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2 Sources, sinks and services

EF Schumacher laid out the idea of the Earth’s ‘natural capital’ on which humanity depends. But those resources are being consumed faster with every passing year – and technological improvements and efficiency savings are utterly unable to keep pace. The Earth’s sinks are now overflowing – and we are starting to pay a heavy price.

‘The idea of unlimited growth… needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and… the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied.’

EF Schumacher

A year after The Limits to Growth appeared, a soft-spoken ex-economist from the British Coal Board, EF Schumacher released a slim volume of essays with a catchy title: Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered. The timing was right. The global economy was reeling in the wake of the 1973 OPEC ‘oil crisis’. Oil-producing Arab nations had suddenly cut supply and jacked up the price of crude in retaliation for US support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Global commodity prices surged in tandem with oil. And three years earlier, in April 1970, the first Earth Day brought 20 million Americans to the streets. The environment was becoming a matter of growing public concern.

Schumacher’s work was received as a blast of common sense, a lucid critique of Western economics that brought things sharply into focus. He wrote with passion and clarity about the environmental effects of economic growth, suggesting an alternative to the neoclassical paradigm grounded in what he called ‘Buddhist Economics’. By that he meant an economics of consumption based on ‘sufficiency’, opportunities for people to participate in ‘useful and fulfilling work’ (which he called ‘Right Livelihood’ based on one of the requirements of Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path) and an engaged, active community marked by peace and co-operation. He called for human-scale, decentralized and ‘appropriate technologies’ as an alternative to a rapacious, dangerous and unjust global system. ‘Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are the denial of wisdom.’¹

As Schumacher saw it, the human economic system must operate within, and be subject to, the constraints of the natural world. For him, this was the major failing of mainstream economics. It was in the end, he thought, a reflection of both human arrogance and human ignorance. ‘Modern man [sic] does not experience himself as part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that if he won the battle he would find himself on the losing side.’

Schumacher was the first popular writer to introduce the concept of ‘natural capital’ to a wider audience. This was a kind of analytic ju-jitsu in which he used the language of economics to illustrate his core idea of the environmental limits to growth. In ‘natural capital’ he included all renewable and non-renewable resources, as well as all ecosystem services and systems – from the pollination of crops through the decomposition of wastes to the regulation of the global climate. Schumacher acknowledged the role of science and technology in creating human-made, ‘sophisticated capital equipment’ but noted that this is a small part of the overall capital on which we depend.

‘Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man – and we do not even recognize it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved… The modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected… It lives on irreplaceable capital, which it treats as income.’

Since Schumacher first popularized the term, ecologists have embraced it, dividing the Earth’s natural capital into three broad categories, all of which are critical to maintaining growth.

Sources

The first and most obvious category of ‘sources’ includes energy and the basic raw materials that are harvested from the planet and fed into the industrial machine. Energy, specifically oil, is the lifeblood of modern economies. Around 90 per cent of our energy comes from fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas.

Oil is number one, accounting for 35 per cent of the world’s primary energy consumption.² Two-thirds of it goes towards transport – powering our trains, airplanes, cars, trucks, ocean freighters, speedboats and snowmobiles. Oil is also at the heart of modern industry, providing the energy and chemical feed stocks to churn out endless consumer goods, electronics, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, machine tools, scientific equipment, chemicals, clothing and myriad other items that mesh into the seamless system of production that now straddles the globe. Perhaps more vitally, petroleum is the energy source that powers modern agriculture. Oil provides chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides while gasoline fuels farm machinery. Oil is also essential to the processing, packaging and distribution of foodstuffs. There is a direct correlation between economic growth and oil consumption. Faster growth requires more oil, lower growth less. That’s why, in times of recession, when growth softens, demand for oil also falls. The same is true for other strategic metals and minerals like copper, iron, nickel, chromium, zinc, tin and manganese. Yet, like oil, the overall trend in the price of raw materials has been rising over the past decade.

