Since the beginning of time, right-leaning technophiles have yearned to blow up suns

People patch together slogan-like generalized cover stories out of scientific or historical materials and then claim that they’re thinking scientifically. Henley’s is the optimistic version, but I used to have a friend who called himself a “realist” whenever he was being knee-jerk pessimistic or cynical.

The claim I remember by Simon is infintie substitutability: aluminum for copper. In the area of materials and metals that will work for a long time, but substitutes for topsoil, clean air, and clean fesh water are hard to even imagine. Many schemes depend on infinite energy based on fusion or solar cells in space. One scheme, making all the Arctic rivers flow sow south, looks like a disaster in the making.

Someone should make a collection of falsely optimistic futurological predictions. One falsification seems to be here: epidimiologists are now talking about “the post-antibiotic age”, as resistent bacteria evolve.

Ilya Prigogine did have a list of scientific discoveries which made things impossible: surpassing the speed of light, Goedel’s proof, squaring the circle, pepetual motion, etc. Many of them, but not all, ere aspects of the entropy law.

Hermann Daly (“Steady-state Economics”) tried to write an economics of no-growth sustainability. Apparently the profession was aggressively unreceptive.

Ed: If you have a quote of someone saying something other than they are quoted as saying, it’s a good starting hypothesis that it is a different quote.

Luckily, Google can also be made from other metals:

To express his notion that natural resources are limitless, Simon said in a 1980 article in Science that “Even the total weight of the earth is not a theoretical limit to the amount of copper that might be available to earthlings in the future… Only the weight of the universe… would be such a theoretical limit… because copper can be made from other metals.”

Unfortunately, _Science_ is a resource which it is prohibitively expensive to extract from its deposits (“libraries”), so we may never know if Simon really really said what people – but only Leftistes, after all! – keep insisting on quoting him as saying.

simstim: Ten (10) years away? We thought it was twenty (20)! Clearly there have been great improvements, if only in forecasting!

By simple (relatively) deregulation of the public electricity market we could cut price and useage of electricty by ~50%. So if you are putting money on how the future is going to turn out, I wouldn’t bet on the crackpots in the 70’s who said all the growth was behind us.

http://www.primaryenergy.com/articles/reports/The%20Case%20for%20Decentralized%20Generation%20of%20Electricity.pdf

DvB, I was trying to take into account the time-lag inherent in CT’s commenting system.

Thanks DVB for the quote source.

The quote I provided seems to better represent Simon’s arguement that we will not need to build our own suns to get copper. If the crux of the arguement against Simon’s position that resource depletion is not a likely source for a decline in quality of life is that we can’t make our own suns then it seems to be a relatively weak point of view.

What a bunch of tards, propping up Simon as a straw man. He may be over the top, but that doesn’t mean technological optimism is wrong. We already have underutilized technology to solve most, if not all, of the world’s problems.

Dorks.

Ed: However, the original and now unchallenged quote is more instructive in establishing the original point that Simon is a batshit techno-pollyanna with few if any scruples. Nobody, so far as I know, has claimed that he is incapable of lucid moments.

Would you also like to endorse the “seven (7) billion years” claim, or would you prefer to dispute that he said it?

A problem that I’ve repeatedly felt is overlooked in the limits/no limits debate are the consequences that occur in the process of proving that limits don’t (yet) exist: if we’re running low on a resource, there’s probably some lode of it in a developing country that some transnational corporation can finance and extract. Great! We’ve got more of that resource. Never mind the havoc that is wreaked in the process, we’ve proven there are no limits!

So for the ‘limits’ folks: how about concentrating more on what happens on the way to finding those ‘limits’ instead of hypothesizing Malthusian/Ehrlichian absolutes.

There’s no free lunch: you can’t claim that science will solve all our big problems eventually, but oppose all current efforts to solve them.

I think the response to this would be that the proper investment in science will take place on its own once it becomes worth it for market to do so: i.e. once the costs of the status quo rise to the point that they become unacceptable. Thus, government subsidization of science is bad policy because it is wasteful and unnecessary. The typical textbook example here is that the Japanese government heavily subsidized the development of HDTV in the 1980s, but got no return on its investment because private American firms later decided to invest in HD as well and reaped the benefits themselves without needing any subsidization of their own.

For the record, this is all just devil’s advocacy.

“,,,that the proper investment in science will take place on its own once it becomes worth it for market to do so.”

Yeah, I remember all the speculation in lunar real estate fuelling the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Wait, or was that Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold The Moon”.

It’s been so long now.

I think the response to this would be that the proper investment in science will take place on its own once it becomes worth it for market to do so: i.e. once the costs of the status quo rise to the point that they become unacceptable.

Oh that’s a response I share myself 95% of the time (although I do sometimes question the usefulness of the “wait until the market deems it unnaceptable” approach for truly catrastrophic events).

In the long run most problems will eventually sort themselves out, but then again, in the long run we will all be … joining the Singularity anyway …

…a pony made of SUNS!

Ehrlich made a mistake using the supply of metals as a key point of his argument. Metals are indeed substitutable, and with materials science, increasingly so.

I often hear futurological optimists speaking as if there were a lot of untapped resources available, but there is very little uncultivated land left (mostly in war-torn areas). The long-term productivity of the sea and the tropical rainforests is quite limited.

Finally, futurological optimists are often dogmatic pessismists about social responses, above all governmental or charitable responses. If you look at the big improvements in health and nutrition, for example, over the last 100-200 years, you will see a mix of science and technology, markets, and government itervention. Lots of government intervention.

