Economy, Energy & Enviromental crises

[LadyDeliah]

This is a really interesting presentation by Chris Martenson about the problems of the economy that are linked to the energy and environmental issues we are facing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WBiTnBwSWc

Really interesting for nerds like me who like data and a scientific analysis.

[Huguenot]

The only thing that worries me about these 'problems' are the artificial hurdles placed by fundamentalists who prevent solutions being enacted.

The principal crisis with environment is food - whilst society is perfectly capable of dealing with the infrastructure costs of wayward weather, it can't if it's not eating.

The solution to the food crisis is genetic modification: a solution currently blocked by fundamentalists who see science as unnatural, and hark back to a fictional agrarian earthly paradise as the answer (an approach that cannot possibly feed 9 billion people).

Similarly the answers with energy already sit before in nuclear power: a solution currently crippled by fundamentalists who see confuse their own lack of comfort with a flaw in the technology. They wallow in terror of the hundreds who have suffered at the hands of nuclear power, but are blind to the billions that suffer as a result of fossil fuels.

The economy is a red herring: obsessions with 'debt' are ridiculous tubs for year one fundamentalists to beat for people who don't feel they have the opportunities they desire.

Currency is a means to the exchange of goods and services, nothing else. The death of currency will be as long and painless as its introduction. The alternative probably sits in front of us now in simple forms of local barter.

They best approach to this would be to stop equating 'change' with 'disaster' and 'unknown' with 'non-existence'.

Fundamentalists need to be sidelined to their daft nostalgic fantasies of some Hobbit idyll, and allow brilliant people to do their job.

[LadyDeliah]

I like the fact you have put some analysis into your answer Hugo, even though I disagree with your solutions, but I think labelling people who hold a different view to you as extremists and fundamentalists is unhelpful in any discussion.

[Huguenot]

Sorry, I wasn't implying that everyone who disagrees with me is a fundamentalist - I was saying it's the fundamentalists who are the problem.

I don't object to anxiety about GM food - but it's only the dogmatic fundamentalists who cannot accept that genetic modification is indistinguishable from 15,000 years of selective breeding.

GM has it's problems - and a significant part of that is patent. We cannot allow Monsanto or individual nation states to control the world's food supply.

Nuclear has its problems, but it takes a fundamentalist to elevate this to a dogmatic religious superstition that denies the world a vital energy supply - especially given the catastrophic alternatives. I still can't believe the psychopaths who recommend a wholesale reduction in the earth's population - what exactly do they think they are proposing?

Debt is just a pointless complaint - my parents took out a mortgage of ?6,000 in the 70s on the house I grew up in - it was more money than they could imagine, nor could they sensibly expect to pay it off within the the bounds of their imagination. Nowadays ?600,000 is the same thing for people at the same life stage and in 50 years time it will be ?6,000,000. Inflation kills debt.

Economists know that - it takes a fundamentalist to freeze like a rabbit in the headlights when they perceive it.

[LadyDeliah]

Sorry Hugo, I've been too busy to give you a reasoned reply, but I'll get round to it eventually!

[DaveR]

From a Sense about Science page, referenced in another thread:

"First of all, we need to realize that polarized "us versus them" debates in agriculture are harmful, and distract us from solving bigger food and environment problems. The debates about organic and GM crops are something of a sideshow anyway, since only 1% of the world's food is certified organic, and only 10% is GM. So 90% of the world's food is *neither* organic nor GM. Let's focus on solving the bigger problems, like how we can get more healthy food with less environmental and social harm across *all* of our agricultural systems. And let's shift our approach of labelling with arbitrary names (e.g. "organic" or "local") to labels that indicate performance (e.g. what nutrition is being delivered, and how many resources/what environmental impact it took to produce it?)"

This applies to almost every serious area of public debate that has some hard science or proper data analysis underlying it. Suggesting that there is a simple answer based on a catchy slogan almost inevitably means that you are wilfully ignoring the truth.

[right-clicking]

DaveR to quote you " And let's shift our approach of labelling with arbitrary names (e.g. "organic" or "local") to labels that indicate performance (e.g. what nutrition is being delivered, and how many resources/what environmental impact it took to produce it?)"

Surely Local would would fall into that criteria? Flying in some sugar snap peas from Kenya would have some environmental impact!!

