Deep Adaptation by Jem Bendell

Frank Ackerman, Climate Economist

On Buying Insurance, and Ignoring Cost-Benefit Analysis. Frank Ackerman, via TripleCrisis. Feb. 8, 2019.

First in a series of posts on climate policy.

The damages expected from climate change seem to get worse with each new study. Reports from the IPCC and the U.S. Global Change Research Project, and a multi-author review article in Science, all published in late 2018, are among the recent bearers of bad news. Even more continues to arrive in a swarm of research articles, too numerous to list here. And most of these reports are talking about not-so-long-term damages. Dramatic climate disruption and massive economic losses are coming in just a few decades, not centuries, if we continue along our present path of inaction. It’s almost enough to make you support an emergency program to reduce emissions and switch to a path of rapid decarbonization.

But wait: isn’t there something about economics we need to figure out first? Would drastic emission reductions pass a cost-benefit test? How do we know that we wouldn’t be spending too much on climate policy?

In fact, a crash program to decarbonize the economy is obviously the right answer. There are just a few things you need to know about the economics of climate policy, in order to confirm that Adam Smith and his intellectual heirs have not overturned common sense on this issue. Three key points are worth remembering.

Worst-case risks matter more than likely outcomes

For uncertain, extreme risks, policy should be based on the credible worst-case outcome, not the expected or most likely value. This is the way people think about insurance against disasters. The odds that your house won’t burn down next year are better than 99 percent – but you probably have fire insurance anyway. Likewise, young parents have more than a 99 percent chance of surviving the coming year, but often buy life insurance to protect their children.

Real uncertainty, of course, has nothing to do with the fake uncertainty of climate denial. In insurance terms, real uncertainty consists of not knowing when a house fire might occur; fake uncertainty is the (obviously wrong) claim that houses never catch fire. See my Worst-Case Economics for more detailed exploration of worst cases and (real) uncertainty, in both climate and finance.

For climate risks, worst cases are much too dreadful to ignore. What we know is that climate change could be very bad for us; but no one knows exactly how bad it will be or exactly when it will arrive. How likely are we to reach tipping points into an irreversibly worse climate, and when will these tipping points occur? As the careful qualifications in the IPCC and other reports remind us, climate change could be very bad, surprisingly soon, but almost no one is willing to put a precise number or date on the expected losses.

One group does rush in where scientists fear to tread, guessing about the precise magnitude and timing of future climate damages: economists engaged in cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Rarely used before the 1990s, CBA has become the default, “common-sense” approach to policy evaluation, particularly in environmental policy. In CBA-world you begin by measuring and monetizing the benefits, and the costs, of a policy – and then “buy” the policy if, and only if, the monetary value of the benefits exceeds the costs.

There are numerous problems with CBA, such as the need to (literally) make up monetary prices for priceless values of human life, health and the natural environment. In practice, CBA often trivializes the value of life and nature. Climate policy raises yet another problem: CBA requires a single number, such as a most likely outcome, best guess, or weighted average, for every element of costs (e.g. future costs of clean energy) and benefits (e.g. monetary value of future damages avoided by clean energy expenditures). There is no simple way to incorporate a wide range of uncertainty about such values into CBA. The second post in this series will look more deeply at economists’ misplaced precision about climate damages.

Costs of emission reduction are dropping fast

The insurance analogy is suggestive, but not a perfect fit for climate policy. There is no intergalactic insurance agency that can offer us a loaner planet to use while ours is towed back to the shop for repairs. Instead, we will have to “self-insure” against climate risks – the equivalent of spending money on fireproofing your house rather than relying on an insurance policy.

Climate self-insurance consists largely of reducing carbon emissions, in order to reduce future losses.[1] The one piece of unalloyed good news in climate policy today is the plummeting cost of clean energy. In the windiest and sunniest parts of the world (and the United States), new wind and solar power installations now produce electricity at costs equal to or lower than from fossil fuel-burning plants.

A 2017 report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) projects that this will soon be true worldwide: global average renewable energy costs will be within the range of fossil fuel-fired costs by 2020, with on-shore wind and solar photovoltaic panels at the low end of the range. Despite low costs for clean energy, many utilities will still propose to build fossil fuel plants, reflecting the inertia of traditional energy planning and the once-prudent wisdom of the cheap-fuel, pre-climate change era.

Super-low costs for renewables, which would have seemed like fantasies 10 years ago, are now driving the economics and the feasibility of plans for decarbonization. Many progressive Democrats have endorsed a “green new deal”, calling for elimination of fossil fuels, massive investment in energy efficiency and clean energy, and fairness in the distribution of jobs and opportunities.

Robert Pollin, an economist who has studied green new deal options, estimates that annual investment of about 1.5 percent of GDP would be needed. That’s about $300 billion a year for the United States, and four times as much, $1.2 trillion a year, for the world economy. Those numbers may sound large, but so are the fossil fuel subsidies and investments that the green new deal would eliminate.

In a 2015 study, my colleagues and I calculated that 80 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could be eliminated by 2050, with no net increase in energy or transportation costs. Since that time, renewables have only gotten cheaper. (Our result does not necessarily contradict Pollin’s estimate, since the last 20 percent of emissions will be the hardest and most expensive to eliminate.)

These projections of future costs are inevitably uncertain, because the future has not happened yet. The risks, however, do not appear dangerous or burdensome. So far, the surprises on the cost side have been unexpectedly rapid decreases in renewable energy prices. These are not the risks that require rethinking our approach to climate policy.

Costs of not reducing emissions may be disastrously large

The disastrous worst-case risks are all on the benefits, or avoided climate damages, side of the ledger. The scientific uncertainties about climate change concern the timing and extent of damages. Therefore, the urgency of avoiding these damages, or conversely the cost of not avoiding them, is intrinsically uncertain, and could be disastrously large.

It has become common, among economists, to estimate the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), defined as the monetary value of the present and future climate damages per ton of carbon dioxide or equivalent. This is where the pick-a-number imperative of cost-benefit analysis introduces the greatest distortion: huge uncertainties in damages should naturally translate into huge uncertainties in the SCC, not a single point estimate.

[1] Adaptation, or expenditure to reduce vulnerability to climate damages, is also important but may not be effective beyond the early stages of warming. And some adaptation costs are required to cope with warming that can no longer be avoided – that is, they have become sunk costs, not present or future policy choices

Climate Damages: Uncertain but Ominous, or $51 per Ton? Frank Ackerman. Feb. 12, 2019.

Second in a series of posts on climate policy.


According to scientists, climate damages are deeply uncertain, but could be ominously large (see the previous post). Alternatively, according to the best-known economic calculation, lifetime damages caused by emissions in 2020 will be worth $51 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, in 2018 prices.

These two views can’t both be right. This post explains where the $51 estimate comes from, why it’s not reliable, and the meaning for climate policy of the deep uncertainty about the value of damages.

A tale of three models

The “social cost of carbon” (SCC) is the value of present and future climate damages caused by a ton of carbon dioxide emissions. The Obama administration assembled an Interagency Working Group to estimate the SCC. In its final (August 2016) revision of the numbers, the most widely used variant of the SCC was $42 per metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2020, expressed in 2007 dollars – equivalent to $51 in 2018 dollars. Numbers like this were used in Obama-era cost-benefit analyses of new regulations, placing a dollar value on the reduction in carbon emissions from, say, vehicle fuel efficiency standards.

To create these numbers, the Working Group averaged the results from three well-known models. These do not provide more detailed or in-depth analysis than other models. On the contrary, two of them stand out for being simpler and easier to use than other models. They are, however, the most frequently cited models in climate economics. They are famous for being famous, the Kardashians of climate models.

DICE, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale University, offers a skeletal simplicity: it represents the dynamics of the world economy, the climate, and the interactions between the two with only 19 equations. This (plus Nordhaus’ free distribution of the software) has made it by far the most widely used model, valuable for classroom teaching, for initial high-level sketches of climate impacts, and for researchers (at times including myself) who lack the funding to acquire and use more complicated models. Yet no one thinks that DICE represents the frontier of knowledge about the world economy or the environment. DICE estimates aggregate global climate damages as a quadratic function of temperature increases, rising only gradually as the world warms.

PAGE, developed by Chris Hope at Cambridge University, resembles DICE in level of complexity, and has been used in many European analyses. It is the only one of the three models to include any explicit treatment of uncertain climate risks, assuming the threat of an abrupt, mid-size economic loss (beyond the “predictable” damages) that becomes both more likely and more severe as temperatures rise. Perhaps for this reason, PAGE consistently produces the highest SCC estimates among the three models.

FUND, developed by Richard Tol and David Anthoff, is more detailed than DICE or PAGE, with separate treatment of more than a dozen damage categories. Yet the development of these damages estimates has been idiosyncratic, in some cases (such as agriculture) relying on relatively optimistic research from 20 years ago rather than more troubling, recent findings on climate impacts. Even in later versions, after many small updates, FUND still estimates that many of its damage categories are too small to matter; in some FUND scenarios, the largest cost of warming is the increased expenditure on air conditioning.

Much has been written about what’s wrong with relying on these three models. The definitive critique is the National Academy of Sciences study, which reviews the shortcomings of the three models in detail and suggests ways to build a better model for estimating the SCC. (Released just days before the Trump inauguration, the study was doomed to be ignored.)

Embracing uncertainty 

Expected climate damages are uncertain over a wide range, including the possibility of disastrously large impacts. The SCC is a monetary valuation of expected damages per ton of carbon dioxide. Therefore, SCC values should be uncertain over a wide range, including the possibility of disastrously high values.

Look beyond the three-model calculation, and the range of possible SCC values is extremely wide, including very high upper bounds. Many studies have adopted DICE or another model as a base, then demonstrated that minor, reasonable changes in assumptions lead to huge changes in the SCC. To cite a few examples:

• A meta-analysis of SCC values found that, in order to reflect major climate risks, the SCC needs to be at least $125. 
• A study by Simon Dietz and Nicholas Stern found a range of optimal carbon prices (i.e. SCC values), depending on key climate uncertainties, ranging from $45 to $160 for emissions in 2025, and from $111 to $394 for emissions in 2055 (in 2018 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide). 
• In my own research, coauthored with Liz Stanton, we found that a few major uncertainties lead to an extremely wide range of possible SCC values, from $34 to $1,079 for emissions in 2010, and from $77 to $1,875 for 2050 emissions (again converted to 2018 dollars). 
• Martin Weitzman has written several articles emphasizing that the SCC depends heavily on the unknown shape of the damage function – that is, the details of the assumed relationship between rising temperatures and rising damages. His “Dismal Theorem” article argues that the marginal value of reducing emissions – the SCC – is literally infinite, since catastrophes that would cause human extinction remain too plausible to ignore (although they are not the most likely outcomes).

