There are no limits to growth: CSIRO says so

We are also unable to examine the assumptions underlying the renewable energy claims. The study seems to have made the very common mistake of taking the cost of carbon that would make it more economic for a generator to shift the generation of 1 kWh from carbon fueled power station to a wind turbine. But this is not the right question. A power supply system with a large fraction of renewable input would have to have a very large amount of redundant generating capacity, most of it sitting idle most of the time, to be able to guarantee supply during periods of low wind or solar energy, or it would have to retain much carbon-fuelled capacity, sitting idle most of the time. Either way high capital costs are created for the system. The multiple for a 100% renewable system seems to be in the range of 4 to perhaps even 10 times the amount of plant that would do the job if renewables worked to peak capacity all the time. So the price of carbon would have to be high before it became cheaper for power generators to shift to renewable systems.

Technical advance and Conservation potential?

The plots show that it is being assumed that demand and impacts can be greatly reduced by technical advance, conservation and efficiency effort. Decoupling depends on these. This is commonly assumed but few if any optimistic pronouncements take into account the significant energy, resource and environmental cost of saving energy, resources and environment. In other words claims are often only about gross reductions achievable and not net reductions.

Powerful examples of this are given by figures on housing and vehicles. Much attention is given to the German Passivhaus which it is said can reduce energy consumption by 75% or more. However this kind of claim usually refers only to energy consumed within the house, and does not take into account the energy used to install the typically elaborate insulation and heat transfer equipment. The issue seems to be unsettled but a recent study by Crawford and Stephen (2013) found that the total life-cycle energy cost for the Passivhaus is actually greater than for a normal German house.

Even more common is the claim that electric vehicles (assumed to make up 25% of transport energy use in this study) can reduce energy use by 75 – 80%, but this does not take into account the considerable energy costs in producing EVs. The State Government of Victoria's trial of EVs found that they reduce emissions only if powered by renewable energy. (Carey, 2012.) Otherwise life-cycle emissions taking into account all factors in addition to fuel are actually 29% greater than those of petrol driven cars. Mateja (2003) finds that electric cars involve much higher embodied energy costs than normal cars. Bryce (2010) says 60% of the life cycle energy and environmental cost of these cars is to do with their production and disposal, not their on-road performance.

Again it would be important to see what assumptions are being made by these authors in arriving at the extremely optimistic conservation and efficiency claims being made.

Would it scale to 9.7 billion people?

The amount of land planted for bio-sequestration would not. The area assumed for the optimistic scenario, up to 59 million ha forest plantation for sequestration plus 35 million ha for "biodiversity planting" would total 2.2 ha per person (assuming Australian population will reach 37 million by 2050.) But Australia has much more potential forest area than most countries and the amount of forest on the planet now averages about only 0.45 ha per person, and is heading for 0.25 ha by 2050.

The paper's expected 2050 consumption of petroleum and gas is considerable, adding to about. 35 GJ per person. The authors give no attention to the strong probability that there will not be much of either left by then. Thus for 9.7 billion people demand would be 340 EJ which is about 1.7 times present world oil consumption … and therefore far from a plausible amount all could be consuming in 2050.

The figures for materials use also show that the expected 2050 Australian use rate could not possibly be had by all people. Thus even if the optimistic scenario could be achieved it would fall far short of one that could save the planet. It would still leave Australians living at per capita levels of resource use that were many times higher than all could share.

Conclusions.

As noted above, it would be difficult to suggest an issue that is more important than whether or not the limits to growth thesis is valid. The case for it has been accumulating weight for at least fifty years and in my opinion has long been beyond serious challenge. All resource stocks are being depleted at significantly unsustainable rates, summarized by the WWF conclusion that 1.5 planet Earth's would be needed to provide them sustainably. And only about 2 billion people are using them; what happens when 11 billion (the UN's 2100 median expectation) rise to our levels of consumption … let alone the levels we will have by then given 3% growth … that is, levels that might be ten times as high as they are now.

This is the kind of arithmetic that is now leading considerable and increasing numbers of people to see the dominant obsession with affluence and growth and tech-fixes as absurd and suicidal, and to join the De-growth and associated movements such as Voluntary Simplicity, eco-villages and transition towns. We who are working in this area believe we know how to save the planet and we know the only way it can be saved. It is by shifting to ways that do not create the problems now destroying the planet, depleting resources, condemning billions to deprivation, causing resource wars and damaging the quality of life in even the richest countries. Our "Simpler Way" vision (http://thesimplerway.info) would be easily and quickly achieved, if that was what people wanted to do. It isn't and it will not be considered until the conditions presently devastating the lives of billions begin to impact supermarket shelves in the countries now living well on their grossly unfair proportion of world wealth. By which time it will probably be too late. The CSIRO paper is saying what just about everyone wants to hear, i.e., that there is no need to worry about any need to take The Simpler Way seriously.

A longer version of this critique is at http://thesimplerway.info/CSIROcrit.htm