Update I thought I’d repost this a year on, and reopen the discussion 10 September 2015
Reader ZM points me to a paper with this title, by Graham Turner of the University of Melbourne. Not only does Turner answer “Yes”, he gives a date: 2015. That’s a pretty big call to be making, given that 2015 is less than four months away.
The abstract reads:
The Limits to Growth “standard run” (or business-as-usual, BAU) scenario produced about forty years ago aligns well with historical data that has been updated in this paper. The BAU scenario results in collapse of the global economy and environment (where standards of living fall at rates faster than they have historically risen due to disruption of normal economic functions), subsequently forcing population down. Although the modelled fall in population occurs after about 2030—with death rates rising from 2020 onward, reversing contemporary trends—the general onset of collapse first appears at about 2015 when per capita industrial output begins a sharp decline. Given this imminent timing, a further issue this paper raises is whether the current economic difficulties of the global financial crisis are potentially related to mechanisms of breakdown in the Limits to Growth BAU scenario. In particular, contemporary peak oil issues and analysis of net energy, or energy return on (energy) invested, support the Limits to Growth modelling of resource constraints underlying the collapse.
A central part of the argument, citing Simmons is that critics of LtG wrongly interpeted the original model as projecting a collapse beginning in 2000, whereas the correct date is 2015.
I’ve been over this issue in all sorts of ways (see here and here for example, or search on Peak Oil). So readers won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t buy this story. I won’t bother to argue further: unless the collapse is even more rapid than Turner projects, I’ll be around to eat humble pie in 2016 when the downturn in output (and the corresponding upsurge in oil prices) should be well under way.
Given that I’m a Pollyanna compared to lots of commenters here, I’d be interested to see if anyone is willing to back Turner on this, say by projecting a decline of 5 per cent or more in world industrial output per capita in (or about) 2015, continuing with a sharply declining trend thereafter. [minor clarifications added, 5/9]
John Quiggin 
It looks pretty close to me, Jack King. I suspect that Turner acquired the original model code from the Donnela Meadows Institute or perhaps directly from Donella’s husband Dennis, who was the director of the modelling project, and re ran it on today’s computers. The Y scale is compressed and the services graph is either indicated differently or added from the original data, but otherwise it is a fair representation of the original.
@BilB
The slope for food per capita is completely skewed from the original. It doesn’t take a trained eye to figure this out. take a minute and compare the two. They are completely different scenerios. If you tweek the variables you will get different outputs. You really need to read the book in context to get the sense of it.
Air travel cops a fair amount of flak but I have heard comparisons made with the power required to run the Internet – they are about the same with huge amounts being consumed by “cloud” installations.
link
rog,
The main distinction is that the internet can be run from renewable energy grid connections – air planes cannot, they need to carry fuel. Using plant based fuel takes land that could be used for other purposes like food growing and reforestation, and plant material that could otherwise be returned to the soil as nutrients, lessening the need for ghg emitting artificial fertilisers.
A Berkley study into power usage
Link
Click to access emergy-hotnets11.pdf
Jack King,
I will try to embed the figure as a Flickr , but to me looking at it the collapse is closer to 2100
Hmmm, that did not work as intended 😦 anyway, it is a link to the figure
@Jack King
Why the shock? I am Marxian in my thinking. Marxian economics is distinct from Marxism being more heterodox, more empirical and less ideological. To be Marxian certainly does not mean support for Soviet style “communism” or any such nonsense. The Soviet Union was in fact a totalitarian state capitalist system. It was not socialist in any Marxian sense.
The statement “the great majority of human beings do not make considered judgements on empirical evidence at the best of times” does not imply that there are special individuals who always do so and thus who should be benevolent or malevolent dictators. Democracy (true democracy if we had it) is not perfect. It is as Churchill said:- “Democracy is the worst system, except for every other system.”
That being said, our parliamentery democracy is a token democracy in many ways. Indeed, our so-called democracy is now a two-party / one-ideology system with both parties bought, suborned and controlled by neoconservative oligarchic capital, A society cannot be democratic until capitalist ownership and power is broken and the workplaces become democratic; worker worked, worker owned and worker managed.