Whether or not the SCC is infinite, many researchers have found that it is uncertain, with the broad range of plausible values including dangerously high estimates. This is the economic reflection of scientific uncertainty about the timing and extent of climate damages.

How much can we afford?

As explained in the previous post in this series, deep uncertainty about the magnitude and timing of risks stymies the use of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy. Rather, policy should be set in an insurance-like framework, focused on credible worst-case losses rather than most likely outcomes. Given the magnitude of the global problem, this means “self-insurance” – investing in measures that make worst cases less likely.

How much does climate “self-insurance” – greenhouse gas emission reduction – cost? Several early (2008 to 2010) studies of rapid decarbonization, pushing the envelope of what was technically feasible at the time, came up with mid-century carbon prices of roughly $150 – $500 per ton of carbon dioxide abated.[1] Since then, renewable energy has experienced rapid progress and declining prices, undoubtedly lowering the carbon price on a maximum feasible reduction scenario.Even at $150 to $500 per ton, the cost of abatement was comparable to or lower than many of the worst-case estimates of the SCC, or climate damages per ton. In short, we already know that doing everything on the least-cost emission reduction path will cost less, per ton of carbon dioxide, than worst-case climate damages.

That’s it: end of economic story about evaluating climate policy. We don’t need more exact, accurate SCC estimates; they will not be forthcoming in time to shape policy, due to the uncertainties involved. Since estimated worst-case damages are rising over time, while abatement costs (such as the costs of renewables) are falling, the balance is tipping farther and farther toward “do everything you can, now.” That was already the correct answer some years ago, and only becomes more correct over time.

That’s not the end of this series of blog posts, however. Three more are coming, addressing three policy problems that arise in climate advocacy: how to talk about methane and natural gas; taxes versus cap and trade systems; and the role of equity and economic obstacles to climate policy.

Methane Measurements and Short Attention Spans. Frank Ackerman. Feb. 18, 2019.

Third in a series of posts on climate policy. 

Carbon dioxide (CO2) represents most, but not all, greenhouse gas emissions. In EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory for 2016, CO2 represented 82 percent of gross U.S. GHG emissions, while methane represented 10 percent (measured as CO2-equivalents). The top three sources of methane are agriculture, the energy industry, and waste management. 

As fascinating as some of us may find such details, the general public has a short attention span for new information about climate change. Within that constraint, what do we want to communicate? For methane, there are two choices, an introductory and an advanced message. 

The introductory message emphasizes that methane, the principal component of natural gas, is an important cause of global warming under any version of the data. It is therefore crucial to reduce and eliminate all fossil fuels, gas included, as soon as possible, replacing them with efficiency, renewables and energy storage.

At a more advanced level, some new research suggests that conventional data understate methane emissions. And a different way of comparing methane to CO2 implies that methane should have a higher CO2-equivalent value, raising its relative importance in GHG accounting. Some combination of these factors might even make natural gas as bad as coal, from a global warming perspective. 

The introductory message is the one that matters for public communication. It focuses discussion on the simple fact that natural gas, like other fossil fuels, has got to go: it is part of the problem, not the solution. The advanced message, in contrast, emphasizes technical controversies and interpretation of recent research. It tends to produce eyes-glazed-over responses along the lines of “I wasn’t that good at science in school.” 

But if you’re reading this, you can probably follow the technical debates, at least partway down the rabbit hole. Consider three chapters of the story of methane: the time span for calculating CO2-equivalents; the issue of gas leaks; and the gas vs. coal comparison.

Thinking about tomorrow

Methane is a much more potent heat-trapping gas than CO2, but CO2 remains in the atmosphere and traps heat for much longer than methane. On balance, how much does a ton of methane emissions contribute to warming, relative to a ton of CO2? 

The answer depends on the time period under consideration. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of 12 years. CO2 is affected by several processes that operate at very different speeds: 50 percent of CO2 is removed from the atmosphere within 30 years of emission, while 20 percent persists in the atmosphere for thousands of years. 

Zooming in on a timespan as short as 20 years after emissions means focusing mainly on years when methane is still present in the atmosphere, trapping a lot of heat. Over a longer interval such as 100 years after emissions, most of the years are ones when methane has faded away, while a significant fraction of the CO2 emissions remains in the atmosphere. As a result, the CO2-equivalent value of methane is 84 over a 20-year period, compared to only 28 over a 100-year period. 

Early IPCC and other technical reports tended to standardize on the 100-year CO2-equivalent value, implying that methane is 28 times as bad per ton as CO2. More recent studies have often highlighted the 20-year CO2-equivalent value, making methane 84 times as bad. 

Neither one or the other is the correct value. Climate change is a problem of both short-term urgency and long-term consequences, of 20-year impacts, 100-year impacts, and beyond. This produces an awkward situation for research and reporting on greenhouse gases: the “exchange rate” between the two leading gases is either 28 or 84. It is less of a problem for public policy, where either of the CO2-equivalent values for methane is enough to make the case: a low-carbon economy must eliminate methane emissions, not rely on natural gas as a bridge to anywhere we want to go.

Counting the leaks

Natural gas leaks from wells and pipelines, increasing the lifecycle methane emissions associated with gas-fired heating or electricity generation. EPA estimated that methane leaks represented 1.4 percent of gas production nationwide in 2015. But a new study based on extensive field measurement found that methane leaks were 2.3 percent of gas production that year. Other studies have reported even higher leakage rates in areas where fracking is widespread. 

It would be a mistake, however, to pin the critique of natural gas solely to high levels of leaks. The same study that found leaks of 2.3 percent also found that “the higher estimates stem from a small number of so-called superemitters … most tied to [malfunctioning] hatches and vents in natural gas storage tanks at extraction wells.” 

It is not hard to imagine the industry, under pressure from regulators, fixing the malfunctioning hatches and vents, and developing better ways to seal leaks in general. This would increase the amount of gas that could be delivered to customers, potentially increasing industry profits. The International Energy Agency, which estimates gas leaks of 1.7 percent worldwide, also finds that 40 to 50 percent of current methane emissions could be avoided at no net cost. 

The key point about methane is not the current high levels of leaks. Rather, reducing methane emissions, from leaks and other sources, is one of the most cost-effective strategies for greenhouse gas mitigation.

Different shades of bad

Some environmental advocates now claim that burning gas is just as bad for the climate as burning coal. There are several strong counterarguments, which do not undermine the case against gas. 

Above all, coal is an environmental disaster, causing havoc throughout its life cycle. Coal mining devastates local communities, on a level that equals or surpasses anything done by fracking. It even releases methane from coal mining, equal to 8 percent of U.S. methane emissions according to the 2016 greenhouse gas inventory. The canaries in the coal mines, back in the day, were brought in to detect carbon monoxide and methane, the deadly gases that threatened miners. 

Coal combustion gives rise not only to CO2, but also to many toxic pollutants which kill people near the plants. Since coal plants are usually located in low-income and minority neighborhoods, plant siting raises issues of environmental justice. After combustion, coal ash must be disposed of, creating a whole new set of toxic risks and environmental justice concerns in the siting of these impacts. Gas does not cause local toxic emissions or leave ash behind when it burns. 

Even restricting attention to greenhouse gas emissions, an extraordinary level of leakage is required to make gas as bad as coal from a 20-year perspective, let alone a 100-year perspective. The IEA has a graph displaying the relationship between leak rates, time horizon, and climate impacts from coal vs. gas. 

Finally, consider the emotional meaning of the statement that gas is as bad as coal. It often seems as if activists feel the need to show that gas is as bad as it gets, in order to support opposition to gas-fired power plants. This is surely a mistake. 

It is not necessary to make something the worst ever, in order to establish that it is bad. George W. Bush was a bad president, for the environment and so much else; now it turns out that he was not the worst possible president. There is no reason to claim that Bush was as bad as Trump – or that a return to Bush-era policies would be a bridge to the future. It’s just a different shade of bad. 

A gas-fired electric grid is different from a coal-fired one. But from a climate perspective, they are different shades of bad: both involve carbon emissions far above a sustainable, climate-friendly level. The need for a carbon-free alternative is the conclusion that matters, independent of the latest research details on methane.

Prices are not enough. Frank Ackerman. Feb. 23, 2019.

Fourth in a series on climate policy. 

We need a price on carbon emissions. This opinion, virtually unanimous among economists, is also shared by a growing number of advocates and policymakers. But unanimity disappears in the debate over how to price carbon: there is continuing controversy about the merits of taxes vs. cap-and-trade systems for pricing emissions, and about the role for complementary, non-price policies.
At the risk of spoiling the suspense, this blog post reaches two main conclusions: First, under either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, the price level matters more than the mechanism used to reach that price. Second, under either approach, a reasonably high price is necessary but not sufficient for climate policy; other measures are needed to complement price incentives.

Why taxes and cap-and-trade systems are similar

A carbon tax raises the cost of fossil fuels directly, by taxing their carbon emissions from combustion. This is most easily done upstream, i.e. taxing the oil or gas well, coal mine, or fuel importer, who presumably passes the tax on to end users. There are only hundreds of upstream fuel producers and importers to keep track of, compared to millions of end users. 

A cap-and-trade system accomplishes the same thing indirectly, by setting a cap on total allowable emissions, and issuing that many annual allowances. Companies that want to sell or use fossil fuels are required to hold allowances equal to their emissions. If the cap is low enough to make allowances a scarce resource, then the market will establish a price on allowances – in effect, a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Again, it is easier to apply allowance requirements, and thus induce carbon trading, at the upstream level rather than on millions of end users. 

If the price of emissions is, for example, $50 per ton of carbon dioxide, then any firm that can reduce emissions for less than $50 a ton will do so – under either a tax or cap-and-trade system. Cutting emissions reduces tax payments, under a carbon tax; it reduces the need to buy allowances under a cap-and-trade system. The price, not the mechanism, is what matters for this incentive effect. 

A review of the economics literature on carbon taxes vs. cap-and-trade systems found a number of other points of similarity. Either system can be configured to achieve a desired distribution of the burden on households and industries, e.g. via free allocation of some allowances, or partial exemption from taxes. Money raised from either taxes or allowance auctions could be wholly or partially refunded to households. Either approach can be manipulated to reduce effects on international competitiveness. 

