Comments gmobus has made

The way science is taught to the masses...

is turning the majority of kids off on science, even some who might well have gone into science in college and career.

We try so hard to do the one-size-fits-all turn them all into scientists. I've seen kids turn away from the subjects just because of the way it is crammed down their throats.

What we should be teaching the majority (after all, not everyone will be a scientist) is how to appreciate what science does and how it enriches our lives, what the nature of scientific knowledge is (as compared with uniformed beliefs and opinions), and how to read and interpret science news stories. On the latter point, we need to better educate the science press as well!

The true science courses (biology, chemistry, etc.) should be reserved for those students who really show an aptitude for the procedural and mental attitudes needed for real science.

What the majority of students need are courses in the philosophy and sociology of science. These can include examples from all of the sciences to introduce students to science-based knowledge, but not with an emphasis on the more quantitative aspects or requiring memorization of arcane facts.

In our zeal that everyone should know every science fact or theory we have literally shut down the avenues to producing citizens who appreciate science (and BTW can recognize when it is being inappropriately used for political agendas).

But I am sure that in our panic to produce more scientists to stay competitive with the rest of the world we will simply redouble our efforts to teach science to everyone and make matters worse.

I would rather have a citizenry armed with the understanding of how science works and the critical thinking skills needed to evaluate how scientific findings are being used than simply having once been forced to measure reagents in a chem lab and quickly forgetting everything they were forced to regurgitate on a test. I suspect that such a citizenry would pay more attention to what scientists report.

Of course there are always going to be that 13% or so who sincerely believe their ideology trumps all. You know, the ones who are still cheering GWB!

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

maximum emotional punch?

Scientist probably shouldn't be concerned with emotional punch when they go to name things. Some naming may be whimsical (quark, sonic the hedgehog) but not to appeal to the public.

In the current case I think you need two kinds of names. A scientific moniker probably ought to focus on the attractor basin switching of a chaotic system being driven. The chaotic system is the entire geochemical, geophysical, and climate regimes. This would include ocean acidification, sea level rise, weathering patterns, and, of course, climate change with its higher variances (greater extreme weather events).

And too there is the impact on social systems. We humans are still parts of nature, components in the world system, as it were. Our societies are going to be changed as a result of increased CO₂ in the bio-hydro-geo-atmo-sphere. If you are looking for a common name that will evoke emotional responses, that would be the image to convey, I think.

So a scientific term not unlike the binomial nomenclature terms (Homo sapiens) for scientific objectivity and a popular term (human) for broader consumption and agenda influencing might be in order.

I must note, in fairness, that in the case of the BN name for humans, the selection of the species name seems to have been emotionally motivated, wishful thinking. In having caused so much potential havoc (not to mention the historical havoc) humans don't appear to be particularly sapient.

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

amazngdrx,

Not really sure what you are suggesting here. Do you believe that it is some fundamental blockage in the minds of corporatists and politicians that is stopping development of new technology? I'd be curious to know what has happened to their minds since the time I was in the commercial technology business. If something looked like it would produce a profit I don't think these folks would have had blockages back in the day. Usually it is lack of potential that keeps new ideas from developing. But maybe things have changed.

Now I wouldn't necessarily argue that the profit motive is sufficient for our current situation. But profitability is at least a surrogate for progress.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Thanks

LPS,

Thanks for the endorsement! I appreciate the kind words.

Jon,

Consider energy/machines as a co-evolution process. Humans are fundamentally motivated by a need for more free energy (energy available to do the work of getting more energy!) Machines (actually all technology including agriculture) have been evolved by trial and error tinkering followed by selection for improvement in function. We select for machines that tend to increase our access to free energy (entertainment value notwithstanding). The expansion of free energy allows us to continue to tinker and improve designs.

But if one contracts the availability of energy to run our current designs one will soon see that machines are necessary but not sufficient explanations for the course of history.

Another consideration is that it is the flow of energy through the brain that allows humans to act as tinkerers and selectors.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

I agree with sindark

Reorganizing politicos and lawyers is not going to accomplish anything.

In my Oct. 24th blog I recommended that Obama get to work even now (as part of the transition) assembling an advisory board of top scientists working on the problem areas we are facing. I would also suggest that he give the chair (or co-chairs) ready access so that they can keep him effectively apprised.

Or, actually, he needs an education. And he needs to get his info from people truly qualified to provide it. And it needs to be integrated since all of the major world and national problems are systemic and interrelated. He can use his own lawyerly knowledge and that of his retinue of advisers for working out policy. But the first thing he really needs is to understand the problems from a scientific perspective. His stump speeches don't leave me with the impression he is getting that now.

The Question Everything blogs of Oct. 24 and 25 (scroll down the page) offer a completely different approach to tackling these problems by an Obama presidency. FWIW.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Richard

In the event I get an answer from Hall it is likely to be a week or more. This thread may be long dead by then. My contact information is in my bio so you can send me an e-mail and I will respond with whatever answer I get.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Thanks Richard

I looked through the links and except for a mention in Wikipedia of the 3-9 times output from pyrolysis by use of generated syn-gas, I could not find an EROI analysis anywhere. Perhaps I missed it. However, I believe that Charlie Hall or one of his students has looked at these kinds of processes and did not find a substantial EROI (in the range of 15:1 or better for long-term sustainability and carbon neutrality) over other biofuels. I'll ask him about it.

All I can say is that photosynthesis is the boundary condition for any biological production and at averages of less than 1% efficiency and at the average power level of insolation in higher latitudes it is fundamentally the case that bio-fuels (or biomass if you prefer) are not sustainable if you are going to leave nature some sunlight to use. On the other hand if we reduce our power requirements per capita and reduce our population then we can get back to sustainable agriculture and your favorite fuel source might work out.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Richard

I don't have time nor care to get into a protracted argument over this. I follow the expert on EROI, Charlie Hall, who has done quite extensive work on many different energy sources. Here is a sample link to an Oil Drum article by Nate Hagens re: Charlie's work. I haven't got time to sift through the volumes to find the numbers on biofuels (of which there are many kinds). So I won't be taking up your challenge since the data are available for anyone to look up.

One of the key aspects of EROI analysis is the choice of boundaries. I remember when analysts from WSU Energy Extension were so excited about their numbers on corn ethanol. They had 'proved' that it was a net energy gain. The only problem was they forgot to factor in some of the more distal energy input factors (like fertilizer). Subsequent analysis with a much wider boundary showed the more realistic fact that corn ethanol was barely break-even for energy. And after factoring in the food-price effect, and the runoff effect in the dead zone below the Mississippi delta in the Gulf, corn turned out to be a negative.

All I tried to do is point out that there are as many so-called externalities wrt biofuels as with coal. I am not arguing FOR coal. But I am not convinced that biofuels in general are as clean as you seem to think. BTW, my area of research is modeling the sustainability of alternative energy sources. If and when I get a usable model together everyone who is interested can do comparative analysis of any energy sources they want. The devil is always in the details. Even current solar PV appears to be a net energy loss if you dig deep enough!

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Replacing is not an option

...we must replace most of the world's energy system in the next few decades with carbon-free technology...

Here is the crux of the argument. As long as our objective is to 'replace' the existing system capacity we are playing a fool's game. I and others have pointed out that the scale and complexity of such an endeavor with supposed alternative energy sources, combined with the issue of true sustainability make it infeasible to think that we will simply replace one form of energy production with another and problem solved.

Even with all of the supposed solution wedges, efficiency, solar (thermal and PV), etc, in place we will never come close to the energy flow afforded by fossil fuels. The energy densities of all the various forms (excepting nuclear) are simply not sufficient to power the kind of economic engine we have evolved.

In order to assuage people's fears of having to give up their consumptive lifestyles, our politicians and their enablers, economists, and talking heads in the media (the experts) continue to claim that all will be well if only big oil (fossil fuels) would stop blocking us. But the sad truth is that the one wedge that will, either voluntarily or by force of nature, produce a feasible solution is powering down and giving up consumption as a modus operandi. Combined with prudent investment in those alternative energy solutions that can supply a reasonable energy flow, albeit a much lower rate, and a reduction in population, the future can be a good one. But it will be a very different kind of culture from the present Western form.

As to why it is probably not a good idea to waste time and effort with CCS is unfolding right before our eyes. Our global financial system has become completely inverted from what is rational and prudent. We now run things by borrowing against the production of future wealth as opposed to borrowing from historical accumulation of wealth (savings). But with the peak of oil we are witnessing the beginning of a down slide in net energy flow available to do useful work. Ergo, in the near future we are going to see a complete collapse of all the phony money that has buoyed the world economy and a constriction of ability to finance worthy projects. As money becomes less available (and don't bet on the bailout working) and things in general become more expensive, our margin for error are rapidly disappearing. A shotgun approach to new energy technologies is probably not going to pay off.

It would be good to get real. To stop believing in magic. To accept that we overdid it and now we have to pay the true price. It would really be nice if the 'leaders' in our world would face this reality and start telling people what they really need to hear to face the future. Otherwise there are going to be a lot of pissed off people when that reality takes them by surprise.

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Bob,

The original thing that I was responding to had to do with governance and difficulties with modern society being so complex, etc.

First, I wasn't always in academia. I managed a mfg. and engineering company in Calif. years ago. Left it to do a start up based on my own invention. The 1987 stock crash sucked all of my venture capital away. So I went back to school and got my PhD. But I had many years in business prior to that, so my experiences are not confined to the halls of academia.

I have blogged long about the issues I raise here. Since I do not care to repeat my explanations I suggest you go there to read the background and arguments. You are invited to note your counter arguments there if you like.

And it is probably best not to assume you know how someone thinks by their current credentials.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

It isn't size that counts.

It is complexity and rate of change. It is also a matter of information flow and good decision models to use with that information.

We have raced to produce an incredibly complex, energy intensive, but mindless civilization that has but one real decision model and that is growth. As long as the GDP, that holiest of holy measures of wellbeing is rising everybody is happy. Of course as GDP rises so rises CO2.

