Economy featured

7 Meta Questions About Our Global Metabolism

By Nate Hagens, originally published by The Great Simplification

April 9, 2024

A short history of progress bookcover

Recorded April 4 2024

Description

Based on this week’s podcast episode with Geoffrey West, which covered how biological scaling applies to human economies, this week’s Frankly is a reflection on what this might mean for the future of our societies. Throughout history and up to today, there are scaling patterns driving our social and infrastructural metabolism – potentially shedding light on some long debated questions about the limits of our ability to design our societies. Do we as humans have the agency to create different paths towards less resource consumption, or are we trapped within a previously hidden law of nature? Will the resource and waste limitations of our biosphere force us to live differently, regardless of our choices? More hopefully, can understanding we have a metabolism change our metabolism, and steer futures away from the current default?

Show Notes:

PDF Transcript

00:25 – Geoffrey West TGS Podcast, Geoffrey West Powerpoint,

00:58 – Kleiber’s Law

01:59 – Sublinear scaling of energy for economies and superlinear scaling of social metabolism

02:42 – Global growth of energy to GDP matches Kleiber’s law scaling, Graph

03:20 – Energy growth is 1.4 that of population

04:23 – Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

05:26 – Accelerating cycle of innovation to avoid collapse

08:19 – Are renewables just adding to the system

10:31 – Wegovy, GLP1

More: Energetic Limits to Economic Growth

Teaser image credit: A Short History of Progress book cover
Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens is the Executive Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF). Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians, and systems thinkers, ISEOF assembles roadmaps for understanding how human societies might adapt to lower-throughput lifestyles.

Nate hosts the podcast The Great Simplification, where he has conversations with experts in energy, ecology, government, technology, and the economy to provide a systemic view of the world around us.

After ten years in finance, Nate left Wall Street to study the interrelationships between energy, ecology, and economics—and the implications for human futures. He was the Managing Editor of The Oil Drum, one of the most respected websites for analysis and discussion of global energy supplies and implications of the upcoming energy transition.

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Andrew M Hartley
Andrew M Hartley
2 years ago

I don’t understand the comment that “for every 100 units of GDP, we need 70 new units of energy, so it tracks.” If, as stated earlier, “The energy use scales GDP to the three quarter power,” then to find the predicted amount of new energy needed for 100 new units of GDP, one would need to know the initial GDP, not only the # of new GDP units, to calculate the new energy units needed.
In particular, the 2 claims together mean
e=g^0.75 &
(g+100)^0.75 = e+70
where e & g are, respectively, the initial energy & gdp.
These 2 together are approximately true only to the extent that e & g are very large (such that 100 is a miniscule increment relative to g).

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