Coal power is making a comeback – an own goal by greens

I tweeted recently that Europe has the stupidest greens in the world.  I meant it. Today I have time to explain.

The Greens of course are political party in many countries now, but the term green applies generally to left wing environmentalists where things only ever seem to benefit the environment if they simultaneous result in wealth redistribution. It is that entire group that I am talking about here. There are lots of environmentalists who aren’t socialist and lots that aren’t idiots, with a very strong overlap in those groups. Many are very smart and support policies or develop solutions that actually benefit or protect the environment. But the greens do seem mostly to fall into the idiot camp. Sorry, but that is a fact of life.

Thanks to green pressure and proselytising of their CO2 catastrophist religion, the EU has gone nuts implementing ludicrously expensive policies to reduce carbon emissions, but has demonstrated mainly negative effects after hundreds of billions investment, often achieving exactly the opposite of what was intended. The greens’ almost universal refusal to engage in proper science or logical reasoning has resulted in very clear demonstration that nature doesn’t care about political ideology or intent, only what is actually done. Some examples are called for:

Many people have been driven needlessly into fuel poverty, their energy bills rising dramatically to pay for wind farms that often actually increase CO2 emissions over their life because they are built on peat-lands. Solar panels on UK rooftops produce more CO2 than they save too, again the opposite of the intent, while managing to successfully divert cash from the poor to the rich, also presumably the opposite of the socialist greens driving it. Industries have been forced to close or relocate overseas due to rising subsidies for renewables, severely damaging the economy and destroying working class jobs, where the intention was to revitalise with a green economy and create jobs, while again pushing up CO2 emissions when the relocation is to countries that produce more CO2 for the same energy. Recession and economic misery has been far deeper and longer with slower recovery thanks to the huge costs resulting directly from green policies, with the poor taking much of the burden. Millions in far away countries have also been pushed into starvation by rising food prices or have been forcefully relocated to make room for palm oil plantations to meet the demand caused by European regulations that biofuels must account for 5% of the fuel in our cars. The peat bogs drained and the rainforests chopped down to make space again increase CO2 emissions.

You couldn’t make it up. The evidence now seems incontrovertible to all but the looniest of greens that CO2 doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as was suggested, and we are certainly not threatened by environmental catastrophe due to global warming. But if we were, all the activities of the European greens so far would have made a huge contribution to making catastrophe worse and much earlier. Green is rapidly becoming synonymous with stupid. Greens are repeatedly shown to be the worst enemy of both the poor and of the environment, both of which they aim to help. Stupid almost isn’t a strong enough word.

Meanwhile, in the USA, where they refused to sign up to the worst of the policies, simple capitalist market forces forced the development of shale gas, reducing energy prices dramatically and stimulating the economy, making people richer and creating jobs, while replacing dirty, CO2-producing coal with clean CO2-light gas. Many business are relocating from the EU to the US, the only successful but entirely unintended CO2 reduction resulting from EU policy so far.  Meanwhile, greens even there have managed to get the government to throw billions away on futile projects to create a mythical green economy, with remarkably few actual jobs to show for the huge investment. It is the diametrically opposite force that has created them in any numbers.

However, because the USA has made so much progress reducing CO2 via shale gas, and is benefiting from greatly reduced energy prices, even it that wasn’t intentional, the price of coal there has been forced down so far that Europe is buying it in. Germany is now reinvesting in coal fired power stations that will greatly increase CO2 emissions, hilarious considering how much cash they have so far wasted on renewables to supposedly reduce them. Meanwhile, although large reserves of shale gas have been found all over Europe, the greens have managed to prevent and delay development of this abundant resource that would revitalise the economy while reducing CO2 emission and reducing pollution. Only now are some mainstream politicians starting to realise the stupidity of such policy and encouraging development of shale gas. In a decade or two the greens might finally understand too.

Japan too is now making a dash for coal. Having closed their nuclear stations, they have to make up the power deficit and with coal being so cheap, is their new fuel of choice. Again, the indirect result of environmental policies have caused a rise in demand for the worst CO2 emitter of them all. But at least the Japanese can also demonstrate that they are exploiting methane clathrates, which would have a CO2-reducing effect while reducing energy costs.

It seems to be Europe where the policies are greenest and stupidest, with the most harm and the highest costs for the least benefit and the consequential wealth redistribution from poor to rich. The only good thing is that since it tuned out that CO2 doesn’t matter as much as they claimed after all, at least they haven’t yet managed to bring about environmental catastrophe. If the greens had been right about CO2, given the policies they’ve so far forced through, we’d really be in a mess.

I rest my case. Europe has the stupidest greens in the world.

Water companies to deliver Gbit broadband over wet string

Warning: to avoid wasting your time, and since it is no longer April 1st, be aware that this was published as an April Fool joke. Please enjoy it but don’t take it seriously:

Optical fibre is sometimes laid in conventional cable form just like copper wires, but because the actual fibres are so light, they can be coated with a rough surfacing that lets them be blown through plastic ducts using compressed air (the plastic ducts are under 1cm diameter). The fibre wiggles its way to the far end, carried by the air flow. It is simply called ‘blown fibre’ and is used extensively where ducts can easily be laid.

The water industry obviously has huge experience in making smooth channels for water to flow through to every building in the land. Blown fibre technology can adapt to this. Several years ago, advised by future technology consultants Futurizon, research produced a soft furry coating that makes it easy to flush coated fibres down water pipes. The coating is based on sugar and has the consistency of candyfloss. The clever breakthrough was making it so that it lasts until installation is complete and then dissolves harmlessly away in less than an hour.  It is of course safe to drink the tap water even soon after installation.  The remaining problem was how to route the fibres when they come to a junction. The inspiration came from optically guided missiles, which have steerable nose cones, that allow the missile to be routed in the required direction just by rotating the cone. Adding a tiny reusable nose cone capsule to the head to the fibre, and knowing the architecture of the pipework, the fibre can be routed correctly at each junction.

A global consortium of water companies now plans to install nationwide fibre networks via the water supply via a company called Fallopior. The main offices and roll-outs will be in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, all of which face issues of getting access to ultrafast broadband for rural areas and all of which have the carbon subsidy economics to make it work. The name of Fallopior presumably emerged because the system uses tubes for delivery and perhaps to try to tap into the female broadband market. At the home, a broadband ‘tap’ is installed that allows the fibre to emerge. Once the fibre is delivered and connected, it is pushed through a silicone plug that is pushed into the tap to completely seal it.

The fibre is routed all the way to the home by this means, and then the broadband tap is opened. A few litres of water later, and the fibre is delivered. It is far more environmentally friendly way of installing the fibre than digging up pavements and roads. The carbon savings and the selling of the associated credits are calculated to reduce the cost of installation to almost zero. This even works in remote areas since the carbon savings are of course far higher here too. The costs of the fibre are low enough to be absorbed into even a low rental agreement. Fallopior say that they can will offer 1Gb/s to any home even in the remotest parts of the country for as little as £5 per month, and this is easily enough to deliver all the high definition TV and internet a home.

Broadband providers have struggled with the economics of fibre to the home and many homes still have to suffer slow broadband, even though they pay far more than this, especially in the country. But all homes have a water supply, so this technology is perfectly adapted. Since the roll-out plans of the other UK providers are so sluggish, the water companies expect to seize massive market share almost overnight.

Some homes questioned about the potential service insisted they don’t want ultra-high speed broadband with the temptations it brings, and amazingly would prefer to have a slower service, even if it means they have to pay more to get less. Engineers have solved this one too. The coating allows very smooth thin nylon string to be coated temporarily and flushed down the pipes in the same way instead of fibre. Since the water keeps it lubricated, wear would be very low and it will only need replaced every 5 years. But that re-installation increases the cost to £7.50 per month.

