Name: Ecology and the politics of scarcity
ISBN: 9780716704829

What Hacker News says

dredmorbiusJan 2025

My point in mentioning Borlaug specifically was that 1) he's the single person most responsible for the post-1950s population boom not ending in mass global famine and 2) he was scared fucking spitless himself. Which means that Ehrlich was far from the only person voicing such views and that the views were not some environmental fringe. I've spent quite a bit of time going through literature of the time, and strongly recommend William Ophuls book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) for, if nothing else, its bibliography which is an excellent and largely balanced selection of the literature of its time.

<https://archive.org/details/ecologypoliticso0000ophu>

(Ophuls bibliographies and biblographic notes are in general absolute gold mines.)

Ehrlich himself rapidly learnt, and spent much of his career arguing, that coercive measures are hugely harmful and largely don't work. What does work best and foremost is women's education, along with social stability, medical and family planning services, and the like. Ehrlich wrote about 40 books as well as numerous papers and articles, he's remembered most for one of the earliest. A quite different thought process is evident in later ones, such as One With Niniveh (2004)

<https://archive.org/details/onewithninevehpo0000ehrl_z0h7/pa...>

Or this 2013 release:

"Equal rights, education for women key to avoiding civilization's collapse"

[T]he Ehrlichs offer a roadmap for avoiding society's total collapse, emphasizing that giving women equal rights worldwide is a critical first step.

<https://phys.org/news/2013-01-equal-rights-women-key-civiliz...>

Not a step, but a critical and first step.

In 1968 the situation appeared absolutely calamitous, Borlaug's Nobel speech came two years later, and concerns over overpopulation continued in the mainstream well through the 1970s and 1980s. That's 40 and 50 years ago now, beyond the ken of most reading this no doubt, but very much the spirit of the times. Influenced in part by Ehrlich, but also by many others. Drastic measures, as one possible tool, and proposed with grave concern, were among the possible interventions.

What ultimately did occur was that, despite several more famines (Sahel drought, 1968--1972, 1,000,000 dead; Ethiopia, 1972-1973, 60,000; Bangladesh, 1974, up to 1.5 million; Khmer Rouge, 1975--1979, 500,000; Ethiopia, 1983--1985, ~500,000; Sudan, 1988, 100,000; Somalia, 1991--1992, 300,000; North Korea, 1994--1998, up to 3.5 million, Congo, 1998--2004, 2.7 million; Somalia, 2011--2012, 285,000; Tigray, Ethiopia, 2020--present, up to 200,000; Gaza, 2023--present, 62,000, and many others <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines>), overall population growth has decreased markedly through much of the world, to the extent that low birth rates are a concern in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and most of the world, and quite notably the largest populations in India, China, and elsewhere aren't living with looming hunger. But that balance is delicate and precarious as we're constantly reminded.

And for those scanning my or Wikipedia's larger list and objecting "but most of those were political, civil war, or other conflicts", I ask preëmptively what the hell do you think drives most such conflict and unrest? Food insecurity (or its near peer, water insecurity) is a primary driver of social unrest around the world and throughout history:

See e.g., "Food Insecurity and Unrest: What You Need to Know" (2022)

<https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2022/07/12/food-insec...>

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dredmorbiusSep 2024

Yeah.

I'd read TFA, and toyed with writing a critique / response to it. Fundamentally I find the methodology of meta-analysis in this circumstance to be rather badly flawed.

I'm reminded of the quote attributed to Einstein that there was a letter circulated with the signatures of many scientists claiming Einstein's own theory was wrong. Had that been the case, he replied, one would have been enough.

<https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/3485>

That doesn't entirely fit the circumstances of the FT article, but to critique a concept on the basis of a wide range of publications tends to muddle rather than clarify the issue. Given a wide range of authors, some are most assuredly going to make poor arguments, poorly substantiate them, or simply be piling on to some bandwagon or another. Rather than critiquing the literature at large, it's sufficient, as with Einstein, to address the strongest cases.

I suspect an availability heuristic in that meta-analysis and textual analysis are easier to produce. Cutting to the crux of a fallacious or mistaken argument or belief is harder work.

