Murray Grimwood argues it's time for some serious systems thinking, making sense of a complex world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it into silos

By Murray Grimwood*

The Climate Change Adaptation Act, a potentially good piece of law, has received a fairly good injection of commonsense but we need to think further. Much further. And some of what we uncover may not be reassuring; indeed, much of what we have assumed may turn out to be incorrect.

Perspective is everything at such times; pointy-headed specialisation, great in times of plentiful supplies of energy and resources, doesn’t do perspective very well. Luckily our PM has access to the kind of thinking (systems thinking) required:

The biggest thinking-change needed, is from ‘funding’ to ‘allocating’; from proxy-earmarking to ear-marking of real resources. The days of betting on an unlimited planet are, simply, over. None of our legislation, active or pending, adequately addresses what is beginning to unfold.

The big picture

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen gave us the big picture, many years ago. Energy and entropy are clearly the restrictions; the recycling of resources (which he labels materials) requires energy, so must be subsequent in our thinking. Energy is everything.

This graphic tells us that the ‘money’ we have hithertofore budgeted with, is really a proxy with which we head to the left-hand side of that box, and exchange it for portions of the two incoming arrows; energy and resources.

Contention for those may be inter-personal, inter-group, inter-business or inter-national, and may range from wheeling to warring, but the big picture is that those resource and energy flows must peak, then decline. We can predict growing contention; we can predict growing gaps on shelves and, from this simple graphic, we can predict major infrastructure triage, with or without ‘managed retreat’.

Growth, Limits to Growth, and de-growth

For 50 years, we have known we would arrive at a point where exponential growth plateaued, then reversed. Much vilified, the Limits to Growth Report has withstood the test of time far better than any other global economic projection. The following graphic (from Dr Graham Turner, via Smithsonian) shows us three inflection-points, happening about now.

They are: Services per capita, industrial output per capita, and – crucially – food per capita. Keep this in mind as you hear stories of tomato shortages, vegetable prices, egg unavailability.

Reference to this graph, and those three inflections in particular, must be kept in mind when making strategic decisions; politically distasteful though the implications may be.  

Misidentification; a waste of energy, resources and time 

Single-topic items – from ‘that dratted Putin’ to ‘no eggs on the shelves’ to ‘rebuilding’ to ‘labour’ – need to be laid upon those two graphics, if said topics are to be referenced in correct proportion. Access to energy is paramount; we are dead without it. Food is energy, ditto. Thus we can link a global lack of eggs (the dearth in France can hardly be due to a change in NZ regulations…) to global contention for wheat, thence to global contention for energy.

We can relate increasing global demand for ‘labour’, to a global reduction in energy-availability per capita; we have forgotten that both do ‘work’ and we have forgotten that fossil energy out-works labour by many orders of magnitude. And we have failed to realise that the current trend will accelerate; less and less available energy per nation, per capita, and per time.

Misidentification via lack of perspective, shows up currently with repetitive descriptions of upper-catchment topsoil – eons in the making – as ‘mud’ or ‘silt’. It may well be unwanted where it currently is, but topsoil is precious beyond measure, and – in the too-common self-important short-term appraisal that passes for journalistic comment these days – it’s loss is being entirely overlooked.

‘Slash’, too, has entered our vernacular, but really the discussion should be about how much material can be extracted (and how much needs to be left) to maintain soil nutrient-quality and volume.

Entropy

Entropy is the most important factor after energy, and the most unheeded of all. Energy, when we use it, gets degraded. It starts as high-quality, compact, a bang for our buck. The trend is remorselessly one-way (a hot cup of coffee always cools, ash never reforms as coal), ending in low-grade heat. Which is unusable; it takes more energy to gather it, than it would return.

Materially, entropy is decay. Decay needs parried – using more and more energy and resources – as time goes on. The Roman Empire did not decay for social or financial reasons; it suffered from a reduction in surplus energy (firewood, food) and an increase in entropy (road, farm and storage maintenance, defense demands). They clipped the ticket (printed money, in effect), re-jigged supply (split into two entities) to be more ‘local’, but succumbed (Homer-Dixon ‘The Upside of Down’, Tainter ‘Collapse of Complex Societies’).

