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It is often stated that exponential growth in the economic sense necessarily requires exponential resource use. But I don't see why. Our use of resources chang

It is often stated that exponential growth in the economic sense necessarily requires exponential resource use. But I don't see why. Our use of resources changes. We used to care about coal production - it is now niche and in no way a choke point. We're on our way off oil, in fact if you believe green transformation maximalists, we may soon have a abundance of energy. Alongside population growth, we had a huge increase in farm yields, so that eg in Europe the use of agricultural land is actually decreasing. In 1890s, IIRC, it was predicted that Paris' growth will inevitably stagnate around 1920s as the capacity to remove horse dung (from carriages etc) will reach a critical point. Turns out we just obsoleted horses instead.

pjerem 1y ago
> We're on our way off oil Last time I checked, oil consumption is still raising year after year except for the covid years. Same for CO2 emissions we entered the era of irreversible natural disasters but we are still emitting more and more tears after years. I may be too optimistic, I can _feel_ the trend will change. But even being optimistic, the data isn’t there to show anything positive and even if we started decreasing oil production / consumption today, we are so late that even the declining trend would have to be pretty strong. I also think (and that’s just an opinion) that making the needed transition requires huge reform of the global economy and that the powerful know it very well. We are not getting fascism return for no reasons.
atoav 1y ago
I did not question that the varying story of how resource use shifted throughout history. As you correctly pointed out these shifts are extremely relevant for accurate projections though. It however changes nothing of the fact that exponential growth in a finite system will eventually run into saturation. If you want to grow your corps revenue by X% each year you will have to sell more. Selling more means making more, making more means using more resources. Now you can reduce the resource use per part with clever designs, different materials or by seeing planned obsolescence as a feature (which will mean customers have to buy a replacement earlier and thus the actual resource use of the product over its lifecycle gets in fact worse). So you optimize and optimize and then you have reached the moment where there is nothing left to remove, but you still need to grow, so you just keep using more resources. Or if you are lucky eventually a new material or design innovation comes around, that again allows you to improve resource use. But your resource use is not going to be zero and you deplete something else on the finite planet. And you need to grow and use more of it each year. If you're lost on a raft in the ocean and first eat the bread and once the bread is gone switch to cookies that does not mean you won't eventually run out of stuff to eat. The solution is to tap into resources that regrow and not use more than is regrowing, but that doesn't jive well with infinite growth. I am an electical engineer and I know pretty well how exponential resource use works in complex systems. If a part of my system would like to exponentially grow its resource use infinitly I'd either consider it defective or use the fact that it can't grow infinitly by bounds I set on purpose.

pjerem 1y ago

> We're on our way off oil Last time I checked, oil consumption is still raising year after year except for the covid years. Same for CO2 emissions we entered the era of irreversible natural disasters but we are still emitting more and more tears after years. I may be too optimistic, I can _feel_ the trend will change. But even being optimistic, the data isn’t there to show anything positive and even if we started decreasing oil production / consumption today, we are so late that even the declining trend would have to be pretty strong. I also think (and that’s just an opinion) that making the needed transition requires huge reform of the global economy and that the powerful know it very well. We are not getting fascism return for no reasons.

atoav 1y ago

I did not question that the varying story of how resource use shifted throughout history. As you correctly pointed out these shifts are extremely relevant for accurate projections though. It however changes nothing of the fact that exponential growth in a finite system will eventually run into saturation. If you want to grow your corps revenue by X% each year you will have to sell more. Selling more means making more, making more means using more resources. Now you can reduce the resource use per part with clever designs, different materials or by seeing planned obsolescence as a feature (which will mean customers have to buy a replacement earlier and thus the actual resource use of the product over its lifecycle gets in fact worse). So you optimize and optimize and then you have reached the moment where there is nothing left to remove, but you still need to grow, so you just keep using more resources. Or if you are lucky eventually a new material or design innovation comes around, that again allows you to improve resource use. But your resource use is not going to be zero and you deplete something else on the finite planet. And you need to grow and use more of it each year. If you're lost on a raft in the ocean and first eat the bread and once the bread is gone switch to cookies that does not mean you won't eventually run out of stuff to eat. The solution is to tap into resources that regrow and not use more than is regrowing, but that doesn't jive well with infinite growth. I am an electical engineer and I know pretty well how exponential resource use works in complex systems. If a part of my system would like to exponentially grow its resource use infinitly I'd either consider it defective or use the fact that it can't grow infinitly by bounds I set on purpose.