Showing posts with label Pollution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pollution. Show all posts

Thursday, 20 May 2021

Collapse You Say, Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization

Sunset Over Lake Huron

In my last post I looked at some of the factors that made industrialization possible, and with it the huge growth in consumption that now threatens the continued survival of our civilization.

During the industrial age all those factors interacted in complex and unpredictable ways, producing not just the intended results (more wealth and power for the already rich and powerful), but also a variety of unintended, and in many cases unwelcome, consequences. So much so that at this point the switchover to fossil fuels as an energy source, and the industrialization that it enabled, is starting to seem like a mistake for all but the small number who have profited the most from it. Unfortunately, while many people are beginning to have an inkling that something isn't right, very few have any idea what it might be.

Some of these unintended consequences are contributing to collapse in general, others are specifically related to the issue of overconsumption. So as not to lose sight of the big picture, I am going to talk about both.

Resource Depletion, declining surplus energy

When it came to fossil fuels and various other mineral resources, we used the low hanging fruit first. That is, the highest quality and easiest to access resources.

Those days are over and, while there are still large quantities of hydrocarbons in the earth's crust, they are, for the most part, in forms and locations that are much more difficult to access and which provide less surplus energy. Starting in the 1970s our economy has been confronted, for the first time since we started using fossil fuels, with reduced availability of surplus energy. Despite everything governments and central banks have been able to do, real growth has slowed. This has caused problems for our financial system, as we'll see in more detail in a moment.

Fossil fuels were a one-time windfall of abundant surplus energy. That is now gone and there's no going back to the way things were. We used that windfall in such a way as to leave relatively little in the way of a positive legacy. All the available alternative, renewable energy sources have a significantly lower EROEI, providing much less surplus energy. Not enough to sustain economic growth of the sort we have become accustomed to. Probably not even enough to maintain our high tech civilization.

Depleted reserves of many important minerals are also going to make it difficult to maintain that civilization.

Depletion of non-renewable resources is a very serious problem which we hardly take seriously at all. Economists assure us that we can always find substitutes for anything that is becoming depleted, but they are flat out wrong. There are many things for which there just aren't any practical substitutes—fossil fuels, copper, and phosphorous being high on the list.

There are many things we can do to reduce the rate at which such resources are being depleted, but eventually we will still run out. It seems to me that this will necessitate significant changes to our supposedly non-negotiable lifestyles.

Resource depletion is, of course, a result of overconsumption, rather than a cause.

Climate Change, Ocean Acidifcation

When fossil fuels are burned, carbon that was trapped underground million of years ago is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increased amounts of it in the atmosphere are leading to a variety of changes in our climate—mainly heating, but also shifting of rainfall patterns and more and heavier storms. CO2 is also strongly absorbed by the oceans, resulting in ocean acidification, with negative effects on many of the oceans' ecosystems.

Methane (CH4, natural gas) is also a significant greenhouse gas. Quite a lot of it leaks into the atmosphere between the well head and where it is finally used. And higher temperatures release methane from where it is currently trapped in permafrost and undersea deposits of methane clathrates.

The effects of climate change, such as rising seas destroying shoreline properties and agriculture suffering from heat and drought are going to be very hard to cope with in the years to come, and will be a major factor in the continuing collapse of our civilization.

Climate change is also a result of overconsumption, rather than a cause. Many of the negatives effects of overconsumption actually show up as climate change.

Pollution, Habitiat Destruction, Ecosphere Damage

Of course greenhouse gases are a form of pollution, but there are many other types of pollution resulting from industrial activities, which have had negative effects on the planets ecosystems and will continue to do so for a long time yet.

The spread of mankind across the globe and more recently the spread of the large scale agriculture and forestry needed by our population, has resulted in the destruction of habitats for many species, and a decrease in biodiversity.

Elsewhere in this series I have said quite a bit about the carrying capacity of the planet and how growth of human population and consumption has resulted in our overshooting that capacity. The important thing to understand is that when we overuse the services provided to us by the biosphere, the biosphere suffers and it's carrying capacity decreases, making the overshoot even worse.

Pollution, habitat destruction and biosphere damage from overuse are all effects of overconsumption.

The "New" World

The so-called "new" world was, of course, not empty. The history of the European colonization is largely a story of the oppression, and in some cases outright genocide, of indigenous people by Europeans. While it is convenient to pretend otherwise, this is still going on and has a destructive effect on societies that continue to let it happen. This too is an effect of overconsumption, albeit somewhat indirectly.

The Financial System

The financial sector of the economy provides services to do with managing money. But what is money, anyway? If you've studied economics, you were told that money is used as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. That's more or less true, but the most important thing about money is that it can be used to make more money. That's how businesses operating in the financial sector make their profits. It's also what drives growth, or perhaps "necessitates growth" would be a better way of putting it.

In a rapidly growing economy there is a great demand for money to build new infrastructure. Existing money is insufficient, so that demand can only be provided using credit, and "fractional reserve banking" is the solution. This simply means that banks are allowed to lend out more money than they have on deposit, usually by a factor of ten. Money is created (out of thin air, basically) when a bank makes a loan. So, in one very important sense, money is debt. Today that is the only way that new money enters the economy. In order to make a profit, banks require debts to be paid back with interest, using money to make money. And by the way, when a loan is paid off, the money essentially disappears, back where it came from.

Where does the money to pay the interest come from? Well, you might say, if a business is profitable, it will be earning more than enough money to pay the interest. True, but where does the money it earns come from? From other businesses and people, who have taken out loans which also have to be paid back with interest. And of course, the money for that interest comes from yet more loans.

As long as the economy is growing, this works just fine. But if growth slows a point is reached where profits fall off and businesses struggle to make loan/interest payments. They are understandably hesitant to take out new loans and banks are reluctant to issue them. If this goes on, eventually businesses can't get credit to finance their day to day operations, and with no new money entering the system they can't pay the interest on their loans. Businesses start to default on their loans and if enough loans are in default, banks themselves start failing.

Banks can reduce their interest rates to allow for lower rates of economic growth, offering cheap credit to stimulate growth, but when interest rates have been reduced close to zero, little more can be done. Over the last few decades the robust economic growth we had previously experienced was replaced by market bubbles (fake growth) and the crashes that happen when those bubbles burst.

All this is why financiers, business men, politicians and even many working class people are so concerned about maintaining economic growth. But economic growth means growth in consumption, and has lead to our current overconsumption problems. It seems that in order to address those problems we will have to stop economic growth and actually experience "degrowth", until our consumption reaches a level that the planet can support on a sustainable basis. In order to do this, we need a financial system that doesn't break when growth stops.

It is important to understand that, despite all this talk of money, what really drives the economy is surplus energy. It seems ironic to me that, after forcing growth in the economy for the last few centuries, the financial system is now struggling because of reduced surplus energy, a situation brought about by overconsumption caused by growth. So, clearly, the financial system is one of the causes of overconsumption.

Throughout the history of the blog I have been talking about these three factors: resource depletion (including Peak Oil), environmental degradation (including Climate Change), and a financial system that drives growth, and can't cope with degrowth, as being the main causes of collapse. I could stop here, but it has become clear to me that overconsumption is also contributing to collapse and there are a number of other factors that cause overconsumption. We need to have a closer look those factors if we are going to figure out how to get them under control.

