The Coming Shortage Of All The World's Most Important Industrial Metals

To read André Diederen's deeply scary presentation, 'Metal minerals scarcity and the Elements of Hope' (presented at the ‘Peak’ Summit, Alcatraz, Italy, June 27, 2009 and republished by Business Insider), click on the title of this post.

In essence: all the major metals on which western economies rely will peak within the next few decades. And then... To quote verbatim the conclusion:

1. Less affordable mass electronic products
2. Forget large-scale conversion towards alternative energy sources
3. Forget large-scale electrification of land-based transport
4. Chemical compounds will become more expensive
5. Construction and machining will become more expensive
6. Metals scarcity will aggravate energy scarcity

I think 2, 3 and 6 are quite enough. But there will be no Copenhagen for resource depletion until it is far too late, because all the key resources are owned by corporations or national governments. The USA and EU are especially exposed, and especially exposed to China - an almost equally scary idea.

As for Diederen's proposed solution:

1. Use less or “managed austerity”
2. Longer product lifetime
3. Recycling and reuse of materials
4. Substitution of materials
5. Develop adapted new products
6. Stockpiles

Hard to see how any of this can be achieved under the current economic regime:

1. Use less or 'managed austerity' - In a production/consumption-driven capitalist economy?
2. Longer product lifetime - As above.
3. Recycling and reuse of materials - Possibly, but the maths of exponential growth means this will only put of the peak by a few years. Has no one learned from the Limits to Growth?
4. Substitution of materials - With what? How often can metallic materials be replaced with non-metallic materials? Sometimes...
5. Develop adapted new products - OK if these can be made profitable - and do not themselves involve any of the key materials. Hard to imagine.
6. Stockpiles - Given the above, what will there be left to stockpile?

Finally, the effect of materials shortages and the domination all this hands to undemocratic governments and global corporations will be to undermine the possibility this very solution ever being carried out.

Very few 'elements of hope', I think.

http://www.businessinsider.com/energy-and-mineral-production-on-a-permanent-downward-spiral-2009-12#economies-are-growing-exponentially-which-is-the-root-cause-of-resource-strain-1

Undertanding stocks and flows: The bathtub metaphor

I’m currently studying for a master's degree in Business Strategy and the Environment at Birkbeck College in London University, and have been very struck by how basic concepts of environmental science are relatively poorly understood – even by our lecturers. A god example is the question of ‘stocks and flows’, which is fundamental to understanding carbon emissions. Nigel Lawson also illustrated his ignorance of this relationship in his recent sceptical tract, so here is a useful metaphor. I did not invent it (in fact it’s a basic model for all sorts of ‘stock and flow’ processes), but here goes.

Imagine that you are lying in the bath. You are up to your nose in water and more is still pouring in through the taps. But don’t worry – your nose is level with the overflow pipe, and as much water is flowing out again as the taps are letting in. But only just – the overflow can handle what is coming in right now but no more. So you are, for the moment, perfectly safe.

But what if the taps are opened just a little more? Leaving aside the very little room for manoeuvre further ‘adaptation’ of your bathtub ‘environment’ allows you, the fact is, an increase in inflow will not be met by an increase in outflow. No matter how small the increase is, you are now in great danger, to the point where you must eventually drown.

Notice that this result does not depend on how much extra water flows in – even the smallest increment will get you in the end. It does not matter how much water was in the bath already or how large or small the maximum inflow and outflow are. As soon as the former starts to exceed the latter, by no matter how little, you will drown.

Likewise for humanity’s collective carbon emissions. Regardless of how much more carbon is emitted from other sources, if the environment is adapted to reabsorb only pre-industrial levels of emissions, then adding more will quickly (in nature’s geological timescale) start to swamp the system. The sizes of both nature's emissions and our own are irrelevant: even if the rest of nature emitted a hundred times as much carbon as humanity as a whole, the natural environment would still be drowning in carbon as soon as we started to increase the flow beyond what nature's carbon 'overflow pipe' is able to remove again.

