Lately I’ve been listening to some talks on climate change, such as this one by Prof. Kevin Anderson, and the news, not surprisingly, keeps getting worse. Anderson discusses many factors that have generally been ignored in official reports that claim to chart a course forward on the climate, including: a) a limit of 2C of warming is no longer really possible based upon the assumptions that they make, b) that 2C was probably the wrong target anyway, c) major reports make very unreasonable assumptions about how quickly emissions can turn around, d) we need to decrease carbon emissions by 70 percent by 2020 to stay below 2C (if we’re serious about that target), and e) 4C is more do-able as a target but also can’t support large-scale agriculture and thus civilization.
Anderson’s and other talks have led me to conclude that:
a) large-scale demand-side changes are really the only option to deal with climate change in the time we have,
b) peak oil will help with that, but the zeal to find new sources of oil/coal/gas will keep peak oil from really being a ‘solution’ to climate change (consider the crazy in-progress moves to drill for oil in the arctic), and
c) the demand-side decrease, however it is implemented, would cause in the near-term (the next decade) a major economic shock.
So my new summary for our predicament is (which hasn’t changed all that much, I suppose), in the vein of the CAP theorem, “Climate or Economy: pick half of one”. That is, if we continue business as usual, and even mine more coal, drill for more oil, etc. we’d be able to keep the economy hobbling along, though peak oil will probably prevent significant economic growth, and we’d fry the climate beyond all repair and that would in the medium and long term cause the economy (and civilization) to collapse. On the other hand, if we downshift demand massively, then the consumer-driven economies of the world will go into a massive (though hopefully temporary) depression, and we’ll still have to deal with warming that’s already in the pipeline. (Not to mention the particulates issue, which is a nasty double-bind in which ending coal use causes warming by removing light-reflecting soot.) Despite these both being bad, the latter still seems like the better one.
I’m in agreement with many prominent thinkers that the right way to approach this problem is to decrease demand by putting a price on carbon. But that’s hoping for a political settlement that may or may not happen in the time we have. As such, I can’t help but feel that we as individuals can and should do more, say in the form of local terraforming that I wrote about previously.
So, in that spirit, I want to answer the following (surely not novel) questions. How many trees would I need to plant to make up for the carbon I directly or indirectly put into the atmosphere? How many trees would we, collectively, as humans on Earth, need to plant to at minimum consume the carbon we put into the atmosphere on an ongoing basis? In other words, what’s my personal, and our collective, tree debt to the planet? (And this is just the Carbon-centric view. Planting trees has so many other benefits: restoring local ecosystems for other plants, and for animals and fungi, holding water in the soil, restoring soil structure, providing food for humans and non-humans, providing shade, regulating local temperatures, restoring natural beauty, etc.)
I’m sure there are good official estimates someplace, but let’s do a simple back of the envelope calculation. Let’s say that a mature tree (say an oak) absorbs about 10 kg of Carbon each year (I’ve seen figures both higher and lower than this, but in this range), and that its lifespan is in the hundreds of years (effectively forever for our current discussion). And for simplicity let’s ignore the sapling phase in which the tree is small and thus isn’t really absorbing as much Carbon annually.
Currently humanity is emitting over 10 billion tonnes (metric) of Carbon each year. That’s 1 trillion trees worth of Carbon absorption. (I’ve looked for estimates of the number of trees on Earth, and haven’t found a good source. I’ve seen huge ranges in estimates, from 1-200 trillion trees on Earth.) Let’s say that each of the 7 billion people on Earth were to plant trees, over the next 10 years. That works out to 14 trees per person, per year for the next 10 years. That’s not bad—about one a month! Of course given that some of us use far more energy than others, we should be planting more trees than that. (Using the 80-20 rule—that is, 80% of the Carbon is caused by 20% of the people and therefore so should the tree planting—it works out to 800 billion trees over 10 years by 1.4 billion people or about 57 trees per person per year.)
