Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts

Wednesday, 5 January 2022

Collapse You Say, Part 10/Time for Change, Part 1: Money

Waves, rocks and ice on the Lake Huron shore

Earlier in this series (Parts 5 and 6) I looked at overpopulation and overconsumption and concluded that while both are serious problems, overpopulation is going to take decades to solve, while overconsumption could be addressed quite quickly. By reducing our level of consumption, we would reduce our impact on the planet and give ourselves time to reduce our population.

In my last post I looked at some of the unintended and negative consequences of the industrialization we've experienced over the last few centuries. I concluded that most of the blame for overconsumption can be laid squarely at the feet of capitalism, with its insatiable hunger to accumulate wealth, its inescapable need for endless growth, and its inability to tackle any problem that can't be solved by making a profit. These days some people are calling capitalism a "death cult", based on those characteristics and the fact that we live on a finite planet. I think they are quite right to do so.

Clearly, the blame for overconsumption should not fall on the supposed innate greed and materialism of individual, ordinary people. The upper classes (mainly capitalists) are superlative consumers and do a great deal of harm themselves. And their marketing efforts have turned the rest of us into pretty good consumers, too. Turn off their incessantly blaring marketing machine and things would be quite different—reducing consumption would look at lot more doable. We'd have a real chance of solving both of our major problems (overpopulation and overconsumption), getting ourselves out of overshoot and avoiding at least part of the die-off that is currently looming ahead of us.

It seems that at this point in this series of posts I am done trying to show that collapse is real and I'm ready to look at what we can do about it. And that is why I am changing the name of this series in the middle of it. It is, indeed "time for change". In truth, I probably should have made the name change starting at Part 7, but it's too late for that now.

Of course, many people in the "collapse sphere" will tell you that what we face is a predicament, not a problem—in the sense that it can't be solved, only adapted to. To those folks I would say, relax—I agree. My idea of a solution to the problems facing us is for us to adapt to them, and that adaptation will probably look a lot like collapse to many of you. We need to have fewer people, all consuming at lower levels that can be sustained by the biosphere, and we must start using up non-renewable resources at a drastically lower rate, until we can manage to replace them with renewables. To quote John Michael Greer, we need to get by with LESS—less energy, less stuff, less stimulation (entertainment). If we choose to do nothing, we'll get there via a brutally hard and deep collapse. But if we deliberately work at adapting instead of trying to save "business as usual", we can get there by a much gentler route, with a lot less grief, and with a better outcome at the end. Still involving major changes to our supposedly "non-negotiable" lifestyles, though.

At the end of my last post (months ago) I promised to tie up a couple of loose ends in my discussion of finance and government, and to talk about how to solve our overconsumption problem by getting rid of capitalism. Over these last few months, I've come up with a wealth of material on these topics and so what was to have been a single post will now be broken up into at least three: I'll be talking about money (finance) today, hierarchies (government) in my next post and what to do about capitalism in the one after that.

Money

Money is a tool and, like all technology, it is not neutral but is designed to be used by certain people for a certain purpose. Money is used by rich people to make more money—to accumulate wealth, and to control poor people. Sure, it can be adapted to other purposes, but I don't believe we can ever stop it from being used for those basic, inherent purposes.

If you study basic economics, you'll be told that money has three primary uses: as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. All three of those really just amount to keeping score in the complex game that is our economy. That score keeping is done in ways that facilitate the business of accumulating wealth. This helps those with lots of money get more of it, and works against those with little. We are told that not keeping score would be even worse, but the more I look into it, the less reason I see to believe that.

Capitalism started out with capitalists using their own money to build infrastructure (factories, mines, railways, etc.) to build stuff, which could then be sold for a profit. This soon changed to using borrowed money to do the same. The banks did very well on that, and before long the other capitalists saw that it is possible to use money directly to make more money, dispensing with factories and production of physical goods. This is known as "financialization" and while there are still lots of factories, making lots of stuff (much of it unnecessary), the financial sector is in some ways the business success story of the last century.

Unfortunately, our financial system creates money as debt, which must be paid back with interest. In order to do that, the economy must continually grow. If growth stops or even slows down, it collapses. At the same time, the eventual consequence of growth is also collapse.

The other primary use of money is as a tool for social control. Everything we need has been monetized—the only way to obtain the necessities of life (and much else) is to pay for them with money. Only a very few people live self-sufficiently today, outside of this system. The rest of us need money to live, and a job to obtain that money. In capitalist societies, most of the value created by your work goes to the capitalists, with as little as possible going to you as wages. This makes it challenging to get ahead.

During my lifetime, it stopped being possible to save up enough money to buy large ticket items like an education, a car, a house and so forth. For most people, especially those without rich parents, such things are necessities and can only be had by going into debt to get the required money up front. And it is getting harder and harder to pay back that debt. But that debt must be paid back is a strong value in our culture. To declare bankruptcy and effectively have your debts forgiven means losing essentially everything you have worked for. This leaves us in a position of being under the control of the banks, with very little that we can do about it.

If you look closely, though, you'll see that while not paying debts has nasty consequences for the lower classes, people in the upper classes can often come to some other arrangement if their debts become too onerous. In particular, capitalists whose businesses fail often walk away with little or no consequences since those businesses are set up as corporations with "limited liability".

