Richard
Heinberg is the author of fourteen books, including
some of the seminal works on society’s current
energy and environmental sustainability crisis. He has
authored hundreds of essays and articles that have appeared
in such journals as Nature and The Wall Street
Journal.
_____________________________________________
Recent
news articles about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research
heralded the potential for “limitless” energy.
Whenever I read that word limitless I wince, because I’ve
learned to view it as a subtle instruction to readers
to “please stop thinking now.” After decades
of false promises to deliver limitless energy, we need
to start thinking instead, and search for limits both
obvious and hidden. Doing so usually leads to a better
understanding of how things really work.
Fortunately,
several other writers have successfully refuted “limitless
energy” claims regarding fusion, so it’s not
necessary for me to do that here. However, it may be useful
to explain more generally why the promise of limitlessness
is misleading and sometimes deadly—and why limits
are lovable after all.
Limits
exist everywhere in nature. Physics, chemistry, biology,
geology, astronomy—pick your field, dig into the
literature, and you’ll soon be struck by how everything
in the universe is defined by limits of temperature, weight,
volume, density, number, power, frequency, speed, and
more. Limits enable the functioning of systems at scales
from the subatomic realm all the way up to galaxy clusters.
If there is any physical thing that could credibly be
claimed to be infinite, it is the universe itself. But
not all cosmologists believe the universe is infinite,
and proving whether it is or not may be impossible in
principle. Leaving the totality of the cosmos to one side
(an action possible only within the human brain—which
does, most assuredly, have its own limits), everything
else we encounter in life has boundaries.
So,
why have many people become obsessed with either denying
or overcoming limits, to the point where they appear to
feel that life can have meaning only if it’s tied
to some limitless thing, quality, or substance? Humanity’s
obsession with limitlessness probably began with the origin
of language, which enables the asking of questions. People
tens of thousands of years ago began to ask, “What
happens to our essential sense of self when we die?”
Their efforts to manage existential terror likely led
them to tell stories about a boundless otherworld in which
the dead live forever. Looking up at the night sky, they
saw a realm of blackness punctuated by moving points of
light; upon this screen they projected their wants, needs,
and fears. Our lives and those of all the creatures around
us may be brief, these early people must have thought,
but there is another dimension that lies beyond—a
dimension without endings. We’ve been searching
for a path to infinity ever since.
LIMITS
AND INDIGENOUS WISDOM
In
practical terms, ancient peoples confronted limits every
day. In addition to personal limits on muscular strength
and endurance, there were also limits to environmental
capacity that constrained whole groups. Overhunt game
or overharvest wild plants this season, and starvation
could follow in the next.
One
solution to scarcity was to move to new habitats, a strategy
greatly facilitated by the adoption of fire and clothing.
By migrating, people escaped the confines of familiar
places, but the benefit was temporary. For example, migrations
from Asia to the Americas ten or twenty thousand years
ago opened vast new human habitats; but, certainly by
500 years ago and likely much earlier, North and South
America were fully peopled.
Migrants
to previously human-free places seemed to believe that
these environments possessed endless opportunity. The
first migrants to Australia hunted megafauna like the
giant kangaroo to extinction; ditto the first Pacific
Islanders, who killed the very last members of about 1,000
different bird species. Altogether, human migration altered
environments and reduced biodiversity across the planet.
However,
people who stayed in one place long enough learned the
limits to their bioregion’s capacity for regeneration.
Through a long series of tough lessons, people discovered
how many plants of each kind they could harvest, and how
many of each kind of animal they could hunt, and when.
In doing this, they were emulating other predatory animals,
which typically evolve to avoid extinguishing all their
prey. In short, even if they sometimes thought about infinity,
Indigenous peoples who stayed put for many generations
adopted a worldview and a variety of behaviors that were
overwhelmingly oriented toward successful adaptation to
the finite.
THE
RESTLESS, VORACIOUS MODERN MIND
That
changed for some people, starting just a few thousand
years ago. These were people with agriculture, writing,
and metal weapons.
