Nothing is Sustainable

Absolutely on the button. Brilliant as ever, Willis.

There is a difference between sustainable development and “Sustainable Development” (note the capitalization). One is the concept of doing things in such a manner as to be considerate of your neighbors and future generations. The other is a mechanism by which governments abdicate their representative responsibility and allow their planning boards, zoning commissions, and environmental agencies to be run by policy set by the UN. “Sustainable Development” as set forth in Agenda 21 of the Rio conference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21
and includes such concepts as the “Precautionary Principal” where something must only be a “plausible” threat to the environment and scientific uncertainty is not to be a factor in limiting action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
We have zoning compliance boards now throwing people out of their homes in LA county in the name of Sustainable Development. It works kind of like this:
You develop high density “affordable housing” along transportation corridors. Then you start making it unaffordable to live in rural areas or to live “off grid” by mandating that you must be connected to the grid and you must be connected to a municipal water supply of that your water supply meet the same standards as a municipal water supply. In other words, they make it unaffordable but anyone other than the very rich to live in rural areas. The poor are “stacked and packed” into “high density” housing while low density areas are condemned as “under utilized” and people are forced to move out.
But more importantly, national governments, states, and localities are encouraged to “internationalize” their policies. This means they are encouraged to go lock-step with UN policy recommendations such as the UNFCCC recommendations. This means that a group of unelected bureaucrats who are for the most part appointed by third world despots get to dictate policy directly to the local level without anyone who is an elected representative of the people being involved anywhere in the process. And they do this under the Orwellian name of “Sustainable Development” knowing that anyone who opposes it will be accused of wanting “unsustainable development”.
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/index.shtml?utm_source=OldRedirect&utm_medium=redirect&utm_content=dsd&utm_campaign=OldRedirect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_development
So basically, some political crony of the President of Bolivia gets to set zoning standards for people living in South Carolina.
It is complete freaking crazy and the first thing we need to do after this next election is to extract ourselves from the Rio treaty.

Willis: Yup. The old Marxist five-year-plan drone, dressed up in sheep’s clothing. (Fill in appropriate socioeconomic construct) will be (fill in postulated better condition) in the future, if we (engage in such-and-such process) today. Which guarantees that none of it will happen.

Famine has been a traditoinal delimiter for economic and cultural sustainability. Another has been neglect of the aged, neglect of the infirm,, and the selling of children when the limits of sustainability have been reached. Of course, The latest Lotus Eaters, of course, are contemplating nothing less than the establishment of the Rule of the Airmen, where the limits of Sustainability is found within their own boredom with Paradise

This is the first time that I have seen anyone tackle the subject of what is meant by “sustainable development”. I have some theories about what it can partially mean based upon some of the architectural practices here in Canberra.
Another one that really irks me is the use of “ethical”…. e.g. “ethical insurance” where the ad reads like an advert for being a watermelon. It is also used by small farmers who are making their own wool etc. Or “fair trade”, which used to have one kind of meaning but now seems to mean something else.
I had not thought about what is meant by “sustainable development” except that it seemed to be aimed at the coal miners, or other minerals mining. Yet the truth is that if it boils down to farming that it should refer to leaving one field fallow every year!!!

You are thinking too narrowly, Willis. Sustainable development is bigger than leaving some in the ground for the kids
Sustainable development is working the land so that it becomes increasingly productive. It is using iron ore, nickel and cadmium (to use your examples) to build to go to the stars to get more — and that is exactly what the best of the breed are doing.
Viewed that way your quote from the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report makes sense:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

It does not mean Stop!

Back in time when the atmosphere was all CO2 and no oxygen, life forms evolved which photosynthesized CO2 to oxygen. Was that sustainable development? No way! They would sure experience peak CO2 and then all die out if enough non-photosynthesizing organisms hadn’t evolved right in time when they were needed.
Even life itself is not about sustaining. It’s about evolution.

See Agenda 21.
“generally, more highly educated people, who have higher incomes, consume more resources than poorly educated people, who tend to have lower incomes. In this case, more education increases the threat to sustainability”

Can you believe these people?

Willis, if you have a cell phone with a NiCd battery, you’re really a “sustainable guy” reusing obsolete technology 😉 (All modern ones – AFAIK – have lithium-based batteries these days)

Excellent ‘Back to Basics’ post which all of these dreamers should read.
The developing world is held in limbo at present by these fools who are denying the needy the resources to help themselves. On a recent visit to India my wife discovered that the best thing to give the poverty stricken children in rural villages was not sweets but a pencil and writing book which was immediately taken with thanks and used to help writing practice. It would appear that education is not free in India as it was when we left in 1948. If the West does nothing else we must make sure that education is free in the developing world.
Knowledge is everything.

Sustainability is one of those flexi-terms that bends and twists to suit the user’s wishes. It’s also the poisoned rapier of choice for the watermelons. As w. notes, the term “unsustainable” can be used to condemn any kind of productive activity. But the “sustainable” alternatives are all illusion and selective accounting.
The greatest real force for maximum return on any resource is efficiency.

Is this to argue for de-population?

I’m disappointed to see this from you, Willis. I thought you were a clearer thinker. You confuse sustainable with infinite. Have you been reading the Bulletin of Atomic Energy recently, perhaps? They ran a very similar, though more pointed, op-ed a few weeks ago.
You confuse materials with consumables. When you mine that iron ore for that shovel, what you want is iron. You take four kilograms of that iron and turn it into a shovel. You use the shovel for twenty years and at the end… you still have four kilograms of iron. Even if some of it has rusted, that oxide is still convertible back to iron, given the right process and enough energy.
Oil and gas are fundamentally different. When you extract oil and gas, what you want is the energy potential in their chemical bonds. Once you’ve used that energy, you can’t get it back. Of course the energy is still there, but you can’t put it back into a useful, high-density form without expending more energy than you’d usefully recover – that’s called the second law of thermodynamics, and from it derives the Carnot limit.
Shovels are sustainable, because after you use it, you’ve still got one. Oil and gas are unsustainable because after you use them you’ve got something else less useful instead. Is the distinction that hard?
And, to poke about with a stick a bit, windmills are sustainable, because after their 20-year life you’ve still got all the materials you used to build them. Neodynium is not infinite, but it is reusable. Oil is not infinite, and it is not reusable (as an energy source, at any rate).

Undefinable Buzz-Words and Catch-Phrases eventually lose their meaning; if you know what I mean.

Espen, is spodumene sustainable?

