The Sixth Extinction

[Robert Tulip]

Light Hearted Prophet of Doom

The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert

Book Review by Robert Tulip

Clear-eyed, superbly informed and informative, remorseful, engaging, well-structured, balanced, lucid, elegiacal ecology.

This wonderful book is the best summary I have read of our planetary predicament. The human situation appears to vindicate the extreme alternatives posed by Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii in their 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe that a technical civilization would either destroy itself or evolve to a long lifetime by expanding into its surrounding galaxy. Fermi’s Paradox, that intelligence should be common in the cosmos given the available time and space but is undetected, suggests that the intelligence threshold at which our planetary civilization stands now has immense risks.

I say with some whimsy that The Sixth Extinction is light-hearted, because Kolbert has brilliantly combined deep scientific understanding with a simple and entertaining and immensely readable presentation. But the breezy wit is the vehicle for a deadly serious message. Humans are busily killing off frogs and bats by spreading funguses, destroying the wonderful biodiversity of coral reefs and rainforests using heat, acid and plunder, and basically cooking the planet with carbon emissions, leaving animals and plants with nowhere to live and move and have their being.

Human activities result from the combination of intelligence and instinct. The tragedy is that our social evolution has not kept pace with our technical evolution. Social values are failing to appreciate the fragility of life, the fact that our planet has in the past seen extinction events that have killed off vast numbers of genetic families, and we are now causing a sixth extinction that on the business-as-usual scenario will be as bad as the Permian event that eliminated about 90% of planetary life 252 million years ago. Gaia will probably survive this onslaught, but humans might not.

Kolbert provides the accurate prognosis that global interconnectedness is producing an Anthropocene, a new virtual super-continent of Pangaea in which species that evolved in isolation are thrown into a common era, with rapid mass extinction the likely fate of biological species and whole families of organisms that cannot keep pace with the unprecedented systemic change introduced by human technology.

The remorse for the loss of biodiversity arises from the ethical view that complexity is good, and that it is bad to destroy in the blink of a geological eye ecosystems that have evolved over millions and billions of years. The destruction of the biological basis of life on earth now underway will lead to a remorseless collapse of created human systems and their enabling ecology if unchecked. So the question posed by the sixth extinction is whether the inference from Sagan and Fermi is correct that the threshold of intelligence may itself be a common tipping point for the evolution of life, like a critical mass at which the system either collapses into the simplicity of a desert or transforms into a new more complex and abundant and sustainable paradigm.

The natural apocalypse of the sixth extinction is already underway, and will inevitably get rapidly worse as a simple causal product of physical system inertia and momentum. But this physical Armageddon can also usefully be analysed against the frameworks of cultural collapse predicted by religious myths of doom. I raise this comparison to open a discussion about strategies to mitigate the impact of the sixth extinction. My view is that the scientific evidence amassed by Kolbert and her numerous sources should provide the basis for philosophical and ethical study of how our predicament may have been anticipated in the past, and how old ideas may provide valuable resources to help address current problems. I understand my view is controversial, but wish to present it here as commentary on the matters arising from the facts of global impacts, to ask how humans can evolve in ways that use our intelligence as our main adaptive advantage.

There is a strong religious undertone in Kolbert’s work. I say this as a positive comment, not as the negative criticism that it might be considered in a solely scientific analysis. The great scientist Richard Dawkins has perceptibly shifted his view on religion, recognising that while the concept of a transcendental God is delusional, religious attitudes do have some adaptive traits, notably a sense of awe and reverence and wonder for the beauty and complexity and grandeur and order of nature.

Kolbert implicitly sees complexity as good and destruction as evil. This value system seems at face value to contradict the Biblical ethics which alienate spirit from nature by placing the highest value on obedience to the imagined messages of a personal transcendental God, rather than on evidence and logic. But this conflict between science and religion, between reason and faith, overlooks the considerable extent to which a natural rational ethic informs religious mythology, and how this ethic in faith provides essential precedents that can assist our adaptation to the new earth on which we find ourselves.

A little known Biblical verse, Revelation 11:18, says that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. This idea can be interpreted in a purely natural and pantheistic way, with the idea that divinity is a quality of natural complex order, not an externally imposed supernatural order. Similarly, the concept of blessedness proposed by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) can be repurposed as a purely natural and rational understanding of reality, as an evolutionary perspective that recognises that humanity requires a paradigm shift from domination to care.

