Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
People have this idea that sailing is cheap, because of the low fuel costs. But blue-water sailors have a saying that goes like this:
The wind is free … but everything else costs money.
Reading the various pronouncements from the partygoers at the Durban climate-related Conference of Parties, I was struck by the many uses of the words “sustainable development” and “sustainability”. It’s pretty confusing. Apparently, paying high long-term subsidies for uneconomic energy sources is sustainable … who knew?
Anyways, I got to thinking about how I’ve never been sure what “sustainable development” means, and of how much it reminds me of the sailors saying. One of the first uses of the term was in the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report, which said:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
I never understood that definition. How could I use a shovel to turn over the earth for my garden, for example? Every kilo of iron ore that is mined to make my shovel is a kilo of iron ore that is forever unavailable to “future generations to meet their own needs”. It’s unavoidable. Which means that we will run out of iron, and thus any use of iron is ultimately unsustainable. My shovel use is depriving my great-grandchildren of shovels.
Oh, sure, I can recycle my shovel. But some of the metal will inevitably be lost in the process. All that does is make the inevitable iron-death move further away in time … but recycling doesn’t magically make iron extraction sustainable.
Figure 1. Example of unsustainable development.
And if me using a steel shovel to dig in my own garden is not sustainable … then what is sustainable? I mean, where are the “peak iron” zealots when we need them?
So other than sunlight, wind, and rainbows … just what is sustainable development supposed to be built of? Cell phones are one of the most revolutionary tools of development … but we are depriving future generations of nickel and cadmium in doing so. That’s not sustainable.
Here’s the ugly truth. It’s simple, blunt, and bitter. Nothing is sustainable. Oh, like the sailors say, the wind is free. As is the sunshine. But everything else we mine or extract to make everything from shovels to cell phones will run out. The only question is, will it run out sooner, or later? Because nothing is sustainable. “Sustainable Development” is just an airy-fairy moonbeam fantasy, a New Age oxymoron. In the real world, it can’t happen. I find the term “sustainable development” useful for one thing only.
When people use it, I know they have not thought too hard about the issues.
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.
Denying those men, women, and especially children the ability to improve their lives based on some professed concern about unborn generations doesn’t sit well with me at all. The obvious response from their side is “Easy for you to say, you made it already.” Which is true. The West got wealthy by means which “sustainable development” wants to deny to the world’s poor.
Look, there could be a climate catastrophe in fifty years. And we could hit some sustainability wall in fifty years.
But when a woman’s kids are hungry, she won’t see the logic of not feeding them to avoid “compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”. She won’t understand that logic at all.
And neither do I. Certainly, I think we should live as lightly as possible on this marvelous planet. And yes, use rates and R/P ratios are an issue. But nothing is sustainable. So let’s set the phrase “sustainable development” on the shelf of meaningless curiosities, go back to concentrating on feeding the children we already have on this Earth, and leave the great-grandchildren to fend for themselves. Everyone says they’ll live to be a thousand and be a lot richer than I am and have computers that can write poetry, so I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
w.
PS—Theorists say that it’s not enough that development be sustainable in terms of the environment. They also demand sustainability in three other arenas: social, economic, and cultural sustainability.
Socially sustainable? Culturally sustainable? We don’t even know if what we currently do is culturally or socially sustainable. How can we guess if some development is culturally sustainable?
I swear, sometimes I think people have totally lost the plot. This is mental onanism of the highest order, to sit around and debate if something is “culturally sustainable”. Like I said … let’s get back to feeding the kids. Once that’s done, we can debate if the way we fed them is culturally sustainable.
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crosspatch says: December 22, 2011 at 1:38 …………….
Thanks for the wiki link on the precautionary principle and the administrative laws being put in place under the guise of ensuring no risk is left unaccounted for. I see that the city of SF is noted as follows-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
“USA”
“On July 18, 2005, the City of San Francisco passed a Precautionary Principle Purchasing ordinance, which requires the city to weigh the environmental and health costs of its $600 million in annual purchases – for everything from cleaning supplies to computers…..”
It will be interesting to see how SF deals with the advocacy groups pushing for the removal of the dam at Hetch Hetchy. Removal of the dam will elimate a lot of the hydro electricity that SF gets out of the system- http://www.bls.gov/ro9/cpisanf_energy.htm
…………”Available Electricity Supply-
“The Hetch Hetchy Enterprise provides electricity to the City’s municipal load customers, which include City facilities, the Port, the Airport, and San Francisco Unified School District and Community College District facilities, to the Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts, and to Airport tenants and Norris Industries, a Federal munitions factory in Riverbank, California. Hydroelectricity is generated by the flow of water from the three Hetch Hetchy system reservoirs, Lake Eleanor, Cherry Lake, and Hetch Hetchy, through the four powerhouses, Holm, Kirkwood, Moccasin, and Moccasin Low Head. In addition to generating hydroelectricity, the Hetch Hetchy Enterprise purchases electricity through its long-term power purchase agreement with Calpine Corporation and on the wholesale electricity market.
