Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXCI–The Nexus of Population, Energy, Innovation, and Complexity
Tulum, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.
This Contemplation comments upon and summarises a paper that discusses the impact of a sudden and significant energy surplus upon human population growth and the complexity that arises as denser populations struggle to meet the stresses they subsequently encounter. It also challenges the belief that human ingenuity via innovation and technology can offset finite resource constraints, especially energy, for any prolonged period of time due to the Law of Diminishing Returns.
It seems self-evident that our fundamental predicament of ecological overshoot is a direct result of humanity’s growth with too many people consuming too many resources and producing too many waste products for a finite planet dependent upon healthy ecological systems. And while this doesn’t require much explanation for those who acknowledge that we live upon a world with finite resources and limited capacity to compensate for our waste production, there are still many who believe that Homo sapiens’ rather unique cognitive abilities and technological prowess can and will ‘solve’ the many challenges we appear to be encountering as we reach and surpass the planetary limits of our relatively recent explosive growth, global expansion, and industrialisation.
In a somewhat reductionist formulation of our predicaments one refrain from some is that ‘If only we could reduce the number of people, then our complex, industrial societies and the living standards they provide could become ‘sustainable’ with our ecological systems remaining viable and healthy’-–there exist similar arguments focusing upon singular elements, such as ‘capitalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’. This is obviously an oversimplification of an exceedingly complex issue, but there are many that hold onto this fraying rope of hope and thus call for compassionate population reduction (an approach that would certainly be much less ‘disruptive’ than what we are more than likely to experience in the not-too-distant future with our current business-as-usual trajectory).
Understanding complex systems, however, requires not only a consideration of a nexus of variables but a recognition that they interact with each other in a variety of ways, including in a nonlinear manner and sometimes in a totally unpredictable fashion giving rise to emergent phenomena that cannot be explained via an analysis of the individual components making up the system in question.
What more simplistic approaches fail to overlook, then, is the vast complexity of interconnected variables and their various feedback loops. The paper by environmentalist Temis Taylor and archaeologist Joseph Tainter argue that our understanding of human population growth and the issue of ‘sustainability’ is increased greatly once one includes the all-important variables of energy, innovation, and complexity.
Human population growth, the consequences of this, and the resulting complexity are important topics to bring to the table regarding our various predicaments. Growth of the human species is one of the keystone issues when venturing into the rabbit holes of ecological overshoot, planetary boundaries, peak resources, etc.. The sustainability of humans on our planet, along with the impacts we have upon the fragile natural systems that we depend upon, cannot help but consider–among other things–the number of people that exist along with their affluence, consumption, and technology use.
I found the paper’s argument very interesting in how it addresses the belief that technology and innovation can offset declining material and energy resources. It argues that most advocates of innovation and technology ignore the fact that this predominant problem-solving strategy of our species is also subject to diminishing returns on investments–the most effective technologies and innovations are typically arrived at and put into practice early on with the subsequent ones costing dramatically more, demonstrating a decreasing rate of efficiency growth, and experiencing an ever-increasing time between ‘breakthroughs’.
The message that diminishing returns is as impactful on knowledge production and thus innovation should be noted and appreciated by all those swayed by the idea/narrative that human ingenuity and technology can ‘solve/address’ our predicaments that involve energy, population, consumption, material resource limits, etc.. Holding on to this belief contributes to/exacerbates our dilemmas for a variety of reasons, not least of which is its tendency to increase resource drawdown and compensatory sink overloading. In essence, it contributes to pushing on a string that is gathering potential energy for a subsequent snapback that will leave an indelible, negative impact upon our societies and species.
Our leveraging of a one-time cache of dense and easy-to-exploit energy has buffered us to date from the consequences of expanding too much, too quickly, and subsequently overloading our various planetary sinks. But as diminishing returns on our investments in that problem-solving strategy of increased complexity begin to bite into the net surplus energy required to sustain us, we will experience expanding negative kickback, especially for that significant majority that exist outside the somewhat insulated ruling caste that sit atop societal power and wealth structures.
