The Complexity of Truth vs The Simplicity of Doubt

When talking about the current economic crisis, climate change, man’s negative impact on the planet, etc, it is often the case that the truth is massively complicated. Climate change, as an example, requires one to understand compliex chaotic interrelationships across much of the planet. The fact that we still have such poor weather forecasting, even over short time periods, is evidence that the systems are so complicated and chaotic that we don’t yet fully understand them. Explaining to people that past average global warming has caused northern Europe to disappear under two meters of ice is tricky, they can’t accept that a lot of the warmth we enjoy comes from the Gulf of Mexico via the Gulf stream. It seems counter intuitive to them that increases in warming over the planet may cause come areas to suffer from incredible freezing incidents.

Doubt, however, is easy. You pick one facet of an idea and take a liberal sprinkle of misunderstanding, whether deliberate or not, and then package it in certainties. You don’t follow the scientific language model, using qualified and uncertain terms. No, you make use of that scientific language in entirely the wrong way. You nit-pick, you poke holes, you highlight where scientific language makes it seem like there is a lot of uncertainty (it doesn’t matter that good science is full of such language, even when reasonably certain). Doubt is easy to generate, because science doubts itself all the time. The scientific method doesn’t prove, it dis-proves. You come up with how you think things are, what would be the case if they weren’t and then experiment. The experiment never proves that things are a certain way, only that they aren’t. If a statement can’t be disproven then it’s not science, it’s a tautology or it’s non-sense. If you have no criteria which would compel you to change your position, then you’re not engaged in science, you’re engaged in dogma and religion.

Both sides of a debate can often be accused of dogmatic adherence to their personal beliefs. Often it’s the case that they don’t admit what it would take for the other side to convince them that they are wrong. Often they don’t admit to themselves that there’s even a chance they are wrong. They believe they have arrived at their position by examining all the evidence critically, so how could they possibly be wrong?

I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be wrong. I’d love it if someone were able to show conclusively that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. That the nuclear industry is safe. That the economy can grow exponentially forever without negative side effects. That mankind is smarter than yeast. I long for these things to be the case, because it would mean a much, much nicer future to look forward to. Hell, if I’m wrong then there is actually a future to look forward to! Wouldn’t that be great?

Exponential Growth

I have previously echoed Richard Heinberg’s question, are we smarter than yeast? I’ve also previously written about the problems of endless growth within a finite system. However, these seem to be two of the least popular (according to my Dashboard blog stats) of my entries. I asked myself why and it seems obvious. They don’t have a happy chapter.

Unlike many dire predictions about the fate of all of us if we don’t change our ways, I don’t believe there is a way to continue ‘business as usual’ and save the planet. A lot of the time we are told that if we just recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce and recycle we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse and recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse, recycle and invest heavily in renewable energy then we’ll be fine. Business as usual, no worries. Go back to sleep, we’ve got this one sorted.

Recycling requires energy and many, many things cannot be recycled forever. They stop being able to be turned into new things. Even the best recycling in the world will still require influxes of new stuff, new metals, new raw materials. It also takes lots of energy. Machines wear out and will need replacing. Parts break. These are the constants of life. We might make all of the wind turbines, solar cells, tidal barrages, geothermal turbines we need tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be the end of our resource use. We’d need to replace them as they broke. Even if we could get into a steady state with all of the resources we use being reused until they can no longer be reused, we still need more stuff. Even in a non-stone-age, ’steady-state’ society, there will still be the need for more stuff to be dug out and used.

This is assuming that the people who are investing in these things, the governments that are pushing them, the companies profiting from them, are abandoning growth. They’re not, of course. We can recycle, because it creates jobs, but we must grow. We can reuse to a point, but we must buy new as well, we must grow. We can reduce packaging, but not consumption, we must grow. We can invest in renewables, because that creates some jobs, but we must grow. We will invest in nuclear, because that creates tonnes of jobs, and we must grow. The economy must grow, or it will die. The implication of that statement is that the economy is more deserving of life than wild nature, or humans. The economy is master and we are its slaves. We are well-kept slaves (in the UK, US and other ‘Western democracies’, at least), but we are slaves.

As Derrick Jensen says, what we need are stories. Stories to tell our children, to warn them and educate them. Stories which will warn of the dangers of taking a steady state system and building from it a system based on growth. The stories will need to be better than just telling them they can’t do it, or appealing to the dictates of some deity or other. There will need to be a web of interconnected, self-supporting stories, a culture, which makes the thought of starting a growth based economy repugnant, insane. These stories will need to be supported by stories about the wonder of nature, its beauty and value. They will need to tell of the death of nature, massive, massive death, horrible death which a machine based on growth causes to priceless nature. They will have to make clear that the death causers also die from the very machine they use to cause the death. In short, they will have to be the exact opposite of the stories we now tell, of infinite growth being logical, necessary and good. They will also need to form the backbone of every culture in the world.