Capitalism and Industrialization

Industrialization was achieved largely using a system called capitalism. It consists of an upper class who own the means of production and a working class who do the work involved in the production.

Based on their ownership of the means of production, the upper class claims the right to the majority of the profit from that production, even though they do very little of the work involved. The working classes are paid either a wage based on the time they spend working or a piece rate based on the quantity of production they do. In either case, the owners try to pay as little as possible in order to maximize their profits, and since the working class has no other way of making a living, they can co-operate or starve.

Capitalism and Industrialism as a cause of over consumption

The main goal of capitalism is to facilitate the accumulation of further wealth by the upper class. Unfortunately, "enough" is not a concept that enters into it, as capitalists are always looking to grow their enterprises and increase their wealth. Indeed, in modern public corporations, stockholders are liable to object if growth is not speedy enough. And, of course, as I said in the last section, the way our financial sector is organized forces capitalists keep to growing their enterprises.

Industrialization has allowed us to produce ever more goods ready to be consumed. As long as there is a demand for those goods, the economy will grow. I suspect that at the start of the industrial age, when most manufactured goods were still made slowly and laboriously by human muscle power, there was a good deal of pent up demand for those goods. As we industrialized, factories were able to make goods more cheaply and in great quantities. It wasn't long before there was a problem of over production, or under consumption, depending on how you look at it.

In addition to that, the nature a factory is to produce large amounts of one particular thing, and once you've invested in a factory, there had better be a market for that thing, whether anyone really needs it or not. This results in the "supply push" model of business, driven by the need to pay off investments in production equipment, and of course, to accumulate more wealth.

Many strategies have been devised to increase consumption, so as to keep up with production, and ensure the flow of wealth into the capitalists pockets. Today these include, but aren't limited to, the following:

  • consumerism, where people are encouraged to see themselves defined in terms of what they buy, and to justify their existence by buying more
  • marketing, or the manufacturing of demand, especially for new and supposedly better goods
  • fads, fashion, collecting
  • planned obsolescence
  • frequent technological upgrades
  • deliberate waste
  • greed seen as a good thing

All these strategies to drive consumption have messed with our heads to the point where most of us consumers have a very strange world view. For example, when discussing how to consume less, many of us are liable to start by asking what we need to buy in order to do that. I mean, how else would you solve a problem than by buying something?

Initially, working class people were underpaid and weren't a major force of consumption. It took a long time and a great many strikes to stop the upper classes from thinking of the working class as anything but workers. Sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, working people, at least in the developed world, finally came to be seen as consumers as well as workers, and in some cases were even paid enough to consume effectively. Of course, this only increased our overconsumption.

But even so, capitalists are still their own best customers, the champions of consumption. Globally speaking, the upper classes, the top 10% by income, do about 60% of the consuming. The bottom 50% of people by income only do a little over 7% of the consuming. So it is clear where any attempts to curb overconsumption must focus. Lest we get too smug, though, it is sobering to remember that the top 10% includes about 800 million people—most of the people in the developing world, including most middle class people and even many working class people.

This is also why it would do no good to get rid of poor people, even those whose population is growing quickly. They consume so little that they simply aren't a factor in our overshoot problem.

In any case, we all must do our part to stop goods piling up at the output of factories, and to keep service providers busy. The way the system is set up, failure to do this leads to the shutdown of factories, layoffs, unemployment and, worst of all, reduced profits for the owners. (Sarcasm, yes, but also factual.)

So, capitalism is the driving force behind overconsumption, and as such is causing the slow collapse we've experienced over the last 50 years or so. But capitalism has other negative effects on society as well.

Negative Effects of Capitalism on Society

Under feudalism there was a web of obligations flowing in both directions. Yes, serfs had to work for their lords. But since there was no other way of getting the work done, the lords had to provide the serfs with a way to feed, clothe and house themselves. This mainly consisted of providing access to a "commons", where serfs could grow crops and graze livestock for their own use, gather firewood and so forth. The level of use of the commons was closely regulated, either by the feudal lord or the community that relied on that commons, so there was no "tragedy of the commons".

Under capitalism there is no such web of obligations. The commons was soon enclosed by capitalists who saw it as an under used resource, and proceeded to over use it (a real tragedy). The only way remaining for working class people to satisfy their needs was to buy them from the capitalists using money they earned working for the capitalists. If the capitalists overproduced and the demand for labour went down, workers got laid off and the owners had no obligation whatever to support them.

Capitalism can't even attempt to solve problems where the solution doesn't involve making a profit. Such issues are ignored or, at best, left for government to solve. Even providing what is needed by the populace is only an indirect result of capitalistic production, and if it becomes unprofitable, capitalists stop doing it.

Capitalists feel entitled to an ever growing slice of the economic pie. As long as the economy was growing fast enough, they could have that and everyone else could see some improvement in conditions as well, since the whole pie was growing. But for the last few decades while economic growth has slowed and capitalists have still insisted on taking a growing slice of it, what remains for the rest of us has continually decreased, and economic inequality has increased significantly.

To be clear, all of us in the developed world are going to be consuming a lot less, either deliberately in an attempt to get overconsumption under control, or unintentionally because we've refused to recognize the reality of collapse and it has continued whether we like it or not.

But with the capitalist fixation on economic growth it is certainly a lot harder to do anything effective about over consumption.

Government

During the industrial era many countries switched from aristocracies to some form of representative democracy. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. But this did not make as big a change as one might think.

Because of the need to fund election campaigns politicians find themselves very much beholden to the rich (mainly capitalists). Not only are capitalists incapable of addressing any problem who's solution would stop them from making a profit, but they make sure that government doesn't try to implement any such solution. These plutarchs, hidden behind representative democracies, are short sighted enough that they are unwilling to do anything to slow growth or reduce consumption. The difficultly we are having in implementing any real solutions to climate change is just the most obvious example of this.

Other countries have ended up under totalitarian dictatorships, which tend to be poor and in need of financial support. So the same thing happens, with those who lend them money actually in charge.

To sum up what I've been saying today about overconsumption—it is not a result of innate greed, not a failing of the human race as a whole, but rather caused by a capitalistic upper class bent on maintaining economic growth and the accumulation of wealth at all costs, with no thought of the negative consequences that await us down the road. They have convinced most of us, and themselves as well, that growth and consumption can go on forever on a finite planet.

There are still a few loose ends from the sections on finance and government, but we'll deal with those next time. That discussion will lead us into the main thrust of my next post—what to do about overconsumption.


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

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Sunday, 22 January 2017

The Collapse of Complex Societies, Part 2

In my last post I started a review of Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies.

In that post, we saw Tainter develop his theory that complex societies collapse because of diminishing marginal returns on investments in complexity. He makes these observations:

  1. human societies are problem-solving organizations;
  2. sociopolitical system require energy or their maintenance;
  3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
  4. investments in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns

I quoted Tainter on how, as marginal returns decline, societies find themselves spending so much on maintaining complexity that they don't have the resources to adequately responding to stress—various sorts of emergencies and disasters. I should have mentioned that this can also be looked at in terms of optimization and resilience. In order to minimize those decreasing marginal returns, complex systems are usually optimized as much as possible. That is to say, they are made as efficient as possible in terms of their intended output under ideal conditions. Unfortunately, this inevitable reduces their adaptability and resiliency. Such systems are very brittle and when even fairly minor things go wrong they tend to break (collapse) where a more resilient system would have been able to adapt and carry on.

