We are running out of time. Fifty years ago the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, and today it is worthwhile to reread their conclusions (Meadows et al. 1972):
- 1.If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on the planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.
- 2.It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future.
- 3.If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
Of course, we have no choice but to strive for the second outcome. According to the UN Department of Economics and Social Affairs, the growth rate in world population peaked at 2.1 percent around 1972 and has declined to 1.2 percent at present; by 2050 the world's population is expected to level off at nine to ten billion people (UN 2017). According to the International Energy Agency, there is more than enough renewable energy available to meet the needs of these ten billion people (IEA 2021). If we stop mining fossil fuels and recycle all carbon, using existing technology to make the goods humans really need, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will decrease, as will be discussed in the section below, “Energy and Climate.” Experts are convinced we can feed ten billion mouths (WUR n.d.), but how we feed the world without devouring the planet is a demanding issue that will be addressed in the section “Biodiversity and Food.” Can we mitigate the energy and climate crisis as well as the food and biodiversity crisis without world peace? This is the subject of the last section of the article.
Before embarking on these discussions I want to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of the International Association on Social Quality and especially their definition of sustainability: A state of dynamic equilibrium between the entire interactive ensemble of nonliving and living entities, functioning within the boundaries of a resilient system (IASQ 2012). To secure overall sustainability, natural scientists and engineers have developed the Energy Transition Model (ETM n.d.), the Carbon Transition Model (Institute for Sustainable Process Technology n.d.), and the Agri-food-nature Transition Model (Kalavasta n.d.). Because a sustainable society also has sociopolitical and legal, socioeconomic and financial, sociocultural and welfare, and socioenvironmental and ecological aspects, the role of human scientists in contributing to overall sustainability is crucial (Westbroek et al. 2020; Nijhuis and van der Maesen 2021).
Energy and Climate
Figure 1 shows the climate catastrophe humans are creating (IPCC 2022). For the first four hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens did not affect the climate; carbon dioxide variations in the atmosphere were due to ice age cycles and stayed below a CO2 concentration of 300 ppm (parts per million), until the Industrial Revolution in 1800, when our use of fossil fuels and the concomitant emissions made CO2 concentration rise steeply. In 2020 it had reached 421 ppm.
Carbon dioxide variations.
Citation: The International Journal of Social Quality 12, 1; 10.3167/IJSQ.2022.120106
At COP21 in Paris, government leaders agreed to limit global warming to 2, or preferably 1.5, degrees (UNFCCC 2015). Then, the International Energy Agency calculated that we should only be allowed to emit 565 GtCO2 (Gigaton CO2) worldwide (IEA 2021). According to the London School of Economics, proven reserves of fossil fuels represent 2860 GtCO2 (LSE 2016). So Big Oil has large stocks of noncombustible fuel.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's CO2 emission credit was 296 GtCO2 in 2021, if we want to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees in order to prevent a climate catastrophe (IPCC 2022). If we divide that emission credit fairly over the world's population of 7.5 billion people, then 296 / 7.5 = 39.5 tCO2 is our carbon credit per person; see also the study by Tim Cadman and Robert Hales in this issue. For the Netherlands, with 17.5 million inhabitants, our joint credit is 17.5 x 39.5 = 691 MtCO2 (Megaton CO2). In 2020, the emission in the Netherlands was 164.5 MtCO2—conclusion: 691 / 164.5 = 4.2 years, so in 2025 our emission credit will be exhausted, not even including aviation and shipping! The Netherlands’ energy and climate policy does not take this into account; like the whole Western world, it simply assumes that curbing CO2 emissions is not an immediate need because developing countries will take much longer to use their carbon credits, but this is “colonising the future” (Reybrouck 2021).
