To properly understand the fate of human society in the
coming century, we should understand the positive and negative feedback loops
that influenced the sustainability of the earth as a system. In my first post, i will use different themes to explore this further. For all analysis
it is very important to remember that timescale is extremely important.
Population
A positive feedback loop over the long term is that many
countries are experiencing a demographic transition with the fertility rate in
most countries decreasing rapidly. However, the medium projection is for world
population to still reach over 9 billion people with most of the rapid growth
in the developing countries. As explained in the population bulletin (1),
this decline in fertility is dependent on the couples in this poor
developing countries having access to family planning which is not absolutely
certain. This
population momentum suggested great stress on the domains of energy, food and
pollution and i will address them one by one.
Food
Food yields while still increasing worldwide is starting to
show stresses from stagnating yields in many developed countries such as in UK
and France.(2) Compounding this problem is the rising meat and dairy
consumption due to greater affluence in some of the developing countries like
China, India and Brazil and expanding biofuel use. This problem was
traditionally solved either by improving the yields greatly on existing lands
or by clearing more forest. Improvements of yields for many developed countries
is though increased automation, greater pesticide or herbicide use, greater
fertilizer use, monoculture practice and using GMO seeds. But these kind of
agricultural practices might have significant drawbacks and could pose great
risk especially when faced with climate changes and the peaking of fossil fuel
during this century. (3-4)
Deforestation of forest land for urban development,
agriculture and biofuel use has been accelerating rapidly in this decade
especially in Southeast Asia(SEA) and in Latin America.
It was estimated that up to 75% of the original forests and 24–63% of Southeast
Asian endemic taxa could face extinction by 2100.(5) The impact of this huge
loss of biodiversity on the stability of the ecosystem and the loss of the
associated ecosystem services should not be underestimated.
A positive feedback loop for food production is that
increasingly, agricultural practices are becoming more sustainable with greater
efforts to incorporate land yield enhancement while trying to protect the land
from soil erosion using techniques such as organic farming, permaculture, soil
management practices and crop rotation.(6-7) However, to date most of these
efforts are small compared to the industrial monoculture method and
considerable delays will occur to source for capital and labour before they can
be brought to widespread use. Because of
this lag time, these practices would have only marginal influence on the
short term(10 to 20 years) but is likely to be important in the long term(>30
years) to combat the problems of deterioration in land fertility and land loss
to erosion.
Energy
Energy has a significant effect on all the process involved
in agriculture from
farm mechanization processes, food production, storage and
the transport processes.(8) As the energy
return on energy invested (EROI) of oil and natural gas extraction has
decreased significantly in the past century due to the depletion of the
conventional oil fields and to their extraction from more energy intensive
sources like tar sand and deep-water horizon, the result is a huge increase in
the price of oil in the last decade. The dynamics of oil price and its effect
on the economy has been well documented by Economist James Hamilton who showed
that 10 out of 11 post-World War II recessions in the United States were caused
by an oil shock.(9) Unfortunately, the marginal cost of new oil has been
increasing rapidly as the new source is unlocked from more energy and costly
operations from tar sand, deep-water horizon and fracked shale oil. This new
unconventional oil and gas become uneconomic every time the oil and gas price
drops below its marginal cost and the production drops as new projects are
halted.(10) This pose a huge problem as the energy consumption of the world is
still increasing at a rapid rate.
A positive trend of reduced energy intensity through greater
efficiencies which are occurring in the western world will help to moderate the
energy consumption increase but is unlikely to be successful in fully
countering the huge increases in consumption increase due to greater prosperity
of the developing world due to the sheer population sizes of these regions.
Economist would say that we can always substitute away from
oil but the substitute is not always a better alternative as assumed. Indeed
the world is showing this substitution whereby half of the rise in global
energy demand over the last decade has been supplied by coal consumption but
this increased coal means that the amount of CO2 emitted will
continue to rise rapidly in the coming decades due to the rapid
industrialization in Asia especially in China
and India.
Substitution with alternative energy sources that are less polluting is
occurring too but this substitution is still very slow though increasing at a
fast rate and not without its problem as highlighted in my post.(12) Nonetheless,
these alternative energies are likely to be the another positive feedback to
the system but a world with such a much lower EROI energy sources would be
incompatible with the present debt based economic system.
Pollution
Over the coming decades, as the effect of the rising
temperature due to CO2 emission and water and soil contamination by
heavy metals or persistent chemicals due to monoculture agriculture and
industrial activities starts to become more apparent, more capital will be used
to combat the negative consequences and to prevent the problem from going
worse.(13)
However, because of the delay in implementing any policies
and the continued industrial growth, land fertility, food production and fresh
water availability will be impaired in the coming decades which result in a
much larger diversion of capital than expected to combat the problems. Things
like carbon taxing, cap and trade or other policies will complement this
increased capital diversion and eventually over the coming century, we could
possible help to reduce the impact as much as possible but at a price of
increased food price, energy demand and reduced capital for other activities.
We can see from my analysis of the complicated Nexus of food,
water, energy, capital and pollution of their interconnectedness. From this, my
conclusion is that although we are clearly on an unsustainable path, we are unlikely
to face Malthusian collapse because of the competitive effects of both positive
and negative feedback loops but a high techno-utopia or BAU will not be
possible either. The likely scenario the world will be heading is thus a long
descent over the coming century because the diversion of capital to combat resource
and energy shortage, agriculture land yield improvement and pollution abatement
results in a much reduced capital for industrial growth. This will be reflected
in the greatly increased price of services and material goods with a consequent
dematerialization (which we are already seeing the first signs now) and a
possible drop in living standards if political and social norms are not taken
to decouple material wellbeing from living standards.
(1) http://www.prb.org/pdf04/transitionsinworldpop.pdf
(2)
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n12/full/ncomms2296.html
(3)
https://class.coursera.org/sustain-002b/forum/thread?thread_id=2621
(4)https://class.coursera.org/sustain-002b/forum/thread?thread_id=2636
(5) 2 Sodhi NS,
Brook BW (2006) Southeast Asia biodiversity in
crisis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agriculture
(7) http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/10-sustainable-farming-practices.htm
(8)
http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/X8054E/x8054e05.htm#P363_53908
(9)
http://reason.com/archives/2011/03/08/oil-price-shocks-and-the-reces
(10) http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/04/21/low-oil-prices-lead-to-economic-peak-oil/
(11) (http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/English.pdf),
(12)
https://class.coursera.org/sustain-002b/forum/thread?thread_id=2512
(13) Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
