James Hansen and the inexorable slide toward nuclear power.

On his Storms of My Grandchildren site, James Hansen talks about how intolerable coal-powered power stations are in any realistic future, and claims that:

in most countries, phase-out of coal emissions requires also a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal. Until we have another way to meet 21st century energy needs while eliminating coal and carbon emissions, nuclear power appears to be the only option.

From this he infers that even nuclear power would be the lesser of these two evils, concluding that

The (“3rd generation”) nuclear technology ready to replace the aging 2nd generation reactors in the United States and other counties is inherently safer than existing nuclear power, which already has an exemplary safety record – however, it still burns less than one percent of the nuclear fuel and leaves a long-lived nuclear waste pile. Hansen recommends initiating urgent development of a fourth-generation nuclear power plant. These “fast” nuclear reactors utilize more than 99 percent of the fuel and can “burn” nuclear waste, thus solving the nuclear waste problem that concerns so many.

This doesn't seem to me to follow. Why is he so confident that these fourth-generation nuclear power plants are any less pie-in-the-sky than carbon capture? It's the first time I have heard anyone suggest that the problems of safety and spent nuclear fuel could be a thing of the past. I would very much like to hear Hansen's reasoning. Not that I would like CCS any more than him, but it doesn't make much sense to be asked to choose between two mirages.

But there's a more important assumption in Hansen's commentary. He argues that, if we are to avoid both fossil fuels and nuclear power, then we need 'a carbon-free source of baseload electric power that is competitive in price with coal'. It is certainly a most attractive option. However, my reading of the technical literature leads me to two conclusions. One, such an option will not exist for many years to come. And two, we can't afford to wait that long.

So how is it Professor Hansen can claim that the solution needs to be 'competitive in price with coal'? Given the magnitude of the potential problem - a series of disasters and creeping destruction that will dwarf any previous human experience short of, perhaps, a re-run of the global plague in the 14th century, surely this is like saying that we should have decided our strategy for the Second World War on the basis of whether it would have been as painless as peace.

Plainly this would be nonsense, and as in the case of WW2, there is little doubt what the consequences of continuing prevarication will be. Add to this the impact of ever-expanding resource depletion, ecosystems collapse and 40% more people by 2050, and waiting for another cheap energy source to come along sounds like madness. It would be nice if we were in a position to choose between cheap, friendly, familiar options, but we aren't. Meanwhile, our social, political and economic system is awash with people and interests for which an effective solution would be anathema, if not fatal.

Of course, we are not at war, and such metaphors are as likely to be misleading as helpful. But to pretend that we can reach Professor Hansen's own goals without paying a price and making preparations comparable to a war strikes me as unwarranted optimism, if not self-deception.

Those who cannot remember the past...

Three decades ago, the Carter Administration tried to pass legislation to establish an energy policy for the USA. Writing in Wednesday's FT Energy Source, Philip K. Verleger - then Carter's Director of the Office of Energy Policy at the U.S. Treasury - claims that the current Obama administration hasn't a hope of getting his global warming legislation through. The reasons: arrogance, ignorance of the substantive issues, and failure to recognise the power of pork.

For Verleger the implications are clear, and in the light of recent events in Congress (and Copenhagen, because, whatever the scorn within which Europeans treat US politics, this is by no means a uniquely American problem) I find it hard to disagree. Here are Verleger's closing words:

"Many of the veterans of the Carter battle have quietly exchanged emails and
phone calls as the Obama legislation awaits its fate. The consensus opinions are
these:

1. None of the people putting the Obama energy policy forward understood the
   problems they would face in Congress.
2. The bill’s supporters (”greens”) are less aware of history than we were in
   the 1970s, if that is possible.
3. The legislation’s passage is unlikely absent an outside precipitating
   event.

It will be difficult to take effective action on emissions even when every
American accepts global warming as fact. Concerns regarding economic security
are far greater than those over climate impacts 10 or 20 years in the future.
Tragically, individuals pushing such actions - the representatives of various
NGOs covered in this blog, for example - do not understand history, the concerns
of voters, or the workings of Congress.

The battle is lost."

For those of us for whom the problem of global warming is, as energy was for Carter, the Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW!), it's a depressing insight.

On cap and trade

Click on the title of this post for some interesting observations on cap and trade. It can't work unless we force the price of carbon so high that it is uneconomic to burn fossil fuels, and that will never be allowed to happen so long as everyone thinks a) economic benefit can be created while disregarding the environmental consequences, and b) this is a zero sum game in which we have to make someone else pay.

The Limits to Growth

Just about the most convincing – and scary - book I ever read about the environment was The Limits to Growth. I would guess that everyone has heard of this book but my impression is that relatively few people have ever read it, or the two follow-up volumes. I read it when it first came out – almost four decades ago – and then again a few months back.

The book was written by a group of MIT researchers - Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens – and published in 1972 by the Club of Rome. The timing is interesting, as the first edition of The Limits to Growth is roughly contemporary with a number of other foundation texts in the overall environmental movement. 1971 saw the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, which gave the growing concern with population growth a kick start. Then in 1972 Barbara Ward and the well-known anthropologists René Dubos published Only One Earth – a sort of semi-official UN report that attracted a lot of attention. And then in 1974, M. King Hubbard gave what was perhaps his most important summary of the position on oil and energy production, namely his testimony to Congress on the peaking of US oil production.

The reason I found The Limits to Growth so compelling – even more than Only One Earth or Silent Spring - was the simplicity and centrality of the question it posed and the directness of the method its authors used to answer it. Instead of endless facts and figures and yet another multi-faceted discussion of our environmental predicament, they simply asked what would happen if humanity at large continued with a small number of key trends:

• World population.
• Industrialization.
• Pollution.
• Food production.
• Resource depletion.

Their method was equally straightforward – so much so that, had I felt very doubtful about its validity when I first heard about it. They started with a very generalised model of these factors - the ‘World3’ model developed by Professor Jay Forrester (also from MIT). This is described in Forrester’s World Dynamics (published the previous year), which used a ‘system dynamics’ approach. This was really a very simple model - basically a suite of functional interactions (circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships, etc.) between what the modellers regarded as the key social and natural phenomena. World3 was based on large, long-term factors, which it defined in self-consciously simple and gross terms, without much detail. It made little attempt to explain why these interactions were as they were.

