The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg

Excerpt from MuseLetter #222 / November 2010 by Richard Heinberg

Download printable PDF version here (PDF, 132 KB)

This is the second Museletter containing an excerpt from the upcoming book which has the working title 'The End of Growth'. The book is set for publication in July 2011.

The End of Growth

Introduction: The New Normal

The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.

The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.

The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.

This is not to say the U.S. or the world as a whole will never see another quarter or year of growth relative to the previous quarter or year. However, when the bumps are averaged out, the general trend-line of the economy (measured in terms of production and consumption of real goods) will be level or downward rather than upward from now on.

Nor will it be impossible for any region, nation, or business to continue growing for a while. Some will. In the final analysis, however, this growth will have been achieved at the expense of other regions, nations, or businesses. From now on, only relative growth is possible: the global economy is playing a zero-sum game, with an ever-shrinking pot to be divided among the winners.

[via MuseLetter read full article there]

Tim Jackson's economic reality check

A new TED Talk Video by Tim Jackson



As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.

About Tim Jackson

Tim Jackson studies the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment to question the primacy of economic growth.

The economy can’t grow forever

Commentary: The whole planet must live within its means
By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

This is an excerpt. Read the full article here.

Those of us who believe that the economy should serve us instead of the other way around are conflicted.

We know that the only way to end unemployment at home and poverty around the world is to make the economy grow faster. But we also know that nothing can grow forever, that the faster the global economy grows, the sooner we’ll run out of essential resources, including fossil fuels, water, arable land, healthy ecosystems and moderate climate.

Economists and politicians can’t admit it, but the laws of physics apply, no matter what the latest polls tell us. The Earth has finite resources that will someday limit our economic growth.

World leaders gather at the United Nations, where tackling global poverty is high on the agenda. Video courtesy of Reuters.

The Earth cannot forever support 7 billion people consuming as much as Americans consume. And yet we’ve staked our future — individually, nationally, and maybe even as a species — on that impossible dream.

Johan Rockstrom - Planetary Boundaries Video

Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us in his TED talk, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.

If Earth is a self-regulating system, it's clear that human activity is capable of disrupting it. Johan Rockstrom has led a team of scientists to define the nine Earth systems that need to be kept within bounds for Earth to keep itself in balance.



Johan Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to sustainability: planetary boundaries. Working with a team of 29 leading scientists across disciplines, Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems -- and marked the upper limit beyond which each system could touch off a major system crash. Climate change is certainly in the mix -- but so are other human-made threats such as ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution.

"Rockstrom has managed in an easy, yet always scientifically based way, to convey our dependence of the planet's resources, the risk of transgressing planetary boundaries and what changes are needed in order to allow humanity to continue to develop."

Anna Ritter, Fokus magazine

Interview: Heinberg on Peak Oil and Economic Growth

Author Richard Heinberg's nine books include The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He discusses what we know about peak oil, as well as its connection to the end of economic growth. His views are explained in his chapter in the forthcoming Post Carbon Reader, some chapters of which are already available for free download.

Heinberg also mentioned Searching for a Miracle, a recent report from the Post Carbon Institute available for free download at the link. It examines the question, "Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?"

Listen to the audio interview at Equal Time Radio here.
[via Energy Bulletin]

Wilberforce: Endless Growth is not Sustainable

Armed with a suitcase full of cash and more blonde beauties than Richard Branson, businessman Dick Smith announced his Wilberforce award at the FEX Market Site in Sydney on Wednesday 11 August 2010.

The award is designed to give a one million dollar prize to anyone under 30 who can impress Dick by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy.

Dick Smith is one of Australia’s most recognised individuals. After a successful business career in retailing and publishing, Dick has become well known as a restless adventurer, making many pioneering and record breaking flights by helicopter, aeroplane and balloon.

The $1 Million Wilberforce Award

It has become obvious to me that my generation has over exploited our wonderful world – and it’s younger people who will pay the price. Like many people my age, I’ve benefited from a long period of constant economic and population growth – we are addicted to it. But sooner or later this consumption growth will have an end. We appear to be already bumping against the limits of what our planet can sustain and the evidence is everywhere to see.

