Schizophrenic links: pessimism, optimism, more pessimism

Some interesting material from The New Scientist

• Pessimism: Rio+20 declaration talks fail almost before they begin The title pretty much says it all. But, for the gory details of the backroom negotiations among the US, Venezuela, Canada, Russia and Japan to kill any major deal, read the story.
• Optimism: Peak planet: Are we starting to consume less? A reasonably thorough assessment of the argument that humanity's ever-rising environmental impact is about to go into reverse. The article discusses value change and 'dematerialization' but places the greatest hope in new technologies. 

Will we grasp the nettle? The Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup argued that throughout history, population growth and the pressure of shortages have been necessary spurs to technological developments, which seem to arrive just in time to avert the sort of disasters that exercised the likes of Malthus and Ehrlich. The signs are that we already have the know-how to live long and prosper without demanding ever more from a finite planet. The question is whether we will make the decisions to realise that promise before "just in time" becomes "just too late".

• More Pessimism: The fixation on Boserup and the notion that "we already have the know-how to live long and prosper without demanding ever more from a finite planet" runs afoul of deeper analyses of our current condition. The Ingenuity Gap, for example, suggests that the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of our problems has created a situation where our requirement for ingenuity has outstripped our ability to supply it.

Bill Gates on Energy and Climate

I have an odd love-hate relationship with Bill Gates. Like many, I use Microsoft products and have issues with their design and stability. More personally, I grew up in Washington state and experienced the changes -- both positive and negative -- resulting from the growth of Microsoft and the transformation of the Seattle region that accompanied it. But whatever you think of Microsoft, you have to admit Gates has both an unusually analytic mind and an exceedingly well developed ability to understand the big picture. He also puts evidence ahead of ideology and, as a result, his thought tends to evolve in relation to changing circumstances rather than stay fixed. He first used those abilities to identify a series of opportunities in computer technology and rather ruthlessly grow a business.

But, as he has moved into retirement, he has progressively applied those same abilities to a wider context. Thus in the late 1990's, much to the surprise of his Silicon Valley competitors, he argued that what the developing world needed was not computer technology (which they were pushing) but, rather, innovation in the area of health. Thus, he created the Gates Foundation and proceeded to fund innovation in the areas of vaccines and seeds. Now, in this wake of the Copenhagen debacle, Gates has shifted again, arguing that energy and climate are the central problem. His recent TED talk provides an exceptionally clear analysis of the benefits and, in particular, the technical and logistical hurdles associated with a variety of clean energy solutions. Interestingly, he is now seriously supporting development of a relatively unknown form of nuclear power, the traveling wave nuclear reactor (aka TerraPower). And, irrespective of whatever one may think of him, this is an interesting development in that his pedigree as the world's most successful late-20th century capitalist means his statements and views might reach climate skeptics in ways that others can't.

Social and Natural Systems in the Decline of North America's Megafauna

One of the most striking characteristics of humans is that we are adaptive generalists. Unlike most species, which are adapted to specific ecological niches, humans have radiated out to populate virtually every land-based ecosystem on the planet. We can do this because we build shelters, transport food and otherwise make arrangements for the necessities of life in those parts of the globe that would otherwise be inhospitable.

It is this capacity, the ability to transform situations to meet our needs, that lies at the root of the interconnection between social and natural systems. The most obvious example of this interconnection is climate change, where humans are pumping the carbon stored in the ground as fossil fuels into the atmosphere and, hence, fundamentally altering both atmospheric chemistry and the global climate.

But what lies at the root of this human capacity? The standard answer is technology. Through technology we transcend the limitations and constraints placed on other species. But a recent article by Christopher Johnson in Science (Science 20 November 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5956, pp. 1072 - 1073) detailing the process of magafaunal decline in North America casts doubt on this account. Here is the story in brief:

Twenty thousand years ago, North America had a more impressive array of big mammals than Africa does today; by 10,000 years ago, 34 genera of these mammals were gone, including the 10 species that weighed more than a ton. Many other drastic changes occurred in this interval, all of which have been advocated as possible causes of megafaunal extinction. The climate flipped from cold to warm, then back to cold in a 1000-year chill (the Younger Dryas), before rapidly rewarming. There were more, larger fires, and the structure and species composition of vegetation changed drastically. People arrived, and the Clovis culture—with a characteristic style of beautifully crafted stone spear points—flourished for less than 1000 years. Some scientists have argued that an extraterrestrial object struck Earth ~13,000 years ago, triggering the Younger Dryas, starting fires, killing the megafauna, and putting an end to the Clovis culture. ....

