Ecological Wealth of Nations
footprintnetwork.org
footprintnetwork.org
---
For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with Permaculture food production. http://permaculture.com/node/518
Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid form.
As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-scale ethanol, for instance.
Note: I've always been a fan of using seaside solar-powered electrolysis to produce hydrogen fuel, though hydrogen storage has its own issues.
Part of what shifts the economics here is that the leftover byproducts of both fermentation and distillation are returned as inputs to the farm.
I also have to mention, at one point Blume had a contract with a donut bakery to collect and make fuel from all their old scrap dough. Sugar and carbs...
There does also exist other means of reaching this goal -- a lot of low hanging fruit, actually.
Public policy could do a lot more to provide incentives which reward for increasing sustainability, and punish for decreasing it.
For example, when I go camping here in the States, especially now in the summer months, I see a lot of people running generators, and sometimes this is even to run AC units.
I look at their rigs: A white roof could reduce heat. Generators and fuel adds weight to haul on the road, decreasing MPGs. Solar panels could add charge at reduced weight. It would be massively more efficient to have the solar panels that are located at solar powerstations, located on top of someone's RV, instead, but we don't do this.
The reason that does not happen is because the incentives for consumers don't line up. Fuel is cheap, and solar panels are expensive. Energy production must be subsidized with taxpayer dollars and heavy handed regulation to create solar generation facilities that then lose power as current is transmitted over the grid.
Still, the difference is close enough that a nudge from effective public policy would make a big difference. Some people do own their own panels. I own one that can charge my laptop and smart phone. It's great, actually.
The correct answer is not a system of carbon credits and tax incentives, creating more heavy handed regulation, bureaucracy, and power to government -- exactly what politicians want. The right answer is to do what America will never vote for: tax gasoline.
If gas taxes actually accounted for the externalities they produce: local pollution, global warming, noise, etc., people would think twice about investing in that solar panel. And the rest of us wouldn't have to live with the externalities.
Taxes will net you less of what you are taxing. Perhaps that doesn't sound so illuminating, but a person from another planet visiting earth would scratch their head looking at our choice to heavily tax things we always desperately want more of (employment), and to subsidize through world policy and military expenditure things we want less of (oil).
Just getting the economics of public policy right can have a big impact on our ability to live in better harmony with nature.
Shouldn't be hard to add a little menu that allows you to choose the color themes, so color blind people can select one where they actually see a difference between the regions.
The easiest way I found for data viz to accommodate color blindness is to make sure everything is separated in intensity by a fair amount and have a tool-tip on the color legend indicating which color it is so if the accompanying text is referring to parts by color it can be figured out which color on the graph is being referred to.
They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure).
They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days that they raze whole villages to dig it out.
I'm having trouble finding comprehensive sources but their CO2 emissions have been on the rise from 2012 to 2014 at least and they are set to miss their CO2 reduction goals of 2020 and 2030.
At this point in time, they are the biggest CO2 source of Europe.
Demand is not growing overall, it's been in decline for a couple of years (with occasional upticks, but that's to be expected).
Germany is the largest total CO2 source in the EU, but it's also the largest country. Per capita emissions are still relatively high though.
It's not all green in Germany, a lot could be better. I'm in full agreement that the huge lignite mines and plants are a terrible thing, but one should still stick to facts. But despite all bads a lot is going in the right direction.
I'm really just waiting for fusion power to become viable and solve all of our earthly power consumption problems once and for all...
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-m...
It sounds like sarcasm but the only realistic way to do this is to significantly reduce your population and have the remaining people live in mud huts or caves like our ancestors did many millennia ago. (which would be insane)
I do agree that population, especially the population of people living a carbon-intense lifestyle, is a serious concern. Many people point a finger at poor nations with high population growth rates while failing to acknowledge that people in those countries tend to emit very little.
I'm currently reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and the two volumes of Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power: How energy forges human history. They're impressive and sobering.
While there are a range of estimates, there are a substantial group of population theorists, largely grounded in ecology, who see the population levels of 1650, roughly 500 million worldwide, as a likely long-term maximum.
(The broader range runs from as few as 50 million, which still exceeds virtually all large land mammals, to several trillion. I find the lower bound potentially plausible, though pessimistic, the higher range delusional.)
The fact that one can guess some results ahead of time doesn't cast doubt on the results, any more than, after coughing blood and 40 years of smoking, a positive cancer diagnosis is suspect.
