Limits to Growth

                                              Comments due by  April 7, 2019

The following is from Limits to Growth published by The Club of Rome 47 years ago. This short book was the first computerised model to make projections about many of the issues that have become central matters in Environmental/Ecological Economics. It is interesting to note that although we have been aware of the severity of the possible ecological degradation that we are facing one can argue that we have not done much about it. Why?

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 “I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can only conclude from the Information that Is available to me as Secretary General, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left In which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership Is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.” U THANT, 1969

 The problems U Thant mentions : the arms race, environmental deterioration, the population explosion, and economic stagnation-are often cited as the central, long-term problems of modern man. Many people believe that the future course of human society, perhaps even the survival of human society, depends on the speed and effectiveness with which the world responds to these issues. And yet only a small fraction of the world's population is actively concerned with understanding these problems or seeking their solutions.

Every person in the world faces a series of pressures and problems that require his attention and action. These problems affect him at many different levels. He may spend much of his time trying to find tomorrow's food for himself and his family. He may be concerned about personal power or the power of the nation in which he lives. He may worry about a world war during his lifetime, or a war next week with a rival clan in his neighborhood.  

 The majority of the world's people are concerned with matters that affect only family or friends over a short period of time. Others look farther ahead in time or over a larger area-a city or a nation. Only a very few people have a global perspective that extends far into the future. Fields can be destroyed by an international war. Local officials' plans can be overturned by a national policy. A country's economic development can be thwarted by a lack of world demand for its products. Indeed there is increasing concern today that most personal and national objectives may ultimately be frustrated by long-term, global trends such as those mentioned by U Thant. Are the implications of these global trends actually so threatening that their resolution should take precedence over local, short-term concerns ? Is it true, as U Thant suggested, that there remains less than a decade to bring these trends under control ? If they are not brought under control, what will the consequences be ? What methods does mankind have for solving global problems, and what will be the results and the costs of employing each of them? These are the questions that we have been investigating in the first phase of The Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind.

Every person approaches his problems, wherever they occur on the space-time graph, with the help of models. A model is simply an ordered set of assumptions about a complex system. It is an attempt to understand some aspect of the infinitely varied world by selecting from perceptions and past experience a set of general observations applicable to the problem at hand. A farmer uses a mental model of his land, his assets, market prospects, and past weather conditions to decide which crops to plant each year. A surveyor constructs a physical model-a map-to help in planning a road. An economist uses mathematical models to understand and predict the flow of international trade. Decision-makers at every level unconsciously use mental models to choose among policies that will shape our future world. These mental models are, of necessity, very simple when compared with the reality from which they are abstracted. The human brain, remarkable as it is, can only keep track of a limited number of the complicated, simultaneous interactions that determine the nature of the real world. We, too, have used a model. Ours is a formal, written model of the world.• It constitutes a preliminary attempt to improve our mental models of long-term, global problems by combining the large amount of information that is already in human minds and in written records with the new information-processing tools that mankind's increasing knowledge has produced-the scientific method, systems analysis, and the modern computer. Our world model was built specifically to investigate five major trends of global concern-accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment. These trends are all interconnected in many ways, and their development is measured in decades or centuries, rather than in months or years. With the model we are seeking to understand the causes of these trends, their interrelationships, and their implications as much as one hundred years in the future. The model we have constructed is, like every other model, imperfect, oversimplified, and unfinished. We are well aware of its shortcomings, but we believe that it is the most useful model now available for dealing with problems far out on the space-time graph. To our knowledge it is the only formal model in existence that is truly global in scope, that has a time horizon longer than thirty years, and that includes important variables such as population, food production, and pollution, not as independent entities, but as dynamically interacting elements, as they are in the real world. Since ours is a formal, or mathematical, model it also has two important advantages over mental models. First, every assumption we make is written in a precise form so that it is open to inspection and criticism by all. Second, after the assumptions have been scrutinized, discussed, and revised to agree with our best current knowledge, their implications for the future behavior of the world system can be traced without error by a computer, no matter how complicated they become. We feel that the advantages listed above make this model unique among all mathematical and mental world models available to us today. But there is no reason to be satisfied with it in its present form. We intend to alter, expand, and improve it as our own knowledge and the world data base gradually improve. In spite of the preliminary state of our work, we believe it is important to publish the model and our findings now. Decisions are being made every day, in every part of the world, that will affect the physical, economic, and social conditions of the world system for decades to come. These decisions cannot wait for perfect models and total understanding. They will be made on the basis of some model, mental or written, in any case. We feel that the model described here is already sufficiently developed to be of some use to decision-makers. Furthermore, the basic behavior modes we have already observed in this model appear to be so fundamental and general that we do not expect our broad conclusions to be substantially altered by further revisions.  It is not the purpose of this book to give a complete, scientific description of all the data and mathematical equations included in the world model. Such a description can be found in the final technical report of our project. Rather, in The Limits to Growth we summarize the main features of the model and our findings in a brief, nontechnical way. The emphasis is meant to be not on the equations or the intricacies of the model, but on what it tells us about the world. We have used a computer as a tool to aid our own understanding of the causes and consequences of the accelerating trends that characterize the modern world, but familiarity with computers is by no means necessary to comprehend or to discuss our conclusions. The implications of those accelerating trends raise issues that go far beyond the proper domain of a purely scientific document. They must be debated by a wider community than that of scientists alone. Our purpose here is to open that debate. The following conclusions have emerged from our work so far. We are by no means the first group to have stated them. For the past several decades, people who have looked at the world with a global, long-term perspective have reached similar conclusions. Nevertheless, the vast majority of policymakers seems to be actively pursuing goals that are inconsistent with these results.

