29 May, 2011
The Archdruid Report

ABSTRACT: Despite four decades of detailed warnings, industrial civilization has failed to turn aside from self-destructive policies of exponential growth and dependence on nonrenewable resources. At this point, stark limits of time and resources as well as a failure of political will make attempts to prevent the fall of industrial society an exercise in futility. Individuals, small groups, and communities can still prepare for the approaching crises by mastering low-tech survival skills now to lay foundations for a sustainable society in the future.

I. The Closed Window of Opportunity

In 1972, the Club of Rome’s path-breaking study The Limits to Growth(1) sent shockwaves around the world. At a time when politicians and pundits across the political spectrum argued that infinite economic growth was not only possible but desirable, The Limits to Growth showed that infinite growth on a finite planet was a recipe for disaster. They predicted that depletion of vital resources and increasing impacts from pollution would break the back of the global economy, leading to industrial collapse and massive die-off in the first half of the twenty-first century. Further studies(2) over the next few decades confirmed and expanded the warning, while economists and energy scientists showed that a sustainable steady-state economy was in reach if the process started at once.(3)

After half-hearted efforts sparked by the oil shortages of the 1970s, the industrial nations returned to business as usual. Alternative energy sources and proposals for a transition to sustainability withered on the vine. Meanwhile global population, rates of energy use, and pollution soared while resources dwindled. In 1992, twenty years after the original Club of Rome study, the same team ran their computer models again with newer and more complete data.(4) What they found confirmed the worst fears of ecologists and resource economists: the industrial world was in overshoot.

Among ecologists, “overshoot” describes a situation where a population of living things has outgrown its environment and is damaging the resource base that supports it.(5) As a population in overshoot expands further and increases its demands on its resource base, the resource base shrinks, cutting into its ability to support the population. Sooner or later rising demand collides with declining resources. The inevitable result is die-off.

The Club of Rome team twisted their computer models nearly to the breaking point to find a plan of action that would avert catastrophe if it was adopted immediately. The resulting plan was politically impossible – it would have required the citizens of the United States to accept Third World living standards – and it never reached the stage of public discussion. Even such feeble measures as the Kyoto greenhouse gas accords failed to win global support, and the dubious Republican “victory” in the 2000 presidential election made any attempt to face the looming future a dead issue until 2005 at the very earliest.

The implications of this delay have rarely been understood or accepted, even by those aware of the approaching crisis. Environmental activists still present schemes for making the transition to a steady state economy as though the industrial world had time to implement them. Yet in 1992, the “Limits to Growth” team warned that if the industrialized world did not launch a massive program to achieve sustainability within a few years, the chance to prevent industrial collapse and dieoff would have been missed.(6) Twelve years have passed since that final warning, and once again nothing has been done.

The hard reality of our situation is that the window of opportunity for a controlled transition to sustainability is past. Depletion of global oil reserves (the so-called “Peak Oil” problem) and global warming are only two aspects of a sprawling crisis that already affects every corner of the globe. The limits to growth are no longer a problem for the future. We are facing them now.

II. The Future Mirrored in the Past

The original “Limits to Growth” study provides a model for our future that bears careful study. Its most crucial and least appreciated prediction is that industrial collapse is an extended process, not an overnight catastrophe of the sort beloved by Hollywood scriptwriters. In simple terms, industrial society has to supply soaring needs from a shrinking resource base. As population rises, more people have to be fed, clothed, and housed; as production increases, more factories and infrastructure have to be built, maintained, and replaced; as the global environment suffers, droughts, crop failures, emerging infectious diseases, and rising sea levels all have economic impacts to be countered.

All these require ever-increasing resource use, but as resources are depleted, the cost of finding and extracting them becomes another burden on the economy. Worse, geological and/or environmental factors set inescapable upper limits on many resources. There is only so much oil in the ground, for example, and the faster you pump, the sooner you run dry. Forced to produce goods and services for immediate needs, forced to maintain and replace factories and infrastructure, to deal with impacts from environmental degradation, and subsidize a dwindling resource base all at once, industrial society is caught in a trap it can’t escape. It can’t do all of these things at once, and yet it can’t stop doing any of them without going under.

The result is a rolling collapse extended over decades. As the economy falters, the shrinking pie of industrial production has to be cut into ever narrower wedges, divided between keeping the work force fed, clothed, and housed; maintaining and replacing economic capital and infrastructure; dealing with the immediate economic impact of environmental degradation; and struggling to keep oil and other resources flowing. Any shortfall in any of these imposes bottlenecks on the whole economy and makes the pie shrink further. Industrial production slumps and the core systems of the industrial economy start coming unglued: energy distribution networks fail, financial systems disintegrate, transport falters, national governments come apart. Finally population dieoff begins as the wrecked industrial system no longer produces enough to meet even the most basic human needs. The process ends with impoverished survivors a century from now scratching out a meager living amid the crumbling ruins of a once-great civilization.

This scenario makes a shocking contrast to the cozy fantasies of perpetual progress most people cherish. Those who study history, on the other hand, will find it much more familiar. The same process has happened dozens of times before, and our present predicament can best be understood by paying attention to the past.

The most crucial of these lessons is that all civilizations fall. As Joseph Tainter points out in his essential book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” this is one of the most predictable things about them.(7) Our civilization is larger and better equipped with gadgets, but it still faces the same fate as Nineveh and Tyre. Like the inhabitants of Rome at the beginning of the fifth century, or the people of the Mayan city of Tikal at the dawn of the tenth, we happen to be living in the early stages of this terrible but natural process. The crisis we face is no supernatural event, nor an instant catastrophe of the Hollywood sort. As the saying has it, it’s not the end of the world – just the end of one more human civilization that failed to notice environmental limits, and crashed as a result.