He also makes it clear (to me, anyway) that adding complexity is our preferred strategy. Even when we reach the point where we are working as hard as we can to just maintain the status quo, we are very reluctant to simplify things. This would seem to imply that our path of progress from the caves to the stars is fated to be interrupted on occasion by collapse, and perhaps stopped altogether.

Of course, these ideas are very unwelcome to those of us who have been raised in the religion of progress. We have been taught that progress makes things work better, makes life more convenient and comfortable and holds great hope for the future. But very little is said about what it all costs. It is pretty clear to me that progress amounts to increasing complexity, even if some of that complexity is hidden. My dad's first car, for instance, (a Model T Ford) had a manual choke and manual spark advance and starting it took quite a bit of skill. Today the latest models have push button start which takes care of all those details and works pretty much every time. Much simpler you might say, but have a look under the hood and you'll find that it takes a lot of hidden complexity to achieve this "simplicity".

When I first read this book, I was unwilling to even accept the idea of decreasing marginal productivity. Even though Tainter offers extensive examples and statistics in Chapter 4 to show that this is indeed so. Whether it is agriculture, resource production, manufacturing, information processing, sociopolitical control, specialization or overall economic productivity—the law of decreasing returns does indeed apply. Indeed, it is one of the few areas of economics in which we have enough confidence to call a "law".

But what I couldn't understand is how you could have decreasing productivity when yields have been going up significantly. Of course, what we are talking about here is decreases in marginal productivity.

To use terminology from agriculture, the yields per acre have indeed improved. But the amount of additional (marginal) effort required has grown for each successive improvement. Effort means energy. Traditionally that meant muscle power, human or animal. Today we have achieved great reductions in the amount of muscle power required in agriculture, but only because we have learned to use energy (in the form of fossil fuels) directly to drive machines or manufacture fertilizers and pesticides. With all this, agriculture has become an increasingly complex endeavour which consumes more energy than ever before. And over the last couple of decades yields have started to level off despite heroic measures to improve them.

Another illustration of this is the development of the coal-based economy in England, covered by Tainter in chapter 4 of this book. One commonly hears the switchover to coal extolled as a great leap forward, due to the greater BTUs per unit weight to be had from burning coal. Unfortunately, that viewpoint suffers from a certain amount of tunnel vision.

Jumps in population at around AD 1300, 1600 and in the eighteenth century, led to intensification in agriculture and industry and as land was increasingly deforested to provide fuel and agricultural space, basic heating, cooking and manufacturing needs could no longer be met by burning wood. A shift to reliance on coal began, gradually and with apparent reluctance. Coal was definitely a fuel source of secondary desirability, being more expensive to obtain and distribute than wood as well as being more dirty and polluting... Mining of coal from the ground was more costly than obtaining a quantity of wood of equal heating value and became ever more costly as the most accessible reserves were depleted. Mines had to be sunk ever deeper, until groundwater problems became a serious problem. Ultimately the steam engine was developed to pump water out of mines, using some of the coal as a power source...

The increased costliness per unit of thermal value in the initial shift from wood to coal is apparent, but unfortunately good data on returns to energy investment are not available before the recent period. Modern data not only illustrate the trend quantitatively, but indicates that the process of declining marginal returns is continuing.

That was written in 1988. It is interesting to note, from our vantage point in 2017, that coal mining in the UK peaked in 1913 and finally came to an end in 2015.

Another aspect of increasing complexity is that, in order to minimize those decreasing marginal returns, complex systems are usually optimized as much as possible. That is to say, they are made as efficient as possible in terms of their intended output. Unfortunately, this inevitable reduces thier adaptability and resiliency. Such systems are very brittle and when even fairly minor things go wrong they tend to break (collapse) where a more resilient system would have been able to adapt and carry on.

In Chapter 5, Tainter takes a close look at three examples of collapse to see if his law of decreasing marginal productivity works as an explanation. These are The Western Roman Empire, The Classic Maya of the Southern Lowlands and The Chacoan Society of the American Southwest. Tainter goes into quite a bit of detail about each of these societies, but I'll just share his conclusions:

  1. In each of the cases examined, the costliness of complexity increased over time while the benefits to the population declined.
  2. In each substantial increased costs occurred late, shortly before the collapse, and these were imposed on a population already weakened by the previous pattern of decreasing marginal returns
  3. For Rome and Maya, population leveled off or declined before the collapse and the well-being of most people deteriorated. This seems to have come about from the demands of supporting such complex systems. It is not currently known whether something similar happened in the Chacoan case, but it is noteworthy that the number of Outliers participating in this system dropped prior to the final collapse. Quite possibly, Outlier communities, whose participation could not be enforced (unlike the Roman and Mayan cases), withdrew from the network before declining marginal productivity adversely affected their local populations.
  4. For the Maya and Chacoans, subsequent abandonment of their territories, and the lack of a substantial reoccupation by agricultural peoples, suggests that there was environmental deterioration during the period of growth. This may indicate that pressures of population on resources had more to do with the Mayan and Chacoan collapses than with that of Rome. The Roman case is very different, for the later Empire was decidedly under populated.
  5. In each case, people on the periphery (the northern European barbarians, the northern Maya, and the Western and Eastern Pueblos) rose to prominence after the older society had collapsed.

None of these cases can be completely understood by the explanations commonly advanced for them.

  1. The fall of Rome was not due to barbarians, for the Empire was economically, organizationally, and militarily stronger than the besiegers. And it was not due to internal weakness, for the Empire remained essentially intact for a period of several hundred years. Rome's collapse was due to the excessive costs imposed on the agricultural population to maintain a far-flung empire in a hostile environment.
  2. The fall of the Maya was not due to a peasant revolt, for peasants supported this civilization for over 1000 years. It was not due to invasions, for which there is unclear evidence and uncertain causality, nor to agricultural deterioration, for the evidence of agricultural intensification indicates that the Maya were fully capable of increasing the productivity of their environment. The collapse of the Maya civilization was due to the burdens of an increasingly costly society borne by an increasingly weakened population. Peasant dissatisfaction, foreign pressures, internal conflict, or an agricultural crisis may have provided a final, insurmountable challenge, but such a challenge was effective only because the Maya were following a course that made them vulnerable to collapse.
  3. The Chacoan collapse was not due to drought or environmental deterioration, for these were factors which the Chacoans were technically capable of dealing with, and indeed had previously done so. The regional populations of the San Juan Basin chose not to continue participating in the Chacoan network, nor to rise to the challenge of the final drought because the costs of doing so had grown too high in comparison to the advantages conferred. Collapse and migration were economically preferable.

This chapter began with the observation that the framework for explaining collapse could probably not be subjected to a formal, quantitative test. The alternative was to investigate three cases in detail, asking whether the framework developed in Chapter 4 helps us to understand why these societies collapsed. The results lead us to answer the question affirmatively: the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Southern Lowland Maya and the Chacoan society can be understood as responses to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.

