Friday, November 30, 2007

Total World Production

The classic book Natural Capitalism quotes a Pew study done in the 1990s that determined (p. 154) “the annual value of seventeen ecosystem services: $36 trillion on average, with a high estimate of $58 trillion (1998 dollars).” The study was published in 1997. In today’s (2007) dollars, these numbers translate into $28T and $45T respectively.

If the world started consuming the means of production of these services in 1990 (the capital has the same value as the services), then we’ve been depleting them since then by the amount of growth in our Gross World Product. In 1990, the services would have been worth $37T to $54T (2007 dollars, estimating inflation). Based on my consumption model’s projections of GWP, we will exhaust the supply of natural services between 2013 and 2020. Interestingly, the earlier date corresponds to when I expect populations of other species to crash (2014) and the later date corresponds to the year that I project our population will peak.

These facts imply that our planet is a closed economic system, with a fixed value that is the sum of humanity’s economic production and the rest of Nature’s ecological production. If true, the total value is between $77T and $94T.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Economic Alternatives

From a purely economic perspective, we must either replace the natural capital we are depleting, reduce our rate of depletion, or some combination of the two. Replacement may be done by repairing the damage we have done and enabling natural systems to recuperate, while providing more resources (such as land and water) for other species; or it may involve the creation of artificial alternatives. As I’ve already discussed, simply reducing the rate of depletion locks us into eventually reaching the final limit, and disaster (though we might give natural systems enough “breathing space” to partially recover and buy us more time).

Currently there are no artificial replacements for most natural products and services. The areas of technology most devoted to creating such alternatives, biotechnology and nanotechnology, are still years away from making a dent in the problem; and, it may be argued, they could make things much worse in the interim. Biotechnology in particular has already created a number of altered species of plants, which have the potential of invading and increasing the rate of destruction of natural ecosystems.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Lean, Smart, and Dissatisfied

It’s hard to think of Thanksgiving without thinking of a turkey. A turkey, at least the domesticated kind, strikes me as having qualities that are the exact opposite of what each of us needs to be. Turkeys are fat, dumb, and happy. We need to be lean, smart, and dissatisfied. To be lean is to consume just what we need and no more. Being smart means learning all we can and using good judgment in what we do. To improve our lives and those of the people around us, we must be dissatisfied with what we see around us.

This is not to say that there is something necessarily wrong with turkeys or their metaphorical counterparts. It is actually healthy to spend part of our lives with extra things as a buffer for the times when what we need is hard to find; to limit our thinking so we can act instinctively as some situations demand; and to accept the world as it is so we can reduce stress. Problems surface when we make this a way of life. And we know how a turkey’s life ends.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Resource Limits

When birth and death rates converge, the world’s population will peak, plateau and then continue rising, or level off. The trajectory of each rate will determine which of these possibilities is in our future. A death rate increasing faster than the birth rate will lead to a decrease in population, and a birth rate increasing faster than the death rate will lead to an increase in population.

The existence of a finite resource limit ensures that the population will peak and then drop, because there won’t be enough resources for people to survive. If resources are replenished at a constant rate, the population will level off. If the amount of resources is effectively unlimited, the population will grow. A brief leveling followed by an increase of population would indicate a temporary period where resources are replenished followed by access to a larger amount of resources.

The slowing of population growth since its maximum in 1976 implies that we are approaching a finite resource limit. If the deceleration showed signs of easing off instead of getting greater, we might be forced to live with constantly replenished resources and the population would approach a constant value.

We can slow our approach to the resource limit by decreasing our per capita consumption of resources, reducing the birth rate, increasing the death rate, or any combination of these (preferably not the last one); but eventually we will reach the limit and our population will crash. If the current trend continues, the population growth rate will drop past zero in 2017.

Of the resources we could be running out of, the most obvious is energy. Based on several curve fits of energy production, I expect that production of petroleum and natural gas will likely peak in 2018 and 2020, respectively. To make up the difference beyond 2018, other energy sources would need to provide an additional 312 quadrillion Btu per year, which in terms of non-fossil sources is almost four times the projected production in 2018 and nearly six times this year’s projected production.

