Overshoot

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Overshoot

Post by Tortoise » Mon Sep 05, 2011 8:48 pm

In other threads, I've briefly mentioned a couple of ideas from William Catton's 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, which I read based on MT's recommendation. MT suggested we start a thread dedicated to this book and related issues.

Overshoot was one of the first books to declare the need to understand human society and its history in terms of a fully ecological paradigm. The book's central thesis is the following:
Human beings, in two million years of cultural evolution, have several times succeeded in taking over additional portions of the earth's total life-supporting capacity, at the expense of other creatures. Each time, human population has increased. But man has now learned to rely on a technology [fossil fuels] that augments human carrying capacity in a necessarily temporary way--as temporary as the extension of life by eating the seeds needed to grow next year's food. Human population, organized into industrial societies and blind to the temporariness of carrying capacity supplements based on exhaustible resource dependence, responded by increasing more exuberantly than ever, even though this meant overshooting the number our planet could permanently support. Something akin to bankruptcy was the inevitable sequel.
Catton contends that "the past four centuries of magnificent progress were made possible by two non-repeatable achievements: (a) discovery of a second hemisphere, and (b) development of ways to exploit the planet's energy savings deposits, the fossil fuels." He explains that, rather than increasing the earth's permanent carrying capacity, the exploitation of fossil fuels has actually made the situation worse by providing the illusion that carrying capacity has been increased. In response to this illusion of increased carrying capacity, human populations have grown at an exponential rate--far beyond the true (i.e., permanent/sustainable) carrying capacity defined by the total amount of land and renewable resources on the earth.

One of the more unique contributions Catton makes in Overshoot is to frame the ecological predicament in a sociological context, summarizing five key perspectives along a sort of "denial spectrum" that various people have in regards to humans' ecological predicament:
  • 1. Ostrichism: Insisting that the assumption of limitlessness was and still is valid
  • 2. Cynicism: Not believing that the New World's newness once did, or that its oldness now does, have any significance
  • 3. Cosmeticism: Having faith that relatively superficial adjustments like family planning, recycling centers, and anti-pollution laws will keep the New World new and perpetuate the Age of Exuberance
  • 4. Cargoism: Having faith that technological progress will stave off major institutional change
  • 5. Realism: Recognizing that the New World is old and that major change must follow
Personally, one of the aspects of Overshoot that stood out most prominently to me was Catton's discussion of the fact that cultural paradigms can be extremely stubborn and resistant to change, specifically the fact that the cornucopian paradigm is so persistent in modern cultures and strongly influences political and economic discussions. Even the basic vocabulary used in said discussions is based largely on the cornucopian paradigm. Reading this book opened my eyes to some basic ecological facts that are simply not discussed in the mainstream media, even by so-called "ecologists" of the Cosmeticist variety. The true ecological predicament of mankind--carrying capacity overshoot--is rarely, if ever discussed. And if it is discussed, it is generally only from a Cosmeticist or (at best) Cargoist perspective.

One of the key points of this book is that, while Homo sapiens is certainly unique among the animals in its being able to understand and react to its ecological predicaments, it is not "above" ecological reality. It is too late for us to use our uniquely human abilities to prevent overshoot and the resulting population crash. The best we can do at this point is to recognize the inevitability of the eventual crash (excepting a Cargoist deus ex machina fantasy such as "free energy") and adjust our cultural paradigms to reflect this ecological fact so that when the crash comes, it will not be falsely blamed on human scapegoats. Failing to make this basic cultural preparation could be far more disastrous than even the inevitable population crash.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Tue Sep 06, 2011 12:24 am

Tortoise,

That's a great overview of Catton's book.

Catton's ideas are some of the most challenging I have ever encountered.  It's hard to fully grasp them and work them into one's existing worldview, and yet the revisions to one's wordview that Catton's logic suggests can also be overwhelmingly difficult to embrace.

What you're left with is it's hard to forget about what Catton argues and it's also hard to know what exactly you are supposed to do with the new knowledge he offers.

Catton's concepts of "phantom carrying capacity" (i.e., a spike in carrying capacity coming from drawing down millions of years of accumulated resources) and his clear-headed description of the way humanity has displaced other species in its takeover of ever-greater portions of the earth's habitat (typically without thinking twice about what the need to displace another species suggests about our own species) are both stimulating and troubling. 

Catton makes virtually all environmental writing and thinking seem painfully short-sighted and lacking in any kind of real coherence.  For example, what's the point in conserving or recycling if it simply buys a doomed survival strategy a few more decades?

"Overshoot" is one of those books that people long for who love ideas and who love to be challenged intellectually.  The fact that it doesn't necessarily have a happy ending (or at least as we have come to understand the concept of happy endings) doesn't mean that it's not an incredibly important set of ideas to be aware of as we chart our way forward as a species.

Tortoise, did you run across anything in the book that seemed off the mark or any conclusions that didn't seem to flow from the arguments he was making?

Reading the Amazon reviews is interesting.  As I recall, one guy said he had several thousand books in his library, and if he could only save one, "Overshoot" would be it. 

I have yet to read a strong refutation of Catton's basic thesis, which is pretty amazing given that he is arguing that much of what we think of as progress is actually deeply destructive to our long term survival prospects.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by stone » Tue Sep 06, 2011 7:21 am

It sounds like a coherent version of the kind of thing I maddly ranted at psychiatric nurses (bless them). Looking at it all from a saner perspective I think that we have hope if we alow ourselves to tap into one of the most valuable resources we have namely human potential. That also is an entirely non-renewable resource. After the next hour has gone by we will never recover this hour's manpower that will be lost due to unemployment, repression, poverty etc etc. Dahrabi in India has one of the lowest consumption rates on the planet and is devoted to recycling. If we globally could adopt a version of that then we could over the next centuries potentially go back to being a smaller population of people in a reforested world with the journey being happy and comfortable. It is just down to human relations IMO.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Lone Wolf » Tue Sep 06, 2011 2:39 pm

That sounds like some hardcore doom and gloom.  Does the author make any specific predictions as to when this all goes down?  Malthus and Ehrlich's predictions were famously way off the mark (such as Ehrlich's predictions of millions of deaths by worldwide famine by 1975.)

