Growth isn't Possible

[Sharky]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

It might serve you well to read an article written in 1995 by David Price - Energy and Human Evolution

OK. Bottom line: resources are limited. I get that.

I don't disagree with the idea that population "adjustments" are coming at some point. What I'm saying is that I don't see why it would affect all parts of the globe equally or at the same time.

I'm also skeptical regarding the timing of these changes. It could start tomorrow, or it might be 100 yrs from now; I simply don't have enough information to know. A big reason for that is that people adapt, and they tend to do so quickly and innovatively under times of severe stress.

Such a high level of uncertainty also means that the prospect of population die-off doesn't have any impact either on how I live my life or on my investments. To me, it's like saying the Earth might be hit by a giant asteroid or a plague, etc, etc; sure, it's possible, and it will almost certainly happen at some point--but I'm not going to change anything in my life based on those possibilities; there are too many other concerns that are much more immediate, and much more manageable (such as periodic short-term fuel, power or food shortages).

[Sharky]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

There is absolutely zero benefit, including any "wealth creation", to producing anything unless somebody, somewhere is willing to "consume" it.

This is actually exactly what's happening today in China. Lots of construction of office buildings, for example, supposedly in anticipation of future growth -- but after being built in an area with lots of vacancies, many of them remain unoccupied long after they're completed.

The only benefit is that it adds to their GDP. Unfortunately, it also destroys wealth.

China isn't the big power-house that many seem to believe it is; it's all a big illusion. For one thing, they're only pseudo-capitalist; their motivation seems to be power and not profit, which will doom them to failure in the end.

[harset]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

Hhhhmmmmmm so the life style enjoyed by an average western person & also as a whole country/region will not be enjoyed by an average person & as a whole mankind, in the future including western people.......

[touchring]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

This is actually exactly what's happening today in China. Lots of construction of office buildings, for example, supposedly in anticipation of future growth -- but after being built in an area with lots of vacancies, many of them remain unoccupied long after they're completed.

The only benefit is that it adds to their GDP. Unfortunately, it also destroys wealth.

China isn't the big power-house that many seem to believe it is; it's all a big illusion. For one thing, they're only pseudo-capitalist; their motivation seems to be power and not profit, which will doom them to failure in the end.

A lot of things are happening in China. Some bad, some good.

Building office buildings bring great profit. Profit from kickbacks. One of the easiest way for state officials and managers to earn money is to build a building - every building brings millions if not tens of millions in kickbacks from contractors and material suppliers.

[Aetius Romulous]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

The question I have for you is "Why was the collapse in the Reindeer herd sudden?" The population dropped from 6000 to 42 suddenly. Why?

What will possibly happen is a sudden reduction in food supplies, inability of others to pick up the slack -- Hoarding, and eating the stored seed resulting in an insufficient seed stock -- an inability to produce food at the same level -- followed by hunger and then disease.

People act stupidly when they are under stress.

Rajiv; If you have not read it (and I suspect you have from your example) Erik Reinert covers this particularly in "How Rich Countries got Rich...Why Poor Countries Stay Poor".

[Rajiv]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

No, I had not come across Reinert's work -- just now looked at a couple of reviews of the book. I will put this on my list of books to get and read.

My examples come from my own training, background and experience. Of course many people's thoughts, ideas and teachings have gone into shaping that.

Also Reinert's website - The Other Canon

[Rajiv]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

Good article from George Mobus - The Hardest Moral Dilemma of All

The Hardest Moral Dilemma of All

Global Population Speak Out

This blog is to fulfill my pledge to the GPSO effort to speak out in February regarding the overpopulation issue that many of us feel is at the heart of most of our global challenges. To see what many other scientists and citizens are doing for this effort, visit the GPSO Web site.

Damned If We Do and Damned If We Don't

If we don't limit global population there is a non-zero chance that all of humanity will go extinct! At the very least we can expect that human life will become mean and brutish as a consequence of unfettered reproduction leading to population sizes unsupportable by the resources of our finite planet. There is considerable evidence mounting that indicates that we humans have exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the planet for our species, given our resource usage patterns. We have come to rely on fossil fuel inputs to our food supply (see: the Green Revolution) and our industrial agriculture methods of modern farming. This has given the illusion (one that is fondly defended as reality by neoclassical economists) of increasing the carrying capacity of the planet. But, sadly, it is based entirely on the formerly abundant flows of high energy return on energy invested (EROI, also EROEI) fossil fuels, which have now begun to reach their peak of extraction (c.f. Peak Oil as an example).

