Past the Point of No Return
George Mobus
2/13/11
For the Global Population Speak Out
A Warning to Readers
This work has caused me a great deal of anguish. Over the years I have tried to consider the global challenges that have been rapidly emerging in our time. My considerations are from a systems perspective — I seek to understand how everything is connected and influences every other thing. Invariably I keep coming back to two factors which seem to lay at the heart of the matter. The first is the fact of biophysical growth in a finite world, specifically the human population and our propensity to consume more resources per individual over time. The second is actually even more so at the root of the first. That is the stunting of the one capacity that we humans evolved that could have made us able to transcend our ordinary biology (causes of the first issue) and learn to live in balance with nature. The capacity I refer to is sapience (below). Human evolution produced a nascent capacity for making good, wide-scaling judgments in complex, especially social, domains — that is our sapience. Unfortunately, today, I think the evidence suggests that that capacity never developed further. Indeed, it seems that it is now almost vestigial, like the little toe or the appendix. Today, the average human being is not very good at making sound judgments of high moral quality. In any case, when you take into account all of the various contributing factors, biological, physical, sociological, psychological, etc. it appears that we have gotten ourselves into a terrible predicament. After spending years thinking about, and searching for solutions that are acceptable in light of all of those factors, I'm afraid I come up empty handed.
What I have written below gives absolutely no pleasure whatever. I am not a doomer or a survivalist. I do not hate humanity and want to see the end. I have children and friends whom I would love to see have happy lives. But what I hope I am, if nothing else, is intellectually honest. If my work has brought me to this point I cannot go on writing as if these conclusions didn't exist.
Population
For several years now I have been writing a contribution to the Global Population Speak Out (GPSO). See: “The Hardest Moral Dilemma of All”. A larger number of people have been writing profusely about the subject of overpopulation and the consequences. And nothing has happened. This is not because these many people have not had worthwhile things to say, suggestions about what might be done, but because the messages fall on deaf ears. The majority of people in this world are either not able to hear the message or they are hostile, for ideological reasons, to the implications of the claims for overpopulation.
I have been thinking about this for several years and have been building the arguments for why what I am about to say is actually the only real solution that could result in the survival of enough representatives of Homo sapiens to ensure that the genus is still around one million years from now. No one is going to like this. I suspect that many people in the anti-growth community are not going to like what I have to say, thinking, perhaps, that my message will damage their own credibility. Believe me when I tell you that I don't like it. But my feeling is that it needs to be said. Even while there are a growing number of people in the world who have gotten the messages and are now aware of the problems, there simply aren't enough, nor do they actually understand the full implications of what is happening.
All I ask is that you not sacrifice the messenger!
The Problem — We Are in Overshoot
Is there any doubt that this statement is true? The world stands on the brink of a human population of seven billion people. Way too many of the current population are living in abject poverty and too many are underfed if not outright starving. Water supplies are in jeopardy, both for drinking and for agriculture. Documented extinction rates are going up due to the human footprint destroying habitat for other species. The climate is already showing severe instability and the worst case models suggest that things are going to get much worse. Sea levels are rising and the threat is that those levels are going to be high enough to threaten a huge fraction of the world's population that live in coastal areas. Finite resources, especially fossil fuels, have been depleted to the point that the cost of extraction of the next unit of the resource has reached diminishing returns. See my take on overpopulation and its implications in my book review of William Catton's, Bottleneck, “Humanity's impending impasse”.
In systems ecological terms the human population shows (empirically) all the signs of being in overshoot. The population is simply too large for the long-term carrying capacity of the planet. We have gotten here through two basic factors. The first is the incredible inventiveness of the human mind and the technologies that have allowed humans to colonize almost the whole planet, “conquer nature”, and escape the ordinary biological selection mechanisms, like diseases and genetic defects. The second is the most amazing bequeath of nature in the form of incredibly energy-dense fossil fuels (actually fossil sunshine) that have allowed the human population to substitute machine work for human labor, at least in the developing areas of the world. The industrial revolution was largely about the interactions of these two factors permitting growth of the population and growth of the per capita consumption of resources in those sub-populations that got lucky. Energy and technology go hand in hand in accounting for the major trajectories of history. Human ingenuity certainly played a role, but, if we are honest with ourselves, that role is more as discovery and exploitation (for hedonic reasons) rather than intentional invention. We were just lucky recipients of the laws of nature when the energy bank account was full. Now that the bank is running dry and we may have reached the limits of invention, things have changed completely. We are in the Wiley Coyote moment (when he runs off the cliff and realizes that he has no support). We have no way to keep the overshot population supported as is.
This essay addresses a simple but profound observation. There is no feasible solution to the problem of population overshoot if stated thusly:
“ We need to find a way to reduce the population to a level that is sustainable in the long run and minimally impactful (in the negative sense) on the environment. And we want it to be accomplished in a humane manner. And, oh yes, we want everyone in the population to live the good life (no sacrifices); we want “sustainable economic growth”!
Put this way, many people think of humane population reduction as some relatively non-coercive process where, perhaps, suddenly everybody gets it, including those of the various religious faiths that now preach being fruitful, and practices contraception. Problem solved. This vision maintains that if a substantial proportion of the Earth's population practices family planning then the above result will follow. Then the sub-problem simply becomes one of convincing everyone to practice family planning.
Even aside from the infeasibility of getting everyone to agree that family planning is a good thing to do, I claim that the gradual reduction in the population that could conceivably result would still not be a solution to the problem. As I will argue later, the rate of decline simply would not be great enough. We are facing a complete population crash simply due to the fact that we have entered an energy decline phase that humanity has never faced before in its entire history, at least not on a global scale. This claim pivots on the notion of what constitutes a ‘feasible’ solution to a specified problem.