So, it's pretty clear that in any society that uses money (keeps score) and makes accumulation of wealth a goal, the result will be ever growing inequality between the upper classes and everyone else. In the past, many societies that used money and debt, even without capitalism in the modern sense of the word, found that for the lower classes debt grew over the years until it crippled society. That was because the lower classes played an important part in those societies and when they were crushed under a mountain of debt, the whole society was negatively affected. It was necessary to have a "jubilee" every so often and forgive debts in order to get things working again.

But under modern capitalism, that's never going to happen—the lower classes are, to an ever greater extent, seen as not having an important role to play. Much of traditional work has been replaced by automation. If we are crippled by debt, it doesn't immediately bring our whole society to a halt. Indeed, much of that debt is held by the upper classes, who see it as a benefit. For the rest of us, debt offers a means to allow us to continue consuming, borrowing money just to give it back to the capitalists, with little time for thought about long term consequences.

Most of us are like fish swimming in a sea of money and monetary concerns, unaware that there is any alternative. We are certainly told that there is not. But we need to ask ourselves if money and this whole "keeping score" thing is beneficial or even necessary? Is there any way we could manage to get by without money?

Economists will tell you that money was invented to get away from the inconveniences of barter. But anthropologists who have actually studied pre-monetary societies, would tell you that that is nonsense—barter was used rarely, mainly for trading with strangers. Inside a community, among people who know each other, there are ways of living without money or barter. We'll go into more detail on that in a bit.

Conservative moralists, who have a great deal of influence these days, are concerned about "moral hazard"—telling us that keeping score using money is necessary to maintain fairness, and make sure that people don't take advantage of each other. In fact, very few people do take advantage. And keeping score mostly leads to growing inequality, which is in itself unfair.

And, of course, accountants would have us believe that the whole of modern civilization would grind to a halt if their ledgers didn't balance.

That's all very convenient for those at the top who actually do benefit, but most of these things could be eliminated without hurting the rest of us. And what's really necessary could be rearranged to benefit us and not just the rich.

If we turn to the study of anthropology again, we find that quite frequently during our prehistory we lived in small egalitarian bands who did just fine without money and largely without keeping score. What little score keeping there was, was informal and aimed at censuring people who didn't share well, to prevent accumulation rather than facilitating it.

For such hunter gatherers getting an adequate supply of protein was often challenging and that is one reason why hunting larger game was done enthusiastically, even though it was often not very successful. Hunters were expected to share the meat when they did make a kill, and generally did so, without expecting thanks or any special treatment for making this contribution.

Scientists studying such societies have observed that altruism (sharing) is a strong part of the culture, and have been puzzled about how altruism could be selected for on an evolutionary basis. It would seem that any individual with an inclination to share would inevitably be taken advantage of by less altruistic people, and individuals with innate altruistic impulses would soon be selected out of the gene pool. And indeed they would have been, if selection was acting solely on individuals. But selection also acted on the level of bands, and bands whose members shared well did better and were selected for strongly enough that such behaviour was eventually evolved into human beings. Mutual aid is a powerful tool for achieving success in groups and a major factor in the evolution of many species, certainly including our own.

Even today one can observe that there is a great deal of benefit to acting on a basis of mutual aid, working together altruistically in groups. In societies such as ours where there seems to be an ethos against altruism (a la Ayn Rand), people still do act altruistically, often as if compelled to do so. This tends to reduce the effectiveness of money as a control mechanism, and so it is not popular with those in power, but it still happens. And even in large capitalistic companies, in those cases where people are still working together in groups, you will find a co-operative, egalitarian culture, because it is the best way of getting the work done. Of course, management prefers to isolate workers, so as to better control them. Solidarity is a dangerous thing, from management's viewpoint.

Hunter gatherers had very little in the way of possessions—their nomadic lifestyle didn't allow for much in the way of accumulation. So you might say that money would have been of little use to them anyway.

But many tribal societies practicing herding or even sedentary agriculture, who had more in the way of possessions, and more opportunity to accumulate wealth, often got along without money or score keeping as well. In some such cultures, when you compliment another's possession, the owner is obligated to give you that possession. Strange as it seems to us, this is the basis of exchange in these societies and it works just fine for them. Since everyone is subject to the same rules, being greedy backfires very quickly.

It has become clear to me that the concept of fairness is quite different between monetary and non-monetary cultures. Diametrically opposite, in fact.

In our monetary society, fairness means playing by the rules, rules that are intended to facilitate accumulation. Successful people are expected to accumulate wealth. Indeed that is our definition of success—we are taught to admire such people, and to aspire to be like them.

In pre-monetary societies, fairness meant behaving altruistically—sharing, being generous and serving the other people in your community rather than taking advantage of them. Because the groups were small, it was obvious to everyone when an individual failed to share and do their part, and such individuals faced censure from their fellows.

If they had kept score you would see that, over time, the rest of the community came to be more and more indebted to skilled people. To our modern eyes, it might seem like the less skilled were taking advantage of the more highly skilled, but they didn't see it that way. Indeed it was frowned upon for successful people to put on airs in such cultures, or to use their skills to accumulate wealth. They considered it their responsibility to support their community. It was seen as just what human beings do, to the extent of their abilities. And everyone expected that their needs would be seen to by their community, to the extent that was possible. The result of all this was strongly beneficial to the community as a whole, including those we might see as being taken advantage of.

If that sounds like communism to you —from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs—you're right. That is exactly what it was, and a good thing, too.

Occasionally, in our lengthy pre-historic past, the idea of money (or at least the concept of credit) was adopted by various cultures. It caught on pretty quickly because it could be used for all the "advantages" we've been discussing here. In some cases there were also built in mechanisms for redistributing wealth—things like potlatches, funeral feasts and so forth, so that inequality didn't grow destructively, and runaway growth didn't have its inevitable environmental effects.

