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Revisiting the Limits to Growth
After Peak Oil
Charles A. S. Hall
Professor of Environmental Science and Forestry,
State University of New York at Syracuse
and
John W. Day, Jr.
Prefessor Emeritus of of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences
Lousiana State University
American Scientist, Volume 97, Number 3, May-June 2009
Reprinted with Permission
In the 1970s a rising world population and the finite resources
available to support it were hot topics.
Interest faded—but it’s time to take another look.
In recent decades there has been considerable
discussion in academia
and the media about the environmental
impacts of human activity, especially
those related to climate change and
biodiversity, but far less attention has
been paid to the diminishing resource
base for humans. Despite our inattention,
resource depletion and population
growth have been continuing relentlessly.
The most immediate of these
issues appears to be a decline in oil
reservoirs, a phenomenon commonly
referred to as “peak oil” because global
production appears to have reached
a maximum and is now declining.
However, a set of related resource
and economic issues are continuing
to come home to roost in ever greater
numbers and impacts—so much so
that author Richard Heinberg speaks
of “peak everything.” We believe that
these issues were set out well and basically
accurately by a series of scientists
in the middle of the last century
and that events are demonstrating that
their original ideas were mostly sound.
Many of these ideas were spelled out
explicitly in a landmark book called The
Limits to Growth, published in 1972.
In the 1960s and 1970s, during our
formative years in graduate school,
our curricula and our thoughts were
strongly influenced by the writings
of ecologists and computer scientists
who spoke clearly and eloquently
about the growing collision between
increasing numbers of people—and
their enormously increasing material
needs—and the finite resources of the
planet. The oil-price shocks and long
lines at gasoline stations in the 1970s
confirmed in the minds of many that
the basic arguments of these researchers
were correct and that humans were
facing some sort of limits to growth. It
was extremely clear to us then that the
growth culture of the American economy
had limits imposed by nature,
such that, for example, the first author
made very conservative retirement
plans in 1970 based on his estimate
that we would be experiencing the effects
of peak oil just about the time of
his expected retirement in 2008.
These ideas have stayed with us, even
though they largely disappeared, at least
until very recently, from most public discussion,
newspaper analyses and college
curricula. Our general feeling is that few
people think about these issues today,
but even most of those who do so believe
that technology and market economics
have resolved the problems. The
warning in The Limits to Growth—and
even the more general notion of limits to
growth—are seen as invalid.
Even ecologists have largely shifted
their attention away from resources to
focus, certainly not inappropriately, on
various threats to the biosphere and
biodiversity. They rarely mention the
basic resource/human numbers equation
that was the focal point for earlier
ecologists. For example, the February
2005 issue of the journal Frontiers in
Ecology and the Environment was dedicated
to “Visions for an ecologically sustainable
future,” but the word “energy”
appeared only for personal “creative
energy”—and “resources” and “human
population” were barely mentioned.
But has the limits-to-growth theory
failed? Even before the financial collapse
in 2008, recent newspapers were brimming
with stories about energy- and
food-price increases, widespread hunger
and associated riots in many cities,
and various material shortages. Subsequently,
the headlines have shifted to the
collapse of banking systems, increasing
unemployment and inflation, and general
economic shrinkage. A number of
people blamed at least a substantial part
of the current economic chaos on oil price
increases earlier in 2008.
Although many continue to dismiss
what those researchers in the 1970s
wrote, there is growing evidence that
the original “Cassandras” were right on
the mark in their general assessments,
if not always in the details or exact timing,
about the dangers of the continued
growth of human population and their
increasing levels of consumption in a
world approaching very real material
constraints. It is time to reconsider those
arguments in light of new information,
especially about peak oil.
Early Warning Shots
A discussion of the resource/population issue always starts with Thomas
Malthus and his 1798 publication First Essay on Population:
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I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly,
that the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state…. Assuming
then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than
the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a
geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with
numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
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Most people, including ourselves,
agree that Malthus’s premise has not
held between 1800 and the present, as
the human population has expanded
by about seven times, with concomitant
surges in nutrition and general
affluence—albeit only recently. Paul
Roberts, in The End of Food, reports that
malnutrition was common throughout
the 19th century. It was only in
the 20th century that cheap fossil energy
allowed agricultural productivity
sufficient to avert famine. This argument
has been made many times before—
that our exponential escalation
in energy use, including that used in
agriculture, is the principal reason that
we have generated a food supply that
grows geometrically as the human population
has continued to do likewise.
