How long can humans survive? TC

Link: How long can humans survive? - UnHerd Please see link above for source text, embedded hotlinks, and comments.

How long can humans survive? This time of plenty won't last for ever Tom Chivers January 17, 2022 In the deep ocean, occasionally, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. Most of the time, in the state of nature, creatures have just about enough to survive. But the first creatures to find the whale have more food than they could ever eat. These scavenger live lives of extraordinary plenty — some of the smaller, faster-breeding species might do so for several generations. There is enough to go around a thousand times over. For a while.

Whale carcass with sharks approaching And then the whale is gone, and the creatures go back to their lives of crushing pressure, constant darkness, and an eternal knife-edge struggle for survival. As Thomas Malthus had it in his bleak vision: organisms, which increase exponentially in number, will rapidly outgrow their resources, which can only grow arithmetically. So of course, the excess population which has grown up on this brief glut must die off 1

We are currently living in a time of whalefall, suggests the scientist Vaclav Smil in his new book, How the World Really Works. He doesn’t use the word, of course: credit for the macabre whale metaphor must go to Scott Alexander. But modern humans are animals, products of evolution like any other, and yet we noticeably do not spend every minute of every day struggling to get the material required to survive. Instead, we build cathedrals and watch football, we make art, we waste time on Twitter. And that is because we live on the gigantic, blessed whale carcass that is our fossil fuel inheritance.

For Smil, our discussions about climate and energy are hamstrung, because so few people actually understand how the world really works. Material lands in front of us in pre-packaged, convenient forms — shrink-wrapped pork chops, winter strawberries, lights that turn on when you flick a switch, phones made of plastic and metal. The world is a set of black boxes that we use but, in most cases, do not understand. So when we say “we need to cut back our carbon emissions”, most of us don’t really grasp the implications of doing so.

But somehow, all these incomprehensible processes are keeping us alive, and we should find it astonishing that they are able to do so. The demand for material – for energy and nutrients – is greater than it has ever been. The world’s population has exploded: in 1800, there were about 1 billion humans. In 1950, there were 2.5 billion. Now there are 7.7 billion. In my parents’ lifetime, the number of humans alive has trebled. But amazingly, the amount of material available to each of them has increased even more, and that is in large part because of our use of fossil fuels.

In 1800, almost all the energy used globally was in the form of human and animal muscles, for mechanical work, or plant matter, burned for heat and light. Coal, the first widely used fossil fuel, was just starting to be used in steam engines in the UK, but it was negligible overall. By 1900, fossil fuels were the source for half our energy. By 2000, they were the source of 87%.

And as a result, our lives have been transformed. The amount of energy available to the world has increased 1,500-fold. That is only part of the story, though: increased energy efficiency means that the gain in useful energy is more like 3,500 times. And even though the world’s population has gone up many times, “an average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century”.

But most of us don’t realise how that energy is actually used. A large percentage, for instance, is used to create four materials which are the building blocks of modern society – materials which are so ubiquitous that we barely notice them, even as we depend on them.

Smil identifies these four basic pillars of human civilisation as steel, cement, plastic and ammonia. Producing them takes enormous amounts of fossil fuels. It takes, for instance, 25 gigajoules of energy to produce one ton of steel, roughly twice the amount of energy used by the average UK household per year. In 2019, the world used 1.8 billion tons of steel; its production is responsible for about 8% of the world’s total carbon 2

emissions. But we can’t do without it: the frameworks of our cities are built of it; the pipes we send our water and gas through, too. Our cars, our transporter ships, our knives and cooking pots. Our machines for making all these things. Cement and plastic are similarly vital, and are responsible for comparable amounts of our total carbon output. We can’t do without them, and there’s no easy carbon-free alternative way of making them.

And then there’s ammonia, which rarely features in any conversation about cutting carbon emissions. Ammonia is a nitrogen atom ringed by three hydrogen atoms. Our atmosphere is 80% nitrogen by mass, but plants – which need it for growth – can’t easily take it out of the air. Instead they need to gather it from the soil. Bacteria that live in the roots of some plants can “fix” it into the soil; animal wastes like manure have relatively high nitrogen content. But those methods can only support a certain amount of growth.

