Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Environment Page 2 of 15

Declining Population Thru Lower Birth Rates Is GOOD, Mmmmkay?

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On August 21, 2023

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Alright, let’s cover this again, with a bit more explication, since the idiots are really doubling down on “oh no, decreasing population.”

If you want to see it on a map, here goes:

Even India has dropped to about replacement rate.

Now, let’s deal with this.

First, to the extent the plummet in birth rates is because of decreased biological fertility, like reduced sperm counts, it’s bad.

Second, despite this, we are well over the world’s carrying capacity and you are seeing it in the collapse of other life forms (ecological collapse) and climate change.

Third: the world’s carrying capacity is variable in a sense: what matters is number of people times the average per capita carrying cost of each person.

Fourth: the more population we want to have, the lower our per capita carrying costs have to be.

Fifth: a lot of people whine about this and to a certain extent rightly so. It is associated with austerity.

Sixth: imagine a world in which you bought a phone and used it for 20 years with modular upgrades; a car and used it for 50 (with modular upgrades); a washer and dryer and used it for 75 years, and where all of those things, when they finally ended their lives, were carefully recycled as much as possible.

Imagine a world in which almost nothing was made out of plastic. (In the 70s almost all bottles were glass and we used paper bags and grocery items were not individually wrapped in plastic and fuck “germs!” Covid has proven we don’t really care about that.)

Imagine a world in which we work half as much, create stuff that lasts for decades or even half a century or more.

Seventh: “but how can we afford this?” We can afford anything we can actually physically do. Each individual item would be more expensive, but last far longer and be cheaper overall. Yes, we would have to change how we distribute permission to have things, but we need to do that already.

Eighth: even in capitalist terms the “oh, without population gain how can we have economic growth” stuff is incoherent. Capitalism is supposed to increase productivity massively, so you should still be able to have growth, certainly per-capita growth. If you can’t, you’re a bad capitalist.

Ninth: that particular issue is related to oligarchs wanting to funnel all the money upwards and instead of relying on customers, rely on government, including central bank, subsidies. (Neither Tesla nor SpaceX would have made it without massive government subsidies.) In actual capitalism capitalists want high wages, because “everyone else’s employees are my customers.” The cost of high wages is more than made up for by people being able to afford their goods. This is why the economy of the post-war era was so good: high wages and lots of consumptiong.

Tenth: of course this sort of capitalism has to go away, we can’t afford a planned obsolesence economy in a world over carrying capacity and with limited stocks of key resources (the way we’re burning thru lithium should be literally criminal). But even in capitalist terms “oh no, population decrease” is an admission of failure.

Eleven: the dependency ratio is how many working people are supporting non-working (old, young, disabled and not allowed to work) people. Yes, a lower ratio makes things harder, but again, productivity is what matters and capitalism keeps claiming it’s good at raising productivity. Plus the actual percentage of people working for wages in high prosperity periods has often actually been lower than in high prosperity periods.

Twelve: oh, and worker compensation is likely to go up as population decreases and as the carry ratio decreases (or at least, be higher than it would have been otherwise, civilization collapse is also in the mix.) After the black death, welfare increased massively. We’re already seeing some of this effect due to the pandemic (one of the only good things to come out of it.)

***

We need less population. The world’s population has over doubled just in my lifetime (I’m 55). That’s ridiculous. And minus the internet and a few good medical improvements, I’ll tell you that life wasn’t worse then. (Even Africa had higher growth rates in the 50s and 60s and the dire poverty numbers are bullshit, because subsistence farming was far more common, but that’s another article.)

We have no problems we can’t adapt to, minus a few scenarios like the Venus runaway, a full ecological collapse which eliminates the apex species (that’s us) or polluting the world so much we can’t survive (which includes nuclear war.)  We can, in theory and even in practice, if our politics wasn’t so screwed up, even make most people better off at the same time. But it will take time, and the most important problems are made simpler by population reductions.

What is going to make everything harder, actually, is our refusal to deal with Covid and our “New Emperor’s Clothes” insistence on pretending it’s over, while it continues as a mass disabling event. Yeah, we can handle a lower dependency ratio, but crippling hundreds of millions of people and making hundreds of millions more sicker is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound.

