Joe Bonometti on LFTR design at the first Thorium Energy Alliance Conference

Rob Morse on Thorium Reactors with out Formulas at the Frist Thorium Energy Alliance Conference

John Kutsch on a Thorium Energy future at Thorium Energy Alliance

Paul Houle on Computer simulation of LFTR designs at Thorium Energy Alliance Conference

David Le Blanc at the first Thorium Alliance Conference

James Kennedy on Rare Earths at first Thorium Energy Alliance Conference

Ralph Moir at the first Thorium Alliance Conference

No Silver Bullets for the RAE

The last two posts on Brave New Climate concern the future 0f energy in the United Kingdom. The most recent post by Barry Brook and Martin Nicholson discussed a thoroughly unimaginative report by the Royal Academy of Engineers, on the energy future of the UK.

The report suggested a range of energy options, without the slightest consideration of cost. The report further compounded its errors by writing off the very possibility of an all nuclear solution, by use of the catch phrase.

There is no single ‘silver bullet’ that will achieve the required cuts in emissions,

How do we know this? The report des not provide us with the slightest clue. The report also calls for stringent demand reduction measures, a scheme that is likely to fail.

I write in response to Brooks and Nicholson:

Why is it that the Royal Academy Engineers was not able to figure out what I was able to figure out in one afternoon in 2007? i never took one college hour in engineering, yet I figured out a way to make turning nuclear power into the very sort of silver bullet that the RAE denies exists. In one afternoon I was able to figure out how to answer all of the objections to nuclear power, including the cost objection, and to produce all of the nuclear power plants we need by 2050 with out breaking the bank, while assuring inherent reactor safety, solving the nuclear waste problem, assuring sustainable nuclear power, and decreasing the likelihood of nuclear war. What is more, once I came to these conclusions I looked around the Internet and discovered that other people had come to the same or similar conclusions.

The solution was quite simple. If you want to build a lot of industrial objects, you build them in factories. If you want to build a lot of reactors, you build them in factories. But how do transport a huge 1000 MW reactor out of the factory? The answer is that you don’t, you make the reactor small enough to transport by rail, barge or truck, say 100 MW. You can do things t make the reactor lighter too and if you make it less complex, it will cost less to build. I knew of such a reactor, an advanced reactor design that my father had spent 20 years working in developing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That was the Molten Salt Reactor.

i quickly realized that the MSR had the potential to answer all of the classic objections to nuclear power, and that it could be built in factories is sufficient numbers by 2050, to provide all of the worlds energy needs. Furthermore, the MSR could run on a thorium fuel cycle, in fact would run better on a thorium fuel cycle than on a uranium fuel cycle, and could be made to breed thorium until we ran out of thorium several billion years from now, thus rendering the “uranium is not sustainable” objection absurd.

Furthermore, the thorium breeding molten salt reactor, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LF’tR), could be operated at temperatures as high as 1200 C, hot enough to for many industrial process uses, hot enough to produce hydrogen.
I became convinced that mall LFTRs could be built in factories at low price, set up rapidly and could revolutionized the energy economy with a time frame of as little as ten years after the completion of LFTR development and the completion of a LFTR factory. I grew up in the shadow of the Manhattan Project. I knew and know what people are capable of accomplishing within a short time, if they set aside the business as usual model, and commit to an all out effort to develop new technology, Far more was accomplished in Oak Ridge between 1942 and 1945 than would be required to see hundreds of LFTRs rolling off assembly lines. But the will has to be there to accomplish it.

What the RAE lacks is a vision, and a willingness to commit to it.

How is Bonneville Power Administration wind doing?

Bright Source to cost $15,000 per kW

Earlier this week the New York Times titled Major California Solar Project Moves Ahead. The story reported that the US DoE had approved a $1.37 billion loan guarantee to BrightSource Energy, for the construction of the 392-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.
The story discussed that an environmental controversy involving had broken out the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity were objecting to the project for environmental reasons although at least in principle support solar energy projects. One has to ask where these distinguished environmental organizations think it would environmentally sound to bulldoze several square miles of desert habitat, and cover the denuded land with thousands of mirrors?

The Times story contained major flaws. as David Lewis noted in response:

If you take the $1.37 billion loan guarantee as the cost of the project, and NREL published data for the estimated yearly output in MWhr (1,079,232 per yr), this works out to $11,120 per available kWhr. But this project relies on a natural gas assist. From the California Energy Commission's webpage on the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System: "Each plant also includes a partial load natural gas fired steam boiler... for thermal input... during the morning start-up cycle... and during transient cloudy conditions". The gas fired assist explains how this plant can claim to be designed to produce power @ 31% capacity factor - a solar plant at that location could only be expected to produce 24% or so.

If you factor out the gas assist, you get actual low CO2 emission solar thermal power out of this thing for a mere $15,0000 per available kW, which is only THREE TIMES what it would cost to put in a nuke plant, if you assumed that Lester Brown is correct when he cites the Areva plant in Finland as the true "tombstone" poster plant that will kill the nuclear renaissance because it costs $5000 per available kW after the cost overruns are included

It would take about 11.7 of these Brightsource "392 MW" nameplate 123 MW actually available on average projects to equal the output of the far too expensive for Lester Brown to consider using Areva Finland nuke. Lester touts solar thermal, so, let's see, for a mere $16 billion or so, you could cover 75 square miles of places the Sierra Club, et al, say they don't want to see covered and use generating stations like these instead.

There was a reason that the Sierra Club used to support nuclear power.

Environmentalists continue to insist on their absurd argument that nuclear power is to expensive, while hiding the real cost of renewable power. The Times, of course, enables the confidence game.

Is a high energy, nuclear powered future incompatible with environmental values?

The mainstream of the environmentalist movement has repeatedly disgraced itself with a well nigh fanatic anti-nuclear stance. John McClaughry commented a couple of years ago,

Over Vermont's 230 years several strange political movements persisted long enough to enter the history books. Among them, anti-Masonry, the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement, and the Prohibition crusade all fizzled after initial successes.

The most notable fringe movement still alive today is the crusade against nuclear energy. It is, naturally, focused on Vermont's lone nuclear reactor, Vermont Yankee, that went on line in 1972.

In the face of all science, reason, and experience, the anti-nuclear zealots fiercely maintain that the Vernon nuclear power plant is a standing death threat against the population for miles around, that its pall of radiation will produce deformed children, and that the plant's present owner, Entergy, is a reckless and sinister enterprise making enormous profits while scornfully dismissing the concerns of its likely Vermont victims.

It should be noted that self-styled environmentalists are in the forefront of of the present Quixotic anti-Vermont Yankee crusade. Not long ago, I pointed to anti-nuclear fanaticism as a major cause of an impending breakdown of the Copenhagen climate change conference, which I correctly predicted.

The environmental community has promoted the view that nuclear power is unnecessary and dangerous, and even has called for the replacement of nuclear power plants with CO2 emitting natural gas fired power plants despite the fact that the natural gas extraction process as well as the use of natural gas in the home and in power plants is responsible for the emission of an enormous amount of dangerously radioactive radon gas. Indeed people are exposed to many times more radiation from natural gas than from nuclear power generation.

Environmentalists have repeatedly attacked nuclear power as too expensive, while disguising the fact that their own favored alternatives, including on shore wind, off shore wind, solar thermal and solar photovoltaic are more expensive than nuclear, and pose major reliability problems for a non-nuclear post-carbon the grid.

