tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42680813506290099122024-03-05T22:35:04.433-08:00NephologueExploring the interplay of thermodynamics, economics, and climateNephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-51143257558969180092019-12-18T13:08:00.002-08:002019-12-26T14:52:40.994-08:00Economic growth: the engine of collapse<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Economists and environmental scientists are working to develop strategies that forestall our worst visions of the future, so we can maintain a healthy environment alongside a robust growing economy that meets development goals. The hope is that, </span><span style="font-size: large;">with astute academic guidance and sufficiently powerful doses of political will,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> we can safely navigate our way through the Anthropocene. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-009-9717-9" target="_blank">But there are physical limits to what is possible</a>. The human world is as much part of the natural universe as anything else. If we readily accept that the complex motions of the earth’s climate march to physical laws, it's hard to see how society should somehow be divorced from the rest of the universe. </span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br />To be sure, many of us see treating people as physical systems seems a bit abhorrent, somehow an abnegation of the essence of what it means to be human. The music of J.S. Bach surely is proof that we are not mere automatons! We're different. And if we truly want to triumph against profound societal challenges, then surely we can.<br /><br />But - sigh - even music appears to <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/3716">obey simple mathematical laws seen throughout nature</a>. Perhaps if we really want to address our 21st century existential crises we should start trying to think more broadly about what it means to be human. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">To get a sense of any physical limits, it helps to look at how physical systems function. A useful concept here is a thermodynamic “heat engine” where available energy powers cyclical motions thereby enabling </span><span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-size: large;">work’’ to be done to move something else while giving off waste heat. This process is as familiar as burning gasoline in a car to power its pistons and propel it forward.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />What is less recognized is how this basic idea from physics can be extended to living systems. Organisms take high potential chemical energy (food and oxygen) and release it in an unavailable chemical state (mostly heat radiation, water and carbon dioxide). The interesting part is that organisms employ a selfish self-propagating twist. Unlike a car, if conditions are right, living things can use the energy and matter in food to grow, allowing themselves the opportunity to consume more energy in the future.<br /><br />So, for example, people use the energy in fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, along with the matter in oxygen, water, vitamins and minerals, to sustain their daily motions and metabolic processes. Whenever we manage to consume more than our daily metabolic needs, we get bigger, and usually our appetite grows too, meeting our newly larger metabolic demands. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Groups of organisms take this self-reinforcing cycle to the next level. A lioness expends energy to hunt gazelles so that she can feed herself and her pride. With enough extra food, her fertility allows her to reproduce and support cubs, so increasing the predatory population.<br /><br />The global economy is just a natural extension of these thermodynamic concepts, what has been termed by some a “superorganism”. Collectively, we bootstrap ourselves to greater heights by extracting energy and material resources from our environment in order to sustain interactions among the accumulated fruits of our prior labours. Growth happens only when there is a remainder of raw resources available to make more people and new stuff. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Suppose for a moment that we were offered the opportunity to look down at our growing civilization from afar. We might see, for example, the back-and-forth of people and their vehicles as they move over the land, sea, and air. Looking even closer, we could measure the activities of human brains and notice that, as part of a larger whole, these brains use some combination of past experiences and new information to make estimates of economic and societal market value, acquired through Google searches, social gatherings, travel, and trade. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />All these activities that form our judgments require a continual consumption of food and fuel. Going a step further, we could hypothesize that there is some connection between total market value and energy. Indeed, quantitative analysis reveals that in any given year, the historical accumulation of past global economic production has had a fixed ratio to the current rate of global energy consumption, give or take a couple of percent. In each year between 1970 and 2016, each additional one thousand U.S. dollars of net worth that we collectively added to civilization through the global inflation-adjusted GDP has required an additional 5.6 Watts of continuous power production capacity.<br /><br />This existence of a mathematical “constant” tying society to physics offers a critical piece of the human puzzle: economic wealth is inseparable from energy consumption; any diminished capacity to recover the energy necessary to maintain the steady hive of civilization must lead to economic collapse. If for whatever reason we fail to adequately fuel ourselves, we can expect the cyclic motions of our machines and ourselves to slowly grind to a halt. Our interest in crypto-currency or the auction price of a self-destructing Banksy will be replaced by more primal values like having a tool for opening a can of Spam. In the logical extreme, with an absence of food, we will wither and die, with all our perceptions of economic worth buried along with us. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Of course, macro-economists would call linking wealth to energy through a constant absurd, even those that acknowledge the key role of energy in economic production. They would likely point out that the global GDP has been rising faster than energy consumption, and offer the utopian dream of “decoupling” the economy from its basic environmental needs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Dream on. </span><span style="font-size: large;">How much is your home worth in an uninhabitable city where there the fuel supply and electrical power are shut off for the foreseeable future?</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">GDP represents the accumulated production of worth over an arbitrary period of just one year; meanwhile, energy is required to sustain the activities of a healthy civilization that has been steadfastly built up over all of history. C</span><span style="font-size: large;">urrent energy consumption is far more tied to maintaining the fruits of centuries of collective effort than to the national vagaries of a single prior year. </span><span style="font-size: large;">We cannot erase the past; it is always with us, and it must be fed.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">So if we want growth over and above repairing decay of everything we have previously built, requires us to extract and transform wood, copper, iron, and crops sufficiently fast. Rust never sleeps. Only when energy is sufficiently plentiful that the material balance between extraction and decay can be tipped in our favour is it possible for civilization to gain weight. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Admittedly, we're pretty good at this! Recently, total net worth and energy consumption, the size of civilization, has been expanding by up to 2.3% each year and the GDP slightly faster. Ever since the end of the last ice age with the innovation of agriculture, we have collectively grown by leaps and bounds, from global populations of millions to billions, and from comparative poverty to extraordinary total wealth. It took 10,000 years to learn how to achieve 200 Quadrillion Btu’s of annual energy consumption in 1970s; we doubled that rate just 30 years later.<br /><br />Feats of innovation have enabled us to accomplish not just exponential growth – e.g. growth at a fixed rate of 1% per year -- but the incredible mathematical feat of super-exponential growth: a growth rate that has increased with time. Humanity has been uncovering and exploiting ever newer and richer fuel resources – from wood, to coal, to oil – and ever more exotic raw materials – from wood, to copper, to niobium – and each has done its part to amplify the pace of expansion into the terrestrial buffet.<br /><br />Unfortunately, we have become so consumptive that our future success is competing with the ongoing resource demands of a growing unchangeable past. The larger we get, the more energy and raw materials we require simply to sustain ourselves, forcing us to deplete the finite resource larder faster than ever before.<br /><br />In the two decades following World War II, a remarkable period of rapid gas and oil discovery created an epoch of super-exponential growth. More recently, new extraction technologies and discoveries of fossil fuel reserves have only barely kept up with previously created demand. GDP growth is stagnating and individuals, professions, and nations are increasingly competing for their share.<br /><br />Inevitably, there will come a point where collectively we can no longer access sufficient resources to sustain the current period of expansion. The question is not whether civilization is ultimately in trouble, but instead whether we will gradually subside or crash like a wave on the beach.<br /><br />The negative impacts of past growth are already clear with accelerating climate change and environmental degradation. They will become particularly pronounced when resource depletion makes it challenging to self-repair, as flooded cities and drought-stricken farmland is abandoned. In biological and physical systems, when growth stagnates, fragility sets in. Following even small crises, recovery times slow, and there arrives <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000171" target="_blank">a tendency for larger-scale collapse</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Of course, predicting the future is hard. But there are always going to be basic physical limits to what can and cannot happen. We can say with confidence that if civilization maintains current rates of economic growth over the next 30 years, within just one generation sustenance will mean doubling the current rate of energy consumption, extracting as much total energy from the environment as it has since the beginnings of the industrial revolution.<br /><br />Can we really do this? Perhaps. Maybe we will continue to find the energy and raw materials on our finite planet to accomplish this extraordinary feat, but with the trade-off that sustaining “economic health” now means more potentially catastrophic consequences of global climate change later. Absent an extraordinarily rapid metabolic shift away from carbon based fuels, persistence of growth implies that we will face a likely 4 °C to 9 °C temperature rise within the lifetimes of those born today.<br /><br />To all but <a href="https://evonomics.com/steve-keen-nordhaus-climate-change-economics/" target="_blank">Nobel Prize winning climate economists</a>, such warming seems impossible to survive. Smaller civilizations have succumbed to much less. Looking to history may provide lessons for what actions are required to avoid the worst of what is to come.</span>Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-43632340225901622962019-11-25T20:21:00.003-08:002022-04-19T09:04:20.297-07:00Frequently Asked Questions about the Nephologue theory of economic growth!<span style="font-size: large;"><br />The <a href="http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-power-theory-of-value.html" target="_blank">theory of economic growth</a> I've tried to explain is pretty foreign to many. There's a lot of questions that get repeated. This post aims to clarify what are probably understandable concerns. Any others?<br /><b><br />“Do you conclude, that global energy consumption and global GDP has been practically perfectly coupled in the past? This would seem at odds with the data”</b><br />No they are not coupled. The relationship between energy consumption and GDP tends to change with time as civilization becomes more or less energy efficient. What is coupled is global energy consumption and the time integral (or summation) of GDP since the beginning of civilization.</span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Can we have a "steady-state" (non-growing) economy?</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b>In general, no, as nothing in the universe is independent from its environment. Everything constantly evolves. Steady-states are only useful fictions that can be imagined to apply when things are evolving slowly compared to some other phenomenon of interest. With respect to our economy, we simultaneously discover and deplete energy resources. Maintaining steady-state wealth would require we discover and deplete these resources at precisely the same rate for a long period of time. Maintaining a steady-state GDP requires that net resources are never depleted.</span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>From where comes the statement that we would need to build approximately 1 nuclear power plant (1 GW?) every day in order to (just) stabilize CO2 emissions?</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />The current annual rate of growth of global energy consumption is 2.3%, or a few hundred GW. In a fossil fuel economy, CO2 emissions rise with energy consumption. It is often advocated that increasing energy efficiency can stall energy consumption growth. What I have shown is that this is only true locally. Globally increasing energy efficiency accelerates growth through a generalized version of Jevon’s Paradox. This leaves switching to non-carbon fuel sources as the only option for meeting the goal of stabilizing emissions while growing the economy. Divide a few hundred GW annual growth by the number of days in a year and one obtains the figure of 1GW of non-carbon energy per day. That’s roughly one nuclear power plant per day.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Can we meet a 2 degrees C warming target and maintain a healthy economy?</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b>No. At least it is very hard to see how. Civilization health is predicated on consuming energy, and at least for the foreseeable future the energy source is primarily carbon based. Economic health is based on consuming energy at ever faster rates. Maintaining this energy growth would seem incompatible with achieving lower carbon dioxide emissions, especially to levels that would prevent the world from exceeding a 2 degree warming target.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Evidence shows that Jevons’ Paradox is wrong. Rebound effects that counteract efficiency gains are small</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b>Studies showing “rebound” rather than “backfire” have focused on particular technological sectors (e.g. lighting) without considering knock-on effects on the entirely of the rest of the global economy. Making such a calculation would be extremely difficult. If the economy is only considered as a whole, then the problem becomes tractable, and global efficiency gains lead ultimately to global acceleration of energy consumption.</span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>GDP numbers are unreliable. They should not be used to calculate any relationship between wealth and energy</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Yes, GDP numbers are uncertain, although this is true of any measurement. Unfortunately, the magnitude of the uncertainty is not stated by reporting agencies like the United Nations. However, there are two things that are in the statistic’s favor. First, the countries that contribute the most to global GDP are likely always those with the greatest interest in having something at least close to a truthful number. Second, the calculation of Wealth discussed in this work is a summation of GDP over all of history. Unless there is a constant bias in the global GDP statistics one way or another, errors from one year to the next will have a tendency to average out towards zero. Further, the most recent statistics, which contribute most to total wealth due to their comparative size, should be the most accurate. Admittedly there is some faith in this statement, but GDP statistics are probably the most robust macroeconomic statistic we have.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Isn’t population growth the fundamental driver of increasing energy consumption?</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />The physics (and perhaps history) suggests that a better perspective is that population growth is rather a symptom. When civilization consumes energy with sufficient efficiency that it is able to experience net growth into new resources, then some combination of increasing standard of living and increasing population follows. It may sound odd to say it, but people are physical objects, and it takes massive amounts of energy consumption and matter to create and sustain an adult human. Without increasing access to reserves of energy and matter, population growth cannot be sustained.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>GDP is only a measure of the part of human activity that is monetized. Even now, GDP doesn't include the work of self-sufficient farmers, or the work of unpaid housewives or retired people.</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Yes, and that is entirely the point. At the moment of engagement, the vast majority of our activities do not require a financial transaction. We do not pay to have conversation, enjoy a meal, or clean the kitchen. We may pay to acquire access to conversation (e.g. by purchasing gasoline so we can drive to a friend’s house), to have a dish on the table (e.g. by buying food), or to live in a house (by buying real estate). But I believe that financial transactions themselves are instantaneous affairs whose value is a representation of their capacity to increase our ability to do things in the future. This is a subtle but very important distinction. The GDP is a tally of the instantaneous monetary exchanges that increase the right to access something in the future. Wealth is about what we can do now. GDP adds to our Wealth, but only Wealth can directly be linked to activities that consume energy. At any given instant, human activity and the GDP are two totally separate things.</span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Are you stating that value is tied to the amount of energy that goes into producing an item, what some call the “emergy”?</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />No, not at all. Consider that judgement of the current value is usually totally agnostic to its past. It’s pretty hard to know all what went into bringing a salmon all the way from a river in Alaska to the dinner table. And ultimately what drives the price is the usual mix of current market forces. Of course the present emerges from the past, so it’s not totally crazy to imagine that past energy consumption can be related to current prices -- after all why would people consume energy without some expectation that it might eventually support a future financial exchange? Nonetheless, there is a much more direct link between current value and current rates of energy consumption than between current value and past rates. The universe at any given time only knows the present. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Has any one else tried to reproduce your result of the constant λ relating wealth to energy consumption?</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />The most detailed investigation I am aware of is by <a href="https://www.dr-ricknolthenius.com/Apowers/A7-K43-Garrett.pdf" target="_blank">Richard Nolthenius</a>, a professor at Cabrillo College. His independent examination obtains a similar result<a href="http://lumma.org/econ/Garrett2.xls">.</a></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Energy is just one factor of production among many, including labor and capital.</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />This argument ignores that the dissipation of potential energy is fundamental to any process in the universe. Energy is not just one factor among many. It is the motivating force that enables anything to happen. People cannot be sustained or do labor without energy. Physical capital has no meaning or value without energy to connect its elements through physical flows of, e.g. people, raw materials, and information. In an effort towards simplicity, one can focus on energy alone.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Wealth is a stock and GDP is a flow. You cannot compare energy consumption (a flow) to a stock.</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />That wealth is best characterized as a stock may be the standard perception. Certainly it is the most obvious. But I don’t believe it is necessarily the best. Civilization is an open thermodynamic system. What that means is that it dissipates energy and consumes matter, and it gives off waste heat and exhales CO2 and garbage. Thermodynamically, one could represent the size of this open system in two ways, both related. One is as the potential difference, or gradient, required to drive these flows. The other is the flows themselves. They are both two sides of the same coin. Wealth is an abstract financial representation of either. GDP on the other hand is a measure of the increase in the potential and associated flows due to a net convergence of matter in civilization. A measurable GDP occurs only when we consume more matter than we get rid of as waste.