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More growth? An unfeasible option to overcome critical energy constraints and climate change

  • Special Feature: Original Article
  • Socially Sustainable Degrowth as a Social-Ecological Transformation
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Abstract

Growing scientific evidence shows that world energy resources are entering a period shaped by the depletion of high-quality fuels, whilst the decline of the easy-to-extract oil is a widely recognized ongoing phenomenon. The end of the era of cheap and abundant energy flows brings the issue of economic growth into question, stimulating research for alternatives as the de-growth proposal. The present paper applies the system dynamic global model WoLiM that allows economic, energy and climate dynamics to be analyzed in an integrated way. The results show that, if the growth paradigm is maintained, the decrease in fossil fuel extraction can only be partially compensated by renewable energies, alternative policies and efficiency improvements, very likely causing systemic energy shortage in the next decades. If a massive transition to coal would be promoted to try to compensate the decline of oil and gas and maintain economic growth, the climate would be then very deeply disturbed. The results suggest that growth and globalization scenarios are, not only undesirable from the environmental point of view, but also not feasible. Furthermore, regionalization scenarios without abandoning the current growth GDP focus would set the grounds for a pessimistic panorama from the point of view of peace, democracy and equity. In this sense, an organized material de-growth in the North followed by a steady state shows up as a valid framework to achieve global future human welfare and sustainability. The exercise qualitatively illustrates the magnitude of the challenge: the most industrialized countries should reduce, on average, their per capita primary energy use rate at least four times and decrease their per capita GDP to roughly present global average levels. Differently from the current dominant perceptions, these consumption reductions might actually be welfare enhancing. However, the attainment of these targets would require deep structural changes in the socioeconomic systems in combination with a radical shift in geopolitical relationships.

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Notes

  1. The peak of conventional oil constitutes a paradigmatic example. (Campbell and Laherrère 1998) recovered (Hubbert 1956) theory, and carried out a study that “conclude[d] that the [conventional oil production] decline will begin before 2010”. This study inaugurated a decade of fertile analysis of the projection of oil and gas maximum extraction studies that were, however, largely ignored by mainstream science and international scientific and governmental bodies (e.g., (Aleklett et al. 2010; Höök and Tang 2013)). However, in 2010, the IEA stated in their annual report that the maximum extraction of conventional oil was reached in 2006 (WEO 2010) and a debate also exists in the IMF (Benes et al. 2012).

  2. We interpret GDP not as a welfare indicator, but as a driver of economic activity that demands energy and materials. We recall that GDP was not designed to measure social or economic welfare (Kubiszewski et al. 2013). In fact, up to now, the world socioeconomic system has been unable even to approach absolute decoupling between GDP and resource use (e.g., UNEP 2011; Bithas and Kalimeris 2013).

  3. The development of a more sophisticated model with a greater degree of energy-economy feedback would be desirable, and, at present, the authors are oriented towards ecological economics to find theories that describe the real importance of natural resources in economic processes.

  4. In this paper we focus on coal since it is the fossil fuel resource (1) with the highest carbon content, and (2) where the uncertainties in its future availability are the most important: there is one order of magnitude of discrepancy between URR figures and official resource estimates for coal (see for example IPCC 2014a; Mohr et al. 2015).

  5. CTL refer to the transformation of coal into liquid hydrocarbons. Different technologies exist; however, all are characterized by low efficiencies between 27 and 50 % (Greene 1999; IPCC 2007; Höök and Aleklett 2010). Their current production is exiguous: 0.2 Mb/d in 2011 (WEO 2012). Growth projections from international agencies are usually relatively modest (e.g., +8.5 %/yr in the New Policies Scenario of (WEO 2012), i.e., less than 1.5 Mb/d in 2035), mainly because they assume that no liquids restrictions will exist in the scope of their projections. Thus, when interpreting the scenarios, we will assume higher deployment rates due to the Liquids scarcity in our model.

  6. In a context of a nearly constant world average GDPpc along the century (see Sect. “Results and feasibility of scenarios”), this last point implies that, in scenario D, the current industrialized countries would reduce their income accordingly to allow the Southern ones to increase their consumption (see Sect. “Exploring the implications of a feasible, sustainable and desirable global future”).