Right now I believe we could be sleepwalking to catastrophe because we are failing to both acknowledge that there are limits to growth in a finite world and to prepare for a more sustainable way of organising our economy. In the 19th Century, empires were built on the labour of slaves, and it was believed economies would collapse if slavery was abolished. But brave people like William Wilberforce fought to end the slave trade – and economies still flourished. We need brave people like Wilberforce today, and I want to encourage a new generation of clear-thinking and inspiring young leaders.

So today I am announcing Dick Smith’s Wilberforce Award – $1 million to go to a young person under 30 who can impress me by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy. I will be looking for candidates whose actions over the next year show that they have what it takes to be among the next generation of leaders our incredible planet so badly needs.

Candidates will need to have a firm belief that we can have a viable and strong world economy that is no longer obsessed with growth for its own sake, but instead encourages both a stable population and sustainable consumption of energy and resources. They must be able to communicate that we cannot continue to squander the resources that will be needed by future generations, and they must also be able to communicate a plan that offers an alternative to our growth addiction.

Like the Nobel Prize, you will not apply for the Wilberforce Award. Over the next twelve months I will be following the media throughout the world to see who is the most outstanding individual in not only making a significant contribution to this important issue, but who also becomes famous through his or her contribution to the debate.

One year from now I will announce the winner of the $1 Million Wilberforce Award. The Award will go towards advancing the momentum the winner will have already achieved.

Beyond the Limits to Growth

An excerpt from the Post Carbon Reader Series: Foundational Concepts
Beyond the Limits to Growth by Richard Heinberg

In 1972, the now-classic book Limits to Growth explored the consequences for Earth’s ecosystems of exponential growth in population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. That book, which still stands as the best-selling environmental title ever published, reported on the first attempts to use computers to model the likely interactions between trends in resources, consumption, and population. It summarized the first major scientific study to question the assumption that economic growth can and will continue more or less uninterrupted into the foreseeable future.



The idea was heretical at the time, and still is: During the past few decades, growth has become virtually the sole index of national economic well-being. When an economy grows, jobs appear, investments yield high returns, and everyone is happy. When the economy stops growing, financial bloodletting and general misery ensue. Predictably, a book saying that growth cannot and will not continue beyond a certain point proved profoundly upsetting in some quarters, and soon Limits to Growth was pilloried in a public relations campaign organized by pro-growth business interests. In reality, this purported “debunking” merely amounted to taking a few numbers in the book completely out of context, citing them as “predictions” (which they explicitly were not), and then claiming that these predictions had failed. The ruse was quickly exposed, but rebuttals often don’t gain nearly as much publicity as accusations, and so today millions of people mistakenly believe that the book was long ago discredited.

In any case, the underlying premise of the book is irrefutable: At some point in time, humanity’s ever-increasing resource consumption will meet the very real limits of a planet with finite natural resources.

The co-authors of The Post Carbon Reader believe that this time has come.

The Pivotal Role of energy

During the past two centuries, an explosion in population, consumption, and technological innovation has brought previously unimaginable advances in health, wealth, transport, and communications. These events were largely made possible by the release of enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels starting in the mid-nineteenth century.

Increased consumption of fossil fuels has produced both economic growth and population growth. However, a bigger population and a growing economy lead to more energy demand. We are thus enmeshed in a classic self-reinforcing (“positive”) feedback loop. Crucially, the planet on which all of this growth is occurring happens to be limited in size, with fixed stores of fossil fuels and mineral ores, and with constrained capacities to regenerate forests, fish, topsoil, and freshwater. Indeed, it appears that we are now pushing up against these very physical limits:

• The world is at, nearing, or past the points of peak production of a number of critical nonrenewable resources—including oil, natural gas, and coal, as well as many economically important minerals ranging from antimony to zinc.
• The global climate is being destabilized by greenhouse gases emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, leading to more severe weather (including droughts) as well as melting glaciers and rising sea levels.
• Freshwater scarcity is a real or impending problem in nearly all of the world’s nations due to climate change, pollution, and overuse of groundwater for agriculture and industrial processes.
• World food production per capita is declining and the maintenance of existing total harvests is threatened by climate change, soil erosion, water scarcity, and high fuel costs.
• Earth’s plant and animal species are being driven to extinction by human activities at a rate unequaled in the last 60 million years.