Why have we been able to mine one of the scarcest metals for some 7000 years and still we’re not running low?
What is found in jewelry, computers, cellphones, stereo/home cinema, cars, … and even some bathrooms, is gold. Most seem to end up in bank vaults, but still the supply keep coming with the demand.
Enter oil and people shrieks about running out of oil. Yet, apparently, by ODAC’s numbers, we’ve only used less than 0.0005 percent of cubic kilometers of oil compared to the Greenland ice sheet, since 1850. Paint that little speck on a world map and you get a visual representation of how little man is, no matter the hubris sized ego of the alarmist.
If we even out the climate, make it more cozy like, won’t we suffer wind depravation? :p

As has been pointed out already, North Korea is a shining example of “sustainable development”.
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In order to give future generations a good future we should concentrate on building up our stores of wealth, technology and knowledge. Of course we should try to be efficient and not waste resources, but on the other hand we shouldn’t be obsessed by it. As wealth and knowledge increases, new resources will be unlocked. By the end of this century mankind may be capable of unlocking the almost limitless mineral resources of the asteroids. And by that ime we will almost certainly have an almost limitless and clean energy source: fusion.
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But mankind is faced by a very real danger right now: if the global warming delusion continues unchecked then the lights will go out and North Korea will represent our future. I think that’s worth fighting against, don’t you?
Chris

Sustainable forestry is possible. So is sustainable farming. You get the plants and animals to reproduce and replace themselves. Using a finite and irreplaceable resource until it is all gone, is not sustainable.

Some lovely ‘sustainable’ quotes:
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
– Maurice Strong, 1972’s Rio Earth Summit
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
– Pr Maurice King
and do not forget the always funny Club of Rome:
“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
– Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
“In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a ‘master plan’ is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

Alleagra, if you seriously mean the amount of iron on the planet, then your answer is about 10^24 spades. However much of that iron is in the core, and thus probably inaccessible.

I said something similar a couple of years ago…
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2998

A very thought provoking post – Thank you.

Many years ago when studying political theory, our class was required to write an essay on our obligations to future generations. My hypotesis was essentialy this; there are two classes of resource – renewable and non-renewable. Any use of non-renewable resources will ultimately lead to a loss of those resources at some point in the future, thus depriving a future generation of that resource. No single fututre generation can be said to have a greater claim to non-renewables than any other, or this one, therefore there can be no absolute moral/ehtical limitation vis a vis future generations on our use of non-renewable resources. Renwable resources by definition have an (for all practical purposes) indefinite fututre utility. this being the case, we have an obligation not to use renewable resources in such a way as to degrade them or otherwise render them unavailable to fututre generations. In addition, our use of non-renewables must not impinge on the future viablitiy of renewables.
It’s not a complete argument in itself, but I think it’s still a good place to start thinking about the subject

When the term “sustainable” agriculture was new and intriguing to me, it became apparent that if followed to it’s logical end, the movement’s advocates were really making a call for a return to a hunter- gatherer society, with emphasis on the ‘gatherer’.

Willis,
You missed one. Wind, Sun, Rainbows, Unicorns. The last consume no food and produce fuel grade poop.

On social and cultural sustainability, these very ideas seem wrong. Unless there is some dead hand blocking their development, society and culture are both in constant flux. To try and make anything sustainable in terms of society or culture would therefore require stopping society and culture changing, which is a totalitarian or arch-conservative instinct.
Interestingly though, it does appear to be the underlying logic behind much ‘environmentalism’ – that society must be frozen in a perfect state. Unfortunately, as anyone who has studied history can tell you, humanity does not freeze societies for long – and the longer the old men with beards or the ideologues try to hold back change, the harder it comes (see recent events in the Arab world for example). People change; society and culture are not separate entities but simply the products of people interacting and expressing themselves; therefore society and culture cannot say the same unless people do. And people always change.

Nowadays, it is science that is creating new religion. They may be intellectual based religions but their central theme is the same as every religion gone before. We are all sinners, we must repent, we must become sustainable(good) and Mother Nature(God) will pay you back if you are not good.
“Sustainable” is the most abused word in the english dictionary. But in the context of warmism and junk climate science, it really means monetary appeasement to Mother Earth and her disciples. It was invented by climate scientists to suggest if good will is shown by man to planet earth, that it will stave off bad weather events like hurricanes and floods in the future; in other words Gaia will lessen these natural events.
What makes “Sustainable” so utterly meaningless is that sustainability is dependent on monetary contribution. Everything is the same as before but now is sustainable. Coca Cola used to be Cola Cola, now it’s sustainable. Flying used to bad for the earth, now it is sustainable. To be sustainable you just make your offering payable to any of the disciples like World Wide Fund for Nature, to Greenpeace or purchase a carbon credit from a green prophet bank. In fact sustainable is the new currency that buys you exclusive right to belong in the church of Warmism, the more you fund the church, the more sustainable you become, the more you spend, the better Warmist you are.

Thanks for that. It’s like in Australia we have Aboriginal Reconciliation. Trouble is nobody has ever defined what that actually means. So now we have a Reconciliation Process. Because there was never a defined outcome. Its all just layer upon layer of bull@#$t.
And Roger Carr: “Working the land so it is more productive” is more BS.
When you grow ANYTHING in land, the growing takes things from the air and the soil – nutrients of various kinds, as well as carbon, water, and such like. The crop (or animal) so grown is then usually taken away from that land and consumed, making urine and human excrement, as well as energy for moving, breathing, exhaling CO2, writing blog posts, and so on. The urine and excrement goes to sewage treatment plants and usually ends up as solid material which may or may not be used as fertiliser or land fill, and nutrient-rich water which goes out to sea.
The nett balance here is that nutrients go from the land to the sea, via kidneys and bowels.
In the long term claiming you can work the land to make it more productive is complete codswallop. Short term maybe. Long term. Simply not possible, by analysis from first principles.

Willis –
Nice post, but I think you’re just scratching the surface of ‘sustainable’. Yes, sometimes it is only meaningless, and sometimes merely unnecessary. Many times, though it is insidious and pernicious. It allows a whole menagerie of nefarious ideologies to creep into our discourse undetected. It allows the most misanthropic disposition to masquerade as ‘caring’ and the most fear-soaked as forward-looking.
Nothing whatsoever that we cherish in our lives arrived by way of the ‘sustainable’. Every step along the way, every resource, every technology, every process was in some way unsustainable – but a stepping stone to the glories of the modern age. Discovering and utilising in short order islands built of guano was hopelessly unsustainable, but brilliant – and fed millions of people. Digging up fossil fuels could only ever end up an unsustainable error….apart from it transforming life on earth, doubling the span of man’s existence and thrusting us into the future of beautiful clean thorium reactors and energy stored in caverns of molten salt.
Without unsustainable practices we would be nothing – cowed and afraid to put our feet on the ground for fear of leaving ‘footprints’.
Down with the sustainable! Let us live fully today and make our descendants both proud and thankful!

Willis Eschenbach quotes the Brundtland Report: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Willis, one of the main tenets of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (the STEM professions) is “There’s always someone smarter than you.” The point being, you have to figure out who those people are, and study their best work.
So maybe we all can learn more, and learn faster, not by cherry-picking the worst analyses of sustainable development, but by studying the best analyses?
On a local scale, my father taught me that farmland regenerates on a scale of a few thousand years — a long but not immeasurably long time. And therefore, a good farmer conserves soil, and plants trees, and learns the science of soil conservation and forestry, and imagines how the land will evolve on a time-span of centuries.
It’s true that there are some mighty sobering lessons associated to land husbandry on a time-scale in which a century is a fairly short time. That’s why a good farmer needs to be not only well-learned and foresighted, but courageous too, to face up to these lessons.
For example, I definitely don’t agree with all that Wendell Berry writes, but any person who wants to learn more — and think more — about the sobering challenges associated to sustainable development is far better off studying Wendell Berry’s writings, than reading reports written by UN bureaucrats. That much is obvious, eh?
The best and greatest traditions of American independence and foresight — and respect for science too — are alive today in independent thinkers like Berry. Good.
Let’s keep those traditions alive.