Retreat

The Environmental Defence Society (EDS) and politicians at all levels, fail to overlay resource-depletion, energy and entropy when discussing retreat. They also fail to overlay ‘per head’. The big-picture realities are that over 40% of accessible land is already being used for human (or human-related) food production – and being degraded in the process.

That spatial pressure has seen us starting to harvest the coastal area, and indeed the ocean, as if it were extra farmland; this should have been seen as an overshoot-warning. Cities – temporarily supported by fossil energy – have grown too big to survive without it, yet are still being mislabeled as ‘more sustainable’ (what is overlooked, is the huge supporting acreage required to service them).

Now and henceforth, we are looking at multiple, overlapping incursions; an inevitable urban exodus onto food-production land, while biodiversity and carbon-sequestration demands compete increasingly with both. And a reduction – via floods, coastal incursion, land degradation and the need to repatriate – of the overall space available, even before contention is taken into consideration.

Thus, retreat needs not only to be physical retreat of existing operations, it needs to include reductions in total activity. By some orders of magnitude.

Population

The very undiscussed elephant in the room, is population. This is exactly the ‘per head’ labels in the Turner graphic, above. If access to resources and energy (left-hand side of the square, Georgescu-Roegen graphic) is real wealth, then less people equals wealthier people per-head. There is no point in hollering about equity, then, if overall population is not part of the discussion.

Those who point to female education as a driver of reduced fertility rates miss the point. The overshoot is here already. It is too late to solve the problem globally, in terms of raising everyone currently alive to First World consumption-levels. Not only that, but with eight billion or more living at an equitable and sustainable level of consumption, that level would be below current Third World standards. Well below.

Factor in the ‘rights’ of future generations, and that level reduces even further. Mother Nature – otherwise known as physics, chemistry and biology – will rationalize this dilemma, and it won’t be pretty. (Neither is war - our usual way of solving such competition - and since 1945, war has the potential to render the planet completely unlivable.) The more we can do about population (immigration restriction, disincentivisation) before nature takes over, the better.

Funding, budgeting, allocating

In the past, we have got away with budgeting in dollar terms (at least, in the First World) most of the time; there was enough remaining planet to support the combined forward expectation. That condition is increasingly untenable, raising questions about accumulated global debt, and continued belief in monetary constructs.

For the future, we need to think of budgeting physical resources and energy – earmarking them ahead – rather than piles of keystroke-issued digital proxy.

Future generations – our children and theirs – are not going to thank us for a collection of decaying, irredeemable and irrelevant infrastructure, nor for a legacy of debt (if the monitoring system survives), nor for any amount of gifted-but-irredeemable digital proxy.

Rights

There can be no unlimited ‘rights’ guarantee-able with an unlimited or an overshot population; there are merely ‘best possible in the circumstances’ conditions. Half the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals are, in light of the above, unattainable. One, number eight, is total bollocks.

Truth – avoidance thereof

It is understandable that politicians avoid unpalatable truths; they’re out on their backsides if they articulate bad news. There are, however, precedents for society being in a position to listen to bearers of such; Churchill’s ‘Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat’ speech being a classic.

Academia fails the truth test too, with much less excuse. Their contract with society is that they are paid to examine – and present when found – truths. Too many, too often, avoid the uncomfortable; essentially putting career, or mana, ahead of truth-addressing. Academia also suffers from the silo-effect, professional inter-disciplinary genuflection too often overriding what should be big-picture resolution, followed by elimination of the disproven assertion.

The media are, increasingly, all short sound-bytes and shallow appraisals. Old- school journalism – of Reed, Gellhorn, Burchett, Hersh, Fisk depth and integrity – is nearly dead on the ropes. The replacement, sadly including publicly-funded media, is unresearched, unquestioning, narrative-assuming, virtue-signalling.

The environmental movement has, by and large, lost sight of limits thinking. Some advocate the planting of trees, to sequester dug-up carbon. Some believe we only need to drive electric cars (the right answer to the wrong question).

Many cling to hopes that we can mitigate the cumulative impacts of our activities by indulging in orders-of-magnitude-too-small actions (recycling, offsetting) or by championing prior cultures. Others have become sponsorship compromised. Some, and these have my utmost respect, know they are fighting a rearguard action, but do it anyway. The reality, though, is that every year that awareness of Conservation/the Environment has been a ‘thing’, the global ecology has gone backwards. Local First World ‘wins’, few as they are, can too-often be traced directly to offshoring (of pollution industries and/or practices). From all four cohorts, we need far better, urgently.

