Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  The conviction here that humans can find endless ways to stretch the carrying capacity of this land is not a Jewish exclusive. Tareq Abu Hamed, a Palestinian who runs Arava’s Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation, is filling the campus with photovoltaic panels. His goal is to perfect solar-driven electricity to split water molecules into their components, oxygen and hydrogen, then store the hydrogen in a boron-based medium for release on demand as carbon-free fuel.

  “This region has the highest solar radiation in the world. We can reduce pollution and make ourselves energy independent,” he says.

  Yet techno-fixes for what limits Israel and Palestine’s existence crash into certain realities. Eilat’s desalination plants are now surrounded by giant mounds of salt. Some gets sold as Red Sea salt for aquariums, some as kosher table salt. But markets can absorb only so much, and dumping the excess back into the Gulf is a hypersaline hazard to marine life. It also takes formidable energy to push seawater through reverse-osmosis filters. In Israel, bereft not only of oil but of rivers to dam for hydroelectric power, energy comes from coal-fired plants that shroud its Mediterranean coast. In 2011, water shortages became so severe that by emergency decree, Israel’s desalination plants began operating around the clock, burning even more coal.

  More solar energy would seem an obvious remedy, but the Middle East’s sunlight advantage is compromised by the fact that at 113°F, a temperature reached frequently at Arava, the efficiency of solar panels drops. “We’re working on solving that,” says Tareq Abu Hamed, mopping his shaved head.

  Yet temperatures keep rising. If the patriarch Jacob were to return—he passed nearby four thousand years ago, en route to reuniting with his son Joseph, who was warning Egyptians of coming shortages—except for far less wildlife, the landscape would still look familiar. The primary vegetation, now as then, is a drought-resistant acacia tree, the food source for gazelles, ibex, insects, and birds. “All Arava Valley agriculture is based on them,” says Abu Hamed’s Arava colleague, ecologist Elli Groner. “They hold the soil in place, and its water.”

  The problem is that the acacias are dying, due to reduced precipitation.

  “If they go, there will be a total ecosystem collapse—what ecologists call a stage shift, from one state to a new one. We don’t know what that new one is. Nobody can predict.”

  Israel’s Nature Protection Authority has suggested watering them. Groner, who directs long-term ecological research here, removes his wire-rimmed glasses and gestures at the dry valley. “With water from Lake Kinneret? From the desalination plants?”

  Israel’s forestry agency, he adds, “did the only thing they know to do. They started planting new acacias. Donors to the Jewish National Fund can now adopt an acacia tree in Israel, to replace a dead one.”

  Population ecologists often speak of the Netherlands Fallacy: The fact that so many densely packed Dutch have such a high standard of living is not proof that humans can thrive in essentially an unnatural, artificial environment. Like everyone else, the Dutch need things that only an ecosystem can provide; fortunately, they can afford to purchase those things from elsewhere. Israel likewise survives on the surplus (and largess) of others.

  Suppose, though, that the cost of shipping fuel to bring bananas, blueberries, or grain from across oceans becomes prohibitively high—due either to scarcity, or to what burning fuel adds to the atmosphere. Should Israel, Palestine, or any place on Earth ever be forced to depend on its own self-sufficiency, it will have to contend with numerous human dependents—and with the fact that humans depend on other living things, which require sufficient soil and water to flourish.

  Not just Israelis and Palestinians: In the Holy Land, they aren’t even the most fecund. Bedouin families, Alon Tal guesses, once may have averaged as many as fourteen children, which would be the world’s highest. Because they’ve always been roving desert nomads, no one was ever sure. But there are a lot of them.

  With only the Negev left for more cities and military bases, Israel is claiming lands where Bedouins traditionally have grazed their flocks. With little choice, they’re moving into cities that Israel is building for them, too.

  In the new Bedouin city of Rahat, Ahmad Amrani, a schoolteacher and one of Alon Tal’s Green comrades, stands atop the flat roof of the four-story home he now shares with various members of his family. Actually, the Amranis inhabit the entire street. “Every street down there,” he says, indicating his raw city, where thirteen mosques rise amid windblown dust and plastic scraps, “is another family.”

