The wikipedia article does a good job of relating all the topics covered in the three episodes, you might want to read that first if you havn’t seen the programs as I’m going to jump around a bit and pick out just some of the ideas that interested me.

The main theme of the series is that from the mid-20thCentury, new ideas emerging from ecology somehow hooked up with evolutionary theory, genetics and computer science to produce the idea that humans and human society, along with the rest of nature, can be understood as machines acting in a system, which are therefore controllable and predictable. Curtis sees this as a dangerous idea, that robs us of our human agency and makes us doubt the existence of free will, especially, the will to change things.

These themes converge dramatically in the Rwanda and Congo: -the Rwandan genocide is portrayed as the result of misguided liberal guilt of the departing Belgian colonialists, who had created artificial tribal conflict in colonial days by propagating the myth of Tutsi superiority; then encouraged the new Hutu government to rise up against the Tutsi minority who had oppressed them during colonial days. This was then exacerbated by misguided involvement of western aid agencies who set up camps which became breeding grounds for more violence; -meanwhile Dian Fossey studied Gorillas in Rwanda, ultimately coming to abuse the local people in efforts to protect the gorillas from poaching; -all this against a backdrop of the rise of computer technology which was fueled by the mining of Coltan in the Congo, spawning a war that has cost 4 million lives in the last 8 years- the computers being the machines which, according to some, then became the way out of economic boom and bust, the way to a stable society which could run itself- like a machine.

The series starts with a look at the influence of Ayn Rand’s influence on the modern world; I have to admit that I had no idea that her objectivist philosophy had had such influence on Alan Greenspan, who was one of here disciples.

While governments had been unable to provide stability in the markets, the advent of computers gave rise to the idea that human society itself could be modeled as a self-regulating system: computers became seen as a medium for liberation and equality. This idea emerged from Silicon valley in the 1970s at the dawn of the computer age. Environmentalist Stewart brand was one of the pioneers, providing one of the links between systems theory and ecology.

But prominent ecologists were already taking on the idea of nature as a self-organising machine. Jay Forrester was an early pioneer of cybernetics, the view that brains, cities and whole societies operated as networks of nodal connections, and that computers would be able to uncover their operating system.

The Odum brothers, Howard and Eugene, developed electronic models of ecosystems based on field data, which they claimed showed how nature self-organised towards balance: the idea of natural balance and the web-of-life. There models became accepted as fact within ecological science.

Although permaculture is not mentioned in the series, Howard Odum was a major influence on permaculture co-founder David Holmgren who dedicated his book “Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability” (2002) to him. He also references cybernetics as another strand of systems thinking, but goes onto say

the influence of systems thinking in my development of permaculture and its design principles has not come through extensive study of the literature, but more through an osmotic absorption of ideas in the “cultural ether” which strike a chord with my own experience in permaculture design. Further, I believe many of the insights of systems thinking that are difficult to grasp as abstractions are truths that are embodied in the stories and myths of indigenous cultures.

His reference to indigenous cultures provides an interesting cross-over of the role of systems thinking in actual machines- computers- to human society and nature- that there is an “intuitive” aspect to this understanding as well as an empirical one.

I had also come across systems theory in the work of Joanna Macey and Deep Ecology, and had a vague feeling then that it was somehow at odds with the “holistic” “intuitive” side of things that Deep Ecology was supposed to be all about. Computers and machines seemed the exact opposite of emotional encounter groups that were the hallmark of Deep Ecology sessions. I see now that the cybernetics part was giving the movement scientific credibility- it was science, with models and graphs and studies to back it up, but of a “holistic” kind. There were also lots of references and general interest within Deep Ecology with New Science, Capra and the Tao of Physics, Buddhism and physics and David Bohm, and so on. (From there you are only a short step away from Deepak Chopra and The Secret.)

So these ideas were taken on by greens and the counter-culture without realizing that they came from something as dry and soulless and mechanistic as computer science- the very antithesis of what the movement imagined itself to be about. “Getting in touch with nature” was supposed to be about the emotions, and spiritual forces, not lines of computer code, a great irony in this whole story which I find quite fascinating.

The idea of human systems was also influential in the next part of Curtis’ narrative, the hippy commune, and one of the greatest migrations out of the cities in America took place during the 1970s as mainly young people flocked to the land to live in small utopian communes which were non-hierarchical -they were supposed to operate like self-regulating systems. Some communes did prosper and thrive and are still around today- like The Farm in Tennesee, although Curtis mentions only that most of them failed after a few months or at most a couple of years. Why? (I lived in two communes for short periods of time; they were both pretty dysfunctional and as was often the case had rapid turnovers of residents. A major course of conflict was the dish-washing rota.)

Perhaps the problem was with the underlying theory of stable, self-regulating eco-systems in the natural world which, as Curtis explains in the documentary, has not stood the test of time. The models that Odum had made were over-simplified; ecology has moved on from the notion of “natural balance” and most ecologists now agree that ecology is about constant dynamic change and adaptation. There may not even be such a thing as a distinct ecosytem anyway, since boundaries are always permeable. (The idea of the whole earth as a system was developed into the Gaia hypothesis by Lovelock, something Curtis only mentions in passing.)

There is no such thing as natural balance, and computer models cannot replicate natural systems very well at all. This is a theme explored by Aynsley Kellow in his book which I reviewed here.

