That’s the headline on my opinion piece in yesterday’s Fin, over the Fold
Billions down the drain
The resignation of Mike Taylor as chair of the Murray Darling Basin Authority reflects a dispute over the interpretation of the 2007 Water Act, under which the MDBA has drawn up its draft Basin Plan. The Guide to the Plan, released a couple of months ago, attracted immediate outrage. Copies were burned at public meetings held in communities in the Basin.
The public dispute has arisen because the MDBA has interpreted the Act as requiring that environmental needs for water should receive absolute priority, while the government says that the Act requires environmental, economic and social impacts of policy to be taken into account.
Regardless of the legalities, a sensible policy must take all impacts into account, and the MDBA did so in the draft plan. The central argument underlying its proposal for a return of 3000 to 4000 gigalitres of water to the environment was that anything less would not be sufficient to restore ecosystems to a sustainable level while anything more would impose unacceptable social and economic costs.
The real problems with the Basin Plan and the Water Act go much deeper. They involve policy mistakes made by the Howard Government when the National Water Action Plan was announced, and perpetuated under Labor.
More importantly, they reflect a misconceived policy focus, in which discussions of the social and economic impacts of planning for the Basin are discussed almost entirely in terms of the size of the irrigated agriculture sector.
The centrepiece of Howard’s Plan was a $10 billion bucket of money allocated to fixing Australia’s water problems and particularly those of the Basin. The plan was conceived almost entirely in engineering terms, and based idea of saving water currently wasted through processes like seepage from unlined channels.
In reality, most water ‘lost’ through seepage returns to the environment in one way another. Very few cost-effective measures to increase water use efficiency have been identified.
Howard’s plan included $3 billion allocated to the purchase of water rights from irrigators willing to sell them, but this was seen as a last resort, and almost nothing was done in his government’s final year of office.
When Labor came to office, the priorities were reversed and the main focus was on purchase from willing sellers. The effort was highlt successful. Entitlements with an average annual allocation of 700 GL have been purchased at a total cost of around $1.5 billion. The $10 billion allocated to the MDB is more than sufficient to purchase enough water for the sustainable environmental allocation of 3-4000 GL identified by the MDBA. There is no need for any cuts in entitlements for irrigators who do not wish to sell.
But Labor’s Water for the Future Plan no fundamental changes in policy. The allocation of more than $6 billion to engineering works remained. Critically, the MDBA continued to work on the basis that its job was to identify the amount of water needed for the environment. It was up to governments to work out how the water would be obtained.
This approach made a nonsense of modelling work on the economic and social impact of the proposals. Without assumptions on the way in which policy is financed and implemented, it is impossible to determine the social and economic impact.
Unsurprisingly, this approach was framed, in public discussion as proposing ‘cuts’ to irrigators’ allocations. Despite repeated statements from the Gillard government that no one would have their entitlement reduced unless they chose to sell, the MDBA did nothing to dispel this presumption, which has remained dominant – media coverage of the issue has continuously referred to “water cuts”.
The economic impact of purchases of entitlements is radically different to that of across-the-board cuts, with or without compensation. Expanded purchases will leave irrigators better off, not worse. The main potential losers are farm employees and business in country towns, who will face reduced demand if farmers shift from irrigation to less intensive dryland agriculture. Even here, the impact will be modest in most parts of the Basin, where irrigation is a relatively small part of economic activity. But some towns will face a significant adverse shock.
A focus on the real winners and losers points up the foolishness of spending billions of dollars subsidising irrigation infrastructure. This money could be far better spent on social infrastructure, aimed both at addressing existing deficiencies and at assisting the adjustment to new sources of economic activity, including tourism and service activities as well as dryland agriculture.
John Quiggin 
Couple of points John, all water used for irrigation is returned to the environment as seepage, transpiration or straight evaporation. If your view on leaky channels is correct then water used productively by irrigators has the same destination.
Are the billions spent on maintaining agricultural income, and dare I say food security, any more foolish than billions spent on the NBN?
The real injustice in “subsidising irrigation” is that the $1 billion dollar per year spend by the govt is halfway covered by the GST alone on ABAREs valuation of $5.5 billion of basin irrigated production. Include income taxes from owners and staff within these agricultural enterprises and sadly it is really irrigators money being used to destroy their own communities.
Irrigators are not in danger here, unless the govt can’t afford to buy the rest of the water it’s told it needs. The community reaction isn’t about protecting irrigators but the communities they are part of.
