Minnesotans ForSustainability©
Sustainable Society: A society that balances the environment, other life forms, and human interactions over an indefinite time period.
|
Minnesotans ForSustainability©
Sustainable Society: A society that balances the environment, other life forms, and human interactions over an indefinite time period.
|
|
|
[MFS Note: The "Energy" section contains many related items.] Population and Energy Graham
Zable*
Introduction
|
|
|
Traditional Renewables |
Coal |
Oil |
Natural Gas |
|
20% of Energy Share |
n/a |
1860 |
1948 |
1990 |
|
Energy Share Peaks |
pre-1850 |
1912 |
1973 |
n/a |
|
20% off Peak |
1860 |
1940 |
2000 (?) |
n/a |
Source: WEC 1995, page 10
The newly ascending energy source typically reaches 20% of the energy mix at
about the same time as the dominant source has fallen about 20% from its peak.
Figure 2 shows how coal attained 20% of the energy mix in
1860, the same time that traditional renewables had lost 20% of their original
100% share. Oil attained a 20% share in 1948, shortly after 1940 when coal had
dropped 20% from its peak of 1912.
This then will be the criterion used to separate the effects of each energy source on the world’s population: when a new energy source attains a 20% share of the global energy mix, it has reached a level where it can upwardly shift the population ceiling.
The model is constructed in the following manner:
The world’s
population from the beginning of time until 1850, just as coal reached a 20%
share of energy resources, will be referred to as Biomass Population.
Coal Population reigns from 1850 until 1950, when oil reached a
20% share of energy resources. Coal Population is the population
of the world not accounted for by the slowly growing Biomass
Population. That is, it is represented by the population that remains when
Biomass Population is subtracted from the world’s total
population. Similarly, Oil Population is the population from 1950 until 2000
that is not accounted for by either Biomass Population or
Coal Population. Natural Gas Population starts
approximately now, within the last ten years, as it reaches a 20% share of
energy resources. The behaviour of Natural Gas Population has yet
to be determined. The diagram in Figure 3 illustrates these concepts.[13]
Figure 3: Sum-of-Energies model of World Population
An examination of each component follows.
Until 1850, most of the world’s population was still supported by traditional renewables (wood, dung, etc.) and animal power (with minor amounts of wind and hydropower). Admittedly Britain was already heavily influenced by coal, but very few other populations were. In 1850, Britain was producing more coal than the rest of Europe combined. In the same year, when the population of the United States was already 23 million, 90% of its energy requirements were still met from wood[14]. So until the mid-1800s, energy from biomass was the main energy contributor to population growth. (It still contributes to population growth. It is estimated that 10% of the world’s energy in the year 2000 is provided by biomass and there are an estimated two billion people that still have no access to electricity.) Wrigley describes this preindustrial era as the Organic Economy, and in England’s case, the Advanced Organic Economy[15]. In this model, it is called Biomass Population.
Biomass Population growth fluctuated in waves of feast and famine; economic growth and population checks[16]. If populations grew too quickly, living standards declined, local carrying capacities were exceeded and food became more expensive. Malthusian population checks ensued: later age at first marriage, decreases in life expectancy and higher mortality. Biomass Population had been growing at a slow, exponential rate with some slight ups and downs for thousands of years. In other words, it exhibited homeostatic behaviour. Population pressures in Europe were relieved through the safety valves of migration. Settlers expanded into sparsely populated regions of the world such as North and South America, Australia and many African and Asian colonies. This enabled small upward shifts in the global population ceiling, or the population equilibrium.
If Biomass Population growth from 800 to 1850 were extrapolated to the year 2000, the value would be 1.09 billion people. This may or may not be an indication of how many people the planet would now be supporting if coal, oil and gas were never commercialised, assuming there were still frontiers to expand into.
Figure 4:
Biomass Population - World Population 800-1850 compared to
Exponential growth
Source: McEvedy and Jones
(1978)
Figure 4
shows the world’s population from 800 to 1850. The plotted line represents
pre-fossil fuel population, or the world population growth that occurred when
biomass was the predominant source of energy. The black line is a fitted line
representing exponential growth. Extrapolating the exponential trend line to
the year 2000 gives a value of 1.09 billion people, as mentioned above.
“In ages past (pre-Industrial Revolution), better living standards had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumed the gains…Gone, Malthus’ positive checks and the stagnationist predictions of the ‘dismal science’; instead, one had an age of promise and great expectations.”[17]
Both oil and coal have been used in small quantities for thousands of years. But until the Industrial Revolution, society’s energy requirements were fulfilled almost entirely by human and animal power and traditional biomass sources. For many years afterward, a large majority of the world remained dependent on traditional biomass. By 1850 population pressures led to the commercialisation of coal and the Industrial Revolution, and the energy derived from coal began to shape the forces that would raise the population ceiling. The world’s population entered a phase of disequilibrium.