Agh, stop the spaceflight stuff. Mining minerals on Mars or Venus will require so much energy and material for transportation that it’s waaaaaayyyyyyyy beyond a dead loss.
You’re forgetting the truly renewable part of Earth, which is Life. The nearest hope, both spatially and temporally, is technology based on cells instead of rare metals.
Google ‘bacterial nanowires’ if you’re not familiar with this line of research.

An even bigger oxymoronic oxymoron is “Renewable Energy”

All of the resources humans use are 100% sustainable except for nuclear reactions in which matter is converted into energy. Humans are simply rearranging or moving around the atoms here on earth and putting them to use for people alive today. Those very same atoms will be here for the people alive tomorrow to move around and do with as they wish. What each generation of people need to do for the next is to make technological progress so that we can eventually move off this planet and start to colonize the universe, because if we do not get off this planet, we will eventually become extinct due to the sun/asteroids/other natural or man-made disaster.

Hmmmm!
So you want to bring the energy consumption of the world to the same level as you enjoy now. I would agree that this is the ideal.
But… Just how long will your fossil fuels, your copper last then! As the shortage of resources grows the price increases. How is the new high consumption members of society going to pay the new inflated prices. Nuclear you may say – but then you have to develope new reactors and you still get a shed load of radioactive debris at the end of life.
Wind and solar may not be the continuous supply desired but the cheap energy for many generations would be better than cheap continuous energy for a few decades, and then back to the stone age.
I showed on another thread that wind at 28% of rated capacity currently produces energy below UK user price taking all costs into consideration. Enercon turbines do not use gears or rare earth magnets, so only copper is a problem.
Is there coal in central Africa? Oil? Gas?. Is there wind/sun?

Sustainable, going green, green… all these are just buzz words that people follow without thinking. It is highly fashionable to use and “think” they are following the popular thought. In 10 years, there will be new buzz words used and to follow.
My favorite color was green. I am thinking about a new color to favor. I am personnaly tired of these new terms. I teach geography and the use of these terms is used often in the texts.

Economic sustainability seems to be off the agenda. Our children and grandchildren are bequeathed massive debt and an unbalanced budget. Note that the Solyndra debacle alone wasted more money than my children and grandchildren will earn in their entire lifetime.
JimB

Willis Eschenbach quotes the UN’s Brundtland Report: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Willis, as an example of what “sustainable development” really means — written not by UN bureaucrats but by a practicing farmer, committed Baptist, and authentic American individualist — please let me commend to your attention, and to the attention of WUWT readers, Wendell Berry’s celebrated essay Solving for Pattern.
Our family’s Iowa farmland has been in our hands for 150 years, and it is still in good shape. When we shape our plans for the future of our farm, do we think on timescales of 1000 years and more?
Yes, indeed we do. Are we foolish, Willis?

Alleagra –
We produce about a billion tonnes of iron a year, and given there is approximately 10(18) tonnes of iron in the earth’s crust, we can carry on producing it at the current rate for a little more than 2 billion years.
However, there are a couple of problems – one obvious, one a little bit unexpected. Firstly, we’ll have to dig through the whole of the earths crust which will require something of a concerted effort. Under mountains and cities and everything..
Secondly, when we have dug up just 1% of the iron, we will [assuming there are 10 billion of us] have a million tonnes of iron each. I’m not sure the concept of some of it being ‘dispersed’ or ‘lost’ makes much sense does it?
As a side issue [because idiots like Lester Brown keep saying we’re going to run out of Copper in 25 years] with elements that are more rare like copper, we should be a bit more circumspect. Oh yes – when we have brought into circulation 1% of the copper in the earth’s crust, we will have only 1000 tonnes of copper each and only one million years will have elapsed. Obviously, some rationing will be in order…
As far as spades are concerned(!) I think with a kilo of iron per spade and a wooden handle, before we get to that 1% extraction we’ll have spades across the earth 1000 feet deep.
You’re right – ‘running out’ of elements is an impossibility – where are they going to go?
And as for energy, how many hundreds of millions of years of energy pouring out of the sun before we notice any change?
Elements and energy? – forever.

@roger Carr
“Sustainable development is working the land so that it becomes increasingly productive.”
Yay, Norman Borlaug is my hero too!

Ahhhh! Entropy!

You’re right that “sustainable development” was first used as a phrase by Gro Harlem Bruntland for the UN’s Commission… But to suggest that it is just an “airy-fairy moonbeam fantasy, a New Age oxymoron”, does not do justice to its frightening reach. Sustainable development is the parent of climate change; the political context within which global warming – and a whole host of green legislation – is framed; the focal point at which global warming science meets policy recommendations; a political initiative upon which the entire United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs is based:
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
The Agenda 21 ideological ethos finds itself everywhere, from national curriculum for 7 year-olds to local LA21 council initiatives, to intergovernmental global legislation. Sustainable development is an extremely powerful political meme, that has permeated all facets of political and economic thinking – think Keynesian, interventionist, environmentalism – and consider how powerful it has become in the push towards putting a price on carbon, global energy policy and placing environmental issues at the heart of all political decision making. The “sustainable development” meme has become an ideological cornerstone of the global governance mechanisms directed and implemented by the United Nations. Big sustainability even.

Eh, careful, lad, we can’t have people questioning the greenie weenies’ lexicon. When they use these words, they mean whatever they want them to mean – usually, that whatever you’re doing is wrong and that you must learn instead to do what you’re told by some petty box-ticker. After all, if we don’t know what they’re talking about, we can’t argue about it … which is just what they want. A good call, Willis.
@Frosty (2:09 am) … Unfortunately we have to believe them. They’re really out there, and just as nasty as they seem. Everybody should read Agenda 21 and take heed.

Tom says:
December 22, 2011 at 2:43 am
“I’m disappointed to see this from you, Willis. I thought you were a clearer thinker.”
What led you to think that?
[REPLY: Perhaps he compared me with you … on a more serious note, Dave, do you have to work hard at being such an unpleasant jerk, or does it just come natural to you? How about you try to contribute something to a conversation, instead of insisting on exercising your god-given right to be a jerk? -w.]

bwanajohn says:
December 22, 2011 at 6:01 am
You’re exactly right. Sustainability to these cretins means how long they can be in control of tax dollars funding their projects. I live in West Texas. There are THOUSANDS of windmills out here, and to my knowledge, not a one of them produce enough electricity to make a profit. They’re all subsidized by tax dollars. Using wind energy is a great idea if only they would pay for themselves.

