biology a la Economist

It always surprises me how little people know about biology and the natural world. No wonder then that nearly half of the population thinks humans and dinosaurs coexisted at one point in time. Or that the planet is less than 10,000 years old. What is truly shocking however, is that even the well-educated are so ignorant of the basics. Below is another gem from this week's Economist.

Before we go there it is perhaps good to point out that much ignorance is due to propaganda from people who have an agenda. The agenda is often religious or couched in religious terms, but in the case of the Economist it is likely to find its origin in the capitalist dogma. The capitalist dogma that says private enterprise is the only road to happiness and prosperity. Here we go.

From the Economist, on fertility: "Malthus himself thought richer people would have more children and, as any biologist will tell you, animal populations increase when there is more food." So far so good, although if you are an astute fan of Hollywood movies you can already see who is being set up for later destruction. This time it isn't just Malthus but also "the biologists."

We go on:"To understand why wealthy people differ from well-fed animals, imagine yourself..." and it continues to give the most common rationalization as to why richer people have less offspring. I am sure you heard this before. When you are poor you need children to help you work the land or take care of you when you get older. That must be the single-best example of an after-the-fact rationalization ever. Can you imagine two young people having sex and thinking about this?

First, let's point out the obvious error. The reason the world population increased so quickly starting in the 1950-60's, doubling in a mere 44 years, is clearly due to more food. Everyone knows the poorly- named "green revolution" is to blame for the rapid rise. "Improved" agriculture with better yields made the boom possible. It had a dramatic impact in Europe and the US but even more so in Asia. China grew so quickly that it felt compelled to institute a population-control measure that even the Economist acknowledges was very effective at preventing disaster.

Yes well-fed people reproduce more quickly. Not in the least because most of their offspring survive when well fed. That is no different from well-fed animals. We are -horror of horrors- animals like all the other animals. However distasteful this may sound to religious zealots and wealthy capitalists alike, we are animals and our behavior is very similar to that of other animals.

Second, only after the population started growing and overcrowding became a problem, did fertility start to drop. If you look at it closely you can also see that the more urbanized a group is, the more its fertility drops. Urban populations experience more overcrowding. Ironically enough, the very same Economist article provides ample evidence for this. It points out how many societies saw enormous drops in fertility and how cities (Tehran is used as a prime example) saw larger drops than rural communities. All places with large drops that are mentioned are urban and overcrowded.

And that too is something we see in animals. When populations are stressed and overcrowding occurs, fertility drops.

Despite all the great rationalizations presented, (if you are a poor farmer, blah blah, but if you are a wealthy city dweller, blah, blah), this is not how people behave. They don't think, I am a poor farmer, I will need kids to help me work or take care of me when I am old. As bankers should know because they often say it when peddling 401ks or IRAs, young people never think about being old or what will happen to them when they are old. Young people just love to have sex, consequences be damned.

And so it is time for an immutable law on human behavior: humans don't act rationally, they rationalize their actions.

population explosion

According to the US census bureau, there were an estimated 1 million people on the planet in 10,000BC. Apparently since that time the human population has increased continuously until the present day. That seems a bit suspicious to me, but so be it. The rate of growth has also increased continuously and there is only one period of significant deceleration. That happened in the 1,000 year window centered around year 1.

In 10,000BC , it took an estimated 1,000 years or 10 centuries for the population to double. There are some minor fluctuations in the estimates but these are probably due to the guesswork involved. By 1,000BC we have an estimated 50 million individuals roaming around. Then the population suddenly starts doubling in approximately 500 years or five centuries. By year 1 we have 170 million people or just 30 million shy of the projected 200 million. And here we see the only noticeable drop ever. It takes another 600 years for the population to reach 200 million.

Starting around 600 the rates accelerate once again. 650 years later we have 400M. Then 550 years later we have 800M and 105 years after that we have 1,600M or 1.6 billion. We are now in 1905 and the doubling rate keeps shrinking. 65 more years until we hit 3.2 billion, then 40 years until we hit 6.4. Luckily, the Census predicts that it will now take 44 years (a whopping 4 extra) for the rate to grow by 50%. You could say, whew, finally!

So what is behind this incredible explosion? It appears that two factors were key. Both involve access to new sources of power and energy. One is the switch from manual and horse-driven labor to machinery and the second is the discovery and wide-spread use of oil. There is little doubt that the so-called "green" revolution is responsible for the biggest boost of all. Clearly what matters most is how much food we can produce. More food equals more people.