In the early sixteenth century, Britain was heavily dependent on foreign suppliers for arms. The threat of war between England and the Catholic countries resulted in an embargo of Dutch manufactured arms to Britain. The embargo impressed upon King Henry VIII the need for self-sufficiency in arms manufacture so he proceeded to establish a domestic arms industry. In 1543, according to the Elizabethan chronicler Holinshed, “the first cast pieces of iron that ever were made in England.”[18] Elizabeth continued the drive for self-sufficiency in many other manufactures: for example salt, copper and glass. All of these industries were heavily dependent on charcoal, which was made from wood. The increasing demands for wood in concert with an increasing population lead to an alarming rise in deforested lands first in England and then Ireland, as the search for timber widened[19]. Although coal was dirty and smelly, the scarcity and rising costs of wood forced many people to resort to the burning of coal for heat. Even before 1600, “London and all other towns near the sea…are mostly driven to burn…coals, for most of the woods are consumed.”[20]
Boserup argues that timber and charcoal became scarce, in response to population pressures and the growing demand for these products by nascent industrial sectors. The success of coal in the use of iron production toward the end of the eighteenth century meant that “the shortages of energy and raw materials were overcome and the Industrial Revolution became possible”.[21]
Since the Industrial Revolution, populations have grown much more quickly. The countries that first experienced industrialisation were the first to grow more quickly. England, where the Industrial Revolution began, was also the first country to witness accelerated population growth. From the late 1700s, Britain’s population begun to grow at levels never seen before. There is little record of population growth before approximately 1500, but lacking the medical advances that are today taken for granted, it is unlikely historical mortality rates could ever have been as low as ours are now. Higher historical fertility rates were always more than compensated for by high mortality rates, putting a brake on population growth. Since 1541, the population of Great Britain never grew faster than it was growing by 1800.[22] By the 1820s, England’s population was growing annually at approximately 1.6%, a rate never surpassed before or since. (Current population growth is negative – English population is declining for the first time since the early 1700s.)
“Between 1550 and 1820 the populations of France, Spain, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands all appear to have grown by between 50 and 80 per cent; in England over the same period the comparable figure was 280 per cent, a contrast so striking that by 1820 England, which had once been a small country by the standards of the larger European powers, though still less populous than France, Germany or Italy, was moving rapidly towards rough equality with them”[23]. During the same period, Britain was mining coal in quantities unseen anywhere else in the world. “In 1800 the output of coal in Britain had reached about 15 million tons a year, at a time when the combined production of the whole of continental Europe probably did not exceed 3 million tons.”[24]
Between 1800 and 1900, the Industrial Revolution crossed the Channel and spread to the rest of Europe. So did the importance of coal. The commercialisation of coal that occurred in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dramatically increased productivity through the use of steam engines that drove trains, boats and many other engines, and through the coking process used to produce steel. Coal made available twice as much heat as an equivalent amount of dry wood.[25] Coal is much more productive than wood – it has a higher thermodynamic potential. By 1900, coal was powering the entire world’s major industrial processes, and powering the industrial nations’ population growth.
Between 1800 and 1900, Europe’s population more than doubled from about 187 million to 400 million. As a percentage of world population it climbed from 21% to roughly 25%. While this percentage increase does not seem very large, it doesn’t measure the roughly 35 million Europeans who immigrated elsewhere. These European immigrants and their descendants spawned large and often numerically dominant populations in many other parts of the world including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many regions in Latin America. They also brought with them the European penchant for coal consumption. By 1865 coal had gained a 20% share of energy consumption in the United States. Shortly after 1880 coal became the main source of energy in the U.S. As a percentage of total consumption contributed by each energy source, coal consumption peak in 1910[26]. The year of highest population growth in the U.S. in the twentieth century occurred in almost exactly the same year[27].
Hackett-Fischer (1996) explains population growth in the eighteen century as follows:
“There was also a modest improvement in life expectancy for infants and women during the eighteenth century, and a moderate stabilization of death-rates. But the primary cause of population growth in this period was a rise in fertility, not a fall in mortality.
Why did men and women choose to marry earlier and have more children? An improvement in material conditions was part of the answer, but not the whole of it. Husbands and wives decided to have more children because the world appeared to have become a better place in which to raise a family.”[28]
That the world appeared to have become a better place was largely due to the commercialisation of coal and the subsequent technological innovations.