We have very poor information about ground truth and things are accelerating toward disruption (note the news about methane emissions up north!)

And nobody understands the whole. They are so busy paying attention to some details here and there without ever connecting the dots.

So yes our nation is not governable, but neither is California, nor even my own state (Washington). It's because no one in charge actually knows what needs to be done. They don't even know what is really wrong.

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

good luck with that BELIEF vakibs

Your SciAm link was not correct.

Nuclear will be part of the future. But any future that assumes we will be able to support the current population in the style to which we have become accustomed is delusion, friend.

DO THE MATH.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

The core of the problem...

Sean Casten said:

They're bailing out banks because our entire economy depends upon solvent banks for growth.

Probably not thinking of it this way, but this is the real core of our problem - growth.

The world is full. We are using up natural resources at an unsustainable rate. It cannot go on.

The answer requires a larger perspective, a bigger view of how the world works (or doesn't in this case).

I recommend: Costanza, R. et al., An Introduction to Ecological Economics, ISBN: 1-884015-72-7. Classical economics cannot answer the problems.

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

RE: Tom's article and other comments

It strikes me that we are in an extremely complex web of causal relations with feedback and temporal shifts. Rather than trying to explain a single parameter's behavior (cost of oil) with simple linear and one way causes, it would be far better to posit a chaotic system and look for those feedbacks and time lags.

Chaotic systems are often driven into new regimens by the forcing of a single parameter. In climate that would be atmospheric temperature (by way of GHG emissions). In the oil and general energy markets (really the whole economy by virtue of the fact that energy is the only thing that really drives it) it is demand, aggregated by virtue of summing all the per capita demand factors on a global scale (transportation, domestic, commercial, etc.).

Russ hit the nail on the head above. The volatility we see in the climate (extreme weather) and in the oil price (as a surrogate for the economy) is a result of chaotic dynamics. There is no one factor to blame, other than the systemic drivers. Trying to pin speculators or Saudis or politics is a useless game because it is a distraction from the real issues. Population size and human nature -- the desire for more external energy support -- are the elements that most affect everything else that is going on.

Oh yes, and for those who keep dreaming of technological fixes, well take comfort in your dreams. Reality is likely to be a lot less satisfying.

George

Question Everything

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Innovation in IT - Moore's law

I wonder if Tom realizes that the analogy doesn't really work. In this country we are so used to bigger faster better in IT that we have a tendency to believe it applies to all invention.

In a sense, computers and telecomm are antithetical to power production. Moore's law is a kind of neg-second law of thermodynamics. Unfortunately in the world of energy conversion and storage bigger isn't necessarily better.

Where exactly does he believe these innovative ideas are going to come from?

I know this isn't the message the growth-economy crowd wants to hear, but you should save your money, don't buy Tom's book and spend it on a physics book on thermodynamics. You'll understand reality a lot better for it.

George
 

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Question everything more than ever...

I took a slight detour into political talk this morning in my blog, still along the lines I have commented here. Given Obama's team of advisers I have misgivings about the coal, nuclear, and ten year time frame promises.

I like the feeling of hope and the potential for new directions as much as the next guy. The rhetoric is magical. But after the good feelings subside it's back to questions.

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Caniscandida,

This thread might be going cold, so if you want to contact me through e-mail to converse the subject, feel free.

So do you believe that?: not that wisdom comes with age, necessarily (God knows, I am living proof that it does not!), but that the only truly so-called "wise" people are people who have been "around the block" a few times?

I do feel that tacit knowledge is largely a result of personal experience vs. learning explicitly from authority. Oral traditions, where knowledge is passed on through stories, might have some role but I'm not familiar with any literature on that aspect. The relationship of age seems to be simply the amount of time it takes to integrate experiences into a building framework. Different experiences need to be parsed for their support of the central models one is constructing (subconsciously). A sapient individual will be better at this integration and end up able to apply 'better' tacit knowledge in later life, generally to a wide variety of wicked problems.

But the native sapient capacity has to be present in order for one to make best use of knowledge.

On the matter of your intersecting ovals: What does "affect" mean?  I have indeed heard that rather recently invented term from the mouths of others, but cannot claim myself to be in control of it.

Affect is the catchall for emotions, feelings, drives, and other limbic system (reptilian brain stuff) functions. The relationship between these and intelligence/creativity was explicated by Antonio Damasio in Descartes's Error. That, at least, is the way I use it.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

vakibs you are right about science...

Which is why I provided references to the scientific study of wisdom. These studies demonstrate that wisdom need not be a subjective term. Nor is it particularly abstract. So consider doing a little updating of your psychology and neuroscience in this area before claiming that use of a term is abstract and without any concrete substance.

Check out Sternberg's work.

Here is a more elaborate bibliography.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Sorry, forgot to put in the newest book!

Above I forgot to put the Ehrilchs' newest book title:

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Ehrlich, Anne H. (2008). The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, Island Press. ISBN-10: 1597260967

George
 

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

I'll endevor to be clearer.

First I am not suggesting that scientists or engineers, by themselves, determine policy. Where science and engineering play a role is in determining within the best available evidence, what the limits, the boundaries, the feasibilities are that will condition what can and cannot be done. For energy, for example, there is a scientific fact about alternative energy systems sustainability. We do not yet know if, for example, most of the alternative energy systems being explored/proposed actually meet this sustainability criteria. Yet politicians, using the slimmest of evidence (it worked on the bench) propose it as a solution to our woes. Only a thorough scientific investigation will determine the feasibility of these various proposals. Ethanol is a prime example of a rush to fix a problem with political savvy but no real scientific understanding.

Obama, nor any president, needs dictatorial power to fund scientific investigation of feasibility or scalability. Funding was supposed to be made available for the hydrogen car (another boondoggle proposal) and for FutureGen to see if carbon capture and sequestration was feasible. That this current administration failed to carry forward with the funding is completely due to POLITICS as usual. Had the funding been done and the projects properly managed it is likely that we would soon get an answer to whether or not these programs were potential solutions. Of course they were themselves the result of politics from the get go. I'm sure the politicos were being told by knowledgeable people that these approaches were high risk and low payoff. But they sounded good to the public.

If Obama's crew included highly knowledgeable scientists in energy and climate (and several other major problems we are facing down) who could steer him toward supporting research in promising areas he could make a bold statement that if elected he would support that research to find real solutions and not play patsy with, for example, clean coal or more ethanol, etc. These people exist and currently do feel that they are NOT being listened to. I know a few of them. So far I have heard vague promises of 'change' from the Obama camp and no substantive details about what he would do. If he had some recognized names in science on his team, I would at least feel like there might be some substance behind those sound bites.

I do not believe his advisers are incompetent in terms of their ability to talk to scientists. But they cannot possibly see the world the way a scientist does. And that is the real rub. It's essentially like C.P. Snow's Two Cultures, only between the scientific world view and the political world view. And I claim the nature of the problems we face today demands more of the former if we hope to succeed.

Some time ago the main interest of life were ownership claims, disputes, and resolution. Fair allocation of land and wealth were based on opinion, not scientific investigations. At that time the legalistic and political world views along with legalistic policy development were quite appropriate. The predominant conceptualization of economics served well to support policies aimed at moving this nation forward. But everything has changed. We made our decisions to pursue economic growth, home ownership, and technology innovation as means to prosperity. Now we know that these were not necessarily the best policies, or at least should have been pursued with more care. Nevertheless, the types of problems society faced pre-WWII were such that an opinion-laden approach to policy might have been appropriate.

Today the biggest problems facing society and the world are of a technical/scientific nature. Opinions cannot rule the day when it comes to deciding what the proper level of CO2 concentration should be. Nor is it a matter of opinion as to whether solar PV is scalable in a time frame necessary to produce the electricity to replace coal-fired plants. There is a reality that only a scientific approach can determine within an acceptable margin of risk.

I suppose I must accede to the seeming pragmatic argument that political maneuvering is a necessary skill in today's political environment. This is what makes me depressed. The politics of compromise to get some 'action' led to the Kyoto Protocol. And we now know, and the scientists you allude to are being more vocal about this, that Kyoto is way too weak. So where has compromise gotten us? Are we better off because we finally got an agreement? Should we pat ourselves on the back for finally getting some words on paper that everyone could swallow? Even when that agreement will do nothing to mitigate global warming? Have the politicians and policy wonks solved the problem? Can we use the slippery slope argument -  that at least it's a start? Do we have time to push the sled further down that slope?

I think that everyone who has fostered the notion that the same kind of thinking that has dominated our history of policy development should dominate in our current situation needs to take many steps back, get a look at the big picture, and seriously examine the results to date.

In the end I am not talking about replacing Obama's advisers. I'm talking about building a balanced team including some of the top scientists (actually in the world, not just in America), and I include ecological economists in that category. I know for a fact that many of these people are quite ready to work with an administration that wants to actually solve problems and not just posture.

By the way, if it is politics that prevent taking action to actually solve these problems, what does that say about us?

Question your assumptions and beliefs. Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

David, don't get overly depressed.

I'm plenty depressed for the both of us.

This thread is depressing as hell. Now we're going to stomp our feet and take our toys home unless we get to hand-pick Obama's energy team.

I don't remember talking about taking my toys home. Nor did I say these guys shouldn't be players. They should, in the right role.

The problem noted is that this team is stacked with people who look at the world pretty much the same way as we have been doing for nearly a century. During that time we have screwed up royally. It seems to me that a 'real' change would involve asking ourselves about our mistakes and be willing to try something different. What is wrong with pointing out that scientists have not played as influential a role as might be fitting to deeply understand the problems?

And we're going to stock it with scientists, as though Science is some secret Truth Ray that can cut through politics.

