by frog
I am spending some of my holiday weekend wallowing in this month´s New Scientist special issue entitled ¨The folly of growth¨. (Both linked articles require a subscription to read, sorry. I bought a hard copy.) Economist Herman Daly talks about how economics has a blind spot that has put humanity and the the earth on a road to disaster.
That is when I realised that economists have not grasped a simple fact that to scientists is obvious: the size of the earth as a whole is fixed. Neither the surface nor the mass of the planet is growing or shrinking. The same is true for energy budgets: the amount absorbed by the earth is equal to the amount it radiates. The overall size of the system – the amount of water, land, air, minerals and other resources present on the planet we live on – is fixed.
While living in a steady state system – planet earth – economists still fantasise that we can ´grow´ our economies exponentially, forever.
As long as our economic system is based on chasing economic growth above all else, we are heading for environmental and economic disaster. To avoid this fate, we must switch our focus from quantitative growth to qualitative development, and set strict limits on the rate at which we consume the earth´s resources.
In such a steady state economy, the value of goods produced can still increase, for example through technological innovation or better distribution, but the physical scale of our economy must be kept at a level the planet is able to sustain.
No doubt the critics will just insist that we will go to space to get what we need. David Suzuki, in another article in the same series, states that:
The option of going into space allows you to pretend that technology will get our asses out of any problem so we don´t have to worry, which is just not true. Limitless resources are a fool´s dream that we can never achieve. The reality is that we are biological beings dependent on the biosphere. What kind of intelligent creature, knowing that these are our crucial limitations, would act as if we can use the Earth as a garbage can and not pay a price for that?
What kind of intelligent creature indeed? Let´s start with the majority of our political parties, in all countries. Until these simple home truths percolate into the political dialogue, humanity is on a road to nowhere. That´s why I am a Green with capital G, and proud of it.
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare | Environment & Resource Management by frog on Mon, October 27th, 2008
Tags: article, David Suzuki, economics, growth, herman daly, limits, New Scientist
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
I’ve come to the same conclusion recently, economists need an understanding of physics (starting with Thermodynamics) to see the shortcomings in how they apply their theories to the real world.
I disagree though that the universe outside of what’s on Earth and what falls to Earth, should be ignored, anymore than Europe should have ignored the New World. I think that when we look to technology to solve many of our problems, a major part of that technology needs to be space technology. Easy nonpolluting access to space is what we need.
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I couldn´t agree more Andrew. I think Suzuki´s point was not that we ignore space, but that we stop using it as an excuse to continue trashing the planet in unsustainable ways. When technology actually improves human lives and our ability to survive, it is a good thing. When it is bent solely at short term wealth creation, it is a waste of time and resources.
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>>I’ve come to the same conclusion recently, economists need an understanding of physics (starting with Thermodynamics) to see the shortcomings in how they apply their theories to the real world.
Count me in on that view, Andrew. Indeed, I understand that Herman Daly’ s own ‘Steady-State Economics’ and ‘Beyond Growth’ constitute giant steps in that direction.
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So given that we, as individuals and as a nation, are up to our eyeballs in debt and it would seem the only way out of debt is to run ever faster, how do we ever get to a steady state?
Do we all just default?
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Do we all just default?
Yes why not. Why should those living now have the pay for the stupidity of those who are now dead or retired. I know everyone has been brought up with the ethic that we should always pay debts, but the alternative, that we trash the planet to pay them, seems far more unethical
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>>Why should those living now have the pay for the stupidity of those who are now dead or retired.
Good-oh. Let’s scrap the treaty. Why should the current generation pay for the stupidity of those who are now dead or retired?
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Good-oh Blue Peter – ever been to an ANZAC Day parade?
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Greenfly, I’m responding to kiore1 post
Yes.
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Okay BP you’ve convinced me. lets just keep on cutting down our forests, polluting our waterways and putting more crap into the atmosphere. After all that is the only ethical response.
BTW the point about the treaty is that those of us who reaped the reward from confiscation of land, should be responsible for making restitution. It is not, or should not be a blame game, but most of us who have benefited from New Zealand’s wealth have done so because of confiscated land.
In the case of third world debt, the current generation got no benefit from many of the mad dictators who used the money to buy arms, but they are being forced to trash the planet to pay it back. A totally different scenario.
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>>Okay BP you’ve convinced me. lets just keep on cutting down our forests, polluting our waterways and putting more crap into the atmosphere. After all that is the only ethical response.
I don’t agree with doing that. It would be nice if we had a green party that focused on such issues….
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*snigger*
I just love it, how it has to be stated that the earth is finite to economists, by scientists, yet again, and they still don’t get it.
I have been advising “less consumption” to sweet young things for quite some time now, and they’ve all been looking blankly at me, since they’re all convinced that the world will collapse without their regular consumption of ‘a new one of everything’, at all possible occasions.
It’s going to be an interesting decade ahead, isn’t it?
Just been reading Chris Trotter’s once-over-lightly history of left activism No Left Turn, and for all it’s faults, with which I quibble, it’s very sound on the 1928 -1938 period.
Now here’s one for the National Party – do you want to find a friendly war to stimulate consumption, & bring us out of the recession? (… joking … in case any one I’m about to bump into this evening is reading! ..)
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More Marxist clap-trap.
We’ve never required a recession to start a war…
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Andrew W Says:
October 27th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I’ve come to the same conclusion recently, economists need an understanding of physics (starting with Thermodynamics) to see the shortcomings in how they apply their theories to the real world.
………
There’s a comment along that line here:
http://tvhe.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/quote-5-lionel-robbins-definition-of-economics/
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I’m just listening to the leaders debate: Rodney Hide asks: “Listen , what is an economy? An economy is people going off to work… an electrician etc etc..” I think Jeanettte needs to make the point that what we make is important. Rodney would be happy with McMansions with 4 car garages but the Greens would favour efficiency in production (such as New Urbanist sustainable housing).
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Oh dear, the stupidity of this remark is amazing:
> That is when I realised that economists have not grasped a simple fact that to scientists is obvious: the size of the earth as a whole is fixed.
Economists are well used to rationing of limited resources. It is environmentalists that haven’t figured it out.
Take peak oil. Economists understand that if oil runs low (or even if people think it will) the price will go up. This signals that oil is getting scarce and everyone substitutes. Many environmentalists still think that it will just ‘run out’!
If we run low on space to put our rubbish, then it will get more expensive to throw things out. We are not remotely close to this happening, and any increase in landfill charges are purely from environmentalist zeal.
