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Limits On Growth of Energy Use and Economies
snoop.daub writes "Dr. Tom Murphy, professor of astrophysics at UCSD, has a new blog called 'Do The Math,' and the first few posts are doozies. In the first, he shows the impossibility of continued exponential growth in energy use. Even if a new, 'free' energy source is developed, thermodynamic limits on efficiency mean that the heat associated with converting this energy into useful work will increase the temperature of the earth to unbearable levels within 300 years. In the second, he extends the argument to economic growth. The timescales there are faster, only 50-100 years. Fascinating stuff. Time to stop breeding, folks, or to get our butts into space."
No one who has predicted the end of the world has been right, to date.
-- $G
You're telling geeks to stop breeding? Isn't that redundant?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seriously, heat build-up was part of the reason for the multi-hundred trillion plus population of the Puppeteer's to move their homeworld into a further orbit.
Then they learned that the whole galaxy was going to be exposed to a massive radiation wave caused by some black hole collapse in the galaxy's core.
We should plan for that.
If/when we ever get to the point that the human population is too large to be sustainable, it will correct itself. History shows us that famine, war, and plague occur when we run out of resources or populate an area too densely. Some of the strong, smart, and lucky will survive to repopulate.
The big problem with his assumption is that in 1400 years our knowledge of physics doesn't change. It's like an an aysos in the 1800s saying we won't be able to keep our homes lit because we will have killed off all the whales. I'm not saying I know the answer, just I am smart enough not to claim exponential energy growth using today's technology.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Since we have an abundance of energy we can simply turn our air conditioners backwards and cool the earth back down.
We're all DOOOOoomed. Doommed.
I'm really tired of all this "being a human being is evil" nonsense.
So many out there would tell you to live your life under a rock, never have kids, never enjoy anything, because OMG THE EARTH IS DOOMED BECAUSE OF YOU.
I consume because I'm alive. That's what the world is here for. Deal with it.
These posts also appeared on The Oil Drum (www.theoildrum.com) a couple weeks ago. If anyone hasn't been there already, it has been the epicenter of all things energy-peakoil related on the intertubes since before the runup in 2008. It has a consistently high signal-to-noise ratio in the comments as well. Exceptional site.
Look how much has changed in 100 years, in 10 years, even in 1 year.
Things change quickly. There is no way to predict anything that will happen in 20 years properly when it comes to technology, which is driven by (1) warfare, (2) government research, (3) input costs versus need. I'm against 1 & 2, but in terms of technology chasing either speed or efficiency, we've been more focused on speed than on efficiency because energy is so damned cheap, and it's likely to stay cheap for the time being.
As long as energy is cheap, our focus will be on doing things faster or better, but not more efficiently, except where there is a financial incentive to.
If energy costs start to go up in a significant way, research will focus more on efficiency than on speed or quality.
For years I've wanted a simple, scriptable home automation system. I've played with all of the systems out there, but without smart outlets and smart meters, the systems are useless. Why aren't there smart outlets and smart meters that actually work? There's no need -- energy is cheap and easy to get.
This is fearmongering, pure and simple.
Denial is a powerful instinct. You can tell them the ship went aground a long time ago, and they still won't believe it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
As it currently exists, if we were to take 100% of the income from every American today, it would not pay off the national debt.
So what? I'll let you in on a little secret: the people who actually own all those treasuries do not want it paid back. It's really that simple. [1]
They hold on to those treasuries because they want to keep the value represented by those treasuries rather than spend it, and they would scream bloody murder if you took the treasuries away from them, because there is no other comparably safe interest-earning asset around.
What's even better is that if some of those people do decide to spend the value represented by the treasuries, this will drive up GDP and it will drive up tax revenue. And magically, the amount by which tax revenue will increase automatically will be exactly the amount necessary to pay out the treasuries. That's a simple accounting equation.
Could someone please sit down with key leaders and explain to them in plain English (or the languages of their choice) why virtually all the premises upon which our society is built, fail the test of exponential growth. [...] Its time to get straight, tell the truth, clean up the mess, and make the planet fit for human habitation on all levels. We start by fixing the disaster that our economy(s) are/is, and we get on with the SANE job of designing then implementing sustainable future.
That's a bunch of big, hollow words. Null content. Come back when you have workable proposals instead of hot air.
[1] Of course, they do want to get their principal back when those treasuries expire, but they'll just "reinvest" that principal back in new treasuries, which is effectively the same as not wanting to get paid back at all.
You don't need a PHD or a complex study, just common sense.
Why do so many people in finance continue to insist on growth?
