**Growth Bad – Topshelf
Unsustainable – Population
Download 0.81 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Increasing population limitations will result in collapse
- Unsustainable – Resources
- Collapse is inevitable—laundry list of reasons
Unsustainable – PopulationGrowth is unsustainable- overpopulation and increased consumptionMeltzer, Steven, and Langley, professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, associate Director at CIC, where he works on development policy and the post-2015 agenda, rector of Policy and Research at Climate Advisers, February 2013 (Joshua, David, Claire, THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE GREAT RECESSION: THE CHALLENGE OF SUSTAINABLE GROWTH , pg 16-17, http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=317112116088088090095116120006096004053017063051087026113098068127097026102127074024053029061030029060000114120126115023013073053061042009079098019126123071020069100059050000007072080068080107022104065079030097089011105065126124074091116029111017081&EXT=pdf&TYPE=2 ) America’s population growth will be confined to its towns and cities as rural areas continue to lose population. By 2050, the U.S. urban population will have grown by more than 100 million (roughly the same size as the entire American population at the beginning of World War I).131 This growth will be driven mainly by first- and second-generation immigrants, as the United States continues to have significantly higher rates of net migration than any other G-20 country. As a result, the country’s cultural makeup will continue to change rapidly, with non-Hispanic whites expected to be a minority of the population before 2050. These demographic changes have the following implications: • Cities will be critical to rates and patterns of economic growth. Urban centers that have high concentrations of educated workers, especially those with scientific and technological skills, will account for a growing share of American GDP.132 Cities that create jobs will thrive and see their populations grow, while the poorest-performing ones will see their populations shrink. This evolutionary dynamic will enhance the ability of the United States to adapt to new economic forces and to make a smoother exit from legacy industrial sectors. • A growing population will consume more. Developed countries with stable populations can expect demand for resources to fall, possibly significantly, if efficiency gains also accelerate. The United States, however, is emphatically not in this group. The U.S. government will be under significant pressure to provide tens of millions more people with high standards of living. Such a large number of additional American consumers will inevitably have a significant impact on the global economy and environment. • Consumptions patterns may shift. Changes in the configuration of American cities and in the preferences of city dwellers could have a pronounced impact on consumption patterns. Will American cities become more densely populated over time and therefore efficient in their use of resources?133 Will the United States’ long love affair with the automobile begin to dwindle with the trend continuing whereby young Americans drive less than previous generations did at the same age?134 And will there be an ongoing dematerialization of the economy as consumers switch from physical goods to virtual services? Increasing population limitations will result in collapseMacKenzie, reporter of the new scientist, 10 January 2012 (Debora, “Boom and Doom: Revisiting Prophecies of Collapse”, http://www.countercurrents.org/mackenzie100112.htm) We already know the future will be different from the standard run in one respect, says Bar-Yam. Although the actual world population up to 2000 has been similar, in the scenario the rate of population growth increases with time – one of the exponential drivers of collapse. Although Limits took account of the fact that birth rates fall as prosperity rises, in reality they have fallen much faster than was expected when the book was written. “It is reasonable to be concerned about resource limitations in fifty years,” Bar-Yam says, “but the population is not even close to growing [the way Limits projected in 1972].” The book itself may be partly responsible. Bar-Yam thinks some of the efforts in the 1970s to cut population growth were at least partly due to Limits. “If it helped do that, it bought us more time, and it’s a very important work in the history of humanity,” he says. Yet World3 still suggests we’ll hit the buffers eventually. The original Limits team put out an updated study using World3 in 2005, which included faster-falling birth rates. Except in the stabilising scenario, World3 still collapsed. Unsustainable – ResourcesResources are decreasing now, soil quality, fossil fuels, metals, and the environment as a whole Jones et al 13 (Aled, Irma Allen, Nick Silver, Catherine Cameron, Candice Howarth & Ben Caldecott, “Resource constraints: sharing a finite world Implications of Limits to Growth for the Actuarial Profession”, 1/17/13, The Actuarial Profession, represents business professionals in the UK, p.4, http://www.actuaries.org.uk/research-and-resources/documents/research-report-resource-constraints-sharing-finite-world-implicati)//WB The evidence for resource constraints is compelling. Particular resources constraints will have direct local impacts (such as water), and could impact globally through supply chains and through second order effects such as increased food prices and instability, while others will have direct global impacts (such as oil). Here we briefly highlight some of the constraints the global economy faces. The accompanying evidence report6 brings together a more detailed review of these resource constraints. For every resource examined the overall trend is one of more expensive extraction and increasing prices. In addition the environmental damage caused by the use of these resources is becoming more expensive – in particular through the impact of increased extreme weather events driven by climate change. Figure 2 is an example of a local resource constraint – namely soil degradation. While agricultural productivity has increased, competition over land is increasingly driven by growing populations, non food crop production, urbanisation, desertification, salination and soil erosion. Land availability and quality will have global consequences through food availability and prices. There is an increasing trend for large scale land purchases globally and average global soil quality is lowering due to a number of factors including over farming and changes in weather patterns. Figure 