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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
R. Gates said:
What an odd rubric to use as a measurement of human success. “Billions” of people, living “longer” etc.
Odd? Every one of those billions is someone’s child—a child that did not die young. Like you, Gates, see?
davidmhoffer says:
December 23, 2011 at 11:15 pm
R. Gates;
You see, the distinction between “manmade” and ” natural” is a construct of the human mind>>>
In that case we can do whatever we want as any effect we have on your prescious web of life is just part of the natural universe.
—
Indeed we can and indeed it is. If you agree with this then we finally agree on something. Just as if a tsunami strikes and kills thousands or a bomb is dropped that does the same– both follow the same laws of the universe, with the distinction being that we can chose. We are a conscious part of the natural world. How will we use that ability?
u.k.(us) says:
December 23, 2011 at 11:16 pm
==========================
Was your contribution any better than mine?
Didn’t think so.
Would anyone care what I think about sustainability?
Didn’t think so.
R. Gates wrote on December 23, 2011 at 10:24 pm:
“… if you were a wild man living in the jungles, surviving by instinct and cunning, you’d at least be wise enough to know that very jungle is a web of interconnected life and any separation from that web is only an illusion of the ego.”
What a surprise – the famous ‘wild’ but ‘wise’ man living in the jungle, from Rousseau by way of A.Huxley straight to the green mystical religion.
A cursory glace at how humanity evolved, and how human society evolved from hunter-gatherers by way of domestication of animals and plants to the first towns in the Middle East shows that it is about survival, of family groups and tribes aiming to have some food surplus to make up for times where food is not available.
Interestingly, all who warble about the wise wild man never ever take into account that one man has obviously not got a family, nor children. So his ‘wisdom’ will be lost with his death. A great recipe for the survival of the species! Any animal is doing better, because reproduction of the species is the driving force in evolution. But that is one of the astonishing facets those people exhibit, unknowingly: while paying lip service to Darwin and to evolution, their aim seems to be to halt evolution now, or even to roll it back, to a mystical past where there are only a few people living in that fabulous web.
May I respectfully suggest that R.Gates and the rest scroll up a bit and look at the cartoon Willis showed in one of his replies …
R. Gates says:
December 23, 2011 at 11:08 pm
“What an odd rubric to use as a measurement of human success. “Billions” of people, living “longer” etc. It reminds me of those who judge their own success by quantity rather than quality. It is not how long someone lives, or how much money they have accumulated, or how big their portfolio is, or how big their house is, etc., but simply how we live our lives. So too, the success of species should not be judged by how many of us are living on this planet, but how we are living on this planet.”
========
Try to sell that story in the slums in India.
You have it so good, so do I, that you don’t know what “poor” means.
It is easy to find out, throw away your wallet and live in the street.
Report back when/if you make enough money to contribute here.
Thanks, david hoffer, you saved me some typing.
Further to my comment above, here is a superb article by Matthew Chew (h/t Aynsley Kellow) which demolishes the eco-nonsense underlying the preservation of ‘natural’ ecosystems mantra brick by brick:
http://asu.academia.edu/MattChew/Papers/450641/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Biotic_Nativeness_A_Historical_Perspective
Chew demonstrates that the whole concept of ‘nativeness’ and by implication that certain species ‘belong’ somewhere and deserve protection to be utterly unscientific and founded on Victorian legal and pre-Darwinian notions about citizenship and botany.
He doesn’t say that we should not get rid of pests and weeds; just that defending it on the basis of ‘preserving’ an environment or ecosystem is utter bunkum.
As I write from Australia, a country where eucalypts killed off most of the opposition trees millions of years ago, this has great resonance for me. It’s not that they have some quasi religious right to be here – it’s that they won the struggle by poisioning the competition (and still do).
The story of the re-introduction of water frogs in Britain in this article is worth the price of admission alone. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Viv Evans,
You nicely described the natural evolution of the human species with the included fact we indeed are social. In each step along the way, humans have expanded their reach and impact upon their environment, right up to the present day when not only is our reach and impact global, but extends off the planet in small but growing ways. From the very beginnings in our simple agriculture and farming, up to today, we had to learn the rules of nature in order to be successful in the environment we were living in and affecting. This is the natural evolution of he human mind. The global reach of human civilization requires we understand the rules of climate to continue to be successful. We’ve always been up to the task. We have challenges ahead but those make us grow
Wellington says:
December 23, 2011 at 11:29 pm
R. Gates said:
What an odd rubric to use as a measurement of human success. “Billions” of people, living “longer” etc.
