You're an idiot.
Enough.
Until you add something useful, shut up.
Cheers
Revelling in hypocricy here are we? I'm as polite to people as they are to me. Set the tone. What you have here is a conflict of opinions and you're getting way to easily offended. Now apparently even though I only argue that you're simply wrong, you argue that I'm an ass and an idiot or whatever other stream of ad-hominem nonsense you see fit to lay at my feet.
Are you talking about energy or food imports in a backwards country? Sure, if you cant build energy infrastructure, civilizaton crumbles. However there has been no sign that energy infrastructure is impossible to build, and its significantly easier to build than it was 100 years ago in the supposed halcyon days of fossil energy abundance.
They allways have. If you take a look at history, there's far less shortages than throughout most of history, and none where it matters, industrial civilization. Now this may be a cold way to look at it, but really food shortages in subsaharan africa or somalia just don't matter for the industrialized world because these people don't contribute to the global economy. They might as well not exist. It doesn't mean its not tragic, but it isn't an argument for the collapse of civilization.
The US economy isn't even in recession yet, this is a bit premature. I'm concerned about a massive crash in the economy (or rather massive inflationary stagnation) as investment capital is sucked out of the rest of the economy to fuel the energy and infrastructure projects that will be in demand as we transition our economy from oil to other sources. This isn't an argument for collapse of civilization.
Is that technically not in recession or practically not in recession? With growth of only 0.6%, in the last two quarters, and a current population growth rate of about 1%, people are getting poorer. However, as I understand it, food and energy are not included in the inflation rate that gets used to determine real GDP growth (because they are considered volatile). If they were added in, it is likely that the last two quarters would have seen negative growth.
Fair enough. But its not what I would call in shambles as was being asserted by the previous poster.
Its a damned looser of a concept when Olduvai Duncan was arguing his nonsense last decade and it still is today because there's no credible scenario that would pave the way for the fall of civilization, and every indication that civilization will continue to advance and grow beyond a resource shift.
You write with 100% confidence and absolute certainty in your opinion. And yet there are those who are at least as intelligent and at least as well read who are equally as confident that there are plenty of signs and believable scenarios where collapse is not only possible but possible within our lifetimes.
It seems that neither side can be influenced by the other, though I see a larger range of collapse scenarios than "it's all going to be fine" scenarios. Why do we get these diametrically opposed and immovable opinions of what the data and signs show? I tend to take the cautious approach - we live on a finite planet and so economic growth cannot continue forever; whether our societies (as we know them) end in collapse or through managed transition is our decision. If we decide to carry on as normal, collapse is inevitable, with only the timing and speed debatable.
Describe such a scenario. You know I'll disagree, but it would be an interesting exercise to find out what we disagree on. I suspect it will be the ability to raise capital for infrastructure change and the scope of human dependance on ecology.
To understand my point of view, I don't think our economy will be confined to earth for more than a few more centuries at most.
Even with off planet resources of course, you eventually run into limits, but this scenario is far beyond what we can reasonably project.
I don't think this is the place to have the scenarios discussion. I'm sure you've read many such scenarios and disagreed with them all. My point was more with your certainty in your opinions and your certainty that the opinions of others are wrong.
I've probably read a lot of the same stuff you have, on these issues, and would love to be certain that limits in resources or environment will not be seriously encountered for hundreds of years, and that technological pushes won't have dire consequences. I'd love to think that mankind's sluggish moves off our planet will succeed and be all the things that are dreamed of. However, none of this rosy outlook appears even 50% likely, to me.
I think it comes down to the fact that the optimistic scenarios all have a large element of faith. A lot of things have to go right, go smoothly, in a timely manner, without detriment. There is always a theoretical element to them. Of course, collapse scenarios are also hypothetical but don't require faith as a knowledge of human nature and the finite nature of the planet we are currently limited to. So I tend to side with the collapse view, until I see real progress to accept or address the limits that do exist.
You are looking at energy in isolation, Dezakin. You are compartmentalizing and not considering the big picture. It could be that you have the belief that, given enough energy (and you have total belief that we can harness as much energy as we want) we can substitute for any scarce resource and correct any environmental problem that may arise.
You haven't shown any of this, apart from a theoretical amount of fissionable material and the technical limit on raw sunlight. Economic growth limits may well be close but you would never be able to see them, until it hit you in the face, because of your beliefs in the markets being able to use technology, at any required scale and speed, to fix any problem that growth might encounter.
I totally agree. I think we are a permanent growth plateau already. The illusion of growth can be perpetuated for a while longer,but I think we hit a true ,substantive peak of global economic activity in the very recent past. We are already heading downward from that point. Many raw materials are being produced at the highest levels they ever will be. Global trade in terms of tons of traffic are at the highest levels they ever will be. Look at how many commodities appear to have gone "elastic." Any significant increase in demand (No, the anticipation of demand even) leads to immediate price increases. Maybe this is a good thing for Russia or a town in Newfoundland, but for the West as a whole it is a growth-killer.If I had to name a single general misconception that exists among moderns it is the importance we attribute to "value-added" and our belief that it will be able to pick-up the slack in growth in an era of scarcity. Less will mean less.
Matt
Is there a link to the original of this essay? I'd like to add it to my list of articles by ecological economists.
There isn't. Herman said he believes the SDC in the UK may eventually publish it. You can print this out or save as pdf and print though...
Its a long winded way of attempting to intellectually prove that we are on a course of unsustainability. Obviously clear for some, not for others. No matter how well formed a set of ideas are, if it requires mandated restrictions on economic development they will fail. Not because they aren't logical, but because it's contrary to the first rule; strive for economic expansion. Economies at the regional, national or international level must expand at some rate or there is a recession or worse yet a depression. Thus trying to convince leaders of the benefits of a plateau would fall on deaf ears.
Fact is, the only culture that lives in a sustainable manner are the most primitive tribes. They are in touch with their surroundings, knowing not to take too much of any one animal or commodity or it won't be there later, so they take a little here and there. We take everything available and only think about putting on the brakes when a crisis develops, like small salmon runs or lack of oil production to meet demand. We are very much a civilization travelling at break neck speed only slowing down when forced to by economic or supply constraints.
And if you've noticed it's only been recently that the idea of Peak oil seems to have penetrated to deeper levels of society. Only as price increases threaten economic expansion is there any recognition of that idea. Only now are all the other possibilities of averting a deepening crisis strongly considered.
What humankind must learn to do is to plan farther ahead. Enviromental and economic impact studies on a global scale must be developed to know when a crisis could occur 20 years ahead of time, so plans can be altered to avert a crisis. Until that mindset becomes part of the process, various kinds of crisis will continue to arise over too short a period of time to adequetly adjust to them without negative repercussions occurring.
For example, if studies had shown conclusively that world peak oil was a possibility, which it could have easily been understood in 1970 after Hubbert's prediction of US peak came true, then there would have been greater investment and planning for alternative forms of energy. Instead of desperately attempting to figure a way out of the problem, we would have been ready. We would have done the R&D on algae ethanol or a more concerted effort on fusion, or invested more in solar and wind. Not a last minute desperate attempt to use lasers to make fusion work. Not this sort of blank look they give each other on CNBC which achieves nothing.
It's simple; Plan far ahead to avert crisis and maintain sustainability.
Cite some examples of organisms or humans that truly planned ahead. The only ones I know of were some of the eastern top down dynasties in Japan and China. But with the Tragedy of the Commons as our fundamental modus operandi, it's difficult to imagine education and awareness will spontaneously result in more collective planning. Individual planning maybe, but are there enough resources for everyone to plan?
Herman brings up equity (again). I used to think this wasn't important (or less important than scale). But now I see it. Peak Oil's first symptoms are going to be a decrease in the middle class - a few in the energy sector will rise to the upper crust but many will be priced out via high prices for basic goods and join ranks of poverty. This trend can't (won't) go on indefinitely in a social democracy - even the rich will find it hard to enjoy being rich if there is general societal malaise and rocks thrown at limosines, etc. Somewhere about then these conversations on theoildrum and other places will start to get considerably less polite...
Peak Oil's first symptoms are going to be a decrease in the middle class...
Well, but wouldn't the symptoms of the Steady State Economy outlined above, should it be imposed any time soon, be virtually identical? Wouldn't the middle class be obliterated quickly? After all, the current world economic product, shared out somewhat equally under a quasi-utopian descent plan, would provide only what most North Americans or Europeans (i.e. TOD readers) would see as universal and serious poverty, with absolutely nothing middle-class about it. And that's even before we share it out amongst nine or ten billion or perhaps more.
Which leads straight to That Whose Name Must Not Be Uttered. The notion of population growth magically halting peaceably at nine or ten billion seems like wishful thinking underpinned by notions of ever wider spread of present-day Western middle-class prosperity, education, and values. Stop economic growth now and impose greater equality at the same time, and even where those underpinnings exist, they're toast. The whole world reverts to the condition of the many - and most often poor - places where the population is still exploding with reckless abandon, casting the already-suspect notion of spontaneous 'demographic transition' into the realm of sheer fantasy. (And any such leveling-off may well be quite transitory, as those who respond to the pressures propagate fewer of their genes and memes into the future, while those who are insensitive to the pressures continue to reproduce without limit.)
I'm afraid I tend to think that if you insist on - or cannot avoid - yes, after 800 years of procreative BAU, the entire planet will be elbow-to-elbow as in the Star Trek Mark of Gideon episode - a steady state, you either control the population by using however much politically directed state compulsion and force as it might take (vide China), or else you accept that it will be controlled for you apolitically, impersonally, and violently through the offices of ever more horrific Malthusian living conditions.
I have no doubt that a century or two from now, global population will be considerably lower than it is now. The world minus non-renewable resources simply doesn't have the carrying capacity to support more than a fraction (maybe 10-33%?) of the present global population.
I have no idea how we will get from here to there, though. I strongly suspect that the trajectory is going to be a sawtooth of multiple mortality episodes of differing causation rather than a single catastrophic die off or a nice smooth and steady decline.
About 7%.
Or 3% or 137%, or any other numbers we choose to just make up perhaps.
I love how people just throw this gloom and doom out. do you have some sort of peer-reviewed paper or something to back you up or do you just have "no doubt" about your views?
John15 -
With all due respect, whenever I hear someone challenge an expressed opinion with, 'Where is (are) the peer-reviewed paper(s)?', I immediately think of Galileo, whose 'peer reviewed' paper nearly got him burnt at the stake by hisso-called peers.
When you get right down to it, 'peer review' is often little more than the imposed consensus of the scientific status quo upon those who dare to go against the grain. I would go out on a limb and say that most of the major scientific advances would not have passed 'peer review' at the fragile seminal time of their introduction. Real advances in science usually do not take place in the mainstream of science, but rather at its fringes.