Another crucial lesson is that the common notion of holing up in a cabin in the hills with stockpiled food and enough firearms to outfit a Panzer division is a Hollywood fantasy, not a realistic response. It takes time for a civilization to come apart, and the process is like rolling down a slope, not like falling off a cliff. We face a future of shortages, economic crises, disintegrating infrastructure, and collapsing public health, stretched out over a period of decades. A few years of stored food and an assortment of high-tech paramilitary gear are hopelessly inadequate preparations in the face of this reality.

Stockpiles of precious metals, another common hedge against collapse, are even more useless. All the gold in the world means nothing unless people value it enough to trade scarce resources for it, and if they value it that much in the postindustrial future, your chances of surviving long enough to enjoy it are not good. Archeologists in Britain every few years turn up hoards of gold and silver hidden away by wealthy Romans as the empire fell around them. The fact that the hoards are undisturbed suggests that their owners did not survive long enough to enjoy them.

A useful way to think of the approaching crisis is to imagine that someday soon you will be put on a boat, taken to some primitive corner of the world far from industrial society, and left there for the rest of your life. You can take anything you want with you, but the place you are going is inhabited, and if your only value consists of the things you have stockpiled, plenty of people will be interested in removing you and enjoying your stockpile themselves. In the postindustrial dark age, where all of us who survive the next decade or so will be spending the rest of our lives, the same rules apply.

III. The Problem with Progress

Many people come out of school thinking of civilization as some vague assemblage of art, literature, buildings, and government. At its core, though, a civilization is a system for producing and distributing goods and services. Roman civilization included not only temples and emperors but also grain markets, aqueducts, roads, and soldiers. When Rome fell, the population crash that followed was not caused by a shortage of temples. It happened because grain no longer reached the markets, goods no longer traveled over the roads, and legionaries no longer kept barbarians on the other side of the frontier.

The present situation is even more extreme. Most people in the developed world have never had to feed, clothe, house, or protect themselves with their own hands, and have only the vaguest notions about how to do so. They rely for every necessity of life on the industrial economy. Even the most basic requirements of life are tied to the industrial system; how many people nowadays can light a fire without matches or a butane lighter from some distant factory? The skills necessary to get by in a non-industrial society, skills that were still common knowledge a century ago, have been all but lost throughout the developed world.

This disastrous situation results from the modern obsession with progress. When a new technology is introduced, the older technology it replaces ends up in the trash heap. Since new technologies almost always demand more resources, use more energy, and include more complexity than their older equivalents, each step on the path of progress has made people more dependent on the industrial system and more vulnerable to its collapse. Compare a slide rule with a pocket calculator. People in the resource-poor world of the future will have a much easier time fabricating slide rules than pocket calculators. Unfortunately only a few retirees today still know how to use slide rules, and books on how to make and use them have long since been purged from library shelves. Even basic math skills are being lost as schoolchildren punch buttons instead of learning multiplication tables. Will our descendants have to rediscover mathematics all over again, reinventing addition by experimenting with pebbles in the dust? The possibility can’t be completely dismissed.

For “slide rules” and “calculators” in the example just given, insert almost any piece of older technology and its more recent replacement. As we’ve climbed the ladder of progress, we’ve kicked each rung to pieces as we reached the next. Now we’ve run out of rungs, and the one holding us up is cracking beneath our weight. If it gives way, there’s nothing to break our fall this side of the ground.

Once the problem is put in these terms, the core strategy of response is obvious. If industrial civilization faces inevitable collapse, the crucial step that must be taken now is the rediscovery and deployment of non-industrial means of survival. A few critical skills have already been preserved or rediscovered and passed on in this way; consider the case of the organic agriculture movement, which has evolved efficient, sustainable methods of growing food without petrochemicals using human muscle as the only energy source, producing yields exceeding those of modern industrial farming. Using such methods, a spare but nutritionally complete diet for one person for one year can be raised on less than 1000 square feet of soil.(8) Unfortunately only a small minority of farmers and a somewhat larger fraction of home gardeners practice these essential skills.

The same is true of many other non-industrial skills. One expert estimated recently that fewer than 500 people in North America can reliably start a fire with a hand drill, the simplest and most readily available of “primitive” fire-starting methods.(9) Black powder flintlocks, the only firearms that will still work when the high-tech ammunition runs out and today’s assault rifles become tomorrow’s awkwardly shaped clubs, are the province of a small network of hobbyists and historical reenactment fans. If these and other effective technologies are to be passed on to the future, this has to change.

IV. Building the Future from the Grassroots Up

Most proposals for dealing with the approaching crisis of industrial civilization take a top-down approach, offering grandiose plans for huge programs to retool the entire industrial world at once. As shown above, it is too late for that approach, even if the political will to accomplish it existed — which it clearly does not. But an alternative grassroots approach remains possible.

What would a grassroots approach to the coming crisis look like? It would begin with individuals learning the skills needed to build a sustainable society within the shell of the collapsing industrial system. These people would revive the basic skills of postindustrial survival, learning how to light a fire, grow a garden, treat an illness, and fight off an assault without any help from the industrial system, using simple hand tools and the capacities of their own bodies and minds. These skills would be practiced and mastered, not merely learned intellectually, so they could be used and taught to others at a moment’s notice.

Each person would then learn some specialized non-industrial skill. The list of potential skills is limited only by the needs, wants, and resources of the postindustrial world. Blacksmiths and beer makers, herbalists and horse breeders, weavers and woodworkers, all fill critical economic niches once the factories shut down forever. Those who have learned such skills and can meet people’s needs will survive and prosper even in difficult times, for unlike stockpiles, which benefit only the people who have them, skills benefit everyone. History shows that even in the most lawless and brutal societies — the pirate havens of the seventeenth-century Caribbean are a classic example – people with necessary skills such as physicians, navigators, and shipwrights were protected from violence because it was in everyone’s best interests to keep them unharmed.

