It’s a shame this is getting posted in the middle of the night for much of the western world. IMO this is one of the most crucial things our society must address currently. The inability to properly value natural capitol is a root cause of so many problems. If this report gives a framework for (among other things) properly assessing negative externalities than we can’t afford to ignore it.
I first realized this while walking through Yosemite national park. I don’t think you can recreate that even if you had a trillion dollars. These sights and areas are literally priceless.
The stark fact is that economic growth as we know it today will come to an end at some point on a finite planet like ours. For those who want an extremely meticulous and data driven analysis of the same I recommend reading Vaclav Smils work. I’m just sharing what I learned.
There are many websites that calculate your “earth footprint”. Ie how many earths are needed if everyone lived the same as you. My earth footprint was 4 earths !
All 8 billion of us cannot live like Americans or even Europeans.
And then there is climate change. There’s no known cheap energy substitutes on the horizon. Tesla’s are for now completely coal powered. The amount hydro carbons consumed is still increasing every year. For things like making steel, fertilizer or cement we cannot even begin to design good scalable solar powered methods.
Solar plants have a very low load factor. It often only generates 30 % of its installed capacity. So you need to over build by 3x of what you need. Assuming we also need solar power for cars we are talking about building 10x the capacity of all existing energy infrastructure and not to talk about storage.
The existing energy grid is crumbling in many places and we are talking about trillions of dollars in spending to build new high voltage DC transmission to make solar scalable.
The world population will be 10-12 billion by 2100. Its hard to imagine how everyone will have a first world lifestyle without completely trashing the planet.
> The world population will be 10-12 billion by 2100. Its hard to imagine how everyone will have a first world lifestyle without completely trashing the planet.
The global annual population growth rate is plummeting. Many countries are well below replacement rates for fertility. While poorer countries lag behind, the world's population is going to peak then decline.
> The stark fact is that economic growth as we know it today will come to an end at some point on a finite planet like ours.
Maybe, but that is a long long way off. Economic growth comes not just from resource extraction, but making greater use of resources than we did before. A raspberry pi zero costs a few dollars and is made with grams of plastic, sand and copper. Only 50 years ago a multi room sized company using tons of metal, requiring a huge amount of energy to run, would have been less powerful.
This does not mean we won't damage the earth. What is means is we need to try harder not to do so.
Information technology is an exception. Nothing in the world improves at that rate. It also doesn’t do much to satisfy our material needs for things like housing, food and basic transportation. The effects of the computer on economic output are far smaller than electricity or the industrial revolution.
You can make your car more fuel efficient but there cannot be a car that doesn’t use fuel. There are physical limits to efficiency and how much work can be extracted. Efficient isn’t infinite.
We need to scale current high living standards 10x from 1.5 billion to 10 billion while having no discernible impact on the biosphere.
Already 70 % of ice free land is shaped by humans for crops or grazing.
Inspite of all this a billion people still living in crippling poverty often going hungry.
The scale of the problem is seriously under estimated.
This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years.
Agricultural output has been skyrocketing. Transport of people are cargo has become vastly more efficient, cheaper and safer. Healthcare is barley recognisable today than it did 100 years ago. Look at solar compared to 20 years ago. And while you discount IT, it has had a huge improvement on every single industry.
It has skyrocketed because of increasing availability of energy. Energy is a conserved physical quantity. Hydrocarbons are basically a giant magic solar battery that was charged over tens of millions of years. We’re basically charging that down to zero in a few centuries like there’s no tommorow.
It doesn’t take much energy to extract this energy. In the case of solar or nuclear it takes a lot more energy to extract it safely and at scale.
You can read about the EROEI of shale, solar etc vs oil. We have fought against it using efficiency but efficiency too has limits.
If we didn’t discover oil / coal none of these changes you mentioned would have happened.
That there will be constant continuous and infinite improvement on a finite planet is far from clear. We can decline, or even go into stagnation for centuries until some major breakthrough.
There was a time when progress was so quick that people assumed flying cars were around the corner and we would all be living in space like the Jetsons. Again energy costs come into play.
