12 ms·

Ecological Wealth of Nations

152 points by schallertd 10y ago

booli 10y ago
Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print? A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  Yeah that just screams "externalities" to me, and if that's true it undermines the whole dataset.
  - Loic 10y ago
    It is a genuine question, not a rhetorical question putting into question the data, Netherlands has currently a deficit of 4.1 GHA.
    - vanderZwan 10y ago
      Oh I misunderstood GP then without double-checking the website. My apologies.
- gpdaccess 10y ago
  Deliberately managing the rate of growth of its population would reduce its global footprint, but we're unable to sustainably meet 0 deficit anywhere unless you commit mass genocide.
- johnchristopher 10y ago
  Might be from the UE green/carbon certificates but don't quote me on that.
- pmontra 10y ago
  They started with a surplus as everybody else and they run into a defict, like most of the rest of the world, including many large countries. Unsustainable growth except something like a technological miracle or a plague happen? Probably.
- Loic 10y ago
  Take a look at Germany, they are steadily increasing their biocapacity while reducing their ecological footprint (I wonder how they increase the biocapacity so steadily over such long period of time). So, you may not achieve a balance, but maybe at the scale of a region like Europe, we can achieve it.
  - saalaa 10y ago
    They have not reduced their ecological footprint. They are relying increasingly on coal, especially as new bioenergy installations are slowing down and demand is only growing. They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure). They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days that they raze whole villages to dig it out. I'm having trouble finding comprehensive sources but their CO2 emissions have been on the rise from 2012 to 2014 at least and they are set to miss their CO2 reduction goals of 2020 and 2030. At this point in time, they are the biggest CO2 source of Europe.
    - tobias3 10y ago
      One also sees the little 1990 peak. That's when inefficient east-block power plants started to be turned off and be replaced by more efficient versions. Other countries did not have such an easy way to increase overall power plant efficiency.
    - RGamma 10y ago
      One of the stupidest things our government did (in my mind) was to introduce the accelerated moratorium of nuclear power (this wasn't planned at first but put into place after Fukushima, except that nuclear power station was built at the coast in an earthquake area, something the middle of Europe is not exactly known for). The short term demand will just be met with coal and a bit of renewables (which might have no local greenhouse gas emissions, but are still dirty to produce/consume rare earths). Oh, and there are lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of euros ([1] says there are estimated damages in double-digit billions of euros overall) in denied profits going on. I'm really just waiting for fusion power to become viable and solve all of our earthly power consumption problems once and for all... [1] http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-mit-top-anwaelten-gegen-merkels-atomkurs-a-769213.html http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-m...
- Shivetya 10y ago
  well their means to score countries is contrived enough to be "we knew the results before we knew the facts". As in any strong economy is bad
  - __jal 10y ago
    More like a strong economy == lots of energy use, and lots of energy use == lots of pollution, because the world uses lots of dirty energy. The fact that one can guess some results ahead of time doesn't cast doubt on the results, any more than, after coughing blood and 40 years of smoking, a positive cancer diagnosis is suspect. I rate this rhetorical tactic a 3: poor composition, not enough work either developing the implication of skullduggery or making it more subtle, missed opportunities for additional attacks on reporters' credibility.
- saalaa 10y ago
  They have quite a vast network of turbines. During some of the most windy days of the year, they produce more electricity than they consume. I'd say they also tend to do much less shipping by truck than many other countries.
  - tinbad 10y ago
    Not sure where you got that from but 'sustainable energy' production (includes more than just wind, but safe to say that in our country is mostly wind) was only 3.9% in 2009. The government set a goal of 20% by 2020. So no, we are still mostly reliant on other forms of electricity. https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Or worth city states like Singapore and Luxembourg
- DominikR 10y ago
  There is no technology available today that would allow an industrialised country like the Netherlands to get to a zero carbon dioxide footprint. It sounds like sarcasm but the only realistic way to do this is to significantly reduce your population and have the remaining people live in mud huts or caves like our ancestors did many millennia ago. (which would be insane)
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    People had moved on from mud huts by the 1600's, and yet had a pretty small (though non-zero) carbon footprint. I do agree that population, especially the population of people living a carbon-intense lifestyle, is a serious concern. Many people point a finger at poor nations with high population growth rates while failing to acknowledge that people in those countries tend to emit very little.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Human civilisation had burned through (or been climate-changed out of) several ecosystems by 1600. Europe was reaching the point of overexploiting its fuelwood resources. India and China were peaking as civilisations, reaching levels they'd not return to until the late 19th or 20th centuries in absolute level, and reaching relative standings among other nations and civilisations not since exceeded. I'm currently reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and the two volumes of Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power: How energy forges human history. They're impressive and sobering. While there are a range of estimates, there are a substantial group of population theorists, largely grounded in ecology, who see the population levels of 1650, roughly 500 million worldwide, as a likely long-term maximum. (The broader range runs from as few as 50 million, which still exceeds virtually all large land mammals, to several trillion. I find the lower bound potentially plausible, though pessimistic, the higher range delusional.)