Although production of petroleum and natural gas would be peaking about the time that the word’s population reached its maximum, there would still be a few decades of reserves of fuel left (at the same rates). This implies that both population and energy are being limited by some other resource.

I’ve suggested that the resource we are actually running out of is natural capital, the infrastructure that provides food, water, temperature control, and a vast array of other things and services that until now we have gotten for free on a renewable basis. The “running out” includes not only consumption but degradation (typically by waste). Consistent with this explanation, my projection of the Living Planet Index, a measure of the populations of other species, falls to zero by 2014, highlighting the stress that other species (a major part of natural capital) are enduring.

There is no “replacing” other species, or finding some new reserve that we can import; at least within the few years we might have left. Reducing our consumption of everything may, as I’ve said, buy some time, but there is a limit to how little we can consume and still keep living. Based on my consumption model, if the average person had an ecological footprint of 0.1 hectare (1/4 acre, the world minimum according to the World Wildlife Fund), we would put off other species crashing for about 180 years and our own by about ten times that long. It is doubtful, however, that most of us would choose to live like an average citizen of Afghanistan.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

A Short History of Humanity

For most of human history, the birth rate and death rate have been pretty well matched, in large part due to limited resources. As more resources became available, a core population would be able to grow. If stress became too great, some people would move, taking their chances locating other resources, and in the process relieving the stress on those who remained. Over time, successful splinter groups might trade resources with other groups, effectively increasing the resource base of everyone.

Having taken over our entire planet, humanity is once again resource limited, and to survive our birth and death rates must once again approach the same value. Space exploration offers the same benefits to our “core population” that other regions of Earth offered our ancestors: Relieving stress by splintering off part of the population, with possible access to other resources. This is in addition to improving the chances that our species will survive if some catastrophe makes Earth uninhabitable. Fortunately, we have the extra resources to enable this “calving” of humanity, but we can’t count on those resources being available much longer.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Life or Death

If the $75 billion cost of transporting settlers to Mars were doubled to provide additional habitat and the result inflated by a factor of ten to account for pork barrel waste that might accompany a government program (a problem that could be fixed by less corruption), settling Mars would cost about as much as the Iraq war and occupation (between $1 trillion and $2 trillion), but without the associated death, pain, and displacement.

The United States, with 1/22 of the world’s population consuming 1/4 of the world’s resources, has apparently chosen death rather than life, and has gone into serious financial debt to do so. Contributing to its death-dealing impact, the fraction of climate changing pollution created by the U.S. is the same as its fraction of resource use, which is the largest in the world despite overwhelming evidence that human activity is causing the climate crisis.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Settling Mars

Getting a minimum breeding population of 160 to Mars would require at least 70 million global hectares of resources (4.4 percent of world consumption, the average consumption of more than 290 million people, or 25 percent of what the U.S. uses). Even if we doubled this amount to help start a settlement, the investment would be a reasonable one, especially since it is likely to be spread out over at least ten years (resulting in an annual rate of less than one percent), and most of the resources would be used here.

Any settlement on Mars would need to quickly develop the means to locate and utilize the resources needed for its survival and growth, independent of Earth. Unlike our planet, Mars is totally devoid of biological infrastructure, so initially settlers would be restricted to technological processing of raw materials. In one or more centuries, using the methods of terraforming, settlers might enable plants, animals, and microbes to grow and provide basic food and atmospheric processing services.

If the population on Earth chose to continue growing in number, people here would ironically be working toward more, not less, technological processing of materials. While Mars became more alive, Earth would be going the other direction.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Threats and Opportunities

Moving our population to Mars doesn’t make sense, especially since doing so will likely make Earth about as uninhabitable as the Red Planet. A smarter option is to move a breeding population to Mars (which has all of the non-biological resources needed for sustenance) and build adequate habitats for the population living here.

There are many threats to life on Earth, and humans are just one of them. Our planet could be hit by a stray comet or asteroid of sufficient size to create a firestorm followed by a devastating nuclear winter. Volcanic eruptions could make our atmosphere un-breathable for years. As our planet grows older, we are due for one last ice age and then the release of greenhouse gases from the oceans due to reduced circulation caused by the land-locking of all the continents. With the Sun growing hotter over time, Earth is due to eventually become much like present-day Venus: a hothouse on which nothing can survive.

