Our energy hunger is torn to our economic past: study

Just as a living organism needs continuous food to sustain itself, an economy consumes energy to do work and things go on. However, that consumption comes with the cost of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. So, how can we use energy to keep the economy alive without burning out the planet in the process?

In a paper in PLOS ONE, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Tim Garrett, University of Utah, with mathematician Matheus Grasselli of McMaster University and economist Stephen Keen of University College London, report that current world energy consumption is linked to unchanging economic production in the past. And the way out of an ever-increasing rate of carbon emissions may not necessarily be ever-increasing energy efficiency – in fact, it may be the other way around.

“How do we achieve a steady-state economy where economic production exists but does not continually increase our size and add to our energy requirements?” Garrett says. “Can we survive only by repairing decay, simultaneously switching existing fossil infrastructure to a non-fossil appetite? Can we forget the flame?”

Thermo-economy

Garrett is an atmospheric scientist. But he acknowledges that atmospheric phenomena, including rising carbon dioxide levels and climate change, are linked to human economic activity. “Since we modeled the Earth system as a physical system,” he says, “I wondered if we could model economic systems in a similar way.”

He is not only thinking of economic systems in terms of physical laws. There is a field of study, actually called thermo-economics. Just as thermodynamics describes how heat and entropy (disturbance) flow through physical systems, thermoeconomics examines how matter, energy, entropy and information flow through human systems.

Many of these studies looked at correlations between energy consumption and current production, as gross domestic product. Garrett took a different approach; his concept of an economic system begins with the age-old idea of ​​a heat engine. A heat engine consumes energy at high temperatures to do work and emits waste heat. But it consumes only. It does not grow.

Now imagine a heat engine that, like an organism, uses energy to do work not only to sustain itself but also to grow. Due to past growth, it requires an ever-increasing amount of energy to sustain itself. For humans, the energy comes from food. Mostly goes to food and a little to growth. And from childhood to adulthood, our hunger grows. We eat more and breathe out an ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide.

“We looked at the economy as a whole to see if similar ideas could apply to describe our collective maintenance and growth,” says Garrett. While societies consume energy to sustain daily life, a small fraction of energy consumed goes to produce more and grow our civilization.

“We’ve been around for a while,” he adds. “It simply came to our notice then past production that has led to our current size, and our extraordinary collective energy requirements and CO₂ issued today. “

Growth as a symptom

To test this hypothesis, Garrett and his colleagues used economic data from 1980 to 2017 to quantify the relationship between cumulative economic production in the past and the current rate at which we consume energy. Regardless of the year surveyed, they found that every trillion inflation-adjusted years 2010 US dollars of economic global production corresponded to an enlarged civilization that needed an additional 5.9 gigawatts of power production to sustain itself. In a fossil fuel economy, that equates to about 10 coal-fired power plants, says Garrett, which results in about 1.5 million tons of CO₂ sent out to the atmosphere every year. Our current energy consumption is then the natural consequence of our cumulative past economic production.

They came to two surprising conclusions. First, although improving efficiency through innovation is a hallmark of efforts to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, efficiency has the side effect that makes it easier for civilization to grow and consume more.

Second, that current rates of world population growth may not be the cause of increasing rates of energy consumption, but a symptom of past efficiency gains.

Proponents of energy efficiency for climate change mitigation may seem like a reasonable point, “says Garrett,” but their argument only works if civilization maintains a fixed size, which it does not. Instead, efficient civilization can grow faster. It can be more efficient. use available energy sources to create more of everything, including humans.Expansion of civilization is accelerating instead of backward, and so are energy requirements and CO₂ emits. “

A steady-state decarbonized future?

So what do these conclusions mean for the future, especially in relation to climate change? We can not just stop consuming energy today then we can erase the past, says Garrett. “We have inertia. Pulling the plug on energy consumption and civilization stops emitting, but it also becomes worthless. I do not think we can accept such hunger.”

But is it possible to bring back the economic and technological progress that civilization has brought to this point? Can we, the kind that uses the power of fire, now “forget the flame”, in Garrett’s words, and reduce growth efficiently?

“It seems unlikely that we will forget our previous innovations unless collapse is imposed on us by depletion of resources and degradation of environment,” he says, “which we obviously hope to avoid.”

So what does the future hold for Garrett’s work? It is one in which the economy manages to keep itself in a solid state – where the energy we use is dedicated to preserving our civilization and not expanding it.

It is also one where the energy of the future cannot be based on fossil fuels. They need to stay in the ground, he says.

“At current growth rates, just to keep carbon dioxide emissions at their current level, we will have to build sustainable and nuclear facilities faster, almost one big central day. And somehow it will have to be done without economic production as well. by accident, in such a way that fossil fuel requirements also increase. “

It is a “special dance,” he says, amid the elimination of previous fossil-based innovations that accelerated the expansion of civilization, while innovating new non-fossil fuel technologies. Even if this steady-state economy were to be implemented immediately, CO would stabilize₂ emits, the pace of global warming would be slowed – not eliminated. Atmospheric levels of CO₂ would still double their pre-industrial levels before they are balanced, the study found.

By looking at the global economy through a thermodynamic lens, Garrett acknowledges that there are no changes. Every form of an economy like civilization needs energy to do work and survive. The trick balances that with the climate consequences.

“Climate change and resource scarcity pose challenges of this century,” says Garrett. “We will have no hope of surviving our problems by ignoring physical laws.”

Future work

This study marks the beginning of the collaboration between Garrett, Grasselli and Keen. They are now working to link the results of this study to a complete model for the economy, including a systematic study of the role of matter and energy in production.

“Tim made us focus on a fairly remarkable empirical relationship between energy consumption and cumulative economic output,” Grasselli says. “We are now working to understand what this means for models that include concepts that are more familiar to economists, such as capital, investment and the ever-important demand for monetary value and inflation.”