Guest post by Dennis Ray Wingo
First I want to say thanks to Anthony for providing this forum for the discussion of climate in a different sense, that is to focus on Durban and what this conference means from the wider perspective of the direction of our global civilization.
When I was young and beginning in the world of technology I complained to my mentor, my company’s regional manager, about a bad performance review delivered to me by a boss who I and he thought was incompetent. His response was to say that “a performance review can be used as a tool or as a bludgeon”. The same thing is true about CO2 and its role on the global stage as providing a tool whereby the technocrats of the UN and its NGO’s seek to reorganize our planetary civilization In keeping with their desired future.
The fear of the negative consequences of the emission of CO2 is being used as a tool to bludgeon the developed world into economic and political suicide. We in the west are told that we must commit this suicide because we must commit to a “Fair and equitable allocation of the atmospheric space, taking into account the criteria of historic climate debt and population;” [bullet 33g of the FCCC/AWGLCA/2011/CRP.39 document]. We are told that the only just and equitable way to do this is to transfer large sums of money to the Non-Annex 1 world and that we must have peak CO2 emissions in Annex 1 (western civilization) immediately [bullet 33d, bullet 32].
There are two critical assumptions that underpin the entire Durban conference as well as previous efforts; the first assumption is that we live in a limited world and that this wealth transfer and the immediate cessation of CO2 emissions is the only possible path toward a “sustainable” future. The second is that technology cannot solve the problem but politics can. What are these assumptions built upon and are they valid? Is this the only path forward? Are we destined to leave our global posterity in a state of perpetual semi-poverty? Human nature rebels against this doom and gloom view of the future, and with good reason.
The Assumptions
I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems that I have mentioned will have reached staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.
Who said this? This statement could have very well have been the preamble to the Durban conference but it actually was uttered by UN Secretary General U Thant in 1969 and is included as the introduction to the book, Limits to Growth. The book “Limits to Growth” (LTG) is the touchstone of the environmental movement as well as the ultimate source of the two underpinning assumptions of the Durban conference.
The Limited Earth
The first assumption that the Earth is all we have and that our resources are limited to only what we have here. This is a patently false assumption. In 2005 I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book on “Spacepower Theory” which was commissioned by the defense department as an extension of Clauswitz’s classic “Landpower Theory”, Alfred Mahan’s “Seapower Theory”, and General Billy Mitchell’s “Airpower Theory”. In my chapter on the “Economic Development of the Solar System as the Heart of a Spacepower Theory”, a word was coined and defined.
“geocentric” is defined as a mindset that sees spacepower and its application as focused primarily on actions, actors, and influences on earthly powers, the earth itself, and its nearby orbital environs. (available online at the NDU press here)
The underpinning assumption that the Earth and its resources constitutes all the wealth that exists for humans to access and use is by definition a geocentric mindset and has been falsified by the last three decades of NASA, ESA, and other nations scientific probes sent to the Moon and beyond. Just in the last few years we have discovered billions of tons of water on the Moon to support propulsion, trillions of tons of aluminum, titanium, iron, Uranium, thorium and other rare Earth metals along with Platinum Group Metals, Cobalt, nickel and iron derived from asteroid impacts. In the asteroid belt are untold riches of water, metals and other resources yet to be identified. Just a single small metal asteroid, 3554 Amun, has tens of trillions of dollars worth of metals, and an asteroid of the same type, 216 Cleopatra, has a billion trillion times more resources of the same type. We now know that Mars has extensive water resources and the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity, found in just a few kilometers of driving, enough metallic asteroid fragments to kick start industry on Mars. It is absurd to think that the geocentric mindset of LTG and today in Durban is correct.
No Faith In Technology
The supposed inability of technology to solve our current problems is the other key assumption of LTG and today in Durban. To anyone who understands history and technology this is absurd but here is what the authors of LTG say about technology;
Applying technology to the natural pressures that the environment exerts against any growth process has been so successful in the past that a whole culture has evolved around the principle of fighting against limits rather than learning to live with them. This culture has been reinforced by the apparent immensity of the earth and its resources and by the relative smallness of man and his activities….
(page 156, Limits to Growth)
… We have felt it necessary to dwell so long on an analysis of technology here because we have found that technological optimism is the most common and the most dangerous reaction to our findings from the world model. Technology can relieve the symptoms of a problem without affecting the underlying causes. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution to all fundamental problems can thus divert our attention from the most fundamental problem – the problem of growth in a finite system – and prevent us from taking effective action to solve it.