@rojo
Couple of points John, all water used for irrigation is returned to the environment as seepage, transpiration or straight evaporation. If your view on leaky channels is correct then water used productively by irrigators has the same destination.
If it evaporates or transpires, the water is genuinely “lost” to the system. Of course it stays on Earth, but it rarely leads to increased rain anywhere in Australia. It may increase the rain rate 5000 km away, and out to sea, which does nobody any good.
If it “seeps” out of irrigation channels however, it stays in the local area, and either recharges the groundwater or end up back in a river, ready to be used again.
Most infrastructure used consists of rubber lining the irrigation channels. This reduces the loss of seepage, but from a whole-of-system point of view, this is a false saving.
Thanks, Sam, for saving others the trouble. It was an insincere effort form Rojo and you picked the weaknesses instantly.
Thank you, JQ, for another interesting summary of another topic left out of the newspapers, while they hunt down non-issues to fill the empty spaces not already occupied by advertising.
Once again, why am I not reading this sort of thing, rather than a load of junk about celebrity sex lives?
@paul walter
says “why am I not reading this sort of thing, rather than a load of junk about celebrity sex lives?”
because you subscribed for a year and the celebrity pages are delivered? It has to be the only reason Paul.
Oh dear JQ – I may not agree – tourism is the last resort (inland Australia not exactly an ideal tourist resort – flies, heat and no beach) of a desperate nation that has neglected its internal production.
Maintain some protection for regional food producers (instead of free market imports and exports of food). It makes sense to me for employment and maintenance of our country towns. Employment has to be nationwide and everyone has forgotten about full employment (and the income it generates), especially the Reserve Bank.
Dont assume the natural transation to tourism or service industries. People who have worked on farms may not do so well in tourism or service and labour is not perfectly mobile and after this crash capital may be less mobile also. Id rather like to think we could sustain our domestic food production without assuming our food needs should be met with cheaper imports, or for that matter exported at prices Australians wont pay.
Sam, are you sure? it’s interesting that rainfall in the basin has been higher in the basin in the latter half of last century, post irrigation development. I’m not sure if we could definatively put this down to irrigation, but I’m surprised you can rule it out.
Sam, are you sure? it’s interesting that rainfall in the basin has been higher in the basin in the latter half of last century, post irrigation development. I’m not sure if we could definatively put this down to irrigation, but I’m surprised you can rule it out.
What infrastructure water savings provide is production from moving the losses to the fields alone, as the fields are capable of seepage and evaporation.
The real genius about not supporting infrastructure is that the channels will lose greater percentages of extracted water, as presumably they will be carrying less flow with water buybacks.
There is a feeling amongst some irrigator, who have put in water saving measures at their own cost, that they will get nothing but cuts in water allocations while those who have done nothing to save water in the past will get financial assistance to get them to the same point with a far lesser impact on their entitlements.
Irrigation and water supply as policy and practice is an extremely difficult area. Politics, finance, social and economic policy, environmental impacts and hydro-engineering are all involved. Australia’s difficult geography and climate play a role in multiplying the difficulties further. Australia’s generally flat terrain means there are relatively few good sites for large dams. Our climate demonstrates long flood and drought cycles with the emphasis at the drought end of the climate range. Combine all this with the anti-intellectualism, anti-environmentalism, anti-science stance and rent seeking behaviour of many of the relevant influential parties and lobbies and good policy development becomes almost impossible. Then add in the law of unintended consequences to get an idea of how truly unmanageable the problem is.
What we have is something that is at once a wicked problem and a social mess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
At root, we would need first to solve several other problems. Namely, Australia needs a population policy, an environmental sustainability policy and probably a food self-sufficiency policy. These are also wicked problems and social messes. Wicked problems and social messes are not strictly amenable to planned intervention and yet each sectional interest can, should and will attempt to intervene and the net result of all these attempts may be some form of apparent planned intervention. It’s akin to life itself which is a wicked, insoluble, messy problem. The problem is wicked and insoluble yet we are constrained to attempt to solve it. Attempting to solve it leads to eventual defeat. Not attempting to solve it leads to quicker defeat.
@Ikonoclast
No it doesn’t, unless I’m radically misunderstanding what you see the components of such a policy might be.
That I can agree with, with the caveat that we might not agree on the scope of such a policy.
I don’t agree with that at all. That sounds like cover for unsustainable farming practice and acceptance of externalities that would subvert the last policy.
