By William Rees – Climate change isn’t the problem, so what is?

Tim Watkins today on the decline of cities.

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021/02/15/a-failure-of-complexity/

For the best part of three centuries, fossil fuels have made modern city living far more bearable than it would otherwise have been. But it has come at a cost in the form of permanent growth. Economies of scale – some made on a global level – have allowed for technologies to be developed at far lower cost than would otherwise have been possible. Global communications networks, for example, are only possible because they are used by billions of users around the world. It would be impossible to manufacture an affordable smartphone or tablet if there were only a few thousand consumers worldwide. Mass consumption is only possible because the costs are borne by billions of people. The same goes for the oil we depend upon and for the electricity and clean drinking water we – in the west – take for granted.

But all of those economies of scale depend upon eternal growth to sustain them. In a sense, the modern, fossil fuel-powered city is like a soufflé – the moment the energy declines, the entire structure collapses in upon itself. There is no “steady state.” Only growth sustains, while some form of managed deflation – or de-growth – is the most optimistic version of collapse. And this is an issue for two reasons. First, fossil fuels are an energy-finite resource. That is, while there are plenty of fossil fuel deposits beneath the ground – perhaps as many again as we have consumed in the last three centuries – the vast majority would cost more energy to extract than they would provide in return. And so – with a handful of limited exceptions – they are going to stay beneath the ground. What this means is that – whether we like it or not, and despite the deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) – the amount of energy available to grow our soufflé cities has begun to decline.

Second, the consequences of consuming fossil fuels – pollution and climate change – are creating the kind of conditions which brought an end to the Bronze Age civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean sometime around 1186 BCE. Climate change is causing or exacerbating a range of natural disasters including flooding and forest fires, while spreading animal and crop diseases, lowering harvests and killing fish stocks. Meanwhile, pollutants and insecticides have decimated the insect life at the base of the food chain. It may well be that we are already too late to save the human habitat. But even if we are not, we would need to dramatically lower the amount of fossil fuel energy we consume to have any chance of surviving in the longer term. So allowing the soufflé cities to collapse may be our only option… damned if we do and damned if we don’t, as it were.

In the broadest terms, what we are living through is the point at which industrial civilisation falls over the net energy cliff:

Put simply, the more energy that we have to use to generate future energy, the less energy remains to power the – currently – much larger non-energy sectors of a modern economy or a modern city. Since, until recently, fossil fuels have provided more than 20:1 energy returns on the energy invested, this has not been a problem. Once the energy return on investment falls below 15:1 – as is the case with fracking, tar sands and biofuels – things rapidly fall apart as ever more energy has to be diverted away from the wider economy.

Traditionally, this was expected to result in shortages which would, in turn, cause prices to rise uncontrollably. In practice though, upward spikes in price have proved temporary simply because the increased cost of energy is balanced by a loss of consumption across the wider, non-energy economy, with the result that general demand for energy actually declines because we can no longer afford it. In the absence of sufficient low energy-cost energy, since the crash of 2008 we have witnessed a situation in which the price of oil is too low for producers to remain profitable, but still too high to be affordable to consumers:

Interesting interview today with Robert Sapolsky on human behavior.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/02/15/134-robert-sapolsky-on-why-we-behave-the-way-we-do/

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

Contrast gloomy William Rees with optimistic Bill Gates. Rees thinks we need to focus on overshoot awareness and population reduction. Gates thinks we need to innovate new green energy. Both men are very smart. What’s the difference between them? One has normal denial genes and the other has defective denial genes. Which man would a female prefer to make babies with?

Another good overview of central bank QE policies and their consequences by Doug Nolan.

When you read Nolan you have to remember that he is not overshoot aware and does not understand that economic growth is coming to a permanent end. Nevertheless he’s still a good source for analysis of central bank policy.

The consensus view of overshoot aware people is that we should expect a series of stairsteps down as the economy adjusts to biophysical limits. I’m coming around to a different view that because the central banks are so determined to prevent any correction in asset prices, when the next correction inevitably occurs, it will be much more like falling down an elevator shaft than taking a step down. In other words, any preparations must be complete before the next crash.

http://creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com/2021/02/weekly-commentary-short-but-momentous.html

The world is now in the throes of history’s greatest experiment in central bank doctrine and operations. It’s easy to forget that the Federal Reserve is only about 13 years into experimental QE activism. Indeed, central bankers have minimal history for a well-founded assessment of how QE operates, its various impacts and consequences, both intended and unintended. The lack of clarity beckons for circumspection.