Electricity that is to be used by the City’s municipal customers, Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts, and Norris Industries each day is scheduled on the State’s electricity grid. The amount of electricity resources, including hydroelectric power generated by the Hetch Hetchy Enterprise and purchased power, that are scheduled on the electricity grid must equal the amount of electricity that is required by the City’s municipal customers, Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts, and Norris Industries. Because electricity cannot be stored, the Hetch Hetchy Enterprise must purchase electricity if it is not able to generate a sufficient amount of hydroelectric power to meet its obligations at any given time. Conversely, if the Hetch Hetchy Enterprise generates more hydroelectric power or has more power purchases under the long-term power purchase agreement with the Calpine Corporation than is required to meet its obligations, the surplus electricity must be offered to Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts if it comes from Hetch Hetchy, or it can be sold on the market if it comes from contract purchases or if hydroelectric power is refused by Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts……….”
I take it the city wouldn’t like to pay the electical rates that the rest of the Bay Area residents currently pay-
http://www.sfbos.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=19229
“A kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity cost San Francisco area consumers $0.216 in October 2011, 2.7 percent less than one year earlier. Nationwide, electricity prices averaged $0.130 in October 2011, compared to $0.127 the previous year. For the past five years, electricity prices in the San Francisco area have been consistently above the national average and ranged from approximately 47 percent to over 88 percent higher.”
Thanks for the reference.
jrwakefield says:
December 22, 2011 at 12:59 pm
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.”
The solar system and the universe is here BECAUSE of the laws of thermodynamics. It is progressing to LESS entropy, not more. The universe was more “orderly” at the Big Bang.
________
jrwakefield,
Unless you’ve discovered some new physics that can reverse times arrow, and lead to less entropy in the universe, for yours and everyone else’s benefit, you ought to know that the universe is heading toward toward more entropy, not less. In simple terms, Entropy is a measure of disorder, and disorder, when looking at the whole system, is always increasing.
Matt Skaggs,
You have removed the inherent complexity to achieve a definition of sustainability by isolating to a single variable (ex forest). I would submit you take this path because it is impossible to do otherwise and even this is impossible.
Your forest analogy is only sustainable from a standpoint of timber- what age forest, what tree mix, who profits, what fire cycle who decides are just a few of the other possible metrics? What if I believe no timber should ever be removed and someone else believed we should burn it all down and replace it with tall grass prairie. Simply stating it is the planting of more trees than you remove is senseless from the standpoint of the ecosystem that organizes around the infinitely complex interplay of forest age, tree type, fire cycle, disease, allelopathy, soil chemistry and its even more complex interrelationship with the biota that selects various mutually exclusive forest states as the preferred sustainable option. And is that a sustainable forest with or without invasive earth worms because that changes everything as well. Who decides these issue and countless others and by what rules?
It gets even harder when we move to solving two variables forest and water- now we need to look at evapotranspiration effects as one example. Do we maximize forest area or groundwater recharge- how do we value the impacts on minimum flow in headwater streams. The type of tree determines in large part the energy dynamics (productivity) related to leaf litter especially in head water dreams. Do we maximize fish production or timber production. Are we optimizing for biomass or diversity? Who decides and why. How does the next generation vote? What buffers to natural variability are imposed?
I could go on and on- sustainability however first requires defining what you want and what are you willing to risk/tradeoff for the chance to achieve it. The second part of how we achieve this will never happen because we will never be able to agree to the first part of the question. Demanding sustainability is how one side justifies never asking what do you want and what are you willing to risk to achieve it?
R. Gates says…. lots of places- ………….entropy……………..
I had to take a look at a reference in my library “Checkland- System Thinking, Systems Practice”- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Checkland to respond to your comments about entropy and why it is not a first principle in “unrestricted sciences-” biology. Somehow embryos come into being and entropy is not applicable while the live system is holding back the forces of decay. Emergent activities happen throughout the development of what we call life. As Willis has pointed out elsewhere it appears that our climate system has similar emergent properties. I’d love to hear more about this subject………..
In the mean time Happy Holidays.