So what does this mean for permaculture? I don’t know, but the idea of a design system based on natural systems does seem to me these days to be metaphorical at best: actually we don’t want our systems to be too much like nature for all sorts of obvious reasons. There are lots of good ideas in permaculture for design and the idea of self-regulation in a designed system makes perfect sense- collecting rainwater, managing perennial landscapes for food- this need not have anything to do with a natural system though. Still, it is interesting that the underlying theory may be based on a completely flawed view of nature.

This idea however went on to inform public policy quite profoundly long after the science had moved on. In 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, based on Forrester’s cybernetics. The report used computer models to forecast the point of overshoot when the population and consumption of people would outweigh the planet’s carrying capacity. This has become a seminal text, one of the foundations of environmentalism, and is still widely referenced today, eg in the preface of “Fleeing Vesuvius”.

Critics claim models are only as good as the data and assumptions that go into them, and that the modelers underestimated the ability of humans to innovate and adapt. Interestingly, Curtis does not mention climate change, although this would be an obvious extension to the narrative: a science relying heavily on models, but with sometimes poor data, trying to integrate human, ecological and climate systems in one huge model, a process that is itself having enormous influence on policy. It is almost as if we believe that, given enough data and computer power, we can predict the future.

Curtis takes these ideas through the east European revolutions in the early 2000s, that used the same idea of non-hierarchical organisation, but that went the same way as the communes: they failed to account for power and inequality already present and soon reverted back into corruption.

Richard Dawkins gets a mention as taking the theory further with the idea of the Selfish Gene (originally invented by William Hamilton): human behavior can be understood as being driven primarily by the impulse of the gene to survive. This doesnt make people selfish necessarily, but it does provide an explanation for things like the Rwandan genocide: from the gene’s point of view, it makes sense to kill our cousins, or at least those not too closely related but not too distantly related either.

Which raises a couple of interesting questions, because if genes mean that we really are like computers and the code is in our genetics, where then does lie free will? This is really the whole point of Curtis’ film, to question the validity of a theory that says, everything can work as an orderly whole, we are just cogs in the machine, so how can we really work to change things? Where can political action come from? Interesting questions, but I am not sure that free will’s existence or otherwise is a testable hypothesis.

Curtis is concerned that seeing ourselves as just part of a system with “natural balance” could be seen as a way of justifying discrimination and apartheid, as had been done by Field Marshall Smuts and his theory of “holism”- everything had a natural place, presided over by white men. In this sense then these ideas of basing human systems on natural systems and striving for some kind of pre-existing balance is far from liberating or progressive, but could lead to oppression and fascism.

So a lot of interesting ideas, covering science, environmentalism and policy. I’m sure I’ll return to explore more them more in the future.

Dear Rob

Thanks for your comments and continual engagement with z5 which I know you have been following since it began 5 years ago.

You point out that there has been a dramatic change of direction in my views over the past couple of years, taking the blog far away from its original purpose of promoting peak-oil doom and powerdown/transition strategies.

This is true and now seems as good a time as any to address this in the context of some of the issues that you raise.

However, you seem to forget that change of direction means that I am fully conversant with the views you defend, having been at least as eloquent and vociferous advocate of them as you good self for many years; it is therefore curious that you think you can tell me I don’t know what is really going on in the environmental movement or within Transition: I am in fact as you well know intimately familiar with these positions.

I’m not going to try to give fully referenced responses to every point you bring up- some I have already addressed in other recent blog posts and will continue to do so. Each issue deserves many posts and books and ongoing discussion so I am not in any way suggesting this is the last word on any of it.

You say:

If you believe that “climate change provides the perfect cover for dismantling modern industrial society which is considered to be inherently “unnatural” and just bad and wrong” then it follows that any policy that addresses climate change is seen as a step too far.

You seem extraordinarily unaware of what the actual issues are Rob- I am beginning to suspect you haven’t been paying nearly as much attention to z5 over the past couple of years as you claim

I would point you towards the work of Bjorn Lomborg on this one. He will introduce you to the concepts of “cost-benefit” analysis, which is the only way to address any environmental issue (compare with your own preference for spurious notions such as “the precautionary principle”- see below). In a nutshell, Lomborg argues that the costs of Kyoto- and worse, the costs of further treaties which are supposed to be an extension of Kyoto- will do more harm than good, while failing to address the climate issue in any case. You crunch the numbers and follow the arguments for yourself- he may have got some of them wrong, but if you think after all these years of promoting Transition as a response to PO and Climate Change that opposing decarbonisation means opposing any attempt to address climate change, you are not even involved with the issue.

Hundreds of activists burning precious fuel flying round the world to endless conferences with only one approach of decarbonisation is clearly going nowhere, as Lomborg explains pretty clearly I think in “Cool It!”. Trying to lay their failure all at the feet of the fossil fuel industry is naive- apart from obvious own-goals such as the 10:10 exploding school children video, the main problem is the dogmatic call for decarbinisation targets. It’s the wrong strategy, it should get itself buried.

Also, it cannot have escaped your notice that many activists are all-to-ready to label anyone who even dares question their views as a “denialist”- not because of the “settled science” but because of their religious/ideological belief that modern lifestyles are wrong. In this case, John Gibbons is fond of quoting Clive Hamilton who is clearly a religious Gaian; Simon Fairlie is another example of religious advocacy – in fact they seem to be everywhere! And yet you defensively claim they are a tiny minority of extremists, with no influence on your good self.

Meanwhile, carbon trading seems to have created a vast opportunity for corruption and selling indulgencies. Enron were big into carbon trading as a central part of their business model,(see here and here) and oil companies like BP are also on the Green bandwagon. Sucking up any subsidies going but achieving nothing.

