Do fossil fuels always cause environmental devastation?

One is well advised to avoid building campfires above coal seams.

Pawpaw, a fellow blogger, raised an interesting point in his comment on an earlier blog:

The oilfield today has nothing to do with declining production. Supply has simply outstripped demand and prices are lower. I know three or four companies that have stopped production entirely until price increases.

Actually, we've got more oil now than we ever had. The supply has increased exponentially over the past decade, in spite of Obama.  In your star charts, you'd do well to increase the size of the star by a factor of six. We've got a hell of a lot more oil now than we believed possible 10 years ago.

According to Marvin Harris the role of technology is to define new resources.  That is, technology can delay the inevitable conclusion of the resource exploitation/depletion cycle.

In 1650, coal's value as a "resource" was as a third-rate building material.  It was soft, it weathered quickly and was highly unsuitable as a material for building chimneys.  The depletion of forests resulted in coal being re-defined as a fuel...a substitute for firewood.  It was a much better fuel than a building material.  Ancillary technologies developed to more efficiently extract coal.  Economies that appeared to be on the brink of collapsing sprang forward an order of magnitude.

Fossil fuels

Fossil fuels have a bad reputation among the self-styled environmental experts.

Haiti on the left side of image.  Dominican Republic on the right.  From Google Maps.

Jared Dimond makes an interesting comparison between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  Both nations share the island of Hispaniola.  Haiti had no coherent fuel policy.  Most people are dirt-poor and collect wood to cook their food.  The Dominican Republic had a policy of supporting the "petrol" industry and supported infrastructure to make LP and kerosene available everywhere in the country.

As a side note:  From a "carbon" footprint perspective, LP and kerosene are easy flames to direct and modulate.  Consequently, less carbon was released to the environment burning those fuels than were released in Haiti, just across the border.  The forests of the Dominican Republic continued to recover and sequester carbon.

Many parts of Haiti are blasted desert.  Many parts of the Dominican Republic, just across the border, are recovering ecosystems.  And the difference was the availability of fossil fuels.

The Dominican Republic may have only delayed the stresses on their ecosystem.  I suppose that delays must be counted as victories.  When the onslaught comes, the Dominican Republic will be able to meet it with deeper topsoil, more efficient wood stoves and better biomass tree species and  management.

Immigration: The Roman Catholic response

Crisis moves at a glacial pace in the eternal and universal church.

Starting in the 1950s, a movement known as "Liberation Theology" became fashionable in the Latin American church.  Many of the tenants of Liberation Theology read like Marxist tracts.  Private property is repudiated.  The human condition is held to be transcendent over any and all property rights.

Private property is perceived as a human (or satanic!) construct designed solely for the oppression of the less powerful.  That "human/satanic construct" concept was also extended to national borders.  Thus, the priests advocating "Liberation Theology" felt divinely sanctioned to preach that borders should be ignored and taught that people have license to help themselves to other people's property.  This is sometimes known as stealing and is prone to all of the pitfalls of other "relativist" moral systems.

More than one pundit observed that Liberation Theology had all of the earmarks of a Soviet initiative aimed at destabilizing traditional institutions (Example).

The Church's response

Pope John Paul II sent an Polish emissary to investigate Latin American Liberation Theology:  After extensive investigation

They both found the Latin American fascination ... naive, alarming, uncritical, bewildering, inaccurate and above all theoretical.  Source

As Poles, they had lived under the reality of Socialist/Communist rule and had no illusions about its material and spiritual outcomes.

Primarily, they saw that the omnipotent State needed to run Communism created a systemic moral hazard to personal salvation.  "Temptation" is universal when all resources are first coerced from the population and then doled out by faceless, anonymous bureaucrats.  Jesus taught us to pray..."Suffer us not to be tempted."  To embrace Communism is to run headlong into the flypaper of moral hazard.

The Roman Catholic church formally responded to "Liberation Theology" in the mid-1980s.  The Church spoke to the Biblical underpinnings claimed by Liberation Theology.

The first picture at the top is a close-up of elephant skin.

The Church claimed Liberation Theology, as it was most commonly preached, was in error because it deconstructed Scripture.  It cherry-picked certain political/material elements out of Exodus as its spiritual foundation.  The Church contends that the Divine message in Scripture must be prayed about and absorbed in its totality. 

When, under the influence of the Paraclete (the Holy Spirit), people discover the divine dimension of their being and life, both as individuals and as a community, they are able to free themselves from the various determinisms which derive mainly from the materialistic bases of thought, practice and related modes of action.  -John Paul II quoted from HERE Page 42

Capitalism, however, did not get a free ride.  The Church tempered its "endorsement" of capitalism by stating that the only morally acceptable capitalism is one that is heavily seasoned with a social conscience.

Bonus reading material  Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation

Extending this to the issues of immigration

The Church recognizes sovereign borders and self-determination of the peoples within those borders.

