Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“Consuming three planets' worthofresources wheninfact wehave oneisthe environmental equivalent
of childhood obesity—eating until you make yourself sick,” says David Miliband, secretary of state for
the environment, food, and rural affairs in the United Kingdom.
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In response to criticisms of renewable
energy plans as utopian and far-fetched, Bill McKibben says, “Perhaps it's the current scheme, with its
requirement of endless growth in a finite world, that seems utopian and far-fetched.”
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ThetheorybehindthesepredictionsisthatEarthhasafinite“carryingcapacity,”anideathatwasspread
far and wide in the 1970s. Two of the leading exponents of this view were Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren.
In their landmark topic,
Global Ecology,
they wrote:
When a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a re-
source limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the “carrying capacity” of the en-
vironment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie.
It must also apply to man on this finite planet.
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These theories were not idle banter—they were used by many to call for drastic restrictions on fossil
fuel use, much as we have today.
Ehrlich and Holdren announced, “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality en-
vironment in North America and to de-develop the United States.”
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This meant an attempt to reverse in-
dustrial development—by law: “This effort must be largely political.”
5
These ideas were viewed highly enough that Holdren's body of work, which stresses these themes over
and over, gave him the prestige to become science adviser to President Barack Obama.
As we've discussed earlier, these predictions were wrong, but why, exactly, were they wrong? The most
direct reason is that there are far more fossil fuel raw materials and far more human ingenuity to get them
than Ehrlich and Holdren expected. But there is a deeper error here, an error at the root of the whole
concept of sustainability. The error is a backward understanding of resources.
THE UNLIMITED POTENTIAL FOR RESOURCE CREATION AND HUMAN PROGRESS
The believers in a finite carrying capacity think of the Earth as something that “carries” us by dispensing
a certain amount of resources. But if this was true, then why did the caveman have so few resources?
Those who believe in the ideal of human nonimpact tend to endow nature with godlike status, as an
entity that nurtures us if only we will live in harmony with the other species and not demand so much for
ourselves.
But nature gives us very few directly usable machine energy resources. Resources are not
taken
from
nature, but
created
from nature. What applies to the raw materials of coal, oil, and gas also applies to every
raw material in nature—they are all
potential
resources, with unlimited potential to be rendered valuable
by the human mind.
Ultimately, a resource is just matter and energy transformed via human ingenuity to meet human needs.
Well, the planet we live on is 100 percent matter and energy, 100 percent potential resource for energy and
anything else we would want. To say we've only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how
little of this planet's potential we've unlocked. We already know that we have enough of a combination of
