Summary
Discusses two approaches – scientific (pushing boundaries) and ecological (as mother nature intended) – to various environmental and humanitarian issues from the 1800s until now: climate change, global warming, food and water supply, energy. The value of this book lies in its emphasis on perspective: both approaches are right and both are wrong.
Key Takeaways
- We are products of our environment and early upbringing. We are shaped by our experiences.
- Prophets (Vogt) look at the world as finite and people as constrained by their environment.
- People need to live in smaller, more stable communities and closer to the earth.
- Ask: how can we avoid our species from overwhelming the natural systems on which we depend?
- Ideology: Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries – exceed carrying capacity – and trouble will ensue.
- Propose small-scale changes centered around the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle. Nudge people and businesses to change their habits and become more efficient
- Wizards (Borlaug) see possibilities as inexhaustible and humans as managers of the planet.
- Emphasis on personal autonomy, social and physical mobility and individual rights.
- Ask: how can we give people a better chance to thrive?
- Ideology: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. We can build a world of gleaming richness for all.
- Human ingenuity and technical prowess will carry us into a future of unbounded affluence.
- Environmental questions can be thought about in different ways. Each lens provides a different path forward.
- Conflicting arguments are correct on their own terms.
- “No wonder they disagreed so endlessly; they were talking about different things.” – Robert. L Heilbroner
- Different models with different assumptions make different projections.
- When results increase, ask yourself: are we doing better or are others around us doing worse?
- Wars are ultimately conflicts over resources. Solve the resource problem, solve the conflict.
- “People, by naming the world, transform it.” – Paulo Freire. Until something has a name, it can’t be discussed or acted upon with intent.
- Hungry people are lured by promises but may be won by deeds. Undernourished species don’t really grow; they just fight to stay alive.
- Three times a small number is still a small number. Focus efforts on areas that can best make use of improvements, not the ones of highest need.
- The odds that any one (experiment) of them will succeed may be small. But the odds that all of them will fail are equally small.
- Divergent reactions are not because people are foolish but because their circumstances have different ethical cost-benefit calculations. No one wants to expose themselves to an unknown peril that only benefits others and makes them only run the risk to be worse off.
- As we continue to find new sources of oil, the notion of peak oil seems bogus (for now) – fossil fuel supplies are effectively infinite. Anxiety about running out of oil or other fossil fuels, however, has shaped many of our actions over the past 150 years.
- Evolution has provided the human brain with tools for detecting and resolving fast-moving, clearly visible, small-scale, near-future risks. By the same token, the brain is easily overwhelmed by slow, abstract, large, long-term problems.
- The climate has a tangle of interacting feedback loops and is subject to the “butterfly effect”. Few climatological theories can be tested in traditional scientific experiments.
- Institutions fundamental to human society can be changed by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated (slavery, feminism, gay rights).
- The great value of fruitful skeptics is that they force advocates to think through these issues.
What I got out of it
Three things:
- Great historical overview of different approaches to global warming, energy, and food and water supply. What has worked, what hasn’t worked, and what we humans are currently exploring. Covers many fields: physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, and more.
- Perspective. If you properly listen to both sides of the argument, you realize there is no right or wrong – it’s all based on one’s perception. Taking a 50 to 100-year view, you notice that both approaches were necessary to get to where we are today. Similarly, both approaches can solve the problems we have today and in the future.
Note to self: one doesn’t have to exclude the other. Try as many things as possible, be patient and persistent, and a solution can always be found. Progress can be made by learning from the past AND pushing boundaries. - Changing values in society. We get frustrated with how difficult it is to change someone’s opinion…if we look at it over a short period (< 1 year). But taking a longer-term approach, it’s remarkable how our societal norms have changed over the past 50~150 years. Even the changes in <10 years are impressive.
Note to self: Don’t expect to change individuals, let alone a society, overnight. As Bill Gates says: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Anything can (and will) be changed. Patience, consistency and repetition are key.
Summary Notes
“No wonder they disagreed so endlessly; they were talking about different things.” – Robert. L Heilbroner
Prologue
Vogt laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. He argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem.
Apocalyptic environmentalism: the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet’s ecosystems.
Borlaug is the emblem of “techno-optimism” or “cornucopianism”: the view that science and technology, properly applied, can help us produce our way out of our predicament. He was the primary figure in the 1960s created “Green Revolution”.
