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Overshoot and Tech Dreams
Global warming is a symptom of human overshoot: the consumption and waste that exceeds the biophysical capacity of the Earth. If we attempt to reduce the fever, but ignore the disease, we will, at best, extend the suffering.
Most species, when confronted with abundant food and no predators, will outgrow their environment. Locusts or pine beetles will devour their hosts and crash. Bacteria in a petri dish will exhaust the food capacity and breed themselves to death. This is overshoot.
In 1944, the US military brought 29 reindeer to St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea as food for soldiers. However, the war ended, the Americans abandoned the island, and the reindeer remained. With no predators and lots of lichen, the herd grew to over a thousand reindeer in fifteen years. Biologists estimated that the island might have sustained this herd of a thousand reindeer, munching moderately within the Island’s carrying capacity. However, the herd grew to 6,000 reindeer by 1965, then, in one winter, with the lichen obliterated, the herd crashed back to 44 animals. This is overshoot.
Humans at Earth Scale
The Rapanui on Easter Island, with a population of only a few hundred in 900 AD, had already degraded the island’s capacity by cutting down trees to transport giant stone statues. As the Rapanui population grew to over 7000 by 1350 AD, their forest disappeared, they splintered into sects, and fought over the remnants. When Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century – seeking resources to solve their own overshoot problems in Europe – only a few hundred Rapanui remained, scraping for survival on a depleted landscape.
Throughout human history, settlements and cities have overshot local environments in Pleistocene watersheds, Mesopotamian floodplains, or the American dust bowl. In these cases, communities could migrate, relocate, or shift food sources. Now, in the twenty-first century, the human enterprise has reached the scale of the planet. This time, we cannot abandon our watershed. We will not sail away to a new island or discover a new hemisphere. We’re flat out of hemispheres.
The new dream for sustaining human consumption is “innovation.” Our alleged leaders – political and corporate – denied global warming for decades. Then, they blamed it on sunspots or claimed it might be a good thing that would allow us to grow avocadoes in Norway and drill for oil in the arctic.
Now, we hear claims that industrialists take global warming seriously. Witness the tsunami of proposals to create a “green economy,” cool the planet with sulfate aerosols, fertilize the dying oceans with iron, build hybrid cars, and construct giant “green energy” systems.
Some so-called “green ” projects may indeed play a role in a human future, but not if we rush to treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease. A friend in Los Angeles told me: “You used to see Porsches everywhere. Now everyone has a Prius.” In Washington D.C., hip lobbyists drive $100,000 electric Tesla sports cars. Did trading in the Porsche for a Prius or Tesla help the planet? No. It cost the planet in metals, plastics, toxins, energy, and CO2, the burgeoning throughput of human overshoot.
“Customers who embrace green products,” says Sandy Di Felice of Toyota Canada, “don’t want a radical change to their lifestyle.” Therein lies the problem: The world’s most voracious consumers cling to a hope that technology will rescue them from having to change their lifestyles. Tech-fix entrepreneurs, their academic apologists, and political cheerleaders scramble to create new “green” products, but fail to address the cause of the fever: reckless human consumption of Earth’s natural bounty. We need to produce and consume less stuff, not more.
The tech trance
The builder, who only has a hammer, treats everything as a nail. In the US, the earnest Obama administration has leapt to solve global warming with the tools they know: money and engineering. In a world addicted to a growing energy supply, they seek a cleaner, greener strain of the drug, while simultaneously and contradictorily launching “shovel ready” highway projects and applying Band-Aids over the inevitable consequences.
Obama science adviser, John Holdren proposed blasting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to block the rays of the sun. In fairness to Holdren, he acknowledged, “It would be preferable by far to solve this problem by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” However, in April, Holdren claimed, “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.”
In 1971, scientist Paul Crutzen first proposed the idea of cooling the atmosphere with sulfur particles, mimicking a volcanic eruption, to reflect solar energy and offset the effect of greenhouse gases. This plan treats the symptoms while ignoring the disease. Global warming is caused by burning hydrocarbons and depleting forests, not by the sun. The sun is not our enemy.
A program to launch sulfates into the atmosphere will burn more fossil fuel energy, the source of the problem, risk depleting the ozone layer, and would likely dry the Mediterranean and Mideast climates. Blocking the sun is going backwards to sustain the unsustainable.
