The Present Through the Lens of the Future – Part 3 – A World Without Growth

Imagine it is 500 years in the future and there is a student whatever-the-equivalent of ‘reading’ whatever-is-the-equivalent of a ‘book’ of history^*Given that ‘history is written by the victors’ and the narrative recorded in the ‘book’ will thus depend on the path society has taken, we are necessarily predicting the future when we seek to answer the question.  But absurd idealizations of objectivity aside, how might the present moment be viewed? about our present. What will be considered the grand challenge of our time^*One boundary condition is necessarily that there is someone to ask the question, thus some degree of ‘victory condition’ must have been met (from an existential perspective).  So in answering the question, perhaps it is impossible to avoid the bias of our own perspective on what must be true if we are indeed going to survive.?

The contenders:

• Climate Change
• Finite Resources
• A World Without Growth
• Evolving Our Values
• Expanding ‘I’
• Coping with Acceleration
• Digital Life
• Polarization vs. Homogeneity

A World Without Growth

Do the very things that enable techno-optimism (invention, progress, etc.) require growth?

If the challenge of finite resources is truly a challenge of growth outpacing carrying capacity expansion, then there are two solutions: increase the rate of carrying capacity expansion or reduce the rate of growth.

It turns out that we might encounter the latter condition organically. The rate of population increase is slowing. The combined trends of increasing quality of life (which results in people choosing to have fewer children), reduced child mortality (which allows people to have fewer children while still providing a minimum number of surviving offspring), and increasing women’s education and women’s rights all are pointing towards a global society that may find population equilibrium. Our best guess is that population peaks at around 11.2 billion.

Source: UN World Population Prospects, 2019

Our collective demand for goods and services scales with population, so what happens to global economic growth in a world of a declining population?

Well, it turns out that very few of us don’t normalize to quality of life (we are sooooo adaptable), and we’ve yet to hit the ceiling of demand growth even in the wealthiest countries. We can use GDP as a modestly appropriate heuristic for thinking about demand.

GDP = GDP per Capita X Population

GDP per capita has continued to grow, and even outpaces population growth in much of the world. Where this is true, it’s possible for economic growth to exist even in a world without population growth.

Source: Our World in Data

Much of our present economic and social framework is based on a presumption of growth (in both population and, more critically, GDP^*A thorough body of work explores whether GDP is the right metric for judging society. ‘Wellness’ and ‘Quality of Life’ are concepts more dear to many of our hearts – the challenge is in measurement!). The notion that there is a time-value to money, the belief in markets, and even the foundational belief in ‘human progress’ is often conflated with a presumption of growth. Indeed, many of the very things that are required to expand the carrying capacity of the planet (including invention and innovation) are often posited to require growth.

The absence of growth is feared to have consequences that are incompatible with our cultural values including the failure of the fabric of communities, a skyrocketing dependency ratio (i.e. more old people than young people), and insufficient job creation.

What economic framework, what organizing principles for society, can enable a transition to a reduced or zero-growth state without harm to qualities of life (and to the extent that this quality of life depends on it, productivity), now and in the future? This, surely, is a grand challenge.

It’s not hard to connect the dots between a society that doesn’t know how to function without growth and our present issue around climate. It’s growth up to and past the carrying capacity that puts us at risk. The sources of demand most centrally relevant to our climate (mostly mediated through greenhouse gas emissions) include demand for energy, demand for food, demand for space, demand for things, and demand for infrastructure.

Some of these sources of demand saturate to some degree as a function of affluence and population stability. For example, there is only so much food that one person can consume (even if it’s the most rich and GHG/land/water/labor intensive food conceivable). The chart below shows the daily calories supplied per person vs. GDP per capita by country and shows a tendency to asymptote.

Source: Our World in Data

The emissions intensity of diets trend higher with affluence. However, the larger determinant, as shown below, is the fraction of the diet associated with animal protein and the relative emissions intensity of animal protein production in a given economy.

GHG per capita of diets by country. Source: Kim et al. 2020

Similarly, infrastructure (think concrete and steel) demand saturates as a function of population and societal development.

Source: van Ruijven et al. 2016

Our demand for space (think deforestation) is more a function our demand for agriculture than for living space (even under pretty generous assumptions of, say, 250 W m^-2 of solar fluence converted at 0.5% photosynthetic efficiency to food and 100% of that food being unwasted with all of us eating at the bottom of the food chain, the average American would need 100 m² of land for food and the living space per person even in our spread-out-country averages less than that!). Consequently, as our demand for food saturates, so will our demand for land. There are some limits, of course, depending on how high up the food chain we eat (i.e. how many calories go into producing one calorie that we consume),^*Today, we already use ~50% of land mass for agriculture but perhaps we can hope that we will avoid creating new species to eat our existing food-generating species and suffer the additional round of metabolic inefficiency associated therein.

Further, because of innovation in agricultural production, our crop productivity has increased dramatically (meaning we make more food per acre of land we farm).