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>It is inappropriate to use market exchange rate (MER) measures of GDP. Purchasing power parity (PPP) measures should be used instead.</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />PPP measures of GDP adjust MER measures to account for relative price differences of baskets of goods between nations. A well-known illustration of this is that the MER price for a Big Mac can vary widely from, say, Norway to India. From a personal perspective, making such adjustments makes sense. It helps us better compare relative standards of living. But from a thermodynamic standpoint that considers the world as an aggregate whole, with people mixed in with everything else that dissipates energy, PPP has less obvious utility. If the calculations are done right, positive and negative PPP adjustments from one nation to another should add up to zero. A basket of goods for the world as a whole can’t be compared to any other world.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Do your energy consumption estimations include the energy captured by photosynthesis of crops?</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b>No they don’t, at least not directly. But my feeling is that they shouldn’t, although for reasons that are subtle. Sunlight is all around us, but some other energy resource is required to make the sunlight accessible to civilization through crop production. Combustion energy is required to clear grassland and forests, either by burning them or mechanical extraction. Burning further fixes the nitrogen that is required as fertilizer, and where there is nothing left to burn we manufacture free nitrogen with fossil fuels. Deserts are bathed in sunlight but have little crop energy of value until we burn other fuels to irrigate and fertilize. Accessible energy and total energy are not the same.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Energy is not value. A country like Switzerland has no energy resources of its own at all, but its currency is strong</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b>The relationship between energy consumption and wealth applies to the world as a whole. Unlike the global economy, which has no connection to any other world, Switzerland is not an isolated system. It maintains its wealth through energy consumption just as any other location, but much of the primary energy consumption is done elsewhere in places to which Switzerland is connected, through such things as its banking system. As long as the world as a whole has access to sufficient access to primary energy supplies, and Switzerland is deeply connected to the rest of the world, its economy will be fine.<br /><b><br />The correlation between energy and wealth you find means nothing. Correlation does not mean causation.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Sure, except it is not a simple correlation, but rather a scalar transformation. Normally, where there is a linear correlation between two quantities, the ratio of the two quantities is variable unless the two quantities pass through the origin (0,0) instead of having an intercept. GDP and energy consumption are an example of two correlated quantities, where the ratio is changing with time even though the two quantities generally are linearly related for periods of a decade or two. I would agree that GDP and energy consumption are not causally related (at least not without considering a couple other things). Wealth and energy consumption are not the same. They have a fixed ratio within reasonable observational uncertainty. Terming this ratio λ as an eigenvalue describing the system may be more mathematically appropriate. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><b><span style="font-size: large;">Your work omits consideration of the role of debt</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><br />When considering the global economy, where wealth includes all aspects of civilization, who is the debt to? It appears to be me, that when everything is properly accounted for, global debt must add to zero because any remainder cannot be to anyone or thing that is not already part of the global financial system. Perhaps some day we will have debts to our Alien Overlords. But until then, for answering global questions at least, debt seems like a red herring.<br /><b><br />By considering wealth as an accumulation of all past production you fail to consider depreciation</b><br />It might at first seem so, but no, this is not the case. Depreciation (or more physically, decay) is very much a part of the model. A particularly elegant result (IMHO) that comes out of the framework is that inflation and decay are two sides of the same coin. Wealth is not the sum of past nominal GDP but instead the sum of real GDP. This difference is calculated through the standard economic quantity called the GDP deflator. There are some subtleties: for example in the very general framework I consider a closer measure of this depreciation or decay might include things like unemployment, as absent retooling we forget and our skills become less needed. </span><br />
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-49874986123480374432019-09-27T09:24:00.001-07:002019-09-27T21:02:01.085-07:00Why use physics to describe economics?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(81, 81, 81); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #515151; font-family: Times; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Do you mistrust the predictions of mainstream <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exogenous_growth_model">macroeconomic growth models</a> and reject the policy prescriptions of their practitioners? Many do. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Is this fair? And what would we do instead?</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">How about using physics ? Certainly as a field it has a pretty good track-record for describing nature, at least as an alternative to religion and magic. The big thing in physics as a field or any other science is that it demands falsifiable hypotheses rather than the opinion or Ivy league pedigree of its practitioners. Results should enable useful predictions, those that offer the potential for robust long-range forecasts subject to physical constraints. </span><br />
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On the other hand, the scientific method is certainly not at the core of modern macroeconomics, probably because economist's are lured by influencing public policy, or they don't believe that social systems are physical systems. Making mathematical models to describe reality is common in macroeconomics. No problem there. Math is a useful tool. And quantifying things is good. But making mathematical models that can't be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability" target="_blank">falsified</a> is terrible! Neoclassical economic models employ equations for the GDP, or “production functions”, that are dimensionally inconsistent formulae that can be “tuned” to match observations of labor and capital. And they always are. It is not possible to falsify these moving theoretical targets because they can always be made “right” by adding layers of social complexity or by tweaking the production function exponents. If conditions change and the formula no longer works, economists just tune again and call it a “structural break”! This is strange, at least if the goal is to understand how things work rather than show off one's mathematical aptitude. It would be abhorrent to imagine a basic physics equation being adjusted as time progresses or for the situation at hand. The speed of light in a vacuum doesn’t get to be different for you than for me or for last year versus this year.<br />
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Perhaps economics and science can be reconciled. It would be nice to think so. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is possible without some important adjustments. Mainstream economic models take the approach that human labor is distinct from physical capital. Labor uses capital for production. Some portion of production is short-term “consumption” of things like food and entertainment, that contributes nothing to the future. The other portion is a long-term “investment” in physical capital that enables labor to produce more in the future depending on labor productivity. The feedback loop of this "virtuous cycle" forms the basis of unconstrained long-run economic growth. The division between long-term investment and short-term consumption is set at the time of one year. In this model if you store a bottle of wine in your cellar for years it adds to capital. If you drink it next week it counts as consumption and does nothing for growth.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But from the perspective of physics this all seems a bit ad hoc. Surely, in a finite world nothing can grow forever. And why prescribe the division between consumption and investment at one year and not some other time? Other than paying annual taxes to the IRS on April 15, there's </span>nothing inherently special about the frequency with which the high density rock we call Earth revolves about the larger accumulation of hydrogen and helium we call the Sun, especially in a non-agricultural economy. And what makes labor so distinctive from physical capital? People are not all that special in the universe, at least there’s nothing in the fundamental equations of physics that says “people” or "labor".</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Thinking about the economy more generally, it might make most sense to make the following adjustments:</span><br />
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<li>Subsume people into a very general physical representation capital that includes all components of civilization. </li>
<li>Remove the one-year separation between consumption and investment</li>
<li>Link consumption to physical resources like energy and raw materials</li>
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Admittedly, not treating people as special might seem strange at first, but let’s go with the possibility that our egocentrism doesn’t really matter. Our personal feelings aside, we are just sacks of matter that enable electrical and fluid flows down potential gradients. It sure has been hard for neuroscientists to find any <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will" target="_blank">evidence</a> for free will; so perhaps people are really no different than any other physical system in civilization, acting as conduits for energetic and material flows just like communications networks or roads. Then, the consumption/investment dichotomy of traditional models disappears. Everything that lasts, including us, is an investment in the future. Equally, everything to last must consume resources to be maintained.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The model I’ve introduced is based on the very simple premise that accumulated economic production of everything in civilization must be sustained by a proportionate amount of global primary energy consumption. Turn off all the power and civilization is worth nothing; and the more we accumulate the more power is required for sustenance. </span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">This is a hypothesis that might seem crazy to a traditional economist. But crucially it is an assumption that is <i>falsifiable. </i>A test can be set up that could potentially show it to be wrong. Making this test however, it turns out that it is a premise that is supported by available statistics: <a href="http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-power-theory-of-value.html" target="_blank">7.1 ± 0.1 milliwatts</a> of continuous power consumption has been required to sustain the historically accumulated global production associated with every inflation-adjusted 2005 dollar in every year statistics have been available since 1970.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Consumption versus production</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From an accounting point of view it makes a lot of sense for economists to selectively subtract short-term household and government consumption from economic output (or GDP) to obtain a long-term capital investment that adds to previously accumulated capital. Capital investments are then independent and additive; it is assumed that the whole is the sum of its parts. If saving an ounce of gold - an item that lasts - adds $1000 then it seems obvious that saving two ounces adds $2000. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But a little added thought suggests it’s not quite so straight-forward. Neither labor nor physical capital means anything without the other. “No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main...” An ounce of gold has no intrinsic worth as it’s just a rock. But it has a great track record of providing value as a collectively appreciated part of society. Someone with lots of gold must be a very important person because <i>they got the gold and others didn't</i>. Value appears to lie in access not the thing itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Viewed physically, gold as a tool in society’s banking system networks, which in turn are maintained by the accumulated knowledge capital of bankers. But if the ounce of gold was left abandoned and forgotten in the middle of the desert it would currently be worthless. It only has value as part of a larger society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And if everyone else tried to sell their gold for $1000, the value per ounce would fall, including the ounce you kept . Value, therefore, does not lie in individual “things” or people by themselves. True value lies in a larger global network and the role we and our structures play in it. Physiological, social, computer, communication, and transportation networks are all part of the living organism we call civilization. Capital value is not strictly additive because no element is completely independent of any other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And this "super-organism" must continuously consume energy and raw materials to survive. Without energy consumption, there is no investment that will be worth anything. We would all be dead if nothing else. So there is no really legitimate separation of short-term consumption and long-term investments in capital. because each requires the other. And individually the value of any element must compete with all others as constrained by the amount of energy and raw material consumption that is possible.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For contrast with our current capitalist state, it helps to think of a subsistence society at near steady-state where nothing can be stored for the future: food rots quickly; the society maintains a more-or-less fixed population; and in its purest form there is no currency and no GDP. Even though the society has to consume food, the consumption is not part of any measurable economic output that contributes to growth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have personally experienced something like a subsistence society working as a Science, Math, and Physics teacher for a couple years in the beautiful, remote tropical South Pacific island group of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha%CA%BBapai">Ha’apai, Tonga</a>. Even though there was a little money to go around for luxury items, it was almost totally impossible to buy traditional foods like coconuts, taro, and octopus that anyone could access. Only revolting imported “specialties” like canned beef and mutton flaps were readily found for sale in small shops. Any given root crop was more or less available from whomever had it; everyone except a handful of foreigners had direct or indirect access to a fixed, finite quantity of fertile land where they could grow throughout the year -- if you didn’t have a yam, get your own or ask (or even take). The local mantra was “Ha’apai is good; food is free”. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In an expanding civilization, matters are rather different, as essential to expansion is the idea that products can be acquired and stored for the future. Food is treated quite differently as it is a real commodity -- in most homes we have a fridge, freezer, and larder. Owning money gives us a right to buy access to something, whether a house or a tasty sandwich. We tend to like sandwiches, and buying access to a sandwich is an investment in our well-being. If we're really really hungry, in fact it's probably the only investment we can possibly think of. The sandwich offers the future potential - no matter how near in time - to be content, better able to interact with others, and more productive in our jobs. T</span>he wonderfully consumptive process of actually eating the energy and raw materials in the bread, mayo, lettuce, ham and cheese provides fuel for our bodies and the lingering memory of sublime satisfaction that spurs future purchase of <a href="https://cochonbutcher.com/menus/lunch-and-dinner/" target="_blank">even nicer sandwiches</a><span id="goog_1228675667"></span><span id="goog_1228675668"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a>. Nothing about the purchase of food is “consumed” in a way that becomes totally lost to the past as expressed in standard economic models.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So all financial transactions, </span>whether for a sandwich or a bar of gold, that count in the GDP are really just monetary expressions of small, instantaneous increments in the growth of civilization’s networks of connection and access. Certainly some are larger than others, but we might expect that the accumulated GDP, adjusting for inflation, is a representation of the growth of these networks, and that the total networks must be sustained by a corresponding consumption rate of energy. Total global capital can be tallied as historically accumulated GDP (units currency), or more strictly, as the time integral of every little differential increment in productivity (units currency per time). Even the most ancient inflation-adjusted economic production has to some degree sustained us through to our activities today. Subsistence cavemen did nothing for our wealth today -- we should expect the GDP was zero. But growing cavemen societies, if they persisted, did, by creating fire and building language and social structures.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This approach, leads to the rather wonderful result that 7.1 ± 0.1 milliwatts of continuous power consumption is required to sustain the worth associated with every inflation-adjusted 2005 dollar of civilization, year after year after year. Simply put, consumption of energy and raw materials sustains all of civilization’s previously accumulated value as calculated by the summation of all prior economic production adjusted for inflation. This value or wealth must be sustained by a proportionate amount of energy consumption.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And with this we're off to the races. Economics can now be moved from the nebulous world of mathematical confabulation and Ivy league pedigree to <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000171" target="_blank">a problem in thermodynamics</a>. It may remain difficult, with much to be understood about such key problems as wealth distributions. But things can be readily said about e.g. <a href="http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2019/06/it-seems-so-easy-to-blame-excess.html" target="_blank">population growth</a>, <a href="http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2019/04/can-we-use-physics-to-forecast-long-run.html" target="_blank">long-run economic growth</a>, and the <a href="http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/09/is-increasing-energy-efficiency-driving.html" target="_blank">fallacy of appealing to energy efficiency to solve climate change</a>. There lies a tested physical foundation with which to attach such problems, one that rests on physical constraints and can be tested with observations like any other true science.</span></div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-68911031025731912972019-06-21T14:18:00.001-07:002022-04-26T08:13:39.163-07:00Population growth is not a driver of climate change<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCgKtcSgWjuh8XYDB8C8XXwaXiyk58ck-40hi_3EbGXi01SbF6hLn2i905RQz2HBiiINB4JER5KQiOJEU3WuSNSuKQlBaoAbHEInmIyCOdBVd2daBFlsgnPLRX7Dq7qt3QVmZb6A6SHs/s1600/cryingbaby-200471089-001.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCgKtcSgWjuh8XYDB8C8XXwaXiyk58ck-40hi_3EbGXi01SbF6hLn2i905RQz2HBiiINB4JER5KQiOJEU3WuSNSuKQlBaoAbHEInmIyCOdBVd2daBFlsgnPLRX7Dq7qt3QVmZb6A6SHs/s320/cryingbaby-200471089-001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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It seems so easy to blame excess population for our planet’s woes. It could hardly appear more straightforward: people consume resources; more people means more consumption; if we have any prayer of reducing our collective damages to the environment, we must make fewer babies.</div>
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There’s a well-known equation first devised in 1970 by John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich called the IPAT identity: </div>
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<i><span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology</span></i></h4>
