Substack is great in connecting like-minded people, but I’ve been finding that this close connectivity, while emotionally fulfilling, tends to create isolated bubbles of thought that then begin to evolve separately. Such bubbles risk clashing and canceling each other out when they ultimately collide through a shared reality. I am thinking in particular about the many people concerned about climate change. Even within this community of concerned Earth’s citizens the views on what should be done to help us out of the crisis differ vastly and often radically.

Today I will share a few ideas on how to shape a discourse that recognizes a major role of biospheric and water cycle disturbances in recent climate disruptions but at the same time respects a major role of added carbon dioxide in the observed global warming. In the proposed framework, more people may hopefully get a chance to listen to and hear each other.

Let us first take a look at the familiar narrative.

The familiar, straightforward message is that all our climate problems can be traced to carbon emissions, so to solve them, we must stop emitting. Biodiversity conservation is the poor cousin in the family of dominant narratives about global change. Attempts have been made to link ecosystem preservation to carbon storage, but these have not worked well—either on practical or even logical grounds. If we view ecosystems not as a complex climate-regulating process but merely as a stock or source/sink of carbon, then natural ecosystems are rendered unnecessary and can be replaced with ever-growing carbon sticks to be harvested and buried.

While the biodiversity crisis is often formally attached to climate concerns—for example, as Rob Lewis noted, the tragic story of the mother whale carrying her dead calf, which had starved due to fish shortages caused by dam construction, was reported in the paper’s climate section—our concern for other living beings is readily sidelined when other climate-related interests take precedence. The problem is not just about cutting trees to make place for wind turbines or solar panels but about large-scale resource extraction, including for renewable energy infrastructure and electric-powered devices. These projects require road construction and often lead to widespread decimation of wild nature.

An alternative narrative, which can be characterized as embracing nature’s complexity, can be formulated as follows.

In this more sophisticated framework, it is acknowledged that rising atmospheric CO₂ contributes to planetary warming. It is also recognized that natural ecosystems act as buffers against unfavorable climate fluctuations. While the biosphere cannot prevent an asteroid from striking Earth, it can maintain planetary homeostasis—provided the biosphere itself remains free from structural disruptions, whether internal or external.

This homeostasis can be quantified in various ways, for example by analyzing how temperature fluctuations evolve over time. Without a climate stabilizer, these fluctuations would follow a random walk model, increasing in proportion to the square root of time.

Another way to formulate the idea of natural ecosystems buffering climate disruptions is through the concept of climate sensitivity. Climate sensitivity describes how much our planet warms in response to a given increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, e.g., its doubling.

For the same amount of added CO₂ we may observer a smaller or larger temperature change, i.e., a lower or higher sensitivity, respectively. The climate sensitivity of the past climates is not very well-known because temperature changes are irregular, and observations are not perfect. For modern climate change, global climate models provide a wide range of climate sensitivities that range by several times, from about two to nearly six kelvins per CO₂ doubling.

If you were a storyteller, how would you visualize and communicate the climate sensitivity concept ? I tried hard and here’s what I came up with.

Imagine the guy in the picture is CO₂, pushing the Earth to the right—toward warming. However, this path is also an uphill climb, which makes it more difficult. The familiar narrative is simple: more CO₂ means more warming.

How do natural ecosystems alter this scheme? The low sensitivity situation means that it is very difficult for the guy to push the planet toward warming, because the slope is very steep. This steep slope is the buffer that natural ecosystems provide.

When we destroy the buffer, climate sensitivity increases. Now, even a small amount of CO₂ is able to push the planet significantly toward dangerous warming. With less natural biota, the same amount of CO₂ leads to more warming. This doesn’t mean that accumulating atmospheric CO₂ is unimportant—I share the concerns of Professor Ugo Bardi, who argues that higher CO₂ levels may even impair our already limited thinking capacity. But by shifting from the left to the right picture, we are quite literally undermining our own existence.

Now, to put some empirical flesh on the bones of our new concepts, we need to address three key questions. First, are there physical mechanisms through which natural ecosystems influence climate sensitivity to CO₂ accumulation? Second, are natural ecosystems in decline? (They are.) And third, is climate sensitivity increasing? (It is.)

We do know that natural ecosystems are powerful regulators of clouds. Clouds are the most complicated element of the climate system because clouds can both warm and cool the planet. They cool by reflecting sunlight, so less solar energy is ultimately converted to heat. They warm because clouds, like CO₂, interact with thermal radiation from the surface and partially redirect it back to the surface, so they are part of the greenhouse effect. As a simple rule of thumb, thick low clouds cool, while thin high clouds warm.

By using these climate levers, it is possible for the biota to regulate surface temperature. Extensive research shows that forests, and not just trees but the whole community of species including fungi and bacteria, emit certain particles that can facilitate cloud formation.

The left graph shows the frequency of shallow convective clouds (those that cool the surface) over different land cover types. These clouds form more often over forests, a pattern observed across all regions of the world. Whether in the Amazon, Eurasia, or North America, forests respond to warmth by producing white cloud shields that help maintain a habitable environment.

The second graph shows that not everything green works right. The blue symbols indicate that cloud cover increases with forest productivity. However, highly productive non-forest ecosystems, such as agricultural lands, generate significantly less low cloud cover, as shown by the purple symbols. The more we extract from an ecosystem—whether through timber harvesting or food production—the fewer resources it has to stabilize itself, the surrounding environment, and climate.

It’s almost hilarious that, in the global change discourse, we still tend to view life merely as a physical-chemical system, even though we know that information governs everything. We’ve embraced artificial intelligence and supercomputers, yet when faced with the ultra-super-hyper computer of life itself, we reduce it to simple chemical reactions—CO₂, carbohydrate production—little more. This perspective is not only flawed but also dangerous.

This outdated view—treating life as a simple physical-chemical process—is also embedded in climate models through oversimplified parameterizations. It comes as an intellectual atavism, a relic of our failure to fully appreciate the complexity of the world.

Returning to the link between natural ecosystem decline and increasing climate sensitivity: The rather dull-looking graph below may not seem engaging, but it encapsulates the drama unfolding on our planet. Over the past century, we have been rapidly losing primary ecosystems—both forests and non-forest landscapes—while simultaneously polluting the atmosphere with CO₂.

The two green curves illustrate a critical reality: we have been dismantling the very system that could have helped mitigate much of the undesired effects of global change. In parallel, the warming has been accelerating. The warming rate has almost doubled in 2010-2023, from 0.18 °C/decade in 1970-2010.

Global surface temperature relative to 1880-1920 is the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) analysis through October 2024. I am absolutely fascinated by the vast wealth of information that, for the first time in human history, we have about our planet. It’s up to us to ensure this knowledge doesn’t go waste but instead catalizes a phase shift in how we appreciate our living planet._

This increasing climate sensitivity remains unexplained. Moreover, those global climate models that began predicting more warming were downgraded in reliability, as they could not accurately explain the past climate change. We noted as follows:

Global climate models with an improved representation of clouds display a higher sensitivity of the Earth's climate to CO2 doubling than models with a poorer representation of clouds. This implies more dire projections for future climate change, but also poses the problem of how to account for the past temperature changes that are not affected by the model improvements and have been satisfactorily explained assuming a lower climate sensitivity. The concept of the environmental homeostasis and the biotic regulation of the environment provide a possible solution: the climate sensitivity may have been increasing with time—reflecting the decline of natural ecosystems and their global stabilizing impact.

There is another important issue:

Any control system increases its feedback as the perturbation grows. Therefore, as the climate destabilization deepens, the remaining natural ecosystems should be exerting an ever increasing compensatory impact per unit area. In other words, the global climate price of losing a hectare of natural forest grows as the climate situation worsens. We call for an urgent global moratorium on the exploitation of the remaining natural ecosystems and a broad application of the proforestation strategy to allow them to restore to their full ecological and climate-regulating potential.

To stop the destruction of natural ecosystems, we need to cooperate globally. This global cooperation does not have to take the form of a rigid, hierarchical correlation—like the relationship between organs in an animal body. Rather, it can be a loose, interconnected network, like the leaves of a great tree. Each leaf functions independently, consuming light on its own, yet all are sustained by nutrients and water flowing through the shared stem. A shared global understanding of the importance of natural ecosystems could guide us toward realistic local solutions for their preservation. If we just halt their destruction right now, we can prevent further deterioration, which, in itself, would be a significant achievement. And this would buy us time.

Linked literature

Arnscheidt, C. W., & Rothman, D. H. (2022). Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales. Science Advances, 8(46), eadc9241. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adc9241

Dror, T., Koren, I., Altaratz, O., & Heiblum, R. H. (2020). On the abundance and common properties of continental, organized shallow (green) clouds. IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 59(6), 4570-4578. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2020.3023085

Hansen, J. E., Kharecha, P., Sato, M., Tselioudis, G., Kelly, J., Bauer, S. E., ... & Pokela, A. (2025). Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 67(1), 6-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494

Heiblum, R. H., Koren, I., & Feingold, G. (2014). On the link between Amazonian forest properties and shallow cumulus cloud fields. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 14(12), 6063-6074. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-14-6063-2014

Makarieva, A. M., Nefiodov, A. V., Rammig, A., & Nobre, A. D. (2023). Re-appraisal of the global climatic role of natural forests for improved climate projections and policies. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 6, 1150191. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1150191

Moomaw, W. R., Masino, S. A., & Faison, E. K. (2019). Intact forests in the United States: Proforestation mitigates climate change and serves the greatest good. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 2, 449206. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2019.00027

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Until quite recently, the idea that the global economy might reverse – my preferred term is inflect – from growth into contraction lived in the realm of radical and unwelcome theory.

But this has been the year in which theory has been borne out by experience.

Much as astronomers deduce the existence of invisible objects through their gravitational effects on other bodies, we can see the effects of economic inflexion in everything from social discontent and the “cost of living crisis” to deteriorating international relations and worsening financial fragility.

The causes of the ending and reversal of growth can be summed up in the single word depletion.

Fossil fuel energy has been depleted to a point where its material costs, measured here as the Energy Costs of Energy (ECoEs), are becoming unaffordable.

Non-energy natural resources, too, such as minerals, agricultural land and accessible water, have been depleted, as has the finite ability of the environment to absorb the effects of human economic activity.

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It has turned out to be perfectly possible to measure, interpret and anticipate these economic processes, and that’s been the aim of the Surplus Energy Economics project from the outset.

But two centuries of industrial expansion have been quite enough to render economic reversal very nearly incomprehensible to most people, and almost entirely unacceptable.

Our first collective responses have involved simple denial, based on the ‘infinite growth’ promises of an economics orthodoxy firmly rooted in pre-industrial conditions, when none of today’s resource challenges were even conceivable.

Our second resort has been to hubris, manifested in the idea that human ingenuity, implemented as technology, can resolve all of our energetic, material and environmental problems. This can, supposedly, offer a seamless, with-growth transition to alternative energy sources, and perhaps even “de-couple” the economy from the use of energy.

The snag here is that the potential scope of technology is bounded by limits set by the laws of physics. The looming failure of technology is going to come as a gigantic shock to the system.

We’ll look at this impending failure shortly.

Reality, meanwhile, is breaking through, as it always does. Few voters now believe that their economic conditions have been improving in recent times, that the current extent of inequality is justifiable, or that soaring living costs are either fully reported or are traceable to one-off bits of simple bad luck. They’re increasingly attracted to scapegoating foreigners, who might be immigrants, or dishonest trading partners.

The authorities, meanwhile, have been drawn towards the ‘extend and pretend’ of reckless credit expansion, to ‘getting their retaliation in first’ against rising popular discontent, and to trying to skew the patterns of international trade to their own national advantage.

Before we judge them too harshly, though, we should remember – in this season of goodwill – that the process of inflexion itself is entirely outside their control, and that, one by one, all of the supposed “levers” of economic management have broken in their hands.

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The formal commencement of the industrial economy can be dated to 1776, when James Watt completed the first truly efficient device for converting heat into work.

But this was to be no sudden revolution. Even in Britain, where this process began, battleships were still made of wood, and powered by wind, into and beyond the 1850s. Industrialization began quite slowly in Europe and North America before extending, again gradually, into all corners of the world.

This said, and with a tiny scattering of exceptions, even the last countries in which industrialization took hold have been living with assumed economic growth for well over a century.

The ending and reversal of growth is, therefore, a profound culture-shock, up-ending generations of almost unchallenged expectation.

It’s a revolution far more sweeping in its implications even than the removal of absolute monarchy, or the arrival and subsequent failure of communism in the USSR and its satellites.

This means that we need to start looking for the practices, systems and institutions that will be swept aside by this revolution – and, conversely, at what might replace them.

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It helps us to know that two assumptions, above all, will be overturned by the ending and reversal of growth.

One of these is that each generation will be more materially prosperous than the one before.

The second is the notion that economic expansion is coterminous with progress. If somebody opposes the bulldozing of farmland or the destruction of historic artefacts for the building of a retail mall, motorway or factory, he or she is portrayed as an obstacle to progress. The word Luddite entered the English language as a term describing futile, unreasoning opposition to the unstoppable march of modernity.

The ever-perceptive Charles Hugh Smith has explained that a lot of what we continue to think of as ‘progress’ has in fact become Anti-Progress, a concept which he has connected to the collapse of quality. Your new domestic appliance, for example, might be wi-fi connected (”progress”), but won’t work as well, or last as long, as the old one (“anti-progress”).

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We can look at this, quite reasonably, as the product of misaligned incentives, where it’s more profitable to sell the customer a new and inferior product every five years than a higher-quality, more repairable one every twenty-five.

But there are structural factors involved as well.

In pre-industrial times, raw materials were costly, in the sense that their supply required large amounts of human labour. In these conditions, it made far more sense to use hard-won, costly timber to make furniture or buildings that would last for generations than to construct shoddier alternatives that would require replacement in a small number of years.

The advent of cheap and abundant energy changed all that, making possible a profit-incentivized shift to an accelerated cycle of creation, disposal and replacement. This is how the energy-dissipative economic model of the past became the dissipative-landfill commercial system of today.

This system will unravel, not as a matter of commercial practice or social preference, but because of changes in the productive-replacement equation itself.

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Contrary to the quaint notions of orthodox economics, the central processes of the economy are material, not monetary.

The defining purpose of the economy is to supply physical products and services to society.

Services are no less material than goods – we can’t run an e-commerce business without vehicles and warehouses, or supply on-line services without cables and computers.

Since a society without a history is as disconnected as a person without a memory, we can safely assume that history will continue to be taught and studied, long after economics has been subsumed into the sciences of thermodynamics and the characteristics of materials.

These historians of the future will be amused, as well as baffled, by contemporary notions that we could build an immaterial economy based on services, or somehow “de-couple” the energy economy from the use of energy. They’re likely to laugh out loud at the notion of ‘infinite, exponential economic expansion on a finite planet’.

The material economy works by using energy to convert non-energy resources into products. These then wear out, and are abandoned and replaced. Critically, the speed at which this cyclical process operates is determined by the relative costs of the necessary inputs.

These inputs are human labour, energy and raw materials.

When each of these inputs was costly, the lifespans of products were extended as far as possible. Cheap and abundant energy made each of these inputs less expensive – production required less human labour, the cost-efficiency of resource extraction rose sharply, and the cost of energy itself was low.

In consequence, life-spans of products became ever less important, and the relinquishment-replacement cycle was accelerated. The creation of the dissipative-landfill system has been a product, not of fashion, or even of incentive, but of evolving material circumstances.

Because this process has been material in its characteristics, nobody has been able to call a halt to it, any more than the advocates of a more human-scale approach could halt the takeover of England by “dark satanic mills”.

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The lesson to be learned from this is that prevalent commercial practice, far from being driven by the latest vogue in business-speak or the most recent pronouncements of management text-books, is determined by material conditions.

And these, as we know, are now changing rapidly. Raw materials, like energy itself, are fast ceasing to be cheap. The balance of cost and scarcity between human labour and exogenous energy is tilting rapidly from the latter to the former.

The ultimate exponents of the rapid-replacement model aren’t manufacturers, or suppliers of services broadly understood, but the behemoths of the “tech” sector. Their business models are tied, to a quite remarkable degree, to the already-failing presumption of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’.

These business models are, to a greater or lesser extent, based on the assumptions of ever-cheaper raw materials, ever more abundant energy, and ever-expanding consumer discretionary affordability.

Yet these assumptions are already becoming twentieth-century notions, preserved in aspic.

The context, looking ahead, is set out in the following charts. In America, as elsewhere, top-line economic output – adjusted to exclude credit distortions, and known here as underlying or “clean” output (C-GDP) – has long been decelerating towards contraction. Meanwhile, the first call made on output by ECoE has been widening the gap between output and material prosperity (Fig. 1A).

Fig. 1

At the same time, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities have been rising, such that the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services, shown in blue in Fig. 1B, is subject to relentless compression.

The United States has been chosen to illustrate these trends because of the differences between Figs. 1C and 1D.

Over a very long period, as the rate of discretionary expansion has fallen below the rate of increase in the population, the average American has experienced a continuing, but gradual, reduction in the affordability of discretionaries (Fig. 1C).

But aggregate discretionary affordability has carried on creeping upwards even as its per capita equivalent has drifted downwards.

This seems to have left many businesses wholly unprepared for the impending rapid decline of discretionary affordability.

The acid-test of vulnerability to these effects is the extent of exposure to discretionary compression. On-line retailing can continue pretty solidly, though it will tilt away from discretionaries and towards staples. EVs have a future, but only as niche products, since the replacement of all (or even most) of the World’s 2bn cars and commercial vehicles is a material impossibility.

On the other hand, anything dependent on advertising or subscription revenues, or on the mass sale of non-essential gadgets to the public, is heading over the Niagara of contracting discretionary purchasing.

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The way in which energy-hungry behemoths turn into dinosaurs will have a critical bearing on how society and the financial system adapt to the ending and reversal of material economic growth.

Embodying a law of diminishing returns, each new iteration of “tech” is more energy-intensive, and seems to add less material value, than the one before, and the sector is already starting to feel the headwinds of a decelerating replacement cycle.

This is typified by smart-phones, where annual units sold peaked back in 2015. The first cell-phone was a major breakthrough, as were the first smart-phones, but subsequent developments have added ever less valuable capabilities at ever increasing costs.

AI, the latest passing vogue in “tech” circles, exemplifies the pursuit of energy-intensive innovation for the sake of innovation itself, and for some very short-lived financial gains. Everybody seems to accept that AI will make enormous demands on energy, but nobody seems to be really clear about how it will add value.

