The Point of Diminishing Returns
Perhaps it is a good maxim of life - success of any form is always abused well beyond its usefulness to us.
Certainly this is true in regards to many drugs. Stimulants allow us to push ourselves beyond our normal limits. Depressants allow us to relax and escape demands upon us and upon overuse can make our problems worse. Both apparently have "tolerances". That is, drugs move us away from our balance point, so when this happens over time our body compensates by either processing the chemicals more efficiently or allowing their effects to diminish.
Debt is a different sort of category that opens bigger doors of abuse. Debt by nature doesn't exist because it is about negatives.
Nature doesn't allow negative quantities. If a lion is hungry, she can live off from "savings" - stored fat within her body, but if that fat isn't available, she will consume other "savings" - muscle which is more useful for catching prey than consuming but must be done. When all the savings are depleted, the animal will die.
Humans believe in debt because we can borrow from our future time - assuming someone will take our promised time. We talk about money, but ultimately money comes down to time, someone's time, even if not always our own. I can "lend" 1 year to X, and X can lend two year to Y, and Y can lend 3 years to Z, while Z might owe 2 months to me. That 1 year of mine might be "worth" $30,000 to me, but the 3 years owed by Y might be $200,000.
Within any system that successfully brings about a desired result, success tends to have some sort of natural limit. Successful wolves killing deer for food will bring an increased wolve population until their success (or another cause) ends their easy food supply.
A good system would have feedback mechanisms that alert participants of reduced returns.
In "the olden days", perhaps a pack of 12 wolves could feed itself well hunting only 3 hours/week. Years later, the same sized pack (competing among many more wider packs), might find it need 3 days/week to find the food it needs.
Clearly a 24 fold increase in effort for the same result is a problem, and averages don't tell the full story.
The original wolf pack might spend 1 hour/week on a good hunt, and 2 days/week on a slow week. In contrast the now pack might still spend 1 hour/week on a good hunt, but some weeks they hunt the whole 7 days without sufficient food. Averages are nice - saving up food consumed from times of plenty and using it up when times are poor. But you can see originally they always had enough, while now they sometimes don't.
Surely nature has genes set up to respond to periods of starvation by reducing reproduction, and some weaker animals might even die during these periods. So "needs" get trimmed down based on supply, and things go on.
Humans have done much to even out the cycles of abundance and scarcity for our needs, at least we're by-in-large much better off than the animals.
We also have economic signs. When money is flowing well, we can feel secure to borrow money (time) from the future to get what we need (or what) in the present.
Security for individuals is a messy thing however. If I'm employed in a high skilled job, I can earn much more money than I need, and use the excesses to pay down past debt, and save some for future needs. However if I lose my job, my sources of income may be drastically reduced for a time, and "promises" I've made over debt repayment may be outside my new reach.
It is a scary thing - even secure debt like a home mortgage. Abundance is wide and as individuals we can take chances to gain wealth - investing our money.
We're all depending on the large economy to sustain us, assuming past success will continue and that we know what we're getting into.
The depression of the 1930's was bad, affecting many more than the foolish people who borrowed money to invest in a bubble stock market. We tend to believe modern stock marget is more secure - better managed - and so long as investors are able to lose everything (The are not investing debt or their bare necessities), the system should work optimally towards our collective well-being.
The adjustments of the corporate scandels of Enron and others dropped the market, but people still had money and those able invested back in on the good deals.
Overall it is amazing to imagine how this big economic engine can exist, each little part acting in self-interest to produce and manage our collective success. Well, barring the reality of companies like Enron which made money apparently merely by buying and selling without actually producing anything. Probably there's a lot of nonsense in our capitalistic system, a lot more corruption than most want to admit, but apparently managable.
If we lived on an infinite planet, too big to be affected by our tinkering, and could keep expanding, I might imagine a point of diminishing returns might never be seriously faced. Short term scarcity would simply promote searches for new opportunity.
The fact that we do seem to be approaching physical limits - the world is explored, and our knowledge of that world is expanding to recognize all the exploitable niches for us.
I must project that collectively a point of diminishing returns IS approaching or HAS already come by wider averages.
Nature teaches success as exponential growth, then there's more of an open question what happens next. Either "overgrowth and crash", or "overgrowth and fall back" or "growth to steady-state".
Ideally nature is already giving us signals of our returns. Do we continue investing in the direction we're going, or do we choose a different path?
Energy is the biggest issue for me. We know fossil fuels are limited, and will be consumed sooner or later, and we'll need alteratives which may or may not be available to help us.
