Bjorn Lomborg: Our lifestyle is unsustainable and why that's irrelevant
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Unfortunately that doesn't mean that bad things can't happen again, just because we don't remember them. In Japan they had ancient stones in the land warning about places where previous Tsunamis had hit. Unfortunately nobody of the "younger generations" cared about them anymore...
This attitude of "technology will sort it out every time" is just stupid and not really supported by history. I have no doubt that humans will survive, somehow. Doesn't mean that there can't be turmoil, millions of deaths and so on on the way anymore.
Nuclear is there as an option, but it's not a pretty one. There's a big lead time on reactors.
As an Australian, I'm very proud of our imminent carbon tax. Businesses will find a way to cut energy use, or generate "green" power before any crisis hits. OK, a carbon cap and trade might do the same, but businesses won't be able to invest as they will be afraid carbon prices will increase or decrease too much. Speculative bubbles, fraud, and the weather would make prices fluctuate too much.
So, you don't believe in innovation on demand.
> As an Australian, I'm very proud of our imminent carbon tax. Businesses will find a way to cut energy use, or generate "green" power before any crisis hits.
Except that you do.
Innovation isn't guaranteed to happen "on demand". Some things may not be physically possible, or even if they are, may prove economically or environmentally unfeasable. "Everything will be OK in a free market" is just that - an article of faith.
The point isn't whether "the free market" or the "will of the proletariat" will solve all the world's problems through innovation. The universe does not care for our beliefs. Either the current environmental and energy crises are solvable through human ingenuity (by "solvable" I mean that we can continue world economic growth and rise in living standards indefinitely) or they are not; if they are not it really doesn't make any difference whether you follow Ayn Rand or Karl Marx.
So there is not really any information contained in "let the free market regulate things". The environment (including politics) determines the actual prize of things. The free market then does the rest, but we still have to set up the environment in the proper way.
For example the price of wheat is not just what people are willing to pay for it - it is also the cost of producing it. You can not go artificially low with the price. Just to provide an example that is not so obviously affected by politics.
According to your definition prisoners are also free. It's just the cost of breaking out of prison are incredibly high (like death penalty).
Unless you want to propose anarchy, you have to propose some policies alongside your supposedly free market, such as property laws enforced by the state/military. There goes you free market down the drain.
My point was that "let the free market sort it out" is not a strategy. It does not contain any actionable information, as you still have to define the actual rules of your "free" market.
To make a better example than shooting my neighbor to take his land: why am I not free to dump my waste on his land? Would a free market (allowing me to dump my waste on his land) somehow sort out that I wouldn't dump my waste on his land?
[1] In the same manner one could argue that fossil oils really are renewable resources if the time frame under consideration is chosen to be long enough.
Clearly "the death penalty" or "incarceration in a Siberian work camp" for the "crime" of trading eggs on the street is an initiation of coercion, so the term "free market" does not apply.
Also things like "shooting your neighbor and taking his land" are clearly beyond the pale. There is property after all, which I define as (1) anything you receive as a gift, such as your body and mind at birth, (2) anything you produce using the property already at your disposal, and (3) anything you obtain in a mutually consensual trade of your property for someone else's. Your neighbor's land does not meet any of those three criteria.
Certainly there is nothing magic about a free market: after all, it's just a group of human beings. But there's nothing magic about coercive force either -- and I would go further and maintain that it's fundamentally destructive.
That may not sound as fun as those sophomore-style late-night "dorm talk" bullshit sessions, but I actually consider precision to be more fun even in those sessions. I don't go "oh wow man you blew my mind" when someone says you're free to roam inside a prison cell. I go "oh wow man" when someone adeptly joins two concepts and hear them go click into place.
I really gave it an effort, and all I got was a "whatever". Oh well, it was fun for me anyway.
As for your "effort", you didn't even talk to me directly, just tried to bond with the other discussion participant over your supposed superior logic. Whatever indeed.
I did consider what you had to say, and I addressed it directly. For example, you wrote "you have to propose some policies alongside your supposedly free market, such as property laws".
I gave my working definition of property. You also said that those laws would have to be enforced by the state/military. Not necessarily. People use private arbitration all the time, and loss of a reputation capital is a very steep penalty indeed in the business world. Prison cells are a poor substitute for restitution.