The purpose of Nuclear Green is not to attack environmentalism. Rather it is to recapture it from the horde of misanthropes, grafters, and ignoramuses, who currently lead most environmental organizations, and their brain dead followers, who recite 40 year old bumper sticker slogans , as if they were the last word on reality. Not only does these people misrepresent environmentalism, but their insane ideology is leading us into a major environmental disaster that could kill millions and perhaps billions of people while damaging the environment they tell us they want to save.

The most significant environmental problem we face in the 21st century is caused by the emission of carbon dioxide gas, a basic waste product of the present carbon based energy technology of the 20th century. Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that continued and rising amounts of Greenhouse emissions will inevitably lead to a significant climate change that would adversely effect global climate. By 1976 Oak Ridge scientists were predicting rising temperatures with greater temperature increases at higher latitudes. Among the accurate predictions that Oak Ridge scientist offered was decreased (global) ice and snow cover, changing cloud cover, localized droughts, with dropping lake levels, melting glaciers, and a long term potential for rising sea levels. I heard all of these long term treats discussed at ORNL in 1971. The Oak Ridge scientists forecast ed a global temperature rise of from 1 to 5 degrees K with each doubling of global temperature. Since that 1976 global atmospheric CO2 emissions have increased by 16% with a and there has been an increase in global temperatures that fall within that range.

None of these predictions have proven false. These ORNL global warming predictions were made at the time of the famous Newsweek Global cooling story. By the way the the environmentalists got things every bit as wrong as Newsweek did, In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote

The greenhouse effect is being enhanced now by the greatly increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the last century our burning of fossil fuels raised the level some 15%. The greenhouse effect today is being countered by low-level clouds generated by contrails, dust, and other contaminants that tend to keep the energy of the sun from warming the Earth in the first place.

At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump.

Other environmentalists were equally as clueless about the threat posed by CO2. In a 1976 review of Amory Lovins' (with John H. Price) book, "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES : The case for an ethicaI energy strategy." Alvin Weinberg chided Lovins for failing to consider the value of nuclear power as a CO2 mitigation tool.

energy itself is a villain: less energy is better than more energy, not merely because the environment can absorb only a limited energy load, but also because (p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.' High-energy futures mean centralised futures, and this is anathema to the authors (p ll0): an 'energy-intensive society' leads .to a highly centralized, highly bureaucratized, high technology society, very vulnerable to internal as well as external disruptions . . .'. . . . since nuclear energy is primarily a source of centralized electricity generation, the authors dislike of energy, electricity, and centralization merge in their dislike of nuclear energy, quite apart from whatever technical and social shortcomings it might have.

Weinberg was especially critical of Lovins attack on nuclear power for its waste heat, and pointed out the heat problem stemming from the discharge of 30 times more CO2 from the coal fuel cycle.

Lovins proposed the use of coal as a fission-free bridge to his soft-energy solutions, and Weinberg asked

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins responded to Weinberg's point that

Dr Weinberg and I both worry about the climatic effects of CO2 more than about those of heat release (which I nowhere claim is'an imminent danger'). Indeed, his group's recent studies show that rapid growth in energy (especially electricity) use means such a large coal burn that COz limits arrive discouragingly soon whether we use fission or not.

Yet despite his worry, Lovins seems not to have found a viable solution to the coal/CO2 problem during the next generation, when America and indeed the world, came increasingly to rely on the coal burning bridge while soft path electrical solutions were deployed much more slowly than Lovins had anticipated. Thus Weinberg's 1976 nuclear path would have undoubtedly lead to lower CO2 emissions that Lovins soft path did. Despite his mid 1970;s forecast that by 2010 CO2 emissions would be rapidly becoming a thing of the past, Lovins's soft path solution has so far failed to control CO2 emissions globally. Indeed in Europe the highest per capita CO2 emissions as well as the most expensive electricity is found in Denmark which has adopted Lovins soft path, while France, which has adopted Weinberg's nuclear path has far lower cost electricity and the lowest per capita CO2 emissions rates in Europe.

Thus we see that during the 1960's and 1970's Environmentalists greatly underestimated the CO2 problem while Oak Ridge scientists, including long time ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg did not. The anti-nuclear stance of self styled environmentalist was in fact far more damaging to the environment, via the CO2 and chemical emissions of fossil fuel burning energy technology, than the high nuclear energy option would have been. In practice Alvin Weinberg, was a far better environmentalist than Amory Lovins or Paul Ehrlich.

It is thus a huge environmental blunder to juxtapose nuclear power to environmental well being. Yet mainstream environmentalist continue to do make this mistake, much to the detriment of the environment, and further jeopardizing future success in the war against climate change. It is my view that environmentalism is a vitally important path to the human future, but that environmentalism has been hijacked by self styled environmentalists who are more interested in their own quixotic anti-nuclear agenda, than they are in dealing with major environmental issues like global climate change. Mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and Friends of the Earth, by their repeated attacks on nuclear power are placing the future of the environment as well as the future of the people who make the Earth their home in jeopardy.

Radon as harbinger of a cornucopia

Map of Natural Radioactivity in the United States
Joe Romm recently offered an interesting post on growing concerns about the environmental impact of fracking as a natural gas production method. I have been calling Joe's attention to the problem created by radioactive radon in the natural gas produced by fracking (hydrolic fracturing) of gas containing shale. There are dozens of radioactive waste cleanup sites in Texas, associated with the natural gas industry. The natural gas industry has largely kept the Texas radon problem largely hushed up. But elsewhere the problems are becoming increasingly well known.

A November 2009 story in Pro-Publica, titled Is New York’s Marcellus Shale Too Hot to Handle states,

The information comes from New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, which analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.

Not only is unsafe levels of radon coming up with water used in the fracking process, but it is also coming up with natural gas, and flowing into peoples homes through natural gas pipelines.According to the physics department of Idaho State University, Natural gas in the home is believed to produce an annual exposure of 9 mrem per year, while average home exposure to radiation from nuclear power plants is almost 100 times less dangerous. Amazingly, environmentalist who claim to be concerned about radiation problems related to nuclear power have ignored the radiation problems caused by natural gas, even though they are potentially far more deadly. Anti-nuclear organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace advocate putting more, rather than less highly radioactive natural gas into peoples homes, while opposing nuclear power which has been shown to pose far less radiation dangers than natural gas does, the New York state evidence suggests that natural gas produced by fraking may be much more dangerous than ordinary natural gas.

So where does the radon that seems to appear every time shalr rock formations are farked for natural gas, come from? According to a report from Commonwealth of Kentucky Geological Survey,

radioactive minreals uranium, radon, and thorium . . . occur in the black shale, which crops out in a horseshoe shape around central Kentucky, and in the phosphate deposits in the Lexington Limestone in central Kentucky.

The black shale is a marine, organic shale that contains many different kinds of minerals, including phosphates. The outcrop of the shale is extensive, and the high organic content makes the shale a good host for radioactive minerals. Uranium and thorium occur in the shale, and radon is a daughter product of the uranium in phosphates within the shale. The black shale also occurs in the subsurface in eastern and western Kentucky where it comes into contact with groundwater. In some areas of the state where there has been significant oil drilling, casing and pipes have become radioactively contaminated, which could cause secondary health hazards when humans come into contact with this drilling equipment.

So it is clear that the presence of radon indicates the presence of uranium and/or thorium, and since radon has no other natural source, finding a lot of radon, enough to be dangerous means that a lot of uranium and/or thorium must be around.

