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The latest from Project Drawdown

March 17, 2020

From The latest report slightly rephrased.

1) We can reach Drawdown by mid-century if we use the climate solutions already in hand at a large enough scale. We can solve our problems even without technological innovation.

2) Climate solutions are interconnected as a system, and they should reinforce each other.

3) Climate solutions have other benefits for people as well, such as no longer being poisoned by pollution, or having their land destroyed.

4) Savings significantly outweigh costs.

5) We need to accelerate moves to reduce or replace the use of fossil fuels. We need to actively stop the use of coal, oil, and gas and replace them with other sources of energy – renewables, hydrogen etc.

6) We need to simultaneously start reducing emissions towards zero and support, or expand, nature’s carbon sinks

7) Some powerful climate solutions receive comparably little attention, reminding us to widen our lens.

  • Food waste reduction and plant-rich diets
  • Regenerating eco-systems
  • Restoration of temperate and tropical forests
  • Rehabilitating peat lands
  • Encouraging Ocean based Carbon sinks (which improve fisheries)
  • Preventing leaks and improving disposal of chemical refrigerants
  • New cements, which exist
  • Building recycling responsibility into products
  • Bio-plastics
  • Electric Transport and improved public transport running on zero-emissions energy.
  • Access to high-quality, voluntary reproductive healthcare and high-quality, inclusive education

8) Solutions do not scale themselves. We need means of removing barriers and accelerating their implementation and expansion. That is, we need political and cultural action.

9) The climate crisis requires systemic, structural change across our global society and economy. Footholds of agency exist at every level, for all individuals and institutions, to participate in advancing climate solutions.

10) Greta Thunberg: “You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up can never ever be an option.”

We should probably add that we need to stop, as quickly as possible, all pollution – that is all waste which cannot be processed by the ecology in the amounts that are emitted. We also need to stop deforestation, and over-fishing.

We need to phase out all subsidies for fossil fuels, whether they are taxpayer handouts, tax breaks, tax evasions, royalty holidays or anything else. If needed the recovered money could be used to help renewable development.

All of these moves will cause lots of opposition, but they are necessary. It is not just a matter of what we do, but what we refrain from doing.

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Comment on Ted Nordhaus: ‘The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse’

February 24, 2020

Mr Nordhaus’s article ‘The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse‘ is challenging and interesting. Any summary of it will probably not do it justice, but hopefully I’m not distorting it too much.

Ted Nodhaus hails from the Breakthrough Institute (not to be confused with Breakthrough: National Centre for Climate Restoration), that is generally pro-corporate, anti-carbon price and pro-nuclear in its approach to climate change, so his argument that mainstream ‘left’ climate action proposals, are not really that left wing, or anti-capitalist, is interesting and worth engaging with. He is largely correct; environmental action has largely been adapted to not challenging capitalism. Neoliberalism is both all-pervasive, unable to take action itself, and inhibiting of any action by others.

Lets begin with his final point:

“we are all neoliberals now. Some of us just haven’t realized it.”

Neoliberalism is about protecting and promoting corporate dominance. A neoliberal is a person who talks about free-markets and small government, but is quite happy to have government intervene to crush workers’ rights or popular protest, to protect companies when they engage in pollution and harm, and to distort or regulate markets in favour of established corporate power.

In neoliberalism, anything established companies do is perceived as the ‘market in action’, and hence wonderful; anything which anyone does to curtail corporate dominance or to protect livelihood, or even existence, is acting against the market, and is evil and to be suppressed. Neoliberalism is both fundamentally anti-democratic and pro-corporate liberty. Corporations do not need democracy, or generate democracy. Profit and financial power are the only virtues neoliberalism recognises. If destroying ecologies makes profit, even if there are any laws left to protect ecologies (which neoliberals will attempt to remove), then ecologies will be destroyed.

Neoliberalism is inherently boring and real world problem avoiding. Neoliberals pretend that what they call free markets bring liberty rather than corporate dominance. Their only solution to every problem is even greater corporate dominance and less government acting on behalf of the people.

It is not surprising that after forty years of neoliberal ‘free market’ talk most people feel alienated from a politics which has become about corporate subsidy and corporate freedom, while considering most of the electorate expendable, or mindless, and to be manipulated rather than listened to.

Neoliberalism creates the conditions of its perpetuation by preventing any challenge emerging, by ensuring critical politicans generally get little funding, by funding fawning politicians, by owning the media and ensuring you get bombarded with neoliberal talking points, by enforcing the market, and dismissing whatever challenge becomes known as ‘anti-market’, and markets are inherently good. It also sabotages its conditions of existence by removing responsibility for the destruction of the ecologies it depends upon.

It is not a surprise that neoliberalism cannot deal with climate change, as recognising climate change demands changes in the behaviour of dominating corporations, a recognition of their responsibility for ecological destruction, and a reassertion of the rights of those ordinary people who are going to suffer severely from climate change. All of this, like any other democratic action is simply branded an interference in the market and unworkable as a result.

Most people (including neoliberals) deny they are neoliberals in this sense, but this is the way neoliberalism works. It forms the destructive background of our crisis

“Many conservatives have attacked the Green New Deal as socialism”

Neoliberals attack everything that does not give the corporate sector more power and wealth, as socialist or communist, suggesting it will lead to mass death. That is their main shtick. It also shows the poverty of their arguments – a slur is enough to satisfy them and prevent any further thinking.

But, as Mr Nordhaus says,:

“what is striking about the Green New Deal and similar proposals coming from climate hawks and left-leaning environmentalists is not their radicalism but their modesty.”

Yes. The left is now what would once have been called economically right wing. The solutions which are being proposed in our parliaments to the problem of climate change, are moderate capitalist, not socialist. They are not radical. The fact that they are attacked in this way, rather than discussed, shows the intensity of the neoliberal desire not to trouble the established and dominant corporate sector. The right is always attempting to push us further to the right.

“almost no one, in either electoral politics or nongovernmental organizations, seems willing to demand that governments take direct and obvious actions to slash emissions and replace fossil energy with clean.”

For the mainstream left, this is pretty accurate. From the 50s to early 70s direct government action would have seemed the sensible and obvious thing to do to almost everyone, as survival is more important than corporate power or markets. Markets have no necessarily beneficial teleology, other than seeking profit at this moment; their long term processes can easily lead to destruction, or the crash. Its not as if we don’t know that markets do crash, and bring many people down with them. Markets always require custom and regulation to work.