Engineers at Columbia University are developing a “carbon scrubber” that could remove over 300 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. The challenge with this approach is that humanity is currently emitting over 20 billion tons of carbon annually, and increasing at 3% per year. Capturing even half of this carbon in scrubbers would require over $6 trillion in initial costs, plus operation, maintenance, and eventual replacement of the scrubbers. If the public pays this, it amounts to a bailout of the energy companies on the scale of the current banking bailouts, and would contribute to another global recession.
More significantly, as Herman Daly pointed out decades ago in Steady State Economics, these “geo-engineering” mitigations actually make us more vulnerable. Once we prop up our unsustainable habits with counter-technologies, we are trapped. We build up a dependence on the tech-fix, and when future generations can no longer maintain the fix, the impending crash will be worse.
Daly also pointed out that these are “costs” of running society, not “benefits,” and these two get confused in our GDP analysis of economic health. We must return to authentic quality of life rather that put hope in stimulating more unsustainable growth, more stuff, and more activity.
Reviving the oceans
Carbon emissions increase ocean acidity, devastating coral reefs and contributing to ocean species die-off. Adding powdered limestone to the oceans could theoretically reverse acidity. Fertilizing the oceans with iron could stimulate phytoplankton photosynthesis, absorbing more CO2.
These “solutions” could help, but they represent patchwork mitigations with added costs. Adding iron and limestone to the oceans mimics the natural process of wind carrying fine sand over the ocean, but there are problems. For phytoplankton to sequester the CO2, the organisms have to die and sink to the bottom. A study recently published in Nature magazine showed that the projects sequestered far less carbon than predicted.
Likewise, iron fertilization tests conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute “dampened hopes on the potential of the Southern Ocean to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide and thus mitigate global warming.” The iron helped Phaeocystis phytoplankton increase slightly, less than natural blooms, but copepods quickly consumed the shell-free, soft algae. Then, the copepods became food for shrimp-like amphipods, which provided additional food for squid and whales. This was a positive result, but the experiment did not result in tons of CO2 safely sequestered on the ocean floor.
Grasping at tech straws
The American conservative think tank, Enterprise Institute, which once denied global warming, has now joined the bandwagon and proposed building “artificial trees,” giant towers that suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it. Like the carbon scrubber plan, this scheme requires more materials and fossil energy, the source of the problem.
Others propose fertilizing trees with nitrogen to stimulate CO2 absorption, but high nitrogen concentrations create nitrous oxide emissions (a greenhouse gas), groundwater contamination, and water demands, since trees that consume larger amounts of nitrogen also require more water.
An episode of Discovery Project Earth tested a scheme to drop tree seedlings from the air, encased in biodegradable containers, rather than plant trees traditionally by hand. The project failed. On Earth Day this year, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Van Jones, promoting the social benefits of environmental mitigation, said live on CNN, “trees don’t plant themselves.” Mr. Jones appears to be a nice person and well intentioned, but he exposes a fundamental misperception about natural systems ecology. News flash: Trees do plant themselves. They only require an intact forest. Dropping trees from airplanes and building giant “artificial trees” represents industrialism gone mad.
The presumed tech-fix solutions suffer from fundamental errors because their designers do not understand ecology. They attempt to preserve a wealthy life-style that is not sustainable. They fail to perform necessary net-energy and carbon-cost accounting. They demand an ever-growing supply of material and energy, and they fail to account for total ecosystem analysis.
Humanity is in overshoot. Every day, without much comment from our “news” media, we degrade the carrying capacity of the planet, add more humans, and extend ourselves farther out over the edge of the sustainability cliff, with nothing below to stop our fall.
Worse, the tech-fix proposals avoid genuine solutions: Humanity must consume less, not more. We should replace our petroleum-guzzling car cultures with light rail transport. We should be localizing agriculture, preserving farmland, conserving energy, recycling everything, creating resilient communities, and developing a steady state economic system. If we are serious about global warming and preserving natural wilderness, we should be stabilizing human population with non-evasive means such as women’s rights and contraception. We should be leaving remnant wilderness alone to recover through natural processes.
These genuine remedies require the wealthy nations and consumers to drastically change their lifestyles, not buy hybrid sports cars. These changes prove politically difficult, but they represent the inevitable path back to paradise.
rw.
