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Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization can be downloaded for free, but I recommend buying a copy and making it your personal Bible.  Lester R. Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, continues to monitor the Earth’s economic and ecological health and analyze what needs to be done to build a sustainable future.  We’ve all boarded the Titanic, and Lester Brown knows about the iceberg, but few people listen to him.  Studying this book gives me so much to contemplate.  Just glancing at the subjects in the table of contents will tell you what’s this book is about, and you can read every chapter online, or download a .pdf of each chapter or the whole book, and even download an Excel spreadsheet of the data too, if you like studying numbers.

Just look how he has divided the problems we face:

• Deteriorating Oil and Food Security
• Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas
• Emerging Water Shortages
• Natural Systems under Stress
• Early Signs of Decline
• Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population
• Restoring the Earth
• Feeding Eight Billion Well
• Designing Cities for People
• Raising Energy Efficiency
• Turning to Renewable Energy
• The Great Mobilization

What is My Fair Share?

To ask if God exists, is philosophical speculation.  No on knows, and we have debated the question for centuries and will continue to do so.  To ask if there is a limit to economic growth is not imaginary speculation.  We will soon know the answer, one way or the other.  Most people believe there is unlimited economic potential for growth.  The economic foundation of our society is based on this belief, just like the builders of the Titanic believed they had built an unsinkable ship.

There are new economists that now see that any model of economics that does not include the ecology of the Earth is doomed to fail.  Lester Brown says that any product that doesn’t factor in its complete costs from all sources is doomed to bankruptcy in the market, like Enron failed as a company because it cooked the books and hid part of its true operating costs.

What this means is economics is really a subset of ecology.

If you accept this, then you come to understand that the Earth has limits, and realize that growth based economics means we’re all cells consuming the Earth like a cancer spreading in a host.  The idea of steady-state economics is a theory that suggests we can all be healthy cells that live symbiotically within our planetary organism.

Once you realize this, your primary ethical question of existence is:  How much can I consume without being cancerous?  This is more than just worrying about carbon dioxide and global warming.  That’s only one of many cancerous growths attacking the Earth.  The answer has to be more than:  As little as possible.  Economists and ecologists need to set goals for individuals to aim for in their daily lives.

If you could buy a piece of land and live there in a totally sustainable manner, without using resources outside of your property, that might be one answer, but not a practical one.  Scientists are just beginning to explore this issue.  Think of the parable about the fishes and the loaves, but this time divide them between 7 billion people and then factor in that the supply of wheat and fish should never end.

Another way to think about it would be to let scientists determine how much carbon dioxide can safely go into the atmosphere each year and then divide that number by 7 billion and let us each figure out how we’re going to budget our CO2 use.  A recent issue of the New Scientist suggests that might only be 1 ton per person, which means living like someone from Yemen or in the Republic of Congo today.

Since I’m probably using 10-20 times that, I’m quite cancerous.  About the only way to get myself down to using 1 ton of carbon per year would be to ride a bike and make my house perfectly energy efficient.  A possibility, but not a likely one.  The 1 ton per person is a global fair share estimate and much more restrictive than those 50% and 80% reduction goals for American peak usage.

What Happens If We Don’t Change?

Even if we don’t concern ourselves with various forms of pollution, there’s a good chance we’re still heading for economic collapse.  If unlimited economic growth is truly unsustainable, then it will also fail for other reasons, other than too much poisonous output.  We can also fail for not having enough input.  The economy can also crash and burn by not jogging faster than debt, something that’s been dominating the news lately.  Other canaries falling dead are stories about shortages.  Just before the liquidity scare, it looked like we were about to start running short of oil.  Luckily a cure for high oil demand is a slow economy, or is that lucky?  What if we ran out of oil but didn’t have renewable energy.  What if we ran out of fresh water before we ran out of oil?  We could easily face critical shortages of commodities long before we faced surpluses of rising oceans.  Reading Plan B 3.0 illustrates the enormity of all the problems we’ll be facing.

Human nature tends to ignore looming icebergs or melting glaciers.  We like to focus on what we want, and not people shouting that the sky is falling.  However, we have seen great positive social transformations happen quickly – just look at the switch to electricity or going from horse power to horsepower.  And isn’t it amazing how fast we all became geeks with our computers, video games and cell phones?  I think we’ll all change over and over again, whether changing for good or bad, whether we move into an ecological paradise, or a depression that makes the Great Depression seem like the good ole days.