What gives this strategy power is that it can be done by one person acting alone and still have a positive impact. Anyone who learns the basic skills of postindustrial survival and some useful craft can survive, teach others to survive, and pass on crucial legacies to the future. As more people start learning and practicing the skills of a postindustrial economy, though, potentials expand swiftly. Once there are enough blacksmiths to keep the future supplied with iron tools, one or more of them can learn gunsmithing and prepare to arm a future community with Kentucky long rifles or the like. Once enough people know how to grow grain, brewing beer becomes a logical next step.

Many people assume that the collapse of industrial society would be followed by a reversion to the Stone Age, if not to a Mad Max fantasy of roaming raiders who somehow manage to keep eating food and firing bullets long after farms and factories are gone. It’s clear that whatever the future holds, it holds many fewer people than today’s world, and the road there won’t be easy or pleasant. Still, plenty of societies in the past achieved a high level of civilization without the benefit of industrial technology. Widespread literacy, democratic government, and a decent standard of living can be achieved without factories and fossil fuels — witness the American Republic two hundred years ago. If people prepare now, there’s no reason why the technology and lifestyles of 1800 should be out of reach for our grandchildren, and good reason to hope for a less catastrophic passage through the crises of the near future to the new dawn beyond.

NOTES

1. Meadows, D. H. et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe, 1972).

2. See especially Catton, W. R., Overshoot (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982), and Gever, J. et al., Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1986).

3. See, for example, Daly, H., Toward a Steady State Economy (San Francisco: William Freeman, 1973), and Lovins, A., Soft Energy Paths (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977).

4. Meadows, D. L. et al., Beyond the Limits (Post Hills, VT: Chelsea Green,
1992).

5. The concept of overshoot is explored in detail in Catton, op. cit.

6. Meadows, D. L. et al., op. cit.

7. Tainter, J., The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

8. See Duhon, D., One Circle (Willits, CA: Ecology Action, 1985), and Freeman, J. A., Survival Gardening (Rock Hill, SC: John’s Press, 1983).

9. Baugh, D., “The miracle of fire by friction,” in Wescott, D., ed., Primitive Technology (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs-Smith, 1999), pp. 32-33.

John Michael Greer is the author of more than twenty books on a wide range of subjects, including The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World, and the forthcoming The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old red brick mill town in the north central Appalachians, with his wife Sara

29 September, 2010
CommonDreams.org

The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage, so in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.

Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? This premise is put forward and supported by those who would benefit financially if their “solution” were implemented. Corporations peddle their high technology genetically engineered seed and chemical packages, their genetically altered animals, always with the “promise” of feeding the world.

Politicians and philanthropists, who may mean well, jump on the high technology band wagon. Could the promise of financial support or investment return fuel their apparent compassion?

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation supposedly works to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa. While these sentiments and goals may be philanthropy at its best, some of the coalition partners have a different agenda.

One of the key players in AGRA, Monsanto, hopes to spread its genetically engineered seed throughout Africa by promising better yields, drought resistance, an end to hunger, etc. etc. Could a New Green Revolution succeed where the original Green Revolution had failed? Or was the whole concept of a Green Revolution a pig in a poke to begin with?

Monsanto giving free seed to poor small holder farmers sounds great, or are they just setting the hook? Remember, next year those farmers will have to buy their seed. Interesting to note that the Gates Foundation purchased $23.1 million worth of Monsanto stock in the second quarter of 2010. Do they also see the food crisis in Africa as a potential to turn a nice profit? Every corporation has one overriding interest— self-interest, but surely not charitable foundations?

Food shortages are seldom about a lack of food, there is plenty of food in the world, the shortages occur because of the inability to get food where it is needed and the inability of the hungry to afford it. These two problems are principally caused by, as Francis Moore Lappe’ put it, a lack of justice. There are also ethical considerations, a higher value should be placed on people than on corporate profit, this must be at the forefront, not an afterthought.

In 2008, there were shortages of food, in some places, for some people. There was never a shortage of food in 2008 on a global basis, nor is there currently. True, some countries, in Africa for example, do not have enough food where it is needed, yet people with money have their fill no matter where they live. Poverty and inequality cause hunger.

The current food riots in Mozambique were a result of increased wheat prices on the world market. The UN Food and Agriculture organization, (FAO) estimates the world is on course to the third largest wheat harvest in history, so increasing wheat prices were not caused by actual shortages, but rather by speculation on the price of wheat in the international market.

While millions of people go hungry in India, thousands of kilos of grain rot in storage. Unable to afford the grain, the hungry depend on the government to distribute food. Apparently that’s not going so well.

Not everyone living in a poor country goes hungry, those with money eat. Not everyone living in rich country is well fed, those without money go hungry. We in the US are said to have the safest and most abundant food supply in the world, yet even here, surrounded by an over abundance of food, there are plenty of hungry people and their numbers are growing. Do we too have a food crisis, concurrent with an obesity crisis?

Why is there widespread hunger? Is food a right? Is profit taking through speculation that drives food prices out of the reach of the poor a right? Is pushing high technology agriculture on an entire continent at that could feed itself a (corporate) right?

In developing countries, those with hunger and poor food distribution, the small farmers, most of whom are women, have little say in agricultural policy. The framework of international trade and the rules imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on developing countries, places emphasis on crops for export, not crops for feeding a hungry population.

Despite what we hope are the best intentions of the Gates Foundation, a New Green Revolution based on genetically engineered crops, imported fertilizer and government imposed agricultural policy will not feed the world. Women, not Monsanto, feed most of the worlds population, and the greatest portion of the worlds diet still relies on crops and farming systems developed and cultivated by the indigenous for centuries, systems that still work, systems that offer real promise.