Later, in the twentieth century, as European populations at home and abroad began to grow more slowly, populations in other parts of the world began to reap some of the benefits of industrialisation. As these benefits filtered to the developing world, it too appeared to have become a better place and developing world populations started growing more quickly. In many cases these African, Asian and Latin American populations grew at rates never before witnessed, eclipsing even the unusually high rates of nineteenth century Europe. (Many started growing extremely fast after 1950 – Oil Population – due to advanced transportation and distribution facilities ??)
Coal greatly reduced pressures of land use. Wood for heating and fuel was replaced by coal, so the land needed to grow that wood could serve a new purpose. The large quantities of fodder for draught animals and horse transport were made redundant by coal and the machines driven on coal. This further reduced pressures on land use and freed large amounts for the increased use of agriculture for food for humans.
The commercialisation of coal eliminated the “dependence upon the products of the land whose quantity could not be expanded indefinitely…This ensured that the process of growth at a relatively high rate could be sustained over a very long period. The key change that ensured the latter was the tapping of a new store of energy capital, so abundant that its production could be expanded immensely without causing any immediate problems of exhaustion of the energy stock. Access to abundant energy stocks was initially of limited value because the new sources of energy could be used only to provide heat, but once a method had been devised for deriving mechanical work also from the new energy source the way was clear for individual productivity to make a quantum leap.”[29]
1850 is chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, as the year that the world began to feel the effects of coal. Around 1850 the world’s population began to grow much faster. For the first time in history, annual world population growth exceeded 0.5%[30]. Most demographers try to explain this growth in terms of economics or mortality decline. This model regards the phenomenon in terms of energy, in this case, coal consumption. Obviously, coal was important in British society much before 1850 and some continents would not feel the benefits of coal power until much later. But by 1850 coal was being mined extensively, canal transportation was growing quickly throughout Europe, the age of rail transport had begun and iron-works were commonplace. This lead to increases in wealth, prices, distribution of foodstuffs, and internal and external migration. The substitution of machines and engines for human and animate power fostered the improvement of material conditions and quality of life. This process began in Britain, but the effects spread far and wide.
Figure 5: Coal Population – World Population less Biomass Population 1850-1950
If we subtract the slowly growing
Biomass Population from the total population between 1850 and 1950, we are
left with Coal Population (Figure 5). Coal Population’s contribution to
world population is then extrapolated backward to 1750 and forward to the year
2000.
The increase in energy inputs into society from the use of coal drove the machines that freed up time for humans to make advances in medicine and health. Coal transported the machines that distributed these advances through European society. Coal has a higher thermodynamic energy potential than traditional biomass, and is able to perform more work.
Coal also played a large part in the development of electricity. With the establishment of the electricity industry in the 1880s following the remarkable achievements of Edison, Parsons, Stanley, Tesla, Westinghouse and their collaborators, electricity quickly expanded to power households, industry and railroads. Electricity was generated in power plants, and those power plants were fed with coal. Still today, 50% of America’s power is generated in coal-burning power plants.
These advances and productivity improvements aided (and may have brought about) the Mortality Revolution, Urbanisation and the Fertility Revolution (in Europe and America). During this time frontiers were still open but were shrinking fast. (Oklahoma, the 46th state of America, was founded in 1907).
The model predicts that Coal Population grows in a logistic manner. That is, population initially grows quickly but eventually a coal population ceiling is reached as coalfields diminish, coal becomes harder to extract from deeper mines, as the productivity of machines driven by coal begins to plateau and as new, cleaner, more productive energy sources begin to supplant coal.
Fairly reliable world coal consumption statistics are available from 1860 onwards. Current annual world coal consumption is approximately 2.2 Gtoe (giga-tonnes oil equivalent), or about 2/5 of one tonne per capita. Consumption has remained stable at this level for over a decade. Increases in coal consumption in developing countries are compensated by decreases in consumption in the developed world as these economies switch from coal to cleaner burner oil and natural gas technologies. Because coal emissions are the dirtiest of the fossil fuel emissions, pressure to reduce coal use grows with concern over the potential climate altering effects of increased carbon dioxide emissions.
Figure 6: World Coal Consumption 1860-2000
Sources: Jenkins (1989),
BP (2000)
This model assumes that annual coal consumption will peak at approximately 2.8
Gtoe. This value is midway between the World Energy Council (WEC) future
energy scenarios B and C. Scenario B is a business as usual scenario which
estimates coal use at 3.4 Gtoe in 2020 and 4.1 Gtoe in 2050. Scenario C is an
ecologically driven scenario which estimates coal use at 2.3 Gtoe in 2020 and
1.5 Gtoe in 2050. Consumption declines in scenario C after 2020 as stricter
emission controls take effect.
