Overwhelming

Sometimes the amount of work that remains to be done is overwhelming. I found the Zero Waste Alliance site [yesterday], just searching for "zero waste." Their goal is to transform all human activity from the linear "take, make, waste" path to a circular path that generates no waste. This is the kind of thinking that is required from today's and tomorrow's scientists and politicians to prepare us for the eventual realities of bumping up against the edges of the petri dish. It is going to take an incredible effort of education, painful social and political upheaval, and individual sacrifice to get there.

The concepts of luxury and consumption are anathema to sustainability and zero waste. Luxury is intentionally wasteful, and will not be possible at some point in the future. Taking a hot bath in potable water in the middle of the desert just doesn't make sense. Having millions of swimming pools in the desert doesn't make sense. It's very nice to take a dip in your pool when it's 115 F outside, and yes that whirlpool hot tub at the Rio is real nice. It's just not sustainable. The aviation industry makes (or loses) money by burning oil to fly people and goods from place to place. They have frequent flyer "elite" "status" "luxury" lounges and give away free seats to those who burn the most oil. That's nice, but not sustainable. I saw today that Amazon has a "green 3" program to help identify the most green products. Well, the products may be green(er), but they're still "products," and we're still expected to "consume" them.

With 6.5 billion mouths to feed, we need 10 trillion food Calories a day, or 20 exajoules (2 x 10**19 joules) of food energy per year. Photosynthesis apparently consumes about 3000 exajoules of solar energy per year. The same article says that worldwide energy consumption is 487 exajoules per year. There are good and bad sides to these numbers. On the good side, there is a tremendous amount of solar energy (3800 zettajoules, or 3,800,000 exajoules, 3.8 x 10**24 joules) added to the earth each year, so we have a great resource to use. On the bad side, to badly feed (and house, and transport, and amuse) those 6.5 billion people (How many people get 2000 Calories/day? How many get way more than that? How many get way less?), we use 25 x as much energy as the amount of energy required to feed the population.

Jeff Jacoby wrote about the coming population decline today, and I read his editorial with great interest. As usual with Jacoby, just when I think he kinda sorta almost gets it, he flips the topic on its head, and spouts ideological nonsense, providing more evidence that conservatives just stick to their ideological guns instead of evaluating evidence to form their opinion on the best way forward to meet their goals. Today, he was calling for the world, and especially the developed countries, to produce more mouths to feed. Yeah, that'll solve all our problems Jeff. Good one. He says that economic growth does not happen when population is declining, and that we need more people to keep up the growth of the economy. This is mathematical ignorance at its best. In fact, he links to an article that claims that "natural resources are not fixed, but are determined by advances in science and technology." OK, there's another good one. If we can just conjure up faster-than-light travel, we'll magically have an infinite number of perfect earths to use as feedstocks for our linear industrial processes. The fact that the earth is large compared to a human being does not mean that it is infinite. We need to deal with the fact that the earth is finite, and that everything we do as a species has to be non-consumptive, or we will use up the earth. Sure, natural processes would take over after hugely destructive wars or plagues, and rainforests and other environments would recover. However, we don't want to bump up against the edge of the petri dish -- that's where it gets uncomfortable. Population stability is a good thing, because it means that we are living in a sustainable cycle. Population decline is a good thing if it brings the species to the level of sustainability with the available technology.

We are so smart, and so good at using resources around us, that we automatically grow and consume all of the available resources. In fact, the processes that we design using our intelligence are vastly inferior to the processes that evolved in the earth's ecosystem. We have a long way to go before we can come close to a life that includes modern conveniences and comforts, but does not consume resources. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, and we will develop a hair tonic that turns our heads into phtosythesizing energy converters, and lets us multiply until we are standing each in our own hexagonal cell, covering the entire (much warmer) world, including the oceans. Won't that be fun? No. No matter what technology we develop, we need to realize the physical limits of the earth, or we will be back in the Middle Ages, except with too many people for the technology of that time (burning wood, vegetable oil, and tallow as fuel, riding horses, dying of the plague, etc.) Any technology that relies on rate of extraction that consume the resource faster than the expected lifetime of the species is inherently unsustainable, and forces the species to find another technology, perish, or revert to the evolved processes. Why not work on technology now that does not rely on extraction, and is permanently sustainable? We will be doing ourselves and all those children and great**4000-children a huge favor. If we need consuming technologies to rely on while we develop sustainable ones, that's fine, but let's recognize them for what they are: linear processes. Let's use them as crutches while we learn to walk using circular processes.

Jacoby says that wealth is not a zero-sum game, and I agree. However, with our advances in technology, we don't have to accept the old economic theories any more. We can advance our standard of living while at the same time maintaining a stable population, well within the limits dictated by natural fluctuations in processes that we rely on (rains, droughts, tough winters, floods, hurricanes, pests, sunspots, movement of the earth's crust.) Old economics (and Jacoby's pals) assumes infinite resources, requires "growth," and ignores the reality that we live in a finite world. New economic theories are needed to reflect reality and push us toward sustainability. I don't have those theories at hand, but I'll be looking for them.