In other cases where inequality was allowed to accumulated across generations, the mass of people soon caught on and rebelled, reverting to more equitable ways of organizing things. In still other cases, societal collapse resulted. And finally, in cases where neither of those things happened, you ended up with the societies that eventually developed into to our modern capitalist civilization. Sadly, by the time those who were on the losing end of such arrangements realized what was going on, it was too late—those at the top of the organization were firmly in control, and not interested in changes that would impinge negatively on them. We were stuck in the sort of societies we currently have. Which brings us to the subject of hierarchies, which I will get to in my next post.

What I am intending to suggest here is that there are ways of supplying the needs of a society without causing inequality to grow. And without needing the economy to grow endlessly beyond the capacity of the planet to support. The sort of examples I've mentioned here are only a very few of the ways this might be done and I believe we may yet come up with new ideas that work even better.

In closing, I should probably (for the sake of completeness, but with little hope of achieving it) make a few comments on markets and property.

Markets

At the most basic level, markets exist to place a value on goods and services. But never forget—the value of goods only needs to be determined because we are keeping score, and using money to do it. In any case, the supposed magic of the "free market" is largely theoretical. At best, it can only work when all the players involved have roughly equal power. In capitalism, the capitalists have considerably more power than workers and consumers, and love markets because they are open to manipulation and control. Being able to game the market actually creates many of the problems inherent to capitalism.

Property and Ownership

The concept of private property is central to enabling the accumulation of wealth. The strong take what they wish, have the power to hold onto it, and use it to generate further wealth. Civilization consists largely of having laws to protect the private property of the rich and a police force to enforce them.

In such a system, owners have the right to abuse their property and deplete its resources, with consequences that are currently beginning to come due the world over (climate change, habitat destruction, resource depletion). In a sustainable society, land and resources would be the property of the community as a whole and that ownership would be about stewardship not exploitation.

We should also be clear that there is a distinction here between private and personal property. Personal property consists of items that you use in daily life (like your toothbrush, and your shoes and clothes). A community might elect to extend personal property rights to tools, homes and garden plots. But if you take property rights much further, you end up with individuals having the right to exploit land and resources to their own benefit and the detriment of the community and planet as a whole. Which is exactly what we want to avoid.

During the last few months while I've been dragging my feet about writing for this blog, I've been reading a number of very interesting books, which bear upon what we are discussing. Here is a list of those books, along with a few that I've read previously, but that also have been a help.

Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, by Christopher Boehm

The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott

Against the Grain, a deep history of the earliest states, by James C. Scott

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, by Andrej Grubacic

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow


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

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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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Thursday, 14 June 2018

Autobiographical Notes, Part 4: My Peak Oil Journey

For some time now I been intending to do a post about "My Peak Oil Journey", describing how my understanding of Peak Oil has evolved over the years. I think it will fit nicely at this point in my series of autobiographical notes.

Throughout the history of this blog I've focused on three of the challenges we face: Climate Change, Peak Oil, and Economic Contraction.

I first became aware of climate change in the late 80s and had no trouble accepting its reality. I expected that nuclear fusion or possibly renewable power sources, especially solar, would take over from fossil fuels and solve the problem with ease. But things have not worked out quite so well.

Sometime in 2000 or 2001 I first heard of Peak Oil. Again, my initial reaction was that improved technology would solve the problem. But I was drawn back to the topic repeatedly and by the time I retired from Hydro One, I was convinced that this is not a problem we are going to solve. I retired with a very nice pension, but also a keen awareness that this pension was contingent on the continuing growth of the economy. And even that early on, my reading about Peak Oil made it pretty clear that continued economic growth was far from a sure thing.

My current understanding of the economy took much longer to come together, and is intimately intertwined with my understanding of Peak Oil.

In the early 2000s many people, myself included, had quite a naive understanding of how Peak Oil might play out. I think many of us thought of oil fields as big underground tanks, originally full of oil. In this view we'd be able to keep pumping oil out of the ground until one day it suddenly ran dry. We also thought that the demand for oil was quite inelastic and running out would cause a very serious disaster, quite possibly the collapse of industrial civilization.

There was a lot of speculation about the amount of oil that was actually left, and good reason to suspect that official estimates of oil reserves were artificially inflated. Both the privately owned oil companies and the OPEC countries had (and still have) much to gain from claiming that their reserves are larger than they are in reality. Some of the agencies estimating future oil use numbers based them solely on predicted demand, without considering the realities of the supply side at all.

Gradually, this way of thinking came around to a more realistic picture of porous rock formations saturated with oil and gas and capped with layers of impermeable rock. Drill through the cap rock and the oil (and gas) would start running out. With this more accurate picture came many inconvenient details which gradually, as events played out over the years, became more obvious.

The rate at which oil comes out of the ground is determined by the geology of each particular well, and is at a maximum when the well is new and declines as the well ages until eventually it is no longer profitable to operate the well, the costs of operation being higher than the small remaining production is worth. This happens before all of the oil is removed from the well. There are techniques such as water injection which can be used to increase the rate at which oil comes out of a well, but this may increase the decline rate so that the total production of the well is less in the end.