The same would happen with increased natural eruptions of carbon from natural sources, of course, and we would still have to deal with the consequences. In fact there is good evidence that massive natural changes in carbon levels have profoundly affected the survival of many species. But most such natural intrusions into the natural carbon cycle are erratic and average out over time to quite small net changes.

Industry in by no means such a slight or incidental factor. Indeed, everything we know about our actions to date point to industry being the single most important factor in the emergence of quality complete new era – what Paul Crutzen has called the Anthropocene.

This era will certainly prove to be the most fatal in a quarter of a billion years for most species on this planet. And right at the centre of its effects will be the ‘bathtub’ effect of stocks and flows.

Stop Climate Change March, London, 5 December 2009

I went on the Stop Climate Change March last Saturday. Depending on who you believe, so did somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 other people.

Some interesting events straightaway. As we stand about in from Grosvenor Square, waiting for the off, I reminisce wistfully about the good old days of anti-Vietnam protests. Hoping he will share my nostalgia, I ask a middle-aged policeman whether we might not be allowed to sack the American Embassy. To my pleasant surprise, I am not arrested or (as far as I am aware) photographed. He replies simply, ‘Is it worth it?’ I am tempted to explain in some detail exactly what part the government and people of the United States currently play in our climate problems, but life is too short and the demonstration has started to roll down towards Piccadilly.

Almost immediately, we pass the Canadian High Commission and huge choruses of boos erupt – a mark of our enthusiasm for the Alberta tar sand projects. Yes, as George Monbiot noted the other day in The Guardian, the Canadians are finally the bad guys. Unimaginable in real life, of course, but then the Canadians no longer inhabit real life. Instead, their government has been hijacked by oil interests, while the great majority of real Canadians reject tar sands development as indignantly as they would slaughtering kittens. (I would say 'baby seals', but that would be a bit ironic with the Canadians.)

We pass by some of the most salubrious of London’s many salubrious properties, not to mention showrooms full of the fanciest of cars. I wonder what the average carbon footprint is around here. A bit more than the average American or Canadian, I suspect, and wonder exactly why popular protests do not focus on individuals and classes with environmentally obscene lifestyles as well as our cousins across the sea.

On down Piccadilly, skirting Trafalgar Square, and into Whitehall. As we pass Downing Street, I ask a policeman to ask Gordon Brown, our beloved Prime Minster, to come out, as his employers are here and want a word with him. The policeman is polite and at least a little amused, but feels unable to take my request forward. Apparently a delegation of representatives of the 100 or so organisations participating in the march got into No.10 to see Gordon, and no doubt reassuring platitudes were exchanged by all sides.

Which is a pity. Normally I have little confidence in our political class – not least because they still seem to be under the impression that climate change can be dealt with by the usual political wrangling. Nature, alas, does not negotiate, is unbeguiled by even the slickest of slogans and remains unimpressed by style and voter preferences. Yet I have the impression that climate change is just the sort of issue our beleaguered premier might be able to do something with, what with his apparently quite sincere (if recently wholly misplaced) moral enthusiasms.

Or maybe I should not be so easily fooled: for all his recent rhetoric, pretending to be a leader when you know full well no one is following you looks forthright and upstanding but risks little. It’s convenient for an unpopular politician facing the polls to be able to occupy the moral high ground (scarcely a position I expect the Tories to be able to occupy any time soon). I just hope he takes the problem seriously enough that millions will not have to move to a more literal high ground while he and his friends play games with the future of billions.

Prompted by a policeman remarking that if he weren’t on duty he’d join the march himself, I ask a couple of police officers whether they would join in if they weren’t on duty. Both reply that they’d be at home, looking after their children. I haven’t the presence of mind to suggest that that’s exactly what the march is all about, and I would like to know how they would have replied.