Unfortunately our food production system is unsustainable in the long run. It is a system whereby we input almost 10 times as much energy -from oil- as we get out. We get the 10 fold extra by burning through an energy source that took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate. And we are going through it in 100's of years. Clearly something is out of whack here.

When the oil industry gleefully reassures us that we are many decades away from peak oil, we may end up feeling relief. The gas-guzzler crowds feel vindicated that once again, the doomsday prophets have failed. But ask yourself this simple question. If we are decades (or even centuries for that matter) away from reaching peak oil, shouldn't we be scared shitless? We are talking about a resource that took 100's of millions of years to get to its current state, and we have been using it for what? 100 years? And we are within a few tens or hundreds of years of depletion?

One thing is for sure, the population graph won't level off nicely like the US census predicts. It may soon start looking like the stock market of the year 2,000. Except that this time around it won't be virtual or paper losses on the way down. It will be real people.

back to the future

Above all, people want optimistic views of the future. Never more so than in problematic times. That explains why Kurzweil is such a fun read today. His promises are surely one's that we can all understand. We have been looking for immortality since the dawn of civilization. What better way to escape high gas prices, food shortages, pollution, and the threat of global warming? If we all lived forever then it wouldn't matter what evil things the future has in store for us. That is the beauty of virtual reality and video-games. When you die you get another life and you can try again.

As a futurist you don't want to disappoint your audience. You have to give them hope, otherwise what is the point of listening? But if you really want to sell books you have to have unbridled enthusiasm and predict exceptional things to come. It doesn't really matter if you are wrong, because the people who buy your books won't be around to witness it. Or if they are, and you were wrong (that is almost guaranteed by the way), they will have moved on to other things.

I personally remember going to a neural network meeting in the early 1980's. At that time energy was high, and the feeling that we had finally understood the brain was universal. Sure, there had been AI or artificial intelligence in the 60s, and it had failed rather miserably, but that was precisely the point. This time around we learned from our mistakes and knew better. And so a very prominent researcher who was starting a company predicted we would all have smart vacuum cleaners by the mid 1990's. Vacuum cleaners that were smart enough to know when the vacuuming needed to be done and take care of it too. At the time, the prediction was met with skepticism. Surely, the researchers in the audience thought, this problem would be solved much sooner than the mid-90s. By the mid-90's we would have smart machines that we could talk to.

Ok, so maybe we were off by a few decades, so what? Clearly, we are making progress. And if you chart the right mile-stones on the right axes, you will see that change is happening exponentially faster. Which means that pretty soon we will get to the singularity. That is a mystical word for hitting the time axis (you have to draw things the right way to see this of course). Now change will be instant. It will be a dramatic step change. Furthermore, this change will be for the better. It will be exponentially better.

Never mind that there a few problems with this approach. One is in the milestones. In essence, you can pick whatever milestones you like, and history has plenty to chose from. You decide whether the steam engine was a world changing event or not? Like the Wright brothers better? And what about the more distant past. Here some well-heeled beliefs are unquestionably wrong but so what? If they fit the chart, why let data get in the way of a good story?

There is one chart however that is based on rather solid data. It too shows very rapid growth and when you extrapolate it further it too will reach a singularity. It is a chart that concerns us all as it shows how many people there are on the planet. In some very real sense we are the data points for that graph. While there is some uncertainty as to the past data, it is of very little concern to us now. Because the curve remained largely flat for a long time. It started its upward growth very recently. And our data for that part of the curve is very good. Since all people are counted within the limits of accuracy, and since the time points are fixed, there is little picking and choosing here. Very little value judgments as to what is important and what is not. No argument as to whether this or that individual represents a breakthrough.

It is clear to everyone that growth of this nature cannot be sustained indefinitely. Somehow, somewhere it has to slow down. Even the most optimistic agriculture experts believe the planet can only sustain 10 billion people. We are past 6 now. Luckily enough, other "experts" predict we will level off at 9 billion around 2050. So why worry you say? Because those same agricultural experts believe the planet can only sustain 2.7 billion "Americans." In this context, Americans means people living at the standard of living (or standard of waste) that current Americans live at.

The bottom line is that even the wildly optimistic think we are in for some serious belt-tightening in the near future. Now that won't sell too many books unfortunately!

calories explained

Most people in the Western world know or think they know what calories are. Yet it appears that few connect calories and energy. Witness to that the success of foods and drinks that promise to deliver energy without calories. Another common example of disconnect are the ubiquitous zero-calorie energy drinks. In case you wonder, the calorie is a unit of energy. There is no such thing as energy without calories and the expression makes about as much sense as saying length without meters (or feet) or weight without kilograms (or pounds).

