The Delusion of Decoupling Economic Growth from Environmental Impact

Population DenialismDegrowthTechnological Fundamentalism

Aug. 5

In this episode, we chat with Dr. James Hopeward, an environmental civil engineering professor at the University of South Australia. We explore the limitations of conventional economic growth models and their environmental impacts, emphasizing the need for more holistic and ecologically grounded engineering practices (and cultural beliefs).

Highlights include:

Why decoupling economic growth from energy and material use relies on temporary efficiency gains and ultimately fails in a growth-based system, rendering the concepts of absolute and relative decoupling meaningless;
How the IPCC treats economic and population growth as exogenous to its modelling scenarios, and has therefore both overestimated fossil fuel supplies and underestimated catastrophic social and ecological outcomes resulting from overshoot;
Why understanding exponential growth was a crucial lesson for James and is now a key part of his engineering curriculum;
Why future infrastructure projects must prioritize climate resiliency;
Why the significance of population issues within environmental and degrowth movements must be urgently elevated to minimize further overshoot-related harm and suffering.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

James Hopeward 0:00
When we talk about decoupling in terms of the definition, people talk about breaking the link between economic growth and environmental impact. So if we could grow the economy and not have any environmental impacts growing at all - in fact have them shrinking down to sustainable levels - that would be what they call absolute decoupling. If we talk about energy, energy is required for our economy. So we can't have absolute decoupling. So they use a sleight of hand, and they pull out this term, relative decoupling. Now relative decoupling means that the economy is growing faster than the underlying impact. So if the economy is growing at 3%, and your energy consumption is growing at 2%, they say, Oh, we've relatively decoupled. I like to use the metaphor of changing gears in a car. I'm relatively decoupling every time I change gears, because I'm moving faster than my rate of fuel consumption is increasing. But I haven't decoupled. I haven't changed the fundamental relationship between the fact that I have to burn fuel to move the car. So decoupling is a delusion, really.
Alan Ware 1:00
That was professor and environmental civil engineer, Dr. James Hopeward. In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast we'll be talking with James about how he is incorporating in his teaching big picture issues like climate, population and limits to growth, and helping future engineers think more holistically about building humanity's infrastructure with greater ecological wisdom.
Nandita Bajaj 1:31
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:53
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's guest. James Hopeward is an academic at the University of South Australia, where he teaches environmental engineering, modeling, and climate change adaptation. Inspired by the late Professor Al Bartlett, in his research James applies basic mathematical models to global problems, such as the limits to global energy supplies and implications for growth. He also studies local solutions such as urban agriculture, and the opportunities and challenges in scaling these approaches. He hopes that this research may help contribute to grounded but hopeful visions of the future. This passion for creating a more hopeful future is at the heart of James's change of name, as when he was married in 2020 both he and his wife Keri added the word hope to James's previous surname, creating Hopeward, moving towards hope. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 3:16
Hi James, welcome to the podcast. It's lovely to have you here.
James Hopeward 3:20
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Nandita Bajaj 3:22
And we're so excited to chat with you today about the many hats that you wear in researching and addressing both the big picture topics like climate and population, and also more localized and ecologically grounded engineering projects. Your combined background in engineering and environmental science gives you a more ecological, systems-aware approach to engineering, which is something we desperately need more of, if we hope to avert further catastrophe and be truly sustainable. So thanks for the great work you're doing. We're excited to dig deeper into that.
James Hopeward 4:02
I'm excited to be talking to you.
Nandita Bajaj 4:04
And let's begin with the first question which is based on some recent research that you've done. Like us at Population Balance, you've long questioned the importance that societies around the world have placed on economic growth. But there are many progressive and liberal green growth advocates who continue to promote the goal of economic growth, and who believe this growth can be made, quote unquote, green by decoupling economic growth from growth in materials and energy use. You recently co-authored a paper showing that decoupling is an illusion. Can you unpack the term a little bit for us? And what are some of the results of that research?
James Hopeward 4:50
Sure, I'd go further than to call decoupling an illusion. I'd call it a delusion. As an engineer, I think of coupling in a very, I guess mechanical sense. Something is coupled to something else it's joined. And when you look at the definition of decoupling in the sort of economic literature, they say decoupling is about breaking the link. So it's definitely intended to be used in that sort of way. When we talk about decoupling in terms of the definition, people talk about breaking the link between economic growth and environmental impact. So if we could grow the economy and not have any environmental impacts growing at all - in fact have them shrinking down to sustainable levels - that would be what they call absolute decoupling. Of course, that doesn't really happen. If it does, it happens in very specific ways. For example, we could potentially decarbonize. So we could reduce the carbon intensity of what we do. You could say we've decoupled from whale oil, largely, that's completely, or we've decoupled from horse manure. Back in the day horse manure was a major environmental problem in the streets. We don't tend to have a lot of horse-based transport, so we've decoupled from that particular environmental impact. So in very specific ways, absolute decoupling can happen. But if we talk about energy, energy is required for our economy. So we can't have absolute decoupling. We can't continue to have more and more activity and not consume more energy. So they use a sleight of hand, and they pull out this term, relative decoupling. Now relative decoupling means that the economy is growing faster than the underlying impact. So if the economy is growing at 3%, and your energy consumption is growing at 2%, they say, Oh, we've relatively decoupled. I like to use the metaphor of changing gears in a car. So if I'm driving out, and I've pulled out of the driveway, and I'm gradually moving up through the gears, if you were to sort of measure my rate of progress along the road, relative to the rate of fuel consumption, I'm relatively decoupling every time I change gears, because I'm moving faster than my rate of fuel consumption