The Essential Exponential

Galileo was a lad who had a powerful talent for thinking outside the box.  He was capable of believing what he saw with his own eyes, and rejecting what society told him to believe, if it was nonsense.  With his telescope, he could clearly perceive that the sun did not rotate around the Earth.  He was alone in comprehending the truth, whilst the rest of society was completely wrong — not fun!

Later, as the nightmare of the Industrial Revolution was picking up steam, the mindset of the elite went absolutely manic, soaring in vivid utopian hallucinations.  One of those wacky dreamers was the daddy of Thomas Malthus, and dad drove the lad mad.  The lad could think outside the box.  He commenced to write a book, which explained why perpetual growth was impossible (an atrocious heresy!).  For 200 years, the ultra ambitious mob has been tirelessly denouncing the lad who had an amazing ability to understand the obvious.

Since World War II, a growing number of heretics have been preaching about limits, carrying capacity, overshoot, and the dangers of ignoring them — folks like Hubbert, Youngquist, Ehrlich, Hardin, and Catton.  But few are listening.  It’s still a heresy.  “Grow or die” remains the law of the land, and no other ideas disturb our cloudy minds.

Today’s sermon is about Albert Bartlett and his book, The Essential Exponential.  Bartlett was a physics professor who was dumbfounded by the world’s inability to comprehend the dangerous power of exponential growth.  Virtually all high school graduates remain blissfully ignorant about the subject, just like most graduates of Ivy League schools.

You can see a tornado rip a town to smithereens.  But as you bike to work each morning, you cannot see or hear the far more destructive force of exponential growth.  It’s like a thousand invisible hurricanes battering the planet, and pounding the future.

Linear growth is like adding one marble per week to your collection of ten marbles (10, 11, 12…).  The rate of growth is steady.  On a graph, linear growth is a straight line.  Exponential growth occurs when something is increasing at a constantly growing rate, and the rate increases with each cycle — the way compound interest inflates the balance of your savings account.

For example, since 1950, world oil production has been growing exponentially, at about seven percent per year.  At that rate, production doubles every ten years.  Bartlett illustrated the scale of this doubling in the following diagram, showing the volume of oil consumed each decade.  Children born after 1966 “will see the world consume most of its oil during their lifetime.”

 

Population can also grow exponentially.  In 1986, the world population grew 1.7 percent, a rate that would double our numbers in 41 years.  In 1999, growth had slowed to 1.3 percent, doubling in 53 years — 80 million people were added in 1999.

Industrial society has been growing like crazy for 200 years.  This was made possible by resources that were once so abundant that they seemed infinite.  During the growth surge, few enterprises ran into limits that could not be worked around.  This encouraged a mindset that paid little or no attention to limits.  Nothing was impossible.  Nothing!

Leap to full alert whenever you encounter a statement that begins with “At the current rate of consumption….”  Bartlett saw an article claiming that, at the current rate of consumption, U.S. coal would last 500 years.  While statements like this may technically be correct, they are meaningless when consumption is growing at an exponential rate.  He calculated that, at the actual growing rate of consumption, coal would last 46 years — which is far more meaningful information.

In 1956, Shell Oil geophysicist M. King Hubbert analyzed the trends in oil discoveries and production, and predicted that U.S. petroleum production would peak between 1966 and 1971.  Experts called him a dolt.  In fact, the peak occurred in 1970.  People who understand numbers, like Hubbert and Bartlett, possess powerful magic.

When you understand the affects of exponential growth on finite nonrenewable resources, reality becomes spooky.  Hubbert produced the following chart to illustrate the era of fossil energy extraction on a 10,000-year timeline.  The surge lasts about three centuries, and what follows is sure to be exciting and memorable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Population growth is not sustainable,” Bartlett insisted.  “Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted, or advanced by having larger populations at the local, state, national, or global level?”  The worst population deviant was the U.S., because our society consumes resources at an extreme rate.

Sustainable growth is an oxymoron.  Bartlett carefully explained the original meaning of sustainability — a way of life that must remain stable for millennia.  He presented 18 laws relating to sustainability, and 23 hypotheses.  He devoted a great deal of thought to sustainability, because it’s an incredibly important concept.

Today, genuine sustainability has been rudely pushed aside by the trendy and highly intoxicating silliness of ersatz sustainability, a masterpiece of magical thinking created by shameless marketing hucksters.  Bartlett lamented that the herd is convinced “that the frequent use of the adjective ‘sustainable’ is all that is needed to create a sustainable society.”  He suffered from an amazing ability to understand the obvious.

Bartlett explained the basics of exponential growth in a lecture titled Arithmetic, Population and Energy, which he gave over 1,500 times.  YouTube carries a number of versions.  It’s an illuminating way to spend an hour of your life.  Arithmetic can be fascinating, when the storyteller is a brilliant heretic.

The Essential Exponential is out of print.  Some libraries and booksellers have copies.  Much of the book is available free online, in an updated form.  Some sections present calculus equations for understanding the mechanics (which go way over my head), but many others are good old-fashioned writing, and present important ideas in a manner that’s easy to understand.  I have three favorites to recommend:

Exponential Recollections

Reflections on Sustainability, Population Growth, and the Environment

The Massive Movement to Marginalize the Modern Malthusian Message

Bartlett, Albert A., The Essential Exponential!, Center for Science, Mathematics & Computer Education, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2004.

Limits to Growth

The Club of Rome was formed in 1968.  It included big shots and experts from 25 nations.  Social and environmental challenges had grown beyond the ability of individual countries to manage.  It was time to study the big issues, and develop strategies for dealing with them.  Their research began with the Project on the Predicament of Mankind.