When Dennis Meadows and his associates were building the original Limits to Growth model back in the early 1970s they were concerned that we would exhaust supplies of basic metals and other industrial raw materials within 50 years. That hasn’t happened. The global economy has expanded 10-fold since then and mining corporations have ransacked countries from Brazil and Peru to Canada and Mongolia in search of strategic materials. Extraction technologies have become more sophisticated and exploration continues to expand at an ever-increasing rate to the remotest corners of the planet. In 2008, the weight of all materials extracted and harvested around the world totaled 68 billion tonnes, nearly 25 kilograms a day for every person living on the planet. Global resource extraction has grown by nearly 80 per cent since 1980. The largest rise in per-capita consumption has occurred in the industrialized world.³

Digging it all out

Global resource extraction has grown by 78% over the past 30 years, from around 38 billion tonnes in 1980 to around 68 billion tonnes in 2008.

Global resource extraction by material category, 1980-2008

Source: SERI, materialflows.net nin.tl/19pu5tO

We have not bumped up against the limits of these strategic metals yet. But it would be imprudent to assume that supplies are limitless. If the rest of the world consumed copper, zinc, tin, chromium and silver at the same rate as the US, it is estimated that the global supply of those strategic metals would disappear in less than two decades.

A 2009 study highlighted by the Worldwatch Institute outlines broad-brush estimates of the availability of common metals based on current levels of consumption. Within the next century we will see major shortages of most basic raw materials as rich seams of ore are used up and new discoveries dwindle.⁴ Existing stocks will also become more expensive to pry out of the ground as ore grades decline. Part of the problem will be real physical shortages, but equally important will be the price of energy used in extraction as oil prices inevitably creep upwards.

Mainstream economists, business leaders and many scientists place their hope in technology and human ingenuity. They look at the last century of scientific achievement and technological progress as just the beginning of more and better innovation. Why worry about running out of resources, they ask, when we can become more efficient by improving our technology?

Isn’t technology an infinite resource? The short answer is, no. As Herman Daly writes: ‘Improved technology means using the entropic flow [remember our entropy discussion from the last chapter] more efficiently, not reversing the direction of the flow. Efficiency is subject to thermodynamic limits. All existing and currently conceivable technologies function on an entropy gradient, converting low entropy into high entropy, in net terms.’⁵

The counter argument is that efficiency improvements – doing more with less – mean we don’t need to worry about running out of raw materials. We can continue to have economic growth using less energy, fewer material inputs and fewer workers. (Don’t ask what happened to full employment. Efficiency demands increased productivity and, if that means more labor-saving technology and fewer good jobs, then so be it. That is the price we must pay for growth.)

Indeed, these claims are not without precedent. Industry has made huge strides in efficiency in recent years. Across the world economies have become less ‘energy intensive’, driving down the amount of energy used to produce every unit of GDP. The US, for example, used 20,000 BTU (British Thermak Units) of energy in 1950 to produce one dollar of GDP. By 2008 that had been slashed to 8,500 BTU. In addition to technology ‘fixes’, economists have a strong faith in ‘price signals’ and ‘substitution’.

Introductory economics textbooks say that if a resource becomes scarce then its price will rise to the point where users will look for a cheaper substitute. This might make sense in some instances. For example, if a bakery finds refined white sugar hard to source and too expensive then it might search for a cheaper alternative – honey, perhaps, or an artificial sweetener. But what works at the micro level may not work at the macro level. In the case of critical inputs, like oil, a substitute is not so easily available.

The Jevons Paradox

The notion that the economy can be ‘de-coupled’ from material inputs and so continue merrily down the growth pathway is dubious. This is largely due to a little-known hiccough called the Jevons Paradox or ‘rebound effect’. In his 1865 book, The Coal Question, the British economist, W Stanley Jevons, posited that greater energy efficiency produces savings in the short run but in the long run results in higher energy use.

‘It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption,’ Jevons wrote. ‘The very contrary is the truth.’