It’s also clear that observation and evaluation of QE is left to us. Wall Street, of course, is bewitched by the Fed’s powerful tool. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is these days uninterested in assessing either QE’s effects or risks, while the economic community remains reticent. After doubling its balance sheet to $7.4 TN over the past 74 weeks, the Fed is now locked into a policy course that will see an additional $120 billion of liquidity injected into the markets on a monthly basis well into the future.

I thought this comment was insightful…

Of the Trillions of fiscal spending, only a trickle finds its way toward investment in our future. Instead, most will be directed at redistribution measures – a policy approach viewed as necessary to counter systemic inequality. How crazy has this all become: Trillions of monetary stimulus stoke Bubble Dynamics and resulting inequality, while Trillions of fiscal stimulus are employed to counteract the inequities promoted by central bank activism.

Small preptip: I tested a box of Kraft dinner 13 years past its best by date. It was not edible. Don’t assume it is shelf stable.

Tim Morgan refines his SEEDS model.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/190-mapping-the-economy-part-one/

The problem with all of the consensus forecasts seems to be that forward energy use projections are a function of economic assumptions. Thus, if the economy is assumed to be X% bigger by, say, 2040, then its energy needs will have risen by Y%, and the deduction of non-fossil supply projections for 2040 leaves our need for fossil fuels in that year as a residual.

This, of course, is to take things in the wrong order. What we should be doing is assessing the future energy outlook, and only then asking ourselves how much economic activity the projected level (and cost) of energy supply is likely to support.
…
Broad observation across the thirty countries covered by SEEDS indicates that complexity determines the level of ECoE at which prosperity per capita turns downwards. In the sixteen advanced economies group analysed by the model (AE-16), the inflection point occurs at ECoEs of between 3.5% and 5%. The equivalent range for the fourteen EM (emerging market) countries (EM-14) runs from 8% to 10%.

This has meant that EM countries’ prosperity has continued to improve as that of the AE-16 group has turned down. This in turn has meant that global, all-countries prosperity has been on a long plateau, with continued progress in some countries offsetting deterioration in others.

Now, though, the model indicates that the plateau has ended, meaning that, from here on, the world’s average person gets poorer.

Thanks to Gail Zawacki for bringing Michael Graziano to my attention. I’ve queued up his books and plan to look for synergies and conflicts with Varki’s MORT theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-consciousness-evolved/485558/

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?

The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right—and that has yet to be determined—then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.
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If AST is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us. Data from my own lab suggests that the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness.

Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language. The relationship between language and consciousness is often debated, but we can be sure of at least this much: once we developed language, we could talk about consciousness and compare notes. We could say out loud, “I’m conscious of things. So is she. So is he. So is that damn river that just tried to wipe out my village.”

Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us. We attribute consciousness to characters in a story, puppets and dolls, storms, rivers, empty spaces, ghosts and gods. Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD. One speculation is that it’s better to be safe than sorry. If the wind rustles the grass and you misinterpret it as a lion, no harm done. But if you fail to detect an actual lion, you’re taken out of the gene pool. To me, however, the HADD goes way beyond detecting predators. It’s a consequence of our hyper-social nature. Evolution turned up the amplitude on our tendency to model others and now we’re supremely attuned to each other’s mind states. It gives us our adaptive edge. The inevitable side effect is the detection of false positives, or ghosts.

And so the evolutionary story brings us up to date, to human consciousness—something we ascribe to ourselves, to others, and to a rich spirit world of ghosts and gods in the empty spaces around us. The AST covers a lot of ground, from simple nervous systems to simulations of self and others. It provides a general framework for understanding consciousness, its many adaptive uses, and its gradual and continuing evolution.

New limerick today from Benjamin the Donkey.

https://benjaminthedonkey-limericksofdoom.blogspot.com/2021/02/apprehension.html

Apprehension

We all know that something is wrong:
It’s overshoot, coming on strong;
Despite some dismay,
I’m still sort of okay,
But I sure won’t be okay for long.

Here’s a pleasant low carbon way to tour the world. This guy walks around different cities of the world with a video camera.

A good quality blu-ray rip of the excellent Jeff Gibbs/Michael Moore documentary Planet of the Humans is up on a popular tracker. It’s a must watch if you haven’t seen it.

https://planetofthehumans.com/

https://yts.mx/movies/planet-of-the-humans-2019