Two perspectives: Wizards (Borlaug) and Prophets (Vogt).
Prophets look at the world as finite and people as constrained by their environment.
Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible and humans as wily managers of the planet.
Prophets: people need to live in smaller, more stable communities, closer to the earth, controlling the exploitative frenzy of the global market.
Wizards: emphasis on personal autonomy, social and physical mobility and individual rights.
Biologists tell us that all species, given the chance, overreach, overreproduce, overconsume. Inevitably, they encounter a wall, always to catastrophic effect, and usually sooner rather than later.
Different models with different assumptions make different projections.
Similarly: Look at different data and you’ll reach a different conclusion.
The rise in global demand is due to:
- Increase in human numbers
- Increase in human affluence (and maximizing economic growth)
The demand for water is constantly increasing, in large part due to the rising demand for food – almost three-quarters of global water use goes to agriculture.
One Law – State of the Species
Vogt and Borlaug had the same mission: to use the discoveries of modern science to spare Mexico from a future of poverty and environmental degradation.
Wizards want to equip the world’s occupants and ask: how can we give people a better chance to thrive?
Prophets want to protect the land and ask: how can we avoid our species from overwhelming the natural systems on which we depend?
Ecology: a holistic view that seeks to place humanity within a framework of overarching natural law. It asks: how can we best fit into the world, and not overstep our bounds?
Genetics: an effort that seeks to break organisms into their smallest components so that they can be harnessed for human benefit. It asks: how can we leapfrog natural bounds altogether?
Six lifeforms on earth (Lynn Margulis)
- Plants
- Animals
- Fungi
- Protists
- Bacteria proper
- Bacteria archaea
Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Unlike mammals, bacteria and protists can:
- Form giant super-colonies
- Reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others
- Take in genes from entirely unrelated species
- Merge into symbiotic beings
Gause’s Law: complete competitors can not coexist. Illustrated by an S-shaped curve.
All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means available. And all living creatures have a maximum reproductive rate: the greatest number of offspring they can generate in a lifetime.
Human-ness is the quality – a mix of creativity, drive and moral awareness – that transforms humans into persons.
How fire ants survive.
Evolved the ability to respond to rising water by knitting their bodies together into floating swarm-balls – workers on the outside, queen in the center – that can ride on the flood for days. Once the waters recede, colonies swarm back onto previously submerged land so rapidly that they can use the devastation to increase its range. Like criminal gangs, fire ants thrive on chaos.
The Haber-Bosch process – an artificial nitrogen fixation process – changed the chemical composition of the earth, enabled the creation of synthetic fertilizer and allowed our species to extract an additional 3 billion people’s worth of food from the same land.
Antibiotics, vaccines, disinfectants, and water-treatment plants pushed back humankind’s bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoan enemies.
Discount rate: valuing the local, concrete, and immediate over the faraway, abstract, and distant in time.
Two Men – The Prophet
Crops benefit from more nitrogen in the ground.
“As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books.” – Vladimir Nabokov
Success at any job doesn’t require training, but boundless energy and a willingness to work for free (to get skills, experience).
When results increase, ask yourself: are we doing better or are others around us doing worse? Note the difference in absolute or relative improvement.
Landscapes and the species that live on them perform useful functions: purifying water, decomposing wastes, nourishing crops, housing wildlife, regulating air temperature – which are both free to the beneficiaries and costly to replace. These are called “ecosystem services”.
Weigh economic benefits against the ecological costs.
“Readers want to be diverted, instructed, and entertained – not preached to.” – Roger Tory Peterson
“Natural ecosystems develop in a predictable pattern over time.” – Frederic Clements in Plant Succession (1916).
Each species adapts to fill a specific ecological niche. The relations among these niches are governed by the available resources – the biotic potential – and the constraints imposed by the physical setting – the environmental resistance. Biotic potential and environmental resistance are in constant tension.
When people kill off a species or destroy its habitat, they are attacking the vital organs of this superorganism (= nature). They are tipping the balance of nature, which can bring down the whole community.
Understand the (biological) rules and measure the environment, and you can comprehend the future.
The soil is the foundation of civilization and human enterprise.
Thomas Malthus’ argument:
- The human population will reproduce beyond their means of subsistence unless they are held back by practices like celibacy, later marriage or birth control.