The word calorie contains the root "calor" or heat and calories were originally defined as the energy required to heat a certain quantity of water (a gram) by a certain amount (a degree centigrade). The definition does not limit the calorie to heating however, and calories are a universal unit for energy. You can calculate the energy content of food, gasoline, natural gas, heating oil, and even nuclear materials, and express it in calories. Since the calorie is a rather small unit, it is not used all that often for gasoline or heating oil. Even the food calorie is in reality a kilo-calorie (or 1,000 calories).

Nutritionists will tell you that the average adult needs about 2,500,000 calories, or 2,500 "food calories" to stay healthy. Most of us consume quite a bit more and these excess calories are stored away as fat. Today, over half the population in the civilized world has excess calories stored away. The mantra in the West is how to loose weight, not how to stay properly fed.

The calorie is an older unit, and the official SI unit of energy is the joule. You may have noticed that some food packages express energy as both calories (Kcal to be exact) and KJ or kilo-joules. When you bought a portable heater or installed an air-conditioner, you may have noticed its rating in BTU or British thermal units. A BTU is approximately 252.5 calories. When you look at your gas bill, you may see yet another unit, called a Therm. A therm is 100,000 BTU or 25.25 million calories.

A kilogram of fat contains 9,000,000 calories or almost 36,000 BTU. A cubic foot of natural gas has approximately 1030 BTU or 260,000 calories. That is equivalent to 260 food calories, and you would need 10 cubic feet of gas per day to stay healthy (provided you could utilize the energy in natural gas).

Why go through this physics lesson?

The reason is to get a better understanding of how we stay alive. We stay alive because farmers produce excess calories that they do not need to feed their families. These excess calories can be traded (sold) to keep non-farmers alive. The non-farmers in turn mine and produce the other goodies we all use. That includes many items that farmers can use to make their yields go higher. And farm yields have increased significantly over the last 100 years. In the 1930's one farmer could sustain 10 people. These days, one farmer sustains 80 or more individuals. In a primitive economy, farmers could only produce enough food for 3-4 individuals. We have come a long way you might say. Yet there is no such thing as a free lunch.

One key reason why farmers have become so successful is because they put in a lot more energy to produce food. Whereas farmers were once limited to manual labor, supported by domesticated animals, today's farmers rely heavily on oil-powered machinery. They also depend on artificial irrigation systems, and heavy doses of fertilizers and pesticides. All in all, they are not just using more energy to produce food, they are using more energy per unit of food produced. What that means is that they are putting in more calories than they get out. And not just by a small margin. Estimates are that we consume 9-10 calories to produce one calorie worth of food. We are definitely entering a region of diminished returns.

All that excess food has had some serious consequences. Not only did we all get fatter, we also reproduced more. A lot more. The population boom of the last century was largely a result of the earlier "green revolution" in farming. Suddenly we could sustain a lot more people, and guess what, a lot more people quickly appeared. Now it seems, we are entering an era of more limited resources. Unfortunately, all those extra people are still with us. And they will be with us for a while to come. Not only that, but those people have already started reproducing too.

And therein lies our key problem.

speculation?

Is the food shortage for real or is it speculation? The same can be asked in the commodities and energy markets. Are we running out of goods and oil or is the shortage artificial? NYTimes editorial writer Paul Krugman answered this question recently by offering three alternatives. The first, that it was all due to speculation and investors driving prices sky high, mainly because other markets were performing so poorly. This apparently has happened before, but more about that later. The second was a combination of both speculation and some real shortages, while the third was outright and real shortage.

I think there is an answer that avoids a choice between these alternatives. Because in some sense they all play a role. Certainly food and commodities prices are high because of a fair amount of speculation. And we aren't really out of food (yet). The wave of obesity, which some call the epidemic is still in full swing. Clearly, many have too much to eat. So much so that they would prefer to use some of that corn to put into their SUVs and offset high oil prices.

Much of the speculation is also driven by future planning and by estimates of future yields. In the planning section we have the ambitious and voter-pleasing US plan to use more corn for ethanol to "reduce dependence on foreign oil." I have pointed out several times before that we are dependent on foreign oil because we choose to be wasteful, not because we need foreign oil. And no, we don't need to drill the Alaska wildlife refuge to handle this self-made problem. Secondly, we also choose to do so to prevent others from taking too much oil. I.e. we have a vested stake in making sure we use enough oil.