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The environmental impact of society is proportional to our population, our GDP per person (affluence), and the environmental damages per unit of GDP (technology).</div>
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On the face of it, the IPAT identity is totally clear, and dimensionally irrefutable. An increasingly affluent and growing population is going to have an increasing impact on its environment. </div>
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A step further is the Kaya Identity, which looks specifically at the impact from carbon dioxide emissions, and breaks down Technology into two components: energy efficiency measured as annual energy consumption per annual GDP and carbon intensity measured as CO2 emissions per Energy:</div>
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<i><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Emissions = Population x (GDP/Population) x (Energy/GDP) x (CO2/Energy)</span></i></h4>
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Again, at least on the face of it, nothing is wrong with this expression. Modifying any of population, affluence, energy efficiency and carbon intensity, will allow us to help the environment: <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;"><b>we can maintain our affluence and reduce carbon dioxide emissions provided that we invest in energy efficiency, switch to renewables, and support birth control. </b></span></div>
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What’s not to like? Certainly, countless politicians and scientists have argued that with sufficient political will, we can accomplish these combined goals to save our planet while supporting our economy.</div>
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The devil is that the Kaya and IPAT identities are constructed so that affluence, energy efficiency and population can be seen as being largely independent of one another, making it seem possible to tweak one without affecting the other.</div>
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In fact, each of the ingredients of the Kaya and IPAT identities can be better seen as symptoms not causes. One perspective is that, broadly put, <a href="http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/The_economic_heat_engine.html" style="color: #0433ff; text-decoration: none;" title="The_economic_heat_engine.html">civilization is a heat engine</a>. What this means is that <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">all </span>of the internal circulations defining what we do in civilization are driven by a consumption of energy, mostly fossil, and a dissipation of waste heat, including carbon dioxide as a by-product. From this perspective, only about 1/20th of the total caloric consumption by civilization as a whole is due to the caloric consumption of people themselves. The remainder is used to support the appetites of everything else, such as the energy required for industry, transportation, and communications. Globally averaged, people have each about 20 <a href="http://www.nous.org.uk/energy.slave.html" style="color: #0433ff; text-decoration: none;" title="http://www.nous.org.uk/energy.slave.html">energy slaves</a> working around the clock to help them accomplish all of civilization’s tasks. </div>
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<span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">People themselves are a relatively small proportion of the world’s total resource consumption. </span>Imagine someone visiting Earth for the first time, knowing nothing ahead of time about the planet or its inhabitants. The visitor would witness all the marvelous phenomena of the earth, atmosphere and oceans. Maybe they would even have a special sensor they use to detect massive plumes of heat, particulates, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from all over the planet, some from small stationary sources and others moving quickly across the oceans and land. Almost all would come from objects made of steel. <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">The visitor would probably fail to perceive people and conclude they are insignificant relative to civilization’s machinery</span>. </div>
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You as a staunchly proud human might tell the visitor that they are missing important context. It’s people who are running the machines not the other way round, and that the measured environmental impacts are proportional to population. </div>
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<span style="font-size: 24px;">But this perspective is based on a belief that people are independent drivers of environmental impacts, that make and grow babies independent of environmental conditions, and affect the environment proportionately. </span></div>
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As a counterweight to this perspective, there is <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237672">a more simple and effective alternative to the IPAT identity</a>. Using some physics, it was shown that: </div>
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><i>Population growth rate + Affluence growth rate = λ x Energy efficiency + Energy Efficiency growth rate</i></span></h4>
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Where the symbol <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">λ </span>had a constant value of 0.22 exajoules per year per year 2005 trillion USD. For example, for the period 1970 to 2015, plugging numbers into the equation gives the following for the annual growth rate of each of the terms:</div>
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<h4>
<span style="font-size: large;">1.5% + 1.5% = 0.22 x 0.089 x 100% + 1.0%</span></h4>
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where the value 0.089 has units of inflation-adjusted year 2005 trillion USD per exajoule. Simplifying: </div>
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<h4>
<span style="font-size: large;">1.5% + 1.5% = 2.0% + 1.0%</span></h4>
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or,</div>
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<span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 29px;">3.0% = 3.0%</span></h4>
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Both sides of the equation add up to 3.0% per year. This is pretty cool. A simple equation for the growth of humanity derived using physics rather than economics agrees surprisingly well with what is actually observed.</div>
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But what does it all mean? The upshot is that being energy efficient, as on the right hand side of the equation, is what enables civilization as a whole (not at just the national level) to increase its population and affluence, as on the left hand side of the equation. If we become <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">more</span> energy efficient, we <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">accelerate</span> growth of population and affluence, and <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">increase </span>our environment impact. It is not the reverse! </div>
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Moreover, because the first term on the right hand side of the equation -- current energy efficiency -- reflects the history of prior energy efficiency gains, and we cannot erase the past, past advances in energy efficiency are effectively the single parameter that determines current growth of population and affluence.</div>
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Intellectually, this is a really nice simplification that removes some of the uncertainty in making long-run forecasts of population and affluence. On the other hand, it might seem totally counter-intuitive. Understandably, most would assume that we can increase energy efficiency independent of population and affluence; and more importantly, increasing energy efficiency will reduce our overall environmental impact. Let’s buy a Prius! </div>
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But this comes back to the previous point that the components of the Kaya and IPAT identities are coupled symptoms of something more important. To understand how each IPAT component is linked through the equation above, it is necessary to understand a bit about the very special nature of how a self-organizing <a href="http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/The_economic_heat_engine.html" style="color: #0433ff; text-decoration: none;" title="The_economic_heat_engine.html">civilization operates like a heat engine</a>. </div>
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The heat engine in your car is of fixed size. Civilization differs because it can grow. It grows because it is able to successfully use energy to incorporate raw materials from its environment into its internal structure.</div>
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If civilization is <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">energy efficient, </span>then it is able to rapidly incorporate raw materials from the ground into its structure. <span class="style" style="font-family: , "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: italic; line-height: 29px;">Energy efficient civilizations are productive and grow quickly. </span>There are two ways we can witness this material growth. One is that population increases: we ourselves are constructed from raw materials. The other is that we increase the amount of our stuff, or our economic affluence. </div>
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With greater efficiency, we can have faster growth, and more of everything, more people included. Interestingly, as shown above, increased energy efficiency appears to increase population and affluence in roughly equal parts, both 1.5% per year. </div>
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So, does population growth matter? Well, I think it’s the wrong question. Instead it makes more sense to ponder the external forces that control the energy efficiency of civilization as a whole, and how efficiently it can use energy resources to incorporate raw materials from the environment. </div>
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Waves of accelerated discovery and exploitation of coal and oil that began around 1880 and 1950 preceded unprecedented explosions in population and affluence. Looking ahead, many question whether we will sustain continued discovery of the energy and material resources that constitute our make up. If we can’t, what does a declining civilization look like? If we can, what is the end game when there are inevitably accelerating negative impacts on the environment?</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-67662272847134115232019-04-09T13:57:00.001-07:002022-06-17T12:39:50.615-07:00Can we use physics to forecast long run global economic growth?<br /><span style="font-size: large;">
One of the more challenging problems in physics is the evolution of complex systems. Atmospheric scientists study phenomena ranging in scale from those of molecules to the size of the planet, and struggle with integrating the full gamut of interacting forces into a usefully comprehensive whole. <br />
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The world’s economy could easily be another example. Individual actions have become intertwined with markets, supply chains, and global trade agreements. Economic forces seem uniquely human, subject to the vagaries of consumer choices and the whims of political and business leaders, almost impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy.<br />
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Yet, humanity is undeniably part of the physical universe. An immense body of work in the social sciences demonstrates that - taken in aggregate - we collectively exhibit the same mathematical characteristics seen in many well-established physical phenomena, such as power-laws for our musical compositions, writing, or income distributions, and negative exponentials (or Boltzmann distributions) for the proximity and number in our social circles.<br />
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Perhaps, well-established tools from physics can also be used to help address questions about where the economy is headed. Forecasting is well-developed in the geosciences for prediction of such complex phenomena as earthquakes, the wind, and tides. Can similar tools be used to help determine our financial future?<br />
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To be sure, this line of thought is not exactly new. Practitioners of a sub-field called econophysics invoke physical analogs to explain market movements.<br />
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My own approach is rather different. Like many physicists, I believe a first approach to any complex problem is to step back as far as possible, to constrain the big picture first before getting bogged down in any details.<br />
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Looking at the whole, one technique is to imagine successive degrees or "moments" of complexity that determine current rates of change, each with its own tendency to persist. For example, things stay still - except when they are perturbed by velocity, which is constant - except where it is perturbed by acceleration, which is constant, except where it is perturbed by the jerk, and so on.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRcRDJ85YUg1XklJ5DUpsHsb9NCfVkxeEtVOCBXYYcML4e8fRVSPX9RLSi0d1aYrBMw8le7P930CejbS4xYmfaj2fZCgqJlxLMYv28586RtbvqVJ12n1srnYNCaVv0uou-L6WclL1FreM/s1600/Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="263" data-original-width="385" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRcRDJ85YUg1XklJ5DUpsHsb9NCfVkxeEtVOCBXYYcML4e8fRVSPX9RLSi0d1aYrBMw8le7P930CejbS4xYmfaj2fZCgqJlxLMYv28586RtbvqVJ12n1srnYNCaVv0uou-L6WclL1FreM/s320/Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa2.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: large;">
Or, consider this beautiful woodcut. We might ask ourselves which way is the boat in the foreground going? Up, down, or staying still? To me, Hokusai conveys the artistic sense that the oarsmen in the foreground are moving upward towards the crest of a wave.<br />
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Maybe you see something different. And more scientifically, we cannot know: all we see is a snapshot in time. Without additional information, assuming the boat stays in roughly the same place would be as safe a guess as any.<br />
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This "stationarity" is what we might call "Persistence", or steady-state in the "zeroth" moment. Naturally, we'd hope to do better by going to higher order moments. If we could, we might ask the artist in his grave where the boat was just a few moments earlier. Then we might sensibly suppose that the boat will continue its upward or downward trend.<br />
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As a means for making a forecast of the boat’s position, we might call this technique “Persistence in Trends” or steady-state in the first moment. We could feel confident that such a forecast would do better than assuming a model of mere “Persistence” that does not consider that the boats moves at all.<br />
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And more sensibly, we know that the boat cannot continue moving up or down indefinitely. To account for this, we would try to go further to the second or even higher moments. For this we might look at other waves for a guide or use a model of the fluid mechanics of an ocean wave to predict how far and fast a wave rises before it falls or breaks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b>
<b>Economic hindcasts and Skill Scores</b></span></div>
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My contention is that we can do something similar with long-term <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000171/abstract">predictions of the global economy</a>, by using thermodynamically-based expressions for how economic systems respond to external forces such as resource discovery and depletion to offer robust, physically-constrained economic forecasts.<br />
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It can be (has been) argued that it's pretty arrogant - even nuts - to imagine that something so complicated as humanity is predictable. But in its defense, using physics simplifies the economics problem to a level that any theory can at least be tested.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWu-WU4vQUpmXa5-lwkkYWsYa_BC5Dst83UDf_nuFI26qotmAAi17UyArh5DymmCQFxQI6-xbJDhmKV8kB9k5ASjQg2GUNov3ZXsmN7ULkt9Z9JDx7qcFgO_58v6yDRJy3JBFXU-OfReM/s1600/esd-2015-10-discussions-f01.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="659" data-original-width="1600" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWu-WU4vQUpmXa5-lwkkYWsYa_BC5Dst83UDf_nuFI26qotmAAi17UyArh5DymmCQFxQI6-xbJDhmKV8kB9k5ASjQg2GUNov3ZXsmN7ULkt9Z9JDx7qcFgO_58v6yDRJy3JBFXU-OfReM/s400/esd-2015-10-discussions-f01.png" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-size: large;">
One way to test any prognostic model framework is to perform what in meteorological forecasting is called “hindcasting” : How well can a deterministic model predict present conditions initialized with the conditions observed at some point in the past? Model accuracy is evaluated using a “Skill Score”, which expresses how well the model hindcast reproduces current conditions relative to some Reference Model that requires zero skill.<br />
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In the Hokusai woodblock, a zero skill Reference Model of “Persistence” would assume the boat stays still; “Persistence in Trends” would assume the boat continues on its existing trajectory. A model based on the well-established physics of ocean waves would hopefully beat either of these simple models to exhibit “positive skill”. Then, the Skill Score would be<br />
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Skill Score = [1 - (Error of the hindcast)/(Error of the Reference model)]x100%<br />
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If a physics-based model of the global economy does no better than the reference at predicting the present, then the Skill Score is zero percent. If it does perfectly, then the Skill Score is 100%.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Hindcasts of civilization growth</b><br />
I have applied these techniques to evaluate the predictive skill of <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000171/abstract">a new economic growth model</a> for the long-run evolution of civilization. This model approaches the global economy rather like an organism. Civilization's growth rate is determined by its past well-being, environmental predation, whether it eats all its food, and whether it is able to move on to discover new food sources.<br />
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</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvSR6THt_Mu0CYs_jf-_LonGt06VYgejwLW71yGuPMSy4rBXBB0ZsLyzblR4PXyq0OI2sfhnmlSREM8K6224pvuv4oDjmedi2JHbwG0Y_43COdaa782Z6JUXtDHn_1TwJGZxUN4Wip8Pk/s1600/droppedImage.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="330" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvSR6THt_Mu0CYs_jf-_LonGt06VYgejwLW71yGuPMSy4rBXBB0ZsLyzblR4PXyq0OI2sfhnmlSREM8K6224pvuv4oDjmedi2JHbwG0Y_43COdaa782Z6JUXtDHn_1TwJGZxUN4Wip8Pk/s320/droppedImage.png" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">For civilization, food is things like oil and iron. We use the energy in oil to incorporate iron into our structure just as people use carbs, protein and fat to turn bread into flesh. Civilization depletes reserves at the same time it uses them, to discover and grow into new reservoirs - provided the remain. Our ability to discover and exploit new reservoirs might easily be impeded by natural disasters, such as those we might experience from climate change.<br />
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A model based on these concepts provides deterministic expressions for civilization’s rates of economic growth and energy consumption. Input parameters are the current rate of growth of global energy consumption and wealth and a rate of technological change that can be derived from, among other things, past observations of inflation and raw material consumption. Output parameters include the rate of return on wealth and primary energy consumption, how fast this rate is growing (or what is termed the “innovation rate”), and the world GDP growth rate (or GWP).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_vEKdJVAF7sbVd8_R-eWCuI-LFrEUPmap_U9ylH3cs8oDnrLzeXpPB4CH3u32IRkdTpG3g-SjqcRHGgP6bzb_Sr4T1tinJ3Il8MiB1LIqyFmza_oDzxUVnLoZYpfV-m2PqlEA-kMaU1I/s1600/esd-2015-10-discussions-f07-web.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="451" data-original-width="1600" height="111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_vEKdJVAF7sbVd8_R-eWCuI-LFrEUPmap_U9ylH3cs8oDnrLzeXpPB4CH3u32IRkdTpG3g-SjqcRHGgP6bzb_Sr4T1tinJ3Il8MiB1LIqyFmza_oDzxUVnLoZYpfV-m2PqlEA-kMaU1I/s400/esd-2015-10-discussions-f07-web.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Gray lines: Fully prognostic model hindcasts initialized in 1960 for the global rate of return on wealth, economic innovation rates, and the GWP growth rate. Hindcasts are derived assuming an average rate of technological change of 5.1%/yr (dashed lines) derived from conditions observed in the 1950s. Solid colored lines: Observed decadal running means. The model reproduces observations with skill scores > 90%. </i><br />
