Peak Resources: ecology

Showing posts with label ecology. Show all posts

We are in a double bind. Growing the economy will cause catastrophic climate change and massive biological extinction. But not growing the economy will lead to lots of suffering under the current neoclassical economic structure. Of course, we could chose to change our entire economic system so that its in line with the biophysical reality we live in, i.e. we would have to give up on growing materially and lower our consumption radically but do so in a more orderly and just fashion. But no, we have made no such decision, instead every government on Earth is trying to push its economy to grow further while dabbling in some greenwashing on the side.

Because we, especially the ruling elites, don't like the alternatives we have to choose from in this dilemma we have tried to maintained status quo at any cost. With the consequence of rapidly rising inequalities, failing infrastructures, collapsing ecosystems, climate disruption and failing states. But now this strategy has reached its end game. The global economy which has been stagnating and on life-support by central bankers stimulus for over a decade is starting to fall apart. All the while people around the world are electing unsavory authoritarian leaders “strong men”, that promote heavy extractive practices, due to increasing mistrust of the ruling elite. The latest example being Brazil.

And nowhere in the mainstream media or from elected politicians do we hear about the underlying issues of our current predicament. About how net energy decline restricts growth and forces the economy to contract. The fact that trying to push for further material growth now costs more than it benefits society. Or that it's simply not possible to fuel our current overconsumptive, overpopulated and destructive techno-industrial society with renewable energy. Not to mention the fact that it's not desirable since it would destroy the ecosystems upon which our very survival depends.

Using total factor productivity as an indicator of returns on innovation, Bonaiuti (2018) has shown how industrial nations have gone through three industrial revolutions of which the latest is now coming to an end. After the peak in the 1930s, when global oil and gas EROI hit a peak, productivity decreased until it reached only 0.34% in the period 1973-95. When US oil production peaked and massive privatization and debt accumulation took off to fund further consumption. The third industrial revolution, known as ICT, has not been powerful enough to compensate for the declining returns of the second industrial revolution. This is evidence that advanced capitalist societies such as the US, Europe and Japan have entered a phase of declining marginal returns or involuntary degrowth with detrimental impacts on societies capacity to maintain its institutional framework.

Total Factor Productivity % of the Private Non-Farm Business Sector (1750-2014). Source: Bonaiuti (2018)

Historical estimate of the global EROI of oil. Source: Court and Fizaine (2017)

In other words, fundamental resources are becoming scarce and expensive and we are becoming poorer and cannot afford to maintain or grow our current society so it starts to crumble. This shows up in the economy in terms of increasingly expensive basic resources like food, rising levels of debt, rising income inequality, underinvestment in infrastructure (e.g. health care, education, railways), and higher unemployment etc.

People are experiencing their living standards falling while politicians are telling them everything is just fine as is, or that the issue can be solved by tweaking the system. But this is no longer enough, people are fed up with false promises and incompetent governments. And rightly so, but the thing people don't realise is the fundamental drivers of our current situation and the fact that no matter how much more they exploit and destroy nature will it improve their lives. Actually, the opposite is true, it only undermines their own wellbeing in the long run. Only investments into low-energy infrastructure and restructuring of the entire economy, focusing on increasing social and ecological capital, can lessen people's suffering. Yet people around the world are voting for violent idiots that promises economic growth by aggressive exploitation of the remaining ecosystems that sustain all biological life.

For example, if the new president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has his way the Amazon rainforest will be decimated to give way for unsustainable soy plantations. The biodiverse rich region and home to traditional peoples will be destroyed and the ecosystems capacity to oxygenate the planet and store carbon will be greatly impacted. Bolsonaro also has plans to legalise the use of weapons on a wider scale which will probably lead to further indiscriminate killings of people trying to safeguard the Amazon and promote wide scale illegal logging. This of course will only undermine Brazilians wellbeing but the majority believe the opposite to be true.

Economic decline led by net energy decline doesn't have to result in despotism, although it can. A number of other factors are likely influencing how politics in resource scarce times turns out. Weak institutions, dysfunctional media, high levels of inequality, high population growth, high levels of private debt, a powerful military, and high vulnerability to changes in environment are other generic factors likely playing a role. Other factors tied directly to energy include: high dependency on food imports, government budgets tied to fossil fuel exports, high per capita energy use, and high dependency on energy imports.

