Category: Limits

There's just enough time

In response to the question, “is there still time for a transition to sustainability,” John Sterman cited Donella Meadows,

The truth of the matter is that no one knows.

We have said many times that the world faces not a preordained future, but a choice. The choice is between different mental models, which lead logically to different scenarios. One mental model says that this world for all practical purposes has no limits. Choosing that mental model will encourage extractive business as usual and take the human economy even farther beyond the limits. The result will be collapse.

Another mental model says that the limits are real and close, and that there is not enough time, and that people cannot be moderate or responsible or compassionate. At least not in time. That model is self-fulfilling. If the world’s people choose to believe it, they will be proven right. The result will be collapse.

A third mental model says that the limits are real and close and in some cases below our current levels of throughput. But there is just enough time, with no time to waste. There is just enough energy, enough material, enough money, enough environmental resilience, and enough human virtue to bring about a planned reduction in the ecological footprint of humankind: a sustainabil­ity revolution to a much better world for the vast majority.

That third scenario might very well be wrong. But the evidence we have seen, from world data to global computer models, suggests that it could conceivably be made right. There is no way of knowing for sure, other than to try it.

Global modeling & C-ROADS

At the 2013 ISDC, John Sterman, Drew Jones and I presented a plenary talk on Global Models from Malthus to C-ROADS and Beyond. Our slides are in SDS 2013 Global Models Sterman Fid Jones.pdf and my middle section, annotated, is in SDS 2013 Global+ v12 TF excerpt.pdf.

There wasn’t actually much time to get into Malthus, but one thing struck me as I was reading his Essay on the Principle of Population. He identified the debate over limits as a paradigm conflict:

It has been said that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from the wished-for goal.

Yet, anxiously as every friend of mankind must look forwards to the termination of this painful suspense, and eagerly as the inquiring mind would hail every ray of light that might assist its view into futurity, it is much to be lamented that the writers on each side of this momentous question still keep far aloof from each other. Their mutual arguments do not meet with a candid examination. The question is not brought to rest on fewer points, and even in theory scarcely seems to be approaching to a decision.

The advocate for the present order of things is apt to treat the sect of speculative philosophers either as a set of artful and designing knaves who preach up ardent benevolence and draw captivating pictures of a happier state of society only the better to enable them to destroy the present establishments and to forward their own deep-laid schemes of ambition, or as wild and mad-headed enthusiasts whose silly speculations and absurd paradoxes are not worthy the attention of any reasonable man.

The advocate for the perfectibility of man, and of society, retorts on the defender of establishments a more than equal contempt. He brands him as the slave of the most miserable and narrow prejudices; or as the defender of the abuses of civil society only because he profits by them. He paints him either as a character who prostitutes his understanding to his interest, or as one whose powers of mind are not of a size to grasp any thing great and noble, who cannot see above five yards before him, and who must therefore be utterly unable to take in the views of the enlightened benefactor of mankind.

In this unamicable contest the cause of truth cannot but suffer. The really good arguments on each side of the question are not allowed to have their proper weight. Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.

Not much has changed in 200 years.

While much of the criticism of Limits to Growth remains completely spurious, and even its serious critics mostly failed to recognize that Limits discussed growth in material rather than economic/technological terms, I think the SD field missed some opportunities for learning and constructive dialog amid all the furor.

For example, one of the bitterest critics of Limits, William Nordhaus, wrote in 1974,

Economists have for the most part ridiculed the new view of growth, arguing that it is merely Chicken Little Run Wild. I think that the new view of growth must be taken seriously and analyzed carefully.

And he has, at least from the lens of the economic paradigm.

There are also legitimate technical critiques of the World3 model, as in Wil Thissen’s thesis, later published in IEEE Transactions, that have never been properly integrated into global modeling.

Through this failure to communicate, we find ourselves forty years down the road, without a sufficiently improved global model that permits exploration of both sides of the debate. Do exponential growth, finite limits, delays, and erosion of carrying capacity yield persistent overshoot and collapse, or will technology take care of the problem by itself?

Do social negative feedbacks achieve smooth adjustment?

I’m rereading some of the history of global modeling, in preparation for the SD conference.

From Models of Doom, the Sussex critique of Limits to Growth:

Marie Jahoda, Chapter 14, Postscript on Social Change

The point is … to highlight a conception of man in world dynamics which seems to have led in all areas considered to an underestimation of negative feedback loops that bend the imaginary exponential growth curves to gentler slopes than “overshoot and collapse”. … Man’s fate is shaped not only by what happens to him but also by what he does, and he acts not just when faced with catastrophe but daily and continuously.

