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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Don’t worry. Iron should be easy to make. There’s some research about transmutation going on in Jülich and Mol.
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?
In the UK, development nowadays has to be sustainable. But the Government refuses to define “sustainable”. We are in a quandary.
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.
Most people who use ‘sustainable’ do so as a buzz word:
“My new mansion on the coast is sustainable as it has a windmill in the grounds and solar panels on the roof, and my new business jet is sustainable because I buy carbon credits, (from my carbon credit sustainability business) when I fly round the world to sustainability conferences”.
But there are those who use it and mean it and they are talking about population. They want to control your breeding, and possibly your right to life as well. I usually associate sustainabilty with eugenics. These people want to decide if you are worthy of living on their planet.
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
The left loves to demand that everything in life is “sustainable”, yet not a single one of their economic proposals ever is. In the end, leftists demand that we all must live at the expense of others and turn our private decisions over to central planners who will also be given guns and prisons to coerce and compel compliance.
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?
The self proclaimed “saviors of the world” clan are more worried about sustainability of the flow of public money that keeps them from actually having to work for a living than anything else.
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 says:
“Sustainable development is working the land so that it becomes increasingly productive.”
Increasingly productive as compared to what? Do you really believe that a “sustainable” farm is more productive than a modern “non-sustainable” farm? If that was the case, then all farms would be moving towards “sustainable”. After all, productivity is today’s driver for almost everything. If all farms were practicing “sustainable” farming, I’m afraid an even greater portion of the world’s population would be hungry.
Perhaps these “sustainable” farms use less herbicide and fertilizer, which the “sustainable” crowd loves, but more productive? I don’t think so.
@roger Carr
“Sustainable development is working the land so that it becomes increasingly productive.”
Yay, Norman Borlaug is my hero too!
Iron, like many other metals, have been recycled for many years. It is not true that your shovel is not going to be available – the atoms of it – for future generations. Metals can be recycled over and over and over and over again. This makes them sustainable.
Ahhhh! Entropy!
Thanks WiIlis! Sustainable development is a buzzword that is used devoid of significance. It assumes we know what future development will be – what we do not. We only dream about it. The same error the socialists/communist did with their development plans, planning more and more of the same. Not understanding there is change in the development, there is evolution.
And what do they sell for it?
Back to old type agriculture using farm animals and human labour? What is sustainable? Stone age?
You are right, important is to focus on solving the big problems we human still have, access to resources, food, cheap energy, to be able to think further then only to feed and find shelter for the rain and cold.
Roger Carr says:
December 22, 2011 at 1:56 am
“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”
Interesting what you are telling Roger. Can you deliberate or point to some links or information from where you have this understanding?
The other day I commented here at WUWT that Copper and Zinc markets were taking a hit. I mentioned that Aluminum plays should be watched. This morning….
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/barclays-hit-immense-copper-trading-loss-50-sigma-move-cancelled-aluminum-warrants
Sustainable is a buzzword chosen precisely because it’s vague. Meaning is in the mind of the hearer and is as fungible as the terms “organic,” “improved,” “green.” Most people probably take it to mean, as you say, “we should live as lightly as possible on this marvelous planet.” At least that’s the way it’s being applied to the construction of new buildings and energy use on my campus. However, I agree that the shallow-thinking don’t make the connection between some so-called environmentalist beliefs and the effect they have on the impoverished. So the criticism applies to the radical end of the spectrum, and less so of the general public.
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.
Willis,
You are looking at the wrong “sustainability”. Quite simply it means the ability to maintain or increase funding from OPM (other people’s money) in the UN sense of the word. That much is obvious to me.
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.
I am glad these sustainable ideas did not exist hundreds if not thousands of years ago when people were going place and doing things. We would not be where we are today if our ancestors had worried about sustainability before going forward. Still living in mud huts I would think as there is more mud than wood.
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.]
I think they were talking in code about the sustainability of their paychecks.
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.
Exactly!
Sustainable development is the new perpetual motion machine. A chimera.