Evolution works via what author Steven Johnson explains in his superb book Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation as the “adjacent possible”. Changes that jump steps don’t happen. A path of connected causality is necessary, moving through adjacent links of the natural chain to explore what is possible, opening the cumulative doors of mutation into new adaptive rooms. In terms of human culture, that means we require what Johnson explains as the evolutionary process of ‘exaption’, the use of existing things for new evolving purposes. Religion, as a primary mode of human organisation, can exapt and adapt to provide resources and ethics for a global ecological transformation into a stable and harmonious world. Similarly, the capitalist system can exapt and adapt to a sustainable state, bringing the resources, expertise, systems, trust and political will needed for alliance against the common peril of system collapse.

Against the millennial timeframe of recent geology, the dating of the Anthropocene, when human activity began to leave distinctive global traces in the geological record, goes back at least to the extinctions of megafauna in Australia 40,000 years ago caused by human invasion, and similarly in Eurasia and the Americas to the times when these new lands were colonised and humans imposed steady downward pressure on the numbers of formerly unpredated and therefore slow-breeding peak organisms.

Kolbert usefully discusses this obvious causal correlation between human arrival and mass extinction throughout history. The anthropogenic impacts in geological sediments include the sudden change in pollen and charcoal levels as plant systems went haywire in the sudden absence of their former grazers. The pace of change accelerated after the ice age with the rise of agriculture and metal technology, producing what could poetically be seen as planetary decline from a golden age of plenty at the dawn of the Holocene through worse ages of silver and bronze to the depth of the iron age of scarcity in recent millennia, as the old myth would have it. Another example of early anthropogenic impact on climate that Kolbert could have mentioned from the early Holocene is how methane from rice cultivation prevented the earth from slipping back into glaciation, but instead allowed the stable temperature and sea level of the ten thousand years of the Holocene, up until now, when industrial emissions are producing geologically instant destabilisation.

The Sermon on the Mount claims divine blessing for the meek, the pure of heart, those who mourn, the peacemakers, the merciful and the righteous. These ideas have well entrenched conventional religious connotations, but my view is that religion has largely missed the point of the original natural intent, which can usefully be approached in scientific terms by considering these blessings as directed towards secure complex ecosystems. Nature can be considered meek, peaceful, pure, righteous and mournful, understood at the planetary and broader cosmic level of a natural divine blessing for our stable and productive global ecology.

In answer to the risk from humans wantonly punctuating the equilibrium of earth’s complex systems, the divine blessing is for those who chart a path of evolutionary reform and progress over the next ten thousand years to a new golden age. The scientific prospect of slow steady improvement over this long time period derives from what the astronomer Milutin Milanković discovered to be the main orbital driver of climate, the date of the earth’s perihelion, its closest approach to the sun. Perihelion causes glacial maxima at the December solstice and minima at the June solstice due to its effect on northern sunlight levels against the seasons. The annual date of perihelion moves slowly forward around the year every twenty one thousand years, advancing by one day every fifty eight years. The perihelion now happens around 4 January every year, and will steadily progress until it reaches the June solstice in ten thousand years.

The social and technological challenge presented by the sixth extinction is to find methods to establish a reconciliation between culture and nature. Religious concepts that are conventionally understood as supernatural can and must be repurposed as natural to achieve this task. Atonement and reconciliation, salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, grace and depravity, blessing and curse, faith and order, the advent virtues of peace, hope, love and joy, are essential components for an understanding of how humanity can deliberately evolve into a sustainable stable future on a flourishing diverse planet. But as Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is quoted by Kolbert, ‘time is the essential ingredient, but we have no time.’

I was really pleased to read in The Sixth Extinction about Elizabeth Kolbert’s meeting with atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University at the remote One Tree Island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. I have followed Ken’s work on geoengineering with some interest, and was fascinated to learn about how his scientific work on the danger posed to coral reefs through ocean acidification caused by carbon emissions inspired his search for practical solutions. Ken tells Elizabeth that things are looking grim. He also says, interestingly, that he likes surprising and provocative computation. That is the spirit in which the search for solutions to the sixth extinction should be framed.

