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Economy and ecology
Global economic systems crash not only because of greed, fraud and toxic assets, but because those systems rest on fallacies about the natural world. The Ponzi scams and derivatives swindles of international bankers are no substitute for real economy: the living ecological systems, energy, soils, minerals, forests, and seas.
The self-serving theories of growthaholic economists peel away from this deep reality like cheap wallpaper. Since the days of Akenaten and Ceasar, overfed profiteers have insisted that their elite and esoteric genius creates wealth. When they salted the soils or decimated forests, they would march into the next watershed or “discover” another continent.
Those days are over. There are no more giant resource pools to plunder. The wealth of Pharaohs and stock hustlers arrived not from their genius, but from their facility with deception, fashioning loans with fantasy money, and trading bets on the changing value of paper promises, the modern “derivatives” market. But in the end, all this affluence relies on the real wealth: nature, her systems, her materials, and her energies.
Markets will rally and crash again, and paper pushers will stuff more cash into their safety deposit boxes, but in the end, money cannot replace soil and water. Gross domestic products provide no surrogate for authentic well-being.
As world stock markets collapsed this fall, several urgent environmental events rumbled below the superficial hand-wringing, like deep volcanoes awakening to announce, “Nature shall not be mocked.”
It’s the soil, folks
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” wrote American ecologist Aldo Leopold five decades ago. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
Economists ignored, even ridiculed, such warnings from ecologists, and the planet now faces a shortage of fertile soil, the result of erosion, salination, contamination, desertification, and a swelling population. U.N Agriculture head, Lennart Bage announced last summer, “Fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset.” It always has been, for everything that lives.
This year, Iran bought over 1 million tons of wheat from the U.S., something they have not done since 1980. Iran would not come begging to their avowed enemy if they had any other option. Iran, the Saudis, and other oil-rich Middle East nations rely on global agriculture for grain. The United Arab Emirates buy farmland in Sudan and Kazakhstan. South Korea seeks land in Mongolia, China in Southeast Asia. Libya leases farms in the Ukraine.
With the closing of Ukrainian shipments, only three major grain exporters remain: North America, Australia, and New Zealand. However, these global producers rely entirely on fertilizers and fossil fuels. However, the production of phosphorus, principal component of fertilizer, is rare and in decline, and the era of cheap energy is coming to an end.
The big bonfire
Globalization is literally running out of gas. Geologists at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) Conference in California, in September, confirmed that world oil production has stopped growing and will begin its inevitable decline during the next decade.
A U.S. Department of Energy study (The Hirsch Report) warned in 2005 – the year that global production plateaued – that society required a 20-year lead time to implement an optimal new energy plan. It is already too late for such a measured response, and this failure to act in time is the direct result of denial from lobbyists and economists, who chanted “eternal growth,” while obscuring or ignoring the evidence before them.
Conventional economic theory has claimed that resources are virtually infinite, that only capital and labour are required to create “wealth.” Oil depletion exposes this tragic conceit. Oil production declined last year in eight of the top twelve producing nations. Every major oil field on the planet is in decline, and global discoveries peaked forty years ago.
Meanwhile, economic growth promoters expect humanity to double its vehicle fleet over the next decade, from 1 billion to 2 billion vehicles, while building more roads across arable farmland.
Wind and solar power developments will help mitigate the coming energy crunch, but will not replace cheap liquid fuels. Biofuels will have certain localized value, if based on agricultural waste, but will prove insignificant on a globalized scale. Corn ethanol undermines food agriculture, and will not remotely replace cheap oil. Cellulose and algae biofuel projects cannot even produce net energy, so they are not economic at any price.
New oil discoveries and recovery technologies lag hopelessly behind the decline of conventional oil fields. Oil industry promoters recently proclaimed “90 billion barrels of oil” in the Arctic. However, these lobbyists failed to mention that this oil – even if it could be confirmed and recovered – represents three years of global supply.
The best and cheapest energy source is conservation. The only environmentally feasible solution to the end of cheap liquid fuels is to burn less. Randy Udall, who drafted Colorado’s Renewable Energy Mitigation Program, told the ASPO conference that energy companies have no use for conservation. Instead, they will burn more coal, make liquid fuel from coal, and melt bitumen at unearthly temperatures in low-efficiency tar sands and oil shale projects.
Udall called our era of history “the Big Bonfire.” We burn a million tons of fossil fuel every hour, releasing 80-million tons of CO2 each day. And here, we arrive at the third big crack in the growthaholics’ thin facade.