If it looks like we will run low on water, then water metering and charging will be brought in (as a first step) to bring the resource into a proper market. As a second step, the price will be ratcheted up until we all stink and the dairy farms have shut. Then, amazingly, there will suddenly enough to go around.
I can’t understand why environmentalists find these concepts so hard to grasp. Can anyone explain?
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>>I can’t understand why environmentalists find these concepts so hard to grasp. Can anyone explain?
This is a real patsy question for the Greens isn’t it? Please don’t make it too easy for them
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Well, apart from the comment on rubbish, we’re the ones that have been making the other points. It is the right-wingers, the ones who supposedly know about economics, that deny there is anything other than a short term problem. Why else would Treasury forecasts for the price of oil be so comically wrong all the time?
As for rubbish, its just that we prefer to curb the growth trend *before* all the space gets used up, not to mention how it relates to other environmental issues, and oil use too.
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Treasury knows almost nothing about the future price of oil. If anyone could predict this price, they would make a fortune by going short/long. That’s the definition of a perfect market – no one knows the future price.
So I think what you are saying is that you don’t want to wait until the market tells you that something is running out, or getting full. You want to act now, before it does. But that’s just wasting money/effort on a problem that doesn’t exist yet, right?:
> As for rubbish, its just that we prefer to curb the growth trend *before* all the space gets used up, not to mention how it relates to other environmental issues, and oil use too.
Let me put your mind at ease. Our rubbish dumps take up virtually no space.
http://savethehumans.typepad.com/weblog/2008/03/why-rubbish-fre.html
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The puzzling thing about the idea that economists have “not grasped” the finite nature of the world is that if you read Adam Smith and the other classical economists will you see that they understood it very well, as shown by their division of the factors of production into 3 parts: the familiar labour and capital, plus the long since neglected finite element they called “land“. Most modern economics textbooks touch ever so briefly on the concept, and then proceed to ignore it completely.
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The Optimist Says:
October 27th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
>> If it looks like we will run low on water, then water metering and charging will be brought in (as a first step) to bring the resource into a proper market. As a second step, the price will be ratcheted up until we all stink and the dairy farms have shut. Then, amazingly, there will suddenly enough to go around.
yes, indeed the market will always solve it. The problem is that, while these market adjustments may be mathematically elegant, they often aren’t that good for the people in the real world.
The 1929 sharemarket crash was a market adjustment, the Irish potato famine was part of a market adjustment too. Sometimes it’s better to plan so that markets don’t have to adjust themselves violently.
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Quit with the pedantry, Optimist, no one is talking about needing perfect knowledge. Treasury has to make price predictions for the government to budget based on cost/benefit analyses, and should do so on the best knowledge available. It doesn’t, but instead always simply assumes the price of oil will come down, enabling the govt to make long-term infrastructure plans that it never would otherwise.
“You want to act now, before it does. But that’s just wasting money/effort on a problem that doesn’t exist yet, right?:”
Wrong. The market works like biological evolution, with no foresight and no ability to plan for the future. It is not strategic. But that it can’t see a likely future problem doesn’t mean its not there. And many problems require much longer to react to than the market will allow.
“So I think what you are saying is that you don’t want to wait until the market tells you that something is running out, or getting full.”
The market is a useful tool. Fortunately, it is not the only one we have given its short-term view. The human brain is very useful for overcoming this shortcoming. For instance Peak Oil has been known about for decades. Those societies that have relied solely on the market (and not all have), are missing their chance to plan a more smooth transition from fossil fuels. In evolution, species go extinct if they can’t cope with sudden change. With markets, people suffer, but it needn’t always be that way.
Efficiency is a fine thing, but not to be worshiped. As Edward Luttwak said:
“I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency – love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes.”
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Optimist.
The point about this Thermoeconomics that is discussed in the link provided by jh is that the economy works by taking rich energy resources and converting them to waste with us all living off the wealth we make through the conversion.
It’s exactly the same process that nature uses, life on this planet takes the rich energy from incoming sunlight and through various processes turns it to waste heat which escapes so that low entropy energy coming in is turned into high entropy energy going out.
Now, what happens if, with the economy or with nature, that rich energy source is exausted and isn’t or cannot be replaced? In both cases the system will be poorer for the loss.
You, using a traditional economics approach assume that an alternative energy source of similar value will be found, but that’s simply an expression of faith on your part, neither physics or economics compels that an equal or nearly equal energy source will be available.
Many years ago we didn’t have the fantastic resource that is petroleum, our society is richer, our population far, far, greater mainly because of our ability to use that and other concentrated and convenient forms of energy.
Here’s another point to consider. Human beings are also a resource, if the system functions at a much lower level of wealth we could well see an economic surplus of humans and the value of that resource will decline.
Optimist “no one knows the future price.”
Even though I’m sure oil supplies will soon be in decline, price volatility will be high, and timing unpredictable, combined with the uncertainty on just how this will affect the economy is enough to make future price an uncertain bet.
A while ago there was a post (from memory on this blog) asking what the price of oil would be in X years, I said the real question was would there still be a global economy in X years? The point being that if we end up in a depression oil could be cheap.
Optimist: “So I think what you are saying is that you don’t want to wait until the market tells you that something is running out, or getting full. You want to act now, before it does. But that’s just wasting money/effort on a problem that doesn’t exist yet, right?:”
You buy house insurance?
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Why we are in so much debt?
This is simply excellent.
http://www.notjustnotes.ws/howbanksrobyou.htm
I don’t agree with all the conclusions but the explanation is brilliantly done.
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Folly of growth eh?
You lot will be the first to bitch about poverty and low oil prices
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Thanks Andrew, I hadn’t really got my head around the point of the thermodynamic model.
………………………..
One little point of economics anyone can understand is that Irish fed big families on small potato patches. I look around and lament the disappearance of the NZ 1/4 Acre… gone in the name of “growth”.
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>>You, using a traditional economics approach assume that an alternative energy source of similar value will be found, but that’s simply an expression of faith on your part, neither physics or economics compels that an equal or nearly equal energy source will be available.
So why are you building wind farms?
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Try powering your car with a windmill on the roof
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>>Try powering your car with a windmill on the roof
Or you could connect it to a grid and run your car off a battery.
A wild and crazy idea, I know.
Dang these new fangled invent-shuns. Don’t like tech-know-ledg=ee, me! I’v dun got mah horse, and dats good enough for anybodys….
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“If it looks like we will run low on water, then water metering and charging will be brought in… the price will be ratcheted up until we all stink… there will suddenly enough to go around.
I can’t understand why environmentalists find these concepts so hard to grasp. Can anyone explain?”
No that’s not what happens, in a free market we don’t all stink, just poor people who can’t afford water. The rich continue to fill swimming pools and take long baths.