is increasing. But I haven't decoupled. I haven't changed the fundamental relationship between the fact that I have to burn fuel to move the car. So decoupling is a delusion, really. When we're talking about fundamental things that our economy requires, like energy and materials, I think it's quite fair to say decoupling is a delusion. What we did in that paper was we challenged a very prominent piece of work that was done by our CSIRO, which is our Australian Government's preeminent scientific body. Their scientists published a major report. And then they published a Nature paper, saying that, I think the title of the paper was, “Australia is free to choose economic growth and reducing environmental impacts.” It was absolutely explicit. And Nature allowed this paper to be published. So for your listeners who aren't familiar, or as familiar with how academic publishing works, if someone publishes something in Nature, it's revered. It's almost gospel, because it's the highest-ranking scientific journal. And so it's a career-making move for an academic, and it generally is very widely publicized as, and treated as though, it's irrefutable. So this is published. And it's explicitly saying that, based on the modeling that they've done, Australia could decouple in absolute terms. What they were really saying was that Australia could move its economy in different directions: decarbonize, embrace carbon farming, and a whole lot of really good things. But to say that this is decoupling, and that we can then have a growth-based economy, a growth-based society, we had to challenge that. We did it in a very simple way. We said, Okay, well, let's take some things as fundamental. So material throughput and energy are fundamental to the economy. You can't have an economy that doesn't have any materials in it. What would that be? You can't have an economy that doesn't do anything, and requiring energy, because that would just basically be nothing. So we said, well, let's assume then that like changing gears in the car, we can get more efficient. But there is going to be some sort of limit to how efficient you can be. And then we basically just extrapolated from the modeling that they'd done, which went out to 2050. And we took it out to 2100. And we found that there was a rebound effect. Once you start to reach those efficiency limits, if you continue to grow the economy, then you run out of runway, essentially, in terms of efficiency gains. It's like running out of gears in the car. Once you're in the top gear, if you try to keep accelerating, you're going to use more and more fuel. So it was very, very simple, but we basically showed that best case scenario is that this sort of decoupling would happen in a temporary way. And it's not decoupling in any real sense. It's a temporary phenomenon as you move into more efficient modes. But we also said it could be an illusion in terms of it might not be happening anyway. Because what we think of as becoming more materially or energetically efficient, might be due to things like offshoring. So think of a lot of the richer countries in the OECD, for example, have achieved what looks like decoupling. And this is where illusion would be a great word to use - the illusion of decoupling - because the dirty parts of the economy can be offshored to other countries. And so domestically, it looks like the economy is growing and the environmental impact is stabilizing, or even potentially decreasing. But what's actually happening if you take a whole system view, and look at all of the impacts associated with that economy, the decoupling wouldn't be happening at all. So illusion, delusion, it's all, it's all there.
Nandita Bajaj 10:20
Both at play, right. Yeah, that's a very, very helpful explanation. And it's interesting, you bring in the offshore impacts, because you you're probably familiar with this organization called Our World In Data. very pro-growth, they provide these very beautiful infographics and they have a very popular page where they try to kind of make this case that decoupling between the economy and ecological impact is happening and is only getting better and better. And because it's such a popular site, billionaire endorsed and funded, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and effective altruists, and all sorts of people. There's a lot of confusion about this concept. And people are kind of throwing this word out willy nilly, that it's happening. So having someone like you unpack it, that's very helpful.
James Hopeward 11:14
Well, I feel I owe a great debt to the late Professor Al Bartlett. I found his arithmetic, population, and energy lecture that he gave some 1600 times in his life, which I still tell my students about him and about that number of deliveries. And I saw him give that lecture live in Adelaide where I live in 2005. That was so influential, because he used this level of mathematics that people who've managed to bumble their way through high school maths can actually get it. And it's irrefutable then. So I sort of almost consider myself a disciple of, of Al Bartlett.
Alan Ware 11:49
That segues pretty well into a note I had taken about Tom Murphy, the retired physics professor at UC San Diego, who looked at exponential growth. I don't know if you've seen that post Galactic Scale Energy - if you assume 2.3% energy growth rate, which has been the last 400 years in the US, and you carry that forward, despite 100% efficient solar panels, right, just the waste heat alone in 400 years would require the power of the entire sun in less than 1400 years, and the entire Earth to be covered with 100% efficient solar panels in 400 years. So your point about Australia, you can tweak efficiency for another 20,30 years and then the recoupling starts, right. There are diminishing returns on efficiency. You just can't get, well definitely, to a 100% efficient solar panel. And then you reach waste heat absurdities, right, after that point. So I agree that, yeah Al Bartlett and the whole exponential growth equation and just thinking of the doubling at a 2% growth rate every 30,35 years it leads to these just absurd conclusions so quickly. So I'm glad you're teaching your students that. So as an educator of future civil engineers, you're playing a crucial role in teaching these future designers of essential infrastructure - transportation, water, sewer systems; I think you could argue that a lot of what we even think of as civilization comes from the expectation that we're going to have clean water, and our waste will go away in some way hygienically and we'll be able to move long distances and communicate reasonably long distances. The list could go on and on of all these everyday activities that we undertake that require this engineered essential infrastructure. But the danger of the engineering mindset, that it seems history has given us plenty examples of, is that it can oversimplify reality, leading to a narrow kind of mechanistic thinking, and it can overlook all kinds of possible second, third, fourth order unintended consequences, especially to the broader natural environment. But you have a background in engineering and environmental science. So that gives you this wonderful knowledge base that you can use in teaching these future civil engineers. How are you helping your students take on that environmental perspective, so they can approach engineering problems with a more holistic, wider boundary kind of focus?
