THE LIMITS TO GROWTH ANALYSIS OF OUR GLOBAL SITUATION

28.11.07

Our society's most fundamental mistake is our commitment to affluent consumer lifestyles and to an economy that must have constant and limitless growth in output, on a planet whose limited resources make these impossible goals.

Our way of life is grossly unsustainable. Our levels of production and consumption are far too high. We can only achieve them because we few in rich countries are grabbing most of the resources produced and therefore depriving most of the world's people of a fair share, and because we are depleting stocks faster than they can regenerate. Because we consume so much we are rapidly using up resources and causing huge ecological damage. It would be impossible for all the world's people to rise to our rich world per capita levels of consumption. Most people have no idea how far we are beyond sustainable levels.

Although present levels of production, consumption, resource use and environmental impact are unsustainable we are obsessed with economic growth, i.e., with increasing production and consumption, as much as possible and without limit!

Most of the major global problems we face, especially environment, Third World poverty, conflict and social breakdown are primarily due to this limits problem; i.e., to over-consumption.

If this limits to growth analysis is valid we must work for radical system change, from consumer-capitalist society, to ways of life and to an economy that will enable all to have a high quality of life on far lower levels of resource consumption, perhaps to 1/10 of present levels.. Such ways are available, and attractive, and easily developed -- if enough of us want to adopt them. (See The Sustainable Alternative Society.)

Contents.

A summary of the basic evidence and arguments

The detail.

Rich world over-consumption

Population

The I = PxAxT equation

Resources

Mineral reserves and resources

Energy resources

Petroleum

What about nuclear energy?

What about renewable energy?

Biological resources

The absurdly impossible implications of economic growth

Diminishing returns

What about the shift to services and information?

What about dematerialisation”?

But can’t technical advance solve the problems?

“But we will become rich enough to save the environment.”

Conclusions on resources

Implications for other global problems

The economy; Basic cause of the problems

The alternative society; The Simpler Way

The transition to a sustainable society

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A SUMMARY OF THE BASIC EVIDENCE AND ARGUMENTS

Following are some of the main facts and arguments that support the limits to growth position.

· Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world's people, are consuming about three quarters of the world's resource production. Our per capita consumption is about 15-20 times that of the poorest half of the world's people. (See fig.1.)

· World population will probably stabilise around 9 billion, somewhere after 2060. If all those people were to have Australian per capita resource consumption, then world production of all resources would have to be about 8 times as great as it is now. If we tried to rise to that level of resource output we would completely exhaust all probably recoverable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, tar sand oil, shale oil and uranium (assuming the present " burner" reactors) well before 2050. We would also have exhausted potentially recoverable resources for one third of the mineral items. (Trainer, 1985.)

· Petroleum is especially limited. Campbell (1997) and many others conclude that world oil supply will probably peak between 2005 and 2010 and be down to half that level by 2035, with big price increases soon after the peak. World oil supply would then be only 1/15 of the quantity needed to give all people the present Australian per capita consumption.

· If all 9 billion people were to use timber at the rich world per capita rate we would need 3.5 times the world's present forest area.

· If all 9 billion were to have a rich world diet, which takes about .5 ha of land to produce, we would need 4.5 billion ha of food producing land. But there is only 1.4 billion ha of cropland in use today and this is not likely to increase.

· Recent "Footprint" analysis estimates that it takes about 7-8 ha of productive land to provide water, energy settlement area and food for one person living in a rich world city. (Wachernagel and Rees, 1995.) So if 9 billion people were to live as we do in rich world cities we would need about 70 billion ha of productive land. But that is 10 times all the productive land on the planet. (Note that a number of other factors could be added to the footprint calculation, such as the land needed to absorb pollution.)

· It is extremely important that global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions should not be more than 2 degrees C. That means atmospheric concentration must be kept below about 450 ppm, and possibly 400, and that to achieve that goal would require annual CO2 emissions to be cut from the present 26 billion tones p.a. to about 10 billion tones p. a. by 2050, and to zero by 2100. In other words by the end of this century we must almost entirely eliminate release of CO2 to the atmosphere. Note that even a 60% reduction in global emissions by 2050, to 10.4 GT/y would mean a global per capita amount of 1.1 t/y of CO2, which corresponds to .3 tonne of Carbon, .42 tonnes of coal, or 10 GJ/Y… when the Australian per capita energy consumption at present is 240 GJ It is argued below that it will not be possible to replace this dependence on fossil fuels with renewable energy, nuclear energy or geosequestration of CO2 from coal use.

