Envirocornucopianism

Just as the hay-burning ponies of the 19^thC gave way to internal combustion engines a hundred years ago, in 2010 at the end of the first decade of the third millennium the bell has tolled for the end of dirty, cheap fossil fuels. The engines of our vehicles and the fires of our power stations will operate just as well today and tomorrow on cleaner fuels from renewable energy sources, in the meantime before technologies evolve and we leave the things of the 20thC behind for good.

Summary

the problem: we’re overrunning the planet with our growing population and consumerism run amok

there is little common ground between the ideological and philosophical extremes; economists find little understanding from environmentalists and vice versa

both sides are prone to misconceptions:

economists can be uncomprehending of the value to us of “free” (uncosted) environmental services provided by the ecosphere, while environmentalists often fail to appreciate just how efficient markets are compared to government controls and regulations, and may also not understand the importance to society of economic growth

if a picture might be painted that were comprehensible to a minority on both sides, of the possibility of economic growth accompanied by improved environmental outcomes and a smaller human footprint on the planet, then that would be surprising 

….

the solution:

• Earth’s human population needs to level off (which seems to be happening)

• conserve and enhance biodiversity

• define “economic growth” in an appropriate fashion, as a measure of improvements in quality of life per capita

• reduce the resource intensity of economic output so measured ie live better yet with lower impact on the environment

and the difficulty in conceiving let alone implementing the solution

• economic growth is seen by almost all environmentalists, with good historical justification, as being intrinsically inimical to the environment

• history records that indeed our great economic growth has come at the expense of the global environment in myriad ways

• even supposing we were to allow the possibility of future economic growth with decreasing primary resource intensity, increasing economic wealth and power has historically implied greater use and abuse of the environment. For instance we might reduce the resource intensity of our economic output but continue to fly overseas for holidays a couple of times per year, eat more meat and more imported foods, live in larger houses full of consumer electronics and toys, and so on

Keys

Some degree of good governance is necessary for society to flourish

Government requires taxation

It’s preferable to tax “bads” not “goods”

Markets are very efficient and effective means to trade goods and services but markets are without inherent ethical or moral values or wisdom

Significant markets in anything need to be well and wisely regulated. Where markets fail government must step in.

The greatest resource we have is not coal, oil, or anything else that we mine, fish or farm; it’s human ingenuity and creativity - an important lesson we should take from history.

The Scene

Suppose we were to measure economic wealth in terms of energy. As energy can be used to produce most of the goods that we typically value in dollars it’s a reasonable idea. Now suppose that today the median established family’s wealth in Australia might using the energy measure turn out to be 3 x 10¹² Joules. Our unit of wealth here, energy, suggests to us that our economic power is roughly equivalent to our capacity to do damage to our environment: it might on average cost 10⁵ J to turn a tree into woodchips, perhaps 10⁶ J to wipe out all the marine life in one bay close to our home, 10⁷ J to mine a tonne of uranium ore from a hectare of land somewhere. (The numbers here were completely arbitrary)

We might be able to add these numbers up to arrive at an arithmetic proof of our ordinary household’s ability to do shocking violence to great swathes of the natural world.

Yet there would be more benign ways to spend that energy capital: we could invest a large fraction of it building renewable energy infrastructure, farming fish, turning sand into reusable image screens (computer monitors) that would replace paper that hitherto had come from dead trees, developing higher-intensity agriculture that would feed more from less land, and so on.

It seems that for hundreds of years at least we have already had the power to cause enormous violence to our environment (and hence ourselves) but that we have partly tempered this with wise laws and regulations to somewhat inhibit our raw economic spirits.

Recently we’ve seen with the oil well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that although there remain oil reserves beneath the deep sea bed, without real environmental care taken people and governments will not necessarily tolerate their exploitation.

Have we changed the face of the planet? Clearly “Yes”. We’ve accumulated an undeniable environmental debt in many respects. In Australia for example wetlands and river systems are starved of water by our voracious agricultural habits, some farmlands have been badly mismanaged and been degraded toward unusability, everywhere our sprawling cities make an indelible environmental footprint that while invisible to most also affects the environment of all.

But look at the examples of cases where great numbers of humans have co-existed with healthy ecosystems for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. We need to check of course that the ecosystem is closed in this respect, that ecological services are not being imported to the community system without matching ecological exports. That is we must be sure that the community is not in fact living beyond its ecological means while the costs are masked or hidden somewhere.

There are plentiful examples of communities that have subsisted even flourished on their (finite) lands for thousands of years, and of others that are not irremediable in their currently unsustainable ways. The industrialized world does export environmental harms when it imports products from the less-developed world but this is not inevitable. For instance the developed world first extracted wealth from its own local environment, and only later discovered an inexorable appetite for imports.