Likewise, many technophiles poo-poo population limitation, even though it seems to be an obvious, necessary response to chnages in mortality rates.

But the vast majority of technophiles are knee-jerk, Know-Nothing, anti-government libertarians.

Can population continue to grow indefinitely into the future, while the overall standard of living also continues to improve? Even mainstream liberal economists are embarassed by that question(and futurist tehnophiles even more so).

To say “yes” is a risky proposition that needs support, but technophiles simply assume it and accuse anyone who disagrees of Luddism.

Quote from Simon in Science 208, 1431-1437 on page 1435:

“But the future quantities of a natural resource such as copper cannot be calculated even in principle, because of new lodes, new methods of mining copper, and variations in grade of copper lodes; because copper can be made from other metals; and because of the vagueness of the boundaries within which copper can be found- including the sea and other planets.”

Technically speaking, although not practical, there are a couple of fairly stable copper isotope decay products from zinc.

Ed said:

There are lots of details on the internets.

I believe the Timber’s troll-in-residence Jet has a business model patent on backing up this claim with exactly zero (0) links; you will surely be hearing from its lawyers.

But the vast majority of technophiles are knee-jerk, Know-Nothing, anti-government libertarians.

Obviously you’ve missed the

‘nexus for progressive transhumanists, or as we say “for democratic transhumanists, nanosocialists, revolutionary singularitarians, non-anthropocentric personhood theorists, radical futurists, leftist extropians, bioutopians and biopunks, socialist-feminist cyborgs, transgenders, body modifiers, basic income advocates, world federalists, agents of the Culture and the Cassini Division, Viridians and technoGaians – transmitting a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future”‘

at Changesurfer.com.

Likewise, many technophiles poo-poo population limitation, even though it seems to be an obvious, necessary response to chnages in mortality rates.

Your beloved European social democracies don’t have population limitation, but their birth rates are miniscule. There are myriad causes for the drop, but China-style limits aren’t one.

Des von Bladet,
I posted a link to my electricity claim, so before you call names, perhaps you should attend that reading comprehension seminar and familarize yourself with what a link looks like (sometimes they are just pasted http addresses).

But I will repeat, simply upgrading electricity production to 1973 technology and decentralizing power production would cut electricity consumption by over 50% while also lowering costs a similiar amount. This is a great example of our energy “crisis”.

It seems to me that Simon’s argument should be seen in the context of the often re-iterated libertarian claim that the U.S. suffers from too much regulation.

Surely, the eco doomsters of the seventies might have motivated some of that regulation, which in turn motivated the technologies that substituted for copper, or better ways to use copper.

Now we have a chance to watch, as in a laboratory, a system without the eco-doom effect (i.e. environmental regulation): China. And what we are seeing is copper prices inflating like oil in the seventies. It is pretty easy to see: technology and regulation actually are imbricated, while societies that devolve regulation into the laissez faire market (for regulation emerges, one way or another, enforced by the state or by coporate monopolies) will soon strain and then break their resource limits.

Is the “since the beginning of time” thingie in the title a parody of something. Googling doesn’t find anything obvious.

PS — this is why libertarianism so radically misunderstand the social welfare state. That state is not inevitably moving towards the abolition of capitalism — it couldn’t exist without capitalism. Rather, it uses the profit motive as a means of directing capitilism in progressive directions it would otherwise have no motive to move in. Companies, to preserve profit and survive, have to figure out ways of complying with government regulations that prevent them from sluffing off costs onto third parties. They wouldn’t have that motive if profit making was abolished, nor would they have it if profit making legally transcended every other social goal.

John: It’s from the Simpsons. Mr. Burns says “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to blot out the sun.” He then blots out the sun so that he has a monopoly on light generation in Springfield.

Centralized planning of R&D isn’t as big a problem as mw pretends it is. Basic research just wouldn’t be done without the government. We need to lay the groundwork for future private inovation.

Centralized planning of production is a big problem because it ignores price signals, but we can’t rely on private industry to do important yet unprofitable research.

On a similar market-based wager, I have an inflation adjusted £1000 that says that insurance premia for buildings on the Ruhr flood-plain will be higher, in real terms, in twenty years’ time; just in case any global warming sceptics fancy a flutter.

Simon has indeed said that copper can be made from other elements, and you are right to point out that this does us little good in the near future, while this process would be ridiculously costly (though it would not require supernovae).

But in fairness, Simon also points out that there is no *absolute human need* for the metal copper. It is used for a variety of things in which suitable substitutes are available. The are other kinds of conductors, etc. Computer chips are currently made out of silicon, but they could be made out of other materials. There is no rock solid, everlasting demand for copper or silicon (which could run up disasterously against diminishing supply), but rather for the things which these materials do for us (allow us to feed, clothe outselves, communicate, get around, etc.).

I think this is Simon’s point, and while I don’t think it necessarily warrants his limitless faith in markets, the point has not been adequately addressed here.

Centralized planning of production is a big problem because it ignores price signals, but we can’t rely on private industry to do important yet unprofitable research.

In the long term, unprofitable research is not a good thing–if it never pays off, it was a mistake. But in the shorter term, private industry makes enormous investments in R&D that may or may not pay off–pharmaceutical companies, are an obvious example, but so are Toyota’s investment in hybrid technology, Google’s recently announced investment in the digitization of university libraries, Microsoft’s investment in the XBox platform, and so on.