Thus since Malthus’s time we have
avoided wholesale famine for most of
the Earth’s people because fossil fuel
use also expanded geometrically.
The first 20th-century scientists to
raise again Malthus’s concern about
population and resources were the
ecologists Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich.
Hardin’s essays in the 1960s on
the impacts of overpopulation included
the famous “Tragedy of the Commons,”
in which he discusses how
individuals tend to overuse common
property to their own benefit even
while it is disadvantageous to all involved.
Hardin wrote other essays on
population, coining such phrases as
“freedom to breed brings ruin to all”
and “nobody ever dies of overpopulation,”
the latter meaning that crowding
is rarely a direct source of death, but
rather results in disease or starvation,
which then kill people. This phrase
came up in an essay reflecting on the
thousands of people in coastal Bangladesh
who were drowned in a typhoon.
Hardin argued that these people knew
full well that this region would be inundated
every few decades but stayed
there anyway because they had no other
place to live in that very crowded
country. This pattern recurred in 1991
and 2006.
Ecologist Paul Ehrlich argued in The
Population Bomb that continued population
growth would wreak havoc on
food supplies, human health and nature,
and that Malthusian processes
(war, famine, pestilence and death)
would sooner rather than later bring
human populations “under control”
down to the carrying capacity of the
world. Meanwhile agronomist David
Pimentel, ecologist Howard Odum and
environmental scientist John Steinhart
quantified the energy dependence of
modern agriculture and showed that
technological development is almost
always associated with increased use
of fossil fuels. Other ecologists, including
George Woodwell and Kenneth
Watt, discussed people’s negative impact
on ecosystems. Kenneth Boulding,
Herman Daly and a few other
economists began to question the very
foundations of economics, including
its dissociation from the biosphere necessary
to support it and, especially, its
focus on growth and infinite substitutability—
the idea that something will
always come along to replace a scarce
resource. These writers were part and
parcel of our graduate education in
ecology in the late 1960s.
Meanwhile Jay Forrester, the inventor
of a successful type of computer
random-access memory (RAM), began
to develop a series of interdisciplinary
analyses and thought processes, which
he called system dynamics. In the books
and papers he wrote about these models,
he put forth the idea of the coming
difficulties posed by continuing human
population growth in a finite world. The
latter soon became known as the limits-to-growth
model (or the “Club of Rome” model,
after the organization that commissioned
the publication). The models
were refined and presented to the
world by Forrester’s students Donella
Meadows and Dennis Meadows and
their colleagues. They showed that exponential
population growth and resource
use, combined with the finite nature of
resources and pollution assimilation,
would lead to a serious decline in the
material quality of life and even in the
numbers of human beings.
At the same time, geologist M. King
Hubbert predicted in 1956 and again
in 1968 that oil production from the
coterminous United States would peak
in 1970. Although his predictions were
dismissed at the time, U.S. oil production
in fact peaked in 1970 and natural
gas in 1973.
These various perspectives on the
limits to growth seemed to be fulfilled
in 1973 when, during the first energy
crisis, the price of oil increased from
$3.50 to more than $12 a barrel. Gasoline
increased from less than $0.30 to
$0.65 per gallon in a few weeks while
available supplies declined, because
of a temporary gap of only about 5
percent between supply and projected
demand. Americans became subject
for the first time to gasoline lines, large
increases in the prices of other energy
sources, and double-digit inflation
with a simultaneous contraction in
total economic activity. Such simultaneous
inflation and economic stagnation
was something that economists
had thought impossible, as the two
were supposed to be inversely related.
Home heating oil, electricity, food and
coal also became much more expensive.
Then it happened again: Oil increased
to $35 a barrel and gasoline to
$1.60 per gallon in 1979.
Some of the economic ills of 1974,
such as the highest rates of unemployment
since the Great Depression, high
interest rates and rising prices, returned
in the early 1980s. Meanwhile,
new scientific reports came out about
all sorts of environmental problems:
acid rain, global warming, pollution,
loss of biodiversity and the depletion
of the Earth’s protective ozone layer.
The oil shortages, the gasoline lines
and even some electricity shortages in
the 1970s and early 1980s all seemed
to give credibility to the point of view
that our population and our economy
had in many ways exceeded the ability
of the Earth to support them. For
many, it seemed like the world was
falling apart, and for those familiar
with the limits to growth, it seemed as
if the model’s predictions were beginning
to come true and that it was valid.
Academia and the world at large were
abuzz with discussions of energy and
human population issues.
Our own contributions to this work
centered on assessing the energy costs
of many aspects of resource and environmental
management, including food
supply, river management and, especially,
obtaining energy itself. A main focus
of our papers was energy return on investment
(EROI) for obtaining oil and gas
within the United States, which declined
substantially from the 1930s to the 1970s.
It soon became obvious that the EROI
for most of the possible alternatives was
even lower. Declining EROI meant that
more and more energy output would
have to be devoted simply to getting the
energy needed to run an economy.
The Reversal
All of this interest began to fade, however,
as enormous quantities of previously
discovered but unused oil and
gas from outside the U.S. were developed
in response to the higher prices
and then flooded into the country. Most
mainstream economists, and a lot of
other people too, did not like the concept
that there might be limits to economic
growth, or indeed human activity
more generally, arising from nature’s
constraints. They felt that their view
was validated by this turn of events
and new gasoline resources.
Mainstream (or neoclassical) economics
is presented mostly from the
perspective of “efficiency”—the concept
that unrestricted market forces
seek the lowest prices at each juncture,
and the net effect should be the lowest
possible prices. This would also cause
all productive forces to be optimally
deployed, at least in theory.
Economists particularly disliked the
perspective of the absolute scarcity of
resources, and they wrote a series of
scathing reports directed at the scientists
mentioned above, especially those
most closely associated with the limits
to growth. Nuclear fusion was cited
as a contender for the next source
of abundant, cheap energy. They also
found no evidence for scarcity, saying
that output had been rising between
1.5 and 3 percent per year. Most importantly,
they said that economies had
built-in, market-related mechanisms
(the invisible hand of Adam Smith) to
deal with scarcities. An important empirical
study by economists Harold J.
Barnett and Chandler Morse in 1963
seemed to show that, when corrected
for inflation, the prices of all basic resources
(except for forest products) had
not increased over nine decades. Thus,
although there was little argument that
the higher-quality resources were being
depleted, it seemed that technical
innovations and resource substitutions,
driven by market incentives, had and
would continue indefinitely to solve
the longer-term issues. It was as if the
market could increase the quantity of
physical resources in the Earth.
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The values predicted by the limits-to-growth model and actual data for 2008 are
very close. The model used general terms for resources and pollution, but current, approximate
values for several specific examples are given for comparison. Data for this long
a time period are difficult to obtain; many pollutants such as sewage probably have increased
more than the numbers suggest. On the other hand, pollutants such as sulfur have
largely been controlled in many countries.
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Figure 1 (Source: Figure 5 of the original American Scientist article)
The new behavior of the general
economy seemed to support their view.
By the mid-1980s the price of gasoline
had dropped substantially. The enormous
new Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska
came online and helped mitigate to
some degree the decrease in production
of oil elsewhere in the U.S., even
as an increasing proportion of the oil
used in America was imported. Energy
as a topic faded from the media and
from the conversations of most people.
Unregulated markets were supposed to
lead to efficiency, and a decline in energy
used per unit of economic output
in Japan and the U.S. seemed to provide
evidence for that theory. We also shifted
the production of electricity away from
oil to coal, natural gas and uranium.
In 1980 one of biology’s most persistent
and eloquent spokesmen for
resource issues, Paul Ehrlich, was
“trapped,” in his words, into making a
bet about the future price of five minerals
by economist Julian Simon, a strong
advocate of the power of human ingenuity
and the market, and a disbeliever
in any limits to growth. The price of all
five went down over the next 10 years,
so Ehrlich (and two colleagues) lost the
bet and had to pay Simon $576. The
incident was widely reported through
important media outlets, including
a disparaging article in the New York
Times Magazine. Those who advocated
for resource constraints were essentially
discredited and even humiliated.
So indeed it looked to many as though
the economy had responded with the
invisible hand of market forces through
price signals and substitutions. The
economists felt vindicated, and the resource
pessimists beat a retreat, although
some effects of the economic stagnation
of the 1970s lasted in most of the world
until about 1990. (They live on still in
places such as Costa Rica as unpaid debt
from that period.) By the early 1990s,
the world and U.S. economies basically
had gone back to the pre-1973 model
of growing by at least 2 or 3 percent a
year with relatively low rates of inflation.
Inflation-corrected gasoline prices,
the most important barometer of energy
scarcity for most people, stabilized and
even decreased substantially in response
to an influx of foreign oil. Discussions of
scarcity simply disappeared.
The concept of the market as the ultimate
objective decider of value and
the optimal means of generating virtually
all decisions gained more and
more credibility, partly in response to
arguments about the subjectivity of decisions
made by experts or legislative
bodies. Decisions were increasingly
turned over to economic cost-benefit
analysis where supposedly the democratic
collective tastes of all people were
reflected in their economic choices.
For those few scientists who still cared
about resource-scarcity issues, there was
not any specific place to apply for grants
at the National Science Foundation or
even the Department of Energy (except
for studies to improve energy efficiency),
so most of our best energy analysts
worked on these issues on the weekend,
after retirement or pro bono. With
very few exceptions graduate training
in energy analysis or limits to growth
withered. The concept of limits did live
on in various environmental issues such
as disappearing rain forests and coral
reefs, and global climate change. But
these were normally treated as their own
specific problems, rather than as a more
general issue about the relationship between
population and resources.
A Closer Look
For a distinct minority of scientists,
there was never any doubt that the
economists’ debate victory was illusory
at best, and generally based on incomplete
information. For example, Cutler
J. Cleveland, an environmental scientist
at Boston University, reanalyzed
the Barnett and Morse study in 1991
and found that the only reason that the
prices of commodities had not been
increasing—even while their highest
quality stocks were being depleted—
was that for the time period analyzed
in the original study, the real price of
energy had been declining because of
the exponentially increasing use of oil,
gas and coal, whose real prices were
simultaneously declining. Hence, even as
more and more energy was needed to
win each unit of resources, the price of
the resources did not increase because
the price of energy was declining.
Likewise, when the oil shock induced
a recession in the early 1980s, and Ehrlich
and Simon made their bet, the relaxed
demand for all resources led to
lower prices and even some increase in
the quality of the resources mined, as
only the highest-grade mines were kept
open. But in recent years energy prices
increased again, demand for materials
in Asia soared and the prices of most
minerals increased dramatically. Had
Ehrlich made his bet with Simon over
the past decade, he would have made a
small fortune, as the price of most raw
materials, including the ones they bet
on, had increased by 2 to 10 times in
response to huge demand from China and
declining resource grades.
Another problem is that the economic
definition of efficiency has not
been consistent. Several researchers,
including the authors, have found
that energy use—a factor that had
not been used in economists’ production
equations—is far more important
than capital, labor or technology in
explaining the increase in industrial
production of the U.S., Japan and
Germany. Recent analysis by Vaclav
Smil found that over the past decade
the energy efficiency of the Japanese
economy had actually decreased by
10 percent. A number of analyses have
shown that most agricultural technology
is extremely energy intensive. In
other words, when more detailed and
systems-oriented analyses are undertaken,
the arguments become much
more complex and ambiguous, and
show that technology rarely works
by itself but instead tends to demand
high resource use.
Likewise oil production in the U.S.
has declined by 50 percent, as predicted
by Hubbert. The market did not
solve this issue for U.S. oil because,
despite the huge price increases and
drilling in the late 1970s and 1980s,
there was less oil and gas production
then, and there has been essentially
no relation between drilling intensity
and production rates for U.S. oil and
gas since.
Figure 2 (Source: Figure 7 of the original American Scientist article)
The original projections of the limits-to-growth model examined the relation of a
growing population to resources and pollution, but did not include a timescale between 1900
and 2100. If a halfway mark of 2000 is added, the projections up to the current time are largely
accurate, although the future will tell about the wild oscillations predicted for upcoming years.
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There is a common perception, even
among knowledgeable environmental
scientists, that the limits-to-growth model
was a colossal failure, since obviously
its predictions of extreme pollution and
population decline have not come true.
But what is not well known is that the
original output, based on the computer
technology of the time, had a very misleading
feature: There were no dates on
the graph between the years 1900 and
2100. If one draws a timeline along the
bottom of the graph for the halfway
point of 2000, then the model results are
almost exactly on course some 35 years
later in 2008 (with a few appropriate assumptions).
Of course, how well it will
perform in the future when the model
behavior gets more dynamic is not yet
known. Although we do not necessarily
advocate that the existing structure of
the limits-to-growth model is adequate
for the task to which it is put, it is important
to recognize that its predictions
have not been invalidated and in fact
seem quite on target. We are not aware
of any model made by economists that is
as accurate over such a long time span.
Figure 3 (Source: Figure 8 of the original American Scientist article)
The annual rates of total drilling for oil and gas in the United States from 1949 to 2005 are
shown versus the rates of production for the same period. If all other factors are kept equal, EROI
is lower when drilling rates are high, because oil exploration and drilling are energy-intensive
activities. The EROI may now be approaching 1:1 for finding new oil fields.
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Avoiding Malthus
Clearly even the most rabid supporter
of resource constraints has to accept
that the Malthusian prediction has not
come true for the Earth as a whole,
as human population has increased
some seven times since Malthus wrote
his article, and in many parts of the
world it continues to grow with only
sporadic and widely dispersed starvation
(although often with considerable
malnutrition and poverty). How has
this been possible?
The most general answer is that technology,
combined with market economics
or other social-incentive systems,
has enormously increased the carrying
capacity of the Earth for humans. Technology,
however, is a two-edged sword,
whose benefits can be substantially
blunted by Jevons’s paradox, the concept
that increases in efficiency often lead to
lower prices and hence to greater consumption
of resources.
Figure 4 (Source: Figure 9 of the original American Scientist article)
The rate at which oil is discovered globally has been dropping for decades (blue), and is
projected to drop off even more precipitously in future years (green). The rate of worldwide consumption,
however, is still continuing to rise (red line). Thus, the gap between supply and demand
of oil can be expected to widen. Data courtesy of the Association for the Study of Oil and Gas.
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And technology does not work for
free. As originally pointed out in the
early 1970s by Odum and Pimentel,
increased agricultural yield is achieved
principally through the greater use of
fossil fuel for cultivation, fertilizers,
pesticides, drying and so on, so that it
takes some 10 calories of petroleum to
generate each calorie of food that we
eat. The fuel used is divided nearly
equally between the farm, transport
and processing, and preparation. The
net effect is that roughly 19 percent
of all of the energy used in the United
States goes to our food system. Malthus
could not have foreseen this
enormous increase in food production
through petroleum.
Similarly, fossil fuels were crucial to
the growth of many national economies,
as happened in the United States
and Europe over the past two centuries,
and as is happening in China and India
today. The expansion of the economies
of most developing countries is nearly
linearly related to energy use, and when
that energy is withdrawn, economies
shrink accordingly, as happened with
Cuba in 1988. (There has been, however,
some serious expansion of the U.S.
economy since 1980 without a concomitant
expansion of energy use. This is
the exception, possibly due to the U.S.’s
outsourcing of much of its heavy industry,
compared to most of the rest of the
world.) Thus, most wealth is generated
through the use of increasing quantities
of oil and other fuels. Effectively
each person in the United States and
Europe has on average some 30 to 60
or more “energy slaves,” machines to
“hew their wood and haul their water,”
whose power output is equal to that of
many strong people.
Figure 5 (Source: Figure 10 of the original American Scientist article)
The energy return on investment (EROI) is the energy cost of acquiring an energy
resource; one of the objectives is to get out far more that you put in. Domestic oil production’s
EROI has decreased from about 100:1 in 1930, to 40:1 in 1970, to about 14:1 today. The EROI of most
“green” energy sources, such as photovoltaics, is presently low. (Lighter colors indicate a range
of possible EROI due to varying conditions and uncertain data.) EROI does not necessarily correspond
to the total amount of energy in exajoules produced by each resource.
