Dennis Meadows, Co-Author of Limits To Growth: Peak Prosperity Interview

[ertyu]

@ZAFCorrection, don't have links to particular studies, but ideas I have encountered in the wild: a lot of the infrastructure we have built for storage and trasportation of oil - piping, gas stations, etc. - can be repurposed for use with hydrogen fuel. A podcast I listened to argued that a transition from oil to hydrogen would be much more seamless than oil to solar/EVs. And also, another video arguing that we might not be able to go off oil completely, but we can move more towards nuclear/nat gas, which has lower carbon emissions/"clean oil" - some project coming online off the norwegian cost was given as an example. On the whole, I agree we're fucked, let's just hope we'll be fucked slower

[7Wannabe5]

Although I mildly disagree with some of the structure of Jorgen Randers model, as described in "2052", and which is freely accessible on associated website, I think it is the most reality based model I have come upon. The thing that has been driving me a bit crazy with all the reading on the topic I've been doing in recent years is that one camp wants all modern growth to be attributed to fossil fuel use and the opposing camp wants all modern growth to be attributed to human ingenuity, whereas reality would suggest some proportional attribution. Randers' model is inclusive of 2% annual decline in energy intensity, and so is more balanced in this regard. However, it still leaves on the table the very likely possibility that we will face risk of runaway positive feedback loop due to CO2 dumping by 2100.

One suggestion I would like to make is that verbal bickering is really kind of useless when there are models freely available for use or modification. Answering question "What might likely happen to my region or my lifestyle in the future given these assumptions or trends?" is, therefore, no different than attempting to answer "What might likely happen to my portfolio in the future given these assumptions or trends?" For instance, I could download Randers' model and modify it to reflect my somewhat differing take on main factors influencing fertility rates* and elasticity of capital** moving forward. Then I could run the model and have something actually intelligent to say on the topic.

*Randers uses rate of urbanization as factor directly determining decrease in fertility rate. As I have noted previously, I would use education of females as determining factor. My reasoning is based on research done on economic well-being of recent Asian immigrants to the U.S. As the stereotype suggests, most Asian immigrants to the U.S. achieve great economic success within 1 generation, but these studies revealed that the only glaring exception to this rule were Asian immigrant families that retained old-school gender based roles excluding females from education/employment opportunities and this practice had ramifications even two generations forward resulting in less overall wealth, less overall education, and higher overall fertility.

**Randers' take seems to be very much in alignment with Picketty in that he believes that stagnating growth rates in most developed countries such as the U.S. will continue to increase socio-economic inequity which will lead to social unrest which will lower productivity further. My belief is that capital isn't uniformly elastic and the wealthy are already chasing good money with bad, so the financial markets will break before social inequity rises to the level of high social unrest in the U.S.

[iopsi]

I would be interested to see these studies which explain how we can successfully make a change to an electricity-based infrastructure (all internal combustion engines subbed out) and pay the cost of all the batteries which need to be swapped every 10 years and keep up with the demands of the current economic system (grow or die). No heretofore uninvented technologies allowed.

My guess is that some parts of that story (mining equipment and trucks, at least) would be unprecedented even at the scale of a prototype.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... wer_Sector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

It is completely feasible with current tech.

Energy storage for demand that sometimes is not met by the variable energy production is achieved by:

- batteries;

- hydrogen (possibly ammonia if needed as a better energy storage medium);

- hydro storage;

- compressed air storage;

- synthetic gas;

- possibly algae oil;

- other biofuels.

And maybe other ways that i don't know.

All of these technologies already exist, are already being used at some level and do not need any major development outside of simply greater scale.

Electricity generation itself via Wind, Solar, Hydro, Biomass, and similar is already roughly competitive with fossil fuels.

It's a matter of economic and political will more than anything.

But as i said, even tho the sooner the transition is done the better, eventually it will happen anyway because fossil fuels will become more and more costly while renewables will only get cheaper (just by economics of scale and marginal improvements here and there, no breakthroughs).


@7wannabe5

Guess we need to bring education to females in third world countries asap.

Your point about fertility rates dropping might imply that after we reach peak population (roughly 10 billions?) we will have a slow decline.
This will have a positive impact in carbon footprint, on top of the increasing amounts of renewables that will be used decades from now.

Another reason to believe that there won't be any civilization-threatening disaster (although climate change will be very damaging ofc if it reaches 2 or more degrees in excess).