Figure 2 (Perez and Perez 2009) shows how we should avoid a climate catastrophe. There is more than enough solar energy to meet all the energy needs of the world, now and in the future. The small disks on the right-hand side of Figure 2 depict the known reserves in nuclear and fossil fuels. The big yellow disk dominating the figure is the abundant amount of solar energy available, and the small disks on top are the other renewables: wind, hydro, biomass, and so on. Note that the renewables are available per year, whereas the fossil fuels are the total available reserves. The two orange disks on the left represent the current world energy needs and those in 2050. There is more good news: the price of electricity from solar cells and wind turbines is already competitive with that of electricity from gas-fired power stations and will soon compete with coal.
A fundamental look at energy reserves for the planet.
Citation: The International Journal of Social Quality 12, 1; 10.3167/IJSQ.2022.120106
The Energy Transition Model (ETM n.d.) and the Carbon Transition Model (Institute for Sustainable Process Technology n.d.) are transparent, fact-based, open-source models designed to support the sustainability transition of fossil-intensive economies. Mapping out raw material, energy, and emission flows and exploring how these change with different sustainability options, the ETM and CTM can be used by decision-makers in government, industry, energy, and society as decision-support tools for realizing a sustainable society in the making.
From the ETM and CTM, the contours of a sustainable energy supply for everyone emerge. Homes, provided they are optimally insulated, become sustainable energy producers. For EUR 5,000, an average family can already have enough solar panels on the roof to fully meet the energy needs of the entire household, including an electric car, and for the rest of their lives. Heating is provided by an electric heat pump, which also works for office buildings and homes in the city. Megacities with lots of high-rise buildings will still have to “import” energy (see later discussion).
Although most electricity is generated locally with solar panels and wind turbines, the need for electricity will increase worldwide due to the economic growth of developing countries, the electric transport of people and goods, and the growth of information and communication technology. Slowly but surely, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants are disappearing. Sun, wind, biomass, and synthetic fuels are taking over, also in companies, heavy industry, and megacities.
As our fleet electrifies, our cars also form a buffer in which sustainable energy can be temporarily stored. As long as we still own private cars, since most cars stay stationary for most of the day, they can be charged with excess sustainable electricity. In densely populated areas, national high-voltage grids are interconnected and internationalized. For example, sustainable electricity from hydroelectric power stations in Norway is already transported via a cable on the North Sea bed all the way to the Netherlands. Such an international grid is under development all over Europe, yet I do not believe that it is possible or cost-effective to create a global electricity network that connects all continents. The idea of a global electricity grid is very old, as the late R. Buckminster Fuller suggested in 1938 (GENI 1995). His dream has not been realized in the past eighty years, although the World Wide Web only took twenty years. Transporting electricity via cables is expensive and wasteful. The idea of hydrogen for energy storage is also almost a century old. It requires an entirely new infrastructure, and the insecurity and large size of hydrogen storage tanks are other objections.
It seems much more plausible to use the existing infrastructure built by the oil and gas industry for the global energy network. In these oil and gas pipelines we can transport “green gas” and synthetic fuels that are produced by recycling carbon, for instance from biomass and waste. Most promising is direct capture of CO2 from the air and using renewable energy plus water to synthesize “green” methanol, methane, gasoline, diesel, kerosene, or other transport fuels. The worldwide energy web already exists; all we need to do is fill it with synthetic fuels, which are already commercially available (Sunfire n.d.). Renewable energy converted into synthetic fuels can be stored, transported, and made available to everyone all over the world, leveraging the existing infrastructure of oil and gas pipelines, road tankers, ships, and storage tanks. Note also that synthetic kerosene is the only way to make intercontinental aviation sustainable (Terwel et al. 2019).
By converting CO2 and water, powered by surplus renewable electricity, high-density products can be synthesized. This so-called Power-to-X scheme couples the energy sector to the chemical, heating, and fuel sectors, thus avoiding the need for fossil fuels (Goede 2022). If we stop mining fossil fuels and recycle all carbon into synthetic fuels (Institute for Sustainable Process Technology n.d.), using direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 from the atmosphere, economic growth, especially of developing countries, will lead to a reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus mitigating climate change. Another advantage of recycling CO2 is that it can be captured from the atmosphere all over the world and locally converted into synthetic fuels (see “Peace and Security” below).
