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http://complexsystemofpipes.wordpress.com/category/economics/capitalism/

“Not long ago, I reproduced George Monbiot’s suggestion that a global recession might be worth hoping for. There’s an increasingly terrifying threat of human activity rendering the biosphere uninhabitable, bringing a series of catastrophes we an refer to by the sanitised label of a “global population crash”, and for all the efforts of environmentalists it’s hard to see what could save us from our own economy, short of its complete collapse.”

“A generation after the oil embargo of the 1970s, few people realise just how dependent we have become on oil in less than a century. It’s not just cars, it’s not just heating our homes, and it’s not just manufactured consumer tat and white goods. In fact, most of use as much oil through the food we eat as through our transport and our home. Agriculture is intense these days, with tractors, pesticides and fertilisers pushing farms way beyond their natural limits. As the oil runs out, there’s every chance of the food running out.”

“Even without biofuels, though, the end of abundant oil has very serious consequences for our food security. Intensive, unsustainable agriculture is half the problem, the other half being intensive, unsustainable food distribution. Our farms will no longer work half so well, and we won’t be able to ship everything from farm to table via processing plants in Poland or China. For the problem isn’t just of intense farms, but of an intense, global farming industry; one that’s extremely reliant on oil.”

Then, why is it that grown-ups with the very best education and responsibilities for ensuring a good future for the young deny one of these basic, irrefutable scientific facts?

While there is a clear consensus among young and old alike that the planet we inhabit is round, many political leaders and powerbrokers in the global economy act as if Earth is somehow infinite, not limited in its capacity to perpetually fulfill the needs and wishes of the human species. Their widely shared, consensually validated and specious thinking supports the idea that the Earth is a sort of cornucopia, a seemingly endless provider of whatsoever human beings desire. Our relatively small and frangible planet is treated by these erstwhile leaders like an ever expressive teat at which the human species continuously and eternally can suckle.

Take the example of the world’s supply of oil. Children see that the oil supply must be limited because the Earth itself is bounded not boundless. In these times, the young ones recognize that older folks are rapidly building oil rigs everywhere on the surface of Earth, draining fields of their petroleum and then voraciously consuming it. Nonetheless, many people continue to consume the limited oil supply as if there must surely be no end to it. Given the requirements of practical reality, why are there not electric cars and trains taking us where we need to go? Where are meaningful economic incentives for limiting profligate oil consumption and promoting the development and use of alternative fuel sources? The policy-making and political decision-making processes of these leaders consciously ignores the current massive dissipation of the Earth’s limited oil resources. Perhaps such behavior is both irrational and irresponsible.

It took millions of years for the oil reserves to form, thanks to God. And in the span of my lifetime it appears a few generations of voracious human beings, now numbering over 6.6 billion, are righteously “sucking up” the lion’s share of the planet’s petroleum capacity. If we old-timers simply keep doing what we are doing now to maximally expand oil production for immediate consumption, what resource base in petroleum will be left for our children and coming generations to this good Earth?

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
http://journals.aol.com/sesalmony/HumanandEnvironmentalHealth/

This should be interesting.

The first part was the global energy scenario developed over the last few months and substantially revised following its critique on the Oil Drum. That baseline article is here: World Energy to 2050.

The new article looks at the impacts of energy decline on national economies. I link the calculated GDP changes with national demographic projections to look at the effect on per capita GDP out to 2050. The latest article is here: National Energy Decline and the Growth of Destitution.

Here’s a short excerpt:

Current statistics from The World Bank indicate that over a billion people today live on a single dollar a day – half of the population I listed above as comprising the poor of 2006. The growth in that population, coupled with the drop in per capita GDP, implies that well over twice that number will be desperately poor in 2050 – perhaps as many as 3 billion in 2050. According to the same source, about half the world’s population today lives on less than $2 a day. If the scenario developed in this article is close to being true, that number could double by 2050. That demographic and economic earthquake could leave 6 billion people – almost the size of today’s entire global population – trying to survive on such a pittance.

Paul Chefurka

Dear Friends,

Thanks so much for all you are doing and planning to do differently. Your examples have got to have something to do with what is required of us all now. All of us have got to find new ways of making a difference just like you are doing.

Here we are, one year away from US national elections. Many people seem to be “marking time” and waiting for a new day. For the moment, and since the turn of the century, leadership has not been up to the challenges of our time.

Because the problems that I am seeing cannot wait “until next year,” I keep doing what I am doing, and hoping to do things better by doing things differently. Current leadership appears to be making bad matters even worse, not doing things better. If leaders keep doing what they are doing now, we will likely keep getting what we are getting now. Therein lies a big problem.