  His house, faced in polished Jerusalem limestone, is mostly empty. Behind it is a Bedouin tent where his relatives spend most of their time, seated on carpets and drinking sweetened tea. Unlike his father and grandfather, Ahmad doesn’t dress in a caftan and keffiyeh; he wears jeans and a leather jacket. He also attended university, the first in his family.

  “Ten years ago, when I went to Ben-Gurion University, I was one of four Bedouin students. Today there are 400.” He pauses. “And 350 of them are women.”

  Making the transition to the confines of urbanity after a life spent on camelback, driving goats across an open desert, has not been easy for Bedouin men, he says. Nobody gets to be a sheik anymore. With most men not working or providing, women are taking on that role. Very quickly, the young women see that the more education they have, the better that goes.

  The big question now is who these educated women are going to marry. “It’s sensitive,” Amrani says. “Because they have higher self-esteem, they have a hard time finding suitable mates. More are staying single. And nobody’s having fourteen children anymore.” He heads down to the tent, for tea and almond cookies. His schoolteacher wife and their one child, a son, will be home shortly.

  Before leaving Israel and Palestine, one more question remains to be posed. Its answer, however, will emerge more clearly beyond this incandescent Middle Eastern flash point, where human passions, both spiritual and fierce, resist being reduced to mere demography. Still, it bears recalling that, in the time of Genesis, when only a few thousand were here, battles over precious wells were already under way among growing tribes.

  The Fourth Question

  If a sustainable population for the Earth turns out to be less than the 10+ billion we’re headed to, or even less than the 7 billion we already number, how do we design an economy for a shrinking population, and then for a stable one—meaning, an economy that can prosper without depending on constant growth?

  CHAPTER 2

  A World Bursting Its Seams

  Cape Canaveral, June 1994: Six hundred scientists and engineers are touring the John F. Kennedy Space Center in a caravan of blue-and-white air-conditioned buses. They’ve gathered from thirty-four countries for the World Hydrogen Energy Conference, united in a dream to switch the planet from an economy fueled with dirty coal and petroleum to one run on clean hydrogen. They’ve come bearing designs for cars, appliances, aircraft, heating, cooling, and entire industries—all pollution-free.

  For them, this is an inspirational pilgrimage. The white spherical tank on the pad, where the shuttle Columbia will presently lift spaceward, is filled with pure hydrogen. Since even before the moon shots, the power for NASA astronauts in space has come from hydrogen fuel cells, refillable devices that, like batteries, chemically convert fuel directly to electricity. Although the hydrogen that NASA uses was derived from natural gas in a process that also produces carbon dioxide, the conference participants are hopeful that the efficiency of solar technology will soon improve so much that water molecules, not hydrocarbons, will be the feedstock.

  Nearly two decades later, they and a new generation of researchers, such as Arava Institute’s Tareq Abu Hamed, would still be hoping for an economical way of producing clean hydrogen energy. It’s frustrating, because there’s more hydrogen in the universe than all the other elements combined. Whether burned by internal combustion or injected into a fuel cell, its exhaust is simply water vapor. Theoretically, that e
xhaust could be captured, condensed, and tapped again for hydrogen, ad infinitum. A perfect, closed system—except for one annoying detail: In this universe, usable amounts of pure hydrogen gas occur naturally only in places like the Sun. On Earth, all hydrogen is tightly bound with other elements, such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. Breaking the bonds to free it—pulling the H out of H2O—requires more energy than hydrogen produces. The number of solar panels needed to milk enough hydrogen from water to run our civilization isn’t remotely practical. After years of trying, the most efficient way to extract hydrogen is still using superheated steam to strip it from natural gas, a process that also releases that pesky pollutant CO2.

