Sustainability in the 21st Century

Thomas Malthus

170 years earlier than Ehrlich, says that population will outstrip the world's ability to provide food. Malthus was wrong because of a dramatic improvement in Chinese and Indian agriculture production, and population growth decreased.

M. King Hubbard

1956 Hubbard predicted Peak Oil would be in 1970. He was wrong like Malthus, because of new technology.

Stabilization Wedges

25-billion-ton "wedges" that need to be cut out of projected future carbon emissions in the next 50 years to avoid a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide over pre-industrial levels.

Tipping Points, Nonlinearities, and other Uncertainties

A tipping point is the point at which a return is impossible. Ex: once we emit too much carbon past a certain point we could be screwed/once enough people buy iphones, everyone else rapidly adopts the technology. Nonlinearities are when outputs in response to certain inputs do not linearly match. Ex: the ice cap in Greenland won't melt quickly until a certain temp threshold, but once we reach that the entire thing will be gone in a few years

World Trade Organization

Administers the rules governing trade between its 144 members. Helps producers, importers, and exporters conduct their business and ensure that trade flows smoothly.

Aldo Leopold

(1949) wrote A Sand County Almanac; promoted a "Land Ethic" -- Humans should view themselves as members and citizens of biotic communities, not as "conquerors" of the land. Our primary ethical concern should not be with individual plants or animals, but with the healthy functioning of whole biotic communities. The "summary moral maxim" of ecological ethics is that we should seek to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. Worries about unforeseen consequences of humans. Says you cannot rely on individual self interest to deliver.

Tragedy of the Commons

(1968) Coined by Garrett Hardin, everyone grazes but there is a danger of overgrazing, depleting resources, resulting with a sub-optimal outcome. This is a biological perspective on sustainability and says that there is no natural basis that humans would work together and manage resources (and the environment) sustainably.

Garrett Hardin

(1968) published "The Tragedy of the Commons" in the journal Science in 1968; argued that rational people will exploit shared resources.

"The Bet" (Resource Depletion vs. Technological Innovation)

(1980-1990) Paul Ehrlich warns about the dangers of overpopulation. Julian Simon said we are NOT going to run out of resources. Simon said to Ehrlich pick 5 stocks of resources you think are being depleted and Simon betted they would would decrease in price in the next decade. Simon wins, because the price goes down. Demand didn't rise faster than supply. In fact supply went faster, pushing prices down. Why? Substitutes. Innovation. Technology.

Brundtland Report ("Our Common Future")

(1987) Produced by the Brundtland Commission. The Brundtland Report sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. 1) economic activity is a source but also can be the solution 2) economic choices and ecology are interdependent 3) Intergenerational equity/ethics

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(1988) IPCC is a science collaborative launched in 1988. Most recent work has 25,000 scientists playing a role. They write scientific assessment reports. Launched by the WMO UN body and the UNEP. 5th assessment came out a few years ago. IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for helping to bring to focus the climate change program. IPCC reports are highly credible, and write that the human influence on the climate system IS CLEAR.

Bill Mckibben

(1989) A journalist who wrote The End of Nature, which was a bestseller that has been called the first book on global warming written for a general audience. "There is nowhere on the earth unaffected by humans." He describes climate change not just as an environmental justice issue, but as "the greatest social justice issue of all time." He argues that more than any other issue in history, climate change has the most inequitable distribution of benefits and risks.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(1992) International environmental treaty negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro from June 1992, then entered into force n 1994. The UNFCCC objective is to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." Established Annex I, Annex II distinctions. The core of the FCCC Agreement was a commitment of the annex 1 developed countries to aim to reduce emissions in the year 2000 to 1990 levels. Did anyone meet their goals? Russia: Collapsed their economy, UK: Margaret Thatcher shut down coal mines: transitioned to natural gas, Germany: absorbed Eastern Germany and collapsed economy. Transitioned out of coal and into natural gas.