Any successful effort to solve resource shortage problems would have the potential for enormous profits, so we have every reason to expect industry to make relevant investments as long as there’s any reasonable chance for success.

Simon merely said that it was theoretically possible (if commercially impractical) to make copper from other elements. He also listed a number of practical methods of increasing copper production. Diamond seriously misrepresents Simon’s position when he suggests that Simon believes that creating copper from other elements is a reasonable method of copper production. I fail to see anything wrong with that statement. There is a big difference between a discussion of what is theoretically possible and what is feasible.

The only good argument against Simon in this thread is that he used a fairly bad analogy when he talked about infinite points on a line. That’s not his best moment, but it’s not really a problem with his substantive argument and I don’t think it does much to damage his credibility.

Like the points-on-a-line statement, the “making copper from other elements” statement indicates amphetamine rapture. It seemed like a beautiful idea at the time. And both lead one to doubt his judgement about everything else.

Simon’s assumption that there are substitutes for everything also strikes me as Utopian and unjustifiable.

True, and in a great many cases it seems to have been a perfectly workable approach. Perhaps this is because the scientific community does some of the work beforehand by doing preliminary research on what the best possibilities could be.

Yes, and even then it can result in a boondoggle of historic proportions. Rather than the Manhattan Project consider the Concorde. The problem wasn’t that it failed as a government funded R&D project–on its own terms, it was a great success. But the terms were completely wrong. The billions invested resulted in a plane that was technological dead end–it cost a fortune to develop and a fortune to operate, provided minimal benefits and those only to small elite. And it was kept on life support for decades for purely political reasons (and because it was ‘cool’).

I don’t believe influence-peddling through personal connections is confined to the public sector

Of course it isn’t. But I’d argue that the kind of extremely long-term, blue-sky, government program where not having an eye on ‘profit’ isn’t a bug but a feature…is just the kind where influence and pork-barrel politics, and multi-decade, Concorde-style screwups are most likely to occur.

Point of information: Concorde made an operating profit, for British Airways at least. [Once the tiny matter of the development costs was written off.]

This week’s Public Sector Aeroplane Of The Week: the SE5a.

This post was brought to you on DARPA’s internet through CERN’s html – enjoy.

Henry draws a far more politically engaged observation out of this than I would. My thought is that this suggests that social scientific futurism from the 1950s-1980s was in and of itself an extremely bounded, historically particular phenomena that has to be understood as an artifact of its times. The problem with doing so is one of entanglement, however: that social science is interwoven into the (usually) more prudential and short-horizon practice that is now the norm. Moreover, that form of futurism unevenly but often powerfully invaded popular consciousness. Just look at how many people are absolutely one hundred percent convinced that fatal population explosions are the inevitable near-term future.

I would say still, however, that Simon came off the better in that bet and in general, and to some extent, Henry is misrepresenting his position on copper, as I understood it. Not that copper could be made from other elements, but that should copper become too scarce, it would be substituted for by metals which were more plentiful and thus cheaper. Which I think is not a ridiculous assertion, though it doesn’t think through the complicated political economies that make some metal extraction possible and other metal extraction vastly more difficult–these are not easily substituted or equivalent to one another as prices or demand shift.

It seems to me that futurism of the heady long-term predictive sort ran aground, hard, on the concrete problem of complexity. Diamond is still running into that problem. He’s using inductive reasoning about past collapses to govern his understanding of the inevitable future, when there’s first off considerable reason to think that post-1750, the rules of the human game became somewhat different (bad and good) and second, because change in complex systems (which human economies and their relationship to environments certainly are) tends to have a nearly-ontological degree of unpredictability to it. If you tried to say, “Look, in all circumstances of resource scarcity combined with run-away overuse of resources, collapse follows”, I could very quickly show you human societies to which that does not apply. Equally, I could show you societies that collapsed on what seem like reasonably comfortable grounds, or that did not overstrip their resource base. Criticality happens, but where that point lies and what ensues after it, I wouldn’t care to predict, either in an Ehrlich-like direction OR a Simon-like one. Perhaps that’s the professional caution of a historian speaking.

I don’t think that either Ehrlich, Simon, or Diamond is an ideal representative of their points of view. I read Guns Germs and Steel awhile back, and it was great in Diamond’s area of expertise, great in its willingness to speculate and talk about ideas from many disciplines, but full of stuff I couldn’t justify.

It comes with the territory (he gambles a lot). But this means that you can’t refute Diamond and thereby refute his general point of view.

Timothy Burke writes:

Criticality happens, but where that point lies and what ensues after it, I wouldn’t care to predict, either in an Ehrlich-like direction OR a Simon-like one. Perhaps that’s the professional caution of a historian speaking.

The thing is, though, that we all have a very compelling interest in determining when criticality happens, regardless of whether it is comfortable to predict it or not.

Deirdre McCloskey expressed a similar thought in the course of critiquing economists’ attachment to statistical significance:

It’s completely obvious, you will agree, that a “statistically insignificant” number can be very significant for some human purpose. If you really, truly want to know how the North American Free Trade Agreement affected the average worker in the United States, then it’s too bad if the data are noisy, but that’s not the point. You really, truly want to know it. You have to go with what God has provided.

(McCloskey, The Secret Sins Of Economics, at 53 (2002).)

This does not mean that you CAN refute Diamond and thereby refute his overall point of view.

mw,

The green revolution is a good example of the “unprofitable” research that governments and NGOs can do that the market isn’t necessarily going to do by itself.