skylan_q 10y ago
"We are fucked" For constantly being alarmist and crying wolf? Yes. Anyways, what happened to the editorial rule here where the title was supposed to match TFA's title? EDIT: Title has been appropriately edited. Thank you.
devy 10y ago
So what are the real options of survival? a) accelerate migration to Mars b) population control? Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?
- legulere 10y ago
  Increase efficiency, reduce consumption. Sending people to mars takes too much resources.
  - diydsp 10y ago
    Exactly, we need to focus on things that last a long time, not gizmos. From a current HN thread on hacking into thermostats: "Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century." I understand the IoT thermostat has the potential to save even more ecoresources, but can't we do that in a way that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced every year?
- rplnt 10y ago
  A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Closer. Easier to repair (parts are not billions of miles/months away) and resupply. As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    Why would people want to live in a space habitat? If not many, then how are we going to choose who to shove there? What if it will turn out discriminatory?
exratione 10y ago
The fundamental problem with Malthusianism is that it is static thinking. It projects on the basis of no change in technology, as if the present moment continues eternally. This is why all statements to date on running out of X or Y at time T in the future have proven false. What actually happens is that people look ahead, forecast increased prices for X, and then the more adventurous go and build a better way of getting X, or create a different resource X1 that can be used instead. It is never different this time. Arguably alarmism that fails to consider technological process is a necessary part of the signaling mechanism by which realistic price forecasts are established, an example of the market performing its usual strange alchemy in turning (often willful) ignorance into something useful, but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating.
- legulere 10y ago
  The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress continuing eternally. For instance Malthus himself was mostly preoccupied with the idea, that the population might increase faster than the agricultural output. Through the use of chemical fertilizers there has been a breakthrough in how much food we can produce, so the malthusan catastrophe was averted. Agricultural output is still growing, but there are physical limits.
  - mooreds 10y ago
    > The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress continuing eternally. And it assumes ERORI stays at a sustainable level. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_in...
  - eudox 10y ago
    >Agricultural output is still growing, but there are physical limits. And people frequently confuse engineering limits with physical limits.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      This is the problem with real-world Malthusian predictions. There are (obviously) hard limits on growth and carrying capacity for Earth, but extrapolating from some existing metric like food growth per human is an atrocious way to find them. A convincing Malthusian argument needs to take one of two forms: either concede that it represents doom without engineering progress, or convincingly argue that it represents a physical boundary rather than an engineering one.
amelius 10y ago
France seems to be doing a little bit better than the rest of Europe. Is that because of their nuclear plants?
- saalaa 10y ago
  Yes. Edit: I forgot to mention we have French Guiana which is essentially untouched forest and which offsets most comparison maps (biodiversity is a famous example).
- schallertd 10y ago
  Probably yes. Nuclear energy is in fact very friendly while in operation, but the aftermath has to be finally solved. God damnit.
- forinti 10y ago
  France is also a lot less dense than is neighbours to the east. It stands as 114/km2 when its neighbours have 200/km2 or more. I guess this is also why South America does so well.
schallertd 10y ago
I'm pretty sick of all that hype around Tesla for example, pretending to be the real solution for independence of oil and gas. That is simply not the case. Tesla hasn't solved any of those issues so far, they only shifted the problem once again. Of course they design very beautiful electronic cars, but this isn't a solution for our energy and resource problem either.
- ericd 10y ago
  How is it not a solution? It decouples transportation from fossil fuels. Yes, the energy can still come from fossil fuels, but it no longer has to. The entire transportation fleet could now be nuclear powered, for example.
  - dashundchen 10y ago
    Because it doesn't address the ridiculous amount of energy and resources spent on private transportation to begin with. I see many people excited about the fact that electric cars can be powered by renewables, and efficiency gains automation can bring, without acknowledging the downsides of an auto-dominated society. What it does not solve is: * The energy spent producing a 2000kg+ car (there's 255 million cars in the US alone, 797 for every 1000 people) [1] * That that 2000kg+ car in the US is moving on average less than 2 people per trip [2] * The energy spent moving single commuters on hour long commutes (average of 25minutes each way [3]). I see many comments discussing how drivers will be productive on long automated commutes, while not addressing the inefficiency of that commute to begin with * The destructive and wasteful development patterns of auto-oriented cities - (sprawl, destroyed agricultural lands, the enormous health costs of sedentary lifestyles) * The resources required and pollution generated for the production/maintenance/powering of all these vehicles, renewable or not - renewables only produced ~13% of all electricity in 2015 [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit... [2] http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-613-march-8-2010-vehicle-occupancy-rates http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-613-march-8-2010-vehicl... [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+cars+in+the+us&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=average+commute+time+us https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+cars+in+the+us&ie=... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...
