Six converging threats to our way of life... and how to be ready for the ripples!

 

Wise Up - The Crash Course

Chapter 3 - The Dangerous Nature of Exponential Growth

Go Next To:  Chapter 4 - Multiple Other Limits to Growth

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Exponential growth is simply where something grows by a certain proportion each time period. This is very different from linear growth where something grows by a certain amount each time period. With exponential growth even though the proportion or percentage of the growth stays the same in real terms growth gets faster and faster. Eventually a time is reached when growth goes "through the roof."

 

Hence Einstein is credited with saying...

Compound interest is, of course, just another expression of exponential growth.

Few people realise how powerful or dangerous exponential growth is. Professor Al Bartlett has been trying to warn us for some time...

We just don't seem to want to know about it!

While the official prediction from the demographers at the UN is that with current trends world population will peak at 8 - 9 billion around the middle of this century the economists and politicians of almost all governments around the world believe in the mantra of unending economic growth. In the future this will be seen as a destructive and impossible belief.

Read the quote below from the New Scientist magazine and think about what it means for us.

The Rule of 72 (it's actually 69.3147 but 72 is commonly used as it is divisible by more whole numbers) tells us how long something takes to double in size if it is growing exponentially.

So it has taken over 100,000 years of human history and development to reach the rate of resource consumption and the impact on the Earth that we have today. If global economic growth were to continue at 3.6% per annum for just another 20 years we will have increased the rate of resource use by almost the same amount that we previously took 100,000 years to reach. (I say "almost" because economists will argure that growth in GDP includes intangibles and services that do not translate into resource use. There is however a very strong proven correlation between economic growth and energy and resource use.)

Even if GDP growth were only to average 2% that would still mean almost doubling in just 36 years.

When one looks at the big picture of peak oil and the other global threats it becomes clear that our economic exponential growth is not sustainable. Even our population growth in recent centuries has only been possible due to the one-off surplus of energy and resources we temporarily gained from burning fossil fuels as graphically expressed below.

With finite limits on fossil fues and food production in particular the world will increasingly struggle to feed a population which has grown exponentially.

We are fast approaching the end of the growth trajectory and shall within our life times enter stage "e" of the curve in the graph below.

Ecologists know that on a finite planet exponential growth always eventually reaches a point where it overwhelms the available resources and has to go into decline. This is often referred to as overshoot and collapse. This is a danger that all overly-successful species eventually face.

Unfortunately, we are totally unprepared for long-term period of no-growth, let alone decline, as our current banking system is designed in such a way that the economy is completely unstable without economic exponential growth. (See  Chapter 5 "Our House of Cards Economic System".)

In the words of Dr M. King Hubbert – the geophysicist who successfully predicted the peaking of US oil production...

“During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of nongrowth.” 

 

For those not blinded by the popular faith in technology and the "market system" there are two questions you might be asking yourself...

For Further Information:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY   - Professor Al Bartlett speaking on the dangers of exponential growth.

 

 

Go Next To:  Chapter 4 - Multiple Other Limits to Growth