Before going further, we must establish a mathematical concept without which it is difficult to appreciate the significance of events we shall face in the 21st century. Few people enjoy math, I know. But it is the language of the universe, and it is better to know the basic notions than to suffer the Law with a capital “L”—the Law of Physics, which is expressed in mathematical form. It is a law one cannot compromise or negotiate with. The Law is cold and pitiless, present always and everywhere. You can respect or ignore a human law, for example, you can run a red light; but you cannot choose to ignore a 100-mph car crash that occurs as a result. Woe unto those who do not know the Law!
In terms of collapse, the mathematical concept you must understand is exponential growth. It is one of the hardest mathematical concepts for the human brain, because we have a tendency to think in lines, according to linear progressions, while an exponential progression is a curve. But you will see that it is an easy concept to understand if only time is taken to explain it.
In the case of linear or arithmetic growth: you add the same new quantity each time. For example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.—that is a linear or arithmetic sequence. Each time the same number—in this case, 1—is added to the previous number; growth is constant. On the other hand, as a percentage, growth diminishes: 100 percent, 50 percent, 33 percent, etc.
Slightly more difficult now—in the case of exponential or geometrical growth: the quantity added each time grows. For example, the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. follows the rule that each number is the double of the preceding value; you multiply by two each time. The quantity you add depends upon the preceding number. It gets larger while the percentage added remains constant, in this case 100 percent. But you can have geometrical growth with any other percentage—50 percent, 20 percent, 10 percent, 1 percent, 0.25 percent—the principle is the same.
To make sure we understand what exponential growth is, let’s take, for example, the growth of a population at 10 percent per year. This means that the population multiplies by 1.1 each year. Thus, for an initial population of 1,000 individuals:
in one year, it grows to 1,100 individuals (1,000 x 1.1);
at the end of two years, it grows to 1,210 (1,000 x 1.1 x 1.1 or 1,000 x 1.12);
at the end of seven years, it has nearly doubled to reach 1948.7 (1,000 x 1.17);
at the end of 100 years, it has been multiplied by 13,780 and reaches 13,780,000 (1,000 x 1.1100).
The general formula is p(n) = p(0) x growthn, where p(0) is the starting population, p(n) is the population after n years, and growth is the given annual percentage growth.
Ok, are you following so far?
Let’s return to the first two number sequences. The linear sequence grows by “1” each time: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Let’s compare it with the exponential series that grows by doubling: 1, 2, 4, 8, etc. We will extend each series out 13 times. Here are the results:
Iteration
Linear series
Exponential Series
1
1
1
2
2
2
3
3
4
4
4
8
5
5
16
6
6
32
7
7
64
8
8
128
9
9
256
10
10
512
11
11
1,024
12
12
2,048
13
13
4,096
A graphic illustration of the first ten iterations gives the following curves:
You see that after a certain time, the exponential progression clearly detaches itself from the linear one. If we prolong the iterations to 13, we get a graph with the following curves:
We see that the exponential progression quickly yields a very different curve from its linear counterpart. At first, the difference is not so great, then it becomes perceptible to the eye, and then, because of its mathematical properties, it seems to explode, and the difference gets ever more immense. Math is cool, isn’t it?
Let’s take a very theoretical but striking example from Chris Matheson’s book The Crash Course. If an investor had put one cent—i.e., one one-hundredth of a dollar—in a bank 2,000 years ago, and this cent earned him 2-percent interest during these 2,000 years . . . well, the difference in the account during the first year would be two hundredths of a cent—0.02 percent x 1 cent. But 2,000 years later, that account would be worth more than 1.5 quadrillion dollars, and that’s 20 times the amount of money in the world today! Math is powerful, isn’t it? If only some Roman, Gallic, Berber, or Germanic ancestor of ours had thought to put a couple Sesterces into a Swiss bank account for us!
So we have demonstrated that the exponential growth of a population quickly advances towards infinity. This is called an exponential explosion. This theoretical evolution is always defeated by reality: no population can grow indefinitely, since its growth is limited by the environment in which it lives. Viruses, for example, reproduce in a population until their hosts die, or develop an immunity, or until the conditions of infection and multiplication are no longer both met. At that moment, the virus dies. Exponential growth is always self-limiting. Nothing grows to infinity—nothing. Not even the reindeer which were left on St. Matthew’s Island.
