Using the alleged and often repeated number that the US coal reserves are sufficient to last for 500 years, Professor Bartlet exposes the fallacy of “sustainable growth” and how false and dangerously soothing ideas are propagated in the public.

Taking us back to the 1970′es, he analyses the responses and comments of the time to the energy crisis in order to determine how things could turn when it returns: It becomes rapidly obvious that “the experts”, the media and the politicians have no idea and do not understand the effects of growth.

Growth in the rate of consumption of a non-renewable resource, such as a fossil fuel, causes a dramatic decrease in the life-expectancy of the resource. In a world of growing rates of consumption of resources, it is seriously misleading to state the life-expectancy of a nonrenewable resource “at present rates of consumption,” i.e., with no growth. It is dishonest to promote growth in the rate of consumption of a nonrenewable resource while, at the same time, reassuring people about how long the resource will last “at present rates of consumption.”

The more optimistic the prediction, the greater chance that it is based on faulty arithmetic or no arithmetic at all.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy – 5

Sustainable Growth is a world class oxymoron.

Sustainable Growth is an insult to the intelligence of those that possess this rare quality.

An impossible theorem.

View also:

Sustainable growth, premises of an absurdity, part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.

Growth Is Not Development, Is Not Evolution – A distinction between growth, development, and evolution.

Fibonacci Spiral - Sustainable Growth

“I don’t believe that the exponential argument is valid at the local level.”

Really!? Arithmetic doesn’t hold at the local level and is dependent on the beliefs of “some” politician.

Let us review what we learned in part three:

Growth control is very controversial. The problem is that controlled growth just means growth!

Bacteria In A Bottle:

Characteristics of steady growth in a finite environment. A case of ordinary steady growth.

One bacteria divides to become two; the two divide to become four, the four become eight, then 16, 32, etc…

Suppose we have bacteria that double in this way every minute.

At 11:00am there is one bacterium in a bottle.

At 12 noon the bottle is full.

We have a finite environment of one bottle, and a doubling time of one minute.

At what time was the bottle half full?

At what time did the bacteria realize they were running out of space?

… 5 minutes before 12 noon, only 3% of the space in the bottle is occupied and 97% is just yearning for development; at that time, how many of you would be conscious that there is a disastrous problem coming right at us in the next 5 minutes?

Suppose that at 11:58 (2 minutes before disaster), some bacteria realize there is a problem and send out search parties for additional space… and by a stroke of impossible luck, they find 3 more bottles.

How long will these four bottles be able to sustain the rate of growth? (how much time, the collossal dscovery of 3 times more resources than previously available in history bought to the bacteria community? At what time are all 4 bottles full and disaster strikes?)

This type of steady growth is the centerpiece of the entire national and global economy. Think about it!

Fibonacci Spiral - Sustainable Growth

People write books and conduct seminars promoting the restoration of “sustainable growth” to save the world! How more moronic than that could that be?

Economists and politicians would have us believe that we can continue to steadily increase our consumption of fossil fuels, we will always be able to find more resources to fuel that growth. Let’s remember that the only thing that a politician ever learns after entering office, is the exercise of power!

“In the energy crisis, we have a classic case of exponential growth against a finite source.”

James R. Schlesinger – US Secretary Of Energy – April 25th 1977.

Fibonacci Spiral - Sustainable Growth

What time is it when the remaining reserves is 3 times the total of all you’ve used in all of history?

The answer is: it is 2 minutes before 12!

What time is it when the remaining reserve is equal to the total of all that you’ve used in all of history?

The answer is: it is 1 minutes before 12!

There is a belief that if you throw enough money at holes in the ground, oil is sure to come out! As half of the oil ever discovered has been consumed, i/e the remaining reserve is equal to the total of all that has been used in all of history: it is therefore one minute before 12! How likely are we going to now suddenly find more oil than has ever been discovered before?

Arithmetic, Population and Energy – 4

Sustainable Growth is a world class oxymoron.