History is replete with examples of brilliant but poorly connected scientists and thinkers being shot down by a fossilized establishment of scientific gate-keepers,frequently deeply imbedded in academia and government.
The Keepers of the Temple never do anything innovative. It is the maveric, the outsider, the misfit, that pushes the envelope.
Besides, how can you have a 'peer reviewed' paper about somebody's expressed opinion of what will or will not be?
So let us cease this nonsense about peer review.
Besides, we have plenty of peers here.
I was about to disagree.
But then I stopped myself...;-)
"So let us cease this nonsense about peer review."
you could have just saved all that time writing and just wrote I don't have one.
Hehe, you're Galileo, eh? You offer a point of view which is based on years of study, is well-documented and its details are available to anyone to read and critique, and your point of view will revolutionise our understanding of the world?
If you're Galileo, where is your Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo for us to read? Please, let us read your revolutionary ideas based on years of carefully-documented observations and research which anyone may check.
kiashu- how about we just work on getting a peer-reviewed paper first?
It doesn't even have to be peer-reviewed, so far as I'm concerned.
He just has to do as little as you or I or a hundred others have done - write something up with links to actual data, drawing conclusions from that data. The data might be as specific as oil consumption differentiated by income for Brazil in 1995-98, or as general and imprecise as, "when the French put in nuclear, they used more energy than before overall, and did not get rid of fossil fuels." But it should be data, and checkable.
Anyone can say, "I reckon so-and-so," who cares? Give us the data, and the conclusions you're drawing from the data.
"Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks."
- Harlan Ellison
Actually, I thought I was being relatively optimistic. The REAL pessimists on this site are absolutely convinced that there can be no other future than a catastrophic crash & massive die off, maybe even leading to the extinction of the human race - and all happening very fast and very soon. I'm actually hopeful that things will play out quite a bit more slowly and that we can at least end up with a soft landing that retains a substantial population and a large fraction of our technological and cultural patrimony.
No, I'm not going to cite any peer reviewed papers, only common sense: when the non-renewables are gone, we are only going to have renewables left, and we are going to have no choice but to live within those means. Then I work from that basic, self-evident assumption.
There is that wonderful essay by Heinberg about the raft in "Powerdown". [Here, on page 11 of this pdf.] I think it makes all the difference in the world whether we are in the raft together or whether there is someone in the raft with all the guns. Are we going to hang together or hang separately? Unless we hang together, powerdown will be sheer hell.
Hanging together is nothing at all like expecting a glorious leader on a white horse to solve all our problems. That glorious leader scenario is much more like hanging separately. In an era of LESS, there will be very few glorious leaders.
Shared sacrifice - and "sacrifice" might not be the right word - cannot be imposed by others; it has to be accepted as a community effort. Of course there can be leaders on the path, but they cannot impose it, because then it would not be shared and it would not be accepted.
Which brings me back to Dawkins, the evolutionary moment, and the possibility that the next step in human evolution will be the meme.
cfm in Gray, ME
The politeness only exists today because it's enforced ;)
If the biofuels wave keeps going on, a first symptom can as well be a decrease in the poor, and not exactly because they will be moving to another social class.
Actually, IMV there is a trade-off between the two possibilities: a policy can throw a large part of the middle class into poverty and the opposite policy can throw a large part of the poor into starvation. Take the last credit crisis: if the Fed had adopted a tight monetary policy, some banks would have fallen, the US would be in deep recession and generally the middle class would have been impacted,, but there would have been little or no inflation. By instead lowering interest rates and flooding the system with dollars they saved the banks, aborted the recession or at least made it mild, and caused rampant inflation that together with biofuels is hitting the poor as food crisis.
This notion has been recently stated by:
Max Keiser
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-keiser/my-appearance-on-al-jazee_b_994...
Martin Hutchinson (IMV the best of the four articles)
http://www.moneymorning.com/2008/04/29/the-feds-dilemma-rescue-the-housi...
Mike Whitney
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article4486.html
Otto Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD22Dj01.html
I'm an old fan of Herman Daly -- he belongs in my pantheon along with Georgescu-Roegen, Catton and Hardin. No doubt it's the prescriptive rather than descriptive elements in his paper that will give rise to controversy. For example, his proposal to 'stabilize population' is one of the hottest potatoes around:
In the real existing US world that's tantamount to saying: reduce immigration to zero.
I would not be very surprised if the great and the good are quick to banish him to the xenophobe leper colony. Garrett Hardin almost had the same fate, IIRR. Let's see ....
Thinking more broadly, how does one reduce immigration to zero if the country in question is the whole planet?
That puts a whole new slant on the term "illegal aliens"
Oh, that produced a chuckle here! Even though the subject itself is controversial, getting a smile along the way can make a person's day.
As I recall an old National Lampoon article from the '70's, one could declare birth to be a form of immigration. The infant, upon birth, is detained by authorities for indecent exposure, asked to show citizenship papers, is unable to, then resists arrest and is shot.
Which is to say, immigration ain't the problem.
Well, that's an 'interesting' counterfactual since the whole planet isn't one country or likely to become one. Instead, it's such a disparate collection that the notion of global agreement on the artificial control of either economic or population growth seems problematical, which is partly why the latter is, as I said, The Thing That Must Not Be Named. Add 'relocalization' - for which read 'provincialism' - and that notion becomes otherworldly. Theoretically it would be possible to cherry-pick the applications of globalism, but a relocalized world where faraway places simply do not matter in any tangible way might well be a place where global issues get no political traction.
Re Hardin, Daly, etc.
With political pressure and social muzzles at suffocating levels, I think listening to 60,70 and 80 year old scientists, who have little to lose and tell it like it is, may not be a bad strategy. At least in the sample size I've experienced, there are seemingly more 'truths' laid bare by these folks than by younger (even smarter) ones trying to climb whatever ladder promoted by their tribe. Age, if not accompanied by senility, decreases B.S.
The book to read is Richard Posner's Aging and Old Age:
http://www.amazon.com/Aging-Old-Age-Richard-Posner/dp/0226675661/ref=sr_...
Certainly one of the bright sides of aging is that you can speak your mind without fear of reprisals. It's one of the main points elaborated in Posner's book. A good present for your friends' 50th+ birthdays, BTW (unless they're female, of course).
I think it decreases intentional or self-aware BS, but never underestimate the ability of old farts to retroactively rationalize. And some are non-senile but quite nuts. Indeed, some who were previously less delusional get into "cramming for their finals" and adopt mysticism.
A 'sweet spot' may be mid-50's to about 70, when creative people are pretty lucid but have begun to accept their own mortality. I'll bet this demographic is well-represented among TOD readers (being in that group myself, I'm too senile to remember the actually demographic survey). I think accepting one's own death is good practice for admitting the possibility of other systems not lasting forever. Being childless would also help, since you wouldn't suffer as much dissonance-angst.
Of course, I'm a mutant and was already in that headspace in my teens. Plenty of those here too, I'll bet.
Nate - has any one ever asked the old guard, Daly, Catton, Bartlett, et al. how they keep plugging away at this for so long (not to emphasize their age or anything but...)in the face of such resistance and futility?
IMHO they are heros and future generations talk about them around the campfire (aka kitchen) gnawing on a roast haunch of...
P.S. I appreciate your picking up the gauntlet so to speak even though you know first hand the futility.
Souperman2 writes:
No doubt they would answer: because it's true, and truth is its own reward.
Not to equate what we do here at TOD with those luminaries (far from the case), but we've been at this for three years...and your answer is the only one I can still give. We do this because we have to...the power of truth compels us to continue until we can't.
It seems to me age has little to do with it. Compare Gray vs Lovelock. Or look to Reagan, or McCain. The end years seems a continuation of the former. And in that the current octogenarians did their first studies before the recent conservative shift in society and academia, we might be simply observing just that reflection.
Hardin passed from this mortal coil in 2003.
His writing was done when in his intellectual prime and are timeless.
Truth telling has nothing to do with age or intellectual prowess.
Certainly not in Hardins case, and there are others. But in my experience, some very smart scientists discover truth on their own, but when presenting it to peers, or in a group, they politicize it down to its least acceptable denominator. There is a social cost to being TOO far out there (look at Galileo, Darwin, etc.)
Garrett Hardin's biggest mistake was memorializing (in The tragedy of the Commons) the fact none other than César Chávez argued before congress to stop immigration—legal or otherwise from Mexico—in order that Mexican Americans be able to improve their economic condition.
Just picked up a copy of Dr. Daly's "Beyond Growth". About 1/3 through it. It is a smallish book and easy to read if you've had a smattering of both economics (classical/neoclassical) and something like trophic ecology. A background in physics, particularly thermodynamics would be useful.
Everything in the article is basically in the book, but expanded and more fully explained. If you find these arguments interesting you might like the book.
The first commenter indicates that to achieve steady state wrt population might require something 'sneaky'. Another commenter points out that we have gone past the point at which many of the options Daly might suggest are still options. That is our degrees of freedom in how we act are limited by inaction over the last several decades.
I suggest that both the options we have open to us and the clarity to know what to do (as well as the motivation for action) will come by looking at things quite differently. We need to think in heretical ways sometimes (way outside the box). We need most of all to ask the right questions.
George
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/
George,
Daly's book is certainly one of the most 'digestible' on the subject. However, the two final chapters, entitled 'A Biblical Economic Principle and the Sustainable Economy' (Chapter 14) and 'Sustainable Development: from Religious Insight to Ethical Principle for Public Policy' (Chapter 15) will not appeal to everybody. His interpretation of the Bible errs on the benign side, I think, and is unlikely to go down well chez Dawkins and the secular humanist community:
etc. etc (page 217)
I don't know if dragging God in is a good idea, since other believers might argue that, being omniscient and omnipotent, there is nothing to prevent God from saying 'Hey Presto' and providing humanity with a couple of trillion extra barrels of oil, ideally in Texas and NASCAR territory, just in the nick of time. Phew! Theologians would then have an extra few hundred years to debate about the 'problem of evil'.
Of course bashing Christians these days is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I'll hold my tongue.
That aside, Daly's book is a must read.
The substitution of "Collective Wellbeing" for "God" works for me. I'm an atheist but I do think we need to come up with a loving concept of humanity as a whole - something to which we can relate emotionally as well as intellectually. Selfishness is self-limited. No, I don't have any answer to this conundrum. It's a tough nut.
