August 10, 2017, NoApp4That

An extremely long article, but I strongly recommend that you read it and everything on this website.



The summary below the video covers only the high points



Technology has grown with us, side by side, since the dawn of human society. Each time that we've turned to technology to solve a problem or make us more comfortable, we've been granted a solution.



Technology wakes us in the morning; grows our food and cooks our meals; transports us to and from work or school; entertains us; informs us of world events; enables us to communicate with family, friends, and co-workers; lights, heats, and cools our homes and offices; and treats our injuries and illnesses. So, naturally, we are led to believe that new technologies will solve the most severe global challenges humans have ever faced-in particular, the three big problems of climate change, overpopulation, and biodiversity loss.



In many respects these very problems are side effects of past technological development. Climate change is a side effect of burning fossil fuels-sources of energy that power virtually all aspects of the modern human world, including transportation, manufacturing, and food systems. Rapid population growth has occurred due to improvements in sanitation, medical care, and agriculture. We're losing biodiversity because of deforestation (helped by industrial forestry equipment), overfishing (helped by modern industrial fishing equipment), and environmental pollution (often from the agricultural chemicals that grow food for 7.5 billion humans). All of these issues are related and compound one another.



Unfortunately technology isn't saving us from climate change, over­popula­tion, or collapsing biodiversity. While solutions have been proposed, some of which are technically viable, our problems are actually getting worse rather than going away, despite the existence of these "solutions." Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are rising. World population is growing more, in net numbers annually (85 million), than the entire populations of most countries. And more species are disappearing every year.



We could invest more in solar and wind power. We could develop manufacturing processes that save energy and don't use toxic chemicals that end up putting children and wildlife at risk. We could produce artificial, lab-grown meat so that we don't have to use a third of the planet's arable land for livestock production to feed a growing population.



However, the real problem isn't just that we aren't investing enough money or effort in technological solutions. It's that we are asking technology to solve problems that demand human moral intervention-ones that require ethical decisions, behavior change, negotiation, and sacrifice.



Averting catastrophic climate change will require us to radically redesign our economy -- but how, and to whose advantage? The only humanely acceptable solutions to overpopulation will require a shift in our attitudes toward reproduction and women's rights, and the political will to provide universal access to family planning. And maintaining the world's biodiversity will require preserving habitat-and that means changing land use policies and ownership rights, thus reining in the profit motive.



If we do make collective moral choices that lead to the successful resolution of each of these dilemmas, we may find that the results are mutually supportive. Reducing population would likely make it far easier to address climate change and biodiversity loss. Maintaining biodiversity (particularly in forests and soils) could help stabilize the climate, while protecting the climate would help preserve biodiversity.



Machines won't make the key choices for us. We need to rethink what we delegate to machines, and what we take responsibility for directly as moral beings.



The moral questions that humanity is confronting now are neither abstruse nor academic; they are plain, simple, and urgent. They concern every one of us, and they will surely impact our children and grandchildren. If we put off acknowledging and addressing these questions, we will in effect have made a moral choice -- but one whose consequences will be very difficult for any of us to live with.



Humanity has always faced challenges imposed by the limits of our ecosystems: our population has grown in good times, and fallen during famines and plagues. There are far more of us now, and each of us has (on average) a far greater impact on the environment. Further, our population continues to grow quickly -- and especially in the poorest of countries. Climate change is by far the worst pollution issue in human history, already impacting the entire planet and threatening the viability of future generations. And other species are going extinct at least a thousand times the "background" or normal rate, with two thirds of assessed plant species currently threatened with extinction, a fifth of all mammals, and a third of amphibians.



The scale of human numbers and environmental impacts rose quickly in the nineteenth century. The main driver was cheap, concentrated sources of energy in the forms of coal, oil, and natural gas-fossil fuels. These were a one-time-only gift from nature, and they changed everything.



We used technology to grow more food, extract more raw materials, manufacture more products, transport ourselves and our goods faster and over further distances, defeat diseases with modern medicine, entertain ourselves, and protect ourselves with advanced weaponry. Fossil fuels increased our power over the world around us, and the power of some of us over others.