A population on Mars would escape these local horrors, while being potentially subject to some of their own. But they would have time to develop the capability of moving people outward to other locations, perhaps including other solar systems. Starting such a population should be one of our top priorities as a species.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Moving to Mars

I estimate that for each global hectare of additional resource use in 1996, the Gross World Product grew by about $120. At that time, Robert Zubrin proposed in his book The Case for Mars that an extremely efficient privately funded plan for manned exploration of Mars could carry a price tag of about six billion dollars (or about one billion dollars per astronaut for a crew of six), including development costs. This translates into an equivalent of over eight million hectares per astronaut. Annual operating costs (after development) would be half of this. By comparison, during that year the average world citizen was consuming a little over two hectares. This gives us a good benchmark for the minimum operating cost of sending a person to another world: About two million times what an average person consumes.

We could move less than four thousand people per year to Mars if we used all of the resources the world currently consumes. It would take nearly two million years to move our entire population at that rate.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Artificial Environments

Humans have been creating artificial environments for at least several thousand years, and will likely continue to do so for as long as humanity exists. If we were ever to settle other worlds this would be an imperative, since the worlds we know about – as well as the intervening space – are environmentally hostile to our form of life.

The bare minimum requirement for a human habitat is protection from the weather and uncomfortable temperature. This requirement is often extended to include storage for food and water, as well as waste management. Habitats not only protect us from harmful and uncomfortable aspects of the environment, they may also provide the means for much of our activity, including entertainment and work.

The per capita consumption for an average home in the United States accounts for nearly two-thirds of the world average or nearly one-sixth more than the entire consumption of an average Colombian. In a country like Denmark (applying for the ratio of overall consumption), this amount would be closer to the entire consumption of a citizen of Zimbabwe.

Using technology to enhance our habitats to compensate for the loss of natural services would surely cost much more. This compensation would speed the degradation of natural systems and force us to totally divorce our lives from Nature.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

The Big Picture

No matter how we look at the world situation, the options don’t change. We can live better individually and reduce the lifetime of our species; or we can live less happy and shorter lives individually and prolong the lifetime of our species. The option of extending the lifetime of our species is rapidly becoming unavailable to us: Soon we will have done too much damage to the Earth’s biosphere and supporting systems for even the most miserly people to survive.

The preferred option, living better while increasing the lifetime of our species, is denied us because much of the world’s population depends on Nature for survival while humanity insists on sabotaging the natural infrastructure that keeps our planet habitable. We might salvage this option if we had the energy and technology to create artificial environments for the entire population, but we have neither; and we probably wouldn’t have enough time left to implement such a solution even if we did.

I can’t help but return to the aspirations of the space community when faced with such dire prospects. A variant of the last scenario is the opening of a new frontier that would provide access to more resources (including energy) and reduce the human load on Earth by moving people to other worlds. Whether those worlds are planets or asteroids, artificial environments will need to be created for their inhabitants. Again, we have a timing problem: Could such a solution be implemented in 40 years or less?

Monday, November 12, 2007

Perceptions of Options

In my sample, the country that most closely approximates the average world population is Turkey. According to my consumption model, the population will drop to zero in 74 years, if consumption stays constant. By comparison, the population will crash in 31 years if next year we attain the best case consumption and quality of life, equivalent to Denmark. The best case for population and worst case for quality of life is equivalent to Zimbabwe, where the population would crash in 198 years if the world dropped consumption to its level next year and maintained it. The way conditions are currently changing, we’ve got no more than 40 years.

The United States, where I reside, is moving haltingly in Denmark’s direction. The required change in consumption is similar to an obese person eating 40 percent less. I have the impression that most of those who have come to accept the need to consume less believe that if the world’s average consumption were cut in half, a decent standard of living could be sustained indefinitely. While powerful countries like the U.S. might approximate Denmark, cutting the average by half turns Turkey into Indonesia, and the population crashes in 148 years.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Extreme Populations

Consuming nearly six global hectares per person per year (49 percent of the world’s maximum) with a life expectancy of 77 years (the average for men and women) and happiness of 82 percent, Denmark has perhaps the best quality of life with a low price in resources. In addition, income inequality is about 25 percent, and its birth and death rates are nearly matched (12 and 11 per thousand people, respectively). Based on my models, this corresponds to an ideality of 80 and an adjusted power of 83. Denmark lives in the narrow region of adjusted power where consumption is falling and ideality is peaking, beyond which the death rate skyrockets and ideality plummets.

