Guest post: We continue to think up simple solutions to complex problems
Originally a comment by iknklast on How can Manchin.
It’s fine to be optimistic, but since we’ve already passed several tipping points, it is probably unfounded. We can’t solve all our problems with solar panels and wind farms because emissions control will not solve our problems. Global warming isn’t the problem, it’s the fever that tells us there is an underlying problem. We can fix emissions all we like and still careen to ecological disaster at a breakneck pace. And, even if I thought we would reduce our emissions, we needed to do it a long time ago, say, about the 1980s…earlier would have been better, but there was still time to fix things by the end of the 1980s. By the beginning of this century, we were already in too deep, but we could slow down global warming. At this point? Maybe we can slow it down or keep it to a lesser warming, maybe we can’t.
Here’s a simple proposition: when the economic system comes into conflict with the ecological one, it is the economic one that must give way. If it does not, we are like crash dummies heading toward the wall. That will mean some serious long-term thinking, and some serious action that goes beyond rhetoric. This is what no one wants to hear, so we continue to think up simple solutions to complex problems, simple solutions that promise to leave everything essentially as it is, no lifestyle changes necessary.
The simple truth is, we can’t solve this problem while there are 7 billion people in the world. Every solution we come up with will “hurt the poor” (even those that won’t, or will even help, like mass transit). As Jesus said, the poor will be with us always, providing a convenient excuse for middle class drivers of luxury automobiles that don’t want to do more than change their fuel source.
Once again, as Bill McKibben has pointed out, the main mistake that almost everyone makes when it comes to the climate issue is to think of it as a conflict between the political Left and the political Right, between industry and environmentalists, between the West and China etc., when at a more basic level what we have is a conflict between the human species on the one hand and the laws of physics on the other. And as we all know, the laws of physics don’t negotiate, or bargain or compromise, or meet you half-way, nor do they give a crap about how much you hate taxes, or regulations, or political correctness, or SJWs, or Al Gore. They just do what they do, and all our objections count for nothing.
As someone with an education in renewable energy and working in hydro power, I can hardly claim to be unbiased, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s either or. While I certainly agree that replacing fossil fuels with less carbon-intense modes of energy production (and the life cycle analyses I have seen are pretty consistent on that point) is not sufficient, that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary. We do not have the luxury of choosing among options. Only through the combination of
1. far more aggressive emission cuts than any government, or any major opposition party, anywhere in the industrial world is even considering.
2. the kind of life-style changes you can’t even suggest without getting dismissed as an idiot and a lunatic.
3. insane amounts of dumb luck
may we still have a chance of keeping the planet somewhat habitable provided we act yesterday.
TL;DR: We’re fucked.
For a big clue about what would at be at least a big help, see this website.
https://app.electricitymap.org/map
It shows how much CO2 is emitted per kWh of electricity generated in the regions they get the data. Color coded from green for low though shades of brown to black for high.
You can click on a given region to see what was generating electricity in the last hour & scroll down to to see how that changed over the last 24 hours.
Spoiler alert: the regions that are consistently green use a mix of hydro, geothermal & nuclear for most of their electricity. The regions that try to use a lot of wind or solar vary from green to mid-brown since when the wind & solar output is low they use gas to generate their electricity.
I absolutely believe that there are solutions available to us. These involve a combination of technical and economic alterations to our civilisation(s) and societies. Do I believe we will implement any one of these potential solutions to the extent required to prevent disaster, possibly even functional extinction? No. That’s because as individuals and societies we are too short-sighted, too lazy, too self-interested. And if we, individually and collectively, are incapable of making the changes required to adjust, how can we expect our leaders to do so? They are after all a product of us, even the dictators. Possibly especially them.
The stupid thing is that there are enormous gains to be made just in the realm of efficiency (both immediate and life cycle). Waste energy slops around everywhere – far more of it than even people in the relevant industries credit. I have one client who carried out a plant expansion that required an additional 40MW of energy, they achieved that without installing an additional coal-fired boiler by instead implementing a total of around 130 individual energy efficiency programmes on their site. The average NZ building code compliant house uses 7x it’s lifetime CO2 budget.In part in wasteful construction, but mostly because it is so poorly insulated and ventilated that you just need lots of energy to live comfortably.
