Showing posts with label carrying capacity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carrying capacity. Show all posts

Wednesday, 25 October 2023

The Porcupine Saga, Part 6, The Sign Above Our Gate

Allan Harper, later on Tuesday, April 9, 2030

Allan Harper left the old farmhouse and walked across the yard to the big pole barn where they'd been piling everyone's stuff as it came in, ready to be sorted out and distributed. It was getting dark, but a "dusk to dawn" light on a wood pole illuminated the area, and he easily made his way to the person-sized door in the east wall of the building. Entering, he called out, "Dad, you in there?"

"Yeah," Tom replied, "I'm back this way."

Allan picked his way between piles and found his Dad seated at a table which held an elderly desktop computer and a big printer. Behind him were several tables of seedlings with grow lights above and heating pads underneath. Tom had been working on them for the last few weeks—the pole barn was not, strictly speaking, heated, but it had been a warm spring thus far and the plants were doing well.

He nodded to his father and said, "I guess I owe you an apology."

"Maybe so," said Tom, turning away from the computer so he could face Allan. "I gotta tell you that 'fascist' shit cuts pretty deep."

"Yeah, I can see that," said Allan. "So, sorry. But...well, a lot of what you say really does sound fascist to me."

"I am puzzled by that," said Tom, "I've spent a lot of time, on my blog and on social media—even in person, sometimes—helping people identify fascism and talking about what is wrong with it. As I understand it, the two essential things about fascism are: one, a belief in inequality, that some people are significantly better than others, and we would do well to let those superior people lead, and two, that there is an essential identity, often based on race, that characterizes that elite. Right?"

"Sure," said Allan, "no argument there. But there are other elements to fascism, and eco-fascism is one of them. Whenever you start talking about over population as the world's main problem, you set off my 'eco-fascist' detector."

"I think there must be a little more to it than that," said Tom. "Eco-fascist are by definition right wing, which I am certainly not, and they are against immigration, which I am also not. As I was reading just now on Wikipedia, they 'embrace the idea of climate change as a divinely-ordained signal to begin a mass purge of sections of the human race', which I certainly don't agree with."

"So you say," said Allan, "but then you go on and make a liar of yourself."

"How so?" asked Tom, with a puzzled look on his face.

"Well," replied Allan, "you brought up the ideas of carrying capacity and overshoot—overshoot by 170%, I think you said—which implies mega, or maybe even giga, death, and mainly in the third world countries. All very handy for an eco-fascist, who would love to see all those poor, brown people gotten rid of. Environmentalism through genocide, it's been called."

"But I don't think overpopulation is our main problem," said Tom. "And I am not suggesting that we get rid of anyone. Maybe you need to look at little deeper into what I really am saying. Will you give me a chance to explain?"

"Sure," said Allan, "go for it. And you can start with this thing about overpopulation not being the problem—it's seems to me that it follows obviously when you start talking about carrying capacity and overshoot."

"Well, I've met a lot of people who do indeed think that connection is obvious," said Tom, "but I'm not one of them. I think you and I need to talk more about carrying capacity, but first we need to consider the other side of the calculation—the idea of impact. If our impact on the planet is greater than its carrying capacity, then we are in overshoot. Impact is the product of three factors: population, affluence and technology. I=PAT. Affluence, which is equivalent to consumption, is, in my opinion, the thing we should be focusing on. Overconsumption rather than overpopulation."

Tom reached back toward the table and picked up a sheet of paper, which he passed to Allan. "That's a diagram that I've been using as my banner on Facebook for years. I think it sums up some pretty significant information."

"OK, let's see," said Allan, "this plots percentage of total world consumption against income divided into deciles."

"That's right" said Tom, "see anything significant?"

"Well, it looks like the top decile—the richest 10% of the world's population—are doing almost 60% of the consuming," replied Allan, "and at the other end, the poorest people are consuming very little."

"Exactly," said Tom. "So if we did as the eco-fascists recommend—got rid of, say, the poorest half of the people living today—what effect would that have on our degree of overshoot? To make that easier for you, I've added it up—the poorest half of us only do about 7% of the consumption."

"Well," said Allan, pulling his smart phone out and starting up a calculator app, "if we are really 170% into overshoot, then reducing consumption by 7%... that's .93 times 1.7... we'd still be 158% or so in overshoot. Considering you're talking about killing over 4 billion people, it hardly seems worth it."

"I'm not talking about killing anybody, but yes, that's my point exactly," said Tom. "Here's another suggestion though—instead of killing anybody, let's try taking the richest 20%, who do nearly 77% of the total consuming, and reducing their consumption by 60%, so they are only consuming at a level that equals about 31% of our current total consumption. This still leaves them doing more than their share of consuming, which they seem to think they are entitled to, even though the other 80% of the population are only doing 23% of the total consumption.

"I've done the calculation, and it brings us down to around 92% of carrying capacity. In other words, not in overshoot at all. That's what an eco-socialist, or a green anarchist like me, thinks we should ideally do. And then we should put a quite a bit of effort into rebuilding our damaged biosphere so as to increase its carrying capacity and give ourselves a comfortable margin to work with. Of course, the 'them' I'm talking about is actually 'us', and that makes it harder."

"I have to admit," said Allan, "that even though you are discussing carrying capacity and overshoot, you don't sound much like an eco-fascist. At least when you are given a chance to go into the details."

"Funny how that works, eh? But I agree, many people in the 'collapse sphere' do deserve to be called ecofascists," said Tom. "They make statements about needing to 'get rid of' a certain number of people to solve the overshoot problem. Then they start talking about how even poor people contribute to overconsumption and how we need to stop the developing world's population from growing so fast. Without even considering that consumption in the developed world is growing faster than population in the developing world. On top of all that, it's clear that these folks have no intention of doing anything about their own contributions to overconsumption or overpopulation."

"Yeah, and it's that kind of thing that gets me pissed off," said Allan.

"And so it should," said Tom. "But a moment ago you said 'if we're 170% into overshoot'. I take it you're questioning that number?"

"More the carrying capacity numbers that it is based on," replied Allan.

"Right," said Tom, "and you were saying something about the whole concept having been debunked?"

"Yes, exactly," said Allan. "As I understand it, carrying capacity is dependent on technology—with better tech the planet could support more of us. It's the T in your I=PAT equation."

"I'll get back to technology in a moment," said Tom, "but first there is an ideological issue that may be causing some confusion here."

"What's that?" asked Allan.

"Well, I've noticed that conventional leftist these days freak out whenever they hear anyone talking about limits," replied Tom. "As I was saying earlier, they think shortages are always fake and just created to keep prices up and profits flowing. I won't deny that does happen sometimes—the so called 'free market' is anything but. Anyway, they do allow as how we live on a finite planet and someday we may run into limits, but surely not yet. I think they are fooling themselves more than anybody else—we are clearly running into some real limits."

"You're really sure about that, are you?" asked Allan.

"Yes, I am," said Tom. "I've observed that among the general population there seems to be a lot of selective blindness and denial where this subject is concerned. As if there has always been enough and always will be, and that's the end of it. But the whole science of ecology doesn't agree. Carrying capacity has proven to be a very solid and useful concept. Sure, it isn't a fixed number—it's actually easiest to calculate afterwards, based on observations, and it varies from year to year responding to factors like rainfall, temperature and so forth. And you are right—it can change based on the sort of technology you are using, but whether technology makes things better or worse is a tossup. I'll give you some links to the organizations that are calculating carrying capacity and ecological footprint. See for yourself if they are full of shit or not."

"I guess I should do that," said Allan. "I do know that most 'conventional leftists', as you call us, think that only the top 1% or so need to reduce their consumption, and then we can increase the standard of living of the people at the bottom end to something more equitable."