(Page 159, LTG)
If you think that this thought pattern is one of the 1970’s, here is what Al Gore said in his book, Earth in the Balance in 1992:
It is important, however, to remember that there is a great danger in seeing technology alone as the answer to the environmental crisis. In fact, the idea that new technology is the solution to all our problems is a central part of the faulty way of thinking that created the crisis in the first place.
Unless we come to a better understanding of both the potential and the danger of technology, the addition of more technological power simply ensures further degradation of the environment, and no matter what new technologies we discover, no matter how cleverly and efficiently we manage to get them into the hands of people throughout the world, the underlying crisis will worsen unless, at the same time, we redefine our relationship to the environment, stabilize human population, and use every possible means to bring the earth back into balance.
(Page 328, Earth in the Balance)
Technology and technological development, in the form of the industrial revolution (the faulty way of thinking according to Gore), has done more to lift mankind out of poverty than all of the political systems tried in the entire one hundred and seventy thousand year history of our species put together. It is amazing that this neo Luddite attitude could exist today, but it does, and as an example of how it influences the Durban conference, only 15% of the money from their massive wealth transfer would be applied to developing technology. That is less than their administrative overhead! At the end of the day, this a key divergence between the NGO’s and technocrats of the UN and those of us who see another way, one rooted in finding solutions to the problems that confront us today.
Developing an Alternative
Let us, for the sake of the hypothetical and to put us on the same page as the delegates in Durban, let us grant the following:
- The increase in CO2 and other IR absorbing gasses in the atmosphere are bad and we must do something about it or suffer the secular apocalypse.
- We apply the minimum financial resources of the $100 billion per year as set forth in Durban to the problem.
Let us set as the requirements the following as well:
- Whatever solution is found, it must in the end result in a more prosperous world for all mankind.
- Whatever solution is found, it must also preserve individual liberty and provide opportunity for the further advance of mankind.
Unfortunately the requirements of brevity in this forum preclude an advanced treatment of this but lets lay the groundwork and if the reader wants more it can be provided in the future.
Energy
The first area to attack is energy. At the end of the day, energy is the key to the future. Just think that if a megawatt of electrical power was as inexpensive as a kilowatt is today, how many things would be different. A trash compactor could atomize your trash and separate it into its basic constituents for recycling. You could easily create your own hydrogen at home for your fuel cell car. Mining on the Earth could extract metals from base rock with oxygen as the waste product.
Half of the $100 billion per year would be spent on a crash program to develop various fusion technologies, including advanced forms of the National Ignition Facility, Polywell Fusion, Thorium fission, and the “traditional” ITER type Tokomak fusion. Applying this much money to these energy technologies would do far more than all of the political world shaping of the wealth transfer of Durban. Providing advanced energy sources would do far more than solar panels or wind turbines to power a prosperous civilization. Both solar and wind are inherently low energy multiple technologies, meaning that the energy that you get out of either of these is only low multiples of the energy that it takes the make, install, and maintain them.
If we put the proper amount of resources into these energy technologies, then we would “solve” the CO2 problem as a side benefit and we could build a world energy grid that would do more than all the antipoverty programs in place today put together to improve life on Earth. In researching the history of the industrial revolution, human lifespan has been directly proportional to the amount of inexpensive energy available to us. human lifespans in the west went from 35 years of age in the year 1700 to almost 50 years of age at the peak of the age of coal in 1900. Today at the peak of the oil age that number has climbed to almost 80 years in Annex 1 countries. It is also in the advanced energy countries where population growth has dropped to replacement or even below. There is a direct correlation between wealth and population and it is far more fun to make everyone wealthy than to make everyone suffer in poverty as would be the ultimate result of Durban.
Space Resource Development
In just the past few years the Lunar Recon Orbiter, the LCROSS, and other missions have made a very preliminary map of the resources available on the surface of the Moon. It is inevitable that there are upside surprises waiting us there. Despite the problems of NASA in getting us back to the Moon, to the Moon is our first destination. Let us apply the other $50 billion a year to an effort to begin the industrialization of the Moon. In inflation adjusted terms, this is still only 40% of the budget spent per year at the peak of the Apollo program. If it is that important, then we can increase that budget to the full $100 billion a year (we are talking about building a sustainable global civilization) on a multi-pronged effort in this area.
This would not just be a NASA effort or a NASA, ESA, JAXA effort but an effort that would provide the means whereby private enterprise could contribute through their own efforts and funds. Tax relief, prizes, and other incentives. We begin with the industrialization of the Moon and the construction of a transportation infrastructure to allow humans to easily move about in the inner solar system. The resources of the Moon enable this. We move forward to build infrastructure in geosynch orbit that are many times larger than today, to enable communications and remote sensing infrastructure that would fundamentally transform our global society for the better.
