THURSDAY, NOV 10, 2022: NOTE TO FILE
The Earth is Full
A TED Talk by Paul Gilding 2012
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: GOOD TALK, FROM THE WIRES, NOT NEARLY GOOD ENOUGH
Abstract: This talk given at Long Beach, California, to a packed house is from 10 years in our past. It was a reasoned and evidence-based call to action that was another in the 'warning to humanity' genre. It was an appeal made 40 years after The Limits to Growth message and 50 years after Rachel Carson's warning. Oh, and 20 years after the World Scientists' Warning of 1992. It was offered the same year as the Kogi's second warning, Aluna, was released to token acclaim.
COOS BAY (A-P) — The Earth is Full:
Let me begin with four words that will provide the context for this week [of TED Talks], four words that will come to define this century. Here they are: The Earth is full.
It's full of us, it's full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands. Yes, we are a brilliant and creative species, but we've created a little too much stuff — so much that our economy is now bigger than its host, our planet.
This is not a philosophical statement, this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology. There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion — that we're living beyond our means [we are in overshoot and, yes, changing the climate too]. The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network, for example, calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy. In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50 percent more Earth than we've got.
In financial terms, this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn, going further into debt every year. But of course, you can't borrow natural resources [or money you obviously will never be able to pay back], so we're burning through our capital [a planetary larder of fossil energy, water, biomass, soil, minerals...], or stealing from the future [posterity, the next 100 generations].
So when I say full, I mean really full — well past any margin for error, well past any dispute about methodology. What this means is our economy is unsustainable [i.e. not remotely sustainable]. I'm not saying it's not nice [being served by hundreds of energy slaves] or pleasant or that it's bad for polar bears or forests, though it certainly is. What I'm saying is our approach [consensus narrative based on error, ignorance, and illusion] is simply unsustainable [i.e. this modern techno-industrial form of civilization will end — humans... maybe not].
In other words, thanks to those pesky laws of physics, when things aren't sustainable, they stop. But that's not possible, you might think. We can't stop economic growth [as that would violate the maximum power principle]. Because that's what will stop: economic growth. It will stop because of the end of trade resources. It will stop because of the growing demand of us on all the resources, all the capacity, all the systems of the Earth, which is now having economic damage.
When we think about economic growth stopping, we go, "That's not possible," because economic growth is so essential to our society that it is rarely questioned. Although growth has certainly delivered many benefits, it is an idea so essential that we tend not to understand the possibility of it not being around.
Even though it has delivered many benefits, it is based on a crazy idea — the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. And I'm here to tell you the emperor has no clothes. That the crazy idea is just that, it is crazy, and with the Earth full, it's game over [after 50k years of human expansionism]. Come on, you're thinking. That's not possible. Technology is amazing. People are innovative [e.g. Clovis point and force multiplier atlatl technology]. There are so many ways we can improve the way we do things [e.g. mass extinction]. We can surely sort this out.
That's all true. Well, it's mostly true. We are certainly amazing, and we regularly solve complex problems with amazing creativity [e.g. prove Fermat's last theorem and find evidence of the Higgs boson]. So if our problem was to get the human economy down from 150 percent to 100 percent of the Earth's capacity [or actually to a biophysical economy of enough based on 20% of Earth's capacity in 50 years to leave room for Nature and reduce population by 95% in 50 years to avoid scarcity triggered conflict], we could do that [easily by rapid birth-off].
The problem is we're just warming up this growth engine. We plan to take this highly-stressed economy and make it twice as big and then make it four times as big [to end poverty] — not in some distant future, but in less than 40 years [by doubling economic growth every 20 years by maintaining a mere 3.5% growth rate], in the lifetime of most of you. China plans to be there in just 20 years [by 2032].
The only problem with this plan is that it's not possible. In response some people argue, but we need growth, we need it to solve poverty. We need it to develop technology. We need it to keep social stability. [We need it to grow the economy of the Global South while contracting that of the Global North so we can fully implement a Green New Deal and achieve all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.]
