Environment Control

In our pursuit of more happiness and longer lives, we humans have been modifying our environment, gradually bringing it within our control. My recent research suggests that in 1943, as the world's industrial base was ramping up in the midst of war, humans for the first time could control the average environment. Our control increasingly accelerated until 1965, as world oil discoveries were approaching their peak. We haven't been able to maintain that level of acceleration since then, and recently – 2007, as the world economy was tanking and we had arguably hit peak oil – our control began to actually decelerate. If current trends continue, I project that we will stop being able to control the environment at all in 2022, corresponding to when the world's population is expected to peak.

The research is based on a premise I've explored in the past, that we each have a set of conditions under which we thrive the most – are the most satisfied with our lives. Simplistically, this might be correlated to our personality, which expresses how we prefer to deal with the rest of the world. If our environment is matched to these preferences, then we will have maximum control over our lives and be as happy as possible and live the longest; to the extent that it isn't, then we are unhappy and don't live as long.

If we simply consider an arbitrary continuum between two extremes for the human population that represents our preferences, the average for the random population will likely correspond to the center (if the extremes are arbitrarily given values of zero and one, then the average of the population would be one-half). The environment (technically, the part that affects us) would have a similar continuum, but not be necessarily bounded as we are; that is, it could have a value less than zero or a value greater than one. Using these definitions, we have maximum happiness (and life expectancy) when our “value” and that of the environment are equal, and happiness decreases as the values get further apart.

With some reasonable assumptions, I used my historical estimates of happiness and their projection into the future to derive how the average of the environment's continuum might be changing over time. The small and virtually constant happiness in the earliest part of my simulated history forced me to accept the idea that the environment's continuum would largely be out of our control, represented by how much of it didn't overlap with the population's continuum. As the population has consumed more, corresponding to its growth in size, the overlap (control) has increased. Unfortunately, we are unable to continue this process for much longer, since the resources we depend on for that control are becoming harder to get and process.

The historical summary at the beginning of this post is my first attempt to assess how this new viewpoint relates to actual events, and the first evidence I can recall of a direct correspondence between my models and peak oil theory. What we may actually be seeing here is a glimpse into the difference in effects on consumption growth between energy supply and the depletion and degradation of the biosphere, which I expect to expand on further.

Peak Oil

Recent increases in oil prices have sparked renewed interest in the subject of “peak oil,” the idea that the world has consumed half of the total supply of petroleum, a resource that underlies most of modern civilization which will from now on become progressively more expensive as demand exceeds our ability to produce (extract and process) it. Because we have been lax in developing substitutes, controlling population growth, and curbing our appetites for more energy, many advocates of the theory believe that civilization will crash and most of our population will die in the process.

Applying my consumption model to oil with starting reserves calculated from reported values, the number of people using oil (“population”) peaks at the same time that I’ve projected for world energy, about 40 years from now. Production (“consumption”) of oil peaks about a decade earlier.

If the peak oil theory is right, then the original world reserve of oil was twice the amount at the production peak, or about 5.2 trillion barrels used for energy. I estimate that we currently have about 3.5 trillion barrels remaining that would be used for energy. Assuming that 21 percent is and was used for asphalt and product feedstock, then the total amount of oil remaining is 4.4 trillion barrels, and the original world reserve was 6.6 trillion barrels.

My model assumes that the number of people using a resource will drop in proportion to the change in the fraction of the resource that’s available (adjusted for preferred growth in population and per capita consumption). Those who do not use the resource will use something else or use nothing (either literally or because they are not being added to the population). Using less is an option only until a full per capita unit is reached, after which the savings counts as a loss of population (especially in a closed system where everyone is forced to use the resource).

In the case of oil, my model projects a slowing of per capita production, which suggests that per capita demand is also slowing (at least historically). Other energy sources are the logical beneficiaries of this trend; but as the peak oil adherents are quick to point out their growth may not be enough to pick up the difference, thus leading to the common behavior of population over time.