(It would be remiss of us here to ignore other environmentalists’ boondoggles such as biofuels, possible only a a result of subsidies introduced to placate climate-change activists; why don’t environmentalists make more of a noise about that?)

Indeed from where I stand I see very little happening at a policy level. The commitment is to economic growth first and the low carbon economy third… And indeed, rather than dismantling anything, the emerging low carbon economy in terms of energy is being driven largely by the private sector because it makes economic sense, with governments trying to catch up.

Yes I agree that the private sector is probably more effective at addressing these issues than government- so why not just let them get on with it? If renewables really can take up the slack, then will not market forces- driven by the profit motive- bring them to the fore? It is obvious that Big Oil and Big Coal will be just as happy to make money from wind and solar if that is where the money is- so what do we need treaties for? What do we need activists for? But in the meantime there are good reasons to think that we will be mainly running on fossil energy for a long time yet, and to campaign for forced reductions because of some nebulous idea of climate change sometime in the future seems perverse. Lomborgs’ recommendation is to funnel more resources into new promising technologies now, so that we can wean ourselves off fossil fuels from a position of strength, without destroying the economy and plunging millions into fuel poverty unnecessarily.

Of course, this is not going to work if we have already decided that modern society is doomed and argue, as I did when I started this blog, that there is no possibility of technological breakthroughs and that any such developments would be undesirable anyway because they might increase the human footprint, support a yet bigger population, postpone the inevitable collapse until later. So opposition to shale gas would seem to come under this category- it provides a perfect example of a new technology that might help overcome oil depletion. Your own post on the Gasland film sees it only as a negative- but to check whether your views are ideological or not, ask yourself whether, IF the safety and environmental concerns were addressed and IF it could be shown to be cost-effective without subsidies relative to alternatives, would you then embrace it- bearing in mind that modern society and growth may then be able to continue apace? For the other side of this debate, have a look at Matt Ridley’s report . (Of course I am aware there are bias on both sides- does that mean the neutral position is to condemn out of hand something with such potential?)

The point is, peak-oilers have always maintained that technology cannot help us; now when a promising technology comes along they oppose it for environmental reasons- so which is it?

You say :

“This idea that environmentalists want to dismantle industrial society is outdated and ridiculous I think… some may do…. (Derrick Jensen and others) but not many. I certainly don’t.”

but a quick look at your website and book suggests otherwise:

‘As one man said during a group discussion at the end of a screening of The End of Suburbia that I organised in Clonakilty, “we’ve just seen that the end of the Oil Age will bring about the collapse of industrial society … bring it on!”.’

“We are surrounded by what poet Gary Snyder, in his classic poem For the Children called “The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics” and by individuals telling us that this means the end, that we have gone too far, that it is inevitable that life as we know it will collapse catastrophically and very soon.“

Also this idea that Energy Descent could be more like a party than a protest march, that we will be happier after oil is delusional: coming off oil before there is a suitable replacement will just mean poverty for millions.

And what about your and most of the environmental movement’s attitude towards GE and nuclear? You have told us quite explicitly that your opposition is ideological:

“I don’t have scientific papers to back that up, it is an instinctive revulsion at the very concept.”

I would call on anti-GE activists like yourself and no doubt many other Transition supporters to take responsibility for the harm you may be doing in campaigning against technologies that could really help millions of people.

This view is generally shared by Big Green- Greenpeace, FoE, Soil Association as well as many in permaculture. And many activists do indeed think we would be better off going back to pre-industrial lifestyles, not realising that organics cannot feed the world (or come close) and that no-one wants to be a peasant farmer except for a holiday. How much of this is meant, not for them but for other people- in other words, keeping the poor poor. Let’s make sure that the poor of the world do not follow “western models of development”- yes there are technologies that could help with this- mobile phones allowing developing countries to leap-frog fixed lines with cheaper cell-phones; but if they don’t get access to improved technology in farming they will stay poor. And what about access to the kind of mobility in terms of car and air travel that we have? For us it is a choice; for the poor, international treaties might deny them access to it completely.

Re one-world government: many enviros do of course want this. George Monbiot wrote a book about it some 10 years ago “The Age of Consent”- I was at the book launch in Dublin. I asked a mutual friend of ours who is a prominent climate change/PO activist recently about this, he replied of course we need a one-world government, that’s obvious isnt it? EU leaders like Sarkoczy have also expressed this publicly, so fears about this are not completely crazy Im afraid. If you still support the IPCC and Kyoto-type treaties, then you are promoting moves towards one-world governance whether you have the wit to realise it or not- how else can international agreements on controlling something as ubiquitous as people’ energy use be instigated?

Perhaps you also agree with the spurious conspiracy theorist argument that the entire ‘Green Agenda’ is actually to massively reduce the human population? (check out http://tinyurl.com/69bd6sl for one of the worst-written articles you will see…) which is equally as unrooted in reality.

Your tendency to invoke extreme conspiracy-types does not help your argument. It is an inconvenient truth that the environmental movement has its origins in the eugenics movement; the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, Paul Ehrlich’s doom-mongering since the early 1970s about over-population, and now the Peak Oil movements’ cries of imminent collapse form the environmentalists legacy which as far as I can see Transition is thoroughly embedded in.

