The Stupidity of Rex Murphy and the Impending Extinction of Humanity
Today’s column comes to you courtesy of Rex Murphy. When I was growing up, I remember listening to Rex on the radio and liking him. Later, he turned to newspaper columns, and I think it was only then that I realized what a dunce he was. And is. After poking fun at the Europeans for the latest tainted meat scandal — it seems that eastern Europeans are raking in money by labelling horsemeat as “beef” and shipping it west to unsuspecting buyers — Rex just can’t resist getting another dig in at the pesky greenies across the pond:
Lay aside the dubious pork, that maybe-it’s-beef, for a while. Britain and Europe have an easy way out: meat from the multitude of our country’s vast seal population. Seal meat is a wonder — very nutritious, nice game taste, can be prepared variously, makes splendid “flipper pie.” It is also, almost by necessity, organic. And free range? The whole North Atlantic is their pasture. Seal meat will see Europe through this crisis.
I’m trying not to take this too seriously, because no doubt Rex doesn’t want his readers to see him as a serious, insightful critical thinker. But the fact that he can even utter such an asinine statement is proof of how appallingly ignorant the denialist right has become when it comes to environmental issues. That’s the same denialist right, incidentally, 40% of which tell pollsters that a 20-foot sea level rise wouldn’t pose a significant problem for coastal cities. (Don’t get too upset at me, right-wingers: I’ll be turning my guns on the denialist left in just a moment.)
Because here’s the thing: someone who makes a statement like this proves, by saying it, that they have absolutely no idea what the ecological footprint of the human race has become. They are absolutely, appallingly, utterly ignorant on the subject. Which I suppose goes a long ways towards explaining why Rex Murphy is something of a climate change denialist. Even in jest, it’s just a really stupid thing to say. It’s like saying: “oh, you don’t like driving in to work from the suburbs every day? That’s okay: invest in a kayak.” It’s nonsensical.
To see what I mean, juxtapose the following two statistics. First of all, even using decade-old figures, the European market consumes 35 million tonnes of meat per year. About one-fifth of that is beef. There’s also 80,000 tonnes per year of legal horse meat — i.e. the horse meat people actually want to buy, not the stuff included in the new “horse-beef” scam.
Second of all, although I’m not sure what the total North Atlantic seal population is, I can tell you that according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans the northwest Atlantic seal population includes 8 million harp seals, 600,000 hooded seals, 350,000 grey seals, and 1 million ringed seals. Assuming that every one of those seals is at the top end of the weight range given by Wikipedia for each species, which they obviously aren’t, and that every pound of animal weight can be turned into a pound of marketable meat, which it obviously can’t be, by my math at any rate, that adds up to a hypothetical meat supply of a few million tonnes.
Or, put another way, if Europeans did what Rex Murphy is telling them to do, they’d eat their way through the entire Canadian Atlantic seal population in a couple of months.
Which is where Rex Murphy, curiously, runs into the left-wing environmental denialists. These ones aren’t like him. They embrace climate change. Believe in it, even. But they also think that the way forward for humanity is to get simpler: organic food, country living, small farms, no more nuclear power plants, 100 mile diets, etc, etc.
It won’t work, folks. There are too many of us now. Like it or not, at its present population level and given present growth projections, humanity requires large-scale industrial production just to stay alive, just to keep treading water. Given presently used and foreseeable future technology, said production will send us careening into an existential crisis in very short order. Left to its own ends, evolution is inexorable, inescapable, and inevitable. We’re committed to our present course, just as surely and for the same reasons as a few lost migratory birds “decided” a few million years ago that on the small islands they were marooned on they didn’t really need wings anymore. Those birds became dodos. What we will become remains to be seen.
So far the only difference between us and them is that a few of us can see the trainwreck coming, which is enough to qualify us as unique. Actually stopping the train requires us to pull off two miraculous exceptions to the natural order of things. Now there are actually quite a number of people who have won the lottery, but I’m not sure how many of them have won the lottery twice.