Kolbert notes that humans are shifting nine billion tonnes of carbon from the earth to the air every year. She comments approvingly about the scientific consensus that reducing these emissions by phasing out fossil fuels is the only solution. In Caldeira’s spirit of provocative computation, I challenge this consensus. Sanitation is not achieved through reducing defecation, but through treatment of waste. Similarly, climate stability should require a focus on treatment of waste carbon, as a more significant factor than emission level. Carbon dioxide and methane can be removed from the air and sea on a scale larger than total emissions, if we can develop new carbon based infrastructure as a profitable storage method, using carbon for roads, buildings and fabric for ocean based algae production systems. With such technology in place, we could still shift more carbon from the earth to the air even while the CO2 level declines.

Here are some surprising and provocative computations. Using five tonnes of carbon per metre of road would use up all human carbon emissions on two million kilometres of road per year. Using one tonne of carbon per square metre of floor space would use all emissions for one thousand square kilometres of buildings with ten floors. Using a tonne of carbon for twenty square metres of fabric would sequester all annual emissions in 200,000 square kilometres of algae farm on the world ocean. Such artificial algae production islands, using bags of fresh water for buoyancy, stability and energy, could float around the great currents of the world ocean or be tethered in place, powered by tide and wave to mix deep rich water with CO2 to make controlled algal blooms. Such floating islands could also provide ecological arks for species like frogs and rhinos which can no longer live in the wild due to human impacts.

Algae was the source of petroleum, and is likely to prove the silver bullet to slow the sixth extinction. The world ocean is more than three hundred million square kilometres in size, more than twice as big as total land surface. Algae farms on one percent of the ocean surface area could be built using total emissions in fifteen years, based on the above rough figures.

As a new Apollo Project, carbon mined from air and sea could be processed into stable useful forms using algae and sunk in bags to the bottom of the sea, aiming to store twice as much carbon as we emit within the next decade. Annual emissions equate to a cube of carbon about two kilometres high, a volume that could readily be located in the vast areas of the world ocean. The ocean has average depth of four kilometres and holds more than a billion cubic kilometres or teralitres of water. The scale and power of the ocean makes it the key frontier for innovative systems to stabilise the world climate and stop the march towards extinction.

The beauty of this idea of large scale ocean based algae production includes that it presents what may possibly be the only feasible way to protect coral reefs from extinction due to the looming threats of heat and acid. Algae production could cool the waters of the Great Barrier Reef and reduce their level of dissolved acidic carbon. Algae production at scale offers a rapid method to drive carbon levels in the air back down to the stable Holocene level of 280 parts per million. The sunk carbon would serve as a carbon bank, a stable resource which could itself be mined in the future to further the use of our global carbon stocks in productive infrastructure.

As you can tell, this wonderful book The Sixth Extinction has got me thinking! The challenges of adaptation and innovation and mitigation posed by the sixth extinction requires new humble dialogue. Science has to a large extent caused the problem by enabling technology whose destructive potential was not understood. Science can also help fix the climate, protecting and cherishing the amazing complexity and diversity of life that still flourishes on our planet, enabling planetary evolution to continue to flourish and grow in natural symbiosis with human intelligence.

[DWill]

We know to watch out when something gets you thinking, Robert! Thanks for this great review. A different reviewer of this book said that the scariest thing about the coming wave of extinction is that it is happening as a result of all of us living our lives, even if most of these individual lives aren't affluent by today's standards. There are over 7 billion of us, and all of this living adds up. It's a perfect "Pogo" situation of meeting the enemy and finding it's us. The religious option might seem to offer a means of dialing back our desires in order to decrease the bad effects of our species-chauvinism, but it would need to be of a type not yet seen in the world. The Amish of America voluntarily achieve a much-reduced footprint, but the social mores that come along with it wouldn't be acceptable even to conservatives.

The paradox, as Thoreau saw it, was that in being humanitarians--placing the human project in the forefront--we lose the perspective needed if we ever were truly to make being part of nature more than a hollow statement. Our belief, ingrained enough that it doesn't need to be said explicitly, is that there should be no restrictions to our doing whatever we see as possible in the short term. "Think locally, act globally" is a fine imperative that has so far proved impractical for us biological creatures geared to what will best advantage ourselves or our group.

[Robert Tulip]

We know to watch out when something gets you thinking, Robert! Thanks for this great review.

Many thanks Bill, I appreciate your comments as I get very little feedback on my views. I used the review as a launch pad to discuss my own ideas about religion and technology, but I think that is within an acceptable scope. As always, if anyone reads something I say and doesn’t understand it or thinks it is wrong, I really appreciate them letting me know.

A different reviewer of this book said that the scariest thing about the coming wave of extinction is that it is happening as a result of all of us living our lives, even if most of these individual lives aren't affluent by today's standards.