Meadows, Meadows, Randers & Behrens, A Response to Sussex:

The Sussex group confuses the numerical properties of our preliminary World models with the basic dynamic attributes of the world system described in the Limits to Growth. We suggest that exponential growth, physical limits, long adaptive delays, and inherent instability are obvious, general attributes of the present global system.

Who’s right?

I think we could all agree that the US housing market is vastly simpler than the world. It lies within a single political jurisdiction. Most of its value is private rather than a public good. It is fairly well observed, dense with negative feedbacks like price and supply/demand balance, and unfolds on a time scale that is meaningful to individuals. Delays like the pipeline of houses under construction are fairly salient. Do these benign properties “bend the imaginary exponential growth curves to gentler slopes than ‘overshoot and collapse'”?

Kansas legislators fleece their grandchildren

File under “this would be funny if it weren’t frightening.”

HOUSE BILL No. 2366

By Committee on Energy and Environment

(a) No public funds may be used, either directly or indirectly, to promote, support, mandate, require, order, incentivize, advocate, plan for, participate in or implement sustainable development.

(2) “sustainable development” means a mode of human development in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come, but not to include the idea, principle or practice of conservation or conservationism.

Surely it’s not the “resource use aims to meet human needs” part that the authors find objectionable, so it must be the “preserving the environment so that these needs can be met … for generations to come” that they reject. The courts are going to have a ball developing a legal test separating that from conservation. I guess they’ll have to draw a line that distinguishes “present” from “generations to come” and declares that conservation is for something other than the future. Presumably this means that Kansas must immediately abandon all environment and resource projects with a payback time of more than a year or so.

But why stop with environment and resource projects? Kansas could simply set its discount rate for public projects to 100%, thereby terminating all but the most “present” of its investments in infrastructure, education, R&D and other power grabs by generations to come.

Another amusing contradiction:

(b) Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the use of public funds outside the context of sustainable development: (1) For planning the use, development or extension of public services or resources; (2) to support, promote, advocate for, plan for, enforce, use, teach, participate in or implement the ideas, principles or practices of planning, conservation, conservationism, fiscal responsibility, free market capitalism, limited government, federalism, national and state sovereignty, individual freedom and liberty, individual responsibility or the protection of personal property rights;

So, what happens if Kansas decides to pursue conservation the libertarian way, by allocating resource property rights to create markets that are now missing? Is that sustainable development, or promotion of free market capitalism? More fun for the courts.

Perhaps this is all just a misguided attempt to make the Montana legislature look sane by comparison.

h/t Bloomberg via George Richardson

Zombies in Great Falls and the SRLI

The undead are rising from their graves to attack the living in Montana, and people are still using the Static Reserve Life Index.

http://youtu.be/c7pNAhENBV4

The SRLI calculates the expected lifetime of reserves based on constant usage rate, as life=reserves/production. For optimistic gas reserves and resources of about 2200 Tcf (double the USGS estimate), and consumption of 24 Tcf/year (gross production is a bit more than that), the SRLI is about 90 years – hence claims of 100 years of gas.

How much natural gas does the United States have and how long will it last?

EIA estimates that there are 2,203 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas that is technically recoverable in the United States. At the rate of U.S. natural gas consumption in 2011 of about 24 Tcf per year, 2,203 Tcf of natural gas is enough to last about 92 years.

Notice the conflation of SRLI as indicator with a prediction of the actual resource trajectory. The problem is that constant usage is a stupid assumption. Whenever you see someone citing a long SRLI, you can be sure that a pitch to increase consumption is not far behind. Use gas to substitute for oil in transportation or coal in electricity generation!

Substitution is fine, but increasing use means that the actual dynamic trajectory of the resource will show greatly accelerated depletion. For logistic growth in exploitation of the resource remaining, and a 10-year depletion trajectory for fields, the future must hold something like the following:

That’s production below today’s levels in less than 50 years. Naturally, faster growth now means less production later. Even with a hypothetical further doubling of resources (4400 Tcf, SRLI = 180 years), production growth would exhaust resources in well under 100 years. My guess is that “peak gas” is already on the horizon within the lifetime of long-lived capital like power plants.

Limits to Growth actually devoted a whole section to the silliness of the SRLI, but that was widely misinterpreted as a prediction of resource exhaustion by the turn of the century. So, the SRLI lives on, feasting on the brains of the unwary.

What a real breakthrough might look like

It’s possible that a techno fix will stave off global limits indefinitely, in a Star Trek future scenario. I think it’s a bad idea to rely on it, because there’s no backup plan.

But it’s equally naive to think that we can return to some kind of low-tech golden age. There are too many people to feed and house, and those bygone eras look pretty ugly when you peer under the mask.

But this is a false dichotomy.

