Posts Tagged ‘Anthropocene’

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Capitalism and Authoritarianism

September 11, 2019

For me, right-wing thought is thought which tends to support hierarchy, authority, power, expansion of power, dictation over people’s personal lives and the enforcement of heavily bounded social categories. It reduces all liberty to the right to buy the products you can afford. Thus the right tends to hate egalitarianism, feminism, anti-racism and so on. They rarely support liberation movements that openly oppose capitalism. As I have argued previously they tend to use quite a lot of force to suppress free-speech, and then suppress awareness of the suppression, just as they suppress awareness of the general political shift rightwards. Right-wing thought has very little to do with conservative thought.

The left tend to favour relative egalitarianism (no one thinks everyone will be completely equal in everything, just that superiority in earning money or inheriting money, should not lead to massive inequalities of power and opportunity). They tend to favour people reclaiming their power and being treated as important politically. They tend to think that the State should not regulate your sex and recreational life, and so on.

I’d add that both modes of thought, tend to be non-systemic and have only a few solutions to problems, and they tend to think that if their policy is not working this must be because:

  • Somebody is deliberately working to prevent the policy being successful.
  • They have not applied the policy strongly enough.

They both tend not to think that unintended consequences are normal and need looking out for, and adjusting one’s actions for. They tend to think knowledge is complete and causality is obvious. The left tends to value looking at a diversity of solutions more than the right does, but this is a fragile virtue, and easily overthrown.

Libertarians tend to think that they understand complexity issues, but they seem completely unaware of the (hopefully) unintended, but expectable, consequences of imposing ‘free markets’ in the context of corporate dominance.

Of course many people on the right are actually more leftish than they believe, and its fair enough to protest against this particular categorisation of politics, but if you look at actual Right wing politics, it tends to nanny the rich and boot the poor, or give more liberty to the already powerful and curtail the liberty of everyone else. At the best it promises to restore the exclusionary power of people who felt they were dominant, but have lost that dominance.

Is it possible to separate this kind of hierarchical and authoritarian thinking from capitalism? I suspect not. After all, libertarians, and social-democrats, have been trying for years, and capitalism has not changed. It has in fact got stronger and more severe in its politics over the last 40 years of constant chatter about the benefit of free markets. There is certainly less liberty, less ability to influence politics, less protection at work, less equity in wealth distribution, less support in misfortune, less interest in protecting essential infrastructure, unless someone makes a profit out of it. Capitalism is not incompatible with dictatorship, although that support then distorts it’s official ideology still further.

I suspect this authoritarianism occurs because capitalism is primarily about the reduction of all values and morality to profit and wealth. This always becomes support for the wealth hierarchy, disciplining the work force, keeping ordinary folk down and assuming that protecting profit is better than protecting survival and continuance. Capitalism seems to suppress empathy for others, unless there is a buck in it, as capital accumulation can generally only occur if you separate yourself from the needs of other people.

In capitalism wealth controls all the modes of power: it can buy politicians, it can buy laws, it can buy the police, it can buy the military, it can buy the media, it can buy ‘knowledge’ that suits it, it can buy the economics that suit it and so on. Almost nothing is beyond purchase, and capitalism spreads its managerial modes of organisation everywhere, even into Churches. Consequently, capitalism becomes unchallengable, taken for granted, part of our sponsored common sense. The only movement that is officially acceptable, and that has much chance of winning out, is to strengthen capitalism and intensify its effects and spread.

In this process, support for authority is so great, that unintended consequences, such as ecological destruction tend to be ignored. If destroying ecologies is what keeps the system going, then that is what the system will do to preserve its power structures. Hence, the ability of free market leaders to encourage destruction, and to try and lower the legal consequences of destruction. They do not see how they themselves are part of a bigger system they need for survival and which they are destroying, or they think that wealth and authority will protect them. Everyone else, all ordinary people, are just rubbish and should be culled, as it is their fault for having too many children or being relatively poor or something. Hence the population line they continually push.

In the contemporary world, capitalism has no serious challengers except for Islamic fundamentalism, and it is doubtful that Islam will ever have much appeal in the West in the short term, so there is no incentive whatsoever for capitalists not to support their own hierarchies and authority and impose it everywhere so as to cement that lack of opposition, their wealth and their power.

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“Solar radiation management”

September 10, 2019

Solar radiation management usually involves reflecting sunlight back into space to lower global warming. The cheapest versions of this proposal involve injecting particles or gasses into the upper atmosphere. The idea is it might give us time to reduce emissions, and reduce Greenhouse Gas levels in the atmosphere, through some kind of carbon removal technology which actually works at the kind of levels we need.

There are a few problems:

  1. We can only model the effects, and use those models to guide us in implementation. We will not know the effects until they arrive. Our models will always be out of date.
  2. Effects from this kind of geoengineering will not be immediate, so it will be even harder to judge what effects are arising from the technology.
  3. Some countries will suffer bad weather events after the process begins. We won’t know if they suffered those effects because of the process, because of climate change, or because of normal weather or a combination of all three.
  4. Some countries which suffer bad weather effects leading to famine or large scale destruction, might decide this is climate warfare against them – which could lead to conventional war. If not they would probably demand and deserve compensation, which would probably cause frictions between badly affected countries.
  5. We would have to have a world-wide agreement on this, and ownership of this, how it was used and what the effects are, to preserve peace and co-ordinate the practice. This is probably impossible.
  6. It will not stop the seas from getting more acidic, leading to ocean death, especially if it encourages delays to reduction of GHG emissions.
  7. It will be costly – not amazingly costly, but costly enough. If there is a world financial crash or war, then it could be discontinued, and climate change might “catch up” leading to more weather instability, and ferocity.

