Category: Overshoot

Supply & Demand

Demand isn’t what we want, it’s what we can afford.

Supply isn’t what we need, it’s what’s available.

Everything we depend on depends on energy.

Renewable energy depends on non-renewable energy.

The supply of anything non-renewable must peak and then decline.

Energy decline begins as falling EROI with rising debt to support demand and supply.

Then interest rates fall to zero or negative because growth is not possible with low EROI.

We are here.

Then something really bad happens because we allowed debt to get so high.

We should be reducing debt and using what wealth we have left to prepare.

It’s not that complicated.

Why wasn’t this discussed in the presidential debate?

Denial.

What could be more important?

Maybe climate change but denial prevented that from being discussed too.

ngeni-there-aint-such-as-thing-as-a-free-lunch

By Gail Zawacki: The Waste Land

My new favorite piece by Gail Zawacki.

A few ideas that stood out for me:

  • Much of what we view as nature is not natural.
  • Humans are an invasive species and we deny this reality.
  • Ozone pollution continues to be a huge problem that we deny.
  • Drought is not killing trees. Human air pollution is killing trees, and dead trees are contributing to drought.
Most often, writing on a blog feels to have no more effect than idly dropping a pebble in the ocean, and watching the tiny ripples disappear; lately it seems that climate heating has gone exponential, and in my imagination I anticipate the moment I will hear an official NASA announcement on the radio – that it’s too late to do anything about climate change because irreversible amplifying feedbacks have taken over and there’s nothing left but to listen to the orchestra play on the deck.

“There ought to be a word that expresses in a few syllables the totality of ecocide – not just the horror in recognizing the physical manifestations of looming extinction, but the ensuing pain upon realizing the futility and meaninglessness that has been wrought by human folly, hubris, stupidity and blindness.  But I don’t know what it is.”

https://witsendnj.blogspot.ca/2016/09/the-waste-land.html

On the Quantity and Quality of Women

A reader expressed concern about the few number of women he finds participating in overshoot discussions and asked what my experience has been.

I replied that the quantity of women was lower than men, but the quality was higher.

Here are some fine examples of female intellect and awareness…

Alice Friedemann is a self-described energy geek that runs the website http://energyskeptic.com. I recently posted a very interesting interview with her here. I am currently reading her latest book “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation” and I hope to write a book review when done.

Gail Tverberg researches the relationship between energy and the economy and regularly publishes superb essays on her site Our Finite World. I have to date posted 13 of her essays, more than any other author, which demonstrates my high regard for her work. Gail is a truth seeker rather than a belief defender. She has a gift for bringing fresh and clear perspectives to complex topics.

Gail Zawacki writes on her blog Wit’s End and has produced an impressive portfolio of essays on overshoot and the damage we are doing to the planet. Gail has been a solitary voice trying to bring attention to the decline of trees worldwide due to ground level ozone that results from our use of fossil energy. I discussed Gail’s work in more detail here and provided links to a few of my favorite essays.

Nicole Foss has a razor-sharp mind and one of the best big picture understandings on the planet. She has a large catalog of work on her site The Automatic Earth but publishes less frequently now. I posted a couple of my favorites by Nicole here.

Donella H. “Dana” Meadows was a co-author of the prescient but sadly ignored book “The Limits to Growth” which I wrote about here. I posted a link to an excellent talk on sustainable systems by Dana here.

Lierre Keith is a radical environmentalist and author of one of my favorite books, which I have read at least 3 times, “The Vegetarian Myth”. In this book Lierre discusses the health hazards of vegan and vegetarian diets based on her own experience, and debunks the myth that these diets are less harmful to the planet. Lierre makes a very strong argument that the only form of agriculture than might be sustainable is one with a foundation of grass-fed animals.

On the Wealth of Citizens: An EU Perspective

Those Who Study History

 

The UK voted to leave the EU yesterday.

What’s really going on?

In an industrialized world with abundant resources citizens typically prosper in economies of all sizes.

As populations rise faster than finite resources, the growth rate of per-capita resources slows and eventually must decline. Over time it becomes more difficult to increase the wealth of citizens. In a resource constrained world there are two methods available to grow the wealth of citizens: efficiency and debt.