That is getting toward the top and you might end up going over. No one is saying scientists are going to 'cut through' politics. Besides it was science that told us about greenhouse gas effects and are currently telling us about the nature of fossil fuel production. We would do well to listen without assuming we know the 'real' truth, thank you very much.

Look I'll be very specific. Right now a popular 'policy' for dealing with CO2 is a cap-and-trade, market creating mechanism. There are lots of variations on the same theme. But they are all based on the supposed success of the scheme for sulfur emissions. But in reality the success of that latter has more to do with the physics and chemistry of point source monitoring. It is a scientific and engineering problem to determine if it is even feasible to do an adequate job of monitoring CO2. It is a scientific problem to determine what a cap would be in the first place. Now some climate scientists have weighed in (not so positively) on this approach and there are still a lot of scientific questions that need to be addressed if not answered before the policy wonks go off claiming that this approach will work. The harsh truth is that no one really knows if C&T can work for CO2.

I may be overly harsh on lawyers (though this is based on some real experience) but politicians and lawyers have a view of things that too often fails to take into account some real physics. They are willing to compromise to get their position through when compromise should not be an option.

A lot of decisions about energy are about to be made that could end up hurting us (shades of corn ethanol - a clear cut EROEI loser before the first acre was harvested) by people who have not shown a history of deep understanding of the problems or have a systemic view of how things really work.

There are very significant questions about re-tooling for alternative energy production and scale issues far from resolved, or even adequately questioned. Yet I hear a lot of commitment coming out of the Obama camp (as well as the McCain camp) about things that are still far from settled. There are a huge number of assumptions floating around about energy that are simply unwarranted yet promoted as if they are solutions (right up there with clean coal). I can only conclude that these are coming from his advisers. And that does not make me terribly happy.

Besides, what is wrong with getting some solid scientific advice from a few more real scientists? Nothing unless the lawyers are afraid they might lose their influence!

I'm not trying to be a downer. I would just like people to use some critical judgment on these things and not just accept that because they like Obama they should accept everything out of his advisers. I suspect our margin of error on getting the right mix of technologies and policies is very slim. We've dicked around so much so far that we've literally p***ed away our opportunities. And who was it that was doing this? Politicians and their advisers worrying about what is politically feasible rather than what if physically necessary.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

I'm with you merrick

It isn't just the people per se. It's the kind of people who are making all the decisions. I've been suspicious of Obama from the beginning. Talk of hope and new directions is dashed by the spectre of business as usual with a cadre of lawyers calling the shots.

Look, I'm not against lawyers as such. They definitely have a place in the order of things. But they should not be the ones determining the nature of reality. Frankly my criticism is based on personal experience with lawyers acting as advisers on science matters with politicians. It is all about the political process and nothing to do with reality. Its what will win support and votes and that frequently doesn't include what will actually work in the real world. Lawyers tend to have a perspective which is simply counter productive when it comes to matters of scientific truth. Since most politicians are lawyers we are up against a particularly difficult barrier to progress. Politicians need to win elections. Lawyers need to win arguments. In both cases the reality of the world doesn't really matter. This is the system we have chosen. And it is the system that will decide our fate.

Ask any of these advisers to explain the 2nd law of thermodynamics and how it impacts our situation and see what answers you get. Ask them questions about scaling alternative energy sources and see what they say. It will most likely be bull crap.

Obama cannot tell us the truth. Either he doesn't really understand the energy problem or the global warming problem, or he can't tell the truth and expect to win votes. What a sad state of affairs we are in.

Anyone who claims human beings are smart enough to figure out what the best thing to do is is blowing smoke or smoking crack. Take your pick.

You will be known by the company you keep.

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Vakibs, reasonable observation,

but some refinements.

Money (M1) is actually a symbolic representation of the amount of energy available to do useful work. When you buy, say, fixed capital resources, you are telling the system that the energy used to produce that capital was well spent - do it again!

It has actually always been thus since the time coinage replaced fractional bartering. Money has always represented an amount of work (by the physical definition of mechanical, chemical, or electrical) that can be done.

Now in a strict sense, there should not be any more money in circulation than there is energy reserves. This doesn't mean oil, but rather the net BTUs that can be extracted from oil (and all other energy sources as well) fix the money supply. But, since mankind sort of forgot this fundamental relationship, and since we have historically been on an upward growth curve in terms of increasing net energy, we've created all kinds of bogus institutions (of the financial kind) that disconnect money supply from energy supply. Fractional reserve banking and liquidity markets turned speculation markets are a couple of examples of ways to artificially inflate the 'money' supply.

Now that the energy supply may be going into contraction the tide is turning. All of our debt-instrument financing is going to go to hell in a hand basket. A lot of so-called wealth (paper assets) is going to go up in smoke (no pun intended). The housing bubble may be just the first major sign of this phenomenon.

I have been blogging about the energy/money relationship for a while now. See, for example, my  March 25th piece, "What is money, really?"

One more tiny detail. Energy does not, unfortunately, circulate the way money does. Energy obeys the second law of thermodynamics and gets used up at each stage of transformation and when work is done. Therefore it is a one-way trip through the economy. Money's circulation is just the effect of it being used to track the two-way exchanges of energy that take place, like my salary represents my energy input to my job, but I buy some of the very product I help make. So it looks like circulation but it only works because real energy is constantly being input at one end of the economy to replace what has been lost as waste heat. Incidentally, I would bet you can correlate the velocity of M1 with the throughput of net energy through the economy.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Wise social governance

I've just finished posting the last installment in a five-part series on a framework for wise governance. That framework is the systems theoretic model of hierarchical control (or cybernetics if the word control make you squeamish and envision dictatorships). I present the case that hierarchical control systems evolve naturally in complex dynamic systems tending toward a steady-state dynamic (you know - sustainable). It has marked the origin of life (homeostasis in autocatalytic processes), the evolution of cells (autopoiesis and mobility), the evolution of brains, and the evolution of social organization.

But in the latter case it is still in process of evolving, so to speak.

Societies need two things; energy flow through to maintain life and governance of that flow through (including material flows) to maintain humanist values (ethics, etc.) The flow through, work that gets done to maintain humanist values, and distribution of the wealth gained is mediated by market mechanisms, but this is not the only mechanism for governance. Governments have existed and evolved to act like the autopoietic structures in a living system, to coordinate larger scale processes when the market alone cannot suffice. Simple time lags and complex, obscure work processes that obfuscate information (needed for any market to work well) are a substantial part of why modern markets can never be adequate mechanisms.

Finally, mankind has to learn to get along with the rest of the Ecos. We aren't doing a great job now. That implies that we need to strategically manage ourselves in ways that current governments and markets can never do.

It's a whole different way of looking at political economy in some ways, but actually not if you see the patterns of hierarchical governance that have evolved in fits and starts over man's history.

For what it is worth:
Question Everything

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

PS

Along the lines of an economic system based on cooperation and coordination vs. competition and overt greed, there is an interesting article by David Brooks in the NYT Opinion section today.

He notes the contrast between Western individualistic society and the Chinese (Eastern) collectivist society and talks about the fact that a booming economy need not be based on the ideology of the former. For me, the kinds of psychological aspects that he mentions is reinforcement for some of the ideas I raise in my blog articles.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Benefit?

Putting GHG into the atmosphere can't be compared with benefits or even costs. It is a side effect of what is beneficial, i.e. doing work to create physical wealth (human-made capital) for which most people perceive the monetary value a benefit. And as long as they do consider it a benefit it will be very hard to convince people to stop creating wealth.

I know that the environmental community has crafted a good-sounding story about how reducing burning fossil fuels will be profitable. But so far it still seems to be just a story. I think it is incumbent on this community to show through a workable case study exactly how this profit is to be made. No hypotheticals. No assumptions about improvements in technologies. Just a clear, straightforward example of turning green saving costs and generating marginal profits that would attract investment. I'll allow you the ability to remove all subsidies from existing energy sources to make a level playing field. But I think it is time to do a real, honest pro forma statement of how this is going to work. We need a full fledged business plan and not more arm waving.

I don't want to come off as hyper critical. Note that I worked the thermal solar energy business back in the 80s. So I'm not blowing smoke from the other side. But I am nervous that this story is going to get a lot of hopes up that may not bear out in practice. And while there are a lot of people telling this story, I have yet to see some solid evidence.

As a model you might want to consider T. Boone Pickens latest move. His business plan might provide the ammunition you need for this continuing faith in market solutions to an externality problem (note pricing carbon would require you actually know the functional relationship between carbon burned and GHG impact and derive the 'right' price). If Pickens would share his detailed analysis and it isn't just a whim of his because he has to get out of oil, then you might be able to build a case for this notion of how green is going to be profitable. You would be doing a giant favor to all those green business folks who, so far, have only been able to clamber for subsidies themselves in order to get a cost advantage.

Meanwhile I'll stick with first principles. Thermodynamics and the physics of work suggest that unless the transition from FF to renewables is massive and quick there will indeed be plenty of displacements as we wind down the FF inputs to the economy (either because of peak oil or to reduce GHG). We need to design actions based on reality and not false hope. So until you can produce a real working plan for prosperity, I will continue to urge people to adopt reduced expectations and prepare for economic contraction.

Question Everything

George

To an optimist a realist looks like a pessimist. To a pessimist a realist looks like an optimist. Being a realist can suck sometimes.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

You are right Bart, from a historical perspective.

Historically the decisions were made to generate a local optimum. Market-based mechanisms for coordination have that effect. Its called the greedy algorithm. Do what is best for me without reference to the rest of the world. Hence shipping raw materials overseas to cheap labor markets makes sense in maximizing local profit. Only if everyone is doing it it raises the demand for transportation energy/oil beyond supply capacity. Whoops.

That was then, now is now. We've painted ourselves into a corner that will be hard to escape by decisions as usual. Now we may fail to recognize this and continue on with trying to find local optima while the whole system declines. That would certainly fit in with my thesis that humans have not yet evolved sufficient sapience to make globally wise decisions (that especially goes for our so-called leaders).