As for yields, there are the dire predictions of future shortages in almost anything of "real value." Food, oil, basic materials, etc. That is certainly true and worrisome, and if we keep on wasting stuff the way we do, we are bound to run out sooner rather than later. What is not mentioned here is that the pollution buildup from all that mining, oil-burning, and food producing activity will probably get us long before we run out of supplies.

Add to the planning and yield projections, the ability to make a quick buck, and the never ending greed of "investors." As has happened before in times of plenty, people are once again becoming unashamed of their unbridled greed. Some are so unashamed, they proudly display greed as a token of success. But as the good pope would remind them, greed is a deadly sin. What that really means apart from religion, is that the human experience over the centuries has shown that openly visible greed almost always leads to disaster. The disaster is then framed as god's punishment for human sins.

The truth is that we are awfully close to disaster. That too has happened before many times I might add, but NEVER on a planetary scale. That is what makes this looming disaster so much more worrisome than any previous one we have faced. And when we get closer to disaster, real and artificial shortages, and combinations of both will become more frequent. Initially, all will eventually dissipate and give the naysayers plenty of ammunition to scold those who worry, but in the end, shortages will become so frequent, with so little normal time in between that everyone will get the picture. Unfortunately, by then it will be too late to take effective measures and avoid a widespread and deep catastrophe.

carrying capacity

To some the earth looks overcrowded as it is. To others there is still much open space left. Years ago, I borrowed a motor home from one of my friends to go visit the American West. I had never been there. Before I left he told me I would see how much open space was left. And he was right. We drove across hundreds of miles of empty space with barely a creature in sight. No doubt my friend thought these acres would all one day be filled with suburbs and gated communities like the one he lived in in Orange County. There was only one problem. A problem that is easy to overlook from an air conditioned motor home with a stocked refrigerator. No water.

For people who grew up watching 2001, Star Wars and other movies that show a future of mega-cities with high rises reaching into the stratosphere, and many layers of aerial traffic, it may appear that we have a ways to go. So what if the luddites say it can never happen? Did they not say that about trains and automobiles too? Clearly, the sky is the limit when it comes to success. Soon we will have buildings that reach up for miles, space hotels flying around in orbit, and bases on the moon and mars. Or will we?

Unfortunately, the movie set designers never consider the real logistics of their creations. How does one feed all these people? Where does all the waste go? Where does the energy come from to power all these vehicles, air- and space-craft? And what about the inevitable pollutants? These are all real issues that matter. Take the simple sky-scraper for example. Already, current designs lose huge amounts of space for ventilation shafts, heating and cooling, cabling, elevators, stairs and what have you. The higher you go the worse it gets. Soon what limits you is not how high you can build, but how much real usable space you get. Sure that may not matter so much for one or two buildings, whose main purpose is to impress visitors from other nations, but putting your whole population in monster buildings does create serious problems. The best sky scrapers are the ones that are largely empty.

I would venture to say that we are near carrying capacity on the planet. Unless we were to adopt stringent restrictions and rationing, our ability to feed people will soon be under stress. And that is true even if we leave nearly 1 billion people hungry as is. That is one sixth of the population. The US makes up one twentieth of the earth's population but it uses more than one quarter of the available resources. We do not have enough resources to bring just China or India up to our current level, let alone both of them.

The problem is not just food. We are also polluting at an extremely high rate. Pollution other than air, is nearly invisible in the West because we are very good at dumping our trash somewhere else. And we are dumping enormous amounts of it. Furthermore increasing percentages of it are harmful in one way or another and they do pollute groundwater and other precious and limited resources. If other countries started generating trash at the rate we do, pretty soon it would become quite visible to all.

There are areas in this country where resource destruction is quite visible. What is always so striking about these places is not just the destruction, but the enormous amount of waste surrounding it. Clearly, these scars are not going to disappear anytime soon, unless we are prepared to spend big dollars.

Already the gaseous pollution is there for everyone to see. CO2 levels are rising. Methane levels are rising. And the planet is experiencing a greenhouse warming effect that will stay with us for centuries to come. Even if we were to stop adding greenhouse gases today, the effect would be there one hundred years from now.

It is no longer sufficient for us to find a new source of energy to sustain our appetites. We need to also find an effective way to deal with our refuse. That will ultimately prove to be a much harder problem. One more reason to start conserving and to reduce waste today. There isn't much time to left to lose.

more nonlinearities

The Wall Street Journal today published a long story on Malthusian predictions. It is quite an interesting read and it got me thinking again about nonlinear behaviors. Even though such behaviors are all around us, many people find the concept difficult to visualize, and even more find it difficult to be concerned about. Yet all natural systems display significant nonlinearities. And there is one particular form of nonlinear behavior that we should be very worried about. And that is one where you cross an invisible threshold and things become self-sustaining. Let me give an example.