There are several measures governments and organisations can take to reduce the risk of a society falling into the hands of a dictator. For example by promoting independent media, investing in low-energy infrastructure, reducing political polarization, strengthening democratic institutions, discouraging inequality, building local food production capacity, decentralising the economic and political system, limiting population growth, and reducing financial instability. In other words, the opposite of what many governments are trying to do currently. So people need to wake up to the realities of our situation and demand change, but such change needs to be guided by the understanding of biophysical realities. Otherwise it is doomed to fail, will only promote further violence and destruction.

Garden of Gods. Credit. John Fowler CC-BY 2.0

Europeans have for the last 30 years lived in their own little bubble of financial scams protected by American hegemony, but that is now imploding by debt deflation and utter disgust with the ruling elite. And while criticising the current neoliberal economic paradigm is one step in the right direction there still seems to be an unwillingness to reflect upon our deeper values, about rights and freedoms, that ultimately led us here.

We live on a finite planet that is now full of people but running low on resources. Our social contracts and economic frameworks developed during a time when the world was less crowded and had plenty of resources. Disregarding biophysical realities is not an option anymore. Therefore one must ask, are those social constructs of ours still valid?

Well, we know that our economic framework certainly is not. There's plenty of evidence to prove that. But how about our ideas about so called “natural” rights?

Social contract theory

The political ideology called liberalism, that we now take for granted, arose from 17th century European ideas about natural rights and social contract theory.

The idea and theory of a social contract gained prominence in Europe when it became one of the leading ways of explaining and delimiting peoples duty of obedience to their government and of their right to resist and overthrow government when it became oppressive. It was an attempt to explore the best form of government and its justifications. What should laws require? When do people have a duty to obey decent government? And when may they justly exercise their right to resist oppressive government?

According to the early formulations of social contract theory citizens may justly exercise their right to resist governments that flagrantly and systematically fails to perform its basic tasks or preserve fundamental rights. And laws are only legitimate when they are generated by the institutions and procedures that are part of the terms of the social contract.

Until the end of the 17th century the social contract was understood in communitarian terms. It was not understood in individualistic terms. The government received its legitimate power in a grant from the community as a whole, not from the the individuals comprising that community. And governments only have legitimate authority when that community consents, through its rightful representatives, to transfer its power to the government. Therefore, the right to resist an oppressive government was only justified by the community as a whole, not individual persons.

But then Thomas Hobbes came along and dropped a bombshell in his famous book Leviathan. He rejected the communitarian aspect of the social contract tradition and claimed that rights belonged to individual persons but that they are at constant war with each other, due to human nature being fundamentally egoistic, and therefore needed to grant power to a strong state that in turn would ensure protection. He believed such a social contract therefore needed to be non-liberal and absolutist-authoritarian.

During the early 19th century the idea of metaphysical natural rights came under attack. Utilitarianist like Bentham rejected the idea that any objective, universal and moral rights possessed by humans in virtue of a common human nature existed. More people agreed with Rousseau's ideas that human nature changed through history. Hume claimed that very few people had actually ever consented to be governed and that it was hard to see how such consent could ever be fairly proved. Furthermore, they argued, that society is much more like an organism which develops without conscious control by its parts than it is like an artificial machine controlled by some outside force. The claim of god given natural rights were believed to have led to bloody wars and revolutions that reigned terror upon Europe and so metaphysical rights and social contract theory were both out of fashion by 1815.

In the Americas, thinkers were slower to reject natural rights and social contract theory than in post-1815 Europe. But by 1861 the idea of natural rights came under scrutiny as it was suspected that the theory had contributed to the South's attempt to secede from the Union and its commitment to states founded on racial slavery. But the doctrine of natural rights continued to be widely popular throughout the period. Many anti-slavery arguments appealed to natural rights. And many pro-slavery arguments did the same, arguing that which legal rights anyone had depended on their natural rights, but slaves were not genuinely human, and so did not have the natural right not to be enslaved!

In Latin America, the idea of natural rights were seen as a obstacle in trying to create a stable government by the 1870s. They rejected the idea in favour for the liberal principles of J.S Mill and Herbert Spencer, as well as those of Auguste Comte´s authoritarian socialism.