I think there are good reasons to be concerned about the warped ideologies of much of the mainstream Green movement. The Green Agenda does indeed look like a conspiracy theory, but both Al Gore and former under-secretary general of the United Nations Maurice Strong are both Gaia -worshipers who invoke religious sentiments of the planet over the well-being of humans.

In addition, many in the environmental movement, including yourself and the Transition movement are clearly closely aligned with pseudo-science and dangerous mystical beliefs and groups including all manner of quack medicine and Anthroposophy, which you have shown yourself only to willing to defend or play down. The Soil Association which you are closely aligned with promotes both homeopathy for animals and biodynamics. Another of your allies is Prince Charles, surely someone on the far end of whacko-de-lah-lah who nevertheless enjoys considerable influence and power, having flown around the world in a private jet to promote carbon reductions in other people’s lifestyles. The Organics movement as a whole is guilty of taking an ideological stance against genetic engineering, as well as promoting unscientific studies concerning the supposed health benefits of organic food, and exaggerating its capacity to replace so-called “chemical farming”.

In a class I gave in Kinsale last year looking at how to feed a growing population, I was told by some of the students that they would rather let people starve than permit GE crops to be grown, if that was the choice. Would you endorse such a view Rob? If not I would welcome a strong statement to that effect. I don’t think these views are uncommon; more, that most people havn’t though through what their beliefs actually would result in. I personally know at least two people who have seriously told me that the best thing to do would be to wipe out a couple of billion people. These are not right-wing nutters- on the contrary, they are otherwise perfectly normal family people who would support many things you are doing.

Rob, follow the logic of your own beliefs: if you are against new technologies like GE and shale gas on principle (or Thorium reactors or whatever); if you are opposed to industrial agriculture even though this is what is feeding the world; if you think governments and international treaties are the way to control people’s use of fossil fuels; if you still think civilisation is about to “collapse catastrophically and soon”- what does this mean for the billions of people yet to benefit from the modern advances that you or I can take for granted? and can you really still claim that you are not ideologically in opposition to modern industrial society, imbued as it is with the spirit of Ahriman?

There is only one rational conclusion: we continue doing the best thing we know, innovation, trade and adaptation; or we ban new technologies and consign ourselves- or, more likely, others- to poverty. It is only technology, and yes the economic growth that this allows, that can help us through what will indeed be a hugely challenging energy transition.

All I am doing is following a well-worn path already marked out by many moderate and sensible prominent greens like Brand, Lynas, Moore, even Schellenberger and Nordhaus. Even Monbiot has revised his views on nuclear and recently wrote that the “mineral crunch” (including peak oil) has failed to materialize because of our ability to substitute and innovate. Though you have far more invested in the views you hold than I have, having spawned an international movement, you will to the same degree gain kudos and respect by acknowledging past mistakes and taking on a more rational and pragmatic view yourself. Compared to these brave pioneers mentioned above the Transition Movement looks increasingly Luddite and stuck in the retro-romantic past.

Finally, to address your comments about my blogs bye-line of “On the edge between nature and culture”- I actually think it is more relevant than ever. My blog still focuses on environmental issues, gardening and permaculture, and is still concerned primarily with how human culture fits in with the natural world and how we relate to it. And it is still on the edge in terms of exploring new ideas and being open to change.

with best regards

Graham www.zone5.org

Fleeing Vesuvius Overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse

edited by Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon

Feasta 2010 ppbck 417 pp.

The recent economic collapse is not just a financial and banking issue, not just an economic and political issue, not a result only of bad policies and lack of regulation, but actually precipitated by the passing of peak oil, which sent oil prices spiraling above $150/barrel in 2008 and is essentially sounding the death-knoll for industrial society. Not only will we never be able to return to economic growth, but we are now facing a chaotic period of decline and collapse. The peak of energy availability has passed and we are now staring into the abyss of continual economic contraction which will result in a vastly simplified society where human muscle power will progressively replace fossil energy, and we will return to the technologies of the Middle Ages or before.

Such is the fundamental of the oddly titled new book from Feasta the Irish-based think-tank on sustainable economics: Fleeing Vesuvius is not about responding to a natural catastrophe such as Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in AD79; nor is it about fleeing, for as editor Richard Douthwaite asks rhetorically, “We expect to get any clearer warnings of impending disaster than the people of Pompeii received. There are already financial fires around the economic cone. If we are to survive we need to move out quickly. Now. But which way are we to go? Is there a map? It would be a poor book about an emergency situation which did not provide one. So, for the final chapter, my co-editor and I asked the contributors to suggest actions which readers could take or support at four levels- personal, community, national and global.”

The book is layed out in seven parts: “Energy Availability”; “Innovation in business, money and finance”; “New Ways of using the land”; “Dealing with Climate Change”; “Changing the Way we live”; “Changing the Way we Think”; and “Ideas for Action”;

There are 28 contributors including economist Richard Douthwaite (author of The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit; julian Darley of the Post carbon Institute; Nate Hagens of the Oil Drum; and Reinventing Collapse author Dmitri Orlov; and with an introduction by Eamon Ryan of the Irish Green Party who had been minister for Communication, Energy and Natural Resources in the last government.

While the starting point is the same for each- the financial crisis and its connection to peak oil-, there are several wide differences of opinion expressed by the various contributors: some see a gradual decline which is worth trying to manage through Transition Towns and international treaties on climate change; while arch-doomer Dmitry Orlov for example pokes fun at such ideas, suggesting instead we should be more concerned with getting enough sleep, avoiding drawing attention to ourselves too much less we become a target for marauding gangs, and collecting things that dont lose their value that are easy to store such as bronze nails.