The general (though rather vague) notion seems to be that AI will make profits by replacing human labour. In fact, though, human labour will be increasingly abundant as the economy contracts, whilst ever-higher thresholds will be set for the prioritization of energy use.

Some suppliers of energy-intensive tech services are already giving thought to investing in their own energy sources, typically small modular reactors, which might enable them to cool as well as power their sprawling data-centres.

What this idea overlooks, however, is the impossibility of re-energizing the economy in which their customers reside.

With no such capability possible, a combination of decreasing prosperity and ever-costlier necessities has already started to exert an ever-tightening stranglehold on the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services.

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What, though, will be the wider implications of technological disillusionment for the broader human endeavour?

The word “technology” has two distinct meanings in contemporary parlance. To scientists and engineers, it means the implementation of human ingenuity in the material world. To investors and business bosses, it means a hugely successful sector that rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the dot-com bust.

To the general public, it probably denotes a combination of the two, a phenomenon which is both enabling and threatening, and something whose unstoppable advance only a card-carrying Luddite would seek to halt.

Humanity, and perhaps every sentient creature, seeks to alter its environment to conditions most favourable to itself. The human project has coined the word “technology” to describe our efforts in this regard.

Hitherto, we’ve been able to look back at the history of technology as an ascending march of progress. Noteworthy names in this progression include Watt, George and Robert Stephenson, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Karl Benz, John Logie Baird, Frank Whittle and Robert Watson-Watt.

We’ve learned, too, from our failures, as when Capt. Cowper Coles’ inherently unstable turret-ship HMS Captain capsized off Finisterre, and when John Blenkinsop invested in spiked wheels on the grounds that railway locomotives with smooth wheels wouldn’t be able to move.

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The critical point about technology, though, is that it has to work within the envelope of material and energetic possibility. Orville and Wilbur Wright, for instance, didn’t invent the aeroplane and then sit around waiting for somebody to discover petroleum. Rather, they found a novel and worthwhile application for a source of energy that was already available.

Modern technology has delivered marvels, and we seem, in any case, to have an instinctive attraction to the new and shiny. Technology has been elevated to the status of a secular deity, capable of resolving our each and every problem.

And this is why our disillusionment with technology, as it arrives, will be such a shock. Because of their inferior material characteristics, renewables can’t restore growth to the economy, or even keep it at its current size. Engineering can’t resolve our environmental problems in ways that allow excess consumption, and super-rapid resource depletion, to continue.

If, at this festive time, you’ll allow me a single cliché, ‘as one door closes, another opens’. There are alternatives to our current arrangements, and perhaps we’ll discuss these in the future.

• Satellite imagery shows that logging activity is spreading from peripheral areas of the Amazon toward the rainforest’s core, according to groundbreaking research.
• The satellite-based mapping of seven of Brazil’s nine Amazonian states showed a “terrifying” pattern of logging advance that cleared an area three times the size of the city of São Paulo between August 2019 and July 2020 alone.
• At the state level, lack of transparency in logging data makes it impossible to calculate how much of the timber production is illegal, experts say.
• Evidence of cutting in Indigenous reserves and conservation units — where logging is prohibited — make clear that illegal logging accounts for much of the activity, according to the report.

One of the main fears about the Brazilian Amazon is beginning to materialize: logging is starting to move from the periphery of the rainforest toward the core of the biome, groundbreaking new research shows.

Tracking cut trees through satellite mapping data, the research found that logging activities cleared 464,000 hectares (1.15 million acres) of the Brazilian Amazon — an area three times the size of the city of São Paulo — between August 2019 and July 2020. More than half (50.8%) of the logging was reportedly concentrated in the state of Mato Grosso, followed by Amazonas (15.3%) and Rondônia (15%).

“Around 20 years ago, we feared that the forest would be devastated in the so-called ‘deforestation arch’ and the movement would migrate from the peripheral areas toward the central region of the Amazon,” said Marco Lentini, senior project coordinator of Imaflora, a sustainable development NGO involved in the mapping project. “Our map shows this is happening now: logging is going toward the Amazon core.”

He said the logging pattern was that of “frontier migration,” adding, “This is something that terrifies us. We have to stabilize this frontier.”

The largest seizure of illegal timber in Brazil’s history saw police recover 226,000 cubic meters (8 million cubic feet) of wood on the border between the states of Amazonas and Pará in March 2021. Image courtesy of the Federal Police in Amazonas state.

The research, released last week, was developed by the Simex network formed by four Brazilian environmental nonprofits: Imazon, Imaflora, Idesam, and Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV). The institutions say they set up the alliance to map, for the first time, logging in almost all of the Amazon. They managed to map seven of the nine states that make up the Brazilian Amazon — Acre, Amazonas, Amapá, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia and Roraima — which together account for almost 100% of timber production from the rainforest.

Although the mapping was unable to specify the exact amount of trees illegally extracted from untouched forests, mostly of the illegalities were concentrated at the triple border between Mato Grosso, Amazonas and Rondônia, where intense logging activity was detected in an Indigenous reserve and a conservation unit, according to Vinicius Silgueiro, territorial intelligence coordinator at ICV, a nonprofit based in Mato Grosso. “Protected areas in this region show a large presence of logging and low level of fiscalization, with a lot of signs of illegality.”

The Sismex map covers areas where the Federal Police made the largest seizure of illegal timber in Brazil’s history earlier this year, recovering 226,000 cubic meters (8 million cubic feet) of wood on the border between Amazonas and Pará states. This operation triggered the ouster of the controversial minister of environment, Ricardo Salles, in June, after he reportedly asked for the release of the wood.

Ten municipalities accounted for almost 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of logging, five of them in Mato Grosso, two in Amazonas and the remaining in Roraima, Acre and Pará. Most logging activity, 78%, reportedly occurred on privately owned properties. Legal permits are often used to mask logging in restricted areas through a process known as tree laundering, according to the findings.

A more detailed study developed by Imazon focused on Pará shows that over half of the logging in the state has not received any governmental authorization. From August 2019 to July 2020, 50,139 hectares (123,896 acres) of forest were reportedly devastated, with 55% without authorization from environmental bodies. This represented a 20% growth over the 12 months before, when non-authorized logging totaled 38%, according to Imazon.

The map developed by the Simex network shows concentrations of logging activity in the state of Mato Grosso, followed by Amazonas and Pará. Image courtesy of Simex.Before the advent of the Simex project, only Pará and Mato Grosso had satellite-based maps identifying areas where logging has occurred. Imazon started monitoring Pará in 2008 and ICV joined the iniciative in 2013 by monitoring Mato Grosso. The institutions say that these states were their initial focus for data transparency due to high logging activities.

Logging for timber doesn’t clear forest area as extensively as deforestation does, and vegetation growth over logging sites can make visualization via satellite harder, according to Vinicius Silgueiro, territorial intelligence coordinator at ICV.

“With logging, different than deforestation, there is still some coverage by vegetation. We can identify scars in the forest made by the roads used to move the logs, as well as clear areas for storage. There is a whole infrastructure around logging that helps us find these areas,” Silgueiro told Mongabay in a phone interview.

In most states, however, he said it’s nearly impossible to verify when the logging activity is illegal, due to lack of transparency or technological barriers. Many times, he added, certificates for legal forestry activities are filed on paper, making it hard to cross-reference the database of certificates with the images. The only two states with digitized databases are Pará and Mato Grosso.

Logging activity in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, with trees already tagged and awaiting transportation. Image courtesy of Vicente Sampaio/Imaflora.

Another challenge is that the certificates allowing forest management give the location coordinates, but not the shape file — the digital map — of the area, which hampers efforts to identify through satellite imagery where illegal logging occurs, according to Lentini.

Despite these challenges, there are cases where it is very clear that the logging taking place is illegal, Lentini said: when it happens in protected areas like Indigenous reserves and conservation units. The study found that 6% of logging in the Amazon, or 28,112 hectares (69,466 acres), was in conservation units during the study period; 5% was in Indigenous reserves, at 24,866 hectares (61,445 acres). “These areas don’t have any kind of authorization for legal logging,” Silgueiro said.

A 2018 report by the Greenpeace, titled “Imaginary trees, real destruction,” highlighted the unreliability of Brazil’s forestry licensing and control systems, which it said makes it harder to tackle fraud.

“A critical flaw in the Amazon states’ forestry governance lies in the weakness of the licensing process for sustainable forest management plans,” the report said. For the most part, no field inspections are conducted before management plans are drawn up, or these inspections are of low quality, according to the report.

“This allows the forest engineers … to overestimate volumes or fraudulently add trees of high commercial value to the area’s forest inventory. State agencies subsequently issue credits for the harvesting and movement of this non-existent timber,” which will be logged from forests on Indigenous lands, protected areas or public lands, according to Greenpeace’s investigation.

Pará state environmental authorities seize illegal timber in an inspection operation in 2021. Image courtesy of Agência Pará.

Silgueiro, from ICV, said legal and illegal logging persist in proportions of around 60:40. “The more legal documentation there is for exploring the forest, the more illegal timber there is,” he said. He added that logging fraud will only stop once the whole process becomes traceable through technologies that help estimate the real volume of timber production and track each tree individually. “Traceability of production is essential,” Silgueiro said. “This technology already exists, but producing states are slow at adopting it.”

The environmental impact of illegal logging is immense. Recent studies show the Brazilian Amazon is now a net CO2 source, instead of being a carbon dioxide sink as would be expected, due to factors that include logging.

Banner image: A truck carries logs cut from the Amazon Rainforest in the state of Rondônia. Image courtesy of Vicente Sampaio/Imaflora.

I am not a climatologist, but as a physician, you only master certain areas and otherwise you listen to various other specialists. We are also used to deal with uncertainties: e.g. If you are considering an operation, you estimate the chance of success based on the patient's age, nutritional and physical condition, morale, heart health and previous illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes etc. Every risk factor reduces the chances of success. Inability to calculate anything precisely does not release you from making an estimate.

Similarly, the uncertainties in the climate discussion do not release one from making an assessment. There we are unfortunately hindered by some taboos and illusions, but let’s try:

I grew up in Basel where in the museum hangs a picture of the dead Christ, painted by Holbein 500 years ago.

This made a deep impression on me and I had it above my desk for years: A mercilessly realistic view of our God, his passion and the end of us all. We have to measure our actions against this end. Until then we must do, what we do as well as possible and not lose time. And there is already the first taboo, death. Death being repressed in the prevailing consciousness, much that is related to it cannot be seen.

Later I studied medicine and learned some principles:

1. Illnesses often begin in secret: First symptoms are often not the beginning, but the last act. A drunkard or a smoker take decades to ruin their liver or lungs; this goes unnoticed because the organism compensates. Once jaundice or shortness of breath occurs, the further course is not in decades, but rather years. Similarly, if our bees die, this is not a beginning but the end, because they have been poisoned already for a long time.

2. Risk factors for disease can more than add up: E.g. depression occurs in one percent of the population every month. A serious stress factor (death of family member, loss of workplace, illness, etc.) adds two percent more. Two stress factors add three percent. With three stress factors, one could assume depression in nine percent, but it is 24 percent: Suddenly the risks multiply. Similar mechanisms may apply in other situations.

3. Patients and insurances want forecasts. Diseases often remain true to themselves: A patient with multiple sclerosis who is only slightly disabled after ten years, will probably not be in a wheelchair after another decade.

4. This is only true in the absence of self-reinforcing mechanisms: The most dreaded example is the narrowing of the aortic valve, the valve of the main artery. The heart adapts, uses more energy, generates more strength and pushes enough blood through the valve; patients can even practice athletics. But when the heart can no longer get enough blood for its own energy requirements, heart failure and death occur within seconds, We physicians are terrified of such self-reinforcing and uncontrollable mechanisms.

5. In our profession there are authorities: If a physician repeatedly has made diagnoses missed by everyone else, he will get a fabulous reputation. You believe him with advantage, even if you don't quite understand his reasoning.

6. Cheating is useless: If the patient dies you are dealt with by the pathologist or the coroner. They are merciless.

Let's apply this wisdom to the environmental situation:

In 1972 the Club of Rome fed whatever one knew into a computer and he predicted that if we don't stop economic growth and limit the population at four billion, ecosystems will destabilize in the middle of our century. They even mentioned the greenhouse effect hoping for a timely solution. The limiting factor was pollution, not scarcity of resources or of land. Whoever pretends that the Club of Rome is discredited because it incorrectly predicted a resource shortage tells a lie or has not read the report. Later, the Club of Rome corrected, that perhaps even a population of 8 billion could be sustainable, but they explicitly stated that the consequences of human aggressiveness could not be modelled.

In 1988 James Hansen first demonstrated that the greenhouse effect was happening while predicting the future warming with great accuracy to this day. Hansen is an authority. If he questions official forecasts and measures, this must raise concern.

James Hansen is taken away by police in shackles

The Paris Treaties of 2015 wanted to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 or 2 degrees. And this brings us to the illusions:

First illusion: The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) takes 1850-1900 as the starting point which gives a temperature rise of more than one degree. But industrialization started 100 years earlier, and starting from the lower pre-industrial values we have already reached the 1.5 degrees.

Second illusion: From the start it was clear that the Paris 1.5-degree target would be missed. James Hansen speaks of a fake deal. If it were kept, the temperature would rise above 3 degrees, over land twice as much. Moreover, the Paris Agreement assumes large-scale sequestration of CO2 from the air, which Hansen describes as illusory.

Third illusion: Hardly anyone keeping the Paris Agreements we are underway to global warming of 4-5 degrees by 2100, again meaning about the double over land.

This is official mainstream, i.e. the predictions of the IPCC.

The fourth illusion assumes that this is hysterical alarmism. Even the greenhouse effect is denied although he has been proven more than 150 years ago.

But in fact, all statements made so far are not alarmistic, but rather too tame,

Fifth illusion: Many think that the temperature increase is linear. But it becomes faster, as one sees with the naked eye:

Even the IPCC suffers from this illusion: Before 2015 they talked of limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees by 2100. In 2018, the IPCC moved this to 2040. American climatologists immediately objected: The IPCC had forgotten that greenhouse gases continue to rise which takes the 1.5 degrees to 2030, a shift of 70 years in some years.

The sixth illusion holds that the greenhouse mechanism is the whole story. This would be bad enough, but the many positive feedback mechanisms are even worse because according to Hansen they were always match-deciding in the previous history of the earth and they can cause tipping points.

The IPCC neglects these feedbacks, because precise predictions are impossible. However for a physician, they are more frightening than anything else: All go in the wrong direction, each can become uncontrollable, and their effects can not only add, but possibly multiply. And then, developments can be shortened to years.

The seventh illusion imagines that the CO2 concentration only depends on how much we blow into the air. However almost a third of the CO2 emissions have been absorbed by the ocean and a warmer ocean no longer absorbs, but releases CO2.

Similarly with trees and vegetation: So far, they also absorb almost a third of the CO2 emitted. Most CO2 compensation programs work with actual or alleged reforestation. But we are already losing forest through logging and fires. And with a temperature increase of four degrees by the year 2100, the trees will die off over large areas, like the coral reefs, and thus trees will change from being a CO2 buffer to CO2-production. The German Climate Pope Schellnhuber says: "We kill our best friends". CO2 emissions will increase, even with zero emissions by humanity! Not counted by the IPCC either.

In the eighth illusion the ice melts slowly, but things accelerate in the Arctic. Wadham, the Pope of Ice, believes that without snow and ice, the reflectivity of the earth decreases and warming becomes 50 percent greater. That may bring us to six degrees by 2100, twice as much over land. Not counted by the IPCC.

The ninth illusion was that the permafrost would not thaw until the end of the century. But it is already thawing, and methane is bubbling there and elsewhere and rising rapidly in the atmosphere. This short-lived but very powerful greenhouse gas can acutely accelerate warming with self-burning becoming a matter of years. Not counted by the IPCC.

The tenth illusion: At a higher temperature, the air stores more water vapor, also a greenhouse gas. Several models predict a decrease in cloud cover, which could further accelerate warming. Not counted by the IPCC.

The eleventh illusion is that everything goes slowly. But geologically, the pace of the current changes is unprecedented, ten times faster than the fastest changes in the last 65 million years.

Twelfth illusion: It’s not only the climate that endangers us, but also the extinction of species, at an extraordinary pace in terms of earth history. It’s still rather climate-independent, mainly caused by hunting and by the loss and poisoning of habitats due to expanding human population and activity. E.O. Wilson thinks that half of the earth should be reserved for wildlife if one wanted to stop this extinction.

Let’s summarize, like a surgeon before an operation:

The first symptoms of disease are omnipresent: droughts, fires, glacier retreat, loss of species, not a beginning, rather the beginning of the end. The biosphere can no longer compensate.

The effects of causal factors - CO2, methane, water vapor, forest fires, cloud loss, ocean acidification, pesticides, habitat loss - don’t necessarily just add up, they sometimes multiply with unpredictable results.

But a physician panics above all about the multiple self-reinforcing feedbacks: ice melt, methane release, forest fires, CO2 release from soil and ocean. There is little handle against such self-reinforcing mechanisms, even if they occur individually, and even much less if they work together.

The 1,5- or 2-degrees goal is out of question. The Paris Agreement is fake, the governments reactions inadequate or contra productive. Only with luck will we reach four or five degrees at the end of the century, but this is improbable, because the self-reinforcing feedbacks have already all kicked in. Some experts expect six or seven degrees, meaning twice as much over land, which human civilization cannot survive.

For Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, with four degrees of global warming the earth can only feed four billion people. This means widespread wars for a living space that will become increasingly scarce.

Because death is tabooed in our consciousness we are unable to see him, even if he stares directly into our eyes. I don't blame idiots like Trump. But rather the climatologists, who do not tell the whole truth. And the Greens, who are raving about the 1.5 degrees, a lie to the voters.

Last but not least, we come to the second taboo: Nobody wants to see the fact that we are too many. We are reproductive machines and reproduction is programmed into us as the most sacred goal. Therefore many - e.g. our benevolent Greens – prefer to believe into the illusion that reduction of consumption is enough.

Admittedly, only the wealthy produce the pollution: The ten percent of the wealthiest probably fifty percent, the 50 percent of the wealthier almost all the rest. But a large part of resource consumption and pollution is forced because we have to live in megastructures, which need energy-guzzling transports.