This is not a solution. But we don’t have a solution. This is a problem.

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Cthulhuocene

August 29, 2019

HP Lovecraft’s story, The Call of Cthulhu, opens with some of the most famous lines of horror literature:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft reverses the then standard idea that we more or less know everything and can know everything relevant, and proclaims this lack merciful rather than horrifying. We are forced to remain in blissful ignorance of the nature of the universe and “our frightful position therein”. The story then proceeds to undo this opening statement, and make it clear what at least part of that frightful position is, and how vulnerable we are to destruction from things we don’t, and cannot, understand.

In a way, this almost exactly suggests how we approach the Anthropocene. The customary position is to refuse to “correlate all our contents,” to argue that the world cannot end from trivial and everyday human actions, to reinforce our ignorance and lack of understanding of an object which is beyond our understanding, and certainly beyond our ability to predict. However, the sciences continue to piece together dissociated knowledge, and open up the terrifying vistas of a climate and ecology, so disrupted and out of control, that we either go mad, or flee into a new dark age in which science and knowledge is subservient to fear and politics.

Both stories are almost detective stories, “flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things.” Lovecraft’s tale is a detective story which links events from all over the world. A professor dies, from unknown causes, after being jostled by a “negro”; racism and horror of the unknown is never far separated in Lovecraft. His heir goes through the professor’s boxes and discovers strange things. These scattered objects and texts, like the fragments that most of us live with in the Anthropocene, strange weather, disappearance of insects, drying rivers, weird snowfalls, scientific gibberish, conflicting accounts, jumbled correlations from over the world, bad dreams, disease, disturbed artists, and mental illness out of nowhere, hint at a story which will destroy the hero and reader’s peace of mind forever.

Images recur, of a hybrid being – “simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature” – but “it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.” Again it is the outline, the suggestion which is beyond easy resolution, like the Anthropocene. No one knows, or can know, what the Anthropocene means, what its outline really is. It can look like sea level rise, drought, storm, or any number of ‘ordinary’ things, but putting them together all at once, in varied combinations, is impossibly disturbing. All we can tell is the natural order is not what we thought. Its image can suggest “a fearsome and unnatural malignancy”.

Both tales bring into mind the vast ancientness of the planet, which has lived without us for billions of years, and will live without us for billions of years. This creature, beyond conception, harbours no special affection for humans, no hostility either, just complete lack of concern. Whether we worship it or not, counts for nothing, although worshippers might convince themselves otherwise. This massive creature, on whom we live and which we are part of, has been sleeping. The Holocene has been relatively free from upheavals, and indeed might have remained free from such upheavals for thousands of years, but we have prodded it, not perhaps, awake, but to roll over it its sleep, to scratch off its fleas, perhaps for some fragment of it to arise out of the oceans and throw civilisation aside without even noticing. Let us be clear, although the Anthropocene may mark a geological epoch, in terms of world existence it is nothing, a mere blip. In a billion years, a relatively small time in planetary life, nothing of the Anthropocene and human life will probably remain to be detected. The earth does not see us, we are no more special than any other species which has vanished in the past, trilobites, brontosaurs, giant dragonflies, all have been and gone

In the story Cthulhu rises from the depths of the Pacific as the earth moves, and science, so far beyond us as to be indistinguishable from magic shatters our reality, opening the strange and disparate affects we might ignore. However, rather anti-climatically, the being is driven back under the waves, more or less by accident. There was only good fortune that a ship was in the vicinity, otherwise the end would have come incomprehensibly to all, and it may yet come at any moment. Whatever safety we had was random.

Come or not, all those who hear of it, and understand however badly, can never be the same. The image haunts them as does the dread. “A time will come-but I must not and cannot think!” Others carry on, the world remaining veiled. Let us hope their dreams, and ours, do not further the world-beast turning once again.

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Consolation for the Pacific Islands

August 19, 2019

The Pacific Islands forum has been held recently. Australia made a splash over keeping up the coal burning, and don’t you worry about those rising sea levels. I mean its not our problem…

From the Sydney Morning Herald

Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga, whose tiny atoll nation face a growing threat from rising seas levels, said members of the forum had called on Australia not to open new coal mines, move away from coal-fired power and to “do things that are necessary to keep up with the targets of the Paris agreement”.

[But], the Morrison government has worked furiously behind the scenes to convince counterparts to tone down the language of the draft Funafuti Declaration, arguing any reference to a transition away from coal-fired power was a “red line” issue for Australia.

Lots of protest and then the deputy Prime Minister said:

“I also get a little bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive,” he said.

“They will continue to survive, there’s no question they’ll continue to survive and they’ll continue to survive on large aid assistance from Australia.

“They’ll continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit, pick our fruit grown with hard Australian enterprise and endeavour and we welcome them and we always will.

There you are: the capitalist paradise, “come and provide wage labour for us and everything will be ok”.

