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Exponential growth literally cannot continue indefinitely on a planet with finite land, finite energy reserves, and finite resources. This should be uncontrover

Exponential growth literally cannot continue indefinitely on a planet with finite land, finite energy reserves, and finite resources. This should be uncontroversial. We can disagree about where, when, and how to stop growth. We cannot disagree that it must stop at some point, and that the tyranny of exponential growth means that you will hit this moment frighteningly fast even when you appeared to have plenty of legroom. With a growth rate of even 1.5%, you can be using less than 10% of the resources available to you, and yet you will hit a hard wall at a minimum within 200 years. And even this is a fantasy, as resources, land, and energy are always utilized in decreasing order of ease of access.

yingw787 7y ago
It is controversial, because the assumption of exponential growth is flawed. For one, your model underfits population growth, it's a logistic curve and not a purely exponential one. Wealthier countries on average produce less children than poorer countries, and assuming no global shakeup occurs, most will end up in the crisis like the one Japan is beginning to see with a lot of older people and not enough younger people to support them. We can talk about what happens after that cliff, but how can you have exponential usage in natural resources when the population _doesn't even exist_? Not to mention human ingenuity when people get desperate. WWI / WWII saw Germany produce coffee from acorns, oil from coal, and Fanta from vegetable scraps, ensuring a rise in industrial production during 1944 under arduous circumstances. We don't operate at 100% efficiency and we can most definitely increase that number by double digit, maybe even triple digit percentages. Take meat, a horrible source of energy inefficiency. Lab grown meats, meat substitutes grown from vertical farms, even eating different kinds of meats (cricket powder protein bars aren't bad and have a more or less 1:1 energy input:output ratio) result in increased efficiency savings. This is a matter of economics. Anti-growth simply isn't feasible from a domestic or foreign policy standpoint. There is no way you will convince any significant politician, and by extension his/her voting bloc, that there must be an end to growth. You can't religion or dictator your way out of this either, since it goes against the very essence of human nature.
- stouset 7y ago
  Nothing I said is rooted in a belief that population growth will continue unabated. You yourself asserted that people’s wants are unlimited. That may be true, but people’s wants are never going to override the cold reality of finite supply. Finite supply exists even if population growth declines. Finite supply exists even if population declines. Finite supply exists even if it’s untenable from a policy perspective. The expectation of continued unending exponential growth baked into our economic system will run up against the actual limits of what the Earth is capable of providing. Again, this should not be controversial. Playing games about population growth is simply dodging the fact that even given a population of two humans, any greater-than-one exponent on economic activity will end. The logistic curve exists precisely because of this fact.
deleted 7y ago
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twblalock 7y ago
The carrying capacity of the Earth is not fixed.
- stouset 7y ago
  And? “Not fixed” and “literally infinite” are completely different ballparks.
KhoomeiK 7y ago
There's a whole universe out there. Europe had "finite land" until it got to the point where the demand for new territorial acquisitions became so high that governments financed colonization of 2 whole new continents. Why wouldn't this be the case with space exploration?
- stouset 7y ago
  It’s hard to come up with a succinct reply to highlight how utterly absurd this argument is. From virtually any physics-based perspective, any kind of space travel or space-faring economy outside of very, very near Earth is unavoidably an net-negative venture[1]. Shipping energy from anywhere outside of Earth’s gravity well costs more energy, even at theoretical optimum efficiency, than it has any chance of gaining. It’s not just that it’s difficult, from any meaningful angle it requires us to have completely misunderstood the relevant physics. If your argument relies on us discovering that all of known physics isn’t just off a bit or needing of refinement, but is completely misguided… well, that’s your prerogative I suppose. Even if you hypothesize a space-colonizing human race, that does nothing for the people who are still stuck on Earth with Earth’s finite resources. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/stranded-resources/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/stranded-resources/
crazygringo 7y ago
You're misdefining growth. Growth in no way has to be dependent on physical resources, and in fact isn't. Growth is just as much about increasing efficiency. If you continue to chop down the same amount of sustainable wood year after year, but figure out how to do it at half the price (e.g. because robots), that's 100% growth. Indeed, look at the huge growth in the services industry over the past several decades. That's not using up extra land, energy, etc. Now growth can involve using up more resources, or it can not, or it can be a mix. But the problem you seem to have is with resource consumption, not with economic growth generally.
- stouset 7y ago
  I am emphatically not doing that. Efficiency gains and “services” simply cannot fuel unlimited exponential economic growth, end of story. You can chop your tree for half the energy use tomorrow, but not the next day and the next and the next and the next. And unfortunately, we’re way closer to optimal efficiency for the tasks that we want to accomplish than you may want to believe. There simply aren’t many more 100% efficiency gains to be had anywhere economically meaningful. At the end of the day, our access to energy is finite. And not simply from a perspective of resources. We are literally a few hundred years shy[1] of heating the Earth to uninhabitable levels from a pure thermodynamics perspective (e.g., entirely ignoring global warming from greenhouse gases, and considering Earth as a simple blackbody radiator). If you somehow believe that we can have unlimited economic output from finite energy and finite resources on this planet I’m not sure there’s any point in me continuing to debate an argument rooted in magical thinking. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    > You can chop your tree for half the energy use tomorrow, but not the next day and the next and the next and the next. Why not? If we're talking decades rather than days, a combination of AI and solar power will eventually get us to the point where virtually no human effort is required at all. Economic efficiency has nothing to do with energy efficiency, it's entirely about the efficiency of human inputs. In fact, a significant amount of economic growth comes from learning how to accomplish the same tasks with less energy -- more fuel-efficient cars, lightbulbs, and so on. Energy and thermodynamics have absolutely nothing to do with it. There's no magical thinking here. You're just confused that you think economic growth requires greater energy usage. It doesn't. And I don't know where you've gotten the idea that it does. And your link is misleading -- just because energy production has accompanied economic growth doesn't mean it always will, or that it does in every sector. It just means it's been the pattern so far, because energy is cheap. As soon as energy becomes more expensive, growth consists in using it even more efficiently and renewably.