Jet, I’m sorry that I called you an lame, egregious, creepo. that was cruel, even if true.

“Or do you really believe people in N. America and Europe stopped having kids over fears of overpopulation in Africa and Asia?”

Ehrlich didn’t localize his overpopulation fears and did not limit them to Asia and Africa. He actually argued (this I do remember) that overpopulation in wealthy nations was more harmful than Asian overpopulation, since wealthy people make more demands on the environment. So yes, I believe that the repeated loud warnings about overpopulation had an effect on fertility in the developed wirld. As I recall, Wattenberg, a big natalist, also believes that.

For one thing, high fertility has always been in part the result of the belief that having as many kids as possible is a wonderful thing, and Ehrlich’s type of argument was destructive to that arguments.

Guys, quit arguing. If someone says **”Gummint Ain’t No Damn Good Never Nohow”**, they’re not going to change their mind.

Jet, I’m sorry that I called you an lame, egregious, creepo. that was cruel, even if true.

“Or do you really believe people in N. America and Europe stopped having kids over fears of overpopulation in Africa and Asia?”

Ehrlich didn’t localize his overpopulation fears and did not limit them to Asia and Africa. He actually argued (this I do remember) that overpopulation in wealthy nations was more harmful than Asian overpopulation, since wealthy people make more demands on the environment. So yes, I believe that the repeated loud warnings about overpopulation had an effect on fertility in the developed wirld. As I recall, Wattenberg, a big natalist, also believes that.

For one thing, high fertility has always been in part the result of the belief that having as many kids as possible is a wonderful thing, and Ehrlich’s type of argument was destructive to that arguments.

Guys, quit arguing. If someone says **”Gummint Ain’t No Damn Good Never Nohow”**, they’re not going to change their mind.

So Johny boy,
Industrialized nations lowered their birth rates do to affluence and longevity. Less industrialized nations lowered their birth rates for the exact same reasons plus government programs to hand out contraceptives and educate women on what exactly causes pregnancy. I’m not sure how 1970’s hippy academics crying over the Human Horde to Come plays into this, but I’m sure you can enlighten me.

Did you ever go back and look at my link? It is actually a very cool link that could spread some light in your world. It is quite the mind numbing epiphany to realize that the energy problem (both environmental and cost) are an efficiency problem and not a supply or overuse problem. But it is also counter to the thread of making fun of technophiles, and I would hate to interrupt the mocking of optimist here.

I will repeat that I believe that Jared Diamond’s primary contribution to this topic is to remind us that we all need to eat. And I will challenge all the unlimited-resource folks among us to name the source(s) of their last meal. I fail to understand how the scarcity of copper driving up the price of cable TV for rich urbanites makes any damn difference. Solve this: we have finite agricultural land. We have a finite budget of sunlight for photosynthesis. We have a finite quantity of fresh water. We are currently susubstituting our finite reserves of fossil fuels for all of these resources.

Jet baby — we’re in the blog world. You are alleging that decreased fertility is for once group of reasons, and I’ve alleged that there’s also an additional reason. And somehow you feel that you’ve won the argument that way. Explain, please. And what do hippies have to do with it?

No, Jet, I did not read your link. I’m responding to the rest of the thread. It might be an interesting link, but when you sail in calling people dorks and tards, they tend not to click your links.

What, no alchemy jokes?

The set of Crooked Timber readers overlaps with the set of Stephenson fans, I’m sure.

I was going to suggest that Simon be nominated as Alchemist Royal to the court of King George Bush the Second.

But some of you seem to be taking him seriously.

The tail end of these threads has to be worth at least a thesis. How do these specific issues of debate spin off from the topic of the thread and why do those topics spin off from that thread? Do those issues represent a core sub-issue of the debated issue? Perhaps it is the newcastle speaking, but if I ever go back to school, blogs and sociology will feature heavily. I mean come on, we have a post making fun of a technophile devolve into a debate over frankenfood and fertility forcings.

Oh, and BTW mw — which U.S. aiports aren’t making changes? The last news I saw on that front was this.

Solve this: we have finite agricultural land. We have a finite budget of sunlight for photosynthesis. We have a finite quantity of fresh water.

Ahem.

“The Millennial Project: Colonising the Galaxy in 8 easy steps” by Marshall Savage.

Granted, there’s a debate on the science…

Can’t remember exactly which of the ghastly societies described in Iron Sunrise is the libertarian one – can you enlighten me?

IIRC, Wednesday’s family winds up as refugees on a fairly straitlaced asteroid society whose name escapes me for the moment. There’s a bit of exposition in there about how the Eschaton loosely terraformed the asteroids, supplied them with a decades supplies – and then populated them with the loud-mouth pro-space contingent from Earth. Eventually the survivors had to shove the liberatarians out the airlock and build a conformist society just to get by.

The truth about modern people is … they’re pussies. They’re not just pussies, they’re pretentious pussies. They’re already coming up with all kinds of convenient excuses why Zero Point oil is simply an insurmountable hurdle, like the pathetic sadsack apologists that they are.

Except all those environmentalist pussies, I guess, who keep saying we should invent new stuff to keep that from happening. But the trouble with them is that they’re too goddamned pussy to see that Collapse is just a rewrite of The Coming Dark Age except for all the ways it’s completely different. And they even missed the fact that Gould was a “crypto commie.” What a bunch of poseurs.

