Lotka's wheel and the long arm of history: how does the distant past determine today's global rate of energy consumption?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Global economic production, or the GDP, has risen steadily relative to world primary energy demands, suggesting technological change is driving a gradual decoupling of society from its resource needs and associated pollution. Here show that in each of the 50 years following 1970 for which reliable data are available, one Exajoule of world energy was consumed to sustain each 5.50 ± 0.21 trillion constant 2019 US dollars, not of yearly production or physical capital, but of running cumulative production summed over human history. The half-century for which this fixed ratio held covers two thirds of historical growth in energy demands, so assuming its persistence, the implication is that society is not in fact decoupling from resource needs. Rather, it can be expected that future environmental impacts will be more strongly guided by past activities, or inertia, than is generally permitted within economic and climate modeling prescriptions that allow for policy to spur more rapid change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".