Sustainable Growth is an insult to the intelligence of those that possess this rare quality.

An impossible theorem.

View also:

Sustainable growth, premises of an absurdity, part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.

Growth Is Not Development, Is Not Evolution – A distinction between growth, development, and evolution.

Fibonacci Spiral - Sustainable Growth

"Excuse me Sir, I am prepared to make you an attractive offer for your square."

This is part three of a series that exposes the idiocy that sustainable growth is the future of humanity. See the video at the bottom of the article.

Part two was about the use of semi log scaled paper where a straight line represents steady growth. Projections of future prices were made using a steady rate of inflation…

We saw that in 1986, the world population reached 5 billion people and was growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. The doubling time is 70 / 1.7 = 41 years; That means that at this “modest” rate the world population doubles every 41 years. In 1999, the world population reached 6 billion and we can calculate that the rate of growth has decreased to 1.3% per year… In spite of this reduction, the world population is still growing by over 80,000,000 people every year.

Should this reduced 1.3% population growth rate continue, the world population density would reach one person per square meter of dry land in approximately 780 years!

The lesson is that

ZERO POPULATION GROWTH IS GOING TO HAPPEN!

We can debate whether we like zero population growth or don’t like it, it is going to happen; whether we debate it or not, whether we like it or not, it is absolutely certain that people could not live with that sort of density on the dry land surface of the earth.

therefore, today’s high birth rates will drop & today’s low death rates will rise… till we have exactly the same numbers and zero growth. That will happen in a relatively shorter time compared to 780 years!

What sort of options are available if we wanted to address the problem?

As you can see, the options that make the problem worse are “as sacred as motherhood” and devoted to the humane goal of lowering the death rate, whereas the ones that solve the problem are generally considered distasteful and not considered…

However, zero population growth is inevitable and is going to happen! It is obvious that Nature is goint to choose from the right hand list and we don’t have to do anything… Except be prepared to “live” with whichever option nature choses to solve the problem.

Or we can exercise the one option that is open to us: that option is to choose first from the right hand list.l We have to find something that we can go out and campaign for…

Here is the human dilemna for its future; everything we regard as good makes the problem worse; and everything we regard as bad, helps solve the problem.

Education so far is also making the problem worse as it has not reduced the ignorance of the problem.

Nature is already choosing from the right hand column: we’ve all heard of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Africa…

At a 6% rate of growth as in the 70′es & 80′es, Boulder, Colorado, will, in 70 years, be larger than Los Angeles. It is obvious that Boulder valley cannot accomodate the population of Los Angeles; therefore Boulder population growth is going to stop. the only question is: Will we be able to stop it before it is wall to wall to wall and we are all choking to death?

The answer is we probably won’t! Boulder elected officials, as most other elected officials and the rest of the population have no idea and do not comprehend what is going on:

A 1960′es brochure promoting Boulder, reported that “Doubling its population in 10 years, Boulder… is indeed a stable and prosperous community.”

WHAT!?

A doubling of the population in 10 years is stable?

This is indeed an idiotic statement! They don’t even understand the meaning of the words they put down on paper!

But, isn’t a bigger city a better city? The beauty of population problems is that their consequences are already visible around us. Someone that is today 10 years old, will be 60 years old in 50 years; there is no changing that, it is ineluctable and “predictable” – one of those instances where the future is already there – For the price of an airplane ticket, one can easily see what Boulder will be like by going over to Los Angeles.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy – 3

Sustainable Growth is a world class oxymoron.

Sustainable Growth is an insult to the intelligence of those that possess this rare quality.

An impossible theorem.

View also:

Sustainable growth, premises of an absurdity, part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.

Growth Is Not Development, Is Not Evolution – A distinction between growth, development, and evolution.

What does it really mean?

This is part two of a series that tears to shreds the absurdity that sustainable growth and compounded interest are the future of humanity. See the video at the bottom of the article.

