July 16, 2016, Damn the Matrix By: Ted Trainer

The "limits to growth" analysis argues that the pursuit of affluent lifestyles and economic growth are behind alarming global problems such as environmental destruction, resource depletion, poverty, conflict and deteriorating cohesion and quality of life in even the richest countries. These levels cannot continue, let alone spread to all the world's people. We must shift to far lower levels of consumption in rich countries.

The counter argument is that the development of better technology will solve the problems, and enable us to go on living affluently in growth economies. Because technology does constantly achieve miraculous breakthroughs, this claim is regarded as plausible and publicity is frequently given to schemes that are claimed could be developed to solve this or that problem.

However there is a weighty case that technical advance will not be able to solve the major global problems we face.

The Simpler Way view says we must change to lifestyles and social systems which do not generate those problems. This could easily be done if we wanted to do it, and it would actually enable a much higher quality of life than most of us have now in consumer society.

But it would involve abandoning the quest for affluent lifestyles and limitless economic growth...so it is not at all likely that this path will be taken.

The 2007 IPCC Report said that if greenhouse gas emissions are to be kept to a "safe" level they must be cut by 50-80% by 2050, and more after that. This means that the average American or Australian would have to emit less than 5% of their present per capita emission rate. Some argue that all emissions should cease well before 2030.

By 2050 the amount of productive land on the planet per capita will be 0.8 ha (assuming we will stop damaging and losing land). The present amount required to give each Australian their lifestyle is 8 ha, 10 times over a sustainable amount, leaving no room for all the world's people ever rising to anywhere near our level.

Australians use about 280 GJ (gigajoules) of energy per capita each year. Are we heading for 500 GJ/person/year by 2050? If all the world's expected 9.7 billion people were to live as we live world energy supply would have to be around 4,500 EJ/year (EJ = 1B GJ)...which is 9 times the present world energy production and consumption.

Almost all resources are scarce and dwindling. Ore grades are falling, and there have been food and water riots. Fisheries and tropical forests are in serious decline. Yet only about one-fifth of the world's people are using most of these; what happens when the rest rise to our levels?

Humans are taking much of the planet's area, and 40% of the biological productivity of the lands. We are taking the habitats that other species need.

Of about 8 billion ha of productive land we have taken, 1.4 billion ha is for cropland, and about 3.5 billion ha for grazing. The number of big fish in the oceans is down to 10% of what it was. We are destroying around 15 million ha of tropical forest every year. And if all 9 billion people expected are going to live as we do now, resource demands would be about 10 times as great as they are now.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that we are now using up resources at a rate that it would take 1.5 planet earths to provide sustainably. If 9.7 billion are to live as we expect to in 2050 we will need more than 20 planet earths to harvest from.

If technology is going to solve our problems, when is it going to start?

If we Australians have 3% annual economic growth to 2050, and by then all 9.7 billion people will have come up to the "living standards" we will have by then, the total amount of economic production in the world each year will be about 20 times as great as it is now.

Most of the resources and ecosystems we draw on to provide consumer lifestyles are deteriorating. The WWF's Footprint index tells us that at present we would need 1.5 planet Earth's to provide the resources we use sustainably. How can we cope with a resource demand that is 20×1.5 = 30 times a currently sustainable level by 2050...and twice as much by 2073 given 3% annual growth?

Huge figures such as these define the magnitude of the problem for technical-fix believers.

We must cut resource use and impacts by a huge multiple...and keep it down there despite endless growth. Now ask the tech-fix believer what precisely he thinks will enable this.

Is it rational for someone to say, "I have a very serious lung disease, but I still smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, because technical advance could come up with a cure for my disease." If you are on a path that is clearly leading to disaster the sensible thing is to get off it.

Does it not make sense to change from the lifestyles and systems that are causing these problems, at least until we can see that we can solve the resulting problems?