In Chapter 6 Tainter summarizes what he has been saying so far, and then considers the idea that collapse may not universally be a catastrophe:

...under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response.

What may be a catastrophe to administrators (and later observers) need not be to the bulk of the population... It may only be among those members of a society who have neither the opportunity nor the ability to produce primary food resources that the collapse of administrative hierarchies is a clear disaster. Among those less specialized, severing the ties that link local groups to a regional entity is often attractive. Collapse then is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.

Tainter concludes by considering the implications for contemporary societies. And here I believe he finds himself in something of a state of denial. Or it may be that he felt a wholehearted endorsement of the idea that collapse lies in our future would have just been too much for his audiences to swallow. Tainter was well aware of the response experienced by The Limits to Growth.

He acknowledges that his findings certainly point to the possibility of collapse of our complex modern society and that such a collapse could be devastating because much of the population does not have the opportunity or ability to produce primary food resources. In addition to mentioning existential threats like comet strikes, he lists a number of scenarios for contemporary collapse:

  • nuclear war and associated climatic changes
  • increasing atmospheric pollution, leading to ozone depletion, climatic changes, saturation of global circulation patterns, and similar disasters
  • depletion of critical industrial resources
  • general economic breakdown, brought on by such things as unrepayable national and international debts, disruptions to fossil fuel availability, hyperinflation, and the like.

He even acknowledges that industrialism will someday have to deal with resource depletion and its own wastes. The major question is how far off the day is. And he admits that patterns of declining marginal returns can be observed in at least some contemporary industrial societies in the following areas: agriculture; mineral and energy production; research and development; investment in health and education; government, military and industrial management; productivity of GNP for producing new growth; and some elements of improved technical design.

He identifies two opposing reactions to all this: economists who believe the challenges we faces are all solvable economic dilemmas (to be solved by economic growth), and environmentalists who believe that stimulating economic growth can only hasten the inevitable crash and hold that we should be aiming for economic undevelopment (what is known today as "degrowth"). He says that both sides are ignoring key historical factors.

He proceeds to do a good job of debunking techno-optimism, talking clearly about what is wrong with the principle of infinite substitutability:

One problem with the principle of infinite substitutability is that it does not apply, in any simple fashion, to investments in organizational complexity. Sociopolitical organization, as we know, is a major arena of declining marginal returns, and one for which no substitute product can be developed. Economies of scale and advances in information-processing technology do help lower organizational costs, but ultimately these too are subject to diminishing returns.

A second problem is that the principle of infinite substitutability is, despite its title, difficult to apply indefinitely. A number of perceptive scientists, philosophers, and economists have shown that the marginal cost of research and development... have grown so high it is questionable whether technological innovation will be able to contribute as much to the solution of future problems as it has to past ones...

It is not that R&D cannot potentially solve the problems of industrialism. The difficulty is that to do so will require an increasing share of GNP. The principle of infinite substitutability depends on energy and technology. With diminishing returns to investment in scientific research, how can economic growth be sustained? The answer is that to sustain growth, resources will have to be allocated from other sectors of the economy into science and engineering. The result will likely be at least a temporary decline in the standard of living... The allocation of greater resources to science of course is nothing new, merely the continuation of a two century-old trend. Such investment, unfortunately, can never yield a permanent solution, merely a respite from diminishing returns.

But then, in my opinion, he goes astray. He says that historical collapses were all of complex societies functional in isolation. Today's world is full of complex societies in competition with each other, which (he asserts) changes things.

Any nation vulnerable to collapse will have to pursue one of three options: (1) absorption by a neighbour or some larger state; (2) economic support by a dominant power, or by an international funding agency; or (3) payment by the support population of whatever costs are needed to continue complexity, however detrimental the marginal return. A nation today can no longer unilaterally collapse, for if any national government disintegrates its population and territory will be absorbed by some other.

His comments on degrowth are limited to this:

Here is the reason why proposals for economic undevelopment, for living in balance on a small planet, will not work. Given the close link between economic and military power, unilateral economic deceleration would be equivalent to and as foolhardy as, unilateral disarmament. We simply do not have the option to return to a lower economic level, at least not a rational option. Competition among political peers drives increased complexity and resource consumption regardless of costs, human or ecological.

I do not wish to suggest by this discussion that any major power would be quickly in danger of collapse were it not for this situation. Both the primary and secondary world powers have sufficient economic strength to finance diminishing returns well into the future.

It is amusing (and sad) that this was written very shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, during which the rest of the world stood by and declined to finance the USSR any further. Evidently, there was insufficient economic strength to finance diminishing returns.

Since then we have witnessed numerous cases where the world powers have stood by and allowed an assortment of small countries to undergo something very similar to collapse. Why? Because it didn't make economic sense to do anything else. Off the top of my head I would point to Cuba, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Greece and Venezuela.

The major powers are simply no longer ready to finance diminishing returns in those cases where there is no profit in it for them. The phenomena of "throwing them to the wolves", both in the case of small economically insignificant countries, and inconvenient groups and individuals within countries, is becoming standard procedure. Help from international funding agencies has turned out to be the kiss of death for developing countries. And people are very unwilling to support governments that call for austerity as a path to economic recovery (rightly so).

Tainter goes on to say (as have so many others) that a new energy subsidy beyond fossil fuels will be necessary to finance declining marginal returns, and even that will only be a temporary fix. He believed that the lack of a power vacuum and the resulting competitive spiral have given us a temporary reprieve in which to search for that energy subsidy.

There is both cause for optimism and pessimism in the current situation. We are in a curious position where competitive interactions force a level of investment, and a declining marginal return that might ultimately lead to collapse except that the competitor who collapses first will simply be dominated or absorbed or dominated by the survivor...

...in fact industrial societies are subject to the same principles that caused earlier societies to collapse. If civilization collapses again, it will be from failure to take advantage of the current reprieve, a reprieve paradoxically both detrimental and essential to our anticipated future.

Sorry, Mr. Tainter—in the event, that's not the way it turned out. Whatever reprieve there was in the closing days of the twentieth century has slipped between our fingers. In the twenty-first century, those who collapse are largely abandoned by those striving to avoid a similar fate.

This just goes to show you how difficult making predictions is, especially about the future. But none of that takes away in the least from the main message of this book, which I would say is rock solid—human societies use complexity to solve problems and because of declining marginal returns, those solutions are always temporary and often lead to collapse. This principle should be kept very much in mind by those of us who are trying understand the events unfolding around us in the world today.

I recommend reading the book, but there are also a quite a few videos featuring Joseph Tainter on YouTube.

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Sunday, 18 December 2016

Political Fantasies, Political Realities

Sunset on Lake Huron, Dec. 18, 2016,
not far from where I live.

A while back I did a series of posts entitled A Political Fantasy. The idea was what would I tell our Prime Minister if he should actually ask me for advice on how to run the country in the age of scarcity. Small chance that that would ever happen, or that he would take my advice if he did get it, but it made for a good way of getting some ideas across.
In the new year I'll be doing two or three book reviews as a way of covering some concepts that need to be set up before I start another series of posts entitled Political Realities--Collapse, Step by Step. The original series appeared here before I caught on to posting links to my blog in a few choice locations. Readership has gone up considerably since then, which is good, but it means that relatively few of you have seen that series. Having read A Political Fantasy before we start on Political Realities might be a good idea, so here is a list of links:
A little light reading to see you through the holiday season. ;) And speaking of that, best holiday wishes to all my readers. Take care of yourselves--I'll see you in 2017.
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Sunday, 30 October 2016

The Limits to Growth, Part 5

In my last post we looked at The Limits to Growth, Chapter V—The State of Global Equilibrium. The post concludes my review of this book, with a look at the last two sections and some thoughts of my own.

