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:
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
More: Energetic Limits to Economic Growth
Comments
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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).