Today is World Environment Day, and it’s a good day to celebrate past achievements and point out the errors of the doomsayers who’ve long been over-represented in the environment debate. The central message of the doomsday school is simple:
we can’t protect the environment unless we are willing to accept a radical reduction in our standard of living.
Although they agree on this point, they disagree radically about its implications, dividing into two opposed groups[1]
* Deep Greens who say that we should radically reduce our standard of living and protect the environment
* Dark Browns who say that we should do nothing to protect the environment because to do so will wreck our standards of living
Experience since the first World Environment Day in 1972 suggests that neither of these positions is true.
On the one hand, claims that we are bound to run out of resources, made most vigorously by the Club of Rome in the 1970s, have repeatedly been refuted by experience. Most natural resources have actually become cheaper, but even in cases where prices have risen, such as that of oil, the economic impact has been marginal, relative to the long-run trend of increasing income. The recent increase in the price of oil, for example, might, if sustained, reduce income by about 1 per cent, or around 4 months of economic growth.
At this point, doomsayers usually point to a growing world population and the increased demands on resources that will arise when people in China and India aspire to Western living standards. The tone isn’t quite as apocalyptic as in the 1970s, when the Paddock brothers were advocating letting Bangladesh starve, but the analysis often hasn’t caught up with the data. Population growth peaked (in absolute terms – the percentage growth rate has been declining for decades) around 1990. Current UN estimates have a population of 9 billion in 2050, but if the declining fertility in wealthy countries is followed elsewhere this will probably turn out to be an overestimate.
In most respects, economic growth is consistent with improvements in the environment rather than degradation. Wealthy countries are unwilling to put up with polluted air and water and have the technical and scientific resources to fix them.
On the other hand, the Brown doomsayers have an equally bad record. Time after time, they’ve opposed environmental improvements as too costly, repeatedly overestimating the costs and underestimating the benefits. The debate over CFCs and the ozone layer provides a good example, since it was one of the first issues to be addressed on a global scale. The doomsayers repeatedly attacked both the science behind the ban on CFCs and the economics of the policy, claiming it would cause massive economic damage. In reality, even without taking account of health benefits, it seems likely that the CFC ban yielded positive net economic benefits. Most of the leading participants in this debate (Fred Singer, Sallie Baliunas, Julian Simon, Tom DeLay, the Marshall and Oregon Institutes) are familiar to anyone who’s followed the global warming debate, except that Bjorn Lomborg has taken Simon’s place.
All of this leads up to the one big remaining problem that of global warming (and the inter-related debate about Peak Oil). The doomsayers on both sides are out in force on this one. For the Deep Greens, it’s the one remaining chance to achieve support for radical change. For the Dark Browns, this is the real fight, for which the CFC debate was just a rehearsal.
All the evidence, though, is that we can reduce emissions to levels consistent with stabilising global CO2 levels over the next few decades at a cost of around 5 per cent of GDP – a few years worth of economic growth at the most. Quite possibly, as in previous cases, this wll turn out to be an overestimate.
fn1. Both groups engage in a fair bit of wishful thinking about their position, the Greens arguing that we’ll all be happier in the long run and the Browns claiming that the environmental problems will solve themselves if we ignore them.
John Quiggin 
I believe that it is wrong for one person to kill another person except in self defence. However when I look around the world I am at a loss to find any external evidence to support this belief. So is this belief merely ideology?
Terje
You have completely overlooked, or not adequately understood my observations regarding scale. Equity (of input and output) of governance and the adequacy and application of local resource knowledge are both eroded by scalar growth. To the point where the system performs primarily for its own dynamic needs as well as for the benefit of the managing elite and not for the broader social mass. And ultimately to the point where the ssytem eats the ground out from under its own feet. Always has until now and most likely always will.
Forget this right and left bulls**t. They are both socially pointless and physically dangerous when they become oversized, let alone gigantic. I think planetary falls under gigantism. That said, cooperative collectivism is the most natural and enduringly successful methodology social models.
Andrew may call the first paragraph an ideological statement but an exception to its conclusion needs to be cited for any such claim to be credible.
[quote]
I believe that it is wrong for one person to kill another person except in self defence. However when I look around the world I am at a loss to find any external evidence to support this belief. So is this belief merely ideology?[/quote]
I think it is and it isn’t, depending.
Most people follow the tenet out of rote social belief and compliance. As such it is an ideology. One that works for them socially which is why they view it and follow it as they do it.
Others in other social situations may follow the opposite of the tenet out of rote compliance (Nazi SS for example). Ditto re the social considerations.
Some people may developed a view of the cause and effect chain involved and, in acceptance of the benefit of either following or of not folowing the tenet, they pursue that line as a consciously practical theory. It is then possibly not an ideology.
Then there is the consideration of what might be functions of short term individual benefit within society as well as functions of long term benefit to society overall and the individuals within it. These two may or may not correlate.
Ideology can be a positive and productive social force if it is congruent to the guidance of social behavior that supports the long term benefit of society and its constituents. For our purposes here it is a negative thing when argued as an imperative without any clear view of the pro and cons that its implementation would lead to.
Terje
I believe we have reached this tipping point.
Effective power, either in sovereign govts. or economic entities (and there are many much bigger than most sovereign Govts.), now rests within entities beyond any remote connection to genuine human feeling or need. The dominant drive now is to get bigger to bolster influence.
The sovereign govt. have limits though that corporate entities do not. I think govt’s will, I think already are tending to, become service providers for the larger, increasingly powerful corporates and cartels of corporates.
I also think that this popular ‘battle’ of economic ideology is becoming a farce for the purpose of maintaining social illusion of an independent Govt. One that ‘can’ protect and support social interest and can threaten economic ‘freedom’. A political invention necessary to float the mass social psyche – essentialy, not specifically, like Goldstein in 1984. In fact they plan, plot and party together like the pigs and the farmers in Animal Farm, while the masses huddle outside in the intellectual snow that falls on them from Free to Air (and, sadly, ABC) current affairs twaddle. Or waiting moronically for the glimpse of a breast on Big Brother.
Totalitarianism is now the real threat. Not right or left.
BTW, how do I quote on this forum?
