Energy 2050 Apocalypse - The Road to Exhaustion (Part 7)

Energy 2050 Apocalypse

World Energy to 2050
  Forty Years of Decline
Effects and Conclusion
Part 7

The Effect of Energy Decline on the World's Population

World Population Estimate

In order to assess the impact of declining energy supplies on the world's future population, we first need to establish what that population will be.

In the past I have argued that a drastic reduction in the world's population was likely over the course of the coming century.  That expectation was based on my estimate of the impact of energy shortages, fresh water depletion, soil fertility depletion, the decimation of oceanic fish stocks, pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change and economic disruption.  It is very hard to make that case, however - not because the problems I list aren't apparent, but because the causal links to human population decline are very difficult to establish conclusively.

Accordingly, for this analysis I have adopted the generally accepted population projection published by the United Nations: a decreasing rate of growth to a population of about 9 billion in 2050. This projection is known as the Medium Fertility Case.  As you can see from the graph in Figure 15 it matches perfectly with the projected trend of actual population growth over the last 20 years.

Figure 15: Actual and projected World Population Growth, 1985  to 2050

The Effect on Average Per Capita Energy

One of the interesting, though very high-level, ways to measure of global wealth is to calculate the average energy available to each person on earth.  While the resulting per capita average doesn't reflect the disparity between rich and poor individuals or nations or let us know what sorts of things people might do with their energy endowments, it can give us a general feeling for how "energy-wealthy" the average global citizen is, especially compared to other times.

Fortunately, the energy analysis we have just completed gives us the tool we need to establish this measure.  By simply dividing the total energy available in each year by that year's population we can construct the graph shown in Figure 16.

Figure 16: Global Average Per Capita Energy Consumption, 1965 to 2050

As you can see, the rising population and falling energy supply combine to produce a falling per capita energy curve.  In fact, if these models of energy and population are correct, we can expect to see a drop of almost 50%  in average per capita energy by 2050, from 1.7 toe/person to 0.9 toe/person.  Each person alive in 2050 will have available, on average, only half the energy they would have today.

The Effect on Countries

Unfortunately the world is not a uniform place, and measures like "average per capita energy" don't really tell us much about how the world might look in 2050.  To gain a bit more insight it is helpful to think of the world as being composed of rich and poor nations, where their wealth is characterized by their total energy consumption and whose population growth is expressed in their Total Fertility Rate.

An interesting insight appears when you sort the world's nations by their per capita energy consumption.  The nations and regions at the bottom of the consumption scale (Africa, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Peru, Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia) all have very high fertility rates, well over the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.  In fact, when normalized for population size, the average TFR of the poor nations is 3.0.  In contrast, the group containing all the other nations is well below the replacement fertility rate at around 1.8.

The implication is that poor nations are going to face double jeopardy.  Their populations will increase even as their already low energy consumption drops further.  In addition, as per capita energy consumption drops world-wide, some nations that are not currently considered "energy-poor" will be impoverished enough to join the group at the bottom, thereby swelling its ranks even further.

The Growing Divide Between Rich and Poor

In order to get some idea of the magnitude of this effect, I have associated each of the 63 countries or regional groupings in this analysis with their current population, total current energy consumption and their population in 2050.  I have arbitrarily decided that a per capita consumption of 0.75 toe/yr is the dividing line between between poverty and wealth.  0.75 toe/yr is a bit less than half the present world average, and only one tenth of the energy consumed by an average American.

The countries and regions that currently fall below that poverty line include Bangladesh, Philippines, Pakistan, India, Peru, Indonesia, Ecuador, Colombia, Egypt, much of Africa, many Asian Pacific nations and some Eurasian countries.  Altogether they have a  population of about 3 billion people.  The rest of the world's nations, from Algeria to Kuwait, are in the rich half of 3.5 billion people.

In order to assess the effect of declining average per capita income, I decided to spread the pain evenly.  The assumption is that most countries will see a similar drop in their level of energy consumption.  While that expectation may not be completely realistic, it seems close enough for the purpose of this exercise.  The result is that countries with a per capita consumption between 0.75 and 1.5 toe/person will lose enough energy to be counted in the group of poor nations.

The countries and regions that drop from rich to poor status include Algeria, Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, much of Central and South America, the non-oil-producing nations of the Middle East, and - most significantly - China.

When we add up the populations in 2050 of the rich nations that are left, it comes out to only 1.6 billion.  Remember, their populations fell due to lower fertility, there are fewer of them and they lost China to the ranks of the poor.

The population of the poor nations is where the shock comes.  Their total population in 2050 adds up to over 7 billion people.  That number is more than the total population of the Earth today, all living at an energy level somewhere between Bangladesh and Egypt.