3 highlights the approximate number of years left for globally traded resources including fossil fuels and metals based on current consumption. The overall trend for all of these resources is increasingly difficult extraction, lower quality ores and higher demand. Therefore, the increases in prices seen over the past decade for these resources is likely to remain and projections for the future would indicate further rises are likely7. If demand for these resources were to increase (as is projected for the majority) then there would be further stress placed on availability. Figure 4 explores environmental loading as another resource constraint. The ability of the environment and the atmosphere to absorb and process society’s waste (whether solid waste, pollution or carbon dioxide emissions) is reducing and key ‘sinks’ are already projected to cause significant impacts on human society over the next century including changes to the nitrogen cycle. While the analysis of planetary boundaries does not directly link to economic risks and includes both local and global issues there is already evidence of the increasing cost of environmental damage (in particular associated with climate change). Growth is unsustainable and causes extinction because of physical demands on space, water, forests, and habitat---tech can’t solve because collapse of ecosystem services is irreversible David Shearman 7, Emeritus professor of medicine at Adelaide University, Secretary of Doctors for the Environment Australia, and an Independent Assessor on the IPCC; and Joseph Wayne Smith, lawyer and philosopher with a research interest in environmentalism, 2007, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, p. 153-156 Hundreds of scientists writing in Millennium Assessment and other scientific reports pronounce that humanity is in peril from environmental damage. If liberal democracy is to survive it will need to offer leadership, resolve, and sacrifice to address the problem. To date there is not a shred of evidence that these will be provided nor could they be delivered by those at the right hand of American power. Some liberal democracies that recognize that global warming is a dire problem are trying but nevertheless failing to have an impact on greenhouse emissions. To arrest climate change, greenhouse reductions of 60 to 80 percent are required during the next few decades. By contrast the Kyoto Protocol prescribes reductions of only a few percent. The magnitude of the problem seems overwhelming, and indeed it is. So much so, it is still denied by many because it cannot be resolved without cataclysmic changes to society. Refuge from necessary change is being sought in technological advances that will allow fossil fuels to be used with impunity, but this ignores the kernel of the issue. If all humanity had the ecological footprint of the average citizen of Australia or the United States, at least another three planets would be needed to support the present population of the world.2 The ecological services of the world cannot be saved under a regime of attrition by growth economies that each year use more land, water, forests, natural resources, and habitat. Technological advances cannot retrieve dead ecological services. The measures required have been discussed and documented for several decades. None of them are revolutionary new ideas. We will discuss the main themes of a number of important issues such as the limits to growth, the separation of corporatism and governance, the control of the issue of credit (i.e., financial reform), legal reform, and the reclaiming of the commons. Each of these issues has been discussed in great depth in the literature, and a multitude of reform movements have been spawned. Unfortunately, given the multitude of these problems and the limited resources and vision of the reformers, each of the issues tends to be treated in isolation. From an ecological perspective, which is a vision seeking wholeness and integration, this is a mistake. These areas of reform are closely interrelated and must be tackled as a coherent whole to bring about change. Banking and financial reform is, for example, closely related to the issue of control and limitation of corporate power, because finance capital is the engine of corporate expansion. The issue of reclaiming the commons and protecting the natural environment from corporate plunder is also intimately connected to the issue of the regulation of corporate power. In turn this is a legal question, and in turn legal structures are highly influenced by political and economic factors. Finally, the issue of whether there are ecological limits to growth underlies all these issues. Only if an ecologically sustainable solution can be given to this totality of problems can we see the beginnings of a hope for reform of liberal democracy. And even then, there still remains a host of cultural and intellectual problems that will need to be solved. The prospects for reform are daunting, but let us now explore what in principle is needed. THE LIMITS TO GR OWTH Our loving marriage to economic growth has to be dissolved. The dollar value of all goods and services made in an economy in one year is expressed as the gross domestic product (GDP). It is a flawed measurement in that it does not measure the true economic and social advance of a society,3 but it is relevant to our discussion here for most of the activities it measures consume energy. Each country aims for economic growth, for every economy needs this for its success in maintaining employment and for the perceived ever-expanding needs of its populace. Politicians salivate about economic growth, it is their testosterone boost. Most would be satisfied with 3 percent per annum and recognize that this means that the size of the economy is 3 percent greater than the previous year. On this basis the size of the economy doubles every 23 years. In 43 years it has quadrupled. Now in 23 years let us suppose that energy needs will also double in order to run this economy. Therefore if greenhouse emissions are to remain at today’s level, then approximately half the energy requirements in 23 years’ time will have to be alternative energy. The burgeoning energy requirements of the developing countries have not yet been included in these considerations. To date, these countries have been reluctant to consider greenhouse reductions saying that they have a right to develop without hindrance, and in any case the developed countries are responsible for most of the present burden of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not difficult to calculate therefore that there is no future for