Amory Lovins argues that technical advances could cut resource use per unit of GDP considerably, saying we could in effect have 4 times the output with the same impact. By 2050 we should cut ecological impact and resource use in half, but we also increase economic output by 20, then we'd need a factor 40 reduction, not a factor of 4...and resource demand would be twice as high in another 23 years if 3% growth continued.

In looking at the factors limiting technical advances, engineers and economists make the following distinctions.

"Technical potential." This is what the technology could achieve if fully applied with no regard to cost or other problems.

"Economic (or ecological) potential”. For instance it is technically possible for passenger flights to be faster than sound, but it is far too costly. Some estimate that it would be technically possible to harvest 1,400 million ha for biomass energy per year, but when ecologically sensitive regions are taken out some conclude that only be 250 million ha or less would be available for harvest.

Enthusiastic claims about a technical advance typically focus on the gains and not the costs which should be subtracted to give a net value. For instance the energy needed to keep buildings warm can be reduced markedly, but it costs a considerable amount of energy to do this, in the electricity needed to run the air-conditioning and heat pumps, and in the energy embodied in the insulation and triple glazing.

The Green Revolution doubled food yields, but only by introducing crops that required high energy inputs in the form of expensive fertilizers, seeds and irrigation. One result was that large numbers of very poor farmers went out of business because they couldn't afford the inputs.

Similarly, it is possible to solve some water supply problems by desalination, but only by increasing the energy and greenhouse problems.

What is socially/politically possible? It would be technically possible for many people in Sydney to get to work by public transport, but large numbers would not give up the convenience of their cars even if they saved money doing so. A beautiful, tiny, sufficient mud brick house could be built for less than $10,000 -- but most people would not want one.

The Jevons or "rebound” effect is the strong tendency for savings made possible by a technical advance to be spent on consuming more of the thing saved or something else. For instance if we found how to get twice the mileage per liter of petrol many would just drive a lot more, or spend the money saved on buying more of something else.

It should not be assumed that in general rapid, large or continuous technical gains are being routinely made in the relevant fields, especially in crucial areas such as energy efficiency. Ayres (2009) notes that for many decades there have been plateaus for the efficiency of production of electricity and fuels, electric motors, ammonia and iron and steel production. The efficiency of electrical devices in general has actually changed little in a century "...the energy efficiency of transportation probably peaked around 1960”. There is no increase in the overall energy efficiency of the US economy since 1960.

We tend not to hear about areas where technology is not solving problems, or appears to have been completely defeated.

The remarkable fall in the costs of PV panels is largely due to large subsidies, very cheap labor, and the general failure of the Chinese economy to pay ecological costs of production.

The significance of the new battery technology is clouded by the fact that costs would have to fall by perhaps two-thirds before they could be used for grid storage without greatly increasing the cost of power, and it is not likely that there is enough lithium to enable grid level storage of renewable energy.

Some claim that resource demand and ecological impact can be "decoupled” from economic growth in ways will enable the economy to keep growing and "living standards”, incomes and consumption to continue rising without increasing resource use or environmental damage.

The fact that the "energy intensity" (energy per unit of GDP) has declined within a country is often seen as evidence of decoupling, but this is misleading. The large amounts of energy (energy we benefit from) embodied in imports are not taken into account. Also, the same amount of energy produces more when we switch from coal to gas, for example. The gas is of a higher quality because it enables more work per unit. Gas is more easily transported, switched on and off, or converted from one function to another, etc.

In agriculture advance has been a matter of increased energy use. Over the last half century productivity measured in terms of yields per ha or per worker have risen dramatically, but these have been mostly due to even greater increases in the amount of energy being poured into agriculture, on the farm, in the production of machinery, in the transport, pesticide, fertilizer, irrigation, packaging and marketing sectors, and in getting the food from the supermarket to the front door, and then dealing with the waste food and packaging. Less than 2% of the US workforce is now on farms, but agriculture accounts for around 17% of all energy used.

