Tag Archives: natural capital

Costanza!

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Last year Robert Costanza published an update to his seminal 1997 paper The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital.  Here’s what I had to say about that in 2014:

The paradox is that because nature has so far provided many services in abundance, they are not “scarce” in an economic sense and our human markets place little or no monetary value on them. This would change in the event our human civilization caused the services to be reduced or interrupted in any way. While it may seem strange to value ecosystem services in monetary terms, it can be instructive to ask what we would be willing to pay if we had no choice but to pay for these services. There are many conceptual and practical challenges with this sort of monetary valuation, but there have been some brave attempts to do it, such as those led by Robert Costanza at the Australian National University.[9] By comparing the magnitude of what we would be willing to pay for these services to the magnitude of the human economy, we can get a sense of the importance of ecosystem services in underpinning our human economy. Costanza’s estimate of the annual value of global ecosystem services ($33 trillion in 1997 U.S. dollars) is the same order of magnitude as the world output of goods and services in that year (approximately $29 trillion[10])! While the estimated value of ecosystem services is certainly less precisely measured than the monetary value of goods and services produced, the order of magnitude suggests that humanity could not afford to substitute its own technology and efforts in place of the services provided by ecosystems, at least not with the wealth and knowledge available to us now.

The new paper is called Changes in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services. Here’s the abstract:

In 1997, the global value of ecosystem services was estimated to average $33 trillion/yr in 1995 $US ($46 trillion/yr in 2007 $US). In this paper, we provide an updated estimate based on updated unit ecosystem service values and land use change estimates between 1997 and 2011. We also address some of the critiques of the 1997 paper. Using the same methods as in the 1997 paper but with updated data, the estimate for the total global ecosystem services in 2011 is $125 trillion/yr (assuming updated unit values and changes to biome areas) and $145 trillion/yr (assuming only unit values changed), both in 2007 $US. From this we estimated the loss of eco-services from 1997 to 2011 due to land use change at $4.3–20.2 trillion/yr, depending on which unit values are used. Global estimates expressed in monetary accounting units, such as this, are useful to highlight the magnitude of eco-services, but have no specific decision-making context. However, the underlying data and models can be applied at multiple scales to assess changes resulting from various scenarios and policies. We emphasize that valuation of ecoservices (in whatever units) is not the same as commodification or privatization. Many eco-services are best considered public goods or common pool resources, so conventional markets are often not the best institutional frameworks to manage them. However, these services must be (and are being) valued, and we need new, common asset institutions to better take these values into account.

So $125 trillion dollars per year in value, and last year the IMF says the world economy was about $77 trillion. This is important for a few reasons. First, it strengthens the argument even further that ecosystem services are not just something happening on the fringe of our economy that give us a helping hand. They are absolutely essential and we could not afford to do without them. Second, if I understand correctly, the annual value we can derive is lower per unit area of land because of degradation of the land since 1997. Every year we are using up $4-20 trillion that the Earth is not able to replenish. That value is hard to put in context, because we don’t know what the total stock is, or how low that stock could fall before it would start to constrain our economy.

There’s another implication – if we could develop a precise accounting of the natural capital being used up each year, we could orient our economy to shift more of those costs to the people, governments, and business entities choosing to impose those costs on the rest of us. Carbon taxes are a fairly obvious first step.

 

Herman Daly on the negative interest rate

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Negative interest rates are even more of a brain-twister than zero interest rates. Here is what Herman Daly has to say about that:

Suppose for a moment that GDP growth, economic growth as we gratuitously call it, entails uneconomic growth by a more comprehensive measure of costs and benefits — that GDP growth has now begun to increase counted plus uncounted costs by more than counted plus uncounted benefits, making us inclusively and collectively poorer, not richer. If that is the case, and there are good reasons to believe that it is, would it not then be reasonable to expect, along with Summers, that the natural rate of interest is negative, and that maybe the monetary rate should be too? This is hard to imagine, but it means that savers would have to pay investors (and banks) to use the funds that they have saved, rather than investors and banks paying savers for the use of their money. To keep the GDP growing sufficiently to avoid unemployment we would need a growing monetary circular flow, which would require more investment, which, in turn, would only be forthcoming if the monetary interest rate were negative (i.e., if you lost less by investing your money than by holding it). A negative interest rate “makes sense” if the goal is to keep on increasing GDP even after it has begun to make us poorer at the margin — that is after growth has already pushed us beyond the optimal scale of the macro-economy relative to the containing ecosphere, and thereby become uneconomic.

