The problem of induction and the blindness of fools

The problem with the future is that it's not always like the past. In fact, were this statement not true, history would indeed be "bunk" just as Henry Ford once said. But, of course, history is a chronicle of what changed and therefore led to a future that was different from the past.

So, it is puzzling that such an obvious truism is so easily dismissed when it comes to the future of oil and energy in general. Enter one Porter Stansberry, an investment newsletter writer, who knows that "peak oil is an economic impossibility." In the linked interview he likens oil to copper. We have found substitutes for copper, namely optical fiber, so we will certainly find substitutes for oil in the quantities we need at the time we need them. He insists though that we won't need them for a very long time.

Stansberry is correct when he states that "[i]t does not naturally follow that a limited supply of oil would limit our production of energy." There are certainly many other known ways to extract energy from the environment. Perhaps some of them such as widespread deployment of thorium-based molten salt reactors might validate Stansberry's observation. But then he states:

The idea that we would lose the ability to create energy in an economic way, in my mind, is absurd. The entire history of the human population is nothing but falling prices for valuable commodities-not measured in dollars, but measured in real terms. I have no doubt in my mind that by the time I'm dead the price of energy in real terms will be far less than it is today.

Here he makes sweeping general statements about the past. It is not true that commodity prices have been falling in real terms for all of human history. There have been sustained bouts of rising prices. It is true that real prices for many commodities have been on a roughly downward trajectory from the beginning of the industrial revolution. This is in part due to the rising availability of cheap fossil fuel energy used to obtain those commodities, whether it is metal from ever lower grades of ore or rising farm productivity largely abetted by fossil fuel inputs such as nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas and pesticides and herbicides from petrochemicals.

So, in one respect Stansberry's analysis suffers from failing to distinguish between sources of energy such as fossil fuels and materials which do not provide energy such as copper. Fossil fuels, our main sources of energy, are the prime movers in the industrial economy. We cannot simply substitute some other materials for them without careful discernment. There are many factors to consider such as energy density, portability, energy return on investment, the requirements of the existing infrastructure and so on.

Still, Stansberry may be right in what he asserts about the future or he may be wrong. But one thing he cannot be is certain. It is a truism that no one can prove anything about the future. So, we often choose to extrapolate current trends. This is what Stansberry does, and it is where he moves from logic to mere supposition. Stansberry, like so many of us, falls into the trap of the problem of induction.

The problem of induction is simple to illustrate. Whenever we notice a recurring pattern in events, we often assume that that pattern will persist, and we sometimes make unwarranted claims usually in the form of a general rule:

Karl Popper (1902- 94) was critical of the inductive methods used by science. The empiricist David Hume (1711-76) had argued that there were serious logical problems with induction. All inductive evidence is limited: we do not observe the universe at all times and in all places. We are not justified therefore in making a general rule from this observation of particulars. Popper gives the following example. Europeans for thousands of years had observed millions of white swans. Using inductive evidence, we could come up with the theory that all swans are white. However exploration of Australasia introduced Europeans to black swans. Poppers' point is this: no matter how many observations are made which confirm a theory there is always the possibility that a future observation could refute it. Induction cannot yield certainty.

And, yet on something as important as energy policy, people with the views exemplified by Stansberry hold sway. They do not accept that their view could be in error. To do so would imply a much different energy policy than the one which most countries are now following. Most policymakers stick to Stansberry's view even though there is considerable evidence that fossil fuel production, particularly oil, may begin to decline soon. And, they seem not to understand that existing alternatives suffer from problems of scalability and energy density and face the all important rate-of-conversion problem.

But, one does not have to know anything with certainty in order to decide on policy. In fact, policy is always based on incomplete information about the past and guesses about the future. What policymaking requires, especially in critical areas such as future energy supply, is humility and therefore caution. The amount of caution required depends on the plausible dangers we face. The range of possible outcomes for oil production five, 10, even 20 years hence is so wide as to require excessive caution when planning the world's collective energy policies.