When tracking what happened when the trends they were interested in unfolded, the Limits to Growth team were not looking for trouble. They made strongly optimistic assumptions when in doubt, and took into account most of the qualifications critics usually offer about predictions of environmental doom and gloom – resource substitution, the power of innovation, and so on. On the other hand, they did assume that all these factors tend towards compound growth - which is to say, that they grow by a constant percentage, and constantly accelerate, not by a constant amount, which would lead only to regular increments of the same size. They also interact with one another, which has the effect of overshoots and disruptions in one undermining the others.

A typical outcome of the model went like this:

1. Population cannot grow without food.
2. Food production can only be increased by growth of capital.
3. Creating more capital requires extracting and processing more resources.
4. Discarded waste from resource extraction, refining and usage become pollution.
5. Pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.
6. So the system tends towards eventual collapse of both population and food production.

It’s crucial to understand that this collapse happens not only because a specific input is damaged or reduced (which might be ameliorated by resource substitution, innovation, etc.) but because the system undermines itself. That is, the initial success of the system destroys the conditions for its continuing success. This is, I think, why it makes relatively little difference to assume that we will eventually find far more resources than are currently expected, or that we can continue to have cheap energy.

The authors made multiple runs of the model based on different assumptions. Although, like most futurologists, they avoided claiming to be making strict predictions, the consistency of the outcomes is quite frightening enough.

The book analyses quite a few scenarios (though only a fraction of those actually run, apparently). The starting point was ‘business as usual’, which led to the following outcomes:

1. Massive industrial growth depletes resources.
2. Resource prices then rise and stocks are depleted.
3. So more capital used for obtaining resources, leaving less for growth.
4. Eventually investment cannot keep up with depreciation.
5. With that, the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, the tax base for government, and so on.
6. However, population keeps rising, so the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.

Radical collapse comes ‘well before the year 2100’.

As I say, the authors presented other scenarios in which:

• Nuclear power is cheap and safe.
• We manage to discover vastly increased resources.
• Innovation and technology allow much reduced pollution.
• Agricultural yields are greatly improved.

And so on. By and large, these optimistic assumptions mean that the eventual collapse is delayed by a decade or two – never more.

Here’s another typical example: the Green Revolution. This has indisputably increased food production, but at a price. The specialised seeds require a great deal of fertiliser and water. The former accelerates fossil fuel use and depletion, while the latter extracts more water than natural systems can sustain. In addition, the need for extensive capital also leads to peasant farmers being evicted from the land by their landlords, and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants end up in Mumbai, Kolkata, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, where they have no resources and no relevant skills from what they might earn a living. This increases pressure on urban systems and causes fertile land to be built over by slums.

The increase in capital requirements – tractors, petrol, fertiliser, shipping etc. – needed to operate the Green Revolution hugely depletes resources, including oil and natural gas. What is worse, the intensive treatment of the soil under a monoculture régime means that it becomes less able to support any other sort of agriculture, so the system becomes even more locked into an inherently unsustainable ‘solution’, and by this remarkable ‘advance’ we have managed to convert what one would have thought was an inherently renewable resource – fertile soil – into a non-renewable resource. Aren’t we clever? Meanwhile, the planet’s carbon footprint is made that little bit bigger, global warming is given that small extra shove upwards, and the glaciers that feed the irrigation systems that feed the crops melt that little bit faster. More jam today, but not only less jam tomorrow but also a lot less ability to manage having less jam tomorrow.

More generally, the consistent result reported by The Limits to Growth was overshoot and collapse. If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue, the limits to growth will be reached by 2070. The alternative scenarios only delay collapse: all end by 2100. The most probable direct outcome will be sudden, uncontrollable falls in population and industry – in other words, the ‘hundreds of millions’ of deaths predicted by the Stern Report. Only The Limits to Growth predicted it all three and a half decades earlier.

The authors conclusions about the ‘business as usual’ scenario are stark:

The unspoken assumption behind all of the model runs we have presented in this chapter is that population and capital growth should be allowed to continue until they reach some ‘natural’ limit. This assumption also appears to be a basic part of the human value system currently operational in the real world. Given that first assumption, that population and capital growth should not be deliberately limited but should be left to ‘seek their own levels’, we have not been able to find a set of policies that avoids the collapse mode of behavior.

As so often, the reactions to the original publication illuminating not only for the welcome offered to this absolutely vital book but also by the disdain expressed by those who could see no further than the status quo. It was described as ‘the most fascinating and the most disturbing book’, and it was said that ‘if this doesn't blow everybody's mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput’. But it was also described as ‘a piece of irresponsible nonsense’ and ‘an empty and misleading work’.

The authors reviewed their findings in updates published in 1992 and 2004. These books are worth reading in their own right, as they both go far beyond updating the original methods and finding. Their original conclusions, they find, were sound. They needed some qualifications, but by comparison with the critics who greeted the original publication with such scorn and the deniers by whom they are still surrounded, they seem to have been pretty much spot-on.

Nor is this merely their own opinion. In 2008 Graham Turner published a comprehensive re-evaluation of the data, and concluded that:

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario…, which results in the collapse of the global system midway through the 21^st century.

In other words, we have done nothing significant to deflect our fate.

So are there no scenarios that lead to a happy ending? Maybe - it depends on what makes you happy. If you want interminable consumerism, then no, there aren’t. If you ever wanted a ringside seat at the end of the world, consumerism represents the front row. But if you are willing to settle for mere sufficiency, to imagine that there might actually be an ‘enough’, then yes, a somewhat reduced standard of living – something like the 1940s or 1950s, it is said – is available for all. Not bad, given the alternative, and hardly desperate poverty by any standard. It’s not as though we are any happier than we were then, though it might take a bit of getting used to. Nor need it look quite like that slightly dismal era – we start from here, not there, and a great deal can be done with a 1950s carbon footprint, give the science and technology of the 21^st century.

But there is a lot to be done – population control, the end of ‘the American Way of Life’ (which surely represents the biggest threat to the planet since the last ice age), serious support for developing countries, and so on. But it’s hardly worth thinking about – we never have done anything about these things, we show no signs of doing anything about it, and we are led by politicians, media and business people with as much grasp of our situation and as much interest in dealing with it as a bucketful of molluscs.

