21June2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Economy; Energy; Global Food; Rich and Poor; Wisdom.
Corn-derived ethanol isn’t dead yet, but it sure smells funny. After decades of intensive scientific research, public financing and commercial promotion, corn as a fuel source has become the most tested of the potential energy alternatives, and it has failed by every measure—economic, environmental, social and moral. Yet, through presidential mandates, billion-dollar subsidies, tax breaks, tariffs, and Department of Energy funding, the United States government has committed itself to greatly expanding its production in the coming years. That is, during this most crucial time—when we’ve finally comprehended the finitude of oil, the absorption capacities of our atmosphere and the demands of an ever growing population, when wisdom is called for in exploring energy alternatives—our tax dollars are enriching the usual big business suspects, not ensuring the security of our nation’s future.
Ethanol cannot even address the two problems it was allegedly intended to alleviate: oil dependency and carbon dioxide emissions. To produce energy requires investment—into research, exploration, exploitation, development, refinement and transportation. At the end of this process, energy output needs to significantly exceed energy input. Today, for example, even as oil becomes more difficult and costly to produce, it still fetches a ten-fold return on energy investment. With corn-derived ethanol, the number is a paltry 1.3—at best. That is, for every calorie of energy invested into it, ethanol yields, at most, 1.3 useable calories. Some analysts, such as David Pimentel at Cornell University, argue that when all the factors are considered, corn-derived ethanol actually comes out in the red. All the tractors and combines, distilleries, pesticides, fertilizers, and transport may actually consume more energy than ethanol returns. Similarly, when all the factors are accounted for in the Green House Gas equation, ethanol production and distribution releases as much or more carbon dioxide than does oil, especially as forests—which are big absorbers of carbon dioxide—are razed for the expanding crops.
This year, American farmers will plant some nine million of our most fertile acres with corn, not for food, but for fuel. This will produce about six billion gallons of ethanol, which will replace about four billion gallons of gasoline—since, gallon for gallon, ethanol delivers only 67% of oil’s power. At first blush, that seems significant—even more so if we visualize the requisite 1,500,000 fuel tank trucks queued up head to tail, three abreast, stretching from New York City to Los Angeles. Yet this colossal fleet would slake only slightly more than 1% of America’s annual 317 billion gallon thirst. Even were we to attempt the preposterous and devote the country’s entire corn crop (forty percent of all American farmland harvested this year), it would offset but a measly 10% of the country’s annual oil consumption.
Already, we’ve witnessed the social and environmental repercussions of subsidizing just the 1% offset: Corn prices rose 70% last year, sparking protests among the Mexican poor who could not afford the most basic staple of their meager diets—the corn tortilla. Indeed, at least 40 countries experienced riots and demonstrations protesting high fuel and food costs in 2007 and 2008. Fueling our trips to the mall now competes directly with feeding people. For perspective: carpooling, eliminating one car trip a week, or maintaining proper tire pressure would each save more fuel than all nine million of our precious arable acres can provide.
The ripple effect continues. To cash in on the subsidized corn, many American acres usually devoted to soybeans went to growing corn instead. Soy prices therefore shot up, as did beef prices (since soy is a common cattle feed). This, in turn, encouraged Brazilian farmers and ranchers to clear more Amazon rain forests to grow these foods.
And, like all high-yield hybrids, corn requires enormous quantities of water, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides. Water scarcity and drawdown from the Ogallala aquifer in many of the corn-growing states is an accelerating problem, and oil and natural gas are crucial to the synthesis and application of fertilizers and various biocides, adding to green house gas emissions. Moreover, the nitrogen-based fertilizers are the principle culprits for the growing hypoxic Dead Zones menacing our nation’s coastal waters. Slightly more subtle, mono-cropping (growing one variety on vast tracts of land) is responsible for decreasing biodiversity, and increasing soil erosion and vulnerability to pest epidemics, such as the 1970 southern corn leaf blight and the black stem rust presently spreading across East Africa.