Now to every nerd’s dream – just like two cans with string between them, this wet string will transmit high audio signals, 100KHz. With the phenomenal ability of today’s coding and compression schemes, this allows 3Mbit/s to be delivered, comparable with what many people receive today on their low speed broadband. Those questioned said they would be happier with this limit which lets them do basic internet access but not much else. It still competes extremely well on price with offerings from other providers so again Fallopior expect massive demand. In an emergency, when there is no electricity supply, a home-owner can still signal the emergency services by making a short series of tugs on the string. Simple Morse code SOS can easily be sent this way. 

A string plant in Cornwall has secretly been built in preparation and has stockpiled  over 100 million km of string. Others have been established on similar basis in the other consortium countries. As another carbon-subsidised activity, the UK site is attached to a 3MW wind turbine. This one looks a little unusual since the spinning motion of the blades is used directly via gears rather like a traditional windmill) to spin the string and power the machinery. String output therefore varies according to wind strength, hence the need to stockpile supplies. Nevertheless, the result is string that is entirely paid for via carbon subsidies. Location in remote Cornwall was chosen because of high winds and proximity to seaside resorts with easy access to local expertise from candyfloss experts. The late arrival of spring and hence the candyfloss market has meant that many were available and willing to assist on the project.

In spite of all the many benefits and promises of very low cost ultra-fast broadband, there is just one problem – as hinted by the unusual just-after-midnight timing of the press release by the Fallopior’s HQ in Auckland, New Zealand, and of course the company’s name.

Quality of life sustainability

I write and lecture occasionally about various aspects of sustainability. I don’t think we have a big problem from population growth or running out of physical resources, as long as we are sensible. It is perfectly possible to support a much larger human population without destroying the environment, by harnessing human ingenuity to improve land productivity and to minimise resource use thanks to advanced technology. There are some obvious limits though. I summarise some in this diagram. As you can see, I don’t think there is room for complacency, but nor do I think the problems are insurmountable, and with willingness, we can ensure a healthy environment.

Personally, I think the problem of man-made global warming has been exaggerated, and I don’t lose any sleep on that issue, but we could still reduce atmospheric pollution generally to good effect. Particulates from fossil fuels, aerosols, HFCs, CFCs and so on could all be reduced. And even if CO2 isn’t an urgent issue yet, it still is definitely a greenhouse gas so we should limit avoidable emissions. However, over-fishing of the oceans is a real and urgent issue. A lot of people rely on fish as their main protein source, and with good fish farming and better fishing practices, we could probably get by OK, but right now, there are some very stupid fishing practices in place, resulting in enormous waste as well as over-fishing. Some species are in real danger, mainly thanks to poor regulation and policing.

Land is often misused too. We may be able to feed more people with less land, but we should still prioritise food production over biofuels and other misuses while people are going hungry. Biofuel production causes a great many environmental problems as well as human ones: incentivising chopping down of forests and draining bogs, increased global food prices and consequent starvation, forced relocation of poor people and probably others I have forgotten. Land that can grow food should not be wasted making fuel for cars and trucks at least until such time as we have eliminated undernourishment for everyone.

Sustainability isn’t just about the environment. We must also ensure that human systems are sustainable too, i.e. we don’t kill each other, or go back to a new dark age, or reduce quality of life potential. It is no easy trick to manage the environment and humanity for mutual benefit, but it can be done. When we look at the whole system, it is tempting to see humanity as the enemy of the environment, but the evidence in the developed world is that by developing new technologies, we can clean the environment up and restore it. So fostering human creativity is one of the keys to achieving sustainability environmentally too.

 

Many of these human issue are normally ignored in environmental discussions, but things that affect human society often have system wide effects that impact on the environment. Recession, diversion of funds and prioritisation of values have obvious impacts but more indirect impacts are also likely. So we should consider human social and political issues as an important part of the environmental system. Man is part of nature too.

What is a climate scientist? Indeed, are there any?

We hear the term frequently, but what qualifies some people and not others to be classed as climate scientists?  You might think it is just someone who studies things that affect the climate. But very many people do that, not just those who call themselves climate scientists. The term actually seems to refer solely to a group who have commandeered the term for themselves and share a particular viewpoint, with partly overlapping skills in a subset of the relevant disciplines. In recent times,it seems that to be an official ‘climate scientist’ you must believe that the main thing that counts is human interference and in particular, CO2. All other factors must be processed from this particular bias.

To me, the climate looks like it is affected by a great many influences. Climate models produced by ‘climate scientists’ have been extremely poor at predicting changes so far, and one reason for this is that they exclude many of the relevant factors.

I am struggling to think of any scientific discipline that doesn’t have something to say about some influence on climate. Many branches of chemistry and physics are important in understanding how the atmosphere works, and the oceans, and glaciers, and soil. We have some understanding of some natural cycles, but far from all, and far from complete. We need biologists and chemists and physicists to tell us about soil, and forests, and ocean life, and how species and entire ecosystems react and adapt to changing circumstances, with migrations or adaptation or evolution for example. We need to understand how draining bogs or chopping trees to make room for biofuels affects the climate. How using bio-waste for fuel instead of ploughing it into the ground affects soil structure, plant growth, and carbon interchange. We need to understand how cosmic rays interact with the earth’s magnetic field, how this is affected by solar activity, how sunspots form, and even gravitational interactions with the planets that affect solar cycles. We need to understand glacial melting, how glaciers move differently as temperature changes, how black carbon from diesel engines affects their heat absorption, how clouds form, how they act to warm or cool the earth according to circumstances. We need to understand ocean cycles much better, as well as gas and heat interchange between layers, how this is affected by weather and so on. I could go on, endlessly. We need to understand the many different ways we could make energy in the future, the many options for capture and containment of emissions or pollutants, or positive effects some might have on plant growth and animal food chains.

But it doesn’t stop with science, not be a long way. We also need people skilled in anthropology and demography and sociology and human psychology, who understand how people react when faced with choices of lifestyle when presented in many different ways with different spins, or faced with intimidation or eviction because of environmental policies.  And how groups or tribes or countries will interact and distribute burdens and costs and rewards, or fight, or flee. And religious leaders who understand well the impacts of religious pressures on people’s attitudes and behaviours, even if they don’t subscribe to any organised religion. Clearly environmental behaviour has a strong religious motivation for many people, even if that is just as a crude religion substitute.

We even need people who understand animal psychology, how small mammals react to wind turbine flicker for example, and how this affects the food chain, ecosystem balance and eventual interchange with the atmosphere and the rest of the environment.

And politicians, they understand how to influence people, and marketers, and estate agents. They can help predict behaviours and adaptation and how entire countries may or will interact according to changes in climate, real or imagined.

And we need economists to look at the many alternatives and compare costs and benefits, preferably without ideological and political bias. We need to compare strategies for adaptation and mitigation and avoidance. Honestly and objectively. And we need ethicists to help evaluate the same from human perspectives.

And we need loads of mathematicians, especially statisticians. Climate science is very complicated, and a lot of measurements and trend analyses need in-depth statistical skills, apparently lacking in official climate science, as evidenced by the infamous hockey stick graph. But we also need some to model things like traffic flows so we can predict emissions from different policies.

And we need lots of engineers too, to assess likely costs and timescales for development of alternatives for energy, transport, entertainment and business IT. We need a lot of engineers!

And don’t forget architects, who influence energy balance via choices of shapes, materials and colour schemes as well as how buildings maintain a pleasant environment for the inhabitants.

Ah yes, and futurists. Many futurists are systems thinkers with an understanding of how things link together and how they may develop. You need a few of them too.

I have probably forgotten lots of others. The point is that there are very many factors that need to be included. No-one, and I mean no-one, can possibly have a good grasp of all of them. You can know a bit about a lot of things or a lot about a few things, but you can’t know a lot about everything. I would say that there are no people at all who know about all the things that affect climate in any depth, and therefore no group deserves a monopoly on that title.