Kyoto Protocol

(1997) An international treaty which extends the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits State Parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the premise that (a) global warming exists and (b) human-made CO2 emissions have caused it. It gave individual targets to countries. US never ratified Kyoto protocol because there had been a resolution adopted saying we will never pass another environmental thing until developing countries also work on climate change. Byrd-Hagel amendment says that the US won't approve anything until the developing nations start making cuts too.

Bretton Woods Organizations

(IMF, World Bank, WTO): Embed SDGs in these organizations because they are the managers of interdependence

Gifford Pinchot

(founder of FES and first head of department of forestry) is very much in this idea of sustainable management. Cut trees, but plant trees for every one we cut (scientific management of natural resources). End of the frontier in 1890, start of environmentalism. "Cowboy environmentalism" use the resource until it's done and then pack up (the frontier).

Tipping Points

After the tipping point has been passed, a transition to a new state occurs. Point when global climate changes from one stable state to another stable state, in a similar manner to a wine glass tipping over.

Ecological Footprint

An ecological footprint is a measure of human impact on Earth's ecosystems. It's typically measured in area of wilderness or amount of natural capital consumed each year.

International Monetary Fund

An international organization of 183 countries, established in 1947 with the goal of promoting cooperation and exchange between nations, and to aid the growth of international trade.

Anecdotal vs. Empirical Analyses

Anecdotal has to do with a personal experience, measured only by that person, entirely subjective. "Empirical" (scientific, non-philosophical) connotes a larger sample, or group of people.

William "Bill" Nordhaus

Author of The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World. According to Nordhaus, we have entered the Climate Casino and are rolling the global-warming dice. But there is still time to turn around and walk back out of the casino. Nordhaus describes the science, economics, and politics involved, and the steps necessary to reduce the perils of global warming.

Theodore Roosevelt

Believe that humans should benefit from nature but manage the natural world carefully. Conserve land and water. Mostly hunters and fishers who want to hunt emerged in the late 1800s. Led to launch of state parks. Sustainable land management, scientific conservation. No more land in the US! The end of the frontier. You can't just keep "going west."

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is comparing one's processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies, countries or past performances.

2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement

Conference of the Parties 21 (COP21), because it took place 21 years after the first meeting. 196 countries present in Plenary Hall in Paris. 2,000 people. 80-100 people from US delegation. EU has its own delegation plus state delegations. 2 People fro Nevis St. Kitts. The action happens in the back rooms, especially through like-minded coalitions (countries that share a perspective, geographic region or issue of interest). Paris agreement broke a lot of new ground. Prior agreement was very top down: national governments telling everyone what to do.Paris agreement holds target of holding global warming at 2 degrees celsius. If we can, 1.5. Focuses on mitigation, adds on the agenda of adaptation. Most fundamentally, it got out from under this idea that had been really solidified in Kyoto that there were real obligations for developed nations and others could just sit on sidelines, after which the Byrd-Hagel Amendment came into effect. Puts end to Annex 1 v. non because it expects contribution from all players, regardless of size or degree of development.

Conservation

Conservation means that the environment and its resources should be used by humans and managed in a responsible manner.

Precautionary Principle

Controls should be implemented on things that could adversely affect health even if the problem is not fully understood yet.

Fracking

Hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas or tight oil. Regulated by states. Been around for 40 years. There are hundreds of thousands of fracked wells. Why is there controversy? It's hugely environmentally risky. There are conflicting elements in science: The EPA says hydraulic fracking could be done safely. Affects water supplies. What do you do with the chemicals? May cause seismic activity. Smell is bad, carbon monoxide and methane is released. Needs more regulation. Methane has 12 years of 30x CO2 potency, CO2 lasts 500 years.

Definitions of Sustainability

Intergenerational and ???

Robert Solow (Woods Hole Speech)

It doesn't matter if we run out of a resource as long as there's a substitute. Cares about flourishing and consumption in today's world shouldn't be overly sacrificed. Also talks about distributional equity, sustainability is a choice between now and the future.

Market Failures

Situations where the market may fail to account for the costs and benefits of a product. Example is externalities, like emissions, because the market isn't accounting fully for some harms.

Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services

The idea that there is a value to nature. We breathe for free. We take it for granted that we will have free air. If we paid for it, we might take better care of it. What is the natural capital value. This concept was really launched in 1997 with an article in Nature Magazine by a Princeton. Nature has a 16.54 trillion dollar value that people are using largely without paying for them. Should we pay for the value of nature?

Deforestation

The removal of forest for various economic purposes

Intrinsic Value of Nature

Thoreau and Emerson rejected an anthropocentric (human centered, value things because they are valuable to humans, part of dominion approach) view of the world. Nature is valuable in and of itself.

Wildness

Thoreau celebrated nature undisturbed by humans: "in wildness is the preservation of the world," he felt government corrupted people and wanted to escape human institutions

Jedediah Purdy

We are living in the Holocene epoch ("totally new" the past 12,000 years) some think we are now in Anthropocene "the age of humans." Economy and ecology don't work together because the market does not price externalities, so have to solve this politically. Frontier closes → end of waste period of American history. Move towards conservation/sustainability and require a new mindset.

Trends

a general direction in which something is developing or changing, such as Wealth creation happening in cities. New cause it used to be on the land where wealth was accumulated or the rising emissions in China, or rising GDP and population.

Open Access vs. Excludable Resources

a good or service is called excludable if it is possible to prevent consumers who have not paid for it from having access to it, like a private swimming pool. Open access is a non-excludable resource like public education.

Environmental Performance Index (EPI)

a method of quantifying the environmental performance of a state's policies. It ranks countries on protection of human health from environmental harm and protection of ecosystems.

Incremental vs. Radical Change

change happening slowly vs. change happening quickly.

NAZCA platform -- cities can register their commitments and track them. New Strategy from Paris

climate change finance. Use small amounts of public money to leverage private sector money. Paris is insufficient for the job we need scientists say but it a big break

Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC)

each country can put forward their own climate change action plan. 188/195 put plans on the table. A terrible plan is still a plan.

Wendell Berry

humans are making a home in nature is "the forever unfinished life work of our species"

Limits to Growth

hypothesis suggests human society is overshooting earth's carrying capacity, with drastic consequences if changes are not made

Carbon Footprint

measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide

Transcendentalism - Spirituality of Nature

Nature is what gives life context and meaning, spirituality and balance of nature. Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

World Bank

A specialized agency of the United Nations that makes loans to countries for economic development, trade promotion, and debt consolidation. Its formal name is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Paradigm Shift

A fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions. Example is 1970s United States when the government took environmental issues very seriously.

Anthropocentrism

A human-centered view of our relationship with the environment.

Adaptive Management

A resource management strategy. A structured, scientific, iterative process of robust decision making in the face of uncertainty, with an aim to reducing uncertainty over time via system monitoring. Continuous learning, synthesizing data, adapting analysis. The alternative to a price approach, like cap and trade.

Individual Tradeable Quotas (ITQs)

A resource management strategy. Cap and trade models encourages innovation, efficiency and cost cutting and encourages people to manage the resources more carefully. Allocate to people who are already in the market. Or if that's too much, scale everyone back. Economists like better auctioning off allowances, which prices off smaller business and poorer people.

Jeffrey Sachs

Columbia professor. Says we are trespassing on the limits to growth. 7.3 billion now we're going to 10 billion. Says with good policy we can have sustainable growth. Says we still haven't stabilized population or have agriculture and food on a sustainable basis. His whole theory is focused around setting goals (sustainable development goals) and getting a strong backing behind achieving them (monitoring, measurement, evaluation, feedback)

Carrying Capacity, Regenerative Capacity

Carrying capacity is the number of people, other living organisms, or crops that a region can support without environmental degradation. Regenerative capacity: population necessary for something to be resilient to natural fluctuations or events that cause disturbance or damage, like cod in New England.

Horizontal Drilling

Cheaper, more efficient. Known reserves of oil and gas are rising because of this. We still aren't at peak oil.

Externalities

Economic side effects or by-products that affect an uninvolved third party; can be negative or positive. Companies are externalizing some of the harm that they're causing, like smoke stacks pouring CO2 into the atmosphere. From economics point of view, that's a market failure, because the market isn't accounting fully for some harms.