“the apocalyptic rhetoric, endless demands for binding global temperature targets, and radical-sounding condemnations of neoliberalism, consumption, and corporations only conceal how feeble the environmental climate agenda actually is”

He is right again. Neoliberal dominance or free market fundmentalism, crushes all innovation and potential innovation (unless it renders profit). Mainstream environmentalism yields, possibly to keep funding and avoid full-on media attacks.

The left’s agitation boils:

“down to some variant of either regulating corporations to stop them from doing things that produce carbon emissions or subsidizing them to use energy and other technologies that reduce carbon emissions”

As he is arguing, this is pretty minor stuff considering the potential scale of the disaster, yet it is vehemently opposed.

It is also true that as well as regulation and subsidy, some people suggest a carbon price as a solution. Not carbon trading, but a governmentally determined price with predictable increases, which gives the business world certainty (to the degree certainty is possible), and is given back to ordinary people to compensate for price increases. Again this is a mild impingement on markets, less of an impingement than sea level rises and so on. Its not hard to find this suggestion, as he recognises in his next paragraph. He continues:

“the primary frame through which climate change has been viewed over the past three decades is as a market failure.”

Yes. With the reservation that this is not really what is usually meant by ‘market failure.’ The term ‘market failure’ implies the possibility of ‘market success,’ yet the complete inability of neoliberal markets to deal with climate change is now reasonably obvious. It is not market failure. It is the nature of the neoliberal market itself that is the problem.

“Missing from this frame is the notion that abundant, cheap, clean energy and the low carbon infrastructure and technology necessary to provide it is a public good.”

Indeed because neoliberalism and its free market theory will not allow, or recognise, this. There is no such thing as ‘public good’ in neoliberalism, and talk of ‘public good’ is seen as a screen for ‘socialist dictatorship’ (lessening of corporate dominance). This again shows the poverty of neoliberal thought. Economics and exchange is a social activity, which depends on social order and a sense of public good. If it does not serve the good of the general public, what is the point? But, in neoliberalism, there is only the private good of the corporate class. No one else counts.

“Treating climate change as a public infrastructure challenge, not a private market failure, brings a range of advantages that pricing and regulation cannot provide.”

Yes again. This kind of action should recognise the inability of the market to work to save us, by itself. Dominant players in the market are currently profitting from the actions which lead to climate change, and they are not about to give those benefits up, without struggle.

“[Public action] enables long time horizons that private investors are unlikely to tolerate; planning and coordination across sectors of the economy to integrate technology, infrastructure, and institutions necessary to achieve deep decarbonization; and low-cost public finance that could make the price of the energy and climate transition far more manageable. And assuming a reasonably progressive tax system, it would arguably do so in a manner at least as straightforward and equitable as cap-and-trade or carbon taxes that aim at “correcting” market failures.”

Yes, but a carbon price may also be useful, as not everything would have to be done by government fiat alone. Perhaps a non-neoliberal market, in competition with central planning, might be useful. We have had mixed economies previously, and they worked quite well; certainly better than neoliberal markets.

“Green opposition to nuclear energy and hydroelectric dams has evolved into skepticism of centralized grids and infrastructure planning.”

I have not noticed this at all. This seems to be lazy thinking. It’s easy for the right to assume Greens are stupid (as they are not neoliberals) therefore they wouldn’t approve of grid planning.

However, as an example of reality, the Australian Greens argue they wish to:

  • “Establish PowerNSW. A new, publicly owned electricity company to generate, distribute and retail renewable energy for the people of NSW fairly and affordably.”

and:

  • “Upgrade the power grid. Build much-needed new public network infrastructure, connecting our abundant renewable energy resources to the National Electricity Market.”

So there is no skepticism about improving the grid. It should be fairly obvious that nuclear energy and Hydroelectricity present fundamental ecological challenges, and dangers, in ways that grids do not. Greens might prefer local people not to be restricted by neoliberal regulations designed to protect commercial grid operators at the expense of those local people, but if the grid became a national project, aimed at more than just private profit, then this might be much less of a problem.

“It was only the distortion of energy markets by policy-makers, at the behest of fossil and nuclear incumbents, [Amory] Lovins [chair of the Rocky Mountain Institute] has long insisted, that has stood in the way of the rapid adoption of renewable energy.”

Sadly this ‘distortion’ (which is not a distortion but part of the way the neoliberal market works) is inevitable in a society in which the official ideology only values profit. Massive inequalities in wealth allow massive inequalities in social power and in access to that power. The super-wealthy can, and will, buy and reward politicians for supporting them, and pay for think tanks to persuade those politicians that, in being bought, they are acting virtuously.

“the realities of renewable energy at scale look nothing like the distributed and decentralized utopia that Lovins and his environmental followers promised.”

Yes, again neoliberal ideology and action ‘distorts’ everything to perserve the powers of the corporate elite. Their aim is to prevent this elite having to change or respond to peoples’ needs or requests, and claim this is reputable because “the market knows best”. The environmental movement should not go along with any of these propositions, however dangerous this might appear.

“Most renewable energy today comes not from homes clad in solar panels but from enormous, industrial-scale wind, solar, and biomass facilities.”

This depends a little on where you live, but yes captured governments and renewable energy corporations, have tended to favour the enormous, and the centralised. They have favoured the structures which were good for coal energy companies and which removed local people from consideration or participation.

“The only remotely plausible path to the sorts of changes that many environmentalists now demand,… would require top-down, centralized, technocratic measures that most environmentalists are unwilling to seriously embrace.”

This is the fundamental paradox, but a centralised system which responded to, and involved, local communities could well have a different dynamic, if that was built into the planning. Again the problem is trying to adapt to neoliberalism.

“That is why the rhetoric of climate emergency in recent years has not been matched by explicit and specific proposals to do the sorts of things that a climate emergency would seem to demand.”

He should perhaps listen to some of the climate emergency declarations, and then realise the practical difficulty of acting against the endlessly wealthy elites…

This radicalism is

“fundamentally lacking any well-formed idea of what such a world would look like, in either its institutions, its actual social and economic organization, or most of its specifics—rationing, nationalization, or even just preempting local resistance to action… what most environmentalists, including radical greens, are basically demanding is capitalism with carbon regulations and lots of windmills.”

Yes true, and yet what visions there are, are still rabidly opposed by neoliberals, because it might set a precedent to challenge unfettered corporate power. There is no agreed on vision, because neoliberals refuse any negotiation, at all, even with this dilute environmentalism.

“there is little reason to believe at this point that we are capable of arriving at or sustaining the sort of political consensus that such an undertaking would require.”

