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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Willis, you miss the entire premise of “sustainable”. They want us to voluntarily return to a hunter-gathering lifestyle. That, they will claim, is the only time in history when humans were sustainable. They look at that as some romantic time in human history when we were one with nature.
Of course they completely ignore what that means in the real world. We were sustainable then because of the brutality of natural selection. But then they argue that natural selection isn’t brutal. They do live in a wonderland…
The phrase (sustainable development) is merely a club with which to beat people into submission. Theoretically it could be used to justify genocide. Suppose the EPA gets their wish with this (as noted up-thread) and proclaims that a population of over 300 million in the US is ‘unsustainable’ (current population is ~307million)? China already did this many years ago with their ‘one child’ policy’, did they not? Didn’t work out quite as they had hoped, but many millions died because of it.
‘Sustainable development’ is the most dangerous, evil and frightening phrase ever voiced.
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 5:13 am
You seem to be confusing bottom-up and top-down, sir. Your farmer family are acting on what they know about their environment in order to maintain that environment; that is sustainability as most people understand the word. However, the word “sustainability” means something very different in the context of any sort of official proclamation on the subject, where its meaning becomes “whatever the state decides”.
Your family know their land and can care for it. Can a bureaucrat who spends his entire life in an air-conditioned office know anything about maintaining farmland, even with advisors? Even if he used to work on a farm, he can’t know what land in other areas would need.
Farming practices that work in Europe and North America don’t work in South America at all, so even if you have the perfect UN official who was raised on the perfect farm and knows exactly what that farm needs, he would be useless deciding what’s “sustainable” in a south-american milieu. The discouragement of semi-nomadic slash-and-burn farming in favour of European permanently-sited farm practices is the perfect example of this: slash and burn looks ugly, so it is declared “unsustainable” even though it’s been practices for thousands of years. European practices produce nice neat fields that look sustainable but destroy nearly the entire biomass of an area of land, resulting in the very thin topsoil floating away into the air and washing out to sea in huge torrents. The end result is the UN decides that farming itself is “unsustainable” in large parts of south america, and attempts to discourage it entirely, or pushes reliance on “natural” methods that amount to little more than hunter-gatherer foraging and which are not remotely sustainable over any length of time, but which are called “sustainable” because they force a reduction in human population.
Bottom up would have maintained the use of methods that were best suited to living in a tropical environment. Top down just buggers everything up. Your example of your family’s farm is a bottom-up approach that would be essentially wiped out by the top-down, dictatorial approach you seem to support.
Sustainability in Willis’ definition would be like some laws in physics like the ideal gas law or the frictionless surface or absolute zero. They are theoretically unobtainable in reality yet can be so closely approached that, for all practical purposes, they are acheived.
For instance, if one doesn’t abandon one’s shovel to the elements as the one in the picture one may keep it in perfect repair so when one goes to hitchhiking surfer sailor strummer afterlife one leaves a perfectly serviceable shovel for the use of those still bound to the mortal coil. Sustainability may be approached even if it may not be perfectly acheived.
Of course most people know that and don’t write pedantic nitwittery about it just to see their prose and pictures filling column space on blog and hear their dimwitted cheerleaders sing praises about it.
“Finally, there is an underlying arrogance about the concept that I find disturbing. Forty percent of the world’s people live on less than $2 per day. In China it’s sixty percent. In India, three-quarters of the population lives on under $2 per day.”
Making this claim is common, usually as an attempt to make our lifestyle some kind of glutonous waste. But it’s a bogus comparison. It’s like claiming that a mouse eats less than an elephant, so the elephant must eat less.
The claim is bogus because the elephant (the advanced first world) requires more food (money) just to keep going. The mouse (third world) needs less food (money) because it is smaller (not as advanced). Forcing the elephant to eat less (reduce consumption) would starve the animal to death. Forcing the mouse to eat more, will just mean more mice to feed.
It takes time for mice like organisms to evolved into elephant like organisms.
To be heretical -“sustainable” to me is a fast breeder reactor. Supplemented by a
series of Thorium pebble bed reactors….
RE: Main Article
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
I presume that this was meant to point out the possibility that conventional nuclear power may, by a continual chain of Chernobyl and Fukushima style events, render the world so contaminated with dangerous long-lived transuranic wastes as to be uninhabitable for almost a million years.
As for resource depletion, since there will be an indefinite number of future generations, there is no way we can preserve exhaustible resources for them short of complete abstinence of their use. This would presume that we could establish a rational for saying that some future generation might have a superior claim on using them. In the case of carbon power, we are well past the time when such a decision could have been made painlessly.