So, if you only look in any depth at a few interaction in the oceans and atmosphere and ignore many of the rest of the factors affecting climate, as ‘climate scientists’ seem to, it is hard to see a good reason to continue to hold the title any more than anyone with another label like astrophysicist, or politician. ‘Climate scientists’ as we currently classify them, know a bit about some things that affect climate. So do many other groups. Having skills in a few of the relevant areas doesn’t give any right to dismiss others with skills in a different few. And if they consistently get it wrong, as they do, then there is even less reason to trust their particular viewpoints. And that’s before we even start considering whether they are even honest about the stuff they do talk about. And as Donna Lamframboise has pointed out recently, they don’t deserve to be trusted.

http://thegwpf.org/best-of-blogs/5864-donna-lamframboise-no-reasonable-person-should-trust-climate-scientists.html

Environmental and engineering convergence

My best friend Dave Faulkner runs an environmental consultancy. I host a couple of his papers on global warming on the Futurizon web site. We have many a beer over debate about environmental issues. Over the years, I have worked a few times with both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. I have a lot of respect for Jonathon Porritt and Doug Parr. We share a passion for a healthy environment, though we disagree on some of the ways to achieve it. It’s the same with my friend Dave. I can like and respect a person without agreeing with everything they say. It is nicer still when some common ground appears.

Only a small bit of my work involves environmental issues so I am far from expert in the environment field, though I do have my own embryonic environmental consultancy now. But I am expert at studying the future overall and pretty good at making predictions – I get it right 6 times more often than I get it wrong – and as I look at the many factors affecting the way the world is going, I feel hesitantly optimistic. There is some potential for a techno-utopia but I know we won’t get that. We will take a sub-optimal path that creates as many new problems as we solve. The world of 2050 and beyond will still be a mixture of good and bad, just with different goods and bads.

The approach to our environment though is one area I think will improve. On one side, we have the likes of Porritt and Parr, leading much of the green community and doing what they can to motivate people with the desire to live in a nicer world in harmony with nature. I can’t fault that, only in some of the policies they recommend to achieve it, which I think come from occasional flaws in their analyses. On another side, engineers are racing to develop better technologies, sometimes deliberately to help the environment, but more often almost coincidentally making better toys that happen to be better for the environment. Engineers are mostly driven by market forces, but they are still human, and many also care passionately for the environment, so will generally seek solutions that do their job but are better for the environment where the choice exists. In fact, it is hard to spot examples of new technology that are worse for the environment than their predecessors. Market forces, mediated through well motivated engineers, can make the world better just as well as any green. Both can help us move to a better world. 

I see a lot of needless worrying by environmentalists though, some of whom (I won’t name names) think of scientists and engineers as the enemy. Needless worry, and sometimes counter-productive. One of the big worries this week is that a lot of resources are scarce that we need to make renewable energy, or to make batteries to store it. But almost at the same time, articles appear on inductive power delivery to cars that circumvents the need for large batteries and hence the need for lithium – I even proposed that solution myself a few years ago, so it is good to see it appearing as a project somewhere. New materials for IT are being developed too, so we won’t rely for much longer on the other things that are scarce. So, no worries, it’s just a short-term problem. For the last few years it has been recommending spending trillions to avoid carbon dioxide production. But even without spending any trillions, future energy technology that is being developed anyway will make fossil fuels redundant, so it will take care of itself. Panic is expensive but unnecessary, the worry needless and counter-productive, serving only to slow down the race to sustainability by diverting funds to the wrong areas.

The environment has some very good friends in engineering now. Biomimetics is the engineering field of copying ideas  or at least inspiration from nature. I’ve occasionally use biokleptics when an idea is blatantly stolen. Nature doesn’t have any lawyers defending her intellectual property rights, but has been using random trial and error for 3 billion years to develop some fantastic engineering solutions and if anything encourages their copying. So, someone looks at spiders and develops a new kind of architecture that produces better structures with less material. Going way back to the 80s, I looked at evolution and made the tiny deductive leap to thinking of evolving software and hardware, then soon after looked at embryo growth and came up with ideas of how to self organise telecomms networks and sensor nets. I love biomimetics.  So do many other engineers, and the whole field is exploding now. It will help to make systems, objects, fabrics, materials, architecture and processes that are more energy or resource efficient, and quite often more beautiful.There are a few purists who insist on copying something exactly as nature does it, but mostly engineers are happy to be inspired and make their own tweaks to adapt it to needs. So, long ago, Icarus started the field by copying nature but a century ago we discovered we could make planes more easily with metal fixed wings.

Synthetic biology essentially completes the relationship by adding human design into biology. This embryonic field will expand vastly, and will be used for a wide range of tasks from resource extraction and processing, to computing. Nanotech and insights from neuroscience will add more to allow rich interaction between organic and inorganic devices, often bridging the gap to allow us to put electronic devices in direct connection with our bodies, or those of other creatures. This field also allows the wonderful possibility of undoing some of the damage done to the environment, and even making nature work better. Gaia 2.0 will be with us this century. Of course, if we don’t develop all this science and technology, we will be stuck with a human world that is immensely resource hungry and getting worse, using far more resources than would otherwise be needed, damaging the environment, with no hope of repairing the damage. There wouldn’t even be a plus side, because people would also live poorer lives and be less fulfilled and less happy.

Having been highly convergent on the goal of making the world a better place, this is where engineers often part company with greens. Most engineers think better engineering is the best route to a sustainable world, most greens (and, it has to be admitted, some engineers) think we should slow it all down. This superficially suggests lower environmental impact, implying that people will consume less if they swap devices less often, or don’t get that next pay rise, but it doesn’t deliver. It is a wrong deduction. In much the same way that poor people are often fatter than rich people, what it does change is the access to a better diet, in this case, of environmentally friendlier technology that really needs extra R&D before it is with us. That funding comes from market demand and the ability to pay, and that needs more people to be richer. For the next several decades, what we need is economic growth, selectively. Again, I start to agree with Porritt here. It isn’t just any growth we need, but growth that is spent wisely, using growth to improve peoples lives, and improving the environment we live in either directly or via R&D and the greener technology it will deliver.

Is greed more sustainable than frugality?

Sustainability is much misunderstood. Certainly government and corporate sustainability policies often point completely the wrong way.

To be sustainable, we must ensure that future generations are able to live decent lives. Not much argument about that usually. But conventional wisdom in the field is that this means we should cut back on consumption.  That leap of logic is flawed. Cutting back reduces environmental impact in the short term but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will reduce it in the long term, or overall over any significant length of time. The full lifetime, full system impact is what counts. Achieving a reduction in overall impact well be best served by increasing consumption in the short term, if this leads to development that reduces the later impacts enough to offset short term damage.

An excellent example is in mobile phone design. Vigorous marketing and encouragement to replace mobiles frequently seems to many people to be wasteful and environmentally unsustainable. However, the rapid obsolescence cycle here has given us 150g mobiles that essentially replace 600kg of previously needed IT equipment. If everyone wants a mobile phone, or to access to the functions they provide, then the lowest environmental impact is achieved by using ultra-high tech phones that do far more with far less. Increased consumption has led to lower environmental impact. If instead, we had held back development and demanded that people use their phones till they fail, we would still be using a lot of heavy and resource intensive kit that needs lots more energy, generates far more waste, and would need far more mining, nasty heavy metals and pollution. And it wouldn’t work half as well, so we’d have less happy lives too.

Greed v frugality? Greed is the more sustainable. Because it leads faster to more advanced technology that is invariably better for the environment.

For a fuller analysis of sustainability and technology, download http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf. It is free.