A negative monetary interest rate means that citizens will spend rather than save, so savings will not be available to finance the investments that produce the GDP growth needed for full employment. The new money for investment comes from the Fed. Quantitative easing (money printing) is the source of the new money. The faith is that an ever-expanding monetary circulation will pull the real economy along behind it, providing growth in real income and jobs as previously idle resources are employed. But the resulting GDP growth is now uneconomic because in the full world the “idle” resources are not really idle — they are providing vital ecosystem services. Redeploying these resources to GDP growth has environmental and social opportunity costs that are greater than production benefits. Although hyper-Keynesian macroeconomists do not believe this, the micro actors in the real economy experience the constraints of the full world, and consequently find it difficult to follow the unlimited growth recipe…

These painful choices could be avoided if only we were richer. So let’s just focus on getting richer. How? By growing the aggregate GDP, of course! What? You repeat that GDP growth is now uneconomic? That cannot possibly be right, they say. OK, that is an empirical question. Let’s separate costs from benefits in the existing GDP accounts, and develop more inclusive measures of each, and then see which grows more as GDP grows. This has been done (ISEW, GPI, Ecological Footprint), and results support the uneconomic growth view. If growth economists think these studies were done badly they should do them better rather than ignore the issue.

Herman Daly on the zero interest rate

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Herman Daly weighs in with a brain twister on money, interest rates, economic growth, and environmental degradation.

There are many things wrong with a zero interest rate. Remember that the interest rate is a price paid to savers by borrowing investors. At a zero price, savers will save less and receive less return on past savings. Savers and pensioners are penalized. At a near zero price for borrowed funds, investors are being subsidized and will invest in just about anything, leading to many poor investments and negative returns, furthering the economy’s already advanced transition from economic to uneconomic growth. Zero interest promotes an infinite demand for savings with zero new supply. But the “supply” is provided artificially by the Fed printing money. The infinite demand would be checked by the rising costs of natural resources and environmental damage if those costs were internalized, but they are not. Yet the environmental costs are real and do not disappear just because they are not counted. With free money and uncounted environmental costs, why not invest heavily in fracking? A very unequal distribution of income does check demand, at least for non-luxury goods. Rich people have an increasing surplus of money to invest, which also helps hold down the interest rate. Yes, mortgage rates fall, and that benefits citizens as home buyers, but they lose more in terms of their retirement accounts. And there is still a significant spread between the zero rate paid to savers and the positive rates charged on credit card and other debt, so the banks are doing quite well.

I’m with Mr. Daly all the way on his concept of “uneconomic growth”. Our primary measure of economic activity, GDP, is simply a sum of how much money changes hands. Some of the reasons money changes hands are good (benefits), and some are bad (costs). Let’s take the example of a factory that makes something that makes peoples’ lives happier or better. The money that changes hands to buy the product is a reasonable estimate of the value of that product, so since it is good we can call this the benefit. However, if the factory produces pollution, that is a cost. However, if people get sick and have to go to the hospital because of the pollution, we will count the money they spend as part of GDP. We will add the cost and benefit, when we should be subtracted the cost from the benefit, to get a net benefit. So we could try to measure net benefits each year and see if they are increasing, and that would be a better measure of human wellbeing than GDP. There are some attempts to do this, but they don’t have widespread acceptance.