Our conclusions are: 1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential. 3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success. These conclusions are so far-reaching and raise so many questions for further study that we are quite frankly overwhelmed by the enormity of the job that must be done. We hope that this book will serve to interest other people, in many fields of study and in many countries of the world, to raise the space and time horizons of their concerns and to join us in understanding and preparing for a period of great transition the transition from growth to global equilibrium.

Stopping CO2 emissions is not enough, they must be sucked out of the atmosphere also.

                                      Comments due  March 30, 2019

Three years ago the world pledged to keep global warming “well below” 2°C hotter than pre-industrial times. Climate scientists and campaigners purred. Politicians patted themselves on the back. Despite the Paris agreement’s ambiguities and some setbacks, including President Donald Trump’s decision to yank America out of the deal, the air of self-congratulation was still on show among those who gathered in Bonn for a follow-up summit.

Yet the most damaging thing about America’s renewed spasm of climate-change rejection may not be the effect on its own emissions, which could turn out to be negligible. It is the cover America has given other countries to avoid acknowledging the problems of the agreement America is abandoning.

The Paris agreement assumes, in effect, that the world will find ways to suck CO₂ out of the air. That is because, in any realistic scenario, emissions cannot be cut fast enough to keep the total stock of greenhouse gases sufficiently small to limit the rise in temperature successfully. But there is barely any public discussion of how to bring about the extra “negative emissions” needed to reduce the stock of CO₂ (and even less about the more radical idea of lowering the temperature by blocking out sunlight). Unless that changes, the promise of limiting the harm of climate change is almost certain to be broken.

Don’t be so positive
Fully 101 of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to chart what lies ahead assume that carbon will be taken out of the air in order for the world to have a good chance of meeting the 2°C target. The total amount of CO₂ to be soaked up by 2100 could be a staggering 810bn tonnes, as much as the world’s economy produces in 20 years at today’s rate . Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed.

They do not. A few power stations and industrial facilities capture CO₂ that would otherwise end up in the air and store it away underground, a practice known as carbon capture and storage. But this long-touted approach to cutting emissions still operates on only a very small scale, dealing with just a few tens of millions of tonnes of CO₂ a year. And such schemes merely lower emissions; they do not reverse them.

What might? One option is to plant more forests (which act as a carbon sink) or to replace the deep-ploughing of fields with shallow tillage (which helps soils absorb and retain more CO₂). Another is to apply carbon capture and storage to biomass-burning power plants, stashing the carbon sucked up by crops or trees burnt as fuel. Fancier ideas exist. Carbon could be seized directly from the air, using chemical filters, and stored. Or minerals could be ground up and sowed over land or sea, accelerating from aeons to years the natural weathering process that binds them to CO₂ to form carbonate rocks.

Whether any of these technologies can do the job in time is unknown. All of them are very expensive and none is proven at scale. Persuading Earth’s swelling population to plant an India’s worth of new trees or crops to produce energy, as the climate simulations require, looks highly improbable. Changing agricultural practices would be cheaper, but scientists doubt that this would suck up enough CO₂ even to offset the greenhouse gases released by farming. Direct air capture and enhanced weathering use less land, but both are costlier. Though renewable energy could profitably generate a fair share of the world’s electricity, nobody knows how to get rich simply by removing greenhouse gases.

