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Our Latest Newsletter
C-R-Newsletter #64:
August 15, 2008
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Big Boost for Molecular Manufacturing
CRN Goes to Oxford
Looking Ahead
CRN Goes to Washington
Superstruct the Future
Nanotech and the Big Picture
CRN Going to Spain
Guest Essay: The Perfect Storm
To keep up with all
the latest CRN and nanotech activity on a daily basis,
be sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
==========
Big Boost for Molecular Manufacturing
Research in diamond mechanosynthesis -- building diamondoid nanostructures
atom by atom using scanning probe microscopy, a technique seen as a first step
toward mature molecular manufacturing -- has received a major boost with a
$3 million grant from
the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, awarded to
Professor Philip Moriarty at the University of Nottingham for a “Digital Matter”
project. In a series of laboratory experiments, Moriarty and his research
partners will spend up to five years testing proposed “tooltips”
developed in sophisticated computer simulations by Robert Freitas and Ralph
Merkle of the Nanofactory Collaboration.
This is truly big news. It's the first time we've seen such significant
government spending on research directly connected to molecular manufacturing.
Our response, as always, is to urge equivalent funding
and attention for the positive and negative implications of nanofactory
technology.
CRN Goes to Oxford
Last month, Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix, the
co-founders of CRN, made a joint presentation titled "Small Machines, Big
Choices: The Looming Impacts of Molecular Manufacturing" at a
Global Catastrophic Risks conference held at Oxford University in England.
The talk was well received and generated lots of discussion, as well as a
positive
review from Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine,
who attended the conference and published his observations.
Looking Ahead
A group of leading nanotechnology researchers recently asked CRN executive
director Mike Treder to provide a current “best-estimate
timeline” for the eventual development of molecular manufacturing. The
primary conclusion (see previous link) is that nanofactory technology “might
become a reality by 2010 to 2015, more plausibly will by 2015 to 2020, and
almost certainly will by 2020 to 2025.” That statement seems reinforced by the
big news item in the opening entry of this newsletter.
CRN Goes to Washington
At the end of July, CRN’s Mike Treder
gave a talk at this
year’s World Future Society (WFS) annual conference. Here is his first-hand
report on the event:
In 2005, for my first appearance at the annual conference of the
WFS, I was given a small room with only 25 chairs, and I was scheduled for a
9:30 PM presentation. My topic was “Do Sweat the Small Stuff: Why Everyone
Should Care about Nanotechnology.” To my surprise and delight, the room was full
and in fact we had another 10 or 15 people standing at the back.
Last year in Minneapolis, I gave my second talk at a WFS annual
conference, this time on the topic of “Nanotechnology and the Future of
Warfare.” The room was larger, with seating for about 50, and again it was
filled to overflowing.
This year I traveled to Washington, DC, for the 2008 conference,
where I gave a one-hour presentation on "Radical Technologies, Rapid Change, and
the Real World." This time, they were prepared for a bigger audience to attend,
with a large room and seats for at least 100 people. But guess what -- it still
wasn't big enough -- once again, we had a standing room only crowd.
You can
download a PDF of the talk that Mike presented, and you can also download
the full text of all eight future scenarios that
were discussed in his presentation.
Superstruct the Future
Jamais Cascio is not only CRN's Director of
Impacts Analysis, he’s also a research fellow at the
Institute for Ethics and Emerging
Technologies, co-founder of
WorldChanging.com -- and
one of the lead developers behind the new
Superstruct project:
This fall, the Institute for the Future invites you to play
Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not
just about envisioning the future -- it’s about inventing the future. Everyone
is welcome to join the game.
“It's the year 2019, and humans have only 23 years to go, as the
Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.”
Fun stuff. If you’d like to know more about the game and how you
can get involved, read the
Superstruct FAQ.
Nanotech and the Big Picture
Our
latest column for the popular Nanotechnology Now web portal has just
been posted. Here is the abstract:
When CRN was founded five years ago, our intent was to assist in
establishing the technical feasibility of molecular manufacturing, to mount a
convincing argument that it would be a disruptive, transformative technology,
and to raise awareness of the potential imminence of its arrival. Now we need to
step back and look at the bigger picture...
We hope you'll read
all our
columns, offer feedback, and tell others about them too.
CRN Going to Spain
In early September, CRN’s Mike Treder will travel to Spain to make a
presentation on “Nanotechnology and Globalization” as part of a three-day annual
event sponsored by the Basque Savings Bank Federation. In previous years they
have covered the digital revolution, sustainable development, demographic
evolution, climate change, and other issues. If you are in Spain and can attend
the event, be sure to say ‘hola’ to Mike.