Source: Our World in Data

That leaves ‘things’ and energy. Very few ‘things’ that we use have GHG emissions associated with them outside of the energy that goes into making them. Some exceptions include cement (which has process emissions associated with the thermal decomposition of calcium carbonate), fertilizer (which has nitrous oxide emissions associated with its use), air conditioning (and the HFCs that come with it), and all of the organic waste that we produce that has the potential to turn into methane emissions in the landfill. Thus, our limits to growth for ‘things’ have much more to do with resource limits (i.e. atoms), and there are a LOT of atoms. Increasingly, our ‘things’ are digital in nature and thus are further directly tied to an energy footprint rather than an ‘atomic’ footprint^*To be clear, the emissions associated with these sectors already exceed what our planet can sustain, so we’re not off the hook for them. But their growth potential is what is at question in this section, not their present contribution to GHGs..

So that leaves energy. Ahhh, energy. You might recall that doing something is harder than doing nothing – that’s because it takes energy. So, no matter what we want to do, we’ll need energy to do it. Whether we should want to do more and more is a question that we won’t address here, but we can look at our historic trends of energy use to understand what our energy demand may look like in the future.

Our demand for energy has historically proven exponential:

Source: Our World in Data

However, as you might recall, our population has also been growing exponentially. Our demand for energy can be calculated as:

Energy Demand per Capita X World Population

Source: Our World in Data

Our per capita demand for energy has been flattening, especially in the developing world. However, this asymptoting trend may be deceptive: in the history of our species we have gone through several phases of unlocking new energy sources, and of unlocking new demand for sources of energy, and consequently it is premature to predict that we have saturated our taste for energy. Indeed, if we look to the relationship between GDP per capita and energy demand we see that individuals in wealthier countries tend to use more energy:

Source: Our World in Data

Further, as we electrify the world, our demand for electricity per capita continues to grow supralinearly with population:

Source: Our World in Data

Energy lets us do everything that we do, starting with living (the energy in our food). We are fundamentally dissipative systems (see Prigogine) – non-equilibrium entities that depend on the flux of energy to survive, to propagate, and to continue to interact with the universe. The good news is, the use of energy isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the environment; it doesn’t necessarily have negative externalities other than increasing entropy and reducing the overall free energy of the universe (which just might be the point of it all anyway).

Fossil fuels dominate our present sources of energy, and it is in the concentration of _CO2 in the atmosphere (and some other pollution) that we find ourselves bumping up against a carrying capacity limit associated with our use of energy. But even if we switch to renewable sources, how extensible is our demand for energy before we reach the next limit?

The principal fluxes of energy on our planet come from 1) the sun, 2) geothermal energy (which was gravitational potential energy translated into thermal energy when our planet formed), and 3) nuclear energy (via the decay of unstable isotopes in our planet). Our planet experiences an average of approximately 250 W m^-2 of solar fluence, for approximately 1.1 * 10¹⁸ kWh per year of total energy received from the sun. At a population of 11.2 billion, even if we were, with 100% efficiency, to capture all solar energy and convert it into usable energy, we could only each have an allowance of just under 100 million kWh yr^-1. Now that might seem like a lot of energy (even Iceland and Qatar only use an average of ~200,000 kWh per person per year). A whole lot more than we could conceive of needing. However, if history has taught us anything about ourselves, it is that we continue to innovate new ways of shaping the world to suit our whim, new ways of reaching out to explore the universe and to propagate into it, and we consequently demand evermore energy (and evermore energy density) to achieve these ends.

Is it possible that we find ourselves tapping out at some maximum energy demand? Absolutely, and it would be a monumental cultural shift – it would imply either 1) and end to growth-orientation (in the context of needing more and more things, services, etc. etc.) or 2) a digitization of our lives. If we follow our present trends of increasing energy demand per capita, then we might expect energy demand to exceed the supply of solar energy. The nuclear potential energy of our planet, however, should be sufficient to keep us occupied for some time (the energy embodied in the oceans should we fuse every atom of hydrogen together in a chain emulating what occurs in the sun would be sufficient to sustain ~4.7 trillion kWh yr^-1 per person for 11.2 billion people for a million years – see Per Capita Energy Supply). It will mean incredible things for whatever our species evolves into should we find this limiting!

The reason I started working in energy was that a world with infinite, effectively-free energy is a world of infinite possibility. We can always erase the entropic harm we do in our tiny enclave of this vast universe by using energy to ‘pump’ entropy elsewhere (even climate change!). So many of our problems could be resolved if we had access to such a source of energy.

However, as I have experienced what it means to live as a human being, as a part of modern society and culture, I have been forced to acknowledge that energy is indeed enabling, but what it enables is yet more crucial. How we use the energy we have may or may not serve us. On the whole, I’d like to believe that we’ve used energy to create wellness and quality of life. But once survival of ourselves, our families, our communities, and our species is reasonably secure, perhaps opportunity for a new framework for choosing how to deploy energy is merited. How might our use of energy best serve us going forward?

Why have I turned a discussion about growth into a discussion about energy? Because energy is the critical enabler of all growth. However, it is worth noting that the energy intensity of GDP has been declining as society increasingly demands services and labor moves up the value ladder. This might imply that economic growth may not require growth in energy consumption, nor growth in population.

Source: Our World in Data

So whether you believe we’ll self-limit (either proactively or reactively) or if our hunger for ‘things’ and energy will grow evermore, the nature of our growth will change in the coming decades. Navigating our way through this, in analogy to the discussion on our use of energy, means confronting that we organize ourselves, our societies, and our economies according to a paradigm that has served us to getting to this incredible point. But it just might be time for a new paradigm, and one that considers the value of growth in a new light.

References