If the optimists such as Stansberry are correct, then policies suggested by that excessive caution will have put global society on a sound road to an alternative energy economy. That would reserve much of the remaining hydrocarbons for high-value uses such as fertilizers, plastics and pharmaceuticals rather than mere burning. If the optimists are wrong, then such policies will be the difference between stability and chaos, between life and death, for the billions that inhabit the Earth.

These are the consequences that might result from the blindness of fools who do not understand basic logic. And, we cannot count on nature to suffer such fools gladly.

Hope, hopelessness and faith

The trouble with hope is that it is so easy to do and so easy to dash. We hear people say that they hope so and so will get well or will get that scholarship he or she needs to attend college or get the job he or she has applied for. There is rarely a second step in this kind of hope. And, those to whom we pay this lip service hope can through circumstances or poor conduct very easily dash our hopes.

In the political world, we often place hope in the leaders we elect. We hope they will do the right thing, enact the right policies, appoint the right people. While there may be a second step in this process--that is, pressuring our political leaders to do what we want them to do--there is little a modern voter can do when arrayed against the money and lobbyists of the corporate world.

We often hear people say that it is impossible to live without hope, by which they mean hope for something better than the current set of problems we face. There may be something to this. To believe that an unbearable present will only be followed by an unbearable future is truly debilitating. But in a world of constant change we can be virtually certain that the status quo will falter at some point.

For those involved in issues of sustainability, peak oil, climate change, and relocalization it might be better to feel a certain hopelessness in our situation. For hope implies dependence on forces outside ourselves. Once we abandon that hope, we can get down to the tasks at hand, the tasks that need to be done--for which we need to ask no politician or government official permission--tasks that we can get started on today. In this way hopelessness concerning the current political and economic arrangements becomes an ally.

So, what we really need is not hope. Hope can be the enemy of action. Hope can be a drug that maroons us in cafes in long, satisfying conversations that never lead anywhere but back to the cafe the next night. In hope's place I nominate faith. Not religious faith, but what George Santayana calls "animal faith." The great American psychologist James Hillman describes it in his book "Inter Views" in this way:

[Animal faith] is faith in the world: that it is there, that it won't give way underfoot when you take the next step, that you just know which way to turn and how to proceed. It's the faith your hands have and your feet have.....the cat jumps on the tree and starts climbing. The tree is not an object of faith to which the cat gives assent. It is a tree in an ecological field belonging to the cat's climbing. The cat has an animal faith in the tree and it loves the tree, loves itself, loves jumping and climbing--no self-examination there, no introspection about belief.

Hope is part and parcel of our pathology, Hillman writes in "Suicide and the Soul." But faith, animal faith, is commitment to the moment, commitment to putting one foot in front of the other, to getting up in the morning and making breakfast. The day will bring what the day will bring. We do not need to "hope" for anything.

And, as we go through the day, our faith can grow. This is not a faith based on belief, but rather on experience, the experience we gain with each small act and the competence that grows in us as a result of those acts. Our faith can also grow as a result of the trust we build with others as we work with them for mutual goals.

So, as we look to the year ahead let us not "hope" for a better year to come. We will almost surely be disappointed and only rarely pleased as we sit on the sidelines watching. Rather let us focus on putting our "animal" faith to work on the tasks at hand and let our engagement be the joy of the new year.

Why climate change adaptation could make things worse

My latest column on Scitizen entitled "Why Climate Change Adaptation Could Make Things Worse" has now been posted. Here is the teaser:

Because many of the proposals for adaptation to climate change require further extensive release of greenhouse gasses, they will only make climate change worse....Read more

Technology will save us...or not

Technology will save us--it's the mantra heard around the world when it comes to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and myriad other environmental and resource challenges. But, that mantra rarely comes with the proviso that technology often has unintended and even perverse consequences.