The book you refer to is "For the Common Good', co-written with theologian John Cobb. Im pretty sure (as with Ecological Economics textbook), the authors alternated chapters - the ones you mention are probably some of Cobbs contributions. (not that this changes anything important)
i studied cobb many moons ago & got to hear him at a series of lectures.
he was unique in bringing together process philosophy - alfred north whitehead - & christian theology. he also advocated a marrying of christianity & some of buddhism's concepts.
whitehead was very 'science' oriented & my memory is his philosophy was in response to the crash of newtonian physics brought about by einstein's theory of relativity.whitehead was theistic . 'process' is closer to describing reality than our typical static concepts was a basic idea.
cobb built on pantheism & developed panentheism. he was a maverick for a christian theologian; very thought provoking for me.
I read some of his comments re: religious appeal in the introduction. I had already planned to skip the last part because of the inference. But I must admit he had a good point in the Intro that the appeal to religious folk about biblical stewardship (e.g. by E. O. Wilson, "The Creation") is somehow disingenuous. It is probably condescending to say something like: "Look I know you believe in all that stuff, but even so you should care for the environment." That kind of message might not be helpful.
The book has enough redeeming quality in the model that Daly projects that I overlook the religious stuff. The secular (non-supernatural) spiritual motivation of loving the earth, biophilia, etc. seems perfectly adequate to me as a motivator to do something about understanding how this world really works. I don't personally need that hypothesis (about you know what). But to each their own.
George
well said..
Having been an activist for a while, I can say that the churches have (at least) two roles in bringing about change in America. The first is to inspire a moral vision that leads some to see the imperative. This was clearly the case in efforts to change US government policy on apartheid. This was similar to mid-1700's Quaker organizing against slavery. The second aspect is what happens when a movement gains strong support in churches. The nuclear freeze movement could be said to have had a secular start and probably gained ground among scientists first (similar to the issues of peak oil or global warming) but pressure on the Senate and thus the administration probably came most from church groups as the movement grew.
This separation does not mean that churches has no influence at the inception of nuclear freeze, nor that churches alone carried through the actions that brought an end to apartheid. But, I in my experience, positive social change pretty much always has church involvement.
In the particulars here, debt relief as a part of IMF and World Bank reform is very much being pushed by the churches.
Chris
I also noticed the capital "C" for Creation and was dissappointed. I think this is the wrong place to introduce God - that is very much a personal issue and many of us might have a different God, or none at all (like me). Nevertheless us atheists (the biggest "theism" in the world I believe) can normally see past these minor issues. The book has as much value even though it includes a few concepts that may have no meaning for readers like me.
Funny EB today quoted the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Lester B. Lave, The era of cheap energy is over. I remember this guy as the no-limits advocate in a short TV debate (warning: 100+ mb video file) with Brian Czech from Steadystate.org. It is nice to see that even Dr. Lave is coming around to realize that we need to curb consumption. He's now suggesting a $4/gallon (!) gasoline tax. (Herman Daly emphasizes that to create a SSE the most scarce key resource must be rationed.)
Side note to EB personnel: your feedback form fails to load the required human-readable image, at least in my browser (Opera).
Lester Lave is famous for a shill piece against electric cars in Science Forum section. It was thoroughly rebutted in many letters to Science, of course, and in a number of venues.
What a coincidence, I recently posted on PO.com about Daly's book by the same name which I had the occasion to skim through at the library the other day. It's interesting to see that the original 3 "institutions" he proposed has increased to 10 "policy points".
Especially interesting is how drastically the zero-growth population policy has been scaled back. The original proposal was for transferable birth licenses to be awarded by the government in such a way as to not exceed the replacement rate. A perfectly sound proposal, but that particular potato must have proved too politically hot to handle.
It's a shame, really. I think it was Hardin who said that trying to solve the other problems without doing something about population is like mopping the floor with the faucet turned on.
Cheers,
Jerry
Jerry,
Thanks for that piece of information. Another Hardin quote that may be of interest:
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/garrett-hardin/
Not surprising that Garrett has been getting the silent treatment for the past decade+. I typed 'Garrett Hardin' into The Guardian's search engine -- one hit in approx 10 years of back numbers (a snide negative comment, needless to say). The likelihood of the educated public having even heard of his name now approaches zero. Still, there were four hits in The Daily Telegraph...
Thanks, that's good stuff.
I recently finished Hardin's book Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos (Oxford University Press 1993). I highly recommend it for a very lucid and insightful reading of our predicament. Hardin excells at demolishing myths and myopia, both demographic and economic.
I transcribed one chapter that describes brilliantly exactly why our economic situation will inevitably end in disaster, eerily it predicts almost exaclty the situation we are seeing today (with much worse to come), and this from a book written 15 years ago. I have the material in both html and pdf format if anyone is interested in hosting it.
Cheers,
Jerry
go to the source and you can read many if not all of his articles. www.garretthardinsociety.org/index.html
"Living on a lifeboat" published in 1974 was my first reading of his work and still the most powerful and persuasive. Everything pretty much written after that by pretty much everyone else is so much fiddling at the margins as Rome continues to burn itself to the ground.
what have you done today to take back the planet?
and then there is "The Tragedy of the Commons" from 1968... we we're told
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0101/article_6_print...
Thanks for the link, that's a great resource. I sent a comment asking if they would host the material I transcribed, hopefully they'll go for it.
Cheers,
Jerry
Mr. Daly has a number of neat insights, but he also seems to miss some basic points:
1. Mr. Daly talks about a cap-auction-trade system with respect to resources subject to depletion, such as fossil fuels. If we are dealing with a long-term steady state economy, I am having a hard time seeing how we can even use fossil fuels and other resources subject to depletion. It seems to me that to have an economy that stays in a steady state indefinitely, we need to use only renewable (or recyclable) resources. Using depleting resources would push the economy on a downward cycle.
2. Mr. Daly doesn't seem to be aware that a huge step-down in population would be required to get to a truly long term sustainable economy. If we were not in petroleum-induced overshoot, this would not be such a problem.
3. Mr. Daly seems to assume that a steady-state-economy could exist with the huge overhead that would be associated with the big government he is proposing. It seems to me we would need to have a much less complex economic order.
4. Mr. Daly talks about gradually raising the reserve requirements of banks from their current very low level to 100%. I have a hard time seeing how this could be done, without massive failure on loans and general collapse of the economy. Spreading the change over years would only drag out the agony.
Long term, yes, but it's the transition to the steady state that we are concerned with here. As such, non-renewable resources have a role to play, but only if they are used for the development of renewable replacements. Our current use of fossil fuels to ferry around overwieght consumers in oversized cars, and to power widescreen TV's, clearly does not meet that definition.
The other thing to consider is that you can draw out a non-renewable resource if you reduce your consumption of it by the same amount that it is being depleted, as opposed to exploiting it at the maximum rate possible, the same thinking behind the oil depletion protocol. The caps proposed by Daly would allow for the amount being auctioned to be reduced by the depletion rate, while still allowing the market to set prices based on relative scarcity.
Cheers,
Jerry
This was a solution proposed by Hartwick some time ago. It was couched in terms of "maintaining total capital" and "investing rents on non-renewable natural resources capital" in human and human made capital (machines and knowledge).
I suppose as regards oil, governments should (have) taxed oil revenues and hypothecated the proceeds of this tax in investments in solar, wind and other renewable technology to produce hydrogen or electric cars. Quite how agriculture and plastics were meant to fit in I do not know.
This doesn't wash with Daly however - increasing entropy works against the constant capital concept so that it is never achieved.
I agree with Daly - I do not see any of this working. An SSE is a fine objective, but will never be achieved. Humans are not wired this way.
raising the reserve requirement to 100% would certainly create a massive wave of failures; but a steady state economy is impossible as long as banks have the opportunity to expand the money supply through lending. an expanding money supply requires a growing economy. a steady state economy is only possible if lending creates no net additional purchasing power--i.e. a 100% reserve requirement.
A steady state economy (SSE) is perfectly possible in the face of expanding money supply because it can result from ANY of the following causes:
- physical constraint from nature
- monetary constraint from the monetary/financial system.
EACH of the causes is enough to force SSE. If the economy is constrained by physical limits to growth, the expansion of the money supply will just cause inflation (as we are seeing right now). If you have 10 breads and 10 $, 1 bread = 1 $. If physical constraints prevent the growth in bread production but the money supply is expanded, you have 10 breads and 20 $, so 1 bread = 2 $.
Analogy: a car can stop by any of the following causes: running out of gasoline or (releasing the gas pedal and pressing the brake). Each event is enough to force a stop.
So, SSE is perfectly possible in the face of expanding money supply. Still, in the case of a physically-enforced SSE it is obviously preferable to have a steady money supply so as to have price stability [1].
To actually happen, an expanding money supply only requires a willing central bank/lender. A growing economy is required only to avoid causing inflation.
As stated above, in the face of physical constraints to growth, lending will not create any net additional purchasing power: the purchasing power of the agents who receive the newly created money is at the expense of the loss of purchasing power of the agents that hold existing money.
Finally, though only of theoretical relevance, it must be noted that lending through the fractional reserve banking system is not the only possible way to increase the money supply [2]
[1] Otherwise, an expanding money supply will trigger a variant of dollarization, a well-studied phenomenon (e.g. by Feige) whereby residents in a country turn to other country’s currency when their own is being printed recklessly, first for the purpose of store of value (asset substitution), and then as medium of exchange (currency substitution). In this case the expanding supply of fiat currencies will cause a shift to currencies that cannot be printed: gold and silver ("metallization"?). This issue is covered in Benn Steil’s article in Foreign Affairs of April 2007 “The end of national currency” (section “Privatizing money”) and its deeper paper at http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj27n2/cj27n2-10.pdf
[2] The theoretical alternative is the "100% reserve banking system", as first proposed by Simons (1934) and studied by Fisher (1935). In this system (modernly referred to as "narrow banking"), banks do not lend, i.e. they keep as cash in their reserves the full sums left on deposit with them. Accordingly, they do not pay interest on their accounts, and they cover their operating expenses and make a profit by charging a fee for their service.
The main benefit of such a narrow banking system, when compared to one based on fractional reserve banking, would be the avoidance of credit booms and busts (M1 would be equal to M0 at all times), including the most acute form of credit busts, bank runs (why rushing to withdraw deposits if all the money deposited is always in the bank?). Though in Simons's proposal the system would be used in a fiat money environment (the Monetary Authority would expand the money supply by x % per year by lending newly created dollars to the Federal Government, who would have the exact budget deficit to match the amount of money to be created), this is also the only banking system that works stably in a gold-based monetary system, where there can be no "lender of last resort".
Fisher, Irving (1935), 100% Money. New York: Adelphi Company.
Simons, Henry C. (1934), "A Positive Program for Laissez Faire: Some Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy". In H. D. Gideonse, ed. Public Policy Pamphlet No. 15. Chicago
Simons, Henry C. (1936), "Rules Versus Authorities in Monetary Policy". Journal of Political Economy. (February, pp. 1-30.)
