The Future (27 page)

T
HE RAPID GROWTH OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION—IN THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE
, the power of technology, and the size of the global economy—is colliding with approaching limits to the supply of key natural resources on which billions of lives depend, including topsoil and freshwater. It is also seriously damaging the integrity of crucial planetary ecological systems. Yet “growth,” in the peculiar and self-defeating way we define it, continues to be the principal and overriding objective of almost all national and global economic policies and the business plans of almost all corporations.

Our primary way of measuring economic growth—gross domestic product, or GDP—is based on absurd calculations that completely exclude any consideration of the distribution of income, the relentless depletion of essential resources, and the reckless spewing of prodigious quantities of harmful waste into the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, soil, and biosphere.

Growth of GDP used to be roughly correlated with an increase in the number of jobs and the size of average personal incomes. During the post–World War II years, when the American model of democratic capitalism was spreading, many experts believed that GDP was the simplest
and most accurate measure of whether economic policy was moving in the right direction. Even then, however, the economist who had created it in 1937, Simon Kuznets, warned that it was a potentially dangerous oversimplification that could be misleading and subject to “illusion and resulting abuse” because it did not account for “
the personal distribution of income” or “a variety of costs that must be recognized.”

In the twenty-first century, especially since the emergence of Earth Inc., policies aimed at maximizing GDP have been driving the world toward more concentrated wealth and power, more inequality of incomes, higher long-term unemployment, more public and private debt, more social and geopolitical instability, greater market volatility, more pollution, and what biologists refer to as the Sixth Great Extinction. Some of these negative consequences are actually counted as
positive
outcomes in the functionally insane definition of growth that we still use as our compass. The heading it gives us points straight off the edge of a cliff.

The world’s abject failure to acknowledge the danger to the future of civilization—and to change course—reflects the absence of coherent global leadership and the imbalance of power, as the insistent imperatives of Earth Inc. dominate decisions at the expense of participatory democracy. Even though growth of GDP no longer increases prosperity or the sense of well-being for the average person, it
is
still correlated with the incomes of elites.

The combination of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind now provides elites with an enhanced ability to manufacture consent for political decisions that serve their interests rather than the public interest—and provides corporations with an enhanced ability to manufacture wants in order to increase consumption of commodities and manufactured products. The result is rising levels of per capita consumption, with an impact that is magnified by the continuing increases in human population.

The global middle class will grow by an incredible
three billion people in just the next seventeen years. And the globalization of culture on television and the Internet is linking their aspirations to living standards that no longer reflect those of their neighbors, but instead reflect
standards that are more common in the wealthiest nations. That is one of the reasons why the growth in per capita consumption of food, water, meat, commodities, and manufactured goods is
exceeding the rate of growth in the number of people in the world.

Earth Inc.—and its impact on ecological systems and the supply of
key resources—is being driven by this combination of many more people
and
much larger per capita consumption rates. The advertiser-driven ideology that’s pervasive in the Global Mind equates more consumption with more happiness. It is a false promise, of course, just like the promise that GDP growth will bring more prosperity.

The tendency to confuse increased commercial consumption with increased happiness was the subject of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington in early 1784: “All the world is becoming commercial. Was it practicable to keep our new empire separated from them we might indulge ourselves in speculating whether commerce contributes to the happiness of mankind. But we cannot separate ourselves from them. Our citizens have had too full taste of the comforts
furnished by the arts and manufactures to be debarred the use of them.”

Jefferson would not be surprised by the recent voluminous research into the causes of happiness, which shows that over the last half century the United States has tripled its economic output with absolutely no gain in the
general public’s happiness or sense of well-being. Similar results have been found in other high-consumption countries. After basic needs are met, higher incomes produce gains in happiness only up to a point, beyond which further
increases in consumption do not enhance a sense of well-being.

The cumulative impact of surging per capita consumption, rapid population growth, human dominance of every ecological system, and the forcing of pervasive biological changes worldwide has created the very real possibility, according to twenty-two prominent biologists and ecologists in a 2012 study in
Nature
, that we may soon reach a dangerous
“planetary scale ‘tipping point.’ ” According to one of the coauthors, James H. Brown, “We’ve created this enormous bubble of population and economy. If you try to get the good data and do the arithmetic, it’s just unsustainable.
It’s either got to be deflated gently, or it’s going to burst.”

In the parable of the boy who cried wolf, warnings of danger that turned out to be false bred complacency to the point where a subsequent warning of a danger that was all too real was ignored. Past warnings that humanity was about to encounter harsh limits to its ability to grow much further were often perceived as false: from Thomas Malthus’s warnings about population growth at the end of the eighteenth century to
The Limits to Growth
, published in 1972 by Donella Meadows, among others.