In the case of coal, a peak of 2.8 Gtoe has no relation to the amount of world coal reserves, which are estimated to last for over 200 years[31]. Rather future coal consumption is seen as being limited by environmental concerns and cleaner alternatives.
If we assume that Coal Population grows in a similar manner to coal consumption then both logistically growing coal consumption (Figure 6) and logistically growing Coal Population (Figure 5) reach 80% of their limits in the year 2000. At this rate Coal Population reaches a plateau of approximately 2.3 billion people in the 21st century. In other words, at current and projected rates of coal consumption, coal supports just under 2 billion people in the year 2000 and can be expected to support as many as 2.3 billion people this century.
Before a coal population ceiling was reached, a new source of energy replaced coal’s dominance. Oil was the next source of energy to be commercialised.
In 1859, Colonel E. L. Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania. More oil was discovered in Texas in 1887. By 1900, oil was extracted in Baku on the Caspian Sea, in Romania, California and Sumatra. By World War I, production had expanded to Mexico, Trinidad, Venezuela and Iran.
Population growth rates in America up until the discovery of oil in 1859 were very high, around 3%. At these rates a population doubles in size in 23 years. By 1900, the United States numbered 45 states, most of the continent had been conquered and the high population growth rates of a country expanding territorially in 18th century America were falling. The population growth rate in the U.S. reached 2.11% in 1909, the highest rate ever reached in the United States in the twentieth century.
Oil is easier to handle than coal. It is cleaner burning and cheaper to transport and store, making it ideal as a transportation fuel. It has a higher thermodynamic potential than coal, and was able to further increase productivity and arguably lead to less land use demand (as oil is underground and puts few demands on land use, whereas open face coal mines use land that could be otherwise put to use).
It is clear that availability of fossil fuels, in particular crude oil, as had a profound effect on population growth. Population has grown because death rates have declined worldwide, but birth rates have remained at high levels in many parts of the world. Oil arguably plays a part in both phenomena.
Oil provides the energy needed to grow and distribute food, and to increase the nutritional content of agricultural produce. Extensive land, air and sea transportation networks enable easy distribution of food. This stimulates mortality decline by getting food to the people that need it, alleviating local food shortages, flying food aid to drought stricken regions and shipping grain to countries whose populations have grown larger than their output of food. As recently as the eighteenth century in Europe, food was typically transported no more than 15 kilometres[32]. Today, jumbo jets transport fresh food around the world everyday.
Oil also plays a significant part in the so-called Green Revolution that has led to growth in agricultural output that has managed to keep up with or even exceed the number of mouths that require feeding. Green Revolution agriculture relies on large amounts of pesticides and fertilisers, products highly dependent on oil and gas. Intensification of agriculture leads to surplus production, enabling greater increases in population which in turn lead to still greater demands for food.
Water for agriculture is also highly dependent on fossil fuels. Pumping of aquifers and groundwater for irrigation “is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century, made possible by the availability of electricity and cheap pumps.”[33]
Figure 7: Oil Population – World Population less Biomass and Coal Population 1950-2000
From 1950 to 2000, Oil Population
is derived by subtracting Biomass Population and Coal
Population from the world’s total population. Oil Population
is plotted in Figure 7 along with a fitted logistic curve. The
graph shows that currently almost 3 billion people are supported by
oil.
Figure 8: World Crude Oil Consumption 1900-2000
Sources:
Jenkins (1989), BP (2000)
Figure 8 plots world crude oil consumption from 1900 to 2000.
The dips in the oil consumption curve reflect the two oil shocks in the 1970s
(1973 and 1979) and the consequences of the Gulf War in 1991. There was also a
slowing of oil consumption growth in the late 1990s as a result of the
economic slowdown in Asia but presently consumption growth is increasing again
as Asia’s economy is recovering and a strong economy in America boosts demand.
A logistic curve is fitted to the oil consumption line which assumes a peak annual consumption of 3.8 Gigatonnes of oil (Gto). This is consistent with the WEC projected consumption in 2020 under their scenario B – business as usual. It is substantially higher than the decline to 3.0 Gto projected in their ecologically driven scenario C but lower than the average increase to 4.5 Gto projected in their high growth scenario A. Based on this assumed peak of 3.8 Gto per year, the world has reached 95% of that level in the year 2000.
