The author makes the assumption that economic growth has to come from an increase in material output, resources consumed etc. when it can very well be the opposite. "Number of atoms in the universe" has nothing to do with anything, and is just used to (incorrectly) turn their subjective argument into a scientific one.
You can reduce emissions and grow the economy, stabilize your population and grow the economy, move from physical goods to digital and grow the economy, reduce number of hours worked and grow the economy. Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.
OP takes a historical view about the actual economy, and where it in real life can go from here. Your argument – a very common one and very influential in today's society – however is purely theoretical. As John O'Neil points out:
"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."
If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.
This apparent decoupling in western nations is an illusion made possible by globalization, where resources are extracted from the global South. When you count in production, no more decoupling can be found.
This is a very important aspect, we really must stop looking at country specific environmental impact (and some other metrics) without its attached outsourced production.
Popular or not, there is a lot of merit to that view. After all a lot of the emissions are driven by manufacturing of goods for export to the West, thus it makes sense for us to take some responsability for them
You must understand that the emissions problem is global : western countries are shrinking their emissions because they are totally outsourcing polluting activities to other countries.
CO2 is totally diffuse in atmosphere and the climate change is global. Outsourcing pollution has no effect on this issue. And the fact is, global CO2 emissions are at an all time high year after year.
87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. The remaining 13 % is the rest of the world, not just the West. So it doesn’t seem like what you’re saying is accurate.
[1] seems to imply it is context dependent. China is shown to be an insourcer of emissions while the trend of many Western countries (except some Nordic ones) is outsourcing emissions.
“Taken as a collective, developed countries are found to be outsourcing emissions to developed economies; however, this is largely due to the U.S. and China”
The relationship between the distance a good travels and the amount of emissions produced by that travel is not linear. Further it's a mistake to underestimate the reduction in emissions that come from productivity.
Emissions aren't the only thing you need to measure - you would also need to factor in resource consumption for manufacturing. The conjecture that the economy can continue growing on virtual goods is an interesting idea, but you can't eat virtual goods and if the economy growing also depends on population growth, something will break at some point.
Note: I'm not entirely convinced economic growth depends on population growth, but historically that has been the case in most countries that haven't exhausted their windfall natural resources like oil and have healthy export markets.
There's a limit to the physical quantity of non-virtual goods you can eat, as well. If you switch from eating a $3 burger to a $100 steak with the same nutritional content, that contributes to economic growth with no change in resource consumption.
There are limits to how far you can take the price of these marginal quality improvements.
At some point you get into side grades and Veblen status goods, which also have limits - their positioning relies on scarcity.
Plus, the $100 steak is more environmentally expensive too, even if lab grown.
A $3 burger is made from mechanically reclaimed scraps with a high level of automation. A $100 burger is made from prime cuts by hand by skilled butchers. It's not inconceivable that the resource consumption is 30x more.
And 2005-2016 saw a sufficient deterioration of conditions for the US public to vote in Donald Trump (!) on a platform of ... there wasn't a lot of agreement on what the platform was, but "the economy is terrible and you're all getting screwed, it must be foreigners ripping us off!" was certainly an element of it.
There are signs that the energy-lite economy growing isn't as useful to people as the old energy-connected one.
Well, it's not the foreigners ripping the US off. It's the US willingly providing the reserve currency without having a high enough percentage of the world GDP to deal with the negative effects.
Having a country offer their own currency as the global reserve currency was stupid to begin with. It's no surprise that it will have to end one day.
The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.
Yes. This is very similar. Lots of commenters here seem to be missing that point. Rather than making a low confidence claim about the immediate future (the economy will crash next year) it's making a more confident claim about the distant future (growth rates are unsustainable over the next hundreds or thousands of years without mind-bending physics).
Yes, definitely. This isn't meant to argue that those limits are anywhere nearby.
The significance of the argument is that once everyone accepts that a seemingly-unstoppable exponential growth trend can be halted by far-off limit A, you can start to have productive discussions about whether it can also be halted by more relevant limits B and C. Sometimes the hard part is just getting past the point that an exponential trend ever need stop for any reason.
As a physicist I find this to be a trite argument. You can easily get to 'finite' simply by arguing that the number of digits required to represent a number cannot exceed the number of atoms in the Universe. That's a ridiculously loose bound, but it's still finite.
