Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (6 page)

This surge in scale and intensity would not have been possible without the exploitation of fossil fuels. By 1700, with the help of domesticated animals, windmills, and water wheels, the most efficient agricultural societies could command four or five times more energy per head than their hunting and gathering predecessors could; even so, the vast majority remained poor and restricted to a life of grinding toil. In the nineteenth century, as the coal-powered steam engine began to transform production, energy availability was again multiplied by five, about the same increment as in the 10,000 years before 1700. But that was still a mere prelude to the boom of the twentieth century, when liquid petroleum fueled a further twelvefold expansion in energy use.
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Apart from minor coal-burning, all energy used before the Industrial Revolution was more or less directly solar—from wind, water, animals fed on crops or grasslands photosynthesizing daily solar flows, or human muscle fed the same way. Even wood, as a fuel, concentrates the solar energy trapped by trees over decades, or centuries at most. Coal and oil, on the other hand, are fossilized solar energy, compacted and distilled out of tens of millions of years of sunlight stored by the primitive trees of the vast Carboniferous swamps (coal) or zooplankton and algae thriving in the shallow seas of the Mesozoic (oil). This is immensely concentrated energy, capable of performing colossal amounts of work. It is probably the most basic precondition for the bizarre exuberance of the era of economic growth through which we have been traveling, especially since World War II, often under the false impression that it is the normal and natural state of human affairs.

Human perceptions have always been filtered through prevailing social narratives about how the world is. At least since the emergence of agriculture, the narrative has emanated from the groups who hold social power, and this was just as true after the Enlightenment as it was in the days of Catholic hegemony in Europe. At least in the Western world, the mainstream interpretation of reality moved from being the preserve of God-given authorities to a contest of ideas ideally based on the rational assessment of empirical facts. Notwithstanding the move toward evidence-based beliefs, the tendency to regard the current world as the normal state of human affairs seems not to have been modified. The observed world continues to be understood as “natural.” To its inhabitants it appears that it has always been that way.

Until about five hundred years ago, rates of change were infinitesimal and the world one was born into was indeed unlikely to change much, excluding occasional natural catastrophes. The world in 2014 is not such a world. The pace of change has accelerated along the lines described in chapter 1. Economist Greg Clark holds that there was “no economic growth” in preindustrial Europe.
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Though this may be a slight exaggeration, there is no doubt that the rate since 1750 or so has been unprecedented. At such a rate of transformation, it might seem obvious that there is nothing “natural” about it, and that it represents a sharp departure in human history. Yet little awareness of such a perspective exists. On the contrary, economic growth remains the mantra of global institutions, governments, and the daily media, and ongoing growth is assumed to be not only possible but essential to a desirable future.

Indefinite Growth and the Laws of Physics

Indefinite growth can be seen as viable when human production is assumed to bear no compulsory relationship to the physical world, an assumption that includes an exemption from the second law of thermodynamics. This is the so-called entropy law, developed by the German physicist Rudolph Clausius from Carnot’s original observations of engines. In 1850, Clausius formulated the principle that heat always moves in one direction only, from the hotter to the colder body, and will not flow the other way without the application of more energy. Based on this elementary fact, the entropy law holds that, in closed systems, all energy dissipates, becoming useless for further work in the process. In a key departure from classical physics, which dealt with reversible processes such as mechanics, thermodynamics describes one-way qualitative change, which is subject to the “arrow of time.”

Nicholas Georgescu-Røegen was the first economist to insist that economics must take the second law into account. He argued that all natural resources are subject to entropic exhaustion, and that human economic production is a physical process that inevitably hastens that dissipation. Irreversible physical transformations are implicit in production, where material resources and available energy are consumed and waste left behind. In Georgescu-Røegen’s words, “Coal turns into ashes in the same direction, from past to future, for all humans.”
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Any economy will therefore require a source of materials and a sink where the waste can be dumped, as Daly suggested to the World Bank’s chief economist. An economy that produces large quantities of material artifacts will require large sources and large sinks. Yet standard economic formulas include no variables to represent resources or wastes, and so are incapable of reflecting the thermodynamic implications of an expanding economic process.