I'd be more impressed with a clear statement of what (if any) consensus or most widely-accepted claims or arguments are made, and what if any counterarguments have been made to those. I'm aware of a set of authors who've made compelling cases: Herman Daly, Howard Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Robert Underwood (R.U.) Ayres, Steve Keen, William Ophuls, and Vaclav Smil most particularly. For virtually all of them, the argument against sustained growth is that economic growth of the past several centuries has been highly predicated on a vast one-time input of fossil fuels (and numerous associated advances), and that the withdrawal of that energy source even with other potential substitutes (solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, biomass, hydroelectric, for the most part) will require some reduction of total material wealth.

There are counteraguments. I've spent a good part of the past decade or two looking into those. Ophuls in particular has tracked many of those down in his books, particularly Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, originally published in 1977 and revised in 1992. Among its other strengths, Ophuls does a deep and broad read of the literature, including the most widely touted of the cornucopians (Julian Simon and Herman Kahn most notably). The bibliography is worth publication in its own right.

What's struck me most of the cornucopian counterarguments is that most seem to 1) have only occurred to economists and similar proponents after the notion of limits itself had been proposed, 2) the arguments for them are long on assertion and short on both facts and causal mechanisms grounded in scientific principles, and 3) most of the discussion seems strongly rhetorical rather than dialectical. A weakness I'd extend to the FT piece here.

That's still not the full justice I'd prefer to apply here, but it'll have to do for now. I'd be happy to respond to questions or rebuttals.

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dredmorbiusSep 2023

On sources: I'm highly partial to the work of William Ophuls who's been writing on this topic for a half century. His PhD thesis was published in 1977 as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (with an update in the early 1990s). That largely lays out the problematique, both in terms of resources and political dynamics. The book's old enough that many of its own projections can be tested, and I think these hold out exceptionally well, particularly in highlighting the (then future) rise of China as a global economic, political, and military force. Ophuls has gone on to suggest at least the framework of solutions, most especially in Plato's Revenge (2009), though that remains fairly high level. What really makes Ophuls's works tremendously valuable is his bibliographic notes which are comprehensive and, to use a favourite word of his, synoptic. The note for Ecology in particular covers much of the previous several decades' literature on growth and perspectives from both optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints, and Ophuls is exceedingly fair in considering both. I've gone back to many of those sources myself (Maddox, Kahn, Simon) to compare notes. I've actually typed out the note from Plato's Revenge, which captures a sense of his practice, though that focuses more on recent and political topics: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230607050023/https://old.reddi...>. In that sense, Ophuls is an excellent entry point into the literature as a whole. He has a website at <http://www.ophuls.org/William_Ophuls/Home.html> though in various states of disrepair.

Ophuls's political-ecological approach is being carried on by Thomas Homer-Dixon: <https://homerdixon.com/writing/>

There are other authors: Bill McKibben's Eaarth (sic), Joel Magnusonn's The Approaching Great Transformation, the book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, all of which I have to hand. Vaclav Smil has written his own damned library on resources and sustainability from a technical perspective, largely looking backwards though with some forward-looking elements. I particularly recommend Energy in World History (1992, 2019) and Energy and Civilization (2017). Energy Transitions (2016) tackles the specific question of converting to a sustainable-energy path: <Energy Transitions>. And there's a long list of other Smil publications.

Kate Rayworth's Doughnut Economics is another prescriptive work looking at ways forward. <https://www.kateraworth.com/>

The original Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens) remains relevant, and is freely available online: <https://donellameadows.org/the-limits-to-growth-now-availabl...>. I strongly recommend reading primary sources over hot takes, interpretations, and commentaries. It's also helpful to remember that LtG served not as a prescription but as an alarm: there's a clear problem and we've got to wake up to it. Sadly, more than 50 years onward, that alarm continues to be ignored by many (including within this thread).

The now-defunct Worldwatch Institute published an annual State of the World publication which was an anthology of articles on sustainability generally, from 1984--2017, and give an excellent sense of the breadth and progress of thinking on these topics. Those are mostly available via the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/search?query=worldwatch+institute+state+...>

Worldwatch's founder, Lester R. Brown, has written numerous books, his latest covers this topic, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy <http://www.earth-policy.org/press_room/C68/market_forces_dri...>

Looking at the energy picture alone, there's David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which breaks down the technical picture, with a focus on Britain though applicable elsewhere, clearly and soberly. Freely available online: <http://www.withouthotair.com/>

That's just skimming the top of a huge literature. There are a tremendous number of different viewpoints, of topics and approaches, and of course disagreement. Contrary to the assertions of some, however, there are specific and actionable recommendations to be found. Looking into the bibliographies and notes of the works listed should launch you further in whatever direction you care to explore.

