The Gaia Theory is good for people to know about, but it takes a lot of scientific equipment and education to be able to see it happening.  So if you don’t have the equipment and education, how can you recognize whether politicians and business people are cooperating with the Gaia Theory or not?

The Selfish Gene Theory isn’t hard to recognize, because all you have to do is to look to see how an animal, or person, or plant, or any other organism, is acting in the attempt to help itself survive and reproduce.  Then you can combine that with the first principle of physics to see how the economic system of the universe meets the economic system of life.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are the economic system of the universe.  There are four Laws of Thermodynamics.  They’re called the Zeroth Law, and then the First, Second, and Third Laws.

The First Law of Thermodynamics was discovered first.  Then the Zeroth Law was discovered later, but the First Law depended on the new law, so that was called the Zeroth Law.  Basically, the Zeroth Law says that if you have three cups of water and one of them is the same temperature as the other two, those two are the same temperature as each other.  If you mix any two or all three together, none of them will exchange heat with each other.  All three are thermodynamically equal.  This is just a point of reference that establishes something that seems obvious.  That’s important in science, because often the things that seem most obvious are the easiest to misunderstand.  Then when you base further conclusions on your faulty premise, all your conclusions are wrong.  I told you what happened when scientists assumed the atmosphere had always been the way it is—they completely overlooked the Gaia Theory.

You’ve probably heard that heat makes molecules move faster, and molecules slow down when they lose heat.  The Third Law of Thermodynamics says that it isn’t possible to cool anything down to the point that molecules stop completely.  Scientists and engineers have cooled things down to within a millionth of a degree of that happening, but that last millionth of a degree can’t happen until the end of the universe, because as long as there is still heat anywhere in the universe, it will get into your experiment somehow.  If you have a thermometer in a room where you’re conducting the experiment, and a wire connected to the thermometer, and a computer connected to the wire where you’re monitoring the experiment, heat will still get into your experiment through the wire.  Or through the walls of the room.  One way or another, something in your experiment is still connected to something where molecules are still moving.

I’ve told you how the universe began with the Big Bang.  The Third Law of Thermodynamics shows us how the universe will end.  It’s called the Heat Death of the universe.  Energy moves because there’s more of it in one place than in another.  That’s how electricity moves from one end of a flashlight battery, through the resistors in the bulb that heat up and give off light, and into the other end of the battery—because there’s more energy in one end of the battery than the other.  That’s why the temperature of two cups of water would change if they were two different temperatures when you mixed the water together—and why the temperature doesn’t change if the two cups of water are already the same temperature.

Matter moves because energy moves it.  You could just as easily say that energy is contained in the motion of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

The Heat Death of the universe will happen when all the energy in the universe is distributed equally.  When all the energy in the universe is equally distributed, everything in the universe will stop.  Time will stop, because there will be nothing left in the universe that’s changing in any way at all.  If you could stand there looking at your watch and looking at all the molecules not moving, and looking at the seconds ticking by, you and the second hand in your watch would be the things in the universe that were still moving, so you would not be watching the death of the universe yet.

This sounds absurd, but that’s only because it takes a while to wrap your brain around the idea.  No one has ever seen anything that’s similar to the Heat Death of the universe, so no one has anything to compare it to.  But this is the inevitable result of the way energy moves through the universe.

The discovery that the galaxies are moving away from each other at an accelerating rate, and therefore the Big Bang wasn’t a simple occurrence that happened at some time in the past, throws some doubt on the original idea of the Heat Death of the universe.   But even if energy is still being created in the center of the universe, it isn’t doing us any good out here—because we’re moving away from all that new energy at an accelerating rate!

From this it seems that something like the Heat Death of the universe will occur at the edges of the universe and move inward, as different parts of the universe run out of energy at different times, but are pushed out of the way by the things closer to the center of the universe that still have energy.  That wouldn’t be the literal Heat Death of everything toward the edges of the universe, because those things would still be moving.  Maybe the Heat Death of the entire universe will never happen, but stars still die, their solar systems die, and entire galaxies die.  Enough energy from the center of the universe will reach the edge of the universe to push all the dead galaxies out of the way, but it won’t be enough energy to bring any of their stars back to life.

This scientific version of the birth and death of the universe is useful because in the same way that you can see the story of the origins of life still being told in every living thing you look at, you can see the story of the birth and death of the universe being told in every physical thing you look at.

The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics create the economy of the universe as it affects us now.   Entropy, by Jeremy Rifkin, is a good book about this.  It’s shorter than this book and easy to read, but it seems like a completely alien way of looking at the world.  He shows how the economic system of the universe affects the economic system of life, but as I’ve said, the economic system of the universe is a big natural blind spot in our perception.  But if you stop looking at the world in terms of how you feel the world is supposed to work, and start looking at it in terms of how energy flows through the world, you can see that poverty, famine, pollution, resource consumption, the breakdown of life cycles in the environment, inflation, and many physical and mental health problems in the modern world all follow the same two simple laws of physics.

The first two Laws of Thermodynamics give us a third important frame of reference.  With the Laws of Thermodynamics you aren’t jumping from biology to chemistry, you’re jumping from biology straight to physics.  Since all of chemistry is physics, from there, everything that applies to physics automatically applies to chemistry.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are the most fundamental laws of the universe.  That makes them an easy point of reference because any time you talk about anything happening anywhere in the universe, you’re talking about the Laws of Thermodynamics.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that matter can never be created or destroyed; it can only change form.  That means the total amount of energy available in the universe is finite.  In order for the energy in the universe to be infinite, the universe would have to be infinitely large or infinitely hot, neither of which is true.  Even if more energy is being created in the center of the universe, the amount of energy available in our part of the universe is finite for all intents and purposes.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the total entropy of the universe tends to increase.  In plain English, that means matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than they move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration.

The most practical way to word these two Laws of Thermodynamics goes:  “The total amount of available energy in the universe is finite and decreasing.”

Any time anything happens, anywhere in the universe, it requires energy.  That’s because making things happen always requires atoms, or at least, subatomic particles, to be moved from one place to another.  Making atoms move requires energy.

Any time energy is expended, some of it radiates out into the universe as heat.  That means it’s gone forever, because the heat gets soaked up by outer space.

If you eat a sandwich and then go running, you’ll use the energy from the sandwich to make your legs move, and then most of the energy will radiate off of you as heat, out into the atmosphere, and eventually, off of the Earth.  If an alien astronomer was looking at the Earth with an infrared telescope, some of the heat he would see would be the energy that was once contained in your sandwich.

A battery works because it has a higher charge of electrons in one side of the battery than the other.  When you put the battery in a flashlight, the electrons flow out one end of the battery, through the flashlight, and into the other side of the battery.  When the electrons are equal in both sides of the battery, the battery is dead, because electrons—meaning electricity—won’t flow from one side to the other anymore.

The entire universe works the same way.  The energy in your sandwich was more highly concentrated than the energy in outer space, so the energy flowed from the area of highest concentration to the area of lowest concentration.

Matter also moves from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.  When my dad was maybe 6 or 8, his mother bought a paring knife.  When I was 27, she still had the same knife.  She had sharpened it so many times the blade was only about 1/4” wide anymore.  That happened because every time she sharpened the knife, she wore knife-molecules off of the blade, and they became distributed more evenly throughout the universe.

This happens to everything in the universe.  Everything wears out eventually.  It happens to the front doorstep of your house. It happens to your carpet.  It happens to your shoes.  It happens to your clothes.  It happens to your car.  It happens to you.

Your carpet and the front doorstep of your house get worn down over time because the friction from walking over them breaks molecules loose and they turn into microscopic dust that you can never reclaim and reattach to your carpet or your front doorstep.  Your carpet doesn’t get thicker the more you walk on it; neither does the front doorstep of your house.

Likewise, your favorite pair of shoes weigh less now than they did when you bought them new.  The soles are thinner also.  You get holes in the knees of your favorite pants by wearing them.  Wearing your favorite pants doesn’t make the holes in the knees disappear.  Your car wears out and breaks down the more you drive it and the older it gets.  Driving your car more doesn’t make it run better.  Likewise for you.  In your peak reproductive years, you’re the healthiest you’ll ever be.  Then your body deteriorates until you die of old age, unless you die from other causes prematurely.