Poor people get dirty and drop dead due to poor hygiene. Eventually they get sick of this situation and drive out the rich people, a war starts, either the poor win and we get some variant of socialism for a while, which doesn’t work very well, or the rich call in military help, lots of people die, poor people give up and put up with the situation and lead miserable lives.
Alternatively, poor people get dirty and catch diseases, rich people catch diseases from them, microbes not respecting market logic, poor health means the poor don’t make very good workers or soldiers, the rich panic and agree to set up free water systems for the poor and we are back to where we started.
It works much the same with food, which is why we have 1.4 billion people living in poverty, which according to free-market logic, means the price of food should be falling, but it isn’t.
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Maybe i’m missing the tone of that comment somehow, but that sounds like a really sh***y system.
I recall that the Greens are vaguely in favour of metering for commercial users..?
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BP
The facetious answer was intended to address the question why we were building “farms” as opposed to something else. It wasn’t serious.
The exchange was a bit amusing, I must say.
I am curious as to whether the apologists for the right here have ever played the old board game “Monopoly”. Whether they remember how it inevitably winds up, and why the roll of the dice is important.
There’s only one winner. Determined by chance and “them as has, gets”. What a LOVELY model for peace and tranquility for the planet.
BJ
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People just love a deterministic universe, don’t they. Especially Greens.
My point is that there is an abundance of energy. We just don’t extract it very well.
The Greens have a tendency to ignore the very real chance that extraction will continue to get more and more efficient. They pretend that we will only have the technology in the future what we have now. In fact, they often do worse. They ignore any technological advances that don’t fit their political agenda. Alt powered cars, for example.
History shows us we get better at energy extraction.
Is it therefore more or less likely that we’ll continue to do so?
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All up, I would argue with Suzuki… not that we can grow unrestricted here on earth by using the power and resources that cheap access to space would give, but that the technological fixes HAVE to be pursued as well. Whether some would perceive it as carte blanche to do as they wished with the biosphere or not. Those people can be dealt with.
The planet is already well past its carrying capacity and without some pretty serious alterations to the balance that COULD come from space, it isn’t just growth that is impossible, it is also survival at current levels of consumption that is impossible. The result could end human civilization in the worse scenarios.
So while his emphasis on restraint of growth here is laudable, his lack of use for technological fixes is too extreme for me. Of course I am not tempted to do what he claims to be the resulting attitude. He protests too much in this regard. I think it damages his message.
respectfully
BJ
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Most economists understand that matter is neither created or destroyed and hence the stuff of the planet is transformed but does not disappear – except for space junk.
Most economists also understand Julian Simon’s law that modern humans produce more resources than they consume which is why wealth has increased during population increases.
Most economists also understand that all “Natural resources” (except for meteoric iron and alluvial gold) are human inventions and hence are infinite. The oil age will end but not because we run out of oil just as the stone age ended but not because we ran out of rocks.
Can anyone identify anything we have “run out of”. We already extract valuable metals from rubbish dumps and as time goes by this might become more common.
Soon global population will be in decline while human knowledge will continue to increase exponentially. Production becomes more efficient by the day. Combine this with declining population and the yearning for catastrophy begins to loose its appeal.
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BP
Efficiency gains in extracting energy? As in being better able to get energy from the sun or wind?
Or are you talking about the efficiency of use of fossil fuels?
Or what exactly? This usage isn’t clear to me.
I am pretty sure however, that YOU know exactly what you meant.
Thanks
BJ
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Stop Development, Stop Traffic?
27 October 2008 – 5:00am
In an effort to reduce traffic, citizens in Santa Monica, California have proposed a yearly cap on commercial development. Though many in the congested city are behind it, opponents say it’s not an effective way to reduce traffic — and that its passage could set a dangerous example.
[snip]
“We don’t believe that this commercial development serves the residents,” says Ted Winterer, a co-author of RIFT and a candidate for Santa Monica City Council. “It begins to just become an engine for revenue growth.” And more jobs. And more traffic.
http://www.planetizen.com/node/35771
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BP – pull your head in mate. You go on and on about how the Greens hate cars and oppose new technologies. Just shut the f@@k up! We say nothing of the sort, we promote electric vehicles while acknowledging that they are not a simple replacement for the ICE. We support alternative technologies of all sorts.
Just where do you get off spouting such rubbish and lies about us on a daily basis?
GO SOMEWHERE ELSE WITH YOUR RUBBISH.
Thank you. Frog feels better now that he has shouted at the troll!
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Owen McShane Says:
October 28th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Most economists understand that
…………………….
No, from what I have read that is a controversial point of view.
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frog Says:
October 28th, 2008 at 11:49 am
BP – pull your head in mate. You go on and on about how the Greens hate cars and oppose new technologies. Just shut the f@@k up! We say nothing of the sort, we promote electric vehicles while acknowledging that they are not a simple replacement for the ICE. We support alternative technologies of all sorts.
…………………..
I think greens do hate cars Frog , in the sense that there are too many of them and as a ratio of weight to load they waste a lot of energy. It isn’t a position that needs hiding.
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Owen – thanks for putting up the usual straw man and knocking him down, again. No one here has said that we are running out of anything, just that relative scarcity is threatening our economy and the planet that supports us, requiring a change in mindset and lifestyle.
Your statement that natural resources are infinite is just laughable. It is about as fantastic as the notion of infinite substitution in markets. Humams will do a damn good job of substituting, until the atmosphere is trashed and our quality of life with it.
You are like a small child who hasn’t learned that mummy and daddy don’t have an infinite wallet from which you can extract infinite ice cream. Grow up! You keep putting up the straw man that we want to deny everything. We don’t. We just want to live within our means like responsible adults.
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Valis you say:
> Quit with the pedantry, Optimist, no one is talking about needing perfect knowledge. Treasury has to make price predictions for the government to budget based on cost/benefit analyses, and should do so on the best knowledge available. It doesn’t, but instead always simply assumes the price of oil will come down, enabling the govt to make long-term infrastructure plans that it never would otherwise.
My point is not pedantry and if you are expecting Treasury to accurately predict the price of oil then it can’t. But there is no evidence that the price of oil should rise over the long term. There is plenty of it, and economies are transitioning to electricity as a cheaper form of energy.
> Wrong. The market works like biological evolution, with no foresight and no ability to plan for the future.
That is so wrong I’m not sure whether to even respond. The market is created by people’s views of the future, so it build in all the information the human race has to hand.
> It is not strategic.
Are you distinguishing between markets and market participants?
> But that it can’t see a likely future problem doesn’t mean its not there. And many problems require much longer to react to than the market will allow.