[via the Post Carbon Institute]

World3 in Modelica: System Dynamics Models

World3 in Modelica: Creating System Dynamics Models in the Modelica Framework

This paper and presentation by F. E. Cellier introduces a new release of the System-Dynamics library of Modelica and shows how it is being used by discussing a fairly large application code: Meadows’ World3 model.

Meadows’ only talked in Limits to Growth about the results obtained with the model. The model itself, originally coded in Dynamo, was described in a separate book.

Meadows’ World3 model has seen two major upgrades since its original inception, one in 1992, i.e. after 20 years, and the second in 2002, i.e., after 30 years. The World3 application code contained in SystemDynamics 2.0 implements the 2002 version of the World3 model. In the code, we offer not only the basic model, but also all 10 scenarios that Meadows and co-workers are talking about in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.

Future Research

What future additions are in the works? In today’s world of dwindling fossil fuel reserves, it becomes important to track how much energy we are actually using. Whereas classical System Dynamics is designed to track material flows, it does not track energy flows. This is a major drawback of the methodology.

For this reason, a second version of the System Dynamics library has also been released as a sublibrary of BondLib, our bond graph library. In that version, all material flows are represented internally by bond graphs. A bond graph naturally tracks energy flows. Each energy flow, in that version of the library, is represented as the product of a specific enthalpy and a mass flow. Hence we can track material flows and energy flows simultaneously.

When I drive my car from home to work, I am not only spending energy in the form of the gas that my car consumes. Some energy was also spent in producing the car, and more energy will be spent in discarding it at the end of its lifecycle and in recovering those materials from it that can be recycled.

The accumulated energy that accounts for all of those indirect uses of energy is called emergy. The specific enthalpy can be used to encode in the model the specific emergy, i.e., the emergy per unit of mass.

I plan on porting examples of emergy modeling, as described in the publications by Howard Odum, over to the bond graph implementation of the System Dynamics library, but this work has not yet been completed.


Check out the full paper and presentation by Prof. Dr. François E. Cellier here.

"Better than Growth" released by Australian Conservation Foundation

Arguing for something beyond economic growth

Australian Conservation Foundation has published an outstandingly well produced paper on how we can redesign our ways of living based on something other than economic growth and all its attendant troubles.


"Most australians don’t agree that their only goal in life is to increase their financial wealth and consumption – but too often our economic policy treats us as if we do. in reality, our quality of life depends on having time for family and friends, a strong sense of community, and a healthy natural environment. our economy should help us achieve those goals.

We can do better than a narrow vision of economic growth, and this report shows us how. Better than Growth explores the best practical thinking from around the world about how to improve economic measurements and align our economies to long-term environmental and social wellbeing."

[via Transition Network]

Conference on Ecomonic Degrowth Presentations

From Friday 26 to Monday 29 March 2010 the Second International Degrowth Conference took place at the historic building of ‘Universidad de Barcelona'. 500 scientists, civil society members and practionners from more than 40 countries attended the conference.

Thirty years ago, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen published a book in French with the title “Demain la Décroissance” (Degrowth Tomorrow) (1979). The organizers of the Economic Degrowth Conference says, “Aujourd’hui la Décroissance” (Degrowth today). The economic crisis of 2008-09 brings a new perspective. Economic degrowth can be good for the environment but it must be socially sustainable.