I refer to the Laws of Thermodynamics in terms of available energy being finite and decreasing because that’s the inescapable problem.  It is conceivable that someone could build a machine for collecting microscopic dust particles and reattaching them to whatever they came from, but that will never be practical because it would take energy to power the machine.  Putting that energy into the machine would create more microscopic dust than the machine collected.  Operating the machine would be completely counterproductive.

In the same way, I’ve heard people ask why we can’t save the environment by shooting all our pollution off into space.  Lifting anything up out of the gravity of the Earth into outer space takes a lot of energy.  Refining that rocket fuel and then burning it would create more pollution than you were eliminating.

When the energy from your sandwich radiated out into space, it was gone forever, because it had moved to the area of lowest energy concentration in the entire universe (or at least, the entire universe that we know about).  There is no machine you can build to reclaim your sandwich energy from outer space, because it would take more energy to power the machine than there was in your sandwich.

At every point of building your hypothetical machines, matter and energy would be lost.  Mining the minerals to build the machines would take energy and would distribute a lot of matter and energy throughout the world more evenly.  Collecting the fuel to power the machines would do likewise. When you used the machine, it would wear out over time, molecules would break off, and they would scatter throughout the universe more evenly as microscopic dust.  Mining the minerals to build spare parts for the machine would scatter matter and energy more evenly throughout the universe.  And so on.

Now here’s where the problems begin.  The economic system of life depends on certain kinds of energy and matter being concentrated in certain places, but the physical economy of the universe works exactly opposite that.

If there were no people in the world, this wouldn’t be a problem.  As I showed you with the Gaia Theory, everything in the world is part of the life cycle of something.  Plants and animals depend on certain kinds of matter and energy being concentrated in certain places for their lives, but whatever comes before them in the food cycle does that for them.  Plants soak nutrients out of the atmosphere and soil, they concentrate matter and energy for herbivores, by eating the plants the herbivores concentrate matter and energy for carnivores, and so on.  Whenever a plant or animal dies, it leaves a lot of matter and energy concentrated in one place that bacteria and bugs and fungus eat, and so on.

Matter keeps moving around in the global environment, but it doesn’t get added or removed from the environment.  It’s energy that gets added and removed from the global environment.  All the energy that powers the food cycles of the world comes from the sun (and a little geothermal heat).  When plants absorb sunlight, they use it to grow.  That means they use the energy to bind the atoms of the nutrients from the soil and atmosphere together to create the big new molecules that make the plants grow.  Some of that energy gets stored in the molecular bonds of the new plant-molecules.  When the herbivore eats the plant and digests the food, it releases the energy from the molecular bonds—which is where the herbivore gets its energy.  It also breaks up the plant molecules and turns some of them into new molecules that become its body mass—which is how the animal grows and maintains its health.  And so it goes when the carnivore eats the herbivore.

At every step of this process, energy is radiating off of the Earth—meaning out of the environment.  But it’s continually being replaced by more energy from the sun.  Energy is leaving the environment, but more energy is replacing it at the same rate.  Energy is continually moving from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration faster than it moves from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration because the sun is gradually running out of fuel.  But as far as the Earth is concerned, the environment had a permanent, constant supply of energy.

Humanity is throwing all of this off for the simple reason that we have the ability to remove matter and energy from environmental cycles, and there’s nothing else on Earth that can counteract what we do.  The environment can adapt to the new distribution of matter and energy, but that takes time.  If we extract matter and energy from the cycles of the world too fast, the environment won’t be able to keep up.

Pollution is matter that accumulates in the environment that doesn’t serve any further use to the cycles of the world.  Either the cycles of the world can’t reclaim it as fast as it’s being produced, or else they can’t reclaim it at all.  Some types of pollution, like CFCs, actively destroy more of the environment after humans dispose of them.

Environmental destruction is all pollution of some form or another, even if it isn’t the waste products of anything humans have used directly.  It could be the direct results of something humans did in the process of making use of other matter and energy, or it could be something that happens as an even more indirect result of something people have done.  In any case, matter and energy are always moving from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.  In the process, matter and energy are moving out of the natural cycles that were using them before, and aren’t moving into new natural cycles.  The net result is that human activity is causing the natural cycles of the world to break down.

For instance, if you mine copper, you have to dig a lot of rocks out of the ground to get to the rocks with the copper ore in them.  You end up with a big pile of rocks lying outside your copper mine.  When those rocks were buried underground, they were fulfilling a critical role in the natural cycles of the world, and now they aren’t anymore.  Specifically, they were holding a lot of arsenic underground, and out of the rest of the environment.  Now that you’ve dug all those arsenic-laden rocks out of the ground and left them lying on a hillside, the next time it rains, a lot of arsenic is going to be washed off of the rocks, down the hill, and into the nearest river.  And this will happen every time it rains for the next 10,000 years.   Obviously, that’s going to have a big impact on the environment.

Before matter and energy were concentrated in certain ways, and the environment had adapted to that.  Then you came, extracted something from the environment, and had to move a lot of things out of the way to get to the things you wanted.  Matter and energy moved from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration, and consequently became distributed more evenly throughout the world.  Then when it rained, matter and energy got even more evenly distributed throughout the world, and moved to areas of even lower concentration.  All that arsenic being scattered more evenly throughout the world changed the environment, even though it’s only a byproduct of your mining the copper you wanted.

Now let’s say a lot of city people want to feel like they’re doing something to help the environment, so they’ve agreed to pay you a lot of money to mine all that copper and use it to build a solar power station.  So you cut down the forest to free up the land to build the solar power station.  It takes a lot of energy to mine all the minerals it takes to build the solar power station, process them, build the solar power station, maintain it, and operate it.  You have to run a lot of machinery to do all of that, and you have to feed the people who work at the station as their full time occupations.

Well guess what.  The forest you cut down to build your solar power station already was a solar power station.     When you add up all the energy that your artificial solar power station produces and subtract all the energy it takes to run your artificial solar power station, the forest harnessed solar energy more efficiently than your artificial solar power station.  The forest was a solar power station that mined all of its own minerals, built itself, and didn’t depend on any people at all to make it function.

Your solar power station is more efficient at generating electricity than the forest was, because the forest didn’t generate electricity at all.  That means your artificial solar power station generates energy that’s useful to humans more efficiently than the forest did, but the gross energy it harnesses is less than what the forest harnessed.  So your so-called environmentally friendly alternative energy source is still destroying the environment.  But the city people who voted to let you build the solar power station are never going to know that.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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Fossil fuels contain energy because plants absorbed sunlight or animals collected energy from the food chain, they concentrated it into small spaces, and then they died and were buried before their bodies could decompose.  While our planetary environment was evolving out of the mud and up to the point that every single thing on Earth was part of the life cycle of something, and all those fossil fuels were being created, sunlight was shining on the Earth faster than heat was radiating off.  That means that energy was being added to our global environment because some of it was being absorbed by the bio-chemical reactions and not being released.  The energy was being stored in the molecular bonds of the big carbon molecules that biological processes were creating now.  Then some of it was stored underground.

In the economic system of the universe, energy was still moving from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than it was moving from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration the whole time, simply because the sun is a lot bigger than the Earth and it’s 93 million miles away.  Only about one billionth of the energy the sun gives off hits the Earth.  The rest radiates away in other directions.

When you burn fossil fuels, you’re releasing sunlight that shone on the Earth hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.  The Earth is basically the side of a battery with all the electrons in it, and outer space is the side of the battery without the electrons.  When we burn fossil fuels, we’re making energy radiate off the Earth faster than it’s being replaced.  We’re killing the battery because we’re using up its energy faster than the battery can be recharged.

As long as we depend on fossil fuels or any other non-renewable energy, we won’t stop destroying the environment.  Learning to live within the physical limitations of the Earth, by definition, means learning to live with the energy that’s supplied by the sun.  That means building an economy that’s powered almost entirely by sunlight.   That means worldwide, localized organic agricultural economies.

While I’m on the subject of fossil fuels, eco-tourism can’t possibly save the environment.  If you try to protect your local environment by using it to attract a lot of tourists and bring in a lot of money, how are the tourists going to get there?  On bicycles?  On horseback?  In wooden sailing ships?  Or by driving cars and riding in planes and burning a lot of fossil fuels?  Where are they going to get those fossil fuels?  They have to be extracted from someone else’s environment.  That means that you’re saving your environment by helping to destroy even more of someone else’s environment.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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The most obvious social effect of humanity’s collective ignorance of the first two Laws of Thermodynamics is poverty.

