I’m talking today at a Brisbane Institute forum on oil and whether it’s running out. 12:30 at the Hilton. I’ll try to post my presentation soon.
387 thoughts on “Peak Oil”
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John Quiggin 
James Sinnamon, in response to your request on November 27th, 2005 at 7:29 pm.
Check this paper for the real story on the energy cost/return ratio of photovoltaics:
‘Use of the energy yield ratio as a means of dispelling one myth of photovoltaics’
by Bryce S. Richards and Muriel E. Watt, Uni NSW.
The bottom line is that modern mass-produced PVs return around ten times the amount of energy used in their manufacture, and this figure is increasing quickly.
Andrew Reynolds wrote
The Australian Aboriginals did not ‘learn’ to keep their population within limits. Like all prehistoric people … they were limited by Malthusian theory. … People lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short.
This is rubbish. I suggest you read :
Primitive Affluence by Bob Black
The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond.
Actually, I happen to agree with Ronald Wright who argues in “A Brief History of Time” for the preservation of the civiisation we have today (can’t find the page number, sorry), however, given the monumental mess that we have made of our planet, which should be obvious to anyone, except for the most blinkered extreme neo-liberal ideologue, we are in no position to judge ourselves as superior to primitive cultures.
Andrew Reynolds wrote: James, you may choose to live with the idea that technology has brought nothing to enhance our ability to live and solve problems – I do not.
I never said that. I just happen to have very serious doubts that it can solve the problems on the scale necessary to keep 6 billion people living indefinitely.
Could you, perhaps, offer your techonological solution to further occurrences of instances similar to Hurricane Katrina, which are predicted to occur with greater frequency from now on, as a result of greenhouse gas emissions?
Andrew Reynolds wrote: I also wonder who, precisely, Dr. Ross Cluney had in mind to get rid of….
This misrepresents Ross Cluney’s views and mine. Apparently we either have to unquestioningly accept your view that 6 billion is within the carrying capacity of our planet or stand accused of advocating mass extermination.
We can achieve populaiton reduction naturally by simply adopting a strict policy of one child per family. I don’t particularly like it, partly because I probably won’t be around to see the world reach sustainable population levels again, but if we don’t do it, naturer will do it for us, and far more brutally and in ways that make the holocaust and all the horrors of the twentieth century look like a schoolyard brawl by commparison.
Andrew Reynolds wrote: I say yet again, James – the human race has solved these problems before.
Rubbish! we have only dug ourselves deeper into a hole. Past societies, which have a lot more in common with our society of today than you are prepared to acknowlege, have collapsed when they have exceeded the carrying capacity of their environments. How can you know it will be any different for us?
Andrew Reynolds wrote: We will solve this one. We will also solve the next one and the one after that. …
I once read on a desktop calendar :
I think we just may be able to pull through the coming crisis but we have little chance unless the stranglehold, that the ideas which you hold, have over our society’s agenda is broken.
Seeker,
I couldn’t find the paper you told me of. The closest I could come to was here :
http://energy.murdoch.edu.au/Solar2004/program2.htm
… which only lists the presentation of ‘Use of the energy yield ratio as a means of dispelling one myth of photovoltaics’ in the program.
Last weekend, at a meeting in Brisbane, sponsored by Quest2025, to discuss how we deal with the looming energy shortage crisis in South East Queensland, an electrical engineer expressed his firm view that photovoltaics were not a solution. Their manufacture created as much additonal greenhouse gases as their use is likely to avoid creating. This is not to say that PVC’s may not have a useful role, but not as a large scale replacement for fossil fuels.
Dave Kimble, mentioned earlier, had this to say in a post to Running on Empty, Oz (roeoz) :
This may not the final word on PVC’s or Solar Energy, but we have got to bear in mind just how difficult it is to capture energy in one form, convert it to another and then store it.
After hundreds of millions of year of evolution, plants are able to do this with solar energy at a rate of around 2%. If there was an overall evolutionary advantage to capturing a greater proportion of energy, then that capability would be more widespread in the natural world by now.
To improve significantly on so much evolution, using solar energy alone, without inputs from fossil fuel, as we use today, is not going to be easy.
James – be a bit careful here as the EROI of PV panels is about 5:1. No-one knows really how long they will last as some of the first ones have been generating power for over 30 years. Some electrical engineers are very narrow minded when it comes alternative energy.
Solar Online is not the cheapest or best supplier I have found. PV panels in Australia are very overpriced. For example a Kyocera KC125 is listed at Tasman Energy for AUD$1025.00 where as the same panel from the US is US$539.00. Even allowing for conversion and freight this is a large price difference. You also do not need 10kWh per day. Part of living with reduced EROI energy sources is you have to reduce your energy requirements by increased efficiency. You can power an efficient house with less than 5 kWh per day which would be less than $20 000 if you source your panels overseas and received the PV rebate of $4000.00.