Feasible Solution Space
A problem is said to have a feasible solution when there exists a volume in a multi-dimensional parameter space where all of the requirements are met and all of the constraints are satisfied and the objective is fulfilled. When constraints are tight or requirements are narrow that volume might be very small. Or, alternatively, if the constraints are loose or the requirements wide the volume might be quite large. Moreover, there may be many pathways by which the requirements might be met while not violating any constraints. Such problems are well defined and are at least soluble in principle.
Figure 1. A feasible solution exists in the problem space when there is some region (volume) in which all requirements can be met while not violating any constraints. Abstractly, the constraints and requirements (appropriately scaled) can be mapped onto a problem space to see if there is any such region where all of these intersect.
Many more kinds of problems, especially complex social problems where inherent conflicts permeate the problem space, cannot be solved, even in principle. As shown in Fig. 2, if even one requirement cannot be found to map in overlap with other requirements, then no feasible region exists and nothing can be done to solve the problem other than to ignore the requirement(s). But then you have just solved a different problem, by definition.
Figure 2. If only one requirement does not map to overlap with the others then no feasible solution exists for the problem as defined.
Even more generally, not all constraints and requirements are actually specified so that one cannot know if a feasible solution might exist or not. Figure 3 depicts a more ordinary sort of social problem (or what is known as a ‘Wicked Problem’.
Figure 3. The worst-case situation for problem definition is when the problem is wicked. The problem is under specified in that not all constraints and requirements are actually known when trying to find a solution volume. Poorly defined problems such as the overpopulation problem easily fall into this category. They are unsolvable in principle and practice.
In real life social problems it is almost always the case that not all the requirements or constraints can even be specified let alone matched up in such a way as to provide a solution. What more typically happens in cases where some kind of “solution” seems to have been found, is that some hidden constraints or misunderstood requirements are simply not specified (as in Fig. 3). Implementation of the solution then either runs into the formerly hidden difficulty, or may be completed but the solution ends up creating more problems. The infamous unintended consequences of supposed solutions is more often the rule than the exception.
Overpopulation is, arguably, the most difficult and under specified social problem of all. Difficult for the obvious reasons that the vast majority of people in this world are compelled by biology to procreate, think it is their god-given right to do so, and mostly don't realize what the global consequences are. It is under specified in the sense that we really don't know all of the factors that shape the population growth rate. For example, not very long ago, population scientists (mostly social scientists with some help of biologists) were proclaiming that the problem would solve itself owing to the demographic transition, the observation that as countries became wealthier (more developed) the fertility rate declined (as in the average number of babies per child-bearing aged woman). In theory, the global population size would top out at say nine billion people and then even start to decline. Everyone could breathe a sigh of relief and go on with BAU. The UN wants to push ahead with the Millennium Development Goals so as to enrich every nation and thereby (through the demographic transition) stabilize the population. In other words, they think making everyone richer will solve the problem. What they have not accounted for, of course, is that making everyone richer means consuming even more resources! And, actually some scientists and governments (whose tax bases are associated with the number of people in the work force) have started worrying about the opposite problem — too few people — as it would affect the economics of the country.
Now comes new evidence that suggests the demographic transition is not a one-way phenomenon. Rather after reaching a certain level of development fertility rates stop declining and even start climbing again. The jury is still out on this but there are other reasons to believe that faith in the demographic transition phenomenon is a poor strategy for solving the problem of overshoot. But the point is that we just do not know all there is to know about population dynamics to take any comfort in an observation like this.
For one thing, even if the transition phenomenon were shown to be effective after all, it still relies on the economic development of the poorer nations where, it turns out, the fertility rate is still high. In a perfect world where there is unlimited energy and the wastes we humans produce would magically disappear that might be fine. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where the energy needed to produce wealth is peaking and going into its own transition downward (see below). We live in a world in which the garbage and pollutants we produce in living the good life are accumulating at a rate much faster than nature can handle. Global warming due to accumulations of CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean acidification due to its accumulation in the oceans are two instances of unintended consequences of us clever humans solving the problem of how to live the good life and avoid the nastier forms of natural selection. And here is the point: The rate of the bad consequences developing into catastrophes is much greater than the rate of demographic transition. Indeed, without the energy supplies to drive that transition, it won't happen at all in what would have been the developing world.
Nature alone holds the secrets of the population problem in terms of establishing the biophysical constraints and the biological requirements. Natural systems have been pursuing the feasible solution spaces since life began on the planet. I say pursuing because any change (say a mutation) in one part of the system invariably leads to changes in other parts and changes in the original constraints/requirements sets. That is what drives evolution.
In fact, I claim evolution is the only feasible way to find a solution to the overpopulation problem. That is what I will outline below. Again, no one is going to like it. But I suspect the dinosaurs were not liking things around 65 million years ago either.
No Real Solution to the Problem As Defined By We Humans
The human defined problem does not admit to a population crash as a solution. The human defined problem looks to have our cake and eat it too. The human defined problem simply ignores the evidence in favor of things like satisfying the constraints of energy flow by some miraculous technology that will bypass the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The requirement that no one suffer while the population decrease takes place cannot be mapped onto a volume that simultaneously satisfies our many other requirements and does not violate any of the real physical constraints.
