Overshoot, page 8
We have overused fossil acreage far more than we have overfished the seas. Overfishing means harvesting fish faster than they replace themselves by reproduction and growth. The inevitable result of continued overharvesting is eventual exhaustion of the resource. If it had been thought that men were harvesting fish as much as 1,000 (or even 100) times faster than the fish could replace themselves, there would have been much alarm around the world already. By 1970, the worldwide ratio between our use of fossil fuels and the natural rate of their replacement by geological processes was more like 10,000 to 1. Yet, at least until 1973, neither the ratio nor even the concept of replacement as such had entered the thoughts of most of the world's ravenous users of prehistoric energy, imbued as they still were with the notion of limitlessness.
For human minds shaped by the culture of exuberance, the closest approach to concern for a replacement rate in the realm of energy seemed to be the vague public awareness that continued geological exploration was constantly leading to discovery of additional deposits of fossil fuels. New discoveries would “replace” the known “reserves” mankind was continually depleting. Oil wells were known to run dry, but new wells were continually being “developed.” The rate of discovery had no relation to the rate at which nature was laying down these deposits, but it looked like a rate of replacement. For a while it exceeded the rate of extraction (misleadingly called “production”), so the illusion of a sustained yield felt almost plausible, even for a resource that, in principle, had to be exhaustible. Deceptive language supported this illusion.
In the 1950s, however, in America's conterminous forty-eight states the discovery rate for petroleum deposits had peaked and turned downward. The downturn came in spite of improved technology for exploration, expanded geological knowledge, and intensified effort—because only the less readily discoverable deposits remained to be found. When the “production” rate was less than the discovery rate, as it had been for several decades, the known “reserves” had been increasing from year to year (though the oil that existed in the world was not increasing). “Production” continued increasing even after the discovery rate began to decrease. The two curves crossed in 1961.24 Thereafter, even the superstitious notion that a rate of discovery somehow sufficed in lieu of an actual replacement rate could no longer support the illusion of sustained oil yields.
Modern man misled himself in a number of ways. He made prodigal use of prehistoric ghost acreage to achieve illusory increases in “efficiency” in farming the visible acreage of the present.25 Cottrell showed in his book, for example, that much more energy was invested to raise 50 bushels per acre in wet-rice farming by mechanized methods in Arkansas than by hoe culture methods in Japan. The illusion that the Arkansas procedures were more “efficient” arose from the fact that less than two man-days of human labor per acre were involved there, as against 90 man-days in Japan. To achieve that saving of 88 + man-days of human labor, however, the Arkansas farmer had to invest in tractor and truck fuel, electricity, and fertilizer, all involving energy that was equivalent to at least 800 additional man-days of effort. This energy extravagance would be even more flagrant if the accounting included the energy used in manufacturing, shipping, and maintaining the tractor, truck, electric pumping apparatus, etc.
Toward the end of 1973, when a no longer deniable shortage of petroleum was curtailing the use of automobiles in many countries, and was producing other unanticipated modifications of human activity, one American food distributor warned customers that food bills might be increased more than travel costs by the oil shortage. The distributor reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had said some 30 percent of the nation's fuel consumption was used in growing food and conveying it to the consumer's table. What neither that distributor nor his customers seemed to recognize was that the figure cited implied that several times as much energy went into producing, processing, and distributing food as the food itself contained! In terms of “newspeak,” the perverted language from George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, here was another inversion of meaning, similar to “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.” Fossil fuel use had enabled man to believe that “prodigality is efficiency.”
Under these thoughtways men continued at the close of the 1970s to imagine that the solution to energy problems was to improve the technology for locating deposits and for extracting combustible substances from nature's underground storage, or to increase the financial incentives for doing these things. It was as if a family whose members were living far beyond their current income should urge the head of the household to solve their problem of overspending by increasing his proficiency in filling out withdrawal slips at the bank. It was as if they were to commend rather than reprimand him for withdrawing more each week than the week before. Newspeak: “Extraction is production.”
Living on Ten Earths
A good estimate of the rate at which nature might be replacing the energy deposits man was withdrawing could have been easily calculated. One merely needed to know (1) the total weight of the earth's atmosphere, (2) the fraction of it that was oxygen, (3) how long it had taken for that much oxygen to be released from carbon dioxide (in which it had formerly been bound), and (4) the comparative weight of the one atom of carbon to the two atoms of oxygen in each former molecule of atmospheric C02. None of this information was secret or undiscovered; it wasn't even very obscure. Sea-level atmospheric pressure was commonly known, as was the approximate diameter (from which could be calculated the surface area) of the earth. So the weight of all the air on earth could be calculated to a reasonable approximation with ordinary high school mathematics. Roughly one-fifth of the air was now oxygen, and 99 percent of that free oxygen had been released, it has been estimated, in the last 600 million years.26 The atomic weights of carbon and oxygen were readily available, and their ratio was simple to calculate. So it turned out that about 625,000 tons of carbon per year had been the average amount buried in deposits of coal, oil, natural gas, and other less combustible substances since the photosynthetic process began releasing into the atmosphere a net total of one million billion tons of oxygen. Much of that extraction of carbon from the atmosphere had occurred in the Carboniferous period, between 215 and 300 million years ago, so the present average annual addition to the world's fossil fuel deposits could scarcely be as much as half the long-term average.