You can fix a lot of this stuff by using more efficient technology, building to better standards, emphasising waste reduction in construction. This requires a whole bunch of changes in thinking and value. Until energy efficient tech becomes commodity scale it comes at a huge cost. It takes builders more time to build if they are trying to use every scrap of material as they go. It takes a mindset change to design buildings to reduce waste and in all likelihood choice of design would become more limited.
Every Watt of energy that can be saved through reducing waste though, contributes to softening the blow of changed and curtailed lifestyle from simply going without. Changing the basis of our economic system is the key. I don’t know if anyone here has read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy? During the initial terra forming phase, the economic system adopted by colonists was based around how much a particular transaction contributed to societies end goal. The better it contributed, the lower the ‘cost’ to the buyer. That comes back to my pessimism (and others by the look of the comments) that we can actually make the required adjustments at all, let alone in time to make a difference.
Bill Rees says it better than anyone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oVTHKzC7TM
@2 This is what gets me, these nincompoops who drive around in their luxury electric cars don’t realize that they are NOT zero emission. I don’t care what kind of propaganda Elon Musk, et al spew. The electricity comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a fossil fueled powerplant. It’s just moving the emissions from one place to another, but hey, you get to brag about how wonderful you are with your twice as expensive luxury electric car, and look good doing it by golly. Conspicuous comsumption and environmental heroics all rolled up into one, what’s not to like? :P
Not to mention the immense carbon footprint of mining the elements necessary to produce the batteries (and the motors and rest of the mostly plastic (read fossil fuel by-products) components), along with the manufacturing process with it’s energy demands and supply chain demands (again mostly fossil fuel powered, particularly the logistics). If these shysters are telling you they are saving the planet, don’t believe them for an instant. It’s propaganda and marketing all the way down, mixed with some pretty complex politics.
Taking up from Bjarte’s comment at #1:
Whatever we do, it must be in accord with the laws of Nature (with a capital ‘N’). The low-hanging fruit, the easily mined ores etc will go first, pricing the poor steadily further out of the market for what is left. The big energy game changer, controlled nuclear fusion, will probably remain as it has been for all of my lifetime so far, about 50 years off into the future.
The short-term thinkers will probably continue to win each round of the game. As fossil carbon depletes, substitutes for use in steel and road making will be sought, and ways devised to keep capitalist economies on their ever-expanding course. But as the economist JK Galbraith observed, “Nature bats last,” and her bat is made not of wood, but of that bedrock principle called by physicists the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That law, in a fancy way, tells us that the Universe is running down and tending to increasing disorder; a bit like a teenager’s bedroom. Visit any abandoned open-cut mine site (even ‘re-vegetated’) for comparison.
But we all have to keep eating and wearing fibres. One of my own major concerns arises out of an article I once read in The Land, a major Australian rural journal. It defined agriculture as “that process whereby land is used to turn petroleum into food” and dealt with the way that the hydrogen used in the production of synthetic ammonia (the Haber Process) is sourced from oil wells. That ammonia is in turn used to synthesise urea, one of the major nitrogenous fertilisers, and used by plants to make protein.
Fossil carbon is presently used to make synthetic rubber, plastics, and the tar-sealing for roads. Our descendants may well finish up driving vehicles with steel wheels over cobbled roads, and the noise they generate will probably cancel out the silent running of their electric motors and make feeding time at the zoo sound like total tranquillity, or the silence of the deepest dark forest.
https://www.alanroberts.net.au/nuclear-power-is-a-phantom-solution-to-climate-change/
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/how-long-fossil-fuels-last-43432/#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20project%20how,54%2C%20and%20coal%20in%20110.
Omar, yes exactly. The roads are paved with dinosaur juice, plastic is made of dinosaur juice, the tires are made of dinosaur juice, and on and on. It’s propaganda. The mining operations that produce the lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum, and everything else that makes the batteries for electric cars possible, is not currently possible without dinosaur juice. The general public is being deceived.
As I noted in 2018
On a larger time scale of civilization, I believe that renewable methods to make ammonia on industrial scales are technically feasible, and civilization can develop renewable ammonia for use in agriculture (in fertilizer) and energy (in fuel cells, and maybe direction combustion).