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thwap
I’ve long felt that industrial agriculture might be a necessity until we can either get our numbers down or experiment with organic reforms for small farmers in places like India.
Vandana Shiva appears to be saying that actually providing resources to peasant farmers would have produced as much output as the Green Revolution did and the corrupt bio-tech revolutions promise to do. I’m not sure about that but I’d be willing to finance some studies.
Here’s a link to another point of view that is very important:
http://makewealthhistory.org/2010/09/27/waste-uncovering-the-global-food-scandal-by-tristram-stuart/
That book gave me hope and enraged me at the same time.
MoS
Good piece, 6E. Barring some sort of miraculous breakthrough in CCS that includes an effective atmospheric scrubber I think we’re hooped. As a society we’ll need a mindset that is still years off and yet we don’t have that much time to change our minds. We’ll be overtaken by events.
Yet I am one of those who has adopted a simpler, smaller lifestyle. Call it climate change adaptation. I live in a much smaller house than any I’ve owned in the past. I drive a highly fuel-efficient small car. I take the even more-efficient motorcycle whenever I can. My house has been retrofitted with a high-efficiency, wood-burning stove/fireplace that, in part because of my immediate proximity to the Pacific, allows me to keep the place comfortable all day with a three or four hour fire in the evening. Best of all, new, high-efficiency, casement windows were put in. They allow the house to be kept cool in the summer without any form of air conditioning. I also added trees and shrubs for summer shade.
I’m pleased that I have made a big dent in my fossil-fuel consumption but my lifestyle changes are far more about adaptation.
When I was born mankind stood at an all-time record of 2.6 billion. In just one lifetime it has swelled past 7-billion and heading, we’re told, to 9-billion. We’ll never get there. We’re hitting too many walls already. I think we’re on the cusp of the die-off. It’ll be grim and extremely dangerous but it’s as inevitable as our rank indifference to it.
Sixth Estate
Don’t get me wrong on this. I’ve never had a large car, or a large house. I’m not saying conservation is for the birds. I’m just saying that we should be realistic about this. I’m not entirely sure on this one, but my guess is that everyone drove the most fuel-efficient car on the market, it still wouldn’t be a large enough cut in emissions to do anything more than buy us some extra years. For example.
MoS
A timely discussion, 6E. Read Andrew Nikiforuk’s sobering take on our civilization’s energy transition from The Tyee. It’s brutal.
http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/02/18/Big-Energy-Shift/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180213
Dave Dawson
Some people are persuaded by wishful thinking. I am persuaded by logic, backed up by facts. The best chance I see for the long-term is to use every possible strategy to throttle energy flow and carbon emissions, including use of fossil fuels to leverage this transition. Is is not true that a lot of small minuses produce a large minus?
Purple Library Guy
The thing about organic (which is not necessarily the same as low-tech) locally-oriented production is not really that its yields are low but rather that high yields require labour-intensive cultivation. We’d need to move a lot of people out of cities and onto farms, and nobody wants to, especially with what farmers make. It would take a massive social upheaval.
Still. Even if you don’t want to go organic, and even if you want to stay large-scale-oriented, the current agribusiness system needs massive reform. It is far from efficient at producing food, even on its own terms. Too much meat, too much sugar/corn syrup, too much biofuel, too many flowers, too much irrigation from unsustainable sources (fossil water running out), too much use of cut-and-paste farming methods on terrain that can’t handle them for long, too much slash-and-burn . . . too many things that generate short-term profits but fail to generate sustainable agricultural production of food. I think when it comes to the food system you are taking free-marketers’ trumpeting of their own awesomeness too much at face value. Will the loss of the Wheat Board lead to increased wheat production in Saskatchewan? No, just poorer farmers.
I do agree that we need fewer people though.
Sixth Estate
Is is not true that a lot of small minuses produce a large minus?