A lot of people have been talking lately about “peak oil production”.  That refers to a mathematical bell curve that was discovered in 1956 by Dr. M. King Hubbert, the greatest geologist of the 20th century.

This bell curve measures oil production, in which the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents amount.  I could give you an illustration, but it’s so simple you can draw it yourself.

The bell curve begins at zero time and zero production.  This represents the beginning of world oil production.

Oil contains energy.  Prospecting for oil, drilling for oil, extracting oil, refining oil, and building all the equipment to do those things all require energy.  The more oil you drill, the more energy you have that you can invest into drilling more oil.

In the beginning the limiting factor on how much oil people could drill was the amount oil production equipment they had.  The more oil production equipment people built, the more oil they could produce.  The more oil people produced, the more oil production equipment they could build.  That’s a self-perpetuating process, also known as a positive feedback loop.

Out of all the oil that was buried underground at first, some was close to the surface.  That was the first oil people collected, because it was the easiest to reach.  That meant it required the least amount of oil production equipment.

Some of the oil was in easily accessible places, like sitting in big puddles on the ground in Texas or Saudi Arabia or wherever.  Other oil was buried under the ocean or the under the Rocky Mountains or somewhere.  The oil that was in the most easily accessible places was the easiest to collect, and required the least amount of equipment to collect.

The oil that was on the top contained the least impurities.  That made it the easiest to refine.  That meant it required the least amount of refinement equipment.

The more oil people drilled, the more oil they had.  They more oil they had, the more uses they found for oil.  That created more demand for oil, so people drilled more oil.  That created another positive feedback loop.

Once people began drilling oil, they began ascending the front slope of the bell curve.  As time went by, they built more oil production equipment and produced more oil each year than they did the year before.  Maybe one oil well became two the next year, four the next year, eight the next year, sixteen the next year, and so on, doubling every year.  Or maybe 100 oil wells became 110 the next year, 121 the next year, 133 the next year, 146 the next year, increasing by 10% every year like compound interest in a bank account.  The numbers themselves don’t matter.  Either way, they increase at an exponential rate.

When roughly half the oil is gone, you reach the plateau of the bell curve.  In the beginning, the oil being close to the surface, free of impurities, and in easy to reach locations made oil production easy.  But the more oil you drilled, the less those qualities applied to the oil that was still available.  As time went by, the oil became progressively further beneath the surface, less pure, and in harder to reach locations.  That made the oil progressively harder to produce, and that made your oil production require progressively more energy.

For the first half of the oil production cycle, the limiting factor on your ability to produce more oil is still your amount of oil production equipment.  Your oil production is becoming increasingly inefficient, but you can still overcome that by building more oil production equipment.

Halfway through your oil production cycle, the laws of diminishing return catch up to you and the limiting factor on your ability to produce oil changes.  At this point, you have all the equipment you can use to drill and refine all the oil that’s available. Building more oil production equipment won’t help you anymore, because it will cost you more oil to build the equipment than the equipment can produce.  All the oil there is available is already being produced by the equipment you have.

Building more oil production equipment now would make your oil production less efficient than it is already.  If your existing oil production equipment is working at 100% capacity, pumping oil out of the ground as fast as mechanically possible, if you invest more energy into building 10% more equipment, you’ve burned a bunch of oil just so you can operate all your equipment at only 90% capacity.  That means you wasted the oil it took you to build the new equipment, and that means you made your oil production less efficient.

The mathematics get more complicated from here, but all that does is to turn the smooth bell curve into a bell curve made up of lots of spikes and valleys.  Any politician or businessperson could show you three numbers and make it look like oil production could increase indefinitely.  But that’s just a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.  It takes a lot of numbers to be able to see through the short-term fluctuations to recognize an oil production bell curve.

We are somewhere close to the plateau on the world oil production bell curve right now.

When we pass the plateau, we will descend the back slope of the bell curve. Now exponential growth will become exponential decline.  As time goes by, the remaining oil in the world becomes increasingly deeply buried, impure, and hard to access.  Those factors have caught with you now.  Those limiting factors on oil production continue to increase.  Now every drop of oil you pull out of the ground becomes more expensive than the last.

We will never be able to use all the oil in the world, simply because some of it is so hard to reach that it would take more energy to drill it and refine it than the oil contained.

Dr. Hubbert predicted we would hit peak oil production in the United States sometime in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. We reached peak oil production in the United States in 1970.   Ever since, U.S. oil production has been on the downhill slope.

Dr. Hubbert predicted that if our trends of the time continued, we would hit peak oil production for the world in 1995.  Peak oil in the United States and the OPEC embargoes shocked Americans into researching and developing more energy efficient ways to use oil, so our current trends didn’t continue.  Dr. Hubbert died in 1989, so he can’t update his predictions now.

We bought ourselves a couple of extra decades.  A lot of scientists are working on this now.  Some think world peak oil is still ahead of us, some think we’re already past it.  None of them think it’s further away than 2020.  Due to all those fluctuations, you can’t get enough numbers to determine that you’ve passed peak oil until you’re already well beyond it.

A documentary to watch about this is called The End of Suburbia.  Another good, related documentary is called Who Killed the Electric Car?.

From the first two Laws of Thermodynamics, it’s obvious that all forms of energy, on any scale of production—local, national, or worldwide—must follow a bell curve.

Producing energy always requires moving things from one place to another.  That means that producing energy always requires energy.  Energy produced can be reinvested in producing more energy, at an exponential rate.  A greater amount of energy produced will create a demand for more energy to be produced, as people find more ways to use the energy.  Then they grow accustomed to having it, and forget how to live without it or else start living their lives in a way that makes them dependant on it.

Some energy sources are easier to produce than other energy sources of the same type.  Some energy sources are more pure than others of the same type.  Some energy sources are more accessible than others of the same type.  Eventually, the three negative feedbacks will overtake the two positive feedbacks, and make continued production of that energy source increasingly inefficient.

Hunting and gathering wild animals and plants requires energy.  The more you hunt and gather, the bigger families you can feed.  The bigger families you have, the more people need to be fed, and the more people there are to hunt and gather.  Some animals are easier to catch than others, and some plants are easier to collect than others.  Some animals and plants are more edible, more digestible, or more nutritious than others.  Some animals and plants live in places that are easier for you to reach than others, whether they live in more accessible terrain, or simply closer to you.

If an exponentially increasing number of people are hunting and gathering in an area, the easiest to find, the easiest to catch, the biggest, most edible, most digestible, and most nutritious animals and plants will eaten first, which will make the remaining animals and plants increasingly difficult—meaning inefficient—to find, catch, eat, and otherwise extract food energy from.

This is exactly how the pre-agricultural Mesopotamians depleted the wild food production of their local environment.

It’s also how our pre-human ancestors drove the wild animals of Africa to evolve to be so big and mean and to run so fast, because they ate all the ones that were easiest to catch.

It’s also how the first Native Americans drove a lot of animals in the Americas into extinction, because when they arrived in the Americas 14,000 years ago, they had well-developed hunting skills, and found two continents full of animals that had no natural fear of humans.  Some had natural fears of other animals that worked well against humans also, but others didn’t.  Once again, the animals that were easiest to catch were the ones that got eaten.

This is also how we’re depleting the world’s fishing banks today.

Farming and ranching works the same way as hunting and gathering, but in a man-made environment.  Now the limiting factors are the climate and the fertility of the soil.  Ranching and farming domesticated animals and plants requires energy.  The more you ranch and farm, the bigger families you can feed.  The bigger families you have, the more people need to be fed, and the more people there are to ranch and farm.  Some areas are easier to ranch and farm in than others.  Some plants and animals grow better in some places than others, and some of them grow faster, are more edible, more digestible, or more nutritious than others.

If an exponentially increasing number of people are ranching and farming in an area, the most fertile and most accessible fields will be used first.   When people move into a new region, like the Europeans did when they colonized the Americas, and the Colonial Americans did when they settled the west, the regions with the most fertile fields in the best climates are settled first.    That will make the remaining land increasingly inefficient for ranching and farming.

This is how the first Mesopotamian farmers over-farmed their lands and destroyed their environment.

This is also how agriculture spread through the world from there, and from the other original centers of agriculture, as the people of the most physically powerful civilizations conquered neighboring hunter-gatherers to claim more land to farm and ranch.

This is also, as I said, how the Americas were colonized and people of more physically powerful agricultural civilizations conquered people of less physically powerful civilizations.