There is undue optimism regarding what pure technical advance can achieve independently from increased energy inputs.

Energy itself is in serious decline, evident in data on EROI ratios. Several decades ago the expenditure of the energy in one barrel of oil could produce 30 barrels of oil, but now the ratio is around 18 and falling. The ratio of petroleum energy discovered to energy required has fallen from 1000/1 in 1919 to 5/1 in 2006. Murphy and others suspect that an industrialized society cannot be maintained on a general energy ratio under about 10.

So when we examine the issue of productivity growth we find little or no support for the general tech-fix faith. It is not the case that technical breakthroughs are constantly enabling significantly more to be produced per unit of inputs. The small improvements in productivity being made seem to be largely due to changes to more energy-intensive ways, and energy itself is exhibiting marked deterioration in productivity.

With minerals, the annual major deposit discovery rate fell from 13 to less than 1 between 1980 and 2008 , while discovery expenditure went from about $1.5 billion a year. to $7 billion a year. Recent petroleum figures are similar; in the last decade or so discovery expenditure more or less trebled but the discovery rate has not increased.

Over recent decades the proportion of rich nation GDP that is made up of "financial” services has risen considerably. The "production” of "financial services" that takes the form of key strokes that move electrons around, much of which is wild speculation: making computer driven micro-second switches in "investments”. These operations deliver massive increases in income to banks and managers, commissions, loans, interest, consultancy fees. These make a big contribution to GDP figures. In one recent year 40% of US corporate profits came from the finance sector. This domain should not be included in estimates of productivity because it misleadingly inflates the numerator in the output/labour ratio.

So when looking at industries that use material and ecological inputs -- the ones that are causing the pressure on resources and ecosystems -- is significant decoupling taking place? Kowalski (2011) reports that between 1960 and 2010 world cereal production increased 250%, but nitrogen fertilizer use in cereal production increased 750%.

The ecomodernists look forward to shifting a large fraction of agriculture off land into intensive systems such as high rise greenhouses and acquaculture, massive use of desalination for water supply, processing lower grade ores, dealing with greatly increased amounts of industrial waste (especially mining waste), and constructing urban infrastructures for billions to live in as they propose shifting people from the land to allow more of it to be returned to nature. If renewable energy sources cannot provide these quantities of energy, their proposals would have to involve very large numbers of fourth generation nuclear reactors.

If 9 billion people were to live on the per capita amount of energy Americans now average, the nuclear generating capacity needed would be around 450 times as great as at present.

The ecomodernist's problem is not just about producing far more metals, it is about producing far more as grades decline, it is not just about producing much more food, it is about producing much more despite the fact that problems to do with water availability, soils, the nitrogen cycle, acidification, and carbon loss are getting worse.

It is a mistake to think that the way to solve our problems is to develop better technology. That will not solve the problems, because they are far too big, and they are being generated by trying to live in ways that generate impossible resource demands.

The solution is to move away from affluent, high energy, centralised, industrialised, globalised etc., systems and standards. Above all it requires a shift from obsession with getting rich, consuming and acquiring property. It requires a willing acceptance of frugality and sufficiency, of being content with what is good enough.

Hundreds of years ago we knew how to produce not just good enough but beautiful food, houses, cathedrals, clothes, concerts, works of art, villages and communities, using little more than hand tools and crafts. Of course we should use modern technologies including computers (if we can keep the satellites up there) where these make sense.

Problems having to do with social breakdown, depression, stress, and falling quality of life will not be solved by better technology, because they derive from faulty social systems and values. Technical advances often make these problems worse, e.g., by increasing the individual's capacity to live independently of others and community, and by enabling machines to cause unemployment.

Massive globally integrated professional and corporate run systems involving centralized control and global regulatory systems will not have a place for billions of poor people. It will enable a few super-smart techies, financiers and CEOs to thrive, making inequality far more savage, and it will set impossible problems for democracy because there will be abundant opportunities for those in the center to secure their own interests.