I find this argument fascinating [in a bat-shit crazy sort of way], as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs [Congress will soon repeal the 2nd Law]. It's like the Earth doesn't care what we [usually clothed apes] need. Mother Nature doesn't negotiate; she just sets rules and describes consequences. And these are not esoteric limits. This is about food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives [and starvation and a conflict/scarcity induced widening death gyre where 'the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world' (Yeats)].
So the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient, solar-powered, knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology [aka Green New Deal] so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion. It's not that it's not possible to feed, clothe and house us all and have us live decent lives [assuming 'energy too cheap to meter' or that the 9 billion will indeed be feed/clothed/housed until maybe 2060 if that is all everyone thinks about cooperatively doing]. It certainly is [impossible to feed more than 600 million without fossil fuel inputs into the industrial food production system].
But the idea that we can gently grow [or resiliently transition] there with a few minor hiccups is just wrong, and it's dangerously wrong, because it means we're not getting ready for what's really going to happen [rapid depopulation, managed or unmanaged]. See what happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate [i.e. as we have been for 300 years] is that the system stops working and breaks down ['things fall apart']. And that's what will happen to us [given that we did not slam on the population/economy/production/consumption brakes in 1972, or 1812].
Many of you will be thinking, but surely we can still stop this. If it's that bad, we'll react. Let's just think through that idea. Now we've had 50 years of warnings. We've had science proving the urgency of change. We've had economic analysis pointing out that, not only can we afford it, it's cheaper to act early. [We knew this and were told this in 1972, but in 2022 we are still not listening to Nature who has all the answers.]
And yet, the reality is we've done pretty much nothing to change course [okay, there was a ready substitute for CFCs, so the ozone hole thing is not such a deal now]. We're not even slowing down. [Meanwhile, 'the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed' —David Suzuki 2016.]
Last year on climate, for example, we had the highest global emissions ever. The story on food, on water, on soil, on climate is all much the same. I actually don't say this in despair. I've done my grieving about the loss [reality ceases to seem strange once you get used to it (HLM)]. I accept where we are. It is sad, but it is what it is. But it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we're not acting, we're not close to acting and we're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy.
And that's why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for. So when does this transition begin? When does this breakdown begin? In my view, it is well underway. I know most people don't see it that way. We tend to look at the world, not as the integrated system that it is, but as a series of individual issues.
We see the Occupy protests, we see spiraling debt crises, we see growing inequality, we see money's influence on politics, we see resource constraint, food and oil prices. But we see, mistakenly, each of these issues as individual problems to be solved. In fact, it's the system in the painful process of breaking down — our system, of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth, is eating itself alive.
I could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this, but I won't because, if you want to see it, that evidence is all around you. I want to talk to you about fear. I want to do so because, in my view, the most important issue we face is how we respond to this question. The crisis is now inevitable.
The issue is, how will we react? Of course, we can't know [the details of] what will happen [but climax and descent will happen]. The future is inherently uncertain [unpredictable]. But let's just think through what the science is telling us is likely to happen. Imagine our economy when the carbon [energy] bubble bursts, when the financial markets recognize that, to have any hope of preventing the climate spiraling out of control, the oil and coal industries are finished. [Or worse, we keep trying to kick the can of growth further so we can grow bigger and fall harder.]
Imagine China, India and Pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water. Imagine the Middle East without oil income, but with collapsing governments. Imagine our highly-tuned, just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying [and a 95% die-off to avoid violating anyone's reproductive rights].
Imagine 30 percent unemployment in America as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty. Now imagine what that means for you, your family, your friends, your personal financial security. [Imagine things are so much better in the United States of America, especially in Long Beach, so much better than everywhere else, that almost everyone else in the Americas (and elsewhere) wants to come to your table to share the wealth.]
Imagine what it means for your personal security as a heavily armed civilian population gets angrier and angrier about why this was allowed to happen [who riot, burn cities... while dividing along political lines, each side vilifying and blaming the other, righteously inflamed in a conflagration of passionate mysideism].
Imagine what you'll tell your children when they ask you, "So, in 2012, Mom and Dad, what was it like when you'd had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row, when every scientific body in the world was saying you've got a major problem, when the oceans were acidifying, when oil and food prices were spiking, when they were rioting in the streets of London and occupying Wall Street? When the system was so clearly breaking down, Mom and Dad, what did you do, what were you thinking?"