I am basically agnostic on monetary policy though, because (like 99.9% of the population) I just don’t understand it well enough. My basic understanding is simply that turning the printing press over to the politicians is very risky, so we allow it to be controlled by a technocratic public/private hybrid entity instead. When money is created, it has to be repaid with interest, which creates some level of discipline and restraint in its creation. If there is not enough money, that creates a serious problem. If there were no discipline or restraint in its creation, it would cease to have any value at all. Both are dangerous. This may be a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, although the system is clearly imperfect. To be fair, Herman Daly’s proposal appears to be to create some sort of technocratic rule based on inflation (which he also has ideas on how we can measure better) that politicians can’t override. Maybe that would work, I will leave it to the experts.

 

natural capital

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Here’s a slightly novel take on natural capital, as a charged battery.

Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind

Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth. This rapid discharge of the earth’s store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere, including conversion of natural habitats to agricultural fields and the resulting loss of native species, emission of carbon dioxide and the resulting climate and sea level change, and use of supplemental nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy sources. The laws of thermodynamics governing the trickle-charge and rapid discharge of the earth’s battery are universal and absolute; the earth is only temporarily poised a quantifiable distance from the thermodynamic equilibrium of outer space. Although this distance from equilibrium is comprised of all energy types, most critical for humans is the store of living biomass. With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity. Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.

 

revolution: the movie

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Revolution is a feature documentary about opening your eyes, changing the world and fighting for something. A true life adventure following director Rob Stewart in the follow up to his hit Sharkwater, Revolution is an epic adventure into the evolution of life on earth and the revolution to save us.
Discovering that there’s more in jeopardy than sharks, Stewart uncovers a grave secret threatening our own survival as a species, and embarks on a life-threatening adventure through 4 years and 15 countries into the greatest battle ever waged.

Bringing you some of the most incredible wildlife spectacles ever recorded, audiences are brought face to face with sharks and cuddly lemurs, into the microscopic world of the pygmy seahorse, and on the hunt with the deadly flamboyant cuttlefish. From the coral reefs in Papua New Guinea to the rain forests in Madagascar, Stewart reveals that our fate is tied to even the smallest of creatures.

Through it all, Stewart’s journey reveals a massive opportunity, as activists and individuals all over the world are winning the battle to save the ecosystems we depend on for survival. Presenting the most important information on human survival and inspiring people all over the world to fight for life, Revolution is essential viewing for everyone. Startling, beautiful, and provocative, Revolution inspires audiences across the globe to join the biggest movement in history that’s rising to the challenge of saving our world.

Revolution premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has already gone on to win ten awards, including the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Atlantic Film Festival, Most Popular Environmental Film Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Victoria Film Festival and the Social Justice Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

climate change and the economy

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Here’s another modeling study in Ecological Economics that looks at the effects of climate change on the global economy.

A demand-driven growth model involving capital accumulation and the dynamics of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration is set up to examine macroeconomic issues raised by global warming, e.g. effects on output and employment of rising levels of GHG; offsets by mitigation; relationships among energy use and labor productivity, income distribution, and growth; the economic significance of the Jevons and other paradoxes; sustainable consumption and possible reductions in employment; and sources of instability and cyclicality implicit in the two-dimensional dynamical system. The emphasis is on the combination of biophysical limits and Post-Keynesian growth theory and the qualitative patterns of system adjustment and the dynamics that emerge.

DICE

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This article in Ecological Economics reminded me of the DICE model from William Nordhaus at Yale.

In integrated assessment models (IAMs) economic activity leads to global warming, which causes future economic costs. However, typical IAMs do not explicitly represent the role of natural capital. In this paper, the DICE model by Nordhaus (2008) is expanded with a natural capital variable that is affected both by climate change and by depletive effects of economic activity. Due to a synergy between the two effects, the optimal policy of the expanded model features more and earlier abatement of CO2 emissions than DICE. Interestingly, the policy implications are different from what follows if one tries to capture the depletive effects on natural capital by simply reducing factor productivity growth in DICE. Acknowledging considerable uncertainty, simulations show that climate- and savings rate policies from the expanded model are more robust in the long term than policies that do not consider non-climatic depletion effects on natural capital.

