What Economists can learn from Nature:
Nature loves abundance. She loves creating. She has, through some very simple rules, been increasing her “Economic Output” for millions of years – and that in way that is not only fully sustainable but that actually makes her system more resilient.
February 28, 2008
When Nature Supports Economic Growth
by Axel Sturmann
www.taintedmirror.com/mm/natural_economics/index.htm
I think:
It is the striving for stability in an every changing environment that is the very driving force behind all creation.
And it is only when we can loose our fear and enjoy both the search for stability within the chaos as well chaos itself, that we will find harmony and contentment both around and within us.
Finally somebody else out there has recognized that even using the non-edible part of food crops (straw and woodchips) for the creation of biofuels is not the answer either.
This because that is the very part of the plant that the soil desperately needs to replenish itself. Removing it, according to Monbiot (see below), will increase soil erosion by 100-fold.
To that I should add that anything that encourages monoculture, including some Scandinavian countries ideas of using plantation wood into biofuels, is ultimately not sustainable on a large scale. The world’s eco-systems only work so well because of the massive efficiency created by having so many different species of plant and animal living, growing, and passing on energy to each (sharing resources) in the same area. An efficiency destroyed when you remove all those interacting species and replace them with one single plant or animal whose most energy rich part you then remove for consumption elsewhere, and thereby effectively turn it into a waste product instead of another species’ food. Turning a complex multi-layered old-growth forest system into a pine tree mono-culture for biofuels is no exception.
Axel
Monbiot/Guardian, February 12, 2008
The Last Straw
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 12th February 2008
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/02/12/the-last-straw/
A new generation of biofuels turns out to be another environmental disaster
Now they might start sitting up. They wouldn’t listen to the environmentalists or even the geologists. Can governments ignore the capitalists?
A report published last week by Citibank, and so far unremarked by the media, proposes “genuine difficulties” in increasing the production of crude oil, “particularly after 2012.”(1) Though 175 big drilling projects will start in the next four years, “the fear remains that most of this supply will be offset by high levels of decline”. The oil industry has scoffed at the notion that oil supplies might peak, but “recent evidence of failed production growth would tend to shift the burden of proof onto the producers”, as they have been unable to respond to the massive rise in prices. “Total global liquid hydrocarbon production has essentially flatlined since mid 2005 at just north of 85 million barrels per day.”
The issue is complicated, as ever, by the refusal of the OPEC cartel to raise production. What has changed, Citi says, is that the non-OPEC countries can no longer answer the price signal. Does this mean that oil production in these nations has already peaked? If so, what do our governments intend to do?
Nine months ago, I asked the British government to send me its assessments of global oil supply. The results astonished me: there weren’t any(2). Instead it relied exclusively on one external source: a book published by the International Energy Agency. The omission became stranger still when I read this book and discovered that it was a crude polemic, dismissing those who questioned future oil supplies as “doomsayers” without providing robust evidence to support its conclusions(3). Though the members of OPEC have a powerful interest in exaggerating their reserves in order to boost their quotas, the IEA relied on their own assessments of future supply.
Last week I tried again, and I received the same response: “the Government agrees with IEA analysis that global oil (and gas) reserves are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future.”(4) Perhaps it hasn’t noticed that the IEA is now backtracking. The Financial Times says the agency “has admitted that it has been paying insufficient attention to supply bottlenecks as evidence mounts that oil is being discovered more slowly than once expected … natural decline rates for discovered fields are a closely guarded secret in the oil industry, and the IEA is concerned that the data it currently holds is not accurate.”(5) What if the data turns out to be wrong? What if OPEC’s stated reserves are a pack of lies? What contingency plans has the government made? Answer comes there none.....
Click here to read the rest of the article.
Own work
How to Introduce Electric Vehicles to Emerging Markets
- By leasing small, semi-mobile electric vehicle battery charging and swap-out stations to the unemployed.
by Axel Sturmann, 22 January 2008
www.axelsturmann.com
The expected environmental cost of the projected emerging markets car acquisitions is enormous and potentially disastrous. A problem only exacerbated by recent news of the worlds cheapest car, the Tata Nano[1], being produced in India where ‘annual car sales are expected to nearly double over the next five years, to 2.3 million in 2012’[2].
And yet who are we in the West to say ‘no’, especially as we refuse to give up our own cars?