The first method available to grow the wealth of citizens is to increase the efficiency of producing and using resources. We have done an excellent job of improving efficiency:

  • We optimized the type of energy we use for each application such as using coal and hydro instead of oil to generate electricity, and using oil instead of coal or horses for transportation.
  • We learned how to squeeze oil from sand and rock, how to drill for oil in mile deep oceans, and how to mine coal from the surface with giant machines.
  • We optimized our machines such as switching to lighter fuel-efficient cars, using heat pumps, and abandoning supersonic air travel.
  • We learned how to convert oil and natural gas into cheap and durable materials like plastic.
  • We used electronics and computers to more efficiently control just about everything.
  • We optimized communication with the internet and cell phones.
  • We reduced waste such as insulating our homes.
  • We recycled energy intensive materials such as aluminum cans.
  • We optimized the productivity of our arable land with Haber-Bosch factories that convert natural gas into nitrogen fertilizer, by replacing horses and rain with diesel powered tractors and pumped irrigation, and by growing mono-crops.
  • We optimized the cost of calories by manufacturing high-fructose corn syrup and vegetable oils, and by operating concentrated animal feeding operations.
  • We optimized the harvest of our oceans with powerful ships that net and scrape everything.
  • We optimized the efficiency of global trade with agreements between many countries.
  • We optimized manufacturing by moving it to locations with the lowest labor and energy costs, and the fewest pollution regulations.
  • We optimized shipping with standard containers and ships and trucks to carry them.
  • We optimized distribution to consumers with Walmart and Amazon.

The laws of thermodynamics and the cost of technology and transport mandate a limit to efficiency gains. We are approaching the limits to efficiency improvement.

The second method available to grow the wealth of citizens is to borrow resources from the future. This amazing trick is done with debt. Cash and credit behave the same when spent. Credit however commits us to produce wealth in the future to repay it. This future wealth represents yet to be produced resources. Hence debt’s magic of letting us spend future resources now.

We started using debt in the 80’s to support the wealth of citizens and total debt has grown exponentially since. There are limits to how much debt can be carried by a citizen or government. Money available for living equals income minus interest payments plus any change in debt plus any change in savings.

The combination of stagnating or falling income due to declining per-capita resources and/or rising interest payments eventually imposes a limit on the total debt an individual or government can carry. There are three methods for extending this limit on debt.

The first method for extending debt is to increase the size of economic organizations. Size matters to debt. The larger an economy is the more internal and external resources it can control, the more taxes it can collect, the larger military it can afford, the more confidence and fear it can inspire, and as a consequence, the more credit it can generate. A good example is the USA and the privileges it enjoys from having the world’s reserve currency.

As the wealth of citizens became increasingly dependent on debt there was pressure to increase the size of economic organizations. This in large part explains the formation of the EU. The majority of European countries were keen to join the EU because it promised them access to more debt. Imagine, for example, how much debt and purchasing power an independent Italy with its own currency could have compared to today as a member of the EU.

The second method for extending debt is to reduce the interest rate. We have steadily reduced the interest rate since the early 90’s. We reached the limit of 0% shortly after the 2008 crisis and the interest rate has remained at 0% for an unprecedented 90 months. Some countries are experimenting with negative interest rates however it seems unlikely that this technique will work without dramatic and improbable changes to the rules of money and banking.

The third and final method for extending debt is to print and give money to citizens and/or governments. Most countries have not yet used this method because it reduces confidence in a currency and risks hyperinflation that destroys wealth and can cause war as happened with Germany after WWI. There will be a strong temptation to try this method in the future because it can work well for a period of time. For example, it took 10 years for hyperinflation to take hold after money printing started in Zimbabwe. A politician forced to choose between riots now and hyperinflation 10 years later might well choose to print money.

As an aside, I leave the reader with a question to ponder about the dark side of debt. What will happen if the depletion of finite resources and climate change prevents us from producing the future resources our debts commit us to? The answer to this question explains why I frequently call for reduced public debt.

In summary, a resource constrained world has two methods for supporting the wealth of citizens, efficiency and debt, and as explained above, we are already at fundamental limits for both efficiency and debt.

What must happen next, and what is already starting to happen, is that the wealth of citizens will decrease. This will create social unrest, and given our genetic denial and the difficulty of understanding our complex world, citizens will seek someone to blame.