The massive and seemingly pointless slaughter of the first world war came to be blamed on the organic theory of the state and society. That blame, along with modernisms distaste for evolutionist models, dethroning Darwin and makine Einstein king of scientific thought, eventually overthrew the organic theory. But utilitarianism continued to predominate in secular moral theory and political thinking, especially after the Great Crash of 1929 when people were sympathetic to socialist and collectivist premises.

But by the 1960s, utilitarianism were overthrown and in the 1970s collectivism was abandoned and replaced by individualism. Natural rights and social contract theory returned to the stage. This was much due to the US unjust war in vietnam killing hundreds of thousands of innocents. People blamed it on deranged utilitarian thought. Unfairly utilitarianism itself was blamed for the US morally corrupt reasoning. And so people turned to Rawls, Nozick and Dworkin's ideas of individual rights trumping collective-utilitarian policies and the Kantian view that governments main duty is to give equal respect to all its citizens.

Modern critique

Given what we know today one must reject the old fashioned ideas of natural rights and social contract that originated from the 17th century and came back to force during the 1960s.

First of all, these ideas came into being in a world that still had plenty of resources and healthy ecosystems to support the population. It was a world were only white men were allowed to take part in discussions, where slavery was rampant, and humans believed themselves to rule over nature.

Our understanding of the world is much better today. We now know that we live in a world that is completely beholden to physical laws such as thermodynamics, conservation of mass, evolution, and diminishing returns of complexity.

We know that there are no such things as objective god given or natural rights, we made them up. We know that people in the past used the claim of natural rights to justify slavery because they didn't want to give up the “free” energy that generated their wealth. Similarly, they didn't recognize that all humans come from a common ancestor and that we are part of the larger animal community. Or that females often chooses the male, not the other way around. Neither did they consider the fact that without healthy ecosystems humans wouldn't survive.

We have to move away from the old reductionist thinking that treats humans and other organisms as isolated parts in a big machinery. We know that the world doesn't work that way. We are part of a whole that interact and feedback on each other. Outcomes are an emergent phenomenon that cannot be derived from studying parts in isolation. Depending on guiding principles, incentive structures, we get different outcomes. Our current incentives tells us to destroy ecosystem for profit so that we can consume even more resources until they run out and we starve. That's simply suicidal.

Moreover, we know that human nature is not just based on selfishness. Humans are capable of both egoistic and altruistic actions but incentives guide them to behave in one way more than the other. It is true in a strict biological sense that humans try to maximize their own and kins net energy in order to survive and thrive but we also know that reciprocity and cooperation has had an evolutionary advantage. By hunting or farming in groups, bigger prey or larger fields can be used to gain a larger energy surplus. Thus being an advantage also to the individual. But a society is much larger than any tribe (say 250 people) and so eventually one cannot rely on personal trust and reciprocity to maintain order. Therefore people invented social constructs like culture and religion to guide human behaviour. Later one, as societies grew ever larger they instituted authorities to oversee that these incentive structures were being followed.

In a full world, there is no room for individual rights over collective outcomes if we wish to avoid mass suffering of both humans and nature. Of course, people will react to this and say “look at all the dictatorships” bla bla etc. But they forget that they will eventually have to kiss their so called “individual rights” goodbye anyway if we continue on the current track. Fossil fuels and other resources are depleting, making us poorer, more unequal and more at risk of death from climate change. Resource limitations often lead to competition, conflict and war. Something we have already started seeing. The neoliberal capitalist ideals born out of the 1960s return to 17th century ideas about natural rights have been an utter failure.

And if we want to talk about rights we must admit that they are made up by humans and can be changed. From an objective perspective, a human has as much right to live as a hedgehog or an oak tree. Either that, or none of us has any rights at all and matters of mass killings or mass extinctions are simply a tragic fate of natural laws.

Charles Blomfield's painting of the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera based on eyewitness accounts

Are we headed for the next succession of financial destruction? It’s been ten years since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 that almost ruined western industrial civilisation. And while rich people in the west, at least mainstream media, seem to have the impression that we now are “back to business” lots of people around the globe are suffering from the reality of limits to growth that struck at the heart of the global economy in 08. Even if more fortunate people, like Swedes, can go on deluding themselves (for a little while) that there’s no problem with our current perverse growth paradigm there are people who don't have that luxury. Just take a look at most of the countries in the Middle East and you will quickly understand how peak oil, water scarcity, food crises, overpopulation and climate change can trigger endless misery and suffering (read Nafeez Ahmeds excellent book on this).