And you’re right — how dare Jared Diamond fail to argue that societies collapse because of internal factors, aside from writing a whole book on the topic? Rock on, cleve. Rock on.

Shouldn’t Julian Simon be given the benefit of the doubt when something he said sounds on a literal hearing completely silly? He was a bright guy and his comments on copper can easily be read as hyperbolic at worst, uttered in an excess of enthusiasm to reinforce his actual point which was (as has been well discussed above) about the endless renewability of resource economics (or something). It’s the way I first reacted to them. Scarcity drives price which drives exploration and subsitution and new technology, yada yada. And for the forseeable future there’ll be copper available to us, anyway.
If something becomes too scarce and expensive, perhaps because a market has done nothing to protect it from overexploitation, people typically discover that we can, after all, cope.

I liked Simon’s attitude that we may as well be optimistic, but perhaps he didn’t emphasize sufficiently that markets need to be well regulated because they don’t care about anything that’s really important. All they care about is buying ‘n selling, not whether the goods are oil, slaves, child workers or weapons.

So that’s a very interesting paper on the electric power business Jet. Its suggestions, which sound well worthy of immediate consideration to me, certainly do require government initiative and a high degree of government regulation to work – not deregulation but reregulation. It’s not as though Clean Air for instance is just going to be completely forgotten about, is it? Energy like other industries of its scale needs to be well regulated, not deregulated. That paper’s new world won’t happen by private enterprise alone MW.

Ha :)
But do you want John to be helped with those issues you have with Simon?

It’s not external forces that cause the decline of civilizations – it is decline that makes civilizations susceptible to external forces.

Such as the Minoans?

“The sun provides enough light to feed the expected maximum population of the earth at a US standard of living”

There is no expected maximum population of earth. And harvesting the light is not a slamdunk. It may not be impossible (the way extracting all the valuable minerals from the sea is), but it’s not that easy. And no, you can’t just say that technology will eventually have an answer.

Jet: You wish me to provide evidence to substantiate my claim that you often invite people to Google for evidence you neglect to provide? I say: go Google for it.

Although I’ve been accused by rightwingers of being left-leaning, I am also a scientist. Some ideas, like exhaustion of resources, have been too uncritically accepted by the left.

Substitution of resources may come about in unexpected ways, so that we won’t need more supernovas to make more copper. We are going to optical cable, the raw material for which is sand, in many applications.

Past examples are that gucky stuff that oozed from the ground in Pennsylvania for whale oil and coal, and automobiles for the horses that kept leaving stuff in the streets of New York.

Or the electrons on this screen for typewriter ribbon, paper, stamps, transport over land and sea…

If the UN’s High estimate shows more or less linear growth, then there’s no estimated maximum. These are all obviously seat of the pants ballpark figures. If you’re just arguing against fatalistic inevitable-doomsday predictions, I can agree, but you seem to argue that we needn’t worry about population growth.

And it’s good that the middle estimate has been lowered. It means that some of the things people have been doing seem to be working, and that they should keep doing them — not that they should quit doing them because they’re unnecessary. That would be like the schizophrenic who quits taking their meds because they feel so good.

Cheryl Rofer, as I said, I think Ehrlich made a big mistake in putting so much weight on metals. Topsoil, energy, clean air, fresh water, fisheries, ozone depletion, greenhouse effect and climate change are the big things to watch.

The variable isn’t how much light reaches the earth, but how much can be captured and stored.

Of course there’s an estimated maximum. The UN predicts that world fertility will fall below replacement levels by 2040; therefore the population is not expected to grow without bound. Furthermore, the “Medium” estimate for population in 2050 has been declining for the past 15 years.

I’m not arguing that no one needs to worry about population growth; I’m arguing that the current worldwide level of worry about population growth seems to be about right to maybe a little much. And since population growth rates seem pretty strongly inversely correlated to “development”, and since I’d like for there to be a lot less bone-crushingly poor people in the world, I’d rather spend my effort worrying about the latter.

If the amount of light per unit area changes dramatically, we’ve got much bigger issues than population growth to deal with. So to the extent that concern over “light” is real, it’s concern over agricultural land. Which we pretty clearly have plenty of; slash and burn farming is only taking place because it’s currently much cheaper than modern farming techniques.

Oh, and BTW mw — which U.S. aiports aren’t making changes? The last news I saw on that front was this.

Ah, bummer. But on the bright side, we’re talking about just the largest airports in the largest cities (and none, fortunately, that I fly out of regularly).

Along with smaller jets, I really like smaller airports–you, know, 15-20 gates, park out front and walk in. John Wayne in Orange County is a nice example–so much better to fly to the LA area that way than through LAX.

I will say, though, that I have no objection at all if FedEx and UPS want to haul cargo with A380s.

John – I think my position is a little more severe than “the most apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid” – it’s probably more along the lines of “most of the apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid”, with a strong side helping of “intuition is no longer useful for coming to meaningful conclusions about this stuff – you have to do the math.”

John – I think my position is a little more severe than “the most apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid” – it’s probably more along the lines of “most of the apocalyptic scenarios are paranoid”, with a strong side helping of “intuition is no longer useful for coming to meaningful conclusions about this stuff – you have to do the math.”

?The Millennial Project: Colonising the Galaxy in 8 easy steps? by Marshall Savage.

Granted, there’s a debate on the science.

Good heavens, I didn’t think my review would still be around after ten years. How pompous. How awkward.

