This Sustainable Life

At the end of our second conversation, Gaya was finishing her book, leaving KPMG, and soon starting at Schneider Electric. The book just came out, Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse: What a 50-Year-Old Model of the World Taught Me About a Way Forward for Us Today (a free download), and she's worked at Schneider a while.

We talk about the book, how the world has tracked two of the Limits to Growth simulations, and how working at Schneider is.

The book treats how to respond to a complex, systemic problem, which is different from how to respond to a simple, linear problem. I consider the advice right on, rare to find, even among environmentalists. To change a system, some of the best levers are its goals and values. Don't change them and you retain the system you're trying to change, which most people are doing.

Gaya's views are a breath of fresh air that give direction for people who want to lead to act.

• Gaya's new book, Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse: What a 50-Year-Old Model of the World Taught Me About a Way Forward for Us Today (a free download)

About the book:

Looming environmental and social breaking points, like climate change and massive inequalities, are becoming increasingly apparent and large in scale. In this book, Gaya Herrington puts today’s key societal challenges in perspective. Her analysis, rooted in her research on a 50-year-old model of the world that forecasted the onset of global collapse right around the present time, brings some structure to what otherwise might feel like the overwhelming task of achieving genuine societal sustainability.

Herrington's research, first published in 2020 in Yale‘s Journal of Industrial Ecology, went viral after it revealed empirical data tracked closely with the predictions of this world model, which was introduced in the 1972 best seller The Limits to Growth. Her book Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse contains an exclusive research update based on 2022 data and is written in a more personable and accessible style than the journal article. Herrington also elaborates more in this book on the many interlinkages between our economic, environmental, and social predicaments, and on what her findings indicate for future global developments.

Herington lays out why “business as usual” is not a viable option for global society and identifies the root cause of this unsustainable path. Most importantly, her book teaches us what systemic changes humanity still has time to make to achieve a better tomorrow. A future in which society has transformed beyond the mere avoidance of collapse and is truly thriving.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I answer:

• Have you tried making home made yoghurt from plant milk and friendly bacteria. I guess you'd want non packaged options like make from almonds or coconut although home made soya milk is possible with some work. (Using my yoghurt maker is one way I've tried to reduce packaging). Likewise have you tried making vegan cheese?

and

• If you didn't work at NYU what would be your dream job?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here is the listener's question this time:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark and I share more highly researched, thoughtful conversation on human welfare and the environment. We see things differently, but I consider our conversations the type we should have more of.

This session we cover

• The book Limits to Growth as well as the concepts underlying limits to growth
• Earth's carrying capacity
• How much wealth is consumed by food and fuel, now and historically, and how much it's dropped
• How the low cost and high availability of energy has allowed us to devote more money for other things, inventions, and life improvements
• What is pollution?

and plenty more.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I learned of Bruce and Milad's Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) report, The Carbon Capture Crux – Lessons Learned, with fascination since I held out for carbon capture to be one of the major potential solutions to climate change. Though climate is only one of the many environmental problems risking civilization, it's one of the big ones.

I contacted them to learn what could work or not. Many projections take for granted that today's unproven technologies will work in time to help, but our wanting them to work doesn't mean they will.

In our conversation, we talked about their findings and what they meant. Sadly, the results aren't pretty. As they said “as a solution to tackling catastrophic rising emissions in its current framework however, CCS is not a climate solution.”

Some highlights from the report:

They studied 13 flagship large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS)/carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) projects in the natural gas, industrial and power sectors in terms of their history, economics and performance. These projects account for around 55% of the total current operational capacity worldwide.

They found seven of the thirteen projects underperformed, two failed, and one was mothballed.

"CCS technology has been going for 50 years and many projects have failed and continued to fail, with only a handful working. Many international bodies and national governments are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to Net Zero, and it simply won’t work. Although some indication it might have a role to play in hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, fertilisers and steel, overall results indicate a financial, technical and emissions-reduction framework that continues to overstate and underperform.”

The study found that Shute Creek in the U.S. underperformed its carbon capture capacity by around 36% over its lifetime, Boundary Dam in Canada by about 50%, and the Gorgon project off the coast of Western Australia by about 50% over its first five-year period.

“The two most successful projects are in the gas processing sector – Sleipner and Snøhvit in Norway. This is mostly due to the country’s unique regulatory environment for oil and gas companies,” said Robertson. “Governments globally are looking for quick solutions to the current energy and ongoing climate crisis, but unwittingly latching onto CCS as a fix is problematic.”

Last week the Australian government approved two new massive offshore greenhouse gas storage areas, saying CCS “has a vital role to play to help Australia meet its net zero targets. Australia is ideally placed to become a world leader in this emerging industry”. 

However, Robertson says, carbon capture technology is not new and is not a climate solution. “As our report shows, CCS has been around for decades, mostly serving the oil industry through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Around 80–90% of all captured carbon in the gas sector is used for EOR, which itself leads to more CO2 emissions.”

