Home » Posts tagged 'finite world'

Tag Archives: finite world

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

A Modern Ethic for a Finite World

November 2, 2018

A Modern Ethic for a Finite World

Photo Source Kevin Dooley | CC BY 2.0

At some point, presumably before leaving the relative comfort of Africa and overrunning the more hostile climes and lesser higher primates of Eurasia, ancient man created powerful taboos some of which survive to the present day. The institution of marriage, for example, which may have evolved alongside totemism – whose prevalence (well into the later part of the modern European adventure) amongst indigenous societies of all continents hints at their antiquity. My traditional African marriage not so long ago included a ritual in which my uncle challenged his counterpart representing the bride to reveal her totem clan name; totem clan names were duly exchanged and the ceremony continued. The significance is lost nowadays on our “chakam” generation as Nigerian duo P-Square put it. I wonder what would have happened a century or so ago if we belonged to the same clan totem: would we have been forbidden from marrying, deemed exogamous?

Mankind is capable of creating powerful taboos that shy groups of us away from things we’d otherwise do (like make the planet unfit for decent human habitation as we know it). Witness the fact that the recent (relatively) religions of the books needed not bother too much with incest and cannibalism. Mankind had already grown out of those unwholesome ills seemingly without the need for prophetic intervention.

Homo sapiens has conquered the physical world and the living world so successfully that we no longer fit in many ecological cycles and would not survive for long if we were cut off from the many links of globalisation. Many of us fear imminent anthropogenic climate disaster or anthropostupid nuclear holocaust. What if mankind were not so successful?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Paying the True Costs of Living

October 3, 2018

Paying the True Costs of Living

We’re in trouble. We as in the people of the Earth, which is all the people there are, notwithstanding theories of extraterrestrials munching their popcorn equivalents while watching us flail about. Our planet is only so big and has only so much in the way of natural resources to offer us. Think of The Giving Tree. As we cruise to a 7.7 Billion human population, the rest of the Earth and its species aren’t doing so hot (anthropological climate change aside), with a few notable exceptions such as starlings, cockroaches, and rats. This represents one of the unquantified costs of living, the impact of our increasing population and activities on the global ecosystem. Not to mention the ever decreasing EROEI (energy return on energy invested) that is signalling the end of capitalism as we know it. Gulp!

For example, flying insect biomass has been found to have decreased by over 75% in Germany over the past 27 years. Insects are one of the foundations of our ecological house, with some 10 quintillion (1 with 19 zeroes after it) bugs in existence on Earth at any given time. Well, maybe 2.5 quintillion these days. Regardless, the fate of these lowly arthropods is an indicator of the fate of higher organism and our fate as well. Other animals eat these bugs and are themselves eaten, the whole circle of life thing. Such as in Britain where farmland birds have declined by 50% since 1970. The world has been made aware of hive collapse syndrome in our hard working bees for hire which pollinate so many of our food crops. But what about all those wild bugs that pollinate for free? Can we lose 75% of them and maintain a functioning ecosystem? 85%? 95%?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What is it like to live in a steady state economy? Miss Hokusai in Edo Japan

April 18, 2016

What is it like to live in a steady state economy? Miss Hokusai in Edo Japan

“Miss Hokusai” is a delicate and beautiful movie set during the late Edo period in Japan. It may give us a feeling of what it is like to live in a steady-state economy. In the picture from the movie, you can see O-Ei (Miss Hokusai) together with her father, the painter Tetsuzo, better known by his pen name of Hokusai.

We owe to Kennet Boulding the concept that “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” And we call the end of this impossible growth a condition of “no growth”, “zero growth” or “stable state.” Many people argue that such a condition is not only necessary because of physical reasons, but it is also a good condition to be in.

In practice, we don’t know what a true “zero-growth” society could be, simply because it has never existed in the modern Western World. The only hint we can find on how such a society could be is from history. Probably the best example of such a society, close in time and very well known, is Japan during the Edo Period, that historians place between 1603 and 1868.

We have no data about Edo Japan that we could compare to our modern concept of “Gross Domestic Product,” which is at the basis of our idea of “economic growth”. However, we have good data about the population of that time and there is no doubt that it remained nearly stable during the whole period. We also know that the extent of cultivated land in Japan didn’t vary over almost one century and a half, from 1720 to 1874 (source).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Politics in a full world

February 8, 2016

Politics in a full world

When Scientific American published Herman Daly’s “Economics in a Full World” in September 2005, few people knew what lay ahead: oil climbing to $147 a barrel, the relentless rise in global temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions, the food riots of 2008 sparked by rising food prices, the economic crash that followed, and the development of an increasingly yawning gap between the rich and everyone else in subsequent years. For the vast majority of people on the planet, growth effectively stopped in 2008. Their incomes have essentially flatlined or declined.