yingw787 7y ago

It is controversial, because the assumption of exponential growth is flawed. For one, your model underfits population growth, it's a logistic curve and not a purely exponential one. Wealthier countries on average produce less children than poorer countries, and assuming no global shakeup occurs, most will end up in the crisis like the one Japan is beginning to see with a lot of older people and not enough younger people to support them. We can talk about what happens after that cliff, but how can you have exponential usage in natural resources when the population _doesn't even exist_? Not to mention human ingenuity when people get desperate. WWI / WWII saw Germany produce coffee from acorns, oil from coal, and Fanta from vegetable scraps, ensuring a rise in industrial production during 1944 under arduous circumstances. We don't operate at 100% efficiency and we can most definitely increase that number by double digit, maybe even triple digit percentages. Take meat, a horrible source of energy inefficiency. Lab grown meats, meat substitutes grown from vertical farms, even eating different kinds of meats (cricket powder protein bars aren't bad and have a more or less 1:1 energy input:output ratio) result in increased efficiency savings. This is a matter of economics. Anti-growth simply isn't feasible from a domestic or foreign policy standpoint. There is no way you will convince any significant politician, and by extension his/her voting bloc, that there must be an end to growth. You can't religion or dictator your way out of this either, since it goes against the very essence of human nature.

stouset 7y ago
Nothing I said is rooted in a belief that population growth will continue unabated. You yourself asserted that people’s wants are unlimited. That may be true, but people’s wants are never going to override the cold reality of finite supply. Finite supply exists even if population growth declines. Finite supply exists even if population declines. Finite supply exists even if it’s untenable from a policy perspective. The expectation of continued unending exponential growth baked into our economic system will run up against the actual limits of what the Earth is capable of providing. Again, this should not be controversial. Playing games about population growth is simply dodging the fact that even given a population of two humans, any greater-than-one exponent on economic activity will end. The logistic curve exists precisely because of this fact.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

twblalock 7y ago

The carrying capacity of the Earth is not fixed.

stouset 7y ago
And? “Not fixed” and “literally infinite” are completely different ballparks.

KhoomeiK 7y ago

There's a whole universe out there. Europe had "finite land" until it got to the point where the demand for new territorial acquisitions became so high that governments financed colonization of 2 whole new continents. Why wouldn't this be the case with space exploration?

stouset 7y ago
It’s hard to come up with a succinct reply to highlight how utterly absurd this argument is. From virtually any physics-based perspective, any kind of space travel or space-faring economy outside of very, very near Earth is unavoidably an net-negative venture[1]. Shipping energy from anywhere outside of Earth’s gravity well costs more energy, even at theoretical optimum efficiency, than it has any chance of gaining. It’s not just that it’s difficult, from any meaningful angle it requires us to have completely misunderstood the relevant physics. If your argument relies on us discovering that all of known physics isn’t just off a bit or needing of refinement, but is completely misguided… well, that’s your prerogative I suppose. Even if you hypothesize a space-colonizing human race, that does nothing for the people who are still stuck on Earth with Earth’s finite resources. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/stranded-resources/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/stranded-resources/

crazygringo 7y ago

You're misdefining growth. Growth in no way has to be dependent on physical resources, and in fact isn't. Growth is just as much about increasing efficiency. If you continue to chop down the same amount of sustainable wood year after year, but figure out how to do it at half the price (e.g. because robots), that's 100% growth. Indeed, look at the huge growth in the services industry over the past several decades. That's not using up extra land, energy, etc. Now growth can involve using up more resources, or it can not, or it can be a mix. But the problem you seem to have is with resource consumption, not with economic growth generally.

stouset 7y ago
I am emphatically not doing that. Efficiency gains and “services” simply cannot fuel unlimited exponential economic growth, end of story. You can chop your tree for half the energy use tomorrow, but not the next day and the next and the next and the next. And unfortunately, we’re way closer to optimal efficiency for the tasks that we want to accomplish than you may want to believe. There simply aren’t many more 100% efficiency gains to be had anywhere economically meaningful. At the end of the day, our access to energy is finite. And not simply from a perspective of resources. We are literally a few hundred years shy[1] of heating the Earth to uninhabitable levels from a pure thermodynamics perspective (e.g., entirely ignoring global warming from greenhouse gases, and considering Earth as a simple blackbody radiator). If you somehow believe that we can have unlimited economic output from finite energy and finite resources on this planet I’m not sure there’s any point in me continuing to debate an argument rooted in magical thinking. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
- crazygringo 7y ago
  > You can chop your tree for half the energy use tomorrow, but not the next day and the next and the next and the next. Why not? If we're talking decades rather than days, a combination of AI and solar power will eventually get us to the point where virtually no human effort is required at all. Economic efficiency has nothing to do with energy efficiency, it's entirely about the efficiency of human inputs. In fact, a significant amount of economic growth comes from learning how to accomplish the same tasks with less energy -- more fuel-efficient cars, lightbulbs, and so on. Energy and thermodynamics have absolutely nothing to do with it. There's no magical thinking here. You're just confused that you think economic growth requires greater energy usage. It doesn't. And I don't know where you've gotten the idea that it does. And your link is misleading -- just because energy production has accompanied economic growth doesn't mean it always will, or that it does in every sector. It just means it's been the pattern so far, because energy is cheap. As soon as energy becomes more expensive, growth consists in using it even more efficiently and renewably.