I know that the book is a little bit old, but does he have anything much to say about nuclear power?  Breeder reactors?

The issue I have with these predictions is that we don't live in a static world.  If we have 20 years before "we're all gonna die", that's one thing.  But if we have some hundreds of years (and given things like nuclear power, oil shale, tar sands, etc. this doesn't seem inconceivable), we are almost certain to have passed the point at which we've developed machine intelligence that far exceeds that of human beings.  It's hard for me to imagine that this problem won't be solved.  I do expect war, disruption, and upheaval around the issues of energy.  But in the end I think we'll move on to denser, superior but more technologically advanced sources of energy and continue as a species just fine.

Does that seem hopelessly cornucopian?  When I think of how different 1911 looks from 2011, it just seems like the way things are most likely to work out.

I do like that even though my thesis is nowhere near as well thought out as Catton's, everyone here is pulling for me to be right.  :)
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Indices » Tue Sep 06, 2011 2:58 pm

I'm skeptical of any books that try to predict long term trends, optimistic or negative. I just can't get into them because they are invariably wrong. Or they're right but the date with which they are right is off by a century or so.

They have found that humans are good at predicting the weather within two days. That is about it when it comes to making future predictions on anything with a lot of variables. So whenever I hear someone predict something that is supposed to happen several decades from now I just don't buy it. Again, positive or negative. We may very well be wiped out soon or we may be on the verge of utopia. Who knows?
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Lone Wolf » Tue Sep 06, 2011 3:01 pm

Indices wrote: I'm skeptical of any books that try to predict long term trends, optimistic or negative. I just can't get into them because they are invariably wrong. Or they're right but the date with which they are right is off by a century or so.
Oh yeah?  Hey, I've got this great investment strategy that I think you might like...  :)
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Tue Sep 06, 2011 4:18 pm

Lone Wolf wrote:
Indices wrote: I'm skeptical of any books that try to predict long term trends, optimistic or negative. I just can't get into them because they are invariably wrong. Or they're right but the date with which they are right is off by a century or so.
Oh yeah?  Hey, I've got this great investment strategy that I think you might like...  :)
I should make it clear that Catton's argument is about a LOT more than predicting any specific event on any particular timetable.

His arguments are very challenging (they were for me at least).  I wouldn't get hung up on whether is trying to predict the future or not.  What he is doing is much different from that.  I wouldn't invite everyone here to take a look at something like this if it was just another prediction about the future.

For me, I found Catton's work to open up an interesting perspective on a part of our shared mental experience of ourselves (e.g., how we got here and where we are going) that I had never seen before.

It's a hard set of ideas to adequately summarize.  I just found the book fascinating and disturbing.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Tortoise » Wed Sep 07, 2011 2:45 am

MediumTex wrote: Tortoise, did you run across anything in the book that seemed off the mark or any conclusions that didn't seem to flow from the arguments he was making?
No, the arguments and conclusions in the book seemed consistent with each other. If I had to make one or two criticisms, I suppose they'd be:
  • Catton didn't mention the theory of abiogenic petroleum origin even once, as I recall. If he considered it a debunked idea (as most scientists now do), he could have at least said so in passing.
  • The book does not address the fact that, even long before the discovery of fossil fuels, the course of evolution has been pushing life towards ever-increasing levels of complexity and intelligence. Fossil fuels have certainly amplified the expression of human intelligence, but they did not create it. What might be the ultimate purpose of evolution on this planet, and how might fossil fuels fit into that picture? If there is a purpose guiding evolution, how might it make man's ecological situation unique in relation to less highly evolved organisms?
Lone Wolf wrote: Does the author make any specific predictions as to when this all goes down?
No, he doesn't. As MT pointed out, the focus of Overshoot is not on specific predictions. It's on the sociological aspects of mankind's ecological predicament.
Lone Wolf wrote: I know that the book is a little bit old, but does he have anything much to say about nuclear power?  Breeder reactors?
He very briefly touches on nuclear power, including breeder reactors. He contends that nuclear power poses significant safety, waste-disposal, and technological challenges. He does not claim the challenges are insurmountable; he simply does not make the Cargoist assumption that mankind definitely will overcome them in time to replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. Even if that happens, Catton points out that the supply of known nuclear fuel for breeder reactors on this planet is not unlimited.

To reiterate, Overshoot is not a book about predictions. It's really a book about learning to think about history and current events from an objective ecological perspective that is rarely encountered in the mainstream, even in today's increasingly "Earth-friendly" political climate.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by stone » Wed Sep 07, 2011 5:06 am

Tortoise, the ultimate aim of evolution is that what lasts, lasts. As Stephen J Gould said we are now in the age of bacteria as the planet has been for the past 4B years. As time has gone buy, a few very complex oddballs have also cropped up and the most complex of those have gotten more complex as the millions of years have gone by. Is your question why the most complex organisms around today (eg trees, whales, us etc) are more complex than those earlier on in evolution? My guess is that one evolutionary strategy is a minimal draw down strategy and that complexity aids that. A whale that lives for 200 years and has two offspring that have a 100% chance of survival (and themselves breeding) has found a successful way to usher its DNA across the millenia. Even a tiny chance of a "black swan" screw up will stop an evolutionary lineage when you are dealing with Billions of years. Evolution does not care whether a species makes up 50% of the global biomass or 0.000000000000...........01% at its maximum extent. All that matters is that it doesn't ever become extinct.
I guess people actually had a very stable population size for much of the past 100k years. I suppose the past few thousand years have been a kind of tumor like growth event for the human population.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Liz L. » Wed Sep 07, 2011 2:22 pm

Reserved at the library, and looking foward to reading.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Tortoise » Thu Sep 08, 2011 2:03 am

stone wrote: Tortoise, the ultimate aim of evolution is that what lasts, lasts.
That just begs the question, much like the anthropic principle does in cosmology. In other words, if we (intelligent life) exist simply because evolutionary conditions caused us to come into existence randomly, then the obvious next question is, Why did those particular evolutionary conditions prevail over most other alternative conditions that presumably would not have supported the emergence of intelligent life?