Jacinda Ardern the New Zealand Prime Minister supported the Pacific Island position and well known Australian radio gnasher, Alan Jones, with the usual calm of the Righteous stated:

“I just wonder whether [Prime Minister] Scott Morrison is going to be fully briefed to shove a sock down her throat. I mean she is a joke this woman…”

As usual, he tried to avoid Australian responsibility, by saying China produces lots of coal (true, but when I was young I was taught that because someone else did something bad, it didn’t mean I should do it as well), and he implied that seeing this statement as part of a repeated pattern of him encouraging violence against powerful women was “wilful misinterpretation of what I said to obviously distract from the point that she was wrong about climate change and wrong about Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide level.” He also made a number of misleading charges about NZ, apparently being unaware that:

New Zealand’s primary renewable energy sources are hydro and geothermal power. About 80 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from renewable energy, compared with about 20 per cent of Australia’s.

Now Pacific Islanders know righteous Australians hate New Zealand more than them.

Sea level rise is an issue for both Australia and the Pacific.

So far sea level rises have been largely trivial (maybe 7-9 centimetres over the last 25 years. Not really perceptible by human vision, especially given tidal variation, human perceptual adaptation and lousy memory. However, even this amount of sea level rise can make a huge difference in terms of flooding and storm surges in low lying lands (such as the Pacific Islands or Bangladesh), and certainly affects underground water supplies in those regions – and even in places like the US. You can see the information on the NASA websites…. Much of this increase may have occurred through the expansion of water through heat absorption.

However the problem is that once the land ice in the Arctic and Antarctic circles starts melting, which it is with the extraordinarily high temperatures they have been getting up in Greenland and Alaska, then we are in unknown territory. The melting is, as I understand it, way more pronounced than expected at this stage of the process, as were the high arctic temperatures. The more the ice melts, the more will melt, as the local temperature’s rise, due to lack of ice. There is also heady suspicion that there is a lot of methane under the ice. Releasing this will increase the rate of warming, so even more ice will melt. Glaciers all over the world seem to be shrinking, so this is not a purely arctic or antarctic event. Glacier shrinkage will cause massive water supply problems in many countries, and hence more refugee movements, and probably wars.

In 2007 the IPCC projected a high end estimate of 60 cm by 2099 (that will probably result in Bangladesh loosing a tenth or more of its land), but in 2014 they estimated 90 cm in the same period because of more rapidly increasing temperatures. Some people suggest that the last time the average temp was around 2 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times then the water was about 5m higher than now. That would do serious damage to most coastal cities. Most of the Pacific Islands would not be remotely habitable. Some people have suggested that, with runaway climate change we are looking at tens of metres of rise before the end of this century – we have to hope those figures are not correct – and most people will assume that.

If people keep pouring greenhouse gasses and pollution into the skies then the rates of sea level increase will be faster than if they stop. Certainly, it is extremely unlikely that water levels will go down. If Tuvalu is increasing in size, it is almost certainly not because water is going down. Land masses apparently increase for many reasons, but it would probably be unusual to hope that all significant land masses will rise by enough to offset the sea level rise.

Events are further complicated because if the Gulf Stream dies which seems probable, then London could get around about the same temperatures as Moscow – whatever they turn out to be – and so we might possibly get a re-icing in parts of Europe, but it seems unlikely, as that is primarily regional, and summer temperatures will be above freezing. Also for reasons I do not understand, sea level rises are not uniform across the globe.

The Pacific Islands, and many other places do seem threatened by sea-level rises. Some small islands in the Solomons have already become uninhabitable and have significantly eroded, and in other islands people are moving to higher ground – where such ground is available.

And the main cause of such rises, as understood at the moment, is greenhouse gas emissions. This comes largely from fossil fuel use, but agri-business practices and building practices are important as well. If we go past various tipping points, because of our emissions, there probably really won’t be much we can do and the levels of destruction Australia will experience from sea level rise alone, will almost certainly be extremely disruptive of anything resembling normal life here.

So while we are helping to destroy the Pacific Islands, we are also helping to destroy ourselves. But hell it makes someone a mighty amount of money.

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The Anthropocene and Geological Time

August 16, 2019

There is a common argument that the idea of the Anthropocene is a joke. That in terms of geological time the idea of the Anthropocene is meaningless; it is currently much shorter than the margin of error for declaring a geological epoch, and that the traces of humanity are unlikely to be marked because “If 100 million years can easily wear the Himalayas flat, what chance will San Francisco or New York have?”. Geological time stretches for billions of years, not millions, and especially not hundreds of years. Even radioactivity is irrelevant “If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.” Personally I like the idea that there were intelligent dinosaurs – there apparently were big brained dinosaurs who were co-operative pack animals with opposable thumbs, and it is interesting to think that no traces of their civilisation survives. However, that is a digression

Basically the argument is that humans are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things and that we have an inflated opinion of our ability to control events. Any human effect on the planet is transient and meaningless (just as was the effect of our imagined intelligent dinosaurs). We will probably be gone in a blink of God’s eye, in geological terms. The idea of the Anthropocene, according to this position, is stupid; nothing that humans can do matters.

I’d have to say this argument does not convince me.

The problem with geological time is precisely that humans, or other genus and families of creatures, don’t matter. It is true, we are probably not going to be here for 10s of millions of years, never mind 100s of millions of years, because if we survive we won’t be the same – evolution will change us. Taking a geological approach to human problems is probably why it seems that geologists are usually the scientists who don’t care about climate change or ecological destruction. In terms of geological time such destruction is totally trivial. The Earth goes on.