Of course, these ‘side effects” are not unique to ethanol production, but the realities of feeding a growing American and world population will by themselves strain our resources in the coming decades; clearing land for a dual role will only exacerbate all these already accelerating problems and threaten more natural ecosystems, as well.
For many of the same reasons, Brazilian sugar cane and Malaysian palm oil are proving, ultimately, to be highly questionable energy strategies. The jury is still out on numerous other biofuels, such as algae and several of the perennial rhizomatous grasses. As for hydrogen fusion, tar sands, shale oil and methane hydrates, all have their technological difficulties and environmental shortcomings. The various forms of geothermal and solar power (direct sun, wind and wave) will likely prove themselves as our long-term standards. Even so, across the political spectrum, (among those not directly receiving monies for corn production, that is) it has been unanimously agreed that devoting any more time, land and energy to this hopelessly inferior product is gravely unwise.
13May2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Overshoot; Sustainability.
“The growing awareness of the impending disaster cannot, in itself, halt the process.” A quote from E.J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth, p. 97. Even should a farmer who is barely scratching a living from the soil understand that overpopulation and poor farming practices are major contributing factors to our ecological suicide, it will likely not be in his best personal interest to have fewer children or stop tilling the soil. Even if he knows that he is one more drop in the bucket of our collective demise, even if he fully understands the global dimension, he cannot do anything different, except as a completely altruistic gesture. He may need children to insure his survival in later years. He may be too poor to afford fuel to cook his food or heat his home, and therefore he must burn the stubble from the fields and the dung from his animals, the very matter that should feed his soil.
According to a number of analysts, including Dr. Pimentel at Cornell University, humans are destroying farmland at the rate of 10,000,000 hectares a year. That’s 25,400,000 acres a year. That’s an area of fertile land the size of the whole of the United States before the end of the century.
Sir Albert Howard, called the founder of the organic farming movement, noted in his 1947 book, The Soil and Health, that what one takes out of the soil, one must make sure gets put back in. However, as Professor Rattan Lal, director at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Ohio State University, says, “Miserable, poor, hungry and desperate, they pass their misery to the land.” In these conditions, one does not have the energy or the means to take care of the land. The soils of Africa, particularly, are fast losing their life-sustaining nutrients. And then the land, in a “positive” feedback loop, passes on its impoverishment back to the farmer.
Some seventy percent of the Third World citizens are farmers. And some 850 million people, according to the U.N., go to bed hungry each day. Two to three billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. They are stunted physically and mentally. They suffer from eye diseases, blindness, and die early from a host of diseases—cancer, malaria, measles, etc. 85 million people suffer acute hunger, and 9 million of these die each year of starvation or disease that their malnourished bodies cannot fight.
Still, even as we degrade the Earth’s soil, there is still plenty of food grown on the planet to feed everyone well. Frances Lappe and several co-authors showed convincingly in World Hunger: Twelve Myths that hunger is greatly a political and economic issue. Europe, the United States and Japan import foods from impoverished nations, food that arguably should stay home and feed the malnourished people there. This has been the story during the abundant decades, the last half of the 20th century when oil, water, grains, fertilizers, pesticides were all relatively cheap. Now, as we reach “peak” in all these, when everything is going to become more expensive, can we expect the First World to become suddenly altruistic by abandoning biofuels, abandoning fishing off the coasts of the Third World countries, forgiving national debts, foregoing subsidizing their farmers in the global market, foregoing the eating of meat grown on tropical lands cleared from forests and the transporting of exotic foods, and blithely paying—that is, without military interventions—top dollar for oil. Can we expect the world’s wealthiest billion people to cut back on consumption, to eat less meat, to eat locally grown foods. Probably not, even though these wealthiest are also the best educated, the most informed about our ecological suicide.
31March2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Dieback; Economy; Sustainability; Uncategorized; Wisdom.