"Yes, yes," you will say, "we know that." Then, why, may I ask, is this almost never mentioned in the same speeches, op-ed pieces, and journal articles that tout the efficacy of one or another technology to definitively solve or at least help solve critical environmental and resource problems? It is because these pronouncements are polemics, or more properly, sermons meant to instruct us in the supposed invincibility of our technology.

Let us take just one example of a technology that is so ubiquitous that people rarely even think about a world without it: the automobile. The automobile was probably the signature technology of the 20th century, one that shaped culture and in turn shaped so many other technologies that serve our automobile-based culture. If humans had understood ahead of time that automobiles would result directly or indirectly in the following, would society have chosen to allow their widespread use?

• Climate change
• Health problems and mortality due to air pollution
• Pollution of groundwater from decrepit gasoline storage tanks
• Urban sprawl
• Hollowing out of many American cities
• Massive traffic jams
• Dependence on unreliable foreign sources of oil
• Serial military conflicts involving access to and control over oil
• Paving and development of prime farmland and forest
• Mass death and disability due to accidents on the world's highways
• An obesity epidemic related to loss of walkable living environments
• Massive public expenditures for roads, parking and other purposes related to automobiles (to the exclusion of other priorities)

I have not tried to be exhaustive. But, I think this list outlines just how deleterious the automobile has been not only environmentally, but also socially and economically. Now, of course, it would have taken exceptional clairvoyance to have foreseen all the perverse consequences I list. But that is just the point!

What allows those who are so confident about the salutary outcomes for their favorite technological fixes to pretend that there will be no perverse and even fatal consequences related to them? How can the technological optimists be sure that their solutions will not lead either to the opposite of what they intend or to other problems perhaps even more intractable than the ones they purport to solve? Perhaps the most readily obvious example is the notion that energy efficiency will result in a reduction of energy use. But the Jevons Paradox tells us that just the opposite happens by making energy cheaper due to a reduction in demand and thus subject to greater demand as more people take advantage of the lower prices.

The technological optimists seem to be unaware of how complex the energy, climate, forest, and other systems with which they propose to tinker are. They do not know the ecological dictum that you can never do just one thing. Each action ramifies outward into any complex system resulting in multiple unforeseen and often unwelcome effects.

But, all of technological optimism can be summed up in one desire: The desire not to have to change any of our current behaviors. And, yet it is our behavior that most of all needs changing. To be sure, even changes in our behavior can have unforeseen and sometimes perverse consequences. But I would venture that these unforeseen consequences would be far less troublesome than those related to new technologies provided that any changes in behavior are guided by two principles: 1) To increase the long-term resilience of human society and 2) to increase the margin of safety in the way in which we exploit the environment. For example, we could decide that the target for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should be 350 ppm--below where it is today--as some advocate, instead of taking a chance that a much higher reading could put us past the tipping point that will lead to runaway global warming.

It is hubris to believe we can easily and precisely calculate the limits of extraction and pollution and then move right up to our artificially calculated limits and still achieve sustainability. Instead, we should take a path of much greater humility that acknowledges that we must build greater resilience and wider margins of safety into our physical infrastructure and our everyday practices.

Ultimately, I believe, we will be forced to live in a much lower energy society. And, that means that the set of behaviors that need to change most will be those that currently lead to overconsumption.

No post this week

I am on deadline for a large writing project and have been unable to find time to write my usual weekly post. I expect to post again on Sunday, December 20.

Reserves are bunk

Henry Ford is famous for having once said, "History is more or less bunk." He was, in fact, attacking tradition in an age of rapid technological and social change. Almost a century later we have a less ambitious observation which may not achieve the broad visceral appeal of Ford's statement, but one which may turn out to have a good deal of importance, to wit: Oil and natural gas reserve numbers are more or less bunk.