> This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years.
No, it isn't. Computational efficiency has improved by more than 10 orders of magnitude since its inception (arbitrarily taken to be the early 1950s).
Agricultural output: less than 1 OM. Transport efficiency: less than 3 OM. Healthcare: less than 1 OM. Solar (presumed PV; compared to electricity production from fossil fuels): less than 1 OM.
Industrial gains from IT: the growth economist Robert Solow famously quipped "you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics". That was a few decades ago, but we are still well short of 1 OM improvement.
None of your examples comes within 8 orders of magnitude of the rate of improvement of computing efficiency since the 1950s. The comparison stands.
You don't need all industries to see 10 OM improvements to see a >8 OM improvement in total economic productivity. I imagine it's enough to improve how people coordinate resource usage by something like 10 OM to see that kind of improvement.
Ride-sharing, house-sharing, computerized car-navigation, self-driving cars, online banking, online shopping, Wikipedia, online directories of product/service providers, etc are all existing or emerging technologies that didn't exist 30 years and massively increase how effectively people can collectively utilize existing resources.
That’s like saying that going to Mars is a logistics problem. Everything involves a logistics problem because it involves profitably using energy to move things around .
There’s plenty of fresh water too it’s just a logistics problem of transporting it from Siberia to all over the earth. It’s simply not feasible.
Energy is not cheap enough to transport food to everywhere it’s needed while also not taking enough away from anyone else by force.
That means we need to live in much more efficient denser setups with mass transport to reduce logistics costs in general. It also means some redistribution of energy and hence wealth.
Agree on your conclusion. Regarding the prior it's messy with local politics, warlords, NGOs, governments etc and if there was the unanimous will there would be no hunger. Food production is a solved problem.
> There are many websites that calculate your “earth footprint”. Ie how many earths are needed if everyone lived the same as you. My earth footprint was 4 earths !
What kind of metric even is that? What does it even mean, Google doesn't say anything.
It’s based on some estimate of sustainable consumption, i.e. the earth can sustainably support everyone if their average footprint is “1 earth.” Any higher level of consumption is unsustainable. I’ve seen multiple variations on this concept, so you’d likely have to consult their specific methodologies to figure out how they determine what is sustainable.
Found this cutesy site ( https://www.footprintcalculator.org ), did the test and apparently just because I eat a decent amount of meat and heat my house so I don't freeze to death, I'm using two point something Earths (whatever that means). Everything else is way below average.
When I clicked on "How do you feel" about my Earth footprint, it presents me only with the choices: Shocked, Inspired, Helpless, Intrigued, Worried, Embarrassed and Confused. Nice propaganda, but I feel okay about myself. If this is in any way accurate and what I'm doing is too much for the climate to handle then I officially don't care about the climate. I'm not going to just roll over and die for the greater good, sorry.
As a bonus, I throw in a recently fired MA official, saying that most emissions come from residential heating and they need to "break our will" for doing that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muxVGmgykA4
Wow, that site is trash. How did I “feel” after taking the quiz? Pretty annoyed that it was trying to guilt trip me into regressing to subsistence farming levels rather than thinking in any critical way how our industries and economies might be making a reasonable lifestyle much less sustainable than it could be.
I went back and adjusted the responses to get 1 earth level, and the result is ridiculous. There’s zero chance we’ll convince 7+ billion people to be zero-waste vegans who live crammed into a tiny apartment and essentially never travel anywhere. And I don’t think we need to! Even assuming their math is correct (of which I’m highly suspect), why should we accept that the solution is to roll over and die (as you nicely put it) rather than improve agricultural methods, energy generation efficiency and sustainability, transportation efficiency, policies that fail to discourage inefficiency, etc, etc, etc. It’s such a thoughtless and uninspired (and uninspiring) take.
edit: ok, after poking around a bit more it seems their proposed solutions are more inline with common sense than it appeared initially. But wow what a terrible way to communicate and inspire people.
I already live a minimalist lifestyle, not because of the climate, but because I simply prefer it that way. If this is not enough, then the climate will be the least of concerns for our grandchildren.