I got the impression that he is trying to find a middle ground or way out of the growth economy without collapse.
Intuition tells you that since this penalizes those who make the most off growth and happen to be the ones in power it won't happen.
Whats I think is missing in this analysis is a understanding of why we don't change why this reasonable attempt at a middle ground is a certain failure ?
First the paper makes a excellent observation that on average growth is no longer economic now that we are resource constrained. This means the average standard of living is decreasing even as technical quality continues to improve.
The flat screen plasma TV is only marginally better than the old tube tv. Fashion in cars and clothing replaces real changes in utility. But this is just a symptom of the move to concentration of wealth everyone craves the trapping of wealth since real wealth is now flowing towards the top and this flow is no longer sustainable by growth.
Ignoring for a moment the wealthy whats happening is as resources are contstrained on average the standard of living of the non-wealthy is dropping. Consider the factory worker and increased food costs and fuel costs. They all make the same wage and all of them lose the same amount of purchasing power. None of the workers can concentrate wealth vs his peers. Upward mobility stops classes stratify and the majority begin to slide down the economic ladder together.
In the opposite direction the masters of industry and people that control the means of production continue to concentrate wealth since the still control the ability to concentrate but this wealthy class becomes incredibly rich since it no longer has a way to reinvest into growth. Instead money is redirected into fashion and glitz mansions and boats.
The problem is that this idle rich class is now totally dependent on support by maintaining the trappings of a growth economy even though its now what I call a bloodsucking economy.
We have case after case across all industries of the management team setting up huge bonus payments manipulating the system to get payouts then leaving a destroyed bankrupt company as a result.
This economy has been growing for some time and is far from over. This paper hints at the imbalance with the 500:1 wage scales. I assert that the rich now have nothing else to do but gut the means of production for maximum payout.
They can no longer invest in growth so the ones that can are acting like rats fleeing a sinking ship in this case fat rats eating holes below the water line to escape but rats all the same.
A few of these that are smart will reinvest into industries that will gain prominence post peak but the short term gains from destroying companies are so large that most will choose this route.
In any case this transition from investment in growth to idle wealth has already removed the capacity of the society to make changes. In my opinion the entire thesis of transitioning a growth economy esp after its become resource constrained is flawed. For it to transition before it converts to a idle rich/poverty mode requires incredible foresight to effectively reject growth and go with a SSE while growth offers immense profit for almost all participants.
Given that we are now technologically adept if we maintain our technical levels we probably can eventually convert a stratified idle/poor economy to a SSE. But first the idle rich have to transition into SSE investors and they only do this once they or their replacements have collapsed the growth economy.
Looking back into the recent past the Renaissance happened when the idle rich which was made up of Nobles and the Church invested in technology primarily in the form or art but in general clever thinkers were subsidized by the wealthy. But the key point is rebirth only happened after a traditional SSE of a few rich many poor was established.
So Growth Economy -> Idle Rich/Poor serf style SSE -> Steady wealth accumulation -> Support for knowledge as a hobby of the rich.
In our case this lead to a new growth economy but I'd say that in Greece and China and Japan at times it has lead to a reasonably enlightened SSE. The ancient ones still included a large poor/slave economy but maybe this time around we can escape this.
But no matter you cannot go from a growth economy to a enlightened SSE directly without passing through the SSE created from the idle rich/poor SSE that ends the growth economy mode. No path exists to avoid this first transition. Well it does exist but it requires the wealthy to pass through the eye of the needle and the poor to accept their fate until the population subsides.
Great big picture thunking as usual Memmel.
I think of it not so much as the poor (but of course it is that) but as the young.
The wealthy are stealing the future via gutting production capability and infrastructure for profits NOW.
Sure the poor should be upset but the young should be PISSED. Even if, or especially if Mummy & Daddy are wealthy.
Which brings up the question of what is wealthy enough to fall UP instead of DOWN the ladder?
This unanserable Q will insure we all, even us here at TOD will keep dancing as fast as we can to get UP one more rung.
I guess you only need to be richer than the next guy.LOL, At least until it's your turn.
I hear the tumbrels bringing the guillotines.
No wonder the piranhas are so hot to get RealId and the surveillance state up and running as rapidly as they can. What scares me is that they will certainly strike pre-emptively.
cfm in Gray, ME
Gail: WRT non-renewable resources, the only thing that would make sense would be to convert them into another long-term asset. For example, iron ore could be fabricated into a metal tool, which could eventually then be melted down and recycled into another tool. In this example, both iron ore and the stock of metal objects made of iron form a single inventory of assets to be carefully managed and used by the steady state economy. Not only is such an approach sustainable, it is the only approach to preserve intergenerational equity -- something at which we fail damnably.
The case of FF is a little more difficult, because except for conversion into plastics, for the most part they have to be used up through combustion to be of any use at all. The answer to that problem would have to be that FFs could only be used for the development of renewable energy infrastructure, thus increasing the capacity of renewable energy available on a long term basis to match (or very nearly so, entropy probably raises its ugly head right here) the depletion of FF energy.
How very different that would be from the way we are doing things. Future generations will be cursing all of us.
Except that every time you melt it down you lose a little bit of it. When I worked in the Aluminum casting industry we assumed 2-6% loss for remelt. That doesn't include the quality issues that require adding new "pure" metals to get the alloy right.
--
JimFive
As I said, Entropy raises its ugly little head in there. In the long run, the Universe runs down to just slightly above absolute zero. I have no solution for that one.
Thats the only time you have to worry about entropy. As long as the night sky is cold, we'll have bigger problems.
There are situations where a steady state economy could use non-renewables. Generally they seem to fall into the category of replacing that non-renewable capital stock with another man-made durable capital stock.
"Use" isn't the right word; there has to be a distinction between consumption and capitalization.
All the issues around step down and collapse are issues of equity, eg distribution. Scale, distribution and allocation. Our current economy and the free-market system tries to shoehorn everything into allocation. Scale and distribution are both political decisions - not market decisions. Now that the planet is clearly full, scale and distribution matter first. The market cannot even function unless they are addressed sensibly. The examples are everywhere.
As far as overhead goes, yes, we do need a simpler order. If political and economic boundaries are realigned with bioregions, if there are hard limits - I cannot import your footprint to make mine bigger - then we get closer to something that can work. That will be a very decentralized system. In the context of the State of Maine - where I have looked at just what that might look like - it means 23 (or more) Department of Health and Human Services instead of 1, it means schools one can walk to, it means the state setting some loose standards and providing technical services, it means devolution of maybe 3/4 of the current functions of the state to county, town or neighborhood. The Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity is what I'm thinking of, so yeah, "Creation" with a capital C. That "overhead" is what makes the quality of our lives, so how far do we want to decrease it?
cfm in Gray, ME
Gail,
Thanks for your comments.
Daly (with co-author Farley) addresses this in "Ecological Economics" on p. 190 (Box 11-1). To be sustainable, use of fossil fuels has to incorporate the user cost, which is the cost which we incur by using the fossil fuel today and denying ourselves the opportunity to use it in the future. I'm not sure exactly how this would play out in economic policy, but obviously it will make fossil fuels more expensive and thus give incentive to conserve or come up with alternatives. The ideal situation seems to be that we would be using the fossil fuels to build solar panels (so to speak, though I realize that electricity doesn't yet substitute for liquid fuels). The user cost would be sufficiently high so that we would reach a point, before complete depletion, when we would be using renewables only.
No, he doesn't address this here. I think in principle this could be addressed by economic means. Daly in "Ecological Economics" treats population as an "open access regime" problem, and says (p. 164) "If we are unable to establish defensible property rights to a resource such as fish, how are we going to address the far more difficult 'tragedy of the commons' problem of overpopulation?"
You could, for starters, in the U. S. eliminate the income tax exemptions on dependents, or maybe even add a tax on having children, or assign women tradable rights to have children. All of these have problems, I'm just throwing out ideas. We may wind up in a nightmare scenario envisioned by some doomers in which there would be forced sterilizations and whatnot, but I'd say let's see what we can be done by adjusting economic policy first.
This is a more serious objection. I think that for the time being we will have to try big government. Otherwise, the traditional economic system will take over which punishes people for conserving resources and rewards them for burning them up. I can foresee a decentralized future, sort of like Marx's fabled second stage of communism, in which conserving resources is ingrained into human culture without feeling oppressive. But I don't know how to get there without big government, unless it's waiting for the big collapse (as portrayed in e. g. Kunstler's "World Made By Hand"), and then starting over with remaining population.
Massive failure of loans and collapse of the economy may be what we are looking at regardless of what we do. At that point, or with luck sometime before this point when the light dawns on the political leaders and the public, the political opportunity will be there to institute drastic measures: nationalize the energy industry, draft everyone up to 65 and put them to work in renewable energy or farming (which actually wouldn't be too hard if we postulate mass unemployment), that sort of thing. I think it is important to have a plan both with the ultimate objective in mind, as well as a transition scenario. That's what I think Daly is trying to do and that's why I like his book, "Ecological Economics," and am generally a fan of his.
Keith
All sounds good. Only one thing in the way. Us.
This has all been written of, theorized about and sincerely pondered for at least 40 years.
It all looks good on paper and rings true.
What mechanism will get past power centers protecting their profit centers?
Who is going to tell the people of China, India, Southeast Asia and Africa that the life style we see as our birthright will never be theirs—but they are better off for it?
The rest is footnotes.
Thanks for bringing that up, I had much the same reaction.
This is going to sound monstrously off-topic, but bear with me. There was a show on PBS the other night that dramatized the miraculous escape of two men from Auschwitz during WWII. After several days of severe hardship they managed to make it to the border and freedom, wherepon they immediately set out to warn the nearest Jewish council of what was happening in the death camps, something the Nazi's had largely been able to conceal through deception.
The reaction? No one believed them. The deportation of the Hungarian Jews went ahead as scheduled and 100's of thousands were sent to the gas chambers, choosing to believe instead they were only being relocated to work camps despite having been warned of the truth.
Similar stories have been told by other survivors in the camps who tried to warn people even as they were being herded naked into the "shower room", and they too were met with disbelief.
Even today, aid workers who have witnessed the death, er, I mean the refugee camps in Africa have found that they cannot talk about their experiences for more than a minute or two before their friends politely change the subject.
What's my point? If the truth is too terrible to hear, it's simply part of human nature to deny it. The ghastly and horrific prospect of the human population crashing and billions dying due to depleted resources, wasted soils, poisoned air and water, and devestated ecosystems has been clearly articulated for several decades now, but what do you know, no one wants to hear it.
