[tt] [ExI] Die for Gaia, save the planet?
Eugen Leitl
<eugen at leitl.org> on
Thu Feb 21 07:35:10 UTC 2008
----- Forwarded message from Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> -----
From: Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:16:15 +0100
To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List <wta-talk at transhumanism.org>,
transumanisti <Transumanisti at yahoogroups.com>,
ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: [ExI] Die for Gaia, save the planet?
Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Die for Gaia, save the planet?
The Soylent wing of the Green movement examined
By [1]Tim Worstall $B"*(B [2]More by this author
The enviroloonies seem to have found their way out of the asylum
again: this time to tell us that 70 per cent of Britons should die for
the sake of Gaia. That's not quite the way they put it, of course.
Rather, the Optimum Population Trust (there's a pedantic part of me
that wants to tell them it's Optimal) [3]tells us that the maximum
sustainable population of the UK is 17 million: given that there are
north of 60 million currently, we can only avert the coming End Times
if the extra pop their clogs soonest.
It's not bad for a paper on demography, economics, the environment and
their interactions written by a physicist, that is, a paper written by
someone with no knowledge of any of the three basic disciplines. The
argument rests on two fundamental pieces of illogic.
The first is the use of the Commoner-Ehrlich equation which is that
ecological Impact is equal to Population times Affluence times
Technology or:
I = P x A x T
Paul Ehrlich, you might recall, is the man who in the 60s predicted
hundreds of millions starving in India in the 70s and the US in the
80s. Then in the 70s predicted the same in the 80s and 90s and, in his
latest book, Real Soon Now. The flaw in this equation is that
technology is held to multiply the impact instead of, as is obvious to
even the casual observer, divide it.
If you haven't spotted why yet, consider this. Are we using higher
technology than hunter gatherers? Yes? Good, now, if there were 6
billion hunter gatherers around, would Gaia simply be, as at present,
a bit grumpy, or even worse off? Correct, there wouldn't be any
biosphere at all as that many humans with flints and spears alone
would have eaten every thing on the planet and then each other. As,
indeed, hunter gatherers did with the megafauna of every place they
got to outside Africa, the Aborigines, the Clovis culture in North
America, the Maori in New Zealand and so on. The equation should thus
read:
I = (P x A)/T
For higher technology reduces the environmental impact. The effect of
this upon the logic used in the paper is this. As the paper says,
higher technology and increased affluence increase the pressure on the
environment, and as none of us is prepared to give up the levels of
both which we already have, the only thing we can do to save the
planet is to have fewer people. But getting the equation the right way
around removes this constraint: we can reduce the impact by having
better technology and there's no need to go round slaughtering the
chavs (well, OK, not this reason then). And most importantly, as we'll
see, we can do this by creating technology which has lower carbon
emissions.
The Footprint industry
The second conceptual error is that in their calculation of the
permissible population level they use the concept of ecological
footprints as calculated by [4]Mathis Wackernagel. Now in one way I've
got a lot of time for him: it's not everyone who manages to turn their
Ph.D thesis into a thriving international business, so hats off, well
done sir. On the other hand, that thesis is what is technically known
in serious circles as horse manure. For example, when looking at the
[5]carbon emissions of nuclear power, the calculation is:
Nuclear power, about 4 per cent of global energy use, does not
generate CO[2]. Its footprint is calculated as the area required to
absorb the CO[2] emitted by using the equivalent amount of energy
from fossil fuels.
Mat bubba: over the cycle nuclear does have CO[2] emissions, roughly
the same as hydro or wind, less than half solar and a tiny fraction of
coal. But our ecological footprint idea gets much worse than that. The
essential idea is that we work out how much land a particular activity
requires. Then we work out how many activites and how much of such
there are and then look at how many hectares of land we need to be
able to do all of them. This is what gives us our regular yearly (when
Mathis and his boys release their annual update) cycle of we need
"three more earths" if we're all going to carry on living like this.
Again there's a conceptual error about technology: thinking that the
amount of land we need to do something is static, which it plainly
isn't. We get more food off a hectare now than we did last year, as we
have every year for at least a century (yields have been going up one
per cent a year for at least that long) and so on. But wait, there's
yet more.
Each piece of land is only allowed to count once. The land needed to
recycle CO[2] emissions is somehow different land from that needed to
grow the food: that plants eat CO[2] to turn it into my food gets
missed.
Even given all of this exaggeration the actual end finding of the
ecological footprints calculations is that we've got plenty of land to
do everything except recycle our CO[2] emissions, something which
really isn't all that much of a surprise. We've had thousands of
scientists labouring away for more than a decade to tell us that, they
even wrote a [6]great big report about it. And guess what the result
of that report is? If we can invent a few more bright shiny new
technologies that don't emit carbon then everything is just hunky
dory.
Death cult
In the end this report is just another sad set of scribblings from
people who would appear to have some deeper personal problems. Perhaps
it's the thought of people having sex without a full body condom that
does it, or perhaps they've come over all Fran Liebowitz ("Children
don't smoke enough and I find that they're sticky, perhaps as a result
of not smoking enough") but something is clearly wrong, when we read:
"It follows that if it is not possible to constrain affluence and
technology, then the only parameter left to constrain and reduce is
population."
Their sad misunderstanding about the effects of technology blinds them
to the truth, that by not constraining technology we don't have to
constrain either affluence or population. The late great Julian Simon
once calculated that we had the resources for a permanently growing
economy and population for the next 7 billion years. That might be a
little Panglossian, to be honest, but it's more accurate than the
insistence that there should be fewer, poorer people. ®
[7]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/20/optimum_population_report/
References
1. http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2008/02/20/optimum_population_report/
2. http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Tim%20Worstall
3. http://www.optimumpopulation.org/HowManyPeople.pdf
4. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=whoweare
5. http://assets.panda.org/downloads/lpr2004.pdf
6. http://www.ipcc.ch/
7. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/20/optimum_population_report/
_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
More information about the tt
mailing list