"That's a laudable goal," agreed Tom. "Those folks have a lot of faith in technology actually increasing carrying capacity and/or reducing our impact. Look up 'eco-modernism' if you want a catch phrase to match your 'eco-fascism'".

"Those eco-modernist guys have some good ideas," said Allan. "Right now we are feeding well over eight and a half billion people and doing a better job of feeding the poorest among them than we were even a few years ago. That's mostly due to advances in technology, so I don't see why are you so against it?"

"That's easy," said Tom, "The modern agricultural technology you're talking about is hugely dependent on non-renewable resources. Every calorie that's produced uses up ten calories of fossil fuel energy in the process. Plus minerals like phosphorous and potash, among others. All of which are non-renewable and being used up faster every year."

"But renewable energy sources are growing exponentially," said Allan. "At least they were before the depression hit."

"You're right," said Tom, "but the amount of fossil fuels we're using has been growing as well. Remember when I first started talking about Peak Oil back in the late naughties? We were using about 85 million barrels a day back then. In 2028 we were using well over a 100 million, even with all the renewable energy sources we'd added. The depression has reduced energy use somewhat, but it has also reduced investment in renewables and discovery work for fossil fuels. The big oil companies are spending less every year on finding new resources and borrowing money to pay dividends to their stock holders. And it's been a long time since new discoveries exceeded consumption. Clearly this can't go on forever, even if the depression is giving us a bit of a breather.

"We've gone to the ends of the earth and surveyed essentially all the resources. New finds are getting rarer and smaller, and the quality of the resources being discovered is getting lower, taking more energy and fancier technology to access."

"We do have a lot of faith in technology, " said Allan, "I think it has a huge potential to fix our problems. I'm puzzled as to why you don't see that."

"Well, if you look at history over the last few hundred years, technological advances have always brought about increases in consumption, not decreases, by reducing the costs of goods and services and making them accessible to more people," said Tom. "We have a tendency to think of technology as something that creates energy. In fact, technology uses energy and raw materials, to a large extent non-renewal resources like fossil fuels and metals that can't be replaced. And it produces wastes that have to be dumped in sinks that are another finite resource. Like CO2 from burning fossil fuels accumulating in the the atmosphere and the oceans, causing climate change and ocean acidification. So on the surface it may look like it's helping, but in reality, not so much.

"The idea of decoupling, of developing technology that can maintain and grow our standard of living without having a negative effect on the environment, seems in reality to be nothing but a pipe dream. The T term in I=PAT always seems to be greater than one when you look at it closely. I think technology has an important role to play in our future, as you'll see here if things go as I'm planning. But we are going to have to be very careful not to use it in ways that make things worse."

"Technology saving our asses is a critical to my argument," said Allan, "and now you are telling me it's bullshit?"

"Sorry, but I am," replied Tom, "based on two things:

"one, so far we have achieved only a little bit of relative decoupling, that is, increasing consumption these days doesn't have quite the impact it once had, but we are a long way from absolute decoupling—from actually managing to increase our consumption while at the same time reducing our impact. And there's no clear path to get from here to there.

"And two, the current state of the world is not conducive to further technological development. Not right away, for sure. Currently the whole planet is mired in a pretty serious depression, there's no spare money for anything, and quite a few places are suffering civil unrest or outright war. Climate change is getting worse every year, new pandemics and new variants of the old ones keep popping up and sabotage of our energy infrastructure continues."

"OK, you got me there" said Allan. "I have to admit that, over the last couple of years, I have grown more pessimistic about revolutionary changes ever happening. Whether you're talking about social organization or technology. I had a lot of hope for nuclear fusion as an energy source that could save us, but now it seems like all the research projects are shut down due to lack of funds."

"Fusion would only have been a short term fix," said Tom, "solving the energy shortage only to run us up against other limits in the long run, and pushing us farther into overshoot in the process. Make energy cheap and the waste heat from our increased energy use would soon become a problem, along with shortages of material resources.

"Anyway, I reached the same conclusion about revolutionary change years ago. You really should read my series of blog posts that summarizes the book The Limits To Growth. Sure, the book was published in the early 1970s, and wasn't meant to be a prediction, but since then things have gone pretty much as they said they would if we didn't change from our 'business as usual' approach.

"As I've just said, we do need reduce our level of consumption, and the best way to do that would be to get rid of capitalism. This would significantly reduce the ridiculous overconsumption inherent in the lifestyles of the rich. It would also get rid of the production and consumption of unnecessary products and services needed to create profits so the rich can continue to accumulate wealth. This might not quite get us out of overshoot, but darn close. To get the rest of the way, we could eliminate some of the waste that's built into our system, and if all else fails, try practicing just a little bit of frugality.

"It's not going to happen, though... I expect that we'll continue right on as we are until collapse brings us to a grinding halt—reducing both population and consumption whether we like it or not—and by a lot more than is necessary just to get us out of overshoot. Some of the things causing collapse are consequences of overshoot—climate change in particular. Others are the inherent flaws in our capitalistic system finally catching up with us.

"All that talk with Jim about slow versus fast collapse," Tom said, shaking his head. "It'll happen at the speed it happens. Still, if we can mount some relief efforts, and help people adapt, I think we can slow collapse significantly and save a whole lot of lives. But if we let it get past a certain point, we'll no longer have the resources to do anything about it, and what follows will be a hard, fast collapse with very few survivors.

"Anyway, sorry for the rant. As you know, recently most of my efforts have been focused on adapting to the changes that are coming. Like setting up this place."

"I think I do follow your explanation," said Allan, "and since your focus isn't on eliminating poor brown people, I guess I can live with it. I do have a couple of questions that have been nagging at me for a while, though."

"OK, got for it," said Tom.

"The first thing is this," said Allan. "You been talking about reducing consumption and at the same time you been talking living well. I've been assuming both those things apply to the community you want us to build here, and it seems to me they are contradictory. What about that?"

"You're right in your assumptions," said Tom, "and on the face of it those two things are contradictory. But it seems to me that the capitalists have done everything they can to make sure a lot of our basic needs don't get fulfilled, while at the same time creating a bunch of artificial needs that they can profit from. So people feel they are missing something and spend a lot on consumer goods they've been told they need, but that don't really help. We are going to reduce that here, cutting off the endless marketing that we've all been exposed to, and at the same time doing a much better job of fulfilling our real needs. We should feel better while actually consuming less."

"OK, I think I see what you mean," said Allan, "and it may even work. It's a big change for us to make in how we live, though."

"Yes, it will be," said Tom. "I think you'll find it will be a positive change, though. Not having to worry about earning enough to pay the bills, having worthwhile work that clearly contributes to the community and free time to create our own entertainment and enjoy it with friends in that community, will make a huge difference."

"You know, I think it will," said Allan. "My other question is about sustainability. You haven't been using that word very much, but it is implied in much of what you're planning."

"Yes it is," said Tom, "and it's going to be harder than many of us probably think."

"Well, that's just what I was going to say," said Allan. "Even though we are going to be reducing our consumption, we'll still be dependent on a lot of non-renewable resources. What are you going to do when they run out?"

"Well, many can be replaced with renewable resources," said Tom. "Some quite easily and immediately, others not so much. We need to make those ones last as long as possible, giving ourselves time to find renewable alternatives, or ways of doing without."

"That does sum it up nicely," said Allan. "I just wanted to make sure you are aware of the problem and planning on addressing it. Sounds like you are."

"Oh yes," said Tom. "Those are both good questions. I am a little surprised, though, that you don't have reservations about the ethics of what we are planning to do here."

"How do you mean?" asked Allan.

"Well, we are setting up to live fairly well, while people suffer and die elsewhere," replied Tom

"You can't be expected to do the impossible," said Allan. "Under the conditions that are coming, the developing world, and for that matter, most of the developed world, might as well be on the moon. At least we won't be exploiting them or their resources anymore. And you're planning on significantly reducing our level of consumption, so we won't be taking more than our share locally—probably significantly less."