Commentary

This chapter is by the Executive Committee of the Club of Rome and contains their comments on the book. They make it clear that they did want a study on limits.

...we had two immediate objectives in mind. One was to gain insights into the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity....

A second objective was to help identify and study the dominant elements, and their interactions, that influence the long term behavior of world systems....

The report has served these purposes well. It represents a bold step toward a comprehensive and integrated analysis of the world situation, an approach that will now require years to refine, deepen, and extend. Nevertheless, this report is only a first step. The limits to growth it examines are only the known uppermost physical limits imposed by the finiteness of the world system. In reality, these limits are further reduced by political, social, and institutional constraints, by inequitable distribution of population and resources, and by our inability to manage very large intricate systems.

But the report serves further purposes. It advances tentative suggestions for the future state of the world and opens new perspectives for continual intellectual and practical endeavor to shape that future.

A preliminary draft was submitted to 40 people, mostly members of the Club of Rome, who responded with just the kind of weak criticisms that have become so familiar in the years since the book was published.

1. Since models can accommodate only a limited number of variables, the interactions studied are only partial. It was pointed out that in a global model such as the one used in this study the degree of aggregation is necessarily high as well. Nevertheless, it was generally recognized that, with a simple world model, it is possible to examine the effect of a change in basic assumptions or to simulate the effect of a change in policy to see how such changes influence the behavior of the system over time. Similar experimentation in the real world would be lengthy, costly, and in many cases impossible.

2. It was suggested that insufficient weight had been given to the possibilities of scientific and technological advances in solving certain problems, such as the development of foolproof contraceptive methods, the production of protein from fossil fuels, the generation or harnessing of virtually limitless energy (including pollution-free solar energy), and its subsequent use for synthesizing food from air and water and for extracting minerals from rocks. It was agreed, however, that such developments would probably come too late to avert demographic or environmental disaster. In any case they probably would only delay rather than avoid crisis, for the problematique consists of issues that require more than technical solutions.

3. Others felt that the possibility of discovering stocks of raw materials in areas as yet insufficiently explored was much greater than the model assumed. But, again, such discoveries would only postpone shortage rather than eliminate it. It must, however, be recognized that extension of resource availability by several decades might give man time to find remedies.

4. Some considered the model too "technocratic," observing that it did not include critical social factors, such as the effects of adoption of different value systems. The chairman of the Moscow meeting summed up this point when he said, "Man is no mere biocybernetic device." This criticism is readily admitted. The present model considers man only in his material system because valid social elements simply could not be devised and introduced in this first effort. Yet, despite the model's material orientation, the conclusions of the study point to the need for fundamental change in the values of society.

Overall, a majority of those who read this report concurred with its position. Furthermore, it is clear that, if the arguments submitted in the report (even after making allowance for justifiable criticism) are considered valid in principle, their significance can hardly be overestimated....

Although we can here express only our preliminary views, recognizing that they still require a great deal of reflection and ordering, we are in agreement on the following points:

1. We are convinced that realization of the quantitative restraints of the world environment and of the tragic consequences of an overshoot is essential to the initiation of new forms of thinking that will lead to a fundamental revision of human behavior and, by implication, of the entire fabric of present-day society.

2. We are further convinced that demographic pressure in the world has already attained such a high level, and is moreover so unequally distributed, that this alone must compel mankind to seek a state of equilibrium on our planet.

3. We recognize that world equilibrium can become a reality only if the lot of the so-called developing countries is substantially improved, both in absolute terms and relative to the economically developed nations, and we affirm that this improvement can be achieved only through a global strategy.

4. We affirm that the global issue of development is, however, so closely interlinked with other global issues that an overall strategy must be evolved to attack all major problems, including in particular those of man's relationship with his environment.

5. We recognize that the complex world problematique is to a great extent composed of elements that cannot be expressed in measurable terms. Nevertheless, we believe that the predominantly quantitative approach used in this report is an indispensable tool for understanding the operation of the problematique. And we hope that such knowledge can lead to a mastery of its elements.

6. We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the present unbalanced and dangerously deteriorating world situation is the primary task facing humanity.

7. This supreme effort is a challenge for our generation. It cannot be passed on to the next. The effort must be resolutely undertaken without delay, and significant redirection must be achieved during this decade.

8. We have no doubt that if mankind is to embark on a new course, concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent.

9. We unequivocally support the contention that a brake imposed on world demographic and economic growth spirals must not lead to a freezing of the status quo of economic development of the world's nations.

10. We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national, and world levels. This change is perhaps already in the air, however faintly.

But our tradition, education, current activities, and interests will make the transformation embattled and slow. Only real comprehension of the human condition at this turning point in history can provide sufficient motivation for people to accept the individual sacrifices and the changes in political and economic power structures required to reach an equilibrium state.

The question remains of course whether the world situation is in fact as serious as this book, and our comments, would indicate. We firmly believe that the warnings this book contains are amply justified, and that the aims and actions of our present civilization can only aggravate the problems of tomorrow. But we would be only too happy if our tentative assessments should prove too gloomy.

The commentary concludes with the following thoughts:

The last thought we wish to offer is that man must explore himself-his goals and values-as much as the world he seeks to change. The dedication to both tasks must be unending. The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.

Appendix

Simply a list of related studies, and the last section in the book.

My thoughts

I think it is first and foremost important to understand that the idea of exponential growth leading to overshoot and collapse should not be a surprise to anyone. This is simply the way ecosystems behave. It is the height of hubris to believe that the human race is an exception to this. Of course, many people do believe exactly that—that because we are intelligent and can anticipate problems before they occur, we will always be able to solve them.

There is also a common misconception that there is "a balance of nature", that leads us not to expect ecosystems to undergo change. Of course our ecosystem has undergone drastic change during the last two centuries, but many people have become inured to this, see it as normal and expect that it can go on forever.

It may be that the authors of The Limits to Growth should have spent more time familiarizing their readers with these issues...

At any rate, once one has understood the implications of exponential growth, it also should be of no surprise that none of the proposed technological solutions in Chapter 4 provide more than temporary relief. Or any other technological solutions, really. The problem, after all, is the exponential growth, not the technology. If we could just get the growth under control (stopped, in other words), the judicious application of appropriate technologies might lead to a stable system, as discussed in Chapter 5.

Stopping that growth, though, would be a social, not a technological solution. And it seems that we don't have a very good grasp of how to engineer social change. For the most part it just happens in reaction to whatever is going on, rather than as part of any sort of plan.

I can't help observing that except for the Standard Run, all the other model runs in The limits to Growth involve ridiculously optimistic assumptions. Even the ones that still end in collapse. The "successful" ones shown in Figures 46 and 47 take that optimism even further, especially as regards social change. And while population and industrial activity are stabilized in those runs, resources are still being used in a non-sustainable way. If those runs were continued on into the twenty second century, at some point they too would run into a resource crisis.

