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The title of this post is a cunning question levelled by Richard Heinberg.
The population growth curve experienced in the last 150 years is similar to the growth curve of yeast as they consume the sugars in order to create alcoholic drinks for us to consume. The yeast then dies off because the liquid it has been living in has been polluted by alcohol which is poisonous to it. We’ve yet to cause a total die-off of the human life on the planet, but we are polluting and destroying the ecosystem we rely on. Are we smarter than yeast?
The growth in human population in the last 150 years has been fed by oil and fossil fuels in general. We have converted these fuels into energy and consumed it to feed the population explosion. In 1850, 65% of the work done in the US was done by non-human animals, 18% by human animals and 12% by machines powered by fossil fuels. Now the work in the US is almost exclusively (>99%) done by machines powered by fossil fuels. The US isn’t abnormal in this regard. The machine percent for the 1850’s might be a little on the high side, but we in the UK aren’t different with regards the modern day use, and neither are most industrialised nations.
A person, over the course of a day, can do approximately 625 Btu’s (British thermal units) worth of work. A gallon of petrol can do 125,000 Btu’s worth of work. If we were to try and replace the work done by fossil fuels by work done by people we’d have to pay the people doing the work around 1/2 a penny an hour for the costs to be relative. In this context it probably starts to make sense why companies which can mechanise look to developing nations for their workforce. If they can’t mechanise a particular job then it costs them over a thousand times more to employ someone in the UK to do the job than it would to get the energy slaves contained in petrol to do it for them. It’s more attractive to get someone who only wants fifty or sixty times the price the energy slaves would cost.
When you start to break into the energy/cost analysis of the comparison between the cost to work ratio of oil compared to the cost to work ratio of people the migration of companies over to developing nations starts to become more obvious. When people first see the migration it doesn’t make sense. Surely it should be more expensive for the company to employ someone over there and ship them over here than it would to employ someone over here and move the goods a shorter distance? Well, in my opinion it should, doing things like that should cost more, not only in fairer wages for the worker but also in massive taxes for the wasted fuel. However, it doesn’t at all. Oil, even at the current price, is insanely cheap for the work it does.
So, are we smarter than yeast? Civilisation’s stories would have us believe that this is a stupid question. Of course we are smarter than yeast, we are the smartest life-form ever, the peak of evolution. However, we are curretly living the life of yeast. We have exploded our population, we are at or close to the peak of our population, we are polluting and destroying the world all around us. Are we going to do the downwards die off too? I can’t see a way we could avoid it. The human population is so over-shot that there is almost no way we can avoid large scale death of humans and non-humans.
We will kick and we will scream. We will continue exploiting and find new ways to exploit. However, we will die and we will prove we are no smarter than yeast.
Further to my previous post I would like to add some facts which are interesting and relevant to the discourse of whether one year’s growth in ice on the North Pole is of any interest unless it establishes a pattern.
Those who track the news will probably have heard the phrase “The hottest X on record” a lot. It’s becoming one of the things which defines modern news broadcasting. This is represented in some facts and figures (‘on record’ means ‘in the last 125 years, since good records began being kept’):
- 2005 was the hottest year on record.
- 2007 was the second hottest year on record, tied with 1998.
- The top 14 hottest years on record occurred since 1990 (18 years).
- The top 24 hottest years on record occurred since 1980 (28 years).
This is a pattern which needs to be acknowledged.
A few people suggest that the cause of recent warming is down to activity on the sun. However, unless the models (which have been able to accurately model historic climate variations and so must have at least some accuracy) are insanely, massively inaccurate then the influence of the variations in the sun are about 1/30th of the influence of greenhouse gas emissions by humans. In other words, quite small and not significant enough to generate 24 of the top 25 hottest days on record.
If you want a more professional version of the information above, along with graphs and much more data, then watch this presentation by John Holdren (can take a few minutes to load).
I’ve posted before about my dislike of the term ‘global warming’ because of the implications of it being so gentle. I’ve expressed a preference for ‘climate change’ because it contains a truer indication of the likely expectations, since while some areas are going to get warmer, some will get colder. While some areas will get dryer, others will get wetter. Etc.
However, I’m coming around to the terms ‘catestrophic climate change’, ‘global climatic disruption’, or ‘global climatic crisis’. The reason being because ‘climate change’ sounds so benign. Like ‘global warming’ it sounds so safe. It sounds like something which can be fixed easily, can be adapted to easily. Change is a part of life, after all. Resisting change can cause problems in itself. As such it must be made clear that the change isn’t benign, it’s dramatic and dangerous.