But not to worry – it will soon be too late to deflect the worst effects of our own actions, so we won’t have to worry about it any more. Just die in our millions. If you have ever wondered what the fall of the Roman Empire looked like, stay tuned.

Read this book.

References

Ehrlich, P. (1971). The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books.

Forrester, J.W. (1971) World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

Hubbert, M.K. (1974). Testimony to Hearing on the National Energy Conservation Policy Act of 1974, hearings before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives. June 6, 1974. Published as The Nature Of Growth by Technocracy.org.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, and J. (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Earthscan.

Meadows, D.H., Randers, J., and Meadows, D.L. (2004). The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update. Earthscan.

Turner, G. (2008). A comparison of the Limits of Growth with thirty years of reality. CSIRO Working Paper Series 2008-2009.

Ward, B., and Dubos, R. (1972). Only One Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

The worst threat to the environment on Earth

By far the single best demonstration that business is about profit, not any sort of social or environmental responsibility, is the Alberta Tar Sands. Billed by Greenpeace and others as the largest industrial and energy project, the biggest capital investment and the worst environmental crime on earth, it really does have to be seen to be believed.

For a first-hand view, click here. Right now.

The real point? That tar sands make no environmental or social sense at all. Imagine someone replacing Florida with a slag heap - that's the new Alberta.

But for business? Lots and lots and lots of money. A no brainer, really. Say goodbye to Alberta now, children - and don't worry about the mess. No, I don't ahve any plans to clear up after me, but always remember - Daddy Business knows best.

Return on investments: it doesn't add up

The fundamental problem with relying on markets to solve our environmental problems is extremely straightforward. No investment will be made unless market conditions – prices, profits and prospects – justify it. If there is no profit to be made – and a profit that beats the alternatives – then no investment will be made. The environmental consequences are obvious, and easily illustrated with a simple practical example.

T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire, has been planning to spend $10-20 billion on a vast wind farm in the American Midwest. But like all business investments, this was really a gamble, in this case based on the assumptions that oil prices would stay high and subsidies would be on hand. Neither assumptions has proved correct, and the projected 25 percent return on investment he had predicted now looks highly implausible. So – few investors, and little prospect of his wind farms seeing the light of the Texas Panhandle for the foreseeable future. In other words, a planned four gigawatts of environmentally friendly electricity will not now come on stream by 2014.

Now it is essential that we invest in alternative energy and other solutions to our environmental problems absolutely as soon as possible. The vicissitudes of the market, however, which are driven by many factors apart from environmental impact, can never be relied on the deliver substantive solutions to serious problems.

Pickens’ dilemma is only one example of a very general problem of capitalist economics that will make it extremely hard to make a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy. A second, even bigger problem refers to the simple question all attempts to move to a different ‘installed base’ for any major sector such as energy generation, food production or manufacturing must answer. If we are going to move to a different technology, who will pay for the technology I already have installed? After all, most currently installed systems – coal-fired power stations, fossil-fuel powered cars, fertiliser and plastic plants, and all the rest – has been paid for by loans from banks and other investors who will still want their money back, regardless of what new systems we plan to install in future. In many cases, the financial commitments go on for decades into the future, and cannot be significantly changed without a massive dislocation to our economy.

Hence the problem with Robert F. Kennedy’s otherwise sensible suggestion that the United States could quickly cut its greenhouse gas emissions by a simple change in the way it manages its existing power generation systems. Apparently US generator capacity is managed to ensure that coal-powered stations are used in preference to gas-powered stations, but if this situation were reversed and gas-powered plant was given preference, then

Mothballing or throttling back these plants would mean huge savings to the
public and eliminate the need for more than 350m tons of coal, including all 30m
tons harvested through mountain-top removal. Their closure would reduce US
mercury emissions by 20-25 per cent, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter
and the pollutants that cause acid rain, and slash America’s CO2 from power
plants by 20 per cent – an amount greater than the entire reduction envisaged in
the first years of the pending climate change legislation at a fraction of the
cost. (Financial Times, 19/7/09)

It seems simple, and from both an environmental and an engineering point of view, perhaps it is. But from an economic perspective, the problem is obvious: who will pay for the existing capacity then? Largely unused but still indebted, these other, high-carbon power plants still need to be paid for. If the income from their electricity will be moved to other, more environmentally friendly gas generation plans, one can only ask, from where? And this is only one instance of a problem that pervades any capitalist economy: investments demand returns, and if returns are not forthcoming, then either economic activity stops or undesirable indirect methods, from lobbying to subversion, start.

Nor could we expect investors to simply accept the losses caused by a sudden technological change – and in this case, sudden means ‘in less than the several decades we need to recoup our investment on existing power stations’ – as their contribution to society’s battle with global warming. These are after all not a minor factories and power plants out on the edge of the economy; to a very large extent, these vast investments are the economy. To stop paying for them would be economically catastrophic in about the same proportion that it was environmentally beneficial. Conversely, we can scarcely turn to these same investors to ask them to pay for the new, environmentally friendly investments we need for a low-carbon environment: in the absence of continuing, reliable returns on their existing investments, where will they get the money from? We could of course subsidise them, but where are we going to get the money from? Money is after all the lifeblood of the capitalist economy, and if the owners of existing ‘investments’ find that what they really own is a vast collection of liabilities rather than assets, then making this environmentally essential switch will lead to a near-instant collapse in returns on investment, profits, employment, tax revenues, industrial capacity, credit (for everyone) and a viable economy.

Or at least, so it is while we carry on playing to capitalism’s rules.

One of nature's little jokes

One of the great hopes for environmentally clean energy to reduce the impact of climate change is of course wind power. One of the places where, through as combination of geography, technology and economy, you would have thought wind power had a good chance of proving itself is the American Midwest. Where, according to a paper just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, wind speeds are have been falling for decades. Because of climate change.

Never let it be said that Mother Nature doesn't have a sense of humour.

Source: Pryor, S.C., R.J. Barthelmie, D.T. Young, E. S. Takle, R. W. Arritt, D. Flory, W. J. Gutowski, A. Nunes, and J. Roads (2009), Wind speed trends over the contiguous USA, J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2008JD011416, in press.