I rate this rhetorical tactic a 3: poor composition, not enough work either developing the implication of skullduggery or making it more subtle, missed opportunities for additional attacks on reporters' credibility.
It is never different this time.
Arguably alarmism that fails to consider technological process is a necessary part of the signaling mechanism by which realistic price forecasts are established, an example of the market performing its usual strange alchemy in turning (often willful) ignorance into something useful, but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating.
It's a hugely important, contentious, and complicated issue (here's a thought: populations can't actually grow exponentially even given unlimited resources, with a loose, but strict, upper bound at the speed of light. The tight upper bound is unknown, probably multifaceted, but I don't see how anything beyond cubic growth is possible). Anyway. When speaking of grey whales, for instance, we say that the population is limited by the "carrying capacity." OK. But they aren't inventing new ways of getting fat nearly as fast as we are.
It boils down to there being a very real Malthusian limit on population. "History" (which is code for "1929 to 2007 or so" because for many economists history began that year, with a vague notion of there being time before that when Americans lived in some sort of Garden of Eden in which nothing ever happened), "history" proved Malthus wrong. Well, yeah, definitely, the food supply didn't grow linearly, which you figure it could have, nor did population increase exponentially, because it can't. But at any rate, he had a point in that there is a Malthusian limit at any given time, and there is a world population level at any given time, and humanity can move them up or down independently. And that's what the article is about, is unwittingly moving the limit down, by, say, turning whales into butter until they're barely any left. For much of the 20th century, we've been so successful at moving it up faster than the population level that we've come to think there is no such limit. And hey, what about Mars?
Just because we haven't hit the Malthusian limit recently doesn't mean it's not there.
Birth control is likely and is effective if you don't try to actively suppress it.
On the other hand, technological improvements aren't exactly stalling. In food alone there are huge benefits yet to be reaped from GMOs and hydroponics, just to mention two. It may not be exponential growth anymore, but there's little to suggest that it will just stop.
So no, the Malthusian limit may very well not be there at all.
And it assumes ERORI stays at a sustainable level. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_in...
For lack of a better metaphor, we have a race between galloping food supply and the propagation of the idea that smaller family sizes are a good thing. Given what I know now, I'd bet on human reproduction declining before food does.
The big monkey wrench is political instability. We have much less of an understanding of it than perhaps we should have.
As an aside, I wonder how much more vulnerable this makes the food supply to shocks, coupled with the increased supply chain length and how many additional points of failure that introduces.
Not necessarily in terms of the frequency of those shocks increasing, rather the compounded impact of those shocks given the number of people being supported by smaller agricultural bases.
It hardly perfect, but it's been polished and debugged over decades. The film "King Corn" does a good job of a layman's exposition of at least the subsidy system.
And people frequently confuse engineering limits with physical limits.
A convincing Malthusian argument needs to take one of two forms: either concede that it represents doom without engineering progress, or convincingly argue that it represents a physical boundary rather than an engineering one.
For example: the ultimate limit to computing power is Bremermann's limit, but that's only reached in the surface of a black hole. The effective limit of computation – how much you can compute in Baryonic matter – is going to be far lower. How low is a hard question to answer.
If you can apply it to a network system, you've got some options for increased efficiency. If you're applying it to an energy system, the improvement is far more likely in the 5-25% range.
Example: automobiles have made increasing use of computers since the 1970s. Computer performance has improved on the order of millionsfold. Automobile fuel efficiency has less-than doubled. A small compact of the early 1970s could achieve ~30 mpg, or 7.84 l/100km, a more useful measure of efficiency. Current models are in the 40 - 50 mpg range, let's take the upper limit, giving 4.70l/100km.
That's a 40% reduction in fuel use. Even before considering countervailing offsets via the Jevons Paradox.
Google have recently similarly claimed a 15% efficiency improvement in data center energy management, again resulting from massive increases in compute efficiency. That is, the end-point energy use impacts aren't much changed.
There's more to this, and the story is complicated. But while computing has very high potential increases, the end-point impacts (worker productivity, economic efficiency, even technical capabilities) are often oddly muted.
To put another twist on this: the Apollo lunar missions had a few hundred pounds of computer assembled in a ring around one of the higher (IIRC above the 3rd stage) boosters. Swapping out that compute capacity for an equivalent mass of modern tech would have very minimal impact on the mass, range, or accuracy of the system as a whole. The main advantage is that an equivalent compute capacity -- sufficient for the mission, could be provided in vastly less mass, which is critical for Earth-based rocket launches. But the improvement then is based on the reduction in the physical requirements for providing compute capacity, not the increased performance of massively more compute capacity itself.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/269/5222/341.long
(Numerous other articles and books.)