> Wars are the most likely outcome.
Yes, that should go without saying. Not cooperation, but endless wars between nations over scarce resources. Or being subjegated by the world elites and basically soviet style communism. Millions starved to death, because one commissar decided that one particular country eats too much and it's bad for the climate. Assuming any of this is true, which I'm told it is.
Yes. But of course it will be swept under the carpet, as the interests of people in power are not aligned with those of the rest of the world, as always.
Jean-Marc Jancovici uses a funny analogy: the ISS cost about $100 billions. It provides a very limited environment for 6 humans. Therefore as a rule of thumb we can extrapolate the value of our existing environment that provides enough for several billions to live on it to $15 billion per person, give or take (actually, Earth is a much better environment than the ISS, which isn't really autonomous anyway). Destroying it for an annual GDP per capita of $12000 seems like a really terrible deal.
Trying to value the potential non existence of the environment using money as a measurement seems to rapidly become incoherent:
assume there's no environment. ok, so human life can no longer be supported on earth. So there's no one to trade with to exchange money for useful goods and services like oxygen and radiation shielding. The value of money is obviously zero in the limit where the environment no longer exists.
Can the analogy be adapted to measure the lifecycle cost of running an ISS terms of physical resources. E.g. what's the minimum size that a self sufficient earth bound country would have to be in order to throw off enough surplus labour and resources to launch and maintain an artificial ISS habitat for 6 people? Would a hypothetical self sufficient New Zealand with 5 million people suffice?
Here's an attempt:
Apparently ISS cost $100b over 10 years. Call it $10b / year. World GDP is around $90t / year. So ISS costs 1/9000th of world GDP. Under extreme conditions, a human nation can direct maybe 1/3 of national GDP to external government projects (e.g. WW2 total war scenario). So maybe we could have a society of 3 * 1/9000 = 1/3000 of world GDP that could sustain itself and an artificial ISS ecosystem for 6 people.
1/3000 of earth human population is about 2.5 million people say.
So a healthy resource rich earth environment + labour of country of 2.5 million people under total war rationing conditions could sustain artificial ISS environment able to support 6 people.
That's more of a fun answer to those who absolutely want to put a value and make a matter of "fair calculation" of everything, nothing to be taken too seriously.
Still, that gives some relief to the absurd notion that drives all economics that only human labour and capital have value, and that resources are infinite and free. Then, that "rational" economic considerations should drive our policies (instead of common, democratic deliberation around our competing wants and wishes, impossible to subsume into any sort of rational calculation).
Should we want to consume as much as possible as fast as we can, then disappear from the face of a scorched Earth? Or should we change radically our ways to make human life sustainable on the long term? This isn't a matter of reason, only of collective preference, that can only be decided through debate. The only thing open to calculation is what the future will be, if we do this, or that. But what future we want isn't a rational matter, and shouldn't be dictated by "those in the know", or even worse, "those in power" (irk).
How to effectively align private incentives with the public good (e.g preserving biodiversity, reducing carbon output) is a question for economists, not ecologists.
How big is the negative externality relative to other things we care about? Pigovian tax or another regulation? How much tax to disincentive the negative externality without killing industry? Where exactly should that tax be applied in the vertical chain? How do we do it with minimal bureaucratic overhead? How do we do it in a way that can be enforced and isn't open to abuse?
These are questions that the specific domain expert (e.g ecologist) isn't equipped to answer, although they should be heavily consulted with.
Part of this problem, as I (a non-expert) see it, is that so-called mainstream economists tend to operate within a specific paradigm that imbues a certain perspective toward the subjects of their analysis. Accompanying that perspective are the same sort of limitations you allude to when you point to ecologist as a domain expert (tangent: economists are also domain experts, with all of the limitations that implies, even if some economists seem to imply that virtually everything is economics...). This remains true even among environmental economists, who largely share the approach of their peers in the world of mainstream economics. While the questions you provide are examples of relevant and necessary concerns, and might be easily addressed (at least superficially) in an undergraduate environmental econ. textbook, they also reflect the limitations of the field.
