Speaker Notes – Rebuttal to Dr Jones’s Lecture


Given by:

Date: 14 October 2005.


1. Introductory slide


2. Crazy correlations: storks and babies, hairdryer use and teen pregnancy don’t let firemen in the house, because there is a strong correlation between the presence of firemen, and the event of your house burning down. (so why should we believe pollution is increasing life expectancy?)


3. Here are some snippets from last class…


Dr Jones started his lecture with this statement.

Clearly engineers are not entirely to blame for all the world’s problems!


4. From Wednesday’s Lecture


Dr Jones presented the argument on Wednesday that unrestrained technological progress is the solution to all our problems.


Our agenda: We aren’t here to argue that technology cannot accomplish many things. Indeed we think that technological progress is essential. We are here to argue that we exist in a complex, uncertain system, both in terms of the natural environment, as well as in terms of our own socio-economic behaviour. And that it is by no means clear what the optimal path to ensuring a happy and prosperous livelihood is for ourselves and future generations.


5. For Today


First we will review the points that Dr Jones made in his lecture on Wednesday. Then we will introduce the idea of market failures. We will point out that we do face some challenges with respect to our environment, and that engineers can play an important and positive role. Bill will discuss the role of the engineer in society- solutions to problems must be social, political, and economic as well as technical. Finally, we are here because we think that the Unabomber need not be the spokesperson for those who are concerned about the environment.


6. From Wednesday’s Lecture


Starting with some of the points Dr Jones made in the first half of his lecture…


That population growth will stabilize at around 11bn

The percentage of people starving in the world continues to decrease

Food is becoming cheaper

There are few signs of resource scarcity

Plenty of energy reserves exist

Life expectancy is increasing


Most people do not debate these points and the data Dr Jones presented is accurate.


However, in our view, they are not sufficient evidence that everything is OK and that there is no need to be concerned about the future.


7. Population Trend


Here is world population using existing data up to the year 2000, and extrapolated out from the year 2000 to the year 2200. The red line indicates the year 2000.

Note that the UN predicts the population will nearly double from 2000 levels before leveling off. Also, the reason fruit-fly and yeast populations leveled off was that their mortality rates increased when they reached the carrying capacity of their experimental cage. This graph assumes only that our population will level off because our lifestyles shift away from large families- it has no information about where our carrying capacity might be.

The critical question for engineers and society is whether or not 11 billion people exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, and if and how technology can ease the transition from current population levels to carrying capacity.


8.


Here is a chart of per-capita grain production from 1960 to 2000. Note that this leveled off after the Green Revolution around 1980. Like in the population graph, the red line indicates the year 2000.

Note that compared to the population graph, which is not yet even close to leveling off by the year 2000, this graph levels off in the early 1980s. Some might argue that keeping food production at the current per-capita food production level through the projected population increase presents a challenge for the future.


9. Ecological Footprint


The ecological footprint is a concept developed by Rees and Wackernagel at UBC. The idea is that everything we consume uses resources- from the coffee beans in the coffee we drink, to the landfill the coffee cup goes to at the end of the day. They translate this resource use into the area of land required to produce consumer goods and assimilate waste, and estimate the current average land used per person on this basis. Canada, Hong Kong, India, China, and the US are shown on this slide. Rees and Wackernagel estimate that in order to support projected population levels, the world average “footprint” will have to be closer to 1.7 acres per person- much lower than current consumption levels in the developed world. So the challenge to humankind is to develop and implement new technologies and modify our lifestyles to reduce our footprint to this sustainable level.


10. Population and Human Health


Dr Jones presented two historical examples of pollution problems that were effectively dealt with. The sewage in the River Thames in England and the ‘pea souper’ fog that affected London in the 50’s. These are both examples of local pollution effects, where the victims of pollution are directly affected by problems which they are able to do something about. I think it is safe to say that if all pollution problems occurred at the doors of the offices of government in each country around the globe, as they did in the case of the Thames river, then we wouldn’t have pollution problems for very long at all.


The global problems we see today do not generate this level of political will. Climate change is a global phenomenon that affects a global resource - clean air. The atmosphere is shared by all nations around the globe and is both a life-sustaining source and a waste receptacle for industrial emissions. It is very hard to attribute concentration of pollutants in the atmosphere to specific emission sources. The total concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a result of the sum of emissions from industry, transportation, residential, agricultural and natural sources around the globe. Despite convincing evidence of climate change and the damages that could result, it is proving extremely difficult to generate an international consensus to commit to action. The Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions does not include the largest emitter, the US and most of the participants are unlikely to meet the reduction targets it specifies.