If nothing is done to radically alter our current course (business as usual with respect to reproduction and consumption of natural resources) there will be a major population crash. This crash will be felt by every single person on the planet. Admittedly some less developed populations may feel the intensity or immediacy much less than populations in the developed world, but there is no way they will escape the ultimate impacts. People often imagine that more primitive tribes (such as the one recently “discovered” in the Amazon) will escape the wrath of a population crash and go on surviving as they have for millennia. This ignores the simple fact that many of the fruits of civilization actually do find their ways into many of these sub-populations. In many cases food imports are necessary to keep the population even in steady state. Furthermore, climate change may have more extreme effects in some of the areas where less developed populations currently live. Nor should we think that some populations will simply migrate from unlivable areas to more livable ones as a result of climate destabilization as, for example, was the case in the several mass movements out of Africa as primitive Homo sapiens expanded into Europe, Asia, and Polynesia. Even though the major pulses of those movements appear to have been motivated by climate change (ice age glaciations and drying in central Africa), that climate change had greater directionality (less chaotic with a definitive trajectory) and took place over many centuries. The current climate shifts are looking more and more the case of potentially rapid and unpredictable shifts, on the order of decades, that will lead to a much more chaotic weather, greater extremes and locally unusual storms (e.g. the snow and cold in southern states several weeks ago).
Nature, if it were sentient (I personally can't say it isn't!), would define the problem quite differently from what humans have. Nature's problem definition might go like this:
“ This cancerous species (humans) is creating a global environment in which many species will be driven to extinction. But that is also the environment that they will have to occupy. And the selective forces generated by that environment are not conducive to the sustainability of that species. So the solution is either that the species radically evolve to become benign or the significant disruption of the body (the Ecos) will kill the species, and with it the genus, since there is only one species within that genus extant.
Our requirements are that we don't want to sacrifice anything. We want the process to be painless. The constraints are those imposed by nature, but we also want to bypass those (or some of them) by inventing something that ensures that our two requirements, in all their various forms, will be met. No inconveniences for us. “Surely there is some technology that will help us solve the problem as we have defined it. Surely there is some way to make more usable energy from sunlight — there just has to be.”
Currently we go along as if that technology must be right on the horizon. We don't think about the counterfactual situation (we're actually not wired to do so). What if no great magical technology comes along in time? Then what do we do? For example, the official policy of the US government is that we ‘pursue’ investment in technology and entrepreneurs to commercialize it. President Obama still insists that there is something called ‘clean coal’, by which he means coal-fired electrical generation that produces much less CO2 gas than ordinary plants. He never took a physics course, I suppose, since he doesn't seem to get that the energy cost of capturing and sequestering CO2 will reduce the net energy production to less than two thirds of an ordinary plant. And that doesn't even address the issue of storing the CO2 (available volume, safety, etc.)
While the president is spouting this delusion everyone else is feeling like we don't have to worry about anything. We don't have to really do anything because the brilliant boys in the backroom will invent the right stuff.
Meanwhile nothing is done. The political solution to the overpopulation problem is to simply ignore it (or deny it if someone dares to bring it up). Don't worry. Be happy (and go out and consume so we can boost the economy). Unfortunately, Nature has a different solution.
What the Numbers Say
As I have written often in these blogs, energy is the key to everything (see: “Economic dynamics and the real danger”). That is, it takes energy flow to build and maintain all physical artifacts and biomass. It takes mechanical and chemical work to make matter into the forms we want it. So without energy flow the entropy version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics takes over and everything turns to dust.
This is the crux of the problem. Our consumption of fossil fuels has permitted us to construct an incredible physical world that has effectively (but only seemingly and only temporarily) insulated us from the vagaries of nature. It has allowed us to produce copious amounts of food and thus allowing us to produce copious amounts of biomass. Our population numbers today are a direct result of the abundance of energy flow from fossil fuels. And unhappily, we are now at the stage where the extraction rates of those fuels are beginning to decline. We have already passed the peak of production of conventional oil on a global basis. Given the role of oil in the extraction work of the other fuels as well as transportation of goods over long distances, we may effectively be on the verge of the peak of production of all fossil fuel energies.
More importantly, the net energy available, which is the net of the gross amount of energy extracted less the energy required in its extraction, is already in decline. I have written extensively about this so I will not repeat the arguments here. But it is becoming increasingly clear that our global economy is feeling the effects of declining net energy as the captains of industry (including the Chinese) scramble to find new solutions to more costly energy. Lately the price of food has been going up steadily as a result of the increased cost of energy. This is an inescapable law of physics — one unknown and unimagined by the economists and politicians in the world.
Below is a graph from one of my models of the biophysical economy, that is the economy of energy flow through the human built world and the supported biomass (sharp readers will note the similarities between this model and The Limits to Growth model of resource depletion — the difference is that I have focused on energy as the primary resource). These are all aggregated under the concept of assets. People are as much considered assets as buildings and cars and roads. All assets can be measured in terms of their embodied energy, or how much energy was consumed in creating and maintaining the assets over their life time. When assets decay (or people die) their physical embodied energy is removed from the books, so to speak. Under historical conditions of growth in net energy flow, total assets have been growing. This reflects the increase in population (and to some degree girth) and consumption of goods and services per individual. The graph shows that as net energy grew throughout the industrial, green, and information revolutions the total assets of the biophysical economy grew as well.
Figure 4. Population/economic dynamics are defined by the amount of net energy available to do real work (construction and maintenance of the built world and biomass, e.g. human beings). This graph includes the effects of a sustainable alternative energy revolution due to a crash program (e.g. WWII mobilization) to build alternative energy infrastructure. This was included to show that even with this effort a crash is unavoidable. Total Gross refers to the total amount of raw energy captured, either fossil fuels extracted or sunlight captured (pre-conversion). Net FF is the net fossil fuels after conversion to usable fuels like gasoline. Net Alt. is the net energy derived from alternative sources like solar or wind. Total Net is the sum of net from fossil fuels and alternative sources. Total Assets are all assets produced from net energy measured in embodied energy units (also called emergy).
