In recent years, we have heard statements indicating that it is possible to decouple GDP growth from energy growth. I have been looking at the relationship between world GDP and world energy use and am becoming increasingly skeptical that such a decoupling is really possible.
Figure 1. Growth in world energy consumption (based on BP data) and growth in world real GDP
Prior to 2000, world real GDP (based on USDA Economic Research Institute data) was indeed growing faster than energy use, as measured by BP Statistical Data. Between 1980 and 2000, world real GDP growth averaged a little under 3% per year, and world energy growth averaged a little under 2% per year, so GDP growth increased about 1% more per year than energy use. Since 2000, energy use has grown approximately as fast as world real GDP–increases for both have averaged about 2.5% per year growth. This is not what we have been told to expect.
Why should this “efficiency gain” go away after 2000? Many economists are concerned about energy intensity of GDP and like to publicize the fact that for their country, GDP is rising faster than energy consumption. These indications can be deceiving, however. It is easy to reduce the energy intensity of GDP for an individual country by moving the more energy-intensive manufacturing to a country with higher energy intensity of GDP.
What happens when this shell game is over? In total, is the growth in world GDP any less energy intense? The answer since 2000 seems to be “No”.
It seems to me that at least part of the issue is declining energy return on energy invested (EROI)–we are using an increasing share of energy consumption just to extract and process the energy we use–for example, in “fracking” and in deep water drilling. This higher energy cost is acting to offset efficiency gains. But there are other issues as well, which I will discuss in this post.
If GDP growth and energy use are closely tied, it will be even more difficult to meet CO2 emission goals than most have expected. Without huge efficiency savings, a reduction in emissions (say, 80% by 2050) is likely to require a similar percentage reduction in world GDP. Because of the huge disparity in real GDP between the developed nations and the developing nations, the majority of this GDP reduction would likely need to come from developed nations. It is difficult to see this happening without economic collapse.
Real GDP Growth and Energy Growth for Several Countries
I started this analysis by looking at trends (1) in real GDP and (2) in total energy consumption for a number of countries, and was struck by how different the patterns appeared.
Figure 2. USA's real GDP and total energy consumption
Up until 2005, the USA was able to increase real GDP by 3% per year, while increasing energy use by only 1% per year. The 2% savings would seem to come from some combination of offshoring and energy efficiency. Since 2005, the relationship between GDP growth and energy growth has been closer.
Figure 3 - Germany's total energy consumption and real GDP.
Germany is another example with much higher GDP growth than growth in energy use. Between 1980 and 2005, energy use was close to flat, while GDP rose by an average of 1.7% per year.
Figure 4. Italy's energy consumption and real GDP
Italy’s real GDP grew by about 1.7% a year between 1980 and 2005, while its oil use grew about 1.0% per year, so it too shows energy efficiency/offshoring gains, amounting to about 0.7% per year. This gain is less than that of the USA and Germany, but Italy was also less industrial to start with, so offshoring was less of an option.
Figure 5. Japan's energy consumption and real GDP
The tie between energy consumption and GDP growth has been much tighter for Japan, especially since about 1987. Since 1987, the two have grown at about the same rate.
Figure 6. Spain's energy consumption and real GDP
Spain has also showed a very close tie between growth in energy consumption and growth in real GDP, with both growing by close to 3% per year between 1980 and 2005.
Figure 7. Greece's energy consumption and real GDP
Greece managed to grow its energy use faster than real GDP during most of the 1980 to 2005 period. This may contribute to its current economic problems.
Figure 8. China's energy consumption and real GDP.
China shows more rapid growth in real GDP than in energy consumption. Its real GDP grew by about 10% a year between 1980 and 2005, while energy use grew by a little less than 6% per year. Between 2005 and 2010, real GDP continued to grow by about 10% per year, while energy use grew by about 7.5% per year. The country has been changing so rapidly that a person wonders how accurate the early GDP numbers are.
Figure 9. Energy consumption and real GDP for the Former Soviet Union
Figure 9 shows that the pattern for the Former Soviet Union (FSU) has been very unusual. Both energy use and real GDP collapsed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the drop in GDP was greater than the drop in energy use. Recently, real GDP has been soaring while energy use remains flat, suggesting that outsourcing of high energy manufacturing is occurring, or that new sources of GDP that do not require much energy use are being created.