I found the people on the REOZ list though knowlegable and friendly they tend to be the mirror image of Andrew. They are just as extreme in their apocolyptic views as Andrew is with his market optimism. I tend to follow a course somewhere in the middle.
I do agree about population however I do not think the China solution with its dreadful outcomes of infantacide and sex imbalance is a very good one. It also implies a draconian government that can force this on people. Human beings are so programmed to reproduce that it is very difficult to change. The Earth deals very harshly with species that outgrow its carrying capacity and I think that the population reductions will happen naturally and with huge human cost and misery – however I do not think that that we will be able to do it any other way. And who knows we may be able to transition to a lower EROI energy economy with minimal loss of life. No-one has really studied the carrying capacity of the Earth given alternative energy and it may well turn out to be close to 6 billion anyway.
We can transform solar energy at better than 2%. Sure oil is a concentrated form of solar energy however there is hope for the future. If we learn to live with lower EROI forms of energy we can sustain a technogical society – we just have to live within our means.
There isn’t any actula contradiction between AR’s views on Malthusian constraints and the real lifestyles of primitive peoples that JS notes.
The apparent discrepancy is resolved by noting that child mortality is different from adult mortality in its effects and in cultural terms, and that many peoples had practices that Malthus would have categorised as “vice” (like endemic warfare with casualties mostly among young men, and gelding surplus males that was practised by peaceful islanders like the Chatham Islanders).
We tend to think only of single dimensional mortality – adult mortality – since most people don’t die in childhood these days. Tragic though that may be, it has little tendency to cause social disruption when it is not changing rapidly; its effects are far more like those of birth control in those respects.
James,
I think we shall just have to agree to differ. I am hopeful about the future we can build – lets just see who, if either of us, is proved right by the effluxion of time.
Of course, the other way to increase your petroleum reserves is to invade joints that won’t play ball.
Andrew,
Of course we can ‘agree to differ’.
However, just as you have used this forum to promote views, which I see as being principally reponsible for the parlous state of our planet’s life support system and, also, a barrier to action to fix the problem, l feel I have a similar right to argue a different point of view.
Andrew Reynolds wrote: … lets just see who, if either of us, is proved right by the effluxion of time.
I think that many out there would prefer to act now to try to pull us back from the precipice, rather than to allow this experiment to run its course, so that 10 or 20 years from now, assuming we were to have both managed to have escaped to Mars, we can compare notes and discuss which of the two of us has been proven right.
Andrew Reynolds wrote: I am hopeful about the future we can build …
Let’s not forget, we are already living in the future that the globalising economic ‘rationalists’ started to create for us more than twenty years ago.
Back in the 1980’s they stridently assured everyone else against their common sense objections that they would all prosper if only they allowed a little more free trade and governments agreed to take the back seats in the management of our economies.
Whilst economists dishonestly use measures such as the GDP and the concocted housing affordability indexes to conceal the reality, the true picture of the results of the neo-liberal experiment can be found in books such as Elisabeth Wynhausen’s Dirt Cheap – Life at the wrong end of the labour market“, Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel And Dimed and Bait and Switch” as well as with the plight of billion plus human beings now living precarious existences in shanty towns around the world (see below).
No doubt you and Terje have tried, and will continue to try, to construe any of the social, economic and environmental ills of the world today as being caused by some claimed remaining constraint by governments on the operation of the free market system.
However, the fact remains, that the whole world’s economic system has been massively shifted in the direction that you and other neo-liberals had wanted it to go.
I don’t recall having being told back in the 1980’s that it had to be ‘all or nothing’ and that the goal posts were going to be constantly shifted. The globalisers had people believe that any significant amount of free market ‘reform’ would lead to a significant improvement in the circumstances of everybody.
Andrew Reynolds wrote: I do not. I also do not indend to have anyone living in shanty towns.
Come on, Andrew. Be honest.
You don’t have the faintest idea of what to do about the social calamity brought upon by the globalising economic ‘reforms’ of the past 30 years. Do you really expect all of us to believe that under the free market system all of those people can hope to achieve decent secure livelihoods, let alone aspire to achieve lifestyles with ecological footprints similar to your own?
If you believe that, then you. no doubt, also believe that pigs are capable of propelling themselves from Earth to planets within remote galaxies.
Remember how those reforms that were going to make everyone on the planet fabulously prosperous?
Instead they were driven, by mechanisation based on non-renewable fossil fuels, off farms on which they earned their livelihoods, and now have no alternative livelihooods, except for a small number of jobs on offer in sweatshop factories largely exported from countries like the US and Australia.