The average global income is three dollars a day. That is extreme poverty by American and other OECD standards. But the aspirations for cars, electricity and other consumer goods require a global paradigm shift if they are to be met in a sustainable way. My view is that global affluence is sustainable, but we have to exploit the frontier potential of our real ‘adjacent possible’, the world ocean, applying scientific knowledge through industrial algae production as the foundation of a new economy.

There are over 7 billion of us, and all of this living adds up. It's a perfect "Pogo" situation of meeting the enemy and finding it's us.

There has been a lot of controversy about megafauna extinction, since indigenous people regard it as a moral accusation against them. I prefer to think that even if the first settlers in America chomped their way through all the megafauna quite rapidly when they arrived from Siberia 13,000 years ago, indigenous people came to have a respect for nature that has been badly lost since the Columbian invasion. Homo Sapien is not doomed to extinction, but we do have to adapt to our environment like any other species. That means using our nature-given brains to work out how to manage planetary ecology.

The religious option might seem to offer a means of dialing back our desires in order to decrease the bad effects of our species-chauvinism, but it would need to be of a type not yet seen in the world. The Amish of America voluntarily achieve a much-reduced footprint, but the social mores that come along with it wouldn't be acceptable even to conservatives.

We have previously discussed the religious theme of sacrifice as a basis for global ethics, along the ‘live simply so all may simply live’ line which you allude to here. My view is that calls for sacrifice through emission reduction may be politically appealing to elites, but are utterly unfeasible and will fail as soon as anyone tries to implement them. The whole UN system is a talking shop that lives in a fantasy world with mirages for targets. A different path is needed. As I note in my review, removing more carbon from the air and sea than we add is a different path from emission reduction. I am of the view that such a different path is scientifically and politically feasible, but is hidden from view by the combined weight of the emissionistas on one hand and the denialists on the other.

Denialism is driven by economics, by the fact that people want to get rich. If a way can be found to combine wealth with climate stability, we can have the best of both worlds, a capitalist method to reduce carbon levels in the air and sea.

The paradox, as Thoreau saw it, was that in being humanitarians--placing the human project in the forefront--we lose the perspective needed if we ever were truly to make being part of nature more than a hollow statement.

Thoreau was a dreamer. He could see that the pioneer mentality of the endless frontier was not sustainable, but blamed the entrepreneurial spirit as a whole for problems that are more properly sheeted home to abuses of that spirit. I think it is possible to place humanitarian values at the centre of strategies to fix the global climate. Indeed, if we adopt the Ehrlich style argument of humans as a pathogen we quickly move to the green margin of politics. Better to stay in the centre of politics, and look for ways to turn around the thinking of the energy industry, so their stock prices based on available reserves can be sustained and we don’t experience a global economic collapse. That means mining carbon from the air and sea so we can keep mining carbon from the earth. This plan offers the prospect of sustained global abundance.

Our belief, ingrained enough that it doesn't need to be said explicitly, is that there should be no restrictions to our doing whatever we see as possible in the short term. "Think locally, act globally" is a fine imperative that has so far proved impractical for us biological creatures geared to what will best advantage ourselves or our group.

The pioneering spirit of freedom and liberty is well expressed by Republican Saints such as Ronald Wilson Reagan and Ayn Rand. But this infinite mentality has always been challenged by empiricists who point out that the world is finite. I actually like Ayn Rand a lot, since my own plan for an ocean based algae production system is very similar to the ideas of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. But there is an essential craziness in Rand and Reagan, born of the political conflict with communism, that led them to see all statements of existential finitude as intolerable constraints on freedom.

Global action is only feasible where it aligns to market imperatives. Hayek’s vision of a rule based capitalist market is the only economic model worth considering as having ethical coherence. The whole project of emission reduction is driven by a covert socialist agenda to increase the political power of governments. In the spirit of Ayn Rand, I totally rebel against that totalitarian ambition. A decentralised energy market based on local algae production can enable entrepreneurial freedom and unimaginable growth in wealth. Critique of the UN does not have to also criticise the science of the IPCC, but should be stringent in analysis of the political and economic implications of the carbon tax model.