“Is there a reason to think” he asks when considering such community solution, ” that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn’t that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does? Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?”

While there are many worthwhile discussion in the book, I’m going to argue here that the general thesis expressed by all the contributors is based on an outdated and discredited concept of environmentalism rooted more in ideology than rational thought.

The tone is set by our ex-Minister Eamon Ryan in his preface when he invokes the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth when discussing the potential for new technologies:

“Some will argue that new natural gas supplies will allow us to get off the hook. It is true that new shale gas supplies have altered the international gas markets. However, as Dennis Meadows and others showed in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, the challenge this century will be to avoid breaching one of a number of constraints that come with living on a finite planet. “Even if gas is more easily available and even if it has relatively low carbon emissions in comparison with other fossil fuels, the reality is that simply replacing oil with natural gas will see us breach the greenhouse gas limits that the best scientific advice says we have to avoid”. (my emphasis).

To my mind this statement rather well expresses some of the core contradictions and confusion in the environmental movement. Essentially, as regards shale gas or other potential ways of new energy sources, Ryan is arguing they should not be used because we have already past the “limits” of what should be used, with reference to a 40-year old report based on computer models.

Make no mistake: I used to think the same myself. I used to argue that limits had been reached a long time ago and any attempt to extend them further would merely lead to a bigger crash and die-off later. Neo-Malthusians argue the same: dont work to feed the hungry of the world, that will simply lead to them breeding all the more and even more people starving later on. (I personally know individuals who subscribe to this policy.) This vile philosophy fails to understand the essential ways in which humanity differs from other species who are indeed subject to limits of boom-and-bust cycles: language and technology.

Whatever about the “science” of climate change, Ryan fails to explain that the dangers of future climate change need to be balanced against the current benefits of cheap energy now and the future wealth it will foster which, coupled with ongoing technological innovation, will set us in a better position to withstand such future challenges.

There are certainly some interesting chapters. Richard Douthwaite, who has written an earlier book surveying attempts at various models of alternative currencies, and who initiated a L.E.T.S. system that I was briefly involved with in Westport, Co. Mayo, advocates regional Liquidity Exchange Networks to help with the credit crunch. Local councils would open accounts in Quids- the generic name for regional currencies- which could be used for public services, possibly to pay a proportion of tax and some other uses; the supply of currency would be completely transparent and can be automatically increased or decreased according to the needs of the system. It is not clear how well they might work on a regional level however; many local areas in Ireland have so little manufacturing that there might not be enough local economic activity to warrant their introduction. Nevertheless, Feasta is dong important work in researching such initiatives and new currency models of this kind may become essential in the near future as the financial crisis deepens.

None of the authors pick up on the fact that it has been the recession that has proved to be not only the most effective instrument by far in reducing CO2 emissions, but the only effective instrument, while environmental concerns have gone out the window for the same reasons, as evidenced by the annihilation of the Irish Green Party, including the loss of Minister Ryan’s seat, in the elections that followed the publication of this book.

Why on earth would anyone be interested in policies that might increase fuel prices when they are struggling to pay their mortgage or keep their jobs, while at the same time we are being told big international globalised institutions are unlikely to last much longer anyway, so the effort required to develop international climate treaties seems futile. Who would give a damn about small amounts of global average temperature increases that may or may not happen 100 years from now when the same people are telling us the supermarkets might be going to run out of food and we should start stashing cans of beans? These interesting issues are not explored by the contributors.

We are treated however to some rather glaring examples of ideological bias: -Patrick Andrews includes in his table comparing the “old and new mindset” “Giving back to Mother Earth more than we take”- an explicitly religious viewpoint; the idea that we need a new mindset and that Andrews is the one to tell us what it might be is just taken as a given- detractors are suffering from a cognitive dissonance attributable to a human propensity to assume that because everything has been ok so far it will be ok in the future. An alternative view might be that Andrews is the one suffering from cognitive dissonance attributable to the human tendency to spend decades and even lifetimes assuming that the End is Nigh.

-Brian Davey includes in his list of “well-established trends in global food production” – which he recommends “if you really want to be frightened”- the old canard about “terminator seeds”: “Development “terminator” seeds to concentrate all seed sales in the hands of a corporate elite.” Maybe his “peer-reviewed” source for this was The Economics of Happiness. How many times do I have to debunk this? Terminator seeds were never developed or used outside the laboratory, and were originally created only as a safeguard against gene-flow. GE seeds can be saved by farmers in most cases; most farmers however continue to buy their seeds quite happily without needing to invoke 9-11 type conspiracy theories.

-Davey will also raise some eyebrows with his unequivocal statement: “If fossil fuels create climate change they should be banned from sale without a permit. Period.” Which sounds not only quite nutty but a call for the end of debate and even maybe even democracy.

-in a later chapter Davy and Rutledge lament the loss of public trust in science, mentioning Climategate but not even considering the possibility that this might actually represent a good reason for people not to trust activist scientists.

-Anne Ryan in an chapter on “Changing the Way we think” is positioned firmly in the “nature knows best” naturalistic fallacy: “Nature favours cycles because they come to an organic end after a suitable period of growth. They do not go on growing because in nature, that is a cancer.” Maybe someone should explain to Ryan that cancer is nature as well. Cycles don’t come to an end in nature because nature knows better but because other species dont have the ability to innovate their way out of these limits. Give any species- including cancer cells- the ability to overcome the limits of evolution and they will take the chance just as we have done.