And problems raised with offsets – along the lines of credits given too casually for tree-planting – are not unique to cap and trade. A carbon tax could emerge from Congress riddled with obscure loopholes, which could be as damaging to the integrity of carbon pricing as any of the poorly written offset provisions of existing cap-and-trade systems. More positively speaking, either approach to carbon pricing can be carried out either with or without offsets and tax exemptions.

Why taxes and cap-and-trade systems are different

Compared to the numerous similarities between the two approaches, the list of differences is a shorter one. A carbon tax is easier and cheaper to administer. In theory, a carbon tax provides certainty about the price of emissions, while a cap-and-trade system provides certainty about the quantity of emissions (in practice, these certainties can be undone by too-frequent tinkering with tax rates or emissions caps). 

Cap-and-trade systems have been more widely used in practice. The European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the world’s largest carbon market. Others include the linked carbon market of California and several Canadian provinces, and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) among states in the Northeast. 

Numerous critics have pointed to potential flaws in cap-and-trade, such as overly generous, poorly monitored offsets. Many recent cap-and-trade systems, introduced in a conservative era, began with caps so high and prices so low that they have little effect (leaving them open to the criticism that the administrative costs are not justified by the skimpy results). The price must be high enough, and the cap must be low enough, to alter the behavior of major emitters. 

The same applies, of course, to a carbon tax. Starting with a trivial level of carbon tax, in order to calm opponents of the measure, runs the risk of “proving” that a carbon price has no effect. The correct starting price under either system is the highest price that is politically acceptable; there is no hope of “getting the prices right” due to the uncertain and potentially disastrous scope of climate damages. 

Perhaps the most salient difference between taxes and cap-and-trade is political rather than economic: in an era when people like to chant “no new taxes”, the prospects for any initiative seem worse if it involves a new tax. This could explain why there is so much more experience to date with cap-and-trade systems.

Beyond price incentives

Some carbon emitters, for instance in electricity generation, have multiple choices among alternative technologies. In such cases, price incentives alone are powerful, and producers can respond incrementally, retiring and replacing individual plants when appropriate. Other sectors face barriers that an individual firm cannot usually overcome on its own. Electric vehicles are not practical without an extensive recharging and repair infrastructure, which is just beginning to exist in a few parts of the country. In this case, no reasonable level of carbon price can, by itself, bring an adequate nationwide electric vehicle infrastructure into existence. Policies that build and promote electric vehicle infrastructure are valuable complements to a carbon price: they create a combined incentive to move away from gasoline. 

Yet another reason for combining non-price climate policies with a carbon price is that purely price-based decision-making can be exhausting. People could calculate for themselves the fuel saved by buying a more fuel-efficient car and subtract that from the sticker price of the vehicle, but it is not an easy calculation. Federal and state fuel economy standards make the process simpler, by setting a floor underneath vehicle fuel efficiency. 

When buying a major appliance, it is possible in theory to read the energy efficiency sticker on the carton, calculate your average annual use of the appliance, convert it to dollars saved per year, and see if that savings justifies purchase of a more efficient appliance. But who does all that arithmetic? Even I don’t want to do that calculation, and I have a PhD in economics and enjoy playing with numbers. My guess is that virtually no one does the calculation consistently and correctly. On the other hand, federal and state appliance efficiency standards have often set minimum levels of required efficiency, which increase over time. It’s much more fun to buy something off the shelf that meets those standards, instead of settling in for an extended data-crunching session any time you need a new fridge, air conditioner, washing machine… 

In short, the carbon price is what matters, not the mechanism used to adopt that price. And whatever the price, non-price climate policies are needed as well – both to build things that no one company can do on its own, and to make energy-efficient choices accessible to all, without heroic feats of calculation.

Inequality, sunk costs and climate policy. Frank Ackerman. Feb. 27, 2019.

Fifth in a series on climate policy.

Climate change is at once a common problem that threatens us all, and a source of differential harms based on location and resources. We are all on the same boat, in perilous waters – but some of us have much nicer cabins than others. What is the relationship of inequality to climate policy? 

The ultimate economic obstacle to climate policy is the long life of so many investments. Housing can last for a century or more, locking residents into locations that made sense long ago. Business investments often survive for decades. These investments, in the not-so-distant past, assumed continuation of cheap oil and minimally regulated coal – thereby building in a commitment to high carbon emissions. Now, in a climate-aware world, we need to treat all fossil fuels as expensive and maintain stringent regulation of coal. And it is impossible to repurpose many past investments for the new era: they are sunk costs, valuable only in their original location or industry. 

If we could wave a magic wand and have a complete do-over on urban planning, we could create a new, more comfortable and more sustainable way of life. Transit-centered housing complexes, surrounded by green spaces and by local amenities and services, could offer convenient car-free links to major employment sites. Absent a magic wand, the challenge is how to get there from here, in a short enough time frame to matter for climate policy. 

Space is the final frontier in energy use. Instead of shared public spaces for all, an ever-more-unequal society allows the rich to enjoy immense private spaces, such as McMansions situated on huge exurban lots. This leads to higher heating and cooling costs for oversized housing, and to higher infrastructure costs in general: longer pipes, wires and travel distances between houses. And it locks in a commitment to low population density and long individual commutes. Outside of the biggest cities, much of the United States is too sparsely settled for mass transit.

Pushing toward clean energy

Carbon prices and other incentives are designed to push people and businesses out of the most emissions-intensive locations and activities. Along with the wealthy exurbs, cold rural states, with high heating and transportation requirements per person, will become more expensive. So, too, will investment in emissions-intensive production processes, whether in electricity generation, heavy industry, or agriculture. 

The art of policymaking requires a delicate balance. Too much pressure to make fuel expensive can produce a backlash, as in the Yellow Vests protests in France, which successfully blocked an increase in the price of gasoline. Too little pressure leads to complacency, to the false belief that enough is already being done. Subsidies to support the transition may be useful but must be time-limited to avoid becoming a permanent entitlement. 

The green new deal, the hopeful, if still vague, political vision that is now drawing widespread attention, calls for a transition to clean energy, investment in low-carbon infrastructure, and a focus on equality and workers’ rights. It would create substantial net benefits for the country and the economy. A more fine-grained analysis is needed, however, to identify those who might lose from the transition. Their losses will loom large in the policy debate, regardless of the benefits to the rest of society. 

For example, after years of seniority-based cutbacks, many of the remaining workers in legacy energy industries (coal mines, oil wells, fossil-fueled power plants) are nearing retirement age. Pension guarantees, combined with additional funding to allow early retirement, may be more important to these workers, while new green jobs could be important to their children or to the smaller number of younger workers in at-risk jobs.
Older residents who have spent their lives and invested their savings in a rural community, or have no assets except a farm, should be welcome to remain in those communities. But the lingering mystique of an almost-vanished rural America should not lead to new initiatives to attract younger residents back to an energy-intensive, emissions-intensive lifestyle.

Responding to inequality

Energy use and carbon emissions are quite unequally distributed, within as well as between countries. In all but the poorest countries, the rich spend more on energy in absolute dollar terms, but less than others as a percentage of income. As a result, any carbon price introduced in the United States or other high-income countries will be regressive, taking a greater percentage of income from lower-income households. 

To address this problem, James Boyce proposes refunding carbon revenues to households on an equal per capita basis, in a cap-and-dividend system. Boyce’s calculations show that most people could come out ahead on a cap-and-dividend plan: only the richest 20 percent of U.S. households would lose from paying a relatively high carbon price, if the revenues were refunded via equal per capita dividends. 

Other authors have proposed that some of the revenues could go to basic research or to infrastructure development, accelerating the arrival of sustainable energy use. Any use of the revenues, except distribution in proportion to individual fuel use or emissions, preserves the incentive effect of a carbon price. The question of cap-and-dividend versus investment in sustainable energy is largely a debate about what will make a regressive carbon price politically acceptable.

Stranded assets

It is not only households that have invested too heavily in now-obsolete patterns of energy use. The same pattern arises in a different context, in the energy sector itself. Electric utilities have often invested in fossil-fuel-burning plants, expecting to recover their investment over 20 to 30 years of use. Now, as changing prices and priorities shut some of those plants before the end of their planned lifetimes, the unrecovered investment is a stranded asset, no longer useful for producers or customers. 

The problem is further complicated by the regulatory bargains made in many states. Depending on utility regulations (which differ from state to state), a utility may have formally agreed to allow state regulators to set its rates, in exchange for an opportunity to recover its entire investment over a long period of years. What happens to that regulatory bargain when a regulated plant becomes uneconomic to operate? 

Businesses whose investments have gone badly do not elicit the same degree of sympathy as individuals stuck in energy-intensive homes and careers. Indeed, Milton Friedman, the godfather of modern conservative economics, used to emphasize that private enterprise is a profit and loss system, where losses are even more important than profits in forcing companies to use their resources effectively. 

Despite Friedman’s praise of losses, demanding that a utility absorb the entire loss on its stranded assets could provoke political obstacles to clean energy and climate policy. Neither zero recovery nor full recovery of a utility’s stranded assets may be appropriate in theory. Given the urgency of a rapid and complete energy transition, it may be more expedient to negotiate a settlement that allows prompt progress. Once again, it is the political art of the deal, not any fixed economic formula, that determines what should be done. Offering utilities too little provokes opposition and delay; offering them too much is unfair to everyone else and could encourage similar mistaken investments in the future.

What does global sustainability look like?

Climate change is a global problem that can only be solved by cooperation among all major countries. The challenge for American policy is not only to reduce our own emissions, but also to play a constructive role in global climate cooperation. U.S. leadership, in cooperation with China and Europe, is crucial to the global effort to control the climate. Reviving that leadership, which had barely surfaced under Obama before being abandoned by Trump, is among the most important things we can do for the world today. 

In the longer run, questions of climate justice and international obligations are among the most difficult aspects of climate policy. High-income countries such as the United States and northern Europe bear substantial responsibility for the climate crisis worldwide. Among other approaches, the Greenhouse Development Rights framework combines historical responsibility for emissions and current ability to pay for mitigation, in assigning shares of the global cost of climate stabilization. 

