Guest post by Thomas Fuller
I have been broadly correct about two important things in my career as an analyst. (I wasn’t the only one and I wasn’t the first–just far enough ahead of the curve to make a difference.)
The two things were the demographic decline of much of Europe and the rapid adoption of the internet following the release of the world wide web. I was not studying or researching either topic at the time–the two phenomena leapt out of other research I was conducting and were obviously more important than what I was doing at the time, so I dropped what I was doing and started looking at them exclusively.
So now it’s time to try for the trifecta. (No, I really don’t care about that at all–but this is the third Capital Letter Issue that has jumped out at me, so what the hey…)
Inadequate projections of latent demand for energy are leading to poor decisions now and are muddying the debate about both climate change and energy policy for the rest of the century.
The U.S. Department of Energy and the United Nations both project global consumption of energy at 680 and 703 quads respectively by the period 2030-2035 (a ‘quad’ is one quadrillion btus, roughly the energy you could liberate from 36 million tons of coal).
However, consumption trends, if extended, are far higher–they could reach 2,100 quads by 2030, if adequate energy was available consistently and at decent prices. This is because of the confluence of several important demographic trends.
The overall population is rising–it will be about 8.1 billion in 2030, the equivalent of adding another China to the planet. The comparison is fairly apt, as most of these new humans will be born into societies that look like China does now, or like China did 15 or 20 years ago.
These new humans will be stepping onto the energy ladder and consuming vastly higher quantities of energy than did their parents–if it’s available. They will be moving from farms with no electricity into slums with a minimum of electricity–but shortly thereafter, development and globalization will start them on the road to refrigeration, television, washer/dryers, computers, motor scooters, cars, ad infinitum.
These new humans will be joined by yet another virtual China–existing people who benefit from the same processes of development and globalization and jump on the energy ladder with both feet and both hands.
Obviously, many of both type will actually be in China. But even more will be in places like Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, large swathes of Africa and the rest of the developing world.
They will want what they perceive as a modern lifestyle–in America that amounts to 327 billion btus per person per year in energy consumption. In Denmark, it’s a much more modest 161 billion btus. But in either case, latent demand for energy will far exceed the 700 quads currently projected by the DOE and the UN.
Assume 7 billion people will be on the energy ladder (changing from wood and animal dung on their way to coal, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear and hopefully arriving some day soon at the promised land of renewable energy). This means there are 1 billion people we have failed. (And I don’t want to ignore them–I just want to present believable numbers for this exercise.)
If those 7 billion consume energy as Americans do it comes to 2,289 quads. (The total will obviously be less, as they won’t all be near the top of the ladder by 2030). If they adopt a Danish model and develop towards that (efficient use of combined heat and power, high taxes on gas, generally high prices for energy, conscious drive to conserve), global energy demand will be 1,127 quads.
Although I would wish that people new to the modern world would automatically choose the far better Danish model, I predict that they will opt for the easier, softer American model and their energy needs will skyrocket.
However, in either case, we will need far more energy than is currently predicted. If they do not get it, they will not fully participate in what the modern world has to offer–education, good healthcare, clean air and water. Nor will they participate in the modern economy, further enriching the rich world with purchases of video games and expensive perfumes. We all will lose, although the losses of the poor will be heartbreaking.
It may well be that the DOE and the UN have correctly identified what governments are willing to build and provide in the way of new energy–but if they are correct, we are condemning billions of people to needlessly live a wretched existence that they would avoid if they could. Because using energy is not just a sign of success at development, or a reward for doing it right or a ‘welcome to the club’–it is often the key mechanism that enables development.
The poor–the two new Chinas–will fight and scheme to get the energy they need. They will burn coal, oil, whatever is available to escape the life sentence of the poor–lives that are nasty, brutish and short.
This conversation is not really about global warming at all. But it is certainly relevant to discussions of our planet’s future climate. China has doubled its energy consumption since 2000. There are two new ‘Chinas’ eager to do exactly the same, mimicking our behaviour of the last two centuries and following the original China’s current example.
The sources and quantities of energy we make available to the world will determine what our planet will look like in the medium term.
There’s no getting around that.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
Exactly. The key to the future development of civilization, not just of the currently-underdeveloped world, but to the future of mankind as we expand out into the solar system (and one day, to the stars), is cheap, abundant energy.
This is why the neo-Luddites and environmental goons who are actively attempting to restrict world energy production as the solution to the entirely factitious problem of ‘global warming’ are so dangerous. They would have humanity stop in its tracks, condemning those of us in the West to a bleak future of Soviet-style spare gray apartments, and the rest of the world to mud huts, malnutrition, and disease.