In situ mining is a very old technology. Copper has been mined in situ for at least 1000 years and quite possibly for 2000 years in China. In order to mine in situ. a leaching solution is pumped through resource baring permeable rocks. The resource mineral or minerals are dissolved in the leach solution and then pumped to the surface. Many uranium mines now use in situ leaching technologies as a means of uranium recovery.

From the viewpoint of energy investment, in situ mining has a big advantage over the pick and shovel type traditional mining. Yes I know, they don't use picks and shovels any more, but they still dig, and pull large amounts of material out of the earth. Digging and pulling material out of the ground, and then milling it, and disposing of the waste is energy intensive, especially when you are dealing with low grade ore. In situ mining, however, is not energy intense. Thus so called low grade ores can be mined by in situ mining without huge energy costs. There are of course challenges with approach. A major limitation to the in situ approach would seem to be that while there is a whole lot of uranium and thorium locked up in shale rock, shale is not permeable, and thus not currently seen as a candidate for in situ mining. That is where frarking comes in.

What a fracking does is to fracture shale and other rocks, that is to make them permeable. So it is possible to frake uranium/thorium baring shale, and then mine them in situ? Why not? We are not looking for a technological break through, just the wedding of two proven technologies. That looks like a slame dunk.

There is no reason why granite could not be also mined for minerals in sutu, and fracking has been used to mine granite already. Still, I suspect that a whole lot more research would be required on fracking granite before the fracking/in situ technology would be used, but the research hardly need take a long time, and fracking/in situ mining of granite can yield enormous amounts of Uranium and thorium plus many valuable metals and other minerals.

Among the common elements often found in shale in recoverable amounts are , vnadium, magnesium, copper, chromium, zinc, nickel, iron, aluminum and phosphorus.

if you would like to confirm the presence of Uranium and/or thorium an granite, there is a simple experiment that you could perform. Take a Geiger counter to a cemetery, and start checking granite tombstones for radiation. Some, although not all will show up as radioactive. The same thing will be true for granite in public building and countertops. In addition to thorium and uranium many granites contain recoverable amounts of Tantalum, Niobium. Titanium, Zirconium, Hafnium. and Yttrium, beryllium, and other rare earths. Clearly then the in situ mining of granites for actinides would yield a wealth of other mineral riches.

Let us now take a look at the big picture. The world Thorium and Uranium is for all practical purposes a sustainable energy resource. They can be mined from shale with very favorable energy return on energy Invested (EROEI). In addition to uranium and thorium a number of valuable minerals can be recovered in the same mining process with little to no further energy investment. Uranium and thorium recovery is also possible through in situ mining of some granite with a favorable EROEI. Many valuable minerals could also be recovered from the granite along with uranium and thorium with little to no further energy investment,

These findings are inconsistent with the neo-Malthusian view that we will soon run out of mineral resources. Indeed my conclusion is that the world can continue to supply abundant energy and material resources that will not be exhausted for as long as people live on it.

The Sierra Club with strings attached

2008 was a bad year for hedge funds, according to Hedge Fund Review,

The hedge fund industry concluded 2008 with investors withdrawing a record $152 billion in capital in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to data released by Hedge Fund Research. The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index fell by 18.3% percent for all of 2008, only the second calendar year decline since 1990.

This capital outflow followed a record year of capital inflows in 2007, during which $194 billion of new capital came into the industry. When combined with the negative performance-based asset flow, total capital invested in the hedge fund industry declined to $1.4 trillion at the end of 2008, a decline of $525 billion from the peak of $1.93 trillion, recorded at mid-year 2008.

According to Market Folly,

Well, here's some overtly optimistic news about the hedge fund industry. That is, if you're a believer that consolidation is natural and healthy. "Only the strongest will survive."

693+ hedge funds were liquidated in the 3rd quarter of 2008 alone. That figure represents around 7% of the industry. When we first started to see signs of massive redemptions coming back in October, we knew it had the potential to get pretty ugly. It did.

Among those who suffered from the downturn was David Gelbaum according to a recent story in the New york Times,

A longtime anonymous donor to the American Civil Liberties Union has withdrawn his annual gift of more than $20 million, punching a 25 percent hole in its annual operating budget and forcing cutbacks in operations.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, acknowledged in a written statement that a "family" had told the organization in September that it could not make its annual gifts, at least for next year.

"This family, that has sought to protect its privacy by arranging its gifts anonymously, notified us last month that due to market conditions it will be unable to make its expected sizable donations of over $20 million," Mr. Romero said.

ACLU board members, who insisted on anonymity because the loss of the gift was reported in an executive session of their meeting, identified the donor as David Gelbaum, who made a fortune as a hedge fund manager and is now better known as a major investor in clean technology.

The Times story continued,

Mr. Romero told the organization’s national board about the loss of Mr. Gelbaum's money at its last board meeting in October, breaking the news in executive session. Mr. Romero did not reveal Mr. Gelbaum's name, describing him only as "a donor," board members said

Still, it is hard to keep secrets with a board of more than 80 members, most of whom report to state affiliates. "As soon as he started telling us, anyone who had a laptop with them was busy Googling" and figured out who the donor was, a national board member said.

Mr. Romero told the board that the donor had also stopped giving to three "sister organizations," a phrase board members said he had used in the past to describe other groups with which the ACLU has collaborated, like the Sierra Club.

Mr. Gelbaum took a rare turn in the spotlight earlier this decade when environmental activists said he was behind the Sierra Club’s decision to adopt a neutral stance on immigration. Some people believe immigration has aggravated environmental problems.

He had given the organization a total of $101.5 million, according to The Los Angeles Times, which wrote what is perhaps the only major profile of him, in 2004. In the article, he is quoted as saying that he told Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s executive director, in 1994 or 1995 "that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me."

Readers of the times story might be shocked to learn that the fabled ACLU, a civil rights organization, regarded the 740,000 member semi-elitist Sierra Club was a sister organization.

According to a statement by Gelbaum, between 2005 and 2009 he had donated $94 million to the ACLU, and $48 million to the Sierra Club. It would appear that the sisterhood of the ACLU and the Sierra Club was in no small measure due to Gelbaum's financial influence.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said of Gelbaum,

David Gelbaum is one of America's greatest heroes – an unassuming man with a spectacularly generous spirit. Every American should be grateful for the selfless commitment to improving the lives of others demonstrated by this remarkable man.

An extensive account of Gelbaum appeared in the LA Times, in 2004. There is little doubt that Mr. Gelbaum is an extraordinary man, who has contributed somewhere between $250 million dollars to charitable efforts to aid military families impacted by Bush II era military deployments. The LA Times story quoted Gelbaum as saying,

I did tell (Sierra Club Executive Director) Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.

There seems little reason to doubt that Gelbaum was passionately committed to the protection of the rights of undocumented aliens. But when Gelbaum pledged to donate $200 million to the Sierra Club, there was an overt string to the donation, the threat to withdraw unfulfilled parts of the pledge, if the group deviated from his stipulation about immigration rights. The LA Times explained,

Gelbaum, who reads the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion and is married to a Mexican American, said his views on immigration were shaped long ago by his grandfather, Abraham, a watchmaker who had come to America to escape persecution of Jews in Ukraine before World War I.

"I asked, 'Abe, what do you think about all of these Mexicans coming here?' " Gelbaum said. "Abe didn't speak English that well. He said, 'I came here. How can I tell them not to come?'

"I cannot support an organization that is anti-immigration. It would dishonor the memory of my grandparents."