"That's true, but somehow it doesn't seem like enough," said Tom.

"OK, but didn't I hear you talking about helping pretty much everybody who shows up at our gate?"asked Allan. "And helping out the local communities as much as we can?"

"Sure, but..." said Tom.

"No buts," said Allan, "I think you've got that one covered, as ethically as needs be. But what's this nonsense you're talking about how we should organize this place?"

"What nonsense?" asked Tom.

"Well, based on the bits and pieces I've heard so far, I have to say I am not impressed," said Allan. "Leadership has got to be a pretty important part of any organization, and it seems that you want to do without it altogether. And you'd have us spend a huge part of our time in meetings, hashing out what we are going to do. But perhaps I should give you a chance to make yourself clear?"

"Once again, that would be nice," said Tom. "OK, first let's take a wide view and talk about how we ended up where we are today, organization wise."

"OK," said Allan.

"Earlier, I was talking about how our ancestors lived in egalitarian bands, and it worked very well for them," said Tom. "Nobody called me on it, but I said nothing about how that lifestyle originated. Our nearest primate relatives all live in bands dominated by a single alpha male, and it seems likely that we started out that way too. And stuck with it, up to a point."

"OK," said Allan, "what point was that?"

"Well," said Tom, "most of us have a built in resentment of being dominated. As our intelligence evolved we got to the point where we could imagine something better than putting up with a dominant bully, especially a bully who wasn't very good at his job. Our communication skills had also developed and we could share our thoughts on the matter with our fellows and make plans together to get rid of the bully. At first that might have been just to replace him with someone more agreeable, but if there were no volunteers we were left with the idea of treating everyone as equals and not having one dominant person. This worked so well that we stuck with it."

"But how did we get from there to where we are today, with hierarchies everywhere?" asked Allan.

"Well, eventually we started to live in larger groups," said Tom. "And they worked just fine, on the same egalitarian basis. But at some point, quite a while after that, a few people realized they could set up a hierarchy with themselves at the top and benefit hugely from opportunities this afforded for exploiting the rest of the population. They justified it by saying the larger group was difficult to manage and required a new, better kind of organization. By the time those at the bottom of the hierarchy realized they'd been had, those at the top had a firm grip on the situation. It was too late to do much about it—the rulers maintained a monopoly on force and violence. About all the common people could do, if they didn't want to go along with it, was to head for the hills. And many did.

"Today, we've all been fed propaganda about how hierarchies and leadership are necessary for efficient organizations, and many people accept that without question. But I think we can see that there are other ways of organizing groups, even large groups, other than feudalism or capitalism. Or feudal capitalism."

"And what specifically might those other ways be?" asked Allan.

"Well, I am an anarchist and an egalitarian," answered Tom, "and I believe strongly in direct democracy, based on consensus decision making. That all fits in well with the mutual aid, sharing and co-operation I was talking about earlier this afternoon."

"You know, Dad," said Allan, "you have a way of packing a whole lot of meaning into a few words. How about unpacking that a bit?"

"OK," Tom said with a wry expression on his face. "I guess that was a mess of buzz words that need further explanation. And some background on how I came to these ideas may be called for as well.

"Abraham Lincoln said that no man is good enough to govern another man without his consent. I would go further and say that no man is good enough to govern another man, period. I have worked for many bosses in large and small organizations, and none of them did a very good job of it. Sometimes that was partly the fault of the individual, but it was always the fault of the system as well. I have been a boss myself and I am no better.

"This isn't easy on the boss either—it's a stressful job. A good leader puts more into it, and it takes more out of him. When he finally packs it in, and he will, you are left with finding a replacement. Remember, I'm 75. Even if I am up to the job, and that's not certain, I've only got a few years left. I have no solution to any of this, except to change the system, and not put an individual in charge.

"To misquote David Graeber, one of my favourite anarchist scholars, 'To understand anarchy you must accept two things: one, that power corrupts and two, that we don't need power—under normal circumstances, people are as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be and can organize themselves and their communities without being told how. If we take the simple principles of common decency that we already believe we should live by, and follow them through to their logical conclusions, everything will turn out fine.'

"This means that everyone involved must be treated as equal—that's egalitarianism. And direct democracy is when everyone in the community takes part in the decision making process, and decisions are made by discussing things until a consensus is reached."

"Doesn't this take a lot more time than having a leader who the rest of us just follow?" asked Allan.

"It does, somewhat," replied Tom. "but it also results in better decisions, using of all those spare brain cells that would be sitting around unused if we had a single boss, and benefitting from the knowledge and experience of everyone in the group. And when we go to implement the decision, we'll be working together with people who are already convinced that it's the right thing to do. No disgruntled minority working against what's been decided.

"Understand, I am not saying that every last detail must be hashed out in a meeting of the whole group. As I was saying earlier, crews will implement in detail the general decisions of the whole group and deal with the specifics of our day to day operations."

"You really think we'll end up with a net gain using this type of organization?" asked Allan.

"I do," said Tom, "lots of people have used it and with good results. There's another Graeber quote that explains what reaching concensus is really about, 'Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.'"

"OK, sounds good. But what about leadership," asked Allan, "don't we still need it in some situations?"

"Well, by now, I guess it's obvious that I'm not keen on the very idea of leadership," answered Tom. "I think we should be fiercely proud of not having leaders here.

"But, yes, I'll allow as how there as some situations where it might be beneficial. During emergencies, we should all be prepared to step in and lead if we find ourselves at ground zero—put out the fire, so to speak—then relinquish authority when things are well enough under control for a crew or the collective as a whole to consult and decide what to do long term.

"And there may be room for some different sorts of leadership. The same people who came up with those ideas on group sizes also talk about leadership as hospitality rather than domination. I'm not sure exactly what that means in practice, but it might be worth looking into. On the whole, though, direct democracy should be our thing. The only question is whether we are ready to give it a try. Or more specifically, are you ready?"

"I am still doubtful," said Allan, "but yeah, I'll give it a chance."

"Good," said Tom. "As it happens we have an individual among us who is a trained facilitator, and has some experience in assisting groups with consensus decision making."

"Who's that?" asked Allan.

"Angie Ferguson," replied Tom. In response to Allan's raised eyebrow, he went on, "yeah, I know—she introduces herself as a hair stylist, but before she ran out of money and dropped out of school, she was studying political science. She also took some serious courses on facilitating, and did quite a bit of work as a facilitator. I should have gotten her to help from the start today. When we go back to the house, I will invite her to facilitate the rest of our meeting. Get things going on a better footing, I hope."

"OK, I have to admit I am pretty clueless about this approach," said Allan, "maybe we could arrange for some training?"

"An excellent idea," replied Tom. "And now on to another issue."

Tom turned back to the table and picked up a 13"X19" sheet of glossy paper on which was printed a graphic and some text.

The Porcupine Refuge Co-operative

"What you got there, Dad?" Allan asked.

"Just an idea for a sign to go over our gate, including a name for this place," replied Tom

"Well, we sure as heck need a name," said Allan, "calling it 'this place' is getting lame."

Tom handed him the sheet and he looked it over. "Porcupine Refuge Co-operative, eh?" Allan said, "I get the 'Refuge Co-operative' part, but what's the connection with porcupines, and what's the graphic? It almost looks like a cave painting."

"It is a cave painting," said Tom, "and while there are various theories about what it means, the one I like best is that the guy on the ground with all the arrows sticking out of him—kind of like a porcupine—is an alpha male who just wouldn't take the hint when the other people in the band suggested that he move on. You can see that the others are pretty thrilled about doing him in."