Conclusion:

These have been some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to the conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to the living standards we take for granted today in rich countries. We seem to be beyond sustainable per capita levels of resource use by a factor of 10 or more. We can only live like this because we are taking and using up most of the scarce resources, preventing most of the world's people from having anything like a fair share, and depleting the planet’s ecological capital. Therefore we cannot morally endorse our affluent way of life. We must accept the need to move to far simpler and less resource-expensive ways.

Now, the growth absurdity.

To this we must now add the absurdly impossible implications of our commitment to economic growth and increasing "living standards." If we in rich countries have 3% p. a. economic growth, by 2070 our "living standards" will be 8 times as high as they are now. If all the people likely to live on earth then were to have risen to the living standards we would have in 2080, total world economic output would be 60 times as great as it is today!!

The present levels of production and consumption are grossly unsustainable yet we are blindly obsessed with increasing them towards multiples that are absurdly impossible.

The magnitude of the overshoot is far too great for technical advance and more conservation and recycling etc. to solve the problems, i.e., to enable us to go on committed to affluent living standards and economic growth while reducing the resource and ecological impacts to sustainable levels (see below.)

Thus there is a very powerful case for there being limits to affluence and growth, which we have exceeded. If we accept this argument then we cannot endorse consumer-capitalist society.

(A note on the book, The Limits to Growth, by D. Meadows et al., 1972. This was an important contribution, drawing widespread attention to the issue for the first time. However a number of its arguments were based on less impressive evidence than we have now. For instance it used mineral and fuel reserve figures, whereas we now have estimates of potentially recoverable resource quantities. We also have “footprint” analysis”, and much clearer understandings of the greenhouse problem, the “peak oil’ thesis, and the general energy problem. The book is often claimed to have been discredited, but we now have much stronger support for its basic theme.)

THE DETAIL

RICH WORLD OVER-CONSUMPTION.

The rich countries with about one-fifth of the world's population are consuming around four-fifths of the world's energy production. The rich world average per capita consumption is about 17 times that of the poorest half of the world's people.

It is important to recognize that these figures significantly underestimate the inequality in resource use, because they include only raw materials used in the rich countries and do not include the large volumes of materials embodied in imported goods. Rich countries now do not carry out much manufacturing but import most of the manufactured goods they use from Third World factories.

POPULATION

The world's population in 2006 was around 6.5 billion. It is expected to peak at 9 billion around 2070. Most of the increase will be in the poor countries.

Third World people are often criticised for having such large families when they are too poor to provide for them. However, the economic conditions of poverty make it important for poor people to have large families. When there are no age pensions people will have no one to look after them in their old age if they do not have surviving children. Also infant death rates are high so it is necessary to have many children in order to be sure some reach adulthood. These are powerful economic incentives to have large families and they will only be removed by satisfactory development which enables pensions and safe water supplies in villages etc.

Many believe the world is presently far beyond a sustainable population. A sustainable population with a reasonable living standard might be only .5 - 2 billion people. We now feed only about 1 billion people well, but might soon have to provide for 9 billion. Indicators of the biological productivity of the planet are falling and many agricultural indicators are worrying (e.g. falling water tables), even without the probable effects of global warming.

Over-population is therefore a very serious problem, but there is a much more serious problem; that is over-consumption on the part of the rich countries…and the goal the rest have of rising to our “living standards’. The world's problems are due much more to over-consumption than to over-population. Population is likely to rise by about 50% but if all rise to the present rich world rates of consumption world resource use and footprint will be about 8 – 10 times as great as they are now.

THE EQUATION… I = PxAxT

The impact we have on the environment (I) can be thought of as being due to the number of people we have (P), multiplied by their per capita level of consumption, or affluence (A), multiplied by the sort of technology in use (for instance heating a house by fossil fuels has a bigger impact than heating by solar passive design.)

This equation shows that affluence is the biggest concern. Again world population is only likely to multiply by 1.5 but the Australian energy use per capita is 120 times the average in Bangladesh. Thus the main worry is that all people want to rise to the "living standards" rich countries have…and we want to raise ours, without limit.

