No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change

Abstract

Abstract. In a prior study (Garrett, 2011), I introduced a simple economic growth model designed to be consistent with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional economic models, civilization is viewed only as a well-mixed global whole with no distinction made between individual nations, economic sectors, labor, or capital investments. At the model core is a hypothesis that the global economy's current rate of primary energy consumption is tied through a constant to a very general representation of its historically accumulated wealth. Observations support this hypothesis, and indicate that the constant's value is λ = 9.7 ± 0.3 milliwatts per 1990 US dollar. It is this link that allows for treatment of seemingly complex economic systems as simple physical systems. Here, this growth model is coupled to a linear formulation for the evolution of globally well-mixed atmospheric CO 2 concentrations. While very simple, the coupled model provides faithful multi-decadal hindcasts of trajectories in gross world product (GWP) and CO 2 . Extending the model to the future, the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios substantially underestimate how much CO 2 levels will rise for a given level of future economic prosperity. For one, global CO 2 emission rates cannot be decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. For another, like a long-term natural disaster, future greenhouse warming can be expected to act as an inflationary drag on the real growth of global wealth. For atmospheric CO 2 concentrations to remain below a "dangerous" level of 450 ppmv (Hansen et al., 2007), model forecasts suggest that there will have to be some combination of an unrealistically rapid rate of energy decarbonization and nearly immediate reductions in global civilization wealth. Effectively, it appears that civilization may be in a double-bind. If civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO 2 levels will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv; but, if CO 2 levels rise by this much, then the risk is that civilization will gradually tend towards collapse.

Long‐run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis

“…The balance of forces that determines the evolution of was explored in Garrett [2012b] which presented a model that couples civilization growth to climate change. It was argued that the rate of return can be expressed in terms of two components = − , expressing a source and a sink, in which case production is related to wealth through…”

“…In what is sometimes termed Jevons' Paradox, technological gains accelerate global energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by increasing the efficiency of civilization growth into the reserves of energy that sustain it. For a further discussion, see Garrett [2012b].…”

Resource acquisition, distribution and end-use efficiencies and the growth of industrial society

“…Importantly, this means that nodes are best viewed as more than just passive recipients of resource. Instead final consumption nodes must in turn facilitate the further acquisition of resources through extending the interface between industrial society and the environment (Garrett, 2011(Garrett, , 2012. Taking this approach essentially means that all components of the RADE system that are mobile are distributional and all static components are either acquiring resources or consuming resources for end-use.…”

“…the costs of transforming final energy into useful work), the remaining portion of x * provides work which is used to increase the size of industrial society (Garrett, 2011(Garrett, , 2012). This in turn expands V and allows the cooption of further resources.…”

“…Initially these insights were largely metaphoric, but increasingly the application of evolutionary (Nelson and Wilson, 1982), metabolic (FischerKowalski and Huttler, 1998) and thermodynamic (Garrett, 2011(Garrett, , 2012 theories has become much more direct in this area. The fundamental physical constraints that underpin the development of distribution networks have previously been used to try and explain the behaviour of biological systems (West et al, 1997), river basins (Rodríguez-Iturbe and Rinaldo, 1997), electricity grids, water distribution systems, road networks (Dalgaard and Strulik, 2011;Pauliuka et al, 2014;Bettencourt et al, 2007), and even cities (Bettencourt, 2013), but have not previously been applied to the behaviour and growth of global industrial society itself.…”