The Human Souffle

Main ingredients: petroleum, minerals and cereals

Photo by Lucas Oliveira on Unsplash

There is now a solid consensus that human population will peak then begin to decline sometime during this century. The reasons given vary according to source: demographic trends, individualism, economic development, the use of contraceptives and so on. What rarely, if ever, gets mentioned is the vital role fossil fuels, minerals and mechanized agricultural play in sustaining 8 billion humans and their global economy. Instead of causing a global famine, however, fossil fuel depletion will only accelerate already established trends set forth by a decade of stagnation in oil production. The human enterprise, I argue, will begin to contract much like a failed souffle, collapsing slowly under its own weight after the heat is turned down. There is one caveat though: We live in a complex adaptive system, where even a slow and gradual withdrawal of inputs can have a massive ripple effect on the system… So, as usual, expect some turbulence ahead.

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Country Overshoot Days 2025. Source: Global Footprint Network 2025

Flawed assumptions

Humanity — at least in most countries around the globe — is already in ecological overshoot. According to this metric Qatar, for example, will have already used up all its fair share of biological productivity (crops, fish, forest products etc.) and released its fair share of CO2 by February 6, 2025. For the rest of the year it will have to rely on imports to meet the needs of its population (2.7 million people). One should not wonder why is that so: Qatar is a small city state in one of the most arid and hottest regions of the world. They are, however, sitting atop a massive oil and gas reserve; the products of which they can trade for food and other commodities. To be fair, there are still some countries who do not use up all their land’s biological productivity in a year, but on a global average, humanity would still need 1.7 Earths to sustain its present consumption level.

This method of ecological footprint analysis, however, is built on a number of flawed assumptions. And while these presumptions might be true for the moment, they leave us with a false impression that things could go on just fine if we made a few adjustments here and there. Suggestions for improvement point mostly in the direction of reducing CO2 emissions since food production got so much more efficient over time that we should not worry about that anymore. To illustrate this point, just take a look at the definition of ‘ecological footprint’ as posted on the Global Footprint Network website (emphasis mine):

Ecological Footprint

“A measure of how much area of biologically productive land and water an individual, population, or activity requires to produce all the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, using prevailing technology and resource management practices. The Ecological Footprint is usually measured in global hectares. Because trade is global, an individual or country’s Footprint includes land or sea from all over the world.”

I might be nit-picky here, but last time I checked both ‘prevailing technology and resource management practices’ (as well as ‘global trade’) are entirely dependent on insanely high amounts of energy use. Something, which under the prevailing technological paradigm means two things: oil and natural gas. All of our agricultural and mining machinery from tractors to combined harvesters, or from excavators to dumpers, are powered by diesel fuel, derived from oil. (Not unlike all those heavy duty trucks and ships carrying all those grains, mineral ores and a gazillion of other products around the world (1).) Oh, and let’s not forget about all the natural gas converted into fertilizers (via the Haber-Bosch process), or the many other applications of methane in the food industry (both as a source of heat and as a source of CO2 enhancing plant growth in hothouses). And while at it, let’s commemorate the untold gigatons of coal burned in furnaces and kilns producing the necessary iron and concrete to build those machines, warehouses and all the rest of the infrastructure delivering food on your table… The contradiction between the wish to reduce CO2 emissions and the desire to maintain our current economic arrangements for 8 billion humans is hard to miss here. We live under a self-destructing paradigm, where feeding, housing and clothing billions of people depend entirely on our unfettered access to fossil fuels — the burning of which is causing an abrupt return of a hot climate, not seen in millions of years.

Source

The vicious cycle ends

Notwithstanding their relative abundance on Earth, the amount of mineral resources (copper, aluminum, sand etc.) we can lay our hands on is also limited by the amount of fossil fuel energy we can devote to their extraction. The easy-to-get, high quality, high grade ores amenable for simple mining methods have been all used up a long time ago, and what remains, no matter how plentiful, requires us to move billions of tons of rocks to get, and thus necessitates millions of gallons of fuel to be burned in dumpers and excavators. Only as long as we can produce more and more fossil fuels year after year to keep up with the depletion of high grade minerals (and their replacement with ever poorer grade ores) can business as usual continue. Hence the chart above.

‘Were it not for climate change and the massive ecological destruction and pollution mining brings about, this activity could go on unabated — practically forever. And if we could electrify these activities, even climate change would not be a problem…’ — or so most of us would like to think. Problem is, that the same dilemma (the depletion of high grade stuff and its eventual replacement with low grade but plentiful resources) affects oil just the same. This is why global oil production is on a flat plateau for ten years now (except for the two pandemic years), with a highest peak daily crude oil output passed in November 2018 already.