As I shared on a Facebook post last week of Elon Musk asserting that humanity should be optimistic about the future because we WILL ‘solve’ the ‘sustainable’ energy dilemma: “What’s interesting and almost always ignored about knowledge production and innovation is that it, like other systems that depend upon finite resources, encounter diminishing returns on investment as time passes. The most obvious, easiest-to-apply, and least-costly ‘solutions’ are always used first and then as time goes on, the technologies and innovations become far more expensive, difficult-to-scale up, and take more and more time between them to ‘evolve’. And, what is also conveniently overlooked is that because we rarely if ever consider all the complexities of an issue (if we even can, given the nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena), our ‘solutions’ are typically only tangentially connected with the issue-at-hand leading to further problems that need to be addressed. We eventually reach a point where our ingenuity and innovations are creating a situation where they are leading to more problems than they are solving. That seems to be where we are now.”
Hydrocarbons have been a significant contributor to subsidising growth through net energy gains and buffering humanity from the consequences of its perpetual growth. In our modern societies it would appear that we have been increasingly using the monetization of debt via credit/currency expansion to aid in this as we bump up against the headwinds of Peak Resources. This additional approach, however, seems more akin to a shell game that is hiding the risk behind an opaque curtain. The Law of Diminishing Returns and biogeophysical reality of resource finiteness can only be ‘avoided’ for so long. As the saying goes, sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences and the banquet being laid out before us appears to be growing ever larger.
Below is a summary of the article. More detailed summary notes can be found here.
PS
There’s a running joke on one of the Facebook groups I am a member of (Peak Oil: Twilight of the Oil Age) where a member will post a link to the ‘latest and greatest’ technological innovation/breakthrough announcement with the intro, ‘We’re saved!’. The irony of these posts (many viewed as public-relations/investing-seeking announcements) is not lost on many of us; although, as is typical of the population at large, there are some who continue to believe the propaganda for whatever reason and cling to the belief that high-tech is our saviour and only way out of the bottleneck we have led ourselves into–I, certainly, am not of these.
The Nexus of Population, Energy, Innovation, and Complexity
Temis G. Taylor and Joseph A. Tainter
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 4
September, 2016, pp. 1005-1043
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129328
Traditional research around the issue of sustainable population size has tended to focus upon food supply and population pressure leading to the argument that the impact of population size and the resulting consumption and technology greatly impact the environment. This article extends this research by positing that human population issues are the result of the nexus of energy, energy gain, societal complexity, and innovation.
Increasing population densities lead to societal challenges (e.g., social order and security, supply provisioning, etc.) that tend to be addressed via the problem-solving strategy of adding complexity. Complexity requires additional resources, especially energy, and can only support additional complexity with increased net energy. Our proclivity to use the easiest-/cheapest-to-access resources first and more difficult-/expensive-to-access ones later leads to declining net energy over time. Innovations and technology can offset this to a certain extent, but not forever. So, while complexity can provide benefits, especially early on during growth phases, it also carries costs that increase as time passes.
Today’s population and societal complexities have come about because of and continue to be supported by our extraction and use of hydrocarbons. In the time of Malthus, it was held that food was the limiting factor to human population growth. And while food supply is still central to societal stability, the impending crisis Malthus foresaw has yet to materialise. The authors suggest that the tension that exists between Malthus’s view and those who hold that technology and innovation allow us to forever overcome resource constraints can be resolved by viewing the issue through the nexus of energy, complexity, population, and innovation.
The Maximum Power Principle posits that ecological systems that capture and use the most energy have an evolutionary advantage. This helps to explain why systems quickly use surplus energy and tend to expand as a result.
Human societal growth has been a slow process for millennia because energy surpluses are rare occurrences. When they have arisen, significant societal shifts have occurred. Homo erectus’s harnessing of fire may be our hominid species’ first example, with this control of an exogenous energy source leading to major evolutionary changes. Another may be the adoption of sedentary agriculture, then the use of draught animals, and then possibly the global adoption of high-caloric New World foods alongside several food production innovations (e.g., crop rotation, ploughs, landscape engineering).
Another revolutionary shift has been brought about by our use of coal, and later oil and gas, that has subsidised net energy-gain over the last couple of centuries. The labour savings that resulted have led to significant affluence and prosperity but has also resulted in a positive feedback loop where energy and population are reinforcing growth in each other.
With a growing concern regarding inadequate food supply arising again the early 19th century, the application of hydrocarbons to aid food production (especially via fertilisers, pesticides, and mechanisation) averted a Mathusian crisis–but has been criticised for its resulting increase in soil erosion, groundwater depletion, environmental contamination, and reduced biodiversity.