Global solutions: effective, efficient, equitable?

A persistent theme in much writing about the coming decades is the need for global agreements that go a good deal further than the technical questions of environment management. Nicholas Stern (the author of the authoritative Stern Review on the economics of climate change) is typical of this line of thought:

But we have to act together, to create a global deal – this is a problem that is global in both its origins and its impacts.

That global deal must be effective, in that it cuts back emissions on the scale required; it must be efficient, in keeping costs down; and it must be equitable in relation to abilities and responsibilities, taking into account both the origins and impact of climate change. (From Stern's A Blueprint for Safer Planet, p.4)

Everyone seems to say as much, and as a statement of how we should approach the coming decades, it is impossible to contradict.

I just don’t believe it will happen. In fact I suspect that the most we can realistically expect is that the actions we take will be moderately effective. Civilisation will probably not collapse. But as for efficiency and equity, what is it in our performance to date that would lead anyone to expect either? I doubt that, whatever the deals we collectively agree too, our collective response will be anything of the kind. There are far too many countervailing forces for that to happen.

The efficiency of any future global strategy is almost certainly out of the question. As everyone admits, we are faced with global problems. But we do not have global systems in place to deal with them. On the contrary, our systems are not only fragmented but also full of conflict and antipathy between individual nations. There is also a profound conflict of interest between the owners and senior management of global corporations - the other most powerful economic players on the planet - and the rest of us.

Of course, in some profound sense we are all in this together, and completely failure will be fatal for all of us. But between here and complete failure there are many decisions to be made, each of which will benefit some and burden others. Reluctant though I am to say it of my fellow human beings, those who control the decision-making at each of these branching points will, more often than not, make sure that the decision is made in their own favour. That is to say, they will be decisions which are efficient for them. In Stern’s very appropriate words, they will be ‘keeping costs down’. This may mean keeping down the costs for humanity at large, but it will almost certainly involve minimising the costs of those who control the decisions. If this means increasing the ‘costs’ – the poverty, the danger, the hunger, the misery, the disease, the fear, the agony – of everyone else, then that will be presented as the best – or at least the least bad – alternative. Those who do not control these decisions will take the consequences. Which, in many cases, will be fatal.

As for equity, we have never taken this seriously in the past and I believe it will be a lot harder to take seriously in future. In the current (relatively) stable and affluent industrial world, only a handful of the most wealthy nations ever fulfils its public commitments on aid. We announce and re-announce help for long term development and short-term disaster, and then fail to live up to either. Given that the sums involved – currently just 0.7% of GDP – are so small that we would not miss them if we paid them in full, what can we expect of decisions about disasters that are not yet even visible. And in a future world of successive environmental crises, mass migrations, resource wars and much else, there will be far less concern for, let alone commitment to, equity. On the contrary, most of humanity will not even show up on the radar screens of the key decision-makers.

Why then should we expect equity from any future arrangements to curb climate change, resource depletion, ecosystems degradation, population growth and other environmental threats? I suspect that the real fount of future ‘equity’ is likely to be what it has always been - the economic power that countries like China, India, Brazil and Russia are already starting to wield. In a world of declining fossil fuels, the European Union will not be allowed to forget that Gazprom alone controls a sixth of the world’s natural gas reserves. The United States Treasury has long since started to eye nervously China’s enormous dollar holdings - they currently hold nearly $2 trillion in US Treasury bonds, whose manipulation could easily hole the entire western economy. These are people we will treat ‘equitably’ – because they come to the negotiating table as equals, not to mention rivals. But the hundred-plus countries that are each smaller than all of the world’s hundred largest companies? If GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco Systems and Wells Fargo are unlikely to be granted a seat at the top table, what can lesser economic entities like Estonia, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Trinidad and Tobago, Ivory Coast, Panama, El Salvador, Tanzania, Bahrain, Jordan, Iceland, Bolivia, Ghana, Paraguay, Zambia, Uganda, Botswana, Honduras and the many other yet smaller countries expect?

But not even the effectiveness of any future ‘global deal’ can be taken for granted. There are after all degrees of effectiveness. I previously suggested three levels of outcome for our current position: a setback comparable to a world war; an impact on our civilisation as a whole comparable to the fall of the Roman empire; and a threat to civilisation as such, comparable to a new ice age. As I have previously said, I do not know which we are really facing, but for all the reasons that we should expect neither efficiency nor equity, we should expect the effectiveness of our actions to be limited too - perhaps to the point where the twenty-first century goes down as the worst in history.

More precisely, we should expect rich and powerful countries that are situated in relatively cool regions to do as little as possible until they have no choice but to act in their own interests. That is after all what they have always done about global problems and what they have done so far about our current environmental threats. Even if they have the foresight to recognise that disaster in developing countries now will mean disaster for them later, they will almost certainly do only what is needed to forestall the later disaster to themselves. This will almost certainly be much less than preventing or remedying the original disaster to developing countries, no doubt accompanied by a great deal of hand-wringing, protestations of good intentions and dishonest claims to be taking ‘appropriate’ action. The real focus being on deflecting the negative consequences for the rich and powerful. Again going by our experience of aid, we will even find opportunities to benefit from the suffering of developing countries. Again, we always have. And then millions and millions of people will die.

The upshot of all this is simple. Simply continually asserting that our approach must be efficient or equitable will result in neither. If we want our response to the many environmental threats we face in the twenty-first century to be efficient or equitable, we must take a very firm and explicit decision that it should be so. More than that, we must create global institutions that represent humanity at large – which is to say, people rather the most powerful corporations and nation states.

It is hard to imagine what such an institution would look like. After all, none of our existing systems operate at that level. But in any case, I can still think of no compelling reason to expect any such institutions to be created even if they could be easily described, and the chances of their coming into existence will recede faster and faster as the real problems caused by 3° and 4° temperature increases start to hit us, as the global economy starts to unravel in the face of accelerating oil and gas prices and whole populations start to move in the face of poverty, hunger, disease and war.