We can’t avoid change.  The real question is whether we can surf change or will change flow over us like a tsunami.

Change is Happening Now

Everything Lester Brown writes about in Plan B 3.0 can be seen on your high definition television right now, if you’re willing to tune in to the right shows.  If you only watch Pushing Daisies and Heroes you can delay learning about the iceberg until after it hits.  A good way to set up your early warning system is to watch PBS Frontline each week.  Keep adding PBS shows, and then documentaries from National Geographic and the various Discovery channels.  Watch between the scenes.  Count how many references to drought you’ve seen in one week, or how many continents and countries are losing their glaciers.  You don’t need a supercomputer or Al Gore to spot trends in global weather patterns.

How Smart Are People?

All the problems mentioned in Plan B 3.0 can be managed.  Theoretically, if humans can cause the problems, humans can fix the problems, but that may not be how things play out.  What everyone really wants to know is whether they are going to be one of those people at the Superdome after Katrina, or will they be the kind of person who had the resources to get out safely on their own.  Being prepared helps.  Sometimes luck is merely a coin toss, and other times luck favors those who plan ahead.  But how do you prepare for global recession?

Plan B 3.0 is a look at what the people in power need to be doing to solve the transition from the economics of growth to a steady-state economy at the macro level.  What we need now are Plan B handbooks for us little guys, advising us what we should be doing to make the same adjustments at the micro levels.  This could be books about careers for college students, to how-to books about starting businesses in a steady-state economy.  I doubt the plumbing industry will be shaken up, but is there much of a future for jet airline pilots?

JWH – 11-2-8

At work, years ago we set up a “Free Stuff” table, up on the third floor near the student copier.  I work at a university, in the College of Education.  The free stuff table started with old text books, from a school book repository.  We had a library of K-12 schoolbooks, and when new editions came out, we’d put the old ones on the free stuff table.  After that, when a professor would move their office, or leave the college, they’d dump academic books and journals on the free table they didn’t want to take with them.  Eventually, faculty and staff, began bringing books, magazines, music CDs and LPs, software, VHS tapes, DVDS from home and drop their stuff off on the table.

Sometimes the donations were good stuff, and the table would clear in less than an hour, sometimes even within minutes.  Other times, the table would fill with boring stuff, 20 year old educational journals that would lay there for weeks, but would eventually thin out and disappear.  I used to take old books to the library, but bringing them to work is much easier.

Because of its location, the table needs to stay neat, so mostly people leave small stuff.  Sometimes we’ll see a DVD drive for a computer, or little radio, or various office supply gadgets, but for the most part the giveaways have been books and magazines.  We have a couple hundred faculty and staff, and a few thousand students, and the table is by the computer labs, so it sees a lot of traffic.  The free stuff table has become a form of recycling.

I’m also fascinated by what kinds of books show up there.  Lots of fiction, lots of educational books, but also religious books, statistics, psychology, sociology, kids books, cook books, etc.  After my mom died, I took a bunch of her old books up there, various bibles, religious books, and Edna Ferber novels.  They went quickly.  The other day my wife set out a box of Christmas ornaments to give to Goodwill.  I took them and put them on the free stuff table and they were gone within 5 minutes.  What’s worthless to one person is valuable to another.

I’m writing about this free stuff table as a way to recommend the idea to others.  It could be a common concept at most offices, but I don’t know.  All we did was tape down a sign on a 30″x42″ table that said, “Free Stuff.”  After that, the table took a life of its own.

JWH 10-21-08

Again, my friend Carl from Stainless Steal Droppings has inspired me to write another essay about religion.  He and I are both disturbed by aggressive communication tactics taken by people on both sides of our philosophically polarized society.  Carl and I agree that both liberals and conservatives go to extremes in attacking each other.  Carl is a Christian and I am an atheist, and we’re working on ways to coexist philosophically.  We’re not trying to convert each other to our own positions, but we are trying to find ways to have opposing ideas and still have friendly discussions.  This is a real challenge.