@Fran Barlow
Of course a population policy is needed. After 30 more doublings, there will only be standing room on the planet.
But more than this – a population matched with land, water, climate, and resources is a much happier than a population forced to fight water-wars, forced to suffer deaths through climate catastrophe, or forced to suffer malnutrition and finally starvation.
Our human species did not evolve to live in huge conglomerations of strangers – humans are only truly happy in small tribes of known individuals.
@Fran Barlow
Australia needs to determine what its maximum sustainable population is. If we exceed the sustainable population we go into overshoot, permanently degrade our human carrying capacity and condemn a portion of our population to a cruel die-off by starvation.
The determination of sustainable population would be based on a carrying capacity calculated by environmentally sustainable water supply and food supply. The key is water supply as that also determines food supply. This determination would be an estimate based on known current technology and would be based on worst decade calulations ie likely water supply in a low (say 25th percentile) rainfall decade. I suspect we would arrive at about 30 million as a reasonable cap.
Cap could be implemented by limiting immigration firstly and secondly limiting natural increase if necessary by removal of child subsidies and an disincentivising environmental tax on children beyond 2 for any female. This latter definition (a female) is easier and more logical than trying to define marriages, couples or households.
Of course, if you prefer Australia to end up like Haiti then do nothing. If we grow indefinitely without regard for sustainable carrying capacity then it is 100% certain we will end up like Haiti.
It is not at all clear that we can continue to rely on the rest of the world for food. Water and food shortages, along with fuel and general energy shortages will soon strike the whole world. Countries will retain essential needs rather than export them. In the times to come, sustainable food and energy autarky will be viable and sensible for large continental countries. To believe anything else is to believe in the cornucopian fantasy of the endless-growthers.
@rojo
That’s possible of course. I don’t want to be absolute about anything; its likely that SOME of the evaporated water will be returned as rainfall in the local area, just not much. A lot of it will be carried away by the wind. There isn’t any really neat relationship between increased humidity and rainfall in any given area. Wind speed and direction is important, as well as the presence of mountains, the right kind of dust and sea salt spray in the air, air temperature and the presence and type of other clouds.
For a really good example of this, the red sea (which is very nearly a thin, North South lake) produces an enormous amount of evaporation yet is surrounded on all sides by desert.
With seepage, by contrast, virtually all is returned to the local area.
@Ikonoclast
1. We can’t know with confidence what Australia’s maximum sustainable population is
2. Short of measures that no civilised society would accept, we couldn’t ensure we could keep to it anyway
3. This ignores equity questions, because there are some places where populations clearly are in excess of carrying capacity and Australia should be part of humanitarian resettlement.
4. Australia is a country not a planet. Long before people were “condemned to a cruel die-off by starvation” food would be imported and/or people would leave.
We have plenty of water — it’s just in places most of us don’t fancy living. We also waste water in major urban areas a lot. We can tap desal at acceptable cost, especially if we have a larger population in major urban areas. The most water-intensive foods are meat products, which we don’t much need. Cereals, legumes, and other protein and carbohydrate sources need a tiny fraction of the water currently used in agriculture, assuming we were attempting a Potemkin Village here.
Are you going to control the return of ex-pats? Are you going to refuse tourists? Students? Temporary workers?
While I’m against “baby bonus” style payments, I don’t regard either of these as ideas as feasible. You might as well oppose state support for public schools or abolish bulk-billing at doctors for under 18s. We do want children to be well cared for, and we certainly don’t want people in the poorest parts of the population to neglect their kids. There’s little evidence that poor people tailor their procreation to family tax benefits. Disadvantaged people tend not to know the benefits systems as well as some allege. Their tendency to think very short term also recommends against this view.
Maintenance of good social support, inclusive work practices and so forth will probably keep birth rates around replacement or slightly above.
A great many things about the future remain unclear, but it is unlikely that fantasies based around population control will foreclose any of these problems.
I hope it will not destroy your reputation Fran, but I agree with just about all you have written.
“It is not at all clear that we can continue to rely on the rest of the world for food.”
Are we doing that? We are large food exporters, mostly grains and meat. We import little that is essential – unless you consider champagne essential.
@ken n
We are becoming net food importers in many food groups Ken n as they continue to bulldoze Australian food producing firms. We are ONLY large exporters in grains and meats.
Thats fine if you think you Australia can live on very expensive hamburgers alone.
