Sure, the Laws of Thermodynamics and the limits to growth are a good place to start.
THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS
The most obvious social effect of humanity’s collective ignorance of the first two Laws of Thermodynamics is poverty.
A lot of people have been talking lately about “peak oil production”. That refers to a mathematical bell curve that was discovered in 1956 by Dr. M. King Hubbert, the greatest geologist of the 20th century.
This bell curve measures oil production, in which the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents amount. I could give you an illustration, but it’s so simple you can draw it yourself.
The bell curve begins at zero time and zero production. This represents the beginning of world oil production.
Oil contains energy. Prospecting for oil, drilling for oil, extracting oil, refining oil, and building all the equipment to do those things all require energy. The more oil you drill, the more energy you have that you can invest into drilling more oil.
In the beginning the limiting factor on how much oil people could drill was the amount oil production equipment they had. The more oil production equipment people built, the more oil they could produce. The more oil people produced, the more oil production equipment they could build. That’s a self-perpetuating process, also known as a positive feedback loop.
Out of all the oil that was buried underground at first, some was close to the surface. That was the first oil people collected, because it was the easiest to reach. That meant it required the least amount of oil production equipment.
Some of the oil was in easily accessible places, like sitting in big puddles on the ground in Texas or Saudi Arabia or wherever. Other oil was buried under the ocean or the under the Rocky Mountains or somewhere. The oil that was in the most easily accessible places was the easiest to collect, and required the least amount of equipment to collect.
The oil that was on the top contained the least impurities. That made it the easiest to refine. That meant it required the least amount of refinement equipment.
The more oil people drilled, the more oil they had. They more oil they had, the more uses they found for oil. That created more demand for oil, so people drilled more oil. That created another positive feedback loop.
Once people began drilling oil, they began ascending the front slope of the bell curve. As time went by, they built more oil production equipment and produced more oil each year than they did the year before. Maybe one oil well became two the next year, four the next year, eight the next year, sixteen the next year, and so on, doubling every year. Or maybe 100 oil wells became 110 the next year, 121 the next year, 133 the next year, 146 the next year, increasing by 10% every year like compound interest in a bank account. The numbers themselves don’t matter. Either way, they increase at an exponential rate.
When roughly half the oil is gone, you reach the plateau of the bell curve. In the beginning, the oil being close to the surface, free of impurities, and in easy to reach locations made oil production easy. But the more oil you drilled, the less those qualities applied to the oil that was still available. As time went by, the oil became progressively further beneath the surface, less pure, and in harder to reach locations. That made the oil progressively harder to produce, and that made your oil production require progressively more energy.
For the first half of the oil production cycle, the limiting factor on your ability to produce more oil is still your amount of oil production equipment. Your oil production is becoming increasingly inefficient, but you can still overcome that by building more oil production equipment.
Halfway through your oil production cycle, the laws of diminishing return catch up to you and the limiting factor on your ability to produce oil changes. At this point, you have all the equipment you can use to drill and refine all the oil that’s available. Building more oil production equipment won’t help you anymore, because it will cost you more oil to build the equipment than the equipment can produce. All the oil there is available is already being produced by the equipment you have.
Building more oil production equipment now would make your oil production less efficient than it is already. If your existing oil production equipment is working at 100% capacity, pumping oil out of the ground as fast as mechanically possible, if you invest more energy into building 10% more equipment, you’ve burned a bunch of oil just so you can operate all your equipment at only 90% capacity. That means you wasted the oil it took you to build the new equipment, and that means you made your oil production less efficient.
The mathematics get more complicated from here, but all that does is to turn the smooth bell curve into a bell curve made up of lots of spikes and valleys. Any politician or businessperson could show you three numbers and make it look like oil production could increase indefinitely. But that’s just a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. It takes a lot of numbers to be able to see through the short-term fluctuations to recognize an oil production bell curve.
We are somewhere close to the plateau on the world oil production bell curve right now.