This is also how the Norse settlers of Greenland, the original inhabitants of Easter Island, the Anasazi farmers of the American southwest, and various other groups of people destroyed their local environments and destroyed their civilizations along with them, which you can read about in Dr. Diamond’s book Collapse.

Logging in Europe followed the energy production bell curve. Logging requires energy.  The more trees you cut down, the more wooden axe handles you can build, the more wooden logging equipment you can build, and the more houses for loggers you can build.  The more wood is available, the more uses people find for it.  The more wood people have, the more families can be housed, the more their houses can be heated, and the more meals they can cook.   Some trees are easier to cut down than others.  Some trees are bigger than others.  Some trees grow in more accessible terrain, or simply closer to where the people live.

If an exponentially increasing number of people are logging in an area, the biggest and closest trees will be cut down first.  That will make the remaining trees increasingly inefficient for logging.

Mining coal, drilling natural gas, and mining uranium work the same way as drilling oil.

Building solar or wind power stations depends on mining the minerals to build them from, which works the same way as mining anything else.  It also depends on how often the sun shines or the wind blows in a location, how hard the sun shines or wind blows, how close those places are, and how accessible the terrain is.  If an exponentially increasing number of people are building solar or wind power stations, the stations will be built in the best places first.  That will make the remaining places increasingly inefficient for building solar and wind power stations.

And so on.

All the basic components that interact to create the oil production bell curve also apply to all other forms of energy production.

That means that all energy production in the entire world must follow one giant bell curve also.  The front and back sides of the bell curve will probably change their slopes greatly from time to time, and would show very large fluctuations as we move from food and firewood to coal to oil and so forth, exhausting one major energy source and then moving on to a different one that had different qualities.  But the gross global energy bell curve is simply all the individual global energy bell curves added together.

As you will notice, the exponentially increasing number of people harnessing solar and wind power, and creating an ever growing demand for it by finding ever more uses for it, was not a factor.  That’s because an exponentially increasing number of people won’t find more ever uses for solar and wind power, because they’ll need all of it just to take the place of the fossil fuels they were already using.  This is how things work on the downhill slope of the bell curve.

All life depends on energy, and all activity, including economic activity, depends on energy also.  What this means for our human economy is that as we pass the plateau of any energy production bell curve, the economy breaks down.  First the economy grew as energy was produced at an exponential rate.  Without being aware of the energy production bell curve, people won’t have any way of realizing they’re approaching the plateau.  Based on their experience to that point, more energy is always available.  They’ll plan on more energy still being available, even though a relatively constant level of energy will only be available now, followed by an ever decreasing amount of energy being available, as they have to devote ever more energy just to producing their energy.

This will result in frequent economic recessions that get progressively worse, and each of which is never fully recovered from.   Ultimately, it will lead to an unrecoverable economic depression.

You know what economic recession means.  Poverty for the least politically powerful people.  The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.  Specifically, the materially wealthy can invest some of their material wealth into protecting the rest of their material wealth, use the political advantages that their economic advantages give them to make the materially poor people bear the brunt of the economic breakdown, and let the economic and political inequality increase.

Poverty leads to things like crime rates and famine.  Those things reinforce poverty.  You know the rest of the story from there.

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The worst part of all is that this most fundamental law of the physical economy of the universe is completely counter-intuitive to us.  All life depends on matter and energy being concentrated in certain areas, but the universe constantly makes matter and energy spread out more evenly.  That means we naturally perceive matter and energy being concentrated in small areas to be good, because we don’t notice the larger amount of matter and energy that had to be dispersed to make that happen.

The part of our brains that gave us the ability to destroy the environment was one of the last parts of our brains to evolve.  Most of the rest of our brains evolved back when we were still chimpanzees.

The part of our brains that gave us the ability to destroy the environment was the part that gave us spoken language.  That was the last of the three things we needed for human intellect.  It worked so well because it gave us our advantage in surviving and reproducing that no other species on Earth could match. Human intellect as a whole let people change their own behavior instead of waiting for genetic evolution to change it gradually, and spoken language let humans make complicated plans among themselves on how to work together.  After we got that part of our brains, our brains didn’t evolve anymore, because there was nothing on Earth that could threaten us as a species anymore.   Now people could adapt their own behavior to fit their environments, instead of waiting around for genetic evolution to change our behavior over thousands of generations.

Individuals can figure out how the Laws of Thermodynamics affect people and the environment, and entire cultures can figure it out—which is how any group of people learns how to lead environmentally sustainable lifestyles.  Or at the very least, individuals and groups can figure out how it affects them within their local environment.  This is not to say that every group of indigenous people who leads environmentally sustainable lifestyles has discovered the Laws of Thermodynamics, but it is to say they figured out enough about how their environment worked to learn to live sustainably there—and the environment works according to the Laws of Thermodynamics.

This is an example of different parts of our brains working against each other, but producing the most stable genetic replication reaction possible.  Back when we were still chimpanzees (or actually, long before that), our brains evolved to make us perceive that concentrations of energy and matter were good.  When we evolved the final part of human intellect, we gained the ability to hunt a lot more effectively than we could without it.  That gave us the most stable way of replicating our genes.  People acting upon everything their brains made them perceive now started destroying the environment also, but at the time there was so much environment and so few people that the environment could withstand the effects people were having on it.  So the environmental destruction people were causing didn’t counteract the new stability of our gene replication that our new intellectual abilities created.

People who lead environmentally unsustainable lifestyles have always had an advantage in the short term over people who led environmentally sustainable lifestyles.  People who lead environmentally unsustainable lifestyles can build up to bigger population sizes temporarily.  They can also extract more resources from their environment, which means they can build more tools, more weapons, and a higher technological level.  Indigenous people who lead environmentally sustainable lives live the way they do because they’ve learned to live with a simpler economy than the Capitalists have.  That’s why the Capitalists are tearing down the indigenous people’s forests now and building factories and shopping malls on their land, instead of the indigenous people tearing down factories and shopping malls and replanting forests—because the Capitalists are the ones with the guns and the bulldozers.

This is also why it’s so easy for politicians to win votes by promising to do things to help the environment that can’t possibly succeed.  This is also why it’s so easy for Capitalists to make profits by selling people environmental suicide.  And, unfortunately, this is also why anti-Capitalists leaving everyone on their own to do whatever feels right to them can’t possibly save the world either.  Everyone acting on what they feel to be right is what caused the environmental crisis in the first place.

A big reason the environmental movement is accomplishing so little right now is because there is so much conflicting information floating around—or I should say, so little real information and so much disinformation and misinformation.   The Laws of Thermodynamics create a very convenient jump point between physics and biology, because the entire environmental crisis is being caused by that simple conflict between the most fundamental law of physics and the most fundamental law of biology.

As I’ve said, there is no easy solution to the environmental crisis.  But by knowing about those two fundamental laws and the fundamental conflict between humanity and the environment they create, people can recognize for themselves whether what politicians and business people are doing is going to help solve the environmental crisis or make it worse.

The Gaia Theory is an invaluable piece of information for environmental scientists, and it’s useful for other people to know about, but it still doesn’t break information down into small enough pieces for most people to use.  With the Laws of Thermodynamics, you can see a simpler version of how the global environment works, according to basic laws of physics.  With the Selfish Gene Theory you can see how the global environment works according to basic laws of biology.  With the Gaia Theory you can see how those basic laws of biology working together for zillions of organisms all at the same time created the global environment.  Then with the Laws of Thermodynamics you can see how basic laws of physics are making the global environment break down as a result of our actions.

The only way we can ever solve the energy and environmental crises once and for all is by building down to a global, localized organic agricultural economy, and thereby living within the physical limitations of the energy that we’re getting from the sun.   We can’t do that immediately, but with the right political and economic systems, we won’t need to do it for hundreds of years.  That means we can build down gradually, which means it will be a much easier transition.

Now that we know why humanity’s current relationship to the environment doesn’t work, how a sustainable relationship with our environment would work, and why we will all be better off that way, we can see what we have to do to get from here to there.  Nobody knows exactly how to make the transition, and making the transition will depend on everyone’s input and cooperation, so there is no clearly defined solution to the problem.  We will have to figure it out as we go along.  But we can rule out a lot of apparent solutions that won’t work—namely, any that make us depend on non-renewable energy and other environmental resources more than we do now instead of less.   By being aware of all of this, people can always ask the most crucial questions:

Is this going to help us build down to a global localized organic agricultural economy?

If so, how?

If not, why are you suggesting it?