The red trace shows the growth and decline of net energy from fossil fuels. The green trace at the bottom shows, first, the level of energy from real-time solar inputs, such as food production. It is augmented by a sudden increase in alternative energy after a massive marshalling of resources to build out an alternative energy infrastructure. This infrastructure must be capable of self-sustaining production, i.e. it must replace itself over time without inputs from fossil fuels. The dark blue trace at the top is the total gross energy extracted either in fossil fuels or in alternative forms equivalent to the energy from fossil fuels, e.g. electricity. The purple trace, total net energy, is what society has to work with to produce and maintain assets. You can see by this the effects of adding alternative energies to the net from fossil fuels.
Finally, the light blue line traces total assets being produced by the availability of net energy. This aggregation covers long-term assets like buildings and roads, intermediate-term assets like heavy equipment and automobiles, and short-term assets and consumables. It also represents non-farm biomass assets, namely people, pets, and ornamental plants. What this does not include is unconverted, or natural resources, such as timber, that require work to be done in order to extract a usable product, such as lumber. Everything is measured in energy units required to construct and maintain the assets. For people, of course, this includes all energies expended to grow and keep kids healthy and the energy of food needed to keep people alive. It doesn't take an Einstein to know what happens if you take away the food.
As you can see the dynamics are not favorable. As fossil fuels diminish, after the peak in the red trace, everything starts to diminish, and rapidly. The time scale in the graph from the peak of fossil fuels is roughly one hundred years. That really isn't a long time, even in terms of human history.
The inclusion of alternative energies here is for two purposes. One is to show the scale and rate problems associated with bringing alternatives on-line. So little energy is gotten from these sources now that a scale up even half of what is implied in the graph seems totally unrealistic (in spite of what you might have heard in the main stream media). The resources that would have to be diverted to accomplish this marshalling would be considerable, requiring sacrifices from everyone in terms of their material lifestyles. Some of my results suggest that the average American citizen will have to give up two-thirds of current income (like a flat tax rate) to support the scale of this kind of effort. But even if we all agreed to do it, to make the necessary sacrifices, it doesn't really change much. The population will still crash, our assets will still crumble down to the point at which we learn to live only on alternative sources (and remember this requires that they be self-sustaining into the indefinite future). The situation shown in the graph is overly optimistic in my view. It assumes not only a very rapid rise in technologies like solar and wind (roughly 25% growth per year for 40 years followed by 10% per year for another 150 years) but that we could sustain that increase over several centuries. And that just gets us to an economy that is roughly one quarter of what we have today. That does not provide wealth production for would-be developing countries I'm afraid. Everyone living in that economy will be very much poorer in terms of material wealth than the average Eastern European is today.
I've included the outline of some results of other models that do not include such a massive build up of alternative energies. The black line shows the complete plummet of assets when all fossil fuels run out. For those clinging to the belief that we would still have hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants, think again. Those facilities are also highly dependent on fossil fuels for maintenance. Shut off the fuels and we would see the end of all technological energy within fifty years. At which time the only sources of energy will be the ancient ones, real-time solar and woody biomass. I suspect the negative impacts of such catastrophic collapse will have serious repercussions on the human psychology that will propel what survivors might remain to acts of unspeakable horror in a vain attempt to survive just a little longer. That is why the black line craters without leveling off. My concern for the latter is that once a collapse starts in earnest there will be a runaway effect that will build such momentum that no human being will be able to survive. Think Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, only much worse. McCarthy still allowed a glimmer of hope at the end (same with David Brin's The Postman). In most of these post apocalyptic stories, there is always the assumption that someone survives and the human species goes on into the future. That may be due to our human-exceptionalism bias, or we just can't imagine a world without us (an exception is Alan Weisman's non-fiction book The World Without Us). But population crashes have usually been unkind to most other species throughout the history of Earth. From a purely biological perspective there isn't any reason to believe that there isn't some kind of crash situation that wouldn't take us out. Most of the readers will, I'm sure, cling to the belief that someone will survive, surely. But ask yourself on what basis do you believe that? Do you have a carefully thought out rational justification, or are you simply rationalizing? Use critical thinking on your own thinking.
The solid blue line, on the other hand, depicts what could happen if the crash of population is managed and the survivors are the wisest of our kind. Natural energy flows can and will sustain a small population indefinitely. The key is to prepare for that future as best we can. I have indicated that ark colonies based on permaculture practices stand the best chance of survival and do not necessarily have to be based on subsistence living (see “What is a feasible living situation for future humans?” for example).
A Feasible Solution (Just Not the One We Would Have Wanted)
If we redefine the problem, for the benefit of the human genus, not ignoring Nature's definition but trying to find a compromise, might we find a feasible solution volume?
I think the answer is yes. Put very succinctly, if we define the problem as:
“ We want to reduce the current population of humanity down to the carrying capacity that is reality, at a rate that will put us on track to achieve that goal before we do any more harm to the environment, with minimal pain and suffering, accepting great sacrifices as needed, for the purpose of ensuring that humans will not go extinct.
Then, I believe there is a way to solve this problem. Long-time readers will have already recognized the arc of my arguments from my previous blogs.
I believe there is a solution to this problem. And I believe it involves human choices and intervention in the evolutionary process that brought us into existence.
This section is not what I originally wrote re: what is a feasible solution. My readers will guess what might have been in this section. I sent an early draft to a number of people in the no- or negative-growth community, people who fully get that we have a serious problem. But a large number of those people were extremely uncomfortable with my feasible solution! Most granted that my arguments are basically sound regarding the fate of the human species if a solution cannot be found. But few were willing to accept the conclusions. My solution, to the modified problem statement, includes a maximally coercive action that is politically unacceptable (or at least politically incorrect!). The need, remember, is to find a way to reduce the population at a rate that will exceed the rate of decline of the carrying capacity. Most people in the ‘population reduction’ movement are queasy over what that will take (look carefully at the graph above and derive your own inferences).