The rationale behind these policies which caused the destruction of the livelihoods of so many third world farmers can be found in the World Bank’s Berg Report (“Accelerated development of Sub Saharan Agriculture” – cited by Edward Goldsmith in the chapter “Farming and Food Production Under Regimes of Climate Change” on page page 60 of The Final Energy Crisis) of 1981.
So the results of ‘free market’ inspired so-called ‘agricultural development’, for those billion plus now living in shanty towns around the world, are there for all to see : loss of livelihood, dignity, and self-sufficiency, and much of the world’s agricultural system now fatally dependant upon non-renewable fossil fuels.
Whilst you may genuinely wish to help these victims of World Bank inspired free market ‘reforms’ I somehow doubt if they would see the solution as more of the same.
James,
I think if you compare the quantity of verbage we have both posted to this thread you will be able to see who has used the more of the earth’s resourses in promoting their views.
Under the systems that existed prior to the development and extension of the concept of the freedom of the individual, of which free trade is a part, the majority of those billions of people, living in the shanty towns, would not have had the chance to live, as we probably would not have. As you rightly pointed out earlier, population had to be limited by natural or unnatual processes until the ability to trade became widespread. That meant that the majority of human births on the planet resulted in a short and unpleasant life – with very high infant mortality, frequent deaths in childbirth and large number of epidemic diseases. Worst of all, there was little possibility of a genuine hope for the future.
Try as I might, I cannot see the failure of the majority of the world’s population to live and die like that to be a problem. It creates problems, sure, no doubt. But I would clearly want to have one of those sets of problems than another.
Andrew Reynolds wrote on 16 Dec : The Australian Aboriginals did not ‘learn’ to keep their population within limits. Like all prehistoric people (I mean that in the sense that they did not keep a written history, at least not as we understand it and without being derogatary about the Aboriginal people) they were limited by Malthusian theory. Malthus may be wrong about modern, technological society, but he was right about the pre-technical. People lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short. There was no learning of population limits – it was simply deterministic.
I will quote from an e-mail sent to me recently:
So, James, are you advocating a return to a hunter / gatherer lifestyle for the people of the planet? Somehow I do not think the remaining wildlife would last long.
As a side note, if H & G was so much better than agriculture, why did people do it? The H & G lifestyle seems a lot beter than settling down.
>As a side note, if H & G was so much better than agriculture, why did people do it? The H & G lifestyle seems a lot beter than settling down.
Andrew there’s actually a large lirterature in anthropology and archaeology devoted to that very question.
Part of the answer seems to be that in some areas (such as the American north-west with the salmon runs and parts of the near east) it was possible to live a sedentary life supported by a hunter-gatherer economy which allowed people to accumulate more material goods and engage in specialisation of labor.
In the case of the near east this happened at the end of the last ice age and was associated with higher than current rainfall levels which produced large areas of wild grain which could be harvested with minimal effort.
When the climate dried out 500-1000 years later it was too late for people to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – for one thign the population had grown significantly.
Another perspective is that slash-brun agriculture acted as a transtion from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent agriculture.
Apart from a few weeks roughly every 3 or 4 years when they burn and plant new fields and relocate their homes, slash-burn agriculturalists barely work more than hunter-gatherers.
And let me guess. You are going to argue that the social, economic and environmental ills of the world today are the result of government inaction. And I suppose that such inaction is all my fault.
Andrew, there are many lot of theories purporting to explain why the Neolithic farming revolution happened. AFAIK (and my knowledge is very limited), not a single one of them involves preference or incentive. Civilisations (and, yes, that’s what hunter-gatherers were) don’t change entire economies because someone develops a preference or comes up with an invention out of spontaneous creativity.
For the theories, ask an anthropologist or read some anthropology. The ones I’ve come across have involved some kind of environmental challenge. One goes roughly thus: unsuccessful hunter-gather economies drove the species they relied on to extinction, and thus were forced to come up with farming to survive. Successful hunter-gatherers remained doing what they did so well.
Note also that it’s obviously not defensible to claim that hunter-gathering is ‘superior’ to agriculture as we practise it today. But it was a manner of living that allowed far more free time for leisure, culture and indulgence of complex social relationships than the forms of subsistence agriculture that immediately followed it.
No, Andrew I am not advocating a return to hunter / gatherer lifestyle. I thought I had made the clear when I wrote above :
I was firstly demonstrating that Aboriginal society had demonstrated far greater intelligence than the policy makers who ignored Paul Ehrlich’s sensible and timely message about population levels in “The Population Bomb” and, instead, decided to make the world dependent upon non-renewable fossil fuels for its food, and allow population levels to increase to levels greater than what could be achieved without input from those fossil fuels.
I was also refuting your very negative depiction of hunter and gatherer societies.
