Green New Deal II - Population growth and control

In Part I of this blog, I explained difficulties with comprehending the astronomical scale of change that is awaiting us, the rich people in the developed countries, in our journey to a more sustainable, greener future of humankind.  I have also pointed out a few of the many ways people escape responsibility for the crimes against the Earth we  - you and I - have committed.  And, please, let's not blame the poor people in Honduras or Gabon for our sins, plastic in the oceans and greenhouse gas emissions.

Exponential growth.  Remember a lonely lily pad floating on an empty pond?  She multiplied daily, so after day one, there were two lilies; after two days, four lilies; then eight; and so on.  After 20 days, there were 1,048,576 lilies. After 21 days, there were  2,097,152 lilies that covered the pond, exhausted nutrients and died. Question: After which day was the pond half-filled?  You already know the answer, it was day 20.  On that fateful day, 95% of the time allotted to our lilies had passed, but the lilies thought their world offered so much more space to grow! This fatal mistake in perceiving availability of resources is now common not only among most humans, but also among most economists, who are more of a space alien ilk. In Figure 1, I show you how humans will possibly undergo 20 doublings, but will massively perish attempting to double for the twenty first time. Such is the creepy logic of exponential growth.  Figure 2 illustrates intensity of the problem humanity and the world trampled by us are facing.  We add to this planet one China worth of people every 17 years.

Figure 1. Doublings of a human cohort 10,000 strong, 250,000 years ago.  After 10 doublings, this cohort grew to 10 million people, the highest population of hunters and gatherers our planet could bear.  After 19 doublings, we grew to 5.2 billion people in 1990.  The 20th doubling will happen sometime around 2070, when human population will exceed 10 billion people.  There will not be the 21st doubling! We will be done one way or another.

Figure 2. It took all human history to reach 1 billion people, then 123 years to double human population from 1 to 2 billion people, and 33 more years to add another 1 billion people. I was born at the end of 1951, in a Holocene world totally different from the Anthropocene world today. Nowadays, in takes 12 years to add to the living another billion of mostly poor and hungry babies. We are adding a population of China in 2014 every 17 years. 

Is there a solution to this runaway growth of human population? Likely there is none, and we will perish like any other dumb, unchecked species that overshot its ecological welcome. But, if the earthlings were sane, they could pass a voluntary UN Assembly resolution, empowering governments around the world to support financially only two or fewer children per family. Each extra child would be a cost borne by the parents, or would go for adoption by people who have less than two children. There could be fractional children, such as 1.8 legal children, with a possibility of buying credit for the missing 0.2 child from the people who do not have children or have only one child. Of course, for this voluntary population limitation to succeed, a massive global program of educating and empowering women would have to commence in parallel.  No man of whatever color of skin and religious creed should have power over a woman's body. It is fascinating that at the very moment reproductive control is needed almost everywhere in the world, the religious fanatics everywhere are doing their best to shut it down.  As usual, the right wing crazies in the US are blazing this backward trail.

Figure 3. Primary power (mostly thermal energy in raw fuels per unit time) generation by earthlings since 1820, in trillions of watts (TW). Today, we are a 17.4 TW thermal machine, whose power is equivalent to 17,400 1000 MW giant electrical power plants.  This comparison is somewhat misleading, because electricity is a more useful form of power than heat (thermal energy of combustion or fission) that comprises most of primary power production in the world. Still, in 2018, the human economy devoured and astronomical amount of power.  Between the years 2000 and 2010, global economy added one US worth of primary power production.  Eleven TW of primary power comes from oil and coal alone.

As my philosopher friend, Ken Weiss, puts it: "Didn't all of the earth's creatures, on the land or in the dark, blue sea get here by grabbing whatever they could grab from whomever they could get away with it? Indeed, we're the only species ever that could comprehend future implications of present actions, so life, as a whole, hasn't had much practice with prudence. So maybe the definition of 'tragedy' should just be: how humans behave."  It appears that humans too have had little practice with prudence and foresight.

As shown in Figure 3, more humans need more power to keep themselves alive and well, especially in the resource hogging rich countries where I reside.  Today, our global civilization is an obscene, monstrous, 17.4 terawatt (TW) machine, powered mostly by fossil fuels, as Figure 4 demonstrates.  In the decade of 2000-2010, the fast-growing world added one US worth of primary power.  Today, the hunger for primary power is receding and its production seems to be peaking. Oops, I should have never used the word "peaking."  The global fossil amoeba knows only of eternal exponential growth and rejects any of the limitations the physical world requires.