Would it be possible to identify specific mechanisms?
What, if any, limits to those mechanisms might exist?
So the takeaway from this is you should aim for high biocapacity deficit, right?
I mean, I live in a deep green country, and it's a filthy dump.
People should aim for maximum human flourishing, not minimising human impact on the planet.
Countries in the deep green are where people are at the mercy of nature and die of 20th century causes.
People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial", occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind.
You do realize that there is a sliding scale here, right?
"to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall [...]
As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate" [1]
"Broadly stated, most ecological problems reduce to a single problem of balancing supply and demand." [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...
This is simply wrong. We produce vastly more GDP per unit of energy than we did a century ago, and will do the same a century from now.
The size of an economy is a measure of what people will pay for a good. It's not a measure of how big a pile of steel you can make. The most expensive goods nowadays, services and computing, do not take vast piles of resources. In fact, the most expensive computers use the LEAST energy per unit of computation.
1. Total energy usage has increased.
2. There's been significant increased inequality within those nations. Particularly the US, also major industrial countries (G-7, OECD, etc.).
3. Many of these countries are exporting heavy manufacturing, with energy and other resource utilisation, and pollution generation, particularly to China and India.
"The material footprint of nations ", Thomas O. Wiedmanna, Heinz Schandl, Manfred Lenzenc, Daniel Moranc, Sangwon Suhf, James Westb, and Keiichiro Kanemotoc. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1220362110. PubMed ID24003158. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110
"The true raw material footprint of nations ", September 3, 2013. "The study, involving researchers from UNSW, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published today in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that the decoupling of natural resources from economic growth has been exaggerated."
https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.u...
Here is a graph is US energy intensity:
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10191
The US uses less than half the amount of energy per unit of GDP than it did in 1950.
Would you mind to source and explain that ?
http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Book_Reviews/...
Anyways, what happened to the editorial rule here where the title was supposed to match TFA's title?
EDIT: Title has been appropriately edited. Thank you.
a) accelerate migration to Mars
b) population control?
Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?
Use natural resources more efficiently by way of better technology and/or import natural resources from the rest of the solar system.
"Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century."
I understand the IoT thermostat has the potential to save even more ecoresources, but can't we do that in a way that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced every year?
Even a worst case scenario where the Earth is burnt, dead and poisonous is much better suited for humans than Mars is.
If humans need to migrate, the oceans is a better first step. It's about a billion times cheaper and more hospitable.
As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.
I propose saving this planet, and not messing up another one.
If not many, then how are we going to choose who to shove there?
What if it will turn out discriminatory?
And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface.
We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.
One can perhaps start a commune in a forest or on an island even today, with handpicked people, but it doesn't happen.
Wanting to flee from Earth with all its problems is understandable, but I fear that we'll repeat a lot of bad stuff in habitats. Think totalitarian cults, slavery, plain old totalitarism.
No idea how we may get people there, neither socially of physically, but this is what is possible. I'm also in no rush to get there, but we will someday, because it is just too tempting. (More because of energy availability than any of the above paragraph.)
But for the others, with just a reasonably low delta-v and some patience you can get into cubic kilometers of unclaimed raw resources for extending your habitat. You just have to know how to use them (what we currently don't).
You'll certainly get a bigger density of material resources on any planet, but then you will be trapped inside a gravitational wheel and must spend all that delta-v again to break free from it once it's completely claimed. For the short term (to the point that any timeframe is "short" in this discussion) small moons and big asteroids are probably the best places to colonize.
I'd recommend going back to his 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which is one of the best distillations of the ecological and limits arguments, and one of the very few extensions of that to political space, I've seen.
I'm still planning on writing a proper review (https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius, eventually), but strongly recommend all his books.
Plato's Revenge updates a few particulars of the argument and extends it toward a solution space. What I appreciate most about him is that he writes not from a prescriptive "here's how to solve this" but an expository "here are the dimensions of the problem and possible frames of resolution".
William R. Catton, Jr.'s Overshoot is also excellent.
Unless all you plan to do is enjoy the view on the way down.
