Is a Reduction in Population Numbers the only Sustainable Solution?
By. Gail Tverberg
In a recent post, I talked about why we may be reaching Limits to Growth of the type foretold in the 1972 book Limits to Growth. I would like to explain some additional reasons now.
In my earlier post, I talked about how rising oil prices are associated with rising food prices, and how these high prices can make it harder for borrowers to repay their loans, as is now happening in Europe. These same problems can lead to a contraction of credit availability. A contraction in credit availability can be doubly problematic: it can lead to a cutback in demand because buyers cannot afford goods using oil, such as new cars, and it can lead to a drop in financing for industrial uses, including expanded oil drilling. All of these issues may lead to contraction of the type expected in Limits to Growth. US governmental debt limit problems and European debt defaults are also outcomes of the type expected with rising oil prices.
In this post, I would like to discuss some other basic issues that seem to be associated with Limits to Growth, and that may eventually lead to an abrupt downturn or collapse.
Limits to Growth: More Basic Issues1. The over-use of resources by humans seems to be of very-long standing origin, dating to the time-period 100,000 BC when there were fewer than 100,000 people on earth. Capitalism today is an extension of this long-term pattern.
2. World systems often seem to work as a gradual build-up of forces followed by a cataclysmic release. Examples include earthquakes and hurricanes. A similar pattern may happen with the Limits to Growth that we seem to be reaching.
3. The extent to which humans can gather resources for their own use depends on their geographical reach. This reach has gradually grown through inventions such as ships, through the settling of new lands and colonialism, and most recently through international globalization. Globalization is necessarily the end of this growth.
4. Globalization sows the seeds of its own demise because factory workers are effectively forced to compete for wages with workers from around the world.
5. In the normal scheme of things, world systems would rest and regroup once resources reach some sort of crisis point, defined by Liebig’s Law of the Minimum. Soils would build up again; aquifers would refresh; climate would reach a new equilibrium; and a different group of plants and animals would become dominant. Oil and gas supplies might even be rebuilt, over millions of years. It is not clear that humans will be part of the new world order, however.
Long-Term Overuse of ResourcesOver the past 100,000 years, man’s record of sustainably using natural resources has been poor. Humans differ from other primates because of their relatively larger brain size, but humans have not used this intelligence to preserve the environment.
There have been five periods in the history of the world in which large numbers of species have died off. These are sometimes called “mass extinctions“. According to Niles Eldridge, the Sixth Extinction is occurring now:
• Phase One began when the first modern humans began to disperse to different parts of the world about 100,000 years ago.
• Phase Two began about 10,000 years ago when humans turned to agriculture.
According to Eldridge, humans have been like bulls in a China shop. They disrupted ecosystems by overhunting game species and perhaps also by spreading disease organisms. Regarding the development of agriculture, he says:
Homo sapiens became the first species to stop living inside local ecosystems. . . . Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems – converting land to produce one or two food crops, with all other native plant species all now classified as unwanted “weeds” — and all but a few domesticated species of animals now considered as pests.
The development of fossil fuels ramped up the attack on natural systems further. Fossil fuel could be used for irrigation, and to produce herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer, allowing farmers to choose the crops they preferred to grow. Fossil fuels also enabled large fishing boats to deplete the oceans of large fish.
The final tool man found in his attach on natural ecosystems was debt based financing. While debt had been used for many years, it took on a new role when economists started realizing that greater debt could be used to increase demand for goods. This happens because debt financing gives people money to spend in advance of when it is earned (for example, a car loan allows a person to buy a car that he could not otherwise afford).
Because debt allows people to buy thing that they would not otherwise be able to afford, it has a tendency to raise commodity prices. These higher commodity prices make it economic to extract more marginal resources, such as oil in difficult locations.
Natural systems often operate through a build-up of forces, followed by a cataclysmic releaseThere are no doubt some natural forces operate at a pretty steady level indefinitely–gravity, for example. But many of the processes we experience are “batch processes”. We remain awake during the day; by evening we become tired, and fall asleep until the next morning. We eat, digest the food, and become hungry again. Movement of earth’s plates gradually builds up forces which are released by an earthquake. When force is released, the change can be quick and dramatic.
Right now, one stress is that of limited oil supply. This is leading to rising oil prices and stress on economies of oil importing countries.
The problem is that when limited oil supply is rationed by high oil prices, economic growth slows down, and eventually decreases (Figure 2). When this happens, it becomes much less advantageous to borrow from the future, because the future is no longer better than today. If an economic contraction occurs for very long, the whole debt system can be expected to undergo a major “unwind”.
Logic says the result would be fairly cataclysmic. We recently started seeing the beginning of this unwind with the financial crisis of 2008-2009. We are seeing more of the potential unwind with the problems in Greece and the rest of Europe, and with the US government reaching limits on borrowed debt. Exactly how this will play out is uncertain, but debt defaults in Europe could spread to banks worldwide, in one scenario.
With much less credit available, demand for extracted energy products would fall, because with less debt, people can afford to purchase fewer products that use energy, such as new cars. Prices of oil and oil substitutes will fall, making oil extraction unprofitable in locations where extraction costs are high. The result is not likely to be a slow decline, of the type attributed to M. King Hubbert. Instead, a much more precipitous decline can be expected.
We can’t know how our current predicament will turn out. Logic says that the natural system needs to rest and regroup after Limits to Growth are reached, in one way or another. Perhaps there is a “happily ever after” solution that will include a large number of humans. Unfortunately, it is hard to see what that solution might be.
Link -
http://oilprice.com/Finance/the-Economy/Is-a-Reduction-in-Population-Numbers-the...=================================
Gail Tverberg is a writer and speaker about energy issues. She is especially known for her work with financial issues associated with peak oil.
Gail also writes as Gail the Actuary, for The Oil Drum website.
http://www.theoildrum.com/
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