Natural Capitalism, written in 1999 by Paul Hawken and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, stands as one of the great contributions to the ecological discussion, a masterful synthesis of the specific global problems and of their solutions. With invariable optimism they present economic solutions to ecologic problems, showing us through anecdote that it is being applied somewhere on the Earth and through statistic that we can all benefit. And the answers lie not only in their book, of course. Our minds have become inundated with answers as thoroughly as are bodies are bathed in electromagnetic waves. An impressive, seemingly infinite, array of ecological solutions are scattered throughout our information media, from the great academic journals to the magazines, newspapers, books, radio, television and internet. And what they repeatedly demonstrate is that we already possess the required technology and understand the necessary governmental policies that can provide a sustainable and comfortable existence for all humanity. We may already know all that we need to halt the further degradation of our oceans, forests, atmosphere, land and wildlife. Yet, because of the complex of socioeconomics, politics and biology, we will likely not implement any solution in time to avert our Ecological Suicide. Intelligent as we are, we will allow our animalian instincts to commit mass suicide as surely as any organism with plenty of food and few predators.
In Natural Capitalism, the authors suggest one powerful way government can force business into sustainable behavior: tax behaviors deemed unsustainable and subsidize those considered sustainable. In The Costs of Economic Growth the English economist E.J. Mishan independently agrees that should government undertake such action it could theoretically eliminate all environmental problems. But he finds that the social and cultural complexities are beyond the abilities of our institutions to implement such wise tax laws. Keeping in mind that within our so-called democratic countries, officials must face election every few years, (in Chapter 14: Self-Sustaining Economic Predicaments) Mishan lays out four powerful obstacles to government intervention:
1. The costs of correcting our behaviors are usually perceived as being greater than the benefits.
2. The environmental consequences of our behaviors are imperfectly known and understood. Much is still hidden and the therefore the range of destruction will surely be greater than we now project. So, whatever we do enact will be the very minimum necessary and likely not be enough.
3. That it takes many years (usually decades) for the cumulative effects on the biosphere to be realized, discourages governments from imposing immediate restrictions, taxes, etc.
4. That costs are immediate, but benefits are years (decades) later further discourages government action.
5. As ecological consequences are increasingly global in scale, any one government acting alone will not only have diminished to negligible effect, but it will put them at an economic disadvantage within the sphere of international competition. This leads to the ever more complicated necessity of bringing all the major nations, each with their own needs, problems and social neuroses to work together, but now without the coercive power that each sovereignty, by definition, commands. Whereas the United States can force state compliance, the United Nations enjoys no such power.
The last point (the issue of unfair disadvantage), by the way, is the same argument made by Robert Reich in Supercapitalism with respect not to countries but to companies and the obstacles to corporate responsibility. One cannot expect Walmart, for instance, to provide health care and other labor benefits for its workers unless all businesses do the same. Otherwise, it puts Walmart at a competitive disadvantage, and so will likely lead to its demise (and so the demise of its workers).
Even these objections to an optimistic appraisal of humanity’s fortunes are timid, for they assume an ideal sense of laissez faire economics and our democratic institutions working side-by-side, free of influence. However, even the most idealistic American citizen over the age of ten now accepts certain inadequacies of government, namely, that business has obtained undue power in influencing “democratic” government through the power of lobbyist and campaign finance, to mention the two most obvious. That leaders tend to be drawn from a rather small group of elite goes into a whole other level of debate. Other complications to the ideal include the fact that (1) Not everyone agrees that the environment is in enough peril to sanction sacrifice of economic performance. (2) There is great effort at the ground level among political functionaries and business managers to subvert the imposed laws. Particularly notorious are China and India. However, American and European businesses traffic in illegal fish, arms and shipping on a truly colossal scale. (3) The difficulties in many countries are so extreme as to make environmental concerns existentially meaningless. If you’re being bombed right now, of what consequence are the incremental effects of global warming?