The Church challenges us as individuals push our leaders to formulate and administer fair and just immigration policies.  That is, fair and just for both the receiving and sending nations.

The Church challenges us as consumers to make moral purchasing decisions.  It is not possible for every consumer to make perfectly moral decisions in every circumstance, but in aggregate we can make a huge difference.  A better world would be one where people have productive labor close to their family, a world where families are not split up by economic forces.

Above all, the Church implores us to pray for wisdom, fortitude and for good outcomes.

Addendum:  Pope Francis, the current Pope, is from Latin America and his sermons often have elements borrowed from Liberation Theology.  This is part of the oscillation of history.  Those Liberation Theology elements are probably triggered by too few Catholics acting on our social conscience.

Eye candy courtesy of Google Maps

The ocean immediately south of Key Biscayne, Fl

Have you ever seen an opal this beautiful.

Same area from farther back.  Spun 90 degrees to better fit in this format.  East is up.

White House denies ISIS guilty of genocide

According to White House spokesman Josh Earnest:

...the use of that word (genocide) involves a very specific legal determination that has at this point not been reached.  Source

The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, says genocide is “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” including by means of “killing members of the group.”

In Iraq, up to 80% of the Christian population emigrated, been forcibly converted or were murdered in the last decade.  In Syria, up to 60% of the Christian population faced the same fate in the last five years.

You decide.

Immigration: Baumol's Effect

Undocumented immigrants are at risk of being coerced into the least savory of jobs due to their vulnerability.

Over time, Baumol's effect changes the job market and creates pressures to allow immigration, legal or otherwise.

"Baumol's effect": in the long run, high status jobs become rare as the economy becomes dominated by large number of jobs that not amenable to productivity improvements.  High status jobs are typically highly paid jobs.  High pay is an artifact of high productivity.  High productivity is usually a result of automation.   The tasks that are easy to automate are usually scalable, that is, they can become even more automated or the machines can move ever-faster thus allowing fewer workers to produce more product.


Three consequences to Baumol's effect are that:

1. The number of highly compensated jobs decrease over time as they become automated
2. The work that is available is less attractive to workers.  In addition to the low pay (to go with the low productivity) the jobs are usually physically demanding or need a very high level of dexterity or attention
3. Overall, productivity growth is self extinguishing because the low hanging fruit is harvested early on.

So what are some examples of jobs that are difficult to make more productive?

They are often described as "High touch" jobs.

Not all "High touch" jobs are low status.  Psychiatry, Dentistry are high-touch medical fields.  There has been little productivity growth in these fields other than off-loading the menial portions of the job (cleaning) to dental hygienists.

Agriculture.  These migrant workers are weeding onions.  There is no machine that can do that as quickly, as accurately and as cheaply as migrant laborers.

Forgive the pun, but sex-workers are the classic case of "high touch" workers.  They get paid piece-work and there is little they can do to increase the number of clients they serve on a given night.

Infrastructure development is often site based and does not adapt well to automation.  This crew is laying fiber optic cable in the field.

Construction.

Child and elder care.  Obviously, these are parents caring for their child.  Changing diapers are the classic item that is difficult to automate.  Diapers are floppy, the soiling of the child is unique and the skin of the child is fragile.

Food preparation.

In most cases, these are not "jobs" that we raised our children to aspire to.  These are the kinds of jobs that immigrants often fill.

What kinds of jobs are amenable to productivity improvements?

Jobs that are highly repetitive, where the task is stable, the work piece is rigid and easily held.

Numerical controlled machining where rigid, metal blanks are precisely positioned on pallets or carriers is a classic case of automation.

Operations that used to be considered impossible to automate can now be automated due to the workplace's saturation with computers (PLCs, on the factory floor) and the availability of programming talent.

Consider the DC-3, an icon of awesome engineering.  By the mid 1930s, engineers had enough experience with air frames to understand where cracks would start.  Basically, cracks start wherever one structural member is joined to another.  Stress is an artifact of how load flows through a structure.  High stresses occur when the loads flow through the smallest sectional area.  That typically occurs when load is transferred from one member to another via bolts or rivets.

Knowing this, the engineers specified that every significant member have beefed up sections in the immediate vicinity of where they join other members.  In 1940, that meant massive extrusions or billets were machined to remove all of the material except for immediately adjacent to the joint.  That resulted in the employment of legions of machinist who rendered +60% of extrusions into chips.

In 2016, a simple set of extrusion dies can be laser cut with an NC robot out of pre-hardened steel plate and assembled as a sandwich.  The middle of the sandwich can be varied by actuators to locally thicken or thin a flange or the web of a section.  And the thickening and thinning can all be controlled using digital imaging of the output.  Wing spars and fuselage stringers can be cranked out in minutes at near-net-shape with very little material waste.

Obviously, there is less demand for highly paid machinists in the 2016 scenario.

Where do all of those college graduates go?