Assuming a similar logistic curve could represent Oil Population as depicted in Figure 7, then Oil Population has reached 89% of its hypothetical ceiling of 3.2 billion people in the year 2000.
There is vociferous debate as to whether growth in oil reserves with continue to grow faster than growth in oil consumption, allowing the ceiling of oil consumption to move upward. Alternative future scenarios will be examined in a following section.
Although the history of natural gas consumption is short and trends are very recent, based on the above figures Natural Gas Population may raise the population ceiling by another 500 million people or so (Figure 9). This increase is much smaller than the increase due either to coal or oil.
Figure 9: Natural Gas Population - post-2000
It is only speculation, but it may be that the higher the thermodynamic potential of energy sources, the less impact they have on raising population ceilings. Higher quality energy sources also lead to improvements in mortality and in standards of living. Both these factors in turn lead to lower fertility levels and thus slower, or even negative, population growth.
Figure 10: World Natural Gas Consumption 1900-2000
This is a sum-of-energies Component view of the world’s population:
Biomass Population - Slow Exponential Growth - open frontiers - low thermodynamic energy – low contribution to world’s population
Coal Population - Fast Logistic Growth - forming frontiers - medium thermodynamic energy – high contribution to world’s population
Oil Population – Logistic Growth (so far) - fixed frontiers - high thermodynamic energy – high contribution to world’s population
Natural Gas Population - Logistic Growth (so far) - fixed frontiers - high thermodynamic energy – low contribution to world’s population
The current best method of population projection is the cohort-component method. But it is entirely unable to predict population discontinuities due to famine, war, etc. It is also unable to predict baby booms or baby busts. On a global scale, an energy-component method may be better able.
For example, famine is very rarely due to a lack of food, rather to a lack of food distribution. This requires energy - trains, planes and automobiles, and fuel.
Figure 11: World Population vs. Sum-of-Energies Population 800-2000
Figure 11 shows sum-of-energies equation versus actual population growth.
There are three general scenarios that the world’s energy future may take. Their effects on population will be radically different. They are:
1. Continued fossil fuel growth
2. Fossil fuel decline with no sufficient substitute.
3. A new source of energy
Oil and gas resources continue to be found faster than we consume them and population grows as projected by the UN, for example, and for that matter almost all agencies, to between 9 and 10 billion people by 2050.
Or, based on the above sum-of-energies model, a different interpretation might be that Oil Population is very close to reaching a plateau of approximately 3.2 billion people, and the world’s population may already be slowing more quickly than most analysts realise.[34] If so, the world’s population in 2050 may be substantially lower, closer to 7 billion people. The increased importance of natural gas in the 21st century may raise the population ceiling, as the introduction of new energy sources has done in the past. But based on current trends Natural Gas Population may play a smaller part in raising the population ceiling (it may raise the ceiling by about half a billion people).
Oil and Gas resources are beginning to peak, as a growing minority of experts believes.
The World Energy Council’s future energy projections posit six future energy scenarios. Of these six, three scenarios see oil consumption peaking at roughly current levels by 2020.
The International Energy Administration, in their most recent World Energy Outlook publication, sees oil supply peaking before 2020 and obliquely refers to an oil supply shortfall of 19.1 million barrels per day by 2020[36]. Some industry experts (Campbell 1988 and Laherrere 1999) believe that the oil production peak will occur much sooner.
If oil and gas production does exhibit a bell curve shaped profile (that is production starts at zero and ends at zero, in between production rises to a peak and then declines back toward zero) then at some point humanity will reach the peak[37]. After that time oil and gas will become much more ‘expensive’. A decline in production would mean a decline in energy inputs into society - less thermodynamic energy - a decline in productivity and, hypothetically, a decline in population. If population growth were in any way related to oil production, Oil Population may decline more quickly than most people anticipate.
Mortality rates may increase, as a population grown large through dependence on high quality energy sources now must allocate scarcer resources per person. This is evident in agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuel based fertilisers[38]. Without them, agricultural productivity decreases and less people can be feed. Less fuel - more famines. Human carrying capacity decreases and the ceiling on population size lowers.
Figure 12: Projected World Oil Production to 2050
Source: Campbell,
The Coming
Oil Crisis
Figure 12 depicts projected world oil production to 2050,
based on figures compiled by Colin Campbell in The Coming Oil Crises.
These figures are based on conventional crude oil resources. They do not
include natural gas liquids, shale oil, oil from tar sands, ultra-deep water
oil or polar oil. These oil sources are not included because they are much
more expensive to extract, in monetary terms but also in energy
terms. In other words, a large amount of energy inputs are required to extract
energy outputs from say, tar sands in Northern Canada. Hence the net
energy gain is lower, and these energy sources may not be as important in
raising productivity and thus population ceilings.
