The planet's got 99 problems, but exponential growth isn't one

> when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense?

When asteroid mining is viable perhaps.

> he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world.

... which is why historically Malthusians have been wrong.

A Malthusian bacterium writing at the time before photosynthesis would have concluded that life on Earth was doomed. Chemotrophic bacteria were gradually consuming all the left over high energy compounds from the Earth's formation and eventually this would run out, leading to a population crash and the end of organic life.

Their math would have been correct.

The thing they are leaving out of their models is adaptation and intelligence. Life isn't guaranteed to always find a way, which is why shorter term stagnations and die-offs do occasionally happen, but given time and resources it eventually will. Life will probably keep finding a way until the heat death of the universe.

The bumps in the road are part of the process. In evolution they provide the constraint that stimulates learning through natural selection. In post-evolutionary cognitive intelligence (humans and eventually AI) constraints give rise to signals such as price signals that tell the system that it needs to learn, change, and adapt.

This isn't a justification for total rose colored glasses woo-woo utopianism because as I said bumps in the road do occur. But it shows why simple Malthusian reasoning hasn't historically been accurate and probably will continue to be mostly inaccurate.

Malthusians are like perma-bears that are always calling for a recession in the market. Occasionally they're right, but there's a joke in finance that these are people who have "predicted 54 of the last 3 recessions."

A prediction method that's wrong that often isn't actually worth very much.

> we are moving ever larger quantities of rock for ever-smaller returns --- when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense?

In economics we deal with supply and demand curves. If you price in the emissions, mining will at some point come into equilibrium with demand and continue to supply copper for those essential activities that require it, while forcing alternatives to switch to something else.

For the specific case of copper, aluminum is a close substitute in most practical applications (or CCA composite wires, combining the advantages of both). The world reserves of bauxite seem sufficient for centuries at current rates of extraction. For high end applications like ship or wind turbine use, superconductor motors are becoming a reality.

Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's *genuine* carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt. It has directly accelerated the mass-depletion of countless other finite resources such as water, healthy top soil, micronutrients, and more. The fact that it has allowed humanity to grow so much without consideration for other finite factors has also contributed to several secondary "loans" which have further trapped us in debt. Most notably, humanity's dependence on mono-culture farming which ravages biodiversity, creates super pests, and zaps soil health. You simply cannot feed 8 billion people with organic farming methods and the current energy cost of controlled-climate hydroponics makes it impractical at scale. As you mentioned, all of this growth also contributes to humanity's collective appetite for, well, everything. Plus the HB process is responsible for 1.4% of global emissions, giant oceanic dead-zones caused by runoff, increased acid rain, less overall nutritious foods, and so so much more. It's a planetary catch-22. Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event.

The Entscheidungsproblem should cover the rest

Exactly this.

What about "endless growth for me, but fuck thee"?

I think the former colonies might disagree with your assessment of a graceful decline and dissolution of the empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

A lot current geopolitical issues are consequences of the British empire dissolution and the way it was handled

leap backwards?

In my opinion economic growth is mostly fueled and sustained by population growth. And population growth depends on various societal, industrial and scientific advancements that often also coincide with EROI improvements.

Would our society look so different if 90% of our energy needs would be produced by nuclear? Would energy be cheaper?

I'm pro-nuclear but reality is you can commission, operate and decommission a PV farm or a wind farm in less time than it takes to build and start a nuclear reactor. Excessive regulation is the reason, but it exists for a reason, too, and that reason isn't ecoterrorists, it's a rational fear that a major ef-up will make a piece of any country inhospitable for all intents and purposes forever.

> Growth is fueled by energy.

No, growth is a an economic concept that expresses our consumption in monetary terms. We could consume anything: 1 million $ worth of electricity is perfectly equivalent, as far as GDP growth is concerned, with a 1 million $ painting that requires 100Wh to make.

Coming from an energy, food and housing starved world, of course our growth seems to be energy driven, because that's what people will consume first when they acquire wealth. But there are strong diminishing returns, you only can eat so much and keep tidy so much floor space.

In fact, the substantial housing cost bubble in the Western world, far above the greenfield costs of new construction with similar comfort, suggests we already are not pricing the house itself, rather the abstract values it comes with, such as the surrounding community, available schools and jobs etc. There is no practical limit to the subjective value of these, and they don't need energy to inflate in relative value.

We have a nice fusion plant called the sun. Almost everything we do is powered by it directly or indirectly. Tapping into its power more efficiently is what is driving economic growth this century.

Nuclear has one big problem. It's just way too expensive. Not just a little bit but by orders of magnitude. That's why renewables are outgrowing nuclear by an order of magnitude as well. We're talking pitiful amounts of nuclear here and there (mostly China actually) and a sweet 0.6-0.7 TW of new renewable capacity added every year, growing year on year. That should cross the TW mark some time later this decade just by virtue of current investment levels (which are also growing).

In comparison, there currently are plans for about 110 GW or so new nuclear capacity. Mostly in China. That's a total, spread over the next few decades. Per year it probably will average around 10-20 GW added per year. That's about 2 orders of magnitude off. And before you consider the existing nuclear capacity that will reach end of life during the same period. Nuclear capacity might actually start experience negative growth (i.e. shrink). And of course some those plans might actually be shelved. A lot can happen in a few decades. Like the addition of tens of TW of new renewable capacity making nuclear kind of redundant. Those nuclear plans date back to an age when people were severely underestimating how much renewables we'd have by now.

Even if you'd double or triple that amount of nuclear, it would still be a side show. The main economic driver for economies this century will be energy delivered mostly by wind, solar, and batteries and a long tail of other, more costly solutions like nuclear, hydro, geothermal. Unless something happens on the cost front, that's how it is playing out.