Here we have a sticky issue of language, money offered in an attempt to influence behavior or opinion can be legitimately be called a bribe. It is not illegal to make an offer to give money to a non governmental organization, with stipulations about that organization's conduct, but not all bribes are illegal. And thus there was nothing illegal about David Gelbaum's threat to not give money to the Sierra Club unless certain conditions about the Club's official position on immigration were meet, and Gelbaum's subsequent offer to give the Club $200 million.

Pope and other Sierra club leaders were aware of Gelbaum's other interests. Through his Venture capital firm, Quercus Trust. Quercus Trust is the second or third largest "green" venture capital firm, and it is heavily invested in solar technology. A business that was heavily invested in Green Technology:

I doubt that Gelbaum would have stipulated to Pope that the $200 million also depended on he Sierra Club's protection of his green investments, but Pope could infer that if Gelbaum would have stopped donating his $200 million to the Sierra Club over immigration, adopting policies that undermined Gelbaum's solar investments was a no-go. A tacit bribe is one that need not be acknowledged, or even understood by either party, under the circumstances of the Gelbaum pledge to the Sierra Club neither not only was the condition not discussed, but neither Pope nor Gelbaum was probably aware of the string, but if the thought of altering the club's stance toward nuclear power ever came to Pope's mind, the possible effect on Gelbaum's gift, and its consequences for the Cub would have also been a consideration. No one could ever say that David Gelbaum had bought the Sierra Club's conscience on energy issues, but in a way, subtly and probably without thinking, he had. Without thinking about it, Gelbaum had rendered a change in the Sierra Club's position on energy, and in particular nuclear energy unthinkable.

Children of the Club of Rome

Sarah Palin's story that Obama's health care legislation called for death panels to determine who would receive medical care, and who would simply be allowed to die in the new medical order, has rightly been described as the lie of the year for 2009. However, a recent post on the Oil Drum by Megan Quinn Bachman tells us that a form of death panels is emerging among people who believe that the Ehrlich/Forrester/Meadows/Club of Rome theory of global collapse of industrial civilization/resources/population . The post, titled "Leading the Way to a Low-Energy Future" describes what Bachman calls lifestyle leaders. Lifestyle leaders are people who are

building gardens, weatherizing their homes, getting rid of their cars, moving off-grid, bartering with neighbors and joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

According to Bachman these lifestyle leaders are pioneering the new order by forging a new set of careers appropriate to the new post civilization order:

I would argue that these people, the Children of the Club of Rome, are the death panels for hundreds of millions if not billions of people. Yet the Club of Rome model predicts a mass human die off:

Thus Bachman's lifestyle leaders are preparing for a Club of Rome apocalypse, which features mass human die off.
I am fond of Gail the Actuary (Gail E. Tverberg), an Oil Drum Editor who is associated with the "we are headed for collapse" point of view. i see Gail's work as having a positive aspect in that she and her guest posters repeatedly point to problems which are otherwise unvoiced. i do disagree with some assumptions and with the chain of argument which inevitably leads to negative conclusions about the future of a high population, materially wealthy civilization. I disagree with the view that the collapse of material civilization is inevitable. In addition I view the projected collapse of material civilization as an unmitigated catastrophe. This is what Chris Clugston suggests:

i disagree with this perspective because it assumes a far more limited future resource picture than I do. My viewpoint can be stated simply, we are not running out of energy, material resources, or food. A combination of two technologies, Hydraulic Fracturing (fracking), and in-situ leaching, offers the potential for high material resource recovery with favorable EROEI, from what was previously considered low grade ore. It is inevitable that the use of such recovery technologies will be applied to resource recovery, and the recovery of Uranium and thorium as part of the process will assure a favorable EROEI. Both fracking and in-situ leaching are highly tested technologies and thus appear to offer a path to a continuation of high energy/high material output civilization. Through the use of efficient and safe technologies like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, the population of earth can be assured of a high level of material prosperity for as long as there is likely to be people around.

Thus the future resource picture may not be nearly as bleak as Gail the Actuary and her associates would have us believe. Nor is the supposed mega-famine, which Paul Ehrlich, Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome have predicted, nearly as likely to occur, as they suggest. Ehrlich's famine predictions were thwarted by the so called "Green Revolution," which dramatically increased agricultural yields in countries like India.

A recent review of global agricultural resources, published in Science, titled "Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People." argues,

the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is used more efficiently and equitably. A multifaceted and linked global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security, . . ..

Thus in a high energy uranium/thorium based economy, the food supply is likely to be continue to be assured. The argument for the inevitable collapse of civilization can be falsified with some certainty, the impending image of mass death through the starvation of most people can be written off as a fantasy. Bachman's "lifestyle leaders"can be seen for what they are, a misanthropic death panel for the human race, whose lifestyle will turn against them as the population of earth continues to survive and increasingly prosper.

The Club of Rome Faces the Yellow Reril

The Limits To Growth was just the first of many Club or Rome Reports, but on other CoR created the sensation that LtG did. In away the success of the LtG made the Club of Rome Famous, but it also tied the Club to the Neo-malthuesian vision of Jay Forrester, and that vision created both problems and opportunities for the club. We have seen that Forrester's model was seriously flawed, both in ints design and in its execution. Fundamental assumptions of the the original Forrester model became the conclusions of the LtG. Forrester reached the hasty conclusion that all resources were being consumed at an unsustainable rate by industrial civilization, without sufficient evidence. In fact, the resource situation is far more complex than Forrester assumed and some earth resources are sufficiently abundant to be sustainable over a very long period of time. Uranium and thorium are sustainable with positive energy return on energy invested even at average crustal concentrations. If uranium and/or thorium were to be mined from "low grade concentrations"sources such as shale or granite, valuable minerals like phosphate could be recovered at little extra cost. Hence a uranium or thorium based economy would offer a sustainable source of the very resources that Forrester and the LtG assumed were about to exhausted.

The potentials of a uranium and thorium based economy were not unknown at the time of the publication of the LtG, so why was the resource potential of uranium or thorium acknowledged by the LtG and the Club of Rome? I have no definitive answer, but I would like to point to the anti-nuclear moral panic which gripped Western Civilization beginning in the late 1960's. There is little reason to doubt that the anti-nuclear moral panic influenced the Club of Rome's judgement about the desirability of a nuclear future. We have some evidence for this from the Source Watch entry on Carl Johan Friedrich Böttche, a Club of Rome co-founder.

Frits Böttcher is in his country a well known skeptic about the greenhouse effect. Böttcher stated during a discussion on televion about the greenhouse effect that there was no carbon dioxide problem. Another member of that discussion asked him after the broadcast was over, "You do know that's incorrect, don't you?" to which Böttcher replied "Yes, but I am against nuclear power energy."

The LtG became poplar because it neatly packaged several moral panics. Population and pollution were already the subject of major moral panics by the time thew LtG was published. Moral panics all follow a simple formula, X is a worsening problem that is “getting out of hand” and threatens public wellbeing. We need to do something about X now. Moral panics are ideological and political tools. And indeed we often see the public being manipulated by competing moral panics in the media. For example, there is a moral panic about Anthropogenic Global Warming, and a conflicting moral panic that insists that AGW is a hoax.

Some moral panics are derived from valid concerns, while some are baseless. Thus, as formulated in the late 1960's and early 1970's the moral panic about pollution was greatly overstated. Pollution problems were being addressed al over the Industrial world as a result of the killer London Smog of 1952. Pollution is in 2010 still a problem, but far less of a problem than it was in 1970. Forrester's model wrongly predicted increasing "pollution" would increase between 1970 and 2010. But what about CO2, hasn't CO2 atmospheric concentrations increased since 1970? Yes it has, but CO2 was not what Forrester or the Club of Rome understood by pollution in 1960's and 1970.

