The diagram expresses the business as usual model of the MIT scientists – economic growth is shown as a growth of industrial production and as a growth in food which allowed the growth of population – however as these increase so too does pollution – while resources decline. by the UNU Office of Communications, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, What to Do When You Suspect We’re Headed for Collapse, Enough Is Enough: A Path to True Prosperity, Dennis Meadows: Limiting Growth to Save the World. It would not be possible for the economy to grow for ever on a finite planet. About 50 years ago a group of economists called Club of Rome argued that non-renewable natural resources such as oil and minerals put a limit to how much economies of the world could grow. I should note that the assumption of a continuously and smoothly increasing marginal cost (disutility) curve is quite optimistic. if it is a developing country then when it was … The focus on the end of growth and Richard’s clear expression thereof and his clarion calls for alternatives. The “ecological catastrophe limit” is represented by a sharp increase to the vertical of the marginal cost curve. It occurred to none of these economists that there might be a Catch 22 of the type described. Economists will note that the logic just employed is familiar in microeconomics — marginal cost equal to marginal benefit defines the optimal size of a microeconomic unit, be it a firm or household. That logic is not usually applied to the macro-economy, however, because the latter is thought to be the Whole rather than a Part. Given our limited understanding of how the ecosystem functions, we cannot be sure that we have correctly sequenced our growth-imposed sacrifices of ecological services from least to most important. The higher machinery, equipment and infrastructure has to be applied to extracting energy because more resources are needed for pollution and waste control, for reducing greenhouse gases, for coping with the depletion of energy minerals, for investing in energy sources like solar or biofuels that give a very low energy return on energy invested and to cope with intermittency. The paper has three main sections. With lithium ion it would cost nearly $12 trillion and with lead acid $8.3 trillion. The cheapest are pumped hydro compressed air but there are few places to put them. Since humanity is almost at that limit (45% of biomass) this means that increasing development of agro energy means displacing other uses – like the capacity of untouched forests to act as carbon sinks, or displacing food growing for fuel and driving up food prices or making fibre crops for textiles scarcer or reducing wood as a building material. The first discusses the ‘limits to growth’ debate of the 1970s, identifying concern with three potential kinds of limits: ecological limits to the physical scale of economic activity, limits to the economic welfare to be derived from growth of economic activity, and social limits to economic growth. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation and begins by reviewing the largely theoretical discussions from the ‘limits to growth’ debate of the 1970s to the advent of sustainable development in the 1980s. Their energy source was fossil fuels – coal fired steam engines began to overtake wind and water mills, sails, wood and the muscles of humans and work animals as the main energy and power sources. It would not have expanded so far without the low interest rates brought about by quantitative easing. (2) the scope for social and behavioural changes or “none technological changes” – changes in institutions like a revival of commons, changes in society like sharing more and making do with less (rationing, resource centres and centres based on the library principle, community agriculture and gardens, mending and repair help, co-housing, public transport infrastructures, and behavioural change). Now a pertinent question has been asked whether economic growth and living standards will continue rising in future or the depletion of non-renewable natural resources will limit it. topic from the ‘limits to growth’ debate of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of the notion of sustainable development in the 1980s. One point should be made – someone asked after my lecture whether it would be possible to institute Keynesian demand creation measures to keep such a society operational. It too would be very expensive in money and grid development and in the bandwith that would be required to have all electrical appliances and items networked and communicating with each other. The notion of economic growth is broader than the notion of economic growth. However what really enabled the industrial revolution to take off was not just that production was being broken down into simplified specialised processes in factories but that this specialisation enabled mechanisation. As the easiest and cheapest to extract coal, oil and natural gas are used up so more energy and money is needed to extract what is left over – resources have to be got from smaller fields found in the Arctic, or in deep sea locations under thousands of metres of rock, or by blasting open unporous rock containing oil or gas with fracking, or by using hot water heated by natural gas to wash oil out of tar sands. Economic growth and development require that energy and other resources be extracted from the environment to manufacture goods, provide services, and create capital. This limitation may come in the form of discontinued FDI, internal instability, or, as I will address in my From 1988 to 1994 he was a senior economist at the World Bank. What are some of the main barriers to economic growth and development?This is a revision presentation covering examples of barriers ti economic growth and development in emerging and developing countries. The message of this book still holds today: The earth’s interlocking resources – the global system of nature in which we all live – probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology. While the finite nature of Earth's resources limits the direction of economic growth, it does not mean that infinite economic growth is impossible. Problem solved. Since a large proportion of total production is being devoted to investment goods to cope with depletion and pollution, less is left over for consumer goods and particularly for discretionary consumer goods – luxuries, the goodies of a consumer society. 