Civilization may need to 'forget the flame' to reduce CO2 emissions


Date:
August 27, 2020
Source:
University of Utah
Summary:
Current world energy consumption is tied to unchangeable past
economic production. And the way out of an ever-increasing rate
of carbon emissions may not necessarily be ever-increasing energy
efficiency -- in fact it may be the opposite.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Just as a living organism continually needs food to maintain itself, an
economy consumes energy to do work and keep things going. That consumption comes with the cost of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change,
though. So, how can we use energy to keep the economy alive without
burning out the planet in the process?

==========================================================================
In a paper in PLOS ONE, University of Utah professor of atmospheric
sciences Tim Garrett, with mathematician Matheus Grasselli of McMaster University and economist Stephen Keen of University College London,
report that current world energy consumption is tied to unchangeable past economic production. And the way out of an ever-increasing rate of carbon emissions may not necessarily be ever-increasing energy efficiency --
in fact it may be the opposite.

"How do we achieve a steady-state economy where economic production
exists, but does not continually increase our size and add to our
energy demands?" Garrett says. "Can we survive only by repairing decay, simultaneously switching existing fossil infrastructure to a non-fossil appetite? Can we forget the flame?" Thermoeconomics Garrett is an
atmospheric scientist. But he recognizes that atmospheric phenomena,
including rising carbon dioxide levels and climate change, are tied to
human economic activity. "Since we model the earth system as a physical system," he says, "I wondered whether we could model economic systems
in a similar way." He's not alone in thinking of economic systems in
terms of physical laws.

There's a field of study, in fact, called thermoeconomics. Just as thermodynamics describe how heat and entropy (disorder) flow through
physical systems, thermoeconomics explores how matter, energy, entropy
and information flow through human systems.



==========================================================================
Many of these studies looked at correlations between energy consumption
and current production, or gross domestic product. Garrett took a
different approach; his concept of an economic system begins with the centuries-old idea of a heat engine. A heat engine consumes energy at high temperatures to do work and emits waste heat. But it only consumes. It
doesn't grow.

Now envision a heat engine that, like an organism, uses energy to do
work not just to sustain itself but also to grow. Due to past growth,
it requires an ever-increasing amount of energy to maintain itself. For
humans, the energy comes from food. Most goes to sustenance and a little
to growth. And from childhood to adulthood our appetite grows. We eat
more and exhale an ever- increasing amount of carbon dioxide.

"We looked at the economy as a whole to see if similar ideas could apply
to describe our collective maintenance and growth," Garrett says. While societies consume energy to maintain day to day living, a small fraction
of consumed energy goes to producing more and growing our civilization.

"We've been around for a while," he adds. "So it is an accumulation
of this past production that has led to our current size, and our
extraordinary collective energy demands and CO2 emissions today."
Growth as a symptom To test this hypothesis, Garrett and his colleagues
used economic data from 1980 to 2017 to quantify the relationship between
past cumulative economic production and the current rate at which we
consume energy. Regardless of the year examined, they found that every
trillion inflation-adjusted year 2010 U.S.

dollars of economic worldwide production corresponded with an enlarged civilization that required an additional 5.9 gigawatts of power production
to sustain itself . In a fossil economy, that's equivalent to around 10 coal-fired power plants, Garrett says, leading to about 1.5 million tons
of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere each year. Our current energy usage,
then, is the natural consequence of our cumulative previous economic production.



==========================================================================
They came to two surprising conclusions. First, although improving
efficiency through innovation is a hallmark of efforts to reduce energy
use and greenhouse gas emissions, efficiency has the side effect of
making it easier for civilization to grow and consume more.

Second, that the current rates of world population growth may not be
the cause of rising rates of energy consumption, but a symptom of past efficiency gains.

"Advocates of energy efficiency for climate change mitigation may seem to
have a reasonable point," Garrett says, "but their argument only works
if civilization maintains a fixed size, which it doesn't. Instead, an
efficient civilization is able to grow faster. It can more effectively
use available energy resources to make more of everything, including
people. Expansion of civilization accelerates rather than declines, and
so do its energy demands and CO2emissions." A steady-state decarbonized future? So what do those conclusions mean for the future, particularly
in relation to climate change? We can't just stop consuming energy today
any more than we can erase the past, Garrett says. "We have inertia. Pull
the plug on energy consumption and civilization stops emitting but it
also becomes worthless. I don't think we could accept such starvation."
But is it possible to undo the economic and technological progress
that have brought civilization to this point? Can we, the species who
harnessed the power of fire, now "forget the flame," in Garrett's words,
and decrease efficient growth? "It seems unlikely that we will forget
our prior innovations, unless collapse is imposed upon us by resource
depletion and environmental degradation," he says, "which, obviously,
we hope to avoid." So what kind of future, then, does Garrett's work
envision? It's one in which the economy manages to hold at a steady state
-- where the energy we use is devoted to maintaining our civilization
and not expanding it.

It's also one where the energy of the future can't be based on fossil
fuels.

Those have to stay in the ground, he says.

"At current rates of growth, just to maintain carbon dioxide emissions
at their current level will require rapidly constructing renewable and
nuclear facilities, about one large power plant a day. And somehow it
will have to be done without inadvertently supporting economic production
as well, in such a way that fossil fuel demands also increase." It's a "peculiar dance," he says, between eliminating the prior fossil-based innovations that accelerated civilization expansion, while innovating
new non- fossil fuel technologies. Even if this steady-state economy
were to be implemented immediately, stabilizing CO2 emissions, the
pace of global warming would be slowed -- not eliminated. Atmospheric
levels of CO2 would still reach double their pre-industrial level before equilibrating, the research found.

By looking at the global economy through a thermodynamic lens, Garrett acknowledges that there are unchangeable realities. Any form of an
economy or civilization needs energy to do work and survive. The trick
is balancing that with the climate consequences.

"Climate change and resource scarcity are defining challenges of
this century," Garrett says. "We will not have a hope of surviving
our predicament by ignoring physical laws." Future work This study
marks the beginning of the collaboration between Garrett, Grasselli and
Keen. They're now working to connect the results of this study with a
full model for the economy, including a systematic investigation of the
role of matter and energy in production.

"Tim made us focus on a pretty remarkable empirical relationship between
energy consumption and cumulative economic output," Grasselli says. "We
are now busy trying to understand what this means for models that include notions that are more familiar to economists, such as capital, investment
and the always important question of monetary value and inflation."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Utah. Original written
by Paul Gabrielsen.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Timothy J. Garrett, Matheus Grasselli, Stephen Keen. Past world
economic
production constrains current energy demands: Persistent
scaling with implications for economic growth and climate
change mitigation. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (8): e0237672 DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0237672 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200827141241.htm

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