The 2nd international conference on economic degrowth for ecological sustainability and social equity followed from the first international conference (Paris, April 2008), that took place with the support of the European Society for Ecological Economics, Club of Rome (Brussels/Europe), Telecom Sud-Paris and SERI (Sustainable Europe Research Institute)

Conference Presentations

Managing degrowth: Employment, Security and the Economy under a Degrowth trajectory

• Blake Alcott: Degrowth and ‘unemployment’; Guaranteed jobs?
• Gjalt Huppes & Ruben Huele: Degrowth with an aging population; increasing leisure for improving the environment. The key role of pensions and their funding
• Richard Douthwaite: Why the global debt burden means there will be no recovery
• Colin C.Williams & Richard White: Transcending the depiction of market and non-market labour practices; implications for degrowth

Beyond Sustainable Development: Sustainable Degrowth towards a Steady-State Economy

• Brian Czech: The Chicken/Egg Spiral; "Reconciling" the Conflict Between Economic Growth and Environmental Protection with Technological Progress
• Daniel W. O’Neill: Measuring progress towards a steady state economy
• Ernest Garcia: Sociology and de-growth: social change, entropy and evolution in a way-down era
• Nicholas A. Ashford: Pathways to Sustainable Development; Co-optimizing Economic Welfare, Employment and Environment
• Ernest Garcia: Sociology and de-growth; social change, entropy and evolution in a way-down era
• Jacques Lauriol: L’Economie de la Fonctionnalité; Une voie nouvelle pour une décroissance soutenable

Degrowth, Capitalist Institutions and Democracy

• Pascal van Griethuysen : Implementing Degrowth; Evolutionary Economic Perspectives:
• Barbara Muraca: Growth, Degrowth, and Justice; A scrutiny of ethical and anthropological assumptions in growth and degrowth

Growth is unsustainable. Long live degrowth?

• E. Bilancini & S. D’Alessandro: Happy Degrowth vs Unhappy Growth
• Joaquim Sempere: Degrowth; Proposals and Questions

Making it real. Practical transformations towards degrowth

• Jørgen Stig Nørgård: Sustainable degrowth through more amateur economy
• Dick Urban Vestbro: Saving by Sharing – Collective Housing for Sustainable Lifestyles
• David Barkin: Constructing alternative degrowth strategies; Experience from rural communities in Latin America

Exergy Evolution of the Mineral Capital on Earth

Dr. Alicia Valero is a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza and works in the Centre of Research for Energy Resources and Consumption (CIRCE).

Her main scientific research areas are exergoecology and energy efficiency. In particular, she has had extensive involvement in the application of the exergy analysis in the global assessment of mineral resources on earth.

Download her PhD thesis (English): Exergy Evolution of the mineral capital on Earth

Abstract

The 20th century has been characterized by the economic growth of many industrialized countries. This growth was mainly sustained by the massive extraction and use of the earth’s mineral resources. The tendency observed worldwide in the present, is that consumption will continue increasing, especially due to the rapid development of Asia, the desire for a higher living standard of the developing world and the technological progress. But the physical limitations of our planet might seriously restrain world economies. In fact, many mineral commodities such as oil or copper are already showing signs of scarcity problems, and consequently their prices are increasing sharply.

Our society is based on an inefficient use of energy and materials, since there is a lack of awareness of the limit. If resources are limited, their management must be carefully planned. But it is impossible to manage efficiently the resources on earth, if we do not know what is available and at which rate it is being depleted.

Therefore, the aim of this PhD has been the assessment of the physical stock on earth and the degradation velocity of our mineral resources due to human action. This has been accomplished through the exergy analysis under the exergoecological approach. This way, the resources are physically assessed as the energy required to replace them from a complete degraded state to the conditions in which they are currently presented in nature. The main advantage of its use with respect to other physical indicators is that in a single property, all the physical features of a resource are accounted for. Furthermore, exergy has the capability of aggregating heterogeneous energy and material assets. Unlike standard economic valuations, the exergy analysis gives objective information since it is not subject to monetary policy, or currency speculation.

Examples of scientific contributions

With the relative abundance of the substances in each of the earth’s outer spheres obtained in this PhD, and the thermochemical information, we were able to calculate for the first time, the average Gibbs free energy, enthalpy of formation and chemical exergy of the atmosphere, hydrosphere and upper continental crust. Furthermore, since the mass of each layer of the earth is well known, we have obtained the first estimation of the earth’s specific chemical exergy: 1,22E9 Gtoe.

