That is a very narrow view of the situation. For example, grain harvests in my own area have, once again, been declared "a catastrophe", and this province is not alone, and neither is Canada.
Four years old but no less true. Misses a couple of Smil's recent books, especially the eye-opening (and huge) How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future. Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’ Jonathan Watts The scientist and author on his latest book – an epic, multidisciplinary analysis of growth – and why humanity’s endless expansion must stop. Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Over more than 40 years, his books on the environment, population, food and energy have steadily grown in influence. He is now seen as one of the world’s foremost thinkers on development history and a master of statistical analysis. Bill Gates says he waits for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie. The latest is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. You are the nerd’s nerd. There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like you. You dug up the astonishing statistic that China has poured more cement every three years since 2003 than the US managed in the entire 20th century. You calculated that in 2000, the dry mass of all the humans in the world was 125m metric tonnes compared with just 10m tonnes for all wild vertebrates. And now you explore patterns of growth, from the healthy development of forests and brains to the unhealthy increase in obesity and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Before we get into those deeper issues, can I ask if you see yourself as a nerd? Not at all. I’m just an old-fashioned scientist describing the world and the lay of the land as it is. That’s all there is to it. It’s not good enough just to say life is better or the trains are faster. You have to bring in the numbers. This book is an exercise in buttressing what I have to say with numbers so people see these are the facts and they are difficult to dispute. Growth is a huge book – almost 200,000 words that synthesise many of your other studies, ranging across the world and exploring far into the past and future. Do you see this as your magnum opus? I have deliberately set out to write the megabook on growth. In a way, it’s unwieldy and unreasonable. People can take any number of books out of it – economists can read about the growth of GDP and population; biologists can read about the growth of organisms and human bodies. But I wanted to put it all together under one roof so people could see how these things are inevitably connected and how it all shares one crystal clarity: that growth must come to an end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river in China. Photograph: Laoma/Alamy I first came across your work while I was writing a book about the Chinese environment. Time and again, you had the data that I was looking for – and it often revealed how dubious many of the official statistics were. You have been described as a “slayer of bullshit”. Is that your goal? I was brought up in Czechoslovakia during the era of the Soviet bloc. Having spent 26 years of my life in the evil empire, I do not tolerate nonsense. I grew up surrounded by commie propaganda – the bright tomorrow, the great future of mankind – so I’m as critical as they come. It’s not my opinion. These are the facts. I don’t write opinion pieces. I write things that are totally underlined by facts. You debunk overly rosy projections by techno-optimists, who say we can solve all our problems with smarter computers, and economists, who promise endless capitalist growth. In many countries, the downside of material growth now seems greater than the upside, which leads to what you call “anthropogenic insults to ecosystems”. Is that a fair summary? Yes, I think so. Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know. The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense. The options are quite clear from the historical evidence. If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone. The best hope is that you find some way to manage it. We are in a better position to do that now than we were 50 or 100 years ago, because our knowledge is much vaster. If we sit down, we can come up with something. It won’t be painless, but we can come up with ways to minimise that pain. So we need to change our expectations of GDP growth? Yes, the simple fact is that however you define happiness, we know – and we have known this for ages – that the amount of GDP is not going to improve your satisfaction with life, equanimity and sense of wellbeing. Look at Japan. They are pretty rich but they are among the unhappiest people on the planet. Then who is always in the top 10 of the happiest people? It is the Philippines, which is much poorer and smitten by typhoons, yet many times more happy than their neighbours in Japan. Once you reach a certain point, the benefits of GDP growth start to level off in terms of mortality, nutrition and education. Is that point the golden mean? Is that what we should be aiming for rather than pushing until growth becomes malign, cancerous, obese and environmentally destructive? Exactly. That would be nice. We could halve our energy and material consumption and this would put us back around the level of the 1960s. We could cut down without losing anything important. Life wasn’t