civilization in the present cultural maladaptation to the growth economy. Sustainable economic growth is an oxymoron. These arguments about doubling time apply to all other environmental calculations. Other forms of pollution that arise from the consumer society will also increase proportionally to growth, the human and animal wastes, mercury, the persistent organic pollutants, and so on. And even if some of these are ameliorated, others will arise from the activities of the burgeoning population. Science tells us that we have already exceeded the capacity of the earth to detoxify these. In advocating a no-growth economy it has been shown in many studies that beyond the basic needs of health, nutrition, shelter, and cultural activity, which can be provided with much less income than Westerners presently enjoy, there is little correlation between wealth and happiness or well-being. A no-growth economy4 would supply the essentials for life and happiness. Human and economic activity fuelling the consumer market would be severely curtailed and the resources redeployed to truly sustainable enterprises, basic care and repair of the environment, conservation of energy, and the manufacture of items and systems that support these needs. The standard of living as measured at present (again by flawed criteria) will fall, but there may be no alternative. The fundamental question is how can a transition be made under a liberal democracy that has consumerism and a free market as its lifeblood? Collapse is inevitable—laundry list of reasonsGarcia-Olivares, Physics PhD, and Sole, Spanish National Research Council, Madrid, and PhD specializing in Oceanography, Climatology, and Ecology, 2015 (Antonio and Jordi, “End of growth and the structural instability of capitalism—From capitalism to a Symbiotic Economy,” Futures, Vol. 68, April 2015, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328714001529, IC) As the present crisis shows, zero or slow growth is a serious problem for capitalism since, as noticed by Heinberg (2011), “in a system in which money is created through bank loans, there is never enough money in existence to pay back all debts with interest. The system only continues to function as long as it is growing.” If this growth slows down and no structural change is implemented on the economy the consequence is a destruction of wealth and debt, unemployment, deflation in the short-term and inflation in the long term (except if government spending equilibrate both processes in the short term) (Heinberg, 2011, chap. 2). Is it possible to overcome this situation by means of a new Kondratieff cycle of economic expansion? García-Olivares and Ballabrera-Poy (2014) showed that a massive investment in renewable energy and electrification of the economy would allow for a continued expansion of energy production until 2070, making it possible to start a new cycle of economic expansion. 3.2. Three challenges to growth The expansion would not be indefinite, however, since the economy may enter into a steady state soon after a renewable installation of about 12 TW due to limitations of copper, lithium and nickel minerals (García-Olivares and Ballabrera-Poy, 2014 and García-Olivares et al., 2012). Substitution of aluminum, graphene and high-temperature super-conductors for copper could be tried after that date, but we do not currently know if that can be made at rates high enough to sustain further exponential growth. Converging with this process, another two processes could produce, by themselves, an end to growth even before 2070. The first is a set of internal economic factors which have symptoms of exhaustion, and that leads Ayres (2006) to conclude that growth of the US economy – and potentially other developed economies – may come to an end in the second half of this century, which would have indeed global impact. Essentially, these factors are: decreasing returns of labor specialization; peak in the scale of international trade; monetization of services made by women and farmers is now largely complete in urbanized countries; borrowing from the future to increase consumption in the present seems unable to feed a lasting and sustainable growth; and technological efficiency to convert raw materials and fuels into useful work has slowed down its rate of increase since 1970 and is constrained in the long term by thermodynamic limits. The second process is decreasing returns to scale due to pollution (Kümmel, 1989) and degradation of natural capital (García-Olivares and Ballabrera-Poy, 2014 and Wetzel, 1995). Regarding degradation of “natural capital”, Barnosky et al. (2012) warn that 43% of the global ecosystems are now seriously perturbed and that a perturbation of about 50% of them will probably be a tipping point for a critical shift in the biosphere, with biological ‘surprises’ on global and local scales. The period suggested by Barnosky et al. (2012) for this general crisis of ecosystems (2025–2045) is close to one predicted for the peak (and beginning of decay) of fossil fuels production (2028 ± 8.5) (Leggett & Ball, 2012). All environmental impacts together make likely that the period 2025–2045 may be considered the start of a “period of consequences” with regard to the natural capital degradation and its effects, which will produce decreasing returns to scale in the economic output. Decreasing returns to scale are able to force a steady state in the GDP only with a relative minor decrease of the factor productivities (2%) for every doubling of the GDP (García-Olivares & Ballabrera-Poy, 2014). 3.3. Rising pressures on the public economy and government While the private economy will face an increasingly slower growth by energy and environmental reasons, the pressure of a rising population adds new economic and social threats that will press on the public sectors of developing and developed countries: (i) incapacity to end hunger crises, despite the huge increase in agricultural production, mainly due to the incapacity of market to distribute food equitably, (ii) increased energy consumption in agriculture, (iii) increasing land degradation and, (iv) degradation of freshwater. As stated by Grantham (2012): “The general assumption is that we need to increase food production by 60–100% by 2050 to provide at least a modest amount of calories to all 9 billion people plus to deliver much more meat to the rapidly increasing middle classes of the developing world. It is also widely assumed that at least the lower end of this target will be achieved.” This view seems very optimistic, given that there are too many factors that will make growth in food output increasingly difficult (Grantham, 2012): 1.
