As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.
About Tim Jackson
Tim Jackson studies the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment to question the primacy of economic growth.
Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us in his TED talk, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.
If Earth is a self-regulating system, it's clear that human activity is capable of disrupting it. Johan Rockstrom has led a team of scientists to define the nine Earth systems that need to be kept within bounds for Earth to keep itself in balance.
Johan Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to sustainability: planetary boundaries. Working with a team of 29 leading scientists across disciplines, Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems -- and marked the upper limit beyond which each system could touch off a major system crash. Climate change is certainly in the mix -- but so are other human-made threats such as ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution.
"Rockstrom has managed in an easy, yet always scientifically based way, to convey our dependence of the planet's resources, the risk of transgressing planetary boundaries and what changes are needed in order to allow humanity to continue to develop."
In 1972, the now-classic book Limits to Growth explored the consequences for Earth’s ecosystems of exponential growth in population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. That book, which still stands as the best-selling environmental title ever published, reported on the first attempts to use computers to model the likely interactions between trends in resources, consumption, and population. It summarized the first major scientific study to question the assumption that economic growth can and will continue more or less uninterrupted into the foreseeable future.
The idea was heretical at the time, and still is: During the past few decades, growth has become virtually the sole index of national economic well-being. When an economy grows, jobs appear, investments yield high returns, and everyone is happy. When the economy stops growing, financial bloodletting and general misery ensue. Predictably, a book saying that growth cannot and will not continue beyond a certain point proved profoundly upsetting in some quarters, and soon Limits to Growth was pilloried in a public relations campaign organized by pro-growth business interests. In reality, this purported “debunking” merely amounted to taking a few numbers in the book completely out of context, citing them as “predictions” (which they explicitly were not), and then claiming that these predictions had failed. The ruse was quickly exposed, but rebuttals often don’t gain nearly as much publicity as accusations, and so today millions of people mistakenly believe that the book was long ago discredited.
In any case, the underlying premise of the book is irrefutable: At some point in time, humanity’s ever-increasing resource consumption will meet the very real limits of a planet with finite natural resources.
The co-authors of The Post Carbon Reader believe that this time has come.
The Pivotal Role of energy
During the past two centuries, an explosion in population, consumption, and technological innovation has brought previously unimaginable advances in health, wealth, transport, and communications. These events were largely made possible by the release of enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels starting in the mid-nineteenth century.
Increased consumption of fossil fuels has produced both economic growth and population growth. However, a bigger population and a growing economy lead to more energy demand. We are thus enmeshed in a classic self-reinforcing (“positive”) feedback loop. Crucially, the planet on which all of this growth is occurring happens to be limited in size, with fixed stores of fossil fuels and mineral ores, and with constrained capacities to regenerate forests, fish, topsoil, and freshwater. Indeed, it appears that we are now pushing up against these very physical limits:
The world is at, nearing, or past the points of peak production of a number of critical nonrenewable resources—including oil, natural gas, and coal, as well as many economically important minerals ranging from antimony to zinc.
The global climate is being destabilized by greenhouse gases emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, leading to more severe weather (including droughts) as well as melting glaciers and rising sea levels.
Freshwater scarcity is a real or impending problem in nearly all of the world’s nations due to climate change, pollution, and overuse of groundwater for agriculture and industrial processes.
World food production per capita is declining and the maintenance of existing total harvests is threatened by climate change, soil erosion, water scarcity, and high fuel costs.
Earth’s plant and animal species are being driven to extinction by human activities at a rate unequaled in the last 60 million years.
The co-inventor of "the ecological footprint" now calls for a planned contraction of the economy, to save the biosphere and promote world fairness. How our primeval brains work against us.
Powerful speech on Radio EcoShock [mp3, transcript by Alex Smith] by Canadian biologist Dr. Bill Rees, April 15, 2010.
At a meeting of the World Federalists, guest speaker Dr. William Rees gave this speech standing, without notes. It shines with clarity, developed form decades of lecturing, in the field of his passion, which he himself developed – the “ecological footprint.” Rees is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada – and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.
Rees begins with an early warning, following the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment. It is a statement by the Union of Concerned Scientists issuing a warning to humanity.
"Many of the Nobel Laureates in science signed on to this particular document but the bottom line is pretty clear: 'A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and our life on it, is required if vast misery is to be avoided, and our global home is not to be irretrievably mutilated.'"