Imagine wolves expanding into a new land filled by deer. However these deer are all very old - they in fact don't reproduce at all, or so slowly to be inperceptable to animals with the lifetimes of wolves.
At first there's a wide abundance of deer and they make easy kills, but year by year their populations drop, and at an increasing rate as wolf populations grow.
When all the deer are dead, there's no other equal food resource to "transition" into. Perhaps besides the deer, there's lots of rabbits, and rabbits reproduce quickly, but just don't have the raw mass of deers, even with wider numbers.
If we question what's a "carrying capacity" of the land for a population of wolves consuming deer, we can't compute an answer because it isn't sustainable and eventually they must transition from deer to rabbit.
If rabbits allow a capacity of 10,000 wolves in a land, and deer population and wolves reproduction allows a 2% yearly population rise from an initial 100 wolves, the only real questions are "How long will it take before wolf population stabilizes?" (assuming a limit besides food), AND "How long will it take that population to consume all the remainind deer then?"
Humanity is in a similar question. Our success is based on a finite resource and the higher our population rises, the sooner we'll hit the limits of the resource and must transition to something else.
Do we have 10 years or 100 years? Does it matter? What livestyle will we leave the next generation? How long do we continue on a "rise and crash" path?
The only "safe" answer is to never become solely dependent upon finite sources of food or energy. If all fossil fuels disappeared tomorrow, could we all survive? Surely not. If we knew in 10 years all fossil fuels would disappear, how about then? I have strong doubts, although a clear limit would be helpful.
Ideally, like the stock market, you only invest what you can afford to lose. By gambling on 6 billion population, we're saying either we can afford to lose a good fraction of our population OR that we believe it is not at risk.
Sure life has no guarantees, and I admit the "only gamble what you can lose" approach to live may be too timid for even survival. I accept that times of hardship are also times of opportunity for developing new ways of living that we can't see now in our easy ways.
Since we don't have a clear "10 year deadline" for ending fossil fuels, we have to make due with ignorance. Maybe a population crash isn't so bad - maybe we're all just spoiled and the next generation can "make due" - even if it must learn the virtues of canibalism. Who knows?
Is it worth worrying about this?
Well, no, it isn't worth it actually. Worrying about the future only serves a purpose if it can promote action in the present. Is there anything worth doing different now?
World conventional oil production IS peaking - soon if not already, and at worst/best in 20 years depending on your point of view.
Such an event is worthy of celebration - our first global depletion of a dead natural resource. Maybe it's like graduation from high school. Our years of "dependency" upon our parents is over, and we suddenly have to try living without this support.
Sure, our parents are not dead (hopefully) when we graduate and they have lots more love and support (and money) they can offer us (if we visit them). But we know there's a high cost on that support - they would be there for us forever - we've got to let go.
Individual teens have it easy - they have lots of peers to talk with, and if a few fail, others won't and so success will go forward.
Our world graduation day isn't so free. We've only got one planet, and we can't afford to fail. If we fail, perhaps other peoples on other worlds far away might succeed, but we'll never know that. We'll only have a future of wasted potential - because we hung on too long.
Our "oil" parent can't "kick us out" before it must, can't show us tough love, except for what it is.
Higher prices for oil are on the way and that's good. Averages are not fun. Like our wolves lamenting their longer hunts for deer, we'll lament our longer hunts for oil. We still have many happy hunting grounds, but they are getting smaller, and some of us might not have as much as we need.
Oh, curious about the rabbits? I don't know what they are - probably lots of game still out there, but some won't be very attractive to us.
One such repulsive fuel is coal, and others are called "Sand Tars" and "Shale Oil". All are similar in ways to oil, but are much more difficult to process, and much more polluting.
The "global warming" issue which some have worried about gets much worse under coal or tar oils, but we're on a roll and we're not going to "leave home", if we can find a garage that we can still "crash in" when we need a roof.
http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/reserves/publications/Pubs-NPR/npr_strategic_significancev1.pdf
I accept the prognosis that it is unacceptable to let our continued dependence upon imported oil increase year-after-year. It is a laudable goal to try to find resources closer to our reach.
The problem is in our high state of addiction, we're not evaluating these resources on the same standards we'd use if we could take or leave them.
We should be judging our energy by pollution requirements, not just costs. Maybe $50/barrel oil prices are enough to justify these dirty fuels, but that doesn't mean it's good for us to use them.
18 months ago I kicked my brother out of my house because he was using drugs and things were being stolen and I couldn't trust him and no longer had any delusions that I was helping him by providing a place to live.