Guest Essay: The Perfect Storm
By Jeffrey L. Treder
Jeff Treder, older brother of CRN executive director Mike Treder, is a retired
English professor and published author. Here he offers an overview of past and
future trends that may be relevant to the development and deployment of
molecular manufacturing.
The Perfect Storm
In October, 1991, two weather systems merged in the Atlantic off New England
to produce a maelstrom that earned the title “the perfect storm.” Subsequently
that evocative phrase has been applied metaphorically to any number of tumults.
Now it seems possible, even likely, that the phrase might legitimately describe
something much bigger than a nor’easter. Four things, distinct but deeply
influencing one another, are about to impact our world in ways hard to predict
but foolish to ignore. These four are climate change, oil and natural gas
passing their supply peak, fresh water depletion and pollution, and population
pressure.
Their mutual influence is obvious. Often they reinforce one another, sometimes
in positive feedback loops (positively harmful to people). Over the last 150
years, fossil fuel consumption has empowered massive population growth and has
become a major cause of long-term climate change. Population growth (along with
technological and economic growth) in turn has greatly increased the rate at
which fossil fuels are consumed. Just while oil and natural gas are passing
their production peak, they are being consumed ever faster, meaning that the
effects of gradually decreasing supply will be felt relatively abruptly. Both
population and economic growth aggravate the depletion of water supplies for
drinking, irrigation, and manufacturing. Together, these four historical
mega-events will reverberate in various ways: food production will be unable to
keep pace with demand, bringing on famine; fresh water supplies are already
being depleted and poisoned worldwide, spreading famine and disease, which in
turn reduce governmental stability; governmental instability leads to repression
and armed conflict of every sort. Meanwhile, the reigning economic theory,
capitalism, tells us we must have constant economic growth in order to bring
profit to the investors who finance the growth -- the perfect feedback loop.
More growth means more production, more people, more consumption, more
pollution, more climate change. The earth is a small house stuffed with people
eating the emergency rations, and the toilet is backing up.
I am going to attempt a forecast of how these things may play out over the next
two decades. All the details are of course speculative, but keep in mind that
the forces in play are not speculative. The earth’s climate is warming and the
glaciers are melting. The fresh water supply is already precarious. At current
rates of consumption, oil and natural gas production is bound to start declining
pretty soon; the only serious debate is over just how soon, and political events
in the Mideast may speed the decline. The earth’s population is estimated to
have been less that one billion in 1800, close to two billion in 1900, and over
six billion in 2000; we will be seven billion in just a few more years.
When two vehicles collide head-on, the impact speed is the sum of the individual
speeds. Likewise, the collision of global population and economic growth with
environmental degradation and fossil fuel and fresh water depletion is going to
make many changes occur faster than they otherwise would and faster than we
expect.
Keep in mind also that I am talking about what I think is most likely to happen,
not what I want to happen or think ought to happen. Reality, whatever it may
turn out to be, trumps our wishes and oughts.
Climate Change
Climate change, a.k.a. global warming, is now denied only by the uninformed
or the disingenuous. The earth’s temperature is rising and human activity is
largely if not solely the reason why. Our activities release carbon dioxide and
methane, the chief greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere in ever increasing
amounts. We are destroying much of the vegetation that absorbs carbon dioxide,
especially by cutting down rain forests and by polluted water runoffs which make
the oceans slightly more acidic, killing off plankton. Humans have already
removed half of the earth’s forests and wetlands and are hard at work on the
remaining half. Each of the last five decades has seen more flooding and
wildfires worldwide than the decade before. Polar and mountain glaciers are
melting faster than even most alarmists predicted. Hurricanes and tornadoes are
more frequent and stronger. Fisheries are collapsing, due both to overfishing
and to warming water. Coral reefs are dying. Droughts are worse and deserts are
expanding.
No matter what we do now, these trends will continue over the next few decades.
If everyone from governments and transnational corporations to SUV owners
immediately starts doing what environmentalists are telling them to do, global
climate might stabilize by the end of the century. But that is a very big if.
Most likely, people won’t change their ways until fuel prices and shortages
force them to.
Prediction: The planet’s weather will continue to grow more violent. Droughts,
heat waves, dust storms, and flooding will be particularly hard on human life.