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 6: Dangers from technology progress

Dangers from technology progress

I am very enthusiastic about technology and its potential not just to make our lives better, but also to protect and even restore the environment. However, although I disagree strongly with doom-mongers most of the time, I am far from a utopianist and am quite capable of seeing potential horrors ahead too. The key word is potential. I don’t think they will likely happen, because I hope we will find ways of avoiding them. However, there were only a few ways that life on earth could be extinguished a century ago, and now there are quite a few. Nature gives us plagues, super-volcanoes, asteroid and comet strikes, supernovas and even solar events in the list of possible extinction-level events. To this we added nuclear oblivion in the 1940s. Not long after, research into bio-weapons came up with viruses and bacteria that could wipe out almost all of humanity as well as hydrogen bombs. Now, we can add a much wider range of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons or mass destruction, particle accelerator accidents, asteroid steering, and can already see potential accidents or weapons arising from solar wind deflection, zombie viruses, genetic modification accidents, nanobot infestations, grey goo scenarios and many more. If you plot a timeline of all these on a graph, it makes quite a neat exponential curve, with the number of ways we could kill everyone rising to about 100 by 2050 and carrying on rising exponentially even after that. Assessing the probability of such things actually happening is difficult, but starting with a familiar one, most of us think a global nuclear war is unlikely in any particular year, but also worry that it may happen one day. If we are in optimistic mood, we might estimate the probability of a nuclear war as 1 in 10,000 in any particular year. When trouble rises in North Korea, Pakistan, or Iran, we might be less optimistic. There are also plenty of mad scientists and terrorist groups as well as malicious governments, mad dictators and religious extremists who want to make an impression on history, not to mention that any of the events might also happen entirely by accident. Additionally, technology has a habit of becoming commoditised over time, so that more people get access to it. Imagine a far future where every depressed student effectively has access to a big red button labelled as ‘destroy the world’! Taking the 1 in 10,000 chance as an averagely optimistic probability for any of the scenarios (remember), the 100 mechanisms in 2050 would give a one percent chance of an extinction level events happening that year. The one percent would rise every year thereafter. It is therefore easy to estimate that the expectation date for extinction is around 2085 based on this argument and these estimates of probability.

There is little point in worrying about other longer term sustainability issues if we are going to wipe ourselves out along with most of the rest of life on the planet. Therefore, finding ways to prevent technology-enabled disasters is very key to sustainability. In this direction, The Lifeboat Foundation started up some years ago and many benign and fine minds work to finding potential solutions to all the disaster scenarios. This work should be considered absolutely essential but sadly is poorly funded, even compared to far more trivial environmental issues. We can’t prevent nutters and nasty people from existing, but we can certainly find ways of limiting the damage they can cause.

Quality of life sustainability

Some people have a very luxurious lifestyle, others live in total poverty and misery. I don’t think it is possible for everyone to be happy, but we should be able to make it possible for everyone to have a good chance of happiness and certainly we should be able to make enough food and clothes, shelter and clean water available to everyone. Sustainability of quality of life is important too. We should try hard to achieve environmental sustainability without damaging people’s ability to live happily.

Scientific surveys occasionally highlight the things that contribute to happiness, and these can be aggregated to a fairly short list: Peace, health, family and friends, social and political inclusion, a nice environment, justice, education, wealth and respect for human rights. Although these are listed in no particular order wealth is actually a fairly poor indicator of happiness, so making quality of life sustainable does not mean everyone has to be wealthy.

Closing comments

Sadly, both dogma and poor thinking are all too commonplace in environmental debate and this one the biggest barriers to protecting the environment, especially when it is coupled with sanctimony and a contempt for science and technology. By enforcing misguided policies, society is prevented from adopting solutions that could actually protect the environment. With the right incentives and leadership, the science and engineering community could produce far better solutions. Technology can and should bale us out of our sustainability problem. Science and technology can offer real solutions that will work without reducing quality of life. This is surely a far better prospect than attempting to solve the problem by constraining people’s lifestyles. We need to achieve sustainability by applying intelligence.

The full report is also completely free and can be found at http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the author

Ian Pearson is a full time futurologist, tracking and predicting developments across a wide range of technology, business, society, politics and the environment. He is a Maths and Physics graduate and has worked in numerous branches of engineering, from aeronautics to cybernetics, sustainable transport to electronic cosmetics. His inventions include text messaging and the active contact lens. He was BT’s full-time futurologist from 1991 to 2007 and now works for Futurizon, a small futures institute. He writes, lectures and consults globally on all aspects of the technology-driven future. He has written several books and made over 450 TV and radio appearances. He is a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, the World Academy of Art and Science, the Royal Society of Arts, the Institute of Nanotechnology, and the World Innovation Foundation. He holds a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Westminster and an Award for Excellence from the US Army.

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 5: Technology

Caution : this section is long. 5000 words ahead:

Linear Induction Bike Lanes

Electronic bicycle lanes could also be constructed to incentivise cycling. A linear induction motor, laid into or on the cycle lane surface could pull cyclists along if they wanted assistance. Mechanical energy is very cheap, whereas the effort required to cycle long distances or up hills is a strong deterrent to many potential cyclists – they are not all super fit! This linear induction drive would only require a small modification to the bicycle (a simple metal plate affixed to the front forks would probably do), and could easily be switched on and off, could offer variable speeds for individual cyclists. Bikes would be pulled along by the magnetic field. It is quite easy to engineer in various safety precautions to prevent misuse and also to enable charging to make commercial ones viable. With no moving parts, and therefore nothing to clog up, it could be extremely reliable. Tracks could be laid either into the surface, or made as rolls that could be quickly laid out on hills to give extra assistance where it is needed. Of course other technologies such as RFID chips could enable highly personalized control (and payment) systems. Apart from encouraging more bicycle use, it could also be used to increase bicycle speed, which both improves journey time for the cyclist, and reduces the congestion bicycles can cause in other traffic. Making it easier to use bikes, and enabling people to use them to commute without needing a shower as soon as they arrive, would yield system wide benefits through extra bicycle use and increased fitness and because speeds would be higher, they wouldn’t slow down other transport as much or cause so many accidents.

Self-driven Pods

New transport solutions based on electronically driven cars and electronic highways could be developed quickly. The basic technologies are all proven now. Cars in the far future will simply drive themselves. These could dramatically improve personal mobility and social inclusivity, and greatly reduce congestion. People would most likely abandon car ownership if this is done well. If personal driving style is eliminated by electronic overrides, there is far less incentive to personally own a car, and at the same time it will become much easier to implement and manage large fleets of shared cars. Fleets give economy of scale and also far better economy of resource. A car would not spend most of its life idle, but could be in use most of the time. A modest number of cars could cater for a large population, especially since the exact locations of all the cars is known, as well as the destinations and likely arrival times of cars in transit. There are already several instances of car rental systems that allow people to just pick up and drop cars as they wish. This will become much more attractive an option with future technology.

So we may well see large fleets of shared cars, owned by companies, government or social groups. With cars linked electronically into a ‘road train’ for acceleration and braking, they could drive closer together, increasing road occupancy, reducing drag and making road travel more energy efficient. With computers driving the cars, they could be much closer together sideways as well as lengthwise, squeezing more lanes onto the same road area, so it may be possible to increase the number of cars on a stretch of road. Given smaller pods instead of large cars, narrower lanes and closer distancing, it should easily be possible to achieve a factor of 5 in the number on a stretch and since they could all be moving well, overall capacity would improve even more. It also makes it more feasible to run roads with lane direction determined by time of day, with some lanes carrying cars one way in the morning rush, and the other way in the afternoon.

Obviously, lorries need more road space but this can easily be accounted and flow still optimised by a computer driven system. Lorries are already being developed that can work in road trains to save drag and driver fatigue.

Such an electronically controlled system could have a mixture of public and private (large fleet company) ownership. The key feature is that it will have all the flexibility of private transport but be more socially inclusive than current public transport, since older people wouldn’t have to walk to a distant bus stop. All they would do is ask their computer to get them a car.

Car batteries are an obvious storage solution for intermittent energy supplies such as wind or solar energy. However, if direct power pickup from road surfaces is implements, and it is likely, then batteries would not need to be very high capacity, since they would only need relatively short local reach. Using smaller batteries would greatly reduce the need for lithium and other materials, making cars cheaper, lighter and safer.