By the 1970s, however, the world's human population, with all its technology, was burning these substances at a rate that re-oxidized and returned to the air more than four billion tons of carbon each year. In short, the rate of “harvesting” from this ghost acreage (4 × 109 tons per year) was more than 10,000 times what the rate of replacement might now be (½ × 6.25 × 105 tons per year). Conservative as the estimate of a 10,000 to 1 ratio might be, it was not calculated in time to deter deep commitment of human societies to such overuse.
Even more simply, it would have been possible (had it not been for the pre-ecological paradigm) to see how much the output of agriculture and forestry and fishing would have had to increase if Homo sapiens were to try to derive more of his current energy expenditures from current energy income. Man was withdrawing annually from savings about ten times as much energy as he was obtaining from current income (from organic sources); therefore, to reduce his dependence on fossil acreage by only one-tenth, man would have to double his use of contemporary photosynthesis. That would obviously entail improvements falling somewhere in the almost surely unattainable range, between another doubling of yield per acre and another doubling of tilled acreage at existing yields.
To become completely free from dependence on prehistoric energy (without reducing population or per capita energy consumption), modern man would require an increase in contemporary carrying capacity equivalent to ten earths—each of whose surfaces was forested, tilled, fished, and harvested to the current extent of our planet. Without ten new earths, it followed that man's exuberant way of life would be cut back drastically sometime in the future, or else that there would someday be many fewer people. Neither alternative, and none of the reasons for them, were contemplated by those who glibly sought “energy independence.”
James Watt had been conventionally regarded as something of a cultural hero for giving man access to a vast “new” source of energy. In the eighteenth century no one could recognize that, by inventing the steam engine, Watt was inventing a way for mankind to overshoot the sustainable carrying capacity of this one earth. Watt was a clever and decent man who lived in (and exemplified) the Age of Exuberance. His invention compounded the influence of Columbus's discovery, extending the carrying capacity surplus that briefly shaped our ideas, our lives, and our institutions. Watt reinforced man's belief in limitlessness.
Neither Watt nor Roosevelt, who also reinforced that belief, was ever taught to think in terms of carrying capacity or ghost acreage. So Roosevelt could not know, while inspiring and leading his countrymen toward recovery from economic depression, or when helping ensure Allied victory over Axis aggression, that he was prolonging unrealistic expectations of exuberance. No one in his “brain trust” could warn him of this, because even the keen minds of his advisors were tuned to the old cornucopian paradigm and were not trained to recognize the perils of dependence on phantom carrying capacity.
Once mankind was committed to heavy reliance on continued use of exhaustible resources such as the deposits of fossil energy, it was certain to be as painful for people to emancipate themselves from their own technological entrapment as it had been for earlier men to emancipate themselves from owning human slaves.
From the end of 1973, Americans began worrying about the ratio between their consumption of “foreign oil” and their consumption of “domestic oil.” We let these worries overshadow completely the more profound issue that should have concerned everyone: the ratio between our dependence on energy from antiquity and our use of contemporary energy, i.e., the ratio between expenditures of withdrawn savings and expenditures of current income. The four billion human inhabitants of this one earth had learned to live as if they could count on harvesting each year the equivalent of ten earths’ worth of combustible substance.
Notes
1. Recognition of this called for a change of national policy that long ago. See Whelpton 1939.
2. Compare discussion of the revolutionary potential when “cultural lags” pile up (Ogburn 1957) with the statement by Heilbroner (1974, p. 132; listed among references for Ch. 1) explaining why the outlook is for “convulsive change.”
3. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 41 (1894): 79–112.
4. Neither the change nor the misunderstanding of it would be exclusively American. This was important: the world had been affected by the free land in the Western hemisphere. It had also been affected by the technology that increased man's power to extract from the land in both hemispheres more wealth than earlier generations ever dreamed possible. So the whole world was now also affected by the filling up of formerly free land, and by the accumulated side-effects of modern technology. See Webb 1952 (listed among references for Ch. 2) and Cottrell 1955.
5. There were a few ways in which bigots might misread their racism into a book like Vogt's, and some writers (e.g., Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976], pp. 378–380) were offended by these aspects of the book. In a later book (People! Challenge to Survival [New York: William Sloane Associates, 1960]) Vogt acknowledged that he had been accused of racism for urging sharp reduction of birthrates especially among Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans, but he pointed out that his accusers “chose to forget my belief that the United States would [also] be better off with less people.” They also seemed to have read through Road to Survival without grasping its central message, as expressed in statements like these:
[p. 80] We must realize that not only does every area have a limited carrying capacity—but also that this carrying capacity is shrinking and the demand growing. Until this understanding becomes an intrinsic part of our thinking and wields a powerful influence on our formation of national and international policies we are scarcely likely to see in what direction our destiny lies.