miloshadzic 10y ago
"Ideal" growth of an economy is 3%. Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc). Compound growth takes more and more resources over the whole planet. Free market fundamentalism means we're not investing so heavily into alternative sources but burning what we've got. Compound that 3% and it's just a metter when we'll be fucked unless things change a lot.
- jylam 10y ago
  > "Ideal" growth of an economy is 3% Would you mind to source and explain that ?
  - zardo 10y ago
    Three percent shall be the number thou shalt grow, and the number of the growing shall be three. Four shalt thou not grow, neither grow thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
    - miloshadzic 10y ago
      Here you go, straight from Zardoz.
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      It doesn't quite capture the high pitch voice that really accompanies that line...
- bpodgursky 10y ago
  > Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc). This is simply wrong. We produce vastly more GDP per unit of energy than we did a century ago, and will do the same a century from now. The size of an economy is a measure of what people will pay for a good. It's not a measure of how big a pile of steel you can make. The most expensive goods nowadays, services and computing, do not take vast piles of resources. In fact, the most expensive computers use the LEAST energy per unit of computation.
eudox 10y ago
>Singapore: 16000% So the takeaway from this is you should aim for high biocapacity deficit, right? I mean, I live in a deep green country, and it's a filthy dump.
- redthrow 10y ago
  That's my take away too. I won't name names but there are a lot of "ecologically wealthy" countries that nobody in the right mind wants to live. People should aim for maximum human flourishing, not minimising human impact on the planet.
  - eudox 10y ago
    A better way to read this map: countries in the deep red are places where people have tamed this inhuman, unforgiving Earth, and people can lead happy and self-defined lives. Countries in the deep green are where people are at the mercy of nature and die of 20th century causes. People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial", occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind.
    - pyre 10y ago
      > People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial", occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind. You do realize that there is a sliding scale here, right?
      - eudox 10y ago
        Probably not.
partycoder 10y ago
Consider this: In 1950, population was 2.5 billion. In 2000, 6 billion (i.e: 2.4x in only 50 years) In 2010, 7 billion (16% growth in only 10 years) Is this sustainable? clearly not the way things are right now.
- overcast 10y ago
  The population growth rate is steadily declining. The last hundred years, is not going to be reflective of the next hundred. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate As the bigger countries like India get more and more industrialized, they will level off too.
- refurb 10y ago
  Considering that some population forecasts are assuming a peak population in the not to distant future, I'd say, yes, it's sustainable.
shoo 10y ago
Great visualisation. It's good to focus on the stocks instead of the flows. "to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall [...] As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate" [1] "Broadly stated, most ecological problems reduce to a single problem of balancing supply and demand." [2] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits... [2] http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html
maehwasu 10y ago
It's pretty revealing that almost everyone in the world would far prefer to live in the red countries.
- rch 10y ago
  Red countries like Libya?
- SamBam 10y ago
  Everyone would probably also prefer to spend the weekend with their high-rolling free-spending uncle, who will be bankrupt in a year but will guarantee you a great time in Las Vegas, than with their budget-conscious boring aunt who will reliably save money away for all the kids' college educations.
  - randyrand 10y ago
    Almost a good analogy, except your uncle has enough money to last your entire life and more. That changes how people would decide.
    - SamBam 10y ago
      There's no science that suggests that the first world can continue to use up resources and emit carbon at their current rates without eventually both destroying the environment and depleting the resources. Sure, things could change, like the uncle could suddenly learn to be responsible.
- agentgt 10y ago
  Seriously? Did you not see Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia. For me it was relatively balanced and mainly the US really throws it off. There are also some red countries that I would seriously not want to live in.
  - eudox 10y ago
    The only context where Argentina can be in the same sentence as Australia is in a list of countries in the Southern Hemisphere, or countries whose names start with an 'A'.
unclesaamm 10y ago
One of the issues with ranking by percentage is it biases in favor of smaller nations because they're more likely to be anomalous. Notice how the countries at the top and bottom are both small.
DominikR 10y ago
> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere. Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today. And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today by altering the ecosystem of the world can feed a population that was unfathomable a 100 years ago. I'm not a proponent of producing waste that harms us without any limits or regulations, but these people that simply cannot accept that human activity changes the worlds ecosystem for human benefit seem like fanatics to me. If we give in to this then I can assure you that we in the West will be conquered by others and rightly so, because our culture has become retarded to a degree that it inhibits our ability to develop technologically, economically and culturally. I'm pretty sure the Chinese will not stop developing to save some frogs, if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us. (not physically but from an economic and technological perspective)
- hx87 10y ago
  > if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us Not before they "slaughter" themselves with pollution.
  - DominikR 10y ago
    You really believe this? People lived and will continue to live in much worse conditions than the Chinese do.
  - FooHentai 10y ago
    The impact of that pollution is felt much wider, even primarily, by those outside of the countries producing the pollution. See: Chernobyl fallout carried west on the wind across Europe, and sea-level rises caused by human-accelerated global warming disproportionately impacting poor island nations not responsible for said global warming. There are of course still very local, direct harms from pollution, but the most severe, long-term effects eventuate globally.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
I guess the guy who implemented that zooming map never gets tired of it?
carapace 10y ago
We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics) has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support current population density with ecological enrichment through "applied ecology", e.g. Permaculture, etc. but only if we are aware of the need and priority. --- For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with Permaculture food production. http://permaculture.com/node/518 http://permaculture.com/node/518 Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid form. As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-scale ethanol, for instance.
- nickff 10y ago
  I have read a few studies on alcohol fuel production, and none of the facilities studied have been a net-producer of energy. While the idea is an intriguing one, energy production is difficult. Has Blume actually shown an ability to produce fuel? Note: I've always been a fan of using seaside solar-powered electrolysis to produce hydrogen fuel, though hydrogen storage has its own issues.
  - carapace 10y ago
    Yes, Blume has produced fuel. If I recall correctly at one point he had a number of people with fuel conversions on their vehicles who were buying his gas through a kind of CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) business. He's very practically oriented. Part of what shifts the economics here is that the leftover byproducts of both fermentation and distillation are returned as inputs to the farm. I also have to mention, at one point Blume had a contract with a donut bakery to collect and make fuel from all their old scrap dough. Sugar and carbs...
- Kenji 10y ago
  Yeah. And rainbows and unicorns. Unfortunately, 99.999% of the population have other things to do and cannot all tend to their farms. Let alone, it would be far from the first time that biofuel has left people starving on the same or other parts of the world, simply because fertile ground is now used for that instead of food.
hosh 10y ago
Many of the countries marked deep green (having higher biocapacity than ecological footprint) have been trending downwards for the past twenty years. The rate at which the biocapacity is diminishing appears to be slowing. But it makes me wonder if there is a way to visualize rates of decline as well. I also wonder if there is a way to divide this up into spatial buckets so we could see say, the footprint of a metropolitan area versus other parts of the country. While national policies have affect on this, ecological impact is not necessarily confined to political borders.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
This is just a human population XKCD heatmap with a handful of exceptions.
vegabook 10y ago
There is a high negative correlation between ecological and monetary wealth. Time to choose. btw southern hemisphere looks good on this measure. As a bonus, zero nukes, and low likelihood of being an attractive target.
r3pl4y 10y ago
Very nicely made tool, unfortunately they forgot that red/green colorblindness is very common, so I can't really see anything in their graphs. Shouldn't be hard to add a little menu that allows you to choose the color themes, so color blind people can select one where they actually see a difference between the regions.
- randyrand 10y ago
  Have you tried the EnChroma color-blindness glasses? It would be an easier solution than designing data viz to avoid using color blindess color-combos or requiring dynamic options, IMO.
  - whorleater 10y ago
    It's really not that hard to design for colorblindness, since there majority of colorblindness is one type. Blue/red instead of green/red is a pretty easy color swap.
  - extrapickles 10y ago
    Those work best when your color-blindness is from your red/green cones being too close together in wavelength (most common form) and not for cases like me where color sensitivity is screwed up. The sensitivity problem can be solved by filtering the colors working correctly down to the level the bad color works at, but that doesn't work well indoors as you are effectively wearing sun-glasses. The easiest way I found for data viz to accommodate color blindness is to make sure everything is separated in intensity by a fair amount and have a tool-tip on the color legend indicating which color it is so if the accompanying text is referring to parts by color it can be figured out which color on the graph is being referred to.
jogjayr 10y ago
67% of Japan is covered by forest. How come they have an ecological deficit?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  127 million people, in an advanced industrialised country. I was shocked to see that Japan has a net out-migration: http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/ http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/ (Metrocosm -- a/k/a Max Galka -- is an absolutely amazing data resource.)