Buses would be a big spoiler for such a system. Since they have to stop frequently to let people on and off, it would be far better to replace them with individual pods. Each person would get personal service door to door and the reduced size makes it far easier for computers to organise flow around them as they stop. In fact, they may even be small enough to simply use pavement. Few people would miss slow and dirty buses or the risk of having a drunk sit next to you, when faced with the option for comfortable end to end service at probably lower cost.

A public transport system like this would require far less resource than today’s, because far fewer vehicles would be needed, and they would be lighter so need less raw material, and drag would be much lower, so they would use less energy. It would also be safer, cheaper and more socially inclusive by far than what we have today.

Rail use – pod trains

There is really no reason why these self-driven pods or road train technology could not be implemented on the railways too. Rail occupancy can be as low as 0.4% on regional railways. Performance analysis shows that packet switched networks can be safely loaded to 80% occupancy before statistics cause significant performance degradation. So there is clearly a huge opportunity for improving the capacity of railways, perhaps 100-fold, if packet switching based solutions were to be implemented instead of the current system, which allocates a very long stretch of track exclusively to each train because of the safety limits required by the obsolete signalling and control technologies that current railways use. Suppose that electronically driven cars and buses could be taken onto the railways, and interleaved with vans and small rail carriages that spend all their time on railways. For example, cars could be made with dual wheels, as some buses are today. Once on rail, no steering is needed and with the vehicles talking electronically to each other to coordinate braking and acceleration, the driver could do other things while the car drives itself to the destination station, whereupon it would leave the track and use its other wheels to get to its final destination. The cars could be driven very closely, and of course the drag and friction costs would be very low. Furthermore, since most of the journey could be on rail with electric energy easily provided, the car could use an electric motor. Instead of using petrol or diesel, or even fuel cells, it could make very long journeys just on batteries, since the batteries could be recharged during the rail journey. Since railways are simple one-dimensional systems, this would be far less demanding in terms of control systems than the equivalent on the roads. So whereas electronic highways will take some more years to become feasible, rail based systems could be implemented much more quickly, given the will.

Nuclear energy – Thorium

Many environmentalists are in favour of nuclear power compared to a few years ago. Nuclear power has always been a scary option to many people because of the waste disposal problem, and the potential use of some kinds of nuclear power stations to generate material for bombs. Nevertheless, if it does turn out that CO2 emissions are a problem, then it offers an obvious way of reducing them while providing much more stable power than that available from wind, wave or solar.

Today’s nuclear stations mainly use uranium, a few use plutonium, but tomorrow we will probably have many that use thorium, a relatively common element that is cheaper and more readily available than uranium, and produces much less dangerous by products as it decays. The Chinese are currently trying to develop thorium reactors and are likely to succeed. If so, this will provide a great deal of help in achieving a sustainable world that still has enough energy for us all to lead comfortable lives.

In the longer term, fusion based energy is inevitable too, but no-one knows when this is really likely to become reality. The very far future has a glut of potential energy supplies, so it is only the short and medium terms that are threatened with shortages. Long term sustainability is not a problem as far as energy goes.

Nuclear waste disposal

Uranium comes from mines. It is extracted, concentrated, used until it isn’t radioactive enough any more and then we lock it in secure dumps until we figure out what to do with it. One option seems obvious when you remember that it came from a mine originally. If the nuclear waste it replaces were to be extremely diluted by mixing with the refuse from the uranium mine, (or indeed with any other rubbish if it is being used for landfill), then it could all be dumped back in the hole it originally came from, and that would result is a slightly less radioactive mine than the original.

A longer term option lies in the space elevator. Nuclear waste could be flung into the sun, which of course is just a nuclear reactor anyway. It could be an expensive solution compared to burying it or using it up in a thorium reactor, but who knows?

Wind energy

If there is one perfect example of the triumph of green dogma over scientific sense, it would be wind farms. Wind farms can harness superficially free energy but are an eyesore, cause noise and stress, disrupt breeding cycles and kill birds, and may even sap enough of the wind to disturb natural weather patterns. They are ludicrously expensive to build, with little scope for cost reduction requiring heavy subsidies. Because wind doesn’t always blow, they still need other power generation capacity to be provided alongside, and this also needs to be subsidised if the generator companies can’t sell their power all the time. Overall, wind farms as they currently stand are anything but green and should really be a last resort.

There are a few developments that will make wind energy slightly less awful though. One is the use of different kinds of turbines according to the deployment circumstances. Vertical axis turbines may be better in turbulent environments such as housing areas, whereas conventional fans cannot harvest efficiently when the wind direction changes frequently.

Super-capacitors made of novel materials such as graphene offer the prospect of being able to store energy more easily, solving one of the big problems with intermittent energy use.

Plastic capacitor sails

Also on the capacitor side, plastic capacitors change their capacitance as they deform. Wind energy harvesters can be made using large sails covered in millions of tiny plastic capacitors that spin in the wind, deforming and springing back every time they make a rotation. The sails would lie on the surface of the sea, and only become visible when the wind fills the sail. There would be no visible movement from any distance away because of the small size of the capacitors, so this would doubly help visual disturbance. Since the energy would be converted more directly into electricity, there would be no need for a large central generator, no need for heavy engineering. The costs of plastic capacitors today make sail solutions even more expensive than conventional turbines, but materials science often follows Moore’s law cost reductions, whereas mechanical systems don’t. This means that in a few years it may be cheaper to use sails, and the cost benefits would continue to improve thereafter.

Whether such advances will ever make wind energy a good solution is uncertain, but it could be less bad.

Solar farms

Solar farms in equatorial regions are likely to spread, contributing enormously to energy supply, but affecting wealth distribution and already associated with crime and forced people movement. Short term costs are very high but inevitably will fall. They also increase absorption of sun’s energy relative to bare ground. So solar farms would produce a great deal of energy and could be cheap as Moore’s law brings down the costs and increases efficiency of photovoltaics, but it isn’t the clean solution sometimes imagined.

Graphene

Graphene is the new wonder material. Like carbon nanotubes, it is just another form of carbon, the atoms just laid out differently. Having said that, it is far stronger and lighter than steel, is a superb conductor, it can be used as a substrate for electronic circuits, and it is made of carbon, an extremely common element. Its importance in sustainability will come from many angles. To list just a few, it will enable substitution for other materials that are in short supply, expensive or dangerous or resource-consuming to make. It will allow super-capacitors that can replace batteries and store power from intermittent energy supplies. It will make ultrafast computers, better sensors, and many other things we haven’t even imagined yet. Engineers are very excited about its potential and it is impossible to know just how much impact it will eventually have, but it is likely to be huge. As a key pillar in future sustainability, graphene is certainly in there.

AI (artificial intelligence)

If we could produce intelligence synthetically, and therefore provide extra thinking capability to solve problems, this could have a profound effect on technology development rate, in every field. Since it is likely that this will be achieved in the next few decades, AI is a very important sustainability tool, with its enormous potential to invent solutions, increase understanding of the environment, and accelerate research development, but it is rarely mentioned in environment debates. Clearly, smart machines might be used to design smarter machines, which will design smarter ones still, leading exponentially quickly to vastly superhuman intelligence that may well solve many of the problems for us, with new energy technology, and new environmental clean-up and management technology.

We should not rely on AI to save us, but we may reasonably expect that it will, even if some man-made solutions fail. It gives us hope, but not enough certainty to avoid us using other approaches in parallel.

Active contact lens

My own invention in 1991, the active contact lens is a tiny display device that is worn as a contact lens, and contains circuits to project images directly onto the retina. It has already been prototyped in primitive form but in the far future it will offer ultra-high resolution fully immersive 3d images, and will make all other display devices unnecessary (though we may still have some anyway). Any kind of other display could be mimicked as a portion of the active contact lens display area. It is possible therefore to save all the resources and pollution involved in all the others. Given the number of TVs, mobiles, PCs, tablets and so on that could be replaced, the active contact lens can be a significant contributor directly to sustainable resource use.