Get your facts correct and look at the food groups and think about the production and jobs and farms and business and income we lose while getting cheap OJ concentrate weeks or months old from South America, or prawns we are not sure might be full of some toxin from goodness knows where – regulation is lax, or pork products we cant vouch for either or apples that are infested with apple blight.
Your argument – “we are large food exporters” – is an entirely false and misleading comment intended to imply “there is no need to worry – we can just ignore the rest of our food producers because the global market will decide who gets to eat what.”
If I had a comparative advantage in banana throwing there would one coming your way.
You are correct about exports Alice and about the specific imports you list (except apples and anyway, I think we should treat NZ as part of us for trade purposes).
But even so, the imports are not very important in the food supply. If you like, we are self-sufficient in the things that matter for a healthy diet and import a few not so necessary extras. OJ, soy sauce, varieties of rice we don’t grow and so on. We swap navel oranges with the US – we sell in winter and buy in summer. Much the same with table grapes. It all makes good sense to me.
A grocery trade association recently released some highly misleading figures that combined food and other grocery imports and encouraged the reader to believe they were talking about food. Ross Gittins took it apart in the SMH http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/there-are-lies-damned-lies-and-vested-interests-reports-20101102-17c9b.html
@ken n
“I hope it will not destroy your reputation Fran, but I agree with just about all you have written.”
She can be remarkably sensible for a some-type-of-Marxist ivory tower dweller 😉
@Fran Barlow
Let me deal with Fran’s points in turn.
1. We can’t know with confidence what Australia’s maximum sustainable population is.
Here, Fran implicitly accepts that Australia has a safe theoretical maximum sustainable population under current environmental and technological conditions. In that case, we should attempt to estimate it and ensure that the estimate is on the safe side. The risks attendant on going over the maximum sustainable limit are severe; high death rates, widespread misery and long term damage to the environment and carrying capacity. The risks of capping our population a little on the low side are insignificant in comparison.
Essentially, Fran’s basic argument is that it is hard to know precisely what standard of brakes we need so we shouldn’t contemplate any brakes at all. This is a poor argument both in car engineering and in practical demographics.
2. Short of measures that no civilised society would accept, we couldn’t ensure we could keep to it anyway.
Some of the measures required may be unpalatable but a prescient civilized democratic citizenry could and should accept them when it becomes clear that the alternatives are worse. Ignoring this problem means storing up greater horrors for the future. Again, the issues are mass misery and starvation deaths versus immigration control and birth control.
3. This ignores equity questions, because there are some places where populations clearly are in excess of carrying capacity and Australia should be part of humanitarian resettlement.
Australia appears likely to rapidly surpass its carrying capacity on current trends. Our capacity to absorb world overpopulation is minute and rapidly diminishing. It is a form of the lifeboat dilemma in moral terms. When the lifeboat is full, if you let more aboard the lifeboat then the lifeboat sinks and all drown. When people realise the lifeboat is full, they will demand a cessation to immigration. It is a natural self-protective and offspring-protective reaction.
4. Australia is a country not a planet. Long before people were “condemned to a cruel die-off by starvation” food would be imported and/or people would leave.
This begs the question. Are not both countries and planets finite? When the country is at maximum capacity and the world too is at maximum capacity where is the spare food for export/import? Where are the under-populated countries for emigration? If we recognise that countries can reach a limit then we must recognise that the planet too can reach a limit.
In fact, the world is already beyond its long term carrying capacity. Key non-renewable resources, especially energy, are past peak production and renewable resources are either being over-exploited (fish), not brought on line fast enough (solar energy) or are having their sustainable potential vastly over-estimated (bio-fuels). We are already past the point of no return with respect to controlled or safe landings yet people still want to view the earth as a limitless cornucopia.
In the next twenty years reality is going to bite us very hard. Tough decisions will have to made and sensitive souls will best protect themselves and their fellows by being proactive quantitative realists not nebulous qualitative idealists.
@Jarrah
You should know better than to box people having told me it was safe to venture over to Catallyxy because they have a wide range of views. Same here Jarrah – so lets not go down the “Marxist ivory tower dweller” insults….beneath you for such a sensible right leaning advocate austerity measures. I cant help feeling you are wrong on that this time because the right hasnt taken into account the level of private sector debt that you would like to see now swallow the stock standard bitter medicine pushed by the right. No two economic circuntances are the same and no remedies work all the time.