  7. Optimistic hypotheses are considered: (1) to overcome the energy constraints (non-geologically constrained coal, transition to coal in Industry and Buildings sectors, a very optimistic deployment level of CTL, the non-inclusion of EROI and net energy, etc.) and (2) to assess climate impacts by considering only energy use emissions and assuming that the natural CO2 sinks maintain their absorption capacity along the studied period. For more details see (Capellán-Pérez et al. 2014b).

  8. Without accounting for the “warming in the pipeline” that would follow in the second half of the century due to the energy imbalance of the Earth. Even if the anthropogenic emissions were stopped in 2051, the Earth would continue to warm in the following decades due to the physical inertia of the warming process that includes delayed effects though feedback processes.

  9. For example, the coal extraction rate of scenario B in 2050 is 2 times the maximum geological extraction rate found in the literature (Mohr et al. 2015). For the scenarios BAU and A, the rate would be between 3.5 and 4 times higher, respectively.

  10. Collapse could be another unwanted possible outcome (Tainter 1990; Greer 2005; Motesharrei et al. 2014).

  11. This transition would certainly require a great effort, necessitating a global reassessment of objectives to carry out large economic (D’Alessandro et al. 2010) and physical resource (García-Olivares et al. 2012) investments.

  12. However, the net available energy resulting from this scenario would be ambiguous: on the one hand enhanced due to the significant renewable penetration and efficiency improvement, on the other hand reduced by the inclusion of EROI and the so-called “energy trap”.

  13. This egalitarian policy path could be implemented, for example, following a “cap-and-share” scheme. As proposed by Douthwaite (2012), a supranational institution would be in charge of allocating the use of fossil fuels around the world, thus preventing excessive competition for them that might damage the global economy. At the same time, it would allow a declining annual global cap to be placed on the tonnage of CO2 emitted by fossil fuels and allocate a large part of each year's tonnage to everyone in the world on an equal per capita basis.

  14. Figure 6 is a simplification because the official statistics only account for the TPES consumed within sovereign territories, ignoring the significant embodied energy transfer through international trade (Arto et al. 2015). Accounting for this fact, an even higher gap between both aggregate regions exists.

  15. WoLiM operates in GDP in Market Exchange Rates (MER). Thus, a conversion to GDPpc Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) has been done to perform the comparison: 11,200 2011 US$ MER ≈ 14,200 2010 US$ PPP (World Bank).

  16. Another limit that the model highlights is land availability. In scenario D, deforestation is assumed to be reversed and 500 Mha are afforested. By 2050, solar would occupy around 50 Mha, and biofuels would use 100 Mha of high productivity land and almost 400 Mha of marginal lands. In a context of rising population, and if current erosion and water cycle degradation processes are not reversed, land scarcity might also become a critical problem.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been developed within the project CGL2009-14268 funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN). Additionally, Iñigo Capellán-Pérez wishes to thank the University of the Basque Country and the REPSOL Foundation for the support through the Low Carbon Programme (www.lowcarbonprogramme.org). Óscar Carpintero would also like to thank the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Project ENE2010-19834, Project CSO2010-21979, and Project HAR2010-18544).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Low Carbon Programme, Instituto de Economía Pública, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain

    Iñigo Capellán-Pérez & Iñigo Capellán-Pérez

  2. Systems Engineering and Automatic Control, Escuela de Ingenierías Industriales, University of Valladolid, Paseo del Cauce s/n, 47011, Valladolid, Spain

    Margarita Mediavilla & Luis Javier Miguel

  3. Applied Physics department, Escuela de Arquitectura, University of Valladolid, Av. Salamanca, 18, 47014, Valladolid, Spain

    Carlos de Castro

  4. Department of Applied Economics, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain

    Óscar Carpintero

Authors
  1. Iñigo Capellán-Pérez
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  2. Margarita Mediavilla
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  3. Carlos de Castro
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  4. Óscar Carpintero
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  5. Luis Javier Miguel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Iñigo Capellán-Pérez.

Additional information

Handled by Iago Otero, IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, and Research & Degrowth, Spain.

The opinions expressed in this paper are the authors’ own opinions and do not necessarily correspond with those of the Low Carbon Programme.

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Appendix A:

Appendix A:

See Appendix Fig. 8

Fig. 8
figure 8

Causal loop diagram of the model with its basic elements. Scenario elements and policies are circled

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Capellán-Pérez, I., Mediavilla, M., de Castro, C. et al. More growth? An unfeasible option to overcome critical energy constraints and climate change. Sustain Sci 10, 397–411 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0299-3

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