I’m not saying that civilization can grow exponentially forever, but I am saying that civilization can migrate away from the Haber-Bosch process.
Dave:
Ah yes, thanks for that. I followed the link. Most interesting.
I read somewhere recently that the Haber process had recently overtaken bacterial nitrogen fixation as found in the root nodules of leguminous plants (clovers, lucerne [alfalfa], acacias) and was now the biggest N-fixer of all. But the MacFarlane process may in time be even bigger.
But those little bacterial cells’ achievements are still mind-boggling. Inside some of the tiniest living cells known, they carry out the equivalent of the Haber Process (with or without Bosch). “For commercial production, the reaction is carried out at pressures ranging from 200 to 400 atmospheres and at temperatures ranging from 400° to 650° C (750° to 1200° F).”
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Haber-Bosch-process
I’m increasingly inclined to think that even “the prevailing political system”, “ideology”, “culture”, “the media”, “our way of life” etc. are symptoms while the real disease is human brain wiring. Every analysis of the problem comes back to this fatal flaw, and this is where any optimistic vision for the future ultimately fails. It was people who created the cultures and political systems that are driving us towards disaster. It’s people who have consistently been voting for politicians spouting “Drill, baby drill!” and “All the Above”. It’s people who have been voting with their time, their attention, their money, and their feet for short-term convenience over long-term sustainability, for ideological conformity over scientific accuracy, for shock or entertainment value over substance, accountability, fact checking etc. etc. It’s the thousand small or large decisions we all (no, I’m not making an exception for myself) make every day that got us into this mess, and given everything we know about cognitive psychology (the self-serving bias, the tribalism, the conformity, the confirmation bias, the cognitive dissonance, the motivated reasoning, the intellectual laziness, the preference for subjective experiences and gut feelings over studies and statistics etc. etc.), I don’t see the pattern changing any time soon. Indeed my understanding of the literature (limited as it is) seems to suggest that people tend to become more tribal and fixed in their ideological views in times of crisis which doesn’t bode at all well for the future.
Pretty much sums it up, I think.
Bjarte:
#11 reminds me of the story told by the legendary banjo picker Earl Scruggs. He spoke quite slowly, but he made up for it when his fingers got going on the neck of his banjo, on which they moved like greased lightning. As I recall, he said: “After I bought my first banjo, the first tune I learned was ‘Cripple Creek’. So I played ‘Cripple Creek,’ over and over again, and then some more. But after about the four hundred and fifty-third time through ‘Cripple Creek’ I said to myself: ‘This is gettin’ monotonous.’ And so, I started to branch out…”
The point being that I’m getting monotonous? ;)
#NoOffenseTaken
Why are the tabloids full of stories about the rich and famous, and as ‘spicy’as possible? Because that is what the buyers want; some of them being aspirational.
But my little old grandmother (Irish despite having been born and raised in New Zealand; her parents having been refugees from the Great Famine of the 1840s) cooked all her life on an open wood fire; in a suburb of Sydney. I have neighbours who do likewise today here on the NW Plains of NSW. She went to bed with the sparrows, and got up with them too. On her acre and a quarter of land, she had an orchard (within a chook yard, so the chooks cleaned up all the fallen fruit) and grew all her own vegetables. She ate eggs and cheese, but not meat, and also had a house cow, which she tethered on a rope in the street to eat the grass on the verges, and milked twice a day. She kept her neighbours supplied with all her surplus produce (her own requirements being very modest.)
She had never been to school, and taught herself to read and write. She learned what maths she knew by counting the stars. She lived in 2 rooms of a 4-room house with external laundry and toilet built for her by her carpenter son (my maternal uncle.) My father bought her a TV set early on, but she refused to watch anything, just in case she ‘saw a murder,’ as she had a hard time telling illusion from reality. For the same reason, she never listened to the radio, or read the papers,and so her only knowledge of what waa going on in the world came from neighborhood and church gossip. She was a regular church attender, but whether she was a Presbyterian, Methodist or Anglican depended on the weather and her mood. The finer points of theology and matters doctrinal did not interest her one little bit. Oh, and she died at the age of 93, having been active up to her last week.
