“If you don’t have some
appreciation of the economy as being embedded
in the natural systems of the planet, you’re
not going to get very far understanding
why we’ve got the problems we have with
the environment, and how we’re going to
solve them.”
-Peter Victor, York
University
The 2010 climate talks
in Cancún ended with a marginal climate
deal that proposed funds for climate mitigation
but no mechanism to provide the money, and
carbon emission cuts that remain non-binding
and too negligible to arrest global warming.
British scientist John Beddington warned
the conference offered “little chance” of
limiting global warming to 2°C and conceded,
“We have to focus on adaptation.” Meanwhile,
the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
released data showing atmospheric CO2 at
record levels, and The Royal Society published
a report, Four degrees and beyond, warning
humanity to prepare for a 4°C warmer
world.
Human society has known
the global warming science since 1896, when
Swedish physicist Svente Arrhenius described
and predicted the effect. At that time,
CO2 concentrations had started to grow from
pre-industrial 280 parts per million (ppm)
to 290ppm. In 1979, James Lovelock sent
Greenpeace a graph of atmospheric CO2, which
we pinned to our office wall, showing CO2
concentrations at 337 ppm. By 1985, when
the first climate conference opened in Villach,
Austria, CO2 concentrations had reached
345 ppm. The assembled scientists ‘expected’
significant warming.
Last summer, CO2 concentrations
reached over 390 ppm. Meanwhile, methane
gas rises from melting Arctic tundra, 13
million hectares of forest disappear each
year and acidic seas and dying coral reefs
absorb less carbon; these factors increase
the rate of planetary heating.
With a century of science
and 25 years of conferences behind us, why
are we still losing ground in the global
warming battle? We might blame greed, delusion
or denial. However, one important piece
of the answer may appear at the very roots
of our global economic system.
A drainage ditch in
Gurao, China clogged with wastewater and
trash. Here the economy is centered around
textile production and Greenpeace has found
high levels of industrial pollution and
has documented the effects on the community.
Image: Qiu Bo / GreenpeaceEconomics without
limits
“Some very respected
economists have been saying some very erroneous
things for a very long time.”
-Herman Daly, Ecological
Economics and Sustainable Development.
In 1972, biophysicist
Donella Meadows and her colleagues at the
Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth,
explaining how declining resources would
eventually limit economic growth. The following
year, economist Robert Solow delivered a
lecture to the American Economics Association
in response. Solow claimed that capital
could be substituted for resources and that
if this were true, then “the world can,
in effect, get along without natural resources.”
In neoclassic economic
terms, Solow’s ‘production function’ states
that economic ‘output’ is a product of capital
x labour x resources. If this were true
then, with a stable work force, as industry
depletes resources, production could be
maintained by increasing capital. This notion
has remained a conventional economic justification
for unlimited growth.
However, in 1971, Romanian
economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen published
The Entropy Law and Economic Process, formulating
what he called ‘Bioeconomics’, exposing
certain errors in conventional economic
theory. Georgescu-Roegen made an important
distinction between resources on the one
hand and capital, labour and technologies
on the other.
Money, or capital, is
not transformed in the industrial process.
However, resources – materials and energy
– pass through the production process and
are changed from raw materials into products
and waste. This transformation must obey
the laws of energy conversion, or thermodynamics.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, known
as the ‘Entropy Law’ states that energy
is always depleted and degraded in any mechanical
process. Georgescu-Roegen showed how this
law also applies to material transformation.
This may sound technical,
but it's actually very simple. We cannot
burn the same barrel of oil twice. Common
sense tells us that a pile of boards and
sawdust is not a tree, even if it represents
the same amount of material. Although we
can recycle materials, every transformation
degrades matter and burns energy. There
is no escape. Money, therefore, is not a
substitute for energy, trees, fresh water
or any other resource, and material constraints
do indeed limit economic growth.
A saline deposit is
the only evidence left of a small lake in
the Star Sea Lake area of China which completely
dried up in 2001. Image: Greenpeace / John
NovisEntropy
“Since the Entropy Law
allows no way to cool a continuously heated
planet, thermal pollution could prove to
be a more crucial obstacle to growth than
the finiteness of accessible resources.”
-Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,
1975
Entropy is a measure
of disorder in a system. Without energy,
physical order decays toward disorder. Sunlight
bathes Earth daily, offsets entropy and
allows organic organisation. We eat to bring
that solar energy into our personal biological
system. However, every biological or mechanical
process transforms useful energy (low entropy)
into waste energy (high entropy).
Georgescu-Roegen showed
that human economics had to respect the
entropy law. This is why there is no such
thing as a ‘perpetual motion’ machine. A
machine cannot create the resources that
it transforms. Tools can increase the harvest
but they don’t create resources. Ancient
hunters knew this. Making more arrowheads
did not create more bison. Farmers have
known this throughout history, which is
why fields were left fallow to recover nutrients
and energy.
The entropy law applies
to materials as well as to energy. We can
transform a tree into a table but we can’t
transform a table back into a tree. We can
recycle a table into building materials
but this requires more energy and involves
a net loss of both energy and material.
Everyone who keeps a house can witness how
entropy works. Order falls apart easily
but it takes energy to put it back together
again. A house left on its own does not
get cleaner or more organised- it collects
dust and gets less organised. That’s entropy
at work.
Georgescu-Roegen and
later economists such as Donella Meadows
and Herman Daly (Steady State Economics)
showed that resource depletion is inevitable
with all economic activity. In nature, ‘sustainability’
is the state of homeostasis, balance with
the material and energy flows available
in a habitat. The promoters of endless growth
mock this as pessimism but, to any biologist
or physical scientist, it is simple realism.
When we look around at our degraded Earth
– acidic seas, drained aquifers, growing
deserts, extinct species – we witness the
entropic cost of human economic growth.
Georgescu-Roegen also
stated that industrial growth necessarily
results in social conflict (over depleted
resources) and inequality, both regional
(the rich taking resources from the poor)
and inter-generational (today’s society
leaving resource scarcity and waste to future
generations.)
New wind turbines are
constructed at the Butterwick Moor Wind
Farm in the UK. Image: Steve Morgan / GreenpeaceQuest
for homeostasis
“They bombard us with
adverts cajoling us to insulate our homes,
turn down our thermostats, drive a little
less, walk a little more. The one piece
of advice you will not see on a government
list is ‘buy less stuff!’”
-Tim Jackson, UK Sustainable
Development Commission
Today, humanity finds
itself in a complex dilemma. Our primary
energy source is heating Earth’s atmosphere,
oceans and land. To stop the heating, we
must make a transition from hydrocarbons
to renewable energy sources such as geothermal,
wind and solar. But there is more. Hydrocarbons
have allowed us to grow our numbers and
consumption at unprecedented rates, and
that growth itself degrades our resource
base and frustrates the transition.
University of Manitoba
Environment and Energy Professor Vaclav
Smil warns that the biggest challenge with
the transition from hydrocarbons is the
scale of our oil-based economy. In the 19th
century, during the transition from biomass
(wood) to coal, it took over 60 years for
coal to grow from 5 percent to 50 percent
of human energy use. However, today, our
overall energy consumption is 20 times greater
than it was then.
Smil warns that the
transition to renewables will take longer
since “the absolute quantities that need
to be replaced have only become bigger.”
He advises that to make such a conversion
feasible requires “decreasing the rates
of per capita energy use.” The leading strategies
of our energy transition must be reduction
and conservation.
The entropy law teaches
us that tools – including computers and
windmills – do not create resources; tools
burn resources. Humanity has stumbled over
this fact of nature in the Sumerian cedar
forests, on ancient denuded Greek hillsides,
on Easter Island, and today on a global
scale.
Global warming has not
slowed down because it is a symptom of a
deeper problem: a belief in unlimited growth.
Biophysical economists such as Georgescu-Roegen,
Meadows and Daly are the Copernicus, Kepler
and Galileo of our age. They looked behind
conventional delusions and discovered the
truth. The status quo today, as in the 16th
century, ignored and mocked them. However,
just as the cosmos revealed itself, so too
will nature here on Earth. Nature shall
not be mocked.
In the end, our quest
for sustainability will be governed not
by wishful thinking but by nature’s laws.
Anywhere in nature – in a watershed, on
an island or on the entire planet – a species
endures only when it discovers homeostasis,
living within the natural energy and material
flow of its habitat.
-Rex Weyler