In the not-too-distant future I suspect we will not have the luxury of 'political decisions' as the way to fix things. But that doesn't mean wise rationality will prevail either. In the latter case we will be a very small blip in the evolution of Earth. An important blip, like the meteorite that hit Yucatan 65m years ago, but short in terms of geological time.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Growth

Well I'm glad to see that you are referring to development and quality over quantity.

I do think, however, that there is danger in the use of terms like growth that has historical context. Most people, and all neoclassical economists think of growth as an increase in GDP quarter to quarter. Aside from the deep problems associated with GDP as a measure of well being, people in general still believe that increasing GDP means the economy is healthy. They think this because growing GDP and low jobless rates have correlated in the past. If the objective is to maintain a low jobless rate then it follows that we need an increasing GDP. Moreover the quality of jobs counts for something.

That is what most people think about when someone is talking about growing the economy.

What you are suggesting is that one sector of the economy - alternative energy equipment production, installation, and maintenance (and David's mention of labor involved in retrofitting efficiency measures in buildings) - is growing while another sector - power generation, etc. - declines. That is really substitution at work. So in terms of providing jobs in one sector while diminishing jobs in another is hardly growth. It isn't even development because we are trading in one form of energy production that produces very high quality energy per unit of investment and labor for another that requires higher investment in land and other resources, possibly including labor, for lesser quality energy production. There is a substantial possibility that we will all be poorer in terms of energy to do useful work after this.

I remain leery of using terms like economic growth when it comes to thinking about planning how a conversion could be done effectively. If people take that rhetoric as promises for a brighter future (in their minds - the American dream, if you will) and end up having to grow their own food and shod their own horses, at least metaphorically speaking, then how do you think they are going to react? When the jobs available are hard labor to retrofit buildings and recover/recycle scrap do you think people will feel they were lied to about economic growth?

Regardless of whether or not there is any kind of improvement in our economics, I favor attempting Gore's proposal for the simple reason that it does start to address the most egregious part of CO2 emissions, but more so because we are going to hit peak fossil fuel energy within the next decade or two. A combination of effort to reduce electrical energy consumption (which has implications for plug-in or EV solutions for transportation) and increase renewable sources would go a long way to  solving our problem, or at least reducing the problems with climate change adaptation.

As for Gore's plan, I don't know what he has in mind, but I do know there is a rational approach.

1. Get energy engineers, physicists, and other energy scientists to evaluate feasibility for a number of scenarios. Let the thermodynamics decide what is likely to work. Rule 1. Don't rely on as-yet-undetermined technology to produce a magic result. Get Charlie Hall from SUNY Environmental Science & Forestry and/or David Orr from Oberlin to head this up.

2. Let the ecological economists into the room to help work out the economic constraints and requirements. They can fabricate a much more holistic plan. Costanza, Daly, et al.

3. Last of all let in the policy makers and political types to formulate a set of policy instruments that are targeted to specific goals laid out by the above. Slap their wrists when they violate a previously determined constraint. Lester Brown might be a good organizer.

4. Model the process of change-over from fossil to renewable sources. This would be a systems dynamics model of the two industries and their interrelations embedded in realistic ecological assumptions, including climate adaptation scenarios. The model should provide guidance as to where the leverage points might be.

But I hope I'm wrong.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

David

With all due respect I suggest that what we really need, badly, is to rethink our entire attitude toward economic growth. If you haven't already investigated Ecological Economics, please see:

An Introduction to Ecological Economics
by Robert Costanza, John H Cumberland, Herman Daly, Robert Goodland, Richard B Norgaard.  ISBN-10: 1884015727

I submit that our historic attitude that economic growth is a good thing is flawed. If you meant development, i.e. improvements in well being of all people without increasing the throughput of energy and materials, then disregard.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

jonas

Just shooting from the hip here. Will do some numbers later, time permitting.

But won't you have to first prove CCS viability before you can make claims about the efficacy of biofuels? If capture and sequestration can be shown to be effective (cost and physically) then I'm ready to listen.

The land availability argument also would seem to have a large number of hidden assumptions.

Thanks.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

It would help, but its not enough

I wish humans were much more rational than they are...

Humans are not wise enough. Rationality is good for problem solving and decision taking, especially in the short-run, but does nothing for understanding how the world works and using that to make good judgments. Wisdom takes in the big picture for the long-term. The vast majority of humans lack that ability. And it seems, so do the vast majority of the leaders we put in office.

I've written extensively about the little recognized brain function of sapience, the basis for wisdom. We often think we are not smart enough but it isn't intelligence that is lacking (well, looking at Bush it is) as much as judgment based on wisdom. We are foolish rather than stupid. (see refernce works below)

George

References:

Goldberg, Elkhonon, (2006). The Wisdom Paradox, Gotham Books, New York.

Hogarth, Robin (1980). Judgement and Choice, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Sober, Elliott & Wilson, David Sloan (1998). Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (1990). Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Anyone know...

Who does Obama get his science advice from? Or his economic advice? I think we can surmise his trajectory if we knew the people who are advising him now. The official web site is lacking the kind of depth that would help answer those questions.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Jon, you are projecting, but...

that's because we humans have gotten a vision of what wisdom is! Throughout history some people have been wise. We recognize it because we all have a little of it! But it is limited both in distance scale and time scale. Distance scale includes WHO we consider part of our tribe. Time scale includes not only your  children but future generations.

In human evolution we had not been selected for wisdom beyond our grandchildren and our tribe (also local tribes for trade). But the present conditions of our complex, technological, and energy-driven cultures, which emerged blindingly fast in evolutionary terms, has produced a need for global scale wisdom. Wisdom that can see sustainability for all future generations. That kind of wisdom is not ordinary in our population.

Wisdom depends on tacit knowledge (justified true beliefs) and models of how the world works. Wisdom is seen in the nature of judgments people make. It requires considerable storage capacity in brains, hence requires more than normal intelligence. But even normal intelligence should be able to serve a greater level of wisdom than you see in average individuals.

I see sapience as the capacity of individuals to think systemically and strategically with a strong moral consciousness. This capacity was just beginning to emerge in early Homo and selected for to produce Homo sapiens when the discovery of agriculture changed the selection dynamics (in my theory) to raise the need for short-term organizational skills and violence reactivity (to protect or invade land needed for food production). Still, sapience did develop. We have seen people with substantial capacity, and everybody has a little of it in themselves. So your projection is quite natural because we see a glimpse of it in ourselves. We just may need more than most people can muster to deal with the problems our species has created.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

PS. Bart

Optimists and pessimists are on extreme ends of a spectrum of personalities and biases. A realist is in the middle and bases arguments on both positive and negative evidence. To an optimist a realist looks like a pessimist and to a pessimist s/he looks like an optimist. Go figure.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Bart, consider the irony...

Our thinking is likely to be skewed, living as we do in one of the most abnormal ages that human beings have ever lived in.

How did the age get so abnormal?

Wolverine summed it up nicely, but you can read more about the problems with human levels of sapience on my blog.

Question Everything

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

I was joking Jason!

About the bet, anyway. I vaguely remember thinking I should, but got lost in other things. Damn.

As for GDP, I'm with Herman Daly on the worthlessness of that particular measure of wealth. GDP goes up when bad things happen as well as good. So the real question is will we be better off materially when energy inputs begin to fall and continue falling thereafter? I'm betting no. On the other hand, if we play our cards right we might be better off spiritually - that is we might be happier not chasing the consumerist American dream.

GDP is measured in dollars. Bad choice. Dollars don't do real work, energy does. If net free energy (physics talk) goes down over time, less work gets done. Measure true income in Btus and you will see real income/wealth decline. There is no breaking or bending of the second law of thermodynamics except in the minds of neoclassicists. Don't know if you are one, but if so, the future is going to disappoint you again.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

And then...

How long since he gave this talk? I got the impression from the content that this was several years ago (I couldn't spot a date, or missed it if it was given).

And what has happened since? What effect did his talk have? How effective is the network of really important people? Now that James Hansen has called for 350ppm as the stabilizing limit for CO2 (and we're at 380+) shouldn't we have mobilized massively by now?

Here is the problem with the entrepreneur's version of solving global warming. It takes energy to do anything. The more you do the more energy it takes. Pretty simple really. If you want to build a million solar panels you will have to expend a lot of fossil fuels to do so. Until solar panels make enough excess (above consumption demand) energy to reproduce and maintain themselves, meaning providing energy inputs to farming (labor)  and mining, etc., you will need fossil fuels. This goes for all alternative energy source technologies. Only when the whole alternative energy infrastructure is sustainable and producing the energy needed to run AN economy (and it won't be the one we've got now) will we be carbon neutral.

Don't get me wrong. I like a can-do attitude and the will to make things happen. But it will have to be the right things, not just the things someone wants. The right things will not involve either economics as usual (EAU) or politics as usual (PAU). It will involve massive sacrifice of energy consumption and careful husbanding of what FF energy we have to build the appropriate alternative energy capital while there is still high EROI energy to be had. We have to get our priorities sorted out. I suspect snowmobiles and yachts will not be high on the list. But neither will be traveling 20 miles to work, or even shipping microwave ovens from China.

What I don't see is that many people are recognizing the fundamental reality of economics -- that energy drives the economy. People seem to split between the cornucopians (a few above) and the doomsdayers (a few above). It's all or nothing. The middle way is to match our lifestyles and aspirations to what nature can actually provide. While we had a huge energy bank account in the ground we could afford to be big spenders, or thought we could. Now that we've spent the easy money we need to be very careful how we invest the rest in interest bearing accounts (alternative energy capital) and prepare to live on a modest income.

Of course, as the price of oil stays above $140/bl or goes past $150, as some are now predicting, the reality of energy-driven economics will start to hit home. If it doesn't then the conversation Doerr will be having with his daughter in 20 years will be about where the next scrap of food will come from.

Question Everything

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Signal processing!

