Interview: 6 limitations of sustainability

we will all have to accept less

to save the planet there is only one option, according to Ronald Rovers: buying less, travel less, work less, less growth. And green growth does not exist.

(translation of an interview for the national Newspaper NRC 28-06-22) by Paul Luttikhuis, illustration Jeltje de Koning

Utrecht. Suppose you end up on an island the size of 2 hectares, about three soccer pitches. There are a few trees there is some fresh water and some berries to eat. That's it. Then what to do? You want a roof over your head. But if you cut down a tree for that, it will take at least 40years before you have grown a new one. If you also want to build a small fishing boat , you run out of trees fast. Besides to fish you need a fishing hook. Maybe you will succeed in gaining some iron from sedimentary rock, but melting and processing the iron takes a lot of energy. So there goes your wood . Maybe you will find some coal or oil, but you have to be careful , since gone is gone.

“That's the earth 0.0,” says Ronald Rovers, author of the book People vs Resources. (2019). In other words a simple illustration of the earth, which itself is no more as an island in the universe. Nothing is added anymore, except solar energy. Everything humans use, needs time to recover. Sometimes relatively quickly, as with a tree, but for many resources that takes ages or even millions of years before the same amount has become available again in concentrated form. [x]

Rovers is originally a building physicist, but has specialized in sustainability. He himself avoids using that word, but prefers maintainability1 instead. “Which is more precise,” as he explains in a cafe at the Utrecht central station . “And sustainability is abused too often.”

Rovers likes to start his lectures with the island example, , since it’s very illustrative for the dilemma’s mankind faces . “The choice for two hectares is not accidental,” he explains, “Its about the land surface everyone is entitled to, if all the land on the planet is distributed evenly .Its including deserts, glaciers and mountains. For real sustainability, a person can’t use more as what can be provided by these two hectares. To exceed that potential, as individual or as society, there is only two ways: deplete the earth further or steal from the neighbors”.

If you don't want that, and not further deplete the planet, you will, according to Rovers, have to face 6 important limitations.

Limitation 1

The notion of sustinability has to be reversed

the question is not how to maintain our wealth in a sustainably way, but how much wealth is possible with a sustainable use of resources.

In 1987, a committee of the United Nations, headed by the Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined sustainability as a "development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations".

According to Ronald Rovers, Brundtland thus wrongly chose mankind and his wishes and needs as a starting point. "That is the wrong starting point," he says. "We will then always try to maintain the prosperity that we created in the wrong way, at all costs, even as we slowly become aware that things must be done differently. Because we consider prosperity to be an important value in our society. But it is a human value that we , at the present level, cannot afford, physical-biologically spoken."

"If you don't want to exhaust nature, you can use very little of most raw materials. I once calculated this for oil. It takes millions of years before new oil from biomass forms. My estimate was that the earth forms about 14,000 liters of oil a year.Even if I am off by a factor of ten , mankind could still only use a fraction of the current amount without compromising the needs of future generations."

14,000 liters is the how-quantity of oil that is now used globally approximately every ten seconds. According to Rovers, most economic theories ignore the finite nature of concentrated of concentrated raw materials. They only talk about renewable sources (such as trees). The so-called non-renewable resources (such as metals and fossil fuels) are ignored and it is pretended as if they will always be available in sufficient quantities. But the difference does not exist.

There will always be enough of them. Also metal reserves are indeed growing again, it only takes so long that it's beyond human imagination.

Limitation 2

a circular economy is still linear

Most production cycles start with new raw materials. Its called circular if those raw materials can (almost) all be reused. In that case, material use is supposedly set to 'zero'.

Many countries are now seeking refuge in the circular economy. Making a product in such a way that all raw materials can be reused. A wrong reasoning, thinks Rovers. "What we now call circular, is nothing more than linear slowing down. It is doing what we have always done, but just a little better. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, we should certainly do that. We should make sure that stuff lasts longer, that it can be repaired and that all materials are reused. But we shouldn't pretend it's circular if you need new raw materials for the initial product whose stocks are not restored."

In his book, Rovers describes the reuse of aluminum beverage cans as an example. In the United Kingdom, 55 percent of them are recycled. That's quite a lot. After sixty days, all the cans are empty. So at that point 45 percent of the aluminum has been lost. If you convert that, per year you've lost 95 percent of the aluminum you started with.

"At that rate, metals are depleting quickly," says Rovers. "Or no, raw materials are not really getting depleted. The problem is that they are becoming increasingly difficult to extract, because they only occur in a diluted form, or in places where it is difficult to access them, such as under the ocean floor. And that in turn means that it costs more and more energy to obtain them." The more energy it takes to extract metals, the more windmills you need to build to extract them. But for that, you actually need extra metals. "Those sums are unfortunately made far too little," says Rovers. "It's a snake biting its own tail."

limitation 3

Green growth does not exist.