The primary concern of the authors is the chaining of food production with hydrocarbons. Human food production has grown to become significantly reliant upon energy subsidies raising the risk of food supply shortages for everyone.
Growth in human societal complexity has occurred alongside population expansion as adding complexity is our primary problem-solving strategy. This approach carries costs, mostly in the form of energy and has been heavily subsidised by hydrocarbons. Modern society adds to energy subsidies via a number of proxies but particularly time and currency.
What energy can do has limits, especially due to entropy–the dissipation of usable energy. Other resources also encounter limits and while recycling can help extend such limits to a certain extent , material degradation and loss inevitably occur. There are also no known substitutes for some vital materials (e.g., phosphorus for food production).
Energy (and other resources) are necessary to extract, refine, and use resources. It is ‘net gain’ that is important to growing/sustaining human complexities. High-gain energy systems with steep thermodynamic gradients allow human complexities to grow relatively quickly and consistently; low-gain systems result in very slow growth. The easiest-/cheapest-to-access resources are used first and innovation can aid in sustaining net-energy gains initially as difficult-/expensive-to-access ones are increasingly required to be used. But as time passes, innovation gains falter and net-energy gains diminish. This is a fall in the energy return on the energy invested (EROEI).
An increase in complexity requires more energy but diminishing returns eventually occurs as the best energy resources have been used–this creates a shift from a high-gain to a low-gain system (e.g., deeper wells, offshore platforms, tar sands, etc.). “As the most efficient solutions are employed, complexity begins to yield smaller returns on investment. If complexity grows faster than the resources available to support it or to make it worthwhile, societies can no longer sustain themselves. When a society enters a phase of diminishing returns to complexity in problem solving, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse.” (p. 1023)
Societies throughout pre/history have had to confront the energy-complexity challenge. Modern society similarly is having to deal with energy resource decline and the negative consequences that accompany increased complexity, including its requirement of an increasing share of energy.
Energy returns from hydrocarbons have been falling from about 100:1 in the 1940s to around 15:1 at the time of the writing of this article. Anything below about 8:1 becomes an issue for our society and its problem-solving strategy of increasing complexity.
In their conception of the IPAT formula for helping to determine the environmental impacts of human activity (Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology), Ehrlick and Holdren believed population size was the most significant variable. The authors, however, focus upon technology arguing that the belief that successes in technological innovations over the past 100+ years can forever compensate for resource limits is a theory that depends greatly upon hydrocarbons rather than human ingenuity as cornucopians tend to hold.
In addition, knowledge production and innovation are, like resource use, susceptible to diminishing returns on investments. Despite ever-increasing investments in research and education, innovation (as measured by patenting) has been declining for decades. This seems to be due to the easiest/least-costly discoveries occurring early in a field of study with subsequent ‘breakthroughs’ being more costly and taking longer to achieve. Education has similarly encountered declining returns with more and more investments being made and returns on them decreasing.
Hydrocarbons have created a ‘levee effect’ whereby society is somewhat buffered from natural limits leading to a sense of security that removes concerns about risks and encourages continued growth. But since these are finite resources, the security can only be temporary. Biogeophysical constraints cannot be overcome because of thermodynamic laws and biological principles. “Innovation can relieve some pressure on the environment and resources, but it is also subject to diminishing returns. Even if technology could compensate for reduced energy gain and population growth, complexity and its costs would continue to rise. As the amount of energy dedicated to complexity increases, the share of energy available per person dwindles.” (p. 1033)
Sustaining humanity’s current population is impossible using natural biomass and probably very challenging with ‘renewables’. The use and allocation of our remaining resources need to become very purposeful because a future of lower energy gain is inevitable.
To get a better understanding of the varied and complex issues we face, the authors suggest that we must view them through the nexus of energy, complexity, innovation, and population. Human population has exploded over the past two centuries due to hydrocarbon subsidies and resulted in tremendous challenges that have been met through our problem-solving strategy of increased complexity.
Again, the more detailed summary notes can be found here.
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
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You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
Released September 30, 2024
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 2
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword by Erik Michaels and Afterword by Dr. Guy McPherson, authors include: Dr. Peter A Victor, George Tsakraklides, Charles Hugh Smith, Dr. Tony Povilitis, Jordan Perry, Matt Orsagh, Justin McAffee, Jack Lowe, The Honest Sorcerer, Fast Eddy, Will Falk, Dr. Ugo Bardi, and Steve Bull.
The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.
Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.
