EDITOR'S NOTE
Last week the population of the planet surpassed eight billion people thereby doubling in number over the past fifty years. As a consequence we have grown the ecological, climate, resources, economic and agricultural food impacts by similar degrees. Consider for example, oil and natural gas that have expected reserves of 47 and 53 years, respectively, based on current global per capita consumption. So what happens when we double the population over the next fifty years?
Without factoring in the laws of diminishing returns these reserves may only last 25 years or less. Then what? Society will have no dependable sources of energy - as fossil fuels now provide more than 80 percent of the global energy needs and there are no practical alternatives. Renewable energy sources cannot meet the needs or replace them because they are too intermittent and have storage limitations. Moreover, they negatively affect the biosphere and will use up the precious arable land needed to feed the billions of new and hungry mouths.
In the final analysis, if there is any hope for a sustainable human society we need to stop doubling the population every 5o years, and learn how to Degrowth economic activity and contract population levels.
Otherwise, we will be joining those other species in the Sixth Extinction Hall of Shame in fairly short order.
Executive Committee
November 25,2022
November 21, 2022
The Final Doubling
Politicians and economists talk glowingly about growth. They want our cities and GDP to grow. Jobs, profits, companies, and industries all should grow; if they don’t, there’s something wrong, and we must identify the problem and fix it. Yet few discuss doubling time, even though it’s an essential concept for understanding growth.
Doubling time helps us grasp the physical meaning of growth—which otherwise appears as an innocuous-looking number denoting the annual rate of change. At 1 percent annual growth, any given quantity doubles in about 70 years; at 2 percent growth, in 35 years; at 7 percent, in 10 years, and so on. Just divide 70 by the annual growth rate and you’ll get a good sense of doubling time. (Why 70? It’s approximately the natural logarithm of 2. But you don’t need to know higher math to do useful doubling-time calculations.)
REAL IMPACT OF EXPONENTIALS POPULATION AND ENERGY
Here’s why failure to think in terms of doubling time gets us into trouble. Most economists seem to believe that a 2 to 3 percent annual rate of growth for economies is healthy and normal. But that implies a doubling time of roughly 25 years. When an economy grows, it uses more physical materials—everything from trees to titanium. Indeed, the global economy has doubled in size in the last quarter-century, and so has total worldwide extraction of materials. Since 1997 we have used over half the non-renewable resources extracted since the origin of humans.
As the economy grows, it also puts out more waste. In the last 25 years, the amount of solid waste produced globally has soared from roughly 3 million tons per day to about 6 million tons per day.
OVERPOPULATION, ENERGY, CLIMATE
COLLAPSE
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