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As shown in the figure above, a first principles physics-based model initialized in 1960, <i>based only on observations available in the 1950s</i>, <a href="http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/6/673/2015/esd-6-673-2015.html">does remarkably well at hindcasting evolution of energy consumption and GDP growth through the present</a>. For example, average rates of energy consumption growth in the past decade would have been forecast to be 2.3 % per year relative to an observed average rate of 2.4 % per year. Relative to a persistence prediction of 1.0% per year observed in the 1950s, the Skill Score is 96%. <br />
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Or, using the same model, a physics-based forecast of the world GDP growth rate for 2000 to 2010 based on data from 1950 to 1960 is 2.8% per year compared to the actual observed rate of 2.6% per year. The persistence forecast based on the 1950 to 1960 period is 4.0% per year, so the skill score is 91%.<br />
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No other economic model I am aware of is capable of such accuracy,</i> at least not without cheating by tuning the model to data between 1960 and 2010. How is it then that a physics-based economic model does so well at predicting the present based only on conditions 50 years ago?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVkw-51ccnpPFdpu91fJJom9Tx-1_VbgyhuhFoCUsnAn9N_QFGcBf7P9Hg5tN40Zn00BExTOKukvpKWna6LJKt2i5hjKnhmnmVx-k8AZ0ZfuWtoChKO-Z6IQPXIjyw27sLDeReZ_Lt2RQ/s1600/esd-2015-10-discussions-f08.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1084" data-original-width="1600" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVkw-51ccnpPFdpu91fJJom9Tx-1_VbgyhuhFoCUsnAn9N_QFGcBf7P9Hg5tN40Zn00BExTOKukvpKWna6LJKt2i5hjKnhmnmVx-k8AZ0ZfuWtoChKO-Z6IQPXIjyw27sLDeReZ_Lt2RQ/s400/esd-2015-10-discussions-f08.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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Well, the obvious answer might be that humanity acts as a physical system and the model at least has the correct physics. But it helps too that the model was initialized in the mid-twentieth century when civilization was responding to an exceptionally strong impulse of fossil fuel discovery. The figure above uses the IHS PEPS data base to show that between 1950 and 1970, remaining global reserves of oil and natural gas doubled because discoveries outpaced depletion. Since, discovery and depletion have been in approximate balance; remaining reserves have been more or less stable. <br />
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</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfK3rsciAjFfvTNuLBCiVdGbtXCsw9lq4Cuzcekp3hciHGuOvgRDPiOa6qQh0OTLyE4c92CVJY3TJcnDahrKMmmSFhwwjD6DNtJtRYpbMo6lXWnTwtSfXTJnpxffNCVq8nCUUi1DIz1N4/s1600/chuckarama50_090716%257E9.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="500" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfK3rsciAjFfvTNuLBCiVdGbtXCsw9lq4Cuzcekp3hciHGuOvgRDPiOa6qQh0OTLyE4c92CVJY3TJcnDahrKMmmSFhwwjD6DNtJtRYpbMo6lXWnTwtSfXTJnpxffNCVq8nCUUi1DIz1N4/s320/chuckarama50_090716%257E9.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-size: large;">It is as if civilization suddenly found itself in 1950 at an enormous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffet#mediaviewer/File:Buffet-2.jpg">restaurant buffet</a>. Each time it visited the table it discovered new plates of delicious energy to consume, and its appetite increased apace. At some point around 1970, however, its appetite increased to the point that it discovered new food not much faster than it consumed the food that was already there. The amount of known food on the table stayed stable.<br />
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<div><span style="font-size: large;">For civilization, uncovering a new energy buffet was far more innovative than merely going back to the table, and it had a correspondingly large and lasting impact on economic growth.<br />
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There was a remarkable fossil fuel discovery event between 1950 to 1970 period, and what followed was a clear physical response to this strong prior forcing. Forecasting the future should also be possible, but it will probably be more of a challenge than hindcasting the past 50 years...unless, once again there is a new wave of massive energy reserve discovery, possibly associated with renewables. If discovery once again outpaces growing demand, it might propel civilization to a renewed phase of accelerated innovation and growth. Then, I anticipate that our future trajectory will once gain be amenable to deterministic forecasts using economic equations based on physics.</span></div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-68269437620948087332018-09-20T10:53:00.002-07:002022-08-09T20:54:06.866-07:00Is increasing energy efficiency driving global climate change?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(81, 81, 81); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #515151; font-family: Times; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>Improving energy efficiency is our best hope to slow global energy consumption and limit carbon dioxide emissions. </i></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Makes perfect sense, right? Better technology for more jobs and a healthier planet! Yay capitalism. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrySJUeyihsqgD_TKA4hC84OuzFrpGQXNGf2N5tMVnYRz3ZjAwiTlLbEFLaRmBV0R7taksMpenLAE0oXZ3cZhT_1s_jZ3L_-_c1XEXYoCq0lCtJIH2aRSJytVdkPpg1-KoFzQly6xmFmw/s1600/2017-Toyota-Prius-v-01.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrySJUeyihsqgD_TKA4hC84OuzFrpGQXNGf2N5tMVnYRz3ZjAwiTlLbEFLaRmBV0R7taksMpenLAE0oXZ3cZhT_1s_jZ3L_-_c1XEXYoCq0lCtJIH2aRSJytVdkPpg1-KoFzQly6xmFmw/s320/2017-Toyota-Prius-v-01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">But let's look a little closer. People may choose to drive more often if a vehicle is fuel efficient: driving is useful or pleasurable and now it is more affordable. Or, less money spent on fueling energy efficient vehicles could enable more money to be spent on fuel for home air conditioning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Economists do acknowledge such offsets to some degree referring to a phenomenon called "rebound". A very few studies even argue for “backfire”: gains in energy efficiency ultimately lead to <i>greater</i> energy consumption. The idea was first introduced by William Stanley Jevons in 1865. Jevons was emphatic that energy efficient steam engines had accelerated Britain’s consumption of coal. The cost of steam-powered coal extraction became cheaper and, because coal was very useful, more attractive.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/7/5/2850" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Calculating the total magnitude of rebound or backfire has proved contentious and elusive</a><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">. The problem for academics has been that any given efficiency improvement has knock-on effects that can eventually propagate through the entire global economy. Estimating the ultimate impact is daunting if not impossible.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Imagine you buy a nice new fuel efficient car. An unequivocal good for the environment, right? Sure feels good to do one's part to save the planet. And you have a fatter wallet too since you spend less on gas. Life's good! You can spend that saved money now (for argument’s sake) on better household heating and cooling so that you sleep better at nights. Being more rested you become more productive at work, giving you a raise and your employer higher profits. The business grows to consume more while you take that much deserved flight for a vacation in Cancun. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In this fashion, the ramifications of any given efficiency action might multiply indefinitely, spreading at a variety of rates throughout the global economy. Barring global analysis over long time scales, conclusions about the magnitude of rebound or backfire may be quantitative but highly uncertain since they are always dependent on the time and spatial scales considered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Analyzing the global economy like a growing child</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s a way around this complexity - to ignore it, by treating the economy only as a whole. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiRBgelIYJnKU29Vasastb4_MlPZUyGiRCJqOwDqsl7sHeja_JtPhG98AKJVC0Iuvpvx3DEmN1sKar7kGt16P63pOe2Z6vWZ06K91m_k8mDPlWaUZsLYy8svFtIJKO_Awd9NFelxDkzWE/s1600/droppedImage.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="330" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiRBgelIYJnKU29Vasastb4_MlPZUyGiRCJqOwDqsl7sHeja_JtPhG98AKJVC0Iuvpvx3DEmN1sKar7kGt16P63pOe2Z6vWZ06K91m_k8mDPlWaUZsLYy8svFtIJKO_Awd9NFelxDkzWE/s320/droppedImage.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Stepping back like this is a standard part of the physics toolbox. Imagine </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">describing the growth of a child without being an expert in physiology. It shouldn't take a doctor to comprehend that the child uses the material nutrients and potential energy in food not only to produce waste but also to grow the child's body mass. As the child grows, it needs to eat more food, accelerating its growth until it reaches adulthood and its growth stabilizes (hopefully!). </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now, an inefficient, diseased child who cannot successfully turn food to body mass may become sickly, lose weight, and even die. But a healthy, energy efficient child will continue to grow and some day become a robust adult who consumes food energy at a much higher rate than as an infant. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What could be treated as a tremendously complicated problem can also be approached in a fairly straight-forward manner, provided we look at the child as a complete person and not just a complex machine of component body parts. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><b>Efficient civilization growth</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We can take the same perspective with civilization. Without a doubt, consuming energy is what allows for all of civilization’s activities and circulations to continue -- without potential energy dissipation nothing in the economy can happen; even our thoughts and choices require energy consumption for electrical signals to cross neural synapses. Just like a child, when civilization is efficient it is able to use a fraction of this energy in order to incorporate new raw materials into its structure. It was by being efficient that civilization was able to increase its size. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When civilization expands, it increases its ability to access reserves of primary energy and raw materials, provided they remain or are there to be discovered. Increased access to energy reserves allows civilization to sustain its newly added circulations. If this efficiency is sustained, civilization can continue to grow. In a positive feedback loop, expansion work leads to greater energy inputs, more work, and more rapid expansion. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is the feedback that is the recipe for emergent growth, not just of civilization, or a child, but of <a href="http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/468/2145/2532.short">any system</a>. The more efficiently energy is consumed, the faster the system grows, and the more rapidly the system grows its energy consumption needs. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ultimately there are constraints on efficiency and growth from reserve depletion and internal decay. But in the growth phase, efficient conversion of energy to work allows civilization to become both more prosperous and more consumptive.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Implications for climate change</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is easy to find <a href="http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dgoldstein/efficiency_really_works.html">economists willing to express disdain for the concept of backfire, or even rebound</a>, by pointing to counter-examples in economic sectors or nations where energy efficiency gains have led to less energy consumption. For example, the USA has become more efficient and thereby stabilized its rate of energy consumption. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">While these counter-examples may be true, they are also very misleading, especially if the subject is climate change. Nations do not exist in economic isolation. Through international trade the world shares and competes for collective resources. Quite plausibly, the only reason the USA appears to consume less energy is that it has outsourced the more energy intensive aspects of its economy to countries like China. Should an economist argue that <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/02/16/207532/debunking-jevons-paradox-jim-barrett/">“There is nothing particularly magical about the macroeconomy, it is merely the sum of all the micro parts”</a> we can be just as dismayed as we would upon hearing a medical practitioner state that “there is nothing particularly magical about the human body, it is merely the sum of all its internal organs”. Connections matter!</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Fundamentally, through trade, civilization can be treated as being “well-mixed” over timescales relevant to economic growth. In other words, trade happens quickly compared to global economic growth rates of a couple of percent per year. Similarly, excess atmospheric concentrations of CO2 grow globally at a couple of percent per year. They too are well-mixed over timescales relevant to global warming forecasts because atmospheric circulations quickly connect one part of the atmosphere every other. For the purpose of relating the economy to atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the only thing that matters is global scale emissions by civilization as a whole.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Taking this global perspective with respect to the economy, efficiency gains will do the exact opposite of what <a href="http://www.koomey.com/post/136611184100">efficiency policy advocates claim it will do</a>. If technological changes allow global energy productivity or energy efficiency to increase, then civilization will grow faster into the resources that sustain it. This grows the economy, but it also means that energy consumption and CO2 emissions accelerate. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">CO2 emissions can be stabilized despite efficiency gains. But this is possible only if decarbonization occurs as quickly as energy consumption grows. At today’s consumption growth rates, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237672">this would require roughly one new nuclear power plant, or equivalent in renewables, to be deployed each day</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>For more details</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Garrett, T. J., 2012: <a href="http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/esd-3-1-2012.html">No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change</a>, <i>Earth System Dynamics</i> 3, 1-17, doi:10.5194/esd-3-1-2012</span></div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-67871782693546917362018-09-10T15:53:00.000-07:002018-09-10T15:53:47.682-07:00On the thermodynamic origins of economic wealth<br />
<br />
<b>What are the origins of wealth?</b><br />
<div>
Economics textbooks describe wealth as an accumulation of all financially valuable resources. It is our collective beliefs that give this accumulated stock value. Human labor uses this stock to produce more stuff through the GDP thereby enabling overall wealth to grow with time.<br />
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<div>
At least on the face of it, this view of the economy makes a lot of sense. Economists have mathematical equations that express these ideas providing quantitative descriptions for how and why the economy grows.<br />
<br />
Yet something still seems unsatisfyingly magical. Why should we believe in the concept of economic value in the first place?. The existence of a financial system is hardly obvious. It hasn’t always existed through history, even during periods where people produced and consumed. And most of what we do in our lives (fortunately) doesn’t involve any exchange of currency at all. We are able to enjoy a good moment of each other’s company without having to pay a single cent.<br />
<br />
<b>The economy and the second law</b></div>
<div>
Sure, financial wealth is a human quantity, but we are still part of the physical universe. No matter how rich we may be, we are all equal subjects of its rules.<br />
<br />
Chief among these rules is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law has been expressed in many ways that are either wrong, strangely mystical, or maddeningly vague. It doesn't have to be this way. The most straightforward is to view the direction of time as a flow of matter that redistributes energy to ever lower potentials. Drop something it falls. It was up, now it’s down; air flows from high to low gravitational potential or pressure to make the winds. Easy.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDock5bFg_Jtro0ZS5w1pBgMde4HsXPBXCNLWKOMtdSdQc8z59cCghU_sVmQj5H-e79liuZHK-0R64YYBdZCMOm7qeroWOA0xc59rsZ3LLS_Qg6ee1k7lcdjrVQdwl5v1Pr5XgdwrsT6I/s1600/Braine_le_Chateau%252CBelgium%252Cmoulin_banal.JPG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="667" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDock5bFg_Jtro0ZS5w1pBgMde4HsXPBXCNLWKOMtdSdQc8z59cCghU_sVmQj5H-e79liuZHK-0R64YYBdZCMOm7qeroWOA0xc59rsZ3LLS_Qg6ee1k7lcdjrVQdwl5v1Pr5XgdwrsT6I/s400/Braine_le_Chateau%252CBelgium%252Cmoulin_banal.JPG.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Take the waterwheel in a mill. A mill consumes high gravitational potential energy from a flowing stream. The flow drives the wheel circulations and finishes its journey in the stream below where the potential energy is becomes unusable. The total capacity of the mill to dissipate potential energy, its size or “stock”, is something we can estimate by looking at the size of the mill and noting how fast it circulates.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUn1otxFUGnYuQGsUF1mw_8qmdblbCEFS0QvCsc5AF1NHh-EuVCNxeIRjlHr3PdubJaEJGHeSB0T6YtFJqdBbjymtfrKOBi1toCN_VuODASAEh6zN5yrpF4ckGpwIWBi-v8Yu9-uraJzI/s1600/hurricane-florence-update-path-satellitejpg-98b4180a792100f0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="444" data-original-width="551" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUn1otxFUGnYuQGsUF1mw_8qmdblbCEFS0QvCsc5AF1NHh-EuVCNxeIRjlHr3PdubJaEJGHeSB0T6YtFJqdBbjymtfrKOBi1toCN_VuODASAEh6zN5yrpF4ckGpwIWBi-v8Yu9-uraJzI/s400/hurricane-florence-update-path-satellitejpg-98b4180a792100f0.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Or how about a hurricane? The pressure difference between the eye of the hurricane and its surroundings provides the potential energy with which to drive the winds while the hurricane constantly loses energy by radiating to space. Again the hurricane has a size or "stock" that defines its power.<br />
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What does this have to do with the economy? Well, everything. Our perceptions are based on neuronal activity in the form of cyclical transfers of charge from high to low potential in our brains. The cycles are sustained by by high potential calories in food that we dissipate as waste heat from our bodies. Our food is produced with high potential fossil fuels that we burn to till the land, produce fertilizer and transport from farm to market. We get to and from market using gasoline that is dissipated in our cars. The money we use to buy food comes from the fruits of our labors staring at computers that that themselves dissipate energy as they make computations with a certain cycle frequency and transfer data to and from other computers along communication networks, all of which turns high potential energy to low potential waste heat. <br />
<br />
But can we really reduce all this to something as simple as a waterwheel or hurricane? There’s 7+ billion of us, our brains are so complicated, and the economy is so big.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSAjsG5uYFB_ml23vOLbFxLkCVq-pmnhzn5NXtSMQZY95g2iTv1Mb0HNGkPT3-yZNH9HGjRLrtWW7nXDlBjRaRzsjYk8c5z991c5oVL2d6KvdWGXHbN6kfZ4wDi8DXKI_cC0maAmkUBc4/s1600/Oil2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1280" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSAjsG5uYFB_ml23vOLbFxLkCVq-pmnhzn5NXtSMQZY95g2iTv1Mb0HNGkPT3-yZNH9HGjRLrtWW7nXDlBjRaRzsjYk8c5z991c5oVL2d6KvdWGXHbN6kfZ4wDi8DXKI_cC0maAmkUBc4/s400/Oil2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<div>
All the circulations in civilization are ultimately derived from the consumption and dissipation of high energy density “primary energy resources”. As a global organism, our civilization collectively feeds on the energy in coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, hydroelectric power and renewables. Civilization continually consumes these resources to accomplish two things: the first is to propel all civilization’s internal back-and-forth “economic” circulations along its accumulated networks; the second is to incorporate raw materials into our structure in order to grow and maintain our current size against the ever present forces of dissipation and decay.<br />
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Energy, from whatever source, powers our machines, our telecommunications, modern agriculture, and the supply of the meals that give us the energy to sustain our thoughts, attention, and perceptions. Without energy, civilization would no longer be measurable. Everything would grind to a halt. Nothing would work. Lacking food, we would be dead and our attention span with it. The gradient that meaningfully distinguishes civilization from its environment would disappear. Value would vanish.<br />