- Reproductive urges are too strong and people will stop restricting births.
- Populations grow too large to feed.
- Disease, famine or war reduce human numbers until they are in balance with their means of subsistence again.
- The unhappy cycle begins again.
Fairfield Osborn: both the First and Second World War were set off by environmental degradation. They were resource wars.
Environmentalism is an argument that respecting the rules of nature is indispensable to having a good society and living a good life.
“People, by naming the world, transform it.” – Paulo Freire
Until something has a name, it can’t be discussed or acted upon with intent.
Carrying capacity: the weight or volume of material that can be transported by some type of vehicle.
Vogt: Carrying capacity = biotic potential – environmental resistance (C = B – E).
Unfortunately, when applied to an ecosystem, it cannot be calculated so easily.
Two ideas at the base of today’s environmental movement:
- Humans, like other species, are bound by biological laws
- No species can long exceed the environment’s carrying capacity
To prevent “non-linear, abrupt environmental change,” humankind must not transgress nine global limits:
- Use too much freshwater
- Put too much nitrogen and phosphenes from fertilizer into the land
- Overly deplete the protective ozone in the stratosphere
- Change the acidity of the oceans too much
- Use too much land for agriculture
- Wipe out species too fast
- Dump too many chemicals into ecosystems
- Send too much soot into the air
- Put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries – exceed carrying capacity – and trouble will ensue.
Two Men – The Wizard
How to survive according to a Wizard: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. We can build a world of gleaming richness for all.
Stem rust (fungus) cannot survive winter in the wheat fields. Two means of returning:
- Survive in places like Mexico or North Africa, where the climate is never cold enough
- Create a type of spore that afflicts barberry, which survives throughout the winter, to remain in colder areas
A good example of the power of naming and propaganda: USA’s nationwide barberry extermination campaign. Came up with all kinds of names and associations to paint barberry as a villain.
Hybrid vigour (heterosis): some hybrid organisms can outperform their parents by mixing their genetic inheritances.
Counteracting (natural) forces affecting maize’s evolution:
- Uncontrolled open pollination creates a few, relatively homogeneous populations of maize.
- Pollination is not uncontrolled, because Mexican farmers carefully select the seed to sow in the next season, and generally do not choose obvious hybrids.
Two perspectives on Mexico’s food issues:
- Wizards: a lack of knowledge and tools.
- Prophets: land degradation.
Neither looked at how Mexican farmers had gotten into this situation. If they had, they would’ve known: the high birth rates causing the land degradation were due to avoidable political events and the lack of knowledge was due to wealthy elites trying to maintain their positions.
Lesson: Continue to ask why and dig deeper. Treat causes not symptoms.
What is the true purpose behind hunger-alleviating programs?
To alleviate hunger? Political stability? Quelling unrest? Propaganda for a wealthy country’s political system?
Hungry people are lured by promises but may be won by deeds.
Undernourished species don’t really grow; they just fight to stay alive.
People abused by authority become irrational.
Three times a small number is still a small number. Focus efforts on areas that can best make use of improvements, not the ones of highest need. A rising tide raises all boats.
A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth’s population find screamingly dull.
Residual heterozygosity: now-unknown negative traits that are hidden inside the genes of newly bred varieties.
Four Elements
Earth: Food
Environmental questions can be thought about in different ways: physics, chemistry, biology, to name a few. Each lens provides a different path forward.
To survive humans need “usable energy”.
- Energy for the body (food and water)
- Energy for daily existence (i.e. fuel to power vehicles, heat and cool buildings, and make essential materials like cement and steel).
When looking at planetary boundaries in terms of physics and usable energy, rather than ecology and carrying capacity, humankind’s real problem is that our species doesn’t know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.
“Photosynthesis has an overall efficiency surely less than 0.00025%.” – Warren Weaver
Paths to the future:
- Tapping new energy supplies, solar or nuclear
- Hacking photosynthesis (and genetic engineering) to grow more food
Liebig’s Law of the Minimum: plants need many nutrients, but their growth rate is limited by the one least present in the soil. In most cases, that nutrient is nitrogen. Plants are able to absorb nitrogen only when it is in chemical combinations.
Nitrogen is critical to photosynthesis. Plants need it chiefly to make a substance called rubisco. Rubisco is an enzyme and the essential catalyst for photosynthesis. Rubisco’s actions are the limiting step in photosynthesis: its rate determines the rate of the entire process.