Unfortunately, extracting, transporting, and burning these fuels polluted air and water, and caused a subtle but gradually accelerating change in the chemistry of the world's atmosphere and oceans. Secondly, fossil fuels are finite, nonrenewable, and depleting resources that we exploit using the low-hanging fruit principle. That means that as we extract and burn them, each new increment entails higher monetary and energy costs, as well as greater environmental risk.



The side effects of all this is depletion of topsoil, the fouling of air and water, and the increasing lethality of warfare. But there are three of these side effects that, if left unchecked, will make everything else irrelevant: climate change, overpopulation, and loss of biodiversity.



At the dawn of the industrial age -- starting in 1750 -- the carbon dioxide content of the global atmosphere was 280 parts per million. In 2015 it averaged 400.83 ppm, and it continues to rise quickly.



Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the overall temperature of Earth's surface to rise. It has increased by over one degree Celsius so far; it is projected to rise as much as five degrees more by the end of this century.



Even slight changes in global temperatures can create a ripple effect in sea levels, weather patterns, and the viability of species that have evolved to survive in particular conditions.



Climate change extremes vary from one location to another. The people hit hardest are often those who are most vulnerable and least responsible. The American southwest will likely be afflicted by longer and more severe droughts. At the same time, a hotter atmosphere holds more water, leading to far more severe storms and floods elsewhere. Melting glaciers are causing sea levels to rise, leading to storm surges that can inundate coastal cities, placing hundreds of millions of people at risk. And global agriculture may be seriously impacted, undermining efforts to produce more food to feed a growing population.



The global human population has gone from one billion at the start of the nineteenth century, to 7.5 billion today. Our current rate of growth is 1.1% per year. This will double the population in about 70 years. If our numbers were to continue growing at one percent annually, our population would increase to over 157 trillion during the next thousand years. Of course, that's physically impossible on planet Earth. One way or another, human population growth will end at some point; but when, and under what circumstances?



The equivalent to the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Mexico City combined, are added to the planet each year. This amounts to another billion people approximately every 12 years.



A world population of 11 billion is expected by 2100, according to the U.N. -- and most of the growth will occur in nations that are already severely challenged to provide for their current populations and to protect their natural environment.



Rapid population growth creates political instability, contributes to deforestation and other environmental problems, and impairs our efforts to tackle climate change. It also complicates efforts to achieve greater economic equality: the larger our human population, the greater the reduction in living standards of those in wealthier nations that would be required in order to achieve global economic equality.



However, the diminished economic prospects of the American working class have much to do with growing multitudes overseas who can do the same jobs for a fraction of the cost.



Humans and their animals now make up about 97% of all land mammal biomass. The rest of the mammals have to compete with deforestation and other land-use impacts.



Our use of agricultural chemicals has led to the disappearance from farm soils of bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and other tiny organisms that provide natural fertility. As these microscopic soil communities are destroyed, carbon is released into the atmosphere. Even in the human gut, microscopic biodiversity is on the decline, leaving us more prone to immune disorders, multiple sclerosis, obesity, and other diseases.



Today's children are set to inherit a world in which many of the animals that filled the lives, dreams, and imaginations of our ancestors, that provided the metaphors at the root of every human language, will be remembered only in picture books.



Natural systems replenish oxygen in the planetary atmosphere, capture and sequester carbon in soils and forests, pollinate food crops, filter freshwater, buffer storm surges, and break down and recycle wastes. As we lose biodiversity, we also lose these ecosystem services -- which, if we had to perform them ourselves, would cost us over $125 trillion annually, according to some estimates.



In addition to climate change, overpopulation, and biodiversity loss we face the depletion of topsoil, minerals, and fossil fuels. This could have catastrophic impacts for future generations.



Most people and policy makers believe that technologies and markets will eventually provide solutions to these problems outlined above, and that these solutions will require few or no basic changes to our economic system or to the daily lives of most wealthy or middle-class citizens.