Some want to solve the problem by eliminating the privileges of the top 10 percent or even - according to old revolutionary customs - by eliminating the top 10 percent of the privileged, e.g.by guillotine. But even half the burden is too much. Therefore one would have to guillotine the wealthier half. This would work if the remaining half would not want to multiply and become wealthy, with industry, meat consumption, cars, airplanes. This they are already trying to do all over the world, e.g. in India, for the noble savage is just another illusion.

Many whose birth is not avoided by birth control will be killed by manslaughter, starvation and disease. That’s the reality we should face. Two generations of one-child family would be more humane.

_Lukas Fierz (79), from a Swiss family of musicians and scientists became a physician and neurologist. Shocked by the report of the Club of Rome together with others he founded the Swiss Green Party for which he sat in the national parliament without any effect. He fought the resulting depression as an amateur cellist with music once played on the Titanic (live recordings on playlist “Music for Titanic”). Moved by the climate youth, he began to participate in the discussion again with his Blog “Letting down humanity”._

When oil drillers descended on North Dakota en masse a decade ago, state officials and residents generally welcomed them with open arms. A new form of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" for short, would allow an estimated 3 to 4 billion barrels of so-called shale oil to be extracted from the Bakken Formation, some 2 miles below the surface.

The boom that ensued has now turned to bust as oil prices sagged in 2019 and then went into free fall with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The financial fragility of the industry had long been hidden by the willingness of investors to hand over money to drillers in hopes of getting in on the next big energy play. Months before the coronavirus appeared, one former oil CEO calculated that the shale oil and gas industry has destroyed 80 percent of the capital entrusted to it since 2008. Not long after that the capital markets were almost entirely closed to the industry as investor sentiment finally shifted in the wake of financial realities.

The collapse of oil demand in 2020 due to a huge contraction in the world economy associated with the pandemic has increased the pace of bankruptcies. Oil output has also collapsed as the number of new wells needed to keep total production from these short-lived wells from shrinking has declined dramatically as well. Operating rotary rigs in North Dakota plummeted from an average of 48 in August 2019 to just 11 this month.

Oil production in the state has dropped from an all-time high of 1.46 million barrels per day in October 2019 to 850,000 as of June, the latest month for which figures are available. Even one of the most ardent oil industry promoters of shale oil and gas development said earlier this year that North Dakota's most productive days are over. CEO John Hess of the eponymous Hess Corporation is taking cash flow from his wells in North Dakota and investing it elsewhere.

So, what has this meant for the state? Not only is the oil industry in North Dakota suffering, but all those contractors who service the oil industry. Beyond that are the housing and public services which had to be expanded dramatically during the boom. Will there be enough people to live in that housing years from now? Will the cities be able to maintain the greatly expanded infrastructure their dwindling tax revenues must pay for?

The state government relies on oil and gas revenues for 53 percent of its budget. So far those revenues are running 83 percent lower than projected for this year. In addition, the pandemic reduced other revenue sources, but those are returning to normal as the overall economy bounces back (at least for now). North Dakota's historically low unemployment rate popped from 2 percent in March to 9.1 percent in April, but has recently come down.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the boom will be the damage to the landscape and the water in North Dakota from years of sloppy environmental practices. While companies are legally responsible for cleaning up their sites and capping old wells, in practice the state's failure to force companies to post bonds to pay for these things means much of the work will have to be done by the state or not done at all. This is because bankrupt companies are just abandoning their wells and other infrastructure. There will be no one left with money to sue to pay for the cleanup in many cases.

What North Dakota may have traded for a temporary boom is a long-lived legacy of tainted land and especially water. Back in 2012 I warned about this danger from the fracking industry in a piece called "Pincushion America: The irretrievable legacy of drilling everywhere on drinking water."

In that piece, I cited a former EPA engineer who said that within 100 years most of the country's underground drinking water will be contaminated. What has happened in North Dakota (and is still happening at a somewhat reduced rate) has likely sped up that timetable considerably for the state. Even with the waning oil industry, the state still has considerable oil to produce and so the damage will only continue to mount.

North Dakota may now experience a long, slow withdrawal from what is called the resource curse. This is the paradoxical notion that natural resource-rich jurisdictions often fail to prosper partly due to the huge swings in prices of their principal products, swings which destabilize their societies. This is because disproportionate amounts of wealth (including labor) are devoted to the natural resource sector and therefore unavailable for other more stable forms of commerce and industry.

In addition, the enormous wealth and influence of those in the natural resource sector are used to thwart environmental protections necessary for the long-term well-being of the population. This influence also keeps taxes on the industry low, depriving the people in the state of the full fruits of the resource boom (and of investments necessary for the day when the resource will be depleted).

Beyond this, governments tend to rely on resource sectors too much for their revenue. This causes them to overspend during booms and face austerity during downturns.

All of the negative effects of the resource curse are now on display in North Dakota and may well get worse. Of course, what North Dakota is experiencing, many resource-rich places around the world are also experiencing in one form or another. The worst thing the state can do now is live by the hope that the oil industry will revive and save North Dakota from its woes. Now is the time to plan a new path to a more stable and sustainable economy.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

We are used to hearing that if everyone lived in the same way as North Americans or Australians, we would need four or five planet Earths to sustain us.

This sort of analysis is known as the “ecological footprint” and shows that even the so-called “green” western European nations, with their more progressive approaches to renewable energy, energy efficiency and public transport, would require more than three planets.

How can we live within the means of our planet? When we delve seriously into this question it becomes clear that almost all environmental literature grossly underestimates what is needed for our civilisation to become sustainable.

Only the brave should read on.

The ‘ecological footprint’ analysis

In order to explore the question of what “one planet living” would look like, let us turn to what is arguably the world’s most prominent metric for environmental accounting – the ecological footprint analysis. This was developed by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, then at the University of British Columbia, and is now institutionalised by the scientific body, The Global Footprint Network, of which Wackernagel is president.

This method of environmental accounting attempts to measure the amount of productive land and water a given population has available to it, and then evaluates the demands that population makes upon those ecosystems. A sustainable society is one that operates within the carrying capacity of its dependent ecosystems.

While this form of accounting is not without its critics – it is certainly not an exact science – the worrying thing is that many of its critics actually claim that it underestimates humanity’s environmental impact. Even Wackernagel, the concept’s co-originator, is convinced the numbers are underestimates.

According to the most recent data from the Global Footprint Network, humanity as a whole is currently in ecological overshoot, demanding one and a half planet’s worth of Earth’s biocapacity. As the global population continues its trend toward 11 billion people, and while the growth fetish continues to shape the global economy, the extent of overshoot is only going to increase.

Every year this worsening state of ecological overshoot persists, the biophysical foundations of our existence, and that of other species, are undermined.

The footprint of an ecovillage

As I have noted, the basic contours of environmental degradation are relatively well known. What is far less widely known, however, is that even the world’s most successful and long-lasting ecovillages have yet to attain a “fair share” ecological footprint.

Take the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland, for example, probably the most famous ecovillage in the world. An ecovillage can be broadly understood as an “intentional community” that forms with the explicit aim of living more lightly on the planet. Among other things, the Findhorn community has adopted an almost exclusively vegetarian diet, produces renewable energy and makes many of their houses out of mud or reclaimed materials.

Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland. Irenicrhonda/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

An ecological footprint analysis was undertaken of this community. It was discovered that even the committed efforts of this ecovillage still left the Findhorn community consuming resources and emitting waste far in excess of what could be sustained if everyone lived in this way. (Part of the problem is that the community tends to fly as often as the ordinary Westerner, increasing their otherwise small footprint.)

Put otherwise, based on my calculations, if the whole world came to look like one of our most successful ecovillages, we would still need one and a half planet’s worth of Earth’s biocapacity. Dwell on that for a moment.

I do not share this conclusion to provoke despair, although I admit that it conveys the magnitude of our ecological predicament with disarming clarity. Nor do I share this to criticise the noble and necessary efforts of the ecovillage movement, which clearly is doing far more than most to push the frontiers of environmental practice.

Rather, I share this in the hope of shaking the environmental movement, and the broader public, awake. With our eyes open, let us begin by acknowledging that tinkering around the edges of consumer capitalism is utterly inadequate.

In a full world of seven billion people and counting, a “fair share” ecological footprint means reducing our impacts to a small fraction of what they are today. Such fundamental change to our ways of living is incompatible with a growth-oriented civilisation.

Some people may find this this position too “radical” to digest, but I would argue that this position is merely shaped by an honest review of the evidence.

What would ‘one planet’ living look like?

Even after five or six decades of the modern environmental movement, it seems we still do not have an example of how to thrive within the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet.

Nevertheless, just as the basic problems can be sufficiently well understood, the nature of an appropriate response is also sufficiently clear, even if the truth is sometimes confronting.

We must swiftly transition to systems of renewable energy, recognising that the feasibility and affordability of this transition will demand that we consume significantly less energy than we have become accustomed to in the developed nations. Less energy means less producing and consuming.

We must grow our food organically and locally, and eat considerably less (or no) meat. We must ride our bikes more and fly less, mend our clothes, share resources, radically reduce our waste streams and creatively “retrofit the suburbs” to turn our homes and communities into places of sustainable production, not unsustainable consumption. In doing so, we must challenge ourselves to journey beyond the ecovillage movement and explore an even deeper green shade of sustainability.

Among other things, this means living lives of frugality, moderation and material sufficiency. Unpopular though it is to say, we must also have fewer children, or else our species will grow itself into a catastrophe.

But personal action is not enough. We must restructure our societies to support and promote these “simpler” ways of living. Appropriate technology must also assist us on the transition to one planet living. Some argue that technology will allow us to continue living in the same way while also greatly reducing our footprint.

However, the extent of “dematerialisation” required to make our ways of living sustainable is simply too great. As well as improving efficiency, we also need to live more simply in a material sense, and re-imagine the good life beyond consumer culture.

First and foremost, what is needed for one planet living is for the richest nations, including Australia, to initiate a “degrowth” process of planned economic contraction.

I do not claim that this is likely or that I have a detailed blueprint for how it should transpire. I only claim that, based on the ecological footprint analysis, degrowth is the most logical framework for understanding the radical implications of sustainability.

Can the descent from consumerism and growth be prosperous? Can we turn our overlapping crises into opportunities?

These are the defining questions of our time.

Edvard Munch Ashes 1894

I have a lot of sympathy for young(er) people who are upset about what has happened, and still is happening, to the planet they were born on, during their lifetime and that of the generations before them. I have less sympathy for the “climate movement” even if those same young people thinnk it represents them, because it has grown too big and too diverse, and has come to rely (for no reason) too much on hype and exaggeration. Don’t feed your opponent or enemy.

The movement also has too little attention for what younger people themselves contribute to the descent into chaos. If you don’t start with yourself, how are you ever going to tell others what to do? How many phones and gadgets and cars do you have? Do your clothes also say Made in China? Personal question.

Naming one’s movement “Extinction Rebellion” strikes me as odd, because the movement appears to be, from what I can see, based almost exclusively on the deleterious effects of carbon emissions, though these have -at least so far- played just a small part in the actual extinction of -far too many- species, much less than the use of chemicals, the loss of forest, and land use in general, just to name some examples.

I have a lot of sympathy for Greta Thunberg, and I’m sure she means very well. But I have no sympathy for the PR people that she allows to surround her, and who make millions of dollars off of her name and appearances. Nor do I think Greta had grasped at age 16 the full complexity of the systems that have led to what she protests against. Very few adults have either, so that’s hardly her fault.

I still think, just like I said a year ago when she was first unloaded upon the Davos conference by those same PR people, that not only is there nothing for her there, but her time would be better spent trying to educate herself about that “full complexity”. Because today, it all appears to me to be too much about what she does not want, rather than about what she does, and to a large extent that’s because she simply doesn’t know. Protesting for something is harder than protesting against it.

Because of all these things, the climate movement is actively though unwittingly helping the rich, who got rich through their use of fossil fuels, to get richer still off of society’s adaptation to a world in which fossil fuels play a smaller role.

Yes, there are enormous amounts of irony involved in this. People like the idea of a green economy. They like the sound of it. But if you would ask them what it means in practice, they would picture something very close to the present economic system, just green, i.e. powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels.

And that is nonsense. In the same way that “fossil free” living is utter nonsense, but nevertheless it’s terms like that which are most prominent in headlines. Carbon neutral, carbon free, fossil free, those terms all describe fantasies; they are terms straight out of a PR campaign book. There’s even carbon negative. But who among the activists understand what this means? You got to be careful guys, because the way this is going, you will all end up being accomplices of the very people you should be protesting.

Here’s what going to happen (and already has), Greta and all of you Greta fans.

You’re getting to Davos and meet with all these rich people, and they all already have their plans ready. They’re going to tell you that they agree with just about everything you have to say. But they do and they don’t at the same time.

The fossil fuel industry, along with carmakers, governments et al, have solved the riddle: what appeared at first to be a huge threat to them, now turns out to be their next golden goose: they’re going to get paid more to move away from fossil fuels and emissions than they previously did to produce them. Pretty smart, right?

Only you will find out not even that is true. Do you know what an electric car produces in pollution, in CO2 emissions? I read the other day that an electric car has to drive 30,000-50,000 km a year over its “lifetime” to pollute less than a petrol one. Details are not terribly important there, it sounds kind of right. Unless you’re in Poland or certain parts of Germany or Eastern Europe, than it’s much higher still. Brown coal.

How did the rich and the worst polluters do it? How did they solve the riddle? By promoting Greta and the entire climate movement, with the help of the media they own, and then steering their priorities to be in line with their own. Piece of cake for them. They have been among the most powerful forces in western society forever, and it wasn’t too hard for them to figure this one out.

And that’s why these days, and increasingly as Davos has started (timing is everything), climate is a well advertized topic, and why the likes of BlackRock and Microsoft -and many others- just days ago announced that they will “go green”, divest out of fossil fuels etc.

They do this because they see a profit to be made. So don’t flatter yourselves, it has nothing to do with you. Or rather, it does, but not the way you thought and wanted. Your worst adversaries are using you for their promotion and advertizing platforms. The more banners you fly, the more words Greta utters, the more governments will make trillion dollar promises, ane the more Big Oil will make profits. Like this one today (just one example in fat growing long row):

UN Decarbonisation Target For Shipping To Cost Over $1 Trillion

At least $1 trillion of investment in new fuel technology is needed to enable the shipping industry to meet U.N. targets for cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, a study published on Monday showed. The global shipping fleet, which accounts for 2.2% of the world’s CO2 emissions, is under pressure to reduce those emissions and other pollution. About 90% of world trade is transported by sea.

A trillion euros for 2.2% of CO2 emissions. We can all do the math here, right?! And yes, Greta and her fellow schoolkids contributed a lot to that amount by seeking publicity, but also by being promoted by other interests. Only to become part of a giant publicity machine.

You see, Greta, the message the rich get is not that they must listen to you, it’s that others do listen who control a lot of money, individuals, governments, and so there will be money to be made if they just promote your ideas enough. You’ve been co-opted and pre-empted, so to speak. And what are you going to do now? You’re in cahoots, whether you like it or not, with the likes of Exxon, Shell, and Mercedes.

The oil companies have long rebranded themselves as energy companies (this started when BP’s logo turned green years ago) and invested billions in solar and wind turbines. The carmakers are betting big on electric vehicles. And this is supposed to achieve your goal of carbon neutrality? Let’s get real, shall we?

You’re way out of your league. You’re up against people who represent decades if not centuries-old interests, as well as -aspiring- politicians in every Parliament and even city counsel who know full well their careers will be nipped in the bud if they don’t go along with those interests. And then there’s 10,000 Middle East sheiks.

Davos is not your stage, Greta, and it’s not the stage for the people who believe in you. You’re betraying them by going there, because you have no control over the stage. Still, the other side really want you to think it is, the oil companies do, US and EU governments do, Mercedes and Toyota and Ford, do. Because you are their meal ticket.

They want you to believe that the problem that keeps you up at night can be solved with electric cars and solar panels and wind turbines. Because they have invested heavily in companies that produce all of those.

And now there’s a trillion here and a trillion there, because people listen to you. No government, no chosen official or appointed civil servant at any level, can anymore be forgiven for not budgeting heavily for climate change effects, even if they are ignorant about what those are.

The entire climate change issue is about energy, not about a duscussion of sources of energy. And as I argued late last year in Energy vs DNA and Energy vs Waste, mankind, like any other organism, is driven to use all surplus energy at its disposal as fast as it can. If only so other organisms can’t benefit from it, or even other humans.

And all energy use produces waste, not just fossil fuels. I suggest you read those. In the meantime, Greta, go home, enjoy the snow and the northern lights on your skin, have the youth you’re supposed to have, share your views with your friends, study study study and keep things in perspective. Your fans are not in Davos, but you are; that’s an ego-trip that will backfire on you because you’re being played for a fool.

Also, dump the PR teams; you’re bigger than that.

Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't

WARNING ⚠ : THIS EPISODE SHOWS IMAGES THAT ARE AN UTTER BUMMER. Thin-skinned, easily-upset viewers will want to pass.

Botanizing a Toilet:

The bleak barren wasteland of neglected urban infrastructure serves as an example of an ecological phenomenon known as "primary succession", however the cast includes a patchwork of non-native species from all over the globe. What plant species are able to thrive amidst the homeless camps, human bleakness (wealth disparity 101), garbage and concrete? Join CPBBD as we explore the ecology of garbage, concrete and urine.

Are your tender and wholesome sensibilities offended by something said in this video (pointing directly at climate deniers here, among others) ? Rather than leaving a shit-flavored comment that will be removed, consider sending a hateful email to me instead. Nothing is easier or more fulfilling than deleting and blocking a shit-headed comment made by some semi-conscious, small-minded mouth-breather with minimal travel and life experience who thinks his shitty, rude parroted opinion based on info he gleaned from YouTube videos or angry opinion pieces is worth chiming in with. I do however enjoy argumentative conflict, so please indulge me @ crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt at geemale dot com

Ever since the writing of Thomas Malthus in the early 1800s, and especially since Paul Ehrlich’s publication of “The Population Bomb” in 1968, there has been a lot of learned skull-scratching over what the sustainable human population of Planet Earth might “really” be over the long haul.

This question is intrinsically tied to the issue of ecological overshoot so ably described by William R. Catton Jr. in his 1980 book “Overshoot:The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change”. How much have we already pushed our population and consumption levels above the long-term carrying capacity of the planet?

In this article I outline my current thoughts on carrying capacity and overshoot, and present five estimates for the size of a sustainable human population.

Carrying Capacity

“Carrying capacity” is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive meaning: “The maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment.”