I think I know what will work. It doesn't involve overtly killing anyone. It does seek to minimize pain and suffering. But it baldly admits to a stark reality. I may be alone in a willingness to face that reality. I'm not clear as to why that is the case. But I have no wish to offend the masses. That won't help anyone. So let me just say that the feasible solution is only for the least faint of heart. Of course, if I'm the only one to accept this reality, it won't matter. The worst will come to pass.
Leaving on a Hopeful Note
I am told by several friends who have known my work that I have to leave people with some hope. I'll leave you with two kinds of hope!
First you may seek solace in the knowledge that my claims are based on computer models, which, like statistics, can be rigged to tell you anything you want them to. Or even if you don't accuse me of rigging the model to get the results I want, you could at least believe that computer models are fallible. The programmer is fallible. This is certainly true. So let us hope that I am mistaken and the models are the result of unintentional biases. Because I am only human, they do not depict a realistic scenario nor do they do a good job of predicting the future trends. Believe it or not I am right there with you on this one. I hope I am way off. Nothing would please me more than discovering a flaw in my models and/or other models demonstrate (flawlessly) that the world will merely enter some kind of steady state condition leaving us all happy and prosperous (and all having ‘green’ jobs).
But the other kind of hope, the one that dominates my thinking now, is that humanity will exercise some sensibility, some good judgment, and recognize the need to bow out gracefully. The actions taken thereafter might just increase the odds for a humanity in the future. Not unlike the man who seeks redemption while dying, perhaps humanity will exercise wisdom as a last act. There is a way to make this work.
I think you might value the work of Jack Alpert. He is a very smart engineer that has been thinking deeply about what population the earth can sustain. The video on his home page is a good starting point:
http://skil.org/
You might also find a recent Radio Ecoshock podcast interesting. It features a discussion with Jack Alpert, Bill Rees, Rex Weyler, and others with some harsh (but informed) opinion of what needs to be done.
http://ia700404.us.archive.org/16/items/ES110204/ES_110204_Show_LoFi.mp3
http://www.ecoshock.info/2011/02/rapid-population-decline-or-bust.html
My personal view is that the population problem will be addressed by WW3. All of history supports this prediction. And in our collective subconscious we know WW3 is the likely end game. Why else would the US spend more on defense that all other counties combined when it is bankrupt?
Posted by: RobM | February 17, 2011 at 09:22 PM
I have a question. How is it possible to work with a rather large majority of the population who think like this:
Mike Beard, a Republican state representative from Minnesota, recently argued that coal mining should resume in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, in part because he believes God has created an earth that will provide unlimited natural resources.
"God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable," Beard told MinnPost. "We are not going to run out of anything."
These are dark times indeed!
Posted by: Fred Magyar | February 18, 2011 at 04:14 AM
Hmmmm. I lack the brilliance to "argue" with your observations and conclusions, and it seems irrational to suggest that you have "rigged" the computer input to output your "desired" conclusions. No rational person (and you are obviously VERY rational) would desire your conclusions. So I conclude that you are "right" - as in "correct" - here, tho I have also to acknowledge that your conclusions mirror my own (less carefully informed) thoughts. Your mention of several films that serve as stark illustrations of these likely realities brings to mind one of my husband's favorite films - Idiocracy. Actually you only have to watch the first five minutes of it to get its drift. And again I STRONGLY recommend Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization. This is a brilliant, VERY well researched interweaving of the critical complex of problems facing modern homo so-called sapiens. This book mirrors and reinforces your position(s) and arguments, and surely there is a certain cold comfort in finding like-minded, equally well informed, soul-mates.
Posted by: Molly | February 18, 2011 at 09:09 AM
I agree with RobM, there will be the biggest war in history far before we are close to net zero energy from fossil fuels.
If the goal is human survival then I think the most obvious thing to do is make biophysics and zero growth a sociopolitical ideology. Instead of trying to convince the masses though (there is too little time and we're already in overshoot) it'd be best for the individuals to form enclave communities that adhered to the principles and to set up a global federalist quasi-government structure for them to communicate and work in concert towards concerted strategy. The aim should be to develop (physical and informational) technology, share information with each other and get as many resources as needed to live through local energy flows at as high of a level as possible; which I personally think is advanced historically speaking if you don't blow most of your energy on stupid consumerism.
Then when conflict hits in their region they have strategy to try to minimize their exposure as much as possible: which means trying to get the local populace not in the enclave to buy in while pretending you don't have much valuable and defending the area from attackers that do come. Then everyone just sits back and prays.
At some point the enclaves will be relatively very strong because they have a concerted strategy and are self sufficient for their basic needs while tons of people outside of them will be sick, dead and terrified. At that point the larger quasi-governmental structure can make the decision about whether to make the push to the larger society both ideologically and (eventually needed) militarily. That is where a big propagandistic clarion call about how they have a sustainable ideology and it's all puppies and sunshine comes in, in contrast to the devastation that will be in place everywhere else to the collapse of the supply chains. At that point puppies and sunshine just needs to mean having food, water, shelter and health, which I think biophysically is a reasonable promise.
So then the strategy at that point would be to get all the new converts to buy in totally and be the Power, and start going around and figuring out how to reclaim all the scrap resources that are lying around and rebuild ecosystems.
People may recognize that what I'm referring to is largely based on Anarchist movements (although they were focused on labor not resource utilization) which all in all weren't totally unsuccessful. Autonomous regions still exist in Spain for instance and the ideology has grown in Argentina. The main reason they were squelched was just supreme resource utilization by the Hierarchical Powers, which at the time was a major disadvantage but in the hypothetical we're positing could be their biggest weakness.