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<b>Wealth is power</b><br />
Stepping back to see the world economy as a simple physical object, one where people are only part of a larger whole, would be a stretch for a traditional economist hung up on the idea that wealth must be restricted to physical capital rather than people. But, crucially, <a href="http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Physics_vs._Mainstream_Economics.html">unlike traditional models</a>, it is an idea that can be rigorously tested and potentially disproved. It is a hypothesis that is <a href="http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Is_Macroeconomics_a_science.html">falsifiable</a>. </div>
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<div>
I have shown in peer-reviewed studies published in <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/100247/">Climatic Change</a>, <a href="http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/2/315/2011/esdd-2-315-2011-discussion.html">Earth System Dynamics</a>, and <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000171/abstract">Earth’s Future</a> that the observed relationship between the current rate of energy consumption or power of civilization, and its total economic wealth (<i>not </i>the GDP), is a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000171/suppinfo">fixed constant of 7.1 ± 0.1 milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 2005 dollar</a>.<br />
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Equivalently, every 2005 dollar requires 324 kiloJoules be consumed over a year to sustain its value. In 2010, the global energy consumption rate of about 17 TW sustained about 2352 trillion 2005 dollars of global wealth. In 1970, both numbers were about half this. Both quantities have increased slowly by about 1.4% per year to 2.2% per year averaging a growth rate of 1.90% /year. The ratio of the two quantities has stayed nearly constant over a time period when both wealth and energy consumption have more than doubled and the rates of growth have increased by about 50%. Currency is the psychological manifestation of a capacity to dissipate energy.<br />
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<div>
<b>Can wealth continue to grow?</b><br />
What this means is that we must continue to grow our capacity to consume primary energy reserves just to grow our wealth. We should never conclude that growth can’t continue over coming decades, as some claim in perennial doomsday predictions. It’s just that there is nothing stronger than inertia to guarantee that it will. The water wheel in the picture above can rot or the river can dry. Hurricane low pressures can dissolve. For us, continued consumption growth may quite plausibly become too difficult due to depletion of energy and mineral reserves or accelerating environmental disasters such as climate change. If this happens, all our efforts to produce growth can be expected to be more than offset by decay.<br />
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At some point, all systems experience decay and collapse. We’ve seen the waxing and waning of civilizations throughout history. Historical studies suggest that any long-term decline in a society’s capacity to consume forebodes <a href="http://doi:10.1073/pnas.0703073104">hyper-inflation, war, and population decline</a>. The question for us should not be whether collapse will happen, but when, and whether it will be slow or sudden. </div>
Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-65379984631974621512018-08-17T09:45:00.003-07:002018-08-17T09:45:50.825-07:00The global economy, heat engines, and economic collapse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheh2AtKKpGcbPaDfImrtI8O46daEJyysmVP9AbwQdTPtWdRRysgBmEQa7XKtlcO-mBxXHj3lTmCInxN5QPpUDWLJN4pLZrO_sXPKCJ5xREqwWUsRF-XkTFer_BOvedo124H0N3yQHIjFQ/s1600/bp-statsreview.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="488" data-original-width="807" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheh2AtKKpGcbPaDfImrtI8O46daEJyysmVP9AbwQdTPtWdRRysgBmEQa7XKtlcO-mBxXHj3lTmCInxN5QPpUDWLJN4pLZrO_sXPKCJ5xREqwWUsRF-XkTFer_BOvedo124H0N3yQHIjFQ/s400/bp-statsreview.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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British Petroleum provides some <a href="https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/energy-charting-tool.html" target="_blank">pretty nice tools</a> for visualizing energy consumption like the figure above which drives home effectively the point of just how fast our demand for energy is growing, roughly quadrupling in the past 50 odd years. <br />
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In order to understand this growth better, I think it's important to ask why we need energy in the first place. This may seem like a pretty bone-headed question -- of course we need energy. But energy is not an essential ingredient in traditional macro-economic models. In the best case energy is treated as a quantity that can be "substituted" for other ingredients of the global economy as capital and labor.<br />
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As a physicist, this seems totally nuts as our individual ability to work rests on the availability of energy. We're not somehow divorced from the laws of the universe. I've never heard of someone being an effective element of the labor force who had completely ceased to eat. And food sure doesn't materialize without work being done.<br />
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Instead, I think it's appropriate to treat civilization as a what can be termed a thermodynamic heat engine. The idea of a heat engine was first envisioned by French engineers in the early 1800s. In a car, work is done to propel a car forward by consuming the chemical energy in gasoline at high temperatures and dissipating it as waste heat at low temperatures with the pistons moving up and down in between.<br />
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In one way, we're very similar. We consume energy to go through the cyclic motions of going to and from work and the grocery store, sending out internet search requests, and pumping our hearts. All these actions require a temperature gradient where energy is released at high temperatures and dissipate at cold temperatures, whether with our cars, our computers, or the gradient from the inside to exteriors of our bodies. In fact, we can see all of human civilization as a "super-organism" that consumes primary energy to engage in all of its internal circulations, ultimately radiating waste heat to the atmosphere and then to cool of space.<br />
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High potential primary energy resources like oil and coal sustain civilization’s circulations against dissipation of waste heat. ‘Useless’ energy ultimately flows to space through the cold planetary blackbody temperature of 255 K. In between lies civilization, including people, their activities, and<br />
all their associated circulations, whether or not they are part of the GDP.<br />
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<h3>
Civilization Growth</h3>
A key difference between human civilization and a car is that it can grow. By growing, its thermodynamic engine expands. A larger engine consumes more, dissipates more, and does work ever faster. This positive feedback provides a recipe for exponential growth.<br />
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Civilization uses energy consumption mostly to sustain existing circulations. A small fraction is also used to grow civilization through an incorporation of new raw materials (e.g. iron and wood) into its structure. Thermodynamically, this is possible only if civilization consumes a little more energy than it dissipates. A small fraction of the energy that is consumed is available to incorporate raw materials to build civilization.<br />
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We’re actually pretty familiar with this. If we eat too much we get fat. I’m told that consuming an extra 3500 calories beyond what we need leads to a pound of weight gain. This is the energy required for the body to turn food into flesh. <br />
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A child consumes food today in some proportion to the child’s body mass. The child experiences a <i>production</i> of mass if there is a convergence of energetic flows such that it dissipates less heat than is contained in the food energy eaten. The child’s current size is directly a consequence of an accumulation of prior mass production. Its current rate of food consumption is also a consequence of prior production. As the child grows it eats more. As the child approaches adulthood, the disequilibrium between consumption and dissipation narrows, and (hopefully!) the production of new mass stalls. <br />
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So economic production, or the GDP, can be seen as the consequence of this imbalance: production is positive only when primary energy consumption is greater than the rate at which civilization dissipates energy due to all it’s internal circulations. If production is positive, civilization is able to incorporate raw materials into its structure. It grows, and then uses the added population and infrastructure created with the materials to consume even more energy.<br />
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<h3>
Collapse</h3>
I think this is what is happening with the BP statistics. Because the GWP exists, we grow, and then use our growth to access more energy which we can then consume with the higher infrastructure demands. The relevant equation is that every 1000 dollars of year 2005 inflation-adjusted gross world product requires <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2013EF000171" target="_blank">7.1 additional Watts of power capacity to be added</a>, independent of the year that is considered.<br />
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Right now, energy consumption is continuing to grow rapidly, sustaining an ever larger GWP. But it is not the rate of energy consumption that supports the GWP, but the rate of growth of energy consumption that supports the GWP.<br />
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This important distinction is flat out frightening. The implication is that if we cease to grow energy and raw material consumption globally, then the global economy must collapse. But if don't cease to grow energy consumption and raw material consumption then we still collapse due to climate change and environmental destruction. Is there <a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/esd-3-1-2012.html" target="_blank">no way out</a>?<br />
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<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-63561773655486951192018-08-01T12:42:00.001-07:002018-09-05T13:05:00.070-07:00Is macroeconomics a science?<br />
Macroeconomics can get <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/15/the-state-of-macroeconomics-is-not-good/?utm_term=.c585643619f8">a pretty bad rap at times</a>, perhaps unfairly. Some of its practitioners are so politically influential on such familiar topics as unemployment and economic growth it's easy for the non-expert with an opinion to get a bit jealous. Few would dispute the merits of the latest winner of the Nobel in physics. But the Higgs boson is pretty inscrutable even to most physicists. It's only natural that economists get more attention -- and criticism -- when Nobel prize winners like Paul Krugman write popular columns for the New York Times. <br />
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Yet, even the noted economist Paul Romer has offered the caustic remark that the field is in "...a general failure mode of science that is triggered when respect for highly regarded leaders evolves into a deference to authority that displaces objective fact from its position as the ultimate determinant of scientific truth."</div>
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Ouch. So maybe macroeconomists are our modern day equivalent of medieval High Priests. Economists' theoretical models didn't predict the economic crash of 2008. Nonetheless, economists don't seem particularly troubled, certainly not troubled enough to consider that their models might be profoundly off course. From their perch, why should they?<br />
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Confirmation bias -- seeing only that which supports existing beliefs -- can be brushed off as the sort of normal human arrogance that we are all susceptible to. But being able to falsify a result lies at the core of the scientific method. It must be possible to set up a test that could lead to a model being discarded. </div>
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For a comparison of professions, imagine if meteorologists predicted sunny days rather than the landfall of a hurricane. And then, because respected NASA scientist James Hansen was himself unconcerned, they put little effort into preventing such a thing from happening again.</div>
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That's not what happens. Instead, in meteorology, the validity of forecast models is constantly tested by performing what is known as "hindcasts" -- starting a model sometime in the past to see how well it predicts the present. Aside from the fact that the models are built on basic physics to the greatest extent possible, various model flavors are ranked according to their hindcast accuracy. It's the job of a professional meteorologist to both understand the model workings and know which models do best in which situations to communicate to the public the best forecast possible.</div>
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<div>
I can find no evidence of the economics profession doing something similar. Traditional macroeconomic models employ equations for the GDP, or “production functions”, that are “tuned” to match past observations of labor and capital. It is not possible to falsify these moving theoretical targets because they are always made “right” by adding layers of social complexity or by tweaking the production function exponents until a decent fit is obtained. If conditions change and the formula no longer works, economists just tune again and call it a “structural break”.</div>
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This is cheating! At least if the goal is understanding how things work. It would be abhorrent to imagine a basic physics equation being adjusted as time progresses for the situation at hand. The speed of light in a vacuum doesn’t get to be different for you than for me or for last year versus this year.</div>
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Let's take for example the basic Cobb-Douglas production function used by economists as a starting point for relating economic production Y to labor L and capital K. The quantity A is a “total factor productivity” that has been thought -- largely due to efforts by Paul Romer -- to be related to innovation.</div>
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Y = A L<sup>α</sup> Κ<sup>1-α</sup></div>
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Here the parameter α is tuned to past data in order to reproduce values of Y. In economic studies, when the inelegant Cobb-Douglas function (or whatever is used as a replacement) doesn’t work well, for whatever reason, the approach is not to ask whether or not something might be fundamentally wrong about the premise behind the fit, but rather to add ever more bells and whistles until once again a sufficient fit is obtained, totally independent of any consideration of dimensional self-consistency.<br />
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For example, maybe a constant exponent α doesn’t provide a good fit unless A is allowed to change too according some equally complex function. Paul Romer introduced government stimulus of R&D to obtain this sort of example of complexity:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVFXYdCzqxc7VEaBLWKaEQL9dgw_gztJp66WCCasYucn4s4a4eQo82aoCFUknE1eRVe2ASz7U8UfK85JKbwBOOIrB7tCLuxkv5MN4Qxl31zDgbg3G4OZzRGSTipsQQ7VB5MiamdOtNsCg/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-08-01+at+1.22.03+PM.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVFXYdCzqxc7VEaBLWKaEQL9dgw_gztJp66WCCasYucn4s4a4eQo82aoCFUknE1eRVe2ASz7U8UfK85JKbwBOOIrB7tCLuxkv5MN4Qxl31zDgbg3G4OZzRGSTipsQQ7VB5MiamdOtNsCg/s400/Screen+Shot+2018-08-01+at+1.22.03+PM.png" /></a><br />
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So many free parameters! With such a complex function one could replace labor with the historical population of rodents in Calcutta and tune A, α and β in such a manner that the Cobb-Douglas function would still reproduce beautiful timelines for Y. As John Von Neumann quipped <i>With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.</i><br />
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This is not what sophistication should look like! Making things ever more mathematically complex does not make things more true, if anything less so. It feels akin to astrology, a highly complex, self-consistent model based on un-physical nonsense. Totally convincing to those who are looking to believe that the world has order and explanation, and that they alone have the years of training required to understand it, but completely lacking in any means for falsifiability.<br />
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<i>It gets worse.</i> The production functions lack the simple element of dimensional self-consistency. Take a basic physics equation, Newton's F=ma, or Force equals mass times acceleration. Mass has units of mass, obviously, and acceleration has units of distance per time squared. So the units of force are mass times distance per time squared. The equation would be totally bogus if force were declared to have any other sorts of units.<br />
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Now compare Newton's F = ma with the Cobb-Douglas function. There is nothing fundamental about the free parameter α since it is just a number. In fact, it can have any value depending on the statistical fit, the country, or the period considered. Suppose for the moment that α = 0.3. If A is just a number, labor has units of worker hours, and capital units of dollars, then Y would necessarily have the absurd units of worker hours to the 0.3 power and dollars to the 0.7 power. This has nothing to do with the real units of economic output which are dollars per time!</div>
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A couple years ago I had the opportunity to discuss economic growth models with well-known environmental economist <a href="https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=igKKg6IAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra">Robert Ayres</a> on a visit to Paris where he lives. He was quite adamant that I was wrong about everything. I don't think he had actually bothered to read anything I had done, which was too bad given the condition for the meeting (his idea) was that I buy and read his latest book. I tried to be patient, but eventually raised this units issue with him. His response was "only a physicist would care about units"!</div>
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Perhaps, I have been too harsh -- everybody is trying their best -- but it looks like fluency in Latin in the Catholic Church, where established macro-economists need something sufficiently opaque in order to maintain their high-priesthood. More generously, economics is complicated and economists just don’t yet know yet how to describe it without such detailed dimensionally inconsistent fits; even in physics, similar fits are occasionally used to describe interactions of particles with turbulence, for example, simply because the underlying physics can be rather challenging. <br />
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And maybe my rant is just another one of those pot-shots from non-economists, I have however tried to do better, by creating an economic growth model with no bells and whistles<a href="http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/6/673/2015/"> that can be easily tested and discarded</a>. It is founded on a proposed constant relationship between energy consumption rates and a very general representation of total inflation-adjusted wealth (analogous to capital K) and is borne out by observations. Further evaluation of the model has been done by performing hindcasts, asking whether we predict the present with a deterministic model that is initialized at some point in the past. Again, in this case it appears we can: current global rates of energy consumption growth and GWP growth can be accurately predicted based on conditions observed in the 1950s, without appealing to any observations in the interim, with skill scores >90%.</div>
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For myself, there's adequate contentment in simply understanding some of the power of thermodynamics. But that is balanced by some abhorrence with certain aspects of macroeconomics.</div>
Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-51034095088589430062018-07-28T09:09:00.000-07:002018-07-28T09:20:20.395-07:00George Orwell on the metabolism of the industrial worldWhen discussing <a href="http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Biophysical_Economics" target="_blank">biophysical economics</a> -- the idea that the human economy can be treated like any other biological organism that grows subject to resource constraints -- well-known names include Charlie Hall, Cutler Cleveland, and Robert Costanza. My personal favorite for the level of insight, using prose rather than math, is the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Economic-History-Geerat-Vermeij/dp/069112793X" target="_blank">work of Geerat Vermeij</a>.<br />