Changes in Energy Intensity
The usual way of measuring energy intensity is as the ratio of energy consumed to real GDP (the red line divided by the blue line in the above graphs), and these ratios vary greatly. In fact, it is hard to even put energy intensities for different countries on the same graph, because the amounts are so different.
Figure 10a. Energy intensities for the world, the Former Soviet Union, and China
Figure 10b. Energy intensities for the world minus the Former Soviet Union, the USA, Japan, and the EU-15 countries
It seems to me that what we are really interested in is the energy intensity of the world, (or perhaps of the world less the Former Soviet Union, if Former Soviet Union data is totally bizarre, reflecting very high energy usage in the past that is now disappearing, and cannot be replicated elsewhere). We show these in Figure 11:
Figure 11. Historical energy intensities for the world, and for the world excluding Former Soviet Union
Figure 11 shows that energy intensity on a world basis has been flat since 2000. This is also the case when FSU data is excluded. We expected recent world energy intensity to be flat, based on Figure 1 at the top of the page.
Why does world energy intensity remain flat, while energy intensity for many individual countries has been decreasing?
We are dealing with a large number of countries with very different energy intensities. The big issue would seem to be outsourcing of heavy manufacturing. This makes the energy intensity of the country losing the manufacturing look better. Outsourcing transfers manufacturing to a country with a much higher energy intensity, so even with the new manufacturing, its ratio can still look better (lower). It is hard to measure the overall impact of outsourcing, except by looking at world total energy intensities rather than individual country amounts.
Looking at world energy intensities, it appears that the huge amount of outsourcing is resulting in pretty much comparable energy use to the original energy that was outsourced. It is hard to make a direct calculation of the difference in energy use, because much of the new energy use is indirect. For example, the government of the developing nation may build huge amounts of new paved roads and concrete homes with tax revenues, and individual workers may buy new cars with their salaries. These amounts are not captured in a simple comparison of the energy used in making a widget in the USA relative to the energy used in making a widget in China, for example.
Another issue is that the energy use of interest is per dollar of real GDP, and a savings in energy that results in a cost savings may not be very helpful in lowering energy intensity of GDP. For example, suppose that a manufacturer creates a new, smaller car, that is 20% cheaper and uses 20% less gasoline on an ongoing basis. More workers will be able to afford this car. Furthermore, a well-off worker who can afford this new cheaper car (and who could also have afforded a more expensive car) will have left-over money. With this left-over money, the well-off worker can purchase something else, such as an airline trip, food flown in from overseas, or a new iPod. All of these extra purchases take energy as well. So when the overall picture is viewed, the fact that more energy-efficient cars are being manufactured does not necessarily translate to lower energy intensity of GDP.
One issue mentioned in the introduction to this post is the fact that EROI for fossil fuels is declining because the easy-to-extract fossil fuels have mostly been extracted. As a result, we are now extracting the more difficult to extract fossil fuels, requiring more energy.
A similar situation occurs in many other endeavors, because we live in a finite world, and we are reaching limits. In mining, the quality of ores is getting poorer, meaning than more energy needs to be used in extraction. In farming, we are stretching our resources tighter, requiring more fertilizer, pesticides, and more irrigation, all requiring energy. We are running short of fresh water in some places, so water is pumped from greater distances or desalination is used, adding to energy usage. Pollution is an issue, so we require utilities to add scrubbers to old coal plants. All of these efforts require energy, and likely contribute to an upward trend in energy usage, offsetting efficiency savings elsewhere.
Another issue that tends to raise energy intensity of GDP is the long-term trend toward using machines and additional energy to do jobs, rather than simple human labor. For example, if a person chops down a few trees and builds his own house, most calculations would say that there is neither GDP nor (outside) energy used. If a person hires a builder to build a house, and the builder uses hand tools to chop down trees and human labor to build the house, the result is an increase in GDP, but little fossil fuel energy use. If the builder becomes more “modern” and uses earth movers and concrete to build homes, then energy use rises relative to GDP created.
Carbon Dioxide Emissions
As might be expected, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP are closely related to energy intensity. In fact,
(Co2 Emissions/GDP ) = (CO2 Emissions / Energy Used) x (Energy Used / GDP)
The ratio (Energy Used /GDP) is simply energy intensity, which was graphed in Figures 10a, 10b, and 11. The other ratio is (CO2 Emissions / Energy Used) graphed below in Figure 12. It shows a similar pattern: declining prior to 2000, and then leveling.