Based on Campbell’s oil production projections, the 3.2 billion people that are dependent on oil in the sum-of-energies population model are in serious jeopardy in the next fifty years as the world’s remaining oil resources are consumed, and world population could suffer a precipitous decline.
This
scenario follows from Ester Boserup’s observations that many of humankind’s
technological innovations have resulted from population pressures, or
increased population densities.
A higher quality energy source, say fission, could lead to further productivity improvements, reducing the pressure on existing resources and further raising the ceiling on population size. But fission still lies closer to the realms of science fiction than science.
A lower quality energy source, like solar or wind, is less efficient. It has lower thermodynamic potential and has less ability to perform work and to raise productivity. For example, a recent study on renewable energy remarks that solar radiation is completely diffuse and contains no appreciable concentration of energy. “For this reason, the vastness of the resource base of solar radiation is not, in itself, an indication of the appropriateness of solar energy as a useful energy source for society.”[39] Another problem with low quality energy sources is that their net energy is low - they require a large proportion of energy in, to get some energy out - in contradistinction to oil and gas, which have high net energy values. A switch to a lower quality energy source from fossil fuels will put further pressure on other remaining energy sources, such as wood and coal. This could lead to further pressures on land and other resources and hence lower the population ceiling. Low quality energy resources do not support large populations.
Nuclear power is not the answer. To replace diminishing oil and gas (which currently provides the world with 65% of its energy resources) with nuclear power (which currently provides 7.6%) would not only require vast amounts of capital but would require vast amounts of high thermodynamic energy. In a period of declining oil and gas resources, existing energy sources would be getting scarcer.
Perhaps a new source of energy will be found with a high thermodynamic potential. This would then add a new energy component to population growth. This may lead to a raised population ceiling and an initial burst of population growth as population grows to occupy the space between the previous ceiling and the new ceiling. Then growth may slow again as a new homeostatic situation is reached. Probably, higher productivity will have further negative effects on both mortality (higher life expectancy/lower mortality) and fertility.
As productivity growth outpaces population growth, fertility may decline. Typically this is an economic argument. I believe that the underlying argument is about energy, and the quality of energy.
Agriculture, medicine, health can all be viewed in terms of energy. In fact, even something like agriculture could be viewed as having three components: Biomass Agriculture, Coal Agriculture and Oil and Gas Agriculture.
Nitrogen prices have risen 25% since late May, says Agriliance, with soaring natural gas prices taking their toll on this essential farm input.
How much of the success of the Green Revolution can be claimed by science, and how much by cheap fossil fuels? Cheap fuel supplies water pumps, processing plants and field machines. It is a low cost raw material for fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Agriculture is the single largest user of fossil fuels in the U.S. (proof?).
“All the evidence suggests that we have consistently exaggerated the contributions of technological genius and underestimated the contributions of natural resources.”[40]
“Industrialisation came about at a fast enough pace so that it enlarged per capita wealth and was not entirely devoted to enlarging population. In principle, any increase in carrying capacity-temporary or permanent-affords a choice between enabling a larger number of individuals to live at previous standards. When the enlargement of carrying capacity is modest and is spread over many generations, it tends to be used mainly to increase numbers; if it is enormous and comes so suddenly that human numbers just don’t rise at the same pace, it raises living standards. The European takeover of the New World had enlarged carrying capacity (for Europeans) just fast enough to begin having this salutary effect. By drawing down stores of exhaustible resources at an ever-quickening pace, industrialization (temporarily) augmented carrying capacity even faster, affording opportunity for quite a marked rise in prosperity and for a phenomenal acceleration of population increase. The welcome rise in prosperity reinforced the dangerous myth of limitlessness and obscured for a while the hazards inherent in the population increase.”[41]
AIDS – not as a phenomenon unrelated to energy, that decreases population. But absolutely related to energy. In America where per capita energy consumption is very high, there is enough energy to fight the disease to stop its lethal effects. In Africa, they do not have the energy to fight the disease, that is the energy to develop, produce and distribute the drugs and medicines that would mitigate many of the disastrous effects. Per capita energy consumption is very low. (See Hackett-Fisher’s The Great Wave). So Africa’s potential reduction in population growth may be directly related to the world’s reduced ability to provide the necessary energy sources. In fact Africa does have substantial energy resources but the large majority of these resources are exported to the energy hungry, wealthy nations of the developed world.