This planet is not the only habitat that is fine-tuned to support the emergence of intelligent life. The universe as a whole is fine-tuned with a handful of very particular physical constants that allow stable galaxies and solar systems to form rather than all matter flying apart from each other or collapsing into one big super-dense lump. Why is that?
stone wrote: My guess is that one evolutionary strategy is a minimal draw down strategy and that complexity aids that.
Evolutionary "strategy"? Strategy implies intelligence. Under the mainstream evolutionary theory that evolution proceeds via natural selection acting on random genetic mutations, how do you see "strategy" entering the picture?
stone wrote: I guess people actually had a very stable population size for much of the past 100k years. I suppose the past few thousand years have been a kind of tumor like growth event for the human population.
Tumor-like growth is one way of looking at the situation. But a different perspective is that evolution is accelerating over time. In Gould's theory of punctuated equilibria, evolution does not proceed gradually and uniformly but is instead characterized by brief periods of rapid evolution followed by long periods of stasis.

In the Cambrian explosion, for example, the rate of evolution was estimated to have accelerated by an order of magnitude. One way of looking at evolution is that it is in some sense an "intelligent" process, and that the emergence of human life and culture has now allowed evolution to manifest itself through purposeful human actions rather than through the much slower and less efficient process of natural selection acting on a virtual infinitude of random variations (most of which lead nowhere).

What I'm getting at is this: maybe nature designed the Earth's fossil fuel deposits as a temporary "springboard" for intelligent life's next big evolutionary leap. If human civilization is not a tumor that the Earth is actively attempting to rid itself of, might this "springboard" scenario be a possibility per Gould's theory of punctuated equilibria?
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Re: Overshoot

Post by stone » Thu Sep 08, 2011 2:50 am

Tortoise, have you heard punctuated equilibria called "evolution by jerks" and the alternative "evolution by creeps" :).

Personally I'm happy with accepting that everything is accidental. I don't see intelligence as a goal of evolution but merely as an accidental by-product. I'm not sure how well we know how little or much intelligent life the universe has. It wouldn't amaze me if our kind of intelligence is incompatible with its own continued existence and so tends to snuff its self out very very quickly in cosmological terms- Hence why we don't get many visits by aliens.

By "evolutionary strategy" I did not mean to imply intention. I just meant an accidental assemblage that continued due to the fortuitous way that it was constructed to operate. That is all that life is IMO. Some lifeforms have very large volatile populations (lemmings, some disease pathogens), others have very stable populations (whales)- that was what I meant by different strategies.

I don't see what we are doing to earth as being much different from what the first photosynthetic bacteria did when they produced oxygen and so poisoned the earth for 99.9% of the life on earth at that time. I'm sure the geochemical changes we make will drive evolution. There is no reason to believe that we will continue though or that intelligent life on earth will continue IMO.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Thu Sep 08, 2011 9:37 am

Tortoise wrote: What I'm getting at is this: maybe nature designed the Earth's fossil fuel deposits as a temporary "springboard" for intelligent life's next big evolutionary leap. If human civilization is not a tumor that the Earth is actively attempting to rid itself of, might this "springboard" scenario be a possibility per Gould's theory of punctuated equilibria?
Isn't that a bit like a couple of dinosaurs standing around a huge clump of vegetation and saying: "You see all this vegetation?  It's here to springboard us to our next evolutionary step.  In the future, we will still rule the world, but our brains will be larger than the size of a raisin and we will have much better technology.  One day, a group of dinosaurs will even visit the Moon."

I think that there is more than a little hubris in that view of things.

Even if fossil fuel deposits were here to facilitate humanity's next leap forward, they won't last nearly long enough in evolutionary time to make any difference.  From start to finish the fossil fuel age will probably be no longer than 400 years or so.

I think what we are seeing is more akin to what happens when you drop a sugar cube into a vat of yeast, except Mother Nature dropped a sugar cube of fossil fuels into a vat of humans.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Tortoise » Thu Sep 08, 2011 2:34 pm

Stone and MT, I think that most likely you're right that fossil fuels are to humans as a sugar cube is to a vat of yeast. I offered the "springboard" hypothesis mainly to play devil's advocate and motivate some discussion.
MediumTex wrote: Even if fossil fuel deposits were here to facilitate humanity's next leap forward, they won't last nearly long enough in evolutionary time to make any difference.
Not necessarily--not if evolution is accelerating exponentially. So much technological progress has happened in the past century that I can't even begin to fathom what the next 400 years might look like. As I hinted at in my previous post, "evolutionary time" may be significantly speeding up if evolution is now manifesting itself directly through human action and human culture rather than indirectly through natural selection and random mutations.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Thu Sep 08, 2011 2:49 pm

Tortoise wrote: Stone and MT, I think that most likely you're right that fossil fuels are to humans as a sugar cube is to a vat of yeast. I offered the "springboard" hypothesis mainly to play devil's advocate and motivate some discussion.
MediumTex wrote: Even if fossil fuel deposits were here to facilitate humanity's next leap forward, they won't last nearly long enough in evolutionary time to make any difference.
Not necessarily--not if evolution is accelerating exponentially. So much technological progress has happened in the past century that I can't even begin to fathom what the next 400 years might look like. As I hinted at in my previous post, "evolutionary time" may be significantly speeding up if evolution is now manifesting itself directly through human action and human culture rather than indirectly through natural selection and random mutations.
Are you talking about cultural and sociological evolution or biological evolution?

As Catton argued, industrialization has clearly spawned a new species that he called homo colossus, but that is, to me, more of a cultural and economic species, as opposed to a new biological species.

