I just listened to the ABC radio interview on Breakfast RN - October 29, 2015 [1].  It strikes me how helpless and pitiful is our collective human intelligence is when admitting what is the root cause of our global warming nemesis. Brendan Pearson, the political spokesperson for the Prime Controllers of Australia, points out some most depressing facts, for those that expect the governments of industrial nations to attempt to do anything useful at all about mitigation of global warming. Of course the facts he presented were the ones that most favoured the expansion of the business interests of his clients.

Global coal trade is expected to increase by 40%, by 2040, according to the IEA. Add to this, likely growth in coal that burned in the same country where it is mined.  There are all the other sources of carbon emissions, including our use of other fossil fuels, our agriculture systems, such that coal power generation is currently about 20% of all emissions.

Industrial civilization is one big massive knot of intertwined relationships that mutually expand carbon emissions with economic growth. Ecological economists and the students of its related matters have pointed out that we have failed to set limits to the scale of our economic systems. Most politicians say in one way or another, that "economic growth is good".

Coal is still the fastest growing fuel, according to the BP statistical review. This is because economic growth demands more energy to grow, and increased size demands more energy to maintain. The fuel which is easiest to expand is coal, because nature made lots more of it in the geological past. Liquid Oil fuels have reached their limits of growth in rate of supply. There has not been a discovery of major new oil reserves for decades.  Distribution of gas reserves is similar story to oil, as they have had a similar genesis.  Even if the "clean-ness" of burning gas is better than coal, the difficulty of gas transport, and its prone-ness to atmosphere leakage prior to burning, make it as bad as coal for emissions, and expanding its supply has many logistic and environment difficulties.  Coal is largely chunks of black rock, which is convenient for raw transport. The coal dust is bad for miners and communities, but that has never bothered the mine owners.

Coal supply has a capacity to expand, more than the other "essential" fuels of oil and gas. The limits of scale of coal removal and burning are not so obvious as those of coal and gas.

I loosely define "Economic Growth" as the conversion of more of nature into "human stuff", both the numbers of our bodies and the size and extent of our infrastructure.

The limits we face are

1. Rate and Absolute amount of Carbon dioxide Accumulation in Atmosphere and Ocean.  The global warming future already underway limits the potential lifespan of our civilization and threatens the extinction of all of us.
2. Limits of social inequality. The distribution of wealth becomes ever-more skewed. Carbon emissions, wealth and social class go together. These roughly follow a "Pareto rule". Eighty percent (80%) of carbon emissions and wealth are from Twenty percent (20%) of the people.[2] This follows roughly for nations, as well as within nations.  As energy supply and consumption equates to wealth, the greatest political power is associated with the greatest carbon emissions.
3. Resource depletion limits. Oil supply has stopped expanding. Gas supplies will follow. Because these as key enabling fuels in manufacture and transport, with poor subsitutability, growth in economic wealth and trade will gradually become negative.
4. Global warming and ocean acidification are matched by alarming trends in several other "planetary boundaries" of safe operating limits for human civilization existing within the bounds of nature.

The pareto like distribution of carbon emissions and wealth suggests that a large reduction in global emissions is possible with only effecting the lifestyle of a small number of people. The problem has always been that it is the same small number of people who are the deciders, who control governments, that get to veto actions that will reduce their power and wealth.

Economic Growth is the one cause from which all other of our problems arise.  Population growth is so often a response to economic growth, the expectations of future prosperity.  A review of the causes of growth suggests that population growth causes an ecological crisis in carrying capacity, which leads to technological innovation. Technological innovation throughout our history has brought about new sources of energy and materials, leading to a new prosperity. Prosperity has encouraged population growth, which encounters limits in carrying capacity, leading to new crisis. Repeating this is a "Vicious Circle".  The circle is vicious, because it masks itself as "progress". Each level incurs costs in a departure from sustainability.  Each level prevents an easy return to a previous state of existance, for a larger population. Each level changes the natural selection pressures on human beings, and encourages further population growth.

We now in the last doubling of exponential growth of civilization, and the dreams of technological innovation now encounter the limits of the laws of space, physics and Gaia.

Further economic growth, and the futher accumulation of wealth and power has to be abandoned. Technology cannot take us to a further into a new unstable vicious existance. Since we don't want to abandon wealth and power, we will wait for nature to eradicate both us and our wealth and power.

[1] http://www.minerals.org.au/file_upload/files/media_releases/Pearson_RN_Breakfast_29_Oct_2015_final.mp3

[2] http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2009/12/greenhouse_gas_emmissions_and_the_8020_rule.html