Still I wouldn’t step back much from what I wrote then. What has changed in ten years is mainly that the prospect of inimical climate change is more definite and is informing international policy, e.g. at the recent G8 Summit. Last week The Age newspaper gave its cover to a warning that we may lose the Great Barrier Reef to coral bleaching, if we have another rise in sea temperature. Climate changes threaten both productivity and biodiversity. This is not your dad’s Limits to Growth debate, it’s a global situation we’re still coming to terms with.

Under the circumstances, Marshall Savage’s picture of giant fresh-water condensers on the continental shelves looks pretty rational. Provide for the fresh-water needs of cities, and the rainfall catchments and rivers gain a degree of freedom to serve agriculture and forestry – forests being our main defense against climate changes.

What I’d hate to see at this point is for “technophilia” to be made part of anybody’s partisan synthesis, especially for “technology” and “environment” to be proposed as moral opposites (yet again). The true technophile position is that we need lots and lots of ologists: ge-, bi-, climat-, ocean-, entom-, bacteri-, etc. We need enough of them that we can discern and implement solutions in timely manner, and have plenty left over for independent study. There’s been a lot said about the new global meritocracy, but there seems to be an accepted assumption that it’s all about growth and trade. Fair enough as far as it goes, but we need it to be about science too. Otherwise, when the decisions have to be made at the municipal and national levels, we’ll be relying on spokesmen for political and commercial interests.

Yeah, but I think only maybe at most 15-20% of the world’s population benefit from technology in a real sense, for the rest it’s about as useful as Alaskan trash dumps for polar bears there. And the dangers are enormous – for everyone.

John Emerson pontified: “Topsoil, energy, clean air, fresh water, fisheries, ozone depletion, greenhouse effect and climate change are the big things to watch.”

The anual drop in productivity from soil erosion is estimated at .3% a year. Certainly a problem, but not a looming catastrophy. Farming productivity has been imporving 1-2% a year, so looks like we’re okay for at least a couple hundred more years of technology to fix the problem.
Crosson 1996a
Crosson 1997d

Air quality in the industralized nations continues to improve. There is also a direct statistical link between GDP and air quality. Once the PPP of a country reaches about $10K, there is a dramatic increase in air quality, quickly increasing to the superb levels of industrialized nations.
EPA 1998c:9
Shafik 1994:764

I’ve already touched on the energy “crisis” in my link you (snarkily) said I never posted, but we’ll just chalk that one up to old age. Find your reading glasses old man, scroll back up using the “mouse”, and paste that link into the “browser”. Contact your great-grandkid if you require assistance.

I could go on to counter all your points and will if you want to mix it up with someone who isn’t blind nihilistic lemming. Copper or Ozone, Zinc or fisheries the world is getting to be a better place. I know you would prefer otherwise, so sucks to be you.

It wasn’t me who accused you of failing to post a link. Get reading glasses yourself, you odious twerp.

You also seem to be one of the people it sucks to be. Have a good day. I prefer blind nihilistic lemmings, thank you.

Most ocean fisheries are in trouble, and some are almost gone. Fish farming is not a source of additional food, since the fish are fed agricultural products which they transform into tasty luxury product. Please explain your point about fisheries.

The point about topsoil is that it’s not substitutable and almost all of what there is is in use. Besides erosion there’s salinization and water mining to worry about. An eight year old 2% annual productivity growth estimate hardly can be assured into the distant future, especially if it’s tied in with other resources such as fossil fuels.

Some of the improvement in the developed world’s air quality comes from exporting polluting industries to the third world.

I’ve already said twice that Ehrlich was wrong to rely on arguments about metal supplies.

I’m not up to date about ozone, so I’ll let that one slide. Certainly no one should take your word for anything.

Heard some tasty things about yo’ mama, little boy.

Thanks for the stats John. All I was trying to say above is that for all the talk about growing food, very few people around here actually have any experience of it. I am suggesting that before you go pontificating about how easy it is to grow food for 7 billion people, you should try growing food for one person. I have done it, and I am telling you that if we run out of diesel fuel, many many Americans are going to be very hungry. Food is not produced with electricity. Food is not produced with fiber optic cable. It is produced with sunlight (which I don’t believe we are in danger of running out of), water, and except for fisheries, land. I’ve yet to hear anyone quote a statistic for how much unused ag land is laying around. And I believe the statistics I’ve heard about the lack of excess fresh water capacity. If any of you have actually seen how a modern American farm operates, it would be clear to you that this much vaunted food production is entirely dependent on vast petrochemical inputs, and the return is diminishing even now, even though oil is still cheap. So I’m not buying the rosy future scenario. I believe things are going to get tougher, and I have no idea whether it will be catostrophic or not, but our problems will not be solved by photo-voltiac cells or desalinization.

John Emerson,
How did I change my story about fisheries? Fish yields still increase every year when you factor in farming. Ocean bio-diversity seems to have reached a leveling point. How is an end to the destruction of the Ocean and a replacement for fish yields not good news? And I don’t understand your point about fish farming not replacing ocean yields. I would premise that the drop in the growth of wheat and rice yields is a function of demand, not ability, and to prove this, I say look at world wheat and rice prices. So the continued growth in overall fish yields has not effected wheat or rice yields. Growth has gone done, yet price has remained steady, which means demand went down too.

I would agree that the ~600% population growth over the last 100 years was not sustainable. But I am pretty sure that 300% over the next 100 years is sustainable. Especially when you factor in alternative fuels which will certainly be competitive with fossil fuels in the next 30 years, and also the fact that current technology would allow for an almost 50% cut in price and usage of electricity/fuel for electricity across the world.