When the lefties bring up their mythical notion of enviro sustainability, I respond with real concerns about the real kind of sustainability: economic sustainability, which is exactly the standard that NONE of lefties’ favored spending programs meet — especially the kinds of corporate welfare without which “green” jobs and “green” products mostly can’t exist.
Willis, I have been away (and without internet access) so I am just trying to catch up with this thread, but readers might enjoy my earlier contribution on this subject:
http://www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats2002/kellow.html
Ken Hall says:
December 22, 2011 at 3:14 am
Sustainable forestry is possible.
Only if you burn the forests in place. Otherwise the forests deplete the soil nutrients over time. Sustainable farming means going into the forest and burning down a section and planting a crop in the nutrients returned to the soil, then moving on to a new section of forest the next year. Even that is unsustainable, unless you eat the food in place and leave behind the dung.
Without added energy, land can only support a very few people per square mile. In the tropics the number is higher, because the energy from the sun is higher. Restrict the use of coal and oil through carbon taxes and the forests of the earth will converted to fuel by economics.
Thus REDD seeks to secure the timber rights to large portions of the earth by displacing aboriginal owners and thus reap fantastic profits. WWF, Strong, Clinton are advocates. Any chance they have a conflict of interest?
as a builder, i have to laugh at the “green” garbage that is being built in the name of “sustainability”. so much of it is just contemporary “me” junk clad in poor – and poorly tested – materials.
and all of that sustainable, award-winning, but severely depreciating junk will be filling landfills in 20 or 30 years. it’s a sick joke.
Here is what sustainable development really means:
The poor of the earth cannot have an education, job, money, house, car, cell phone, TV, running water, electricity, 3 square meals a day, because this would deplete the resources of the earth, ruining things for those of us that already have those things.
There is no such thing as sustainable development. It is simply greed and fear. Greed to deny the poor what you already have. Fear that they will take it away unless stopped.
So true, Willis, well said. That utterly ridiculous word “sustainability” has been annoying me for years courtesy of the clueless who worship it.
A physicist says:
“Smokey, those lefty nutjobs at Forbes disagree with you; they say the syndromes that Borlaug and Berry foresaw are upon us.”
In reading that Forbes link, I see that it has nothing to do with my comment. That is the typical M.O. of ‘a physicist’: he cannot refute my point that after 30 years Borlaug has been proven wrong, so ‘a physicist’s’ inane response is to link to an unrelated article rather than admit that Borlaug’s prediction was an abject failure.
Aynsley, If I understand your paper correctly sustainability is the arena where we battle over competing fears, interests and ideologies while trying to make believe its about natural eco-systems.
Pat,
Yes – it is a concept that tends to reflect our concerns over social instability, and we cling to it despite the fact that ecological science no longer supports a meme of ‘Nature’s delicate balance.’ Ecological science and the environmental movement parted company c1990, but it is an idea that still infects branches of ‘political science’ such as that on climate change science that is based on the notion of a stable climate – but for anthropogenic factors.
Willis Eschenbach says:
“December 22, 2011 at 10:16 am
1DandyTroll says:
December 22, 2011 at 3:05 am
Why have we been able to mine one of the scarcest metals for some 7000 years and still we’re not running low?
Hey, Dandy, back to trolling I see. In answer to your question, it’s because”
Always. Thank you for noticing. 🙂
“a) for about the first 6,800 of those years there weren’t many of us, and”
By the meagre calculations I can make, that’s a none answer, or an answer by someone who also doesn’t understand the enormity of the human race in relation to the scarcity of gold.
“b) the world is a big place, and”
7000 years ago, it wasn’t that big of a place, yet we still mine in the same places they did 7000 years ago, more or less.
“c) when we start to run low we use something else. Who would have guessed that copper communication cables could be replaced by glass cables?”
You can’t create gold, only diamonds lol, and there’s no glass plated speaker wires…and I can’t get glass cables either in the place I live for internet, only gigabit copper cables (and that’s another metal we never seem to run out off.) :p
Here’s my guess, we will never run out of gold even if it is, in reality, a limited resource. And we’ll probably never run out of oil or gas either, because it has been accumulating for a billion years and simple little man has only mined it for less than 100 years, industrially and the machinery that use it we keep making use less of it to perform the same or better. But mostly because we’re our own ants in relation to our size which is ant-sized in comparison to our own egos. :-()
Merry Christmas, and plz why not put your articles and conclusions together in a book?
I should add that my student Phil Lawn published a good book from his thesis on the economics of sustainability (reference is in my lecture), where he showed convincingly that resource depletion is not an issue. The only concern is waste accumulation in the longer term (following Georgescu-Roegen’s incorporation of the entropy law into economics) – but then we are not necessarily in a closed system and could conceivably fire off nuclear waste into the sun and still come out in front.