At some time in the future, the exhaustion of resources may render the current population ‘unsustainable.’ Nature, operating in the guise of the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ or perhaps a future ‘United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Population Control’ will enforce a number of very unpleasant and probably very controversial measures to reduce world population to solar-sustainable limits.
I believe it is our duty, as users of temporarily abundant resources, to do our best to provide succeeding generations with one or more effective low-cost alternatives to carbon power *before* it is depleted. With an inexhaustible source of low-cost energy, such as *might* be obtainable from liquid-state thorium nuclear reactors, the iron from that shovel would be continually restorable to its original state, even if it has to be extracted from seawater.
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
– Maurice Strong, 1972′s Rio Earth Summit
A multi-millionaire who lives in China inside a walled compound. Wanna bet he has steak for dinner? The man is a gross incompetence. He almost destroyed Ontario Hydro, we are still paying off the debt from that company, and that was almost 30 years ago now. He’s classic Marxist.
Willis, did you really mean to use iron as an example of ” ‘ forever unavailable ‘ to future generations”?
Iron is one of the most re-used materials we utilize. We re-melt it and doing so is more efficient than iron from ore. Who knows where the steel in your car or stove – or shovel – came from, and how many times it has been processed? It might be once, and it might be ten times or more.
Iron in goods today may be one of the materials of today that is most likely to be used by your great-great-great grandkids – and in the process it may be re-used scores or hundreds of times.
IMHO, you could have used a better example.
[That post by feet2thefire is one of my userIDs here, but not the one I meant to post as. It should have been under the name Steve Garcia.]
Is wind really sustainable? Wind is caused to a large extent by the Coriolis force, which in turn is caused by the earth’s rotation. So, isn’t wind energy really rather earth rotation energy? Doesn’t wind power take a bite out of the finite resource of the earth’s rotation?
Entropy.
Some resources are depleted faster than they can be generated or grown, but not all of them. More strawman logic fail from willis, this is becoming a pattern.
Well said Willis. I stumbled on this book “What Environmentalists Need to Know about Economics” by Jason Scorse, an environmental economics prof in the USA (you can download the entire book for free as a pdf at http://policy.miis.edu/faculty/faculty.html?id=171). I thought he was spot on. It was a refreshing read and helped me solidify some of my thoughts on how we should go about treading lightly on the earth. I thought you folks might value it as well. He talks about how we must discount the future when we make value jugements. Words like ‘sustainability’, ‘our future generations’, etc are emotive but little else. It is when we sit down and quantify (even approximately) our options that the proper basis for decisions and actios begin to form.
Bill
You comment, “nothing is sustainable” highlights a point, but you miss a few things.
As for iron ore. Iron ore won’t run out for human needs. Iron is one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust. We only mine the very top grade of this resource, less than 0.0001% of the earth’s crustal resource of iron. Current cut off grades are of the order of 45%, depending on other factors. When this runs out, we mine, 44%, then 43% and so on. Each lowering of grade increases the size of the resource available. Most of the worlds iron ore is mined from an ancient sea rich in iron; this source of iron is not currently being produced geologically, so is not being renewed,but other sources are available (eg iron skarns).
But as for sustainability as a concept, you have a point, sort of. I often say to people if they want to follow ‘sustainability’ to its logical conclusion, then you need to get rid of people, because every single one of us is not sustainable, we ALL die, however, populations as a whole ARE sustainable (at least in terms relevant to human needs, evolution itself shows even populations, ie species, are not sustainable indefinitely), and that is the point. In other words, individuals are not sustainable, but populations but we dont get rid of individuals just because they are not sustainable.(which is also related to advanced complex social issues such as individual rights, for example)
Mines are one of the things that are similar to people. (Nature seems to recognise that individual ‘entities’ are not sustainable, but whole ‘orders’ of such entities can be). Individuals mines are not sustainable, but mining as a whole, is.We cannot ‘run out’ of gold, copper, iron, nickle, cadmium, etc etc, because these resources in the earths crust are very large in temrs of human needs, but individual mines can, and do, ‘run out’, just like individual people, who die. So this is what you say to people who dont like mining because it is not ‘sustainable’, you just tell them that individual people are not sustainable either, and so they soon realise there are exceptions to the rule. Many exceptions.
But you have a point, but its complicated.
Remember, sustainability must also be “smart”. Smartness is reserved for the dipsh*ts that are responsible for global warming alarmism and all of that other stuff.