These are not fantasies, these are not science fiction ideas, they are 100% doable today. The problem has been that the financial support has not been there, even considering the $18 billion dollar a year NASA. NASA is not designed to lead the economic development of the solar system, nor should it be, this is something that the American people and our fellows in western civilization are uniquely qualified to do. Dr. John Marburger, the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Bush administration had a marvelous speech on this subject at the Goddard symposium in 2006. In it he said:
The ultimate goal is not to impress others, or merely to explore our planetary system, but to use accessible space for the benefit of humankind. It is a goal that is not confined to a decade or a century. Nor is it confined to a single nearby destination, or to a fleeting dash to plant a flag. The idea is to begin preparing now for a future in which the material trapped in the Sun’s vicinity is available for incorporation into our way of life.
This is the alternative to the Durban failure that should be investigated and I submit that if we did this, our future would be far better in the year 2100 than even the most optimistic scenarios developed in any of these conferences that focus on how to split the existing pie up in a way that supports their political proclivities. We want to build a far bigger pie. Today the average welfare recipient in the United States lives a life style that Augustus Caesar or the greatest emperor of old China would think of as magic. Our goal should be to create a world in the year 2100 where the poor live a lifestyle that George Soros would envy.
Beyond Artificial Limits
For those of us who work in the space business and who develop new architectures for lunar development and beyond it seems absurd that these false assumptions should underpin serious global deliberations at crafting a better future for the citizens of our planetary civilization. This at the end of the day is my greatest objection to the role that climate scientists play in the arena of solutions to the “CO2 problem”. Whether or not you believe that CO2 is the secular apocalypse, one thing is certain, the people that are trained in the arcane science of climate proxies are inadequate in training and incompetent in execution of something as large as architecting a future for our civilization. We must open up the boundaries of the discussion to include energy development on the Earth and resource development off planet as serious and viable alternatives to plans such as the failed ones being drawn up in places like Durban.
There is a future out there, a glorious one, that while it may not solve all of our problems, it will certainly get us beyond these artificial limits to growth.
I think it bears pointing out that the lifespan that Dennis Wingo and Stephen Skinner (12/11/2011 2:21 AM) are talking about is life expectancy at birth. Life expectancy at later ages has improved since the 19th century, but not nearly by as much.
Example: For American white males: life expectancy at birth for those born in 2004 is 75.7 years, while life expectancy at age 60 for those born in 1850 was 15.6 years; i.e., the average 60-year old white male born in 1850 lived to be 75.6 years old.
See this life expectancy chart.
Far be it from me to side with the Durban loons, but I don’t see that Mr. Wingo’s ideas about the future are much better justified than theirs. It might turn out that “the material trapped in the Sun’s vicinity” is NOT “available for incorporation into our way of life.” That is, we might find that it is too expensive to mine them. I’m all for optimism that we won’t find it so, but I don’t see that we can exclude the possibility that we’ll be disappointed.
When confronted by folk who more or less demand that we move to renewables like solar and wind (and I have both panels and a wind turbine) I may always be heard to say “In the pursuit of renewables every penny not spent on fusion research will very likely turn out to be a penny wasted.”
This article boils down to two things:
A: Spend part of $100 billion on developing fusion power
B: Spend the rest on developing space-transportation infrastructure
As a lifelong supporter of the space program, I actually agree with part B, so long as it results in a system that will eventually pay for itself. By contrast, e-commerce expanded the way it did because taxation was outlawed. It is an open question whether it will survive once that restriction is removed.
As for Durban: On the good side, India and China continue to refuse to abide by Kyoto-style targets. This will result in “industrialized” countries gradually falling away. (The “agreement” to abide in the future is laughable.) On the bad side, the new bureacracies to create world-wide taxation have now been authorized, and they will have one and only one priority: to grow.
The best way for the “developed” nations of the world, “the payors” to help the rest of the nations of the world “the payees” is for the private sectors to invest the money in new and inproving technology. The private sector is the most efficient method of pursuing technology because it quickly recognizes success and just as quickly abandons blind alleys, something governments habitually fail to do.