The first man to point out this problem was Pastor Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). He calculated that if a population grows in an exponential or geometrical fashion, while the resources available undergo linear (or, in any case, limited) growth, the result is that the population outgrows the carrying capacity of its environment. A demographic catastrophe becomes inevitable. For millennia, populations remained more or less stable, or only grew slowly. Then, suddenly, the children who would have died of natural causes started surviving; they grew up and had a bunch of children . . . who themselves survived and, during the last century, contributed to the massive increase of the population. The exponential growth of population, therefore, is a reality that is not only limited by agricultural production, but also by complex phenomena connected to the growing wealth of society and the individual choices this seems to inspire: people tend to have fewer children or prefer not having any at all. In any case, Malthus stated that exponential growth would, sooner or later, outrun the environment’s capacities. That this has not yet happened does not mean that his thesis was illogical or false. His analysis remains structurally valid over the long term. Poor Malthus has been denounced and pilloried because his prediction did not come true. His pessimistic prognostication was soon delayed, since the world just happened to experience a great increase in resources and agricultural yields.
Let us return to our Homo sapiens, running naked in the savannahs and gradually discovering that a sedentary agricultural way of life allows his little tribe to grow more efficiently. It required nearly the whole of human history—slightly over 100,000 years—before world population reached five million (around 10,000 BC). Then it took nearly 12,000 years to reach, around the year 1800, one billion. In the following one hundred years—only one century—this population doubled to two billion. One more century, and we are over seven billion in 2013. Each year there are 90 million more people.
According to the most optimistic predictions—which take account of lowered birth rates in many countries—we will be nine billion in 2050. Why did it require 100,000 years to get to five million, and why does it now only require 40 years to add another three billion? It is because population growth follows an exponential progression.
You will gather that the hockey-stick curve is the result of the mathematical function that represents the exponential growth of the human population. The important thing is to define clearly the graph’s two axe
s. If you only examine one part of the graph, you could almost make the mistake of thinking it is a linear curve. For example, if you only consider human growth in the period 1800-1900, you would see that it took an entire century for the population to double. You wouldn’t notice that it took only five hundred years for it to grow from half-a-billion to a billion, nor that, starting in 1900, the population quintupled in just one century. The key lies in understanding the proper scale. If the planet has enough resources for 100 billion people, going from one billion to seven or even 17 billion is not really a serious matter. But what if the limit is, to take a number at random, 1.5 billion? In fact, it is the rapidity of growth that is impressive. A billion people are being added to the total ever more quickly. If a population of one billion has an average growth rate of 1 percent annually, it will reach two billion in 70 years. If growth continues at that same rate, it will take just 41 more years to reach three billion people, just 29 years to reach four billion, just 22 years to reach five billion, 18 years to reach six billion, and no more than 12 years to reach seven billion. In the world of exponential growth, things move ever faster. Especially toward the end. Are you still following me?
This also means that in the world of exponential growth, awareness of problems only comes very late, and the time for action is short. Often, it comes too late.
The exponential law applies to growth of any kind, including economic growth and the energy consumption that results from it. Between 2000 and 2009, China reported 8 percent annual economic growth. This means that between 2000 and 2009, the Chinese economy doubled, and with it the consumption of energy, minerals, etc. At this rate, it will double again between 2009 and 2018—nine years. This means that if China has 14 nuclear power plants, it will probably need twice as many (28 are being constructed as of 2011, in fact), that if China consumes 10 million barrels of oil each day, it will be consuming 20 million in 2018, or 20 percent of current world production. If a country has a more modest growth rate of 5 percent per annum, its economy will double in 14 years. The same formula works for everything: if crime increases 7 percent per annum, it will double in 10 years, etc.
We will conclude our little math course here, but you must admit that it is an important concept for understanding the problems we will be facing in the coming years. We will soon run into exponential growth again. For now, let us go back to our population of seven billion people.
Can we agree on the following propositions?
The greater a population, the greater the need for food, drinking water, etc.
The greater a population, the greater the need of each individual composing it for education, medical care, housing, transportation, employment, consumer goods and services. . . Thus, the greater the need for economic growth.
In order to support current global population growth, which is 2.8 percent per annum, the world economy must double (i.e., grow by 100 percent) between 2010 and 2035. Then it must double again between 2035 and 2060 (i.e., our current economy must quadruple), and then it must double yet again between 2060 and 2085, and finally double again between 2085 and 2110. At the very least, then, this means expanding the economy by a factor of 16 in a hundred years!
Is this possible?