James Hopeward 14:25
Great question. I actually come back to the influence of Al Bartlett here, because since 2007 I believe, I've been giving a series of lectures to all first year engineering students - which is civil, electrical, mechanical engineering - at our university. And I use the language of maths - the simple maths that is easy for a first year engineer to engage with and, in fact, they're potentially more likely to engage with it than if I came into the classroom and said, Okay, you've got all of your calculations and things that you do in engineering. Now we need to worry about the environment. Because that often tends to be seen as some sort of qualitative 'nice if we can', but not really as essential core as, as what they might think of as real engineering, which is about crunching the numbers and getting the building to stay upright. So instead, I flip that and say, right, this environment thing is about numbers too. And let's start out with the exponential function, and do some of those calculations that have them sort of hear this intake of breath throughout the whole, the whole room when you do things like let's just, I don't know, let's extrapolate 1% global population growth for 1000 years, which is small in the context of civilization. There are pubs in England that have been running for more than 1000 years. And who wants to sort of say how big they think the population will be, after 1000 years at 1% growth. And we get to, we're in the hundreds of trillions of people at that point. And then people just think, Whoa, that's one person per square meter. Now, I owe all of this to Al Bartlett. It's lifting it directly out of his lecture. I think it's a way to speak a language to engineers that calls them to think differently about the environment. But then I also talk in more qualitative terms and say, we do need to think globally, even if you are going to be constrained as an engineer by the conditions of a project that you're working on. If you've been contracted to design the footing for a building, you can't necessarily make that particular project all about saving the world. But it's worth maintaining a global perspective. And then, as engineers, we do have an ethical responsibility to society. And so encouraging students to think, well, we shouldn't be silent. At times where it is appropriate for us to speak up, we should actually be prepared to say, as an engineer, I have a certain skill set I can bring. And if that includes crunching some numbers, then so be it. But I have a responsibility to speak out about an issue like endless growth. So these are some of the flavors that I bring. And like I said, that's been running for certainly 15 years or more, and seems to be quite successful as a way of engaging first year students. I think there's probably still more we can do. But yeah.
Alan Ware 17:08
Do you ever look at engineering projects that were big environmental boondoggles? Say the Aral Sea in Russia or the way we're growing all this alfalfa in Arizona now, and irrigating it with the Colorado River? There's so many engineering projects that have been done that are so environmentally destructive and wasteful?
James Hopeward 17:29
There certainly are. I think there are definitely others in in the engineering program who look more at these sorts of environmental catastrophes, and I have limited time with the students. So I tend to keep things fairly conceptual, and then look at issues like climate change, and I look at trade-offs versus synergies. So there are these great examples of people thinking, here's an engineering solution to climate change, like geoengineering. We're gonna put a giant reflector in space to try and block out the sun, because that's obviously what's warming up the planet, and trying to get them to kind of really question the validity of bringing that engineering mindset in, because that's in the sorts of examples. Yeah, we could list plenty of examples in engineering and other things where reductionist approach to a problem has resulted in a solution that is then either not solved the problem, or created a much bigger problem. So it's a great point you raise. I think there's probably more we can do in our engineering programs to encourage students to critique. I like to tell my students not to overlook simple solutions, because I think there is a tendency to think, well, engineering is about creating the most complex, all singing, all dancing, sophisticated, robotic solution. Sometimes the simplest solution is actually the best in terms of the environmental outcomes.
Alan Ware 18:50
Yeah, do you have to talk about the trade-offs between robust and resilient versus the kind of optimized, expensive quest for perfection in engineering? It seemed like that would be a huge trade-off.
James Hopeward 19:03
That's right. And we're in the process of rewriting some curriculum at the moment, and bringing resilience into the center of this, especially when it comes to climate change adaptation - teaching students what resilience means in different sectors, through different lenses, and how that could be applied. So that's a work in progress. But it's very important, very important, I think, to challenge and engineers are in a group of professions that have substantial influence, even if they're not necessarily the sorts of people you see talking on the news. So I think that there's a lot that can be done in the hearts and minds of these people to ensure that these people who move into positions of influence in society, even if it's quiet, behind-the-scenes influence are approaching things with a more ethical, appropriate mindset.
Alan Ware 19:49
Because they are often tasked by policymakers or politicians to do something, right? Build that bridge. We want something done and the engineer carries it out. So I suppose it is a delicate balance. They can't just turn directly against their paying customer for very long if that's a political body or a private corporation or something. But it would be nice if they could, in the spirit of which you have some experience, of permaculture, where you just observe things. You don't take action, pell mell. You just kind of observe the natural ecosystem for a while and see how it responds to natural processes, which kind of made me think too of nonhuman engineers and you've, and I was wondering if you had any experience with the bison, the beavers, earthworms. I know here in North America the beavers were a huge ecosystem engineer, possibly 10% of all North America was beaver ponds by area, and then within 200 years, they're just, it's just a genocide for beaver hats and ridiculous superfluous human needs. And all of the water retention, the flood control, the soil that the beaver dams helped create, all of the species. So that's an engineering species that can do a lot of damage for human goals if they're flooding farm fields and roads. But if we have the patience, and we have the ability to step back, it seems like we could reintroduce those kinds of animals and let them create ecosystems through more natural engineering. Do you hear much about that?