Often in the editorial press and on the blogosphere you see writers trying to convince readers of their beliefs.  For many aggressive writers trying to get notice their position is often:  I’m right, you’re wrong, let me explain how you’re a dumb ass.  One step up in politeness is:  We’re right, they’re wrong, let’s have a good laugh. What I like to see is:  I’m coming from this vantage point, you’re coming from that vantage point, how can we solve a problem together.  Which probably explains why I’m not a popular writer because of my Pollyannaish thinking.

In my last essay on the subject, Faith, Carl posted a very good reply, but I particularly like what he said here:

I think you certainly got part of what I was referring to as ‘faith’ down. The other part is probably most accurately reflected in my feelings about evolution. I certainly believe in the type of evolution that involves adaptation. I believe species can adapt to surroundings, eventually developing new ways to cope with their environment, etc. In fact this kind of thinking most definitely falls in line with biblical ideas about how God’s creation works. I do not, however, believe that any one species evolved into another regardless of how long this ol’ earth may have been around. My own personal view of the ‘theory’ of evolution is that it is that, a ‘theory’, based on observations and calculations of scientists but mostly based on a type of ‘faith’. I don’t recall reading any ‘proof’ that my ancestors came from monkeys and it is certainly not an experiment that can be duplicated in a lab, tested, etc. so my ideas that there is ‘faith’ involved in science in large part comes from the way that a large part of the scientific community and humanity at large accepts the idea of evolution as science ‘fact’ rather than theory. That, in my mind, is no different than the faith I place in the existence of a real and loving and personable God. I know, your hackles are rising, but can you see what I am driving at?

Now this brings us to a very exact problem.  I don’t want to make this an issue of which side is right.  I’m not going to try and convince Carl how I think evolution is a good explanation biological reality.  What I want to do is explore ways in which Carl can have his beliefs and I can have mine and we can develop a social structure that allows us to coexist and communicate.

Science describes a universe 13.7 billion years old.  The Bible, by certain people’s measure, describes a universe that is just several thousand years old.  This is a problem mainly for our public education system.  It’s a problem being fought by school boards and state legislatures.  One solution brought about by creationists, is the theory of intelligent design, an idea that scientists considers an insult to science.  To describe the battle so far, some Christians feel that society went too far by excluding religion from schools.  The original solution to the problem Carl and I are working on was to separate church and state, and that’s still the best solution in my mind.  Evidently, there are conservatives that don’t like that idea, and they want to find ways to change the educational system.

But I don’t want to get into politics.  What I want to explore is how we treat each other personally.  Concurrent to my discussion with Carl, I’ve been discussing Christianity with a lady friend at work.  I told her that even though I’m an atheist I like studying the Bible, and I’m willing to consider some religious teachings as philosophical explorations on down-to-Earth problems.  She said Christianity is about accepting Christ, salvation and rebirth.  I told her I couldn’t go that far.

In fact, while I was talking with her, I had a revelation of my own.  I’ve always tried to imagine a metaphysical aspect to reality where religious people could be right.  I’ve always tried to imagine some kind of wormhole to the spiritual dimensions.  Theoretically, I wanted to give religious beliefs a possible loophole in space and time that could only be found in death where we might exist in some other dimensional realm.  However, while talking with my friend, I realized that I no longer can imagine such a loophole existing.

Where does that leave me?  I feel quite confident that all 6.7 billion of us living on planet Earth all share the same reality.  Whether or not that reality is ruled by some unknown quantum physics that allows for thought to bend the fabric of reality so Christians can be right as well as Richard Dawkins, or Buddhists meditating in a temple in Tibet, is beyond what I can know.  I do know that a couple billion of our 6.7 billion are Christians, and I think Muslims make up another billion or so.  Whatever political and social system we have has to include everyone.

Does that mean that the religious of the Earth are like a more populous Amish, and we should just let them freeze knowledge at some pre-19th century level of discovery?  Is it okay to just let a portion of the population deny Darwin?  Maybe the answer lies in my discovery of how to handle climate deniers that I made last week.