I always look at these kinds of phenomena from the basis of signal processing - filtering specifically. The signal to noise ratio in oil prices is pretty bad, I imagine. The signal is the price based on basics - supply and demand. The noise comes from discrete events like burning a pipeline or a hurricane. Biases are slightly longer term pressures, they don't cause spikes but can create upward or downward short-term trends. Speculation is one of these kinds of noise. But if you could filter all that out you would be able to see the real signal and based on my very rough approximation I suspect the "true" price of oil signal is more than 50% of the smoothed value over say month-to-month averaging.

It would be a fun graduate student project to try to build a model that could filter the noise and tell us what the signal is for real.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Financial trend watchers...

are just transferring their observations of previous bubbles in stocks, housing, and other markets where speculation played a big role. They quite naturally assume that they are looking at a bubble in oil prices because it has many of the same characteristics as financial bubbles. Thanks to the neoclassical economics school they simply don't understand the dynamics of non-renewable resources (without adequate substitutes) vs. renewable stocks, like houses. So they apply the only tool they have (law of the instrument, Maslow) to a new phenomenon. I wonder what they will be claiming a year from now? Especially if Saudi Arabia manages to increase its production as promised and the prices don't come down.

Of course, I suspect that the Saudis are blowing smoke.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

And on your reading list by 'good' economists...

I highly recommend An Introduction to Ecological Economics, Costanza, Cumberland, Daly, Goodland, & Norgaard. A new, updated edition is on it's way so you may want to hold off on a purchase, but get the current edition from the library. Ecological economics is what economics should have been 30+ years ago. But since economists in general want to pretend to be physicists and they give politicians the ammo they need to get re-elected...

BTW: Hubbert's name is correct in the above, so you might want to drop the [sic] behind it.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Public education

Russ, you are right about the need to simplify for public consumption. Maybe your description is understandable and moves the majority of the public along in the right direction. But I find it sad that we have to dumb down our rhetoric because a phenomenon like peak oil is too hard for the average American to understand. Of course, this is probably why we are in the situation we are today.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Peak oil is not...

We don't think the world has run out of oil.

For the life of me I don't understand how this characterization keeps popping it's head up. Peak oil is not a theory about how we run OUT of oil. It is a theory about how the marginal energy return on energy invested (ERoEI or EROI) tends toward zero as the oil gets harder and harder to recover (deep water, arctic, horizontal drilling, pressurizing old fields, etc.).

This translates into dollars because, in the end, money = energy. Energy to do useful work (like drilling and pumping, building deep water rigs, building plants for building deep water rigs, etc.) is the only real currency that counts. Atoms you can reuse if you have enough energy to recombine them. But energy is a one-way trip from source to sink with the hope you can get some work done as it flows through the system. Hence the cost of recovering oil gets more expensive and eventually (maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday and for the rest of our lives) the return doesn't warrant going after the stuff any more.

The preponderance of evidence seems to favor the peak oil theory, and that it may be upon us today.

Now consider this. As oil gets more expensive, everything that depends on oil eventually gets more expensive. That includes oil rigs and people to work them. That means the price of oil goes up to pay for the increased costs - second order effects. The correlation (and some would argue the causal relationship) between oil price and inflation is strongly positive. This is an inescapable fact that underlies the peak oil theory.

So there will be oil in the ground (deep) but it will simply be too expensive both in energy and monetary costs to go after. The same logic applies to so-called unconventional sources. It takes considerable energy to make these sources useful, coming anywhere near the usefulness of light-sweet crude. And, the same logic applies to coal gasification and sequestration. The energy costs for these latter are not known as well as the costs for oil, but in the lab they are still quite high.

Please can't we purge this false characterization of what peak oil means once and for all?

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

hapa says:

you won't get an analysis with this level of detail. it's unknowable, except for saying that without action, the situation will be worse.

If it is unknowable and yet they are good questions to ask because they do, indeed, play into the picture, then how can we accept the conclusions of the IEA report? How do you extrapolate from unknowns?

Given that there are cadres of economists collecting and analyzing more complex data then what I would like to see, it isn't obvious to me that these questions must go unanswered.

Also, given that peak oil implies that we have very little margin of error, it would seem prudent not to just 'get going' only to find later we were off on the wrong track.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Gar

You may not have noticed that the quote was inside the blockquote from the comment made in Andy's blog. It was directed at some of the comment posters in the Dot Earth arena who have consistently pummeled me in past posts with arguments of why I can't possibly be right.

As far as questioning me on rightness or wrongness of the ideas I posted - fire away.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

What connects knowledge and policy?

Over the last several years I have been concerned with questions like: "why do our leaders make such dumb mistakes if they are so smart?"

At least part of the answer seems to be a lack of wisdom¹. Ordinary human beings, even very clever ones (intelligence + creativity²), are not really very sapient when it comes to global-scale wicked problem solving. The missing element is the judgment that comes from wisdom³. The latter is based on rich tacit knowledge of how the world works, hopefully based on the currently best scientific understanding. But it also depends on knowledge of human interactions and human nature gained by experience.

And all of this depends on a capacity of the brain which I call sapience⁴. Unfortunately sapience seems to be an underdeveloped capacity in Homo sapiens. The best evidence for this is all around us. Look at the state of the world today! We have cleverness aplenty. We are inventive and good technological problem solvers. But we are not very good at setting governance policies when the scale and complexity of issues reach the levels we see today⁵. We just keep muddling through and hoping our immense cleverness will be sufficient to get us through.

Democracy fails to raise competent leaders for two reasons. The voters are not wise and there are so few sufficiently wise people in the population that identifying them is nearly impossible (they are wise enough not to seek public office through what passes as a political process!)

Ironically, the solution to our problems may require abandonment of democratic governance and a concerted effort by clever people who care to find a cadre of highly sapient people (a council of elders!) to make judgment calls based on the best science and understanding of nature in its fullest sense. People like E.O. Wilson and Herman Daly, and Nancy Andreasen come to mind immediately. There are more. Most are scientists, or started out as scientists, but they are all humanists AND naturists. I would put my trust in a panel of such people to dictate what needs to be done in the future to save whatever can be saved of our world. It is a wise gamble in my mind.

1. Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven.

2. Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.

3. Hogarth, Robin (1980). Judgment and Choice, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

4. Mobus, George (2008). What is sapience?, personal blog.

5. Mobus, George (2008). Social organization, governance, and sapience, personal blog.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

A wasted effort?

Wolverine,

You might want to read my blog and other commentary I've made here and elsewhere on the nature of wisdom and the mental capacity called sapience. Your comment above suggests you do not understand that to which I am alluding.

There is nothing wrong with the genus. In fact I have made a study of the evolution of sapience in the species and what did, actually, go 'wrong' that caused the further evolution of the brain basis for wisdom to get sidetracked (as it were). Indeed, elsewhere I have suggested that a population of eusapient beings would behave not much differently from what you suggest. Wisdom extended to the whole earth would and could override some of H. sapiens more emotionally driven decision processes in favor of the long-term and the global scale. It boils down to the scope in time and space of the capacity for judgment. And that is a function of the brain processing power given to judgment.

But what, from one point of view, the one you seem to have adopted, looks like a mistake and a calamity might look very different from a grander view of evolution. After all, what was bad for the dinosaurs appears to have worked out pretty well for mammals and birds, no?

I am suggesting that the genus can yet give rise to a eusapient species out of the evolutionary bottleneck that seems increasingly likely to occur. There might be a solution, it just might not look like anything people now think about.

My sentiment is that evolution has produced something extraordinary in the hominid line. While I agree with you that the current species has acted like a petulant, spoiled child and a reckless teenager (perhaps that is more than just an analogy), I can't agree that total loss of this evolutionary product would be a good thing. What is needed is completion of the effort, not abandonment. H. sapiens might never achieve the status of angels but our distant descendants might have a shot at it. But I think it is our moral responsibility to recognize our own shortcomings and take action to ensure that an adequate gene pool exists after whatever bottleneck we face.

Please read a few posts at Question Everything or visit my academic site at: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/ before assuming too much from my comment here.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Toyota is a rare bird

Today there are very few world leaders or corporate leaders who have either the balls or the wherewithal to think ahead and use good judgment.

I examine the nature of judgment and sapience at:
Question Everything

George
 

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Here is my problem

One of the underlying assumptions behind all thoughts about building out alternative energy sources in order to keep our way of life pretty much intact: There will be plenty of spare energy available to build wind turbines and solar cells, etc.

All of these technologies are now dependent on fossil fuels for production. Until, or unless, someone can show how there can actually be enough spare available, high quality energy from the alternative energy sources already in operation this fact is not going to change. But anyone familiar with the problems associated with peak oil is going to realize that the scale of change-over and the time allotted to do so make this a less than feasible solution.

The price of oil just hit $127 a barrel and no one knows when this climb is going to end. One thing most people are sure of is that the supply is not keeping up with the demand growth. The long term outlook is for a global recession along with price inflation in every sector (all economic activity ultimately depends on high-grade energy to do work - period). As primary production (food and extractive industries) are hit with higher energy bills their costs are going to percolate up until eventually every sector is impacted. Producing alternative energy production capital in that kind of economic climate will, I predict, require significant sacrifices from everybody. And that will be just to produce enough energy production to provide a minimal consumptive lifestyle.

We do not live in a one emergency world. We are surrounded by emergencies that are all interconnected by the one factor that still goes without serious attention. People have a propensity to believe they have a god-given right to procreate and consume.

There are times when I suspect we don't give the deniers-delayers enough credit for native intelligence. Perhaps they actually do realize that at the scales we are talking about and with the loss of cheap energy to drive the engine of economic growth (hell even to maintain what we have now) that it is fundamentally impossible to replace the fossil fuel inputs in any reasonable time. I won't grant them conscious awareness of this problem. But I do suspect their denial comes from a more rational calculus than many readers here give credit.