Discovery of new oil resources must make up for the decline of existing wells and allow for increased use of oil as the economy grows. For the last few decades this has not happened, and it appears to me that the production of "conventional" oil peaked around 2005. This was reflected in the increase in the price of oil from around $12 per barrel in late 90s to just over $140 per barrel in the summer of 2008. The price of oil goes up as demand exceeds supply or even if events make it seem that supply might soon be constrained. It seems that in the months leading up to the summer of 2008, both of those factors were involved in making the price of oil spike upwards.

Looking back on the effect of oil price on the economy, post 2008, it became clear that almost every recession since the 1950s had been preceded by a spike in the price of oil. It turns out that the demand for oil is not nearly so inelastic as some had imagined. When the price goes up we see what is known as "demand destruction"—economic growth slows and people find themselves short of cash, cutting back on discretionary spending and doing whatever they can to use less energy. If the price goes high enough, even conservation begins to look like attractive.

At the same time, the idea that there is no alternative to oil turns out to be a little too simplistic. As the price goes up, oil wells that have been shut down as unprofitable become profitable again. Alternative forms of oil, what is known as "non-conventional oil" (deep offshore oil, Arctic oil, fracked oil, heavy oil and bitumen from tar sands) which had previously been too expensive to bother with, also become economically feasible.

The demand for oil dropped off from 86.3 million barrels per day in 2007 to less than 84.5 in 2009, and the price dropped to just over $40 per barrel. As the economy recovered, non-conventional oil made up for the decline in production of conventional oil and total demand increased to over 99 million barrels per day in 2018. Higher prices 2010 to 2014 (peaking at over $100 per barrel in early 2014) no doubt drove developments in non-conventional oil, while at the same time slowing the recovery of the economy.

In that period (2008 to 2014) the idea of Peak Oil was alive and well. Lots of people were interested, there were numerous websites and books being published, and a variety of groups, (of which the Transition Town movement is probably best known) sprang up in an attempt to bring people together to prepare for what was coming.

And while overall global oil production kept growing, many oil exporting countries reached their production peaks. In a phenomenon described by "The Export Land Model", this happened even quicker than it might have otherwise. As most such countries were experiencing growth in their own economies and improvements in their standards of living, so their domestic consumption of oil was increasing, leaving even less to export than could be accounted for by natural decline, and putting their balance of payments in an ever worsening situation post peak.

In the Middle East climate change brought on increased temperatures and droughts, making agriculture less and less feasible. And this was at a time when money to import food and jobs for bankrupt farmers fleeing to the cities were both in short supply. There is no doubt in my mind that both climate change and peaking of oil exports were factors in the so called "Arab spring". But changing governments does little to improve the situation when there are real, fundamental problems that even the best government would be hard pressed to cope with. In general, everywhere in the world, there is growing disillusionment with new governments, elected to deal with economic and social problems, who turn out to be just as inept as the old ones, and just as much in denial about what's wrong.

It was sometime after 2008 when I put together the missing pieces in my understanding of economics.

The first thing was to realize that it's not really about money.

Money is just a convenient set of tokens—a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. Of course, a whole "meta" level of business, the financial sector, is based on money. But it's vital not to lose sight of the underlying realities.

The second thing was to understand role of growth in the economy.

Modern economies run on credit. Money is created by the banks as debt and those debts must be paid back with interest. The extra money for the interest comes from yet more loans. This works fine as long as the economy is growing and the banks have good confidence that debtors will continue to pay back their loans, with interest. If the economy stops growing, or even if its growth slows down very much, governments, businesses and individuals who have taken out loans find themselves unable to continue making their payments and are forced to default on their loans. Too many defaults and the banks themselves start failing. So it is vital that the economy continue to grow.

The third thing is the role of energy in the economy.

The reason that debtors can pay back loans is that they used the borrowed money to set up enterprises that create more value than the capital and labour that are put into them. This surplus value can be used to pay off loans, with interest, and leave something as well for the owners of the enterprise. Or in the case of large companies, pay dividends to the investors. Conventional economic theory is pretty vague about where this extra value comes from. But when I read up on "biophysical economics" it became clear to me that the extra value comes from the energy inputs to the process, because the energy costs substantially less than the value it enables us to create.

That Wikipedia article I linked to doesn't mention the two sources where I learned about biophysical economics: Energy and the Wealth of Nations by Charles Hall and Kent Klitgaard, and Life After Growth by Tim Morgan. Morgan also has a website with up to date information.

Extra value (wealth) coming from surplus energy was true to a limited extent even in the past when energy came in the form of food and was converted in mechanical form by human or animal muscles. Things improved somewhat when we learned to harness the mechanical energy in moving air (wind) and falling water. But with the invention of engines that could convert the heat of burning fuel into mechanical energy, things really took off. These engines could drive automated factories which could produce goods with a fraction of the human labor previously required. This started with steam engines burning coal to pump water out of coal mines, replacing horse powered pumps. What followed was the industrial revolution.

The economy grew as it never had before, and as long as abundant cheap energy was available, it continued to grow.

Throughout the history of fossil fuel use, we've used the lowest hanging fruit first—the easiest to access and the highest quality fuels among those. With the result that as time passes, the remaining fuels are harder to access and/or of poorer quality. This leads us to concept of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI), and the related idea of surplus or net energy.

Taking a typical oil well from the early twentieth century, the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil would have been used to get 100 barrels of oil out of the well. This gives you an EROEI of 100, and surplus energy of 99 barrels of oil equivalent.

Looking at present day corn based ethanol, to produce 1.3 gallons, it takes the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of ethanol. This gives you an EROEI of 1.3 and surplus energy of .3 gallons of ethanol equivalent.