Cheers,
Jerry
Thanks for that, much more eloquently profound in a blood freezing kind of way.
Denial is a powerful part of the human mind.
We are all frogs sitting in the proverbial pot of water that is being brought to a boil and this fact has been brought to our reptilian attention for at least 40 years in various persuasive and popular venues.
It is like the story about the frog and the scorpion looking for a ride across the river...well you know the story. The punch line/death scene comes with the scorpion having stung the frog is asked by said frog, "Why did you do that now we are both going to die!" To which the scorpion says "Couldn't be helped, it's in my nature."
I guess some of us have the nature of frogs and some of us have the nature of scorpions and so far the scorpions among us would seem to have the upper hand.
But I am rooting for my fellow frogs to pull it out in the final inning—can't be helped it's in my nature.
I like being camped on the banks of denial. It has a certain vacation tone around it.
I don't know if it's denial so much as lack of imagination and being at a loss for a proper response.
That's a real failing of the environmental and similar movements. "There's a BIG PROBLEM!" they cry, and go on at length to show why it's a problem.
"..."
"Well? I said there was a BIG PROBLEM!"
"Yes? What am I supposed to do about it?"
"... but there's a BIG PROBLEM!"
That's why we need more positive visions of the future, to show how the world could be different but not worse. MLK didn't inspire people by saying, "blacks get lynched", he inspired people by saying, "blacks get lynched, and I have a dream of a better world where..." and so on. Kennedy didn't inspire people by saying, "oh no! The commies will get to the Moon!" but by saying, "we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do these other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
So I don't think it's really denial. First it's a failure of imagination, to know how to imagine what the person is describing. And secondly it's just not knowing what to say in response. "What am I supposed to do about this big problem?"
It's not a failure in the listener, but in the speaker.
Actually, I get frustrated by the discussions here. A year ago the conversations centered around making the problem of PO known. Well, we hit a tipping point last October and now the word is spreading. As you point out, we can't just keep yelling, "There's a problem!" We must start talking about what the solutions(s) might be.
And then we have to be strong enough to start building that future. I suggest there be an effort on the part of this "community" to come to some minimal level of agreement about what needs to be done and promulgate at least the outline of a solution that perhaps a majority can stand behind and start cheer leading for.
Scary thought: If we cannot successfully do that, how the hell will our individual nations or the world at large?
Personally, I think the answer must include a large degree of decentralizing, localizing and the end to the growth paradigm. Solutions must lie to a great degree at the individual/community level to avoid die offs of major numbers. Entropy says central governments are not going to be able to handle this.
What say the rest of you?
Cheers
I don't think that's possible. We simply do not agree on anything here. (As Bart found out, when he tried to post some things "everyone could agree with" - and we all jumped all over him. ;-)
Even the TOD staff is divided on the value of localization. I can see it both ways. In the long run, I think we'll be more localized, simply become the complexity to run a global system will become too expensive on a solar energy budget.
However, some sort of central control is probably our only hope in the medium term. Grassroots can't solve problems like global warming and nuclear war.
I agree with what Leanan says here...
There is little doubt to me that this site will evolve as we approach that tipping point. We are not there yet, and more screaming at the trees needs to be done. However, we are also thinking about the next steps in the site and in our own lives.
What do I tell people? Try to make a difference--whether that's at the local level, the state level, or the national level. After that, it's all stochastic anyway--control what you can control and do what good you can.
I doubt either of you will see this, but... Some things we might get a high degree of agreement on:
1. Some degree of bootstrap solutions (localizing) must be part of the equation. This is particularly true of food. At minimum, Victory Gardens should be promoted strongly.
2. Conservation (demand destruction) is unavoidable.
3. Corn ethanol is a no-go.
4. Politicians who are energy unaware are dangerous and might be targeted for education/replacement.
5. Locating/Creating a like-minded community, regardless of location, might be a good idea: safety in numbers; a larger voice; organizing outreach, etc.
Cheers
Hardin would agree, "We are not faced with a single global population problem, but rather 187 separate national population problems."
He wasn't a globalist, he also said "Unity within each sovereignty; diversity among sovereignties."
Of course the number 187 reflected the number of independent national states at the time and that number has gotten bigger.
I agree that all the gnashing of teeth and pounding of key boards doesn't move a damn thing closer to a better outcome.
Unfortunately I don't believe a better outcome it is possible.
Hardin was a poet as well as a scientist (and very precise in using language and concerned with its correct interpretation by those who would read him as are all great educators).
I believe he was also resigned to a bad outcome.
In The Tragedy of the Commons he quoted the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to leave no doubt what he meant in his use of the word "tragedy"—"'The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.' He then goes on to say, 'This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.'" A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Mentor, New York, 1948), p. 17.
Had we acted when we got our first wake-up call in the late sixties and early seventies who knows?
You are monstrously on topic, actually.
There a still a handful of diehards who don't believe that Jews were murdered en masse during WWII -- and a very large number who don't believe that the Ukrainian famine ever occurred, or that there was an Armenian Holocaust. Etcetera. And yes, it's part of human nature to deny these realities.
No problem -- when I hear the word Africa, I reach for my remote control. I switch channels. That's the big question: if millions die in a famine, and the media are there to cover it, and you change programmes once you hear the A-word, did that famine really happen?
Ask a philosopher....
Well then, if you're in the mood to be morbidly depressed for at least a week you really don't want to miss this:
http://dieoff.org/page226.htm
Cheers,
Jerry
Thanks,
I thought I'd read every contribution in dieoff but I had missed out on that one. Though as I get older I find it psychologically increasingly impossible to read either about the Holocaust or the Gulag. I bought Primo Levi's If this is a man some ten years ago and still can't muster up the courage to read it through to the end.
Bedtime here in idyllic Luxembourg (country with the world's highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions, BTW) ....
... more tomorrow, if the world and myself are still there.
As is the Rev Wright. Hmmm, I dunno, "party on" is starting to sound better and better all the time. No - I've got another 200 plants to pot up tonight.
cfm in Gray, ME, knee deep in pro-mix and topsoil
jerry- I saw that program the other day and I think you are definitely not describing what happened accurately.
Yes they did believe them, just not at first. when they checked names of people they said we're killed against a list of people that had been sent to the camps they believed them and sent out a report to hungary and other places. that reports was ignored by a key Hungarian who was negotiating with the Germans to save the Hungarian Jews. the report did end up eventually saving the Hungarian Jews in a round about way. you can read about it here.
The Vrba-Wetzler Report
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/?p=45
Vrba-Wetzler report
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba-Wetzler_report
I totally disagree. global warming is front and center. we've been cleaning up the air and water for decades now. we have things like recycling programs and environmental laws.
maybe the problem is that people have heard it and rejected it as nonsense?
Oh, joyous day!
I'm so glad to hear that hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews didn't die in the Nazi gas chambers!!! And that depleted resources, wasted soils, poisoned air and water, and devestated ecosystems are no longer a problem!!!
Thank you so much for that, you have completely restored my faith in the sanity of the human race.
Cheers,
Jerry
jerry I didn't say Hungarian Jews weren't killed. you said the two who escaped weren't believed, they were as I clearly pointed out using a source straight from PBS.
again, I didn't say that the earth wasn't polluted, I said we've made great strides.
you have problems with the facts.
Mother Nature will drag us by the ear, kicking and screaming and crying, all the way down to where we must end up. And this will happen regardless of what our "leaders" and power elites want or say or do.
Thank you, this was a very excellent read, and fills in some blanks of what I view to be the future of the US.
A brief summary: We are facing 5 stages, each stage will last an indeterminable amount of time, possibly short, possibly very long. Stage 1: Basic resource inflation, the stage we are in. Stage 2: Resource shortages/outages. Parts of the world are in this stage already. Stage 3: Institutional and governmental radical reform and/or collapse. Stage 4: A Kunstler style "dark age". With proper planning and forsight it is possible to avoid this stage, or it is possible we could be stuck in this stage for centuries. Stage 5: A society based on renewable/recyclable resources with a steady state economy. History teaches that dark ages never last forever. Assuming we still have libraries, we will rebound eventually.
So I am very interested in how a renewable/recyclable steady state world can work, and how do we get there avoiding as much of the stage 2 to 4 ugliness as possible. The politically difficult parts may not be possible to implement until stage 3, when it may already be too late.
Your correct in your stages. But your wrong in avoiding them why are people so insistent that we some how avoid what coming ? All the solutions I read amount to some clever ways to keep our expansion based society lasting a bit longer for more people. The vast majority of people on earth today never really participated in this glorious expansion economy anyway.
Of the six billion people in the world maybe a billion lead a decent lifestyle of this billion maybe half can be considered middle class of this 250 million maybe 100 million earn over 90k a year. Of this 100 million maybe 10 million are close to a million dollars in real wealth or higher. So 10 million out of 6 billion is pretty much the batting average we have achieved using up some terrific non-renewable resources or a 1.6% batting average.
Its foolish to try and create tricky plans that are somehow going to even keep this pitiful return much less do better under resource constraints. Not that I don't like fantasizing about some dream world where we suddenly start doing the right thing. But the reality is we have fucked up badly and we will pay the price for our mistakes as will our children and grand children on for several generations. Everyone that is proposing solutions is worried about how they will manage to live a decent life in a renewable world well for most of us the probability is we won't. Some of us will starve some of us will catch a bullet in the head lugging a suitcase full of gold.
Some of us will get lucky and make it and a few will get luckier and live this comfortable life. Regardless all of us won't be shocked surprised or in disbelief if the system unravels like it seems to be doing. This although it does not seem like a lot is far more than most people will have.
Accept it and go on. The best we can do is work on a real renewable economy and take care of ourselves. If you have kids raise them as best you can if they curse you for having born them into a miserable world accept the curses and beg them to do better.
With luck the next time around the lack of resources will result in a human civilization where more than 1.6% of the population lives rich happy lives. We know that having all the resources we could wish for did not work.
In any case I need to work on my liquid nitrogen storage for renewable resources later.
Mike
you are correct in absolute terms, but I assure you someone making 20k in CostaRica is living a much 'larger' life than someone making 90k in Manhattan. I think one needs to make 30-40k in USA just to live within the current infrastructure without going into red. Thats the problem - we have stretched the difference between wants and needs so much that there are now huge amounts of pat dependent waste.
The main problem I see with Daly’s ideas is that he sees a SSE as being steady in the current state. Clearly, even if economic growth and growth in demand for oil were to somehow magically become “Steady-State” at this moment, the world cannot continue to consume 85 million barrels of oil a day indefinitely into the future.