Figure 17: World Population at low and high energy consumption levels, today and 2050

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Conclusion

How many ways are there to say the world is heading for hard times?  Losing most of our oil is bad enough, and losing most of our gas as well borders on the catastrophic. Combining these losses with the exponential growth of those nations that can least afford it is nothing short of cataclysmic.  The ramifications spread out like ripples on a pond.  There will be 7 billion people who will need fertilizer and irrigation water to survive, but would be too poor to buy it even at today's prices.  Given the probable escalation in the costs of fertilizer and the diesel fuel or electricity for their water pumps, it isn't hard to understand why the spread of famine in energy-poor regions of the world seems virtually inevitable.

In normal times the poor would appeal to the rest of the world for food aid.  However, these times may be anything but normal.  Even the shrinking population of the rich world will see its wealth eroded by the drop in energy supplies and the increasing cost of producing the energy they do have. This decline in their wealth will in turn erode any surpluses they might otherwise have donated to international aid.  In any event, there will be over twice as many hungry mouths crying for that aid, with less and less of it available.

This assessment doesn't even consider the converging and amplifying impacts of the other problems I mentioned above: the loss of soil fertility and fresh water, the death of the oceans, rising pollution, spreading extinctions and accelerating climate change.

The solution to this dilemma, if solution there may be, does not seem to lie in some Deus ex Machina or in a technological revision of the parable of the loaves and fishes.  If the dark visions outlined in this article come true, we will be faced with a world in which the only way forward is to accept that Mother Nature does not negotiate.  We must use our considerable intelligence to figure out ways to live within the ecological budget we have been allotted.  More than that, we must change our values away from our current paradigm of growth, competition and exploitation to one of sustainability, cooperation and nurturing.  The longer and tighter we cling to our present ways, the more damage we will ultimately inflict on ourselves and the world we live in.  For many, the time for such a change has already passed.  For a fortunate few there may yet be enough time to move toward the new ways of living and being that will be required in this brave new world. 





The End.

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The Great Global Famine - Aftermath to Peak Oil

The Coming Famine

By Peter Goodchild

http://www.survivepeakoil.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-coming-famine.html

Humanity has struggled to survive through the millennia in terms of Nature's tendency to balance population size with food supply. The same is true now, but population numbers have been soaring for over a century. Oil, the limiting factor, is close to or beyond its peak extraction. Without ample, free-flowing oil, it will not be possible to support a population of several billion for long. Without fossil fuels for fertilizer and pesticides, as well as for cultivating and harvesting, crop yields drop by more than two-thirds (Pimentel, 1984; Pimentel & Hall, 1984; Pimentel & Pimentel, 2007).

Over the next few decades, there will be famine on a scale many times larger than ever before in human history. It is possible, of course, that warfare and plague, for example, will take their toll to a large extent before famine claims its victims. The distinctions, in any case, can never be absolute: often "war + drought = famine" (Devereux, 2000, p. 15), especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but there are several other combinations of factors.

Although, when discussing theories of famine, economists generally use the term "neo-malthusian" in a derogatory manner, the coming famine will be very much a case of an imbalance between population and resources. The ultimate cause will be fossil-fuel depletion, not government policy (as in the days of Stalin or Mao), warfare, ethnic discrimination, bad weather, poor methods of distribution, inadequate transportation, livestock diseases, or any of the other variables that have often turned mere hunger into genuine starvation.

The increase in the world’s population has followed a simple curve: from about 1.7 billion in 1900 to over 7 billion today. A quick glance at a chart of world population growth, on a broader time scale, shows a line that runs almost horizontally for thousands of years, and then makes an almost vertical ascent as it approaches the present. That is not just an amusing curiosity. It is a shocking fact that should have awakened humanity to the realization that something is dreadfully wrong.

Mankind is always prey to its own "exuberance," to use Catton’s term. That has certainly been true of population growth. In many cultures, "Do you have any children?" or, "How many children do you have?" is a form of greeting or civility almost equivalent to "How do you do?" or, "Nice to meet you." World population growth, nevertheless, has always been ecologically hazardous. With every increase in human numbers we are only barely able to keep up with the demand: providing all those people with food and water has not been easy. We are always pushing ourselves to the limits of Earth’s ability to hold us (Catton, 1982).

Even that is an understatement. No matter how much we depleted our resources, there was always the sense that we could somehow "get by." But in the late twentieth century we stopped getting by. It is important to differentiate between production in an "absolute" sense and production "per capita." Although oil production, in "absolute" numbers, kept climbing -- only to decline in the early twenty-first century -- what was ignored was that although that "absolute" production was climbing, the production "per capita" reached its peak in 1979 (BP, annual).

