Sorting out the ethics of animal suffering and catastrophic risk.
Weights marginal benefit heavily over systematic change. This may be inappropriate for very wealth philanthropists, or a group of pooled funders that may achieve the same effect.
Doesn’t give appropriate weight to stopping problems before they become a crisis, especially for inter-generational effects. E.g., there hasn’t been a lot of rigor in how EAs assess family planning.
Difficult to overcome:
devaluing of systematic change, and ignoring the biggest money flows. E.g., the amount of money that goes to aid is a fraction of a percent of the capital flight, foreign debt repayments, and natural resource capital/wealth that leaves poor countries. EA asks people to give, but doesn’t approach the problem of stopping the biggest leaks of wealth from where it is needed most. This has a lot to do with challenging wealth directly and supporting systematic change.
I don’t think there is enough information to rule out the strong sustainability hypothesis. (This is not to say it is true, just that there isn’t enough information to go either way).
It’s not just about what technologies we have to discover, it’s about how fast they can be discovered, developed, and implemented to overcome problems. Technology is value-neutral; sometimes it solves problems, sometimes is makes new one, sometimes it does both. There are good reasons to think that we are much more robust to pressures that collapsed a lot of earlier civilizations, but the scale of the problems we face is also unprecedented. Biocapacity and energy throughput concerns have proved impressively stubborn to technical solutions in the last several decades. And we don’t have a infinite amount of time to figure them out before they become serious collapse pressures.
I have a background in energy and I have studied these issues extensively, so I could write many pages, but I will try to be brief. We actually already have the technology to support 10 billion people at the US standard of living sustainably. It is good to think about the dynamics and embodied energy. But because typical renewable energy pays back the energy investment in about three years, if we just took the energy output of renewable energy and reinvested it, the amount of renewable energy production would grow at about 30% per year. Therefore, if we just reinvested our current renewable energy production, we would be at 100% renewable in a couple decades. The energy payback time of nuclear energy power plants (not mining) is more like one third of a year, so this is even more favorable.
The HANDY paper does not consider technological improvement, which is probably appropriate for the timescale of past collapses (but note that in the longer term, our carrying capacity has gone from millions as hunter gatherers to billions now even with higher consumption per capita, so technological change is key). However, now that we have markets and R&D, we don’t need the government to intervene to get to a sustainable solution quickly. The book “Limits to Growth” does consider technological improvement. But for some reason it estimates the carrying capacity of the earth is much below current consumption, perhaps because it does not recognize we can make nitrogen fertilizer with renewable hydrogen. I think the carrying capacity issue is why “Limits to Growth” nearly always predicts collapse.
It is conceivable that we will overreact to these slow problems much more so than we did in 2008, and this could turn into a catastrophe. But more likely these resource constraints could reduce our resilience slightly to actual catastrophes. From a food perspective, there is around a 10% chance of nuclear winter this century, and when you include lesser catastrophes like regional nuclear war, volcanic eruptions, abrupt climate change, pandemics disrupting food trade, etc., it is greater than even chance. So I am worried much more about these catastrophes than resource constraints.
But because typical renewable energy pays back the energy investment in about three years, if we just took the energy output of renewable energy and reinvested it, the amount of renewable energy production would grow at about 30% per year.
How many scarce materials would be needed? How much land area? How much toxic waste would be produced, e.g. from solar elecontronic components? Energy investment is not the only input needed for renewables.
(If you have a link that answers these and similar questions, that would be good.)
Thanks for the good questions. Wind power can use scarce materials, like rare earth permanent magnet generators. But it is possible just to use copper. Some photovoltaic technologies use scarce materials, but silicon is abundant.
US per person primary energy use is ~10 kW: Energy Information Administration. “Annual Energy Review 2007.” If we start with renewable electricity, we need less primary energy, 4-8 kW, so say 6 kW. So 10 billion people require 60 trillion watts (TW). Current wind technology could provide 72 TW: Archer, C. and M. Jacobson. “Evaluation of global wind power.” JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, D12110, doi:10.1029/2004JD005462, 2005. Solar maximum on land is ~6,000 TW, but practical ~600 TW: Lewis, N.S. “Powering the Planet” California Institute of Technology presentation. If solar is 10% efficient and average solar radiation is 200 W/square meter, this requires ~0.1 acre/person: 5% of ecological footprint quota, but could be in desert or on rooftops.
Of course we need to be careful with toxic waste, but landfills take up a negligible amount of land.
Criticisms:
Manageable, with further work:
Sorting out the ethics of animal suffering and catastrophic risk.
Weights marginal benefit heavily over systematic change. This may be inappropriate for very wealth philanthropists, or a group of pooled funders that may achieve the same effect.
