Professional Documents
Culture Documents
say, that the power of popula- affluence—albeit only recently. Paul The first 20th-century scientists to
tion is indefinitely greater than Roberts, in The End of Food, reports that raise again Malthus’s concern about
the power in the earth to produce malnutrition was common through- population and resources were the
subsistence for man. Population, out the 19th century. It was only in ecologists Garrett Hardin and Paul Eh-
when unchecked, increases in a the 20th century that cheap fossil en- rlich. Hardin’s essays in the 1960s on
geometrical ratio. Subsistence ergy allowed agricultural productivity the impacts of overpopulation includ-
increases only in an arithmetical sufficient to avert famine. This argu- ed the famous Tragedy of the Commons,
ratio. A slight acquaintance with ment has been made many times be- in which he discusses how individu-
numbers will shew the immensity fore—that our exponential escalation als tend to overuse common property
of the first power in comparison in energy use, including that used in to their own benefit even while it is
of the second. agriculture, is the principal reason that disadvantageous to all involved. Har-
we have generated a food supply that din wrote other essays on population,
Most people, including ourselves, grows geometrically as the human pop- coining such phrases as “freedom to
agree that Malthus’s premise has not ulation has continued to do likewise. breed brings ruin to all” and “nobody
held between 1800 and the present, as Thus since Malthus’s time we have ever dies of overpopulation,” the latter
the human population has expanded avoided wholesale famine for most of meaning that crowding is rarely a di-
by about seven times, with concom- the Earth’s people because fossil fuel rect source of death, but rather results
mitant surges in nutrition and general use also expanded geometrically. in disease or starvation, which then kill
AP Images/Brennan Linsley
all sorts of environmental problems:
acid rain, global warming, pollution,
loss of biodiversity and the depletion
of the Earth’s protective ozone layer.
The oil shortages, the gasoline lines
and even some electricity shortages in
the 1970s and early 1980s all seemed
to give credibility to the point of view Figure 4. In drought-stricken southeast Ethiopia, displaced people wait for the official distri-
that our population and our economy bution of donated water. Children who try to make off with the resource hours ahead of the
appointed time are chased off by a man with a cane. Such incidents demonstrate that water is
had in many ways exceeded the abil-
another resource often available only in limited quantities.
ity of the Earth to support them. For
many, it seemed like the world was
falling apart, and for those familiar ity more generally, arising from nature’s
QBSBNFUFS QSFEJDUFE BDUVBM
with the limits to growth, it seemed as constraints. They felt that their view
if the model’s predictions were begin- was validated by this turn of events
QPQVMBUJPO CJMMJPO CJMMJPO
ning to come true and that it was valid. and new gasoline resources.
Academia and the world at large were Mainstream (or neoclassical) eco- CJSUISBUF
abuzz with discussions of energy and nomics is presented mostly from the QFS
QFPQMF
human population issues. perspective of “efficiency”—the con- EFBUISBUF
Our own contributions to this work cept that unrestricted market forces
QFS
QFPQMF
centered on assessing the energy costs seek the lowest prices at each juncture,
of many aspects of resource and en- and the net effect should be the lowest WBMVFTWTMFWFMT
vironmental management, including possible prices. This would also cause
food supply, river management and, all productive forces to be optimally SFTPVSDFT
especially, obtaining energy itself. A deployed, at least in theory. DPQQFS
main focus of our papers was energy re- Economists particularly disliked the
turn on investment (EROI) for obtaining perspective of the absolute scarcity of PJM
oil and gas within the United States, resources, and they wrote a series of TPJM
which declined substantially from the scathing reports directed at the scien-
GJTI
1930s to the 1970s. It soon became ob- tists mentioned above, especially those
vious that the EROI for most of the most closely associated with the lim- QPMMVUJPO
possible alternatives was even lower. its to growth. Nuclear fusion was cit-
Declining EROI meant that more and ed as a contender for the next source $0