There's no money in saving the world

We continue to see the repercussions of relying on business to deliver our response to climate chaos, global warming and resource depletion. The last few days have thrown up these stories in the media:

• Canadian environmental groups on Wednesday accused Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s biggest energy group, of reneging on its promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at its oil sands project in Alberta. (FT, 8/4/09)
• At least five big wind energy projects are in danger of being delayed or shelved owing to higher costs and a shortage of credit, the British Wind Energy Association said on Wednesday. (FT, 9/4/09)
• Japan is expected to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant shortly – nearly two years after it was damaged by an earthquake. The prolonged shutdown of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant’s seven reactors knocked Tokyo Electric Power into the red and threatened Tokyo with electricity shortages during the hot summer months, when air-conditioner use pushes up demand. The facility accounts for 13 per cent of Tepco’s generating capacity and without it the company has been forced to rely on more expensive coal, oil and gas plants. (FT, 9/4/09)
• Several prominent energy companies have scaled back their commitment to renewables, including BP, Shell and Iberdrola. (FT, 9/4/09)

And so on. On the other hand, Mars and Cadbury have promised to move to sustainable, Fairtrade supplies of cocoa (FT, 9/4/09). So we don't need to worry about Peak Chocolate just yet. On the otehr hand, I would not be very confident that they would ahve done anything about this were it not for ethically motivated public and staff pressure - as Fiona Dawson, managing director of Mars UK, has said, consumers and employees expected Mars to “do the right thing” because “nobody has to buy confectionery”.

The fact is, a monkey will type Hamlet before profit-driven companies will create a credible and effective answer to our many, many environmental problems in the middle of a slump. (I was going to say that Hell will freeze over, but at least that is one outcome global warming protects us from.)

London - Paris return: 10.9kg

I'm off the Paris tomorrow, to see my lovely daughter. So I thought I'd try to find out exactly how much CO2 I'm going to be emitting in the process. Starting from London, the answer is 10.9kg, Eurostar (the train company) tell me. All independently audited, etc.

Compare that with 122 kg - 11 times as much! - if I fly! And the door-to-door journey time is not noticeably different.

Two questions naturally spring to mind:

1. Why on earth would anyone prefer to have a truly wretched time traipsing out to Heathrow, hanging about and queuing for an age, and then being stuffed into a noisy, uncomfortable and (relatively) dangerous airplane?

2. Why is even still legal to do take the plane when the environmental difference is so vast?

No, the answer isn't freedom of choice. I don't have the freedom to shout in other people's ears in public places (though apparently advertisers do), so why should I have the freedom to pollute their air and endanger their planet? And the sooner we get used to that idea, the better for all of us. Especially for my daughter, her children and grandchildren.

Yes, that's the point!

Europe's larger CO2 emitter, the German power company RWE, has issued a statement criticising the EU's plan to make electricity generators pay for their CO2 emission permits in full from 2013:

Companies such as ours that... rely on coal-fired power generation will
find themselves at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis companies like EDF, which
are based mainly on nuclear and have virtually no CO 2 costs...

This, RWE claimed, will spell the 'end of fair competition in the energy sector in Europe'

Maybe I've missed something here. Isn't that the point of this entire exercise - to end competition based on nothing but price? Or rather, to include in the price of electricity some of the all-too real environmental factors that we will all pay for before long, not least the 140 million tons of CO2 RWE pump into the atmosphere every year.

Pointing at EDF, France's nuclear power generator, is quite bogus - the same point could be made about wind farms.

No, this is where environmental policy starts to bite. Will the EU have the political will make it stick - and, given the commitment of most EU countries to coal-, gas- and oil-based power generation, is the policy going to lead to serious economic and political problems as electricity costs start to rise to pay for the permits?

The polluter doesn’t pay after all

Today the UK government begins its sale of 4 million carbon permits, equivalent to the right to release 4 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The sale is to electricity producers.

Despite the fact that this is a sale, not a giveaway, the permits are effectively free, because the public - you and me - have already paid for them.

Last year the power generators were given the permits for free - just to get them interested. (Apparently the alternative of being refused permission to sell electricity wasn't sufficient incentive to cough up.) But they passed on the 'cost' of these permits - i.e., the nominal price - to us consumers anyway. So even though they were free, electricity prices went up to reflect the cost of permits!

What does that mean? It means that this year the power generators have a large wad of cash - taken from us last year - with which to pay for permits. And they will of course pass this year's costs on to us too - which means that next year, they will again have a nice wad of cash - taken from us this year - with which to pay for permits. And so on, and on, forever.

In other words, unless the price of permits goes up radically or they need to buy a lot more, they will never pay for the pollution they cause. The polluter pays only for the marginal changes – it’s the polluted who pay the bulk of the costs.

Don't markets work well - especially if you control the market?

Getting the sums right

The International Energy Agency – described by the Financial Times rather implausibly as the ‘oil watchdog’ – announces that if we don’t invest very heavily indeed in new exploration and production, world oil production can be expected to fall by 9.1% per annum from now on. Apparently meeting the demand from China, India and other developing countries’ demand will cost around $360bn each year until 2030. And even if we do make all that investment, it will fall by 6.4% anyway. So peak oil is well and truly here.

Curiously, this does not occur to the FT, who then add that the IEA has consequently revised its projections for oil consumption downwards from 116 mbd (million barrels a day) to 106 mbd - a little under 10% less. Yet we are currently producing only about 87 mbd. So according to the FT, if we start with 87 and subtract at least 6% a year, we will get to 106 in 2030…

Who says educational standards are falling? Evidently some of the best educated members of my own generation – the FT’s journalists – can’t add up either.

But the FT are hardly alone in this peculiar visual impairment. Governments everywhere seem to be totting up the figures for economic development – especially in the developing countries – and coming up with equally fantastic numbers for all sorts of things. Oil, gas – even coal looks a bit shaky now. Industrialisation will proceed apace, yet the supply of many of the most important inputs will peak soon. Nor do we have even an idea about substitutes for most of them. So prices will rise and rise, supplies will grow scarce and then fall to nothing – but industrialisation will proceed apace.