My view is that the idea that carbon taxes could stop global warming is like suggesting the French could have stopped Hitler from invading by reforming their tax system. It is entirely laughable. Global warming is a freight train, a Permian Extinction prospect, eyeballing us this century. Changing tax rules might help, but what we really need is vision and action to remove carbon from the air on a very rapid and big scale. I say that must be done in alliance with the fossil fuel industries. The impasse of climate politics is due to the UNistas painting the energy industry as demons. I prefer to see Shell and Exxon and Chevron as amazing repositories of talent and money and will, ready to be mobilised into climate action as soon as a path of trust is identified and explained.

[DWill]

The average global income is three dollars a day. That is extreme poverty by American and other OECD standards. But the aspirations for cars, electricity and other consumer goods require a global paradigm shift if they are to be met in a sustainable way. My view is that global affluence is sustainable, but we have to exploit the frontier potential of our real ‘adjacent possible’, the world ocean, applying scientific knowledge through industrial algae production as the foundation of a new economy.

Figuring a per capital global wage is tricky business, but we don't have to agree on precise numbers to agree that the inequalities are astounding. We might differ on a matter of faith--whether my standard of living can be that of the rest of the world without bringing on calamities for the planet. If a religious awakening is conceived as part of the salvation, what might this consist of if not in a steep reduction in what everyone "needs" in the form of creature comforts? I think it's delusion to believe in having it all. placing all our eggs in the basket of some miracle energy source. Algae has this allure solely because it's an unrealized energy source, with any unintended consequences, and all of its potential to fuel the planet, still unknown. Fossil fuels and the atom once were panaceas as well. We need to take less, each of us, which requires a restraint we have never exercised except under conditions of resource scarcity.

There has been a lot of controversy about megafauna extinction, since indigenous people regard it as a moral accusation against them. I prefer to think that even if the first settlers in America chomped their way through all the megafauna quite rapidly when they arrived from Siberia 13,000 years ago, indigenous people came to have a respect for nature that has been badly lost since the Columbian invasion. Homo Sapien is not doomed to extinction, but we do have to adapt to our environment like any other species. That means using our nature-given brains to work out how to manage planetary ecology.

I hope the time comes, and it had better come soon, when global action will be a practical possibility. But nothing I see points in a hopeful direction.

We have previously discussed the religious theme of sacrifice as a basis for global ethics, along the ‘live simply so all may simply live’ line which you allude to here. My view is that calls for sacrifice through emission reduction may be politically appealing to elites, but are utterly unfeasible and will fail as soon as anyone tries to implement them. The whole UN system is a talking shop that lives in a fantasy world with mirages for targets. A different path is needed. As I note in my review, removing more carbon from the air and sea than we add is a different path from emission reduction. I am of the view that such a different path is scientifically and politically feasible, but is hidden from view by the combined weight of the emissionistas on one hand and the denialists on the other.

Denialism is driven by economics, by the fact that people want to get rich. If a way can be found to combine wealth with climate stability, we can have the best of both worlds, a capitalist method to reduce carbon levels in the air and sea.

The elites chiming in on sacrificing is hypocritical in the extreme, since they expect only others to do the sacrificing. Al Gore is an example. The way out is probably not to focus on self-sacrifice, but to begin to appreciate the ways in which happiness can grow independent of material growth. Economic growth models are inevitably destructive but are the only metric we now have for gauging progress. I don't believe we can have the best of both worlds; the alternatives and choices are much harder than that.

Thoreau was a dreamer. He could see that the pioneer mentality of the endless frontier was not sustainable, but blamed the entrepreneurial spirit as a whole for problems that are more properly sheeted home to abuses of that spirit. I think it is possible to place humanitarian values at the centre of strategies to fix the global climate. Indeed, if we adopt the Ehrlich style argument of humans as a pathogen we quickly move to the green margin of politics. Better to stay in the centre of politics, and look for ways to turn around the thinking of the energy industry, so their stock prices based on available reserves can be sustained and we don’t experience a global economic collapse. That means mining carbon from the air and sea so we can keep mining carbon from the earth. This plan offers the prospect of sustained global abundance.

Thoreau did have some admiration for the pioneers of commercialism, but it's true that he thought business detracted from one's humanity. I don't like the view of humans as a cancer or plague, but fear that in the final evaluation it may be true.

The pioneering spirit of freedom and liberty is well expressed by Republican Saints such as Ronald Wilson Reagan and Ayn Rand. But this infinite mentality has always been challenged by empiricists who point out that the world is finite. I actually like Ayn Rand a lot, since my own plan for an ocean based algae production system is very similar to the ideas of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. But there is an essential craziness in Rand and Reagan, born of the political conflict with communism, that led them to see all statements of existential finitude as intolerable constraints on freedom.