Figure 12 - Carbon dioxide emissions per barrel of oil equivalent energy, based on BP Statistical Data.
The ratios in Figure 12 reflect changes in energy mix over time, and their relative propensity to generate CO2. Since 2000 these emission per unit of energy use have, in fact, started to rise a little, because of the greater use of coal in the energy mix. The CO2 measurements used in this analysis are BP’s calculations, based on the types of energy used each year (including renewables*). They do not reflect actual measured CO2 in the atmosphere.
The ratio of new CO2 emissions to Real GDP reflects a combination of these ratios (C02/Energy and Energy/Real GDP) and is shown in Figure 13.
Figure 13: Ratio of New Energy Carbon Dioxide Emissions to Real GDP
Figure 13 indicates what we would expect from Figures 11 and 12: A declining ratio of CO2 emissions to real GDP until about 2000, then fairly flat thereafter. In fact, there is a distinct upturn in 2010. Thus new CO2 emissions from energy sources have been rising about as fast as real GDP since about 2000, and a little faster than real GDP in 2010. This is no doubt discouraging news to those who adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, thinking it would reduce CO2 emissions.
A Few Thoughts on Energy Policies
Carbon taxes and cap and trade policies seem to encourage outsourcing of manufacturing. The primary benefits of outsourcing would seem to be (1) a reduction in imported fossil fuels, (2) lower cost of manufactured goods to the consumer, because of lower labor costs, and (3) possibly higher profits to the company selling the new cheaper product. Offsetting these benefits are a loss of jobs for the country doing the outsourcing and a loss of control over what types of energy are used in the manufacturing process. It seems to me that we would be better off not encouraging this outsourcing, especially when essential goods are being created.
One misconception that seems to guide much energy policy is the view the biofuels will substitute for oil, and that use of additional electricity use will substitute for oil. Oil use is pretty much maxed out. Oil supply is very close of inelastic, regardless of price. Someone, somewhere, will use any oil pulled out of the ground, perhaps at a slightly lower price, even if a particular country can reduce its oil consumption through the use of biofuels, or if a car can run on electricity.
This means that any biofuel that is created will add to world energy supply, by using natural gas and coal supplies more quickly, since their use is still somewhat elastic. Similarly, by moving energy demand from oil to electricity, we what we are really doing is expanding total energy usage, by burning more coal and natural gas to make more electricity.
Thus, from a world CO2 perspective, biofuels and increased electrical usage are not helpful. Individual countries may still find biofuels and expanded electrical use helpful, because they can reduce oil imports, if oil use can be shifted to another country. There is also the hope that we can continue our motoring lifestyle longer, using electric cars.
If our intent is really to reduce CO2 emissions, it seems to me that we need to look much more broadly at the issue. Maybe the issue should be viewed in terms of (1) fossil fuel resources that we are willing to use in each future year, and (2) how much real GDP can be created from those resources, given the issues we are facing. The quantity of fossil fuels to be used each future year might consider CO2 goals as well as limits on the amount of oil that can be extracted each year because the “easy oil is gone”. The amount of real GDP that can be created from these fuels would depend on a number of factors, including declining EROI and increasing efficiency.
If the plan is to reduce fossil fuel consumption, then we may very well be expecting real GDP to also decrease, perhaps by a similar percentage. In fact, looking at the experience of FSU in Figure 9, the GDP decline may even be greater than the energy decline.
Conclusion
We are facing a challenging time. This post seems to suggest that there is yet another story that we are being told, that isn’t quite true. It seems to me that we need to examine the issues ourselves, come to our own conclusions, and start telling the real story.
*I have not attempted to discuss the impact of renewables, since to date their impact has been small. The front-ending of energy use of renewable makes their impact on energy intensity of GDP less beneficial than standard comparisons would suggest.
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You can make more stuff with less energy for a while, but eventually you must begin to increase energy use to increase total output. Things like electric motors can be made more efficient, but efficiency can never exceed 100%. Eventually, no matter how efficient your new electric motor is, you will need to use more energy to make more things. So you can improve the amount of work accomplished per unit of energy, but since machines can’t make their own energy, you will inevitably reach a point where the total output can only be increased by using a greater amount of energy.