"And this is a reminder to any individual who tries to set themselves above the rest of us here at 'Porcupine'?" asked Allan.

"You got it in one!" Tom said with a smile. "What do you think?"

"Looks good to me," said Allan. "I hope we can reach a consensus on it, eh?"

"Yes indeed," said Tom, "I hope so too. If you and I are good, perhaps we should head back and see if there's any supper left."

"I'm good, and hungry," said Allan. "Lead on."

When they got back to the house, supper was just finishing up. Karen sat them down at one of the big tables in the dining room, in front of plates of spaghetti and meat sauce. "I hope you two have got whatever it was out of your systems," she said.

"Yep," said Tom, "we're feeling much better now. Would you mind asking Angie to join us?"

"Yes sir," Karen said with a mock salute and headed for the addition. She was back in a moment with Angie.

"Hi Angie," said Tom, "I probably should have had you facilitating this meeting from the get go. Allan and I are all sorted out now and we'd like you to take over and facilitate the rest of the meeting. I need to finished my thoughts on ecology and then go on to the next section.

"Well, if all you are going to do is stand there and talk, maybe take a few questions, there won't really be much facilitating to do, will there?" said Angie.

"I'll grant you that," said Tom. "Not at the start, anyway. But I'm going to end up talking about participatory, consensus decision making. After that I'll introduce you. And then I have a suggestion that will spark our first bit of group decision making."

"I guess that might work," said Angie with a frown. After a moment's thought, she switched to a smile, and added, "OK, let's do it. What's this first decision about?"

"An idea for a name and logo for this place," said Tom. "You take over, give me a chance to make my suggestion and then I'll get out of your hair."

"Somehow I doubt that," replied Angie, "but sure."

"OK, we'll just finish eating and then I'll continue where I left off before."

A few minutes later Allan and Tom entered the addition. Allan took his seat at the back next to Erika, and watched Tom continue to the front of the room and pick up his marker.

"He get you straightened out?" Erika whispered in Allan's ear.

"Yeah, that's pretty much what happened," replied Allan.

"I hope you'll excuse the interruption," said Tom, "at least it gave you a chance to have supper. Anyway, I think Allan and I have our differences sorted out now. And he helped me get my thoughts in order for the rest of this."

Tom went on, going over all of what he and Allan had discussed before supper and, in Allan's opinion, doing a better job of making his points than he had the first time through. There were a few questions, but Tom fielded them all with no trouble.

"So, those are my thoughts on how we should run this place," said Tom. "I know I was never officially appointed boss around here, just sort of fell into by virtue of having started things, but at this point I am officially stepping down. This leaves us without a leader and better off for it. But a central role in participatory decision making is that of the facilitator. A facilitator is not a leader or boss, but more of a referee. And we are fortunate to have among us someone who is a trained and experienced in that role. I think you all know or at least have met Angie Ferguson. Angie, why don't you come on up here and take over from me."

Angie came to the front. Tom handed her his marker and then took a seat beside Karen.

"Maybe take over isn't exactly the right word, since I'm not going to be running things either," said Angie with a wink directed at Tom. "But I take your meaning. We really need to arrange some introductory training in this style of decision making for all of you, and also get a few more people trained as facilitators so we can share that duty around and avoid me becoming another de facto boss. We obviously can't do that tonight though. What we can do is discuss an issue Tom wants to bring up. Back to you, Tom."

"Thanks Angie," said Tom, standing up, but pointedly not resuming his former position at the front of the room. "I think we've all noticed that it's getting pretty awkward not having a name to call 'this place'. So, I have a suggestion."

He'd rolled up the big printout and brought it with him, and now he unrolled it and held it up in front of his chest. "The Porcupine Refuge Co-operative is my suggestion, and it comes with a graphic that I think we should paint on a sheet of plywood and mount above our front gate."

"Where the heck does 'porcupine' come from, and how does it relate to that graphic," asked Erika, "or to what we are doing here?"

Tom was a little thrown by this, and hesitated long enough for Angie to step in, "Bet you thought this would be easy, didn't you Tom?" she said with a grin. "You've already explained this to Allan, right? Just share with us what you said to him."

"Allan made it pretty easy on me," said Tom, "easier than his better half is doing, anyway. So, the graphic is a cave painting..."

Coming soon, The Porcupine Saga Part 7, When We Met Jack.


Links to the rest of this series of posts:
The Porcupine Saga

Maintaining the lists of links that I've been putting at the end of these posts in getting cumbersome, so I have decided to just include a link to the Porcupine section of the Site Map, which features links to all the episodes I've published thus far.

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Sunday, 21 February 2021

Collapse you say? Part 6, overpopulation and overconsumption

We've had a lot of snow
recently in Kincardine

In this series of posts I've been talking about why I think our industrial civilization has been slowly collapsing since the 1970s, and is likely to continue to do so until circumstances have forced us to adopt a sustainable lifestyle. In the light of the issues I'll be talking about in this post, I should make it clear that I don't think of collapse as a problem to be solved, but rather as a predicament to which we must adapt. And there is a lot of room for different opinions as to what exactly those adaptations should be.

My last few posts have sparked some discussion on a couple of issues that I think are worth devoting the entirety of this post to, before I go on with scheduled programming, so to speak.

Footprints

The first is what "footprint" actually means. The best source I can recommend for this is the Global Footprint Network and their Ecological Footprint measure. I found their FAQ page answered most of my questions. Interestingly, the most surprising things I found out are about what the Ecological Footprint isn't. Which lead me to the Water Footprint Network and the concept of Carbon Footprints. For the issues of dwindling non-renewables like fossil fuels and minerals it was harder to find anything like "footprints", but Wikipedia does have an article on resource depletion which may serve as a good jumping off point if you want to do further reading.

What footprint definitely does not mean is "square miles per person". This is clearly a confused approach to the subject, since hunter-gatherers who have a very low impact on the ecosystem use a lot of square miles per person, but step very lightly wherever they go. While modern humans occupy a relatively small area of land each, but have a very heavy impact on the planet.

The Ecological Footprint uses a measure of "global hectares per person" where "one global hectare is the world's annual amount of biological production for human use and human waste assimilation, per hectare of biologically productive land and fisheries."

"In 2012 there were approximately 12.2 billion global hectares of production and waste assimilation, averaging 1.7 global hectares per person. Consumption totaled 20.1 billion global hectares or 2.8 global hectares per person, meaning about 65% more was consumed than produced. This is possible because there are natural reserves all around the globe that function as backup food, material and energy supplies, although only for a relatively short period of time."

Those quotes are from Wikipedia's short article on "global hectares", which may serve to clarify what I am talking about here.

Overpopulation or Overconsumption?

The second issue was a disagreement about whether overpopulation or overconsumption is the main problem contributing to the overshoot situation we are facing. Opinions on this seem to lie on a spectrum, interestingly coinciding somewhat with the left to right political spectrum. In my discussion of this below, I'll be disregarding the people who don't think there is a problem to worry about at all, who don't believe that we are or ever will be in overshoot. They are either in denial or have immense and unjustified faith in progress and technology. But that is a whole different story.

First I should note that the problem is not just that there are too many people or that they are consuming too much, but also that both our population and our consumption are growing. Even if we didn't have a problem yet, growth means that we soon would have. Of course, we clearly do have a problem and have had since the 1980s when our impact went above the carrying capacity of the planet. Growth just means it's getting continual worse.

My friends on the left aren't terribly concerned about overpopulation. What they are concerned about is excessive consumption by the upper class. If that can be eliminated, and the lot of the poor improved accordingly, they believe that the demographic transition will continue and population will peak out at a level that the planet can support. They also speak about reducing waste in the food production system, which would be a good idea. And they have quite a bit of faith that technology will assist with all of this. If you suggest that we should be actively trying to reduce our population, they may well label you as an "eco-fascist".