In addition to replacing other displays, it can also be used for new services such as augmented reality. This allows even a basic environment to be enhanced virtually, and if the display quality is sufficient, it would be indistinguishable from the real thing.

Digital Jewellery

A person wearing a few grammes of digital jewellery in the 2020s will have far more IT capability than someone today with a laptop, phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera, GPS navigation system, security alarm, identity card, electronic cash cards, credit cards, voice recorder, video camera, memory sticks, radio, portable TV, a book, magazine, games console and many other gadgets that haven’t even been invented yet. Furthermore, by 2020, billions more people will be able to afford these sorts of things. These can also be the basis for a distributed cloud platform, requiring far less server farm provision and requiring far less power than today’s server farms. It is important that we get greater miniaturisation and lower energy use if everyone in the world is to have access to all the benefits of IT sustainably. Digital jewellery will be key.

Biomimetics

Biomimetics is simply using nature as stimulation in engineering design. Three billion years of natural evolution has come up with some great ideas, still being discovered. Engineers draw inspiration from these. Sometimes natural techniques and designs can be mimicked almost exactly, sometimes a bit of human tweaking is a good idea, but nature-inspired design is often lighter, stronger, faster, or better in some other way than alternatives. Biomimetics is another great sustainability tool. There are some purists in the field who like to stay true to nature, but as far as sustainability goes, it is great to get ideas wherever they come from, and nature is a big source. Even if the end product looks nothing like nature, its initial inspiration can be important.

Biomimetic architecture has been around quite a while, enabling low power air conditioning systems for example, or skyscrapers that can be lighter weight, or use lower drag materials to reduce wind pressure. There are very many opportunities here.

Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology can be seen as a major derivative or biomimetics. Engineers and scientists have been discovering how nature works at microcellular and even molecular levels, and are now copying and using even genetic tools. At first, the major headlines are in modifying DNA slightly or assembling genomes from off-the-shelf chemicals to create synthetic bacteria, but it will undoubtedly progress to designing whole new classes of proteins, genes, and different types of synthetic organisms. It will also allow us to modify and enhance existing ones. Proteins are nature’s machines, and by understanding how to design and build them for our own purposes, this will be a rich seam for future development.

However, it is not without risk. Messing with nature will allow us to fix a lot of environmental problems. But as it becomes better and eventually commoditised, it is also a tool that lends itself well to the military, terrorists and mad scientists. I would say synthetic biology is in the top three tools when it comes to achieving sustainability, but I’d also put it in the top three risk to life on earth. If we can harness its potential while protecting against its threats, we will have a much better world for sure, but that is no easy task.

Bacterial mining

One example already under way is bacterial mining, designing bacteria to break transform a fixed resource (coal in this case) into a gaseous one (methane) so that it can be extracted more easily. Methane also produces less CO2 than coal for a given amount of energy. This clearly would help sustainability, as would many other custom bacteria. Other roles may be mining rubbish tips to recover useful elements from them, extracting resources without digging big holes and ruining ecosystems; processing waste; fixing carbon; making algae fuels; changing the earth’s albedo and many others. Again, the dangers are possible harmful but unexpected interactions with the environment (and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time we have had unexpected reactions), or commoditised advanced uses being perverted for destruction.

Restoration of the environment to health via genetic technology, desert greening programs, weather control technology and so on, are all highly likely to be developed over the next several decades. Synthetic biology could also yield tools to rescue life on earth after environmental catastrophe, by eventually enabling wholesale redesigning of the ecosystem from the ground up.

Carbon Reefs

Most UK householders are already encouraged to separate plastic waste for recycling, and when it reaches the recycling centres, it is usually compressed into blocks for easier handling, which sadly is often done in China. If these blocks were instead to be dumped in the sea and suitably contained, just off the Norfolk coast for example, transport and processing would produce far less CO₂, carbon would be locked up, coastal erosion would be reduced, land would be reclaimed, and landfill would fill up more slowly. The plastic would effectively become a plastic reef and later, reclaimed land. This approach would be carbon negative, while recycling is at best carbon neutral. One of the obstacles to this solution is the move towards biodegradable plastic, which of course returns carbon to the atmosphere, and ironically, was developed to help the environment. Another is EU law which prohibits dumping plastic in the sea. Another obstacle is environmental groups who argue that we shouldn’t try to resist erosion because it will then happen elsewhere, but that is a rather defeatist attitude. Put some of the blocks there too.

The much levied criticism of conventional plastics, that they will stay around in the environment for thousands of years, actually makes them ideal for a carbon sink. Bio-degradable plastic, and current laws that prevent plastics from being dumped in the sea could turn out to be environmentally damaging, by preventing such solutions.

Some other waste could be mixed in too. For example, glass is borderline recyclable, yielding a environmental benefit when recycling it rather than producing it from scratch, but since this full-life benefit is actually quite small, perhaps it could also be included with the plastic, giving extra density to the waste.

Even organic waste could be processed by heating with reduced oxygen so that it carbonises, giving off natural gas in the process that could be used as fuel. The carbon could be added to the plastic reef to help absorb toxins from the seawater, cleaning it up a bit too.

Fabric Technology

New fabrics that don’t need to be washed are making their way onto markets already. It is the norm for clothes to be washed of course, and not everyone will be happy wearing clothes without ever washing them, but gradually acceptance is likely to grow. Washing machines that require far less water and detergent, and wash at lower temperatures are of course already here, and we will see their penetration increase too. All of these are useful tools in the battle for sustainability.

One of the first fabrics to be released is treated cotton. This is quite ironic, since cotton production is extremely water intensive and polluting. But it is still a start.

We can expect more and better synthetic fabrics in the future of course as well as treatments for natural fibres. Some of these will reduce environmental footprints by keeping us warm and dry and clean while reducing consumption of raw materials, water and energy use. Genetic engineering is likely to improve natural fibres too or make them easier to produce without so much water.

Carbon sequestration

Solutions for carbon sequestration can be developed quickly if we need them. As yet, we don’t really know if we do and this could be money wasted.

Farming

Organic farming generally produces less food per hectare of land, which decreases global food production capacity, which increases prices and makes it harder for poor people to survive, forcing them to have more children, which creates a greater population, greater need for aid and so on. It is a Western luxury that is paid for elsewhere.

Organic farming products are often delivered by a different distribution system, which has different impacts and these also need to be accounted. Additionally, marketing for organic produce tends to reinforce other aspects of lifestyle and attitudes that affect the system in many more subtle ways. For example, as well as consuming ‘organic’ food, the same people are likely to prefer natural fibres instead of synthetic substitutes. This increases demand for cotton. Cotton is becoming a hot environmental topic in itself, producing pollution and water stress among many other socioeconomic problems. Again, the transport, CO₂, energy demand and social impact is very different across the whole system and whole lifecycle from synthetic clothing.

Planes and alternatives

Cheap air travel is a strong focal point for environmental hostility, but it is generally better to solve the actual problem than just tackling a few of the symptoms. The real issue isn’t travel, it is the environmental impact of the travel. Future technology can even provide alternatives to planes if need be. And ultimately, there is no law of physics that says that travel has to use any energy. The whole planet travels 1.5 million miles every day without using any energy at all!

The airline industry is currently researching the potential for both battery powered and hydrogen powered planes. If the hydrogen is produced in an environmentally friendly way, then that would certainly be one solution that would keep air travel going without creating major environmental problems. More interestingly, taking futurology back 100 years, we find ideas that may just have been ahead of their time. At the turn of the 20^th century, futurologists were suggesting long tubes through which people could be propelled in vehicles by compressed air. That idea is now making a comeback, with long tubes that use vacuums and magnetic propulsion instead of compressed air. De-pressurising the tubes reduces air resistance. Superconductivity will make these far better than is possible today. We do not yet posses the tunnelling technology to make such solutions viable on a widespread basis, but they may become viable for high speed city links in the not too far future. For overseas journeys, large plastic tubes might even work, suspended not too far below the surface. Again, once an object is moving, in the absence of friction, it will continue doing so with no power consumption. This could be a very low energy transport solution one day, or perhaps it will be still a curiosity in another 100 years.