That is why peak oil will be so dangerous. As soon as the amount of total energy available for transportation begins to decline, the cost to transport everything will rapidly increase because other fuels are less efficient, and more costly. A couple of years after the global oil production begins to decline, the global economy will begin to contract, and living standards will probably begin a long, slow (hopefully) decline. I’m assuming the financial system can be kept intact. That is a big assumption with a constantly shrinking economy.
I agree. The financial system is a big if. The Euro has been hit first, but the repercussions of it may be enough to damage our system. The current US problems financial are otherwise hidden by government deficit spending and too high debt.
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Could it be that the recoupling of the GDP to energy use is that after March 2000 when the dot-com bubble crash, a significant part of the GDP growth after 2000 is due to the real estate booming period. Thus before 2000, the energy intensity was able to decrease significantly because the tech boom does not require much energy but after the crash and the FED and the whole world starts on the real estate boom which requires large amount of energy, the GDP growth is thus directly dependent on the energy group.
I suppose that more emphasis on real estate after 2000 could have raised energy intensity (although, as calculated, the flattening in US energy intensity happened more at the end of the decade). China has certainly put a big emphasis on real estate development in the last few years. I am not certain about the rest of the world–I would expect that Europe and Japan probably have not seem as much real estate growth (except in prices), because most lots have already been built.
@DownToTheLastCookie,
TheOilDrum.com ran an article about the relationship between energy and happiness back in 2006. The author’s results agreed with work done by Vaclav Smil: past 100 MJ/capita, happiness doesn’t increase very much.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/3/5/233142/0483
You might also be interested in Ivan Illich’s essay “Energy and Equity.” At the risk of oversimplification, he argued the real energy crisis of the 1970s was that we were consuming too much energy per capita (he uses Buckminster Fuller’s concept of “energy slaves” to great effect and discusses the wonders of the bicycle). http://clevercycles.com/energy_and_equity/
For most of us (99%), maybe the question should be “Does quality of life have anything to do with GDP and energy growth or can quality of life improve while GDP and energy growth decrease ?”.
Then again, maybe GDP and energy growth will just destroy all of human life by global climate change or just some of it like the Iraq war, coal miners, chernobyl and air pollution, etc.
I would prefer quality over quantity (GDP and Energy growth). I’m going to go for a bike ride now because I don’t need a job to pay for a car, gasoline, insurance and auto repairs. What are you doing ?
Perhaps I missed it, but could some of the discrepancies you note be the result of financial capital effects on GDP?
For example, banks “loan money into existence,” but that is really borrowing from the future, with no energy backing the new money. So this “new” money contributes to GDP, but there’s no “there” there — it’s out of thin air. When the piper comes a callin’ (as in 2008) then GDP “crashes” back to sync with energy.
The growth of the financial industry, medicine, education, and entertainment has helped reduce the energy intensity of the United States’ economy. And the all of the debt has helped build demand for these services. I expect we will see a lot of debt defaults, as well as a crash in the discretionary section of the economy. So, directly or indirectly, I think you are right.
The real things require energy food, housing, heating, lighting, transportation.
The services that we can live without are low energy entertainment, education, medicine, finance.
Ed and Gail have a good point. I would like to see the energy intensity history of resource extraction and material goods manufacture/distribution rather than GDP, which can include all sorts of low energy fluff.
Concentrate on a few key parameters: steel, concrete, lumber, water, food staples; all as delivered to the end user. Use mass quantities rather than dollar value. This would really tell us how energy “efficient” we have become.
There would still be a “mix” issue. Suppose wood is not energy intensive at all, but concrete is. If a country switches from wood to concrete buildings (as China seems to have) under these circumstances, the energy intensity would go way up.
Gail thank you for the updates: adding Figure 13 and the additional text helps to make your point, I think.
You are welcome. I realized when I read through it again that what I said at first was pretty incomplete.
Gail:
The Fed’s have been trying to decouple GDP growth and energy growth by quantitative easing or printing money. It will only work for awhile and it’s probably not working anymore. Martensen has a full explanation energy and GDP growth in Chapter 16 of his book “The Crash Course”. It confirms what you are saying or visa versa.