Also, if your state/military enforcement mechanism depends on the violation of property rights for staffing and financing (i.e. conscription and taxation), then isn't it ironic, don't you think?
You then suggested that property laws imply "There goes you free market down the drain." But I defined the free market as a group of people engaging with each other on the basis of mutual consent. Any trade which occurs with mutual consent is by definition one which respects property (see my clause 3).
You're right that I was bonding with the other discussion participant who said "Most categories break down if you stretch them far enough." I agreed with him that you had stretched the categories too far.
I understand what you mean by "Nobody is really free, just our average prison cell is bigger." In this world, there will always be someone trying to initiate coercion against you, no matter where you go. All you can hope to do is find a "prison cell" which is comfortable enough. If you want more economic freedom and lower taxes, perhaps you can move to Hong Kong or Singapore. If you don't want to risk harsh penalties for possession of certain plant materials, perhaps you should avoid Singapore and opt for Portugal or Spain instead. Even those choices have their own drawbacks. More trade-offs. I get it.
I also directly addressed this: "My point was that "let the free market sort it out" is not a strategy. It does not contain any actionable information, as you still have to define the actual rules of your "free" market."
I did define the rules of the free market: namely, that no individual initiates coercion against another. That is actionable. First, I take it upon myself to respect that principle. Second, I aim to deal only with other individuals who also respect that principle. That is all I can possibly do. That is action.
Also consider this statement of yours: "why am I not free to dump my waste on his land? Would a free market (allowing me to dump my waste on his land) somehow sort out that I wouldn't dump my waste on his land?"
The answer is yes, the free market would indeed sort out that you shouldn't dump your waste on his land. To do so is to violate his property rights. Your dumping of waste is an act of aggression.
Even dumping waste on your own property can be an act of aggression. For example, if you dump toxic chemicals on your land and they leach into the water table, you have actually dumped waste onto someone else's property haven't you? After all, the chemicals are now in the water that someone else owns by virtue of it being on their land.
On second thought, I think you made a very good point by emphasizing the rules of property. Property rights are the single most important concept in a free market, and defining them is critical. I did state my definition of property. I think it's the right definition, otherwise I wouldn't have stated it. :)
(By the way, I upvoted you for challenging me on this. Yesterday I did a rather surly downvote and I wanted to make up for it.)
I am not sure if your definition of free market is really workable in practice (no coercion, people just respect each other etc.). So let me just ask again what I asked in another comment: are there cases in history where free markets have resolved a tragedy of the commons situation?
That was the original claim as I understood it: just let the markets run their course, and they'll fix the world's problems.
I think in the original example of a tragedy of the commons, villagers letting their sheep ruin the common grazing grounds. The solution was to set up fences, that is change the property rules - in my view a government intervention, not an achievement of the market. In that light it seems to me that things like CO2 certificates, as specified by governments, are worth a try.
I define a government as a group of people who have a monopoly of force in a given territorial region. Such monopolies are very dangerous and often inimical to property rights. The very people who claim to defend property typically become the worst aggressors against it. Specifically, my own property is far more vulnerable to seizure by government employees than by ordinary burglars.
I'm sorry if that sounds like anti-government propaganda, but it's the simple paintful truth of history and the current moment.
Ideally, people institute governments for the purpose of protecting individual life and property, but it just doesn't turn out that way. After all, human beings are at the helm of such force monopolies, and it's generally unwise to trust human beings with that much power.
You wrote: I am not sure if your definition of free market is really workable in practice (no coercion, people just respect each other etc.).
On the contrary, the non-initiation of aggression works everywhere that it is tried, all the time. It happens billions of times per day, in homes, stores, and businesses all over the globe. It is the norm -- so common that it goes unnoticed and unremarked. Aggression and force are the exceptions, the deviations from the norm.
You wrote: So let me just ask again what I asked in another comment: are there cases in history where free markets have resolved a tragedy of the commons situation?
In a free market with strong property rights, there are no commons. The tragedy of the commons arises where there are no clearly defined property rights.
