I like the idea of sustainable cookies. One could hardly argue that future generations will not need them. While they may evolve, cookies must nevertheless, remain cookies in order to, you know, be them.
Perhaps I will launch a GoFundMe effort to enable to develop said sustainable cookies. The obvious goal must be to develop cookies that are delicious, availlable and self-restoring.
I suspect someone will insist these cookies must be free of sweeteners, gluten and any trace of salt as well as totally vegan in origin, and devastate the entire effort.
I had never formulated it so muchly, just figured sustainability was undefinable, meaningless pablum to make politicians appear to be concerned and doing something. I did wonder why the users thought previous generations were more interested in destroying resources rather than preserving them, or maintaining them, so they could sell them or pass them on to heirs. I am glad you do take the time to state the obvious, and so well.
The problem with your post is that there are good definitions of sustainability in ecological economics or systems science and you don't know them or argue about them. For example, Herman Daly proposes 3 principles for a sustainable economy. I'll quote these principles from the article "What Should Be Held Steady in a Steady-State Economy?":
"1. Limit the use of all resources to rates that ultimately result in levels of waste that can be absorbed by the ecosystem.
2. Exploit renewable resources at rates that do not exceed the ability of the ecosystem to regenerate the resources."
3. Deplete nonrenewable resources at rates that, as far as possible, do not exceed the rate of development of renewable substitutes."
When you understand these principles, you will have answers for your questions.
Most resource consumptions reduce considerably over time, per economic unit or product. A can of coke today uses only one sixth the aluminium it previously used, as well as much less energy. This is why Paul R. Ehrlich lost his bet and continues to lose it in terms of every single resource, all of which are more abundant today.
There are. of course, exceptions. 1) Externalities. 2) The displacement of natural wilderness caused by the economic desperation of people living under the globally acknowledged absolute poverty thresholds.
Contrary to what intellectually lazy Westerners think, the answer isn't global transfers of wealth. Foreign aid over decades did a lot of good, but it didn't help raise people out of poverty. The only thing that does is the type of economic opportunity empowered by the market- with mobile phones and dirt cheap automated banking functions accomplishing more in twelve years than all the well-meaning help of Western altruists.
This doesn't mean their isn't a role for the Left, but it should come in the form of Fair Trade enforcement and the establishment of stronger international labour rights. Ironically, the free market can also reduce child labour levels far better than top-down government interventions. Of course, it also requires investigative journalism, which seems to be a dying profession.
The first sentence is true but irrelevant because which is important for sustainability is absolute resource consumption and it is increasing; the reason is rebound effect. Also the main drivers of resource consumption are economic growth and population growth.
Resources are not more abundant today, their production rates are higher today. That is why they are economically more affordable except a few resource like crude oil. Indeed, This is predicted by "The Limits to Growth"; rise (higher production rates), peak and decline. That is the cycle of civilization.
_Limits to Growth_ ignores rational behavior with regard to the future. As Hotelling pointed out a very long time ago, it is in the interest of the owner of a depletable resource to allocate production over time efficiently, leaving oil in the ground today if selling next year pays him more than selling it this year and investing the money.
On their model, if the price of food is going up farmers produce more in the near future, less in the far future, because they are over farming and wearing out the soil. But the higher the price farmers expect to get in the future the greater their incentive to maintain the fertility of the soil so that they can produce in the future. If the Limits model was correct Japanese agricultural output would have crashed long ago, since prices have been high there for a long time.
What they did was equivalent to predicting the course of an automobile on the assumption that the driver was blind. The conclusion, of course, is that it would crash.
Hotelling's model is wrong because it can't explain stylized facts of resource depletion:
1-bell-shaped curve of production (Hubbert curve)
2-U-shaped prices (initially decreasing prices due to increasing production and rising prices after peak)
Hotelling's model predicts ever decreasing production rates and ever increasing prices. So, it can't explain exponential growth of production.
We know that Hubbert's model is the correct resource depletion model. Actually, it is not coincidence that the model of Limits to Growth also produces bell-shaped curves.
Mineral resources are actually common pool resources in the eyes of firms. They can't optimize production as Hotelling assumes because this will cause them to fall behind in competition. So, firms deplete one field and turn to another so that they can grow as fast as possible and maximize their profits. If one firm doesn't do this, another firm will. So we can apply Hardin's tradegy of commons to mineral resources which also predicts a bell-shaped production curve.
Dennis Meadows also uses automobile analogy. It is the extreme speed of automobile (exponential economic growth) which causes the crash no matter how eagle-eyed the driver is.
My point was that the limited growth from limited resources narrative is a fallacy- at least in practical terms- because it fails to take into account human innovation. That being said the process of innovation is under attack, at least in the West.
Let's take coal as an example- by far the most easily tackled major contributor to climate change. If one looks at Our World In Data then one will see a massive decrease in coal usage in Europe, and some countries, like the UK, have done away with it as energy source completely. My point would be that both China and India (more modestly) are working to replace coal as an energy source- with the primary load being borne by a significant build out of nuclear energy capacity.