James Hopeward 21:24
In the Australian context, there's less time looking at animals, I suppose, like beavers in your example. But biomimicry, or ecomimicry is present, and sort of nature-based design. One thing that's quite prominent here in South Australia, very much in a civil engineering context, is water- sensitive urban design - so taking an urban landscape where it used to be vegetated, and water was basically retained in the landscape. And it was slowed down by all of the plants. It then seeped into the ground. It recharged the streams slowly. And there was just a general slow movement of water through the landscape. Very important in a dry environment like South Australia, having that slow recharge so that there's a base flow in streams and things is important, as well as having the ability for water to seep in and provide nourishment for vegetation in the landscape. Of course we then come along and concrete everything - asphalt, pavements, rooftops - and this creates now a problem for people because now the rain comes, or when the rain comes, it runs off very rapidly. And we've got a huge amount of water pooling. What do we do? Well, we concrete line all of the streams, so we can convey that water away as quickly as possible. It carries all of the pollution. Where does it end up? It ends up in the sea, at the coast, killing all of the subsea vegetation, all of the seagrass and so on. So in terms of the biomimicry, we then go and look, well, okay, what have we done here? We've completely ruined the hydrological cycle. Can we learn from the natural system, or what happened in the natural system? Let's go back. The water was retained in the landscape. So now we talk about bio-retention. So retaining the water. So now when the rain lands, what can we do to retain that water in the landscape. Let it soak into the ground where there is still ground. Introduce wetlands to capture the water. Use natural processes to treat it, store it, reuse it, on vegetated areas, and so on. So I think it's encouraging. It's encouraging to see where people actually take the time to observe nature, and not just think it's nature or human endeavor. So in your example, sort of saying, Ah, well, these animals might be doing something that is damaging the thing that the people are trying to do. And it's like, well say, Okay, well, maybe what we're doing is damaging what we're trying to do as well. And it's obviously damaging what nature is trying to do. So maybe we can try to work with and observe nature, and try to find something that is not so antagonistic. So there are encouraging steps. And again, we have a long way to go.
Nandita Bajaj 23:57
Yeah, that is encouraging. I studied engineering in undergrad and that was 20 something years ago. And I wish I had some kind of an education that had an ecological lens or looking at nature-based solutions. Because all I remember was there was one ethics course that we took and a lot of it was just making sure the safety requirements, etc., were being met. But I don't recall at all ever talking about the environment, let alone the impacts of engineering projects on human rights or ecosystem integrity, etc. So, I ended up leaving several years after working within the field because interestingly, I found the field of engineering, because it's so siloed, almost seems devoid sometimes of humanity, the nature of working with people and nature. It becomes, as you both have alluded to, so much of a reductionist, mechanistic approach that is always looking at all problems kind of as an engineering problem that need to be solved, but from a very limited perspective. So, yeah, I think that is encouraging that, at least within your university, that kind of overlap, or interdisciplinary types of discussions, are starting to happen.
James Hopeward 25:27
Yeah, one of the extra things that I'd love to say in response to that is that we at our university have, for a long time, been encouraging the incorporation of what we call ACUP, Aboriginal Content in Undergraduate Programs. And this is about encouraging students to understand and value the knowledges and perspectives of Aboriginal people, starting off in our engineering programs in particular. And so, in Australia, we have terrible colonization history, which people in the US can obviously relate to. And we are starting with a heck of a long way to go. But we are starting to unpack that in more sensitive ways. And it's encouraging to see that happening in things like our engineering programs, because this is where totally different knowledge systems that come from civilizations that have lasted tens of thousands of years, if not more, can be valued. And we can say, Okay, well, there isn't just sort of one way that we've been doing it for the last couple of 100 years that is the only way. There are actually completely different ways of approaching what we could validly call engineering and science. And I think that, yeah, this is the start of a journey of reconciliation. And there are some encouraging signs, at least in this early stage.
Nandita Bajaj 26:43
That's very heartening to hear. And definitely, as you say, a step in the right direction with a long way to go. And then you alluded a little bit to a course in climate adaptation for civil engineers, which is a crucial topic for helping modern societies maintain critical infrastructure like water and sewage treatment, roads, bridges, ports, airports, etc in the coming decades. If we and our listeners were taking the course, what key takeaways would you want us to have?
James Hopeward 27:19
Well, as I think I alluded to, there's a bit of a curriculum redevelopment underway. So I'll try and answer this question imagining that a listener was taking the course and the course as it's intended to be post-development, which isn't that different from the course as it exists today. But I guess the key take-homes - climate change is complicated. I've walked in climate marches with banners that say 'climate action now', and it's quite a simple slogan. But climate change is far more complicated than what we can sort of put into a simple slogan. So there's mitigation and there's adaptation. So I encourage students to understand climate change in quite a deep way. So first of all, what is climate? So we sort of unpack that. What do we actually mean by climate? Long-term averages of weather parameters - like average temperature, average rainfall; long-term statistical data like extremes - extreme rainfall, extreme temperature. So it's a long-term picture of how the weather behaves over perhaps 30 years. So climate change is then a change on those sorts of timescales where you end up with a different kind of 30 year pattern. So getting them to understand climate and climate change. Then what are the drivers of climate change - natural and anthropogenic, primarily anthropogenic in this type of course. And then mitigation versus adaptation. So mitigation being how do we address the drivers to try to lower the problem in the first place? And then of course adaptation. And the course is primarily about adaptation. So we get to there. And that's where it starts to get really messy, if you like. Because now we need to say, Well, what element of all of that system are we trying to, or elements are we trying to, adapt to? So then we need to look at well, what is the thing that we're responsible for? Are we responsible for a water treatment plant? Are we responsible for managing some primary industry? It isn't just civil engineers who take the course. So it could be environmental scientists, environmental engineers, project managers. So people who might have a role in government, in natural resource management, could plausibly take this course. So are we concerned with something that is going to be sensitive to the average temperature, which might be true in a water treatment plant? More likely we're concerned with extreme events. In most cases, we're worried about, Are we're going to have more intense storms, more prolonged heat waves, longer droughts, increased flooding risk, and things like that. So we look at risk and we look at resilience. And we try to understand well, what do we know? And what don't we know? And there's an enormous amount of uncertainty, especially in precipitation, understanding under different scenarios of climate change. Are we likely to see more precipitation or less precipitation or more at different times of the year and less at other times of the year, or more intense or less intense? And these remain uncertain. There's a likelihood that precipitation patterns will change, but exactly how and why is actually surprisingly difficult to unpack. So we need to therefore really understand the system that we're looking at. What are the elements of the weather that govern vulnerability within that system? Are we talking about something which is vulnerable to flooding, or vulnerable to drought, or vulnerable to heat, or vulnerable to wind damage and things like that? Then we say, Okay, what do we know about the current weather that affects this system? And what do we understand from various scenarios of climate change as to what is plausible, and could potentially change in those parameters that affect our system? So it's, it's all quite complicated. And I guess I try to convey that to students so that they can then be equipped to do the learning that is required when they find themselves in a situation, because what I've seen is that practitioners have not always been equipped with that, I guess, systems view. And they think, okay, they get into a situation where they need to do some climate adaptation plan and are a little bit lost as to where to start. So I try to sort of give them that grounding, so that they can then think, Okay, well, I know what I need to do. I need to go and find out a lot of information. I can't give them all of that information for every possible combination of vulnerability parameters and climate variables. But telling them that's the sort of thing that they need to do, then they can go and find that information themselves.