152 points by schallertd 10y ago

booli 10y ago

Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print? A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?

vanderZwan 10y ago
Yeah that just screams "externalities" to me, and if that's true it undermines the whole dataset.
- Loic 10y ago
  It is a genuine question, not a rhetorical question putting into question the data, Netherlands has currently a deficit of 4.1 GHA.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    Oh I misunderstood GP then without double-checking the website. My apologies.
gpdaccess 10y ago
Deliberately managing the rate of growth of its population would reduce its global footprint, but we're unable to sustainably meet 0 deficit anywhere unless you commit mass genocide.
johnchristopher 10y ago
Might be from the UE green/carbon certificates but don't quote me on that.
pmontra 10y ago
They started with a surplus as everybody else and they run into a defict, like most of the rest of the world, including many large countries. Unsustainable growth except something like a technological miracle or a plague happen? Probably.
Loic 10y ago
Take a look at Germany, they are steadily increasing their biocapacity while reducing their ecological footprint (I wonder how they increase the biocapacity so steadily over such long period of time). So, you may not achieve a balance, but maybe at the scale of a region like Europe, we can achieve it.
- saalaa 10y ago
  They have not reduced their ecological footprint. They are relying increasingly on coal, especially as new bioenergy installations are slowing down and demand is only growing. They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure). They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days that they raze whole villages to dig it out. I'm having trouble finding comprehensive sources but their CO2 emissions have been on the rise from 2012 to 2014 at least and they are set to miss their CO2 reduction goals of 2020 and 2030. At this point in time, they are the biggest CO2 source of Europe.
  - tobias3 10y ago
    One also sees the little 1990 peak. That's when inefficient east-block power plants started to be turned off and be replaced by more efficient versions. Other countries did not have such an easy way to increase overall power plant efficiency.
  - RGamma 10y ago
    One of the stupidest things our government did (in my mind) was to introduce the accelerated moratorium of nuclear power (this wasn't planned at first but put into place after Fukushima, except that nuclear power station was built at the coast in an earthquake area, something the middle of Europe is not exactly known for). The short term demand will just be met with coal and a bit of renewables (which might have no local greenhouse gas emissions, but are still dirty to produce/consume rare earths). Oh, and there are lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of euros ([1] says there are estimated damages in double-digit billions of euros overall) in denied profits going on. I'm really just waiting for fusion power to become viable and solve all of our earthly power consumption problems once and for all... [1] http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-mit-top-anwaelten-gegen-merkels-atomkurs-a-769213.html http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-m...
Shivetya 10y ago
well their means to score countries is contrived enough to be "we knew the results before we knew the facts". As in any strong economy is bad
- __jal 10y ago
  More like a strong economy == lots of energy use, and lots of energy use == lots of pollution, because the world uses lots of dirty energy. The fact that one can guess some results ahead of time doesn't cast doubt on the results, any more than, after coughing blood and 40 years of smoking, a positive cancer diagnosis is suspect. I rate this rhetorical tactic a 3: poor composition, not enough work either developing the implication of skullduggery or making it more subtle, missed opportunities for additional attacks on reporters' credibility.
saalaa 10y ago
They have quite a vast network of turbines. During some of the most windy days of the year, they produce more electricity than they consume. I'd say they also tend to do much less shipping by truck than many other countries.
- tinbad 10y ago
  Not sure where you got that from but 'sustainable energy' production (includes more than just wind, but safe to say that in our country is mostly wind) was only 3.9% in 2009. The government set a goal of 20% by 2020. So no, we are still mostly reliant on other forms of electricity. https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie
ajmurmann 10y ago
Or worth city states like Singapore and Luxembourg
DominikR 10y ago
There is no technology available today that would allow an industrialised country like the Netherlands to get to a zero carbon dioxide footprint. It sounds like sarcasm but the only realistic way to do this is to significantly reduce your population and have the remaining people live in mud huts or caves like our ancestors did many millennia ago. (which would be insane)
- CalRobert 10y ago
  People had moved on from mud huts by the 1600's, and yet had a pretty small (though non-zero) carbon footprint. I do agree that population, especially the population of people living a carbon-intense lifestyle, is a serious concern. Many people point a finger at poor nations with high population growth rates while failing to acknowledge that people in those countries tend to emit very little.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Human civilisation had burned through (or been climate-changed out of) several ecosystems by 1600. Europe was reaching the point of overexploiting its fuelwood resources. India and China were peaking as civilisations, reaching levels they'd not return to until the late 19th or 20th centuries in absolute level, and reaching relative standings among other nations and civilisations not since exceeded. I'm currently reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and the two volumes of Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power: How energy forges human history. They're impressive and sobering. While there are a range of estimates, there are a substantial group of population theorists, largely grounded in ecology, who see the population levels of 1650, roughly 500 million worldwide, as a likely long-term maximum. (The broader range runs from as few as 50 million, which still exceeds virtually all large land mammals, to several trillion. I find the lower bound potentially plausible, though pessimistic, the higher range delusional.)