Future obligations

This gets tricky. Where? How long? For how many? Let us limit it to: New Zealand, seven generations hence, and ‘as many as can be supported within those’.

Fossil energy is in the rear-view mirror long before seven generation have passed, but the remnants of our existing infrastructure, will be around. The juxtaposition dilemma, is that ALL of our current infrastructure is fossil-energy dependent, or was designed for use in a fossil-energy-available world. (Electric cars, for example, assume bitumen, bridges and diggers). This needs a radical re-think; the assumption has been to carry on our style, with a carbon-reduction here and a riparian reparation there. That assumption was orders-of-magnitude adrift.

Triage time

The above, means that large portions of our infrastructure – from super-highways to digital-reliance – need to be re-evaluated. Much of what we then identify as ‘existing but soon to be irrelevant or unmaintainable’, needs to be appraised for it’s re-use or re-purposing potential; existing materials, in hand, are a better bet than potentially/possibly available materials from somewhere else. From both the supplied graphics, we can confidently predict that there will be a period – maybe more than a human lifetime – where such triage, re-use and re-adaption, will be a paramount skill.

Planning/retreating

The re-creation of what has been compromised, is now understood to be invalid unless the benefits outweigh the risks. So far so reasonable, but a look-ahead, even a short-term one, needs to factor-in the lesser or total un-availability of fossil energy, and its repercussions. Those things which required an energy surplus, particularly the rapid shifting of people and stuff, will be reduced, perhaps to negligible proportions. Local will therefore be the way of the future, making centralization of anything, Three Waters being a classic example, an incorrect move.

Lack of available energy will also render technical complexity a blow; typically complexity is used to effect efficiencies, but does so at the expense of resilience. As a rule of thumb, lower-tech is easier maintained and less vulnerable to parameter-alterations (like supply-chain issues, or immersions).

Assumptions need to change from ‘how/where can we shift this?’ to: Will this be needed/possible in the mid-term future? This is important, because we probably only have one energy shot at getting it right. If we get it wrong and the tanks are empty, there will never be another (this is a once-off event in human affairs; overshoots hithertofore have been local; global overshoot can only happen once in any meaningful-to-humans timescale).

The questions will be brutally simple: Can we maintain this, ex imported input? Will we need it in an era of severely reduced global trade? How many people can we support, at what level, doing what, where? That kind of thinking is hell and gone from ‘rebuilding’.

We are, slowly but inevitably, inching closer to the debate we need. We will probably run out of time, make that certainly. So even what we do in the remaining time, will need to be triaged (for instance, Onslow was a fantastic idea 20 years ago; have we the build-time left, given those two graphics?).

Lateral thinking – that enemy of those invested in existing formats – will be needed in spades; upstream-tethered floating houses, for instance?

Ironically, if Chris Hipkins has read his Mum’s book, we may have one of the few First World leaders familiar with the form of thinking best suited to addressing the next, inevitably down-shifting, years. What a pity it would be, if those around and across from him, didn’t know enough to engage. What a pity it would be, if an ignorant media didn’t understand what to ask him, to elicit such knowledge for public consumption.

What a pity it would be, if a need-to-fund curtailed academic research into the pending, multi-faceted predicament, diverting it instead into blind alleys (like hydrogen).

We can do so much better than that. ‘Disaster planning’ has to scope so much wider than cyclones, pandemics and earthquakes; multi-generational forward obligations have to be factored-in, as does capacitance (the ability to withstand, long enough to pivot/regroup; like having 15% spare hospital beds, or several months of spares inventories).

The biggest one, though, may be the message contained in those two graphics; the exponentially-increasing speed at which the resource/energy/ecological lid is lowering on the recent, temporary irruption of our species. That will demand all the thinking we can muster – and perhaps a little more. The need – the desperate need – is for meshed systems-thinking at all levels, in all things. The days of siloed thinking – an oxymoron, when you think about it – need to be over.

And ‘funding’ has to be displaced by ‘earmarked-for’. Someone should tell Treasury.

*Murray Grimwood comments on interest.co.nz as powerdownkiwi.