Let me introduce you to B. J. Doyle, vice president of operations for a small Houston-based oil and natural gas exploration company. Doyle's views on the oil and gas business have been on display for more than a year now at The Oil Drum, a site famous for its technical prowess and breadth of coverage when it comes to energy-related issues. On the site Doyle goes by the moniker Rockman, and through his frequent comments he has been trying to educate readers about the realities of the oil and gas business.

Now, he didn't actually say that oil and natural gas reserve numbers are more or less bunk. Nevertheless, that is a fair summary of what he told me when I spoke with him recently. To understand why an insider would cast aspersions on this sacred metric of the oil and gas industry, you need to know two things. First, Doyle doesn't have to please shareholders. The company he works for is privately held. Second, reserve numbers are meaningless unless they are indexed to a price.

Doyle began his explanation with a seemingly astounding statement: "One of the things we're least interested in is the amount of oil and gas that we are going to produce." How can this possibly be true? It turns out that the oil and gas industry uses a method common to nearly every modern business enterprise to evaluate its investments, namely, net present value analysis or NPV.

The concept is actually simple. If you have the choice of receiving $1,000 now or $1,000 three years from now, naturally you'd take the $1,000 today. That's because of what is called the time value of money. If you can invest the $1,000 today, say, in a bank CD, you can at least earn some interest in the next three years. Also, if you were foolish enough to wait for your money, inflation might undermine the purchasing power of that $1,000. The inflation calculator at the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that it would take $1,072 in 2009 to equal the purchasing power of $1,000 received in 2006.

Every business knows that there are several ways in which it can invest its capital. So, business owners take the amount of the initial investment in, say, a new factory or a new oil well, and subtract that amount from the present value of what they forecast will be the future cash flows from that investment. If the amount is positive, then the project will be profitable and should be considered. If the amount is negative, the project should be abandoned. Of course, there are many factors when considering an investment, but a project that appears to be unprofitable will certainly not be considered.

Net present value analysis, however, doesn't describe the real world perfectly. This flows from the obvious truth that no one can actually know the future. One has to estimate the expected future cash flows. This is no easy feat when dealing with the uncertainties of yet-to-be drilled underground reservoirs, the challenges of operating producing wells, and the vagaries of the oil and natural gas markets. Then, one needs to apply a so-called discount rate. This process assumes that future cash flows received years down the road must be "discounted" to reflect the time value of money as described above. Doyle explains that discount rates applied in the oil and gas industry often range from 10 to 15 percent per year. He admits it's an arbitrary number, but it's arbitrary in every industry except perhaps as it reflects the presumed risks involved in the venture and the cost of capital (such as interest on loans).

When you work out what this implies for cash flow generated from a well several years after production begins, it becomes clear why the ultimate amount of oil and gas recovered from a well has little relevance to the decision to drill it. Let's do an example to see why. If you invest $3 million to drill a well (not an unusual amount these days) and expect to get cash flow of $1 million per year from the well for 10 years, on the face of it that sounds as if you are reaping more than three times your investment. But when you discount the cash flows appropriately, for example at 12 percent per year, you get an NPV of $5,650,223. That's $2,650,223 more than you are investing, so it's still a positive number even after discounting. And, it's 1.88 times the initial investment, a ratio that will become meaningful below. But the NPV of the $1,000,000 in annual cash flow in years 8, 9, 10 are as follows: $359,634; $316,478; and $278,500. (Remember: Each successive year's cash flow is discounted another 12 percent in this case until you get to the final year.) If the well keeps producing in year 20, the NPV of the cash flow in that year falls to just $77,562. If it is a very long-lived well, the NPV of the cash flow from year 40 is negligible, $6,015. All this serves to illustrate that the further any year's cash flow is from the present, the less valuable it will be to the company and therefore the less bearing it will have on a decision to drill a well.

As it turns out, few companies would even bother drilling such a prospect. Doyle says that right now his company won't even look at a prospect unless, based on seismic data and other information, it reasonably expects that the completed well will produce an NPV six or more times that of the initial investment. When there is keen competition for prospects, companies will drop their expectations down to three to four times the NPV.