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Gail, very nice article, although I am a bit confused by your Figure 12.
Right above the figure, you wrote, “if we look at carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP, they show a similar pattern to energy intensity.” But the caption to Figure 12 itself is described as “Carbon dioxide emissions per barrel of oil equivalent energy.” So you are not actually showing carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP in Figure 12. Was that your intent?
Recently, I pointed out that there seems to be a fundamental difference between how one’s view of the future is shaped by whether or not has a “PO” versus “AGW” view (http://crash-watcher.blogspot.com/2011/08/peak-oil-and-climate-change-time-for.html) and how these two views seem to be dissonant with each other (http://crash-watcher.blogspot.com/2011/08/dissonant-views-of-peak-oil-and-climate.html).
In view of this, I have two, perhaps leading, questions:
If carbon dioxide emissions are highly correlated with fossil fuel use, and, if the rates of fossil fuel use are, or will soon, peak and decline in the coming decades, then won’t carbon dioxide emissions (and along with it, GDP) also decline, no matter what we do? And, aren’t we just kidding ourselves to think that “we” can really do anything to affect this trend?
That CO2 will decline as fossil fuels decline is a point that Aleklett at Uppsalla University in Sewden has made. He says the UN model assumes exponential increase all the way to 2100 and there is simple not enough fossil fuel to meet that assumption.
Though I am concerned by an article in TOD that claims 5000 gigatons of coal in Alaska.
You are right–the-write up about Figure 12 is not correct. I went back and made some changes. Now the text says:
As might be expected, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP are closely related to energy intensity. In fact,
(Co2 Emissions/GDP ) = (CO2 Emissions / Energy Used) x (Energy Used / GDP)
Sorry about that! I think I was too anxious to get finished, and stopped thinking very clearly.
I didn’t explain why the two ratios should shift from downward to flat at the same time. It may be that the big push to coal in China and India affected both, and these in turn were related to the same other issues–reaching limits in many things, including oil EROI.
Edit: I also added a Figure 13, that looks a lot like Figure 11 and Figure 12, showing the ratio of CO2 emissions to Real GDP. You might check the post.
Regarding,
I think this has been my view as well. But I didn’t really thing I could put it that way in this post.
A thought provoking post, as usual.
In order to think clearly about the relationship between Real GDP and energy consumption, I think we have to go back to some fundamentals.
A high percentage of the economy in the world is accounted for by the informal economy of home production and informal barter and gift economies. In a tribal culture the informal economy may be dominant and the money economy may be small. Adam Smith noted the fundamental reasons why we are motivated to engage in the money economy. First, to acquire things through trade that we cannot make or forage ourselves from strangers who can make or forage them. Second, to take advantage of specialization. He compares the effort required to make a nail all on one’s own resources versus a simple nail factory. Modern peoples have pursued specialization to an extreme. For example, last week I was in a meeting where some educators working with low income children related how they had to teach them to use knives to eat non-industrial food. The food industry has pursued specialization to the point of preprocessing frankenfoods so that they do not have to be cut and require no real chewing.
Specialization and to a lesser extent trade with strangers are the drivers for GDP. As we can see from the low income children example, more specialization and higher GDP may be extraordinarily dangerous in the larger scheme of living long and prospering. I submit that specialization and trade with strangers are also the drivers for energy consumption (excluding free energy such as the solar which grows crops and warms our bodies).
So…in a time of energy contraction, a household can pursue three broadly different strategies. First, it can attempt to find clever niches which let it exploit whatever energy remains more effectively than other households and thus outcompete the other households. For example, using electronic messaging rather than moving physically through space in order to communicate. Second, it can attempt to exploit basic human needs by supplying non-energy intensive services. For example, a researcher gave a TED talk on the sex workers in Jakarta. She found that they made the same amount of money in 20 minutes as women who worked in textile factories all day. Third, the household can substitute more products from the informal economy for those formerly obtained from the money economy. Playing with your children instead of attending a movie, growing vegetables rather than buying refrigerated water shipped from California, or trading work with neighbors (an ancient rural custom). Over the weekend I heard Joan Dye Gussow, who lives just north of New York City, say that she has not bought a commercial fruit or vegetable in 15 years. She is now around 80 and seems to have the energy of people 30 years her junior. So it CAN be done.