[7Wannabe5]

@iopsi:

Randers' model optimistically predicts population peaking at 8.1 billion around 2040 and then slowly declining back to around current levels by end of century. This is still not good enough to keep temperature increase within 2 degrees. It will exceed that level by mid-century and, therefore, go even higher by century end, even if emissions are neutralized by mid-century. I actually worry that his population prediction might be too optimistic if trend towards urbanization is not quickly associated with gender equity. I have seen first hand how this can play out while working with recent immigrants from villages in the Middle East. Second generation girls have to actively rebel against their father's dictates in order to be allowed to engage in activities such as taking a bus to college campus. Of course, this behavior wouldn't be possible at all in rural village, so my quibble is fairly minor.

OTOH, I think there is a good deal of contingency in capital development. If/when American believes in renewable energy future, it can happen very quickly and in ways not yet entirely predictable. Right now the future in this regard is still like a ball spinning round in a roulette wheel. Once it lands, and the parties interested in investment have more knowledge, the next level of throw down could be huge. Maybe the next election will be factor?

[TheWanderingScholar]

American's don't have to "believe" in renewable energy future, instead just the cost of converting to a used electric vehicle becomes more economical than an ICE engine with the infrastructure to support it.* Which is a benefit of the capitalistic system as more of the Great Plains states become more open to wind mill farms as the economic benefit is just too high to ignore for the sake of ideologue.

If Democrats sweep all three branches, then I imagine the push for for renewable energies will be pushed harder. If President Trump is still in office, the current movement will continue at its current progress, especially if the natural gas industry and fracking industries are not able to ship out all their goods. Example being natural gas is not profitable where people actually buy the natural gas off of companies resulting in lower electric bills.


*Unless you consider that part of "believing"

[7Wannabe5]

@TheWanderingScholar:

I was thinking of this:

Chicago's population exploded after 1833 without bothering much about a pastoral stage, a settlement of pioneering subsistence farmers, or even an agricultural community at all. The town's speculators gambled on an urban future, staking fortunes on land they hoped would soon lie at the heart of a great city...The land craze of the 1830s was nationwide, part of an upward swing in the business cycle and a dramatic easing of admittedly shaky credit in the wake of Andrew Jackson's victorious assault on the Second Bank of the United States.- "Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West"

My generalized point being that although ecology and economy are similarly best understood at the systems level, not every analogy is sensible. Oftentimes, great quantities of capital moving quickly like a colony of bees establishing a new hive (infrastructure) is a better analogy than capital growing in place like a forest towards climax. So, what I meant by "believing" in a renewable energy future would be akin to the collusion of pheromones that leads the majority of bees to "believe" that a particular hollow tree is the place where new hive will be established.

One fact that often escapes us moderns when we read or watch accounts of Early American Pioneer life, like "Little House on the Prairie" is that these pioneers very much were not "starting from scratch." They were carrying every concept or good to that point developed in the cities of the Northeast or Europe forward with them in stored potential or token plate of fine china. This restless frontier seeking towards development spirit is still very much in existence in the U.S. and it transcends many other differences. For instance, over the holidays I attended one gathering which was majority strong Progressive and another gathering which was majority strong Conservative, and almost everybody at both gatherings was talking about how to make money with legalized marijuana

[shemp]

Since human female response to affluent urban lifestyle is to have fewer children,...

All sorts of hidden assumptions in that term affluent. Hasidic Jews in New York City report poverty level incomes, so as to benefit from welfare programs for the poor, but their true standard of living (food, hours of leisure, medical care, etc) is as high as anyone's, unless you want to count pure waste (jetting around the world, leaving giant houses mostly unoccupied, throwing out most food, household servants, etc) as part of high standard of living. Clearly these Hasidic jews are urban. Are they affluent? If so, then your assertion above is false. If not, then what do you mean exactly by "affluent"?

I see no hard biological reason why urban living, affluence and/or education of girls should reduce birthrate. The correlation is common, but that may be because all developed world cultures tend to be similar, so that all reacted similarly to technologies of the late 20th century ( cheap and effective contraception, television, internet, automobiles, etc). But further technology changes could change everything on the opposite direction, or society might simply be drifting naturally to a situation where affluent educated urban women want as many children at possible.

My baseline assumption about culture is that if some belief system is possible, it will eventually arise. To predict the future, I combine that assumption with the mathematics of exponential growth/decrease plus the limitations imposed by physics, geology, biology and other natural sciences. Result is always the same: Malthusianism or worse.