Catalyst: a substance that facilitates a chemical reaction but is not itself affected by it. Catalysts are like jaywalking pedestrians who cause car accidents but walk away from them without being affected. Catalysts are essential to the smooth functioning of thousands of chemical processes.
Impact of artificially fixed nitrogen.
- About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years has washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide.
- This has boosted the growth of algae, weeds, and other aquatic organisms.
- When these die, they rain to the ocean floor, where they are consumed by microbes.
- The microbes grow so rapidly that their respiration drains the oxygen from the lower depths, killing off most life.
- Result: where agricultural runoff flows, dead zones flourish.
If our gold is filth, our filth is gold.
“The basis of all Nature’s farming is the Law of Return: the faithful return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal and human wastes.” – Sir Albert Howard
The Law of Return (aka recycling or full-cycle organic farming) embodies an insight: everything affects everything else.
Symbiosis: any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two different biological organisms, be it mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasitic.
Mitochondria: minuscule entities that regulate energy flow.
Animals form a critical component of the overall grain industry – but eat less grain themselves than one might think. Every uptick in meat consumption is associated with a bump in grain production. But the precise amount of the increase is not straightforward.
Two paths to increasing harvests exist:
- Lift actual yields: the yields produced by farmers, some are better than others
- Increase potential yield: the theoretical maximum
C4 plants need less water and fertilizer because they don’t waste water on reactions that lead to excess oxygen and because they don’t have to make as much rubisco. And they better tolerate high temperatures. C4 is especially common in the tropics.
The odds that any one (experiment) of them will succeed may be small. But the odds that all of them will fail are equally small.
Scientists look at a question as if it were one of risk, whereas men and women on the street also think in terms of fairness (equity).
In the laboratory, scientists ask: Is it feasible? In the world outside the laboratory, people ask: Is it right?
Divergent reactions are not because people are foolish but because their circumstances have different ethical cost-benefit calculations. No one wants to expose themselves to an unknown peril that only benefits others and makes them only run the risk to be worse off.
Conflicting arguments are correct on their own terms.
Organic farmers have radical alternatives: domesticating new cereal species, hybridizing ordinary crops and their wild relatives, or even switching to entirely new crops.
Cassava produces more calories per acre than wheat. The same goes for tree crops: apples, papaya, nuts.
Government policies promoting industrialisation and urbanisation have made labour for agriculture more scarce…making ecological (or Prophet) solutions more difficult to implement. The whole system can grow only with some kind of a wall-to-wall rewrite of the legal system that encourages the use of labour.
Water: Freshwater
Why do we have water scarcity?
- 97.5 percent of the world’s water is saltwater: undrinkable, corrosive, and even toxic.
- More than two-thirds of the remainder is locked into polar ice caps and glaciers, the great majority of it in Antarctica.
- The rest – all of the planet’s lakes, rivers, swamps, and groundwater – is less than 1 percent of the total. That is the theoretically available freshwater supply. And more than nine-tenths of that water is groundwater, and most of it is unusable or inaccessible.
Even when the total supply of freshwater is enough for everyone, distribution is a problem.
Flow vs stock.
- Flow: a current with a value that is measured by time (gallons per day, for rivers).
- Stock: exists in a fixed amount, like gold and coal.
When stock runs low, the cost of extraction and price go up. People respond by:
- Searching for additional supplies
- Finding substitutes
- Inventing cheaper methods of using the material
Problems have a tendency, however imperfect or slow, to self-correct.
Some flows, like sunlight or wind, cannot be affected by humans. But other flows – “critical-zone resources” – can be exploited to exhaustion.
Groundwater flows take longer to destroy than rivers but are just as vulnerable.
Thick with salt and minerals, seawater is denser than freshwater; once in an aquifer, there is no known way of flushing it out.
In a world of 10 billion the demand for water could be 50 percent higher than it is now.
Human incompetence with water management has destroyed countless societies over the millennia.
Societies throughout the Fertile Crescent had cut down forests to build cities and, especially, feed the forges that made bronze and iron. Without tree cover, the hills could not retain water; floods destroyed canals downstream.
The National Water Carrier was and is a Wizardly demonstration of technological prowess.