Quotes are opened and closed as follows;
(blockquote)blah blah
(/blockquote)
except use point brackets. Ie Greater than and less than symbols.
Greg,
You have made many unsubstantiated claims in your comment, including such things as “gigantism”, a “tendency towards monopoly”, “Scale of activity is the fundamental problem at hand, corrupting the function of markets, Govt. and social groupings” and, when I disagree you say that i have to prove my point. You raised them – you prove them.
You seem to share a common background to many others who critisise a belief in the freedom of the individual of which an understanding of the right to freely interact economically with others is a part. I see lots of critisism, but not much substance to replace it.
You say that “…pricing signals alone can NEVER be an adequately accurate or reliable guide to resource allocation …”. Please let me know what you propose to replace pricing signals with. I presume from the above it is “cooperative collectivism”. Please define and provide a working example.
.
To quote, enclose the text in “blockquote” and “/blockquote” tags. I cannot give an example as it will be interpreted by WordPress as an attempt to quote and will then be hidden. It you have a standard US English keyboard the quote marks above can be replaced by angle brackets.
Andrew
You’ve trawled across a whole number of posts for an inventory of distraction and ignored my specific request.
Let me be very precise.
Please tell me what you understand by the following:
I believe, from this, that your position is:
The bigger and more complex the market the less the quality of information contained in the prices in the market.
The second bit may not follow logically, but can be read to say “As prices cannot be adequately accurate, that pricing signals alone should not be used for “resource allocation, responsible management of resource depletion and equity issues”.
I say it may not follow logically as it follows from the first section that a small, less complex market has better pricing information. As the market grows smaller there is a possibility that the price will have sufficient information in it to be used for “resource allocation, responsible management of resource depletion and equity issues”. This would then violate the “NEVER” condition unless there is a level of error built into every single pricing mechanism, no matter how small the market. You have excluded this possibility, though.
.
I should add that I disagree with the above – but you have provided a specific question, so I have responded in kind.
Now, please let me know why to believe the statement you have quoted to be true and logically consistent. As an additional request, please let me know why you believe there is a better mechanism than the price mechanism and what that mechanism is.
Some significant reasons why a bigger more complex market interferes with the quality of information and its transfer – (There are many but these are adequately indicative):
There is simply too much of consequence that is not known and/or not factored in the price. This is likely because there is cost in finding out but no profit in knowing; neither producer nor consumer bear the cost (in the immediate term of the market) of not knowing or of not taking account; the marketplace is physically beyond the ability of consumers to grasp or care to grasp the vital details of all that they consume and thereby stimulate further production of.
Within the resource scope of larger scale markets producers can develop increasing capacity to manipulate and distort buying information as well as price. Corporate effort can develop active subcultures around their branding. Quasi-religious attitudes are possible toward brands and whole industry sectors. The home improvement sector is an example of the latter. There are significant socio-economic downsides to this trend industry but none are prominently discussed, and that manufactured silence makes it an alien concept for anyone to try to discuss.
So this information is deplete for the purpose of accurate pricing with regard to long term resource management. It is mostly only adequate, because it is mostly only purposefully intended for driving at increasingly short term marketing and financing ends.
Where does the additional necessary info come from? In a big market nowhere. The govt. is just as compromised by all of the listed deficiencies as are the big and/or desperately competitive producers/sellers and generally hapless buyers. Unless maybe something visibly effects a marginal seat. And then the intervening info will be politically ‘enhanced’ and not really accurate. You see no-one very much lives anywhere anymore that they give much of a stuff about. Not at a dynamically real bio-system level. Those with the widgets and the dollars are all remote and detached from any immediate bio-physical concern.
Markets operational largely at the local or bioregional scale have a potential for stronger direct sense of consequence from their resource exploitation. The social awareness and expectation upon appropriate market behavior is better developed and direct. If an effective political scale matches this smaller market scale, the opportunity exists to directly apply appropriate reflection of social and resource values via pricing or even by direct regulation of transactions or industries.
At the most durable and traditional levels of socio-political economy these values are embedded and transferred within codes of religious and metaphysical belief.
So as social, and thus market size is reduced in any tour back through socio-eonomic history, we find other factors than price applied at those more intimate social levels of interaction. I think you will find that price alone has never been relied upon to manage resources by any social group that wanted to be around for a long time.
Price might work if knowledge was complete in its applicable detail and fully applied to the price setting. But any culture intimate enough with its resource base to know and care about these values would not need price to allocate the resources. A metaphysical bond and code operates at this scale. Love of landscape and its innate wealth and longevity is the purpose, motivator and controller, not love of money and the material surfeits that a wealth of it can procure.
Money facilitates trade between groups of people that are not socially intimate with each other. Its considerable power then further assists development of that separation. Relatively imperceptively at lower scales but eventually it tends to burst into huge imperial flourishes that then collape into their own dust. Can you name one such imperial flourish that hasn’t ?
Greg,
Interesting words and some nice sentiments.
How do you reduce the market scale down to the level that allows for a metaphysical bond and a love of the landscape to develop?
Terje,
The thrust of much of your post is that all the world’s problems which seem to have been compounded since what I thought was the commencement of the economic ‘rationalist’ ‘small govenment’ revolution roughly three decades ago, have, incredibly, been caused by government and not by market forces..
I recall, back in the early 1980’s being lulled into relative complacency by the strident assertions (feebly challenged by all but a few on the left) of free market advocates, that adoption of their policies of deregulation, outsourcing, privatisation and cutbacks to government spending would solve all of our problems.
Now, it seems the problems haven’t been solved at all! Apparently they have got worse, and ‘big government’ is now even bigger!
So what went wrong? Were the people we thought were neo-liberal legislators, in fact, secretly working to bring about even bigger Government and possibly even socialism?
Or, perhaps, instead, we were sold a lot of codswallop?
I think Greg Wood put it very well in an earlier post :
What went wrong is that the arguments of free market advocates were rejected in all but a select few areas. Specifically:-
1. deregulation
The free market advocates lost. Take Telecommunications. How more heavily regulated than ever. Sure some regulations were removed but on the whole there is now more regulation and laws relating to economic activities than ever.
2. outsourcing
The free market advocates lost some they won some. Which do you object to.