Willis, you miss the entire premise of “sustainable”. They want us to voluntarily return to a hunter-gathering lifestyle. That, they will claim, is the only time in history when humans were sustainable. They look at that as some romantic time in human history when we were one with nature.
Of course they completely ignore what that means in the real world. We were sustainable then because of the brutality of natural selection. But then they argue that natural selection isn’t brutal. They do live in a wonderland…

A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 5:13 am
You seem to be confusing bottom-up and top-down, sir. Your farmer family are acting on what they know about their environment in order to maintain that environment; that is sustainability as most people understand the word. However, the word “sustainability” means something very different in the context of any sort of official proclamation on the subject, where its meaning becomes “whatever the state decides”.
Your family know their land and can care for it. Can a bureaucrat who spends his entire life in an air-conditioned office know anything about maintaining farmland, even with advisors? Even if he used to work on a farm, he can’t know what land in other areas would need.
Farming practices that work in Europe and North America don’t work in South America at all, so even if you have the perfect UN official who was raised on the perfect farm and knows exactly what that farm needs, he would be useless deciding what’s “sustainable” in a south-american milieu. The discouragement of semi-nomadic slash-and-burn farming in favour of European permanently-sited farm practices is the perfect example of this: slash and burn looks ugly, so it is declared “unsustainable” even though it’s been practices for thousands of years. European practices produce nice neat fields that look sustainable but destroy nearly the entire biomass of an area of land, resulting in the very thin topsoil floating away into the air and washing out to sea in huge torrents. The end result is the UN decides that farming itself is “unsustainable” in large parts of south america, and attempts to discourage it entirely, or pushes reliance on “natural” methods that amount to little more than hunter-gatherer foraging and which are not remotely sustainable over any length of time, but which are called “sustainable” because they force a reduction in human population.
Bottom up would have maintained the use of methods that were best suited to living in a tropical environment. Top down just buggers everything up. Your example of your family’s farm is a bottom-up approach that would be essentially wiped out by the top-down, dictatorial approach you seem to support.

“Finally, there is an underlying arrogance about the concept that I find disturbing. Forty percent of the world’s people live on less than $2 per day. In China it’s sixty percent. In India, three-quarters of the population lives on under $2 per day.”
Making this claim is common, usually as an attempt to make our lifestyle some kind of glutonous waste. But it’s a bogus comparison. It’s like claiming that a mouse eats less than an elephant, so the elephant must eat less.
The claim is bogus because the elephant (the advanced first world) requires more food (money) just to keep going. The mouse (third world) needs less food (money) because it is smaller (not as advanced). Forcing the elephant to eat less (reduce consumption) would starve the animal to death. Forcing the mouse to eat more, will just mean more mice to feed.
It takes time for mice like organisms to evolved into elephant like organisms.

RE: Main Article
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
I presume that this was meant to point out the possibility that conventional nuclear power may, by a continual chain of Chernobyl and Fukushima style events, render the world so contaminated with dangerous long-lived transuranic wastes as to be uninhabitable for almost a million years.
As for resource depletion, since there will be an indefinite number of future generations, there is no way we can preserve exhaustible resources for them short of complete abstinence of their use. This would presume that we could establish a rational for saying that some future generation might have a superior claim on using them. In the case of carbon power, we are well past the time when such a decision could have been made painlessly.
At some time in the future, the exhaustion of resources may render the current population ‘unsustainable.’ Nature, operating in the guise of the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ or perhaps a future ‘United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Population Control’ will enforce a number of very unpleasant and probably very controversial measures to reduce world population to solar-sustainable limits.
I believe it is our duty, as users of temporarily abundant resources, to do our best to provide succeeding generations with one or more effective low-cost alternatives to carbon power *before* it is depleted. With an inexhaustible source of low-cost energy, such as *might* be obtainable from liquid-state thorium nuclear reactors, the iron from that shovel would be continually restorable to its original state, even if it has to be extracted from seawater.

Is wind really sustainable? Wind is caused to a large extent by the Coriolis force, which in turn is caused by the earth’s rotation. So, isn’t wind energy really rather earth rotation energy? Doesn’t wind power take a bite out of the finite resource of the earth’s rotation?

Some resources are depleted faster than they can be generated or grown, but not all of them. More strawman logic fail from willis, this is becoming a pattern.

You comment, “nothing is sustainable” highlights a point, but you miss a few things.
As for iron ore. Iron ore won’t run out for human needs. Iron is one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust. We only mine the very top grade of this resource, less than 0.0001% of the earth’s crustal resource of iron. Current cut off grades are of the order of 45%, depending on other factors. When this runs out, we mine, 44%, then 43% and so on. Each lowering of grade increases the size of the resource available. Most of the worlds iron ore is mined from an ancient sea rich in iron; this source of iron is not currently being produced geologically, so is not being renewed,but other sources are available (eg iron skarns).
But as for sustainability as a concept, you have a point, sort of. I often say to people if they want to follow ‘sustainability’ to its logical conclusion, then you need to get rid of people, because every single one of us is not sustainable, we ALL die, however, populations as a whole ARE sustainable (at least in terms relevant to human needs, evolution itself shows even populations, ie species, are not sustainable indefinitely), and that is the point. In other words, individuals are not sustainable, but populations but we dont get rid of individuals just because they are not sustainable.(which is also related to advanced complex social issues such as individual rights, for example)
Mines are one of the things that are similar to people. (Nature seems to recognise that individual ‘entities’ are not sustainable, but whole ‘orders’ of such entities can be). Individuals mines are not sustainable, but mining as a whole, is.We cannot ‘run out’ of gold, copper, iron, nickle, cadmium, etc etc, because these resources in the earths crust are very large in temrs of human needs, but individual mines can, and do, ‘run out’, just like individual people, who die. So this is what you say to people who dont like mining because it is not ‘sustainable’, you just tell them that individual people are not sustainable either, and so they soon realise there are exceptions to the rule. Many exceptions.
But you have a point, but its complicated.

Stop it with that bourgeois thinking, Willis.
Like the meaning of is, Sustainable Development means whatever we need it to mean, when we need it.
Trying to say it means one thing, and always sticking to it, is anti-progressive.
~More Soylent Green!

The only sustainable product I know about is …….. software.

Wonder how all this sustainable development is working out for the people of North Korea.

Fantastic, another ‘Rational Optimist’, there are not many of us in this world. Here is to hoping for more critical thinking in the future instead emotional emoting!
Thanks.