Bravo on pointing out growth is dependent on energy -- we don't care about our exponentially growing economic debt because it doesn't matter as long as The Economy is growing exponentially, but if growth is tied to energy, that means we need to be exponentially growing our energy supply too.

Awesome job bringing in EROI. We can keep exponentially growing our energy supply as long as we have infinite reserves of high-return energy supplies.

Let's take a look at oil from your link:

> The weighted average standard EROI of all oil liquids (including coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, biofuels, etc.) is expected to decrease from 44.4 in 1950 to a plateau of 6.7 in 2050

Huh, in EROI-speak, that means we're expending more effort to get fewer returns out, which is a fancy way of saying "Oil's getting tapped out"

Shale revolution?

> Resulting EROI is typically around 1.4-1.5

Anything above 1.0 is worth doing, but the Revolution sounds like bottom-of-the-barrel marginal returns.

So how about your incendiary renewables-massive-leap-backwards comment?

PV had admittedly a "depends on how you measure things" high error bars:

> mean harmonized EROIs between 8.7 and 34.2

Wind is quoted as 19.8 with front-of-the-technology-curve numbers quoted as high as 31. The nuance here is whereas oil has finite reserves and can only decrease long-term, manufacturing-based technologies will increase up the learning curve before they plateau.

So, finally we have nuclear: quoted as EROI 75-106. Clearly a winner on energy-return, but EROI doesn't capture the messy pragmatics. Instead of energy-return, we can look at cost-returns: Levelized Cost of Energy, or how much lifetime energy do you get out vs. the lifetime costs of that energy. And we all know how expensive nuclear plants are to design, build, and maintain. There have been nuclear plants shuttered because in the 10 years it would take to get them online, you could just overbuild solar way more cheaply. Big advantage of renewals is they're getting dirt-cheap (relatively speaking).

And I'm not even touching the politics of nuclear risk and waste yet... yes, there's solutions, but I would argue that's still a much hairier problem than renewables' intermittency.

Point is, yes, from a "exponentially-growing civilization requires exponentially-growing energy" point of view, nuclear is the only path forward. But cost-returns are just as important as energy-returns -- both can make a project infeasible, and if you consider both constraints, renewals aren't a bad solution.

For some reason I'm disinclined to trust a table that has "failed verification" next to almost every entry.

Besides - EROI is almost completely irrelevant compared to more obviously useful metrics like cost per kilowatt hour.

YMMV, but it's clear that renewables have the potential to offer very, very cheap and reliable energy.

Someone always points out that wind is intermittent, but renewables currently have almost no storage, and oil isn't any less intermittent - as almost every major geopolitical event since the 1970s oil crisis proves. See also, what's happening in the Red Sea.

Nukes? There's a reason that the recent string of coups in Africa has concentrated on uranium producing countries.

The real reasons for hostility to renewables are political. If there's a robust wide smart grid for distribution, and everyone has PVs on their roof, the fossil and nuclear BigCos no longer have a monopoly on supply. They also lose the political leverage that goes with it.

The fossil industry makes around $4tn a year in profits, and receives around $7tn a year in global government subsidies. That is a huge drain on the planetary economy, and a global renewables program would cut that by quite a bit.

> The other is a lot of the renewables: the massive leap backwards they offer.

EROI is bullshit. But regardless, renewables score higher on this score than fossil fuels.

https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/5ecefeb6-51e5-4aa3-a0...

> The lack of methodological consistency, however, among these papers has led to a situation where inappropriate comparisons are being made across technologies. In this paper we provide both a literature review and harmonization of EROI values to provide accurate comparisons of EROIs across both thermal fuels and electricity producing technologies. Most importantly, the authors advocate for the use of point-of-use EROIs rather than point-of-extraction EROIs as the energy “cost” of the processes to get most thermal fuels from extraction to point of use drastically lowers their EROI. The main results indicate that PV, wind and hydropower have EROIs at or above ten while the EROIs for thermal fuels vary significantly, with that for petroleum oil notably below ten.

Have we ever hit anywhere near that?

My examples for how fast exponential growth gets out of hand:

• At 1% annual population growth starting now without access to faster than light travel in ~12000 humans the total volume of all human bodies would exceed the volume of the 12000 light year radius sphere that humanity would be limited to.

• At 1% annual energy growth in energy needs starting from now in ~12000 years our annual energy use would equal the energy of the entire universe. All the mass including dark matter converted to energy (E=mc^2) and all the gravitational potential energy and all the dark energy...one year of human use.

• At 1% annual population growth starting now in ~12300 years the total mass of all human bodies would exceed the mass of the observable universe.

Let's break that last one down into waypoints along the path to needing the entire universe. Starting from now with 1% annual population growth and assuming humans don't evolve so much in the next 12000+ years to be massively (no pun intended!) smaller:

• 3400 years until we need the entire mass of the Earth plus to Moon for human bodies.

• 600 years after that and we need to add Jupiter's mass.

• 700 years more and we need all the mass in the solar system.

• It is then 2000 years until we need to mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

• A mere 100 years later we need to add the mass of the Andromeda Galaxy.

• That's 6800 years from now. From there it is another 5500 years to need to add the rest of the observable universe.

Right? Capitalism at its core relies on exponential growth, since every investor wants ROI. So acknowledging that exponential growth is a problem would go against the interests of pretty much all financial players.

You think that people directly benefitting from saying that growth must be kept positive year over year would say exponential growth isn't a problem? Preposterous.

Opinion columns are not the same as editorials. But anyway, the Financial Times is well able to publish pieces that say "this currently profitable endeavour will blow up in everyone's faces". It's a serious newspaper.

What are the limits to technological progress?

In the past we have replaced resources that we might run short of with other resources. We have almost entirely replaced wood as a source of energy, and many countries have almost replaced coal.

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