Anyone familiar with medicine knows that certain conditions are caused by toxins and that removing the toxins is essential to curing the condition. But they also know that there is often a point where this simple solution is no longer effective. Even though the toxins are removed, and the patient is no longer exposed, the damage keeps going and eventually leads to organ destruction and death. Such events are relatively rare, but they frighten both doctors and patients. More so because the point of no return is situated somewhere along the path of exposure but nobody knows exactly where or when. Such a phenomenon occurred in a small number of people as a result of a very promising anti-diabetes drug developed by Warner-Lambert, now Pfizer. That drug was subsequently withdrawn. The affected patients required a liver-transplant and many died.

A similar scenario worries climate scientists. We pollute the environment and we assume that, at all times, we will be able to stop and even reverse the damage by some technological means. You could argue that we have done so successfully in the past. There have been times where pollution in big cities was extensive and was remedied effectively by new rules and regulations. Cities like London have better air today than they did at many time periods in the past. The same has happened in Los Angeles and other metropolitan areas. So far so good. At some levels pollution is really a linear phenomenon.

The idea that we can reverse damage when we want to seems like a logical assumption to make. It is a good reason why people feel things will be alright in the end. If pollution really becomes a problem we will have a fix for it. And even if we don't, we can always do something about it then and there. But that may not always be the case. So far the episodes we had to deal with were all pretty confined and local. And the pollution had few secondary effects. It consisted of noxious gases and particles that eventually dispersed or dropped to earth. It wasn't the type of slow accumulation in the atmosphere of gases that had other significant impacts such as trapping heat.

When it comes to greenhouse gas pollution, we are dealing with extensive secondary effects and a global situation. Climate change is a global event. There are fewer remedies available for global effects. There is no place the gases can go. We can think of technological ways of trapping gas, but projects of such magnitude are very difficult to implement. The best we can hope for is to trap greenhouse gases where they are produced. Removing gases from the atmosphere in large quantities is a bit more involved. And it may not help. Once the climate changes significantly, other things happen. These in turn may sustain further warming, even if we should manage to remove all the excess CO2.

We could find ourselves in a situation where we do not know what is driving further changes. And if matters accelerate we may not be able to find a good solution quickly. Or we may run out of time trying to implement it. Such scenarios may sound far fetched, but in effect very little global change is needed to jeopardize our long term survival. You may think we are pretty robust and we are very adaptable, but you better think again. There are good indications that humans are quite fragile and that adaptations take a long time to develop. It may be far easier to change behaviors now. And more effective too.

nauru and the free market

The BBC ran a story recently (3/15) on the fortunes of the Republic of Nauru. Nauru is a small island in the Pacific that had the good fortune of being covered by bird droppings for centuries on end. That built up a layer of the world's purest phosphate and provided a tremendous source of income for the population. Phosphate is a key ingredient in fertilizer. Nauru quickly became very rich. So rich that the population did not know what to with all its money. In that sense it is much like America today. The Nauru spent money on sports cars even though there are few roads. You get the picture. The story is fascinating.

Nauru is also a great example of free market economy and its story clearly shows that the "market is always right" is not a smart idea. The inhabitants of the tiny island would have been much better off had they done some thinking ahead and some planning. Government regulation would have been very beneficial. No doubt some of the Nauru population got very rich and a few may have become especially rich. Those few probably would not have liked government intervention. But there is no doubt that as a whole the population would have been better off. Nauru is a microcosm of what happens when humans discover wealth.

It is also a good example of what happens when the party ends. And the more quickly and efficiently people mine their resources, the more trouble they are in for when the bubble finally collapses. You may argue this could never happen here. But it already has. The US economy is a string of bubbles, each one bigger than the previous one. And each one leaving more trouble in its wake.

For sure, we live on a much larger island. And we have many more options and more resources. But ultimately, the planet is just Nauru on a grander scale. It would behoove us to learn these lessons before it is too late. Because this planet is all we have. Unlike the Nauru, who will surely recover by relying on others, once we create a planet-wide bubble there will be no place to turn to. No alternative. Not like so many other civilizations. Take the Icelanders, who turned to the sea for a second chance, after they destroyed the land. We will not get a second chance.

And planet-sized bubbles are nearby. It is time to take the warnings seriously instead of debating the finer points of the science behind global warming. Because global warming is but one of the many problems we are faced with. Overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion, unsustainable practices, etc. It won't last. Now is the time to do something about it. And "letting the market handle it" is the dumbest thing we can do. Because that amounts to doing nothing. It is what the rich and greedy like because it fills their pockets more quickly and more efficiently. No obstacles in my way ! No need to slow down me getting richer every day !