Up until very recently I worried that climate deniers would keep humanity from doing something about global warming, and then I reached a critical mass of observations in the news.  So many nations, states, companies, industries, scientists, educators and citizens are now working on the problem of global warming with the assumption that the theory is valid that it doesn’t matter if millions of people who are doing nothing, deny the concept.  Sometime in the last year, I think a secret vote was taken, and it was decided this was a problem we had to deal with, and people went to work.  A critical mass of scientists accepted the theory, and now the problem of global warming caused by man-made actions is now accepted as fact.

There are millions of people that don’t believe in the income tax, but that hasn’t stopped Uncle Sam from collecting our dough.  The same is true about evolution.  The scientific and academic world accepted evolution as fact a long time ago.  I do not understand linear algebra, but this mathematical discipline can exist quite well without my awareness.  The time to argue Darwin’s ideas was in the late 19th century.  Botanists, zoologist, biologists, and all the people who use the science of evolution in their work took up the idea long ago and made it part of their routine because it worked.

It doesn’t matter that I believe Darwin, because my kind of belief is only a kind of faith. I’m just a fan at the Science Bowl rooting for the Science team.  It doesn’t matter that Carl chooses not to accept the theory of evolution.  As long as he doesn’t try to publish any papers on biology, his lack of belief will go unnoticed.  Is me trying to convince Carl that evolution is right any different that me trying to convince him that the Beatles were a better band than The Rolling Stones?

I think too much of the polarized emotional heat in the press and the blogosphere are people fighting over opinions.  Why should it matter to Christians that some people don’t believe?  Why should it matter to atheists that some people do?

Carl and I love to discover great books.  That’s what we do.  That’s why we’re friends.  I think we need to focus on what we do, and less on what we believe.  In the old days, it was considered impolite to talk about politics and religion publicly.  I think I’m going to take up that custom.  It doesn’t matter if I “believe” in global warming, it only matters if I do something about it.  I need to get away from writing essays about pure ideas and abstract beliefs.  I need to get back to writing about science fiction books.  Those are real.

JWH – 10-4-8

My friend Carl and I were talking about words that can be shared by religion and science.  Carl commented to my last post,

From a Christian perspective what I think many people need to hear is an acknowledgment that science itself is filled with leaps of faith and is founded on faith. Now that faith may not seem to be defined the same way for both groups but I think that is wrong. I think it is the same word. It is trust and belief in things that cannot be seen. Science takes leaps of faith all the time. It is the hard line view of a need for religion and science to be seen separately that scares off religious people and makes them want to reject scientific speculation, proof, etc.

When I first read this I wanted to protest that the word faith has no place in science, but I let Carl’s comment ride around in my head for awhile.  I’m glad I did, because many ideas grew from letting my thoughts lie fallow for awhile.

The pursuit of science does not involve faith, that is the testing of a hypothesis.  Scientific experiments have to stand alone and be reproducible and not be influenced by the beliefs of the experimenters.  However, faith plays a big role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.  We are all taught that the Earth orbits the Sun, but how many of us could actually prove it?  I have read about many experiments that are meant to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun, but I have not replicated any of them.

And I think this is what Carl is talking about.  We have a kind of faith in science.  We accept the consensus that the Earth orbits the Sun.  But is acceptance the same as faith?  Christians have faith that life exists after death, but that belief does not come from experiments and testing.  Religious people have faith in untested hypotheses.  So can one word apply to both situations?

My faith in science comes from reading a lot of books and in the acceptance of consensus.  I assume every scientific idea has been tested over and over again, and that all of science if built on billions of experiments that are constantly being retested.  I also live on the assumption that any technology derived from scientific laws will behave in a way that connects it to all other scientific laws.  Since I am not a scientist, I have to trust, accept, believe or have faith in science, but I depend on it to be consistent.

Religious people use the word faith in an inconsistent manner.  The object of their faith varies from person to person, and from religion to religion.  To the skeptic the faithful appear to be validating their wishes with determination and belief.  However, to the faithful, faith is about commitment to the unknowable.  Spiritual knowledge is handed down from the past, much like how scientific knowledge is passed down, and the worshipful are asked to accept this knowledge on faith.