That the governments of the West, apparently in their zeal for taxes and control and ideological purity, have fallen prey to this madness beggars belief. They are heading in entirely the wrong direction, which should be to encourage at every step the development of cheap (I mean virtually free) energy in unlimited quantities, all over the world. Anything less is traitorous to the human race.
/Mr Lynn
I find all Malthusian thought appalling.
What’s more, I find all Malthusian thought a sign of mathematical deficiency.
Malthus got everything exactly backwards and we’ve spent 200 years proving it over and over.
The proposals to “solve” Malthusian problems always seem to involve dehumanizing government control over the personal lives of – here’s the important part – the personal lives of people who don’t look like the writer.
As I said, appalling.
OK, I’ll try to remain civil here, but it’s tough. All who agree with Grey Monk (and those who wonder why they are treated with the “start with yourself” type of reply) need to understand some simple facts. If you really believe that the Earth is overpopulated and that is causing others to suffer, there really is only one logical solution. Do we really have that much of a shortage of ability to take problems and arguments to there logical conclulsions? Seriously.
As for those who think that we cannot support that many people on this planet, I will START to see your side of the story when we stop paying farmers not to produce food in large sections of there fields every year to keep prices from dropping too far. We have plenty of room for people to live and for food production. Every year technology helps us produce more in less area. The only solution that is needed is to continue improving as we have and let the rest of the world in on it as well – a kind of twist on the old “work smarter, not harder” adage.
All that being said, I hope we do find some form of renewable/alternate/clean/non-polluting fuel source that will allow all people to have every advantage they can get. But not at any cost and not under the misguided notion that humans are some parasite on the host planet Earth. We are animals like any other animal. We take advantage of what’s available like any other animal. That is the natural way. Eventually there will be a point when we cannot continue to proceed on this expansion of human population, but we are far from it now. Nature will put us in our place when that time comes. It always does.
Let me try this analogy: In nature, when a prey species is over hunted by a predator, the population of the prey species drops (duh!). Then, it is harder for the predators to live on the fewer prey animals (again, duh!). The predators die off in some numbers and the prey animals have a better chance of living until the predator’s population increases again (third duh!). There is a virtually identical pattern for herbivores and the plants they live on.
The same is true for humans, but we have the advantage of technology. We need energy for technology. The cheaper and more abundant the supply of energy, the quicker and more widespread the increase in technology. The quicker and more widespread the increase in technology, the more likely we are to increase our overall population as well as our quality of life. Keep energy cheap and effective and it’s a win/win for humanity and nature. Right now “fossil” fuels (though I believe that to be a misnomer) are the best we have. We need to encourage their use and not tax them into inefficiency.
OK, now I must get down off my soapbox and get back to work…
The education problem for the third world will be solved. Easily.
http://laptop.org/en/
yeah yeah
and 50 years ago the projections were that the population would be double what it really is and we would be out of food.
“This conversation is not really about global warming at all. But it is certainly relevant to discussions of our planet’s future climate.”
I guess it all falls in line, if you believe one bull hockey, you might as well believe it all.
Being right about the demographic decline of Europe, or the success of the web is like congratulating yourself for predicting you will go down river during a flood (absolutely no offense intended).
Predicting peak anything that relates to human behavior is a pointless endeavor. The amount of energy available to humans is strictly a matter of our behavior, and has little to do with “resources”. Any specific resource (coal available on land, oil in easy to drill locations) is of course subject to local depletion. We move on. Humans having a better standard of living than a colony of ants is dependent solely upon our productivity. Productivity is the result of our behavior (manifested by technology)coupled with energy which is used to leverage our individual feeble physical capabilities. From a large perspective, there is simply no limit, relevant to humans, to the amount of energy we can utilize. Consider simply the extremes: Fusion, deep geothermal and above atmospheric solar. The access to these is merely a matter of technology. The current side show of solar and wind will likely always be the PC phase of energy development…for extremely simple and fundamental reasons: Capacity factor and random availability (relative to need). Solar cells are useless when the sun is down or occluded, and wind is random. (I do agree that the technological feat of a near perfect battery would affect this.). In the medium term (next century) we will find and harvest the technologically easy (based on todays technology) energy sources….coal, oil, gas, fission. When these get a bit too hard, we will move on to fusion (or breeders), harder to get at coal, oil, gas, and then to deep geothermal and or above atmospheric solar. I suspect (with little more than personal bias) that nuclear will dominate eventually…if for no other reason than that it is purely technology driven (relative to the cycle) and relatively limitless (again, relative to humans). A past remark about a nuclear battery with nice convenient plus and minus connectors that lasts a very long time (again relative to humans) is much more a political decision than a technological one.