Efficient use of water in cities requires three parallel water systems:
- One for carrying portable water from nearby springs
- A second for collecting stormwater and wastewater and pumping them with windmills into reservoirs for reuse by agriculture and public works
- A third for gathering sewage for recycling
Contemporary sewage treatment occurs in three steps (and all are costly):
- Sewage is placed in large tanks where the most disagreeable solids settle on the floor. This sludge is removed and buried in landfills (occasionally it’s turned into fertilizer).
- Adding bacteria to the still-vile water to consume the remaining organic matter. After eating their fill, the bacteria sink to the bottom and are scraped away.
- Disinfecting the wastewater with chlorine or ultraviolet radiation, after which it is safe to discharge into rivers or seas.
Sewage can be transformed into irrigation water: unlike the flow of rain, the flow of sewage is constant.
Urban planning is easier in a dictatorship than in a democracy.
Providing water to cities entails four basic functions:
- Purifying the water that goes into the system
- Delivering it to the households and businesses
- Cleaning up the water that leaves those homes and businesses
- Maintaining the network of pipes, pumps and plants
Private companies are better equipped at providing these services than governments.
Removing salt from seawater – “reverse osmosis”: forcing seawater through a membrane with extremely fine holes – so fine that they allow water molecules to pass through but block the slightly larger salt molecules.
Two difficulties:
- Making membranes that are strong enough to withstand continual pressure but fine enough to allow water to pass through.
- The cost of fueling the motors that pump millions of gallons through the membrane
Prophets: Desalination kills marine life, pollutes the sea with their discharges and increases utility rates.
Instead, they propose small-scale changes centered around the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle. They want to nudge people and businesses to change their habits and become more efficient:
- water recycling
- stormwater capture
- lawn and garden watering rules
- leak tracking
- greywater reuse
- appliance and fixture-efficiency standards
- well controls
Wizards create solutions that do not depend on local conditions or knowledge. It leads to concentrated productivity. Societies that adopt the soft (Prophet) path will lead toward networks of smaller farms with drip irrigation and multiple crops.
Fire: Energy
In the 1800s and 1900s: because they had few alternative resources (wood), Britain and northern Europe kept using fossil fuels, despite the pollution.
Fossil fuels transformed daily existence.
The world looks different depending on whether one focuses primarily on energy supply or energy by-products.
Perspectives on generating energy:
- Wizards support big, high-tech, centralized power plants based on concentrated energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas, uranium).
- Prophets place their hopes in small-scale, distributed, low-impact, neighbourhood- and house-level facilities that harness diffuse forms of energy (sunlight, wind, geothermal heat).
Peak oil: the notion that the stock of fossil fuels will run out.
The conviction that civilization is hurtling toward an energy disaster has become embedded in the culture. World leaders predict all the time that the world will soon run out of oil and gas. And every time new supplies are found and oil reservoirs extended. Then people forget their apprehension until the next alarm.
None of this matters if the fears had no cost, which is not the case: they fuel wars, rebellions and hatred among nations. Equally problematic, peak oil helped establish a set of mistaken beliefs about natural systems that have impeded environmental progress.
Our crisis is not energy scarcity, but energy abundance.
Jevons paradox: improvements in efficiency reduce the cost of energy (from coal). Lower cost encourages more people to use more, draining reserves faster.
Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal.
Oil’s greater energy density means that it, rather than coal, was the fossil fuel of choice.
Sunlight is plentiful and free, but it comes as an intermittent flow, not a reliable stock.
Society prefers a stable stock of coal over an inconsistent flow of sunlight.
Lesson: reliability and convenience are key.
Solar research is the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety fades, so does the interest.
Technocracy: the world is controlled by flows of energy and mineral resources. Don’t base economies around supply and demand, but around energy (laws of physics).
Most historians and economists view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies. Arab petro-states could not target individual nations because national oil companies sell oil and gas to what is a single worldwide pool controlled by middlemen. Any embargo thus could only raise prices equally across the planet, rather than striking at a single nation.
The embargo cut global oil output by about a quarter, pushing up petroleum prices worldwide. Middlemen could take advantage of the higher prices only if they sold their oil to nations other than the United States, with its price caps. Doing just that transformed a modest global shortfall into a U.S.-specific oil drought.