Excellent essay!
My father and I used to discuss this 15 or more years ago, and he said it appeared to him that the modifier and the verb had been misused in the phrase.
My personal opinion? “Sustainability” sets an artificial mean, and then supply and demand be damned, cost, cause and effect be damned, we will do without whatever is necessary, or supply whatever is necessary, to “sustain” that artificial mean.
No matter how far the quality of life falls below the line, no matter how far the cost rises above it.
Here’s a simple idea, from a simple troll, but why Mr Willis not have a great get together by you good people? Just imagine it, You, of course, Mr Watts, The JoNova, The last conservative Delingpole, Tall “got nicked” bloke, J.Id, Laframboise, The evil twins McIntyre and McKitrick, and capped by the one and, ours all only, skeptical Lord Monckton?
Just imagine the ad propagated youtube video of such a showing and how informative that could be for climate change (the latte, of course, is a must to get EU funding for any conference or debates, these days, apparently.)
Smokey, the key graphic in the Forbes article “Why We Are In Political Gridlock: The Private Sector Is Dying” is the Economy-Wide Return on Invested Capital, which has been trending down in every decade since 1965 (which is why median family income has been stagnant in these same decades). As the Forbes article says:
To my mind, the ideas of Wendell Berry and Norman Borlaug account for this adverse American economic trend more naturally than the slogans of either political party, or the machinations of the investment bankers of Wall Street, or Willis Eschenbach’s “just-say-no to sustainability” economic theories.
Willis: “In other words, Roger, there’s nothing that’s sustainable except building spaceships, and Tim, you agree? Just trying to clarify your position. If that’s it, it’s very much like mine—I say nothing is sustainable, and you say only building spaceships might be sustainable … but since building spaceships is only about 0.0001% of what humans do, we’re not far apart.”
More or less, Willis; yes — although I do not believe we are at the point of needing spaceships yet; just the continuing development of the technology to have them in the future so we can when either necessary or because we wish to. (That we do continue development is critical, but under threat from those who beat their breasts in woe–another subject we are becoming increasingly familiar with… to our despair; or mine, anyway.)
Does humanity claim to be the ultimate expression of life (and I believe it is) then it is up to humanity to see that we live forever. We have a planet to play with, and then the stars.
So, yes, we can be “sustainable” — if we wish to be.
p.s. Four grandchildren wanting to play train games on this computer right now! is limiting me even as it inspires me…
‘a physicist’ says:
“From his early years, Dr. Borlaug… felt that it only gave the world a breathing space of 30 years.”
My comment was in response to Borlaug’s failed prediction. The Forbes article is merely a diversion; deliberate misdirection away from a provably wrong prediction. Man up and admit that the prediction was flat wrong. Or post diversions, or whatever is necessary to give some desperately needed wiggle room.
Climate alarmists’ predictions all have one thing in common: they’re wrong.
By cloaking this all in terms of defending Nature to justify economic/social/political arguments we have held meaningful environmental improvement hostage. From an economic view point I no longer see any incentive to correct ANY environmental problem. The maintenance of the problem simply has more value now to the various organized concentrated interests than does any solution. Those of us that entered the environmental field decades ago thinking we were going to fix wetlands and fisheries rather than people simply feel betrayed. I have learned Austrian economics explains the last 40 years of environmental “decision making” better than does any science. What a waste.
Unless you’ve discovered some new physics that can reverse times arrow, and lead to less entropy in the universe, for yours and everyone else’s benefit, you ought to know that the universe is heading toward toward more entropy, not less. In simple terms, Entropy is a measure of disorder, and disorder, when looking at the whole system, is always increasing.
—-
Yes, my bad. Had it backwards.
R. Gates says:
December 22, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Davidmhoffer sez:
“The earth is an inanimate object and doesn’t do squat to sustain life. Life sustain’s istelf by adapting to the conditions on earth.”
You’re trying to Anthropomorphize the living system that is the earth. The Earth is hardly inanimate. If it were…you’d surely have never existed. This is a dynamic living planet in which the whole is far more than the sum of the parts.>>>>
Oh poppycock. The Earth is a planet. A chunk of rocks and minerals, a whack of water, and some gases. It isn’t animate, it doesn’t think, and it doesn’t sustain a damn thing. The biosphere is just life that exploits the resources of the planet.