This can be helpful in choosing the sorts of energy we should be using—early twentieth century oil wells are something we can only dream of today and the corn ethanol business is hardly viable without large subsidies. But there is more to it than that, because surplus energy is what drives the economy and makes economic growth possible. If you look at all the energy sources a country uses and calculate a weighted average EROEI, it can tell you quite a lot about that country's economy.

As that average EROEI declines toward about 15, economic growth grinds to a halt and it becomes difficult to raise capital to start new ventures and to maintain existing infrastructure. Below 15 a modern industrial civilization quits working. Because this is a weighted average, choosing to produce more energy from low EROEI sources makes things worse while temporarily seeming to make them better. It has been estimated that the current average EROEI of the world economy is around 11. Of course some lucky countries are doing much better than that.

But because of our "lowest hanging fruit first" approach, EROEI continues to decline. Real economic growth appears to have stopped in the 1990s, with governments using clever new ways of calculating gross domestic product, and unemployment and cost of living statistics to make things look better in the short run. And low interest rate policies to encourage lots of borrowing and keep the economy growing, again, in the short run.

By early 2014, oil prices had topped $100 per barrel and it looked to many of us like the economy might fall apart again as it had done in 2008.

But then oil prices started to fall, bottoming out below $40 per barrel. Why the slump happened is not well understood, but it had been predicted by a few (notably Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth) as yet another step on the way to Peak Oil.

There was a glut in oil supply from 2014 to 2017. Several factors contributed to this.

The first, no doubt, was the increase in non-conventional oil production, particularly tight oil in continental US, accessed through the "hydro-fracturing" process, commonly referred to as "fracking". Contrary to popular belief this was not enough supply all of America's demand for crude oil. But it did add about 4 million barrels a day to US oil production.

All the hype about fracking as a new source of crude oil and natural gas caused some people to conclude that Peak Oil was dead, and that any shortage of oil was a very long way in the future. Even President Obama announced that there was enough tight oil to last 100 years. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In 2017, the United States produced an average of about 14.2 million barrels per day, and consumed about 19.8 million barrels per day, with the difference made up by imports, changes in petroleum inventories, and petroleum refinery processing gain.

No doubt fracking has significantly decreased the amount of oil the US has to import. But this is temporary—the decline rates of fracked wells are much higher than those of conventional wells and most of the sweet spots in the tight oil plays have already been used up. Realistically, America's supply of tight oil will likely run out early in the 2020s.

But even if there was enough tight oil and gas to last 100 years, fracking is a classic case of trying to use a low EROEI energy source (somewhere between 3 and 5, in this case) to keep an economy going. You might expect that this oil would be more expensive than conventional oil, but as we learned in 2008, high energy prices cause recessions, which should lead to over-production and lower prices.

Parts of this happened—oil prices certainly went down. But oil consumption continued to grow, by about 1.7% per year. Strangely, it appears that this extra energy did not result in corresponding growth of the US economy. It is a bit of a puzzle where the energy went, until you realize that fracking is a very energy intensive process (the "energy invested" part of EROEI). Fracking itself is the "gas guzzler" that was causing the growth in US oil consumption. This is what I call "energy sprawl", where the extensive infrastructure and energy use required to make low EROEI energy sources work begins to dominate the economy and the landscape.

OPEC was initially unwilling to cut back production to bring the price back up, but in late 2016 an agreement to cut production was signed by many OPEC producers and Russia as well. At the same time, many other non-OPEC producers were experiencing natural decline.

The price of oil bottomed out just under $40/barrel in early 2016, bounced around in the $40s and low $50s, and then in mid 2017 started to increase pretty much steadily, as the glut began to dwindle. Today the price is in the high $70s/barrel and has topped $80 in the past few weeks. The glut is over and the U.S. government has quietly asked Saudi Arabia and some other OPEC producers to increase oil production by about 1 million barrels a day to bring the price down to a more acceptable level.

OPEC economies were hurt badly by several years of low prices and one suspects they will be only too glad to increase production. The question is how long they will be able to do so before the natural decline rates of their oil fields catch up with them.

The major oil companies were hurt by low prices too, and cut back on their investment on discovery in order to save money. This has left us in a very bad situation as far as oil supply goes over the next few years. Trillions of dollars would have to be spent on discovery to catch up with demand. It seems to some of us that there is no sweet spot where oil prices are low enough to keep the economy growing and high enough to make the oil business profitable.

In any case, it seems unlikely that there are actually sufficient oil resources out there even if we could find the money to spend on discovery. Beyond natural supply decline and reduced spending on discovery, we are seeing geopolitics playing a role in Peak Oil as well. Major oil producers like Venezuela are facing sanctions and internal economic chaos. Their oil industry is suffering as a result and production is falling off. If President Trump gets his way, something similar will likely happen with Iran. An overall peak in production will likely occur sometime in the next few years.

How will the economy respond to this? Not well, to be sure, but the specific details will include some surprises that are very hard to anticipate.

That's my "Peak Oil Journey", to date at any rate. No doubt there is more to learn. We're pretty good at explained what just happened, but not so good at predicting what's coming next. It always seems to involve something we just haven't considered yet.

While I was following the story of Peak Oil, my life carried on and I tried to prepare for the challenges that lay ahead. Eventually this lead to me starting this blog and calling myself a "Kollapsnik". More on that next time.