[p. 284] By excessive breeding and abuse of the land mankind has backed itself into an ecological trap. By a lopsided use of applied science it has been living on promissory notes. Now, all over the world, the notes are falling due.
Payment cannot be postponed much longer. Fortunately, we still may choose between payment and utterly disastrous bankruptcy on a world scale. It will certainly be more intelligent to pull in our belts and accept a long period of austerity and rebuilding than to wait for a catastrophic crash of our civilization.
Critics who dismissed Vogt as an implicit racist were evading the necessity of facing that choice between revising our drawdown policies and undergoing global bankruptcy. Vogt had said (p. 284), “In hard fact, we have no other choice.” And he was hardly being racist or xenophobic when he insisted (p. 285), “Drastic measures are inescapable. Above everything else, we must reorganize our thinking. If we are to escape the crash we must abandon all thought of living unto ourselves.” By accusing Vogt of racism, however, preoccupied critics could even remain blind to such warnings as this:
[p. 68] We are an importing nation; and every day we waste hundreds of millions of gallons [of gasoline]…. Our tensions find outlets in…traveling at high speeds that reduce the efficiency of our cars. We build into our automobiles more power and greater gas consumption than we need. We use the press and radio to push the sales of more cars. We drive them hundreds of millions of miles a year in pursuit of futility. With the exhaustion of our own oil wells in sight, we send our Navy into the Mediterranean, show our teeth to the U.S.S.R., insist on access to Asiatic oil—and continue to throw it away at home.
6. For example, American officials urge Saudi Arabia to keep oil output high to help stabilize the world economy in the face of shortages from other sources; the administration pushes through Congress a proposal for an Energy Mobilization Board with powers to “cut red tape” (i.e., by-pass environmental protection legislation) when energy-related projects such as pipelines, oil refineries, synthetic fuel factories, etc., are at stake; the government “deregulates” natural gas and petroleum prices partly to “give incentives” to “producers.”
7. Borgstrom 1965, p. 78.
8. Ibid.
9. See such sources as Small 1971; Colin Clark, “The Economics of Overexploitation,” in Hardin and Baden 1977, pp. 82–95; P. A. Larkin, “An Epitaph for the Concept of Maximum Sustained Yield,” Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 106 (Jan. 1977): 1–11. There is an important relation between the sustained yield concept and the concept of carrying capacity. Carrying capacity could be defined as the maximum population of an exploiting species supportable by sustained yields of exploited resource species. See the definitions of these two terms given in the Glossary.
10. See Moorcraft 1973.
11. See Wynne-Edwards 1975.
12. See several of the papers in Schmidhauser and Totten 1978.
13. “Japanese Protest U.S. Fishing Limit,” Seattle Times, Nov. 4, 1976, p. G4.
14. Richard S. Lewis, Appointment on the Moon (New York: Viking Press, 1969), pp. 504, 546, gives the total weight of the Apollo 11 Command Module plus Service Module plus Lunar Module plus Lunar Adapter as 50 tons. The velocity to which all this weight had been boosted when it left earth orbit en route to the moon was 24,000 miles per hour. It had thus had imparted to it 2.61 times 1012 joules of kinetic energy. For comparison: since three-fourths of the Great Pyramid's 450 foot height is above its center of mass, the 11.5 billion pounds of stone used to build it were raised an average 112.5 feet from the ground; this imparted to the 2.3 million stone blocks a total of 1.76 times 1012 joules of gravitational potential energy—roughly two-thirds of the energy imparted by rocket engines to the spacecraft bound for the moon.
15. Newsweek, Mar. 27, 1972, p. 39.
16. In 1979, American gasoline prices began to catch up with the higher prices most of the world's other peoples had already experienced for years. The rise continued to be mistaken for “gouging” or “blackmail,” even though in ecological terms it was fundamentally an approach to greater realism, i.e., the beginning of a continuing correction of past underpricing.
17. Cottrell 1955, p. 4.
18. See Ayres and Scarlott 1952, pp. 233–239, and Cottrell 1955, pp. 141–142.
19. Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 12, 1976, pp. 1, 30.
20. Cottrell 1955, p. 142.
21. Recent research even indicates that biomass farming would, with present technology, yield negative net energy; energy inputs would exceed the energy content of the usable fuels made from the harvests. This shows even more emphatically how dependent upon phantom carrying capacity modern nations have allowed themselves to become. See Weisz and Marshall 1979.
22. At a time when other nations were devising “earless day” schemes, or were at least having to curtail the hours or days of the week on which gasoline could be sold, the American Daily News Digest (put out by Research Publications, of Phoenix, Arizona) expressed its “conservative, free-market economics philosophy” by asking “Why is it that only the U.S. has a gasoline shortage?” The answer it suggested (in the third week of May, 1979) was that “only the U.S. has a Department of Energy.” Startlingly similar views were expressed the following month by the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Milton Friedman, who called for immediate abolition of the DOE and elimination of all price controls on petroleum products and natural gas, “confident that the market will promptly bring the energy crisis to an end.” See his column in Newsweek, June 18, 1979.