Low grade oil, in our case, means low energy return on energy invested: more and more, deeper and deeper wells drilled into the same area just to keep up with the accelerating depletion of existing wells. This means more fuel spent, more truckloads of sand, drill-pipes and fracking fluids delivered on site, more CO2 pumped underground to squeeze out the remaining oil, more coal burned to make drill pipes and pipelines delivering the product. Simply put: as older more productive wells deplete, we have to run faster and faster just to stay in place. And now, with the peak of shale oil extraction — the last source of growth in global oil production — most probably behind us already, there is not much left to do to increase net oil output.

This has nothing to do with who is the president, or how much “red tape” is removed. We have slowly arrived at a point where the depletion of even the newest of wells have reached such a high pace that no matter how many more holes we bore into the sand we can only keep production flat. And since the market cannot pay enough for a barrel of oil to finance drilling an ever increasing number of ever more expensive (longer, deeper) wells indefinitely, the trend of relentless growth in oil production will eventually turn into a long decline. Which, by the way, is no longer denied (not even by the most optimistic organisations) and can be expected to commence in 5 years.

It’s not that we will be running out of oil by the end of the decade, but that the virtuous cycle of more and more cheap materials and food (made available by more and more cheap fossil fuels) will slowly turn into a vicious cycle, where less and less cheap fuel will make even less and less material extraction and food production possible. As a result, we face a gradual decline in both fossil fuel and mineral production in the years and decades ahead, saving whatever we can to maintain food production as long as we can. This, on the other hand, will not only make the “energy transition” (requiring the quadrupling of the extraction of many minerals) impossible to continue with, but will also prevent us from using “prevailing technology and resource management practices” or relying on “global trade” for much too long. So allow me to rephrase the above definition to reflect reality:

Ecological Footprint (corrected version)

A measure of how much area of biologically productive land and water an individual, population, or activity requires to produce all the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, using up a finite reserve of polluting fossil fuels and rapidly depleting minerals. The Ecological Footprint is usually measured in global hectares. Because trade is global — at least as long as oil production levels allow — an individual or country’s Footprint includes land or sea from all over the world.

This implies that from now on we would have to continuously recalculate our true ecological footprint based on locally available resources using low-tech, low energy means of extraction. And if that means, that there are no (or very little) resources left in a area that could be extracted (or used to grow plants with), than that land will simply become unable to support such high population levels.

A dangerous delusion

Viewed in the larger context laid out above, the alleged global decoupling of agricultural land and food production must be called what it is: a dangerous delusion. We are in an absolute, and ever increasing, ecological overshoot. We consume and pollute way more than what could be regenerated or absorbed by Nature in a year. A fact, masked only by a similar increase in fossil fuels and minerals use giving an artificial and temporary boost to the production of food globally. As the decline in oil production reaches a certain point, however, this charade will be impossible to continue with and the consequences of ignoring reality will begin to bite back. Just take a look at the chart below and compare it with the quote from the same page titled Peak Agricultural Land.

The global decoupling of agricultural land and food production. Source

“Humans have been reshaping the planet’s land for millennia by clearing wildlands to grow crops and raise livestock. As a result, humans have cleared one-third of the world’s forests and two-thirds of wild grasslands since the end of the last ice age. This has come at a huge cost to the planet’s biodiversity. In the last 50,000 years — and as humans settled in regions around the world — wild mammal biomass has declined by 85%.

Expanding agriculture has been the biggest driver of the destruction of the world’s wildlands. This expansion of agricultural land has now come to an end. After millennia, we have passed the peak, and in recent years global agricultural land use has declined.”

Peak agricultural land was no accident, nor part of an international push to re-wild grasslands and forests. The loss of farmland was, and still is, due to the many — so far ignored — consequences of human ecological overshoot: the relentless expansion of cities and road networks, soil erosion, nutrient depletion, pollution, desertification and more recently: salt water intrusion from rising seas. The apparent decoupling of food production from the size of agricultural land is a temporary phenomena: a result of increased fertilizer use, mechanization, pesticides, herbicides and genetic engineering. Processes, powered entirely by fossil fuels and coming at a cost of biodiversity loss, nutrient run-off (causing algal blooms), and ultimately the loss of soil fertility. Finally, as a consequence of burning all those fossil fuels and chopping down (then burning) all those trees, climate change will pose an increasingly greater threat to crop yields on remaining farmlands.