The IPAT equation supports the claim that the richest countries are also grossly overpopulated, including Australia. We can support our numbers affluently only by a) importing most of the world’s resource production, b) producing and exporting a lot and thus contributing heavily to the greenhouse problem, c) exporting things like coal and aluminium and beef, which are generating the greenhouse gases and depleting our ecological capital. If we lived without doing these things we could support far fewer people at our present "living standard".

RESOURCES,

The basic concern in the limits analysis is how long would crucial resources last, especially if all people aspire to rich world "living standards"?  Economists often give the misleading impression that resource availability depends mainly on the price we are prepared to pay. Their assumption is that if a resource becomes more scarce its price will rise and it will then be economic to process poorer grade deposits (or move to substitutes.) There is a tendency for this to happen, but the important limits are set by geochemistry, i.e. by the quantities and grades of ore and fuels in the earth, and biology, e.g., by the amount of biomass that could be put into ethanol production.

It is sometimes argued that resources can't be becoming scarce because their prices have fallen throughout the Twentieth century. However price trends are poor indicators of real scarcity. For example the price trend of tropical timber tells us nothing about the fact that it is being rapidly depleted and will be largely unattainable in a few decades. The real price of oil fell after the early 1970s rises, but it is likely that oil has been becoming much scarcer and will be available in only very small quantities in a few decades.(See Petroleum below.) Thus price is an uncertain indicator of long term availability or scarcity.

In general resource prices fell through the 20^th century, but it seems that this trend has now reversed. Bardi and Pagani (2007) analysed US Geological Survey production figures and concluded that 11 of 57 minerals have passed their production peak. Grain, food, water, fish and petroleum now all seem to be showing significant price rises.

MINERAL RESERVES AND RESOURCES

There are a few geo-chemically abundant minerals (iron, aluminium, titanium, magnesium and silicon). However it is quite unlikely that all the world's people could consume the per capita quantities of these items that people in rich countries do, due mainly to the energy costs of producing them. In the 1990s, to produce the annual American per capita steel consumption already took as much energy as is used by the poorest half of the world's people for all their purposes.

The term "reserves" refers to quantities of minerals that have been discovered. New discoveries are adding to reserves all the time and in the future technical advance could make it economic to mine deposits that are too poor at present to include in the reserve figures. In many cases reserve figures have actually increased over time even though use rates have increased. It is also important to recognize that mining companies tend to carry out only sufficient exploration to prove enough reserves for about a decade’s mining ahead. This means that as time goes by they will look further and find more deposits. So we will probably not learn much about limits by examining reserve figures.

It is more meaningful to consider estimates of “potentially recoverable resources”, i.e., the quantities and grades of ores that remain in the ground, including those undiscovered at present. These are difficult to assess confidently but estimates of these quantities have become available since the early 1970's. (E.g., Erickson, 1980.) These cannot be taken as very precise but they do provide a useful indication of quantities we might access.

Only a very small proportion of any mineral existing in the earth's crust has been concentrated into ore deposits, between .001% and .01%, and the rest exists in common rock, mostly in silicates. (Skinner, 1987.) In general, to extract a metal from its richest occurrence in common rock would take 10 to 100 times as much energy as to extract if from the poorest ore deposit. To extract a unit of copper from the richest common rocks would require about 1000 times as much energy per kg as is required to process ores used today. In other words we will run into such a huge energy cost barrier that it is most unlikely that we will ever process very poor ores or common rock for minerals (especially as energy is probably the most urgent resource problem we face.)

We should therefore regard as potentially recoverable only those quantities that have been formed into ore deposits. Table 2 sets out estimates which geologists have made of these quantities for a number of items stating the amount within the top 4.6 km depth of the earth's crust. (Ore deposits tend to be within a few kilometres of the surface, because many have been formed by surface processes such as weathering and sedimentation.)

There are a number of reasons why we are not likely to retrieve more than a very small proportion of the material that exists in all ore deposits and estimated in Table 2. These are

a) we are not likely to find a high proportion of ore deposits (almost half of them are under the oceans),

b) some of those we find will be in locations which make mining difficult or impossible, such as under cities or under Antarctic ice.

c) many of the deposits found will have ores of too low a grade to process economically (most deposits are of low grade ore).

d) some deposits found and containing high grade ore will have too little material in them to justify the construction of a mine at that site (most deposits are small and isolated from each other.)