The practical question is will our lives be recognizable to someone alive today when we do hit a ceiling? The average person 100 years ago could hardly imagine the way we live. If the limits come in some unimaginable future, what good does it do to worry about it now?
There are plenty of problems that we can foresee in the near to medium term. The finitude of the Earth is not yet an issue.
> The average person 100 years ago could hardly imagine the way we live.
Serendipitously, Karel Capek's "R.U.R.", the book which popularised the concepts both of robots and of androids, was first published in 1921, 100 years ago this year.
I dunno. I think people from 100 years ago could likely imagine our current lifestyle just fine.
I mean, some of them are still alive, even, and many were involved in making our current lifestyle.
It might be because you're a physicist that you find the argument tiring! You already understand and accept the underlying assumptions. I think it's meant to be applied when someone really stands their philosophical ground on exponential growth continuing forever.
We're very far from exceeding the limits of available energy on Earth. Between enormous reserves of carbon (the U.S. has an insane amount of natural gas in proven reserves), nuclear, and solar, we're good for a long time. Of course, I am considering that negative population growth is baked into the world population pyramid, which means that we'll see some slowing of energy demand growth in a couple of decades. I think most people would be very happy with 15-20KWh/day, which is roughly what Americans are used to.
> I think most people would be very happy with 15-20KWh/day
'640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' - Bill Gates (apocryphal, apparently he never said this)
When the Jones' are using their energy-sucking teleporter to travel instantly to work and taking summer vacations to the Moon, when their kitchen is fitted with exotic self-cleaning metamaterials and they tolerate no natural discomfort in their lives, I would think that their neighbors would not be caught dead one step behind them. You can achieve happiness with less - but you can achieve happiness today with much less than your number as well, and most people measure themselves against their neighbors, not some theoretical absolute level of energy usage.
Energy consumption in the developed world tends to increase.
U.S. consumption has been around 22KWh/day/capita for a long time. The rest of the world is much lower. The 22KWh/day/capita includes gasoline and diesel. I don't see Americans wanting to consume 30KWh/day for current uses. Do you?
According to OurWorldInData[0] the number is closer to 220 kWH/capita/day, although it does show the usage as stable or even declining over the last decade.
According to the US Energy Information Administration[1] total energy usage seems to have increased. That particular chart stops at 2009, but this tool[2] using their data shows 1. stable usage since ~2007 and 2. roughly 10% increase since 1995, and a 3-fold increase since the start of the data in 1950. By a long time, did you mean since 2007?
Current growth rates need an exponential increase in resources.
Even if we -after some technological singularity- could expand a sphere of influence that brings everything in the expanding bubble to complete subatomic level of control, this would mean at most sustainable cubic growth (available resources are growing cubically).
So our current situation is exceptional and not steady state and can't continue indefinitely (wasn't going to anyway).
I think his main most valuable point is that the status quo can't - and that stands.
Personally chasing constant growth doesn't sound like what we need to be aiming at anyway.
It would be saner to be engineering some long term stable state that we adjust as soon as new potentials become available.
Like aiming at a fixed upper limit maximum human population on earth with an acceptable minimal standard of life as opposed to letting blind growth search out the natural feedback loops instead.
I think they are talking about "economic" growth rates, which are independent of population growth rates.
This actually makes me lean towards saying that the economist is right, money is arbitrary anyway so if the argument is actually that the economy can increase forever I see no reason that can't happen physically. It's not real, it can't be real in the future and it's barely real now.
Well, if we are going to talk about nominal growth, I'll throw this in.
Our money system does need endless growth just to function properly but it only needs endless nominal growth. If inflation is high enough then real interest rates are negative. No need for real growth.
Numbers going up does not mean increased productivity and there are human (and technological) limits to that, even if you make everyone into work slaves. Which would be completely immoral.
Maybe we are far from exceeding the limits of available energy regarding the inputs of the processes, but our most immediate problem is the output energy, which is released as heath in the environment.