How can that be? Well, Jevons argued that just because we use energy (or raw materials) more efficiently doesn’t mean we’ll use less of them, especially in an economic system predicated on growth. The Jevons paradox, in a nutshell, says that the benefits of increased technical efficiency are inevitably swamped by increased consumption. Improvements in efficiency translate into lower prices in the short term, which in turn trigger higher consumption. You see this ‘rebound effect’ when the price of gasoline falls and people drive their cars more. Or when savings on energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances are used to buy a new flat-screen TV or another household gadget.

We’re caught in a bind. Ramping up GDP without improving technological efficiency leads to more resource inputs, more energy consumed and environmental damage. Yet improving efficiency triggers more growth – which leads to the same end. Total resource consumption grows even while efficiency improves. Between 1970 and 2000, rich countries saw impressive gains in energy efficiency of up to 40 per cent. But average improvements of two per cent a year were eclipsed by growth rates of three per cent a year or more.

In one study cited by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), environmental economist Toyoaki Washida found a significant ‘rebound effect’ in the Japanese economy that swallowed 35-70 per cent of the efficiency savings.⁶ According to NEF, ‘even if technological energy efficiency and the uptake of new, more efficient devices increased by 50 per cent over the next 20-30 years with GDP rising by a conservative 2.5 per cent, within 25 years we’d be back where we are now.’

Other researchers confirm that growth eventually swamps efficiency improvements. In a study of the material outflows of five industrial nations, the World Resources Institute found that industrial economies are becoming more efficient in their use of materials, but that waste generation also continues to increase. ‘Even as decoupling between economic growth and resource throughput occurred on a per-capita and per-unit GDP basis, however, overall resource use and waste flows continued to grow. We found no evidence of an absolute reduction in resource throughput.’⁷

The chart below shows exactly that. Even though ‘material intensity’ (the volume of materials consumed per unit of GDP) has been decreasing since 1980, the total volume of materials extracted continues to increase. We are using fewer resources more efficiently. But it makes little difference if growth and population continue to rise.

Relative de-coupling of economic growth from resource use, 1980-2007

Source: SERI/Friends of the Earth/Global 2000/ REdUSE, Under Pressure, nin.tl/1f5ghgj

This does not mean efficiency improvements are a second-tier priority, as some free market boosters suggest. Critics like the Washington-based Institute for Energy Research (funded by, among others, ExxonMobil Corporation and billionaire Tea Party supporters, the Koch brothers) maintain that the market must be left on its own and that efficiency should not be enforced by government regulation. Directing energy policy through regulation is a ‘folly’, the Institute says. ‘Instead of forcing more energy-efficiency requirements on American consumers, policy-makers and government regulators should allow market prices and disruptive innovations to guide energy use.’⁸

But it’s not the goal that is wobbly, it’s the context. Efficiency improvements are necessary – but not sufficient. It’s the growth that negates the efficiency savings that is the real issue.

Growth optimists also boast that physical resource limits are irrelevant in our new knowledge-based economy. As economies ‘mature’ and shift from production to finance, insurance and real estate (the so-called FIRE sector), engineering, education and other services, there will be less need for raw materials. As the economy ‘dematerializes’ we will continue to grow as our work-places and homes become greener and cleaner. Unfortunately, there is little evidence of this happening. For the most part advanced industrial economies have simply shifted production overseas where labor costs are cheaper, taxes less burdensome and environmental regulations weak or non-existent. So, as Western countries ‘offload’ production of real goods overseas, the global pollution load actually increases.

High-end service jobs also generally pay more, which inevitably means more consumption. But, while resource-intensive manufacturing has relocated abroad, we in the West are no less addicted to our ‘stuff’ – hi-tech electronic gadgets, sprawling suburbs, new cars and cheap flights to warm places. As our consumption increases, we are merely ‘outsourcing’ the problem. Out of sight, out of mind. We are still chomping through tons of raw materials. It’s just that now the ‘throughput’ is halfway around the globe. All we see are the final results on display in the local mall. As University of British Columbia ecologist William Rees notes: ‘High-income service employees therefore have much larger per-capita ecological footprints than workers in the basic economy; those countries with the largest high-end service sectors have the largest national eco-footprints.’