ZM, as I mentioned earlier, hydrodgen or other synthetic fuels can be used and they can be created using renewable energy. Looking at a map of Adelaide airport I see there is room for about 7 million square meters of solar panels. With 20% efficiency for the panels and 1/3 efficiency for liquid hydrogen production that would produce hydrogen fuel with an energy equivalent of about 700,000 liters of jet fuel or enough to fly about 20,000 people a day to Sydney in modern fuel efficient planes. That’s enough to fly everyone in Adelaide to Sydney and back about three times a year. And much more efficiency can be achieved with simple changes in airline operations. For example, considerable fuel savings could be made by increasing flight times and using propeller planes instead of jets. Also, seats could be removed from planes and passengers strapped into vertical harnesses instead. Charging by the kilogram for passengers and luggage would result in further efficiencies. (High speed rail is looking better all the time, isn’t it?)
Just to be clear, the solar panels don’t have to be located at the airport. It’s just an example of what could be done with land that’s already set aside for aviation. And to be even clearer, like a jellyfish, I don’t think hydrogen will be used as aviation fuel. After all, there is no shortage of conventional oil in the world. Not if people stop burning it. It seems likely to me that the electrification of ground transport will keep the cost of oil low enough to make it practical for applications such as passenger flight. And I’ll mention it is more efficient from an area of land required perspective, to burn oil and use agriculture to remove and sequester the CO2 released from the atmosphere than to use agriculture to produce biofuels. But remember that I just mentioned that hydrogen or other synthetic fuels could be used for flight. Agriculture is not a requirement.
Ronald Brak,
Everything I have heard about hydrogen is that it is not practicable, it is highly explosive , and no one has worked out a way how to make it a usable everyday scalable fuel.
Do you have a new update on the practicability of hydrogen?
We can’t keep using normal fossil fuel oil because it causes climate change.
People can just travel less and go by train and boat.
@ZM
Yeah, I tend to agree there. It depends a lot on what you’re pulling the hydrogen from. If it’s from water, then the efficiency will be terrible (nowhere near 33%). It would need to be removed from some renewable hydrocarbon. Then liquefying it *alone* takes about 30% of its potential energy output. It is considerably more hazardous and leaky than hydrocarbon fuels. Its density is terrible translating to a requirement for larger volumetric fuel tanks with the requirement for significant insulation. The storage itself will require non trivial energy inputs to keep it in the liquefied state.
@Ikonoclast
Not sure that the Russian position is really defensible. I mean, while the Russians might be encircled by other countries, so is Switzerland, and last time I looked the Swiss weren’t looking to build a buffer around themselves. And I don’t see other countries planning to invade Russia by stirring up discontent amongst ethnic minorities inside Russia.
By all means the Russians might feel threatened by NATO, but only in the sense that NATO might seek to curtail Russian adventurism.
Rog said:
Err no … at least not on the basis of the figures supplied. There’s a difference between 30 billion watt hours and 30 billion watts. The first is a measure of power demand, the second, installed capacity. Assuming it’s 30 bWh (or 30GWh). You could produce that with 1.25GW of 24/7 capacity — a bit over 1 nuclear plant.
Also, as the article from which you took this stated, there’s a lot of redundancy and waste in the data centres — servers that are running that are doing very little computational work, running versions of apps that have been replaced and upgraded and are running elsewhere and should be decommissioned.
Interestingly, Google houses many of its servers in Iceland, which allows them to run the centres entirely on renewables and use the icy waters as a heat sink.
John
I’ll join you for at the table in 2016, but I can’t imagine that there will be humble pie on the menu. I cannot see a lot of reason for significant growth in industrial output in the short to medium term for several reasons, but I cannot see anything that would cause any sharp decline either.
This process of playing gotchas with figures from 40 years ago is pretty reprehensible. When denialists sneer at scientists for not being able to predict the exact date of arctic sea ice loss, or of reaching a particular warming threshold, we rightly point out to them that this is just stupid. Yet here we have a post demanding people give precise percentage declines with precise dates, for a study from 40 years ago. And this demand from an economist – a discipline that can’t predict a crash five years from now to within a five year time frame.
The limits to growth work obviously needs to be seen in the context of some degree of uncertainty about the time frame. They appear to have couched this in terms of the beginning, middle and end of a period of decline. You can’t just expect the exact date and character of the beginning of a near century-long decline to be predicted accurately to within a year – especially if you come from a discipline that couldn’t predict the GFC from five years away.