Doesn’t give appropriate weight to stopping problems before they become a crisis, especially for inter-generational effects. E.g., there hasn’t been a lot of rigor in how EAs assess family planning.
Difficult to overcome:
devaluing of systematic change, and ignoring the biggest money flows. E.g., the amount of money that goes to aid is a fraction of a percent of the capital flight, foreign debt repayments, and natural resource capital/wealth that leaves poor countries. EA asks people to give, but doesn’t approach the problem of stopping the biggest leaks of wealth from where it is needed most. This has a lot to do with challenging wealth directly and supporting systematic change.
Crippling, if true:
Limits to growth is more or less the reality, meaning strong sustainability is a much better model than weak sustainability. Lack of sufficient effort locks us in an Energy Trap and makes us likely to suffer an irreversible (Type-N) collapse. Uncertainties would dominate such a scenario, weakening the usefulness of a lot of EA tools and techniques.
I always find it quite strange to find people asserting that there are strong limits to growth when:
i) most technologies that are possible haven’t been invented yet ii) humans only occupy a tiny spec of the universe.
It’s more accurate to say there are limits to the rate of growth we can achieve—limits set by our ingenuity at any point in time.
I don’t think there is enough information to rule out the strong sustainability hypothesis. (This is not to say it is true, just that there isn’t enough information to go either way).
It’s not just about what technologies we have to discover, it’s about how fast they can be discovered, developed, and implemented to overcome problems. Technology is value-neutral; sometimes it solves problems, sometimes is makes new one, sometimes it does both. There are good reasons to think that we are much more robust to pressures that collapsed a lot of earlier civilizations, but the scale of the problems we face is also unprecedented. Biocapacity and energy throughput concerns have proved impressively stubborn to technical solutions in the last several decades. And we don’t have a infinite amount of time to figure them out before they become serious collapse pressures.
I have a background in energy and I have studied these issues extensively, so I could write many pages, but I will try to be brief. We actually already have the technology to support 10 billion people at the US standard of living sustainably. It is good to think about the dynamics and embodied energy. But because typical renewable energy pays back the energy investment in about three years, if we just took the energy output of renewable energy and reinvested it, the amount of renewable energy production would grow at about 30% per year. Therefore, if we just reinvested our current renewable energy production, we would be at 100% renewable in a couple decades. The energy payback time of nuclear energy power plants (not mining) is more like one third of a year, so this is even more favorable. The HANDY paper does not consider technological improvement, which is probably appropriate for the timescale of past collapses (but note that in the longer term, our carrying capacity has gone from millions as hunter gatherers to billions now even with higher consumption per capita, so technological change is key). However, now that we have markets and R&D, we don’t need the government to intervene to get to a sustainable solution quickly. The book “Limits to Growth” does consider technological improvement. But for some reason it estimates the carrying capacity of the earth is much below current consumption, perhaps because it does not recognize we can make nitrogen fertilizer with renewable hydrogen. I think the carrying capacity issue is why “Limits to Growth” nearly always predicts collapse. It is conceivable that we will overreact to these slow problems much more so than we did in 2008, and this could turn into a catastrophe. But more likely these resource constraints could reduce our resilience slightly to actual catastrophes. From a food perspective, there is around a 10% chance of nuclear winter this century, and when you include lesser catastrophes like regional nuclear war, volcanic eruptions, abrupt climate change, pandemics disrupting food trade, etc., it is greater than even chance. So I am worried much more about these catastrophes than resource constraints.
How many scarce materials would be needed? How much land area? How much toxic waste would be produced, e.g. from solar elecontronic components? Energy investment is not the only input needed for renewables.
(If you have a link that answers these and similar questions, that would be good.)
Thanks for the good questions. Wind power can use scarce materials, like rare earth permanent magnet generators. But it is possible just to use copper. Some photovoltaic technologies use scarce materials, but silicon is abundant. US per person primary energy use is ~10 kW: Energy Information Administration. “Annual Energy Review 2007.” If we start with renewable electricity, we need less primary energy, 4-8 kW, so say 6 kW. So 10 billion people require 60 trillion watts (TW). Current wind technology could provide 72 TW: Archer, C. and M. Jacobson. “Evaluation of global wind power.” JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, D12110, doi:10.1029/2004JD005462, 2005. Solar maximum on land is ~6,000 TW, but practical ~600 TW: Lewis, N.S. “Powering the Planet” California Institute of Technology presentation. If solar is 10% efficient and average solar radiation is 200 W/square meter, this requires ~0.1 acre/person: 5% of ecological footprint quota, but could be in desert or on rooftops. Of course we need to be careful with toxic waste, but landfills take up a negligible amount of land.