Always glad to hear of initiatives like Paul Chefurka’s and to know so many other people are active. Not just to me personally, but for everyone’s sake, the work at hand is vital.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Thanks for your review and comments. If you go back to the article this morning, you’ll see that I’ve taken on your comment about hydro. I think I got mesmerized by the mathematical projections, and reading your comment snapped me out of it. The future of hydro development isn’t nearly as imponderable as wind and solar, so it’s actually more defensible to use a hand-constructed, gradually slowing growth curve than a purely mathematical projection.

As I said earlier to John, rest assured I haven’t stopped beating the die-off drum. What I’m going to try and do is sneak up on it from behind, using escalating fertilizer prices (from rising hydrogen costs due to the decline in natural gas) as my signpost.

Here’s how I intend to proceed:

I need to first quantify the energy changes in a selection of poor countries from now to 2050, based on their usage of various energy sources and rates of change I’ve established in my model.

I’ll translate that into GDP changes using the work of Ayres and Kummel that analyzes of the energy contribution to GDP.

I’ll then need to come up with a believable estimate of fertilizer prices based on the rising cost of natural gas. I may also factor in the probable costs of replacing some of the hydrogen made from from methane with hydrogen from electrolysis.

Then, looking at the current fertilizer use by my target countries I’ll try and project the impact of fertilizer costs onto their (presumably declining) economies, and try to figure out if those costs will be supportable. I suspect they won’t be, and that a lot of countries are going to find themselves in the position of Malawi who were in a famine situation until the government stepped in and subsidized fertilizer costs.

I’ll use that information to project declining fertilizer use, declining crop yields and declining per-capita grain production. From that we should get some realistic estimate of how much food the poor nations will be able to produce, and what shortfall would need to be made up by forign aid.

This will all be based on the UN population projection, but by the time the shopradsheets have cooled down we sould have a better idea how out of whack that projection is likely to be.

I’m going to publish my findings as a seeries of chapters to let people review the methodology and results.

It promises to be an interesting and informative journey…

Paul

If anything, the energy numbers look optimistic — which is a good thing as it makes it harder to say Paul is biased toward a pariticularly dire outcome. For instance, hydro continuing to grow at any significant rate isn’t plausible in my view given that we’ve already tapped the best sites and river flows are not increasing. But that’s just a nit pick.

The link between traditional energy production (gas and coal fired power plants and nuclear power generation) and water use isn’t made in this paper or in many others I’ve read. To a certain extent I don’t mind that here. How much can a person do in a single essay? But to understand the future we have to make this link.

A recent work from the University of Michigan using data from the USGS shows for the USA 1% of water is used in the home and 39% in agriculture. So far so good. I was a little surprised that only 1% was home-use, but the thing I found shocking was that power generation consumes 39% of all fresh water, the same amount as agriculture! Think of the trade offs we are going to be facing.

Of course, land use is also a factor to link to energy production and population. Again, you can do only so much at one time in a single paper.

Another issue that jumped out for me is related to a comment in the paper about the usefulness of moving to electric cars and trains. I agree; it’s a smart move. But, still, we then have to produce a lot more electricity to power those cars and trains. It’s very difficult to convey how concertrated the energy is in a gallon of gasoline and how much more electricity will have to be produced to come close to the mobility we now enjoy thanks to oil and its refinement.

This becomes another quality of life issue for the future. What will the world be like in terms of how the economy works (global and regional trade) and what our leisure is like when mobility is severly contrained with respect to what we enjoy today?

Paul’s last chart titled “Population and Energy” is excellent and a great way to end the paper. To a certain extent we can be sidetracked by whether or not there will be a population die-off. It’s more than enough to focus on quality of life issues. When we come to the point at which a greater and greater portion of the population is poor, reversing the trend we have been on, then, as a civilization, we are on a downward trend. That’s enough to get my attention.

Excellent work Paul. I’m happy to echo all of Steve’s sentiments about what you are doing even if you do blush. And thanks, John, for bringing it to my attention.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3148#comment-255358

. . . and realized you were still gonna be the life of lil’ Tommy’s party.

Anyway, we all do what we can, and here’s my next kick at the can: “The Daughter of WEAP” is up on my web site. No die-off this time, just a solid, detailed look at our species’ energy future and some examination of what will happen if the UN’s Medium Fertility Case turns out to be correct and there are 9 billion of us stomping around on the planet in 2050.

It’s at http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP2/WEAP2.html

Let me know if my Paullyanna optimism distresses you too much.

The irony is that in a world of nearly 7 billion, you would think there would be more Galileo’s than ever. Oddly, a larger percentage of the few people trying to bring attention to these issues are informed “amateurs,” myself included.

I wonder if it has a lot to do with the way the profession of science works today. Too much pressure to get grants and publish so as to get more grants etc. It’s not like in Galileo’s time. Perhaps the world is paying a price for that.