Maintaining agreement on action and individual compliance on tribal scales was difficult enough. Now, with six-and-half billion people covering the earth we are finding the collective action necessary to avert our demise nearly impossible. We have been imminently successful at the animalian—eliminating competition, procuring food, reproducing. Indeed, Adam Smith’s capitalism was a catalyst to our success. With its prescription of individual selfish interest creating a web of collective good, it gelled perfectly well with our reading of the rules of the jungle. But we are finding that the universe is far more nuanced than the lessons we have taken from Adam Smith and Charles Darwin (although they themselves would have been surprised at how we interpreted their ideas). We have found that to live harmoniously (sustainably, if you prefer) with the Earth requires higher order behavior—selflessness, honesty, compassion, humility, and these, we are discovering, are far more difficult to execute than childishly selfish ones. It is these more mature behaviors that will be necessary to hold back our selfish, childish, animal instincts. On a large scale, humanity will have to mature beyond our childish, or perhaps adolescent, level. So far there is little room for optimism.
20March2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Economy; Overshoot; Wisdom.
The March 2, 2008 New York Times Op-Ed page was devoted to eight former presidential candidates from the two principle American parties, allowing each of them highly valued media space to describe an issue important to them that was not receiving its fair attention in the American dialogue. From left-leaning Kucinich, through the Democratic party spokespeople — Richardson, Biden, Dodd – to the representatives of the right – Thompson, Tancredo, Hunter and Brownback, all men, by the way, they thoughtfully wrote on any number of important issues that plague the American landscape—war in Afghanistan, the mortgage crisis and foreclosures, immigration policies, the crumbling infrastructure, the hallowing out of the country’s industrial base, and the rising divorce rate. Not one peep about the global environment, however. Not one word about global warming, extinction rates, water scarcity in America’s Southeast and Southwest, dead zones, three billion malnourished humans, the ethanol hoax…
And The Economist (March 15-21, 2008) notes in “The revolution that wasn’t” that despite European environmental taxes and discussions in England of raising carbon cuts from 60% to 80% by 2050, the actual benefits are nebulous and the governmental efforts likely to decline in the face of economic realities. Rising oil prices and inflation in England are having a chilling effect on environmental consciousness, at least at the level of power.
We cannot expect much more from our political leaders. They are in the awkward position of weighing the public good and the long-term interests of society with their own short-term interests. To keep their jobs, they face re-election every few years before a fickle electorate, and, if they didn’t know it before, all certainly understand now that of all the thousands of issues which any complex society must address, the most important is the economy. “It’s the Economy Stupid” still reverberates through the cultural mindspace. And a thriving economy of three hundred million within a larger global economy of billions, juiced up on fossil fuels and fed through the machinery of industrial agriculture is completely anathema to environmental sustainability.
Technological optimists and “can do” spirit aside, all environmental indicators have increasingly worsened when measured against time. There is little to yet suggest that we as a global community are prepared to scale down our lifestyles to the degree sufficient to even slow down the environmental degradation. Perhaps we are constitutionally incapable of transcending our animalian short-sightedness, or at least quickly enough to prevent our Ecological suicide. Since obviously we cannot voluntarily stop our destructive behaviors, the questions then become how long can life, the soil, water, oil, forests, oceans and air hold out, and with what forces will they compel our compliance?
25February2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Economy; Sustainability.
Creating the kind of consensus necessary to effect a radical change in our institutions requires a fundamental shift in our collective consciousness. Hard economic times could, of course, have such an effect, if the Great Depression of the 1930s depression be any guide. During that difficult decade, tens of millions of Americans became openly supportive of socialist policies and alternative societal models. However, the argument has also been waged for millennia that one’s individual (as opposed to collective) action can be the key to a society’s transformation. This is the mystic’s path. “You must be the change you want to see in the world,” Mohandas Gandhi said. And Sartre in Existentialism and Human Emotions suggests that each person behave as she or he desires all people behave.