Willis’ essay on sustainability unleashed a torrent of ideas that have been dammed up in my brain. In recent years, I have become a rabid anti-environmentalist. For many decades now environmentalists have promoted one eco-scare after another, all proven wrong in the end. The movement has become so mindless and corrupt that I automatically reject any notion they promote.
I first became aware of their antics back in the 1970’s during the run-up to the Alaska oil pipeline, which was supposed to devastate the caribou herds, but instead seems to have greatly benefitted them. Remember the ozone hole that wasn’t? The acid rain that wasn’t? The poor endangered polar bears that are at all time high populations? The (fill in the blank) eco-disaster that never happened?
Environmentalism is filled with nonsense concepts like “sustainability,” which Willis so expertly lampooned. The root idea of environmentalism is hatred of human beings — that humans are a plague upon the earth and damage the environment. I ask: Why is it that only human activity is considered damage to the environment? Why can’t humans eat bovine burgers, but lions can munch on antelope steaks? Why is it wrong for humans to log a forest, but okay for an elephant herd in Namibia to strip a forest bare? Why can’t humans build dams, but beavers can? Why can’t humans build mile long cities, but prairie dogs can?
According to biologists, humans are descended from hominids who evolved on the African savannah. In short, the environment made us just like it made every other living creature on the planet. So why is it that only human activity is considered to be damage to the environment?
What is “the environment,” anyway? Consider this tale. Through the patch of woods behind my property runs a small stream. Last spring, we had lots of rain, which swelled the stream, which created a wetlands of sorts in the drainage basin. For a time, the place was swarming with insects, frogs, and the birds which fed upon them. After seven weeks of no rain, the stream dried up and the wetlands vanished, as did all the creatures which depended on it. A large turtle even showed up in my backyard, the first time ever, apparently migrating toward my neighbors’ backyard pool. I relocated it to another nearby pond teeming with turtles.
Which environment am I supposed to protect? The dried up mud flats or the teeming wetlands?
Too many people seem to think the environment, including the climate, is static and unchanging. In truth, change is the only constant. The environment changes. All living creatures either adapt to their changing environment, or they adapt it to their needs. I declare that humans have as much right to impact the environment as any other living creature.

Luther Wu @ 3:35
I think that this is what is meant by sustainable development, with or without capital letters. My ex wanted to live a sustainable lifestyle. To him it meant producing everything we needed, with as few ( and I mean few) purchased inputs as possible. He only saw the positives and completely ignored the negatives of living this way. For some background, we lived on a farm. He sold his larger tractors and bought a very old tractor that didn’t even have a cab on it. He sold his larger field implements because the smaller tractor wouldn’t pull them. However, it used to take him X hours to work the fields and now it took him 3 times X, because the implements were smaller and didn’t cover as much area as they did before. He finally gave up farming all together and planted all the fields to grass, to let the cattle “harvest” the grass instead of having to harvest the fields (which had been wheat, millet and hay fields) using machines.
His goal was to have me fix meals with all the things our farm produced. We had our own meat, although it was sent out to be butchered, wrapped and frozen. He wanted to start doing that at home. We had a cow who provided milk, and I churned butter and separated cream. We had a large garden, but we still had to buy groceries at the store, and he hated us doing that. We didn’t live in the South or on the West Coast, so our garden was frequently hit with hail and grasshopper infestations.
His desire was for us to buy everything used, from cars to clothes. He didn’t want artwork on the walls because seeing nature outside through the window was enough. He didn’t want us driving any more than was necessary and wanted me to quit my off the farm job for that reason, although I desperately needed that time away from him. He didn’t want the kids playing organized sports because we: a) had to drive there and b) it taught them that some people were better than others. He wanted all the kids to stay on the farm and develop their own farm oriented enterprise, to provide an income. He thought that tribal living was the way to live and wanted to start an eco village on the farm, with “like minded” people, although it was basically a commune with a fancy name.
He couldn’t see that he was becoming a dictator and that his family was unraveling and revolting. Mother Earth was more important to him than his own family.
I know it sounds like I am bashing my ex, and this isn’t the forum for that. My reason for writing this is that my ex ABSOLUTELY thought we should live this way and that I was being selfish, uncaring and “living a consumeristic American lifestyle” for disagreeing with him. But can you see the thought processes he was using? We were becoming isolated, different, with his goals dominating and everyone else ignored. It was extremely cult-like thinking.
I saw many downfalls to his grand ideas, one of which is that living the way he wanted took an incredible amount of physical labor, and I was getting too old and achy to want to start adding that kind of physical labor to my daily life. I also thought that we were living too close to the edge for comfort- where an injury to him would seriously affect our standard of living; any financial downturn would be fatal; any weather event would be devastating. I lived this “Sustainable Lifestyle” for a number of years and it is only sustainable in good times. I cannot believe that this is the way the “powers to be” wants us to live. It sounds romantic from afar, but it is brutal up close.

JJThoms says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:47 am
Is there coal in central Africa? Oil? Gas?. Is there wind/sun?
Who knows what is hidden away in Africa, but it was the first continent to go nuclear!
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mragheb/www/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Natural%20%20Nuclear%20Reactors,%20The%20Oklo%20Phenomenon.pdf

“You cannot talk about sustainability without talking about people, about politics, about power and control.” John Holdren*
A more honest definition I have yet to read- He who controls the sustainable definition- controls the power and the people.
*from a 1995 World Bank speech-The Meaning of Sustainability: 
Biogeophysical Aspects 
by John P. Holdren, Gretchen C. Daily, and Paul R. Ehrlich

A note to “a physicist:” I envy your patience. You can recommend to Willis that he read some literature on a topic so that his essays might at least acknowledge the accumulated wisdom of others, but he won’t do it. It is probably not that he does not want to read the literature, but that he has already moved on to his next drive-by essay.
REPLY:I’m not sure patience is the word, blind faith dogma might be a better fit. Go ahead, argue with Willis on this topic, make my day – Anthony

“A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:15 am
On a local scale, my father taught me that farmland regenerates on a scale of a few thousand years — a long but not immeasurably long time.”
Obviously your father was aware of the Russell soil loss equation.But, as in most of your posts, your diatribe was long on flowery stereotypic definitions, but short on facts.
Each “type” of soil regenerates at a highly predictable rate, roughly 2-10 tons a year. Since an acre/furrow/slice (6″/acre) weighs ~2,000,000 lbs, it can take up to 5,000 years or as little as 2,000 years to regenerate 6″ of topsoil. What sustainable folks don’t comprehend is that even virgin grassland loses soil, as in gullies, blowouts on hilltops (even in CRP set aside acres), indigenous weed patches that have no winter cover, etc. The massive coastal wetlands where the Mississippi outlets into the Gulf existed before mankind. Who caused that erosion of topsoil?
But you are right in suggesting conservation. The goal in conservation is to limit erosion of the topsoil to the rate of regeneration of that particular soil determined by the soil loss equation. It has nothing to do with horse drawn implements or forcing the population of the world to eat grass, which is the goal of the UN committee on Agriculture. I can show you extensive examples of highly intensive operations that are actually gaining soil and increasing soil organic matter, one of the main ingredients in productive soils (think Mollisols in Iowa). In terms of maintaining productivity, these farms utilize energy in the form of chemicals, large implements, and nutrient replenishment. They actually have a lower energy footprint/unit of production than ecosystem evolution. So to alter this massive production system to a “sustainable” energy utilization in the terms loosely bandied about by the ecofascists is tentamount to commiting mass genocide on a global scale. Develop thorium reactors, reuse the current waste, and eat more chicken.
But you don’t want to hear this, do you?

I recently gave a talk along with Lord Monkton to a group of Maryland County officials concerned with the State’s new sustainability planning master plan (PlanMaryland) about to be adopted. The plan is about the growing of local food that doesn’t pollute, fair and equitable tiny housing, a return to the cities and a whole lot of bicycles and walking. Businesses will also need to fit the green future.
At the heart of the Agenda 21/sustainability is a belief markets cannot be trusted to produce a sustainable or equitable outcome. The nearly approved PlanMaryland- states this quite clearly:

” in the absence of a set of policies and strategies for containing development and prioritizing the highest and best use of all land in the State, there is no reason to believe that market forces alone will produce development that is smart, sustainable, and balances the competing demands made on limited resources.”