In the beginning of the 20th century, a German chemist called Fritz Haber invented a process for getting nitrogen out of the air by making ammonia. It requires huge amounts of energy, and hydrogen, usually taken from natural gas. We now spread hundreds of millions of tons of ammonia on our fields — about 50% of the total nitrogen going into food production comes from it. Smil quotes an author, writing in 1971: “industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”

This means the world is able to eat. The share of the global population that is underfed has plummeted, even as the actual population has ballooned – about 65% of people could not get enough to eat in 1950, compared to about 9% in 2019. So, “in 1950 the world was able to supply adequate food to about 890 million people,” as Smil puts it: “but by 2019 that had risen to just over 7 billion”. That is not entirely down to ammonia, but ammonia is a large part of the story. If fertiliser were removed, perhaps half the world’s population would starve.

Agriculture, then, depends on the whalefall: the glut of energy provided by fossil fuels.

Our deep reliance on fossil fuels, to create materials most of us don’t appreciate we need, is unnerving. Especially when Smil points out that much of the world — notably, sub-Saharan Africa — lives on well below average levels of energy use. Africa uses just 5% of the world’s total ammonia supplies, despite having almost 25% of the population.

About 40% of the world — 3.1 billion people — has a per capita energy supply “no higher than the rate achieved in both Germany and France in 1860”. “In order to approach the threshold of a dignified standard of living,” writes Smil, “those 3.1 billion people will need at least to double — but preferably triple — their per capita energy use.”

Can we do that while also reducing our carbon emissions? Not fast, says Smil. For all the boasts and pledges — all the “government targets for years ending in zero or five”, about which Smil is very sniffy — the world relies too heavily on fossil fuels, for too many things, to rapidly stop using them. Even the International Energy Association’s optimistic “Sustainable Development Scenario” projects that the share of fossil fuels in the world’s energy mix will only drop to 56% in 2040.

3

We can, and need to, replace fossil-fuel energy sources with renewable ones. But there are obstacles, beyond simply the political will. Renewable energy is very good at making electricity. But electrical energy isn’t ideal for making the incredible heat needed for iron and steel production, or cement. The Haber process for making ammonia works much more efficiently with natural gas as the source of hydrogen and energy than it does with water and electricity.

Away from the four pillars, fossil fuels have other huge advantages. It’s very energydense: you can store more energy in a kilogram of kerosene than you can in a kilogram of battery, meaning that transatlantic flights are possible. And it keeps. Currently, there is no suitable way of storing electrical energy for more than a few hours or days, so solar energy stored up in summer is no use in winter. A barrel of oil will last indefinitely.

Those facts will change, and Smil is more downbeat than I am about how quickly that will happen, but we are definitely going to be relying on fossil fuels for some decades yet.

But unlike the crabs and hagfish that eat the fallen whale, we are clever, and we needn’t simply slink back into the darkness and starve. Smil thinks there are major gains in efficiency which can be had, over and above the enormous gains so far. He points to water use as an example: in 2015, the US only used about 4% more water than it did in 1965, but in the meantime, its population had gone up by two thirds actual per capita water use has dropped by 40%, even while the country has got richer and better fed.

Perhaps similar efficiencies can be found with energy and carbon.

Besides, we are not about to run out of whale, at least not imminently: the raw materials — metals, fuels — that our lifestyle needs are still around in large amounts. But we have grown in numbers and lifestyle well beyond the capacity of the pre-whalefall world. And we don’t want to go back to the lifestyle we had before, even if some romantics and millenarians might disagree. In fact, we want many more people to enjoy the spoils of whalefall. We have used fossil fuels to construct an astonishing world, one that feeds and houses an incredible number of people.