Every culture in the world will need the same core cultural stories because if any one decides that growth is okay, or good, then every other will fall before them. A growth based culture isn’t better because it wins cultural battles, it’s just more violent, more efficient at casting people onto the fire to fuel it. Its greed leads to its hegemony. Winning doesn’t make it right, it makes it repugnant.

The Fatal Taboo: Endless Growth

It’s obvious when you hold a petri dish up and smear some bacteria on it that, without intervention, one day the bacteria will run out of resources and die. Our minds can comprehend that, despite the tiny, tiny size of the baceria at work, they will run out of food. We can see the full extent of their food, the resource we have given them to survive on. The Bacteria, we have to assume, is unaware that it is in a little biosphere with enough food to last it X amount of time. Once it starts multiplying it has half-X, a quarter-X, one-eighth-X, etc.

We assumes the bacteria doesn’t understand its situation because we imagine that, given the same set of circumstances, we would be more frugal with the resource, aiming to make it last as long as we possibly can. We assume the bacteria is stupid and we are smart. Indeed, when faced with a size of resource that fits into our field of view we can be very frugal, we can ration for ourselves and decide how much to use on any given day with the end goal of making it last as long as we can. When faced with a resource that doesn’t fit into our field of view we act like the bacteria.

It brings up Richard Heinberg’s question again: Are we smarter than yeast?

When you try and make them face the reality of a infinite growth system on a finite world, most people don’t have the head-space for it. You can try all you like to tell them that inifinity inside something finite doesn’t work. You can use the Kalam Cosmological Argument (intended as a proof of God’s/Allah’s existence, but serviceable), which hinges on Zeno’s Paradox to shoot down the idea of infinity within a finite space. You can pick numbers so astronomically huge and depletion rates so tiny and show them how steady depletion at that rate isn’t sustainable, let alone a growth in depletion rate. They tend not to comprehend. Whether this is a case of it being impossible to tell someone something that the way they lead their lives necessitates being counter to what you’re saying, or it’s a case of the failings of the education system yet again, it’s not important. You often can’t explain this in such a way as it passes the filters in place over most people’s minds. Growth is good. Infinite growth is highly desireable. Recessions are terrible. Ever increasing profits are to be rewarded with praise.

“We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world’s resources. Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours.

“Genocide followed. Now there is a case to answer that genocide is once again an apt description of how we are pursuing business as usual, wilfully ignoring the consequences for the poorest people in the world.” – Challen, ‘We must think the unthinkable, and take voters with us,’ The Independent, March 28, 2006.

There are resources which are termed as ‘renewable’. The tag is often used interchangeably with ‘infinite’, but a lot of them aren’t. Trees are often called renewable, but they are certainly not infinite. They are renewable so long as they are used at a rate which they can recover from. Since we are losing over 2% of the forest cover of the planet each year, it’s not extreme to suggest we are using trees at a rate greater than they are replenished. We live in a growth-based system. If we are deforresting at a rate of 2% this year, then next year we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.04%, the year after that we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.08%, 10 years after that we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.54%, in a further 10 years we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 3.09%. That’s with the ’stable’ growth that most governments want of 2% per year.

If you change that to the more optimistic growth desires of large companies, who want to grow as much as possible but we’ll cap it at 5% instead then 20 years after that 2% starting point you’re at 5.05%. Of course, when you’re talking about organisms which need other organisms around to make their next generation then you’re talking about a much more complicated system, but if the rate of tree reproduction could be kept constant while this rising number of tree destruction continues then 20 years after the start of the 5% growth chart you’re left with about half the trees you started with. Small percentages result in a depletion that is horrific.

No one is really willing to accept that they may need to be paid less and less each year, mother culture has promised more and more money each year. No one is really willing to accept that they may need to have fewer and fewer things each year, mother culture has promised more and more things each year. The argument often spewed by those on the other side of the fence is that I just want to make you all live in caves again. That’s not really accurate. I’m saying one day we will probably be living in caves again, maybe not in our life time, but within the life time of our traceable children. I’m suggesting we might want to make that time as far off in the future as we possibly can. I’m suggesting we might want to control the decrease in resource use rather than have it dictated to us by the planet.