However, the problem comes when this position is used to imply that social action is not resulting in a series of ecological crises, that the sixth great extinction of life on Earth is not likely to be happening, that climate change is a mere blip, that we are not leaving forms of pollution all over the global eco-system, or disrupting that system to an extent which is dangerous for many species, and possibly for human survival. Such an implication is simply wrong, and when pushed, most geologists would probably deny they are making it.

The term ‘Anthropocene’ is useful because it recognises that contemporary human societies are having a marked effect on global ecological, climate and geological systems. We are potentially changing the ecology to such a degree that our current civilisations may not be able to survive, and possibly billions of humans will die off. These crises would probably not have arrived, or been the same, without human action.

In human terms, as opposed to geological terms, this recognition is relevant. Having a term that recognises those changes and our role in creating them is useful. Suppressing it, almost certainly makes it harder to think about it, which is probably why articles like this get published.

Now, I’m certainly not going to argue that we can reverse the crises and return to the world we have destroyed, or that people always achieve the results that they intend. The world involves interconnecting complex systems, and consequently unintended consequences are routine and reversibility is not generally on.

If human social action results in unintended, unplanned, consequences which involve ecological catastrophe and (as far as we can tell) the deliberate actions of bees (for example) don’t, then I think humans are more responsible than bees, dolphins, or koalas, for those consequences. Furthermore, I’m not convinced bees, or other creatures, can take responsibility or act differently, while we can.

Yes, the Earth goes on, but I would rather it went on with us, than it went on without us. This is irrespective of the billions of years of Earth history in which humans have not, and will not, exist. This may be selfish or self important, but if we are to think about humans and the creatures who share the Earth with us, then we cannot think primarily in geological time – that is an abrogation of responsibility, and of our own, and other species, survival in the immediate future – and, if we do cause a mass extinction, then we are affecting the future history of life on Earth – no amount of saying we don’t matter in geological time will change that.

Lack of total control of the world does not mean we cannot mitigate and lessen the crisis. Who says that we have to “defeat” an ecological crisis, rather than, say, refrain from causing one – given we know how we are causing it? We do not have to have complete control to take action. If we had to take control of the world before we did anything, we would never act.

Even stopping causing the problem as much as we can individually, or as groups, is an improvement on the actions of the Australian and US governments (to take two of many examples), who seem to be trying to encourage corporations to pollute more for higher profits and to make things worse for us.

Refraining from making the situation worse may not be enough, but it is better than nothing – and because we are living in complex systems with unintended consequences as normal, we cannot be sure a particular action won’t start something which eventually becomes enough.

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What is Energy?

July 26, 2019

This is an attempt to talk about energy more concretely. It is clearly exploratory, rather than finished. Comments and disagreements more than welcomed. I do not claim to be particularly well informed.

What is Energy?

Many people spend a lot of time talking about energy in social theory, but they don’t say what they are talking about. This probably produces confusion, so this is an attempt to be more specific.

Energy is present in motion, change or transformation, or keeping things in regular dynamic patterns. This usually involves forces (such as electro-magnetism, differences in heat, or gravity) being transmitted through: physical contact; ‘radiation’;  displacement in space;  chemical bonding and so on. This is particularly the case when we are talking about “cause”. Causing or producing events takes energy. Jean Mark Jancovici, a French energy and climate ‘expert’ writes “Energy is what enables you to change the environment, by definition”.

Energy is often defined in terms of “work”. In normal parlance work means controlled, or directed, energy expenditure. It may, or may not, be useful to keep the term “work” for that specific meaning of human labour. Labour might be thought of as the directed and controlled application of human energy. With this definition, we can perhaps more readily understand why human labour may not have to increase, for there to be increased production, value or potentiality – we just need the energy to come from elsewhere.

Energy is in some ways observed in a dynamic set of relationships between ‘things/nodes’ and the systemic context and changes that the things/nodes ‘cause’.

What any organism, or group of organisms, can do, is limited by the amount of energy available to it for conversion into activity. Some animals spend almost all their obtained energy in eating, growing, healing and reproducing. As shall be stated later, energy is always lost, or dissipated, when it is used.

Let’s look at the cycles of energy on earth.

  • Naturally occurring nuclear energy within the Sun (energy within the atomic structure) provides sunlight and heat.
  • This heat drives movement of ‘matter’ on Earth: tides, weather, water cycles etc.
  • We also have planetary geothermal heat gradients, volcanoes and so on, and geographical gradients from uneven weather, stratification, upheaval, water flow, and other chemical state changes (expansion of water as it freezes, natural acids etc), which also drive the movement, and break up, of matter on Earth.
  • Chemical/biological conversions of sunlight, to the movement, or growth, of a pattern of material (an organism).
  • After organisms die they can form fossil fuels over very long (geological) periods of time and chemical processing. This also requires energy and pressure which is a form of energy stemming from gravity.
  • Organisms can convert other organisms to energy, through eating.
  • Finally we have ‘tools’ and ‘machines’, some of which are powered by human or animal energy, some by weather, some by fossil fuels, nuclear energy, or electrical energy from some other source.
  • For humans, after they are fed, using more energy really means “using more machines” (Jancovici again), or killing themselves through over-eating, or whatever.

Fossil fuels are amongst the most efficient forms of energy currently available to humans. They are easy to use, have been easy to find, and the technology involved is pretty simple. So far replacement technology for fossil fuels is more complicated, and requires more energy expenditure to build.

The laws of thermodynamics apply to energy. The important ones for social analysis, seem to be:

1) Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.