What we actually need are two things. First, we need to reach something like a stable level of energy use. The alternative, even at something like 2% energy consumption growth per year (which I believe is our long-term energy growth over the past century or something like that), is that we reach ridiculously large energy consumption levels on ridiculously short timescales (i.e. needing to build a Dyson sphere in a thousand years’ time). In theory, strict energy rationing can accomplish this, although so far it looks like population growth plus growing wealth in the developing world would overwhelm anything less than extreme conservation programs.
But assuming the climate projections are anything like accurate, we also need a wholesale transformation of our energy base. Ideally this would happen gradually, but the window for doing so is closing, which means that there is more and more of an emphasis on “abrupt” and less and less on gradual. Probably already, and certainly 20 years down the road if we take no action in the meantime, which seems likely, I don’t know that there’s any historical parallel for the gargantuan task that will be required of us. It follows that the chance of catastrophic failure is extremely high. So far as a species, we’ve been lucky, but in the long run, the house always wins.
Sixth Estate
The thing about organic (which is not necessarily the same as low-tech) locally-oriented production is not really that its yields are low but rather that high yields require labour-intensive cultivation. We’d need to move a lot of people out of cities and onto farms, and nobody wants to, especially with what farmers make. It would take a massive social upheaval.
Still. Even if you don’t want to go organic, and even if you want to stay large-scale-oriented, the current agribusiness system needs massive reform.
I won’t disagree with you on the inefficiency of the corporate system, but frankly, we have no choice other than large-scale-oriented production. There are 7 billion people on this planet and the number is still growing. It seems that natural demographic factors lead to population shrinkage in developed countries, but relying on that approach alone will require many decades if not centuries of gradual and painful transitions. More on this in the future, since I see by the Globe 7 Mail columnists page that there are still some idiots who believe population growth is a good thing.
Now, labour-intensive can be accommodated, although not easily. Our governing system isn’t capable of forced relocation to the countryside. It could have voluntary measures for that, but people wouldn’t be willing to sever their ties to the cities, which means increased transportation, which means increased carbon emissions.
Plus, at this point in time, the last thing we need to do is devote more human capital to manual labour intensive activities. We already have a massive proportion of the workforce doing nothing of any particular benefit to humanity by working in retail, finance, etc. I suppose you could take those people. But what we really need is to retool our society so that a minimum of effort is expended on traditional labour and a maximum proportion of people are in highly educated scientific and technical fields. In the short term, those are where any deliberate solutions will come from.
john
Until people see using paper bags as effective as promising not to fart again, and that if you were really green you wouldn’t have any kids, then we won’t change.
What would it take to make being childless ‘green’?
Even all the posters above seem to argue that if we all use a little less we’ll be ok. But all we’ll do is postpone it to the next, and yet again larger, generation.
Sixth Estate
I don’t know if that’s entirely true. Some of them did say they agreed that a reduced population would be a good idea, even if their main focus was on reduction and efficiency.
However, any argument that doesn’t involve expanding the sustainable human population beyond Earth does ultimately revolve around just postponing extinction. Unless we plan on leaving this solar system, we have the same roughly billion-year envelope to play with. The only question is, how much of that time period do we plan on being here?
Dave Dawson
“…in the long run, the house always wins.”
Indeed it does. We need to base our decisions, not simply on profits or perceived ‘efficiencies’, but on fundamental ethics. House percentages seem to have a way of increasing.
Sixth Estate
The trouble is, somewhere in elementary economics, nobody gets taught to ask “efficient at WHAT?” anymore.
So far as I can tell, a large number of so-called efficiencies actually only involve massive transfers of costs or liabilities off the books. The notion that fossil fuels are more cost-effective than solar power is a fine example of this.
Purple Library Guy
People always give me a hard time whenever I express a degree of support for Chinese population policies. Frankly, while those policies may not be totally ideal, at least they’re doing something. And it seems to be working, certainly if you contrast with, say, India where as far as I know they’re doing sweet diddly.