From a public policy perspective, I can’t think of any reason why the adjustment to energy contraction must necessarily be either debt inflation or a desperate search for dangerous and expensive new energy. People are a weedy, resilient species, and it just may be time for them to flex those resilience muscles.
From a financial perspective, shrinking GDP is disastrous. Debts, which make Finance go round, cannot be repaid. Of course, humanity has been through this before. We fell from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. And the Plains Indians fell from the abundance of the Buffalo economy to the misery of reservation life. Joan Dye Gussow voluntarily dropped out of a major portion of the money economy and is thriving.
My own thought is that most people in the US pursued specialization and trade with strangers to ridiculous extremes and took on unrealistic debts. Now it’s time to increase the role of the informal economy and reduce the role of the money economy. That may be disastrous for the bankers, but so be it. We need to clear away the debris and build a very much smaller financial sector.
Don Stewart
Gail
Riveting stuff!
Am I missing something? Figure 12 reflects change in energy mix, not CO2 per unit GDP?
CO2 continues to rise and has accelerated over recent decades reflecting rising total fossil energy use and any changes in biosphere net absorption (agriculture/forests; ocean?).
Rembrandt Kopelaar did some calcultions a few months ago (?) that involved purchasing power per capita/worker, which might help thinking, going forward.
Similarly, the famous US and German high productivity must relate somehow to relative purchasing power and to energy/GDP ratios?
Countries with large net exports of oil (incoming GDP?) will have very different ratios? Not negligible in KSA, Iran?
best
phil
Hi Phil,
In Figure 12, CO2 per unit of GDP changes, partly because of changes in energy intensity of the world economy and partly because of a change in mix in fuels. Now increasing use of coal is making the ratio rise. The offsetting impact of renewables and more natural gas is small.
Purchasing power of workers really depends on energy per person, and this ratio will go down in the future. The pool of retired workers, which is growing rapidly, will also have to be paid from this pool, so there will be a real squeeze. I don’t remember Rembrant’s article. I expect Europeans in general will be shocked at how bad their situation really is.
Regarding the US and German high productivity, I am wondering how the special role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the position of Germany’s currency so it is valued relatively lower than other Euro currencies plays into this. If the US could only import as much as it exports, and if the Germany’s currency were to separately float, their positions would not be nearly as good. But the other part of the story is that both countries have historically used oil and coal to their advantage, to build industrial infrastructure. This has helped ramp up productivity. Now, when these functions are outsourced to China, energy intensity is reduced. I understand Germany has kept a lot of small, high value type manufacture.
I didn’t really look at a long list of energy intensities by country, but Wikipedia has a list. Major oil exporters generally have high energy intensities. For example,
Angola 322.6
Canada 293.2
Iran 316.1
Kuwait 481
Russia 519
Saudi Arabia 448
UAE 481.3
Venezuela 434.2
Poor countries in warm areas can have low energy intensities. For example:
Bangladesh 97.9
Columbia 98.1
Peru 86.7
Uruguay 94.5
Island nations tend to have high energy intensities because of the need to import everything. Eastern european nations have higher energy intensities than western european nations (colder weather, more industries using coal perhaps).
The PIIGS tend to have lower energy intensities than the European countries that are doing better:
Portugal 138.2
Ireland 107.6
Italy 122.8
Spain 142.5
Greece 137.8
Some other European countries:
Belgium 205.5
Germany 163.9
France 170.5
Norway 172.2
UK 141.2
Sweden 216.9
The difference may partly be because the PIIGS are more Southern, and have less need for heat.
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I am left wondering the difference between imported energy (=exhaled monies) and that which is domestically extracted and used, in relation to GDP growth.
The importation amount may add up closely to the difference between year-to-year in GDP growth and a country’s energy usaage.
Also, imported products produced elsewhere = an importation of the energy used in their manufacturing processes, as you have pointed out.
In casual conversation, most all would disagree with me, but y’all know what i mean.
also, without a debt incurred component, gdp is fairly meaningless..
There is a somewhat absurd tendency on the part of analysis to define an endpoint as “the Euro will collapse”.
That’s not an endpoint. If you print money to keep the wheels turning, the private lenders will refuse more lending because they are being repaid with cheaper Euros. Without more lending, Greece and Italy and the others can’t function.