  That’s especially unfortunate, since during a lunch address at the 1994 hydrogen conference, NASA director Daniel Goldin imparted some disturbing news. Over the previous decade, he said, satellite data revealed that the world’s sea levels had risen nearly an inch. Goldin didn’t have to connect the dots for this particular audience: They knew the connection between the rise in seas, global temperatures, and the carbon dioxide expelled using man-made energy. Worldwide, four-fifths of our energy comes from ancient organic waste that nature didn’t need to run the planet, so it was buried safely away. Over eons, the buried organic matter compressed into highly concentrated coal and petroleum. Then, in less than three centuries, humans dug up hundreds of millions of years’ worth of the stuff and burned it. Its exhaust loaded the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide than the Earth has seen in at least 3 million years—a time when the world was rather balmy, and its oceans one hundred feet higher.

  That was one of two reasons the hydrogen researchers were intent on an alternative to fossil fuel. The other was addressed that afternoon, by a physicist named Albert Bartlett. A University of Colorado emeritus professor, Bartlett professed to know little about hydrogen but something about basic arithmetic. He was particularly fascinated by what happens when things start to double.

  “Imagine,” he said, “a species of bacteria that reproduces by dividing in two. Those two become four, the four become eight, and so forth. Let’s say we place one bacterium in a bottle at 11:00 a.m., and at noon we observe the bottle to be full. At what point was it half full?”

  The answer, it turned out, is 11:59 a.m.

  As awareness penetrated his audience, Bartlett nodded in return, his bald pate encircled by a few remaining gray tufts. “Now,” he continued, “if you were a bacterium in that bottle, at what point would you realize you were running out of space? At 11:55 a.m., when the bottle is only 1/32 full, and 97 percent is open space, yearning for development?”

  Everyone giggled. “Now suppose that with a minute to spare, the bacteria discover three new bottles to inhabit. They sigh with relief: They have three times more bottles than had ever been known, quadrupling their space resource. Surely this makes them self-sufficient in space. Right?”

  Except, of course, it doesn’t. Bartlett’s point was that in exactly two more minutes, all four bottles will be full.

  Exponential doubling, he noted, doesn’t only gobble space. In 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter observed in a speech to the nation that, “During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind’s previous history.” But as the century drew to a close, that rate inevitably had slowed.

  “We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit,” said Bartlett. “Finding more gets progressively harder.”

  Albert Bartlett didn’t know back then about twenty-first-century technologies for fracturing bedrock to release trapped natural gas, or squeezing the petroleum out of tar sands—or rather, he did, but at the time, when the price of oil was around sixteen dollars per barrel, their cost seemed prohibitively high, as in higher-hanging fruit. But even so, they were just the equivalent of finding a couple of new bottles: As demand keeps increasing exponentially with countries like China and India zooming past the United States, they at best give us a few more decades—and a lot more CO2.

  Albert Bartlett, now in his late eighties, has told his bacteria-bottle story more than fifteen hundred times, to students, scientists, policy makers, and any group who will listen. “They still don’t seem to get it,” he laments, deploring what seems to have devolved into a race to see how much damage fossil fuels will wreak before they’re exhausted, as humans scrape ever deeper for the dirtiest ones.

  He’s amazed that people find the concept of exponential doubling so slippery, even when he spices it up with more examples. In one, a Chinese emperor is enamored with a new game that one of his subjects has invented, called chess. He summons the inventor. “Choose your reward,” he commands. “Whatever you wish.”

  “All I want is rice to feed my family,” he said.

  “Done,” the emperor replied. “How much do you need?”

  “Just a bit. In fact, Your Highness can measure it out on the chessboard. Put one rice grain on the first square. Put two on the next, and double the amount on each square thereafter. That will be sufficient.”

  The emperor neglected to consider that anyone who could dream up chess must be a shrewd mathematician. At the end of the first row on the chessboard, the eighth square, the inventor had 128 grains of rice—barely a mouthful. But by the sixteenth, he was up to 32,768. After three rows, the tally was 8,388,608 rice grains, enough to empty the palace’s storerooms. By half the chessboard, he would be owed all the rice in China—and by the final square, 18 quintillion grains of rice: more than the entire planet had ever produced. Things never got that far, of course; long before, the emperor had him beheaded.