However, a (at least partial) solution could be found by first roping in a few extra disparate problems and solutions. First, India’s oil dependency, which is expected to grow to 91.6% by 2020[3]. Second, her unemployment rate, especially for those, like the roadside letters writers[4], who have been put out of business by the rapid spread of technology, in this case the cell phone. Third, the development, in India, of the world’s cheapest car, the $2,500 Tata Nano. And fourth, the plans of Silicon Valley’s Shai Agassi to create an Electric Vehicle battery leasing, charging and swap out distribution network[5] in the USA and Israel[6]. His basic idea being that to increase the range of electric vehicles you do not have to wait while others spend billions of dollars and years on research and development untill you have a competitive battery, or on creating an entire new hydrogen manufacturing and distribution network, but simply use the existing electric distribution network – the grid – to charge batteries that are leased to the consumer and distributed to them at swap-out stations where, instead of having to wait hours for the car to charge, a machine simply swaps your flat batteries for a fully charged one.
For India I envision thousands of semi-mobile roadside charging stations least to the entrepreneurial unemployed, like the aforementioned letter writers. Possibly built onto trailers that can be moved to high traffic roadside locations when in use – these licensed from the government or placed as an addition to an existing small enterprise or gas station – and moved to secure locations when not in use. After all, few unemployed are otherwise going to be able to afford the high rents of conventional high traffic roadside retail space.
The mobile charging station could be fitted with the correct charging apparatus and racks designed in such a way that the battery can only be inserted with the correct connector point touching the correct charge point – same way as they should be designed for the car. A bit like the way your SD memory card can only fit into your camera the correct way around. Flat batteries being pushed into the front of the rack and full ones being taken out the back – with green light sensors showing both the operator and customer that the end batteries being removed are indeed fully charged.
With up to half of the initial cost of an electric vehicle being the batteries[7], such a system has the added advantage of cutting that cost substantial. A factor which, together with possible government investment (into the country’s future physical, environmental and economic health), could soon make an electric car a viable competitor to even the Tata Nano.
Come on India, take the lead.
Footnotes:
[1] ‘Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants’ by SOMINI SENGUPTA, January 11, 2008, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/world/asia/11indiacar.html
[2] ‘Speed limits rise as India falls in love with the car‘ by RANDEEP RAMESH, December 5, 2007, Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2222324,00.html
[3] ‘India's energy security challenge’, by THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ANALYSIS OF GLOBAL SECURITY, January 21, 2004, Energy Security, http://www.iags.org/n0121043.htm
[4] ‘The Ink Fades on a Profession as India Modernizes’, by ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, December 26, 2007, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/world/asia/26india.html
[5] ‘Reimagining the Automobile Industry by Selling the Electricity’, by JOHN MARKOFF, October 29, 2007, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/technology/29agassi.html
[6] ‘Israel Is Set to Promote the Use of Electric Cars’, by STEVEN ERLANGER, January 21, 2008, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/world/middleeast/21israel.html
[7] ‘Silicon Valley's $200 million electric car startup’, posted by Todd Woody, October 29, 2007, Green Wombat, http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/10/silicon-valle-1.html
Own Work
A satirical critically complimentary look at Bavarian/German culture through the eyes of beer and bicycles.
January 17, 2008
Bicycles, Beer and Bratwurst in Bavaria
by Axel Sturmann
http://www.axelstuermann.com/en/samples-mm/071130_MunichBicycle/index.htm
Own Work - Opinion
“Infinite Economic Growth is Not Possible on a Finite Planet”
WRONG!
by AXEL STURMANN
It was, in fact, a statement that I had supported for many years as an environmentalist. However, more recently I began to see that Nature herself had quietly proven the statement wrong long before the notion had even occurred to any human. Nature, the complete environmental system of this planet (with a little help from the sun), has been sustainably increasing her “economic output” in leaps and bounds since long before the first single cell amoeba started “making out” in Earth’s prehistoric primal goo; had been doing this with a perfectly developed “free market economic system” since millennia before Adam Smith, Karl Marx or Gordon Gecko had even been a blip (or blot) on the evolutionary/creationary radar. In fact, it appears that the greater her economic output – the greater the variety and number of species created and the greater the flow of energy between these species – the more stable the system is; hunt the only primary predator in an ecosystem to extinction and you have a catastrophe, but in a more complex system other primary predators can take its place.
By comparison, our world economic system, which has been developed by humans over the last few hundred years in a process of only semi-controlled creative evolution, has a great deal to learn from Nature’s. Economists trying to develop the perfect economic system – one that sustainably offers ongoing increases in living standards and security – need only humble themselves enough to copy what Nature has long since developed.
After all, our economic system is not separate from Nature’s economic system; it may be a unique part within it, like the Great Barrier Reef, but it is not separate. If you doubt this then think what will happen if just one part of the ecological system, say oil, is removed from our economic one. The ecological system can survive without our economic system, even prosper, but in no way can our economic system survive without the ecological one. No oil, no food, no shelter, no Playstation. The end.