skylan_q 10y ago

"We are fucked" For constantly being alarmist and crying wolf? Yes. Anyways, what happened to the editorial rule here where the title was supposed to match TFA's title? EDIT: Title has been appropriately edited. Thank you.

devy 10y ago

So what are the real options of survival? a) accelerate migration to Mars b) population control? Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?

legulere 10y ago
Increase efficiency, reduce consumption. Sending people to mars takes too much resources.
- diydsp 10y ago
  Exactly, we need to focus on things that last a long time, not gizmos. From a current HN thread on hacking into thermostats: "Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century." I understand the IoT thermostat has the potential to save even more ecoresources, but can't we do that in a way that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced every year?
rplnt 10y ago
A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Closer. Easier to repair (parts are not billions of miles/months away) and resupply. As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  Why would people want to live in a space habitat? If not many, then how are we going to choose who to shove there? What if it will turn out discriminatory?

exratione 10y ago

The fundamental problem with Malthusianism is that it is static thinking. It projects on the basis of no change in technology, as if the present moment continues eternally. This is why all statements to date on running out of X or Y at time T in the future have proven false. What actually happens is that people look ahead, forecast increased prices for X, and then the more adventurous go and build a better way of getting X, or create a different resource X1 that can be used instead. It is never different this time. Arguably alarmism that fails to consider technological process is a necessary part of the signaling mechanism by which realistic price forecasts are established, an example of the market performing its usual strange alchemy in turning (often willful) ignorance into something useful, but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating.

legulere 10y ago
The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress continuing eternally. For instance Malthus himself was mostly preoccupied with the idea, that the population might increase faster than the agricultural output. Through the use of chemical fertilizers there has been a breakthrough in how much food we can produce, so the malthusan catastrophe was averted. Agricultural output is still growing, but there are physical limits.
- mooreds 10y ago
  > The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress continuing eternally. And it assumes ERORI stays at a sustainable level. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_in...
- eudox 10y ago
  >Agricultural output is still growing, but there are physical limits. And people frequently confuse engineering limits with physical limits.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    This is the problem with real-world Malthusian predictions. There are (obviously) hard limits on growth and carrying capacity for Earth, but extrapolating from some existing metric like food growth per human is an atrocious way to find them. A convincing Malthusian argument needs to take one of two forms: either concede that it represents doom without engineering progress, or convincingly argue that it represents a physical boundary rather than an engineering one.

amelius 10y ago

France seems to be doing a little bit better than the rest of Europe. Is that because of their nuclear plants?

saalaa 10y ago
Yes. Edit: I forgot to mention we have French Guiana which is essentially untouched forest and which offsets most comparison maps (biodiversity is a famous example).
schallertd 10y ago
Probably yes. Nuclear energy is in fact very friendly while in operation, but the aftermath has to be finally solved. God damnit.
forinti 10y ago
France is also a lot less dense than is neighbours to the east. It stands as 114/km2 when its neighbours have 200/km2 or more. I guess this is also why South America does so well.

schallertd 10y ago

I'm pretty sick of all that hype around Tesla for example, pretending to be the real solution for independence of oil and gas. That is simply not the case. Tesla hasn't solved any of those issues so far, they only shifted the problem once again. Of course they design very beautiful electronic cars, but this isn't a solution for our energy and resource problem either.

ericd 10y ago
How is it not a solution? It decouples transportation from fossil fuels. Yes, the energy can still come from fossil fuels, but it no longer has to. The entire transportation fleet could now be nuclear powered, for example.
- dashundchen 10y ago
  Because it doesn't address the ridiculous amount of energy and resources spent on private transportation to begin with. I see many people excited about the fact that electric cars can be powered by renewables, and efficiency gains automation can bring, without acknowledging the downsides of an auto-dominated society. What it does not solve is: * The energy spent producing a 2000kg+ car (there's 255 million cars in the US alone, 797 for every 1000 people) [1] * That that 2000kg+ car in the US is moving on average less than 2 people per trip [2] * The energy spent moving single commuters on hour long commutes (average of 25minutes each way [3]). I see many comments discussing how drivers will be productive on long automated commutes, while not addressing the inefficiency of that commute to begin with * The destructive and wasteful development patterns of auto-oriented cities - (sprawl, destroyed agricultural lands, the enormous health costs of sedentary lifestyles) * The resources required and pollution generated for the production/maintenance/powering of all these vehicles, renewable or not - renewables only produced ~13% of all electricity in 2015 [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit... [2] http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-613-march-8-2010-vehicle-occupancy-rates http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-613-march-8-2010-vehicl... [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+cars+in+the+us&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=average+commute+time+us https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+cars+in+the+us&ie=... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...