This all suggests that the time for compromise with neoliberalism has passed. Neoliberals, as Nordhaus almost recognises, have obstructed climate action at every turn; no matter how mild the suggested action, they still claim it is too ‘socialist’. Over 40 years of neoliberal dominance there have been pretty much no neoliberal ‘free market’ suggestions for a solution to climate change that neoliberals have been willing to actually act upon. Perhaps because there cannot be.

Climate survival clashes with fundamental neoliberal principles.

The left may have to gain the kind of intolerance displayed by the neoliberals and not bother about further attempts at dialogue. Neoliberal markets do not work. Challenging neoliberals will be painful. Not challenging neoliberals will be death. Possibly this needs to be the fallback realisation of the environmental movement, left and right. Neoliberalism is not conservative at all.

Nordhaus ends with a kind of solution, which is probably yet another avoidance of the problem of neoliberal love of destruction.

“technological change will likely continue to prove more easily seeded and sustained than political change.”

Possibly, but again technological change and the way it is used, needs to be removed from neoliberal hands, or we will have more of the fracking disasters, and the leaking of methane in to the air. Fracking might “have significantly reduced the role of coal in the US electricity market” but it is doubtful it has reduced emissions, or preserved ecologies. It just reinforces the destructive system.

Technology has unintended consequences, but neoliberal technology will be designed and organised to benefit neoliberal power and wealth structures, before it will be designed and organised to improve quality of life or ecological stability.

Attempts to accommodate neoliberalsim and keep corporate support, may explain the incoherencies I have discussed in Australian climate policy, as neoliberalism is essentially hostile to ecological preservation and loss of any established corporate power. There is, and can be, no neoliberal effective climate policy. Consequently, neoliberalism must be defeated. We can begin by recognising that Neoliberalism in all its forms, is:

  • essentially anti-democratic
  • inherently destructive
  • unable to deal with ecological problems or climate change
  • reduces everything to maintaining profit
  • uninterested in most peoples’ survival, if that might lessen corporate wealth
  • controls the media, and hence what most people know
  • attempts to destroy information which is true, but might affect it
  • formidable as it is a form of plutocracy or rule by wealth
  • attempts to take over the state, through buying politicians, lobbying, privatisation, and positioning corporate people in government departments responsible for regulating their corporate activities.

Challenging neoliberalism will be difficult. Perhaps the only alternatives are revolution or death. I’d much rather they weren’t, but when established power seems bent on destruction and ignoring the problems, then perhaps that is the only option.

Fighting neoliberalism will be painful, but it is the only course of action that will get us anywhere.

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Some suggestions from William E. Rees

February 2, 2020

 

William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

He suggests that there are eleven minimum actions we need to take to avoid crisis, or to face into it. Here they are with some commentary.

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reduce the human ecological footprint;

[The important thing here is the need to reduce the ecological footprint – which means the amount of ecological destruction, and pollution issued by each country and per head of global population, in its current mode of existence. This will end ‘material growth’ which is a rather vague term, implying the material is a problem.]

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/ consumption means less production/ consumption;

[We have to move back from consuming or destroying more per year than planet Earth can regenerate in a year. This also means ending ecologically destructive modes of gathering.

[For example, if trawlers damage the sea bottom when trawling for fish, they almost certainly lower the capacity of the sea, in that region, to regenerate fish. In current models of fishing, the large fishers move in, destroy the regenerative capacity and move on, as they have little connection to place. We should probably prevent such types of destructive fishing, and hand the activity back to small fishing fleets. This should lower the amount of food available in the present (which could be a dire problem) while increasing it in the future. One step is to make sure all the fish is consumed, or released if not suitable, rather than thrown back into the ocean dead.

[These first two moves, are the beginnings of “sustainable life styles”. Without these steps, particularly the second, we have no long term prospects outside of war and mass murder.]

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

[A complicated way of saying that we probably cannot replicate the energy characteristics of fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. We need to use less energy. As Williams states earlier, this probably cannot be done with large cities. Large cities are, so far, extremely energy intensive. They are quite possibly based on the availability of cheap and plentiful energy for food among other things.]

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

[Happiness does not depend on consumption, or on energy usage. However, cheap energy increases what people can do, so reducing energy consumption is likely to be seen as restrictive – it would eliminate whole industries (air flight based tourism etc). This would take adaptation and persuasion. It will be difficult.

[It may be particularly difficult as people are now used to having material prosperity taken from them and handed to the elites, although they may define, and perceive, elites differently. Avoiding this perception is going to be difficult. We either probably have to get the elites to go first and cut their lifestyles back, or ignore the elites altogether, or attack wealth elites for their role in the destruction. All these procedures have problems.]

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

[The more energy is available the more is wasted. However, wastage is sometimes part of profitability. We may need to force the prices of pollution upwards. At the moment, the price of pollution and the penalties for pollution are being reduced in the US. That this increase is not automatically seen as bad, shows the conceptual difficulties faced by our societies in dealing with our futures.]

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

[This will have to happen whatever we do. Even if we had the ability to pollute without limits, the contemporary economy is based on destroying jobs, and people have to be retrained for work and income, which is not always welcomed. Or we need to rethink work itself.]

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

[Carbon prices, based on the amount of pollution which can be issued, are probably the best methods. Not carbon trading which is unstable and gameable.

[However, allocating remaining carbon budget to countries will be difficult. Should Western countries like the US and Australia, be given any? They could be considered have overspent already. And yet we cannot cut down completely overnight without massive social disruption, and the likelihood of countries leaving the scheme. Nation States are usually competitive, and non-cooperative, by their history, so it will probably not be possible to allocate the budget in a way in which everyone will see as ‘fair,’ ‘just’ or ‘practicable’.]

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

[I can see vast arguments over what is ‘essential’ happening here, and these arguments being used to slow transitions, but it possibly has to happen]

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

[Yes. The problem is that without the global ties of trade there is more tendency for nationalist wars]

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CO2 and Drawdown technology

January 11, 2020

There is lots of new drawdown technology, which claims to be able to make plastic and fuel out of CO2 extracted from either the air, from coal power, from cow farts and so on. I’m not being sarcastic about the cow farts, that is apparently a real claim (although I doubt it is functional).

The argument seems to be that as this tech exists, and people seem to keep demanding new electricity, we can happily extend, or increase, the use of fossil fuels and be ok with any ‘temporary’ increase in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.

To me there seem to be a number of problems with this approach.