Unfortunately that definition becomes more nebulous and controversial the closer you look at it, especially when we are talking about the planetary carrying capacity for human beings. Ecologists will claim that our numbers have already well surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity, while others (notably economists and politicians…) claim we are nowhere near it yet!

This confusion may arise because we tend to confuse two very different understandings of the phrase “carrying capacity”. For this discussion I will call these the “subjective” view and the “objective” views of carrying capacity.

The subjective view is carrying capacity as seen by a member of the species in question. Rather than coming from a rational, analytical assessment of the overall situation, it is an experiential judgement. As such it tends to be limited to the population of one’s own species, as well as having a short time horizon – the current situation counts a lot more than some future possibility. The main thing that matters in this view is how many of one’s own species will be able to survive to reproduce. As long as that number continues to rise, we assume all is well – that we have not yet reached the carrying capacity of our environment.

From this subjective point of view humanity has not even reached, let alone surpassed the Earth’s overall carrying capacity – after all, our population is still growing. It’s tempting to ascribe this view mainly to neoclassical economists and politicians, but truthfully most of us tend to see things this way. In fact, all species, including humans, have this orientation, whether it is conscious or not.

Species tend to keep growing until outside factors such as disease, predators, food or other resource scarcity – or climate change – intervene. These factors define the “objective” carrying capacity of the environment. This objective view of carrying capacity is the view of an observer who adopts a position outside the species in question.It’s the typical viewpoint of an ecologist looking at the reindeer on St. Matthew Island, or at the impact of humanity on other species and its own resource base.

This is the view that is usually assumed by ecologists when they use the naked phrase “carrying capacity”, and it is an assessment that can only be arrived at through analysis and deductive reasoning. It’s the view I hold, and its implications for our future are anything but comforting.

When a species bumps up against the limits posed by the environment’s objective carrying capacity,its population begins to decline. Humanity is now at the uncomfortable point when objective observers have detected our overshoot condition, but the population as a whole has not recognized it yet. As we push harder against the limits of the planet’s objective carrying capacity, things are beginning to go wrong. More and more ordinary people are recognizing the problem as its symptoms become more obvious to casual onlookers.The problem is, of course, that we’ve already been above the planet’s carrying capacity for quite a while.

One typical rejoinder to this line of argument is that humans have “expanded our carrying capacity” through technological innovation. “Look at the Green Revolution! Malthus was just plain wrong. There are no limits to human ingenuity!” When we say things like this, we are of course speaking from a subjective viewpoint. From this experiential, human-centric point of view, we have indeed made it possible for our environment to support ever more of us. This is the only view that matters at the biological, evolutionary level, so it is hardly surprising that most of our fellow species-members are content with it.

The problem with that view is that every objective indicator of overshoot is flashing red. From the climate change and ocean acidification that flows from our smokestacks and tailpipes, through the deforestation and desertification that accompany our expansion of human agriculture and living space, to the extinctions of non-human species happening in the natural world, the planet is urgently signalling an overload condition.

Humans have an underlying urge towards growth, an immense intellectual capacity for innovation, and a biological inability to step outside our chauvinistic, anthropocentric perspective. This combination has made it inevitable that we would land ourselves and the rest of the biosphere in the current insoluble global ecological predicament.

Overshoot

When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a condition known as overshoot. Because the carrying capacity is defined as the maximum population that an environment can maintain indefinitely, overshoot must by definition be temporary. Populations always decline to (or below) the carrying capacity. How long they stay in overshoot depends on how many stored resources there are to support their inflated numbers. Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that helps maintain their numbers. For humans one of the primary resources is energy, whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind, biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.). A species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but exhaustible stock of a resource. Like fossil fuels, for instance…

Population growth in the animal kingdom tends to follow a logistic curve. This is an S-shaped curve that starts off low when the species is first introduced to an ecosystem, at some later point rises very fast as the population becomes established, and then finally levels off as the population saturates its niche.

Humans have been pushing the envelope of our logistic curve for much of our history. Our population rose very slowly over the last couple of hundred thousand years, as we gradually developed the skills we needed in order to deal with our varied and changeable environment,particularly language, writing and arithmetic. As we developed and disseminated those skills our ability to modify our environment grew, and so did our growth rate.

If we had not discovered the stored energy resource of fossil fuels, our logistic growth curve would probably have flattend out some time ago, and we would be well on our way to achieving a balance with the energy flows in the world around us, much like all other species do. Our numbers would have settled down to oscillate around a much lower level than today, similar to what they probably did with hunter-gatherer populations tens of thousands of years ago.

Unfortunately, our discovery of the energy potential of coal created what mathematicians and systems theorists call a “bifurcation point” or what is better known in some cases as a tipping point. This is a point at which a system diverges from one path onto another because of some influence on events. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that bifurcation points are generally irreversible. Once past such a point, the system can’t go back to a point before it.

Given the impact that fossil fuels had on the development of world civilization, their discovery was clearly such a fork in the road. Rather than flattening out politely as other species’ growth curves tend to do, ours kept on rising. And rising, and rising.

What is a sustainable population level?

Now we come to the heart of the matter. Okay, we all accept that the human race is in overshoot. But how deep into overshoot are we? What is the carrying capacity of our planet? The answers to these questions,after all, define a _sustainable _population.

Not surprisingly, the answers are quite hard to tease out. Various numbers have been put forward, each with its set of stated and unstated assumptions –not the least of which is the assumed standard of living (or consumption profile) of the average person. For those familiar with Ehrlich and Holdren’s I=PAT equation, if “I” represents the environmental impact of a sustainable population, then for any population value “P” there is a corresponding value for “AT”, the level of Activity and Technology that can be sustained for that population level. In other words, the higher our standard of living climbs, the lower our population level must fall in order to be sustainable. This is discussed further in an earlier article on Thermodynamic Footprints.

To get some feel for the enormous range of uncertainty in sustainability estimates we’ll look at five assessments, each of which leads to a very different outcome. We’ll start with the most optimistic one, and work our way down the scale.

The Ecological Footprint Assessment

The concept of the Ecological Footprint was developed in 1992 by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth’s ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet’s ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to assimilate associated waste. As it is usually published, the value is an estimate of how many planet Earths it would take to support humanity with everyone following their current lifestyle.

It has a number of fairly glaring flaws that cause it to be hyper-optimistic. The “ecological footprint” is basically for renewable resources only. It includes a theoretical but underestimated factor for non-renewable resources. It does not take into account the unfolding effects of climate change, ocean acidification or biodiversity loss (i.e. species extinctions). It is intuitively clear that no number of “extra planets” would compensate for such degradation.

Still, the estimate as of the end of 2012 is that our overall ecological footprint is about “1.7 planets”. In other words, there is at least 1.7 times too much human activity for the long-term health of this single, lonely planet. To put it yet another way, we are 70% into overshoot.

It would probably be fair to say that by this accounting method the sustainable population would be (7 / 1.7) or about four billion people at our current average level of affluence. As you will see, other assessments make this estimate seem like a happy fantasy.

The Fossil Fuel Assessment

The main accelerant of human activity over the last 150 to 200 years has been fossil fuel. Before 1800 there was very little fossil fuel in general use, with most energy being derived from wood, wind, water, animal and human power. The following graph demonstrates the precipitous rise in fossil fuel use since then, and especially since 1950.

This information was the basis for my earlier Thermodynamic Footprint analysis. That article investigated the influence of technological energy (87% of which comes from fossil fuels) on human planetary impact, in terms of how much it multiplies the effect of each “naked ape”. The following graph illustrates the multiplier at different points in history:

Fossil fuels have powered the increase in all aspects of civilization, including population growth. The “Green Revolution” in agriculture that was kicked off by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug in the late 1940s was largely a fossil fuel phenomenon, relying on mechanization,powered irrigation and synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. This enormous increase in food production supported a swift rise in population numbers, in a classic ecological feedback loop: more food (supply) => more people (demand) => more food => more people etc…

Over the core decades of the Green Revolution from 1950 to 1980 the world population almost doubled, from fewe rthan 2.5 billion to over 4.5 billion. The average population growth over those three decades was 2% per year. Compare that to 0.5% from 1800 to 1900; 1.00% from 1900 to 1950; and 1.5% from 1980 until now:

This analysis makes it tempting to conclude that a sustainable population might look similar to the situation in 1800, before the Green Revolution, and before the global adoption of fossil fuels: about 1 billion peopleliving on about 5% of today’s global average energy consumption.

It’s tempting (largely because it seems vaguely achievable), but unfortunately that number may still be too high. Even in 1800 the signs of human overshoot were clear, if not well recognized: there was already widespread deforestation through Europe and the Middle East; and desertification had set into the previously lush agricultural zones of North Africa and the Middle East.

Not to mention that if we did start over with “just” one billion people, an annual growth rate of a mere 0.5% would put the population back over seven billion in just 400 years. Unless the growth rate can be kept down very close to zero, such a situation is decidedly unsustainable.

The Population Density Assessment

There is another way to approach the question. If we assume that the human species was sustainable at some point in the past, what point might we choose and what conditions contributed to our apparent sustainability at that time?

I use a very strict definition of sustainability. It reads something like this: “Sustainability is the ability of a species to survive in perpetuity without damaging the planetary ecosystem in the process.” This principle applies only to a species’ own actions, rather than uncontrollable external forces like Milankovitch cycles, asteroid impacts, plate tectonics, etc.

In order to find a population that I was fairly confident met my definition of sustainability, I had to look well back in history – in fact back into Paleolithic times. The sustainability conditions I chose were: a very low population density and very low energy use, with both maintained over multiple thousands of years. I also assumed the populace would each use about as much energy as a typical hunter-gatherer: about twice the daily amount of energy a person obtains from the food they eat.

There are about 150 million square kilometers, or 60 million square miles of land on Planet Earth. However, two thirds of that area is covered by snow, mountains or deserts, or has little or no topsoil. This leaves about 50 million square kilometers (20 million square miles) that is habitable by humans without high levels of technology.

A typical population density for a non-energy-assisted society of hunter-forager-gardeners is between 1 person per square mile and 1 person per square kilometer. Because humans living this way had settled the entire planet by the time agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, this number pegs a reasonable upper boundary for a sustainable world population in the range of _20 to 50 million_people.

I settled on the average of these two numbers, 35 million people. That was because it matches known hunter-forager population densities, and because those densities were maintained with virtually zero population growth (less than 0.01% per year)during the 67,000 years from the time of the Toba super-volcano eruption in 75,000 BC until 8,000 BC (Agriculture Day on Planet Earth).

If we were to spread our current population of 7 billion evenly over 50 million square kilometers, we would have an average density of 150 per square kilometer. Based just on that number, and without even considering our modern energy-driven activities, our current population is at least 250 times too big to be sustainable. To put it another way, we are now 25,000%into overshoot based on our raw population numbers alone.

As I said above, we also need to take the population’s standard of living into account. Our use of technological energy gives each of us the average planetary impact of about 20 hunter-foragers. What would the sustainable population be if each person kept their current lifestyle, which is given as an average current Thermodynamic Footprint (TF) of 20?

We can find the sustainable world population number for any level of human activity by using the I = PAT equation mentioned above.

• We decided above that the maximum hunter-forager population we could accept as sustainable would be 35 million people, each with a Thermodynamic Footprint of 1.
• First, we set I (the allowable total impact for our sustainable population) to 35, representing those 35 million hunter-foragers.
• Next, we set AT to be the TF representing the desired average lifestyle for our population. In this case that number is 20.
• We can now solve the equation for P. Using simple algebra, we know that I = P x AT is equivalent to P = I / AT. Using that form of the equation we substitute in our values, and we find that P = 35 / 20. In this case P = 1.75.

This number tells us that if we want to keep the average level of per-capita consumption we enjoy in in today’s world, we would enter an overshoot situation above a global population of about 1.75 million people. By this measure our current population of 7 billion is about 4,000 times too big and active for long-term sustainability. In other words, by this measure we are we are now 400,000% into overshoot.

Using the same technique we can calculate that achieving a sustainable population with an American lifestyle (TF = 78) would permit a world population of only 650,000 people – clearly not enough to sustain a modern global civilization.

For the sake of comparison, it is estimated that the historical world population just after the dawn of agriculture in 8,000 BC was about five million, and in Year 1 was about 200 million. We crossed the upper threshold of planetary sustainability in about 2000 BC, and have been in deepening overshoot for the last 4,000 years.

The Ecological Assessments

As a species, human beings share much in common with other large mammals. We breathe, eat, move around to find food and mates, socialize, reproduce and die like all other mammalian species. Our intellec tand culture, those qualities that make us uniquely human, are recent additions to our essential primate nature, at least in evolutionary terms.

Consequently it makes sense to compare our species’ performance to that of other, similar species – species that we know for sure are sustainable. I was fortunate to find the work of American marine biologist Dr. Charles W. Fowler, who has a deep interest in sustainability and the ecological conundrum posed by human beings. The following two assessments are drawn from Dr. Fowler’s work.

First assessment

In 2003, Dr. Fowler and Larry Hobbs co-wrote a paper titled, “Is humanity sustainable?_” _that was published by the Royal Society. In it, they compared a variety of ecological measures across 31 species including humans. The measures included biomass consumption, energy consumption, CO2 production, geographical range size, and population size.

It should come as no great surprise that in most ofthe comparisons humans had far greater impact than other species, even to a 99%confidence level. The only measure inwhich we matched other species was in the consumption of biomass (i.e. food).

When it came to population size, Fowler and Hobbs foundthat there are over two orders of magnitude more humans than one would expectbased on a comparison to other species – 190 times more, in fact. Similarly, our CO2 emissions outdid otherspecies by a factor of 215.

Based on this research, Dr. Fowler concluded that there are about 200 times too many humans on the planet. This brings up an estimate for a sustainable population of 35 million people.

This is the same as the upper bound established above by examining hunter-gatherer population densities. The similarity of the results is not too surprising, since the hunter-gatherers of 50,000 years ago were about as close to “naked apes” as humans have been in recent history.

Second assessment

In 2008, five years after the publication cited above, Dr. Fowler wrote another paper entitled “Maximizing biodiversity, information and sustainability_.” _In this paper he examined the sustainability question from the point of view of maximizing biodiversity. In other words, what is the largest human population that would not reduce planetary biodiversity?

This is, of course, a very stringent test, and one that we probably failed early in our history by extirpating mega-fauna in the wake of our migrations across a number of continents.

In this paper, Dr. Fowler compared 96 different species, and again analyzed them in terms of population, CO2 emissions and consumption patterns.

This time, when the strict test of biodiversity retention was applied, the results were truly shocking, even to me. According to this measure, humans have overpopulated the Earth by almost 700 times. In order to preserve maximum biodiversity on Earth, the human population may be no more than 10 million people – each with the consumption of a Paleolithic hunter-forager.

Urk!

Conclusions

As you can see, the estimates for a sustainable human population vary widely – by a factor of 400 from the highest to the lowest.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/paul-chefurka/carrying-capacity-overshoot-and-sustainability/185335328288318

The Ecological Footprint doesn’t really seem intended as a measure of sustainability. Its main value is to give people with no exposure to ecology some sense that we are indeed over-exploiting our planet. (It also has the psychological advantage of feeling achievable with just a little work.) As a measure of sustainability,it is not helpful.

As I said above, the number suggested by the Thermodynamic Footprint or Fossil Fuel analysis isn’t very helpful either – even a population of one billion people without fossil fuels had already gone into overshoot.

That leaves us with three estimates: two at 35 million, and one of 10 million.

I think the lowest estimate (Fowler 2008, maximizing biodiversity), though interesting, is out of the running in this case, because human intelligence and problem-solving ability makes our destructive impact on biodiversity a foregone conclusion. We drove other species to extinction 40,000 years ago, when our total population was estimated to be under 1 million.

That leaves the central number of 35 million people, confirmed by two analyses using different data and assumptions. My conclusion is that this is probably the largest human population that could realistically be considered sustainable.

So, what can we do with this information? It’s obvious that we will not (and probably cannot) voluntarily reduce our population by 99.5%. Even an involuntary reduction of this magnitude would involve enormous suffering and a very uncertain outcome. In fact, it’s close enough to zero that if Mother Nature blinked, we’d be gone.

In fact, the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens is an inherently unsustainable species. This outcome seems virtually guaranteed by our neocortex, by the very intelligence that has enabled our rise to unprecedented dominance over our planet’s biosphere. Is intelligence an evolutionary blind alley? From the singular perspective of our own species, it quite probably is. If we are to find some greater meaning or deeper future for intelligence in the universe, we may be forced to look beyond ourselves and adopt a cosmic, rather than a human, perspective.

Discussion

How do we get out of this jam?

How might we get from where we are today to a sustainable world population of 35 million or so? We should probably discard the notion of “managing” such a population decline. If we can’t get our population to simply stop growing, an outright reduction of over 99% is simply not in the cards. People seem virtually incapable of taking these kinds of decisions in large social groups. We can decide to stop reproducing, but only as individuals or (perhaps) small groups. Without the essential broad social support, such personal choices will make precious little difference to the final outcome. Politicians will by and large not even propose an idea like “managed population decline” – not if they want to gain or remain in power, at any rate. China’s brave experiment with one-child families notwithstanding, any global population decline will be purely involuntary.

Crash?

A world population decline would (will) be triggered and fed by our civilization’s encounter with limits. These limits may show up in any area: accelerating climate change, weather extremes,shrinking food supplies, fresh water depletion, shrinking energy supplies,pandemic diseases, breakdowns in the social fabric due to excessive complexity,supply chain breakdowns, electrical grid failures, a breakdown of the international financial system, international hostilities – the list of candidates is endless, and their interactions are far too complex to predict.

In 2007, shortly after I grasped the concept and implications of Peak Oil, I wrote my first web article on population decline: Population: The Elephant in the Room. In it I sketched out the picture of a monolithic population collapse: a straight-line decline from today’s seven billion people to just one billion by the end of this century.
As time has passed I’ve become less confident in this particular dystopian vision. It now seems to me that human beings may be just a bit tougher than that. We would fight like demons to stop the slide, though we would potentially do a lot more damage to the environment in the process. We would try with all our might to cling to civilization and rebuild our former glory. Different physical, environmental and social situations around the world would result in a great diversity in regional outcomes. To put it plainly, a simple “slide to oblivion” is not in the cards for any species that could recover from the giant Toba volcanic eruption in just 75,000 years.

Or Tumble?