I wouldn't do that to anyone and he's surely suffered more than I'd ever want to experience, and he's still not out of the hole, and might yet die next week from a dangerous lifestyle. It's not acceptable to me to let him suffer, but I know no other way.
I can agree with the accessment that environmentalists are "obstructionists" that cause more problems than they solve and sometimes cause WORSE consequences in the short run than had they let things go on. However I know there is "pain for my own good", and there are times when there's no GOOD path and delay no longer serves a purpose, if it ever did.
As world oil prices increase, there's going to be political pressure in many directions for alternatives, and EVERY ONE of them will SEEM inferior to what we've known. However they will not be interchanable.
Some will be WORSE in the long term, while others offer hope for eventual improvement.
Going back to coal should be a choice based on freedom - NOT necessity.
We have a small window of opportunity where we can challenge our alternatives while we still don't need them.
Overall a BEST managed solution now is a managed fall. I'd see us like the wolve population eating immortal deer, and recognize a fall is neccesary and react by managed starvation BEFORE the deer are all gone. Unrealistic surely, but humans maybe deserve to mention impossible choices before we ignore them.
Well, this is a religious point to consider. Jumping off a bridge because the world MIGHT end tomorrow is foolish, but maybe it's not a bad idea to map out the location of those bridges in case we need them.
I accept the thought it may already be too late.
The worst projected end-game for civilization is that of global warming gone mad. Global warming has the most affect in the polar regions - in the glaciers and ice, but more importantly in the permafrost of northern canada and russia.
Frozen organic material remains suspended in a partially decayed stated, and if it warms to a point of decomposition, microbial decomposition is capable of releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - far beyond our little fossil fuel burning.
We might have "lit a match" to a fire that we have no power to stop. Feedback mechanisms are yet unknown in a complex earth, and she may yet have a tool to reserve this run away greenhouse. It might just be another ice-age - not in hours and days like silly movies - but over a few generations.
We can't know the affects of our actions, and perhaps all our best efforts are already useless. Perhaps we are best seeing the century as a "last party" and doing our worst.
I don't believe it. I do believe our problems are bigger than we all know, even as I accept the earth is more resilient than we deserve.
I am yet a wolf, consuming immortal deer in a field of wonder.
I don't have the heart to abandon the slaughter yet, but I see the end will come, and I hope that it will happen sooner than later.
I won't wish anything upon the next generation that I won't wish upon myself.
Certainly this is true in regards to many drugs. Stimulants allow us to push ourselves beyond our normal limits. Depressants allow us to relax and escape demands upon us and upon overuse can make our problems worse. Both apparently have "tolerances". That is, drugs move us away from our balance point, so when this happens over time our body compensates by either processing the chemicals more efficiently or allowing their effects to diminish.
Debt is a different sort of category that opens bigger doors of abuse. Debt by nature doesn't exist because it is about negatives.
Nature doesn't allow negative quantities. If a lion is hungry, she can live off from "savings" - stored fat within her body, but if that fat isn't available, she will consume other "savings" - muscle which is more useful for catching prey than consuming but must be done. When all the savings are depleted, the animal will die.
Humans believe in debt because we can borrow from our future time - assuming someone will take our promised time. We talk about money, but ultimately money comes down to time, someone's time, even if not always our own. I can "lend" 1 year to X, and X can lend two year to Y, and Y can lend 3 years to Z, while Z might owe 2 months to me. That 1 year of mine might be "worth" $30,000 to me, but the 3 years owed by Y might be $200,000.
Within any system that successfully brings about a desired result, success tends to have some sort of natural limit. Successful wolves killing deer for food will bring an increased wolve population until their success (or another cause) ends their easy food supply.
A good system would have feedback mechanisms that alert participants of reduced returns.
In "the olden days", perhaps a pack of 12 wolves could feed itself well hunting only 3 hours/week. Years later, the same sized pack (competing among many more wider packs), might find it need 3 days/week to find the food it needs.
Clearly a 24 fold increase in effort for the same result is a problem, and averages don't tell the full story.
The original wolf pack might spend 1 hour/week on a good hunt, and 2 days/week on a slow week. In contrast the now pack might still spend 1 hour/week on a good hunt, but some weeks they hunt the whole 7 days without sufficient food. Averages are nice - saving up food consumed from times of plenty and using it up when times are poor. But you can see originally they always had enough, while now they sometimes don't.
Surely nature has genes set up to respond to periods of starvation by reducing reproduction, and some weaker animals might even die during these periods. So "needs" get trimmed down based on supply, and things go on.
Humans have done much to even out the cycles of abundance and scarcity for our needs, at least we're by-in-large much better off than the animals.