I think that humans have probably had the same raw cognitive abilities that we have now for thousands of years.  It's not that we are getting smarter.  Rather, through the preservation of past knowledge that the written word provides us, and the near unlimited capabilities to use that knowledge that cheap fossil fuels have provided us, we have been able to take the same cognitive engine in the form of the human brain and do a lot more with it.

The process above, however, seems quite different from us actually getting smarter or otherwise biologically more well-adpated to our environment.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Tortoise » Fri Sep 09, 2011 3:28 am

MediumTex wrote: Are you talking about cultural and sociological evolution or biological evolution?
The former, along with technological evolution. Although our biology has not changed appreciably in thousands of years, what we are beginning to see is human intelligence taking the evolutionary reins by starting to directly modify and upgrade itself and other organisms. Genetically modified crops, gene therapy, prosthetics, implantable brain chips... the examples are numerous and rapidly multiplying.

In fact, such basic technological developments as antiseptics have allowed millions of people to live who otherwise would have been weeded out by Mother Nature at a very young age. Also, consider all the people on this planet who wear corrective lenses: what chance of survival would they have had before eyeglasses were invented? Most of them would have been much more likely to be eaten by predators and would have been at a huge disadvantage in hunting and gathering their food.

In these ways, technology has allowed us to transcend some of our biological limitations. Humans no longer need natural selection in the traditional sense to evolve biologically. We create tools to evolve ourselves. Our tools allow us to do rapidly what used to take evolution and geological processes millions of years to do. If I didn't know better, I would be tempted to think that the purpose of this accelerating process might be to transfer evolution from the realm of biology into the realm of technology. After all, isn't technology really just biology in disguise--a natural expression of biology at a higher, more abstract level?

Human civilization's drawdown of fossil fuels may be ecologically similar to a sugar cube dropped into a vat of yeast, but I think at the very least it's much more interesting to observe and discuss :) It is probably hubristic to claim that humans are exempt from Mother Nature's laws, but I don't consider it hubristic to recognize the plain fact that humans are remarkably special in some pretty important ways.

(By the way, I'm leaving on vacation and hope to re-join this discussion if it's still going when I return in about a week.)
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Re: Overshoot

Post by stone » Fri Sep 09, 2011 9:33 am

Tortoise, have a great vacation!

I'm not sure that humans are better off now than we were in the past.  More people starved in 2009 than ever before. All the advances you describe are enjoyed by a small fraction of the 7B people on earth. Even for those few people at the apex of the rapacious globalised human enterprise, modern life misses many things that make life most worth while. I've seen a couple of TV programs where jungle tribes people were shown around the modern UK. They seemed distinctly unimpressed and I think with some justification. Basically they seemed non-plussed as to how we could be so stupid to put up with living as we do (stuck in doors all day, not seeing our old people or children much, having vast amounts of cluttering pointless stuff etc etc).

About corrective vision- apparently elderly eskimos who grew up staring into the horizon looking for distant seals didn't develop short sightedness. The subsequent generations who grew up reading and watching TV did just as much as us (I'm very short sighted myself).
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Lone Wolf » Mon Sep 12, 2011 4:08 pm

Tortoise wrote: In these ways, technology has allowed us to transcend some of our biological limitations. Humans no longer need natural selection in the traditional sense to evolve biologically. We create tools to evolve ourselves. Our tools allow us to do rapidly what used to take evolution and geological processes millions of years to do. If I didn't know better, I would be tempted to think that the purpose of this accelerating process might be to transfer evolution from the realm of biology into the realm of technology. After all, isn't technology really just biology in disguise--a natural expression of biology at a higher, more abstract level?
Bingo.  Intelligence changes the equation in remarkable ways.

While I'm not at all certain that flesh and blood humans will travel out to the stars, I believe that intelligences in durable bodies (our "descendants") will do so.  I'd be surprised and disappointed if the intelligent descendants of humanity didn't move onward in some fashion for millions and millions of years.  Evolution alone doesn't get you to that level of development in any reasonable timeframe.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Tue Sep 13, 2011 11:37 am

For anyone who would like to read an excerpt from "Overshoot", here is chapter 2:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/5874

Here is chapter 3:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/6069
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Pointedstick » Mon Feb 01, 2016 11:00 am

I'm resurrecting this awesome topic.

Having read the two free chapters (going to pick up the whole book too), I'll admit I'm not convinced of the problem. Consider the following passage:
If gasoline and other fossil fuels had been thirteen times as costly, we would never have fallen into the trap of reorganizing our social systems around their abundant use. Our overcommitment to dependence on fossil acreage was the result of the temporarily low cost of energy from antiquity. Because the low cost was temporary, it was an unrealistic basis for a way of life.
This suggests that the signals sent by a market pricing mechanism do their job; the only problem was an inaccurate price. If high market prices are capable of dissuading people from over-consuming a precious and non-renewable resource, then honestly I don't see the need for any doom and gloom. Because we already have that market pricing mechanism and it already works. If fossil fuels become scarce at a price that they can be profitably extracted, then their price will rise so high that a huge variety of alternatives will become cost effective. This is the same problem I have with peak oil enthusiasts--there's no magical cliff we fall off that makes industrial society suddenly collapse; if fossil fuels become scarce, they become expensive, and expensive things are avoided. Since the book was written, we've had 36 years of development in the fields of alternative energy, particularly solar PV. In 1980, the installed cost of solar PV was somewhere around $15/watt in 1980 dollars. Today throughout the developed world it's $2-4/watt in 2016 dollars before government subsidies--a huge decline in price. At this price level, some fossil fuels in markets with strong environmental regulations are already struggling to compete economically. Markets with high electricity prices are seeing substantial customer installation of solar PV.

There is no reason why anything stationary that is currently powered with fossil fuels cannot be switched over to electrically-powered motors, hydraulic compressors, and the like. An example is the transition from coal-powered blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces. The electric ones are generally better, in fact. Sure they require huge amounts of electricity, but for an electricity grid that comes to be supplied by an increasing fraction of non-fossil-fuel sources, it hardly matters. If your house has a gas furnace, water heater, range, and dryer, you can (and should, long-term) switch all those over to electric versions that do basically the same thing. Plastics in consumer products can largely be replaced with other materials, like wood (renewable), metal (100% recyclable), or ceramics, glass, and masonry (super-abundant and recyclable). Those applications absolutely requiring plastic will probably rise in price, but the plastics can be provided by what fossil fuel reserves remain, or biofuels. These are solved problems.