We are very much in the process of developing a sustainable world. In order to end poverty and feed the people the world needs energy and a positive direction. Giving billions to despicable third world leaders is stupid and certainly non-sustainable. It’s the type of thinking that Dennis is showing that has helped create our constantly improving world. The people meeting in Durban take their beliefs and try to destroy the growth and prosperity of the human race. Two hundred years ago land covered with oil seepage left the land useless because you could not farm or raise animals on it. We have since found a use for the oil and the value of the land soared. Some may want to stop this growth to the future and run backwards but we in America say forge ahead and we will let the people define that future. That’s the way that the world goes round. What is needed throughout the world is for people to be free to act in their own self interest and a fairly enforced rule of law to protect their rights and freedom then life for the people of the world will improve.
Richard111 says~ and by 2100 when sea levels have risen by any number of metres population of 32 billion with standing room only will see an end to all this drivel.
Ricky, one of your gods, hansen, predicted that a certain highway would be under ‘a number of meters’ of water, by… three years ago.
Another one of your gods, algor, recently bought himself a nice, sea-level mansion which, by his prophecies, will be engulfed by ‘a number of meters’ of water in about 20 years.
A third god, david zusuki, lives in a nice mansion on an island which he expects will be under ‘ a number of meters of water’… but he doesn’t seem intent on leaving any time soon!
When are you going to get that the ‘drivel’ is pouring from your god’s [self-snipped]?
richard December 11, 2011 at 2:05 am
alternative fuels, blah!
what is wrong with co2.
May i introduce you to the Johnson co2 generator for Greenhouses, at a cheap cost it pushes up co2 to 1000ppm.
What are you saying, that CO2 is a fuel? No, it’s not. It’s already oxidized. That’s why plants need energy from the sun to break it down.
I’ve got a whole better idea that would not only save us the proposed spending of $100 billion/year, but would obtain the desired results much more cheaply and quicker. Use a bottom up approach (rather than the top-down one so loved by plutocrats and vilified by everyone else).
IOW, get rid of the massive overregulation of the free market.
Ever notice that the Envirobots attending these events have a spooky red glow emanating from their chests? We need to enlist Will Smith to inject a vial of nannites into the side of the UN building, thereby destroying UNVIKI and disabling all the NS-5 Envirobots that are screwing things up.
Throughout human history, there have always been individuals and groups that have the idea that they are ‘anointed’; that they know what is best for the rest of humanity and that it is their right and duty to control everyone else for the good of all. History has shown us that these people, no matter how diversified, have always been wrong, and, when given the chance, make things worse 100% of the time. It is simple impossible for an individual or small centralized group to have and process all of the information required to make good decisions for everyone else. The universal failure of the anointed is often more a matter of math than morality.
Don’t get me wrong. We all think we know what is best for everyone else. The difference is that most of us do not try and control the rest of the population with force, fiats and fear to get our way. Instead, we invite others to join our vision of a better world and set out to make our own little part of the world better.
Richard111 says: December 11, 2011 at 4:03 am
Richard, just where do you get that sort of drivel? First, your “facts” are wrong. The first billion was achieved between 1800 and 1820, not 1900. The second billion was reached about 1920. The world’s population is not exponentially increasing: growth is declining. There is one (probably over-optimistic) population scenario that predicts world population peaking at about 8.5 billion in the 2020’s and declining to just under 6 billion by 2100. 32 billion? Get a grip.
Very simply, the UN is a Luddite organization, as then they can maintain that all solutions must derive from them and politicians.
From a Canadian point of view, I view the following statement from our Minister of Environment, Peter Kent, as by far and away the most important thing he said.
“Nor will we devote scarce dollars to capitalize the new Green Climate Fund — part of the Durban agreement — until all major emitters accept legally binding reduction targets and transparent accounting of greenhouse gas inventory,”
In other words, not one red cent until everyone has agreed to binding reductions. Anyone heard when hell is going to freeze over?
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The increase in CO2 and other IR absorbing gasses in the atmosphere are bad and we must do something about it or suffer the secular apocalypse.
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Even as a hypothetical, I consider this statement wrong.
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Smoking Frog says:
December 11, 2011 at 6:48 am
What are you saying, that CO2 is a fuel? No, it’s not. It’s already oxidized.
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I read him to say that advocating alternative fuels to keep from producing CO2 is nonsense. CO2 is good for the environment. Commercial greenhouses routinely add more CO2 to promote plant growth.
Jim
There is another important flawed assumption made by the architects of the Durban economic plan for the world. The participant’s economic beliefs stem from socialism or worse that income must be redistributed because it is finite and cannot be created. Capitalism is a creator of wealth as been shown to be the case in America. By forcing the industrial nations to distribute their wealth to underdeveloped nations will ultimately destroy wealth and the capacity of technology to address the world technical concerns such as pollution. Thus the Durban economic model is flawed from the start and will ultimately fail if it is ever implemented.
