My Sentiment on Humanity’s Precarious Situation
While growing up on a farm in rural Austria in the 1970ies and 1980ies, the sense of material progress of the post World War II economic boom was still palpable everywhere; the implicit growth paradigm got deeply engrained in my mind, and perhaps in the minds of my generation, as well as generations before and after. However, over the past years some serious doubts emerged in my mind on the long-term viability of this path enabled by the exploitation of our planet and its resources. This story tries to communicate the change of my perspective on economic growth as I realise the precarious situation humanity is sailing into.
Smells of Progress
It may sound surprising, but for me certain smells are associated with economic and material progress during my upbringing. For example, dense fields of barley in bloom have a distinct smell to them in early summer; they also look like uniform satin when touched by a gentle breeze. Then, in late summer it is a pleasure harvesting say 8000kg of barley per hectare with a combine harvester when a generation before the yield was about 2000kg/hectare from a thinly populated field, all harvested by scythe and hand; the lovely smell of fresh grain and straw is still in my mind. Together with maize fields and other mono-cultured crops, however, their rich uniformity was enabled by a generous helping of ammonia derived fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides.
In a similar vein, I have always loved seeing new buildings going up, or old ones being neatly restored, using lots of cement; the smell of fresh concrete is a sign of solid progress, literally. During the same period I also used to spend quite some time in the metal workshop grinding and welding steel. Here too, the smell of iron sparks, melting steel or cutting oil left a positive association in my mind: creativity, progress, growth. The underlying world view is that of sustained progress, material growth and prosperity: subjugate the Earth to human’s needs. The article The Modern World Can’t Exist Without These Four Ingredients in the Times magazine quantifies the four pillars of this industrialised civilisation:
4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. [] As a result, global production of these four indispensable materials claims about 17 percent of the world’s annual total energy supply, and it generates about 25 percent of all CO2 emissions originating in the combustion of fossil fuels.
Over the past few years, however, my thinking has changed and evolved based on reading and studying plenty of books in and around climate change. I tried to do my own back-of-an-envelope calculations, e.g. on energy and food (at times with posts on this platform), or followed blogs like Do the Maths; as a result, I do not feel that positive any more about unbridled economic (and material) growth on a finite planet; climate change due to CO2 emission from burning fossil fuels is only as the tip of an iceberg: the entire system is flawed and not sustainable, or in the words of Sir David Attenborough in A Life on Our Planet:
We can’t cut down rain forests forever; and anything that we can’t do forever is — by definition — unsustainable.
If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates, ultimately to a point where the whole system collapses. No ecosystem — no matter how big — is secure: even one as vast as the ocean.
The Predicament
Looking at the numbers does not reassure me. I see two major trends that in combination might soon lead to a catastrophic outcome:
- Destructive trends: there are plenty of metrics quantifying destructive developments, partially in an exponential fashion, such as aquifer depletion, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation, bio-diversity loss, or ocean acidification, etc, etc. Climate change is an important but perhaps not even dominant factor. Some of the detrimental effects are proportional to the economic output (or energy and resource consumption rate), and some are proportional to the accumulated economic output (e.g. radiative forcing is proportional to the CO2 content which is the proportional to the accumulated fossil fuel consumption). It is all a matter of scale as the extent of damage is far beyond the planet’s reparation or regeneration capacity. Most derived diagrams show a grace period of 10–20 years until a point of no return might be reached, e.g. for the decline of marine life:
- Growth trends: the established mind set is one of economic growth. All economic metrics are are expected to be going upwards, partially in an exponential fashion (expected annual growth rates yield a power series, a discretised exponential function). The evolution in the gross domestic product is a proxy for energy and resources and expresses an unbreakable belief in growth as shown below. Since the majority of the world’s economic activity is still powered by fossil fuels and will be for the foreseeable future (or within the time constants of the detrimental effects), there won’t any sudden changes.
The combination of an economic system reliant on growth (and the necessary energy and resource consumption) and the continued ecological damage undermines our own existence perhaps best expressed by the following collage. Civilisation is akin to the Titanic overloaded with people, cars and consumer goods, sailing at high speed on hydrofoil over a polluted ocean while releasing waste; this results in some kind of dilemma:
- If the ship slows down or stops, being overloaded, it does not have enough buoyancy to stay afloat and would sink;
- If it continues on its course at great speed (even accelerating) it will find its eventual demise when crashing into an iceberg.
The situation is a system’s issue; I do not necessarily see specific culprits, it is an emergent property of a complex system. We all engage in economic activities, are embedded in a global civilisation. There is simply a combination of various forces at work: people want improvement in their lives, politicians promise that through growth and are then elected, investment and government bonds follow, businesses seek return on that investment linked to the future such as pension funds; this complex interconnected global economic system is built on the expectation of growth and cannot afford not to grow. Therefore, civilisation is trapped in the success of its economic model. If we continue, we destroy our life support system, if we slow down, economic collapse entails, a difficult dilemma, our predicament, a bit of a pickle.
Is there a way out of here
One might say: all above is a bit of an exaggeration, a sign of climate anxiety and the result of simple linear extrapolation. Of course it is always difficult to carry out any form of projection; I have worked on modelling of various dynamic systems. However, systems with some inertia do not jump and leap, they carry on for a while; for those systems it is permissible to make linear extrapolations for a short time with respect to the system time constant involved. Barring an international military conflict, the world economic system could gradually transition into various worlds, but it takes time. Note, however, that the grace period of some natural systems (oceans, soil, etc) to a point of no return is in the order of one or two decades only. Consequently, there is not much time left to turn things around.