Plus not to forget that we are actually importing water (80/90% of fruit and veg ) from nations that can ill-afford to loose it, Only our wealth enables us to afford what the exporting nations cannot, effectively stealing the food from the poor.

[LondonMix]

Local captures absolutely none of these concepts. Production techniques often have a more significant impact than the distance produce has to be shipped on the overall environmental resources used.

There was a pretty decent discussion of all of this on another EDF thread recently (particularly towards the latter end of the posts) with several good links to academic articles and interviews with prominent researchers focused on these issues.

http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?20,1028216

[Huguenot]

I get confused about the cultural vacuum surrounding 'water exports'.

If you don't want to take agricultural products from Kenya (which they exchange for things like spanners and cars) what exactly do you propose they do for a living?

[david_carnell]

Hueguenot - there is a delicate balance to be struck between supporting British farmers, supporting farmers in the 3rd world and ensuring neither the farmers in the 3rd world or the land they are farming is being unsustainably exploited. See for eg cotton in Aral valley or sugar in Cambodia. Both are things unable to be grown in Britain (with the exception of sugar beet, also phenomenally environmentally unfriendly) and so can be used to help developing economies but in fact merely contirbute to further environmental degredation (Aral Sea) or see native subsistence farmers evicted from their lands by governments selling to multinational sugar conglomerates (Cambodia).

There is also a vicious irony in importing food from nations where they often struggle to feed their own population.

[Huguenot]

Well those are different issues altogether.

[DaveR]

"DaveR to quote you...."

It's not my quote - it's a quote from the debate between food/environmental scientists that I reproduced. Those scientists said that using 'local' as a label is less helpful than carrying out a proper analysis of resource input vs nutritional output. That seems sensible to me. You seem to disagree, backed up by some vague example of sugar snap peas from Kenya. I'm not persuaded.

And this:

"Only our wealth enables us to afford what the exporting nations cannot, effectively stealing the food from the poor."

is rubbish. In pure economic terms, poor countries moving from subsistence farming to cash crops for export means an increase in national income. How that additional income is distributed, and other impacts that the change might have make it too simplistic to see that as an inherently desirable thing, but again, emotive nonsense is no substitute for rational analysis.

[kanecarter]

The distant future is quite bright, literally. About 90 petawatts of solar energy reaches the surface of the Earth and our current total global energy consumption from all sources is a mere 15 Terawatts, a miniscule fraction of what's available from the Sun. The record efficiency for photovoltaics is now 42.8% with 65% on the horizon and photovoltaics are also coming down in price, compare this to photosynthesis which is the source of all bio and fossil fuels where most plants barely eek out 1% efficiency and the theoretical maximum efficiency of photosynthesis is just 6.6%. Of course, leaves literally grows on trees.

The problem will be the cost of changing over to a more sane and sustainable way of using solar energy then our limited fossil reserves. Fossil fuels are literally as inexpensive as opening a tap, nature has done all the hard work over millions of years. Unfortunately, there will be great economic upheaval before we can reach the clean solar future that is already technically feasible, we'll probably will have to run out of cheap fossil reserves with al the economic problems of doing so before people will invest seriously in a solar future. It would take exceptional leadership to soften the transition by encouraging investment now. The recent oil price collapse from $150 a barrel to $50 a barrel didn't help matters as the current generation of business investors now know they can easily loose their shirts if they are betting on high oil prices, the same thing happened in 1986 when oil prices collapsed to $12 a barrel and it took from then till now for a generation of managers oblivious to oil price collapses before major investments occurred and now we'll probably have to wait another 30 years.

Our children's children may be fine but some of us are going to go broke in between.

[BrandNewGuy]

kanecarter Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> The recent oil price

> collapse from $150 a barrel to $50 a barrel didn't

> help matters as the current generation of business

> investors now know they can easily loose their

> shirts if they are betting on high oil prices, the

> same thing happened in 1986 when oil prices

> collapsed to $12 a barrel and it took from then

> till now for a generation of managers oblivious to

> oil price collapses before major investments

> occurred and now we'll probably have to wait

> another 30 years.

Eh? The price of oil has been over $100 a barrel for two years now. Apart from the 2008-2009 dip (due to the massive contraction in economic activity post-credit crash), the price of oil has been rising steadily for over ten years.