The link in the Guardian op-ed piece to the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute is broken. I am dubious about those charts, given the Brooking 1992 piece on Club of Rome linked in post 4. And I see no evidence of imminent food shortages leading to a population crash.
We’ve got a ways to go yet. Still, conservation is a better answer, along with more efficient energy usage. California’s gasoline use has remained constant for a while - not per capita, total - thanks to more efficient vehicles. Owners of sliver Priuses around here have a hard time finding their car in the parking lot, there are so many of them around.
Historically environmental and social problems have not been solved by big engineering projects, they’ve been solved by small ones.
The application of incremental improvements in internal combustion to self-propelled wheeled vehicles created the car, which in turn solved some pretty huge social and environmental problems, rather notably the fact that cities were swimming in horse shit and it was killing people by the thousands (a problem many people assumed was unsolvable.) Nobody swept in and got rid of all the horses in one giant project.
And there will be. The more expensive oil gets, the more people will want things other than oil. The Tesla corporation may be a giant welfare recipient now, but 50 years ago it wouldn’t have even gotten this far, and not far from now it and its inevitable competitors will be riding high.
I’ve never read anything that indicated that an attempt to solve the very real horse poop problem was behind the development of the automobile. However I think we can consider the quite large projects of developing sewer systems and water systems engineering solutions to environmental issues.
More often the social impact is an unexpected result of engineering projects - like that of the interstate highway system.
Tesla is not the only electric car around. I see at leas half a dozen electric cars on my way to and from work, the vast majority not Teslas (though I drive by the Tesla plant.) I think five people in my department have electric cars, and the Volt is being heavily advertised on the radio. This is due to technology - gas prices today are not all that high, historically speaking. 40 years ago, after the oil embargo shock, we didn’t have the technology for practical electric cars.
The perception of high gas prices helps, though.
In a global capitalist system, efficiency leads to more consumption and not conservation. The only thing that will lead to conservation is economic crisis:
And even that won’t be enough. The U.S. has less than 5 pct of the world’s population but has to consume a fifth to a quarter of world oil production to maintain middle class standards. If the rest of the world followed such, we’d need at least one more earth. And a capitalist system leads to that:
And if the economic growth needed to sustain that requires 1-2 pct in oil demand increase per annum, or the equivalent of one Saudi Arabia in new oil every seven years, then we may be a lot closer to major crises than we think.
Finally, more factors are involved. More details in the article I shared above.
It wasn’t. It was, however, one of the little technological moves that eventually eliminated one problem (while, of course, creating others) - just as a thousand advances in engineering and materials development made large scale sewer systems more economically and technically feasible.
Generally speaking, when something is free people tend to use a lot of it.
Emitting CO2 is free. So a lot of the gas is dumped in the atmosphere. Attach a price to it (which can be done via a carbon tax or a tradeable emission permit) and the problem will go away. Not instantly of course (unless the price is set really high). But over time, yeah.
In the Soviet Union, bread was cheap and subsidized. So it got fed to cows. We have the same system for greenhouse gases.
As for Limits to Growth, Nordhaus (1992) summarizes the 1992 iteration of the LtG model as follows: [INDENT]The basic scenario shows that per capita food production peaks in 1994 and then falls by 40 percent over the next three decades; that per capita industrial production peaks around 2010, then declines at about 4 percent annually through the 21st century to a level of about 5 percent of its peak by 2100; and that population goes through a Malthusian crisis, growing rapidly until around 2035, and then declining by over half by the end of the next century. [/INDENT] PDF cite: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/1992%202/1992b_bpea_nordhaus_stavins_weitzman.pdf
Recall that this model of the economy contains no prices: it’s basically an economic model with exponentially growing consumption and fixed ratios on the supply side.
Anyway, per capita food consumption didn’t peak in 1994. Industrial production took a dive in 2008-2009, then continued growing. That’s a different pattern than predicted by the Club of Rome: they thought industrial production would peak then go into a relentless decline. Which isn’t surprising since one is related to a demand-related recession, while the other is driven by a supply catastrophe.
If food was growing scarce we’d expect to see skyrocketing prices. We aren’t. Ditto for industrial output.
Hey, the world might be coming to an end. I’m just saying that Limits to Growth doesn’t help us understand that in any way.
What does the Club of Rome recommend? It’s pretty wild stuff: check out pages 7-8 of the Brookings piece. I quote Nordhaus quoting Limits II: [INDENT][The scenario] shows a simulated world. … with a definition of “enough.” This world has decided to aim for an average industrial output per capita of $350 per
person per year-about the equivalent of that in South Korea,or twice the level of Brazil in 1990… If this hypothetical society could also reduce military expenditures and corruption,a stabilized economy with an industrial output per capita of $350 would be equivalent in material comforts to the average level in Europe in 1990.[/INDENT] That’s awesome. South Korea had an income of $7190 in 1990, not $350. The poorest country in Europe had a per capita income of $8000. Those are third world levels of consumption they were driving towards: Nordhaus notes that to purchase a copy of their book would require one month’s wages: “The LTG prescription would save the planet at the expense of its inhabitants.”
I trust however that if the economist William Nordhaus designed a particle physics model, that the results would be comparably embarrassing.
To summarize, the reduction in gasoline use is 77% due to reduction of miles driven. The cause for that? The author has friends who are insurance actuaries who say kids are unemployed and so don’t drive. Kind of weak on the cite there.
No mention is made of increased use of public transit, car pools, and, probably very significant, the increasing urbanization of the population. Near where I work in Silicon Valley there is a massive building of apartments and condos close to offices and close to light rail.
The recession of course also reduced miles driven, but the trend seems to have continued well into the recovery.
I don’t know the reference to food production and industrial output per capita peaking by 1994 and 2010 respectively. Is it “World Model with Stabilized Population and Capital”?
The one used for Turner’s study is “World Model Standard Run.”
Yes Nordhaus’ 1990s article in Brookings Papers covers the more recent work, the one with an updated model.
Frankly, I have some difficulty trusting the tables in Turner without having access to the 1972 work. To be clear I’m suspecting cherry picking and whitewashing, not outright fabrication. I suppose I could try to dig up Nordhaus’ takedown of the original, penned during the 1970s. Or if the original 1972 book or a paper based on it is available online, I could look at that. I couldn’t find anything useful at the Club of Rome website.
I stress that I advocate a vigorous scientific approach regarding global climactic change and corresponding curbs on greenhouse gases. I’m just unimpressed by a model that assumes exponential growth in demand and population, but no substitution of inputs or the possibility of certain kinds of technological change. I’ve read theoretic treatments that show catastrophe hinging on the value of certain technological parameters. They note that we have little idea what those values are. That’s a concern. But Limits doesn’t help us discuss such issues.
Accentuating the positive, here’s a book on climate change by authors with a deep understanding of environmental policy and risk. Admittedly I’ve only read the book reviews. Here’s one, found via search engine: Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet.
I checked the '72 book. It’s the World Model Standard Run.
Also, the book looks at the points that you gave, which is why it contains several runs: resources “unlimited,” that plus pollution controls, those plus birth control, etc.