No more space for economic growth as we know it

Those of us who are old enough will remember how the windscreens of our cars would be covered in insects after a long drive through the countryside. If we travelled overseas, we could visit wilderness that lacked roads and wild animals seemed plentiful. This has changed, as humans expand into every habitat on Earth with an insatiable appetite for resources and energy.

Since 1970, in the decades that make up most of my lifetime, we have lost about 70 percent of wild animal biomass; atmospheric CO2 has risen from 325 to 420 ppm; and the human population has increased from 3.5 to 8.2 billion. Our ecological footprint, the area needed to provide renewable resources and assimilate wastes, is greater than the area available to us on Earth and is increasing.

In 1972, Donella Meadows and a group of fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists used a then-powerful computer to generate a global systems model of human activity. Using decades of global data, and trying alternative scenarios, they reached a simple conclusion: “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

The work was published as the book Limits to Growth, which became a bestseller and was translated into many languages. Though widely dismissed in mainstream economics, subsequent analysis of the past 50 years of global data by independent researchers such as econometrician and sustainability researcher Gaya Herrington has shown the original study is robust.

So why is continuous growth and resource replacement via technological innovation the popular narrative for our future? I would argue that it arises from energy blindness as described by systems thinker Nate Hagens of the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, and the host of podcast The Great Simplification.

Hagens shows that a barrel of oil can do about 4.5 years of human physical work. The equivalent of 85 billion barrels of oil is used per year, so that’s like having 383 billion invisible workers around us providing goods and services. Compared to our forebears 150 years ago, people in rich countries live like royalty and cannot imagine a different world. But fossil energy cannot last forever, and the cost of pollution is high, specifically global heating.

We are also materials-blind. Gone are high-quality ore deposits of metals like copper needed for the digital world. We now crush rock containing less than 0.5 percent copper, and for every kilogram produced we must use more land, energy, water and chemicals to extract it.

For those concerned about climate change, ‘renewable’ energy is seen as the saviour. However, solar and wind energy systems are not renewable and must be periodically rebuilt using a diverse range of metals such as dysprosium for magnets in electronic motors.

They also need concrete, steel and glass, and vast land areas.

Depending on the specific metal, mining geologist at the Geological Survey of Finland Simon Micheaux has shown that replacing the global fossil energy output would require mining at rates of 100 to 10,000 times that of the present day. Natural habitat destruction would be enormous, especially in the Global South. Ironically, the mining would be driven by fossil energy.

Despite all the investment, an energy transition is not taking place. In the terms of energy used, annual growth in coal, oil and gas use far exceeds ‘renewables’. In fact, the fastest-growing new energy form is non-conventional oil extracted from shale rock and tar sands.

Furthermore, we have never had an energy transition in human history. We are using more biomass today than prior to the Industrial Revolution. Energy forms and earth materials are symbiotically related. Oil extraction is one of the biggest users of steel, which requires coal for production. The oil then powers machinery to extract more coal. Solar, wind, nuclear and hydro energy is mostly for electricity production, which is only about 20 percent of global energy use. For decades to come, steel, cement, fertiliser and plastic production at scale will rely on fossil energy. This highlights the fallacy of resource substitution (that we can adapt, by replacing one resource with another) which is central to economic theory.

Even if we could reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to curb global heating, we would still have the interconnected meta-crisis of biodiversity, fish stock, forest, groundwater, arable land and soil loss. None of which can renew at rates faster than we deplete them. This brings us back to the conclusion of Limits to Growth. As explained by William Rees, University of British Columbia ecologist and the developer of the ecological footprint concept, we have overshot the human-carrying capacity of Earth.

The good news is that our economy requiring constant growth to avoid collapse is a social construct and is not based on the biophysical reality. We could find an alternative. It is time for governments, education and communities to have an adult conversation about the future.

It will require a civilisation-level change, but I am sure that other species and marginalised people are ready for that. The way forward will involve a low-energy life where nature not GDP is the goal. We will need to revise our belief that having more children to sustain the global population is a good thing to do and instead prioritise the rights of women and other species.

We had already reached growth limits decades ago but have been buying time by drawing down fossil and living reserves and extracting from faraway lands. I hope there will be more rather than less of nature remaining when we finally act.