In Which The Moonbat Gets It Right

…and by “right,” I mean sort of:

The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much. As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines, they’ll switch to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world’s surface. We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us.

And even if there were an immediate economic cataclysm, it’s not clear that the result would be a decline in our capacity for destruction. In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use of natural assets.

All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.

What he understands: there is no crisis in terms of abundant cheap energy.

What he doesn’t understand, and this is understandable, because it would require a renunciation of everything that he’s thought and known for decades, is that this is a good, not a bad thing.

Given that he was one of the first to understand the implications of Climaquiddick, maybe there’s hope that he’ll come the rest of the way over to the side of the light.

24 thoughts on “In Which The Moonbat Gets It Right”

  1. Stop calling it “resource exploitation”, start calling it “free health care for Gaia.”

    Seriously: You’re cleaning up toxic, carcinogenic, teratogenic, mutagenic, flammable, inflamable, and explosive compounds that are a threat to most forms of life on the planet and ultimately converting them into plant food and water.

    And you thought the threat from dihydrogen monoxide was bad.

  2. It’s interesting taking his point about moving to lower quality resources to its ultimate conclusion.

    Fossil fuels actually come in two parts: the reduced material extracted from the ground, and the oxygen in the air with which they are reacted. Both reactants are necessary.

    The oxygen is just as much a fossil as the coal or oil (or lower quality disseminated reduced material). Going out far enough, the ultimate limit to fossil fuel extraction (assuming CO2 can be dealt with, for example by mineral carbonation) is when we run out of oxygen.

    Of course we aren’t at that point, or anywhere close to it, but it’s interesting that the decline in O2 has reached the point that it can be reliably detected (this also provides another check that oxidation of reduced carbonaceous materials is the primary source of the current atmospheric CO2 increase, not release of already existing CO2).

    BTW, I’m finding I like Monbiot. He’s saying (to both sides) you haven’t thought this through. Being willing to say that to those you’ve otherwise been agreeing with is a sign of intellectual integrity, and makes me take him more seriously.

  3. Most of the commentors on the site think population control is the answer. Their thinking is wrong on so many levels, I wonder why they never make the link between economic prosperity and a cleaner environment?

    Of course that would mean acknowledging capitalism is a good thing…..

  4. They don’t even make the link between economic prosperity and lower birth rates.

  5. Short of shooting them into space or nuclear reacting them, the earth has the same number of atoms, of the same type, that it started with. Looking at it that way, how in the world are we using up resources? What constitutes the “expenditure” of a resource? IMO, it’s an energy and entropy state, not a matter of the resource being gone.

    The only real resource that we can run out of is useable energy. We aren’t anywhere close to running out of that. If we switch to nuclear fission, it could be tens of thousands of years. As long as we have abundant energy, we can support arbitrary populations.

    People, then, are wealth creators, not “resource consumers”. The whole resource consumption thing, the idea that your neighbor’s kids are competition for your own, is an instinct that must have come from the hunter-gatherer stone age – it’s not really appropriate for any period of human history since then.

  6. Ah, and the typical villification of “consumerism”. Those people, thinking they can just go out and *buy* things, merely because they *want* them. The nerve! No one points out that on the other end of the transaction (in an undistorted economy), earning the money, people have to be producing the things other people want to buy. No one talks about “producerism”.

  7. Man, by page 2, the progressives are already back to their turn-of-the century roots. Engineering death plagues to cause wages to rise and full employment. Check. Euthanizing anyone over a certain age. Check. Fertility control boards to ensure only “desirable people’s” children survive. Check check check.

  8. He completely fails to take account of the fact that resource recovery becomes more expensive as the resource is depleted, which automatically (without government intervention) encourages the switch to renewable resources. It won’t be on the time frame that he wants, but it will definitely happen.

  9. In the case of the industrial scrap-metal industry, it is already cheaper to recycle things like aluminum (due to energy costs) and copper (due to demand). Far from being a government industry, you can get wads of untraceable cash courtesy of your local organized crime for turning in scrap metal, hence all the hooligans ripping off people’s heat exchangers.

  10. He completely fails to take account of the fact that resource recovery becomes more expensive as the resource is depleted, which automatically (without government intervention) encourages the switch to renewable resources. It won’t be on the time frame that he wants, but it will definitely happen.

    As shortages in one resource appear, market forces push people to use other resources. They won’t necessarily be renewable ones, either. When England was experiencing a wood shortage a few centuries ago, they switched to burning coal. Renewable energy will only be viable when the cost of producing it (without subsidizies) is equal to or less than the cost of getting energy from other sources. Likewise, there are oil fields that are unprofitable below a certain price (say $50 a barrel) but can be quite profitable at a higher price. That’s one reason why the effective supply of oil increases when the price goes up. It isn’t that they’re finding more oil, it’s the fact that more oil becomes economically viable to extract. At the same time, the higher prices make other energy sources more economically viable as well.

  11. “History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over”

    I saw those movies too. Gibson’s finest work.