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Recently, I've been reading George Orwell's 1937 book "Road to Wigham Pier", a testimony of the plight of the British working class. He captures similar themes, more eloquently, I think, than anything else I've read:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our civilization...is founded on coal more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">dependent upon coal. </span><span style="background-color: yellow; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In the metabolism of the Western world</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> the coal-miner </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">supported.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic,and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets may scratch one </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole we are </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal', but we seldom or </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">labour in the mines. It is just 'coal'--something that I have got to </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. </span><span style="background-color: yellow; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">The full chapter, truly remarkable for its description of the work life of the miners, is <a href="http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/1.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmMLlCd97Xlt7O7fR-Jeq9dQts67oIJIFlHWlRBG-S2Hca58O4Q1JFJdDLZyJXucuitv8EV-MhAtfwIKTM9KoEru-KBsWkAinh7ks1Ee6QUQXpVY7Q81cIkM4utyilq2h7DX-902ULwR4/s1600/1*_kEWChavxcr9ka5pLDh4lg.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1096" data-original-width="1536" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmMLlCd97Xlt7O7fR-Jeq9dQts67oIJIFlHWlRBG-S2Hca58O4Q1JFJdDLZyJXucuitv8EV-MhAtfwIKTM9KoEru-KBsWkAinh7ks1Ee6QUQXpVY7Q81cIkM4utyilq2h7DX-902ULwR4/s320/1*_kEWChavxcr9ka5pLDh4lg.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When I am digging trenches in my garden, if </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">bent double before I begin. The miner's job would be as much beyond my </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">weeks. </span></div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-270387370510271182018-07-02T09:22:00.002-07:002022-04-24T20:09:37.745-07:00Are renewables our salvation?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(81, 81, 81); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #515151; font-family: Times; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/climate/companies-renewable-energy.html" target="_blank">past article</a> in the New York Times by climate and energy writer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/brad-plumer" target="_blank">Brad Plumer</a> cast a ray of hope on the shadow that was cast by Donald Trump's decision that the United States should exit the Paris Climate Accord. Independent of government mandates, private companies are spontaneously moving into the renewables business. "<i>Last year in the United States, 19 large corporations announced deals with energy providers to build 2.78 gigawatts worth of wind and solar generating capacity, equal to one-sixth of all of the renewable capacity added nationwide in 2017"</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hurray for capitalism! Climate's curse may be yet be it's salvation! S</span>olar and wind may have the issue of being either expensive or intermittent. But production prices keep falling, and with a continental sized electrical grid, it’s probably sufficiently windy or sunny somewhere. Remarkably, solar and wind seem to be succeeding. </div>
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There a couple of considerations in this discussion that I don't see frequently addressed and I think may be really important. First, new sources of energy have historically added to past sources rather than replaced them. Second, any source of energy, whatever its source, enables civilization to further destroy its environment through the extraction of matter.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Consider the figure above, which provides a broad brush view of energy consumption in the United States over the past couple of hundred years. Overall, total energy consumption has risen dramatically. With the establishment of European settlers, society was first powered off wood, adding coal to the mix around 1880, with non-solid fossil sources taking off around 1950. Nuclear and renewables have (so far) been smaller players. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s a couple of interesting things to notice about these curves. First is their shape: following an initial period of exponential growth, each source tends to plateau. Then, when new sources are added, they are additive: previously dominant sources do not decline, or at least not by much -- they simply become part of a larger mix. The curve for coal is particularly interesting. While there was marginal decline between 1910 and 1950, since then consumption of coal appears to have been <i>resuscitated</i> by oil and natural gas. Fluid fuels didn’t replace coal. In fact it was quite the opposite!</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Why would this be? I think a case could be made that what is going on is that new energy sources grow civilization, thereby increasing all of its aspects, including population, vehicles, and homes, as well as their corresponding demand for all types of energy, irrespective of source. Energy supports the technological advances that make previously inaccessible sources of energy more accessible. With the introduction of oil, mechanized digging of coal gets easier; with an explosion of human population aided by the fertilizer produced with oil, demand for electricity produced by coal increases too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There are many physical analogs for this sort of behavior. To use the language of physics, we could think of an energy type as a “degree of freedom”. In low energy systems, certain possible degrees of freedom may be “frozen out”, and be inactive. With increasing energy added to the system, these degrees of freedom become active, but not at the sacrifice of those degrees of freedom that were previously active at lower energies. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So renewables are great as a substitute fuel for the purposes of slowing climate change, <i>provided they actually replace rather than add to existing sources of energy</i>. Unfortunately, it is not clear that there is any precedent for this sort of thing happening.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A second issue is that civilization is made of matter not energy. As civilization grows, it accelerates its rate of pollution as it goes. Acting as an open thermodynamic system, we use energy to extract raw materials from our environment in order to feed and grow our children, construct the stuff of civilization, and offset ever present decay. As we do so, resource extraction depletes the oceans of fish, the forests of trees, and the ground of minerals, leaving behind material waste products such as plastic, nitrogen, and exotic chemicals that pollute our land, water and air. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">How can it be that renewables are any sort of environmental panacea if they simply add to the energy mix that we use to extract raw materials from our environment and leave behind an ever growing pile of waste? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Whether the energy source is oil or solar doesn’t really matter. Energy of whatever stripe is used to acquire the raw materials from our environment, the components of all the stuff of humanity, building more of us while leaving less of the environment in its wake. Sure, maybe renewables do not leave behind carbon dioxide in quite the same way as fossil fuels, but the energy they do provide helps contribute to our seemingly unstoppable conversion of matter from the environment into the matter that composes civilization. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So, even if sunlight and wind is seemingly infinite, our planet Earth is not. Any short-term material gain of ours is a loss for the world around us. Renewables only accelerate this process.</span></div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-14674706096614963462018-06-18T16:19:00.000-07:002019-04-11T14:45:01.239-07:00Is brain thermodynamics the link between economics and physics?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiq6dW8vUatQ2e4w4zdqY5BZvnYogRTnbhVTEKsYG9WW9nr29-071UagRle-cwBP5GDd1JbPxvhoIIy9I8L6m5nLTlsBYC1V0N2hnenLxeKeAUJW12sYXc0LfeBq1ff0bTbgSHU26TIuQ/s1600/money-saving-spending-habits-psychology-2136x1427.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1069" data-original-width="1600" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiq6dW8vUatQ2e4w4zdqY5BZvnYogRTnbhVTEKsYG9WW9nr29-071UagRle-cwBP5GDd1JbPxvhoIIy9I8L6m5nLTlsBYC1V0N2hnenLxeKeAUJW12sYXc0LfeBq1ff0bTbgSHU26TIuQ/s400/money-saving-spending-habits-psychology-2136x1427.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I've argued that the accumulated wealth of civilization is <a href="http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-power-theory-of-value.html" target="_blank">fundamentally linked to its total rate of energy consumption through a constant</a>. The total historically accumulated value of humanity's inflation-adjusted production -- not just the annual accumulation called the GDP -- rises every year by a percentage that matches the increase in humanity's energetic needs.<br />
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But how could this be? The value of stuff is determined by our brains. How do our brains somehow "know" collectively how fast we consume energy? How do we comprehend how a psychological construct like money can be tied to a thermodynamic construct like energetic power? Doesn't economic value go only so far as human judgement?</div>
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As a clue, even with no one home and all the utilities turned off, a house still maintains some worth for as long as it can be perceived as being potentially useful by other active members of the global economy. Real estate agents talk about "Comps" for determining the value of a home. Comps are based on the recent sale value of other homes in the neighborhood. Comps were determined by people with brains (though arguably less so in a real-estate bubble) who in turn are connected through social and work connections to other people with brains, and with several degrees of separation, everyone on this planet with a brain. </div>
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Individual brains process a wealth of information from the rest of civilization using extraordinarily dense networks of axons and dendrites. Patterns of oscillatory neuronal activity lead to the emergence of behavior and cognition. Powering this brain activity requires approximately 20 % of the daily caloric input to the body as a whole. Arguably this number is 100% since neither the body nor the brain could survive without the other. </div>
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And we are connected not just to each other but, by definition, all other elements of civilization, including our transport and communications networks. We and civilization also couldn't survive without each other. Dissipative neuronal circulations along brain networks may implicitly scale with dissipative circulations along civilization networks. Our collective perceptions must reflect global economic wealth. </div>
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Individually, our brains may seem very personal, and a small part of the whole. But they are also connected to each other. They are part of a much larger "super-organism" that includes not just our bodies but our stuff. Our brains collectively march to broader economic circulations along global civilization networks that are sustained by a dissipation of oil, coal, and other primary energy supplies. </div>
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Summing wealth over all the world’s nations, 7.1 Watts is required to maintain every one thousand inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars of historically accumulated economic production. This relationship may seem unorthodox by traditional economic standards, but it may also be seen as a type of psychological constant that ties the physics of human perception to the thermodynamic dissipative flows of energy that drive the global economy.</div>
Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-50424904846001261902018-06-06T08:55:00.000-07:002018-06-06T14:44:51.343-07:00On the exponential growth, decay and collapse of civilization<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEdjYkalDqC0CwPC9SiaJRVTSRctCyeghmhM9bKtB6ksiTkzfN-t9d_ivCxqflxTseYsfu5jAWYLXh6ta2vOjVPhEaL582cqQw2gbZc8bfHDLpEi1-XbaFVz97D2du1oiarRbnSeOjhlU/s1600/93222-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="355" data-original-width="230" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEdjYkalDqC0CwPC9SiaJRVTSRctCyeghmhM9bKtB6ksiTkzfN-t9d_ivCxqflxTseYsfu5jAWYLXh6ta2vOjVPhEaL582cqQw2gbZc8bfHDLpEi1-XbaFVz97D2du1oiarRbnSeOjhlU/s200/93222-3.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>
Last week I had the fortune of seeing Rogers and Hammerstein's Carousel during a short trip with my wife to New York City. It's a 1940s classic set in a fishing town in New England. Some of the themes are a bit dated to be sure, but then I still love Italian opera which can be totally absurd. This particular Broadway production fittingly introduced Renée Fleming in <a href="https://youtu.be/MoAGqV7cvqY" target="_blank">the role of Nettie</a> - a real treat to hear this world-famous soprano sing.<br />
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The plot of the musical contrasts a happy couple with one that is more challenged. For the happier, fisherman Enoch woos his bride-to-be Carrie in a song showing off his good-husband-material ambition:<br />
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<i>Enoch</i><br />
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When I make enough money outa one of my boat,</div>
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I'll put all of my money in another little boat.</div>
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I'll make twice as much outa two little boats,</div>
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An' the first thing you know, I'll have four little boats;</div>
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Then eight little boats, then a plenty little boats,</div>
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Then a great big fleet of great big boats.</div>
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All catchin' herring, bringin' into shore;</div>
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Sailin' out again, an' bringin' more.</div>
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An' more, an' more, an' more!</div>
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The first year we're married,</div>
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We'll have one little kid.</div>
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The second year we're goin'</div>
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Have another little kid.</div>
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You'll soon be donnin' socks</div>
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For eight little feet-</div>
<i>Carrie</i><br />
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I am not enough for another fleet!</div>
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Utterly hokey, but presumably this was Rogers and Hammerstein's intention. At least it's clear that Enoch picked up somewhere a basic mathematical mastery of powers of two and the ingredients for exponential growth.</div>
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Exponential growth is curious, particularly in the economics literature where it is often presented as a God-given truth without questioning where it actually comes from. In fact, whether we look at boats, fish, or kids, or anything else, exponential growth is subject to fundamental thermodynamic constraints. The <i>rate</i> of exponential growth constantly changes over time as a function of past growth and current conditions, and that rate can evolve from being positive (growth) to negative (decay).<br />
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There's a couple of important themes: </div>
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<b>System growth</b><br />
This is the most basic ingredient of exponential growth. As a system grows, it grows <i>into </i>the resources that enabled its growth in the first place, increasing its<i> interface </i>with its supply. A larger interface permits higher flow rates of the resources thereby allowing the system to grow faster. A bigger fleet catches more fish. As long as fish are profitable, this leads to a bigger fleet yet.<br />
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<b>Diminishing returns</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-EzoxfHyESsFoAhH3MSAyhx3JhaOc1GUDZaFMLMP6G-1FKWtL151afHeR-aHpw7kQ0C9RouDDVjogEJW0kDYH5k0ThMTf7dl5Q5SPX5Q8pCFnUDxvh8uO2soxvlGknvJf4096DGuojSo/s1600/Interface.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1127" data-original-width="1280" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-EzoxfHyESsFoAhH3MSAyhx3JhaOc1GUDZaFMLMP6G-1FKWtL151afHeR-aHpw7kQ0C9RouDDVjogEJW0kDYH5k0ThMTf7dl5Q5SPX5Q8pCFnUDxvh8uO2soxvlGknvJf4096DGuojSo/s320/Interface.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Even if a system grows into new resources, growth rates have a natural tendency to slow with time. The reason is that systems compete with their growing selves for available resources so that growth of the interface succumbs to diminishing returns. The more Enoch's fleet grows, the more his own boats compete with with the rest of the fleet for the remaining fish that are there; the bigger the fleet, the more competition. The consequence is that the interface of boats with fish does not grow as fast as the fleet itself so consumption stabilizes.<br />
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<b>Discovery</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_tfezixtB5m12SrFDq6lBtuzZXCn8x_2qizDBQZTvJ6hJi5pGLyofHguEQOhVWivm3B8lqXiaN1xNtwbc49BRZMunpHKWE0X-Uv3qV5neRN3iRAkOKtHkQwdiKzm7WqaNN7XBnOsLdBk/s1600/1*-YfhGBjK_YM7YN7Xz8xi7w.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1257" data-original-width="1600" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_tfezixtB5m12SrFDq6lBtuzZXCn8x_2qizDBQZTvJ6hJi5pGLyofHguEQOhVWivm3B8lqXiaN1xNtwbc49BRZMunpHKWE0X-Uv3qV5neRN3iRAkOKtHkQwdiKzm7WqaNN7XBnOsLdBk/s200/1*-YfhGBjK_YM7YN7Xz8xi7w.jpeg" width="200" /></a></div>
As former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, there are the "unknown, unknowns... There are things we do not know we don't know.". A system grows exponentially by growing its interface with known resources. Normally, diminishing returns takes over, but by way of this growth, there can also be discovery of previously unknown resources. Early Portuguese fisherman could not easily have anticipated the extraordinary riches of cod to be found in the New World that would propel fish catches skyward.</div>
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<b>Depletion</b></div>
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Resources can be depleted if they are not replenished as fast as the ever increasing rate of consumption. In turn, growth of the interface between the system and its supply grows more slowly than it would otherwise. Enoch catches fish to grow his fleet. But New England fish stocks decline - there are limits to growth.<br />
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<b>Decay</b><br />
Poor Enoch will eventually grow old and his boats and nets constantly need repair. What can't be fixed also slows growth. Exponential growth is still possible if decay is slow enough. But an unpredicted hurricane could wipe out Enoch's entire fleet of boats beyond his knowledge or control, in which case gradual decay can easily tip towards collapse.<br />
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<b>Putting it together</b><br />
Putting all these things together we end up with a mathematical curve for growth known as the logistic function characterized by increasing rates of explosive growth followed by decreasing rates of exponential growth. Growth then stagnates and tips into either slow or rapid decline.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhheDu1NTlK5euUTC1akMhGPtzFZ0U-MeKuaoYSfpU24ZEN6X7snYXvao1hHWdk7DJwVvPBVekKRmhyphenhyphenqWwb9lbQkMUrhIlI6x1crqOsc3TaHc0lei81R2wGiFU3FwF5IY7pGTcS2PIDMSM/s1600/Finite+Resources.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1020" data-original-width="1470" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhheDu1NTlK5euUTC1akMhGPtzFZ0U-MeKuaoYSfpU24ZEN6X7snYXvao1hHWdk7DJwVvPBVekKRmhyphenhyphenqWwb9lbQkMUrhIlI6x1crqOsc3TaHc0lei81R2wGiFU3FwF5IY7pGTcS2PIDMSM/s400/Finite+Resources.png" width="400" /></a></div>
