Guest post: We cannot even manage those minor changes
Originally a comment by James Garnett on We’ve come to believe our own press clippings.
I don’t think Earth will support eight billion humans living off the land.
Oh, I don’t disagree with that, at all. I’ve been saying for some years now that humanity and civilization are far past the point of sustainability; the great fall of humanity is not only inevitable, I think, but it’s coming far sooner than most people probably expect. My comment that “there are those who have taught themselves the old ways” is not a call for humanity to return to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, it was simply an observation that there are people who do that. Because they lament the state that we’ve gotten into, among other reasons. It’s not going to save humanity.
Look, we’ve got maybe a decade and likely even less before climate crises become our #1 problem, and that is something over which we very much do have control, even with relatively minimal changes to our lifestyles, and we cannot even manage those minor changes. Every few years our besuited representatives gather at public expense to eat fine meals and somberly agree to carbon-limit targets which we all then cheerfully ignore until the next somber meeting where the previous targets are tweaked and re-agreed-upon while everyone else is busy doing things like obliviously generating “Living the RV Life” YouTube reels wherein they drive around the world in enormous land-yachts consuming resources at a furious pace, instilling envy into their followers, and economists loudly bemoan the fact that the growth of that kind of self-absorbed earth-killing living is “only growing at a 4% adjusted yearly rate”. Yeah, we’re doomed.
This has been your monday-morning dose of PNW cynicism.
I sort of agree…the main argument I have with this is that I do not believe we have control, not any more. It’s possible we can control the extent of the warming, but even that’s doubtful now. It’s likely we’ve passed the tipping point.
At this point, we can still do the right things, but don’t expect major improvements…or even minor ones. We have given climate change momentum. The train is no longer on the rails.
Even IF we can slow, or reverse the rising temperatures, we are still doomed.
The world may come to run on 100% renewable electricity and 100% hydrogen, but there are still limits.
We will still need oil, not for ICEs, but for plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilisers, etc.
We will still need plastics, not for excessive packaging, but for all its other myriad uses in medicine, science, engineering, etc.
We will run out of silica sands for making solar panels. Fraser Island has enormous deposits of almost 100% pure silica, but mining has been banned since the 70’s. But will that ban hold as silica supply exceeds demand?
We will still need to mine iron ore, copper, and all the other metals needed to build solar panels, and wind turbines, connect them to the grid and distribute the electricity. South Australia has a huge uptake of rooftop solar on homes and commercial properties, but not everywhere in the world is blessed with that amount of sunlight, even in winter.
And then we still have the pollution problem, the industrial waste to dispose of. Solar panels don’t last forever, and there is currently no way to recycle them. A similar problem exists with the blades of wind turbines.
And, that is just the beginning of future problems.
None of that is to argue we should give up the fight, because even if we achieve nothing but cleaner air and water that will be a massive win.
This has been your daily dose of doom and gloom.
[…] a comment by Rev David Brindley on We cannot even manage those minor […]
Rev David Brindley@2, exactly. The points that you bring up are exactly why I maintain that there is no such thing as “green” energy. It’s a sham.
The “minor changes” that I maintained that we won’t do all involve decreasing consumption. Every so-called solution to the climate-change problem that has _ever_ been proposed that I’ve seen has involved alternative forms of energy production designed to maintain our frenetic consumption; not a single one of them starts from a thesis that we’ve already gone too far and need to ratchet back. Solar, wind, nuclear: all of them are fake feelgood shams that will never solve this problem, and in fact exacerbate it because it just exports the damage: there are entire regions of China that are now toxic wastelands from solar-panel and magnet production supporting all those suburban roofs and wind-farms now generating energy so that little Johnny can play all those shiny new PlayStation 5 games that he got for Christmas.
A lot of people maintain, however, that any changes whatsoever are already too late, as iknklast pointed out. That may very well be true. But if true, those consumption-decreasing changes were, at one time, things that might have once made a difference and we never made them, because everything we (as a society/civilization) hope and plan for is built upon a premise of increasing consumption, not decreasing. People freak out when economic growth is less than a couple percent per year, and celebrate when it’s double digits, but that kind of growth just speeds us inexorably towards our demise.
James @#4:
Unfortunately, a bloke by the name of Joe Stalin flushed socialism and the idea of a centrally plaanned economy down the gurgler; probably never to return.
Liberalism is an imperative, in either its British or its American sense. But it in turn cannot escape the imperatives that flow out of Sadi Carnot’s Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that entropy (read disorder) is increasing.