The report of 400 experts from around the world, The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), is ignored by the proponents of a New Green Revolution, precisely because it shows that the best hope for ending hunger lies with local, traditional, farmer controlled agricultural production, not high tech industrial agriculture.

To feed the world, fair methods of land distribution must be considered. A fair and just food system depends on small holder farmers having access to land. The function of a just farming system is to insure that everyone gets to eat, industrial agriculture functions to insure those corporations controlling the system make a profit.

The ultimate cause of hunger is not a lack of Western agricultural technology, rather hunger results when people are not allowed to participate in a food system of their choosing. Civil wars, structural adjustment policies, inadequate distribution systems, international commodity speculation and corporate control of food from seed to table— these are the causes of hunger, the stimulus for food crises.

If the Gates Foundation is serious about ending hunger in Africa, they need to read the IAASTD report, not Monsanto’s quarterly profit report. Then they can decide how their money might best be spent.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer and activist from Wonewoc, WI and a WK Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow.

Modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world and University of Washington psychologists believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.

“We are a technological species, but we also need a deep connection with nature in our lives,” said Peter Kahn, a UW developmental psychologist and lead author of a new study exploring how humans connect with nature and technological nature.

Writing in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Kahn and two of his UW graduate students, Rachel Severson and Jolina Ruckert, look at the psychological effects of interacting with various forms of technological nature and explore humanity’s growing estrangement from nature.

The UW researchers cite earlier experiments conducted by Kahn’s laboratory, one with a plasma display “window” and several with AIBO, a robotic dog.

The plasma window study showed that people recovered better from low-level stress by looking at an actual view of nature rather than seeing the same real-time high-definition television scene displayed on a plasma window.

“What do we compare technology to? If we compare it to no nature, technological nature works pretty well. But if we compare it to actual nature, it doesn’t seem to provide as many psychological benefits,” Kahn said.

The AIBO studies showed that children were in some ways were treating the robots as other beings But compared to interacting with a real dog, their interactions with AIBO were not as social or deep.

“Robot and virtual pets are beginning to replace children’s interactions with biologically live pets,” said Ruckert. “The larger concern is that technological nature will shift the baseline of what people perceive as the full human experience of nature, and that it will contribute to what we call environmental generational amnesia.”

This concept of amnesia proposes that people believe the natural environment they encounter during childhood is the norm, against which they measure environmental degradation later in their life. The problem with this is that each generation takes that degraded condition as a non-degraded baseline and is generally oblivious of changes and damages inflicted by previous generations.

“Poor air quality is a good example of physical degradation,” said Kahn. “We can choke on the air, and some people suffer asthma, but we tend to think that’s a pretty normal part of the human condition.

“Some people get the idea on one level if they are interested in environmental issues,” said Severson. “They see the degradation, but they don’t recognize their own experience is diminished. How many people today feel a loss such as the damming of the Columbia River compared to a wild Columbia River? A lot of us have no concept of it as a wild river and don’t feel a loss.”

Kahn likened the situation to the effort to convince people that climate change is a serious challenge. But unlike climate change, the threat posed by technological nature, isn’t right in our faces.

“People might think that if technological nature is partly good that that’s good enough,” he said. “But it’s not. Because across generations what will happen is that the good enough will become the good. If we don’t change course, it will impoverish us as a species.

###

The National Science Foundation funded the research.

Reposted from the University of Washington.

Click here to view the embedded video.

WASHINGTON/LONDON/NAIROBI/DELHI – 15^th April 2008. The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse. That is the message from the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, a major new report by over 400 scientists which is launched today.

The assessment was considered by 64 governments at an intergovernmental plenary in Johannesburg last week.

The authors’ brief was to examine hunger, poverty, the environment and equity together. Professor Robert Watson Director of IAASTD said those on the margins are ill-served by the present system: “The incentives for science to address the issues that matter to the poor are weak… the poorest developing countries are net losers under most trade liberalization scenarios.”

Modern agriculture has brought significant increases in food production. But the benefits have been spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment.

It says the willingness of many people to tackle the basics of combining production, social and environmental goals is marred by “contentious political and economic stances”. One of the IAASTD co-chairs, Dr Hans Herren, explains: “Specifically, this refers to the many OECD member countries who are deeply opposed to any changes in trade regimes or subsidy systems. Without reforms here many poorer countries will have a very hard time… ”

The report has assessed that the way to meet the challenges lies in putting in place institutional, economic and legal frameworks that combine productivity with the protection and conservation of natural resources like soils, water, forests, and biodiversity while meeting production needs.

In many countries, it says, food is taken for granted, and farmers and farm workers are in many cases poorly rewarded for acting as stewards of almost a third of the Earth’s land. Investment directed toward securing the public interest in agricultural science, education and training and extension to farmers has decreased at a time when it is most needed.

The authors have assessed evidence across a wide range of knowledge that is rarely brought together. They conclude we have little time to lose if we are to change course. Continuing with current trends would exhaust our resources and put our children’s future in jeopardy.

Professor Bob Watson, Director of IAASTD said: “To argue, as we do, that continuing to focus on production alone will undermine our agricultural capital and leave us with an increasingly degraded and divided planet is to reiterate an old message. But it is a message that has not always had resonance in some parts of the world. If those with power are now willing to hear it, then we may hope for more equitable policies that do take the interests of the poor into account.”

Professor Judi Wakhungu, said “We must cooperate now, because no single institution, no single nation, no single region, can tackle this issue alone. The time is now.”

For more information visit GreenFacts.

[This is an edited transcript of a talk given to the Senior Fellows Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, March 27, 2008.]