@ken n
Ken n says “We swap navel oranges with the US – we sell in winter and buy in summer”. not quite again Ken n.
Tell that to the once owners of the thousands of acres of much juicier, mush fresher slightly paler and slightly more greener looking in parts (because the sun does it) orchards of valencias we used to grow here that have been bulldozed because the US developed a more orange looking orange, with a bigger pith and girth, which Woolworths happily stocks, but which is as dry as a bone and comparatively (to Valencias) juiceless by the time it gets here.
Given the rate of species extinction, water-stress, acidification of oceans, and human induced climate change, it appears that we have already exceeded the sustainable level of population.
It will take a lot of education but our present course has already demonstrated that it is unsustainable.
Pretending that we “do not know” what a sustainable population is, demonstrates a head-in-the-sand approach that does not address the needs of future generations.
There is no reason for any increased population – except greed.
@Ikonoclast
Far easier said than done, as current environmental and technological conditions will become progressively less determinative as each year passes. It seems very clear though that there is ample scope for Australia to carry a much larger population than we current do, assuming political support for population densities of around 80ppHa in the major cities could be secured or else people were willing to live in the better watered parts of the country and the rest of us were willing to support them while they got established.
A larger population in the major urban areas, could easily support the kinds of measures that could radically improve the management of urban water assets, improve the distribution of transport and health services, support quality public housing, for example. Certainly, a larger population would make the per capita costs in retooling energy systems, reconfiguring water distribution, and doing desal, if it came to that, a lot easier to bear.
Let’s get the analogy right. Because we don’t know exactly when we will need to start slowing down or whether the elevation of the terrain will force us to slow without applying the brakes, we don’t know when and if we should apply the brakes at all. If we see a clear reason for applying them and can work out the rate at which we must slow, then we will know how hard to apply them. We also have to be aware that stopping too quickly could mean we get run over by those following behind us, as China with its one-child policy is beginning to discover.
You say that but you don’t specify policies that would assure a definite target. If you are going to be certain, you need to bar large numbers of people not only becoming citizens and permanent residents, but from obtaining tourist. student and working visas. You would need to put quotas on returning expats, and impose severe penalties on people with third children. You’d need to bar the children of citizens partnered with non-nationals from living here. Given that you can’t say with confidence that the alternatives would be worse, the public utility of such arrangements is hard to see.
Since you don’t know what that is, and population forecasting is notoriously rubbery, that’s a hard claim to warrant.
It seems to me that we should at least accept our curent share of the world population in humanitarian resttlement. Your argument has been used to attempt to relieve Australia of its emissions obligations (we only emit 1.5%), and it is just as bogus there. Australia is not a lifeboat. It’s not going to sink. We have or can contrive all of the resources we need, if we are minded to do so. However, parochialism and xenophobia are common here and many would sooner look the other way than assist their fellow human beings.
Not it doesn’t. There was no imported assumption. I merely used your claim. You may have meant: this invites/raises the questionare not both countries and planets finite? When the country is at maximum capacity and the world too is at maximum capacity where is the spare food for export/import?
Petitio principii (a.k.a Begging the question): We are not yet at maximum capacity or anything like it and with greater equity would tsabilise before we got there. We have a radically inequitable world which this neo-malthusian claim obscures.
Not a fact, but an assertion. It is true that the richest third of the world is burning resources at a rate that will prejudice the longterm interests of nearly everyone but especially the poorest two thirds, which is quite a different thing.
Alice – many marketing campaigns tried to sell Valencias. But people did not want to buy them, because they believe navels are better eating oranges. You can still buy Valencias (we use them for juice) but few buy them. Fact is, they are not great eating.
Bloody consumers.
See, Alice, we can have a civilised conversation, even when we disagree.
Not need to abuse or anything like that.
We might even find we do agree on some things, as Fran and I have found.
@ken n
says, totally ignoring Australias natural comparative advantage that we are surrounded by ocean and dont get other countries diseases (or at least we didnt when quarantine ran well and import controls)
“I think we should treat NZ as part of us for trade purposes”
But not for apple blight which they have and we dont..so far. Nor did we have mad cow disease which gave us a winning edge. You dont really get it. By opening ourselves to global food trade we risk our own domestic supply and we lose our global comparative advantage as a safe food producer.
There you go..thats the trouble with extremes.
@ken n
Disagree totally on Valencias as good eating Ken. I totally ignore big orange Florida navels and would choose home grown any day. Taste better, more juice. I am not fooled by the orange colour and the bigness.