Nandita Bajaj 31:27
Yeah, that's so interesting. The thing about adaptation, the way you're describing it, is some of it is just unprecedented stuff that's just never happened before. So it's, in some cases, it would be impossible to anticipate what to expect or prepare for, unless you are looking to other countries or communities that have already had those types of changes happen to them, given how disproportionately climate change impacts are happening around the world. Is the adaptation mainly infrastructural? Or are they also looking at how human behaviors are adapting to these and what to expect with infrastructural and behavioral changes that come from climate change impacts.
James Hopeward 32:16
Yeah, well, there's obviously a lot to unpack. There's certainly a case study approach, and looking at different parts of the world with different vulnerabilities. I focus on what we think of as resilience and definitions of resilience. So what would have resilience to shock, for example, ability to recover from a shock? So you're absolutely right, we can't just sort of say, well, if we're looking at the past in this particular area, then tweak some parameters and that's the future. We do need to think of events that we may not have seen, like the migration of hurricane or extreme winds, we call cyclones, to higher latitudes and things like that. That's very relevant in civil engineering, for example, where building standards need to be updated. When cyclonic winds or hurricane speed winds move into an area where they've never been experienced before, yeah, there is a lot to unpack. I think the human behavior element is an adaptation in terms of the technologies that we use to adapt to climate change versus behaviors that we use to adapt to climate change. These are all important ingredients. I mentioned earlier about synergies and trade-offs. And so when we talk about mitigation and adaptation, there are synergistic approaches to climate change adaptation. And there are trade-off solutions. So I use an example, a very simple example. So let's say you've got a very poorly insulated house. And we're trying to adapt to more extreme heatwaves, even just higher average temperatures, but typically heatwave type conditions. So it's a poorly insulated house. So we could simply install a much larger air conditioner on that house. That's going to consume vastly more energy. And if that energy is coming from fossil fuels, that's going to contribute disproportionately to making the climate change problem worse, which is going to further increase the temperature. And so this is, we might be able to maintain a comfortable temperature inside that house in this example. So that's an adaptation solution that is adapting to the extreme heat, but it's a trade-off solution because it's making the mitigation part of the equation harder. Alternatively, we could say, let's try to, and this is where behavioral change could come in as well, let's try to insulate that house. Let's implement some different behaviors in terms of how we use space potentially - using different parts of the house, closing doors, and things like that. And now we can reduce the overall energy demand of keeping the house cool. We might still need an air conditioner. But we might be able to get away with a much smaller air conditioner with a lower energy footprint. And so this is an adaptation solution or collection of solutions that is more in line with what we're looking for in terms of reducing energy and the mitigation problem. So these are complicated problems. And there's only so much we can do in a single course. But yeah, I think you've raised some really good points.
Alan Ware 35:02
So speaking of climate change, you've published several articles criticizing some of the scenarios adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, both the representative concentration pathways, what are known as the RCPs, and the associated shared socioeconomic pathways or SSPs. So in a nutshell, what are those scenarios of the IPCC? And in your opinion, how could they be improved?
James Hopeward 35:31
Sure, this is where I get into the most trouble. I'll try to do this in a nutshell. The RCPs, the representative concentration pathways, are nominally four, well, they started out as four, but they've sort of grown. Four different scenarios. They have numbers, RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5. The number is referring to how many watts per square meter, that's watts as in power. It's the rate of energy gain happening to the planet. So RCP 4.5, for example, is saying that on every square meter of the planet, there is a net gain of 4.5 Watts, or 4.5 joules of energy per second. And that's how much is contributing to the heating of the planet. So they have these different scenarios ranging from low to high amounts of heating. And those are then a set of standard scenarios that all of the different climate modeling groups around the world, there are these huge groups of people doing very sophisticated work on modeling climate change impacts. They can have a standardized set of scenarios that they can feed in. Now, it says representative concentration pathway, because they then have to say, Well, if we were going to reach this level of heating of 4.5 Watts, or 6 watts, or 8.5 watts per square meter, what sort of greenhouse gas concentrations would be required to be consistent with that amount of heating? We know the greenhouse effect. We know increased CO2 causes warming. So what sort of amount, or what would be the pathway of greenhouse gas emissions that would lead to those levels of warming. So that's why it's a representative concentration pathway. So I've been critical of these at the upper end, because those of us who've been following Peak Oil, which really is far from a new idea, I mean, Hubbert, M. King Hubbert was talking about it back in the 1950s. But it really came to prominence in the early 2000s in the lead up to the global financial crisis. That's certainly when I became aware of peak oil as a concept and then peak fossil fuels more generally. So those of us who are aware of that then look at the representative concentration pathways and how much greenhouse gas would need to be put into the atmosphere to generate the level of warming of 8.5 watts per square meter in particular at the upper end. And we realize there's actually a discrepancy between one set of projections, which are the people who are projecting a