The pesky market forces are to be replaced by the enlightened guidance of sustainability commissioners who will decide how the interests of sustainability, equity and the environment are apportioned. Monetary evaluations are not a proper planning metric for the new Maryland that uses theThe Happy Planet Index as an example guide in how to value sustainable decisions. The happiest of countries include Guatemala, Laos, China and Viet Nam-while the middling happy include Haiti, Iran and Algeria. The most unhappiest of countries includes the US just edging out Nigeria and Tanzania. (When I first saw this I thought it was a joke- after reading it I recognized it as dangerous).

Willis:
There is no doubt there is a finite amount of iron in the world. Have we reached “peak iron” yet? It’s written in stone (another thing that we’ve already reached peak production of, stone) somewhere. It’s just a matter of time.
Unless, of course, we carefully plan for peak iron, and how much anybody should be allowed to own or consume.
~More Soylent Green!

A Physicist says: Our family’s Iowa farmland has been in our hands for 150 years, and it is still in good shape. When we shape our plans for the future of our farm, do we think on timescales of 1000 years and more? Yes, indeed we do. Are we foolish, Willis?

Ferd Berple asks:

Is there enough land for everyone in America to have a farm in Iowa? If not, then the practice of individuals owning farms is inherently unsustainable, as eventually there will be a shortage of farm land, which drives the price out of reach for new farmers.

Ferd, you ask a good common-sense question, and one of the best common-sense answers (known to me) is the answer that Wendell Berry gives in his celebrated essay Solving for Pattern:

In an organism, what is good for one part is good for another. What is good for the mind is good for the body; what is good for the arm is good for the heart. We know that sometimes a part may be sacrificed for the whole; a life may be saved by the amputation of an arm. But we also know that such remedies are desperate, irreversible, and destructive; it is impossible to improve the body by amputation. And such remedies do not imply a safe logic. As tendencies they are fatal: you cannot save your arm by the sacrifice of your life.

Here the point is that family farms are but one organ within the living body that is the American way of life. And therefore, as Berry’s essay wisely reminds us, what is good for America’s family farms is good too for America in its entirety. It follows, as Berry’s essay also reminds us, that the ongoing destruction of family farming must be regarded as “desperate, irreversible, destructive, and unsafe” for America.
Because if American farmers cease to conserve their land, with foresight on a timescale of centuries, who will take their place?
That is the common-sense reason why Solving for Pattern is about more than farming, and is recommended reading for skeptic and scientist alike.

jrwakefield says:
December 22, 2011 at 6:24 am
Exactly Excellent Explanation.

Additionally, a physicist, as someone reported in a post above, Maurice Strong, etal. ad infinitum, propose a meatless diet, as the conversion of plants into meat is “inefficient” in undefinable global terms (ignores the fact that the vast majority of arable land is unsuited to any other agronomic practice but herding). But recent data has shown that vegans have a higher, albiet mostly insignificant mortality from many forms of cancer (read to the bottom). http://veganhealth.org/articles/cancer
Other data has determined that consumption of carbohydrates increases cancer.
http://www.carbohydratescankill.com/901/carbohydrates-cancer-prospect
Since mankind evolved as hunter/gatherers, I’m sure you can connect the dots…..
BTW, this data ( and an extensive additional abundance) were collected at the MDA Anderson Cancer center, where my wife underwent radiation treatment for breast cancer. She feels great eating a low carb diet (<50 net mgs./day). She'll probably outlive me as the only take-home fact I'm willing to subscribe to revolves around an abundance of dietary red wine.

A physicist says:
“Because if American farmers cease to conserve their land, with foresight on a timescale of centuries, who will take their place?”
You have no technological component in your rationale. It wasn’t till the mid 1940s that fully 50% of the land tilled in the US switched from horse drawn to tractors (an important point because perhaps 40% of all agriculture farmland used i the US at the turn of the 20th century was to provide food for the urban and rural horse population.
Corn and wheat yield yields per acre are up 300 to 350% since 1950 and no signs of slowing down. A cow now produces 4X the milk as one did in 1970.
Increasing agriculture efficiencies are the reason our forests and other wild lands have been increasing. I can see no better stewardship than a continuing drive to use the least land possible for agriculture production-seems to me we are doing a great job- all while slashing the cost of food than consumed nearly 40% of the average family budget in the 1940s and less than 10% today. A large part of the Depression era Federal and State programs were actually directed at getting people off land with soils so poor they should have never been farmed in the first place. However that can only happen if the remaining prime soils grow more food per acre.
It is doubtful with the pace of technology in a hundred years -if not killed by sustainability ideology- will even be recognizable. We are already seeing large parts of the fresh vegetable market being replaced with hydroponics.
We have all seen the link between prosperity and energy use– there is another- the necessity of less than 5% of the workforce to be involved in agriculture.

Judy F. says:
December 22, 2011 at 7:41 am
Mother Earth was more important to him than his own family.
______________________
Dollar to donut his inspiration was the News…

“Sustainability”=Communism=total economic collapse. ‘nuf said.

“A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 8:35 am
It’s hugely enjoyable to see you and Hansen ending up on the same page (for reasons that I regard as excellent).”
Stick around long enough, and the unemotional, non-ideological logic espoused by us denialists may rub off.
Sorry to hear about Iowa State though.
Go U of A Hogs!!!!

What I construe from the words:” sustainable development” is a rate constant. Is the rate of change sustainable? As climate can be described as a non-linear, non-equilibrium oscillatory system, so too, development carries many of the same characteristics. Culture changes: Tevia and the song “Tradition” from Fiddler on The Roof. Economics change from paradigm to paradigm. Society changes how it values items, work, people. Sustainable in my mind means a temporary linear trajectory until a perturbance followed by disorder and chaos, a transition and the emergence of a new sustainable paradigm. The Birth & Death of the Soviet Union was a sustainable paradigm until all the Bolsheviks died off, then a death spiral, chaos, transition and the emergence of a new order is emerging: sustainable, for the time being.
What is so uncomfortable is the transition, not knowing what is in the immediate future. When in one sustainable paradigm, our most recent run up to a banking collapse, the immediate future could be “predicted.” Of course it couldn’t, but the trajectory seemed sustainable: i.e., the rate of change would go on and on and on. It didn’t. In the CO2 global warming paradigm, the trajectory was each nation buying into the carbon tax paradigm until a major perturbance: in this case, Climategate 1.0 and the failure at Copenhagen, 2009. We are in transition now, and it is uncomfortable. Many ideas, and sustainable development is just one, like some flotsam from the wreckage of AGW is grasped to keep afloat in the current stormy sea with its disinformation, etc. What emerges after this tempest has passed, I have no clue. A new paradigm, it too viewed as sustainable until….