Population too – it will level off at around 9 billion sometime around 2050. Yet many of the basic ‘inputs’ for population growth – water for crops and drinking, fertile land, farming skills, people in the right places (i.e., not in giant slums) – are not only in hopelessly limited supply for such a number but we are actively reducing them by our current policies. We are currently producing less and less cereals per head each year, we spent most of the summer sorting out a global crisis in rice supply, we are responding to the melting of the glaciers on which a huge proportion of the world relies for basic drinking water by introducing crops that demand more water – but there will still be another 2,500,000,000 of us by 2050.

Why the double vision? Because a) we don’t want it to be true, b) most of the tools we have for analysing the problem simply don’t work when faced with problems like this, and c) we haven’t a clue what to do about it, not least because we have absolutely no faith in popular willingness to support radical change.

Take environmental economics – surely that can give us the answers? The clue’s in the name!

Not really. Like all other flavours of ‘modern’ economics, environmental economics assumes that most problems can be understood in marginalist terms - balancing claims on our resources to maximise marginal utility, optimise the distribution or substitution of resources, etc. But it has nothing to say about a situation in which resources fall below basic survival level and we haven’t any substitutes, or where the decision to be made about ‘utility’ is about who will die and who won’t. Not really a ‘marginal’ question, unless you are willing to regard the falling over the edge of a cliff as just another incremental step.

That doesn’t add up either. Perhaps it’s time for remedial maths classes for economists or politicians.

A summary of where I think we are now

The problems posed by the human impact on the environment are huge and extremely urgent and we have no previous experience in solving problems of this type or magnitude. The means at our disposal are not only essentially incapable of solving these problems but they are inherently inclined to make them worse. Yet there is no time to create new systems. Therefore the only realistic option is to learn to manage these systems far more radically and on a far larger scale than we do at present. But so radical are the necessary changes that they are likely to be heavily resisted, and resisted by some of the most powerful forces on the planet.

The problems posed by the human impact on the environment are huge and extremely urgent. We need to reduce the impact we are having on the environment radically. In the leading industrial countries we need to reduce our collective carbon footprint by 90% or more, or perhaps even shift to a carbon-negative economy, in which we compensate for past excesses by absorbing more carbon than we emit. We are starting to move, but even the most ambitious national and international targets commit us to probably failing to halt this process. Meanwhile, almost every worst-case scenario – Arctic melting, climate damage, habitat loss – is turning out to be the best case. At this rate, we may well be living in the last century – if not the last few decades - of industrial civilisation.

At the same time, many strategic materials on which our current economic system relies – not only oil and natural gas but many metals and minerals - will become scarce to the point that they will start to disrupt our current economic systems within the foreseeable future. A number of absolutely basic resources such as fresh water and fertile soil will also come under threat within the same timescale, affecting so many people (especially in developing countries) that their effects are imaginable only if you are prepared to imagine the very worst.

But we started to exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity about a quarter of a century ago, and we have already started to witness the consequences.

We have no previous experience in solving problems of this type or magnitude. Pundits like to compare the impending crisis with the Second World War. As the next couple of chapters will make clear, if we do not take vigorous actions quickly enough, the fall of the Roman Empire may well turn out to be a better comparison – if not the last Ice Age. We are already losing – in many cases, actively destroying - the means to solve our problems. Within a few decades the losses will trigger a sequence of environmental implosions in which the collapse of this or that area – the Amazon forests, the Siberian tundra, vast undersea methane hydrate reservoirs - will release enough additional carbon to change the question from ‘How do we manage this?’ to ‘How do we survive this?’

Other events will be equally devastating. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets alone will make some of the world’s most heavily populated areas uninhabitable and flood many of the world’s greatest cities. The droughts that inevitably follow the final melting of most of the world’s glaciers (which feed many of the most important rives) will turn many of the world’s most densely populated – and nuclear-armed – regions to scrublands capable of supporting only the most meagre of populations. In the same timescale we can expect some of the world’s most fertile and productive agricultural areas to fail, including the American Midwest and California’s Central Valley, several of China’s rice-growing regions$$ and the Ganges valley.

Taken together, these processes will combine to ignite civil and political conflicts on an unprecedented scale even while massively damaging the social and political systems we rely on to manage such conflicts.

Meanwhile, the means at our disposal to solve all these problems are not only essentially incapable of solving these problems but they are inherently inclined to make them worse. Faced with any global problem, our most important resource is our economy. It is this that produces the means to do anything else, especially create the new systems and technologies we will undoubtedly need to deploy to escape our predicament. More than three decades after the first credible warnings of what would happen if we continued with unabated industrial growth and almost two decades since global targets and agreements on climate change were first promulgated, we have failed to meet practically every target we have set ourselves.

The fundamental reason for this is, straightforward enough. A capitalist economy relies absolutely on the continual expansion of profits. Without continuing the cycle of profit, investment and profit, it has no rationale and will cease to function. With that, all the remainder of society that relies so entirely on capitalist relationships – employment, consumption, taxation, government – will also collapse. With such a large proportion of all capital tied up in industrial machinery, global transport systems, vast retail networks and an enormous advertising and marketing industry – not to mention an almost official post-ideology ideology of consumerism – not only is our current economic system not designed to help us cut back, but it positively demands endless expansion. Although industry as such is not a problem – any machine can be turned off – capitalist industry is an absolute catastrophe. Under a capitalist regime, turning off the machines would put an end not only to the profits but also to the only system we possess that is capable of creating the means to solve our current environmental problems. Even replacing them with more environmentally friendly alternatives before they had recouped their original investment would cripple businesses.

Yet there is no time to create a new economic system. The problem is Now, and every past transformation as radical as the replacement of capitalism has taken literally centuries. Therefore the only realistic option is to learn to manage these systems far more radically and on a far larger scale than we do at present. The famous ‘turning on a penny/dime’ at the start of the Second World War is encouraging, but the changes needed now are far more fundamental. We have longer to complete them, but there is scarcely an area of everyday life they will not touch, and unlike the changes wrought at the start of the Second World War, this is not a transient change to be made in the face of a clear and present danger. If we are to succeed, we must take far more radical steps than anything ever contemplated before, forcing an extraordinary level of change (and perhaps disruption).