Yet another novelty is the idea of using super-cavitation to allow supersonic submarines. It has apparently been demonstrated that high speed travel through water can be done with less resistance than through air. This effect has already been used for torpedo technology.

Virtual existence

Estimates of future population generally only include humans, but we won’t be the only intelligent beings on the planet much longer. Advances in AI promise to make sentient AIs in a decade or two and by the end of this century there will be millions or even billions of them, with a  wide range of intelligence levels and characteristics. They will not only exist to serve people. Some will have a purposeful existence of their own, just as we do. They will have their own culture, and we will interwork with them. AI’s are potentially very diverse in nature, just as organic life is. We shouldn’t assume that they will all sit in rooms looking like computers, or even walk around as robots. Some will, some won’t. Some AIs will stay in the same place. But that ‘place’ could be the entire global network and any associated computer. They may roam electronically. They may also consume resources just like we do, for entertainment, research, building, arts, even growing gardens. We should not preclude AIs necessarily from sharing at least some human interests, as well as many we don’t have. But we can reasonable assume that many or even most AIs are produced to serve human interests. They may help a great deal with science and technology development, so may be extremely valuable in the fight to achieve sustainability. But there are some other lines of thought worth listing before moving on.

Science fiction generally presents robots as having their ‘brain’ on board. With cloud working today, this already looks dated. It is highly likely that robots will have a mixture of on-board and remote capability for processing, sensing, storage and communication. Some robots will essentially be empty husks waiting for occupation by any AI that is capable of occupying them. Or human mind for that matter, once our technology is up to the job. Direct links to the brain are extremely embryonic today, but by 2050, remotely occupying a robot and feeling senses as if you were present in it should be feasible, and if not by then, certainly not long after. This is an important factor for sustainability. It opens the possibility that people could carry on in machine form after their biological bodies die, or even have multiple parallel existences in different forms. It also allows an alternative for of travel, where you simply hire a robot at the destination and use remote presence to be there. There is little point in detail here since these technologies are too far away and will happen in a very different world from ours. It is enough just to mention them and move on, as I will now.

The full report is completely free and can be found at http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 4: Environmental Policy

We don’t have to wait for new technology to make a start. Some things can be changed now. For example, local authority, corporate and government environmental policies can have a rage impact on sustainability but are often poorly thought through, taking too simplistic an approach and ignoring secondary impacts of superficially promising ideas. There are many areas where policy could usefully be considered on a more system-wide, full life-cycle basis. A few to start with:

Rubbish taxation is sometimes advocated to reduce waste production, but it may result in increased water demand and increased pollution through use of water to wash cans, and flushing of organic waste instead of putting it in bins. Also, flushing waste at the point of creation reduces the potential for central biomass power if the waste were instead collected. It additionally increases resource use by stimulating the market for waste disposal units. The use of more hot water and dishwashers compounds the problem still further. Even though it obviously makes it easier for recycling depots to push work onto the household, people should not be asked not to wash out containers before collection. Centralised washing is better because it creates less pollution, uses less resource and better enables use of the organic waste for power generation or composting.

Encouraging home composting can increase methane levels, especially since most people are far from expert at composting. Centralised composting may be better, since methane can be tapped and used.

Privately owned bus companies may generate more CO₂ than publicly owned services, because the need to generate profits leads to practices such as using meandering routes to fill the buses. Increased journey length obviously needs more fuel, even though it is shared among more passengers. Worse, it deters many people from using them by increasing journey time and so increases uses of private cars. More complex models should be used when designing routes to factor in environmental damage.

Taxis generate more CO₂ per passenger journey than private cars (a taxi often has to make the trip in one direction empty) so classification as public transport should be reconsidered and their use should be discouraged. However, the maths will change substantially when the taxis are replaced by self driving pods in a decade or two.

Bicycles not using cycle lanes can cause many other vehicles to brake and accelerate, thereby increasing overall system wide CO₂ production and energy use, and having secondary impacts via time wastage, wear and tear etc. Although beneficial when used sensibly, bikes should be discouraged from using busy roads at peak times except on cycle paths. Of course, if linear induction mats are used, this would be less of a problem (see below).

Use of biodegradable plastics has some merit but can prevent recycling by contaminating plastic recycling batches.

It also may prevent carbon sequestration via carbon reefs, see below.

Use of biofuels is of highly dubious merit. Though new techniques are constantly being developed to use bio-waste, these need to be modelled properly against the use of that waste in power generation, composting or ploughing back into the ground to maintain soil structure, carbon sequestration and other secondary impacts on the ecosystem. Soil structure and chemistry in particular is an area that needs more attention in climate models and obviously in overall ecosystem maintenance. It is far from fully understood.

The production and erosion of topsoil, which is a very significant climate change factor, is strongly affected by a range of other decisions, such as the use of biomass for power production. Greater coordination and much more system-wide, full lifecycle thinking is required.

Use of agricultural land to grow biofuels is certainly counter-productive, via a range of mechanisms. It causes great harm to both people and the environment.

Carbon trading is too much associated with fraud and other crimes and creates perverse incentives for environmental destruction. Although it is agreed that CO2 contributes to warming, other natural factors seem much stronger, (there is some evidence that we may even be heading into a few decades of cooling), and it is certainly by no means agreed that CO2 production is a grave danger that requires solutions with such heavy socio-economic impacts across the board. At the very least, the whole global carbon trading system needs a major rethink and overhaul.

So much for local and national policy. At a global level, some environmental policy could use some tweaking too. The whole global environment is intricately interconnected, and the environmental doctrine of ‘think globally and act locally’ applies well, but we still need to do some global thinking too.

Land Use

The Earth provides a diverse range of climates and terrains. Some land is particularly suited to growing crops, rearing animals, human habitation, or extraction of minerals. Some offers little except sunshine, but even that has uses. Some is beautiful and needs preserved in its own right. A sustainable world will need people to organise things that affect land use globally as well as locally.  It is easy for countries to have too much inward focus when looking at environmental use. It is hard for most people to understand land being left idle because of local market gluts when other parts of the world are short of food, forcing them to destroy their local environment to provide food for their families, which eventually feeds back into global environmental changes. Economic excuses might be valid today, but that really only suggests that the economy needs to be fixed – people should not be starving when there is plenty of room to grow food to feed them. More coordination is needed. It makes little sense to use arable land to grow bio-fuel for example. It should be used for food production. There are plenty of alternative fuel supplies today and in the future, energy can be produced using solar energy in deserts. If we use deserts to make energy for machines, we can use arable land to make energy for humans and animals. A small proportion of land everywhere needs to be sacrificed for housing and industry. This could be optimised better too, but the benefits would actually be quite small, since only 2% of land area is covered in buildings or roads even in densely populated countries such as the UK. As for getting minerals, we just have to put up with where nature has placed them.

 

The full report is also completely free and can be found at http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 3: Population Growth

World population is growing rapidly, and will continue till it levels off around 9.5 billion by about 2050, after which it will start to fall. (9.5 billion is a lot of people, but let’s not treat it as if it will be a major catastrophe. Some doom-mongers are already predicting mass starvation, riots and so on, but the numbers need put in perspective. I live in the South of England. I can easily go on a walk and meet few people on the way; mostly it will be empty countryside and most of the time we won’t be able to see a single building or road. I do not feel it is terribly overpopulated here yet, even with the second highest population density on Earth, at 470 people per square kilometre. Other countries with massive populations are actually less densely populated. India only has 345 people per square kilometre, even with its massive population. China has even less at only 140, while Indonesia has 117, Brazil just 22, and Russia a mere 7.4 people per square kilometre. Yet these are the world’s biggest populations today. So there is plenty of room for expansion perhaps. If all the inhabitable land in the world were to be occupied at average English density, the world can actually hold 75Bn people. There would still be loads of open countryside, still only 1 or 2% covered in concrete and tarmac. So let’s stop first of all from imagining that we are running out of space any time soon. We just aren’t!  We panic in the UK because we see the extreme inequality of distribution of people, but that will self limit. If it becomes too dense, people will stop immigrating.