This is where things get interesting. Doyle has seen some public companies drop their goal down to one. That's right. They will drill prospects that they believe have no reasonable chance of doing anything other than breaking even. Why will they do this? To boost stated reserves, a number by which Wall Street judges the value of oil and gas companies. They won't, however, make any true profit on these wells. But they will become what Wall Street calls an "asset play." They will be valued on their assets, in this case stated reserves, rather than on their profitability. This strategy has proven especially tempting to those engaged in the hunt for shale gas since drilling success rates are very high. This is a risky strategy, however, that leaves little margin for error. Prices lower than those forecast by such an analysis could quickly bankrupt a company that drills too many wells based on an assumed one-to-one ratio of investment to net present value.

The claims that the United States has 100 years of recoverable natural gas as a result of the newly accessible shale basins has no meaning without attaching a price to it, Doyle contends. The fact that major shale gas producers have trimmed their active drilling fleets to a fraction of what they were during the 2008 boom in natural gas prices proves that price is a critical factor in determining whether to drill. And, where there is no drilling, there are no additions to reserves. The natural gas market has shown itself to be highly volatile which has not surprisingly led to wide swings in natural gas drilling. The notion that somehow there will be a consistent accretion of natural gas reserves from year to year or that all discoveries from previous years will still be considered reserves in a low-price environment is pure bunkum.

The same logic applies to oil discoveries. But these days no one is claiming the United States has enough oil left to supply the entire country for 100 years. And, so hype about oil reserves is less of an issue.

The upshot is that expected cash flow determines what areas will be drilled, not the size of potential reserves. Most companies won't drill a prospect unless they believe they can get their money back within two to three years, Doyle says. If it takes four or five years, the prospect is not very attractive. Cash flow is king.

It turns out that the NPV of the first three years of cash flow from my hypothetical well mentioned above is $2,401,831, less than the initial investment. Most companies would or should pass on such a prospect, and it would therefore never become part of anyone's reserves, he explains. Part of the hype over shale gas has to do with the claim that the wells may be very long-lived, he adds. Even if that turns out to be true--not a certainty as of now--the low flow rates expected after the initial burst of production and the distant payoffs would actually work against any decision to drill such wells. No wells, no reserves.

Doyle says that given modern technology, oil and natural gas are easier to find than ever before. But he doesn't believe that in North America at least, there is that much more to find. He thinks that shale gas in North America my indeed prove to be plentiful. But it will not be both plentiful and cheap.

And, of course, if we succeed at expanding natural gas production to meet the needs of a new natural gas-powered vehicle fleet--an idea advocated by one of the leading producers of shale gas--and expand other current uses such as the generation of electricity, we can expect that natural gas prices will soar. That may provide the necessary incentive (i.e. cash flow) to extract the shale gas that lies below the American landscape. But it will also certainly mean that the 100 years of supply that has been so frequently touted in the media will rapidly shrink to perhaps 30 or 40, and that the peak in production will come much sooner.

A peak in natural gas production in, say, 20 years would not exactly be a useful talking point for those advocating the wholesale conversion of key parts of the U. S. economy to run on natural gas. Just as we would be finishing such a conversion, we could find ourselves on the downslope of the natural gas production curve and faced with the urgent need to adapt our costly and newly completed natural gas infrastructure to run on some other energy source.

Taking a Break--Happy Thanksgiving!

I am taking a holiday break and expect to post again on Sunday, December 6. Happy Thanksgiving!

The trouble with apocalypse

Although for us the End has perhaps lost its naive imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions.

When you read, as you must almost every passing day, that ours is the great age of crisis--technological, military, cultural--you may well simply nod and proceed calmly to your business; for this assertion, upon which a multitude of important books is founded, is nowadays no more surprising than the opinion that the earth is round.
                                      --Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

The trouble with apocalypse is that most people have already seen it at the movie theater, watched it on television, read it in a book, or heard all about it from the pulpit. So inundated with the language of crisis are we that we have become immune to it. From the perspective of the historian our age has been chock full of "great transformations." And, it is, after all, the historian's business to write about great change even if he or she has to invent some.