“Holdren explains that the term “global warming” is actually a misnomer. The term implies that the problem at hand is gradual, when in truth it’s quite rapid; uniform when it is highly inconsistent across all of Earth; mainly about temperature, but it encompasses everything about climate; and potentially benign, although it is entirely harmful.” – Strategic Sustainability Consultant’s Blog.
For anyone wondering how I can write climate change entries with the Arctic seeming to be freezing over again, it’s because one year doesn’t make a trend. The trend is very different. One year of ice growth isn’t a good sign since one year of ice growth can be expected to melt in one year. Persistent multi year ice is the stuff that we have been getting rid of. Losing muti year ice is bad news as it’s more resilient than single year ice, it’s harder to melt, yet last year alone saw a large volume of it melting away.
Even if this year’s ice growth does mark the start of a re-laying of multi year ice, that doesn’t kill the idea of climate change. It would kill the idea of global warming, but as pointed out, it’s not about global warming, it’s about the climate changing, which it clearly is doing. Would I be happy seeing multiple year on year gains of ice over the poles? Yeah, it’d be nice. However, it could also indicate a catestrophic slowing of the Gulf Stream, meaning my house would be on the way to being under a few feet of ice in a couple of decades. That wouldn’t make me quite so happy, even if it meant that polabears survived.
One of the many options being seriously considered to halt carbon emissions is the use of bio-fuels.
One of the many options being seriously considered to halt the waste of resources represented by over-packaging is bio-plastics.
Two solutions which believe that making food into non-food is a shiny idea. Brazil leads the way on bio-fuels and is proud of this. Brazil also has a lot of people starving who have been bought or evicted off of their land by large agri-businesses so they can change the crops those lands grow into bio-fuel crops. Sounds great, huh? This is the real-time result of food for fuel.
Most people are more than willing to pay more for fuel than they are for food. A field growing bio-fuels is more profitable than any food crop the land could support. So what is likely to happen, when we already have poor people around the world, going hungry, growing cash crops on land that could feed them? These are uneducated people. They more often than not believe the corporate salesman when he tells them that they will be better off selling all of this years crop and then buying their seed for next year’s crop from the company. While they’re at it they might as well use this new fertiliser and pesticide, it’ll boost their production. Since you’re using our chemicals you don’t need to employ any of your traditional land management techniques, these products remove the need to do that. And if they’re boosting their production they might as well buy the seed for cash crop X and thus make surplus money to afford to send their children to school and to buy things they want. Sounds good, we’ll take it.
Then they might get a season or three of great growth and it might seem like they’ve made the right choice. Then they might start to see the effects of prolonged use of chemicals on their land, they might start to also see a decline in the level of growth they’re getting. They might start to think that it’s not actually so great to buy their seeds from the company and so try to save them, only to find they’re terminator seeds and don’t grow a second season, so they’re now trapped in the buying cycle and are unable to save their seeds. So, they stop buying the chemicals, their fields weren’t that bad before, they grew the food the family needed well enough. They then find out that the seed they are now trapped buying doesn’t grow or grows very poorly without the company’s fertiliser and other chemicals, so they’re locked into buying them too. Eventually they’ve ruined their fields, spoilt the environment they rely on and are almost indentured to the company, needing to buy the seeds and chemicals each year to further ruin their fields in order to keep any money coming in. Conveniently the money they may get is also dictated by the corporation which is selling them the means to ruin their way of life.
Rambling? I know. Off topic? A little. Unlikely? No. This happens and has happened for many years now.
Even as they starve, people will still export food for money. It happened during the Irish potato famine during the 1840’s and it happened during the Ethiopian Famine of the 1980’s. During both famines the respective countries were exporting food to Britain while masses of people starved in their own countries.
The invention of terminator technology was such a vile attack on life that I can’t believe it wasn’t seen for what it is. People who use technology for such gross violations of sanity should be considered criminals, not pioneers of industry. Products made to do such things should be illegal, not profitable.
Agri-fuel industrialists will bleat about how the current food prices aren’t their fault because only 2% of the food of the planet is used for fuel. This isn’t the point, honestly. The current food prices are probably because of the sharp rise in the price of oil, since food is oil now, but wanting to increase the amount of food siphoned off for fuel will have an impact on the global food prices. People consider their cars to be essential (often because they live criminally far away from their place of work), while fresh, healthy food comes in second place. Most people will live on cheap beans and cheap bread when forced to choose between fixing, fuelling and insuring their car or eating well. The choice for them is obvious.
