Sustainability Of The Modern Human Economy

By Larry Weiers

To most people, the word “sustainability” implies that whatever is being talked about is being managed in a responsible way so that it may continue well into the future. We would expect that a sustainable practice, company or industry is one that could continue indefinitely without significant harm to our environment.

This book was written to illuminate the concept of sustainability from a scientific viewpoint. It has detailed sections on energy systems, essential materials, the atmosphere and population trends, as these are foundational to understanding sustainability.

This book is not only about the physical aspects of sustainability, but also explores the way we humans think about and take positions on issues. It looks critically at the difference between open minded scientific examination and pre-determined beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Weiers
• Release date: Mar 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370321278

Larry Weiers

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Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Digression 1: Memes

• Supply and Demand

Section One-Energy

• Energy Overview

• Food energy

• Heat Energy

• Energy for Transportation

• Electrical Energy

• Sum-Up Energy Section

Section Two: Essential Commodities

• Land

• Water

• Garbage

• Scarce Resources

• Specialization and Free Trade

• Sum Up Essential Commodities

Section Three: Atmosphere and Climate Change

• The Atmosphere

• Carbon Dioxide

• Air Temperature

Digression #2: Indoctrination and Mental Constructs

• Global Warming

• CO2 Reduction

• Sum Up: Atmosphere and Climate Change

Section Four Population

• Population Overview

• Fertility Rate

• Aging Populations

• Immigration and Refugees

Digression # 3: Tolerance

• Population Pyramids

• Birth Control

Digression #4: Rhetoric

• Sum Up Population

Section Five: Evolution

• Evolution of The Universe

• Evolution of Life

• The Genome

• Evolution of Human Thinking

• Evolution of Religion

Digression #5: Reason VS Faith

• Religious Extremism

Digression #6: Myths

• Sum Up Evolution

Synopsis

Digression # 7: The Spaceship

Afterword

Preface

This book was written to illuminate the concept of sustainability.

To most people, the word sustainability implies that whatever is being talked about is being managed in a responsible way so that it may continue well into the future. We would expect that a sustainable practice, company or industry is one that could continue indefinitely without significant harm to our environment.

At present, the concept is being kicked around by many who have co-opted the word for their own purposes. Politicians, corporations, special interest groups, and Miss Universe contestants all attempt to green wash their agenda with a popular and intelligent sounding word.

Political leaders claim their policies are sustainable, coal companies declare their mountaintop mining is sustainable, oilsands project proponents advertise how their activities are sustainable, and Wal-Mart claims to be a sustainable company. It seems that everyone who gives a speech these days must use the word in some fashion.

Even the most obviously non-sustainable entities, like military arms manufacturers or tobacco companies, will have a sustainability policy prominently displayed on their website.

Faced with all this babble on the subject, I would like an opportunity to shine some light on sustainability from my own point of view, using scientific principles and a technical focus on the elements needed to sustain our human existence.

This book is not only about the physical aspects of sustainability, but also explores the way we humans think about and take positions on issues. It looks critically at the difference between open minded scientific examination and pre-determined beliefs.

I feel very fortunate that I have the luxury of time to explore issues in depth, and can say what I honestly think without outside influence. Those of us that choose to write and publish an e-book in the current era are lucky to have all the necessary tools at our fingertips, with the only downside that perhaps no one will read it.

I hope you find something interesting or thought provoking in this wide-ranging book.

Larry Weiers

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Introduction

The human race has reached a very special time in history. Our population is over 7 billion, and we have taken over much of the planet to provide ourselves with the necessities of life. Recently people are demanding more than just the necessities, including luxuries such as travel and richer entertainment. Other species are retreating or being consumed by our advance, and there is growing destruction of our ecosystem. Physical evolution of our own species is in a totally new state- survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of almost everyone. Health or fitness is no longer an important factor in our ability to reproduce new humans or keep them alive.

Population is rising dramatically while our average age is increasing and average fitness levels are plummeting. Certain groups are bent on violence and destruction rather than tolerating others and working towards common goals.

This situation has many of us concerned. Most of us care about our planet and other living creatures, and have a deep-seated compulsion to be good stewards of the land. We would like to leave our descendants with a functioning planet and a bright future, so we are eager to understand what we might do about it.

Digression 1: Memes

Throughout this book, I will take the liberty of digressing away from the main topic at hand to tackle more philosophical issues. Instead of talking about the physical world, these sections deal with how the human mind functions. These digressions are listed with links in the table of contents.

The first of these is the concept of Memes.