The photo of the rusty spade shows just why the spade cannot be recycled for ever – it will eventually end up as atoms of Ferrous Oxide floating around the environment.
However, to answer the question, What is sustainable?, how about a wooden spade? Grown from sustainable trees that when harvested are replaced by 3 new trees, they suck carbon from the atmosphere and reduce global warming. Since more trees are being replaced than used, they would start to be used for everything else – from tractor wheels to engines, from windturbine blades to the magnets that power their generators, from tv screens to microprocessors. Nothing is impossible for this wonderful sustainable resource.

This essay reminds me of the ‘big problem’ as covered by Isaac Asimov:
http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 8:35 am
Tim Clark…Thank you for… advocating a global energy path-forward that is so strikingly similar to James Hansen’s.
_______________________
James Hansen appears in many photos wearing a hat.
I’m reasonably certain that Tim has worn a hat, too.
You see how easy it is?

Wow, what a lot of straw men packed into one post.
Sustainable living isn’t about belief in eternal resources – that’s the blithely optimistic mindset of the people who want to burn, baby burn. Talk about projection.
The impoverished practise sustainable living by necessity. You don’t waste what you can’t afford to. You don’t have to be a greenie to know the value of insuring against the future.
Whether you believe it or not (that doesn’t matter for this point), climate change is projected to hit poorer countries much harder than affluent ones. Wealthier, developed countries would be better placed to adapt. Communities on the edge of subsistence would do it much tougher. And it’s poor countries who most vehemently want an international agreement on emissions controls. What’s that? Now they’re self-interested and gaming the UN, are they? Crikey, that was a quick turnaround. How much are we supposed to care, exactly? It’s so easy to lose the thread….
So let’s just make them healthy, affluent societies, right? Oh yeah, that’s been the cry for a century before global warming was an issue, and the distance between poor and wealthy countries is phenomenally greater than ever. But climate change cynics really truly rooly care about these people. They’re not using their hardship as a political football like the activists do, noooo.
Willis is telling us that we either forget emissions policy or make people starve. Wow. Just wow. What an amazingly straightforward dichotomy that is. Is it really that simple? There’s no way you can mandate emissions regulations without killing people. Well, it’s on a blog so it must be true.
The cynicism here is lamentable but understandable, but the faux concern for the world’s destitute is nauseating. Please don’t.

The word “sustainable” belongs in the same genre as the phrase “climate change.” The constructs are seemingly totally meaningful, yet totally meaningless utterances that might be expected from the caterpillar with the bong in Alice-in-Wonderland. They are useful constructs in that they can be used by the socialists to “engineer” the culture in any way that they choose to take it.
That said, wood and trees get pretty close to being truely sustainable.

‘Sustainability’ is something dreamt up by elites living comfortable, secure lives in highly urbanised environments, knowing full well that what they preach for the rest of the world is not something they will ever do themselves.
The description by Judy F above (December 22, 2011 at 7:41 am) serves very well to illustrate this.
It always amazes me that so many professional feminists in the ‘green’ and ‘environmental’ movements seem to be wishing for nothing better for themselves and their daughters than the life of drudgery experienced by so many of us in the UK well into the middle of the last century.
I can promise those ladies – you won’t have time to go to meetings or swan off to nice resort when you have to spend your whole day to keep the fire burning in the kitchen, wash the clothes of your family by hand, scrub and sweep the floors by hand and trot out to get groceries every day because there’s no fridge nor freezer. And you still have to cook the food. Oh – and imagine doing the washing-up without – no, not a dishwasher, but without ordinary washing-up liquid.
And you spend the evenings (no telly, no PC, no iPhone, ordinary landline phone at the street corner) ‘sustaining’ the clothing of your family, like, darning socks, trousers, turning cuffs on shirts etc …
Yep, totally sustainable progress, and knowledge and intelligence, which could help produce new technologies, totally wasted on ‘sustainability’.
But there’s more:
both the idea we must and can ‘stop’ climate from changing, as well as this sustainability, are signs of dangerously closed minds, who have given up on evolution both in the usual meaning as well as in cultural meaning. Everything must stay just as it is now, with a few billion people less.
This all speaks of their total fear – of change, of weather, of nature.
Actually, we should pity them.

John West says:
“The solar system and the universe is evidence that order can arise from chaos, that the second law of thermodynamics is not applicable to such systems.”
I don’t know about that, seems pretty chaotic to me, over the long haul at least. The rules (that we think we know of) by which it seems to operate do allow for both it and us to exist, for now anyway. And those rules seem to have some order to them. Change just one small factor though, like the expansion rate of the universe or the energy levels occupied by electrons within the atom and there would be nothing here. Antropomorphic theory or intelligent design, take your pick. Or I guess probability theory in a multiverse could get us here. Easier to believe in God, I should think.

Imagine going to your doctor for a routine physical and having him telling you “I need to amputate your arm”. You ask why. He says: Well, it’s a dangerous world. You could cut your arm. And if you cut your arm it could get infected. And if your arm gets infected we could become unable to control the infection. In a worst case scenario, we might have to amputate the arm. If we amputate now, this situation will be impossible.
So much of the greens’ “reasoning” reminds me of this prophylactic amputation. Why impose on ourselves policies at least as bad as what *could* happen if we continue business-as-usual? Even worse, they they argue that such policies are demanded by their canonized “precautionary principle”.

Re Sustainable someone else may have made this point allready but:
The universe is a puzzle box
you need fire to harden wood and bone tools to et you work with copper then bronze which lets you dig surface deposits of Iron and coal which lets you make steel that allows you to drill oil and gas which in turn gives you the rescource base to buid nuclear power plants and computers which will eventually allow you to mine the moon and then the asteroids and so forth and so on each level of technology opens the door to the next the only way to fail is to stop advancing to deny the benifits of hich tech and only worry about the possible problems. I have faith we will continue to advance maybe not in the US or the west but eventually some group will walk on the moon again and eventually someone will be able to tell us about living on those eartlike planets kepler keeps finding
Just my 2 cents John G

John West says:
“The solar system and the universe is evidence that order can arise from chaos, that the second law of thermodynamics is not applicable to such systems.”
Sorry John, but it doesn’t work that way. The second law of physics requires that any order you see today must have existed at the time universe was born. It’s the law of entropy. In a closed system order does not increase without a commensurate reduction in order from elsewhere in the closed system. It can also be called the law of conservation of information where we define information as order. Two of the greatest living physicists today, Leonard Susskin and Stephen Hawking, along with a cadre of kibbutzers on both sides, argued over whether the information in an encyclopedia could be permanently destroyed by dropping it into a black hole. Neither argued that it be destroyed by some more mundane chaotic event like being burned in blast furnace. In principle all the information would still be present in the exact positions and velocities of the ash and smoke molecules. It would be practically lost but not theorectically lost. This is the law of conservation of information illustrated and defended by top physicists. The argument was about whether the information would be lost forever to the outside universe should the destruction occur by falling into a black hole. After 10 years Hawking conceded that even in that case the information would not be lost it would exit the black hole in the form of Hawking radiation which is the moral equivalent of smoke from a fire on the other side.
You either misunderstand the second law or you misunderstand the nature of the universe. Order can only increase if it is imported from outside the system under consideration. For order to have increased in the universe over time it must have been imported from outside the universe. Plenty of religious folk will be happy to say that outside source is God. Personally I don’t think God needed to tinker with his creation so, as Einstein went to his grave believing, we live in a clockwork universe of cause and effect that God wound up and set in motion. If there’s any chaos in the universe I think it might be confined to free will if such a thing as free will really exists.

