Blogpost by Laura K. - July 21, 2010 at 18:51 PM Add comment
Deep Green is Rex Weyler's monthly column, reflecting on the roots of activism, environmentalism, and Greenpeace's past, present, and future. The opinions here are his own.July 2010 -
We're all in Deepwater Now.
Corporations don't need regulation, because protecting the environment is in their interest. The free market will protect nature.
That theory disintegrated at 21:49, April 20, 2010, under a waxing quarter moon, on a dark spring night in the Gulf of Mexico.
We've witnessed the collapse of corporate credibility before - at Bhopal in 1984, at Chernobyl in 1986, at the Marcopper Copper Mine in the Philippines in 1996, in Seveso Italy, at Love Canal, and in Minimata Japan for four murderous decades, as Chisso Corporation poisoned a fishing village with mercury.
Human industry now sinks its claws into every corner of the Earth, exploiting the last pockets of resources. The juggernaut took the easy stuff first because it was cheap. Now we go higher into the mountains for lithium and copper, deeper into the forest for ancient trees, and deeper into the earth's crust for oil and gas. Damn the cost. Rich consumers will pay, and the pelicans have no lawyers.
The Deepwater blowout that now stacks up among the greatest ecological holocausts of all time was not just an accident. It stands as the latest symptom of industrial civilisation's hubris.
Solutions aren't the answer
Any robust species will naturally expand, if it can, to occupy its habitat. However, in nature 'success' has a cost. A flourishing species must find new energy and nutrient resources, and must negotiate with its environment to process its wastes. Ecologist and historian Kenneth Boulding called this the 'metabolic cost' of evolutionary success.
Likewise, as human societies dominated their habitats, they sought solutions to the problems of paying this metabolic cost. Societies often fail to see that those problems were the results of previous solutions. Irrigation allowed ancient city states to solve the problems of population growth and scarce rainfall, but extensive irrigation produced salty, depleted soils.
To win new lands for food production, empires abandoned their cities and moved to new watersheds. Eventually, they clashed with other migrating communities, so they designed weapons and built armies to 'solve' conflict. The subsequent arms race created new problems. They solved this with bigger armies, but big armies need more food. New problem.
Innovative technologies helped solve these problems but technologies, like armies, must be fed resources. Ships consumed forests. Machines demanded iron and oil. Computers require copper, plastic, silica and lithium. Where does it all stop?
Anthropologist Joseph Tainter studied societies to find out where the problem-solution-problem cycle stops. Most complex civilisations and empires simply collapsed under the weight of their metabolic costs. Their solutions became bigger problems until they consumed all available resources, depleted their habitat, and collapsed. Persia, Rome, Maya and Easter Islanders travelled this route to failure.
In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter describes how civilisations trapped themselves in increasing complexity until they experienced diminishing returns on their solution investments. At that point, new complex solutions no longer paid for themselves. To feed the bigger army meant expanding the empire, but a bigger empire has more borders to defend and more over-taxed, irate citizens to pacify.
To finance the rising cost of growth, an empire must discover new energy subsidies. Ancient Rome increased its energy consumption by annexing distant forests, taxing landed peasants, and capturing slaves. However, the hunt for more energy costs energy. "Imperialism," Boulding explained, "makes the empire poor."
Finally, a growing civilisation experiences negative returns on its investments. The modern disasters in Bhopal or the Gulf of Mexico provide examples of negative returns. As our industrial system seeks out more energy, we find ourselves digging up the Canadian tundra, destroying wild watersheds, draining lakes, and boring deeper into the Earth's crust below the ocean.
We may notice that the greatest driver of environmental destruction is the growth process itself. Tainter points out that the only known examples of avoiding collapse - in both nature and in human history - involve simplifying, not growing. Eventually, we have to stop building false 'solutions' that create new problems and negotiate a lasting peace with nature.
The high cost of high tech
We may believe that a new technology will solve the problems of growth, until we account for the full ecological cost of that new technology. To build hybrid cars and computers, we seek out copper, lithium, zinc, aluminium, and rare earth metals, displace communities, and push deeper into Earth's remaining wilderness.
Timothy Gutowski and colleagues calculated that as computer chips shrunk in size and grew in power the material and energy intensity per unit mass increased a million-times. This is even before we factor in the cost of armies swarming over Afghanistan to secure the lithium for batteries.
We tend to think that since our computers require so little energy to operate, that they are 'efficient', but we're measuring the wrong thing. We need to measure the 'embodied' energy and material required to mine and ship resources and to build telecom infrastructure, server networks, software, research labs, and office towers. According to the International Energy Association report,'Gadgets and gigawatts', electricity consumption for computers, cell phones, iPhones, and other devices will triple by 2030, and this does not include the bulldozers digging up resources.
Remember when people claimed computers were going to save paper? This never happened. In 1950, at the dawn of the computer age, humanity used about 50 million tons of paper each year. We now use 250 million tons, five times the paper. Growth swamps efficiency. Computers stimulated growth and created more uses for packaging and paper. Meanwhile, during that period, the Earth lost over 600 million hectares of forest.
In 'The Monster Footprint of Digital Technology' Kris De Decker points out that utility stations operate at about 35 per cent efficiency, so the actual energy consumed is almost three-times the electricity consumed when a device is switched on. This is the metabolic cost of growth, the rising cost of complexity, paid long before you boot your computer or recharge your iPhone.
In Deepwater now
Like our ancestors, modern human enterprise took the low hanging fruit and harvested the cheapest oil first. In the oil heyday, 50 years ago, oil flowed from shallow wells with 99 per cent net energy efficiency.
Today, we dig into oil sands, destroy vast tundra and grassland, melt bitumen in giant furnaces, fill lakes with black sludge, kill migrating waterbirds, displace caribou and human communities, trigger lung disease, mix bitumen with condensate refined thousands of kilometres away, ship the goop through long pipelines, endanger our coasts with oil tankers, and heat the planet like a flambé to deliver crude oil at 50 per cent net energy efficiency.
More costs, less benefit, represents the 'declining return' on our investments. Eventually those returns turn negative. In the Gulf of Mexico, British Petroleum lobbied politicians to cancel regulations, drilled a 6,000 metre well in 1500 metres of water, and cut corners to save money.
At 21:49 on April 20, 2010, gas from an improperly sealed well reached the BP drilling rig, ignited, blew up the rig, killed 11 people, devastated the Gulf's coastal economy, and launched an ecological holocaust on the scale of Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Minimata. The blowout has killed thousands of seabirds, turtles, fish, and marine animals. Some 50,000 to 150,000 barrels of oil per day pours into the Gulf of Mexico. On top of this, BP has added over 1-million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersant, banned in the UK, which contains the neurotoxin 2-Butoxyethanol, arsenic, cadmium, cyanide, and mercury.
The Gulf of Mexico tragedy is not unique. It is only the latest symptom of a civilisation out of control, stumbling blindly to pay the metabolic cost of reckless, unsustainable growth