It's only technological change which can fix all this- not behaviour change, stopping cars or shifting to a plant-based diet. Of course, behaviour change through persuasion is an entirely different matter. The school run is a prime example- all the evidence shows that parents shielding kids from other kids who are oftentimes occasionally cruel, is bad for their long-term emotional development because it doesn't build emotional antifragility. When these children grow to adults they can never be truly happy because they have no experience fending away bullies, negotiating with others or building relationships which last. The school run is major source of car road usage in most Western countries- it's also a critical contributor to congestion.
But where climate change advocates and politicians get it wrong is in trying to introduce change through stealth, pricing mechanisms and covert behaviour change. Recently Cambridge UK tried to introduce a scheme aimed at pricing people out of their cars. Despite being a major academic city, significantly to the Left of anything seen in US, the local Left was voted out of office in a heartbeat- they ceded the political ground to the British Conservative Party who just happen to be at their lowest ebb in terms of national popularity in more than a generation. Which brings me to another point- start telling people in major cities that air pollution shortens their lives by up to ten years- that's an easily proved assertion and might just get the kind of change that the climate change lobby wants.
Most people profess to wanting change, but the question is how much are they willing to pay? For some, it's only the princely sum of $20 year- certainly not the $11K per person per year achieving net 20% would take in America, in perpetuity (given current technological deployment). Innovation on the other hand achieves about $11 per dollar spent- compared to roughly 5c per dollar is we leave it to the mismanagement of government resource allocation.
And as for degrowth? We tried it during the pandemic and it completely reversed the improvements made to poverty in Africa and the rest of the poor global South, primarily because of a withdrawal of Western and Asian markets. 120 million were put back below the threshold for absolute poverty- basically, malnourishment.
Geary Johansen <i> My point would be that both China and India (more modestly) are working to replace coal as an energy source- with the primary load being borne by a significant build out of nuclear energy </i>
I certainly don't yet see China's efforts, such as they may be, showing up in emissions measurements. Nor does the more obvious upgrade path seem to be getting any support, in either nation nor among globalists. Clearly -- to me -- every joule of energy obtained by combustion of the Hydrogen in natural gas is "cleaner" from a CO2 standpoint than a joule generated from wholly Carbon rich coal. So, investing in fracking and pipelines to move a depletable fossil fuel gas to brown-field, near-urban, furnaces/boilers, still viable and relatively easily converted, from coal to gas is a smarter play than investing in any wholly new "sustainable" generation stations in green fields farther from the market.
The US, for the moment, has decades of head start and still has both competitive and comparative advantages over most of the rest of the globe with regard to fracking. Building and sustaining pipelines ... well, every nation is pretty much at par on that tech. So long as demolition teams don't blow up the pipelines as covert acts of war...
G Johnson's point about fertilizers also implies support for gas and fracking. One might use "clean" electrical energy from hydro, wind, solar or nuclear fission to step thru the chemistry from hydrolysis of water to reactions with air to make ammonia. But given inevitable losses of funds and energy at each stage of process, not to mention the costs of a "grid" -- cables and towers and transformers -- to move electricity from solar farms to fertilizer factors, well, there's not much of that future that I would regard as sustainable, either.
My one criticism of the article is that it doesn't look far enough ahead. It only looks 12 years into the future, when, at a minimum, it should be looking to 2060.
At this point, critics usually point out that this is too slow. But it's worth noting that last year wind and solar accounted for 12% of world energy- and this represents about 15 years of trying to build out these industries in earnest. It's also worth noting that solar seems to be reaching a natural capacity limit in fabrications- although the recent massive rises in silicon prices will no doubt increase extraction, we just don't know how much more silicon we can lay our hands on per year.
Plus, wind and solar between them seem to have around a 40% hard limit on the contribution they can make to a specific region's energy pool. Most places that have gone that far are having problems matching supply to demand.
One of the problems of sustainability is that, at the detail level, it often seems to achieve short-term sustainability at the expense of long-term sustainability. A good example would be the Western insistence that Sub-Saharan Africa not develop its natural gas resources for energy purposes.
Here's the problem. I ran the population growth rates a couple of years ago. With energy austerity Sub-Saharan Africa would have 57 people per two people today. The reason? Falls in population growth rates require three things- education for girls, access to birth control and, most important of all, access to the type of economic opportunity which only industrialisation and markets can bring.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that more affluent Westerners seem to romanticise traditional farming, which in Africa is more accurately termed subsistence farming. Sure, climate and weather events has often lead people in Africa to flee the land to the cities or Europe, but this is vastly outweighed by young people wanting to exchange backbreaking labour working the land with a substantial increase in standard of livings in what the West dubiously terms 'sweatshop' conditions.
And the current imputations to the reputation of Norman Borlaug, the man who saved a billion lives with his Green Revolution is simply disgraceful. Contrary to slanderous Netflix documentary assertions North Africa hasn't increased fertiliser usage, Europe has substantially reduced it, whilst almost all increased usage of fertilisers has been in the world's least developed countries (this Our World in Data source even collates the data into a single graph category).
The worst kind of evil is that which is committed in the name of good, knowingly or unknowingly.
I always looked at sustainability arguments as either direct arguments for renewable energy or pleas against activities that make species go extinct. I never considered it a complete philosophy of economics or anything else.