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Now that I’ve told you about the Selfish Gene Theory, the Gaia Theory, and the Laws of Thermodynamics, I can tell you about the discoveries of the Club of Rome that began all of this.

All of the discoveries I’ve been telling you about so far have been scientific discoveries about humanity’s relationship to the world.  When the Club of Rome was founded, none of this science existed.

The Club of Rome put all of this into motion by using the information they did have at the time.  Namely, they began by studying humanity’s relationship to the world mathematically.

In 1968, humanity’s knowledge of the global environment consisted of some numbers.  We knew population sizes, acreage of farmland, productivity of farmland, total land area, total productivity of factories, a reasonable estimate of the supplies of natural resources in the world, and some pollution levels.  And we had records of how those things had changed over time.  That was the most critical part.

The Club of Rome figured out how all of those things fit together.  None of those numbers change independently of each other.  Any time you change any one of those numbers, at least one other number changes.  That meant they had discovered the outline of a gigantic algebraic equation.  But nobody knew what it was an equation for, or how to write it down.  Basically, they’d discovered that the world was ruled by some gigantic mathematical law, and nobody knew what the law was.

They didn’t have enough numbers to write a literal mathematical equation for what they were trying to study, and there was no way they could get reliable numbers for everything in the world anyway.  What they did instead was the next best thing.

A systems theory is an outline of a mathematical equation that doesn’t require complete numbers to make it work.  It measures the relationships of numbers to each other.  It’s a diagram of which numbers affect other numbers and how.  Without having perfect numbers, you can’t tell perfectly how much changing one number will change other numbers, but you can keep track of which numbers will change, and get a general idea of how much they’ll change.

A lot of environmentalists have heard about the  I = PAT equation.  This is a very simple systems diagram, expressed as a mathematical formula.  It says that humanity’s environmental Impact is a product of Population size, Affluence, and Technological level.  You don’t need any actual numbers to see how that relationship works.  Any time you increase population size, affluence, or technological level, you increase your environmental impact.  The amount you increase the environmental impact by raising one of those factors depends on the size of the other two factors. This works on any scale, from a village to a town to a city to a region to a continent to the entire world.

The Club of Rome developed a much more complicated systems diagram, and used all the numbers they had in it, to make it much more specific.  Once they’d done that, they could see that humanity had a problem.  Some of the numbers involved were constant, some were increasing, and others were decreasing.

The most obvious problem was that land area was a constant, and population was growing.  That meant there was an inescapable physical limit on the amount of available farmland in the world.   At any level of agricultural productivity, each person requires a certain amount of farmland to produce the food they need to live.  If the population kept increasing, eventually there wouldn’t be enough farmland to feed everyone.  Famine was a mathematical inevitability.  The population growth would be stopped by the physical limitation on available farmland.

A similar problem was industrial productivity.  People kept producing more in factories every year, but there was a physical limit on the natural resources available in the world.  People were going to stop producing things in factories eventually, because sooner or later they were going to run out of natural resources.

Factories also give off a lot of pollution.  That affects the food productivity of farmland.   The more people use factories to produce things, the less food each acre of farmland can produce, so the more acres of farmland it takes to support each person, and the fewer people can be supported with the available farmland.

Their systems diagram got a lot more complicated from there, but that’s the basic idea.

Humanity affects the environment in five ways:  Population size, usage of material goods, food production, natural resource usage, and pollution.  Each person needs food and material goods to live.  Material goods are made out of natural resources.  Farming, turning natural resources into material goods, and using material goods, all produce pollution.

The population of the world is growing at an exponential rate.   We are building factories at an exponential rate.  With those factories, we are turning natural resources into material goods at an exponential rate.  We are also generating pollution at an exponential rate.  When you put all the numbers together, the population is increasing at an exponential rate, and each person is consuming natural resources and generating pollution at an exponential rate.  Humanity’s impact on the environment is increasing at a triply exponential rate.

Back in 1968, the Club of Rome ran all the numbers through their mathematical formulas.  On our current course, we were going to run out of farmland and natural resources some time in the 21st century.  When that happened, billions of people were going to die.  Our food productivity depends on our usage of natural resources, because a lot of our natural resources are used to build farm machinery.  If we run out of farmland and our population keeps growing, we’ll have to start devoting more and more of our natural resources to farming to increase our food productivity.  But eventually our natural resources will run out.  Then we won’t be able to maintain our industrialized agriculture, so we won’t be able to maintain our food productivity.  That means we won’t be able to produce enough food to keep everyone alive.  That means worldwide famine killing billions of people, and inevitably, a lot of wars and plagues along with it.  With that set of numbers, most of the population of the world would be dead by 2100.

Then the scientists tried changing numbers.  They guessed that perhaps we had underestimated the supplies of natural resources in the world, they guessed that people could develop a lot of new technology to solve various problems, they guessed that people would start recycling more, that people would find easy ways to boost the food productivity of their farmland, and so on.  They made wildly optimistic speculations, beginning with assuming there were twice as many natural resources in the world as anyone realized.  But no matter what combination of numbers they tried, global environmental disaster always struck in the 21st century, and billions of people always died.

Then they tried a different approach to the problem.  Instead of changing the numbers themselves, they tried changing the rates at which the numbers were changing.  They went back to the real numbers they’d started with.   They found that if they just changed two things, global environmental disaster could be avoided, and most people in the world could be better off by the end of the 21st century than they are right now.  Of course, 96% of the world’s population doesn’t live in America.  By 2100, everyone in the world, including Americans, could have something less than an average American standard of living as of 1968.  Americans would have to make some sacrifices, but global poverty could be ended.   By 2100, everyone in the world could have an average American standard of living as of 1950, or something like that—that’s the basic idea, anyway.  I’m not talking about owning specific material possessions or everyone owning a house in the suburbs or anything, I’m talking about everyone working for a living, getting enough to eat, living lives free of oppression, and dying of old age—and having all the things they need to make those basic things possible.

In 1972, four scientists from the Club of Rome published their discoveries in their book, The Limits to Growth.   By doing that, they changed the very future they had predicted by raising people’s awareness of the problem, and people acting differently as a result.  That was, of course, the whole reason they published their book.

A lot of good came of their publishing their book.  So 20 years later, they started writing a sequel, as a progress report.  By now, there were environmental activists hard at work all over the world.  But when the scientists started putting all the numbers together again, they realized the news wasn’t nearly as good as it appeared on the surface.  They titled that sequel Beyond the Limits to Growth.

Ten years later, they wrote another sequel, called The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update.   They published that in 2002.

They had a lot more information, a lot more numbers, and a lot more science to use by now.  And all the numbers still indicate global environmental disaster and billions of deaths in the 21st century.

In The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update, the scientists give a lot of specific examples of ways to recognize that problems are growing, and what would need to be done to solve them.

Basically, right now we’re living 20% beyond what the world can sustain.  20% of the things we’re using right now are things we need to keep the global environment functioning.

To solve the problem, all we have to do is to use our resources differently.  Cutting down on the world’s population wouldn’t hurt, but we can do all of that we need over time just by everyone having smaller families.

Reducing our population size could be accomplished over generations by each woman limiting herself to having whatever number of children would let two of them grow up to be adults.  In America, that means having two children.  In countries with high child mortality rates, that means something more than two—at least, until their living conditions improve.  The population decrease could be left to some women choosing to have less than two children or not being able to have children for whatever reason.

Zero population growth necessarily depends on identifying all the problems that make population growth seem like a good idea to people, and changing them.  For instance, in a lot of impoverished countries, large families are the Social Security system.  Parents have 6 or 8 children so that when they’re too old to work anymore, their children will be able to provide for them.  We used to do the same thing here in America.  But if every couple in your country has 8 children, you get 400% population growth every generation, which means 4 times as many people having to feed themselves every generation, just to be able to feed their parents.  The environment can’t withstand that forever, which means sooner or later the country is going to run out of farmland.

Using our resources differently will mean using them more efficiently, and redistributing a lot of them.   That obviously means gigantic economic and political changes.  With our current political and economic systems, the easiest way to cut 20% out of our impact on the environment would be to take it from the people who are already the most economically marginalized and the least politically powerful.  But that will never work, because half the population of the world barely has enough to live already.

People who can barely get enough to live have very little choice in what impact they have on the environment.  They have whatever impact on the environment they need to have to keep themselves alive.

If those people are ever going to get the things they need to live, they’re going to get them because the people who could afford to part with them hand them over.