shortage of fossil fuels due to simply running short on these non-renewable resources, versus the amount that would be required to generate that heating. So I've spent some time trying to raise awareness of this. It's very, very difficult to operate in this space, because it is interpreted by people listening, and maybe there are people listening to what I've just said, having a double take, because it sounds very much like the sort of thing you hear from a climate change skeptic or a denier of climate change, because you're challenging the worst case climate change scenarios and saying they are actually implausible, which is not to challenge the underlying science of climate change in any way. It's not to say that we don't believe global warming is happening. It's not to say, we don't believe in a link between carbon dioxide and temperature change. It's simply saying, if you wanted to imagine a scenario, which none of us want to imagine this scenario, but if you had a scenario of 8.5 watts per square meter, it would require such a large amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That doesn't balance with a scenario where we are running short on fossil fuels and not putting that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Now, I don't think through any any of my efforts, but people who are sort of in charge, for want of a better word, of these scenarios, or people who are curating the scenarios at a high level, and there are scenario groups, have started to pull back on RCP 8.5 and have said this, actually, almost irrespective of whether we run short on fossil fuels. It just doesn't seem to be the path that the world is going down. It would require all of the momentum in renewable energy to cease and for the world to decide to massively reinvest in coal, almost going back to the level of coal intensity of before we had oil and things like that. So going back to steam engines and, and things like that, in order to produce the amount of CO2. So people have basically started to realize that RCP 8.5, that scenario is no longer really plausible. The difficulty with that is that in the meantime, it's it's been quite a long journey since these scenarios were produced. And it's quite recent that people have started to say, oh, that's probably not considered a plausible scenario. In the intervening 10 or 15 years, an enormous number of studies have been published that have quoted RCP 8.5, which is the one that's no longer considered plausible and have referred to it as business as usual. And so there is a widely held perception that, on the current trajectory, we're likely to get to climate outcomes that are no longer considered plausible. So that's the RCP. Now, you mentioned the shared socioeconomic pathways, the SSPs, which are related. Now these, so I said, the RCPs started by saying, Let's have a level of heating and then let's see what would be the required amount of emissions of carbon into the atmosphere that generate that amount of heating. The SSPs are then saying, Well, what would be a plausible evolution of socioeconomic conditions that might lead to that sort of carbon outcome? And there are five SSPs nominally. So they try to pair each of the SSPs with each of the RCPs to kind of say, Okay, well, here's a plausible combination of socioeconomic parameters that could coalesce - and by socioeconomic parameters, I mean, population growth, economic growth, underlying energy consumption, modes of energy consumption, and so on. What would these kind of coalesce into to produce this type of carbon outcome that would then produce that type of heating outcome. And my criticism of the SSPs is that all five of them are growth-oriented. They all have growth as an exogenous variable. So they assume growth. They assume different amounts of growth. Some of them very, very high; some of them not quite as high. But I believe that the lowest has a doubling of global real GDP over the next century. That's the lowest. And I think that the highest may have a tenfold increase in real global GDP by the end of this century. Now, going back to what we've talked about, about decoupling, think about the underlying energy requirements and things like that. We've got five different shots at this in terms of five different scenarios that are underpinning studies of the way that the future might plausibly, I'm using plausibly in air quotes, how the future might plausibly evolve. Why not have at least one of those five suggesting a stabilization and at least one of them suggesting some sort of decrease? And the decrease could be voluntary or involuntary. I look at this and I think it's like you're about to cross a busy road. And we are spending all of our time looking one way and we're studying the cars and we're studying the trucks, and we're studying the buses, and we're looking at the speed that they're coming in. We're really clearly, very precisely judging whether it's safe to step out into the road by looking one way, and then we're stepping out into the road, without even glancing the other way. I think that it's, it's really important. And so we've got both the RCPs and the SSPs are about high growth futures. Now go back to the RCPs. Look at those low emission scenarios, and we think, Oh, well, maybe that sort of deals with the degrowth question. The lowest one, RCP 2.6, has actually been replaced by an even lower one now, because they realized RCP 2.6 might not quite get us to the one and a half degrees that we want. But RCP 2.6 involved a tenfold increase in energy. So it was a massive, massive green growth scenario. So we don't have in any of these scenarios that have underpinned the mainstream studies of future climate and future energy - the mainstream I say. We don't have scenarios that have a genuine degrowth. There are people who have been publishing degrowth studies to counter those mainstream ones, and they're in the peer-reviewed literature now. But I criticize these scenarios, because I feel like they reinforce an underlying belief system, which is that belief system in green growth. So it's kind of saying, Well, look, we can have brown growth, which leads to this catastrophic climate change, or we can have green growth. It's kind of like, how would you like your growth? It's like, how would you like your eggs?
Alan Ware 43:54
And have you been able to talk to anybody in those IPCC groups about this, why they don't have a no growth or extremely slow growth or contraction scenario?
