A common rebuttal of the Meadows report that I keep reading is "they predicted we would run out of resources, and we never ran out of anything."
Do they mean metals ? Coal ? Oil ? (As I understand it, we _kinda_ ran out of conventional oil, but were able to replace it with shale oil et al... so it's unclear [1])
That doesn't really change the math. It is a finite resource, the amount consumed keeps going up. There has to be a peak. Growth tends to be to a logarithmic or exponential curve, so adding a huge amount of extra resource doesn't change the date all that much on long timeframes.
Not remotely clear. First, we have enormous amounts of coal and uranium, so we can make electricity for thousands of years, and EVs mean that if we have to give up on oil, we can. Second, the U.S. has something like 1,200 years' worth of proven shale natural gas reserves(!), so again, we can make all the electricity we need.
And many countries have vehicle fleets that run on natural gas, so again we could give up on oil if we had to.
Manufacturing natgas-powered vehicles is way less resource intensive, and way more sustainable than manufacturing EVs. And if we have that much in the way of shale natgas reserves then running out of oil won't be as big a problem as you paint it.
The development of natgas-powered vehicles and EVs happened in spite or because of the demand inelasticity of oil.
To start with, there will always be a growing number of events that (relatively to our species evolution, until its disappearance) will be in the past. Not necessarily more events with artifacts to which we can have access to though.
It’s not like "consumption" is an act of annihilation of anything, this is all transformations. At least as far as energy-mass equilibrium goes.
In a sense, we can literally lose information, as it will never be possible to access it again, be it a star (the stellar body) existence that is out of observable, a species which disappeared million years ago that has let no trace of its passage on earth, or our beloved ones whose loving memory won’t last much centuries.
Whether we use conventional oil, shale or synthetics is really just an implementation issue. The basic idea of solar energy + hydrogen + carbon is pretty much common.
This doesn’t necessitate oil being cheap, just that we’ll never realistically be at a point where we’ve used up all oil.
Humans have made pretty steady progress in getting in ever more difficult forms of oil. Originally we found naturally near surface reservoirs, then started drilling, then deep sea drilling, and then fracking. Each phase was more technologically difficult.
To be clear I think a lot of technological progress is required for synthetical oil to be economical, but in a discission of resource limits across decades, centuries or millennia it's an important escape path.
As such, we're emitting a more than economically optimal amount of carbon dioxide, and demand overall should drop. Hence, peak demand. More energy consumption can give us more good things, so the energy consumption itself isn't bad, but we've reached a point where the side effects of the energy consumption are eating into the benefits we get, probably past the point of marginal benefit overall.
Also the side effects of benefits have large delays, so economics are very dependent on the rate of discount you use for your net-present-value calculation...
Resource consumption goes up until it reaches a peak, then goes down. Generally, there are plenty of second peaks.
And exponential doesnt mean the peak will be in 20 years. It could be 500 years.
And there is no way our current trend of oil use can be sustained for 500 years. By then our oil use will be negligible compared to what it is today unless something truly bizarre and unforseeable happens.
I'd give even odds there will always be use cases for burnable fuels, and almost all vehicles use burnable fuels currently. Sure seems a shorter path to just pull CO2 out of the air and keep moving along as we always have, vs electrifying everything.
Or course, the planet will be uninhabitable much, much earlier, so it doesn’t matter too much.
See for example https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/47070/20231113/earth-s...
So, to answer your question, in the part where humanity can certainly change the world to its own detrimental, but is currently not able to really put it in a state where absolutely no life form is conceivable anymore, and that even putting it a state where some hunters gatherers would not be able to survive is not a 100% garantie outcome of current trends. though I would rather consider the current trend rather awful if you ask.
Some optimization required...
Just because a relationship is linear-ish up to a point doesn't mean it always will be.
The system is trapped in a what-is-measured-is-what-is-managed loop, where we worship "growth" without understanding what it's for.
These can all be true without contradicting one other:
- Many people on the planet can't access as much energy as they need to achieve optimum happiness and wellbeing. Making more energy available to them would alleviate suffering.
- Providing enough for all 9Bn to reach their optimum without destroying the environment will be extremely difficult. There aren't enough critical minerals available with current tech for everyone to live a high-energy electric dream.
- Some have vastly more energy than they need, and depleting resources to make them richer won't make them, or anyone else, happier. There is a diminishing returns effect beyond a certain point, where a massive increase in consumption only produces a small net gain.
- Nevertheless, the super-rich do not have so much that we could redistribute it all and the poor would also have enough. Liquidate the rich, give it all away and the poor will be.. slightly less poor.
- The relationship between energy and wellbeing is not fixed or linear, and may indeed come down with time. For example, if you have an effective and energy-efficient information system, people don't need to expend as much to live a good life (you don't need to go halfway around the world to find the girl or the job, if it turns out there was a good one in the next town or city over, but if your information systems suck you'll never know). Same for matching buyers to sellers and so on.
$2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Elon Musk counts the same in global GDP as $2Bn accrued to the balance sheet of Ghana. I don't need to tell you which one will do more for humanity.
I don't care if the system understands what's it for as long as the planet remains habitable. Regulators have a tough nut to crack without a world government to prevent runaway collapse due to either scarcity or abundance of energy.
I'm personally not convinced we'll get there. "S"-curves also look exponential in the first half of their lifetime. Trouble ahead, but on the positive side, don't underestimate human ingenuity when it comes to keeping those bread trucks rolling.
Looking at outcomes - within the global top 20% or so of nations, there is little correlation between GDP and happiness, freedom, life expectancy and so on. A net worth of $1B, $10B, $100B buys you weeks (if that) of life expectancy vs $10M. What do we actually think we're going to get in return for boiling the oceans? Food? Sex? Shelter? Love? Or just a bunch of AI-generated VR porn?
They also used simplification models which don't account for many of the cascading problems that can't be directly quantified (i.e. dragon king events, debt defaults/ponzi failures, pollution (pfas). There was an austrian report that showed we are following the business as usual approach, and that we have dangerously overshot.
Brittle systems lead to unexpected and chaotic failures.
Failures in food production, or related logistics; would spell catastrophe since half the population is dependent on peacetime technological production methods.
[1] https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n55/mode/...
[2] https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wggray/Teaching/His300/Illustrat...
None of those places are producing at anything close to max capacity. Nobody really cares (other than the people who live there) because the world has enough shale.