Ok, but CO2 is another output of human activities, can we increase energy expenditure while lowering CO2 emissions? (it’s not a rethoric question, I don’t know the answer)
LED bulbs are a relatively recent invention, thus their manufacture, at industrial scales, was built on developments in manufacturing engineering that didn't exist when the incandescent bulb was developed. So here's a question for you: if we went back and re-tooled incandescent assembly lines for modern processes, would LEDs still beat them?
The answer is yes, by simple costs of communication. Communication is neither free in energy, nor instantaneous or faster than light. Fanout limits the speed too.
So essentially at some point the economy becomes unmanageable and unstable by pure lag. Earlier than that, by human reaction time and decision failures.
HFT is already riding on speed of light distance differences. If you grow the economy even more (in number of actors), the costs become exponentially higher.
And if you're talking real economy, then we're talking actual real resources which are even more finite and scarce than electricity and time lag.
I'm sorry to put it so crudely, but this doesn't make any sense.
It does not cost more in 'communication' to convey a better idea.
Moreover, communications cost is marginal, so even in an very theoretical scenario in which 'more economic activity requires more communication' - it's not applicable.
"And if you're talking real economy, then we're talking actual real resources which are even more finite and scarce "
Again this is completely false.
Education, Entertainment, Legal Services, Financial Services, R&D - i.e. 'Services' are the 'Real Economy'.
The 'Value Add' provided by applied intelligence is considerably greater than the raw, natural resources economy.
> Maybe we figure out how to control simply and cheaply store CO2 in pellets at the bottom of the ocean. Climate changed solved.
Well… yes, maybe we’ll figure out. But I hope you understand that’s a risky bet ? Climate change CAN be stopped rapidly. But it can’t be reversed (on centuries scale). So each catastrophe frequency increase, each heat record, each impact of the acidification of oceans that happen year after years is here to stay for centuries, at least.
I sincerely hope your CO2 pellets are for today, because if they are not, we will need another plan. And the only working one we have as of today is to stop burning fossil fuels.
> The issue is does increasing economic output, require increasing energy use? The answer is no.
The article addresses that by arguing that it would imply energy became arbitrarily cheap, while being scarce and finite. That means someone could buy the whole supply and wipe out their competitors. That contradicts it being arbitrarily cheap, so energy would be a limiting factor.
Which is a silly argument. There a lots of essential raw materials that have a market size of a few billion or less per year. Bezos could theoretically buy the entire years supply and cripple the economy.
For example, let's choose something expensive sounding -- platinum. 170 tons per year of production, at $30 million per ton. $5B will let you corner the market for the year. Yet it doesn't happen, for a wide variety of reasons.
For the analogy to work with energy and still be true to the physicist's argument, we would also have to imagine that all exchange of goods and services requires new platinum -- and that there's a hard physical limit on the platinum mining rate.
Perhaps a world where platinum jewelry is all that is bought and sold. Jewelers improve in skill and the jewelrt becomes ever more intricate and elaborate, such that its value grows ever higher than the raw platinum it's made from.
In such a world, there might be no limit on the jeweler's craft, but could the price of platinum really become arbitrarily small? As time goes on, first the world's greatest jeweler could afford the whole supply, but then even a second rate jeweler, and then eventually anybody could perhaps afford to buy all the raw platinum.
A: Platinum is an example, there are hundreds of other such resources.
B: Platinum is much easier to corner than energy would be, since platinum mining is limited to a very few number of active minutes. Energy production is quite distributed.
The limit is very high. Every kW generated by hydrogen fusion is a kW that, by the laws of physics, will eventually be dissipated. Enough exponential growth fusing hydrogen on this planet and the earth would quite literally become a mini sun. That is the theoretical limit referred too.
Space is cold and big. We can theoretically sink near infinite heat there (generally in the form of radiation of wavelengths not readily absorbed by anything in the atmosphere).
Yes, but only in proportion to the fourth power of the Earth's surface temperature, which we would want to limit. (The argument is predicated on not becoming multiplanetary).
Fourth power of temperature of heat spreader. It can be isolated from earth's atmosphere and still export heat. Of course, it's not enough if we want to limit ourselves to "IR wavelengths to which atmosphere is transparent".
That's a good point, although in the context of exponential growth, it's a small difference that just buys a few more centuries. The heat spreader would either have to grow exponentially in area radiating into space, or grow exponentially in temperature; at some point it will hit geographic or material limits, or else eventually end up bathing the Earth in gamma rays.