ZM, hydrogen being highly explosive is entirely the point. This is why kerosene is currently use to power planes. Because it’s highly explosive. The most powerful non-nuclear bombs in the world operate by spraying kerosene in the air and then detonating it. All else equal, the more energy a chemical holds per kilogram, the more effective it is as an aircraft fuel. As for whether or not highly explosive chemicals can be used safely, there are people who drive everyday using petrol and fly using kerosene. There are even people who drive using hydrogen every day. Also, hydrogen is used safely everyday in many industrial processes ranging from oil refining to fertilizer manufacture.
And just to be totally jellyfish, no one is going to build hydrogen powered planes.
@Troy Prideaux
Tony, what figure are you using for electrolysis efficiency? Efficiencies of over 50% are possible with enough capital expenditure (PDF):
Click to access pd090_ayers_2012_p.pdf
PS: Just to be clear, no one is going to use hydrogen powered planes.
PPS: Unless they do. But it is currently not a realistic method of replacing kerosense.
@Ronald Brak
Don’t tell hermit – he’s clearly terrified of the prospect of an aircraft powered by dimethyl ether. If he finds out kerosene is just as bad, he’ll never fly again. 😉
@Ronald Brak
Being rich in energy (per unit weight) is not synonymous to being highly explosive though. Paraffin wax has probably just as much energy as kero, but its physical properties translates to different explosive hazards. The deflagration rate of an air:hydrogen mix is much faster than a kerosene vapour:air mix or even petrol vapour:air mix. Couple this with its tendency to leak through places that other fluids simply can’t and its deficiency of detectable odor or colour provides you with a hazard that at least requires consideration.
SG#16
“”Yet here we have a post demanding people give precise percentage declines with precise dates, for a study from 40 years ago. And this demand from an economist – a discipline that can’t predict a crash five years from now to within a five year time frame.
“”
A case of, why bother with ‘Interpreting probability’ when you can simply ‘quantitative ease’ the problem away.
But that’s exactly what Turner is doing. Read the abstract for goodness sake: it’s printed right there.
As a general observation, Ivor, your comments are both rude and obtuse. You’ve added nothing to the discussion since you arrived. Anything further that I take as an insult directed at me or other commenters will lead to an immediate and permanent ban. That includes the response that is undoubtedly forming in your mind as you read this.
@faustusnotes
Same applies to you. The 2015 date isn’t mine, it’s Turner’s, and it’s not from 40 years ago, it’s a 2014 publication.
@ Tim M
Not terrified, insufficiently funded. LNG (ie methane fuelled) planes could be the go since the cold requires less pressure containment
http://www.bluecorridor.org/ngvs/natural-gas-industry/could-natural-gas-aviation-be-in-our-future/
Some suggest world peak natural gas will be circa 2030 but when oil slides maybe from 2018 ships and land vehicles will want first dibs on natural gas. The key to cheap dimethyl ether from biomass is cheap hydrogen which like so many other things remains out of reach.
@jrkrideau
And others: To be clear, the risk of catastrophic collapse from climate change is real and serious, although unlikely to be realised in the next 10-15 years.
But the valence of Peak Oil (and coal, and gas) switches sign here. Turner (and it would seem quite a few others) predict imminent disaster based on running out of (or low on) fossil fuels. If you care about the climate the sooner Peak oil happens, the better, and the fact that, in the developed countries it has already happened is one of the limited signs of hope.
Troy, I called you Tony for some reason in a post above that just got out of moderation. Sorry about that.
@Fran Barlow
Fran, nobody mentioned watt-hours. But if they had, 30 billion watt-hours would be a measure of energy consumption, not power consumption. Power consumption is measured in watts, the same as power production. So the figure of 30 billion watts would seem to be an estimate of the data centres’ power consumption, which, if accurate, would indeed roughly match the combined output of 30 large power stations, just as the quote in rog’s comment states.
@Hermit
I was alluding to your comparison between a dimethyl ether-fueled aircraft and a spray can tossed into a fire. I realise you weren’t entirely serious, of course.