Putting pressure on a dwindling food supply by making it into plastics and petrol when 30 countries around the world have had food riots this year alone isn’t ethical. It’s not right.
In a world where oil prices push up food prices, where climate change looks set to destroy more and more crops around the world, where the population overshoot continues apace, should we really be thinking about converting food into not-food?
Capitalist society is fueled by wage inequality. It’s the main glue that holds the whole mess together. Not only because it allows those with the majority of the wealth to dictate how things go and thus keep themselves in possession of the majority of the wealth, but also because it acts as a very attractive carrot.
We all know the Local Boy Comes Good story. It’s one of the most fundamental stories of civilisation. It teaches us that, if we only work ‘hard’ enough then we too can join those with the majority of the wealth. This story keeps people content to earn a fraction of top CEOs because, they believe, they too have a chance to earn disgusting levels of income. However, the vast majority of people who are earning seven figure sums have parents who earn such figures. Old money, it’s called. The major deciding factor isn’t the results you have but the place you got those results. If you have Eton and Oxford/Cambridge on your CV that’s what’s important.
Interestingly, what they seem to mean by ‘work hard’ is ‘willing to plunder, abuse and exploit for profit’. There are very few (if any) large companies which have clean records. Most have been fined for breaking the law when it was profitable to do so. Many have factories in developing countries where they can employ children for less than it costs to have three meals a day and work them for 72 hours a week. If hard work truly brought with it the rewards we are supposed to believe it does then these children should have the majority of the wealth. However, they don’t. They can barely afford to feed and house themselves and are forced into working because their parents can’t make enough money for them not to work. Companies get fat and profitable by exploiting such children and supporting the repressive regime which allows them to beat their employees and fire them when they reach 16.
When scandals like those conscerning Enron hit we are always assured that those responsible are just a couple of ‘bad apples’, and that the vast majority of businesses are honest. This is demonstrably not true, all you need do is look at the fines imposed on companies for breaking the law to see that the majority of them will break the law so long as the cost analysis shows it to be more profitable. Edward Norton’s job in Fight Club is the kind of thing I am talking about.
“A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.” – ‘Jack’ The Narrator, Fight Club 1999.
Now, I’m not saying that Norton’s quote above is factually accurate, I can believe it, but I don’t know if there is actually a specific person who does that. However, such cost analysis are done all the time, is it cheaper to pay people damages or to recall this or that line, is it cheaper to abide by fair competition laws or is it cheaper to say to hell with them and absorb the fine, is it cheaper to pay for the licensed loggers to go into the Amazon and cut the limited amount of wood the Brazilian authorities allows, or is it cheaper not to ask where the wood came from and thus buy it from illegal loggers who have no right to cut down trees? So long as option A is more expensive than option B, we take option B, that it’s illegal or not is moot.
Another story we are often told is that if we don’t like what a company is doing we can vote with our feet, hit them in the wallet where it hurts, and make them change their minds. We are supposed to hear this and accept that it is fair. However, this is about as unfair as you can get. Our voting system operates on one man one vote because that is the fairest way to run a system to give everyone an equal share of the power. Voting with your feet is totaly unfair, because it gives Joe Bigbucks many times more votes than Norman Nocash. Joe, by virtue of having more money is a more attractive customer to the company and so is the one they target with their advertising. Norman is the same age and gender as Joe and is interested in all the same things, however because he is poor he isn’t the target audience of the companies advertising and the company doesn’t care what he thinks. So long as Joe is happy to shop there ther company doesn’t mind if Norman never comes throgh their doors again, he could neve buy much even when he did.
Voting with our feet is a fantastic story for the rich to tell. Invariably, those unhappy with the status quo are those who are not benefiting from it. Those who benefit from the status quo (or feel they do by being able to afford McMansions, Hummers, SUVs, etc) are often very content with it. Activists are normally those who are fed up of being stepped on by the system, not always, but mostly. I’ll grant you that most of the activists in support of fox hunting were no where near the bread-line. As a result of this, more often than not the people who care what a company is doing in Nicaragua, the Philippines, etc and want to change it aren’t the ones with a lots of feet votes. But, because they buy the voting with your feet story they are happy to register their displeasure by staying at home and not shopping with the company, despite never really having shopped there in the past and not having any plans to shop there in the future. The story works as an excellent way to keep the number of people who think direct action protests are the answer to our collective problems to a minimum.
People sitting at home watching the TV are even easier to ignore.