It is a physical fact that growth on one side always means loss somewhere else, for example, loss of resources, depletion of fertile soil, loss of biodiversity and climate change.

"In a distant past, we were able to grow because whole areas of the earth were not occupied by humans," says Rovers. "We formed colonies and developed unexplored areas. Soon, no doubt, we will do that again when the ice on parts of Greenland has melted. But with 7.5 billion people and a growing world population, there is no unused land left. Growth is then only possible through more depletion of Earth's resources, with more adverse consequences."

The question, then, is how to distribute existing resources fairly. "Very nice, that we all build windmills here," says Rovers. "But that takes an incredible amount of resources - more than we can afford. At the same time, a billion people still have no electricity at all. I would say: start there and let's settle here for what we already have in terms of renewable energy."

So that means: start using much less energy. We need the economy ie consumption to shrink rather than grow. In People vs Resources, Rovers likes to use the car as an example. Is it about the object itself, or about its function? "I would say about the function. In that case, a car is nothing but a means of getting around," says Rovers. "But then you can also do with a number of shared cars per neighborhood. Saving a lot of resources. However, if people keep driving the same amount and share a car with ten households, that car will wear out ten times faster." So the real question is whether individual mobility fits into a sustainable society. Traveling less and using public transport only, may be the only options.

Limitation 4

High-tech does not lead to greater sustainability.

High-tech has only accelerated the use of raw materials. Innovation, which in practice means even more technology, will therefore never be able to rescue the economy from the climate crisis.

"Take clothes dryers, for example," says Rovers, "Even if you make them supposedly circular, i.e. from waste materials, and also extremely energy-efficient, you still have to build a windmill in addition to generate the power for thew manchine. But we could also have used the wind directly by drying laundry on a clothesline. By doing that, you get the technology out of the way, and all the energy and material depletion, with the same result."

The Western economy currently functions thanks to ‘machines’ , which have taken more and more work off people's hands, Rovers writes. But machines - and in the future, increasingly, robots - cost a lot of resources and require energy to do their work. "The earth system has long created the ideal way to convert solar energy: that's us. Humans use energy anyway, in the form of food. So let the work be done by humans as much as possible."

'Human-tech' instead of 'fuel-tech', as Rovers calls it (simply put: more bike, less car) has another advantage. "The labor input into the economy is directly related to the number of people," Rovers says. "Since human labor can never consume more than goes in, the depletion rate stays within the carrying capacity of the earth."

limitation 5

Change the value of money.

In the current economic system, value comes from artificial created money. But real value should come from avoiding debt to nature.

"If you buy a bicycle, you probably feel that you are doing something sustainable," says Rovers. "If we leave the raw materials that are needed for that bike out of consideration, of course you are. But you've paid 700 euros for it, money that the bicycle seller might use to go on a holiday flight to Spain. Money that the pilot of that flight to Spain uses to build a heated swimming pool in his backyard."

"The most sustainable thing you can do is burn money," says Rovers, laughing, but with a serious undertone. "Money was once a medium of exchange in the economic system, directly linked to an amount of land and resources. But that link no longer exists. And now we are in the process of removing the link with human labor as well, as machines and robots take over the work. Then soon the only ‘capital’ will be financial capital itself, without a relationship to the physical world.

Advocates of green growth like to talk about people-planet-profit. According to Rovers, this is merely an attempt to keep the existing economic system afloat. "You have to separate people and planet from profit," he says. "Look at the economic crisis of ten years ago. What was the EU's response? First save the banks and then buy up debt, that is, print money and pump it into the economy, thousands of billions of euros! Money that should keep the economy afloat by fueling consumption. Money is the emperor's clothes, you say you want to change the old system, but you cling to it with everything you have."

limitation 6

The real cause is consumption, and CO2 is a side effect of that.

It is impossible to reduce CO2 emissions while maintaining current consumption patterns. Climate change could work as a crowbar for social change.

"We are living way beyond our means and therefore leaving a negative legacy for our children. We will have to settle for less, buy less, travel less." But fortunately not only less, Rovers adds, also more: "More maintenance, more repair, more leisure, more walking, more love. The balance will be very different."

"Today's prosperity is entirely based on fossil fuels," he says. "If we are allowed to emit no more CO2, so really zero emissions, a lot of things will simply not be possible anymore." According to Rovers, anyone who wants to know what a world without fossil fuels would look like need only look back a hundred and fifty years, to the time before the industrial revolution, when coal, oil and gas were barely used.

We may not have to go back that far, Rovers thinks. "With the knowledge we have now, and with everything we've already taken away from future generations, and what we've appropriated from other countries, we might be able to live within the limits of the planet in a way like the early 1960s. Is that bad? Oh well, I had a very happy childhood."

More on these issues , the book and some background, see this page:: www.ronaldrovers.com

1 maintainability: to be able to maintain the use of a resource eternally