The impossibility of growth

[apocryphal]

"Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it."

http://www.monbiot.com/2014/05/27/the-i ... of-growth/

[workathome]

This sort of undermines the philosophical framework of indexing... and pension plans.

[Devil's Advocate]

Thought-provoking article. Thanks for the link, apocryphal.

Two ways to look at this. One is our way. The other :

If the horse cart people had stayed content with no/low growth, no steam engines would have come about. If the steam/coal people had stayes content with no/low growth, then our petroleum economy wouldn't have happened.

Who is to say another quantum jump isn't round the corner? Into nuclear power, or solar power, orr perhaps something thus far unimagined? That next stage will stay unrealized if we stay content with low growth or no growth.

Growth is risky. No guarantees. But only the imperative of growth can spur us to the next level. And the one/s beyond. No limits. Of course, no guarantees either.

The article is unnecessarily pessimistic. Life is risky, sure, but it is not a lightless pit.

[Devil's Advocate]

And hey, we do have a billion billion solar systems out there. Quite literally. Many more, in fact.
No cause for gloom!

Like I was saying, no limits. But again, no guarantees either.

[chenda]

Maybe I misunderstand his argument, but he seems to be saying growth is impossible in the long term because there is a fixed amount of matter on earth ?

But surely growth is ultimately driven by the rearranging of matter in ways which give us greater utility, rather than permanently destroying it ? We may be using certain resources faster than they are re-created, but that doesn't suggest that growth is mathematically impossible. Growth in this theoretical sense is essentially unlimited, and in practice is determined by human ingenuity or folly.

Aside from that, is he suggesting we intentionally abandon industrial civilisation and return to an agrarian economy ? (or even a hunter gather existence, though he curiously ignores the growth driven by the invention of farming) The human suffering this would cause is incalculable.

[Familjen Fri]

This sort of undermines the philosophical framework of indexing... and pension plans.

... of life as we know it.

But surely growth is ultimately driven by the rearranging of matter in ways which give us greater utility, rather than permanently destroying it ? We may be using certain resources faster than they are re-created, but that doesn't suggest that growth is mathematically impossible. Growth in this theoretical sense is essentially unlimited, and in practice is determined by human ingenuity or folly.

I think the key point is that unlimited growth is impossible in a limited system. Another point is that technical substitution and the human resourcefulness will not be enough given the power of compounding growth.

A very interesting lecture about growth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iFESMAU58
Probably the best video I've seen on youtube. And I've seen a lot of cats videos.

[jacob]

@chenda - If certain resources, indeed any single unsubstitutable, resource is used faster than it is recreated, it will eventually go to zero and this will take the process to zero as well. This is pretty much a law of physics.

Now, a lot of the arguments depend on how "growth" is defined.

I can take a lump of iron and forge it into a club. The club has greater killing power than the lump and so my utility has increased. I can reforge the club into a sword and again increase my utility. And so on. This kind of growth can go on for quite a while because it closes at least one resource loop (that of procuring iron).

Conversely, if I take my lump of iron and upon discovering club technology simply throw the lump away, I need to go and find more iron. And so on. This is somewhat more limited.

It used to be that iron could be picked up in the form of meteoritic stones. These days iron needs to be procured in huge mining operations. This complicates the cycles.

There's also a limit to human ingenuity. The greater the level of technology, the greater the cost of supporting it. The internet, for example, is hugely expensive. Think of the large number of software engineers we must support with food, houses, etc. so they can spend 100% of their time on the internet. Think of the electricity demand needed to keep the serves alive (it is really high!). You can see where this is going. We can not create any kind of technology that is more advanced that the available human brain power that can be supported to do so. Note that fossil fuels and modern agriculture has made that a lot cheaper.

ERE in itself is mainly about closing resource loops. This is what allows us to get much more bang for the buck than the throw-away consumer using the same resources. However, this requires some human brain input in terms of complexity growth. This is why everybody here, by necessity, is rather smart.

What is needed is ERE or the closing on loops but on a much larger scale. This is certainly possible but only in another paradigm. The simple-minded paradigm that guides current resource strategy, namely, technology and substitution is banging its head against the limits. We're reaching for marginal returns already.

Now, it's rather common for people who worry about these things to suggest that we fix our mistakes by going back. However, progress or regress is not a linear process. We can't fix a malfunctioning system by rewinding much like we can't heal someone who has been run over by a car by running him over again with the car going in reverse. There are far too many people on the planet to be supported by anything by petroleum driven agriculture unless we draft every other person to do biointensive gardening. And then what happens to the internet. Also, there's no way we can get iron by picking it up in lumps on the ground anymore.

Anyhoo ... the problem of a paradigm shift is that it requires everybody to "get it". Whereas technological substitution only requires an elite few to actually understand the problem and the solutions. It's easy for one person to think up a microwave oven and then teach 100000 people to "push start". It's not easy at all to teach 100000 people ERE concepts, say, when it requires more effort than just pushing the start button.