1) We seem to be perilously close to massive tipping points. This is vitally important:

  • If we get a run of summers like the one we have just had in Australia (and there is no reason to assume that we will not, as the trend for average temperatures has been increasing steadily over the last 20 years), then, we will have little surviving natural bush, we will have no place for the bush fauna, and we will lose a large number of our farmers, for economic and fertility reasons. We have almost certainly lost some normally non-inflammable rainforest forever.
  • The fires have come close to increasing Australia’s carbon emissions to 175% of normal.
  • The fires have significantly reduced our natural extraction of CO2. We hope that regrowth will compensate, but regrowth could be problematic and slow (See previous post).
  • Rivers and creeks will continue to breakdown and dry up. The water supply situation will get worse. Fish and other fresh water creatures will continue to die. Local food supplies for people outback will decline.
  • It is highly probable, that large numbers of Aboriginal people (and other outback based people), will no longer be able to live on their land, or maintain their ways of life.
  • Other countries are likely to follow a similar course. Australia is just more sensitive to global warming than most other places, we are a country of erratic weather, droughts, floods and storms.
  • The permafrost is melting elsewhere in the world, due to global heating. There is thought to be a large amount of methane and other green house gases stored in the permafrost. If so, there will come a time when this gas starts to leak. Some reports suggest this is already happening. When it does, climate turmoil will accelerate even more rapidly than it is doing. It is extremely likely that the resulting weather changes will affect the world disastrously.
  • There are other effects which will accelerate as well, but you probably already know this.

Summary: We cannot afford to increase the amounts of Greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere.

If we increase GHG emissions we are heading for destruction. It is that simple.

We need to lower emissions now and we need drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere now. Technological drawdown is a great idea in principle. Whether it is currently useful is another issue.

2) Historically, drawdown technology has not eventuated, but the promise of drawdown technology has been used to increase GHG emissions: “Soon we will be able to extract all this, and fossil fuels will be clean!”

In Australia, the government has given the fossil fuel industry significant amounts of money to build this technology.

  • The coal industry largely used the money for dinners and promotion of coal. No vaguely working extraction and drawdown technology emerged. Naturally they did not have to pay the money spent on parties and promotion back.
  • Some gas companies did some work, but this was primarily to use extracted CO2 to push more gas out of wells. The successes in extraction, or storage, were minor, or significantly less than the increased emissions, arising from the use of the field.
  • No commercially useful long term, non-propaganda, successes were reported, or implemented outside the test sites.

3) It is possible that the empty promises of drawdown tech are not essential to the talk about it any more. We may even have working tech. If so, the basic conditions for acceptable working tech are:

  • If it is making fuel, then the total amount of energy consumed is considerably less than the amount of energy emitted (ie it has an Energy Return on Energy Input greater than 1).
  • If making plastic or any other substance, then it has to have significantly less emissions than the normal production of the substances, and it has to be economically competitive with recycling and normal production. If it is massively more expensive, then it will not be deployed, or be deployed as a novelty, or demonstration of capacity to be discontinued when the costs do not come down.
  • If we are storing the extracted CO2, then we have to be able to test the stored CO2 for escape into the atmosphere. If such tests are impossible then storage should not be undertaken. Theory of success is not enough.
  • If extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere, then the technology has to be able to deal with the small amounts of CO2 in real atmospheres and again not be dependent, in any way, on GHG emitting sources of energy.
  • It should be competitive with reforestation, regenerative agriculture, or education of women, over the long term, otherwise let’s use an existing (simpler) working technology.
  • Technical data and the results of experiment has to be freely available. In most of the sites dealing with the new tech, the technical data seems to be mainly hype, based on assumptions of success. They rarely tell you current data. Sometimes there is no technical data at all. This may not be the case about every product, but it is common enough that we cannot assume it is not the case in advance.
  • Independent testing is needed before we risk the technology’s use for GHG reduction.

Summary: We cannot assume, without thorough investigation, that the hype about drawdown technology is accurate, and the technology is ready for commercial or effective layout now rather than in some distant future.

4) Given these issues, if we are to increase the amount of fossil fuels we use, for whatever reason, then we need to be sure that:

  • We reduce the use of other fossil fuels so that the amount of GHG emissions does not increase.
  • If the drawdown technology is being used to extract new fossil fuels, or otherwise unviable fossil fuels, then the total levels of emission (including those from burning the fossil fuels extracted) has to be zero or less; otherwise we are increasing emissions.
  • Drawdown tech has to be installed, thoroughly tested, and shown to be viable, before any new emissions get released. AND we measure the drawdown accurately, and make sure there is no escape.
  • We increase the fossil fuel emissions by less than we are actually drawing down through tech now, so the emissions trend really is downwards.
  • We do not increase the fossil fuel energy supply, or GHG emissions, to power the drawdown technology.

If drawdown technology is ready and functional, then these conditions should seem fairly straightforward. If these conditions seem onerous, then the drawdown technology is not ready, and we need to stop increasing GHG emissions now. The easiest way to stop increasing emissions is to stop increasing fossil fuel based power.

5) We should spend the limited amounts of money, and energy available, primarily refining technology we already have that works to reduce emissions now. If that includes drawdown tech that meets the criteria above, then great.

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Neoliberals and Nuclear Energy

December 31, 2019

When discussing climate change with people on the political Right, you commonly get two responses.

The first is “You hate private enterprise and want to get the State to interfere with our lives and destroy our freedoms”

No I want people to be able to choose that they have a future, and that they do not have to be poisoned and disempowered by corporate profit seeking, and neoliberal politics.

It is true I don’t want to surrender the future to the corporate elite and their political representatives, but if business wants to come along and help save both the economy and ecology they function in, they are more than welcome to join in, and many businesses are. In many states in Australia, the renewables transition has been led by business and local councils, in the face of government opposition or intransigence. I can’t stop them, and don’t want to stop them.

Despite the neoliberal Right’s ongoing claims that the only options are to do nothing, or to accept massive government interference in our lives; this is not true. That is just their attempt to politicise the issue, so as to save profit, at the citizens’ expense, and make doing nothing, part of right wing self-identity by suggesting that only left wingers believe in climate change and all the solutions are evil, and worse than the problem should it exist.

The second response I get is “Nuclear power is the solution but you won’t let us have it“.

Nuclear power is an option, although there is little evidence that many people, including the neoliberal Right, actually want it.

From what I hear from people in the UK, the price of the power reactors produce has blown out, and they are slow to build safely.