When I hear reference to sustainable, i immediately expect a conversation on green self righteousness.
If a person has to announce their own virtue, they probablly lack virtue.
Now we enter an era of light pollution. We are polluting the evening skies with fugitive light form parking lots and cities.

I’m wondering, when my Irish ancestors were cutting peat did some busybody come up and pester them about not using too much as future generations would be in need of this fuel source?

Willis, you have a real gift for bringing a smile to my face … `cuz ain’t Wendell Berry himself now 77 years old, and still doing the work of three ordinary men (farmer, essayist, poet)?
Wendell’s belief in sustainability evidently is doing him no harm … heck, most of us scarcely hope to be even half as lively at age 77 as Wendell is.
So purely on the evidence, Wendell’s sustainability practices not only have been mighty good for his farmland, they’ve been mighty good for Wendell himself too.   🙂
It’s mighty instructive to search Google’s N-Gram Viewer for usage of “sustainability, sustainable development“; these two n-grams have come into widespread use only since 1980 or so (an earlier, less-used, mainly military variant is “sustainment”). And when we search the early 1980s literature with Google Books, we verify that Wendell Berry’s name is prominently associated with these terms.
And finally, Google Books shows us that Wendell Berry uses the words “sustain”, “sustainability” and “sustainment” commonly in his own writings … along with another Wendell Barry favorite word: “stewardship”.
So anyone who’s been wondering what these words mean needs only to consult the writings by and about Wendell Berry … who is (IMHO) a true American original and a national treasure.

Seriously Willis (since your last post overlapped with mine), if you’re going to claim for yourself such a high regard for Wendell Berry, why don’t you simply quote Wendell’s views regarding sustainable development?
Instead you’ve posted quotes from boring UN bureaucrats, along with a cartoon that outright mocks four of Wendell Berry’s most cherished values clean air, pure water, healthy exercise, and organic farming methods.
In my opinion, WUWT folks would be far better off reading for themselves what Wendell Berry has to say about sustainability.

There is nothing more dangerous than a government policy to meet a goal that no-one can define. Winners and losers in any such system are dictated by those controlling the definition.
What is troubling is that critical infrastructure and food security matters may be put in the hands of social scientists and crusading english majors in the name of sustainability. To those commentors here that think sustainability is about common sense soil erosion controls. Perhaps this will wake you up- What is Sustainable Agriculture?http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/concept.htm
“In addition to strategies for preserving natural resources and changing production practices, sustainable agriculture requires a commitment to changing public policies, economic institutions, and social values. Strategies for change must take into account the complex, reciprocal and ever-changing relationship between agricultural production and the broader society”
To attain sustainable agriculture we must make “specific and concentrated efforts to alter specific policies or practices, to the longer-term tasks of reforming key institutions, rethinking economic priorities, and challenging widely-held social values.” And then the author goes completely off the rails linking to locavore issues, labor organizing and meeting spiritual needs. But most importantly sustainability was about giving more money to UC Davis to guide us to this green future.
If UC Davis’s definition of sustainable agriculture prevails over modern agriculture practices we may all end up hungry- but we will all be equally hungry. Consider resistance to “sustainability” sustainable on my part.

Thanks Willis,
Yes, it is entropy we would seem to want to avoid. And yes, it can be done. It just takes some international government “seed”‘ investment in the perpetual motion machines industry; A small tax on the rich would fund it so it would be fiscally sustainable. /sarc

Willis,
I believe you are completely wrong about the source of the modern usage of the word “sustainable” – it actually comes from Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot who was one of the early visionaries of the more radical green sustainable movement. It is based on agrarian socialism and is a political philosophy rather than anything to do with the scientific use of the word “sustainable”.
In a scientific sense, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, so ultimately nothing is sustainable and even the sun will die eventually.

reposting this from the Hansen arrested development thread special for A Physicist:
A physicist;
And IMHO, it’s very good to see that science and skepticism are evolving toward this natural mutual accommodation! :)>>>>
That’s probably the biggest load of total bunk you’ve posted in this thread so far.
Your assumption that skepticism isn’t even part of science in the first place, that it is some sort of other discipline or process, and that skepticism is moving toward an “accomodation” with science is ignorant and arrogant beyond belief. But what else should we expect of someone who calls themselves a physicist, but clearly doesn’t know SFA about physics or science? What else should we expect from someone who takes ridiculous positions, and rather than respond to the criticisms with facts and logic, simply changes the subject, or comes up with that most devastating or remarks, “what’s the problem?”
You sir are a charlatan attempting to present yourself as some sort of middle ground proponant, but your conduct reveals what you are. A spin doctor advocate for magic dressed up as science who understands neither the magic nor the science.

This may rock your Iron Boat:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-buzz/scientists-discover-metal-type-earth-core-202021339.html
Iron oxide (rust) is an insulator unless it is subjected to high heat and pressure (such as is found in the inner mantle of the Earth). It then becomes a conductor.
Perhaps iron is more ‘sustainable’ that previously thought.
Upcoming at http://prl.aps.org/

All right folks. When you think about energy and raw materials remember that we live in a star system that’s chock full of everything we need to fill it with life.
This tiny planet is but an infinitesimal part of it.
If we would just stop fighting over the table scraps and start mining asteroids and moons, and building habitats and power sats, we would have access to virtually infinite resources and living space.

Based on:
Figure 1. Example of unsustainable development.
Sustainable development is not shovel ready.

My graduate adviser used “sustainability” as a trick to make sure we were thinking. “Were American Indian agricultural practices sustainable?” was one question used on our comprehensive graduate exams. The correct reply is the question “In time or in space?” followed by “Which group or nation?” In some cases the correct answer is “apparently neither.” In other cases “it was sustainable over time but not in place, which is why they practiced modified swidden agriculture. But how long that could last we cannot know.” The prof is philosophically as Green as grass but is a stickler for looking at all the data and avoiding platitudes as well as being a firm believer in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Wish more were like that.

The U.N. Agenda 21
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
But, you missed the following . . .
It contains within it two key concepts:
1) the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
2) the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs
Limitations imposed by social organization. Hmm. That would be government, eh? And, since Agenda 21 is put forth by the U.N., we’re talking about a unified WORLD government, eh? So, this really has absolutely nothing to do with resources, environment, or development. It does have a lot to do with power and money. Always follow the money. But here we also have power. What kind of power? The power to be able to impose limitations (rationing or redistribution) on pretty much anything or anyone.
So I dig up iron and make a shovel. What right do I have to that shovel under this agenda? I have no right to any of my private property, like a shovel, because it is up to some world government agency to decide what is the best use of that shovel. Because that is what is implied in “meeting the needs of the present.” Who decides what is sustainable? What laws can be passed, if everything has to pass a sustainability test? Who enforces those laws? Are the laws subject to any restrictions at all?