Why don’t we run out of non-renewable resources?

Matt Ridley:

There is not a single example of a nonrenewable resource that has run out. Nobody ran out of stone in the stone age, iron in the iron age, or bronze in the bronze age. That’s not why these ages peter out, it’s rather because we move on to something else ..whereas renewable resources tend to run out, like whales, passenger pigeons, and white pines.

(Hat-tip to Falkenblog)

Why do we not run out of non-renewable things like metals, of which no more is being made; but do tend to run out of renewable things like big game?

Two related thoughts:

The difference between stocks and flows. Broadly, a stock is the amount of something that you have, and a flow is the rate at which it is being replaced or added to (a bath full of water is a stock of water, and the rate it is being filled from the tap is a flow). Non-renewables have a flow of zero, but the stocks are massive. Renewables do have a flow, but the stocks are small and the flow is not flowing quickly enough.

Technological advances that increase the rate at which we can access resources. A breakthrough in oil extraction technology effectively increases our stock of oil, because we have made more if it accessible. More people with more guns, or more fishing boats with bigger nets, do not serve to make more fish and game accessible, they just increase the speed with which we harvest.

Human nature, and why you shouldn’t get in a tizzy about it

I’m currently reading Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, sub-titled “Why dense cities, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, restored wildlands, radical science and geoengineering are essential”. It’s a cracking book, with a light touch of style that leavens a wide-ranging, quote-heavy discussion on a lot of environmental issues.

A standard eco-pessimist could announce almost triumphantly in 1992:

“Modern humanity is rapidly destroying the natural world on which it depends for its survival. Everywhere on our planet, the picture is the same. Forests are being cut down, wetlands drained, coral reefs grubbed up, agricultural lands eroded, salinised, desertified, or simply paved over. Pollution is now generalised – our groundwater, streams, rivers, estuaries, seas and oceans, the air we breathe, the food we eat, are all affected. Just about every living creature on earth now contains in its body traces of agricultural and industrial chemicals – many of which are known or suspected carcinogens or mutagens.

As a result of our activities, it is probable that thousands of species are being made extinct every day. Only a fraction of these are known to science… By destroying the natural world in this way we are making our planet progressively less habitable. If current trends persist, in no more than a few decades it will cease to be capable of supporting complex forms of life.”

(That was Edward Goldsmith’s opening salvo in The Way: An Ecological Worldview. His worries are accurate individually, but they are selective, one-sided, and over-aggregated into a paralysing spasm of angst.)

I don’t entirely agree with Brand’s point that Goldsmith’s fears are “accurate individually”, but I agree with his general conclusion of a “paralysing spasm of angst”.

The question to ask of that statement is: What is it for? What is the point? No doubt it made Goldsmith feel better in writing it, but what could it possibly achieve? It’s all very well “alerting” people to what you perceive to be the state of affairs, but as I’ve said before, “raising awareness” can be a complete waste of  time, if not actively unhelpful. Reading that paragraph, assuming you take it as correct, how do you feel? Do you feel energised to go and find out about what he is talking about, to understand the problems, and to find and implement solutions? Or do you feel like it is all too much, and why bother trying?

This is the perpetual problem that environmentalism has – presenting your view in order to impress upon people the magnitude of the problem as you see it makes the whole situation seem an insoluble mess.

However, a lot of people do find out more, they do look for causes (if not necessarily solutions), so the awareness raising isn’t necessarily wasted. But all too many people come to the conclusion that the problem is human greed. The obvious corrollary to this is that if we solve or eliminate greed, the problems will be solved.

Let’s step back a bit from the idea of greed. It’s an emotive term, let’s think about it. Think about greed as being a subset of the more general human desire to want more stuff. Not all stuff-wanting is bad. A starving man wants more stuff – to eat – so that he doesn’t die. He also wants more stuff so that his family doesn’t die either. He will then want more stuff so that he and his family are protected to some degree from the elements and from misfortune; and then so there is surplus, enabling his children to go to school instead of having to work. And so on. At some point on this scale of actually having more stuff, people declare that the point at which all reasonable demands are satisfied, and that any more is just plain old greed. Probably, most people think that that point is just a little bit above where they are on the having stuff scale.