He points out some of the problems but it is a superficial treatment and some of the economics is wrong. Where he gets it right he is unwilling to follow through on the logic of his argument. He complains about the UK spending the revenue from North Sea oil but he has already pointed out that resources are fungible. As long as average real income continues to rise, his sustainability criterion is met whatever happens to particular resources.
He suggests as a solution to the using up of natural resource income investing it, so that the natural resource is replaced by assets that will be available to our descendants. But investing more from one revenue source will tend to push down interest rates, reducing investment from other sources.
He says that future generations don't participate in the market, which sounds right but isn't. In deciding whether to pump oil now or leave it in the ground to be pumped and sold later, the owner is considering what he thinks the demand of future generations will be.
There are other problems.
A disappointing essay, but thanks for pointing me at it.
Sustainability apparently means, in a policy sense (see comments on this thread), "keep the things I like the way I like them for the indefinite, but VERY long future. It works for me, so it must be good." However the policies all seem aimed at some sort of mystical stabile balancing point.
Sustainability then must mean some kind of semi-permanent stasis. Or maybe just death. That seems to be very stable for individuals.
I prefer to think about resiliency. As in what can we do to best prepare indefinitely for an unpredictable future? And stasis/sustainability tends to destroy the ability to be resilient.
Like the argument here against suburbs. It is becoming more and more evident to me that it is cities that are unsustainable. At least given average human desires. The main reason for the existence of cities (being a locus of the transfer of goods, services, and ideas mostly) no longer exists as it has in the past. We don't need to live cheek-by-jowl to readily exchange goods, or services, and especially ideas. Thus we 'lose' the good things about cities while keeping the bad things, like crime, unpleasant interactions with strangers, dirt, noise, etc. Oddly enough many people prefer the suburbs because it better suits their human needs.
And a reasonably well-run suburb can provide the necessities with its own tax base. Especially if avoids the corruption that pervades most (all?) big cities.
I've been reading Eliezer's Rationality AI to Zombies (most over my head, but I'd recommend it for at least the parts I can grasp). He gives an exampe of an argument about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, to one, yes, because he means it causes vibrations in the air, to another, no, because he means an audible vibration on an eardrum of an observer.
So for this word, sustainability, it's not always empty rhetoric, although I agree with you as you've used it.
If I say, "I spend more than I earn every month," and someone says, "that's not sustainable," I'd have to agree...if I go into debt at a higher rate each month, eventually the house of cards falls.
If I'm hunting elephants for ivory, that's not sustainable either, evenutally the elephants can't breed fast enough to keep up and they go extinct.
The problem is the connotation of the word and also the "so what effect."
If someone says, "using fossil fuels is unsustainabile," we can say, "yeah, so what? We'll have figured out solar or some other fuel source soon enough, humans are inventive, it's not a problem. Use as much oil as you want, it's probably better, long term, because it forces people to invent alternatives."
So there is this divide, in both elephants and fossil fuels, we can agree that if we use them at X rate, eventually they aren't available anymore, i.e. the use would be unsustainable, however, in the case of oil, it's good, in the case of elephants, it's bad (assuming you like elephants).
I think it gets trickier with some things like farm land use, it doesn't seem sustainable to keep growing more and more wheat, soy, and corn, but maybe it doesn't matter....maybe it does... some things seem to have some unknown unknowns.
Certainly cutting down old growth forest or slash and burn farming isn't "sustainable" in, just like elephants, old growth trees and/or certain forests/jungles can't regrow fast enough.
So there's some (seemingly) gray areas here. The cod fisheries (and others) seemed to not only not have been sustainable, they seem to be lost forever. Maybe it's not problem, protein is protein and the people can eat talapia.
In the mid-90s I went long-line fishing with my dad, at the time, in Hawaii, shark finning was legal. The crews of tuna boats killed a lot of sharks for their fins. That wasn't sustainabile by any means, and if it hadn't been made illegal, eventually the ecology would have flipped in ways that might have been very bad for the fisheries in general, certianly bad for the sharks. I didn't really care at the time, I needed the cash, but in retrospect, I think it was irresponsible and selfish.
So, yeah, I don't think it's fair to argue about sustainability unless it's well defined about what you mean.
If you mean using up fossil fuels and in general building roads and stuff, it seems that's going to go well and fine, we adapt, and as you mention, we don't know the future. But if you mean, "yeah, go ahead and extinct blue whales because we don't know if our great grandchildren will reallly care about whales," I'd definately disagree with that position. I can imagine a world in which nobody cares about whales or elephants, or maybe they make robot AI whales and elephants, but still, I think that would be a net loss for humans (although I concede 98% of things have already gone the way of the dodo).
The elephant case is complicated, and might go the opposite of the way you assume. From the standpoint of the locals, elephants are a nuisance, since they trample crops, sometimes kill people. So if the locals don't get any benefit from the elephants they are likely to do what they can to kill them.
If elephants can be harvested for ivory and the locals get some of the value, that's a reason to protect them.
There is an interesting book called _At the Hand of Man_, — I should probably reread it and do a book review. It's by an environmentalist who is skeptical of other environmentalists. By his account, when the ivory ban was proposed, people who actually worked with elephants were mostly against it, for that reason. People who did fund raising for environmental causes were for it. When it was voted on by African countries, the countries that voted for it contained a majority of the African population but the countries that voted against contained a majority of the elephants. His explanation was that countries which couldn't control poachers were for the ivory ban, since the poachers killed the elephants to get the ivory — and such countries didn't have a lot of elephants. Countries with good enough law enforcement to prevent poaching had a lot of elephants, and were against the ban.