The overflowing sinks

What goes into the maw of the growth machine must eventually come out the other end as waste. The waste comes in many forms – from household garbage, plastic bottles and construction refuse to slaughterhouse offal, toxic tailings, noxious gases and pesticide residues. All of these find their way into one of Planet Earth’s natural ‘sinks’: the air, the water or the land. Until the last 50 years or so this was not really a problem. Mother Nature could take just about anything we could throw at her. All that has changed. Today the absorptive and assimilative capacities of the Earth can no longer handle the Niagara-like torrents of waste we are disgorging.

The ‘sinks’ are overflowing. The evidence is clear wherever we turn as our rapacious global economy hits the limits. All major ecosystems are being degraded at an astonishing speed. It’s a depressing litany that includes the ransacking of ocean fisheries (12 of the world’s 13 major fisheries are now severely depleted); the continued destruction of tropical rainforests; fertile soils salted with agro-chemicals and converted to industrial agriculture; increasing desertification; the destruction of wilderness; species extinction and the erosion of biodiversity. The list goes on.

Take the case of synthetic chemicals – the hazards of which Rachel Carson, whose pioneering 1962 book, Silent Spring, is credited with launching the environmental movement, first raised over 50 years ago. We continue to pump millions of tons of deadly chemicals into the environment every year and the damage both to humans and nature is no longer in doubt. We are living in a deadly stew of toxins, most of which did not exist before modern chemistry was born in the crucible of World War Two.

There are more than 80,000 chemicals in industrial production today, with hundreds added each year. Few have been tested for their effect on human health or the environment. And, critically, there is almost no knowledge of how chemicals interact with each other. When the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was passed in the US in 1976, more than 62,000 chemicals were ‘grandfathered’ into the market – in other words, no testing, no questions asked. According to investigative journalist Mark Schapiro, these included highly toxic substances such as ethyl benzene, a widely used industrial solvent suspected of being a potent neuro-toxin; whole families of synthetic plastics that are potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters; and thousands of other substances for which there was little or no information. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admits that 95 per cent of all chemicals have not undergone even minimal testing for toxicity. In the European Union it’s estimated that two-thirds of the 30,000 most commonly used chemicals have not been vetted. According to Schapiro, the EPA had banned just five chemicals in the quarter-century prior to 2007.⁹ All of us live with this toxic burden. But the poor, the marginalized, and the people of color, those who are cheek-by-jowl with industrial plants, suffer the most.

Rachel Carson would have been outraged but not surprised. ‘The chemical war is never won,’ she wrote in Silent Spring, ‘and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.’ It was Carson who first promoted the notion of ecology, the complex web that binds human life to the natural world. ‘The serious student of earth history knows that neither life nor the physical world that supports it exists in little isolated compartments… harmful substances released into the environment return in time to create problems for mankind [sic]… We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity. The two exist together, each acting on the other to form an ecological complex or ecosystem.’¹⁰

As humankind pushes every deeper into the most remote areas of the globe, expanding our industrial production and consumer habits, we threaten natural systems and sully the last remnants of wilderness left on our ‘full’ planet. ATVs (all terrain vehicles) thunder across alpine meadows deep in the Rocky Mountains. Seismic lines crisscross the high Arctic. Cattle ranches and industrial-scale soy farms replace dense, tropical forests in the Brazilian Amazon, displacing native peoples and destroying a unique pharmacological treasure trove. Nearly a fifth of Brazil’s tropical forests have been logged over the past four decades – more than in the previous 450 years since European contact. It is estimated than another 20 per cent may be lost in the next decade.