When we pass the plateau, we will descend the back slope of the bell curve. Now exponential growth will become exponential decline. As time goes by, the remaining oil in the world becomes increasingly deeply buried, impure, and hard to access. Those factors have caught with you now. Those limiting factors on oil production continue to increase. Now every drop of oil you pull out of the ground becomes more expensive than the last.
We will never be able to use all the oil in the world, simply because some of it is so hard to reach that it would take more energy to drill it and refine it than the oil contained.
Dr. Hubbert predicted we would hit peak oil production in the United States sometime in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. We reached peak oil production in the United States in 1970. Ever since, U.S. oil production has been on the downhill slope.
Dr. Hubbert predicted that if our trends of the time continued, we would hit peak oil production for the world in 1995. Peak oil in the United States and the OPEC embargoes shocked Americans into researching and developing more energy efficient ways to use oil, so our current trends didn’t continue. Dr. Hubbert died in 1989, so he can’t update his predictions now.
We bought ourselves a couple of extra decades. A lot of scientists are working on this now. Some think world peak oil is still ahead of us, some think we’re already past it. None of them think it’s further away than 2020. Due to all those fluctuations, you can’t get enough numbers to determine that you’ve passed peak oil until you’re already well beyond it.
A documentary to watch about this is called The End of Suburbia. Another good, related documentary is called Who Killed the Electric Car?.
From the first two Laws of Thermodynamics, it’s obvious that all forms of energy, on any scale of production—local, national, or worldwide—must follow a bell curve.
Producing energy always requires moving things from one place to another. That means that producing energy always requires energy. Energy produced can be reinvested in producing more energy, at an exponential rate. A greater amount of energy produced will create a demand for more energy to be produced, as people find more ways to use the energy. Then they grow accustomed to having it, and forget how to live without it or else start living their lives in a way that makes them dependant on it.
Some energy sources are easier to produce than other energy sources of the same type. Some energy sources are more pure than others of the same type. Some energy sources are more accessible than others of the same type. Eventually, the three negative feedbacks will overtake the two positive feedbacks, and make continued production of that energy source increasingly inefficient.
Hunting and gathering wild animals and plants requires energy. The more you hunt and gather, the bigger families you can feed. The bigger families you have, the more people need to be fed, and the more people there are to hunt and gather. Some animals are easier to catch than others, and some plants are easier to collect than others. Some animals and plants are more edible, more digestible, or more nutritious than others. Some animals and plants live in places that are easier for you to reach than others, whether they live in more accessible terrain, or simply closer to you.
If an exponentially increasing number of people are hunting and gathering in an area, the easiest to find, the easiest to catch, the biggest, most edible, most digestible, and most nutritious animals and plants will eaten first, which will make the remaining animals and plants increasingly difficult—meaning inefficient—to find, catch, eat, and otherwise extract food energy from.
This is exactly how the pre-agricultural Mesopotamians depleted the wild food production of their local environment.
It’s also how our pre-human ancestors drove the wild animals of Africa to evolve to be so big and mean and to run so fast, because they ate all the ones that were easiest to catch.
It’s also how the first Native Americans drove a lot of animals in the Americas into extinction, because when they arrived in the Americas 14,000 years ago, they had well-developed hunting skills, and found two continents full of animals that had no natural fear of humans. Some had natural fears of other animals that worked well against humans also, but others didn’t. Once again, the animals that were easiest to catch were the ones that got eaten.
This is also how we’re depleting the world’s fishing banks today.
Farming and ranching works the same way as hunting and gathering, but in a man-made environment. Now the limiting factors are the climate and the fertility of the soil. Ranching and farming domesticated animals and plants requires energy. The more you ranch and farm, the bigger families you can feed. The bigger families you have, the more people need to be fed, and the more people there are to ranch and farm. Some areas are easier to ranch and farm in than others. Some plants and animals grow better in some places than others, and some of them grow faster, are more edible, more digestible, or more nutritious than others.