The DICE model and a variety of papers related to it are freely available here.

ecological footprint vs. planetary boundary

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This article in Ecological Economics tries to link the concepts of planetary boundaries and ecological footprint.

While in recent years both environmental footprints and planetary boundaries have gained tremendous popularity throughout the ecological and environmental sciences, their relationship remains largely unexplored. By investigating the roots and developments of environmental footprints and planetary boundaries, this paper challenges the isolation of the two research fields and provides novel insights into the complementary use of them. Our analysis demonstrates that knowledge of planetary boundaries improves the policy relevance of environmental footprints by providing a set of consensus-based estimates of the regenerative and absorptive capacity at the global scale and, in reverse, that the planetary boundaries framework benefits from well-grounded footprint models which allow for more accurate and reliable estimates of human pressure on the planet’s environment. A framework for integration of environmental footprints and planetary boundaries is thus proposed. The so-called footprint–boundary environmental sustainability assessment framework lays the foundation for evolving environmental impact assessment to environmental sustainability assessment aimed at measuring the sustainability gap between current magnitudes of human activities and associated capacity thresholds. As a first attempt to take advantage of environmental footprints and planetary boundaries in a complementary way, there remain many gaps in our knowledge. We have therefore formulated a research agenda for further scientific discussions, mainly including the development of measurable boundaries in relation to footprints at multiple scales and their trade-offs, and the harmonization of the footprint and boundary metrics in terms of environmental coverage and methodological choices. All these points raised, in our view, will play an important role in setting practical and tangible policy targets for adaptation and mitigation of worldwide environmental unsustainability.

I like ecological footprint because there is no ambiguity between stocks and flows. Natural capital is the underlying stock. The ecological footprint is a proxy for natural capital, the equivalent land area required to produce the annual flow of ecosystem services. It is very intuitive that if the ecological footprint is greater than the size of the Earth, you are digging yourself a  deeper hole each year, and if it is less, you are digging yourself out of the hole. Natural capital is like a huge trust fund or endowment that we can live off of for a long time. But if we are consuming more than the interest produced each year, there will eventually come a day when the trust fund is depleted.

Planetary boundaries, on the other hand, try to measure a mish-mash of stocks and flows. Fertile farmland, for example, is clearly a stock of natural capital. But the amount of fresh water consumed each year is an annual flow of ecosystem services. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is a stock – a sort of anti-ecosystem service, because it represents the opposite of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb further emissions (which are an annual flow). So it all sounds very scholarly, but it needs some cleanup before it will be a clear framework for figuring out what course of action we should be taking.

critical natural capital

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This article in Ecological Economics is about the idea of critical natural capital. Critical natural capital is meant to bridge the gap between strong sustainability, which says manufactured capital cannot be substituted for natural capital, and weak sustainability, which says it can. Critical natural capital says that some, but not all, of it can be substituted, because some of it is, well, critical.

The other theme of this paper is the “capability approach”, which is based on the ideas of Amartya Sen. Reading Amartya Sen is on my list of things to do eventually someday, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.

This article is an attempt to conceptually improve the notion of strong sustainability by creating a rapprochement between its core concept, critical natural capital, and the capability approach. We first demonstrate that the capability approach constitutes a relevant framework for analysing the multiple links between human well-being and critical natural capital. Second, we demonstrate that the rapprochement between critical natural capital and the capability approach can form both the normative basis and the informational basis for a deliberative approach to human development which embraces a strong sustainability perspective. This conceptual rapprochement, as illustrated in our case study, opens up avenues of research towards the practical implementation of human development projects from a strong sustainability perspective.

2014 Report Card

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It’s taken me a while to get out a “year in review” post for 2014, but anyway, here it is. This won’t be a masterpiece of the essay form. I’m just going to ramble on about some interesting trends and themes from the year, along with a few relevant links.