We need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and the sooner the better. But it will be a long and difficult job — as Smil demonstrates, they are threaded through our society at every level, entwined like knotweed in the systems that provide our food, our housing, our machinery, our transport. We forget how complex our society is until it stops working in some way — as when supply chains broke down in the pandemic and our hospitals ran out of rubber gloves (an issue Smil talks about in a section on globalisation). As it stands, if we were to reduce fossil fuel consumption by the sort of degrees that some demand, it would lead to disaster, because we haven’t unpicked the threads yet.

4

Comment by John Shanahan, allaboutenergy.net, USA: This is an excellent discussion of the importance of fossil fuels and the writing of Vaclav Smil. The website allaboutenergy.net, supports carbon dioxide as the molecule of life, fossil fuels and their by-products that created the modern world in 220 years and China in just 50.

For us, there is only one reason to slow down use of fossil fuels. Stop wasting fossil fuels on applications that don’t really serve a good purpose in the long run. Example: about one billion automobiles, many with only a single occupant, stuck in crawling commuter traffic morning and evening for a total of one to three hours per day. With better design of cities, residential areas, and work locations, commuter travel could be reduced for a billion cars from 30 to 70 miles down to 5 to 20 miles total per day. Design could also include facilitation of using electrified mass transportation powered by nuclear power plants like is done now in France. Fossil fuels are a precious resource for energy and their many by-products that will be very difficult to replace any time soon.

We support nuclear power, nuclear medicine, nuclear technologies of all kinds for peaceful purposes. We support fission using uranium and thorium. It can power all the world’s energy needs for as long as people will live on Earth. We support many different sizes of nuclear power plants for different market needs. We support fusion nuclear power, should it become commercially available.

Radioactive waste from nuclear fission can easily be managed and produces much less volume than waste from other energy sources.

Comment by Marty Cornell, The Right Climate Stuff, USA: Chivers states what is obvious to anyone who gives energy more than a cursory though, but, of course most people are happy recipients of low cost and abundant products of energy, unaware of its important role in their lives.

However, Chivers states as fact the need to move away from fossil fuels or fossil-based plastics (not a fuel): •

“We need to wean ourselves of fossil fuels”…. To which I ask, “why?” If his answer is that fossil fuel reserves are finite, then I agree. If it is because he accepts the false premise that industrial CO2 emissions impact the climate in a meaningful way, then I suggest he needs to look much more closely at the empirical evidence.

•

“We can, and need to, replace fossil-fuel energy with renewable ones”. … To which I again ask, “Why?” If he now includes nuclear as renewable energy (which is not a technically correct characterization), then I agree with him. But of course, outside of those profiting from the climate government-industrial 5

complex, there is no justification for wind or solar, in fact their impact on the environment is negative.

Chivers gives credit to the tremendous positive impact of ammonia on the world’s food supply, but no credit to CO2 fertilization nor the positive impact of higher levels of atmospheric CO2 on water use efficiency. Most of our greening biosphere is not ammonia fertilized.

Comment by Don Bogard, The Right Climate Stuff, USA: As societies become increasingly complex and "comfortable", an increasing amount of energy is needed to sustain and advance them.

But another factor underlies modern society -- the many layers of simpler technology that support higher technology levels. And for each technology level a greater amount of energy was required to develop it.

An interesting question is IF modern technology were destroyed, could it be rebuilt as before?

We have seen sci-fi movies where the group of humans saved from disaster walk onto remains of the destroyed civilization, ready to rebuild as before.

But even with the knowledge of what can be done to rebuild, does the capability exist??

Take Energy. Initially humans obtained energy from burning wood. 400 years ago the eastern half of North America was almost fully wooded and Europe was the same 2500 year ago. Most of those trees have been cut. Further gone with those trees are abundant game often used for food. A small population might be supported, but the current world population not.

Take Metals. Metal use began with silver, copper, and tin (bronze) and progressed up through iron to steel. Increasing energy is required to extract this progression of metals from their ores.

Further, the near surface, easily processed metal ores have been found and used. Remaining metal resources are more difficult to obtain requiring more energy.