As before, as so far always in this crisis, the most important thing we have to do is replace our leadership class: political and private, en-masse, so that the correct decisions can be made. And yes, capitalism as we understand it is going to have to go away.

But this weird idea that population reduction right now is bad is breathtakingly stupid, and people who believe it have been fooled, or are fools

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The Simplest Thing You Need To Understand About Climate Change

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On August 9, 2023

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The amount of warming is based primarily on how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere.

This is what is known as a STOCK. Think of it like the water in a sink.

The amount of climate change gases we are putting into the atmosphere is a FLOW. Think of it as the net amount of water going into the sink.

So, when you read an article talking about how much gas is being produced, if it says that amount is going down, what that means is that warming is still increasing.

If we want to reduce the amount of warming, we have to get to a negative amount of gasses going into the pool; into the stock. The flow needs to be negative, like turning off the water and pulling the plug.

Unfortunately, and that is what I’ve been concerned by, at a certain point, stored climate change gasses start being released. Methane in the permafrost and in swamps, for example. Once the permafrost areas heat up enough, methane which has been kept out of the stock and flows starts flowing into the pool.

This is a flow we have only indirect control over and it makes it much harder to get to a negative flow or even slow the increase of the stock.

So, if we ever want the old world back we’re going to have to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere or take other radical steps like orbital mirrors which reflect sunlight so there’s less incoming heat.

Removing CO2 is HARD. It’s not an easy problem and many of the ways of doing it, like ocean seeding, may cause other problems. As with a lot of problems, the easiest way to deal with it was not to let it occur in the first place.

It’s too late to do that.

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Preparing For Collapse During Collapse

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On August 1, 2023

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As regular readers know my judgment is that we are now into civilization collapse. It’s slow right now, and it will be stop and start, but it will continue and pick up speed over time.

That means that you should be preparing for collapse to get worse, including climate change and ecological collapse.

Civilizations rise and fall, that’s normal, and ecological collapse commonly happens at the same time, but what’s unusual right now is that we have a world system which is global, and thus is collapsing all at once, and we have a global ecological collapse.

So it’s going to be bad. Very bad.

Still, there are things to be done.

The most important thing is to make and sustain social ties. The people who do best in collapses are those whom other people like and need. Join a church if you can stomach it (and there are churches which come with little theological baggage, for atheists.) Make friends with your neighbours and join groups. Be liked.

If you have family you can stand or good friends, consider communal living. An extended household will often do better than a person alone or a nuclear family, being both cheaper and having more ability to take care of itself and its members.

Get some skills: basic maintainence abilities will be worth a lot: electrical, plumbing, minor repairs, etc…

Figure out a way to grow some of your own food, or set up a relationship with local farmers, ideally one that is a trade of your abilities for their food. Back in the Great Depression one friend’s father was a lawyer, and he did the legal work for a lot of farms and they kept  him fed.

Gardens are so-so. Climate change is going to make outdoor gardening very uncertain. If you can, create something with climate control, ideally a green house and figure out a way to keep it cooled when necessary. You can do this in your house too, by replacing some walls and part of the roof with a transparent material, ideally with some form of shutters. If you have a flat roof, and it’s load bearing, you can put your green house up there.

Do something about water. Lack of water will kill you faster than anything but temperature and lack of oxygen. Some sort of storage system and ability to gather rain water is one possibility. If you’re somewhere humid, dehumidifiers of the right type can produce enough water for drinking. Get some sort of purification system, something simple.

Power is going to be an issue. Solar panels have a limited lifespan and so do batteries, but they’re better than nothing. You want to be able to provide power for a couple weeks and/or during brown outs — if power will be out hours every day due to rationing, you need to be able to handle that. Some form of non-panel solar is a good idea: research heat engines and see if you can figure out how to store energy mechanically by raising water or physical objects or some other way.

Temperature control is another obvious issue, and figuring out  how to stay cool is important. As heat rises, public power will become less reliable at exactly the times you need it, so the power equation above is important.

If there are local violent authories, whether government (police/military) or non-government (gangs) make sure they like you. Become friends with their leaders if possible. As civilization breaks down, be part of whatever replaces them in certain areas. (Like in Iraq, where various militias and mosques took over.