This interconnection becomes even more obvious when we look at the nature of Nature as a perfect free-market economic system of supply and demand. A quick look at the circle of life will demonstrate this or a glance at a weather map – with its blobs and arrows representing areas of high pressure (supply), low pressure (demand) and the wind flowing between them as the trade that evens them out. Likewise the migration of antelope in search of food; the movement of the ocean currents; the rising, shifting and eroding down of the continental shelves; the entire rise and fall of species’ population numbers to match their food supply; all are dancing the economic – sorry, natural – dance of responding to supply and demand. A perfect system. A natural system which can, human foolishness and giant cosmic meteorites notwithstanding, continue to create new species and fill the Earth with an abundance that still manages to boggle even our greed-obsessed human minds.
Unlike our economic system Nature’s is perfect because (humans excluded) there is no greed; because the only species which have learned how to act on impulses of greed have been humans – if other species even have these impulses at all. And this because humans alone have learned how to store and thereby control energy almost indefinitely; with the invention of money and the ensuing creation of financial markets being the pinnacle of this development of stored and tradable energy. By growing grain a farmer transforms his labour, fertilizer, water and solar energy into food energy that can be stored for times of shortage (times of low supply and high demand), or transported and traded in areas experiencing low supply and high demand like to a city or a drought-stricken country. However, the farmer can also trade his created food energy for money energy, which is just a form of stored energy that he can keep until he needs it at another time or place. Squirrels, by comparison, having not yet figured out the concepts of vacuum sealing or refrigeration, can store nuts for one winter, but “know” that storing more than they can reasonably consume or need will only be a waste of valuable energy, as they see their unconsumed nuts turn into either trees or compost in the spring rains.
The reason why capitalism (as it is currently practiced) does not work, why it is unsustainable, why any half-smart economic test of long-term economic viability should rate the current capitalist system as a lousy investment, is not because today’s capitalism contains elements of free market economics – that part is good – but because it has been tainted by greed. And, contrary to what Gordon Gecko would have you believe, greed is bad. Because greed limits and even stops the flow of energy within a system. Because greed corners markets. Because greed moves as much energy as it can from anywhere that it can find it into the control of as few people as possible and then holds it there with a vehemence boarding on psychosis. Greed, in those few that suffer the psychosis, is what causes them to spend those few extra hours funnelling available energy, in whatever form, into their exclusive control for the sole purpose of using that stored/cornered energy as leverage over nature (including other humans) to gain yet more energy into their exclusive control. Because greed is a sin against that which creates and sustains life (a sin not in the conventional sense – I am not religious – but in the sense that it works against Nature). Because, based on the second law of thermodynamics, as any physicist can tell you, if you remove energy from a system you will be left with a state of entropy, of nothingness, with a pile of inert matter with no potential for creation or work, with perfect death. And that is where we are heading if we continue as we are – just read the headlines on global warming. Greed can also be seen as “bad”, “wrong” or “evil” on a metaphysical level, because it goes utterly against one of the very cornerstone ideals shared by almost all of the world religious, spiritualist, humanist and philosophical schools of thought, namely, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. A concept discovered, shared and quoted hundreds of years before it found itself into even the Christian teachings[1]. Furthermore, it is an argument that can even be used against those who desire economic stagnation for the sake of environmental protecting. Although economic stagnation is still better than the current environmentally destructive system of greed based “growth”.
If you answer that technology will save us, that it is this very economic system that has hugely increased our standard of living, dropped our infant death rate and provided us with i-Pods, and which will now provide us with the financial means and technical know-how to solve the very problems it has created, then you have missed my point. I am not arguing against free market economics or the ability of freethinking and free trading humans to create the most amazing of solutions, I am arguing against the use of greed to control that process for the benefit of only a tiny minority of only one of Nature’s millions of species.
If you want to regulate an economy, do not regulate the flow of energy or creation, regulate the greed.
Footnotes:
[1] The earliest written version known being The Tale of The Eloquent Peasant from ancient Egypt, c. 1800 BCE.
Own Work - short story
by Axel Sturmann
In my home I am not alone. I am observed, watched, judged, found wanting. Constantly. At any moment. I am like a creature in a laboratory, a disease beneath the microscope, an amoeba in a petri dish. It is glass-walled and round – no corners to creep into, no shadows to hide in, no escape – a cell.