To answer your question directly: yes. One example is the elephant population in Africa. In areas without property rights, poaching abounds and the elephant population is decimated. In areas with property rights, elephant populations triple. There's no magic involved, and it happens for a simple reason: property owners want lots of elephants to live on their property. Wouldn't you? You might say that the "dirty little secret" is that these property owners sell hunting licenses for $50K a pop to Teddy Roosevelt types to go in and bag some big game. But what's so dirty about it if fewer elephants are killed and more elephants are born? Do you want elephants or don't you? ;)
You wrote: "That was the original claim as I understood it: just let the markets run their course, and they'll fix the world's problems."
I would rephrase that. Just let people run their course without initiating aggression against each other, and they will fix the world's problems. And when I put it that way, it seems obviously and trivially true. But that is the definition of a free market after all, so it's not just a word game.
You might say that free markets are not "workable" because very few people will behave that way. But as I point out, most people refrain from aggression against other people's property most of the time. It's the norm. Theft, murder, and rape are very rare and uncommon occurrences. They only seem common because they get so much attention when they do occur.
You wrote: villagers letting their sheep ruin the common grazing grounds. The solution was to set up fences, that is change the property rules - in my view a government intervention, not an achievement of the market
Not at all. Those are achievements of free people trying their best to minimize conflict. People don't like conflict and will try to minimize it on their own. I suggest you read "The Voluntary City" for some historical examples of people doing amazing things, seemingly impossible in this day and age, without the "magic" of government, a.k.a. unilateral force and aggression against other people. They even managed to build roads of all things -- the favorite example trotted out now as something only government can do. And they weren't toll roads either. Hard to imagine now, but it's so obvious when you see how they did it.
Common sheep grazing lands, and common fishing areas in the ocean, are all prime examples of tragedy of the commons. Where there are no property rights, there is no motivation to preserve what's there. It's just one giant ugly grab, indistinguishable from looting.
Perhaps you are arguing that only governments are capable of defending property rights, since only governments have the sufficient force to do so. That's what Ayn Rand thought, and I think she's wrong about that. I don't need to get into an argument about guns here, and here's why: guns are a last resort when it comes to defending life and property. Free and uncoerced people will try all sorts of things to avoid coming to that point. Sociopaths don't care, but they are rare. Most people will go to great lengths to maintain their reputation, which is why arbitration is so often effective.
I'm not going to address CO2 certificates, because to me that represents an externality that is extremely difficult to define in terms of specific offenders and victims. CO2 is one of those things that animals must produce in order to survive. I do think that the "free market", which again means any group of individuals interacting solely by mutual consent, are fully capable of dealing with any threat there. Consider the vast changes in awareness of environmental issues over the last few decades. Hell, these days it's uncool to throw cans in the trash and to waste energy. This is social pressure, not the threat of physical force.
More people need to get more wealthy so they can afford a clean environment. Poor people scrabbling in the dirt cannot afford to think about it. And I predict that as the Chinese become more capitalized, they will innovate in manufacturing and energy production to reduce emissions of all sorts. There's a simple reason for that. Producing waste requires energy, and energy costs money. But without capital, you cannot afford the innovation at the margin to clean up the processes.
Is the free market magic? Will it lead to the Kingdom of God on earth? Hell no. But I am sick of hearing people extol the virtues of force monopolies, and how if they don't apply the lash, nobody will ever do anything right or worthwhile. The reality is quite the opposite.
"Just let people run their course without initiating aggression against each other, and they will fix the world's problems."
But that is just what is so silly about Lomborg & Co. Obviously people running free do not fix the world's problems. They form dictatorships, exploit resources, fight wars and so on. Your condition of "peacefully" does not work out - people are not peaceful. In an utopia where people would be peaceful somehow it might work, but we don't live in such an utopia. And frankly I doubt such an utopia would ever exist, but that is for another discussion.
We seem to agree that only property management seems to solve the tragedy of the commons problem, except that you think markets create properties and I claim governments (or agreements of people) create properties. But how then do you suppose to solve the tragedy of the commons in our modern world? Air and sea pollution - how do you want to solve that, without all the governments in the world agreeing on property rules for those things? And that is not a market thing.
As for the elephants, how do the property owners defend against the poachers? I strongly suspect guns are involved.