The long list of proposed technological solutions include alternative energy (nuclear power, solar and wind energy), energy storage (batteries, flywheels, pumped hydro, compressed air and hydrogen), and electric vehicle, electric self-driving vehicles and Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS)



But nuclear plants are slow and costly to build, and there are widespread concerns about radiation risk in the wake of the Fukushima reactor meltdowns. Hydro, geothermal, wave, and tidal power are incapable of being scaled up to provide as much energy as society will need. And the rate of transition to renewable energy would have to accelerate to roughly ten times the current rate to achieve a fully renewable energy system in time to avert a climate crisis. Also, it's still unclear whether or at what scale a renewable energy system could be fully self-sustaining (i.e., powering all of its own inputs, such as mining and materials transformation) for decades and centuries to come.



Only 18% of our current final energy is consumed as electricity; much of the rest is used in the form of liquid fuels derived from oil. Most of those liquid fuels are consumed in the transportation sector-in automobiles, trucks, ships, and airplanes. Electric and electric self-driving cars trucks and and Transportation-as-a-Service are green alternatives that may substantially reduce the use of those liquid fuels. But in 2016, over 88 million new light vehicles were built; 99.1% of them had internal combustion engines.



It's undeniable that a rapid shift away from private ownership of gas-guzzling cars would reduce world oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. What's not clear is whether that shift can be driven rapidly enough by market forces alone so as to make a significant difference with regard to climate change



The only way to minimize these problems is to dramatically reduce overall energy usage throughout society-a project that will require not just innovation, but also commitment and sacrifice.



Additonal items on the list of proposed technological solutions are carbon capture and storage (CCS), planting trees, carbon farming (perhaps sequestering an additional 1 billion to 3 billion tons of carbon -- to 11 to 34% of current emissions from fossil fuels combustion), surface-based geo-engineering, fertilizing the oceans with powdered iron.



Official climate models in which the global surface temperature remains below 2°C assume high levels of carbon capture and storage. The scientists who construct these models have concluded that there is no other realistic way to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently, and fast enough, while maintaining economic growth. In effect, the only reason policy makers are seriously discussing extreme technologies like CCS and geo-engineering is that the project of shifting to alternative energy sources while maintaining economic growth is so daunting.



Capturing and storing the carbon from coal combustion is estimated to consume 12% to 35% of the power produced, depending on the approach taken. That translates to not only higher prices for coal-generated electricity but also the need for more power plants to serve the same customer base. New technologies designed to make carbon capture more efficient aren't commercial at this point, and their full costs are unknown.



Capturing and burying just 38% of the carbon released from current U.S. coal combustion would entail pipelines, compressors and pumps on a scale equivalent to the size of the nation's oil industry. It is costly and inefficient. A new generation of power plants would do the job much better -- but that means replacing 511 coal-fired current-generation plants, representing over 300 gigawatts of capacity.



Cooling technologies include growing high-albedo crops, spraying fine seawater to whiten clouds and thus increase cloud reflectivity, releasing stratospheric sulfate aerosols, or other reflective substances, and satellite-based mirrors or orbiting dust clouds.



Population growth and the negative agricultural impacts of climate change will require us to grow more food under conditions that are likely to be drier and/or less stable. Technologies that aim to increase crop production are gene splicing and bringing some animals and plants back from extinction.



Another proposed method of CCS is BECCS, which entails growing enormous amounts of biomass, burning it, then capturing the carbon and burying it. BECCS entails the same cost for pipelines, compressors, and pumps, but also requires vast tracts of farmland. By one calculation, an area the size of India would have to be planted in fast-growing crops destined to be combusted in order to offset less than a third of our current carbon dioxide emissions. Setting aside so much arable land for CCS seems highly unrealistic given that more land will also be needed to grow crops to feed a larger human population.



The prospects for carbon farming -- using soil-building agricultural techniques to capture atmospheric carbon and sequester it -- are more favorable. This would yield safer and more nutritious food, protect biodiversity, and pump less pollution into the environment. However, recent research questions the potential of soils to take up carbon. Also, carbon farming is set of techniques that will require significant changes to industrial agriculture. It is not likely to take off without initiative, investment, effort, and sacrifice, supported by political will manifesting through regulations and subsidies.



