Energy, population, and economic growth
Blog belongs to a physics professor at UCSD, and the posts I'll link were the ones he led with before toning things down and discussing more limited subjects. Basically, they establish the ground rules to his line of thinking on all things energy/economy/growth.
The first post, Galactic-Scale Energy, he establishes that the laws of thermodynamics (forget The Market) prevents endless growth in energy production/consumption. This sector flatlining or contracting is inevitable, or we'll all be living on a planet that closely resembles the center of the sun.
In response to one of the comments under that first post, he further clarified the data trends in a post titled Does the Logistics Shoe Fit?
His second big post is the one that I've seen hotly debated and may be fun to discuss here. In Can Economic Growth Last?, he posits that it is impossible to decouple economic growth from a flatlined or contracting energy sector. It's a very similar argument to that surrounding automation and the contracting of the job market that this will force. On one side of the debate are those who say that if robots are doing everything, more people will be out of work. On the other are those who say that new technology will mean replacement jobs forever just like industrial jobs replacing agricultural. In the case of energy and the economy, the counterargument is that virtual goods replace physical goods, and the economy keeps growing in spite net-zero energy consumption. This dude disagrees.
Anyway, maybe somebody here will find it interesting. Or at least enjoy gazing upon my hotness in my avatar over there.
Comments
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I skimmed the first one...read like the mental masturbation of a not-so-bright science guy who just got his first teaching gig in science. Skimming the second one it looks like said person investing in his first 401K.
Yes, we continuously use more energy...comparing it to solar anything is dumb because because it is stored energy over millions of years. Efficiency prices itself in...when the costs go up you will see usage going down. And assuming population anything 50 years out is even dumber...fertility rates have dropped from 7 to under 2 from the 1800s until now. Been buffered by extending average lifetimes but we are hitting the limits of that now. Most first-world countries are worried about maintaining population much less growing it.
He should do that analysis on China...he'll conclude the world is ending much sooner than a couple hundred years out. -
This is pretty much his point: Constant growth is impossible over the long term, both in terms of population and energy consumption, so does this also make perpetual economic growth impossible? We can only service each other and profit in a circle over imaginary assets so much before physical goods have to be produced, and there is a limit imposed by physical laws on the rate at which this can occur. Approach that limit, and you have a steady state economy whether you want it or not.HoustonHusky said:I skimmed the first one...read like the mental masturbation of a not-so-bright science guy who just got his first teaching gig in science. Skimming the second one it looks like said person investing in his first 401K.
Yes, we continuously use more energy...comparing it to solar anything is dumb because because it is stored energy over millions of years. Efficiency prices itself in...when the costs go up you will see usage going down. And assuming population anything 50 years out is even dumber...fertility rates have dropped from 7 to under 2 from the 1800s until now. Been buffered by extending average lifetimes but we are hitting the limits of that now. Most first-world countries are worried about maintaining population much less growing it.
He should do that analysis on China...he'll conclude the world is ending much sooner than a couple hundred years out. -
That's a dumb take though...economic growth does not equal population growth or energy growth. You could artificially hold population and energy consumption the same and you would still get people making faster computers, better medicine, better TVs, etc. Historical correlation does not equal future causation.
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Again, your final sentence supports his argument. Just because a growth economy is possible now (and we're already seeing the cracks starting to form), doesn't mean it will continue to be in perpetuity. As to the bolded, this doesn't address the concern at all. Per one of your examples:HoustonHusky said:That's a dumb take though...economic growth does not equal population growth or energy growth. You could artificially hold population and energy consumption the same and you would still get people making faster computers, better medicine, better TVs, etc. Historical correlation does not equal future causation.
You're a company that makes ever-faster computers, and sales have to grow in order for your company to grow. But population is flat or shrinking, as you previously agreed is inevitable. You sell a million computers in year X. Let's say the population stabilizes at 10 billion people and your company's investors demand 10% growth. It only takes 97 years before your company would have to sell a computer to everyone on earth to maintain that growth. Not much longer before you have to sell two to everyone per year, and not much longer still before you're selling a computer to everyone on earth ten times every day. Without a growing population and energy production, how do you maintain perpetual growth? -
Disagree completely. Say energy prices go through the roof...you are now a computer company that sells computers that are more energy efficient for the same or slightly more power. They get better and better...people buy them accordingly because they provide additional value to them. Somebody comes out with yet another new device that adapts to that change in the market. Look at food production...the efficiency of producing food has gone from 80+% of the population focused on it to less than 5%. Did the world end? Nobody says farming is a growth industry, but it doesn't mean there aren't thousands of other industries that are that popped up because the resources (workers) became available. As long as technology is marching forward and people's standard of living is increasing you will have growth.1to392831weretaken said:
Again, your final sentence supports his argument. Just because a growth economy is possible now (and we're already seeing the cracks starting to form), doesn't mean it will continue to be in perpetuity. As to the bolded, this doesn't address the concern at all. Per one of your examples:HoustonHusky said:That's a dumb take though...economic growth does not equal population growth or energy growth. You could artificially hold population and energy consumption the same and you would still get people making faster computers, better medicine, better TVs, etc. Historical correlation does not equal future causation.