So a SSE is possible, but only at a much lower population level and at what we would by to-day’s definitions, consider a lower “standard of living.” Instead of being steady-state at first, we will have a declining economy, likely in fits and starts over the next decades. Yet Daly speaks of income equality in the current paradigm of employers and workers, the latter of whom get a paycheque for their efforts. But one of the first effects of a declining economy will be massive unemployment across the vast majority of industries. And as the decades pass the fossil fuels will eventually deplete, and I strongly suspect, the amount of “renewable energy” we will be able to generate without to-days large base of fossil fuel inputs will be nowhere close to supporting an industrial, employer/employee type economy.
But people still need to eat, so as time goes on, the world will revert to agrarian societies, on a locally sustainable scale. Of course, none of our current political, legal or economic structures can handle any of this as their underlying purpose is to facilitate and promote “growth.” And yet they are too entrenched to be easily overthrown, more likely is that after several step-downs in economic activity and the overall standard of living, they will become increasingly irrelevant and discredited. Not until this time will it be practical for more relevant, and more regional/local forms of governance and economies to supplant the former order.
I would imagine that it will take several hundred years for this to all play out, but in the end, I expect that the year 2,500 will look a lot more like the year 1,500 than anything else. One poster above made the statement that “If we still have libraries, we will bounce back.” Assuming “bounce back” means to return to to-day’s level of economic and industrial activity and overall living standards as well as our political and legal systems, well I don’t see it happening, as the vast reserves of fossil energy which boosted us to this level won’t exist anymore.
Hopefully, we will still have libraries, and we won’t lose the knowledge that will prevent life from becoming as miserable as it was back in 1,500, stuff like hygiene and sanitation, etc. And hopefully, we will be able to generate enough electricity to keep the larger cities and towns at least partially electrified, and maybe a skeletal railroad system could still function.
Antoinetta III
"...Assuming we still have libraries, we will rebound eventually..."
I am concerned that much of the knowledge we now have is held in a fragile state, e.g. these postings require computers and the Internet to be accessible. Current fab chip plants cost around USD 5 billion and are well beyond "rebound" technology. IMVHO it is likely that in a powerdown scenario we will lose all computers over say 20 years. Many books are printed on paper that will only last a few years.
We should be taking steps to preserve our knowledge in a low-tech manner if this is not being done already.
In complex organic systems, the "steady state" equates to death. Individual cells respire, consume nutrients, produce waste, rest, and divide. Complex organisms rise, energize, tire, and sleep, and occasionally screw and produce new offspring.
Individual living cells in a complex organism do not maintain a steady population within the body, either. They grow, peak, decline, and collapse.
But let's try again and see if we can actually improve on the design that evolution has provided after billions of years of trial and error, without first bothering to understand that refined and resilient Darwinian system.
Who knows, maybe this time, we'll be able to screw around with a complex system we don't understand and have there be no unintended consequences or detrimental side-effects.
Yes, but there are species that have managed to exist on earth for hundreds of times longer than homo sapiens. Perhaps their numbers have fluctuated up and down a bit over time, but we are pretty much talking about a steady state population here. Somehow, they managed to not explode, fill up the whole earth, overshoot, crash, and go extinct. It therefore must actually be possible.
the startling thing about species and our planet is that (according to Neil Degrasse Tyson) 80 percent of all the species that have been on our beautiful earth are extinct.
so perhaps in that way we are in harmony with the planet in moving species to extinction—even if it is our own, maybe because it might be our own.
the common statistic I've seen is 99+%
(most recently in "Our Inner Fish" - great new book)
Nate is right - I have seen 99.9+%. The extinction rate is now very high - some 10,000 times the background rate (1 per million species per year) it is thought. As no one knows exactly how many species there are, we will never know the true rate of extinction, or how much of it is anthropogenic. In addition speciation (new species) is also occurring and this rate is also not known though it is several thousand orders of magnitude smaller than the extinction rate.
In fact the current extinction rate is the highest since the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event 65m years ago when the dinosaurs faced some sort of Peak something. However on a more serious note the current loss of biodiversity is a serious threat to us. We rely on the biosphere to deliver ecological services to us. Loss of biodiversity ultimately means loss of these ecological services a little at a time.
Unless existing loss of biodiversity, plus climate change, plus pollution, adversely impacts the plankton in the oceans, which supply nearly half the planet's breathable oxygen.
Or these things affect the wheat. Or the bees.
Or these things start happening all at the same time. Hey, isn't that what's going on now?
Complex fluctuations do happen in population dynamics, but they happen as part of a system which is self-organized, with many external checks and balances.
We negate the effects of our natural checks and balances by appropriating more resources. Until the advent of germ theory, disease did a fair job of keeping us in check.
710 - Making some bread today and the dough was not raising as it should so I thought YEA! the yeast got smart and are husbanding their resources.
Wrong, dead yeast.
Oh man, I just got the significance of your screen name. Boy do I feel stoopid.
If I were of the female persuation I would be 710 3A170 .
Cheers
If you were of the female persuasion, then you'd probably be looking for 3A3d0d with that moniker. ;)
I recently lost my sourdough starter, not because it died, but because I forgot to take some out of the proofed starter before adding the olive oil, yogurt, tahini, salt, and spices. (I was trying to make sourdough pita bread.) Now I need to culture some wild yeast again, assuming I don't cheat with commercial yeast.
Mangia!
In SIMPLE organic (and non-organic) systems that might be true if you simplify to the point that no nutrients pass a cell wall. A steady state is a climax forest, an island of foxes and rabbits in equilibrium, oceans, the nitrogen cycle, gaia herself. Give me a break, the only cases where "steady state" means death are those where you oversimplify to prohibit life itself.
cfm in Oy Where
The forest, the foxes and rabbits, the oceans, the nitrogen cycle, and the ecosystem as a whole are not examples of steady state processes. They are all in complex flux, respiring, taking in nutrients, excreting, growing, declining, etc.
"Equilibrium" when used alone is a poor descriptor for these constantly changing processes. These are examples of complex equilibria, which are not steady states.
Ensuring durable predictability, which is what a "steady state economy" tries to do, would still require the attempt at avoiding normal entropic and thermodynamic processes. This is the case especially from a hierarchical standpoint, where the members of the upper hierarchy do not possess the knowledge to manage a system which contains complexity beyond the human brain's ability to manage.
In a complex organism, like the human body, the complexity is self-organized by myriads of interdependent systems, no single system of which has durable control or hierarchy over the others.
Damage to skin cells is taken care of by the skin cells, the brain doesn't manage it. The brain keeps the heart beating, the cardiovascular system keeps the blood flowing, the lungs shed CO2 and take in O2, the digestive system processes nutrients, so that the blood flow can bring in O2 and nutrients to area of damaged skin, so that it may repair itself. All these systems work together, and none of them is "in control". This is not a steady state, it is a complex, self-organized flow.
The human brain is capable of externally managing a system of roughly 150 nodes, containing approximately 11,000 relationships. The complexity involved in a system containing 6.7 billion nodes is certainly beyond the ability of the human brain to manage externally, much less comprehend the myriad specific details which define those relationships.
Stupid question: How do you use those gray boxes?
Do you mean the quotes? It's an allowed HTML tag, simply copy the desired text from the original message and paste it into your reply, then surround it with the blockquote tags. HTH.
Cheers,
Jerry
Jerry is a high flyer -- he expects you take a computer course first.
You put < blockquote> before the stuff you want in gray and < /blockquote> after it, but without the empty space after the left chevrons which I had to put in since otherwise my example won't work.
You want to put 'Mary had a little lamb' in gray. You type:
< blockquote> Mary had a little lamb < /blockquote> but delete the empty spaces after the '<'.
Then you get:
.
Clear as mud?
It seems to me that the author glosses over a couple of things.
1. Loans/Interest: In a steady-state 100% reserve economy where does the borrower get the money to pay interest? In the current situation that money comes from someone else's loan of newly created money.
2. The employment issue: Without full employment, which is acknowledge in the article, people will become less able to purchase necessities. We don't work to work, we work to eat somewhere out of the rain and cold. The proposed solution, "more ownership" completely slides around the problem of how someone would afford that ownership. I'm not going to let someone buy into my business just because they want to. So is he talking about workers' ownership of the means of production? The same problem raises its head. When someone wants to take a job they need to buy part of the company? How can they afford to do that, indenture?
--
JimFive
1. Loans/Interest: In a steady-state 100% reserve economy where does the borrower get the money to pay interest? In the current situation that money comes from someone else's loan of newly created money.
I don't understand this question. We have had 100% reserve banks for a long time. They are called loans.
As far as where the money comes from it comes from people who are no longer working in other words the final source of income is the savings of the retired people. The still spend money even though they no longer work to earn money.
Assuming you have a fixed amount of money and the economy is increasing in refinement of goods and services the value of the money will increase in purchasing power over time. Its highly deflationary. For example a house bought for 1000 dollars would be purchased for 100 dollars in say 30 years. Instead of inflating your currency you would be creating smaller denominations. A really low nominal interest rate with a deflationary currency would have high real purchasing power. 0% interest would be decent basically doing nothing with the money but letting it set out of circulation would be a good long term investment. That jar of pennies would become a pot of gold.
Eventually of course the money in savings will be spent at some point and reenter the economy. In general instead of simple loans with interest you would be making loans for a share of the profit from the loan. So lets say a business comes in for a loan you would make the loan with collateral in case of default but instead of interest you would get rights to the profits. Muslim law does not allow interest and in general its these sorts of co-ownership agreements that are used to profit from loaning.
http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2005/06/sharia_finance.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking
Basically instead of charging interest everyone takes on some risk from a transaction. And like I said eventually the money in savings accounts is simply recycled generally having increased in value over time assuming a fixed amount of money.
In any case taking a long term loan out under this sort of banking system is not done lightly. And paying a lot of money for something that does not retain its monetary value which means it increase in real terms is pretty stupid.
For example if you bought a house under these conditions you would probably buy the minimum one you could for the cash you had on hand but you would want it built in such a way that as you got more money you could enhance the house to increase it value just to break even on the financial side. On the purchasing power side you probably come out simply by taking reasonably good care of the property. Allowing long lasting goods to fall into disrepair is financial suicide along with paying good money for shoddy goods.
memmel,
For not understanding the question you did a wonderful job of answering it.
To clarify, in the current US economy money is created when it is loaned out by a bank and that money is destroyed when the loan is payed off or defaulted. In order to pay the interest on the loan the customer has to get extra money. To get that money requires that someone takes out a loan and give me some small portion of that new money. If everyone payed off all of their debt we would have a major financial crisis. In a steady-state economy there is no "extra money" being created so if banks loan out a significant portion of their holdings, there is not enough money in the economy to pay the interest on the loans.