If
language cracked open the door to thoughts about the infinite,
writing kicked it wide. Writing enabled the development
of mathematics, which led to geometry (invented for surveying
land), which in turn paved the way to the discovery of
irrational numbers, the relevance of which will be clear
in a moment.
Imagine
a square with each side one unit in length. How long is
that square’s diagonal? Answer: the square root
of two. But what, exactly is the square root of two? Well,
it’s 1.41421356…, those final three dots indicating
an infinite series of numerals. That’s right, infinite.
As an irrational number, the square root of two cannot
be expressed precisely as the ratio of any two whole numbers.
Irrational numbers are implicit in nature, but they endlessly
resist efforts—even using modern supercomputers—to
express them fully with decimals.
Mathematicians
like to think of their field of study as an ethereal,
universal realm containing infinity. Indeed, pure mathematics
(i.e., study of mathematical concepts independent of any
real-world application) may be as close to infinity as
humans can get, and many mathematicians throughout history
have thought of it in those exact terms. But that’s
not the same as limitlessness in a practical sense. In
theory there may be an infinite number of integers, prime
numbers, irrational numbers, and imaginary numbers, but
we never encounter infinity in physical life. Even if
essential mathematical truths live forever in principle,
mathematicians die just like the rest of us, and math
textbooks eventually turn to dust.
Mathematics
provided a logical basis for the belief in infinity. But
it did far more than that. People in early civilizations
used math mostly to keep track of livestock, land, money,
and debt. Countable money then facilitated the expansion
of trade and civilization itself. Math also helped in
the invention and refinement of technologies via, for
example, metallurgy, ballistics, and navigation. Technological
developments in these fields subsequently assisted in
the conquest of Indigenous peoples throughout the world.
The conquerors felt superior in that they had developed
a way of living that could overleap previous constraints
on the scale and wealth of human societies. While they
often attributed this assumed superiority to their religion
(our god is more infinite than yours!), it was guns, germs,
and steel that made the crucial difference.
Still,
there were practical bounds to the energy sources then
available—which consisted primarily of food crops
and firewood. Agriculture enabled population growth and
social complexity, but it gradually robbed soils of nutrients.
Sailing ships guided with clocks and navigational charts
could increase the scope of trade, but building wooden
ships (and making charcoal for forging steel) was leading
to the deforestation of whole continents. A reckoning
with limits seemed to be in store.
Then
a miracle happened. People who lived in some key centers
of global trade started using fossil fuels—energy
sources capable of delivering power in previously unimaginable
and seemingly endless quantities. Coal, oil, and natural
gas enabled the development of transport technologies
(steamships, railroads, cars, trucks, and airplanes) that
overcame prior limits to the speed of travel and trade,
so that products and resources that were abundant in one
place could be transported to places where they were scarce.
Fossil fuels could be used to increase the rates of resource
extraction via powered mining machinery, and to process
lower grades of ores as more concentrated ores were depleted.
They could be fashioned into plastics and chemicals to
substitute for some natural materials that were getting
scarce, such as hardwoods and whale oil. And they could
be made into artificial fertilizers, which could replace
soil nutrients lost due to unsustainable agricultural
practices.
All
these developments together enabled population growth
at rates that far outstripped historic trends: human numbers
expanded from one billion to eight billion in a mere two
centuries. We were, in effect, stretching existing constraints
on population and consumption to the point that it was
difficult for many people to see that boundaries still
existed at all.
A
relatively new field of study, economics, saw the expansion
of production, trade, and population as inherently beneficial,
attributed it to human ingenuity (rather than to fossil
fuels), and declared that it could and should go on forever.
After all, the economists gushed, there are no limits
to human ingenuity! (Actually, there are.)
Eventually,
math was accelerated to warp speed by the development
of electricity systems (generators, transformers, motors,
etc.) and computers—which enabled space exploration.
Today, we take for granted the ability to bounce radio
signals between thousands of satellites in orbit and billions
of computers back on terra firma, thereby making trillions
of items of information available in the palms of our
hands.