You're a company that makes ever-faster computers, and sales have to grow in order for your company to grow. But population is flat or shrinking, as you previously agreed is inevitable. You sell a million computers in year X. Let's say the population stabilizes at 10 billion people and your company's investors demand 10% growth. It only takes 97 years before your company would have to sell a computer to everyone on earth to maintain that growth. Not much longer before you have to sell two to everyone per year, and not much longer still before you're selling a computer to everyone on earth ten times every day. Without a growing population and energy production, how do you maintain perpetual growth?
Markets are a wonderful thing...science teachers worried about their fascination with basic thermo usually aren't good arbiters of how they works.
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Pretty interesting discussions. I've perused all three articles but have to read them again to account for my lack of an attention span.
I am probably missing the point here massively, but I wonder ... which do I care about?
Status quo - I invest my money and, through dividends, I am paid a return. That's circular. I'm trading risk and time for more dollars to circulate back into the economy. This can happen without making the pie larger. Think energy and timber investments. As long as what they produce is renewable, I don't care. I do suppose that to the extent population is the key variable, if there are few people consuming their renewable, that could be a problem.
Growth - this only happens when value is being created from a baseline. But it's accomplished with either or both of two things: selling more of something or selling something better to replace the last thing you sold. Even in a declining population, the latter can still generate growth.
IDK. I'm sure there is something there that I missed. It was good, but heavy, reading. I'm glad you shared it. What he seems to ... not so much miss as underestimate, is the ingenuity of our species. In our own lifetimes we've seen this. Even relative to energy. I'm loathe to take on a physicist on the topic of solar energy, but he seemed to dismiss it as limited without trying very hard. Maybe we find away to get more of it through the atmosphere and clouds. Maybe we do, in fact, incorporate the ocean somehow in the collection process.
As Houston said, markets are a terribly effective motivator.
Also, the factors that lead to declining population can be replaced or affected by other factors. It isn't obvious to me that the pressures that lead to having fewer children are permanent and unalterable. It's still in our DNA to produce ... all the smut talk around here will remind you of that.
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Historical correlation does not equal future causation. I even mentioned the transition from agriculture to manufacturing in a previous post. At the time, the population and global energy consumption were also rapidly expanding. Even today, emerging markets are keeping a lot of businesses afloat as domestic sales shrink.HoustonHusky said:
Disagree completely. Say energy prices go through the roof...you are now a computer company that sells computers that are more energy efficient for the same or slightly more power. They get better and better...people buy them accordingly because they provide additional value to them. Somebody comes out with yet another new device that adapts to that change in the market. Look at food production...the efficiency of producing food has gone from 80+% of the population focused on it to less than 5%. Did the world end? Nobody says farming is a growth industry, but it doesn't mean there aren't thousands of other industries that are that popped up because the resources (workers) became available. As long as technology is marching forward and people's standard of living is increasing you will have growth.1to392831weretaken said:
Again, your final sentence supports his argument. Just because a growth economy is possible now (and we're already seeing the cracks starting to form), doesn't mean it will continue to be in perpetuity. As to the bolded, this doesn't address the concern at all. Per one of your examples:HoustonHusky said:That's a dumb take though...economic growth does not equal population growth or energy growth. You could artificially hold population and energy consumption the same and you would still get people making faster computers, better medicine, better TVs, etc. Historical correlation does not equal future causation.
You're a company that makes ever-faster computers, and sales have to grow in order for your company to grow. But population is flat or shrinking, as you previously agreed is inevitable. You sell a million computers in year X. Let's say the population stabilizes at 10 billion people and your company's investors demand 10% growth. It only takes 97 years before your company would have to sell a computer to everyone on earth to maintain that growth. Not much longer before you have to sell two to everyone per year, and not much longer still before you're selling a computer to everyone on earth ten times every day. Without a growing population and energy production, how do you maintain perpetual growth?