Also, what are you supposed to do if you don't have an elephant farm? Just be consent with being poor? Poaching of elephants could probably be solved by giving everybody an elephant farm. But there aren't enough elephants to go round - and that is a fundamental problem of the human condition. There is not enough stuff to go around.
I think even if we could produce enough food and iPads for everyone, that problem would not go away. For example attractive mates might always remain a limited resource.
Now that's a good point isn't it. I'm so accustomed to people in government doing everything by force that I no longer even consider the possibility of government by consent. OK I'll allow it. :)
So here's the thing. I will support a government that protects life and property from aggression, so long as the people in that government are not initiating the aggression themselves.
In short, I don't want anyone to commit theft or murder, including people with badges or uniforms.
You wrote: "Obviously people running free do not fix the world's problems. They form dictatorships, exploit resources, fight wars and so on. Your condition of "peacefully" does not work out - people are not peaceful."
Yes. However, people are only able to do those things when too much power is concentrated in their hands. Power corrupts, yadda yadda.
You wrote: "except that you think markets create properties and I claim governments (or agreements of people) create properties"
OK, but at this point I have amended my stance so we're in agreement here. Because if the people calling themselves "government" themselves respect life and property and deal with others on the basis of mutual consent, then, by my definition anyway, they are part of the free market.
You wrote: "Air and sea pollution - how do you want to solve that, without all the governments in the world agreeing on property rules for those things? And that is not a market thing."
I want to solve that the same way it's been solved for decades: through technological innovation. For example, a modern car emits far fewer pollutants than one from the 1970s.
A lot of pro-government extremists like to claim that's only because government forced the manufacturers to make more efficient cars, but I don't buy that. People are motivated to produce and use clean and efficient cars, but the only way to achieve that is through the application of financial and intellectual capital. People in government always like to come in from behind and claim victory for themselves, as if without them nothing good would have ever happened. That's a propaganda game and I'll have no part of it.
You wrote: "As for the elephants, how do the property owners defend against the poachers? I strongly suspect guns are involved."
You are correct sir. If necessary one must defend life and property with severe force. Fortunately in many cases the mere threat of such force is enough to prevent an attack. In most cases where a gun is used in self-defense, it is not even fired. Therefore it is not true to say that the only purpose of a gun is to kill people.
You wrote: "that is a fundamental problem of the human condition. There is not enough stuff to go around."
I don't buy the Malthusian argument for one moment. The Earth, and the universe at large, is a place of massive abundance, a cornucopia. People will produce good things precisely to the degree that they are free to enjoy the rewards of producing them. Yes, it is true that they must "exploit resources" to do so. But that's such a loaded phrase. I just say "using things". People must use things in order to produce other things.
And yes, the production of good things always produces some bad things as well, and we call this "waste". For example, when you eat some food, it produces energy and vitality for you. It also produces waste in the form of feces. That will always be so; it is decreed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
You might argue that people are lazy and sloppy by nature and will always go about spreading waste everywhere. But there are a few social dynamics working against that.
First, economics. Very often one can save money by reducing waste. But again this requires technological innovation to achieve those gains at the margin, and I maintain that free uncoerced people are best able to summon the financial and intellectual capital needed for that.
Second, property rights. If you try dumping your garbage on someone else's property, you might find yourself facing the business end of a shotgun. But let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Third, reputation. If you operate a factory and dump toxic chemicals in the nearby water supply, you may find yourself excoriated and your products widely boycotted. Most people are not sociopaths and will therefore care very much about this outcome. For actual sociopaths, see my first point above about shotguns.
You might argue that we need government to protect the little guys against big bad corporations who don't care about those market dynamics or pathetic bands of peasants showing up with pitchforks. Now if we're talking about a "government" in your sense of the word, to which I have agreed, meaning a group of people who protect life and property without attacking those very things in the process, then I can see the possible need for it. The "little guys" would in effect be outsourcing that business end of the shotgun to a better equipped and trained group. I have no problem with that. It's even a market function.
But where the whole government experiment goes awry is when that group itself becomes the principal threat to life and property -- and as you say, this happens repeatedly throughout history, with the institution of dictatorships and the instigation of wars. By some estimates, upwards of 200 million people were slaughtered by governments in the 20th century. With those odds, I'll take my chances with anarchy any day.
