Of all religions, nothing is more enduring than our misplaced faith in technology. The truth is, there is no technological "fix" for overconsumption.
"One of the hallmarks of waves of innovation, however, is that technology should never be underestimated." James Bradley Moody and Bianca Nogrady from “The Sixth Wave: How to succeed in a resource-limited world” http://theconversation.edu.au/population-is-only-part-of-the-environmental-impact-equation-4009
The Ignorance Of Environmentalists Should Never Be Underestimated
In arguing that “Population is only part of the environmental impact equation”, James Bradley Moody and Bianc Nogrady make a commonplace mistake. They assume that technological innovations and efficiencies can offset the ecological impact of population growth, or put another way, by miniaturizing our footprints technology can counteract the introduction of more “feet”. Technology, they remind us, “should never be underestimated”.
With all due respect to James Bradley and Bianca Nogrady, what should never be underestimated is the persistent ignorance by environmentalists (or "cargo cultists" as Catton called them) of the Jevons Paradox (or Khazoom-Brookes postulate). Consider these factoids :
1 .Energy use per unit of US GNP has fallen 50% since 1975 after enormous efficiencies were effected following the Arab oil embargo. Yet total energy usage has risen in the US by more than 40%.
2. Since 1980, for any given car, the average fuel economy has improved 30% but American drivers responded by driving bigger vehicles greater distances. And thanks to population growth there are 130 million more cars on the road. 88% of increased energy consumption is due to population growth and only 12% to increased per capita energy consumption.
3. Fuel efficiency in aircraft improved by more than 40% since 1978, but overall fuel consumption rose by 150% since 1975 due to the explosive growth of air traffic from cheaper costs per mile.
4. Air conditioners improved their efficiency by 17%, but then the number of air conditioners increased by 36% erasing that energy saving. The same phenomena has been observed with other products like furnaces, computers, DVDs. More are bought and left running.
The bottom line here is that energy consumption has grown steadily as efficiency improvements have steadily lowered the cost of consuming it, as Mr. Jevons would have predicted. Within the context of a market economy, tech efficiencies will always provoke more total consumption. Money freed up by the introduction of more efficient technology will be spent on other goods or services.
Decoupling Consequences From Actions and Belief From Common Sense
Not content with repeating one misconception, Moody and Nogrady repeat another:
"In this vision of the world, technology allows us to begin to decouple economic growth from resource consumption, without compromising either population or affluence".
I guess we can expect that then that weight gain will be separated from ice cream consumption and dehydration from the lack of water. We can grow the population to 15 billion and if there is any negative fall-out from that, don't worry. Among those extra billions there surely will sprout a genius who solve all the problems wrought by growth----just as Julian Simon imagined----presuming geniuses can develop without adequate food clean water, shelter, education and health care made scarce by overpopulation. There is reason for hope, because many environmentalists and Green Party politicians have already managed to "decouple" their thought processes from their cerebral cortex.
Two Types Of Technology
I think it would be useful to distinguish between two types of technology. Those technologies which enable us to discover and exploit natural non-renewable resource (NNR) deposits and those that enable us to use NNRs in an ever-increasing number of new applications. As analyst Chris Clugston stated in his book “Scarcity”, “Ironically , while human ingenuity and technical innovations that increase economically viable NNR supply levels are experiencing diminishing returns, human ingenuity and technical innovations that increase our NNR requirement levels appear unlimited.” In Clugston’s words, “we are getting double-whammied”----as NNR-supply technologies are becoming less effective, the NNR-requirement technologies are running amok.
Thus we have “more efficient” expresso-makers, garage-door openers, and personal computers---stuff we didn’t have fifty years ago. And they all require more NNRs than just energy NNRs in their manufacture. The bad news is that as Clugston has meticulously documented, 69 of the 89 NNRs that are vital to our industrial economy have already peaked, while the appetite of emerging economies for these resources is set to grow leaps and bounds. China’s share of global economic output , a mere 2.2% in 1980, is set to increase to 18% by 2016.
Nature Doesn’t Give A Damn About Our Per Capita Anythings
What techno-optimists fail to grasp is that Nature couldn’t care less about our efficiencies---- real or imagined----- or about per capita anything. It’s about TOTAL consumption, and particularly the resources that underpin our industrial civilization. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happens next when our very existence is predicated upon the continuous availability of ever-increasing quantities of finite, non-replenishing and increasingly scarce NNRs.
Tim Murray
November 15, 2011
PS Read Craig Dilworth's "Too Smart for our own Good". Technology has only allowed us to grow further on a limb. The bigger we are, the harder we'll fall.
Comments
Hans (not verified)
Fri, 2011-11-18 10:05
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C02 mitigation is a Coalition plot - Christian Democrats
quark
Fri, 2011-11-18 18:03
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Penny Wong knows about decoupling
The Australian Federal Parliament's Penny Wong in her role as Climate Change Minister in 2010 showed herself to be a fan of the decoupling technique saying that population and greenhouse gas emissions in fast growing Australia could be "de-linked" rather than making any changes to the domestic human population growth trajectory. I'm more inclined to go with Al Bartlett's analysis though. See Albert Bartlett: Population Problems Downunder of 14 Feb 2010. Penny is now the minister for Finance and deregulation. Is it a promotion?
Greg (not verified)
Thu, 2011-11-24 18:38
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Another odd de-couple
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