Increasing temperatures will kill off vegetation and dry up water resources, and
their loss will lead, in a destructive feedback loop, to even more warming. The
Amazon and Indonesian rain forests will suffer drought and massive wildfires,
sending up thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fresh water
supplies will be critical by 2020 and will be a major cause of migration and
conflict. Due both to thermal expansion and glacial melt, the sea level will
slowly rise, and by 2030 low lying coastal areas like Bangladesh, the Nile
delta, the Netherlands, London, and southern Florida and Louisiana will be
inundated during storm seasons. Much of Venice will be abandoned.
The Global Oil Peak
As to fossil fuel depletion, I am assuming, and I believe, that those
analysts are correct who see the global oil production peak occurring by 2010
(if it has not already occurred), in the same way that U.S. production peaked in
the early 1970’s. The easy-to-extract-and-refine part of the world’s oil fields
has already been burned up. Of the remaining less exploited fields, the chief
one is offshore of Africa, south of Nigeria in the “armpit.” Drilling and
pumping there will involve all the customary African politics; oil production is
a long-term operation and African politics are capricious. The profits will go
to the oil giants and to the current high office holders in Nigeria, Cameroon,
Angola, and a few others. Most jobs on the rigs require training and experience,
which most Africans lack. And if oil is produced there in significant quantity,
the effect will be to stretch the global depletion curve while adding to the
burdens of economic growth and climate change. More oil will only amplify the
impending collision.
Whenever we pass the global production peak, we will only know it in hindsight.
Total production will gradually zigzag downward, and prices upward, but we will
only know for sure that this trend is more than temporary about ten years after
it begins.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the oil peak is the psychological one. A
lot of oil will still be being pumped and refined, if not quite as much as a
decade before. But everyone will know by then, though some will still deny, that
the handwriting is on the wall. The next few years will be worse, and the years
after that worse still. Visible on the horizon will be a day when “civilization
as we know it” will be over. Airlines, factories, trucking fleets, industrial
fertilizer, petrochemicals, and commutes -- all those things that burn petroleum
or are made from it -- will be in a terminal shrink. Coal will outlast oil, but
it is a more potent climate changer. Nuclear, solar, and wind power will help a
little but nowhere near enough; they can’t, for instance, fly airplanes.
Unemployment will balloon and the global economy will be sliding inexorably into
depression. People will react in various way to this crisis, mostly unhappy
ways. It will be one more component in humanity’s extreme psychological stress.
And then there is the political factor. The world’s largest oil fields are in
the Mideast. The main underlying reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq and overthrew
Saddam was in order to gain and maintain de facto control over those oil fields.
The official explanation for this, beyond rooting out the malignancy and his
supposed Al Qaeda connections and WMD, was to bring stability and democracy to
that politically challenged region. Predictably, and as widely predicted, that
effort couldn’t succeed and didn’t. Whatever the next twenty years may bring to
the Mideast, it won’t be stability. Iraq seems to be headed for civil war,
possibly a long one. The totalitarian regime in Iran will certainly try to
control the outcome of that war. The U.S. government may feel driven to go to
war against Iran. Lots of things are possible and the most likely ones are bad,
bad for the locals and bad for the West’s oil supply.
Prediction: Driven especially by steeply rising demand in China and India,
alongside unslackened demand in the U.S., the price of oil will continue
ratcheting upward, and so will the price of everything that depends on oil, like
food, fertilizer, plastics, lubricants, manufactured goods, and transportation.
In short, the cost of living will keep going up. Rising fuel prices will force
more airline bankruptcies and mergers; increasingly, only the wealthy will be
able to afford air travel. Somewhere in the 2010-2020 decade the bloated and
sublimely corrupt House of Saud will fall to a radical Islamic revolution. The
flow of Mideast oil to the West will be seriously disrupted, after which air
travel will become rare, the province of governments, corporations and
millionaires. There will be war between Israel and a coalition of Islamic
nations, a very bloody war climaxed when Israel, out of options, goes nuclear.
And then the U.S. and China, desperate from oil starvation (among other
desperations), will go to war over control of the Arabian and African oil
fields. In the process those oil fields will largely be destroyed. By 2030, the
remnants of the world’s oil and natural gas supply systems will be dysfunctional
and fought over.