miloshadzic 10y ago

"Ideal" growth of an economy is 3%. Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc). Compound growth takes more and more resources over the whole planet. Free market fundamentalism means we're not investing so heavily into alternative sources but burning what we've got. Compound that 3% and it's just a metter when we'll be fucked unless things change a lot.

jylam 10y ago
> "Ideal" growth of an economy is 3% Would you mind to source and explain that ?
- zardo 10y ago
  Three percent shall be the number thou shalt grow, and the number of the growing shall be three. Four shalt thou not grow, neither grow thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
  - miloshadzic 10y ago
    Here you go, straight from Zardoz.
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    It doesn't quite capture the high pitch voice that really accompanies that line...
bpodgursky 10y ago
> Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc). This is simply wrong. We produce vastly more GDP per unit of energy than we did a century ago, and will do the same a century from now. The size of an economy is a measure of what people will pay for a good. It's not a measure of how big a pile of steel you can make. The most expensive goods nowadays, services and computing, do not take vast piles of resources. In fact, the most expensive computers use the LEAST energy per unit of computation.

eudox 10y ago

>Singapore: 16000% So the takeaway from this is you should aim for high biocapacity deficit, right? I mean, I live in a deep green country, and it's a filthy dump.

redthrow 10y ago
That's my take away too. I won't name names but there are a lot of "ecologically wealthy" countries that nobody in the right mind wants to live. People should aim for maximum human flourishing, not minimising human impact on the planet.
- eudox 10y ago
  A better way to read this map: countries in the deep red are places where people have tamed this inhuman, unforgiving Earth, and people can lead happy and self-defined lives. Countries in the deep green are where people are at the mercy of nature and die of 20th century causes. People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial", occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind.
  - pyre 10y ago
    > People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial", occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind. You do realize that there is a sliding scale here, right?
    - eudox 10y ago
      Probably not.

partycoder 10y ago

Consider this: In 1950, population was 2.5 billion. In 2000, 6 billion (i.e: 2.4x in only 50 years) In 2010, 7 billion (16% growth in only 10 years) Is this sustainable? clearly not the way things are right now.

overcast 10y ago
The population growth rate is steadily declining. The last hundred years, is not going to be reflective of the next hundred. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate As the bigger countries like India get more and more industrialized, they will level off too.
refurb 10y ago
Considering that some population forecasts are assuming a peak population in the not to distant future, I'd say, yes, it's sustainable.

shoo 10y ago

Great visualisation. It's good to focus on the stocks instead of the flows. "to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall [...] As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate" [1] "Broadly stated, most ecological problems reduce to a single problem of balancing supply and demand." [2] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits... [2] http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html

maehwasu 10y ago

It's pretty revealing that almost everyone in the world would far prefer to live in the red countries.

rch 10y ago
Red countries like Libya?
SamBam 10y ago
Everyone would probably also prefer to spend the weekend with their high-rolling free-spending uncle, who will be bankrupt in a year but will guarantee you a great time in Las Vegas, than with their budget-conscious boring aunt who will reliably save money away for all the kids' college educations.
- randyrand 10y ago
  Almost a good analogy, except your uncle has enough money to last your entire life and more. That changes how people would decide.
  - SamBam 10y ago
    There's no science that suggests that the first world can continue to use up resources and emit carbon at their current rates without eventually both destroying the environment and depleting the resources. Sure, things could change, like the uncle could suddenly learn to be responsible.
agentgt 10y ago
Seriously? Did you not see Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia. For me it was relatively balanced and mainly the US really throws it off. There are also some red countries that I would seriously not want to live in.
- eudox 10y ago
  The only context where Argentina can be in the same sentence as Australia is in a list of countries in the Southern Hemisphere, or countries whose names start with an 'A'.

unclesaamm 10y ago

One of the issues with ranking by percentage is it biases in favor of smaller nations because they're more likely to be anomalous. Notice how the countries at the top and bottom are both small.