Since materially poor people can’t afford to make the choice to lead environmentally sustainable lifestyles, environmental sustainability depends on getting rid of the lower class, worldwide.  Getting rid of the lower class necessarily depends on getting rid of the upper class, because that’s what will happen when you redistribute resources from the way they’re distributed now to the way they will need to be distributed to let people stop taking whatever toll they need to take on the environment to keep themselves alive.

Escaping the environmental crisis necessitates a redefinition of the concept of “rightful ownership”.  The concept of rightful ownership that will enable people to use resources in the way people will need to use resources to escape the environmental crisis will be what we already call the Use-Value economy.

The immediate problems that overpopulation are causing could be solved by our cutting back on our environmental impact by 20%.  The term “overpopulation” only refers to what number of people your economic relationship to the environment can support.   A better term than “overpopulation” would be “over-exploitation of the environment”.

Once again, solving this problem depends on identifying the problems that make over-exploiting the environment seem like a good idea to people, and solving those problems.

A lot of people whine and whimper that the world is going to end if we change our economic system.  No, only Capitalism will end if we change our economic system.  As long as people need food to eat, there will always be work for people to do.

In the same way that overpopulation can be ended by women practicing zero population growth, over-exploitation of the environment can be ended by people practicing zero economic growth.   An increasing population requires an increasing exploitation of the environment to maintain the same economic level for the people.  People can also over-exploit their environment by trying to raise their economic level.  Or both, which is what’s happening now.

Zero population growth makes zero economic growth possible.  Zero economic growth means that every time one factory machine breaks down, you build one factory machine to replace it.

Zero economic growth makes solving the environmental crisis possible.  Once you stabilize your economic relationship to the environment, you can cut 20% out of your environmental impact, and be down under the physical limitations of the environment.

Cutting 20% out of an ever-increasing economic relationship to the environment doesn’t accomplish anything in the long run.  Technically, you wouldn’t be cutting 20% out of your economic relationship to the environment; you’d just be making it 20% more efficient.  But as long as you keep making a problem worse faster than you’re making it better, you’re not solving the problem.  An ever-increasing economic relationship to the environment that’s made 20% more efficient only produces 20% more; it doesn’t reduce the environmental impact of your economy.

An end to economic growth doesn’t mean an end to economic development.  People are always looking for new and better ways to do things.  With an end to economic growth, people would still be free to find new and better ways to use the economy they have.   Basically, equating economic development with economic growth is just economics for lazy people.

The big question is:  Where do we cut out 20% of our environmental impact?

The short answer is:  Everywhere.  In fact, the best solution to the environmental crisis is to cut as much as possible out of our environmental impact, because everything we cut out beyond 20% is a safety margin we’re building into our economic relationship with the environment.   It isn’t possible for us to say that we’re over-exploiting the environment by exactly 20%.  Neither is it possible to say exactly what that 20% refers to—we might be over-exploiting one part of the environment by 10% and another part by 30%.  Ultimately, we won’t be living at the physical limitations of the Earth until we’re living below the physical limitations of the Earth, because we can get a good idea what the physical limitations of the Earth are, but we can’t be exactly certain.  Environmental sustainability depends on keeping a safety margin and monitoring our relationship to the environment, so that if we start seeing warning signs that we’re over-exploiting the environment, our safety margin will give us time to react.

In The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update, the scientists give a lot of examples of warning signs that an environment is being over-exploited.   Basically, when you have to start devoting more and more of your economy to making your economy continue to function, you know you’re in trouble.

The eternal question of any economy is:  Where are the resources the economy depends on going to come from?

Some warning signs that your economy is in trouble are:

Having to invest more in claiming low-quality resources because the high-quality resources are gone.

Having to invest more in claiming hard-to-reach resources because the easy-to-reach resources are gone.

Having to clean up your own pollution because the environment isn’t cleaning it up fast enough anymore—or at all.

Poverty increasing because resources are being diverted away from people who need them.

Health care and education systems breaking down because resources are being diverted away from maintaining quality of life just to maintain life at all.

People fighting wars over resources because there aren’t enough to go around anymore.

Governments breaking down because the decision-making elite take advantage of their positions to protect themselves.

Does any of that sound familiar?

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There are three basic ways humanity’s economic relationship to the environment can work.   We can overshoot the physical limitations of the environment and destroy it.  We can overshoot the physical limitations of the environment, feel the effects, over-react, undershoot the limitations of the environment, feel the effects, over-react, over-shoot the limitations of the environment again, and so on, always fluctuating around the limitations of the environment but never being in control of the situation, never knowing what to expect, and always causing avoidable problems though our ignorance.  The other possibility is, we recognize problems arising and react to them in advance, before the problems get out of hand.

The commercial fishing industry is an example of an overshoot of a physical limitation of the environment leading to the collapse of an environmental system.   Fishing hooks were invented about 60,000 years ago.  For 60,000 years, fish were income for some people, and they were free food for materially poor people who lived in coastal areas.

What do we have now, but oceans full of fishing trawlers dragging 30-mile-long fishing nets, just to catch smaller numbers of smaller fish every year?  Now we have fish farms where we invest a lot of resources into trying to do things the oceans used to do for us for free, and not being able to do it nearly as well.  Now materially poor people who live in costal areas can’t catch their own fish and can’t afford to buy them either.

I grew up on the coast of Maine, and so did my mother.  We’ve seen this happen almost first-hand.

The fishermen where I come from would go out to fish on George’s Bank, off the coast of Canada.  The problem was, nobody knew how many fish there were in the ocean.  All anyone knew was that there had always been lots of fish in the ocean, so nobody imagined how it could be possible to catch them all.

Most deep-water fishing takes place in international waters.   That meant there was no regulation on who or how many people could fish where or when.   Basically, no one thought the situation through far enough to see there could be a problem, no one paid attention, and no one did anything about it until the problem was already upon them.

The most materially wealthy people built the biggest ships with the biggest nets.  They made the most money that way, and then they built even bigger ships with even bigger nets.  They caught so many fish that materially poor people couldn’t catch fish anymore.  They basically stole the food off the materially poor people’s tables and then sold it back to them.  What did you expect?  What they did was legal, and they made profits from it.   Big surprise.

Now people are trying to solve the problem by limiting the numbers of people who are allowed to fish, decommissioning fishing boats, and things like that.  If all goes well, the world’s fishing banks will recover within a few hundred years from now.

This is a perfect example of environmental destruction being caused by completely maladapted social structures.   Now we’re trying to solve the problem after the fact, and we’re trying to solve the problem by adapting the very social structures that caused it in the first place.

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The world’s oil supply since the OPEC embargo of 1973 is an example of a fluctuation around an environmental limitation that causes endless problems.

A lot of people love to say, “Don’t worry, just trust the markets.  The marketplace will work everything out.”  The world’s oil supply is a perfect example of why that isn’t true.

By 1972, certain people in certain countries had built their economies on the assumption that a certain amount of oil would be available.  But then the people who controlled the flow of oil decided to cut back on the supply.  They imposed an artificial environmental limitation by not pumping it out of the ground as quickly.

When the oil supply stopped meeting the demand and drove gas prices up, there were two basic solutions people found to the problem:  Improve fuel efficiency, or find more oil.  Some people did one, some did the other.

Since everyone was acting independently in the marketplace without any sort of oversight or control, no one had any way of knowing what everyone else was doing.  It takes time to develop new cars, and it takes time to drill new oil wells.   If a thousand people each react individually to a change in the market as of 1973, but nobody’s solution will go into effect until 1975, there’s no way for anyone to predict how everyone else’s solutions will affect the market by the time their own solution is completed.

People over-invested in solving the problem.  By the time everyone’s fuel-efficient cars were built, there was so much more oil in the market that the prices had dropped to the point that there wasn’t much demand for fuel-efficient cars.  Since there wasn’t any money to be made in fuel-efficient cars, people stopped building them and stopped investing in fuel efficiency research.

Then there was another oil embargo in 1979.  All those delays built into the marketplace solution made everything fluctuate again.

When the physical limitations of the world’s oil supply finally caught up to us in 2000, we could’ve had a 27-year head start at developing fuel-efficient technologies to deal with it.  But instead we’d thrown it away.

Both the fishing overshoot and the oil overshoot happened for the same reason any overshoot happens.  Basically, economic momentum had outrun people’s environmental foresight.

