Parliamentary group warns that global fossil fuels could peak in less than 10 years

British MPs launch landmark report on impending environmental ‘limits’ to economic growth

by Nafeez Ahmed

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowd-funded investigative journalism project for the global commons

A report commissioned on behalf of a cross-party group of British MPs authored by a former UK government advisor, the first of its kind, says that industrial civilisation is currently on track to experience “an eventual collapse of production and living standards” in the next few decades if business-as-usual continues.

The report published by the new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Limits to Growth, which launched in the House of Commons on Tuesday evening, reviews the scientific merits of a controversial 1972 model by a team of MIT scientists, which forecasted a possible collapse of civilisation due to resource depletion.

The report launch at the House of Commons was addressed by Anders Wijkman, co-chair of the Club of Rome, which originally commissioned the MIT study.

At the time, the MIT team’s findings had been widely criticised in the media for being alarmist. To this day, it is often believed that the ‘limits to growth’ forecasts were dramatically wrong.

But the new report by the APPG on Limits to Growth, whose members consist of Conservative, Labour, Green and Scottish National Party members of parliament, reviews the scientific literature and finds that the original model remains surprisingly robust.

Authored by Professor Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey, who was Economics Commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, and former Carbon Brief policy analyst Robin Webster, the report concludes that:

“There is unsettling evidence that society is tracking the ‘standard run’ of the original study — which leads ultimately to collapse. Detailed and recent analyses suggest that production peaks for some key resources may only be decades away.”

The 1972 team used their system dynamics model of the consumption of key planetary resources to explore a range of different scenarios.

As Professor Jackson and Webster explain in the new APPG report:

“In the standard run scenario, natural resources (for example oil, iron and chromium) become harder and harder to obtain. The diversion of more and more capital to extracting them leaves less for investment in industry, leading to industrial decline starting in about 2015. Around 2030, the world population peaks and begins to decrease as the death rate is driven upwards by lack of food and health services.”

Not all the model’s scenarios result in this outcome, but the majority of them “show industrial output declining in the 2020s and population declining in the 2030s. The researchers didn’t put precise dates on their projections. In fact, they deliberately left the timeline somewhat vague.”

Resource decline

The new APPG report flags up two major challenges facing global society: the overconsumption of planetary resources and raw materials, and the breaching of critical ‘planetary boundaries’ triggering irreversible environmental changes.

According to recent peer-reviewed scientific studies reviewed by the APPG’s report, key resources like phosphorous (essential for fertilising soil in agriculture), coal, oil and gas have “either already reached peak production or will do so within the next 50 years.”

The report in particular assesses evidence regarding ‘peak oil’ — the point when oil production hits its maximum possible production, after which it begins to decline. One recent model, the report finds:

“… suggests that overall oil production is in fact peaking already. The combination of declining conventional oil with increasing unconventional oil supplies then results in a ‘plateau’ in supplies to the end of the century, before a decline begins.”

Global fossil fuel production, the model indicated, “is likely to peak in around 2025” — which is less than 10 years away:

“World fossil fuel production is likely to peak in around 2025… largely as a result of Chinese coal production peaking. In short, unconventional oil seems to buy us several more decades before resource depletion starts to bite.”

An important and often misunderstood issue clarified by the report is that the risk of collapse is not because resources are running out, but because the quality of the available resources is declining, while the cost of extracting this lower-quality resource is increasing.

Collapse happens not due to “the absolute exhaustion of resources but from a simple and inevitable decline in resource quality.”

Planetary boundaries

The overconsumption of planetary resources has increasingly led industrial civilisation to disrupt ecological processes regulating land, ocean and atmosphere, which underpin a ‘safe operating space’ for human survival.

Four of these ‘planetary boundaries’ — biodiversity loss, damage to phosphorous and nitrogen cycles, climate change and land use — have already been crossed.

“Humanity has changed the natural environment so profoundly that we may have created a new — and far more unpredictable — geological epoch, according to recent research. The relatively stable environment of the Holocene, an interglacial period that began about 10,000 years ago, has provided the conditions for human societies to develop and thrive. Now, however, the world has entered a new era known as the Anthropocene, where the activities of humans are the dominant influence on the atmosphere and environment.”

The world has just 6 years left to “completely decarbonise the economy” and thereby avoid a rise in global average temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius — beyond which we enter the realm of dangerous climate change.