US Labor Force as percentage of population: 1952-2012

This is a different metric to, say, the Labor force Participation Rate.

Although there has been a marked decrease in recent years, the most salient part of this graph has to be the 1962-1990 growth period, whereby large amounts of people entered the workforce. This reflects the growth of women choosing to work in the workplace rather than remaining at home. I'm sure that birthrates during this period would also reflect a downward trend.

And although productivity is certainly a important feature in GDP growth, this graph should also prove that GDP growth between the 1962-1990 period was also driven by an expansion of the available workforce. Similarly, any discussion about how GDP growth in recent decades has been lower than the previous ones should also take into account the plateau from 1990 onwards.

Note also that the 1981-1990 period grew at a slower pace than the 1964-1980 period. Reaganomics?

The 1952-1962 period is interesting in that the population grew faster in proportion to the workforce. In a word: Baby Boomers. By 1962, the eldest Baby Boomers were 17 and ready to go to work.

The post 1990 period corresponds with the tech boom, the housing boom and the GFC.

As the population ages and more people retire, there will be a fall in the above graph. I'd love to look at a graph for Japan, considering their population is aging and now in decline.

Sources: CLF16OV, POP.

Worldwide food production: no collapse yet

This is a result of some number crunching I did, comparing the amount of cereal grains produced to world population level:

I chose a three year average because the original had huge yearly swings while this gives a reasonably good idea of where things have been heading. It also takes into consideration the fact that cereals can be stored over the long term, which means that high production one year can help service demand the following year.

I chose cereal grains since these are a staple food and indicates generally the potential for future famines (as production decreases).

What it shows is that, so far, there have been no significant negative impacts on world food production in the past 50 years. There was a marked decline between 1985 and 2003 that needs to be explained, but production since 2003 has risen quickly.

The reason for looking at per capita figures (tonnes of grain produced divided by world population) is to see whether or not production levels are exceeding population: It's all well and good for cereal production to increase but it is another thing altogether if population is increasing faster than cereal production.

You can see the effect of the "Green Revolution" between 1963 and 1986.

I created this spreadsheet and graph to see whether or not Peak Oil and Global Warming had affected global food production. So far the answer is that they haven't yet.

A few years ago there were various food riots around the world tied to increasing prices. See here and here. It seems that, in hindsight, these problems were probably a result of local issues arising out of the Global Financial Crisis.

It's also true that grain prices have increased and this is due to increased demand from developing countries like China. Notwithstanding these facts and the consequences of them (richer people increasingly consuming more of the available food than poorer people) worldwide cereal production is still better now than at probably any other time in history.

Sources:

World Population Figures: Source.
Cereal Production 1961-2010 (World total; Cereals total; Production quantity): Source.
Cereal Production 2011-2012 (estimates): Source.

The Three Spheres of Society

• People
• Business
• Government

What happens when Conservatives get convinced by Climate Change?

They don't stop being conservatives, they start advocating a carbon tax:

Taking stock of our conservative principles and America’s energy and climate challenges, E&EI believes that the solution is an energy policy which:

• Eliminates all subsidies for all fuels;
  
• Attaches all costs to all fuels;
  
• and Ensures revenue neutrality to prevent the growth of government

A sensible solution is a revenue-neutral tax swap, accompanied by a phase-out of all energy subsidies. A tax swap would, dollar for dollar, ratchet down anti-growth income taxes and shift the tax onto carbon pollution: Tax the bad, quit taxing the good, and let the free-enterprise system deliver the fuels of the future.

Despite my position on the left hand side of the political spectrum, I have always believed that a number of conservative beliefs are worth keeping. The solution proposed by E&EI is probably not enough to solve the whole problem of global warming, but it is a healthy start, and one that comes from a side of politics that seems all too willing to deny science.

Obama's trip to Ireland

Jedward

No Peak Now?

Monbiot has given up on Peak Oil:

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner.

...

Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time.

A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

...

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world's most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.

But The Oil Drum says that the Harvard study is flawed:

So, there now comes an Energy Study from Harvard which boldly states that this is rubbish - that by 2020, global production will be at 110.6 mbd and these concerns that most of us have at The Oil Drum (inter alia) are chimeras of the imagination.