Avoiding an overshoot depends on people being able to see they’re approaching a physical limitation, and being able to take action to correct it before the pass the limitation.  In the same way, if you’re driving a car at night, you have to drive slowly enough that if you see something in front of you in the headlights, you’ll have time to stop the car before you hit it.   People who don’t do that get into a lot of avoidable accidents.

Humanity’s economic relationship to the environment is no different—just a lot more complicated.

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Chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone depletion was an example of people anticipating that they were reaching an environmental limitation and taking action to correct it before they overshot the limitation.

Chlorofluorocarbons were first invented in 1928.  They were used as coolants for refrigerators and air conditioners, as aerosol propellants, in packing material, in insulation, and in electronics components.

It wasn’t until 1974 that scientists discovered that one CFC molecule would start a chemical reaction that would destroy millions of ozone molecules.  Then they started testing the ozone layer, and discovered that the ozone layer was being destroyed everywhere, and especially over the poles where CFCs were building up due to the air currents.

There were a lot more delays built into this problem.  First, there was the time it took for CFCs to be created and put into refrigerators or wherever, and then for them to leak out and escape into the atmosphere.  Then there was the time it took for the CFCs to drift all the way up to the ozone layer.  Then there was the time it took to notice the problem, study it, and discover that it was affecting the atmosphere. The ozone depletion the scientists discovered in the 1970s was caused by the CFC industry of the 1950s, or something like that.  In the intervening time, people had been manufacturing more and more CFCs every year and installing them into more and more things they were going to leak out of eventually and escape into the atmosphere.

Then there was another delay caused by the time it took scientists to discover enough evidence for people to act upon.  Then there were more delays caused by the time it took the wheels of bureaucracy to start turning, then more delays caused by business leaders dragging their feet as usual at recognizing there was enough evidence to prove there was a problem, then more delays caused by some political leaders, like President Reagan, dragging their feet and saying it wasn’t a problem.

In 1987, 13 years after the problem was first noticed, the first international meeting was held at the United Nations for politicians to try to figure out what to do about the problem.  Then more delays were caused by politicians disagreeing about what they should do about it because of the effects that banning CFCs would have on their different economies.   But they did at least sign an agreement to get the process started.

Over the next 10 years, more evidence came in that indicated that the original agreement wasn’t enough to solve the problem, because the problem was worse than anyone had realized at the time.  So four more meetings were held and more agreements were made, until by 1997 an agreement was finally made that could contain the problem (at least, as far as we know), with the phasing out of CFCs and other ozone-destroying chemicals in 2000.

This is an example of a problem that was solved before it got out of control, and with all those delays it still took 26 years to solve the problem.

The ozone layer is still being destroyed, and will continue being destroyed for maybe 20 more years.  Ozone molecules are produced by chemical reactions in the atmosphere, so once all the CFCs break down, the ozone layer will recover, but once again it will take hundreds of years.

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Environmental sustainability depends on a certain combination of environmental and social structures.

The basic structures we need are:

To constantly monitor our impact on the environment.

To take action when warning signs are first noticed.

To adapt our economy as necessary to solve the problem.

To adapt our economy even more if necessary, when further information comes in.

To keep our economy moving slowly enough that its economic momentum won’t outrun our environmental foresight.

To use renewable resources only as fast as they’re renewed.

To use non-renewable resources only as fast as alternatives can be found to replace them.

And to pollute only as fast as the natural cycles of the world can break down the pollution and reclaim it.

Of course, doing all of this will require us to construct political systems that make doing these things possible.  Those political systems would be Green Socialism.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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A lot of Capitalists assume the best economic solution to the environmental crisis is to exploit the environment right up to the point that we can no longer afford to extract anything from it, so that we get all we can out of the environment and build up our economy as much as possible—as if the environmental economy works the same as the stock market.

That won’t work for a number of reasons.

First of all, there isn’t a point at which environmental sustainability or unsustainability will be decided.  It’s more like a slope leading up to the edge of a cliff.   The slope represents possible relationships between population size and standards of living.   Everywhere on the slope we have the same size of economy, but as we ascend the slope, the economy gets spread out among more people.  If we wait until the very last minute to start leading environmentally sustainable lifestyles, we’ll end up with the worst possible standard of living.

If we wait until we reach the very edge of the cliff, and we assume optimistically that Capitalism has an OFF switch, which we could throw to shift instantly to an egalitarian economic system, by that point we’ll all be slaves to the environment.  Waiting until the last possible moment to shift to an environmentally sustainable economy necessarily means spreading our economy as thinly as we can.  That means spreading our economy so thinly that we barely have enough left to keep everyone alive.  That means everyone in the world getting up every morning, going to work, earning enough to keep themselves alive for one more day, going home with nothing else to show for their work, and then going back to work the next day to do the same thing all over again, every single day of their lives.  A lot of people in Africa already live that way.

Basically, this way we’d turn the entire world into a giant Wal-Mart, where we’d all have to work bagging groceries for our entire lives, because nobody could afford to build universities anymore to learn how to do anything else.

Of course, if we don’t magically turn into Socialists at the very last moment before we jump off the environmental cliff, it’ll only be worse.  If everyone in the world has barely enough, then there would be only one way left for people to get more: fight each other for it.   Then we all fall over the environmental cliff.  If people are fighting over barely enough resources to keep everyone alive, whoever is fighting in self-defense is fighting for survival.  People who are fighting for survival are fighting to win.  In order to win, they’re going to need to get hold of more resources to fight with.  That means extracting more resources from the environment to keep themselves alive in the short-term, and that means sacrificing the environment in the long term.

The fate of the global environment has come down to a very straightforward chemical reaction.

People are made out of topsoil nutrients.  Period.  If topsoil nutrients don’t move into people at the same rate they move out of people, it means the people aren’t getting enough to eat.  Period.  That means you have a famine, and lots of people are going to die.  Period.

No amount of bleeding heart liberal know-it-alls believing that life is so mystical and magical and wondrous that it can’t possibly all be caused by topsoil nutrients is going to change that.   If your life isn’t made possible by the nutrients in the food you eat, what is it made possible by?  Are you really going to try to convince impoverished foreign peasants that there are mystical magical wondrous things in life that are more important than food?  How exactly do you intend to win public support for your political movement that way?

Geez, and progressively minded people try to convince me that teaching everyone about science is going to make them overlook important things in life.

Basically, The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update is a book about how some of the world’s greatest scientists reinvented the anti-Capitalist revolution all on their own, by studying scientific evidence.  The difference between their version of anti-Capitalism and the traditional version is, theirs isn’t just their opinion about how people should live.  It’s simple mathematics.  People need certain things to live.  Are they going to get them, or not?  Are we going to institute the economic and political systems we need to get people the things they need, or not?  Period.

The economic and political systems we have now work the way they do because of the decision-making structures that are built into the political systems.  If we had different decision-making structures, we would have a different economy.  If we want a different economy, we need different decision-making structures.

The basic decision-making structure the scientists allude to, but stop somewhere short of spelling out in the interests of maintaining their professional reputations, depends on two basic things.

First of all, individual people need to be able to get the information they need, take action independently, and work together to solve problems.   That means a political system to which everyone can contribute their input, and in which everyone can participate.

Second, social structures that enable large-scale decision-making and that absolutely minimize all delays.

This creates a hierarchy with only two tiers.  The top is basically the United Nations, although not necessarily the United Nations as we know it.  The bottom is something that’s basically identical to the World Social Forum.  Or the Industrial Workers of the World’s idea of one big union.

My intellectual peers number about two tenths of one percent of the human race.  As far as most people are concerned, I have intellectual superpowers.  To try to build a political structure that had no hierarchy at all would be to try to force me, and people like me, to be just like everyone else, just so everyone else could feel equal to us.  That would be nothing but an emotional welfare system.  The Communists tried to force everyone to live at equally low economic levels, and where did it get them?  Trying to force everyone to live at equally low intellectual levels just to keep from hurting anyone’s feelings would cause more harm than good.

I’ve already told you how escaping the environmental crisis will depend on Green Socialism.  Keeping the government democratic depends on an effective Anarchistic dual power system.  It doesn’t matter if Anarchists don’t want to see it that way.  Anyone who knows enough about how the world works to serve in the upper tier understands that democracy and political equitability depend on the citizens directly wielding an effective balance of power.  In a democracy, the workers are supposed to be one big union.  Anyone who weilds power over anyone else is inherently untrustworthy.  Anyone who deserves to weild power over anyone else understands that, and understands that democracy survives because the workers are one big union.  That’s why I said that if anyone ever claims to found a government on my work who perceives Anarchism to be a threat to social stability, shoot him.