In the current political climate there is no hope of achieving complete consensus about international burden-sharing before beginning to address the climate crisis. The urgency of climate protection requires major initiatives as soon as possible, in parallel with (not waiting for the conclusion of) discussions of international equity. U.S. actions on both fronts are essential for global progress toward climate stabilization. Significant steps toward equity and burden-sharing may be required to win the support of emerging economies such as India, Indonesia and Brazil. 

Finally, assuming success, what would global sustainable development look like? In view of the rapid urbanization of emerging economies, the key question is, what kind of low-carbon urban life can the world afford? The sprawling, car-intensive and carbon-intensive expanse of Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Houston seems like an amazingly expensive mistake. The compact, energy-efficient, transit-based urbanism of Tokyo or Hong Kong is at least a contender, a high-income life with much lower resource use per person. 

The American example matters around the world: if our vision of the good life remains one of extravagant sprawl, others will try to imitate it. If we develop a more sustainable vision of our own future, the whole world will be watching.

Climate Links: February 2019

Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment: Climate Change, Sustainability and People. International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

627-page report states that even in the best-case scenario, the Himalayan mountains will lose more than one-third of their ice by the end of the century. An earlier report was even scarier, it said the Mt Everest region would lose 90% of its ice by 2100.

‘The devastation of human life is in view’: what a burning world tells us about climate change. David Wallace-Wells, Guardian. Feb. 2, 2019.

reading about warming, you will often come across analogies from the planetary record: the last time the planet was this much warmer, the logic runs, sea levels were here. These conditions are not coincidences. The geologic record is the best model we have for understanding the very complicated climate system, and gauging just how much damage will come from turning up the temperature. Which is why it is especially concerning that recent research into the deep history of the planet suggests that our current climate models may be underestimating the amount of warming we are due for in 2100 by as much as half. The authors of one recent paper suggested that slashing our emissions could still bring us to 4 or 5C, a scenario, they said, would pose severe risks to the habitability of the entire planet. “Hothouse Earth”, they called it.

Sea Level Rise and the Loss of Shipping Ports. SurvivalAcres. Feb. 3, 3019.

What this means is all low-lying coastal regions are now at greater and greater risk. An enormous amount of infrastructure is destined to be destroyed and flooded out. That would include many of the world’s sea ports (not just cities and towns), which handle 95% of the U.S. international trade. 

In total, there are 196 countries with more than 4,764 ports that will be affected by sea level rise. Not one sea port in the world is prepared for extreme sea level rise.

In total, should all the world’s ice melt, we’re talking about a level of inundation that absolutely boggles the mind. And if it were to happen – civilization would certainly end.

Silent majority' of Canadians wants more government action on climate change. Andre Mayer, What on Earth, CBC News. Feb. 1, 2019.

The Canadian weasel: a whiny species. undenial. Feb. 15, 2019.

The problem in microcosm. Consciousness of Sheep. Dec. 26, 2018.

... in this one small issue we find a microcosm of our global predicament and the reason why we are not going to do anything about it. ...

Indeed, the car symbolises our global predicament: 

• Emitting too much greenhouse gas 
• Powered by a fuel that is increasingly expensive and difficult to obtain 
• Made from increasingly rare and hard to recycle mineral resources 
• Central to our excessively-consumptive lifestyles. 

If we were serious about mitigating climate change, resource depletion and environmental destruction, among the most important things we would do (I would add a ban on commercial air travel and a one-child policy) would be to cease all non-essential private motoring immediately. And yet, when it comes down to it, politicians lack the spine even to implement what would amount to little more than some additional inconvenience for motorists in order to begin to redress some of the vast imbalances between cars and other road-users. 

If they will not even do that, does anyone seriously believe that they are going to implement the massive lifestyle changes necessary to offset the unfolding environmental catastrophe or the cascading failures that will follow from resource depletion?

Environment in multiple crises - report. Roger Harrabin, BBC. Feb. 12, 2019.

Politicians and policymakers have failed to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis facing the Earth, a report claims. 

The think-tank IPPR says human impacts have reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy. 

Scientists warn of a potentially deadly combination of factors. 

These include climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling and acidifying oceans. 

The report from the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research says these factors are "driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels. 

"This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years."

Insect population faces 'catastrophic' collapse: Sydney research. University of Sydney. Feb. 12, 2019.


The Ocean Is Running Out of Breath, Scientists Warn. Laura Poppick, SciAm. Feb. 25, 2019.

Widespread and sometimes drastic marine oxygen declines are stressing sensitive species—a trend that will continue with climate change

As the Colorado River runs dry: A five-part climate change story. By Jim Robbins, Photography by Ted Wood, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. February 15, 2019.


Guest post: Land management ‘blind spots’ make 1.5C goal highly unlikely. Dr. Calum Brown, Carbon Brief. Feb. 18, 2019.

The Paris Agreement represents a rare high point in international climate negotiations, with 195 signatories pledging to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C or 2C above pre-industrial levels. 

However, despite initial optimism, progress towards meeting this ambition has been lacking. Of the “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) that describe each country’s plans for cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, most are vague, underwhelming documents that are almost certainly insufficient and unlikely to be implemented in full. 

This is particularly obvious in plans for cutting emissions from the way the land is used, managed and farmed. 

In a new “perspective” paper, published in Nature Climate Change, my co-authors and I look at the “blind spots” that hinder strategies to cut land-based emissions. These include inconsistent policies, time lags that make rapid change difficult, and detrimental consequences of some mitigation options.

The hidden environmental cost of Valentine’s Day roses. Gaby Del Valle, Vox. Feb. 12, 2019.

It all comes down to shipping.

When we talk about flowers and sustainability, the biggest issue is how flowers get from their point of origin to retailers across the country. During most of the year, flowers are shipped on passenger planes, Amy Stewart, an investigative reporter and author of the 2007 book Flower Confidential, told me. “They’re put on planes that are going anyway.” But hundreds of cargo planes full of flowers fly from the Andes to Miami in the month before Valentine’s Day. According to the Post, 30 cargo jets fly from Colombia to Miami every day in the three weeks leading up to the big day and a similar amount fly out from Ecuador, amounting to more than 15,000 tons of flowers delivered in less than a month.  

These flights have important consequences for the rest of the planet. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, comprising 28 percent of the country’s total emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Just over a quarter of US transportation emissions come from freight over air, land, and sea. Growing aviation demand, for both passengers and cargo, helped fuel an increase in emissions in the United States last year, reversing years of decline. This is significant, as greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane trap heat in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. 

Concrete is tipping us into climate catastrophe. It's payback time. John Vidal, Guardian. Feb. 25, 2019.


global dimming:
Up to half a degree more warming hidden in pollution. Dr. Robert Allen, via RadioEcoShock. Feb. 21, 2019.


Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. Josh Gabbatiss, The Independent. Feb. 18, 2019.

New findings suggest trees are 'our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change', says scientist

Humans are frogs in hot water of climate change, research says. Jen Christensen, CNN. Feb. 25, 2019.

BP Energy Outlook 2019.


Suffering in Silence III. The 10 most under-reported humanitarian crises of 2018. CARE.

Dancing with Ulysses. Albert Bates. Feb. 10, 2019.

While it is yet unknowable if humans have the collective capacity to act quickly enough to actually reverse climate change, what can be said is that a small number of activists in the ecovillage, bioregional, and permaculture worlds have already changed the conversation.

If there will be salvation for our kind, it must pass through that reversing door. We have set a lantern there. Wahl quoted (without attribution to Herman Kahn or Al Gore) the aphorism, “We must do the impossible because the probable is unthinkable.”

This too we know: each and every one of us will have our deer-in-the-headlights moment when we realize we really did blow up the Holocene and it won’t be coming back and that could be all she wrote for homo sapiens. Then arrives, in the echo of that thunderclap, the realization that accumulating property, saving historical mementos, writing books, making films, or building companies or concepts to outlive yourself are all meaningless activities when placed into a context of Near Term Human Extinction. What matters is… What? What matters is what happens next to each and every one of us.

Remembering the sensation that Alan Watts called The Wisdom of Insecurity, or that Arnold Mindell describes in Sitting in the Fire, — living fully in the moment, not knowing, but being content with unknowing — is a better skill to develop than trying to know everything or to be constantly battling boredom while surfing channels on your phone. This complex, living, dynamic system of which we are part and which we co-created with our actions or inactions, is too complex to be predicted and controlled anyway. Indeed the very act of attempting control, such as with AI, changes it enough to make it unpredictable again.

Is There An Upper Limit On Human Self-Deceptive Bullshit? Dave Cohen, Deline of the Empire. Feb. 7, 2019.

So, even a non-binding resolution expressing humanity's positive but delusional hopes and fantasies is unlikely to make it through the U.S. Congress.

William Catton, 1982: Overshoot

Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse
Excerpt from Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary ChangeWilliam Catton*
1982

In a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most successfully on the people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just like a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. George Orwell, 1984.

New Ecological Understandings

Circumstance: The Age of Exuberance is over, population has already overshot carrying capacity, and prodigal Homo sapiens has drawn down the world's savings deposits.

Consequence: All forms of human organization and behavior that are based on the assumption of limitlessness must change to forms that accord with finite limits.

Unrecognized Preview

The Industrial Revolution made us precariously dependent on nature's dwindling legacy of non-renewable resources, even though we did not at first recognize this fact. Many major events of modern history were unforeseen results of actions taken with inadequate awareness of ecological mechanisms. Peoples and governments never intended some of the outcomes their actions would incur.

To see where we are now headed, when our destiny has departed so radically from our aspirations, we must examine some historic indices that point to the conclusion that even the concept of succession (as explored in previous chapters) understates the ultimate consequences of our own exuberance. We can begin by taking a fresh look at the Great Depression of the 1930s, an episode people saw largely in the shallower terms of economics and politics when they were living through it. From an ecologically informed perspective, what else can we now see in it?

The Great Depression, looked at ecologically, was a preview of the fate toward which mankind has been drawn by the kinds of progress that have depended on consuming exhaustible resources. We need to see why it was not recognized for the preview it was; this will help us to grasp at last the meaning missed earlier.

We did not know we were watching a preview because, when the world economy fell apart in 1929-32, it was not from exhaustion of essential fuels or materials. From the very definition of carrying capacity - the maximum indefinitely supportable ecological load - we can now see that non-renewable resources provide no real carrying capacity; they provide only phantom carrying capacity. If coming to depend on phantom carrying capacity is a Faustian bargain that mortgages the future of Homo colossus as the price of an exuberant present, that mortgage was not yet being foreclosed in the Great Depression. Even so, much of the suffering that befell so much of mankind in the 1930s does need to be seen as the result of a carrying capacity deficit. The fact that the deficit did not stem from resource exhaustion in that instance makes it no less indicative of the kinds of grief entailed by resource depletion. Accordingly, we need to understand what did bring on a carrying capacity deficit in the 1930s.