However, in the longer term, the form of society that will endure will have to be one that only lives on the interest of energy derived from the sun, and not by depleting our natural capital of fossil fuels.
My own hope is that such a society will still have telecommunications and the Internet. I expect, unfortunately, that frequent long distance travel will not be possible.
I expect it will be largely based on the ideas of both Ted Trainer as well as the Permaculture concepts of David Holmgren, and Ian Mollison.
Permaculture, or whatever other term it will become known by is simply a means to produce food and other necessities of life without having to depend upon fossil fuels. If we are not able soon to implement this on a widespread scale, we may be in deep trouble.
Having said that there is a plausible case that hunter/gatherer society may be the only form of society that can exist on Earth for any reasonable length of time. I include the concluding paragraph of Jared Diamond’s Essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
One thing is certain. That is that our current form of society, which so wastefully consumes the earth’s non-renewable resources as if they were infinite, cannot last.
Hmmm, short comment, lots of responses.
Ian, I’m aware of the discussion on the transition from hunter gatherer to agriculture, I just thought that James was advocating a move back. I stand corrected, but I will be interested, given James’ position on how bad the current technological phase has been, in how he rationalises using the benefits (‘telecommunications and the internet’ in his interpretation – personally, I can think of many more) of a civilisation that has apparently destroyed,or at least impaired, the ability of the planet to sustain itself. Is that not using the fruits of horror for benefit?
One other point, James. If we use a similar time clock, but rebased on the period of life on the planet, we would all become single celled life forms again. Personally, I prefer the multi-celled, just as I prefer our current life to our past as a species. I believe we can sustain one as we sustain the other.
Crispin,
From James’ description, it is a wonder there were any ‘unsuccesful’ HG societies to move to agriculture. One thing that, IMHO, a lot of people forget is that society is composed of many individuals. If group of HG people decided to settle down, it was not a decision of a group, but of the majority of the individuals within that group. To me, at least, they decided for certainty (comparatively) and consistency of food, with the added benefit for collective defense and other social interaction.
I say yet again, it is people that make decisions – not societies. No society I know of has a mind of its own – it is only the people within that group.
James:
“From James’ description, it is a wonder there were any ‘unsuccesful’ HG societies to move to agriculture.”
Hunter-gatherer societies haven’t been identical to each other, any more than have agrarian ones. Those studied most closely had been around for tens of thousands of years and thus by definition were the ‘successful’ ones.
“One thing that, IMHO, a lot of people forget is that society is composed of many individuals.” I don’t think a lot of people forget this at all. An inconsistent and confused version of it is an essential part of contemporary market fundamentalism. We are propagandised with it daily.
“it is people that make decisions – not societies.” A truism that hides a greater truth. When Sydney was established, the ‘coming in’ of the local peoples to the colony was clearly inevitable. It didn’t matter which particular individual happened to come up with the idea first.
I’ll make a predication: if robustly explanatory or predictive scientific theories of the behaviour of human societies are developed, they will make only small limiting references to the psychology of individual brains. They will deal with forces acting on whole societies, history, the environment, etc. The sciences to watch will use complexity theory. Neuroscience will be relevant in the way that chemistry and physics are relevant for explaining other complex systems: a contributor, but not explanatorily determining.
Trying to explain large scale human movements through history using one tiny narrow contemporary ideological meme, with absolutely no support from science, is a hopeless anachronism.
James has said ‘Paul Ehrlich’s sensible and timely message about population levels in “The Population Bombâ€? ‘. I’ve always considered myself a small ‘g’ greenie, but I have a visceral allergic reaction to any mention of the ghastly Ehrlichs. To me they represent the worst kind of hysterical, crypto-racist, early-seventies charlatans. I had hoped that ‘The Population Bomb’ had been consigned to the same wheelie bin as the Club of Rome report and I was depressed to see them making a comeback in the 1990s.
Seeing that pair again was like watching a revival of Eric Von Daniken.
James:Andrew:“From James’ description, it is a wonder there were any ‘unsuccesful’ HG societies to move to agriculture.�
(etc. Sorry).
Crispin,
The point I was trying to make was not that you could not model on a societal basis, but that the move of society in this way was actually made up of lots of individuals following what they believed to be their own best interests. If the move in to Sydney was ‘inevitable’, it was only inevitable because it served the perceived interests of the individuals within the society. The same is true of the HG to agriculture transition. The aggregates of those people then mean that society itself was believed to be better off. Thus, for example, the move to the cities during the industrial revolution was not some mindless drive by society to the cities, against society’s interests, but the result of a lot of conscious decisions by individuals following their own paths in life.
Andrew, well, even if your model of decision-making were defensible, it wouldn’t be relevant here. If a model shows that something is going to happen to an aggregate regardless of which member of the aggregate initiates the trend, then the individual is not the locus of the appropriate lawlike generalisation. To whit, individual action is not the significant causal factor.