It also gives a cohesive long term reason to live that is appropriately cynical (can't stop the collapse so just wait for things to fall apart and war to destroy the old ways) but also intrinsically optimistic on both the philosophical and humanistic level (there will still be a few billion people that are suffering and need help and the ideology can provide it). That'll make "our people" have something to live for in the moment that isn't a total lie, which is important for all honest people even if we eventually end up getting nuked or shot or dying from famine due to flood or kill ourselves to end suffering. Or perhaps the worst fate, we're all wrong and things work themselves out.
In a perverse way it also provides hope. I think part of the problem is that environmentalism in general and zero-growthism in particular are infected with enormous strains of kumbayaism on the emotional level and scientists are infected with detached rationalism on the intellectual level. This means that our movement basically is sitting around saying "oh why can't everyone just get along and be happy?" or "it all makes so much sense, how can we best communicate this to everyone so they do the right decision?"
For instance Fred asks above how we can work with that idiot? I say we don't, we just organize into a structure that has a higher resiliency and wait for those types to die off to the point that they lose influence and come begging or are destroyed. Which is highly anti-thetical to my nature (I'm much more apt to just try to work with people or ignore them) but seriously, with climate change that's not an option. I've always held solace in the fact that I personally wouldn't mind living an ascetic life with some good friends, but climate fuckery really doesn't make that an option.
This Naked Capitalism post "Why Liberal Are Lame" contains a comment at the gist of what I'm saying:
Contrary to the Nazi's smearing of Nietzsche, the superman concept is very similar to George's sapient species. And reading George's reframing of the issue not as a liberal moralistic issue but a survival strategy in the evolutionary sense has given me a newfound sense of purpose in my own aims and goals. It also is a perverse positive vision that gives the active nihilists something to work towards and beyond, and we're definitely seeing a huge increase in those numbers to tap into.
Students of history will also recognize that as the difference between the Anarchists that did terror and random assassinations until they were put down (smearing the whole concept) and those that formed worker collectives that served as a beacon of sanity.
It also helps that Anarchism is intrinsically much more systems oriented and that its success relies primarily on information transfer, which the internet can provide; indeed cyber Anarchism is a huge subculture amongst experts. They just need to get linked up with the physical aspect and then you have a pattern for society.
Posted by: mikkel | February 18, 2011 at 01:01 PM
Watch for Egypt, a paradigm of overshoot: Oil money gone, now how to finance food imports? Food prices were the straw that broke Mubarak's back. Here's the only glimmer of hope I see: The Egyptians managed to revolt peacefully. I didn't expect that. But food prices will keep rising. Will they starve in peace?
Posted by: Florifulgurator | February 18, 2011 at 03:20 PM
Good job George,
Unpleasantries are hard.
Could you follow up with a graph with time scales and human numbers assuming a mean US lifestyle, Mean Western European and Mean Chinese lifestyle in current energy terms? I am sure we can also become more efficient if we try but could we support .5 billion at US standards with our present technology assuming that we do not overharvest water and end our net topsil loss as a species?
there is a small posibility that we could have net energy fusion within 50 years or so. Then it could be ramped up but still we would have to be careful stewarts of the net primary productivity of the earth
Posted by: Larryshultz | February 18, 2011 at 05:50 PM
RobM,
I know Jack. And we had quite a bit of conversation at last year's Biophysical Economics Meeting.
On the issue of WWIII: I don't think history gives us a good guide to predicting or even understanding the future. True enough that wars have been the 'logical' outcome of resource conflicts throughout history. But we are entering an entirely different phase of human existence. Wars of any size require energy resources and lots of them. Someone, somewhere may get off a nuke or two in some early and vain attempt to conquer, but I'm betting that will be the extent of it. Even marauding hoard scenarios seem unlikely to me since these depend on there being local resources where they are invading in order to sustain them. Again, not too likely in my estimation.
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Fred,
But wouldn't it be swell if Beard turned out to be right? The likelihood may be slightly less than monkeys flying out of Mike Meyer's a*s. But you never know for sure.
To tell you what my answer to your question would be, OTOH, I honestly don't think you can work with the majority. The capacity for critical thinking is critically dependent on sapience, the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex. And for most people that is stunted.
While an embryo or even a post-natal being has an opportunity to develop their brains up to the limits of what nature endowed them, once they are grown there is no known method to 'teach' them to have larger prefrontal cortices!
Dark, indeed.
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Molly,
Ahmed's book is on my Amazon wishlist. Have to wait until the budget allows. Our library copies seem to be taken up. No availability for 6 months!!! Must be good.
Also agree about Idiocracy. Loved the premise - no wait - I mean I didn't love it, but it is classic gallows humor.
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Mikkel,
You saw my comment to RobM re: war. I don't doubt that there will a lot of local and even regional violence as things unwind, so your notion of an enclave that is prepared and protected is certainly legitimate. I also would not be surprised to see terrorism increase in the near future as people lash out at the supposed enemies (e.g. the US), but as fuels diminish the logistics of carrying out any massive or sustainable conflict grow increasingly difficult to the point that the returns on such a campaign would be negative.
But in a chaotic world, who knows.
And, yes, Nietzsche's ubermensch was a concept that started me thinking about sapience a long time ago.
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Flor,
I can take the voice of an optimist on occasion! Notice the quote is regarding a 'provisional' requirement, where the provisional part is in serious question. I did say this was infeasible.
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Larry,
I don't have numbers like that to graph. Although I have seen such analysis in other places (e.g. The Oil Drum). My models derives from first principles rather than data-based.
The ecological footprint people have models based on average lifestyle (consumption rates) but point out that averages don't really tell the whole picture as far as a population parameter. Also the per capita energy consumption per country is known, but again it is only a gross measure of what is going on dynamically.