Migration may be viewed in terms of energy. Populations migrate from energy poor regions to energy rich regions, either energy producers (the Middle East) or consumers (Europe, North America).
The Baby Boom might be partially explained by the large growth in oil consumption after World War II. (Whether the oil enabled the boom, or the boom fuelled the production of oil doesn’t really matter. It couldn’t have happened without large energy inputs.) It may be that populations grow quickly when first encountering a new energy source and then slow afterwards as productivity gains permeate society and improve education, health, etc. England’s fastest population growth ever was in 1826 just as Wrigley’s Advanced Organic Economy was being supplanted by his Mineral-Based Energy Economy. America’s fastest population growth after frontiers were fixed occurred in 1909, shortly after oil discoveries first in Pennsylvania (1859) and then Texas (1887).
It must be stressed that all of the above is merely hypothetical. Very little account has been taking of many variables - energy intensity, energy efficiency etc. Many figures are hypothetical – for example, limits of coal consumption could differ widely from the chosen value of 2.8 Gtoe.
Nuclear, hydroelectricity and renewables have not figure in this analysis because their contributions to the global energy mix are relatively minor. But they too must contribute somehow to population growth.
The main purpose of the paper has been to try and thrust the issue of energy into demography’s limelight. Energy is an issue that has been widely ignored when attempting to explain historical demography and it is widely ignored when attempting to project future demographic scenarios. Yet I hope this paper has shown that neither the past nor the future of demography can be adequately explained without also examining energy’s role (not economics’!) in the rise (and fall) of populations.
Anderson, M.
1996. British Population History: From the Black Death to the Present
Day. Cambridge University Press.
Boserup, Ester. 1981. Population and Technology, Basil Blackwell.
Boserup, Ester. 1990. Economic and Demographic Relationships in
Development, The John Hopkins University Press.
BP (BP Amoco). 2000. BP Amoco Statistical Review of World Energy,
various editions 1979-2000.
Campbell, Colin. 1988. The Coming Oil Crisis. Multi-Science
Publishing Company.
Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois Press.
Cohen, Joel E. 1995. How Many People Can the Earth Support? W. W.
Norton and Co.
Hackett-Fischer, D. 1996. The Great Wave. Oxford University
Press.
IEA (International Energy Administration). 1999. World Energy Outlook.
Jackson, Tim. 1992. “Renewable Energy: Summary paper for the Renewable
Series”, Energy Policy, September 1992.
Jenkins, G. 1989. Oil Economists’ Handbook, 5th
Edition.
Landes, D. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. W. W. Norton
and Co.
Laherrere, J.H. 1999. “World oil supply-what does up must come down, but when
will it peak?”, Oil and Gas Journal, Feb. 1, 1999, pages 57-64.
Lee, R. D. 1987. “Population dynamics of humans and other animals”,
Demography 24:443-65.
Leslie, Jacques. 2000. “Running Dry: What happens when the world no longer has
enough freshwater?”, Harper’s Magazine, July 2000, pages 37-52.
Livi-Bacci, M. 1997. A Concise History of World Population (Second
Edition). Blackwell Publishers.
McEvedy, C. and R. Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History.
Penguin Books.
Nakicenovic, N. 1987. “Technological substitution and long waves in the USA”
in T. Vasko (ed.) The Long Wave Debate pages 76-104. Springer-Verlag.
Perlin, J. 1989. A Forest Journey: The role of wood in the
development of civilisation. W.W. Norton & Company.
Schurr, S. H. and B. C. Netschert. 1960. Energy in the American
Economy 1850-1975. John Hopkins Press.
Smil, V. 1994. Energy in World History. Westview Press.
Tainter, Joseph A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Cambridge University Press.
Tranter, N. L. 1996, British Population in the Twentieth Century.
MacMillan Press Ltd.
United States Bureau of the Census. 1960. Historical Statistics of
the United States: Colonial Times to 1957.
United States Bureau of the Census. various editions. Statistical
Abstract of the United States.
Watt, K.E.F and Colin Campbell. 2000. “World Population, Past and Future”,
unpublished.
WEC (World Energy Council) 1995. Global Energy Perspectives to 2050
and Beyond. WEC, London.
Woods, J. W. 1998. “A theory of preindustrial population dynamics: demography,
economy, and well-being in Malthusian systems”, Current Anthropology
39:99-133.
Wrigley, E. A. 1988. Continuity, chance and change: the character of
the industrial revolution in England. Cambridge University Press.
Wrigley, E. A. 1994. “The classical economists, the stationary state, and the
Industrial Revolution” in Snooks, ed., Was the Industrial Revolution
Necessary? pages 27-42. Routledge.
