Energy to build it, energy to maintain it.
The industrial model of civilization requires steadily expanding energy consumption. From an overall perspective, it doesn't really matter where the energy comes from (fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear or renewables), so long as the thermodynamic imperative of increasing the entropy flow into the environment by increasing the exergy throughput of civilization is fulfilled. That's because the underlying driver of civilization is the simple, basic thermodynamic physics of open systems. Even if we get rid of both fossil fuels and nuclear power this framework will still operate.
This isn't necessarily the result of bad human decisions. The growth imperative that has been necessitated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the culprit here.
As civilization grows, it needs energy for two purposes: to maintain its cumulative asset base (all the stuff we've built so far); and to build new assets to support the expansion of population and activity levels.
According to Tim Garrett of the University of Utah, just supporting our accumulated asset base requires ~9.7 mW of power per 1990 constant dollar of cumulative GWP (cumulative over at least the last 2000 years). Only once that bar has been met can we devote energy to building out yet more assets. Below that level, presumably, we would fall into something that looks like John Michael Greer's "catabolic collapse".
Based on Tim Garrett's analysis, here is the situation since 1900. the graph shows the amount of energy spent on maintaining the existing asset base, and its reciprocal: the amount of energy that's left over to use in the growth of civilization. Notice that the "growth energy" has been falling since 1970:
If this assessment is correct, we risk falling into catabolic collapse before 2030 unless we can drastically increase the amount of energy we can generate increases substantially. Energy efficiency increases of a few percent aren't going to be enough.
You may be looking at the actual limits to growth.
A press release from the University of Utah talks about Garrett's findings.
And one last note: Despite all the publicity given to the idea, energy efficiency improvements alone cannot, over the long run, decrease energy use. That's because efficiency improvements simply increase the amount of work that can be performed by the same energy. As that work is translated into money, civilization keeps expanding. It's the Jevons Paradox operating at the level of our entire civilization.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Mon May 27, 2013, 07:44 PM - Edit history (2)
Here’s a chart of UN World Population figures.
Get the data here: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.html
[font size=4]Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.[/font]
By Jeff Wise|Posted Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013, at 7:45 AM
[font size=3]The world’s seemingly relentless march toward overpopulation achieved a notable milestone in 2012: Somewhere on the planet, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the 7 billionth living person came into existence.
Lucky No. 7,000,000,000 probably celebrated his or her birthday sometime in March and added to a population that’s already stressing the planet’s limited supplies of food, energy, and clean water. Should this trend continue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a five-part series marking the occasion, by midcentury, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity.”
A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.
…
This is a counterintuitive notion in the United States, where we’ve heard often and loudly that world population growth is a perilous and perhaps unavoidable threat to our future as a species. But population decline is a very familiar concept in the rest of the developed world, where fertility has long since fallen far below the 2.1 live births per woman required to maintain population equilibrium. In Germany, the birthrate has sunk to just 1.36, worse even than its low-fertility neighbors Spain (1.48) and Italy (1.4). The way things are going, Western Europe as a whole will most likely shrink from 460 million to just 350 million by the end of the century. That’s not so bad compared with Russia and China, each of whose populations could fall by half. As you may not be surprised to learn, the Germans have coined a polysyllabic word for this quandary: Schrumpf-Gesellschaft, or “shrinking society.”
…[/font][/font]
Yes, that’s right. Population growth is slowing, and we can expect the world population to start to fall.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/11/overcrowding-nah-the-worlds-population-may-actually-be-declining/
By Rebecca Nelson Jan. 11, 2013
[font size=3]In the 1973 movie Soylent Green, the world had turned (spoiler alert!) to cannibalism to feed its billions of unwashed masses by 2022. But nine years before that milestone, it looks as if the world’s population could actually be starting to decline.
The number of people on the planet has grown exponentially in the past half-century alone, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to an estimated 7 billion in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The world’s 7 billionth person, born sometime last March, elicited concern that we would run out of food and resources for everyone. An ever updating Census Bureau population clock shows the numbers rising.
People have worried about this since at least the 18th century, when British political economist Thomas Malthus first theorized that unchecked population growth would ultimately lead to starvation. China, so concerned about the drain of overpopulation on its resources, instituted a one-child policy in 1979, imposing heavy fines on parents who go over the limit.
But it turns out the world’s population isn’t growing nearly as fast as it once did. In fact, experts say the rate of population growth will continue to slow and that the total population will eventually — likely within our lifetimes — fall.
…[/font][/font]
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/conservation-and-development/population-bomb-so-wrong/
[font size=4]How Electricity, Development, and TV Reduce Fertility[/font]
May 8, 2013 | Martin Lewis,
[font size=3] India’s declining fertility rate, now only slightly higher than that of the United States, is part of a global trend of lower population growth. Yet the media and many educated Americans have entirely missed this major development, instead sticking to erroneous perceptions about inexorable global population growth that continue to fuel panicked rhetoric about everything from environmental degradation and immigration to food and resource scarcity.
In a recent exercise, most of my students believed that India’s total fertility rate (TFR) was twice that of the United States. Many of my colleagues believed the same. In actuality, it is only 2.5, barely above the estimated U.S. rate of 2.1 in 2011, and essentially the replacement level. (A more more recent study http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323375204578270053387770718.html now pegs U.S. fertility at 1.93.) Still, from a global perspective, India and the United States fall in the same general fertility category, as can be seen in the map below.
In today’s world, high fertility rates are increasingly confined to tropical Africa. Birthrates in most so-called Third World countries have dropped precipitously, and some are now well below the replacement rate. Chile (1.85), Brazil (1.81), and Thailand (1.56) now have lower birthrates than France (2.0), Norway (1.95), and Sweden (1.98).
To be sure, moderately elevated fertility is still a problem in several densely populated countries of Asia and Latin America, such as the Philippines (3.1) and Guatemala (3.92).
…[/font][/font]
... but our current economic theory and practice has us in a graveyard spiral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral
We've probably got the instruments we need to successfully bring this airplane safely down on the river, but the cornucopian and anthropocentric faithful are paying no attention to the ecologists. They are flying by the seat of their pants and mocking those who have seen these curves before.
The concept that humans are nothing more than an innovative eukaryotic life form just like all the other eukaryotic life forms who have profoundly disrupted existing environments throughout earth's history is anathema to them. Mankind is the center of their universe. Unseen godly powers created this garden for us to exploit and it's inconceivable that we would be "allowed" to die like ordinary animals in the ordinary fashion, exponential growth followed by collapse.
At the last second, seeing the ground or ocean expanding rapidly in front of the windshield, they do not accept reality and will simply die for their faith.
It's a morbidly fascinating thing to watch... who needs horror films when we've got this reality?
