Running on Empty

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Resource Depletion 



"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
-Albert Bartlett


    As everyone knows, economies around the world all function on growth. Without growth, economies will collapse. Percentage growth is exponential growth. Exponential growth has two unique characteristics. One, at any given percentage there is a doubling period and two, the magnitude of the growth speeds up over time. For example, a quantity (x)  growing at 10% per year will be double (or 2x) in a little over 7 years. After another 7 odd years, that new amount will double again (or 2*2x). In addition, the amount of the quantity will get larger and larger in a shorter and shorter period of time ( by that I mean it took a little over 14 years to get 4x but it will only take 7 years to get another 4x).

    Worldwide, GDP has grown at an average of about 3% a year since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In order to produce that GDP the Earth's resources need to be consumed. Therefore, it is not a stretch to say that consumption of the Earth's resources has also grown by about 3% per year. So it makes one wonder, if consumption levels stay the same, how long until growth is no longer possible? When do we start to run out of resources to exploit?



    The graph above shows 3% per year consumption since 1770 and it projects to 2034. There are a few things to consider when studying this graph. The world population in 1770 was about 700 million and people lived more simply and most didn't have much. Resource consumption was much less than today and it doesn't even show up on the graph (because of the scale of the graph). Each date is 24 years away from the next because that represents the doubling period at 3% growth. By 2010, the Earth's resources are being exploited to the max. The Earth's carrying capacity is showing signs of strain. Easy to get, conventional oil has peaked and likewise, the best coal. Many resources are being depleted at ever increasing rates (Pollock instead of Cod anyone?)  and human population is still shooting upward. When consumption doubled again by the end of 2010, it represented an amount equal to the total of all resources that have ever been consumed throughout human history, and then some. Will there be enough resources to double 2010's consumption by the end of 2034? At 3% growth there will need to be.







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