The great energy crisis of the 1970s passes and is followed by an era of cheap energy lasting more than 20 years. The great run-up in energy prices in recent years is followed by a collapse in prices. The "worst economic downturn since the Great Depression" is now being followed by a ceaselessly heralded recovery. The much feared Y2K computer bug was either fixed or of little consequence on January 1, 2000. A modern plague has been in the wings for years, first as SARS and then as avian flu. Now that the H1N1 virus is here, it doesn't seem like the civilization-destroying event it was advertised to be. Even such events, despite the drama they propagate, create a certain cyclical continuity making them seem not all that remarkable. Once the worst is over or the predicted crisis fails to materialize, the fear that most people felt fades from memory.

Yet, the "cultural crisis," the "economic crisis," the "health care crisis," the "education crisis," and the "national security crisis" somehow continue. We momentarily look away from our computers, cellphones and flat screen TVs. Then, we are back again to our routine. Yesterday we had email, today we have email, tomorrow we will have email. On the short view, nothing much seems to have changed. The world appears to be moving closer to the technological utopia we have been promised.

For human beings, the apocalypse in its many forms "is a figure for their own deaths," Frank Kermode remarks in his classic of literary criticism, The Sense of an Ending. He adds, "[W]hat human need could be more profound than to humanize the common death?" And, so we are wired to listen, at least temporarily, whenever a storyteller of any type on television, on radio, on the Internet, in movies, and on the printed page hoists the flag of crisis. Any reference to crisis improves ratings and book sales. If what you're telling me isn't a crisis that requires my immediate attention, perhaps it can wait until later when I'm through looking at my email or watching my favorite spinoff of Law and Order.

Such is the environment in which those concerned about sustainability for human society find themselves. Peak oil, climate change, an impending food crisis, a water crisis, none of these truly captures the imagination of the broader public and rouses it to action. Perhaps the public is suffering from apocalypse fatigue. But that would be an incorrect assumption. One need look no further than the movie screen this holiday season. The movie 2012, a series of visual explosions based on various disaster scenarios and end time prophecies, is a runaway hit. The movie trailer tells us that one particular day in 2012 will be a moment that unites us all, very much "the common death" that Kermode discusses. And, the movie is not a cultural one-off. The same director gave us the climate change thriller, The Day After Tomorrow, which has grossed nearly $200 million at the box office. The appetite for apocalypse is endless and perennial. When I was in seventh grade (a long time ago), Alas, Babylon, a novel about a small town that survives after a nuclear war, was actually required reading.

What apocalyptic narratives do is elevate the importance of the trajectory of every person's life regardless of his or her station in society. If we're all in this together, then we can share in a great destiny no matter who we are. But destiny sounds like fate. What can one do if one is headed toward a great apocalypse? Pray, perhaps. Repent, maybe. But responding to such a gargantuan event calls more for attaining the right relationship with one's god than engaging in constructive social and political action.

While apocalyptic stories may seem as if they are about our collective path, for the individual they are really about an inward journey. That is why they can be quite good at filling movie theaters, bookstores, and churches. And, that is why appeals to the apocalyptic strain in culture are wrongheaded when attempting to move people toward actual concrete steps that can improve our collective prospects amid the unfolding calamities of the 21st century.

Amelia Earhart and the complexity problem

As I watched the recently released film about Amelia Earhart, I couldn't help thinking about parallels between her journey and ours as an industrial culture. The Earhart in the film noted that her path up to time when she attempts to circumnavigate the globe had been free of major mishaps and had led the public to underestimate the dangers of flying. When she attempts to fly around the globe, she has her first major accident which occurs early in the trip. It happens during takeoff and leaves the plane heavily damaged, but the occupants intact. Despite this, she makes repairs and begins her fateful second attempt three months later.