Robertson says more research could be done on CCS applications in industries where emissions are hard to abate such as, cement, as an interim partial solution to meeting net zero targets. “As a solution to tackling catastrophic rising emissions in its current framework however, CCS is not a climate solution.”

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Longtime listeners know I spent some formative years in some rough neighborhoods in Philadelphia. In researching them for my upcoming book, I discovered the many-award-winning book Loving Day by Mat Johnson took place largely a block from where I lived. His Wikipedia page showed he went to grade school with my stepbrother and stepsister.

I read and loved Loving Day, which not only described my neighborhood, it explored it through race, which I was looking to understand, and it was raw and vulnerable, which I struggle to create in my writing. It opens: "In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father's house." That house was a block from my home.

Loving Day led me to read his books Pym, Incognegro, and Incognegro Renaissance, all of which I enjoyed, comprising most of the fiction I've read lately. I invited him to this podcast to explore all these topics. Since he teaches writing at the graduate level and has written so much, he shared more than I had hoped for, to my pleasant surprise.

I think of this episode as less about the environment and more personal to me and my history, but his experience in creative expression and teaching will make it valuable to all.

• Mat's home page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I read Holly's book because I see us as a society and individuals addicted to what pollution brings. What can we learn from someone who overcame a different addiction?

Holly's book is the opposite of a downer. It's spirited, researched, personal, and engaging. She reveals with infectious anger how society profited at wrecking her life, telling her poison was normal and good. Most of all, she shares how before stopping her addiction she thought sobriety looked impossible to achieve and boring if she did, but after sobriety, she loved life beyond what she could have imagined and beyond what an addiction-based society conditioned her to expect.

We live in a society built on addiction. We created it. Almost every sentence in her book applies directly to our addictions to what pollution brings: flying, social media, fashion, and so on, all lowering our quality of life, controlling us, hiding from us reality and how joyful life can be.

In our conversation we talk about the forces around us hell-bent on addicting us, creating craving and emotion to lock us in and keep us coming back. She agrees on how her experience applies to pollution.

• Holly's home page
• Her New York Times bestseller: Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

From Holly's page, how to follow and connect:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark is a physicist who went into business around the environment. There aren't many of us, so I think you'll hear a rapport we enjoyed that I think you'll enjoy too. We indulge in physicist talk.

I contacted him because I found his reports on what solar and wind---what I don't see how we can call renewable, green, or clean energy sources---require in their manufacture, transportation, installation, decommissioning, and more. Many fans of such technologies gloss over their problems, which seems to me irresponsible. If we are not honest about them we will make mistakes. Partisanship is a problem when there are testable answers to how much a particular solar installation or strategy to lower emissions works.

Mark looks at possible futures but also returns to what's happening today, what works now, not just in the future. He looks at what's going on behind the scenes that can be measured. I recommend reading his work I link to below.

We talk about the book Limits to Growth, I welcome his views though, for the record, don't find it as wrong as he does. I consider its systemic approach essential and didn't view its simulations as predictions so much as learning what patterns our global environmental and economic system could show.

I use solar, but don't consider it a long-term solution. I also don't think things like nuclear and fusion work long-term either, but we didn't get to that topic. We'll continue our conversations, though, which I look forward to.

• Mark's book: The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s

Some of my favorite of Mark's posts and videos

• Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check
• The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking
• The Hard Math of Minerals
• 41 Inconvenient Truths on the “New Energy Economy”
• What’s Wrong with Wind and Solar?
• How Much Energy Will the World Need?

Mark's podcast

• The Last Optimist

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you keep your screens by your bed? Do you find yourself running in circles like: Twitter to email to latest news to Facebook to Instagram to Twitter and repeating the cycle forever?

John shares his results committing to turning off his screens no matter what at 8pm a couple nights a week. Do you imagine it would affects his relationship with his wife, with whom he watched shows and movies? Would he get more anxious or less? Read more or sleep earlier? What do you think you would do?

He shared what worked, what challenged things he needed to do for work, feelings of addiction.

Toward the end he generalized to patriarchy, hierarchy, race, and leadership. Before recording we planned to keep the conversation short, but kept feeling engaged so kept it going. I think you'll find it engaging too.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don regularly reads my blog. We've emailed for years so after inviting to record episodes with other listeners, I invited him.

We both find a systems perspective the most effective way to understand and act on our environmental problems. I enjoyed talking to him about systems. Many people see them as technical, to the extent they get the view at all, but you don't have to work with them that long to see they are how to understand the environment and how we can act on it effectively.

The alternative is to keep proposing solutions that sound nice but exacerbate our problems, things like trying to reduce carbon emissions alone, carbon offsets, recycling, chasing efficiency, and plans that accelerate the system and its polluting results. What works is changing our values, goals, images, beliefs, and things leaders work on. Changing the system, not being more efficient.

If you get and like systems, you'll find our conversation refreshing. If you don't get systems, you'll appreciate learning from our conversation.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.