Future thrills Some themes for an exciting future. Financial visibility in the US — who has the money, what are they up to?
Exponential growth is not sustainable — ever The world is finite. It is time to start planning as if we understand. Think man, think. And do. The transition has already started — and it was inevitable. See video with Albert Bartlett on YouTube Wikipedia says: The exponential function describes a relationship where a constant change in the independent variable gives the same proportional change in the dependent variable — e raised to the power of x.
Troy says:. August 23, at am. NASA, Worldwide crop and fisheries failure, devastating weather events and health effects would follow, the result of attempting continuous growth. An economy built on the premise of unlimited growth that cannot fundamentally provide for unlimited growth is doomed to fail. We live in a culture that prioritizes quick yet destructive short-term economic gain over methodical, sometimes tedious but resilient long-term gain.
Seeking out instant gratification and short-term satisfaction can no longer be tolerated. If there is any hope in creating a successful economy without continuous economic growth, we must reteach ourselves how to consume.
Students are entering the workforce with crippling student debt, unable to afford a house or provide for a family. Only when dissatisfaction with the system reaches an intolerable tipping point can the economic and political solutions gain enough public support to be implemented. Imagine educational systems and national movements that teach the youth how to think critically and strategically when navigating a world that bombards them with unnecessary temptations and empty promises.
Imagine the public demanding investment in the research and development of clean technologies, including renewable energy, that would eliminate reliance on energy sources that degrade our environment. Imagine the creation of a circular economy from the ground up, where households, businesses, and public institutions envisioning strategies for reusing their waste, so they no longer need to pay unnecessary expenses for disposal and replacement.
This makes a linear increase in her rate of consumption. She would empty the 1, gallon hot tub in 45 days. In Scenario III, her consumption doubled each day. This is an exponential increase in her rate of consumption. She would empty the 1, gallon hot tub in only 10 days. Below is a table showing the exponential growth scenario. In this case the amount of water removed from the hot tub is doubling every day, so the doubling period is one day. Notice that in each doubling period, more water was consumed than the total that had been consumed up to that point.
For example, on day five, 16 gallons were consumed, which is greater than the total amount of water that had been consumed up to that point 15 gallons. This will always be true for anything that grows at a fixed percentage exponentially. On the morning of the last day, more than half of the water still remained both in the hot tub and in the scenario with the oceans above and in one day more than half of the entire resource was consumed, which was more than had been consumed in total up to that point.
The following short video shows visually what happens when you consume any resource at an exponential rate. Exponential growth occurs when something increases by a fixed percentage every year. As a result, your earnings increase every year. So, the time it takes the amount to double is always the same.
There is an easy way to determine the doubling time for anything that is growing exponentially. Just take the number 70 and divide by the growth rate. Now you know how wealthy families get even wealthier. After a while, the investment will be growing by an enormous amount every year. It is this resource perspective that allows us to see why EVs may help offset carbon emissions yet remain utterly unsustainable under the limitless growth paradigm.
We have argued that the inextricable link between material consumption and GDP makes the infinite-growth paradigm incompatible with sustaining ecological integrity. Thus, while EVs constitute a partial answer to the climate question, within the current paradigm they will only exacerbate the larger anthropogenic crises connected to unsustainable resource consumption.
The real question is this: how do we transition to alternative economic paradigms founded on the reconciliation of equitable human well-being with ecological integrity? This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Chirag Dhara is a climate physicist and a research associate at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Vandana Singh is a professor of physics at Framingham State University working on transdisciplinary climate pedagogy. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options.
Go Paperless with Digital. Industrial era exponential rise in the use of primary and derived physical resources: cropland a , fossil fuels b , freshwater c , metals d , plastic e. Sustainability from a resource perspective: Exponentially rising resource use and pollution a and b are unsustainable. We define sustainability as flatlined resource use c and extinguished pollution d.
0コメント