Carrying Capacity and Liebig's Law

To attain such an understanding we need to step outside the usual economic or political frames of thought, go back two-thirds of a century before the 1929 crash, and reexamine for its profound human relevance a principle of agricultural chemistry formulated in 1863 by a German scientist, Justus von Liebig. That principle set forth with great clarity the concept of the "limiting factor" briefly mentioned in Chapter 8. Carrying capacity is, as we saw there, limited not just by food supply, but potentially by any substance or circumstance that is indispensable but inadequate. The fundamental principle is this: whatever necessity is least abundantly available (relative to per capita requirements) sets an environment's carrying capacity.

While there is no way to repeal this principle, which is known as "the law of the minimum", or Liebig's law, there is a way to make its application less restrictive. People living in an environment where carrying capacity is limited by a shortage of one essential resource can develop exchange relationships with residents of another area that happens to be blessed with a surplus of that resource but happens to lack some other resource that is plentiful where the first one was scarce.

Trade does not repeal Liebig's law. Only by knowing Liebig's law, however, can we see clearly what trade does do, in ecological terms. Trade enlarges the scope of application of the law of the minimum. The composite carrying capacity of two or more areas with different resource configurations can be greater than the sum of their separate carrying capacities. Call this the principle of scope enlargement; it can be expressed in mathematical notation as follows:

CC (A + B) > CC (A) + CC (B)

The combined environment (A + B) still has finite carrying capacity, and that carrying capacity is still set by the necessary resource available in least (composite) abundance. But if the two environments are truly joined, by trade, then scarcities that are local to A or B no longer have to be limiting.

A good many of the events of human history need to be seen as efforts to implement the principle of scope enlargement. Most such events came about as results of decisions and activities by men who never heard of Liebig or his law of the minimum. Now, however, knowing the law, and understanding also the scope-enlargement principle, we can see important processes of history in a new light. Progress in transport technology, together with advancements in the organization of commerce, often achieved only after conquest or political consolidation, have had the effect of enlarging the world's human carrying capacity by enabling more and more local populations (or their lifestyles) to be limited not by local scarcity, but by abundance at a distance.

Vulnerability to Scope Reduction

As human numbers (and appetites) grew in response to this exchange-based enlargement of composite carrying capacity, continued access to non-local resources became increasingly vital to human well-being and survival. As the ecological load increased beyond what could have been supported by the sum of the separate carrying capacities of the formerly insulated local environments, mankind's vulnerability to any disruption of trade became more and more critical. The aftermath of the crash of 1929 demonstrated that vulnerability.

Unfortunately, modern transport systems, and some aspects of modern organization, are based very heavily upon exhaustible resource exploitation. Insofar as this is true, they must eventually founder upon the rocks of resource exhaustion. But even before they might succumb to such physical disaster, the trade arrangements upon which the earth's extended carrying capacity for Homo colossus has come to depend can be torn apart by social catastrophe. It is important to recognize at last that that is what happened in 1929-32. In fact, some of it began happening during, or as a repercussion of the Great War of 1914-18.

World War I disrupted relationships between the various peoples of Europe and between Europe, the New World, and the Orient. It also resulted in reallocation of the still colonial parts of the world among the various imperial powers seeking to exploit them as ghost acreage. Not all aspects of these changes wrought by the war would have reduced the scope of application of Liebig's law, but some certainly did, for some peoples, to some extent.

In the case of defeated Germany, access to resources from outside German territory was cut off. At the same time, the staggering requirement of reparations payments to the victorious Allies aggravated the load to be borne by Germany's limited indigenous carrying capacity. Even internally, Germany suffered as inflation shattered the vital exchange relations between its diverse localities and between the occupational categories (quasi-species) into which its culturally advanced population had become differentiated. Destruction of the value of currency meant destruction of the medium of mutualism; as inter-occupational symbiosis crumbled, hardship was rampant.

The astronomical German inflation was thus no mere fluke of history. Rather, it was a preview of the larger preview to come, when other forms of financial disruption would rend the fabric of trade throughout the world. By thus compelling a reduction of the scope of application of Liebig's law back down to local resource bases, such trade dislocation would convert existing loads of human resource-consumers, previously supportable by composite carrying capacity, into overloads no longer fully supportable by fragmented carrying capacities.

In America in the 1920s, after a brief post-war depression, a period of neo-exuberance set in, leading in the later years of the decade to such an expectation of perpetual progress and prosperity that some people found they could prosper from the expectation itself. "Speculation" in the stock market became the expected way to get rich. Inhibitions against speculation were relaxed; people supposed the American prototype democracy, having enabled the Allies finally to triumph over Kaiser Germany, had made the world safe for getting rich and had established the right of everyone to try to do so.

The essential contrast between speculation and genuine investment is this: speculators buy stock not for the purpose of acquiring claims on future dividends from the business in which they acquire shares, but for the purpose of profiting from the expected escalation in their stock's resale value. When nearly all buyers are speculators, then virtually the only value of their shares is the resale value. Stock prices continue to escalate under such circumstances only as long as virtually everyone expects resale values to continue rising, and are thus willing to buy. The fact that prices may already grossly exaggerate a stock's intrinsic (dividend-paying) worth simply ceases to concern the speculator during the time when price escalation is confidently expected to continue. Breakdown of that faith, however, turns the process around. Anticipation of inexorable enrichment gives way to fear of ruin as self-induced price escalation turns into self-induced price decline. Panic, in the stock market sense, means the competitive drive to sell before falling prices fall farther - which drives prices down.

What connected the 1929 Wall Street crash to Liebig's law was the fact that so much speculative buying had been done with borrowed money. Collapse in the "value" of stocks thus led to an epidemic of bank failures, because the banks were unable to retrieve the funds they had lent to the speculators. Stock certificates taken in by the banks as security from borrowers were worth much less money after the crash than the number of dollars borrowed on them before the crash. When banks failed, depositors with accounts in those banks suddenly found themselves shorn of the purchasing power formerly signified by their bankbook entries. As depositors went broke, they ceased being able to buy goods or hire employees. Sellers of whatever they would have bought, or workers they would have employed, were therefore also suddenly bereft of revenue sources.

In a society with elaborate division of labor and a money economy, a "revenue source" is the magic key that provides access to carrying capacity. Collapse of fiscal webs thus confronted millions of people with loss of access to carrying capacity, as truly as if purchasable resources had actually ceased to exist. Nations whose citizens had increasingly become masters of one trade apiece and jacks of few others found themselves suddenly unable to rely on composite carrying capacity drawn from a nonlocal environment. What I have called the "medium of mutualism" was no longer functioning, so the scope of application of Liebig's law of the minimum was being constricted once again to local (or personal) resources.

There was not in those days any Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to back up the solvency of an individual bank when it suffered a "run" by its depositors. The failure of bank after bank in a time when banks had no institutionalized way of pooling their assets for mutual protection can thus be seen as a fiscal instance of the hazards of scope reduction. Had bankers understood that an ecological principle formulated by an agricultural chemist could apply to the world of finance, perhaps something like the FDIC would have been invented sooner.

The fiscal collapse had an even more important implication than this for our ecological understanding of the human predicament. That implication appears in the generalized Depression that followed. Consider the farm population in America. Like almost everyone else, farm families were compelled, by the repercussions of bank failures and the ramifications of general panic, to cut their consumer expenditures. Farmers also often had to allow their land, their buildings, and their equipment to deteriorate for lack of money to pay for maintenance and repairs. Many farms were encumbered by mortgages - mortgages which were foreclosed by banks that now desperately needed the payments farmers could not afford to make. (Bank failures were even more common in rural regions than in major cities.) In spite of all these difficulties, however, the farm population in America ceased declining (as it had been doing) and increased between 1929 and 1933 by more than a million. The long-term trend of movement out of farm niches and into urban niches was reversed during the Great Depression.

Niches everywhere were being constricted by the Depression. However, the urbanizing trend that had been occurring as a result of industrial growth in the cities and from elimination of farm niches by mechanization of agriculture was disrupted by this economic breakdown. At the heart of the reversal was a simple fact: the nature of farming in the 1930s was still such that, whatever else they had to give up, there was still truth in the cliché that "the farm family can always eat". Other (non-flood-producing) occupational groups that now had to fall back (like the farmers) on carrying capacities of reduced scope could find themselves in much more dire straits.

If we read it rightly, then, we can see the differential impact of the Depression upon farm versus non-farm populations as a cogent indicator of the dependence of the total population on previously achieved enlargements of the scope of application of Liebig's law. With breakdown of the mechanisms of exchange, various segments of a modern nation had to revert as best they could to living on carrying capacities again limited by locally least abundant resources, rather than extended by access to less scarce resources from elsewhere. Although scope reduction hurt everyone, rural folk had local resources to fall back upon; urban people, in contrast, had so detached themselves as to have almost ceased to recognize the indispensability of those resources. For reasons we shall examine in a moment, economic hard times hit the farms sooner than they hit the cities, but in the final scope-reducing crunch the farmers turned out to have an advantage sufficient to interrupt a clear trend of urbanization.

No Fairy Godmother

The Depression also interrupted the advance of industrialization and its attendant occupational diversification of the population. With hindsight, that interruption becomes an opportunity to bring the previous diversification into ecological focus.

An ecological perspective enables us to see pressure toward niche diversification as the natural result of the overfilling of existing niches. Among non-human organisms, this pressure leads eventually to the emergence of new species. Among humans it leads through sociocultural processes to the emergence of new occupations (quasispecies), which, as we noted in Chapter 6, had been made clear by Emile Durkheim as long ago as 1893. To bring Durkheim's analysis and the ecological perspective to bear upon the Great Depression, however, we must take into account the fact that nature is no Fairy Godmother and provides no guarantee that new niches will automatically be already available at the right time and in the right quantity to absorb immediately the surplus population from overfilled previous niches. Nor does nature guarantee pre-adaptation of the surplus individuals to whatever new niches do become available.