4. The natural (renewable) supplies can be regenerated but not if they are overharvested – which requires proper management of the resource. People may simply assume that higher national output and progrowth policies are good for the economy and all groups of people. Second, the timing of new technology is uncertain. The second sees a limitation to China’s growth. the tractors and irrigation pumps or the fermentation process are powered by bioethanol as the energy carrier. Politicians will try to convince you that your job is safe with their plans to stimulate the economy. At worst the catastrophe limit might coincide with and discontinuously determine the economic limit. Economic growth - Economic growth - The role of government: The differences in rates of growth are often attributed to two factors: government and entrepreneurship. During the 17th and 18th centuries the rise of mercantile power, colonialism and a slave economy was associated with the development of the idea that “improvement” meant production growth and was an indicator of a new idea of progress. Do we then endure uneconomic growth while waiting and hoping for the curves to shift? Machines were being applied to production on a greater scale and these machines were powered. Although the relationship between growth and distribution is far from settled. Limits to Economic Growth & Development. It sold ten million copies in over thirty languages and had considerable impact on economic and political thinking and provided an impetus to anti-growth sentiment. There is a limit to how many goods we can enjoy in a given time period, as well as a limit to our stomachs and to the sensory capacity of our nervous systems. Before we can consider whether there are limits to economic growth, we first need to understand what is meant by the term ‘economic growth’. Technical possibilities do exist for energy storage – but for a few minutes or hours locally – not for storing energy from the summer to the winter to cover weeks of cold winter days and nights. In making way for growth, we may ignorantly sacrifice a vital ecosystem service ahead of a trivial one. For the oil and gas companies this means they need higher prices to make fossil fuel extraction profitable but there is then a catch 22. They struggle to explain it. There is currently a fierce debate about whether these problems can be resolved – and there has been since the 1970s – from the very first time that the Limits to Growth book was published. Even with no cost of production, there is a limit to how much we can consume and still enjoy it. The fossil fuel industry itself promotes fracking for shale gas and shale oil. Although more energy is being used at the later date a much higher proportion of the output of the society has to take the form of investment goods – machinery, equipment and infrastructure – with a smaller proportion in the form of final consumer goods. Biofuels are in fact very greedy for land area and labour and this is because of their low net energy. The problem is the same – one of affordability. However, the macroeconomic curve-shifters need to remember three things. What needs to be appreciated here is that there is an upper limit on the percentage of biomass growing on the planet that humanity can use without by being counter-productive and reducing the availability of what is called “net primary production” (NPP). A cubic mile of oil is the amount of oil consumption that global economy is using every year. The good thing about the economic limit is that it would appear to be the first limit encountered. Coal plants that capture and store 90% of their carbon emissions cost nearly two-thirds more than an equivalent coal plant without CCS to produce the same amount of electricity. That’s just the oil – the other energy sources are mainly coal and natural gas with a small amount of biomass, nuclear, hydro electric, geothermal and wind and solar. Such technologies are sometimes called “extreme energy” because their environmental and public health impacts are greater too. Economic Growth and Development. Economic activity also puts wastes and pollution back into the planetary system. It too is a Part, a part of the larger natural economy, the ecosphere, and its growth does inflict opportunity costs on the finite Whole that must be counted. Adopting a steady state economy allows us to avoid being shoved past the economic limit. Debate about the relationship between environmental limits and economic growth has been taking place for several decades. There is a spurious argument that biomass is zero carbon and can be taken without displacing food production and/or displacing existing cultivating communities who are using land that the agro-energy industry needs to get hold of in order to plant up with energy crops. Now let’s turn to why the 1972 Limits to Growth model does describe reasonably well what has happened. Key theoretical underpinnings come from the laws of thermodynamics: first, that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, and second, that some … You have been given the task of writing a report on the current state of economic growth in two different countries. When a Part expands into the finite Whole, it imposes an opportunity cost on other Parts that must shrink to make room for it. There are, of course, technical ways to balance intermittent energy sources like solar and wind – for example with gas fired power stations fired up when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. The benefits of economic growth and development is a widely discussed topic by governments to academia. As production (real GDP) grows, its marginal utility declines, because we satisfy our most important needs first. The net energy is therefore only 6 Gigajoules per hectare. Arguably this is the process that is happening fastest and is likely to have the biggest short term impacts. 