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Monday, 9 October 2017

Collapse Step by Step, Part 6: More on Political Realities

Paddle Boarding/Surfing off Kincardine's Station Beach

When I wrote the last couple of episodes in this series of posts, I was well aware that I was expressing opinions that are quite controversial, in some circles at any rate. So I expected to get some push back from people whose political leanings are different from mine.

As it turns out, only one reader (who I'll refer to as BK for the sake of brevity) responded with such a comment, and he was reasonably polite and clear in what he had to say. Now, as it happens, I do believe there is such a thing as objective reality, and if you can show me that an opinion I hold runs counter to that reality, I'll willingly change it. I actually have done this at various point in the past, but in this instance that wasn't what happened. Just the opposite, in fact—what BK has done is give me a clearer understanding of my own politics and in the process strengthened my convictions. Overall, that's probably a good thing.

On both sides of our discussion, though, I think there may be a good bit of misunderstanding. It is very tempting now to go ahead with a rant about people replying seemingly without having read what I've actually been saying, and who address themselves to strawmen instead my actual points. But I suspect that the guy on the other side of the discussion may feel that I am doing the same thing to him. One of the most important skills to have in the hard times to come will be the ability to talk to and work with people who have different viewpoints, and that is a skill I am trying to cultivate.

One of the down sides of social media is that the connection we have out here in cyberspace is very tenuous. When talking face to face with friends there is real incentive to work at making communication happen. On the internet it's so easy to just give in to temptation and turn the discussion into an argument or maybe a flame war. But that's not why I am here, and I am certainly trying not to give in to the temptation.

When you get into politics, there is a great deal of ideology involved and people have a tendency to accept the party line and not bother checking it against reality. BK claims that in the last couple of posts I haven't even made any attempt to prove what I am saying. Pretty odd, since that was exactly what I had set out to do and quite a number of people have said that they think I did a pretty good job of it. But let's have a closer look at the details, and in the process perhaps I can do a better job of expressing my thoughts.

First of all, why would it be appropriate to talk about politics in a series of posts about the details of collapse?

As BK says, "In order for politics to determine how badly or dangerously collapse happens (if/when it does), there must be a dichotomy in political views regarding the causes of the type of collapse which provides the context of these articles. However, there is no such dichotomy. The dichotomy exists in precisely the opposite context, i.e., what would be a fair way to distribute the benefits of perpetual growth."

Modern politics, for the last couple of centuries anyway, has indeed been mainly about how to distribute the benefits of growth. That is certainly not the discussion we need to be having. Forty five years ago, while we were still not quite in overshoot, (right after the publication of The Limits to Growth) we needed to have a discussion about whether growth could go on forever or whether we should begin adapting to the limits of our finite planet. Serious consideration would have led to acceptance of those limits, and political discussion since then would have focused on the details of living within those limits.

However, it didn't happen that way—those who support BAU (business as usual) made sure that The Limits to Growth was never given serious consideration. We continued on, as usual, and are now in overshoot by about 150%—a very serious situation.

To be fair, it is hard to see how it could have happened otherwise. Because of the way our financial and business systems are set up, they rely on continuous growth. We really have no idea of how to stop economic growth without causing a catastrophic collapse. Politicians know this, so they are stuck trying to fix the system by treating the symptoms while still maintaining growth—the root cause of the problem. So instead, nature will take its course. There will be a dieoff and when things finally settle out, there will be a lot fewer people and they will be a lot poorer.

But even though I agree that politics is asking the wrong questions, and applying the wrong fixes, I still think that it is going to be an important influence on the course of collapse for a few decades yet. To make sense of this, I should explain where I think collapse is taking us.

Among collapse "enthusiasts" there are many who expect that someday soon there will be a fast collapse. This will take place essentially overnight, in a matter of days or perhaps weeks, but certainly not years or decades. The great majority of people would not be prepared for such an event. The ability to work together, solving problems for our mutual benefit that has been the key to much of mankind's success, would be very difficult to bring to bear on our problems during such a collapse. It seems likely that only a tiny and improbably lucky fraction of our species would survive. And I will grant that politics is not likely to have much influence over the outcome of this sort of collapse.

But I am another variety of "kollapsnik" altogether. I've taken to calling myself a "kollapsnik" lately to differentiate myself from "doomers", who think that mankind is facing imminent doom. They range from those who talk about near term extinction (by 2030) to those to expect a fast and hard collapse in the near future, with only a very few survivors left, who will fall back into a new stone age.

Instead, I talk about a slow collapse, which has already been going on for decades in many areas and will continue for much of the twenty-first century. I take this one step further and assert that collapse does not take place uniformly. It's progress is geographically uneven, chronologically unsteady and socially unequal. I do expect that this collapse will be a population bottleneck, but not an extinction event—I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few hundred million people make it through.

To borrow a the term from John Michael Greer, I call the first stage of this long period of collapse the "age of scarcity". During the last couple of centuries some parts of the world experienced an "age of abundance" due to the windfall of cheap energy from fossil fuels, and became industrially and economically developed. In the process, supplies of industrially important natural resources (particularly fossil fuels) were depleted and sinks for industrial by products (pollution) have started to fill up, with unpleasant results such as economic contraction, climate change, ocean acidification and so forth.

Many parts of the developed world have been in the age of scarcity for some decades now and their governments have struggled to keep up appearances (and growth) under less than ideal conditions. A few have been so successful that you still meet people who think these are the best of times and that we should expect things to get even better. But such an opinion can only be held by those who are very careful about where not to look.