I observe that there are common thoughts that spread around, sometimes called common knowledge and referred to as memes by social scientists. These are things that somehow everyone knows just by interacting in society. For example, politicians are dishonest, lawyers prey on widows and orphans, putting a brick in your toilet tank or using green bags for groceries is a good thing for the environment, coal is bad, windmills are good, electric cars are good, pipelines are bad, carbon dioxide is bad. Moderate religions are good but extremist thinking is bad.

Advertising experts would refer to these perceptions as branding. The public perception of a populist issue is an association that sticks solidly to something, regardless if it is fair or scientifically true. These brands can be reinforced by the media, and often we can immediately tell if a news outlet is for or against a certain individual or issue by the photos they include. If they want to hurt a certain person’s brand, they will include an unflattering photo of the person grimacing or highlighting wrinkles, while if they support that person they will show a wise and thoughtful portrait. If they are against certain industrial developments, they will post photos of the worst smog and garbage, even if they have to get them from an unrelated location. You really can tell a lot about any newspaper or media company just by looking at the pictures critically.

If someone asks you what you think about a certain issue, and you quickly respond with a populist response, you may just be plucking a handy meme out of your brain, rather than giving a reasonable answer after a detailed critical analysis. There is a tendency for people to have a ready answer to any question. It is rare to hear someone respond that they just don’t know enough about that subject. Look at any poll, and the pro or con numbers are always way ahead of the not sure numbers, even though we could reasonably expect few true experts in any random poll. Take this poll as an example:

Question: Do you believe that UFOs have visited Earth?

Results: Yes: 30%. No: 54%. Unsure 16%

This is an issue requiring a fair bit of experience and expertise to answer, yet most people polled will go ahead and promptly answer one way or the other, many times drawing on a social meme to do so. If there is an answer that just pops into your head as you discuss topics with others, there is a good chance that you are accessing a meme rather than giving a reasoned response.

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Back to sustainability. At present, many people in the world today see the situation something like this: Humans are using way too many resources, like oil, plastic and trees from rain forests, and should cut back. Greedy corporations will do or say anything in their quest to make a fast buck. Bad companies are dumping too many pollutants into the water and air, and the government should do something, like impose more regulations. We should all conserve and be more efficient, or at least get on the bandwagon to buy energy saving light bulbs. If we are really committed to change we need to go out and bravely confront those companies that are doing nefarious things, in the way that Greenpeace does. Politically, green advocates are often ready to battle evil organizations like pipeline companies that are running rampant throughout the world.

The way I see the world, and will elaborate in the book, is quite different and goes like this: There are way too many people in the world. This is a result of high population growth rates driven by high fertility rates and improving survival rates over recent generations. The poorest parts of the world are being heavily influenced by value systems that keep them poor, uneducated and at each other’s throats in a brutal cycle of intolerance. Most humans have moved to urban areas with many more headed that way, and have lost the skills of our ancestors to live off the land. Modern society is completely reliant on modern energy and political systems for survival. The list of essential commodities has broadened to include energy in addition to food, water and shelter. There is no going back to a past before the transition to our current economy as there are no longer enough old fashioned sources of energy to meet our needs. The economy reacts in lockstep with demand, and whatever people demand will be provided to them if they can afford to pay.

My view is that sustainability is all about how many people are entering the planet and how many resources they are going to demand during their lifetimes. It is statistically easy to estimate the resources used per person, which is highly dependent on their wealth. If population is stabilized before we damage the planet too severely, we have a good chance of being a sustainable society. Humans will make decisions based on their own internal logic plus what they have been taught or how they have been influenced, so philosophical factors are also very important for our world’s future.

There is good news and bad news in this book, but my aim is more to present data and inform than to predict a rosy or apocalyptic future.

A lot of the analysis in this book is based on a stable economy, one in which technology is working as expected and there are no major disruptions. Our modern economy is more fragile than most people realize, and we are reminded of that whenever extreme events reveal how thin the veneer of civilization is. It has been said that society is only three meals away from anarchy.

In times of war or natural disaster, we see how quick some people are to pull out a gun and go looting as they get hungry and desperate. In these situations, we start getting a better appreciation of energy and social contracts as essential, not just a lifestyle choice. Just think…without electricity for simple services such as elevators, cooling and water supply, high rise buildings would be completely uninhabitable. What fraction of the population could climb twenty flights of stairs even once? How about twenty times a day? Without petroleum to transport all the necessities of life into the cities where 80 percent of people in developed economies live, and electricity to cool and elevate people, our cities, home to most humans, would be completely uninhabitable.