We should be focusing on steady state sustainability.
breeding, and I'm ready for space!
Exponential growth in any real (not imaginary/virtual) system must slow down when it exceeds some percentage of it's total environment. Eventually, it hits a saturation point and must slow down. While the exact percentage that defines saturation varies with the growth rate and environment, typically exponential growth can't continue once it reaches 50% of it's environment. So, on a very basic level, he has simply stated the obvious.
However, as heat can be converted to other forms of energy, there are ways to dissipate and/or use the surplus heat. Also, higher efficiency methods of converting heat into electricity or other useful forms of energy will delay the saturation point. So, he's correct in theory, and his details are probably not an accurate prediction.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
I'm almost all the way through it. Very sobering stuff, only a few bits I have quibbles with. Or, if you don't have the time, read the synopsis.
The point about the assumption of growth is an important one. The world's financial systems are built on that assumption i.e. anyone who lends money expects to make a profit on the loan, after inflation if applicable. That's true of all loans, from the smallest micro-loan to the trillions in sovereign debt owed by the USA.
(this is not a
Soon we'll grow everything we need, we'll feed our equipment and housing rather than fuel it, let stuff grow rather than mine and refine.. Problem solved, population of ten or twelve billion humans living wealthy and prosperous lifetyles, energy needs go through the floor. As to the "Monsanto Type Personalty" problem that might arise with this, we use the time honored French Revolution solution.
Now extrapolate 50 years ahead. All of a sudden, those remarkable, delicate and doomed circumstances that make your life so pleasant right now - DON'T EXIST (food, clean air, water, infrastructure, toys, relative afflluence, relative safety).
This thinking is a great plot device for movies, but historically speaking, mankind has survived quite a bit.
It didn't have to be this way but a lot of very poor choices were made (and continue to be made).
Those bad decisions do not need to continue to be made, and there is no guarantee that non-western world leaders will not make the same or worse mistakes in the future.
-- $G
MIT was commissioned decades ago to study the 'Limits to Growth' by the Club of Rome. The created a simulation and published a description of their efforts in 1972. Then updated the program and its parameters 30 years later and published again. It's very interesting. The authors made it accessible and understandable. The conclusions are not what you might expect, especially if you are just itching for an argument like so many here seem to be.
Man has become the dominate actor in the natural global system, and we have choices to make regarding our future. We can seek to understand our cumulative effect or we can bungle in what's left of jungle, fiddle while home burns or just party like it's 1999. If you're interested enough to read a grown up book, here's a chance.
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
Uh, mankind has survived, but I think the point is that for all but the top 1% survival has been a brutal and unpleasant ordeal. Things like leaving your children on the side of the road to die (happening right now in Africa, as a matter of fact)...
I see no evidence that those bad decisions have stopped. People still treat people like shit and let them breed uncontrollably. OTOH, a nice big WWIII with a few hundred million going off to die in the trenches'll solve that. Don't forget, when it comes to trench warfare it doesn't matter how smart you are. We sent Physicists off to die too.
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Of course it isn't the answer.
We can't manage this planet. What makes anyone thing that we can manage a new one?
It is sad that the "space option" types - generally smart people - are not smart enough to see this. Or that they don't see the danger in thinking of our planet as disposable.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Press release?
Our energy production has risen some percentage every year. That is exponential by definition...
but I think the point is that for all but the top 1% survival has been a brutal and unpleasant ordeal.
This assumes there is a universal definition of what pleasant life is.
We sent Physicists off to die too.
LOL. I was a nuclear reactor operator in the US Navy.
-- $G
This was taken verbatim from a post from Usenet. I am not the author.
I think we can support about five hundred billion at the levels of present day affluent American suburbia or Singaporean city:
The more people, the more skills and human energy. But at some point we will start to run short of room on planet earth, resources, entropy sinks, and food.
With a population of five hundred billion to one trillion, most of them living a western middle class lifestyle, we could solve the human genome problem in a few months with the money one would get by passing around your hat and free voluntary donations of time and labor. The boy scouts would have sufficient resources to build colonies on the moon and in the Kuiper belt. We would have sufficient resources not merely to map the human genome, but to understand it, and rework it, and redesign it, perhaps for purposes such as growing artificial organs and ending and reversing old age. (A project vastly larger and more difficult than merely mapping it.)
Another area where a vast population would come in handy is the biotechnology and nanotechnology project of making useful devices that look after themselves like cats and breed like rabbits, completely absorbing the biosphere into the technosphere. Again the main obstacle to us producing such things today is the vast complexity of such things.