The market sees everything which is seeable, and makes a decision (right or wrong) based on those things. For example, if it looks like oil is going to get scarce, the price goes up. At the moment, it doesn’t, so the price of oil is dropping. I’m sorry for you
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jh – I don’t hate cars. But I do believe that we have too many of them and that the ‘market’ is delivering them and their roads far out of proportion to what is sustainable. Would I go back to a time before cars? No. But I would go back to a time before our entire civilisation was built around them and for them? Yes. But we cannot go back, only forward. I hate what we have become in relation to the car – it’s slave. But we can change that. Both through new technologies, urban design, etc. I’m afraid I am an optimist, and hence my impatience with idiots like BP who tell lies daily and of cours bait frogs.
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This might come in useful:
New Study: More Parking=More Driving
25 October 2008 – 11:00am
A new U of PA study, ‘Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving’ compares two NYC neighborhoods, showing decisively that providing off-street parking is a sure way to guarantee more driving.
http://www.planetizen.com/node/35753
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Optimist said:
The market sees everything which is seeable, and makes a decision (right or wrong) based on those things. For example, if it looks like oil is going to get scarce, the price goes up. At the moment, it doesn’t, so the price of oil is dropping. I’m sorry for you
Optimist – that is the biggest load of anthropomorphic rubbish I have read in a long time! The ‘market’ sees nothing because it is ‘nothing’. The market is not a being! It makes no decisions, right or wrong. Humans do. And they do it with limited and imperfect knowledge. (What we call educated guessing)
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Frog,
I see. One rule for you, different rule for everyone else.
I, however, would never be that rude.
The fact is you are opposed to cars. Your transport policy is against building more roads, because you’re working on the assumption car traffic will not increase. You’re shifting the money from enabling cars to enabling rail.
I have not seen any policy promoting the use of electric cars, and very little commentary, other than to dismiss them.
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>>I hate what we have become in relation to the car – it’s slave.
The car is a tool.
I guess you’d rather be a “slave” to walking. Or trains. Or high-density town planning.
No thanks.
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“No one here has said that we are running out of anything,”
Cod, orange roughy, some types of tuna, flounder that you can catch with a drag net, Arabian gazelles, kakapo, wilderness, tuatara, caviare, large herds of North American bison, fried sturgeon, blue whales, freedom, unmodified NZ forest, steam locomotives, intelligent political debate.
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Optimist
The invisible hand is a HAND, it has no eyes, no brain and no feet. It responds to the near term impulses and prices that it feels and it has an exquisitely tuned sense of touch and a marvelous reaction time.
When confronted with dangers that do not give economic signals, like consumption of the commons, or limits that are NOT readily overcome by some technological fix, it fails. When it fails people die.
Governments suck at dealing with the sense of touch, immediate responses etc, but have brains (not the elected weenies, the working pukes) and eyes that can see trouble coming at them. May do the wrong thing anyhow (the elected weenies make the decisions after all).
You want to tell me that the market in its collective wisdom knew what was coming better than I did 2 years ago? Horse-puckey and other smelly stuff. Four years ago I said house prices were stupid, this would end badly, the economy would tank. Two years ago I opined that the derivatives were overcooked. Laughter ensued. Roubini said much the same thing. The markets climbed higher.
Suddenly reality came by and basically said “sorry boys, it doesn’t work that way” and cut them off at the knees. They are STILL falling.
The information was there. The market ignored it. The market ignored it precisely because the analysis was based on the laws of thermodynamics and the simple concept – TANSTAAFL that the economists reject.
Roubini did a better job of getting heard but was also poorly treated. The market does NOT make rational decisions about the future, it ignores information that doesn’t agree with it, that is incompatible with immediate profits. It is as entirely imperfect as the government… and has less sense of responsibility.
The limits to growth over the next century are largely limits of energy availability. Not easy to overcome those…. there’s a lot of pain coming. Growth on the other hand, is the ONLY thing that keeps the fractional-reserve banking system working. Look at the link I posted up above in this thread.
http://blog.greens.org.nz/2008/10/27/daly-and-suzuki-on-the-folly-of-growth/#comment-62471
There’s a reason for all the debt and the perceived (by business) need for “growth”. There are limits to the growth that we can manage. The exponential sh!t required by this economic system is flatly impossible.
This is what we face:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/
How is it that this conflict isn’t understood as the nightmare it is?
Why are bankers still allowed to run the planet?
respectfully
BJ
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http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP2/WEAP2.html
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BJ I have been expecting you to er-um chip in to my question further up this thread with some thoughts on how to get kiwis (as individuals and as a collective) out of the debt mire.
I agree that the culture of debt is a massive problem, but to get out we need a positive balance of payments in the long term and to get that we need growth. Something that leaves me feeling somewhat pessimistic…
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Andrew W
> Even though I’m sure oil supplies will soon be in decline, price volatility will be high, and timing unpredictable, combined with the uncertainty on just how this will affect the economy is enough to make future price an uncertain bet.
Oil supplies will decline when demand does. Until then you are going to have to put up with watching ever-increasing supplies of oil, year on year.
A month or two ago on this blog I did offer to bet that oil would be down to $60 within 5 years (can’t remember exactly the details). I would have collected already…
> I said the real question was would there still be a global economy in X years?
This is silly, of course there will be a global economy. Or are you thinking nations will close their borders to trade? There is too much to lose.
>> Optimist: “So I think what you are saying is that you don’t want to wait until the market tells you that something is running out, or getting full. You want to act now, before it does. But that’s just wasting money/effort on a problem that doesn’t exist yet, right?:”
> You buy house insurance?
I don’t buy house insurance to insure against building materials running out. I buy insurance against it burning down. I don’t believe Lloyds offer that sort of insurance for a world. Or perhaps there is a Martian insurance group I am unaware of…
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Frog,
> Optimist – that is the biggest load of anthropomorphic rubbish I have read in a long time! The ‘market’ sees nothing because it is ‘nothing’. The market is not a being! It makes no decisions, right or wrong. Humans do. And they do it with limited and imperfect knowledge. (What we call educated guessing)
I’ll look that word up in a minute.
The market is all-seeing. It is an anthro-amalgam of everything that everyone knows. It is a very human thing, being made up almost entirely of humans. I hope you won’t claim that a silly little 23yo bureaucrat in Wellington or (bless your hearts) an environmentalist, knows more than the market as a whole?
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The Optimist Says:
October 28th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
>> Oil supplies will decline when demand does. Until then you are going to have to put up with watching ever-increasing supplies of oil, year on year.