3. privatisation
The free market advocates carried the day in many areas. Other than in Telecommunications there is little controversy in any of the privatisation and no significant moves by anybody to reverse them.
4. cutbacks to government spending
The free market advocates lost big time. Government spending has not been cut back. Name one significant nation on Earth in which government now spends less per capita?
I don’t speak for Andrew but I did addressed this bit specifically here:-
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/05/against-the-doomsayers/#comment-60252
Terje,
I would prefer to wait for Greg to comment on how he would like to achieve a reduction in market scale. I think, if he has an answer, it would be interesting to say the least.
Terje,
It’s no answer to Greg Wood’s argument that the market is very imperfect, to state the obvious, that is, that governments aren’t perfect either.
However, governments are ultimately accountable to all members of society, whilst corporations are, at best, only accountable to a small subset of our society. You will, no doubt, object that our power as consumers makes us even more able to hold them to account than we could if these utilities were owned by us, but this runs directly counter to my own experience and would appear to run counter to the experiences of most members of our society who overwhelmingly stand opposed to corpratisation, privatisation and deregulation and outsourcing according to all opinion polls.
In any case, allowing society members to collectively decide their destiny through their governments doesn’t even have to entirely preclude the use of market forces.
Terje,
Your post confirms my point. At the time of the partial privatisation of Telstra, I did not hear free market purists clamouring to tell us that this would make the situation worse, as it clearly has, or that it would have to be taken much further for it to work properly.
Rather, we were told that his would improve things for everybody and would solve most of our problems.
This goes for all other ‘reforms’ introduced in the last three decades.
Little did I suspect, that, after all these years and having travelled so far down the path dictated by economic ‘rationalists’ that so much that has been made worst in the world since then (including the acceleration of species extinction) would still be blamed on the influence of government rather than on the free market.
Andrew,
It’s up to you whether or not you take up my simple challenge:
However, if you don’t I think others are entitled to conclude that you have not answered my point. I certainly had a look and could not see where you had.
James,
Any linkage between privatising Telstra and species extinction seems like a real stretch. And if you don’t find telecommunications services better today then they were when Telstra had a monopoly then we simply don’t agree. I don’t use Telstra for any of my telecommunications services and I am happy to have that choice. Whilst Telstra happens to have a piece of copper running to my house it does not get used. And whilst their share price is down I don’t mind because I don’t own any of them.
Regards,
Terje.
James,
As I have said, ad nauseum, I do not believe it will go on indefinitely, just as do not believe it will go on for any other defined period.
In most cases the resources are not “consumed” (implying destroyed). In many cases, and increasingly, they are being recycled / reused / redeployed. Other options are being found. The move to renewable energy will help. As our knowledge of the value and ability of these technologies improves we will use them more. This is all good stuff.
Global population will also peak, and probably some time this century. As I have said before, the problem in the long term facing the human race is not too many people, but, on current trends, too few.
What I strongly disagree with, and continuously argue against, is attempts to mandate a solution as typically this would have to be through government action. You seem to have a (touching) faith in government to do the right thing and make the right choices. I do not.
I believe that price signals, transmitted through an open market, are the best way of achieving these changes. You, I presume, do not.
I am not the (possibly mythical) “Deep Brown� straw man that PrQ has mentioned above. I believe these changes will occur and need to occur, but that they will happen gradually and almost imperceptibly, as they have been changing over the last few centuries.
The reason why I am asking Greg to let us know how he believes the changes will be made is that there are a lot of beautiful theories on this – each with their own idealised outcome. I if they cannot be achieved except through massive force and intervention then they are, IMHO, not worth considering.
.
Greg,
I am still waiting.
James, Greg,
I have given my answer to your simple challenge. Can you answer mine? How do we get from here to where you want to get?
Still waiting, James and / or Greg. Been 2 days now. This will be my last request. If there is no response I will have to take it that you have no idea how you are going to achieve this Nirvana of yours and move on.
Terje,
Read my last two posts again.
I wasn’t linking the partial privatisation of Telstra, in and of itself with, the increasing rate of extinctions of other species. I was saying that if the promises of the neo-liberals twenty five years ago were to be believed, then today things should be much much better.
Instead, when we find, that things have got worse in nearly every regard, rather than better, neo-liberals attempt to blame all the problems on the fact that the world does not yet completely conform to their ideal. I would have thought that, logically, having moved as far as we have down that path, things would have been better, if the claims of the neo-liberals were to have been believed, but now it seems, it needed to be all or nothing.
A pity the public wasn’t warned of this thirty years ago!
So, Andrew and you would have us believe that the extinction of the Western Black Rhino was all caused because to the land on which they roamed is (nominally) publicly owned, rather than, having been caused by the adoption nearly everywhere else in the world of many of neo-liberals policies : privatisation, removal of barriers to investment, reduction in Government spending, outsourcing, deregulation, etc.
Deregulation
I don’t see how you expect me to derive much satisfaction from the fact that we have a regulated telecommunications sector. It see it as a second rate alternative to having the sector run as natural monopoly by our Government on behalf of the people of this country. If the neo-liberal purists were aware that there would be so many problems with this half-privatised half-regulated mess, then they should have loudly said so at the time, so that the public may have been able to consider whether or not it would have been better to have simply kept our telecommunications services running as a public service.
Your argument that telecommunications has improved as a result of partial privatisation is ludicrous. It ignores so much of what was said on the “Re-nationalise Telstra” thread. By your logic, partial privatisation would have still been a success if we all had Internet connections running at 19,200 KBPS.
In fact we have been cheated of the full benefits of advances in communications technology precisely because of privatisation. Even now Telstra and the Government are haggling over the conditions of access to the broadband network that Telstra has yet to roll out. If Telstra had been run as a public service, nearly all Australians would have had access to broadband Internet connections years ago.
Government Spending
You imply that increases in Goverenment spending show that, in this regard, the world has moved away from your ideal of a free market and presuably towards ‘socialism’.
One reason government spending have have gone up rather than down may have been precisely due to the greater inefficiencies caused by the free market system. Another would have been privatisation. For example, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s a succession of Labor and Liberal NSW governments sold off publicly owned buildings in which they kept their department offices. (The federal Government has embarked upon a similar course since 1996.) A few years later I read (surprise, surprise!) that the increased costs of rental accommodation for its departmental offices had become a serious problem.