Odd? Every one of those billions is someone’s child—a child that did not die young. Like you, Gates, see?
———–
Six million children die of hunger every year. If you want to measure human success by quantity, why not use this one? Your own values will dictate what you want to call success. Personally, I favor quality over quantity. How we live is far more important to me than how many of us do or how long we do. If there were only 1 billion humans on earth but none went hungry– that to me would be success. Now that we have seven billion of us, under my value system, success will be getting all seven billion fed adequately.
Willis: To some extent, I think AGW the science is dead. From my personal perspective, I note the following. The hindcasts are under siege. Borehole data does not match. There appears to be very little, if any, predictive value in the models. Pro AGW sites like Real Climate live by censorship to keep the faithful believing. The battle lines have been drawn, there is very little ability to change the faithful, and now it is a question of policy makers.
The iron is now hot. Solyndra failed. The Volt, with its $225K per car subsidy has failed. The Chinese export nearly all of their solar panels. People three years ago thinking about “Green Energy” are not engaging in that as a career. Canada is withdrawing. Russia is opposed. China could care less. Democrats are vulnerable as carbon sequestration of coal plants is a bust, and they rely on coal minor unions for votes. And China has locked up the solar panel market. Let’s let them suffer for their foolishness.
In my view, it is a good time to attack the politics of the problem. Of course, certain politicians want to create a “One World Government,” in which some external threat, in this case AGW, can unify the world. There is opportunity in this. Solar is a fail, as you’ve pointed out. So why not promote ideas that are good for the US under these circumstances? The political wheel runs on much longer scales and different goals than science. Due to the nature of the problem, proving one way or the other is not going to happen for forty years.
Let them have their AGW. But let’s use the opportunity to pursue better alternatives. A new policy needs to be forged, one that is hopefully in the interests of the US. Let us unwind the insanity of Al Gore, with his “electric fleet in 10 years.” Let’s align with ideas of cheap, clean energy on the order of coal. Promote the idea that electric generation is a far easier problem than becoming independent from oil (no plastics, no cars, no fertilizer).
I think nuclear development is reasonable defensible answer.
Observing that electric generation is the huge C02 producer, and working the political system, which has nothing to do with science (AGW “science” is only a tool), can yield greater energy prosperity. We can export it to the world. There are still many very intelligent people in the US, so let’s move the discussion from “renewables” to terrorist proof nuclear that can solve the democrats ideals of helping out the impoverished in the world. It doesn’t matter if their methods are wrong, the point is to use the system for a better outcome.
In other words, let’s pop up a level, and look to what’s going to happen in twenty, thirty years, and start to promote within the confines of the political system a result we can all live with.
Anyway, it’s not the kind of Science we all want. But it’s the kind of policy perhaps our leaders can deal with, and leave the US in a better position than the track we are on. The failures are there that provide leverage to a better alternative, and now is the time to let go of things that won’t change anyone’s mind, and to grab something bigger.
RE: 1DandyTroll: (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?”
I am not so sure about that, several months ago, Google found this quote for me at the Oil Drum web site:
“Drumbeat: November 14, 2009
“Looking Back at Peak Global Production of…Gold
“Posted by Heading Out on November 14, 2009 – 10:16am
“Topic: Supply/Production
“Tags: gold [list all tags]
“Yesterday the President of the largest gold mining and production company, Barrick Gold, noted that after ten years of declining production it is time to recognize that the world has seen the peak in gold production. To maintain production ore is being mined with increasingly less gold in it. (The grade of the ore, or metal content, defines whether it is profitable to mine.)
“Ore grades have fallen from around 12 grams per tonne in 1950 to nearer 3 grams in the US, Canada, and Australia. South Africa’s output has halved since peaking in 1970.
“The supply crunch has helped push gold to an all-time high, reaching $1,118 an ounce at one stage yesterday.”
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5960
Some have compared this site to Realclimate…
“The Oil Drum is a web-based, interactive energy, peak oil and sustainability think tank and community devoted to the discussion of energy issues and their impact on society. The Oil Drum is facilitated by the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, a Colorado non-profit corporation.” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oil_Drum
R. Gates you should volunteer to go first if you feel that strong about it.
RE: R. Gates: (December 22, 2011 at 12:09 pm)
“Bottom line: Life on Earth (and in this universe) might not be infinitely sustainable, as entropy will eventually have it’s way, but for all practical puposes, if we watch the methods nature has evolved, we can learn how to be practical sustainable in our lives and in our civilizaitons.”
