An Unfamiliar World
An Unfamiliar World
Last month’s post on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers worldwide. Nearly everyone alive today grew up hearing about the population boom; it requires a major shift in mental gears to adjust to the imminence of the population bust.
It fascinates me that so few people have grasped that this is happening, and even fewer have any sense of what it implies. I still field comments tolerably often from readers who are convinced that overpopulation is the biggest threat our species faces. (Admittedly most of those readers belong to my generation, and we grew up in a media culture saturated with such ideas.) That human population is near a peak and will be declining for centuries to come—not due to some sort of catastrophe, but for reasons of simple demographics—has not yet entered most people’s minds. It’s because the coming of population decline hasn’t yet shaped most people’s view of the future, in turn, that certain current events remain hopelessly misunderstood.
Let’s start with the demographic realities. It requires a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births on average per woman to maintain population at any given level; this is called the replacement rate. (That .1 is needed to account for the children who die before they reach reproductive age themselves, or who never reproduce for some other reason.) In 1970 the world’s total fertility rate was well above 5 live births per woman; now, it’s right around 2.3 and is falling steadily. Africa still has a total fertility rate of 4.1, down from nearly double that in the mid-20th century and still falling; but Asia and Latin America both have fertility rates of 2.0, North America (including Mexico) is at 1.8, and Europe is down to 1.6 live births per woman.
Some of the biggest countries are surprisingly far down the curve. India, the world’s most populous nation these days, is at 2.0, below replacement rate; China, second most populous, is at a stunningly low 1.1 despite recent efforts by its government to encourage births. The United States, third most populous, is at 1.7, and Malaysia, fourth, is at 1.8. Only with the fifth, Pakistan, do you get a rate that will sustain population growth, 3.3, and only with the sixth, Nigeria, do you get the kind of fertility rate the whole world had half a century ago, 5.1. Only six countries on the planet have a higher fertility rate than Nigeria does, while 187 have a lower rate. At the very bottom is South Korea, with a 0.8 fertility rate; if that stays unchanged, it will leave each generation not much more than a third the size of the generation before it.
The world’s population is still edging upwards—there’s always a delay between changes in total fertility rate and changes in population, because children have to grow up and reach reproductive age themselves before their numbers begin influencing population growth. Sometime in the decade or two ahead of us, however, the world will reach its all-time peak human population and begin to see sustained year-over-year contractions.
That’s already happening in some places. China made headlines earlier this year when its population came in 3 million people lower than the year before. Japan, Korea, and a fair number of European countries are already seeing population contraction so dramatic that it’s become a serious political issue. In a slightly more roundabout sense, of course, demographic contraction has also become a serious political issue in Europe and North America, because certain highly influential political and economic interests have been frantically promoting illegal mass migration from various countries into the United States and most of the nations of the European Union. There’s a very straightforward reason for this, which we’ll discuss in a bit.
Before we get to that, though, let’s talk about the basics. Why is this happening? Will it continue? And what are its consequences?
There’s been a vast amount written over the last three quarters of a century or so about the factors that cause human population growth rates to rise and fall. Much of that literature is pretty clearly pushing political, economic, or cultural agendas of various kinds, using the whole range of gimmickry that’s given the phrase “replication crisis” so much prominence of late. Thus it’s arguably more useful to come at it from a different angle: that of population biology.
We’ll start with some definitions. For any species in any given environment or set of linked environments, there is a maximum permanently sustainable number, which is called the carrying capacity. This isn’t fixed—it varies up and down with changes in the environment—but it tends to be fairly stable except in unusual circumstances. When the population of a species is below the carrying capacity of its environment, the population has room to grow. When it reaches the carrying capacity, the limits of the environment cut into further growth and tend to level it out.
That process isn’t always smooth. If the environment has a lot of variation, so that the carrying capacity rises and falls over the short to middle term, you very often see a boom-and-bust cycle in the living things in that environment. Animal populations in the ice-free portions of Greenland are a good example. Small variations in weather cause sharp changes in how much plant matter grows during the short snow-free season; populations of herbivores rise and fall dramatically as their food supply varies, and this drives equally dramatic swings in the numbers of predators that can support themselves on the herbivores. So the populations of lemmings and arctic foxes are always rising and falling in a whiplash fashion.
An even more dramatic version of this can happen when a species finds its way into an environment it had not previously reached. In this case, very often the species reproduces so quickly that its population shoots up past the carrying capacity of the environment. This is called overshoot, and it has two consequences. The first is that once the peak is past, the population of the species tends to decline very quickly. The second is that once it is in overshoot, the species tends to damage the environment and reduce carrying capacity below what it would otherwise be. In extreme cases this can send the species plunging straight to extinction; much more often, what it means is that population numbers drop steeply, level off at a small fraction of the peak, then gradually creep upwards again as carrying capacity regenerates.