To make [the Hinkley Point] project viable, the U.K. pledged to pay EDF [The company involved] 92.50 pounds for every megawatt-hour of electricity it produces, more than double the current market price, for 35 years. 

Bloomberg

Let us reiterate the obvious position here. Hinkley Point is only going ahead because of government interference in the market, by guaranteeing an electricity price.

It is also probable that it is able to go ahead because the Government is providing tax-payer funded indemnity as private insurance companies will not cover the complete risk of accident.

I don’t understand why a government would offer this, as once relieved of the burden of responsibility for accidents the company building the reactor has an incentive to cut costs on safety to increase profits. And as safety problems are likely to happen years in the future when the high level executives and their bonuses have all disappeared, or the company may not exist, there is even less incentive to make sure it is safe.

So for some bizarre reason neoliberals support nuclear energy even though it appears unable to operate in a free market. They frequently argue that renewables cannot survive in a free market and therefore should be penalized, although this is not as obvious. The position is not that consistent. It must be because tax-payers’ money is being directed at the established corporate sector.

As far as I can tell, Gen IV nukes which there is a lot of noise about, don’t actually exist as commercially or developmentally ready. Even a supportive site points out that

the new technology will be challenged to expand in the open power market without a guaranteed cost savings [over renewables]. Gen IV will be more likely to expand in state-owned utilities willing to take the technology risk…. Investments to commercialization, continued international cooperation, government support, and multi-years’ worth of effort are needed, but by many indications, Gen IV reactors will be the next nuclear renaissance. [italics added]

Let’s not rely on marketing hype for our future: the tech may never arrive and, if it does, it may not be as good as hoped.

Thorium could be good, but I can’t find any significant present day research on this issue, and it failed in the 1980s in Germany. So we are looking at at least 15–20 years research before anyone starts building, and it may have significant problems anyway.

As far as I can see (which could easily be wrong as things change a lot here), few reputable private companies seem to be building nuclear energy reactors, and few politicians (no matter how much they mumble about nuclear energy being the solution) are keen to have them built in their own electorates.

The reality is that I don’t see any serious agitation for nukes from anyone, including from the political right, other than from nuclear power companies, although quickly forgotten suggestions are reasonably common, as is blaming the left for the lack of nuclear power. I also do not see any decent finished innovations in the field and we still face the possibility that reactors are no longer economic. On top of this, we still have not really solved the waste and insurance problems.

If there was any serious agitation, or interest, given that we live in a plutocracy in which corporations own the political system and the news system, then nuclear energy would probably be happening.

It seems that the establishment is still more interested in subsidising fossil fuels and eco-destruction, than they are in nuclear energy, for whatever reason.

So whatever the regulations are, that might obstruct nuclear energy, they do not seem to be the sole problem. And when things are dangerous, you might hope there would be some regulation, otherwise we just repeat the destroy the environment and poison the people, for profit thing, which is the main cause of our problems.

If all this is correct, then nuclear energy seems a displacement fantasy and a political pretense, rather than a valid solution.

When it comes down to it, I would rather support Renewable transitions which are happening anyway (however hindered by governments), than push hard to get something going which might not happen and probably would be a waste of tax-payers’ money.

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Myths of Climate 04: Prometheus

December 30, 2019

Continues from: Myths of Climate 03: Apocalypse and Millennium

Prometheus brings humans fire which is needed for culture and development, and is chained to a rock by Zeus, with an eagle devouring his liver every day, until he is eventually rescued by Heracles.

The myth of Prometheus encapsulates both the idea that technology can save us, and the counter-position that technology leads to retribution or destruction.

While the two parts of this myth are usually kept separate, it may be useful to bear both in mind simultaneously.

God Like Technology

The ‘technology is always positive’ side of the duality reassures us that technology can save us. Influenced by this myth we tend to be carried away into technological fantasy, into thinking that we have solutions to problems, when we don’t know if those solutions work or not. It often promotes non-existent ‘fantasy’ technology (like clean coal, carbon sequestration, or mirrors in space, portable nuclear power stations, fusion power) as saving us from having to abandon coal fired power stations. Or it may claim potentials for existing technologies that have so far been largely unsuccessful at containing ecological destruction (biofuels, thorium reactors, new hydro power, etc).

Within the myth, we expect technology to arrive to save us, just as part of the natural order of things. Some people even argue that something like this is part of economic fundamentals; if there is enough need, then investment will occur and the technology will be invented and appear. However, this is never guaranteed, and it encourages us to forget the unexpected effects of technology, and to ignore complexity and assume we know all the interconnections in a natural system, which we cannot.

In this mode, human technological endeavour is heroic, even godlike. No radical change is needed and we can retain the status quo; we can continue as normal with a technological add on. Some writers can even move away from climate change acceptance and any tinkering with the corporatised market, by arguing that ecological degradation has nothing to do with climate change or forms of economics, and that it can be fixed by easily deployed technologies.

In the ‘technology is good’ side of the equation we also tend to think that technology is determinate, and indicates degree of advancement and proficiency – this is something of a contradiction to the technology as add on idea, but it is used in different arguments about technological superiority and usually kept separate. We often mark out history by supposedly technological periods which follow in succession, a kind of “technological ladder”: Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic), Bronze Age, Iron Age, Agricultural Age, Age of Print, Age of Sail, Age of Steam, Industrial Age, Atomic Age, Space Age, Computer or Information Age and so on. Each ‘Age’ is supposedly better than the last, rather than just partly the same and partly different.

This allows us to dismiss any wisdom or knowledge possessed by ‘earlier’ ages, and also makes it hard to see the complexities of reality, such as ‘Stone Age’ Australian Aboriginal people appear to have had complex systems of ‘agriculture’ which are completely different in their ways of working to European systems (see Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe) (Some references to the controversy over this).

Harmful Technology

The counterposition makes science the cause of all our problems. Not only does it suggest Prometheus’ punishment is more primary than his success, but it suggests the Tower of Babel with God striking down human technological presumption, or that our technology will escape and take over the world, destroying us, as we can see in many science fiction scenarios. It implies that technological presumption leads to disaster, perhaps even to the end of the world.

The dark side myth can be used to imply technologist and scientists are evil, as with the “climate change ideas only exist because of a world wide socialist conspiracy” trope. All experts can be ignored, if they don’t agree with positions we already hold.

This view can also be used to imply that people ‘down’ the ‘technological ladder’ had generally much greater wisdom and lives than we do today, which may not always be the case.