Tomorrow, as a species, we will be better off than yesterday. Thus is the prayer of the techno-phile ;)

And I believe the statistics I’ve heard about the lack of excess fresh water capacity.

The words you’re looking for, Eric, are “Oglala Aquifer“

“Prices don’t tell you about food supply. Food supply is measured otherwise.” But this does provide some light on why ag yield growth has gone down. If yield growth had gone down because of inability to meet demand, prices would have gone up. Since prices have remained steady, then yield growth went down because of a drop in demand. Which is all to make my point that fish, an important part of human diet, can continue to be supplied, at historic growth rates, with little or no effect on gross ag production.

And given the incredible disparity between industrialized nations and developing nations in yields per hectre, this trend can continue for a long time. I would only get worried when world average yields approach industrialized nations top yields, ie when India’s rice yields approach Japanese rice yields.

“in environmental or demographic time (centuries)” we can barely fanthom the state of the world in 100 years, so setting that as our horizon on things to worry about certianly seems fair.

As for water shortages, more efficient usage is the answer. Switching to more efficient forms of irrigation can cut ag water usage from 30-70%, while boosting production. Once again the problem is the resource was too cheap and overly used. Forcing improvements in efficiency BEFORE nature demands them is the answer. Also, irrigation quality water can be created from sea water for $.20 m3. And as time goes on and water becomes more scarce, who here would bet money that we don’t find even better ways to improve efficiency?

Water shortage is not a limit to growth, merely a challenge.

From Helen Caldicott’s website:

Of the 7,000 warheads in the U.S. arsenal, 2,500 are maintained on a 24-hour ready alert status, and can be launched within moments.

And, the commander of the Strategic Air Command has only about three minutes to decide if a nuclear attack warning is real or not. Then he has 10 minutes to find the president and give him a 30-second attack briefing, including options.

After that, the president has three minutes to decide whether or not to retaliate and if so, which targets will be hit. Once they were launched, U.S. missiles would reach their Russian targets in about 15 to 30 minutes.

The situation is relatively similar in Russia, with the exception that Moscow’s early warning system is rapidly aging.

According to the McNamara and Caldicott, the systems of both countries sound alarms daily, in response to wildfires, satellite launchings and solar reflections off clouds or oceans.

But as the Russian system continues to decay, it may be more difficult for Moscow to determine whether alerts are real or not.

That’s dangerous, argue experts, because it may mean in the future, [dead-drunk?] Russian commanders and leaders may have to rely more on human judgment—a concept much less reliable than computerized early warning systems that operate without emotion.

“I find it highly plausible to believe that, for example, once we get anywhere near the end of fossil fuel reserves (and my understanding is that we are nowhere near), it will become extremely profitable to invest in alternate energy sources, and unless we have strong reason to think such alternate sources are impossible in principle, we should trust that they will be developed when it becomes worth our while to do so.”

Why?

This just boggles me. A firm or a family which used up its resources as thoughtlessly as this would be regarded as suicidally irrational. “Something will come up” is not a plan.

I think that Simon’s cornucopianism (which is actually Lomborg’s term) is an unassailable cargo-cult ideology. This particular type of free-market Utopianism combines several principles in thoughtless, dogmatic form: faith in technology and the market, mistrust of government and collective activities, admiration for individual economic rationality and planning,contempt for collective rationality and planning, and refusal to think of the long term except in terms of optimism and faith.

The divergent time scales between environmental history (100 years is a short time) and human history (100 years is a long time) are not reasons to forget about the long term. They’re a problem to think about, or reasons why we’re probably going to blindly screw up. I haven’t read Diamond’s book, but it sounds like one of the things he’s talking about is blind lack of foresight, and a lot of people here seem to have made that into a positive principle or “feature”.

I am not a prophet of inevitable doom, I just say that the various environmental and demographic warnings deserve serious attention and perhaps action. I also say that we should pay attention to the concrete physical sciences of demography, oceanography, climatology, and economic geography, and not allow them to be overruled by economics, which is a idealistic, non-physical science which simply assumes that market forces will bring something into existence as soon as it’s needed. (And much less, futurology, which is often simply voodoo.)

And likewise the related conviction that technology will certainly be able to solve any problem that arises — not a rational conviction, but wishful thinking.

I am in favor of good things happening, but I don’t think that they can just be assumed.

And last, the difference between ecological and human political time scales is at the root of what we’re talking about, and can’t just be waved off. A succession of 20-year solutions does not necessarily lead to a 200-year solution.

John sez:

I think that Simon’s cornucopianism (which is actually Lomborg’s term) is an unassailable cargo-cult ideology. This particular type of free-market Utopianism combines several principles in thoughtless, dogmatic form: faith in technology and the market, mistrust of government and collective activities, admiration for individual economic rationality and planning,contempt for collective rationality and planning, and refusal to think of the long term except in terms of optimism and faith.