Unfortunately, when that happens we will all lose.

market forces

A favorite line in the Wall Street Journal is "let market forces take care of {anything you care to add}." According to the WSJ anything and everything can be solved this way and should be solved this way. It is like a mantra. And there is no doubt in my mind that market forces can "fix" things, depending on how you define fix. If fixing things means letting go and see what happens then the WSJ is the do-it-yourself newspaper par excellence.

The main reason why the WSJ aficionado's want to let the market fix things is because they are afraid regulations will cut into their profit margins. It is not that they want to fix things or that they even care. It is just that they are afraid as all hell that someone would do something that would take even a 1,000th of 1 % of their profit margin. In the old days this used to be known as greed and it was considered bad. Now if anything, greed is good. Never mind, it won't last.

Letting the markets decide is not only synonymous with doing nothing, it is also the dumbest thing one can do. But why do you think rich people, who ought to have some smarts -after all they were smart enough to move wealth in their direction and makes us believe this was the right thing to do- would take such a course in the face of overwhelming evidence that it can't last ?

There are several reasons why. First off, they are incredibly greedy. So greedy that their fear of missing out on something is many times greater than their reason or common sense. They will follow that fear until they are absolutely, 101% sure that there is no other way to go. And even then they will first try to shift the blame and the obligation of a fix onto others. Unfortunately when things move fast, such a strategy is too little too late.

Secondly, they feel immune to most threats. They live in ivory towers and are largely unaffected by bad news. It is only natural for them to think that this will continue forever. Marie Antoinette, the one who famously said, "Let them eat cake." never saw it coming either. She thought she was above it all and untouchable. Why me worry? Most superrich feel the same way. They think they will survive and survive well.

Thirdly, there are many so many apocalyptic predictions -and better than 99.9% of them never materialize- that most people are very suspicious of doomsday scenarios. The few times that everyone really worries -as in the famous Y2K "crisis"- are usually non-issues and the aftermath of those just reinforces the notion that all doomsday scenarios are unrealistic.

But it is not predictions of doom that should worry you. It is simple facts. The fact that most fisheries are overfished. The fact that we can see the end of oil and fossil fuels. The fact that Lake Mead is dropping below the Las Vegas city intakes. The fact that the climate is changing. The fact that the rain forest is shrinking. The fact that the population is exploding. What all these facts tell you is that something will happen soon unless we take serious steps and implement severe restrictions.

Sure, the markets will take care of it. But markets take care of things in a very simple way. They crash or collapse causing immense and long-lasting hardship. Surely we are intelligent enough to find a better way ?

peak oil (again)

Peak oil made it into the local news yesterday. In a Special Report, KTVU described "peak oil" as a phenomenon that is gaining adherents everywhere. It was described as an "apocalyptic" vision with severe shortages in food, medicine, technology, and the like. An end of the world scenario. KTVU then dug up a UC Berkeley economics professor to call it all "laughable" and "untrue." Although the professor did agree that global warming was a problem. When it comes to fossil fuel however, he thought there would be plenty to go around for a long time to come. Even when oil runs out we will be able to produce liquid hydrocarbons to feed our energy "needs," he said.

I for one, tend to agree that it is unlikely we will run out of energy anytime soon. I have said before that pollution is much more likely to do us in. But that does not mean we won't be in trouble if oil gets more expensive. In the simplest scenario, prices for liquid fuel -the kind you need in transportation- will go so high that everyone will be forced to cut back severely. Given how our need for liquid fuel is embedded in our infrastructure, that alone could cause major upheavals. Think the housing market is bad now ? What if suddenly all those nice suburban homes become worthless ? Because modern suburbia is built on the premise of cheap liquid fuel. Without it, all those houses have no value. To say nothing of the houses in the middle of the desert. These too are in for a major re-valuation. Negative numbers come to mind.

Humans are very good problem solvers. Especially when the problem is easily perceived. Lack of oil is such a problem. While it may not go down without some major hardship and pain, it is unlikely to cause an apocalyptic scenario. The same cannot be said for insidious problems such as global warming, where the true cause is much more open to debate and the link much more indirect. Warming is especially problematic because it is difficult to imagine during adverse weather events, of which there are plenty. Nobody is very keen on global warming during a snowstorm.