Electricity is fundamental to all modern economies, and everything operating within them, including blogging at sites like this excellent one. Little Johnny with his playstation is only a miniscule part of it. My own view is that research should be directed at modifying that solar energy trapper par excellence, namely the chlorophyll found in all green plants, so that sunlight can convert it from one electrically charged state to another within the solar panel based on it: a new breed of spinach for Popeye perhaps?
I cannot see why every rooftop in the world should not in time be covered with such panels, provided it can be done. And there is only one way to find that out.
Omar@5:
Nowhere did I call for socialism. Nowhere did I call for anything, except for an implied suggestion that we need to change in a way that nobody ever seems to seriously consider. I pointed out that maintaining our lifestyle is what is killing us; the only solution is changing our lifestyle, not finding more ways to produce more energy to continue to feed our Malthusian delusion. You’ve offered a different angle on the latter, but it’s ultimately still no solution. What happens when every roof is covered in an energy-producing green slime? Free energy in a culture of unfettered consumption is even worse than its costly counterpart. We’ll just think up more ways to consume it, require more mines and cut down more forests to produce them, and increase the pace of our self-destruction many-fold.
You don’t cure the alcoholic by giving him free liquor.
Bingo. As an Environmental Scientist, I argue this point all the time – even with others in my field, many of whom wish to simply maintain our lifestyle in a “clean, green” way. Not happening…though we could do better with small changes, and bring our individual footprint down to that of, say, France, without having a life that is nasty, brutish, and short, the reality is that substantial changes need to be made (even in France, but I clean my house first before I clean someone else’s).
Not every area is good for solar power. Solar power will not do well in, for instance, Scandinavian countries. Any country much further north than Nebraska or South Dakota may struggle to get enough sunlight. The thing with renewables is it’s not one size fits all like fossil fuels. For instance, in Nebraska, tidal power is a no go. No tides.
Everyone wants to find “a” solution. There isn’t one. There may be solutions, but even those will entail large changes in our lifestyles…and large changes in the size of our population.
This is what keeps getting in our way. Economies. I put a question to you (actually more than one question):
(1) Which is more complex, economies or ecosystems?
(2) Which is man-made?
(3) Which is it easier (though not easy) to change?
People act as though capitalism has always been the norm. I doubt anyone on this site believes that, but most of us are aware of the problems of feudalism, socialism, and every other economic system, including the improbability of successfully doing the barter system with such an enormous population. I am totally aware of that, and am not suggesting socialism. Stalin also shows us that would not be any greener than what we are doing. In socialism, there was a focus on increased production, just like in capitalism, but the means of production were under different types of ownership. I consider communism to be capitalism upside down.
As capitalism was developing, people were becoming aware (in a limited sense) of limits, but those limits seemed so far in the future that few people bothered to think they were a problem. Even now, many people believe there are no limits to human ingenuity, and that we’ll fix the problem by building, let’s say for sake of argument, a better mousetrap. This isn’t going to happen.
Most engineering solutions I see fail one basic test: Biology. They build enormous things designed to impress, but don’t consult with anyone outside their profession to see what it will destroy. During the early twentieth century, we engineered thousands of dams, some of them seemingly impossible, for two reasons. One was to solve water problems. The other was for engineers to do what everyone said was impossible and look impressive.
Biology hasn’t got the solutions, either. Nor does Physics, Chemistry, or Astronomy. Until we stop working against each other, and the environment, and sit down with clear heads and willingness to think outside the box (or my preferred phrase, color outside the lines), we will not solve the problems. We may solve one small problem in one place (though the dams mostly just pushed the water problem into the future – our times – and didn’t solve them); until we look for solutions that are DIFFERENT than what we’ve been doing, we won’t likely find the answer.
James @ 6 – Omar has a habit of arguing with things no one said. I’ve asked him not to 100 times but…
And question number (4) What exactly are you trying to save? If you’re abandoning a sinking ship, you’d best let go of the solid gold anvil you’ve been hauling around with you, or you’re going to follow the ship all the way to the bottom. Taking it onto a lifeboat would require kicking people out, or dumping survival rations and equipment. The lifeboat can’t handle the weight of your anchor anyway; if you insist, everyone dies.
Which is more complex, economies or ecosystems? As the economist JK Galbraith said somewhere: “the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.” That has to be true. No individual or group can isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Not even the holy hermits of ages past. Not even the animals on isolated islands.
Whoever it was who made the first stone axe was extracting a resource from the natural environment. That individual’s associates might have said: “Don’t do that. None of us can have any idea what it may lead to.!” And if they did, not much notice was taken of them. But as resources deplete, people either find substitutes or find reasons to go to war with one another. (Vide Easter Island, where warfare apparently transmogrified into a frenetic statue-carving competition.)
I don’t think that History knows any other way. It just gets made up as we go along, with precious little foresight or forward planning.