In my opinion, when it comes to ecological concerns, effectively aligning private incentives with the public good is a question for ecological economists * , not just (plain old) economists or ecologists. Ecological economists, though fewer in number and typically relegated to more liminal realms of the field than mainstream economists, utilize a relatively more wholistic approach that carries with it a different set of limitations. If humanity is going to successfully address the monstrous environmental challenges it faces in the 21st century, I suspect it will be accomplished by asking different questions than those (mainstream) environmental economists are prepared to answer.
* as well as other scientists and social scientists (e.g. environmental sociologists)
Economists have a terrible understanding of the importance of biodiversity if you use how we’ve set up our economy with too big to fail corporations dominating everything as the litmus test.
I'm also highly sceptical of economics as a discipline, but still can't think of who would be more appropriate to work alongside an ecologist in order to design practical policies.
Economists aren't a monolith. As the other poster in this thread mentioned, there's such a discipline called ecological economics.
Besides, even if all of them do have a terrible understanding of ecology and the importance of biodiversity, that's the reason we need a multi-disciplinary team to tackle the issue. Ecologists by themselves won't know how to align incentives or create practical policies, and economists without ecologists will be lost.
Would climatologists be able to design an effective emissions trading scheme by themselves without working with an economist/policymaker?
If we want to establish a legal framework to prevent companies to damage the environment and to require civil remediation in case of failure we probably need to perform this exercise.
Otherwise the required remediations are whimsical and the justice delivered at best a sham. Typically, the sum requested as is currently often the case for oil spills, are far inferior to the actual remediation cost.
Finally, as other comments mention, it would also be good to know when the cost would be infinite or near infinite, to have a clear understanding of our limits and in those cases privilege using a criminal justice framework over a civil one.
Not disagreeing with you, but from my perception of economics as a field, biodiversity is not a topic that attracts a lot of attention. Working on biodiversity topics does not lead to a top 5 journal publication or a job in a prestigious institution for an economist. I doubt there is a strong incentive for economists to take on this problem. On the other hand, ecologists have been working on biodiversity for a long time. Of course, a collaboration between economists and people who work on biodiversity would seem most effective.
It's not a difficult problem to cost though is it, if we continue on the path we are on and destroy all biodiversity, we'll have killed the planet that sustains us and the side effects will quickly destroy our civilization. Thus the cost is infinite.
We can't survive without other life on earth, and life on earth dies without enough biodiversity.
What is "enough" though? 30%, 50%, 90%? And how much are we willing to spend to hit each of those targets. We're obviously not going to spend "infinite" economic resources to protect biodiversity and we've long since accepted that we are willing to sacrifice a bit of 'nature' for a bit of 'comfort' and that won't change. We're now negotiating how much we are willing to give up to save how much of nature, and that is, demonstrably, a very difficult problem.
I think it may be helpful to invert the framing of your question - you allude to spending economic resources to protect biodiversity, but aren't we actually talking about spending biodiversity (and other natural resources) to gain economic resources?
Your framing takes acquiring economic resources (a.k.a. the destruction of natural resources) for granted, assuming that we're losing, or giving up, something by opting to not destroy some portion of the natural environment for economic gain. Aren't we losing, or giving up, something every time we choose to gain economic resources by destroying part of the natural environment?
Logically, both framings are valid, but they don't appear wholly equivalent to me. Perhaps I'm missing something, but economic resources seem far more fungible than natural resources, which seems to imply that the latter framing may be more appropriate.
This difference, highlighted here, in this essentially ephemeral internet-space, may seem to occupy the border between semantic and pedantic, but I think it will take on a fundamental role in determining humanity's future prospects. How we define our relationship to the earth determines how we live. Your framing of the economic/environmental calculus seems to represent the status quo, but I don't think it represents a sustainable future for humanity. If/how/when the status quo shifts, I have no idea, but it does seem (from my limited vantage point, anyway) that more and more people are developing sympathy for the notion that modern society doesn't optimize for human well-being.