In this book, I hope to bring to light some new perspectives that may assist the reader in their own thinking about sustainability. Because pictures communicate more effectively than tables of numbers, I have embedded quite a lot of charts and graphics. These aren’t meant to be overly precise or up to date, but do fairly highlight the underlying relationships or indicate real trends. I think it is very important to show factual data without bias. Often, data collected to support a certain premise is later used to support a completely different conclusion. That’s OK, good data is always a solid foundation, and conclusions developed from it are always subject to change. An example is the data recorded by early astronomers on the movements of planets, taken to better understand how the other bodies revolved around the Earth. The data was later used to support the revolutionary theory that the planets all revolved around the sun. The data didn’t have to be modified to fit the new theory at all!

Even if you don’t like any of my theories developed in this book, please trust that the data presented is as factual as possible, and you are welcome to develop your own ideas about what is really going on.

Supply and Demand

The concept of Supply and Demand is a key foundation of this book. It is illustrated in the simple graphic below:

supply demmand

Graphic 2: Elasticity of supply and demand with price

This chart shows the relationship between supply, demand and price of any commodity in a free market system. It illustrates that supply and demand are linked in a predictable way that can be estimated for any commodity. Let’s take gasoline as an example. If a hurricane hits Texas and shuts down refineries there, the supply would be reduced and the price would go up due to the increased scarcity of the product. Similarly, if the long weekend rolls around and demand increases, price would also go up. We sort of understand this, but are always ticked off by rising gasoline prices. Transportation fuel is expensive, and many mistrust and dislike big oil companies. At the time this book was being written, a worldwide oversupply of oil had just reduced the price by about one half.

By the time you read this, a worldwide shortage of oil resulting from reduced investment in new oil projects may once again increase the price of oil to over $100 per barrel. Boom and bust cycles in commodities are to be expected in free market economies, as conditions change. No matter what you think of the price of gasoline, it does behave rationally in the absence of collusion, just like every other commodity, and the price that settles out is at the intersection of the supply and demand curves.

Note that this relationship works for free markets only. The price of gasoline in Venezuela is less than 20 cents per gallon not because of market forces, but due to government price controls, which I would say are completely unsustainable.

The point of this example is that, if we wanted to reduce the amount of gasoline used, we are far better off trying to reduce the demand than we are to reduce the supply. Reducing the supply would only raise the price marginally, after the market rebalanced.

We often see environmentally conscious activists working against resource and energy companies, trying to slow or stop any project that is vulnerable to opposition. In the long run, and in the big picture, it only serves to move energy companies around among their global opportunities and very slightly raise the price of the product. In the cold, hard eyes of an economist, the interveners would be far better off to lobby governments to raise taxes on gasoline, which would have the same equilibrium effect on demand. This is not to say that all oil projects should be done, just that for a typical project with typical impact, the planet doesn’t care where they are located. If protestors stop natural gas drilling projects in Quebec or New York state, there will just be more drilling in places like Texas. If there is a demand for the product, the suppliers will stop at nothing to keep the supply chain full. The higher the price the more determined they will be to do their job.

Perhaps the best example of a supply/demand situation misunderstood and mishandled is that of foreign illegal drugs coming into North America. Common sense tells us that drugs are a big problem for our society, so we should aggressively chase down all drug producers, transporters and dealers to stamp out the problem. The US Drug Enforcement Agency has worked tirelessly to harass foreign producers and catch importers, in addition to arresting thousands of resident drug dealers. This is all focusing on the supply side of the drug problem. The result is jails that are full of drug trade people and rising violence anywhere that the trade meet resistance. Since just about anyone in North America who wants (demands) the illegal drug of their choice can get it, it is fair to conclude that all the Fight Against Crime has done is raise the price of the product by some amount, but not changed the total usage very much. Many critical thinkers are starting to realize that a better solution is to legalize, regulate and tax the illegal drug trade, as is done with alcohol. This would take billions of dollars out of the hands of criminals and redirect it to government revenues. Consumption levels could then be managed by price changes, all according to the same supply and demand relationship. The point to take away is that drug dealers will stop at absolutely nothing- including the murder of about 1100 US citizens per year- to keep the supply chain full for this profitable commodity.

The most important implication of this supply/demand relationship is that the best way to get rid of any undesirable activity is to stop supporting (demanding) it. As an example, if you don’t want to see beggars in the streets, just stop giving them money. Personally, I give to charities that feed and house homeless people in my home town, but never give cash to street beggars, as that would be like paying them to sit out in the cold rather than going to the homeless shelter.

Even religious services work in this manner. Christian churches and Muslim mosques are flourishing in many countries because they have a group of sponsors willing to fill their collection plates in return for advice from the pulpit and guidance on how to live their lives.

Holy Men, like street beggars and salvation army volunteers, provide guilt relief for a fee. We are willing to demand their services and pay for them, but we should be aware of what they do with our donations. The cash given to a street beggar will most likely be used for addictive substances, while that given to the salvation army will most likely be used for a charitable purpose. Your simple decision to drop a few dollars in either place can make a big difference in what commodities are subsequently pulled through the economy.

