2020 Past world economic production constrains current energy demands: Persistent scaling with implications for economic growth and climate change mitigation
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7451548/
This article identifies a persistent relationship between global energy consumption and cumulative economic production. It implies that a surprisingly simple description of the human system is sufficient to explain past global trends and make robust projections of the aggregated world economy and its waste products. Humanity grows when more energy is available than it requires for its daily needs. Then work can be done not just for sustenance but for expansion. Because current sustenance demands emerge from past growth, inertia plays a much more important role in determining future societal and climate trajectories than has been generally acknowledged, particularly in the physically unconstrained models that are widely used to link the economy to climate [46, 47]. We have accumulated over history a long series of innovations in efficiency that continue to propel us forward. Without forgetting these advances, we will maintain a continued ability to expand our interface with the primary resources we consume.
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Eventually, of course, the interwoven networks of civilization will unravel and emissions will decline, whether it is through depletion of resources, environmentally forced decay or—as demonstrated recently—pandemics [48]. But the cuts will have to be deep, continuous, and cumulative to overcome the tremendous accumulated growth we have sustained up to this point.
The formulations presented here are intended to help constrain the problem by reducing the number of available targets that can reasonably be expected to lead to avoidance of extreme climate change. Notably, gains in energy efficiency play a critical role in enabling increases in population and prosperity, and in turn growth of energy demands and carbon dioxide emissions, contrary to what would reasonably be assumed if civilization did not grow [33, 49, 50]. What seems to be required is a peculiar dance between reducing the production efficiency of civilization while simultaneously innovating new technologies that move us away from combustion.
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For example, Fig 4 shows that stabilizing concentrations at a nominal value of 350 ppm would require that the current world cumulative production shrink by two thirds to a value not seen since 1960.
It is probably safe to assume that civilization will not willingly engage in such drastic pruning. Looking to the future, Fig 4 shows that without rapid decarbonization, we have already committed ourselves to CO2 concentrations above 500 ppmv, well in excess of the 450 ppmv threshold that has been deemed “dangerous” [44]. At current growth rates, the commitment is to a doubling of pre-industrial levels by 2030, and to eventual levels close to 650 ppmv by 2040.
It should also be noted that CO2 uptake is not in fact linear over timescales much longer than decades. The values for [CO2]eq presented here do not reflect important non-linearities that might arise from e.g. increasing ocean acidification, and that would allow for concentrations to continue to slowly rise even as energy consumption rates stall [37]. With respect to globally-averaged surface temperature anomalies, it has been argued that they have a linear relationship with cumulative emissions of carbon. This sensitivity depends only weakly upon whether emissions are rising and falling, and the maximum CO2 concentration that is reached. A value of 1.6°C per Tt C [45] can be used as a rough guide, in which case persistence of current 10 Gt C yr−1 emissions rates would imply a further temperature rise of about 0.5°C by 2050. Assuming persistence in current 2.4% yr−1 energy consumption growth rates, and no further decarbonization, the increase is 0.7°C.
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the specific value of λ that was identified is 5.9±0.2 gigawatts per trillion 2010 US dollars, ... Any evidence of a sustained downward trend in λ may help pinpoint decoupling of economic production from civilization’s metabolic needs.