The Housing Trust of South Australia was able for many years provide high quality affordable housing for all sectors of South Australian society and it never cost South Australian taxpayers a single cent!
Instead of following the course of building up the stock of publicly owned housing that would have logically followed from this experience all governments have adopted polices of selling off that housing. The federal Government said that they said that they would compensate welfare recipients with increased housing subsidy payments. This would have only served to have fuelled the runaway housing inflation which had occurred since then. So a good amount of social welfare payments which you so deeply resent would appear to be social welfare for landlords, property speculators and real estate agents.
Other increases in Government spending which are of little benefit to welfare recipients, or anyone else, include payments for courses in how to write resumes, how to write job applications and attend interviews, which nearly everyone has done half a dozen times anyway and which even those running the courses think are useless.
A good deal of taxpayers’ money is also spent on elaborate means to make the life of unemployed people as difficult as possible. You have already written elsewhere that you approve of such expenditure.
Andrew,
Your last post contains only wishful thinking.
Recycling has gone backwards since when I grew up as a consequence of the manufacturers prefering throw-way cans to re-usable bottles. This was, of course, caused by the “price signals” which you hold to be the hope of humankind.
Even if we achieve phenomenal increases in recycling, it still requires a lot of energy, and, still, with each cycle, the entropy of our planet increases.
As examples: in each cycle of paper recycling the length of paper fibres become shorter and the purity of paper is reduced. The same goes for plastics. Each cycle in the recycling of metals necessarily causes the waste of significant quantites of metal. So the process can’t be continued indefinitely.
Does anyone have any idea how concrete with the steel reinforcement can possibly be recycled, at least without enourmous inputs of energy? … or ceramics?
Even if we achieve the hoped for ‘factor four’ increase in our efficiency of resource consumption with the help of recycling, humankind would still be consuming orders of magnitude more sources than it has for nearly all of its history.
We have yet to see demonstrated a system which allows our society to function at anywhere near the amount of material prosperity we now enjoy, using the relative trickle of energy which comes from the sun, rather than all that concentrated free energy which has been so conveniently captured and buried for us over periods of tend of millions of years. In other words, as I have put before we have yet to demonstrate our capacity to live off nature’s interest, rather than it’s capital.
Until this has been properly demonstrated, on a significant scale, somewhere in the world, the only responsible course of action is to assume that it cannot be done and, accordingly, act with a sense of utmost urgency to reduce our consumption of the earth’s non-renewable resources accordingly.
If that causes problems for our free market system, then I am sure our grandchildren would say: ‘too bad’.
That you maintain that we may soon be faced with a threat of having too few people on this planet further confirms that you stand well and truly amongst the cornucopian extremists who have no grasp of the physical limits of this planet.
James,
Yet again you avoid the question I have asked. How do you propose to do it?
Critisise away, but be prepared to propose as well.
James,
If we could have the low levels of tax and regulation that we had in 1976 I’d be all for that. However I don’t think the subsequent tax increases were on the advice of neo-liberals.
I think both scenerios that you present are simplistic. If you think the extinction of the Western Black Rhino is due to “privatisation, removal of barriers to investment, reduction in government spending, outsourcing, deregulation” then I think you are stretching the bounds of reason. If I had to give an opinion I would say that the most likely cause was poaching.
Out of interest did the Social Democrats of 30 years ago mention the possible extinction of the Western Black Rhino when they opposed privatisation etc.
I also get little satisfaction from the excessive regulation. Maybe they could deregulate.
You’re putting the horse before the cart. Taxation is a tariff on domestic trade. If the level of taxation has increased then there is little wonder that the market system is now less efficient. Once taxation gets to 100% I guarantee you that the efficiency of the market system will bottom out at zero.
Just updated my details with the FAO today so I can get some more of that ugly welfare stuff. However I agree with this point of yours. The government is pumping too much welfare into the system. If should instead reduce taxes and restore incentives.
Not sure of the specifics that you refer to. I don’t think we should make life hard for the unemployed and I certainly don’t think we should spend money doing it. I do think that as a matter of public policy we should ensure that getting a job is not harder than getting unemployment benefits. And I would prefer that unemployment benefits were not paid, although that would necessitate a lot of other reform first.
Either way isn’t the downward trend in unemployment great.
Terje,
Your post avoids the main point of my last three posts. You appear to have focussed on the parts for which you think it was possible to have written superficially plausible responses, and have ignored the rest.
You can carp on ad infinitum about how you, as a near liberal purist, feel cheated because this aspect or that aspect of the neo-liberal agenda has not been implemented in full or has not been implemented universally, but the simple fact remains, that much of the neo-liberal agenda has been implemented around the globe and at enormous cost to ordinary people.
In order to achieve toleration for these policies the neo-liberal ideologues held out, starting around thirty years ago, promises that their reforms would dramatically improve our situation. Clearly they have not in the broad environmental sense as the increase in species extinctions, as just one of many examples, would indicate. I have also shown elsewhere that the material quality of life for many in our society has actually become worse in spite of the increased per-capita consumption of non-renewable resources, but this has largely been concealed because of the use of deeply flawed measures of prosperity such as the GDP and the omission from the CPI of many factors which have added to the cost of living, most strikingly, housing costs.
Given that neo-liberal economic policies have failed in so many areas, I would argue that this would show that in order to, figuratively speaking, stop the ache inside our heads, we should stop beating our heads against a brick wall. You are arguing, to the contrary, that we need to beat our heads even harder against that brick wall.
You cite taxation as an example of where the free market agenda has allegedly been rejected, but ignored my points which have shown that increases in taxation have not been used for the benefit of ordinary people, but for the benefit of the wealthy.
They have not resulted in a more humane social welfare system. In fact, they have resulted in precisely the reverse. They have not led to more and better government services, rather fewer and lower quality. As an example, check out the Weekend Australian Magazine of 8-9 July, if you can find a copy. There’s an article entitled “12 things that used to be free”. Included in the list are : airports, directory assistance, rubbish tips, university education, water, bank service, fishing, roads, resident parking and doctors.
