Many of you follow my eclectic blog posts hoping that one of them might appeal to you. They span a broad range from personal to professional, craft to art, simplistic to technical, worldly to cosmic. I sometimes offer my opinions and back them up with data. In today’s data-challenged world (not from a dearth of data, but rather the challenges from those who don’t like the data), it is hard to make a compelling argument.
Nevertheless, I recently embarked on exploring a topic that has always bothered me: the idea that we can solve our problems by economic growth. I can see how it can solve certain short term problems, like borrowing money to pay back interest on prior loans, but it didn’t seem like a viable long term strategy. We live on a finite planet and so eventually we would end up against practical physical limitations, right?
It is obvious to a physicist, but seemingly not to many others.
Over the last month, while staying warm in our natural gas-heated home, I looked into the future of fossil fuels and their impact on our global economy. I crafted three essays which are more technical than many of my posts, and may not be of interest to many of my followers. So don’t feel compelled to digest them.
But if you are curious, here are brief descriptions, with links.
Energy, Growth, and Overshoot
This is an introduction to the concept that our economy is based on energy, and the modern economy is based on the high energy density of fossil fuels. Without them, we revert back to the annual supply of solar energy we harvest by the hunting and gathering of plants and animals. A simple model is presented that shows our peak energy (and economy) happening around 2050
The Supply and Cost of Fossil Fuels
Fossil fuels are high in energy content, but they are not free. It costs some energy to extract them. This is an introduction to “energy return on investment”. The simple model is extended to show that we will have consumed the first half of our total fossil fuel supply by 2032.
Cause or Effect?
When we apply the costs of extraction, it becomes clear that the first half of our fossil fuel supply was the easy half. It becomes more expensive as the reserves are depleted, which contributes to an inflation factor in the economy. A few scenarios are explored, which include an insistence on continued growth, with and without inflation.
This last essay has the answer to my original question about the limits to unlimited growth. It doesn’t end well.
These are simple analyses and simple models, but they reveal serious problems. Our world may not collapse in seven years, or even thirty-seven, but it is hard to see how we won’t run into the physical limits of what fuels our economy in the next generation or two.
I enjoy your comments and prospective. And it makes great sense, from a logical mind. Unfortunately, I don’t see any government, political party, or leadership interested in even looking at the possibilities you have presented.
I live in Northern California, near Sacramento, in the foothills. Our climate is mild, winter temps 40 to 60 F, summer 70 to 90+. But this is California, auto gas at near $5.00/gal, PG&E electrical at $ 0.49/ kWh, PG&E Natural gas at $3.15/ Therm, plus surcharges. This months gas charges $549.67, and we have had a mild winter. And I have solar panels.
I’m getting old, older. I’ve got great genes, gonna be around for awhile, maybe 15 +/- years. I sincerely feel terrible for those following me. From my geologic prospective, mother earth can support a human population, indefinitely, of about half of our current population. The problem is: Who gets to decide who stays and who needs to go?
This is exactly right. It is the growing population that has brought us here. I fear that we will not “decide” how our population gets back to a supportable level; it will be decided for us as we hit the limits. I don’t look forward to that process- conflict and starvation. As you point out, you and I will likely not be around to witness it, but our kids and grandkids are likely to.
The question of whether fossil fuels drive growth or whether growth drives fossil fuel development is answered by economists through market pricing, wherein sometimes fossil fuel development drives growth and sometimes growth drives fossil fuel development. When growth is strong and oil/gas becomes very expensive (e.g., May-June 2008) growth tends to slow or decline as plans for expansion are tabled because costs have risen above future revenue expectations. When oil/gas becomes very cheap due to cratering growth (e.g., March-April 2020), oil/gas utilization plans are taken off the shelf and put into place because costs have declined so sharply that expansion plans become workable even though the immediate future might be a little cloudy (due in March-April 2020 to the covid pandemic), and the capital spending connected with those plans generate economic growth.
This is probably why it is difficult for people to grasp the relationship between energy and economic activity- there are lots of complications in markets and geo-politics. While this post series highlights the unsustainability of unlimited growth, it is not growth that will be the problem in the end (as we pass the peak and start to decline); it will be the high level of energy consumption it has brought us to that cannot be sustained when the oil runs out and becomes too expensive to mine. My short-term prediction is that we will experience a recession, activity will decline, oil supplies in the pipeline will be more abundant than demand, and oil prices will drop for a while. In the long run however, oil will become ever more expensive to extract, and eventually become a significant component of what we measure as inflation. The easy oil has already been burned, what’s left is the expensive oil.
Economists would tell us that as oil prices increase the market incentives to develop alternate energy sources increases. This may be a little pollyannish, because oil and natural gas have been such cheap energy sources that we have to expect the transition to alternate forms will retard living standards. The transition, however, will be certain to generate economic activity!