ZPG2: zero population and zero oil growth

One “emerging consensus view”, even among politicians who continue rooting for economic growth if only to claw tax receipts for paying off swollen national debt, is that world oil demand will ceiling if not crater. Peak Oil has won converts, some of them even able to openly admit it is real, but mostly selling oil saving and oil substitution to consumers as part and parcel of the hunting down of the Evil Molecule called CO2. A new accessory to the claimed climate change mitigation imperative for eschewing oil is that Global Green Energy will generate jobs and profits.

In reality, geological depletion of global oil reserves sets a hard limit on flights of fantasy as to why we suddenly have to go green and hunt down GHG. As anybody able to read a few charts on world oil discoveries, reserves, incremental capacity costs and net capacity gains will agree, increasing net total supply is more than difficult. By 2025-2030 world oil supply could be down 25% or more from today’s output, and export supply or “offer” will shrink even faster.

Talk of ZPG for Zero Population Growth may be on a lot shakier ground for media and political opinion manipulators, but like Zero Oil Growth has some very powerful logic behind it.

In the 20thC world population nearly quadrupled from around 1.55 billion to about 6 bn. Nobody in their right mind, today, claims it could quadruple this century, to about 24 billion. Population boomers are however still at work. This includes the newly victorious Democratic Party of Japan, insisting that restoring or strengthening population growth is vital for the nation and good for everybody. Above all, population growth is claimed as good for ‘classic’ economic growth.

Energy Bulletin