Common Wealth by Jeffrey D. Sachs

[Rob Olason]

I'm curious if anyone has read "Common Wealth-Economics for a Crowded Planet," by Jeffrey D. Sachs. I am finding it a good overview of how, over the last 90,000 years, humankind has been on a growth trajectory that has overwhelmed the planet. It is a comprehensive look at humankind's impact on the environment through population growth and the subsequent strain on resources. He also offers global solutions that involve the developed world taking a pro-active role to stabilize population growth and reduce poverty and our carbon output.

[David MacLeod]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for posting. I haven't read the 'Common Wealth' book. I'm curious if Sachs includes much discussion of energy inputs (and the limited availability of finite resources) in relation to the growth trajectory.

If I had to pick only one online link to recommend to people, in regards to sustainability, energy resource scarcity, population issues, etc., it would be Albert Bartlett's presentation entitled "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy," recorded in 2004. "The retired Professor of Physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder examines the arithmetic of steady growth, continued over modest periods of time, in a finite environment. These concepts are applied to populations and to fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal." This happens to be the most popular/most downloaded content at Global Public Media. It can be read as text, listened to as audio, or watched as video.
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461

I have said before that "It should be required listening for every activist, environmentalist, planner, politician, scientist, theologian, philosopher, and thinker."

[David MacLeod]

A Second Note.

I've just been doing some research for another project (Bellingham/Whatcom County Energy Resource Scarcity/Peak Oil Task Force), and I came across something written by Stuart Staniford, that is relevant to this topic of growth on an over-crowded, overwhelmed planet.

Stuart, trained in physics, is well-known in the 'peak oil community' for his well-researched posts at The Oil-Drum. However, I found this piece of writing in the Comments section of Prof. James Hamilton's Econbrowser blog. If I just linked to the article, you'd have to scroll through a whole long series of comments to find this, so I'll just repost below. I found his analysis of Julian Simon's work(cornucopian economist) to be very insightful.

David
______________

...I started to read Julian Simon's book (Ultimate Resource II). I view it as a caricature of what good economists must think: his treatment of any subject other than economics is so ill informed that I just got disgusted and couldn't finish the book (I lost any sense that I could rely on him as an authority on anything). The chapters on infinity and entropy are particularly bad. I'm hoping that first rate economists view him as a second rate popularizer and idealogue...

In response to Eric H, and at the risk of further turning off the English majors, I don't think it's accurate to claim Simon has made better predictions than the Limits to Growth sequence of books. The latter have fairly consistently had a base case scenario in which things peak in the 2010-2020 timeframe and then start to crash. For those who believe in a near term Hubbert peak and a sharp depletion rate, that still looks remarkably prescient starting from the early '70s. However, Meadows et al are very quick to point out they only mean the model to be a qualitative general explanation of the core system dynamics. They wouldn't claim the specific dates or the exact evolution of the system should be taken too seriously. Obviously, it models a zero dimensional world - if they get within +-50% of reality on any given thing, they did well.

The basic logical errors in Simon's book are as follows. Most of his argument comes from looking at past data over the last 50-200 years. Since things keep getting cheaper and better in that timeframe, he argues it must always be so in the future. This is logically a non-sequitur - an exponential curve, a logistic up to around the inflection point, and a peak-and-crash halfway up the peak are going to be statistically indistinguishable looking back down the curve, given enough real world noise added to the basic dynamics.

Also, almost all his data series come entirely from the fossil fuel era, so I would argue that most of the effect he's seeing is precisely the accelerated growth you get from discovering such a fantastic source of highly ordered energy that you can get out of the ground with huge EROEI [Energy Returned On Energy Invested], and very short payback times. (There's a much longer data series on Japan, but he omits to look at the historical quality of life over the last 2000 years in the Yucatan peninsular, or Italy, which would make one think a lot harder about the idea that human civilizations only get better and better over time).

His arguments that economic growth can continue exponentially into the future forever are where he gets completely farcical. The total energy in the planet in a thermodynamically usable (ie low entropy) form is a large but mathematically finite number. The annual solar flux is a finite number. So civilization can only double it's energy use some fixed number of times before it can't do it any more (absent a miracle). You can argue that day is sooner or later, but arguing the day will never come places you outside the bounds of rational discourse. Continuing exponential growth tends to cross even enormous chasms in quite modest numbers of doubling (he slips around actually doing the calculation and throws up a heavy smoke screen in that chapter).