In conclusion, the age of fossil fuels will come to an end, and there is more than enough solar energy to provide a sustainable society with the electric power and the synthetic fuels needed. Carbon recycling instead of mining will mitigate climate change. Energy security requires synthetic fuels not only for the global energy network, but also for local self-sufficiency.
Biodiversity and Food
Can we feed the world without devouring the planet? This point is discussed extensively by George Monbiot in his recent book Regenesis (2022). The problem is not that there are too many people, but that there is far too much livestock: 77 billion chicken, 1.5 billion pigs, 618 million turkeys, 590 million sheep, 495 million goats, and 293 million cattle (OWD n.d. c). This has the following consequences for land use, according to Monbiot:
Just 1 percent of the world's land area is used for buildings and infrastructure. Crops occupy 12 percent, while grazing, the most extensive kind of farming, uses 28 percent. Only 15 percent of the world's land, by contrast, is protected for nature. The rest of the Earth's land surface is either uninhabitable (glaciers, ice caps, deserts, rocks, mountaintops, salt flats) or mantled by unprotected forests. Yet the meat and milk from animals fed entirely by grazing provide just 1 percent of the world's protein. (Monbiot 2022: 77)
The “Green Revolution” of the past century was meant to fight hunger. We must admit that it has resulted in industrial farming and the rise of “fast food.” For the people who live on a diet of rice, potatoes, or pasta as their first food, a burger is often their second food. For many (in the “food deserts,” the poorer neighborhoods of major American cities) the hamburger is already the most important if not the only food. The danger of the popularity of fast food is its high market value worldwide. As more and more people use the same crops or food products, it pays to invest more in those products. Thus, fast food pushes other food products off the market. Plants and animals that do not contribute to the hamburger or other fast food products are becoming scarce. For the major part of our diet we consume only a dozen of the three hundred thousand kinds of flowering plants on Earth. This impoverishment, caused by fast food, in all its lack of dietary diversity and susceptibility to disease, is a potential threat to our food supply and health in the future. This is how Ed O. Wilson, coiner of the word “biodiversity,” characterized the steady destruction of nature (Wilson 2014: 101):
In the world view of the corporate priesthood, the restructuring of Earth to accommodate vast numbers of people and their artefacts is not the price of progress. It is progress.
About half the Earth is now in use by people. Wilson, who passed away recently, was afraid that the whole Earth would become a human park:
Only if we divide our planet in two, in two parallel worlds, can we guarantee the survival of biodiversity and of ourselves. (Wilson 2014: 102)
Is it impossible to feed ten billion people adequately and at the same time reduce our footprint to half of the Earth? At present, the amount of land worldwide in use for agriculture is 4.924 billion hectares; with a world population of ten billion, that is 0.5 hectare/person, which should be more than enough for humans with a vegetarian diet. Figure 3 shows land use per 100 grams of protein.
Land use per 100 grams of protein (OWD n.d. a).
Citation: The International Journal of Social Quality 12, 1; 10.3167/IJSQ.2022.120106
To produce 100 grams of soy protein, eaten by humans in the form of tofu, requires just over two square meters of land. To raise 100 grams of egg protein requires just under six square meters. Chicken protein needs seven and pork ten square meters. Chickens and pigs need more land than tofu does because they cannot turn everything they eat into meat, as they have to sustain themselves and build other body parts. Milk (see Figure 3) requires an average of 27 square meters, beef 163, and lamb 185. Lamb protein, in other words, requires 84 times as much land to grow as soy protein. If we all stopped eating meat and dairy, and switched instead to entirely plant-based diets, we would reduce the amount of land used for farming by 76 percent!