Instead of expecting our political and business leaders to blithely accept a redistribution of wealth, we can perform the end around. If Americans can accept, no aim for a lower standard of living, by letting go of the dream of ever-rising material wealth, of being the child with his face pressed to the candy store window, the addict begging for more even though more is killing him, we could regain our power. If we’re not jonesing for the goods, the peddlers lose their power over us. And by the way, in these same decades in which Americans have been working harder and consuming more, Americans have reported becoming increasingly unhappy, according to Richard Layard in his book Happiness.
The idea is simple enough: work less, produce less, consume less. Spend more time with family, in leisure, growing vegetables in your garden, puttering around the house, attending civic and social events, volunteering, exercising, meditating, praying, doing all the non-consumer things that bring happiness and ease and physical and mental health to a person’s life. With less ambition and less drive to consume, one’s daily existence becomes less stressful and life actually more secure. The house isn’t as big or perfect, the car isn’t as shiny, but more time allows for wiser consumer decisions (so that the drop in one’s material standard of living isn’t proportional to the drop in income). And, besides, we know, in our quieter moments, that inner happiness makes these priorities fade away like the illusion that they are.
The reverberations across the social landscape could be immense. Industry will sell their goods elsewhere, of course, continuing the post-modern form of imperialism, where companies become increasingly transnational, owing allegiance to no nation, to no one, having only to obey the laws their wealth cannot elude. This may, as it turns out, be good for equality across the globe, but it won’t be good for the environment and our continuing Ecological Suicide. It’ll promote equal opportunity suicide.
And some suggest that at home a downside of recession–whether voluntary or historically imposed– is that industry will invest less on Green research and development and that government and business will redirect their focus onto the economy at the expense of the environment. Perhaps. However, as every environmental indicator worsens, anyway, technology-driven solutions have thus far proven themselves insufficient. Economic growth and increased (Green) consumption hardly seem to be the way to improve the environment. Again, these objections sound more like the addict’s rationale for staying the course when their drug is threatened.
As for the recession, ours can become individual, voluntary and liberating.
15February2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Economy; Sustainability.
Robert Reich (1,2) in his Feb. 13, 2008 New York Times op-ed piece, Totally Spent, says “We’re sliding into a recession, or worse…” Americans have been spending beyond their means for decades by having more women join the workforce; by working longer hours; and by borrowing on the value of their homes through home equity loans. The American consumer is running out of ways to “keep the spending binge going.” He suggests that we either have to accept a lower standard of living, or “reverse the trends of widening inequality and more concentrated wealth.”
Both are radical solutions, given the power of the American beliefs in consumption as the way to happiness and in the inevitability of progress and economic growth. The etymology of the word radical suggests going to the root. The roots of our worldviews and of our behaviors need to change simultaneously. Since the levers of power are firmly in the hands of concentrated wealth, wresting any of that wealth would prove to be as difficult as it has been since the dawn of civilization.
In this country, however, the constitution is still enough intact to allow such a change. As Robert Reich says in his book Supercapitalism: “ government could change the rules. In theory, it could enact laws to make it easier for all employees to unionize, require all large companies to provide … …health insurance and pensions, enact zoning regulations to protect Main Street retailers from the predations of big-box retailer, and raise the minimum wage high enough to give all working people a true “living” wage.”
We could, if we saw fit, but we have been properly trained to hold sacred the separation of finance and state. So removed has economics become from the concept of freedom that, as Benjamin Barber notes in his book Jihad vs. McWorld, we now view ourselves as consumers, not as citizens. In other words, we have come to voice our opinion by what we buy, not through the voting booth.
15January2008
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Energy; Overshoot; Technology.