James Hopeward 44:04
So in 2019, I was in Denver at the Scenarios Forum. So this is where the movers and shakers in this space, the people who are responsible for doing the modeling that then allows these scenarios to form both the RCPs and SSPs, there was a convention on scenarios. And I was lucky enough to be there. I was very much on the outside. But I was, I used it as an opportunity to really rattle the cage and, say, make all of the points I've just made. I was not well-received. As you can imagine going to a convention where everyone is talking about the scenarios they've already produced, going and saying, I think all of your scenarios are probably wrong. Certainly some of them are very wrong. That wasn't well-received at the time. Now, I don't know if I had any influence whatsoever. I suspect I had none. But in the most recent IPCC report, which is the Sixth Assessment Report, there was the beginning of the degrowth commentary. So when they're talking about scenarios, there was an acknowledgment that degrowth may be an alternative scenario. And I suspect that what is happening is that they're starting to realize that a growth-oriented transition, if you start to think 1.5 degrees warming, requires us to nominally reduce emissions globally by 50% by the end of this decade, which is approaching astonishingly quickly, and get to net zero by nominally by 2050. If we're going to do that, the sheer rollout of renewable energy required is just incredible. It basically requires us to replicate the amount of energy infrastructure that was produced in the fossil fuel space throughout the entire 20th century, but roll that out over the next 25 years, in some cases in technology that is only sort of just being proven up economically and even technologically. So I think people are starting to recognize that you may not be able to do that even to maintain current energy levels, which would be required to sort of maintain roughly current real GDP. And therefore, the only way to actually get down to the levels of emissions that we need - to get anywhere close to one and a half or even perhaps two degrees warming - is going to require some sort of overall decline in energy, and therefore some sort of degrowth in terms of economy. So I think that the penny is starting to drop. But there's a lot of momentum behind these scenarios, because thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed papers and government planning documents and things have been using these scenarios for a long time.
Nandita Bajaj 46:37
It's awfully strange, because it was also in the 2022 mitigation report that the growth in GDP per capita and growth in population - were two of the main drivers of carbon dioxide emissions in the last decade. So they are obviously recognizing what's driving climate change, but they're not willing to look at how to curb those emissions by curbing the growth in the two things that are so growth-oriented.
James Hopeward 47:09
Yeah, well, I think these are both treated as exogenous variables in the scenarios, which is reflective of that mindset that you've just laid out, that they're assuming that these are not challenged, assuming that they therefore continue, and that there are no feedbacks from, let's imagine that we have continued growth. Let's imagine it's fossil fuel powered growth and there's enough fossil fuels and we create absolute climate catastrophe as a result. There are no feedbacks that come back and challenge the growth of the population. So it's just continued numbers of people being sort of floated up by the rising sea levels and somehow surviving. It doesn't make sense to not have feedbacks. And really, these things should be endogenous. Now, those words your listeners are most likely familiar with. But exogenous basically means it's a parameter that we specify outside the model, and then that just runs through the model and is not influenced by what happens in the model. Endogenous would mean, it's something that emerges within the model. And I think that there are a few innovative papers that have been published, where they say, growth should be an endogenous parameter. So we should actually model the system and say, if the system evolves more like an ecological system, then if there is an opportunity for growth, it will happen. But if there isn't an opportunity for growth, it can't happen. That's a much more realistic way to model the system that we're in and to try and generate scenarios to say, Okay, well, look, if the whole world catches fire, we're probably not going to have more population growth.
Alan Ware 48:35
Yeah, I think there's a recent report, I saw, that it'll have six times the economic impact - climate change - than they had initially anticipated. It was the equivalent almost to, I think it was a continuous major running world war, just constantly sucking GDP out of nations.
James Hopeward 48:53
Right. So this needs to be baked into a model where if the attempt to grow the economy is actually causing greater harm back to the economy, then net result is not going to be economic growth. So these sorts of feedback loops need to be built into the models in a in a more holistic way.
Nandita Bajaj 49:10
And we are seeing more and more studies that are showing that billions of people, especially those living in poorer, less resilient, less kind of adaptation-ready countries, are falling out of this kind of human climate niche, where they're no longer going to be able to survive those climates. So either there's going to be mass migration and/or there's going to be mass death of probably the same people that are being displaced from their homes. And there does not seem to be much concern for what these growth scenarios are doing to the human and nonhuman wellbeing. It's kind of shocking.
James Hopeward 49:54
Yeah, it is. And I think, going back to the Scenarios Forum, and some of the feedback that I encountered was very much that, and this relates to the questions that we have in the population space, when we're talking about rich world, or high income countries and low income countries. So when I tried to talk about, we need to have degrowth type scenarios, the anger that came back was sort of like, How dare you? You're gonna go and tell all the people in Africa that they can't have economic development, because you want degrowth? And it was a little bit like the blowback that we get in the population space when people say, Oh, so now you're going to blame the low income countries with high fertility for the population problem when you in Australia or in the US have such a high per capita consumption level. And it's like, well, no, it's not either/or. We're trying to talk about this. And I think there'll be a lot of people in the UN who would feel very, very strongly and are very good people and are very well-intentioned in terms of those principles about human wellbeing, but who perhaps don't connect the scenarios with that and thinking, Well, if we have growth, that is the best way to deliver the good outcomes that we believe in as an organization for the most vulnerable people in the world. And it's like, well, yes, if you have people who are living below the poverty line, those people require growth, to improve their level of wellbeing. The problem is that when you've got people who have a hundred or a thousand times per capita consumption, those people are actually going to also get the growth if we have growth built into our system. And in fact, it's going to continue to accumulate to the people who already have the momentum in their economies and so on. So I think we need a more nuanced approach that recognizes the needs of people. And I think we're on the same page here.
Nandita Bajaj 51:42
So, you know, maybe we'll jump into that aspect of the conversation is, you're one of the founding members of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance who actually believes in the population issue. Is this something you've tried broaching with the members of the Alliance? And what kind of response have you received, if you have?