But anyway, an interest-seeking theory of decision making doesn’t really look plausible. Philosophically, it’s either false or empty (depending on a broad or narrow interpretation of interests). Empirically, cognitive psychology is increasingly amassing evidence of people not being aware of the causes of their decisions (indeed with simple decisions, and this may or may not turn out to be generalisable, the decision can happen before a person is conscious of it at all).
Crispin,
That is a fascinating concept. People can move homes or jobs without making a decision to do so. Booking the moving company or sending out a CV would be a challenge.
I would agree that which precise individual initiates the transformation is not relevant – but we should not forget that it is the individuals who do it – whether by conscious (or, possibly, unconscious) decision or action.
For example, as some references I have read have maintained, people moving from agriculture to the cities in 18th century England moved from a healthy life to a squalid one. Personally, I can’t understand why they would. If they did, why did they not move back? If the analysis on aggregate shows that a large group of people have made a consistently silly decision about their own welfare, then you can be fairly certain that it is the analysis that is wrong, not the people.
This, by the way, is the reason I prefer decentralised decision making to a centralised model – the decisions of the people, on aggregate, are almost invariably more right than any amount of analysis. And I speak as someone who’s career is in analysis of such aggregates.
In case anyone is interested, Ronald Wright’s “A Short History of Progress”, referred to above, is being broadcast each Weekday from today (Monday) until Friday on ABC Radio National at 6PM in the Eastern States except Qld where it is brodcast at 5PM
See Massey Lectures Page on Radio National web site.
Will De Vere wrote : … I have a visceral allergic reaction to any mention of the ghastly Ehrlichs. To me they represent the worst kind of hysterical, crypto-racist, early-seventies charlatans.
Could you please provide me with some substantiation of your condemnation of Paul Ehrlich?
I have searched the Internet in vain to find any substance to allegations of Paul Ehrlich having been racist.
From what I have read of Ehrlich and from having heard him at a talk in the early 1990’s he strikes as being profoundly humanitarian and anti-racist.
He’s the guy that postulated that human civilisation on earth has been frequently visited and assisted by aliens down through the ages. He produced all sorts of cultural artifacts that he says demonstrate that various civilisations had intimate contact with space men.
If your feeling a little green then you might be one of those litle green space men come to guide our civilisation.
Andrew: “That is a fascinating concept. People can move homes or jobs without making a decision to do so.”
That’s a sneer, not an argument. Fair enough, perhaps. It could be justified on various grounds: (a) you know the psych/neuroscience involved well, and think it’s crap, (b) you know it well, and think my interpretation is crap, or c) you know nothing about it, and aren’t curious.
c) is just an isomorph of the religious fundamentalist response to evolution, and interests me as much as any other traditionalist obscurantism (ie. not a bit).
(a) and (b) would be good to hear more about. I’m just a curious layperson, and would like to listen to what someone more expert might have to say.
“If the analysis on aggregate shows that a large group of people have made a consistently silly decision about their own welfare, then you can be fairly certain that it is the analysis that is wrong, not the people.”
This illustrates why an interest-seeking theory of decision-making is always either false or empty. If you define ‘silly’ by your own lights/values (or a set of theoretically-spawned ones), it’s just false. There are countless examples of people doing silly things as judged by other peoples’ values. If you prefer to think of ‘interests’ as neutrally empirical (ie. you look at what that set of people just happen to prefer), then it’s circular, uninformative, and predicts nothing.
There’s a vast amount of neuroscience and psychology research coming out about how humans make decisions, and from what I’ve seen not much of it backs up our common-sense picture of ourselves. ‘Reasons’ for actions frequently turn out to be confabulations, people can be manipulated into making decisions without their having any insight into their causes, systematic biases are evident in judgements. In short, our minds don’t work in anything like the manner they appear to from introspection and ordinary language.
Robust commonsense doesn’t often fare well when good science pours in to contradict it. I doubt it’ll do any better here.
“This, by the way, is the reason I prefer decentralised decision making to a centralised model – the decisions of the people, on aggregate, are almost invariably more right than any amount of analysis.”
I wonder if you really do prefer the idea of decentralised decision-making? If so, then you’d support a major clampdown on marketing propaganda (especially as consumed by people at a developmental stage before the brain is fully-formed — late teens/early 20’s on current estimates) in the interests of the cognitive health of the individuals making the decentralised decisions.
Crispin Bennett wrote : … Trying to explain large scale human movements through history using one tiny narrow contemporary ideological meme, with absolutely no support from science, is a hopeless anachronism.
Thank you, Crispin. I wish I had written that. And thanks for your other posts, which I find myself almost entirely in agreement with.