After the peak of high powered energy production from fossil fuels, we can expect a long decline in net energy flows into the economy with constrictions being felt in the food supply. For example, as natural gas supplies suffer decline we will see the production of fertilizers decline as well. This is significant because many, perhaps most of our agricultural soils have been depleted of nutrients and absolutely require repeated applications of artificially manufactured fertilizers to maintain any semblance of productivity. Additionally, chemical pesticides and herbicides, which are synthesized from petroleum, are needed to maintain food production at these levels. Antibiotics, some of which are also based on petroleum, are needed to keep industrial production of animals sustained.

When oil goes into decline it will impact the production of all other forms of energy. For example, it takes a substantial amount of diesel fuel to extract and transport coal (used to produce electricity). Today all of manufacturing (with some exceptions in the Pacific Northwest where hydroelectric is still the predominant non-transportation energy source) is based on fossil fuel inputs. That means wind turbines and solar panels require fossil fuels to be built and installed (as well as maintained). Thus the carrying capacity, artificially elevated in the oil-rich age, is going to be brought back to what it was before the advent of our oil-based approach to agriculture.

All of this is by way of explaining an incredibly difficult moral dilemma that we, as a species, are soon going to face. The horns of this dilemma we are going to have to choose between are: certain starvation for huge segments of the population, or forced population control via sterilization. There will be no middle ground between these two, equally reprehensible choices. Less food will be produced as energy flows decline. Even if every man, woman, and child were to devote themselves to farming and/or hunter-gatherer lifestyles, there simply won't be enough land and bio-stock production possible to feed everybody. We have already depleted major fisheries (though it won't matter given that the fuel needed to run a fishing fleet will be so expensive no one would be able to afford fish as a source of protein). This means that we will no longer be able to support even the current population, let alone the 9+ billion individuals projected by the UN for the middle of this century if current trends were to continue. And the point is, those trends can't continue without sufficient energy!

This is difficult, actually nearly impossible, to consider. There is already ample denial going around, especially from politicians and neoclassical economists who are simply not capable of processing the factual data, building the models, doing the arithmetic, and interpreting the results. Most people are not able to fathom the predicament in terms of the scales involved. Even among those who do understand the basic nature of the problem there is a tendency to believe that just limiting ourselves to zero population growth (ZPG¹), with the usual nod to humane methods, should be enough to solve the problem. The more radical thinkers call for negative population growth (NPG) but still try to maintain that there are humane approaches to accomplishing this. Noting the demographic transition effect in Japan, Italy, and other OECD countries (though not the US!) many advocates of population control are hopeful that if we just supported economic development for the high birth rate countries, education and economic opportunities for women in these countries, that somehow everything would work out. The argument goes that when women have more control over their lives and more opportunity to choose careers other than motherhood, they tend to have fewer children. Who knows? Perhaps it might have worked this way if we had all the energy in the world to expand economic development in the way envisioned by the UN Millennium Development Goals. But we don't. And no amount and combination of technology, alternative energy sources, conservation and elimination of wastage, or efficiency gains will compensate for the loss of fossil fuel inputs². This too is an extremely hard pill to swallow and there is no dirth of denial on this front either. People want to believe in a future that is better than the present and they are unwilling to do the math to determine what the reality might be. Reality doesn't always match desires and sometimes you just have to give up those desires when they are not feasible.

The sad bottom line is that this planet will not be able to support the population at its current level in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, given the degree to which we have devoured and degraded resources like water, air, and soil, as well as general bio-diversity, it is possible that within a few generations we will find that the number of people actually supportable is even fewer than any of us are ready to believe!

Thus we are damned if we do nothing more proactive in population reduction than just hoping it will happen naturally with the demographic transition effect. And we are damned if we do what it will actually take to mitigate the impending disaster.

Our moral compasses point in an entirely different direction. From Wikipedia's page on Reproductive Rights:

The World Health Organization defines reproductive rights as follows:

Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.

The operative terms have been highlighted.

The number of people who would question the notion that people have a natural right to reproduce as they see fit is probably very small. In general, the right to procreation is considered, universally, God given, or at least inalienable. Thus it would be morally reprehensible to consider any methods for population control that interfere with those rights.

At the same time, if the above projections of nature-forced population decline due to the effects of overshoot are correct, then the pain and suffering of literally billions of people is a certainty (see: Catton, William R., Jr. (1982). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL. and his latest book, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation. See also my review of this last book).