Contrary to the dominant narrative of “progress” I see major systemic crises converging towards the year 2020, or sooner! Are we reaching a major tipping point or simply another wave of entropy entering the system?

The symptoms of this can be found in the global economy itself with the rate of global growth stagnating (i.e. energy and debt limits) and tensions between countries competing for limited resources increasing. We also see it in the political sphere where maniacs with empathy deficit disorder get into power as a response to people's frustrations and start talking about all kinds of warfare: cultural, economic and military. We already see social unrest, conflict and trade wars but also talk about military wars connected to resources, mainly oil. Most societies are already very vulnerable, lack resilience to withstand further shocks, so a global financial meltdown could escalate fairly rapidly into chaos and destruction. When people lose everything, and they don't know why, they tend to get angry and violent. How will the US act? Will they unwind the empire, all military bases etc., or spend every bit of their last resources to plunder the planet? The place is more like an oligarchy so the über rich might decide they want the last of the oil, not for the people but for themselves. Europe is a basket case and is likely to break down, every nation on their own eventually. If a economic collapse doesn't do it, the flood of climate refugees will.

As for Sweden, we will see our massive housing bubble pop and a deep recession meanwhile people fleeing from the middle east will want to immigrate here. With the nationalist and xenophobic party, the Sweden Democrats, now being the third largest party things could turn out to their advantage as people become poorer and are likely to blame immigration issues. Similar to what we see in the rest of Europe. There is, however, a fairly strong left still in play in Sweden and to my surprise they got 10% of the votes in this year's election. So perhaps there is still some balance left in the political system, but without any major blocs the grownups in the government has yet to come to an agreement about how to rule, so maybe not. While they argue about who get what seat the world is on fire, and so it goes with large bureaucratic structures that become incompetent. And so the likelihood of social unrest increases.

As for the UN climate targets last chance of bending the emissions curve, I'm pretty pessimistic. A global financial meltdown will put all those hopes on hold and even if action did occur its likely too late to stop the climate from going above the 2C target. Moreover, what we need is not “green growth” but actual downsizing which would happen when the economy contracts. If we won't voluntarily give up consumption, mother nature will do it for us. But of course, it won't be what most people hoped for, it likely won't be a civilised and peaceful decent.

Will there be a global financial meltdown soon? Somewhere between 2018-2020? Well, I don’t know, but what's certain is that something has to give since we live on a finite planet where endless growth is impossible. There's no negotiating with nature.

A hysteresis window between an environmental condition (heat) and group behavior (degree of infighting) in social spiders as they respond to heat stress. Groups that have been in an agitated state (red) tend to remain agitated, whereas calm groups (blue) tend to remain calm over a common temperature range. Credit: Mesa Schumacher

Complex adaptive systems

We know that there are tipping points in many different complex systems. Although they may be hard to study and exactly define. For example in large systems such as the global economy or climate system. A recent study shows beautifully, in simpler ways, how social animals that lives in communities also have tipping points, before the function of the system changes fundamentally.

In this case the research focused on the communal spider which lay their eggs, spin webs and share their prey in cooperatives colonies, from Massachusetts to Argentina, in relatively cool temperatures. However, only until 31 degrees C, after which they start to attack each other. Suggesting a tipping point where some small perturbation can cause an abrupt and dramatic shift in the behavior of the system.

Reversal is difficult

As ecologists familiar with complex systems all know, once the system crosses the tipping point it will be difficult or perhaps even impossible to return to its previous state even if environmental conditions are reversed. This phenomenon, called hysteresis, implies that a system can have two very different stable states and which state the system is in depends on environmental conditions and its historical dynamics.

Its common that conservation efforts claim that returning to previous environmental conditions in a ecosystem will lead to a recover. However, this is not necessarily true if the system has already crossed a tipping point, in which case you may have to rewind the system to a much earlier set of environmental conditions to drive its recovery. As demonstrated in the studied heat-stressed spiders, turning temperatures down just below 30 degrees C did not alter the behavior of fighting. Not until temperatures dropped down to 28 C degrees did the communal spiders stop fighting again.

Involuntary degrowth and its consequences