During the rest of the age of scarcity our industrial society will gradually weaken until eventually it will be "down for the count". We will then transition into the age of salvage, making use of the materials left behind, which we will no longer have the wherewithal to make from scratch for ourselves. Of course, this transition will occur at different times in various places around the world. And while it will certainly be a big step down from current conditions in the developed nations, it will be a long way from the stone age. There will be a lot of salvage left to work with and we now know a great deal that we did not know even a few centuries ago.

Because I am expecting a slow collapse, I believe there is a lengthy period ahead of us when governments will still be in charge and have some resources available to pursue their policy objectives. What those objectives are will have a large influence on how collapse progresses, and to what extent it can be mitigated. If we are not going to just stoically accept what comes, we will need to choose between the various sorts of actually, realistically achievable politics, searching for the ones that can do the least worst job for us.

Yes, there will eventually come a day when federal, state (provincial) and, in the case of large cities, even local governments are so resource starved that they are no longer effective (or exist at all, perhaps) and local communities are left to their own devices. But it seems to me that even then the sort of politics that has been popular in a society will have a lingering effect on the workings of those communities.

Since it is now clear that it going to take two, if not three, posts to cover everything I want to talk about on this subject, I think I'll bring this post to an end. Next time we'll look in detail at how two of those political positions will differ in their approach to life in the age of scarcity.

And BK, please be patient. In your comments you made several other points that deserve a thoughtful response, which I hope to be making in my next post, or maybe the one after that....


Links to the rest of this series of posts:
Political Realities / Collapse Step by Step / The Bumpy Road Down

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Sunday, 5 March 2017

Evaluating Existential Threats

In a recent post, I talked about how most people are loath to discuss collapse, some even believing that talking about it makes it more likely to happen. After all, Business As Usual is working just fine and everything is going to be alright. Right?

In contrast to this sort of head-in-the-sand optimism there are people (admittedly a much smaller number of us) who like to focus on existential threats—things that promise, at the very least, to wipe out a large chunk of our human population and, at the worst, to bring an end to life on earth. When you start looking into this you'll find that there are quite a variety of such threats. In my next two posts, I'll take a look at a selection of them. I'll explain why I think that the kind of collapse that I've been talking about is the threat most worthy of most of our attention. And in the process we'll get a clearer picture of what kind of collapse that is.

This post, though, is about the virtues of worrying and how to evaluate existential threats.

What "virtues of worrying", you ask? Worry certainly isn't in fashion these days. On social media one frequently sees this little flowchart about when to worry. All paths seem to leads to the same conclusion—"don't worry".

Now, I admit to being somewhat of a worry wart. Perhaps because of that I can see several things wrong with this flowchart. First, when you don't know, you need to find out. While you are finding out, worry serves as an incentive. And at the bottom of the chart the possibility that there is a problem, and that you can do something about it, is very much under emphasized. Worry serves as an incentive to find out what you can do, make a plan and then execute it. When you've set that in motion, I guess maybe you could quit worrying, but instead I would swing back around to the top left of the chart and see if there is anything else to worry about.

On the other hand, it is true that you can waste a great deal of time and mental anguish worrying about things over which you have no real influence. You have to identify problems that you can actually do something about and concentrate your efforts there. Of course, different people will reach different conclusions—it's a big world and there is lots of room for disagreement. We can't really determine what the right thing to do is without a lot of trial and error, so a diversity of response is a good thing in that it makes it more likely that some of those responses will be more or less successful.

I'll borrow a "new word" from John Michael Greer—"dissensus". The opposite of consensus, dissensus means agreeing to disagree and wishing the other guy all the best even if you think his ideas are outright crazy or stupid. Provided, of course, that he extends a similar courtesy to you. I've noticed that when people are willing to do this, and then find themselves faced with a serious threat, it often turns out that on important points like "what the heck do we do next" there is a remarkable degree of agreement. Ideological differences can be set aside when we are dealing with more immediate problems.

What I am expressing here on this blog is my own point of view, which you are free to disagree with. I do wish you all the best in pursuing your own point of view. And if we find ourselves coming up with similar plans, it may be that we can help each other to put them into action.

What is my point of view? Well, I have a great deal of faith in the scientific consensus—we really don't have any better way than science of finding out about the world around us, and in the last few hundred years science has built up a pretty useful picture of that world.

Some will no doubt ask, "How can you question BAU and expect it to collapse and yet still be in favour of the scientific consensus?"

It is a common error to conflate the scientific consensus with the "official stories" that are the basic myths of Business As Usual. You can hardly blame anyone for jumping to the conclusion that BAU and science are on the same side, since every effort is made to use science to legitimize the ideas of BAU. Those myths are pushed by politicians, economists and business. They are dressed up in the kind of pseudoscientific costumes that make them hard to distinguish from reality. The "Biggest Lie" that I talked about recently, the idea that our population and consumption can go on growing forever on a finite planet, is at the heart of this false worldview.

There are lots of people who don't completely buy into BAU. And there are multi-billion dollar per year businesses (organic farming, health food, and alternative medicine to name just a few) who take advantage of that, spending a great deal on propaganda and doing a good job of positioning themselves as being in opposition to Business as Usual. There is money to be made in that business, but the pseudoscience they are selling is just as bad as the myths from regular BAU. The people pushing both of these ideologies are very adept at finding the parts of science that happen to agree with their positions and flogging them for all they are worth to further their cause.