Ancient methane
According to the international Global Carbon Project, last year’s annual increase in carbon emissions, 2.9 percent, exceeded previous projections, “generating stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.” All the international gatherings, carbon-trading festivals, and Kyoto handshakes have failed to reduce carbon emissions or even stabilize the growth rate of these emissions.
Meanwhile, in September, Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University – with the International Siberian Shelf Study, sponsored by the Russian Science Academy and American Geophysical Union – announced evidence that millions of tons of a methane gas – 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – now escapes into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed. As the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned, the deep permafrost appears now to be thawing.
Scientists on board Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi recorded methane bubbling to the sea surface, causing air-borne concentrations 100-times background levels. Ten previous expeditions since 2003 did not detect these levels of free methane. The new data describes releases so intense that the methane does not have time to dissolve in seawater but rises as bubbles to the ocean surface. Similar releases have been recorded in the East Siberian and Laptev Seas, amounting to millions of tons of methane from melting sub-sea permafrost.
The escaping methane represents a massive exhalation of ancient hydrocarbons likely captured in the Paleozoic warm era when amphibians crawled from the sea. The carbon escaped once before, during the Permian ecological collapse, 225 million years ago, leading to peak Mesozoic heat, and was recaptured as methane during the last 100-million years. Meteorologists warn that this significant store of ancient carbon could lead to run-away global warming, far beyond the influence of human technologies to sequester or forestall.
The methane represents an unaccounted cost of doing business in the era of the big bonfire. Market wizards may shave toxic assets from their balance sheets, but they cannot dictate nature’s accounting.
Resilience
Regardless of stopgap bailouts and more paper promises, economic collapse will continue in fits and starts until humanity achieves genuine ecological balance, adopts a steady state economy, and finally understands that ecology is the foundation of human enterprise. There are only two options for living cultures in a physical system: homeostasis or collapse.
Future generations will have every right to dismiss “the big bonfire” as an era of ignorance and unconscionable excess. But I want future generations to know this: Many from our generation never sold you out. We kept our eyes open, witnessed the truth, and did our best to warn our bumbling, myopic civilization.
I speak to young people, who are terrified and/or angry about the state of the world, the wasteful extravagance of society, and needless ecological destruction. I experienced similar reactions when I learned as a child that our world could be vaporized by nuclear weapons. When we’re young, our families and teachers protected us from certain disturbing realities. If we remain naïve or ill-informed, the discovery of alarming truths about our world may create shock and outrage.
The best way to never again be disillusioned is to not be illusioned in the first place.
Economic slight of hand won’t restore our place on this earth. Human survival strategies now will be as much about resilience during transformation as finding “solutions” to preserve untenable expectations. Our resilience will include a rediscovery of a richer life with simpler means, a genuine quality of life that cannot be purchased but only lived. Human society can change, and in fact has to change. Don’t get depressed. Get informed and get active.
See this and other essays at "Deep Green," on the Greenpeace International site.
Tags: , Aldo Leopold, ASPO, bail-out, Ecology, economy, energy, methane, oil, Peak oil, permafrost, soil
This was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Ecology . Feel free to respond, or trackback.
10 Responses to “Economy and ecology”
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Tanya Dua Says:
Kudos to you, Rex for writing such a sensitive article, juxtaposing two very prevalent issues today efficiently. I get your “Deep Green” column from Greenpeace monthly, and its always a pleasure to read your columns! I wish to write like you someday! Cheers!
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Mary Gill Says:
I want to point out a small error in your piece. You say “money cannot replace soil and water”… not true! Given the value of the American dollar it will make great compost very soon.
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Miguel Ariza Says:
Dear Mr. Weyler,
Reading about the alarming methane emissions, I would appreciate your comments on the theory which says that we are facing an Ice Era, produced by Sun cycling activity. If I am not wrong, this theory is from a Mexican scientist.
Best Regards
Miguel Ariza
ColombiaRex Weyler response
Earth warming and cooling cycles
Cooling and warming influences constantly converge within the earth climate system, so Earth could move into a cooling period, or regional cooling, regardless of warming caused by human activity. The Earth’s atmosphere has been in a long cooling trend for over 65 million years, since the demise of dinosaurs, and during that trend, we call the extreme cooling dips “ice ages,” but these are small fluctuations in the big picture of Earth temperature over the eons.
Life on earth – the first bacteria – emerged some three billion years ago, and endured through two billion years of fluctuating temperatures. Terrestrial life forms boomed during a million-century warm spell between 600 and 500-million years ago, the warm Cambrian period.
Over the next 300 million years life forms thrived and crashed four times, during both warm and cold cycles that lasted a million centuries each. The most dramatic species crash of all time, the “Permian collapse,” which wiped out 95-percent of all species, happened at the end of a long cool period between 325 – 215 million years ago.
