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Forests take in and hold a great stock of carbon, which helps balance the stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus ameliorates the greenhouse effect and global warming. And last, but far from least, undisturbed forests are beautiful, beloved places for recreation and the restoration of the human soul.
Before the advent of human agriculture, there were six to seven billion hectares of forest on Earth. Now there are only 3.9 billion, if we include some 0.2 billion hectares of forest plantations.
Only one-fifth (1.3 billion hectares) of the Earth’s original forest cover remains in large tracts of relatively undisturbed natural forests.42 Half of this is boreal forest in Russia, Canada, and Alaska; much of the rest is tropical rain forest in the Amazon.
The United States (exclusive of Alaska) has lost 95 percent of its original forest cover. Europe has essentially no primary forest left. China has lost three-fourths of its forest and nearly all its frontier forest.
If the rate of loss remains constant at 20 million hectares per year, the unprotected forest will be gone by about 2094.
Giveaways of publicly owned forest resources for private gain, secret sales of harvesting permits, misleading accounting, false certification of species or volumes or areas cut, halfhearted enforcement of regulations, sweetheart deals, kickbacks—these
They show that remaining oil resources (defined as the sum of current and undiscovered reserves) could last 50 to 80 years at the year 2000 usage rates, while natural gas could last 160 to 310 years. Coal is even more abundant. The cost of accessing the resource will of course increase as the resource depletes.
Of all the fossil fuels, natural gas emits the least pollution—including the greenhouse gas CO2 —per energy unit, and therefore there is significant interest in having it rapidly replace oil and coal.
In 1970 photovoltaic (PV) electricity was generated at a capital cost of $120 per watt. By 2000 the cost had dropped to $3.50 per watt.
Around the turn of the millennium, Americans used some 105 billion (109) aluminum cans per year, of which some 55 percent were recycled. That means that every year the recycling of those tiny tabs saved 16,000 tons of aluminum and around 200 million kilowatt-hours of electricity.
rule of thumb says that every ton of garbage at the consumer end of the stream has also required the production of 5 tons of waste at the manufacturing stage and 20 tons of waste at the site of initial resource extraction (mining, pumping, logging, farming).79
Increasing product lifetime through better design, repair, and reuse (as, for example, in washing cups instead of using throwaways) is more effective than recycling, because it doesn’t require crushing, grinding, melting, purifying, and refabricating recycled materials. Doubling the average lifetime of any product will halve the energy consumption, the waste and pollution, and the ultimate depletion of all the materials used to make it.
No nation has solved the problem of nuclear wastes. In nature such wastes are hazardous to all forms of life, both by outright toxicity and mutagenicity.
As byproducts of nuclear power production, they are accumulating steadily, stored underground or in water pools within the containment vessels of nuclear reactors, in the hope that someday the technical and institutional creativity of humankind will come up with someplace to put them.
For example, as warming decreases the snow and ice cover, the Earth will reflect away less heat from the sun, thereby warming further.
A rough assessment . . . shows that current appropriations of natural resources and services already exceed Earth’s long-term carrying capacity. . . . If everybody on Earth enjoyed the same ecological standards as North Americans, we would require three earths to satisfy aggregate material demand, using prevailing technology. . . . To accommodate sustainably the anticipated increase in population and economic output of the next four decades, we would need six to twelve additional planets. —MATHIS WACKERNAGEL AND WILLIAM REES, 1996
A population and economy are in overshoot mode when they are withdrawing resources or emitting pollutants at an unsustainable rate, but are not yet in a situation where the stresses on the support system are strong enough to reduce the withdrawal or emission. In other words: Humanity is in overshoot when the human ecological footprint is above the sustainable level, but not yet large enough to trigger changes that produce a decline in its ecological footprint.
Overshoot comes from delays in feedback. Decision makers in the system do not immediately get, or believe, or act upon information that limits have been exceeded.
Only 1 molecule in 100,000 in the ozone layer is actually ozone. But that concentration is sufficient to absorb most of a particularly harmful ultraviolet wavelength called UVB from the sun’s incoming light (see figure 5-2).
UVB light is a hail of little bullets of energy just the right frequency to take apart organic molecules—the kinds of molecules that make up all life, including the DNA that carries the code for life’s reproduction. Thus the ozone layer is a gossamer veil with a crucial function.
When living organisms are hit by UVB, one possible ...
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The hole over the Antarctic certainly had a psychological effect, maybe all the more so because it was not understood.
Most industrializing countries did not sign. China, for example, was trying to equip millions of households with their first refrigerators, which meant a huge new demand for Freon. The USSR waffled, saying that its five-year planning process did not allow rapid change in CFC production. It demanded and got a slower phase-down schedule. Most industrial makers of CFCs were still hoping to maintain at least part of their market.
Several industrializing countries refused to sign unless an international fund was established to help them with the technical shift to CFC alternatives.