What about people? It has long been argued that Clovis artifacts signal the first arrival of people in North America south of the boreal ice sheets and that the Clovis people were specialized big-mammal hunters who caused a crash of megafaunal populations from prehuman abundance to extinction within a few hundred years. This “blitzkrieg” scenario is supported by the fact that terminal dates on megafaunal fossils range from 13,300 to 12,900 years ago, which coincides almost exactly with the Clovis period. But the new data show that the megafaunal decline had begun more than a thousand years earlier. If people were responsible for that decline, they must have been pre-Clovis settlers. The existence of such people has been controversial, but archaeological evidence is slowly coming to light and is consistent with their arrival around the beginning of the megafaunal decline. It is beginning to look as if the greater part of that decline was driven by hunters who were neither numerous nor highly specialized for big-game hunting. Clovis technology may have been a feature of the endgame, possibly reflecting an intensified hunting strategy that developed once megafauna had become rare, possibly wary, and harder to hunt. ...

Before 14,800 years ago, the environment around the site studied by Gill et al. was an open savanna or parkland, probably with scattered spruce and rare broad-leaved trees growing over a short grass-dominated pasture, and almost no fi re. As the megafauna declined, woody biomass increased, mainly by growth of broad-leaved trees that had presumably been suppressed by the large herbivores. The result was a transitory spruce/broadleaf woodland, the like of which does not exist today. Big fires broke out ~14,000 years ago, and for the next few thousand years, major fires returned every few centuries. These changes were widespread: Fire increased throughout North America ~14,000 years ago, and the transitory “no-analog” woodland extended over a vast area.

In short, we begin with an ecosystem dominated by open savanna and numerous species of megafauna. Humans arrive, and apparently without the aid of significant technology, kill off the majority of the megafauna thus setting loose a cascade of ecological changes that ultimately result in the replacement of the savanna by a "no-analog" woodland. Thus we have a clear, early example of the interconnection of social and natural systems, but one that seems not to implicate technology as the fundamental driver.

The Ebenezer Scrooge Carbon Reduction Plan

The Ebenezer Scrooge Carbon Reduction Plan

1. Am I obliged to give you a day off every 15th of December so you can go to Copenhagen to protest at the climate change conference? I suppose if I didn’t you would think yourself ill used.

2. The Middling Classes should buy as much stuff as possible so the Rich will be rich enough to afford all that expensive technology, like carbon capture and storage. So get back to work, you ungrateful slug.

3. Shut down the coal-fired power plants? Are you mad? Coal-fired power plants spew millions of tons of sulphur dioxide and ash into the air, which everybody knows causes global dimming. We should build as many coal-fired power plants as possible, at least one a week.

4. The poor should stay as poor as possible so the Rich can continue to be industrious. Any increase in consumption by the poor would only turn the rest of us into toasted Welsh Rabbit.

5. Climate change is caused by overpopulation. There are simply too many people on this planet, billions too many. Mass starvation is Mankind’s best Natural defence. If they are going die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

6. There is nothing more to be done about the mass migrations of Unfortunates driven from their homes by climate change. Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

7. Binding reductions? Bah, humbug!

Copyleft 2009 Shaun Bartone

The Critical Supply of Minerals and Elements for Technology

The guys over at the Oil Drum are obsessed with counting things: how much of anything is left in the ground, etc. The graph posted here is an estimate of how much minerals and elements are left to be mined that are critical to our current technology and how long that supply will last, given current uses. I'm not sure of the date of this information, and I cannot vouch for how accurate it is. But it's certainly a spectacular graph and is at least informative on the types of minerals we use and suggestive of the supplies we need. The graph was posted in a response to a post about an article in the November Scientific American, "A Plan for a Sustainable Future."

Geoengineering the Climate

Over the past couple years scientists have expressed renewed interest in geoengineering solutions to climate change, the idea that there is a technological solution to global warming that doesn't require people to modify their actions. So, for example, you dump a bunch of iron into the ocean in order to create an algal bloom which will soak up carbon from the atmosphere. Or, more imaginatively, you mimic the action of volcanos by pumping large quantities of reflective sulphur dust into the Earth's stratosphere through a patented 18-mile-long hose held up by helium balloons.