Wrong. From 2005 to 2008, oil prices went up, but supply stayed roughly constant. That is a clear sign that demand was rising and supply couldn’t keep up.
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Bjchip if you are claiming that the market didn’t know the current collapse in house prices was coming then you need to read more widely. It has been talked about for years.
> The limits to growth over the next century are largely limits of energy availability. Not easy to overcome those…. there’s a lot of pain coming.
If that is the case, then we are sorted. Energy availability is exploding, and we are on the cusp of a revolution in this area. I believe the price of energy is going to plummet in the next 10 years as new technologies become available.
> There’s a reason for all the debt and the perceived (by business) need for “growth”.
Actually a good part of the debt is consumers. They buy stuff because it makes their sorry little lives slightly less unbearable. They buy it with money they don’t have, hence the debt.
> Why are bankers still allowed to run the planet?
Because the environmentalists haven’t taken over yet?
Seriously though, I didn’t realise the planet was run by bankers. If it were, I’m sure they wouldn’t have allowed the current crisis to happen.
And that web site you link to is just a load of ‘what if?’.
Let me try it: What if…
- We had infinite energy available at almost no cost
- A device the size of an AA battery could power a plane for a week
- Cars could travel at 300km/h and fly
Wouldn’t it be great. Now explain to me why my predictions are any less probably than those on the web site?
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Owen McShane Says:
October 28th, 2008 at 11:28 am
> Can anyone identify anything we have “run out of”.
Moa. The skeletons of south island Maori who died after the Moa died out show clear signs of malnutrition in comparison with those from before they died out, which shows that they hadn’t stopped needing Moa for food, they had just stopped being able to find any.
Totara. Well, not quite, but we used to build window frames out of Totara when we had plenty of totara to cut down, and now we don’t because there is a shortage of totara forest. Anyone who has experience of house-painting can tell you that totara window frames last better and are easier to paint and strip down than other timbers, but we now use other things to make window frames out of, because there’s not enough totara forest left.
There are plenty more examples in older and more densely populated countries.
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The Optimist Says:
October 28th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
>> Actually a good part of the debt is consumers. They buy stuff because it makes their sorry little lives slightly less unbearable. They buy it with money they don’t have, hence the debt.
Also because businesses spend heaps of money on insidious social engineering (called advertising and marketing) designed to make people believe they will be happier if they go out and buy these things they don’t need with money they don’t have.
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Optimist: “This is silly, of course there will be a global economy. Or are you thinking nations will close their borders to trade? There is too much to lose.”
Restrictions on or the closing of boarders to trade is exactly what happens during a severe recession or depression, after the 1929 collapse countries responded by erecting tariff barriers, worsening the problem, and within five years, two-thirds of international trade had disappeared.
We saw a similar response recently when a shortage in food supplies resulted in several countries restricting food exports.
Owen: “Can anyone identify anything we have “run out of”. ”
Plenty of species of animals, land.
But as you’ve been told before peak oil isn’t about running out of oil, oil will still be available 100 years from now, peak oil is a decline in oil production as a result of geological constraints, numerous countries have seen their own oil production decline as a result of these geological factors.
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A problem I see with Green thinking is it regards one possible scenario as inevitable, rather than one of many possible scenarios.
In terms of transport policy, it’s all based on the idea that oil will:
a) power most transport
b) will become unaffordable
That’s one possible scenario. Highly unlikely, in my view, as we’ve already proven we can run cars without oil. Decrease the demand in one area, like vehicle transport, and the price of oil plummets, making aircraft and shipping cheaper.
That’s another scenario.
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That type of thinking isn’t limited to any group, you’ll find it in just about everyone with strong political views.
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This New Scientist article is very poignant, particularly given the current recessionary issues globally. I can’t help but think that the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink our definition of success and progress.
A very well-thought presentation of the issues and alternatives are provided by James Gustav Speth in his book ‘The Bridge at the Edge of the World’ released earlier this year.
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kahikatea:
> Wrong. From 2005 to 2008, oil prices went up, but supply stayed roughly constant. That is a clear sign that demand was rising and supply couldn’t keep up.
Not as far as I can see – have done a post on it
http://savethehumans.typepad.com/weblog/2008/10/peak-oil-produc.html
> Also because businesses spend heaps of money on insidious social engineering (called advertising and marketing) designed to make people believe they will be happier if they go out and buy these things they don’t need with money they don’t have.
That’s a very socialist attitude, unless you change the word ‘make’ to ‘encourage’. I think you’ll find it is governments which ‘make’ people do things. With companies, you normally have a choice.
A capitalist might call this the way of the world, or what makes the money go around, or just life.
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I’m glad people are waking up to the folly of expecting a ‘growth’ economy to go on forever.
We need to budget for all of our resources. Everything is finite: money, time, land, fishing stocks etc etc etc.
NZ is already pretty much at the limit of the population it can sustain with hydro power. Population budgeting is one necessary step toward living more sustainability.
It is time for each of us to contemplate the sort of life we would be living if we had to sustain ourselves with the real fruits of our own endeavours.
That is one reason I have become supportive of any political party which confronts NZs need to limit beneficiaries, and boost overall productivity.
It sounds right-wing but is in fact necessary for the ongoing health of our resources and our planet.
So often beneficiaries put nothing back except extra population.
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> But as you’ve been told before peak oil isn’t about running out of oil, oil will still be available 100 years from now, peak oil is a decline in oil production as a result of geological constraints, numerous countries have seen their own oil production decline as a result of these geological factors.
OK, so if production doesn’t decline you will be proved wrong? A lot of the problem with environmentalist causes is that they have a bet each way (e.g. rising or falling temperatures is a sure sign of global warming, rising or falling oil prices is a sure sign of peak oil).
If we can agree that rising world oil production is a sure sign that peak oil is a scam, then the debate might get somewhere.
> Restrictions on or the closing of boarders to trade is exactly what happens during a severe recession or depression,
Well you could be right on that – it certainly happened in the 30s, but hopefully governments and people are not so stupid as then, and anyway trade is a much larger part of the world economy now. New Zealand would quietly go bust without trade. As I said, there is too much to lose.
Anyway, environmentalists hate trade, so whose side are you on?!
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Kiore…I agree wholeheartedly.
The problem with the current approach to resolving treaty issues is that it also makes the innocent pay.
No one in my family EVER benefitted from anything taken from Maori, yet we still have to pay an ongoing price for someone elses wrongdoing. Not least of which is the stigma of being white people in a land that respects brown-ness far more.
During my lifetime we have suffered plenty at the hands of Maori and it would be great to see a treaty reversal: ie…given that they accepted the Queens rule-of-law we should expect them to provide restitution for the times they didn’t meet the standard.