Daly’s thesis seems more relevant than ever as government policymakers puzzle over lackluster global economic growth despite unprecedented government spending (and debt) and ground-hugging interest rates in the seven years since the crash. Maybe we have reached the point, as Daly would argue, when economic growth is uneconomic, when the costs outweigh the benefits (except, of course, for a very narrow strata of people at the top who get to put the costs on everyone else).

If we are moving toward a low-growth or even no-growth world because growth is becoming much more difficult and problematic, then Daly’s outline of a new economics will need a companion outline: politics in a full world. I have a preliminary candidate for that outline: Bruno Latour’s The Politics of Nature. Daly’s steady-state economics always implied a revolution in governance without being explicit about it.

Latour never mentions Daly and may never have read him. But Latour clearly understands that the natural world–which politics has always held at arm’s length while nevertheless dealing daily with nature’s demands–must now explicitly invite that natural world to the bargaining table.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle

January 7, 2016

2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle

What is ahead for 2016? Most people don’t realize how tightly the following are linked:
  1. Growth in debt
  2. Growth in the economy
  3. Growth in cheap-to-extract energy supplies
  4. Inflation in the cost of producing commodities
  5. Growth in asset prices, such as the price of shares of stock and of farmland
  6. Growth in wages of non-elite workers
  7. Population growth

It looks to me as though this linkage is about to cause a very substantial disruption to the economy, as oil limits, as well as other energy limits, cause a rapid shift from the benevolent version of the economic supercycle to the portion of the economic supercycle reflecting contraction. Many people have talked about Peak Oil, the Limits to Growth, and the Debt Supercycle without realizing that the underlying problem is really the same–the fact the we are reaching the limits of a finite world.

There are actually a number of different kinds of limits to a finite world, all leading toward the rising cost of commodity production. I will discuss these in more detail later. In the past, the contraction phase of the supercycle seems to have been caused primarily by too high population relative to resources. This time, depleting fossil fuels–particularly oil–plays a major role. Other limits contributing to the end of the current debt supercycle include rising pollution and depletion of resources other than fossil fuels.

The problem of reaching limits in a finite world manifests itself in an unexpected way: slowing wage growth for non-elite workers. Lower wages mean that these workers become less able to afford the output of the system. These problems first lead to commodity oversupply and very low commodity prices. Eventually these problems lead to falling asset prices and widespread debt defaults.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Our Electricity Problem: Getting the Diagnosis Correct

October 15, 2015

Our Electricity Problem: Getting the Diagnosis Correct

What is really wrong with our energy system, particularly as it relates to electricity and natural gas? Are there any mitigations available? I have been asked to give a talk at an Electricity/Natural Gas conference that includes both producers and industrial users of electricity and natural gas.

In this presentation, I suggest that the standard diagnosis of the problems facing the energy system is incomplete. While climate change may be a problem, there is another urgent problem that attendees at the conference should be aware of as well–affordability, and the severe near-term impact affordability can be expected to have on the system.

My written summary of this talk is fairly brief. I have not tried to repeat the information shown on the slides. This is a link to a copy of my presentation: Our Electricity Problem: Getting the Diagnosis Right

Slide 2

A finite world is one that is subject to limits. Its economy cannot grow forever for many reasons.

Slide 3

Let’s look at some examples (Slide 4) of how limits work in finite systems. Often there seems to be a change of direction.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Economic Growth Fails

August 11, 2015

How Economic Growth Fails

We all know generally how today’s economy works:

Figure 1

Our economy is a networked system. I have illustrated it as being similar to a child’s building toy. Ever-larger structures can be built by adding more businesses and consumers, and by using resources of various kinds to produce an increasing quantity of goods and services.

Figure 2. Dome constructed using Leonardo Sticks

There is no overall direction to the system, so the system is said to be “self-organizing.”

The economy operates within a finite world, so at some point, a problem ofdiminishing returns develops. In other words, it takes more and more effort (human labor and use of resources) to produce a given quantity of oil or food, or fresh water, or other desirable products. The problem of slowing economic growth is very closely related to the question: How can the limits we are reaching be expected to play out in a finite world? Many people imagine that we will “run out” of some necessary resource, such as oil, but I see the situation differently. Let me explain a few issues that may not be obvious.

1. Our economy is like a pump that works increasingly slowly over time, as diminishing returns and other adverse influences affect its operation. Eventually, it is likely to stop.

As nearly as I can tell, the way economic growth occurs (and stops taking place) is as summarized in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Overview of our economic predicament

As long as (a) energy and other resources are cheap, (2) debt is readily available, and (3) “overhead” in the form of payments for government services, business overhead, and interest payments on debt are low, the pump can continue working as normal. As various parts of the pump “gum up,” the economic growth pump slows down. It is likely to eventually stop, once it becomes too difficult to repay debt with interest with the meager level of economic growth achieved.

 

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress