Limits to Growth: Chapter II
World sustainability depends on both physical (economic + demographical factors) and social necessities (e.g. peace and social stability, education, employment, and steady technological progress).
Neither this book nor the author's world model at this stage in its development can deal explicitly with social factors (except insofar as the information about the quantity and distribution of physical supplies can indicate possible future social problems).
Food, resources, and a healthy environment are necessary but not sufficient conditions for growth. Even if they are abundant, growth may be stopped by social problems.
Although total world agricultural production is increasing, food production per capita in the nonindustrialized countries is barely holding constant at its inadequately low level.
if the world's people did decide to pay the high capital costs, to cultivate all possible arable land, and to produce as much food as possible, how many people could theoretically be fed?
Even if society did decide to pay the necessary costs to gain new land or to increase the productivity of the land already cultivated, the rising population would quickly bring about another "crisis point." And each crisis point will cost more to overcome.
Even if the choice were consistently to produce food as the first priority continued population growth, we would rapidly come to the point where all available resources are devoted to producing food, leaving no further possibility of expansion.
Arable land is just one potential limit among other limits (e.g. the availability of fresh water) to food production.
Possibly, we have a chance to avoid or extend these limits by technological advances that remove dependence on the land or that create new sources of fresh water. The problem is that the factories and raw materials to produce synthetic food, the equipment, and energy to purify sea water must all require physical resources.
The world usage rate of every natural resource is growing exponentially. For many resources the usage rate is growing even faster than the population, indicating both that more people are consuming resources each year and also that the average consumption per person is increasing each year (the exponential growth curve of resource consumption is driven by both the positive feedback loops of population growth and of capital growth).
Given present resource consumption rates and the projected increase in these rates, the great majority of the currently important nonrenewable resources will be extremely costly 100 years from now. This statement remains true regardless of the most optimistic assumptions about undiscovered reserves, technological advances, substitution, or recycling, as long as the demand for resources continues to grow exponentially.
Pollution is another exponentially increasing quantity in the world system. The natural ecological systems can absorb many of the effluents of human activity and reprocess them into substances that are usable by, or at least harmless to, other forms of life. When any effluent is released on a large enough scale, however, the natural absorptive mechanisms can become saturated.
The measured amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing exponentially, apparently at a rate of about 0.2 percent per year. Only about one half of the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels
has actually appeared in the atmosphere – the other half has apparently been absorbed, mainly by the surface water of the
oceans.
By the laws of thermodynamics, essentially all of the energy used by man must ultimately be dissipated as heat. If the energy source is something other than incident solar energy (e.g., fossil fuels or atomic energy), that heat will result in warming the atmosphere, either directly, or indirectly through radiation from water used for cooling purposes. Locally, waste heat or "thermal pollution" in streams causes disruption in the balance of aquatic life. But thermal pollution may have serious climatic effects, worldwide, when it reaches some appreciable fraction of the energy normally absorbed by the earth from the sun.
Nuclear power will produce yet another kind of pollutant –radioactive wastes. Since nuclear power now provides only an insignificant fraction of the energy used by man, the possible environmental impact of the wastes released by nuclear reactors can only be surmised.
Carbon dioxide, thermal energy, and radioactive wastes are just three of the many disturbances man is inserting into the environment at an exponentially increasing rate. The toxic metals (lead and mercury) are released into waterways and into the atmosphere from automobiles, incinerators, industrial processes, and agricultural pesticides.
No upper bounds have been indicated for the exponential growth curves of pollutants because it is not known how much we can perturb the natural ecological balance of the earth without serious consequences. We do know, however, that there is an upper limit. It has already been surpassed in many local environments. This ignorance about the limits of the earth's ability to absorb pollutants should be enough reason for caution in the release of polluting substances. Any pollution control system based on instituting controls only when some harm is already detected will probably guarantee that the problem will get much worse before it gets better. Systems of this sort are exceedingly difficult to control because they require that present actions be based on results expected far in the future.
The surest way to reach that upper limit globally is to increase exponentially both the number of people and the polluting activities of each person.
Vicious circle: it may be that technological developments will allow the expansion of industry with decreasing pollution, but only at a high cost. A country can postpone the payment of such costs to increase the present growth rate of its capital plant, but only at the expense of future environmental degradation, which may be reversible only at a higher cost than it would be earlier.
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