Still, there are those physical limits I mentioned above. They are looming ever closer, and it seems a foregone conclusion that we will begin to encounter them for real within the next decade or two. In order to draw a slightly more realistic picture of what might happen at that point, I created the following thought experiment on involuntary population decline. It’s based on the idea that our population will not simply crash, but will oscillate (tumble) down a series of stair-steps: first dropping as we puncture the limits to growth; then falling below them; then partially recovering; only to fall again; partially recover; fall; recover…

I started the scenario with a world population of 8 billion people in 2030. I assumed each full cycle of decline and partial recovery would take six generations, or 200 years. It would take three generations (100 years) to complete each decline and then three more in recovery, for a total cycle time of 200 years. I assumed each decline would take out 60% of the existing population over its hundred years, while each subsequent rise would add back only half of the lost population.

In ten full cycles – 2,000 years – we would be back to a sustainable population of about 40-50 million. The biggest drop would be in the first 100 years, from 2030 to 2130 when we would lose a net 53 million people per year. Even that is only a loss of 0.9% pa, compared to our net growth today of 1.1%, that’s easily within the realm of the conceivable,and not necessarily catastrophic – at least to begin with.

As a scenario it seems a lot more likely than a single monolithic crash from here to under a billion people. Here’s what it looks like:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/paul-chefurka/carrying-capacity-overshoot-and-sustainability/185335328288318

It’s important to remember that this scenario is not a prediction. It’s an attempt to portray a potential path down the population hill that seems a bit more probable than a simple, “Crash! Everybody dies.”

It’s also important to remember that the decline will probably not happen anything like this, either. With climate change getting ready to push humanity down the stairs, and the strong possibility that the overall global temperature will rise by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius even before the end of that first decline cycle, our prospects do not look even this “good” from where I stand.

Rest assured, I’m not trying to present 35 million people as some kind of “population target”. It’s just part of my attempt to frame what we’re doing to the planet, in terms of what some of us see as the planetary ecosphere’s level of tolerance for our abuse.

The other potential implicit in this analysis is that if we did drop from 8 to under 1 billion, we could then enter a population free-fall. As a result, we might keep falling until we hit the bottom of Olduvai Gorge again. My numbers are an attempt to define how many people might stagger away from such a crash landing. Some people seem to believe that such an event could be manageable. I don’t share that belief for a moment. These calculations are my way of getting that message out.

I figure if I’m going to draw a line in the sand, I’m going to do it on behalf of all life, not just our way of life.

What can we do?

To be absolutely clear, after ten years of investigating what I affectionately call “The Global Clusterfuck”, I do not think it can be prevented, mitigated or managed in any way. If and when it happens, it will follow its own dynamic, and the force of events could easily make the Japanese and Andaman tsunamis seem like pleasant days at the beach.

The most effective preparations that we can make will all be done by individuals and small groups. It will be up to each of us to decide what our skills, resources and motivations call us to do. It will be different for each of us – even for people in the same neighborhood, let alone people on opposite sides of the world.

I’ve been saying for a couple of years that each of us will each do whatever we think is appropriate to the circumstances, in whatever part of the world we can influence. The outcome of our actions is ultimately unforeseeable, because it depends on how the efforts of all 7 billion of us converge, co-operate and compete. The end result will be quite different from place to place – climate change impacts will vary, resources vary, social structures vary, values and belief systems are different all over the world.The best we can do is to do our best.

Here is my advice:

• Stay awake to what’s happening around us.
• Don’t get hung up by other people’s “shoulds and shouldn’ts”.
• Occasionally re-examine our personal values. If they aren’t in alignment with what we think the world needs, change them.
• Stop blaming people. Others are as much victims of the times as we are – even the CEOs and politicians.
• Blame, anger and outrage is pointless. It wastes precious energy that we will need for more useful work.
• Laugh a lot, at everything – including ourselves.
• Hold all the world’s various beliefs and “isms” lightly, including our own.
• Forgive others. Forgive ourselves. For everything.
• Love everything just as deeply as you can.

That’s what I think might be helpful. If we get all that personal stuff right, then doing the physical stuff about food, water, housing,transportation, energy, politics and the rest of it will come easy – or at least a bit easier. And we will have a lot more fun doing it.

I wish you all the best of luck!
Bodhi Paul Chefurka
May 16, 2013

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This has raised serious concerns among space agencies that we may be heading towards the creation of a “debris belt” that might lead to a critical climax known as a Kessler Syndrome event. The Kessler Syndrome, named after Donald Kessler, a scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who warned about such an event in a 1978 paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, refers to the exponential increase in space junk leading to a tipping point that would in turn trigger a cascade of collisions between orbiting objects. This could make lower orbital space inaccessible for hundreds of years. In addition, it would dramatically impair, and likely disengage, telecommunication operations, weather forecasting, interfere with airline and GPS navigation, and military and national security surveillance and operations. There are no international treaties in place to deal with this crisis nor concerted collaborative efforts to limit the further trashing of space. In the meantime the US government spends enormous amounts of money simply monitoring 24/7 potential collisions and to maneuver functioning satellites out of harm’s way.

Since the launch of the first satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik in 1957, there have only been 8,378 satellites lofted into the heavens thus far. That may not seem to be many over the course six decades, nevertheless the threats posed by space debris is becoming an issue of growing concern as satellite launches steadily increase annually. According to the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs, there were slightly under 5,000 satellites in the Earth’s orbit at the start of 2019. However the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that only 1,957 of these are actually operative. In other words, over 75 percent of orbiting satellites are revolving clutter.

If some space scientists are worried today about the potential of a Kessler Syndrome cascade, the implementation of 5G technology, the global installation of the “internet of things,” is going to accelerate the probability of this catastrophe astronomically.

Speaking before a 5G conference in Oslo last October, United Nation’s staff member Claire Edwards warned of the 5G efforts to dramatically colonize the lower orbital space with a minimum of 20,000 5G satellites by 2022. Without our governments’ and the Big Telecom Industry’s impatience to engulf the planet in 5G, and with the full support of the military and intelligence complexes, there would be absolutely no need for this kind of expansive satellite colonization of the Earth’s lower orbit.

...

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning to install 12,000 satellites alone, including 1,585 in low earth orbits (LEO) and 7,518 positioned at very low earth orbits (VLEO). He expects to control 50 percent of all internet traffic. Last month, SpaceX widened its ambitions to seek permission to launch an additional 30,000 satellites thereby raising the commercial space industry’s total to 53,000 — twenty-six times more than now orbiting the Earth. The Institute of Electric and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) estimates that the combined mass of Musk’s adventure will be ten times greater than the International Space Station. SpaceX is betting on the uncertain promise that when these Tesla Model-3 automobile sized VLEO satellites reach their final days, they will burn up during their descent through the atmosphere before reaching the Earth’s surface. The science shows otherwise. Much debris will remain in addition to reaching the Earth’s surface.

Besides satellites being damaged and inoperative from space clutter and solar storm events, satellites are not immortal. They have a limited lifespan. An LEO satellite’s average life is between 5-8 years above our atmosphere. In other words, starting in another eight years, all of these satellites will need to be replaced, further adding to the ocean of electronic waste. In addition., during the course of their life in orbit, many will malfunction or be damaged and need to be replaced. We have already trashed our oceans, so what is preventing us from doing the same in space?

Furthermore, despite what pro-5G voices wish us to believe, the roll out and ongoing maintenance of the 5G global blanket is not green and climate friendly. The steady launch of thousands of suborbital rockets will “create a persistent layer of black carbon particles in the northern stratosphere that could cause potentially significant changes in the global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone and temperature,” according to a paper released by the Aerospace Corporation. This will likely deplete the ozone by 1 percent and the polar ozone layer by as much as 6%. The report concludes that “[A]fter one decade of continuous launches, globally averaged radiative forcing from the black carbon would exceed the forcing from the emitted CO2 by a factor of about 10 to the fifth power.” Back in 1991, Aleksandr Dunayev at the Russian Space Agency was quoted by the New York Times, if there are “about 300 launches of the space shuttle each year [it] would be a catastrophe and the ozone layer would be completely destroyed.” And for several years, even with Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket potentially carrying 100 satellites for a single launch, this would still exceed Dunayev’s calculations. In other words, 5G is going to have a perilous carbon footprint at a time when we must drastically reduc our greenhouse gas emissions.

Although there are no conclusive directly caused risks to human health or the environment from orbiting telecom satellites, the entire 5G network will require millions of base stations and an estimated 200 billion transmitting objects blanketing the nations that sign on to this monstrous technological experiment. The number of EMF transmitting objects is expected to increase to over a trillion several years after full deployment. The human and environmental health risks of EMF emitting 5G base stations and transmitters have been reported extensively. Eight years ago the World Health Organization had already classified wireless as a Group 2B carcinogen and further medical evidence continues to pile up. There are now over 10,000 studies supporting the evidence of genetic and cellular damage to humans, animals, insects and plants, a variety of cancers, cardiovascular disease, neuropsychiatric disorders, reproductive dysfunction, and general EMF hypersensitivity symptoms such as chronic headaches, learning difficulties, sleep problems, fatigue and depression, etc.

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The full assault of 5G is dependent upon the satellite programs from companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb, Boeing, Iridium, Telesat Canada and Amazon collaborating in league with the telecom giants. The commercial space industry is an intricate factor in the 5G infrastructure estimated to be worth $32 billion. The wolves following behind 5G’s trashing of space is the recent appearance of a space debris removal industry, which is expected to be valued $2.9 billion by 2022. Key corporate vendors in this emerging business include Airbus, Astroscale, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. In our dystopian civilization, where one technological disaster leads to the creation of another for-profit industry, this is called job growth. Clearly, all the pieces are being put into place for a 5G deep state, a powerful edifice committed to the massive surveillance of every person and human activity.

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including The War on Health, Poverty Inc and Silent Epidemic.

Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end. Only it won’t.” — Chris Hedges

One thing the climate crisis underscores is that Homo sapiens are not primarily a rational species. When forced to make important decisions, particularly decisions affecting our economic security or socio-political status, primitive instinct and raw emotion tend to take the upper hand.

This is not a good thing if the fate of society is at stake. Take “hope” for example. For good evolutionary reasons, humans naturally tend to be hopeful in times of stress. So gently comforting is this word, that some even endow their daughters with its name. But hope can be enervating, flat out debilitating, when it merges with mere wishful thinking — when we hope, for example, that technology alone can save us from climate change.

As novelist Jonathan Franzen asks: “If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do 10 years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory?”

We needn’t bother Roger Hallam with this question. He can scarcely be held up as a “messiah of hope.” Quite the contrary. Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, has been desperately warning of societal collapse for years.

...

Nuclear power costs too much

U.S. nuclear power plants are old and in decline. By 2030, U.S. nuclear power generation might be the source of just 10% of electricity, half of production now, because 38 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are past their 40-year life span, and another 33 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are over 30 years old. Although some will have their licenses extended, 37 reactors that produce half of nuclear power are at risk of closing because of economics, breakdowns, unreliability, long outages, safety, and expensive post-Fukushima retrofits (Cooper 2013. Nuclear power is too expensive, 37 costly reactors predicted to shut down and A third of Nuclear Reactors are going to die of old age in the next 10-20 years.

New reactors are not being built because it takes years to get permits and $8.5–$20 billion in capital must be raised for a new 3400 MW nuclear power plant (O’Grady, E. 2008. Luminant seeks new reactor. London: Reuters.). This is almost impossible since a safer 3400 MW gas plant can be built for $2.5 billion in half the time. What utility wants to spend billions of dollars and wait a decade before a penny of revenue and a watt of electricity is generated?

In the USA there are 104 nuclear plants (largely constructed in the 1970s and 1980s) contributing 19% of our electricity. Even if all operating plants over 40 years receive renewals to operate for 60 years, starting in 2028 it’s unlikely they can be extended another 20 years, so by 2050 nearly all nuclear plants will be out of business.

Joe Romm “The Nukes of Hazard: One Year After Fukushima, Nuclear Power Remains Too Costly To Be A Major Climate Solution” explains in detail why nuclear power is too expensive, such as:

• New nuclear reactors are expensive. Recent cost estimates for individual new plants have exceeded $5 billion (for example, see Scroggs, 2008; Moody’s Investor’s Service, 2008).
• New reactors are intrinsically expensive because they must be able to withstand virtually any risk that we can imagine, including human error and major disasters
• Based on a 2007 Keystone report, we’d need to add an average of 17 plants each year, while building an average of 9 plants a year to replace those that will be retired, for a total of one nuclear plant every two weeks for four decades — plus 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste
• Before 2007, price estimates of $4000/kw for new U.S. nukes were common, but by October 2007 Moody’s Investors Service report, “New Nuclear Generation in the United States,” concluded, “Moody’s believes the all-in cost of a nuclear generating facility could come in at between $5,000 – $6,000/kw.”
• That same month, Florida Power and Light, “a leader in nuclear power generation,” presented its detailed cost estimate for new nukes to the Florida Public Service Commission. It concluded that two units totaling 2,200 megawatts would cost from $5,500 to $8,100 per kilowatt – $12 billion to $18 billion total!
• In 2008, Progress Energy informed state regulators that the twin 1,100-megawatt plants it intended to build in Florida would cost $14 billion, which “triples estimates the utility offered little more than a year ago.” That would be more than $6,400 a kilowatt. (And that didn’t even count the 200-mile $3 billion transmission system utility needs, which would bring the price up to a staggering $7,700 a kilowatt).

Extract from Is Nuclear Power Our Energy Future, Or in a Death Spiral? March 6th, 2016, By Dave Levitan, Ensia:

In general, the more experience accumulated with a given technology, the less it costs to build. This has been dramatically illustrated with the falling costs of wind and solar power. Nuclear, however has bucked the trend, instead demonstrating a sort of “negative learning curve” over time.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the actual costs of 75 of the first nuclear reactors built in the U.S. ran over initial estimates by more than 200 percent. More recently, costs have continued to balloon. Again according to UCS, the price tag for a new nuclear power plant jumped from between US$2 billion and US$4 billion in 2002 all the way US$9 billion in 2008. Put another way, the price shot from below US$2,000 per kilowatt in the early 2000s up to as high as US$8,000 per kilowatt by 2008.

Steve Clemmer, the director of energy research and analysis at UCS, doesn’t see this trend changing. “I’m not seeing much evidence that we’ll see the types of cost reductions [proponents are] talking about. I’m very skeptical about it — great if it happens, but I’m not seeing it,” he says.

Some projects in the U.S. seem to face delays and overruns at every turn. In September 2015, a South Carolina effort to build two new reactors at an existing plant was delayed for three years. In Georgia, a January 2015 filing by plant owner Southern Co. said that its additional two reactors would jump by US$700 million in cost and take an extra 18 months to build. These problems have a number of root causes, from licensing delays to simple construction errors, and no simple solution to the issue is likely to be found.

In Europe the situation is similar, with a couple of particularly egregious examples casting a pall over the industry. Construction began for a new reactor at the Finnish Olkiluoto 3 plant in 2005 but won’t finish until 2018, nine years late and more than US$5 billion over budget. A reactor in France, where nuclear is the primary source of power, is six years behind schedule and more than twice as expensive as projected.

“The history of 60 years or more of reactor building offers no evidence that costs will come down,” Ramana says. “As nuclear technology has matured costs have increased, and all the present indications are that this trend will continue.”

Nuclear plants require huge grid systems, since they’re far from energy consumers. The Financial Times estimates that would require ten thousand billion dollars be invested world-wide in electric power systems over the next 30 years.

In summary, investors aren’t going to invest in new reactors because:

• of the billions in liability after a meltdown or accident
• there may only be enough uranium left to power existing plants
• the cost per plant ties up capital too long (it can take 10 billion dollars over 10 years to build a nuclear power plant)
• the costs of decommissioning are very high
• properly dealing with waste is expensive
• There is no place to put waste — in 2009 Secretary of Energy Chu shut down Yucca mountain and there is no replacement in sight.

Nor will the USA government pay for the nuclear reactors given that public opinion is against that — 72% said no (in E&E news), they weren’t willing for the government to pay for nuclear power reactors through billions of dollars in new federal loan guarantees for new reactors.

Cembalest, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, wrote “In some ways, nuclears goose was cooked by 1992, when the cost of building a 1 GW plant rose by a factor of 5 (in real terms) from 1972” (Cembalest).

Further topics:

• Nuclear power depends on fossil fuels to exist (Ahmed 2017) ...
• Peak Uranium ...
• Nuclear power is Way too Dangerous ...
• Nuclear power plants take too long to build ...
• A crisis will harden public opinion against building new Nuclear Power Plants ...
• EROEI and decommissioning ...
• Scale ...
• Staffing ...
• Nuclear Proliferation & terrorism targets ...
• Water ...
• NIMBYism ...
• No good way to store the energy ...
• Ramping up and down quickly to balance solar & wind damages nuclear power plants ...
• Breeder reactors. You’d need 24,000 Breeder Reactors, each one a potential nuclear bomb (Mesarovic) ...

Every book by Ursula Le Guin is by definition the best book by Ursula Le Guin. And there is no book by Ursula Le Guin that's not the best book by Ursula Le Guin. But this one, "The Word for World is Forest" may be even better than that!

I read "The Word for World is Forest" maybe 30 years ago, but when I took it up again, every word in it was familiar to me, as I had dropped it in a drawer just one week before. Each word of it carried the rumble of thunder and the force of a hurricane, the same effect on me of a presentation by Anastassia Makarieva on the same subject, the forest.

Anastassia Makarieva is a scientist, Ursula Le Guin was a novelist. It doesn't matter. There is a thread, there is a narration, there is a story that pervades humankind's consciousness. I can't remember who said that trees are the pillars that hold the sky, but I am discovering it is true. Not single trees, the forest, it is the biotic pump, an incredible machine that works pumping water from the air above the oceans and distributes it for free to every living creature. The ultimate gift of life.

I can't understand how Ursula Le Guin could grasp these concepts by pure intuition nearly 50 years ago, but she did. Reread many years later, this book is a pure hit to the stomach. It leaves you breathless, but in a state of mind as if you wanted to be punched again and again, for the pure pleasure of the action, the movement, the sensation.

In 1972, something about this subject was already known and the destruction of the Vietnamese forests using the infamous "agent orange" reverberates all over the book. The basis of the story is the Vietnam war, retold in a science fiction setting, with the Aliens in the role of the Vietnamese and the Terrans of the Americans. The Terrans want to destroy the forest to turn it into plantations, the Aliens want to save it. In fact, it is the same story as that of the "Avatar" movie, it is just that Cameron's debt to Ursula Le Guin is not acknowledged.