Environmentalism and climate science

A lot of people come to the climate change issue as environmentalists. Environmentalism is diverse, but I would say that a common denominator for environmentalists is that they are concerned with the negative impact of human activity on the ecosystems that sustain life on the planet and want to make changes that reduce that negative impact – or have no impact or positive impact. But having agreed on this, there are many different views within environmentalism. Some environmentalists want to protect nature from humans, some want to protect nature for humans. Some think technology is to blame, others think technology could be the solution.

Environmentalists sometimes talk about a “triple bottom line”. That’s ‘social, economic, and environmental’. The ‘social’ part is ‘social justice’, it’s a concern for people. People concerned about social justice usually believe that equality is a value society should strive for, especially in the economy. They are critical, skeptical, of the claims of those in power or authority.

I am also concerned about climate change as a scientist. The scientists who have developed our understanding of climate change are mostly atmospheric physicists. I studied atmospheric physics as an undergraduate, but now I work in forestry, and like most scientists, I work in a fairly specialized area. My work is not about how climate change occurs in the atmosphere, but on the impact of that change on forests, specifically on forest fires in the Canadian province of Ontario. I will elaborate on climate science below, but I want to say that working in this field, I have had the experience of most scientists. We use the established models from our field of application (in my case, models about how fast fires spread in different forest types and under different weather conditions). We feed these models some possible, and likely scenarios for what the weather will be like if things continue along present trends. We look at the results and are shocked by how much worse things are than we could have predicted. That’s the experience of modelers like me. The scientists who gather the data, who are watching the polar ice or the temperature trends, are similarly shocked every time they look at the new data.

I think that having all three of these lenses: an environmentalist one, a ‘social’ one, and a scientific one, is very useful in looking at the climate problem and possible solutions. It takes a bit of work to bring these views together, but in the end you get a good picture of the situation and what has to be done about it.

Science and environmentalism

Let me start by talking a little more about the science. I thought Al Gore’s film was a good and straightforward presentation of the science. Some of the best books on solutions to the problem – George Monbiot’s Heat, for example – don’t get into the science very much. They assume it, or they accept the authority of the scientific consensus. Should we? There are legitimate questions about this. Leftists raise legitimate questions about this. Even though not all questions about the science of climate change are legitimate or well-meaning or raised by people with decent values, it is worth spending some time taking them on.

A lot of the controversies about climate science are artificial. They are manufactured by petroleum-industry funded lobbyists who have gotten visibility and equal time in the media despite not having scientific credibility. Monbiot, who is a journalist and an expert at the kind of investigation that exposes these links, exposes these ‘denialists’ in his book, Heat. Here is a problem though, for someone who is concerned about social justice and critical of the media. We might believe there is an establishment that uses mechanisms like editorial review, self-censorship, and social sanction, to exercise a subtle control over what information gets out and what information gets emphasized in the public conversation. Is the scientific establishment any different, a socially critical person could ask? And is the current media interest in climate change not a sign that climate change isn’t really a problem, since we know the system tells lies? This is the argument made by a pair of (frequently very perceptive) social critics from my part of the world, in Canada, and by Alexander Cockburn here in the US. To answer this argument requires some quick discussion on what science is.

To repeat the problem: we are all told that we face a very serious threat to human civilization in the form of global warming caused by our emission of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels. We have to act against this threat, and we have to act quickly. We are told this by ‘science’. But why should we believe ‘science’? Who is behind it? Is it a network of university-trained elite professionals, funded by government and private sector grants, a gentlemen’s club that protects its interests and promotes ideas that will further those interests?

Of course it is. Some of the better known philosophy of science, like Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, shows how most scientists in most times work within a set of assumptions – what he calls a paradigm – and that science advances when one or more of these assumptions is shown not to hold. Those scientists who work within a paradigm are doing what Kuhn calls “normal science”, and there is certainly lots of “normal science” going on in climate research. It’s humble stuff. Kuhn shows how “normal science” defends itself by excluding new ideas and that new ideas only advance when old generations die off. But it gets worse even than that. Physicist Jeff Schmidt wrote a book, Disciplined Minds, that gives just such an analysis. In that book he shows how graduate and professional school, even in the most “disinterested” of sciences like physics, train people to think creatively, but inside a box. And still worse, consider how much of research activity is ultimately intended for military ends. Or how much pharmaceutical research and medical research has been corrupted by the interests of drug companies. And this doesn’t even get into the social sciences, like economics, which produce arguments in favor of inequality and barbarism and present them with scientific authority. So yes, science is an establishment.

But it is also something else. In Einstein’s words, science is the refinement of everyday thinking. To me, science is applying certain human capacities – combining consistent logic and reasoning, creative leaps and then systematic testing, attention to evidence – to the world. It is something everyone can do and it is cumulative, maybe the most cumulative of our activities because it is intrinsically based on building on what others have done. The promise of science is that we can, if we pay attention, discipline ourselves to think clearly, and work and think with others, and give ourselves time and make the effort, come to some understanding about the world. It will be tentative, it will be subject to change, but we will be able to have some mental understanding, some mental model, that corresponds to reality. What I like about science, in other words, is that it doesn’t depend on authority. It is about not accepting things on authority. It’s actually when we don’t use our scientific capacities that we are left with nothing but some external authority to tell us how to understand the world.

Of course, ‘science’ itself is presented as just such an authority. Psychologists, doctors, government- and university-employed scientists constantly make public claims invoking the authority of science. What they do not do enough is actually open the process up: talk about the evidence behind the claims, the methods they use, the assumptions they make. They don’t present science as the refinement of everyday thinking and help people refine their thinking because that would actually reduce their authority. If you reject their claims, you can be accused of being ‘unscientific’. Who wants to be ‘unscientific’? Outrageous claims made by people with an air of authority can be used to make something seem ‘controversial’. If the process were more open, people could be invited to look at the methods, the evidence, the assumptions, and decide how credible a claim is. Because some things, some fields, are better understood than others.