It is very clear that the way we produce food now is increasingly out of balance and unsustainable; a circular system with minimal losses is needed. Together with our partners at Kalavasta, we are developing the Agri-food-nature Transition Model (Kalavasta n.d.), which allows food producers, suppliers, supermarkets, NGOs, governments, financial institutions, and consumers to forecast the food and biodiversity effects of various sustainable developments. The ATM takes into account feedstock, nutrients, energy, and water, and looks at agricultural production, consumption, and all the processes and trades that happen along the agri-food-nature chain.
In applying the ATM to achieve circularity in the agri-food-nature chain in the Netherlands, two fundamental questions are currently being addressed. First, how much of farming in our country caters to the fast food industry? It is known that fast food has negative consequences for our health and also contributes to biodiversity loss, while it is produced and consumed on an (economically) large scale. But how large is unknown. An estimate of the size of the industry could give us an indication of the consequences if people were to consume less fast food. Second, is circular agriculture without livestock at all possible? In the present agricultural system, animals partly consume residual flows that are not immediately suitable for consumption by humans. This raises the question of whether we can also valorize these flows without animals. For example, in a system in which much fewer or no animal products were produced and consumed, we would waste these residues, and in addition, there may be other important implications for the supply of nutrients to the soil.
Integrating the ETM, CTM, and ATM tells us that the climate costs of farming mirror its land costs. Raising a kilogram of beef protein releases 113 times more greenhouse gases than growing a kilogram of pea protein, and 190 times more than growing a kilogram of nut protein. Perhaps surprisingly, pasture-fed beef and lamb have far worse impacts, about three to four times worse, than beef raised intensively on grain, harmful as this is. This is because of the lower efficiency of converting grass into protein, and the slower growth of pastured animals: the longer they live, the more methane is released from their stomachs and nitrogen oxides from their dung. Monbiot writes:
If a magic switch were thrown, causing the entire world to shift to a plant-based diet, and the land now occupied by livestock were rewilded, the carbon drawn down from the atmosphere by recovering ecosystems would be equivalent to all the world's fossil fuel emissions from the previous sixteen years. This drawdown could make the difference between our likely failure to prevent more than 1.5 C of global heating, and success. (Monbiot 2022: 83)
From the above, my conclusion is that the age of livestock farming, like that of fossil fuels, will come to an end. We can mitigate the energy and climate crisis as well as the food and biodiversity crisis, but is this at all possible without world peace?
Peace and Security
Some people think that we have lived in an era of peace, at least in Europe, for the past seventy years, but we are and have been at war, and not only recently in Ukraine. In 1946, the Dutch went to war in Indonesia, and in 1950 our allies in the USA went to war in Korea. In 1956 Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and in 1969 into Prague. We lived under the threats of the Cold War until the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. For the past thirty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have been engaged in three different kinds of war in three different periods:
- 1.Peace interventions in the Balkans (1990–2001) started with the UN-ordered Operation Deny Flight to end the civil war in Yugoslavia, escalating to bombing raids by NATO Allied Forces after Srebrenica.
- 2.The War on Terror (2001–2021) started after 9/11 in Afghanistan, with Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban and al-Qaeda and the so-called NATO training mission, which turned out to be mainly a combat mission with ground troops and air support.
- 3.Hybrid warfare by ISIS and Russia (2014–present), waged with conventional weapons combined with terrorism, paramilitary and subversive actions, psychological and cyber-warfare, has been combatted by the US along with fifteen allies in Operation Inherent Resolve, with Dutch ground forces and bombing in Iraq and Syria, creating millions of refugees whom we do not want to take care of. (Osinga 2020)
Number of active state-based conflicts, world, 1946 to 2020 (OWD n.d. b).
