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To Save Ourselves, We’ll Need This Very Different Economy

August 12, 2021

To Save Ourselves, We’ll Need This Very Different Economy

What would ‘getting serious’ about the survival of civilization look like?

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‘Ecological overshoot’ is causing climate change, the pandemic and more. Is our political system capable of doing what’s needed? Photo by Paddy O Sullivan.

The pandemic is a big problem. Climate change is an even bigger problem. But the meta-problem is ecological overshoot.

Plagues and heat waves — along with plunging biodiversity; fishery collapses; soil and land degradation; land, water and sea pollution; resource shortages, etc. — are mere symptoms of a much greater planetary malaise. Ecological overshoot means there are way too many people using vastly too much energy and material resources and dumping too much waste.

In more technical terms, humanity’s consumption of even renewable resources and our production of wastes exceeds the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosphere. This is the biophysical definition of “unsustainable,” and a harbinger of pending systems collapse.

Avoiding the collapse of one’s civilization would seem to be job one for political leaders. And yesterday they received yet another “code red” reminder of what is at stake from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yet few politicians have even heard of overshoot. Concern about its implications has yet to penetrate economic and developmental policy circles.

It therefore seems fair to ask: What accounts for such political deafness? One obvious earplug is the neoliberal economics dominant in the world today. Its adherents assume that:

    • The economy is separate from, and can function independently of, the biophysical “environment.”
    • Important relationships between variables change predictably and if they deviate from desirable comfort zones, can be reversed.
    • The “factors of production” (finance capital, natural capital, manufactured capital, human capital) are near-perfect substitutes. For example, human ingenuity — technology — can make up for any potentially limiting natural resource.

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

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May 23, 2021

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Chris Clugston on Overshoot:

Scientists work to solve phosphate shortage – the dwindling resource required to grow food

July 27, 2019

Scientists work to solve phosphate shortage – the dwindling resource required to grow food

By 2030, the world’s population is projected to be about 8.5 billion people. Global food security is a major concern for governments – zero hunger is the second most important of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

However, there is a severe conflict between sustainable food production and the use of nonrenewable resources in agricultural systems, particularly phosphate. Phosphorus is a major mineral nutrient required by crop plants for optimal growth and productivity. Phosphate is the only form of phosphorus that plants can absorb — it is often applied to crops as phosphate fertilizer. 

Phosphate is obtained through rock mining. Seventy per cent of the world’s phosphate reserves are located in North Africa. China, Russia, South Africa and the United States all have limited quantities of the mineral rock. 

Finite resources

Scientists have reported that global phosphate production would peak around 2030, at the same time the global population will reach 8.5 billion people. Several reports have also warned that the global reserve would be depleted within the next 50 to 100 years. Current agricultural practice involves the use of a high amount of phosphate fertilizer in order to achieve optimal plant yield.

A phosphate shortage will threaten global food production: phosphate fertilizers are used extensively to produce optimal plant yield. Shutterstock

This is because of the chemical properties of phosphate, which interacts with soil particlesin a way that makes it difficult for the plant to acquire, leaving a large portion of the element in the soil surface.

Because plants can only uptake small amounts of phosphate, a large majority of fertilizer ends up in unwanted places, like bodies of water, making these practices ecologically and financially unsustainable. It is only reasonable to fathom that as phosphate becomes more expensive and may eventually run out, it not only poses a food security threat, but may also pose political crisis between phosphate rich countries and importing countries.+

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

The real oil limits story; what other researchers missed

May 14, 2016

The real oil limits story; what other researchers missed

For a long time, a common assumption has been that the world will eventually “run out” of oil and other non-renewable resources. Instead, we seem to be running into surpluses and low prices. What is going on that was missed by M. King Hubbert, Harold Hotelling, and by the popular understanding of supply and demand?

The underlying assumption in these models is that scarcity would appear before the final cutoff of consumption. Hubbert looked at the situation from a geologist’s point of view in the 1950s to 1980s, without an understanding of the extent to which geological availability could change with higher price and improved technology. Harold Hotelling’s work came out of the conservationist movement of 1890 to 1920, which was concerned about running out of non-renewable resources. Those using supply and demand models have equivalent concerns–too little fossil fuel supply relative to demand, especially when environmental considerations are included.

Virtually no one realizes that the economy is a self-organized networked system. There are many interconnections within the system. The real situation is that as prices rise, supply tends to rise as well, because new sources of production become available at the higher price. At the same time, demand tends to fall for a variety of reasons:

  • Lower affordability
  • Lower productivity growth
  • Falling relative wages of non-elite workers

The potential mismatch between amount of supply and demand is exacerbated by the oversized role that debt plays in determining the level of commodity prices. Because the oil problem is one of diminishing returns, adding debt becomes less and less profitable over time. There is a potential for a sharp decrease in debt from a combination of defaults and planned debt reductions, leading to very much lower oil prices, and severe problems for oil producers.

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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