“You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality” — Ayn Rand

World population with and without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (all made from natural gas and doped with minerals mined with diesel fuel). Source

This is not to say that hunger and famine is about to hit wealthy nations in a few years time. Although food systems account for at least 15% of all fossil fuel use, the economy will most likely shed its less essential parts (like car manufacturing) first. So as oil production begins to decline somewhere toward the end of this decade / beginning of the next, we will more likely see mass lay-offs from factories rather than an abrupt shortage of wheat, corn or rice. (Although climate change, war and political collapse can mess this prediction up considerably.)

According to the latest UN numbers around 735 million people globally already face hunger and 3.1 billion cannot afford and/or do not have access to healthy diets. As economic conditions deteriorate expect these numbers to grow silently, with an increasing percentage of Western population joining the ranks of people facing malnutrition. Also expect fish, meat, diary and egg products — as well as exotic produce — to become ever more expensive, and thus increasingly inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. (In case you were wondering, besides peak farmland, we have already passed “peak fish”, too: the reconstructed catch peaked at 130 million metric tons annually in 1996 and declined more strongly since.)

Animal products require much more energy to make, and not only in the form of feed, but also in terms of electricity, natural gas and diesel fuel, too. As these inputs become ever scarcer due to our inability to increase fossil fuel output indefinitely, the price of animal protein can be expected to increase faster than that of plant based foodstuffs (requiring much less fuel per kcal than meat). Meanwhile, the cost of making ultra-processed food (also requiring untold gigawatts of power to produce) will increase as well — together with profit margins of large corporations merging into mega-monopolies selling them… Food inflation is thus here to stay, and can be expected to accelerate further still, affecting the least well-to-do in our societies the worst.

The souffle deflates

Population is, and always was, a function of food and resources available. Throughout human history, and still in many places around Africa, more children meant more help around the household and the garden. (Youngsters are able to grow or collect more food than what they consume, which comes especially handy when parents get older and become frail.) In industrial societies, however, children have become a liability and a source of stress and anxiety. Their tuition fees, together with the increased cost of starting a family (a need to buy a bigger house and car, spend more food, fuel, clothes and consumer goods etc.) place an increasingly unbearable burden on young couples.

No wonder that young people chose to have a career instead, and as of late, feel increasingly unable to start a family amid a rising risk of precarity and a growing uncertainty about the future. Masses of youngsters thus “chose” to ‘walk away’, or to use a more contemporary word: silently ‘lay flat’, as civilization ceased to work for them. As oil production entered it’s high plateau phase ten years ago (with crude oil output hovering around 51583 terawatt-hours globally plus-minus 1.6% except for 2020 and 2021) the material economy could no longer grow. Without an adequate growth in surplus energy and minerals, though, there is simply no way to uphold current living standards for a still increasing number of humans. An inevitable decline in living standards thus began to take hold. In the meantime the race to live a middle class life and to have a family was lost for way too many young people, even before their life really began.

The sorry state of global fertility. In an ideal world every woman in a given society would need to give birth to 2.1 children on average to keep population levels flat. Source: statista

Another important factor, so far unprecedented in human history, is chemical pollution from pesticides and herbicides (as well as from industrial processes) causing both male and female fertility rates to drop precipitously. These so called ‘forever chemicals’ which tend to circulate in the food chain for an awful long time causing harm to all participants, can reduce female fertility by as much as 40% and male sperm counts by 53%. (Listen to this very interesting conversation to learn more or watch this “fun” 20-min video.) And as pollution load increases the situation can be expected to get worse. If present trends hold, there will be almost no babies born by the middle of the century, even if the economic situation improved in the meantime (3).

As a combined effect of growing economic precarity, turbocharged by resource scarcity and an unprecedented increase in endocrine disrupting chemicals, no wonder that there is a collapse of birth rates worldwide. This is especially so in the most well-to-do regions of the world, which have experienced the most industrial pollution throughout the past centuries, and whose once esteemed working class increasingly suffers from wage stagnation, rising living costs, and job losses as a result of deindustrialization. Is it any wonder that the median age has reached its all time high throughout the most “developed” regions of the world? Just take a look at this map, posted by the American Geographical Society, and see how low birth rates result in high median ages, and vice versa.

World Median Ages. Median age means: half of the people are younger, half are older than this age in a given country.