A second Moral Panic that effucted Forrester and the LtG was the overpopulation panic which was triggered by the 1968 publication of the Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich. Indeed, Forrester's World Dynamics appears to have a most unfortunate affinity for Ehrlich population theories. Now there is little doubt that Ehrlich's theory was absurdly mistake. Ehrlich had predicted,

“In the 1970’s, the world will undergo famines hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death … At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate …”

Of course the huge wave of famine with hundreds of millions of deaths never happened. But facts are such little trivial things, At least Jay Forrester had the good sense die before his great famine had been forecasted by the computer. Perhaps the reason Ehrlich was in such a hurry was that he was being spurred on by David Brower.

Ehrlich introduced the concept that

I = P × A × T (where I = Environmental Impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology)

This formula lacks empirical foundation and there is ample evidence that a relatively small number of nomadic sheep and goat herders,can cause enormous environmental damage. The controversial theory that Mayan Civilization collapsed for ecological reasons, actually entails a collapse with what amounted to stone age technology, since the Mayans lacked metal tools and had draft animals wheeled transportation, or simple mechanical devices like pulleys. Thus if the collapse of Mayan civilization can be attributed to an environmental collapse due to exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, advance technology would not have played a big role in that disaster. Finally, demographers have demonstrated that affluence appears to bring, if anything, population stabilization, and even long term population declines, not from starvation, disease and war, but from decreased reproduction. Despite a population growth rate that has tripled the number of people in India since 1960's Ehrlich's projected famines and population collapse shows no sign of appearing. Thus it would appear that Ehrlich has greatly underestimated the carrying capacity of India soil.

Indian economist Amartya Sen noted something that Ehrlich ignored, namely

90 percent of which is taking place in the developing countries.

Yet the moral panic about population growth occurred in

the richer countries of the world and has much to do with the current anxiety in the West about the "world population problem."

What is the black box called "the population explosion hiding? According to Sen, it is

belief that destitution caused by fast population growth in the third world is responsible for the severe pressure to emigrate to the developed countries of Europe and North America. In this view, people impoverished by overpopulation in the "South" flee to the "North." Some have claimed to find empirical support for this thesis in the fact that pressure to emigrate from the South has accelerated in recent decades, along with a rapid increase in the population there.

Sen points to the source of the Western anxiety,

Fears of Being Ungulfed

A closely related issue concerns what is perceived as a growing "imbalance" in the division of the world population, with a rapidly rising share belonging to the third world. That fear translates into worries of various kinds in the North, especially the sense of being overrun by the South. Many Northerners fear being engulfed by people from Asia and Africa, whose share of the world population increased from 63.7 percent in 1950 to 71.2 percent by 1990, and is expected, according to the estimates of the United Nations, to rise to 78.5 percent by 2050 AD.

It is easy to understand the fears of relatively well-off people at the thought of being surrounded by a fast growing and increasingly impoverished Southern population. As I shall argue, the thesis of growing impoverishment does not stand up to much scrutiny; but it is important to address first the psychologically tense issue of racial balance in the world (even though racial composition as a consideration has only as much importance as we choose to give it). Here it is worth recollecting that the third world is right now going through the same kind of demo-graphic shift—a rapid expansion of population for a temporary but long stretch—that Europe and North America experienced during their industrial revolution. In 1650 the share of Asia and Africa in the world population is estimated to have been 78.4 percent, and it stayed around there even in 1750.7 With the industrial revolution, the share of Asia and Africa diminished because of the rapid rise of population in Europe and North America; for example, during the nineteenth century while the inhabitants of Asia and Africa grew by about 4 percent per decade or less, the population of "the area of European settlement" grew by around 10 percent every decade.

Even now the combined share of Asia and Africa (71.2 percent) is considerably below what its share was in 1650 or 1750. If the United Nations' prediction that this share will rise to 78.5 percent by 2050 comes true, then the Asians and the Africans would return to being proportionately almost exactly as numerous as they were before the European industrial revolution. There is, of course, nothing sacrosanct about the distributions of population in the past; but the sense of a growing "imbalance" in the world, based only on recent trends, ignores history and implicitly presumes that the expansion of Europeans earlier on was natural, whereas the same process happening now to other populations unnaturally disturbs the "balance."

Thus behind Ehrlich's Population Bomb, behind Forrester's World Dynamic Model, and behind the Club of Rome's fear of uncontrolled global economic development is the Western fear of loss of control to the Asian other, fear of the Yellow Peril.

Aurelio Peccei's Flawed Vision and The Club or Rome

The Limits of Growth was the first report to the Club of Rome, and it appears to have established an enduring slant to beliefs about the future subsequently. The current Club of Rome internet site states:

It is clear that the present path of world development is not sustainable in the longer term, even if we recognise the enormous potentials of the market and of technological innovation. New ideas and strategies will be needed to ensure that improved living conditions and opportunities for a growing population across the world can be reconciled with the conservation of a viable climate and of the fragile ecosystems on which all life depends. A new vision and path for world development must be conceived and adopted if humanity is to surmount the challenges ahead.

At this point I I would like to point out who the Club of Rome is, and who they are not. The Club of Rome is composed of a small circler of wealthy, powerful and influential people. Its self conceived mission is

"to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public." Its activities should: "adopt a global perspective with awareness of the increasing interdependence of nations. They should, through holistic thinking, achieve a deeper understanding of the complexity of contemporary problems and adopt a trans-disciplinary and long-term perspective focusing on the choices and policies determining the destiny of future generations."

Leadership of the Club of Rome appears to be Eurocentric.

At present the Club has two Co-Presidents, Dr. Ashok Khosla of India and Dr. Eberhard von Koerber of Germany, and two Vice-Presidents, Professor Heitor Gurgulino de Souza of Brazil and Dr. Anders Wijkman of Sweden. The work of the International Club is supported by a small secretariat in Winterthur, Canton Zurich, Switzerland under the leadership of Martin Lees of the United Kingdom.

In case you are wondering about Ashok Khosla, his biography states,

Ashok Khosla is one of world's leading experts on the environment and sustainable development. A former director of the United Nations Environment Programme, he was awarded the 2002 Sasakawa Environment Prize - "the Nobel Prize of the environment world" - and has been named in the UNEP's Global 500 Roll of Honour.

Born in Kashmir in 1940, the son of a university professor and a college lecturer, Khosla gained a masters degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University before going on to do a PhD in experimental physics at Harvard.
After a period teaching in the United States - he was part of the team that designed and taught Harvard's inaugural undergraduate course on the environment - he returned to his native India where he became the founding director of the Indian government's Office of Environmental Planning and Co-Ordination, the first such agency in a developing country.

In 1976 he was appointed director of the UNEP, where he designed and launched Infoterra, the global environmental information exchange. He remained with the UNEP until 1982 when he left to found Development Alternatives, a Delhi-based Non-Governmental Organization devoted to promoting commercially viable, environmentally friendly technologies.

He has been a board member of numerous global environmental organizations - including the Club of Rome, the World Conservation Union and the International Institute for Sustainable Development - and served as an adviser to, among others, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and the Indian government.

In his presentation speech for the Sasakawa Award Klaus Toepfler, Executive Director of the UNEP, described Khosla as "a legend in the realm of sustainable development, and an individual who personifies the hopes and dreams of billions trapped in the indignity of acute deprivation."