If an exponentially increasing number of people are ranching and farming in an area, the most fertile and most accessible fields will be used first. When people move into a new region, like the Europeans did when they colonized the Americas, and the Colonial Americans did when they settled the west, the regions with the most fertile fields in the best climates are settled first. That will make the remaining land increasingly inefficient for ranching and farming.
This is how the first Mesopotamian farmers over-farmed their lands and destroyed their environment.
This is also how agriculture spread through the world from there, and from the other original centers of agriculture, as the people of the most physically powerful civilizations conquered neighboring hunter-gatherers to claim more land to farm and ranch.
This is also, as I said, how the Americas were colonized and people of more physically powerful agricultural civilizations conquered people of less physically powerful civilizations.
This is also how the Norse settlers of Greenland, the original inhabitants of Easter Island, the Anasazi farmers of the American southwest, and various other groups of people destroyed their local environments and destroyed their civilizations along with them, which you can read about in Dr. Diamond’s book Collapse.
Logging in Europe followed the energy production bell curve. Logging requires energy. The more trees you cut down, the more wooden axe handles you can build, the more wooden logging equipment you can build, and the more houses for loggers you can build. The more wood is available, the more uses people find for it. The more wood people have, the more families can be housed, the more their houses can be heated, and the more meals they can cook. Some trees are easier to cut down than others. Some trees are bigger than others. Some trees grow in more accessible terrain, or simply closer to where the people live.
If an exponentially increasing number of people are logging in an area, the biggest and closest trees will be cut down first. That will make the remaining trees increasingly inefficient for logging.
Mining coal, drilling natural gas, and mining uranium work the same way as drilling oil.
Building solar or wind power stations depends on mining the minerals to build them from, which works the same way as mining anything else. It also depends on how often the sun shines or the wind blows in a location, how hard the sun shines or wind blows, how close those places are, and how accessible the terrain is. If an exponentially increasing number of people are building solar or wind power stations, the stations will be built in the best places first. That will make the remaining places increasingly inefficient for building solar and wind power stations.
And so on.
All the basic components that interact to create the oil production bell curve also apply to all other forms of energy production.
That means that all energy production in the entire world must follow one giant bell curve also. The front and back sides of the bell curve will probably change their slopes greatly from time to time, and would show very large fluctuations as we move from food and firewood to coal to oil and so forth, exhausting one major energy source and then moving on to a different one that had different qualities. But the gross global energy bell curve is simply all the individual global energy bell curves added together.
As you will notice, the exponentially increasing number of people harnessing solar and wind power, and creating an ever growing demand for it by finding ever more uses for it, was not a factor. That’s because an exponentially increasing number of people won’t find more ever uses for solar and wind power, because they’ll need all of it just to take the place of the fossil fuels they were already using. This is how things work on the downhill slope of the bell curve.
All life depends on energy, and all activity, including economic activity, depends on energy also. What this means for our human economy is that as we pass the plateau of any energy production bell curve, the economy breaks down. First the economy grew as energy was produced at an exponential rate. Without being aware of the energy production bell curve, people won’t have any way of realizing they’re approaching the plateau. Based on their experience to that point, more energy is always available. They’ll plan on more energy still being available, even though a relatively constant level of energy will only be available now, followed by an ever decreasing amount of energy being available, as they have to devote ever more energy just to producing their energy.
This will result in frequent economic recessions that get progressively worse, and each of which is never fully recovered from. Ultimately, it will lead to an unrecoverable economic depression.
You know what economic recession means. Poverty for the least politically powerful people. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Specifically, the materially wealthy can invest some of their material wealth into protecting the rest of their material wealth, use the political advantages that their economic advantages give them to make the materially poor people bear the brunt of the economic breakdown, and let the economic and political inequality increase.
Poverty leads to things like crime rates and famine. Those things reinforce poverty. You know the rest of the story from there.
THE LIMITS TO GROWTH
The Club of Rome put all of this into motion by using the information they did have at the time. Namely, they began by studying humanity’s relationship to the world mathematically.