As William R. Catton Jr. pointed out trenchantly many years ago in his book Overshoot, this is the situation the human population of Earth is in just now. The invention of fossil fuel-powered technologies and the breakneck extraction of fossil fuels that followed provided the industrial world with a resource base equivalent to ten spare planets. That was why population figures started rising in the nineteenth century and went into overdrive in the twentieth: all those additional resources temporarily boosted the carrying capacity of the planet to levels never before reached, and allowed our species to experience an immense population boom.
The crucial word in that last sentence, though, is “temporarily.” Technically speaking, fossil fuels aren’t actually nonrenewable resources—the Earth regenerates them from organic material buried in sediment—but the process takes tens of millions of years to go from dead fish to light sweet crude. In terms that mean anything to human history, in other words, once a bucket of coal, a barrel of oil, or a cubic foot of natural gas is burnt, it’s gone, and the time it’ll take for the Earth to produce another is on the same scale as the interval that separates us from the last dinosaurs. Since fossil fuels power the tractors, produce the fertilizer, fuel the trucks and ships, and provide energy and raw materials for nearly all of the food and other products that have allowed our planet’s population to balloon to between four and eight times the maximum figure for all earlier history, that’s not exactly a minor issue.
A long time ago, in what feels sometimes like a galaxy far, far away, I used to blog about this point quite a lot. This was in the heyday of the peak oil movement—the last sustained attempt to get people in the industrial world to pay attention to the fact that their lifestyles depend on finite resources and those resources are running up increasingly hard against supply constraints. The language of carrying capacity and overshoot was central to my blogging in those days.
Every time I talked about this, without exception, I fielded criticisms from two opposing viewpoints. On the one hand were the people who insisted that progress was invincible and surely sometime very soon, once the price of oil rose high enough, somebody would come up with some even more cheap and abundant source of energy to replace the ones we were wasting so extravagantly. On the other hand were the people who agreed that no substitute for oil would be found but insisted that the end of the fossil fuel era would be sudden and cataclysmic, a vast apocalyptic event that would crush industrial society in a matter of months if not days and cause instantaneous mass dieoff worldwide. It was somewhat odd, you have to admit, to find myself simultaneously denounced as a hopeless pessimist by one set of critics and a blind optimist by another set, but that was how it turned out.
Nearly two decades have now passed since world conventional petroleum production peaked and began a ragged decline. In retrospect, it’s clear that my critics were wrong and I was right. The price of oil, which was around US$10 a barrel at the turn of the millennium, is now fluctuating between US$70 and $90 a barrel. Countless attempted replacements for fossil fuels have been pushed onto the market; those that haven’t failed completely have become niche-market products making no noticeable dent in fossil fuel use. Meanwhile the great apocalyptic event that so many people loved to predict has pulled a no-show.
What happened instead is, ahem, what I predicted back in the day. As conventional petroleum reserves plateaued and began to lose ground, frantic efforts to find additional reserves were padded out by the breakneck extraction of inefficient, low-grade sources of liquid fuels—anything and everything that would keep fuel tanks filled, no matter what the cost or the consequences. That’s why the old technology of hydrofracturing was dusted off and applied to shale deposits across the United States, squeezing out a large but temporary burst of natural gas liquids and light oil, while Canada and Venezuela poured vast amounts of money and energy into digging up tar sands and extracting thick, high-sulfur gunk from them.
These were less useful than they seemed. It takes energy to extract, refine, and ship fossil fuels. Light sweet crude from shallow wells and good hard anthracite coal from shallow mines take very little energy to extract. In the case of the best grades of light sweet crude, this worked out to 1/3 of 1% of the energy in the oil having to be used to extract it—but those grades are rare now, because we pumped and burnt them all. The worse the grade, the more energy has to go into extracting and refining the crude oil, and the less energy is left over to do everything else that energy does in a civilization. While fossil fuel production has climbed steadily year after year, in other words, the availability of energy to society has faltered—and in lockstep, just as population ecology would predict, birthrates have fallen.
They’ll continue falling, too, because there is no energy source within reach of our species that can replace fossil fuels at the rate we’re using them. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, the Earth’s fossil fuel deposits were the largest concentration of easily accessible, highly concentrated chemical energy in the known solar system. Our species used them with reckless abandon, and built a vast array of technologies specifically designed to make use of their properties. Sure, it would have been possible to build an equally vast array of technologies to use some other resource, but we didn’t, and attempts to start making that happen in the 1970s ended up being scrapped in the decade that followed. So here we are.
