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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Breathing is not sustainable. Eventually the earth will run out of O2. In the carboniferous period atmospheric oxygen levels were almost double current levels. Currently, O2 levels are barely enough to support fire. Much lower and human and animal life is not possible.
We need to act now to prevent future O2 loss for future generations. All use of O2 needs to be heavily taxed and banned. We need to have 20% reduction in O2 use by 2020 and ZERO OXYGEN FOOTPRINT by 2050.
Yes, everything we do increases the entropy of the universe. LOL. Assuming the second law of thermodynamics is applicable to the universe. That’s actually a pretty big assumption given the second law pertains to closed systems AND was never intended for systems large enough for the weak force of gravity to be anything more than a negligible influence. 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. I read the book that’s a precursor to “sustainability”, “Entropy: A New World View” (ISBN 0-670-29717-8), back in the 80’s. Well, more precisely, I read about 3/4 of it, I just couldn’t stomach any more of it.
Mr. Wingo did an excellent job in his recent post dispelling some of these sustainability myths:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/10/the-true-failure-of-durban/
Nothing is sustainable. Life itself is not sustainable, either in the individual sense, or in the generic sense. The fact of living increases entropy, as does making clothing, housing and cooking food. You build more complex things at the expense of breaking down others.
This fact of existence is not limited to life. Even the Sun builds complex elements by destroying others.
The best you can hope for is to not pollute too much during your existence.
I mean, where are the “peak iron” zealots when we need them?
They’re out in Desert Center, backfilling Kaiser’s Eagle Mountain mine with Los Angeles trash.
jrwakefield says:
December 22, 2011 at 6:24 am
Exactly Excellent Explanation.
I would like to close-out my participation on this thread-topic today (I have things to do!) with the motto appearing on the Zerohedge.com website masthead FWIW:
“On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
.
Additionally, a physicist, as someone reported in a post above, Maurice Strong, etal. ad infinitum, propose a meatless diet, as the conversion of plants into meat is “inefficient” in undefinable global terms (ignores the fact that the vast majority of arable land is unsuited to any other agronomic practice but herding). But recent data has shown that vegans have a higher, albiet mostly insignificant mortality from many forms of cancer (read to the bottom). http://veganhealth.org/articles/cancer
Other data has determined that consumption of carbohydrates increases cancer.
http://www.carbohydratescankill.com/901/carbohydrates-cancer-prospect
Since mankind evolved as hunter/gatherers, I’m sure you can connect the dots…..
BTW, this data ( and an extensive additional abundance) were collected at the MDA Anderson Cancer center, where my wife underwent radiation treatment for breast cancer. She feels great eating a low carb diet (<50 net mgs./day). She'll probably outlive me as the only take-home fact I'm willing to subscribe to revolves around an abundance of dietary red wine.
Man will never reach “peak stupidity”,
like peak oil, idiots keep moving the goalpost.
A physicist says:
“Because if American farmers cease to conserve their land, with foresight on a timescale of centuries, who will take their place?”
You have no technological component in your rationale. It wasn’t till the mid 1940s that fully 50% of the land tilled in the US switched from horse drawn to tractors (an important point because perhaps 40% of all agriculture farmland used i the US at the turn of the 20th century was to provide food for the urban and rural horse population.
Corn and wheat yield yields per acre are up 300 to 350% since 1950 and no signs of slowing down. A cow now produces 4X the milk as one did in 1970.
Increasing agriculture efficiencies are the reason our forests and other wild lands have been increasing. I can see no better stewardship than a continuing drive to use the least land possible for agriculture production-seems to me we are doing a great job- all while slashing the cost of food than consumed nearly 40% of the average family budget in the 1940s and less than 10% today. A large part of the Depression era Federal and State programs were actually directed at getting people off land with soils so poor they should have never been farmed in the first place. However that can only happen if the remaining prime soils grow more food per acre.
It is doubtful with the pace of technology in a hundred years -if not killed by sustainability ideology- will even be recognizable. We are already seeing large parts of the fresh vegetable market being replaced with hydroponics.
We have all seen the link between prosperity and energy use– there is another- the necessity of less than 5% of the workforce to be involved in agriculture.
Sustainable development is to true development
as a people’s republic is to a true republic:
namely, as a strait jacket is to a dinner jacket.
Judy F. says:
December 22, 2011 at 7:41 am
Mother Earth was more important to him than his own family.
______________________
Dollar to donut his inspiration was the News…
Tim, you are absolutely right that my father was thoroughly grounded in soil science … his degree (from Iowa State) was in agricultural engineering, and he knew every kind of soil not only on our farm, but all around the county.
For my father every hill, creek, tree-stand, pond, prairie, and glacial erratic boulder had ten-thousand-year story to tell, and he dearly loved to share those stories with his family, friends, and Sunday-school classes.
As for thorium reactors, your reference made me LOL — because WUWT’s arch-devil James Hansen is fond of thorium reactors too (beginning minute 7:55). Not that James Hansen regards thorium reactors as perfectly safe, but rather he appreciates that thorium reactors are a far less dangerous energy source (in the long run) than coal-fired power plants.
It’s hugely enjoyable to see you and Hansen ending up on the same page (for reasons that I regard as excellent).
