Im generally open to the idea that humans are intelligent, but otherwise
Im a little more pessimistic than George Backus:
At 08:56 AM 11/17/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>In responding to Bill Harris: Lomborg argues that most of the reports
>excess "ecological footprint" is energy. The energy intensity is declining
>robustly in industrial nations.
Declining energy intensity is the Bush administration "plan" for combatting
climate change. As long as economic growth outstrips the decline in energy
intensity (gigajoules/$) - which has been true globally - the footprint
will grow. I havent watched regional numbers but Id be interested to hear
any speculation on whether some of the decline in industrial nations is
associated with the IT productivity blip, and whether it is relaxing to a
slower rate.
The ecological footprint about half energy - eyeballing the graphs in the
report at
http://www.panda.org/downloads/general/LPR_2002.pdf its 7 out of
13 billion hectares. This number is somewhat tricky - 90% of the energy
footprint is the forest area you would need to plant to offset enough
fossil CO2 emissions to maintain a constant atmospheric CO2 concentration.
This approach is hard to maintain as the stock of fossil carbon is 5-10x
the current biomass. The footprint assumes that 35% of emissions will be
absorbed by the oceans, which also cannot be sustained in the long run. If
no one plants the trees, and climate change occurs (as it will to some
degree due to our accumulated carbon debt, also neglected in the
footprint), its unclear how to assess the resulting "footprint" of various
kinds of climate damages.
Even if CO2 turns out to be a non issue, the energy picture is not
completely rosy. The footprint neglects other aspects of energy use - space
occupied by capital (except reservoirs), non-carbon pollutants (acid rain)
and feedback effects (such as an increase in the crop footprint due to
lowering of yields by pollution - or for that matter a decrease in the crop
footprint due to raising of yields by capital/energy intensive production
and CO2 fertilization). I have a hard time getting my head around the
footprint of the military implications of oil depletion.
>Substitution can allow renewable energy
>forms as markets allow it and as service economies become more dominant.
>Thus, the energy footprint is not necessarily an indicator of true
>overshoot, but rather a transient condition. It is a condition that needs
>to be taken seriously, but is also readily reversed prior to its causing a
>true overshoot trauma.
I agree that renewables and conservation could substitute away the energy
footprint, but I dont believe that "readily" describes the ease with which
the transition could be accomplished. Energy production and consumption is
a capital intensive business, and many of the capital stocks involved have
long lifetimes (dams, homes, cars, infrastructure, ...). Some have high
embodied energy, so that wed need a big up-front investment of energy to
reach a lower-intensity steady state. Many of the technologies concerned
need refinement before expanding out of their current niches. I suspect
that the process of getting agreement on the need for change, shifting
lifestyles and settlement patterns, abandoning existing capital, ramping up
new industries, and installing new capital would be about like preparing
for a world war if you had to do it in a hurry.
All attempts to reduce the globe to a single index yield some absurdities,
so I take the footprint with a grain of salt. But given that Id prefer to
live in a low-footprint world I dont find it encouraging.
Tom
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Thomas Fiddaman, Ph.D.
Ventana Systems
http://www.vensim.com
8105 SE Nelson Road Tel (253) 851-0124
Olalla, WA 98359 Fax (253) 851-0125
Tom@Vensim.com http://home.earthlink.net/~tomfid
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