This kind of naive blabber about “nature” in the context of this book would really make you wonder whether Feasta is actually a “think tank” at all or merely another branch of the seemingly all-pervasive Church of Gaia.

Maybe it starts with the editor Richard Douthwaite, an excellent writer and economist whose chapter I enjoyed and he makes a lot of very sensible points about the problems with the euro and other aspects of our current economic plight. Douthwaite’s views seem however to be underpinned by a retro-romantic wish to return to the 16th century:

“I argued that the wrong turn was taken in England in the 16th Century as the population began to recover from the balck Death. The increased numbers- a rise from 1.6million to 5.5million in less than 200 years- naturally put pressure on resources and caused communities to have problems living within the limits imposed by their local environments. In 1631, Edmund Howes described how this had forced them to start burning coal…

“That was it. The thin end of the wedge. The slippery slope…” Oh dear. Just as humanity was doing OK and keeping everything nice and simple and civilized without too much technology, someone went and started digging out the smelly black stuff and its been downhill ever since.A few quick centuries later and we have those awful supermarkets stocked with cheap food and 27 types of chocolate rice crispies, Twitter, Lady Gaga and God knows what else. It’s all been a terrible mistake!

Mr. Douthwaite may well prefer to be living in the 16th century, but probably not as one of the vast majority of the population who were landless peasants with pretty much no further prospects from birth to a most likely early death. While he acknowledges that no-one was going to protest then against the shift to coal, he ignores the fact that there is no chance we will voluntarily leave fossil energy until there is a cheaper, better alternative. Thankfully, he at least accepts that individual actions like going off grid are futile and that energy solutions are better done collectively, while Corinna Byrne apparently thinks that “the installation of small wind turbines to power ones home will also help”- no it wont Corinna, dont be daft.

Douthwaite, in common with the other main authors, assume that technology will have little to offer, and hence “collapse is inevitable” as David Korowicz argues. I had the opportunity to ask David how he could be so sure that another energy transition was impossible, siting shale gas; fuel cells and breakthrough solar technology; oil from algae; and thorium reactors as potential candidates for new energy sources. He replied that a)there is no time- peak oil and financial collapse are upon us; and b)none of these (apart from oil from algae) actually replace the convenience of oil as a liquid fuel for transport. In a discussion later he recommended Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Myths and Realities. Apparently Smil does not accept the peak oil hypothesis but empasizes that an energy transition away from fossil fuels will take decades.

Clearly we have enormous challenges, but what the peak oil doomer theorists in this book fail to address is that growth, prosperity and development do not rely only on digging holes in the ground and extracting the goodies until they are all gone and collapse ensues, but also that we are clever monkeys whos defining nature is technology and innovation. This is nothing to do with the quasi-religious New Age beliefs that Davie Philip mentions in his chapter as being off-putting to some in the Transition Towns movement, and which are also clearly expressed in some of the offerings here, of having lost our way, separated from nature, fallen from Eden and having lead to the hubris of thinking we can control nature, but simply that that is what we are as human beings.

I could take the doomer prognosis expressed in this book more seriously if there wasn’t such an apparent rubbing of hands with glee at the prospect of collapse. This is clearest in Orlov’s chapter. Orlov clearly thinks that the enormous successes of the modern world at feeding people are just a huge mistake:

“What piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil inputs?” but ignores the possible but politically incorrect answer of genetic engineering and other new plant breeding techniques which could indeed help lower the resources needed to feed the growing population. He is right of course that there should be more to life than fast food and computer games, but forgets that for the majority of human existence there has been little more to life than a rather brutal struggle for survival.

Korowicz told me he would love to be wrong, and has no wish to lose the benefits of the modern world, but finds it hard to be optimistic. This seems reasonable enough but predicting the future is still really little more than a parlor game. Other contributors seem naive beyond belief in terms of what a low-energy world where we learn to say “enough” will actually be like- not one I think we would ever chose.

While there are valuable ideas on the economy and new ways of organizing businesses and community contained in this book, it unfortunately fails to provide a credible analyses of the predicament we are in, instead providing only a hop-scotch of doomer predictions of the future and new age pap.

I’m not quite sure what a “crypto-denialist” is but I think it means someone who claims to accept the science of AGW but actually does not- in other words, a fraud. John’s supporters also joined in with plenty of personal attacks and ad hominems:

Mr Strouts, in not knowing even what peer-review is puts himself on the same plane as James Delingpole – bombastic argument, sweeping assertions riddled with howling factual errors (like thinking TSE to be a peer-reviewed publication, for goodness sake, how stupid can you get?).

Now I do understand what “stupid” means; but for this charge to stick it needs to be backed up by evidence. The evidence I have for believing The Skeptical Environmentalist was indeed peer-reviewed comes from the publisher at Cambridge university Press:

As a University Press, we insist on a peer review process for every book we publish. It has become part of the anti-Lomborg folklore that his book bypassed the usual Cambridge peer review process and was cynically spirited through the system by an ignorant social science editor.5 This is a charge that has been repeated in many of the public and private attacks on the press, and it is unfounded. Indeed, The Skeptical Environmentalist would never have been published by Cambridge had it not been for peer review

It is true that I found that link via the Wikipedia entry which I am informed “has been clearly generously edited either by Lomborg or members of his fan club (sorry, Wikipedia isn’t actually peer-reviewed, at least not in the academic or scientific sense of the phrase)”- but no supporting evidence of this is provided.