What struck me about this audacious trip was how many things had to go right every step of the way: the weather, the availability of fuel and supplies, correct navigational guidance from the expert navigator who accompanied her, the cooperation of those on the ground (especially worrisome in countries that had only rudimentary aviation infrastructures), and, of course, the mechanical and electrical integrity of the plane and its equipment.

There are many theories about what brought Earhart's flight to an end somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. One suggested cause was simple poor planning and preflight checking. The plane may not have been fully refueled before taking off from New Guinea to cross the Pacific.

The public had perhaps been lulled by Earhart's past successes into believing that she would succeed in any bold undertaking. In the same way we today believe that our vaunted technology will solve every problem we face including finding enough food and energy for a population that is estimated to hit 9 billion by mid-century while simultaneously addressing global warming. All of this will, according to our current ethos, be accomplished as the standard of living for billions across the globe is raised to that currently enjoyed by wealthy countries.

Earhart lost her way on the final leg of her journey because of multiple breakdowns: The direction finder on the naval ship stationed near the island where she was to land and refuel lost battery power; the radio operators on the ship could hear Earhart, but she could not hear them; the antennae of Earhart's plane may not have been well-suited to the needs transocean flights; a flight pattern meant to bring her plane over the island may have been incorrectly calculated.

Like her, our civilization does not realize that it may not have enough fossil fuel to make the transition to a renewable energy economy. To build such an economy we will have to use current energy sources which are mainly fossil fuels. If we squander that patrimony on current consumption and continued growth, we may find our energy infrastructure inadequate to our needs as the fossil fuel age winds down. And, like Earhart, we are not getting the proper feedback to tell us what to do, she from her radio and we from the market economy which fails miserably to anticipate and properly signal us concerning long-term challenges such as global warming and fossil fuel depletion.

Unlike Earhart, we as a civilization do not seem to understand the difficulty of our journey, that is, our necessary journey toward a sustainable system. She had expert navigational advice and at least a modicum of trepidation about what dangers lay ahead. We as a civilization are relying on such directional beacons as Daniel Yergin, Julian Simon, and a broad cabal of cornucopian economists across the world to guide policy, and their message amounts to,"Don't worry, be happy." The result is that nascent efforts to meet the ecological challenges we face are being overwhelmed by the imperative of growth at any cost. That growth is wiping out gains in sustainability not only by negating attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution of all types, but also by negating attempts to preserve and restore the fertility of the land and the productivity of the oceans.

We might as a civilization be able to address global warming. And, we might be able to address energy supply problems both by shifting to renewable sources and drastically economizing on energy use. And, we might be able to address the growing problems of soil degradation and food supply. And, we might even be able to devise a way to raise significantly the standard of living for billions (so long as we define that standard not simply as personal consumption) while minimizing our use of resources. But having to face all these problems at once significantly reduces our chances of solving any of them. In fact, they are all interrelated, primarily through the fossil fuel energy that is a significant contributor to global warming and the enabler of a modern agriculture. That agriculture, in turn, is simultaneously undermining the productivity of the soil while allowing us to feed (temporarily) an ever-growing population that consumes more and more resources every year.

Earhart had it much simpler. If any one of the problems cited above had not occurred, we might well be talking about Earhart's successful aerial circumnavigation of the globe.

Her aims were singular and focused: Get around the world in a plane. Ours as a civilization are multivariate and contradictory. Economic prosperity for a larger proportion of a growing population under our current infrastructure requires greater burning of fossil fuels, not less. Greater production of food requires either more land cultivation in the face of increasing urbanization which destroys farmland or more energy-intensive farming; either of these will only worsen global warming. Reducing global warming requires drastically less burning of fossil fuels and the reallocation of resources toward the deployment noncarbon-based energy on a scale and a schedule that would seriously erode people's standard of living, that is, as measured by current consumption.