more energy output would have to be of abundant, cheap energy. They also OJUSPHFO
devoted simply to getting the energy found no evidence for scarcity, saying
QFSDBQJUB
needed to run an economy. that output had been rising between
JOEVTUSJBMPVUQVU
1.5 and 3 percent per year. Most im-
The Reversal portantly, they said that economies had
All of this interest began to fade, how- built-in, market-related mechanisms Figure 5. The values predicted by the limits-
ever, as enormous quantities of previ- (the invisible hand of Adam Smith) to to-growth model and actual data for 2008 are
ously discovered but unused oil and deal with scarcities. An important em- very close. The model used general terms for
gas from outside the U.S. were devel- pirical study by economists Harold J. resources and pollution, but current, approxi-
mate values for several specific examples
oped in response to the higher prices Barnett and Chandler Morse in 1963
are given for comparison. Data for this long
and then flooded into the country. Most seemed to show that, when corrected a time period are difficult to obtain; many
mainstream economists, and a lot of for inflation, the prices of all basic re- pollutants such as sewage probably have in-
other people too, did not like the con- sources (except for forest products) had creased more than the numbers suggest. On
cept that there might be limits to eco- not increased over nine decades. Thus, the other hand, pollutants such as sulfur have
nomic growth, or indeed human activ- although there was little argument that largely been controlled in many countries.
T
that energy use—a factor that had
CJSUIT
not been used in economists’ produc-
tion equations—is far more important
than capital, labor or technology in
explaining the increase in industrial
production of the U.S., Japan and
Germany. Recent analysis by Vaclav EF
BU
JUB
IT
Smil found that over the past decade
QP
BQ
QV
SD
the energy efficiency of the Japanese
MBU
F
economy had actually decreased by
TQ
POJ
DF
10 percent. A number of analyses have
SWJ
shown that most agricultural technol-
TF
ogy is extremely energy intensive. In
other words, when more detailed and
systems-oriented analyses are under-
taken, the arguments become much FSDBQJ
UB
more complex and ambiguous, and GPPEQ
show that technology rarely works JOEVTUSJBMPVUQV
U
by itself but instead tends to demand QFSDBQJUB
high resource use.
Likewise oil production in the U.S. PO
QPMMVUJ
has declined by 50 percent, as predict-
ed by Hubbert. The market did not
solve this issue for U.S. oil because,
despite the huge price increases and ZFBS
drilling in the late 1970s and 1980s, Figure 7. The original projections of the limits-to-growth model examined the relation of a
there was less oil and gas production growing population to resources and pollution, but did not include a timescale between 1900
then, and there has been essentially and 2100. If a halfway mark of 2000 is added, the projections up to the current time are largely
no relation between drilling intensity accurate, although the future will tell about the wild oscillations predicted for upcoming years.
and production rates for U.S. oil and
gas since.
There is a common perception, even
among knowledgeable environmental
scientists, that the limits-to-growth mod-
el was a colossal failure, since obviously
its predictions of extreme pollution and
population decline have not come true.
CJMMJPOCBSSFMTPGPJMFRVJWBMFOU
EV
later in 2008 (with a few appropriate as-
sumptions). Of course, how well it will
perform in the future when the model
behavior gets more dynamic is not yet
known. Although we do not necessarily
advocate that the existing structure of
the limits-to-growth model is adequate
for the task to which it is put, it is im-
portant to recognize that its predictions ZFBS
have not been invalidated and in fact Figure 8. The annual rates of total drilling for oil and gas in the United States from 1949 to 2005 are
seem quite on target. We are not aware shown versus the rates of production for the same period. If all other factors are kept equal, EROI
of any model made by economists that is is lower when drilling rates are high, because oil exploration and drilling are energy-intensive
as accurate over such a long time span. activities. The EROI may now be approachining 1:1 for finding new oil fields.
EPNFTUJDPJM
through petroleum.
Similarly, fossil fuels were crucial to
the growth of many national econo-
GJSFXPPE
linearly related to energy use, and when
UBSTBOET