From a very different perspective, e.g. from analyzing the energy requirements for a permaculture-based lifestyle (not subsistence), based on data I got from Pimentel & Pimentel, "Food, Energy, and Society", I have estimated that the number of hectares per individual would be about 4. This is mixed-use land (forests, watershed, fields, etc.) and assumes a relatively stable climate. That is a lot of land! And given that there are only a fixed and small number of hectares in this world where the future climate is currently thought to be relatively stable, the total future sustainable population may only number a few million, not hundreds of millions.
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George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 19, 2011 at 12:06 PM
Fascinating essay but I'm a bit puzzled about your 'feasible solution' which you have alluded to but not set out in the text (unless I'm being really dense). Does it involve the constraint that the majority of the world's population: (a) understand the problem, and; (b) are prepared to do something about it? If so, then I'm not so sure that this feasible solution exists. People won't even give up their incandescent light bulbs. What hope is there for a major (planned) change in their lifestyles? The 'tragedy of the commons' dictates that very very few people are going to be willing to sacrifice anything at all in their daily lives, even if the very existence of our species depends upon it.
Posted by: Icarus | February 19, 2011 at 03:51 PM
Icarus,
I did not explicitly print the 'feasible solution' to the restated problem (the one that only requires that the genus Homo survives) because when I tried it out on a focus group of no-growthers I got a generally negative reaction. It seems the only solution that I can imagine invokes negative emotions even among people who actually do understand the general problem of overpopulation. It involves admittedly overtly coercive actions, so it does not depend on everyone in the population understanding and doing what they should.
Others in the group were simply uneasy with some of the assumptions I use regarding the survival of more sapient people. I have written about this before, but many in this group were not sufficiently convinced by the arguments. And the strength of the arguments is carried by my working papers on sapience.
So I removed that and only allude to its existence.
Maybe someday, when TSRHTF, I will reveal it more broadly.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 19, 2011 at 04:30 PM
Oh for heaven's sake Dr. Mobus why don't you just say what your solution is? We're all big boys and girls here :-)
Here's my guess:
1. Testing to rank people who can or will be able to procreate by sapience.
2. Assignment of some threshold below which you will not be allowed to procreate.
3. Forced sterilization of those who fall below this threshold.
4. Forced sterilization of those who are allowed to have children after they have the maximum number of children.
Alternatively, you can lower the threshold and hold a lottery for the increased number who fall above to get the same amount of people who can procreate.
Assuming my guess is somewhat on target here are some questions that immediately pop up in my head:
How the heck does one test for sapience?
Do you want differences in the sex ratios?
Will the test have gender differences?
How do you avoid politically powerful and/or connected people from gaming or simply doing an end-run around the system of selection?
This question does not assume my guess is anywhere near correct:
Do you go into feasible ways of implementing whatever solution you have? I mean if it's anything like my guess, it's going to get a lot of push-back!
Posted by: Paul Yarbles | February 20, 2011 at 06:13 AM
I don't believe voluntary sterilization will be workable. We are competitive dissipative structures with a loose overlay of cooperation. Maximal reproduction and resource acquisition defines our success. The survival of the nation does not supersede the survival of the individual especially as it becomes apparent that the nation is neither homogeneous, intelligent, nor willing to adapt to developing shortages of life-sustaining energy.
We have just gone through a massive amount of energy and used much in an effort at educating one of the productive components of the technological system (humans). Unfortunately the prevalence of magic space within the cranium has shrunk very little, even with free libraries and twelve years of compulsory education.
It is most likely, IMO, that the population will be brought under control on the death side of the ledger with pathogens of mysterious origin. A final solution of a grand scale and likely not sparing any ethnicity. What comes later for the survivors? Consolidation in the most survivable geographic areas and abandonment of large areas of developed infrastructure? It must be noted, however, that each nation could also have a strategy of being the last nation standing if only energy availability is at stake. If the environment undergoes massive degradation, those in control of infectionious agents may decide that population must be reversed even in their own nation.
At this point it seems clear to me that established interests have led us into this predicament based upon their own desire to extract all the profit possible from fossil fuels, as fast as possible, while imagining magical technological innovations to save us at the last moment. They get the profit and they can assuage their guilt by “believing” in technological magic or perhaps the intervention of Gods.
Posted by: foolmetwice | February 20, 2011 at 09:58 AM
You say: "The population is simply too large for the long-term carrying capacity of the planet."
Well, I think that while focusing on just one factor, you miss the whole equation:
charge_capacity = population * resource_consumption
So, why put the burden on just one side? I don't mean we don't have a population problem, but you cannot count an American or an European with the same weight on that equation as an Bolivian or a Cuban or a Malawian. We can both act on population factor and on consumption factor. That's what's about the Degrowth movement.
Yes, we are in overshoot, but not necessarily in overpopulation: the "over" point is given by the consumption level of each and all of the humans that compose that population.
Posted by: Manoel | February 20, 2011 at 10:40 AM
"The time scale in the graph from the peak of fossil fuels is roughly one hundred years."
100 years after the peak? Did you take in account the following EROEI in your model? David Murphy's and also my own models of net energy Hubbert curves shows a shorter period, of about 20 years!
See: http://www.cenit-del-petroleo.info/images/eroei2-we-are-here-2010.png
Posted by: Manoel | February 20, 2011 at 11:18 AM
Sorry: I meant "falling EROEI", not "following" :-D
Posted by: Manoel | February 20, 2011 at 11:19 AM
George, when do you think these issues will come to a head? I'm personally betting that within 10-15 years they will be causing so much misery due to our social structure that we'll have large scale conflict. At that point we'll still have a hundred billion barrels of oil at an EROEI of 7-8; plenty to fight a war with mandatory quotas for the populace.