Global warming due to GHG emissions IS important and does need to be addressed. But I strongly suspect it will be by radical reduction of economic activity (forgoing the flat panel TVs, the iPods, and the NASCAR extravaganzas at very least). Thinking that we will simply replace fossil fuels by wonderful technology is, I fear, magical thinking.

I hope I'm wrong.

George  

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Needed: Strategic plan for humanity, global scale

Global warming is just one piece of a very complex and dynamic puzzle. Who is thinking strategically about our species' future, the future of the globe?

http://questioneverything.typepad.com/

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Distortions in the information money conveys...

are a major cause of the ability for deceitful parties to hide real conditions and profit as they do.

Monetary-based measurements, like GDP are terribly skewed and simply do not help us understand what is happening in the economy or the ecosystem.

I have a proposal that seeks to make the workings of the economy far more transparent by relating the meaning of money to the real currency of work - free energy. My latest blog entry suggests that if people perceived the economy, at both a macro and micro level, as a work process that consumes energy in the process of creating wealth, that they would tend to make better decisions about what to spend money on.

My hypothesis is that if we change perceptions about the nature of reality, people will be able to choose more wisely. At present the vast majority of people base their decisions on ideologically-based perceptions of how the world works. The result is exactly the world we have today. If we want a different direction in the future we have to change how people understand the world.

George
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Yes, asking the RIGHT questions

I submit that we have yet to ask such.

I believe the right questions have to do more with our own nature, our own capacities, than with any technological competence.

Are humans, individually (in a democracy) and collectively, competent to make WISE choices? I think the evidence does not support a positive answer.  But realistically, are we, Homo sapiens up to the task? Before we assert answers about the technical competence shouldn't we look in the mirror? No matter what we might be capable of technically, we are not yet able to modulate or mediate our own behaviors. Shouldn't we be focusing on that issue before assuming that we can fix things technologically?

Asking the RIGHT questions is vital. I'm not seeing that we are there yet.

George
 

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

little faith, yeah

John,

That is exactly what my engineers used to say when they saw my bumps on their estimates. Go figure!

But the story I didn't tell is that when I was one of those engineers (software) I was just as guilty! Somehow it always seemed it should be easier than it turned out.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Irony can be pretty ironical

Usually, Joseph, I am in accord with your arguments. But I think you are very badly underestimating the nature of the twin problems born of fossil fuels - GW/CC and PFF. Peak fossil fuels is a greater problem than understood. It isn't just oil that is about to peak. Both coal (the economical stuff) and natural gas will peak in the not-too-distant-future as well.

Now here is the irony. As climate change accelerates and creates massive dislocations we will need to have more total energy available to do the work of adapting. You don't move large population centers without a substantial amount of work. Coupled with this is the fact that population is slated to be greater at mid century as well. So we have growing demand per capita, growing population, and a need to invest in who-knows-what amount of adaptation.

But wait! The energy supply will be in decline. I see no feasible way that we can build up alternative sources to the level needed in the time frame projected. Besides, you need fossil fuel energy to build the energy capture and distribution infrastructure that would then need to be self-perpetuating after the fossil fuel goes away. In other words, for alternative energy sources to be sustainable, they will need to supply not only consumption demand, but self-replacement into the future (all energy technology has to meet this criteria, which has been easy for oil and coal to do as long as their ERoEI was > 30:1).

All of this presupposes we're not in massive, energy-consuming resource wars. It doesn't factor in water shortages, food shortages, etc.

I think, in general, people tend to seriously underestimate the energy requirements to do all the work, even if we could approach maximum efficiencies. Speaking of which, realistically we are not going to replace the standing stock of vehicles with more efficient ones over night. We won't be able to convert all industrial processes in the virtual wink of an eye. I believe there needs to be much more attention to scale and the interrelatedness of all of these challenges. Just looking at one challenge, say climate change, and saying that is the most important is a big mistake. They all interact in complex ways that we need to get a better handle on.

Finally, I take issue with your point #4. On what basis do you casually claim, '...the peak oil problem will not "destroy suburbia" or the American way of life.' That seems like a very bold statement without much to back it up. Perhaps you covered it in the article, but it would have been nice to provide some hint of why in your judgment this statement is true.

Becoming a curmudgeon I tend to question everything.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Relationship between energy and money

I speculate that a good deal of confusion about things like value, growth, borrowing, etc., staples of the current economic view, might be cleared up if we better understood this relationship.

I've posted a blog on this that some might find thought provoking if not reasonable.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Hmm, tough choice

benp: 'Martin Rees is a doomsayer like no other. "Our Final Century"...'

Let's see. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of England, long, esteemed career vs. benp, a climate change denier with no visible publications. Tough choice on who to attend to, I must say.

BTW: it's "Our Final Hour" if you are referring to the book.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Some dynamical systems physicists...

are going to be surprised that they don't count as talking the language of science!

According to benp, "The language of catastrophe is not the language of science."

But actually catastrophe theory and chaotic attractor basin jumping are part of science. So maybe you should restrict this claim to the more colloquial version of catastrophic events.

Oh yes. Martin Rees, James Lovelock, Jared Diamond, and more than I can name (or should have to) are going to be disappointed that they are no longer talking the language of science.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Markets and hierarchical cybernetics

In a number of my blog postings last month I addressed questions about the general problem of governance from the standpoint of democratic politics, government structure, regulation, and economic cooperation/coordination mechanisms. The 'market' is a fine cooperation mechanism when embedded in a hierarchical cybernetic system that provides regulation and stabilization. You might be interested in my hierarchical cybernetic (strategic, tactical/logistical, and operational control mechanisms) discussions there.

The main principle is that evolution of system dynamics and stable steady-state require an integrated hierarchical control system of which all of the above are components. We, in the US have been part of an evolutionary experiment in moving toward this kind of system but we have a long way to go. Libertarians would have us believe that the ONLY control structure necessary is the market. They are, of course, completely out of touch with nature.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

That was my first thought too...

TaserP,

I agree. But I think this incident, like so many  others we've seen of late, is just one more piece of evidence that our leaders and their minions are lacking in basic judgment and wisdom. We are in the clutches of fools. I even wonder if Congress would have known what to do?

We can only hope there are judges with better judgment!

George
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com/

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Understanding denial/contrarianism

I find that attacking the denial game is a game in and of itself. What might be more productive is understanding what it is about human nature that causes some people to get into this kind of mindset while others are more open to changing their minds once the evidence is in. I've suggested, on Dot Earth, that the psychology of belief is where the real story is.

One of the most fondly held beliefs by modern humans is that profit is always a good thing. Even those who want to combat global warming are appealing to the profit motive and market mechanisms to save the day. It won't work.

I question the conventional wisdom at Question Everything because conventional thinking isn't going to work now.

George Mobus

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Overwhelming forces?

Joseph said:

I am a tad surprised that Shell doesn't understand just how much global warming will overwhelm all other concerns...

It seems to me that what will be overwhelming for civilization is the confluence of global warming and consequent climate change effects, peak energy, population overshoot, poverty, and all the various forms of ecological degradation. They all interact with one another and are all the result of human nature under the release of natural constraints imposed on the rest of the biological world.

These interacting forces will require a true systems approach to understanding and solving (if they are indeed solvable). I'm betting there are no simple solutions. I doubt we can simply say "reduce carbon output and all will be fixed." There are those who firmly believe that setting a tax on carbon will fix both the energy problem and the CO₂ emissions problem. Same for cap-and-trade. I suspect it won't be that simple at all.

We can't just say stop population growth, or stop overfishing, or stop deforestation, or... The world is a whole system with various non-linearities that complicate the dynamics tremendously. No single policy pronouncement will suffice.

This is not an argument for non-action. I fully support all efforts, no matter how local, to mitigate problems.  It is a call for a parallel effort in systems analysis at a global level. Nobody can say for sure that even that sort of approach will work in time to truly mitigate the problems and bring the world to a sustainable state. We have no way of knowing how much time is available to pursue this route. What I do feel confident in saying is that unless we do pursue the systems approach in earnest, the problems won't be solved.

George

http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com/

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Two thoughts

1. Senior scientists can pick up the mantle of civic activism after a proven career of science. They do not need to give up anything to be advocates. They additionally have the experience and (one hopes) wisdom to not step on the rakes. E.O. Wilson is my model for this.

2. Perhaps Grist could start workshops aimed at helping scientists become more vocal and giving them hints about how to avoid the rakes. I believe what may keep many scientists from becoming vocal is a fear of doing just that. If they had some tutoring about policy process and political savvy, perhaps more would join the chorus.

George Mobus
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com/

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

When you look at all the factors...

involved in determining the future.

David Roberts said:
"There's every reason to think that a comprehensive, full-scale retooling of the economy along sustainable lines would create the same wave of prosperity."

If just fighting global warming by "retooling" were the only thing to do, fine. Here is what worries me though. Where will the energy come from to retool?

Tooling up is like bootstrapping. Either you do it by using fossil fuel with its high quality free energy, in which case retooling is just another contribution to GDP and means new jobs.  Or you do it incrementally by re-routing energy from alternative sources to the retooling effort. Since we are not starting with a sufficient installed base of solar collectors and wind generators, where will the energy come from to retool?

Now given that the evidence is mounting that we are at or have passed peak oil we may not have the prior option (and this aside from reducing carbon emissions).

I think we are looking at very different economic dynamics here. I worry that avoiding the word sacrifice in order to not get caught in the enemy's frame will bite us in the ass when people start realizing they have to give up a great deal of the American lifestyle in order to reduce carbon. Actually, given the reduction in fossil fuels in general, those won't be sacrifices. They will be losses.

Call me a pessimist if you must. But I just don't see where the BTUs are coming from to keep things humming along without a care.

George
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Rate of change

The challenge is great. The time is short. Look at the graph.

By the time all of the parties who need to agree to this proposal did so, where would we be on that timeline? If we wait too long to implement, and if the effects take too long to be felt in actual reductions, and if the technological changes needed to permit economic activity (and development) to continue unabated do not come to fruition... how successful will this be?