If plausible probabilities for these factors are assumed the proportion of the existing ore material that we are likely to retrieve could be under 2%. However Table 2 assumes we will retrieve 10%.

The final column in Table 1 shows that given these assumptions, if all people were to consume minerals as Americans did in the 1990s, estimated potentially recoverable resource quantities of about half the items listed would be completely exhausted in around 35 years. 

Note again that the figures significantly underestimate actual consumption rates because they refer only to quantities of raw materials used in the US and do not take into account the materials in the many goods imported.

Table 1.

ENERGY RESOURCES

Table 2 summarises common estimates for potentially recoverable energy resources. If all these are added together and we ask how long would they last if 9 billion people each used energy resources at the present rich world per capita rate, the answer is only 45 years.

Table 1. World Energy Resources Remaining. (Very approximate estimates.)

Amount in tonnes of coal equivalent.

Petroleum 200 billion (a)

Coal 2000 billion (b)

Gas (10,000 trillion cubic feet) 450 billion (c) 

Shale and tar petroleum 700 billion (d) 

Uranium 150 billion (e)

Total: equivalent to 3500 billion tones of coal.

US energy use is equal to 12 tonnes of coal per person per year. If the present 6 billion people used energy as Americans do, the above energy resources would be exhausted in 49 years. 

If the expected 9 billion people used energy as Americans do, this amount of energy would be exhausted in 33 years. 

Notes: 

a. Campbell's estimate (1997), 1000 billion barrels remaining. 

b. This is a high estimate of recoverable coal; several are around 1000 billion tonnes. Perhaps 15,000 billion tonnes are in the earth, but mostly in thin deep, fractured seams. Recent analyses indicate that coal supply might peak in two decades; see below,

c. 10,000 trillion cubic feet. The 2000 USGS estimate is lower, at 4,600 trillion cubic feet. 

d. Campbell's estimate of 10 billion barrels per year for 70 years. There are large volumes of petroleum in these sources, but they are difficult to extract (e.g., they have to be mined, unlike oil), with high water and ecological costs. 

e. This figure assumes use via the present "burner" reactors only; "breeders would derive much more energy from uranium.

Clearly, even if we doubled or trebled the assumed potentially recoverable energy resources it would not be possible to keep up rich world "living standards" for all people for more than a few decades. 

 

PETROLEUM


The most urgent limits problems are set by petroleum. Our society is highly dependent on liquid fuels. There is considerable agreement that the total ultimately recoverable figures is around 2000 billion barrels. (Campbell 1997 argues for a figure under 1800 billion barrels. The USGS arrives at a higher figure; below.) Since 1995 a number of petroleum geologists have contributed to the following set of alarming claims about world petroleum supply. (Including Campbell, 1997, Ivanhoe, 1995, Duncan and Youngquist, Laherrere 1995, Fleay, 1995.)

- World supply will probably peak between 2005 and 2020, and then decline.

- By 2030 supply will probably be down to half its peak supply. (This would enable all people on earth then to average only 1/15 the amount per capita we now use in Australia.)

- Price will jump and remain high as soon as the peak is reached.

- Alternative petroleum sources such as tar sands and oil shales will not make a significant difference to the situation. These are difficult to extract and environmentally problematic.

- According to some measures, at present the world is using oil three times as fast as it is being discovered.

Important in this discussion is the fact that Third world countries, especially India and China, are eager to greatly increase their access to petroleum.

The US Geological Survey has recently put forward a much higher estimate of oil resources, 3000 billion barrels, compared with the 2000 billion barrels Campbell and others claim. (USGS, 2000.) However even if this amount is found it would only delay the peak by about 10 years. Critics of the USGS say that discovery plus “reserve growth” are running well below the level needed to achieve the USGS figure.
 

In 2007 the influential International Energy Authority seems to have come around to accepting that petroleum is much more scarce than it had thought in recent years. (For more detail see The Petroleum Situation.)

So the most urgent limit to affluence and growth is to do with the probability of an extremely disruptive peaking of petroleum supply, followed by rapid decline, within a few years. It would be difficult to exaggerate the seriousness of this. It would cause catastrophic change in all aspects of consumer society, making travel, transport, trade, tourism, agriculture, etc. very costly and in some cases impossible.