At best this side of the myth implies that technology alienates us from something essentially human, even though humans always seem to have used technology of some sort. We often hear people arguing that the internet destroys our capacity to think, or to have an inner life, when (if we were loosing our capacity to think etc) there might be many other reasons – like being fed false information for political purposes, or being so busy and nervous at work that we have no time for reflection.

One writer rebuffs the idea of using windmills to generate electricity as they are a medieval technology and make an infernal noise – reference to the sound of hell is not accidental, even if unconscious, and that implies the possibility of punishment from God. Yet I suspect the writer does not object to other noisier technologies like aircraft. But this does not seem clear to him. To be real, and of the future, technology has to look a certain way, a demand shaped by myth, or at least by films of a great future (do we have those any more?). Likewise President Trump seems somehow aware that building windmills can involve pollution, even if he seems unaware of the pollution from coal mining and burning, or he chooses not to emphasise this. Likewise with bird killing.

In this part of the myth new technology becomes seen as corrupting and inherently destructive of the social, or natural, order, and indeed it may well change those orders.

When technology becomes part of the social order, it does so as a complex system within other complex systems, and unintended consequences are routine. At a simple level it can open opportunities for some groups to consolidate or increase their social power and influence. Although this is usually only considered disruptive if people from lower groups get raised. If people from dominating groups increase their power, this may not be portrayed as a problem.

The Conflict/Paradox

What one side hears as the solution sounds to the other like a charter for further destruction. Technology is simultaneously, saviour and destroyer, potentially part of the solution but currently part of the problem. Which position we choose to argue from determines where we end up, and the alarms (intended or otherwise) we raise in other people.

However, both positions have equal possibility of being true. In this case, it is possible that putting the two halves of the myth together may help us deal with problems of transformation/transition.

Some technological breakthroughs could save us, or at least help us. And we may not have to wait for them, we already have renewable sources of energy. However, it is also true that renewables may not be able to save us, if we wish to keep using more energy, or bring everyone in the world to the energy use of the average Australian or US American. A change in lifestyle and life plans may also be required. Some people may loose wealth so as to stabilize the system, some people may gain wealth to stabilized the system. This could be disruptive and it would be easy to make people fear this change, because who knows where it will end up? We also appear to have the capacities to lower pollution and waste production, but it is difficult because it is not profitable, and profit is what counts in our economic and political system. In this case the technology is being disrupted by the maintenance of other systems.

It is also true that new technologies can be disruptive or harmful, and they may well need to be vetted, but this is not easy.

Ultimately a significant part of the problem with technology comes down, not just to the myth, but to our inability to think in terms of complex systems, and, of unintended consequences as being normal.

We have tended to deal with unintended consequences, just by arguing about them afterwards, or generally ignoring them, as with fossil fuels, with the possible exception of the London smogs. These were solved by government action, information work, and regulation. They could have continued to be ignored, there is no reason why the death of ordinary people should impinge on the souls of those seeking profit alone. Probably enough of them lived in London to accept the reforms, or feared the rise of the poisoned working and middle classes and gave in.

As the consequences of technology are often unintended and unexpected we cannot easily predict them, but part of the problem is that we do not try – we often do not seem to consider this at all.

Exploring the dynamics of unintended and unexpected consequences should be a major research project. All policy, corporate or governmental, should consider the likelihood of unintended consequences, and determine how these consequences will be looked for, and taken into account.

Technology does not escape myth.

See also: Problems of Transition 02: Technology as Fantasy

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Donald Trump on Wind Energy

December 26, 2019

This is an excerpt on wind power and the Green New Deal, from a speech by President Trump issued by the Whitehouse, so its absolutely official…. Read and enjoy?

Palm Beach County Convention Center
West Palm Beach, Florida: 5:23 P.M. EST

“How about the senator from Hawaii? Nasty. Nasty. Horrible. Gee, what she says — what she says is so mean and angry. She’s not the smartest person on the planet. (Laughter.) She wants the Green New Deal, and then they informed her that that does not include airplanes. And you’re the senator from Hawaii. So they said, “What are you going to do?” And then they talked about building a train to Hawaii, can you believe it? (Laughter.)

“No, no, she wants it, even though you can’t — you’ll never get to Hawaii again. Say goodbye to Hawaii. No, it’s crazy, isn’t it, though?

“But I don’t want to knock it. All of these things have to be st- — it’s too soon. It’s too soon. Let it go. Let — let it seed. Like — just like our great agenda has to seed like a tree. It has to seed. Let the Green New Deal seed. (Laughter.) And then about two months before the campaign ends, I will rip that sucker like you have — (applause). We’ll let it seed, the Green New Deal. (Applause.)

“We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody I know. It’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right?

“So they make these things and then they put them up. And if you own a house within vision of some of these monsters, your house is worth 50 percent of the price. They’re noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go. Take a look. A bird graveyard. Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life. (Laughter.)

“You know, in California, they were killing the bald eagle. If you shoot a bald eagle, they want to put you in jail for 10 years. A windmill will kill many bald eagles. It’s true.

“And you know what? After a certain number, they make you turn the windmill off. That’s true, by the way. This is — they make you turn it off after you — and yet, if you killed one they put you in jail. That’s okay. But why is it okay for these windmills to destroy the bird population? And that’s what they’re doing.

“AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because they’re idiots!

“THE PRESIDENT: (Laughs.) This is a conservative group, Dan. (Applause.) No, but it’s true. Am I right? (Applause.)

“I’ll tell you another thing about windmills. And I’m not — look, I like all forms of energy. And I think (inaudible) — really, they’re okay in industrial areas. Like you have an industrial plant, you put up a windmill — you know, et cetera, et cetera.

“I’ve seen the most beautiful fields, farms, fields — most gorgeous things you’ve ever seen, and then you have these ugly things going up. And sometimes they’re made by different companies. You know, I’m like a perfectionist; I really built good stuff. And so you’ll see like a few windmills made by one company: General Electric. And then you’ll see a few made by Siemens, and you’ll see a few made by some other guy that doesn’t have 10 cents, so it looks like a — so you see all these windows, they’re all different shades of color. They’re like sort of white, but one is like an orange-white. (Laughter.) It’s my favorite color: orange. (Applause.)

“No, but — and you see these magnificent fields, and they’re owned — and you know what they don’t tell you about windmills? After 10 years, they look like hell. You know, they start to get tired, old. You got to replace them. A lot of times, people don’t replace them. They need massive subsidy from the government in order to make it. It’s really a terrible thing.

“And what they want to do is they want to get rid of all petroleum product. That means you basically won’t have any factories in the United States.