Disease
Global warming and the disruptions caused by it, by population pressure and
poverty, and by fossil fuel depletion will promote the spread of disease. AIDS
will lead the way, devastating China, India, Southeast Asia, and Russia just as
it has already devastated sub-Saharan Africa. Since we are at the top of the
food chain, and since our whole environment is increasingly polluted, most of
the food we eat is laced with toxins, which lower our bodies’ resistance to
disease. Sometime in the next twenty years there is likely to be another
worldwide flu pandemic like the one that killed millions in 1918-19. Malaria,
dengue fever, cholera, and tuberculosis will continue to ravage the poorest
regions of the world. The poor will become poorer still, many of them dying, but
no nation will escape the economic, social, and emotional damage of chronic and
epidemic diseases
Ecological Loss
Concern over the loss of some percentage of the earth’s millions of plant
and animal species seems to most people, and certainly to most Americans, an
incomprehensible fuss motivated mainly by green-warm-fuzzy sentimentality. There
is more to it than that, though. Deforestation, desertification, pollution, and
urbanization -- modern humanity’s footprints -- are disrupting and destroying
ecosystems all over the planet. Population pressure and soil exhaustion are
driving farmers to push into ancient rain forests, slashing and burning to clear
the land. Rich natural biodiversity is being replaced by chemically sustained,
large-scale monoculture. When we harm our natural environment, we harm
ourselves, often in ways that are hard to detect and understand, the full
effects of which may not show up for some time. The complex interdependency of
the life forms in an ecosystem isn’t just a biology teacher’s mantra. For
millennia, the earth’s forests have been steadily absorbing carbon dioxide and
giving off oxygen, and now we are steadily bulldozing and burning them while
replacing them with cars, trucks, buildings, pavement, airports, power plants,
and farmland, most of which consume oxygen and spew atmospheric pollutants. It’s
as if we are in a race with ourselves to see which we will run out of first,
drinkable water or breathable air.
Water
The growing scarcity of clean, fresh water is the most unambiguously severe
threat confronting us. We can live, sort of, without oil, but not without water.
There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that, as with oil, water
won’t be running out on us all at once. It’s a gradual thing (though less
gradual recently), and some regions are affected more severely than others. The
bad news is that the problems we have created for ourselves are largely
irreversible. Once the great underground aquifers are depleted, they won’t be
replenished for something like a thousand years -- if untapped. Farmland which,
through irrigation, has been sterilized by mineral salts is similarly going to
remain unproductive for a very long time, like the former Fertile Crescent which
is now Iraq. As the glaciers downsize, we get less meltwater from them. River
dams silt up over time, thus holding less water, and dredging them is expensive
-- in money and energy -- even where technically feasible. Much of our remaining
fresh water, in aquifers, lakes, rivers and reservoirs, is dangerously polluted
from our mining operations, industries, toxic wastes, irrigated agriculture,
herbicides, pesticides, livestock, and, in many parts of the world, untreated
human sewage. Air pollution turns rain into acid rain.
Water scarcity is now a problem in most parts of the world, and in three large
regions it has become critical -- Australia, northern China, and the southwest
part of North America (from Kansas down to Central America). Global warming will
probably make these dry areas dryer still, even as their dams continue silting
up and even as they are pumping deeper into their aquifers and getting ever less
groundwater at ever higher costs (more energy required). Major cities in these
regions depend on that disappearing water: Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Beijing,
Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego. The odds against Las Vegas are about ten to
one.
Along with famine and political turbulence, water scarcity will be a main cause
of mass migration, notably from North Africa into Europe and from Central
America and Mexico into the United States. Both of these migrations are already
underway, of course; as the numbers grow, so will conflict. And Latin Americans
will have to keep going when they reach Southern California and Arizona. There
won’t be enough water there either.
Famine
The Green Revolution of the 1960’s enabled farmers in many parts of the
world to grow food much more efficiently and abundantly, and thus enabled the
population to keep on growing. That revolution coincided with the advent of
large-scale industrial farming, and it was made possible entirely by cheap and
abundant oil. All this increasing energy consumption in “developing” countries,
for agriculture and livestock feed as well as for factories, office buildings,
road construction, trucks and cars, is helping to hurry the world past the oil
peak. (If the poor nations share in the blame, of course, the rich ones,
especially the U.S., get the glutton’s share.) The slowdown in oil-based food
production, along with water scarcity and soil salinization, will spread famine
in Africa, China, India, Central and Southeast Asia, and many other parts of the
world. At the same time, overfishing coupled with global warming will exhaust
the world’s harvest of wild fish; fish farming will help, but it won’t make up
the difference. The reduction and unreliability of long-distance transportation
will require that most food be grown locally. Water for drinking and irrigation
will be scarce and fought over. There will be widespread anarchy, and many
localities will be ruled by warlords, gangs and militias (variant terms for
similar things) fighting among themselves -- West Africa gives us a preview.