In Part One we learned that some human problems are tied to the exponential function which people mostly do not understand in spite of its simplicity. The exponential function describes the size of anything that grows steadily – for instance 5% per year. It is a situation where the time required for a growing quantity to increase by a fixed fraction is a constant. It is ordinary steady growth. If it takes a fixed length of time to grow 5%, then it follows that it takes a longer fixed length of time to grow by 100% – This longer time is called the doubling time.

The doubling time is calculated by dividing 70 by the % growth per unit of time; for instance, for a 5% growth per year, doubling time = 70/5 = 14 years.

doubling time = 70 / growth rate.

The number 70 is approximately 100x Ln(2) = 69.3 (if you wanted to know the tripling time, you would use the natural log of number 3, etc…) but it is not essential to know that, if you just remember the number 70, you’ll know more than 99% of the population. Now, every time you see a percentage growth in a news story, you are able to easily calculate what is the doubling time and make sense of it. For example, if you heard that something has grown 7% per year for a decade, you would not be alerted, right? However, if you saw that “crime has doubled in 10 years”, you might worry and wonder “what the heck is happening?”

You are now able to compare both a 7% increase over 10 years or the doubling of crime in a decade as being exactly the same propositions. Doubling time = 70 / 7 = 10 years —>anything that grows at a 7% rate over 10 years, doubles in size.

More generally, after one doubling time, the growing quantity is up to twice its initial size, two doubling times is 4 times the initial size, three doubling times is 8 times, four is 16 times, five 32 times, six 64, seven 128, 256, 512… After just 10 doubling times, it is 1000 times larger than when it started!

One other powerful property of a steady growth is that the growth in any doubling time is greater than the total of all the preceding growth. i/e every time that the growing quantity doubles, it takes more than all that you’ve used in all the preceding growth. This is what President Carter was referring to in his famous speech on energy in 1977:

…”and in each of those decades (the 1950’s and 1960’s) more oil was consumed that in all of mankind’s previous history.”…

President Jimmy Carter, April 18th 1977

Last, we learned of an easy to calculate consequence of a steady growth over the length of a human life time (approx 70 years): at 1% growth, the quantity would double over a human lifetime; at 2%, it would be 4 times larger in a human lifetime; at 3%, 8 times more; at 4% 16 times, 5% 32 times, 6% 64 times, 7% 128 times, etc… Hummm, as Einstein remarked on the power of compounded growth, he may have mis-estimated its consequences…

Most people have zero understanding of the consequences of the simple arithmetic of steady growth.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy – 2

Sustainable Growth is a world class oxymoron.

A “Sustainable Growth” is an insult to the intelligence of those that possess this rare quality.

An impossible theorem.

View also:

Sustainable growth, premises of an absurdity, part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.

Growth Is Not Development, Is Not Evolution – A distinction between growth, development, and evolution.

A “Sustainable Growth” is an insult to the intelligence of those that possess this rare quality.

An impossible theorem.

This is the first part of a 50 days long, tearing to shreds of the absurdity that sustainable growth is the future of humanity, series on TheTrimTab.

We start with a conversation with A. Bartlett from the University of Colorado that establishes the premises of our series:

Arithmetic, Population and Energy – 1

View also:

Sustainable growth, premises of an absurdity, part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.

Growth Is Not Development, Is Not Evolution – A distinction between growth, development, and evolution.

Please make sure that you have all reviewed The Crash Course prior to the event; and if you have 40 minutes, you can listen to an interview of Chris Martenson by Jim Puplava at the link listed below.

The full Crash Course can be accessed following the links below:

Crash Course Part 1, The nature of the crisis: 3 Beliefs; The convergence of Energy, Economy & Environment; ExponentialGrowth, Growth vs. Prosperity.

Crash course part 2, Money: What is money? How is it created? The Federal Reserve System & a brief history of US money; the true nature of Inflation.