The unequal distribution of resources plays a part. The average inhabitant of the US consumes far more than the average inhabitant of India or China. Nevertheless, if all the world’s resources were evenly distributed, the result would only be universal poverty. It is the totals and the averages of resources that we must deal with in order to determine the totals and averages of results. For example, if all of the world’s arable land were distributed evenly, in the absence of mechanized agriculture each person on the planet would still have an inadequate amount of farmland for survival: distribution would have accomplished very little.

We were always scraping the edges of the earth, but we are now entering a far more dangerous era. The main point to keep in mind is that, throughout the twentieth century, while population was going up, so was oil production. Future excess mortality can therefore be determined -- at least in a rough-and-ready manner -- by the fact that in modern industrial society it is largely the oil supply that determines how many people can be fed.

There is no precise causal relation, of course, between oil production and famine. To suggest such a thing would conflict with other ways of estimating future population. Another figure, closely related, might be the ratio of population to arable land. Even then, the history of famine does not suggest an exact correlation between population and arable land; certainly in the 1950s there were major famines although the world population was only a third of that today. Ó Gráda claims that the worst famines in recent times were actually in countries which rate relatively well in terms of the ratio of population to arable: Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Sudan. In fact famine, at least up to the present time, seems to have been more related to politics than to arable land or other resources.

Famine will also cause a lowering of the birth rate (Devereux, 2000; Ó Gráda, 2007, March). This will sometimes happen voluntarily, as people realize they lack the resources to raise children, or it will happen involuntarily when famine and general ill health result in infertility. In most famines the number of deaths from starvation or from starvation-induced disease is very roughly the same as the number of lost or averted births. In Ireland’s nineteenth-century famine, the number of famine deaths was 1.3 million, whereas the number of lost births was 0.4 million. The number of famine deaths during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), however, was perhaps 30 million, and the number of lost births was perhaps 33 million.

The "normal," non-famine-related, birth and death rates are not a factor in determining the future population figures, since for most of pre-industrial human history the sum of the birth and death rates -- in other words, the growth rate -- has been nearly zero: 2,000 years ago the global population was about 300 million, and it took 1,600 years for the population to double. If not for the problem of resource-depletion, in other words, the future birth rate and death rate would be nearly identical, as they were in pre-industrial times. (And there is no question that the future will mean a return to the "pre-industrial.")

Nevertheless, it will often be hard to separate "famine deaths" from a rather broad category of "other excess deaths." War, disease, and other factors will have unforeseeable effects of their own. Considering the unusual duration of the coming famine, and with Leningrad (Salisbury, 2003) as one of many precursors, cannibalism may be significant; to what extent should this be included in the calculation of "famine deaths"? In any case, it is probably safe to say that an unusually large decline in the population of a country will be the most significant indicator that this predicted famine has in fact arrived.

We must ignore most previous estimates of future population growth. Instead of a steady rise over the course of this century, as generally predicted, there will be a clash of the two giant forces of overpopulation and oil depletion, followed by a precipitous ride into an unknown future.

We are ill-prepared for the next few years. The problem of oil depletion turns out to be something other than a bit of macabre speculation for people of the distant future to deal with, but rather a sudden catastrophe that will only be studied dispassionately long after the event itself has occurred. Doomsday will be upon us before we have time to look at it carefully.

The world has certainly known some terrible famines in the past. In recent centuries, one of the worst was that of North China in 1876-79, when between 9 and 13 million died, but India had a famine at the same time, with perhaps 5 million deaths. The Soviet Union had famine deaths of about 5 million in 1932-34, purely because of misguided political policies. The worst famine in history was that of China’s Great Leap Forward, 1958-61, when perhaps 30 million died, as mentioned above.

A closer analogy to the coming "petroleum famine" may be Ireland’s potato famine of the 1840s, since -- like petroleum -- it was a single commodity that caused such devastation (Woodham-Smith, 1962). The response of the British government at the time can be summarized as a jumble of incompetence, frustration, and indecision, if not outright genocide, and the same may be true of any future responses by government.

As previously mentioned, population is not tied with mathematical precision to oil production; the latter provides only a rough indication of the former. To some extent, people will learn to live with less. Certainly most westerners can cut their living standards considerably and still live healthy lives -- perhaps even healthier, since they would be eating less and walking more. People will also switch to other sources of energy: in particular, firewood can replace fossil fuels for heating, though the amount of wood will not be sufficient for billions of people. All these adjustments will alleviate matters for a while, although the basic problem will remain: that fossil fuels will decline at a much faster rate than any voluntary reduction in births.