There was clearly a lot of dispute at the time over this controversial publication, and plenty of literature available looking at the attacks on the book and the defences

Lomborg’s book basically makes the case, with plenty of evidence, that the world may not be quite so doomed as many of us have believed, or as some environmentalist would have us think, but rather than demonstrate actual errors, John and his friends prefer to insist that the whole thing is a con, a fraud, with each sentence and statistic carefully concocted to mislead the unwary reader and lead them into damnation as they will surely then continue to pollute the environment and destroy the planet

Equally, Gore’s film was also clearly controversial, and there are many reasonable (ie not “denialist”) critiques of it, such as this one by William Connelly which closely examines the court case that was taken against the film being promoted as science in schools, who concludes on the issue of exaggerating sea-level rise:

“Pupils might get the impression that sea-level rises of up to 7m (caused by the complete melting of Greenland or half of Greenland and half of the West Antarctic shelf) could happen in the next decades. The IPCC predicts that it would take millennia for rises of that magnitude to occur. However, pupils should be aware that even smaller rises in sea level are predicted to have very serious effects. or Burton: “This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr Gore’s ‘wake-up call’… not in line with the scientific consensus.” Yeah, I think Gore was misleading on this, and said so before.

In the discussion below Connelly concludes “its misleading on a number of important points, so I don’t think you can call it a great intro, and I’m definitely advising against championing it”.

Compare this to John’s defense of the film:

That film was a thoroughly researched, balanced and objective guide for the lay-person on climate change. Just ask the actual climate specialists over at RealClimate.org and they’ll confirm as much.

But if one were to take the stance of the supporters of ThinkorSwim (ToS) Connelly would also be dismissed as a stupid crypto-denialist troll. What good does that do anyone?

According to John and his followers, Lomborg has been proved to be a fraud; John states that Lomborg “ignores the entire canon of actual climate science”- an extraordinary statement to make since TSE in fact explicitly accepts the science of AGW, and discusses in depth the scientific consensus that human influence is warming the planet; the book is actually a discussion of how bad this is likely to be (there may be some benefits, eg. declining cold-weather deaths) and what we should do about it.

Lomborg takes issue with the mainstream policy recommendations of dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, arguing that this would be too expensive, and that in any case we cannot really do that to the degree indicated because the technology for low-carbon fuels to replace fossil energy to any degree simply does not yet exist.

John’s errors however extend beyond simply misrepresenting his bete noir Lomborg, he also misrepresents the science in each of the cases that he refers to:

Graham also recycles denialist guff about exaggerated threats of sea level rise. These are anything but. Quoting a solitary “recent study” is a pretty thin basis for his premise that concerns about accelerating ice melt are “doom-mongering pure and simple”. A little knowledge here is indeed dangerous. “Doom-mongering” is a serious charge. Graham may not be aware that according to GRACE gravity satellite readings, Greenland is currently losing 104-138gt per annum. That’s 104–138 BILLION TONS of ice lost per annum. Some doom-mongering (this figure is somewhat ahead of the 2007 IPCC estimate of 100gt/annum).

One commentator responded:

100 billion tons is indeed a large figure. But let’s see what that means in terms of sea level rise. The earth’s radius is about 6400 km. Earth’s surface area, use 4 pi times the radius squared; and 70% of that area is water — it comes to about 3.6 x 10^14 sq. meters. Ocean isn’t all of that, though, and I cheated a bit and looked online to get a figure of 3.35 x 10^14 sq. meters of ocean area. Let’s get back to those 100 Gtonne, or 10^17 g, of melting ice per year. As water has a density of (approx.) 1 g/cc, that comes to 10^17 cc of water, or 10^11 cubic meters. Spread that evenly over the above ocean area, and it comes to a depth of 0.3 mm. A rate of 0.3 mm per year is about 1 inch per century. Doesn’t seem to merit capital letters to me.

Now, whether or not these calculations are correct, it is clear from John’s hand-waving response that he had not done any calculations himself at all; he had merely seen the figure of “a lot of ice” and quoted it in a doomish kind of way, with not a clue as to what it may or may not mean for sea-level rise.

More astonishing still, he becomes probably the first person ever to represent temperature change in terms of percentages:

Just in case you’re not familiar with the basic science (and I really am now beginning to wonder), the current global average surface temp. is c.14.5C. Add 4C to that in half a century and you have increased the average surface temp by over 25%. That means, briefly: zero Arctic ice, Greenland committed to collapse (the idea of this taking thousands of years in a 1000ppm+ CO2 world is fanciful in the extreme)

Another commentator responded:

Using Fahrenheit, the same temperature change (58.1F to 65.3F) is a 12% increase, using Kelvin it’s about 287.6K to 291.6K, or a 1.4% increase. It really does matter where the zero is, if you are talking about percentage changes. That’s why one uses simple temperature differences when talking about climate, and not percentages.

To his credit, John did, after two more promptings, finally admit this error; but that he could make such an off-the-wall statement is very worrying for a non-scientist commentator who states about himself:

Guilty as charged. I’m not a scientist, and am occasionally likely to make a technical gaffe, like the one pointed out by DR. I regret the lack of precision in my language… My stab at translating this into percentages that most people could understand was clumsy and unscientific. …[my]25 years working as a journalist and publisher has taught me a healthy respect for facts, and an equally healthy suspicion of ideology, in all its subtle forms.