Markets are a wonderful thing...science teachers worried about their fascination with basic thermo usually aren't good arbiters of how they works.
In your example, the company that makes the more efficient product and sells a ton of them does so at the expense of either their existing product or another company's. Overall, it's a stalemate for the economy. Sales does not equal growth. More sales than last year/quarter/etc. equals growth. Which means more global production every year.
So you have a flat population, flat energy consumption (this is not optional, and there are limits to efficiency), yet growth economy. This--by necessity--increasingly means that value will have to be created out of thin air (like GameStop in your other thread). At some point, everybody's just Ubering each other around or supporting each other's YouTube channel, and the economy flatlines. -
Actually, he addressed this directly, even projecting out to encircling the sun with perfectly efficient panels.creepycoug said:Pretty interesting discussions. I've perused all three articles but have to read them again to account for my lack of an attention span.
I am probably missing the point here massively, but I wonder ... which do I care about?
Status quo - I invest my money and, through dividends, I am paid a return. That's circular. I'm trading risk and time for more dollars to circulate back into the economy. This can happen without making the pie larger. Think energy and timber investments. As long as what they produce is renewable, I don't care. I do suppose that to the extent population is the key variable, if there are few people consuming their renewable, that could be a problem.
Growth - this only happens when value is being created from a baseline. But it's accomplished with either or both of two thing: selling more of something or selling something better to replace the last thing you sold. Even in a declining population, the latter can still generate growth.
IDK. I'm sure there is something there that I missed. It was good, but heavy, reading. I'm glad you shared it. What he seems to ... not so much miss as underestimate, is the ingenuity of our species. In our own lifetimes we've seen this. Even relative to energy. I'm loathe to take on a physicist on the topic of solar energy, but he seemed to dismiss it as limited without trying very hard. Maybe we find away to get more of it through the atmosphere and clouds. Maybe we do, in fact, incorporate the ocean somehow in the collection process.
As Houston said, markets are a terribly effective motivator.
Also, the factors that lead to declining population can be replaced or affected by other factors. It isn't obvious to me that the pressures that lead to having fewer children are permanent and unalterable. It's still in our DNA to produce ... all the smut talk around here will remind you of that.
Fun question: Do you know what the brakes on your car do? I mean, in simple terms, they make your car stop. In engineering terms, they convert potential energy from forward motion into heat. Specifically, heat in the brake rotors (and some in the fluid). There is no free lunch. Similarly, it doesn't matter whether the energy source comes from solar, fossil fuels, cold fusion, whatever. He chose solar for his example because it's easy to expand that into space. Using that energy generates heat, and exponential functions are powerful. We're still in the flat part of a lot of those curves, but they get awfully steep awfully quickly.
We can use a fuckton of energy to power the economy with little effect on global surface temperature, just not an infinite amount. Infinite growth requires an infinite ceiling. The whole point is that thermodynamics dictate that energy use cannot increase indefinitely or you boil yourself like the proverbial frog, efficiency gains slow this process but quickly reach a theoretical limit that barely creates a blip in the curve over a relatively short timeline (but longer than any of us will live), thus hitting a ceiling in energy growth while perpetually growing the economy creates an inflection point between those two curves with interesting consequences. 100 years from now? 500 years from now? Fuck if I know, I'm just some fat dude in a sexy thong, but the article suggests it's chinevitable.
Around the time I found these blog posts, I stumbled upon a lecture from a professor at University of Colorado. Very similar principles. I'll attach it below, but skip to 22:00 for an interesting thought experiment when it comes to exponentials. 4:05 is also cool. I enjoyed the whole lecture, even though it's slow and dumbed down a bit for hung over college freshmen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8 -
The Eeyore position is always popular with a certain segment of the population.
Whether it's the economy, peak oil, global warming and climate change, or Seattle dying, doom and gloom sells. I've heard it my whole life. I bet Race has, too - and that fucker actually rode dinosaurs.
Still here. Still first world. Still haven't missed a meal.
I'm starting to think Eeyore just likes to be a miserable fuck. -
You are off in the weeds now. This idiot’s claim is the future correlation between energy usage and economic growth which is FS. Case in point...in the US energy usage per capita is down over 10% from it’s peak in the early 1970s. I don’t think anyone would claim economic growth even accounting for population changes shrunk 10% between the early 1970s and today.
His fundamental assumption is wrong...which makes the rest of his discussion kinda useless.