Dr. Rees says this warning had no effect whatsoever. He moves to a more recent statement, from the Millennium Ecosystem Summary Report, in which Rees participated, along with 10,000 other scientists. It was the largest study ever taken of the world's ecosystems. It warned that:
‘human activity is putting such a strain on that the natural functions of the Earth that 'the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain human endeavor can no longer be taken for granted.'
It is no exaggeration to say that Bill Rees has taught and inspired at least two generations of students, ecologists, and environmentalists around the world. Here he outlines the condition of humanity on a small planet, with thoughts on how both can survive.
Dr. Alicia Valero is a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza and works in the Centre of Research for Energy Resources and Consumption (CIRCE).
Her main scientific research areas are exergoecology and energy efficiency. In particular, she has had extensive involvement in the application of the exergy analysis in the global assessment of mineral resources on earth.
The 20th century has been characterized by the economic growth of many industrialized countries. This growth was mainly sustained by the massive extraction and use of the earth’s mineral resources. The tendency observed worldwide in the present, is that consumption will continue increasing, especially due to the rapid development of Asia, the desire for a higher living standard of the developing world and the technological progress. But the physical limitations of our planet might seriously restrain world economies. In fact, many mineral commodities such as oil or copper are already showing signs of scarcity problems, and consequently their prices are increasing sharply.
Our society is based on an inefficient use of energy and materials, since there is a lack of awareness of the limit. If resources are limited, their management must be carefully planned. But it is impossible to manage efficiently the resources on earth, if we do not know what is available and at which rate it is being depleted.
Therefore, the aim of this PhD has been the assessment of the physical stock on earth and the degradation velocity of our mineral resources due to human action. This has been accomplished through the exergy analysis under the exergoecological approach. This way, the resources are physically assessed as the energy required to replace them from a complete degraded state to the conditions in which they are currently presented in nature. The main advantage of its use with respect to other physical indicators is that in a single property, all the physical features of a resource are accounted for. Furthermore, exergy has the capability of aggregating heterogeneous energy and material assets. Unlike standard economic valuations, the exergy analysis gives objective information since it is not subject to monetary policy, or currency speculation.
Examples of scientific contributions
With the relative abundance of the substances in each of the earth’s outer spheres obtained in this PhD, and the thermochemical information, we were able to calculate for the first time, the average Gibbs free energy, enthalpy of formation and chemical exergy of the atmosphere, hydrosphere and upper continental crust. Furthermore, since the mass of each layer of the earth is well known, we have obtained the first estimation of the earth’s specific chemical exergy: 1,22E9 Gtoe.
This study has obtained an inventory of the most important renewable and non-renewable resources on earth measured in exergy terms. The main novelty introduced in the inventory is the combined assessment of energy resources with non-fuel minerals. Since exergy is an additive property, we have been able to obtain the total exergy of the non renewable energy resources, including nuclear, fossil fuels and non-fuel mineral reserves. Furthermore we could estimate for all renewable resources, the rate of current consumption with respect to the available potential use.
Similarly, for non-renewables, we estimated the resource to production ratio. We came to the important conclusion that vast amounts of energy resources are available on earth, especially of renewable nature. However, we are currently using less than 2% of its potential. On the other hand, we have estimated that the reserves of concentrated fuel and non fuel minerals, which can be practically used by man, represent only 0,01% of the chemical exergy of the earth. Furthermore, their global R/P ratio excluding nuclear materials, is less than 100 years. Hence, humankind is not facing an energy crisis, as many claim, but rather a material’s scarcity.
This PhD has applied for the first time the Hubbert model to non-fuel minerals, with the aim of estimating the year were the peak of production is reached. It has been stated that the bell-shape curve is better suited to non-fuel minerals if it is fitted with exergy over time, instead of mass over time. This way, we take into account the concentration factor, which is very important for the case of solid minerals. Consequently, we have developed the required equations for estimating the Hubbert’s peak for all kinds of minerals in exergy terms.
With the available information about world mineral historic statistics and available reserves, we have carried out the first diagnosis of the state of non-renewable minerals on earth. This PhD has estimated through the exergy analysis, the degradation degree of the mineral commodities, detecting the ones being degraded at the highest rates, and the ones facing important scarcity problems.
We have stated that iron and aluminium are the most extracted commodities but not the most depleted ones, due to their crustal abundance. On the contrary, copper, which is also being extracted at very high rates, is already suffering scarcity problems, with more than 50% of its world reserves depleted. Other commodities such as mercury, silver, gold, tin, arsenic, antimony or lead are even more degraded, with more than 70% of their reserves depleted.
The Energy Crash Blog features news, reports, opinions and videos on the challenge to keep our society running with less and more expensive fossil fuels on which we depend on.
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