The key is, somehow, to prevent such massive aggregations of forceful power into the hands of a few human beings. So-called "democracy" does not help here, because the throngs often support the formation of such dangerous power because they are convinced those in power will give them something for nothing. As Bastiat put it: "The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
Having diagnosed the problem, I cannot propose any cure other than for each individual to take it to heart and live according to the principle of non-aggression in his or her own life. Do not seek to live at the expense of others, and do not associate with those who do. Other than that, I got nuthin.
You wrote: "For example attractive mates might always remain a limited resource."
Yeah. People need to make more beautiful babies. Many ask "why would I want to bring another child into this world?" Unfortunately I see their point. I often sound like an optimist, but deep down I have this grim suspicion that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. To paraphrase Churchill (no hero of mine btw), people will always eventually do the right thing, after they exhaust all other alternatives.
And fossil fuels would be sustainable if their rate of production was greater than or equal to our rate of consumption.
I will do no such thing because I have not argued that "a free market will save us". I solely wanted to note that arguing over definitions and making caricatures of commonly understood terms ("But what does it really mean to be free?") is pointless and does not add much to the discussion at hand.
I agree, however, with the comment made by gaius: historically it is more probable that a free market produces innovation than a centrally planned economy. Not, IMHO, because the abstract entity “free market” somehow magically comes up with a solution. But rather because it allows individuals to tinker and to test their results w.r.t. the actual wants and needs of other people as opposed to assuming that the best solution can be planned and designed top down.
Food prices are an example that is infested with politics.
The US spends a lot of money "supporting" various food prices, including wheat. Some other countries spend resources on depressing prices by means which reliably result in shortages.
There are physical realities in producing pretty much everything.
> What is the point of your nitpicking?
I'm pointing out that food is among the worst possible examples for whatever your point is. (I'm assuming that you've got more than "must charge more than cost of production".)
Correct.
My point is that that applies to govt/social mandates as well as the free market.
The demand for cleaner energy is here now. Lomborg wants to dismiss that. His argument is biting it's own head off.
And I think it is because these things are often disconnected. If you buy an iPad, the waste ends up in China, not on your front lawn. Maybe if you would have to pay by converting parts of your garden into a toxic waste dump, you would act differently.
Besides, I am not convinced that it is a decision between "enjoying the fruits of technology and destroying our world or living like in the stone age, but sustainable". Waste from producing iPads can be processed properly, rather than dumping it into the nearest river. It is a matter of figuring out the proper ways of conduct and proper prices.
It's not trivial to find another way, though.
I could imagine that modern technology could enable more transparency, allowing consumers to make better choices.
The latest in argument tactics is just plain old making shit up, huh?
>Besides, I am not convinced that it is a decision between "enjoying the fruits of technology and destroying our world or living like in the stone age, but sustainable". Waste from producing iPads can be processed properly, rather than dumping it into the nearest river. It is a matter of figuring out the proper ways of conduct and proper prices.
Sounds like you're in agreement with the author!
Scientific progress is not instantaneous. It does not go boink. The capacity to solve many of our current problems exists, but any programmer ought to know that implementation is never the easy part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_...
While I am generally rather positive about the long term fate of our current society I do worry that blind belief that technological innovation will always deliver solutions is perhaps a bit naive.
1) The planet's human population is much greater than it was even 50 years ago (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=sp_pop_...) and continues to rise
2) We still don't fully understand the impact of widespread habit and species loss
1) is important because each person requires a minimum amount of energy, in whatever form, to sustain them, so we need to improve our technology year-on-year just to stay at the same level of 'resource drain'.
2) is important because the idea that the natural world will recuperate once we've developed more sympathetic ways of existing with it may actually be flawed. There is some evidence to suggest that the biosphere is a self-regulating system of which we are now breaking or removing many parts. Any such system, however resilient, can only stand so much of that before it collapses.
Of course technological development is crucial to our long term survival, but in my opinion this doesn't make short term fixes irrelevant.
In short: as soon as the economy of a country improves, its population growth stabilizes (and sometimes it even decreases like in Europe).