To be specific. Cultures can conceivably exist wherein women want as many children as possible, regardless of how well educated or urban or affluent the women are, just as cultures can exist where highly intelligent, educated, affluent and urban women (and men) believe that the creator of this physical universe sent his son down to earth about 2000 years ago (why not sooner?) and the son was crucified and then rose from the dead, but instead of showing himself in a public place after rising from the dead, so as to eliminate all.possibility of doubt as to this miracle, he onstead skulked about in secret and only showed himself to a few poor fishermen acquaintances, so now everyone has to take their word for what happened (actually, since these fishermen died long ago, we have merely hearsay testimony at this point). Also, this creator of the Universe showed his left butt cheek to a guy named Moses about 1500 years prior, and that's the only time anyone has ever seen this so-called God in the flesh, since mostly God lives in a place called heaven whose whereabouts the astronomers don't discuss. You get the point right? Namely, no limit to the bullshit humans can and will believe. We are simply naked apes, and what's truly surprising is that we can reason coherently at all, not that we often reason very poorly.

Anyway, believing that having as many children as possible is the most important thing in life is far easier than believing the farrago of nonsense that constitutes the typical religion, so I assume subcultures will arise in the future, if they don't already exist, which have this procreation focus as their core belief. Given that all developed societies strongly subsidize poor mothers (this is a significant new development that didn't exist in the past, when runaway procreation would have soon resulted in starvation of the poor mother and most or all of her brood, stopping the process) these subcultures will quickly overwhelm surrounding cultures which promote sterility, especially the "Sex and the City" lifestyle you might be thinking of when you mentioned "affluent urban lifestyle" of modern educated women in developed societies. This is already happening in Israel, for example.

Tl;dr:, far more likely, IMO, that population growth stopped and maybe reversed by physical limits than by culture.

[Update:] Somewhere in comments to the Limits of Growth podcast, I found a link to the below graph, which shows birthrate exploding after decline. Unlike "urban, affluent, educated girls ==> lower birthrate", for which there is limited historical precedent and no examples for other mammal species, "population stress ==> increased birthrate" has plenty precedents and is common among mammals. Hunting wolves and wild boar, for example, is known to increase birth rate. Baby boom in all countries affected by WWII, after the war, including those which were still very affluent after the war, such as USA.

Many historical examples of urban, relatively affluent and educated girl populations with very high birthrates, such upper classes in England and Germany prior to modern times. JSBach had 7 children with first wife, 13 with the second. Both these wives educated. Collapse of existing economic system might easily shock young women in places like Japan, who currently haves little interest in children, to suddenly become fanatic about producing large numbers of children, similar to Japanese women in 1950.

Population still declines in graph, despite boom in birthrate, because death rate rises even faster. Bottom line is that physical limits controls population in graph, not culture, same as I predict using my model of "any culture that can exist, will eventually exist; culture embodying exponential growth dominates in the long run; physical limits are hard limits; everything points to Malthusianism.or worse (ruling class exterminates masses in favor of robots)".



https://www.imgur.com/PkHS05m

[7Wannabe5]

what do you mean exactly by "affluent"?

I see no hard biological reason why urban living, affluence and/or education of girls should reduce birthrate. The correlation is common, but that may be because all developed world cultures tend to be similar, so that all reacted similarly to technologies of the late 20th century ( cheap and effective contraception, television, internet, automobiles, etc). But further technology changes could change everything on the opposite direction, or society might simply be drifting naturally to a situation where affluent educated urban women want as many children at possible.

The correlation is strong, but I don't believe there is strong consensus on exact mechanism. In Randers' "2052" model, which differs/has been updated from original Limits to Growth model, he assigns the cause to Urban living NOT Affluence. Therefore, in his model, he supposes that even the poor outer ring slum dwellers in the mega-cities of the 21st century will reduce their birth rate. I am being less optimistic by choosing to assign the cause primarily to Education/Egalitarian Opportunity for Women. This correlation is not limited to similar cultures of the late 20th century. It has been historically observed:

By two thousand years ago, Roman women- particularly those from the leading families- were able to inherit goods, property and money, and to divorce their husbands with relative ease. Increasingly, couples were co-habiting for love, many not bothering about formal marriage at all. There was even a severe drop in the birthrate as women took control of their own fertility.- "Here On Earth" - Tim Flannery

The Roman women who wished themselves free to engage in something like unto "Sex in the City" lifestyle drank silphium seed as a contraceptive. The seed is symmetrically heart shaped and was quite possibly the origin of the symbol still used for valentines. Ancient Rome was also very well-stocked with fast-food stalls, called popinas, so no need to slave over a hot stove all day either.

