by Richard Heinberg - Oil Price.com
Accidents and natural disasters have long histories; therefore it may seem peculiar at first to think that these could now suddenly become significant factors in choking off economic growth. However, two things have changed.
First, growth in human population and proliferation of urban infrastructure are leading to ever more serious impacts from natural and human-caused disasters. Consider, for example, the magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 earthquake that took place on January 26 of the year 1700 in the Cascadia region of the American northwest. This was one of the most powerful seismic events in recent centuries, but the number of human fatalities, though unrecorded, was probably quite low. If a similar quake were to strike today in the same region—encompassing the cities of Vancouver, Canada; Seattle, Washington; and Portland, Oregon—the cost of damage to homes and commercial buildings, highways, and other infrastructure could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the human toll might be horrific. Another, less hypothetical, example: The lethality of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed between 200,000 and 300,000 people, was exacerbated by the extreme population density of the low-lying coastal areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India.
Second, the scale of human influence on the environment today is far beyond anything in the past. In this chapter so far we have considered problems arising from limits to environmental sources of materials useful to society—energy resources, water, and minerals. But there are also limits to the environment’s ability to absorb the insults and waste products of civilization, and we are broaching those limits in ways that can produce impacts of a scale far beyond our ability to contain or mitigate. The billions of tons of carbon dioxide that our species has released into the atmosphere through the combustion of fossil fuels are not only changing the global climate but also causing the oceans to acidify. Indeed, the scale of our collective impact on the planet has grown to such an extent that many scientists contend that Earth has entered a new geologic era—the Anthropocene. Humanly generated threats to the environment’s ability to support civilization are now capable of overwhelming civilization’s ability to adapt and regroup.
Ironically, in many cases natural disasters have actually added to the GDP. This is because of the rebound effect, wherein money is spent on disaster recovery that wouldn’t otherwise have been spent. But there is a threshold beyond which recovery becomes problematic: Once a disaster is of a certain size or scope, or if conditions for a rebound are not present, then the disaster simply weakens the economy.
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