I sincerely applaud the intellectual effort that went into this proposal. I marvel at the ingenuity and I deeply respect the contributers. I am a huge admirer of Dr. Costanza (whose name was mentioned on NPR's Market Place last night!)

But I think this is yet another attempt to do things in an orderly, essentially traditional way. The problems we are facing - overpopulation, peak energy production, and climate change due to global warming -  are all interrelated in complex ways. And they are all driven by the complexities of individual and group psychological processes better suited to the Pleistocene. The solutions, if any exist, will not be gotten from traditional approaches. It will take a massive revolution of social organization thinking bolstered by a concerted systems science approach to the technical issues to even begin to address these issues.

The world, one hundred years from now, will be a very different place. Either humanity will have reorganized itself and its general thinking to recognize a steady-state system with balanced energy flows and material cycles, or it will be back in the Pleistocene again (if at all). It's a hard call.

Is there enough wisdom among enough individuals to  lead such a revolution and a reorganization? I suppose time will tell.

I like to explore these kinds of out-of-the-box questions at:
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com/

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

What would help

Reduce baseload demand.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Mark B. (and anyone who has the time to read!)

Since caniscandida covered the issue of authority eloquently, I will only say ditto!

But it seems you put a lot of weight into the authority of Ray Kurzweil. On the issue of whether machines will one day be as intelligent as humans (or more so in Ray's estimation) I can only say that after 20 years of researching this area with hands-on demonstrations of what I call a 'moronic snail brain' my own opinion is that Ray and Hans Morovec ("Mind Children") are overly optimistic about what computers can and will be able to do relative to the processing capabilities of brains.

As to the issue of wealth creation and energy, my own contention is that wealth comes from the capture and use of free energy. It is true that it is the intelligence of the human mind that organizes material into tools that help redirect energy flows into human-valued useful work. But I also think we make too much of the notion that engineering is strictly intentional. The development of technology actually seems to fall into the category of evolutionary processes. What humans are gifted at is 'affordance' the ability to recognize a usefulness of an object and a co-opting of that object to achieve a desired objective. Later observations of how an object might be refined to achieve greater effectiveness or efficiency and intentional modification follow.

In other words, we are really just muddling through it all. Where we excel is doing a lot of muddling in parallel (and that is the only argument I allow regarding the number of people - the so-called critical mass). Then natural-like selection (the market) takes over to determine which muddling results will take hold.

Our problem is that we have no real far-sightedness regarding the long-term impacts of our short-term selections. Once upon a time cars seemed like a really good idea. And they were, to a point. But no one had the foresight to see what could go wrong when so many people bought and drove cars for so many miles. We humans have very little long-term judgment capability -- in other words, wisdom. Hence the muddling may progress us technologically, but unless, as Jon points out, it is coupled with the environment (and I see you have some experience in this area) and the trade-offs are noted and optimized for the long haul, it will be our undoing. I think of yeast growing in a sugar-rich environment, going wild, reproducing like crazy, and all the while churning out that most savory of fluids - ethanol. Its a waste product for yeast. But in a closed bottle with no escape it just keeps building up until it kills the yeast cells.  It may be good (in a sense) for us but the yeast are dead.

Our technologies are also the source of our non-biological wastes. These are building up at an exponential pace. What else should we expect from this scenario? Some magic technology - like super-human computers - that will thwart those nasty laws of nature and let us go on forever growing in mass, growing in junk, and depleting the natural world in order to achieve that growth?

George
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com/
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Mark, which science do you do?

Just curious since you seem to be the authority on what counts as science. No prediction - no science huh?

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Answer to Odo

Yes it is an important distinction. This is pretty standard stuff re: human mental models (c.f. Johnson-Laird, Philip, (2006). How We Reason, Oxford University Press, Oxford.) vs. formal statistical inference. If an economist is going with his gut then we are all in very deep trouble.

This isn't to say that statistical modeling is always that much better. The statistics may be flawless, but the underlying assumptions and what you choose to measure may be horribly askew. Isn't that what we are claiming about much of economic prediction?

The reference to 'Tetlock' is obscure to me.

As for 'true' scientific prediction, you claim that only deterministic systems count. This is terribly dismissive of the whole arena of stochastic systems that are, by definition only knowable by statistical inference. I think most biologists and many chemists would be surprised to hear that they are not doing true science.

In fact, even deterministic systems (involving gravity as in your example) cannot be modeled without some statistical work. Measurements are always imprecise and noisy. It takes many observations and averaging to collect the 'data'.

In the example you mention, the solar system and predicting the position and momentum of bodies, it turns out that the equations are not closed form and the solutions have to be computed by mathematical modeling. Even then there is inherent error in the prediction!

I would have said that true scientific prediction is ALWAYS approximate, and therefore of a statistical nature. But that's just me nitpicking.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Predicting happiness

Odo: 'My recollection is that Gilbert makes a case for human nature (and happiness) strongly centered in the word "prediction."'

My recollection is that he makes a case for how badly people 'predict' their own happiness under various scenarios of gain or loss. In other words, humans are lousy predictors of future situations involving how they will feel. Rather, they base their estimates of their happiness on a causal model of how something ought to make them feel. And they consistently get it wrong.

Robin Hogarth makes a good case for the fact that what people do is not prediction (in the technical sense) because that implies statistical inference based on probability theory. People routinely show that their estimates of likelihood for two or more mutually exclusive events often sum to more than one. Check out "Judgment and Choice" by Hogarth. Its a good read.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Prediction vs. anticipation

Odo and jabailo,

Humans don't actually predict, they anticipate. The difference is that prediction involves a formal statistical inference approach, which as Odo points out, humans are not wired for. We need models and computers to come up with predictions and since our models (especially those used in economics) are generally flawed the predictions are too. A prediction is saying what WILL happen in the future, all other things being equal. It is a passive statement, as jabailo alluded.

Anticipation is a fundamental property of all animals that move in their environments. Anticipation is the use of an encoded causal model, using a leading indicator cue to change the future! An anticipator is attempting to produce a good outcome from a potentially bad situation (e.g. getting eaten) through threat avoidance, or a better outcome through resource capture.

Odo is right about humans not being very good predictors, at least as far as their mental capacity is concerned. But formal models are sometimes good. Especially when they incorporate new information (like Bayesian learning) from empirical studies, as has happened with the climate models over the last decade.

In fact these models, if believed by our leadership, could become part of an anticipatory political system. The IPCC has pointed the way to what can happen given the cues we are now measuring (i.e. CO2 emissions). The UN, with the support of the US could act as an anticipatory system that seeks to mitigate a bad outcome. Its the support part that is in doubt.

Economic models and their subsequent predictions might seek to be anticipatory systems coupled with policy implementations. But let's face it; bad models (or incomplete ones that are not updated with experiential information) will fail. I think the record of economic models in producing real effective policy responses has been abysmal. And unless they start basing them on the real underlying phenomena that give rise to economic activities and processes they will continue to produce misguided policies.

George
When the results contradict the prediction it is time to start
asking questions.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

PS

I am working on a bottom-up model of energy flow through systems that will attempt to put much more physical/biological meaning into economic concepts (like money and trade). Will let Jon know when that is along.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Definition of growth

Some really fundamental problems with the definition of growth - especially in economic terms.

Would it be useful (or feasible?) to attempt to fix a definition of growth, grounded in biophysical reality, that we could then use to analyze various claims of economics?

This has been tackled before by ecological economists and actually before that by Howard Odum in ecology. The physical grounding comes from the recognition that free energy is transformed into chemical bonds in biological systems to produce biomass. The term used by Odum, embodied energy, has been shortened to emergy. As emergy is sequestered in biomass more chemical resources from the CHEOPS and trace minerals groups are clustered and the SIZE of the biomass increases at the expense of the material environment. The net result is both an increase in mass devoted to the biosphere and an increase in the relative complexity of the system. In nature, however, growth is self limiting by virtue of negative feedback mechanisms and, in the limit, depletion of the resources.

When applied to humans we are talking about the increase in human biomass, of course, but also the emergy and material mass devoted to human support systems. That would include the biomass of farms and the emergy captured in the tools and technologies of human origins. The amount of energy flowing into human usage, and diverted away from the rest of the biosphere has been increasing exponentially over history as human ingenuity has been applied to finding new, more energy dense sources of fuel, especially historically sequestered solar energy. Growth, therefore, is measurable by the emergy content of humans and culture.

In a finite resource and energy flow world - you know, the real world - growth of a single species will come at the expense of other species. Transforming rocks into tools means you give up rocks. The growth of one sector of the ecos results in the diminishment of all other sectors.

Economics doesn't begin to recognize this. It has no place for the conservation laws of mass and energy, nor the second law of thermodynamics for non-equilibrium systems. The earth is effectively a closed system to mass, and a fixed steady-state with respect to energy. Economics does not respect these realities. It's easy to understand why when not long ago the earth seemed a vast, conceivably infinite reservoir of everything we would conceivably need. And given the redundancy of function in some components of the environment, substitutability was not, at the time, an unreasonable assumption. But in the limit, it is of course false.

I would recommend sticking with the physical definitions of growth and development in order to truly conduct a scientific exploration of what wealth is and how it is created. Growth is an increase in mass devoted to a particular sub-system of the earth - say the human species and its civilization. Development is the increase in complexity over time. The latter also has the meaning of increasing the emergy extraction from total (and fixed) free energy flow-through. As Buckminster Fuller pointed out this means "doing more with less".