Which brings us to the other end of the spectrum, where there actually are some eco-fascists. But most of the people I know who are saying that overpopulation is the source of our problems also acknowledge that over-consumption is a big concern. They mention overpopulation first because they are concerned that it doesn't get enough attention.

There are some people, though, who focus entirely on overpopulation and believe the overconsumption is solely the result of overpopulation. Worse yet, they take the fact that an abundance of food facilitates population growth and then jump to the conclusion that having less food available is the only effective way to get our population to decrease. The problem with that idea is that it doesn't fit the facts.

First, these folks will tell you that we are continually increasing the food supply and because of this the population is growing at a steady 1.4% per year. In fact, while the level of food production has been increasing, the population growth rate peaked in the 1960s at around 2% and has been decreasing since then, to around 1.05% in 2020.

In the developed nations the population growth rate has decreased to below the replacement level in many cases. And that is with an excess of food.

In the developing world, fertility and the population growth rate are still high. This despite the fact that many people are suffering from malnutrition—around eight hundred million globally, most of them in the developing world.

The eco-fascists say that if the food supply was gradually decreased, gradually increasing malnutrition would cause a reduction in fertility and with it falling population growth rates, and without causing undue hardship. But while severe malnutrition does reduce fertility, the response of fertility to minor levels of malnutrition is much more complex.

As for avoiding hardship, in the real world of markets where we ration by price, if there is a shortage of food then the price of food goes up, and the poorest people in the affected area experience what amounts to famine driven by economics. In many cultures this is more likely to spark a revolution than to decrease fertility, as it did in several countries when food prices spiked at the start of what has been called the "Arab Spring". This was less a matter of a sudden desire for democracy than a reaction to an increase in the price of food.

The negative effects of a plan to control population growth rate by reducing the food supply would fall disproportionally on poor, brown people, and this is where the term "eco-fascist" arises. Labels aside, oppressing the poor and weak seems to me like a pretty despicable thing to do. Especially since it would not, as we'll see in a moment, achieve the desired result of reducing our degree of overshoot.

Even though my politics are pretty far left, my ideas on overpopulation versus overconsumption lay somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I've been looking at humanity's impact on the planet using the I=PAT approach, which considers the effects of population, affluence (consumption) and technology. It's pretty clear that our impact is already greater than the carrying capacity of the planet (about 165%), with both population and consumption contributing to this, and both continuing to grow. It is clear that the per capita level of consumption is increasing, so that something beyond just population growth is driving growth of consumption. You mighty characterize this as "increasing affluence", which gives the problem a name, but doesn't do much to solve it.

It is also important to keep in mind that where ever our impact is greater than the carrying capacity, the ecosystem is being damaged, and carrying capacity decreases. This makes our situation even worse.

Much of our current consumption relies on non-renewable resources. As these resources become depleted, it costs more and requires more energy to access them. This takes us further into overshoot in a way that I don't think is adequately represented by footprint or impact measures. The depletion of resources we rely on, and don't have adequate substitutes for, is a major driver of collapse.

For a long lived species such as ours, there is a lengthy delay between reducing the rate at which our population grows, and actually reducing the population. At best, if the demographic transition keeps spreading in the developing world, and the population growth rate continues to decrease, it will be many decades before our population stops growing. During that time our impact will almost certainly exceed the carrying capacity of the planet by a much greater extent than it does at present. I would expect this will result in a significant dieoff of the human population.

So, I believe we should still do everything we can to reduce population growth, including educating women, striving to give them more control over their lives, and making birth control more readily available. We should not do anything that would be morally abhorrent, lest the solution be worse than the problem.

We also need to look elsewhere for something that can be done to reduce our impact in the short run, before overshoot catches up with us.

In the decades since Paul Erlich proposed the I=PAT approach, many have turned to technology as the most promising way to reduce our impact. It is the only approach that doesn't call for significant changes in lifestyle, especially for rich people. Sadly, no real technological solutions have been forth coming. The oft promised "decoupling" hasn't happened, and there is good reason to think that it won't ever. Many new technologies actually consume more, especially more energy—take bit coin, for example. I'll go into that in more detail in an upcoming post.

The only remaining alternative to reduce our impact would be to reduce consumption. This is something most people are unwilling to do, but I believe we that must, and that we can. While overpopulation will take a long time to address, overconsumption can be reduced almost immediately, as we have seen during the current pandemic.

Consider the graph below, which charts world income deciles against consumption.

Figure 1

I guess it's no surprise that richer people consume more, but how much more is pretty shocking.

Based on this graph, 59% of consumption is done by the top 10% of the richest people in the world. The bottom 50% of the people, the poorest people in the world, do only 7.2% of the consumption. If we were to get rid of the bottom 50% of our population, it would have very little effect, leaving our impact at 153% of carrying capacity( .928 times 1.65 = 1.53). On the other hand, if we were to get rid of the richest 10%, it would reduce our impact to 68% of carrying capacity(.41 times 1.65 = .68). Of course, I am not proposing that we set out to "get rid" of anybody, but this does show why I think that we should be looking at reducing consumption as well as population. And why I think people who want to stop poor folks from breeding are barking up the wrong tree.

Before we can take a close look at what drives consumption, and the growth of consumption, I think we need to look at several touchy subjects—human nature, our needs and wants, and politics. I'll do that in my next post.

Here is some additional reading on the subject of population growth and malnutrition: https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/4523


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?

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Saturday, 2 January 2021

Collapse you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff

Nature's Ice Sculptures Along Lake Huron

On the rare occasions when the subject of collapse comes up in polite conversation, a kollapsnik like me is liable to get responses like: "Collapse you say? Surely not!" Thus the title of this series of posts. But I've found that responding with "Surely yes!" isn't very effective (as well as sounding rather childish). The pandemic this year (2020) has got some people thinking a bit more, but most still expect things to get back to normal any day now.

So in this series of posts I've been talking about what collapse is and why I think the our civilization has been slowly collapsing for several decades and will continue doing so. This in the hope of laying out the facts clearly enough that just about anyone should be able to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

In the last two posts(Part 2, Part 3), I looked at problems with the inputs to and outputs from our civilization, and pointed out a number of issues, any one of which alone should be cause for great concern. And taken together, well....

Now I think it is time to have a look inside the box labeled "Industrial Civilization". When you look around you from within this civilization, you are confronted with a complex and confusing sight, of which I don't have any sort of complete understanding. But there are some aspects which bear more directly on collapse than others, and I'll have quite a bit to say about them in the next few posts.

The problems we've looked at so far—resource depletion, declining surplus energy, climate change, overshoot and decreasing carrying capacity—all seem to be a result of the ongoing growth of our civilization, both population growth and growth in affluence. So you would think we'd be making a serious effort to get growth under control, maybe even initiate "degrowth", in order to cope with these problems. And yet, over the last few decades economic growth has come to be seen as a necessity. If you paid attention to election speeches, you'd conclude that the most pressing problem we face is maintaining and further stimulating such growth, not preventing it. It seems to me that this obsession with growth is a built in feature (dare we say a fault) of our civilization.

To more clearly understand our impact on the planet—our footprint—we need to review the subjects I touched on at the end of my last post: eco-system services, carrying capacity, and overshoot. Eco-system services are things like breathable air, potable water, a reliable climate and moderate weather, arable soil, grasslands, forests and the animals living on/in them, waters and the fisheries they provide, and so on. And also important, though I neglected to mention it in my last post, is the ability of the eco-system to (within limits) absorb and process our waste products. All these things are available to us free of charge and we simply could not do without them.

It is reasonable to call the rate at which the eco-system can supply those services to us its "carrying capacity". The portion of those services that the human race uses can be called our "footprint"—the impact we have as we walk upon this planet.