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Tags: acidic oceans, climate, Easter Island, Herman Daly, overshoot, seeding atmosphere, seeding oceans, St. Matthews Island, technology
This was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Ecology . Feel free to respond, or trackback.
4 Responses to “Overshoot and Tech Dreams”
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Adrian Says:
Exactly so. Heedless technological development got us into this mess in the first place. The thought of our messing further in a clumsy attempt to fix a complex problem we don’t fully understand is rather horrifying.
I’d only add that we should be designing human habitats to accomodate other species so as to improve species-area relationships as in Michael Rosenzweig’s reconciliation ecology.
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minda Says:
Thank you for the article. Seems to me that our arogant consumption drives concentration of the political power to the global levels as well as concentration of the wealth. Both concentrated power and wealth are distant from the localized comunities and are not eco friendly. Tech solutions furnished by concentrated wealth does not and will not eliminate the eco problems due to its nature. And as you, Mr. Rex end your article saying “These changes prove politically difficult, but they represent the inevitable path back to paradise” that sounds like a cather. Could you broaden this statement? Is it some sort of trend to balance politics, ecology and religion. Or what? We probably will fail if we just entitle one political leader (Obama) to solve the problems. We will fail if we will go along with high tech solutions to end eco problems in one sweep, suggested by big money and we will probably also fail concentrating on building Rapanui stone idols.?
Rex Weyler:
What I mean by: “These changes prove politically difficult, but they represent the inevitable path back to paradise”
They are difficult because they threaten the status quo system of wealth consolidation by the wealthy, power consolidation by the powerful, and mass consumption that results from an economic system that attempts growth at any ecological, social, or spiritual cost. These changes are difficult because a few people can get very rich in a consumptive, growth economy, while the earth itself gets poorer, depleted, poisoned. The status quo power structure and economic structure — scams, pyramid schemes, junk derivatives, swindles — do not want to change and will resist any change just as they resisted Gandhi, Civil rights, women’s rights, ecology or any other value other than money.
So, you are correct, I believe: We will not achieve these things through the system, even through inspiring leaders such as Barack Obama, who has already been bought and paid for, manipulated, and brainwashed by the Goldman-Sachs and Paul Volker crowd.
However, these changes are “inevitable” because nature’s laws are inevitable. We don’t get to re-write the laws of physics, biology, or thermodynamics just because we are smart, large-brained primates with opposable thumbs and hegemony over most of the earth. We are still natural creatures. We exist entirely within a natural ecosystem that obeys the laws of nature. We have been able to overshoot the earth’s capacity, not because we can defy nature, but because the earth is so vastly resilient. However, like the Rapanui on Easter Island, we will crash. The changes I discuss — localization, simplicity, preserving soil, growing food, — are inevitable because ultimately, these are the only things that will keep humanity alive for a long run. Artificial trees and Credit Default Swaps won’t keep us alive. Sunlight and soil will keep us alive.
rw.
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Edgar Says:
I have seen in other videos that the nations after world war II agreed on the consumer lifestyle. I would love to think that this was agreed so the economy could support the millions of humans that would soon be born. It was pretty simple: everyone should get a job, so they can get money to buy the “cool” stuff, so they don’t get mocked for not having it, etc.
If this was indeed the reason it has failed, as only the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, which leads us to problems like narcotics.
The main point of my post is how viable would be for the economy to have people that buy only what they really need? Wouldnt that crash the economy and lead to mass unemployment?
Regardless of the answer, I think that we really have no other choice but to change our lifestyles to be more eco friendly. That is, if we want to survive as a species.
Rex Weyler:
Edgar, yes, as we change to a human culture that does not consume wastefully, that only consumes what we need, this will change our economics. Reckless and wasteful consumption make a few people very rich, but simultaneously makes the earth poor — lost rivers, lost soil, lost forests, lost fish, acidic seas, toxic wastes, melting glaciers, and all the rest. As we impoverish Earth, we impoverish ourselves. Our system of growth economics is not sustainable in any biological and phyisical world. All growth in nature ends in either a crash or in the discovery of ecological balance that we call “homeostasis.”
So yes. Living sustainably — real sustainability, not the phoney “green” consuming we see in the world today — will change our economic system.
