Saturday, December 29, 2007
Growth isn't necessarily good -- or inevitable
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Michael Abraham is a businessman who lives in Blacksburg.
My late Grandpa Henry was a crusty, upstanding New Yorker with little patience for my impertinence. To warn me against an impending faux pas, he'd curtly insist, "It just isn't done." One does not question conventional wisdom, he would admonish.
Perhaps no wisdom in contemporary American economics is more unquestioned than the inherent rightness of growth. In the collective mind of economic developers, politicians, businesspeople and everyday citizens alike, growth is not only inevitable, but natural and desirable. The intrinsic worthiness of growth as a social construct is inviolable and sacrosanct; few argue against it. Yet as we enter this new century, natural constraints are forcing us, often kicking and screaming, to re-evaluate.
Invariably, all discussions about growth are rooted in the works of Thomas Malthus, the English demographer of the late 18th century who published "An Essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798. In it, he predicted that population, because of our ability to reproduce exponentially, would outrun food, which expands arithmetically and, thus, more slowly, leading to devastating famines, cyclically keeping populations in check.
At that time, the worldwide population was under 980 million and wouldn't reach its first billion until 1820. When Grandpa was born in 1900, the population was 1.65 billion. The fact that today's population is arching past 6.5 billion stands to many as repudiation of Malthusian theories. Instead, Malthus may have been right in his basic concepts but fooled by a fate of time.
Prior to 1750, virtually all energy exploited by humankind was the daily shower of solar energy. Photosynthesis allowed plants to produce food energy, which people either ate themselves or fed to livestock, which they then ate. Wood provided heating and wind was harnessed for motive power on the seas. Falling water provided motive energy for a fledgling industrial revolution.
But things didn't really get going until a new energy source -- fossil fuel -- was found quite literally beneath our feet. Its exploitation propelled an unprecedented bonanza of wealth and population growth that continues today. Fossil fuel accounts for more than 85 percent of daily worldwide energy consumption, and myriad studies have shown the tight link between this consumption and growth.
An epic roadblock, however, looms on the horizon. Fossil fuels, led by petroleum -- soon to be followed by natural gas, and finally coal -- are rapidly approaching their international production peaks, from which they will inexorably and terminally decline.
Modern Americans have been largely insulated from the ravages of declining energy supplies. Other than the OPEC-inspired crises of the 1970s, more energy has been available for consumption each decade than the one before. However, this will soon change radically. In spite of recent record prices for oil, monthly production figures for 2007 have yet to reach the international record set in May 2005. Peak will only be fully known years afterward, but will be reached soon, if not already passed.
So dependent have industrialized societies become upon the daily ration of astronomical quantities of fossil fuels, and given that there are no viable replacements on a global scale at any point in the foreseeable future, it is foolhardy to assume that population can continue on its 10-generation growth spurt. If, within a decade, petroleum is diminishing at 3 percent to 6 percent annually, as many experts believe, we'll be lucky if we can feed current populations.
Energy isn't the only problem we're likely to face. Momentary but horrific events like hurricanes Katrina and Rita reveal that considerable swaths of land once considered habitable are no longer. But perhaps an even more paradigm-changing situation is currently playing out in the area of Atlanta, where residents are perhaps just a few months from an epochal crisis with shrinking water resources unable to keep up with even minimal needs.
According to one observer, all of the southeastern states don't have sufficient tanker trucks to import enough water to slake the thirst of more than 4 million people. Many areas throughout the world are similarly afflicted.
Against this backdrop, imagine the owner of undeveloped but prime commercial or residential land whose investment is suddenly worthless because of inadequate water to allow new hookups. What new function will the Atlanta Development Authority provide?
So growth isn't inevitable, but a predictable byproduct of surplus energy. And it isn't natural, but an historic aberration. And it isn't even necessarily desirable, as burgeoning populations stress the capacities of the land and resources to provide equitably for all.
And yet "no growth" rhetoric still carries weighty political fallout.
Perhaps Malthus wasn't wrong at all and merely failed to predict the population upsurge fostered by fossil fuels. We'll soon see. Meanwhile, it might be prudent to explore alternative social and political constructs -- a Plan B, as it were.
Even Grandpa might approve.