You can forget about mining on the moon. Theres enough cheese on earth.
The costs would be so high as to make it a fantasy.
I wouldn’t just call these folks geocentric but eggists. They are birds that think they only have the egg they’re just woken up in, breaking the shell is bad and they have to conserve their energy as much as they can. Instead all they do is suffocate the long process that led them to be a species destined for flight.
Boris Gimbarzevsky says:
December 11, 2011 at 3:51 am
Excellent article and details succinctly what we need to be doing. It’s not clear where the human race lost its technologic optimism. I remember the days of seemingly unlimited options in the 1960′s when, with what now seems like primitive technology, we made it to the moon. My expectation was that this would result in human settlement of the moon and the movie 2001 provided a time frame during which this process would happen.
The “human race lost its technologic optimism” when being in politics became a career rather than a part-time job done for the good of one’s country. The career politicians largely now have degrees in law or politics and are only interested in furthering their careers. They have no understanding of science and in many cases are anti-science as politicians (and a lawyers) want to ‘win the argument’ regardless of the ‘truth’: they do not wish to be shown to be wrong by observation. From this it is easy to see how the ‘Team’ climate ‘scientists’ fit so well with their politician funding sources.
The only way out of this problem, which is affecting the entire world is to make politics part time as in Texas and impose term limits. Politics must not be seen as a career.
Louis Hissink says:
December 11, 2011 at 3:20 am
> Tokamak Fusion ? How long has it been attempted, 50 years????
Yeah, but we can expect commercial (hot) fusion reactors in only another 30 years. 🙂
We have had the technology to start economically mining asteroids since the 1950s.
Project Orion field tests demonstrated that space propulsion using nuclear explosives was clean, ridiculously powerful, and economically feasible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Since the 1950s we’ve had the ability to launch ships capable of re-engineering the solar system, shifting asteroids into Earth orbit, to mine or colonise, or even launch a manned mission to the nearest stars.
All that is needed is the political will to reach out and grab the opportunity.
We are explorers at our core. That is probably the key to our success.
The discovery of the new world opened up abundant resources, Moon and Mars will do the same. We are fools to not be investing in settlements there.
Furthermore, we have barely scratched the surface of the earth when it comes to available resources.
The unsustainability hypothesis is dead wrong and they know it.
Very good article, Mr. Wingo. I want to make a suggestion that is not intended as a joke though it might seem to be. Send your article to Newt Gingrich. He just might decide that embracing space “industrialization” is the great project that he needs in his campaign.
Limits to Growth took a look at “reserves” of the principal metals and fuels without understanding that the mining geologist only develops sufficient reserves to ensure feed for the concentrator for 10 to 15 years ahead. The cost of measuring these reserves through diamond drilling and assays is part of the cost of mining which must be kept to the minimum required to plan operations ahead. Projects like Inco’s nickel operations (now owned by Vale of Brazil) has had only 10 to 20 years reserves since they started in the Sudbury, Ontario area in 1905 and they are still going, and the reserves they have discovered in entirely new deposits since 1905 (and since the publication of LTG) dwarf what they had in Sudbury.
Now for the technology. LTG gave us some 20-30 years (or so) of zinc left. Let us assume here that that is all there was. Three quarters of all zinc was used for coating steel for barn rooves, culverts, etc. to prevent them from corosion – we have many alternatives to this and since, we have many new materials that do the job better – plastics, composites, etc that weren’t even known when this alarmist Malthusian Lilliputian scholarship was prepared. Remember Jevons, the British 19th Century economist who saw the world sliding into ruins because of having only a century of coal left. Malthus himself who saw cities expanding in two dimensions (of one to 2 or 3 story buildings) so that a person on the outskirts would require several days on horseback or in a horse-drawn carriage to get to the centre of town (several technologies here – hey we don’t even have to present ourselves in the flesh now to go to a meeting in the far reaches of the globe!). And finally, in light of LTG, an electrical engineer skeptic apparently constructed a radio in the 1950s using only (I believe) concrete, steel, quartz and a few other abundant commodities. It was cumbersome I’m sure, but made the point that alarmists are constrained to linear thinking.
The attendees at Durbin want other people’s money and they want it now. They are using a fraud in an attempt to eliminate free enterprise, interfere in commerce and rake off money and take it for their own purposes. Their plans do not include mining the universe but do include limited mining on earth.
They wish to sit at the top and distribute the worlds resources as they choose, in other words to determine life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The only thing in their way is the desire for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over dictatorship.