2) In a closed system the entropy, or dissipation of energy as random motion or heat, will increase over time. Things will run down. Hence energy needs to be arrive in the closed system from somewhere else.

Entropy is often equated to disorder and randomness, but this is not quite correct. With universal heat death, where entropy is maximal, order is almost total. Everything is uniform. One space is not distinguishable from another, over time. Nothing of “any interest” occurs. In that sense, disorder and difference seems essential for functioning systems. Energy occurs in patterned systems of difference.

These principles of thermodynamics roughly translate as follows (even experts sometimes disagree on what they mean):

1) Energy is not created. It is converted from one form to another, or transported from one place to another. Conversion and transport of energy usually require some other form of energy conversion. There is no energy available to humans without previous energy expenditure. Understanding this idea is vital.

Energy that is taken from a patterned system for a particular use, is not available for other uses – partly because of the next law.

2) We can never use energy with total efficiency. Some energy will be lost in processes of conversion or transport and dispelled into the general systemic context/relationships – perhaps disturbing or disrupting them. The more steps to a process, the more energy is likely to be lost/dissipated.

The ratio between energy expended and the energy available as a result of that expenditure is usually known as “Energy Return on Investment” (EROI) or, as I prefer, “Energy Return on Energy Input” (EREI)- because this makes it clear that energy input is central and money, while important, is secondary. The higher the EREI the higher the “energy availability” and the more freedom of action; although, for particular societies, this also depends on the social organisation. In economies of high inequality, large groups of people are likely to be powerless and poor with little energy available to them. EREI ratios of one or less are disastrous for complex civilisations, because it implies all the energy available is being used to produce less replacement energy.

The ‘external’ Sun is the basis for continuing life and any “interesting” planetary functioning. Without the Sun, the system would run down. Earth does not form a closed system because of the input from the Sun.

I have heard people say that “entropy will kill us anyway in the long run”, therefore we should do nothing about climate change. But they rarely say: “we don’t need to be employed because of entropy, or we don’t need wealth, we don’t need energy etc…” So this argument is rather selective.

Eventually we will all die, and the solar system will end; but this is probably not a basis for not caring about the near future. As long as the sun shines at roughly its current rate Life will continue. For current day humans, this ultimate end is not an immediate worry, or even a distant worry. It will not affect us, or our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren. It will occur in billions of years.

While it is not formally part of the entropy theory, we can extrapolate and say that any long-term directed use of energy to produce what the users consider to be order will produce disorder as well, because of the effects of dissipation of energy. Disorder or randomness is not unimportant to the system’s ability to function, or its ability to fall apart. Without generation of entropy nothing happens.

In macro terms, this means we cannot ignore the production of waste and pollution if we want to keep the system functioning. This means we cannot ignore the destruction of ecological sources of energy through energy usage (ie the destruction of ecologies, of food, the capacity for chemical conversion of waste into useful products for the ecology, and so on). These ecological systems provide energetic resilience, or systemic stability (within bounds). Without them, the system is more likely to become unstable. So we always have to look at the whole system in order to understand the effects of the parts of that system.

Most of these sources of energetic resilience are currently ‘free’ – or, more accurately, provided by the planetary system without human effort. Destruction of the natural ecology, destroys the processes of conversion of waste into resources, and the resilience of the system. This ongoing destruction, through social ordering, opens the possibility of a general transition to new and unfamiliar, disruptive stabilities or instabilities, which humans will find costly in all senses of the word. It will require a lot of energy usage for humans to compensate for the loss of these systems, and that will produce more pollution, and it will possibly take energy away from other necessary activities.

The problem with fossil fuels, despite their extraordinarily high Energy return on Energy investment, is that they increase disorder through pollution, and climate change, and they poison the systems they are used within. This is not strictly entropic, but it is comparable, as it disrupts the energetic resilience of systems.

If we counted destruction of energetic resilience as a problem, we would be expending more energy to solve the problem, whatever else we do. We might even abandon fossil fuels. There is also the possibility we are losing high EREI fossil fuel extraction anyway: people do not extract oil from tar sands if oil is easily, and cheaply, available elsewhere. Likewise, people do not frack, if gas is easily, and cheaply, available elsewhere – unless there are other incentives such as government subsidies, or economic distortions such as Ponzi type loan schemes.

Money is a sign of energy. Easily available money can enable the appearance of human organised energy, and activity. However, currency depends upon social power. If social power and monetary accounting is used to ignore real energy deficits, the destruction of energetic resilience, or increases in disorders, then we are headed for lower EREIs and probably for intensified disaster.

Monetary cost and profit can also distract from significant problems such as the noticeable entropic or disorderly effects of our ‘movement’, such as when we overgraze land, overfish waters, or stick poisons in rivers because it’s easy. In some cities the amount of heat produced as a side effect of air conditioning (cooling) is supposed to be noticeable, but in general that does not seem to be a problem.

One of the problems for decarbonisation projects is that those energy substitutes for fossil fuels, which are easily available, do not have as high EREI. They require more energy to build (in the short term) and are often built through heavily polluting processes. It may also be the case that the lower EREI means that less energy is freely available, lowering the ease of transition at the very moment we require freely available energy to build that transition. However, the consequences of delaying the change, get worse with every delay. This is not an easy process, but it is essential.

But if we did not have a civilisation that was based on ignoring the basic nature of energy, and the energetic production of entropy in the form of disruptions and dissipations of production through pollution and ecological destruction, then we could be better off to make the transition and to plan realistically for life afterwards….