An example of the timeline is shown above, illustrated for the special case where resources are in fixed supply and simply <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/31/9511" target="_blank">drained like a battery</a>. Resources are consumed by the system; the system thrives on resources but is always consumed by decay. While growth is initially exponential, diminishing returns takes over. Then, during a period of overshoot, the system keeps growing for a time, even as resources and consumption decline, but eventually decay takes over and tips the system into decay and collapse. Critically, there is no equilibrium of steady-state to be had, not at any point.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sFjGMhq7p6ESiSx7A8YDQG-RbQlhPnPRl7Z5V0XUGJbGDJSAaBUKy6M1WhP86XeKDk3DqtMZWgG5fVaTbKe08C7x7xx5wIaauXzsP9VU8bD6JdgMbiSNA0fs4P9v2b5fz8YTwG5JX9I/s1600/Discoverable+Resources.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="989" data-original-width="1499" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sFjGMhq7p6ESiSx7A8YDQG-RbQlhPnPRl7Z5V0XUGJbGDJSAaBUKy6M1WhP86XeKDk3DqtMZWgG5fVaTbKe08C7x7xx5wIaauXzsP9VU8bD6JdgMbiSNA0fs4P9v2b5fz8YTwG5JX9I/s400/Discoverable+Resources.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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But, the situation is rarely as simple as a depleted battery. This is because resources can be discovered. The figure above shows how this works. All the same phenomena are present as in the drained battery scenario except just as the system enters overshoot and plateaus, a new resource is discovered, and the system enters a second period of exponential growth. Eventually decay still takes over, but it does not forbid the system from potentially entering some new phase of growth in the future, perhaps repeating the original cycle.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDNhrphWsB0vcoPXLh-rd29-KBrWSs7bwlsoD33b_xiv4OuZpfnV1K49HJvPIHegMpJzOTpfp0cRF0H9gndPPrxNfoBKYmjkjVaQ7S1cpVQ3qsbIXoAMIi9idVIbRENxgAcLWhSYo9yrk/s1600/EIA+energy+timeline.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="286" data-original-width="578" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDNhrphWsB0vcoPXLh-rd29-KBrWSs7bwlsoD33b_xiv4OuZpfnV1K49HJvPIHegMpJzOTpfp0cRF0H9gndPPrxNfoBKYmjkjVaQ7S1cpVQ3qsbIXoAMIi9idVIbRENxgAcLWhSYo9yrk/s400/EIA+energy+timeline.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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It's easy to see some of these dynamics at play in our civilization. At least in the U.S., energy has consumption has seen multiple waves of exponential growth, diminishing returns, competition and discovery. Since the mid-1700s, we have progressed from biomass, to coal, to petroleum, each discovery rescuing the U.S. so that it can continue expansion outward of its interface with primary energy supplies. Currently, natural gas and renewables appear to be entering a new exponential growth phase, with coal sliding into decline. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf3o9YEkFnwGLt9bxDHHWaeq-lIyiTkWFnV7NkGNZCrdR5LxD8CjTUjW80NQkc_2A9EWPN0FhMaSjOcIfvUpRCSDKNOAzyk1RUxrOtOp2mAL4ZaLINNj9RzrB3UY-XN2ZUZOLMJlJmE-Q/s1600/Population.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="934" data-original-width="1535" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf3o9YEkFnwGLt9bxDHHWaeq-lIyiTkWFnV7NkGNZCrdR5LxD8CjTUjW80NQkc_2A9EWPN0FhMaSjOcIfvUpRCSDKNOAzyk1RUxrOtOp2mAL4ZaLINNj9RzrB3UY-XN2ZUZOLMJlJmE-Q/s400/Population.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Similar things can be seen in world population growth going back even further in time: always successive pulses of exponential growth, followed by stagnation, then discovery, and renewed expansion. We are now growing faster than ever.</div>
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So what does this mean for us and our future? The thermodynamics and mathematics of how a system grows can be described and predicted <i><a href="http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/468/2145/2532" target="_blank">provided we know the size of resources and the magnitude of decay</a>. </i> The problem is that we don't because there are always the "unknown unknowns". That said, we can say with some confidence that there are two main forces that will shape this century, resource depletion and environmental decline: it seems like <a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/esd-3-1-2012.html" target="_blank">one of the two will get us</a>. </div>
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So far resource discovery has more than adequately kept civilization afloat. But this cannot continue forever. When will it stop? This depends on this balance between discovery and decay. Discovery of new energy resources seems to be fairly unpredictable. Still, we've been remarkably good at it considering doomsday forecasts of Peak Oil have been overcome by the introduction of shale oil, natural gas, and renewables. Nonetheless, we currently double our energy demands every 30 years or so. Can new discoveries keep pace? If they can, won't that lead to environmental disaster as atmospheric CO2 concentrations climb past 1000 ppm and we lay waste to the forests, oceans, and ground? </div>
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Unlike diamonds, exponential growth cannot be forever. It just can't. Eventually, something has to give.</div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-81191049472895826712018-05-21T13:15:00.001-07:002022-12-26T13:02:11.816-08:00What's your Carbon Footprint?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Global-Warming-Reduce-Footprint-ebook/dp/B071JNLB15/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1526933216&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=carbon+footprint&psc=1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="340" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIEq7g_Fzkbtu5Kz4eN4sDjbWzkkAuqh8fL1VJ02WVLyCo8nZjNFYyv8cq4rjBoneGBMqhib-fS-IubWbFS5KzFGSrwEEOJyAOJ6DlCpOzeDhI6JH-ppzz8QEiu8vgHO2Ng0SP-gYEFdY/s320/51wXQvck99L.jpg" width="217" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Much has been made of the question of how we can reduce our individual impact on climate change. We all of us want to make a difference. If we individually consume less, surely we're doing our part to save the planet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But I really think the premise is wrong, because in an interconnected world, none of us can be meaningfully separated from the whole. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Consider the number of degrees of separation between you and anyone else on the planet. This might seem like a pretty hard thing to assess given how many of us there are and in some pretty far-flung places. I don’t know personally anyone in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (to mention some arbitrarily remote location), but I can be pretty sure that it’s not too much of a stretch to suppose my Australian friend has a friend who has been to the PNG capital Port Moresby where he ran across a guy whose cousin occasionally makes trips to the capital to work for “luxury” items to take back to his remote mountain jungle dwelling where he presents them to his wife. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That would be just five degrees of separation. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Certainly, the relationships are pretty far-flung, but it’s like the line from the TV series </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Breaking Bad, </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> “</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B6mGsYCI-A" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">I know a guy who knows a guy.</a><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">” None of us is truly independent of anyone else.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The same principle can apply to all of history. Suppose that an estimated <a href="https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/">100 billion people</a> have walked the earth in the last 50,000 years. With each successive generation, each of us is related to two others to the power of the number of generations. Exponentials lead to big numbers quickly: 100 billion people equates to just 37 successive generations. So, it shouldn’t take too great a number of generations before the number of your number ancestors is similar to the number of people living at that time. As evidence, all humans look and act pretty much the same. One way or another, there was sufficient intermingling for us all to have ancestors in common.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So, as a first approximation, we are linked through our social and economic connections to everyone currently alive, and moreover we can be linked by blood and tradition to everyone who has ever been alive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It seems then that the question should be not what is <i>your</i> carbon footprint but what instead is <i>our </i>carbon footprint, that for humanity as a whole. We are a collective “super-organism” that has evolved over time by burning carbon based fuels to sustain ourselves and to grow. Individually, we may profoundly feel that we can behave as isolated entities; our personal economic choices, in however limited a way, can reduce the collective rate of CO2 exhalation. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The evidence is against this argument, however. If we term our collective wealth as the accumulation of all past economic production, summing over all of humanity over all of history, then the data reveal a remarkable fact: independent of the year that is considered, collective wealth has had a fixed relationship to added atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Expressed quantitatively, <a href="http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/esd-3-1-2012.html"> 2.42 +/- 0.02 ppmv CO2 is added every year for every one thousand trillion inflation-adjusted 1990 US dollars of current global wealth</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A useful analogy here is to a growing child, who consumes food and oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. The rate of CO2 exhalation by the child is determined by the sum of all cellular activity in the child. All the child’s current living cells require energy, and all produce CO2 as a waste product. But there are two key things: first, no set of cells can be magically dissociated from any set of others, e.g. the heart from the brain, as they are all interdependent; and second, the total number of current cells in the child is not determined by what the child does today, but rather by child’s past. Over time, the child grew from infancy to its current size, accumulating cells such that prior growth determined the child's current capacity to exhale CO2.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For humanity, it is the same. We currently “exhale” CO2 as a total civilization, but our current rate of exhalation is a collective enterprise by its intertwined parts as they have emerged from past civilization growth. </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(81, 81, 81); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #515151; font-family: Times; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(81, 81, 81); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #515151; font-family: Times; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">So, if emissions are so tightly linked to the collective whole, and all past growth of civilization’s consumptive needs has already happened, entirely beyond our current control, what individually can we do right now?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To further illustrate the problem, let’s look at CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. To calculate the actual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, one has to consider that the land and oceans absorb a fraction of what is emitted. Estimating carbon sinks is possible but can get pretty tricky. Nonetheless, we can look at the observed relationship between economic activity and atmospheric chemistry to get a sense of what is going on. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Looking above at the past 2000 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, obtained from Mauna Loa in Hawaii and from ice cores in Antarctica, and measured as a perturbation from a baseline “pre-industrial” concentration of 275 ppmv, there is a surprisingly tight power-law relationship with global GDP. For the entire dataset :</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>log[CO2(ppmv perturbation)] ~ 0.6 x log[GDP(2005 USD)]</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Amazingly, for over 2000 years, the relationship between CO2 and economic activity has been pretty much a mathematical constant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In fact, if we look just at the past 60 years in the above, the relationship is linear and even tighter: since 1950, for every trillion inflation-adjusted year 2005 USD of global economy, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has been 1.7 ppmv higher.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And, we could turn this around. With an extremely high degree of accuracy, we could estimate the global GDP simply with a CO2 probe at Mauna Loa. In units of trillion year 2005 USD and ppmv CO2:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>GDP = 0.58 x CO2 - 174</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">An atmospheric chemist could easily obtain the size of the global economy within a 95% uncertainty bound of just 1.5%! No need for economists!</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of course, we have to be careful with correlation and causation. And even if the above relationship has worked extraordinarily well for the past 65 years, the underlying basis for a relationship between GDP and CO2 concentrations is in fact rather more complicated. Nonetheless, these data clearly support an argument that what matters for determining the concentrations of this key greenhouse gas are collective human activities. </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(81, 81, 81); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #515151; font-family: Times; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(81, 81, 81); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #515151; font-family: Times; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The</span> relationship between CO2 and world economic activity has been extremely tight and invariant over a very long time period during which the configuration of humanity has changed extraordinarily. There have been periodic wars, famines, and global economic crises. We do not consume the same raw materials with the same efficiencies to the same extent now as we did in the past. The mix of wind, solar, nuclear and fossil fuels has been consumed in widely varying mixtures using an extraordinary range of different technologies. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Yet this tie remains. What is going on? Speculating, perhaps one way to look at it is to consider individually the impact of buying that fuel efficient Prius, or turning down the thermostat. A car or house that consumes less fuel allows for an instantaneously incremental reduction in the demand for fuel. Sounds great. Except, the resources for producing the fuel are still available. If demand drops incrementally, then oil producers reduce prices to increase demand. Cheaper gas is more desirable, and so the collective response of all consumers is to consume more. Ultimately, the net effect on the collective rate of fossil fuel consumption of buying a fuel efficient Prius is zero (or even an increase). </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“No man is an island entire of itself...” We have no individual carbon footprint. We are only “... a part of the main”. We'd like to think our individual actions matter but it is only collectively will they reduce our impact on climate. And this will be very, very hard. As unpalatable as it may be, the only successful climate action will be to dramatically and collectively deflate the global economy. Unfortunately, this may be a bit like asking that growing child, once it has reached a healthy adulthood, to voluntarily suffocate or shrink back to infancy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Is there an alternative perspective that allows for change but is still consistent with the observations? It would be nice to think that our individual or collective actions can meaningfully decouple the economy from changes in atmospheric composition. But how? </span></div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-91709372760727767652018-05-14T08:15:00.002-07:002019-09-09T15:00:26.836-07:00Determinism and the human machine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Physicists" border="0" height="400" src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png" title="If you need some help with the math, let me know, but that should be enough to get you started! Huh? No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says." width="265" /></a>I've been called a "dangerous nihilist" for trying to show how humanity can be treated usefully as a simple physical object. And a paper by D. Cullenward et al. strongly critical of my work - albeit by totally getting it wrong - referenced this rather funny cartoon, concluding that "<i>Perhaps in the future a particularly brilliant scientist will discover a robust and verifiable means for deterministically predicting energy system dynamics. Until that time, however, the evidence suggests we should err of the side of humility and uncertainty in making projections about the future."</i></div>
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I get it. Treating the collective behavior of humans as simple by-products of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, something reducible to one line equations in physics, would hardly be the stuff of Keats or Shakespeare sonnets. Obviously, interpersonal dynamics can <i>feel</i> strong, and those feelings lead to <i>decisions </i>that seem at times to be utterly unpredictable, certainly a far, far cry from the elegant simplicity of an equation in physics.</div>
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But I don't see that poor predictability of the human condition is inconsistent with it being strictly deterministic, something that could be, at least in principle, reduced to a mathematical representation. </div>
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The father of chaos theory, MIT atmospheric scientist Ed Lorenz was perhaps the pioneer of this idea. In his seminal paper <a href="https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469%281963%29020%3C0130%3ADNF%3E2.0.CO%3B2" target="_blank"><i>Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow</i></a> he devised a simplified set of equations that represented some key processes in the atmosphere. The details don't really matter, but for edification here's the set up: <br />
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Aside from the rather extraordinary genius of representing the atmosphere in such a compact manner, what was so enormously influential was that Lorenz showed how purely deterministic equations - <i>X</i>, <i>Y, </i>and <i>Z </i>at any given time is uniquely determined by where <i>X</i>, <i>Y, </i>and <i>Z </i>start out - are nonetheless unstable and inherently unpredictable. This did not mean the solutions aren't well bounded. That is to say, on Earth, <i>X</i>, <i>Y, </i>and <i>Z </i>couldn't become just anything. It's just that the precise solution of <i>X</i>, <i>Y, </i>and <i>Z </i>at any point in time could not be predicted very far ahead because even very small differences in the precision of the initial state translated to large differences in some not-so-distant future state. </div>
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<i>Sensitivity to initial conditions </i>means the final outcome can be deterministic but nonetheless unpredictable. Determinism does not mean knowability. </div>
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Of course, this does not mean we give up in despair. Well-bounded solutions do nonetheless exist. Not everything is possible, although we must accept a certain loss of resolution in our results the further out we look. </div>
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Due to the approximate length of the water cycle, we know we can't peer beyond about 10-days in our weather forecasts, but we will accept a 1-week forecast for our weekend planning - albeit with a larger grain of salt than the 1-day forecast for the kids' soccer game. And we can still make climate forecasts that are averaged over space and time: it's not idiocy to claim that summer will arrive in the Northern Hemisphere around May, 2026 even if there's no prayer of saying it will rain in New York City on July 15.</div>
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I don't see it as being entirely dehumanizing to treat humanity in a similar fashion. We are wonderfully unpredictable and predictable at the same time. We don't know what exactly the day or year will bring even if we have a pretty good idea. Like the popular quote in the financial world "<i>History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes". </i></div>
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So it is with the approach I've taken to the evolution of civilization. There is no pretense at being able to explain the details at any given time or place, but there is predictability, <a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/6/673/2015/" target="_blank">predictability that can be tested with hindcasts</a>, <i>provided we step back and look at humanity as a whole</i>. Stepping back, we can see farther into the future. Sensitivity to initial conditions yields to bounded solutions that are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. For example, whatever a Nobel prize winning economist might imagine, we will not decouple the economy from energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. It's as physically possible as a perpetual motion machine.</div>