The late J K Galbraith (or possibly his son) recently pointed out that the size of the US Government today, supposedly committed to ‘small government’ is, in fact, larger as a proportion of GDP than that terrible interventionist government of President Roosevelt in the 1930’s. I would again suggest that this is precisely due to the need to cope with the massive inefficiencies caused by laissez-faire economics as well as (as Greg Wood has pointed out) population growth.
You wrote: If I had to give an opinion I would say that the most likely cause was poaching.
It was not myself who first tried to attribute blame for the extinction of the Western Black Rhino to to either the free market system or ‘big government’. It was Andrew Reynolds. I would have thought that the relevance of this sad news to this thread was all too obvious, regardless of whether the blame for its extinction can be shown to lie at the hands of ‘big government’ or laissez-faire economics. However, since Andrew did try to score a point in this regard, I believe that I was perfectly entitled to show that is point was bunkum, as I believe I have.
You wrote: Either way isn’t the downward trend in unemployment great.
Well, obviously it is better that the unemployment rate has gone down rather than up, but what point are you trying to make?
Let’s not forget that the bureau of statistics absurdly considers that anyone who works for more than one hour per week is employed.
Much of the employment on offer these days is for casualised low-skilled menial work in socially useless occupations. Let’s not forget that in 2004 a Federal Government Minister (can’t remember which one) justified not taking measures to curtail the activities of the telemarketing industry because it employed over 200,000 people (which I have to admit, even as one who is constantly bothered by telemarketers, sounded like an extraordinarily high figure). So clearly the reduction in unemployment you would have us all rejoice in is based upon occupations with pay and conditions that few would have contemplated working in a generation ago.
Also, I would add that much of the growth in employment, as I have said many times before, is largely based, unsustainably, on the extraction and export of non-renewable mineral resources and the sale of Australian real estate to overseas buyers.
Andrew Reynolds wrote: How do we get from here to where you want to get?
Andrew Reynolds further wrote: I will have to take it that you have no idea how you are going to achieve this Nirvana of yours and move on.
Andrew Reynolds further wrote: Yet again you avoid the question I have asked. How do you propose to do it? Critisise away, but be prepared to propose as well.
Andrew, I have got plenty of ideas. Don’t have time right now to spell them out in detail. Not sure if ‘Nirvana’ is now possible thanks to the mess that economic neo-liberalism has caused over the last thirty years. I would happily settle for avoiding the kind of future depicted in the “Mad Max” movies.
If you check out the submission I wrote to the Senate Inquiry into the Privatisation of Telstra, in 2003 you should be able to see that I am more than willing to put up my own ideas as well as to criticise the ideas others (although ‘ideas’ would seem to me to be a very generous description of some of what I have read).
For now, I will refer you back to my earlier post in this thread and I will leave it at having rebutted, at least to my own satisfiction, your arguments.
James,
Indicating that you don’t mine a bit of mining under certain circumstances does not a framework make – nor does opposing the privatisation of a telecoms provider.
If you believe that this answers my questions that is fine for you, but I doubt that many others here will think so.
I suppose I will have to presume that, like true communism, your outcome is unobtainable or at least not thought out.
Andrew,
Let’s assume you’re right. Let’s assume I have no idea what to do. (My proposal that our society implements the ideas of David Holmgren and Ted Trainer somehow doesn’t satisfy your criteria for a ‘framework’.)
So what?
We still need to know whether or not our current rate of consumption of energy and other non-renewable resources is sustainable. If it isn’t – and I believe that the data clearly shows that it is not – then surely we need to change our practices drastically. If our free market system cannot cope with these changes, then it must be ditched and something different has to be tried.
It’s as simple as that.
—
Energy consumed at a rate 365 times
all of the world’s photosynthesis
Here’s some stats about humankind’s consumption of fossil fuels from ABC Radio National’s “EarthBeat” Program in 2003 (hope the unordered list tags work this time) :
The second statistic means that if we appropriate for human use every plant cell grown all across earth we will still only have (1/365) of what we currently burn.
Can we produce 365 times the total energy that photosynthesis captures from the sun indefinitely into the future using artificial means such as solar panels? To Quote David Holmgren from “Permaculture, Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability”, page 97 :
David Holmgren’s conclusions are based, in turn, upon chapter 8 of Howard Odum’s book, Environmental Accounting : EMERGY and Environmental Decision Making, 1996.
‘Properly evaluated’ means that we take into consideration all the energy inputs which are required to produce solar cells. Currently they are manufactured using fossil fuels. I don’t know where solar cells have been manufactured on a large scale using only energy from other solar cells. I personally find it difficult to envisage the diffuse energy from the sun being captured and concentrated and stored sufficiently as to enable the manufacture of more solar cells. If it were possible to set up such a manufacturing process I suspect that with all of the losses in energy entailed in concentrating and storing the energy, biological photosynthesis may well prove to be more efficient as Holmgren and Odum argue.
So if they are right, we will be struggling to even obtain 1/365 of the energy we currently use after fossil fuels are exhausted even if can somehow capture every photon of solar energy which falls on this planet.
To bank our hopes on technology guided by ‘the invisible hand’ of the free market being able to outdo, by, at the very least, a factor of 365, processes brought about by billions of years of evolution would be the ultimate folly of humankind.
BTW, the correct link to Ted Trainer’s “The Simpler Way” website, referred to above is :
Your “main point” would appear to be that certain political advocates failed to deliver on their promises. You have grouped them under the lable of “neo-liberals”. You argue that since we now have more government regulation and more taxation (by pretty much any measure) their policies prescription was a failure. You are entitled to your opinion, however from where I stand your sumation of cause and effect, and your attribution of responsibility for what happend with tax policies and regulations makes no sence. I don’t say that to be rude but merely to observe that there is clearly a large gulf that separates our thinking (or else our use of lables). I recommend periodic doses of communication.
Terje,
Firstly, of course, I agree that communication is a good thing.
I am arguing that the world is in a far worse state since the commencement of the Thatcher ‘revolution’, and would have been in a far better state today if we had kept that genie in the bottle.
Whether or not you feel that the political philosophy that you espouse should be held responsible for the mess thus far, I think your ‘remedy’ would only make matters worse.