One thing I am quite sure of is that attempting to study growth or development phenomena using monetary units to measure is never going to produce meaningful results. There is no necessary connection or calibration between monetary units, such as dollars, and actual measures of mass and complexity. We have always relied on human judgment of worth or value to roughly gauge the correspondence. But as the nature of products and services have become so incredibly complex it has become increasingly impossible for individuals to make reasonable judgments about the long-term value of things they buy or services they purchase. It wasn't so long ago that one human could judge how long it might take him to make an arrowhead with his lesser skills, compared with how quickly he could make a game kill if he got arrowheads from his neighbor who had greater skill in arrow making but wasn't much of a hunter. Trade anyone? Those kinds of judgments are well within the human capacity to make. But how do you make judgments about wide screen, flat panel wall TVs? Certainly not by how much time and effort it would take you to build one. So what should you pay for it? (Actually should you even buy it?)

Economics, as practiced, is stuck in measuring attributes of the wealth-making machine that is human society using monetary units. Yet, if I and other physics-minded folks are right about the deep meaning of wealth-as-emergy then clearly the use of monetary units is way off the mark and will never tell us anything. Imagine trying to calibrate the relative values of energy production facilities (e.g. solar panels vs. wind turbines) when the meaning of a dollar's value shifts with the price of oil. And imagine what that means as oil is depleted. The dollar's actual energy purchasing power is based on a recursive relation. The more oil costs the more costly it becomes to produce oil extraction equipment. And guess what that does to the cost of oil. Its a vicious cycle that distorts measurements. The one that will be especially distorted is the gold-standard of economic health - the Gross Domestic Product. Using this device, the increased cost of oil extraction equipment contributes to the growth of domestic product (sold for more dollars) so the economy is gauged to be growing. I can't believe more people can't see this madness, but then I suspect that the majority of people can't really explain the second law of thermodynamics or the physical definition of work either.

Economics is a social science, and like all social sciences started its observation phase in the middle of the phenomenon of interest but with the assumption that its subject matter was a closed system without a need to see its relationship with the physical world (except in the sense of domination over it). Biology kind of started with a similar assumption about life - it is so obviously different from non-life that early Greek 'biologists' set it apart from the rest of the physical world. But that mistake was corrected by chemistry.

E.O. Wilson has called for a consilience of knowledge wherein the social sciences can be integrated with (not taken over by as too many post-modernists fear) the natural sciences. In truth its all natural science. But this would call for neo-classical economists to change their understandings radically, I think. I can see that this is a traumatic experience and means that many underlying assumptions about what is true will have to be revisited and many given up. But it is the only way forward as far as I can tell.

Economics has many useful insights and tools for studying the phenomenon of human choice and values - what artifacts and services they will want to use and have. But they need to be grounded in models that are co-extensive with physical, biological, and psychological sciences. Inroads to the psychology of economic choice have already been made, e.g. the work of Kahnemen & Tversky. But until this extends downward into biology and physical chemistry it won't produce any results we can actually use to solve problems like global warming.

Survival of our species could very well require questioning the conventional wisdom. I question everything at:
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com/

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Odo - growth

Are you suggesting that Moore's Law (observation) implies an infinite reduction in the size of bits?

I should point out that quantum computing (if it ever comes to that) is not about storing fixed bit patterns but rather the algorithmic manipulation of such patterns that will presumably still be stored on magnetic or electronic media. So please don't suggest that as an out.

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Jon, JMG - machines

Isn't it a matter of bootstrapping and evolution. Or emergence if you like and selection for improvement. Three ingredients go into work (useful): free energy, matter arranged to permit dissipative flow through (or with sufficient degrees of freedom to allow those arrangements), and intelligence aimed at doing the arranging of matter so as to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the work accomplished. By intelligence I don't mean intentional a priori design (you know, like in 'intelligent design'). I am talking about the capacity to learn patterns and then the fortuitous exposure to some serendipitous arrangement that happens to work better. More a matter of discovery and then exploitation through 'affordance'.

The history of machine development has been one of   (usually) step-wise improvements in functionality, efficiency, and esthetics. Even modern engineers advance designs by incremental improvements rather than imagination followed by quantum leaps.

But there would be no impetus to evolve machines unless all three factors were present and available. Harold Morowitz pegged it though with his famous saying: "It is the flow of energy through a system that acts to organize the system." Human intelligence is the result of biological evolution toward higher information processing capacity. Culture is the result of meta-biological evolution as the availability of free energy (first fire, then agriculture, etc.) was increased through exploiting stored energy sources, fossil fuels just being the most accessible high-potential source. The whole process of evolution (more intelligence and more machines) is one big positive feedback loop, but only as long as there is a net potential between the energy source and the energy sink that exceeds the storage capacity of the current system (e.g. dissipation yet to be found, so to speak). When the system is fully dissipative, that is when it achieves a steady-state dynamic, things stop developing (at least in physics!) That could happen because we've had long enough for the system to evolve or because the energy flow is turned down.

The latter is my worry. The reduction in free energy portended by the peak oil phenomenon will put a lot of those machines to rest (and rust). Fewer machines means fewer people since we are now so fully dependent on those machines.

We have to find a way to power down (Heinberg) or relax (Tobis) gracefully. But before we can even begin to work on that we have to convince people that that is our course of action. We have to convince people (and economists that still believe) that growth is now NOT A GOOD THING, even though once long ago it might have been. That one worries me too. Intelligent as our species is, I have serious doubts about its claim to wisdom. And I suspect it is the latter that will be required.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

The practical side of growth

My sense of the compelling economic story for growth is that it creates new jobs. Recession (bad) = lower job growth to accommodate the population. Not-recession (good) = annual growth of GDP (stock market or your favorite surrogate). People believe it. Bernanke believes it.

From there some, maybe most, economists argue it also creates demand for products, which in turn creates creativity and entrepreneurship. The virtuous cycle (ala Friedman, "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth").

So any theory (ideological or formal) will need to address how reduction in consumption will not cause loss of jobs and reduction in improvements in life (of course it will need to explain how not having humongous widescreen wall TVs contributes to a better life).

Coming up with such a theory will be a great challenge testing the intelligence and creativity of Homo sapiens, or what I have called our cleverness (I have renamed the species Homo callidus, man the clever). I think, as I believe Jon does, that the model for such a theory must come from the natural world - from ecology - and understanding how a dynamic steady-state energy flow system might sustain humans within the fabric of the ecos. I'm betting in advance that it will involve a whole lot fewer people on this planet, but that is yet another problem to solve.

Neoclassical economists, as a rule, find it hard to admit that their domain of study is a subset of a larger system, the ecosystem. Of course there are a growing number of economists who are questioning the basic assumptions (we just had a posting from Costanza, et al.) that fail to acknowledge this fact. Progress is being made in understanding reality by these efforts, but as long as the general public (you know the people that can vote and sometimes do) believes that growth is good, the politicians will believe growth is good, and thus the economists (who are hired by the politicians or bankers - one and the same?) will think growth is good.

It's a daunting task to redefine what is good and what is bad. Especially when through much of history what is now bad was actually good!

George
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Odo - Huh?

Sorry if I misunderstood you. I can parse sentences but sometimes miss the intended semantics.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

A basic model (for starters)

Jon and all,

Here is a rough diagram of a net energy production farm. It is necessarily simplified and I have left off the relevant parameters (e.g. amount of insolation per unit area).

a sustainable net energy farm

The devil is always in the details, isn't it? But I find it is best to start with simple frameworks and add details as they become apparently needed. As per my last comment, there are baseline numbers that can  be applied to this kind of model that would at least tell us what is feasible.

Regards

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Climate Disruption

I think the intent of the phrase 'global weirding' was to emphasize the weather weirdness people are beginning to experience due to climate shifts as the world seeks a new steady-state. I suggest we start referring to what is happening as climate disruption or disturbance to emphasize this aspect without making it sound too gloom-and-doomish. Even though I tend to be on the pessimistic side in terms of where this is going I still talk to people about it as if I believed it is yet manageable. My hope is we can avoid the runaway warming by reducing the CO2 forcing. If we need to get people on board by suggesting we can avoid climate shift problems through framing the issue more mildly but not too mildly, so be it.

As for Friedman: My own take is that he is a good recognizer of new trends (good or bad) and a keen observer along the way. But he too often jumps to premature judgments and draws faulty conclusions as evidenced by the failures of too many of his predictions. But that's just me.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

Energy is the only real currency

I have always been amazed at how economists have missed one of the most obvious facts of the real world - that energy is the real currency of the world system. Money is nothing more than a signaling mechanism regarding the amount of free energy available in the system. The coinage of the realm is used to form messages about the availability of energy to do useful work. It is not the work itself.

All work requires the flow-through of energy. And by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, once energy is used up in doing work, it is lost as waste heat. So unlike material, which can in principle be recycled, energy flows in one direction, into, through, and out of the system. The so-called economic growth of the past century has been fueled by easily extracted fossil fuels, increasing the energy input per unit time. Our experts - the economists - have never understood that it was the energy flow that allowed this exuberance. Fuel is treated more-or-less like any commodity with prices speculated on and a dollar price set. The problem is the dollars should be attached to the number of BTUs available. The commodification of fossil fuels and the speculative trading distorts the monetary system's ability to represent reality and value.

To be sure energy coupled with human cleverness (at finding ever new ways to waste the energy in their ignorance) could provide for a sustainable 'economy' if 1) the energy is renewable, 2) the population were substantially smaller and in steady-state, and 3) each individual consumed a much smaller amount of energy than the typical American today so that the sum used equaled the sum gained. Then, through technologically reasonable conversion rates (raw solar to high-potential free energy) we could enjoy an economy where human ingenuity results in what Buckminster Fuller called ephemeralization - doing more with less.

Given that the prevailing Zeitgeist holds that growth of the GDP is an economic good, contraction of the energy flow after say, peak oil, will be viewed depressingly. Its a shame.

But maybe stories like this will help wake people up. After all, Kahnemen & Tversky did much to dispel the belief that humans are rational agents, a cornerstone of neoclassical economics. Maybe with oil prices so high they will begin to understand the relationship between money and energy.

George
http://www.questioneverything.typepad.com/

George Mobus, Professional Student for Life