Wrigley, E. A. and R. S. Schofield. 1981. The Population History of
England 1541-1871. Edward Arnold.
Zabel, Graham. 2000. “U.S. Bureau of the Census population projections: Are
they getting any better?”. Unpublished.
[1]
a term borrowed from evolutionary biology, and coined by well-known
scientist Steven Jay Gould who argues that evolution proceeds dramatically
in short bursts of geological time rather than at a constant rate.
[2]
Woods.
[3]
Boserup, Population and Technology, p. 3.
[4]
Boserup, Population and Technology, p. 46.
[5]
Boserup, Population and Technology, p. 109.
[6]
Smil, Energy in world history.
[7]
See for example Boserup, Population and Technology, p. 125 or
Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support?, p. 42.
[8]
BP Amoco, Statistical Review of World Energy 2000, p. 30.
[9]
Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population. p. 147.
[10]
Smil, Energy in World History, p. 253
[11]
Cohen, How many people can the Earth support?, p. 91.
[12]
Wrigley, “The classical economists, the stationary state, and the Industrial
Revolution”, p. 27-28.
[13]
The concept of energy eras, or energy long cycles (of approximately 50 years
and sometimes related to Kondratieff cycles) has been noted by several
observers. Nakicenovic (1987) lists the “age of canals” (1773-1840), the
“age of railroads” (1840-1895), the “age of electricity” (1895-1945), the
“age of oil” (1945-1995) and predicts a new energy era starting in the 1990s
and suggests that natural gas will be the best candidate. In this case the
first three “ages” are all based on the consumption of coal. See also Smil,
Energy in World History, p. 240-241.
[14]
Schurr and Netschert, Energy in the American Economy 1850-1975,
p. 511.
[15]
see Wrigley’s Continuity, chance and change.
[16]
for a very cogently argued explanation of these fluctuations, see
Hackett-Fischer, The Great Wave, p. 246-249.
[17]
Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, pg. 187.
[18]
quote from Perlin, A Forest Journey, p. 166.
[19]
many contemporary English observers expressed great concern at the
decimation of the forests. For an excellent account see Perlin’s A
Forest Journey, Chapter 10.
[20]
quote from Perlin, A Forest Journey, p. 186.
[21]
Boserup, Economic and Demographic Relationships in Development,
p. 35.
[22]
According to extensive research carried out by the Cambridge Historical
Demography group. See Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History
of England 1541-1871.
[23]
Wrigley, Continuity, change and change, p. 13.
[24]
Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, p. 54.
[25]
Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, p. 54.
[26]
Schurr and Netschert, Energy in the American Economy, 1850-1975,
p. 511
[27]
highest growth occurred in 1909. Calculated from population figures in U.S.
Bureau of the Census’ Historical Statistics of the United
States:Colonial Times to 1957 and subsequently for the U.S. Bureau of
the Census’ on-line International Database.
[28]
Hackett-Fischer, The Great Wave, p. 125.
[29]
Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, p. 90.
[30]
derived from McEvedy and Jones, Atlas of World Population History,
p. 342.
[31]
BP Amoco Statistical Review of World Energy, June 2000, page 30.
[32]
Boserup, Population and Technology, p.70.
[33]
Leslie, “Running Dry”, p. 40.
[34]
Zabel, “U.S. Bureau of the Census Population Projections: Are they getting
any better?”. Figures 1 and 2 on page 3 show that since 1975, future world
population projections have been consistently too high and over time they
show a marked downward trend. “It appears that the magnitude of the slowing
of the world’s population growth rate has taken forecasters by surprise and
continues to do so.” (p. 3).
[35]
WEC, Global Energy Perspectives to 2050 and Beyond, p. C1.
[36]
IEA, World Energy Outlook. Both table 7.12 (page 101) and table
7.18 (page 117) show a projected difference between oil demand (111.5
million barrels/day) and supply (92.3 million barrels/day) of 19.1 million
barrels/day by 2020 which they account for as Unidentified
Unconventional Oil – oil from currently unknown or uncertain projects.
[37]
see Laherrere, “World Oil Supply-what goes up must come down, but when will
it peak?”.
[38]
85 percent of the cash cost of producing ammonia comes from natural gas.
[39]
Jackson, “Renewable Energy: Summary paper for the Renewable Series”, p. 867.
[40]
Stewart L. Udall. 1980. in the forward to Catton, Overshoot: The
Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, p. xv.
[41]
Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change.
p. 29-30.
Return to top of page.
_____
Portion of PhD. thesis, London School of Economics
See original at Dieoff.org < www.dieoff.com/page199
>