Doctors, uninvited, muttering beneath their breath, impersonal behind gowns and masks peer in. They monitor me, scrutinise, evaluate and judge me. Always judging, and muttering. They show nothing in return, not from behind the masks that create shadows for their eyes: no vulnerability, no crack, no emotion, no need, no fear, no weakness. How can they be so cold, so perfect? Are they human, too? I can't be sure. Don't dare be sure. They are so strong, so self-assured. I am the only one with weakness. This is understood, accepted, expected.
I am exhausted. Always on my guard, always being studied for flaws. I try to run, to find a place to hide, someplace safe where for a moment I can let down my guard, relax, be myself; my weak, vulnerable, scared, insecure, pathetic, real self. And not be judged for it. Not condemned. To just be… In that moment… Vulnerable… Vulnerable and safe.
But there is nowhere. Even the closet is too small – believe me, I have tried. Even the gap beside the bed, that too little space, no use.
I live in a psycho-ward; a mental case, a desperate one, the only one; crawling along the corners of the cell walls. A cell with mirrored-windows and cameras always looking in. But a cell without padding, without protection; sharp objects abound; plates to smash, knives to slash. This temptation, in the moment, is huge – a snap decision, an instantaneous micro trip-switch somewhere hidden in the screaming chaos of my brain clicks in and stops the destruction a second's fraction before it is too late. How? Why? Who controls it? Where is it? Will it always work? Does it come with a guarantee? I do not know. I have no control. I can only trust. I have no choice.
It seems odd, but I can leave any time. It is, after all, just my home. Take the front door and the elevator, or one step over the 8th floor balcony. So far I've only taken the elevator. I don't always know why.
Sometimes it's nice going out, for a while. When I 'm strong. When I'm prepared. When choose to go there. When I can wear my mask; feign strength, confidence and abilities I do not have. I know when to laugh, to joke, to show compassion, understanding; to share a semblance of wisdom, to entertain, to charm. I can do this for a while, my act is polished, I have practiced for years.
So long as it's only for a while – a predetermined time for which I can plan, prepare, or avoid if I am not ready – appointments cancelled by SMS, no human contact required, no feedback, no explanation needed, no chance that my voice will reveal my fear, my truth.
But I always need my refuge, a place to hide, to recharge my batteries, to practice my lines. A place to be myself; my petrified, feeble, frightened self. I hate the lies. I am exhausted from the lies. The constant pressure to perform. If all the world's a stage, then home should be my dressing room. The one place where I can prepare, can practice, can cry out my shame-filled fear of failure; can scream my insecurities to the face in the make-up mirror or the few I allow in whom I know will not harm me, will not use my weakness against me, who I pray will not do so. It should be the one place I can be vulnerable, where I can openly puke my stage-fright fears into the bucket before the curtain call, before I must again perform, lie, give my all of what the audience does want, no, demands.
Who is this person I do act? This fraud I envy so? This man of charm and whit and brains and dashing looks? Or so I kid myself until my reflection I do see; glimpse it in a mirror, a glass, or in the flicker of recognition in my harshest critics' eyes. They are there. Everywhere. In the audience. All about. I swear. Every one an actor and a ruthless critic too. Show weakness for a moment and they will pounce, slashing with their pens in their headlines they will shout; ‘a fraud’, ‘a weakling’, ‘no backbone’, ‘a failure through and through’. Headlines, conviction, and sentence for all the world to see.
How right they are.
Oh how I want to flee.
Interesting Viewing:
About a week ago a Republican mayor publicly changed his stance in favor of gay marriage – itself something quite remarkable.
However, what really impressed me was the courage and the strength in his humility which he displayed in sharing his deep vulnerability.
Oh, if we had more leaders like him.
Please, please watch the video; the imperfect fear and courage visible in his every move and word say it better than I ever could in words.
Pictures of Auschwitz camp cards enjoying themselves on retreat caused some commentary, including my own in this blog under "Looking for Hitler" and the New York Times under "Down Time From Murder".
However, it was a response to the NYT article that I wanted to share with you: (link)
In your column you ask, “What would you have done? Filled your mouth with blueberries or balked and paid the mortal price?” Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men writes, “no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment” (p. 170). I post, first, because I’m curious to know if, to your knowledge, evidence contrary to Browning’s statement has come to light since he published it in 1992. Second, if no such evidence has come to light, what was the price to be paid for not “filling your mouth with blueberries”? Was the price of noncompliance really so mortal?
[4] Posted by: David Cohen,
Own Work - opinion
Looking for Hitler
by Axel Sturmann
Own Work - opinion
Emperor Putin?
Or, will Putin replace Putin?
by Axel Sturmann
Own Work - multimedia
Shakespeare & Company
- holding out in a Paris refuge
by Axel Sturmann
Own Work - Essay
Afghanistan – effect of aid
by Axel Stürmann