Mineral ores, for example, are most useful and most accessible for human use in concentrated form. The world’s most concentrated ores have already been heavily depleted, while more dilute sources are rendered accessible by the application of new technologies and of more and more energy—and, other than solar power, energy resources are themselves subject to depletion. Gold mining in the twenty-first century illustrates the trend. Much of the gold that remains unmined consists of microscopic particles; in most mines today, something like thirty tons of rock must be excavated, pulverized, and sprayed for years with cyanide drizzle to recover an ounce of gold. Such an undertaking can only be profitable on a huge scale; the energy required to make and drive the machinery is considerable, as are the massive volumes of waste rock and wastewater that must be disposed of, and the acid and heavy metals frequently released into waterways in the process.
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Entropy is not necessarily manifested quickly. Georgescu-Røegen notes that it took thousands of years of sheep grazing before “the exhaustion of the soil in the steppes of Eurasia led to the Great Migration.”
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By contrast, indicative of the scale, pace, and intensity of recent economic growth, two decades of intensive cashmere goat grazing in northern China have already compromised the fertility of the Alashan Plateau of Inner Mongolia. China’s rapidly expanded herds of cashmere-producing goats might have slashed the price of sweaters, but they have also grazed these grasslands down to a moonscape, unleashing some of the worst dust storms on record.
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In the case of oil—the energy on which the past century of explosive growth has been based—depletion did not take thousands of years, another indicator of the exceptional pace of twentieth-century change. Even if oil supply continues to meet demand for several more decades, as optimists argue, the production of light crude has leveled off, and there is little doubt that depletion will occur fairly soon in any long-run view of the human prospect. In 2010, the International Energy Agency declared that “the age of cheap oil is over.”
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What is also imminent in the second decade of the twenty-first century is the limited capacity of the planet to act as a satisfactory sink to absorb the waste that will be released if we burn the remainder of the fossil fuels.

As far as energy is concerned, the earth is not a closed system, of course. Though matter is not exchanged, the earth receives an immense amount of solar energy every day, making available a generous and indefinite supply of energy, should humans have the means to harness it. This solar flux—not subject to entropic exhaustion for another four or five billion years—is the only rational basis for indefinite human energy use. Industrial capitalism, however, replaced solar-based energy forms such as wind, water, and biomass with the energy stored in finite terrestrial fuels—coal in its initial phases, and petroleum since the unprecedented bonanza generated by the harnessing of oil to the internal combustion engine. These fuels are finite and their availability is governed by the second law, which tells us that energy, once tapped for work and dissipated as heat, cannot be reconcentrated for a second use. In the words of Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Holdren, those who are waiting for a breakthrough that would overturn the second law might as well “wait for the day when the beer refrigerates itself in hot weather and squashed cats on the freeway reassemble themselves and trot away.”
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While coal is expected to be available for another century or more, it is widely suspected that oil is near “peak” production—in other words, the maximum level of production we will ever see.
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Apart from the low-cost oil fields remaining, primarily in the Middle East, oil recovery is now carried on in ever less hospitable contexts—deep seas, Arctic climates, “tight” oil,
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low-content tar sand and oil shale (kerogen), and low-quality gas liquids. In all these alternative sources, the proportion of energy yield expended in extraction is on the increase. The energy budget is just as relevant as the economic one—a ton of oil from kerogen or tar sands is not worth extracting if it takes equivalent energy from gas or coal to do it; whatever the dollar value, it makes little sense to extract energy once it has negative energy return on investment. This is also a severe qualification on the virtues of corn-based ethanol. Even the most optimistic estimates suggest that, in the United States, it takes seven or eight gallons of petroleum to produce ten gallons of ethanol, while Cornell University’s David Pimentel has estimated a significant net energy deficit.
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Shell’s project to extract petroleum from kerogen (or oil shale) deposits in Colorado, for example, is likely to reflect such a deficit.
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It should be noted, in addition, that oil produced from kerogen not only risks a net energy deficit but yields greatly inflated CO
₂
emissions, owing to the large amount of coal burned in the course of its extraction. A similar caveat applies to oil from tar sands where gas is used. The market is not fully sensitive to these drawbacks since the producer does not pay for CO
₂
dumped in the atmosphere.

