Decline of the Empire

A Note On Adventures In Flatland — Part II

I am aware that some of the concepts introduced in Part II are difficult. Species extinctions driven by human actions are easy to understand, but thermodynamic models relating energy and the global economy are very hard to understand.

I want to point out that humans, especially orthodox economists, are just as deluded as I said they are, a point which becomes easier to make when we consider Paul Krugman's Could Fighting Global Warming Be Cheap and Free? (hat tip, reader Reed).

This just in: Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free.

But will anyone believe the good news?

Adventures In Flatland — Part II

This is Part II of my essay Adventures In Flatland. These essays are an attempt to summarize my work on Decline Of The Empire (DOTE) — Dave

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The Human Relationship To The Natural World

If you're waiting for an ecological crisis to persuade human beings to change their troubled relationship with nature, you could be waiting a long, long time
   — J.B. MacKinnon

In "Consume, Screw, Kill," a review of Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, Daniel Smith sums up the human relationship to the natural world.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, 250 years ago, humans have dug, developed, dammed, and diverted with such transformative fervor that the effects will be detectable in the geologic record 100 million years from now. We have become indelible...

An Israeli oceanographer, Jack Silverman, summarizes the problem of the [destruction of] coral reefs for Kolbert as follows: “If you don’t have a building, where are the tenants going to go?” The question is rhetorical, but it raises an uncomfortable subject that The Sixth Extinction, for all its thoroughness, never truly addresses.

That subject can be put in the form of another rhetorical question: From the point of view of the slumlord, or the developer, or the demolition crew — or whatever role humans would be assigned in Silverman’s metaphor — what does it matter where the tenants go? Our indifference to the tenants’ welfare, after all, is why they’re in trouble in the first place. We haven’t much concerned ourselves up to this point. Why should we start now?

Indeed, now may be the unlikeliest time for us to grow a conscience about how our rapacity is endangering other species, since we’re now aware of how frightfully our rapacity is endangering us...

The key word describing the human attitude toward the natural world is indifference. Smith goes on to say that "we’re now aware of how frightfully our rapacity is endangering us," but who does "we" refer to?

Adventures In Flatland

This is Part I of a three-part essay summarizing my work on DOTE. The second part will be published in the 2nd half of September. The third part will appear sometime in October. This essay is closed to comments. I know that's not the "spirit" of the internet, but that's my preference.

My e-mail is included at the end if you want to contact me — Dave

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How Goes Life Among the Humans?

Imagine if you can a wise, compassionate, and reasonable species quite unlike the one you belong to. This other species does not wage war or destroy its planetary environment willy-nilly. This species does not produce most of its own suffering. The members of this species are not deluded—they don't believe, as some humans apparently do, that if only everybody quit smoking, handguns were banned, and gays could get married anytime they wanted, all their big problems would be solved.

The list of differences between this imagined species and we humans would be very, very long.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

As I mentioned, I've been taking my time with Part III of Adventures In Flatland. But I have completed the first section of that essay. It wasn't easy to write because of the subject matter. I was trying to explain the Flatland perspective on bullshit. How do we define bullshit? What motivates it? And so on.

Anyway, that was the easy part. The hard part was taking humans seriously. Consider Paul Krugman's recent Rolling Stone article In Defense of Obama. By the way, Krugman does not appear in Part III.

I said to myself, "Why are you writing this? Virtually nobody reads your shit anyway. Why don't you just publish the picture and caption below and be done with it?"

Cognitive Superiority?

Normally I wouldn't say anything, but stuff like New Technique Offers Faster, More Accurate Way to Count Brain Cells compels me to respond (Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2014).

Such stories seduce me. I am weak.

Counting brain cells helps scientists explain how humans differ from other animals, but until recently, enumerating billions of cells by species was too onerous a task to tackle. That changed with the work of a Brazilian researcher who pioneered a technique that is both fast and accurate.

We’re looking at the most basic properties of brain tissue,” said Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who developed the approach. “What is it made of, what are the rules of putting a brain together and how does the human brain compare to other brains?”

The 11 Trillion Dollar Delusion

I've got time on my hands and haven't mentioned the U.S. economy in a while. Some stuff is too good to pass up. I'll quote from Bloomberg's The $11 Trillion Advantage That Shields U.S. From Turmoil.

Call it America’s $11 trillion advantage: Consumer spending is likely to steer the U.S. economy safely through the shoals of deteriorating global growth and turbulent financial markets.

The combination of more jobs, falling gasoline prices and low borrowing costs will help lift household purchases. Such tailwinds probably matter more than Europe’s struggles or the slackening in emerging markets that caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average last week to erase its gains for the year.

“We’ve got a lot of things working in favor of the consumer right now,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist in Lexington, Massachusetts, at IHS Inc. “To have that kind of strength is the biggest asset for the U.S. It’s a pretty rock solid footing.”

Rock solid. So rock-solid that September retail sales were even worse than economists' lowest forecasts. But that's merely a quibble.

What Is Real? And What Is Not?

In a post called Slow Steaming and the Supposed Limits to Growth, Paul Krugman doubled down on the delusional optimism he recently expressed in Could Fighting Climate Change be Cheap and Free? The Conscience of a Liberal was responding to a Bloomberg View piece by Mark Buchanan, who is an actual physicist. Buchanan's editorial was called Economists Are Blind to the Limits To Growth.

Allow me to explain why I am one of those scientists who are preoccupied with the physical. Economists are correct in saying that growth doesn't necessarily require more pollution, more carbon pumped into the atmosphere or more deforestation, even though we're getting all of the above today. Humans can learn, and we might figure out how to grow differently in the future, separating the benefits from the environmental costs.

There's just one crucial exception: energy.