Understanding sustainability and society

We see claims of sustainability attached to many things, often without any justification. We have a general sense that sustainability has something to do with ecological balance, but what does it really mean? What is sustainability?

This course will offer a meaningful definition for that idea, and will argue why this definition is meaningful and gravely important. In addition, it will build a mechanics of sustainability to both help you understand the world around you—including culture, economics, history, and of course the environment—as well as to evaluate existing claims to sustainability.

• Peak oil?

• Sustainability?

• Exponential growth

  • Professor Albert Bartlett's Arithmetic, Population and Energy

    Note

    Voluntary homework: explore the references presented in this course.

  • Growth proportional to size (colloquially "steady growth", "% growth")

  • Source of growth? Beneficiary of growth

  • x(t) = x₀e^rt = x₀e^(P/100)t

  • Doubling time?

  • Current examples:

    Stock markets

    Exponential Growth Rate of US Stocks since 1871

    Economies

    Long-term real growth in US GDP 1871-2009

    Resource consumption (production?)

    • EIA data on US oil production

    • US oil reserves

    • History Database of the Global Environment (oil, metals, etc.)

    Population

    • What's Behind Egypt's Problems?

    • World population growth

    • Recombinant Records: St Matthew Island

  • Professor Tom Murphy's Galactic-Scale Energy (alternative location) and part 2, Can Economic Growth Last? (alternative location)

• Effects of growth

  • Technical effects

    • Byproducts

      • Pollution, waste

      • Global Emissions of CO2 From Fossil Fuels: 1900-2004

      • Climate Change

    • Resource depletion

      • Peak oil (primer)

      • Peak ... everything ([Hei2007])

    • Decreasing resilience with decreasing diversity

      	Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.
      	--[Qui1992]

  • Societal effects

    • Robert Newman's History of Oil

• Sustainability

  • Civilization ([Jen2005])

  • Theses on Sustainability

  • Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

• Technical mitigation

  • Alternate sources of energy

  • Renewable energy

  • Efficiency

  • Sequestration

  • Geoengineering

  • [Mac2008]

  • Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated (50 minutes in)

  • Mitigating effects, not growth

• Cultural mitigation

  • Shift in values

  • Consciousness of sources and sinks (ecosystems)

  • Community

  • Food?

  • Energy?

  • Water?

  • Shelter?

• Reasons for growth

  • Investment and debt

  • Money as Debt

• Prosperity?

  • Culture (The Yes Men Fix the World)

  • Language

  • Goals and values

  • How did we get here?

  • Growth?

• Morality

  • “Hope is for the Lazy: The Challenge of Our Dead World”

• What to do?