According to the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity, credible estimates of carrying capacity range from 4 to 16 billion humans, with a median around 10 billion. The literature I've read on carrying capacity and dieoff typically talks about us currently being at around 165% of the planet's carrying capacity. If such estimates were made when our population was around 7 billion, then the carrying capacity was a little over 4 billion. That's at the low end of the range of estimates, which seems prudent. Using the high or even median estimates would lead us to do nothing in the belief that everything is OK and may well continue to be OK. Instead, we should be setting ourselves up to run well below carrying capacity, allowing us to live on this planet without damaging it and with a comfortable margin to allow for unforeseen circumstances.

Being over carrying capacity is called being in overshoot, and it leads to collapse. Some of the extra over 100% comes from consuming non-renewable resources, and some of it comes from using renewable resources at greater than their replacement rate, so that they too are irreversibly consumed. This means that we are actually reducing the carrying capacity of the planet and digging ourselves into an ever deeper hole. Certainly judging from the resource depletion and pollution (mainly climate change) problems we're currently experiencing, it seems that we are indeed in overshoot, and the condition of the ecosphere is definitely worsening.

If we are to solve the problems caused by our overshoot we need not just to reduce our impact below the current carrying capacity of the planet, but rather to go below the smaller carrying capacity that will be left by the time we get to where we are aiming. Further, since it is a big planet with different conditions in different places, we can't just look at global averages, but must consider impact versus carrying capacity on a region by region basis. This to avoid being fooled if we are lucky enough to live in an area that is not as yet hard hit. In much of Europe and North America, it seems we are currently being fooled.

Our footprint (impact) is expressed in the following equation: I=PAT.

"I" stands for impact, or footprint, which is the product of three factors:

  • "P", which stands for population.
  • "A", which stands for affluence, or consumption of resources.
  • "T", which stands for technology, and is included in the hope that improving technology can reduce our impact

We seem determined to do whatever it takes to increase "I", no matter how negative the results. Is this because of something inherent about human beings, or the way we organize ourselves, or the circumstances we find ourselves in? Or perhaps all three combined together?

In the rest of this post and the following one we'll look at this from the viewpoint of our growing population. In future posts we'll look at the role affluence and technology play in our problems.

But first I think we need to understand something about the mathematics of growth. In cases where the rate of growth is related to the size of what's growing, growth is "exponential". If you chart such growth on a graph, it looks something like this:

Figure 1, The Exponential Function

This is the kind of growth you get with a compound interest savings account, where even if the interest rate stays the same, the balance in the account increases dramatically over time. It is convenient to look at exponent growth in terms of the doubling rate, the amount of time it takes for that bank account to double. A rule of thumb is to divide 70 by the percent growth rate per year, and that gives you the approximate doubling period in years. If you are lucky enough to get 10% interest, your savings will double in 7 years. At 5% interest it takes 14 years to double and at 1% interest, it takes 70 years to double.

What may not be clear from Figure 1 is the degree to which the curve takes off as it moves to the right. Growth is very slow at first until we reach the "knee" of the curve, then it goes right through the roof, so to speak. A great deal has been said about how exponential growth is counter-intuitive for most people. Here is a short (not quite two minutes) YouTube video about the subject. If you have a little more time (11 minutes), this video goes deeper into it.

But in the physical world, growth consumes resources, which are only available at a certain maximum rate and can a only support so large a population. At some point the rate of growth starts to decrease and the curve levels off rather than continuing upwards. So the exponential curve doesn't really give us a very good picture of how growth actually works. For that we need to look at the logistic function.

Figure 2, The Logistic Function

Of course the logistic function assumes a constant supply of whatever it takes to support a population, so that the right side of the curve levels off and stays flat. Again, the real world doesn't exactly work like that. In the real world it is possible to go into overshoot, and over consume resources so that the rate at which the system can supply them is reduced. This results in something like the curve shown below.

Figure 3, Overshoot and Dieoff

The population in this case is of some sort of simple organism with a more or less fixed consumption rate per individual, and a growth rate determined by the availability of food. I have chosen to show the worst case scenario where the population we are considering declines to zero because of decreased carrying capacity and the rest of the ecosystem is so badly damaged by the overshoot that it dies out as well.

Fortunately, this is not necessarily the case—as the population goes into dieoff it eventually goes below even the reduced the carrying capacity of the environment and quits damaging the environment. The environment, if the damage is small enough, may be able to recover, even if the species that was in overshoot doesn't. If it recovers enough before the population under consideration goes extinct, that population may be able to recover as well, something like this:

Figure 4, Overshoot, Dieoff and Recovery

What happens as time progresses off the right end of the graph varies. The population may go into overshoot again, then die off and recover, and this may be repeat on an ongoing basis. Or, at any point along the way, a dieoff could lead to extinction. In any case the idea that there is a "balance of nature" that would cause the population to level out just below the carrying capacity is largely bogus. Things are always changing and don't stay balanced forever, or even for very long.

So now that we've looked at growth in general, we need to look in detail at the growth of the human population of this planet. Because human populations can change their growth rates, their levels of consumption and even the carrying capacity of their environment, this is complex, and I'm going to devote the whole of my next post to the subject. In short, though, based on the ideas of carrying capacity, overshoot and our capacity for growth, I am not in the least dissuaded from my predictions of collapse,"dieoff" in the language we've been using in this post.

This has turned out to be quite a short post, mainly because I have split it in two and saved the slightly longer second half for next time. So, there is room here for a couple of graphics about carrying capacity and ecological footprint.

Figure 5, Biocapacity and Ecological Footprint

This an interesting and possibly misleading graph, which compares the carrying capacity (biocapacity) of various countries with their consumption, on a per capita basis. The units on the vertical axis are "global hectares per capita, Gha".The Wikipedia article on GHA is a short and informative read. Here is one central paragraph:

"Global hectares per person" refers to the amount of production and waste assimilation per person on the planet. In 2012 there were approximately 12.2 billion global hectares of production and waste assimilation, averaging 1.7 global hectares per person. Consumption totaled 20.1 billion global hectares or 2.8 global hectares per person, meaning about 65% more was consumed than produced. This is possible because there are natural reserves all around the globe that function as backup food, material and energy supplies, although only for a relatively short period of time. Due to rapid population growth, these reserves are being depleted at an ever increasing tempo. See Earth Overshoot Day

To understand what I mean by misleading, take a look at Canada, the country where I live. The graph might make it seem that we are doing fine, since we have a large biocapacity compared to our population. but our per capita consumption (ecological footprint) at 7 Gha is among the highest in the world.

Figure 6, Footprint in terms of "Planets"

Another way of looking at footprint is to calculate how many planets like Earth it would take if everyone on Earth today lived like they do in a certain country. As is so often the case, Canada is left out of Figure 6, but a little calculation using the numbers in Figure 5, leads me to believe that if everyone lived like we do in Canada, we'd need around 4.4Earths. I find that quite a sobering idea.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?

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Wednesday, 7 October 2020

Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued

Kincardine's breakwall awash in the waves

This is the second half of a post that I cut in two because it was just too long (6000+ words). If you haven't read the first half yet, it would be a good idea to do so—what follows will make more sense that way.

That first half finished with a discussion of the problems with fossil fuels as an energy source for our civilization. It's last paragraph is repeated below. Today, we'll go on from there, looking at other inputs that are problematical for our civilization.

Energy, renewable sources

But, you may say, if fossil fuels are no good what about renewable energy sources? There are large amounts of energy available from sources like hydro, biomass, wind, solar and so forth. And they don't involve adding more CO2 to the atmosphere—even biomass is only adding CO2 that was recently taken out of the atmosphere and will be taken out again as more biomass grows. A great many people today believe that renewables can replace fossil fuels and solve both our surplus energy and climate change problems. In fact, it has become very unpopular to challenge that idea, but I am afraid I must do just that.