2. Due to degradation of freshwater, the crop irrigated worldwide peaked in 1978 (surface irrigated per person was 0.48 Ha), and decreased 10% since then (Pfeiffer, 2006). Water problems are increasing to a point where gains from increased irrigation are being offset by the loss of underground water and salinization of soils. About 125 million Chinese, 175 million Indians and 30% of the US population (Berg, 2011), to mention just three cases, are now fed through the use of declining aquifers. Reviewing other authors, Leng (2009) concludes that annual overpumping of aquifers is 160 × 1012 tonnes, which is equivalent to 160 million tonnes of grain that will not be produced when the pumping have to be stationary, or around 10% of total world grain production, and more importantly, 66% of the world's currently traded grain. There is a solution – desalination. But the only energetically sustainable solution for its high cost seems to be a global deployment of thermo-solar power in the coasts of subtropical deserts (García-Olivares et al., 2012). And this implies to implement the kind of renewable stationary solution that we have discussed in the Introduction. 3.
4.
Finally, increasing oil prices will probably cause high food prices and increasing social instability. In Supplementary Material we show a model to estimate oil price rises as a function of the extracted fraction of its Ultimate Recoverable Resource (URR). Our conclusion is that oil prices may reach $ 325 per barrel at 2050. This estimation is only illustrative of what might happen, because of the uncertainties commented on in Supplementary Material. Bassi, Powers, and Schoenberg (2010), with a system dynamics model predict an oil price of $ 300 by 2050, which is close to our projection.Lutz, Lehr, and Wiebe (2012) project an even faster price rise. Given that the FAO food price index evolves in high correlation with the oil price (Tverberg, 2011) an increase in oil price between 2020 and 2040 of 116% (Supplementary Material) would produce a similar rise of basic food prices. Thus, even if we could produce enough food globally, increasing numbers could not be able to afford the marketed food. The impacts are hitting hardest in the developing world, where fuel price rises make the difference between poverty and extreme vulnerability (Ebenhack and Martinez, 2008 and House of Commons and RESET, 2008) and because they have in many cases a large population to feed. Lagi, Bertrand, and Bar-Yam (2011) have observed a strong correlation between periods where the FAO food index is above $190 (dollars of 2004) and periods of social unrest in Africa and Middle East. These periods will probably increase in number in the future. Food price increases will probably have deep inflationary effects which will increase social instability, enhance poverty in both developing and developed countries, erode real GDP, and increase public spending in mitigation. This latter effect may even erode real GDP since heavy-handed reliance on “demand management” policies can distort market prices, generate major inefficiencies, and destroy production incentives (Anderson, 2014). Heinberg (2011), as well as Morgan (2013), with similar arguments to those used in Sections 3.2 and 3.3, conclude that the end of growth may be a matter of a few decades rather than the 60 years that the optimistic model studied in García-Olivares and Ballabrera-Poy (2014) predicts. Our conclusion is that the end of growth seems highly probable in this century due to three independent causes: Ayres’ internal economic factors; resources (fossil-fuel and metal) limitations; and decreasing returns to scale due to degradation of natural capital. Markets are not able to solve by themselves these three families of problems, which must be considered “externalities” and “market failures”. They will put the capitalist system under increasing pressure. To that, will be added increased pressure on the public sector, and rising social unrest, which will be especially visible in developing countries (House of Commons & RESET, 2008). The next section discusses the probable responses of the economic and social systems to these multiple challenges. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
|