Another global pollution problem is Persistent organic pollutants (or POPs). These compounds, such as the types of chemicals found in pesticides, can cross borders by evaporating, and are re-deposited elsewhere in rain. They accumulate in fish and marine mammals - when these animals migrate, they bring their toxin loads with them. They have also been found in harmful concentrations in the breast milk of mothers living in far northern locations such as Antarctica where these compounds accumulate.


In many countries, the costs of clean technologies are prohibitively high. So, even if engineers in a wealthy country like Canada design technology to reduce pollution problems, lower income countries may not be able to afford to use it. Since pollution can travel, its effects are felt elsewhere in the world. Clearly, transboundary pollution issues require social and political, as well as technical solutions.


Finally, Dr Jones presented statistics on how the causes of death have changed over time. It is by no means clear what is causing the rise in chronic diseases, such as cancers. Dr Jones argues that their increase is simply because we are not dying from other causes. However, cancer could equally be a result of environmental factors such as persistent organic pollutants, the science is just not developed enough to say right know.



11.


Dr Jones puts a lot of confidence in market forces to direct us in overcoming the sustainability challenges ahead.


There is no doubt that the capitalist market system is a very effective method of co-ordinating activity in the economy. We have seen tremendous increases in productivity and economic growth over the last two centuries as many of Dr Jones’s graphs have demonstrated.

And any criticism of the capitalist system must be tempered by the reality that alternatives such as Marxist economics have failed to live up to the aspirations of their founders.


However, there are problems with the market system. They are known as market failures and are universally accepted even by economists. Their relevance to environmental problems is quite significant.


12. Market Failures

The first problem with markets is prices. Prices are the main feedback mechanisms of the market. When a resource becomes scarce its price increases, giving us an incentive to substitute a different resource. This way, the market can help us adjust to scarcity. However, scarce resources are not the only problem we face. To ensure that the market allocate resources efficiently prices must represent the true cost of each alternative.


In reality prices often don’t capture the full cost of producing consumer goods. For instance, the market price of power produced using coal, which is still widely used around the world, often does not include the costs of respiratory distress, CO2 emissions, or damages caused by the wastes produced during extraction.


13. Market Failures


Take electrical power for instance: the blue bar is the cost of a KWh of electricity generated using wind. The red one is the cost of a KWh of electricity generated using coal. Coal is cheaper, so the market will guide us towards using coal instead of wind. The yellow bar shows the cost of coal generation once you factor in the costs related to air pollution, such as respiratory distress. In order for the technical solution to this particular environmental problem to be implemented- in this case, we mean the use of wind power in the place of coal- the market must include the full costs of coal production. Including these costs is a job for economists, policy makers, as well as health and environmental scientists- engineers have already made an excellent contribution!


14. Old Growth Forests


On Wednesday, Dr. Jones argued that “….”.

The thinking behind this argument is interesting. The argument focuses on a single environmental issue, and a single attribute of an old growth forest. Removing the trees from an old-growth forest would result in significant soil erosion. Erosion often causes a variety of problems in nearby water bodies, landslides, and can release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, adding to global warming. It often doesn’t make sense to consider only global warming when designing environmental policies- are we really better off reducing CO2 emissions by cutting down a forest, when this might cause a massive landslide or fish kills due to erosion? POINT - need to account for the full range of services (bioengineering services) provided by intact forest – not just a carbon sink, PLUS replanting, though quaint idea – would NOT function as a carbon sink….. [????]


15. Ecosystem Services


There are many important and complex services that nature currently provides us for free. These include photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, and pollination. These systems have evolved over millions of years to be both efficient and elegant. It is naïve, as well as conceited to believe that we can replicate these services with engineered solutions. It is also inefficient – these services are provided now, for free, by the environment. The cost of their preservation now is a series of relatively simple management decisions – rather than the overwhelming cost of an engineered solution.


Research funding is not always easy to come by. Given the simple elegance of something like natural pollination of agricultural plants by bees, it may well prove to be a much more efficient use of research dollars to design policies, like more stringent and effective pesticide use regulations, to maintain abundant levels of natural pollinators than to design some sort of system to replace them.


