What does it look like when growth hits physical limits?
I've been thinking a lot about the limits to growth recently. If you look up the non-renewable resources that our economy depends on it quickly becomes apparent that all of them, whether they be fossil fuels or metals like copper , are somewhere between 30% and 70% exhausted. And the exhausted part is invariably the easiest to get to. However, it has only recently occurred to me that land is also a non-renewable resource: they're not making any more of it.... Checking out Our World in Data one can see that nearly 5 billion hectares are currently in use by humans. That compares with a total available of 13 billion hectares, if you discount the ice covered land. So, in fact land falls into the same 30-70% exhausted range as everything else. I downloaded the data and produced a smoothed graph of growth (%) vs year and found something interesting: growth grew more or less exponentially until about 1956 at which point it fell sharply to zero....