I would be interested in knowing how many people who oppose ivory products would be in favor of finding ways to produce more elephants (and thus, more ivory) or generate ivory in some way that didn't involve killing elephants (e.g. extracting the tusks nonlethally somehow, and perhaps feeding the elephants something that causes their tusks to quickly regrow). I'm fairly certain people aren't objecting to there being a particular type of off-white jewelry with a certain texture, or of specific types of homeopathic treatments derived from ground tooth material, but rather to the killing of elephants. (For similar reasons, I would be interested in knowing how many people who like ivory products would be in favor of generating that ivory artificially, or would object because the provenance does not involve the death of a powerful animal.)
In either case, I suspect I won't find out, as the alternatives to ivory are probably so impractical as to be out of the question and so everyone's views assume that.
My understanding is that ivory can be harvested by cutting off the tusk without killing the elephant. It can certainly be harvested by waiting until the elephant dies.
Is there such a person that opposes ivory for any reason than harm to animals?
Like would such a person be against using mammoth ivory dug up from the earth?
I think the only logical objections are either they don't like the killing of these particular animals (or maybe as in a vegan, any animals) or they recoginze that the externality of killing elephants for ivory is passed to all of society (those that love elephants and think a world without them is lessor).
As for artifical ivory, eventually we'll have the ability to make artifical everything, so sure, people will still prefer diamonds over CZ, but only for dumb reasons.
I also heard from an environmentalist that explained when a certian region gets good at law enforcement, i.e. protecting elephants, the poachers move to another area, i.e. gorillas.
So, all points to consider, i.e. unintended consquences and counterintuitive results.
I'm a meat eater and don't have qualms about hunting, etc., but I have issues with killing elephants and whales. Sentimentality? I don't know, but I find the idea of killing certain large mammals repugnant. Still eat beef, however, so maybe I'm a hypocrite.
I lived in California when that rich socialite got the horse meat ban on the ballot and whatever Prop it was passed, that was cultural bigotry nonsense, of course, if pork is legal, banning horse (or dog) is illogical and merely an emotional reaction.
My favourite is 'The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good' by William Easterly. I knew that it was primary market forces which lifted over a billion people out of absolute poverty between 2000 and 2012, but what I really didn't understand was the depth of the folly of the period which preceded it. Real world 'Man of Systems', roughly 200 years later.
I really like the example about sustainability of horse riding circa 1900. That I think really hammers in the question of what we mean by sustainability. Personally, when I think about sustainability, I'm actually mostly thinking about efficiency, especially long term efficiency. For example, the unsustainability of suburb development patterns is actually evident in the ongoing money-losing proposition that suburbs inflict on cities. Just as a ponzi scheme is unsustainable because its a money losing venture, so are US-style suburbs unsustainable because the infrastructure they use can't be feasibly paid for by the taxes suburban residents can produce.
Similar to the above but with things other than money, I also view things that aren't sustainable as things that are destroying things of value. Habitat destruction, soil depletion on unsustainably operated farms, pollution of the oceans with plastics, styrofoam, and other garbage, and the proliferation of space garbage in orbit. These are all things that destroy value, mostly as negative externalities, but notably in the case of farmland destruction, it seems that the ultimate result (sub-par produce) falls on the consumers who are ignorant of the low quality it causes.
I agree that ecnomics will automatically work things out if we run out of fossil fuels. Its seems unlikely in the near future that we will, but an angle that fits with the concept of destroying something of value would be: what if we run out of fossil fuels, then the ice age hits, and we have nothing to burn to stave off another snowball earth? Its possible the rampant use of fossil fuels today could mean we won't be able to use them for a much more valuable purpose in the future. Again, very hypothetical.
A sudden population collapse could indeed be problematic, but I do not see a gradual decrease in the global population as a problem. If anything, the contrary. Resources needed by humans would presumably become less scarce and therefore cheaper, although this would probably be partially off-set by a smaller population producing fewer man-made resources. If a population collapse were to happen in the developed world only, an immediate solution could be to simply open the borders to people from third world countries. They and their descendants would soon flourish and and thus bolster the productive population.
For most people, sustainability means not using resources faster than you can obtain them.
Sleep is a good example of something that needs to be done sustainably.
I will try to put it in economic terms: Wakefulness is highly correlated with patience with your children. Wakefulness is a limited resource that runs out after a certain number of hours.
Let's say I practice sustainability by taking a nap in the morning. My kids are up at 4, and if I don't take a nap sometime between then and 3pm, I'm not going to have any patience left for bedtime.
Or maybe I'm saying that short term sustainability makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure anyone is really applying it to the long term.
You're killing it, a content machine
I like the idea of sustainable cookies. One could hardly argue that future generations will not need them. While they may evolve, cookies must nevertheless, remain cookies in order to, you know, be them.
Perhaps I will launch a GoFundMe effort to enable to develop said sustainable cookies. The obvious goal must be to develop cookies that are delicious, availlable and self-restoring.