World 0 — Business as Usual
As far as I can tell, there is still some denial of this predicament within society, or an oblivious portion of it, a sense that the detrimental effects of civilisation on nature are merely problems that can be fixed; we simply need to continue with business as usual. This view assumes that there are enough fossil fuels around for many decades to come during which time nuclear fusion will become real and unleash further economic growth. In this world, planet Earth is seen as the substrate humanity can build on; there is a sense of detachment from the natural, biological world which is deemed dispensable: humanity is seen as the pinnacle of evolution and it is believed that we can live off inorganic substances and energy only.
In the business as usual trajectory our civilisation spends its one-time inheritance of fossil fuels and draws down the resources and ecosystems of our finite Earth. Civilisation might probably plod along in that way for the next years or even decades. With no fundamental changes in place, however, the outlook is bleak. For instance, freezing the fossil fuel consumption at the current level alone produces an accumulated CO2 concentration in the order of 600ppm by the end of this century, resulting in 3.4◦C warming at least. This is far beyond the capability of nature (and people) to allow ecological adaptation. But then, somebody of this mindset would shrug and say: we do not need nature, our ingenuity will find a way, we’ll build something and live in a new environment.
World 1 — Green Capitalism
This world is not so different from the previous, only it is painted green, i.e. business as usual but with the commercial potential of a “green” economy. It is characterised by the belief in technology and techno-optimism: we engineer ourselves out of a pickle, we can compensate the negative effects of technology with more technology, and at the same time strive for more efficiency with even more technology. This approach sounds to me like “spend your way out of bankruptcy”, “drink your way out of alcoholism” or “snack your way out of obesity”. We could easily find ourselves as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. So why is a technological approach a problem?
It is generally thought that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the answer to all ills; this transition includes the electrification of all aspects of industry and society. While this world is definitely more “sustainable” than World-0, a significant amount of fossil energy and non-renewable resources are needed for the transition, and beyond that, for the maintenance of even a constant energy supply in a stationary economic state or circular economy without growth, let alone a growing energy demand: all matter in circulation deteriorates (recycling losses); energy and a certain amount of virgin material is needed to compensate the losses, either by mining or refining. Mining gets progressively harder (and destructive) until it’s essentially prohibitive, and refining demands more and more energy, a run-away process.
What about compensating the recycling losses with efficiency gain; if the gain is larger than the loss, less and less matter is needed. Unfortunately, efficiency gains are usually limited by physical constraints, i.e. some virgin material will be needed at some point. As long as an economic system or our civilisation requires non-renewable resources, such as those gained through mining, it can per definition not be truly sustainable. Mining produces mine tailings and pollution, destroys habitats and result in collateral damage in the form of permanent species extinctions. Such as system cannot be considered to be long-term viable or truly sustainable. The symbol of this green world is to me the smug driver of an electric SUV believing that driving such a vehicle is good for the world.
World 2 — Account for Externalities
An improvement of World 1 would be if all known long term externalities of any human activity would be taken into account as soon as they can be modelled and predicted. There would be no discount rate on future, long term effects many generations ahead would be accounted for. By virtue of accountability, unsustainable practices will become uneconomic, and truly sustainable methods more attractive. Perhaps many materials needed now would be replaced (substitution principle) with ones produced by the planet or other more natural processes. Just let free markets work with constraints imposed by scientific models and appropriate taxation (negative feedback). The current alternative using delayed feedback of negative effects leads to instability; using predictive models and anticipation of the future negative effects can stabilise the system.
There is only one snag: the economic growth paradigm is still being maintained. First, all economic activity needs some material basis to some degree, even in an economic system mainly evolving around services. Second, all transformation of matter needs energy, and all matter decays which again needs energy to compensate. Consequently, the more sophisticated a civilisation becomes, the more energy is needed which again needs materials. At an expected economic growth rate of about 5%, it does not take long to require twice the energy (~14 years). So again, medium term sustainable but not long term.
World 3 — Balance of Life
Long term sustainability is based on activities that can be done indefinitely, ad infinitum, or at least for many, many generations, at a time scale that allows all life to co-evolve and adapt; it implies humanity to accept that we are part of a web of life, not on top of it. Humanity evolved in a community of life and must maintain that community as its life support system. An appropriate value has to be put onto the system nature; we ought to expand our consideration to value the whole. That must be the driving mind set, or as Sir David Attenborough would say:
If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us. It’s time for our species to stop simply growing: to establish a life on this planet in balance with nature.
… a species can only thrive when everything else around it thrives, too.
Planet earth produces an annual stream of resources (renewable), that is what humanity has to make do with and we can be, or rather, we have to be very clever about that. We need science & technology and we will have art while being part of the web of life. This all calls for a major societal change combined with humility, but most importantly, devising an economic system that does not rely on growth. Change is unlikely to happen, unless in the words Sir David Attenborough:
To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity: the very thing that we’ve removed. It’s the only way out of this crisis we’ve created. We must re-wild the world.
In conclusion, all of that does not sound too positive; reaching World 3 within a short period of time may not look feasible; it is a bit like climbing a mountain which can be very daunting but easier if thought to happen in stages. If we get from World 0 to world 1, then gradually transition to world 2; from there moving towards world 3 is not that frightening any more. However, when climbing a mountain no dawdling is allowed as the chalet on the top has to be reached before nightfall.
