The latest “Museletter,” by a senior fellow and cofounder of the Post Carbon Institute, begins below. At the end are two articles “written for Independent Media Institute on the renewable energy transition.” — MCM

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The final doubling

By Richard Heinberg | Post Carbon Institute

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Herman Daly, the father of ecological economics, who began writing about the absurdity of perpetual economic growth in the 1970s; Herman died on October 28 at age 84.

Politicians and economists talk glowingly about growth. They want our cities and GDP to grow. Jobs, profits, companies, and industries all should grow; if they don’t, there’s something wrong, and we must identify the problem and fix it. Yet few discuss doubling time, even though it’s an essential concept for understanding growth.

Doubling time helps us grasp the physical meaning of growth—which otherwise appears as an innocuous-looking number denoting the annual rate of change. At 1 percent annual growth, any given quantity doubles in about 70 years; at 2 percent growth, in 35 years; at 7 percent, in 10 years, and so on. Just divide 70 by the annual growth rate and you’ll get a good sense of doubling time. (Why 70? It’s approximately the natural logarithm of 2. But you don’t need to know higher math to do useful doubling-time calculations.)

Here’s why failure to think in terms of doubling time gets us into trouble. Most economists seem to believe that a 2 to 3 percent annual rate of growth for economies is healthy and normal. But that implies a doubling time of roughly 25 years. When an economy grows, it uses more physical materials—everything from trees to titanium. Indeed, the global economy has doubled in size in the last quarter-century, and so has total worldwide extraction of materials. Since 1997 we have used over half the non-renewable resources extracted since the origin of humans.

As the economy grows, it also puts out more waste. In the last 25 years, the amount of solid waste produced globally has soared from roughly 3 million tons per day to about 6 million tons per day.

Further, if the economy keeps growing at the recent rate, in the next 25 years we will approximately double the amount of energy and materials we use. And by 50 years from today our energy and materials usage will have doubled again, and will therefore be four times current levels. In a hundred years, we will be using 16 times as much. If this same 2 to 3 percent rate of growth were to persist for a century beyond that, by the year 2222 we’d be using about 250 times the amount of physical resources we do now, and we’d be generating about 250 times as much waste.

Population growth can also be described in terms of doublings. Global human population has doubled three times in the past 200 years, surging from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1927, to 4 billion in 1974, to 8 billion today. Its highest rate of growth was in the 1960s, at over 2 percent per year; that rate is now down to 1.1 percent. If growth continues at the current rate, we’ll have about 18 billion people on Earth by the end of this century.

All of this would be fine if . . . READ MORE . . .