The above predictions can be nothing more than approximate, but even the most elaborate mathematics will not entirely help us to deal with the great number of interacting factors. We need to swing toward a more pessimistic figure for humanity’s future if we include the effects of war, disease, and so on. One of the most serious negative factors will be largely sociological: To what extent can the oil industry maintain the advanced technology required for drilling ever-deeper wells in ever-more-remote places, when that industry will be struggling to survive in a milieu of social chaos? Intricate division of labor, large-scale government, and high-level education will no longer exist. 

On the other hand, there are elements of optimism that may need to be plugged in. We must not forget the sheer tenacity of the human species: we are intelligent social creatures living at the top of the food chain, in the manner of wolves, yet we outnumber wolves worldwide by about a million to one; we are as populous as rats or mice. We can outrace a horse over long distances. Even with Stone-Age technology, we can inhabit almost every environment on Earth, even if most of the required survival skills have been forgotten.

Specifically, we must consider the fact that neither geography nor population is homogeneous. All over the world, there are forgotten pockets of habitable land, much of it abandoned in the modern transition to urbanization, for the ironic reason that city dwellers regarded rural life as too difficult, as they traded their peasant smocks for factory overalls. There are still areas of the planet’s surface that are sparsely occupied although they are habitable or could be made so, to the extent that many rural areas have had a decline in population that is absolute, i.e. not merely relative to another place or time. By careful calculation, therefore, there will be survivors. Over the next few years, human ingenuity must be devoted to an understanding of these geographic and demographic matters, so that at least a few can escape the tribulation. Neither the present nor future generations should have to say,

 "We were never warned." 

Add caption

References:

BP. Global statistical review of world energy. (annual). Retrieved fromhttp://www.bp.com/statisticalreview

Catton, W. R., Jr. (1982). Overshoot: The ecological basis of revolutionary change. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Devereux, S. (2000). Famine in the twentieth century. IDS Working Paper 105. Retrieved fromhttp://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0000076/Devereux.pdf

Ó Gráda, C. (2007, March). Making famine history. Journal of Economic Literature. Retrieved from http://www.ucd.ie/economics/research/papers/2006/WP06.10.pdf

Pimentel, D. (1984). Energy flows in agricultural and natural ecosystems. CIHEAM (International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies). Retrieved fromhttp://www.ressources.ciheam.org/om/pdf/s07/c10841.pdf

------, & Hall, C. W., eds. (1984). Food and energy resources. Orlando, Florida: Academic Press.

------, & Pimentel, M. H. (2007). Food, energy, and society. 3rd ed. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press.

Salisbury, H. E. (2003). The 900 days: The siege of Leningrad. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press.

Woodham-Smith, C. (1962). The great hunger: Ireland 1845-1849. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row.

www.firstfinancialinsights.blogspot.com

Peak Civilization?

Peak  Oil, Peak Everything 

By Peter Goodchild



http://www.survivepeakoil.blogspot.ca/2016/02/peak-oil-peak-everything.html

Perhaps the most common response to the peak-oil problem is: "The oil isn't going to disappear overnight. We have a century to prepare." Unfortunately, the fact that the decline in oil is a curve, not a vertical line, makes it difficult to comprehend. What matters is that the serious damage will have been done long before we get to those tiny remaining drops. That damage started around 1970, and it was not confined to oil.

Also, there are "curves within curves," so to speak. "Peak oil" in an ABSOLUTE sense was around 2010, but "peak oil" PER CAPITA was 1979, when there were 5.5 barrels of oil per person annually. According to UN estimates (admittedly quite uncertain), the world's population will rise to about 8 billion or more in 2030, whereas a look at the usual (or, at least, realistic) estimates for oil production show a decline to about 15 billion barrels in 2030, giving us a "per capita" figure of less than 2 barrels. That figure will not constitute an "on/off" situation, but by that year 2030 the human race should probably say goodbye to the Oil Economy.

It is not only oil, but in fact the entire North American economy that has followed something like a bell curve. In many ways it was not 2010, or any other year in the early 21st century, but the year 1970, that was the Peak, the Big Peak of Everything. Backward or forward on that curve, we see a dirty, noisy, crowded world. Right on that Peak, we see the Golden Age -- Beatlemania, "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll," Easy Street. As Dickens might say, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." The gap between the rich and the poor was not so bad in those days, whereas according to the US Census Bureau the mean income of the richest 5 percent of American families began to skyrocket shortly before 1970. In the year 1968, there was the Tet offensive, the turning point of the Vietnam War -- from an American military point of view, the downturn. In the year 1969, there was the first moon landing -- "the Space Age" began, although within a few years the expression (like "the Atomic Age") would be just an embarrassment.