R. Gates;
“Nature” trying to kill us? Surely not. Nature is the sum total of interrelated living things. Nature no more is trying to kill the gazelle, when it is attacked by the lion then it is trying to kill you when you’re attacked by a virus.>>>
The part you don’t seem to get is that we’re not animals, we’re humans. We’ve eradicated some of the viruses that would otherwise kill us, we’ve found cures for others, and we will do the same for the rest. The gazelle has no choice but to die and be eaten if caught by a lion, and the lion has no choice but to die if it doesn’t catch enough gazelles to eat. THAT is the point! We’re NOT animals, we do NOT have to accept the rules that the animals live by, we can make our OWN rules for what is best for US. You are arguing that we would be better off just being animals and doing our best to survive. If you want to go back to 40% infant mortality rates, plagues, famines, and life expectancies half of what we have today, you go right ahead. But don’t you dare ask the rest of us to come with you.
R. Gates;
There is always the balance between quantity or length of life and quality of life.>>>
What you propose is a poor quality short life.
Though you can extend the “life” of a love one with technology long after nature, in her mercy, would have taken them, it doesn mean that you should. There is a reason why they call pneumonia the “friend of the elderly”.>>>>
We’re not talking about technology and the elderly. We’re talking about regular people over the course of their lifespan. In the world you propose, most of us would be dead at under the age of 30 from starvation, disease and cold. Given the choice of having the dilemma regarding the elderly, I’d rather have the choice. You want your kids and grandkids to have a near zero shot at getting old in the first place, then you’re one evil nasty dude.
R. Gates;
In decay and death, nature plants the seeds for the next generation of life. Have you never had a compost pile?>>>
Yes I have one. Nature didn’t build it though, I did. The best you can do is use as an example something that wouldn’t exist without humans? Wow. So, what you are saying is that human intervention is good for the biosphere? Why, exactly, is a compost heap “good” and “natural” when other methods of enriching the soil and improving production are not?
R. Gates;
And in terms of “preservation”, that is one area that human have really screwed things up for themselves. Do you know how much pancreatic cancer has been caused by years and years of preservatives being put into the body?>>>
No idea. Do you know how many people are saved from death from food borne diseases because of those preservatives? How many people are saved from starvation because of those preservatives? How many people are lifted out of poverty because preservatives make food supplies so much less expensive? The good outways the bad by orders of magnitude, not to mention that without the preservatives the very people you claim are being killed by pancreatic cancer probably wouldn’t live long enough to develop it. Pick one: Die of plague at age 30, or die at 65 of pancreatic cancer. Pick one: Die of starvation at the age of 30, or die of pancreatic cancer at age 65. In fact, find me ONE person who would NOT pick pancreatic cancer! Then add to that the fact that dieing from plague or starvation by age 30 would be a near certainty, but dieing of pancreatic cancer would be pretty rare even if one went heavy on the preservatives all one’s life.
That’s the choice you are suggesting. A nearly certain short brutal life, or a teeny chance of death at old age via pancreatic cancer. You pick whatever you want, but don’t sentence billions of people to your own fate.
R. Gates;
Best to just eat fresh food, and stay away from the sodium nitrite especially. It essentially pickles your pancreas.>>>
Where, with your use as little of everything stay in harmony with nature bullsh*t, do you suppose the fresh food is going to come from? Do you think it will make itz own compost heaps, till itz own soil, pull itz own weeks, harvest itself, refrigerate itself, and walk to your house where it will then boil water with which to wash itself off and then present itself to you to be eaten “fresh”?
You live in some sort of dream world R. Gates where it is good to sentence billions to death and live like animals because they are “natural” and so we should be too.
Bullsh*t.
Davidmhoffer said:
“Oh poppycock. The Earth is a planet. A chunk of rocks and minerals, a whack of water, and some gases. It isn’t animate, it doesn’t think, and it doesn’t sustain a damn thing. The biosphere is just life that exploits the resources of the planet.”
——
Nice reductionism. You could break an apple down to the individual elements…so much carbon, oxygen, etc., but it would not tell you about what the essence the apple is. If you cannot see that the Earth and all the systems of minerals, oceans, atmosphere, magnetosphere, etc., add up to a life sustaining whole, then I feel very sorry for you and leave you to contemplate your pile of dead elements that once was an apple and the notion that the whole is far more than the sum of the parts.
I’ve had this sort of conversation with my wife. She claims we need to use our salary wisely to sustain our family. I point out quite rightly that we will spend it all whatever happens, so why not blow it on having a good time before it disappears in inflation etc? She for her part claims that sustainable use of our income and resources is about maximising the use and potential of what we have and not being wasteful. Ah well, you’ll never convince some people eh!