Consider the whaling industry of 150 years ago. At its peak, tens of thousands of these beautiful, intelligent mammals were being slaughtered every year. The largest whaling center was in the US, in the Nantucket area, but there were whaling ports in many other countries including Europe and Australia. Japan is one of the last holdouts that still allow whales to be harvested.

If you lived in that era and felt sorry for the whales, what could you have done about it? I suppose you could have gotten a protest group together and marched to Nantucket to picket the whalers, but the rough-cut sailors would be more likely to throw you in the Sound than stop whaling. Even if they were forced out of the eastern US, they would just keep whaling out of different international harbors, as whale oil was a completely fungible international commodity at the time, the same as petroleum oil is today. Who then stopped the whalers? It was innovative petroleum pioneers in the 1850s who developed a way to make kerosene from petroleum oil. Twenty five years later, the whaling fleet was reduced by over 90 percent as kerosene disrupted whale oil for lighting.

In turn, electricity disrupted the kerosene lamp industry a few decades later, by providing a superior product, enabling kerosene consumers to stop demanding the product. Then the kerosene lamp industry simply disappeared for lack of demand, even though there was still plenty of supply.

It is worth asking ourselves who controls the flow of any commodity. On first glance, we could look at an oil pipeline project and jump to the conclusion that the oil companies decide how much oil should be flowing in that particular pipe. That thinking is backwards. The oil companies are just installing a conduit to connect the sources of supply and the points of demand. They really have no choice in how much oil flows, and just a few limited options like pipe, rail cars or trucks. The collective we control the flow of all commodities in the modern economy, as we exercise our collective demands.

By this reasoning, if you are against oil, coal fired power, or marijuana, just stop using gasoline, electricity or pot, convince everyone else to do the same, and those industries would quickly disappear. If people stopped paying fortune tellers to read their palms, the palmistry industry would collapse just as surely.

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Section One-Energy

Energy Overview

Any discussion of a sustainable future is inextricably linked to the energy required by we humans in our modern economy. All the other stuff that we need is totally dependent on energy being available, for example the electricity needed to provide essential drinking water. We require energy in four main categories: carbohydrate energy for food; energy for heat, from sources like natural gas or wood, energy for transportation like oil, and energy for electricity which comes from multiple sources. The following pie chart shows the relative amounts of energy in each category, on a heat energy basis:

Graphic 3: Energy mix

Before the modern economy, and before humans discovered fire, there was only one type of energy in the system-food. Today it is the smallest slice of the pie.

The chart below shows the historical use of non-food energy fuels in the US, from back when wood was about the only energy source, used for heating, until the present where oil is the most important energy fuel. We can see the recent trends showing a reduction in the amount of oil, increase in natural gas, and reduction in coal as well as an increase in renewables, primarily wind power:

EIA_energyhistory

Graphic 4: History of energy consumption

We often see different energy streams depicted in charts as if they were equivalent; as if a unit of heat energy is the same as a unit of electrical energy, because they can all be expressed in terms of BTUs, calories or some other common unit. In reality, they are very different. You can’t eat electricity, and your car can’t run on hamburgers. Also, it is easy to store oil products like gasoline, just by putting them in a plastic container. But it is difficult to store even a small amount of electricity. There are also conversion costs to go from one to the other. We lose two thirds of the energy in oil or natural gas to convert it to electricity. We lose two thirds of the energy in oil to convert it to mechanical power. We lose a whopping 90 percent of the food energy we eat to convert it to physical motion. In many applications, we lose half of the electrical energy we put into batteries when we store and then withdraw it. A general rule of thumb is that electrical energy costs about 3 times as much as heat energy, because most of it is refined from heat energy, in a process where most of the primary energy is lost.

Only when we understand the differences can we appreciate why we don’t have battery backup on our large power systems, why it is expensive to use electricity for heating homes, and why electric cars are so costly to build.

One common misconception, for example, is the meme that we can reduce our dependence on imported oil by installing wind turbines. By understanding both the oil transportation energy sector and the wind component of the electrical energy sector, we will see that there is almost no connection between oil imports and wind turbines.

The chart below shows the major sources of non-food energy and how they are consumed:

Graphic 5: Energy supply and demand

While petroleum oil is a very large factor at about one third of the supply mix, the good news is that it is technically possible to substitute natural gas for oil in most energy sectors, using liquid products made from natural gas. This is fortunate for the countries with abundant domestic supplies of natural gas. The chart above lumps hydroelectric power into the renewables category, which tends to muddle the understanding of what wind and