A great many otherwise intelligent people were totally gobsmacked by this book, and reacted very negatively. They simply didn't believe in limits and it seems that The Limits to Growth only hardened that irrational disbelief.

But here we are 44 years after the book was published. Can't we just look at how things turned out to see if there was anything to the future they predicted? Yes, indeed we can—have a look at Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data by Dr Graham M. Turner, who is a Principal Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia.

It turns out that the Limits to Growth standard model run is a pretty good match to how things have turned out since then. In the standard run, resource depletion started early in this century and required more capital to be diverted to the resource sector.

With significant capital subsequently going into resource extraction, there is insufficient capital available to fully replace degrading capital within the industrial sector itself. Consequently, despite heightened industrial activity attempting to satisfy multiple demands from all sectors and the population, actual industrial output (per capita) begins to fall precipitously from about 2015, while pollution from the industrial activity continues to grow. The reduction of inputs to agriculture from industry, combined with pollution impacts on agricultural land, leads to a fall in agricultural yields and food produced per capita. Similarly, services (e.g. health and education) are not maintained due to insufficient capital and inputs.

I'd say there is every indication that we have already seen the start of something very much like this in the past decade or two. As early as the 1990s real economic growth slowed due to resource depletion and surplus energy issues. The markets started blowing bubbles in an attempt keep growth going. First the dot com bubble and then the real estate and derivatives bubble in 2008. After that, higher prices for depleted resources (especially energy) slowed a faltering economic recovery, reduced the demand for those same resources and brought their prices down below what it costs to produce them, leaving the extraction industries in a very rough spot. I certainly expect a further down turn and eventually collapse during the next few decades—just what the standard run shows us.

But you can look at the same evidence, squint a little and hold your mouth just right, and conclude that what we are seeing is just a bump on the way to growth with no end in sight—the techno-optimist's wet dream. Are we already deep into overshoot or just nicely getting started on our way to the stars? Depending on who you ask, you can hear spirited arguments on either side of the issue.

Based on The Limits to Growth and the intervening years of history, during which essentially nothing was done to address our headlong approach to those limits (and lots of other evidence as well), I'd say you'd have to be pretty deep in denial not to see that we are already well into overshoot. Time will tell, but my nature is such that I want to be prepared for the worst. In the unlikely event that it doesn't happen, I'll be quite relieved.

I've just finished reading Nicole Foss's The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space. I mention this here because it deals mainly with defining things that are outside the set of feasible responses. And because most of what is suggested in The Limits to Growth is indeed outside of that set. She looks in detail at the kind of changing social conditions which will be brought on by collapse—the sort of thing that was anticipated but not explored in detail by the authors of The Limits to Growth.

I think looking at things to avoid is a very good place to start. Here's Nicole's list:

  • Given that the cost of capital will be very high, and there will be little purchasing power, proposed solutions which are capital-intensive will lie outside solution space.
  • Proposed solutions to our predicament that depend on the functioning of large-scale organizations operating in a top-down manner do not lie within viable solution space.
  • If proposed solutions depend on a cooperative social context at large scale, they will not be part of solution space.
  • Given that the energy supply will be falling, and that there will, over time, be competition for increasingly scarce energy resources that we can no longer take for granted, proposed solutions which are energy-intensive will lie outside of solution space.
  • Proposed solutions dependent on the current level of socioeconomic complexity do not lie within solution space.

In the early 1970s, The Club of Rome was advocating the sort of top down, co-operative response that needed to be started almost immediately if it was to be successful in moving towards a "equilibrium state". None of this happened, and the model run illustrated in Figure 48, where stabilizing policies are not put into effect until the year 2000 and which leads to another collapse, serves as a cautionary tale. All the more so in 2016 with no move toward stabilizing policies anywhere in sight.

Ms. Foss believes there is little hope of ever achieving a worldwide steady state economy. The fact that there is no such thing as a "balance of nature" would tend to support that. It is a new concept for me, but one worth considering. I definitely agree with her that our efforts need to be focused at the family and local community level. And that reliance on government and high level activism to convince governments to change course, would be foolhardy in the extreme.

I should add at this point my usual comments about the shape of the collapse I am expecting. First of all, I am not talking about sudden, apocalyptic change. The collapse I expect, and indeed am already seeing, will take place very unevenly both geographically, chronological and across the various social classes. It will take place over decades—a slow, step-wise descent to a level of economic activity that can be support by our remaining energy resources.

For many people it will be detectable only after it has happened. If you are a member of the elite, moderately lucky and perhaps a bit dense, you may not be aware that it is happening until it is pretty much over. On the other hand, if you are a refugee in a war zone or starving in the middle of a famine, collapse has already happened for you. And if your investments have turned out to be worthless and you've just lost your job and your house, then collapse will very real for you, even if most of the people around you are oblivious.

Already, even for those of us that collapse hasn't quite caught up with yet, it is easy to see what Ms. Foss is talking about. Most of us don't have access to much in the way of capital, or much influence in large scale organizations or government. So what shape should our preparations take?

In the early days of this blog, I talked about that quite a bit and I think most of what I said still applies. You might have a look at the following posts:

Well, this concludes my first attempt at a book review. I still have several shelves full of books I'd like to talk about, but I clearly need to find a way to do this that doesn't take more than one post per book!

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Limits to Growth" posts, here is a complete set of links.


The Limits to Growth

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Sunday, 23 October 2016

The Limits to Growth, Part 4

This posts continues looking through the book The Limits to Growth, summarizing it and offering my thoughts on what it has to say. In my last post (insert link) we finished with Chapter IV, Technology And The Limits To Growth.

Chapter V—The State of Global Equilibrium

In real world finite systems there are negative feedback loops which stop positive feedback loops from generating exponential growth and collapse. The delays in the negative feedback loops allow overshoot to occur, which is wasteful of resources and actually reduces the carrying capacity of the environment, leading to a deeper collapse and making recovery more difficult. Technological solutions work by weakening the negative loops and allowing growth to continue for a while, but in the long run the result is the same.

Instead we need to stop growth and level out into a steady state system before we encounter limits.

We are searching for a model output that represents a world system that is: 1. sustainable without sudden and uncontrollable collapse; and 2. capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people.

How to do this? Well, we could strengthen the negative feedback loops. But most people would take a dim view of increasing the death rate in order to stop population growth or increasing the rate at which industrial equipment wears out in order to stop industrial growth.

What if we weakened the positive feedback loop instead? This has never been tried or even seriously suggested, but within a system dynamic model we can easily change a few numbers to see what happens if we reduce positive feedbacks, and see if it is worth trying in the real world.

In Figure 44 the positive feedback loop of population growth is effectively balanced, and population remains constant. At first the birth and death rates are low. But there is still one unchecked positive feedback loop operating in the model—the one governing the growth of industrial capital. The gain around that loop increases when population is stabilized, resulting in a very rapid growth of income, food, and services per capita. That growth is soon stopped, however, by depletion of nonrenewable resources. The death rate then rises, but total population does not decline because of our requirement that birth rate equal death rate (clearly unrealistic here).

What happens if we bring both positive feedback loops under control simultaneously?