All well and good, but as regards the use of carbon power, I believe the time to invoke these considerations was *before* we increased global population by a factor of eight by depending on that resource. Now it is imperative that science produce an alternate, abundant, and indefinitely sustainable source of energy or the world may be due for a painful period of population downsizing as the Earth’s carbon power stores run out. There are some, yet to be fully developed, alternative nuclear power options that may yet avert this fate.
It may be possible to support a global population larger than that of 1880 with advanced solar-renewable techniques, but I seriously doubt that the expansive green energy collection installations required could economically support anything like our current global population level.
davidmhoffer says:
December 23, 2011 at 6:55 pm
First, “A fake physicist” complains about farming practices and posts a link about strip mining as a reference, and when asked what that has to do with farming practices, SPM chimes in with links about the effect of mines on nearby farms.
Hands up all you folks who thought they made sense.
OK thanks…………………………………………………………
=========================================================================
Well, how many hands did you see Dave ??????
Oh and BTW….
I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
Since Me comment has been awaiting moderation this long, I guess it will be sniped. Well, as they say, piss or get off the pot, so get it over with already or post it.
R. Gates;
Six million children die of hunger every year. If you want to measure human success by quantity, why not use this one? Your own values will dictate what you want to call success. Personally, I favor quality over quantity. How we live is far more important to me than how many of us do or how long we do. If there were only 1 billion humans on earth but none went hungry– that to me would be success.>>>
To save 6 million you would sentence 6 billion to death.
You disgust me.
Not to mention, BTW, that the children who die of hunger in this world of ours do so, not because we cannot produce enough food to feed them, but because they had the misfortune of being born in places like North Korea, Zimbabwe, Darfur, Somalia…
What is preventing those children from growing up strong and health is not lack of food. It is their own governments which cling to power through repression. Fix that sir, and you will save their lives. Instead you propose to visit the sins of those governments upon us in some kind of twisted logic where you advocate for the very policies that are the cause of their misery while pissing all over the very policies that have delivered billions from that misery.
You disgust me, R. Gates.
Gates:
I’m afraid that you’ve fortified yourself in your position so well that you can’t see over the ramparts anymore.
Six million children die of hunger every year?
If you’d peek over your bulwark for just a moment you’d know that the reason why people are dying of hunger today has little to do with the sustainability of human life on this planet as defined in your thread of arguments. The cynical part of me expected you’d just throw something like that back over your wall again and warned that I was wasting my time but my well-abused better angels asked to try one more time. I hate it when the cynic is proven right but, well, I am used to it.
Good bye, Gates, peace and love to you in this Christmas season.
Spector,
I agree with everything you wrote. The boom in energy production and food production was brought about by the rapid increase in the use of fossil fuels. We borrowed stored sunlight from the past to rapidly grow our current civilization, and we probably can’t gather enough current solar (and derivatives like wind and wave) to maintain ourselves. Fusion in the long term, or in the short term thorium fission, may be the best alternatives.
R. Gates says:
December 23, 2011 at 10:24 pm
JPeden,
You never answered the question…
Yes I did. And it is you who is “begging the question”, while you also later concede that you have no question by making everything you say completely conditional upon your own arbitrary assemblage of appearances and sounds, etc., [words], which then in effect means to me here in the real world that all you are doing is making random keystrokes and noises. Just as I suspected!
And that, according to you, we can do anything we want to the natural world as davidmhoffer says: December 23, 2011 at 11:15 pm; which is probably pretty close to what you, Gates and your Big Green Parasites, want to have the power to do in the first place, not we “rugged individualists”.
Well, Merry Christmas anyway, Gates.
[Although, based upon your own theory of linguistic meaning, you can’t possibly know whether you know what I meant by that particular assemblage of keystrokes, and I likewise can’t possibly know if I am able to understand anything you “say” or able to communicate anything at all back to you, including what I just wrote.
So R. Gates, you don’t want to admit you’re a trained scientist with zero peer-reviewed publications or what ?