Crash Course Part 3, The State Of The US Nation (and the world): Calibration for very large numbers. How much debt? A US failure to save. Assets and Demographics. Bubbles. Lies and fuzzy numbers.

Crash Course Part 4, Everything starts, and stops, with energy: Peak Oil; Energy Budgeting; Energy and Economy.

Crash Course part 5, Environmental data: The Shape Of Things To Come, or are we there already? Future Shock. What should I do?

Crash Course Bonus Audio: An Interview with Chris Martenson.

Looking forward to this week’s The Bucky Call special – please be on time.

The recording of this special The Bucky Call will be posted on TheTrimTab.com

Sun Kid's Drawings

If Peter from GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations ) is correct, a 200 miles square collects sufficient solar energy to power ALL human activity.

Let’s assume that:
1-    Distribution is not a problem. (either the grid does it, or better, the equipment is locally installed… GENI, cited above specializes in distribution)
2-    The 200 square miles takes conversion into account. (which I think it does)
3-    $10 per sq foot buys and installs the equipment needed.

200 sq miles = 1,115,000,000,000 sq ft x10$ = 11.15 Trillion Dollars

…Compare that to:

1-    The Outstanding Public US Debt as of May 19th 2009 = 11.30 Trillion $

US National Debt

2-    The US bailouts of King Henry, Buffoon Geithner & Ben Burnthebank’s friends so far = 12.80 Trillion $

With 6,000,000,000 people on earth, this makes for 180 sq ft per capita or 1,800 $.

Ahem! Is this too simple or are we too freakin’ dumb to get it done?

1. Earth surface is 5,488,289,081,985,940 sq ft (approx!)
2. 30% is land = 1,646,486,724,595,780
3. 50% receives enough sun = 823,243,362,297,890
4. The sun shines 50% of the time = 411,621,681,148,945
5. And only during the day (50%) = 205,810,840,574,473
6. 25% is suitable for solar equipment = 51,452,710,143,618
7. Another 50% is lost to whatever = 25,726,355,071,809

(I did the math from the surface of a sphere, but you can check the numbers at wikipedia; they add up closely enough not to waste time arguing.)

Divide that surface by what is needed now (1,115,000,000,000) = 23 times excess energy that can be easily harnessed with today’s technology. Yes, we are talking energy surplus.

Let me give you a few additional thoughts to ponder:

1. Energy = Clean Water = Food for all = … = … = Our choice of a future for humanity.
   My special salute to Dr Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe who started her keynote speech at the #futuresummit yesterday with “EAT YOUR WORDS” addressed to the KPMG Australia CEO that ignored Africa in his own speech earlier in the day; and generated an uncommon enthusiasm with her truth and integrity.
   (see also The Bucky Call,
2. Bucky Fuller calculated in 1980, that humans’ energy consumption was 1/500,000th of 1% of what our “conveniently located 8 light minutes away nuclear reactor (the sun) delivers every day. In other words, the sun’s energy “cash flow” is 50,000,000 times our needs (yes, that is 50 MILLION times).
3. In a world where Politics are established based on a Malthusian concept of inadequacy of resources, it may be time for the powers in place to either wake up to facts or to stop lying to us, by ignorance of deceit.
   (See 99 percent of humanity still believes in Malthusian concepts – see also The Bucky Call, Darwin anniversary special part one: The Reality of Natural Selection, and part two: Natural Selection and the Malthusian Principle or Competition for Limited Resources.)

I spent the last two days on twitter, following the live developments of the #futuresummit in Melbourne Australia; I will relate the experience in a soon to come article; however, I would like to share with you the micro-blogging of the above statement (a 200×200 miles square provides enough energy to provide all of humanity); it generated quite a few questions and enthusiasm… see for yourself:

200 x 200 miles square is enough to power all of humanity

Thank you for reading and thinking… Please leave a comment and let your friends know.