Between the Proverbial "Rock and A Hard Place"

This, then, is our moral dilemma. If many others like Catton and I, are right, we are faced with making a choice that comes from understanding the true (and I suppose cruel) nature of this world. We can choose to allow billions of people to starve, dehydrate, or succumb to diseases from population density effects. They will live lives of squalor and despair until the end (mercifully) comes. The model for this is already at play in places like Darfur in Africa. Or we can choose to do something quite drastic in terms of proactive population control, such as mass sterilization. These two choices are extreme evils but I suspect they reflect the reality of the corner we've painted ourselves into. We failed to heed the warnings of people like Paul Ehrlich and the Meadows (see footnote 1 below). Most of our economists derided their warnings as the work of pessimists. Had we taken them more seriously back in the latter half of the 20^th century, we might have less of a problem today. But it probably wouldn't have been much less.
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[MulaMan]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

None of you understand how technical innovation works, do you?

and none of you actually understand how much technical innovation is exploding at the moment, do you?

and the real question is if America wants to fall back and stay in the 20th century, reading your bibles, or if you want to join the world in the 21st century?

Amazing how the Americans that invented "progress" are now so afraid of the future.

Could be factor of the baby boomers growing old and stuck in thier ways, scared to leave home.

Top 4 things America can do to join the 21st century are / or legacy to leave the next generation.

1. The best public / free health care in the world to its citizens.

2. The best public / free scientific education to any citizen that wants to put in the work - not "no child left behind" lowest common denominator.

3. Re-regulated banking and crush the FIRE economy. Low house prices, ect..

4. Reduce the US military / defence spending by 80% - let the Armagedon nut-jobs keep a few nukes to destroy the world 5X over to make them happy.

[gordonbrown]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

What we need is fiat energy, borrowed into existence. World saved ; again.

[gnk]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

None of you understand how technical innovation works, do you?

and none of you actually understand how much technical innovation is exploding at the moment, do you?

Technical innovation today is a mere novelty compared to a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, the auto, the telephone, refridgeration, industrial and agricultural revolution, etc... started becoming widespread and changed the world. Today, we look at nifty novelties produced by Apple, and think wow, we have it so great. Please....

Look at it this way. Compare life in the 1920s, with life 50 yrs prior - say, the 1870s.

Now compare life today, with 50 yrs prior - say, the 1960s.

Who really experienced a technological explosion that made their lives better?

Did people growing up in the 1960s have a rough life, short life span, grueling work that started in their childhood years at sunrise everyday? No - that was people in the 1870s.

Technology today is making us work faster and harder and keeps us "plugged" in 24/7. Damn that blackberry.

Don't get me wrong, the information age is a wonderful thing, but it hasn't really turned into an enlightened age yet, has it? That requires most people to actually use information to critically think. How many people really accomplish that?

All I'm saying is that we should put technology in perspective. Air conditioning was great, refridgeration was great, the auto was great. The airplane was great.

The Ipad? whoopee!

[Rajiv]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

None of you understand how technical innovation works, do you?

and none of you actually understand how much technical innovation is exploding at the moment, do you?

and the real question is if America wants to fall back and stay in the 20th century, reading your bibles, or if you want to join the world in the 21st century?

Amazing how the Americans that invented "progress" are now so afraid of the future.

Could be factor of the baby boomers growing old and stuck in thier ways, scared to leave home.

Top 4 things America can do to join the 21st century are / or legacy to leave the next generation.

1. The best public / free health care in the world to its citizens.

2. The best public / free scientific education to any citizen that wants to put in the work - not "no child left behind" lowest common denominator.

3. Re-regulated banking and crush the FIRE economy. Low house prices, ect..

4. Reduce the US military / defence spending by 80% - let the Armagedon nut-jobs keep a few nukes to destroy the world 5X over to make them happy.

Mula, I do not disagree with your four points. But that is not the point of the article. The fact that we have a finite planet, and an exponentially growing population is. We are rapidly approaching the limits of what we as a species can exploit, and we, as a group, are doing our best to ignore "the elephant in the room."

It is not that people are afraid of the future -- it is just that people are very myopic when they look at resource availability and exponential growth.

[raja]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

That very assumption is what is crucially at fault -- We have a limited planet with a limited real estate, and hence limited resources -- as quoted in the book above

Of course, you are right Rajiv.

But as the Bovinator pointed out, it was a thought experiment . . . .

Economics is so complex, I was trying to eliminate some variables, such as resource limitation, so as to see how the other variables would dynamically interact.

Given that clarification, would you care to take another shot at it?

Let's say that the Chinese kept making stuff, but just gave it all to America.
And suppose the all the raw materials, oil, etc. required by China to make that stuff was just given to China.
Then imagine that everyone in the world went to their jobs, and did their work for no pay, and that all their needs for food, etc., were given to them.
Assume also that all production and consumption continued at the same levels -- in other words, people would get and give what they've been getting and giving. As the population grew, the new people would give and receive in the same manner.
And finally, assume there is no peak in any natural resource.