2.) The green argument: Resource deppletion and irreversible and fatal pollution of the environment due to growth. Nowadays, although a debate exists most mainstream economists and politicians seem to be barely, or not at all, aware of the issues and take for granted that growth can and should continue. From the diagram we can distinguish three concepts of limits to growth. It could be generated too by hydro power dams as well as by wind and solar. But the macro-economy is not the Whole. It certainly occurs before the futility limit, and likely before the catastrophe limit, although as just noted that is uncertain. All economic development rests upon the substrata of the world’s environment. It has thus made losses and built up debt since 2009. In London, UK, which is a moderately suitable location for solar power, a solar panel produces on average 10 times less energy in December than in June. This is an idea likely to be even less popular than fracking. The “economic limit” is defined by marginal cost equal to marginal benefit and the consequent maximization of net benefit. Since the per capita average consumption of oil for the USA is 24 barrels per person per annum we can say that the average US lifestyle requires 204 “energy slaves” and the average West European lifestyle requires requires 110. Therefore it is very important to estimate the risks of catastrophe and include them as costs counted in the disutility curve, as far as possible. When the Whole itself expands, it is thought to impose no opportunity cost because it displaces nothing, presumably expanding into the void. There has been some improvement but not major breakthroughs. However 20 Gigajoules are needed for the energy input, to power the tractor, the irrigation pumps and so on. So there are technical and engineering options – but are they affordable and are they acceptable? The constraints on development include: Inefficiencies within the micro-economy. Known elements left out of this picture but which would be in a longer presentation would have included: (1) inequality – most of the growth of production and income over 250 years has gone to the richest 10% of the (“developed”) world. In the future rising sea levels will likely flood many areas of land. But there are other problems too – like plastic pollution in the earth’s oceans for example. (From Kozo Mayumi and Mario Giampietro, The Biofuel Delusion 2009 Earthscan ). The Limits to Growth (LTG) is a 1972 report on the exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. Any increase in real GDP is called “economic growth” even if it increases costs faster than benefits. A good question – but it is worth remembering that the choice of 1970 and 2030 were just two notional illustrative dates. The graph from climate scientist Kevin Anderson shows the trend increase in greenhouse gas emissions – and compares it to how greenhouse gas emissions would have to fall to have an outside chance of global temperatures not rising by more than 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial level. In conventional terms, economic growth means either the growth in a nation’s real GDP (an increase in a nation’s output of goods and services) or the physical expansion of the nation’s economy (note: the two are not the same) (see Lawn, 2007a). Economic development is viewed in terms of the long-run well-being of humanity, social stability, environmental sustainability, and just distribution of economic gains, not simply as the growth of GDP. If it does go bankrupt this will in all probability pull down the financial sector too. With NaS a 24 hour power store would cost $40 trillion, cover an area of 923 square miles and weigh 450 million tonnes. I make no apologies for concentrating a talk about growth on the massive growth of the energy system. The cheapest is using energy to pump water up to an elevated reservoir where it can be stored and tapped later as hydro power. How about nuclear power? There is evidence to suggest that, at least in the initial stages of development; growth tends to worsen the distribution of income. We’ve been told that economic growth is essential for human prosperity. The expected technology may not be invented or come on line until after we have passed the economic limit. The nature of the relationship between economic development and the environment has been discussed since the 1960s, yet opinion remains divided. Or 91,250,000 x 2.1kW solar panel every year for 50 years….) Prof. Daly is a recipient of Sweden’s Honorary Right Livelihood Award, the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science, the Leontief Prize, the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic, and the NCSE Lifetime Achievement Award. It’s another techno fix that raises costs – this time of fossil fuel power generation. Unfortunately it seems that we perversely continue to call it economic growth! This variation can extend as far as producing 65 times less energy on a heavy overcast day in December at 10 am than on a sunny day in June at noon. By its “non satiety” postulate neoclassical economics formally denies the concept of the futility limit. Likewise, the marginal disutilitiy inflicted by growth increases, because as the economy expands into the ecosphere we sacrifice our least important ecological services first (to the extent we know them). The two are not mutually exclusive. Take for example depletion of copper ores….humanity extracts 15 million tons of copper a year from ores that are only 0.5% copper, which means there are 3 billion tons of waste ore – even more than the total mass of concrete produced a year globally. Commissioned by the Club of Rome , the findings of the study were first presented at international gatherings in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1971. What the appropriate technological fixes are actually going to be are the subject of competition and debates between coalitions led by different industrial and corporate groups, academics and researchers and their respective PR advisers and lobbyists. This means doing much the same as when I was 64 but with a state pension and tiny private pension as well. (3) the scope for reviving and adapting older technologies that are pre-fossil fuel and combining these with new approaches to ecological design that integrate households and cultivation, and work with nature like permaculture…, In summary, the theorists of 1972 argued that growth would run out as more and more resources would have to be devoted to the work arounds and techno-fixes to deal with depletion and pollution. 