...

The amount of oil in the region tapped by the well is finite, and when it is gone it is gone, whether from a vertical well that shows gradual decline with time, or from the horizontal well that holds the production level until the water hits the well and it stops. I am not sure that the author of the report understands this.

...

The report further seems a little confused on how horizontal wells work in these reservoirs. As Aramco has noted, one cannot keep drilling longer and longer holes and expect the well production to double with that increase in length. Because of the need to maintain differential pressures between the reservoir and the well, there are optimal lengths for any given formation. And as I have also noted, the report flies in the face of the data on field production from the deeper wells of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Limits of Biochar

I recently did some basic equations about Biochar. If Biochar were the sole way that carbon is removed from the atmosphere, how much land would be needed to store the stuff? The calculations ended up being very pessimistic indeed. Armed with these calculations I sent off an email to the boffins at Real Climate. NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt responded and pointed out that I had wildly overestimated the amount of anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere but, when taken with carbon that had been sequestered into the ocean, the final figure ends up being 400 billion metric tonnes - an amount that doesn't take into account future emissions.

How much Biochar can be used as a soil amendment? According to this, the amount is around 23.2 metric tonnes per hectare. It was just a matter of then dividing the amount of anthropogenic carbon by 23.2 and see how much land is required to sequester Biochar. The result is very depressing:

In short, 23.2 metric tonnes per hectare is not enough. Even if every single hectare of above ocean land mass is sequestered with 23.2 metric tonnes of biochar, the result is not enough to remove anthropogenic carbon. In reality, sequestering of biochar could not be achieved over the entire earth's surface, so I've given figures there for 10% of the earth's surface as well as 5%, which would require a Biochar sequestering of up to 23 times what is recommended.

So, the questions are:

1. What amount of sequestered Biochar is too much? At what point will it turn from being a soil amendment and become toxic to plant growth?
2. What would be the effects of deep Biochar sequestering, whereby Biochar is sequestered up to 10 metres underground rather than just existing within the 1-2 metres?
3. Is it viable to use carbon as a resource to replace current commodities such as iron, aluminium, glass and so on?
   

The good news, I suppose, is that a cylindrical storage container 50 metres high and 18.25 kilometres wide could effectively store all 400 billion metric tonnes of carbon (at 2.267 grams per cm³ = 90,680,00 km³, volume of cylinder = πr²h) if necessary. NOTE: My spreadsheet let me down in its maths here. The real figure would be 500 metres high and 7600km in diameter: Not good news.

Solar Power...

Balancing Economic Benefits

The Australian Government agency CSIRO has recently won a court battle in the US to protect wi-fi technology patents it set up in 1996. The case was very clear - the CSIRO made the patents and the technology industry failed to compensate the agency for their work. As a result, the CSIRO will gain a lot of money which it will presumably use to invest in more technology.

One of the problems that Americans have with this ruling is that the agency is owned by the Australian government. As a citizen of Australia, therefore, I am a shareholder in this organisation and I am proud of its achievements throughout the decades in developing high technology. Yet at the same time I also realise that I will not see any financial benefit from this court case - despite being a part owner of the CSIRO I will not see a penny of this financial windfall.

But then a part of me is also concerned that such a windfall may end up benefiting the world less than if the technology was made free. The enforcing of this patent will ensure that the cost of wi-fi services around the world will increase - though obviously at a level not noticeable by the average consumer.

The idea that an economic entity (a business or individual) should reap financial reward for its work (whether in the form of labour or in innovation) is not in question here. Instead I am questioning two related issues:

1. Whether the amount of of financial reward is appropriate.
   
2. Whether the financial reward should be factored directly in to the price of the labour or technology in question.

Within the free market system these two issues are moot. An entity's financial compensation for its work is determined by market forces and is a result of the price the market is willing to pay for it. This is economics 101.

Now while I'm not advocating a communist system here, whereby supply, demand and price for all goods and services are determined by bureaucrats, what I am pointing out is that maybe some parts of the economy are better off and more efficient if some level of planning and government intervention exists.

