I haven't made up my mind about it yet. I'm reminded of the movie version of the classic HG Wells story called "The Time Machine" - where mankind appears to have reached a utopian state at some future date, only for the time traveller to discover that they are being controlled and farmed by a sinister sub-species of man living in a dark, underground underworld.
Sustainability professionals are often criticised for being negative, forecasting disaster and failing to come up with a convincing set of proposals for how to make things better at scale. I have come across a project that addresses this criticism - the Venus Project.
I haven't made up my mind about it yet. I'm reminded of the movie version of the classic HG Wells story called "The Time Machine" - where mankind appears to have reached a utopian state at some future date, only for the time traveller to discover that they are being controlled and farmed by a sinister sub-species of man living in a dark, underground underworld.
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The following exchange is from a LinkedIn "Green" group discussion ("Tiny minds of environmental prophets of doom") in January 2013, based on an infrastructure project in the USA:
----------------------------------------- One of the posts: david alba •In coming months, you will see a national and likely international story on the GRID Project. A proposal to build a 21st Century Container Supply Chain Container Port in the U.S. specifically designed to service the industry's largest class container vessels (up to 18,000 TEU that cut CO2 emissions by up to 40% over older smaller ships). Our container platform using new crane technology will cut vessel berthing dwell time by over 50% (a game changer in this $400B a year business) and use cold ironing to shut down engines on ships while berthed. One of our targeted trade gateways is Southern California's Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a physically conjoined water way in the San Pedro Bay, where 50% of the nation's class 1 doublestacked container trains deliver to and from these dual connected ports. Also, combined, they are the 7th largest container trade gateway on Earth moving about 16M TEU in and out of Southern California. The basic idea is to consolidate a new direct ship to rail interface pier designed vertical container terminal and platform (SuperDock) loading and discharging containers to Class 1 trains in real time for immediate inland delivery and also connecting to an electrified rail freight pipeline system delivering containers using pipeline technology modified from the water transmission industry (except we move boxes on rail and keep the water out of the 15 to 18ft diameter pipe/tunnel way fastened with electric track). By eliminating the need to store containers at container terminals by over 70%, we estimate consolidation of 14 fragmented redundant container terminals will yield over 3,000 acres for new industrial use and revenue to both ports. This 3,000 acre yield will offset a large portion of the tremendous infrastructure costs for the project. The savings to the shipping companies in taking these 100 million dollar operating facilities off their balance sheets will get a smart industry CEO's attention. The Freight pipeline eliminates the need for nearly 70% of trucks to travel to and from the ports on our Southern California's freeway networks reducing hundreds of millions of truck miles traveled to and from the ports. The boxes are delivered on a pipeline circuit that takes the box to the cities via electric rail fastened within the pipe, and surfacing for transfer to trucks within the centers where the highest density of industrial container warehousing activity (usually 50 to 60 miles from the ports) is zoned. Our business model will demonstrate that the system will require a significant changing of skillsets for longshoremen labor to operate these machines, new inland facilities, and technology driven systems. It will also demonstrate a net increase of these jobs over time to ensure human resource positions and labor numbers will continue to grow as projected volumes for cargo increase over years. Like the advent of containerization, the exact opposite of what labor feared and predicted from the new containerized technology (loss of jobs) had actually resulted in a 300% increase of registered Longshoremen when (back then) opponents of containerization accused the new technology of over half a century ago, to be a death sentence for longshoreman labor due to containerization's tremendous and revolutionary efficiency and performance. Today, longshoremen on the West Coast of the US are among the highest paid laborers in the nation. If they become the first to embrace new technology, they will preserve the very jobs re-creating history containerization had brought them over half a century ago. Now over 5 years in development, GRID Logistics Inc. is one such example of a massive infrastructure investment supporting a notoriously polluting industry, and making the most aggressive but realistic innovations where environmental improvements MUST contain compelling business rationale in the form of efficiency, performance, and operational cost savings. gridlogisticsinc.com -------------------------------------------------------- My response: Wow, David (Alba), You set out a lot of efficiency improvements in shipping in your neck of the woods. If I may draw out some highlights from your post: "... consolidate a new direct ship to rail interface ...electrified rail freight pipeline system delivering containers using pipeline technology modified from the water transmission industry ... that takes the box to the cities via electric rail fastened within the pipe ... eliminates the need for nearly 70% of trucks to travel to and from the ports ... labor numbers will continue to grow ... consolidation of 14 fragmented redundant container terminals will yield over 3,000 acres for new industrial use and revenue to both ports ..." While this means that the resource-usage per kg-mile of delivered product will be reduced (which, all things being equal, is a good thing for making the earth's resources go further, there are three challenges I'd raise: 1) Has analysis been done of all the knock-on consequences of this development (a whole system level analysis including all externalities), eg trucking industry impacts are not all positive - fewer truck emmissions (good), but partially offset against the negative impacts on ancilliary industries supporting trucking and the multiplier effect of the spend of the truckers etc. (eg buying local food on their travels). What is the sustainability footprint of truckers' lifestyles versus Longshoremen's? Is it a straight substitution or are there going to be more reductions in truckers than there are additional Longshoremen? 2) What alternative use will the 3,000 acres be put to? If more sustainable than the previous shipping/transportation usage, then good, but if occupation is driven by highest financial return, this might not be the case, and therefore there would be negative sustainability impacts to offset against the positive efficiency improvements you mention. 3) Jevons Paradox - will more efficient operations increase total throughput of high-footprint products (eg with high embedded carbon) to satisfy the desires of a highly consumerist society, thereby accelerating the total human system towards resource depletion based cataclism from a planetary scale tipping point? Perhaps this example illustrates that there is an argument for developing a Whole-System-Impact analysis, along the lines of Environmental Impact Assessments? I’ve had the pleasure of attending the Oxford Real Farming Conference this month in Oxford, and have compared and contrasted it with the published materials from the Oxford Farming Conference (a separate conference