He lives in Delhi.

Heitor Gurgulino de Souza is a former Rector of the United Nations University, a think tank in Japan., as well as a Special Advisor to the Director-General of UNESCO,.

I do not subscribe to conspiratorial interpretations of the Club of Rome, but its limitations are obvious. Women are underrepresented as are Asians and arguably scientists. The Club of Rome claims to be

"a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity and acting as a catalyst to stimulate public debate, to sponsor investigations and analyses of the problematique and to bring these to the attention of decision makers".

Infact there is scant evidence that the Club of Rome even attempsts to foster debate. For example, the Club of Rome still maintaining that the findings of the Limits of Growth were valid despite the currently accept view that the Forrester/Meadows model was deeply flawed and used an unsatisfactory quality data set. The actual quality of the model was unimportant to the Club of Rome however, what was important was the argument that humanity needs to re-evaluate its exploitative attitude towards humans and the earth. The fundamental vision of the Club of Rome appears to have been Peccei's vision.

The Club of Rome's view of its mission was clearly outlined in a 1979 speech by Club founder Aurelio Peccei:

The purpose of this project is to bring to the forefront two intertwined questions which are fundamental for the survival and development of humankind.

One is whether what we call progress is perhaps so hectic and haphazard that world populations are utterly confused and out of step with the waves of change it causes for better or for worse. The idea implicit in this question is that, though highly advanced in other ways, modem men and women are as yet unable to grasp fully the meaning and consequences of what they are doing. Failing to understand the mutations they bring about in the natural environment and their own condition, they come to be increasingly at odds with the real world. This is the human gap - already large and dangerous, and yet destined almost inevitably to get much wider.

The second question, then, is whether present trends can be controlled and the gap bridged before a tragic and grotesque fate overtakes homo sapiens. To give a positive answer to this question, one must assume that the human being possesses still untapped resources of vision and creativity as well as moral energies which can be mobilized to bail humankind out of its predicament. This may indeed seem a far- fetched assumption, but many of us consider it perfectly valid. The average person, even when living in deprivation and obscurity, is endowed with an innate brain capacity, and hence a learning ability, which can be stimulated and enhanced far beyond the current relatively modest levels.

First, Peccei assumes that he understands the grand sweep of human history, and that he possess the insight required to identify mistakes in human thought and action. In other words Peccei is making grandiose assertions. Secondly, Peccei asks if human beings possess "untapped resources of vision and creativity as well as moral energies"needed to solve the problems he envisions. While there is little doubt that improving education world wide, and greatly increasing human access to educational opportunities is highly desirable, improving the the education of world's population might not produce the sort of agreement about the "human situation" which Peccei seemingly anticipates. Indeed as Peccie unfolds his vision it becomes increasingly open to question.

For quite a while, humanity thought that in this way it had discovered an optimal pattern of steady, self-propelling development. We were all proud of a civilization highlighted by unprecedented scientific achievement, wonderful technology and a flood of mass-production which brought in their stride higher standards of life, the conquest of disease, undreamed-of travel opportunities and instant audiovisual communications.

But it eventually began to dawn on us that by the indiscriminate adoption of this pattern we were all too often paying exorbitant social or ecological costs for improvements obtained, and were even induced to neglect the virtues and values which are the foundations of a healthy society and at the same time the very salt for the quality of life. Then came the creeping doubt that for all its greatness humanity lacked wisdom.

First, we must ask if Peccei over rates the human ability to foresee the consequences of its haphazard decisions and underrate the human ability to successfully adapt to those consequences as they emerge. We have to ask what Peccei envisions as the human and ecological consequence of modernity. First, premodern human economies were also capable of producing significant environmental feedback as a 2000 report by the state of Israel on the On the Implementation Of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification noted,

The arid regions of Israel suffered natural soil erosion due to climate change during early historical times, and ancient Negev populations invested commendable terracing efforts to halt this erosion and to develop run-off agriculture there. From the dawn of history nearly all parts of the country have been under intensive land use by humans, including pastoralism and cropping, though evidence for desertification or the lack of it during historical times is not conclusive. During the turn of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century exploitation of woody and herbaceous vegetation especially in the dry subhumid areas, for firewood and due to grazing, caused severe soil erosion and significant degradation of vegetation. Many lowland regions have become waterlogged and salinized. It is not known whether or not semi-arid drylands suffered desertification at that time.

The report does not elaborate on the relationship of grazing practices to desertification, but these are well documented elsewhere. "Wildlife", and Internet site states.

In the Near East, the plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers formed the ancient region of Mesopotamia. This area was known for its agricultural wealth, but it became an early victim of desertification brought about by humans.

Ancient farmers knew that periodically leaving land fallow or unplanted, helped to renew the soil’s fertility. But they stopped this practice so that they could grow more crops.

After 3000 B.C. irrigation be-came more widespread, proba-bly in response to a population increase. As a result, the soil be-came exhausted. Its fertility was also decreased by a buildup of salts left behind by evaporated irrigation water. Eventually the once lush plains became a des-ert, and the ancient Mesopo-tamian civilization collapsed.
____________________________________________________________________

At one time the lands north of Africa’s Sahara Desert supported a wide range of wildlife. Ancient rock paintings, murals in tombs, and Roman mosaics all depict deer and gazelle in grasslands, with predators such as leopards and lions hunting them.

Under Roman rule, North Africa produced vast quantities of cereal grains such as barley and wheat. However, centuries of overgrazing by cattle, as well as harm to shrubs and trees by goats, have combined with climatic shifts to erode the land and destroy wildlife. Tunisia, for example, has lost approximately half its arable land.

Some scientists believe desertification reintorce itself intensifying the changes in the climate. Whenever vegetation is destroyed on a large, long-term scale, ground temperature rise and rainfall decreases. In 1969 the Israelis built a fence across the Sinai-Negev Desert between Israel and Egypt. On one side the Egyptians continued grazing camels, sheep, and goats. On the other side the Israelis left the land uncultivated, and wild plants began to take hold. Satellite photographs re-veal dark patches of vegetation under hazy cloud cover on the Israeli side but a clear sky and a desert in the making on the Egyptian side.

Thus the ecological damage caused by modern agricultural practices must be measured against the ecological damage caused by traditional practices of agriculture. Neither is desirable, but the superior resources available to modern agriculturalists, would appear to make mitigation more likely. A recent Chinese report of the mitigation of agriculture related desertification states,

Transforming the traditional resource-consuming agriculture into modern agriculture is the only choice and fundamental way to improve agricultural and ecological conditions in the Northwest.
Modern agriculture is a resource-saving and technology-intensive industry run by intensive management with the combination of planting, breeding, processing, trading, manufacturing and farming. The traditional way of extensive cultivation and management as well as the divorce of agriculture from animal husbandry must be replaced by the concept of modern agriculture. Only in this way, can the course of industrial management and adjustment of the agricultural structure be advanced, and a technology-industry system will come out of the combination of animal husbandry, cultivation of herbage, farming of fine breeds of livestock, water conservancy, processing of agricultural products, and management of agricultural energy.

Both irrigation- and rainfall-dependent agriculture can form an expanding agro-pastoral circle centered on villages or oases, which is the outcome of harmonized relations between human and nature, and an optimized man-made ecosystem suitable for natural and cultural environments in the Northwest.

