Global Energy, GWP and Population Growth: what happened in 1972?

[GliderGuider]

The growth rates of all three measures of human activity - energy consumption, Gross World Product and global population - topped out between 1969 and 1975 (marked by the yellow shaded rectangle), and have been struggling for the last 40 years. 1972 seems to have been the year of peak growth in human civilization.

[Demeter]

1. The Oil Shock

Nixon supported Israel, who invaded Egypt....the Middle East cut off the oil to the US, and then the Space Program and the Vietnam War came to a sudden end.

All for the lack of cheap oil. With the added militancy of the 99% America, which was sickened by Presidential perfidy...and their own suffering, which was not only substantial, but growing.

That doesn't even begin to mention what the ordinary American, faced with his own little oil shock, did. Insulation, weatherstripping, high efficiency furnaces and alternate fuels, less driving, turning off lights, going to renewable energy and conservation.

Yes, we used to be a country pulling back from the brink of destruction...

I really need a rocking chair to go with this discussion, and some grandkids at my knee, listening with innocent surprise.

[GliderGuider]

2. So that was the U S of A. What about the rest of the world?

They're all in there - Chindia, Europe, S. America, the old Soviet Union. why would the american factors you mentioned have affected their birth rates or GDP?

[Demeter]

5. China instituted the One-Child Policy, and enforced it

India went for aborting female fetuses.

South America had continual warfare, and a lot of falling away from Catholicism and into birth control. The Soviet Union devolved, with poor diet and worse public health, their expected life span shrank.

Don't underestimate the effects of the US economy on the world during that time. We were the only game in town. The US sneezed, a lot of the Third World died.

There are massive movements in nations, across continents. Riht now, we are all confronted with Corporate Globalism, which has over-reached and will come crashing down of its internal contradictions and propensity to rape and pillage.

[GliderGuider]

6. I'm not convinced, but I'll keep looking.

Anything that might bring down our population, consmption, energy use and GWP should be encouraged.

[Iterate]

3. Beats me.

I've never thought about the growth rate of those three that way.

50 years after WWI, 25 after WWII? I know wars can have some serious knock-on effects that keep echoing. It's also about the same time that rebuilding after WWII was largely completed. If that's part of it, similar numbers for China should be shifted later by about five years, because it ended later for them and they had the famine from '58 to '61.

It's also about the time full employment ended world-wide. Cause or effect?

Energy and WDP were far more linked then, so you might be counting the same activity twice. Maybe??

Or it was because the Beatles broke up. That, and the near certainty that if you write a book called "The Population Bomb" you will learn on the publication date that the growth rate had already peaked.

[GliderGuider]

4. Hah! I knew it had to be Paul Ehrlich's fault!

Human behavior is so complex that it's hard to decipher cause and effect - it all seems to roll up into one big ball of feedbacks. EROI peaked? The high-consumption nations finally got saturated with stuff? The Second law of Thermodynamics realized that machines were more efficient gradient-destroyers than people, so it didn't need as many bags of skin any more?

Quien sabe?

[Iterate]

7. Ok, time to get serious

Sleep and a few minutes of free time bring clarity. Who knew.

With all three factors bound together, what you're really only looking at is the post-war babyboom peak. But with the three not shared evenly across the globe, the reason they all converge on 1972 is interesting. You can load the data into gapminder and watch the transitions. Unfortunately they don't include energy growth.

The low population/high GDP nations started the post-war transition sooner. Peak natural pop. growth for the US was 62?? or 63??. In the the early 70's, the US was an outlier for total energy use and boomers(apologetic hand wave) had hit peak startup for setting up households. The EU and Japan had lagged a bit, but by the late 60's their pop. and GDP growth had begun to stabilize as well.

The post-war recovery for high population/low energy nations started later and peak population growth for them was about the same time. India was at 2.4 in 1976, China peaked at about 2.7 in 1971.

It just occurred to me that I'm replying to your last line by saying that 1972 wasn't a peak year for civilization, it was the peak year for recovery from de-civilization.

[GliderGuider]

8. Nice analysis. Thanks.

I hadn't thought of the WWII recovery angle - add that to the post-war development of consumer technology and it starts to look more like a bubble than the "peak-and-decline" of civilization. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of these trends from now until the climate emergency changes the game in a completely new direction.

[kristopher]

9. My first thought was post war rebuilding also.

- Europe and Japan were rebuilt from the ground up.
- Japan got a big boost with economic activity supporting US operations in Korea and Vietman.
- China didn't start popping economically until the mid-90s.
- It wasn't the "oil shock" that is reflected, it was the formation of OPEC and the end of colonialism. This resulted in a more realistic assessment of the value of oil and other commodities since the owners were able to exact rents that reflected more of what the market was willing to pay.
- Post war population booms are normal.


Lastly a question: what will that graph look like with a longer time horizon at both ends? For each of the data streams, will 1972 mark the peak of a surge in an otherwise relatively stable trendline, or is it rather a peak to trends that were on a long-term upward trend?

There are many more contributing factors, but that serves as an example and warning about the danger of reductionist thinking.