This is where religion and science are different.  Science says to students, trust me, the experiments have been done, and I’ll show you how to reproduce any of them yourself.  Religion says, trust me, this knowledge comes from a higher being, one who was not of this world.  Religious people are followers of mystic knowledge.  Mystics are those people claiming direct experience with other worldly knowledge.  Religious people accept mystic knowledge on faith.  I am not religious, but that doesn’t mean I can disprove their hypothesis in which they base their faith.  Nor can science.

For decades there have been those who want to unite science and religion, and there have been Popes that have tried to solve the problem by allowing science to have providence back to the big bang, but declaring anything earlier belonging to God.  Religious people need for the realm of the supernatural to exist beyond our physical reality for their faith to exist.  Faith in the supernatural is very different from faith in the foundations of science.  Carl has his faith, and I have mine, so what’s the problem?

What bothers Carl and I are the competition of faiths that we see in the news and in the people around us.  Most people would like to be left along to pursue their own beliefs, but a few believers from every belief system want to legislate their faith into law for all to follow.  Some people have faith in areas other than religion and science, such as concepts like justice, goodness, evil, economics, ethics, etc.  There are all these competing ideas and ideologies.  It’s enough to drive one to watching sitcoms.

My conservative friends are riled up by Michael Moore and Al Gore.  My liberal friends are outraged by Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.  These folks are a kind of prophets of various faiths.  They campaign to gather believers in their ideas.  Just like the current presidential election, with each candidate wanting voters to embrace their beliefs, and thus have faith in them.

It makes me wonder if “faith” is a bad word.  If I express my faith in the concept of global warming, it presses the button on some people that raises their hackles.  But if someone around me starts talking about “intelligent design” my own hackle button gets pushed.  If I’m willing to accept Christianity as a belief, why not intelligent design?  This is getting to the heart of things, I think.

Faith requires betting the farm, committing the entire soul.  As long as Christianity is separate from science I can ignore it.  Intelligent design is religion’s way of attacking the belief in science.  Ouch, time to fight back.  The theory of evolution overlaps faith in the old testament.  Ouch, let’s start a crusade against science.

Faith has to be 100% pure, and any conflict is a threat.  Many people like to believe that reality is completely objective and can only handle one truth.  Nobody assumes their faith is one of the many that’s not part of reality.  I happen to wonder since most people lead highly delusional lives, does it really matter which faith is validated by objective reality?

But this head-in-the-sand approach won’t work.  My faith in science does conflict with other people’s faith in the systems they need to believe in with 100% certainty.  Strangely, this comes down to politics.  You’d think we could keep metaphysics out of decisions on road building, taxation, maintaining armies, building schools and libraries, and all the other mundane activities that go into running cities and states.  Take for instance the Wall Street buy out under discussion in congress.  Why are things lining up along party lines?

Everyone has many faiths, and for some reason of psychology, these collection of faiths line up along the two political parties like iron filings in a magnetic field, polarized by two opposing charges that we don’t understand.  Actual science is not a faith.  Believing in any idea is a faith.  Backing unproven scientific assertions is still a kind of faith.  We can’t prove our faiths with scientific like experiments, although some people believe rhetoric is a science, which it’s not.

I don’t know if the two species of humans I talked about in my last post are different because of their beliefs, or they are physically different in some way that make them believe along opposing lines.  I wonder if anyone has done studies of political parties around the world, and explored whether or not they had common traits and how they might be related to personality types.

JWH 9/25/8

In the old days people would tell you jokes and anecdotes in person, but in these modern times they send them around in emails.  I got one the other day that sparked my interest,

A stunning senior moment

Apparently, a self-important college freshman attending a recent football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation. “You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one,” the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear.

“The young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon. Our space probes have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, ships and electric and hydrogen cars, cell phones, computers with light-speed processing …and more.”

After a brief silence, the senior citizen responded as follows:

“You’re right, son. We didn’t have those things when we were young …….. so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little shit, what are you doing for the next generation?”

The applause was amazing ……

Since I’m slightly old, at 56, a big smile came to my face at the end, and I thought “Yea, for the old guy.”  But after I closed the email and went back to work I started thinking about this little anecdote.  The freshman wasn’t wrong, so why should he be the butt of the joke?  Kids today are different, and they grow up in a much different world than us baby-boomers, and much more different than my parent’s generation.  The difference between any two or three generations is always going  to be startling.