But the book is not just a political statement, it is much more than that. Read this passage ("Selver" is the alien leader of the story):

"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is.

The meaning of this passage may be evident to you, or you may need to mull it over for a while in your mind. But it is one of the deepest statements I've ever read on the predicament we find ourselves in. The beauty of it is that so much hope is embedded in these words: the world changes, ideas evolve, sometimes taking the form of Gods or god-like entities. It is in this way that the world is changed: when dreams become reality. And some dreams are truly beautiful and full of hope, like this one by Anastassia Makarieva

You see, there is a succession process for forest recovery. We first have shrub grasses after some disturbance like fire, then it takes time for that to be replaced by trees. So if we are lucky our grand grandchildren will be walking in such forest, so this dimension should also be stressed. We are working for the future we are not just securing for ourselves some two dozens years of better comfort. Rather, we send a message through centuries such that people will remember us and walking into this forest along the brookes and rivers they will remember us with gratitude for our consciousness and dedication. (Anastassia Makarieva (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ1UtHRBcG4 - min 30:05))

By now most environmentally conscious people understand that Jair Bolsonaro is a bad guy. Brazil’s president has scandalously blamed environmentalists for starting fires burning in the Amazon region, after having called for more “development” of the huge forests.

Canadians are lucky we have a prime minister who is not such an embarrassment and understands environmental issues, right?

While Justin Trudeau has called for better protection of the Amazon, his government and Canadian corporations have contributed to the rise of a proto fascist Brazilian politician who has accelerated the destruction of the ‘planet’s lungs’.

In 2016 Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a “soft coup”. While Canadian officials have made dozens of statements criticizing Venezuela over the past three years, the Trudeau government remained silent on Rousseff’s ouster. The only comment I found was a Global Affairs official telling Sputnik that Canada would maintain relations with Brazil after Rousseff was impeached. In fact, the Trudeau government began negotiating — there have been seven rounds of talks — a free trade agreement with the Brazilian-led MERCOSUR trade block. They also held a Canada Brazil Strategic Dialogue Partnership and Trudeau warmly welcomed Bolsonaro at the G20 in June.

Bolsonaro won the 2018 presidential election largely because the front runner in the polls was in jail. Former Workers Party president Lula da Silva was blocked from running due to politically motivated corruption charges, but the Trudeau government seems to have remained silent on Lula’s imprisonment and other forms of persecution of the Brazilian left.

With over $10 billion invested in Brazil, corporate Canada appears excited by Bolsonaro. After his election CBC reported, “for Canadian business, a Bolsonaro presidency could open new investment opportunities, especially in the resource sector, finance and infrastructure, as he has pledged to slash environmental regulations in the Amazon rainforest and privatize some government-owned companies.”

Canada’s support for right-wing, pro-US, forces in the region has also favored Bolsonaro. Since at least 2009 the Canadian government has been openly pushing back against the leftward shift in the region and strengthening ties with the most right-wing governments. That year Ottawa actively backed the Honduran military’s removal of social democratic president Manuel Zelaya. In 2011 Canada helped put far-right Michel Martelly into the president’s office in Haiti and Ottawa passively supported the ‘parliamentary coup’ against Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012. In recent years Canada has been central to building regional support for ousting Venezuela’s government. The destabilization efforts greatly benefited from the ouster of Rousseff and imprisonment of Lula. Brazil is now a member of the Canada/Peru instigated “Lima Group” of countries hostile to the Nicolás Maduro government.

Ottawa has long supported the overthrow of elected, left leaning governments in the hemisphere. Ottawa passively supported the military coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and played a slightly more active role in the removal of Dominican Republic president Juan Bosch in 1965 and Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. In Brazil Canada passively supported the military coup against President João Goulart in 1964. Prime Minister Lester Pearson failed to publicly condemn Goulart’s ouster and deepened relations with Brazil amidst a significant uptick in human rights violations. “The Canadian reaction to the military coup of 1964 was careful, polite and allied with American rhetoric,” notes Brazil and Canada in the Americas.

Along with following Washington’s lead, Ottawa’s tacit support for the coup was driven by Canadian corporate interests. Among the biggest firms in Latin America at the time, Toronto-based Brascan (or Brazilian Traction) was commonly known as the “the Canadian octopus” since its tentacles reached into so many areas of Brazil’s economy. Putting a stop to the Goulart government, which made it more difficult for companies to export profits, was good business for a firm that had been operating in the country for half a century. After the 1964 coup the Financial Post noted “the price of Brazilian Traction common shares almost doubled overnight with the change of government from an April 1 low of $1.95 to an April 3 high of $3.06.”

The company was notorious for undermining Brazilian business initiatives, spying on its workers and leftist politicians and assisting the coup. The Dark side of “The light”: Brascan in Brazil notes, “[Brazilian Traction’s vice-president Antonio] Gallotti doesn’t hide his participation in the moves and operations that led to the coup d’État against Goulart in 1964.”

Gallotti, who was a top executive of Brascan’s Brazilian operations for a couple decades, was secretary for international affairs in the Brazilian fascist party, Acao Integralista. Gallotti quit the party in 1938, but began working as a lawyer for Brascan in 1932.

Historically, Canadian companies empowered fascists in Brazil. Today, corporate Canada appears happy to do business with a proto-fascist trampling on Indigenous rights and fueling climate chaos. Ottawa has also enabled Bolsonaro. At a minimum the Trudeau government should be pressed to follow French President Emmanuel Macron’s call to suspend free-trade negotiations with MERCOSUR until Bolsonaro reverses his wanton destruction of the earth’s ‘lungs’.

ECONOMICS, THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE PROBABILITY OF ‘DE-GROWTH’

One of the clichés much loved by business leaders and others is “blue sky thinking”. An implication of this term, it seems to me, is that there’s an infinity of possibility. Although the mainstream press has, in the past, dubbed me “Dr Gloom” and “Terrifying Tim”, I don’t discount the concept of infinite possibility. I’m an incurable optimist – when I’m not looking at the economic outlook, anyway.

However positive you are, though, if you set out on a lengthy expedition, it’s as well to take some wet weather clothing with you, because blue skies can turn dark grey pretty quickly. ‘Hoping for the best but preparing for the worst’ seems a pretty prudent way to think.

Before we address some of the financial, economic and broader issues which might darken our skies, I’d like to draw your attention to an important distinction, which is that ‘situations’ and ‘outcomes’ are different things. ‘Situations’ are circumstances calling for decisions, but, in themselves, they generally contain a multiplicity of possible results. ‘Outcomes’ are determined by the responses made to any particular set of ‘situations’.

This is important, because a lot of what I’m going to discuss here concerns ‘situations’. Many of these look pretty daunting, but the point about a multiplicity of possible ‘outcomes’ remains critical. Bad decisions turn difficult situations into malign outcomes, but wise choices can, at the very least, preclude the worst, and can even produce good outcomes from unpromising situations.

The gloomy non-science

Economics has been called “the gloomy science”. In fact, economics – as currently practised – may or may not be “gloomy”, but it isn’t a “science”. The fundamental flaw with conventional economics is that it assumes that the economy is a financial system, to be measured in dollars, pounds, euros and yen.

This, in reality, is a huge misconception. Throughout history, systems of money have come and gone. A collector might well buy a Roman coin from you, but you couldn’t use it in a café or a shop. Money is simply a human artefact, often of temporary duration, which we can create or destroy at will.

The purpose of money is the facilitation of exchange, something more convenient than barter. Its other often-claimed functions (as “a store of value” and a “unit of account”) are flawed at best. The “store of value” concept is particularly unconvincing. If somebody in a Western country dug up some banknotes buried in the garden by his or her great-grandmother, their purchasing power would be dramatically lower than when the biscuit-tin containing them was interred between the cabbages and the carrots. Measured using the broad-basis GDP deflator, the US dollar has lost 62% of its purchasing power since 1980 alone, and the pound has shed 71% of its value. Moreover, many countries change their notes and coins at frequent intervals, invalidating older versions.

Money does have important characteristics – which we’ll come to – but it’s not in any sense coterminous with a ‘real’ economy that consists of goods and services. All of these are products of the use of energy. Once you grasp this fundamental point, a ‘science’ of economics becomes a possibility, but as a branch of the laws of thermodynamics, and not, as now, as ‘the study of money’.

The energy fundamentals

As regular readers will know, whenever energy is accessed, some of that energy is always consumed in the access process. This divides the totality of energy supply into two streams – the consumed component is known here as ECoE (the Energy Cost of Energy), and the remainder is surplus energy. Because this surplus energy powers all forms of economic activity other than the supply of energy itself, it is the determinant of prosperity.

The SEEDS model calculates that, over the last twenty years, global trend ECoE has more than doubled, from 3.6% in 1998 to 7.9% last year. That’s already taken a huge bite out of our ability to grow our prosperity, and there’s no likelihood of ECoE levelling out in the foreseeable future, let alone turning back downwards.

The ECoEs of renewables are falling, just as those of fossil fuels are rising exponentially. This is a topic that we’ve discussed before, and will undoubtedly return to in the future, but it seems unlikely that a full transition to renewables, utterly vital though it is, is going to stabilise overall ECoE at much below about 10%. For context, back in the 1960s, when real economic growth was robust (and when petroleum consumption was growing by as much as 8% annually, whilst car ownership was expanding rapidly), world trend ECoE was less than 2%.

There are two reasons – one obvious, one perhaps less so – why an understanding of ECoE is critical to the environmental debate.

Obviously, if we continue to tie our economic fortunes to fossil fuels, the relentless rise in their ECoEs is going to carry on making us poorer, so there’s a compelling economic (as well as environmental) case for transition to renewables.

Less obviously, whilst prosperity is a function of surplus (aggregate less-ECoE) energy, climate-harming emissions are tied to total (surplus plus ECoE) energy. Essentially, we need to reduce our emissions from fossil fuels at a rate which at least matches the rate at which their ECoEs are rising if we’re to stand any chance at all of overcoming climate risk.

It’s a dispiriting thought that, whilst energy-based economics could make a powerful contribution to the case for environmental action, conventional, money-fixated economics can only interact negatively, by telling us how much it’s going to “cost”. Unfortunately, mainstream economics can’t really tell us the cost of not transitioning.

These “costs”, to be sure, are dauntingly large numbers. IRENA – the International Renewable Energy Agency – has costed transition at between $95 trillion and $110tn. These equate to between 619 and 721 Apollo programmes at the current-equivalent cost ($153bn) of putting a man on the Moon.

Moreover, the Americans of the 1960s had a choice about whether or not to fund a space programme. In economic as well as in environmental terms, there is no choice at all about our imperative need to transition.

...

...

When it comes to our understanding of the unfolding global crisis, each of us seems to fit somewhere along a continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into five stages:

1. Dead asleep. At this stage there seem to be no fundamental problems, just some shortcomings in human organization, behaviour and morality that can be fixed with the proper attention to rule-making.
   People at this stage tend to live their lives happily, with occasional outbursts of annoyance around election times or the quarterly corporate earnings seasons.

2. Awareness of one fundamental problem. Whether it's Climate Change, overpopulation, Peak Oil, chemical pollution, oceanic over-fishing, biodiversity loss, corporatism, economic instability or sociopolitical injustice, one problem seems to engage the attention completely.
   People at this stage tend to become ardent activists for their chosen cause. They tend to be very vocal about their personal issue, and blind to any others.

3. Awareness of many problems. As people let in more evidence from different domains, the awareness of complexity begins to grow. At this point a person worries about the prioritization of problems in terms of their immediacy and degree of impact.
   People at this stage may become reluctant to acknowledge new problems - for example, someone who is committed to fighting for social justice and against climate change may not recognize the problem of resource depletion. They may feel that the problem space is already complex enough, and the addition of any new concerns will only dilute the effort that needs to be focused on solving the "highest priority" problem.

4. Awareness of the interconnections between the many problems. The realization that a solution in one domain may worsen a problem in another marks the beginning of large-scale system-level thinking. It also marks the transition from thinking of the situation in terms of a set of problems to thinking of it in terms of a predicament. At this point the possibility that there may not be a solution begins to raise its head.
   People who arrive at this stage tend to withdraw into tight circles of like-minded individuals in order to trade insights and deepen their understanding of what's going on. These circles are necessarily small, both because personal dialogue is essential for this depth of exploration, and because there just aren't very many people who have arrived at this level of understanding.

5. Awareness that the predicament encompasses all aspects of life. This includes everything we do, how we do it, our relationships with each other, as well as our treatment of the rest of the biosphere and the physical planet. With this realization, the floodgates open, and no problem is exempt from consideration or acceptance. The very concept of a "Solution" is seen through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.
   For those who arrive at Stage 5 there is a real risk that depression will set in. After all, we've learned throughout our lives that our hope for tomorrow lies in our ability to solve problems today. When no amount of human cleverness appears able to solve our predicament the possibility of hope can vanish like a the light of a candle flame, to be replaced by the suffocating darkness of despair.

How people cope with despair is of course deeply personal, but it seems to me there are two general routes people take to reconcile themselves with the situation. These are not mutually exclusive, and most of us will operate out of some mix of the two. I identify them here as general tendencies, because people seem to be drawn more to one or the other. I call them the outer path and the inner path.

...

It used to be a mantra in environmental circles that "the solution to pollution is dilution." That simply isn't tenable anymore, and it probably never was. The reasons are many:

• We now know that many compounds are biologically active at extremely low levels.
• We know that chemicals, radiation, and biological agents can and do act synergistically to magnify their effects on humans, animals and plants.
• We know that chemicals that were thought to degrade quickly in the environment such as glyphosate may persist for long periods.
• Most people now understand that the industries producing chemical and radiation hazards have spent huge sums to propagandize the public and intimidate and control scientists in order to convince us that the industry's products and the pollution associated with them are not harmful.
• Furthermore, in many cases, the dangers have been known from the beginning and been covered up.

A little history regarding leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, bisphenol A, and wireless radiation will highlight these conclusions.

Let us start with leaded gasoline which was invented in the early 1920s to increase the performance of gasoline engines—essentially to get rid of the "knocking" noise which also indicates inefficient combustion.

The now infamous inventor of leaded gasoline, chemist Thomas Midgely, certainly knew that the lead compound in question, tetraethyl lead, was poisonous. How? Midgely himself came down with lead poisoning from exposure to the substance.

Later, five workers manufacturing the compound died from lead poisoning. And yet, a task force convened by the U.S. Public Health Service concluded that the levels of lead emitted from vehicle exhaust pipes would be too diffuse to cause problems. The members concluded this even though every driver tested by the panel was positive for lead in his or her blood. The tests took place after leaded gasoline was being widely used.

A crushing blow to the lead-is-safe-in-gasoline story was delivered by a geochemist, Clair Patterson, best known for his work in establishing the age of the Earth. Patterson discovered vastly increased lead levels in industrially contaminated soils and air. Atmospheric lead was now 1,000 times the natural background level. His findings were published in 1965.

Of course, by that time lead residue was everywhere and was especially dangerous to children who are more susceptible to damage from such poisoning and were suffering from behavioral problems, learning disabilities and lowered intelligence.

It wasn't until 1974 that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set a schedule for phasing out lead in gasoline. And, it wasn't until 1976 that a U.S. federal circuit court upheld the EPA's action.

It's worth noting that General Motors (GM), the owner of the tetraethyl lead patent, already knew about another solution to engine knocking before it began production. The other solution was ethanol. All one had to do is add ethanol to gasoline. But GM chose not to pursue ethanol as a gasoline additive because ethanol couldn't be patented and therefore the company couldn't make any money on it.

The pattern we see in the history of leaded gasoline has repeated itself again and again, and yet the public is convinced again and again to believe that substances which are inherently harmful are somehow rendered harmless when released into the environment and diluted by wind, water and even the soil.

...

It’s rare that I reach back into the past of the Automatic Earth, but it’s not entirely unique either. The reason I do it today is not only the relevance of the article -in my view-, or the fact it was published so long ago, but it’s that the ‘world’ has changed so much since January 1 2014, the date I wrote the piece below, as Everything Better Is Purchased At The Price Of Something Worse. It’s gained much new relevance since.

This essay, way back when, dealt with Carl -Gustav- Jung, probably the most influential psycho-analist we’ve ever known (he’s having a heated discussion with Freud about this as we speak, over a glass of brandy), and his take in the 1950s on our ability to incorporate new technologies into our lives, our minds and brains.

Jung couldn’t have dreamt how much of that was yet to come, but he already put some very dire warnings out there. His main point appears to be that our capacity to ’embrace’ anything new is per definition -very- limited because we ARE our ancestors, and whatever they never knew, we will have a hard if not impossible time making part of our lives.

It’s just that, as he warns, we are completely blind to this. Once you lose the link to your ancestors, you will move away from them ever faster. Because there’s nothing left to anchor you. But at the same time, you ARE your ancestors.

I am thinking about this on a near constant basis as I see people sit or move around with their iPhones et al, and their Facebook and Instagram et al, and I wonder what they did with their lives before they could walk the streets bumping into each other -or the odd car- before a constant link to faraway places seemed appropriate and/or needed.

Jung already thought about this, before it existed, 60-odd years ago. He framed it as: what are you giving up for what you gain? But of course the whole younger part of the poulation, who’ve never known anything else, have no notion of having given up anything. They never did anything else with their lives.

Well, Jung had a completely different idea. He said our brains haven’t even processed the times we never knew, ‘primitivity’, ‘antiquity’, or the Middle Ages yet, let alone radio, TV, or the internet. “We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.”

Carl Jung claimed that our only true frame of reference is our ancestors, and since they never knew radio, TV, internet, we cannot incorporate such things into our lives without losing our connection to them. But we ARE them, and if we would ever lose that connection, we would be beyond lost. We’d be gone. First mentally, then -inevitably- physically.

And what we label ‘progress’ is then merely a way to move ever faster awasy from what we really are, which is the ancestors that gave birth to us. Gone, lost, into some empty space, with no grounding and no purpose.

Perhaps that goes a ways towards explaining why we are destroying the planet we live on. We lost the connection to who we are. We are focused today only on progress, on the future, and not on the present, because the present requires a link to the past.

Here’s my take on this 5.5 years ago. Before all these millions of zombies were stalking the streets looking only at their phones, eagerly – nay, desperately- awaiting messages from people thousands of miles away. Mostly about what food they eat, no less, or what dress they wear.