which took place at the same time in another part of Oxford). I have to say that the text of Mark Lynas’s presentation at the Oxford Farming Conference – downloadable at: http://www.ofc.org.uk/papers - comes across as confrontational. In it, he attacks anti-GM lobbyists (of which he says he was one several years ago) on the grounds that without GM-driven improvements in agricultural productivity in the past circa half a century, mankind would have needed X more agricultural land to produce the same amount of food as is produced today. The statistics he quotes to back this up are indeed impressive. However, in the context of sustainability, productivity (for example as expressed in yield per hectare) is not the most important aspect of the current debates around food and farming. For sure, efficiency can be a good thing – reducing the amount of inputs used for a given amount of output is desirable, all other things being equal. However, all other things are not equal in the context of our use of the planet’s resources to feed ourselves. In a finite- resource system (such as the capacity of the planet) each increase in efficiency has consequences elsewhere. Unless all the knock-on effects (of significance) are factored in, the external costs and consequences of the increased efficiency can be greater than the direct productive effect of the efficiency. Taking this to its extreme, the ultimate efficiency would be disastrous. Consider this - the ultimate efficient, productive system might be represented by, for example, two-thirds of the Earth’s landmass growing one crop species to feed the whole of the human population living on the remaining third. This might be an extremely efficient system, based on a tremendously high-yielding GM crop innovation that had out-competed all other crop species (both GM and non-GM). The major downside, which hardly even needs to be voiced, as it is so obvious, would be that the system would be suicidaly vulnerable to failure of that one crop through, perhaps, disease or climatic conditions one season. In my view, what this superbly ridiculous reductio-ad-absurdum scenario demonstrates is that there are at least two aspects other than efficiency that must come into play, over the long-term: The first aspect of importance is a total system perspective. This can be phrased as the debate between systematic approaches based on one planet living and alternative (currently prevailing) systematic approaches based on assumptions of unconstrained economic and physical growth. The second aspect of importance is risk and resilience (paraphrased as the debate between permaculture/polyculture and monocultures in agriculture). Agroecology is an increasingly significant area of academic and practical investigation on these matters. I won’t say more about risk and resilience in this post, because I want to say more about efficiency. From a total (finite) system perspective, efficiency is fine up to a point. That point is when efficiency and total system health come into conflict with each other. (System health could be described in terms of quality of life of system residents and long-term viability of the system itself). At that point, Jevons Paradox comes into play. This paradox says that, under reasonably normal market economics of supply-and-demand, increasing productive efficiency will usually result in increasing throughput (ie sales) because the improved economies of scale mean that reduced selling prices can be offered. At the point where system resource limits are being approached or have been reached, a more important consideration than efficiency is the matter of how to respond to the impending system failures in order to protect (or fundamentally redesign) the human system. The most important system failure at that point would be the catastrophic collapse of the ability to source some, or all, of the necessary resource inputs to the (man-made) system. There are many historical examples of this already, such as over-fishing of cod in the North Sea. In such a scenario, increased efficiency (on its own) just hastens the collapse of the system rather than preventing it. What prevents (or delays) such system collapses are measures such as those described in modern times as “demand-side response” (influencing consumption behaviours, for example through public awareness campaigns) or more drastic ones such as direct government intervention in markets and supply chains (eg through regulation, taxation, subsidisation, price-controls or even rationing). Monocultures which typify the increasingly efficient GM-based approach result from the drive for yield per hectare and increased economies of scale. This is also typified by reduced numbers of people living and working on agricultural land. This obvious disconnect between people and the food they eat is one of the symptoms of the lack of health of the current system. To round up this somewhat rambling post, I’ll summarise my own position on GM and its place in a healthy planet-scale agricultural vision. While I wouldn’t rule out the use of GM in tightly controlled circumstances as part of a mixed and diverse farming system, I would not support its unconstrained growth to the point where it dominates the farming system and provides economic control of that system via the large corporate participants in it, to the exclusion of small, organic or low-impact farming methods based around agroecology, polycultures and environmental balance. This is because we need a healthy system capable of operating in a balanced way that provides both the means for significant numbers of people to live and work on the agricultural land and also produces sufficient food to feed all current and future generations of people in the rest of the global population (which might peak at, say, 10 billion people). Mark Lynas is wrong to support GM so wholeheartedly as he does in his recent speech. He is also scare-mongering when he says: “If we don’t get yield growth back on track we are indeed going to have trouble keeping up with population growth and resulting demand, and prices will rise as well as more land being converted from nature to agriculture.” We need a more measured, inclusive and balanced approach than he espouses. My own vision is for a future Earth where living on the land AND using the land to produce food sustainably is much more prevalent in all communities, whether in urban settings, peri-urban ones, in open countryside or even in the few remaining ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ settings. This is very different from the current paradigm, where these things are so often separated out and the vast majority of urbanites have nothing to do with growing food and the vast majority of farmers have nothing to do with the people who consume their produce. This separation encourages short-term sub-optimisation rather than total system health for the longer-term. The picture below shows a slide that was presented at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, showing the UK cities that are Sustainable Food Cities that the Soil Association are working with, to encourage consumers to support sustainable agriculture. |
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