It is a well known fact amongst economists that the supply and sale of certain goods and services does not  have a zero sum effect upon the economy, but can vary. A few years ago a UK think tank determined that hospital cleaners created ten times more wealth than it cost to employ them while waste recycling workers were twelve times more valuable than their wages. This was determined by how much an economic effect such workers had upon the broader economy, with cleaners and waste recycling workers providing a service that, if forsaken by modern society, would result in greater costs overall. The study also concluded that certain workers in the financial industry actually destroyed value in the economy (this was measured after a recession so the numbers are a bit skewed).

In the same way, think of the CSIRO and their wi-fi patent. The money that was spent developing this technology was paid for by the Australian taxpayer rather than by market forces. But as a result of their discovery, millions of people around the world have easier access to the internet - something which ends up having a positive economic effect far greater than either the amount of money spent by taxpayers like me and even by the increased cost of wi-fi brought about by the patent lawsuit.

Nevertheless I ask the question again - what would be the eventual economic benefit to the world if the CSIRO forgoes the money due to it via this patent lawsuit? The CSIRO may lose $200 million per year in funds but what if the net effect of making it free was greater than the CSIRO's windfall? If the patent was open and free, low cost tech companies the world over could provide cheaply manufactured wi-fi hardware and software that ends up lowering the cost of wi-fi throughout the world. If this is the case then perhaps the CSIRO should rethink its actions.

Now let's extend this idea beyond the CSIRO and the idea is not so radical. Roads, obviously, provide huge amounts of economic benefits beyond what it costs to make them but there is no direct method of paying for them to be built and maintained (apart from the occasional tollway) - instead they are reliant upon tax revenue and government decisions. The police and legal system are funded by the state too and the effect they have in maintaining a peaceful society brings about huge economic benefits.

But let's extend this further. Think of the pharmaceutical industry and the profits they reap on patents. Having a patent for a successful drug allows Big Pharma to sell the drug at a premium price because they control the drug's production. But what would happen if the patents they hold were free? Would the financial loss incurred by the pharmaceutical company in no longer having a patent be more than made up for by the financial benefits of cheap supply of the drug to the market by generic pharmaceutical manufacturers? Of course one criticism of this approach would be the survivability of big pharma in making better and better drugs if there is no funding for them to do it - and to which I respond by pointing out that maybe, just maybe, the funds for research and development could come from taxpayers. In the real world this would result in pharmaceutical companies getting government funding to develop patent-free drugs, or else the government could purchase the patent (either through agreement or by eminent domain) and open it up for the generic industry to produce.

Of course I'm only using Big Pharma here as an example and I'm in no way going down the route of demonizing them as others have done (I think there are huge problems with Big Pharma, but I recognise the benefits as well). Think about the effect of open agricultural patents, with companies like Monsanto forgoing their litigation campaign and getting on with developing new strands of vegetation without having to worry about how the consumers are using or misusing their product (since, of course, they receive their funding from the state).

Or even think about JK Rowling. What if Rowling made the Harry Potter series public domain? Sure she would lose all of her income but the effect would be very cheap Harry Potter books available from every conceivable book publishing company, thus lowering the price of reading her books for families and schools. Would the resultant economic effect of cheap Potter books be greater than the economic benefits Rowling receives? (She does, after all, have more than enough money to live off).

There are plenty of other examples I could use here. I'm certainly not saying that every conceivable example would work or should even be initiated even if they did work - the long term certainly needs to be taken into account and economic entities need revenue to survive and continue providing goods and services and labour to the economy. Slavery, whether hoisted upon the individual or upon companies, is not what is being described here, though some level of constraint is being presented.

By way of closing let me just say that much of capitalism's history has proven right in that the price the market is willing to pay labour and innovation has pushed society forward. I'm not saying that communism should be reintroduced. Nevertheless I am questioning whether the market-only attitude is the sole paradigm we should operate in. Maybe it would be better for all if government diverts tax revenue to certain areas of the economy because the overall economic benefit outweighs the market/price benefit to the producer.