And that's what our problem is. Most of our political thought has been designed around petty nation states competing for access to infinite resources. Most economic thought has been designed around freeloading on science and technology. And science and technology are petering out. How many people are aware that there hasn't been any substantial progress/paradigm shifts in physics for the past 50 years?

[apocryphal]

I like George Monibot, he's one of the few columnists I frequently think really "gets it". Or maybe he just has the same personality type as me and we are both wrong

His book "Heat" is the only place I've ever seen someone work out what would civilization look like if we did cut our carbon emissions by the 90% needed to avoid 2C of warming. I'd probably prefer that world to the one we have now.

[Devil's Advocate]

Jacob, at a personal level I agree with you. Even at a societal level I am happy with that solution myself.

But let us not forget that another very viable alternative exists. That of limitless growth.

We may not prefer this option (I don't, and nor do you), but to deny its feasibility is to make a Malthusian blunder.

The horse buggy people could not have imagined the possibilities of a coal and petroleum based economy.

Why should we think we won't be able to vault over limits to current technology similarly? Via nuclear power or solar power, or some other technology.

As for overflowing the earth, well, why need we be confined to earth?

I wouldn't call it freeloading on tech and science. After all that is the very purpose of technology, and one of the purposes of science.

As for lack of progress in physics in recent years, well, you're the expert there : but I remember reading about someone seriously considering shutting down the US patent office, since they believed nothing significant was left to invent. This was early last century. How wrong they were!

Human ingenuity (potentially) knows no limits. And breakneck growth, risky though it is, offers the very impetus that is necessary to bring about such non-linear advancement.

And an ERE-ish society may actually hamper that process.

I myself am all for ERE, at both micro and macro levels. I follow an ERE lifestyle myself. But we must acknowledge that other option too (although we may not embrace it, since we prefer happiness and contentment to advancement and progress).

The article is unnecessarily pessimistic. The author seems to be making a Malthusian error (in this case, with growth in general rather than only population growth).

[George the original one]

> As for overflowing the earth, well, why need we be confined to earth?

The energy costs of getting mass into orbit on a scale sufficient to bleed off population will keep us on earth unless we invent something like teleportation.

[Dragline]

Here's the most frequent "pro-growth" argument I see, at least with respect to energy:

http://www.pv-tech.org/editors_blog/cou ... _of_energy

I don't even pretend to know the answers here.

[workathome]

The most likely "solution" is horrible to contemplate, but will probably involve losing a large percentage of the earth's population in a couple generations of disease/war/starvation. The black plague wiped out 30-60% of the European population. It's quite possible the world population could be setback 50% just through inadequate preparations or inability to combat a globally spread virus, or make it easier to spread if current systems breakdown during a resource war (or even purposefully permitted to spread by one side in a war).

[jacob]

The plague was followed by an era of incredible growth and technological development as tools were made to replace the dead humans. Not bad, as long as you're one of the survivors, I guess.

Following this, a new continent was also discovered which again allowed humanity the freedom to expand and crystallize a manifest destiny growth paradigm that has lasted several hundred years by now.

After that happened, oil was discovered allowing a substantial increase in agricultural yields.

We'd need something equivalent to the discovery of a new continent or an energy source many times more powerful than the current known ones (fusion or better) to do this again. If we can do this every couple of hundred year forever and ever from now on, the Cornucopians will be right. If we fail once, Malthus will be right.

[Ian]

This guy reminds me of John Michael Greer. Greer takes many of the ideas we're discussing here further, so I recommend him if anyone is interested in reading more on the subject. I'm not endorsing him beyond "interesting" but I do wish his brand of thought was given more space in modern discourse.

I think there is compelling evidence of a downward trend, but there are enough other trends that I don't pretend to be able to predict what will happen. It's possible that fusion will finally stop being perpetually twenty years away and flood the planet with nearly free energy. Or aliens might bulldoze earth to build a hyperspace bypass.

It would take something truly revolutionary to be able to overcome the limits we're facing. The energy surplus created by manufacturing oil dwarfs every other available source of energy, especially when you consider that many alternative energy sources are in effect subsidized by cheap oil (the manufacture of solar panels isn't accomplished purely with solar energy, for example). Another source doesn't just need to be net energy positive, it needs to be so overwhelmingly positive that it can keep up with rapidly rising consumption.

[Sclass]

The most likely "solution" is horrible to contemplate, but will probably involve losing a large percentage of the earth's population in a couple generations of disease/war/starvation. The black plague wiped out 30-60% of the European population. It's quite possible the world population could be setback 50% just through inadequate preparations or inability to combat a globally spread virus, or make it easier to spread if current systems breakdown during a resource war (or even purposefully permitted to spread by one side in a war).

