George Mobus on the impending bottleneck

[GliderGuider]

Dr. Mobus is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Tacoma. He has a very broad academic background, and interests that include biology, and evolutionary, cognitive, and neuro-psychology. He is co-author of a textbook on Complex Systems.

His blog, Question Everything, has been up since 2007, and features erudite articles on biophysical economics, evolution, sapience, systems science, and the global human predicament. He is the one writer in the blogosphere whose work consistently comes closest to expressing my own views.

In the blog post excerpted below he puts a stake in the ground regarding what he now firmly believes is an upcoming evolutionary bottleneck. It's an event that follows naturally from the expanding global predicament, driven by social, environmental and ecological factors that our world culture appears powerless to address with enough speed or resolve to turn back the rising the tide of calamity.

Do You Want to Avoid the Bottleneck?

After more than a decade of searching for answers, and attending to the major trends in our world, I have come to certain conclusions about the future of humanity. I haven't made a secret of my now fairly firm belief that in the not-too-distant future humanity will suffer an evolutionary bottleneck event concurrent with a sixth major extinction. Ironically this extinction event is being brought on by humanity itself. Freed from the ordinary biological constraints that keep other species in check in normal ecological feedback loops, and bolstered by the discovery of incredible power stored in fossil fuels and nuclear fission, humans have used their cleverness to grow far beyond the natural carrying capacity afforded by real-time solar influx. And the problems caused by this fact have grown obvious to most. We are altering our climate. We are polluting our environment. We are diminishing the quality of soils and water. And we are behaving badly toward one another, as well as the rest of the biosphere.

If you want to know why I am so convinced of this outcome, I have put together a list of things that, from a systems perspective, seem to me to be necessary actions needed to minimize the negative impacts rapidly approaching. All of the items on this list interact in complex, nonlinear ways so that you can't just pick and choose the one or ones you think will do the job. All will have to be done, together, for there to be any positive effect. Once you see the list, and ponder the likelihood that our population will do any of them, let alone all, you will understand my conviction.

• Stop all reproduction. No new babies for twenty years at least and then only ten percent of the adult population should be allowed to reproduce afterward.
  
• Stop capitalistic profit taking. Forever. No more capitalism and profiting ever again. Freeze prices and wages (except for the overpaid executives: reduce theirs).
  
• Take back the wealth of the top 10% - it will be needed to support survival activities.
  
• Destroy the financial system. Revert banking to hold savings and eliminate securities and futures markets.
  
• Reallocate housing to handle the poor. Move those living in squalor and homeless into the mansions in the Hamptons (for example).
  
• Put all able-bodied men and women to work restoring soils and growing food for local consumption.
  
• Turn all arable and climate-viable land over to permaculture.
  
• Begin immediate mass migrations of peoples living in climate danger zones. For example all of the people of the MENA and central Africa regions are in danger from severe climate change. They will need to be relocated north as far as Russia and Europe.
  
• Eliminate all luxury product/service productions. Re-purpose the capital to producing absolute necessities such as plows!
  
• Redirect all fossil fuel production to supply energy for recycling materials, food production, and migration.
  
• Minimize energy consumption by the public to just that essential to support the above.

But you may have another conclusion. What is yours, and on what basis do you make it? What evidence do you have? Simply saying you just can't believe my conclusion is valid is not sufficient. You need to show where my evidence is wrong or that counter evidence exists to warrant another (possible) conclusion. I'm open to arguments with merit. In fact I hope someone can shoot me down on this, for obvious reasons.

[pscot]

1. in theory if these actions were taken immediately

we would be able to salvage some portion of the population and preserve our species (but) No one will give up on the hope that we can restore our pursuit of wealth. No one will admit that they have to sacrifice a lot if we are to salvage humanity. At least not until it really is too late for even these actions to make a difference.



Emerson understood the Species better than most:

The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.
...

The horseman serves the horse,
The neat-herd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind,
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.

Our preparations consist of a border fence and internment camps, militarized police and universal surveillance. We're getting ready for the French Revolution and a simultaneous border war. You can see the military mind at work. Beyond that there is zero political will to lead on any of this. As BC was so fond of reminding us, where there is no vision, the people perish.

[GliderGuider]

2. We could take all those actions immediately

...if only we could repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Everyone just wants their children to have a better life than they did. Is that so wrong???

[Demeter]

3. It is neither wrong, nor impossible

I see the next evolutionary bottleneck being "breeding".

When women gained a measure of equal opportunity, and went into technical schools, instead of teacher's colleges, they met men of similar genomes.

They met, they reproduced, and now there are too many kids suffering from the genetic reinforcement of genes that has led to the outbreak of autism and similar diseases that arise from too many copies of the "good thing" that supports logical, mathematical thinking.

Genetic counseling will be the next frontier, if we survive the pollution and the financial parasitism of the Elite.

[pscot]

4. It would take a change in our DNA

and the last one of those was 50 or 100 millennia ago.

[GliderGuider]

5. Absolutely true.

The thrust of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in open systems (towards energy dissipation, growth and self-organization) is enshrined in our DNA, and our DNA in turn governs every species' general behavioral tendencies. This is why I say that in order to make wholesale changes in our species' behavior we would need to go all the way back to 2LoT, and pull the tree out by its roots so to speak. Not going to happen in this universe.

[CRH]

6. Everyone just wants their children to have a better life than they did, ...

I can buy into that for the third world; but, I was a child of the fifties, my parents had a very good lower middle class life, and I wanted for nothing that was 'needed', to flourish. At this time the nuclear family used less than half the energy per person and lived better than any generation before.