Most people start to laugh when they hear this stuff. And, indeed, these ideas were largely discarded by the scientific establishment years ago when they were first proposed. A number of them are described in Bill McKibbon's book The End of Nature first published in 1989. The recognized problem is that they have massive unintended consequences. Thus, for example, all that sulphur pumped into the stratosphere ultimately ends up in the ocean and transforms the oceans chemistry (and not in a good way). But, the scientists feel they are being forced to return to these ideas because the scientific evidence concerning climate change has become both stronger and more alarming while political consensus on effective international action has become weaker. In short, they are giving up on the political apparatus and social changes and starting to contemplate the need for immediate technical action because in order to avoid a tipping point in the climate.

As this article in The Guardian shows, these ideas are gaining popular attention. Equally as significant, in my view, is the fact that China is taking these ideas seriously. As they showed during the Olympics, the Chinese are capable of acting on a massive and concerted scale to accomplish environmental goals (e.g., clean air in Beijing during the Olympics) if they so desire. Even more significantly, geoengineering solutions are relatively cheap. This leads Gwen Dyer to speculate in Climate Wars about the possibility that certain nations particularly threatened by the consequences of climate change (for example, Small Island Developing States) might go rogue and intervene in the biosphere on a massive scale in order to prevent sea level rise, even if there were little international support for such schemes.

Wikipedia provides an interesting overview of some of the schemes.

Edward Burtynsky’s Oil

Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007.

Noted Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has an acute awareness of the scale of our impact on the earth and an uncanny ability to capture it in photos. Click on the image a couple of times to get the full effect. Like seeing his work in person (they are HUGE), the bigger the image is, the more impact it has. Photos from his new work, Oil, can be seen here. His photo of NB's own Saint John refinery is among those decorating the right hand column of the blog.

Burtynsky's TED talk about his work can be seen here.

Social Thermodynamics

The new Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics (EoHT), launched in December 2007, is a wiki of 1,150 articles related to the thermodynamics of human systems.

Within EoHT is a subsection on Sociological Thermodynamics. Under this heading I found a section on Niklas Luhmann and a French co-theorist that I hadn't heard of before, Jacque Ellul. The sociology subsection contains a list of social theorists of thermodynamics. Among these is an American anthropologist, Eugene Ruyle, who developed social thermodynamic theory based on Marx's labor theory of value; Edgar Morin, a French philosopher who developed a "complexity theory" of sociology; and Adrian Bejan, a Romanian-born mechanical engineer at MIT, applies thermodynamics in his "constructural theory" of society.

The author of the EoHT believes that the use of thermodynamic theory in sociology is still fairly new. The wiki was started by Sadi Carnot, aka, Libb Thims.

I had been looking for some connection between Luhmann and thermodynamics. I knew that he had a cybernetic theory, but not necessarily a thermodynamic model. I still think that Luhmann's thermodynamics is only partial, mainly concerned with entropy. But that the fact that he conceives society as an autopoietic system is an excellent place to begin to construct a sociology of thermodynamics.

The page lists some excellent sources, including Douglas White's Thermodynamic Principles for Social Sciences.

Dancing at the Edge of the Precipice

Alexis Ziegler's article, Dancing at the Edge of the Precipice, is a profound analysis of the global energy situation that goes well beyond the usually narrow "peak oil" discussion. The article ties shrinking resources to global class divisions, imperialist state and corporate power relations, and the decline of civil liberties. A sample:

"We are part of an aging Empire that is now facing a constriction of energy supply, which will in turn exacerbate the impacts of other ecological and resource limits. Put simply, if the global supply of energy and resources is shrinking, and if the global upper class is intent on maintaining its lifestyle at current or expanded levels, the consumption of the rich must be supported by a reduction of consumption among the poor. If the energy pie is shrinking and we intend to continue to eat the same or more, than everyone else must eat less."

* * * * *

"In the larger perspective, we do not face an energy crisis at all. Even as oil supplies decline, we will still have a greater supply of energy and other resources at our disposal than our grandparents had. . . The real issue is power. As we discussed in Culture Change, consumption is power, throughput is power. The desire of the global upper class to hold on to power drives them to continue to consume, and that is creating a conflict over dwindling resources."

Can someone please tell me where to find the system?