I suspect someone will insist these cookies must be free of sweeteners, gluten and any trace of salt as well as totally vegan in origin, and devastate the entire effort.
I had never formulated it so muchly, just figured sustainability was undefinable, meaningless pablum to make politicians appear to be concerned and doing something. I did wonder why the users thought previous generations were more interested in destroying resources rather than preserving them, or maintaining them, so they could sell them or pass them on to heirs. I am glad you do take the time to state the obvious, and so well.
The problem with your post is that there are good definitions of sustainability in ecological economics or systems science and you don't know them or argue about them. For example, Herman Daly proposes 3 principles for a sustainable economy. I'll quote these principles from the article "What Should Be Held Steady in a Steady-State Economy?":
"1. Limit the use of all resources to rates that ultimately result in levels of waste that can be absorbed by the ecosystem.
2. Exploit renewable resources at rates that do not exceed the ability of the ecosystem to regenerate the resources."
3. Deplete nonrenewable resources at rates that, as far as possible, do not exceed the rate of development of renewable substitutes."
When you understand these principles, you will have answers for your questions.
Most resource consumptions reduce considerably over time, per economic unit or product. A can of coke today uses only one sixth the aluminium it previously used, as well as much less energy. This is why Paul R. Ehrlich lost his bet and continues to lose it in terms of every single resource, all of which are more abundant today.
There are. of course, exceptions. 1) Externalities. 2) The displacement of natural wilderness caused by the economic desperation of people living under the globally acknowledged absolute poverty thresholds.
Contrary to what intellectually lazy Westerners think, the answer isn't global transfers of wealth. Foreign aid over decades did a lot of good, but it didn't help raise people out of poverty. The only thing that does is the type of economic opportunity empowered by the market- with mobile phones and dirt cheap automated banking functions accomplishing more in twelve years than all the well-meaning help of Western altruists.
This doesn't mean their isn't a role for the Left, but it should come in the form of Fair Trade enforcement and the establishment of stronger international labour rights. Ironically, the free market can also reduce child labour levels far better than top-down government interventions. Of course, it also requires investigative journalism, which seems to be a dying profession.
The first sentence is true but irrelevant because which is important for sustainability is absolute resource consumption and it is increasing; the reason is rebound effect. Also the main drivers of resource consumption are economic growth and population growth.
Resources are not more abundant today, their production rates are higher today. That is why they are economically more affordable except a few resource like crude oil. Indeed, This is predicted by "The Limits to Growth"; rise (higher production rates), peak and decline. That is the cycle of civilization.
_Limits to Growth_ ignores rational behavior with regard to the future. As Hotelling pointed out a very long time ago, it is in the interest of the owner of a depletable resource to allocate production over time efficiently, leaving oil in the ground today if selling next year pays him more than selling it this year and investing the money.
On their model, if the price of food is going up farmers produce more in the near future, less in the far future, because they are over farming and wearing out the soil. But the higher the price farmers expect to get in the future the greater their incentive to maintain the fertility of the soil so that they can produce in the future. If the Limits model was correct Japanese agricultural output would have crashed long ago, since prices have been high there for a long time.
What they did was equivalent to predicting the course of an automobile on the assumption that the driver was blind. The conclusion, of course, is that it would crash.
Thank you for reply,
Hotelling's model is wrong because it can't explain stylized facts of resource depletion:
1-bell-shaped curve of production (Hubbert curve)
2-U-shaped prices (initially decreasing prices due to increasing production and rising prices after peak)
Hotelling's model predicts ever decreasing production rates and ever increasing prices. So, it can't explain exponential growth of production.
We know that Hubbert's model is the correct resource depletion model. Actually, it is not coincidence that the model of Limits to Growth also produces bell-shaped curves.
Mineral resources are actually common pool resources in the eyes of firms. They can't optimize production as Hotelling assumes because this will cause them to fall behind in competition. So, firms deplete one field and turn to another so that they can grow as fast as possible and maximize their profits. If one firm doesn't do this, another firm will. So we can apply Hardin's tradegy of commons to mineral resources which also predicts a bell-shaped production curve.
I don't know much about soil degradation in Japan but I see a peak and decline of Japanese agricultural output (Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture,_forestry,_and_fishing_in_Japan)
Dennis Meadows also uses automobile analogy. It is the extreme speed of automobile (exponential economic growth) which causes the crash no matter how eagle-eyed the driver is.
My point was that the limited growth from limited resources narrative is a fallacy- at least in practical terms- because it fails to take into account human innovation. That being said the process of innovation is under attack, at least in the West.
Let's take coal as an example- by far the most easily tackled major contributor to climate change. If one looks at Our World In Data then one will see a massive decrease in coal usage in Europe, and some countries, like the UK, have done away with it as energy source completely. My point would be that both China and India (more modestly) are working to replace coal as an energy source- with the primary load being borne by a significant build out of nuclear energy capacity.
It's only technological change which can fix all this- not behaviour change, stopping cars or shifting to a plant-based diet. Of course, behaviour change through persuasion is an entirely different matter. The school run is a prime example- all the evidence shows that parents shielding kids from other kids who are oftentimes occasionally cruel, is bad for their long-term emotional development because it doesn't build emotional antifragility. When these children grow to adults they can never be truly happy because they have no experience fending away bullies, negotiating with others or building relationships which last. The school run is major source of car road usage in most Western countries- it's also a critical contributor to congestion.