But we are already crashing. Our economic system is in a crash right now. It will jerk and sputter continually until we learn to live within our means, within the biophysical limits of the planet. Once we learn this — perhaps over the next few generations — we may discover that real wealth is nature itself, a stable, abundant world, not a private bank account.
And you are correct: We have no choice but to change.
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John Billings Says:
Hello Rex and Everyone,
All of these environmental problems, Earth abuse, from localized species extinction to global climate change, have two roots.
The first root of Earth abuse is the delusion that we are above nature: supernaturalism, the whole “rape the Earth” dominion ideology. This error can be corrected, and I think is slowly being changed through education in evolution and ecological science.
The second root is more difficult: sheer human population. No “green” technology or lifestyle will sustain us for long. A population of 6.5B is simply unsustainable, and standard predictions have us at 9.5B by mid-century. This is not likely to happen.
Given the current ecological crises, including warming I have observed over 20 years in Florida, I expect a drastic human population reduction before 2050. This will happen either by Nature, or by our own choice.
For those already familiar with ecological science basics, please bear with the following. The Biosphere is dynamically equilibrated, which means that organisms cannot outgrow their supplies for long.
If an animal outgrows its food or other supply, the supply fails and the animal population is reduced until its supply grows back. This is dynamic equilibrium, or rebalancing.
Humans are about to be rebalanced. We have been very effective in killing our predators and prey, and changing the environment to suit ourselves. Thus we have grown vastly beyond Biospheric carrying capacity. The results are the extinctions of 25 species per day, massive loss of rain forests and Arctic icecaps, and so on.
However, the Biosphere is an excellent self-balancing system, of which we are just one part. This is true no matter what our religions or egos tell us. The Biosphere will rebalance itself by reducing our population, and I think rather soon.
The human response in terms of future survival is another matter, but one strategy to reduce the natural balancing exists for us. I am speaking of voluntary population reduction (VPR).
Certainly, VPR is not easy to discuss, but discuss it we must. We are the first species to have this problem, and we can use our intelligence to solve it.
There is a scenario for voluntary population reduction, which is entirely consensual and humane, but I would rather describe it when and if people show real interest.
On another note: I have noticed recently a sort of “plague party” mentality among some people. They are saying, in effect, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we go extinct.” My answer to the plague party is, I have children.
This is not an incurable plague; Earth abuse is a solvable problem. We just have to make some difficult decisions, far beyond “green technology”, and make them soon. May we have the courage.
John
Rex Weyler:
Thanks John for this analysis of ecological realities, dynamic equalibrium, and the fate of any species in overshoot. You are correct that our growing civilization — the scale of population and consumption — is not sustainable. And yes, nature will stabilize us if we don’t do it consciously.
I would love to hear your ideas about creating ways to allow human population to decline to a sustainable level. Human population is indeed a sustainability issue on ecological grounds. Every species must find a level of homeostasis in its habitat. Nature does not give us a free pass to ignore these limits to growth just because we’re clever humans.
I have been advocating three global policies that would help stabilize human population and allow us to reduce human population without unpleasant government actions:
1. Women’s rights. When women have the right to choose their family size, they have less children naturally. Democratic countries that already enjoy gender and civil rights could help achieve this by refusing trade with nations at have not formalized women’s rights.
2. Contraception access: Wherever families have access to contraception, birth rates go down.
3. Education, at every level of society: Neither the public nor our policy makers and alleged leaders appear to understand the ecological fundamentals that we now face. General education will help citizens achieve civil rightsgain local control of their lives and environments. Ecological education at the level of policy development, economics, and political leadership will help our policy makers understand the real challenges and discover authentic solutions.
You are correct: We must openly and freely discuss these critical ecological issues and not be intimidated by cultural taboos against discussing the problem. We must also avoid stupid, sociopathic responses such thinking we should just party and enjoy frivolous pleasures. I have children too. And beyond that, a billion people live in hunger and other 4 billion people live subsistance lives with extremely modest consumption. Only about 15% of humanity enjoys the opportunity to be reckless and wasteful with their material and energy consumption.
Humanity will either get real and learn what ecology demands of us, or we’ll increase overshoot and crash. In nature, those are the only two choices.
Here is an earlier blog posting on human population:
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