[Language. Be polite. Robt]
The attraction of sails in small boats is range. As boat size decreases it becomes impossible to carry enough fuel to cross an ocean. For example, we crossed the Pacific in a 40 foot sailboat. The boat itself had a range under power of about 500 miles, which is good for a small boat. The distances between fuel stops across the Pacific are often well in excess of 1000 miles.
From a cost point of view, sails are a disaster. If you are operating to a schedule where you must pay crew and schedule dock space and delivery for loading and unloading, then the cost of unreliable winds will quickly overwhelm any fuel savings.
On a per mile basis alone, the wear and tear costs of sail outweigh the costs of diesel. While the wind may be free, the effects it has on sails and rigging is definitely not free. An ocean crossing under sail is a continual battle to identify and repair wear points before they reach the point of failure, especially at night when visibility is reduced.
Even then, the reason you battle wear and tear is not so much cost, as the fact that spares are limited on an ocean crossing. For reasons of comfort, stability and safety you often need to have the sails up to limit motion, not simply for propulsion, even though this increases wear and tear.
For example, when sitting becalmed, the flapping of sails is often preferable to rolling your guts out in a seaway. However, the flapping is not gentle. With modern sails each roll of the boat sounds like a cracking of a whip, which shudders violently throughout the boat and every piece of gear. I estimated the wear cost under these conditions at as much as $1 per roll of the boat, which averages about once every 7-10 seconds.
Sustainable development is the 21st century version of communism.
Greens are the useful idiots with the simplistic moral message to give cover to the bureaucrats to take away your liberty. They are even funded by government.
Instead of going to the local bureaucrat for a production quota you go to the local bureaucrat for the permission to consume energy – which is far wider and allows them to do back-room deals.
The windmills, electric cars, solar panels are not intended to be viable they are intended to prick your psyche – hence feed in tariffs. It is to get the most people possible feeling they are gaining from it or arguing on the basis of it – not to address the (non) problem.
They will fail because of the economic crash, and the ponzi pyramid they had to produce to keep it going – people that would naturally object were paid off by basically giving them their existing profit for less work and a functioning monopoly – at the end customers cost who did not understand.
The media and universities were bought with grants and government advertising. These funds will be hard to maintain. It is scary how close they came though.
Stop it with that bourgeois thinking, Willis.
Like the meaning of is, Sustainable Development means whatever we need it to mean, when we need it.
Trying to say it means one thing, and always sticking to it, is anti-progressive.
~More Soylent Green!
Well said Willis. This phrase is a post-modern oxymoron, and the UN’s definition reveals that they have turned the “means” into an “end”. They have made “sustainable” the goal and completely ignore “development”. This is why the post-modern, nihilistic collectivists create these pseudo concepts; it is nothing more than a verbal sleight of hand to avert our attention and goad us into feeling guilty about the manner in which we support our lives and feed our kids.
This pseudo concept is a package deal to undermine, hamstring and inhibit honest, real-world, here and now development.
The only sustainable product I know about is …….. software.
“Sustainable” is a poorly understood and misused term. The market based economies are inherently “sustainable” in that the market price mechanism will always over time use the most efficient method to produce goods and services, thus limiting the consumption of anything that is in short supply.
On the other hand, centrally planned economies are inherently “non sustainable” in that they substitute objectives other than market efficiency in place of the price mechanism. For example, the use of taxes and subsidies to encourage activities that do not reflect relative supply and demand. This is inherently unsustainable long term, as has been demonstrated time and time again by every government that has attempted this solution. The EU debt crisis is simply the latest example.
Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In simplest terms sustainability as defined by the un-accountable self-identified liberal elite is the capacity of the people to endure the desires of the un-accountable liberal elite who would impose the cultural, economic and social sustainability policies, laws and taxes to sustain their demands under the force of their policies, laws and taxes.
Dictators sustain their power through crisis, lies and threats and force. Sustainability in this case is no more than that. And dictators also attempt to paint their desires as a noble cause in this case the cause is sustainability.
My definition of sustainable:
If a generation increases the value of untapped resources through technology improvements more than it decreases them through use, that generation’s activities are sustainable.
In terms of shovels, if you start with sufficient resources to make 100T shovels and deplete 20% of that without advancing any technologies, then you are unsustainable. You started with 100T potential shovels and ended with 80T. But if you invent a new type of shovel that uses 30% less resources at the same time as depleting those resources, then you are acting sustainably. You leave behind sufficient resources to make 104T shovels.
If we burn all of the world’s coal and gas at the same time that we invent cost effective fusion power plants that can power the world indefinitely, then we acted sustainably.
The only practical path to sustainability is through constantly improving technology.
Wonder how all this sustainable development is working out for the people of North Korea.