In nature, overfilling of old niches can result in massive death. Many organisms fall by the wayside in the march of speciation. Among human organisms the principles hold, but the process is moderated because humans are occupationally differentiated by social processes rather than by biological processes. Ostensibly, when old niches become obsolete, we can retrain ourselves for new roles. So, for Homo sapiens, overpopulation and death are avoidable results of niche saturation. The avoidance is not easy, however, and retraining for new niches can be traumatic.

An ecological perspective thus heightens the significance of a classic sociological study that clearly showed how unlikely it is, even among members of the relatively flexible and plastic human species, that re-adaptation to new niches (as old ones close up) will occur easily or automatically. Between 1908 and 1918, W I Thomas at the University of Chicago analyzed mountains of documentary data on the experience of Polish immigrants in America. The people he studied had come to the New World after absorbing the folkways of their native Poland. In America they were faced with the necessity of adapting to unfamiliar circumstances. Thomas found that old ways of behaving and thinking were not easily abandoned or changed. New ways were learned only with difficulty when they contradicted the migrants' old-country upbringing. Thomas generalized from the immigrants' situation to say something about social change in broader contexts. He concluded that an accustomed way of behaving tends to persist as long as circumstances allow. When circumstances change, making familiar and comfortable ways unworkable (or unacceptable), a degree of crisis is inevitable. Re-adaptation hurts. It is resisted.

We know now that the change that makes re-adaptation necessary need not be relocation. Any event that makes old ways unworkable and new ways mandatory can provoke the trauma of reorientation. Conflict and tension are natural accompaniments of change; they tend to continue until some new modus vivendi is worked out. The new form of adaptation will typically combine some elements of the old with some features imposed by the changed circumstances.

"Culture shock" became a familiar term for denoting the enervating disorientation and bewilderment associated with movement into unfamiliar societal contexts. Even a casual tourist can feel it when he travels abroad. Half a century after the phenomenon was studied by W I Thomas among Polish peasants resettled in America, Alvin Toffler coined and popularized another phrase that extended the concept. "Future shock" was his apt new term; forced adjustment to new ways can be as traumatic as forced adjustment to foreign ways.

People in a post-exuberant world found themselves surrounded by alien conditions. They underwent a great deal of future shock, years before they got that name for it. By mechanization of agriculture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Western world greatly reduced the number of farm workers needed to provide sustenance for themselves and for urban dwellers.

Displaced from agricultural occupations, ax-farmers naturally migrated into cities in search of alternative employment, employment for which their farming experience or upbringing had not prepared them. Industrial expansion connected with World War I took up the slack temporarily, making employable on an emergency basis many persons who would otherwise have been passed over as unprepared for a given job. The war also helped hasten the mechanization of agriculture that was creating the displaced farm-worker surplus. After the war, urbanization and the proliferation of industrial occupations could not altogether keep pace with the continuing displacement of workers from the farming sector. There continued to be more farmers than were needed, so the agricultural portion of the economy was beset with "overproduction". This depressed farm prices - several years before the Wall Street crash provided the impetus that depressed prices for everyone. The resulting loss of purchasing power by the farming population helped depress, in turn, the urban-industrial sectors of the world's economy.

Ecological difficulties were aggravated, of course, by human errors - the glibly confident indulgence in speculation in 1928 being one example. But the causal importance of some human errors was easily overestimated. Amid the economic and political events of 1929-32 it was plausible for Americans, unaware of the ecological basis for what was happening, to see all the difficulties of that difficult time as products merely of the failures of the Hoover administration. This attractive oversimplification neglected one fact that should have been obvious: many other nations, over which Mr. Hoover did not preside, were undergoing the same calamity.

For those of radical inclination, it seemed plausible (in the absence of an ecological paradigm) to attribute the dire situation to a failure of "the capitalist system". But socialists believed as ardently as capitalists in the myth of limitlessness. In spite of socialists' commitment to production for use rather than for profit, they were not then (and have not been since) any more cautious than capitalists about adopting the drawdown method. They assumed that socialist-sponsored versions of drawdown could somehow eliminate such "capitalist contradictions" as simultaneous overproduction and abject poverty. They remained just as unconcerned as the capitalists about overshoot.

Conservatives, on the other hand, who were not necessarily misanthropes, found it plausible to whistle in the dark, insisting that prosperity would automatically return if we just waited for the system to adjust itself. They were the Ostriches of their time, holders of the Type V attitude (delineated in Chapter 4). They believed nothing essential had changed from the Age of Exuberance.

Roosevelt was elected to replace Hoover, new approaches were put rapidly into practice, and a discouraged nation took heart. But full economic recovery continued to elude even the New Deal until preparation for World War II began to spur massive industrial activity - with even more than the usual disregard for long-range drawdown costs.

Economic recovery under the New Deal was not unique. Nazi Germany also overcame its depression, reducing unemployment in the first four years under Hitler from six million to one million. (People outside Germany did not automatically interpret this achievement as validation of Nazi tactics.) Under the Nazi method, millions of the unemployed could be employed as soldiers, and millions more could be compulsorily retrained and given niches as producers of military hardware. The war economy nurtured demand for consumer goods for the soldiers and for these re-employed makers of military materiel; furthermore, it provided "the correct psychological atmosphere", enabling the civilian sector to accept painful re-adaptation.

War psychology overcame natural human resistance to departure from custom. The war also used elaborate technology and drew down the world's stocks of natural resources.

In the United States, wartime economic recovery supposedly proved that New Deal "pump priming" by fiscal deficits had been the right kind of response to a stagnant economy, except that it could not be done in adequate volume until the need to re-arm rapidly for all-out war made truly massive red-ink budgets politically acceptable. But American recovery from the depression of the 1930s did not unambiguously validate the Keynesian economic theory implicit in Roosevelt's approach.

In either the German or the American portion of the Great Depression, an economic interpretation (by minds unaccustomed to an ecological perspective) enabled us to miss the point. Very simply, the ecological paradigm enables these events to be read as follows: Expansion of the military establishment, at the cost of additional resource drawdown, suddenly provided new niches (in industry and in the armed forces) capable of absorbing the overflow from the whole array of saturated civilian occupations. And the wartime social climate provided the patriotic push that made the trauma of re-adaptation to new occupational roles endurable.

The new or enlarged military-industrial niches had been previously either non-existent or under serious stigma. What was important, ecologically speaking, was the fact that previously existent and acceptable niches had been saturated; there were people to spare - in America because of technological progress and population growth; in Germany because of the debacle of World War I and its aftermath, which left the German economy, occupational structure, and national morale in a shambles. Moreover, human redundancy throughout much of the world had become manifest when, in various ways and in various places, the medium of mutualism came apart, leaving everyone to cope with carrying capacity limits set by local minimums.

In the American case, the fiscal deficits run up during World War II were merely the ledger-book picture of the change that eased the problem, not the cause of that change. Red ink didn't re-employ the unemployed. The growing national debt (expressed in money) was a fiction of accountancy, a fiction that enabled Americans to believe that wartime drawdown of the once-New World's resource reservoir only constituted "borrowing from ourselves", rather than stealing from the future. The reality of diachronic competition remained unacknowledged. Nevertheless, resources used up in World War II were made unavailable for use by posterity.

Circular versus Linear Ecosystems

Whatever the origins of human redundancy, and whatever the sequel to it, we needed to see (but were not seeing) that what had happened to us between the wars, and especially what happened to us since World War II, had not resulted merely from politics or economics in the conventional sense. The events of this period had simply accelerated a fate that began to overtake us centuries ago. The population explosion after 1945 and the explosive increase of technology during and after the war were only the most recent means of that acceleration.

Human communities once relied almost entirely on organic sources of energy - plant fuels and animal musclepower - supplemented very modestly by the equally renewable energy of moving air and flowing water. All of these energy sources were derived from ongoing solar income. As long as man's activities were based on them, this was, as church men said, "world without end". That phrase should never have been construed to mean "world without limit", for supplies can be perpetual without being infinite.

Locally, green pastures might become overgrazed, and still waters might be overused. Local environmental changes through the centuries might compel human communities to migrate. As long as resources available somewhere were sufficient to sustain the human population then in existence, the implication of Liebig's law was that carrying capacity (globally) had not yet been overshot. If man was then living within the earth's current income, it was not from wisdom, but from ignorance of the buried treasure yet to be discovered.

Then the earth's savings, and new ways to use them, began to be discovered. Mankind became committed to the fatal error of supposing that life could thenceforth be lived on a scale and at a pace commensurate with the rate at which treasure was discovered and unearthed. Drawing down stocks of exhaustible resources would not have seemed significantly different from drawing upon carrying capacity imports, at a time when nobody yet knew Liebig's law, or the principle of scope enlargement, or the distinction between real and phantom carrying capacity, or the various categories of ghost acreage.

Homo sapiens mistook the rate of withdrawal of savings deposits for a rise in income. No regard for the total size of the legacy, or for the rate at which nature might still be storing carbon away, seemed necessary. Homo sapiens set about becoming Homo colossus without wondering if the transformation would have to be quite temporary. (Later, our pre-ecological misunderstanding of what was being done to our future was epitomized by that venerable loophole in the corporate tax laws of the United States, the oil depletion allowance. This measure permitted oil "producers" to offset their taxable revenues by a generous percentage, on the pretext that their earnings reflected depletion of "their" crude oil reserves. Even though nature, not the oil companies, had put the oil into the earth, this tax write-off was rationalized as an incentive to "production". Since "production" really meant extraction, this was like running a bank with rules that called for paying interest on each withdrawal of savings, rather than on the principal left in the bank. It was, in short, a government subsidy for stealing from the future.)

The essence of the drawdown method is this: man began to spend nature's legacy as if it were income. Temporarily this made possible a dramatic increase in the quantity of energy per capita per year by which Homo colossus could do the things he wanted to do. This increase led, among other things, to reduced manpower requirements in agriculture. It also led to the development of many new occupational niches for increasingly diversified human beings. (Expansion of niches in Germany, America, and elsewhere from 1933 to 1945 was, it now appears, just a brief episode in this long-run development.) Because the new niches depended on spending the withdrawn savings, they were niches in what amounted to a "detritus ecosystem". Detritus, or an accumulation of dead organic matter, is nature's own version of ghost acreage.