Even local food production and distribution will be difficult under such
conditions. By 2025-30, millions of people will be dying every month from
starvation, disease, human violence, and natural disasters. By 2030 the world
population, after having peaked at around 7.5 billion, will be down below 5
billion and falling.
Russia
After the implosion of the Soviet Union came the high-minded but misguided
and doomed attempt by the Clinton administration to impose democracy and
capitalism on a society completely unready to receive them. For many centuries
the Russian people had been accustomed to autocracy and authoritarianism, both
from the state -- tsars and then commissars -- and from the Orthodox church.
Russian culture has always been deeply hierarchical and paternalistic. The poor
and weak are resigned to being regimented -- what we tend to see as oppressed.
They don’t necessarily like it, but they prefer it to Western-style freedom,
because they know intuitively that in their culture, freedom would mean a
violent, winner-take-all free-for-all. That is just what it did mean in the
1990’s, and the reasons why are easy to see in hindsight (and were seen by many
in foresight).
The Russians had none of the civil institutions and customs of a democratic
society, such as property and contract law, a secure and well-regulated banking
system, an independent judiciary, and above all a cherished concept of civil
liberty and responsibility. So when the Soviet state crumbled, the more powerful
Soviet apparatchiks, under a smokescreen of democratic blarney, seized the
remaining economic assets, including heavy industry and, especially, natural
resources (the only really valuable asset) -- mining, oil, and natural gas.
What has emerged is an authoritarian, paternalistic (think Godfather) gangster
state, run by a band of billionaire thugs who massage the masses with fascist
rhetoric and who are determined to regain international respect (again, think
Godfather). The country’s physical infrastructure, however, is in much worse
shape even than America’s. Their environmental pollution as almost as bad as
China’s. Their oil and natural gas deposits have already passed their production
peak, and the income from these will decline as the global economy sinks. How
the Russians will react to this is unpredictable. We may hope that their nuclear
arsenal and its delivery systems deteriorate faster than the psychic state of
the bosses. The long-suffering Russian people will go on with disease, alcohol
and apathy.
China
China’s problems now and in the near future are the problems of the rest of
the world writ larger and sooner. And China has real big problems. The collision
of economic growth with environmental disaster is happening there in news-cycle
slow motion, historical fast motion. China has one-fifth of the world’s people;
whatever happens to them is going to affect us all.
They have the world’s worst air quality; they bring a new large coal-fired power
plant on line every week, and they are adding new cars and drivers at a pace
similar to America in the 1950’s. Their great ambition is to surpass America in
all things; their first breakthrough is the production of greenhouse gases.
Pollution in their rivers and coastal waters has killed off most of the fish.
Most of the sewage of thirteen hundred million people goes into the ground water
system untreated. Most of that polluted river water is sucked out for irrigation
and industry, both of which pollute it even more, before a toxic trickle of it
reaches the sea. Overgrazing, soil erosion, and aquifer depletion, coupled with
climate change, are causing wholesale desertification on the dry northern plain.
Poorly educated peasants continue to leave overcrowded rural villages and stream
into overcrowded cities where they join a hugely overcrowded labor pool and get
hungrier as they watch the lifestyle of the wealthy minority. To their mind, the
government has made promises it isn’t delivering on, or is delivering very
unequally. As for the Communist (well, militaristic authoritarian) leaders, they
are experts at riding the tiger. They know the tiger well, but it keeps getting
bigger and more agitated.
Prediction: Around 2015, widespread, desperately violent peasant uprisings will
be harshly suppressed by the army. Before 2020 the economy will implode under
the combined weight of overpopulation, environmental ruin, epidemic disease, and
loss of overseas markets due to global economic conditions. That will lead to
civil war. After great bloodshed, the army will manage to establish military
rule over most regions of an exhausted, impoverished country. As noted above,
China’s leaders will probably feel driven to go to war with America over control
of Mideast and African oil, a war neither former great power will be able to
win. By 2030 China’s population will be around 800 million and falling
The United States
Apart from the United States’ indulgence in human slavery and the consequent
and calamitous Civil War, the nation has enjoyed a singularly favored history.