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Mining in Australia II

July 10, 2019

There has been a recent report which suggests that fossil fuel mining in Australia accounts for 5% of global greenhouse emissions, as well as being one of the highest per capita producers or greenhouse emissions. It is possible that with the new coal and gas mines Australia could be responsible for something like 17% of Global emissions by 2030.

see RenewEconomy and The Guardian

Obviously the country hits well above its weight, and the argument that we shouldn’t do anything because our contribution to the problem is trivial, is completely wrong.

One potential response is to suggest that we are just not going to stop because its so economically important, but as previously suggested its doubtful we make that much from this type of mining, due to export of profits overseas, low royalty rates, massive tax concessions and decreasing employment in the industry.

But, if we recognised that fossil fuel mining and burning is a problem, then another possible response is “someone has to stop fossil fuel mining first, if we are going to survive in our society, and so it might as well be us.”

However, I suspect that the real question, may well be “should we go about increasing the amount of fossil fuel mining we are doing, so that we become the one of the world’s biggest exporter of emissions, and one of the biggest causes of ecological destruction on the planet, or should we begin to phase fossil fuel mining out?”

If people agree that is a real question, then we can begin to stop opening new mines, especially mines that threaten water supplies and agriculture as do the Adani mines, and the mines in the Sydney catchment areas, and when that is done we could stop expanding existing mines into agricultural regions, and then start phasing them out altogether.

If we are about to increase exports to provide 17% of global energy emissions, then it might well appear that the rest of the world is cutting back by comparison. Certainly some countries plan to phase out coal mining. So why not us as well?

This may not happen because the parties are bought by miners…. but we probably should not let corruption stop us from doing the sensible or moral thing. Behaving morally is not always easy, and won’t always make you as much money as behaving immorally.

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2040

July 7, 2019

I suggest that people see the film 2040. It portrays how we can start to beat climate change with the tech we have now. Its a bit glib on occasions but it gives hope that something could be done, if we could remove the corporate and governmental opposition.

First he goes to Bangladesh, to see how villages (we are talking shacks) can put solar on their rooftops and share it with other households, through a network of wiring and metres, which allows people to buy energy from this micro grid, even without being able to afford solar panels. The process allows microgrids to connect up, thus making a robust local system, which can cover the countryside. If the grid is broken by the increasing natural disasters of climate change, people can still get some power, as opposed to none.

This system would work well in Australia, but is currently illegal due to pro-corporate regulations. (We sold off our wires, and had to make them safe for private enterprise…). At the moment if i want to share my solar power with my next door neighbour i can’t. We need to make such links, installed by registered electricians, legal.

Then he looked at self driving electric cars, and how people could come to think of cars in terms of use, like they now think of music and films, rather than ownership. This would free up massive amounts of parking space which could be turned into urban farms, solving some of the food supply crisis, and relieving the need to transport food over vast distances. He also seemed to think it would reduce traffic and traffic jams, but i’m not sure about that. It might work because the cars go off after they have delivered you and don’t have to search for parking.

As far as I understand, this set up is not yet workable, making self driving cars that are relatively safe outside of small areas is still quite difficult. If it did reduce traffic, then you could also expect massive opposition from our toll road owners who have paid billions for waste property, and of course from oil companies who are not renown for their ethics, but are renown for ruthless political operation and massive misinformation campaigns. Anyone need to say Exxon? I’m not sure carpark owners would sell their property for urban farming either, but this could be solved by the State buying land and buildings back for people’s use (however unfashionable it is for the State to do anything useful).

Then there is regenerative agriculture. One person claimed that agriculture was responsible for more carbon emissions than burning fuels. This makes it important.

It turns out relatively easy to fix (apart from droughts). In Australia, industrial farming with fertilisers kills the soil, and the water runs off, taking the soil with it and taking the fertilisers into rivers where they provoke algal blooms and dead fish. Destructive ecologies spread.

The film maker visited a farmer who had simply planted a mix of grasses, sunflowers, sorgum, millet etc. and let them grow to about over a metre or so in height. Then he let in some cattle who ate them and defecated on the soil, and moved about as they are supposed to. Cattle that eat corn are unhealthy and their meat not so good for people, cattle that eat grass are pretty good alround.

After three months it was possible to see a marked difference between the old concrete like soil and this new spongy friable dark and moist soil. Apparently this process puts masses of carbon back into the soil and makes it more fertile without fertilisers. If we eat less meat then more soil can be let wild, we can store more carbon, and probably get a bit healthier.

We can also grow seaweed for food and fertiliser on platforms in the ocean deserts (although transport might be a bit of a problem). This provides areas for fish to grow, de-acidifies water from excess carbon, and could revitalise fish stocks – although we would have to stop industrial fishing from killing everything again. We could also do this closer to the coast. It is really easy to upscale with few negative ecological consequences.

Problem: Big agriculture will hate this, as it requires care rather than cheapness of production. They will fight against it. They want us to eat GMO foods that depend on brand name fertilisers and weed killers. However, small farmers should love it, and in the non-industrialised world saving small farmers, removes poverty (from dispossession for large farms…etc) and provides most of the food anyway. Some possible problem as crops rot releasing CO2 and methane, but still better than industrial ag.

Finally educating and empowering women and girls. Lowers population, increases care for the planet. The whole deal. What can I say?

Problem: Religions…. most of them.