So Tim, your excellent post was wrong only in saying “But you don’t want to hear this, do you?”
Thank you for inspiring those wonderful memories of my father’s wise teachings, and for advocating a global energy path-forward that is so strikingly similar to James Hansen’s.
Philip Peake says:
December 22, 2011 at 8:22 am
The best you can hope for is to not pollute too much during your existence.
One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. Wasn’t O2 at one time a planetary waste product that threatened all life? What do plants say about dung? Pollution or nutrient?
Tim Clark says:
December 22, 2011 at 7:56 am
“
A physicist, I agree with Tim Clark. His post is directed at you. Do you care to respond cogently to the substance of his post?
“Sustainability”=Communism=total economic collapse. ‘nuf said.
Another similar bugbear of mine: ‘forward thinking’ e.g. in the phrase ‘forward thinking policies’.
“A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 8:35 am
It’s hugely enjoyable to see you and Hansen ending up on the same page (for reasons that I regard as excellent).”
Stick around long enough, and the unemotional, non-ideological logic espoused by us denialists may rub off.
Sorry to hear about Iowa State though.
Go U of A Hogs!!!!
I am all for developing our resources in a sustainable way. I am NOT for bolting our policies to a UN Agenda 21 committee.
What I construe from the words:” sustainable development” is a rate constant. Is the rate of change sustainable? As climate can be described as a non-linear, non-equilibrium oscillatory system, so too, development carries many of the same characteristics. Culture changes: Tevia and the song “Tradition” from Fiddler on The Roof. Economics change from paradigm to paradigm. Society changes how it values items, work, people. Sustainable in my mind means a temporary linear trajectory until a perturbance followed by disorder and chaos, a transition and the emergence of a new sustainable paradigm. The Birth & Death of the Soviet Union was a sustainable paradigm until all the Bolsheviks died off, then a death spiral, chaos, transition and the emergence of a new order is emerging: sustainable, for the time being.
What is so uncomfortable is the transition, not knowing what is in the immediate future. When in one sustainable paradigm, our most recent run up to a banking collapse, the immediate future could be “predicted.” Of course it couldn’t, but the trajectory seemed sustainable: i.e., the rate of change would go on and on and on. It didn’t. In the CO2 global warming paradigm, the trajectory was each nation buying into the carbon tax paradigm until a major perturbance: in this case, Climategate 1.0 and the failure at Copenhagen, 2009. We are in transition now, and it is uncomfortable. Many ideas, and sustainable development is just one, like some flotsam from the wreckage of AGW is grasped to keep afloat in the current stormy sea with its disinformation, etc. What emerges after this tempest has passed, I have no clue. A new paradigm, it too viewed as sustainable until….
I’ve thought the same thing.Nothing is sustainable. But some things require a lot less work to get work out of it.
At the end of the day, there are two ways to measure something – Financial ROI and Net Energy ratio. Both are really about thermodynamic availability.
The photo of the rusty spade shows just why the spade cannot be recycled for ever – it will eventually end up as atoms of Ferrous Oxide floating around the environment.
However, to answer the question, What is sustainable?, how about a wooden spade? Grown from sustainable trees that when harvested are replaced by 3 new trees, they suck carbon from the atmosphere and reduce global warming. Since more trees are being replaced than used, they would start to be used for everything else – from tractor wheels to engines, from windturbine blades to the magnets that power their generators, from tv screens to microprocessors. Nothing is impossible for this wonderful sustainable resource.
Sometimes Anthony delays my responses, but usually they appear eventually; my best effort at a “cogent” response to Tim Clark appeared above. So please let me add to that post (and I think speak for everyone) only this one thing: my very best wishes for the health of Tim’s wife.
As for economic, moral, and scientific issues, I am broadly in agreement with the vigorous writings of farmer Wendell Berry with regard to sustainability, and of scientist James Hansen with regard to energy policy (for details, see the links supplied above).
And finally, like most folks on WUWT (Willis Eschenbach in particular) I have no great regard for lengthy mushy policy papers written by UN bureaucrats. Life’s too serious, too fun, and too short! 🙂
[Posting time is usually proportional to the number of moderators’ mice available at any given time. 8<) Robt]
This essay reminds me of the ‘big problem’ as covered by Isaac Asimov:
http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
Certainly, I think we should live as lightly as possible on this marvelous planet.
No you don’t.
And neither do I.
And neither does anyone else.
Some people think that other people should live exactly as they wish them to. They may figure that other people should stop doing things that they either consider unimportant, or actively disapprove of, and excuse that desire for control under “you need to live lightly”. The more virtuous might believe in doing what they want to do, and meeting their wants and needs, with as little impact as can be achieved without too greatly limiting what they consider to be their own quality of life. But nobody believes that they should live as lightly as possible. Even trappist monks aren’t doing that, and there are very damn few people that choose to live like they do.
“As lighlty as possible” is one of those absolutist platitudes that should be binned next to “Sustainable Development”.
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 8:35 am
Tim Clark…Thank you for… advocating a global energy path-forward that is so strikingly similar to James Hansen’s.
_______________________
James Hansen appears in many photos wearing a hat.
I’m reasonably certain that Tim has worn a hat, too.
You see how easy it is?