Sometime around October 31, according to estimates by the United Nations, the world’s population reached 7 billion. The 7 billionth baby was likely a girl born somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. How, researchers and scientists are asking, can the earth sustain this kind of growth in the long term?
The Compass Summit, a conference now available on demand at FORA.tv, focused on just this question as well as other global challenges humanity faces.
Tom Murphy, associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, in his program “Growth Has An Expiration Date” asked, can society continue to grow and flourish and not outpace its own resources? “We expect growth in our everyday lives, and so did our ancestors,” he said. However, our society’s growth is tied to how much energy we can produce and ultimately sustain. “We are physical beings in a physical world and fundamentally we rely on a base of energy to keep going,” he said.
Do We Have the Energy To Continue Growth?
Even though we’re currently developing energy-efficient technologies, from computers and telecommunications infrastructure to automobiles and airplanes, Murphy said we shouldn’t expect human growth to continue unabated without severe consequences. “We have all this hubris that technological advances will be able to keep up with the number of people on the planet, when in fact we should be more humble about what the world will look like 200 years from now.”
While the United States makes up 2 percent of the world’s population, it consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s current energy production. If we want everyone in the world to live like Americans then the amount of energy needed to sustain that growth dwarfs the world’s entire fossil fuel production by a factor of ten. Based on this alarming data, Murphy asks: “Is the concept of sustainability even an option?”
The world economy has been growing at 2 percent a year since the industrial revolution, and there will come a point in the not-so-distant future when the energy needed to sustain our world will equal the amount of energy produced by the Sun. Murphy believes that the larger hurdle for business leaders and governments is to abandon the concept of “growth” and instead focus on the idea of a “steady-state economy”—one that continues to advance our knowledge and understanding of the world without exceeding Earth’s ecological and natural resource limitations.