An oil reservoir in the earth is a stock. If it becomes too costly or difficult to extract, people will either find new reservoirs, new techniques to extract more from old reservoirs, or new methods to use less to accomplish the same goal.
Fossil-fuel supplies have no known bounds. In strictly technical terms, this means they are infinite.
In sunlight, selenium conducts electricity; in darkness, it does not.
Photoelectric effect: the emission of electrons when electromagnetic radiation, such as light, hits a material.
Today’s multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil. Why did Big Oil keep investing in a technology with such a slow potential payoff? One reason was a new wave of peak-oil anxieties.
“The price of oil was an index to the Western world’s anxiety. It told us how bad we felt at a given time.” – Don DeLillo.
Photovoltaics generate only between sunrise and sunset. To provide electricity at night, energy generated in daylight must be stored, a practice called “load-shifting.” Typical load-shifting projects heat a liquid (molten salt, say) by day; at night the stored, superhot liquid boils water, driving a steam turbine, producing electricity.
To make solar energy work we need infrastructure for generation and for storage.
Air: Climate Change
The Great Oxidation Event occurred after cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis. Photosynthetic creatures spread through the oceans, excreting oxygen all the while. The flood of oxygen permanently changed the surface of the earth, the composition of the oceans, and the functioning of the atmosphere. It made the vast majority of the world’s land and sea uninhabitable for the vast majority of the planet’s living creatures.
Lessons for today:
- People who thought that living creatures couldn’t affect the climate have no idea of the power of life.
- The onset of climate change means that Homo Sapiens are getting into the biological big leagues – we are tiptoeing in into the terrain of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures.
- Species don’t pick up after themselves.
Are we fated by natural law to wreck our own future? History provides two ways of approaching this question:
- Scientists and pioneers – both Wizards and Prophets – increase our knowledge of climate change enough to halt its worst effects.
- Our waste kills us because of indecision and political tensions over symbols and values.
Limestone is a storehouse for atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide absorbs some of the wavelengths that water vapour lets through.
Increasing temperatures attacks ice in two ways: warmer air melts it from above, forming pools on the surface, and warming ocean currents eat at the underside of the sheet, creating large cracks.
Argument for action on climate change: we have a moral responsibility to people in the future. But this is asking one group of people to make changes to help a completely different set of people to whom they have no tangible connection. There is no way to know what those hypothetical future people will want.
The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.
Our conviction that life is worth living is “more threatened by the prospect of humanity’s disappearance than by the prospect of our own deaths.” – Samuel Scheffler
Evolution has provided the human brain with tools for detecting and resolving fast-moving, clearly visible, small-scale, near-future risks. By the same token, the brain is easily overwhelmed by slow, abstract, large, long-term problems.
The climate has a tangle of interacting feedback loops and is subject to the “butterfly effect”: tiny changes in complex systems can have wildly disproportionate effects.
Few people care about rising temperature. What matters is their potential future influence on other things: agricultural productivity, sea levels, rainfall patterns, ocean chemistry, and infectious disease.
Few climatological theories seem testable in traditional scientific experiments. Climatologists are forced to refine ever more complex mathematical models, which grow ever harder for outsiders to understand.
Activists and corporate executives rail against each other all the time. Result: new regulation. Often, it’s less costly than what businesspeople expected and the problem was less severe than activists thought.
Four decades of additional research have not brought us closer to predicting the precise impact of dumping carbon dioxide into the air.
People seek to ward off major threats while sacrificing as few other goods as possible.
Example: instead of forcing billions of people to change their lives and reduce car and home emissions, target coal-fired power plants and coal-driven steel and cement factories to reduce their emissions. Fewer parties, same impact.
There are two ways to control the side effects of coal: clean up coal plants or shut them down. Cleaning up coal plants: “carbon capture and storage” or CCS – the best-known technique being “amine scrubbing”. Scaling up this process is not easy.
The Wizardly argument for CCS:
- The technology is new, and its cost will come down
- It is unwise and even unethical to assume that China, India, and other developing nations, having just built hundreds of big coal plants, will tear them down and replace them – they just don’t have the money.
Nuclear power plants are extremely costly to build, but once built nuclear plants have proven more reliable, cheaper, and safer than coal plants.
- Reliability is measured by “capacity factor,” the fraction of the time that the power plant is actually sending out electricity at its maximum rate.