The idea of these two conflicting ideologies, both of which are wrong, is central to what I am talking about on this blog and you'll find it coming up again and again. Last year I wrote a series of posts on the subject:

If anybody can suggest a better term than "Crunchy", something less pejorative and more mellifluous, I'd sure be happy to use it. Setting aside all the pseudoscience for a moment, Crunchiness, in its opposition to BAU, is on the right track.

Anyway, if you actually take the time and make the effort to understand how science works and what the current scientific consensus is, you'll realize that it does not particularly support either of these ideologies. But for a great many people, who don't have any real background in science, the combination of conflicting ideologies and pseudoscience is extremely misleading.

One unfortunate side effect of this is that a great deal of worry and effort is wasted on problems that nothing need be done about (because the risk is vanishingly small), or that nothing can be done about (because solutions are beyond our reach). Risk assessment is the key to avoiding this sort of thing.

Ask yourself four things when considering any particular problem or threat:

  1. Risk: what is the likelihood of this happening?
  2. Severity: what are the consequences if this does happen?
  3. Difficulty: how hard will it be to do something about this?
  4. Timescale: how soon will this happen?

If you study up on any existential threat, you'll find reliable experts who have already considered the problem and have a lot of wisdom to offer.

Based on the answers you find to each of those questions, you will decide to worry or not:

 
  • If risk is small, there isn't much to worry about and little need to plan a response.
  • If the severity is small, same conclusion.
  • If it would be easy to do something about the threat, you may want to take some action even if the risk and/or severity are small. If response is difficult then it will require detailed planning and the mobilization of forces beyond yourself. And you will need time to mount a response.
  • Sometimes it is simply not possible to stop a threat from happening, so the action we can realistically take consists of preparing to cope its effects.
  • If the timescale is short, you'll want to plan and act immediately. Preferably to draw on resources you already have in place.
  • If the timescale is long then you may use that time to plan and mobilize your response, or, you may decide to just watch and wait until it is more clear what's going to happen and when. Of course, ignoring threats that are on a long timeline is a tempting but dangerous approach. Eventually that timeline will get a lot shorter.

You'll plan a response based on the nature of the threat and follow up with action, or go and look for something else to worry about. After the first few times you run through your list of threats, you will already have made plans and started to implement them, so the time for worry is over. Of course, you'll always want to keep a "weather eye" out for trouble that you haven't anticipated, or established threats that have changed and now require a different response.

There are a few challenges involved with this approach that we should consider here.

How to identify a reliable expert is certainly one of those challenges. Unfortunately the letters "Dr." in front of a name is no guarantee that someone is either an expert or reliable. I can recommend only skepticism, critical thinking and learning to identifying the many types of bias and the sort of dirty tricks used by those producing pseudoscience. After a while you will develop at sort of "BS" detector that goes off when you are confronted with pseudoscience. A big part of that is knowing what the current scientific consensus says and being skeptical about claims that contradict that consensus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And it is reassuring to find many researchers turning up the same findings, and interpreting them in similar ways.

Some will be eager to point out that scientists working for business concerns are certainly not reliable and their work just can't be trusted, as it will be biased to the advantage of the company. Sometimes this is true, but just as often it is not true. Your evaluation of that work must be based on the evidence, not on ideology—theirs, or yours.

Evaluating risk can also be quite challenging. In my experience there are a couple of particular pitfalls that people encounter. There are probably more, but these are the ones I know personally.

People often look at risk as being "monotonic". That is, if something is dangerous in large quantities, it must also be dangerous in small quantities—it may take longer for the harm to become evident, but there is still harm. This certainly sounds reasonable, but in most cases it is simply not true. Take radiation as an example. There is no doubt that ionizing radiation can kill in large quantities. This makes it frightening and since it can't be seen and is poorly understood, many people don't want to have anything to do with it, assuming that any release of radiation will affect them negatively.

But life on earth has been dealing with small quantities of radiation since day one and has evolved mechanisms for coping with the "background radiation". Most releases of radiation result in a barely detectable increase in the background and are not a serious concern. Of course, if you work in the nuclear industry, where there is the chance of exposure to significant amounts of radiation, you should take safety procedures seriously. And that brings me to my second risk evaluation pitfall.

The majority of the people I worked with during my career in the electrical transmission and distribution industry were quite brave. We often worked in close proximity to serious hazards and while a healthy respect was vital, outright fear would have been crippling. So far, so good. But some of the hazards we encountered were less straightforward. If there is a one in ten chance of serious injury, essentially everyone will take the appropriate precautions. But at some level of decreasing risk, many people will decide to just accept the risk, rather than do much about it. Especially if the precautions they are expected to take (procedures and protective equipment) are rather onerous.

At what level of risk is that a reasonable response? One in a million? Probably. But what about one chance in a thousand? My experience is that there is a range of risk that is significant, but many people find hard to take seriously. The trouble is, if a large population is exposed to the risk on a regular basis, the odds good are that someone is going to get hurt fairly soon. That's why the safety rules are written and why supervisors (me at one point) have to enforce them, even if they didn't take them so serious when they were workers. Something to keep in mind when evaluating risks.

One final thing I should point out—it seems to me that mankind as a whole is at or just past the peak of our ability to respond to large existential threats. From here on in, as collapse proceeds, it's all a bumpy downhill ride. The best we will be able to do, in a great many cases, is to mitigate the effects of what is coming. And since it appears that governments aren't interested in, and increasing don't have the resources to organize such a response, this will have to be done on an individual, family, or at most, community level.

So, what are some of these threats? I've divided them into two groups: non-anthropogenic (not manmade) and anthropogenic (manmade), and I'll be covering them in my next two posts.

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