But where climate change advocates and politicians get it wrong is in trying to introduce change through stealth, pricing mechanisms and covert behaviour change. Recently Cambridge UK tried to introduce a scheme aimed at pricing people out of their cars. Despite being a major academic city, significantly to the Left of anything seen in US, the local Left was voted out of office in a heartbeat- they ceded the political ground to the British Conservative Party who just happen to be at their lowest ebb in terms of national popularity in more than a generation. Which brings me to another point- start telling people in major cities that air pollution shortens their lives by up to ten years- that's an easily proved assertion and might just get the kind of change that the climate change lobby wants.
Most people profess to wanting change, but the question is how much are they willing to pay? For some, it's only the princely sum of $20 year- certainly not the $11K per person per year achieving net 20% would take in America, in perpetuity (given current technological deployment). Innovation on the other hand achieves about $11 per dollar spent- compared to roughly 5c per dollar is we leave it to the mismanagement of government resource allocation.
And as for degrowth? We tried it during the pandemic and it completely reversed the improvements made to poverty in Africa and the rest of the poor global South, primarily because of a withdrawal of Western and Asian markets. 120 million were put back below the threshold for absolute poverty- basically, malnourishment.
Geary Johansen <i> My point would be that both China and India (more modestly) are working to replace coal as an energy source- with the primary load being borne by a significant build out of nuclear energy </i>
I certainly don't yet see China's efforts, such as they may be, showing up in emissions measurements. Nor does the more obvious upgrade path seem to be getting any support, in either nation nor among globalists. Clearly -- to me -- every joule of energy obtained by combustion of the Hydrogen in natural gas is "cleaner" from a CO2 standpoint than a joule generated from wholly Carbon rich coal. So, investing in fracking and pipelines to move a depletable fossil fuel gas to brown-field, near-urban, furnaces/boilers, still viable and relatively easily converted, from coal to gas is a smarter play than investing in any wholly new "sustainable" generation stations in green fields farther from the market.
The US, for the moment, has decades of head start and still has both competitive and comparative advantages over most of the rest of the globe with regard to fracking. Building and sustaining pipelines ... well, every nation is pretty much at par on that tech. So long as demolition teams don't blow up the pipelines as covert acts of war...
G Johnson's point about fertilizers also implies support for gas and fracking. One might use "clean" electrical energy from hydro, wind, solar or nuclear fission to step thru the chemistry from hydrolysis of water to reactions with air to make ammonia. But given inevitable losses of funds and energy at each stage of process, not to mention the costs of a "grid" -- cables and towers and transformers -- to move electricity from solar farms to fertilizer factors, well, there's not much of that future that I would regard as sustainable, either.
I largely agree with you on nat gas, BTW. Nothing did more to reduce America's emissions. Nothing.
A good article from Forbes on the subject: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05/17/how-long-will-it-take-for-chinas-nuclear-power-to-replace-coal/?sh=66d86edf3b1b
My one criticism of the article is that it doesn't look far enough ahead. It only looks 12 years into the future, when, at a minimum, it should be looking to 2060.
At this point, critics usually point out that this is too slow. But it's worth noting that last year wind and solar accounted for 12% of world energy- and this represents about 15 years of trying to build out these industries in earnest. It's also worth noting that solar seems to be reaching a natural capacity limit in fabrications- although the recent massive rises in silicon prices will no doubt increase extraction, we just don't know how much more silicon we can lay our hands on per year.
Plus, wind and solar between them seem to have around a 40% hard limit on the contribution they can make to a specific region's energy pool. Most places that have gone that far are having problems matching supply to demand.
One of the problems of sustainability is that, at the detail level, it often seems to achieve short-term sustainability at the expense of long-term sustainability. A good example would be the Western insistence that Sub-Saharan Africa not develop its natural gas resources for energy purposes.
Here's the problem. I ran the population growth rates a couple of years ago. With energy austerity Sub-Saharan Africa would have 57 people per two people today. The reason? Falls in population growth rates require three things- education for girls, access to birth control and, most important of all, access to the type of economic opportunity which only industrialisation and markets can bring.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that more affluent Westerners seem to romanticise traditional farming, which in Africa is more accurately termed subsistence farming. Sure, climate and weather events has often lead people in Africa to flee the land to the cities or Europe, but this is vastly outweighed by young people wanting to exchange backbreaking labour working the land with a substantial increase in standard of livings in what the West dubiously terms 'sweatshop' conditions.
And the current imputations to the reputation of Norman Borlaug, the man who saved a billion lives with his Green Revolution is simply disgraceful. Contrary to slanderous Netflix documentary assertions North Africa hasn't increased fertiliser usage, Europe has substantially reduced it, whilst almost all increased usage of fertilisers has been in the world's least developed countries (this Our World in Data source even collates the data into a single graph category).
The worst kind of evil is that which is committed in the name of good, knowingly or unknowingly.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-consumption-usda?country=OWID_WRL~Least+developed+countries
I always looked at sustainability arguments as either direct arguments for renewable energy or pleas against activities that make species go extinct. I never considered it a complete philosophy of economics or anything else.