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Optimist,
1. I’m not an environmentalist
2. As I said we’ve already seen peak oil production in numerous countries, there’s still debate about when global peak will occur, the pesimists say now, others around 2040, this large uncertainty is attributed by many to doubt about the honesty of OPEC member states about their claimed reserves.
http://trendlines.ca/scenarios.htm
3. I tried to post a comment on your blog a couple of minutes ago (just to say what an arse you are) ended up filing an error report with typepad because the “operation couldn’t be completed” perhaps others have had the same problem.
Cheers!
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Well another of my comments looks to have been caught as spam, to repeat the jist of it:
Optimist
1. I”m not an environmentalist
2. peak oil will happen between about now and 2040 depending on what figures you believe for major OPEC producers reserves, Saudi’ Arabia Kuwait and others don’t allow independent auditing of reserves and it’s noticable that claimed reserves in these nations jumped suspiciously when the quotas were being handed out, higher reserves = higher quota in OPEC.
3. I thought I’d post a comment on your blog, just to say what an arse you are, seems to be a problem with keypad, they asked for an error report
Cheers!
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Take peak oil. Economists understand that if oil runs low (or even if people think it will) the price will go up. This signals that oil is getting scarce and everyone substitutes.
Cheer up Optimist, the glass is half empty.
I would have thought the last couple of years would have cured anyone of the folly of relying on the “invisible hand” to guide energy policies.
Six months ago : full steam ahead with alternative energies, oil at $US150 is proof that we’re running out!
Today : Aw shucks, false alarm. Let’s cancel those alternative-energy investments, waste of money, $US60 a barrel is proof that peak oil is a myth.
The problem with the market is that it has no memory, and no predictive power. (one could say the same thing about most politicians, which is why the Greens are so strikingly different from the crowd!)
The reality is that the prices of six months ago are positive proof that the balance between supply and demand was exceedingly tight. (There was lots of speculation which drove the price up, but speculation can only exploit a tight market, it can’t create it.) The current collapse in price is the market anticipating an over-supply due to the emerging world recession.
And the irony is that peak oil, which I have been predicting as occuring between 2010 and 2012, is almost certainly this year!
We’re entering a multiple-year depression. Producers, who have been pumping full tilt, will cut back production slightly, but in 2009 we’ll still burn 95% or so of what we burn this year… moral of the story, field by field, the oil wells will pass their peak and enter into decline… By the time the depression’s over, investment in new fields will have been depressed by years of lower prices, and we’ll suddenly hit a wall of high prices as demand meets supply, just like it did in 2008. But the peak will be behind us by then, and we’ll have wasted several precious years of weaning ourselves off oil… if we just trust the price signals.
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Frog,
You are not an optimist.
Regards,
The Optimist
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Optimist: “So I think what you are saying is that you don’t want to wait until the market tells you that something is running out, or getting full. You want to act now, before it does. But that’s just wasting money/effort on a problem that doesn’t exist yet, right?
I’m guessing when your grandchildren or great grandchildren or theirs wonder what the planet must have been like when they sit in class decades or centuries from now being shown what species/ and even races have capitulated to eroding environments, just one example, native forests being bulldozed in exchange for palm oil plantations?
So in that example there are multiple dramas..
1. what creatures great or small are having their natural habitat taken away from them as we type? Imagine a bigger creature than you putting a bulldozer through your home? how well would we survive if forced into finding a new habitat… quickly.
Guess that’s the way of the world too? kill or be killed? last man standing perhaps? Lucky we’re bigger than them ay, hate to be in their shoes.
2. a market demand has emerged for things labeled and marketed as “bio fuels”… sorry there seems to be a bandwagon being driven here… mowing down exotic untouched ancient forests to provide fuel/energy in a hurry.??? hmmm.. market demands and pressures.
So we’re gunna get more efficient at extracting energy? is that by forcing third world residents being sold into planting more palm plantations because they’re being paid more than their traditional crops?
So it governments or companies “making” these people change the landscape?
3. And going back to the grandkids, I’m sure your grandkids are going to have a pretty good life here in NZ… but what about elsewhere in the world. It’s pretty easy for us to sit here isolated from these kind of issues.
It’s too late when it’s gone. Whether we’re talking bout natural resources, habitats, whatever.. it won’t be the same as it was ever again.
These are things i don’t expect a true capitalist to understand, they won’t have to worry bout these things when they’re gone. They’ve made their money, lived their life…. retired gracefully etc etc…
I personally want my future family to have access to exactly the same opportunities I have had… plants, animals, air quality even??? Moas would’ve been cool to see in the flesh, pity. Yes i do think we’re poorer for not having any of these species around.
I think you’ll find there are thousands more problems than that above well and truly exist right now.
Consider your point of view if you were born in another less fortunate country. The haves and have nots are two teams that don’t seem to swap players all that readily ay.
So with a large unimagineable number of humans (like you and me) living in extreme poverty around the world right now. Why is it a silly idea to think that if we just buttoned back now, things may actually get better for a lot of those people too?
We’re actually letting this take place to our own species, so what chance is there that other plant or animal species are going to recieve our attention.?
That is why we have to put some effort in yesterday.
Owen =”Most economists understand that matter is neither created or destroyed and hence the stuff of the planet is transformed but does not disappear – except for space junk.”
Have you seen Disney’s movie WALL-E ?
Scares the shit out of me looking at my local streets at the moment with the inorganic rubbish going on.
Maybe there will be something useful come of that steaming pile of crap sometime in the future? Maybe not all of it tho? can that sort of attitude carry on forever? doesn’t matter who you are, (no pun intended) when there isn’t any useful matter left, we sit around and wait for something useful to pop out of the piles of crap? Don’t assume technology will race ahead and solve the problem for us, that may or may not happen. That is something nobody knows 100%.
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Kahikatea and Andrew,
Apologies – blog shorthand meant I did not include the usual disclaimer about the biosphere. It is quite easy to “run out of” species for one reason or another. After all about 95% of all species that have ever lived are extince.
My discussion was limited to what are normally called “natural resources’ which we mine or extract or whatever.
I know that that Greens have recognised that we don’t run out of things but the susuki essay which triggered this debate choses words in such a way as to promote the idea that we must run out of the earths resources because we somehow consume them. We don’t. We transform them – but they don’t go away.
Frog dismisses my argument that natural resources are infinite. There are several classes of “infinity” – ask any mathematician. If you accept that the vast majority of natural resources are human inventions (walk around the world and find me a piece of aluminium or titanium.) then given that there is no limit to the ability to invent then natural resources are unbounded. Uranium was not a useful resource until Fermi built the first pile. Aluminium was not a useful resource until we invented high powered electrolysis. THis is why resources increase as human population expands as any inventory will demonstrate.