Steady-State Economics

Economies that mirror natural ecosystems tend to be stable and don't grow or shrink significantly. Steady.

Managing Interdependence

Every country needs every other country to do their part. The UN is the only organization with the legitimacy to pull this off

2009 Copenhagen Accord

Fell apart. "Accord" recognized that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the present day and that actions should be taken to keep any temperature increases to below 2 °C. The document is not legally binding and does not contain any legally binding commitments for reducing CO2 emission.

John Muir

Founder of the Sierra Club. Preservationist. "During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees—tens of centuries old—that have been destroyed."

Greenhouse Gases

Gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. The primary greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone.

Bjorn Lomborg

Got famous as a doctorate student. Hypothesized that all of this environmental stuff is overblow and exaggerated. Human capacity to get out from under limits is enormous. If you have limited money you probably don't want to spend it on environmental protection. He has done a service by saying let's look at the data, but he didn't look at the right data.

Fisheries

Harvested fish stock. Fish are a huge source of animal protein all around the world. 20% of animal protein. Until 120-130 years ago, people believed the ocean was endless in its supply of fish. Starting 100 years ago, we began to see fish stocks diminishing, because of overexploitation. 57% of the world's fisheries are fully exploited and 30% are overexploited or depleted. Cod is the most famous example off of Boston. Nearly completely collapsed these days. We need to resuscitate the stock. New technologies like radar exploit fish and capture more. Habitat destruction, ocean contamination and climate change also contribute to fewer fish.

Energy, Environment, and Economy (EEE) as Integrated Strategy

History of the idea of sustainability involves these three E's.

IPAT Formula

Human IMPACT on the environment is a function of POPULATION, AFFLUENCE and TECHNOLOGY. IPAT is a variable that tracks efficiency and substitution.

Planetary Boundaries

Jeff Sachs lists nine natural boundaries that define a "safe operating space for humanity." Include climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, freshwater scarcity, land use change, biodiversity, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. 450 ppm of CO2 is a boundary that we don't want to cross but definitely will.

Encyclical Letter, Pope Francis

Pope Francis calls on people to fight climate change and says the science is accepted. Linked social and environmental issues.

Preservation

Stricter than conservation. Under preservation of the environment, lands and their natural resources should not be consumed by humans and should instead be maintained in their pristine form. Preservationists believe that humans can have access to the land, but they should only utilize it for its natural beauty and inspiration.

Dominion/Mastery of Nature

The Puritans came here in service to god and they had a religious duty to exercise dominion over the last class.

Assimilative Capacity

The ability of the environment or a portion of the environment (such as a stream, lake, air mass, or soil layer) to carry waste material without adverse effects on the environment or on users of its resources.

Trade-Offs

The alternative choices people face in making an economic decision. Example is choosing between GDP growth and environmental sustainability.

Anthropocene

The current geological period, starting from the 18th century when human activities began to impact global climate and ecosystem, showing that humans have had a great enough impact to create a new time period to understand the natural world.

Deep Ecology (Arne Naess)

The deep ecology is ecocentric, has deeper concerns which touch upon diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness. Shallow ecology movement is anthropocentric. Should only save an ecosystem if it has value to us. Its central objective is the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.

Climate Change

There is a build up in our upper atmosphere of these greenhouse gases and they have a heat-trapping effect, keeping the earth warmer than it would otherwise be. This is a very good thing! Without greenhouse effect, this would be an uninhabitable cold planet. But what has happened? The excess greenhouses gases have intensified the effect. There is a natural carbon cycle where CO2 goes up and it's re-absorbed by trees. Historically, the amount being released and the amount being absorbed has been a balance. In recent years, this has not been the case. Actions include Adaptation, Mitigation and Geoengineering- Mitigation like Energy efficiency, shift away from fossil fuel sources to clean sources, Adaptation like recognizing climate change impact. What do we do about it? Worry about coastal flooding, strategy for moving houses back. Many implications for roads, houses, power stations. Infrastructure has to be rethought. Why couldn't we talk about this? Because environmental people saw it as giving up. Now we've acknowledged that you should get ready for some degree of impact. Geoengineering, comes in two forms. When you try to intervene in the climate change process. One way is to try and extract CO2 out of the atmosphere. Second is paint roofs white. Certainties and Uncertainties: Uncertainties include the pace and magnitude at which the greenhouse gases are building up, the regional distribution of harm, the projection of 3-7 degrees more warming over the next century, the roll of clouds, how much oceans can absorb, if currents will be affected, melting permafrost, timing, dramatic impact sooner or later? We have no idea! Feedbacks: feedback loop - is there a feedback loop so even if we stop emitting GHGs that we are already over the edge?Tipping Points and Nonlinearities - is something going to happen all of a sudden?