But so radical are the necessary changes that they are likely to be heavily resisted, and resisted by some of the most powerful forces on the planet. The situation is essentially that the next century will be by any standards the most expensive century in human history. That is, we will be investing not so much in grow as in change – often accompanied by shrinkage. Faced with such a situation, most governments and practically all businesses will try to deal with this problem by either evading their responsibilities or making someone else pay for them. Given that at least a significant fraction of governments and businesses have demonstrated a willingness to obtain economic resources and avoid social obligations by a combination of force and fraud, this may well prove to be the most violent century in human history too.

Yet there is a great deal we can do. But only if we are prepared to face up the reality of the situation, and only if we are willing to take action. Now.

The price of petrol

I read an interesting fact about the price of petrol. I don’t what the price of petrol there is right now, but in 2007 Americans could buy a gallon of gas for $3. However, that price only includes the costs to the oil companies – the costs of exploration, pumping, refining and distribution – plus, of course, a margin for profit. That leaves out most of the real cost of petrol – the tax breaks, the enormous direct subsidies we pay these (fabulously rich) companies, the massive military costs of ‘protecting’ our access to oil fields, and of course the massive and growing environmental costs.

The International Center for Technology Assessment has calculated that, taken together, these additional factors total something like an extra $12 per gallon.

Now, it does seem very likely that a major part of making the transition to a more sustainable lifestyle will depend on making consumers pay the real costs of what they consume. So is anyone going to ask Americans to pay $15 a gallon for petrol? I doubt it, and not just because of the average American politician’s supine attitude to car culture, oil companies and all the other enthusiasts for mass environmental collapse. The real problem is much more serious than that.

Geographically speaking, Americans are very spread out. Leaving aside the fact that there are literally thousands of miles between the principle business and industrial centres on the East and West Coasts, Chicago and Texas, most Americans rely on their cars for an enormous range of practical purposes. There is more space and far less public transport than in Europe or Japan, so even if every American were suddenly smitten by a desire to get on a bus tomorrow, there probably wouldn’t be one to get on.

So if petrol cost Americans $15 a gallon, so many people would be literally unable to move – go to work, shop, or even move to a geographically more sustainable location - that the American economy would collapse - and with it much of the world’s economy too. Add to that the effect of making consumers pay four times as much for everything else they use oil for, and the end would be in sight for American society. We Europeans wouldn’t be far behind.

And if that happens, it would not significantly reduce the environmental damage we do. Much of that is a) embedded in things we have already made, whether or not we use them; and b) built into infrastructure such as power stations that will not stop operating just because we are poor.

On the other hand, it certainly would remove the primary instrument we have for solving the problem, which is the economy itself. Not only would a massive depression remove the economic surplus we need to make long-term investments in environmental solutions but it would so panic us that we would start to adopt short-term solutions that were environmentally catastrophic. So no, a recession would not be a good thing for the environment.

Most of the economic alternatives are little cheerier. Even a degree of economic direction through instruments such as tax and regulation are not credible so long as we continue to treat economic activity as primary and economic motives such as profit as sacrosanct. Yet the option of not accounting for the real cost of our high-energy, disposable lifestyles is also rapidly slipping off the table.

Finally – and perhaps the greatest impediment of all – our existing economic system has no way of managing any such transition. The way companies are organised and the mechanisms whereby capital moves through the system (essentially, directed solely by opportunities for short- and medium-term profit) mean that planning for a long-term transition is out of the question. It is not that we could not manipulate the structure of markets, and so of prices and profits, in the right direction; it is rather that the resistance to this from the existing economic powers – global corporations in particular – would be so great that it is scarcely likely to work in the very limited time we have available.

In short, there is no straightforwardly economic solution to the crushing economic problem our environmental position confronts us with.

Which leaves only one option: a political solution.

That is not to say, a ‘political’ solution of the usual kind we apply to the rest of the world. The rich cannot cut themselves off in a comfortably affluent cocoon, but neither can they force the world into submission. The extent and intensity of globalisation makes any such idea laughable. Even the American military, it turns out, can barely down a single Middle Eastern nation we spent a decade starving into submission before we threw everything we had at it. Even together with Europe, Russian and Japan’s unqualified support, it is improbable in the extreme that we could force the rest of the world to pay for our continuing excesses.

So ‘business as usual’ is not an option, not even temporarily.

As far as I can see, we need a progressive (and very rapid) transition towards two goals – the protection of society as the transition is made, and a long-term sustainable energy position. It is likely that this will have to include capitalist business, and it will be interesting to see how we manage to keep that particular genie in its box – because it will not want to stay there.

Does it work?

Energy prices are soaring everywhere – except in our house. Just the other day our supplier changed our standard bill – downwards. While energy prices as a whole are leaping up almost by the day, ours are falling. We have made no significant physical change to the house yet – not even upgraded the loft insulation. We haven’t even finished replacing the light bulbs, which is as easy as it gets. What we have done is changed our behaviour in all those small ways that look so unlikely to make a difference, but they seem to have done the trick.

Things we have been doing since February include:

1. We turned the heating (space and water) down a couple of degrees – which is to say, down to the temperature all homes were heated to a couple of decades back – not exactly a major sacrifice! After a week I started to find anything higher quite oppressive.
2. We also slightly trimmed the times the room and water heating were on, especially in the morning. It made no difference to our comfort at all.
3. When we got cold, we put on a woolly jumper. Or two, if necessary. I actually find an extra layer of clothes rather comforting, just so long as it doesn’t make me sweaty. When sitting down for long periods, I use a rug – it’s very nice.
4. Lights off as we leave the room. Don’t worry about that hoary old myth that fluorescent lamps are better left on – according to the US Department of Energy, that is only true if you plan to turn them back on again within between 3 and 11 seconds, depending on the light. Incandescent bulbs are always worth turning off.
5. The only lights we put on in the first place are those we are actually using. Which turns out to be surprisingly few.
6. All standbys off. Obviously. What could be more useless than a piece of technology that saves you literally a moment’s effort for such a high price.
7. We closed doors as we went through. This meant that the heat we were paying for was kept in the rooms where we wanted it.
8. We turned of the heating in rooms we seldom use.
9. We stopped filling kettles any fuller than necessary. Given that the average kettle is twice as full as it needs to be, this is a ludicrous waste – it slows you up, adds to your electricity bill and wastes energy. I also stopped waiting for the kettle to turn itself off. The internal detector keeps the kettle boiling going for quite a while after the water is obviously bubbling.