Managing solar radiation with space mirrors or white roofing material wouldn't remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and therefore wouldn't reduce other effects from these gases, principally ocean acidification. Seeding the atmosphere or oceans with sulfur or other chemicals might have serious unintended consequences, such as significant changes to the hydrological cycle or ozone depletion. Such effects might be cumulative or chaotic in nature, and hard to predict with existing models. And, unless geo-engineering efforts were kept continually operating, climate change impacts being held at bay would immediately reassert themselves.



So far, gene-splicing technologies have mostly been used to make crops immune to proprietary herbicides, with a resulting increase in herbicide usage and little change in crop productivity. Is it worth spraying our fields with even more glyphosate, which the World Health Organization has found to be a "probable" carcinogen that's also associated with collapsing populations of monarch butterflies?



Big claims are being made for new gene-splicing technologies such as CRISPR, which could open the door to different kinds of potential food production improvements. But who would benefit from whatever "improvements" are actually achieved? Farmers? Consumers? Or giant agribusinesses?



Some of the agricultural applications of CRISPR being researched include ones that would alter the biology of insects and weeds, which could spread their edited genes rapidly through wild populations, possibly reshaping entire plant or animal communities in just a few years. The prospects for side effects, such as upsetting food webs and facilitating invasions by other species, are as obvious as they are serious.



Reviving long-gone animals like the mammoth or the passenger pigeon will be a meaningless exercise if these species have no habitat.



So far technology has not solved our biggest problems: atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are still increasing, climate impacts are worsening; population growth is plateauing, instead of declining, rapid population growth is contributing to political instability in a growing number of poor nations, and the rate at which plant and animal species are disappearing is increasing rather than diminishing.



The most promising solutions with the fewest likely negative side effects are changes in human behavior and in systems.



Throughout the world, successful programs for biodiversity protection have centered on limiting deforestation, restricting fishing, and paying poor landowners to protect wilderness areas. Biologist Edward O. Wilson's vison of setting aside half the Earth's land and seas for biodiversity recovery is both necessary and feasible, according to one expert.



We lack insufficient investment capacity to bring about technological solutions. Most nations can't even afford to maintain much of the infrastructure they already have in place, much less do they have the means to deploy most of the above solutions at the scale needed in order to deal with our three big problems of climate change, overpopulation, and biodiversity loss. Especially given the enormous existing levels of government debt throughout the world. Many shifts in energy usage technology that will be needed to support the transition to all-renewable energy will require households to invest in new machines (electric cars, electric heat pumps to replace furnaces, electric induction cooking stoves to replace gas stoves, solar hot water systems), but most households are likewise drowning in debt.



In addition, the rapid, unprecedented technological transformation that roiled the twentieth century depended upon conditions that cannot be expected to continue. These included the rising availability of cheap energy, plentiful raw materials, fast-growing economies, and the capacity to generate enormous amounts of investment capital. In the future we can expect constrained amounts of available energy, depleting raw materials, stagnant economies, and mountains of debt.



The global economy is generally slowing, a phenomenon called "secular stagnation.” A few economists have explicitly tied this slowing of growth to the well-known phenomenon of diminishing returns, where ach new increment of economic growth produces higher levels of environmental and social costs (i.e., externalities), which can begin to exceed benefits delivered.



Many, if not all, technologies discussed above will have their own negative consequences that, in a few cases, may be as serious as the problems they're intended to solve. Even solar and wind power, whose climate impacts are far lower than those of the fossil fuels they may replace, imply environmental risks and costs, including resource depletion and pollution associated with raw materials extraction and the manufacturing, transport, and installation of panels and turbines.



Inequality, like the other problems we've been discussing, is worsening: while absolute poverty has been reduced worldwide in recent decades, wealth is concentrated in fewer hands today than ever before. Further, as social problems tied to economic inequality proliferate and deepen, they tend to absorb our attention to the point that we lose sight of the ecological conditions that contribute to them-such as climate change and overpopulation. In other words, it is a very serious problem -- as serious in its own way as the three-make-or-break global dilemmas mentioned above.