If switching from grazing to rearing sheep in folds is to tackle the problems of desertification and degeneration of the grassland at the root on a large scale, speeding up the construction of modern agriculture is to resolve the issues of ecological improvement and agricultural development in the Northwest at a higher level. As fundamental measures to combat desertification, raising sheep in pens, stopping cultivating and grazing, and promoting the course of modern agriculture are emphases for the investment of capital and technology and deserve favorable policies.

Thus not only may traditional agriculture cause far more ecological damage than modern agricultural practices, but modern agricultural practices offer routes to mitigation of the damages caused by traditional practices.

I call attention to the desertification issue because it suggests modernity itself may not be a cause of all or even most human ecological problems. Furthermore attempts to fight pollution go back to the Middle ages. in 1271 King Edward I, of England banned the burning of coal on penalty of torture and death. Yet despite repeated royal efforts, coal use was not controled in the United Kingdom until the infamous London smog of 1952 killed 3000 people in London. Similar conditions exist in contemporary China, which appears to be the pollution problems earlier experienced in Europe and North America, during their earlier periods of industrialization.

Several observations suggest that Peccei's thought was in many respects conventional. For example, Peccei claimed,

Tangles of mutually reinforcing old and new problems, too complex to be apprehended by the current analytical methods and too tough to be attacked by traditional policies and strate- gies, were clustering together, heedless of boundaries and plaguing all nations, whether developed or developing, and whatever their political regime and societal structure.

But while it is true, that Peccei have to offer? He offered a dump of bad data into a Jay Forrester's poorly conceived and untested World Dynamics model. Peccei appears totaly unaware of the 1960's critic of unsophisticated use of computer tools, >garbage in, garbage out." Peccei himself acknowledged the problem, stating that it was

well-nigh impossible to draw a map of this complicated web of problems or to perceive the most virulent knots, . . .

Peccei suggested,

even ordinary people feel just how formidable the threat is becoming. They realize that increasing world disorder and real or feared scarcities of natural resources exacerbate political tensions and trigger military build-ups of dementia1 proportions, stifling peaceful development;

Peccei's statement is flawed in multiple ways. Were people more concerned about progress than in the past? How did Peccei know this? Peccei delivered this speech in 1979 as the arms race was winding down. and the cold war was beginning to loose its edge, yet Peccei chose to focus on Cold War issues. Today some 30 years later, material scarcities are still with us, but they do not seem to be propelling an arms race. Complaints about international conflict have been replaced by complaints about "globalization," a form of peaceful international economic development.

Thus we must ask, "on what grounds did Pecceie articulate his 1979 claim that

In overall terms, while apparently still advancing, humankind is now actually losing ground, and is going through a phase of cultural, spiritual and ethical, if not also existential, ecline - thus turning the gap into a chasm.

It would appear that Peccei great intellectual gift was to boil down complex problems to to overly simple general statements, that is Peccei was given to hasty generalizations. These generations glar at us in Peccei's list of global problems,

might is right the myth of national sovereignty but aggravates the inequalities among states, while social injustice coupled with inefficient, often corrupt institutions breeds civil violence, which readily expands internationally; that polluted and impoverished environments, besides vitiating our life, also drag the economy downwards at a time when recession and inflation already conflow into stagflation, spawning unemployment, frustration and still more tension and disorder - and so on and so forth.

Peccei is clearly a "glass is half empty" sort of guy. It is clear that the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the very sort of progress

And conspicuously absent from Peccei's list are the condition of women in traditionally societies - an issue avoided by the male dominated Club of Rome. Also absent is the issue of religious persecution and religious inspired conflict and violence. Rather than loosing ground, the economies of India and china, and the well being of their people appear to have rapidly gained rather than lost ground during the last decade.

Thus it is clearly open to question whether Peccei's vision could have been said to be true in 1979, and even more questionable today.

Elites and World Future: The Club of Rome

There is little doubt that the Club of Rome is an organization of elites. The original founders included Fiat executive, Aurelio Peccei. whose 1965 speech to a group of international Bankers, who were meeting to consider measures to help Latin American economies. Peccei's speech caught the attention of a number of people who could be characterized as possessing elite status, including American secretary of State Dean Rusk. Jermen Gvishiani, Soviet leader Alexey Kosygin's son-in-law and vice-chairman of the State Committee on Science and Technology of the Soviet Union, and Alexander King, by then Director General for Scientific Affairs for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Club of Rome movement quickly attracted many individuals about whom worlds like distinguished, famous, wealthy and powerful applied: An early Club of Rome Executive Committee included:

Belisario Betancur ex-President of Colombia

Umberto Colombo ex Minister of Research and Universities of Italy

Orio Giarini Secretary General of the Geneva Association

Bohdan Hawrylyshyn Chairman,Council of Advisers of the Parliament of Ukraine

Alexander King co-founder of the Club of Rome

Yotaro Kobayashi President of Fuji Xerox

Eberhard von Koerber President of ABB Europe

Ruud Lubbers ex-Prime Minister of the Netherlands

Manfred Max-Neef Rector, Universidad Australe de Chile

Samuel Nana Sinkam FAO Director for Congo

Ilya Prigogine Nobel Laureate

Right from the start participants in the Club of Rome viewed themselves as epistemologically privileged. There was an assumption to knowledge that greatly exceeded the groups intellectual capital. This claim to knowledge clearly appears in the group's charter document, "The Predicament of Mankind".

That statement begins:

As in every epoch of its existence, mankind today finds itself in a particular "situation".

Of course, but as a statement of fact, this is both pompous and trivial. The statement added

In some deep sense our situation compels us to animate and perpetuate it almost blindly, and thus to move toward a future whose shape or quality we do not comprehend, whose surprises we have not succeeded in reducing to a rational frame of ideas, whose complexities we are not in the least sure of being able to control.

This is of course nothing that the Philosopher Hegel had not already said one hundred and fifty years before, but Hegel would have added, people are not going to figure out what their situation is until after they are out of it. Hegel lived in a period when the limitations of knowledge was an important intellectual issue. The founders of the Club of Rome were not nearly as circumspect. they stated,

In some deep sense our situation compels us to animate and perpetuate it almost blindly, and thus to move toward a future whose shape or quality we do not comprehend, whose surprises we have not succeeded in reducing to a rational frame of ideas, whose complexities we are not in the least sure of being able to control.

Here we have a complaint about Hegel's dilemma, but not Hegel's acknowledgement that a way of life has to be dying before it can be understood or controlled.

The statement tells us,

There are, however, a few basic perceptions that possess both wide currency and increasing persuasiveness, by means of which people in many different walks of life have begun to apprehend the nature of this situation. It is thanks to such perceptions that we have come to recognize the forces that hold us in their grip as arising from what we have long recognized as being the very source of our power and achievement --at least in those countries where the industrial mode of life has flourished and broken the back of age-old scarcities.

The source of our power lies in the extraordinary techno- logical capital we have succeeded in accumulating and in propagating, and the all-pervasive analytic or positivistic methodologies which by shaping our minds as well as our sensibilities, have enabled us to do what we have done.

In other words, we have gotten where we are by science and rationality, but

our achievement has, in some unforeseen (perhaps unforseeable) manner, failed to satisfy those other requirements that would have permitted us to evolve in ways that, for want of a better word, we shall henceforth call "balanced." It has failed to provide us with an ethos, a morality, ideals, institutions, a vision of man and of mankind and a politics which are in consonance with the way of life that has evolved as the expression of our success. Worse, it has failed to give us a global view from which we could begin to conceive the ethos, morality, ideals, institutions, and policies requisite to an inter-dependent world --this, despite the fact that the dynamics of our technologies and of our positivistic outlooks are global in their impacts, their consequences, their endless profusion and, more importantly, in the promises they proclaim and in the promises they imply.