- Cheapness refers to the price of a kilowatt-hour of electricity. By far the biggest cost is constructing the plant. After that, actually making the electricity is cheap.
- Safety usually is measured by the number of deaths in the “energy chain”:, how many people are killed by the entire cycle, from exploration and mining to refining and transportation to actual power generation, as well as waste treatment and disposal. Nuclear plants kill people only in rare, awful accidents like Chernobyl (even in the frightening 2011 meltdown at Fukushima, radiation is not known to have caused a single fatality).
Case against nuclear: waste.
However, the waste we have accumulated in 60+ years is about one football field 24 meters deep (aka not much). This can be encased in glass and left deep underground; within a few centuries, its radioactivity level will have fallen by a factor of a million.
Prophets: Some types of nuclear waste, like plutonium and radioactive iodine, are astonishingly deadly – radioactive for millennia, lethal in doses smaller than grains of sand. It is unrealistic to imagine that something so dangerous in such small amounts can be contained for eons, when it can be carried away by the smallest draft of wind or dissolve into drops of water. Leaving such noxious gifts to future generations is a moral calamity.
Wizards: For the foreseeable future, renewables are unreliable (low capacity factors), pricey (high cost per unit of power, including storage), and land-wasting. Here and now, nuclear power is ready. Equip the most efficient existing coal facilities with CCS, but go nuclear for everything else.
Distressing: several thousand coal mines have caught fire and many have been burning for decades, some for centuries.
Prophet’s energy generation: seven No’s and one big Yes
- No oil
- No gasoline
- No kerosene
- No natural gas
- No wood or biomass stoves
- No nuclear power
- No carbon capture and sequestration
- Yes electricity: electrifying the economy that runs on coal and petroleum.
- The new renewable plants will not have to replace all of the power generated by fossil fuels. Electric motors are more efficient than fossil fuel engines. Also, energy-efficiency measures like insulating buildings and improving appliances will further cut demand.
- Building that smaller capacity will, paradoxically, require more power plants, because solar and wind power are intermittent.
Energy transitions are always slow. In every nation, modern electricity grids took decades to assemble. Also, there is little public appetite for beginning the process or even appreciating the magnitude of what lies ahead.
By making smaller, more effective droplets (increase surface area), geoengineers can achieve the same reduction by spraying just a few million tons of sulfur dioxide into the air in a year, which is financially feasible.
If carbon emissions do not fall quickly enough, we can dump sulfuric acid into the air for a couple of decades, buying more time to finish the transition from fossil fuels.
Potential pitfalls of geoengineering:
- Reduce temperatures globally, but have local losers and winners – places that experience too much or too little rainfall, places subject to sudden temperature extremes.
- Its greatest virtue is its greatest danger: low cost.
We can create a new Carboniferous and carbon farms by covering the two biggest deserts in the world – the Sahara and the Australian outback – with trees. It’s simpler, politically more feasible and less risky.
Poor farmers are wary of new techniques – the penalty for failure is too high. But people in Burkina Faso were desperate and rocks were everywhere and cost nothing but labour. Hundreds of farmers put in cordons (pierreux) – long lines of stones which pause water – bringing back thousands of acres of desertified land.
Uncomplicated, inexpensive and proven techniques like cordons spread far and wide.
Lesson: keep it cheap and simple, prove it, and any idea or invention will spread easily.
Old trees can be “pyrolized” – burned in low-oxygen environments, which turns them into charcoal, retaining about two-thirds of its original carbon. The charcoal can be ground and buried, enriching the soil. Over time, buried charcoal slowly oxidizes, providing the requisite binding sites. Nutrients and organic matter “stick” to it, providing food for the bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that make the soil fertile. Charcoal, properly manufactured and deployed, can dramatically improve bad farmland.
Wizards: Turning deserts into forests would destroy desert ecosystems. Or they would require large numbers of people to radically change the way they live. Or it amounts to green imperialism – forcing poor people in desert areas to offset the emissions of faraway rich people.
In climate change, all choices involve leaps into the unknown. Any claim one way or another amounts to saying: I prefer the unknown risks associated with this course rather than unknown risks associated with that course because the first leads to a future that I like better.
The atmosphere doesn’t act like a greenhouse. The atmosphere is warm because it absorbs heat radiation from the surface. A greenhouse is warm because the glass physically blocks hot air from wafting away, a different process.