Now, as I understand your answer, what would end up happening is that loans would generally be replaced by venture capital (buying a piece of the business). Any small amount of interest that might get charged does not become a major force in the economy but causes only minor redistributions of savings. In addition to that, in a steady state economy there is little incentive to loan money because you get a guaranteed return from holding on to your money due to deflation.
As I said, I felt this was glossed over in the article.
Thanks for the explanation!
--
JimFive
The key is that a fixed monetary environment replaces deflation with inflation money becomes more valuable over time.
Loans are paid back with money that was in savings when the original loan was made and its increased in value. A loan in this environment that has a interest rate of 1% would have a purchasing power inflation of say 10% in 10 years.
You may need to add money into the system but only if it gets to valuable to easily denominate. For example when a penny gets to the purchasing power of a dollar you may want to inject additional capitol.
The key is that wealth can be withheld from the current economy and saved to be injected at a later date. Without inflation you don't need to make investments in the current economy. The overall money supply need not grow that much if at all remember its basically a steady state economy. As long as we can refine our processes and deflate anyone who can save makes money.
I'm always kind of amused when economists are mystified by what has occured to our economy. Markets work because they mimic natural selection - the strongest live, the others are consumed, you pay for what you use. Providing FREE Limitied Liability to individuals (and corporations) as we do today fundamentally breaks the risk/reward cycle. It's really weird that people go into convultions of logic and intricate schemes trying to game the system. The reality is that nature will win - PERIOD. And nature observes a strict UNLIMITED LIABILITY rule.
The article contains a lot of food for thought. I have read Mr. Daly's book Steady State Economics which is largely concerned with debunking the myth of everlasting growth but which is very sketchy with respect the principles of creating an economc system which does not depend on growth. Obvious Daly's idea have developed considerable since the publication of that book. Here are a few comments on his ideas:
As for controlling what goods actually get produced, I do not oppose the idea of taxing ecologically damaging activity. However, it seems to me that a more straight forward method of control exists. Limit the kinds of production enterprises which get capitalized in the first place. If financing is done by public banks with public funds, then public input into the kinds if enterprises which are to be financed would be natural. People are not going to buy products that are not manufactured. If someone proposes to build a jet ski factory we simply refuse to capitalize this enterprise. Yes this subjects consumer choices to the tyrannny of the majority. If this is the worst problem we have to face over the next several decades we will be very lucky indeed.
All of this discussion may sound very theoretical and irrelevant to the short to intermediate term future because cultural inertia and vested interests in the status quo will resist such radical changes. However, as Daly points out, even if collapse is the most likely outcome we will eventually have to rebuild society, and if that rebuilding is to take any other form than neolithic villages, then the problem of growth will have to be addressed. If we do not even have an intellectual conception of how an economy can function without composite growth how will we be able to forge new economic institutions?
from today's NYT about our not-so-steady-state
"IN February, on a chilly, clear Sunday morning, Sir Richard Branson, president of Virgin Atlantic, along with the co-sponsors Boeing and GE Aviation, lured more than 200 journalists to a hangar at Heathrow Airport near London to witness what they said was airline history. Over flutes of Champagne and plates of mini-bagels filled with salmon, everyone’s eyes were fixed on a 747 as it took off on the world’s first biofuel demonstration flight.
Never mind that only one of the plane’s engines used biofuel, and that was about 25 percent mixed with standard kerosene jet fuel. It was still significant, given that air travel is the fastest-growing source of global greenhouse gases, and the race to find an alternative to kerosene is now crucial."
And just in time for the proliferation of jet flight taxi service from the thousand small airport for those who can't be bothered with commercial aviation and can afford it.
Denial is a powerful thing and the drive for profit equally powerful.
How do we invert reality so that we deny the discomfort of walking, bicycling, or taking mass transit instead of our cars and there is more profit from saving the planet than there is from destroying it?
As they say in Maine—"Yaa caahhn't get theeyya from heerrra."
The example of leaded gasoline turns out to be a really interesting one. One way states have contributed to GDP growth is through a very large build out of prisons. This was fueled politically by a rise in violent crime, but the prison space is often filled with non-violent offenders. As it turns out, the subsequent reduction in violent crime matches very closely the reduction in childhood exposure to lead from gasoline: http://www.amherst.edu/~jwreyes/papers/LeadCrimeNBERWP13097.pdf
So, in a way, lead may have given a good boost to GDP through prison construction.
Chris
I am a confirmed Dalyist. I work at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE), a nonprofit organization developed from Daly's ideas (he is on the board of advisors). I wanted to be completely up front about my affiliation before providing the following comment.
If peak oil and ecological limits are likely to put an end to economic growth (or at least slow it for a bit), I am thankful to see a respected economist proposing sane policies to help us transition to a sustainable economy. Along with Brian Czech, I wrote a guest post here several weeks ago calling for a transition away from growth http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3759. One of the main criticisms of the post was the lack of concrete policies. Since then, I have been working on some ideas for outlining the changes that will be necessary in our governance, policies, and social institutions to achieve a sustainable economy. My perception is that society has been so focused on growth that no one considers how we might operate a non-growing economy.
As noted by other commenters, discussions about nature and the limits it imposes on human society are not new. What is new, however, are discussions about how to live in some degree of prosperity, maximize personal choice, and avoid ecological collapse. Thanks to Herman Daly for eloquently expressing ideas on this front.
Ah, well, not really. One example that immediately pops to mind is The Limits To Growth which contains a detailed step-by-step discussion of specific policies for achieving a reasonably prosperous steady state scociety, complete with scenarios generated by their system dynamics simulation. That report was originally published almost 40 years ago now, and I'm sure there are other examples.
Don't get me wrong, I admire Daly tremendously and I also thank him for eloquently expressing his ideas, I just thought your statement lacked a little perspective.
Cheers,
Jerry
Allow me to qualify that statement. It is true that some folks, largely drawn from the ranks of ecologists, have discussed the limits to growth and provided ideas about how to manage more sustainably. And they've been at it for years. What I'm thinking of as new is the broader discussion that's developing (e.g., the one we're having here, the acceptance of climate change as a real condition in the United States, the first hints of standard economists questioning growth). I wouldn't exactly call sustainability discussions mainstream, but the ideas are gaining more traction. I know we're a long way off, but I actually see business practitioners working toward ecologically sound operations. I also notice the discussion gaining steam in the media in response to all the negative trends and doom and gloom reports.
"My perception is that society has been so focused on growth that no one considers how we might operate a non-growing economy."
I don't know who your "we" is but the economy already knows how to function in a non-growth mode. I hope your we isn't government because they'll just create more problems than they'll solve.
When you say that "the economy already knows how to function in a non-growth mode", do you mean recessions? If so, wouldn't you expect that recession to end someday? In which case, the economy doesn't know how to function in a non-growth mode, since it is always trying to get back to growth, if it ever deviates from it.
Now that I think about it some more I do not really understand the function of requiring 100% reserves for banking. As long as banks can loan money for interest an exponential growth spiral results (assuming the resource base will support such growth). If a bank starts with a given amount of reserves and is constrained by a 100% reserve requirement they will start lower down on the exponential spiral. But once a given volume of loans is reached exponential growth will proceed at the same rate. A 100% reserve requirement gives better protection to depositors but does not in and of itself prevent growth.
A 100% reserve requirement is necessary to prevent an expansion of the money supply. An inflation of the money supply will inevitably be followed by an inflation of price levels, which will distort the economy and result in sub-optimal resource allocation decisions, AKA waste. If there is one thing that a sustainable, steady state economy cannot allow it is waste.
Very interesting post. Thank you very much.
In my humble opinion, the largest problems, considering human nature, are our need to be better off than our neighbor, and having too many kids when things are going 'fine'.
Concerning the first problem, I would advise this: awaken a sense of injustice at inappropriate and outraging differences in pay. If somebody can earn 500 times as much as us, he must be a god, or at least an angel, to be worth 500 times as much as us. We all know he needs to wipe his backside afterwards, just like us. Isn't it outrageous, that these people, these happy few, can live it up, while we see the world crumbling around us?
Shame is the most potent social emotion: nobody wants to go red cheeked.
We can use it against affluence, as we have used it against cigarettes, extra-marital sex, and deviant behavior of any kind.
Maybe there lies a clue for the second problem: If we could make having more than 2 kids shameful, population could stay at a steady state.
Lots of reference to books today. I recall a book mentioned a number of weeks ago that dealt with agriculture/small time farming. I think it was published some time ago. Quite a few posters thought highly of it, do any of you recall the title? I would like to order a copy....
Thanks
jjlalaska
Part of the reasons Australians don't 'get' sustainability issues is the seeming never ending success of the mining industry. In today's Oz media are stories of labour shortages and half million dollar bungalows in mining towns. Hence we supposedly need more population. Never mind that the rivers are chronically short of water. While people know that mineral deposits are finite so far there have always been new discoveries.
I think one sign that an economy has reached steady state is that prices have levelled out between renewable and nonrenewable. For example when recycling aluminium from drink cans costs about the same as the bauxite ->electrolytic refining route. Or NPK fertiliser is line ball with organic. Cornucopians see the commodity boom as a sign that everything is OK whereas I think it is a sign of serious imbalance that will end up with somebody losing out.
The correct term for out-migrants is 'emmigrants'.
Just being picky.
Or "emigrants", if we want to be even more picky.
Kyle's 5th Law of Flaming: Any post correcting someone else's grammatical or spelling mistake will contain a grammatical or spelling mistake itself."
Now find mine ;)
Seems to me that a steady state economy would mean nobody ever gets a raise? Is this true, wouldn't that be hard for people to accept that they will never better their own standard of living within society?
That depends on where they are now.
If you're in the shit, you'll only put up with being in the shit if you think there's hope of rising out of it. If you've no hope, then you start challenging the system which keeps you in the shit. Thus, when the rich-poor gap gets too large, and/or social mobility (the ease of rising or dropping in wealth and position) decreases too much, you get rebellions and revolutions.
But if you're reasonably well-off, you might say, "I have enough" and be content.
If a steady state economy means that many people must live in mud huts without running water barely managing to do subsistence farming, or live in drafty apartments working in dingy factories 12 hours a day choking on bad air, then people won't accept that they'll never better their standard of living, yes.
But if they're living on productive farms with a surplus to sell for other goods and services, running water, some electricity and so on, or in a clean well-insulated unit with power, heating and cooling, working in a factory with natural light, clean air and tree-lined paths along the way to work, for eight hours a day, they'll probably accept that as their lives, yes.
The genius of our current capitalist endless growth system is that it offers everyone the promise of stupendous wealth. So people will put up with quite miserable lives in the hopes of better lives. Thus it's much more resilient as a system than feudalism, communism and so on.