More sand Prof – we all digress.
@ken n
I don’t recall anything of your reputation, but I long ago stopped being bothered by the “wrong” people agreeing with me. Occasionally, when one does, I do re-examine whether they are being sarcastic or if I’ve misspoken.
@Chris Warren
Or the desire to have children and watch them grow up and discover the world. That’s a pretty common reason. That was certainly my reason for having the two I gave birth to. The idea that I’d make a dollar or two out of having them never occurred to me, and indeed, I assumed they would cost me a fortune. Had greed been in my mind, I’d have avoided getting pregnant. Others might see it differently I suppose.
I am glad you are buying Valencias Alice. You keep doing what pleases you. I don’t but, nor do I buy navels in summer. Tho I don’t object to consumers doing what they want.
The fireblight issue is a hard one tho I suspect the kiwis are correct that the risk is negligible.
My underlying belief is that world trade is a wonderful thing. My mother (god rest her soul) used to object to Tasmanian potatoes coming to Sydney. “We can grow potatoes” she would say.
A small example: we eat a lot of rice. We buy short grain from the MIA, Basmati from Pakistan and, occasionally, Japanese varieties from California.
And champagne from France.
@ken n
I have no objection to buying French champagne Ken n, especially when the rich pay more for it.
Fran, Chris means the politicians and developers pushing unsustainable development predicated on a need for high population, in aid of the usual rapacious profit impulse.
It’s probably true that, were the world to have a different mentality and system, all people and all kids could be fed, nurtured and allowed to grow.
Currently, the world’s resources are wasted on the manufacture of unproductive consumer fetishes and fetishism, from expensive toys to wasteful wars launched by the neurotic against the rest.
With the current system predicated on wastage and economies of excess, it’s probably the reality that big families have been priced out of the market for the entire world, when even in rich countries like ours, people are unwilling to take on the risk of larger families.
yeah, no point in buying any thing but local in reds and whites, Alice, but if you want bubbles there is no choice…
@Alice
French champagne is one of those things that should have a luxury tariff on it. In fact I can think of a lot of ways we could fix deficits without cutting pensions, increasing working lives, or increasing student fees. Im very surprised no one else has thought of them…but then poiticians arent exactly on the side of getting things starightened out quickly from the mess we find ourselves in post GFC. I guess if some people remain positive on the benfits of free trade, globailsation and market power (the guvmint cant pick winners or losers unless you are being robbed in the street and you want them to), much like yourself, the country and its jobs and working conditions will continue to suffer – until the majority get pretty cranky.
Some of us are lost in the supermarket I might add – obsessed with a god called price and another called the consumer.
oops – spelling bad and now talking to myself – thats what happens on a Saturday night!
and I dont like bubbles
I also need a sandpit
“and I dont like bubbles”
Nor do I, but Liz does, so what can a bloke do?
The problem with luxury taxes is that most say they should apply to stuff other people like.
Not books, CDs, opera tickets and all.
Stay way from supermarkets – there are other places to buy what you need. Tell Woolworths and coles you don’t need them.
There is a fundamental moral fallacy here.
If this “common reason” gives some great benefit BUT results in wars and starvation for others, then this “common reason” is unethical.
There is also a democratic fallacy here.
While one person can get great happiness by having many children, no-one gets much happiness if everyone has many children.
As civilisation develops, the level of domocracy and ethics (and happiness) should go up, not down.
It was not so long ago that “common reason” kept women in their places, slaves on their plantations, and serfs behind their ploughs. Common reason is the worst of all reasons.
@Fran Barlow
Fran Barlow says, “We have or can contrive all of the resources we need, if we are minded to do so.” The construction and wording of this sentence is revealing. It goes beyond being an unsupported assertion and reveals itself as an article of faith which denies the validity of science.
Fran is a Cornucopian. Cornucopians believe that human will and ingenuity can overcome the laws of nature in general and suspend the laws of thermodynamics in particular. Material resources (measureable quantities) are not limiting, according to Cornucopians, as human ingenuity (an unmeasureable quantity) can “contrive” resources.
I will put the best construction on this and assume that Fran does not believe that resources can be contrived ex nihilo. This indicates Fran believes resources can be contrived by resource substitution. Resource substitution takes two essential forms.