Mexico, announced they would not take advantage of their 10-year grace period, but would follow the same reduction schedule as the industrialized countries. Gradually all others, including China and India, followed suit, and currently all production is scheduled to cease by 2010.
Despite this and other minor issues, the world has largely reached consensus on the problem and has made enormous progress in implementing solutions. It has taken more than 25 years, but successful response to overshoot is clearly possible.
People and nations do not have to become perfect saints in order to forge effective international cooperation on difficult issues; nor is perfect knowledge or scientific proof necessary for action.
A world government is not needed to deal with global problems, but it is necessary to have global scientific cooperation, a global information system, an international forum within which specific agreements can be worked out, and international cooperation in enforcing those agreements.
All the actors in the ozone agreement were important and will be needed again: an international negotiator like UNEP; a few national governments willing to take the political lead; flexible and responsible corporations; scientists who can and will communicate with policy makers; environmental activists to apply pressure; consumers willing to shift product choices on the basis of environmental information; and technical experts to come up with innovations that can make life possible, convenient, and profitable even when it must adapt to bring human impacts back within limits.
The idea that there might be limits to growth is for many people impossible to imagine. Limits are politically unmentionable and economically unthinkable.
The technologies we see are highly specific to particular problems; they cost money and take a long time to develop. Once they are proven in the lab there are further delays to develop the capital, labor, sales and service staff, marketing and finance mechanisms necessary to bring them into widespread use.
In the “real world,” if hunger is mainly in Africa, if pollution crises are mainly in Central Europe, if land degradation is mainly in the tropics, if the people who experience problems first are those with the least economic or technical capability to respond, there will be very long delays before problems are corrected.
We have to remember, too, that the World3 model has no military sector to drain capital and resources from the productive economy. It has no wars to kill people, destroy capital, waste land, or generate pollution. It has no ethnic strife, no strikes, no corruption, no floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, nuclear accidents, AIDS epidemics, or surprising environmental failures. Therefore it is, in may ways, wildly optimistic.
And in an increasingly linked world economy, a society under stress anywhere sends out waves that are felt everywhere.
Time is in fact the ultimate limit in the World3 model—and, we believe, in the “real world” Given enough time, we believe humanity possesses nearly limitless problem-solving abilities. Growth, and especially exponential growth, is so insidious because it shortens the time for effective action. It loads stress on a system faster and faster, until coping mechanisms that have been adequate with slower rates of change finally begin to fail.
The first reason is that markets and technologies are merely tools that serve the goals, the ethics, and the time horizons of the society as a whole. If a society’s implicit goals are to exploit nature, enrich the elites, and ignore the long term, then that society will develop technologies and markets that destroy the environment, widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and optimize for short term gains.
The second reason for the vulnerability of technology is that adjustment mechanisms have costs.
It may be affordable to cut pollutants per car in half, but if the number of cars then doubles, pollutants per car have to be cut in half again just to keep the same air quality. Two doublings will require 75 percent pollution abatement. Three doublings will require 87.5 percent.
Thus at some point it stops being true that growth will allow an economy to become rich enough to afford pollution abatement. In fact, growth takes an economy up a nonlinear cost curve to the point where further abatement becomes unaffordable.
At that point a rational society would stop the expansion of its activity level, since further growth will no longer increase the welfare of its citizens. FIGUR...
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The third reason technology and the market can not automatically solve these problems is that they operate through feedback loops with information distortions and delays.
we want to return to the purposes to which technology and markets are put. They are simply tools. They have no more inherent wisdom or farsightedness or moderation or compassion than do the human bureaucracies that create them.
The fault is not with people, it is with the system.
You are thinking of the whaling industry as an organization that is interested in maintaining whales; actually it is better viewed as a huge quantity of [money] capital attempting to earn the highest possible return. If it can exterminate whales in ten years and make a 15 percent profit, but it could only make 10 percent with a sustainable harvest, then it will exterminate them in ten years. After that, the money will be moved to exterminating some other resource.14
Technology and markets typically serve the most powerful segments of society.
The same combination of people, organizations, and physical structures can behave completely differently, if the system’s actors can see a good reason for doing so, and if they have the freedom, perhaps even the incentive, to change.
The structural causes of overshoot over which people have the most power are the ones we did not change in chapter 6, namely those that drive the positive feedback loops causing exponential growth in human population and physical capital. They are the norms, goals, expectations, pressures, incentives, and costs that cause people to bear more than a replacement number of children. They are the deeply ingrained beliefs and practices that cause natural resources to be used more wastefully than money, that distribute income and wealth inequitably, that make people see themselves primarily as
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A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today.
A sustainable society is one that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”2
To be materially and energetically sustainable, the economy’s throughputs would have to meet Herman Daly’s three conditions:3 • Its rates of use of renewable resources do not exceed their rates of regeneration. • Its rates of use of nonrenewable resources do not exceed the rate at which sustainable renewable substitutes are developed. • Its rates of pollution emission do not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment.