The economic system children of the fifties were borne into created the capitalistic values of always wanting more than was needed, conservation took a back seat, advertisement created dissatisfaction with status quo, family structures dissolved, and every family suddenly had two and three cars to travel farther in a day than their grand parents traveled in a month. But that still wasn't enough, we all wanted to retire without worry, by age of 55. Most all of the above is learned behavior, expectations greatly influenced by an economic system and supporting media, that demanded an ever increasing consumption level far beyond need, to realize personal satisfaction.

Now we try to convince ourselves our actions were natural, derived from DNA. My grandparents, didn't even know what DNA was, and they cherished what they had, maintained it and passed much of it on to the younger generation, wasted near to nothing, and thought a half day on Sunday to eat and talk story with the family and neighbors, was the best life to be offered. They were happy and content. They would cringe at the throwaway society we live in today, where no level of consumption is enough, happiness is fleeting within dreams of more, and ages faster that the last material purchased.

Everyone wants a better life for their children? Maybe in the third world. For the first and second world citizens, we have lived a life divided between need and desire, and have made a choice. The majority were swept along within the designs of the society and economy they were reared. We had the tools to think and the emotion to sink. Our collective choice, is today's dilemma.

From where I've been and from what I've seen, the second law of thermodynamics and DNA are but an excuse that dissolves guilt from actions of desire. As for the motivations and framework of the society and economy we have become, that has been driven by greed without thought of the future, and materialistic benefitting, only the very few. We have only been led to where we are today, by surrendering our choice to emotion.

[NickB79]

7. Any government taking any one of those actions

Would at the very least see massive civil unrest; at worst an all-out uprising against the regime responsible for instigating the new rules.

[joshcryer]

8. Share Our Wealth.

Do Huey Long's Share Our Wealth program.

The benefits would be immediate and ground breaking.

[GliderGuider]

9. How does sharing existing wealth prevent or mitigate the bottleneck?

We are already at least 70% into overshoot. If the aggregate material wealth of humanity is behind the collapse of the global biosphere, how would spreading it out more evenly help?

[joshcryer]

10. Efficient living is only affordable by the wealthy.

See: solar, electrics, etc.

So you'd be able to quickly develop zero emission technologies and be able to live a more sustainable life.

As it stands now zero emission living is 1) very expensive and 2) the wealthy don't actually give a shit about it.

[kristopher]

11. No, it isn't, but that is a common right wing meme

Solar Power to the People: The Rise of Rooftop Solar Among the Middle Class
By Mari Hernandez October 21, 2013

Homeowners across the United States have begun a rooftop solar** revolution. Since 2000, more than 1,460 megawatts of residential solar installations have been installed across the country, and more than 80 percent of that capacity was added in the past four years.1 In 2012 alone, rooftop solar installations reached 488 megawatts, a 62 percent increase over 2011 installations and nearly double the installed capacity added in 2010.2

The question is: Who is buying up all of those solar power systems? Through our analy- sis of solar installation data from Arizona, Califaornia, and New Jersey, we found that these installations are overwhelmingly occurring in middle-class neighborhoods that have median incomes ranging from $40,000 to $90,000. The areas that experienced the most growth from 2011 to 2012 had median incomes ranging from $40,000 to $50,000 in both Arizona and California and $30,000 to $40,000 in New Jersey. Additionally, the distribution of solar installations in these states aligns closely with the population distribution across income levels.

But many within the electric utility industry have claimed that distributed solar is mainly being adopted by wealthy customers. Concerned by the threat that rooftop solar’s rapid growth poses to traditional utility business models, some utility execu- tives have used this claim to support a rising desire within the industry to alter existing solar programs and policies. The idea is that through solar policies such as net metering, middle- and low-income customers who cannot afford to go solar are subsidizing the wealthy customers who can.

In this issue brief, we show that rooftop solar is not just being adopted by the wealthy; it is, in fact, mostly being deployed in neighborhoods where median income ranges from $40,000 to $90,000. In the first section, we present the overall findings from our income analysis of solar installation data from Arizona, California, and New Jersey. We then discuss the implications of those results in the context of the current growth of rooftop solar and the ongoing discussion of solar policies that will affect its future growth.

California, Arizona, and New Jersey are ...

http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/RooftopSolar-4.pdf

**Residential solar photovoltaic, or PV, systems—also referred to as “distributed” or “rooftop solar” in this report— consist of an array of solar panels that are roof or ground mounted to produce electricity that is either fed back into the electric grid—grid connected—or solely used onsite by the residential building—off grid.

[joshcryer]

12. Distribution of income:

The bottom 50% can't afford to have zero emissions.

[kristopher]

13. Your claim is false - See post 11 nt

[joshcryer]

14. I suppose you don't like Share Our Wealth then.

[kristopher]

15. Your claim re "efficient living" being only for the wealthy is not true

As pointed out in the CAP study that disproves it and my previous post, that claim is a right wing meme. I have no idea why you would seek to promote it even after being shown undeniable evidence it isn't true.

I have no opinion regarding your infatuation with one of the most corrupt politicians of the 20th century. Economic populism is a tool that many demagogues gravitate towards and, having lived in the deep south (including time in both Louisiana and Mississippi) I don't see any trace of actual progressive economic policies there. What I do see is continued corruption and unceasing populist rhetoric and scapegoating of any available target during any given election cycle.