It’s
understandable that many people think we humans are just
getting started, and that in few more centuries we’ll
be able to know everything, control everything, and move
at infinite speed. This “Star Trek” mentality
consists of a widely held conviction that it is our duty
and destiny as humans to take over not just the entire
Earth, but increasing swathes of cosmic habitat—even
if we have to subdue some unruly Klingons along the way.
LIMITS
SNAP BACK
Meanwhile,
here on planet Earth problems are brewing.
It
turns out that fossil fuels suffer from a couple of serious
drawbacks: depletion and pollution. Coal, oil, and natural
gas are finite substances we extract from the Earth’s
crust using the low-hanging fruit principle. While we’re
not about to run out of these fuels in an absolute sense,
the effort required to get them is increasing. We’ve
already extracted all the easy stuff, and beyond a certain
point it will take more energy to obtain the remaining
fuels than they will yield when burned. We haven’t
arrived at that point yet, but years before we get to
fossil-fuel energy break-even the global industrial system
will begin to shudder and shake. And, yes, we may already
be at that stage according to some analysts.
Pollution,
the other drawback to fossil fuels, was recognized as
a problem many decades ago when coal smoke began to cloud
industrial cities like London and Pittsburgh. But it turns
out that an invisible and odorless pollutant, carbon dioxide,
will have much greater long-term impact than smoke. By
burning tens of millions of years’ worth of ancient
plant matter in just a couple of centuries, we are releasing
hundreds of billions of tons of CO2, changing the chemical
composition of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans,
causing climate patterns to become more chaotic, and thereby
threatening not just global agriculture but the ecological
cycles that support myriads of other creatures in addition
to ourselves.
If
the energy-climate conundrum were all we had to worry
about, the obvious answer would be to transition industrial
society to operate on other, less problematic energy sources.
Unfortunately, it turns out that a full energy transition
to renewable alternatives like solar and wind power won’t
be easy (for reasons I’ve discussed here, here,
and here). But there’s even worse news: the energy-climate
problem isn’t our only survival-level ecological
dilemma.
As
we’ve grown our population and our per capita consumption
rates, we’ve been taking habitat away from other
organisms. As a result, nature is in full retreat. Vertebrate
and invertebrate animal species have suffered average
population declines of 70 percent in the past 50 years,
and thousands of plant species are endangered as well.
Not
only are most people apparently willing to ignore the
loss of Earth’s biodiversity as long as the industrial
economy can continue to keep them fed, clothed, housed,
and entertained, but they are also largely unaware of
the exhaustion of the materials that feed the industrial
machine. As high-grade ores deplete, miners are forced
to dig deeper and process more ore in order to produce
the same amounts of copper, iron, aluminum, and dozens
of other critical materials. Yet merely the same amounts
won’t do: we need to double these amounts every
25 years to enable economic growth at recent rates—and
we need loads more materials to build vast numbers of
solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries that will be
needed to substitute for fossil fuels.
Some
scientists use math to determine how close we are to planetary
limits. One such effort goes by the name “planetary
boundaries”; its main proponents, scientists at
the Stockholm Resilience Centre, calculate that, of nine
critical global ecological thresholds that might lead
to collapse, humanity has already crossed six. A related
effort is being undertaken by the Global Footprint Network,
which tracks our “ecological footprint”—how
much of Earth’s biological regenerative capacity
is being used by human society. Our footprint scorecard
currently shows humanity using resources as if we lived
on 1.75 Earths—which it is only possible to do temporarily
by, in effect, robbing future generations.
Altogether,
civilization’s survival dilemma in the 21st century
is best described by a concept from population ecology—overshoot.
This refers to the situation where a crucial resource
temporarily becomes more abundant, thereby enabling a
group of organisms to grow its population beyond levels
that can be sustained over the long run. For a population
of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might
consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth
has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity
currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary
energy abundance has led to many good things (for some
of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial
products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience.
But we are about to become victims of our own success.