When the need is great, the science is nascent and commercial incentives are missing, the task falls to government and private foundations. But they are falling short.

More science would serve as a collective insurance policy against a grave threat. However, this year Britain became just the first country to devote cash to such projects; America is eyeing grants, too, despite Mr Trump. Britain’s one-off £8.6m ($11.3m) is footling. Roughly $15bn a year goes to research into all low-carbon technologies; that pot needs to increase, and more of it should be channelled to extracting carbon.

Another form of climate denial

A big market for CO₂ would provide an extra incentive to mine it from the atmosphere. But its uses are still limited. If regulators forced industries that cannot convert to electricity, such as aviation, to use synthetic fuels rather than fossil ones, demand for the CO₂that is the raw material for those fuels could increase greatly. The industries, though, would resist.

If the market will not provide an incentive, governments could. The case for a proper price on carbon (this paper has favoured a tax) is strong. Its absence is one of the reasons carbon capture and storage has not taken off as a way of reducing emissions from fossil-fuel plants; the kit needed can double the price of electricity. Yet, setting a price high enough to encourage negative emissions would asphyxiate the economy.

Subsidies are another option. Without them, renewables would have taken longer to compete with fossil fuels. But they are wasteful. Germany has lavished $1trn on low-carbon electricity, and even then still depends on fossil fuels for over half its power. Still, governments could offer a reward for every tonne of CO₂ that is extracted and stored. In theory such a bounty should be paid from a fund bankrolled by countries according to their cumulative historical emissions (top comes America followed by Europe, with China rapidly closing the gap). In practice no mechanism exists to get them to cough up.

Indeed, facing the shortcomings of Paris is beyond most governments. Under Mr Trump, America is not prepared to reduce the flow of emissions, let alone the stock. But the problem would not magically be solved even if America returned to the fold. Many rich countries say they are already doing their bit by cutting emissions more steeply than developing countries. In fact, taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not an alternative to belching out less greenhouse gas. It is necessary in its own right. Unless policymakers take negative emissions seriously, the promises of Paris will ring ever more hollow.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "What they don’t tell you"

A Brief Intro to The Kuznets Curve

                                                    Comments due by March 16, 2019

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesized relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. In the early stages of economic growth degradation and pollution increase, but beyond some level of income per capita, which will vary for different indicators, the trend reverses, so that at high income levels economic growth leads to environmental improvement. This implies that the environmental impact indicator is an inverted U-shaped function of income per capita.

An example of an estimated EKC is shown in Figure 1. The EKC is named for Kuznets (1955) who hypothesized that income inequality first rises and then falls as economic development proceeds.

Figure 1. Environmental Kuznets curve for sulfur emissions.  

 If the EKC hypothesis were true, then rather than being a threat to the environment, as claimed by the environmental movement and associated scientists in the past (e.g., Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972), economic growth would be the means to eventual environmental improvement. This change in thinking was already underway in the emerging idea of sustainable economic development promulgated by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) in Our Common Future. The possibility of achieving sustainability without a significant deviation from business as usual was an obviously enticing prospect for many––letting humankind “have our cake and eat it”.

Proponents of the EKC hypothesis argue that

at higher levels of development, structural change towards information-intensive industries and services, coupled with increased environmental awareness, enforcement of environmental regulations, better technology and higher environmental expenditures, result in leveling off and gradual decline of environmental degradation.

It is clear that emissions of many pollutants per unit of output have declined over time in developed countries with increasingly stringent environmental regulations and technical innovations. But the mix of residuals has shifted from sulfur and nitrogen oxides to carbon dioxide and solid waste so that aggregate waste is still high and per capita waste may not have declined.⁹ Economic activity is inevitably environmentally disruptive in some way. Satisfying the material needs of people requires the use and disturbance of energy flows and materials stocks. Therefore, an effort to reduce some environmental impacts may just aggravate other problems.

The evidence shows that the statistical analysis on which the environmental Kuznets curve is based is not robust. There is little evidence for a common inverted U-shaped pathway that countries follow as their income rises. There may be an inverted U-shaped relation between urban ambient concentrations of some pollutants and income though this should be tested with more rigorous time-series or panel data methods. It seems unlikely that the EKC is an adequate model of emissions or concentrations