John essentially sees himself, like Delingpole, as an “interpreter of interpretations”- someone who tries to interpret science in layman’s terms most people can understand. He has been doing this for many years, yet appears to be misrepresenting the science at every turn.

This should be of concern to any of his readers who do rely on his interpretations: what other mistakes might he be making? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go at John personally, he is a very nice man; I am merely discussing his stance in the public role he has created for himself.

He is clearly a doom-monger, interpreting a recent report from the Royal Society, which looks as an exercise at a scenario they themselves consider unlikely, as leading to an increase in temperature of 4 degrees by 2060, if there are stronger feedbacks and higher emissions than currently expected. John misrepresents this “what if” scenario- and all the IPCC scenarios are also essentially “what if” exercises- claiming that “I’ll be guided by what the experts say, and they are increasingly trending towards sea level rises of upwards of one meter this century”. No supporting link is given for this; he dismisses the less scary prognosis for Greenland I linked to in the original post as “thin evidence”.

One fascinating issue is that of future growth scenarios. John is in accord with many moderate environmentalists, as well of course peak-oilers and general catastrophic doomers as well, that future growth is impossible because of resource constraints:

Lomborg is a libertarian propagandist, the Dr Strangelove of climate science (read ‘The Lomborg Deception’ by Howard Friel of Yale for a thorough debunking). He commissions and recycles “data” from fellow right-wingers like the economists Tol and Nordhaus, ignores the entire canon of actual climate science and then concocts bizarre happy-clappy “We’ll all be millionaires in 2100, so why worry” scenarios that anyone whose nose is not completely blocked will know reeks to the heavens of bullshit.

But as with the rest of Lomborg’s book, the projections for future growth of incomes is taken from the IPCC and other official statistics- the same figures that everyone uses. It seems that the mainstream scientists- the “consensus view” on economic growth is severely at odds with John’s doomer viewpoint, although he then contradicts himself by saying “Current emissions trajectory is worse than the IPCC’s “worst case” A1F1 scenario. It will continue to worsen, barring disasters, as China, India, etc. continue to grow at breakneck speed ”.

So he believes both a richer world (that should be much more capable of adapting to climate change and other problems) is both “bullshit” and also inevitable “at breakneck speed”.

If the IPCC scenarios are wrong about growth in all their scenarios; if most if not all climate scientists reject the doomer peak oil position of imminent collapse (as I guess they would, although I really dont know for sure); then why should we believe anything else they say?

John implies it is a no-brainer to do whatever we have to do to stop runaway climate change, using the analogy of house insurance. Yes, in a sense this is what the whole of Lomborg’s book is about: carefully considering the costs of mitigation with the costs of insurance: a cost-benefit analysis.

John and his followers appear to have no concept of what Lomborg is on about at all. For them, he is a fraud pure and simple and anyone who disagrees is stupid and also a fraud. Although it is to his credit that he did allow the post on his site, this was apparently only to allow it (and me) to be attacked and ridiculed, and bizarrly he felt the need to apologize to readers some of whom were “shocked” at what I had to say.

There is a not-so subtle cross-over from the actual science- what is happening in the climate- into policy- what, if anything , we should do about it; but try to even raise these issues on ToS and you will be screamed at. Those guys already know all the answers and for them, the debate is closed.

I tried to press John to address some of these issues, but he did indeed prefer to close the debate threatening to remove any more comments I might place there.

What is most troubling about all this is that there is really no need to defend Gore, or attack Lomborg in such a way. The response I received from John and some of his supporters seems closed-minded, and even cultish, and provides plenty of ammunition to those who claim the AGW movement is essentially a religion.

It is a perfectly respectable position to hold, to accept the “consensus” view on AGW- that it is happening, that it is a problem- while being careful to question the more zealous predictions of doom that assume a policy response that is in fact far outside the remit of the science itself.

Once this line has been crossed, we are in the territory of ideology and religion. And this is another reason why we should in fact be very skeptical of Al Gore and his followers: Gore is motivated by religious beliefs in the sanctity of nature and New Age ideas of Gaia worship. In his earlier book Life in the balance he writes:

The need for personal equilibrium can be described in a simpler way. The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis…spiritual…the search for truths about this ungodly crisis is the search for truths about myself… (pp. 10-11)

He believes in Ancient Wisdom and Goddess worship:

“The spiritual sense of our place in nature…can be traced to the origins of human civilization…in prehistoric Europe and much of the world was based on the worship of a single earth goddess, who was assumed to be the fount of all life and who radiated harmony among all living things…the notion that a goddess religion was ubiquitous throughout much of the world until the antecedents of today’s religions (meaning Christianity, Judaism which he attempts to link to Hinduism), most of which still have a distinctly masculine orientation–swept out of India and the Near East, almost obliterating belief in the goddess. The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity…it seems obvious that a better understanding of a religious heritage preceding our own by so many thousands of years could offer us new insights…” (pp 260)

More quotes from Gore here.

Just how much of this kind of thinking permeates and informs the environmental movement as a whole- think organic food, chemophobia, the anti-GM movement- and perhaps climate change as well?

Even if we accept climate science at face value- that it has not been corrupted by politics and money- fears of climate change do seem to provide a perfect platform for religious zealotry.

Update: Interesting interview with Lomborg here. Apparently Pachauri, head of the IPCC, who had previously compared Lomborg to Hitler, wrote a “great blurb” for Lomborg’s new book. Maybe John Gibbons should contact Pachauri to tell him how he has been “had” by this fraudster.