The critical question this blog tries to answer is, is our civilization failing or not? I’ll talk about our human economy, our planetary system, and make some attempt to tie the two together.

Overall Human Health and Wellbeing. First, there are some very happy statistics to report. For example, worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. What better measure of progress could there be than more happy, healthy childhoods? And it’s not just about increasing wealth – people in developing countries today have much better health outcomes at the same level of wealth compared to developing countries of the past (for example, Indonesia today vs. the United States when it passed the same income level). It’s hard to argue against the idea that economic growth and technological change have obviously eliminated a lot of human suffering. So, I think the important questions are, will these trends continue? Is the system stable? Can the natural environment continue to support this trend indefinitely? There may also be an important question of whether we had the right to exploit the natural environment to get us to the point where we are now, but that is an academic question at this point.

Financial System Instability. Let’s talk about the stability of our human economic system. The U.S. economy may finally seem to be picking up from the aftermath of the severe 2007-8 financial crisis, but it is certainly far below where it would be if that hadn’t happened and the prior growth trend had just continued since then. The rest of the world isn’t doing so well, however – Europe and Japan are looking particularly slow if not in an outright deflationary spiral, at the same time developing countries appear to be slowing down. Some are calling this a “new normal” for the world economy. More scary than that, the industry-written regulations and perverse incentives allowing the excessive risk taking that caused the crisis have not been fully addressed and the whole episode could recur in the short term.

Thoughts on Ecosystem and Economic “Pulsing”. 2007-8 was a textbook financial crisis – although it was caused by novel forms of money and risk taking beyond the direct reach of government regulators and central banks, it was not that different from crises caused by plain old speculation and over-lending back when there were no central banks around. It’s hard to draw a direct link from the financial crisis to ecosystem services, climate change, or natural resource scarcity. However, if we think about natural ecosystems, they are resilient to outside stressors up to a point – say, moderate fluctuations in temperature, hydrology, or pressure from non-native species. However, say a major fluctuation happens such as a major flood or fire that causes serious damage. In the absence of major outside stressors, the system will eventually recover to its original state, but in the presence of major outside stressors, even if they did not cause the flood or fire, it may never bounce back all the way. In the same way, our human economy may appear resilient to the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, and so forth for a long time, but then when something comes out of left field, like a major financial crisis, war, or epidemic, we may not be able to recover to our previous trend. This probably also applies to the effects of technology on employment, as discussed below. In the absence of major shocks coming from outside the system, we’ll see a long, slow slide in employment and possibly a long, slow rise in energy and food prices, with so much noise in the signal that it will be easy for the naysayers to hold sway for long periods of time. But when those major events happen, we may see sudden, painful changes that we have no obvious way of mitigating quickly.

Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Automation, and Employment. After decades of slow but steady progress, these technologies are really coming into their own. Robots are being used to keep miners in line and to drive cars, for example. Manufacturing has become a high-tech industry. As computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow. At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.

Will our society recognize and solve this employment problem? American corporate society, and its admirers around the world, are unlikely to. Something very similar to this happened with agricultural automation in the early- to mid-20th century, and with globalization in the mid- to late-20th century. As agriculture became more automated, many displaced workers moved from rural areas in the U.S. southeast to urban areas in the U.S. northeast, looking for factory work. Unfortunately, the factory jobs that existed previously were being moved to developing countries with abundant low-wage labor. The pockets of poverty, unemployment, and social problems created by these forces have not been adequately addressed to this day. To the individual worker, it doesn’t much matter whether your job is being taken by a local robot or an overseas human. Unemployment created by technological forces today could resemble what was created by globalization yesterday, only on a much larger scale. We can only hope that the larger scale will drive real political solutions, such as better education and training, sharing of available work, and more widespread ownership of the labor-saving technology.