The result of stopping population growth in 1975 and industrial capital growth in 1985 with no other changes is shown in Figure 45. (Capital was allowed to grow until 1985 to raise slightly the average material standard of living.) In this run the severe overshoot and collapse of Figure 44 are prevented. Population and capital reach constant values at a relatively high level of food, industrial output, and services per person. Eventually, however, resource shortages reduce industrial output and the temporarily stable state degenerates.

What if we combine controlling both positive loops with technological changes? One example of such an output is shown in Figure 46.

The policies that produced the behavior shown in Figure 46 are:

1. Population is stabilized by setting the birth rate equal to the death rate in 1975. Industrial capital is allowed to increase naturally until 1990, after which it, too, is stabilized, by setting the investment rate equal to the depreciation rate.

2. To avoid a nonrenewable resource shortage such as that shown in Figure 45, resource consumption per unit of industrial output is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value. (This and the following five policies are introduced in 1975.)

3. To further reduce resource depletion and pollution, the economic preferences of society are shifted more toward services such as education and health facilities and less toward factory-produced material goods. (This change is made through the relationship giving "indicated" or "desired" services per capita as a function of rising income.)

4. Pollution generation per unit of industrial and agricultural output is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value.

5. Since the above policies alone would result in a rather low value of food per capita, some people would still be malnourished if the traditional inequalities of distribution persist. To avoid this situation, high value is placed on producing sufficient food for all people. Capital is therefore diverted to food production even if such an investment would be considered "uneconomic." (This change is carried out through the "indicated" food per capita relationship.)

6. This emphasis on highly capitalized agriculture, while necessary to produce enough food, would lead to rapid soil erosion and depletion of soil fertility, destroying long-term stability in the agricultural sector. Therefore the use of agricultural capital has been altered to make soil enrichment and preservation a high priority. This policy implies, for example, use of capital to compost urban organic wastes and return them to the land (a practice that also reduces pollution).

7. The drains on industrial capital for higher services and food production and for resource recycling and pollution control under the above six conditions would lead to a low final level of industrial capital stock. To counteract this effect, the average lifetime of industrial capital is increased, implying better design for durability and repair and less discarding because of obsolescence. This policy also tends to reduce resource depletion and pollution.

In Figure 46 the stable world population is only slightly larger than the population today. There is more than twice as much food per person as the average value in 1970, and world average lifetime is nearly 70 years. The average industrial output per capita is well above today's level, and services per capita have tripled. Total average income per capita (industrial output, food, and services combined) is about $1,800. This value is about half the present average US income, equal to the present average European income, and three times the present average world income. Resources are still being gradually depleted, as they must be under any realistic assumption, but the rate of depletion is so slow that there is time for technology and industry to adjust to changes in resource availability.

We might choose to make different tradeoffs in setting up a stable system, but this example does show the levels of population and capital that are physically maintainable on the earth, under the most optimistic assumptions. What if we go back a little in the direction of the real world and relax some of the restrictions imposed in Figure 46?

Suppose we retain the last six of the seven policy changes that produced Figure 46, but replace the first policy, beginning in 1975, with the following:

1. The population has access to 100 percent effective birth control.
2. The average desired family size is two children.
3. The economic system endeavors to maintain average industrial output per capita at about the 1975 level. Excess industrial capability is employed for producing consumption goods rather than increasing the industrial capital investment rate above the depreciation rate.

The model behavior that results from this change is shown in Figure 47. Now the delays in the system allow population to grow much larger than it did in Figure 46. As a consequence, material goods, food, and services per capita remain lower than in previous runs (but still higher than they are on a world average today).

We do not suppose that any single one of the policies necessary to attain system stability in the model can or should be suddenly introduced in the world by 1975. A society choosing stability as a goal certainly must approach that goal gradually. It is important to realize, however, that the longer exponential growth is allowed to continue, the fewer possibilities remain for the final stable state. Figure 48 shows the result of waiting until the year 2000 to institute the same policies that were instituted in 1975 in Figure 47.

In Figure 48, both population and industrial output per capita reach much higher values than in Figure 47. As a result pollution builds to a higher level and resources are severely depleted, in spite of the resource-saving policies finally introduced. In fact, during the 25-year delay (from 1975 to 2000) in instituting the stabilizing policies, resource consumption is about equal to the total 125-year consumption from 1975 to 2100 of Figure 47.

From my viewpoint in 2016, this is not encouraging. Yet it bears out much of what I have been saying is this blog all along—that resource depletion is already causing a collapse and it is too late for a solution that enables those of us in the western world to maintain our current lifestyles.

The rest of the chapter is spent considering the many obstacles to setting up a steady state system and arguing the value of doing so. Here are a few typical paragraphs that will give you the flavour of this:

Indeed there would be little point even in discussing such fundamental changes in the functioning of modern society if we felt that the present pattern of unrestricted growth were sustainable into the future. All the evidence available to us, however, suggests that of the three alternatives—unrestricted growth, a self-imposed limitation to growth, or a nature-imposed limitation to growth-only the last two are actually possible.

Achieving a self-imposed limitation to growth would require much effort. It would involve learning to do many things in new ways. It would tax the ingenuity, the flexibility, and the self-discipline of the human race. Bringing a deliberate, controlled end to growth is a tremendous challenge, not easily met.

By choosing a fairly long time horizon for its existence, and a long average lifetime as a desirable goal, we have now arrived at a minimum set of requirements for the state of global equilibrium. They are:

1. The capital plant and the population are constant in size. The birth rate equals the death rate and the capital investment rate equals the depreciation rate.
2. All input and output rates—births, deaths, investment and depreciation are all kept to a minimum.
3. The levels of capital and population and the ratio of the two are set in accordance with the values of the society. They may be deliberately revised and slowly adjusted as the advance of technology creates new options.

Population and capital are the only quantities that need be constant in the equilibrium state. Any human activity that does not require a large flow of irreplaceable resources or produce severe environmental degradation might continue to grow indefinitely. In particular, those pursuits that many people would list as the most desirable and satisfying activities of man-education, art, music, religion, basic scientific research, athletics, and social interactions-could flourish.

Technological advance would be both necessary and welcome in the equilibrium state. A few obvious examples of the kinds of practical discoveries that would enhance the workings of a steady state society include:

  • new methods of waste collection, to decrease pollution and make discarded material available for recycling;
  • more efficient techniques of recycling, to reduce rates of resource depletion;
  • better product design to increase product lifetime and promote easy repair, so that the capital depreciation rate would be minimized;
  • harnessing of incident solar energy, the most pollution-free power source;
  • methods of natural pest control, based on more complete understanding of ecological interrelationships;
  • medical advances that would decrease the death rate;
    • contraceptive advances that would facilitate the equalization of the birth rate with the decreasing death rate.

One of the most commonly accepted myths in our present society is the promise that a continuation of our present patterns of growth will lead to human equality. We have demonstrated in various parts of this book that present patterns of population and capital growth are actually increasing the gap between the rich and the poor on a worldwide basis, and that the ultimate result of a continued attempt to grow according to the present pattern will be a disastrous collapse.

The greatest possible impediment to more equal distribution of the world's resources is population growth. It seems to be a universal observation, regrettable but understandable, that, as the number of people over whom a fixed resource must be distributed increases, the equality of distribution decreases. Equal sharing becomes social suicide if the average amount available per person is not enough to maintain life.