Some techno/growth enthusiasts talk about sustainability as if it consisted entirely of atavistic agrarian aspirations. But what a lot of sustainability advocates are after, myself included, is a high-tech future that operates within certain material limits (planetary boundaries, if you will) before those limits enforce themselves in nastier ways. That’s not really too hard to imagine; we already have a high tech economy that operates within limits like the laws of motion and gravity. Gravity takes care of itself, because it’s instantaneous. Stock pollutants and resources don’t, because consequences are remote in time and space from actions; hence the need for coordination. Continue reading “What a real breakthrough might look like”

The neo-cornucopians, live from planet Deepwater Horizon

On the heels of the 40th anniversary of Limits to Growth, the Breakthrough crowd is still pushing a technical miracle, just around the corner. Their latest editorial paints sustainability advocates as the bad guys:

Stop and think for a moment about the basic elements of the planetary boundaries hypothesis: apocalyptic fears of the future, a professed desire to return to an earlier state of nature, hypocrisy about wealth, appeals to higher authorities. These are the qualities of our worst religions, not our best scientific theories.

Who are these straw dog greenies, getting rich and ruling the world? Anyway, I thought the planetary boundaries were about biogeophysical systems, appealing to “higher authority” in that the laws of physics apply to civilizations too. Ted Nordhaus doesn’t believe it though:

To be sure, there are tipping points in nature, including in the climate system, but there is no way for scientists to identify fixed boundaries beyond which point human civilization becomes unsustainable for the simple reason that there are no fixed boundaries.

The Breakthrough prescription for the ills of growth is more growth: Continue reading “The neo-cornucopians, live from planet Deepwater Horizon”

Fight or flight in resource modeling

A nice reflection on modeling in emotionally charged situations, from Drew Jones, Don Seville & Donella Meadows, Resource Sustainability in Commodity Systems: The Sawmill Industry in the Northern Forest:

Through the workshops and discussions about the forest economy, we also learned that even raising questions of growth and limits can trigger strong defensive routines …, both at the individual level and the organizational level, that make it difficult even to remain engaged in thinking about ecological limits and, therefore, taking any action. Managing these complex process challenges effectively was essential to using systems modeling to help people move towards well-reasoned action or inaction.

… We were presenting our base run to a group of mill executives and landowners from five different companies. During the walk-through of the base-run behavior of mill capacity (which begins to contract severely several decades in the future) we found that a few participants quickly dismissed that possibility, saying, ‘‘Sawmill capacity in this region will never shrink like that,’’ and aggressively pressing us on what factors we had included so that (we presume) they could uncover something missing or incorrect and dismiss the findings. Their body language and tone of voice led us to believe the participants were angry and emotionally charged.

… we came to identify a recurring set of defensive routines, that is, both emotionally laden reflexive responses to seeing the graphs of overshoot in which participants did not connect their critique to an underlying structural theory, or simply disengaged from thinking about the questions at hand. … When we encountered these reactions, we found ourselves torn between avoiding the conflict (the ‘‘flight’’ reaction; modifying our story to fit within their pre-existing assumptions, de-emphasizing the behavior of the model and switching to interview mode, talking about the systems methodology rather than implications of this particular model) or by pushing harder on our own viewpoint (the ‘‘fight’’ reaction; explaining why our assumptions are right, defending the logic behind our model). Neither of these responses was effective.

Back to the presentation to the industry group. During a break, after we had just survived the morning’s tensions and had struggled to avoid ‘‘fight or flight,’’ Dana [Meadows] walked up to us, smiling, and said, ‘‘Isn’t this going great?’’ ‘‘What?!?,’’ we thought.

‘‘The main purpose of our modeling,’’ she said ‘‘is to bring people to this moment—the moment of discomfort, of cognitive dissonance, where they can begin to see how current ways of thinking and their deeply held beliefs are not working anymore, how they are creating a future that they don’t want. The key as a modeler who triggers denial or apathy is to bring the group to this moment, and then just breathe. Hold us there for as long as possible. Don’t fight back. Don’t qualify your conclusions about what structures create what behaviors. State them clearly, and then just hold on.’’

Tim Jackson on the horns of the growth dilemma

I just ran across a nice talk by Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth, on BigIdeas. It’s hard to summarize such a wide-ranging talk, but I’d call it a synthesis of the physical (planetary boundaries and exponential growth) and the behavioral (what is the economy for, how does it influence our choices, and how can we change it?). The horns of the dilemma are that growth can’t go on forever, yet we don’t know how to run an economy that doesn’t grow. (This of course begs the question, “growth of what?” – where the what is a mix of material and non-material things – a distinction that lies at the heart of many communication failures around the Limits to Growth debate.)

There’s an article covering the talk at ABC.au, but it’s really worth a listen at http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/07/bia_20100704_1705.mp3