COAL

In the past it has been taken for granted that there is a very large amount of coal to be mined and in time it can be used heavily with capture and storage of the CO2. (CCS) However if 9 billion people had the probable 20509 Australian per capita energy use (500GJ) and ¾ of this came from coal, 150 billion tones would have to be used every year, and the commonly assumed 1000 billion tonne reserve would last 7 years. Retrievable coal reserves are sometimes guestimated at 4000 billion tones, which would last about 28 years.

Heinberg (2007) reports that recent surveying has concluded that coal is mush more limited than had previously been thought, and supply might peak within 15 years.

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE; GEOSEQUESTRATION

What about using a lot of coal but burying the CO2 produced. The main limit here is to do with the storage capacity likely to be available. Large quantities should not be put into the deep ocean, given the unknown risk of ecological effects, especially when the greenhouse problem will alter ocean currents.

Hendricks, Graus and Van Bergen (2004) say that the best estimate of land storage capacity is 1700 GT. (The speculative high limit estimate is 6 times as great.) If 9 billion people had the expected 2050 per capita energy consumption, and 25% of this came from coal plugging gaps left by heavy use of renewables and nuclear energy, then 46 billion tones of coal would be used each year, generating 122 billion tones of CO2. So the storage capacity would last about 14 years. The safe limit for emissions might be 6 GT/y y 2050 and none by 2100.

Note that it only applies to emissions that can be captured, which rules out transport and includes only about 40% of emissions. In addition it can’t capture more than about 80-90% of the gas. If the above 122 GT/y was from sources to which capture technology could be applied, maybe 24 GT/y would not be captured, far above a safe limit.

So geo-sequestration cannot be a solution to the greenhouse problem.

WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR ENERGY?

There are several reasons why nuclear energy cannot solve these problems, and should not be adopted even if it could.

· A cording to the common estimate there is far too little Uranium at high grade to fuel a large-scale nuclear era for more than about a decade. (Leeuwin and Smith, 2005, Zittel, 2005.)

· If 9 billion people were to live as Australians do now, getting all their energy from nuclear sources, the world would have about 300 times its present nuclear capacity. At present rates of growth in Australian energy use this multiple could be 2.5 times as great by 2050.

· An accident could have catastrophic consequences. Some of the materials that would be released would remain radioactive for thousands of years. If the US Price Anderson Act had not limited insurance claims that could be made on nuclear generating corporations there would be no reactors in that country, because no one would insure them.

· No matter how well designed, reactors are operated by humans so it is always possible for mistakes to be made, e.g., when operators over-ride automatic safety systems as happened at Chernobyl. There can be no such thing as a “fail-safe” reactor.

· A nuclear era would increase the chances of access to dangerous elements by criminals and terrorists, or governments seeking to produce nuclear weapons. Huge quantities of dangerous materials would have to be trucked around all the time. Much of this could not be used to make a nuclear bomb, but could be put into a “dirty bomb”, i.e., one that would spread radioactive material through a city.

· Nuclear energy involves considerable release of carbon dioxide, because liquid fuels must be used in mining. This would increase as ore grades that must be mined deteriorated, reducing the amount of Uranium economically extractable.

· There is no agreed solution to the problem of waste disposal. It is not possible to be sure that a site that has been very stable and dry for a long time will remain dry for hundreds of thousands of years into the future, through ice ages and greenhouse effects on hydrology. The Synroc process for storing wastes involves reprocessing spent fuel and thus problems of contamination and terrorist access to highly radioactive elements.

· Nuclear energy only produces electricity, which is only c 20% of rich world energy use, so it could not cut carbon release sufficiently. (If Australian transport, 1200 PJ pa, was to be run on electricity we would need to produce 2400 PJ because of the energy losses involved, plus normal electricity demand, 700 PJ pa, i.e., 4.5 times present electricity supply…which is increasing at 2+% p.a.)

· The moral problem; the people living in a nuclear era would get all the benefit, but many future generations would pay the biological costs without getting any of the benefit.

· We have no idea what will be the total long term health, genetic and mortality effects of nuclear energy. These effects will accumulate over hundreds of thousands of years. Even without accidents small quantities of radioactivity are released. There is no threshold level below which we can say there will be no biological effect. Thus, we cannot be in a position to say that the benefits out weight the cost.