Take Fossil Fuels. Like metals, the near-surface, easily extractible coal and oil has been recovered and used, and much energy has to be expended today to extract fossil fuels. As the article you posted said, fossil fuel (mainly gas) is used as raw material for all kinds of things, from plastics to chemicals. If a society stripped of its existing technology (but not its knowledge of that technology) does not have ready access to the raw materials, how would it re-build its past technology? Back to whale oil?

6

Although a small population might be able to "start over", a large population (say billions) could not. It would be even more difficult to rebuild modern technology from scratch than it was before. That is both the blessing and the curse of abundant energy.

Comment by Eric Jelinski, mechanical, chemical-nuclear engineer, research in agriculture, soils, food nutrition value, Canada: Many, many years ago, another high school experiment was to first culture some common bacteria in a petri dish with agar. Once the bacteria samples from a tiny swab had grown to a say ¼ inch or so on the agar plater, I applied various concentrations of penicillin solution covering the colony of bacteria. This was to quantify the effectiveness of penicillin concentrations.

Extra petri dishes were kept also incubated without penicillin to enable the bacteria to grow without obvious interference. Their food supply was the agar gelatine and those bacteria was expected to grow exponentially quickly to cover the entire petri dish.

However, we observed that the bacteria stopped its growth, receded and died. Why? Answer; the bacteria suffocated in its own waste. You can google scholar the literature.

A sombre analogy for humans perhaps that we may “drown in our swill”.

I offer a rude awakening; as a farmer we know soil fertility is on the decline, hence food nutrition is on the decline. In north America, our food today is only on average about 50% nutrition compared to when the land was first intensively farmed.

Books have been written, civilizations grow and decline based on food nutrition. Armies (soldiers) of the past could only fight if well fed and would lose if food was lacking in nutrition. The growing trend of obesity, cancer, autism in north America is not due to lack of food, but food lacking proper nutrients for healthy bodies. This is why the virus first picks off the co-morbid vs those who supplement diets with additional vitamins and minerals. Further studies in food nutrition shows us that for a list of very common fruits and vegetables may have regional differences in nutrition 10’s or more times different or lacking nutrition. Ref https://www.bionutrientinstitute.org/reports It is not really a question of how many people can the earth feed.

The question is pointed at individuals and governments how to ensure maximum nutrition.

The answer to the above is ‘written on the wall’…ie. the governments of the past two years have done nothing to enhance nutrition as a means of reducing mortality from covid…Nothing at all.

Pills and needles are not the answer, will never be a silver bullet.

7

After two years of lives/time wasted, I believe we are coming around to agreeing to natural immunity as the only defense.

Quality of life depends on cleanliness. Romans built bath houses. Clean water systems built even centuries ago basically eliminate all waterborne diseases. Sewage systems eliminate bacterial diseases at the back end to keep the water intakes free of diseases.

The above are the keys to survival.

Comment by Hayden Eastwood, subscriber to UnHerd, Europe: To me the interesting point, once again, lies with Africa. Someone working in food security told me that Africa is still a net consumer of food.

This should worry everyone because the continent is due to grow from 1 billion to 4 billion by 2100. It is the only continent undergoing explosive growth in this century.

Even Asia will stabilise in population by.2050 (China itself is due to start a population decrease by 2026).

Why is Africa a net consumer of food, despite sitting on the largest most fertile land mass on the planet?

In my observation this is due to 4 reasons. The first (already stated) is the reality that populations on the continent have doubled every 25 years for the last 100 years. This poses major logistical challenges for any country. I very much doubt the UK would be able to feed a population growing to 120 million by 2035.

Second, political factors. Zimbabwe, a typical example in the region, no longer allows private land ownership. In this way, the “land reform program” took land with private title and returned it to the state, which had neither the desire nor the knowledge to organise large scale agriculture.

Peasants do not own their land, so they have no ability to raise capital for farming. Low inputs destine farmers to low outputs.

The third factor is cultural. I know one person attempting to introduce modern farming practices to some rural farms. The trial has been successful in improving yield, but resulted in neighbouring farmers accusing the successful farmer of witchcraft, and thereafter burning her crop to the ground.