[GliderGuider]

10. Here's a look at a longer time series

The question is what happens in the future. Is the fossil-fueled growth we've seen since the mid-to-late 1800's a bubble that will shortly subside or burst? Or is it a signal that complex adaptive system of human civilization has undergone a bifurcation - a transition to a new, meta-stable high-energy state?

It seems obvious that recent growth rates can't/won't be sustained, so the rapid growth will stop. The question is, can we maintain the energy supplies, climate regime and biosphere required to maintain the new state? In other words will the underlying curves turn out to be be sigmoid, or a peak-and-decline of some sort? From what I'm seeing, the latter seems far more probable.

Edit to add: Post-WWII reconstruction seems to have accelerated the growth, but the rate of change has been rising since about 1875. that implies that fossil fuels are behind it. The end of post-war reconstruction may have been responsible for the down-turn in growth since 1972, but growth rates are still far above the historical norms without fossil fuels.

[Iterate]

11. Try loading this. See if we're seeing the same thing.

http://tinyurl.com/ngzlftm

It's from gapminder, an odd mix of total fertility on the left(which largely gets away from immigrant influenced total pop. increase) and energy per person(which is toe and gets away from the oddities in GDP). You can deselect/select counties and track changes, but it's mostly limited to post 1960 for those stats.

Just rechecking that, it's set at x-y log-lin, but probably should be lin-lin. I should have zoomed the scale too.

[GliderGuider]

12. Here's what I see

For most of the countries I checked, the trails were more or less vertical (I went to lin-lin). This tells me that TFR (an "approxy" for te population growth rate) was falling, per-capita energy in each country remained more constant over the time interval. So, as population growth rates fell, and per-capita energy use remained constant, overall energy growth rates would fall as well. This seems to imply that population growth drives energy growth, at least to some degree. That's reasonable, as there is an adaptive feedback going in that direction.

[Iterate]

13. Interesting. Way interesting.

Last edited Sat Jul 12, 2014, 03:49 AM - Edit history (1)

That adds dimension to what I was thinking. It's clear, population growth would drive energy use in that people are born into a given culture and infrastructure and 15 years later the energy bill starts to get paid.

The data on disrupted nations is sparse here, but from other sources it's clear that wars, especially chronic civil and colonial wars, kick population growth. Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala are still recovering demographically.

No nation maintains pop. growth above maintenance for very long, and nations really don't make babies anyway, women do. When there is stability and the means to do so, it eventually drops to 2.1 or below, even if it takes a generation or two. Stability may be in short supply over the next 100 years.

Energy per capita is remarkably stable. For those countries moving to the right/increasing, like Japan/France/Germany/UK/Denmark rebuilding cities, they stabilized at a point around 1965-1975 and didn't move much from it. It's almost as if there's a setpoint that depends upon the built infrastructure, consumption culture, and economic relationships. It's yet another reason why nothing should be built now that isn't low carbon and sustainable.

That's very bad news for nations whose infrastructure has been determined by real estate speculators and car dealers.

It is possible though to see a leftward/decreasing shift in a few countries after 2003 or so. I assume that's a climate change response. Some of the soviet client states also moved even more quickly left after 1990.

[GliderGuider]

14. Overall world energy use per capita stabilized in 1975

Last edited Wed Jun 26, 2013, 09:01 PM - Edit history (1)

The uptick since 2000 is mostly because of China, of course. Chinese per capita energy consumption has gone up 250% since 2000 from 0.8 toe to 2.0 toe/cap - which is above the world average.

Have you read Tim Garrett's paper on the energy cost of cumulative wealth? He estimates it takes 9.7 mw of primary energy per 1990 dollar's worth of cumulative GWP to keep the show running, in terms of the energy plowed into maintaining the asset base. Only power over that amount could be put towards growth, and that fraction has been declining since ... about 1972.



The press release about Garrett's findings.
A short article I wrote about it.

[Iterate]

15. I remember Garrett

I think at one point I looked at the paper itself...or memory fails.

The 9.7 mW number got me distracted right off the bat because it's such an impossibly low number -that's a bag of watches, less than a metabolic rate, and the units...per...? and I couldn't understand where it all came from. The error of +/- .3 mW? Measurements of human activity on that scale just simply don't have that level of precision. The problems only got worse when trying to apply his dollar value to the rest of the world.

Nonetheless, there were some interesting ideas, like "the 1990 power dollar" (which led to other thought tangents), and a maintenance minimum is a very valuable idea. If there are energy constants that apply to historical periods or different cultures, I'm interested. I just got to the the point where I didn't trust his work, especially when it seemed he was trying to sell me a power plant. I don't know where I'd put it, and I want to buy less, not more.

And there was the business of direct application of physical laws to human behavior. It's not that humans aren't existentially constrained, but it's risky business to leap from one to the other. The intermediate steps, the how, where and when, have to be nailed down. Atoms have identical interactive rates and properties of interaction everywhere. People don't.

We're more likely to find common ground with Jevon's Paradox, though I should point out that it applies within an existing economy and infrastructure. Between different stable economies and infrastructures, your mileage may vary, literally.

