The Limits to Growth Are Interplanetary

Full article in Palladium magazine.

For centuries, men have believed that rising wealth and population would soon deplete all available resources, causing mass death and social collapse. For centuries, they have been wrong. Predictions of imminent collapse have been a constant since Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus claimed that lowering birth rates would help prevent, or at least mitigate, this mass famine and suffering. His heirs say the same thing today. Today there are eight people for every man, woman, and child alive in Malthus’s day, and the eight eat better than the one. The days have passed when a bad winter in Europe or a megaflood on the Yellow River would cause starvation deaths by the hundred thousand. Now even the worst backwaters fear only “food insecurity” and fractional chances of stunted growth.

Claims of resource depletion and collapse have accompanied industrial society on every step from steamboats to container ships, from hot air balloons to Mars rovers. Of the many such arguments that have been put forward in our long history, the best was made in 1865, when William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question. This book argued that industrial society was eventually doomed because of the limited supply of coal for power. Because consumption grows exponentially and supply is finite, we will eventually run out of coal and be unable to power our machines.

It’s true that the supply of coal is finite. What Jevons missed, understandably in his own time, is that coal is not the only possible source of industrial power. When he published, effectively all industrial power came from coal. In 2023, this was down to 26%. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, the first oil-producing megacorporation, five years after Jevons finished his book. A century after Jevons’s argument, in the 1960s, oil finally surpassed coal as the world’s top power source. Today coal, oil, and methane gas each provide about a quarter of the world’s power, with coal providing a bit more power than methane gas and a bit less than oil.

Continue reading my full article in Palladium magazine.