It seems to me that the biggest challenges are transportation and fertilization. Fossil fuels dominate transport, particularly aerospace, because of their energy density. You can't wire a plane up to a power plant, and achieving the equivalent electrical energy storage with batteries will require the kind of huge increase in weight that is antithetical to the design and operation of an airplane. Luckily, there's an obvious solution: less air travel, more rail travel. Trains can be and many already are fully electrified. The USA lags behind in this infrastructure but we can fix it easily should the need or political will ever arise. Our industrial capacity is vast and our technical expertise is unmatched. We can do it. Private cars aren't too hard to imagine, either. Probably there will be fewer of them and people will live in more clustered urban areas served by more public transit, and the private cars that people do own will all be electric. We're already getting there. In just a few years, the price of these vehicles has fallen to a realistic level. And there's no problem with an electric tractor carrying huge batteries.

That leaves fertilizer. It's definitely a problem. But modern farms only need intensive fertilization because of wasteful farming techniques that are destructive to soil health. I bet there are lots of clever ways we can work around this by learning or re-learning to plant cover crops that add nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium back to the soil. Techniques like no-till farming are also making a comeback, and there are ways to grow "food forests" that are incredibly nutrient-dense, far higher than modern farming.

Regardless, global population seems to be moving towards some kind of equilibrium anyway. Population growth rates are near or under replacement for a large part of the world (Europe, north and south Americas) Once Asia and Africa catch up to this trend, the total human population will level off.

Maybe Catton would describe all of this as "cargoist", but it's already happening. Does he address any of this in other chapters of the book?
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Mon Feb 01, 2016 4:50 pm

Pointedstick wrote: I'm resurrecting this awesome topic.

Having read the two free chapters (going to pick up the whole book too), I'll admit I'm not convinced of the problem. Consider the following passage:
If gasoline and other fossil fuels had been thirteen times as costly, we would never have fallen into the trap of reorganizing our social systems around their abundant use. Our overcommitment to dependence on fossil acreage was the result of the temporarily low cost of energy from antiquity. Because the low cost was temporary, it was an unrealistic basis for a way of life.
This suggests that the signals sent by a market pricing mechanism do their job; the only problem was an inaccurate price. If high market prices are capable of dissuading people from over-consuming a precious and non-renewable resource, then honestly I don't see the need for any doom and gloom. Because we already have that market pricing mechanism and it already works. If fossil fuels become scarce at a price that they can be profitably extracted, then their price will rise so high that a huge variety of alternatives will become cost effective.
Here's the problem with that analysis: If the market signals arrive too late, the market cannot make the appropriate adjustments, given that alternatives have LONG lead times for development and the buildout of needed infrastructure.
This is the same problem I have with peak oil enthusiasts--there's no magical cliff we fall off that makes industrial society suddenly collapse; if fossil fuels become scarce, they become expensive, and expensive things are avoided. Since the book was written, we've had 36 years of development in the fields of alternative energy, particularly solar PV. In 1980, the installed cost of solar PV was somewhere around $15/watt in 1980 dollars. Today throughout the developed world it's $2-4/watt in 2016 dollars before government subsidies--a huge decline in price. At this price level, some fossil fuels in markets with strong environmental regulations are already struggling to compete economically. Markets with high electricity prices are seeing substantial customer installation of solar PV.
All of that is true, but it's still nibbling around the edges.  For the most part, we still get electricity from coal, natural gas and nuclear.  Two out of those three are fossil fuels, and the other one presents a set of legacy environmental challenges that will persist into the future for longer than human civilization has even existed.  If at any point in the next few thousand years things fall apart in a way that makes nuclear power plant maintenance a problem, you've got a big mess on your hands.
There is no reason why anything stationary that is currently powered with fossil fuels cannot be switched over to electrically-powered motors, hydraulic compressors, and the like. An example is the transition from coal-powered blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces. The electric ones are generally better, in fact. Sure they require huge amounts of electricity, but for an electricity grid that comes to be supplied by an increasing fraction of non-fossil-fuel sources, it hardly matters. If your house has a gas furnace, water heater, range, and dryer, you can (and should, long-term) switch all those over to electric versions that do basically the same thing. Plastics in consumer products can largely be replaced with other materials, like wood (renewable), metal (100% recyclable), or ceramics, glass, and masonry (super-abundant and recyclable). Those applications absolutely requiring plastic will probably rise in price, but the plastics can be provided by what fossil fuel reserves remain, or biofuels. These are solved problems.
The electricity currently comes overwhelmingly from fossil fuels.  I don't see that switching to electricity solves anything the way things are currently configured.  Wind and solar are never going to provide uninterrupted electricity.  Something will have to supplement these sources.
It seems to me that the biggest challenges are transportation and fertilization. Fossil fuels dominate transport, particularly aerospace, because of their energy density. You can't wire a plane up to a power plant, and achieving the equivalent electrical energy storage with batteries will require the kind of huge increase in weight that is antithetical to the design and operation of an airplane. Luckily, there's an obvious solution: less air travel, more rail travel. Trains can be and many already are fully electrified. The USA lags behind in this infrastructure but we can fix it easily should the need or political will ever arise. Our industrial capacity is vast and our technical expertise is unmatched. We can do it. Private cars aren't too hard to imagine, either. Probably there will be fewer of them and people will live in more clustered urban areas served by more public transit, and the private cars that people do own will all be electric. We're already getting there. In just a few years, the price of these vehicles has fallen to a realistic level. And there's no problem with an electric tractor carrying huge batteries.
The basic problem with your line of thinking is that you are talking about exchanging a far less efficient set of power sources and storage technology for one that is astonishingly well-suited for the kind of world economy we have built.  Fossil fuels are amazingly versatile and cheap.  Their high technology replacements are not.  All economic activity based upon a cheap energy input business model basically stops once the energy inputs needed to operate it become more expensive than the projected value of the economic activity itself.
That leaves fertilizer. It's definitely a problem. But modern farms only need intensive fertilization because of wasteful farming techniques that are destructive to soil health. I bet there are lots of clever ways we can work around this by learning or re-learning to plant cover crops that add nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium back to the soil. Techniques like no-till farming are also making a comeback, and there are ways to grow "food forests" that are incredibly nutrient-dense, far higher than modern farming.
I'm not as concerned about fertilizer as you are.  My concern is more than the entire industrial agriculture apparatus we have is basically a giant fossil-fuels-to-food conversion process.  It's all oriented around fossil fuels: fertilizer, tractors, trucks, irrigation systems, delivering crops to market, etc.  It all runs on fossil fuels.
Regardless, global population seems to be moving towards some kind of equilibrium anyway. Population growth rates are near or under replacement for a large part of the world (Europe, north and south Americas) Once Asia and Africa catch up to this trend, the total human population will level off.
The leveling off is still leveling off at a level that is massively higher than any human population in all of our history.  What's worse is that the economic system we have created to provide goods, services, food and medical care to this large population is a system that must constantly be growing.  An economy with structural constraints that prevents its continued expansion doesn't function very well at all.  See Japan, U.S., Germany, etc. for examples of sputtering economies due, in part, to unfavorable demographic trends.
Maybe Catton would describe all of this as "cargoist", but it's already happening. Does he address any of this in other chapters of the book?
It's certainly cargoist thinking to imagine that wind, solar, hydro, nuclear and whatever else could ever replace fossil fuels.  That's not to say that it couldn't happen, but I think this is where our magical thinking around a kind of techno-theism comes into play.  We don't think of it that way because it is the religious tradition most of us grew up in (even though we probably didn't think of it as a religious tradition).