No doubt there are thoughtless dogmatists in every intellectual camp; I certainly tried to present my position with enough qualifiers to escape the latter charge. In any case, I think there’s a conceptual disjunct between your characterization and the better thinkers in the free market camp. It’s not about “collective” decisionmaking versus “individual” decisionmaking. The market is a collective process. The problem addressed by Hayek and company is precisely that the information needed to answer the hard questions about resource allocation is dispersed in such a way that only a truly collective process can make use of it. What you call “collective decisionmaking” is really giving some individual or individuals power to decide on behalf of a collective. Markets are about letting decisions actually be made collectively through the experience and decisions of all the knowledgeable individuals, no single one of whom knows what everyone else knows, and no single one of whom is capable, even in principle, of calculating how much of some resource should be made at the expense of all the others. A market is a continuous referendum on the issue of resource allocation, in which each voter is required literally to put his money where his mouth is. It does take the long term into account, because the value of any asset is equal to the sum of all the (discounted) future revenues the collective wisdom thinks it will yield. It has blind spots to the extent that the individual actors within it are shielded from negative consequences of their decisions, and rules that seek to recapture that information and make it play a role in the process can therefore be salutary. It’s not a question of “faith”; it’s a question of soberly evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of different processes of collective decisionmaking for different types of problems, and deciding which is likely to do a better systematic job.

Who is putting more misplaced faith in the power of individuals to make wise decisions? The one who says that a few individuals who get elected and who are largely insulated from the direct consequences of their decisions should make them for the whole society, overriding the views of all who disagree? Or the one who says individuals should only have power to make decisions whose consequences they have to live with, and only within the constraints placed on them by the collective preferences of those around them?

This just boggles me. A firm or a family which used up its resources as thoughtlessly as this would be regarded as suicidally irrational. “Something will come up” is not a plan.

The mistake you’re making here is assuming that because microeconomic decisions have to be made by deliberate rational choice, so do all macroeconomic decisions. A family has to decide how much milk to buy and what else to give up in order to do so. A dairy farmer has to decide how much milk to produce and what other production opportunities to forego in order to do so. But as long as those two groups of individuals are free to make choices and adjust to each other’s choices based on the information they get from market prices, nobody has to decide how much milk should be produced or consumed by the society as a whole. Every time someone has tried make that kind of decision, it’s been a disaster.

It’s precisely because families and firms are not, generally speaking, suicidally irrational, that my confidence in markets making the right allocation decisions is justified. As known reserves of fossil fuel diminish, its price will gradually go up, raising the prices of commodities that depend on it and increasing the relative desirability–hence profitability–of developing and using alternate energy sources. This will lead both to voluntary conservation and voluntary development of alternatives. Which, I suppose, are the same actions you think “thoughtful” actors should take. The same actions you want governments to impose now, to head off the future shortage. So the question isn’t really about what we should do in response to the finitude of a given resource, but when we should do it, and by what degrees. Remember that there are costs to doing it too early just as surely as there are to doing it too late. The very technology we need to create the viable alternative may well be retarded if we shackle the economy by taking premature steps. The fact that my tank will eventually run out of gas does not make it rational for me to stop at each filling station I pass. And if I turn off the engine in order to avoid the possibility of ever reaching empty, I will never reach the next filling station.

mw:

That is, for reasons quite apart from resource depletion, they would like to see us change our ways of living in the direction of ‘simpler, lower-tech lifestyles’ and ‘very dense cities’.

If there turned out to be a way to generate greater supplies of cheap energy that would allow the world to continue to evolve in the direction of U.S. levels of consumption (without environmental degradation) ? they would not regard this as a good thing. In fact, there is a hint of satisfaction that environmental limits are forcing us to do what we should be doing anyway.

Is that a fair or unfair inference?

Fair question, and I’m on target. But I think the realistic answer is too equivocal to support a rhetorical advantage for laissez-faire.

I would regard it as a good thing – a very good thing, since it would offer modern prosperity to the whole human race. It is what I hope for, over the next century, from space solar power.

But SSP is a trillion-dollar, century-long project, and the alternatives – very large-scale fission, or fusion, or terrestrial photovoltaics – are comparable in cost. In fact, every energy option, deployed on a scale to replace oil, entails massive changes in employment and land and water use – indeed entails a new chapter in the Industrial Revolution.

I have a lot of optimism for the rising generation, but the happiest I can imagine is that world development is going to slip backward, because developing economies will not be able to afford new energy options. Too many are already sunk in debt for the capital they’ve already installed.

If someone could propose to me how the developing world is to muster such an economic advantage, over the oil decline period, that they can bid more-or-less as equals in the market for new energy supplies, then it would change my life. But sadly, I don’t see that happening. I see the debt, I see the concentration of effort into primary production, and I see the best of their people joining in the world meritocracy while their compatriots muddle through on the margins.

So I desperately want the low-fuel, low-tech, labour-intensive, dense cities to work. Insofar as they do, they work for everyone, not just the currently successful.

If fuel prices rise to the point that a region cannot even afford to re-gear for low-fuel, that is when development slips backward, maybe even catastrophically. Rust belts and ghost towns. Failed economies, failed savings, failed tax bases, failed human talent pools.

That’s my Spectre, and I welcome any thought that can help me address it. If it comes out of a laissez-faire perspective, that’s fine. But I cannot see that laissez-faire economics points elsewhere than unequal development. The alternative I see as possible requires planning for low-fuel.

Now there is another side to all this: an argument that regions, maybe even villages, which are self-sufficient in energy constitute an economic basis with more opportunities than those dependent on external suppliers. That is what much of the ’70s Whole Earth Catalog alternative energy exploration was about. “We don’t have to be dependent on the System; we learn more and become stronger and escape the dependency culture by working out how to do this stuff with windmills and bicycles.” We can debate that. But I assure you, and really quite urgently want to convince you, that the prior argument is genuine, sufficient in itself, and not a cloak for the latter.