Posted by EROI Guy on April 25, 2009
This post relates to an article written by my advisor Charles Hall and a close friend of his. The article is available from American Scientist (paywall) or from Professor Hall's web site.
There are only finite resources in the world, but population continues to grow. How will this situation resolve itself? This was a question a group of scientists (Meadows et al), commissioned by the "Club of Rome," attempted to answer back in 1972, in a book called Limits to Growth. The model they presented predicted growing resource scarcity, increasing pollution, and eventual population decline, all prior to 2100.
Charles A. S. Hall and John W. Day revisit these predictions in an article published this month in American Scientist called Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil. Their analysis indicates that the predictions from 1972 were surprisingly accurate, considering how long ago they were made:
According to Hall and Day, "The values predicted by the limits-to-growth model and actual data for 2008 are very close."
Hall and Day immediately acknowledge that the academic world has paid most attention to human impacts on biodiversity and climate change and not enough on general resource issues. They believe that there are numerous resource issues related to peak oil that are “coming home to roost” and that all of these issues were laid out quite accurately in 1972 in the Limits to Growth model. They write:
As many continue to dismiss what those researchers in the 1970s wrote, there is growing evidence that the original “Cassandras” were right on the mark in their general assessment, if not always in the details or exact timing, about the dangers of the continued growth of human population and their increasing levels of consumption in a world increasingly approaching very real material constraints. It is time to reconsider their arguments in light of new information, especially about peak oil.
According to the authors, there has been widespread belief that the original 1972 forecast was incorrect:
Economists particularly disliked the perspective of the absolute scarcity of resources, and they wrote a series of scathing reports directed at the scientists mentioned above, especially those most closely associated with the limits to growth. Nuclear fusion was cited as a contender for the next source of abundant, cheap energy. They also found no evidence for scarcity, saying that output had been rising between 1.5 and 3 percent per year. Most importantly, they said that economies had built-in, market-related mechanisms (the invisible hand of Adam Smith) to deal with scarcities.
An important empirical study by economists Harold J. Barnett and Chandler Morse in 1963 seemed to show that, when corrected for inflation, the prices of all basic resources (except for forest products) had not increased over nine decades. Thus, although there was little argument that the higher-quality resources were being depleted, it seemed that technical innovations and resource substitutions, driven by market incentives, had and would continue indefinitely to solve the longer-term issues. It was as if the market could increase the quantity of physical resources in the Earth.
But analyses since then have proven these arguments false. According to the authors,
For example, Cutler J. Cleveland, an environmental scientist at Boston University, reanalyzed the Barnett and Morse study in 1991 and found that the only reason that the prices of commodities had not been increasing—even while their highest quality stocks were being depleted—was that for the time period analyzed in the original study, the real price of energy had been declining because of the exponentially increasing use of oil, gas and coal, whose real prices were simultaneously declining. Hence, even as more and more energy was needed to win each unit of resources, the price of the resources did not increase because the price of energy was declining.
Of course, the time period since the study has been very different, with less growth in resources and higher prices, showing that Barnett and Morse's conclusions did not hold for the long term.
Another reason that some believed Limits to Growth was wrong was confusion over what one summary graph showed. The graph shows dates only at the two end points--1900 and 2100--so was somewhat confusing to read. A graph of the forecast, with more intermediate dates, is shown below:
According to Hall and Day, this forecast is "largely accurate" to date. "We are not aware of any model made by economists that is as accurate over such a long time span." We cannot know at this time how accurate future projections will prove to be.
Another reason people have been reluctant to believe forecasts predicting shortages is because the forecast of Thomas Malthus back in 1798 proved wrong. Malthus predicted that population would grow more rapidly than food supply, resulting in starvation. A major reason he was wrong was because of the growth in the use in fossil fuels, and the resulting increase in food production.