The curious thing is that after a week or two of all this, I can’t remember why I ever behaved otherwise.

Squander energy: Take the train

I have been working out just how much energy I use on my way to work each day. Yes, I know, trains are so much more environmentally friendly than cars, and I am certainly glad that I can commute to work now rather than driving in. But this note isn’t about whether what is, on the whole, a lower energy option. It is about the many areas on the train where energy is grossly squandered.

In fact the type of train we get on our local line is a model of how to squander energy and reduce the lifetime of the system. I suspect that the designers were frustrated aircraft designers, given how much of the train is designed as a sealed environment – not a very sensible assumption for a domestic UK train. Here are the main points:

• All train’s external doors are electric. So as soon as they fail, the whole carriage will be out of bounds to users. At some point in the not too distant future, whole trains will probably be out of commissions for door repairs.
• All internal doors are electric. The point of this is hard to imagine. Like in shops, there seems to be an obsessive assumption that opening doors is a problem. This isn’t even true with a trolleyful of groceries, let alone a briefcase.
• Inside the carriage, there are 24 small lights, one over each seat. You can turn them on or off a you choose, but a) they provide no meaningful illumination during the day time; b) they are always on by default – an absurd starting point in summer, and given that the carriage has overhead lights too, probably pure waste even in winter; and c) I seem to be the only person who ever turns them off.
• The main lights are always on too. Having spent many years travelling in the earlier model, I don’t recall any problem in expecting the train staff to turn the main lights on and off as and when needed. If we must have an electrical system, wouldn’t light-sensitive switches be a better solution?
• There are overhead electric signboards throughout the train. Most of the time they tell you nothing but the name of the train company and what time it is. I do not need to be told this by a train. All its other messages repeat what the tannoy system says anyway. Assuming that electric signs are solving a significant problem that the tannoy announcements do not (which I find hard to believe), they could at least be switched off when they are saying nothing meaningful.
• There are no openable windows – the whole place uses electrical air conditioning and heating. One or other is on at all times. The system is constantly far noisier than one would have thought possible, and has been from Day 1. But this is England – when have we ever needed air conditioning? I have never been in a train, even at the height of summer, when opening the windows did not provide a perfectly adequate solution. There are no temperature controls, so the automated system rules absolutely. Some days it is too cold, even at the height of summer. And as with the doors, as soon as the air conditioning fails, the train will be out of commission. This will almost certainly mean that its energy and carbon impact will be even higher as it goes into repair sooner and more often and is finally junked a decade or two earlier than its predecessors.
• I go to the loo. The door is electric. It has an electric sign saying whether or not it is occupied. When I get in, the switch to close the door is electric. So is the (separate) switch to lock it. As there are no window, the light has to be on permanently, and so is the air conditioning. The loo flush is electric. The switches to unlock and open the door are electric. Not one of these things needs to be electric.
• As we pass through Woking station at 7.53 am – one of the major hubs southwest of London – every single light I can see is on - even out on the platforms in the sunshine. Fortunately this is not the rule - other stations, especially the smaller ones, have their lights turned off. But especially in the larger stations electricity is being wasted just as badly as a Woking. Again fortunately, there does not seem to be a single superfluous light on at Clapham Junction, which is still, I believe, Europe’s busiest station. But Waterloo is not short of uselessly illuminated lamps.

As we wait to leave Woking, the guard announces that the train next to us is having ‘door difficulties’ that are causing it to be delayed. No fooling?

As I understand it, the rolling stock on this line was 35-40 year old before it was replaced by this all-electric, all environmentally-hostile model. I will be surprised if this stock makes it to its twentieth anniversary without major mishap, or to its thirtieth birthday at all. The old trains were not good, but that was mainly because they were extremely old, unkempt and unmaintained. These, it seems to me, are designed to have a short and absurdly expensive life.

The history - and future - of energy efficiency

A problem that is raised over and over again in the energy literature is the poor conversion ratio of green energy sources. Hydrogen, for example, may lose as much as 75% of its energy value between raw material and use as energy. Most projections assume that we never will do very much better than current efficiency levels.

I have no idea why this is. Perhaps there is a fundamental issue I am not aware of, but looking back at the history of, say, the steam engine, the improvements inefficiency are astonishing. I have read that Newcomen’s engine converted less than 1% of the available energy, but James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s improvement were only the first of many massive improvements up to and including the modern steam turbine.

Is EROEI really significant?

A question about EROEI. It has been noted that solar PV systems often show an ‘energy returned on energy invested’ (EROEI) ratio of about one. But is a figure of 1 or less actually a problem? As with so many economic and technological issues, the key question is not so much about absolute amounts or ratios as the conversion of a low-value resource into a high-value asset. That's why it makes any sense at all to invest 1 calorie of oil to create 1 calorie of food – because you can’t eat oil, but you can eat food. If the simple calorific value were significant, we would never have made an entire industry of converting oil into food.

Likewise for many other technologies – we are surrounded by energy, but not all of it in forms that are usable to us, given everything from our current metabolisms to our current economic systems. But so what? An EROEI of less than one would make perfectly good sense if the energy invested were derived from a clean, widely accessible source and the energy returned were in a usable form that did not perpetuate other destructive forms of activity.

Peak oil vs peak energy

One issue I am having real difficulty with is in distinguishing between peak oil and peak energy. Peak oil is coming - it may already be here. But as there is no such thing as peak energy, what are the real implications of peak oil itself? Not necessarily an energy-poor society, if peak energy is nowhere in sight. So what then?

Specific issues I would like answers to:

1. How much does the transition to a post-fossil fuel energy regime rely on making the most of peak oil - such that, the oil fails too soon, we won't make it?
2. Energy is a physical issue, but fossil fuels also have a major chemical role in our economy - in plastics, in fertilisers, and so on. How can this be dealt with?
3. Biggest of all by far, it has been argued that a specifically capitalist economy relies on fossil fuels - its extremely rapid and highly focused cycles rely on such a mobile, flexible and instantaneous form of energy. To what extent is this true? And if it is true, what are the political implications of this fact, which vastly exceeds the planning of any current political system?