My original point is that if the population is increasing at all, that will at least partially offset gains in efficiency brought about by newer technologies, and since population growth compounds over time, we'll need to make bigger and bigger gains just to maintain the status quo in terms of absolute energy and resource usage.
Just look at the progress of just about any large scale research project such as sequencing the human genome or making an AI capable of beating a chess grandmaster. The progress starts out unbearably slow, and then most of the gains happen in the last 20% of the time spent researching.
One reason for this is that as our technology increases, so does the power of the tools we use for creating more technology. Not only are computers getting better performance/price at an exponential rate, but those gains are fueling research into materials sciences, bioinformatics, and other emerging fields.
(Still it does say something about it, my country's population (small European country) is decreasing, around 10% less people in the last ten years even with all the immigration.)
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/inde...
It's not just blind faith in technology but rather technology is the best choice we have now, so instead of using trillions on political statements of intention, let's use them where it matters and that is in trying to innovate and engineer our way out of some of the issues.
The fact is: if people can exploit some loophole (like blowing dirt into the air instead of installing expensive filters), they will do so. They don't really have an incentive to do otherwise. It doesn't have to be laws that gives them an incentive - there could be "transparency", customers could prefer to buy "clean" stuff, hence producers would have an incentive to produce clean.
Without such an incentive, nothing will happen.
There is good consensus that corn ethanol is energy negative, and that it doesn't result in cleaner air or less greenhouse gases due to production costs.
This mis-allocation of capital hinders development of truly better alternatives, and sets back innovation. These setbacks, beyond the cost of the subsidy and the lack of improvement in the areas targeted, do cost trillions.
Lomborg is not some gun-ho republican right-wing that denies there is a problem. I is just in disagreement with what most people find to be the right reason.
He is as liberal as they come and he just happen to have a different take on what the problem is and how to solve it.
Calling him a troll is sorry to say this but absurdly unfair and shows more about you than him.
It matters not where it purely a poltical (read most often moral) statement.
Customers don't prefer to buy clean stuff. Most of them prefer to buy cheap stuff. That is the reality, that is the reason discount is doing so well.
The technological developments and business investments in filtering and related technologies would not have happened without environmental groups putting up a fight.
In a similar way, groups shouting about unsustainability are the ones who actually get people to think about alternatives, which in turn plays one part in moving technology forward.
Of course technology is moved forward by other things as well. But don't underestimate the impact of young people taking up PhDs in relevant subjects partly because of the high visibility of the debate about sustainability.
The thing about the Anthropic Principle is that it only protects you in the past, not in the future. We're here now because our civilization overcame its past problems; but any speculator can tell you that past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Nice well-behaved Newtonian systems are amenable to prediction by mathematical regression. Messy, complex, chaotic living systems are not. Everything changes, and changes how it changes, and changes how it changes how it changes, and ...
Lomborg makes the simple suggestion to rely on the most proven processes we have to solve problems: science, technology and trade.
How can this in a community of hackers and entrepreneurs be so provocative?
Arguing against him is not arguing against science. Actually, it is my respect for science that makes me wary of him. He always seem to suggest simple populist solutions to complex problems.
The other thing is that while its true that in the past, the problems eventually became irrelevant, I don't think it is predictable and I don't believe we should make a law out of that. Maybe it is a fluke or maybe the timing could be off next time. I don't believe there is a a force that gives us a right to exist, a magical mechanism that makes us pull out ourselves out of any trouble. We have to do it ourselves. I understand we should hear this as "Just don't throw yourselves around like headless chickens" but what I hear is just "Don't worry, do nothing, don't care" and that is not at all inline with being an entrepreneur.
Peak oil (and gas, and coal) is physics. The laws of physics are absolute.
The lost energy from declining fossil fuel EROEI must be either replaced or the demand must be destroyed. Replacing all that energy seems very unlikely... I read about this problem a lot. Demand destruction can occur through efficiency improvements or through simply not buying, not driving, not using.
If that's not enough, demand destruction can occur through war, famine, and death. The point is that this will happen if we can't make up the gap, and no amount of wishful thinking will change it. Nature doesn't care.