Greece burns 400K bpd. No one will sell it to them right now other than Iran. All their oil is now coming from Iran because no one else will sell it to them without prepayment.
My point is this. Default doesn’t work. There is no global bankruptcy court. If Greece defaults (even 50%), then you just stop lending them money. And hell, you carry it on the books on the off chance they will someday be able to pay. You then submit your claim and if they still refuse, confiscate assets in another venue.
My point is the same for hyperinflation. It doesn’t work. In both cases the ultimate punishment is refusal to lend further. Only a 1 billion barrel field found under Athens can save them.
There is, of course, only one 100% reliable way to expunge this sovereign debt. Debtor nations must kill the creditors and all their heirs. There is no other way. Take physical possession of the debt instrument, paper or otherwise, and physically destroy it.
All other scenarios, beyond the miracle oil discovery, do not end the debt’s existence.
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Nice post, Gail.
How do you define real GDP?
On Russia and Eastern Europe’s anomalous GDP: IMO a century of being bled dry by world wars, revolutions and counter revolutions has left the areas population exhausted.
Population levels of ‘native European / Russians’ are below recovery levels depleted by institutional barbarity and contempt for the individual manifest in society by for example: starving the Ukrainian peasantry to death; clearing minefields by walking over them in formation; sending troops forward until German troops had to clamber up piles of bodies to see the next wave to shoot at until they literally ran out of bullets.
To be fair this is nothing new and reflects the requirements of a sprawling state with long borders Tsars were also barbaric.
A redeeming character of the Russian is a good film must end badly cf. with the US.
Russia
Total: 0.86 male(s)/female (2009)
At birth: 1.05 male(s)/female
Since 1992 the natural change rate has been between -1.5 and -6.5 only other negative year was 1933 at -18.5% caused by famine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#After_WW_II.5B22.5D.5B23.5D
Russians know Russia is not where you want to be so you loot and diversify capital if an oligarch i.e. you have old party contacts or leave before or after getting an education.
Those born unfortunate stay that way in a society where contacts are everything.
The best people leave if they can, London is lousy with Russians.
So in brief Russia is now just a petro state with remnants of industry left over from Soviet investments.
Or put another way a broken popn. ruled by resource exporting oligarchs.
Thanks for your insights. I have been picking up bits of pieces of knowledge over the years, from a few contacts there. I understand a few major cities are kept up (sort of), but even they seem to have a lot of very old buildings and old subway systems. It must be a strange place.
“Real GDP” is the amount by which an economy increases in a year, after backing out the impact of inflation. Governments like to show that there is a big increase in real GDP, so have a tendency to “low ball” the inflation rate used in this calculation. If this is done, the calculation results in real GDP that is higher than it is actually.
The real GDP rate can also be pumped up through the use of increased debt. For example, if you are given a loan, you may be able to go out and buy and new car or a new house. The price of the house (if it is newly built) or the price of the car would go into GDP, even if the purchases are made through loans which have not yet been repaid. I have shown that these loans were pumped up in the past, but are now coming down in amount, leading to downward pressure on GDP.
In listening to the Munk debates last night David Rosenberg I believe stated that the real GDP growth (for the US) was related to the 10 year US TIPs rate – which is negative.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=realyield
And that GDP per capita was negative for the US. The consumer de-leveraging has been about $1T, and there was $3T more to go, none of which will be offset by stimulus (Krugman’s prediction).
There are other aspects of that debate that would really play in this post.
Too much time trying to use some of it constructively.
I worked with a lonely desperate ethnic Russian with a huge intellect for a while.
Shadow stats are good for example:
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
Seen recently:
‘Ofgem study ‘undermines’ case for nuclear’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-15711200
Personally I can’t see where the capital is coming from for nukes or wind still waving good bye to nukes is a plus for the UK =)
Gail, thank you for noting that governments tend to low ball inflation.
Nice post, a US centric thing:
yes the energy per GDP have undoubtedly historically declined due to outsourcing, but in that outsourcing (of say 1 ton of steel) might actually be using less energy because there are no scrubbers say in China but are required in the US. What would be interesting is to try to get a proxy for outsourcing, has it leveled off over the past 12 months would be the question looking in parallel with your graphs. At the moment I’m believing that if the US continues to decline it has little to do with outsourcing, because that has plateaued.
