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Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet
I
continue to be troubled by what I hear in the media, at conferences, in
university lecture halls, etc. with respect to what basically amounts to the
promotion of "sustainable growth."
You
can't have economic growth forever on a finite planet, resource substitution
and other measures of technological development notwithstanding.
We
in the developed world got used to continual growth as "normal" over
several generations' time since the advent of fossil fuels, primarily oil. In
the past, always being able to expand our access to cheap, accessible high
net-energy (high EROEI, Energy-Return-On-Energy-Invested) oil allowed us to
grow our economy and vastly increase in societal and infrastructure
complexity.
Subtract
cheap high EROEI oil and growth stalls and reverses into contraction, and
society rapidly decomplexifies. (Some use the term, "collapse.")
By
now we've run out of cheap, easily accessible, high quality oil, and have begun
to exploit more dispersed, environmentally risky, geo-politically contentious,
low quality, and therefore more expensive, low EROEI resources (e.g. fracked
shale oil, tar sands, super deepwater offshore deposits).
The
question is, what minimum EROEI is required to run a highly globalized and
integrated, sub-/peri-/urbanized, industrialized, hyper-complex society, and
where are we now with respect to that minimum?
In
the first decades of oil drilling in PA and TX, the EROEI was 100:1 or more.
Currently, conventional oil clocks in at around 25:1. Average for US oil today
is about 10:1. Tar sands run from 3:1 to 5:1, biodiesel from soybeans at 1.7:1,
and corn ethanol at a mere 1.3:1. (Solar, wind, and hydro fare better, but are
good for electricity production, not transport, and still require a platform of
cheap fossil fuels in order to be deployed at a meaningful scale.)
The
fracking "boom" does not represent a real boom in new resources, or
old resources opened up by technological breakthroughs in horizontal drilling.
It is a combination of high ($100+/barrel) oil prices, and Wall Street
financial bubble shenanigans. (The shale
oil bubble – give it a year or so and this will be a household term – is the
current in a series of US economy bubbles dating back at least to the S&L
scandal of the 80's, the Enron scandal and the tech bubble of the 90's / early
2000's, and the housing bubble and financial crash of the mid-2000s).
The
trouble with high oil prices is that they reliably send the economy into a
recession. (Because energy is the “master resource” that effects the production,
and prices, of all other goods and services in the economy.) This destroys
demand; but if oil prices drop, then it is no longer economical for energy
companies to exploit expensive new “tight oil” plays. These upper and lower oil
price bounds have characterized the bumpy plateau of oil production that we
have been on since 2005, and go along way explaining our protracted economic
non-recovery from the crash of 2008. Some analysts think that this indicates we’ve
hit peak oil. Some analysts think this also signals the end of the era of
economic growth – that we are not in a "recession" per se (because
"recession" implies a defined trough ending with an uptrend back to
"normal"), but are experiencing the first symptoms of economic stall
and contraction.
We
talk incessantly about sustainability when we should be talking about
un-sustainability.
Economic
growth is unsustainable, by definition, since it implies increasing demands for
energy, resources, and waste assimilation capacity. Substitution, technological
innovation, and gains in efficiency can help, but not beyond the limits
specified by the laws of thermodynamics. Often, efficiency gains end up
backfiring as increased consumption outstrip them. Technological innovation
often creates more problems than it solves through unintended consequences and
diminishing returns. And as ecological economists have demonstrated, human
capital is complimentary to natural capital, not a substitute for it as assumed
by mainstream economists. This limits the extent to which resource substitution
is effective or possible (contrary to cornucopian Julian Simon's winning bet
with biologist Paul Ehrlich regarding the prices of a few metals over a few
years' time).
The
current global trend in urbanization is unsustainable. A lot of fact-based
arguments can be made to demonstrate this, but it is a lot easier if you've
simply visited a third-world peri-urban slum to realize these arrangements are
not sustainable. For example, when it comes to providing adequate water, sanitation
and hygiene in such circumstances, the problem is intractable, overwhelming.
That's why no one has been able to do it – not for lack of money, or political
will, or economic incentive.
