Peak energy = peak population
April 21st, 2009 by Jim JustGraham Zabel of the London School of Economics has published a paper exploring the relationship between population growth, energy resources and carrying capacity at a global level.
Applying a sum-of-energies population model, he calculates that the energy embodied in oil supports about 3.2 billion of the world’s current population. This excess of global population is in “serious jeopardy in the next fifty years as the world’s remaining oil resources are consumed.” Zabel warns that world population could suffer a “precipitous decline.”
A peaking in energy sources implies a peaking in global population. How the decline plays out remains to be seen:
If we take a future historical perspective and imagine ourselves looking back at this time from 1000 years hence, our world’s unprecedented population growth (and possible decline) will not be explained by demographic transitions, or industrial revolutions, or health care, or urbanisation, or green revolutions, or contraception, or war, or natural catastrophes. These phenomena will play their part but will be seen as secondary. In seeking to understand how we balance the needs of an increasing human population against the carrying capacity of our planet, we need to recognise the primary relationship between population growth and energy resources, and that this relationship is both positively and negatively reinforcing.
Colin Campbell, founder and Honorary Chairman of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), said pretty much the same thing in a recent interview with photojournalist Neil Jackson:
Peak Oil is a turning point for mankind. It is a big subject. In short, the population only doubled over the first 17 centuries of the last millennium. But then came coal followed by oil and gas, and the population increased six-fold. These new energy sources, especially oil, the easiest, allowed the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade and agriculture allowing the economy to expand greatly. It was accompanied by the growth of financial capital as banks lent more than they had on deposit, confident that Tomorrow’s Expansion was collateral for Today’s Debt.
But now we face the dawn of the Second Half of the Age of Oil when supply declines from natural depletion, meaning that debt goes bad (as is already happening) and the economy contracts. Today’s oil supply support 6.7 billion people, but by 2050 the supply will be enough to support no more than about 2.5 billion in their present way of life. So the challenges of using less and finding other energy sources are great