Figure 4. Days in a year the world is powered by a given source of primary power.  In 2018, coal, oil and natural gas powered the human economy for 103+129+89 =321 days, or between Jan 1 and Nov 18.  Nuclear power and dams powered the world for another 15 days, or until Dec 3.  All "renewables," mostly biomass (wood), powered the world for 28 days, until the end of December. This power mix is similar to the power mix used to generate electricity in the US over the last 70 years (the horizontal dotted line).  The financial crash of 2008 is denoted by the vertical dotted line.

OK, my environmental and sustainable friends, it is time to sound retreat from this fossil amoeba monster I just painted above. In your mind, you already have many renewable solutions that you have colored green, just like pictures in those coloring books for little children. Since your solutions are already "green," you can relax and continue living happily ever after. Or can you?  Well, therein lies the first of many, many difficulties we shall run into here and in Part III.  To begin with, each transition from one dominant source of primary power to another one took several, sometimes many decades to accomplish, as shown in Figure 5.  I know, you only want to talk about the blue part of the curve below: a transition away from the nasty fossil fuels that power the world today into something else you will enjoy. There are three key features of this transition:

1. Production of primary power will increase from the current 17.4 TW to about 22 TW, or by 25%, to subsidize the transition you wish for.  This subsidy will come from fossil fuels outright, cement, steel, copper, aluminum and rare earth metals, to name a few.  It will cause a significant incremental environmental damage and pollution of air, soil and water.  But then we all want to live in a Nirvana, don't we?  And we don't want to limit our current happiness, do we?
2. Depending on how ambitious this transition from fossil fuels (FF) to whatever will be, it will take three to ten decades, as I will show you in Part III.
3. In the end, humanity will limit its power generation to about 1/2 of the current 17.4 TW.  We all, my resource devouring friends, will then live in a world that will be as different from today as today is different from the 1960s. With one difference, however, 60 years ago the world was much less depleted from all resources and the population was 3, not 7.6 billion people.  This means that in 30 years from 2020, each person in the rich countries will be using 4-5 less power than today. And that's significant.

Figure 5. Transitions from one leading source of power to another take decades.  Here is the last 400 and future 200 years of our fossil fuel (FF) civilization.  The transition from wood to coal started in roughly the year 1800 and ended after WWI.  The transition from coal to crude oil was complete after WWII.  One simply could not run tanks and bombers on coal.  The transition from oil to natural gas started in the 1990s and is ongoing.  Notice that in this scenario the world economy will demand 22 TW at the peak in 2030, to power a transition from fossil fuels to some mix of "renewables" and nuclear power.  After this transition, the earthlings will be generating something like 7-8 TW, less than 1/2 of  current primary power production. 

Figure 6 shows that the demand for power generation increases in direct proportion to the number of humans living on the Earth.  This has been the case for the last 200 years, only the slope of both curves quadrupled since the year 1900.  You are now facing the scariest two curves in this blog.  Please take time to think about the many implications of what you see here.  I'll tell you what I think:  No transition to anything sustainable can be achieved without a drastic reduction of growth and eventual decline of human throngs that trample our planet.

Figure 6.  Growth of normalized global population and primary power.  Zeros correspond to the year 1820, and ones to 2018.  As you can see, the population and power generation have been growing in tandem over the last 200 years, or the duration of our industrial revolution.  The slightly faster expanding power production between 1950 and 1973 reflected the unprecedented economic expansion of the US after WWII, and up to the Arab oil embargo of 1973.  Conclusion: more people need proportionally more power.   

Thus, the main conclusion from what you just read is this:  Stop multiplying first and decline in numbers next, because without a population decline no Green New Deal can ever happen.  I know that I am boring, but please stop focusing on the technologies of power generation, but rather on education, contraception, and a UN proclamation calling for two state-supported children and no more.  And, no, God will not provide for your five or six children today.  She has an infinity of problems with the rest of the Universe.

P.S. (06/03/2019)  I forgot to tell you that since 2008, humanity has been stuck on  the 1.27%  annual rate of population growth.  Call it a residual growth rate, after better education and enrichment here and there have been discounted by the families. This means that in 2019, 98 millions of new babies will need water, food and shelter in mostly desperately poor, failing countries.  In 2020, the number of net new babies will exceed 120 million, or the population of Egypt, see Figure 7.

Figure 7. Current population of Egypt is around 105 million people and continues to grow exponentially.  Historically, Egypt's Nile River could support 3 million people on the average (the horizontal line at the bottom of the plot).  The Aswan Dam (1960) has damaged Egypt's ability to feed itself by preventing inundation of the river valley and delta with sediment-rich water.  Today, Egypt is beyond the point of no return and she will implode. The question is how soon and how drastically? Watch out Europe, because you may have tens of millions of Egyptians knocking on your door.  But not to worry, Egyptians will first mine the ancient, 200.000 years old water from the Nubian aquifer.