Looking to the future, the authors see peak oil to be a key issue:
. . . a key issue for the future is the degree to which fossil and other fuels will continue to be abundant and cheap. Together oil and natural gas supply nearly two-thirds of the energy used in the world, and coal another 20 percent. We do not live in an information age, or a post-industrial age, or (yet) a solar age, but a petroleum age. Unfortunately, that will soon end: It appears that oil and gas production has reached, or soon will reach, a maximum. . .
Most environmental science textbooks focus far more on the adverse impacts of fossil fuels than on the implications of our overwhelming economic and even nutritional dependence on them. The failure today to bring the potential reality and implications of peak oil, indeed of peak everything, into scientific discourse and teaching is a grave threat to industrial society.
Charles Hall can be reached at "chall at esf dot edu"; the author of this post, Dave Murphy (aka EROI Guy), can be reached at "theoildrumeroi at gmail dot com".
Thanks, Dave, for bringing this important article to our attention. Readers are encouraged to write about the article on their own blogs, and to pass along links to this post to news media.
The graph is very revealing. I can certainly understand the drop in resources and the expected (but not absolutely certain) drop in Industrial Output that would accompany it (recycling is a largely untapped source of many resources for example). However, I have trouble believing that pollution would accelerate so dramatically even in the face of rapidly declining industrial output and energy (and initially at least in the face of declining population). The demographic transition is well underway in all industrialized societies (that is the reason for the drop in the birthrate, even in India). A rapid drop in birthrate means a rapid aging of the population (unless the death rate accelerates and that has not yet happened). Take a look at Europe and Japan for examples of this (dramatic drop in school age population for example). Rapidly aging populations change their resource utilization and pollution emission patterns. For example, even now, I as a middle-aged person have dropped my resource utilization and the majority of the resources I use are directed at my children. As they leave the home, my resource utilization will drop by at least another factor of 2 (probably more like 5 times). Retired people usually use much less resources than young people starting families. I do not know if the authors have taken this into account, but pollution intensity should probably drop as well (as least I would think).
What do you think?
Iwylie
The pollution issue is one that the model does not seem to be matching as well on.
The pollution issue is not yet clear, but the model may turn out to be more accurate than we expect. Some considerations that come to mind:
1. In recent years, pollution has shifted from the developed countries to the lesser developed countries, where we see the pollution less, but it probably affects more people.
2. As we have less resources in the future, pollution control may be one of the first things to go. There seem to be fairly abundant coal resources, especially if the lowest grade ores are considered. These are very cheap to burn, especially if one does absolutely no pollution control. Burning of wood and of dung as fuel also has pollution issues.
3. Cumulative pollution is probably as important as point in time pollution. If our lakes are filled with mercury and cannot be used to support fishing, it doesn't matter whether that pollution happened last week or fifty years ago.
Not to shake the hornet's nest, but CO2 and other GHG are pollution.
As the capacity of natural systems to absorb industrial excesses declines, pollution will become more visible. E.g., oceanic dead zones, acidification, and coral bleaching. Then add indirect effects like increasing methane release from melting tundra.
-- Philip B. / Washington, DC
For ecosystems, as for individual life forms, there are many things that are essential but are toxic in sufficient quantity (e.g. water, oxygen). The issue is the dose. Pollution is set in the public mind as referring to stuff that has no positive value at any dose.
Pollution has been dramatically reduced since the environmental movement in the 1960-1970’s.
Some highlights:
*Limits to discharge to both air and water of heavy metals, BOD and other harmful chemicals by industry
*Reduction in acid rain from using lower sulfur coal plus scrubbers
*Banning or restricting persistent pesticides like DDT and chloradane
*Secondary and tertiary treatment of municipal sewage by aeration and chlorination
I worked in industry throughout this period and saw the change first hand. I also recall the days when smog from the steel mills in Birmingham, AL, USA and the industrial Midwest darkened the skies for sometimes over 100 miles away as I witnessed driving on heavy pollution days when I seemed to stay in the haze for hours. The improvement since those days is amazing.
My main criticism is that we throw away nutrients in sewage. If we do not recycle all phosphorous the world will be unable to support anything like the current population in less than 100 years.
www.theoildrum.com