In general, though, understand that supply chains are going to become more and more unreliable. Get the tech you need as soon as possible, and make it tech that is durable and/or easy to maintain. Buy spare parts and take training so that you can fix your own equipment, which will also make you valuable to your neighbours.

Learn how to make certain simple medicines if you can: basic antibiotics are not hard to make and the same is true of the sulfa drugs. If you can do this, you’re golden, because you’ll be able to help other people and you will be valuable to them.

Medical systems, especially public ones will become more and more unreliable and less and less available to people who aren’t on the inside. Take care of as many medical issues as you can right now. I like to joke that it’s a good thing I got cancer now, because in 10 years I’m not sure I’d have gotten care soon enough. You can’t schedule something like cancer, but you can make sure whatever problems  you have now are dealt with.

Taper off drugs you use all the time if that’s possible. For some, like insulin, you’re out of luck (but should look into how to get an alternative supply), but for many other drugs, tapering now rather than being forced to go cold turkey is advisable IF it’s medically appropriate.

Take action as soon as possible. The more money you have, of course, the easier this will be, but if you don’t have money there are still things you can do, like joining local maker clubs, churches and organizations. If you have extra money do use some of your money to prepare: money will become less valuable as time goes by.

We’re on the downward slope now. If you want to survive, or to have a decent life, take whatever steps you can.

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Quick Takes 5: The Year Climate Change Became Undeniable

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On July 31, 2023

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Only someone ignorant, stupid or on the payroll could deny climate change before 2023, but this is the year where to remain in denial you have to be 5-sigma stupid or on the payroll.

So, boys and girls, let’s look at some of the highlights of what will be one of the coldest years of the rest of your life.

Let’s start with Antarctic sea ice extent. Remember, this is during WINTER.

For years I’ve said that marine inundation (sea level rises) would happen before most people expect it. And I’ll be right.

Next, we have more winter fun. 35 degrees celcius in Chile.

Well, that seems… bad.

Now for the lovely long-term view:

What’s super about the aboe graph, is that I’ll lay you 4:1 it is over-optimistic. By a lot.

There’s a vast amount of delusion about how bad global warming will be. People talk about 1.5 C, or 2 C, or 3 C.

How about +10C as the equilibrium? This is from a pre-print, but it’s not unreasonable:

Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG level is 10°C for our central estimate

Now, the guys who made the above estimate are on the gloom side and as they themselves say, blackballed, but everyone who’s been paying attention knows that essentially everything has been coming in sooner and worse than expected. Are you going to bet on the consensus forecasts made for politicians that have consistently under-estimated climate change?

Yeah.

Next we have Farmer’s Insurance leaving Florida. The time when home owners insurance won’t be available anywhere unless the government underwrites it is withing sight.

Ocean water is warming up. In the more tropical areas it’s destroying coral, but it’s damn impressive in the north, too:

Spain, July 7th.

My guess is that most of the Mediterranean area will not be inhabitable during the summer in ten to twenty years. If you don’t have air conditioning, you will die.

Then there’s the whole “jellyfish future”:

Oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have already dropped more than 2 per cent between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to seven per cent below the 1960 level over the next century. Some patches are worse than others — the top of the northeast Pacific has lost more than 15 per cent of its oxygen. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2019 special report on the oceans, from 1970 to 2010, the volume of “oxygen minimum zones” in the global oceans — where big fish can’t thrive but jellyfish can — increased by between three and eight per cent.

I for one welcome the ocean’s new Jellyfish overlords.

We’ll talk more about the implications of all this soon, including the implications for you personally.

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Permafrost Tipping Point Almost Certainly Reached

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On July 11, 2023

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As regular readers will know, for a long time I’ve emphasized what are now being called tipping points, and in particular the tipping point where permafrost melt becomes self sustaining. As a matter of politics, I’ve been quite sure this would occur, since we aren’t likely to do anything about it.

One model shows that the tipping point is already past. If we were to stop all emissions today, it would still happen and temperatures would still rise.