(Most people who hold Simon's views, when you really push them to the wall, turn out to be relying ultimately on interstellar space travel. That strikes me as approximately on a par with hoping that co-ordinated prayer will avail us something good).

Where I do agree with him somewhat, and somewhat disagree with Limits To Growth, is that many many other problems are survivable *if* you have enough energy to throw at them. You can grow massive amounts of food on tiny amounts of land if you can illuminate the hydroponic plants with large amounts of artificial light. You can mine incredibly poor quality metal ores and then fix up the land afterwards if you have the energy to move all that material. You can augment your denuded soil with crushed rock if you have the energy to quarry, crush, and transport it. You can sequester almost all the CO2 from your coal fired power plants if you can stand to lose the energy required to do it.

But if you *don't* have the energy, all those bets are off.

The thing that worries me (and I don't claim to fully understand the situation) is this: *all* our well developed post-oil options share the following characteristic to varying degrees: if you make a large investment of energy, you can eventually get more energy back than you put in, but the payback time is rather long. That's true of nuclear plants (with their massive capital investment up front, and the need to mine the uranium), it's true of solar (with it's high embodied energy panels or mirrors collecting very diffuse sunlight), it's true of oil sands (where you need a refinery and a bunch of steam generating equipment to get the stuff out of the ground and into a usable form), it's true of wind (where you put up a big metal thing that produces an unpredictable trickle of energy). The energetic annual ROI will be rather poor on all these. And yet we would need to make truly massive investments in these poor energetic ROI options to replace the energy we have with oil. Even conservation takes investment (Priuses take quite a bit of energy to make and the payback time on that embodied energy is long).

Those investments might be rather hard to do when the available energy is declining and already spoken for just keeping us all in the style we've become accustomed to (assuming for the purpose of discussion that the oil depletion rate becomes real and is somewhat rapid). It will be like raising capital for a startup with a so-so economic ROI story when the stock market is tanking. It won't be easily done (I was raising capital in 2001-2002, so I know whereof I speak).

The present cash economics of these things is probably completely misleading in most cases because almost all the embodied energy will have been supplied by cheap fossil fuels. To know if an option has any long term viability as an alternate basis for civilization, we have to look just at the energetics.

A good solution for rapidly declining fossil fuel would have the following characteristics: you get more energy out than you put in, the energy payback is fast (1-3 years, not 10-30 years), and it doesn't release greenhouse gases. All the candidates with that potential are still at the only-a-dream stage, as far as I can tell. The list might include tabletop nuclear fusion, gossamer thin solar panels with hardly any embodied energy in them, and bio-engineered plants that capture a far higher proportion of solar energy than the ones evolution has provided, and provide it in a form that can be trivially turned into hydrocarbon fuel.

I wouldn't rule out any of these possibilities. I hope the guys working on them are staying in their labs at least as late as I'm staying up to write this. UK North Sea oil production is now declining at comfortably over 10% a year. If that turns out to be a harbinger for what oil decline looks like after you've developed fields with multilateral maximum reservoir contact wells and peripheral water injection from day one, we're going to need to pull one of those technological rabbits out of the hat one of these years. Hopefully its some freak factor with the nature of the reservoirs in the North Sea instead (oil industry insiders assert that the same technology used to develop the North Sea is now widespread in the industry).

Finally, for our self-sufficient English major: the last time humanity was subsisting by human/animal powered agriculture alone, the population of the planet was around a billion, with regular famines to keep the numbers in check. We're now at 6.5 billion on a very rapid path to 10 billion from existing demographics alone. What's the plan for the other 9 billion? And how are you going to stop them from raiding your organic garden if they get hungry?