John Quiggin,
I haven’t read the full article yet as I have had other things needing doing, but I think because you’ve only read the abstract you don’t quite understand what Graham Turner is saying. Turner is noting the beginnings of a long term down turn in 2015 – not that there is imminent collapse in 2015. As history has so far followed the standard run business as usual scenario without appropriate government policy making – I would presume the proper collapse around 2070-2100 in the figure could be staved off – should appropriate policy mean we stop following business as usual scenario and follow an interventional it’s scenario instead.
I think Turner has pointed out some concerns he has that the needed levels of government intervention could be difficult to fund at the moment because of the gfc, peak oil, and the higher costs of extracting mineral resources due to having already mined most of the easy deposits (this is why there is so much open cut and mountain top removal mining now – because the quality of deposits is so low they can’t get them out profitably in a more environmentally sensitive way).
I should have it finished by tomorrow to make a comment with quotes .
No probs – thanks for the link. It seems my understanding of the efficiencies are way out of date.
@ZM You say
Turner says:
(emphasis added)
I can’t see how you can sustain your reading in the face of such unequivocal statements.
Then of course, there’s the title of the paper (and this post). Turner’s answer is pretty clearly “Yes”, wouldn’t you say?
Energy consumption is power, energy/time. Power consumption is gibberish in this context, unless you’re talking about the rates at which power plants wear out.
> If you care about the climate the sooner Peak oil happens, the better
Not necessarily! We may want to use the oil to build equipment to decarbonise the economy, there’s a rather nasty “we don’t have the capital to fix our loss-makers” possibility.
John, I have said nothing rude or obtuse. I even linked to a post of mine about work by Bardi, who is cited in the paper you link to. Furthermore, your claim that this paper is predicting a year ahead because it was written in 2014 is obviously not true. The 2015 date is not Turner’s and he makes this clear. The paper is presenting a comparison of the World3 scenario from Limits to Growth with publicly available data. i.e. it is reporting on the accuracy of a 40 year old comparison. The abstract also doesn’t state 2015, it states “about 2015.” You are the one insisting that a prediction from 40 years ago needs to be precise in its particulars to within 5%, and its time frame to within a year – do you really think that’s reasonable?
John Quiggin,
I have to read it more carefully, but I think he is pointing to the decline of mineral resources. People I’ve talked to in the field say this is a concern – hence there is now a move to more environmentally damaging resource extraction methods to keep profitability via increasing externalities.
You are an economist, not me, but maybe you would know about the trueness of this statement compared to present reality and near future likelihood (I would have to do too much research to work out if it’s justified – it is quite a short article so things are not given lengthy explanations). The modelling seems to use physical models mixed with economic models … the government thinks we do not have enough capital, they are always complaining about it and making cuts – so they would seem to agree with Turner about diminishing capital and not enough to fund services like education.
“Until the non-renewable resource base is reduced to about 50 per cent of the original or ultimate level, the World3 model assumed only a small fraction (5 per cent) of capital is allocated to the resource sector, simulat-ing access to easily obtained or high quality resources, as well as improvements in discovery and extraction technology. However, as resources drop below the 50 per cent level in the early part of the simulated 21st century and become harder to extract and process, the capital needed begins to increase. For instance, at 30 per cent of the original resource base, the fraction of total capital that is allocated in the model to the resource sector reaches 50 per cent, and continues to increase as the resource base is further depleted (shown in Meadows et al., 1974).
With significant capital subsequently going into resource extraction, there is insufficient capital available to fully replace degrading capital within the industrial sector itself. Consequently, despite heightened industrial activity attempting to satisfy multiple demands from all sectors and the population, actual industrial output (per capita) begins to fall precipitously from about 2015, while pollution from the industrial activity continues to grow.The reduction of inputs to agriculture from industry, combined with pollution impacts on agricultural land, leads to a fall in agricultural yields and food produced per capita. Similarly, services (eg. health and education) are not maintained due to insufficient capital and inputs.
Diminishing per capita supply of services and food causes a rise in the death rate from about 2020 (and a somewhat lower rise in the birth rate, due to reduced birth control options).The global population therefore falls, at about half a billion per decade, starting at about 2030. Following the collapse, the output of the World3 model for the BAU (Figure 1) shows that average living stan- dards for the aggregate population (material wealth, food and services per capita basically reflecting OECD-type conditions) resemble those of the early 20th century.