Secondly, infrastructure is a huge consumer of energy, given the above graphs for the US, if 08-12 is down this might map to the end of new home/commercial building and its attendant infrastructure. If it flattens out then we potentially have a bigger problem.
Lastly, it might be time to start putting together a Gail Index for structural efficiency of energy use, because I think a “corrected” grouping might be more interesting right now. A Gail Index (or a Gail/Marty index :0 ) might look at things such as this:
Internal National Production: 0-10 based on percentage
Subsidized Transport Fuels: 0-10 internal price vs regional or world price for gasoline for instance
Subsidized NG Fuels: 0-10 “ditto”
Subsidized Electric Grid: 0-10 “ditto”
(and a few other things)
Assuming only 4 for now, I’m interested in looking at the cluster of countries that are in the 30-40 range, i’ll guess, Iran, Saudi, mexico, brazil, iraq, maybe pakistan.
What does their energy consumption per unit of GDP look like? compared to ROW, ROW-FSU, US, etc.
You are right about lack of scrubbers in China possibly reducing energy use, when manufacturing is outsourced there. I am not sure how precisely that would work out, when it comes to energy intensity of GDP, because the cost now would be lower as well–more steel for the same price.
You are right about my leaving out the need for infrastructure repairs. We did a lot of that kind of thing in the 1950s and 1960s, but then started putting things off indefinitely. We will have to do more of it in the future, it we want roads, water and sewer pipelines, and electricity transmission, sending up future energy costs.
I think I need a little more explanation with respect to your Gail/Marty Index.I am also not sure where I would get data.
Bingo. Nice post. Now you are getting to the core of the issue.
Wealth is proportional to energy consumption. See Timothy Garrett for analysis that shows $1 US (1990) equals 9.7 mW: http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Economics.html
It is not possible to reduce CO2 without reducing wealth. 98% of all energy is fossil. Efficiency won’t help because improved efficiency redirects more energy to growth which leads to more wealth and more energy consumption. In theory we could force the replacement of fossil energy with alternative energy however this would require global cooperation which is impossible because the poor want more stuff and the rich don’t want to give up any stuff. Furthermore, alternatives have lower energy density which means they have lower net energy which means they generate less wealth or are more expensive depending on how you look at it. Thus alternative energy cannot generate enough wealth to pay for itself and everything else a complex society needs.
The only practical solution is fewer people consuming less stuff per person. We can choose to go there voluntarily and peacefully now, or wait and be forced there violently in the future.
It amazes me how few climate scientists understand these facts. Most of the climate activists don’t get it either. Rather pathetic.
Some of these things seem pretty obvious, but I never sat down and worked out the numbers until I ran across a convenient listing of world real GDP by country. I don’t think I have really read the Stern Report, but it always seemed optimistic to me.
Gail, are you familiar with Nation Master? Fascinating source of data!
Interesting that Iraq GDP appears to be growing at 46.5%. Go figure… 🙂
I don’t think I have used NationMaster. The one I use fairly often is CIA World Fact Book. It shows Iraq’s GDP real growth rate to be 0.8% for 2010. A different source is the data table I used for this analysis, from the USDA economic research arm. Its data seems to show very unstable changes in real GDP. Real GDP for 2010 is estimated to be $82.92 billion (in 2005$), up 2.8% from 2010. But Iraq’s real GDP on the same basis was $63.3 billion in 2001, and $39.4 billion in 2003.
In a nation like Iraq, inflation also plays a big role. If the GDP numbers aren’t labeled as “real”, they show the combined impact of inflation and “true” GDP growth.
So while Nationmaster is interesting, and in stable cases can probably provide good data, it is more “iffy” when the data relates to an area which is changing rapidly, as in Iraq.Thanks, though, for mentioning it. It never hurts to have another source of information.
(Edit: I just noticed Nationmaseter used to how the frequency of power outages varied by country, and it seemed to work pretty well there.)
“The only practical solution is fewer people consuming less stuff per person.”
We’re doing that. It sure would be nice if there were some incentives to do so! I don’t even know what sort of incentives I’d like to see, since any monetary incentive or any incentive based on physical goods would defeat the purpose.
I guess I’d just like a little pat on the back and a heart-felt “atta boy!” now and then. Instead, the government cajoles us to consume, consume, consume.
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