"I don’t buy this dichotomy [that it is either wind power or fossil fuelled climate change]. Wind power won’t stop eco destruction, just help power more of it. Same old same old."

Paul Kingsnorth

(Source: twitter.com)

Natural Population Control

Nature builds a number of controls into the system, so that overpopulation will not occur.

Limited food supply
We have found ways around this problem, thanks to the use of fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, cultivation, and fast transport to market.

Infectious diseases
If humans live in close proximity to each other without adequate sanitary precautions, infectious diseases become a problem. In today’s world, these are not much of a problem, because we have built water and sewer systems, and have developed antibiotics. Doing these things required external energy sources, generally oil and other fossil fuels.

Territoriality
Craig Dilworth in “Too Smart for Our Own Good” says that there are instinctual behaviors that would normally act to prevent overpopulation. One of these is territoriality. Primates and most mammals are what are called K-selected species.

In K-selected species, territoriality tends to hold down population size by restraining the number of breeding pairs. We have all seen territoriality, if we have male cats or dogs. They mark out their territories, and defend them.

The territories chosen by instinct by K-selected species are large enough to ensure that populations do not grow to such a size that they undermine their own resource base. Thus, if territoriality is working properly, there is no problem with tragedy of the commons (excessive use of shared resources), because the territory selected by the male for his family group is large enough to feed the family, with much available food left over.

Humans have managed to overcome territoriality to a significant extent. One mechanism is language, since it allows humans to communicate with one another. Another is trade. If an outsider is of some value to us because of goods we gain through trade, then an individual is less likely to kill the outsider when he comes into contact with him. …. The availability of sufficient resources, as has mostly been the case since World War II thanks to fossil fuels, may also act to reduce territoriality.

Other K-selected population control factors

(Source: peakoil.com)

"

[T]he poverty of the poor makes it …. impossible for them successfully to adopt our technology. Of course, they often try to do so, and then have to bear the more dire consequences in terms of mass unemployment, mass migration into cities, rural decay, and intolerable social tensions. They need, in fact, the very thing I am talking about, which we also need: a different kind of technology, a technology with a human face, which instead of making human hands and brains redundant, helps them to become far more productive than they have ever been before.

As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses. The system of mars production, based on sophisticated, highly capital- intensive, high energy input dependent, and human labour-saving technology, presupposes that you are already rich, for a great deal of capital investment is needed to establish one single workplace. The system of production by the masses mobilises the priceless resources which are possessed by all human beings, their clever brains and skilful hands, and supports them with first-class tools. The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person [dubious]. The technology of production by the masses, making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralisation, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines. I have named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology of the rich. One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology - a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and powerful.

"

E. F. Schumacher | Small is beautiful

(Source: ee.iitb.ac.in)

"[T]he direction of research …. should be towards nonviolence rather than violence: towards an harmonious cooperation with nature rather than a warfare against nature; towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than the noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions of our present-day sciences."

E. F. Schumacher | Small is beautiful

(Source: ee.iitb.ac.in)

"The modern farmhand in the United States today who is deprived of power tools is under a double pressure quite different from that of the classical slave: he must measure up to performance standards set by farm hands elsewhere who use machines, and he is constantly aware that he is underprivileged, exploited, and abused because in an age of the megamachine he feels that he is used like a component."

Tools for Conviviality | Ivan Illich

"Immense new sources of power were tapped during the twentieth century, and much of this power became self-governing. Man has now been almost replaced by machines and reduced to being their operator. Fewer men are needed as gang workers in the fields: slavery has become uneconomical. But also fewer men are needed on the assembly line, as engineers have designed machines to perform the tasks that mass production and industrialization had created in the centuries before the steam engine. More power has become available, so more power is used, the human slaveowner is replaced by the operant conditioning of men in the mega-machine."

Tools for Conviviality | Ivan Illich

(Source: clevercycles.com)

Renewable Energy Policy

Carbon tax/trading 
Technology independent // Lowest cost option // Good driver of efficiency // Poor driver for development of new technologies 

Feed-in Tariff
Technology dependent // medium cost option // Good at driving down manufacturing cost of developed technologies

Direct R&D Investment
Highly technology dependent // high cost option // Good method for funding or getting-off the ground new and unproven technologies (pilot projects)   

All three policy options are necessary

"[I]t seems fairly obvious to most people that dynamic cuts in energy usage and carbon emissions could be achieved on a massive and near instantaneous scale if people were encouraged (or forced) to purchase less products per se, or use their existing stuff more sparingly. However, instead of prioritising thrift or self control on the part of ‘consumers’, most if not all market-led sustainable energy ‘solutions’ require massive spending on R&D and marketing to offer replacement products which simply maintain or enable increasing levels of usage. “If I buy a low energy wall-screen, I can leave it on for more of the time.”
Low energy products and renewable energy generating technologies maintain or even intensify the growth-based, business-as-usual mentality which free-market proponents and (most) politicians accept as a natural state of social reality. …. an ethic of thrift, or enforced radical energy reduction via law or policy … terrify free market ideologues, because they fundamentally challenge the mantra that economic growth is a prerequisite for a healthy society."

Dark Mountain Issue 2 | Sustainable Energy Will Destroy The Environment: Discuss | Matt Szabo | p117

"We have exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuel that we have already entered into a much riskier business era—the era of extreme energy. That means drilling for oil in the deepest water—including in icy Arctic seas, where a cleanup may simply be impossible. It means large-scale hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal. Most controversially, it means the tar sands."

Dark Mountain Issue 2 | On Precaution | Naomi Klein | p1-2

"Even in the eighties …. the Soviets were planning to transform the world through creative uses of technology. Few outside of Russia remember most of these projects, but great resources were devoted to them. ….. most were not military in nature: as, for instance, the attempt to solve the world hunger problem by harvesting lakes and oceans with an edible bacteria called spirulina, or to solve the world energy problem by launching hundreds of gigantic solar-power platforms into orbit and beaming the electricity back to earth."

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit David Graeber

from The Baffler No. 19

(Source: thebaffler.com)