One of the reasons that so many have been so wrong in their predicted futures is failure to grasp the nature of techno-social evolution - the overall effect of technical advancement when coupled with social advancement. Though it's difficult to cleanly distinguish one from the other in all cases, and they are each both cause and effect when viewed from different perspectives, it is possible to talk about them usefully in the language of one or the other. Here's a useful example:

Economic expansion depends on greater yield from whatever inputs are available. The energy intensity of the US economy has been falling steadily since the 1970's, yielding more and more economic output per unit of energy; still, greater efficiency can be overcome by falling supply. The alternative is to convert something else to suit. American society is no stranger to this phenomenon; in the past 229 years, US society has seen a number of transformations in its use of energy for various purposes:

• Coal replaces firewood as the primary source of space heat.
• Steam replaces draft animals for rail transport power.
• Kerosene replaces wax and tallow as the primary source of light.
• Incandescent electric lights supplant kerosene.
• Internal combustion replaces draft animals for road transport.
• Natural gas and fuel oil supplant coal as the primary source of space heat.
• Diesel engines replace steam for rail transport power.
• Fluorescent lamps supplant incandescent.

Each transformation either created a resource out of a material which had not been used widely or at all before (coal, petroleum, natural gas) or greatly increased the efficiency of use (fluorescent lighting, diesel locomotives vs. oil-fired steam). Each time, some resource was leveraged to yield more benefit.

It's not an exhaustive list but it makes the point well that resources were in a sense created, they had not been seen or used as resources before the ability and need arose. Attempting to predict futures without consideration of this process is largely a waste of time, and trying to predict the results of this process is very difficult. Not impossible, not always, just very difficult. We can partly make out some possibilities in the dimly illuminated near future.

But even if we can't name the new resources that will be created by this process we can reasonably expect them to emerge as need arises. Perhaps not enough - things do fall apart sometimes - but enough to affect our overall predictions and provide the possibility for some satisfactory scenarios.

Seeking Carbon

The point being pursued in the referenced post was focused on energy and was the third in a series of posts exploring the potential of the solar heated thermochemical zinc process.

The . . . solar heated thermochemical zinc process . . . converts zinc oxide to elemental zinc with a catalyzed heat reaction. The catalyst, which lowers the reaction temperatures required, is carbon. At higher temperatures no catalyst is needed. That would be good, a carbon neutral energy system, but since the carbon in the catalyzed system would be captive it might make sense to sequester it.

Though carbon is not needed except as a catalyst to lower reaction temperatures it would make things easier. Solar furnaces to generate the higher heats needed without catalysts are not entirely prime time yet. High temperatures are an engineering challenge in any number of ways.

So where can the carbon be found? Is it a created resource in the sense mentioned at the beginning, something we once didn't value or even considered to be waste? Yes and no. Clearly there are carbon wastes, more than in the past when poverty and an agrarian lifestyle made us more frugal, less than in the recent past before we again discovered the value of byproduct carbon. So, yes, there are waste carbon materials that have value - but no because there are many competing uses for that carbon. Energy generation isn't the only, and arguably not the best, use for what we considered waste not long ago.

Not surprisingly markets are sorting this out. Many of the materials that were once called agricultural wastes are now worth almost as much money per ton as some primary production. Almond hulls, the leathery skin of an almond nut, were once considered waste until they were discovered to be valuable as food in a mixed ration for livestock. Though they are not particularly nutritious they provide some of the fiber needed for digestion. They became expensive. Then it was discovered that almond shells, the more brittle layer between the hulls and the nut meats, also had value as a source of fiber. What was waste a couple of years ago and being used as fuel for energy generation in co-gen plants, is now worth $100 per ton as forage.

This will continue. One by one all of the carbon materials we once called waste will become valuable again as higher uses are recognized. In the ultimate sense - the future SF plot - there can be no such thing as hydrocarbon waste. We'll mine the asteroids for hydrocarbons. It's in a sense true wealth for carbon based life forms.

There may be short term opportunities for using carbon wastes for energy generation applications but it isn't a long or even medium term solution. We are coming to realize how much carbon has been lost from our soils, how much this affects the atmosphere, and how much this degrades the soil as well. See Breathe Deeply, a recent post about the British discovery that CO2 emissions from tilled soil is as great as all their reductions achieved thus far through industrial, transportation and residential regulation. See also Save British Ale, which discusses the error of growing biomass for energy generation.