Policy makers seem to be trying to do four things at once in order to keep social and ecological chaos at bay: (1) reduce economic inequality, (2) accommodate a growing global population, and (3) reduce human impacts on the environment (notably climate change and biodiversity loss), all while (4) growing their economies. Yet from a practical standpoint, the second aim is at odds with the first and the third: a growing population tends to increase (not reduce) environmental impacts, and it also makes programs designed to reduce economic inequality more difficult to fund, because a constantly increasing number of people must be served by those programs. Meanwhile, a larger economy is overwhelmingly likely to have a larger throughput of energy and materials, putting (4) at odds with (3).



Policy makers tend to assume that the technology-related trends mentioned above somehow can eventually make inequality, and the contradictions just mentioned, disappear.



Since the administration of John F. Kennedy, economists have delighted in equating economic growth to "a rising tide that lifts all boats.” That's an encouraging metaphor, but the trouble is that the tide tends to lift the yachts while swamping the canoes. And how helpful is a rising tide if it threatens to undermine the life-supporting capacity of planetary systems?



Demographic transition is a shift, observed over the past century in many countries, from high birth and death rates to lower birth and death rates (and slower net population growth) as those countries became more industrialized and urbanized -- i.e., as they adopted more sophisticated technology. With indus­trialization and economic growth, the problem of rapid population growth appears to solve itself.



Although addressing the inequality problem could help solve our population dilemma, it also could unintentionally increase overall consumption levels. When currently poor people become wealthier, they tend to spend most of their income gains on consumption, whereas wealthy people tend to withhold more of their income for savings and investments.



The proposed solution is to decouple GDP growth from energy usage and resource consumption -- to do more with less. Decoupling is suggested as the main key to banishing the contradiction inherent in trying to resolve inequality, population growth, and rising environmental impacts. Unfortunately, it turns out that decoupling has been oversold. A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that even the relative decoupling that most economists believe industrial nations have already achieved is actually the result of false accounting.



Without decoupling, the contradiction between reducing inequality on one hand, and resolving our environmental problems on the other, remains firmly in place. Worse still, it turns out that "demographic transition” is really just a theoretical construct that doesn't fit the data evenly and doesn't necessarily have much predictive value.



Before fossil fuels, and before the technological revolution they fueled, we were forced to confront and adapt to limits. We codified lessons about limits in a set of virtues (sufficiency, modesty, thrift, generosity, and self-control), and vices (greed, selfishness, envy, and gluttony) that were held similarly by people everywhere, in very different and distant societies. Lately we have come to believe that technology makes these virtues and vices at least partly obsolete. We are encouraged to want more, consume more, and waste more because the economy demands it. But doing so doesn't make us better people; it usually does just the opposite. By abandoning those old virtues and ignoring those vices, we merely become more dangerous to ourselves, one another, and our environment.



Personal Actions





Climate Stability: Ditch the screen and reconnect with the people in your life. Take the pledge to unplug.

Right-sized Population: Talk with friends and loved ones about family size. Read this article or Bill McKibben's book Maybe One for ideas on how to start a conversation.

Biodiversity Conservation: Turn your yard, balcony container garden, schoolyard, or work landscape into Certified Wildlife Habitat.

All Three Goals: Learn how to build resilience in your own community. Take the Think Resilience online course.

Climate Stability: Host a Turn21 event. It's time we grew up and treated the planet and each other with respect.

Right-sized Population: Support your local Planned Parenthood Health Center or step up to become a Planned Parenthood Defender.

Biodiversity Conservation: Take part in some citizen science, and help track wild bird populations. Participate in the Christmas Bird Count.

All Three Goals: Shift the way your friends and colleagues think about the issues we face. Organize a discussion group for the Think Resilience course.

Climate Stability: Support Barefoot College and/or Solar Aid, who meet people's needs while reducing emissions.

Biodiversity Conservation: Volunteer with the Land Trust Alliance to protect and conserve natural habitats.

All Three Goals: Share this manifesto with 10 people. Include your local, state, or national representatives.

Community ActionsNational / Global ActionsRight-sized Population: Support the Population Media Center and change lives by changing the story.