It only seems politically unlikely. Even at the highest estimates of 6 billion USD per 1GW plant, building 500 of them would provide 4Twh per year [1], almost as much as the 4.4Twh that the US now generates, and for about the cost of the Iraq and Afganistan wars. We already know the US could have spent this much money: it did. The US could have spent that money on nuclear, or it could have spent it on lofting solar power satellites, or even massive solar installations, and any of those would have essentially erased our dependence on oil, at least.
But even though it wasn't spent on that, all is not lost! Current coal reserves are good, energy-wise (not necessarily environmentally) for at least a hundred years, which gives plenty of time to grow a space-based energy policy, or to make a policy about nuclear power that makes sense, or whatever.
Maybe Lomborg makes these points in the article; it seemed as though he was only saying things I agreed with, so I didn't finish.
[1] this assumes that each one is operational for 11 months of the year, and that they do something useful like providing energy for methane for gasoline replacement during trough times of day
What about the recent financial crisis? Not sure how hard it really hit, but nevertheless, technology has not prevented it. Just an example to point out that we do NOT have everything under control.
Greed will always be the source of the problem.
Doing nothing and hoping someone independently solves the problem strikes me as an unacceptable risk; there is little market incentive at the moment to reduce environmental damage. A carbon-trading scheme would create such an incentive, but would no doubt create its own inefficiencies. Markets are great at dealing with resource shortages, for example whale oil, but quite bad at dealing with negative externalities, e.g. air pollution. It took government intervention to clean up London (I think? I don't have any sources on this).
Spending money on proactive solutions encourages economic growth instead of discouraging it, and can lead to future benefits as "green technology" leads to new advances. On the other hand, it's somewhat risky as most avenues of inquiry will lead to dead ends, and any geo-engineering technology that becomes widely adopted could have nasty side-effects.
It is so ironic, there are so many different diets, just to conceal the simple fact that if one eats excessively they will get fat and the simple fact that if one wants to be in good shape, there is a very simple straightforward answer, eat less move more. Instead we busy ourselves with the new " scientific breakthrough" that allows us to be eating bacon all year long and then drink the magic pill and wear our bikini just in time for the miss skinny contest.
P.s. The interesting dude is Odisseas, who before going close ro the sirens, he assessed the risk and decided, to hear their sing but not
The situations that are cited in the article seem like apples when comparing to the situational oranges of today. A shaky foundation like this hardly seems like a good place to build a valid logical argument. But, it sure does look cool.
These are linked issues.
All fossil fuels will peak this century. It's not politics... it's physics. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. Actually, I suspect they will all peak before 2050. Many knowledgeable people think oil has already peaked.
Peaking doesn't mean running out, it means exponentially declining EROEI (energy return on energy invested). There's plenty of oil left, but when it takes a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil we are out of oil.
Nothing except maybe nuclear has the muscle right now to fill the gap for electricity generation. Just try to sell that now, post-Fukushima. Nothing except biofuel can presently fill the gap for transportation, and it is dubious that biofuels can scale to those levels.
Does this mean apocalypse? I'm actually not a "doomer" per se. But consider this: as we pass peak on all fossil fuels, the vast majority of our surplus energy and labor will have to go to simply treading water and maintaining our standard of living in the face of rapidly declining energy availability. There's also going to be a lot of demand destruction: people buying less, traveling less, using less.
All that does spell doom for our financial system. Even a short interruption in growth results in financial catastrophe, since without continuous growth you get a wave of debt defaults.
It could be a very chaotic century.
Edit: but on the upside, there's going to be a ton of entrepreneurial opportunities around saving energy, making energy, and storing energy. Personally I think IT isn't where it's at... if I wanted to get back into entrepreneurship now (and I might in the future) I'd get into something energy-related.
This is natural and a good thing: If Earth can't sustain very many people buying cars every 2 years, then we can't buy new cars every 2 years. We have to use resources more efficiently. It's a similar situation with fuel: For a long time, we built stronger engines that consumed the same amount of fuel, instead of building engines that used less fuel for more efficient use. Later that trend reversed. A similar thing happened with computers and their energy use.
I hope my kids won't have to buy more than one car in their life.
But I do agree that the middle class is in trouble in America. Today to be middle class you need at least a BS degree or equivalent skills and you have to constantly re-educate, and that bar appears to be rising steadily.