In many cases they work for the government or in jobs mandated by government regulations.  Those mandated jobs are auditors and inspecting and regulating.

For the most part, auditing type jobs impair productivity.  They stop work (production) when they are activated.  That is a feature, not a bug.  As noted earlier...we have too much productivity in the things that can be automated.

Summary:

Baumol's Effect creates a vacuum that is filled by immigrants.  Native born workers seek higher status jobs, which by-and-large have been automated out of existence.  The low status, low paying, physically demanding jobs are abandoned by the native born workers.

Nature hates a vacuum.  These jobs are filled by immigrants (many of whom are undocumented) with the tacit knowledge of the people who hire them.

I guess it depends on whose ox is being gored

"I hope we will always have non-vindictive Presidents in this country... If there were Presidents who wished to pursue vendettas, the regulatory state would be the most direct and simplest way for him (or her) to do so."

The implication is that the author (a tenured Professor) believes that President Obama and his cabinet is a bastion of moderate, benevolent visionaries.

Things appear different from my perspective.

If there were a President who wished to pursue vendettas, the regulatory state would be the most direct and simplest way for him or her to do so. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.ZXTNjbW3.dpuf

I hope we always will have non-vindictive Presidents in this country.  One reason is because the regulatory branch reports to the Executive.  And if you own a large company, it is virtually impossible to be in accordance with all of the regulations all of the time.  If there were a President who wished to pursue vendettas, the regulatory state would be the most direct and simplest way for him or her to do so.  The usual presumption of “innocent until proven guilty” does not hold in many regulatory matters, nor are there always the usual protections of due process. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.ZXTNjbW3.dpuf

I hope we always will have non-vindictive Presidents in this country.  One reason is because the regulatory branch reports to the Executive.  And if you own a large company, it is virtually impossible to be in accordance with all of the regulations all of the time.  If there were a President who wished to pursue vendettas, the regulatory state would be the most direct and simplest way for him or her to do so.  The usual presumption of “innocent until proven guilty” does not hold in many regulatory matters, nor are there always the usual protections of due process. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.ZXTNjbW3.dpuf

Immigration: Can the economy "grow" with a static population?

A simple, graphic model of the discovery-exploitation-depletion-collapse cycle.

Conventional wisdom holds that our economy cannot grow without a growing population (and modest, monetary inflation).

Kunstler, Homer-Dixon and Dimond suggest that the conventional wisdom only tells half the story.  They recast history and re-tell it as cycles of resource discovery, exploitation, depletion and collapse.

The black star represents the body of a new resource.  The colors were chosen to represent a flammable material (black like oil or coal) and red/orange to represent flame-front and fire, respectively.

The length of the flame front grows at a modest pace.  Historians generally speak in terms of frontiers and lands that are subjugated.  It can just as easily describe the development of the technology...how to shore up a mine, better drill heads,  better shipping and refining techniques.

This narrative typically has a "break-out" moment when the growth rate increases at a stunning rate.

Hubbard's peak.  Life is about to change.  This is particularly traumatic if each one of these stages takes several generations.  The only "reality" for people alive today are the last two images...at least when we are discussing fossil fuels.

Adding to the insult of declining production are the logistical fragilities of long supply lines.  Midland, Tx and Tulsa OK are much closer to California and New York than, say, Iraq and Dubai.

Time to invest in stocking caps, quilts and bicycles.

An expanding population is desirable up until Hubbard's peak.  They are needed to cut mine shoring, lay rail, drill wells, weld pipeline and the like.

People are funny.  We are complacent as long as our prospects seem to be expanding.  It is easy to advance in a growing organization.  If it is growing quickly enough, an employee only needs a pulse and to have not embarrassed the organization in order to become a manager.  Peace is easy to maintain when everybody buys into "Tomorrow will always be better.  Don't rock the boat and screw it up!"

That up-draft slams into reverse when organizations start down-sizing.

Kunstler in particular, posits that massive, civil strife is inevitable as population over-shoot collides with the grim mathematics of resource depletion.

Kunstler contends that much of our schizophrenia is due to the piece-meal, gut-level realization of Hubbard's peak and the implication.  The citizens of the Middle-East and Latin America are more attuned to where we are in the exploitation-depletion cycle and they are bailing out.

The conventional wisdom in the west still subscribes to the growth model.  We believe that we are still in the expansion stages.  This is supported by our fantastic material wealth; wealth we accrued not due to our intrinsic abilities or growing resource base but due to our ability to "pull" resources from less robust economies.

We are caught like a small boy astraddle a picket fence.  Half the world is preparing for collapse and Armageddon.  The other half squanders wealth in enormous displays of conspicuous consumption (Example: "Poor people" paying exorbitant prices for branded apparel.)

Perhaps the more germane question is not "Can the economy 'grow' with a static population." but "How can peace be created in an environment of static or diminishing prospects?"