The problems with switching over to renewable energy sources can be divided into three areas.

  • the political will to do so
  • the economic means to do so
  • the technical feasibility of doing so

Political Will

It is clear that we will have to switch to renewable energy sources if we wish to become sustainable. But it is also clear that, as we'll see in a moment in the section on technical feasibility, renewable energy sources will not be able to support the level of growth and consumption that many of us are accustomed to, and they certainly won't be able to extend that level of prosperity to the poorer parts of the world.

For the overwhelming majority of people, lifestyle is not negotiable. And our current lifestyle demands continued growth and ever increasing prosperity—consumption, convenience, comfort and entertainment. I haven't noticed anyone rioting for the sort of austerity measures that I believe a switch away from fossil fuels would require. So, any plan that can't provide continued material progress is unlikely to be seriously considered, much less implemented. Yes, of course, I realize that we could change our lifestyle, and indeed circumstances may well force us to do so. My point is that most of us don't want to change the way we live, and will resist any attempt to get us to do so.

Plans like the "Green New Deal", which promise to create jobs and stimulate economic growth while switching over from fossil fuels to renewables, are intended to be more palatable. But there is good reason to think they are not economically or technically possible. And, if they were seriously undertaken, they might well make things worse, requiring the consumption of even more fossil fuels in the huge construction project that this switch over would require. This would mean further increases in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and would make climate change even worse, bringing about collapse even more quickly. Certainly not what the Green New Deal promises, but what it is likely to deliver.

The Economic Means

The surplus energy problem that I spoke of last time, and the resulting continued economic contraction that is going on, make it seem unlikely that we will have the wherewithal for such a major construction project in the years to come—we are looking at spending trillions of dollars building solar panels, windmills, storage facilities and an enhanced grid. Most of which will only make the surplus energy problem worse.

Technical Feasibility

For me, this is the real deciding factor. Let's consider the technical problems with renewable energy sources in general and then have a look at the issues with specific types of renewables. This will make it clear why I think a switchover to renewables is simply not doable, without drastic changes to our lifestyle.

The current fossil fuel infrastructure—coal mines, oil and gas wells, shipping, rail cars, pipelines, refineries, storage, distribution and retail facilities, and the equipment we have set up to use those fuels—is actually quite compact, owing to the concentrated nature of those fuels. They contain a lot of energy in a small, light package, and this has been the key to their success.

Renewables are more diffuse and require extensive infrastructure to gather and concentrate them to the point where they are useful. Already we are seeing what I call "energy sprawl" spreading across the countryside in the form of wind turbines and solar panels. But the amount of energy we are getting from this sprawl is tiny compared to our total energy use.

The renewable energy that is being proposed as a solution (wind and solar, mainly) comes largely in the form of electricity. Unfortunately, only about 20% of the energy we use today is used in the form of electricity. The rest is used directly in the form of refined fossil fuels to power transportation and to supply heat for industrial processes, space heating and so forth. The two biggest obstacles are electrifying heavy transportation (trucks and ships), and using renewable power to provide heat for manufacturing things like steel and concrete.

Switching over to renewables not only requires us to build huge amounts (5 times more than we currently have) of electrical generation, all of it powered by renewable energy sources, but also that we switch our transportation fleets and industrial infrastructure over to use electricity instead of fossil fuels as a power source.

This a big job that the "powers that be" don't really seem very interested in undertaking, and there are large chunks of it that we don't even know how to do as yet. I'll borrow a term from the nuclear industry here: "paper reactors". Solutions that so far only exist on paper have a tendency to take longer than predicted to implement, and cost a lot more money than expected. Time and money are two things that we don't have in great supply these days.

The power grid, which in most areas is just barely coping with peak loads, will also have to be beefed up by a factor of five to cope with the switch over to an all electric economy. But using the electricity from renewables presents some significant problems for the grid. Our civilization treats the power grid as an infinite source of energy which is available 24/7. In order to provide this, the grid needs energy sources that are "dispatchable". That is, energy sources can be turned on and off at will and ramped up and down as needed to cope with varying loads. This is usually done using a combination of coal, oil, natural gas and hydroelectricity, all of which are to some extent dispatchable.

But wind and solar are anything but dispatchable. The wind blows when it will, and there are often long periods without any wind at all over large geographic areas. The sun shines only during the day, except when there is cloud cover, and solar panels are often be covered with snow in the winter. None of these variations corresponds in any way to the normal variations in load that the grid experiences. In fact, to make even small amounts of intermittent renewable energy fit into the grid, highly dispatchable energy sources like combustion turbines (jet engines connected to generators, burning jet fuel) must be left spinning on standby, ready to compensate instantly when renewables falter.

This hardly makes the grid any "greener" at all. One solution would be to have a way of storing electrical power which could then be used to fill in when renewables let us down. Pumped storage of water is one alternative that is a mature technology. Water is pumped uphill to a reservoir when surplus power is available and then runs down hill through turbines to generate power when extra is needed. The problem is scalability—there are limited locations where reservoirs exists at the top a large change in elevation and near a supply of water. Batteries or compressed air on the scale that is needed here so far only exist on paper, and further development seems likely to run up against some fundamental physical limits.

Even if all these issues can be solved, we'd end up with a grid that is less resilient and more complex—more susceptible to failure.

It should also be noted that equipment like wind turbines, solar cells and batteries have a limited life. This poses two problems—when they wear out, they have to be replaced, and the old equipment has to been gotten rid of. Hopefully recycled, but more likely just disposed of.

A late addtion: Bev, one of my regular readers, pointed out in the comments below something that I had failed to make clear: while the energy from renewables is renewable, the equipment itself is built with largley non-renewable materials, and using up the quantity of materials we are talking about will no doubt lead to new resource depletion problems. It also takes fossil fuels to build, deliver, install, operate, maintain, repair and eventually decommision that equipment. Someday we may be able to power some of those steps with renewables, but initially and for the foreseable future, it's hard to see if there is really any net reduction in the use of fossil fuels when you look at the whole process.

And finally, even if all the technical problems could be solved, wind and solar do not have very good EROEIs, and would make our surplus energy problem even worse.

To bring this all home, let's take a look at the specific forms of renewable energy that we might turn to if we want to get off fossil fuels.

Power from biomass, basically firewood, is a very mature technology, and it has many advantages. While it is produced only during the growing season, it can be harvested and stored for use during winter. It is quite dispatchable and its EROEI is reasonably high, depending on how far it has to be hauled from the forest to where it is going to be used. Unfortunately, it is not highly scalable, since it competes with agriculture for land at a time when we are struggling to grow enough food for the world's growing population.

Hydroelectric power is another mature technology, with good dispatchability and a high EROEI. It is somewhat seasonal and it is not very scalable since most good locations are already in use. Developing the few remaining feasible locations would mean flooding large areas of land with environmental consequences that we should likely see as unacceptable.

Wind power is quite scalable, but intermittent and not dispatchable at all. It's EROEI is in the high teens, which is borderline for our needs, and probably lower if you take storage facilities into account.

Solar power is quite scalable, but intermittent and not dispatchable at all. It's EROEI is quite low, in the mid single digits, less if storage facilities are included in your calculations.

Nuclear fission power is not really a renewable since it relies on finite supplies of fissionable fuel. If a nuclear powered economy is to keep growing, it will run out of fuel in a surprisingly short time, even if spent fuel from the current generation of reactors can be processed for use in newer reactors. Nuclear has limited dispatchability, being best suited to supply base load. It has pretty good scalability, except that it takes a long time to build new nuclear plants, and we would need a lot of them to replace fossil fuels. We must also overcome many political and safety issues before starting to build more nukes. Lastly, the EROEI of nuclear is around 9, largely due to the complexity and safety features involved, so it only makes the surplus energy problem worse.