And they conclude with the following:

If there is cause for deep concern, there is also cause for hope. Deliberately limiting growth would be difficult, but not impossible. The way to proceed is clear, and the necessary steps, although they are new ones for human society, are well within human capabilities. Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a totally new form of human society-one that would be built to last for generations. The two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the human will to achieve that goal. Without such a goal and a commitment to it, short-term concerns will generate the exponential growth that drives the world system toward the limits of the earth and ultimate collapse. With that goal and that commitment, mankind would be ready now to begin a controlled, orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium.

Forty plus years later we are no closer to having the goal they speak of. Our politicians still see "economic recovery"—the resumption of "robust" growth—as their main goal. Even though growth is the very thing that is causing most of our problems.

In my next post we'll (finally) wrap up this review.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Limits to Growth" posts, here is a complete set of links.


The Limits to Growth

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Tuesday, 18 October 2016

The Limits to Growth, Part 3

This posts continues looking through the book The Limits to Growth one chapter at a time, summarizing it and offering my thoughts on what it has to say.

In my last post we stopped part way through Chapter IV, Technology And The Limits To Growth, having just looked at several runs of the World 3.0 model, each of which ended with a collapse of the world system as one sort of limit or another was reached. The rest of this chapter is spent discussing the implications of those model runs and some of the limitations of the model.

One limitation is that once collapse starts, there will be significant social change and the model's structure will no longer match the structure of the world's systems. So the models "predictions" are valid only up until things start to fall apart.

The model runs in this chapter make it clear that the basic behaviour mode of the world's system is exponential growth of population and capital followed by overshoot and collapse. This is so if we assume no change from the current system or numerous technological changes. All the model runs to this point assume that population and capital growth are allowed to continue until they reach some natural limit, since this seems to be a basic part of the current human value system.

Using the most optimistic estimates of the effect of technology in the model did not prevent the ultimate decline of population and industry, nor even delay it past the year 2100.

Delays are built into many of the feedback loops in the system, so that the effect of a change in one value is not felt immediately in other areas. The result of this is that a value which is approaching a limit will often actually overshoot that limit before collapsing.

I'd like to point out that during the first part of an occurrence of overshoot, when population and industry are still growing, it is difficult to tell that overshoot is actually occurring. Only after they peak and start to decline does it become obvious that the system has actually been in overshoot for some time. This leads us to what is for me the essential question that comes out of The Limits to Growth: are we already in overshoot or are we just starting to do really well as the techno-optimists and cornucopians would have us believe. It should be no surprise that I believe we are well into overshoot and heading merrily along toward collapse.

The authors go on to say that technological change has social effects that are not included in the model and that these effects often manifest themselves after a delay as well. This is unfortunate since we may commit to a technology and become dependent on it, only to find out too late that it has some negative social consequences, which we now have to live with since we have become dependent on the technology.

As an example they point to the Green Revolution, which was intended to be a technological solution to the world's food problems. They claim it was also intended to be labour intensive so as to provide more jobs and not require large amounts of capital so as to be accessible to the poor in developing nations. In areas like the East Punjab in India this worked well—the number of agricultural jobs increasing faster than the rate of growth of the total population, with real wage increases of 16 percent from 1963 to 1968.

The principal, or intended, effect of the Green Revolution—increased food production—seems to have been achieved. Unfortunately the social side-effects have not been entirely beneficial in most regions where the new seed varieties have been introduced. The Indian Punjab had, before the Green Revolution, a remarkably equitable system of land distribution. The more common pattern in the non-industrialized world is a wide range in land ownership, with most people working very small farms and a few people in possession of the vast majority of the land.

Where these conditions of economic inequality already exist, the Green Revolution tends to cause widening inequality. Large farmers generally adopt the new methods first. They have the capital to do so and can afford to take the risk. Although the new seed varieties do not require tractor mechanization, they provide much economic incentive for mechanization, especially where multiple cropping requires a quick harvest and replanting. On large farms, simple economic considerations lead almost inevitably to the use of labor-displacing machinery and to the purchase of still more land! The ultimate effects of this socio-economic positive feedback loop are agricultural unemployment, increased migration to the city, and perhaps even increased malnutrition, since the poor and unemployed do not have the means to buy the newly produced food.

I would add that the Green Revolution was intended not as a final solution, but rather to give us a breathing space while we got population growth under control. That hasn't yet happened, and the social problems caused by the Green Revolution haven't been solved, either. It is also becoming evident that the Green Revolution and conventional agriculture in general is pushing up against resource limits such as arable land, fresh water, fossil fuels and mineral resources like phosphorous. That is exactly what the model runs earlier in this chapter should lead us to expect—that the application of technology to apparent problems of resource depletion, pollution or food shortage has no impact on the essential problem, which is exponential growth in a finite and complex system.

In any case as the world changes, we have to adapt by making social changes, which take place quite slowly. The authors comment:

The social delays, like the physical ones, are becoming increasingly more critical because the processes of exponential growth are creating additional pressures at a faster and faster rate. The world population grew from 1 billion to 2 billion over a period of more than one hundred years. The third billion was added in 30 years and the world's population has had less than 20 years to prepare for its fourth billion. The fifth, sixth, and perhaps even seventh billions may arrive before the year 2000, less than 30 years from now. Although the rate of technological change has so far managed to keep up with this accelerated pace, mankind has made virtually no new discoveries to increase the rate of social (political, ethical, and cultural) change.

They go on to discuss that there is a whole range of problems that cannot be solved by technological advances. Problems which yield only to social solutions.

Applying technology to the natural pressures that the environment exerts against any growth process has been so successful in the past that a whole culture has evolved around the principle of fighting against limits rather than learning to live with them. This culture has been reinforced by the apparent immensity of the earth and its resources and by the relative smallness of man and his activities.

The basic choice... is the same one that faces any society trying to overcome a natural limit with a new technology. Is it better to try to live within that limit by accepting a self-imposed restriction on growth? Or is it preferable to go on growing until some other natural limit arises, in the hope that at that time another technological leap will allow growth to continue still longer? For the last several hundred years human society has followed the second course so consistently and successfully that the first choice has been all but forgotten.

The chapter ends with this:

Perhaps the best summary of our position is the motto of the Sierra Club: "Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress."

We would hope that society will receive each new technological advance by establishing the answers to three questions before the technology is widely adopted. The questions are:

1. What will be the side-effects, both physical and social, if this development is introduced on a large scale?
2. What social changes will be necessary before this development can be implemented properly, and how long will it take to achieve them ?
3. If the development is fully successful and removes some natural limit to growth, what limit will the growing system meet next? Will society prefer its pressures to the ones this development is designed to remove?

Let us go on now to investigate nontechnical approaches for dealing with growth in a finite world.

Answering those questions is likely to be difficult and such answers as we can get will not be terribly clear. But unfortunately, choosing not to adopt technology can also have severe consequences, as we'll see in the next chapter.

This is a rather short post, but including Chapter 5 would make it too long, so I'll break off here and be back in just a few days with my review of Chapter 5, which is already written.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Limits to Growth" posts, here is a complete set of links.


The Limits to Growth

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