Global action is only feasible where it aligns to market imperatives. Hayek’s vision of a rule based capitalist market is the only economic model worth considering as having ethical coherence. The whole project of emission reduction is driven by a covert socialist agenda to increase the political power of governments. In the spirit of Ayn Rand, I totally rebel against that totalitarian ambition. A decentralised energy market based on local algae production can enable entrepreneurial freedom and unimaginable growth in wealth. Critique of the UN does not have to also criticise the science of the IPCC, but should be stringent in analysis of the political and economic implications of the carbon tax model.

My view is that the idea that carbon taxes could stop global warming is like suggesting the French could have stopped Hitler from invading by reforming their tax system. It is entirely laughable. Global warming is a freight train, a Permian Extinction prospect, eyeballing us this century. Changing tax rules might help, but what we really need is vision and action to remove carbon from the air on a very rapid and big scale. I say that must be done in alliance with the fossil fuel industries. The impasse of climate politics is due to the UNistas painting the energy industry as demons. I prefer to see Shell and Exxon and Chevron as amazing repositories of talent and money and will, ready to be mobilised into climate action as soon as a path of trust is identified and explained.

Religion and the markets, a two-pronged attack on the destruction of earth's environment? This requires a two-legged faith as well. Free markets have always been uninterested in anything but maximizing profit--not a bad thing in itself, but not what we're needing in the context of a sustainable environment. Religion has no track record either.

[Robert Tulip]

Figuring a per capita global wage is tricky business, but we don't have to agree on precise numbers to agree that the inequalities are astounding.

Yes it is a tricky business, and the $3 figure I quoted is way out of date. That was the world median income in about 2003, but the Chinese and Indian growth rates since then have lifted the median dramatically to about $18 per day. https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/ex ... l=en&dl=en shows the Chinese takeoff. The number I was looking for was actually the cash median based on national per capita income statistics, not adjusted for purchasing power parity. It means that about 3.5 billion people survive on less than that, although it does not take into account the inequality in big poor countries such as China and India. $18 dollars gets you a lot more in a least developed country than it does in the USA. And the mean is higher than the median.

We might differ on a matter of faith--whether my standard of living can be that of the rest of the world without bringing on calamities for the planet.

I actually think that we agree that sustainability requires a big shift in values, so that people value ways of life that protect the planet and prevent extinction. My view is quite simply that working out better ways to manage carbon can produce a far higher quality of life for everyone, with more travel, better diet, more energy use, in ways that have net positive impact on global ecology and biodiversity. I just don’t accept the pervasive story that sustainability and wealth are incompatible.

If a religious awakening is conceived as part of the salvation, what might this consist of if not in a steep reduction in what everyone "needs" in the form of creature comforts?

It is not the scale of consumption that is damaging the planet, but rather the type of consumption. The current world economy is like shitting into a cholera pit and drinking it. What we need are new sanitarians who will do the equivalent of Dr John Snow removing the pump handle from the cholera tap in London in 1854. People can emit carbon as long as we clean up after ourselves.

I think it's delusion to believe in having it all. placing all our eggs in the basket of some miracle energy source. Algae has this allure solely because it's an unrealized energy source, with any unintended consequences, and all of its potential to fuel the planet, still unknown. Fossil fuels and the atom once were panaceas as well. We need to take less, each of us, which requires a restraint we have never exercised except under conditions of resource scarcity.

Algae has allure because it is feasible, and was the original source of our energy. Mimicking nature is the way to go to establish universal abundance, and requires no miracles. It is fine for you to scoff but I plan to prove you wrong.

I hope the time comes, and it had better come soon, when global action will be a practical possibility. But nothing I see points in a hopeful direction.

There is a fascinating exchange in the New York Review of Books between Elizabeth Kolbert and Naomi Klein. https://www.facebook.com/nybooks/posts/ ... comments=9 I am entirely on Kolbert’s side here since I think that Klein is a dangerous authoritarian while Kolbert is mostly sensible. The concept of global action is authoritarian, a bit like Pol Pot shutting down the cities. Instead we should look for bottom up entrepreneurial solutions, with the role of top down politics being to accede to John Galt’s demand that they get the hell out of the way. The UN actively prevents climate action by holding the planet hostage to its fantasy demand of a global agreement on emission reduction, as seen in its scandalous and contemptible persecution of Russ George’s Ocean Iron Fertilization experiment. George is calling for action against marine extinction but the UN so-called biodiversity bodies just don’t care. They are a shameful disgrace.

