Another Way
Extractive growth will never hit the hard limit of the planet's resources
Is economic growth necessarily extractive? If so, does that mean eventually growth must cease, and stagnation/entropy triumph once again?
At the root of the hydra-headed scepticism about the explosive growth - the progress - seen since the 17th century, there is the belief that economic growth must necessarily be ‘extractive’. It involves taking, transforming and consuming ‘stuff’. And if it is necessarily ‘extractive’, then at some point, the argument goes, this explosive growth - this progress - will have to cease. For those of a more apocalyptic frame of mind, when that progress stops, chaos, depopulation, war, famine will ensue.
The chart does a good job in preparing us for the bad news. The history of mankind, up until around the 17th century was, after all, one of stasis, stagnation, no-progress. The battle against entropy ended only in stalemate. That was our entire normality. So no wonder then, that we might wonder whether the exponential flourishing of mankind since then has been just ‘luck and strange’, as David Gilmour puts it.
Moreover, the belief that such expansion must be unsustainable seems intuitively obvious: GDP measures, after all, the manufacture and consumption of stuff and services. Yet because we live on a single finite planet, there must come a time when we run out of the stuff than makes stuff. Consequently, it seems to follow that there must limits to growth, and the immediate job is to figure our where those limits are.
Fifty-six year ago (1968) 30 individuals got to work on this seemingly inevitable problem, founding the Club of Rome, and producing The Limits to Growth. This is the founding Bible of this doom-laden belief. Consider: ‘If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.’
Bravely, the Club was prepared to forecast when non-renewable resources would be exhausted, given the growth in population, usage and the currently-known rates of resource discovery. It concluded we would exhaust supplies of gold in nine years, ( ie, by 1977), mercury in 13 years, copper and lead in 21 years, aluminium in 31 years, manganese in 46 yrs. In fact, by 2024 we’d have run out of all industrial commodities except coal, cobalt, chromium and iron. Oil would have run out in 1988, natural gas in 1990.
Even assuming a fivefold rise in resource discovery, by now, we’d still be out of oil, gas, copper, aluminium, zinc, gold, silver, with plenty of other non-renewable resources running out soon.
Well, they say you can forecast a price, and you can forecast a date, but you should never forecast them together.
Meanwhile, economic growth has far outstripped the Club of Rome’s forecasts. In 1968, global GDP was put at $2.492tr, with per capita GDP at $704; by 2023, global GDP was running at $100.8tr, with per capita GDP at $12,688.
In 1968, the Club of Rome expected China’s per capita GNP to be $100; in fact it turned out to be 10x that.
So why has the Club of Rome been so wrong so far? And nevertheless, might they yet be proved right? Is growth necessarily extractive?
An Easy Partial Answer
There is an easy but partial answer, which is that technology time after time trumps resource limitations.
Consider the iron & steel industry. In Britain’s economic boom of the late 17th century, all the blast furnaces, producing the key feedstock of iron, were fueled by charcoal. One can imagine a proto-Club of Rome man working out when the industry would collapse because it had denuded Britain’s forest stock. The charcoal-limit loomed. But of course, in 1709 Abraham Darby debuted his blast furnace fueled by . . . coke. So the industry evaded the charcoal-limit, and we’ve still got plenty of trees.
Similarly, consultants are now employed working out how much we can make by stripping out the copper from old telephone lines.
And, of course, the Club of Rome could not anticipate that one of the industrial commodities likely to be most essential in the coming decades is lithium. Lithium was not even considered.
This still feels like a partial clever-dick way to avoid the underlying problem - that if growth is fundamentally and necessarily extractive, then eventually, surely there must come a time when we’ve extracted the last piece of usable resource?
But let’s face it, the history of mankind since around 1700 has been a history of clever-dicks re-writing the rules of the possible. Maybe the combination of humanity’s endless search for solutions, coupled with the relevant information delivered by prices, will allow humanity to dodge the bullet for ever?
Still, there are two better answers, and both can work together.
The Circular Economy
If there comes a time when technology doesn’t trump resource limitations, and the price-information of commodities and the stuff they are transformed into is sufficiently unequivocal, then the stop-gap solution would be to develop a ‘Circular Economy’ in which all non-renewable resources are completely recycled at every stage of production and distribution. From the cradle to the grave and back to the cradle.