This study has obtained an inventory of the most important renewable and non-renewable resources on earth measured in exergy terms. The main novelty introduced in the inventory is the combined assessment of energy resources with non-fuel minerals. Since exergy is an additive property, we have been able to obtain the total exergy of the non renewable energy resources, including nuclear, fossil fuels and non-fuel mineral reserves. Furthermore we could estimate for all renewable resources, the rate of current consumption with respect to the available potential use.

Similarly, for non-renewables, we estimated the resource to production ratio. We came to the important conclusion that vast amounts of energy resources are available on earth, especially of renewable nature. However, we are currently using less than 2% of its potential. On the other hand, we have estimated that the reserves of concentrated fuel and non fuel minerals, which can be practically used by man, represent only 0,01% of the chemical exergy of the earth. Furthermore, their global R/P ratio excluding nuclear materials, is less than 100 years. Hence, humankind is not facing an energy crisis, as many claim, but rather a material’s scarcity.

This PhD has applied for the first time the Hubbert model to non-fuel minerals, with the aim of estimating the year were the peak of production is reached. It has been stated that the bell-shape curve is better suited to non-fuel minerals if it is fitted with exergy over time, instead of mass over time. This way, we take into account the concentration factor, which is very important for the case of solid minerals. Consequently, we have developed the required equations for estimating the Hubbert’s peak for all kinds of minerals in exergy terms.

With the available information about world mineral historic statistics and available reserves, we have carried out the first diagnosis of the state of non-renewable minerals on earth. This PhD has estimated through the exergy analysis, the degradation degree of the mineral commodities, detecting the ones being degraded at the highest rates, and the ones facing important scarcity problems.

We have stated that iron and aluminium are the most extracted commodities but not the most depleted ones, due to their crustal abundance. On the contrary, copper, which is also being extracted at very high rates, is already suffering scarcity problems, with more than 50% of its world reserves depleted. Other commodities such as mercury, silver, gold, tin, arsenic, antimony or lead are even more degraded, with more than 70% of their reserves depleted.

Feasta Tipping Point Report and the New Emergency Conference

Feasta aims to identify the characteristics (economic, cultural and environmental) of a truly sustainable society, articulate how the necessary transition can be effected and promote the implementation of the measures required for this purpose.

Feasta has released a new report Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production, by David Korowicz of Feasta and the Risk/Resilience Network, is now available for download. The report argues that the defining dynamic of our civilisation is the withdrawal of energy from a complex and integrated system adapted only to growing. A managed "de-growth" is impossible; what is required is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer-term adaptation.

Feasta organized The New Emergeny Conference last year. The videos of all of the presentations from the conference can now be viewed for free on the conference website.

This conference, marking Feasta's tenth anniversary, analysed the systems and the mindsets that have steered the world onto its grotesquely unsustainable current path. Discussions focussed on the new systems (financial, energy, food) and ways of thinking that are urgently required to correct the situation and bring about a rapid transition to a more secure future. Many of the ideas explored were Feasta's. Others were presented by international speakers who broadly share Feasta's analysis of what needs to be done to build a truly sustainable world.

That's it for the 100th post on the Energy Crash blog.

The Limits to Growth and Beyond Growth

The Limits to Growth is a famous 1972 book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, commissioned by the Club of Rome. Its authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The book used the World3 model to simulate[1] the consequence of interactions between the Earth's and human systems.

Five variables were examined in the original model, on the assumptions that exponential growth accurately described their patterns of increase, and that the ability of technology to increase the availability of resources grows only linearly. These variables are: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. The authors intended to explore the possibility of a sustainable feedback pattern that would be achieved by altering growth trends among the five variables.

The most recent updated version was published on June 1, 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company and Earthscan under the name Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Donnella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have updated and expanded the original version. They had previously published Beyond the Limits in 1993 as a 20 year update on the original material.

In 2008 Graham Turner at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia published a paper called "A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality". It examined the past thirty years of reality with the predictions made in 1972 and found that changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21st century.

"For the first 30 years of the model, the world has been tracking along an unsustainable trajectory," Turner concludes. Herman Daly of the University of Maryland says these results show that we "must get off the growth path of business as usual, and move to a steady state economy", stopping population growth, resource depletion, and pollution.