6 Gj per hectare is very low. Economist range of views. But gas is depleting and it defeats the goal of a fossil fuel free energy system to have a gas powered – or biomass fired back-up. Thus, economic growth remains a priority, while the correlation of economic problems with social ones should lead to the development of any national economic system, especially when structural crises demonstrate that the limits of the system are about to be reached. Beyond that point it becomes uneconomic growth because it increases costs by more than benefits, making us poorer, not richer. At that time economists declared that the Limits to Growth authors had not understood how markets and technology worked and declared the study discredited. Wind, solar and other renewable energy technologies like wave or tidal power are all technical possibilities but they are all expensive to develop particularly when you also add in the costs of dealing with intermittency – the fact that the sun is only shining part of the time and with varying degrees of intensity and the wind is also variable and in an even less predictable way than solar. That’s exactly what is happening…. 1 Disregard of the Environment. With these largely theoretical arguments in mind, the paper then reviews the numerous empirical studies that, in recent years, have statistically examined the historical relationship between economic growth and a wide range of environmental indicators. For an individual technology to reach 12 hours of capacity, annual production by mass will need to double for lead, triple for lithium, and increase by a factor of 10 or more for cobalt and vanadium. … Prices would rise, more would be produced and less would be demanded. Christmas 2020 last order dates and office arrangements Learn more › Dismiss. The “economic limit” is defined by marginal cost equal to marginal benefit and the consequent maximization of net benefit. According to the World Bank, sustainable development is about people - better lives now and a healthy planet for future generations According to the late David Pearce, sustainable development means that each generation should pass on at least as much "capital" as it inherits, the Pearce approach defines capital in broad terms, to include physical capital (machinery and infrastructure); intellectual capital (knowledge and technology) and environmental capital (which includes quality and the stock of natural r… This is a story where only part of the narrative has been told – partly because the lecture was itself only 40 minutes long. The central role of energy is substantiated by both theory and data. Once humanity is down to 0.1% copper it will be necessary to shift 5 times the amount of waste – with a correspondingly 5 fold increase in the energy bill to do that. The Limits to Growth. To get a sense of the scale of what happened over 250 years we can compare the amount of power that averagely fit human beings can generate in work processes to the amount of power generated each year by fossil fuels. Under fluctuating cloud cover, the output of multi-megawatt PV power plants in the Southwest USA was reported to have variations of roughly 50% in a 30 to 90 second timeframe and around 70% in a timeframe of 5 to 10 minutes. This diagram by Charles Hall (and reproduced in my book Credo) can be thought of as illustrating the idea of the techno-fix transition if it were possible. The first, and most dominant, projects its future on a trajectory determined by recent and past success, which presents little to no limits on future growth and development. Nevertheless doing without when the energy is not there will probably need to be the major part of the response. If prices rise too high this has macro-economic effects. Economist range of views. In 1970 I got a 1st in Economics at Nottingham University – and then in 1974 an M.Phil. The energy is converted through machines which processes raw material into products, it powers transport vehicles of various kinds, it powers communications and information processing devices like the internet, it powers devices to regulate temperatures and other devices in the home that makes domestic labour quicker and more effective – vacuum cleaners, cookers, dishwashers and so on. It the UK it could meet its energy needs most days of the year but on a random basis it would be without electric power for perhaps 65 days a year, according to the authors of Zero Carbon Britain. So the issue of distribution of the fruits of the growth process becomes first important limitation of process of economic growth. Without an appropriate carbon price to incentivise the needed technologies “growth itself would be threatened” – his ultimate nightmare. The Institute is funded by the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and has five research programmes: 1. The Keynesian/Galbraith argument: Is there a sense of growing ad infinitum. If we ask someone to sit on a pedal generator and peddle all day and night they can generate is 3kWh p/d. For example virtually all production processes that use energy generate CO2 and a variety of other greenhouse gases, while wastes like plastic are a serious threat to marine eco-systems. I now live