Detritus ecosystems are not uncommon. When nutrients from decaying autumn leaves on land are carried by runoff from melting snows into a pond, their consumption by algae in the pond may be checked until springtime by the low winter temperatures that keep the algae from growing. When warm weather arrives, the inflow of nutrients may already be largely complete for the year. The algal population, unable to plan ahead, explodes in the halcyon days of spring in an irruption or bloom that soon exhausts the finite legacy of sustenance materials. This algal Age of Exuberance lasts only a few weeks. Long before the seasonal cycle can bring in more detritus, there is a massive die-off of these innocently incautious and exuberant organisms. Their "age of overpopulation" is very brief, and its sequel is swift and inescapable.

When the fossil fuel legacy upon which Homo colossus was going to thrive for a time became seriously depleted, the human niches based on burning that legacy would collapse, just as detritovore niches collapse when the detritus is exhausted. For humans, the social ramifications of that collapse were unpleasant to contemplate. The Great Depression was, as we have seen, a mild preview. Detritus ecosystems flourish and collapse because they lack the life-sustaining biogeochemical circularity of other kinds of ecosystems. They are nature's own version of communities that prosper briefly by the drawdown method.

The phrase "detritus ecosystem" was, of course, not widely familiar. The fact that "bloom" and "crash" cycles were common among organisms that depend on exhaustible accumulations of dead organic matter for their sustenance was not widely known. It is therefore understandable that people welcomed ways of becoming colossal, not recognizing as a kind of detritus the transformed organic remains called "fossil fuels", and not noticing that Homo colossus was in fact a detritovore, subject to the risk of crashing as a consequence of blooming.

Bloom and crash constitute a special kind of sere; certain kinds of populations in certain kinds of circumstances typically experience these two serial stages - irruption followed by die-off. Crash can be thought of as an abrupt instance of "succession with no apparent successor". As in ordinary succession, the biotic community has changed its habitat by using it, and has become (much) less viable in the changed environment. If, after the crash, the environment can recover from the resource depletion inflicted by an irrupting species, then a new increase of numbers may occur and make that species "its own successor". Hence there are cycles of irruption and die-off (among species as different as rodents, insects, algae). Our own species' uniqueness cannot be counted upon as protection. Moreover, some of the resources we use cannot recover.

When yeast cells are introduced into a wine vat, as noted in Chapter 6, they find their "New World" (the moist, sugar-laden fruit mash) abundantly endowed with the resources they need for exuberant growth. But as their population responds explosively to this magnificent circumstance, the accumulation of their own fermentation products makes life increasingly difficult - and, if we indulge in a little anthropomorphic thinking about their plight, miserable. Eventually, the microscopic inhabitants of this artificially prepared detritus ecosystem all die. To be anthropomorphic again, the coroner's reports would have to say that they died of self-inflicted pollution: the fermentation products.

Nature treated human beings as winemakers treat the yeast cells, by endowing our world (especially Europe's New World) with abundant but exhaustible resources. People promptly responded to this circumstance as the yeast cells respond to the conditions they find when put into the wine vat.

When the earth's deposits of fossil fuels and mineral resources were being laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet been prepared by evolution to take advantage of them. As soon as technology made it possible for mankind to do so, people eagerly (and without foreseeing the ultimate consequences) shifted to a high-energy way of life. Man became, in effect, a detritovore, Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we must expect crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel. What form our crash may take remains to be considered in the concluding section.

One thing that kept us from seeing all this, and enabled us to rush exuberantly into niches that had to be temporary, was our ability to give ideological legitimation to occupations that made no sense ecologically. When General Eisenhower, as retiring president, warned the American people to beware of unwarranted influence wielded by the military-industrial complex , it was presumably political and economic influence that he had in mind. But the military-industrial complex was a vast conglomeration of occupational niches. As such, it wielded an altogether different (and even more insidious) kind of influence. The military-industrial complex helped perpetuate the illusion that we still had a carrying capacity surplus; it made it profitable for the living generation to extract and use up natural resources that might otherwise have been left for posterity. It absorbed for a while most of the excess labor force displaced by technological progress from older occupational niches that had been less dependent on drawing down reservoirs of exhaustible resources. It thus helped us believe that the Age of Exuberance could go on.

Nor was General Eisenhower alone in missing the ecological significance and over-emphasizing the political elements in the trends of his time. His young, articulate, and sophisticated Bostonian successor launched a new administration with an inaugural address whose inspirational quality lay partly in its eloquent resolution of American ambivalence. If we wanted to maintain full employment, we dreaded achieving it by means of an arms race. Subtly, and with the gloss of high idealism, John F Kennedy reassured the nationwide television audience on that crisp, brilliant January day in 1961 that the temporary occupational niches of the military-industrial complex could be long-lasting and could be made more honorable than horrible.

There was to be a "new Alliance for Progress", and we were to hope for emancipation from the "uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war". But the conflict-bred niches would last, for "the trumpet summons us again ... to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out ... against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself". Under both parties, the military-industrial complex enabled us to be preoccupied with matters that helped us ignore resource limits. It helped thereby to obscure the fact that population was expanding to fill niches that could not be permanent because they were founded upon drawing down prehistoric savings, exhaustible fossil energy stocks.

The human family, even if it were soon to stop growing, had committed itself to living beyond its means. Homo sapiens, as we saw in Chapter 9, was capable of transforming himself into new "quasi-species". By the Industrial Revolution humans had turned themselves into "detritovores", dependent on ravenous consumption of long-since accumulated organic remains, especially petroleum.

If we were to understand what was now happening to us and to our world, we had to learn to see recent history as a crescendo of human prodigality. When American birth rates declined as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, this did not mean we were escaping the predicament of the algae any more than the ringing words of President Kennedy's inaugural address had really meant that we could eat our cake and still have it. Rather, something had happened that was fundamental, and that could not be undone by brilliant rhetoric: there had been a marked acceleration in our previously begun shift from a self-perpetuating way of life that relied on the circularity of natural biogeochemical processes, to a way of life that was ultimately self-terminating because it relied on linear chemical transformations. They were linear (and one way) because man was using (with the aid of his prosthetic equipment) so many non-crop substances. Man was no longer engaged in a balanced system of symbiotic relations with other species. When man degraded the habitat, it tended to stay degraded; it was not being rehabilitated by other organisms with different biochemical needs.

Perils of Prodigality: The Coming Crash

Man does not live on detritus alone. Misled by our prodigal expenditures of savings, we allowed the human family to multiply so much that by the 1970s mankind had taken over for human use about one eighth of the annual total net production of organic matter by contemporary photosynthesis in all the vegetation on all the earth's land. That much was being used by man and his domestic animals. It would require taking over more than the other seven-eighths to provide from organic sources the vast quantities of energy we were deriving from fossil fuels to run our mechanized civilization, even if economic growth and human increase were halted by the year 2000. Thus, as we began to see in Chapter 3, we were already well beyond the size that would permit us to re-adapt (without severe depopulation) to a sustained yield way of life when our access to savings gave out. On the other hand, just three more doublings of population (scarcely more than Britain had already experienced in the short time since Malthus) would mean that all the net photosynthetic production on all the continents and all the islands on earth would have to be used for supporting the human community. Then our descendants would be condemned to living at an abjectly "underdeveloped" level, if no fossil acreage remained available to sustain modern industry.

Such total exploitation of an ecosystem by one dominant species has seldom happened, except among species which bloom and crash. Detritovores provide clear examples, but there are others, and we shall take a close look at some of them in the final chapter. For Homo sapiens, it was unlikely that we could even divert much more than the already unprecedented fraction of the total photosynthesis to our uses.

It was thus becoming apparent that nature must, in the not far distant future, institute bankruptcy proceedings against industrial civilization, and perhaps against the standing crop of human flesh, just as nature had done many times to other detritus-consuming species following their exuberant expansion in response to the savings deposits their ecosystems had accumulated before they got the opportunity to begin the drawdown.

It was not widely recognized, of course, but the imminence of that kind of culmination really was why the United Nations had to convene its 1972 Conference on the Human Environment. The conference in Stockholm was meant to begin the process of preventing our only earth from being rendered less and less usable by humans. In short, its purpose was to arrest global succession. Persons who had struggled valiantly to bring about this conference had been engaged (in an important sense) in a global counterpart of the efforts of Dr Goodwin in Williamsburg. But whereas he sought to undo succession in order to preserve history, they sought to preserve a world ecosystem in which Homo sapiens might remain the dominant species - and might remain human.

Until the extent of the transformation of Homo sapiens into Homo colossus was seen and the full ecological ramifications of that transformation were more nearly understood, however, it would hardly be recognized that the kind of world ecosystem the United Nations was seeking to perpetuate was already being superseded - by an ecosystem that, by its very nature, compelled the dominant species to go on sawing off the limb on which it was sitting. Having become a species of superdetritovores, mankind was destined not merely for succession, but for crash.

Unfortunately but inevitably, the Stockholm deliberations were confused by the fact that the luckier nations which happened to achieve industrial prodigality before the earth's savings became depleted had already infected the other nations with an insatiable desire to emulate that prodigality. The infection preceded recognition of the depletion. The result of this sad historical sequence was the pathetic quarrel over whether the luxury we cannot afford is economic growth or environmental preservation. Neither was a luxury; worse, neither was possible on a global scale.

Excess numbers and ravenous technology had already brought Homo colossus to an ecological impasse. The laudable ability of delegations from 114 diverse nations to hammer out compromise resolutions favoring both environmental protection and economic development for all nations did not extricate us from our predicament. Deft avoidance of political deadlock once again preserved the illusion that cake could be both eaten and saved. But illusion preserved was still illusion.

Man needed to realize how commonly populations of other species have undergone the experience of resource bankruptcy. But we humans have been experiencing a double irruption, confronting us with an intensified version of the plight of such species. As a biological type, Homo sapiens has been irrupting for 10,000 years, and especially the last 400. In addition, our detritus-consuming tools have been irrupting for the last 200 years. It is conceivable that the inevitable die-off necessitated by overshoot could apply more to Homo colossus than to Homo sapiens.

That is, resource demand might be brought back within the limits of permanent carrying capacity by shrinking ourselves to less colossal stature - by giving up a lot of our prosthetic apparatus and the high style of living it has made possible. This might seem, in principle, an alternative to the more literal form of die-off, an abrupt increase in human mortality. In practice, it runs afoul of several implications of W I Thomas's finding about resistance to change. Accustomed ways of behaving and thinking tend to persist; this is probably as true of the detritovorous habits of Homo colossus as it was true of earlier human folkways. Outbreaks of violence among American motorists waiting in long queues to buy gasoline, sputtering in stubborn non-recognition of the onset of the twilight of the petroleum era, suggest that the people of industrial societies who have learned to live in colossal fashion will not easily relinquish their seven-league boots, their heated homes, and their habit of living high on the food chain. As we said, re-adaptation hurts. It will be resisted.