Watch the film, and have a look at:

https://whatsyour2040.com/

2040

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Another way Capitalism ‘works’

June 9, 2019

One of the ways Capitalism works:

Step 1: Destroy or poison something, because it helps make a profit.

Step 2: Sell people what they used to have before it was destroyed, and make a profit.

Step 3: Say “how great is this?”

Capitalism could love climate change, because there is now so much to repair and replace. You can sell people air pollution filters, oxygen tanks, reforestation, bottled water, water filters and desalination plants, rehabilitation of destroyed reefs and artificial fish stocks, flood walls, geo-engineering projects to lower temperature rises, and machines to remove CO2 from the air. You might invent things that remove plastics from food. You boost production of medical treatment due to anti-biotic resistant bacteria generated by farming practices and so on.

The GDP should go up like anything.

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HT Odum on Energy, Ecology and Economics

June 3, 2019

Howard T. Odum was one of the earliest people to tie economics together with energy and ecology, so it is worthwhile giving a brief outline of some of his thought. As Odum develops his thought, the ideas seem to get a little overcomplicated, so this is only a basic account which seems enough to be useful for understanding our current situation and highlighting its problems. More detail may follow later.

Ramage & Shipp (Systems Thinkers) describe his underlying theme as follows:

The central method for Odum in understanding the behaviour of an ecosystem at any scale was to follow its energy flows: the way in which energy was transferred and transformed from one part of the system to another.

Odum also wanted to develop principles which applied to any ‘ecosystem’ from the ‘individual’ to the world.

I’m not sure what Odum’s definition of energy is, as I cannot find one at this moment, but let us assume energy is the ability to do work, move particles (produce heat) or to build organisation, structure or what is sometimes called ‘negative entropy’. We can use the Jancovici definition of energy as produced by, or allowing changes in, the world/system, or as being the engine of transformation. A constant stream of fresh available energy is needed to maintain any system’s functioning.

Paying attention to the ‘laws’ of thermodynamics, Odum notes that there is always a loss (or more accurately ‘dispersal’, or ‘degrading’) of energy; this is known as ‘entropy.’ There is always a difference between usable, or available, energy and the total energy expended to produce, transport and concentrate that available energy. The usable energy is generally less than the total energy expended, through the system.

For example, the energy used by motor transport is not just the energy used by the automobiles to move around, but the energy used in manufacturing the cars; building the roads and bridges and petrol infrastructure; transporting petrol; maintaining roads and cars etc. Energy is constantly dispersed, or lost as heat, in these processes, and the energy required to maintain the whole traffic system is much greater than just the sum of petrol burnt to power cars.

The amount of available, or net, energy to a society, organism or ecological system, determines the limits of what may be done. For Humans, real wealth, or prosperity, is ultimately limited by geophysical, ecological and energetic processes.

Odum argued as far back as 1974 that humans were using more and more of our available fossil fuel energy to generate new fossil fuels or other energy sources, thus lowering socially available energy as a percentage of energy use. This was presumably overcome through using up energy sources more rapidly.

Most business predictions about future available energy are based on the gross (total) energy of the source and not the available energy. This relationship between energy consumed to make energy available (what other people call Energy Return on Energy Input) can be excessive and Odum argued that shale oil, for instance, would never yield more energy than was used to extract it. This does not mean that people cannot structure the market to make profit from shale oil in the short term, but it is ultimately a non-constructive use of energy and will cause collapse somewhere in the system.

Odum suggests that social systems will succeed and dominate, the more they can “maximize their useful total power from all sources and flexibly distribute this power toward needs affecting survival”. When it is possible to expand inflow of available energy into a society, then survival can be helped by rapid growth or expansion allowing that society or organism to take over a domain, even if there is a large amount of energy (and other) wastage.

This spread or domination often involves using energy before others can use it; or ‘stealing’ energy from others and the future. The expanding system is heavily competitive (perhaps internally as well as externally). The more energy a system steals from others, the more likely its expansive phase will be short, as it is probably destroying its ecological base.

In general, if a society, or organism, consumes all of the resources it requires for survival, then it must change, diminish or die out.

Furthermore, if the energy expended by a society (especially one with decreasing available energy) does not help support energy collection and concentration, or social replication and general equilibrium processes, then the system is also likely to become vulnerable to collapse.

When energy inflows are limited or declining then successful systems (or parts of systems) are more likely to use the available energy to build relatively co-operative, stable, long-lasting, high diversity, equilibrium states. These societies are more oriented towards maintaining energy inputs without increasing energy expenditure to do so. In this case, previously marginal lifeforms or societies, using energy sources that are neglected by the dominant form, may continue after the dominant form has burnt itself out.

Odum seems primarily interested in the dominant systems using maximum power and then changing, rather than in evolution on the margins. He also seems to assume steady states (equilibriums) are what ‘nature’ seeks, rather than that all systems change and risk disequilibrium. His thesis was largely developed before Chaos and complexity theory, and assumes that all systems develop maximal use of energy: “systems organize and structure themselves naturally to maximize power [energy use]”. However he notes that “energies which are converted too rapidly into heat are not made available to the systems own use because they are not fed back through storages into useful pumping, but instead do random stirring of the environment.” This could be destabilising.

He suggests that modern economics developed during an extremely high expansion era, and economists are generally not even aware of the possibility of relatively steady, low growth, societies. Most of our other institutions and understandings are also based upon, and demand, expansion. These institutions and ideas will be challenged and stressed by lower energy availability and may actively sabotage attempts at change.

