Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF



The WWF presents these demands in its just-issued [1] Living Planet Report for 2012. It's a remarkable document, not least for the fact that it is formally endorsed for the first time by the European Space Agency (ESA) - an organisation which would cease to exist in any meaningful form if the document's recommendations were to be carried out.





This is bad, because:
Biodiversity is vital for human health and livelihoods ...


What does this mean?
Human demands on the planet exceed supply.

"We need to measure success beyond GDP," says WWF, an argument they've made before [2]. In particular the organisation argues that "human development" or the still-flakier metric "inequality adjusted human development" is a far better one than GDP per capita. (One may note that under the normal HDI (Human Development Index) [3] it is better to live in Ireland, Hong Kong, Israel, Korea, Slovenia, Spain, Italy or the Czech Republic than in the UK.)

As the green hardliners note:






Windfarms, tide barriers, solar panels to power EVERYTHING. But you can't have any concrete or steel or iron or copper. Or glass. Or shipping either. Get on with it!

All this means more disease, and there will also be less health care (only rich nations can afford proper health care for all or most).

Everything - everything - will be a lot more expensive: materials, tools, books, booze, gadgets, clothes. Holidays will be bus trips to the seaside if you're lucky, not trips overseas by plane or car. So it goes on.
Even this grim poverty-stricken dystopia, though, is not the biggest of the WWF demands. The real biggy is that by the year 2050 all energy is to be supplied in the form of renewables-generated electricity, that is by means of windfarms, solar plants, tidal barriers and so forth. Foralmost all of human history and prehistory [4] we have burned things to generate energy - it is one of the things that makes us human - but now, within a single generation, that is to almost completely stop. After a million years, the fires will go out.

That won't be simple. At the moment, the great bulk of energy used by humanity is not electrical at all - it is generated directly by burning fossil fuels (a little, by burning biofuel such as wood). What electrical energy there is (only a tenth of the total even in countries like the UK) is also mostly fossil-generated right now, and the small proportion of this small proportion which isn't fossil is mainly nuclear, not renewable - presumably to disappear for some reason under the WWF plan.

Then, regardless of the impression one gets from the media, it is not perhaps-dispensable things like aviation or gadgets which use most of our energy. Overwhelmingly, energy is used either in the home, by industries - including for example the health [5] and construction industries - and for ordinary everyday forms of transportation.

And as even WWF acknowledges, billions of people worldwide have no access to any electricity grid at all.

Yet nonetheless - without giving any specifics as to how - WWF considers that just about everyone on Earth can be hooked up to an electrical grid and that these grids can be entirely powered by renewables; and the transport sector can be pretty much entirely electrified; and all of industry, all the mines and smelters and refineries and factories, all of it, can go electric. All this, within 38 years.
There will need to be quite a lot of industry remaining. Even quite limited renewable power goals - for instance (pdf) [6] getting the US onto 20 per cent wind electricity by say 2030 (in other words achieving roughly 2 per cent renewables power for the US) would require every year:
About 6.8 million metric tons of concrete, 1.5 million metric tons of steel, 310,000 metric tons of cast iron, 40,000 metric tons of copper, and 380 metric tons of the rare-earth element neodymium.
Even this equates to 3 per cent of current US domestic consumption of steel, iron and copper - much more in the case of neodymium. To achieve full renewable power you would be talking about doubling or tripling production of concrete, steel and copper. At the moment these materials are produced by burning vast amounts of fossil fuels, so even if you managed to slash use of energy in all other sectors then huge increases in energy demand for materials to build the windmills would cause a massive further demand for more windmills and more materials for them and so on. And all this stuff would have to be hauled all over the place, as renewable plants normally have to be built in inaccessible locations - hauled by electric transport!

But in the WWF cloud-cuckoo-land all this steel and concrete and copper is probably, somehow, unnecessary. The 2012 report says that there must be:
Ambitious energy demand management, especially in sectors with limited renewable options that are likely to be dependent on bioenergy. (Aviation, shipping and high heat industrial applications are likely to be among these.)
"Demand management" is eco-nomics code for "rationing, or making mostly illegal". Rationed aviation is not a big deal except socially (no flying means a return to the days when only the rich and powerful ever got to travel other than for war and migration).

But rationed shipping, in a world which needs to shift gigatonnes of iron and concrete and steel and copper about, is fantasy - the more so as much of the new infrastructure would have to be situated offshore.

And far worse still, "ambitiously" rationing "high heat industrial applications" means that you basically can't have much concrete. Or steel, or copper. Or carbon fibre for your wind-turbine blades. Or glass for your possible solar plants either.

No: the whole plan is plain and simple barking lunacy, based on comedy made-up numbers that signify nothing.

And yet WWF is big stuff. Reports of this type get picked up not just by the mass media but by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and used in official UN doom warnings (often much to the UN's subsequent embarrassment, as in the cases of the non-melting glaciers [7] and the non-burning rainforests [8]). WWF turns over half a billion dollars a year: not much money in some contexts, but a very big budget in marketing or PR terms. WWF can sign up the ESA, for goodness' sake. ESA astronaut André Kuipers - now in space aboard the ISS - is an official WWF ambassador, and his signature is in the front of Living Planet 2012. He writes:
Looking out of my window and watching Earth from space comes with my job as an astronaut. Nevertheless, I feel I am privileged ... I will live on the International Space Station for five months ...
And yet the hundreds of billions it took to build the ISS, the lesser but still enormous sums that sent Kuipers up to live aboard it - there isn't the slightest prospect that these resources would have been available in a world of the sort that WWF advocates. In a world where governments cared nothing for GDP and economic growth and surpluses, where rich nations or populations able to afford proper space programmes had been outlawed (and poor nations with small space programmes, like India, no longer got aid payments from rich ones) ... in that world, Kuipers would never have got the chance to look down on Earth. With WWF-mandated rationing on aircraft, most of his previous career as an aviation-medicine expert and airforce officer would also not have happened.

But people have a strange blind spot about WWF. They think it's still the cuddly old World Wildlife Fund (CNN does [9], anyway - and so indeed does the ESA [10]). But it's not the WWF any more, nobly trying to save the whale and the dolphin and the tiger. It has transformed into simply WWF - the initials, like those of global arms multinational BAE Systems, no longer stand for anything [11].

Today's WWF is not really about tigers and dolphins any more, though they make excellent figureheads for fundraising. Just to show how much they aren't, in fact, in step with everyone else, the organisation's activists would be very happy if the present desperate efforts to end global recession were to fail; and this just as a prelude to making you (perhaps still more) miserably poor and launching a frankly insane effort to stop the human race using fire in just 38 years - by building windmills without steel or carbon, tide barrages without concrete and solar panels without glass [12].

Think about it, next time one of your kids asks if you can sponsor a dolphin [13], or the next time you hear "WWF says ..." on the news. ®


  1. "The WWF economists also argue that human beings actually don't - or anyway, shouldn't - want to get richer ..."

    I see the CEO of the U.S. arm of the WWF is paid around $450,000 pa, putting him well in the top 1%.

    I think they need to start at home before lecturing the rest of us.

  2. They should have stuck to wrestling....