Atmospheric science involves mostly physics and chemistry. Fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and spectroscopy are well-developed, well-understood fields with experimental backing and very credible theory. The atmosphere is complex, but it is a much more narrow field of inquiry than the ecosystems it interacts with, because adding life to the mix introduces something qualitatively different. Add human society and economy into this and you get another qualitative change. And in general, the more narrow the field of inquiry, the deeper the understanding. Social sciences like economics are intrinsically incredibly broad, and the results are therefore shallow if they’re valid. Economists try to narrow their inquiries by making assumptions, but this often abstracts out very important elements of the real world and makes their results useless for the real world.

I am arguing that atmospheric science, the science that tells us the climate is changing, is a field where more precise and accurate claims can be made than in economics. But the public discussion is presented as if the opposite were true. As if our society had to weigh the ‘certain’ costs of dealing with climate change against the ‘uncertain’ threats from it.

It’s true that climate science is uncertain. But all science is uncertain, and climate science claims are less uncertain than economics claims. It has a much better record of prediction. And uncertainty cuts both ways: the ‘uncertainty’ about the impacts of climate change mean that things could be much worse than we think. A Danish statistician named Bjorn Lomborg wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. He sometimes shows some interesting ‘skepticism’ about environmentalist claims, but he doesn’t show skepticism about claims about economic activity, or cost, or growth, or markets. These assumptions are accepted so completely that we don’t even know they are assumptions. But this is the opposite of a skeptical attitude or a scientific attitude. Science advances when people discover assumptions they didn’t know they held.

Science is work, it takes time, and because it is cumulative, there are many pieces that build on others. What the denialists do is take one piece out of context and present some (usually dubious) counter-evidence or simple argument. They are usually wrong about the pieces they take on, but they also try to use some small piece to discredit the entire building. In a short time, it’s impossible to present all of climate science. If I had a full hour I could not do better than Al Gore did in his film. But let me just present some elements of the science as it was taught to me. You can, and should, look into it further if you are interested. If you do, I think you will be able to convince yourself of its validity.

The climate story

The basic argument is this. The energy to warm the earth comes from the sun’s radiation. Some of that is reflected straight back into space by clouds or ice (the reflectivity of the earth is called its albedo). Some of it reaches the earth’s surface, raises the earth’s temperature, and radiates out as heat. Some of that heat is, in turn, trapped by the atmosphere and returned again to the earth’s surface. How much heat is trapped by the atmosphere depends on the composition of the atmosphere – different chemicals have different characteristic frequencies that they emit at. CO2 emits heat. So does CH4 (methane) and some other important gases. The atmosphere has increasing amounts of these gases because we keep burning fossil fuels. The gases eventually cycle out of the atmosphere and back to the surface of the earth, when plants grow for example, but we are emitting into the atmosphere much more and much faster than the carbon is returned to the earth’s surface. The result is more heat in the atmosphere and higher temperatures, which, because the atmosphere and the climate are complex systems, have effects on everything else.

There is a carbon cycle. Carbon travels in a kind of equilibrium between the ocean and the earth’s surface, plants and animals on that surface, into the atmosphere, and back. The processes that drive the carbon cycle have a lot to do with life. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere as they use energy from the sun to grow. Animals release carbon into the atmosphere when they breathe. When organisms die, a lot of the carbon in their bodies is released. But it can also be stored. Coal is ancient plant matter that has been stored. Oil is ancient plankton, from the ocean. These fossil fuels can be thought of as dead, trapped, concentrated solar energy.

Flannery quotes a scientist named Jeffrey Dukes at the University of Utah who concluded that 100 tonnes of ancient plant life is required to create four litres of petrol (about 1 gallon). Growing that much plant life takes a lot of years of sunlight. The equivalent of about 1 year’s fossil fuel use (1997) globally is 422 years of sunlight.

It takes a remarkable process to make oil, a really remarkable sequence of events over thousands of years. It is such a chance event that I want to describe it in detail. This is Flannery (pg. 76):

The geological process for making oil is as precise as a recipe for making soufflé. First the sediments containing the phytoplankton must be buried and compressed by other rocks. Then, the absolute right conditions are needed to squeeze the organic matter out of the source rocks and to transfer it, through cracks and crevices, into a suitable storage stratum. This stratum must be porous, but above it must lie a layer of fine-grained, impervious rock, strong enough to withstand the pressures that [would shoot] the oil and gas into the air… and thick enough to forbid escape. In addition, the waxes and fats that are the source of oil need to be ‘cooked’ at between 100-135 degrees Celsius [water boils at 100 C] for millions of years. If the temperature ever exceeds these limits, all that will result is gas, or else the hydrocarbons will be lost entirely. As there is no cook tending the great subterranean ovens wherein oil is forged, the creation of oil reserves is the result of pure chance – the right rocks being cooked in the right way for the correct time, usually in a dome-shaped structure where a ‘crust’ overlies a porous oil-rich level that prevents the oil’s escape.

It can’t be replicated, which means our economy, based on it, is inherently unsustainable. But even if it could, our economy is also based on taking carbon that has been out of circulation, stored in the ground, for millions of years, and putting it into the atmosphere.

This changes the carbon cycle. To have an ecological world-view is to understand that everything is connected to everything else. So changing the carbon cycle changes the atmospheric temperature. It changes the hydrological cycle. It changes habitats for wildlife. It changes agricultural potentials and the amount and type of life different ecosystems can support. It combines with all the other kinds of toxins we release into the atmosphere, water, and land in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways. These changes are making parts of the earth, which are habitat for diverse life forms, unlivable. They are making parts of the world where millions of people live, unlivable. Let me not make the case for how serious the problem is, here. I refer you to Gore, or Flannery, or just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s very conservative estimates. This presentation assumes you think the problem is very serious and must be solved quickly. The solution has an easy and a hard part.