1. Resource B can substitute for exhausted resource A.
2. After natural sources of Resource A are exhausted, resource A can be produced by a high energy process.
Method 1 can have profound impacts. Glass fibre optic cable (manufactured from silica) can replace copper wire for data transmission. Silica is the most common mineral in the earth’s crust. Note that energy is still needed to process the silica. Method 2 also requires energy. Replacing naturally occuring and exhausted sources of freshwater with desalinated water is an energy intensive process. Again, note the importance of energy.
Resource substitution has limits, particularly in the case of human requirements. There is no substitute for water in human physiology. There are also no substitutes for the essential nutrients such as lipids, proteins and carbohydrates. These are material resources produced or obtained by energy intensive processes. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be repealed or out-thought by human ingenuity.
The true limits of growth for the human population on earth are the limits of energy available to do useful work. We have reached peak appropriation of non-renewable energy about now or will soon do do. Solar renewable energy is our best hope but we are developing this resource too slowly for substitution purposes. An energy crash in the next decade or two is almost a certainty on current trends. Even insolation (solar energy falling on the earth’s surface) is limited although large.
Denying limits to (physical) growth is science denialism pure and simple and ranks right up there with climate change denial as a fallacious faith derived position.
Totally typical of every Howard policy. There’s money there but you can’t have it.
“Howard’s plan included $3 billion allocated to the purchase of water rights from irrigators willing to sell them, but this was seen as a last resort, and almost nothing was done in his government’s final year of office”
@Ikonoclast
This is so, but this energy is potentially enormous, and we have scarcely tapped it at this stage. With sufficient energy available to do work any convertible resource is available anywhere. If the deuterium fusion reaction can be made to work positively, then cornucopia does indeed present itself — in theory enough to supply everyone on the planet at 100 times US consumption for 1 million years. Who is to say that problem will never be solved? We can’t rely on it being solved and we should be prudent until it is, but as I said above, let us respond to the actual terrain and its constraints rather than what they might be.
That’s so, but luckily, water is not something one can use up. There’s about as much water about now as there was 4.4billion years ago. What we need is the energy to make it suitable for our purposes by being at the right quality and location.
Again, this is true but there is currently no global shortage of these things on the planet. Gross maldistribution, waste and malfeasance attends them, but these are matters of public policy rather than technical constraint. To raise this claim without adequate foundation while ignoring the public policy attending these things is to provide unwitting cover for those who continue to debauch public policy in their own service.
Australia cannot (and should not attempt to) become a laager state. This would be ethically indefencible and not ultimately in the interests of the descendants of most people who have made it to be citizens of permanent residents.
oops: citizens
ofor permanent residents.“Denying limits to (physical) growth is science denialism pure and simple and ranks right up there with climate change denial as a fallacious faith derived position.”
I knew that would happen – a powerful term is invented and its use becomes so stretched that it becomes just about meaningless.
holocaust to climate change to limits to growth to ?
In marketing, this is called brand extension and is very often a bad idea there too.
Who wants to buy Coca Cola underpants? Actually, Coke has contained their brand very well, but others have not.
If denialism is to become an all-purpose term of abuse, it will become worthless.
@Fran Barlow
Fran, you can rest assurred that your theory will be tested and not mine. Mine is a tiny minority viewpoint. Almost nobody listens to logic and science. Most are either ignorant of them or prefer faith and wishful thinking. The earth’s population will continue to grow exponentially until… well, until what eh Fran?
Until there is one person on every square metre of land? Hmmm no, that doesn’t seem physically possible. Gee, there’s a physical limit right there. Until the food supply and water supply can’t keep up? Until the energy supply can’t keep be kept up? Until the climate fails? Until we are smothered by waste?
Do you think there is a limit Fran or do you think the earth can hold an infinite number of 21st C consumers? Are you aware of climate change and global warming? Are you aware that the current extinction event caused by mankind is the largest and fastest in earth’s history? Are you aware that the oceans are just about fished out? Are you aware of ocean acidification? Are you aware of the potential for oceanic methane hydrates to come out of solution in a mass methane eruption. Are you aware of the thawing of the tundra and the methane emission from the tundras? I expect not. If you were aware of all this empirical evidence you could not cling to your cornucopian fantasy.
As I said, your theory will be tested not mine. Anyone with a better than 20 year life expectancy is almost certain to see undeniable evidence of the global limits to growth. The crash is close in historical terms.