Robert Solow took a scalpel to the idea of sustainability here: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~econ480/notes/sustainability.pdf
He points out some of the problems but it is a superficial treatment and some of the economics is wrong. Where he gets it right he is unwilling to follow through on the logic of his argument. He complains about the UK spending the revenue from North Sea oil but he has already pointed out that resources are fungible. As long as average real income continues to rise, his sustainability criterion is met whatever happens to particular resources.
He suggests as a solution to the using up of natural resource income investing it, so that the natural resource is replaced by assets that will be available to our descendants. But investing more from one revenue source will tend to push down interest rates, reducing investment from other sources.
He says that future generations don't participate in the market, which sounds right but isn't. In deciding whether to pump oil now or leave it in the ground to be pumped and sold later, the owner is considering what he thinks the demand of future generations will be.
There are other problems.
A disappointing essay, but thanks for pointing me at it.
Can someone please summarize? It's a very long PDF
Sustainability apparently means, in a policy sense (see comments on this thread), "keep the things I like the way I like them for the indefinite, but VERY long future. It works for me, so it must be good." However the policies all seem aimed at some sort of mystical stabile balancing point.
Sustainability then must mean some kind of semi-permanent stasis. Or maybe just death. That seems to be very stable for individuals.
I prefer to think about resiliency. As in what can we do to best prepare indefinitely for an unpredictable future? And stasis/sustainability tends to destroy the ability to be resilient.
Like the argument here against suburbs. It is becoming more and more evident to me that it is cities that are unsustainable. At least given average human desires. The main reason for the existence of cities (being a locus of the transfer of goods, services, and ideas mostly) no longer exists as it has in the past. We don't need to live cheek-by-jowl to readily exchange goods, or services, and especially ideas. Thus we 'lose' the good things about cities while keeping the bad things, like crime, unpleasant interactions with strangers, dirt, noise, etc. Oddly enough many people prefer the suburbs because it better suits their human needs.
And a reasonably well-run suburb can provide the necessities with its own tax base. Especially if avoids the corruption that pervades most (all?) big cities.
Ah, well.
I've been reading Eliezer's Rationality AI to Zombies (most over my head, but I'd recommend it for at least the parts I can grasp). He gives an exampe of an argument about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, to one, yes, because he means it causes vibrations in the air, to another, no, because he means an audible vibration on an eardrum of an observer.
So for this word, sustainability, it's not always empty rhetoric, although I agree with you as you've used it.
If I say, "I spend more than I earn every month," and someone says, "that's not sustainable," I'd have to agree...if I go into debt at a higher rate each month, eventually the house of cards falls.
If I'm hunting elephants for ivory, that's not sustainable either, evenutally the elephants can't breed fast enough to keep up and they go extinct.
The problem is the connotation of the word and also the "so what effect."
If someone says, "using fossil fuels is unsustainabile," we can say, "yeah, so what? We'll have figured out solar or some other fuel source soon enough, humans are inventive, it's not a problem. Use as much oil as you want, it's probably better, long term, because it forces people to invent alternatives."
So there is this divide, in both elephants and fossil fuels, we can agree that if we use them at X rate, eventually they aren't available anymore, i.e. the use would be unsustainable, however, in the case of oil, it's good, in the case of elephants, it's bad (assuming you like elephants).
I think it gets trickier with some things like farm land use, it doesn't seem sustainable to keep growing more and more wheat, soy, and corn, but maybe it doesn't matter....maybe it does... some things seem to have some unknown unknowns.
Certainly cutting down old growth forest or slash and burn farming isn't "sustainable" in, just like elephants, old growth trees and/or certain forests/jungles can't regrow fast enough.
So there's some (seemingly) gray areas here. The cod fisheries (and others) seemed to not only not have been sustainable, they seem to be lost forever. Maybe it's not problem, protein is protein and the people can eat talapia.
In the mid-90s I went long-line fishing with my dad, at the time, in Hawaii, shark finning was legal. The crews of tuna boats killed a lot of sharks for their fins. That wasn't sustainabile by any means, and if it hadn't been made illegal, eventually the ecology would have flipped in ways that might have been very bad for the fisheries in general, certianly bad for the sharks. I didn't really care at the time, I needed the cash, but in retrospect, I think it was irresponsible and selfish.
So, yeah, I don't think it's fair to argue about sustainability unless it's well defined about what you mean.
If you mean using up fossil fuels and in general building roads and stuff, it seems that's going to go well and fine, we adapt, and as you mention, we don't know the future. But if you mean, "yeah, go ahead and extinct blue whales because we don't know if our great grandchildren will reallly care about whales," I'd definately disagree with that position. I can imagine a world in which nobody cares about whales or elephants, or maybe they make robot AI whales and elephants, but still, I think that would be a net loss for humans (although I concede 98% of things have already gone the way of the dodo).
The elephant case is complicated, and might go the opposite of the way you assume. From the standpoint of the locals, elephants are a nuisance, since they trample crops, sometimes kill people. So if the locals don't get any benefit from the elephants they are likely to do what they can to kill them.
If elephants can be harvested for ivory and the locals get some of the value, that's a reason to protect them.