There is a caveat though: as the median age of population rises above 30, the trend could all too easily become irreversible. People above this age cannot expected to have large families — they would need to have one started much sooner than that — resulting in a precipitous decline in population as older generations leave the scene. (If you are interested how peak population might look like based on reality — v. the wholly unrealistic UN projections based infinite economic growth — visit Tom Murphy’s excellent blog and read his take on the topic.) In the meantime, though, this trend could result in a ratio of 4–8 grandparents to every grandchild, making social security and publicly funded healthcare increasingly impossible to maintain (for most of the healthcare costs occur during the last few years of a person’s life).

With the prime years of consumption falling between age 25–45, and as more and more people move towards retirement, maturing societies will experience a further erosion in consumer spending. All the big ticket items (a house, first car, furniture, household equipment etc.) are bought during this phase of a person’s life, after which people tend to give up on spending and start to save for retirement. And as we have seen, we not only have a lot less young people, but they also have a lot less money to spend due to increasing housing costs and food prices…

Conclusion

I have likened the human enterprise to a failed souffle, which after the heat (energy) is turned off, will start to deflate immediately. Being based entirely on rapidly depleting easy-to-get resources, there is no such thing as a “steady state” or “equilibrium” for a civilization in overshoot, as it must grow ceaselessly to avoid the onset of contraction (2). Thus as soon as oil wells — the source of energy powering every other activity — begin to deplete faster than we could replace them, the current stagnation will end, and deflation will become inescapable. We will have to learn the hard way that fossil fuels, minerals, food and population are not separate entities in our modern world, but one closely interconnected system running out of steam. Climate change, wars, novel viruses, endocrine disrupting chemicals and other wild cards “just” come on top of all this; accelerating these socio-economic trends kicked into motion by the overconsumption of resources.

As the human system fails to increase its energy uptake, it will no longer have the power to replace lost farmland with more mechanization, nor to compensate the loss of easy-to-mine mineral resources with ever poorer ores requiring ever more shoveling and hauling to get. Something will got to give. Food prices already began to increase rapidly to reflect this new reality, leaving less and less money for consumer goods, cars and houses, and resulting in a ‘cost of living crisis’ unwilling to recede. A collapse in spending, on the other hand, has already begin to turn into a collapse in production — a trend, which might leave us with a glut of oil and resources as manufacturing plants close and as demand evaporates faster than oil extraction declines. Oh, the beauty of self-adaptive systems!

It follows from all of the above that the consumption crisis will continue to accelerate worldwide as the median age of the population keeps rising, fewer and fewer children are born, and food inflation eats more and more into the average wage earner’s budget. Supply and demand for both food and consumer goods will thus begin to recede as we pass the all time high of world population, together with a peak in petroleum and mineral extraction. In fact we can already observe the first signs of this trend with some pretty serious economic trouble brewing in China — the world’s biggest manufacturer of goods — and stagflation in the West, the largest consumer on the globe. A financial system predicated on growth, on the other hand, will not react so subtly to such developments, threatening to pull the entire economy. How our delusional, misguided, panicky political-economic elites will react to that, however, is an entirely different matter.

Until next time,

B

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Notes:

(1) Batteries are simply too heavy, too material intensive to make and would have to be recharged way too often to be used in such applications. The same goes to hydrogen, which must be generated at a huge cost and stored under immense pressure (400 bar) in a special, hermetically sealed (and thus heavy and expensive) container. Note also how both of these “replacements” to oil are mere stores of energy (which must be generated elsewhere), while fossil fuels are a source of energy.

(2) The faster a resource tends to deplete, the faster the onset of collapse. While ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians relied on a steady stream of nutrients and water from the mountains, and consumed their resource base very slowly, our rapacious civilization fueled by oil has run through rich mineral deposits in a few decades, and as we ran out of the easy-to-get stuff, we face a similarly rapid decline.

(3) Note how limiting pollution right now (and presuming that it solves the birth-rate crisis in a year or two) would cause a rise then a spike in consumption quarter of a century down the line (that is around 2050) when the newborns of today enter the workforce and start producing / consuming products en masse. The problem is, that by then oil production can be reasonably expected to be half of what we have today. Since everything is mined, delivered and built by diesel fuel (and this cannot reasonably expected to change significantly in two decades) it will be physically impossible for those children to have a lifestyle even remotely similar to what their parents used to have in their childhood. So even if the pollution problem could be solved overnight, the economic hardship (coming from a steady depletion of rich resource deposits) could not be disappeared.