The above-mentioned statement, "We have a century to prepare," also raises the question: Who is the "we" here? All human beings? A small group of dedicated survivalists? If the answer is the former, then the statement is false: humanity, as a whole, never makes any decisions. The human race, taken in its entirety, simply does not behave in such a sophisticated manner; the human race much prefers ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and intolerance. Robert Kaplan's book The Ends of the Earth is one of many texts that elucidate the harsh reality of human nature.

What about the coming several decades? Of course, a great deal depends on which time period one is discussing: the world of 2100 will be very different from the world of 2030. The question of slow versus fast collapse will also have a big effect on future scenarios. But if we look at tangible events of the last hundred years, two possible conceptions of the future stand out most clearly. These have best been illustrated by novelists (although not with peak oil as the setting) rather than by sociologists.

The first is that of a slow slide into an impoverished police state, as illustrated by George Orwell’s 1984. In this scenario, government does not disappear. It is here to curse us forever. We may be poor and living in chaos, but we will live in relentless drudgery. This is roughly the same scenario as that of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The second is that of a nuclear war that throws humanity back into a quasi-medieval world, as in Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. In the fight for the remaining resources, civilization is largely destroyed. Such a scenario is just as plausible as that of George Orwell.

All civilizations grow too large to support themselves, and their leaders have little foresight. These civilizations then collapse and are buried in the sand. The same will happen to American civilization, but human shortsightedness prevents us from seeing it as only one among many. The USA, in other words, is seen as "civilization" in a generic sense, when it is really just one single civilization in a quantifiable sense. Unlike that of ancient Egypt, however, it is not likely to have a lifespan of three thousand years. Nor is it likely that another will take its place.

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Energy 2050 Apocalypse - The Road to Exhaustion (Part 6)

Energy 2050 Apocalypse

World Energy to 2050
  Forty Years of Decline
Putting Energy Sources in Perspective
Part 6

By Paul Cherfurka

http://www.paulchefurka.ca/

Putting Energy Sources in Perspective

Figure 11: Energy Use by Source, 1965 to 2100

Figure 11 shows all the above curves on a single graph, giving us a sense of the relative timing of the various production peaks as well as the rates of increase or decline of the different sources. As you can see, fossil fuels are by far the most important contributors to the world's current energy mix, but oil and natural gas will decline rapidly over the coming decades. By the middle of the century the dominant player is coal, with oil, gas, hydro, nuclear power and renewables making very similar contributions to the world's mid-century energy supply.

  

Figure 12: The Global Energy Mix in 1965, 2005 and 2050

Figure 12 shows the changing contribution of each energy source relative to the others over time.  There are three interesting things to note about this progression.

The first is the large role that coal plays in the global supply picture.  That situation is not entirely unexpected, but it hints at the difficulty we will have trying to replace our dirtiest and most dangerous energy source as our supplies of oil and gas decline.

The second is the increasing diversity of energy sources over time.  This change is a good thing, as it indicates that various regions will have a much wider range of energy options available to them than in the past.

Finally, by mid-century energy sources that do not generate greenhouse gases may be supplying 40% of the world's power as opposed to 13% today and only 5% in 1965.  Combined with an overall (albeit involuntary) reduction in global energy use by 2050, that shift bodes well for reducing the carbon dioxide our civilization exhales into the atmosphere.

Figure 13: Total Energy Use, 1965 to 2100

Figure 13 has all the energy curves added together to show the overall shape of total world energy consumption. This graph aggregates all the rises, peaks and declines to give a sense of the complete energy picture.  The graph shows a strong peak in about 2020, with an ongoing decline out to 2050. The main reason for the decline is the loss of oil and gas. The decline is cushioned by an increase in hydro and renewables over the middle of the century, and averages out to 1% per year.

Fuel vs. Electricity

The energy we use can be broadly categorized into two classes, fuel and electricity.  The former consists of oil and gas, the two sources that will be in decline over the next half century.  The amount of electricity we produce from all other sources including coal will increase, though not enough to offset the decline in fuels in terms of the energy they supply.  Figure 14 shows show how the split between the two classes of energy will change over the next 45 years.

Figure 14: Fuel and Electricity Use, Today and 2050

In addition to the loss of transportation mobility it represents, the loss of the enormous contributions of oil and natural gas means that the total amount of energy available to humanity by the middle of the century may be only 70% of the amount we use now. That shortfall contains an ominous message for our future that is the subject of the next section.

Next

Part 7: Effects and Conclusion
(February 27, 2016)