Reduced URL for this article:    http://bit.ly/17KAjG

J. P. Morgan of JP Morgan

…There were a number of individual bankers who went far beyond unwise banking practices and who, as individuals, took personal advantage of the information they had of individual depositors’ affairs and of their privilege as top bank officers to do truly inimical things to enrich their own positions. Few today remember that a half-century ago (note: this was written in 1980, about events that happened during the 1930s Great Depression) a number of New York and Chicago top bankers were sentenced into penitentiaries – the New Yorkers into Sing Sing – the senior partner of J. P. Morgan and Company, the president of the National City Bank, the president of Chase Bank. Everyone of them had been found to be doing reprehensible financial tricks. They were selling their own friends short. They were opening their friends’ mail and manipulating the stock market. They were manipulating everybody. They were way overstepping the moral limits of the privileges ethically existent for officers in the banking game, so a great housecleaning was done by the New Deal…

-Bucky Fuller, Critical Path, Legally Piggily.

Fast forward 80 years:

Jamie Dimon Of J.P. Morgan

…(about bankers) This is an enormously influential group of people, and 90 percent of that influence is being spent to gain powers and practices that the world would be better off without, it will be very hard to accomplish the kind of surgery that would be desirable for the wider civilization (…) Policy makers should seek to impose limits on banks that are deemed ‘too big to fail’ after financial institutions worldwide suffered more than $1 trillion in losses. The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the recession (…) We need to remove from the investment banking and the commercial banking industries a lot of the practices and prerogatives that they have so lovingly possessed (…) If they are too big to fail, they are too big to be allowed to be as gamey and venal as they’ve been — and as stupid as they’ve been…

-Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Vice Chairman, on Bloomberg TV.

The safeguards implemented at the time of the New Deal were removed by Bill Clinton and Lawrence Summers in 1999. I sometimes think we are collectively too dumb and ignorant and only get what we deserve…

Other (hand picked) related posts of interest:

• Illegaly Piggily: Are Bankers Lying To Us? A graphic representation of the subprime mortgage crisis, derivatives & securitization.
• Banksters and Black Swans – Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the arrogance and deceit of Bankers.
• Critical Path, Financial Crisis, Patterns

Crash Course – 11 – How Much Is A Trillion

During the Crash Course, you will often encounter numbers that are expressed in trillions. How much is a trillion?
A trillion is a very, very big number, and I think it would be worth spending a couple of minutes trying to get our arms around the concept. Make no mistake, we should not be lulled into complacency simply because it is too big to really get our minds around.
Keep this lesson in mind as we discuss the total accumulated debts and liabilities of the US, which are many tens of trillions of dollars.

***SPECIAL ADDITION*** Jess Bachman at wallstats.com has a really good artistic representation of a trillion dollars, (and a fascinating video of his work in progress); do not miss it.

Crash Course – 12 – Debt

Now we enter a new chapter of the Crash Course. With the background you’ve received thus far, you are now positioned to understand how the Three “E”s – the Economy, Energy, and the Environment – intersect and seemingly converge on a very narrow window of the future – the Twenty-Teens. The next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years.
For you and me, there are only two ways to settle a debt: 1) Pay it off or 2) default on it. If you have a printing press like the government does, a third option exists: 3) Printing money to pay for the debt. So what is debt, really? Debt represents future consumption taken today.
Our entire economic system, and by extension our way of life, is founded on debt, and debt is founded on the assumption that the future will always be bigger than the past. Therefore it is utterly vital that we examine this assumption closely, because if this assumption is false, so are a lot of other critical things that we may be taking for granted.

Crash Course – 13 – A National Failure To Save

If you’ve just seen the previous chapter on debt, then you might be wondering if either our savings or our assets are of sufficient quantity to make those levels of debt perfectly manageable. In this chapter I will present evidence that the United States has failed to save money at virtually every level of society and make the claim that the United States government is insolvent.
A personal failure to save has been reflected by a state and local failure to save, which are mirrored by a corporate failure to save, all dwarfed by a failure to save at the federal government level. And capping it all off is a profound failure to invest. All of these deficits lie before us and lead me to conclude that the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years.