Mainstream economists have ignored or disparaged the appeal to entropy. In his review of Georgescu-Røegen’s key text,
The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
(1971), the Michigan economist Robert Solo accused Georgescu-Røegen of peddling an “extreme form of Malthusianism,” arguing that his entropic approach rendered him one of “the prophets of doom” who have “followed along behind Malthus” for nearly two centuries. For Solo, the second law is a faith-based dogma in exactly the same way as a belief in the Last Judgment. He repudiates the link between production, on the one hand, and depletion and waste on the other, and denies outright that resource diminution and pollution are related to population size and economic activity. For Solo, advanced economies can “eliminate all noxious wastes,” and economic growth is what guarantees the advanced technology that will do it; industry does not necessarily have to produce waste at all and is not limited by the laws of thermodynamics. Solo is silent about the source of its raw material.
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In short, he does not really engage with Georgescu-Røegen’s argument—he simply says it is wrong. This kind of denial, supported by little argument, is the forerunner of the approach taken by many economists throughout the past thirty-five years in which raising questions about the limitations of the physical world is simply “not the right way to look at it.”

Scale, Compound Growth, and Herman Daly’s “Steady State”

If one regards the human economy as subsidiary to the natural world, rather than vice versa, the scale of the macroeconomy is necessarily circumscribed by the scale of the planet; consequently, endless growth in material extraction and physical waste cannot possibly be sustainable. Herman Daly argues that the physical world is indispensable to economic activity, supplying both the low-entropy inputs and the sinks for discharging high-entropy wastes. The scale of the economic enterprise must therefore be proportionate to the scale of the natural world.
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Because of the generous proportions of the original “empty earth,” such limitations were not especially obvious while human production was negligible in relation to the global environment. Sources and sinks could reasonably be reckoned to be infinite in this situation
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—or, if not quite infinite, capable of recovery, given rest. The human ecologist Sing Chew argues that some of the so-called “dark ages” in history represent eras of ecological recovery, redressing periods when overexploitation of natural resources had led to the collapse of populations or economies.
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Recovery is not guaranteed, even with the passage of time. While the forests of Europe were cleared in pulses of economic expansion and probably grew back again several times,
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parts of northern Africa, intensively cultivated for Roman consumption, and Mesopotamia, farmed until it was eventually rendered infertile by salt, never fully recovered. Worldwide, however, there has been little sign of a “dark age” since the early centuries of the last millennium.

The mathematics of compound (or exponential) growth indicates that the ongoing growth of any physical process will ultimately collide with physical limits, a key consideration of the
Limits
project. In
The Limits to Growth: The
30-Year Update
(2004), the MIT researchers devoted a chapter to it. The doubling period of compound growth can be calculated by dividing the annual rate of growth into 72. At 10 percent, for example, the volume will double every seven years or so (something like what has taken place in the Chinese economy since 1979). The
Update
recounts a number of folk legends illustrating the counterintuitive surprises built into compound growth. In the Persian legend, in which the king agrees to pay just one grain of rice on square one of the chess board and double the amount on each subsequent square, the effect of protracted doubling is not at all obvious in its early stages, when the base is small. When a trillion rice grains must be supplied at square forty-one, it becomes clear that the debt cannot be paid, confounding the apparently modest undertaking at square one.
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According to the IMF, world GDP grew by 3.2 percent in 2012, and was predicted to grow by 3.3 percent in 2013.
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Should growth continue at this rate, world GDP would double in about twenty years.