Because those in the environmental space have talked and waffled and maybe don't have the reach they need. Money talks and they might get something more done.
Yours sincerely, someone who works adjacent to those in the environment space.
> Leave it to ecologists and other biodiversity experts? Not everything warrants an opinion from economists.
Exactly. Economists are impulsive and bend to the whim of fashion far too much, they will make up theories to suit their agenda and justify it with arcane sounding jargon, which is clear to see every time they speak. When you can actually read through the BS the IMF, Federal Reserve and ECB and all other central banks are nothing more than crooks with better tailors then your average thief.
When you understand how things like derivatives like CDO, MBS or (re)Hypothecation work and how they create massive risks in the financial system (2008) you soon realize this is the biggest con in Human History.
And that the IMF and World bank have so much more influence than perhaps the UN or G20 combined. And ALL OF THEM are guilty of of crimes against Humanity.
No, the World needs to realize this cohort has vested interests in keeping the World as it is is, which protects them and their class and often lends itself to depraved things that rely on Human exploitation, slave labour in the developing World, environmental disasters for resource/mineral extraction which lends itself to human trafficking and sex trafficking of minors for all to see: Jeffery Epstein was just the most high profile case.
Those Qanon imbeciles were filled with too much of Trump's BS tasting kool-aid to realize he was Jeffery Epstein's close friend who was tried and convicted for being a sex offender of children, and that Trump was implicated in that trial of molesting young children as he was part of their class.
The fact that most people still honestly think these people have any merit, let alone would be put in a compromising position to exposing them to crimes like that let alone ecocide, is the real problem.
No, the World has to move on from this suicidal fiat based ponzi scheme we call 'the traditional' fiat based economy, and it's priests (economists) in reality this what bitcoiners like me really want the most: for average people to lose complete confidence in the monetary system that keeps Humanity from flourishing with boom and bust models that entrench thier wealth more deeply with every passing crisis and makes reform entirely impossible since it's so entrenched, and would sooner destroy the World, itself and everyone within in before it reformed itself. Most don't even realize how much more sustainable our network and system is and actively seeks and creates renewable energy sources that would otherwise be impossible due to 'economists' opinion on value creation. We create auxiliary systems and wealth creation with out excess energy (gardens or plant nurseries are the most common), whereas the fiat system will burn off it's excess gasses in plain sight and then send countries to war based on this tired notion that securing oil makes us 'safe' and charges 4+ gallon in the US when oil in ~$60/barrel, it's so absurd...
Being an environmental activist for nearly 20 years, with a background in reformative and sustainable Ag (biodynamic), and a biology degree and nearly 10 years in fintech I can say with absolute confidence NO ONE should be able to make these violations on our environment justifiable: economists, politicians, Nation-State or otherwise. And these environmental violations (Ecocide) should come with at least lengthy prison time or penalty of death, not fines that simply add up to a cost of doing business which they never pay taxes on.
I wish public outrage and cancel culture seen on social media for the most feckless and pointless of things would be directed for environmental causes, because if they only understood the calamity and chaos the ensues by poisoning our ecosystems and how it can have domino effects in precipitating mass extinction events (like we're currently experiencing) they would stop with this BS pro-noun and divisive hateful SJW tirades and mob mentality and put their energy into an actual cause with meaning that may give them purpose in life: something I'm certain every single one of the lack.
> If you're going to put a dollar cost on irreversibly damaging the ecosystem, it's going to be one you can't afford. Not in a thousand years.
Doesn't work. You're essentially saying to assign the value of infinity. Then if there is a one in a trillion chance of ecosystem damage, you have to refuse even if the alternate is to definitely lose a billion lives. Can't be infinity.
At this point you're at the old joke. Man asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a hundred billion dollars. She thinks about it a while and then concedes that yes, she would. The man then asks the woman if she would have sex with him for five dollars. She's offended. She says, what kind of woman do you think I am? The man replies that they've already established that and now they're just negotiating on the price.
You can't just use an astronomical number. It has to be as accurate as possible because it's being traded off against other real things of significant importance. If the number is too low, bad things happen. But if the number is too high, different bad things happen.