Yesterday UK citizens blamed the EU. Because most UK citizens do not understand the underlying forces that are causing their hardship they probably have made things worse for themselves, at least in the short-term. Longer term, when there is insufficient affordable oil to support long distance trade, all communities will have to re-localize to survive.

Other independence movements within Europe are building momentum for similar reasons. A primary message of Donald Trump is that “others” are to blame for the hardship of US citizens.

A recurring theme on this blog is that some form of civilization collapse is inevitable and not too many years away. If the majority of citizens do not understand and/or deny what is going on the collapse will be much worse than it needs to be.

We still have sufficient resources to prepare a softer landing zone.

The first step is an adult conversation about what’s really going on.

book review: Our Renewable Future by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley

A new book titled Our Renewable Future by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley is available to read online for free here.

The book is an excellent primer on energy and does a nice job of summarizing the challenges we face as fossil energy depletes.

Heinberg’s style is to present an intelligent fact-based view of the challenges while simultaneously offering positive things we could choose to do to make the future less bad. He avoids predicting pain or collapse although having followed him for years I think this is likely a politically correct veneer. He also tends to ignore the effect of de-growth on our debt-based economy and the resulting small amount of wealth we will have available for investment.

I like the fact that the book uses a wide lens and discusses things often ignored like high temperature industrial processes that cannot run on renewable energy (concrete, metal, and silicon chip production, for example) and discusses the use of fossil energy as feedstocks (fertilizer needed to feed 7 billion, for example). I also like that it discusses honestly the need to reduce our population.

If you’d like a calm intelligent summary of our predicament with lots of space to draw your own conclusions this book a great place to start.

As an aside, I remember David Fridley from an excellent talk he gave in 2007 on the Myths of Biofuels. It’s still relevant and worth watching here.

A Deadly Recipe: One Part Ignorance, One Part Denial

I’ve been paying a little more attention these days to what the main stream media thinks is going on.

They report on government data that says the economy has recovered from the 2008 crisis. They also report on the rise of Trump that indicates many citizens are struggling and angry.

They know that incomes have stagnated while life’s expenses continue to rise but they have no clue what is causing this.

They don’t even have an intelligent theory.

On other important matters obvious to anyone that cares to look such as the climate spiraling out of control, the 6th great extinction of species, and human overshoot starting to bite in some of the weaker countries, they say nothing.

It’s quite amazing.

It seems likely we will collapse with most people having no idea what is causing their pain.

One part ignorance and one part genetic denial is a deadly recipe for war and civil unrest.

By The New York Times: Venezuela Drifts Into New Territory: Hunger, Blackouts and Government Shutdown

The collapse of Venezuela continues.

“The economic situation of this country is collapse,” Pablo Parada, a law student, who was participating last week in a hunger strike in front of the O.A.S. office in Caracas. “There are people who go hungry now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world/americas/venezuela-economic-government-collapse.html?_r=1&referer=http:/m.facebook.com/

Notice that this New York Times article has no clue about the underlying causes of Venezuela’s problem. It does not even mention that their population has grown by more than 6 times since 1950.

We observe problems, deny overshoot, and blame something easy like corrupt politicians that doesn’t require us to make lifestyle changes.

Rinse and repeat to the bottom.

I wrote more about this here.

The UK: A State of unDenial?

A book titled Limits to Growth was published in 1972 by a group of respected scientists including two of my favorite thinkers, Dennis Meadows and Donella Meadows. They modeled a variety of scenarios and showed that industrial civilization would collapse some time before 2100 unless we proactively limited one or more aspects of human population and economic growth.

Limits to Growth generated a lot of passionate criticism. Sadly, most critics did not read or understand the book. There was, and still is, little or no rational discussion by citizens or their leaders about overshoot.

A 30 year update by the authors and several recent independent reviews have shown that we are tracking to one of the Limits to Growth scenarios called the standard model. The evidence is that the Limits to Growth predictions were accurate and we are probably on a path to collapse.

One compelling piece of evidence in support of Varki’s denial theory is that no country in the world, regardless of political or religious belief, is having a meaningful discussion about human overshoot, let alone taking steps to mitigate overshoot, despite overwhelming evidence that we are in serious trouble.

The UK may be a country trying to achieve a state of unDenial.