@Ikonoclast
If you weren’t so pre-occupied with the cultural concern you’ve adopted you might wonder why that is so. After all, most people have a strong attachment to the idea of humanity having a future, if only as retrospective validation of the worthiness of everything beyond buying themselves another minute, hour or day of life.
I call Weltschmerz here. The vast majority of policy makers and people listen to logic science enough (or at least what they take it to be) to change their behaviour on the basis of it. Even the delusionals, fostered by the special pleaders, on climate change like to pretend to themselves that what they are denying is not science but a scam. You’re either doing hyperbole out of irritation that the world isn’t as you’d like it (I’ve been there a few times) or doing a variant of the claim that you and those who share your cultural position are privileged interpreters of logic and science, which, outside of a persuasive appeal to independent data and robust modelling must be circular in its reasoning and therefore paradoxical when set beside your claim.
Ah, slippery slope/reductio ad absurdum. I wonder how many fallacies you can squeeze in?
I’ve not suggested that resources are infinite or that exponential growth ad infinitum was possible or even desirable, or that if there were persuasive evidence that the physical limits of ecosystem services would be tested on a timeline comparable to one we might act upon, that we should not act to curb growth. I just want something like good reasons for founding policy on that assumption, given that persuading most people that it needed to be done and could be done would be challenging.
Yes indeed, and with the exception of the question of ocean fish stocks have posted on every one of these matters. Ocean acidification and likewise the integrity of the Arctic permafrost are matters I’ve posted on with especial regularity, most recently at the (currently offline) LarvatusProdeo. You’re either being rhetorical or haven’t paid much attention to what I post.
We are at the limits of peak oil and peak food production right now. There is overwhelming empirical evidence for that conclusion.
But I give up. Fran has a faith position. It’s impossible to argue logically with faith reasoners and useless to cite empirical evidence.
It seems accepted now that world population will peak at about 8.5 billion in 2050 and then decline – each projection recent has been slightly lower than the last. Demographers aren’t worrying about overpopulation any more – population decline and aging is what they are onto now.
8.5 billion is still a lot of people but well within the world’s ability to feed.
So far as I can see Ikon, you have not cited any empirical evidence at all.
@Ikonoclast
One of the curious things about peak-{fill in the commodity} is that you can’t be sure that you are there when you are. It is always retrospective. One looks back ten years, shows how demand went unmet despite rising prices and one can make the call.
Some say peak oil occurred in 2006-2007. Last I heard, the IEA was predicting peak oil in 2013. Hubbard in the 1970s predicted it for the late 1990s/early millennium. Clearly, it’s very unclear when it will occur. It seems to me quite likely that at some point in the foreseeable future that it will no longer be economically feasible to extract oil for combustion in private motor vehicles, and some time after that for commercial transport vehicles either. Personally, I’m hoping that occurs sooner rather than later, precisely because the environmental and cultural footprint of oil-for-energy is both grossly pernicious and ubiquitous and I doubt mere advocacy will suffice to abate it. That said, I regard speculation on peak oil as a distraction.
This is what in court would be called non-responsive or in psychologistic discourse, both projecting and deflecting.
It’s ironic Ikonoclast that you project onto me your own central episteme — faith. Your nym and your method are at one — you and your small band of neo-Malthusian Illuminati alone relay on “science” and “logic” as against the hordes of cornucopians. Yet You adduce no evidence beyond the mere assertion that peak everything important is here and that because in the longer run, we must surely accept that resources are finite that this must be so in the short run as well and that we are up against that constraint right now.
Of course you “give up”. It is far more comforting to continue to believe your standpoint amounts to sage iconoclasm — and don’t get me wrong because I’ve been there and done that. Ultimately though your position is self-defeating because if you really do want to stand with human well-being you need to engage with observable reality and so much of human culture as lies outside your capacity to reconfigure.
You are in the minority because at the moment the case you propose has not been adequately made out. Dealing with that will leave you uncomfortable in the short term, but more comfortable in the longer term.
@ken n
says “Who wants to buy Coca Cola underpants?”
Be careful. Xmas is coming. It could happen. It always amazes me the people who dont mind paying to be walking advertisements.
@Ikonoclast
says “Do you think there is a limit Fran or do you think the earth can hold an infinite number of 21st C consumers?”
Of course there is a limit. Many of our current problems with climate change, pollution, enviro damage is because basically we are in plague proportions already globally – think cockroaches or locusts. Wanting to accommodate yet more population growth or assist it or predicate policy on it is denialism (the scourge of the noughties).