Andrew Reynolds wrote : I think if you compare the quantity of verbiage we have both posted to this thread you will be able to see who has used the more of the earth’s resources in promoting their views.
I doubt if the whole of http://johnquiggin.com had used as much of the earth’s resources as a typical round trip to and from work each day of the week, much less a return trip to South Korea.
However, if you wish to reduce the volume of verbiage, it would help if you could understand the arguments of others, or if you do cone to understand them, then not misrepresent them.
It seems that Crispin’s point:
… went largely over your head when you wrote :
A decision to move home could hardly be considered a ‘simple decision’.
Andrew Reynolds wrote : … I will be interested, given James’s position on how bad the current technological phase has been, in how he rationalises using the benefits (‘telecommunications and the Internet’ in his interpretation – personally, I can think of many more) of a civilisation that has apparently destroyed, or at least impaired, the ability of the planet to sustain itself. Is that not using the fruits of horror for benefit?
It seems that I must either uncritically accept how our civilisation has developed and applied technology or remain a complete Luddite. Andrew sees anything in between these extreme poles as impossibly self-contradictory. (As I wrote earlier, earlier, Andrew also has difficulty in understanding that to say the world is overpopulated is not tantamount to advocating extermination.)
Terje said ‘If your feeling a little green then you might be one of those litle green space men come to guide our civilisation.’
Nah, it’s a lost cause. I’m going to take my ball and go home to Epsilon Eridani.
James said
‘Could you please provide me with some substantiation of your condemnation of Paul Ehrlich?
I have searched the Internet in vain to find any substance to allegations of Paul Ehrlich having been racist.’
I actually said ‘crypto-racist’. When I saw mention of Ehrlich and his archaeological curiosity, ‘The Population Bomb’ (we keep it on the same shelf as ‘Doomsday 2000’, ‘The Jupiter Effect’, ‘Future Shock’ and ‘The Kremlin’s Plan for World Domination’), I amazed that anyone still held it in any regard. Like some of the current charlatans for globalisation, especially Thomas Friedman, Ehrlich made a mountain of cash by telling the American public about the future of all those funny little coloured foreigners. There are just too MANY of them. Calcutta is just teeming with them and they’re all so smelly! If those smelly little Indians and yellow people don’t stop breeding so irresponsibly, then in 2001 we’ll all starve to death!
I don’t believe that this is a caricature of what Ehrlich claimed way back in the enlightened early seventies. Perhaps the good doctor has polished his patter to match the more complex conditions of the 1990s, but I’ll always regard him as an opportunistic, doom-mongering fraud. American publishing throws up a couple of them every year.
Will De Vere,
I did ask for substance for for your allegation of Ehrlich being racist, or, if you like, ‘crypto-racist’, but you have provided none. This is also the case with anti-Ehrlich material on the web – plenty of paraphrasing of what Ehrlich was supposed to have said, but few direct quotes of any substantial length.
What you have written is a caraciture of what Ehrlich wrote at the start of “The Population Bomb”. He was accurately describing how very unpleasant it was to be in a city that was as overcrowded as Calcutta was. Whether the inhabitants were black, white, red or brown would have been beside the point.
I recall that the pargraph from the start of Ehrlich’s book was scurriloulsy quoted out of context in one issue of a far left newspaper I read in the 1990’s, and I am sure that this was not the only time this has happened. A sentence in that paragraph which unambiguously expressed compassion for the people Ehrlich was describing was deliberately omitted. (Can’t give the quotes, because my copy of the book is not with me.)
If we are to confront the problems we face, we have to first accurately describe reality and not try to pretend it is something else for fear of offending some politically correct sensitivites.
The fact is that many species which don’t exercise free will and which lack predators to keep their numbers in control will tend to grow exponentally until its numbers overshoot the capacity of the environment to support it, after which their numbers are catastrophically reduced.
The discovery of all that free captured solar energy stored under the ground, which had been denied to other past civilisations, has allowed this globalised civilisation to go well beyond the ecological limits that those past civilisations ran up against.
When those resources are used up, we will find that we have well overshot the true ecological limits of the planet.
We must act now to prepare for that so that we don’t end up repeating the mistakes of the Mayans, the Easter Islander, Greeks etc, but on a far wider and more horrific scale.
A necessary, but far from sufficient step, is to urgently take steps to stop population growth and begin the reduction in world human numbers.
To be honest, I don’t actually find the thought of population control to be very appealing, as I had meant to make clear earlier on, but it is vastly preferable to the unthinkably horrible alternative.
Finally, I don’t see any logic in putting Erhlich, and other population control advocates, in the same category as globalising economic rationalists. In fact, it seems that quite a few on the far left, who deny the physical limits of our planet, have far more in common with globalising economic rationalists than does Ehrlich.
