SUBHEAD: Having not acted in time we now can choose to face either the rock or the hard place.
By George Mobus on 19 May 2011 in Question Everything
(http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2011/05/two-scenarios.html)
[Publisher's note: This is the last half of a long article detailing our failure to act on overpopulation and resource depletion when we had he chance to mitigate their ensuing problems. The portion of the article reproduced here describes the resulting options left to us. A Most and Least likely scenario. Use link above for complete article.]
Image above: Detail of illustration of "Fat Man's Misery" passage in Mammoth Cave, from 1875. From (http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/king/ill471.html).
"Sapience is often defined as wisdom, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment, a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom#Sapience)
In the end, our predicament has been caused by a lack of adequate sapience to manage our over-exuberant cleverness and lust for profits. So a lack of adequate sapience is the root or causal liability. Just as once long ago sapience was the root of our success, given the disparity in rates of cultural evolution compared with biological evolution it has turned into a weakness. A major weakness. Perhaps the ultimate weakness.
What Can We Expect?
Two Scenarios Let us examine two scenarios that play out from the above starting conditions. We will look also at the relative likelihood for each and the consequences that ensue from each.
I have chosen these two scenarios (both of which discount any miracle breakthrough in energy production) to contrast the effects on humanity of a bottleneck condition. That is, in both of these scenarios humans go through an evolutionary bottleneck that reduces the population to a very small fraction of the current level.
One bottleneck results from humans continuing to act as they do now (the so-called business as usual attempt), don't take any anticipatory action, and basically let nature take its course. The other scenario assumes a specific intervention taken early enough to make a difference in the quality of life lived as we go through the bottleneck.
In the former case the bottleneck will be steep and rapid in culling the unfit. In the second case, the bottleneck, which is inevitable, is engineered so as to minimize suffering as much as possible. A bottleneck cannot be avoided in any case. The population of humans cannot be sustained at anything like current levels even if we were to discover a reasonably cheap energy source. We are doing irreparable damage to the planet just by virtue of our numbers and the rate at which we produce wastes. Something has to give, and that something will be us (and likely countless other species as well).
This being the case, we have to make a choice. Do we do nothing and go out hard, or do we do something to make our reductions in numbers the least painful possible?
Most Likely — Scenario One I also think of this as the pain and suffering scenario.
The majority of humans, if they perceive anything being wrong in the world believe they are living in a bad dream and hold onto the belief that they will wake up (things will eventually return to ‘normal’). With this belief driving their judgments they will fail to act in any kind of timely way. They will not anticipate the future and will suffer the consequences. The lucky ones will succumb quickly, perhaps from some early violence or a pandemic disease. But many will survive past the early cataclysmic events to face lives of hardship and grueling subsistence.
By 2020 the effects of depleting net energy will be clear to those who understand its relation to economic work. The first effects will be seen (are even now being seen) in the food supply to poor people. The cost of food produced in industrial agriculture will continue to climb through the decade. The floor cost will be established by declining oil products (or the costs of those products as scarcity increases). The fluctuations above the floor will be caused by weather and climate shifts, draught, floods, etc. making monoculture fail more frequently.
Within twenty-five years net energy available to do useful work could be less than ten percent of what it is today. That means we will be producing ten percent less wealth and/or failing to maintain what physical wealth we have now. Almost certainly within this time frame the financial system, which depends entirely on the hope that real wealth production (backing with real assets) will resume will have collapsed. I would think it likely that the fiat currencies of nations, especially the United States, will have failed and there will be a massive reversion to some kind of barter/local currency-effected trading commerce.
An early response to this failure of the financial system will be very rapid closure of business everywhere. That will mean loss of jobs and incomes (with money that is no good anyway). By 2030 we will see a massive attempt at relocalization restructuring in the OECD countries. Naturally, the dates will vary depending on what sorts of local conditions and resources prevail. For example Japan has little in the way of local natural resources, certainly no energy sources, so we could expect Japan to undergo paroxysmal reorganization as the internal powers seek some new kind of equilibrium. It will be more pronounced for an island nation than a continentally-based one.
Relocalization is the only available response in light of diminishing supplies of energy for transportation. However it has many serious flaws. Its success depends entirely on the local resources available, and things such as climate stability and local population sizes. Unless a locality has the benefits of good soils, mild climate and sufficient growing season, reachable forests, etc. it will not provide a sustainable base for residents. And then, too, if the local population is quite large relative to the local resources, that spells disaster.
I see many discussions about transition towns and relocalization that assumes an adaptation of an existing locale to local-only food and necessities production is feasible. Some have argued that the lawns of suburbia might be converted into crop lands, for example. That thinking is grossly naÃve. Most residential lawns are possible only because grasses have shallow root systems and require copious helpings of fertilizers and water to stay green. The underlying soils are generally pretty poor and in no condition to grow food crops in any kind of quantity.