The implications of the BAU scenario are stark: Figure 1 depicts global collapse of the economic system and population. Essentially this collapse is caused by resource constraints (Meadows et al., 1972), following the dynamics and interactions described above.The calibrated dynamics reflect observed responses within the economy to changing levels of abundance or scarcity (Meadows et al., 1974), obviating the need for modelling prices as the communication channel of the economic responses.”
I will upload figure 1 to Flickr and link to it so as to make it convenient for everyone.
Figure 1
He also says there is still time for social action to make things either better or worse. I think I will finish it before commenting again.
“In terms of social changes, it is pertinent to note that while the authors of the LTG caution that
the dynamics in the World3 model continue to operate throughout any breakdown, different social dynamics might come to prominence that either exaggerate or ameliorate the collapse (eg. reform through global leadership, regional or global wars).”
Just one more thing.
He does not say the full collapse is imminent.
He says the *onset* of the collapse is predicted around 2015 – and that this *onset is imminent* – which it is because 2015 is only next year, next year is very imminent as we are already in September.
Slightly OT us this link to a gov.au site which recommends Ian Lowe article on BAU. Ian Lowe says that we have two options, BAU (steady as she sinks) or become a clever country by investing in our future. There is no indication that we are inclined to select the second option over the first
It’s almost a given that the Abbott govt has not read the Ian Lowe article.
@John Quiggin
The quibble ZM and I had was that Turner predicted PER CAPITA industrial output would flatten and decline from 2015. You were asking people to predict a 5% decline in industrial output (no per capita) from 2015. It’s a bit different.
Yes, per capita world output will cease rising in or about 2015 IMO. A flattening and then drop in total world output will take a bit longer. I think this will flatten by about 2020. The drop thereafter will accelerate slowly but surely. I think the world economy might be shrinking by about 2% or 3% per annum by 2025. Five percent (5%) shrinkage per annum will start happening about 2030. That’s a rough guess. From that point on it could turn into a “Seneca Cliff” or we could stabilise major regions of the world economy (but not all regions) and start building a steady state, renewable, circular and ubiquitous resources economy. Crude quantitiative material growth (in total infrastructure and population) will have to cease but we might keep on achieving qualitiative growth in knowledge and technology for a very long time at least in theory. But climate change might wreck even this hope.
So I do see a major crisis and human kind going to the brink of collapse. What happens then I am not sure. I have tended in the past to think that collapse will continue but the overall historical record of human kind does indicate an ability to recover, consolidate and progress in new directions at key junctures in world history. This could hold true in some regions. It will be a patchy and regional phenomenon if the stabilisation occurs. Some of the more badly placed regions will collapse. Of that I feel fairly certain.
So, I have some qualified hope for the long run.
@Collin Street
I think it would be more accurate to say that power is the rate of energy use or consumption. “Power consumption” is a commonly used, plain English term which generally refers to the power (in watts) at which an electric appliance operates. I don’t think its meaning is particularly obscure.
Obviously, if you want to be pedantic, both ‘energy consumption’ and ‘power consumption’ are gibberish, since neither energy nor power can be ‘consumed’ (because, y’know, the conservation of energy, and all that). But if you’re merely being sensible, then the meaning of ‘power consumption’ is pretty straightforward.
I presume you don’t dispute that the power required to operate the world’s data centres is something different from the energy used in their operation. The former is measured in watts, and the latter in watt-hours. It seems pretty obvious to me that the article quoted by rog was referring to the former, whatever you choose to call it.
I think with the Turner article rather than arguing about whether in discussing ‘imminent’ collapse, Turner is predicting it or simply discussing the LtG scenario*, it is better to use his measured comment in the conclusion
Also though I don’t want to put too much emphasis on personality, I do think personality does come into this, and it is probable that whether one thinks there will be an imminent collapse or not does in part reflect whether one is an optimist or pessimist.
Myself I’m an optimist, but also quite old – so I have learnt that while things don’t always work out as well as I hope, they usually do work out better than the pessimists predict! Based on the latest polls showing both concern about climate and support for the RET rising, I predict this: we will get some shocks (basically climate based events) over the next five years and this will prompt people to start taking more action to mitigate climate change and avert disastrous scenarios (although we inevitably will get more temperature rise etc).