More information on population control, can be found on the web site of Sustainable Population, Australia.
I only add here that, like every prophet of doom in the past, Ehrlich has been proven wrong in every single one of his forecasts (except the quantity of people). We now have more food per head than ever before.
I will answer the other ponts when I have a bit more time.
Can we make 300 on this thread?
James
the substance was all too obvious. It’s significant that a well-off American pundit (from the Indian word ‘pandita’) used Calcutta to present his vision of Hell. It sold well back home. What if he had used New Orleans as an example of tropical crowding?
Spare us from these pious, ‘compassionate’ missionaries, ecological or Christian. His writing has had zero-impact on India or any other country, but he obviously still has groupies. So do Timothy Leary and Madame Blavatsky.
No, he’s an antiquated fraud from a dishonest era.
Will and Andrew,
You can deflect the real issues in conversation using words, excoriate thinkers you don’t like with ad hominem attacks (ad nauseam); but the reality of the parlous state created by our lack of forethought and basic responsibility (indeed their glorification in self-justifying guff about consumerism and ‘decentralised decision-making’) will come back to bite you, whatever is said here. The physical facts of the world show us to have been mired for some time in difficulties whose magnitude is becoming rapidly apparent, and much too little is being done, much too slowly.
The more influential and misleading the public figure, the more hominem and nauseating the attack should be.
I can’t stand Helen Caldicott, either. And I’m becoming skeptical about Gandhi.
If environmental disaster doesn’t carry us all off, hero-worship will.
“…Simply stated, no cheap natural gas, no cheap fertiliser, less food. Or to put it another way, without the use of industrially produced nitrogen fertilisers, about 2.5 billion people out of today’s world population of 6.2 billion simply could never have existed…”
The full article at http://www.dailyreckoning.co.uk/article/soybeansnaturalgas.html highlights how fundamental cheap natural gas is to food production. What substitutes will economists come up with for affordable food?
Brian, most economists seem to believe in something called an Invisible Hand. You know, Tolkien, magic, goblins, all that stuff.
Invisible Hand = metaphor.
Most anti-market advocates actually believe in the effectiveness of everybody voting without any personal accountability for how they vote. Somehow decisions arrived at in this manner are magically effective (except if people vote for more market freedom).
Most pro-market economists actually believe in the effectiveness of price signals and decentralised self organsising systems.
The worlds postal system works even though there is no global headquarters.
The internet works even though it is guided by conventions not government laws.
Written language works even though it is guided by conventions not government laws.
In countries where food production is nationalised, highly taxed or highly regulated starvation is common. And yet in countries where the INVISIBLE HAND is left to its own devices the nations population is well fed.
Wikipedia produces meaningful content with quality comparible with Britanica even though the management of content creation is totally decentralised.
Ecologists also believe in decentralised self organising systems. They don’t generally think that cutting down big trees in favour of the little trees leads to a healthier ecosystem.
“To me, at least, they decided for certainty (comparatively) and consistency of food, with the added benefit for collective defense and other social interaction.”
Actually there’s some evidence that people were coerced into settling so that their excess food production and other goods could be exploited by rulers.
In south east Asia, polynesia and subsaharan Africa, states tended to be weak because it was relaitvely easy for peasants to escape into the jungles (or to other islands0.
Terje, you give my daft comment more attention than it deserved. As it happens, though, I’ve read enough AS (more for his moral philosophy than economics) to know what the invisible hand meant. To the extent that I had any target, it would be the economists who claim that all the big global problems will just be sorted out if we leave so-called ‘markets’ to fix them. But that’s such obvious nonsense anyway that no-one would make such a claim unless they were paid to do so.
Some of your examples are actually pretty off the mark.
I don’t think that’s true. Most advocates of democracy are more concerned with legitimacy than effectiveness of decision-making. Least-worst, etc.
True enough, but they are highly designed systems. Self-organisation’s role seems to have been to get complexity started, and then it has been refined via Darwinian mechanisms. In effect those mechanisms mimic a designer, a planner.
I’m not arguing about the merits of decentralised, complex, self-organising systems for managing many things, anyway (if only European subsidiarity had worked!). I just don’t think that’s what so-called “free markets ” give us. Instead they give us social control by the greatest propagandising experiment ever attempted in the history of mankind (marketing). The Jesuits were right about the effectiveness of control via grabbing kids young.
I just heard the biggest load of rubbish imaginable on ABC Radio National’s ‘Perspective’, from Hugh Stretton, in which he tried to whip up fear in his audience about supposed overpopulation the world supposedly running out of oil and coal.
This is the guy who set up the Housing Trust of South Australia (HTSA), which was a proven disaster for the South Australian economy.