We also have economic signs. When money is flowing well, we can feel secure to borrow money (time) from the future to get what we need (or what) in the present.
Security for individuals is a messy thing however. If I'm employed in a high skilled job, I can earn much more money than I need, and use the excesses to pay down past debt, and save some for future needs. However if I lose my job, my sources of income may be drastically reduced for a time, and "promises" I've made over debt repayment may be outside my new reach.
It is a scary thing - even secure debt like a home mortgage. Abundance is wide and as individuals we can take chances to gain wealth - investing our money.
We're all depending on the large economy to sustain us, assuming past success will continue and that we know what we're getting into.
The depression of the 1930's was bad, affecting many more than the foolish people who borrowed money to invest in a bubble stock market. We tend to believe modern stock marget is more secure - better managed - and so long as investors are able to lose everything (The are not investing debt or their bare necessities), the system should work optimally towards our collective well-being.
The adjustments of the corporate scandels of Enron and others dropped the market, but people still had money and those able invested back in on the good deals.
Overall it is amazing to imagine how this big economic engine can exist, each little part acting in self-interest to produce and manage our collective success. Well, barring the reality of companies like Enron which made money apparently merely by buying and selling without actually producing anything. Probably there's a lot of nonsense in our capitalistic system, a lot more corruption than most want to admit, but apparently managable.
If we lived on an infinite planet, too big to be affected by our tinkering, and could keep expanding, I might imagine a point of diminishing returns might never be seriously faced. Short term scarcity would simply promote searches for new opportunity.
The fact that we do seem to be approaching physical limits - the world is explored, and our knowledge of that world is expanding to recognize all the exploitable niches for us.
I must project that collectively a point of diminishing returns IS approaching or HAS already come by wider averages.
Nature teaches success as exponential growth, then there's more of an open question what happens next. Either "overgrowth and crash", or "overgrowth and fall back" or "growth to steady-state".
Ideally nature is already giving us signals of our returns. Do we continue investing in the direction we're going, or do we choose a different path?
Energy is the biggest issue for me. We know fossil fuels are limited, and will be consumed sooner or later, and we'll need alteratives which may or may not be available to help us.
Imagine wolves expanding into a new land filled by deer. However these deer are all very old - they in fact don't reproduce at all, or so slowly to be inperceptable to animals with the lifetimes of wolves.
At first there's a wide abundance of deer and they make easy kills, but year by year their populations drop, and at an increasing rate as wolf populations grow.
When all the deer are dead, there's no other equal food resource to "transition" into. Perhaps besides the deer, there's lots of rabbits, and rabbits reproduce quickly, but just don't have the raw mass of deers, even with wider numbers.
If we question what's a "carrying capacity" of the land for a population of wolves consuming deer, we can't compute an answer because it isn't sustainable and eventually they must transition from deer to rabbit.
If rabbits allow a capacity of 10,000 wolves in a land, and deer population and wolves reproduction allows a 2% yearly population rise from an initial 100 wolves, the only real questions are "How long will it take before wolf population stabilizes?" (assuming a limit besides food), AND "How long will it take that population to consume all the remainind deer then?"
Humanity is in a similar question. Our success is based on a finite resource and the higher our population rises, the sooner we'll hit the limits of the resource and must transition to something else.
Do we have 10 years or 100 years? Does it matter? What livestyle will we leave the next generation? How long do we continue on a "rise and crash" path?
The only "safe" answer is to never become solely dependent upon finite sources of food or energy. If all fossil fuels disappeared tomorrow, could we all survive? Surely not. If we knew in 10 years all fossil fuels would disappear, how about then? I have strong doubts, although a clear limit would be helpful.
Ideally, like the stock market, you only invest what you can afford to lose. By gambling on 6 billion population, we're saying either we can afford to lose a good fraction of our population OR that we believe it is not at risk.
Sure life has no guarantees, and I admit the "only gamble what you can lose" approach to live may be too timid for even survival. I accept that times of hardship are also times of opportunity for developing new ways of living that we can't see now in our easy ways.
Since we don't have a clear "10 year deadline" for ending fossil fuels, we have to make due with ignorance. Maybe a population crash isn't so bad - maybe we're all just spoiled and the next generation can "make due" - even if it must learn the virtues of canibalism. Who knows?
Is it worth worrying about this?
Well, no, it isn't worth it actually. Worrying about the future only serves a purpose if it can promote action in the present. Is there anything worth doing different now?
World conventional oil production IS peaking - soon if not already, and at worst/best in 20 years depending on your point of view.