The easy part of the solution

Two scientists from Princeton, Pacala and Socolow, published a paper in Science 2004 called “stabilization wedges”. The abstract of the paper is worth reading in full.

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50 years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

The elements that Pacala and Socolow present include what I call non-solutions like ethanol fuel and nuclear power as well as things that have to happen like reducing reliance on cars and stopping deforestation. Ethanol is already contributing to rising food prices and hunger in Latin America. By taking agricultural land out of circulation to produce corn for ethanol that then goes in a car, we’re still emitting CO2. But we’re also feeding cars instead of people. And the energetics of ethanol are scandalous. Filling an SUV’s tank takes enough corn to feed a person for a year. The food system and farming is dysfunctional as it is, distorted because of energy inputs and ecological destructiveness, actually. But we are hoping to stabilize the climate in time to prevent millions from dying and being displaced because of floods and drought. We don’t want to do it in a way that threatens millions with mass starvation. Nuclear power has other problems. If there is no safe way of disposing of it, if there are small risks of unthinkably catastrophic events, it is irrational to keep incrementing these risks with new plants.

Another non-solution is carbon offsets. The idea here is that if you are going to emit CO2, you can purchase “offsets” somewhere else so that you can end up with a net carbon balance of zero – your money is taking up as much carbon as it is putting out. Most of these “offsets” have to do with planting trees. But trees need to be planted anyway, and there are a whole number of reasons why a tree should or shouldn’t be planted in a certain place. Is that agricultural land? Is it well-watered enough for growing trees? Is the tree useful habitat for wildlife, or would some other land use in that area make better habitat? Even more than this, forests have an equilibrium role in the carbon cycle. When they grow, they take carbon out of the atmosphere. When they die, they release it. Burning fossil fuels is not an equilibrium activity – we are taking carbon that’s been buried for millions of years, out of circulation for millions of years, and putting it into the atmosphere. Forests cannot be used as a substitute for reducing emissions.

George Monbiot’s book, Heat, goes much deeper than Pacala and Socolow do in their paper, and he also rejects biofuels. He starts by saying, if it is technologically impossible to have an advanced, comfortable civilization and a stable climate, then we are probably doomed, because it will be impossible to generate the kind of social movement necessary to stabilize the climate if people have to mobilize to ruin their own lives. But then he does a very careful evaluation of the technologies and some evaluation of political feasibility, and shows that it is technologically possible to have pretty much all of the comforts and conveniences we are used to and still have a stable climate – all the conveniences except mass commercial flight. Which, obviously, since I’m convinced by Monbiot, makes me feel somewhat silly for flying here from Toronto to do this talk. Perhaps next time I’ll visit by videoconference?

I should say that, think that, Pacala and Socolow are basically right: the scientific, technological, and industrial knowledge exists to solve this problem. But every solution that is proposed needs to be evaluated for its ecological, social, and ethical implications. The test for any technology, any institution, any idea, any action, ought to be – what will this do to people, what will it do to nature, does it protect or destroy life?

One technology that I think does pass this test is a type of idea environmentalists are always raising. I’m presenting it as a technology following George Monbiot. The simple “technology” is called leaving the fossil fuels in the ground. It sounds crazy, but it would be very good for the atmosphere. It would also be good for society – if we could learn that not everything has to be viewed as a resource and not every resource has to be harvested, that would be positive. Since most people are not getting the benefits anyway, and since most people are being harmed, this technology isn’t one that harms the poor more than the rich. So, instead of society mobilizing its people, its brains, its institutions, to take resources and burn them, we could redirect our efforts to figuring out how not to do this. And how to do what we really want without doing this.

The hard part of the solution

It would seem, then, that the path is reasonably clear. We live in a democracy, after all. So we convince enough people that the climate problem is serious. We demonstrate that the technology is available to solve it without sacrificing most comforts and conveniences. Then we convince our leaders to make the necessary technological and policy changes, and if they don’t, then we elect leaders who do. Some who make decisions for the economy, through businesses they own or manage aren’t elected, it’s true. But they, too, can be convinced by rational arguments. Business leaders meet with environmentalists regularly. British Petroleum is getting ‘beyond petroleum’, they just call themselves BP now so you can wonder whether they’re British or Beyond and whether Petroleum really has anything to do with it any more. If parts of the planet become uninhabitable and there are a series of catastrophes for nature and people, that would be bad for business, right? So they will come along with the right arguments and proposals?

I wish it was true, but I don’t think that’s how things work. The basic nature of the system we live in isn’t democratic. We are ruled by a system that takes the elements of life – nature, land, water, energy, cultures and peoples – and destroys them to turn them into money and power. The system has its own logic. If you are a player in it, you have to follow that logic. You have to take what you can grab – for most people it’s their own lives – and turn it into money. If you’re excluded from it, you’re excluded from the very means of survival. If you’re excluded and you try to get the means of survival for yourself or your loved ones outside of the system, you will be met with violence. If you’re in this system you cannot think about whether it is killing the planet, whether the whole system is basically leading us to suicide. Even if you know that’s true, so long as it would make you more money to ignore it, you will never be able to compete with someone who does ignore it unless you do. And so much of our world is based on competition: between individuals, between businesses, and between countries. Economic competition, political competition, military competition.

You have probably figured out that I am talking about capitalism. It is a system based on profits, accumulation, competition, private property, class hierarchy, the destruction of nature, backed up by force. It coexists with a culture that has what environmentalist writer Derrick Jensen calls a ‘death urge’ – a culture that hates life, that hates women, that hates indigenous peoples and encourages hatred of anyone below on the rungs of a hierarchical society.