In 1972, Limits to Growth was published, authored by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows.  (Here is a free PDF of the book.)  They developed a computer model that allowed them to tinker with variables like population, food, pollution, and resources, and create possible scenarios for the coming decades.  This allowed them to understand which variables were best for leveraging desired improvements. 

The book concluded that we were on a path to big trouble, but it was not too late to avert disaster.  World leaders did not leap to action, so 20 years later the second edition was published, Beyond the Limits.  It announced that humankind was beyond overshoot, and it was time to slow down.  Despite millions of copies sold, consumers kept consuming, and leaders kept snoozing.  In 2004, the third edition was published, Limits to Growth — The 30-Year Update, the subject of this review.

All three books present two very important ideas.  First, our planet is finite, so economic and population growth cannot continue forever.  There are limits to growth.  Nothing could be more obvious to anyone who has more than two brain cells, but our culture stubbornly refuses to accept this.  It is impossible to ever have enough.  We are hell-bent on perpetual growth, by any means necessary, at any cost.  Sorry, kids!  Even the most prestigious universities on Earth remain hotbeds of the perpetual growth cult, which is the equivalent of the flat Earth cult of centuries past.

Second, humans have moved beyond the limits.  We are currently on a path that cannot continue for more than a generation or two.  Sorry, kids!  Exponential population growth continues, and exponential growth in resource consumption is growing even faster.  Climate is becoming unstable.  Cropland is being destroyed.  Rivers and aquifers are being drained.  Forests are vanishing.  Fossil energy is finite.  And so on.  There are no silver bullet solutions, but there are countless ways to weaken the monster.

Naturally, the perpetual growth cult is yowling and screeching.  They denounce the Limits to Growth research, asserting that the “predictions of the future” were wildly inaccurate, and therefore all of their ideas are pure balderdash.  Of course, those who have actually read the book(s) know that the authors were careful to repeatedly remind readers that the various possible scenarios of the future were not predictions.

So, there are limits to growth, and we are beyond the limits — this begs the question: what next?  The hurricane of predicaments that comprise humankind’s war on the planet is enormously complex.  We have countless options, and the better ones include slowing down, consuming less, fewer kids.  With regard to what next, the book gets fuzzier.

The intended audience is not the billion hungry souls living on less than two dollars a day.  The authors are writing to the educated, wealthy elite — folks who will yowl and screech if anyone makes a move toward their air conditioner, refrigerator, or vehicle.  They cannot wrap their heads around the notion that life can be both pleasant and sustainable, because sustainability implies terrible sacrifice, an unbearable reduction of their precious high-status, high-waste standard of living.

Because this elite audience is jittery and spooked, the discussion becomes more acrobatic and dubious.  For example, “A global transition to a sustainable society is probably possible without reductions in either population or industrial output.”  Not all growth is bad.  Poor folks need some growth so they can escape from poverty, and discover the magic of family planning.

Of the ten scenarios presented in the book, only one results in a sustainable future, which is inhabited by eight billion happy humans.  This scenario includes the highest number of major changes.  In it, “the system brings itself down below its limits, avoids an uncontrolled collapse, maintains its standard of living, and holds itself very close to equilibrium.”

Our predicaments have been accumulating for centuries.  The Agricultural Revolution sharply disturbed our relationship with the family of life, and the Industrial Revolution greatly magnified these imbalances.  Consequently, it’s time for the Sustainability Revolution.  The book mentions three ways of contemplating sustainability.

Most well known is the Brundtland Report, which defines sustainable development as “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”  It fails to point out the huge difference between wants and needs.  Needs are about the basic necessities for survival: food, clothing, and shelter.  Consumers often perceive needs as everything money can buy. 

Another approach is the Herman Daly Rules.  (1) Renewable resources such as fish, soil, and groundwater must be used no faster than the rate at which they regenerate.  (2) Nonrenewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels must be used no faster than renewable substitutes for them can be put into place.  (3) Pollution and wastes must be emitted no faster than natural systems can absorb them, recycle them, or render them harmless.

The Daly Rules are clearer, and they imply backing away from industrial society and traditional agriculture, which is rational and daunting.  His second rule is perplexing.  It’s OK to use energy and minerals to make solar panels, but what would we need electricity for?  Rule two would seem to prohibit using energy and minerals to make computers or refrigerators, because they are not renewable, and they require the existence of a vast and unsustainable industrial society.  Readers are warned that a sustainable society “would be almost unimaginably different from the one in which most people now live.”

The authors favor a third approach to sustainability, the Ecological Footprint model, which compares the impact of human activities to the planet’s carrying capacity.  They calculated that humankind’s current footprint requires an area 1.2 times the Earth — we have exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity by twenty percent, and this is unsustainable.  The footprint is defined as “the total area of productive land and water ecosystems required to produce the resources that the population consumes and assimilate the wastes that the population produces, wherever on Earth that land and water may be located.”  The footprint model is vague and imprecise.

The scenarios in the book are based on measurable variables, like cropland area, industrial output, energy reserves, population, and so on.  They do not include unknowns like war, floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and climate instability. 

A serious weakness in their computer model is the assumptions used to project crop yields.  Nine billion could be fed in 2100 if cropland area was not diminished, if food production doubled worldwide, if degraded land was restored, if erosion did not increase, if irrigation capacity did not diminish, and if there was adequate energy and fertilizer.  These assumptions are impossible to take seriously.  Agriculture is highly unsustainable already.

No book provides the solutions we wish for — a healthy future, with a high standard of living, quickly achieved via easy, painless changes.  Limits to Growth is a classic, and it takes a unique approach to describing our predicaments, and evaluating responses to them.  It’s nourishing brain food, easy to read, and a bit sugarcoated.

Meadows, Donella; Randers, Jorgen; and Meadows, Dennis, Limits to Growth — The 30-Year Update, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2004.