Much as I hate to say this, most of the people who attempt to relocalize in their current neighborhoods are going to die in situ from malnutrition or dehydration. The amount of food crops needed to provide an annual caloric input per person is far greater than most weekend and patio container gardeners can imagine. Most would-be farmers have no idea what crop mixes to grow to achieve a balanced diet, especially providing for the essential amino acids that our bodies do not manufacture. Indeed how many people even know what those amino acids are?
And then there is climate change. Try to imagine the folk in New Orleans eeking out a bare minimum living raising okra in their back yards to have another Cat 5 hurricane swipe across their relocalized homesteads. Or consider, over a longer time scale, admittedly, the folk in southern Florida trying to keep their oranges growing as the sea infiltrates their water table and eventually their land.
By 2050 I am seeing most transportation coming to a standstill. The dreams of an electrified transportation system powered by wind and some solar will be dashed as the transportation necessary to service the wind turbines in remote locations cannot be sustained with diesel prices in the stratosphere. What is happening now that will aggravate this situation is a sudden turn to electric vehicles and things like high-speed rail systems. The latter are truly boondoggles.
They are meant to make a show of doing something proactive for political gain, and to perpetuate the myth that there is a technological solution to every problem. These high-speed rail proposals that Obama is touting are nothing more than his version of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" theme (the one that temporarily blinded me in one of my lesser sapient periods!) Considering the overall scale (running between a few cities where the major ridership will be financial types anxious to get to the next ‘deal’), compared with the scale of trying to fix the standard rail system that actually carries supplies between regions that have and those that don't, this is blatant window dressing (these sentiments have been expressed by James Howard Kunstler, perhaps using similar rhetoric, though much more eloquent that I can muster!)
The climate impacts on regions of the world where many people are going to be literally stranded will begin to take their toll within the next few decades. As I said above, the first to suffer will be those in poorer regions. When the cost of a boat trip across the Gibraltar Straits or across the Arizona desert gets to be unaffordable, refugees will be stranded (we will likely see a resurgence of indentured servitude and outright slavery for a while as long as someone can afford the fuel to make the trips). Far more will be left in this condition than will get out. And those that do can expect nothing but hostilities from otherwise host countries.
Even people in the developed world where climate change will be drastic will suffer the same basic fate. The American eastern and western south lands are incredibly vulnerable to drought and increased average temperatures. The southwest is already arid, but supports a huge population due to imports of drinking water from northern regions, like the San Francisco Bay area or the Colorado River. Even now these sources are under severe stress and not likely to hold out beyond 2030 or 2040.
Something has to give. It seems more likely that Americans living in these areas are going to be somewhat able to pack up and leave for northern realms more readily than peoples in the global south (or Mexico). But what will be the effects of massive migrations north on the communities struggling to relocalize? For the US, the south will not rise again. It will find itself begging the north for shelter. And I make no bets on how generous the northerners will be.
Even if many people from the negatively impacted climate zones make it to milder climes, they will contribute to the further increase in population density exactly at a time when health services will be in rapid decline. The opportunities for huge pandemics will increase and there will be little in the way of prevention of the spread, or treatment of the afflicted. It has happened before (Black Plague) and it would be foolish to suggest it couldn't happen again. Indeed under the conditions I envision, it almost certainly must happen again.
Under the dynamics of this scenario I am thinking that by 2075 more than three quarters of the world's population today will be dead, most from traumatic causes. By 2100 the population may be down to little more than a few million individuals scattered among the last regions that have some level of climate stability. The bottleneck event will have transpired. After this time almost anything can happen. With a radical enough change in the living conditions of the Earth, humans may go extinct. The bottleneck could be as severe as the last one supported by some evidence. We could go down to a mere several hundred individuals! Then what?
There are many well intentioned people today who do see the problems arising and who are trying their best to offer possible solutions. They are to be commended for their sincerity and efforts, but condemned for their inability to see this whole situation systemically. They offer false hope and only exacerbate the situation with respect to getting other people to take any kind of realistic action by reinforcing in them the hope that something will be done and therefore they don't need to do anything differently. As long as someone is taking care of the problem they are content to do nothing. As a result, this ‘do nothing’ action plan will be the most likely to be followed. I don't really blame anyone. This is just our human nature with minimal sapience. But it still sucks.
Least Likely — Scenario TwoSuppose the above scenario represents a reality that will obtain if we do nothing now. This is what we could anticipate by taking no action. We could say these are predictions of what will happen because we don't attempt to alter the future with preemptive actions now. Then the question should be, what if we do take some action now? Would that alter the outcomes in some favorable way? And if so, what actions should we take?