In 1968, humanity’s knowledge of the global environment consisted of some numbers. We knew population sizes, acreage of farmland, productivity of farmland, total land area, total productivity of factories, a reasonable estimate of the supplies of natural resources in the world, and some pollution levels. And we had records of how those things had changed over time. That was the most critical part.
The Club of Rome figured out how all of those things fit together. None of those numbers change independently of each other. Any time you change any one of those numbers, at least one other number changes. That meant they had discovered the outline of a gigantic algebraic equation. But nobody knew what it was an equation for, or how to write it down. Basically, they’d discovered that the world was ruled by some gigantic mathematical law, and nobody knew what the law was.
They didn’t have enough numbers to write a literal mathematical equation for what they were trying to study, and there was no way they could get reliable numbers for everything in the world anyway. What they did instead was the next best thing.
A systems theory is an outline of a mathematical equation that doesn’t require complete numbers to make it work. It measures the relationships of numbers to each other. It’s a diagram of which numbers affect other numbers and how. Without having perfect numbers, you can’t tell perfectly how much changing one number will change other numbers, but you can keep track of which numbers will change, and get a general idea of how much they’ll change.
A lot of environmentalists have heard about the I = PAT equation. This is a very simple systems diagram, expressed as a mathematical formula. It says that humanity’s environmental Impact is a product of Population size, Affluence, and Technological level. You don’t need any actual numbers to see how that relationship works. Any time you increase population size, affluence, or technological level, you increase your environmental impact. The amount you increase the environmental impact by raising one of those factors depends on the size of the other two factors. This works on any scale, from a village to a town to a city to a region to a continent to the entire world.
The Club of Rome developed a much more complicated systems diagram, and used all the numbers they had in it, to make it much more specific. Once they’d done that, they could see that humanity had a problem. Some of the numbers involved were constant, some were increasing, and others were decreasing.
The most obvious problem was that land area was a constant, and population was growing. That meant there was an inescapable physical limit on the amount of available farmland in the world. At any level of agricultural productivity, each person requires a certain amount of farmland to produce the food they need to live. If the population kept increasing, eventually there wouldn’t be enough farmland to feed everyone. Famine was a mathematical inevitability. The population growth would be stopped by the physical limitation on available farmland.
A similar problem was industrial productivity. People kept producing more in factories every year, but there was a physical limit on the natural resources available in the world. People were going to stop producing things in factories eventually, because sooner or later they were going to run out of natural resources.
Factories also give off a lot of pollution. That affects the food productivity of farmland. The more people use factories to produce things, the less food each acre of farmland can produce, so the more acres of farmland it takes to support each person, and the fewer people can be supported with the available farmland.
Their systems diagram got a lot more complicated from there, but that’s the basic idea.
Humanity affects the environment in five ways: Population size, usage of material goods, food production, natural resource usage, and pollution. Each person needs food and material goods to live. Material goods are made out of natural resources. Farming, turning natural resources into material goods, and using material goods, all produce pollution.
The population of the world is growing at an exponential rate. We are building factories at an exponential rate. With those factories, we are turning natural resources into material goods at an exponential rate. We are also generating pollution at an exponential rate. When you put all the numbers together, the population is increasing at an exponential rate, and each person is consuming natural resources and generating pollution at an exponential rate. Humanity’s impact on the environment is increasing at a triply exponential rate.
Back in 1968, the Club of Rome ran all the numbers through their mathematical formulas. On our current course, we were going to run out of farmland and natural resources some time in the 21st century. When that happened, billions of people were going to die. Our food productivity depends on our usage of natural resources, because a lot of our natural resources are used to build farm machinery. If we run out of farmland and our population keeps growing, we’ll have to start devoting more and more of our natural resources to farming to increase our food productivity. But eventually our natural resources will run out. Then we won’t be able to maintain our industrialized agriculture, so we won’t be able to maintain our food productivity. That means we won’t be able to produce enough food to keep everyone alive. That means worldwide famine killing billions of people, and inevitably, a lot of wars and plagues along with it. With that set of numbers, most of the population of the world would be dead by 2100.