  There are others, all forehead slappers: If you fold a sheet of paper in half, and could keep folding (seven folds is the usual physical limit), after forty-two times its thickness would reach the moon. But the entertainment value of exponential doubling begins to wane when it dawns on you that you’ve been one of the doublers. Albert Bartlett, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, began giving his talk in the 1960s when he saw a chamber of commerce brochure that boasted, “Doubling its population in ten years, Boulder is indeed a stable and prosperous community.”

  Quick math showed Bartlett that if the doubling continued at that rate, by 2000 Boulder would be bigger than New York City. Some stability. Fortunately, the doubling slowed, as Boulder residents resisted developing all the empty bottles of open space that surrounded their city, lest the scenic reason for living there in the first place vanish—along with the city’s water supply.

  In recent years, Bartlett has raised some controversy by proposing an end to immigration before the United States is engulfed with humanity. But even critics who challenge the ethical, practical, social, and environmental complexity of such a measure don’t argue with his math—especially when the scale gets so big that we lose sight of what’s happening to us. The planetary scale, for instance. In 1900, there were 1.6 billion people on Earth. Then, during the twentieth century, the world’s population doubled, and then doubled again. How much space did that leave in our bottle? How can we tell if, in fact, we’ve already filled it up?

  The shuttles have stopped flying from Cape Canaveral. Something else has stopped in Florida, too, at least for now: the biggest single-dwelling housing boom in history. In 1999, the Tampa Tribune reported, land-use plans for the state’s 470 cities and counties would allow for 101 million residents, amounting to “stuffing the populations of California, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania into Florida’s borders.” That figure may have accurately reflected Florida planners’ chronic disregard for orchards, farms, woodlands, wildlife, lakes, rivers, and aquifers.

  Ten years later, the ghost suburbs infringing one of Earth’s rarest ecosystems, the Everglades, attested that they disregarded more than that. A wasteland of empty Spanish-tiled condos, foreclosed shopping centers, and unfinished hospitals was succumbing to advancing mold atop what, a decade earlier, were marshlands filled with wood storks and enda
ngered Cape Sable sparrows, edged by tomato fields.

  This is one of several ground zeros in America’s Sun Belt of the 2008 subprime mortgage bust. Having run out of qualified home buyers as U.S. middle-class jobs were outsourced, banks invented mortgages based on a fantasy that someone who couldn’t afford monthly payments on 6 percent loans would magically be able to pay ballooned rates seven or ten years later. Concealing thousands of these dubious loans in packages impressively named derivatives, they then sold them to duped investors around the world. (For good measure, they purchased short positions on those packages that allowed them a tidy profit when they proved worthless.)

  Presumably, the world now knows better—except, despite the economic carnage that left Florida with three hundred thousand vacant housing units, its local governments have since approved zoning for five hundred fifty thousand more. Such an apparent disconnect from reality reveals what psychologists might call a dysfunctional codependence between our population and our economy. If we measure economic health, as we commonly do, by the number of monthly housing starts, somebody has to live in those houses we then build, and furnish and decorate them, and buy whatever it takes to run and maintain them. That’s a lot of products, each representing jobs for whoever made and sold them. The more jobs, the more workers—wherever they live—needed to fill them. The more products, the more customers needed to buy them. That sounds nicely circular, and it might be—except for the more part.

  At some point, something finally runs out. In the housing market collapse, the shortage was of people with enough money to pay their mortgages, leading to millions of foreclosures. But in the United States as in the world, people’s numbers keep growing nonetheless, and as they do, so must the planet’s economy to feed, clothe, shelter them—and beyond those basics, serve and entertain them in as many ways as they need or desire, and in as many ways as marketers can persuade them that there’s something new and exciting that they also need. So instead of a circle, it’s a spiral. Numbers spiral upward, cities spiral outward, housing adds up, and then suddenly there’s sprawl. Which, except for developers, is too much of a good thing.