Pollution is a difficult matter because its effects are very stealthy. Crop yields go down slowly, driving prices up and causing shortages. Diseases spread to newer locales. Food shortages make people more susceptible to disease. Salt water intrusion and flooding destroy valuable crop land. Wind erosion removes top soils. Weather becomes more erratic leading to occasional heavy losses. All this happens slowly and in the background. It hardly ever makes front page news. And to make matters even more confusing, a ton of 'noise' is superimposed on the long term trends. The noise often makes it difficult to see what is really happening. And it gives the naysayers plenty of ammunition that can be put to good use in politics.

But the most dangerous result is the sudden appearance of positive feedback. Entering what is known as a vicious circle of negative effects. (Ironically enough I found that the Wall Street Journal called the current vicious circle in housing an example of negative feedback. Negative no doubt refers to the negative outcomes such as falling prices. Because the phenomenon described was a clear example of positive feedback. At least in the engineering sense of the word. Maybe economists have a different definition?)

In any case, positive feedback can appear suddenly and unexpectedly. When it does, disastrous outcomes accelerate quickly. Then it is often too late to fix things and perfectly reasonable fixes may now only make matters worse. Because we entered into a different regime. One in which the old rules no longer apply. This is a situation humans are not very good at solving. For one, the number of good solutions is now very small and dwindling even faster. For another, drastic counterintuitive actions are needed fast. Last but not least, time is a major enemy. The latter is especially true where for humans. Because humans have a huge built-in lag time. Their life-span and their time to maturity are very long. Coupled with huge numbers it is a recipe for disaster. These scenarios can lead to apocalyptic endings. You have been warned.

the forgotten charm of the outhouse

Sewage spills into the San Francisco Bay have become headline news. It started with a multi-million gallon spill in Richardson Bay during the heavy January rains. Then there was the San Quentin parking lot spill that drained into the Bay. Pretty soon, eager journalists discovered that spills are a regular occurrence and are usually quickly forgotten. A token fine is paid and everybody moves on. For the sewage treatment plants, paying the fine is peanuts compared to the money that would be needed to upgrade the system. Most systems are outdated by several decades and in need of millions of dollars of repairs.

In the meantime we are polluting the Bay and with it a plentiful food supply of bottom feeders and salmon. It is not just a minor inconvenience. And it is not about to get better. Because nobody wants to pay the extra taxes that would be needed to fix the problem. You heard the voters: they want services but they do not want to pay for it.

But why is there a problem? For one, there are over five million toilets in the Bay Area that all get flushed several times a day.

You may think the modern toilet is a marvel of engineering. Especially the newer low flow types that "save" water. This is the type of savings that we are familiar with. Spend more to save more. And even those low flow marvels account for a huge chunk of the residential water use. Imagine that, we spend all this effort to provide clean running water, free of chemicals and bacteria, and people just flush most of it down the toilet. In some cases, cities will go as far as desalinating ocean water at a huge cost and huge pollution just so we can flush away our waste (into those same oceans by the way).

Is an ultra-low flow toilet the solution ? Well, not really. The famous water closet (WC) toilet is the problem not the solution. It used to be people had outhouses to take care of waste. Outhouses are remarkably simple. They consist of a wood plank with a round hole in it, suspended above a huge container. The more sanitary ones include a cover for the hole and screens in the vents to keep out flying insects. The outhouse does not use water. It also keeps the smells out the house by a simple means: location. No water waste and no fans or windows that let out the heat (that then gets replaced).

Outhouses have another benefit. The residues stay put and ferment. Then they can be used to cover the land and fertilize it for the next growing cycle. That way we return a lot of the nitrates that we took out in plants. It is a neat cycle with a minimal amount of loss. That, my friends, is a marvel of engineering. It cuts back on water and artificial fertilizer use. Granted, it is a rather stinky preposition especially on those days when the redistribution takes place. It is not something our modern noses are used to anymore. It is not something suburbia can tolerate. Never mind the tons of air pollution from SUVs, lawn-mowers, leaf-blowers and chain saw exhaust that smells like roses to us now. But not human waste, mind you. That is "unnatural."

So what happened to this marvelous system ? Well, soon people figured out they'd rather not go outside to use the bathroom. They'd rather do so in the comfort of their home. But that meant bringing a toilet into the house, not exactly an appetizing idea. To solve this problem, ingenious minds invented the flush toilet and the S shaped outflow. Now there was a way to dispose of things and block smells from entering back into the house. Add a couple of fans and generous windows and you can take care of the other smells too. Never mind the heat and cooling you lose that way. It is all part of modern conveniences. No more freezing bottoms or scary night time trips to the outhouse. No more fears of falling down the toilet.