Recently, however, the richest nation ever has drifted (and sometimes barged)
into serious problems. These problems include the mammoth national debt, the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the financial cost thereof), a financial
system regulated after-the-fact (Enron, mortgage loans), oil dependency, aging
infrastructure, unaffordable healthcare, retiring Baby Boomers, personal debt
(particularly through “credit” cards: that is, debt cards), porous borders,
drought in the West, and a government (regardless of party) which is reactionary
in the most literal sense, failing to anticipate trouble but instead reacting to
it histrionically and often counterproductively. And the list goes on .... Any
two or three of these might be manageable, but in company with climate change,
the whole list is a backbreaker.
The trouble with the national debt is that the government can only keep on
servicing it (forget repaying it) as long as the economy keeps on growing.
Whether or not a continuously growing economy is a good thing, it won’t happen.
Among the numerous reasons why it won’t, the first is probably our participation
in the globalized economy. It is the computer, an American invention, which has
chiefly empowered globalization, and that is ironic because, while the global
economy has both benefits and costs, the U.S. gets more of the costs than the
benefits. Globalization has compromised the economic independence of all
nations, and as the richest nation, the U.S. has the most to lose -- at least a
lot of middle-class Americans do, those whose jobs have been deported to
lower-wage regions. It’s cold comfort to tell these people that instead of
clerking at Walmart, they can regain a sufficient income by retraining to be a
computer programmer, a surgeon, a CEO, or a lawyer.
The trouble with personal debt is that many are using it to subsidize inadequate
income and in lieu of retirement savings -- savings essential since few
employers offer pension plans any more. The trouble with healthcare is that many
of us can’t afford the insurance premiums and almost none of us can afford a
hospital stay without insurance. (Two of the main reasons why our healthcare is
so expensive are our infatuations with high-tech machinery and with lawsuits.)
The trouble with the war in Iraq is that we can’t win it and we can’t quit and
go home without jeopardizing our oil supply. As with China, the old image of
riding the tiger applies -- can’t stay on, can’t get off. Altogether, too many
troubles.
Prediction: The U.S. will enter a period of “stagflation” as in the 1970’s --
flat or falling incomes, rising unemployment, and rising prices (mainly due to
rising energy costs). After Saudi Arabia falls to Islamic fundamentalists,
energy shortfalls along with mounting debt and a middle class falling into
poverty will increasingly cripple the U.S. economy. Walmart will go bust. Social
Security cuts will push more retirees into poverty. By 2020 the whole global
economy will be in a tailspin. Before 2030 we will go to war with China --
last-ditch and hopeless -- for control of the major oil fields. After that,
things will get worse all around.
Why We Probably Won’t Deflect the Perfect Storm Before it Arrives
Most of the experts who have written on these interrelated subjects conclude
their analysis with recommendations about what we must do in order to avert a
catastrophe. Usually they are guardedly optimistic about our willingness to
actually do what must be done, and do it in time. I have no argument with such
optimism except that, obviously, I don’t share it. I expect that some people,
some groups, even some governments (not, however, major ones like the U.S.,
China, India, and Russia) will take some steps that will do some good, but it
won’t be enough, because overall we are motivated mostly by short-term
self-interest, as we perceive it. We do in fact act as if there were no
tomorrow.
When the opportunity came to pump non-renewable water and oil from underground,
we pumped and used them as fast as we could, even after we realized that our
grandchildren and their children will have to do without. Even now that most of
us realize that our lifestyle is altering the earth’s climate in ways that will
harm the human race far more than help it, what are we doing? So far, at least,
rather than cutting back, we are pumping more water and oil, digging and burning
more coal, sawing down more forests, plowing and irrigating more land, making
and driving more cars and trucks, manufacturing and buying more luxurious
gadgets, and evidently we will keep on doing so until the economic and
environmental costs become absolutely prohibitive. We justify such behavior on
the grounds that our economy has to keep on growing, because if it doesn’t keep
on growing, our lifestyle will begin slipping -- never mind that all this
economic growth is incontestably at the expense of our descendants.
There once was a time when more was better, but now what we have is already too
much and more is a disaster. There is scant evidence to suggest that we are
about to suddenly convert ourselves en masse into self-denying, far-seeing
altruists. In the meantime, having sown the wind, we begin reaping the
whirlwind.
Suggested Reading
James Gustave Speth - The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism,
the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
James Howard Kunstler - The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate
Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
Kenneth S. Deffeyes - Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage
John Ghazvinian - Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil
William H. Calvin - Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change
Jared Diamond - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Maude Barlow - Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle
for the Right to Water
Lester R. Brown - Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Third Edition)
Pat Murphy - Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate
Change
and the enduring classic
Marc Reisner - Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
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