“So tell me though, how are you going to win Texas when you say, “We’re going to get rid of all petroleum,” right? (Applause.) If you win — how about this guy, Beto? Beto. He was a beauty.

“AUDIENCE: Booo —

“THE PRESIDENT: Beto came out — he’s from Texas. He came out against religion, he came out against guns, and he came out against energy — oil, right? So he’s against oil, guns, and the Bible. Abraham Lincoln can’t win with that platform in Texas. I can tell you, right? (Laughter and applause.)

“No, we’re doing it right. We’re doing it right. And you know, our numbers, environmentally, right now are better than they’ve ever been before, just so you know, because I’m an environmentalist. I am. (Applause.) I want the cleanest water on the planet. I want the cleanest air anywhere — crystal-clean water. I want perfectly clean air. And we have the best numbers right now that we’ve ever had, meaning in the last 40 years. (Applause.) I assume the numbers a couple of hundred years ago were better because we didn’t have anything. So, over the last 40 years — we’re in very good shape.

“The coming months will decide whether our country will be governed by a corrupt, failed, and far-left ruling class or whether we will govern our country. Will it be governed of and by the American people? That’s what we’re talking about. (Applause.)”

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The Million Mile Battery

December 13, 2019

An article in yesterday’s cleantechnica reports a prediction that the Tesla Truck could soon have a million mile battery.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the original prediction was found by the author in Reddit. But the evidence for this proposition is that some researchers, with a contract with Tesla, think its possible.

Capitalism works by hype, PR, advertising and deception. The idea being that if you can persuade people that a product exists or will exist with amazing properties, then people will be less likely to buy competing inferior products, or will hold out for your innovation and be less likely to buy supposedly inferior products. As the article itself states ” This would be a key selling point for the indecisive buyer who is on the edge of purchasing one [a Tesla truck].” 

The researchers may also be making the claim to keep Tesla interested in them, and supplying some funding – they have an interest in selling themselves as well.

So unless there is strong evidence that a million mile battery is currently in the testing stages, and that it is practicable for Tesla to build them at a price which is likely to attract custom (I have a million mile battery that can just power a car, only it weighs 100 tonnes, takes a year to charge and costs about 2 million dollars. Anyone interested?), then the sensible approach is to assume this is hype, and look at what the Tesla truck can do now. That may even be remarkable, just not as good as ridiculous, and its not so dependent on promises.

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Problems of Transition 03: Technology is social

October 23, 2019

Follows on from: Technology as Fantasy

Some of these problems talked about in the previous post, occur because technology is not neutral, it is born into being, and designed, within existing social relations, social struggles, ecological relations and so on. Technologies will almost always be designed, and modified, to try and maintain or intensify relations of social power, and distributions of wealth. In capitalism, for example, work tools are rarely designed to give people more simple leisure, and indeed leisure tools like the internet or mobile phone, can be used to extend work hours ‘voluntarily’. Any technology with potential, become sites of social struggle.

Technology involves social organisation

In the current world, social organisation and disorganisation exists before new technologies are introduced. Sometimes we can easily think of social relations and organisation as a form of technology. Armies of soldiers are a different form of technology, to collections of warriors. The discipline of Roman troops and troop formation, generally proved victorious over warrior bands, even though the basic physical technologies were not that much different; swords, spears, shields, armour, bows etc. The pyramids were primarily built through the organisation of human action; without that organisation, they could not have been made. Irrigation systems require co-ordination and distribution systems, which usually imply allocation of power and authority. These various systems may, in some cases be primarily religious, magical or astrological – so again magic is overtly part of the technologies application. Capitalism grew together with styles of organisation of factories, offices, labour, finance, expertise and so on. Office machines and factory machines also grew within these frameworks. Technology as a part of, or enabler of, social relations, is also deeply implicated in power relations and hierarchies, and the struggles within them.

To repeat; technology arrives into a situation in which social struggles, conflicts, failures, successes and so on already exist. The technology is designed by at least one faction in this set of complex social relations, and is inserted into them. It is not always possible to clearly demarcate a technology from the social relations and organisation that exist ‘around’ it and ‘through’ it. Technology is social from the beginning.

Maybe, in another world, it is possible the internet could have become a tool of democracy but, in this world, it was born in a period of increasingly neoliberal capitalism, and was transformed by the victors of that struggle into a commercial, data collecting set of business oligopolies. It was used in the political struggles of the world, to promote neoliberal ideologies, to win elections, to increase surveillance, to arrest dissidents, to destroy other States, to find new ways of manipulating people, and so on. Its potential to be a tool of democracy was destroyed by those who wished to use it to support their own power.

The same problem of the effect of established, or victorious, social relations is relevant for renewables. If renewables are established within social relationships which already depend on sacrificing ecologies for pofit, then it seems likely that renewables will be used to continue that sacrifice.

This is not an issue that can be answered in advance of research, However, continuing sacrifice does seem a problem.

Sacrifice of some for the good of all.

Research in India shows that people can have their land stripped away from them for corporate renewable installations (possibly through fraudulent contracts, or simply by ignoring the existing use). The installations can render the land desolate through the use of mass concrete stands. The removal of agriculture, can lead to massive unemployment and skill loss, because renewables only require a small, relatively unskilled labour force to maintain. Water, in short supply to begin with, can be taken from the public to keep the panels clear of dust. Attempts by local people to establish their own renewable networks, can be destroyed by people developing national grids, who demand local homemade grids be taken down, as they disrupt ‘proper’ grids.

Research in Australia implies that standard corporate development practices flourish, with top down imposition of energy farms (in a similar way to the way coal mines can be promoted) which alienates local people, prevents discussion of the potential problems of the development, prevents people discussing the contracts they might get for land-use, and leads to envy because some people get large payments, and others get nothing. Again, this can destroy local small town economies, because the levels of employment are less. As with the internet, democratic practices can be sacrificed for profitability.

Likewise, support for these top-down installations often seems to suggest that people’s relationship to the land which they feel they are protecting by objecting to the renewable projects, is irrelevant, when we precisely wish to maintain nurturing relationships to land and ecologies to allow transition. Strategies of development seem bound up with the idea of sacrificing people or ecologies for the developmental “benefit of all”, or perhaps the benefit of some. Renewables can take on this need to sacrifice others as easily as fossil fuels – although established power relations seem to make renewables easier to object to successfully. This idea of sacrifice may need modification, but how?