I’m only suggesting that people start to ask the questions, start to debate what needs to be debated. I’m also suggesting that a lot of the standard discourse around these issues is fog, smear, smoke blown out by large companies to hide the reality, to cloud judgements.

Are We Smarter Than Yeast?

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.

Peak Oil

Some reading for those not familiar with the concept of ‘Peak Oil’: Wikipedia’s Peak Oil Page.

As with so many things in the world today, the USA is leading the way on modeling what happens to a countries oil demand after the easy to access oil it uses from its own fields starts to let it down.

As the national production of oil declined the US didn’t start to think of new products to replace oil, it just started to buy it from other countries. The reason Americans complain about $3 (approx. £1.50 or 33 pence a litre) a gallon prices is because they are used to much, much cheaper prices from their own fields. The US peaked in 1971, so the old, cheap petrol is still very much in the memories of a lot of motorists who are much more used to a dollar a gallon or less. While those in the US complained about their $3 a gallon, in the UK we were paying $8 a gallon.

If anyone has tried to push their car for any sort of distance they will understand what petrol provides us. As Richard Heinberg points out in this short clip, a gallon of petrol can push a standard car 20 miles (more efficient cars will get more, less efficient will get lesss). If you’re going to try to push your car 20 miles you’d better be exceptionally fit. But a gallon of petrol does that work and is exceptionally cheap for the work it does. Imagine trying to find someone or a group of people to push your car 20 miles. It’d cost you a lot more than £4.50. I doubt you could regularly find people willing to do it for less than a few hundred pounds. This is just an illustration of what petrol provides us with and why it’s so insanely cheap.

Here’s another Richard Heinberg clip which I think is interesting and on-topic.

As the graph above nicely demonstrates, we can demonise China all we like for their use of oil, but the US is still head and shoulders above them. The crown of world energy user is still firmly in the West.

The amount of oil an OPEC nation is allowed to drill and sell is directly proportionate to the amount of reserves that country has. A measure designed to stop the market getting flooded with cheap oil and so keep prices at a level that makes insane profits for a few massive companies. As you can imagine, this means that OPEC member states have a big impetus to lie about their reserves. The years after this rule was adopted most OPEC members revised the size of most of their oil fields upwards quite sharply so they could pump more oil and earn more money. This makes the information on this Wikipedia page doubly dubious, but it gives an indication that the largest oil fields in the world are starting to or have already peaked.

This problem isn’t one that might see fruition, maybe, possibly. It’s a fact, a certainty. From the instant the first drop of oil, the first flake of coal, the first whiff of natural gas was extracted and burnt to provide energy it was inevitable that one day we would be here. This is because of the simple fact that coal, natural gas and oil all take millions of years to form and are finite. We know this, it’s a fact we have known for a long time.

Yet the answers to peak oil have been electric cars (powered by electricity generated by fossil fuels), hydrogen fuel cells (created using electricity generated by fossil fuels), and bio-fuels (grown on fields which use a lot of petro-chemicals^[1] in order to make their yield higher and harvested by machines using fossil fuels). The point I’m making is that the solutions to the peak oil problem is invariably using other fossil fuels or the oil in a less efficient way. Insanity.

Then there are the people who say we can run our cars on electricity generated by nuclear power. Forgetting, perhaps by accident, perhaps on purpose, that nuclear power doesn’t just appear from nowhere by magic and that uranium is also finite and a lot more scarce. Estimates are that the Earth has about enough for the use of humans for 12 years. A real good alternative, I think you’ll agree.

Maybe we could make enough renewable energy sources, such as wind, tidal, hydroelectric, solar, etc, to run our cars in the future. Since these sources, especially the sun, will be with us for as long as we can live on the Earth, they are a good alternative to be thinking about. Yet NIMBYs are allowed to stop the production of these simply because they don’t like the look of them! Oh, also many of the materials needed for their production come form oil so we’re still screwed as it’s another short term fix. Once we’re out of oil we wont be able to make any more of them and wont be able to repair the ones we’ve made already.

Finally, the catch-22? The worst possible outcome is that we find large reserves of oil to exploit. Allowing our current business as normal to continue. Allowing the exploitation and destruction of natural environments to continue. Allowing the release of yet more carbon dioxide. Allowing the further pollution of our planet. Allowing the further increase of our population and further population overshoot to happen.

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[1] The ratio of calories out in the form of food and calories in in the form of fossil fuels for many agricultural methods is in the region of 1:25, or 25 times more energy used than produced. Sometimes this can be as bad as 1:150, if the food is air-freighted. Interesting reading about how food is oil.