Of course, one of the earliest and probably the most shameful example of a modern capitalist system generating wealth for an elite few at the expense of workers is the American slavery system of the 18th and 19th centuries. We just can’t trust amoral, self-interested private enterprise to maximize welfare in the absence of a strong moral compass coming from the larger society. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Another example of extreme corporate immorality: Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook.

The Gospel of Shareholder Value. There is an important debate over whether people who run corporations have any ethical responsibility to anything other than profit seeking. Well duh, everyone on Earth has an ethical responsibility. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. There is even evidence that the ideology of profit maximization is a drag on innovation. Except billions of people out there who have worshiped at business schools would disagree with me. And I don’t want to offend anyone’s religion. Noam Chomsky had a quote that I particularly loved, so I am going to repeat it here:

In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger. So take the financial crisis. One of the reasons for it is that — there are several, but one is — say if Goldman Sachs makes a risky transaction, they — if they’re paying attention — cover their own potential losses. They do not take into account what’s called systemic risk, that is, the possibility that the whole system will crash if one of their risky transactions goes bad. That just about happened with AIG, the huge insurance company. They were involved in risky transactions which they couldn’t cover. The whole system was really going to collapse, but of course state power intervened to rescue them. The task of the state is to rescue the rich and the powerful and to protect them, and if that violates market principles, okay, we don’t care about market principles. The market principles are essentially for the poor. But systemic risk is an externality that’s not considered, which would take down the system repeatedly, if you didn’t have state power intervening. Well there’s another one, that’s even bigger — that’s destruction of the environment. Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.

Our Ecological Footprint. WWF issued an updated Living Planet Report in 2014 suggesting that our annual consumption of natural resources (including the obvious ones like energy and water extraction, straightforward ones like the ability to grow food, but also the less obvious ones like ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products) is continuing to exceed what the Earth can handle each year by at least 50%. We’re like spoiled trust fund babies – we have such incredible resources at our disposable, we never learn to live within our means and one day the resources run out, even if that takes a long time. As we recover from the financial crisis, we have a chance to do things differently, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future.

Other Big Stories from 2014:

  • World War I. 100 years ago, World War I was in full swing. Remember The Guns of August? Well, that was August 1914 they were talking about. Let’s hope we’re not about to blunder into another conflict. But (and I’m cheating a little here because I read this in 2015), the World Economic Forum named “interstate conflict” as both high probability and high consequence in its global risk report.
  • Ebola. Obviously, Ebola was a very bad thing that happened to a whole lot of people. To those of us lucky enough that we weren’t directly in its path, it is a chance to selfishly reflect whether Ebola or something even worse could be coming down the pike. Let’s hope not.
  • Severe Drought and Water Depletion in the Western U.S.: California has been in the midst of a historic drought, although they got some rain recently. Some are describing this as the new normal. Besides rainfall, glaciers, snowpack, and groundwater all seem to be disappearing in some important food-growing areas.
  • Solar grid parity is here! At least some places, some times…

Conclusion. Yes, I think we are on a path to collapse if nothing changes. And I don’t see things changing enough, or fast enough. There are glimmers of hope though. Lest you think I offer only negatives and no solutions, here are two solutions I harp on constantly throughout the blog:

  • Green infrastructure. This is how we fix the hydrologic cycle, close the loop on nutrients, begin to cleanse the atmosphere, protect wild creatures and genetic diversity, and create a society of people with some sense of connection to and stewardship over nature. Don’t act like it’s such a big mystery. It’s known technology. There has been plenty written about trees, design of wildlife corridors and connectivity, for examples. There is simply no excuse for cities to do such a crappy job with these things.
  • Muscle-Powered Transportation. Cars are clearly the root of all evil, the spawn of Mordor, as I pointed out several times (sorry, I just sat through 6+ hours of Hobbit movies). Unless you are perhaps that rare hobbit who can own a car without your morals being completed corrupted by its evil powers. But for the rest of us, I explained several times why getting rid of cars would be good. Here is just one example:

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.