Innovation Ends Where Idiocy Begins

More disinformation and delusion from Pravda:

Maybe Malthus was on to something, after all.

First, some background: Twenty-six years ago, in one of the most famous wagers in the history of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Harte and John P. Holdren bet Julian Simon that the prices of five key metals would rise in the next decade. Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues, all environmental scientists, believed that humankind’s growing population and appetite for natural resources would eventually drive the metals’ costs up. Simon, a professor of business administration, thought that human innovation would drive costs down.

Ten years later, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues sent Simon a check for $576.07 — an amount representing the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation. To many, the bet’s outcome refuted Malthusian arguments that human population growth and resource consumption — and economic growth more generally — would run headlong into the limits of a finite planet. Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity.

Indeed, the 1990s seemed to confirm this wisdom. Energy and commodity prices collapsed; ideas (not physical capital or material resources) were the new source of wealth, and local air and water got cleaner — at least in rich countries...

Maybe Malthus was on to something, but what he was on to seems to have eluded this author completely.

Notice the key disinformation statement: "Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity."

Having experienced the heady explosion of innovation that was Seattle in the late '80s and early '90s first hand, with a few patents under my belt even, let me assure you, if anything, the modern market system squelched any innovation it might have accidently generated.

Innovation was caused my hundreds- nationwide, hundreds of thousands, of small independent lab competing but also co-operating in a spirit of exploration.

Yes, money was made. And as soon as big business smelled that, the hundreds of thousands of independent laboratories began to be gobbled up as government deregulated industry. Now, the advertising budgets of most companies who made their initial bucks off of research and development are larger than the research and development budgets.

As a result there a fewer, and less every day, new drugs or inventions being created. Or marketed.

...But today, it seems, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues may have the last (grim) laugh. The debate about limits to growth is coming back with a vengeance. The world’s supply of cheap energy is tightening, and humankind’s enormous output of greenhouse gases is disrupting the earth’s climate. Together, these two constraints could eventually hobble global economic growth and cap the size of the global economy.

The most important resource to consider in this situation is energy, because it is our economy’s “master resource” — the one ingredient essential for every economic activity. Sure, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped sharply from its peak of $78 last summer, but that’s probably just a fluctuation in a longer upward trend in the cost of oil — and of energy more generally. In any case, the day-to-day price of oil isn’t a particularly good indicator of changes in energy’s underlying cost, because it’s influenced by everything from Middle East politics to fears of hurricanes...

This basic trend can be seen around the globe with many energy sources. We’ve most likely already found and tapped the biggest, most accessible and highest-E.R.O.I. oil and gas fields, just as we’ve already exploited the best rivers for hydropower. Now, as we’re extracting new oil and gas in more extreme environments — in deep water far offshore, for example — and as we’re turning to energy alternatives like nuclear power and converting tar sands to gasoline, we’re spending steadily more energy to get energy.

For example, the tar sands of Alberta, likely to be a prime energy source for the United States in the future, have an E.R.O.I. [“energy return on investment”] of around 4 to 1, because a huge amount of energy (mainly from natural gas) is needed to convert the sands’ raw bitumen into useable oil.

Having to search farther and longer for our resources isn’t the only new hurdle we face. Climate change could also constrain growth. A steady stream of evidence now indicates that the planet is warming quickly and that the economic impact on agriculture, our built environment, ecosystems and human health could, in time, be very large. For instance, a report prepared for the British government by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, calculated that without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, by 2100 the annual worldwide costs of damage from climate change could reach 20 percent of global economic output.

Humankind’s energy and climate problems are intimately connected. Petroleum’s falling energy return on investment will encourage many economies to burn more coal (which in many parts of the world still has a relatively good E.R.O.I.), but coal emits far more greenhouse-inducing carbon dioxide for every unit of useful energy obtained than other energy sources. Also, many potential solutions to climate change — like moving water to newly arid regions or building dikes and relocating communities along vulnerable coastlines — will require huge amounts of energy.

Without a doubt, mankind can find ways to push back these constraints on global growth with market-driven innovation on energy supply, efficient use of energy and pollution cleanup. But we probably can’t push them back indefinitely, because our species’ capacity to innovate, and to deliver the fruits of that innovation when and where they’re needed, isn’t infinite...

What total, utter nonsense. Where to begin to deflate it? Let's keep it simple.

As long as the sun shines in the sky, there is an endless- in human terms- source of energy.

In fact, all of our energy and economic base derives ultimately from the sun.

We're only at the beginning of our ability to harvest it. Sooner or later someone will decide to use the tools of molecular genetics to make tailored microbes capable of synthesizing methane, alkanes, and hydrogen from direct or indirect solar-coupled reactions.

Think higher hydrocarbons are far-fetched from a microbe? They can make benezene in yeast, so the sky's the limit. Only a lack of corporate-sponsored innovation is holding it back. But who am I kidding? Over the last 100 years the government has funded most innovative research, not the private sector.

Just something else for the Theocrats to drown in a bathtub I suppose.

But right now, there are still trillions of dollars worth of oil in the ground, and the people who would rule us won't allow a cheap and endless source of energy to be developed.

The ability of any individual to innovate is finite. But the innovative ability of the human race doesn't have to be so. The stars are ours, because we are made of the stars.

However, infinite innovation can't co-exist with an economic system, or a class of rulers, that would ride a dwindling oil supply curve downward over the next century as men who would be king fight wars for dominion of their small little world.

It's quite possible the human race can't exist ruled by such men either.