· Breeder reactors would greatly increase energy production, but these are much more problematic, involving reprocessing of spent fuel and handling Plutonium.

· Fusion reactors might be got to work but the electricity they would produce would be very costly, and scarcity of the Lithium they require would limit their potential severely.

WHAT ABOUT RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES?


We must eventually move from fossil fuels to the use of renewable energy, but it is not likely that all people can all have our present energy-affluent ways on renewable energy sources. It is most likely that the cost would be far too high and/or the deliverable quantity would be too low. (The argument is detailed in Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society, Ted Trainer, Springer, 2007. For a more recent summary article see http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/REcant.html)

There is no doubt that we could derive a lot of energy from renewables, but if we are to reduce the greenhouse problem to safe levels we must more or less completely cease CO2 release, within this century. Because most renewables are intermittent we would have to use too much coal or nuclear power to provide electricity when the sun or wind as not available. Windmills and solar panels can provide no electricity on calm nights. Capacity for very large scale storage of electricity is not available, nor is it foreseen. These are not problems when renewables make up a small fraction of total supply, perhaps even to 25% each. But to solve the greenhouse problem almost all electricity would have to come from renewables sources (or nuclear sources or CCS use of coal.)

It is not difficult to start adding renewable capacity to a grid, but when the proportion of demand being met becomes significant, possibly before 20%, problems of integration arise, e.g., having much coal-fired capacity on stand by in case the winds drop. We would also be moving to the situation where we might have a coal, wind, solar thermal and PV system side by side, with one or two meeting demand while the others sit by idle waiting for when they are needed or available. Total system capital cost would then be very high.

There are good reasons for thinking that we will never have a large scale hydrogen economy, especially the large losses in storing, pumping, transforming this element.

However the biggest problems are to do with producing liquid fuel; see box.

THE BASIC LIMIT ON LIQUID FUEL FROM BIOMASS

The International Energy Authority (Fulton, 2005) says that in future it will probably be possible to produce about 7 GJ net of ethanol from each tonne of woody biomass. (However some do not think ethanol from cellulosic material will be viable; see Augenstein and Baer, 2007.

A plausible yield of woody biomass from very large areas might be 7 tonnes per ha per year.

Australian per capita liquid fuel (oil plus gas) consumption is 128 GJ/person/year.

Therefore Australia would need to harvest 2.6 ha/per person.

For 9 billion people we would need to harvest 23 billion ha.

…but total world land area is only 13 billion ha. There are only about 4 billion ha of forest.

It would therefore be impossible to derive more than a quite small proportion of the present per capita liquid fuel use from biomass.

"...biofuels are unlikely to alleviate to any significant extent the current dependence on fossil energy..."

"...none of the biofuel technologies considered in our analysis appears even close to being feasible on a large scale due to shortages of both arable land and water..." 

Giampietro, M., S. Ulgiati, and D. Pimentel, "The feasibility of large scale biofuel production. Does an enlargement of scale change the picture", Bioscience, 47, 9, Oct., 1997, 587-600, p. 558. 

"...present US energy use is 30% greater than the total solar energy captured by all US vegetation." 

Pimmentel, D., (1998b), "Food vs biomass fuel", Advances in Food Research, 32, 1, 185-239, p. 197.) 

Note that this is not an argument against use of renewable energy sources. We must live on them solely before long so it is important to make them as effective as possible. The argument has been that their development cannot support a consumer-capitalist society committed to affluent living standards and economic growth.

Use coal to plug the gaps left by renewables?

Unfortunately the gaps would be too big. PV solar technologies provide no energy at night. Wind systems even in good regions will perform at under 20% of capacity about 20% of the time, etc., and at times there will be calms over very large regions. Solar Thermal systems can store heat, but are not effective in winter. Very little biomass would be available to plug gaps. There will therefore be large gaps left by renewables.

It can be estimated that the “safe” global greenhouse limit for fossil fuel use without sequestration of the CO2 corresponds to about 77 EJ. If half this budget was given to transport (which would only equal 6% of present Australian per capita transport energy consumption) if spread over 9 billion people), and half the electricity, per capita electricity supply would be 4 GJ (th), which would generate about 1.3GJ of electricity per person…which is 4% of the present Australia per capita consumption pa. In other words using the allowable fossil fuel budget would fall far short of plugging the gaps left by renewables.