Thereafter, the planet began a long warming as atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 2000 parts per million (ppm; compared to 370 ppm today) and Global Mean Surface Temperature peaked at about 25°C (10°C hotter than today). During this 200-million-year Mesozoic heat wave, reptiles and forests flourished.
A long cooling
The expanding forests cooled the planet by increasing moisture circulation and storing carbon from the atmosphere. An asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, changed the environment, killed off the large reptiles, and began a cooling trend, supported by the growing forests and eventually grasses and flowering plants.
We remained in this cooling phase, until the expansion of industrial human civilization, the loss of forest cover and the release of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
Modern warming
Since the earliest human temperature records, about 1860, atmospheric carbon and global average surface temperature have increased. Temperatures have risen by about 0.6°C over the last century, and the rate has accelerated to about 1.0°C per century now. This accelerating rate remains troubling.
Nevertheless, cooling influences remain, even if the warming influences prevail. Regional cooling may appear superimposed over greenhouse warming. One reason this happens is that the warming causes water to evaporate in the tropics and fall as rain at high latitudes, toward the poles. Thus, fresh water is lost in the tropics and added into high latitude oceans, where it dilutes the salt content, changing ocean current patterns. As North Atlantic warm currents are slowed, Europe and North America may experience colder winters. Nevertheless, the heat gained due to greenhouse gas in the atmosphere remains in Earth’s climate system.
Other geophysical cooling forces can include the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis and the orientation of our elliptical orbit around the sun, causing the well known “precession of the equinox” (a 23,000 year cycle through the zodiac: Taurus, Aries, Pisces, Aquarius, etc.). These orbital changes contribute to warming and cooling cycles.
Human warming impact prevails
Nevertheless, the impacts of human activity, reduction of forest cover and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases appears now dominant over the natural cooling trends, as confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the US National Academy of Sciences, and other climate observers. Nevertheless, there remain many climate forces, and the Earth’s climate can change rapidly, as it has in the past, and could again in the future.
Recent data indicate deep ocean heating (to 3000 meters deep). This sequestering of heat in the deep ocean might mitigate global warming of the atmosphere, but we now know that the deep, sub-sea permafrost is melting, releasing ancient methane back into the atmosphere, which in turn will cause more heating of the earth. This recent discovery of deep methane releases remains extremely unsettling, and could signal the beginning of run-away warming.
So yes, cooling and warming influences continue simultaneously, but right now in the history of Earth, human-caused warming appears to dominate temperature change.
rw.
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Pedro Miguel Pereira Says:
Dear Rex,
I’m writing just to thank you very much for another excellent article. It is very good indeed. I’m in favour of a more fair distribution of the resources and of a world population control, to decrease the world production and, so, to decrease the damages that are being done to the Environment.
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Helen Champaloux Says:
October 18th, 2008 at 11:11 am
I totally agree with Rex. His analyzes are converging with what American Indians have said when they were on the brink of destruction:
When the last tree has been be cut, when the last fish has been caught, when the last river has been drought, only then you will find that money can not be eaten.
We are living in a totally artificial world, a nightmare in which all the lower human desires are fulfilled by those who are manipulating the puppets of consumerism and making money off this.
It is an organized brainwashing. Manipulation and lies are the main weapons of these monsters using all the resources to addict children to useless and potentially deadly desires and the adults they will become to destroy the planet. Subjected to this mind manipulation they will buy cars, they will destroy without even knowing it all the ecosystems of our beautiful Earth.
I am living at the moment in a big city and on the streets I never see somebody looking at the sky, at few birds flying their way somewhere or watching a very polluted sunset. Like pigs (sorry for the pigs, they are certainly more sensitive) they are looking on the dirty pavement of the city, lost in their headphones and throwing on the ground their empty McDonalds containers.
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Simon Isaza Says:
Hi Rex, I want to thank you for the great thing you are doing for this planet. about economy and ecology, what exactly do you mean with “a richer life with simpler means”?
Rex Weyler:
“Richer ends and simpler means” is an idea borrowed from Arne Naess. The meaning is that our real quality of life, the richness and enjoyment of life is not dependent on complex and wasteful consumption, but rather on simpler means: family, community, creativity, walking in nature, teaching our children, playing, and so forth. We must consume less stuff, and to achieve social justice, the rich world must share with the poor, but using less stuff does not mean less enjoyment of life. Quite the opposite. A simpler life, with less bashing about to earn more wealth reduces stress and distraction. Where do the rich go for holiday? Into nature, to the seashore, to the mountains. When we ask our elders what made them happy in life, what was rewarding in life, do they say, “Oh, making all that money, working every day, driving through traffic.”? No, they say that what gave their life meaning and happiness were friendships, family, community, their opportunities to be creative, to be in nature. So, we can achieve this rich life without destroying the planet. Richer ends, simpler means.
rw.