The concept of what constitutes our lives has changed profoundly. It is no longer the people around us, or even the landscape, our lives now are made up of people who are not here (and landscapes in travel brochures and nature documentaries). That is quite something.

Carl Jung said quite a while ago that our minds and brains cannot handle that. But there you are and here we go.

...

“Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.” — Raymond Williams (Culture and Materialism, 2005)

“It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something — a form — in common with it.” — Wittgenstein (Tractatus)

“Year after year
On the monkey’s face:
A monkey’s face.”
— Basho

What I am seeing of late is that the Climate Crisis is destroying environmentalism. What I consider real environmentalism. The Climate discourse is quickly being taken over by monied interests whose desire is to save capitalism before they save the planet. They fly (in jets, often private) to conferences in which avocados (or whatever) are flown in from California (or wherever). And there is aristocracy, literally, in attendance. It feels almost required. The British or Dutch Royals, if we’re talking carbon footprints, are tracking in with size 12 Florsheims– while the indigenous activists who toil and are persecuted in places such as Honduras, or Colombia, are not invited. They are of an other way of life, the life of actual concern for nature. These conferences are a kind of ceremonial environmentalism.

And the branded progressives of the Democratic Party, Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, feint to the left with tepid rebukes to the establishment, but quickly tack to the right with praise for blood drenched ghouls like Madelaine Albright and even Gloria Estafan, whose father in fact was a bodyguard for Batista. Who “fled” Cuba (meaning fled the evils of communism) and thereby should be seen as a role model of some sort for young liberals and (yes) environmentalists… because brand loyalty being what it is, etc etc.)

Meanwhile back at the conference, there is the issue of packaging. And I want to examine the packaging industry for a moment. Everything comes in a package. That is mass production at work. You can buy small yogurts that amount to five spoonfuls and then you must throw out the plastic container. The world is awash in plastics. And not only are plastics destroying the oceans and marine mammals and fish, pliable plastic is downright poisonous to the human beings. And this has been known for some time now. I first read about BPA and the effects of plastics in the early 90s.

“CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that “almost all” commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren’t exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun’s ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.{ } According to one study, the pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs female. DES, which was once prescribed to prevent miscarriages, caused obesity, rare vaginal tumors, infertility, and testicular growths among those exposed in utero. Scientists have tied BPA to ailments including asthma, cancer, infertility, low sperm count, genital deformity, heart disease, liver problems, and ADHD.” — Mariah Blake (Mother Jones, 2014)

And yet, like Big Tobacco did for years with cigarettes, the packaging industry has buried this information. People overwhelmingly eat from containers made of pliable plastic.

“The toxicological consequences of such exposures, especially for susceptible subpopulations such as children and pregnant women, remain unclear and warrant further investigation. However, there is evidence of associations between urinary concentrations of some phthalate metabolites and biological outcomes (Swan et al. 2005; Swan 2008). For example, an inverse relationship has been reported between the concentrations of DEHP metabolites in the mother’s urine and anogenital distance, penile width and testicular decent in male offspring (Swan et al. 2005; Swan 2008). In adults, there is some evidence of a negative association between phthalate metabolites and semen quality (Meeker & Sathyanarayana) and between high exposures to phthalates (workers producing PVC flooring) and free testosterone levels. “ — Richard Thompson, et al (Royal Society of Biological Medicine, 2009)

Ah, the fertility drop off, which would be an elegant segue if I didn’t want to stick with packaging just a bit longer.

The new Climate Crisis…or Climate Emergency, feels increasingly distant from radical environmentalists of an earlier time. And I think part of the problem in wrapping one’s head around this crisis is that one has to tie together so many different topics. Fertility, mental health, dropping literacy, infrastructure neglect, pollution, militarism, Big Agra and Big Pharma, as well as digital technology and the psychology of contemporary westerners. A psychology mediated in huge part by lives increasingly spent staring at screens. And rather than expend the effort to actually connect these threads I find most people gravitate toward a simplistic and generalized position on the environment. And that position feels increasingly shaped by a marketing of fear.

The question then is how to frame a climate discourse that is not predicated on narrow almost tribal loyalties, and not deferential to the institutions of western capital. I mean presuming that the earth actually does face mass extinction over the next fifty years (or, pick a date, say a hundred years) then one would want a sober clear dialogue with those who best know what is going on to make the earth warmer (and I think even so called deniers grant that earth is getting warmer… and the question would be how much warmer, for what reason and with what consequences ).

The problem is, who does know best what is going on? I see, increasingly, movie stars or celebrity politicians, or just celebrities, joining in the new branding of *climate emergency*. Why there is Mark Rufalo and Don Cheadle. There is Arnold with Greta. There is Barry with Greta. The world increasingly is presented as if Annie Liebovitz photographed everything for us. And I can find you the scientists who now have claim to their kind of celebrity, and I can find those who contradict them, even if they are not so called sceptics.

Now as I research this piece I run into sites where I have to subscribe to read the article. New Scientist for example. Someone explain how that works…we are looking into the possible termination of human life, right? But you want to charge me a subscription fee?

I digress. Ok, now, I want to again note the invaluable work that Cory Morningstar has done. And rather than excerpt her detailed research on who is behind the various co-opting measures that western Capital has employed in creating the new narrative on the climate emergency, I will just link to her latest article here.

I mean honestly, Coca Cola is going to help save the planet? If you only read the Global Shapers section you will arrive at a pretty clear idea of how this all works. My point is that once you have The Climate Reality Project, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Procter and Gamble, Reliance Industries, Oando, GMR Group, Hanwha Energy Corporation, Rosamund Zander and Yara International *investing* in saving the planet, you know something is wrong.

The *Climate Emergency* is coming to obscure a host of other environmental and social problems. A recent report on links between fracking and cancer seems to get only minor attention. Or the aforementioned plastics problem — which does get attention from the perspective of ocean pollution but far less to none in terms of human and especially infant health. When there is a clear and recorded drop in IQ scores and when educators bemoan the state of academics and student skills, and when there are spikes in early onset Alzheimers and autism and for that matter depression and anxiety, the scope of what can be included under the label of *environment* increases dramatically. This is not to even begin discussing U.S. Imperialism and the defense industry. See this and this.

And I am not even going to get into the effects of Depleted Uranium here.

The U.S. military hides statistics on its petroleum usage and its disposal of chemical waste, and of course the severe consequences of all the current ongoing U.S. wars (see Cholera in Yemen just for starters). The socio-political landscape is seeing the rise of global fascism as well as a continuing migration of wealth to the very top tier of the class hierarchy. Homes are being built with servants quarters for the first time in over a hundred years. It is a return to both Victorian values and social structure and in a wider sense a return to feudalism. The homeless camps that circle every American city speak to the extreme fragility of the social fabric in the West today. A fragility that both planned and exploited by the ruling classes. The environment includes those people sleeping on the sidewalks of American cities. It includes a terrorized inner city black population, terrorized by ever more openly racist police departments (militarized under Obama) that routinely abuse power and often simply execute the vulnerable populations — populations that are growing.

And of course the dependency of the population of the West on its smart phone use. A new generation is always coming out and replacing the perfectly fine earlier generation of phone. Apple, Samsung, etc are massive polluting agents. So called *e waste* is gigantic. And it has accelerated the mining for rare earth minerals. Where is the discussion about this on these new green conferences? The idea of a future is still based on something like the old cartoon show The Jetsons. It is the entrenched belief in technology to solve everything, including global warming it seems.

Here is another link to Wrong Kind of Green and the investment in fear.

The target demographic is youth. And the Greta phenomenon is the first volley of that campaign. The Gates Foundation is busy indoctrinating and grooming the young in Africa. Microsoft does the same, with… See this.

As does the U.S. military.

But “Climate Works” is quite simply behind nearly everything to some degree.

The issue of credibility looms as significant here. While I think everyone agrees that the planet is getting warmer, the marketing apparatus of global capital exaggerates and sensationalizes nearly everything. Extreme heat in India, dozens of deaths in Bihar. Well, the poor die in Bihar all the time, and in the past they have died from heat, too. New Delhi has had brutal heat for a hundred years in May and June. Now its getting worse. And there is little question it will continue to worsen. But articles are written as if they were scripts for Hollywood disaster films. The Raj used to move to the hill stations in summer to avoid the heat on the Indian plains. The poor are always the first to suffer when anything happens. Even when the exceptional event does occur, it is hard to trust its exceptional qualities. And this might well be the final state of brain lock that to which the Spectacle has brought us.

There is a growing conformity of opinion and a moral indignation that follows should one disagree, or even, often, simply ask questions. I have several times been referred to the NASA climate page. And I am shocked, really. On the page is one article on how the U.S. Navy is preparing for global warming. I mean the mind reels, honestly. Should I believe without question what NASA and the Navy tell me about the environment? The Navy, you know, the ones who torture and murder dolphins and whales. See this.

Here is another side bar follow up on the military.

Lets take the IPCC, whose voice and influence is far reaching here. They authored the *Climate Bible*, and are widely respected and endlessly quoted. Who is the IPCC?

“The Panel itself is composed of representatives appointed by governments. Participation of delegates with appropriate expertise is encouraged. Plenary sessions of the IPCC and IPCC Working Groups are held at the level of government representatives. Non-Governmental and Intergovernmental Organizations admitted as observer organizations may also attend. Sessions of the Panel, IPCC Bureau, workshops, expert and lead authors meetings are by invitation only. About 500 people from 130 countries attended the 48th Session of the Panel in Incheon, Republic of Korea, in October 2018, including 290 government officials and 60 representatives of observer organizations. The opening ceremonies of sessions of the Panel and of Lead Author Meetings are open to media, but otherwise IPCC meetings are closed.”

The IPCC is a child of the UN. It is, of necessity, a political organization. And as such there are a host of very suspect relationships involved. The most obvious is that poor countries are given technology and training, and money often, by the UN. Or rather, these gifts are largely administered by the UN. The developing nation must follow the UN guidelines and answer to the UN. This is a bit like the environmental version of economic austerity. There is also the fact that climate skeptics are now simply stigmatized and ridiculed. Usually by non scientists, even if said skeptic IS a scientist. Such is the desire (nearly pathological desire) for consensus in the West today. The point is that the IPCC is both political, western based and UN funded, and the UN uses the work of the IPCC to chart its climate course and allocation of funds. The UN itself of course is U.S. based and does nothing to offend its host.

The IPCC has direct and significant ties to the WWF, Greenpeace, and the Environmental Defense Fund; in other words the corporate green opportunists. There is massive financing behind these groups. The IPCC also has had numerous accusations lodged against it regarding dodgy definitions of peer review (and for the record, peer reviewed material is actually no more likely to be true than non peered review material..see Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, here…

And just to cover more of who runs government organizations, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is headed by retired rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet (lead administrator) while the Chief of the NOAA is Neil Jacobs, previously chief Atmospheric scientist for Panasonic Avionics {sic} (and still to be confirmed the CEO of Accuweather Barry Myers). The previous head of the NOAA, appointed by Obama, was Jane Lubachenko who called the IPCC an embarrassment. Just to keep your scorecards up to date here. Also…the NOAA is tasked with managing U.S. satellite programs (through sub organization The Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service — NESDIS) who collects data for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, among others. There are several sub sub services like National Coastal Data Development Center. The point being this is, again, the U.S. military in good measure. And most intelligent people I know distrust most everything that the military says, and with good reason — they have a long history of lying through their teeth.

“And this ties into the notion of personal responsibility. Solutions to our environmental crisis have been reduced to “life style changes” which have also become the en vogue activism of the day. It is a line of thinking that is accepted and even endorsed by corporations, banks and neoliberal governments because it poses no real challenge to their power or their ongoing destructive practices. To the mainstream, tweaking one’s lifestyle is all that is needed. Buy an electric vehicle or use a bicycle. Don’t take a plane on your vacation. Buy reusable bags. Choose organic only. Go vegan. Buy reusable straws. While there is nothing wrong with doing these things in general, they must be understood as individual choices that are based on privilege and that have little impact in addressing urgent crisis our biosphere is facing right now.

What they do manage to do is deliver an added punishment on the poor and working class, people who are struggling to make ends meet. It places an unfair level of guilt on ordinary people whose impact on the environment is relatively negligible compared to the enormous destruction caused by the fossil fuel industry, mining companies, plastic and packaging production, shipping and the military industrial complex. Seldom (if ever) questioned are the basic foundations of the current economic order which is driving the decimation of the biosphere for the benefit of the wealthy Davos jet set.” — Kenn Orphan (Counterpunch, March 2019)

Again, a difficulty in grasping the environmental crises in its entirety is that there are literally mountains of material to read and absorb. But it is clear that the U.N. (on Rockefeller land by the by) is really not to be trusted. It provides, at times, a platform for revolutionary voices, but more often it works against change. The very existence of the Security Council is a working definition of anti-democratic. Speaking of Rockefeller, here is another bit of sidebar history.

One of the interesting details from Ralph Richardson, circa 1976, is the interest of the foundation in ‘weather modification’. Thats fifty years ago now. See this.

I mean make of that what you will. And this also again raises issues of credibility. There are countless activists who claim geo-engineering is going on, that HAARP is behind it, and that chemtrails are evidence this, etc. For anyone who is not a scientist there is simply no way to verify or disprove any of this. It sounds crack-pot, though I can’t honestly tell you it is. But it does cause one a momentary shudder to note that the Rockefeller Foundation was interested in weather modification over fifty years ago. But my point here is broader, in a sense. I have written several times (and on my blog often) that contemporary life in the West feels unreal, that people in general exhibit almost trance like inabilities to reason or think or calculate. And I think that addiction to screens, to digital technology, to the internet itself (and I am as guilty as anyone) has led to a serious erosion in autonomous thought. And accompanying this erosion is a particular American brand of self righteousness. Even on the left. This is a society of acute group think, and of shaming and stigmatizing. Dissent is, we know, actively attacked by the surveillance state, and censorship is growing on all fronts, and on the left I feel a chilling embrace of Puritanical moralism. The Climate Crises…maybe that should be in quotes….is becoming a nearly religious movement in which heretics are to be digitally burned at the stake.

Why is there such a growing hostility to credulity? Why do people seem not to care in the least that most of the word’s largest corporations are *investing* in climate cures. Not donating to climate cures but investing in them as business opportunities. And alongside this overarching investment in global warming is an recruitment and indoctrination of youth. The military is only one branch of the marketing that targets the young. Microsoft and the Gates Foundation proudly trumpet their target demographic; poor kids of the global south.

Now there is another discussion here, and oddly enough the arch conservative Aussie journalist Andrew Bolt distilled it a few years ago…

“It’s that global warming is an apocalyptic faith whose preachers demand sacrifices of others that they find far too painful for themselves. It’s a faith whose prophets demand we close coal mines but who won’t even turn off their own pool lights. Who demand the masses lose their cars, while they themselves keep their planes. It’s the ultimate faith of the feckless rich, where a ticket to heaven can be bought with a check made out to Al Gore [to purchase offsets from a company he owns]. No further sacrifice is required. Except of course, from the poor. ( ) If the planet really is threatened with warming doom, why don’t you act like you believe it?” ( The Herald-Sun, Nov.17, 2010)

Now Bolt is profoundly reactionary voice, but he’s not entirely wrong here at all. Or rather he is wrong about global warming, but he is not wrong about a new cultural cultic following of armchair nihilism.

I have had people tell me its selfish to have more children. I have had them tell me to stop flying, or to stop eating meat (actually I’m already a vegetarian). But the point is this sort of individualistic nonsense masks a certain very stark hypocrisy. The problem is that this is not an individual problem. So two things seem to be ignored: the first is that industrial civilization has been going on for a long time and it began to hurt the planet and atmosphere from the first day. And two, this historical long range amnesia is connected to the Hollywoood-fication of all thinking. People literally perceive the world as if Dwayne Johnson was going to rescue it. . You get the idea. Angelina Jolie now delivers speeches at the council on foreign relations. She is going to run for office (or, is, cough, thinking about it). American politics is a clown show operating at the lowest possible common denominator.

The point is that environmental destruction has been going on a long time. And the industrial revolution intensified the harm and civilization never looked back. The greenhouse emissions theory may or may not be completely true or accurate. But it also doesn’t matter, really. Society itself is unravelling. People are sick, depressed, even increasingly suicidal — and the U.S. seems to want to wage even more war. The madness of this is stupefying — and it again underscores the need for a political vision that begins with a platform that says STOP WAR. All war, all of it. That men like John Bolton or Mike Pompeo are in positions of authority, that such men can manipulate their power to create military conflict speaks to the utter and absolute depravity and decadence of the Capitalist system (of course in a wider sense Bolton and Pompeo are just following the mandate of the ruling class, something they learned and perfected long ago). Capitalism cannot survive. I have no idea if the planet can survive, but I suspect it will, though with rather substantial damage and suffering. But the hierarchical profit driven capitalist system cannot. The new feudalism is here, already, but its not sustainable. And western capital is helping with the rise of new ultra nationalist fascist leaders across the planet. Nature is, I believe, more resilient than mortals think. Humans may not survive each other, however.

Then there is this.

Again, there is always a question of credibility, of who to believe, and to remember these are models, computer models, and hence open to error, and behind any such numbers are the always lurking racism of the West, and sexism. But the Pew report does suggest that, as Roger Harris put it, the overpopulation ideologues may have just woken up to a demographic winter. By 2100 white people will be a stark minority in the world. Might this have anything to do with Bill & Melinda Gates obsessive birth control measures in Africa and India? Make America white again!

The climate emergency is disproportionately pushed by three or four mainstream outlets. I’m just noting this, really : the Guardian UK, Globe & Mail, The Independent, and Washington Post. And the Guardian can criticise what they see as institutional hypocrisy on the part of the World Bank for funding coal burning sites but they say nothing against U.S. NATO aggressions, and they repeat the lies of the U.S. state department and Pentagon, as well as Israel, and this nowhere registers as cognitive dissonance. (and honestly, George Monbiot, he who cares so for the planet, is also among the most egregious apologists for western Imperialism one can find).

“…capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the age-old social tendency to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’. It is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions. The expansionary drive of capitalism, reaching a point of virtual universality today, is not the consequence of its conformity to human nature or to some transhistorical law, or of some racial or cultural superiority of ‘the West’, but the product of its own historically specific internal laws of motion, its unique capacity as well as its unique need for constant self-expansion. Those laws of motion required vast social transformations and upheavals to set them in train. They required a transformation in the human metabolism with nature, in the provision of life’s basic necessities.” — Ellen Meiksins Wood (The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View)

Wood’s earlier notes Marshall Berman’s ideas of the Enlightenment’s inherent duality; a desire for universality and immutability, contingency and fragmentation. And that this was somehow a response to the ephemeral and ever shifting perspectives of modern life, aka Capitalism.