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Maybe we are a bit like Don Draper in the opening credits of the Mad Men series, falling deterministically through a series of life events, lacking any real internal control. Watching the series we already know the story: Don is irretrievably trapped by his mysterious past, and will inevitably succumb to women and booze. However, because we never know exactly how, we nonetheless derive the very human joy of watching his agonies as we binge-watch the next episode. Is this Nihilism? Voyeurism? I don't know. But I feel a bit the same about watching the progression of civilization through its own coming struggles with resource depletion and environmental decline.</div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-10414508167030974802018-05-11T12:09:00.002-07:002019-12-01T17:41:53.710-08:00EIA energy forecasts also spell economic doom?The <a href="http://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/05/has-us-energy-information.html" target="_blank">last post</a> looked at the Energy Information Administration (EIA) energy forecasts to conclude that the 1% per year global energy consumption growth rate implied that <i>over the course of the next 40 years we will consume as much energy total as the total we consumed in the past 100 years. </i>Of course, we will consume even more if the growth rate continues at 2% per year, as it has in the past decade. If the past century of environmental destruction is any guide, destruction powered by our energy consumption, then the planet will be rather worse for wear in most of our lifetimes.<br />
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But what does it imply economically? Agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund forecast between 3% and 4% global GDP growth in the coming years. Can this be reconciled with EIA forecasts of just 1% for the fuel that power the economy?<br />
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A direct implication of the constant relating energy consumption and historically accumulated wealth that <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%252Fs10584-009-9717-9.pdf" target="_blank">I have described</a> is<br />
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<i>GDP growth rate = Energy consumption growth rate + Growth rate of energy consumption growth rate</i><br />
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So just to show that this isn't totally out to lunch, the respective mean growth rates for the 40 year period between 1970 and 2010 are<br />
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3.1%/year = 2.0%/year + 1.4%/year<br />
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3.1%/year = 3.4%/year. So not perfect, but pretty close, about 10% error. What we see globally is that GDP has been growing faster than energy consumption, but the difference can be accounted for by the second term on the right hand side above, the growth rate of the growth rate, a term I have been calling <i><a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/6/673/2015/esd-6-673-2015.pdf" target="_blank">innovation</a> </i>since it can be related to improvements in energy efficiency.<br />
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So, let's now take a look at what the EIA forecasts imply for the future. If energy consumption has been growing at 2.0%/year, and the EIA projects instead a steady 1%/year, then the equation above for GDP growth would read:<br />
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1.0%/year = 1.0%/year + 0% per year<br />
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1.0%/year. Isn't that something close to a permanent recession? Keep in mind that 1.0%/year is an average value for the world, and that there will be competition among countries for this global constraint. Developed economies tend to grow more slowly than average, so this doesn't sound particularly rosy for those of us who live there. Really, I'm in no position to say what such an anemic growth rate actually looks like on the global economic stage, but it would seem to be well below what most economists would consider desirable. The last time growth stagnated like this over a long period of time was the 1930s. We know what followed.<br />
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And meanwhile, even at 1% per year energy consumption growth, we would still consume enough energy to bring about roughly a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, sufficient to blow well beyond the 2 degrees Celsius cap proposed by the Paris Climate Accords.<br />
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It seems we can't win!<br />
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<br />Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-10418341626265865622018-05-09T17:19:00.002-07:002018-05-09T17:22:57.638-07:00The EIA forecasts environmental doom? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The United States Energy Information Administration provides projections for <a href="https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=1-IEO2017&region=0-0&cases=Reference~HighMacro~LowMacro&start=2010&end=2050&f=A&linechart=~~~Reference-d082317.28-1-IEO2017~HighMacro-d082417.28-1-IEO2017~LowMacro-d082417.28-1-IEO2017&map=&ctype=linechart&sourcekey=0" target="_blank">how much energy the world can be expected to use over the next few decades</a>. Predicting the future is hard, but I think one has to give them credit for trying. The low, medium, and high economic growth projections shown above are largely just extrapolations of existing trends. Even if there is a curious inflection point around 2030, assuming persistence in trends is not a bad way of going for something as highly aggregated as the global economy.<br />
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The simulations use an <a href="https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/" target="_blank">everything but the kitchen sink</a> philosophy for approaching the problem, representing to the greatest extent possible the myriad forces that drive energy consumption, such as political agreements and national and sectoral competition for a range of energy sources. Just <a href="https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/nems/documentation/macroeconomic/pdf/m065(2016).pdf" target="_blank">the US macroeconomic module</a> alone has well over one thousand equations.<br />
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But, as always, there's more than one way to skin a cat. For my part, I have developed <a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/6/673/2015/esd-6-673-2015.pdf" target="_blank">a model for <i>global</i> energy consumption</a> that is almost absurdly simple. It has only a few equations. Nonetheless it manages to produce accurate hindcasts for energy consumption and GDP growth rates with skill scores >90% for a 50 year period between 1960 and 2010 using only conditions in the 1950s to initialize the model.<br />
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The key ingredients of the model are only that global energy consumption and wealth can be <a href="https://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-power-theory-of-value.html" target="_blank">linked through a constant</a>; that inflation-adjusted global GDP grows global wealth; that the coefficient relating wealth to GDP is a function of past innovation; and, that innovation can be related through thermodynamics to resource availability and rates of decay.<br />
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Claiming that civilization can be reduced so simply is admittedly a bit unorthodox. What the model does have going for it is that each of these things is testable and based on <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2013EF000171" target="_blank">physical reasoning</a>.<br />
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Of course, the tremendous trade-off with this more holistic view is it offers little to nothing about the details, like how national consumption will change over the coming decades. Understandably, some think it's important to distinguish the U.S. from the rest of the world.<br />
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Still, we do still talk about the<i> global</i> economy. And, for an atmospheric scientist trying to link economic growth to climate change, it doesn't matter whether a molecule of carbon dioxide comes from Timbuktu or Trump Tower since CO2 is a long-lived well-mixed gas.<br />
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But let's assume that those thousands of equations the EIA uses does get things plausibly right, at least in the big picture. On average, EIA projections see the global demand for energy growing by about 50% over the next 40 years, 0.9% per year on the low end and 1.4% per year on the high end.<br />
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Using the aforementioned <a href="https://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-power-theory-of-value.html" target="_blank">constant</a>, what is being referred to by others as the <a href="https://player.fm/series/environmental-professionals-postulating/ep-015-a-discussion-with-dr-richard-nolthenius-part-3-of-3" target="_blank">Garrett Relation</a>, a trivial prediction of the model I mentioned is that inflation-adjusted global Wealth will also grow by 50% over the same time period.<br />
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Some of us might feel a bit disappointed by a real growth rate for our collective assets of just 1% per year, but effectively this is what the EIA projections imply.<br />
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I am a bit skeptical they are correct partly because the physically-based economic model also forecasts that there is substantial inertia to existing trends. Between 2000 and 2010, the average growth rate for global energy consumption and real wealth was about 2% per year (although GDP grew faster, closer to 3% per year). A sudden revision downward in growth to 1% would require something fairly dramatic in terms of a reduction to resource availability. If we were to assume for the sake of argument a continuation of the 2% growth rate instead of the EIA's 1%, that would mean that global Wealth would increase by 60% in 40 years.<br />
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But whether the increase is 50%, as implied by the EIA, or 60%, as implied by persistence in trends, the future still looks good. Right?<br />
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Well, maybe not, at least not for the environment. Even maintaining 1% per year growth will require something that might seem pretty extraordinary: over the course of the next 40 years we will consume as much energy total as the total we consumed in the past 100 years. At 2% growth, that number is more like 140 years.<br />
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Energy does stuff. In thermodynamics we call it Work. A lot of stuff has happened in the past century. Consuming the same amount of energy in 40 Years will mean, very roughly, we will do the same amount of Work all over again.<br />
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A more advanced concept in thermodynamics is that there is a coupling of energy dissipation with material flows. What this means is that energy is consumed not just to sustain civilization's internal circulations, but to take raw materials from the environment like fish, minerals, and wood. These are used to repair and grow civilization (including by making more of us as people) while leaving behind a big pile of garbage in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms.<br />
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We've certainly packed on the pounds over the past century, largely at the sacrifice of the critters and plants on land and the fish in the oceans, while leaving behind an added 100 ppm to the atmospheric concentration of CO2.<br />
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What will the world look like when we manage to do the same all over again?<br />
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<br />Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-18354307039418456982018-05-06T14:07:00.002-07:002018-05-06T17:15:31.348-07:00What's in a name?<br />
Professor <a href="https://www.cabrillo.edu/~rnolthenius/">Richard Nolthenius</a> of Cabrillo College has been referring to the <a href="https://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-power-theory-of-value.html" target="_blank">constant relationship between power and wealth</a> in <a href="http://slideplayer.com/slide/11727693/">talks</a> and <a href="https://player.fm/series/environmental-professionals-postulating/ep-015-a-discussion-with-dr-richard-nolthenius-part-3-of-3">podcasts</a> as the Garrett Relation, or GR for short. Of course, its a bit embarrassing to have one's own name attached to a phenomenon. In my view, the really interesting thing about any phenomenon is what it tells us, and not the much more incidental matter of whomever happened to stumble upon it first. But as Richard has pointed out, it needs a name. Is there better wording? The Power Theory of Value (PTV) Relation seems a bit dry but workable. Or is the Garrett Relation as good as any?Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-5061949274717214152018-05-06T14:04:00.001-07:002018-05-06T20:41:42.580-07:00A Power Theory of Value?Economic wealth or capital is not a static quantity that simply exists. Rather it requires continual energy consumption for its sustenance. <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%252Fs10584-009-9717-9.pdf" target="_blank">Civilization is like a living organism</a>, or as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DpfsqjQbP0" target="_blank">Nate Hagens</a> puts it, a super-organism. Energy is required not just to grow civilization but also to maintain its current size. <br />
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Sure, civilization is complicated. Valuing any given component of civilization is something all of us try really hard to do with varying degrees of success (myself, I'm a terrible investor). But, as philosophers have recognized for hundreds of years, all components of civilization, whether human or physical, have no innate value in and of themselves; value can only be acquired through connections and the judgement of others, nothing intrinsic to the item or person in question.<br />
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As John Donne put it: "No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main...” An ounce of gold has no intrinsic worth, but only acquires value by acting as a useful part of society, through banking system networks maintained by the accumulated knowledge capital of bankers, all of which require primary energy to be sustained, either by feeding the bankers or by powering electronic transactions. An ounce of gold left abandoned and forgotten in the middle of the desert is worthless until it is found.<br />
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Looking at civilization as a whole we might surmise that, like a living organism, the internal transportation, communication, and human physiological networks that define what we think of as humanity require a continual consumption of energy. Otherwise they wither and die, becoming totally valueless. We're not much use at work if we stop eating. A road never traveled serves little purpose. We can hypothesize that economic value and energy consumption are linked.<br />
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This suggests a "Power Theory of Value", that energy consumption and economic wealth are tied by a constant. Importantly, this is a falsifiable hypothesis. And, as shown above, it seems to be borne out by the data. Summing wealth over all the world’s nations, 7.1 Watts is required to maintain every one thousand inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars of historically accumulated economic production. <br />
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A lot of people get confused about this relationship though: to be clear, it is not about energy and yearly economic output or GDP. Plenty of people find a correlation there, but the ratio between the two has been increasing with time. The intercept is not zero.<br />
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Nor does the relationship refer to the more restrictive view of wealth as physical capital that can be found in traditional economic models. Instead, the constant relates current energy consumption to the summation of production, not just over one year -- the quantity called GDP -- but over all of time, what I refer to as Global Wealth.<br />
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Adjusting for inflation is key, in these calculations. Then, as shown in the figure above, this highly aggregated Wealth has a fixed relationship to current energy consumption, <i>independent of the year that is considered</i>. As of 2010, civilization was powered by about 17 trillion Watts of power. This energy consumption supported about 2352 trillion dollars of collective global wealth. In 1970, civilization was younger and smaller. Both quantities were less than half as large (in fact, GDP was less than a third current values). In the interim, energy consumption and wealth grew in tandem, even at variable rates that increased slowly from 1.4% per year to 2.2% per year. At all times, the constant of proportionality stayed effectively the same, with a standard deviation of only 3%.<br />
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If one really wants to relate energy to GDP, then from the perspective above, the correct relationship is to consider year-to-year changes, that is the relationship between global GDP and the annual <i>increase</i> in global power capacity. Then, on average, adding every extra exajoule of global consumption capacity in a year enables 89 billion of year 2005 trillion USD of GDP. Variability is higher, but nonetheless the relationship is more or less fixed.<br />
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Why does this matter? Constants of proportionality are what provide a foundation for linking what initially seem to be two independent quantities (e.g. energy and frequency in quantum mechanics or energy and rest mass in relativity). Constants form the basis for all that follows. All other physical results are just math.<br />
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The constant of proportionality λ that relates civilization’s economic wealth to its rate of energy consumption has the potential to tell us not just where we are today but to dramatically simplify and constrain long-term estimates of where the global economy is headed. The constant ties economics to physics, so with physics, <a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/esd-3-1-2012.html" target="_blank">more robust economic forecasts become possible</a>.<br />
<br />Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4268081350629009912.post-2303977721511212382018-05-05T12:45:00.000-07:002018-09-21T10:18:25.151-07:00About this blog<div style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.870588); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.870588); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
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I am a professor at the University of Utah interested in the interplay between economics, energy, and climate. Most of my funded research focuses on the complex interplay between aerosols, clouds, precipitation, radiation and climate, another complex problem. My interest in economic questions grew from a ordinary inquiry into possible solutions for some of the most pressing issues of our time. I am fairly naive about economics as a field, yet it has always seemed inescapable that human activities must be governed by the same universal thermodynamic laws as the rest of the climate system. </div>
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In 2006, I started to put together <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-009-9717-9" style="color: #4285f4; text-decoration: none;">a little model</a> for the physics governing the growth of the global economy and its carbon emissions. The basis of the model was a hypothesis that global rates of energy consumption should be tied through a constant value to the accumulation throughout history of a very general representation of global wealth. It was an exciting time to find out that this does indeed turn out be supported by the data. This constant has a value of 7.1 Watts of primary energy consumption for every one thousand year 2005 dollars of historically accumulated global civilization wealth, independent of the year that is considered.<br />
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I expected the result to have been simply "re-discovered" and probably rather standard to the field of Economics. It turned out it wasn't. What I found was that economists approach economic growth and environmental impacts by focusing on the macro and micro-economic parts, using techniques that are mathematically complex but dimensionally inconsistent, full of untestable opinion, and with little to no reference to energy and raw material resource constraints.<br />
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This blog takes a different tack by examining physical constraints on the evolution of globally and historically aggregated wealth. The intent is to step back, overlooking internal details of the complexity of the coupled human-climate system, to see their interactions as whole.</div>
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Almost all detail is lost from this viewpoint. However, it offers the tremendous advantage of simplifying long-term predictions for where we might be headed by offering the robustness of physics as a guiding tool. There are some pretty pressing global problems we face this century. It's hard to see how we survive them by pretending we can beat the laws of thermodynamics.</div>
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Nephologuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02527992193035047074noreply@blogger.com4