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dredmorbiusSep 2023

The problem with any of these measures is leakiness, particularly in light of global fuels trade, emissions, and global warming impacts.

I somewhat agree that taxing fossil fuels directly is the most direct route, though that faces a number of challenges:

- There's no one single global tax authority. Several of the largest fossil fuel extractors (China, India, Indonesia, for coal, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, for oil, and Russia, Iran, Qatar, and China for natural gas) would tend to be noncompliant with such impositions.[1]

- Outsourced manufacturing means that a secondary tax on imports of goods or services by carbon emissions would likely be necessary. I'm not sure how this would comport with existing trade treaties.

- Taxes would hit low-income countries much harder than rich ones. This is one of the common sticking points for virtually all emissions- and limits-based interventions, and has been since the 1970s if not earlier.[2]

- Any such taxes would have to be adjusted based on actual atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Not merely CO2 but other emissions as well. Effectively the goal is to set a net emissions and warming budget and adjust a tax scheme to achieve that.

- Black markets would undoubtedly emerge, though the scale of such markets would make detection relatively straightforward. The more likely complication is that major actors (the US, China, Russia, India) are nuclear states, and direct interventions would entail their own risks.

- As wealth is power[3], the passing, adoption, and enforcement of such a tax would likely be highly challenging.

I don't have much by way of alternative suggestions, but I do somewhat agree that a direct economic mechanism aimed at the source would be preferable.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Five largest extractors each are, coal: China, India, USA, Indonesia, Australia; oil: USA, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, China; natural gas: USA, Russia, Iran, Qatar, China, sourced from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2022.

2. Excellent contemporaneous discussion of this in William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, 1977, particularly Chapter 7. <https://www.worldcat.org/title/2524932> <https://archive.org/details/ecologypoliticso0000ophu>

3. See: Hobbes and Adam Smith.

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dredmorbiusSep 2022

Much of it boils down to coordination problems, local optima, game-theoretic outcomes, and the like. Politics, in a broad sense.

These are not solveable through popular rhubrics such as "market mechanisms", as those markets are quite often what have produced the conflicts or underlying frictions in the first place.

The work of William Ophuls has largely been dedicated to describing these problems and attempting to find ways out (as well as pointing out approaches doomed to failure). See especially Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, 1992) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105> and Plato's Revenge (2011) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198>.

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dredmorbiusAug 2022

Framing degrowth as a choice (against continued economic growth / business as usual (BAU)), rather than as a planned de-escallation as an alternative to an unplanned catastrophic collapse and/or descent into some post-prosperity feudalistic gilded era in which a vanishingly small fraction of global haves might enjoy something approximating present high-consumption lifestyles but the overwhelming majority do not and never will ... is ignoring the fundamental reality of the degrowth / steady state argument which is that planetary boundaries exist. There are limits to resource availability, as we've known for a long time, as well as to sink capacities --- the ability of the environment to absorb the effluvia of our activities without undergoing a catastrophic shift.

There are also quite probably systemic responses, including (though I'd suggest not limited to) the emergence of global epidemics and pandemics of disease and dysfunction. Kyle Harper's recent book, The Fate of Rome, advances the case that diseases co-evolve with civilisation. This itself becomes an interesting counterpoint to the well-worn argument that science, technology, and progress have relieved humans of the evils of infectious disease. It was progress, population growth, commerce, and urbanisation which created those plagues in the first place. As Jarred Diamond noted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was the Old World with its crowded cities and vast commercial networks which introduced plagues to the New (with a very few possible exceptions, and those largely very slow-moving insults).

Though of course, diseases of the tropics were well-known. Those however are overwhelmingly zoonotic and parasite-based rather than trasmitting directly between humans, and reflect the same dynamics (huge populations and intense intercourse) though of other species, typically insects. Diseases of sanitation and hygiene, notably cholera, would be the other principle exception, though that was introduced to Europe largely from the Indian subcontinent.

Again, the point isn't that degrowth is an option to BAU, it's an option to a far worse collapse or oppressive wealth concentration with massive disenfranchisement. The fact that discussing the issue in these terms an on this basis is so readily derailed is itself among the profound challenges in achieving a non-worst-case outcome. I've pointed before to the work of William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, Plato's Revenge) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (various) before, I'll recommend them without reservation here again.

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