James Hopeward 52:05
So at the founding meeting in 2017, in Pretoria, South Africa, I did try. I floated it. And it was one of those rooms where you fairly quickly realized that, I think Paul was in the room as well, Professor Paul Sutton, who's known to you both. And he's an ally in this space in terms of being open to talking about overpopulation. Apart from the two of us, I don't think anybody else in the room wanted to touch it. And I don't think that that is reflective of being dismissive that population is a problem. But I think it is more of a pragmatic issue for a number of people in this space. I think that it is saying, If we talk about this, then it's going to create division. And division is not what we want, when we're trying to create a unifying movement. So that's my take on it. There might be people who are actively sort of saying no, overpopulation is not a problem. But I didn't encounter that. I encountered more of a kind of like, we might not mention that right now type response. So that's 2017. That meeting was really an initial drafting of the principles of the Alliance. So shortly after that, I think that there was some discussion that said, we probably need to have a bit more of an explicit position on population. But I think that it's one of those things that's been kind of kicked down the road, because there is just historical angst around discussing population - that a lot of people in the environmental and sustainability space are affected by the legacy of past conversations that have gone wrong, that have been divisive, that have ruined dinner parties, and so on. And there's just a reluctance to talk about it, because they're fearful that it's going to create division and put people off because people are going to think, Ah, Oh, you're one of those people who thinks we should all have, you know, one child policy and all of that stuff that has been leveled at anyone who has tried to talk about population. You've had that sort of response. And you and you then sort of say, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not. But it's almost too late. By the time somebody has accused you of that, they've put the blinkers on. They've got the headphones on, and they're not listening to you anymore. So I think that's why this movement, and so many other movements that in so many ways we would look at and say these are allied movements, and they are allied movements, why aren't they talking about population? I think it's mostly a pragmatic response. That's part one. Part two is that it's seen as well, if we are, and most of the people in the room in that initial meeting were people, even though it was taking place in South Africa, most people in the room were from wealthy countries, from the US, from the UK. I was there from Australia. And there is a real reluctance. People don't want to be seen as like, Well I'm here with my gigantic per capita consumption level, and I'm going to start saying the problems of the world are caused by overpopulation and high fertility rates in parts of the world where people are living below the poverty line, because that's seen as kind of punching down. And we can unpack that, and we know ways to have that conversation differently. But again, it's sort of saying, it's almost like a risk aversion, I think. Some people are like, I don't want to touch that because I know that it's going to come back at me as though this is the rich person pointing the finger at the poor person. So I think those are the reasons why it's still in the background in a lot of these organizations, including WEAll.
Nandita Bajaj 55:30
Yes, I think all of what you said makes a lot of sense. You know, the risk aversion aspect from both fronts. And yet it doesn't make it any less frustrating for people like us who are taking a really holistic approach to the issue, and I really do think that it plays into the hands of the neoliberal interests who are very much spreading the rhetoric of 'you’re racist if you talk about population. I mean, you look at who are the institutions who are spreading the alarmism? As we spoke to Naomi Oreskes, it's the same institutions that were behind climate denialism. It's Cato, the American Enterprise Institute, all of these libertarian, market fundamentalist organizations that have never done an ounce of work in reproductive rights or family planning or confronting patriarchy. And if we don't look at who's spreading this kind of disinformation, and if we continue to play into the hands of that kind of fear, we literally just keep emboldening those same religious, market fundamentalist powers, who benefit from population growth, who want more institutional power, and who want more economic growth. So we are grateful that you're part of our tribe and can have some influence in helping to shift the needle.
Alan Ware 56:58
And you had some history and experience with those conversations and we were wondering what led you to become concerned about overpopulation in Australia or in the globe in the first place?
James Hopeward 57:10
Yeah. Well, it's really strange because Australia is, on the one hand, it has a relatively low population by world standards. We're sitting here at something like 27 million at the moment. And if you look at that for our landmass, most of our landmass is desert. So it's actually not quite as low as it seems. But I think I became concerned about population primarily at a global level, looking at these global issues, like running short on finite resources, and, and also running short on what are renewable resources like land. You're going to run short on that if you try and divide it by too many people. It's basic mathematics. So at a global level, it's like, well, hang on, this is something we should be talking about. And then you look at a country like Australia. And whilst our population is relatively low, our growth rate is really quite high, especially in the context of it being a high per capita consumption country. It bucks the trend, and I think the US is in a similar situation, Our fertility rate is below long term replacement level. But our immigration rate is high and deliberately high in terms of government policies. And this means that we have a high per capita consumption country that is actively trying to increase its population, which means it's actively trying to increase the number of high per capita consumption people. And this is not in the interests of global sustainability. let's take Ehrlich and Holdren's IPAT equation. IPAT - impact is equal to population times affluence times technology,. You can't take that equation and say, well, it's the number of people multiplied by how much they're each consuming, and say, Well, only one of those parameters matters. You know, if I say three times two is six, is the three more important than the two? And so it doesn't make any mathematical sense to me to just be concerned about one issue and not the other. And so I do feel like the environmental movement tends to focus very much on the per capita consumption part of it, because the population part of it is considered too difficult. And I think that the way that Nandita you've talked about having the conversation from the point of view of opposing patriarchal structures, and opposing kind of colonial structures, things that a lot of people will get on board with, I think that's really admirable. I'd love to learn more about that and read more about your work and learn more about what you're doing. Because I think these sorts of things where we like, let's find something that people will get on board with initially. And we can realize that one of us doesn't have three heads or something like that. We're actually people who, who have a lot of good things in common. We want the best outcomes for the planet for all of the human and nonhuman beings that live on it. It shouldn't be so difficult for us to reach common ground then. So that's kind of where I've got to,
Nandita Bajaj 59:55
Yeah, thank you. This seems like a great place to end the conversation. It was fascinating actually talking to you. It's probably the first engineer that we've had to bring it all together - scientific and environmental, ecological principles in this interdisciplinary type of approach while recognizing limits to growth, while recognizing limits to population growth, not often you see so many overlapping values. So it was really nice being able to chat with you and seeing how you're educating the next generation of engineers.
James Hopeward 1:00:36
Well, thank you. I may not be tremendously representative of engineers. But yeah, it's been a real pleasure. And I'm really humbled to be here. And when I see the amazing work that you're doing, and your other guests on the podcast have been doing so it's been a wonderful experience talking to you both.
Alan Ware 1:00:52
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:53
Thank you.
Alan Ware 1:00:54
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and we hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:24
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.