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Thus a key issue for the future is
the degree to which fossil and other
fuels will continue to be abundant and
cheap. Together oil and natural gas
supply nearly two-thirds of the energy
used in the world, and coal another
20 percent. We do not live in an information
age, or a post-industrial age,
or (yet) a solar age, but a petroleum
age. Unfortunately, that will soon end:
It appears that oil and gas production
has reached, or soon will reach, a maximum.
We reached that point for oil in
the U.S. in 1970 and have also now
reached it in at least 18, and probably
the majority, of the 50 most significant
oil-producing nations. The important
remaining questions about peak oil are
not about its existence, but rather, when
it occurs for the world as a whole, what
the shape of the peak will be and how
steep the slope of the curve will be as
we go down the other side.
The other big question about oil is
not how much is left in the ground (the
answer is a lot) but how much can be
extracted at a significant energy profit.
The EROI of U.S. petroleum declined
from roughly 100:1 in 1930, to 40:1
in 1970, to about 14:1 in 2000. Even
these figures are relatively positive
compared to EROI for finding brand new
oil in the U.S., which, based on
the limited information available, appears
likely to approach 1:1 within a few decades.
Historically most of the oil supplies
in the world were found by exploring
new regions for oil. Very large reservoirs
were found rather quickly, and
most of the world’s oil was found by
about 1980. According to geologist
and peak-oil advocate Colin Campbell,
“The whole world has now been
seismically searched and picked over.
Geological knowledge has improved
enormously in the past 30 years and it
is almost inconceivable now that major
fields remain to be found.”
Energy Scarcity
The world today faces enormous problems
related to population and resources.
These ideas were discussed intelligently
and, for the most part, accurately
in many papers from the middle of the
last century, but then they largely disappeared
from scientific and public discussion,
in part because of an inaccurate
understanding of both what those earlier
papers said and the validity of many
of their predictions. Most environmental
science textbooks focus far more on
the adverse impacts of fossil fuels than
on the implications of our overwhelming
economic and even nutritional dependence
on them. The failure today to
bring the potential reality and implications
of peak oil, indeed of peak everything,
into scientific discourse and teaching
is a grave threat to industrial society.
The concept of the possibility of a
huge, multifaceted failure of some substantial
part of industrial civilization is
so completely outside the understanding
of our leaders that we are almost totally
unprepared for it. For large environmental
and health issues, from smoking to
flooding in New Orleans, evidence of
negative impacts has historically preceded
general public acceptance and policy
actions by several decades.
There are virtually no extant forms
of transportation, beyond shoe leather
and bicycles, that are not based on
oil, and even our shoes are now often
made of oil. Food production is very
energy intensive, clothes and furniture
and most pharmaceuticals are made
from and with petroleum, and most
jobs would cease to exist without petroleum.
But on our university campuses
one would be hard pressed to have any
sense of that beyond complaints about
the increasing price of gasoline, even
though a situation similar to the 1970s
gas shortages seemed to be unfolding in
the summer and fall of 2008 in response
to three years of flat oil production, assuaged
only when the financial collapse
decreased demand for oil.
No substitutes for oil have been
developed on anything like the scale
required, and most are very poor net
energy performers. Despite considerable
potential, renewable sources (other
than hydropower or traditional wood)
currently provide less than 1 percent
of the energy used in both the U.S. and
the world, and the annual increase in
the use of most fossil fuels is generally
much greater than the total production
(let alone increase) in electricity from
wind turbines and photovoltaics. Our
new sources of “green” energy are simply
increasing along with (rather than
displacing) all of the traditional ones.
If we are to resolve these issues, including
the important one of climate change,
in any meaningful way, we need to make
them again central to education at all levels
of our universities, and to debate and
even stand up to those who negate their
importance, for we have few great intellectual
leaders on these issues today. We
must teach economics from a biophysical
as well as a social perspective. Only then
do we have any chance of understanding
or solving these problems.
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