—
… and here’s another one for those with a Pollyanna-ish outlook on the state of the world:
Gorbachev warns worldwide lack of lack of
water and energy supplies could spark wars
Without passing comment on the entire Thatcher period I do think the income tax cuts she implemented were necessary and appropriate. And in hindsight shutting down economically unviable coal mines seems like a good decision, although I did share house in England with one X coal miner that disagreed rather passionately.
James,
There are plenty of examples where humanity has exploited a resource for a period until it became too expensive or otherwise rare and then we moved off it onto a replacement.
While oil and other fossil fuels are a big part of our current life and we are consuming at (much) more than replacement I put it in the category of resources that we will use and then replace. All I believe will happen is that the price will go up and we will gradually replace it in our daily lives, as I have said before. Nothing magic about it. The real damage would be done if we moved off it prematurely into another resource that was more expensive.
The sole question about this is the one of managing the externalities, the principle one of which may be AGW.
Thats all.
BTW – as you did not seem to want to look at how to get there, I had a look at Ted Trainer’s approach. Please let me know if this is representative.
David Holmgren’s (must be a good bloke, from WA) approach seems to be to actually build the villages.
If this is so, I have little argument with it. No force, people voluntarily choosing to join it. I have always had a healthy respect for anarchy.
This bit, though, worried me:
It shows (IMHO) some seriously woolly thinking about how this whole thing would work. I would be interested to see your thoughts on this.
Andrew,
The ‘woolliest’ thinking that I can see is not in Ted Trainer’s words, but in your enunciation yet again, at the start of your post, of your unshakable faith that the free market, if unencumbered by any meddlesome governments, will solve all of the looming problems faced by humankind that I have alluded to: the rapidly increasing entropy of the earth, the exhaustion of our global stocks of stored solar energy (aka ‘fossil fuels’), global warming, depletion of water resources, depletion of marine resources, loss of bio-diversity, etc, etc.
I don’t see what the problem, you see with Ted Trainer’s words, is. He can’t be 100% pescriptive. The manufacture of some artefacts such as refrigerators is not likely to be possible on a small local scale so some regional cooperation may be needed.
Andrew,
Also, in response to your point, that humans were able to find alternatives when one resource ran out, don’t forget the examples I gave where they did not: the Ancient Sumerians, the Angkor Watt civilisation, the ancient Mayans, the Easter Islanders the Norse Greenlanders.
Don’t kid yourself that neo-liberal economic theories somehow make us fundamentally more intelligent than the peoples of those past collapsed societies.
When their resources of forests, fertile agricultural soil and water were destroyed by their neglect, all of their creativity and ingenuity could not save their advanced civilisations from total collapse. It will be no different for us, if we don’t take steps now to preserve what limited stocks of natural capital we have left and to use them properly, while we still have them, to build the necessary infrastructure and artefacts to sustain our civilisation.
We cannot afford any longer to allow the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market to go on guiding us to waste these resources on such extravagantly expensive white elephants as the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, the Traveston Dam, the Suncorp Stadium, Luxury high rise apartments, luxury cars, yachts, jets, etc, etc.
The resources being wasted on these projects need to be diverted now to help us build the kind of sustainable communities that Holmgren and Trainer advocate.
Where these societies based on command and control economies or free market systems? Probably a mixture but I would say that it is probably hard to know what the ratio was.
A free market economy that gets struck by a disaster (the arrival of a new culture, the deplection of a key resourse, the eruption of a volcano) may show weaknesses in its response to impending doom and in its preparation for such possibilities. However the issue is whether a command and control society would necessarily do a better job. Under both the USSR and the Chinese Communists starvation happened repeatedly due to failures in resourse allocation.
My recollection (which may be wrong) is that most of the Norse Greenlanders responded to cooling by abandoning their colonies and retreating to warmer climates. I am not sure what this example illustrates.
… and yet another one for those of the ‘Pollyanna’ persuasion on this thread :
Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon
Time is running out for the Amazon rainforest. And the fate of the ‘lungs of the world’ will take your breath away …
—
Terje, we simply must begin to act now to save our global environment. Simply curtailing the operations of corporations in order to do so does not turn us into a command economy.
James,
Which of these projects was “free market” based – the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, the Traveston Dam or the Suncorp Stadium?
As for the luxuries – the amount of consumption these represent is immaterial in the context of a large economy like ours. In addition, they represent part of the incentive to outperform in resource allocation. In general terms (obviously there are a few exceptions) the people using these resources are able to as they have created improvements elsewhere. I know you are going to disagree with that reflexively, but that is your mantra / faith. You will, no doubt, keep saying we are living unsustainably and all this is horrible and must be stopped.
As Terje correctly (IMHO) pointed out, the question is how are you going to improve on our current system? The means are critical. All of these visions of the future that have been advocated in the past without that being thought out have either ended in failure or mass deaths. Neither is acceptable.
As I said, if you and a group of friends choose to start a community on your land and live in a way you view as sustainable, I have no problem. I, in fact, would fight for your right to do so. If you, however, tried to force me to join you against my will, I would similarly fight, as, I believe would many others.
The reason why communism, fascism, despotism, socialism, and many other –isms failed is simple – inefficient resource allocation. Centralising the decisions relies on a small group of brains to understand the whole economy. In that sense they are less intelligent. Capitalism has proven time and again that, through the means of the price mechanism, that resource allocation is best handled at as low a level as possible.
There are some inefficiencies in resource allocation under capitalism – I would be the first to admit that. I trust you will find many more than you have cited here and I could reply with even more.
Command and control systems, though, are worse. Have a look at the Three Gorges Dam – stupidity at its highest.
You, though, are advocating small communities. How are these to be developed? How are they to be enforced? What happens if someone starts disagreeing with the rest of the community? If there are differing opinions, how are they worked out? Is a full consensus required before action? All of these questions have been worked out under our current system. Before you tell us to take a leap in the dark, please shine some light on it. I, for one, need to know that where I am heading is at least as good for me and my family before you, Ted and David lead us there.
James,
You also keep trying to depict my “faith� in the price mechanism as some sort of blind following. It is not. I see it working every day. When I go to the shops I see plenty of the goods I want or need at a price that I, and most other Australians can afford. When I work I see I am able to do work I want to do at a price for that work that I can accept.