It is leading us to a disastrous future. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine is about what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’. Those in power can use disasters to reconfigure the institutions of a country to make it easier to make profits. When they don’t have a disaster to hand, they can create one. One of her chapters is about Iraq. Another is about New Orleans. The book could be a picture of a nightmare future, except that it is the present. But a future along these lines can only get uglier.

Neither the climate problem nor running out of fossil fuels can be ignored. They will be dealt with. But they will be dealt with according to the principles of disaster capitalism. Yes, parts of the world will become uninhabitable. Other parts of the world will be habitable. These will be reserved for elites. Those who live there now will be displaced, by force. Yes, there will be a scarcity of energy, food, water, land. There will be some of these resources, and they will be reserved for elites. They will be used by elites to keep themselves secure from the rest. Before petroleum runs out, it will probably be reserved for exclusive use by the military. This will happen until the resources are run down and the basis for life is destroyed. Warning elites of this collapse won’t help – they know they are the only ones who have a chance of surviving it.

We know this will happen. It has happened. It is happening. And despite the ultimately suicidal nature of the system, it will defend itself against attempts to change it. That is why, as destructive as competition is, I don’t think we can completely discard it. For a stabilized atmosphere, we are going to have to defeat some people and some institutions. Success in that competition will require all the tools of social change: organization, communication, demonstration, and actions of all kinds, at least some of which will be new and correspond to the time and place. Everybody has to join that, and we have to win it.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and activist. He teaches at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. Read other articles by Justin, or visit Justin’s website.

Reprinted from http://www.dissidentvoice.org/

The new technology, which is making its way into products ranging from food storage containers to computers, is seen differently among scientists than the general public, with scientists appearing to be more concerned in some areas. But in broad categories of risk versus reward both groups seem to agree – go slow and be cautious of the technology’s deleterious effects. What may be most useful in the future are good, trusted communicators.

These are among the findings of a recent survey that will be presented by Elizabeth Corley, an Arizona State University assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs, on Feb. 15 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.

The report is based on a national telephone survey of American households and a sampling of 363 leading U.S. nanotechnology scientists and engineers. It reveals that scientists who have the most insight into a technology with enormous potential — and that is already emerging in hundreds of products — are unsure what health and environmental problems might be posed by the technology.

Findings of the report, first published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (Nov. 25, 2007), were in stark contrast to controversies sparked by the advent of major past technologies, such as nuclear power and genetically modified foods, which scientists perceived as having lower risks than did the public.

Nanotechnology is based on science’s newfound ability to manipulate matter at the smallest scale, on the order of molecules and atoms. The field has enormous potential to develop applications ranging from new antimicrobial materials and tiny probes to sample individual cells in human patients, to vastly more powerful computers and lasers. Already, products with nanotechnology built in include golf clubs, tennis rackets and antimicrobial food storage containers.

At the root of the information disconnect, said Corley, who conducted the survey with Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is that nanotechnology is only now starting to emerge on the nation’s policy agenda. Amplifying the problem is that the news media have not paid much attention to nanotechnology and its implications.

“In the long run, this information disconnect could undermine public support for federal funding in certain areas of nanotechnology research, particularly in those areas that the public views as having lower levels of risk,” Corley said.

While scientists were generally optimistic about the potential benefits of nanotechnology, they expressed significantly more concern about pollution and new health problems related to the technology. Twenty percent of the scientists responding to the survey indicated a concern that new forms of nanotechnology pollution may emerge, while only 15 percent of the public thought that might be a problem. More than 30 percent of scientists expressed concern that human health may be at risk from the technology, while just 20 percent of the public held such fears.

Of more concern to the American public, according to the report, are a potential loss of privacy from tiny new surveillance devices and the loss of more U.S jobs. Those fears were less of a concern for scientists.

While divergent in some specific views, Corley said that scientists and the public seem to agree in broad terms on the rewards versus the risks of nanotech.

“Not surprisingly, scientists are more likely than the public to find nanotechnology research useful and morally acceptable,” Corley said. “Yet, scientists and the public have similar perceptions (around 17 percent) of the overall risks of nanotechnology and the need for government regulations of nanotechnology (around 40 percent).

“Our new analysis shows that despite scientists’ perceptions of high levels of benefit from nanotechnology research, they tend to agree with the public that they should pay attention to government regulations and unknown risks,” she explained.

Corley added that the survey shows university scientists are the ones thought to be most qualified to communicate the potential risks and benefits of the technology. Some 88 percent of scientists believe university scientists have the necessary expertise, while about 75 percent think that nanotech industry scientists have the required level of expertise. Yet the public is less likely to trust nanotech industry scientists. Of the three groups that the public trusts most — university scientists, consumer organizations and regulators – the only group that more than half the public trusts are university scientists.

“This is a policy relevant finding,” she added, “because, on average, university nanotech scientists have been hesitant to engage the public in this sort of discourse.”

Reprinted from Arizona State University

The study’s indicators predict that China will soon pass the United States in the critical ability to develop basic science and technology, turn those developments into products and services — and then market them to the world. Though China is often seen as just a low-cost producer of manufactured goods, the new “High Tech Indicators” study done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology clearly shows that the Asian powerhouse has much bigger aspirations.

“For the first time in nearly a century, we see leadership in basic research and the economic ability to pursue the benefits of that research — to create and market products based on research — in more than one place on the planet,” said Nils Newman, co-author of the National Science Foundation-supported study. “Since World War II, the United States has been the main driver of the global economy. Now we have a situation in which technology products are going to be appearing in the marketplace that were not developed or commercialized here. We won’t have had any involvement with them and may not even know they are coming.”

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