Capitalism and industrial society, have depended on destructive technologies

Capitalist economies have routinely profited from cheap energy, cheap resources (ignoring environmental effects), and cheap disposal of pollution, waste and used or superseded products. At the moment, most recycling is not true recycling, as people recently found out in Australia; much of the process involved companies being paid to collect waste and then paying third world countries to make it their problem with the recyclable produce often used as land fill. Money was made but little was recycled.

This reliance on cheap pollution and low monetary cost for ecological destruction, leads to the common point about such societies consuming more resources and producing more waste in a year than can be possibly regenerated in a year. Obviously the longer this goes on, the less can be regenerated and the more living capacity that is destroyed. Therefore, the problem intensifies.

Solar panel manufacturing in China, until recently, was driven by capitalist priorities, it was made with cheap dirty coal energy, paid low wages, and emitted harmful effluent pollution, killing rivers and possibly local people – although this latter point can be disputed. However, these cheap panels did drive cleaner manufacturers out of business.

Mess of information.

Because capitalism depends on sales, information about technology and technological quality is primarily propagated through PR, advertising and hype. These factors tend to exaggerate the quality and capacity of developing technologies, in order to diminish the attractiveness of other available, or potentially available, technologies and attract sales. It certainly was routine in the software industry for programmers to declare that company sales staff would promise potential purchasers capacities the software could not deliver, which would lead to problems after installation.

The same problems occur both with renewables and clean fossil fuels. In particular clean fossil fuels never seem to have the deliverables they promise. The promises often seem to be attempts to lock in pollution, on the grounds that it might get better at some non-specified time in the future.

We also have the problems that corporations which depend on fossil fuels, and others, try to find the weaknesses or uncertainties in theories of climate change, and predictions of what is likely to happen. As we are trying to describe complex systems, such weaknesses will always be found. Sometimes this propaganda behaviour seems to have gone against the scientific advice that they accepted for their own business survival, as when they moved storage and processing facilities to higher ground. However, they have helped delay transition, promote the use of fossil fuels, and confused people as to what they are facing in order to continue to make sales and profit, rather than to wind-back, change, or profit from transition. In this sense, these corporations really do depend on destruction.

Capitalism, like many other systems, messes with information as part of its standard modes of operation. It disrupts the flow of accurate information which is necessary for its own survival.

Consequence.

Without some changes to social systems, the product which confuses people and distributes its costs and harms to the populace, rather than to the manufacturer, is likely to win out. This may be especially true in a period of rapid change, in which it is hard to compare quality and harms as they become more visible over a longer period.

Technology is social, not pure and abstractly technical

Continues in:

Problems of Transition 4: Energy Return on Energy Input

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Population and Technology?

September 21, 2019

Population creates pressures on land, water and food supplies, is it possible to solve these problems with improved technology?

Firstly, let us acknowledge that increasing population is a significant problem. Obviously you cannot have an infinte population of humans on the planet and expect anything to work. The planet probably could not survive a population of 20 billion humans whatever the technology.

This is the classic Malthusian problem, and one of the ways that we have solved that problem is through improved technology and improved agriculture. We now grow more food than ever before. Can we keep improving our yields? The answer is probably not. We will eventually reach peak phosphorus, and peak other nutrients. This will occur when we have, if I can put it crudely, shat and pissed most of the essential minerals into the sea, where they will be hard to access. This problem of removing nutrients from the country, and putting them into the seas has been known since mentioned by the nineteenth century scientist Justus von Liebig, and is the basis of John Bellamy Foster’s talk of Marx’s analysis of the “Metabolic rift”.

So there is a point in talking about how do we reduce population or slow population growth, and whether there is a role technology can play in helping us to deal with the effects of population growth.

We do know that increase of population radically slows, where women have a degree of freedom, ability to be self supporting and access to birth control. In other words, the more equitable and the less ‘patriarchal’ the society the better for population decrease. So there is a possible solution to the population problem, but it is not popular with significant forces in the world. These forces are usually religious, although sometimes nationalist politicians campaign for population growth possibly to get more canon fodder or to sponsor economic growth. It has been argued that one of the reasons for British social security is that working class men made unhealthy and weak soldiers – improving fertility was another conjoint solution.

If ‘patriarchy’ is the problem and we know a solution but seem reluctant to use it, then population increase is primarily a political problem, not a technical problem (once reliable birth control exists).

As far as I understand, the main problems today, which are intensified by population increase, involve distribution of food, allocation of living space, avoidance of warfare, growing lack of access to drinkable water, and the destruction of natural systems of waste disposal and regrowth.

Poorer, less powerful, people are being dispossessed from land, which is taken for mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, city expansion and so on. This destroys those people’s ability to be self-supporting, and often severs their connection with being attentive to, and looking after, natural systems. It often forces them into the cities. This, again, seems a political problem.

Some of the politics arises because businesses are given too much power to expand and to insist upon satisfying their drives, and natural processes are given a monetary value which, if paid, allows destruction. For example, water rights are sold by governments to private companies who then sell it to those who can pay the most, excluding many others who might need it more, but have less money. Emissions trading systems allow wealthy people to pollute. As said earlier, we also waste water and soil nutrients in coastal cities which pump it all into the ocean rather than back onto the land.

Likewise, in Australia, it has sometimes seemed that rather than belong to the people, coal belongs to the State which seems owned by coal miners, and hence people get displaced so that land can be destroyed for cheap coal, and, with it, potential food and water supplies. The possession by coal seems to be so extensive that it sometimes seems Australia spends more to get people to mine here, than we make from them in taxes or royalties.

We also have the problem of the huge ecological footprint of certain populations, and this footprint might be more senstibly distributed as well as cut – as I’ve said before, we simply can’t survive if everyone on the planet has the kind of footprint common in contemporary Australia…

All of these problems seem to be primarily political rather than technological.

That is, the questions are really about how do we persuade some people to have less, so that others can have more, and how do you prevent companies from engaging in destruction if it makes money? I don’t have any easy solutions to any of this at all.

On even simple fronts like energy, it seems everyone could be doing a lot better with the technology we have, rather than hoping for new tech – and this failure to act with what we have, is again a set of political, rather than purely technical, issues.

I’m dubious that even new tech can make that much difference, unless its completely unprecedented… which is a lot to pin our hopes on. However, without a change in politics, technology could simply make the processes worse; so that we destroy more land more quickly, strip soil of its nutrients with more efficiency, or create even more unequal distributions of wealth, nutrition, power and involvement.

But if the problems are more political than technological, then they can possibly be rectified with relative ease, once people start realising this and start to act.

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