The system you are advocating sounds great – but it requires that leap of faith that a free market does not. Until Ted’s and David’s system(s) are more thought out, with definite paths and a reasonably certain outcome, it is that system which requires the leap of faith.
Almost every example of stuff ups you have come up with are government ones. All that they have done is reinforced the picture I have that, where something is done on a price base, it works. When done otherwise, it stuffs up. Sorry, but I am in no way convinced by your arguments.
Andrew Reynolds wrote:
I don’t care what you decide to do. If, when there is no water coming out of your taps, when the supermarket shelves are bare, and our power generation system fails, you choose to live at the top of one of what are today’s luxury high rise apartments, without the lifts operating, then that’s your right.
Andrew Reynolds wrote:
This one has been answered a long time ago by Greg Wood as I pointed out above:
Your debating ploy is ridiculous. If I don’t accept completely the free market extreme that you advocate, then I am obliged to state what completely prescriptive alternative I advocate in its place. If it is not any one of
… then I am obliged to spell out a total blueprint of my own plans for my alternative form of society, before any of my objections to the way this society is run can be taken seriously
Well, I don’t yet have the complete blueprint that you demand, but I think I have already shown that I do have lots of ideas about how I think this society could be run a whole lot better.
If that doesn’t satisfy you, then too bad.
I think I will find that a lot more poeple out there will be in agreement with me, and would care little for your objections.
James,
If you want to say that we should choose to do it, go ahead. Without a realistic plan I doubt you will get many takers. Critisise all you want, but I will continue to ask what you propose in its place.
As a (possibly) useful tip in your advocacy, the answer of “Uhhh, some eco-friendly villages, maybe a little trade and I don’t know what else” will not exactly convince many.
But feel free to continue.
Andrew,
As I wrote, your demand that I proved a comprehensive alternative plan of how our society has to be run is only a ploy to avoid a proper discussion about what should be done about all the looming threats of species extinction, global warming, oil depletion, of water resources, etc, etc.
Sorry, I meant to write ‘provide a comprehensive alternative plan …’ instead of ‘proved a comprehensive alternative plan’.
James,
I have said what should be done about it. Multiple times – you just seem to miss it each time and then chant something about how terrible the market is.
To recap, and in a nutshell – oil, water and any other resource depletion – price the oil and water correctly and the problems will solve themselves through an increasing price, causing alternatives to emerge and conservation of the resource to occur, as has happened numerous times that the price mechanism has been allowed to work.
Other than talking irrelevantly about ancient civilisations run by despots, please indicate where a free market has not priced a good correctly over a sustained period and I will show you why you are wrong.
Species extinction and global warming are, if they are happening, examples of externalities to an economic system. First, studies need to be completed as to whether they are positive or negative externalities. Then have a look at the cost of proposed actions against the costs of other actions that could otherwise be taken to deal with other problems. Then (and only then) might some action be justified on the part of a (or several) governments. The studies, debating any proposed action and any actual action are (IMHO) the proper preserve of governments.
I’m sorry, but (IMHO) that is somewhat better than “Uhhh, some eco-friendly villages, maybe a little trade and I don’t know what elseâ€?.
If I have mis-represented your position, please feel free to correct me.
There are already alternatives to oil it is just a matter of price, not emergence. It makes sence to use the cheap option first because it has the virtue of being cheap. When it is no longer cheapest we will use something else. So I would say we should continue to use oil just as long as we can afford to.
I don’t think there are any alternatives to water ever likely to emerge. However I am splitting hairs because I am sure that you did not mean to imply we would drink something different, but rather that we would obtain water differently or use it more carefully if it becomes scarce.
Andrew,
I haven’t missed your incessantly repeated argument that market forces will solve everything. Both Greg Wood and I have already explained to you why have no basis to assume that they will.
As I wrote earlier:
I also explained earlier why your insistence that we can rely on recycling indefinitely is wrong, particularly at the current rate of consumption of resources:
As the resources upon which our civilisation depends become depleted and prices go up, it is possible, but by no means guaranteed, that alternatives will be found. In regards to fossil fuel energy, my guess is that the alternative will be manual human labour.
When we make this transition, economists will, no doubt, be able to show with GDP figure further rises in our standards of living.
Apologies for grammatical error in the last sentence of my last post. “GDP figure” should have been “GDP figures“.
James,
Apart from nuclear (which has its own problems and benefits) a photovoltaic generation station 140 x 140 km in area at an average US location could generate all the electricity needed in the US (2.5 x 1012 kW-h/yr), assuming a system efficiency of 10%, a balance-of-systems efficiency of 81% and a system packing factor of 50%. (K. Zweibel, Harnessing Solar Power-the Photovoltaic Challenge, Plenum, New York 1990). I know its old, but it is the best reference I can find quickly.
Since then, efficiency has gone up – more than doubled for the best cells.
The problem is not the amount of energy; it is the cost of alternatives to fossil fuels. The amount arriving from the sun is hardly “the relative trickle of energy� you (or whoever you are quoting) have misrepresented it to be.
Terje is partially right on the water – there is more than enough water on the planet, the problem is that most of it has too much salt in it. Most of what you need to make it viable to drink is – you guessed it – energy. Obviously, some of the things we are using water for now is wasteful. People washing their drives down is wasteful. A broom also works, so an increase in price of water will lead to some alternatives being used, but, with that little quibble, Terje was right.
On recycling – if you want to use the specific example of buildings, fine. The current fascination with high rise buildings – the ones needing reinforced concrete – is a function of their cost. As the price of steel and concrete rises, guess what happens? Either a way to efficiently recycle them is found, we stop knocking them down and “recycleâ€? in-situ (i.e. reuse the building) and/or we stop building them and a more efficient way, using truly recyclable materials, is found. There are plenty of other ways to build them.
Andrew,
Your endless restatement of the one and only idea that you have ever offered to this discussion is becoming rather wearying.
Regarding your analogy of water. The economists who have been telling us for years that only with growing population could South East Queenslanders enjoy better living standards, forgot to warn a 73 year old pensioner who wrote a letter to the Sunday Mail about two weeks ago, that he would, as a result, have to rsort to watering his garden with buckets rather than with a hose, in order to comply with the Queensland Government’s draconian water use restrictions.