So, the point at which greed starts depends on where you are on the scale, and anyway it is the result of a hard-wiring that we have which makes us want more stuff because, for essentially all of evolutionary time, we have only ever been a couple of pieces of stuff away from death. That’s quite an incentive.

Now, consider diving in football. Diving is a perfectly rational response for as long as the potential benefit (getting a free kick or penalty) outweighs the risk (being caught and booked). Apart from the diver no-one really likes diving, so lets get rid of it! According to the greed-causes-environmental-problems hypothesis, what we need to do is instruct the players to slightly diminish their will to win. After all, if we were all less greedy we wouldn’t have environmental problems, right? So if footballers were all less keen to win we wouldn’t have any more diving. Yeah right.

Newsflash: human action is dictated by human incentives. Get used to it.

You won’t get rid of greed, however the hell you define it. Even if it were true that greed does cause environmental problems you won’t “solve” greed, so you’d better look somewhere else for your solutions.

But why do people plump for the greed hypothesis (and by implication the non-greed solution)? Because the presentation of environmental problems as an existential crisis that can only be understood or appreciated in the abstract invites similarly abstract, existential solutions.

If the problem is presented in discrete chunks, solutions are easier to conceptualise, develop, and ultimately implement. And you don’t have to change human nature to do it.

This is not how a chartered institution should declaim

As an environmental consultant, I am a graduate member of the Chartered Institute of Water and Environment Managers (CIWEM), one of the main chartership organisations for environmental specialists. It has a very important role in aiding and recognising the professional development of its members; and in keeping standards high in the profession. I have no complaints in those respects.

What I have a problem with is the way it postures, like some Marxist environmental studies undergraduate, on all sorts of things that frankly are not within it’s proper business. Reading WEM – Water and Environment Magazine – is often like reading some of the loopier comments on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free. Here is one item from the summer, which I reproduce in full here (italics are mine):

CLEANSE THE OIL STAINS FROM THE ARTS

How can the UK’s most revered arts establishments continue to collaborate with the perpetrators of catastrophes that leave legacies of incalculable environmental, social and economic damage?

Crimes against the environment are crimes against humanity. Therefore CIWEM, led by the Institution’s Arts and Environment Network, deplores the continuing acceptance of guilt monies and influence from the petro-carbon industries. CIWEM believes that it sullies the arts and undermines our cultural institutions as it represents affirmation of these global social and environmental crimes.

The present oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is but one disaster endemic of the carbon industries that perpetuate a culture of mendacity, greed and destruction backed by generations of craven politicians. It has brought to head a situation that for many years has been uncomfortable but tolerated.

CIWEM calls on the Government and Trustees of cultural institutions to put a halt to the tyranny of oil patronage and cleanse the oil stains from the arts.

Nick Reeves, CIWEM’s Executive Director, says: ‘As the terrible and tangible effects of climate change unfold, we are incredulous at the degree of cognitive dissonance displayed by our society. In the face of increasing global poverty and depravation we are disgusted by the disregard for social and environmental justice. As we witness the cynical atrocities of oil corporations in their pursuit of wealth, influence and power at the expense of people, animals, plants, landscapes, the oceans and all habitats and living things, we must speak out.’

Even if you agree with that, which I don’t, a sense of self-awareness wouldn’t go amiss. Many many members of CIWEM work for, either directly as employees or indirectly as consultants, all sorts of dastardly evil corporate types (oil or otherwise). I’m not talking about not biting the hand that feeds you, but about how you can maintain an ongoing working relationship. You don’t walk into a meeting, shout “F*** off you evil b******” in the face of the person you are meeting and then sit down and expect to have a meaningful discussion. Environmental consultants work with industry. That’s what they do – consult, with organisations that are doing big messy things and need to make sure they are minimising the mess.

CIWEM needs to consider it’s role in the world and how what it says helps define it.