Two Men – The Prophet
“Man’s command over nature has grown more rapidly than his mastery of himself.” – Edmund Sinnott
Prophets: Education is key. If all aspire to a Western standard of living, the pressure on ecosystems will be unbearable. The most important task of climate change organisations: promote knowledge of human ecology, carrying capacity and limits.
The cause of Delhi’s extraordinary growth was not births but urbanisation: Delhi had jobs and was being promoted by the Indian government who wanted to industrialize.
U.S. forests are bigger and healthier than they were in 1900, when the country had fewer than 100 million people. Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.
“People pollute.” But more people does not necessarily mean more pollution.
The exact relations among economic growth, environmental destruction, and planetary limits are not clear..
Rather than asking How many people? ask: What are those people doing?
Two Men – The Wizard
Yield increases made farmland more valuable, making it worth seizing. Rich landowners, seeing an opportunity for advancement, evicted sharecroppers and renters and went into business for themselves, monopolizing local access to seeds and fertilizer. Increased harvests made prices fall. Big estate-holders could more than make up for the decline with volume; smallholders were immiserated.
The intensive fertilization mandated by the Green Revolution has heavily contributed to nitrogen problems on land and water. Industrial-style Borlaugian agriculture is a significant contributor to air pollution and climate change.
Environmental problems are more due to bad policy and administration than anything inherent to Green Revolution technology.
Cultural heritage also affects the adoption of new produce and breeds. To South Asians, the whiteness of chapati “suggested purity, luxury, even modernity,” so they wouldn’t want the strange Mexican wheat. However, if you change the name and background and convince people it’s “home”-made, pride and patriotism kick in.
Lesson: people prefer what they know over the unknown.
“Evergreen revolution”: combine high technology with “traditional ecological prudence.” Genetic engineering can create new varieties that need less water and fertilizer and can tolerate salty soils. Farmers install electronic monitors in their fields to monitor crop growth and ensure proper management of chemicals and water. Computers combine the readings with weather data and crop-simulation models to produce individualized recipes for farmers to maximize their yields.
Why would you listen to people who have no idea what you consider important?
Lesson: listen and understand others’ points of view first.
One Future
Slavery was normal 200 years ago, but was abolished due to the fierce opposition of slaves themselves and the fact that abolitionists convinced people around the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An institution fundamental to human society for millennia was made over by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.
Currently, we see the same happening with feminism and gay rights.
History repeats itself: first a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, perhaps, a slow movement to equality.
Appendix A: Why Believe? (Part One)
Lynn Margulis thought that natural selection was just part of the picture – in the long run, symbiosis and chance were more important sources of evolutionary innovation.
We still do not understand either the rate at which climate change is occurring or its precise effects.
Half a dozen climate scientists identified what they see as the biggest uncertainties – the reasons that their fears could be wrong:
- No computer today can handle calculations that cover the entire surface of the earth and its atmosphere. In consequence, researchers simplify their models by treating the atmosphere and surface as an array of cubes, each perhaps fifteen or twenty miles on a side (different models have different sizes).
- All the models have difficulties with clouds. Low-altitude clouds tend to reflect sunlight, cooling the air around them. High-altitude clouds tend to trap infrared radiation, heating the air around them.
- Will warmer oceans end up driving clouds higher into the atmosphere?
- Will they create more low-altitude thunderstorms?
- Will air and water currents in a warmer planet push cloud formations north or south of where they would have been?
- Which effects will dominate?
- Climate models are constructed by physical scientists; as a result, biology has been excluded. One lesson that biology has taught us is that living creatures profoundly shape the world.
- No one has an accurate figure for how much carbon dioxide is absorbed in forests around the world.
Everyone involved believes that human-caused warming is occurring – the question is how fast, how long, and what it will do.
The great value of fruitful skeptics is that they force advocates to think through these issues.
Appendix B: Why Believe? (Part Two)
Recognizing a problem doesn’t automatically imply accepting either its seriousness or any particular solution to that problem.
With our current knowledge: ingesting GMOs poses no significant health risk.
Instead of discussing the safety of GMOs, more beneficial to discuss: can the current version of industrial agriculture with the addition of new technologies provide for the world of 10 billion in a long-lasting way – or are the perils involved (ecological, economic, spiritual) are large enough to require it to be radically revamped?