If Denmark represents the best that any population can achieve, Zimbabwe is its mirror image. People there have a life expectancy of only 37 years and happiness of 33 percent. Income inequality is 50 percent, and the birth and death rates are double those of Denmark (25 and 24 per thousand). Ideality is 35 and adjusted power is estimated to be five. Per capita consumption is less than one hectare per person, or eight percent of the world maximum.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Future Income Inequality

Income inequality has two distinguishing characteristics which make it something worth avoiding. First, it is somewhat like an attenuated mirror image of ideality (quality of life): When ideality is low inequality is high, and vice versa. Second, inequality nearly parallels death rate, with both high at the same time and low at the same time.

It is therefore no surprise that my consumption model’s projection of population collapse is accompanied by a dramatic (if brief) increase in income inequality. For those who might hope to survive such a collapse, there is the morbid possibility of owning a majority of the scraps left in a severely damaged world.

If we reduced consumption by one percent per year starting now, the population would peak in 2024 and fall to zero by 2162. During most of that period, population would be falling at about the rate it is currently climbing, while ideality and income inequality stayed fairly close to their present values. At any faster rate of conservation, income inequality would dip briefly and then surge to its historical maximum as ideality fell gradually and population leveled off.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Income Inequality

Statistically, income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) is very high for countries with low power and totally incorrect perception of how people can reach their goals. Inequality reaches a minimum just before some people start perceiving the correct things they must do to improve their lives. Inequality climbs several percent and virtually levels off as people gain more power and awareness. Beyond a minor dip at the point where everyone knows what “direction” (if not the total amount of effort required) to act in their best interest, inequality climbs again, most rapidly as everyone has a better than even chance of knowing how much effort to expend.

Applied to world history, the world had nearly 90 percent income inequality until the late 1800s, and then dropped rapidly to the minimum of about a quarter. It climbed to near its current value of about a third by 1900, and has stayed near there since then (the “minor dip” occurred in 1950, when ideality leveled off).

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Happiness and Resources

Does happiness truly depend on the fraction of available resources consumed, or on the absolute amount of resources consumed? In a closed, interconnected system like the Earth, where the people reporting on their happiness are aware of how well others might be living, the question is virtually meaningless (the two are practically the same). But if we were to increase the resource base, for example by opening up another planet for emigration or reclaiming the 95 percent of materials and energy that goes into the products we use, would everyone’s quality of life be perceived as worse than it was before?

It is reasonable to assume that human biology imposes a limit on how much an individual can physically gain from the environment, but psychology is another matter: The more we could potentially have, the more we want. There are several options for what to do with the excess, if we can acquire it. We could use the excess to grow larger families (a biological need that results in an increase in the population); we could distribute it to others (giving does make some people happier); or we could create more “stuff” that ends up underutilized (“waste”).

While we might experience a brief reversal in knowledge about how to improve our lives (while we learn how to make use of the new resources), thus reducing adjusted power as I’ve suggested, the long term impact would be an increase in population, possibly higher ideality (assuming an ideological shift that promotes giving), and ultimately more waste.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Trajectories and Resources

When adjusted power (a composite of personal power and knowledge) exceeds about 55 percent of the maximum (the “climbing point”), per capita consumption increases radically. It roughly doubles by its peak at an adjusted power of 75 percent and then drops precipitously. After increasing adjusted power (what I called the “second trajectory”) over nearly all of human history, the world approached the climbing point in the 1950s and then retreated (along the “first trajectory”), pausing briefly in the early 1990s.

