Paths to sustainability

Throughout the course Sustainability, Society and You run by the University of Nottingham under the FutureLearn banner I have struggled to reconcile the aspirations of the people of Asia and Africa with the resulting demand on the world's resources. If they follow the same path as Europe and the USA the result is unlikely to be sustainable. The best I can do is to pose the question: how do the majority of the world's population move to sustainability without going through their own industrial revolution?

World GDP/capita and energy efficiency - base case - wealth convergence by 2100

Here I'll develop a 'wealth convergence' scenario to act as a base case:

1. GDP/capita in Europe grows at the same annual rate between 2010 and 2100 as it did between 1870 and 2000. The analysis by Broadberry and Klein (1911) gives GDP/capita growth rates (% per year) as follows:

   Region	1870-1913	1913-1950	1950-1990	1990-2000
   NW	1.03	0.95	2.47	2.19
   S	1.15	0.73	3.39	1.57
   C&E	1.12	0.79	2.55	-0.47
   Total	1.08	0.82	2.72	0.96

   Northwestern (NW) includes Scandinavia, Benelux and the UK; Southern (S) covers countries bordering the Mediterranean including Turkey plus Portugal; Central and Eastern (C&E) includes Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Poland and the USSR.
   Since 1870 there have been times of boom and bust, of war and peace but there has been an increase in GDP per capita over the 130 years for all Europe which averages out at 1.5% per year. This is the figure that will be assumed for the remainder of the 21st century.
2. Every nation converges on European GDP/capita by 2100. This implies a slowing in the rate of growth of GDP in the USA compared to Europe but is unlikely to introduce serious errors for global GDP which by 2050 will be dominated by Asia who will be joined by Africa by 2100.
3. The trend in energy efficiency that was achieved by the USA in the last 200 years is achieved by all nations and maintained throughout the 21st century. The evidence from my posting on 16 January 2014 shows that between 1795 and 2005 the USA increased GDP/capita by a factor of 40 whilst increasing energy efficiency by a factor of 20. For my base case I will assume that this rate of improvement in both parameters will be sustained by all nations throughout the 21st century.
   R/R₀ = (W/W₀)^0.8where R is GDP/Mtoe and W is GDP/capita

Global carbon emissions

Carbon emissions since 2004 can be prepared at the World Bank website. The following graphs illustrate total and per capita carbon emissions for a range of countries:




China has already overtaken the USA as the biggest emitter and is continuing to steadily increase emissions. The big question is whether China will be able to hold its per capita emissions at the UK level or will follow the USA. Either way it's populations and their aspiration to be as wealthy as the West which will be driving emissions.

Climate change: challenges & solutions - plumbing the depths of my ignorance

Fascinating course and well-presented although raising more questions than answers given the depth of my ignorance.

I'm still confused by our ability to use a single temperature to characterise global climate.

I'll start with the last 50 years which has used very sophisticated ground and satellite based techniques for measuring the weather. Put simply I don't understand what methods have been used for averaging over the Earth's surface. Taking an extreme case: how are temperatures in the Himalayas accommodated? Do they contribute according to the area exposed to the atmosphere because that would be most appropriate for heat transfer and sublimation? Or is the area taken simply as that on a map, i.e. projected area? And if the latter, what allowance if any is made for altitude?

And tree rings presumably provide evidence on temperature and rainfall in the growing season but what assumptions have to be made about the rest of the year?

Ice cores go back millennia and provide evidence on relatively long periods of time so what assumptions are made about the variability within those periods?

Good discussions of these matters at: UEA FAQs and on the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies pages. Also some explanations at the latter site about how data from ice cores, tree rings etc etc are consolidated.

Poorest countries are not most energy efficient!!

There is an interesting Wikipedia article on energy intensity which presents the following plot of individual wealth v energy efficience (return) around the year 2000 for the world's top 40 economies:

This seems to suggest that there is some sort of 'boomerang' effect in which the least wealthy (least productive) countries generate the greatest economic return on energy consumed, i.e. the poorest seem to be the most highly energy efficient. Increasing wealth seems to be related to a reducing return on energy employed until reaching those countries where individuals are at least moderately wealthy (productive) at which point increasing wealth is associated with an increasing return on energy consumed.