In a region where notions of enlightenment causality do not exist, and in which destiny is assumed to be the outcome of the capricious whims of ancestors and witch doctors, it is no wonder that scientific farming practices have little uptake.

8

Finally, the environment is being ravaged in ways that most Westerners are utterly unaware of. I spoke to an ecologist who had returned from the Sahel region near Niger, where there is a national park in pristine condition. The only difference between that national park, home of trees, grasslands and rare large mammals, and the desert that exists across the boundary to it, is humans. Niger exists because it is a food aid colony and for no other reason. It cannot support itself. Few people realise the extent to which arable land on the continent is being turned to desert by slash and burn agriculture.

Nigeria is scarcely the size of Texas but holds 220 million people. This number will grow to 700 million by 2100. With no extraordinary revolution in agriculture, it is likely that 500 million people will be locally displaced, causing political and economic instability both regionally and internationally.

In my view, the demographic explosion in central Africa will be the biggest driver for social and political conflict in our lifetime. And yet, there is very little interest in discussing this, much less finding solutions to it.

Migration to Europe from Sub Saharan Africa is already a driver of political changes in Europe, and this will only accelerate as states in Africa fail under the weight of demographic explosion and weak government.

So, the question really should be – how long can Africa survive with its current combination of political and social institutions? And, how long can the rest of the world survive with the results of those institutions?

Comment by Marty Cornell, The Right Climate Stuff, USA: It is, perhaps, helpful to be reminded of the Malthusians who constantly warn of unstainable depletion of resource, i.e. the early calling out of supposed existential threats to mankind. Foremost is the Club of Rome, founded in 1968, with the premise that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of resource depletion (Limits to Growth, 1972). Their solution was (is?) a uniform global governance, i.e., totalitarianism. I am surprised that this group is still active.

And then we have that ultimate pessimist, Paul Ehrlich, who’s 1968 book The Population Bomb that prescribed population control to prevent mass starvation. Ehrlich, and his disciple, John Holdren, lost their 1980 bet with Julian Simon that the future scarcity of resources in an increasingly polluted and heavily populated world would cause the price of five key metals to be higher in 1990. For his track record of being consistently wrong, Holdren was awarded the position of Obama’s scientific advisor, where he provided the foundational basis for Obama’s, and now Biden’s attack on fossil fuels.

All this prediction ignores the evidence over the ensuing 50 years that, as the global population has grown to over 7.5 billion, true poverty and starvation have been slashed, 9

and rising global wealth has enabled the creation of infrastructure that provides clean water and sanitation and resilience to extremes of weather and tectonic events. We have all seen that Lomborg chart of the precipitous drop in weather-related deaths since 1900. And a condition for this wealth creation was low cost, abundant, and reliable energy to power our machines and condition our buildings. This wealth also provides the means to clean up pollution.

But wither bound future population growth and resource depletion? I note that as human wellbeing increases in a society, their birthrate declines. Note that the current fate of highly developed economies without an influx of migrants is a declining population.

Also note the footprint of agriculture lands diminish with higher productivity due in part to ammonia and CO2 fertilization and to genetic modification. The literature that I read does not support the contention that these food crops have any significant diminished nutritional value, in fact in several cases the opposite is true (yellow rice for example). The plant does not care where its nitrogen comes from, there is no significant difference in the nutritional value of an “organic” or synthetically fertilized and insectprotected food plant, except for the price of course. Yes, tillage practices can be optimized to enhance nutrient content. But a balanced diet, as is accessible in developed economies, is not a high hurdle to obtain. Once the inane practice of growing biofuels is ended, even more land will become available for food production, or, as is the case in Western Europe, returned to forest.

And once the inane practice of forced use of low energy dense wind and solar for electricity generation is ended, the world will move on toward nuclear power. Fossil hydrocarbon use can then be used for the most valuable applications like pharmaceuticals and high-performance polymers.

The survival of humanity will not be determined by resource depletion, despite what Ehrlich and Holdren say. The world is not a constrained petri dish.

10