This is what I worry about. I agree that there is the possibility that we will grow exponentially till our population crashes violently like bacteria in a petri dish.

More disturbing than energy or materials to me is money. As I keep running my compounding calculations I can see the two worlds of finance, linear and exponential, moving apart at an increasing rate...an exponential rate for you mathematicians. I guess it is okay though because we can print (with digital money we don't even need that) more unlike oil or worse, fresh air, soil and water.

[Hankaroundtheworld]

My 2 cents on this topic (and thanks for the many good comments and articles, some good minds here )

My recipe:

(1) Buy time
We need to reduce the destructive parts of our Growth-based Consumer lifestyle Economy. This will buy us time to find new ways. ERE awareness and broader programs to guide people to better lifestyles and enforce Companies to produce more efficiently, is a necessity to this.

(2) Innovate / Energy domain
We need to use more clean Energy, and at the moment, the Sun is the only limitless green power source (at least, limitless from a human timeline perspective). Focus all the human effort on bringing costs to zero for exploiting Sun power. I agree with "Devil's Advocate" positive view, we can make another quantum leap, if we focus knowledge and resources to it.

(3) Control Abundance
Once we have close-to-zero green Energy, we can create enough fresh water, and once we have that, we can make deserts into fertile land, etc… It still means that we need to be careful with using Earth materials, but with limitless Energy, we can become ultra-efficient.

I like to keep a positive view on this, otherwise you get easily depressed by these articles, even though there is a lot of truth in it.

[jacob]

WRT quantum leaps, that's what I was trying to say above (not very well, though). They aren't that easy. The physics community has tried _unsuccessfully_ for 50 years to make a quantum leap to go beyond what was known in the beginning of the 1960s. It's not a question of writing checks for brains---no matter how much money you give anyone you're not going to make them any more intelligent. A LOT of money has gone towards this no-result effort. There's clearly something missing and the state of physics is similar to that of the late 19th/early 20th century. We can explain almost everything we know BUT there are some things that are clearly wrong/missing. Fifty years and going and no progress beyond filling in details.

I'm not saying that nothing will ever come about, but 50 years is a long time compared to the rate that population pressure adds to the problems. There are 4 billion extra people today. Clearly all those young minds that were added didn't help solve the problem.

[Chad]

While, I think humans as a whole are ridiculously stupid, my outlook remains rather positive. We do seem to fight our way through that stupidity most of the time. Because of this, I do think we will achieve some of what the Kurzweil's (Dragline's link being one of them) of the world predict and I do think it will be enough to save the human race and allow us to grow (of course, other species may be screwed).

Of course, that doesn't mean I should be stupid and completely rely on the big tech leaps. Thus, ERE, which allows us to take advantage of growth by having capital and gives us a better safety net if the gods get angry, again.

[oldbeyond]

As a species we are fond of narratives, prone to self-aggrandizement and quite lacking in perspective. Worldwide, industrial civilization is overwhelmingly fueled by concentrated, fossilized carbon, whether in the form of oil, coal or natural gas. If you look at human energy usage over time, it is quite stable for millennia, and then it rises dramatically, to say the least, as industrialization gets underway. Sure, we've managed to utilize a few different forms of highly concentrated, fossilized carbon. I'm not saying that the the combustion engine or the gas turbine weren't great achievements. They obviously required quite a bit of ingenuity and skill to invent and implement, but the concepts involved are very similar.

Humanity(or, at least the industrialized world) is a bit like someone who's been unemployed for the last 30 years, but who this week and last won 10 grand in two different lotteries. Instead of being humble, he then boasts of his ingenuity in picking numbers, and assures everyone around him that another windfall is sure to arrive next week, for how could it not? His spending the money on quickly depreciating junk, and even acquiring substantial liabilities, is defended as prudent given the new surplus. Noblesse oblige.

[Sclass]

I see what you guys are getting at. A great revolution in energy may be an issue of luck. Like penicillin. Things like that are not engineered but rather accidental in nature.

The steam engine came as a series of linked inventions. Computers alike.

I'd hate to admit that something is missing in the state of physics that is preventing the discovery of the next energy revolution. But it may be we are going after the problem with the wrong tools.

I find it odd that some great discoveries like calculus are on the tips of several peoples' tongues simultaneously. But new energy research (I know little about this and wring my hands for the dream team as they search) reminds me of a lot of technologies like machine vision that are dying for a new paradigm. The revolution will come when we don't try to use more of or more complex versions of the existing tech to eke out more performance. (machine vision is my pet peeve because I was once forced to work on an image processing machine to mimic human vision which lead me to believe I could contribute nothing to a revolution there. My hammer and nail {digital logic}were not the right tool. We needed a neurobiologist).

This is probably why putting more checks in front of more physicists (no offense to physicists, I used to be one) may not get us to the next level. Or maybe we will get funds to that visionary one...

Luck is a big player on this one. Scary counting on luck eh?