So, here we have an example of an adjustment for the worst, which has been dictated by the growing scarcity of a resource. In this case I see no evidence that ‘market forces’ have in other ways made up for this loss.
The same will occur with so many of the other resources which are now being wasted so profligately.
Obviously, it stands to reason that market forces will eventually result in adjustments to the pricing of some commodities, but usually only when it is too late.
What will occur as we shift from the use of one resource to the next, with each successive transition requiring ever more complex technologies, our overall material standard of living will decrease.
I guarantee you that alternatives to petroleum will not come into effect for years, if ever. For that to happen we need to replace, at enormous cost, the several hundred millions of cars that depend upon petroleum today and and to build all of the infrastructure necessary to supply alternative fuels.
In the meantime those unfortunate people, who have to commute for hours across gridlocked traffic in cities designed abysmally, based on the idiotic assumption that cheap petroleum would last forever, have now suffered significant and real reductions in their standard of living as the additional cost of fuel eats into their disposable income. As petroleum prices go inevitably higher, this situation can only become worse
On what basis can you presume that we can go on making transition after transition from the use of materials requiring simple technologies to the use of materials requiring ever more complex technologies without our suffering a decrease in living standards?
None, whatsover.
If we are very lucky, we may be able to go on making these transitions, and suffer the consequent declines in our living standards, without a catastrophic failure of our economy which will have become ever more complex and interdependant. The consequence of failure hardly bears thinking about.
As I written before, there is no more basis to your belief that ‘the invisible hand’ unaided by collective consucious human decision making (aka ‘government’) will be able to sort out the mess than their is to the belief by New Guinea’s cargo cultists that gods will one day again descend from the heavens in order to provide them with all of their material needs.
James,
The wearying part here is your failure to substantiate.
The reason that the water shortage is a problem is because the market has not been allowed to operate – not that it has. I do not know the water charging regime in Southern Queensland, but if it is anything like the one in WA then I can see how it fails. It is actually prohibited for a private supplier to charge for water here. The Water Corporation (a government business) has a monopoly of supply. It builds the dams and then charges for water based on the rental value of property (go figure) plus a charge for use that goes up and down at various quantities of use. It charges differing amounts to differing industries (with farmers charged least of all) and these bear little or no relationship to a true market price.
My advice? Stop using water to try to prove that the market does not work. I can, and will, hammer you every time.
“On what basis can you presume that we can go on making transition after transition”? On the simple basis of history. We are no longer riding horses to work, burning wood or cow dung to cook or heat our homes, using an abacus to calculate, passing notes around using messenger boys, burning whale oil to light our streets, making all our own clothes, hand writing our records on parchment or vellum or hunting bison with sticks.
I can hear your blood rising from here – about to explode with “But it takes fossil fuels for most of those!”
Calm down. You are right – we are using fossil fuels for many of these. We, as a society, have transitioned several times in fuel source as better and cheaper ones have been discovered / developed. Each had high investments and sunk costs. Each transition has been achieved virtually seemlessly. The current predominance of electricity will greatly reduce the costs of changeover as all that needs to happen is the next source will feed into the electricity grid.
As for liquid fuelled vehicles – most have a shelf life of less than 20 years, and, in any case, diesels can be fuelled by bio-diesel, cars by ethanol (once some simple modifications are done) and most lubricating oils have been synthetic for a long time. CNG or LNG will also work for some time to come.
As I have said time and again – back off and let the prices sort it out. It is not magic, not some conjouring trick, and certainly not a cargo cult (no sitting on our bums here) – just simple demand and supply.
.
Got any more for me to demolish? I am having some good fun here. Looks like we have bored everyone else to death, though.
Andrew,
You attempted to downplay the hardship caused by water restrictions in South East Queensland when you wrote:
I countered this by showing that the restrictions have caused real hardship:
You then ignored your own original point that I was responding to and changed the subject by attempting to blame the hardship suffered by the 73 year old pensioner (and, presumably, the residents of the Mary Valley) on the failure of Peter Beattie to privatise Queensland’s water.
Is this an example of what you were referring to when you implied that you had demolished all of my arguments?
Water Privatisation
Water privatisation has been disastrous for consumers wherever it has been tried starting from Britain, where the executives of the privatised corporation voted themselves huge pay rises and then proceeded to neglect the infrastructure over the coming years. In Third world countries privatisations have universally resulted in huge increases in charges to consumers. As I have pointed out elsewhere, in Angola it has caused an outbreak of cholera in which 2,000 have died and 50,000 have been infected, according to a report on ABC radio national’s The World Today of 26 June. Your response, I recall, was something to the effect that they can get it right next time. I think that, by now, this refrain is well and truly wearing thin. It should be obvious to all those except the very few with vested interests in privatisation, that it is a deeply flawed idea and that no amount of re-packaging with different gimmicks can change that.
Resource substitution
Regarding transitions, none of the transitions to which you referred to above, with the one exception of the transition from the use of wood as a fuel to the use of coal, were the result of scarcity. The transition from petroleum to alternatives will be driven by shortages. As I wrote above, the technologies to get alternatives to oil will be inherently more complex. Instead of simply drilling a hole into the ground and extracting all of that conveniently packaged energy which can be so easily stored in metal containers, we will instead have to grow it first, if we adopt bio-fuels. It is not even clear whether the energy output will exceed the energy input, especially if we need to use fertilisers manufactured from fossil fuels in order to grow the crops. In any case, the production of bio-fuels to the extent necessary to provide for our current needs would take up an inordinate amount of farming land and quickly exhaust even the deepest topsoils, rendering them useless for food or fuel production. Australia has very little topsoil.
There are also huge problems with hydrogen power. The technologies to store nd transport the energy, whether as gas or in battery cells are far more complex than that needed to store liquid petroleum.
Logically, the ever greater complexity necessary to harness the different sources of energy, will at the very best, prove unable to sustain our current material standard of living.
At the worst the necessary complexity may leave our society vulnerable to the threat of total collapse.
Even a teenager should be able to see that the current rate of consumption of the world’s non-renewable resources is grossly irresponsible. The longer we delay action to rein in this waste, the greater will be the price we pay further down the track.