Citation: The International Journal of Social Quality 12, 1; 10.3167/IJSQ.2022.120106
Barack Obama received the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” By the end of his time in office, drones had struck almost ten times more than under his predecessor's watch, with many thousands of deaths. The architecture of drone activity had been extended deep into the African continent, not just across the Middle East and South Asia. The same trend applied to the Special Forces, which operated in or moved through 138 nations—or 70 percent of all countries in the world—in Obama's last year in office. Actual fighting took place in at least thirteen, and targeted killing occurred in some of those (Moyn 2021).
Dutch troops (fifty thousand in total) have been and are still active outside our country, outside Europe, even outside NATO borders. Here is a list of current military missions (Netherlands Ministry for Defense n.d.): Iraq (CBMI), Lithuania (eFP), Somalia (VPD), Bahrain (CMF), the Strait of Hormuz (EMASOH), the Gaza Strip (EU BAM and USSC), Israel, Syria (UNDOF), Kosovo (EULEX), Lebanon, Syria, and Israel (UNTSO), United Arab Emirates (FSE Mirage), Mali (EUTM, EUCAP Sahel en Minusma), Uganda (GPO), and Afghanistan (Resolute Support).
But we don't call this war. Questions about the legal status of these military missions by our own forces or those of our allies are almost never raised. The Kellogg–Briand Pact—officially the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy—is a 1928 international agreement on peace in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them.” Sponsored by France and the US, the Pact is named after its authors, United States Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. The pact was signed by Germany, France, and the United States on 27 August 1928, and by most other states soon after. It was concluded outside the League of Nations and remains in effect.
Some people think that waging war, including economic war and the striving for world hegemony, is part of human nature. Yet for our energy security we need a worldwide energy web and for food security a worldwide food web. The recent Russian invasion of Ukraine is having a severe effect on both, resulting among other things in an energy crisis in Europe and a famine in Africa. In the interest of energy security, instead of speeding up the implementation of renewables, Germany is reconsidering the decision to close down its nuclear power stations, and the Netherlands its coal-fired power plants. On the other hand, do the recent actions of the UN with regard to world grain supplies not show the importance of globalization, our unprecedented and still increasing interdependence, and its crucial role in diminishing the outbreak of global war? In order to avoid extinction, humans should learn to live not from but in symbiosis with Earth's biosphere, including other humans.
Conclusions
I would like to conclude that we find ourselves today in a unique historical situation. Amid all uncertainties about the future, one conclusion stands out: the age of fossil fuels and of livestock farming will come to an end. It is significant to note that this article has been primarily conceived from a natural scientific perspective. While writing it, I became aware of the limitations of this one-sidedness, which was getting in the way of presenting the complete picture of what is going on. The following case of nitrogen pollution and biodiversity demonstrates that concerning both the emergence of ecological problems and controlling them, this perspective provides a seriously reduced picture. At present in the Netherlands, a crisis situation has emerged concerning the vast, uncontrolled emission of nitrogen by livestock farmers and the livestock industry. The resistance of farmers against a policy recently launched by the government to reduce the nitrogen levels near protected areas of nature, meanwhile, has led to a serious political crisis. The origins of the crisis that we are now encountering go back to the 1950s, when—exclusively for economic reasons—the large-scale industrialization of the agricultural sector was strongly promoted. The situation seriously worsened, resulting in the present ecological imbalance, when in following decades—fully in line with the neoliberal climate in the Netherlands—the agriculture sector expanded immensely (WUR 2022). The policy recently launched by the special “Secretary of Nitrogen” was an economic and technical device, without any attention to or appropriate measures for dealing with the emotional, welfare, and cultural aspects that have driven the perceptions and reactions of the farmers. Right now, the situation seems to have become almost a “cul-de-sac.” This example demonstrates that socioecological problems that have emerged because of the impacts of the Anthropocene also involve sociopolitical and socioeconomic dimensions. Critical sociocultural and welfare aspects have also been removed from the picture. This topical case shows that we must acknowledge the limitations of my natural scientifically and economically based perspective. I would like to express a plea that we seek analytical frameworks that enable a more comprehensive understanding of the problems we create as human beings.
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