For
all biological organisms, there is a positive correlation between food supply
and population growth. With industrial agriculture and the Green Revolution, we
have spent the past 100 years turning cheap oil into people. Now the cheap oil
has run out and there are too many people to sustain at a highly energy-and-resource-intensive
way of life. Yet UN (and other agencies) projections of population growth,
economic growth, food production, etc., all show current upward trends
continuing to 2050 and beyond – why?
Is it
because it is unpleasant and politically untenable to publicly consider the
more likely course of economic contraction and population decline?
In
our culture, it is common to assume that humans are not like other biological
organisms. On the contrary we assume that "people are our greatest
resource," and that fabulously innovative human brains grant us
exceptional status in the biological world. We are staking a lot on these
hopes, which amount more to tenants of a modern religious faith in
"progress" and human exceptionalism than on factual, scientific contemplation
of material reality.
It
deeply troubles me that we talk incessantly of "sustainability"
without acknowledging our unsustainable reality.
Implied
in the profligate use of the word "sustainable" is that current major
trends in economics, population dynamics, food production, energy acquisition
and use, infrastructure development and maintenance, transportation,
biodiversity, pollution, climate and biogeochemical disturbance are
unsustainable. Anything that cannot continue indefinitely, sooner or later, won't
– the question is not, "if?" but, "when?"
So,
"when?"
Soon.
No
one can put an exact date for when these unsustainable trends really start to
bite. In many instances, especially among the worlds’ poor, they have already
substantially begun to bite. But when they begin to bite us too, in the
(over-)developed West, it will undoubtedly feel too soon.
Optimists
in the mainstream may tentatively acknowledge our un-sustainability, but put
any attendant economic or resource crunch several decades into the future.
I
believe the crunch is coming in our lifetime. I believe the crunch is coming in
the course of our careers. I believe that the next 10, 20, and 30 years are
going to look vastly different than the last 10, 20, 30 years, and nothing at
all like a linear extrapolation upwards based on previous decades' trends.
I
believe this has consequences for how we enact our careers and how we live our
lives now. We ought to be in a mode of preparation for a very different future
than what we've been led to expect based on the influence of social
institutions (education, the media, culture, etc.).
In
short, we need to prepare for an energy-constrained existence, and one that
involves a high degree of local production of necessities (e.g. food, basic
household goods, beer – especially beer) for local consumption. Subtract cheap
oil or a stable global economy and international relations and huge transport
distances for food and other critical goods manufactured wherever in the world
labor costs are lowest and/or environmental regulations the most lax become
prohibitive.
I'm
not trying to be morbid, predicting the doom of human civilization, etc. I use
stark language because I believe the converging problem of energy, economic, and
environmental unsustainability is something we need to begin addressing
immediately – and yet we are not even talking about it earnestly.
As
someone involved with university education, I feel we have an obligation to do
our utmost to prepare students for a career "in the real world," and
in this case, "the real world" means a world of economic contraction
and re-localization, declining living standards, energy constraints, degraded
environments/ecosystems, and climate irregularities.
As
someone involved in "engineering for developing communities" and the
"international WASH sustainable development" establishment, I feel we
have the obligation to recognize that the (over-)developed world is going to
look increasingly like the developing world in the years to come, rather than
the typical assumption of the reverse. We have a lot to learn from poor people
in the developing world about how to cooperatively solve problems, meet needs,
and conduct convivial and purposeful lives under conditions of economic
constraint and relative scarcity. (And to this purpose we would do well to step
aside from conventional "professional development" and careerism
activities to undertake long-term participatory, experiential studies within
so-called developing communities.)
Yet
as educators and professionals concerned with environmentally sustainable human
development we are not adequately taking up these tasks in our classroom
curricula or conference agendas.
To
begin to do so means first an acknowledgement that indefinite growth in
anything – GDP/economy, population, food production, efficiency – is an
impossibility theorem and therefore invalid as a programmatic objective. And
second, it means acknowledging that biophysical limits to growth are currently
making themselves felt and will increasingly do so over the course of our
careers and lifetimes (and not at some vague far-off point many decades in the
future).
With
this renewed and corrected vision of the near- and medium-term future, we can
more responsibly and accurately prepare students, as well as the communities we
serve through our professional activities and even our own communities and
households, to adapt to coming changes and the tough times ahead.