As a result of habitat destruction, hunting, invasion by alien species, disease and climate change, the speed of global extinction is accelerating. There are now more than 17,000 plants and animals at risk, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This Swiss NGO’s Red List of endangered species records that 25 per cent of all invertebrates, 20 per cent of mammals, half of all primates, one in eight birds, a third of all amphibians and half of all turtles face extinction. When the IUCN first released figures in 2004, it noted that we are losing species 100-1,000 times faster than the normal ‘background’ rate suggested by fossil records before humans were around. Between a third and a half of all terrestrial species are expected to die out over the next 200 years if nothing is done to stop habitat destruction. Scientists generally put the normal extinction rate at about one species every four years. Harvard’s EO Wilson, one of the world’s most eminent biologists, has predicted the rate of species extinction could reach 10,000 times the ‘background’ rate in the next 20 years.

The Anthropocene and nature’s services

The destructive impact of human activity on the Earth has become so pervasive that ecologists now suggest that the previous geological era has ended and we have entered a new age: the Anthropocene. Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize winning Dutch chemist, coined the word in 2000. Crutzen was attending a scientific conference where the chair kept referring to the Holocene, the period that started at the end of the last ice age nearly 12,000 years ago. ‘Let’s stop it. We are no longer in the Holocene. We are in the Anthropocene,’ Crutzen recalls blurting out. ‘Well, it was quiet in the room for a while.’ When the group took a coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of conversation.¹¹ No wonder. No other species has had the dubious distinction of defining a geological era by its activities. According to the Royal Society, the Anthropocene is a ‘vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth’. We have laid down a trail, left our mark, indelibly, on ice cores in the Antarctic and in new layers of sedimentary rock being laid on the ocean floor.

Two recent events highlight the threat that economic growth poses to ‘ecosystem services’, the natural cycles and systems that make our planet green, clean and habitable. We mentioned Fritz Schumacher’s inclusion of these ‘services’ in the phrase ‘natural capital’. But let me say a little more about these gifts that nature bestows on us and which we mostly take for granted. They include those fundamental processes that lurk in the background of our daily lives – the water cycle, photosynthesis, pollination, flood control, the decomposition of wastes and, ultimately, the regulation of the global climate. Unfortunately, both the terms ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’ adopt the dry language of economics to interpret the richness and mystery of nature. Nonetheless, they are useful, if mechanistic, shorthand to counter the prejudices of mainstream economics, in which the environment has never been treated as more than an ‘externality’. This of course is nonsense. Nature is not external; it is fundamental. The human economy is not a self-contained system. It is a product of human culture and human culture is uniquely, delicately, nested in the natural systems of the biosphere.

So let’s look now at those three examples of the erosion of ecosystem services by exponential growth.

When NASA released satellite photos of the Greenland ice sheet, taken four days apart, in July 2012, the contrast between the two images could not have been starker. An unusu al Arctic heat wave had melted a vast expanse of surface ice; approximately 97 per cent of it had thawed in less than a week. We’re talking about the surface here. The ice did not disappear. It’s almost two miles thick in places so it will take decades to melt to bare earth. But Greenland’s ice sheet is dwindling, undeniably, a little more with each passing year. About four times more ice melted in the summer of 2012 than in the 10 previous years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-mandated grouping of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, warns that if Greenland’s ice sheet were to melt completely it would raise sea levels by 7.5 meters.

Back in 2007 the IPCC said that we would not see ice-free summers in the Arctic for another century. That now looks wildly optimistic. Things are changing even more quickly than forecast. A month after the NASA Greenland photo, researchers using data from the European Space Agency’s satellite corroborated the NASA findings for the Arctic as a whole. The Polar ice cap, too, had melted at an unprecedented rate – in total more than 11.7 million square kilometers, 22 per cent more than average. Scientists now predict an ice-free Arctic summer within 20 years. ‘This is staggering,’ Cambridge University sea-ice researcher Nick Toberg told The Guardian. ‘It’s disturbing, scary that we have physically changed the face of the planet.’¹² Studies show that 60-95 per cent of the melting of Arctic ice between 1953 and 2011 was due to human activity. There is little doubt that human-induced global warming has been more extreme in the far north. The area has been heating up about twice as fast as the rest of the world.