"Astronomical" isn't an actual number. You still have to decide if it's a billion dollars or a trillion dollars or a billion trillion dollars. It's possible, and harmful, to choose a number which is too large.
I find myself agreeing with you and at the same time thinking that your position is absurd. Let me try to put this into words. I might be missing parts of your point.
If we measure out the cost of avoiding total environmental collapse - which also implies human extinction - and we put a finite number on it, we've said 'the survival of human life on earth is worth this much and not more'.
It's really hard for me to get my head around the idea that we would find a dollar value that has any meaning that would properly describe the limit of how much humans value their own survival. I wouldn't know where to start, what to measure, or what to exclude. I'd personally be loath to excluding anything, as a fan of existence.
I'm not convinced I'm right to think putting a dollar value on existence is folly -- but I can't conceptualize what it would mean.
And what if the cost of not doing that is also "astronomical"? Billions of people need to eat, work, raise their families. Somewhere between mass starvation/war and environmental destruction is a cost less than "astronomical" which people are willing to pay. It has to be realistic or it won't happen.
It seems like you might be missing part of this discussion: with widespread environmental collapse as described -- irreversible decline -- humanity faces extinction, regardless of the number of jobs in the economy.
Yes, but unrealistic measures won't motivate people to make the necessary changes. There are costs people will pay and ones they won't. You're not going to care much about the future if your kids go hungry now because there are no jobs. Particularly when it's based on a future prediction that might turn out differently.
if you can't put a real cost on something you can't actually weigh it, what happens if you say ecosystem damage is astronomical in cost and the loss of jobs if we don't build this dam costs 1.5 million dollars is the dam gets built because nobody has put any sort of measurable cost on what happens if the dam gets built.
Not disagreeing with you exactly, but given the global ecosystem predates money, is it really outside the realm of possibility that money can't be used to accurately describe or measure it?
> You have to refuse even if the alternate is to definitely lose a billion lives. Can't be infinity.
Well, if the entire ecosystem collapses humanity is guaranteed to die - unless we figure out how to eat acid and breathe toxic air. That's 7-8 billion lives.
It might be safer for biodiversity if economists don't think too much about it :P The biggest source of damage might well be "optimizing" with a badly-framed/biased model... while the short-term "value" can be easily argued for, the long-term costs will typically be underestimated/externalized.
Not in a thousand years, yes. But eventually all ecosystems on earth will end in a few billion years when the sun enters its red giant phase. So irreversible damage is coming absent some intervention.
With that happening, "pricing" things will also have to account for whether the actions will lead to some sort of ecosystems lasting longer. The really long term will do amazing things with compounding...
You could account for billions of years in terms of money. Where as destroying things in a thousand because that is our business horizon is much more likely, and actually it's more like a year or two from current business practices, maybe a decade for long term thinking. If our business horizon was a billion years, then all the money and economic wealth in the world and quality of life indicators, and jobs would be so minuscule as to be a rounding error.
> If you're going to put a dollar cost on irreversibly damaging the ecosystem, it's going to be one you can't afford. Not in a thousand years.
Is there such a thing as a change that can't be reversed in a thousand year ? Just think of a scenario in which we stop consuming carbon and plastic overnight for a thousand year.
You probably don't know much about Economics and have a very distorted view on what it is. You should definitely try reading something like the Undercover Economist by Tim Harford which is a pleasant read and a good introduction to the way economists think. Economists try to understand the world using a very consistent approach. It can seem strange at first but it is very deep.
By the way, the way economists think has been deeply influenced by John Von Neumanm who has also had a deep influence on computer science (assuming that's your thing) so you may find some interesting overlap.
The (600 page) report, including 100 page abriged version that appears highly readable at a glance: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-...
It’s a shame this is getting posted in the middle of the night for much of the western world. IMO this is one of the most crucial things our society must address currently. The inability to properly value natural capitol is a root cause of so many problems. If this report gives a framework for (among other things) properly assessing negative externalities than we can’t afford to ignore it.