Nuclear fusion power isn't renewable either, though it's fuel is much more common than fissionables. But it is a "paper technology"— usable fusion reactors have been "just thirty years in the future" since the middle of the twentieth century, and will likely always be so. If we did somehow find the money to finish developing this technology, it would be very expensive to build, and its EROEI would likely be very low due to its high degree of complexity.

All in all, this is not an encouraging picture. You can see why I am so doubtful about switching from fossil fuels to renewables. One the one hand we desperately need to get off fossil fuels to get climate change under control. On the other hand we desperately need fossil fuels (or the elusive "something equivalent") to supply surplus energy to maintain our growing economy and the lifestyles it enables.

I have no confidence that we will even try to address this seemingly unresolvable conflict, and that is one more reason that I am expecting collapse.

Further, as the weighted average of the EROEIs of all a civilization's energy sources declines it is not just economic growth that suffers, but also the ability to maintain infrastructure. This includes the ability to build high tech equipment, including things like solar panels and wind turbines. At some point, as our industrial civilization continues to collapse, we will find ourselves restricted to low tech renewables and unable to maintain a large scale power grid. We'll be forced to drastically reduce our consumption of energy, and to adapt our use of energy to the intermittency of the sources, rather than the other way around.

So far I have only addressed the problems with energy inputs to our civilization, but there are other inputs that also present significant challenges.

 

The Ecosystem, and ecosystem services
Figure 2, from my last post

The circle enclosing industrial civilization in the diagram above is misleading in that it would tend to suggest there is a boundary separating civilization from the environment, when it is really just another part of the environment. I have use a dashed line, hoping to indicated that many things flow freely between our civilization and its environment. There is a whole category of such things—inputs to our civilization—that we are absolutely dependent upon. Often referred to as "ecosystem services", these inputs are things we tend not to be aware of, in much the same way as fish are not aware of water.

They include breathable air, potable water, a reliable climate and moderate weather, arable soil, grasslands, forests and the animals living on/in them, waters and the fisheries they provide, and so on. These things are available to us free of charge and we would simply could not do without them.

It is important to understand that the ecosystem can only supply its services at a certain maximum rate—its carrying capacity. If we use those services at a higher rate, the ecosystem suffers and that carrying capacity is reduced. Many of the waste outputs of our civilization can also damage the ecosphere, again reducing its carrying capacity. And we continue to convert nature into farms, roads and cities, yet again reducing its carrying capacity.

This has created the current situation where we are temporarily in "overshoot", using more than 100% of the planet's carrying capacity. We are able to do this because there is a certain amount of stored capacity within the system. Drawing on that capacity has lulled us into a false sense of security. But rest assured, the situation is temporary and shortly the damage to the ecosphere will become obvious, and its declining ability to support us will have disastrous consequences.

To put some numbers on this, in the early 1970s when The Limits to Growth was published, we were using about 85% of the planet's carrying capacity. There was, at that point, at least hypothetically, an opportunity to put the brakes on economic growth and start living sustainably. Of course, we did not do so and now we are using around 165% of that carrying capacity. If we bring the poorer part of the world up to a standard of living similar to that of the developed nations, it would take about 500% of that carrying capacity to support the human race. Many suggest we should do exactly that, as a matter of social and economic justice.

It is hard to disagree with that, in and of itself. But long before this happens, of course, the ecosphere will have collapsed and suffered a drastic decrease in its carrying capacity.

Three factors are involved in our impact on the ecosphere: population, affluence (consumption) and technology. This can be represented by the equation I=PAT.

Population and affluence are politically sensitive subjects, so many people have focused on using technology to reduce our footprint. This is known as "decoupling", since the aim is to decouple rising population and consumption from their effects on the ecosphere, to allow growth to continue without having harmful effects. It turns out decoupling has not yet even begun and is very unlikely to ever be achieved. It is largely a myth. Here are a couple of links (1, 2), to articles that go into this in detail.

In addition to promoting myths about decoupling, those who do not wish growth to stop quibble about exactly what the planet's carrying capacity actually is and just how far into overshoot we currently are. This accomplishes nothing, since whatever that carrying capacity actually is, continued exponential growth will quickly take us past it into overshoot.

So it would seem we should do something about population and/or affluence. Population is such a hot button issue that one can hardly discuss it in polite company. Understandably so, since reducing population must involve either reducing fertility or increasing the death rate. Indeed people have been accused of being "eco-fascists" because they see the need to reduce our population, and look to the most populous areas as the first place to take action. I think "eco-fascist" is a reasonable term, since the most populous areas are also the poorest places on the planet and our impact on the ecosystem is the product of both population and affluence. In the developed world our consumption is so high that even though we have far fewer people, our impact is much larger than that of the poorer parts of the world.

Figure 3

As this chart (Figure 3) shows, the richest 10% of the planet's population does close to 60% of the consumption. The richest 20% does over 75% of it (17.6+59=76.6). So, reducing consumption in the more affluent parts of the world would be a good start to coping with our problems because it would immediately take us out of overshoot and give us some breathing room to address the damage we've been doing to the ecosystem.

Figure 4

As this revised consumption chart (Figure 4) shows, if we could reduce our consumption by 50%, it would reduce our ecological impact down to 82.5% of the planet's carrying capacity, while actually increasing the consumption level of the lowest seven deciles of the population, and only reducing the consumption levels of the top three deciles. This would seem to satisfy our yearning for social and environmental justice and significantly delay, if not prevent, collapse. But since the most affluent people, those in the tenth decile, are also in control of the situation, it seems unlikely that we'll make a serious attempt to implement that solution unless we are forced to do so by events beyond our control that bear a strong resemblance to collapse.

You may say that our population problem exists because our capacity to provide food has increased and our capacity to reproduce has responded, not the other way around. I don't disagree, but I don't think it is very useful to point that out. Deliberately cutting back on food production and letting people starve in order to reduce our impact on the ecosystem is morally repugnant. It is also not particularly effective since the poor would be effected first and they are not the major contributors to our impact on the ecosystem.

It has also been observed that as countries get richer, their birthrate goes down. Extrapolating current trends (including continued development in the developing nations), the UN calculates that our population will top out around 10 billion late this century and then begin to decline. They would tell you that all we have do is hang on until then and all will be well. But again, I disagree. Long before our population reaches 10 billion, especially if nothing is done to reduce our rate of consumption, the ecosystem will collapse and its carrying capacity will crash down to a level that can support only a tiny fraction of our present population. I think 10 to 20% would be an optimistic prediction.

Overuse of Fossil Water

This post is already quite a bit longer than I usually aim for, and I have only covered what I see as the most urgent input and output issues. There are many other areas that I haven't begun to cover, and which I will have to leave for another day. But there is one more input issue that I just can't leave out, and that is the depletion of fossil water.

Many of the important agricultural areas around the world rely on irrigation, and water for that irrigation is pumped out of fossil aquifers. That is, underground reservoirs that took hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate. The current rate of use is many times greater than the current rate of replenishment, and it is only a matter of time, and not much time, until they run dry.

The consequences for agriculture will seriously debilitate our civilization's ability feed us.

Summing it all up

We have seen again and again, from the start to the finish of this post, and the previous one, that resource depletion of various sorts, and depletion of the sinks into which we dispose of our wastes, seriously threaten our civilization. Any one of these issues is enough, all on its own, to compromise that civilization's ability to provide us with the necessities of life. In other words, to bring about collapse. And many of them interact in ways that just make the situation worse.

But inputs and outputs are not the whole story. The interior workings of our civilization are replete with issues that threaten its ongoing survival. Next time, we'll have a close look at some of those issues.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?

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