If the population of the world were living amidst affluence today, it might be possible to imagine that, yes, we still have room to grow. But, as urban theorist Mike Davis shows in his book Planet of Slums, more than half the world’s population today lives in shantytowns and favelas, amid filth and squalor, crime, violence, and corruption. Is this because of unfair sharing of wealth, exodus from the countryside, economic exploitation, geographical or political factors, even plain bad luck ? Sure. But all things being equal, the greater the population, the more problems to solve. It’s as simple as that.
Due to female literacy, birth rates are beginning to slow in almost all countries; but despite this fact, exponential growth will remain with us through sheer inertia at least until 2050. Phew! So we’ll just have to quadruple the world economy! We are entering an unprecedented historical period. People have never been so numerous. Things are going to get extremely difficult.
The difference between ourselves and the reindeer introduced in 1944 to St. Matthew’s Island in the Bering Strait is that we are able to understand the limits of growth, to change our way of life, to reconstruct damaged ecosystems and create a durable economy.
Or are we?
Are we able to see these problems? Can we change our habits in time? A new Anthropocene geological era, you say? It may not last long. Let us examine why.
*
Maurice has run out of luck.
His car broke down, and his wife left with the children for a few days at her parents’. He will have to take public transportation. It has been 20 years since he took the bus or subway in his city. From his suburb, Maurice must get to his workplace. He is employed in a multinational firm. Instead of the 45 minutes it usually takes by car, he discovers that it is much longer today. It’s the waiting for buses (always running late), missed connections, trips in jam-packed rush-hour trains. . . If he finds walking rather refreshing in comparison to sitting in his car stuck in a traffic jam reading his emails on an iPhone, he also really hates being stuffed like a sardine and shaken by that swarming mass of people.
He is dripping with sweat, and the physical contact with so many people leaves him uneasy. He is suddenly afraid of catching something. He didn’t remember there being so many people when he was a student and often took the subway. The makeup of the crowd has greatly changed, too. Whereas in his day, nearly all the people were . . . how to say it . . . “like him” ethnically, now things are different: he is the one in the minority. He has nothing against foreigners, but he suddenly finds that his own city greatly resembles that of countries where he sometimes goes on business. And how many of them! The escalators: full! The buses: full! The subway: full! Finally, he gets to his office, feeling liberated from that strange world. He heaves a sigh of relief . . . but then notices that his wallet has been stolen.
The End of Oil
<
kurt vonnegut
/2006/
<
william l. chambers
researcher
/2010/
<
barack obama
politician
/2011/
Our civilization is sustained by fossil fuels. These are products of the immense power of the Sun, which have accumulated for hundreds of thousands of years. The Sun has gradually transformed biological debris into fossil energy that we now use on a massive scale.
Among these fuels, petroleum (commonly referred to as “oil”) is a substance with extraordinary properties: liquid at room temperature, easy to transport and handle (by tanker, truck, train, or pipeline, etc.), it contains a great amount of energy in relation to its size, and is easily transformable into various useful by-products, such as gasoline, diesel fuel, kerosene, etc., which efficiently power our vehicles, generate electricity, or heat our buildings. Petroleum is not only useful for transportation; it plays a role in the manufacturing of a host of products we use every day: plastics, polymers, pharmaceutical and chemical products, pesticides, computers, glues, paints, road surfacing, car seats, nylon stockings. . . The list is practically endless. Nothing compares with petroleum in terms of its combination of energy, versatility, transportability, and ease of storage.
Look around you: everything you see, everything you are wearing, all that you eat, our whole civilization is based on petroleum. What’s more, it is so inexpensive and easily available that even people at the bottom of the social ladder benefit from it. Inex
pensive, yes, but of great intrinsic value. To prove it, imagine you filled your car tank with a gallon of gas, then drove a few miles before running out, and that you then had to walk back to your starting point or push the car the entire distance you drove with that gallon. How much would you pay for having an extra gallon available to avoid that effort and lost time? A gallon of gas represents hours of manual labor. Now, since it is traded in dollars, and the prices are kept artificially low, petroleum is one of the cheapest liquids in the world, hardly more expensive than bottled water!
Is this going to last much longer?
If the answer is yes, whoopee! We can continue with our current way of life and let it spread to the rest of the planet.
But what if it isn’t?
The International Energy Agency estimates that current deposits are declining at a rate of 6.7 percent per annum. This means that in 10 years, existing deposits will give us only half the petroleum they give us now. So it will be necessary not only to find new deposits to replace that annual loss, but also to satisfy the new demand. Of course, one might try to pump more quickly from the known deposits in order to compensate for the diminution, but this would be like pressing harder on a toothpaste tube to make the paste come out more quickly: it does not change the total amount.
Survive- The Economic Collapse Page 3