The consequences of sustained population contraction are the stinger in the tail of our current predicament, because it wasn’t just our technologies that were designed around the short-term condition of rapid growth driven by abundant fossil fuel energy—so were our economies. It seems like simple common sense to most people nowadays that assets will on average increase in value, investments will yield a return, and businesses will make a profit. Stop and think about that for a minute, though. Why does this happen? Because the economy grows every quarter. Why does the economy grow every quarter? There are many reasons, but they all ultimately boil down to the fact that the population increases. With every passing year, there are more people joining the workforce, buying assets, making investments, and purchasing goods and services. Thus population growth is the engine behind economic growth.
To see this more clearly, imagine for a moment that population contraction was already under way. In the neighborhood where you live, there are fewer people who need to buy or rent a home this year than there were last year; there are fewer people shopping at the neighborhood stores, using the services of the neighborhood banks, working at the shops and factories, and so on. What happens to housing prices, rents, business profits, local tax revenues, measures of gross productivity, and the like? On average, they go down. Extrapolate that same process to your state or province, your country, and the world, and see how it works.
Now remember that housing prices, rents, business profits, local tax revenues, and the like don’t exist in a vacuum. In today’s world, all of them are used to prop up a vast hyperleveraged structure of investment and debt which gives the privileged classes of the modern industrial world their wealth and their influence. Your mortgage or rent payment, your purchases at the local grocery, and the sales tax the clerk adds to the bill are tiny bricks in a financial Tower of Babel soaring far beyond the dreams of skyscraper-builders—and it all depends on growth.
That’s why the global economy has been lurching and shuddering like a worn-out truck in recent years, and why the privileged classes of the modern industrial world have shed their former habit of remaining out of the limelight and are gathering at places like Davos to insist, in shrill and plaintive tones, that the world ought to do as it’s told. It’s also why these same privileged classes, through a network of nongovernmental organizations they control, are luring as many people as possible to migrate illegally to Europe and Anglophone North America. Why? Because if it weren’t for the ongoing flood of illegal migration, western Europe, the United States, and Canada would already be deep into population contraction, and the entire structure of power and wealth that depends on economic growth in those areas would have come apart.
It’s a temporary gimmick at best, and not just because illegal mass migration is generating a forceful political backlash in western Europe and Anglophone North America. The more potent issue is that birth rates are falling in the countries that until now have produced most of the immigrants. Mexico’s a good example. Mexico’s fertility rate right now is around 2.0 live births per woman, below replacement level. As a result, these days, Mexico provides very few illegal migrants to the United States; most migrants pass through Mexico from points further south, from countries that still have a temporary population surplus.
Exactly when there will no longer be enough migrants available to prop up the existing order of things is an interesting question. Doubtless frantic attempts will be made to get people to have more children; there have been plenty of attempts in that direction over the last century or so, and none of them has accomplished much, but I’m sure it will be tried again. Meanwhile demographic trends will keep sliding in the same direction because the forces driving them are not subject to political or cultural manipulation.
All this has consequences that are already being felt in various ways, and will be felt to a much greater extent in the years to come. If assets, investments, and businesses no longer yield a profit on average, the only people who will be interested in them are those who depend directly, in a nonfinancial sense, on those things: in an age of demographic contraction, the value of a house is that it gives you a place to live, the value of farmland is that you can grow food there, and so on. This is why, in the twilight years of every civilization, economic arrangements undergo radical simplification, refocusing away from the market economy and toward people producing goods and services for themselves and their neighbors.
It’s the transition from an obsolete economy of growth to the new economy of contraction that will likely generate the most colorful fireworks, though. We’ve already seen some of this by way of articles in the mainstream media shrieking that growing your own food is bad for the climate, and that people who take care of their own health instead of relying on a baroque and fantastically overpriced medical industry are evil conspiracy theorists. Notice the underlying tone of stark panic in these articles: it’s rooted in a cold realization that the process of radical simplification just mentioned is already picking up speed, and gently cutting the ground out from under the foundations of the existing order of society.
Disintermediation—the replacement of complex, overpriced webs of distribution by more direct exchanges between producers and consumers, or by labor in which the producer is also the consumer—is already shaping up to be an important trend, and it will become far more so in the years to come. Nor, I might add, will it be entirely voluntary. The accelerating crapification of goods and services in the corporate economy makes a good measure of just how much strain the current system is under; it would not surprise me at all if a growing range of goods and services simply stop being available to most people in the years immediately ahead. Learning to do things for yourself and for your neighbors may thus be a crucial habit to cultivate in the years immediately ahead.
We are entering an unfamiliar world, and habits such as the one just suggested will be among the few options that will make it possible to thrive there. In later posts I plan on talking about some of the other requirements of life in an age of decline.
Source: Ecosophia
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