Under these conditions, would society's wealth continue to increase?
Would standards of living continue to rise, remain stagnant, or decline?

[Rajiv]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

Raja,

I would rather not answer that question, as it does not bear upon the reality of the world as it exists. I will only say, that the thought experiment that you propose was the premise in a world without resource limits, of a human race served by robots.

If you wish to understand the conundrums faced by humanity today, a good book (web book) is - An Introduction to Ecological Economics

Humanity's Current Dilemma

“ ... It took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve its prosperity; how many planets will a country like India require ... ?”
—Mahatma Gandhi, when asked if, after independence, India would attain British standards of living

Historically, the recognition by humans of their impact upon the earth has consistently lagged behind the magnitude of the damage they have imposed, thus seriously weakening efforts to control this damage. Even today, technological optimists and others ignore the mounting evidence of global environmental degradation until it intrudes more inescapably upon their personal welfare. Even some serious students draw comfort from the arguments that:

• GDP figures are increasing throughout much of the world.

• Life expectancies are increasing in many nations.

• Evidence of greenhouse warming is ambiguous.

• Some claims of environmental damage have been exaggerated.

• Previous predictions of environmental catastrophe have not been borne out.

Each of these statements is correct. However, not one of them is a reason for complacency, and indeed, taken together, they should be viewed as powerful evidence of the need for an innovative approach to environmental analysis and management. GDP and other current measures of national income accounting are notorious for overweighting market transactions, understating resource depletion, omitting pollution damage, and failing to measure real changes in well-being (see Section 3.5). For example, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare^[2] shows much reduced improvement in real gains, despite great increases in resource depleting throughput (see Section 3.5, Figure 3.3). Increases in life expectancies in many nations, by contrast, clearly indicate improvements in welfare; but unless accompanied by corresponding decreases in birth rates, they are warnings of acceleration in population growth, which will compound all other environmental problems. In the former USSR, sharply increasing infant mortality rates and actual declines in life expectancy attest to the dangers of massive accumulations of pollution stocks and neglect of public health^[3].

The divergence in views among scientists concerning the greenhouse effect underscores the pervasiveness of uncertainty about the basic nature of our ecological life-support systems and emphasizes the need for building precautionary minimum safe standards into environmental policies. The fact that some environmental problems have been overestimated and that the magnitude of any one of these problems can be denied or debated does not reduce the urgency of our responsibility to seek the underlying patterns from many indicators of what is happening to the “balance of the earth”^[4].

Only recently, with advances in environmental sciences, global remote sensing, and other monitoring systems, has a more comprehensive assessment of local and global environmental deterioration become possible. Evidence is accumulating with respect to accelerating loss of vital rain forests, species extinction, depletion of ocean fisheries, shortages of fresh water in some areas and increased flooding in others, soil erosion, depletion and pollution of underground aquifers, decreases in quantity and quality of irrigation and drinking water, and growing global pollution of the atmosphere and oceans, even in the polar regions^[5]. Obviously the exponential growth of human populations is rapidly crowding out other species before we have begun to understand fully our dependence upon species diversity. Although post-Cold War conflicts such as those in Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda are characterized in part by ethnic differences, territorial overcrowding and food shortages are contributing factors and consequently provide additional early warning of accumulating global environmental problems.

Clearly, remedial policy responses to date have been local, partial, and inadequate. Early policy discussions and the resulting responses tended to focus on symptoms of environmental damage rather than basic causes and policy instruments tended to be ad hoc rather than carefully designed for efficiency, fairness, and sustainability. For example, in the 1970s emphasis centered on end-of-pipe pollution control which, while a serious problem, was actually a symptom of expanding populations and inefficient technologies that fueled exponential growth of material and energy throughput while threatening the recuperative powers of the planet’s life-support systems.

As a result of early perceptions of environmental damage, much was learned about policies and instruments for attacking pollution. These insights will help in dealing with the more fundamental and intractable environmental issues identified here.

The basic problems for which we need innovative policies and management instruments include:

• unsustainably large and growing human populations that exceed the carrying capacity of the earth

• highly entropy-increasing technologies that deplete the earth of its resources and whose unassimilated wastes poison the air, water, and land

• land conversion that destroys habitat, increases soil erosion, and accelerates loss of species diversity.