in Nottingham in semi-retirement. Building a world of resilient communities, Ecocide – Kill The Corporation Before It Kills Us: Review, Green Economic Growth is an Article of ‘Faith’ Devoid of Scientific Evidence, The priest, the engineer and the economist, The Conservatives are shrinking the state – to make room for money and privilege, How to Get Off Fossil Fuels Quickly—and Fairly. First, the physically growing macro-economy is still limited by its displacement of the finite ecosphere, and by the entropic nature of its maintenance throughput. What about using electricity when it is available? For Italy to supply 30% of its transport energy requirements with biofuels without fossil fuel inputs would require 94% of its labour supply and around 7 times the agricultural land in Italy under cultivation. This was a core idea in Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations. We could take our time to evaluate new technology rather than letting it blindly push growth that may well be uneconomic. Meanwhile the market has incentivised new technologies of extraction but, as explained, these are trapped in a catch 22 of unaffordability. He holds a B.A. Overview. Ignoring this fact leads many economists to believe that growth in GDP could never be uneconomic. Leaving aside these so called external costs most of the US shale industry in the US has not covered its internal costs. 5 Agricultural development and economic growth Agriculture has been transformed in the past three decades. However action on pollution problems in general and climate change in particular has been blocked by the lobbying and PR power of the fossil fuel companies whose power in the state apparatus of various countries is unparalleled. To explain this we can take an idea from a book by Kozo Mayumi and Mario Giampietro. The pollution and wastes can be absorbed by the planet at a certain scale – but if too much they become toxic and destructive. The pace of development can be slowed down, or even reversed, by various factors affecting the economy. Thus the marginal cost curve might in reality zig-zag up and down discontinuously, making it difficult to separate the catastrophe limit from the third and most important limit, namely the economic limit. Mainstream economists typically concentrate on science, technology and innovation to explain economic growth – but virtually all these new innovations are new ways to use energy and it is the energy of coal, oil and gas that does the work. Did the technological advances of tetraethyl lead and chlorofluorocarbons shift the cost curve down or up? This occurs during the production process itself and, later, when products are thrown away. The technologies of energy delivery evolved too. In the early stages of sustained growth, government has often provided the incentives for entrepreneurship to take hold. economic growth. But what about doing it the other way round – adapting the use of energy to when the wind is blowing and sun is shining. Let’s use another measurement to get a sense of the scale of energy usage in the contemporary world – the cubic mile of oil. ; Imbalances in the structure of the economy. The same trend can be seen in the extraction of energy minerals – oil, natural gas and coal. The other solutions for intermittency are expensive too – overdeveloping the renewable infrastructure so that it has a wide geographical spread with connections so at least the the wind and sun are available from somewhere. Sustainable development is the organizing principle for economic development while simultaneously sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. He co-founded the journal Ecological Economics. Any description of the world is always lacking elements, some known but left out for reasons of time, some not known anyway. 53–70, Jingumae 5-chome,Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-8925, Japan Tel: +81 3 5467 1212Fax: +81 3 3499 2828, Designed and Developed Techno-optimists have ideas about smart grids which turn the fridge off when the electricity is not there/too expensive. Oil 1.06 CMO; Coal 0.81CMO; Natural Gas 0.61CMO; Biomass 0.19CMO; Nuclear 0.15; Hydro Elec 0.17CMO; Geothermal < 0.01CCMO; Wind+PV+solar thermal <0.005CMO (The power point graphic image shows what would be needed to provide a substitute amount of energy equivalent to a CMO. The diagram expresses the business as usual model of the MIT scientists – economic growth is shown as a growth of industrial production and as a growth in food which allowed the growth of population – however as these increase so too does pollution – while resources decline. Later still natural gas became a fuel. Above all energy storage is expensive. Is continued growth and an industrial economy actually desirable and, a separate and different question, is this growth sustainable? Furthermore, this textbook explicitly recognizes the complexity of economic development by linking economic activity to our broader social and natural environments. Typifying the techno optimists are economists like Nicholas Stern whose famous report of 2006 on the economics of climate change was all about how an appropriate carbon price was needed to incentivise the necessary technological changes. The next are sodium sulfur (NaS) and lithium ion. Although there have been many sources of environmental toxicity to water, land and atmosphere the main focus globally has been on emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases and the global climate crisis. Lecture notes of 28th Nov slightly rewritten. Or 32,850 turbines with a 70-100 metre blade span generating 1.65MW every year for 50 years. Where along the horizontal axis it might occur is uncertain. environment, international development and political economy to create a world-leading centre for policy-relevant research and training in climate change and the environment. And night they can generate is 3kWh p/d the Center for the Advancement of the chemical element which stores energy! 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