TADEAS:
If you read the papers and look at the data, we see that natural resources are deteriorating on every single continent. We’re far above sustainable levels. Even if we could avoid climate change, there is no possibility of sustaining 8 billion people at anything near the living standards we’ve come to expect. There have been some academic exercises to calculate how many people the earth could support. That’s really a silly sort of exercise, because it ignores most of the values and goals that we have for making human life on this planet worthwhile: equity, liberty, welfare, human health. These things are all intimately affected by overpopulation. I don’t know what a sustainable population level is now, but it’s probably much closer to a billion people, or fewer, if we aspire for them to have the kind of living standards and the political circumstances that we enjoy in the West.
Depletion in the future is probably going to manifest most directly through what look like political forces. As countries like the United States and China become dependent on imports to sustain their living standards, which they are already with respect to oil, they will begin to implement political, military, and economic measures to gain control over those assets abroad. And that’s certainly going to bring us into conflict. Diverting resources off to the mechanisms of control will reduce the kind of growth that’s possible domestically. We can argue about how much technology will make new resources available to us, but the key thing to remember is that, generally speaking, technology is to be understood as a way of using fossil energy to secure something. And as our fossil energy resources start to decline, the ability of technology to make evermore abundant resources available is certainly going to go down.
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There are profound differences between what we did and the modeling which has been carried out in support of the IPCC. I respect that effort enormously. I know many of the people involved in trying to model long-term climate change. They are excellent scientists, and they’re doing good work. They have generated much useful new knowledge. But the nature of their analysis is just totally different from what we did. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that the IPCC model starts first with what is politically acceptable, and then tries to trace out its scientific consequences, whereas we looked at what was scientifically known, and then tried to trace out its political consequences.
The IPCC model leaves many things exogenous. To use it you have to specify population growth assumptions, economic GDP level assumptions, and so forth. We worked very hard to make the important determinants of our model endogenous. It means that it evolves over time in response to changes that are occurring within the model. Making the important variables, like population, exogenous saves you a lot of criticism. You can give a bunch of different scenarios, and within that set, almost any politician will find something that they like.
The IPCC scenario is just telling us about climate change, and does not get into other issues. We were trying to provide an overall framework. So, they’re both useful efforts, just totally different
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Energy availability, of course, is not only a matter of physical quantities, but also useful energy. The concept of energy return on investment (EROI) is extremely important, and probably well known to the people who monitor your website. We know that it’s trending down. Charlie Hall, in his pioneering work, has done the best job I’ve seen to calculate what EROI needs to be in order to sustain an economy as complex as ours. We have a ways to go, but it will be the decline of energy return on investment, which is the biggest problem.
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to get back down: to find ways to maneuver the system, in a peaceful, equitable, hopefully fairly liberal way, and bring our demands back down to levels that can be borne by the planet. That’s a totally different question than the one we addressed. It would require a totally different kind of model than the one we built, and a totally different set of books than the ones we wrote...
with these kinds of problems over time, the concern tends to go up, but the discretionary resources tend to go down. And it’s often the case that, by the time policymakers become sufficiently concerned about something to start wondering what to do, they no longer have sufficient discretionary resources to be very effective. And this is all compounded with what I call
the time horizon vicious circle. Because we haven’t taken effective action in the past, crises are mounting. It’s in the nature of the political response that, when crisis comes, you focus more and more on the short term, and your time horizon shrinks. And because that leads you to do things which fundamentally don’t solve the problem, the crisis gets worse. So, as the crisis gets worse, the time horizon shrinks even more, bad decision making increases, and the crisis goes up even further. That’s where I see us now....
If I were trying to start a new momentum for change, it would be on understanding the nature of human perception. Why is it that we tend to focus on the short term and the local, when in fact, the fundamental solutions to these problems are long-term and far away?
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There are two ways we change: socially and biologically. Fundamental genetic change in our species requires 3,000 or 4,000 years. It takes about that long before a constructive mutation can become fairly widespread. Social adaptation can, at least in theory, occur quicker, so the question here is: what are the prospects for our social system to change in ways that are more congruent with the reality? It’s high in theory. In practice, I’m not sure. The dominant issue we face is that the current system is serving the interests of many people very well. ... In the past, change happened rapidly under periods of crisis, not typically during periods of peace and success. As the crises grow we will see what change is available.