Comments GliderGuider has made

How does population change the picture?

It's very encouraging to envision a non-catastrophic decline to the beginning of another round of human civilization's adaptive cycle.  It's also good to contemplate what sorts of changes we might make now to promote such an outcome.  When we do this, however, we must remember to consider all the factors arrayed against us right now.  Not the least of these is the burgeoning human population, or more accurately its burgeoning consumption and waste production.

There is no question that modern industrial civilization is the largest, most complex, most interconnected, most productive system yet seen on the planet.  If the resilience theorists are correct, it is therefore axiomatically the least resilient.

Per capita energy consumption is a good proxy for overall consumption, and its change over time will, if anything, understate the level of overall consumption as the energy intensity of the global economy declines.  Unfortunately, per capita primary energy consumption is again rising following its plateau during the 1980s and 1990s.  When you combine that fact with a population growth rate of 75 million people per year, it's obvious that we are continuing to increase our pressure on the global ecosystem.  That means that all the stresses THD mentions continue to climb, as does the risk that some perturbation may eventually prove too great for the system to absorb.

When people speculate what might cause such a perturbation, the usual suspects include nuclear wars, pandemics and climate change.  I maintain that the likeliest suspect is none of these.  Climate change is too slow and gradual, and while wars or pandemics could be candidates, there is one other factor that is both strong enough cause a problem, and absolutely inevitable.  The clue is in the first phrase in the previous paragraph.  The more I have learned about it, the more it seems obvious to me that the energy disruptions prouced by declining global oil production have a high probability of triggering a precipitous release of system organization in the near future.

"Oh no, not another peak oil doomer!" Well, actually yes.

We know that oil is a finite resource.  We know that global oil production has been on a plateau for two years.  We know that oil is intrinsic to the transportation networks that bind the web of ultra-efficient (and correspondingly low resilience) world industry and trade.  We know that production is declining in almost three quarters of the world's oil producing nations.  We know that production in some oil provinces and fields is declining at near double-digit percentage rates.  We know that all but one of the 14 oil fields that have ever produced over one million barrels per day is in decline, and there is significant evidence that the last one - Ghawar - is now entering decline.

The Hirsch Report has made a convincing case that mitigation efforts need to begin ten to twenty years before the decline begins in order to avoid significant social and economic disruptions.  Evidence is mounting that the beginning of the decline is now five years or less away.  Not everyone agrees with this time line , of course, but several serious analyses of planned oil projects (known as bottom up analyses) have pointed to this possibility.

If the decline begins in 5 years, we will have by then added over a third of a billion people to the world's population.  At our present energy consumption rate that hints at a rise of over 5% in demand just at a time when our crucial energy source is going into decline.  And this situation will continue to worsen as the world's population continues to grow.

Now, if the effects of such resource depletion were uniform, we might not have to worry too much.  After all, a demand growth of 1% per year could easily be dealt with through conservation measures.  Unfortunately the growing disparities between rich and poor nations guarantee that the effects will not be uniform - some regions will face calamitous effects, while others will fare much better.  Here is where the problem of resilience (or rather the lack of it) rears its ugly head.  The highly interconnected nature of our civilization guarantee that local failures from system shocks like the sudden disruption of national oil supplies will have repercussions far beyond their origins, and in sectors of the civilization not obviously related to the original cause.

I claim that such failures are inevitable precisely because a rising population with rising material expectations will collide with a declining oil supply within such a short time frame that mitigation efforts will not have a chance to work.  Population and time scale are the confounding factors for any foreseeable avoidance strategy.  Combine that with the natural tendency of nations to try an ensure their own advantage and the reluctance of people to voluntarily impoverish themselves, and you have a sure-fire recipe for a stew of hard times.

And of course all this is playing out against the backdrop of the other stresses that THD mentions.  Soil fertility depletion, fresh water depletion,  the death of the oceans, deforestation, desertification, pervasive chemical pollution, accelerating rates of species extinctions, global economic instability and accelerating climate change merge to generate a rising drumbeat of ecological stress.  We have set ourselves up for a Tragedy of the Commons of truly epic proportions.

While we may not be able to avoid the fate that appears to be looming over us, I maintain that there is in fact hope - though coming from an unexpected direction and not without cost.  Here's what I see, excerpted from my article Population Decline - Red Herrings and Hope:

Start from these three realizations:

1. The genetic imperatives that drive our reproduction, consumption and competition guarantees that we will not change our civilization's value set voluntarily or preemptively.
   
2. Humanity is like yeast. We reproduce and consume until our ecological niche is stripped of resources and poisoned by waste, then we die off.
   
3. Humanity is like cockroaches. We are resourceful, adaptive and hardy, and you can't kill us all.

These three facts mean that although we are heading for a bottleneck, some portion of humanity will survive to regroup and rebuild in a massively damaged, resource-poor world. On our way through the bottleneck we will lose much of our physical and social capital. The one and only good thing about this, from a species, biosphere and planetary perspective, is that the existing socioeconomic structures will be forcibly and involuntarily stripped away, leaving room for new structures to take their place.