Since civilization began some 9,000 years ago, humanity’s impact on the environment has been accelerating by an auto-catalytic process of the mutually-reinforcing variables Surplus, Innovation and Population. One can think of Surplus as wealth, or the material and energy flows through our lives. Innovation, although encompassing knowledge and technology, refers to the mental energy, individually and collectively. Population stands as a multiplier effect in all its complexity. Through a slightly different lens, surplus represents the material, population represents the life force, and innovation refers to consciousness.
An inflection point in the J-curves of these variables occurred around 1950, so that from that point on, every factor worth measuring has exhibited a troubling skyward trajectory.
As in all natural systems, the environment’s responses (in this instance global warming, dwindling land, water, fossil fuels and wild animals, etc.,) signals a resistance to present behaviors. Awareness of these signals and their possible meanings has diffused so thoroughly through Civilization that even the power elite’s staunchest apologists (such as president George W. Bush) must publicly acknowledge them. We are likely approaching a crisis for the Civilization project. In all its uses (general, medical, psychological), crisis is the term used to indicate a turning point for the system in question, when it becomes clear whether the system will flourish or decline.
Our Environmental Impact is caused by the multiplier effect of Population, Consumption and the Resources/Wastes per amount of Consumption. Globally, voluntary reductions in either population or consumption are considered unlikely. Therefore, most analysts today suggest that Civilization’s only response to its predicament revolves around the Resources/Waste factor, and this comes down to a reliance on human ingenuity to power us through: finding new resources, substituting new materials, innovating efficiency. Let us wish us all, Good Luck.
30December2007
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Philosophy.
The following entry is the third of three from Neal Goldsmith, philosopher and psychotherapist, at http://www.nealgoldsmith.com/philosophy.html. One can–without much distortion –substitute “society” and “our civilization” for the role of the “client” in Dr. Goldsmith’s model. Then, it would be the healers’ calling to facilitate the natural development of an individual and of society. As part of our maturation, we–individually and collectively–become more in tune with what it means to live with others we progressively widen that circle of community. A child first learns the sustainable way to live with family, then with friends, school, etc. To live sustainably with the rest of life on earth, however, we can no longer afford to stop our sphere of inclusion at family or town or nation or humanity as traditionally has been our wont. We will have to become far more mature than we have been. We will have to continue expanding our community to include all life, the Earth, and even universe… Read the rest of this entry »
27December2007
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Philosophy.
This entry is the second of three from Neal Goldsmith, philosopher and psychotherapist, at http://www.nealgoldsmith.com/philosophy.html. I will add only that what is here referred to as Post-Modern might more properly be called Post-Post Modern or perhaps Integrative, as Post-Modernism has usually been seen as deconstructive in perspective.
“Every world view contains the seeds of its own eventual dethroning, contradictions that will be explained only by the next, superseding world view. Today, it is post-modernism supplanting modernity – the dualism of Descartes being replaced by a world view that accommodates and integrates opposites: of technology and art, mind and body, man and god, matter and energy, spirit and flesh. This is what I refer to as a “poetry science” - not the science of poetry, or poetry about science, but a poetical world view that positions modern, industrial, extractive science in the broader, undergirding context of cosmology, creativity, spirituality, and community. Read the rest of this entry »
19December2007
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Philosophy.
This entry is the first of three from Neal Goldsmith, philosopher and psychotherapist, at http://www.nealgoldsmith.com/philosophy.html.
“It was a devil’s bargain: Thought, ideation, intent, objectification, ego, the finger-eye-frontal lobe complex. A devil’s bargain, yes, but supremely adaptive, as we now dominate nature and occupy every corner of the globe. And the devil’s bargain was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: The first division, like light and darkness, soul vs. body, humans vs. nature, Christians vs. animists.
“Of course, it’s an old story by now how life started natural-yet-brutish and how we evolved adaptations to protect us and how now, the very traits and brain functions that enabled us to excel thus far, are proving counter-adaptive in the form of pollution, extinctions, cancer, obesity, overcrowding, competition, mechanization and social alienation.
“So how do we heal that rift? Read the rest of this entry »