16. Nature is the Enemy?

Nature has had billions of years to get systems to work properly!


17. Uncertainty


In the lecture on Wednesday Dr Jones said


“We can understand and predict all important features of complex systems and the effects of our actions”

And

“We can modify technologies and adapt when unforeseen impacts are later discovered”


This is not a view shared by all scientists, particularly Earth Scientists and Climatologists. The interaction of the atmosphere, biosphere and oceans is extremely complex and dynamic and we are only now starting to understand the processes involved in this complex system.


Since nature has had billions of years to engineer these complex systems, we can be fairly comfortable stating that we don’t completely understand them- how systems.


Also: time lags – delayed feedback on impact of action – e.g. an increase in global mean temperature is thought to cause a corresponding increase in sea level around 50 to 100 years later.


Conclude, and segue into Bill’s talk.


18. Uncertainty


Here’s a little metaphor for science that I quite like on the subject of uncertainty.


The progress of science can be likened to inflating a balloon: The more we learn, the greater the frontier of knowledge becomes, and the more we realise we don’t know. So given that we only know what we know and we know that eco-systems are incredibly complex and provide us with important life support services such as air, water and nutrients. What does this say about our decision-making with respect to our actions?


One problem is irreversibility. E.g. if we discover in 50 years that ancient rainforests really do provide essential life-support services it will be too late to get them back. Top-soil is another example of this. It is an essential natural resource that Dr Jones did not present any data on. Unlike other resources there is no known substitute for top-soil and, furthermore, there is substantial evidence that top-soil is being lost irreversibly through erosion and poor agricultural practices.

Because of the uncertainties, scientists today are increasingly advocating the use of new decision-making criteria such as the Precautionary principle - the idea that if the consequences of an action are unknown, but are judged to have some potential for major or irreversible negative consequences, then it is better to avoid that action. This leads to the Idea of ‘no regrets’ decisions where we do not compromise future opportunities.


19. Destiny among the stars!


At the end of his talk Dr Jones said our destiny is in the stars…


What do you want for your future? Many would argue there is more to life than money and human ingenuity can provide.


Personally, I’m not so sure I like where this is going. I like living on this planet.


Potentially, we could easily lose something fundamental about what it is to be human if we lose (or replace) elements of our environment.


Idea of ‘existence value’

For example: some people see intrinsic value in knowing that whales exist in the ocean. Even if they are not used for any other human purpose.


20. Technological Change


Dr Jones is a technological optimist. He has a lot of faith in the ability of science to anticipate the world’s future problems and in technological progress then being able to overcome them. There is no doubt that we need technological progress to overcome the challenge of sustainability. We are in complete agreement there! In fact we need the highest rate of technological progress possible.


As we have seen from energy resources and the possibility of recycling, there are no theoretical limits to achieving sustainability and technology and human ingenuity are not limited. This is good news. Where we probably do not share quite the same level of optimism as Dr Jones is in the likelihood that technology will develop, of its own accord, at the required rate or in the directions necessary to ensure we achieve our objectives.


Dr Jones said on Wednesday “All that is needed for a thing to become practicable is that we focus our efforts on its accomplishment.” Indeed this is true and it is a good explanation of how technological progress works. There is another phrase which you may have heard: “necessity is the mother of invention”.


There is a dominant school of thought that technological change is not something that just happens automatically. Rather, it needs to be induced through incentives and often, by directly funding research and development. In a free market, R&D is usually underprovided. This happens because it is difficult to prevent inventions from being used by your competitors. Patent law is a mechanism created to alleviate this problem, but it is nevertheless often too financially risky to engage in advanced or path-finding research. Therefore government funded R&D is critical to fill the gap.


And invention is not enough either. New technologies are, by their very nature, more costly at the early stages of prototyping and commercialization. Only by getting them into production in large numbers to economies of scale and so-called ‘learning by doing’ begin to reduce the cost and make them competitive. Often technological ‘lock-in’ makes it difficult for a new technology to penetrate. For example existing road networks and urban layouts favour the use of the private automobile over perhaps more efficient alternatives. For this reason, left only to markets, the rate of technological progress will be much slower and may not progress at all unless governments intervene and create incentives.


21. Energy Intensity


Now lets look at some energy consumption data and see what effect technological change is having.


