For numerous species there is no tomorrow. They are gone; the more sorely missed the more recent their demise. For thousands and thousands more there will be no tomorrow. They are the living dead, past the point of no return, inexorably on the path to extinction even if people don't know it yet. It is conceivable that some species may still hang on in a bleak and impoverished world. Which category will we fall into? Unlike the other species, we have no one but ourselves to blame—unless we blame our predecessors and our contemporaries. One single species is to blame for all this. What does one do when a growth out of control threatens the viability and health of the whole?
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Saturday, June 23, 2012
It's the people, stupid...
Thor is not one of those people who blame corporations for everything. It is PEOPLE who work in or for corporations, buy from corporations, allow corporations and money into politics, allow corporations to rape and kill the earth, allow governments to be weak, stupid, naive, corrupt or to get away with murder, vote for the politicians who maintain the status quo rather than fix the problems and lead the way to a better future, remain passive rather than throw the bastards out or make it impossible for the people in the corporations or in politics to act the way they do, PEOPLE who create more people that again become part of the problem, legitimize the status quo, continue to treat other species with disrespect and ignorance, etc. etc. etc. Corporations may not be people in the way a compromised Supreme Court of the United States has stated that they are, but they consist of people, sell to people, and they carry on with the complicity and collaboration of people. And governments are nothing but people either. Mostly naive and stupid people, or people with good intentions but few degrees of freedom—at least they perceive that they have few degrees of freedom. And they need people to vote for them if they are going to remain politicians. Which probably they shouldn't...
If you resent that people have no choice but to buy from corporations, that corporations have no loyalties other than to the shareholders and their own wallets and careers, that weak politicians pay too much heed to what the monied folks want, that corporations are wrecking the world in which we live while corrupting our politics and our monetary system and making the way people live their lives completely meaningless and ugly, there is only one thing for it: Get organized and do something about it. The difficulty is, of course, all those other people who are oblivious, greedy, pacified, and remain hooked up to the Matrix, and all those people who perceive that they have few degrees of freedom to act any different than they do. How to move humanity away from their all-destroying path...
Friday, June 15, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Friday, April 20, 2012
Discussions with an economist...
Nice blog posts by UCSD physicist, Tom Murphy, taking on the dogma of growth economics, on the blog "Do the Math": http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
Thor´s comments:
As an ecologist I think we face ecological limits much sooner than we face physical limits. Some of those limits are evident every day. Yet of course we have spent so little effort trying to be efficient with anything other than labor and capital inputs that there is great room for improvement—if we would only focus on efficient use of the things that really matter. So we can still do a lot with technical fixes, if we only concentrate in the right arenas (something we have not done in the past). But of course it depends on what is really the limiting factor (water? land? soil? nutrients? recycling capacity? ecological resilience/robustness? absorption of GHGs? primary productivity? energy? low entropy?... clearly the entropy limit is a long way off yet...)
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
—Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
Thor´s comments:
As an ecologist I think we face ecological limits much sooner than we face physical limits. Some of those limits are evident every day. Yet of course we have spent so little effort trying to be efficient with anything other than labor and capital inputs that there is great room for improvement—if we would only focus on efficient use of the things that really matter. So we can still do a lot with technical fixes, if we only concentrate in the right arenas (something we have not done in the past). But of course it depends on what is really the limiting factor (water? land? soil? nutrients? recycling capacity? ecological resilience/robustness? absorption of GHGs? primary productivity? energy? low entropy?... clearly the entropy limit is a long way off yet...)
Two points:
1) I do not care only for what is important to Homo sapiens, but also to other species with which we "share" the planet--many of which are going extinct every day on account of the status quo in human society. There must be room for others as well. Furthermore, we have evolved in a world with other species around us, this is what we are used to and we have been evolutionarily adapted to it over millions of years and they are part of what we like and love about this planet (even if H. sapiens has only been around for a little over 100,000 years). That would have to be a mind-numbingly good virtual reality machine... Be that as it may, many of the good things in life already don't cost any money—unfortunately they are being destroyed by other people´s pursuit of money, experiences, family, etc. In the immortal words of Paul Simon, "one man's ceiling is another man's floor".
2) Even if the economy shifts into the non-material world and focus of the economy shifts to quality of life ("insubstantial" aspects such as art, virtual reality, decorative desserts, etc.) that do not require a lot of material inputs, there must be a limit to how much people will or can pay for the massive house of cards that is built on top of the real inputs in the economy (food, nutrients, etc.)... If food production is the ultimate "real input" into the economy, how big a house of cards can we build on top of that before people are saturated with that immaterial part and will not be interested in paying more and/or the necessary part of the economy is not able to bear any increase in the weight of the "superstructure"?
Cessation of growth seems inevitable also in the economic sense.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
—Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Political democracy without monetary democracy is ineffective
A better democracy is long overdue...
Postgrowth currency expert Bernard Lietaer at PopTech 2011:
Monday, October 31, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Work is the root of all evil
How much is that job of yours costing you?
The Language of Work, by Mark Kingwell, Harper's Magazine, July 2011
SOUS LES PAVÉs, LA PLAGE! (Under the paving stones, the beach!)
The Language of Work, by Mark Kingwell, Harper's Magazine, July 2011
SOUS LES PAVÉs, LA PLAGE! (Under the paving stones, the beach!)