There is an interesting book called _At the Hand of Man_, — I should probably reread it and do a book review. It's by an environmentalist who is skeptical of other environmentalists. By his account, when the ivory ban was proposed, people who actually worked with elephants were mostly against it, for that reason. People who did fund raising for environmental causes were for it. When it was voted on by African countries, the countries that voted for it contained a majority of the African population but the countries that voted against contained a majority of the elephants. His explanation was that countries which couldn't control poachers were for the ivory ban, since the poachers killed the elephants to get the ivory — and such countries didn't have a lot of elephants. Countries with good enough law enforcement to prevent poaching had a lot of elephants, and were against the ban.
I would be interested in knowing how many people who oppose ivory products would be in favor of finding ways to produce more elephants (and thus, more ivory) or generate ivory in some way that didn't involve killing elephants (e.g. extracting the tusks nonlethally somehow, and perhaps feeding the elephants something that causes their tusks to quickly regrow). I'm fairly certain people aren't objecting to there being a particular type of off-white jewelry with a certain texture, or of specific types of homeopathic treatments derived from ground tooth material, but rather to the killing of elephants. (For similar reasons, I would be interested in knowing how many people who like ivory products would be in favor of generating that ivory artificially, or would object because the provenance does not involve the death of a powerful animal.)
In either case, I suspect I won't find out, as the alternatives to ivory are probably so impractical as to be out of the question and so everyone's views assume that.
My understanding is that ivory can be harvested by cutting off the tusk without killing the elephant. It can certainly be harvested by waiting until the elephant dies.
Is there such a person that opposes ivory for any reason than harm to animals?
Like would such a person be against using mammoth ivory dug up from the earth?
I think the only logical objections are either they don't like the killing of these particular animals (or maybe as in a vegan, any animals) or they recoginze that the externality of killing elephants for ivory is passed to all of society (those that love elephants and think a world without them is lessor).
As for artifical ivory, eventually we'll have the ability to make artifical everything, so sure, people will still prefer diamonds over CZ, but only for dumb reasons.
I also heard from an environmentalist that explained when a certian region gets good at law enforcement, i.e. protecting elephants, the poachers move to another area, i.e. gorillas.
So, all points to consider, i.e. unintended consquences and counterintuitive results.
I'm a meat eater and don't have qualms about hunting, etc., but I have issues with killing elephants and whales. Sentimentality? I don't know, but I find the idea of killing certain large mammals repugnant. Still eat beef, however, so maybe I'm a hypocrite.
I lived in California when that rich socialite got the horse meat ban on the ballot and whatever Prop it was passed, that was cultural bigotry nonsense, of course, if pork is legal, banning horse (or dog) is illogical and merely an emotional reaction.
My favourite is 'The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good' by William Easterly. I knew that it was primary market forces which lifted over a billion people out of absolute poverty between 2000 and 2012, but what I really didn't understand was the depth of the folly of the period which preceded it. Real world 'Man of Systems', roughly 200 years later.
I really like the example about sustainability of horse riding circa 1900. That I think really hammers in the question of what we mean by sustainability. Personally, when I think about sustainability, I'm actually mostly thinking about efficiency, especially long term efficiency. For example, the unsustainability of suburb development patterns is actually evident in the ongoing money-losing proposition that suburbs inflict on cities. Just as a ponzi scheme is unsustainable because its a money losing venture, so are US-style suburbs unsustainable because the infrastructure they use can't be feasibly paid for by the taxes suburban residents can produce.
Similar to the above but with things other than money, I also view things that aren't sustainable as things that are destroying things of value. Habitat destruction, soil depletion on unsustainably operated farms, pollution of the oceans with plastics, styrofoam, and other garbage, and the proliferation of space garbage in orbit. These are all things that destroy value, mostly as negative externalities, but notably in the case of farmland destruction, it seems that the ultimate result (sub-par produce) falls on the consumers who are ignorant of the low quality it causes.
I agree that ecnomics will automatically work things out if we run out of fossil fuels. Its seems unlikely in the near future that we will, but an angle that fits with the concept of destroying something of value would be: what if we run out of fossil fuels, then the ice age hits, and we have nothing to burn to stave off another snowball earth? Its possible the rampant use of fossil fuels today could mean we won't be able to use them for a much more valuable purpose in the future. Again, very hypothetical.
A sudden population collapse could indeed be problematic, but I do not see a gradual decrease in the global population as a problem. If anything, the contrary. Resources needed by humans would presumably become less scarce and therefore cheaper, although this would probably be partially off-set by a smaller population producing fewer man-made resources. If a population collapse were to happen in the developed world only, an immediate solution could be to simply open the borders to people from third world countries. They and their descendants would soon flourish and and thus bolster the productive population.
For most people, sustainability means not using resources faster than you can obtain them.
Sleep is a good example of something that needs to be done sustainably.
I will try to put it in economic terms: Wakefulness is highly correlated with patience with your children. Wakefulness is a limited resource that runs out after a certain number of hours.
Let's say I practice sustainability by taking a nap in the morning. My kids are up at 4, and if I don't take a nap sometime between then and 3pm, I'm not going to have any patience left for bedtime.
Or maybe I'm saying that short term sustainability makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure anyone is really applying it to the long term.
Many things in life are