This graph shows the energy intensities of major economies over the last 100 years. Energy intensity is a measure of how efficient the economy is in terms of its use of energy. It represents the energy requirements to produce a unit of output. As you can see in most countries energy intensity is decreasing. This is of course due to improvements in technology. If we look at the efficiency of power generation plants we can see a remarkable improvement in efficiency from around 5% at the turn of the century to over 55%.


However in this same time period (between 1900 and 2000) annual per capita energy supply in the United States more than tripled and in Japan it more than quadrupled. So if energy efficiency is improving so fast why is energy use still increasing? Does anyone know?


Because of economic growth. As we become wealthier and because energy has remained cheap, we start to use energy for more and more uses. Every efficiency gain is in effect cancelled out by a new use for the energy saved. Think about outdoor heaters and all the new electronic products that we now use that didn’t exist 50 years ago.


So the end result is that energy consumption and emissions from fossil fuel combustion have continued to increase at the same rate as economic growth.


22. Stabilising the Climate


So what’s the forecast going forward into the future?


Economists have made forecasts of future growth in the economy using complex models that take into account population growth, economic and social development around the worlds, and rates of technological change. Even at current rates of technological progress they predict that the rate of emissions from fossil fuel use will more than double by the end of the century. This is what is called the ‘business as usual’ scenario (BAU) that is shown here.


At the same time climatologists have done their best to understand the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on the atmosphere and what the likely consequences would be. They say that we should try to keep the concentration under 500 parts per million which is less than double the concentration in pre-industrial times (280ppm). The current concentration is 375ppm.


Very roughly, to achieve this goal of 500 ppm we would have to keep emissions at or near the present level of 7 billion tons of carbon per year (GtC/year) for the next 50 years. This is the path depicted by the blue graph above. So what they are saying is that this problem is not going to solve itself unless some action is taken. The market does not recognise the climate change effects caused by emissions and so technological change does not kick in to address the problem.


Just like in the historical cases that Dr Jones described, we need political consensus to take action to address this problem. This will stimulate innovation and hopefully a high rate of technological change so we can get on the path toward climate stabilisation. But my question is how likely is it that these changes will come about?


23. Making Change in Society


Despite what you might think human activity on this planet is not entirely determined by engineers.


Many factors influence what goes on in the 100s of countries around the globe: individual preferences, cultures, markets, governments and other actors in society all play a role.


At the level of the individual preferences dictate what people do and what their desires are.

Their behaviour is influenced by cultures and religion which vary tremendously around the world.

Markets play a major role in many countries motivating activity to meet the needs of consumers and businesses.

And governments and other political actors in society make big decisions that effect millions of people.


Every day difficult decisions have to be made about how to use finite resources (financial, material, human and environmental) – this is what economics is all about.

To ensure that the right decisions are made, we have to understand the problem and this is the role of science.

Then engineers have to come up with effective solutions.

Finally the political actors in society have to agree before any action is taken – this is the domain of public policy making and law.


In this final stage the decision-making process is far from scientific. It is about negotiating and bargaining between competing interests. Often the political arena is dominated by special interests that some argue do not represent the common good. For example, it is thought that interests that represent the status quo (e.g. large corporations) often have more influence than other interests. Future generations who arguably experience the long term benefits or costs of decisions made are not even represented!


24. Key Sustainability Challenges


So to summarise,


There are major challenges to accomodating the livelihoods of 11 billion people sustainably by the end of the century.


There are global problems such as climate change and persistent pollutants that require unprecedented international co-operation to intervene in markets.


There is loss of biodiversity, that is not valued in the market system and we are uncertain of the impacts of these losses on the functioning of the earth’s life systems.


There are market failures that perpetuate environmental problems and the need for governments to intervene in markets to correct prices for example.


There is the problem of the rate of technological change and the need to stimulate it.


There is our limited understanding of the earth’s life support systems, and how they might respond to the effects of our actions.


The scientific uncertainty calls for new ways of decision making that we have not experienced before, and the potential time lags in responses of earth systems mean that often we cannot rely on observations or evidence of the changes, or then it would be too late.


Finally there are the problems of influencing the public policy making process and the difficulties of making decisions in the common interest when special interests are involved in the process.


25. I wish my undergrad had taught me…


I did my undergrad in Engineering 11 years ago and then worked in chemical plants and oil and gas production. Looking back at my education now, I recognise that there are many things that I wish I had been taught.




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