If my model is correct, the retreat will stop as population growth stops, and then the second trajectory will resume as more people die than are being born. With fewer people, more resources will be available to the survivors; at least until the population totally crashes. As I’ve already discussed, the population peak will be a consequence of exhausting the Earth’s natural capital, and the obvious way to stop that is to repair natural systems and reduce consumption (be even more aggressive in following the first trajectory). With no increase in available resources, the consequences of the first trajectory are far from attractive: We will be effectively shutting down modern civilization.

An increase in resources would result in a similar trajectory (since per capita consumption is measured as a fraction of available resources), but with an important qualitative difference. Our decrease in knowledge and power would be relative to the use of the new resources – we would not actually “lose” anything, just be learning how to use something new.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Alternative Trajectories

As people become more aware of what is happening around them, they are more enabled to do something about it. The negative consequences of the world’s consumption patterns are becoming more widely known, and an increasing number of people are changing their lives in response.

My research suggests two possible trajectories for change given current circumstances. One trajectory is a retreat toward less knowledge and power over their lives. The other trajectory is an increase in knowledge and power.

The first trajectory is the one most feared by those of us at the high end of the consumption curve. It involves giving up technology and political freedom while becoming more vulnerable to Nature and living with more physical hardship. It could be a harsher world than history indicates, since we would also be dealing with less available energy and debilitated natural systems.

The second trajectory also leads to a reduction in consumption and freedom (caused by people having more power over each other), but carries with it the risk of a much higher death rate and steeper decline in lifestyle.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Harmful Consumption

If my projections are accurate, people’s lives began improving rapidly in the mid-1800s: The annual rate of increase in ideality (happiness and longevity) suddenly more than doubled and then gradually decreased, reaching zero 100 years later.

The transition occurred when the growth rate of ideality caught up to the growth rate of consumption. Population growth continued to increase after that, pulling resources away from improvements in the quality and longevity of people’s lives. In the 1970s, as the rate of ideality growth dipped slightly below zero, the rate of population growth reached a maximum that came close to the rate of consumption.

Since 1980, increased consumption has had a net negative effect on humanity. The decreasing population growth rate has not translated into an increase in ideality, which confirms that more and more resources are being converted into not just waste, but harmful waste.

Harmful consumption likely falls into three categories: Destruction of natural capital (which has occurred since 1990), direct poisoning of people, and war making. If we could stop poisoning people and repair the damage to natural infrastructure we have caused, we might at least stand a chance at long term survival. Even if we found some way to live without Nature’s services (“eating rocks” as I’ve indicated elsewhere), we would still need to clean up our environment. Stress from other people interfering with survival-related tasks can lead to the diversion of resources toward weapons manufacture and their use to reduce the number of people.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Replacing Capital

From an economic perspective, cutting consumption is a reduction of demand, which has the effect of extending the time that the supply can be consumed. Unfortunately, we are strictly speaking no longer depleting supply; we are depleting capital, the means for creating supply. That capital takes several forms, among them other species and naturally usable air, water, and land.

In an ideal world, we would not only cease our destruction by consuming less, we would repair and rebuild what we’ve already damaged and destroyed (including isolating dangerous toxins so they will not do harm in the future). This would take a concerted effort (thus my suggestion that the world unite) and probably require much of our remaining fuel reserves.

There is great resistance to this idea. As I’ve empirically discovered, reducing consumption carries the real threat of reducing happiness and life expectancy (ideality), which would be a reasonable thing to avoid if consuming more wasn’t likely to result in far worse consequences. A knee-jerk reaction I have personally experienced is to reject the whole notion of a disastrous future based on current trends and to instead have faith in our ability to increase the supply of resources or more efficient use of the ones we have.

While conservation may be reasonable, people’s feelings about their lives are unlikely to prompt them to action until they feel a change in their lifestyle. My consumption model shows that if we reduced consumption by four percent for forty years, the population would peak in 2040 but we would see a peak in lifestyle (IP index) as early as 2020. By contrast, with business as usual, lifestyle wouldn’t peak until 2029 (at the same level as with conservation), even though population would have started to fall. If people knew that not conserving (thus making less change in their lives) would increase the amount of time that their lives were improving, they would probably be less likely to conserve. In short, the demand for change wouldn’t exist until it was too late to do anything meaningful about supply (investing the “capital” saved by conservation in restoring Nature’s ability to provide for the future).