And if you want to ensure a species does not go extinct enable humans to farm it. No farmed animal is at risk of extinction because humans practice sustainable management when the right incentives are in place – of which private property is the main one.
I suspect these thoughts make the Frog froth at the mouth because they are so threatening to his belief and his general yearning for catastrophe.
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As far as I know Greens do not long for catastrophe – why would we? We have families and friends too. We do take the long view though – and your comment about the human ability to invent things is in fact part of that long view.
For example, instead of relying on some instant technical response to sudden changes in availability of things we have come to rely on, we try to think about that ahead of time, anticipate what might happen so we can already have something going that can be put in place. At the very least, we should be cultivating a political habit of being aware that things change and we need to be prepared.
Thirty years ago, Jeanette was telling the government that turning gas into gasoline at Waitara was a wasteful use of the resource – she suggested using it as cng as an interim measure to start weaning us off imported oil so that in the longer run we could still run vehicles but not be dependent on oil. It would also have allowed us to refine motor technology. Instead, they chose to burn 65% of it off to make the 35% into gasoline. It ran out last year, as everyone knew it would. And we are still largely an oil-dependent country.
Secondly, while you are right that you could farm such things as kukupa (it has been suggested) that is not the same thing as protecting the ecology that supports it. Environmentalism isn’t about individual species. So, simply turning to farming as a fix for extinction is not the approach we’d take – learning how to manage the commons for the common good, rather than relying on private property owners to be responsible is the longer-term approach.
I guess it is a fundamental difference in world-view. But it isn’t about ‘yearning for catastrophe’ – just a different apporach to averting it.
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So can we agree that environmentalists should operate in little museum-like parts of the country and we can have the rest of the country for actual economic use?
DOC controls about 1/3 of the land. Is that enough, or do you want more?
How can a country get anywhere with 1/3 of its land under lock and key?
Mine that coal!
> As far as I know Greens do not long for catastrophe – why would we? We have families and friends too. We do take the long view though – and your comment about the human ability to invent things is in fact part of that long view.
The longer the view the largest the error. How can your long view take any account of technology? It doesn’t, and assumes that technology will not change in the next 20, 30, 50 years. Of course it will. In fact some people think that technology will change the world and us utterly in 40 years.
This is why environmentalists are often called luddites. Not willing to make any economic effort, not willing to trust in science or technology or engineering, no willingness to place a bet on mankind to solve the problems as they come up. This is crazy, as our track record is pretty good so far.
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Owen McShane Says:
October 29th, 2008 at 10:08 am
> And if you want to ensure a species does not go extinct enable humans to farm it. No farmed animal is at risk of extinction because humans practice sustainable management when the right incentives are in place – of which private property is the main one.
The problem is that most species don’t seem to domesticate well – either they don’t breed well in captivity, or they don’t thrive in captivity. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond says that the vast majority of species that various groups of people have tried to domesticate in the last thirteen thousand years have turned out to be non-domesticable.
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Not sure why you feel environmentalists are anti-technology.
I’ve been using photovoltaic panels since 1988 and wouldn’t be without them.
This blog was about the foolishness of supporting a “growth” strategy without taking on board the message that resources are all finite, and should be rationed accordingly.
Technology can help us extend the lifetime of certain resources, and provide alternatives where necessary.
There is still no point in being such a believer in science or technology that one makes an ASSUMPTION that it can ALWAYS provide an alternative.
There is definitely a place for having the mindset of living within our current means (whether that be economic limitations or limitations on some resource or other)
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Speaking of WALL-E the most lasting impression of that movie I’ve had is BUY n’ LARGE, the name of of the Mega-corporation that finally got to own EVERYTHING.
A brilliant name that sums it all up nicely.
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greengeek – I too take issue with those who regard environmentalists as anti technology Luddites (do you know the background of the Luddites? It’s a story that’s worthwhile exploring). In my field of endeavour, the best, cutting edge technology is deceptively ‘simple’ – clay tops petroleum based grafting waxes, reds and rushes are better than synthetic water filters, woven willow ‘withies’ beat plastic hail cloth and so on. It all looks ‘luddite’ to the casual observer, but the technology is both deeply researched, trialed, environmentally benign (or beneficial) and ‘appropriate’. Back to the past – perhaps, more ‘futuristic’ I think. There are many, many examples of better technologies masked by their simple appearence,
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Environmentalists are only called luddites by idiots. Damned few of us have eschewed the use of appropriate technology.
I should point out however, that along with understanding technology deeply we also understand its limits. Something that you seem to ignore. There is not in history, any instance of a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. There are no perpetual motion machines. The carnot-limit has never been violated by any heat-engine. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Greens keep saying that and people without a deep understanding of technology keep crowing about it as though it will solve their problems.
As one of the wizards tasked with using technology to solve problems and paid well for my skills I have to tell you that there ARE limits. The ones I mentioned are rooted in physics. Some of the others are, by observation, human based. None of them have been addressed except by “environmentalists” and the human species is heading into a sh!tstorm without an umbrella.
You tell me that we’re going to get more efficient? Maybe we will. It is not going to happen fast enough. Efficiency increases from technology tend to grind out pretty slowly. Linear improvement over time, made up of small step-functions. The growth that Fractional-Reserve debt-based economic systems require is exponential. The growth of population is also exponential. The planet however, doesn’t grow at all. Efficiency is the only game in town. Cheap Access to Space changes the equations but STILL doesn’t solve the problem here on earth. It just buys us a bit more time. That is the only thing tech can do that would make a difference.
It hasn’t been done. It hasn’t even been seriously set as a goal.
It is I think, fatally late in the game to try to correct the problems.
No, I am not an optimist either. I am a pessimist proven correct far too often.
BJ
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The problem with trying to be seen as ‘anything but luddits’ is that you end up choosing the technology that looks most high-tech, even if it isn’t the best. Wind turbines are a bit like old-fashioned windmills, and hydro-power stations are a bit like windmills, and coal-fired power stations are a bit like steam engines, so people end up deciding that nuclear power stations must be the way of the future, because they look so unlike the ways of the past, even though they cost twice as much to build and run as wind farms or hydro-power stations.
Then there’s nuclear fusion. Some people like to think that’s even more high-tech. But in principle, it works the same way as the sun, which is the most primitive energy source there is.