Unlike Earhart who despite the complexities of her endeavor might have survived if she had gotten one lucky break, we are faced with needing virtually all our attempts to address critical problems to succeed simultaneously even though our current solutions are leading us in contradictory directions.

Immigration and our ecological predicament

Whenever the word immigration is mentioned, two polarized camps almost immediately emerge. One camp considers new residents an asset, bringing new ideas and entrepreneurial zeal to a society, while the other considers immigration a bane, bringing crime, disease, poverty and culturally disruptive practices.

Only very rarely mentioned by those opposing immigration is a concern that the host country has run out of carrying capacity and cannot afford to feed, clothe, educate and keep healthy any more people. Immigration opponents may claim that their home country cannot afford additional people. But, by this they do not ordinarily mean that the population and the economy of the country should cease to grow. They simply mean they do not wish to share any growth with newcomers.

The carrying capacity of many industrialized nations was probably reached several decades ago. If a country imports critical resources--oil and food come to mind--then it has in all likelihood overshot its carrying capacity. So, while lack of carrying capacity has some validity as an argument against immigration, it is difficult to apply in a globalized economic environment. This is because most wealthy countries import a significant portion of their carrying capacity. The destruction resulting from this importation takes place "over there" where the forests are leveled, the land is eroded, the mines are depleted and the rivers are poisoned.

Those in the importing country simply do not feel the effects of that undermining of world carrying capacity and therefore assume that carrying capacity has not been reached or at least that it has not been impaired by the standard of living in the importing country. The usual retort is that the water and air are cleaner today than they were 30 years ago in the importing country. What's not mentioned, of course, is that the damage the importing country is doing through its consumption has simply been shifted elsewhere.

Now, if we reframe the issue not as one of immigration, but rather as one of mass migration, we will complicate things even further. For much of the migration we are seeing today is from countries which export resources to wealthy nations. In other words, we are seeing mass migrations from resource exporting countries where carrying capacity is being systematically undermined toward countries that are importing that carrying capacity.

One concrete example is Mexico which has been exporting its carrying capacity in the form of oil for decades. It has also been exporting other minerals and foodstuffs as well. As oil production plummets in Mexico, the ability of the nation to function has become impaired. The government is having trouble keeping its population safe from drug cartels which now control a significant share of the country. Jeff Vail, a contributor to The Oil Drum and a former U. S. Air Force intelligence officer wrote in 2007 that he believed that Mexico was already on the path to collapse. He updated his views earlier this year and sees the process is actually further along.

What this means is that the already substantial flow of immigrants from Mexico into the United States is likely to turn into a torrent as economic opportunities and personal safety decline in Mexico. A government that relies on oil profits for 40 percent of its budget will be hard pressed to provide the economic activity and the social services to satisfy all of its population as oil profits continue to decline with oil production.

As similar dramas unfold elsewhere--Vail mentions Nigeria and Iraq--we can expect a rise in the tempo of migrations from countries that are exporting their carrying capacity to countries that are importing it. This will no doubt be accompanied by calls to limit immigration. If the flow becomes great enough, it might result in military action to close borders, at least temporarily.

If policymakers do not recognize that the decline in carrying capacity is one of the key drivers of contemporary mass migrations, they cannot hope to address the situation. And, simply shutting the borders when the flow of people becomes too great may turn out to be problematic for those wealthy countries that currently import a substantial share of their carrying capacity. How will they maintain an orderly flow of imports while at the same time exclude people who are not legally allowed to enter?

It would be felicitous if new policies were enacted to raise carrying capacity by drastically reducing consumption in wealthy countries and gradually reducing population everywhere. As long as consumption in wealthy countries remains at or near its current levels, those countries will continue to be on a collision course with mass migrations born of ecological overshoot and skewed trade relations--trade relations which have for so long allowed the wealthy to export their environmental degradation elsewhere and saddle the poor with the consequences.