An all-party parliamentary group (APPG Limits to Growth) has been set up to encourage dialogue on limits to growth.

To seed the discussion APPG commissioned a report published in April 2016 titled “Limits Revisited: A Review of the Limits to Growth Debate”

The report is a quick read and other writers such as Nafeez Ahmed have already summarized it so I won’t repeat the details here. Instead I’ll comment on a few things I thought were important.

The authors are clearly concerned about creating a “happy story”.

Visions for prosperity which provide the capabilities for everyone to flourish, while society as a whole remains within the safe operating space of the planet, are clearly at a premium here. A number of such visions already exist. Developing and operationalising them is vital.

I suppose this is the reality of trying to influence two generations that have not known hardship. Time is short. I think we need more forthright honesty and less spin.

The authors understand the climate change threat but I saw no evidence that they understand how difficult it will be to reduce carbon emissions.

The authors understand that economic growth may be ending however I saw no evidence that they understand the implications of no-growth for our debt based monetary system.

The APPG has good intentions and they are breaking important new ground.

It will be interesting to see if they achieve anything.

By Mark Williams et al.: The Anthropocene (Human Impact by the Numbers)

Produced energy and the pattern of human population growth from 1750. Utilization of these energy sources, together with the energy used by humans from net primary production, is now approaching the entire energy available to the global ecosystem before human intervention [Barnosky, [1]]. Key to colours: dark blue = coal; dark brown = oil; green = natural gas; purple = nuclear; light blue = hydro; orange brown = biomass (e.g. plants, trees). Data source from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8936

Humans now consume between 25 and 38% of net primary production of the planet. Human modification and appropriation of NPP, and the production of energy over and above NPP, has been developing over thousands of years, but accelerated markedly from the mid-20th century onward (Figure 1).

Professor Zalasiewicz at the University of Lecister said the last times such huge effects were seen happened 2.5 billion years ago when photosynthesis appeared, and again half a billion years ago when the food web grew more complex.  Although the 5 major extinction events were also huge, “ even measured against these events, human-driven changes to production and consumption are distinctly new.”

Co-author Dr Carys Bennett added: “It is without precedent to have a single species appropriating something like one quarter of the net primary biological production of the planet and to become effectively the top predator both on land and at sea.”

Some of the massive effects humans are having on the planet include mining phosphorus and fixing nitrogen to make fertilizer, burning hundreds of millions of years of fossil fuels, and directing this increased productivity that is well beyond natural levels towards animals re-engineered for our consumption.

Commentary by Alice Friedemann…

http://energyskeptic.com/2016/a-strong-case-for-the-anthropocene-no-other-species-has-ever-consumed-as-much-of-earths-resources-so-quickly/

Original paper…

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015EF000339/full

By Dahr Jamail: Global Fisheries Are Collapsing — What Happens When There Are No Fish Left?

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35574-global-fisheries-are-collapsing-what-happens-when-there-are-no-fish-left

Overfishing and the imminent collapse of global fisheries is an excellent example of how we have used non-renewable energy to over exploit and destroy a renewable resource that will be needed when non-renewable energy is gone.

It’s a similar story for soil, and trees, and wildlife, and fresh water.

There are no villains in this story. Just hard working people trying to provide for their families.

The problem is too many people.

I don’t see any solution that will help except population reduction.

Commercial overexploitation of the world’s fish stocks is severe,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said back in 2012. “Many species have been hunted to fractions of their original populations. More than half of global fisheries are exhausted, and a further third are depleted.”

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 85 percent of global fish stocks are “overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion.”

Fisheries for the most sought-after species of fish have already collapsed.

The populations of all large predator fish in the oceans have declined by 90 percent in the 50 years since modern industrial fishing became widespread around the world, according to a shocking paper by scientists with Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, published in Nature in 2003.

Three years after the paper’s publication, the same scientists, along with colleagues from across the world, published an even more startling paper that predicted a total collapse of all fish that are currently caught commercially by 2048.

Many scientists, like Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, have estimated that the total fish catch for the planet peaked back in the mid-1980s, and has been declining ever since.

“The big problem is that we are overfishing,” Boxall told Truthout. “The [fisheries] management isn’t working, and is in fact causing just as much destruction [as] if there was no management in the first place.”