About
one million people inhabited the world twelve thousand years ago at
the beginning of civilization, and were consuming just barely enough
natural resources to increase the population by a paltry few hundred
per year.
Five
of every six people believed that humanity's destiny was to take over
the world, while the rest respected Nature and wanted to consume as
much as was safe for them and the other creatures in the world. The
vast majority in each group preferred to maximize the number of
people without improving their lifestyle, with the minority
preferring to maximize their lifestyle without increasing the number
of people.
Mathematically,
the history of global population consumption appears to have unfolded
as a result of the activities of these groups which grew
proportionately with population. Each has succeeded according to
their size and natural constraints, and together forming a spectrum
that is a composite of all of them.
The
group that respected Nature achieved its goal in the 1920s, when (on
average) about one-fourth of renewable resources were being consumed
by humanity, leaving half to other creatures and the remaining
quarter as a surplus for use in hard times. With nearly two billion
people in the world, the minorities had grown so that more than one
million people wanting maximum happiness were in this group. In the
other group, seven thousand people were working for happiness and
world domination.
By
2015 we were three years from achieving the goal of using the maximum
amount of resources that would keep the world habitable, but it was
snatched away due to an unintended consequence of the pursuit of that
goal: global warming. Our use of fossil fuels had unleashed the
equivalent of a competing species, effectively consuming
a growing share of the remaining resources, depriving us of their
use, and then forcing us to consume less.
As
long as the group that prefers population over happiness is dominant,
we
can expect population to stay constant while per-capita
consumption drops to the minimum required to maintain a healthy
population with food security, which is what it was about 1500 years
ago (and what I've been calling "minimum footprint"). That
level will be reached by 2040. The preceding decrease in consumption
would have kept up with the removal of resources due to global
warming.
After
2040 our consumption decrease will slow; but, as it drops, our
population will drop with it. Even worse, our collective decrease in
consumption will not keep pace with global warming. By 2063 our
population will reach zero just as global warming "consumes"
all of the resources needed by us and the species we have depended
upon.
This
narrative tracks with updates to my population-consumption model
utilizing new data and insights. It includes the results of a
"backcasting" exercise that reproduced basic features of
past population and consumption, lending credibility to its
projections. My narrative of the future is based on an observed
correlation between average global temperature and humanity's global
ecological footprint, and assumes that self-sustained global warming
will have its own global footprint, independent of ours after 2015
(which is when it is calculated to impose a limit to growth of our
own global footprint). As my Twitter
feed will attest, I have been monitoring related news and have
become convinced that global warming is currently self-sustaining and
is having a significant impact on other species, especially those
near the bottom of the food chain that will directly impact our
survival.
Given
our proximity to the limits my model postulates with and without
global warming, the model is now making clearly observable
predictions of the behavior of familiar global variables in the very
near-term: global population, economy (Gross World Product), and
wealth. Perhaps the most obvious of these predictions is a rapid
decrease in growth rates for these variables over the next two years,
beginning soon this year, and an unstoppable contraction of the
economy and wealth beginning in 2017.
I
likely won't live to test the most critical of the predictions,
around 2040, when population either begins to fall because humanity
has reduced consumption too far, or we will have already gone extinct
after finding a way to survive while killing the rest of the species
that historically kept us alive. If some people are alive when my
projections show there will be none under any circumstances, then my
model will be a glorious failure, glorious because I wish more than
anything that the hideous future it projects never comes true.