Cities, with no room for outhouses, quickly discovered the sewer system. At first sewers would just dump their residues in rivers and streams a little ways away from the city. But that quickly led to ugly and smelly scenes and so sewer outlets were moved. Until they could no longer be moved. In came the sewer treatment plant. More water and power use. And more losses. Because we were now shipping the valuable nitrate and other bio-components away from the land and the next cycle of plants.

Soon other ingenious minds came up with the artificial fertilizer, a clean non-smelly substance that can be spread over the land with bare hands. Never mind all the oil and power that went into producing that. And once that fertilizer goes into plants and the plants into humans or animals, the residues just get flushed away. So every season you need to bring in more fertilizer. That, my friends, is good for business and the economy.

While we were busy undoing this highly efficient system, we also added a lot more people. That is called a double whammy. We move to a more wasteful system and we bring in more people to waste even more. And where do all these fertilizers go ? With a healthy dose of enteric bacteria mixed in ? To the oceans. There, they provide ample nutrients for algae and bacteria in a convenient watery medium. And to make matters even better, we are also adding a healthy dose of warming just to keep the pot boiling.

Now instead of recycling our waste and growing more food with it, we ship it to the oceans where it grows algae. Algae that then bloom and use the oxygen supply killing off the fish that we otherwise would eat. In other cases we "only" add bacteria, that are now also free to multiply in the water (instead of the soil where their expansion is limited). These can then infect our favorite shellfish and other bottom feeders and make us sick that way. Or they can infect us when we use the beaches for recreational activities.

However, we all have warm bottoms and a toilet in the coziness of our home. And in doing so, we are helping the economy.

population bubble

In 1950 there were an estimated 540 million people in China, virtually the same as in Europe. India had a mere 350 million while the US stood at 150 million. The total world population was at 2.5 billion, nearly half of which lived in China and Europe. What came next is generally referred to as the baby boom in the West. In history texts the baby boom is often seen as a reaction to the loss of life in World War II. The data do not mesh very well with this view. US losses were relatively small, at less than half a million, yet the US population doubled in size in the next 56 years.

In Europe, where significant losses of nearly 50 million had occurred, only 250 million were added. That means Europe only grew by 50% or half as much as the US. The real population boom happened in Asia, where the impact of war had been relatively small. From 1950 to 2000 China's population more than doubled to 1.3 billion. India's population skyrocketed to over 1 billion and is expected to keep growing and eventually overtake China. In China growth was so rapid that authorities had to step in and force mandatory birth control. China's growth has leveled off at 1.7 or below replacement, but India is still far about replacement rates at nearly 2.8.

A better explanation for this furious growth is oil. The exploitation of this new energy source enabled many things, chief among them a near doubling in agricultural productivity. Suddenly there was a mountain of food and a means to distribute it relatively cheaply. And more food quickly translated in more babies surviving to adulthood. The change was greatest in those countries with untapped potential. And that included the US and much of SouthEast Asia. Europe was densely populated to begin with so the impact here was far less pronounced.

The agricultural miracle has been called the "Green Revolution." Its key ingredients were pesticides and fertilizers. But one should not forget the plentiful oil used to power farm machinery, irrigation systems, and refrigeration and shipment of food. The Green Revolution was seen as a great victory for science and technology. It coincided with many other breakthroughs that changed people's lives in rather dramatic ways. These include the automobile, radios and TV's and even some fearful weapons such as the atomic bomb. Many of these had been developed decades earlier but the late 1940s and early 1950s were the period of market acceptance. The war and its aftermath played a great role in worldwide distribution.

As is common during such times, people quickly moved to integrate the new amenities into everyday life. Cities were built that were predicated on the automobile and oil. Layouts that had never been seen before and that would not have been viable earlier on, quickly became the norm. And nowhere was this more obvious than in California and the American West, areas where there was little history to stand in the way of progress.

Excess production in the West fed the growing armies of people in the East. And in return, the East quickly provided cheap labor to make trinkets for us. Industrial production started to shift Eastward and the economies in the West quickly moved into Services and other intangibles. All the while the world ran up a big credit card bill. A bill written in pollution, resource depletion, and greenhouse gas production. A boom time economy has developed that is dependent on cheap oil and all the benefits cheap oil can bring.

Unfortunately, it is not sustainable. But it is also not hard to see why people would resist letting go of it. And why people think so highly of scientific breakthroughs and technological solutions. The latter however were merely clever tricks to better exploit the true driver of the bubble: oil.

To keep going we won't just have to find another source. We will also have to deal with the residuals left over from the previous party.