Well so the statement is that we are far from perfect. Well of course, but here we slip into danger. And we see exactly what that danger is going to be,

It is the aim of this particular project of the Club of Rome to turn the above assumption into a positive statement, by trying to cognize and investigate the all-pervasive problematique which is built into our situation, through some new leap of inventiveness.

At this point we see the emergence of the Club of Rome's epistemologically privileged. The Club of Rome limited itself to 100 members at first, but while it had grand pretentions it did not have a real intellectual orientation until Jay Forrester entered the picture. Forrester was a pioneer in the system dynamics research, and had at a younger age engineered feed back mechanisms. The idea of systems was not exactly new in science, and in fact scientists were already involved in system and feedback research, including carbon cycle research. Perhaps someone who was wiser than Forrester would have known better than to attempt to undertake a modeling of the dynamics of human society, but after applying system dymanics to the life of industries and cities, Forrester decided that he was ready to take on the world.

We know a good deal more about systems and modeling now than we did in 1970's. By that time Forrester was a big name, and an MIT professor, but he was about to over reach himself. As Paul Klugman later pointed out,

The essential story there was one of hard-science arrogance: Forrester, an eminent professor of engineering, decided to try his hand at economics, and basically said, “I’m going to do economics with equations! And run them on a computer! I’m sure those stupid economists have never thought of that!” And he didn’t walk over to the east side of campus to ask whether, in fact, any economists ever had thought of that, and what they had learned. (Economists tend to do the same thing to sociologists and political scientists. The general rule to remember is that if some discipline seems less developed than your own, it’s probably not because the researchers aren’t as smart as you are, it’s because the subject is harder.)

As a result, the study was a classic case of garbage-in-garbage-out: Forrester didn’t know anything about the empirical evidence on economic growth or the history of past modeling efforts, and it showed. The insistence of his acolytes that the work must be scientific, because it came out of a computer, only made things worse.

Forrester's model was in fact focused on problems that were on the popular agenda in 1970. As it happened I was involved in an attempt to develop a computerized environmental model in 1970-71 so I had some down and dirty insights into the problems of modeling. When I finally got a copy of World Dynamics, I immediately spotted some big flaws. First the world was not treated as a multi-dimensional entity. The only dimension the Forrester model recognized was time. Thus transportation played no role in the Forrester model. The Forrester model focused on four variables which the black box of Forrester's equations related. Those variables were:

* Population

* Quality of Life

* Natural Resources

* Pollution

* Agriculture

* Industrialization

Forrester's conclusions were as sweeping as those of Parson Malthus:

It is certain that resource shortage, pollution, crowding, disease, food failure, war, or some other equally powerful force will limit population and industrialization if persuasion and psychological factors do not. Exponential growth cannot continue forever.

Those topics were all in the air in 1970, and this makes World Dynamics interesting from the viewpoint of the spirit of the time. The problem is, however that Forrester has little insight into the dynamics of his variables. If you ask demographers, they would scoff at the notion that population dynamics can be explained without refercnce to where people live. This allowed Forrester to ignore population trends in the advanced industrial and post industrial economies, and the implication of those trends in a global economy.

Forrester's was also guilty of ignoring pollution trends. Already in 1970 pollution problems in industrialized countries were subject to increasing regulation. Of the major pollutants only CO2 was not subject to pollution regulations, and Forrester and indeed the movement he spawned largely ignored CO2. This was most unfortunate, because the Forrester/Club of Rome movement largely ignored the CO2 problem for a long time.

Forrester appears to have based his resource depletion model on M. King Hubbard's study of oil depletion. Forrester failed to note that in the same paper in which Hubbard announced his oil depletion findings, he also analyzed uranium reserves and found,

From these evidences it appears that there exist within minable depths in the United States rocks with uranium contents equivalent to 1000 barrels or more of oil per metric ton, whose total energy content is probably several hundred times that of all the fossil fuels combined. The same appears to be true of many other parts of the world. Consequently, the world appears to be on the threshold of an era which in terms of energy consumption will be at least an order of magnitude greater than that made possible by the fossil fuels.

It should be noted that rock with uranium recovery potential of equivalent of 1000 barrels of oil per ton by no means represented the downward limit of uranium ore recovery with favorable energy returns. Further, Hubbard failed to note the further availability of even larger quantise of thorium, which was also recoverable with favorable rates of energy return.

The availability of such large amounts of recoverable energy resources the future resource picture might well be effected. For example mining of low concentration mineral resources such as shale rock or granite for uranium and thorium would probably yield large amounts of mineral and metal byproducts. These byproducts could be recovered with little added energy costs. Wast heat from nuclear reactors could be used to desalinate sea water, and valuable mineral resources extracted from the rejected brine. Finally, the so called waste from a large scale nuclear energy economy could be "mined" for stable and valuable fission products. In addition to these nuclear economy based resources, other minerals and metals exist in basically inexhaustible supply in the earths crust, Forrester simply assumed that all resource supplies were similar to oil, when in fact they are not. When one resource becomes scarce, another may be substituted in its place. Substitution thus becomes a major factor for sustaining civilization, but there is no evidence that Forrester recognized the importance of substitution in maintaining a long term economy. Thus Forrester's account of resource sustainability was extremely flawed.

Unfortunately, Forrester's extremely flawed non spacial World Dynamics model caught the attention of the Club of Rome, and became the Club of Rome model. Peccei managed to obtain Volkswagen Foundation money for further research on Forrester's World Dynamics model by a Forrester associate at MIT, Dennis Meadows. The result was the famous study The Limits of Growth. Not only did the limits of growth fail to correct Forrester's flaws, it projected a Neo-Malthuesian future of a resource starved civilization. In doing so, Meadows and his associates over looked the true nature of the earths' material resources. Further, it appears likely that in preference to mining ever larger stocks of minerals, future human economies will take more and more to recycling as a basic source of resources. A further source of economic growth would be more efficient use of existing resources, for example through miniaturization Through recovery of resources through the operation of a nuclear economy, the recycling of resources, more efficient use of resources, and resource substitution a high material lifestyle would be available for the entire world's population. Further through increased efficiency, the world's economy could continue to grow as long as technological advances continued. Finally more efficient use of resources and shifting to low pollution technologies would control pollution problems. Finally with economic development, world population would peak and then gradually decline. This population decline would not be caused by poverty and scarcity, but by demographic factors linked to improved quality of life already present in materially advanced nations. The tong term decline in population would lead to a gradually increasing level of per capita wealth, and with greater wealth would come improved quality of life.

Thus we have seen that a largely self appointed organization of world elites, The Club of Rome, assigned to itself and to its agents a special capacity for knowledge. In addition to Jay Forrester's World Dynamics findings, one other aspect of Forrester's work probably drew the Club of Rome's attention, that is Forrester's contention that systems dynamic computer modeling lead to counterintuitive conclusions. Forrester never appears to have considered that some of his conclusions might have been counter intuitive because they were wrong. Forrester's system dynamic world model was what Bruno Larour called a black box. This black box has become a corner stone of the Club of Rome's claims to special knowledge.

We are now confronted with a paradox. The Club of Rome was founded as a consequence of a speech given in a meeting of international bankers intended to to aid in the economic development of Latin America. The Club of Rome however, quickly adopts a position that says in effect, developmental efforts directed toward Latin America are doomed to lead to disastrous consequence and mass death. We should rightly ask, "what is going on here?"

This question will require further exploration.