Then the scientists tried changing numbers. They guessed that perhaps we had underestimated the supplies of natural resources in the world, they guessed that people could develop a lot of new technology to solve various problems, they guessed that people would start recycling more, that people would find easy ways to boost the food productivity of their farmland, and so on. They made wildly optimistic speculations, beginning with assuming there were twice as many natural resources in the world as anyone realized. But no matter what combination of numbers they tried, global environmental disaster always struck in the 21st century, and billions of people always died.
Then they tried a different approach to the problem. Instead of changing the numbers themselves, they tried changing the rates at which the numbers were changing. They went back to the real numbers they’d started with. They found that if they just changed two things, global environmental disaster could be avoided, and most people in the world could be better off by the end of the 21st century than they are right now. Of course, 96% of the world’s population doesn’t live in America. By 2100, everyone in the world, including Americans, could have something less than an average American standard of living as of 1968. Americans would have to make some sacrifices, but global poverty could be ended. By 2100, everyone in the world could have an average American standard of living as of 1950, or something like that—that’s the basic idea, anyway. I’m not talking about owning specific material possessions or everyone owning a house in the suburbs or anything, I’m talking about everyone working for a living, getting enough to eat, living lives free of oppression, and dying of old age—and having all the things they need to make those basic things possible.
In 1972, four scientists from the Club of Rome published their discoveries in their book, The Limits to Growth. By doing that, they changed the very future they had predicted by raising people’s awareness of the problem, and people acting differently as a result. That was, of course, the whole reason they published their book.
A lot of good came of their publishing their book. So 20 years later, they started writing a sequel, as a progress report. By now, there were environmental activists hard at work all over the world. But when the scientists started putting all the numbers together again, they realized the news wasn’t nearly as good as it appeared on the surface. They titled that sequel Beyond the Limits to Growth.
Ten years later, they wrote another sequel, called The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update. They published that in 2002.
They had a lot more information, a lot more numbers, and a lot more science to use by now. And all the numbers still indicate global environmental disaster and billions of deaths in the 21st century.
In The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update, the scientists give a lot of specific examples of ways to recognize that problems are growing, and what would need to be done to solve them.
Basically, right now we’re living 20% beyond what the world can sustain. 20% of the things we’re using right now are things we need to keep the global environment functioning.
To solve the problem, all we have to do is to use our resources differently. Cutting down on the world’s population wouldn’t hurt, but we can do all of that we need over time just by everyone having smaller families.
Reducing our population size could be accomplished over generations by each woman limiting herself to having whatever number of children would let two of them grow up to be adults. In America, that means having two children. In countries with high child mortality rates, that means something more than two—at least, until their living conditions improve. The population decrease could be left to some women choosing to have less than two children or not being able to have children for whatever reason.
Zero population growth necessarily depends on identifying all the problems that make population growth seem like a good idea to people, and changing them. For instance, in a lot of impoverished countries, large families are the Social Security system. Parents have 6 or 8 children so that when they’re too old to work anymore, their children will be able to provide for them. We used to do the same thing here in America. But if every couple in your country has 8 children, you get 400% population growth every generation, which means 4 times as many people having to feed themselves every generation, just to be able to feed their parents. The environment can’t withstand that forever, which means sooner or later the country is going to run out of farmland.
Using our resources differently will mean using them more efficiently, and redistributing a lot of them. That obviously means gigantic economic and political changes. With our current political and economic systems, the easiest way to cut 20% out of our impact on the environment would be to take it from the people who are already the most economically marginalized and the least politically powerful. But that will never work, because half the population of the world barely has enough to live already.
People who can barely get enough to live have very little choice in what impact they have on the environment. They have whatever impact on the environment they need to have to keep themselves alive.
If those people are ever going to get the things they need to live, they’re going to get them because the people who could afford to part with them hand them over.