The elites chiming in on sacrificing is hypocritical in the extreme, since they expect only others to do the sacrificing. Al Gore is an example. The way out is probably not to focus on self-sacrifice, but to begin to appreciate the ways in which happiness can grow independent of material growth. Economic growth models are inevitably destructive but are the only metric we now have for gauging progress. I don't believe we can have the best of both worlds; the alternatives and choices are much harder than that.

When we establish an algae-based world economy, we will have unimaginable wealth and freedom to focus on spiritual growth. Growth is not inevitably destructive, as an abundant economy can have positive externalities. Growing algae for biofuel in coral reefs is the only way to protect the reefs against extinction from heat and acid.

Thoreau did have some admiration for the pioneers of commercialism, but it's true that he thought business detracted from one's humanity. I don't like the view of humans as a cancer or plague, but fear that in the final evaluation it may be true.

How wonderful it would be if everyone could contemplate their spiritual identity getting back to nature on Walden Pond. Unfortunately we don’t have seven billion Walden Ponds though.

Humans are not a cancer or plague. We are simply in the grip of delusional ideologies, and can live in harmony with nature once we break free. Your rumination here about cancer illustrates a common opinion in green politics, which they often try to hide because it is such electoral poison.

Religion and the markets, a two-pronged attack on the destruction of earth's environment? This requires a two-legged faith as well. Free markets have always been uninterested in anything but maximizing profit--not a bad thing in itself, but not what we're needing in the context of a sustainable environment. Religion has no track record either.

Christianity does in fact provide this two-legged faith in Matthew 25, where Christ combines the capitalist principle “to those who have will be given” with its apparently communist opposite “what you do to the least you do to me”. Only by unleashing the talents of entrepreneurial invention in a well-regulated free market will we obtain the abundant resources needed to feed the hungry. We have to apply the profit motive to provide the incentive to scale up industrial algae production as a way to protect biodiversity and reverse climate change.

[Interbane]

Only by unleashing the talents of entrepreneurial invention in a well-regulated free market..

Is that really the only way? What if we could instead recreate the drive that was behind Einstein(it wasn't entrepreneurial) or Newton or the thousands of other scientists and researchers whose motives are more pure(if not entirely pure), and less driven by the desire for power and money. Fame and pride, perhaps, but with a larger chunk of communal empathy? Is the motive to increase wealth really the best motive to solve this issue?

[Robert Tulip]

Only by unleashing the talents of entrepreneurial invention in a well-regulated free market..

Is that really the only way? What if we could instead recreate the drive that was behind Einstein(it wasn't entrepreneurial) or Newton or the thousands of other scientists and researchers whose motives are more pure(if not entirely pure), and less driven by the desire for power and money. Fame and pride, perhaps, but with a larger chunk of communal empathy? Is the motive to increase wealth really the best motive to solve this issue?

Stopping global warming is not just about science, but about politics, technology, money, economics and some very rapidly occurring biological extinction and potential system collapse problems.

We need to harness the animal spirits of private enterprise, especially the fossil fuel industry, in order to achieve the scale and pace of technology research development and deployment needed to reverse global warming.

Setting industry as the enemy only polarises a debate that industry will win in the short term to everyone’s cost, and fails to bring in the skills and money and trust which industry have in abundance.

Private investment requires incentive and interest to incubate innovation. My vision is of a world where algae production systems compete on price and quality to deliver a myriad of new profitable products within a system of strong regulation for environmental protection.

Only when algae biofuel costs less than Saudi crude will we be on a path to planetary protection. My view is that such price competition is entirely possible using mechanised systems with economies of scale and relying on natural ocean energy inputs and developing very high yielding algae varieties.

Governments should steer not row. Their job is to set the rules of the game, and get out of the way of innovators so we can deliver jobs, growth and a healthy environment.

[DWill]

Robert, you reference the mistakes or delusions of the greenies. I think one mistake you make is to make our environmental crisis equivalent to global warming. It is much more than that. In terms of the subject of Kolbert's book, extinction, it is especially obvious that eliminating species gallops along with only an assist from climate change. We have an impact on the planet much greater than our ability to warm it up. Habitat loss is probably the biggest factor here, with overexploitation second. To say that we can continue exponential economic and population growth if only we turn to algae just sounds absurd to me. You sound like another special interest.