So how do you feel when the lights go out on the global economy in your mind, when your assumptions about the future fade away and something very different emerges? Just take a moment and take a breath and think, what do you feel at this point?
Perhaps denial. Perhaps anger. Maybe fear. Of course, we can't know what's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty. But when we think about the kind of possibilities I paint, we should feel a bit of fear. We are in danger, all of us, and we've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat [which, however, is not climate change, but overshoot in multiple forms which maybe some fraction of one percent of humans can see in front of their pug-nosed face].
But this time it's not a tiger at the cave mouth. You can't see the danger at your door. But if you look, you can see it [through a glass darkly that inspires no corrective action] at the door of your civilization. That's why we need to feel our response now while the lights are still on, because if we wait until the crisis takes hold, we may panic and hide [fail to persist].
If we feel it now and think it through, we [the 99%; the 0.001%?] will realize we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Yes, things will get ugly, and it will happen soon — certainly in our lifetime [if average age of audience is 40, then in 40 years or so]— but we [maybe the 0.001%] are more than capable of getting through everything that's coming [and who knows, maybe the 1% with more ammo in their bug-out bunker will get through the bottleneck to rebuild a dysfunctional world of their making that works just fine for a time until it doesn't].
You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right [if humans end up building a Dyson sphere and go fourth to colonize a universe for the taking]. The only thing they're missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going. When we feel fear and we fear loss, we are capable of quite extraordinary things [building Dyson spheres as Borg-like expansionists].
Think about war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it just took four days for the government to ban the production of civilian cars and to redirect the auto industry, and from there to rationing of food and energy. Think about how a company responds to a bankruptcy threat and how a change that seemed impossible just gets done.
Think about how an individual responds to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and how lifestyle changes that previously were just too difficult suddenly become relatively easy. We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. And the good news, this one's a monster. [Laughter]
Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilization, but if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilization instead. And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that? There's certainly no technical or economic barrier in the way. [Actually, declining energy deliveries have a determinate outcome, are a barrier.]
Scientists like James Hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net CO2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades. I wanted to know what that would take, so I worked with professor Jorgen Randers from Norway [who at the time was certain that the human population would peak at about 8 billion in 2040 and decline] to find the answer. We developed a plan called "The One Degree War Plan" — so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required. To my surprise, eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap, not very cheap, but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization.
We didn't calculate that [the cost of collapsing civilization] precisely, but we understand that's very expensive. You can read the details, but in summary, we can transform our economy. We can do it with proven technology. We can do it at an affordable cost. We can do it with existing political structures. [Existing political structures from democracy to autocracy select for short-term self interests — it's a form of civilization thing, i.e. there are no political solutions for political animals, a modern condition.]
The only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel [we just need the political will to rapidly degrowth our population to 85 million, or there abouts]. And this is where you come in. When we think about the future I paint, of course we should feel a bit of fear. But fear can be paralyzing or motivating. We need to accept the fear and then we need to act [note that the 'solution' is a call to 'action' of some sort].
We need to act like the future depends on it. We need to act like we only have one planet. We can do this. I know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do. They're wrong. We can be more, we can be much more [if we destroy the Old Education system and replace it with a New Education system, formal and informal].
We have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago [e.g. the collapse of all prior overcomplex societies]. We've built a powerful foundation of science, knowledge and technology — more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent, meaningful and satisfying lives [until we can't turn fossil fuels into food].
The Earth can support that if we choose the right path [e.g. rapid depopulation]. We can choose this moment of crisis [when we admit it has come, maybe ten years after the fact at which point we reactively panic and things fall apart in chaotic collapse as usual] to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution — like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality?
Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered [sane and sapient]. Like generations before us, we'll be growing up in war — not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age. ['Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.']
We can choose life over fear. We can do what we need to do, but it will take every entrepreneur, every artist, every scientist, every communicator, every mother, every father, every child, every one of us [to stand down from our hubris heights]. This could be our finest hour. Thank you. [Applause]
[Failure to properly estimate the difficulty of muddling through, the challenge of persisting through a ghastly future (bottleneck) and sidestepping extinction, may disallow a viable future. Sorry. Not good news for 10 year olds.]