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…and in any case, it does not matter how new-fangled and fancy a technology is, mankind always seems to stretch a “three-person thingy” till it is expected to act like a “four-person thingy”
Build a nuclear power station to service a population of 1 million, and it wont be long till the population is allowed to grow to 3 million and need a bigger reactor. Or a second reactor. Or a third.
It all comes back to being smart and living within our means.
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mankind? some branches of the ‘family tree’ don’t stretch it, but put in place controls so that they do live within their means. sadly for us, this is not a phenomenon of the industrialsied world.
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Can’t argue with Physics ay…
Why do we always go with the technology that has unknown consequences and by products that we don’t know how to deal with?
For example…Did anyone do any math on the emissions from motor vehicles given the population world wide and the likely uptake of vehicles by that population way back then?
Here’s an interesting google result that came up first pop…
Surely the numbers must have made scientific people wonder of the consequences? or now we know of such consequences are we going to let magic technology lead us to salvation?
“On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the fifteen millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan. Since his “universal car” was the industrial success story of its age, the ceremony should have been a happy occasion. Yet Ford was probably wistful that day, too, knowing as he did that the long production life of the Model T was about to come to an end. He climbed into the car, a shiny black coupe, with his son, Edsel, the president of the Ford Motor Company. Together, they drove to the Dearborn Engineering Laboratory, fourteen miles away, and parked the T next to two other historic vehicles: the first automobile that Henry Ford built in 1896, and the 1908 prototype for the Model T. Henry himself took each vehicle for a short spin: the nation’s richest man driving the humble car that had made him the embodiment of the American dream.”
Not to mention the actual gasoline pumped into 15 million vehicles in that space of time?
Wonder if anyone asked “Hey where is all this oil comin from?? Is there plenty there? we gunna need lots of it!!”
Maths and Physics…. can’t be beat.
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Greengeek said:
“NZ is already pretty much at the limit of the population it can sustain with hydro power.”
While I agree with the sentiment, it should be mentioned that New Zealand has a wealth of other renewable resource that can be used to generate electricity, including wind, geothermal, wave and biomass, and a potential tidal flow resource. The big problem we will face is a lack of transport fuels. We should be moving towards more use of electricity and less use of fossil fuels for non-transport applications, rather than being afraid to use electric vehicles because of a perceived shortage of electricity.
Trevor.
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Trevor… good point. I love those alternative fuels.
The question is…how can we make the best of those alternatives without allowing the situation to develop where population again outstrips supply, and makes such technologies look dated and inadequate?
Especially so with electric vehicles. When the fleet goes electric the demand for winfarms will increase, but again, we only have a certain land area that can be allocated for such uses.
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Greengeek: “Build a nuclear power station to service a population of 1 million, and it wont be long till the population is allowed to grow to 3 million and need a bigger reactor. Or a second reactor. Or a third.”
But we’ve seen birth rates in the West decline with increasing wealth.
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The Electricity Commission looked into the wind resource and found:
http://www.electricitycommission.govt.nz/pdfs/opdev/transmis/renewables/TTER-App4.pdf
This gives 14GW capacity and 50,000 GWH/annum energy available from sites offering more than 10MW per square km, and more than this from slightly lower grade sites. Our demand is only 7-8GW and under 50,000 GWH/annum, so we coult more than triple our electricity generation if we needed to or wanted to.
With the rising overseas energy prices, we can expect aluminium prices to rise as well, so we may well want to export some of this electricity in the form of aluminium – or ammonia or nitrates or nitrogen fertilisers or other energy based products..
Trevor.
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I’m not sure if that is true though. Certainly some cultures within the west have dropped to 2 kids per family, but is that true of the population overall?
Without looking up the stats my gut feeling is that America, Britain, Aussie, NZ etc are all still showing increasing population figures.
It seems to me to be a worthy goal to aim for higher wealth per family, in conjunction with more manageable birthrates, and immigration controls.
Let every citizen be a valued and somewhat wealthy one.
If we did that, every new energy project could be built using green technologies like the windpower Trevor mentions.
Our power sources would never need to be dirty again.
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There’s a dif between birth rates and population increase i.e. immigration.
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Doesn’t matter so much what the mode of growth is though. It still seems like a mistake to build our economy on needing either growing birth rates, or growing immigration.
The only justification for that idea is the idea that we need more young people to pay the pensions of the retiring baby boomers. But if paying those pensions means we need more young people that just means we will need even more again when they reach their own retirement age.
At some point we have to contemplate how life will be when population is stable from generation to generation…not always growing for the sake of stimulating the economy.
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Here’s fertility rates, as you can see most developed countries are below replacement rates (which is about 2.1 live births/woman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
The information I’ve seen points towards global population peaking (as a result of this trend of declining fertility) at around 9 billion midcentury if present trends continue, which means continuing growth in per capita incomes world-wide.
It would be a bit of a shame if that didn’t happen and it were rising death rates because of increasing poverty that brought the population down.
As I’ve said before, we mustn’t close safe enegy options because of false fears created through ideologically motivated paranoia.
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Are you saying that nuclear is a safe energy choice?
I am not sure any technology is a safe choice longterm if our economy is always predicated upon “growth”.
Perhaps any energy choice (including the dirty ones) could be considered safe if the population using them stays low and controlled.
ie: a little bit of chimney smoke is fine if we have 2 million people, but not if we have 6 million.
>>”It would be a bit of a shame if that didn’t happen and it were rising death rates because of increasing poverty that brought the population down.”
I feel that is inevitable unless we make a concious decision to select an acceptable population figure and apply it, rather than just “letting it happen” as a result of a “growth economy”.
Resource constraints and economic constraints always cause increasing poverty when population grows ahead of wealth, technology and resources.
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Greengeek you are hitting onto a very valid point with regard to government retirement.
A person needs to save enough capital during their working life so they can then live off that capital when they retire, A nice libertarian principal.
Any scenario where 2 or more workers are supporting an elderly person is a scenario that isn’t sustainable.
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I’m looking for options we can take that’ll maximise human welfare whilst minimising damage to the planet, options that I know can work and that don’t rely on “new technology will save us because it has to” type faith.
I doubt that an economy that’s forced to rapidly retrench can survive intact and without huge civil strife at best, global resource wars, starvation with a big die-off at worst.
Forcing people (outside a disciplined military) to conform with what you know what’s best for them only leads to tears, we need options that the majority of people on this planet can find acceptable.
If you start a rapid economic retrenchment it will not work, like a military retreat, it would need to be orderly and steady and under strong leadership to succeed. We don’t have the time, we don’t have the discipline, we don’t have the strong (and centralised) leadership.
Generally speaking change isn’t bad, what does the damage is a rate of change that’s too fast for people and other life to adapt.
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