Future thrills

The world is finite. We can not take more than there is, we can not make another one. When all is gone we have emptyness, and we could disappear.

When we add a fixed percentage – growth –  to what we produce, consume, spend – every year – year after year – we will eventually run out of resources. The growth will be so big that it is no longer possible to go on, there will be so much produce that a stifling will come. At some point enough is enough.

The constant growth paradigm of the world economy  will come to an end at some time – if the world economy grows by 2% a year for a long time – it will double inn 35 years – and then double again in the next 35 years. If it grows by 4% the doubling time will be 17.5 years. After a while all the resources of the world will be spent.

The present world population of about 6.8 billion is now growing at a rate of 1.14 % per year, the doubling time – i.e. the time it takes to double the population to a population of 13.6 – will be  61.4 years, in another 61.4 years the population will be 27.2 billion. If this continues to about year 2185 the world population will be 54 billion – which is a huge number of people all of which need food and a place to stay, a job. After another dobling  - in year 2246 we will have 108 billion people here.

Oil consumption has been growing by about 7% for some time, i. e. doubling every 10 years. This is about to stop as oil production is peaking, and unless huge new fields are found we are heading for a change – this growth is not sustainable.

The growth in personal consumption in the rich world is not sustainable either, it is about 20 times higher than the per capita consumption in many countries. Fairness will come some day.

And if everybody in the world should consume the same amount and the same products as the western world, there just is not enough to go round. A change is coming – perforce.

An easy to understand example of the exponential function is money: If you earn interest of 4% a year on your money they will double in 17.5 years.

There are about 136 million cars in the US. A little arithmetic says that with the same car density in the rest of the world, there will be 2.7 billion cars on the Earth. This is not going to happen. And fuel for these cars – not a chance.

There is a huge fault showing itself in the way we run our societies – we don’t think about what we do. But surely we understand the exponential function? We are not daft, are we?

It is time to start planning as if we understand. Think man, think. And do.

The first law of sustainability is that we can not have exponential growth in a finite world – we must find the right level. And distribution should be fair and consumption equal.

The transition has already started – and it was inevitable.

See video with Albert Bartlett on YouTube

Wikipedia says: The exponential function describes a relationship where a constant change in the independent variable gives the same proportional change in the dependent variable – e raised to the power of x.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 6:38 pm and is filed under What humans do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.