Posted by: Stuart Staniford at July 13, 2005 12:21 AM
from comments section of Prof. James Hamilton's blog, Econbrowser:
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/07/how_to_talk_to.html

Reply:

Stuart: the energy payback time for a large windmill is, depending on locatiaon, around 4 years which is close to your desirable range of 1-3 years. For solar panels, that time is presently around 10 years. Further progress is likely given that serious research in this area has been only done since the 1970's. You need a century of development in order for any technology to mature. Bicycles have been build for over 200 years, yet progress is still being made. You are right in your remark that present day cash prices are misleading (since they are based on cheap fossil fuels). However, I do not believe that the present per capita energy consumption in the western world can be sustained indefinitely. Fortunately, in order to maintain life standards, it is not necessary to maintain energy consumption. Energy consumption can decline significantly if efficiency can be improved dramatically. Most energy is wasted anyway. Why do we still heat houses if houses can be build which do not require any heating? The answer most often given is: because it is cheaper to heat the house than to insulate.

Posted by: Robert Sczech at July 13, 2005 06:36 AM

Reply to the Reply:

Robert:

I was a little sloppy in my comments. I agree wind is reasonably favorable as long as one can add the electricity into the grid, which can be done in small quantities. To rely on it at large scales (since it's erratic), it needs to be turned into something transportable and storable (eg hydrogen) and transported: that worsens the energetics a lot.

I agree with you that a mixture of conservation and development of better renewables is the only half-decent answer over the course of the century. It just seems to me that that process can only be moderately painless if the post-peak oil depletion rate is very low and/or the plateau around peak is very long (because the energetic ROI of these things is so marginal right now). It's not at all clear that those assumptions about depletion are good (nor is it clear to me they are wrong). If the transition becomes too abrupt, there's a risk of breakdown in order (one can argue that's already started with the Iraq war). Also, there's a sharp limit to how much we can reduce our need for transport energy without cutting the global food supply a lot (since most of the people don't live close to where food is produced any more). Making this much better again requires large scale investment in more energy-efficient transport technologies (eg railways). Even R&D is an investment that societies can only make when they are in reasonable shape (eg soviet scientists spent the nineties digging in their vegetable gardens).

Finally, the low hanging fruit in energy conservation are mostly in the middle-class consumer sector (home energy use and autos). But's that not where the market will pick to conserve first, since energy is not yet a very noticeable part of most household budgets. So conservation will not kick in at scale till rather late in the game (absent a lot more political leadership than we are seeing at present).

Stuart.

Posted by: Stuart Staniford at July 13, 2005 10:06 AM

[Rob Olason]

Hi David,
Thanks for the links. I plan to follow them up. They are just the thing I have been looking for. I think I represent the person who is new to the issues that Transition Whatcom is addressing and am looking for background material that will help bring me "up to speed." The Transition Whatcom web site is a great resource for that process.

I realize that the main page has good "what you can do right now" information, but I wonder as more people join the site, who bring varying levels of knowledge and awareness, if it would be helpful to create a "Start Here" section that provides a general overview and helps create a common vocabulary and understanding of the issue.

As someone just starting out in the process of educating myself on the issue, I feel I am listening in on a lengthy on-going conversation. I can understand some of the conversation, but I don't know many of the underlying assumptions. While searching the web can help this process, web search success can oftentimes be defeated by the randomness of such a process. Also, without a little guidance, one is just as likely to find inaccurate or down-right incorrect information as the useful variety.

[David MacLeod]

Rob Olason said:

I realize that the main page has good "what you can do right now" information, but I wonder as more people join the site, who bring varying levels of knowledge and awareness, if it would be helpful to create a "Start Here" section that provides a general overview and helps create a common vocabulary and understanding of the issue.

As someone just starting out in the process of educating myself on the issue, I feel I am listening in on a lengthy on-going conversation. I can understand some of the conversation, but I don't know many of the underlying assumptions. While searching the web can help this process, web search success can oftentimes be defeated by the randomness of such a process. Also, without a little guidance, one is just as likely to find inaccurate or down-right incorrect information as the useful variety.

Sorry for the slow response, Rob. This is excellent feedback. We are planning to get more content on this website to address the concerns you raise. Your comments are helpful as we plan how to do that.

In the meantime, see the attached list of recommended books, films, and websites.

My personal shortlist of book recommendations:
The Transition Handbook, by Rob Hopkins
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, by Richard Heinberg
Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, by David Holmgren
Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change, by David Holmgren

Film/Video:
The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (David Korten presentation available to borrow from Congregational Church library)

Website:
http://www.energybulletin.net (RSS feed in lower right corner of this website)