Our lived environments have lots of empty, degraded land in need of restoration. On some, or maybe even much of it local terraforming will be required if trees are to live there in the long term without ongoing human effort. (For example, swales might be required in arid and semi-arid areas to ensure sufficient soil moisture.)
In summary: if you use a lot of energy (live a Western lifestyle), plant a tree a week. If you don’t use much, plant a tree a month. This won’t resolve the many other environmental and energy challenges we face, and won’t halt climate change unless everyone does it, but it’s the least we can do to pay back our tree debt.
A Singul(arity) Track Mind
I like reading things that I think I’ll disagree with. I just borrowed one such book from the library—Peter Diamandis’s Abundance. His book has gotten a fair bit of traction in the mainstream and technology press, and more than that Diamandis seemed to be one of the few techno-centric authors willing to at least attempt making a holistic case for his views. And so like Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants that I discussed a few months back, Abundance seemed worth a look.
One thing I noticed right off the bat was the book relies upon two forms of argument:
1. Good news is being ignored, its impact is right around the corner, and here are some random examples. The idea is that the reason we don’t recognize that there are good things going on is that the news is focused on bad things, and that the human mind is trained to focus on those bad things. I’m reminded of something wise Bruce Schneier has written many times:
I’ll be examining Schneier’s latest book in an upcoming post. In any case, Diamandis makes this case again and again to defend the notion that good news is being lost in the noise, and floods the reader with random anecdotes without connecting the dots. Sure, I’ll agree that some good news isn’t widely acknowledged. Nevertheless, we can’t forget Schneier’s observation, which is that there are plenty of bad things that the news is ignoring as well. (Consider that there’s no opposite to Wired or Discover or Popular Mechanics—a magazine that focuses on the non-sensational, dire things that are being discovered every day. This is the closest to such a magazine in the blog world.) Anyway, I’ll come back to this again later.
2. Ruthless extrapolation. Tom Murphy wrote about this recently—the tendency of engineers and scientists to use past data to extrapolate into the future, which works most of the time except at turning points, when it fails spectacularly. In particular, Diamandis conveniently ignores trend changes when they don’t fit the argument being made. (Consider his claim that “quality of life has improved more in the past century than ever before” and that this indicates that more good things are on the way. He ignores that since the early 1970s median household real income, energy per capita, employment among youth, among other things, has been declining.) In this, he’s very much of the Kurzweil school of thought.
These are the main two tricks in his bag. But let’s get down to it, starting with the book’s treatment, very early on, of The Limits to Growth.
The Limits to Growth. To be fair, Diamandis does a slightly better job than most cornucopian authors at describing LTG at first. He does slip a bit, say by claiming “while many of their more dire predictions have failed to materialize…”—probably to Dennis Meadows’s chagrin, as Meadows has repeatedly pointed out that the book did not make predictions. But to my surprise, he doesn’t even attempt to take LTG head on, and instead drifts off into a discussion of irrelevant topics such as how population control is a bad idea, how people solve things that were thought to be unsolvable, etc. Diamandis claims that there are three driving forces that will lead to an “age of abundance”: a) “exponentially growing technologies”, b) money being spent by “technophilanthropists”, and c) the “combination of the Internet, microfinance, and wireless communication”, and that’s going to “[transform] the poorest of the poor into an emerging market force.” (This let them eat smartphones notion is one I see around a lot, as I wrote a few months back.) Fundamentally, though, the Limits to Growth was an examination of unchecked exponential functions of a different sort, a sort Diamandis carefully avoids.
Goals. I was surprised to find that Abundance took a fairly reasonable tack when discussing goals: what is this abundance he’s seeking (and claims is forthcoming), anyway? In his initial formulation, it’s that he wants to meet the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy for everyone on the planet: access to food, some energy to prepare food, lighting, sanitation, basic education, public health, etc. He also wants communication and information freedom for everyone on the planet, and I can’t disagree with that goal. This sounds good to me. His claim, however, is that this abundance “should be achievable within twenty-five years, with noticeable change possible within the next decade.” Much of the rest of the book is about making the case that this is possible.