Crash Course – 14 – Assets And Demographics

Our nation has a historic, never-before-seen level of debt and a historic failure to save. Along with debt and savings, one also has to consider assets. After all, does it really matter if you have no savings and a million dollars of debt, if you have assets worth 10 million?
An asset is an item of ownership that is convertible into cash. Assets comprise the total resources of a person or business, including such things as cash, notes, accounts receivable, securities, inventories, goodwill, fixtures, machinery, and/or real estate.
Debts are fixed, while assets are variable. When you take on a debt, there it placidly sits, growing larger until you make payments on it. Assets, on the other hand, are variable, sometimes gaining and sometimes losing value.

Crash Course – 15 – Bubbles

Along the continuum of irrational financial behavior, it can be tricky to tell the difference between a bubble, a mania, and mere touch of exuberance. A bubble is reserved for the height of folly, and history is rich with folly.
So how would we know that we’re in an ‘asset bubble’? What do they look like and what can we expect when one bursts? The Fed famously likes to claim that you can’t spot one until it bursts. But actually you can, and the definition is pretty simple.
Bubbles used to happen once every generation or so, because it took time to forget the pain from the damage. Today we are facing the bursting of a second major asset bubble, housing, spaced less than ten years from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. This is simply astounding and thoroughly unprecedented. It is the largest bubble in all of history and will probably be the most destructive. And it is happening right now.

Crash Course – 16 – Fuzzy Numbers

In this Crash Course video chapter called Fuzzy Numbers, you will learn how our official economic statistics are based on deeply misleading, if not provably false, data. Our economic recession, and possibly depression, can be partially explained by the extent to which we have chosen to provide ourselves with misleading economic data. Certainly if you share my concerns over stocks, bonds, and 401K holdings, or are a serious investor of any sort, you owe it to yourself to listen to this explanation of how wrong our measures of inflation and GDP really are.
In Fuzzy Numbers, we will examine the ways that our measures of inflation and Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, are flawed, using charts of inflation and GDP as well as other easy-to-understand graphics. This chapter will help you understand inflation and GDP and how our national obsession with misrepresenting them to ourselves has led us to the edge of a recession and possibly depression.

- Courtesy Chris Martenson.

The chapters of The Crash Course take over 3 hours to go through and give you an overall understanding; we have broken the learning down into 5 postings. This is the third installment. The first part explained the nature of the crisis, the convergence of an Economic, Energetic and Environmental crisis, and the distinction between growth and prosperity; in part 2, we reviewed the nature of money, money creation, the role of the US FED (Federal Reserve System), and a brief history of US money, and revealed the true nature of inflation. Next, in Part 4, we will move on to energy, peak oil, the role of energy in our society, and the improbable existence of civilization without energy; last, we will measure the impact on the environment, the coming shock, and engage in a discussion about what we can do and who we must be to change this course of events that humanity has unwillingly set for itself.

The other parts of The Crash Course can be accessed following the links below:

Crash Course Part 1, The nature of the crisis: 3 Beliefs; The convergence of Energy, Economy & Environment; ExponentialGrowth, Growth vs. Prosperity.

Crash course part 2, Money: What is money? How is it created? The Federal Reserve System & a brief history of US money; the true nature of Inflation.

Crash Course Part 3, The State Of The US Nation (and the world): Calibration for very large numbers. How much debt? A US failure to save. Assets and Demographics. Bubbles. Lies and fuzzy numbers.

Crash Course Part 4, Everything starts, and stops, with energy: Peak Oil; Energy Budgeting; Energy and Economy.

Crash Course part 5, Environmental data: The Shape Of Things To Come, or are we there already? Future Shock. What should I do?

Crash Course Bonus Audio: An Interview with Chris Martenson.

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