We resist the notion that there might be limits to the rate of growth we are used to—in part because new technologies have so frequently enabled us to become far more efficient in producing more with less and to substitute a new resource for one in short supply. Some of the resources we depend upon the most, including topsoil (and some key elements, like phosphorus for fertilizers), however, have no substitutes and are being depleted.

On every continent, the population and economy are placing new demands for more food, freshwater, energy, commodities of all kinds, and manufactured products. And worryingly, over the past ten years, multiple indicators have been showing that real physical limits are being reached.

World food prices spiked to all-time record
high levels in 2008 and again in 2011. Both times, food riots and
political upheavals struck several countries. Important groundwater aquifers are being depleted at unsustainable rates—especially in
northern China, India, and the Western United States. Water tables are falling in
countries where 50 percent of the world’s people live. The unsustainable erosion of topsoil and loss of soil fertility are
depressing crop yields in several important food-growing regions.

The prices of almost all commodities in the world economy have
surged simultaneously in the last eleven years. After declining steadily throughout the twentieth century by an average of 70 percent—with the expected ups and downs for the Great Depression and the post–World War I depression, the two world wars, and the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979, all of those price reductions were wiped out by price increases between 2002 and 2012—
increases larger than those that accompanied either World War I or II.

Among the commodities with the fastest price increases are iron ore, copper, coal, corn, silver, sorghum, palladium, rubber, flaxseed, palm oil, soybeans, coconut oil, and nickel. An influential investor, Jeremy Grantham, warns that the growth in demand for commodities creates
the danger that we may soon reach “peak everything.”

The cause of these continuing price hikes is a surge of demand that reflects population increases, and even more significantly, sharply rising per capita consumption levels. This has proven particularly true in China
and other emerging economies whose growth rates (since the middle of the 1990s)
have been at least three times faster than those in the industrial world. China, in particular, is now consuming more than half the world’s cement, nearly half of all the
world’s iron ore, coal, pigs, steel, and lead—and roughly 40 percent of the aluminum and copper.

Almost one quarter of the new cars
being produced each year are now made in China. The largest U.S. automobile manufacturer, General Motors, now sells more
automobiles in China than in its home country. In the last forty years, the world’s population of cars and trucks quadrupled from
250 million to slightly over one billion in 2013. The number of cars and trucks in the world is projected to
double again in the next thirty years—driving ever higher oil consumption. The production of automobiles in developing and emerging economies will overtake production in developed countries by 2015 and auto sales in the same countries will overtake those in developed economies by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has also found that “
All of the net growth [in the IEA’s scenario, which assumes that new proposed policies to reduce emissions will be put into effect] comes from the transport sector in emerging economies.”

Within the last two years, there have been some indications that consumption levels in the United States—where they are still the highest in the world—and in other developed
countries may be slowing, and in some cases may have peaked. Some optimists believe that as a result, concerns about continued high growth rates may be overblown. However, even if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the
world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today’s unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries.

Around the same time that
The Limits to Growth
was published, peak oil production was passed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data
on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and
U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive.

The balance of geopolitical power shifted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973,
the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in
China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases.

Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries as well,
China’s coal imports have already increased 60-fold over the past decade—
and will double again by 2015. The burning of coal in much of the rest of the developing world has also continued to increase significantly. According to the International Energy Agency, developing and emerging markets will account for all of the net global
increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades.

The prediction of
global
peak oil is fraught with controversy, largely because of uncertainty about the size of reserves yet to be discovered deep underneath the ocean floor in regions that have been difficult to access, and in unconventional sources such as the exceptionally dirty tar sands of Canada, the carbon-rich extra-heavy oil in Venezuela, and tight oil resources discovered in deep continental shale formations. Some experts are predicting that even larger new oil supplies in the U.S. will soon be produced with the same water-intensive hydraulic fracturing (commonly called fracking) techniques—combined with horizontal drilling—that have been used
to exploit the newly discovered abundance of deep shale gas. Yet even if supplies are increased significantly, global demand is growing even faster—and in any case, no sane civilization would add so much additional CO
₂
to the already oversaturated global atmosphere.

At current levels of growth, the global economy is now projected
to require a 23.5 percent increase in the consumption of oil in less than twenty-five years—even as the marginal cost of increased supplies reaches all-time record highs, and even as the political instability in the world’s largest oil-producing region threatens wars, revolutions, and the disruption of supply routes.

Global oil production from conventional wells on land actually
seems to have peaked more than thirty years ago. The growth of oil production since 1982 has been of
more expensive unconventional onshore sources, and particularly offshore, where production is increasingly in risky deepwater wells—like BP’s Deepwater Horizon (Macondo) well in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the same accident-prone deepwater drilling technology is being recklessly deployed in the
unforgiving and environmentally fragile Arctic Ocean. And unfortunately, oil companies are also ratcheting up the political pressure to produce oil from exceptionally carbonintensive tar sands, which would make the problem of global warming that much worse.