The possibility of abundance. Diamandis feels that our cognitive biases are what are holding us back—that abundance is right around around the corner if we could just allow ourselves to believe in it. Through a flurry of pop-psychology, one of his primary claims is that because of cognitive biases, and that humans didn’t evolve to understand “exponential technologies”, we misunderstand new technologies and are disappointed, all while those same technologies revolutionize the world. However, one could draw a very different set of inferences from a discussion of such cognitive biases—at the end of my discussion of climate change vs. peak oil, I discussed Dan Miller’s application of these same cognitive biases to why we don’t as a society respond to the dire consequences of unchecked climate change.
“The singularity is nearer”. Now we can shift gears into Diamandis’s flood of anecdotes. He’s trying to paint a picture, and I suppose it could be convincing to a certain type of reader; it’s equal measure “random thing X is better than it once was, so abundance is around the corner” and “somebody was wrong about something once, so any predictions I don’t like will also be wrong”. He considers, among other things:
The list goes on, painting a portrait of technology that has been and will continue to be the driver for unchecked human advancement.
Food. The Abundance argument completely runs off the rails when it comes to food production. After going through a litany of warnings from scientists about future challenges in food production (only to dismiss these warnings as being ill-founded), Diamandis goes on to claim, first of all, that we’ve actually continued to produce plenty of food thanks to the wonders of genetically-engineered crops despite dire forecasts from the usual chorus of naysayers. (Never mind that per capita agricultural production has flatlined since the 1980s and is likely to decrease by most studies as a result of ecological mismanagement, and GE crops often don’t produce any benefits in terms of yields.) But the solution, he says, is vertical farming and “cultured” meat. I can’t do better than this dissection of such specious claims.
DIY and hagiography. There’s a whole middle section of the book that is a bit embarrassing: page after page extolling the virtues of everything from the Maker movement to the Whole Earth Catalog, but more importantly the men (and it’s all men from what I can tell) behind them. I don’t deny that each has its virtues, but how they lead to some sort of revolution in our culture and an age of abundance is left as an exercise for the reader. Well that’s not quite true: Diamandis tells us that we’ll get a leg up from “technophilanthropists” like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (!).
Energy. It’s hard to know where to start with Diamandis’s claims about energy. On one hand PVs are going to be super cheap, he claims, because of exponential trends—I don’t doubt that solar cells will become very cheap in time, but infrastructure and installation costs seem like they won’t change much and will dominate. On the other hand he claims our oil woes will be no more because of synthetic biology. Throw in a smart grid, some new nuclear reactor designs (never confronting some of the real issues, of course) and some batteries, and apparently not only are our energy woes a thing of the past, but we will have a “squanderable abundance of energy” that will enable us to halt climate change in its tracks. If I’ve adopted a mocking tone at this point, it’s because the argument has gotten even more flimsy than before: despite discussing a topic like energy that is amenable to doing the math ala Tom Murphy, Diamandis reverts to a combination of hand waving and vignettes of inventors while ignoring basic issues like the energy trap or a whole host of other practical scaling challenges Murphy discusses.
While Diamandis drags the reader through a litany of anecdotes about education (OLPC anyone?) and health care, his approach remains the same for the rest of the book, and doesn’t grapple with the hard challenges that he ought to. In the end, I credit Kevin Kelly for having spent considerable time discussing technology’s limits in his book while trying to make a case that it does still provide some upside. The little Diamandis does to this end—in an appendix—is to make the case that nanobots and cybercrime won’t be our undoing. In any case, maybe Diamandis is onto something: nuanced arguments don’t make for bestsellers, and with numerous high-profile interviews and talks in the last year, he’s on a roll.
Date: July 20th, 2012 | Comments: 3 Comments »
Category: alternative energy, climate, commentary, computing, culture, economics, food, greenwashing, limits, transportation