Do marches work? No. Or at least, no one could believe that they have much impact on their own, given how little was accomplished by at least twenty times as many people protesting about the war in Iraq. Will Blair ever be put on trial? No, of course not. But if he is, how many of the current crop would be up there with him? And what does that tell us about the likelihood that they will do anything substantial about climate change?

At 3 pm exactly we have the Great Blue Wave. Soon we are in Parliament Square. And straight past Parliament itself! Hang on, what’s the point of marching from one end of London to the other and then doing nothing? No great visible, audible protest? Why on earth not? Is it perhaps that the organisers couldn't get permission? Yes, that’s right, we need permission to express our opinion to our lords and masters about the way they are neglecting the planet. Which is, I suppose, as conclusive proof as you could want that they are indeed our lords and masters. And we go along with it, of course. Because, no doubt, we are British and middle class and jolly polite.

What do we want?
Modest and reasonable improvement!
When do we want it?
In due course!

Oh well. At least it’s quite interesting, having a ring side seat at the end of the world. I wonder what the average Roman senator felt like in about 450 AD?

Staring down the pipeline

A telltale sign of our various governments’ inability to grasp what the environmental problem actually is is the enthusiasm with which they embrace the possibility of a business-led solution. That it is specifically business-led view of the world is indicated by the specifics. For example, it is perfectly clear that a huge campaign of insulation would be a powerful, low-tech method of substantially reducing our collective carbon footprint at minimal cost and with a huge impact on key economic problem such as issues as employment.

But although this is an economic solution, it isn’t a business solution, so it won’t do. Well, not for central government anyway. Local government (such as Kirklees) is busy insulating, distributing energy-efficient light bulbs, updating boilers and otherwise making millions of one-off improvements in the countries’ carbon consumption. But that’s the problem: from business’s point of view, one-off is only one step better than ‘no step’. What business needs is a continuing stream of buyers who will need to come back over and over again.

But pandering to a growth-obsessed economy – which is to say, a capitalist economy – is precisely how we got into this mess in the first place: by creating an economic system that not only busily generated an endless pipeline of new demand (through marketing, built-in obsolescence, consumerism, and so on) but also is unable to survive if that pipeline is ever turned off. The current finance-driven crisis is only a taste of what would happen if demand for industrial products as a whole collapsed, or even stood still. That really would be a global crisis, and no amount of Asian savings would get us out of it, not least because the manufacturing-based Asian economies would be as badly affected as everyone else.

So the business necessity for an endless pipeline explains why it is that central governments (who, unlike local government, have both the power and the obligation to drive the capitalist economy as a whole) all but ignores one-off, ‘passive’ measures such as insulation. The scale of the effort that would need to be mounted is vast, but being a single shot, is not what business needs. So business programmes and journals, having finally got over their initial queasiness about green ventures, are looking at alternative energy, nuclear power, and so on – because they mean continuing streams of high-value sales that can be safely predicted to go on mounting and mounting for decades to come!

How much more ironic could it get? The solution to an environmental problem caused by uncontrolled growth is to give the people who got us here a whole new area into which to grow! Clever us. Likewise for the obsession with toys like electric cars: what purpose do they serve from an environmental point of view, given that the electricity they will run on will reduce the electricity available for genuinely social purposes such as heat and light. It isn’t very likely at the moment that we will be able to safely generate enough clean energy for those purposes in time to deflect our environmental problems, but we are talking about electric cars anyway. The odd allusion aside, we are not talking about public transport, reducing travelling for work and the many opportunities they would offer to clean up our planet ant, but rather methods for keeping an inherently unsustainable economic system in its present image. And why? Because that is what business needs. And what society needs? What the environmental needs? Who cares.

Of course, we need alternative energy and many other things for which the only solution is mass production by industrial methods. But what we don’t need is another turn of the very wheel that got us where we are today. There will be no solution to our environmental problems until we take a good clear look at the economic system we are relying on to deliver it.