It’s possible this model is wrong on the margins, but I’d be rather surprised if it’s wrong on the fundamentals. The danger has always been passing the point where humanity was in the driver’s seat. We started global warming climate change, but we can no longer stop it short of, perhaps, some hail-mary geo-engineering.

Back in 2009 I said that runaway climate change was a sure thing, not because I thought then that the tipping point had been reached, but because it was clear that we were close to the tipping point and that politicians were not going to take action. I considered the 2008 election the last chance, Obama was elected and he was a disaster: not only didn’t he take the action needed, he vastly increased fracking, something he is very proud of, having said “that was me!”

Let’s run quickly thru what this means.

Water shortages in large areas of the world. We’ve depleted and poisoned the aquifers too. This is going to be ugly: most of the American southwest, large chunks of China and India, huge areas of Africa, and more. I’ve written about this many times, this is a 100% certainty.

Actual Famines. Right now we produce way more food than we need. We won’t continue doing so. The first famines will be distributional famines, but by 2050-60 at the latest there will be real subcontinental scarcity famines. Obesity isn’t going to be an issue for much longer, maybe 20 years.

Massive Refugee Crises. Like nothing we’ve every seen. Borders will be SHUT and refugees will be shot. I figure the best candidate for the first one that involves tens of millions of refugees in a short period is Bangladesh/India. And I give 50/50 odds the Indians will shoot a lot of them.

Supply Chain Cascade Failures. We’re already seeing this. We’re past the tipping point on economic collapse as well, though it will be quite uneven. My favorite current failure is that there’s a shortage of Siracha hot sauce, and there’s nothing that can be done about it because there aren’t enough materials to make it with.

This issue has a lot more causes than climate change, but climate change doesn’t help.

Ecological Collapse. The birds, the bees, the insects: they’re all dying and when their populations collapse, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. This is why I usually say “climate change and environmental collapse.” Some of this stuff is really scary, like the possibility of a collapse of the phytoplankton in the ocean which produce about 30% of our annual oxygen.

Large Chunks of the World Being To Hot To Live In. Yeah, sorry. At first it’ll just be in the summer, but in time it’ll be most of the year.

Will Spain, northern Africa and the southern Med even be inhabitable in the summer in ten to twenty years? The only solution would appear to be a ton of solar and/or nuclear and a lot of air conditioning, but you can’t farm in these temperatures, heck this is approaching wet bulb death temperatures.

Riots, Revolutions, Warlordism, etc… Yeah, sorry, when the famines and no water and heat and so on get bad, people will not sit there and just die and countries will break up. I would expect, in about 30 years or so, for half the world’s countries to be essentially descended into warlordism. In fifty years, 70% or so.

All of this was preventable, we knew in time and knew what to do and did not do any of it.

As a species we are responsible, but the people who are most responsible have names and addresses. One of the requirements of handling climate change and ecological collapse in the best way will be to remove them all from power, take everything they have, and throw them in prison for the remainder of their lives. They can be permitted to have no power and everyone must understand see that they did not benefit from their evil.

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Utilities As Mutual Companies

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On July 3, 2023

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One of the big constant news stories recently has been about UK water utilities constantly flushing untreated sewage into the rivers and oceans near the UK, while raising prices, paying huge salaries to their executives and massive dividends. One solution is to take them back into public ownership.

But another possibility is to make the mutual companies. I worked for a mutual insurance company for a while, and helped it de-mutualize, at which point its prices went up, employees were treated worse, executives made more money and so on.

In a mutual companies, customers own the company. Dividends are paid to the customers. Prices tend to be lower than in stock companies (there’s plenty of research on this), employees are treated well and executives make less. Since customers own the company, they have a say in what the company does, and since customers of, say, water companies wouldn’t want sewage in the water or forest fires (for electrical companies like California’s PG&E) they might prove better for environmental concerns and also for customer service. Also a lot less likely to get situations where the customers water is full of lead and other pollutants.

There used to be a lot of mutual companies, but most of the de-mutualized because executives wanted to pay themselves more, especially thru stock grants and so on, but if a law was put in place that utilities and other public companies like railways and public transit are either public or mutual and can’t be stock companies, that might cure a lot of problems, especially if the owners(customers) have to approve executive salaries.