Economic growth can be sustained and our population even increase somewhat while at the same time the natural environment can be protected, but at the moment we’re a long way from that happy state of affairs.

Theorem: economic growth can be environmentally sustainable

[Note that no single proof of this theorem could possibly satisfy everyone. From the extremes of libertarians to greenies, from business economists to academics in the sciences, many believe they understand the problem (sustainable economic growth with environmental improvement) but their understandings differ, mostly irreconcilably]

Here are a handful of different proofs; each of which will not appeal to most of the special groups, but might tickle somebody’s fancy

Proof 1 (by kind-of-induction)

Suppose not. Then we would already have hit a limit as we’ve been going for a long time with steadily increasing world population and economic output. We’re still here so there is apparently no insuperable or irrecoverable economic limit on us. [This kind-of-proof should not persuade too many people  ]

Proof 2

Suppose not. Then we can point to an economic model that fails in some unrecoverable fashion, or a small historical real-world example of a population somewhere that failed for reasons that we could not today identify and circumvent. As neither of these circumstances obtain – all individual modes of economic failure that can be identified in economic models or that have been recorded by history can or could have been avoided or recovered from – the supposition is refuted.

Proof 3

An ordinary household economy, carefully detailed, can make a fair toy model for a world economy. It’s easy to picture ways in which almost any household will be able to increase its nett income and quality of life while simultaneously doing less damage to its environment. There are energy conservation measures ranging from the passive – insulation and good architectural design – to active such as solar hot water and power (only profitable today thanks to government handouts, but here these are a positive externality for the householder).

For a larger model consider that some nations have sustained themselves on their own lands for hundreds of generations, with their people’s conditions on average improving (ie economic growth) while their environment was conserved. [Only in recent times has the rate of world economic growth become so rapid and pervasive, with environmental harm exported so extensively from the developed world, that it’s become by now difficult to point to or even conceive of a truly isolated or “island” economy]

Proof 4

Can we show something like the converse, that it’s possible to do greater environmental harm while throwing away economic wealth? Hell yes! Almost everyone will accept that proposition so, it being virtually the same question and all … why would we be resistant to the proposition from the other direction?

gg dec 2012

Super fishing screwup

Simple insights into complex problems - good or bad thing?

Australia has banned the super trawler MV Margiris from its waters until at least 2014 with further scientific study to be undertaken of the effect on the marine environment of "super fishing". Also in the past week the country has announced the world's largest network of marine parks.

From a scientific point of view, is superfishing the wrong way to go about things? I think so. An analogous operation on land would be to drag nets through forests and across plains collecting pretty much all wildlife in your path, then sorting out the catch with commercial value from the rest of the "bycatch" that you'd discard onto the ground. Is there anyone anywhere who'd find "superfishing" on land to be acceptable?

I think the opposite trend would be appropriate in fisheries today. This has been the case on the land where agriculture and livestock farming has moved toward more intensive farming alomgside greater protection of forests, parks and rivers. Our seas might also benefit from a trend toward more farming of fish within certain restricted areas of the seas, away from environmentally more damaging and relatively unconstrained trawling.

Of course other problems arise with intensive farming practices. Concern is justified over the ethical treatment of animals in places like feedlots, for instance. Yet the path toward more sustainable and morally acceptable farming on land has led away from the analogues of "supertrawling".

Too "simple" for some? - on environmental and scientific grounds a move toward fish farms, away from super trawlers, should be the preferable option.

Should asthma be understandable?

Is it mystifying that so much research effort continues to be thrown at a disorder as common as asthma?

Yoga has taught the art of breathing for thousands of years and its philosophy of pranayama makes elegant sense to me.

Then there are the learned institutes of today none of which seem to be able to separate things like allergy and substance sensitivities from what should be far more fundamental - simple breathing.

Graeme Greenup on asthma:

The suspicion that the asthmatic may try too hard to breathe better, but consequently breathe worse, may lead us to some more of the various possible vicious circles in asthma. A few of the more obvious are:
...
We may conclude, then, that the sympathoadrenal system in the asthmatic is constrained ...
asthmatics may simply try too hard and, consequently, not breathe well
...
Stimulus of the 'fight/flight' response, or administration of a sympathomimetic agent, may help the asthmatic to break out of the immediate spasm - but learning to relax from cortically-driven overbreathing would be better.

Do it all!

Get the little things done, because the big things are out there to be done too.

Uncertainty

None of us sees clearly. We tirelessly seach for leading indicators that might give us some clue to our future.

Appealing to your punters

As nobody can keep up with all that's happening on every front and as we're all mostly kept busy by our own affairs, it's normally quite difficult to get people's attention onto really important matters and impossible to keep it there.

Change

Things that really change, do so mostly unnoticed by news and media.