But any time I say something like this, I get jumped on at max speed, often even by people who see themselves as very environmentalist. And they talk about the gender imbalances being caused, and the coercive nature of the policies and all that. All no doubt very true, but to me it’s like if someone were quite rightly complaining about regressive Canadian policies for dealing with murderers under the Conservatives, but then saying their country where murder wasn’t illegal at all was superior. The answer isn’t to do nothing, it’s to come up with better policies.
I’m not totally convinced by “big is better” on agriculture. Sure, in Canada we’re probably stuck with that for the most part, probably in the US as well (although I think their agriculture is headed for major crisis no matter what they do). But India still has masses of people living in rural areas. Solutions for different places vary, and when it comes to production I’m really not convinced that 100 little plots must by definition make less than one big one of the same area. “Small scale” doesn’t mean fewer acres under production. And while large agribusiness-type farms benefit from efficiencies in terms of how little capital it takes to replace a unit of labour, the actual cultivation of a small plot is often more intensive, putting different crops in between rows of the main one and so forth.
Dun
I am pretty small scale organic. In addittion to our daily jobs, my wife and I have a less than quarter acre garden (suburban yard sized), with greenhouse. All raised beds, all french i8ntensive, all rotational crops. In the corner of the garden, we have a root cellar.
From late spring, (up here thats end of June), until October, we buy no produce and very little meat. What we do spend money on is some meat, coffee, sugar, rice, flour, butter, salt, pepper, chocolate, popcorn and milk.
By the fall, we have put away enough blanched peas, corn, beans, berries and fruit not to buy any for backing, cooking or juice until mid spring. For carrots, beets, cabbage, potatoes, we go year to year just growing, not buying. We havnt bought a chicken or an egg in years. We also give away about half of what we grow, either not having the space to store it, or harvesting more than will last us a year.
Key to this abundance is low consumption, ( not a lot of meat at the table, lots of vedge, no McSizing of portions), lower on the food chain, and being willing to garden.
One result of the AgriBlitz of the 1950s and 1960s, is that average people, stopped growing any of their food. During both Wars, Victory Gardens freed millions of acres of productive land from the tyranny of lawnmowers and created surpluses of food.
Sixth Estate
PLG — The one child policy has never bothered me all that much. The gender gap in children isn’t a product of the policy — it’s a product of sexism. Ugly as it may be, if anything it makes the policy more effective than it would be if the gender divide was 50-50.
That said, many wealthy industrialized countries with at least a modicum of women’s rights appear to be achieving at least gradual population reductions without any assistance from population control programs. The trouble is, most people don’t live in those countries.
Sixth Estate
Dun — I’m glad to hear it. These sorts of things don’t bother me. It’s just that I’m deeply skeptical we can feed 7 billion people on a long-term sustainable basis using small-scale agriculture. Or, before anyone jumps on me, industrial agriculture as it is currently practiced either.
Dun
Wheat and other large grain crops, (not rice), cannot be grown economically through small scale organic, but they can be profitably grown on a smaller scale, (family farms) that the current Corporate Industrial model.
Small scale organic can pretty much fill in the rest and can take advantage of Urban sites, like roof tops and vacant lots.
It does require that food cost more, and that more people are employed, (professionally or otherwise) in growing food, but with the current projection of a 9 degree rise by 2050, food isn,t really the problem.
Sixth Estate
I don’t know if it’s actually 9 by 2050, but actually, given such a temperature rise, yes, food will be a problem, and the majority of the world’s population live in zones which will become too warm for subsistence agriculture to work for them. Maybe any kind of agriculture.
Dun
It’s 9F by 2050.
for the scary words:
http://science-pope.com/2013/02/i-bet-you-didnt-know/
for the scary graph:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-most-terrifying-graph-youll-see-all.html
I remember seeing a USDA Map back some time around 2007 showing viable wheat growing regions of the world in 2007, contrasted to projected viable wheat growing regions of the world in 2050 with a predicted 5F rise by that date.
It showed the Plains baked dry, Australia and Argentina barren, a tiny strip in Northern Canada along the edge of where the taiga meets the tundra now, ( mostly granite) and a similar but larger strip in Siberia, (where there are some pockets of fertile soil).