However, most of human existence has occurred in relatively low expansion societies, so such societies are not impossible.

Furthermore, as most economists take expansion as natural (living in societies of high energy availability), they assume expansion of energy is also natural or easy. They tend to oppose ideas which suggest contraction or conservation are healthy phases, and tend not to notice how new post-fossil-fuel, energy sources (e.g. nuclear and solar) often depend on a kind of subsidy through fossil fuel use. These new energy sources become less useful, less easy to build and less profitable when that energy subsidy is removed.

[M]ost technological innovations are really diversions of cheap energy into hidden subsidies in the form of fancy, energy-expensive structures.

It is even possible that the successes in expanding agriculture in the last 100 years does not primarily come from improvements in agricultural knowledge and practice, but from burning lots of fossil fuels, so that we invest far more energy into food than we get out of it. People now eat “potatoes partly made of oil.” The expansion of fish catch has come from massively increased tonnage of ships, massive increase in the energy expended in the building of them and powering them. With the decline of fish populations, even more energy may be required to carry on getting a profitable fish catch, until the fish are gone, and the fishing system collapses.

Changing social energy sources to renewables takes massive energy expenditure (and probable ecological destruction) to make the factories, gather resources, build the equipment, fuel the transport etc. That does not mean it is completely impossible to slowly organise the manufacture of renewables entirely through renewable energy, but that it won’t occur without considerable planning and enforcement, and it may not happen in time to prevent disastrous climate change.

It may be the case that there there are no new sources of low energy input, and low polluting, energy becoming available. For example, fusion is still a fantasy.

The energy available to contemporary society, and hence the amount of work/organisation and effective activity that can be done, may well be running down. Consequently economic expansion is slowing. Quite a number of people argue that the period of real growth in the West ended in the 1970s or even earlier.

It could be that current appearances of expansion are largely being funded by the attempt to use easy currency availability as energy, through low interest debt and through syphoning wealth up the hierarchy. But this ‘simulation’ of available energy cannot continue forever, without new sources of energy availability. Some of the global expansion may be happening because developing countries are using energy to generate growth, from a low basis, as happened earlier in the west.

The question arises that if we are now beginning an era of declining global energy availability, how should we best spend the energy remaining? Sixty years ago we possibly could have used the energy to build a renewable system, that may now be more difficult, because of the decline in availability.

Societies also receive an energy subsidy which comes from the natural workings of ecologies such as the flows of sun, wind, waters, waves, etc. Another method of achieving apparent growth could arise through accelerated destruction of the world ecology (consuming it without replacement) which will have fierce consequences as life supports are destroyed, and need to be repaired (requiring large amounts of energy if possible).

An economy, to compete and survive, must maximize its use of these [ecological] energies, [while] not destroying their enormous free subsidies. The necessity of environmental inputs is often not realized until they are displaced.

Our current societies are tending to destroy these subsidies, or remove vital parts of the system (such as water) and replace the ecosystem workings (if replaced at all) by high energy expenditure technologies, which become vulnerable to energy decline. A society which is aiming for relative equilibrium may need to make sure it helps its natural ecology to increase its own replication and equilibrium capacity.

After this discussion it should seem obvious that the energy used to give us energy availability includes the works of the sun, ecologies, humans and technologies. A lot of this energy availability comes without human work, and the more human activity destroys this ‘free energy’ the more expensive energy production becomes.

High availability of energy allows the building of complicated structures, greater resilience against natural fluctuations and threats, and allows greater concentrations of people and built organisation. Cities, for example, depend on cheap energy for building concentrated structures and for bringing in food. With fossil fuels, cities have increased in size as food can be brought in from far away and local lands do not have to support the population. Loss of energy availability, may mean cities collapse.

High energy availability also gives greater capacity for expansion. High energy availability human societies are usually military threats to lower energy availability societies – hence the pressure for everyone to increase energy availability for defense. Attempts to maintain growth seem to be a matter of maintaining, or obtaining, dominance at the expense of a functioning eco-system. In times of energy scarcity, militarily active societies may burn themselves out, putting energy into expansion rather than conservation, or they may put increasing amounts of energy into maintaining the power and lifestyles of the already wealthy and powerful. This may postpone apparent system breakdown, but it will only increase the problems and collapse will more likely be hard to control.

In the contemporary world, those countries which have only recently embarked upon the growth/expansion process, may be starting it at a time when it would be better to support or improve their former economic and energy flow patterns, if they wish to survive.

Countries which save energy now are more likely to survive, and they will have functioning energy resources in the future. Countries which attempt to solve their energy problems through warfare at a distance will probably expend more energy than they can recover.

With the decline in available energy human labour will become more important. Without some degree of social change in attitudes to labour, this seems likely to involve the creation of an under class or even slavery (although Odum does not argue this). Information storage, processing and availability may well decline, as that consumes a lot of energy. Information (because of the second law) tends to disperse, depreciate, and develop error, and it requires ongoing energy usage to preserve unchanged or develop, although it may require less energy to replicate than to generate anew.

The contemporary world is caught in the paradox of needing energy to continue with its patterns of development and expansions, but the only energy and economic processes which can power this, are destructive of the ecosystem at large and of the capacity of these societies to continue. The only way non-catastrophic way forward is to find some way in which general economic expansion can be curtailed, ecologies supported, and energy usage reduced.

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