I feel this is the least likely scenario because it requires humans to exercise a level of sapience I doubt that they possess. It would require a level of unprecedented cooperation that I suspect we cannot muster. But I cannot help but wonder, ‘What If?’
The objective of intervention cannot be to prevent a bottleneck. We are in population overshoot and there simply will not be enough resources, especially energy, to do that. Instead, the objective needs to be to minimize the pain and suffering of going through such a bottleneck (without of course simply everyone committing suicide which would be the easy way out).
Along these lines, the objective is to extend over a longer period of time the reduction of population by virtue of allowing a natural death rate to exceed (considerably) the birth rate. In other words, we would undertake an engineered population reduction that would achieve getting that population down to a sustainable level in a short enough time scale that would allow the preservation of at least some natural resources for future generations to build upon.
The population reduction rate has to be fast enough to prevent total depletion of resources such that future generations might not be able to have anything to power anything like what we might call a civilization. What rate might that be?
It is determined by the depletion level of fossil fuels, the rate of change in climate impacts, and the depletion levels of all of the other resources mentioned above. If we had evidence that there would be adequate resources for the next hundred years, it would be reasonable to think that we could come up with a planned reduction with a population halving every hundred years or so. That would translate to an intervention that would affect only a fraction (about one fifth) of the world's people in each generation time period over that several hundred years. Of course we would have to target those in the areas currently suffering the largest population growth rates, which is a political quagmire, as in politically incorrect since it would also be viewed as targeting specific racial or ethnic groups. This would be repugnant to liberals and progressives.
Unfortunately, certainly as far as energy is concerned, our evidence suggests something more radical is called for. We don't have several hundred years. We have, at best, forty or so years before the depletion rate exceeds any possible potential for mitigation by engineered (as opposed to violent) population reduction. This is based on my model (mentioned above) which suggests that the energy decline curve will be much more severe than most others now think likely. If I am wrong, hurrah. If I am right...
Using a pretty standard population dynamics model I estimate that something like ninety percent of the current child-bearing population would need to be sterilized in order to force the population size down sufficiently fast to avoid the worst scenario (above). That is admittedly extremely radical, I do not deny it. The model could be wrong. But what if it isn't? We are playing what if after all. What if I am right?
Suppose we did engineer a radical reduction in the population over the next fifty years. Would that be sufficient? Unfortunately no. This would only be a basic action that we could take to assure a managed bottleneck. In addition we would have to make provisions for how to handle an aging population. There would be no new young people to take over the farms and relocalized manufacturing. What we would gain from the reduction is a conservation of energy and material resources that would allow us to stretch out the time scale of reduction. Instead of a catastrophic reduction in, say, ten years, we could have the same percentage reduction stretched over twenty to thirty years or more. The key would be how many reproducing adults were still in the population.
It is feasible that if we do manage to conserve resources we could redirect some of them to developing technologies that would compensate for not having young workers to replace aging ones. I think we are very close to producing workable robots that could take over the more physical tasks directed at producing just the assets we actually need to live reasonably comfortably, not in luxury. Those robots would be used to assist the aging population until the last sterile individual succumbed to old age (or disease). Robots would need to be powered, of course. So their practicality requires that the remaining flows of energy (especially, say, from wind, solar, and hydroelectric) be used to run them and maintain them in working order. The latter task might be taken on by the non-sterile remaining people forming the breeding population.
An interesting possibility for work that people would be engaged in during this time of contraction is dismantling the human built infrastructure and preserving the reusable resources, steel, copper, etc. for future generations. This would be meaningful work. Granted it isn't meaningful in the same sense as building the world. It would be meaningful as a contribution to future generations of humans who will need these resources but won't have the fossil fuels needed to extract them on their own. Spending time now, dismantling the buildings and machines no longer needed and aggregating those resources would serve humanity in the future. It would be a worthy legacy not unlike a fortune's bequeathal to an heir.
Of course the majority of able bodied will initially be needed in the food production industry because it will become increasingly labor intensive. By drastically reducing the population size it should be feasible to find productive land in spite of the depletion of soil quality throughout the industrial agriculture world. Many folk could be put to meaningful (though hard) work restoring additional soils to permaculture standards. As the population declines, the robots, mentioned above would replace the aging workers in this most necessary work.
An engineered bottleneck would have the advantage of reducing the pain and suffering of starvation, etc. but it would have the obvious negative effects of mental trauma from a denial of childbearing. Which is worse? Moreover, it cannot eliminate all physical suffering because that is already underway and would carry forward no matter what we did. It is really a matter of choosing the least painful alternative. There is no way to avoid some pain.