horrible in 1960s or 70s Europe. People from Copenhagen would no longer be able to fly to Singapore for a three-day visit, but so what? Not much is going to happen to their lives. People don’t realise how much slack in the system we have. The growth of information is not just a flood or an explosion. Those adjectives are inadequate. We are buried under information. It’s not doing anyone any good You cite Kenneth Boulding’s distinction between the “cowboy economy” and the “spaceman economy”. The former is wide-open spaces and seemingly endless opportunities for resource consumption. The latter is a recognition that planet Earth is more like a closed spaceship on which we need to carefully manage our resources. The challenge is to shift from one way of thinking to another. But human history is thousands of years of cowboys and only a few decades of spacemen. Aren’t we hardwired? There is a deep tradition both in the eastern and western traditions of frugality, living within your means and a contemplative life. It has always been like this. Now there is this louder voice calling for more consumption and a bigger bathroom and an SUV, but it’s increasingly apparent that cannot go on. It will be something like smoking, which was everywhere 50 years ago. But now that people realise the clear link to lung cancer, this is restricted. The same will happen when people realise where material growth is taking us. It is a matter of time I think. How do we move in that direction before the risks become unmanageable? To answer this, it’s important not to talk in global terms. There will be many approaches which have to be tailored and targeted to each different audience. There is this pernicious idea by this [Thomas] Friedman guy that the world is flat and everything is now the same, so what works in one place can work for everyone. But that’s totally wrong. For example, Denmark has nothing in common with Nigeria. What you do in each place will be different. What we need in Nigeria is more food, more growth. In Philippines we need a little more of it. And in Canada and Sweden, we need less of it. We have to look at it from different points of view. In some places we have to foster what economists call de-growth. In other places, we have to foster growth. Your one-man statistical analysis is like the entire output of the World Bank. Did this research make you feel we are closer to the end of growth than you previously realised? People ask me if I am an optimist or a pessimist and I say neither. I am not trying to be deliberately agnostic: this is the best conclusion I can come up with. In China, I told people how bad the environment was and the picture totally shocked people. They said: “When will it collapse?” And I’d answer: “It’s collapsing every day, but it’s also being fixed every day.” They used more coal and got more air pollution, but they also took billions from the World Bank and finally have modern water treatment in big cities. Now they are using modern farming, so they use less water for irrigation. This is how it is. This is what kind of species we are: we are stupid, we are negligent, we are tardy. But on the other hand, we are adaptable, we are smart and even as things are falling apart, we are trying to stitch them together. But the most difficult thing is to calculate the net effect. Are we up or down? For all the analysis, we don’t know this. Your book notes that the entire library of Rome, 2,000 years ago, contained about 3 gigabytes of information, but now the global internet has more than a trillion times more. You are clearly sceptical this has been a net positive or that it has improved our ability to deal with our problems. The growth of information is not just a flood or an explosion. Those adjectives are inadequate. We are buried under information. It’s not doing anyone any good. There are satellites above us producing huge amounts of information, but there are not enough people to analyse it. Yes, computers can help and shrink the amount, but someone still has to make decisions. There is too much to grasp. Did you experience any statgasms (statistical orgasms) is the course of the research? I am a biologist by training, so I was delighted to read new studies about the world’s biggest trees – the redwoods and eucalyptus. They never stop growing. And for elephants, they have indeterminate patterns of growth and never really stop until they die. We humans stop when we are 18 or 19. But the biggest species on the planet keep on growing until they die. And on human population? What is most remarkable is how rapid the decline has been. For more than a 100 years, the growth rate accelerated. The 1930s faster than the 20s, the 40s faster than the 30s and so on. By the 1960s, the world population was growing so fast that a famous paper in Science said that by 2024, it would be growing at an infinite rate – like a population singularity moment, which is, of course, absurd. Since then, the rate has declined every year. Population continues to grow in absolute terms, but in percentage terms it has been declining since the mid-60s. The US far outstrips other countries in terms of energy consumption. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Overall, I would say the tone of the book is pessimistic, but you also mention the possibility of a more optimistic scenario in which the global population does not expand beyond 9 billion – as is currently predicted – and in which the energy transition is faster than expected. Even if material demands peak before 2050, that still leaves us several decades of rising pressure. Given the already apparent strains on the climate, the soil, biodiversity and social stability, how do we get over this dangerous bulge? That is the difficult part. In the western world and Japan, we are almost there. China still has a way to go because it is at the level of Spain in the 1960s in terms of energy. The real bulge is coming in Africa, where 1 billion more people will be born. Just to bring the current African population to a decent level of living, like Vietnam and Thailand, is tough. To do that with an extra billion will be extraordinarily hard. You can bring it all down to one figure – it is gigajoules of consumption of energy per person per year, but the unit is not important. Just consider the comparison. The US is about 300. Japan is about 170. The EU is about 150. China is now close to 100. India is 20. Nigeria is 5. Ethiopia is 2. To grow from Nigeria to China is a 20-fold increase just on per capita terms. Such is the scale of the bulge. So you can cut consumption in Copenhagen or Sussex, but not in Nigeria. Is ageing Japan a model? It strikes me as incredible that the country has been able to weather a long decline of property prices, stock market values, population vitality and influence without sliding into chaos. Are there lessons there for others who face involuntary retreat? Japan can only be a partial model, because until recently it was such a frugal and disciplined society that people there can tolerate what others would not accept. But we have slack. We are so fat in terms of material consumption. There is room to cut back. But there is no easy answer. If there were, we would have already done it. Can businessmen accept an end to growth? Have you mentioned this to Bill Gates? I don’t need to tell him. He knows a lot about the environment. Put aside the billions of dollars and he is just a guy who likes to understand the world. He reads dozens of books every year. Like me. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil is published by MIT Press (£30). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15 What Microsoft founder Bill Gates says about Vaclav Smil’s books Photograph: Saeed Adyani/AP Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT Press, 2017) “Smil is one of my favourite authors and this is his masterpiece. He lays out how our need for energy has shaped human history – from the era of donkey-powered mills to today’s quest for renewable energy.” Making the Modern World: Materials & Dematerialization (Wiley, 2013) “If anyone tries to tell you we’re using fewer materials, send him this book. With his usual scepticism and his love of data, Smil shows how our ability to make things with less material – say, soda cans that need less aluminium – makes them cheaper, which actually encourages more production. We’re using more stuff than ever.” Harvesting the Biosphere (MIT Press, 2013) “Here [Smil] gives as clear and as numeric a picture as is possible of how humans have altered the biosphere… it tells a critical story if you care about the impact we’re having on the planet.”
Interesting summary. While everyone was yelling about gas stoves, the incandescent light bulb went away The quiet phaseout of household incandescents showcases the power of government regulations to push changes in the marketplace. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/27/incandescent-light-bulb-led-00107935
The problem [with the normal monsoon] is that this [year's] average conceals huge fluctuations across space and time. India’s Food Security Is Being Choked by Climate Change A warming planet is destabilizing the cycles of rain and sun that are keeping the country fed. Seeing red. By David Fickling July 24, 2023 at 5:00 PM EDT The world’s most populous nation is more poorly endowed with farmland, per capita, than Greece or Algeria. That’s going to make life harder as a warming planet destabilizes the cycles of rain and sun that have kept it fed for millennia. India last week suspended exports of non-basmati varieties of rice after heavy monsoon rainfall damaged newly plantedcrops due to be harvested in winter. With rice retail prices up 3% in the past month and 11.5% over the past year, the government hopes to quell food inflation by reserving more grain for the domestic market. It’s not the only crop that’s in crisis. Tomato prices have risen fivefold or more in recent months, prompting heists from stores, markets and trucks, and causing farmers to camp out in their fields to protect their produce from theft. One Twitter user said her sister brought 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of the vegetable in her luggage during a visit from her home in Dubai. Once again, heavy rainfall in tomato-producing states has been the culprit. Room to Build India's endowment of arable land is one of the poorest among major economies Source: World Bank Up to now, India’s most politically contentious crop has remained largely immune. Onion prices, blamed for the fall of governments in 1980, 1998 and 2014, have only risen modestly in recent months. That’s no guarantee that the situation will stabilize, however: It’ s typically in October and November that price spikes occur, when the country finds