[Robert Tulip]

It is disappointing if not surprising to see these comments informing me of my supposed mistakes. They reveal an inability to engage with efforts to find practical solutions. I am convinced that the popular fixation among leftists on emission reduction as the only solution for warming is driven more by ideology than science. It is wrong to jump from the true observation that the science on global warming is settled to the false assumption that we know how to fix it through global treaties.

Global treaties won't work and new ideas are needed. We need to get away from the tired and empty cynicism that says there are no technological silver bullets and the solution is making people poorer.

Robert, you reference the mistakes or delusions of the greenies. I think one mistake you make is to make our environmental crisis equivalent to global warming.

I have never said global warming is the sole cause of the environmental crisis. Indeed, I explain in the opening post here that humans are spreading fungi around the world due to travel that are causing extinction of bats and frogs, creating a new Anthropocene of global connectedness. Those problems are due to trade and tourism, not global warming, so you are simply wrong to assert I have made the mistake you describe.

But perhaps your error is grounded in your lack of scientific appreciation of the scale of the warming peril? Most people do have trouble envisaging orders of magnitude. Global warming and CO2 emissions are responsible for the worst emerging extinction problems such as the expected elimination of coral reefs this century mainly due to acid added from carbon emissions, the pervasive poleward and upward migration which often leaves species with nowhere to go and overcomes their adaptive powers, and the expected drastic changes in rainfall and sea level.

A 4-6 C degree rise in temperature this century as predicted by the World Bank Report Turn Down the Heat under business as usual would make the environmental problems we have seen to date seem small.

It is much more than that. In terms of the subject of Kolbert's book, extinction, it is especially obvious that eliminating species gallops along with only an assist from climate change.

Have you read Kolbert’s book? Your comment is like saying a horse gallops along with only an assist from its rider, ignoring the fact that without the rider the horse would not gallop. CO2 emissions are likely to be the most dangerous of the suite of human toxic timebombs, magnifying the impact of exploitation etc.

We have an impact on the planet much greater than our ability to warm it up. Habitat loss is probably the biggest factor here, with overexploitation second.

Kolbert provides a poignant analysis of how fragmentation of habitat into tiny separate parcels leaves their animal and plant inhabitants supremely vulnerable to climate change, for example in the Amazon. Scientifically speaking it makes no sense to assert that habitat loss and over exploitation are worse problems than climate change, except in the sense that we have not yet seen the worst of climate change.

To say that we can continue exponential economic and population growth if only we turn to algae just sounds absurd to me. You sound like another special interest.

You are just presenting an argument from incredulity without engaging with evidence. My view is that we are at the start of a global phase shift into a higher magnitude of abundance and freedom, based on systematic conversion of ocean energy and nutrient into useful products, and enabling education and regulation to deliver greater environmental sensitivity to protect biodiversity. I appreciate that is a preliminary and controversial argument, but it is hardly something that can be refuted merely by an expression of disdain.

The problem here is that the advocates of sacrifice and reduced footprint are just romantic dreamers like Thoreau, with no capacity to engage productively with the real economy, but with considerable ability to mess things up and produce conflict and poverty, leading to the very problems of ecological collapse that they sought to avoid in the first place. Unless you ride the tiger you will be eaten by it. I understand the snobbish dislike that socialists have for objectivism, but technology is a vastly preferable path than the totalitarian social regulation inherent in plans for global climate treaties.

Protecting the environment requires a wealthy peaceful society. In terms of a theory of change, we have to find a way to secure wealth and peace in a way that transitions away from increasing warming. The silver bullet for that objective is industrial algae production. It is about public good, not special interest.

[Interbane]

The problem here is that the advocates of sacrifice and reduced footprint are just romantic dreamers like Thoreau

Are you saying our footprints can get larger? Or that our population won't grow?

I think one of the key causes of all our issues is that we've grown to encompass the planet. Steering a laissez faire economy to the correct solution with 7 billion people on Earth is quixotic as trying to regulate it into submission. People will eat and drink and screw regardless of our attempts to intervene.

I don't have the answer, but if I see the answer I hope I'd recognize it. Saying that it's okay to continue growing doesn't ring true to me, perhaps because it's open ended. Can we continue growing until 2050? 2100? Has this been thought out? We'll smash a million species into extinction, solve global warming, then die as the threads of the ecosystem unravel from the extinction event.

It is disappointing if not surprising to see these comments informing me of my supposed mistakes.

You dislike having your ideas challenged?