My grandmother, who was born in 1881 and died in 1972 saw a lot of changes, having been born before the car, electric grid or airplane.  My mother was born in 1916, and my father in 1920.  I assume the senior citizen of the story was maybe from the 1930s or 1940s, older than my generation, but younger than my parents.

So why was the senior so angry at the freshman?  As I get older I hear more resentment of the young.  I wouldn’t mind being young again myself, but I don’t hold it against them that I’m not.  I think this story is popular, because I searched on “Now, you arrogant little shit, what are you doing for the next generation?”  at Google and got 34,600 hits.  A lot of people are quoting it and thinking it funny, but I’m not finding many people commenting on it.  I think we need to examine the story more closely.

First off, why the anger?  Are older people, boomers and older generations, threatened by the current generation?  I see old people all the time that have adapted to computers, cell phones, iPods and the Internet, but for those that haven’t, are they angry at the young for leaving them behind?  Don’t we expect the young to surpass us, and go out and discover new stuff?

The young Freshman was right, the world of 2008 is extremely different from anything before 1990, and especially before 1980.  Is it his fault that the older generations don’t stay current.  Kids are all the time talking to me about fantastic music groups and movie stars that are unknown to me, but on the other hand, I can mention William Powell and Kay Francis, and their faces will go blank.  It evens out in the long run.

And can the senior at the game really take credit for inventing all that stuff?  I never invented anything.  And a lot of that tech was invented by people before the baby boomers.  Would that senior feel that my generation didn’t do anything either?

We don’t know the full context of the story.  Was the freshman being rude to the senior?  Was his tone really arrogant?  Or did the senior just read that into the situation?

I bring this up because there’s a lot of humor going around the net at the expense of various groups, much of it political.  Conservatives make fun of liberals, and liberals make fun of conservatives.  If you ask the people making the jokes they will say it’s all in fun, but if you’re on the receiving end, it feels like hostility.  I wonder how Sarah Palin feels about the jokes about her.  Or how Obama feels about jokes about him?

This senior moment story is pretty minor, but at the core of it is anger, and I think a lot of people think it’s funny because of resentment towards the young.  Later the same day after reading this humorous anecdote I read about a 12-year-old boy inventing a 3D solar cell.  The point of the senior moment anecdote is patently false, the young are always inventing new stuff.  Every generation has its slackers and heroes.  So why the, “my generation is better than yours,” routine?

One reason could be because the older generations don’t like all the tech stuff and hate having to deal with it.  They might prefer the good ole days of vacuum tube radios and vinyl LPs.  They might prefer mail with stamps over email.  They might prefer Ed Sullivan to Chris Rock.  Life might have been nicer with 3 channels of television as opposed to hundreds.

Maybe the old are just envious of the young.  The freshman was the same age as the football players the senior was paying to watch.  Maybe the freshman was with a beautiful young girlfriend, and the senior felt jealous at not being young himself.  Even at 56 I would feel envy for their youth.  Could the attitude of the freshmen have made the senior, and all the people who enjoyed this joke, feel they were over the hill, and the angry retort made them feel better?

Now, if you are from my generation and older, and you meet a kid that points out how backward you are and how you’re out of touch with modern times, are you going to use the same line as this senior did?  Or will you say something different?

The senior could have wisely said, “So, kid, how are you going to feel in a few years when a younger person tells you what you told me?  And you maybe surprised how quick you’re find yourself in my place.”

Or he could have smiled and said, “It’s easy to be 19, let’s see how you do at 75.”

Or maybe the senior could have done what my Uncle Jack did to me.  I was 13 at the time, but the same trick will probably work with someone 19.  I had arrogantly told my Uncle Jack something, this was around 1965, and the generation gap was starting to widen, and he replied, “Ok, smarty, I’ll tell you what.  Write down everything you just said and put it in an envelope, and in five years we’ll open it up and I’ll give you five dollars for everything you list you still believe.” 

I refused to do it because I was so confident in my beliefs that I didn’t think it worth my time.  Later on, when I was 18, I remember that incident and realized that my uncle wouldn’t have lost any money on the deal.

Wisdom is not calling the younger generation arrogant little shits.

Jim