[Part 1]

It seems that sociologists don’t study “society” anymore. There’s no such thing. There’s only a “chain of interaction rituals,” or a “network of individuals.” Or to put it another way, the chain of interaction rituals among individuals is the system. So there is basically only one level: the micro-level. If there is a macro-level, it’s just the micro-level writ large. So, micro or macro, there’s really only one level. Ok.

But I still have this nagging feeling that there’s a system. Why? Because we keep talking about it. We still refer to the “economic system” (ooh, that’s a big one), the “educational system”, the “political system,” etc. So the, what do these “systems” consist of? [Silence.] Individuals. In chains of interaction rituals. Aaarrggh! I want to tear my hair out.

This is where I find myself in the discipline of sociology. I have entered a Goffmanian hall of mirrors where the same single object gets repeated over and over into infinity.

The Goffmanian argument goes like this: if all the individual (humans) in the world suddenly vanished, there would be no society. It’s the Social Theory of the Neutron Bomb. Suppose some alien dropped a hundred thousand giant neutron bombs on planet earth and thereby killed all the humans on the planet all at once (and all the plants and animals too, but we won’t get into that). Poof! Society gone. There would be no society.

Pretty convincing and tough to dispute. But, the great thing about the neutron bomb (shiver) is that it leaves all the buildings standing. Just, nobody’s in them. And all the telecommunication systems working, but nobody’s using them. And all the cars running, just nobody’s driving them. (Why can’t they come up with a “car bomb” that only kills cars?) And all the documents stuffed into all the drawers and tacked up to all the walls, mail in the inboxes. The stores would be full of goods, but no one's buying them. And the Internet still humming. All of our Facebook pages would still contain billions of our own words and images, but no one would be looking at them, or adding anything new.

Sociologists almost always ignore the built environment. Except for Foucault—who took into account buildings and spaces like the prison, the asylum, the clinic—and urban sociologists, like myself.

So, arguably, that part of the social system, the built environment, the fabricated environment, the electronic environment, would still be there, all hooked up, ready to go. That conglomeration of objects is at least a significant portion of the social system. But again, without live humans, it’s little more than a smoldering relic.

Out of our decrepit 12 Monkeys landscape, one person crawls out of the wreckage and begins to look around. She had been sheltered in a radiation-protected laboratory deep underground where she had been conducting research with a thousand chimpanzees, who also survived. Once on the surface, she roams the streets, then enters an office building. She wipes the dust and debris off a desktop computer, presses the power switch, and hey, it still works! She sits down and begins to view all the images on the screen, all the stored text , photos, and videos, all the telecommunications sent between hundreds, thousands, millions of people. For her, at least, there is a virtual social system.

She must conduct research. While things are still marginally running, she embarks on a grand scheme of social research to discover one thing: is there anybody out there? In theory, if she can find at least one other human, she has a "social system." But how can she, one human, possibly cover all the territory and search all the places that need to be searched to find other humans?

Ah, thank god, she still has the thousand monkeys! She has trained chimpanzees, and she can send them out to find other humans. It’s the Thousand Monkeys Research. Get one thousand monkeys to randomly do social research for a thousand years, and you might (randomly) come up with something that looks like a social system. So she sends them off—run, fly, go find Society!

This is the state of sociology today, at least as I have found it. Dominated by micro-theories of interaction and Thousand Monkeys research, there is nothing left of what used to be our grand theoretical tradition of social systems. There is no “society.”

I’m discouraged but I haven’t given up. I know there’s a social system out there, somewhere.

[end of Part 1]

Gadgets and the Jevons Paradox

The NYTimes has a nice article describing how increases in the electrical efficiency of consumer electronics is actually leading to an increase in electrical consumption (because the number of gadgets we have is increasing). This trend will only get worse as we move toward the world of ubiquitous computing described in Adam Greenfield's book Everyware.








This same process occurred with automobiles, increases in fuel efficiency and emissions reduction from catalytic converters were offset by increases in the amount driven and, as a result, auto emissions were not reduced. The phenomena is so well know that economists have a name for it, the Jevons Paradox, referring to the tendency for technological increases in the efficiency with which a resource is used to increase, rather than decrease, the rate of consumption of that resource.

The folks over at Workers of the World Relax have put together a video about the paradox, suggesting that the solution is for North Americans to follow the European model and use productivity gains to increase the amount of leisure time rather than to increase production and consumption.