“When the materials point at the sky, the infrared rays can pass straight through the atmosphere and into space. That effectively links the materials to an inexhaustible heat sink, into which they can keep dumping heat without it coming back.”
I agree with jbay808 on the impracticality, but note that in context, I am responding to the question of whether it would be harder to remove the heat than to generate it. Both obviously quickly become impracticable if we expect exponential increases.
Economic growth due to technological advance is completely swamped by economic growth due to increased throughput.
It is the throughput, the increase in entropy, that is at issue. Almost all economic growth comes from increasing the flows from sources to sinks. E.g. Turning coal into CO2
I would suggest that the increased throughput comes from the technological advance. We're getting ever more efficient at converting energy and raw materials into stuff we want. That means it's cheaper. That means we do it more.
And yeah, "the economy" includes services as well as goods. But services are performed by humans, and humans need to eat and live in houses and wear clothes etc.
For now. The sink analogy does not quite work, they're closer to empty containers that you fill with gas, which get harder to fill above certain pressure and can even explode.
Right, I don't get what atoms have to do with it at all. Today, I can buy an iPhone for $1000 that's a phone, camera, encyclopedia, game console and more and more. Just 30 years ago this would have required a lot more atoms (including energy input, I suspect) and a lot more money.
I’m guessing here but it seems to me the idea is that each atom can hold a finite amount of information and information storage requires energy. An economy requires information and storage of information (not necessarily permanently for each transaction). So it seems to me that the ‘economy’ is limited in size by being proportional to the number of atoms we’ll be able to have access to.
Consider Jevon's Paradox. Yes, we're more efficient at turning materials into products, but that just means we do it more, and the net consumption goes up. Did you replace your camera, encyclopedia, game console etc every few years, 30 years ago? Do you think we're mining less?
Replace atoms with bits of quantum information and you'll get a more or less equivalent upper limit. Even if your economy is 100% information based, you still need to store/transmit that information.
If a bit of data could be stored in a single hydrogen atom, after 1000 years of 1.03 growth 1e9 kg of hydrogen would be required (starting from 100 zetabytes today). After 2000 years you're at 1e21 kg, more or less the mass of the moon. For completeness, after 2700 we'd need the mass of the solar system in hydrogen atoms.
I agree with the article that there is a fundamental limit to growth. If I had to guess, the first limit will be the number of humans on the planet, followed by the black body radiation rate of the earth needed to stop our gizmos from overheating.
>Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.
The economy ultimately comes from material goods. The digital economy is only a facade built on that substrate. And it's already pushing its limits, which is why everyone, from FAANG companies to the guy selling some digital asset online, is pushing to sell something or another as hard as they can, with all the conviction and integrity of a snake oil salesman.
I agree, and I'm not even clear on what "grow" means. Like, literally increase global GDP? Increase some measure of productivity? Because already there's all sorts of contradictions in our society's "advancement."
Productivity is increasing, but wages are decreasing.
Country net worth is increasing, but happiness is decreasing.
Etc.
When I read these kinds of posts, I think about "stagnate." It feels like an inherently negative word. I know that most people value a constantly improving technology, but as my OP says, technology can "improve" while, say, net worth or GDP "stagnates." Even leaving that to the side, I don't feel like "stagnated" technological advancement is inherently bad. It's just a value many of us hold.
Not to get primitivist, but, humans really were just eating berries and vibing for a really long time. I don't think we should "return to monkey," but if we get to the point where we figure out that we can't really defeat death, it might then become time for society to instead start thinking about living the way a cancer patient with a deadline does: how can we find meaning, knowing the end is inevitable? Sure yeah meaning could be still trying to advance, but given that current modes of technological advancement often involve capitalist exploitation and general misery (which isn't REQUIRED but we seem to be really big fans of it cause we keep doing it), perhaps we could decide to let go and just live happily with "technological stagnation."
You can reduce emissions and grow the economy, stabilize your population and grow the economy, move from physical goods to digital and grow the economy, reduce number of hours worked and grow the economy. Heck a few thousand years in the future we could all wire up our brains directly into hyperspace and still grow at 1% per year.