Sustainable Urban Planning

94 Practice

Box 3.3 Global population and energy use

During the nineteenth century the increase in population
numbers and the scale of fossil-fuel uptake were not in
observable global conflict. Selecting AD1900 as an
assumed last year of insignificant competition between
population numbers and fossil-fuel extraction, the graphs
show that from 1900 onward, increases in the rate of
fossil-fuel uptake outstrip the rate of population growth.
The fossil-fuel-to-population crossover sometime after
2000 is a function of the global population still increasing
while fossil-fuel extraction starts to dwindle.
In terms of this construct the high-volume oil-
consuming nations will confront absolute fossil-fuel
shortages early on in the twenty-first century, and oil
resource scarcity will be a fact of global life by 2050.
The construct suggests also that the rate of fossil-fuel
supply at AD2100 (the end of the ‘fossil-fuel age’) will be
about what it was only 200 years earlier in 1900 (at the
beginning of that age). Furthermore, by 2100 both the
fossil-fuel supply rate and the rate of population growth
will have levelled off. But by then, according to this prog-

nosis, several times the AD1900 population will be

obliged to get by with only the 1900 level of continuing

fossil-fuel supply.a

References:Meadows and others in Beyond the Limits,

1992; I. G. Simmons,The Ecology of Natural Resources, first

published 1984. J. S. Steinhart and others Pathway to

Energy Efficiency, 1987. Also from Brian Fleary,Decline of

the Age of Oil(1998) ‘Oil production in the major pro-

ducing regions of the world is reaching its peak and begin-

ning a decline...The former Soviet Union’s production

peaked in 1989 and has suffered rapid decline since. The

remainder of the producing regions outside the Arabian

Gulf are expected to peak by the year 2005. The Arabian

Gulf region, with two-thirds of world oil reserves, is likely

to peak last, in about 2020.’

aIt is probable that hydrogen-powered vehicles of carbon

fibre construction will be in mass production by 2025.

6.0

4.5

3.0

1.5

0.0

10.0

8.0

6.0

4.0

2.0

0.0

1800 1900 2000 2100 2200

Year

1800 1900 2000 2100 2200

Population (billions)

Year

Fossil Fuel Use (10

12

kwh/year)

all’; and huge advances in medical science which would both ‘constrain popula-

tion size and prolong human life’. The reasoning, in short, was that resourceful

humankind – as was usually, but not always the case previously – would find a

technological ‘fix’. The hopeful expectation from this counter-quarter was for a

discovery or synergism which would extend the era of carboniferous capitalism

beyond the period of concern for those now living, the mistake being that all

this was done without taking into account that the numbers now living are not

only of unprecedented magnitude but enjoy much longer lives as consumers, and

that the rate of consumer uptake of fossil fuels is beyond previous historical

levels.^21