The bottom tier is pretty much everything the people who set up the World Social Forum have figured out.  If you carry what the scientists hinted at to its logical conclusion, it means a general social structure the size of the entire world, in which anyone can come together and meet with anyone else, to talk about their problems, help each other solve them, learn from each other, and whatever else.  The main difference between the World Social Forum as it exists today and this social structure of the future would be that the people in the upper level of the hierarchy wouldn’t interfere with it.  Instead of the World Social Forum being a movement of anti-Capitalist revolutionaries, it would be just the way things are done from now on.

The social structures we will need to escape the environmental crisis will be something like a government, but nothing like any governments we have right now.  Since all of economics is a product of the environment, and all of politics is a product of economics, any politician who isn’t an expert at environmental science doesn’t know the first thing about economics or politics.  So once again, carrying what these scientists couldn’t afford to put in print to its logical conclusion, there are extremely few people in the world right now who are qualified for the upper level of the hierarchy.

In a political system constructed with the goal of escaping the environmental crisis, a certain amount of political inequality is inescapable, for the simple reason that there are some exceptional people who have far better abilities and skills for dealing with the environmental crisis than anyone else.

However, if political inequality becomes the goal of any of those people, the political system is guaranteed to break down.  Environmental sustainability will depend on everyone’s input, because in the global environmental crisis, everyone is affected by other people’s actions.  Intentional political inequality is the intentional prevention of people’s contribution of their input.  So Rule #1 for anyone who wants to get into the upper tier of the hierarchy is, if you try to make the government politically inequitable beyond what your exceptional abilities make inescapable, you’re out.  And then maybe life in prison, or death by firing squad, or something like that.

In the lower tier of the hierarchy, everyone working together can keep the political system equitable, even though it isn’t literally equal.  Scientific geniuses still have to eat, and if all the world’s farmers are in the lower tier, the people in the upper tier better be nice to everyone.

More specifically, all scientific geniuses don’t necessarily have to belong to the upper tier.  Right now I don’t belong to the upper tier.  The lower tier is what makes the upper tier possible.  Once you establish the lower tier as a worldwide social structure in which everyone can work together independently of their governments, you give the people what they need to build a new upper tier if they don’t like the one they have.

Basically, anyone who’s qualified to serve in the upper tier understands that environmental sustainability depends on practical political equality, and practical political equality depends on the people in the lower tier being able to replace the people in the upper tier or completely dismantle the upper tier and replace it with a new upper tier easily at any time.  That depends on the people in the upper tier teaching the people in the lower tier as much as those people are capable of learning about how to perform the functions of the upper tier.  Motivated people who care about environmental sustainability but don’t have exceptional abilities at it are worth a lot more than corrupt geniuses.  There’s no such thing as a corrupt environmental genius, because environmentalism and corruption are mutually exclusive.  If you’re not an environmental genius, you don’t belong in the upper tier anyway.

The success or failure of the upper tier won’t be measured by elections or futile attempts at impeachment like we have now.  The success or failure of the upper tier will be measured by public approval.  Right now, President Bush has about a 70% public disapproval rating.  If 70% of Americans want him gone, obviously the only reason he’s still President is because those people are unable to remove him from office legally and unwilling to take their chances on removing him from office illegally.  Obviously, a president with a 70% public disapproval rating is an armed revolution the public doesn’t dare to start.

Basically, you teach everyone in the lower tier about planetary biology, and then whoever is the best at it gets to move up to the upper tier.  But the people in the lower tier all learn how to do the jobs of the people in the upper tier, and they can remove people from the upper tier at any time by a public vote of no confidence.

Anyone who can’t understand all of this can’t do the job of the upper tier.  Anyone who can do the job will go to work every day knowing that the only reason they have their jobs is because the people in the lower tier have chosen not to overthrow them.

The scientists who wrote The Limits to Growth didn’t actually think of all of this, because they aren’t trying to mastermind a political revolution, they’re just trying to help facilitate a transition to environmental sustainability.  But they’ve been saying since the first book came out that to make a transition to environmental sustainability, radical social change will be necessary.  And that’s what we’re here for.

The basic political system the scientists did spell out—without realizing it—is the same political system that small groups of indigenous people who live in the jungles of the Amazon, or wherever, have been using all along.  These scientists didn’t figure it out, they just reinvented the idea.  Other scientists have figured out how that works recently, and obviously, everyone figured it out at one point.

A basic indigenous tribal government consists of two basic tiers.  In the upper tier are the elders of the tribe, who earned their places there by being the best at the most important things.  In the lower tier is everyone else.  The people in the lower tier have enough brains to understand that the elders of the tribe know the most, so they’d better do what they say.  The people in the upper tier have brains enough to understand that if they betray the people in the lower tier, their political system will break down.

This is the original political system of humanity.  People used it all over the world for at least 50,000 years, from the evolution of spoken language to the first development of agriculture.  There are some people who are still using it today.  It has proven so successful for the same reason anything proves successful—because it works.  Big decisions get made by the people who are best at making them, little decisions get made by everyone, everyone does whatever they’re best at, and everyone works together get what they need.

As you may have noticed, that was how the government here in America was supposed to work.  The problem is, a lot of people figured out how to get into the upper tier and cheat, and thought they could get away with it.  Now a lot of people in the lower tier have learned that they can’t trust the people in the upper tier, so they don’t cooperate with them—not that cooperating with them would do them any good anyway.  The people in the upper tier have the goal of political inequality, and sure enough, it’s making our political system break down.

I think it’s worth pointing out that Lenin—one of the best-known anti-Capitalists in history—figured out his own version of this basic political structure.  The upper tier of the Soviet Union was going to be made up of the Communist leaders, and the lower tier was going to be made up of the workers.  The workers would control the means of production, and if they didn’t approve of what their leaders were doing, they could stop them in their tracks with a general strike.  As you can see, he had all the basic components in place.

Lenin only served in office for about one year after the smoke cleared from the Russian Revolution, so he never got the chance to put this into effect, and Stalin obviously wasn’t interested in political equality for the workers.  Even if Lenin did get the chance to put his visionary form of government into effect, and even if he did live up to his word (he could’ve been lying, but we’ll never know), it still wouldn’t’ve worked.  Lenin still had fundamental misunderstandings of how the physical economy of the universe and the economy of life work, so he still would’ve made big mistakes, things would’ve gone wrong, and no one of the time would’ve been able to figure out why.  The Russian Revolution happened 50 years before the idea that eventually would become planetary biology was even conceived.  Lenin would’ve made a lot of plans that didn’t work, and a lot of promises that weren’t physically possible for him to deliver, and the Soviet political system would’ve turned into just another good idea that didn’t work in practice.

Ultimately, escaping the environmental crisis depends on our adapting the original political system of humanity and applying it on a global scale.

As I said, the World Social Forum is a good beginning of the lower tier, and the United Nations is a good idea for the upper tier.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of other tiers in between right now that are getting in the way.

This is not to say that the literal United Nations should be the only part of the upper tier.  This is to say that any social structure that’s created needs to be a part of either the upper tier or the lower tier.  Any social structure people create is either a part of the tier where exceptional people make big decisions, or it’s part of the tier where everyone makes little decisions.

Really, the only thing standing between us and environmental sustainability is all those excess tiers that create political inequality—which are also known as social structures that make oppression possible.

Remember what I said about the lower tier making the existence of the upper tier possible, and how practical political equality depended on the people of the lower tier learning enough about planetary biology to recognize that the people in the upper tier were exceptionally good at it, but also to be able to take over their jobs if they failed?  And you know how, at this very moment, you’re reading a book about the revolutionary uses of planetary biology?   By the end of this book, you will know more about planetary biology than just about anyone who occupies any upper tier, with the exception of people who work in scientific advisory committees for the United Nations, and you’ll know about lots of other books you can read if you want to learn more.

You are helping to build the lower tier at this very moment.  Then it’s just a matter of building an upper tier where the people actually know more than the people in the lower tier.  If everyone who’s in the lower tier now learns how to serve in the new upper tier better than most anyone who’s currently occupying an upper tier, all that will leave will be to make the people who currently occupy the upper tiers understand that they’re fired.

This is a political revolution through education.

Really, how much of a stretch of the imagination is it to say that anyone who can’t get a Ph.D. in planetary biology doesn’t deserve to be a political leader?

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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