Rather than a real effect is it possible that the 'boomerang' is caused by some artefact of the data being analysed? Wood is omitted from most energy budgets and this can be a major source of energy in some economies. For example, consider the USA from 1790 to 2006:

Once wood is accounting for it seems that the boomerang effect disappears and the US has been steadily increasing individual wealth while improving energy effectiveness, i.e. increasing the return on energy consumed.

What about a country like Bangladesh?

It seems that once wood is included in the energy consumption Bangladesh is not quite so highly energy efficient as we might have thought. Not only that but it exhibits the same trend of increasing individual wealth with improving the return on energy consumed.

So the poorest countries do not achieve the greatest return on energy consumed; increasing individual wealth is instead associated with increasing efficiency of energy use!

A few definitions

Before analysing GDP and energy demand it is necessary to give a few definitions. The descriptions of the following terms may not be universally agreed but they are essentially those that I used in my first posting although they have been modified to emphasise the approach that I will use in my next posts. For a given region:

• Energy demand (E) =
   Population (P) x Wealth (W) x Return (R)
• Wealth is GDP/person.
• Return is the GDP returned for each unit of energy employed.

World energy demand is simply a sum over each of the world's regions as follows. In my original work in 1989 I considered two regions, North and South, which was a convenient and politically correct way to categorise the developed (rich) and developing (poor) nations of the world. Twenty five years on and it is now more useful to group nations by continent:

• America
• Europe
• Africa
• Asia

Current and predicted populations for each continent have been considered in an earlier post.

My next post will consider a misconception about the efficiency with which energy generates a return in GDP.

World population

I recently came across a superb lecture on global population growth by the statistician Hans Rosling "Don't panic: the facts about population". Based on the latest UN data, populations in billions are predicted to be:

	2010	2050	2100
America	1	1	1
Europe	1	1	1
Africa	1	2	4
Asia	4	5	5
Total	7	9	11

There is uncertainty in these predictions, for example back around 2000 the UN predicted global population at 9 ± 1.5 billion by 2050, although it seems unlikely that they will be fundamentally incorrect unless there is a cataclysm.

What's changed since 2009?

A lot should have happened since my last posting in 2009 so I've decided to brush up my knowledge by taking the FutureLearn course "Climate change: challenges and solutions" run by the University of Exeter

Amongst the developments that I need to consider are:

1. Global warming has apparently levelled out and no one knows why.
2. World population shows signs of stabilising at around 11 billion by 2100.
3. The economies of China and India still grow rapidly and their populations aspire to Western standards of living.
4. Financing of major new projects has been badly hit by global recession.
5. Nuclear has had its Fukushima moment yet there are still sparks amongst the embers, including in the UK.
6. Thorium cycle has been touted as an inherently safer way to exploit nuclear power.
7. Fracking is the new kid on the block, bringing revolutionary change to US energy supply and potentially also to the UK.
8. Investment in renewables has proceeded apace.

I will take stock of the progress that has been made in the nearly quarter of a century since my original study in 1990 and have decided to extend my horizon to 2100 because 2025 is only ten years away and too immediate to consider major strategic options.

University of East Anglia Climate Disaster

Arguably the greatest damage to the credibility of scientists and the future of mankind has been achieved at a single stroke by the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Not only have raw data on world climate been destroyed in an unparalleled act of vandalism but the 'corrected' data have been massaged to portray a less ambiguous picture of the warming of our planet.

As a result, the reputation of all scientists has been tarnished and the value of many major infrastructure projects will be called into question. Decisions on energy production will now be based on wild political assertion rather than fact and scientists presenting the risks and benefits of competing energy systems will be dismissed for manipulating the facts to their own ends.

Perhaps it's time to consider going off-grid, seeking high ground and becoming self-sufficient?