The change in perspective involves not looking forward from our current situation into the decline.  Rather, step forward a couple of hundred years and look back.  what I believe you will see is the rebirth of the next cycle of civilization.

The question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?"  How will we ensure that our descendants will  eventually inherit a sustainable world, even though our current situation is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination?

I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds for such a transformation have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through the bottleneck, and they carry the correct values for the rebirth I suggest.

American activist Paul Hawken has just written a tremendously important book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen.  For a glimpse of some of these organizations, take a look at the web site WiserEarth.org.

Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, one attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization.

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups "the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream".

I am convinced we will not save this civilization, and will lose a large fraction of humanity in the process.  But I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future.

Good luck to us all,

Paul ChefurkaOn A review posted 2 years, 4 months ago 70 Responses

willa, your point is well taken.

It is indeed much easier to snipe than to come up with workable suggestions of one's own.  As well, what finally gets implemented after several bruising encounters with reality will probably bear little resemblance to any of the original plans (that reminds me of the  quote, "In war no plan survives its first contact with the enemy.")

The problem is that all these plans are the best I've seen, and they all have holes you could drive a  Humvee through.  Given the strength of the "enemy" we face in the Problematique, it's very easy to lose faith...On A review of Joe Romm's new book posted 2 years, 10 months ago 34 Responses

The disconnect

This disconnect between the problem set and the solution set is evident in every Global Warming or Peak Oil book I've read that takes the time to do a halfway rigorous assessment of the problem.  Look at any of the works by Tim Flannery, George Monbiot, Ken Deffeyes, Richard Heinberg - if you want to see a tryly naive proposal, read Heinberg's new book "The Oil Depletion Protocol".

The difficulty is obviously the scale of the problems and the fact that any significant mitigation is going to require international cooperation in making ourselves voluntarily poorer.  That will be a hard sell even as the effects of the problems become obvious.

Garret Hardin observed in "The Tragedy of the Commons" that not every problem has a technical solution.  He was talking about population growth, but the observation applies equally to the GW/PO domains - especially inasmuch as these problems are merely manifestations of the actual underlying problem of too many people doing too much.

However, as you observe, it's considered unseemly to point this out.  The human spirit must be thought triumphant in all matters, or it raises uncomfortable suspicions that we may in fact be merely part of nature, running by pretty much the same rules as reindeer or yeast.  This notion is profoundly distressing to the well-conditioned dualist world view upon which our continued comfort  depends.  As a result, all the authors described above are forced to take refuge in puerile proposals, or risk not being published at all.

I personally don't think there is a technical solution to the problems of Global Warming or Peak Oil, at least in the sense of a solution that would somehow permit 6.5 billion people to keep on living this lifestyle in perpetuity.  My readings on ecology convince me that in such an overshoot as we are currently in the pressure is ultimately resolved through a modification of both quality of life and population numbers.  I see no reason to believe we are any more exempt than other species from this iron law of nature.
On A review of Joe Romm's new book posted 2 years, 10 months ago 34 Responses

Charcoal Fertilizer

I'm halfway through the book, and I've come to the conclusion that it's the very best general-interest GW book I've read so far.  The tone is strong and uncompromising, but the book itself isn't depressing.  What is depressing is watching the American administration stick its collective head in the sand (or somewhere more scatological, if you prefer).

My major concern is in the imminent convergence of Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Scarcity.  Researching those three aspects of the Global Problematique, keeping an eye out for ways they intersect and amplify each other, as well as how solutions to one may be incompatible with (or even prevent) solutions to the others - now that's depressing.

I'm thinking of putting together a two-book package on this convergence to give to people who Need To Know.  It would consist of Hell and High Water and Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over - one of the better general books on Peak Oil.

Anyhow, on to charcoal fertilizer.  I recently had my eyes opened to the general subject of Terra Preta do Indio in the Amazon.  This led me to the discovery of the commercialization of the idea by a company called Eprida, and also to the academic work of Johannes Lehmann.

This research points the way to a very low-level technology that has mind-boggling promise:  it sequesters carbon, it enhances soil fertility, and it can produce biofuels - both directly by growing fuel crops and indirectly during the charcoal-making process.  As a result it addresses  in one mechanism the three main converging crises:  liquid fuels, CO2 emissions and imminent food scarcity.

It's also one of the few mitigation proposals that might actually scale up enough to do some good:

Actually, the scalability seems to be extremely good, as reported in this article:

Claims for biochar's capacity to capture carbon sound almost audacious. Johannes Lehmann, soil scientist and author of Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management, believes that a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions!

As a result, I'm convinced that this technology deserves mention, an possibly even pride of place, in analyses such as Dr. Romm's.  I have yet to see  it mentioned in any general-interest overview of the topic, and I believe this is an egregious oversight.  It's certainly as doable as a million wind turbines, less technologically problematic than CO2 sequestration in old gas fields, and much more politically acceptable than 700 nukes.
On A review of Joe Romm's new book posted 2 years, 10 months ago 34 Responses