Proponents of the Circular Economy - and I’m one, mildly - consider it to be the next industrial revolution waiting in the wings. The nation which discovers how to make it work will export it to the rest of the world. But the discovery will not, cannot, be easy. That’s because the entire basis of a ‘Circular Economy’ is holistic, in the sense of mutually supporting & competing companies and projects at all stages of design, production, marketing and re-cycling. Companies scattered around the world are attempting to construct subsectors within sectors which are to some extent based on circular principles, but alone their efforts can never amount to much.
In short, a ‘circular economy’ can and will only be imaginable as a large upstream/downstream cluster. That will not happen by itself, unless either a government decrees it (as the Chinese government decreed Shenzhen), or market prices dictate their is no other path to industrial and economic survival.
And ultimately, whilst a Circular Economy would result in an economic structure which is radically less extractive, I can’t yet imagine that it could be 100% self-sustaining.
Even a Circular Economy will, in the end, continue to be extractive to some extent or other.
Infinite Energy = Endlessly Renewable Resources
The second answer is more radical, asserting that in principle, no resources should be thought of as non-renewable or finite. Given an infinite source of energy, all resources are infinitely creatable, atom by atom.
So if we do run out of a resource - copper for example - if you have an infinite source of energy, you simply create it atom by atom. The most basic stuff can be organized to create the stuff we need to make the stuff we want.
And we will not run out of atoms. Even in the deepest vacuum of intergalactic space, scientists think you can probably rely on one hydrogen atom per cubic meter.
This argument, of course, hinges on there being infinite sources of energy. And luckily, though we may obsess about our current ways of harnessing the universe’s energy, there’s no doubt that energy supply is genuinely infinite. It’s just that we have barely scratched the surface.
So if economic growth, even under Circular Economy conditions remains at some point irreducibly extractive, we need never run out of the stuff we need.
Wildly Optimistic?
Too optimistic? An unseemly and unwise rush into the clutches of the tech-bros? David Deutsch, in ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ seems confident that ’that anything is possible, given mankind’s endless quest to discover better solutions to the inexhaustible promenade of new problems.
But maybe he is wrong: Brazilian academic Antonio Gelis-Filho in a recent paper in Nature argues that ‘no civilization can mobilize the energy necessary to test new scientific hypothesis after a point of its understanding of the laws of physics.’ Whether that’s interpreted as merely reckoning the escalating monetary cost of things needed to make the next breakthrough in scientific understanding (example, CERNs’ Large Hadron Collider cost is estimated at $4.75bn; the ITER nuclear fusion project at $18bn and counting), or the diminishing returns to the societal complexity which supports the most highly-developed economies, eventually the costs bring technological development to a standstill.
Thing is, I don’t think Elon Musk would agree: in 2000, launching something into space cost as much as $73,000/kg. So far SpaceX slashed this by 98% to $1,200/kg, and if his Starship succeeds, Musk is targeting $10/kg!
If Musk succeeds in getting launch costs down to $10/kg in the medium term (or sooner?), then energy economics could change dramatically. Do the maths: currently an earth-tethered solar panel typically weighs in at 18-22kgs; my guess is that space-floating panels will be lighter. It seems the day will arrive when it will be far cheaper to orbit solar-cells in space and beam the energy back to earth in microwaves, than buying up the land to site them on earth.
Space-based solar power stations, orbiting thousands of miles above earth, and beaming back continuous power? Fantastical at $73,000/kg; almost certain to happen at $10/kg. Several prototypes, after all, have already been demonstrated.
Oh, and one other thing: it’s net zero!
It would be a significant moment: the moment at which the fears that our extractive habits must have an early sell-by date begin to ease.
In 1938 Buckminster Fuller observed that technology enabled us to do,
"..more and more with less and less until eventually we can do everything with nothing,"
This process is called ‘Ephemeralization’
A glance at the screen of your phone shows the carnage of once huge physical industries. The abstraction of millions of products onto our devices in the form of ‘Apps’ accommodating the desires of billions in an entirely sustainable fashion.
Film & Camera Photo albums Music player Baby monitors Spirit levels
Newspapers Magazines Stop watches Filing cabinets Compasses
Calculators Calendars Security camera Bar code readers Share trading
Wallets TV’s, Cinemas Medical records Telephones
Parking meters Dictaphones, Games consoles Records/DVD/CD’s Banks
Radios Phone books Magazines Magnifying glasses Maps
Do we need to grow economically? ("Yes" I hear you all shouting "You silly person").
Can't we grow culturally, push the limits of our minds, bodies, our creativity? Instead of looking beyond Earth to exploit and extract, can we not fully explore ourselves? I think we humans can be so much better, the world can be fairer. Now I hear you shout "Sharon. What planet are you living on?"