Posted by: mikkel | February 20, 2011 at 11:33 AM
Mikkel, your insights look very interesting, and remind me those of Ted Trainer in favour of an anarchist bias for Transtion movement (see http://candobetter.net/node/1439 )
You look like if you were Spaniard for you comments about Anarchist communities (in 1936-37 revolution, maybe?) and autonomous communities (a totally different concept of 'community', I must say). If you like, you can contact our Galician association in http://VesperaDeNada.org
I think that global federation on anarcho-permaculturalist lifeboats could work!
Posted by: Manoel | February 20, 2011 at 11:47 AM
George, as you said "No Real Solution to the Problem As Defined By We Humans", so here's another approach, taking off from Dan Arely's entertaining "predictably irrational" approach. He gave a nice lecture on Feb 8 that you can watch. Re: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/02/08/3131922.htm
The question is: "What kinds of beliefs do we not dare check?"
Are we more likely to be willing to check, beliefs based largely on agreements with others, or beliefs based largely on direct observations? You can tell already what the answer to that is, that questioning beliefs based on agreements threatens the belief system and the complex social network… and checking them would question the integrity of everyone and be perceived as a threat. In most groups that would risk dissention and loss of personal status to even bring up. Questioning beliefs that are readily checked is easy for people to understand and discredits no one’s integrity, so decisions about checking are balances of costs and benefits that are readily discussed.
So, if we’re naturally blocked from checking, when seeing cultural beliefs not working… 1) what kinds of irrationality do we construct to avoid confronting the observations that would confirm it, and 2) what would give people the self-confidence to at least consider the balance of costs and benefits involved?
I’m sure you have examples. I have lots of them, important questions with clear proof that people persistently avoid, if anyone needs them. Phil
Posted by: Phil Henshaw | February 20, 2011 at 03:10 PM
Fascinating posts on this thread.
What kind of ideas we dare not think..?
Reminds me of the
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Mims-Pianka_controversy
Which few have even heard of...Harking back to my time on the Derrick jensen forum.
Posted by: GaryA | February 21, 2011 at 05:35 AM
Alas Manoel, I am not a Spainard and my Spanish is woefully stuck at a weekend tourist's level for now. Which is a pity because I've always preferred Spanish culture over Anglo.
But yes, except for a few small points Trainer was speaking out of my mind. The primary difference between what he wrote and I believe is that he did not have enough emphasis on technology. He alluded to it briefly in talking about IT, but I think it is integral. I say the ideal economy has fractal production because everything is done as localized as rationally possible (in accordance with systems theory) which means that higher forms of technology would be made in a more centralized manner but would focus almost entirely on enabling local production.
I also think the key point is that all citizens should be producer-consumers -- which he talked about extensively -- and that with this goal then the economic theories do not matter so much. I find it absurd that historically there has been so much friction between anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-communists and syndicalists. I say that people should define the boundary conditions based on biophysics and let the implementation of the cultural dynamics proceed as they may. Different local cultures and governance should be actively encouraged because people are different; yet we can still work together on the more abstract aims.
Lastly I want to put more emphasis on aestheticism. I am strongly influenced by the technocracy movement in ideal (although not implementation) that we should use our scientific and technological progress to minimize the need for menial labor. I have spent an inordinate amount of time experimenting and calculating and I believe that it is possible to create a low energy community in which people only need to work 4-6 hours a day for their needs. Which as George has mentioned in the past, is not a chore but a pleasure to a sapient individual. There is some formalization of the concepts I feel intuitively, for instance from Oscar Wilde's Wikipedia, "Wilde envisions a society where mechanisation has freed human effort from the burden of necessity, effort which can instead be expended on artistic creation. George Orwell summarised it thus, "In effect, the world will be populated by artists, each striving after perfection in the way that seems best to him.""
And in the vein of Maslow, "artist" would not have the narrow meaning it has now but expand to an outpouring of all forms of self expression.
Speaking of Orwell, his experiences in Catalonia and admiration for the anarchists even has his faith was destroyed in the centralized communists influenced me a lot in actually figuring out what anarchism was at its roots. Which obviously is not widely done considering the response on this page to Trainer's ideas. And with that I just noticed you chimed in with my exact thoughts that "Rob’s approach is more realistic than Ted’s in that area." Which is true in itself, but honestly I have not been able to get into Transition because I haven't found any there there...it's like trimming around the edges of your lawn while it's on fire. The idea that it is exposing people to these memes without having them needing to change the core of their life is a valid one so I can't complain; especially because I'm not doing any of this yet since I am working on trying to squeeze out a few more things from being in proper society. I just do not find their vision sufficient.
They would find me far too pessimistic but I'm posting this on a well reasoned thread about extinction of all mankind, and feel the outlier risks are to that side than theirs.
If you are working on this stuff from the more radical angle I'd like to hear more.
Posted by: mikkel | February 21, 2011 at 09:57 AM
Thanks for your answer, Mikkel. I'm glad you know so much about anarchist historical experiences here in Spain!
Me, working on this stuff? Well, I'm trying but very modestly:
- I've bought a rural house and I'm making my own way back-to-the-land (from which my parents emmigrated) here in our Celtic Galicia
- I've been trying to promote Digital Direct Democracy (while we still have some digital tools!). Direct Democracy is a concept beloved by anarchists, isn't it?
- I'm working with an association and cultural think tank called Véspera de Nada http://vesperadenada.org We have got little but important success, like getting the first Spanish municipality to approve a peakoil resolution. Now we're working on a Energy Descent Manual for its citizens.
- I'm trying other ways of spreading the peakoil concept like http://www.cenit-del-petroleo.info
Radical? Well, Digital Direct Democracy http://www.d-3.info might seem quite radical for many. And going back to land with a low energy style and changing computer engineering by natural-agricultural and permaculture re-skilling will seem so for many more! :-D
I'd like to translate and spread some texts about Direct Democracy + eDemocracy in English. Hope you can read some soon.
Posted by: Manoel | February 21, 2011 at 11:46 AM