    Seriously, these greens who think we are going to collapse society and leave them in charge is smoking crack. They are going to be the ones who rebuild society as slave labor at the point of a gun because frankly, they will have no other value at that point in such a world because they are incapable of producing anything of real, tangible value.

    The market for their idiocy will long since have evaporated. The dog will have caught the car. We all know how that one ends.

  12. I like Monbiot. I don’t agree with him on all points, but at least he thinks. That’s more than can be said for most Greens.

    He had a collumn not long ago on how nuclear is far greener than coal or any other hydrocarbon (Eureka! No one’s been saying that for decades!). He might even come around to rational thought any day now.

  13. The Moonbat wrote:

    In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees.

    He writes this as though it were some big revelation. I don’t know what’s scarier, the thought that that’s a revelation for him or that there are others that haven’t had that revelation yet.

    Mike

  14. In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees.

    Indeed, Michael. Would any rational person actually thing people would give up cooking if an alternate source of heat were available? Does this idea surprise anyone? Or are econazis that out of touch with reality?

  15. Yeah, and is he actually saying “people who don’t give up cooking” are psychopaths?

  16. Ya think that perhaps he’s just picking an obvious an easily understood example as a way to illustrate his point?

  17. Paul D. Says:
    May 6th, 2011 at 3:11 am

    “this also provides another check that oxidation of reduced carbonaceous materials is the primary source of the current atmospheric CO2 increase, not release of already existing CO2”

    This is faulty logic. There are two separate processes: A) the combustion of fossil fuels, which consumes oxygen and B) the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.

    Saying oxygen is depleted is consistent with combustion, only. Taken in isolation of other processes, they would be equivalent: combustion depleted oxygen. It is a tautology.

    It says nothing about how CO2 released by anthropogenic combustion would accumulate, or fail to do so, in the atmosphere.

  18. Despite all the evidence that if you pump CO2 into an atmosphere the CO2 concentration is going to increase, Bart is determined to find other reasons to explain the observed increase.

  19. Actually, I’m not quite right with that comment, Bart isn’t trying to find other reasons, he just wants an excuse to rubbish the obvious reason.

  20. Bart: are you aware that if we were not burning fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 would be decreasing, and that this has been true for more than a century? The past emission of CO2 into the atmosphere have left it so out of equilibrium with the oceans and forests that, absent current emissions, these sinks would be sucking CO2 out of the air.

    I also like attempts to pretend we can’t fairly accurately estimate emissions from fossil fuel combustion. As if governments don’t keep careful track of stuff they get taxes from.

  21. Until enviros examine and discard their life destroying premise that the Earth and its environs have intrinsic value, his ‘logic’ will always lead to the conclusion that the human species must be destroyed, as can be evidenced by the comments there.

    What they need to discover is the proper non-suicidal theory of value, that ‘resources’ of the Earth (or elsewhere) have value only in as much as they can be utilized by individuals to promote human life and happiness.

    This reflects the reality that the items considered natural resources change with human knowledge. This is so self evident that we even refer to past ages of human existence by the materiel our ancestors used. The only reason we don’t continue to do so is we’ve so quickly grown our depth and breadth of utilized ‘natural resources’ so much in recent history that it would no longer be a useful metric for the advancement of civilization.

    Because of this, we now refer to ages of civilization in terms of abstract ideas: industrial, information… reflecting that the most important resource of all is the reasoning human mind.

    Until they learn to value that, they will necessarily be drawn to genocide, suicide, and destruction.

  22. The most astonishing things in that article are:

    1) “You think you’re discussing technologies, and you quickly discover that you’re discussing belief systems.”

    – noooooooooooo really? Like you’ve never been told this before?

    2) We [moonbats]choose our technology – or absence of technology – according to a set of deep beliefs: beliefs that in some cases remain unexamined.

    – nooooooooooo really? Like you’ve never been told this before either.

    3) A steady state economy will be politically possible only if we can be persuaded to stop grabbing. This in turn will be feasible only if we feel more secure.

    – This guys needs to take the Human Nature 101 course.

    4) A third group tries to avoid such conflicts by predicting that the problem will be solved by collapse: doom is our salvation.

    – nothing like the power of positive thinking huh?

    5) But this also raises an awkward question for us greens: why hasn’t the global economy collapsed as we predicted?

    – maybe your collapse predictions were as fact-based and scientific as your East Anglia pronouncements. Also, see #3

    6) All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost.

    That some of them *propose* a collapse is frightening. These are frightening people.

    7) I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically,

    – logic would be a nice change.

    Like a lot of economic ideas, these notions he lists runs counter to Human Nature. Any system that doesn’t take human nature into account is doomed to fail. Even if it uses the heavy hand of suppression – human nature will search for a way to defeat it.

    To me the main bit of information, in his article, is that these people simply do not understand humans. They understand only those in their own bubble. The paraffin/cooking/wood story underscores that nicely. That plus the “if we only made them feel secure, they would stop grabbing” bit – how Marxian.

    But then Marx didn’t understand people either.

Comments are closed.