Indeed,
humanity’s confrontation with limits will make this
century pivotal. Whether it’s the rate of emission
of greenhouse gases, the proliferation of “forever
chemicals,” the depletion of soils and minerals,
or the destruction of habitat for other species, in each
case we see industrial society plunging headlong over
the guardrails. Our collective survival will depend on
whether we can restrain population growth, resource extraction,
and waste dumping so that we can get onto a path that
can be sustained for centuries or millennia. That means
de-growing economies, starting with the wealthiest ones
like that of the United States.
But
culturally we are ill-equipped for this necessary re-adaptation
process. Indigenous wisdom, which should be our guide,
persists in traditional societies fighting for cultural
survival. Everywhere else, the dominant industrial worldview
holds that talk of limits is dreary, scary, unimaginative,
and uninspiring. Where limits are undeniable, as with
carbon emissions and climate change, we try to finesse
them with clever math (carbon credits, anyone?) and sophisticated
technology.
Further,
worsening economic inequality is undermining the social
cohesion needed for a cooperative human about-face. Indeed,
the people who are empowered to decide what direction
society takes are in almost all cases ones who tend to
benefit most from overexploitation of resources. They’re
the very people least likely to propose measures that
would pull us back from the precipice.
THE
PLEASURE AND SOLACE OF LOVING LIMITS
We
have flown so far from safe boundaries that our only possible
landing path entails a crash: the policies required to
fully align our industrial system with nature’s
sustainable productive capacity would themselves trigger
enormous economic and political problems. Imagine the
response of American citizens if new regulations required
them to cut back on energy and material usage by, say,
50 percent. What would happen to the economy in that scenario?
There’s no easy answer to overshoot, when it’s
gone to such lengths. This is not to say that activists
should stop protesting new fossil fuel production projects,
or that planning agencies should stop advocating more
energy efficiency and solar panels, or that conservationists
should stop protecting creatures and ecosystems. We must
do what we can, even if it’s not enough to avert
all the environmental, social, and economic crises that
we’ve been fomenting with decades of over-consumption.
However,
in addition to such worthy efforts, at least some of us
can adopt an attitude fundamentally different from the
dominant “Star Trek” mindset—an attitude
geared to help us find an equitable way through the Great
Unraveling that’s already begun, while laying the
conceptual and cultural foundation for a truly sustainable
society. The key will be a new(ish) attitude toward limits—a
willingness to view them not as restrictions always to
be fought against, but as boundaries that enable systems
to work.
Sure,
limits can sometimes be a straitjacket. Few of us like
arbitrary strictures of outmoded custom. But far too little
is said about the benefits of nature’s limits—including
the starkest limit of all, mortality. It’s sad when
loved ones die, and few of us look forward to our own
demise; hence the perennial quest for an elixir of eternal
life, or at least a cure for cancer. But if nobody died,
the planet would quickly fill with humans and empty of
all the things that feed and provision us. Death clears
space for new life; it is the non-negotiable price of
admission to the great banquet of existence.
Denying
and fighting limits is hard work. We can afford to relax
a bit and learn to better appreciate the immense beauty
of the masterpiece that nature creates out of finite resources
and lifespans.
In
addition to Indigenous thinkers, some ancient Greek and
Chinese philosophers understood the value of limits. Stoics
like Seneca and Epictetus taught that we should view apparent
obstacles as opportunities. They said things like, “You
have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize
this, and you will find strength.” In China, at
roughly the same time, Taoist sages proclaimed, “Life
is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t
resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be
reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever
way they like.” Don’t just respect limits;
celebrate them and work in harmony with them.
This
is a philosophy grounded in nature’s way. Mortality,
loss, beauty, and wisdom all arrive in the same package;
sadly, many of us stop unwrapping it before we get to
the wisdom at the center. Wisdom says: embrace limits
even as they snap back, knowing that, in the long run,
everything moves toward balance.
It’s
a philosophy that’s especially relevant in difficult
times, such as ones we are entering, when it may be helpful
to remember: this too shall pass. Even the craze for limitlessness
has its limits.
This article is republished from ENSIA
under a Creative Commons license.