DominikR 10y ago

> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere. Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today. And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today by altering the ecosystem of the world can feed a population that was unfathomable a 100 years ago. I'm not a proponent of producing waste that harms us without any limits or regulations, but these people that simply cannot accept that human activity changes the worlds ecosystem for human benefit seem like fanatics to me. If we give in to this then I can assure you that we in the West will be conquered by others and rightly so, because our culture has become retarded to a degree that it inhibits our ability to develop technologically, economically and culturally. I'm pretty sure the Chinese will not stop developing to save some frogs, if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us. (not physically but from an economic and technological perspective)

hx87 10y ago
> if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us Not before they "slaughter" themselves with pollution.
- DominikR 10y ago
  You really believe this? People lived and will continue to live in much worse conditions than the Chinese do.
- FooHentai 10y ago
  The impact of that pollution is felt much wider, even primarily, by those outside of the countries producing the pollution. See: Chernobyl fallout carried west on the wind across Europe, and sea-level rises caused by human-accelerated global warming disproportionately impacting poor island nations not responsible for said global warming. There are of course still very local, direct harms from pollution, but the most severe, long-term effects eventuate globally.

honkhonkpants 10y ago

I guess the guy who implemented that zooming map never gets tired of it?

carapace 10y ago

We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics) has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support current population density with ecological enrichment through "applied ecology", e.g. Permaculture, etc. but only if we are aware of the need and priority. --- For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with Permaculture food production. http://permaculture.com/node/518 http://permaculture.com/node/518 Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid form. As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-scale ethanol, for instance.

nickff 10y ago
I have read a few studies on alcohol fuel production, and none of the facilities studied have been a net-producer of energy. While the idea is an intriguing one, energy production is difficult. Has Blume actually shown an ability to produce fuel? Note: I've always been a fan of using seaside solar-powered electrolysis to produce hydrogen fuel, though hydrogen storage has its own issues.
- carapace 10y ago
  Yes, Blume has produced fuel. If I recall correctly at one point he had a number of people with fuel conversions on their vehicles who were buying his gas through a kind of CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) business. He's very practically oriented. Part of what shifts the economics here is that the leftover byproducts of both fermentation and distillation are returned as inputs to the farm. I also have to mention, at one point Blume had a contract with a donut bakery to collect and make fuel from all their old scrap dough. Sugar and carbs...
Kenji 10y ago
Yeah. And rainbows and unicorns. Unfortunately, 99.999% of the population have other things to do and cannot all tend to their farms. Let alone, it would be far from the first time that biofuel has left people starving on the same or other parts of the world, simply because fertile ground is now used for that instead of food.

hosh 10y ago

Many of the countries marked deep green (having higher biocapacity than ecological footprint) have been trending downwards for the past twenty years. The rate at which the biocapacity is diminishing appears to be slowing. But it makes me wonder if there is a way to visualize rates of decline as well. I also wonder if there is a way to divide this up into spatial buckets so we could see say, the footprint of a metropolitan area versus other parts of the country. While national policies have affect on this, ecological impact is not necessarily confined to political borders.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

This is just a human population XKCD heatmap with a handful of exceptions.

vegabook 10y ago

There is a high negative correlation between ecological and monetary wealth. Time to choose. btw southern hemisphere looks good on this measure. As a bonus, zero nukes, and low likelihood of being an attractive target.

r3pl4y 10y ago

Very nicely made tool, unfortunately they forgot that red/green colorblindness is very common, so I can't really see anything in their graphs. Shouldn't be hard to add a little menu that allows you to choose the color themes, so color blind people can select one where they actually see a difference between the regions.

randyrand 10y ago
Have you tried the EnChroma color-blindness glasses? It would be an easier solution than designing data viz to avoid using color blindess color-combos or requiring dynamic options, IMO.
- whorleater 10y ago
  It's really not that hard to design for colorblindness, since there majority of colorblindness is one type. Blue/red instead of green/red is a pretty easy color swap.
- extrapickles 10y ago
  Those work best when your color-blindness is from your red/green cones being too close together in wavelength (most common form) and not for cases like me where color sensitivity is screwed up. The sensitivity problem can be solved by filtering the colors working correctly down to the level the bad color works at, but that doesn't work well indoors as you are effectively wearing sun-glasses. The easiest way I found for data viz to accommodate color blindness is to make sure everything is separated in intensity by a fair amount and have a tool-tip on the color legend indicating which color it is so if the accompanying text is referring to parts by color it can be figured out which color on the graph is being referred to.

jogjayr 10y ago

67% of Japan is covered by forest. How come they have an ecological deficit?

dredmorbius 10y ago
127 million people, in an advanced industrialised country. I was shocked to see that Japan has a net out-migration: http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/ http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/ (Metrocosm -- a/k/a Max Galka -- is an absolutely amazing data resource.)