The limits to growth

For all those that have asked for pics of my boat, I'm afraid you will have to wait till the next post, or maybe the one after. I went to Spain just after my first day on the boat to give a talk and come to the ASPO conference in Barcelona, I won't be back until next week. And on top of that, it looks like I lost my digital camera (yes, I was making photos of my houseboat).

In the meantime, I'd like to show you pictures from my talk: my updated version of the World3 model, the one used in the famous "Limits to growth" book in 1972. My updated version contains data about climate change and peak oil, and has calculations about all the main types of energy, taking EROEI into account.



This is the state of things in a "business as usual" scenario. You can see that industrial output starts dropping catastrophically sometime around 2012. This is because of an energy crisis caused by peak oil and gas.



This is one of the main updates to the model: it calculates what happens with all types of energy, based on EROEI (easier energy gets used sooner). As you can see, people move to coal and nuclear, renewables are never worth it. But in the end, nothing works.



But this has a silver lining: carbon dioxide levels stay relatively low... civilization collapses before we have a massive effect on climate change.



This is what life will be like if my model is right: little stuff, little services and little food.



For those of you that think zen monks are happy, a couple of more news that may change your mind: life expectancy reaches the lows of the beginning of the 20th century, mostly due to high infant mortality (malnutrition is rampant). And the Human Welfare Index, an index normally used to compare different poor countries to estimate if they are poor but happy or just poor and wretched, also falls right down.



Finally, this is what happens to economic growth. It falls like a stone into negative territory, and doesn't recover for a long, long time... Now, I'm not saying the news we have right now mean we are at the top of the cliff and beginning to fall, but they are just the kind of thing I would expect to hear if we were.



And if you think all the above is just because I'm a doomer peaknik, and that we have a lot more oil... Well, this graph shows that you'd better pray that we don't have too much oil. This is what happens when I double oil reserves. Things keep going for a little longer, then climate change starts wreaking havoc with crop yields, and no matter the efforts done, food production stays flat while population keeps growing... until, at one point, everything falls apart, even more catastrophically than the previous graphs. Do you see where industrial output goes? Yep, right to zero. Back to the Middle Ages, no industry at all.

I'm working now on the policies needed to avert disaster - correction, to achieve harsh times as opposed to downright hellish. I'm always the optimist. :)