I also wonder if there is a way to divide this up into spatial buckets so we could see say, the footprint of a metropolitan area versus other parts of the country. While national policies have affect on this, ecological impact is not necessarily confined to political borders.
In 2000, 6 billion (i.e: 2.4x in only 50 years)
In 2010, 7 billion (16% growth in only 10 years)
Is this sustainable? clearly not the way things are right now.
Edit: I forgot to mention we have French Guiana which is essentially untouched forest and which offsets most comparison maps (biodiversity is a famous example).
I guess this is also why South America does so well.
Sure, things could change, like the uncle could suddenly learn to be responsible.
Edit: although it looks like a way to be a green developed country by this ranking is largely to have extremely uneven population density.
btw southern hemisphere looks good on this measure. As a bonus, zero nukes, and low likelihood of being an attractive target.
I was shocked to see that Japan has a net out-migration:
http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/
(Metrocosm -- a/k/a Max Galka -- is an absolutely amazing data resource.)
I see many people excited about the fact that electric cars can be powered by renewables, and efficiency gains automation can bring, without acknowledging the downsides of an auto-dominated society.
What it does not solve is:
* The energy spent producing a 2000kg+ car (there's 255 million cars in the US alone, 797 for every 1000 people) [1]
* That that 2000kg+ car in the US is moving on average less than 2 people per trip [2]
* The energy spent moving single commuters on hour long commutes (average of 25minutes each way [3]). I see many comments discussing how drivers will be productive on long automated commutes, while not addressing the inefficiency of that commute to begin with
* The destructive and wasteful development patterns of auto-oriented cities - (sprawl, destroyed agricultural lands, the enormous health costs of sedentary lifestyles)
* The resources required and pollution generated for the production/maintenance/powering of all these vehicles, renewable or not - renewables only produced ~13% of all electricity in 2015 [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...
[2] http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-613-march-8-2010-vehicl...
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+cars+in+the+us&ie=...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...
Shifting the problem is a sometimes a good thing.
In this case, because it means the energy can now come from effective sources (nuclear) instead of carrying petrochemicals in the vehicle.
As in math, transforming one problem into another is often just as good as finding a direct solution.
1. It decouples transport from fossil fuel use.
2. It achieves greater efficiency per unit energy input than combustion-based systems, if using non-thermal (nuclear-excepted) fuel. Carnot's Law limits heat engines to ~20 - 45% efficiency, max.
On the negative side:
1. Tesla doesn't fundamentally change the dynamics of land-use which lead to massive amounts of personal transit being necessary.
2. Thermal energy (coal, gas, oil, biomass, and even nuclear, though without the CO2 emissions) still has a peak generating efficiency of only about 45%.
3. It's possible that synfuels might prove a better route for portable energy storage. Carbon-neutral synthetic petrol, kerosene (jet fuel), deisel, and methane would be infinitely miscable with current fossil-based liquid and gas fuels, and would require no replacement of extant transport, refining, dispensing, or utilisation capital. (The cost would be higher, though there's an accounting argument to be made there as well.) Energy densities (by volume and weight), handling properties, safety, and very, very long-term storage capabilities (tens to hundreds of millions of years, proven) make this attractive.
4. The entire system is predicated on economical sources of lithium (or other battery substrate). Lithium is not an abundant mineral, and present recycling rates are low. Even with 90% recovery, the stock of material would fall by 80% in 15 generations. Most metals see recycling rates of closer to 30%, if that.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/recycle/rec...
Powering a car without fossil fuels, by contrast, is not on the table for most people. Quality, budget electric cars stand to 'shift' the resource problem over to one we've already dealt with, which sounds like a huge win to me.
Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today.
And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today by altering the ecosystem of the world can feed a population that was unfathomable a 100 years ago.
I'm not a proponent of producing waste that harms us without any limits or regulations, but these people that simply cannot accept that human activity changes the worlds ecosystem for human benefit seem like fanatics to me.
If we give in to this then I can assure you that we in the West will be conquered by others and rightly so, because our culture has become retarded to a degree that it inhibits our ability to develop technologically, economically and culturally.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese will not stop developing to save some frogs, if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us. (not physically but from an economic and technological perspective)
Not before they "slaughter" themselves with pollution.
See: Chernobyl fallout carried west on the wind across Europe, and sea-level rises caused by human-accelerated global warming disproportionately impacting poor island nations not responsible for said global warming.
There are of course still very local, direct harms from pollution, but the most severe, long-term effects eventuate globally.