The two posts deal with a similar error in thinking - too narrow a scope of investigation. The first discovers that there have been no net emissions reductions despite significant efforts, the second advocates argronomic practices that would greatly increase emissions in one place to reduce them in another, for a net increase in emissions. The principles of systems thinking - paying attention to the flows within a system as well as the sources and sinks and seeking to do effective decision making given those realities are sound. The principles of holistic thinking - considering the whole system rather than bounding it in a convenient and often misleading way or ignoring sources, sinks and flows within it not considered to be significant are sound. We just aren't very good at implementing those principles. We too often do a poor job of it, and to make things harder for ourselves we often give too much credence to those poorly designed systems analyses and the policies they suggest.

As we go about our business of techno-social evolution - creating resources and gaining startling efficiencies - we will do better if the scope and scale of our thinking enlarges. We can rely on group decision making to nudge things in the right direction - as in the market example above for commodity pricing - but that mechanism can be ignored or ruined by political intervention. Our policies can be self defeating. They are often so. The policies themselves are subject to the same natural processes - bad ones give way to better ones over time - but it degrades things significantly and sometimes prevents dealing with issues. Societies do collapse.

Knowing that we may be wrong on any given assessment should give us pause. How do we help ourselves be open to unknown but beneficial discoveries? Diversify. Adopt an attitude that everything is pragmatic and provisional. At some level we know that this is true, this too shall pass, but we don't always act appropriately. In the heat of conflict, especially political conflict, we harden and narrow our minds, in effect reducing our intellect and degrading the quality of our decisions and policies. Though not always true it is more productive to assume that your competitors and opponents are making good points, that they are reasoning in good faith and see something useful that we may have missed. Even those who have intellectually ossified, become believers rather than knowers, all their ideas fossilized into ideology, may have a point worth your attention. Though their specific arguments may be trivial political speech, there is an insight buried beneath that behavior worth investigating. Sometimes it's a useful insight, sometimes not, but you need to consider it in your holistic systems thinking, even if just to account for the wreckers in society, those who are not making a net positive contribution. They are part of the system too, if nothing else they may be the gritty irritant around which a pearl can form in self defense.

Update:

A useful example of thinking narrowly about problems as well as the diminishing amount of "waste" carbon is the idea of using corn stover as a source of char.

Many plants are grown for fruit, seed or tubers but create a great deal of other plant matter as well. In zero-till farming this material can be problematic, as it insulates and prevents the earth from warming as desired in the spring and delays the start of growth. It is desirable to remove this excess matter, but what to do with it? . . . The stalks and such left over from corn (maize) is called "corn stover".

Corn stover isn't "excess matter". It is forage of a quality comparable to average hay. A third of all stover produced is used as forage now and more will be used in future. It is neglected somewhat as a forage now because maize is subsidized. It's cheaper to feed grain. Seventy percent of all maize raised is for livestock feed and when those subsidies diminish the price will rise. The stover will rise in value too as well as increasing in use.

There are some interesting technologies associated with the "creation" of this resource. One is to ensile the stover, a process which allows anaerobic bacteria to "ferment" the stover and in doing so increase both its palatability (to ruminants, we think it stinks) and its nutritional value. Another method is to treat the stover with anhydrous ammonia which reacts with the cellulosic portions of the stover to make it more palatable, more digestible and nearly double its protein content.

There's some interesting work in developing countries to make better use of stover using such techniques, but even more interesting is the work to develop cultivars which have naturally more nutritious stover. In the past breeders payed no attention to this except in varieties of maize intended to be grazed or used for silage. There are several cultivars that have quite nutritious stover. Hybrid varieties that have both nutritious stover and high yields of grain are in development.

The world needs to double its food production in the next two or three decades to feed expected population increases and the nearly one billion people who are hungry now. As development proceeds there will be greater demand for food as well. In short, there isn't any such thing as agricultural waste or land that can be repurposed for production of biomass for energy generation. For a very brief time there may be some materials available, but that's a problem that is being corrected as agriculture becomes more efficient and productive.

» Biocidal Surfaces from Crumb Trail
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Tracked: September 13, 2005 09:19 AM