In "How the West Really Lost God", Mary Eberstadt presents a good deal of evidence that reverses the usually assumed arrow of causation relating religion to large family size. It seems that it is not the case that religious dictates cause large family size, but rather that those who have large families or wish to have large families for other reasons, obviously including the economic, are drawn to religion for support. I personally saw a good deal of evidence for this during my brief tenure as a member of a group of American women who had converted to Islam. If you are a 21st century American woman who for whatever reason wants to have 5 kids where are you going to find a guy who will support you in that goal outside of conservative religion? OTOH, I met many well-educated women who were born into Islamic culture and actively practiced the religion who were not at all down with the idea of having 5 kids, because they knew very well how expensive it was going to be to support even 2 kids through grad school. I can also well remember this same paradigm applying to the American Catholic women of my parents and grandparents generations. In one memoir I read about life in a very Republican Protestant Midwestern Relatively-Affluent town in the early decades of the 20th century, young Protestant girls were sternly warned by their mothers to not marry Catholic men, because of the hard life they would suffer due to religious constraints on birth control/family planning.

Also, since I am a woman who loves babies and finds caring for them fairly easy, I was torn between having 2 or 8 myself (I used to read pro-breastfeeding, natural living, frugal-large-family, "cheaper by the dozen" oriented magazines obsessively. It's interesting to note that the frugality movement has this pro large family vs.pro population-reduction dichotomy within itself. ) So, I know the factors that went into my decision to stop at 2, and I observe that most women are similarly motivated. Not all women feel like "mothering" is one of their purposes and most women feel like they have purposes beyond "mothering", so if/when women are living in a culture which offers them the opportunity to invest some of their life energy towards other purposes, they will limit their fertility and choose to create value in other ways.

Many historical examples of urban, relatively affluent and educated girl populations with very high birthrates, such upper classes in England and Germany prior to modern times. JSBach had 7 children with first wife, 13 with the second. Both these wives educated. Collapse of existing economic system might easily shock young women in places like Japan, who currently haves little interest in children, to suddenly become fanatic about producing large numbers of children, similar to Japanese women in 1950.

There are many examples of cultures in which affluent women are educated, but are still not granted full property rights or employment opportunities. For instance, in 19th century United States, the royalty rights of a married woman who produced intellectual capital belonged to her husband. A primary reason why property rights were finally extended to women, and this was also true in Roman times and Islamic Code (which was progressive for its time) was the "plight of orphans." Property rights, affluence, and inheritance laws are inextricably bound together. Many of the Founding Fathers of America were "second sons of second sons" immigrated from a culture of primogeniture. Mohammed was an orphan who was born into a wealthy, powerful family/clan and was dependent on uncles and cousins for support. So, he felt it was important to extend property ownership to widows, so they could protect assets until their children achieved majority. Similar reasoning applied after the Civil War in the U.S. and was also promulgated by Homestead Act, since this allowed a married couple to claim stake to larger federally subsidized land handout (flash forward to SNAP card ) than a single man.

Therefore, I would argue that there is a natural progression towards extension of property rights with growing affluence, because even within the bounds of a very restricted patriarchal caste system, there will be individuals who will rise to position of prominence from status of initial unfair treatment under the law, and these individuals will work mightily towards changing these laws. Thus, the property rights of women were first fully supported by born into affluence sons who were orphaned of father in minority and thus suffered loss due to mismanagement by whatever male relative was granted authority. Of course, great wealth to be inherited can only pile itself up in developed/urban based economy with strong rule of property law, so the feedback is positive reinforcing. Thus, it can be seen that even in the most ancient cultures, among those who accumulated enough wealth/power to fret about inheritance and no further direct economic dependence upon manual labor or warrior behavior, when sons were lacking and grandsons had not yet achieved majority, daughters were often made Queen.

Obviously, this does not preclude the possibility that if massive war or pandemic were to decimate the population, the birth rate might shoot right back up again. But, a massive war or pandemic would also clearly decimate overall affluence, so the correlation still holds, UNLESS you can picture a scenario in which wealth can accumulate without property rights/law.