Abstract
Climate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the contribution of inertia to future trends. Drawing from thermodynamic principles, and using 38 years of available statistics between 1980 to 2017, we find a constant scaling between current rates of world primary energy consumption [Formula: see text] and the historical time integral W of past world inflation-adjusted economic production Y, or [Formula: see text]. In each year, over a period during which both [Formula: see text] and W more than doubled, the ratio of the two remained nearly unchanged, that is [Formula: see text] Gigawatts per trillion 2010 US dollars. What this near constant implies is that current growth trends in energy consumption, population, and standard of living, perhaps counterintuitively, are determined by past innovations that have improved the economic production efficiency, or enabled use of less energy to transform raw materials into the makeup of civilization. Current observed growth rates agree well with predictions derived from available historical data. Future efforts to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions are likely also to be constrained by the contributions of past innovation to growth. Assuming no further efficiency gains, options look limited to rapid decarbonization of energy consumption through sustained implementation of at least one Gigawatt of renewable or nuclear power capacity per day. Alternatively, with continued reliance on fossil fuels, civilization could shift to a steady-state economy, one that devotes economic production exclusively to maintining ongoing metabolic needs rather than to material expansion. Even if such actions could be achieved immediately, energy consumption would continue at its current level, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would only begin to balance natural sinks at concentrations exceeding 500 ppmv.
Highlights
2 Thermodynamics of global economic value. Can these strictly thermodynamic concepts be linked to the economy expressible in financial terms? Suppose for the moment that they can, and that there exists a hypothetical global quantity expressible in units of real currency W that expresses the size of civilization and is presumed to be proportional to energy consumption and the civilization potential through a constant scaling factor λ: G ’ E 1⁄4 lW
This article identifies a persistent relationship between global energy consumption and cumulative economic production
Because current sustenance demands emerge from past growth, inertia plays a much more important role in determining future societal and climate trajectories than has been generally acknowledged, in the physically unconstrained models that are widely used to link the economy to climate [46, 47]
Summary
Like other biological systems [1, 2], the human economy interacts with its surroundings through flows of energy and matter [3, 4]. Recent growth rates of global primary energy consumption are approximately 2% per year (or equivalent to τlong ’ 50 years), so the implied difference between E and Esust is only about 0.01%. Civilization elements are not a purely additive summation of civilization “things” n Rather they represent a number of network nodes, defined in terms of people, firms, or nations that collectively enable work to dissipate energy at rate Esust. It follows from Eqs 8 and 13 that any long-term net convergence E is a surplus that can be partitioned between manufacturing more civilization nodes or increasing their average potential μ:. Through expansion of the physical interface at rate dn=dt with reserves of energy and matter, civilization grows, leading recursively to further expansion and higher consumption
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