Overall, I would say that you just have to read Catton's entire analysis and see where it leaves you.  It's well worth the investment, though, even if you don't come away from it agreeing with all of his conclusions.

I would also say that this isn't a topic that lends itself to resolution, but is more like material for a discussion with no simple answers, and credible and legitimate points on both sides.

I've been having this conversation now for about 12 years, and the one thing that I have seen over and over among the optimists is a belief in the promise of technology that has many "cargoist" overtones, primarily arising from a lack of understanding of how much new technology depends on access to cheap sources of energy to develop it.

I have always thought that this topic was the most important topic of our time, but I sort of got tired of talking about it because it's such a downer, and people rarely want to make the investment it takes to really see the issue clearly without the rose colored lenses of the past century of amazing technological development (which happened to coincide more or less exactly with easy access to cheap fossil fuels).

The thing to remember, too, when thinking about wind and solar is that these energy sources basically involve "harvesting" current sunlight and sun-related atmospheric changes.  With fossil fuels, however, we are essentially drawing down millions of years of accumulated sunlight trapped under the earth in the form of carbon-rich vegetation that has been cooked into this amazing source of power that can be used to power almost anything.  The problem is that it's a one-time allotment.  Once it's gone, it's gone.  There is a lot of it to be sure, and there is a lot more to be found, but it's still a non-renewable resource, and the fear is that we have created a set of cultural beliefs and expectations that presuppose cheap and easy energy is NOT a non-renewable resource when, in fact, it is.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Mon Feb 01, 2016 5:23 pm

Here is how the godfather of peak oil, Shell geologist M. King Hubbert, explained it to Congress in 1974:
The earth and its biological inhabitants comprise an evolving system in which various of its components change in magnitude with time. To describe these changes we may use the term "growth'' in a generic sense as being synonymous with change. Thus a given quantity may be said to exhibit positive growth if its magnitude increases with time, negative growth if it decreases with time, and zero growth if it remains constant.

Two terms applicable to an evolving system are of fundamental importance. These are steady (or stationary) state and transient state. A system is said to be in a steady state when its various components either do not change with time, or else vary cyclically with the repetitive cycles not changing with time. A system in a transient state is one whose various components are undergoing noncyclical changes in magnitude, either of increase or decrease.

[...]

The growth phenomena with which we are at present concerned are almost exclusively of the transient kind. Three types of transient growth are illustrated in Figure 1. This figure is drawn with a time base extending from the year 1800 to beyond 2100 during which some quantity is assumed to grow in one or the other of the three modes shown.

[...]

Another fundamental property of uniform exponential growth is the following. If the logarithm of the quantity is plotted graphically as a function of time, or if the quantity is plotted on semilogarithmic paper, the resulting graph will be a straight line whose slope is proportional to the growth rate. Conversely, a straight-line graph of the growth of a quantity, when plotted on semilogarithmic paper, indicates a uniform exponential growth.

A second type of growth is that shown in Curve II of Figure 1. Here the growing quantity increases exponentially for a while during its initial stage, after which the growth rate starts to slow down until the magnitude of the quantity finally levels off to some fixed maximum quantity. After this the growth rate becomes zero, and the quantity attains a steady state. Examples of this kind of growth are afforded by biological populations and by the development of water power in a given region. The population of any biologic species, if initially stationary, will respond to changed conditions in a manner indicated by Curve II, or conversely by its negative analog. That is, the population in response to a disturbance will either increase exponentially and then level off to a stable maximum, or else decrease negative-exponentially and finally stabilize at a lower level, or perish.

A third type of transient growth is that represented by Curve III in Figure 1. Here, the quantity grows exponentially for a while. Then the growth rate diminishes until the quantity reaches one or more maxima, and then undergoes a negative-exponential decline back to zero. This is the type of growth curve that must be followed in the exploitation of any exhaustible resource such as coal or oil, or deposits of metallic ores.