As emphasized throughout this work, these problems are all evidence that the material scale of human activity exceeds the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth. We argue that in addressing these problems, we should adopt courses based upon a fair distribution of resources and opportunities between present and future generations as well as among groups within the present generation. These strategies should be based upon an economically efficient allocation of resources that adequately accounts for protecting the stock of natural capital. This section examines the historical record and the emerging transdiscipline of ecological economics for guidance in designing policies and instruments capable of dealing with these problems.

Historically, severe anthropogenic damage to some regions of the earth began as soon as humans learned to apply highly entropy-increasing technological processes to agriculture and was sharply escalated by factory production in Europe during the industrial revolution. Early public policy responses were feeble to nonexistent, allowing polluters whose political and economic power began to eclipse that of the feudal magnates to gain de facto property rights to emit wastes into the common property resources of air and water. In England, it was not until urban agglomeration in London with its choking smog from coal fires so discomforted Parliament that forceful action was taken. In the mid-twentieth century, incidents of deaths from smog, the result of automobiles and modern industry, began to occur. In Donora, Pennsylvania, in the U.S. in 1948 a “killer smog” produced by a steel mill operating during a week-long temperature inversion killed several people and caused illness in the thousands. In London several thousand people were killed during one winter night in 1952 as a result of the smog from domestic and industrial coal burning. Eventually these incidents led to the passage of clean air legislation and improved technologies.

Even more massive loss of life from the spread of water-borne diseases continued to be accepted as part of the human condition until advances in scientific knowledge concerning the role of microorganisms prompted sewage treatment and water purification systems. Vast urban expenditures on such systems eventually reduced the enormous loss of human life from the uncontrolled discharge of human waste into common property waterways. The application of appropriate science, appropriate technology, and community will was necessary to reduce the costly loss of human life that had resulted from unprecedented population expansion, the concentration of humans into unplanned urban areas, and uncompensated appropriation of common property resources for waste disposal.

Homo sapiens is at another turning point in its relatively long and (so far) inordinately successful history. Our species’ activities on the planet have now become of so large a scale that they are beginning to affect the ecological life-support system itself. The entire concept of economic growth (defined as increasing material consumption) must be rethought, especially as a solution to the growing host of interrelated social, economic, and environmental problems. What we need now is real economic and social development (qualitative improvement without growth in resource throughput) and an explicit recognition of the interrelatedness and interdependence of all aspects of life on the planet (see Section 3.3 for more on this important distinction between growth and development). We need to move from an economics that ignores this interdependence to one which acknowledges and builds upon it. We need to develop an economics that is fundamentally ecological in its basic view of the problems that now face our species at this crucial point in its history.
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[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

They will live lives of squalor and despair until the end (mercifully) comes. The model for this is already at play in places like Darfur in Africa. Or we can choose to do something quite drastic in terms of proactive population control, such as mass sterilization.

We see major increases in population in South America, Mexico, China, India and Africa. We see leveling off or declining population in parts of Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada and (outside of immigration from Mexico) the United States.

When I was young and poor, families had five or ten kids, hoping some would survive to adulthood. Now the more prosperous families in my immediate experience have two, +/- one, children.

As Lord Monckton has noted recently, if we got clean water and adequate food to the poorer nations (rather than stealing their agricultural capacity to grow biofuels) we could (1) save millions from starvation and early death by disease, and (2) solve the "population problem" as well, as their populations would self-moderate once it was reasonably likely that each child born would live a long and healthy life.

Rajiv, this article you quote from George Mobus is highly objectionable. We see attempt after attempt to scare us into submitting to, even seeking out, world control (by some unelected masters) to save us from global freezing, global warming, energy collapse, asteroids, aliens (this last one hasn't been pushed very hard yet), pollution, communism, fascism, terrorism, swine flu, AIDS, ...

Beware the messengers of doom. Ask what is in their other hand that they would recommend as the "solution" ... the "final solution".

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Growth isn't Possible

to save us from global freezing, global warming, energy collapse, asteroids, aliens (this last one hasn't been pushed very hard yet), pollution, communism, fascism, terrorism, swine flu, AIDS, ...

Oh dear me ... in my list of impending disasters I left off a couple of good ones.

There is the impending crisis of world financial collapse, which is the primary disaster concerning many of us here at iTulip today.

There is also the "fires of eternal damnation" which has been a favorite disaster foretold by many religions to motivate faithful attendance to recommended religious duties.

===

I also inadequately state the motives for such doom forecasts. It's not just unelected world (or, already, European) governments with vast central powers that might be gained.

This year we've seen big pharma gain billions from the swine flu scare; various scientists gain much research funding from the global warming scare; and last but far from least, a few big banks gain trillions from the financial panic.