No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change

[GliderGuider]

Here is a paper by written Tim Garrett. an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. In it he treats the global economy as a thermodynamic system and examines the energy requirements and CO2 outputs in relation to it.

He claims to demonstrate several interesting things: that inflation-adjusted global GDP growth can be related to global energy consumption by a constant of about 10 milliwatts per dollar; that the Jevons Paradox (applied as a generalized indirect rebound effect) is real; that efficiency improvements won't help reduce CO2 emissions; and that CO2 emissions cannot be mitigated in the presence of a growing global economy.

Here are a few excepts of Garrett's paper (PDF). The emphasis is mine.

Abstract

In a prior study I introduced a simple economic growth model designed to be consistent with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional economic models, civilization is viewed only as a well-mixed global whole with no distinction made between individual nations, economic sectors, labor, or capital investments. At the model core is a hypothesis that the global economy’s current rate of primary energy consumption is tied through a constant to a very general representation of its historically accumulated wealth. Observations support this hypothesis, and indicate that the constant’s value is = 9.7 0.3 milliwatts per 1990 US dollar. It is this link that allows for treatment of seemingly complex economic systems as simple physical systems.

Here, this growth model is coupled to a linear formulation for the evolution of globally well-mixed atmospheric CO2 concentrations. While very simple, the coupled model provides faithful multi-decadal hindcasts of trajectories in gross world product (GWP) and CO2. Extending the model to the future, the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios substantially underestimate how much CO2 levels will rise for a given level of future economic prosperity. For one, global CO2 emission rates cannot be decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. For another, like a long-term natural disaster, future greenhouse warming can be expected to act as an inflationary drag on the real growth of global wealth. For atmospheric CO2 concentrations to remain below a “dangerous” level of
450 ppmv (Hansen et al., 2007), model forecasts suggest that there will have to be some combination of an unrealistically rapid rate of energy decarbonization and nearly immediate reductions in global civilization wealth. Effectively, it appears that civilization may be in a double-bind. If civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO2 levels will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv; but, if CO2 levels rise by this much, then the risk is that civilization will gradually tend towards collapse.

Conclusions

Another implication is that the commonly used IPCC SRES scenarios make unphysical underestimates of how much energy will be needed to be consumed, and CO2 emitted, to sustain prosperity growth. At the globally relevant scales, energy efficiency gains accelerate rather than reduce en-ergy consumption gains. They do this by promoting civilization health and its economic capacity to
expand into the energy reserves that sustain it.

Reductions in CO2 emissions can be achieved by decarbonizing civilization’s sources of fuel. But this has an important caveat. Decarbonization does not slow CO2 accumulation by as much as might be anticipated because it also alleviates the potential rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. If decarbonization leads to fewer climate extremes, then economic wealth is supported, and because wealth is tied to energy consumption through a constant, consumptive growth partly offsets the anticipated CO2 emission reductions. Ultimately, civilization appears to be in a double-bind with no obvious way out. Only a combination of extremely rapid decarbonization and civilization collapse will enable CO2 concentrations to be stabilized below the 450 ppmv level that might be considered as “dangerous”.

This paper is one of the first rigorous confirmations I've seen of something that many of us have only intuited until now: that GlobCiv 1.0 is in a "coffin corner" caused by the intersection of climate change and the economy, and the only way out is though a breakdown of the economy.