That duality feels more like schizophrenia today. Or bi-polar disorder. The shifting ephemeral experiences and shocks that Walter Benjamin described with Paris are now dulled computer generated flat screen cut out dolls.

I am reminded of a succinct capsulation of Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts by William Wall on his blog…

“Davis makes a convincing argument for seeing these late-Victorian famines in places as diverse as India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia and Egypt, as structural products of capitalism, the result of a nexus of improved communication by railroad and telegraph; the destruction of pre-existing communitarian (and therefore anti-capitalist) balances such as the ”iron granaries” of China; the demand for raw materials and foodstuffs to feed European industrial development; a fanatical belief in what we now call neo-liberalism but which was then called laissez-faire; the desire to exploit the labour surpluses that occurred when starving peasants abandoned land and moved to industrial centres; endemic racism (‘it would be a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows’ – commented Lord Salisbury) combined with the Malthusian dogma that famines were a gift from God to keep human reproduction within the limits of our capability to produce food.”

Pertinent at this moment, I think. Oh and food… it is worth pointing out the realities of food waste at this point.

“Our calculations show that food surplus is increasing and food deficit is decreasing globally (Figures 2 and S4). Between 1965 and 2010, the food surplus grew from 310 kcal/cap/day to 510 kcal/cap/day, and the food deficit declined from 330 kcal/cap/day to 120 kcal/cap/day (moderate PAL). The amount of surplus food is increasing especially in most of the OECD countries, e.g., food surplus in the United States has increased from 400 kcal/cap/day to 1,050 kcal/cap/day between 1965 and 2010. Food availability has increased over the last few decades, whereas biophysical food requirements have remained almost constant.” — Diego Rybski, and Jürgen P. Kropp (Environmental Service and Technology, 2019)

and

“Americans waste an unfathomable amount of food. In fact, according to a Guardian report released this week, roughly 50 percent of all produce in the United States is thrown away—some 60 million tons (or $160 billion) worth of produce annually, an amount constituting “one third of all foodstuffs.” Wasted food is also the single biggest occupant in American landfills, the Environmental Protection Agency has found.” — Adam Chandler (The Atlantic, 2014)

There is more than enough food, in other words. But here is a very short primer on food dynamics…

“The early 1900s saw the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, innovations that have become a hallmark of industrial crop production. In just 12 years, between 1964 and 1976, synthetic and mineral fertilizer applications on U.S. crops nearly doubled, while pesticide use on major U.S. crops increased by 143 percent. The shift to specialized monocultures increased farmers’ reliance on these chemicals, in part because crop diversity can help suppress weeds and other pests.

Chemical and pharmaceutical use also became commonplace in newly industrialized models of meat, milk, and egg production. Antibiotics, for example, were introduced to swine, poultry, and cattle feed after a series of experiments in the 1940s and 1950s found that feeding the drugs to animals caused them to gain weight faster and on less feed. By 2009, 80 percent of the antibiotic drugs sold in the U.S. were used not for human medicine but for livestock production. ( ) Largely as a result of consolidation, most food production in the U.S. now takes place on massive-scale operations. Half of all U.S. cropland is on farms with at least 1,000 acres (over 1.5 square miles). The vast majority of U.S. poultry and pork products comes from facilities that each produce over 200,000 chickens or 5,000 pigs in a single year, while most egg-laying hens are confined in facilities that house over 100,000 birds at a time.” — Johns Hopkins Center for a Liveable Future, 2016

Obesity has tripled since 1975 according to the WHO. In 2016 close to two billion people worldwide were clinically obese. The has also been a dramatic increase in childhood obesity. Capitalism is a system that only considers profit, you see. It does not consider our health, our quality of life, and certainly not planetary survival.

“Food industry monopolists are behind the dismal economic reality of rural America. According to data compiled by the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2012, the four largest food and agriculture companies controlled 82 percent of the beef packing industry, 85 percent of soybean processing and 63 percent of pork.” — Anthony Pahnke and Jim Goodman (Counterpunch, 2019)

Globally, what Vandana Shiva calls food imperialism, is also bankrolled by the same corporate forces and money that are coopting the Environmental movement. Cargill, Pepsi Cola, Bayer, Uniliver, Syngenta, Dupont, et al… (oh and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos) and this form of cultural imperialism also tries to erase history, as do all Imperialist projects.

“The industrial west has always been arrogant, and ignorant, of the cultures it has colonised. “Fake Food” is just the latest step in a history of food imperialism. Soya is a gift of East Asia, where it has been a food for millennia. It was only eaten as fermented food to remove its’ anti-nutritive factors. But recently, GMO soya has created a soya imperialism, destroying plant diversity. It continues the destruction of the diversity of rich edible oils and plant based proteins of Indian dals that we have documented.

Women from India’s slums called on me to bring our mustard back when GMO soya oil started to be dumped on India, and local oils and cold press units in villages were made illegal. That is when we started the “sarson (mustard) satyagraha“ to defend our healthy cold pressed oils from dumping of hexane-extracted GMO soya oil. Hexane is a neurotoxin.
While Indian peasants knew that pulses fix nitrogen, the west was industrialising agriculture based on synthetic nitrogen which contributes to greenhous gases, dead zones in the ocean, and dead soils.” — Dr. Vandana Shiva (Counterpunch, 2019)

If there is a possible future, it is one without corporations. Which means, really, a classless society, and that means, really, communism or socialism. It means, as I have said before, that equality is the real green. The climate discourse today is often mediated by those arrogant voices of both right and pseudo left America, the bullying aggressive believers in “science” .. the belief in science by non scientists. And honestly, many scientists today are very narrowly focused and rather myopic outside of their specialization. The best scientists I have known are those most suspicious of their profession or practice.

“For Thomas Kuhn, scientific hypotheses are shaped and restricted by the worldview, or paradigm, within which scientists operate. Most scientists are as blind to the paradigm as fish to water, and unable to see across or beyond it. In fact, most of the clinical medical students I teach at Oxford, and who already have a science degree, don’t even know what the word ‘paradigm’ means. When data emerges that conflicts with the paradigm, it is usually discarded, dismissed, or disregarded.” — Neel Burton, MD (The Problems of Science, Pyschology Today, 2019)

Now, the flip side of trying to interrogate science is overcoming the blatant anti-science propaganda put out by the far right, and more significantly, perhaps, by the oil industry (Lee Raymond, when he was CEO of Exxon, spent huge amounts of money to propagate climate denial papers and disinformation). The Koch brothers donate huge amounts of their vast fortune to further an anti science right wing propaganda, as does Rupert Murdoch and the heinous FOX news empire.

Everything is political. Science is political. Our emotional lives are political. I just think it is important to remember that. The system wants the population both confused and at odds with each other. And remember too that social media is almost by design a toxic environment. The negative is rewarded and reinforced. And it has resulted in a populace that is highly defended (and resulted in more withdrawn and isolated people, especially among the young). An already aggressive society is now more aggressive.

For context see

• The New Green Revolution, a.k.a. The Grand Transition to... ?? - Part I
• Green New Deal - Part II
• Green New Deal, Part III: How?

Recently, I gave in Polish an opening lecture, “Can we salvage our global civilization?”, at a one-day conference of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU). The conference took place in the Isabela Lanckoronska Auditorium at the historic PAU building on Slawkowska 17 Street in Kraków. This conference, “Civic organizations and local communities faced with climate change disasters,” was organized by the Committee on Threats to Civilization of PAU. The last lecture was given by a young activist from a well-known non-profit, who manifestly misled the audience with his proposed implementation of the Green New Deal that would immediately shut down all coal-fired electric power plants in Poland, and replace them with wind turbines, PV arrays and geothermal wells. I pointed out to the nice young man that his radical solution would cause immediate power blackouts in Poland, and asked if he shouldn't have mentioned some of the problems with the transition? His answer was that the ordinary people were not ready to hear an inconvenient truth and thus must be fed reassuring fairy tales to move them in the right direction. Hmm, and then we wonder why so many people trust no one.

The only answer to the harrowing, complex questions of the Big Transition in population, power and lifestyles is science. Science is imperfect. Scientists make mistakes. Some scientists and their funding agencies cannot resist publicity ploys, and oversell their findings. Some scientists have big egos and claim that their particular answers are the only ones that will save humanity. But, science is the merciless quest for perfection, the continuous verification of all models, and the immediate disposal of failed assumptions and theories. Science is continuous doubt. I know the pain of doubting everything, because I am a scientist. In the end, science is the only thing humanity has going for it. Without science, we are merely the dumb, suicidal lemmings that stumble in the dark, all 7.6 billion of us.

So here is the latest science from EOS: "Legions of scientists have put together the computer model that simulates the planet’s climate: the Community Earth System Model (CESM). Last year, the latest version of CESM, CESM2, debuted. Results from this new version’s simulations point toward a much hotter future climate—driven by humans continuing to burn fossil fuels and pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—than any previous version of CESM. The jump comes after what-if simulations in which researchers doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, starting with levels that existed before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. (Those concentrations were about 280 parts per million. Today, levels are about 415 parts per million.)

Results from the same simulation from older versions of CESM were 2.9°C of warming in 2006, then 3.2°C in 2009, and 4.1°C in 2012. Now the projected warming is 5.3°C. The real planet has already warmed by 0.7°C to 0.9°C." The difference between the two models is accounting for the super-bright, solar radiation-reflecting clouds made of supercooled water. These clouds disappear fast from the warming up atmosphere and its models.

The supercooled water clouds over Wimberley, TX. Because of the extraordinarily wet spring in Texas, lots of ground moisture is being evaporated here each day. Now, the greedy Brazilians led by the corrupt neo-Nazi, Bolsonaro, want to "develop" (read destroy) the Amazon forest and change it into the soybean plantations for export to China. During that development process, the giant captive cloud system over the Amazonia will disappear. Today this supercooled cloud system gives the hot tropical Amazonia appearance of a cold Arctic region. The accelerated destruction of the Amazonia is yet another way, in which the US, led by Trump and his tariffs, will speed up to the conversion of our hospitable planet into a hot hell for all of us. But the myopic, self-annihilating greed and stupidity are general human features. My friend, Rex Weyler, reports a bumper sticker seen in Colorado on a black pickup with huge wheels and rattling muffler: “My carbon footprint is bigger than yours.” With the Amazon forest gone, parts of Colorado are likely to become a sand desert. Source: T.W. Patzek, 7/6/2019.

Thus, there are no other paths but to shrink, shrink more and transit away from fossil fuels. You can stop reading here, but if you are courageous enough to keep on reading you will understand a little better the Herculean difficulties with the shrinkage and transition.

All right, here are more facts: since 2004, the annual increases of total electricity consumption in the world have outpaced all electricity production by all PV arrays in the world, see Figure 1. And the 2.7 TW of electricity in 2018 was only 16% of total primary energy demand in the world. If you read Part III of this post, you'll understand that even in Sector 1 of the global economy (electricity generation) solar PV electricity has not kept pace with the incremental demand for electricity. As bad as this finding is, it merely illustrates the fact that without stringent population control in the poor countries and massive depowering of the rich countries there will be no comprehensive Green New Deal or Energiewende. But I already made these difficult to swallow points in Part II.

Figure 1. Here is the scope of our problem: since 2004 (the beginning of meaningful solar power) , the annual increases of total electricity demand have outpaced total electricity production from all PV arrays in the world. The only exception was the year 2009, when the global financial crisis was in full swing. Please digest this plot for a second or two, because it shows the height of the power mountain we are on. Data source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019; data extracted by my electrical engineer friend, Pedro Prieto, 6/13/2019.

Let's go back to the GHG emissions that have been increasing rather briskly at 2.7% in 2018, also see Figure 2. At a recent Atlantic Council meeting, Mr. Spencer Dale, chief economist of BP, was reported to have said this :

"Dale closed his presentation with a discussion of the power sector, emphasizing the importance of its decarbonization. Despite the renewable energy surge in the last decade, the power sector fuel mix remains the same as twenty years ago. Dale argued that switching coal production to natural gas is key to cutting emissions, as switching just 10 percent of global coal consumption to natural gas would have the same impact on emissions as doubling the renewables capacities of China and the United States." See Figure 3, to understand the scales involved.

Figure 2. Notice that international aviation (us flying and our Valentine roses being flown from Costa Rica), and maritime transport (our stuff being shipped everywhere throughout the global fossil amoeba) emit as much of carbon dioxide as the continent of Africa. Source: Ourworldindata.org

My dear green friends, even though Mr. Dale works for the oil industry, he is telling the truth. I'll come back to him a little later. There is no other quick way of limiting GHG emissions from electricity generation, unless the rich countries insist on the immediate and deep, really deep, power cuts that would spell the end of the current global economy that our visionary (just kiddin') president Trump wants to kill. Please remember that a vast increase of solar power postulated in Part III, would require heavy subsidies from fossil fuels and the concomitant increase of GHG emissions by perhaps as much as 25%, see Part II.

OK, let's move on. In Part III of this post, I offered you a magic conversion from coal and oil to equivalent solar electrical power. I expected a few of you to push me back by arguing that we do not need as much as 89 TWp (terawatt peak) of photovoltaic electricity to replace most of the 11 TW of global coal and oil. If you did, I would have answered, no, in fact we need several times more solar electricity during the day to run all the background processes of generation of hydrogen or other energy carriers to power the rest of the economy during the night and provide heat for other industrial processes. If hydrogen generated by the solar electrolysis of water were to leave the closed loop of generation/burning, the need for photovoltaic power would increase again, not to mention a steady waste stream of salts from the electrolyzed water, one way or another.

For example, a 1 MWp solar plant can deliver at best 20 tons of oil equivalent (or 20 tons of gasoline equivalent) per year as liquid or compressed hydrogen. That's one tanker truck per year! As my Spanish electrical engineer friend, Pedro Prieto, calculates, a 1 MWp solar PV plant delivers to the consumers only 22% of its electricity production as usable hydrogen. I hope that you understand just how arduous and inefficient a large scale replacement of fossil fuels with hydrogen would be.

In keeping with the tone of this four-part post, the ever-brilliant Onion tells us - the rich people - what to do in order to become more sustainable:

"PROVIDENCE, RI—Redefining the necessary adjustments required to address the accelerated pace of the growing global environmental crisis, a report published Wednesday by researchers at Brown University concluded that a single individual who wishes to do their part to stop climate change must remove 40,000 cars from public roadways and revive 20 square miles of coral reef. “As long as everyone on the planet intensifies their efforts by personally clearing 6.5 tons of plastic from the ocean, installing 7,000 solar panels in their community, and cutting back their use of fresh water by 300 million gallons, the human race may still have a shot at slowing climate change,” said atmospheric scientist Dr. Lauren Moffat, who further noted that each person on the planet would also ideally commit to saving at least three species from extinction every month while simultaneously working to reduce the world’s population by 1.3 billion in order to forestall global environmental collapse. “Some believe it may be too late to reverse the damage humans have done to our planet, but individual change can start with something as small as picking up four tons of garbage every day. At this point, it’s a cultural imperative for everyone to pitch in by performing small but measurable tasks—such as replacing 150 hectares of industrial buildings with hardwood forests in every U.S. city—if we want to stall the meteoric rise in global temperatures for a few more years.” Moffat added that reversing climate change can be as simple as removing every single car from the road or perfecting cold fusion."

OK, scientifically speaking, I may have some beef with the Onion, but in general they are soo correct. Except that their population reduction goal is way too small, and personal water use too high.

Not to be outdone by the Onion, the Guardian proclaimed that

"The UK’s biggest carbon capture project will soon block thousands of tonnes of factory emissions from contributing to the climate crisis, by using them to help make the chemicals found in antacid, eyedrops and Pot Noodle. Within two years a chemical plant in Cheshire could keep 40,000 tonnes of carbon from the air every year, or the equivalent of removing 22,000 cars from the UK’s roads. ..."

This real project will deliver roughly half of the personal goal set out by the Onion. We live in a world in which comedians tell the scientifically defensible truth, and the serious, independent media seem to suffer from acute meningitis. And so many others just want to manipulate us, truth be damned. Are we still laughing?

On a more serious note, the Houston Chronicle published this analysis quoting the same Mr. Dale:

"An economist with European oil major BP recently concluded an unexpected jump in global energy demand last year largely was due to a rise in the number of very hot and very cold days in some of the world’s most populated areas, including the United States, driving up consumption of power and heating fuels — and the carbon emissions that most of the world’s governments are racing to reduce “As they reach for the switch of the heater or air conditioner, energy consumption goes up,” Spencer Dale, group chief economist at BP, said at an event at the Washington think tank Atlantic Council earlier this month. “If there’s a link between the growing level of carbon in the atmosphere leading to the weather effects we saw last year that will signal the beginning of a more worrying, vicious cycle where increasing levels of carbon lead to more extreme weather patterns, which in turn lead to greater growth in energy and carbon.” Climate change and the global effort to combat it generally have been perceived as a threat to Texas’s sprawling oil and gas sector and other industries that produce large volumes of carbon dioxide. But BP’s analysis suggests at least in the short term, a warming planet could increase demand for fossil fuels."

I'll add that this "short term" could last for several decades, unless a major rearrangement of the status quo happens real fast. And we cannot afford several decades of annual increases of GHG emissions around the world.

Figure 3. Petawatt hours (1 peta = 1000 tera = 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts) of electricity produced from all sources (red curve) and solar PV + wind turbines. As you can see, the contribution of "renewable electricity" is visible, but hardly sufficient to drive the Green New Deal even in Sector 1 of the global economy. I have put "renewable electricity" in quotes to stress that the solar PV arrays and wind turbines are machines that repeatedly produce electricity for 20-30 years, after which time they must be replaced, if it is still possible in the greener simplified economy with much less power throughput.

In conclusion, paraphrasing somewhat a recent email from David Hughes: "An increase of renewable power did account for 33% of the increase in electricity consumption in 2018 (Sector 1, please read Part III), but renewables haven’t actually reduced non-renewable consumption. Unfortunately, that still leaves the 84% of delivered power that is non-electric (Sectors 2-4 of the global economy). And down the road when we all drive electric cars and fly in electric planes with our food delivered by electric drones, and create hydrogen via electrolysis for fuel to colonize Mars the annual increases are going to get larger." I would say many-fold larger. Did I mention the stupid lemmings stumbling in the dark?

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