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Not normal
Sooner or later in every talk, [David] Brower describes the creation of the world. He invites his listeners to consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been four billion years. In this scale, a day equals something like six hundred and sixty-six million years, and thus "all day Monday until Tuesday noon, creation was busy getting the earth going." Life began Tuesday noon, and "the beautiful, organic wholeness of it" developed over the next four days. "At 4 P.M. Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight, man appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fourtieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fourtieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad."
(John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, 1971)
"The Hetch-Hetchy Valley, California" by Albert Bierstadt, ca. 1874-1880.
(John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, 1971)
"The Hetch-Hetchy Valley, California" by Albert Bierstadt, ca. 1874-1880.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Eat fruit and understand exponential growth!
You still believe Malthus was wrong? Study in a social "sciences" department, did you?
Exponential growth is counter-intuitive, but only very simple math is required. The "rule of 69" tells us that with a constant rate of growth, the doubling time (T2) is 69 years divided by the annual growth rate (in percent): ln2/k ≈ 0.69/k. With k the annual rate of growth, in percent, the doubling time, in years, is approximately 69/k. (With k=0.02 or 2% (2/100), the doubling time is ln2/k≈100*0.69/2≈35 years; If something grows steadily at 7% per year (k=0.07), the doubling time is 69/7≈10 years). This is all easily derived from the exponential growth function r(t)=r(0)exp(kt), where r(t) is the quantity r at time t, r(0) is the quantity at the start (t=0), and k is the growth rate. The doubling time is the time, T2, at which r(T2)=2r(0), that is, 2r(0)=r(0)exp(k(T2)), which implies that T2= ln2/k ≈0.69/k.
Furthermore, with each successive doubling, the resulting quantity is greater than the cumulative total of all quantities before that since the process began.
The quantity in question can be money, a particular resource, or an animal population, such as the human population size—anything that is capable of growing (for a while) at a constant rate of growth.
If r is a resource, such as global oil reserves, suppose we have R tons of oil left, and we are increasing the rate of oil use by 100k% per year. The expiration time, Te, the time it takes to use up all that oil, is the amount of time till the total used is equal to R. The total resource used by time T, is the integral from t=0 to T of r(t) with respect to t, which is ∫r(t)dt=∫r(0)exp(kt)dt=r(0)(exp(kT)-1)/k. Hence the expiration time, Te, is where R = r(0)(exp(kTe)-1)/k, so Te= ln((kR/r(0))+1)/k.
An excellent introduction to exponential growth can be found here:
You can watch Dr. Bartlett's entire lecture, piecemeal, here, or here.
Do it! It is every voting citizen's duty to acquire the understanding and the prerequisites needed to comprehend the important issues of our time.
If you are only going to watch one 9 minute segment of the lecture, part 3 gives a particularly vivid example:
It doesn't matter whether the growth is in population or in consumption.
Money can grow indefinitely, because the money we use today is simply debt. There is no absolute limit to the total amount of debt humanity can have. But there is a limit to the stuff we can buy with that money (debt)... Thor believes you can figure out the consequences of that for yourself...
"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place…"
—Isaiah 23, 005:008
Exponential growth is counter-intuitive, but only very simple math is required. The "rule of 69" tells us that with a constant rate of growth, the doubling time (T2) is 69 years divided by the annual growth rate (in percent): ln2/k ≈ 0.69/k. With k the annual rate of growth, in percent, the doubling time, in years, is approximately 69/k. (With k=0.02 or 2% (2/100), the doubling time is ln2/k≈100*0.69/2≈35 years; If something grows steadily at 7% per year (k=0.07), the doubling time is 69/7≈10 years). This is all easily derived from the exponential growth function r(t)=r(0)exp(kt), where r(t) is the quantity r at time t, r(0) is the quantity at the start (t=0), and k is the growth rate. The doubling time is the time, T2, at which r(T2)=2r(0), that is, 2r(0)=r(0)exp(k(T2)), which implies that T2= ln2/k ≈0.69/k.
Furthermore, with each successive doubling, the resulting quantity is greater than the cumulative total of all quantities before that since the process began.
The quantity in question can be money, a particular resource, or an animal population, such as the human population size—anything that is capable of growing (for a while) at a constant rate of growth.
If r is a resource, such as global oil reserves, suppose we have R tons of oil left, and we are increasing the rate of oil use by 100k% per year. The expiration time, Te, the time it takes to use up all that oil, is the amount of time till the total used is equal to R. The total resource used by time T, is the integral from t=0 to T of r(t) with respect to t, which is ∫r(t)dt=∫r(0)exp(kt)dt=r(0)(exp(kT)-1)/k. Hence the expiration time, Te, is where R = r(0)(exp(kTe)-1)/k, so Te= ln((kR/r(0))+1)/k.
An excellent introduction to exponential growth can be found here:
You can watch Dr. Bartlett's entire lecture, piecemeal, here, or here.
Do it! It is every voting citizen's duty to acquire the understanding and the prerequisites needed to comprehend the important issues of our time.
If you are only going to watch one 9 minute segment of the lecture, part 3 gives a particularly vivid example:
It doesn't matter whether the growth is in population or in consumption.
Money can grow indefinitely, because the money we use today is simply debt. There is no absolute limit to the total amount of debt humanity can have. But there is a limit to the stuff we can buy with that money (debt)... Thor believes you can figure out the consequences of that for yourself...
"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place…"
—Isaiah 23, 005:008
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
So cute...
Bull sharks... So cute! :-) No shark has a worse reputation among humans than the bull shark, which is often found in brackish and murky waters.
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