The laws of physics make it impossible to move hundreds of billions of people to the stars rapidly using known or reasonably foreseeable technology, but with immortality, we would have the time and patience to travel to the stars using less rapid forms of transport. Immortality is basically a problem of understanding and reworking an immensely complicated system, thus it is a classic example the kind of scientific and technological project that would benefit from a substantially higher population.
The question then is what are the likely physical limitations that could prevent such a desirable outcome: what would we run out of first?
raw materials and energy:
The cost of separating rock into its various pure chemical compounds is roughly comparable to the cost of refining ore: Therefore if we were reduced to mining rock, rather than ore that has already been separated for us by natural processes, this would increase raw materials refining costs by roughly five or ten times, since rock is roughly ten or twenty percent useful ores, depending on what one counts as useful. We are already processing low grades of iron ore which not very long ago would have been considered rock, not ore.
Since the refining and raw material cost of ore is an insignificant fraction of total costs in an advanced industrial society, this would not have a substantial mpact. A gradual and orderly conversion to lower and lower grades of ore, until we are refining rock rather than extracting ore, will not have any large economic impact.
A ton of granite contains uranium and thorium roughly equal to one hundred tons of coal, assuming breeder reactors and nuclear waste reprocessing. This ratio is typical of continental rocks, but is not typical of the earth has a whole: Once we strip mine the entire continental surface of the earth to about thirty or forty miles deep, we will no longer be able to employ fission power. For a population of several hundred billion immortals, people with a vastly longer perspective than ours, fission power would eventually come to be seen as disturbingly finite. Fortunately this leave more than ample time and resources to create space based solar power systems.
For some sufficiently large population the waste heat from all this is going to cook the earth, but if we assume one trillion people consuming as much energy per head as people in the USA consume , this is not going to heat up the earth substantially.
The total energy of sunlight falling on the earth is one hundred and ten million gigawatts. A population of one thousand billion people, consuming energy at about the rate
As loath as I am to quote wikipedia, they seem to have a nice concise discussion on what exponential means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not Groucho, but the one that wrote about what economies without growth need to look like. I would pretty much put the vilification of Marx's work on the doorstep of the dependence on the assumption of growth.
Seems pretty constant for the last fifty years for per-capita use, at least in the US:
Here's a chart.
I wouldn't be surprised if global energy use shows a rapid increase, but there needs to be some common sense applied to extrapolation. I suspect the number of cars worldwide shows a similar rapid increase, but that doesn't mean that we're going to all be buried under automobiles by the year 2200.
I'm going to have to ask you to go look up the definition of exponential before you make any more posts about the definition of exponential...
So you approve of an unfair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having it forcefully taken from someone who did earn it? Call me crazy, but doesn't the dictionary define that sort of behavior as "theft"?
Also, I find it horribly ironic that you talk about the evil "greedy" people, yet you fail to see the greed in thinking you should get something that you didn't earn.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
"As it currently exists, if we were to take 100% of the income from every American today, it would not pay off the national debt. "
False. but hey, I don't really except anyone to understand what the national debt actual is.
OTOH, that line did spare me from reading the rest of your post, since It is probably as accurate.
Which part did you think was false about those numbers?
Federal debt (not to mention state debt) is 14 T
Total personal income in 2010 was 12 T
I'm not saying he's blowing smoke, just hot air. The author is analyzing a real problem we face today in a future tense. It's all buggy whips to me. I'm sure there were 19th century public commentaries on the same subject but in terms of horses, cobblestones, whale fat and arable landmass (always a favorite). Yes, yes he's got charts and graphs showing how our economy can't keep growing and how we'll all die of heat saturation or some such.
100 years from now hopefully we'll move on from the short lived stock markets, banks and other parasites on the exchange of goods and services. Then all this economy talk will be nothing more than buggy whip mania. None of these so called institutions are necessary anymore, we just don't realize it yet. We have real time communications worldwide! Why do we need centralized clearing house to capitalize projects? There all just middlemen to get interested parties together and are being automated more and more. We should just cut the middle men out and let the infrastructure do the work.
Likewise with energy. There is mention of solar panels being 85% heat engine because it's only 15% efficient. I though the other 85% was solar radiation bound to heat up the earth anyways. Renewables don't just mean free delivery, it means that the east energy is already a part of the system. Any harnessing if this energy is actually a temporary reduction (eventually it gets returned via entropy but with a slight delay) as water in a river ultimately returns to the oceans. 100-200 years from now we will be putting a lot of energy OFF the planet. Whether it is more satellites, space exploration, asteroid mining or fueling colonies. More buggy whips. When we are draining energy off planet the current concerns with heat engines, global warming, etc will be a distant memory, like the problem of how to keep the streets clean of horse manure is today.