By visiting the nonpartisan site GoodReads we can check for ourselves the prevailing values of America’s readers. For Bjørn Lomborg we find only one contributed quotation, which is liked by only one reader:
For Wendell Berry we find more than two hundred contributed quotations, which are liked by many thousands of readers. Among Berry’s highest-rated quotes, one of my favorites is a poem:
Among American citizens who read, and who share their ideas, there is no doubt of whose ideas are more highly regarded. And the margin is not small, but rather reflects the overwhelming consensus of America’s reading community.
REPLY: “Only when we get sufficiently rich can we afford the relative luxury of caring about the environment.” ― Bjørn Lomborg
You demonstrate this perfectly here, without your cushy job and ample free time, you would NOT be here to harangue us all with your “wisdom”. You’d be working hard just trying to survive. As for the “consensus of America’s reading community” your opinion on this is just that. With no citations nor surveys to support it, you have no claim. But Merry Christmas anyways, now take a timeout until Tuesday, because nobody will be around to approve your posts.
BTW it isn’t a good idea to put your email address into the author name field of comments, so I’ve removed it for you and put your regular name there. – Anthony
Thank you for the correction, Anthony.
Anthony, the numbers you seek are readily obtained from Amazon.com.
Consulting the Amazon sales rank for Bjorn Lomborg’s best-selling Skeptical Environmentalist (sales rank #26,636), we find that even Wendell Berry’s Collected Poems outsells Lomborg (sales rank #22,904). As for novels and essay collections, it appears that Berry has at least a dozen titles that each that presently outsell Lomborg (Berry’s essays The Unsettling of America at #7,041, Berry’s novel Hanna Coulter at #19,790).
Hopefully these concrete sales rank numbers will convey to WUWT folks some of the very real respect and affection that Americans have developed for Wendell Berry’s sustainment-oriented philosophy and personal way of life.
Wendell Berry is a thinker who makes no one comfortable, and yet (to judge by his reader reviews and sales figures) Berry’s writings are bringing hope and inspiration to very many folks. Here’s a quote that many WUWT folks can applaud:
So more power to Wendell Berry, and Merry Christmas to all at WUWT!
The only true solution to sustainability is technological advancement. One could argue that the dinosaurs led the perfect Green definition of a sustainable lifestyle. How well did that work out for them? The key to technological development is the availability of cheap, reliable and abundant energy., which is exactly opposite to what the Greenies, most democrats and Obama want. Also, as a species we should be advancing technology as fast as possible justified by using one of the warmist’s favorite rationales, “The precautionary principle”, since the next great extinction event could be just around the corner. Fusion energy powers the universe, once we acquire that technology and make it reliable, abundant and inexpensive we will be well on our way to making it possible to start colonizing other planets and eventually other solar systems or living in enormous space ships.
We should not worry about using up all the coal and oil. Forget about CO2 sequestration, that is inane and just drives up the cost of energy. The new EPA mercury regulations are stupid as well. I have not heard of anyone dying in recent times of air born mercury poisoning in the US. The EPA’s only goal is to drive up the cost of energy by shutting down coal powered energy facilities as illustrated by the EPA wanting to install mercury filled light-bulbs in every house and building across the country but yet supposedly worrying about the 1ppb that might be coming out of a power plants smoke stack.
What we should worry about instead of using up the coal and oil, is not expending the resources required to develop the technology needed to replace it as an energy source ( a few hundred years perhaps) before it runs out. If we run out before that happens what is the worst outcome? We will be right where the greenies want us in the first place, relying on wind and solar just like our ancestors did or we will have to accept the utilization of fission energy.
I will finish my comments by saying as I started, the key to human sustainability is technological advancement, and the faster we advance technologies, the longer our virgin resources last and the easier it is for us to recycle them. Cheap and abundant energy is the key to technological development as the evidence clearly demonstrates.
A fake physicist;
Consulting the Amazon sales rank for Bjorn Lomborg’s best-selling Skeptical Environmentalist (sales rank #26,636), we find that even Wendell Berry’s Collected Poems outsells Lomborg (sales rank #22,904). >>>
If that’s your measure of credibility, then Mad Magazine, Arhie Comics and Marvel all trump them both. How does Einstein’s theory of relativity rank? What? Really really low? That means it is wrong?
Just for reference, here is an indirect link to Kirk Sorensen’s recent (December 16, 2011), 36 minute, Google Tech Talk, You Tube video explaining why the Molten Salt Thorium Reactor project was discontinued by the government.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/13/the-rp-ratio/#comment-842338
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!