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Philip G. Bartilet Says:
I’m sorry Rex, I have to back-track, all of your articles since I read this magnificent article, I can’t stop. Nevertheless, I already sent it to many of my friends and families who are environmental advocates. Soon, they will be reached by your enlightening messages, and be informed to take more action in sustaining Mother Earth.
We have an environmental publication in our community. Is it possible for us to reprint some of your articles to reach our brothers and sisters who have no Internet connections, particularly in the rural areas, which are less informed?
Thank you, and more power to you!
Philip Bartilet
Philippines -
saraswati kavula Says:
Hi Rex,
Thank you very much. I was glad to read your story on ecology and economy in Deep Green. You put in words a lot of questions I have put for myself for some time now.
I have a question for you – since you are from the Greenpeace. I have been involved in an anti-uranium campaign in my state, Andhra Pradesh, in India. We have approached Greenpeace India, (based in Bangalore) many times asking them to take up the issue of the Uranium Mining and all the new Nuclear Plants coming up in the country.
We have no response from them. One memeber who is a good friend said to me, “Greenpeace India doesn’t have the mandate regarding nuclear issue.” I find that the most shocking statement, considering that Greenpeace started as an Anti-Nuclear movement.
Please tell me the reason why this is happening?
Warm Regards and Wishes
saraswati kavula
filmmaker and activistRex Weyler:
I write my Deep Green column for Greenpeace, but I am not involved in campaign decisions. I don’t know what the campaign priorities are for Greenpeace in India.
However, I know that humanity faces many more urgent environmental issues than Greenpeace alone can fix. Yes, Greenpeace started as an anti-nuclear peace group, and they are still working on nuclear and peace issues, but we can’t expect Greenpeace to come in and solve all our ecological challenges. It is more important for each community to stand up on their own and insist that their governments protect their environment. Nuclear power will not save us; it is a carbon-intensive, wasteful industry that has a huge toxic waste backlog. Here is my article on nuclear power. Many blessings. rw.
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Richard Register Says:
Hi Rex – Excellent points and I work on ecological city design to get the urban, town and village energy consumption down about 90% – then you add in solar, transit, bicycles etc. But that’s not why I’m writing. My Eskimo Friend Willy Willoya wrote a book called The Rainbow Warrior. His stories are amazing. He lived with a by eating the animals for decades of his life, witnessed climate change and disastrous relations between the races. He feels he can’t write a whole book at this point in his life – 71 years old and not writing books since about 1960. I’m trying to get through to people who could help him do that and see things to publication. Would be a powerful book largely because he’s a wonderful person. Can you help me get to people to help, and I should think Greenpeace might like to return the favor of him giving you the boat its name.
Many thanks, Richard Register, author of “Ecocities – Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature”
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Andrea Peloso Says:
Interesting segment from an interview with Fidel Castro on economy and ecology… numbers on oil aside, an incredible contrast to what most politicians are saying:
Ignacio Ramonet: Cuba is not a ‘consumer society’; consumption is, in fact, austere, and some people here even bemoan that. What would you say to those who complain of not having access to the products of capitalist consumer society?
Fidel Castro: Well, I’d tell them that the consumer society is one of the most frightening, terrifying inventions of developed capitalism today in this phase of neoliberal globalization. It is disastrous, just awful, because I try to imagine 1.3 billion Chinese with the per capita number of cars that the United States has… I can’t imagine India, with its more than 1 billion inhabitants, living in a consumer society; I can’t imagine the 600 million people who live in the sub-Saharan Africa, who don’t even have the electricity and in some places more than 80 percent of whom don’t know how to read and write, in a consumer society.
Under a diabolic and chaotic economic order, in fifty or sixty years at the most, consumer societies will have exhausted the proven and probable reserves of fossil fuel… There is no clear and coherent idea about the energy that in fifty years or so will be moving the billions of motorized vehicles that flood cities and highways in the wealthy nations, and even in much of the Third World. (The consumer society) is the expression of a completely irrational mode of life and consumption, and it will never serve as a model for the 10 billion people who will supposedly inhabit the planet when the dreadful oil age is over.
That economic order and those models of consumption are incompatible with the world’s limited and non-renewable essential resources and the laws that govern nature and life. They also clash with the most elementary principles of ethics, culture and moral values created by mankind.
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