Whether we live in grass huts on 1500 calories a day, or sit at computers eating bon-bons and remotely driving our factories is purely (in general, not always individually) a choice we make. I rather like my bon-bons, but if you like living in a grass hut, I most certainly won’t try to stop you.
guidoLaMoto August 13, 2010 at 4:00 am
There’s a social dimension to ‘one-child’ policies. Human beings don’t like being told how many children they can have and despite social approbium and punitive taxes, continue to have as many children as they want. In China, there has come into existance a class of ‘undeclared’ extra children now growning towards adulthood. Since they’re ‘off the books’, they’re obliged to survive by either sweatshop labour, criminality or prostitution.
The official estimate of the numbers is 200 million but I suspect that’s way off the true number. These people will have children of their own. I wish the poor wretches luck and fervently hope all population ‘controllers’ burn in Hell.
Pointman
Josh Grella says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:27 am
Thank you Josh for some sanity. In Norway school-children learn the marxism lithany every day, I’m sorry to say.
I disagree with the population projections…. As countries modernize women have less babies. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it is lifestyle brought about by empowerment of women in society through laws, technology like the pill, longer life spans, etc.
I suspect that in the coming years developed countries will stifle unchecked immigration and hold the governments of dysfunctional emigrant countries to account…. The world will become a democratic place. This is the future challenge… Not energy policy.
The market place will decide energy policy…. not governments.
Who would have thunk it when I was a small boy?
Television service to virtually every home. 400+ channels on mine, and a few actually worth watching. We had Spitfires and Hurricanes and Messerschmitts, but who could have seen the death of the ocean liners and their replacement by intercontinental airliners, with ticket prices some of my younger grandchildren can afford. Who could have imagined the assembly over southern England, of the first thousand bomber raid? (Mainly U.S. vehicles of course). The transistor and miniaturisation of electrical circuits. Computers and home computers. The internet, giving me the ability to converse instantly with other people right around the globe. Motor cars have changed relatively little if one ignores the fact that they no longer come with a starting handle. Who could have seen that one day in the late ‘fifties, we should stand excited and expectant on our front lawns, waiting to watch the first publicly announced transit of Sputnik across the night sky? (Sorry my American friends. Sputnik was first and that is possibly the most amazing memory of my lifetime). Who could have seen that for all of the magnificent discoveries, we still need to rely so heavily on the internal combustion engine? Who could have seen that coal deposits of mind boggling extent in Africa, that had been located and identified before I was born, would remain unexploited three quarters of a century later? Who could have believed that politicians would one day believe that wind power would again be the ultimate means of locomotion? Who would have believed that the predictions of scientists, in the main, would prove no more accurate than the Oracle of Delphi?
In theory all of those coal reserves around the world could be used up, but it will never happen. To believe otherwise I have to believe that man’s mechanical ingenuity has run its full course and that we shall see no consequential innovation over the next three quarters of a century. Archaeologists are always surprised when they discover that man was using tools several hundred thousand years before their last announced first time date. They make the mistake of regarding our ancestors as primitive. They fail to understand that man came with ingenuity built into him from day one.
The end is not nigh.
Three words:
“Location, Location, Location..”
Whoops, that’s real estate.
For energy it’s, NUCLEAR, NUCLEAR, not UN-CLEAR, but NUCLEAR!
Anthony, are you actually trolling? I have been keeping up with this site for two years, and I have never seen so many Malthusians post on a a thread. I’m with Layne Blanchard (12:51 am), Grumbler, Evanmjones, and Ken on this one (there are others, I don’t mean to leave you out). Thomas Fuller’s article really does sound like Paul Erlich; the persona has the voice of a creepy fatalist who speaks from the heart of the warmist/environmentalist mentality.
How many times have we heard about the population bomb? Earth is a big place and humans are but a tiny speck. A thought experiment done several years ago, which still holds today, is that every person in the world (with a 2009 estimate of 6.79 billion) would fit in an area the size of Jacksonville, Florida (757.7 mi^2), giving each person roughly 3 ft^2.
People are myopic, seeing only what is around today. If just before the advent of the automobile you told someone in New York City what the population would be in 50 or 100 years, one of their biggest concerns would have been what to do with all of the horse manure. There will be advances in the future and we cannot yet know their impact. (Of course, as long as governments insist on driving policy things will stagnate, but that is another topic for another ‘blog.)
Overall I liked this post but it does have issues.
About the notion of a “Denmark model” one needs to realize that significant adjustments might be required to accommodate geographic location and population density. For example, Denmark has a population density of about 333 people per square mile but for Montana the value is less than 7.
Other comparisons are similarly striking – nearness to population and industry, temperatures, ocean access, and so on. A Denmark model will need some tweaking to work in Montana.
——————————————————
Generally, thinking seriously about the issues of this post is a good thing but understanding the difficulties of forecasting are important.