Such an event is worthy of celebration - our first global depletion of a dead natural resource. Maybe it's like graduation from high school. Our years of "dependency" upon our parents is over, and we suddenly have to try living without this support.
Sure, our parents are not dead (hopefully) when we graduate and they have lots more love and support (and money) they can offer us (if we visit them). But we know there's a high cost on that support - they would be there for us forever - we've got to let go.
Individual teens have it easy - they have lots of peers to talk with, and if a few fail, others won't and so success will go forward.
Our world graduation day isn't so free. We've only got one planet, and we can't afford to fail. If we fail, perhaps other peoples on other worlds far away might succeed, but we'll never know that. We'll only have a future of wasted potential - because we hung on too long.
Our "oil" parent can't "kick us out" before it must, can't show us tough love, except for what it is.
Higher prices for oil are on the way and that's good. Averages are not fun. Like our wolves lamenting their longer hunts for deer, we'll lament our longer hunts for oil. We still have many happy hunting grounds, but they are getting smaller, and some of us might not have as much as we need.
Oh, curious about the rabbits? I don't know what they are - probably lots of game still out there, but some won't be very attractive to us.
One such repulsive fuel is coal, and others are called "Sand Tars" and "Shale Oil". All are similar in ways to oil, but are much more difficult to process, and much more polluting.
The "global warming" issue which some have worried about gets much worse under coal or tar oils, but we're on a roll and we're not going to "leave home", if we can find a garage that we can still "crash in" when we need a roof.
http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/reserves/publications/Pubs-NPR/npr_strategic_significancev1.pdf
I accept the prognosis that it is unacceptable to let our continued dependence upon imported oil increase year-after-year. It is a laudable goal to try to find resources closer to our reach.
The problem is in our high state of addiction, we're not evaluating these resources on the same standards we'd use if we could take or leave them.
We should be judging our energy by pollution requirements, not just costs. Maybe $50/barrel oil prices are enough to justify these dirty fuels, but that doesn't mean it's good for us to use them.
18 months ago I kicked my brother out of my house because he was using drugs and things were being stolen and I couldn't trust him and no longer had any delusions that I was helping him by providing a place to live.
I wouldn't do that to anyone and he's surely suffered more than I'd ever want to experience, and he's still not out of the hole, and might yet die next week from a dangerous lifestyle. It's not acceptable to me to let him suffer, but I know no other way.
I can agree with the accessment that environmentalists are "obstructionists" that cause more problems than they solve and sometimes cause WORSE consequences in the short run than had they let things go on. However I know there is "pain for my own good", and there are times when there's no GOOD path and delay no longer serves a purpose, if it ever did.
As world oil prices increase, there's going to be political pressure in many directions for alternatives, and EVERY ONE of them will SEEM inferior to what we've known. However they will not be interchanable.
Some will be WORSE in the long term, while others offer hope for eventual improvement.
Going back to coal should be a choice based on freedom - NOT necessity.
We have a small window of opportunity where we can challenge our alternatives while we still don't need them.
Overall a BEST managed solution now is a managed fall. I'd see us like the wolve population eating immortal deer, and recognize a fall is neccesary and react by managed starvation BEFORE the deer are all gone. Unrealistic surely, but humans maybe deserve to mention impossible choices before we ignore them.
Well, this is a religious point to consider. Jumping off a bridge because the world MIGHT end tomorrow is foolish, but maybe it's not a bad idea to map out the location of those bridges in case we need them.
I accept the thought it may already be too late.
The worst projected end-game for civilization is that of global warming gone mad. Global warming has the most affect in the polar regions - in the glaciers and ice, but more importantly in the permafrost of northern canada and russia.
Frozen organic material remains suspended in a partially decayed stated, and if it warms to a point of decomposition, microbial decomposition is capable of releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - far beyond our little fossil fuel burning.
We might have "lit a match" to a fire that we have no power to stop. Feedback mechanisms are yet unknown in a complex earth, and she may yet have a tool to reserve this run away greenhouse. It might just be another ice-age - not in hours and days like silly movies - but over a few generations.
We can't know the affects of our actions, and perhaps all our best efforts are already useless. Perhaps we are best seeing the century as a "last party" and doing our worst.
I don't believe it. I do believe our problems are bigger than we all know, even as I accept the earth is more resilient than we deserve.
I am yet a wolf, consuming immortal deer in a field of wonder.
I don't have the heart to abandon the slaughter yet, but I see the end will come, and I hope that it will happen sooner than later.
I won't wish anything upon the next generation that I won't wish upon myself.
posted by Ares Olympus at 1:01 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home