However, now it runs into resource constraints. It becomes obvious that it's physically impossible for the growth to continue forever. If endless growth is impossible, then at some point the hope of universal wealth must be set aside. So people become afraid. That's why you run into such resistance to ideas like peak oil and climate change - people have to either ignore physical reality, or reject the capitalist growth system. Many people would rather ignore reality than give up hope.
The key, of course, is to show how they need not give up hope, that a decent quality of life is possible within our resource constraints; something like a one tonne CO2 lifestyle is physically possible, though politically very difficult, for the entire world.
Mass psychosis is the best framework to view the current capitalist denial that the wheels are finally coming off the Little Train that Could.
In the US, the government will be dropping heavy duty prescription anti-anxiety medications from helicopters, along with plenty of newly printed funny fiat money.
Don't be late for the party.
Kiashu - well said - I nominate it as 'comment du jour'...(editorial privilege)
My favorite part:
In the end, it always comes back to population. Some societies have achieved sustainability, so it's not impossible. But population control has to be their #1 priority. They believe in zero population like we believe in democracy, apple pie, motherhood, and the American Way.
There have been some interesting ideas for how to design a "zero sum economy." I can't find the link right now, but there was one I liked at dKos a couple of years ago. Among other things, it disallowed wealth accumulation by not allowing people to inherit money. When you die, your wealth simply vanishes. Dunno how practical it would be, but it was interesting reading.
They didn't believe in zero population growth, they belived in mortality. Same effect, I suppose, but different intentions entirely.
The Chinese believe in population control, India apparently does not.
Both are about a billion plus.
Want to place bets on who thrives and who dies?
Hardly a historical example, especially considering still hasn't experienced anything approaching zero population growth yet, and a bad comparative argument besides:
Poor africa is largely black while Europe is largely white, so therefore Africa will be poor because its black.
Corolation isn't causation.
Although the Chinese have their one child policy in the cities this does not apply in the country. In addition a Chinese born colleague informs me that there could be a couple of hundred million people more than officially admitted to. It seems many people who have "extra" children do not declare them. I am not sure how they cope, but it does sound plausible. I suspect Chinas population could be as high as 1.4bn. This would take world population up to 7bn.
I would like to point out that comparing China to India is worse than comparing a temperate desert to a tropical rain forest. India is notionally a single political entity but racially, culturally and linguistically, it is far more complex than even the whole of Europe.
To say that India apparently does not believe in population control is incorrect. India has cared about reducing population growth right from the '60s. But as a messy democracy, you simply cannot enforce one-child or no-child policies in India. For all its command economy and socialistic nature, it is essentially not a top-down society politically.
I will give you an interesting statistic. China implemented its one-child policy in 1979. At that time, the population growth rate in the south-western Indian state of Kerala (about the size of the Netherlands) was higher than that of China. Fifteen years later, the population growth rate of Kerala had fallen below that of China, with no draconian policies enforced. One can argue that it may not be a statistically valid comparison since Kerala's 31 million is peanuts compared to China's 1,300 million, but still it shows that you don't need coercion to achieve zero population growth.
As a stoic Indian, I am not really interested in who "thrives" and who "dies", but please desist from comparing an authoritarian culture with an organic, free-for-all, messy-but-exhilarating culture.
Thanks for that, marram, the example of Kerala and China. I'll be using that in future. In speaking of population, I've always noted how when Westerners speak of "solving the population problem" they don't tend to bring up "increasing prosperity and education for women" as a solution.
It's said that,
Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology
However, in reality affluence isn't a problem as such, it's how much waste of resources there is in achieving that waste. A Western vegetarian living in a small unit in a city, using wind energy and cycling everywhere is living more affluently than some illiterate Brazilian cutting down a few hectares of forest to make pasture for cattle for American burgers, but it's plain that the Brazilian, the less affluent guy, is living a more wasteful lifestyle.
Thus,
Impact = Population x Waste
Broadly-speaking, the West is more wasteful than the Third World. Australia uses 15bbl of oil per person annually, Senegal 2. Swedes use 25,000kWh of electricity annually each, Ethiopians 300kWh. Australians eat 3,800kcal daily, PNGers 1,800kcal. The 300 million people of the US use as much oil as the 1,300 million of China.
High population countries assure us that waste is the problem. High affluence countries assure us that population is the problem. Of course, both are right, and both wrong. Both waste and population are the problem.
However, the wasteful part of our Western affluence can be changed tomorrow. Population takes decades to change. I can sell my car and take the train or bike, or change from coal to wind power, and halve my carbon emissions tomorrow. I cannot halve my household's population tomorrow without murder.
We in the West naturally prefer to focus on the half of the impact equation which requires dirty brown-skinned people to change over many decades, and us nice clean white people to... do nothing. The truth is that both parts must be attended to: population, and waste.
Of course, the most proven effective long-term method of steadying and reducing population is increasing prosperity and education for women. Strangely, we in the West are not too keen on increasing the education and prosperity of the women of the Third World. We'd rather just take the minerals of the countries and sell guns to their dictators.
And in all the times I've seen population brought up by some Westerner as an issue in response to "what causes environmental impact?", not once have I seen them suggest increasing education and prosperity. It's all one-child stuff and tying of tubes.
It's racism, plain and simple.
I don't think you're right about that. The factors that lead to lower birth rates are well-known, even here in the US, if only because the original plan (provide birth control) didn't work back in the '70s.
The problem I see is that the things that have led to lower birth rates - the population bust, as some are calling it - are likely to regress in the post-peak world. Prosperity, education for women, health care (including birth control), urbanization (making kids less economically desirable), government provided pensions (meaning children don't need to be your social security), political stability (which, like health care, means your kids will likely live past childhood)...I just don't see those increasing in the post-carbon age.
And no matter how low your environmental footprint...eventually, the issue is going to be population.
Birth control hasn't reduced the population growth rate in the US? You feel that women in America don't take the pill?
And in all the times I've seen population brought up by some Westerner as an issue in response to "what causes environmental impact?", not once have I seen them suggest increasing education and prosperity. It's all one-child stuff and tying of tubes.
It's racism, plain and simple.
American businessmen and politicians are right there with you brother. They are exporting jobs to India and China and other non-white countries just as fast as they can. I am right with you as well in that any day now we can expect China and India to have a lower environmental impact. I would bet good money that if we could send all of our auto manufacturing and software development to China and India the air quality around Beijing and Mumbai would improve dramatically.
And for shame on any white person who talks about the higher growth rates of non-white countries. Not cool. Not allowed. Just as bad as a white person pointing out how harmful it is to have so many people flooding into this country. When those people are all non-white there is no criticism allowed, only praise.
Ah yes the other shoe drops.
It was only a matter of time for the race card to played and all meaningful discussion to come to a screeching halt.
Simple fact we live in a finite world.
If demand for all things is infinite, well then Houston we have a problem and it isn't racism.
Not offered as a 'solution' in the sense that it will allow the whole population to achieve a sustainable level of comfortable living -- something I suspect is wishful thinking -- I do think there is a way to better understand our situation. And with understanding might come pointers to what to do next. That idea is to peg money (in all of its diverse forms) to the stock of energy that is available to do useful work. This stock takes into account the quality of the energy (e.g. high source potential relative to the sink potential) by careful definition of 'useful' work.
This proposal is in agreement with most, if not all, of Dr. Daly's points. In particular it is in agreement with the abolition of fractional reserve banking, which he has correctly identified as the worst sort of Ponzi scheme.
Basing money on available energy comes from what amounts to first principles in systems science. Energy is what does work, period. What work is to be done, up until humans learned to tame fire, has been determined by general evolution (physical, chemical, etc.). It works as long as energy flows through the system (Harold Morowitz, "Energy flow in biology"). Energy is the currency of the economy. Peak oilers, better than most others, should be able to recognize this. EROI (Hall) is a clear application of this principle.
An energy standard for money has been advanced several times, but in times when energy was seen as just another commodity and the Second Law is not generally appreciated by the public and certainly not by traditional economists. But I think the time has come to revisit this idea.
As I have been exploring it in my blog (example: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2008/04/can-a-...
) the benefit of using an energy-based standard for money is that we will finally be measuring a real quantity rather using a squishy device to measure squishy concepts (take GDP for example). Since low entropy materials got that way due to the flow of energy in the past (now embodied in the material) it can be seen that even measuring material stocks in energy units is a valid approach, consistent with some of Daly's ideas regarding natural stocks.
This approach, an attempt to accurately and meaningfully measure what is going on in the economy (and reconciling it with externalities/ecological factors), will at best only give us a better idea of costs, especially at the margin. It will only make transparent real costs in production and the real 'value added'. It won't save a failed economic system. It won't magically create alternative energy sources. It will only help us understand the nature of the problem and the magnitude of it. It might position us to do a better job of managing resources if we were, as a species, to get a second chance.
George
As much as The Oil Drum posters and politicians and businessmen and many of the common man will twist themselves into knots coming up with reasons why there is no need to stop immigration (or population growth), it will happen. At least if you believe Peak Oil is going to occur and affect our lives very negatively.
In the Great Depression we stopped immigration. I would guess they romanticized immigration just as much then as we do now - the Statue of Liberty was put up more than 40 years earlier and The New Colossus poem had been engraved on it for almost 30 years. And yet when times got very bad, the businessmen and politicians of the day turned on a dime and went with the will of the people and shut it down. All the rhetoric about how good immigration is, how it makes us better, how it makes us what we are, how we won't survive without out it, how it's racist to speak against it, will very likely dry up. Just as they say - in every dark cloud there is a silver lining.
A few points.
Are you saying that finite resources can continue to be depleted at a fixed rate, for ever? This would be false, of course.
Wouldn't any inequality make an SSE impossible? If there is inequality in income, you will always have those lower down wanting to get further up. There will always be an incentive to work harder, smarter. Is this likely to get people anywhere in an SSE? Is there a fixed number of higher paid jobs with their being freed up only by retirement (effectively)? Inequality has been a driver, to some degree, for the growth economy we have now. How could inequality be workable in an SSE?
So, in this and the paragraph that follows, you suggest GDP growth can continue? If a company is making more money from the same production level (because of improved value) then that is greater GDP. And that extra money will go towards buying something extra (by the company, by its shareholders/owners, by the bank which loaned the money or by the bank's shareholders). Wouldn't the throughput of resources then increase? Surely, the ideal situation of extra monetary resources only paying for exactly the right amount of qualitative improvements is not likely?
Many thanks for posting this Nate. It almost made me cry - the combination of someone straight-talking such sense and the awareness of how few are listening I guess. Still, it does my heart much good and helps me develop my own economic ideas. I'll be returning to this one often.