out whether damp weather has destroyed the winter crop in storage and the monsoon one in the fields. New Delhi, facing general elections in the second quarter of 2024, has been stockpiling bulbs to quell such volatility. What’s remarkable about all this is that India as a whole isn’t having a particularly unusual monsoon. Rainfall has been about 5% above average levels so far, but total monsoon precipitation typically varies 10% in either direction from year to year. The problem is that this average conceals huge fluctuations across space and time. East of Delhi — especially in the grain-producing breadbaskets of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal — it’s been unusually dry, while western states, where pulses, oilseeds and vegetable crops predominate, have been soaked. Making matters worse, the clockwork operation of the monsoon has been disrupted, with dry early weeks giving way to unusually wet conditions more recently. In the Red Indian tomato prices have seen an extraordinary spike this year Source: NNS Online This is precisely what climate models have predicted for decades— a monsoon that grows more intense as the climate heats up, with warmer air carrying more moisture and dumping it in less predictable ways, leading to more volatile cycles of drought and flooding. That will hold the entire country back. Extreme weather was already costing India $10 billion in 2017— equivalent to about 0.4% of gross domestic product. There’s a grand injustice to the fact that a nation that accounts for just 3.7% of the world’s historic carbon emissions— a smaller share than Germany — should be facing some of the worst damage. At the same time, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is responsible for its own policy choices, and many will only exacerbate the problems of food security on a warming planet. Take road transport. India is falling well behind other major auto markets in its shift to electric cars and buses, with sales percentages in the single digits last yeardespite better performance from three-wheelers and two-wheelers. One factor has been the lackluster rollout of charging stations, with 135 cars per public charger compared to 19 in the US and six in China and the Netherlands. Where India is succeeding is biofuel. The government is running ahead of its 10% ethanol blending mandate and looks on track to hit a 20% rate by 2025 as it seeks to trim its oil import bill. That’s putting pressure on farm production, however. Sugarcane is a thirsty crop which, unlike most Indian food grains, needs a whole year or more to grow to maturity. It predominates in many of the same northern states where rice and wheat would otherwise be grown. Keeping It Sweet Sugarcane has seen some of the fastest growth of Indian crops in recent years Source: India Department of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare Note: Shows change in hectarage between 2017 and 2022. Figures for winter and monsoon crops have been combined. Thanks to government pricing levels that make it an unusually profitable crop, the area planted went up around 17% between 2017 and 2022, while rice had an 8% increase and pulse fields shrank by 0.8%. If policymakers want to reduce emissions while cutting the impact of petroleum on the balance of payments, they need to reverse the current situation where biofuels are prioritized over electrification. With renewables, too, India needs to lift its game. The 15.7 gigawatts of wind and solar installed last year is only about half of what is needed to hit the government’s target and left the country 32% short of where it had intended to be by that date. Planned tenders of 50 gigawatts a year through March 2028 are markedly more ambitious — but they need to be turned from words into reality first. No country will suffer more from climate change this century than India — but no country is going to see its emissions grow faster over the coming decade. If New Delhi doesn’t want to see a future of more crop failures, floods, droughts, export bans and farmer suicides, it’s going to need to do everything to reverse that trend. Graphics and interactive charts in article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...imate-change-is-choking-india-s-food-security
Conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change — and it wouldn’t stop with President Joe Biden’s policies. The 920-page blueprint, whose hundreds of authors include former Trump administration officials, would go far beyond past GOP efforts to slash environmental agencies’ budgets or oust “deep state” employees. Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials. If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/far-right-climate-plans-00107498
‘It’s Called Summer’: GOP Brushes Off Record Heat Wave Republicans say people concerned about unprecedented heat around the world should just chill out. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-heat-republicans_n_64c3c5bfe4b024f8ebc870f5
Let's see what Fox News has to say... It's not climate change that's causing heat waves this summer but no one wants to explain why In the 1930s, the government's Heat Wave Index was four times higher https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/not-climate-change-causing-heat-waves-this-summer-explain
Whatever we did to stop the weather problems form the 1930's we should repeat How did we end the dust bowl