Worth a try, at any rate, though I’m aware of the political problems.

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And He Said To Me “We’re all going to die, and heaven knows we deserve to”

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On June 12, 2023

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That’s what a friend wrote to me when he sent me the story attached to that picture.

“A cleanup is underway as an unquantifiable amount of dead fish washed ashore on several Texas beaches today due to low oxygen levels in the water, according to a Quintana Beach County Park Official.”

Yeah. Now this isn’t just a climate change thing, nor is this the first time it’s happened, but warm water holds less oxygen and also reduces the number of oxygen producing phytoplankton. Red Tides (algal blooms which deplete oxygen) are also made more common by climate change.

So, there are two things to say about this.

First: the probability that all humans will die is low. Not zero or effectively zero though I know some smart people who think that’s true. They argue “the Earth has had this much carbon/heat before and there was life, it’ll suck, but whatever.” Well, yeah, but not while humans were around.

What it really is is about is an assumption that the next equilibrium point (from the one we’ve inhabited for about 10K years) is a livable one, and that we won’t blow thru it and others and settle at one which is not livable, or more accurately, which we cannot adapt to in time to avoid an extinction spiral.

It is also true that the problem is NOT just carbon, it is ecological collapse. Human are apex predators. If we take out the web beneath us, we are the ones most vulnerable.

This is probably true. It is not certainly true.

Second: Just Because Human Life Will Probably Go On, Doesn’t Mean Yours Will. Or, y’know, the life of anybody you care about. Always true, but more true in mass death scenarios. Nor does it mean your life will not really, really, suck.

Well, there’s your Monday cheer for you!

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Declining Birth Rates Are Good & Bad

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On April 4, 2023

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So, there’s constant talk about the problem of declining birth rates and how much of a problem they are. There’s some truth to this, but a lot of it is based on the argument that more people lead to growing economies and that argument is terrible. The part that is reasonable is the rising increase in infertility, including plummeting sperm counts. That’s not bad because it leads to less children, precisely, it’s because it indicates how badly we’ve poisoned ourselves.

But the simple fact of the matter is that the world is well past its carrying capacity for the type of society we have. The Club of Rome predictions from 1968 have almost all tracked the real world, and we’re just past the hump: we’re into decline, but barely.

Notice that population decline happens about 30 years after the peak of food, industrial and services per capita. That’s bad and it’s part of what is going to make this so ugly. Check out the food per capita line for some real ugliness, though there’s going to be a lot less fat people.

Note that carrying capacity is not purely about population. Different global societies have different carrying capacities per capita. If we had not gone with planned obsolescence (there was a fight over near the end of the 19th century, managers vs. engineers and the engineers lost); if we did not have suburbs and exurbs but only urban, rural and wilderness; and if we had seriously started our transition from fossil fuels in the 80s instead of electing Thatcher and Reagan, our carrying cost would be much less and the world could support a much higher population. But under current circumstances, the world maximum population is probably about two billion, and once climate change runs amok it will be less.

So our population is going to reduce. It’s not “we have to reduce our population” it is “we are animals who exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment and our population IS going to drop, whether we like it or not.” That’s going to suck.

There was a window to avoid this. It is a result of our own decisions: to go with planned obsolescence, to have suburbs and massive numbers of cars, to pollute like maniacs, to destroy the forests and the swamps and the jungles, to not transition away from fossil fuels and dozens of decisions based on greed and “I won’t be here when it gets bad, so who cares?”

As for economies, high dependency rations (fewer working age people supporting people who can’t work) will be a drag. But because we have legitimately already overshot carrying capacity and because of resource and sink constraints (sinks is where we put our pollution, like CO2 and methane) reduced overall population is going to be more good than bad.

How much population will be lost is, in some sense, up to us. We left doing all the right things too late to avoid this, but the faster we transition to societies built around not exceeding planetary limits and working with and for the environment, the less people will die.

But even in a very optimistic scenario I have trouble seeing our population not winding up down two to three billion.

It is what we, as a species, chose through our decisions. That doesn’t mean you or I chose, we mostly didn’t, but at the species level, our decisions lead here.

It is what it is, and it will be what it will be.

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