Re: [Marxism] Trawling the oceans to exhaustion

[ehrbar <ehrbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here are my answers to S. Artesian's four questions yesterday:

> 1. cheap energy and fossil fuels:  Is there evidence that the actual costs
> of production of "fossil fuels," coal/oil/gas, have increased to the point
> that those increases are behind the increased spot market prices of oil?

This is the wrong question to ask.  We don't want the supply of fossil
fuels to go all the way to the point where marginal costs equal the
demand-determined price.  In his recent congressional testimony,
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623.pdf James
Hansen writes: "to preserve our planet we must ... ensure that the
next mobile energy source is not obtained by squeezing oil from coal,
tar shale, or other fuels."  Why not?  Because so much energy is
needed to process these fuels that the CO2 emissions per kwh of usable
energy go through the roof.  The amount of fossil fuels which can be
extracted is not limited by production cost but by the earth's ability
to serve as carbon sink.

> 2. Is it impossible or too expensive to access greater stores of
> not-yet-tapped hydrocarbon energy-- i.e. methyl hydrates, to support social
> development?

Scientists fear that methyl/methane hydrates/clathrates under the
ocean floor will erupt when the oceans warm up.  Since methane is a
potent greenhouse gas, this can heat up the planet by several degrees
all at once.  Apparently such things happened in the past.  A good
readable source is chapter 16 of the book *With Speed and Violence:
Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change* by Fred Pearce,
Beacon Press, Boston 2007.  Others want to mine these deposits, since
methane has a lower carbon content per kilowatt hour than oil or coal.
But the danger that the mining might destabilize them and trigger
eruptions seems high to me.  And right now we don't have the
technology anyway.

> 3. When you argue that living standards cannot be maintained, do you mean
> that the general levels of social indicators that are pointed to with
> differing amounts of pride by advanced countries-- literacy, death in
> childbirth, infant mortality, life expectancy, access to clean drinking
> water and adequate sanitation facilities, cannot be maintained in those
> countries much less achieved in less developed countries?

Cuba shows that these social indicators can be maintained even at low
living standards.  And there is a lot of "happiness" literature
showing that consumption of carbon intensive stuff beyond a certain
level does not make people happier.  Therefore our slogan should be:
education and healthcare for all, old age security, lots of free time.
But air travel must be limited unless we switch to biofuels or solar
powered airships (blimps) etc.

> 4. What is the carrying capacity of the earth and how is that derived?

To say that the earth has a "carrying capacity" means we cannot
multiply the number of humans indefinitely by better technology or
better social relations.

I think the concept of a "phantom carrying capacity" is also useful
here -- a carrying capacity that is only temporary because it depends
on fossil fuels.

Richard Heinberg: "There are now somewhere between two and five
billion humans alive who probably would not exist but for fossil
fuels."

Heinberg: "[I]f the availability of these fuels were to decline
significantly without our having found effective replacements to
maintain all their life-sustaining benefits, then the global human
carrying capacity would plummet--perhaps even below its pre-industrial
levels."

James Howard Kunstler said similar things in his book "The Long  Emergency":

"...[C]heap oil has skewed the equation over the past hundred years
while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of nonrenewable
condensed solar energy accumulated over eons of prehistory...The cheap
oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not
much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years...  So, I hazard to
assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves arc
toward depletion, we will indeed suddenly be left with an enormous
surplus population...that the ecology of the Earth will not support.
No political program of birth control will avail.  The people are
already here.  The journey back to non-oil population homeostasis will
not be pretty.  We will discover the hard way that population
hypergrowth was simply a side effect of the oil age. It was a
condition, not a problem with a solution.  That is what happened and
we are stuck with it."

The UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment comes to the conclusion that
two-thirds of the earth's ecosystems are in decline.

A good source is also William E. Rees at http://dieoff.org/page110.htm


Low cost measures now can make a huge difference later when the
inevitable correction comes due: education, empowerment of women, make
birth control available, a social safety net making sure old people
can survive even if they don't have children, etc. We should say that
one child per woman is the responsible thing to do.  The Catholic
church and also the Mormon church should be criticized for their
population policies.  This should be the subject of talk shows and
soap operas.  It is a debate, fitting together with debates about
sustainable consumption patterns and intergenerational equity.
Marxists should not exclude themselves from this debate by the
word "Malthus."

Hans.

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