Survivors of the Bottleneck This leads us to a consideration of the nature of survival of the bottleneck event. In Scenario One I have already indicated that there is a non-zero probability that any survivors would eventually succumb and the human species would be finished forever. There is some chance that some survivors would remain and find ways to procreate, but starting from the genetic pool of today, it is problematic as to what form evolution would take after that. My guess is devolution toward primitivation rather than advancement. Of course this may just be the natural course of things after all so what would it matter?
In scenario Two we have something of an option. An engineered bottleneck allows us an opportunity to choose the characteristics of our species' progeny. And if we did that (wisely) we might seed a future evolutionary process with a gene pool that promotes those very best characteristics of our kind. My vote goes for high sapience.
Yes Virginia this is eugenics! I admit it. But what else would we do? We might choose higher intelligence, but we already know what high intelligence without higher wisdom produces. Better capitalists! And better capitalists rape the world faster than less bright capitalists.
I realize that very many people will question the genetic basis of sapience and wonder if there isn't some kind of education that could prepare the selected survivors. Then we could just use a lottery system for choosing and our only real action would be to set up that educational system.
This amounts to asking "Are people educable to wisdom?" Certainly, to some degree, some aspects of wisdom could be instilled in anyone. But only some aspects. One might as well ask if people with IQs of 75 might not be trained to do calculus. They are certainly capable of being taught intuitions about rates of change (going faster vs. going slower). But this isn't exactly the same thing as doing calculus is it? Holistic wisdom comes from a native ability to learn veridical tacit knowledge and having the facilities for using that knowledge for judgment in decision making. This is a rare capacity in we humans.
Fortunately we are developing the very tools we would need to answer this question and a basis for making selection decisions if we collectively decided that this would be the better route to take. See Overpopulation: Here is the Solution (http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2011/04/overpopulation-here-is-the-solution.html).
If we selected high sapient individuals of breeding age (please bear in mind I am not of breeding age!) and provided protections for them, as well as resources to nurture their establishment, they would survive an engineered bottleneck and have a much better chance of surviving the future changes in the environment due to climate change and massive ecosystems alterations. We could bequeath them the fruits of our civilization (the appropriate technologies and knowledge) with the hope that they will succeed in preserving the genetic heritage of our genus into the distant future.
Feasibility How likely is Scenario Two? Not very, I'm afraid. Not only do we lack, as a species, the wisdom to act appropriately, we lack the intestinal fortitude to practice the kind of triage that would be necessary. Our political structures, at least in the West, do not even allow the subject to come up let alone make necessary decisions.
The feasibility of determining something like sapience level as a selection criterion is, I think, relatively high given our access to information about the brain functions, brain development, and genetic basis for development. Our understanding of judgment is now high and growing, so the possibility of developing psychological probes that would discriminate sapient judgment from mere intellectual decision making is quite high.
But, we won't even try it. We are, collectively, cowards. We won't even face up to the consequences of what we have wrought until it is too late. Moreover, I expect the majority of people to panic when those consequences start to be felt in earnest. Look at how many people are already reacting to high fuel prices. Instead of seeking information and education on the situation, instead of thinking through the various causes and seeing the naturalness of the effect, what do people do? They complain that they can't consume more. They whine about how hard life is for them. Wait until it really starts to get hard. Then let's see how they react.
So once again I offer this as little more than an intellectual exercise knowing full well that my species will be unable to deal with the forces at hand. Which leaves us with Scenario One, the pain and suffering scenario. Now my only hope is that somewhere out there a few really sapient individuals will be thinking clearly and planning ahead, anticipating the worst and preparing for it.
Older individuals, such as myself, can only try to make younger high sapient people aware and trust to their level of sapience that they will be able to make the right choices. This is a hit and miss proposition. No guarantees. Younger people, even with high sapience, have not accumulated the wisdom of experience. Their sapience can only help them obtain that experience. But then hit and miss always was the nature of evolution! The ultimate question will be whether such a process will produce viable survivors with the right qualities to provide a basis for progress in the development of our genus.
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Image above: Lance Armstrong - an example of celebrity fail. From (http://dancappello.com/2011/05/21/my-reaction-to-the-lance-armstrong-allegations).
Americans gathered around the hearth of CBS's 60 Minutes must have been bemused to hear reporter Scott Pelley announce self-importantly that the US Department of Justice is investigating Lance Armstrong's bicycling team for performance-enhancing drug use. Does it really matter if any pro athlete takes drugs? Why not throw Babe Ruth out of the Baseball Hall of Fame for drinking sixteen beers the night before a World Series opener? Or Ditto Mickey Mantle for that, plus smoking two packs of Marlboros in the dugout during every game. 