"Land Ethic"

There is intrinsic value to nature that humans need to respect. Humans are members not conquerors. Humans should manage land in a way that advances society's long term interests.

International Treaties

They all have a right to speak. Everyone is equal in the international policy realm. National Territorial Sovereignty -- everyone is technically on equal footing. Agreement is by consensus -- people come to agreement and they can't be forced to obey. Agreements happen when most people mostly agree, and the most important people do agree (as long as China, the US, and the EU have a consensus).

Pantheism

a doctrine that equates god with the forces and laws of the universe.

Drivers

a factor that causes a particular phenomenon to happen or develop

Peak Oil ("Hubbard's Peak")

When consumption is overtaking added supplies (demand outstrips the level of us finding new oil reserves) For years, we thought we were seeing production levels of oil crest. But, scientist/geologists were finding more than we were burning. Fracking and horizontal drilling

Population Growth

Why did the population risk not come to pass? Technology. And that population rise slowed. If you educate girls, they have fewer children. World Bank found economic progress comes from educating girls. Better management of family planning and population size. Still growing in parts of asia and subsaharan africa. Steep decline in russia

Measurement, Indicators and Metrics

World population, GDP, emissions, energy usage etc.

Henry David Thoreau

Writer who saw nature as a guide, as a teacher. Stewardship dimension. Emphasis on protecting and preserving nature. He and Emerson reject an anthropocentric view. Nature has a value independent of its relation to humans. Thoreau celebrated nature uncorrupted by humans.

Jared Diamond

Wrote "Collapse" -- ecosystems are not endlessly resilient, many societies hit limits and then collapsed, Norse of Greenland, community of Easter Island, the Mayans.

Intergenerational Ethics

You have an ethical obligation to not screw over your kids. Sustainable development is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Renewable vs Non-Renewable Resources

renewable is a resource that is naturally replaced such as fish, trees, wind, sun. non renewable are fixed supply, oil, gas, coal, helium, materials, rare earths. People estimate reserves based on known reserves. Depletion time: years until roughly 80% of reserves gone. Might be recapture-able or recyclable. Coal is broken up into pieces and is gone, but metal is recapture-able and reusable.

Resource Scarcity

resources being limited in amount but desired in a seemingly infinite amount. Exacerbated by population growth, inequity, and environmental destruction.

Rivalrous vs. Non-Rivalrous Resources

rivalrous: when one person consumes it and prevents another person from consuming it. non-rivalrous: my consuming doesn't prevent you from consuming

Religious ecology

symbolic understanding of ecological interdependence

Sustainable Yield

the ecological yield that can be extracted without reducing the base of capital itself, i.e. the surplus required to maintain ecosystem services at the same or increasing level over time.

Urbanization

the process by which towns and cities are formed and become larger as more people begin living and working in central areas.

Resource Productivity

the quantity of good or service (outcome) that is obtained through the expenditure of unit resource. This can be expressed in monetary terms as the monetary yield per unit resource.

Sustainable Development

was launched in part to overcome what was perceived to be an environmentalism that was too narrowly focused.

Herman Daly

we need an ecological economics "Economics in a full world" -- he says we need a steady state economy, not one premised on permanent economic growth. Believes that the global economy is now so large that society can no longer safely pretend it operates within a limitless ecosystem. We must developing an economy that can be sustained within the finite biosphere requires new ways of thinking, we need an ecological economics

Paul Sabin

wrote book called "The Bet" detailing Ehrlich and Simon's bet.