About ready to post, but in looking at your toe chart again, I think the three plateaus need names. How about Rural/Ag/Horses on the left, Urbanized/Coal/Rail for the center, and Sprawl/Fossil/Cars for the right? It's a start, but the names need to be catchier.

[GliderGuider]

16. I had similar questions about Garrett's 9.7mw number, so I wrote him.

Last edited Thu Jun 27, 2013, 12:54 PM - Edit history (2)

He clarified it as being the power required to support the total accumulated asset base of civilization since the beginning of time (or practically speaking since Year 1?). His proxy for this was the cumulative constant dollar GWP going back as far as made any difference.

The idea makes intuitive sense to me - you need energy to maintain what you built last year as well as stuff that was built 20 or 50 or 100 years ago, as well as to build new assets in order to grow- but I think the precision he claimed came from a very small sample of years, and so is open to legitimate criticism. Estimating GWP from e.g. the year 500 is imprecise business, though Angus Maddison made a good stab at it. Also, GWP is a poor proxy for asset construction, since the rate of Fixed Capital Formation within economies and over time varies a lot, and even poorer as the economy become decoupled from physical activity through the use of financial instruments like derivatives.

I think he had a good insight, but the validity of the proof is low.

The application of physical laws to human behavior is an area I'm very interested in at the moment, and is what led me to find Garrett. I'm looking at the possibility (now IMO a certainty) that basic human behavior - especially anything having to do with survival and growth - is shaped by the operation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as manifested in non-equilibrium open systems. Essentially, our strong cultural resistance to de-growth or restraint (especially in the use of energy) is evidence that we are shaped by the thermodynamics inherent in the "survive and propagate" directives that drive all living organisms.

The thermodynamic shaping of human behavior is apparent at the individual level if one knows how to look at it, but becomes more obvious when we look at our whole global civilization. The collective behavior of 7 billion individuals becomes statistically deterministic, similar to the way temperature and pressure appear in a gas composed of many individual molecules. The molecules themselves each have a mass, a position and a velocity, while the gas aggregate exhibits the emergent properties of temperature and pressure.

The plateaus in the energy use graph represent stable technological periods - I'd just call them the agricultural, industrial and electronic eras after their defining technologies.

I'm just beginning to delve into cybernetics in my quest to understand what's going on. The first thing I discovered was a 1963 paper talking about "Deviation-Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes". It's about growth-amplifying positive feedback loops between two or more processes rather than the more typical cybernetic concept of homeostasis requiring negative feedbacks. The analogy to the feedback relationship between processes like population growth and energy production, technological growth and urbanization, or the system of (fossil fuel CO2 production, Arctic warming, shrinking polar ice cap, methane releases from melting permafrost) is obvious.

Essentially all of human growth activity is tangled up in positive feedback loops. Such loops can only be broken in two ways: by external limits on essential process outputs or inputs, or the inability of the system to maintain structural coherence at high levels of activity. Collective human behavior does not appear to be able to put artificial controls on the feedbacks, so breaking the loops will require either input limits or system breakdown.

To finish off by going a bridge too far (or jumping the shark, take your pick of metaphor) I'm beginning to suspect that we are approaching a point of endosymbiosis with our cybernetic control technology, especially the Internet. If endosymbiosis is achieved, humans become essential elements of a larger super-organism in much the same way that mitochondria migrated into early prokaryotic cells and became essential components of the new eukaryotic cells. Similarly, it's possible that we are evolving towards a situation in which human beings act as hyper-functional neurons within the super-organism, with endpoint devices like smart phones and PCs acting as synapses, and network connections being analogous to nerve fibers.

It's an old science-fiction idea, but I think it's about to appear in reality. However it seems to be happening through a process of coevolution driven by the mutual amplification effects of human ingenuity and electronic technology, rather than through a Borg-like assimilation of humans into a hive mind, or Kurzweil's eschatological Singularity.

It's probably going to happen much faster than we expect, and in ways that we don't interpret as being what they are - much like the way most people are unable to see our behavior as being shaped by thermodynamics rather than solely by human volition. The big question is whether climate change and the rest of the Global Clusterfuck is going to win the race and eliminate the possibility before it happens. I rather hope not. So in the interests of seeing this possibility have maximum opportunity for expression, I now hope solar and wind do end up powering a future 100 terawatt civilization. Srsly. I'd love to see how a cyborg civilization comes into being.

[Iterate]

17. Yea, but those 7 billion individual

heat-seeking, entropy-surfing, sugar-snacking individuals are still bound by cultural limits and narratives. Even the nuttiest RWer knows that something is very wrong but their narrative is just fucked. Or maybe I'm just bound by my cultural narrative that says discussing cultural narratives is relevant.

Most days the situation makes me think of a troop of baboons with a bucket of hand-grenades. They're just never going to figure it out. Never.

In the mean time I think I'll find something to do as well, something mildly useful and amusing, but have no idea what it will be. Ooops, I'm about to salvage or loose forever about 100GB of some poor bastards data. I'd better pay attention. Cheers.