Limits to Growth Redux

Every couple of years, an article comes out reviewing the performance of the World3 model against data, or constructing an alternative, extended model based on World3. Here’s the latest:

Abstract
This study investigates the notion of limits to socioeconomic growth with a specific focus on the role of climate change and the declining quality of fossil fuel reserves. A new system dynamics model has been created. The World Energy Model (WEM) is based on the World3 model (The Limits to Growth, Meadows et al., 2004) with climate change and energy production replacing generic pollution and resources factors. WEM also tracks global population, food production and industrial output out to the year 2100. This paper presents a series of WEM’s projections; each of which represent broad sweeps of what the future may bring. All scenarios project that global industrial output will continue growing until 2100. Scenarios based on current energy trends lead to a 50% increase in the average cost of energy production and 2.4–2.7 °C of global warming by 2100. WEM projects that limiting global warming to 2 °C will reduce the industrial output growth rate by 0.1–0.2%. However, WEM also plots industrial decline by 2150 for cases of uncontrolled climate change or increased population growth. The general behaviour of WEM is far more stable than World3 but its results still support the call for a managed decline in society’s ecological footprint.

The new paper puts economic collapse about a century later than it occurred in Limits. But that presumes that the phrase highlighted above is a legitimate simplification: GHGs are the only pollutant, and energy the only resource, that matters. Are we really past the point of concern over PCBs, heavy metals, etc., with all future chemical and genetic technologies free of risk? Well, maybe … (Note that climate integrated assessment models generally indulge in the same assumption.)

But quibbling over dates is to miss a key point of Limits to Growth: the model, and the book, are not about point prediction of collapse in year 20xx. The central message is about a persistent overshoot behavior mode in a system with long delays and finite boundaries, when driven by exponential growth.

We have deliberately omitted the vertical scales and we have made the horizontal time scale somewhat vague because we want to emphasize the general behavior modes of these computer outputs, not the numerical values, which are only approximately known.

Model Quality: the High Road

There are two ways to go about building a model.

  • Plan A proceeds slowly. You build small or simple, aggregate components, and test each thoroughly before moving on.
  • Plan B builds a rough model spanning the large scope that you think encompasses the problem, then incrementally improves the solution.

Ideally, both approaches converge to the same point.

Plan B is attractive, for several reasons. It helps you to explore a wide range of ideas. It gives a satisfying illusion of rapid progress. And, most importantly, it’s satisfying for stakeholders, who typically have a voracious appetite for detail and a limited appreciation of dynamics.

The trouble is, Plan B does not really exist. When you build a lot of structure quickly, the sacrifice you have to make is ignoring lots of potential interactions, consistency checks, and other relationships between components. You’re creating a large backlog of undiscovered rework, which the extensive SD literature on projects tells us is fatal. So, you’re really on Path C, which leads to disaster: a large, incomprehensible, low-quality model.

In addition, you rarely have as much time as you think you do. When your work gets cut short, only Path A gives you an end product that you can be proud of.

So, resist pressures to include every detail. Embrace elegant simplicity and rich feedback. Check your units regularly, test often, and “always be done” (as Jim Hines puts it). Your life will be easier, and you’ll solve more problems in the long run.

RelatedHow to critique a model (and build a model that withstands critique)

No, Climate Change CAN’T Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline

My award for dumbest headline of the week goes to The Atlantic:

Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline

A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere.

If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change. It could give people a decisive new tool in the race against a warming planet, but could also unsettle the issue’s delicate politics, making it all the harder for society to adapt.

Their research seems almost to smuggle technologies out of the realm of science fiction and into the real. It suggests that people will soon be able to produce gasoline and jet fuel from little more than limestone, hydrogen, and air. It hints at the eventual construction of a vast, industrial-scale network of carbon scrubbers, capable of removing greenhouse gases directly from the atmosphere.

The underlying article that triggered the story has nothing to do with turning CO2 into gasoline. It’s purely about lower-cost direct capture of CO2 from the air (DAC). Even if we assume that the article’s right, and DAC is now cheaper, that in no way means “climate change can be stopped.” There are several huge problems with that notion:

First, if you capture CO2 from the air, make a liquid fuel out of it, and burn that in vehicles, you’re putting the CO2 back in the air. This doesn’t reduce CO2 in the atmosphere; it just reduces the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere by displacing the fossil carbon that would otherwise be used. With constant radiative forcing from elevated CO2, temperature will continue to rise for a long time. You might get around this by burning the fuel in stationary plants and sequestering the CO2, but there are huge problems with that as well. There are serious sink constraint problems, and lots of additional costs.

Second, just how do you turn all that CO2 into fuel? The additional step is not free, nor is it conventional Fischer-Tropsch technology, which starts with syngas from coal or gas. You need relatively vast amounts of energy and hydrogen to do it on the necessary gigatons/year scale. One estimate puts the cost of such fuels at $3.80-9.20 a gallon (some of the costs overlap, but it’ll be more at the pump, after refining and marketing).

Third, who the heck is going to pay for all of this? If you want to just offset global emissions of ~40 gigatons CO2/year at the most optimistic cost of $100/ton, with free fuel conversion, that’s $4 trillion a year. If you’re going to cough up that kind of money, there are a lot of other things you could do first, but no one has an incentive to do it when the price of emissions is approximately zero.

Ironically, the Carbon Engineering team seems to be aware of these problems:

Keith said it was important to still stop emitting carbon-dioxide pollution where feasible. “My view is we should stick to trying to cut emissions first. As a voter, my view is it’s cheaper not to emit a ton of [carbon dioxide] than it is to emit it and recapture it.”

I think there are two bottom lines here:

  1. Anyone who claims to have a silver bullet for a problem that pervades all human enterprise is probably selling snake oil.
  2. Without a substantial emissions price as the primary incentive guiding market decisions about carbon intensity, all large scale abatement efforts are a fantasy.