Transition From Steady State To Transient State Due To Fossil Fuels


By about 2 million years ago biological evolution had advanced to where the ancestors of the present human species had begun to walk upright and to use crude stone tools. At that stage this species must have existed as a member of an ecological complex and competed with the other members of the complex for a share of the local solar energy essential for its existence. The energy utilizable was almost exclusively the food supply derived by the biological system from solar energy by the mechanism of photosynthesis. During the subsequent million or more years the human species progressively devised means of capturing an ever larger supply of the available energy. This resulted in a slow change in the ecological relations and to an increase in density and geographical spread of the human population, but the energy per capita changed very little.

Although the pace quickened about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago with the domestication of plants and animals, a rapidly changing transient state of evolution was not possible until the large supplies of energy stored in the fossil fuels began to be utilized -when the mining of coal as a continuous enterprise was begun near Newcastle in northeast England about 9 centuries ago. This was followed as recently as 1857 in Romania and in 1859 in the United States by the exploitation of the second major source of fossil-fuel energy, petroleum.

[...]

What is most strikingly shown by these complete-cycle curves is the brevity of the period during which petroleum can serve as a major source of energy. The peak in the production rate for the United States has already occurred three years ago in 1970. The peak in the production rate for the world based upon the high estimate of 2100 billion barrels, will occur about the year 2000. For the United States, the time required to produce the middle 80 percent of the 170 billion barrels will be approximately the 67-year period from about 1932-1999. For the world, the period required to produce the middle 80 percent of the estimated 2100 billion barrels will be about 64 years from 1968 to 2032. Hence, a child born in the mid-1930s if he lives a normal life expectancy, will see the United States consume most of its oil during his lifetime. Similarly, a child born within the last 5 years will see the world consume most of its oil during his lifetime.

A better appreciation of the epoch of the fossil fuels in human history can be obtained if the complete production cycle for all the fossil fuels combined -- coal, oil, natural gas, tar sands, and oil shales--is plotted on a time span of human history extending from 5000 years in the past to 5000 years in the future, a period well within the prospective span of human history. Such a plotting is shown in Figure 13. This Washington Monument-like spike, with a middle 80-percent span of about three centuries, represents the entire epoch. On such a time scale, it is seen that the epoch of the fossil fuel can be but an ephemeral and transitory event-an event, nonetheless, that has exercised the most drastic influence so far experienced by the human species during Its entire biological existence.

Other Sources of Energy

It is not the object of the present discussion to review the world's energy resources. Therefore, let us state summarily that of the other sources of energy of a magnitude suitable for large-scale industrial uses, water power, tidal power, and geothermal power are very useful in special cases but do not have a sufficient magnitude to supplant the fossil fuels. Nuclear power based on fission is potentially larger than the fossil fuels, but it also represents the most hazardous industrial operation in terms of potential catastrophic effects that has ever been undertaken in human history.

For a source of energy of even larger magnitude and without the hazardous characteristics of nuclear power, we are left with solar radiation. In magnitude, the solar radiation reaching the earth's surface amounts to about 120,000 × 1012 watts, which is equivalent, thermally, to the energy inputs to 40 million 1000-megawatt power plants. Suffice it to say that only now has serious technological attention begun to be directed to this potential source of industrial power. However, utilizing principally technology already in existence there is promise that eventually solar energy alone could easily supply all of the power requirements for the world's human population.

Constraints on Growth

Returning now to the problem of sustained growth, it would appear that with an adequate development of solar power it should be possible to continue the rates of growth of the last century for a considerable time into the future. However, with regard to this optimistic view attention needs to be directed to other constraints than the magnitude of the energy supply. These constraints may be broadly classified as being ecological in nature. For more than a century it has been known in biology that if any biological species from microbes to elephants is given a favorable environment, its population will begin to increase at an exponential rate. However, it was also soon established that such a growth rate cannot long continue before retarding influences set in. These are commonly of the nature of crowding, pollution, food supply, and in an open system by adjustments with respect to other members of the ecological complex.

In our earlier review of the rates of production of the fossil fuels it was observed that for close to a century in each case the production increased exponentially with doubling periods within the range of 8 to 16 years. The same type of growth rates are characteristic of most other industrial components. Figure 14 is a graph showing the exponential growth of the world electric generating capacity. The solid part of the curve since 1955 shows a growth rate of 8.0 percent per year with a doubling period of 8.7 years. The dashed part of the curve shows approximately the growth since 1900. In the United States during the last several decades electric power capacity has been doubling about every 10 years. The world population of automobiles and also passenger miles of scheduled air flights are each also doubling about every 10 years.

In Figure 15 a graph is shown of the growth of the world's human population from the year 1000 A.D. to the present, and an approximate projection to the year 2000. This is important in that it shows the ecological disturbance of the human population produced by the development of technology based upon the fossil fuels, the concomitant developments in biological and medical science, and expansion into the sparsely settled areas of the newly discovered geographical territories. Note the very slow rate of growth in the human population during the 500 year period from the year 1000 A.D. to 1500, and then the accelerated growth that has occurred subsequently. Were it possible to plot this curve backward in time for a million years, the curve would be barely above zero for that entire period. The flare up that has occurred since the year 15M is a unique event in human biological history.

It is also informative to contrast the present growth rate of the human population with the average that must have prevailed during the past. The present world population is about 3.9 billion which is increasing at a rate of about 2 percent per year, with a doubling period of about 35 years. What could have been the minimum average doubling period during the last million years? This minimum would occur if we make a wholly unrealistic assumption, namely that the population a million years ago was the biological minimum of 2. How many doublings of this original couple would be required to reach the world's present population of 3.9 billion? Slightly less than 31. Hence, the maximum number of times the population could have doubled during the last million years would have been 31. The minimum value of the average period of doubling must accordingly have been 1,000,000/31, or 32,000 years.

To be sure the population need not have grown smoothly. Fluctuations no doubt must have occurred due to plagues, climatic changes, and wars, but there is no gainsaying the conclusion that the rate of growth until recently must have been so extremely slow that we may regard the human population during most of its history as approximating an ecological steady state.