It will be a bumpy ride though and there will be some disasters, particularly for people on low-lying coastal land and islands. I hope the Abbott government gets brought to justice one day for their crimes in the present (especially against asylum seekers) and against future generations.
*(which is not clear although I think he does seem to be supporting it at the first point where he discusses it)
also it seems likely that we will get more terrible droughts and bushfires in south eastern Australia in the next five years. Abbott and his ilk will probably keep trying to say they are not linked to climate change, but I think it will become increasingly clear that they are criminals.
The curve or rather it’s inclination is more relevant than the singular point of it’s peak in relation to useful predictability of various scenarios.
As well as the social or spacial variables Ikon and others are pointing towards have to be taken into considerations. Hence the concept of resilience has become of great interest in risk management within various fields.
A weakness (with hindsight of course) in the LtG scenario is the relative lack of attention to climate change. Turner doesn’t seem to fully acknowledge the implications of this, but does say that the scenario is more about resource (energy) limitations.
In this discussion, the issue is confused because we are talking about climate change as well as or even more than about resource constraints. So overall I think JQ’s challenge is a bit – sort of too difficult or unfair – because the basis of what we are talking about is inevitably confused
@Ikonoclast
Marxism is certainly more egalitarian…..everyone is poor. So Marx was in favor of democracy?
@Tim Macknay
I wasn’t sure exactly what the article was claiming about the energy demands imposed by the world’s commercial data servers. Depending on how you interpreted the words there was a difference of 2400%
That seemed significant to me.
If they really meant to say that 30GW of capacity at 100% availability was needed, then they should have said so.
@Val
I think Val has got it exactly right. That quote is almost (see 3 below) the only point where Turner seems to make his definition of imminent more explicit [1], so I think it’s fair to say that he is not actually committing to a 2015 timeline.
That said, I think it’s reasonable to get that exactly that impression from initial reading. Although I enjoyed the article I actually quite dislike the tone of the abstract and title, since they both imply a stronger position than the one that is actually taken. In particular, I suspect the 2015 date is put in their precisely to grab the attention of someone who thinks an incredibly bold prediction is about to be made.
For my two cents on the actual content:
1) I don’t really agree with John’s statement “A central part of the argument, citing Simmons is that critics of LtG wrongly interpreted the original model”. It seems to me Turner spends a good couple pages disparaging what he sees as unfair criticisms of LtG, but this is all irrelevant to argument Turner plans to mount for why LtG is plausible. My criticism is that all of this could have been removed without changing the conclusions of the article, but I suppose it’s good to engage with previous criticisms. I presume John’s objection is that he’s engaging only with the clearly mistaken criticisms.
2) The major argument is that the LtG BAU scenario that predicts an imminent collapse does quite well matching 40 years of historical data. But this is a bit question begging, in that these are precisely the years where the limits to growth aren’t really meant to show up in the data. Turner then counters this by trying to identify real world phenomena (peak oil being a prominent example) that mirror the mechanisms by which the LtG model predicts collapse (basically, we have to sink more and more resources into extracting the hard-to-get remains of the dwindling resource).
3) Interestingly, the conclusion of the peak oil section seems to be that we’re actually doing a lot better at unconventional extraction than the LtG BAU scenario expects given we’ve already passed peak production. So from this standpoint Turner tweaks the model and suggests a delay in collapse of a couple decades. On the other hand, the collapse is more catastrophic when it comes. But it’s funny that he doesn’t mention in the abstract or conclusion that this section of analysis is indicates collapse is rather less imminent than 2015.
4) My other gripe with this is that it doesn’t really engage with what seems like the other big potential flaw in the LtG mechanism as exemplified by peak oil. Namely, IIRC per capita oil use is declining in developed countries and relatively flat in developing countries. This suggests that (modulo population dynamics) demand could perhaps stabilise/decline in the future. Unless I’m mistaken the whole point of the LtG model is that demand is meant to stay high (or even keep increasing) until the crash. It reckon this is the criticism it would have been most interesting to see addressed.
@Jack King
So how come there were no food banks and homeless in Tito’s Yugoslavia? Why was there no 25% unemployment?
Have you seen the US food stamp data recently?
Have you looked at UK housing for those on normal wages?
Under self-managed socialism, no-one is poor because no-one is rich.
@Fran Barlow
No matter. I was just having an attack of SIWOTI, anyway. 🙂