Moreover, habits of thought persist. As we shall see in Chapter 11, people continue to advocate further technological breakthroughs as the supposedly sure cure for carrying capacity deficits. The very idea that technology caused overshoot, and that it made us too colossal to endure, remains alien to too many minds for "de-colossalization" to be a really feasible alternative to literal die-off. There is a persistent drive to apply remedies that aggravate the problem.

If any substantial fraction of the more colossal segments of humanity did conscientiously give up part of their resource-devouring extensions out of humane concern for their less colossal brethren, there is no guarantee that this would avert die-off. It might only postpone it, permitting human numbers to continue increasing a bit longer, or less colossal peoples to become a bit more colossal, before we crash all the more resoundingly.

All this tends to be disregarded by advocates of a "return to the simple life" as a gentle way out of the human predicament. Blessed are the less prosthetic, for they shall inherit the ravaged earth. Probably so, in the long run. But some view the dark cloud of fuel depletion and purport to see a silver lining already: individuals forced to abandon much of their modern technology will then get by on smaller per capita shares of the phantom carrying capacity upon which prosthetic man has become so dependent. However, insofar as the high agricultural yields upon which our irrupted population's life depends can be attained only by means of energy subsidies - by lavish application of synthetic fertilizers, and by large-scale use of petroleum-powered machinery - the dwindling fossil acreage will probably lower the output of visible acreage.

As we asked before, what happens when it becomes necessary again to pull the plow with a team of horses instead of a tractor, and a substantial fraction of the crop acreage that now feeds humans has to be allocated again to growing feed for draft animals (or biomass to produce tractor fuel when the Carboniferous legacy is no longer cheaply available)? So much for that silver lining.

It will spare us no grief to deny that Homo sapiens has been irrupting. It will in no way ease the impact to deny that crash must follow. We must seek our rays of hope in another way altogether (as we shall do in Chapter 15).

Not Cleared for Takeoff

The "developed" nations have been widely regarded as previews of the future condition of the "underdeveloped" countries. It would have been more accurate to reverse the picture, as perhaps the Stockholm Conference began to do for its most perceptive participants and observers.

It was one thing to be an underdeveloped nation in the eighteenth century, when the world had no highly developed nations. It is quite another thing today. When today's developed nations were not yet industrialized and were just approaching their takeoff point, the World had only recently entered an exuberant phase which made takeoff possible. European technology was just starting to harness (for a few brilliant centuries) the energy stored in the earth during the past several hundred million years, and the sparsely populated New World had only recently become available for exuberant settlement and exploitation. These conditions of exuberance no longer prevail. The underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the twentieth century cannot realistically expect to follow in the footsteps of the undeveloped nations of eighteenth-century Europe. Most of today's underdeveloped nations are destined never to become developed. Egalitarian traditions will be forced to adjust to permanent inequality.

Hard as it might be for the people and leaders of underdeveloped countries to face the fact, they are not alone in finding it repugnant. The people and leaders of the affluent societies have also resisted seeing it. Recognition that most of the world's poor would necessarily stay poor would destroy the comforting conviction of the world's privileged that their good fortune ought to inspire the world's poor to emulate them, not resent them.

Nature's limiting factors would not clear most underdeveloped countries for takeoff. But now that people are so numerous, it would be even worse if many did somehow take off. Most men of good will have been unable so far to accept this implication of the ecological facts. Some will no doubt righteously denounce this book for analyzing the situation in this unpalatable way, as if no fact could hurt us if we refused to acknowledge its truth. But not only are there not enough of the substances a developed human community must take from its environment in the process of living to permit a world of four billion people to be all developed; the capacity of the world's oceans, continents, and atmosphere to absorb the substances Homo colossus must put somewhere in the process of living is limited. Even as a waste disposal site, the world is finite.

Right into the 1970s we were misled by so bland a word as "pollution" for this part of our predicament. We were already suffering the plight of the yeast cells in the wine vat. Accumulation of the noxious and toxic extrametabolites of high-energy industrial civilization had become a world problem, but no government could admit that it would turn into a world disaster if the benefits of modern technology were bestowed as abundantly upon everyone in the underdeveloped countries as they already had been upon the average inhabitant of the overdeveloped ones. Leaders everywhere had to pretend full development of the whole world was their ultimate aim and was still on the agenda. By such pretensions mankind remained locked into stealing from the future.

Learning to Read the News

Viewing contemporary events from a pre-ecological paradigm, we missed their significance. From an ecological paradigm we can see that fewer members of the species Homo colossus than of the species Homo sapiens can be supported by a finite world. The more colossal we become, the greater the difference. What we called "pollution", and regarded at first as either a mere nuisance or an indication of the insensitivity of industrial people to esthetic values, can now be recognized as a signal from the ecosystem. If we had learned to call it "habitat damage", we might have read it as a sign of the danger inherent in becoming colossal. Even if the world were not already overloaded by four billion members of the species Homo sapiens, it does not have room for that many consumers of resources and exuders of extrametabolites on the scale of modern Homo colossus. In short, on a planet no larger than ours, four billion human beings simply cannot all turn into prosthetic giants.

As we move deeper into the post-exuberant age, one of the keen insights of a passionately concerned and unusually popular sociologist, C Wright Mills, will become increasingly important to us all. It was an insight by which he tried to help his contemporaries read the news of their times perceptively. We will need to be at least as perceptive to avoid misconstruing events that will happen in the years to come.

Although the paradigm from which Mills wrote was pre-ecological, in one of his most earnest books he transcended archaic thoughtways enough to note that only sometimes and in some places do men make history; in other times and places, the minutiae of everyday life can add up to mere "fate". Mills gave us an unusually clear definition of this important word. Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative, can become enormously consequential. Fate, he explained, is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.

In a world that will not accommodate four billion of us if we all become colossal, it is both futile and dangerous to indulge in resentment, as we shall be sorely tempted to do, blaming some person or group whom we suppose must have intended whatever is happening to happen. If we find ourselves beset with circumstances we wish were vastly different, we need to keep in mind that to a very large extent they have come about because of things that were hopefully and innocently done in the past by almost everyone in general, and not just by anyone in particular. If we single out supposed perpetrators of our predicament, resort to anger, and attempt to retaliate, the unforeseen outcomes of our indignant acts will compound fate.

In precisely Mills's sense, the conversion of a marvelous carrying capacity surplus into a competition-aggravating and crash-inflicting deficit was a matter of fate. No compact group of leaders ever decided knowingly to take incautious advantage of enlargement of the scope of applicability of Liebig's law, or subsequently to reduce that scope and leave a swollen load inadequately supported. No one decided deliberately to terminate the Age of Exuberance. No group of leaders conspired knowingly to turn us into detritovores. Using the ecological paradigm to think about human history, we can see instead that the end of exuberance was the summary result of all our separate and innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a tractor, to avoid illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a farm to a city, to live in a heated home, to buy a family automobile and not depend on public transit, to specialize, exchange, and thereby prosper.

Notes

1. See the explanations offered by various analysts cited in Patterson 1965, pp. 227-245.

2. For the original formulation of this principle, see Liebig 1863, p.207. Also see the sharpened statement of it on p. 5 in the "Editor's Preface" to that volume. For indications that Liebig had the principle in mind even before he grasped its generality and fundamental significance, see his earlier work, Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (London: Taylor & Walton, 1842), pp. 41, 43, 85, 127, 129, 130, 132, 139, 141-142, 159, 178. On the development of Liebig's thinking about this and other ecological principles, see Justus von Liebig, "An Autobiographical Sketch", trans. J. Campbell Brown Chemical News 63 (June 5 and 12, 1891): 265-267, 276-278; W. A. Shenstone, Justus von Liebig: His Life and Work (New York: Macmillan, 1895); and Forest Ray Moulton, ea., Liebig and After Liebig: A Century of Progress in Agricultural Chemistry (Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1942).

3. Cf. Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). Too often social limits are unwisely cited as if to afford some basis for disregarding environmental finiteness; social limits actually make finiteness all the more salient. They do not make carrying capacity less relevant to human affairs. The cliche which asserts "There are no real shortages, only maldistribution" inverts the significance of social limits. In comparison with biogeochemical limits, social limits to growth include all the ways in which human societies are prone to fall short of developing and maintaining the optimum organization that would allow Liebig's law to apply only on a thoroughly global scale, with carrying capacity thus never limited by local shortages. Social limits, in other words, tend to aggravate, not alleviate, the problems posed by biogcochemical limits.

4. See William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), pp. 61-62 In thinking about the human implications of the law of the minimum and the social impediments to implementing the principle of scope enlargement, it is well to remember that, when the collapse occurred in Germany, one ramification was the opportunity it afforded for rise of the Nazi dictatorship, with grave consequences for many other nations.

5. See Galbraith 1955, especially the first five chapters.

6. See Ch. 4, "Farmers in the Depression", in Chandler 1970.

7. See Thomas and Znaniecki 1918-1920 passim.

8. Cf. Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 282-284.

9. Toffler 1970, pp. 4-5.

10. Cf. Ehrenfeld 1978 (listed among references for Ch. 1), pp. 249-254. For recent examples of socialist persistence in the myth of limitlessness, see Stanley Aronowitz, Food, Shelter and the American Dream (New York: Seabury Press, 1974); Hugh Stretton, Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Also see Irving Louis Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of International Stratification, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. xvi, where "overdevelopment" is defined without any ecological reference as "an excess ratio of industrial capacity to social utility", i.e., to the ability of people with existing organization, skill levels, etc., to benefit from industrial output. In contrast, overdevelopment signifies to ecologists - e.g., Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1972 (listed among references for Ch. 12), pp. 418-420 - a level of technological development that disregards physical and biological limitations and requires "far too large a slice of the world's resources to maintain our way of life".

11. Michael Tanzer, The Sick Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

12. See, for example, Odum and de la Cruz 1963; Darnell 1967.

13. This makes it unwise to have defined these substances as "resources".

14. For an interesting discussion of the political significance of Eisenhower's warning, see Fred Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Macmillan, 1962).

15. Quoted and discussed in Morison 1965 (listed among references for Ch. 5),p. 1110.

16. Odum 1971 (listed among references for Ch. 6), p. 55.

17. Mills 1958, pp. 10-14.