A life well lived; though some might disagree, and a tiny ecological footprint.
I try to follow her example as best I can, but expect that ‘market forces’ will sooner or later cut back our consumption bit by bit, and as items become more expensive, they will drop off the shopping lists. If we don’t find sustainability, it will sooner or later find us.
So we were relatively harmless only so long as our numbers were small and our technology rudimentary. Our past looks much more environmentally benign because of our comparative powerlessness.
Exactly!
Bjarte:
That IMHO was a profoundly good post of yours. But I don’t see how it makes us departures from standard behaviour across the entire Kingdom Animalia. For example, wild grazing animals (say as originally on the plains of Africa) slowly graze their way through the countryside, followed closely by their predatory carnivores. They eat a patch down to a level they find unsatisfactory, then move on, creating opportunities for smaller herbnivores and birds etc as they go.
We as a species have seen off all predators, including the disease organisms, so now we are in the position that the European rabbit was in Australia until the deliberate introduction of the myxomatosis virus in the 1950s. Because humans, concerned for their livestock, had cleared the countryside of all natural predators on the rabbit, that set the stage for the explosion of the rabbit population, originally introduced in 1859 for ‘sport’ by homesick Britons.
One does not have to postulate some abnormal wiring in the rabbit brain. The well-established basics of ecology will do. Animals also suit their own interests as we do: in the short, rather than the medium or long term; and my own personal experience and observation of them convinces me that they can think, in their own ways; punishing offenders, taking revenge for the odd outrage to their own dominance and dignity, and so on.
So I do not believe that Rene Descartes ‘cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am” was speaking exclusively on behalf of his own sapient species. Almost certainly, dolphins, whales and other species need the tag ‘sapiens’ in their scientific names, lest there be an implied and undeserved exclusivity accorded by us to us.
By the same token, after writing this comment I might confer on myself a knighthood. Only problem is: of which Order?
Thanks, Omar :)
I suppose I should clarify that I wasn’t thinking of any particularly abnormal brain wiring. As you say, we observe very similar patterns of behavior in other species (of course on a large enough time frame the life expectancy of a species isn’t that impressive). “Normal” does not imply “sustainable”, though. Indeed it’s precisely the normal human brain wiring that’s the problem. As Not Bruce points out the main difference between humans and other animals seems to be that recently humans have developed the technology to pursue those hard-wired tendencies orders of magnitude more effectively (and in vastly greater numbers), but our hard-wired goals and motives haven’t caught up, and natural selection works orders of magnitude too slowly to help us adapt in time.
Bill McKibben makes a useful analogy to bees: If your goal is to gather as much honey as possible, bees are ideally suited for the task. If you want to know whether or not more honey is really what you need right now, bees are the last creatures on the planet you should be asking. We already know what their answer is going to be. They will go about their task with the single-minded firmness of purpose that makes them go good at what they’re doing, with no consideration for anything else, and if you get in their way, they will quickly get angry and sting.
Of course McKibben’s point was to highlight how corporations are more like a bee than a person (and therefore shouldn’t have legal status as persons): If you want to extract the Alberta tar-sands, you need a corporation. It you need to decide whether or not extracting the Alberta tar-sands is a worthwhile thing to do, you need to keep corporations as far away from the decision as possible. Once again we know ahead of time what their answer is going to be.
McKibben has more faith in humans than I do, though. His argument is that while bees and corporations are both simple, individuals are complicated and capable of having many conflicting motives that sometimes makes us not act on an impulse. It’s not that this never happens, of course. On the whole, though, I think Humans are still much more like a bee than the rational, moral agents we imagine ourselves to be.
@Your Name’s not Bruce? #16
So we were relatively harmless only so long as our numbers were small and our technology rudimentary. Our past looks much more environmentally benign because of our comparative powerlessness.
Depends. Some of our civilisations drove past regional ecosystem recovery ability, exhausted it and went extinct. Easter Islanders is the most famous example, but not the only one.
On the other hand, some of our civilisations created luxuriant gardens, like Amazonia (current view is more that of a successful agroecological garden rewilded as humans declined after European contact).
I think we still have the opportunity to chose a softer kind of doom, but we better decide quickly.