Abstract
Many urban analysts assume that standard projections regarding growth in human population, agricultural output, and energy supply and demand over the next several decades are correct. If current trends continue, all of these factors would increase significantly. However, an alternative scenario also is plausible—one in which the increased costs and reduced availability of energy, especially fossil fuels, sharply constrain further growth and diminish or even reshape some of these trends.
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Notes
- 1.
William Meyer, “Urban Legends,” November 2014, http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html.
- 2.
International Energy Agency (IEA), Key World Energy Statistics 2015 (Paris: 2015), 7.
- 3.
Richard Heinberg, “Goldilocks Zone for Oil Prices Is Gone for Good,” Reuters, March 24, 2015.
- 4.
Robert Rapier, “Boom to Bust – 5 Stages of the Oil Industry,” Energy Trends Insider, November 4, 2015; for Hughes’ reports, see http://shalebubble.org; J. David Hughes, Tight Oil Reality Check: Revisiting the U.S. Department of Energy Play-by-Play Forecasts Through 2040 from Annual Energy Outlook 2015 (Santa Rosa, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2015); Art Berman, “Only 1% of the Bakken Play Breaks Even at Current Oil Prices,” Forbes, November 3, 2015.
- 5.
J. David Hughes, Shale Gas Reality Check: Revisiting the U.S. Department of Energy Play-by-Play Forecasts Through 2040 from Annual Energy Outlook 2015 (Santa Rosa, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2015).
- 6.
Hughes, Shale Gas Reality Check.
- 7.
IEA, Key World Energy Statistics 2015, 37.
- 8.
Gordon Conway, The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Associates, 1998). Figure 6–1 from Patrick Canning et al., Energy Use in the U.S. Food System (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, March 2010).
- 9.
Ugo Bardi et al., “Turning Electricity into Food: The Role of Renewable Energy in the Future of Agriculture,” Journal of Cleaner Production 53 (August 15, 2013): 224–31; Richard Heinberg and Michael Bomfod, The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post-Carbon Food System (Santa Rosa, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2009).
- 10.
David Biello, “Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World?” Scientific American, April 25, 2012.
- 11.
Figure 6–2 from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 34 (Oak Ridge, TN: 2015), Table 2.7.
- 12.
David Biello, “Bio-Jet Fuel Struggles to Balance Profit with Sustainability,” Scientific American, December 5, 2011; Steve Conner, “Why the World Is Running Out of Helium,” The Independent (U.K.), October 22, 2011.
- 13.
Population Reference Bureau, “Human Population: Urbanization,” Lesson Plans, July 2009, www.prb.org/Publications/Lesson-Plans/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx.
- 14.
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
See, for example, The Greenhorns website, www.thegreenhorns.net, and the Transition Network website, https://www.transitionnetwork.org.
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Heinberg, R. (2016). The Energy Wildcard: Possible Energy Constraints to Further Urbanization. In: State of the World. State of the World. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-756-8_5
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