What will life be like in the future. That is hard to say. Almost every attempt to project beyond about 30 years seems to fail when dealing with developing societies. Some of us are old enough to remember when news summaries were delivered weekly as flickering black and white images in our local theaters along with that week’s movie (for a 25¢). Newspapers filled in the details – in my town on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We had a party line phone and a live operator to connect us to our desired destination.
The previous century was likewise interesting and citizens of large cities worried about accommodating all the horses the future city would need. Here is a link that “paints a vivid portrait of a city in the throes of an ecological crisis” because of its horse-driven infrastructure.
http://www.fathom.com/feature/121636/
Portrait of an Unhealthy City: New York in the 1800s
From: Columbia University | By: David Rosner
Evan – ‘Peek and ye shall find’
That’s the problem Evan.
I have been peeking for oil for nigh on 30 years…..
Big problems coming down the pike 🙁
Rgds
Mike
Renewables are subsidized, but so are, perversely, fossils.
It makes a difference by how much. (Do they still teach innumeracy in schools?) Roughly the fossils are subsidized at pennies a watt and renewables at dollars a watt
Many great comments precede mine, and I concur about the imaginary limit forecasts regarding population and food not taking technology into consideration. On the other hand we can’t see what innovations will come down the pike. Further, I wish I had references for this, from reading 30 years ago or so, about stressed populations of humans stopping/reducing reproduction. We also cannot foresee what epidemics will occur, aside from intentional anthropogenic diseases, we are making many common bugs resistant to treatment. Also, reproduction has already dropped below replacement in the societies that have plenty, and have fewer people and more food production than was supposed 30 years ago. With many modern societies advocating, or at least allowing, non-reproductive sex, that in itself will reduce populations. It is hard to predict an outcome when the rules of the game and even the playing field are in constant flux.
A thermodynamic explanation of politics
One point regarding the chart at the beginning of your post:
The tar sands production over time looks way too low. Tar sands comprise an energy source as large or larger than oil. There are three ways to harvest tar sands energy:
1) Open pit mining followed by industrial upgrade and water filtration.
2) Down well steam injection, producing upgraded product flowing from the well.
3) Down well air injection, in ground combustion and well catalysts combing to create upgraded oil in ground.
Large scale commercial operations are only currently running for method #1. Methods #2 and #3 are currently in field prototype phase moving toward commercial production. If these advanced methods are commercially viable, they will exceed conventional oil production by the mid 2020’s.
Thomas Fuller mentions the Danish model – which is very similar to the German; extremely high taxes on fuel to discourage consumption – and says that this will probably not be the model taken by the emerging economies.
Well; if they develop enough buying power to compete for fuel, this will drive up prizes globally and the “Danish model” will then not be necessary to discourage consumption; the high market prizes will suffice for that, no need to slap on Danish taxes then.
In terms of which energy model developing countries will adopt consider the development of telecommunications in developing countries. The lack of legacy infrastructure has resulted in generations of technology which are still in use in developed countries being skipped and the latest technology being adopted and provided by private companies not governments. I would suggest the same might happen with energy. Putting a solar cell on a roof connected to an LED does not require any government involvement, does not require the massive infrastructure which took developed countries decades to build in the same way a mobile/cell phone can be provided by a private company with far less infrastructure than land lines whose infrastructure took decades to build in developed countries often with heavy government involvement.
Anyone worried about future population estimates should have a look at this great video-
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/
It features Dr. Hans Rosling with some beautiful dynamic graphs that illustrate why the predictions of the apocalypsian Malthusians in the 1960’s and 1970’s were not just wrong, but laughably wrong.
Anyone demanding an immediate reduction in global population needs to join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and immediately reduce their personal carbon footprint to zero. No offsets allowed.
To read so many positive comments on the nature and future of humankind brings about a great upwelling of pride and optimism in my heart.
It seems to me that the skeptics are indeed optimistic lovers of humanity while the warmistas are just pessimists who have no faith in the ability of we humans to contunue and constantly evolve.
Thank you all.
What do some people have against healthy,happy -Prosperous-dark skinned people?
BTW Shale gas is the game changer. if we have the temerity to keep up.
It’s already happening…
Layne Blanchard’s comments have it right. We should focus on removing barriers to energy production and technological innovation and prices will deliver the appropriate signals. That’s one of the many benefits of a free market. Long-term planning is carried out on a distributed basis across every market participants sphere of influence. Unfortunately, our impulse is to believe that our own understanding and ability to influence behaviors and outcomes will deliver superior results. This is called “hubris” and is part of our nature. It should be the goal of any political system to avoid cementing hubris into law. It only makes the eventual outcome worse and more abrupt.