The same kind of reasoning may be applied to the other components of any ecological system. It is known from geological evidence that organic species commonly persist for millions of years. Consequently, when we compute a maximum average growth rate between two finite levels of population at a time interval of a million years, we arrive at the same conclusion, namely that the normal state ­ that is the state that persists most of the time ­ is one of an approximate steady state. The abnormal state of an ecological system is a rapidly changing transient or disturbed state. Figure 16 illustrates the behavior of the populations of three separate species of an ecological complex during a transient disturbance between two steady states. In such a disturbance all populations are effected, some favorably, some unfavorably.

[...]

Cultural Aspects of the Growth Problem

Without further elaboration, It is demonstrable that the exponential phase of the industrial growth which has dominated human activities during the last couple of centuries is drawing to a close. Some biological and industrial components must follow paths such as Curve II in Figure 1 and level off to a steady state; others must follow Curve III and decline ultimately to zero. But it is physically and biologically impossible for any material or energy component to follow the exponential growth phase of Curve I for more than a few tens of doublings, and most of those possible doublings have occurred already.

Yet, during the last two centuries of unbroken industrial growth we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture. Our institutions, our legal system, our financial system, and our most cherished folkways and beliefs are all based upon the premise of continuing growth. Since physical and biological constraints make it impossible to continue such rates of growth indefinitely, it is inevitable that with the slowing down in the rates of physical growth cultural adjustments must be made.

One example of such a cultural difficulty is afforded by the fundamental difference between the properties of money and those of matter and energy upon which the operation of the physical world depends. Money, being a system of accounting, is, in effect, paper and so is not constrained by the laws within which material and energy systems must operate. In fact money grows exponentially by the rule of compound interest.

[...]

In particular, if the industrial growth rate a and the average interest rate i have the same values, then the ratio of money to what money will buy will remain constant and a stable price level should prevail. Suppose, however, that for physical reasons the industrial growth rate a declines but the interest rate i holds steady. We should then have a situation where i is greater than a with the corresponding price inflation at the rate (i-a). Finally, consider a physical growth rate a=0, with the interest rate i greater than zero. In this case, the rate of price inflation should be the same as the average interest rate. Conversely, if prices are to remain stable at reduced rates of industrial growth this would require that the average interest rate should be reduced by the same amount. Finally, the maintenance of a constant price level in a nongrowing industrial system implies either an interest rate of zero or continuous inflation.

Time Perspective of Industrial and Cultural Evolution

The foregoing example has been discussed in detail because it serves as a case history of the type of cultural difficulties which may be anticipated during the transition period from a phase of exponential growth to a stable state. Since the tenets of our exponential-growth culture (such as a nonzero interest rate) are incompatible with a state of nongrowth, it is understandable that extraordinary efforts will be made to avoid a cessation of growth. Inexorable, however, physical and biological constraints must eventually prevail and appropriate cultural adjustments will have to be made.

***

http://www.oilcrisis.com/hubbert/growth/
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Re: Overshoot

Post by MediumTex » Mon Feb 01, 2016 5:41 pm

For reference, here is our peak oil discussion:

http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/ot ... /peak-oil/
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Re: Overshoot

Post by Pointedstick » Mon Feb 01, 2016 6:51 pm

I picked up the eBook and am eagerly reading it--with a genuinely open mind. One thing I am struck by is how dated the writing is. The book was written more than 40 years ago and I admit I am skeptical of old apocalyptic non-fiction--by definition, the predicted apocalypse hasn't happened yet! This doesn't mean it won't, or couldn't, of course. Fossil fuels are undeniably a resource that is non-renewable on a human time scale (with our current level of technology  ;)). We might have used 50% of the fossil fuels that will ever be economically feasible to extract or we might have used 2%, but we're certainly using it up.

Nevertheless, I retain my faith in market pricing. Supply and demand can only be denied by governments for so long--once the price starts to rise because the supplies of economically extractable fossil fuels are dwindling, the shift to electricically-powered equipment and non-fossil-fuel electricity generation will really heat up. And it's already happening. Several European countries get more than half of their total energy from non-fossil-fuel sources. The infrastructure conversion from fossil-fuel-fired to electricity-powered has been taking place for decades. The world looks like a substantially different place from the one that Catton saw in 1973. Back then everything was coal, oil, gas, smoke, smog, pollution, low efficiency. In 2016, four of the houses in my middle-class neighborhood have large solar PV arrays on their roofs, and I could buy an electric car for $16k if I wanted to. The world itself seems to be a constant low-level refutation of Catton's worries. But I'll read the whole book and let you know if anything he said changes my mind.
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Re: Overshoot

Post by sixdollars » Tue Feb 02, 2016 6:37 pm

Nothing has caused me more cognitive dissonance than overshoot / peak oil.  It's weird, but I find myself flip flopping between not caring about overshoot and peak oil, to caring too much.  It's like when I read about it, it makes so much sense that I cannot logically refute it.  The big picture takeaway is extremely depressing and makes me wonder about the timing and if I should even bother worrying about it.  Part of me thinks that there's not really much you can honestly do anyway, so it's best not to worry... the other part of me thinks that it's stupid to just do nothing.

After a few months of not reading anything about it, it's like it goes to the back of my mind and I no longer fear it or think it relevant anymore.  I sometimes think this is my brain in denial employing a natural defense mechanism.  Does anyone else have this happen? Just me?

The problem is, I have yet to hear a convincing argument against overshoot/peak oil that didn't involve high levels of cargoism... I'm waiting though.  I actually spent a good amount of time trying to find analyses that could persuasively refute overshoot/peak oil, sadly, I found none that were very convincing.

I hear that a lot of people are attracted to this sort of narrative because it's thrilling doomer porn, but I honestly can't fathom why anyone would WANT to believe in overshoot or peak oil, it's pretty depressing.  I'd much rather NOT have heard about it at all to be honest.  It's like when Morpheus offers the blue pill vs. the red pill.  Just take the damn blue pill..  ;D
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