True, the HTSA never cost South Australian taxpayers a cent, but for decades it denied property investors much of their rightful due.
As a consequence, the resources of the South Australian economy were tragically diverted away towards a chemical industry, a vehicle industry, a petroleum industry and metal manufacturing.
Make sure you give this talk the widest possible berth.
Isn’t this also true of so called “free elections”?
Terje,
Hardly. Think about the sheer volume of marketing messages, all essentially purveying the same consumer-fundamentalist political angle, consistently forced on the average child. Political campaigning (let alone serious analysis) is insignificant by comparison.
Gosh. This all started with crude oil reserves and now it’s about selling Tim Tams. Get your hands off our children, you nasty Jesuits!
IG, It is documented that the 16th century Irish were coerced into settling (from a previous more pastoral approach). See Spenser on Ireland.
It is not true that states in SE Asia etc. tended to be weak simply because it was relatively easy to escape into jungles. Rather, they used different methods. In Borneo the malay states worked just like Irish clans, by holding strong points (typically at the mouths of rivers) so that they could control the hinterlands indirectly. Also, when land was available to escape into, institutions tended to use slavery and kinship affiliation rather than land holding and geographical affiliation. Celtic customs have influenced a discrepancy at this level between Scots (and Irish) Law and English Law to this day. However, this non-geographical emphasis did tend to produce more and smaller states, which were weak to the extent that no one of them was all powerful.
A recent article in New Scientist said that about 200,000 square kilometres of land are covered with landmines. Landmines are nasty weapons, but by denying land to agriculture and allowing the growth of wild vegetation, they might encourage biodiversity and moderate greenhouse gases. Rice paddies, for example, generate vast quantities of methane, but wild bamboo captures vast quantities of CO2. Perhaps some future, ferociously green, government will use mines to protect wilderness areas from human encroachment.
In the spirit of the festive season and with goodwill to some people, I would like to propose that landmines are good for the global environment.
…been watching this thread for weeks and have one point to contribute.
Crispin,
Your comments suggest that you don’t know what evolution and complexity science are. Or are you a fan of ID theories (but let’s not resort to personal attacks…)? On the 19th at 7:38am you state:
I’ll make a predication: if robustly explanatory or predictive scientific theories of the behaviour of human societies are developed, they will make only small limiting references to the psychology of individual brains. They will deal with forces acting on whole societies, history, the environment, etc. The sciences to watch will use complexity theory…
Ahh..? Complexity theory deals precisely with how the little bits add up to the big bits. Or don’t (as is usually the case). If you thinks that the way a human mind works has no bearing on the economic and social institutions that govern our lives, compare how one piece of DNA/mRNA can affect an ecological system. You know, get one thing wrong in your genetic makeup and your more than likely to turn out as a paranoid RWDB…
On the 20th at 6:01am, In response to Terje’s comments regarding ecologist, you state:
True enough, but they are highly designed systems. Self-organisation’s role seems to have been to get complexity started, and then it has been refined via Darwinian mechanisms. In effect those mechanisms mimic a designer, a planner…
What designed what!? Did the hare I was trying to catch or the sabre- toothed tiger I was trying to avoid design me? Or was it changes in the weather? Are you suggesting that Darwinian mechanisms (some omnipotent being, I presume?) can design anything? There was no multitude of beings from which the weakest have been removed, leaving only the finest specimens. Complexity always exists and emergence constantly occurs.
The complexity of the system allows for new structures to emerge (mutation in biology, invention and innovation in economics) and selective pressures determine which new structures survive (Darwinian processes in ecology, market forces in economics).
And to tie in with more recent posts, why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and start advertising the end of the world (‘s oil supply) while investing heavily in alternative fuel technologies. Let’s see how your ideas survive the jungle of the market place, where everyone gets to decide for themselves!
PS. Why would you become an agriculturalist if there was no market for your produce? Doesn’t it make more sense for the settlements to come first (possibly made up of a loose association of specialist artisans trading their goods) and agriculture to come as a response to the growing food requirements of the settlements? It’s all about incentives, people!
To return to the originla topic for a moment, while current solar cells produce around 10 times the ernergy produced in their production, the latest thin-film designs halve the energy required to make the dells:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsASMA59.htm
Does this mean Ender’s 20:1 EROI has already been reached? Excellent – peak oil problem solved.
NEXT!
Ian,
A lot of thin film solar cells don’t last that long in sunlight. Traditionally they have been used for calculators and other indoor applications. Although its possible that there has been some change in this arena.
Regards,
Terje.
Will De Veere says: “In the spirit of the festive season and with goodwill to some people, I would like to propose that landmines are good for the global environment.”
What a great piece of lateral thinking. I wonder if a few marine mines in the Antartic would deter the Japanese whaling fleet? Better tell Greenpeace.