Can economies keep growing indefinitely

The story: The electric vehicle (EV) is a modern symbol of a world awakened to the challenges of unsustainability and climate change. But even “sustai

Can economies keep growing indefinitely

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• The story: The electric vehicle (EV) is a modern symbol of a world awakened to the challenges of unsustainability and climate change. But even “sustainable” technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and cost a lot environmentally.
• A perfect EV: For a “perfect” EV, it will be solar powered, efficient, reliable and affordable. But is it sustainable?

1. EVs powered by renewable energy (RE) may help reduce the carbon footprint of transport. But sustainability is not only about the carbon footprint but the material footprint also - the aggregate quantity of biomass, metal ores, construction minerals and fossil fuels used during production and consumption of a product.
2. The approximate metric tonne weight of an EV constitutes materials such as metals (including rare earths), plastics, glass and rubber. Therefore, a global spike in the demand for EVs would drive an increased demand for each of these materials.
3. Every stage of the life cycle of any manufactured product exacts environmental costs: habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and pollution (including carbon emissions) from extraction of raw materials, manufacturing / construction, through to disposal. Thus, it is the increasing global material footprint that is fundamentally the reason for the twin climate and ecological crises.

• How the world consumed: The global material footprint has grown in lockstep with the exponentially rising global economy (GDP) since the industrial revolution. This is because of huge consumption by the super-affluent in a socioeconomic system founded on growth without limits. Today, technological innovation and efficiency improvements are cited as ways to decouple growth in material use from economic growth.
• Limits to everything: The engine efficiency of airplanes has improved little for decades since they have long been operating close to their theoretical peak efficiency. There is a hard limit on the efficiency of photovoltaic cells (of about 35 percent) because of the physical properties of the semiconductors that constitute them. The power generation of large wind farms is limited to about one watt per square meter as a simple yet utterly unavoidable physical consequence of wake effects. The exponential increase in computing power of the past five decades will end by about 2025 since it is physically impossible to make the transistors on the computer chip much smaller. (already 5 percent of the size of the coronavirus)
• Physics helped, and Physics will limit: Some physical principles that allowed incredible technological leaps over the past 100 years also have limited them. Extensive recycling of materials may perhaps be the only way to offset efficiency limits. But while glass and metals can be recycled indefinitely without loss of quality, materials such as paper and plastic cannot be recycled indefinitely. And, recycling itself may be an energy- and materials-intensive process.
• The permanent link: It is impossible to decouple material use from economic growth. No country has really achieved a planned, deliberate economywide decoupling for a sustained length of time. Claims by the Global North to the contrary conceal the substantial offshoring of its production, and the associated ecological devastation, to the Global South. The proposals for 'ecocidal' deep-sea and fantastical exoplanetary mining are a consequence of a growth thought that refuses to accept these inconvenient truths.
• Summaray: To survive, manking will need to ensure resource use curves be simultaneously flatlined and all pollution curves simultaneously extinguished. Ecological integrity is being integrated, even with electric vehicles (EVs).

 

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