Since materially poor people can’t afford to make the choice to lead environmentally sustainable lifestyles, environmental sustainability depends on getting rid of the lower class, worldwide. Getting rid of the lower class necessarily depends on getting rid of the upper class, because that’s what will happen when you redistribute resources from the way they’re distributed now to the way they will need to be distributed to let people stop taking whatever toll they need to take on the environment to keep themselves alive.
Escaping the environmental crisis necessitates a redefinition of the concept of “rightful ownership”. The concept of rightful ownership that will enable people to use resources in the way people will need to use resources to escape the environmental crisis will be what we already call the Use-Value economy.
The immediate problems that overpopulation are causing could be solved by our cutting back on our environmental impact by 20%. The term “overpopulation” only refers to what number of people your economic relationship to the environment can support. A better term than “overpopulation” would be “over-exploitation of the environment”.
Once again, solving this problem depends on identifying the problems that make over-exploiting the environment seem like a good idea to people, and solving those problems.
A lot of people whine and whimper that the world is going to end if we change our economic system. No, only Capitalism will end if we change our economic system. As long as people need food to eat, there will always be work for people to do.
In the same way that overpopulation can be ended by women practicing zero population growth, over-exploitation of the environment can be ended by people practicing zero economic growth. An increasing population requires an increasing exploitation of the environment to maintain the same economic level for the people. People can also over-exploit their environment by trying to raise their economic level. Or both, which is what’s happening now.
Zero population growth makes zero economic growth possible. Zero economic growth means that every time one factory machine breaks down, you build one factory machine to replace it.
Zero economic growth makes solving the environmental crisis possible. Once you stabilize your economic relationship to the environment, you can cut 20% out of your environmental impact, and be down under the physical limitations of the environment.
Cutting 20% out of an ever-increasing economic relationship to the environment doesn’t accomplish anything in the long run. Technically, you wouldn’t be cutting 20% out of your economic relationship to the environment; you’d just be making it 20% more efficient. But as long as you keep making a problem worse faster than you’re making it better, you’re not solving the problem. An ever-increasing economic relationship to the environment that’s made 20% more efficient only produces 20% more; it doesn’t reduce the environmental impact of your economy.
An end to economic growth doesn’t mean an end to economic development. People are always looking for new and better ways to do things. With an end to economic growth, people would still be free to find new and better ways to use the economy they have. Basically, equating economic development with economic growth is just economics for lazy people.
The big question is: Where do we cut out 20% of our environmental impact?
The short answer is: Everywhere. In fact, the best solution to the environmental crisis is to cut as much as possible out of our environmental impact, because everything we cut out beyond 20% is a safety margin we’re building into our economic relationship with the environment. It isn’t possible for us to say that we’re over-exploiting the environment by exactly 20%. Neither is it possible to say exactly what that 20% refers to—we might be over-exploiting one part of the environment by 10% and another part by 30%. Ultimately, we won’t be living at the physical limitations of the Earth until we’re living below the physical limitations of the Earth, because we can get a good idea what the physical limitations of the Earth are, but we can’t be exactly certain. Environmental sustainability depends on keeping a safety margin and monitoring our relationship to the environment, so that if we start seeing warning signs that we’re over-exploiting the environment, our safety margin will give us time to react.
In The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update, the scientists give a lot of examples of warning signs that an environment is being over-exploited. Basically, when you have to start devoting more and more of your economy to making your economy continue to function, you know you’re in trouble.
The eternal question of any economy is: Where are the resources the economy depends on going to come from?
Some warning signs that your economy is in trouble are:
Having to invest more in claiming low-quality resources because the high-quality resources are gone.
Having to invest more in claiming hard-to-reach resources because the easy-to-reach resources are gone.
Having to clean up your own pollution because the environment isn’t cleaning it up fast enough anymore—or at all.
Poverty increasing because resources are being diverted away from people who need them.
Health care and education systems breaking down because resources are being diverted away from maintaining quality of life just to maintain life at all.
People fighting wars over resources because there aren’t enough to go around anymore.
Governments breaking down because the decision-making elite take advantage of their positions to protect themselves.
Does any of that sound familiar?
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