I think the author is a skilled writer and agree that there is a need to solve these problems today but I find his notions that today's problems will be relevant in the future, to be quaint and somewhat shortsighted and naive. It is not easy to see the future when the present is blocking the view.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Well, doing it in one year is kind of optimistic. Why did you assume that was the time periode he meant?
Anthropological note: Some people's brains are wired such that when they hear "growth will end" they hear "the world will end". Note how growth literally means the world to this poster. This sort of learned behavior usually derives from studying the science[sic] of Economics.
No, I think he approves the extremely fair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having them forcefully taken from someone who didn't earn it either, such as a CEO, banker, high frequency stock trader, etc. Seeing how most of the nation's wealth is currently in the hands of people who didn't earn it, there shouldn't be a shortage of things that can be justly redistributed any time soon.
No, thievery means taking something you don't own, not something you didn't earn.
The alternative to people getting things they didn't earn is the return to feudalism, where the local lord owns the means of production and other people obey him or die. Capitalism concentrates a larger and larger share of the wealth into fewer and fewer hands, so you either have mechanisms to redistribute it or accept that most people will get a life of miserable poverty.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Contrast to today, when most of the population of developed countries, what around 15% of the global population, live relatively comfortable and healthy lives. Sounds to me like pretty conclusive evidence that things have improved.
There is a more palatable solution. As societies bring up standards of education and living the birth rate falls off until population growth is flat or even negative. The goal of spreading education and living standards is achievable. Not easy, but possible to do.
We will then also need to adjust our economies to account for that, as we are doing to some degree in Europe now. Japan is looking at a drop of tens of millions and a large retired population so chances are they will lead the way, but cultural differences may make their solution unworkable in the west.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Expansion of economy != physical expansion. Many of the high-value things we produce these days require very little in terms of physical goods. Most tech is actually the opposite - the smaller it is the higher the value. The less energy something uses the higher the value, given 2 goods that are otherwise equal. Lots of things that we give value take up physical space only in terms of magnetic charge on a drive platter. There's no reason to think that as the number of humans stops increasing and starts decreasing in the next century that the economy must certainly be reduced by a similar amount.
The debt is a one-time sum. (It keeps growing, but it's not an annual accruance.) Income is annual, and repeats. So if you take all the income from every American, they would pay off the debt in 1.17 years -- one year's worth of income, plus about two months from the next year's income. Then we'd have no debt and everyone would get their income back.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then compare personal income to the deficit, which is the amount that the debt is growing each year. The deficit is about 1.4 T. If we tax incomes an average of 11.6% higher then the deficit disappears and we start shrinking the debt.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The only problem is that congress has an insatiable appetite for spending money. If we increased taxes 11.6% what would stop government from spending it and then some. No this isn't a R or D thing as they both just spend on different things.
This is the essential problem -- do you trust government? It does break down into R and D, though. Ds, in general, do trust government, and Rs in general do not. Personally, I feel that government got us into this mess and we need it to get out, but I do want watchmen and safeguards in place to keep it on the right focus.
Additionally there are probably lots of cuts that could be done
No, there really aren't. Look, we essentially need to add 11.6% in revenues, or cut the equivalent, or both, to eliminate the deficit. Look at the federal budget. We spend a total of 19% of it on discretionary spending -- corn subsidies, food stamps, education, highway spending, food inspection, etc. You would have to eliminate 60% of all federal discretionary programs in order to save enough money. It can't be done, not without destroying the republic.
Where you have to cut is where the fat is. That means defense -- our defense spending is way out of whack, 40% of the world total and more than six times the second-largest spender (China). If we cut defense in half we would still be the biggest spender in the world, and we'd nearly eliminate the deficit. There's also fat in Medicare/Medicaid -- our health care system is horrible and much more expensive than it should be, and it could be cleaned up and trimmed.
Social Security does *not* need reform. It's 20% of the money going out, but it's 40% of the money coming in. Social Security is flush, a net positive in our national budget, until at least 2037. Anyone who says they want to reform Social Security is trying to raid your paycheck to get tax breaks for the rich.
But even if you clean up Medicare and decimate Defense spending, you're still only going to eliminate the deficit. To dig away at the debt, we need a surplus. There's no way to get that without revenue increases. I'd be willing to pay 12% more in taxes to make this entire debate go away, or even just to shut up some of the morons on TV bloviating about it.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.