Secondly, westerners’ (i.e. relatively wealthy people’s) houses typically provide 5 or 6m deep of living space. They live on top of 6000km deep of materials, a million times more, and much denser. So do their neighbours. Not all of it is useful, but it is really hard to see why there is so much panic about physical resources when they lie so deep under our feet. When we discard them, they are still there, just repositioned. If you buy stuff, your house quickly fills up and you have to throw something out to make space before you buy more. It gets recycled or thrown on landfill, which may become a future mine if materials ever did become scarce enough. A few spacecraft have left the earth forever over the years, but space dust occasionally lands too, so actually there are more physical resources on Earth than there were before people came into being. Asteroid mining will also come into use in a few decades, bringing us any essential materials that are in short supply. Organic resources such as forests and fisheries are a different matter, but they can be managed and farmed sustainably.

But of course, all other things remaining the same, if everyone wants to live to westerns standards, the demands on the environment will grow as the poor become richer and able to afford more. If we try to carry on with existing technology, or worse, with yesterday’s, we will not find it easy. Those environmental activists who preach that technology and economic growth are enemies of the environment, and who therefore want to lock us into today’s or yesterday’s technology, would condemn not only billions of people to poverty and misery but also force those extra people to destroy the environment to try to survive. Poverty is one of the greatest causes of environmental destruction. The result would be miserable future for humanity and a wrecked environment. Those people are the true enemies of the earth, and of humanity. Thankfully, most environmentalists are not so extreme. If we ignore such lunacy as we should, and allow progress to continue, we will see steady global economic growth that will result in a higher average income per capita in 2050 with 9.5Bn people than we have today with only 7Bn. The technology meanwhile will develop so much that the same standard of living can be achieved with far less environmental impact. Before modern engineering, structures had to use far more resources than today’s, but now we can make materials with known and consistent strength, and can model the forces precisely, so we need far less material to do the same job. With nanotechnology and improved materials, we will need even less in future. The environmental footprint of each person will be far lower in the far future if we encourage technology development than it would be if we restrict growth and technology development. It will almost certainly be less even than today’s, even though our future lifestyles would be far better.

Take TVs as an example. TVs used to be hugely heavy and bulky glass monsters that took up half the living room, used lots of electricity, but offered relatively small displays to show a few channels. Today, thin LCD/LED displays use far less material, consume much less power, take up far less space and offer bigger and better displays offering access to thousands of channels via satellites and web links. So as far as TV-based entertainment goes, we have a higher standard of living with lower environmental impact. The same is true for our phones, computers, networks, cars, fridges, washing machines, and most other tools. Better materials enable lower use. New science and technology has enabled new kinds of materials that can substitute for scarce physical resources. Copper was once in danger of running out imminently. Now you can build a national fibre telecommunication network with a few bucketfuls of sand and some plastic. And we have plastic pipes and water tanks too, so we don’t really need copper for plumbing either. Aluminium makes reasonable cables, and future materials will make even better cables, still with no copper use. There are few things that can’t be done with alternative materials, especially as quantum materials can be designed to echo the behaviour of many chemicals.

Oil will be much the same story. To believe the doom-mongers, our use of oil will continue to grow exponentially until one day there is none left and then we will all be in big trouble, or dead, breathing in 20% CO2 by then of course. Again, this will prove nonsense. By 2030, oil will be considered a messy and expensive way of getting energy, and most will be left in the ground. The 6Gjoules of energy a barrel of oil contains could be made for $30 using solar panels in the deserts, and electricity is clean. This solar energy can be generated in deserts, where it is actually sunny, where land is cheap, because it isn’t much use for anything else. The energy will get to us via superconducting cables. Sure, the technology doesn’t yet exist, but it will. Oil will only cost $30 a barrel because no-one will want to pay more than that for what will be seen as an inferior means of energy production.

By 2050, fusion power should be up and running, alongside efficient solar power, thorium-based nuclear, shale gas power generation, and various other forms of energy production, proving a huge energy glut that will help with water supply and food production as well as our other energy needs. Our technologies will be so advanced by then that we will be able to control climate better too. We will have environmental models based on science, so we will know what we’re doing rather than acting on guesswork and old-wives’ tales. We will have excellent understanding of genetics and biotech and be able to make far superior crops and animals, so will be able to make foods to feed everyone. While today’s crops deliver about 2% of the solar energy landing on their fields to us as food, we will be able to make foods in labs far more efficiently, and will have crops that are also far more efficient. In the long term, there is absolutely no need to worry about feeding everyone. And no need to worry about the impact on the environment either, because we can make more food with far less space. No-one needs to be hungry, and with steady economic growth, everyone can afford food too. This is no fanciful techno-utopia. It is entirely deliverable and even expectable.

And how can we be sure it will be developed? Well, for one thing, there will be more people. That means more brains. Those people will be richer; they will be better educated; many will be scientists and engineers; many will have been born in countries that value engineers and scientists greatly, and will have lot of backing, so will get results. And some will be in IT, and will have developed computer intelligence to add to the human effort, and provided better, cheaper and fast tools for scientists and engineers in every field to use. The total intellectual resources available to solve problems will be far greater than they are today. So we can be absolutely certain that technological progress will continue to accelerate. And as it does, the environment will become cleaner, healthier, because we will choose to make it so. We will restore nature. Rivers today in the UK are cleaner than 100 years ago. The air is cleaner too. We look after nature better, because that’s what people do when they are affluent and well educated. In the far future, when far more people are wealthy, we will see that care being even more widespread. The rainforests will be flourishing, species will be being resurrected from extinction via DNA banks. People will be well fed. Water supply will be adequate. But it can only happen if we stop following the advice of doom mongers who want to take us backwards.

And that is really key: more people means more brain power, more solutions, better technology. And for the last million years, that has meant steady improvement of our lot. In the un-technological world of the cavemen hunter-gatherers, the world was capable of supporting maybe 60 million people. If we try to restrict technology development now, it will be a death sentence for humanity and nature. People and the environment would both suffer. No-one wins if we stop progress. That is the fallacy of environmental dogma shouted at us by doom mongers. They would go back to yesterday, rejecting technology, living on nature and punishing everyone who disagrees with them. They can indulge such stupidity when there are only a few of them, and the rest of us make their lifestyles possible, but we can’t all live like that. Again, without technology, the world can only support 60 million. Not 6 billion or 7 billion or 75 billion. There simply aren’t enough nice fields and forests for us all to live that way. It is a simple choice. We could have 60 million miserable post-environmentalists living in a post eco-catastrophe world where nature has been devastated by the results of stupid environmental policies invented by environmentalists with contempt for science. Or we can stop the nonsense, get on with our ongoing development, and live in a richer, nicer world where 9.5Bn people (or even far more if we want) can be happy, well fed, well educated, with a good standard of living, living side by side with a flourishing environment, where our main impacts on the environment are positive. Technology won’t solve every problem, and will even create some, but without a shadow of a doubt, technology is by far nature’s best friend. And ours. Not the ‘environmentalists’, many of whom are actually among the environment’s worst enemies, at best well meaning fools.

And there is one final point hat is always overlooked in this debate. Every new person that is born is another life, living, breathing, loving, hopefully having fun, enjoying life and being happy. Life is a good thing, to be celebrated, not extinguished or prevented from coming into existence just because someone else has no imagination. Thanks to the positive feedbacks in the development loops, 50% more people means probably 100% more total joy and happiness. Population growth is good, we just have to be more creative, but that’s what we do all the time. Now let’s get on with making it work.

The full report is completely free and can be found at http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf