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What Fuels the Takeoff of Growth?

In 1960, American economist Walt Whitman Rostow compared the point

at which an economy begins to grow to a plane’s takeoff. His famous work,
published that year, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,
combined economic theory with praise for capitalism, and imposed the stan-
dard explanation of the economic-growth phenomenon that was boiling at
the surface of the globe. Once the “takeoff ” is successful, economic growth
must inexorably lead to the ultimate societal stage that the Americans were
experimenting with, and the Europeans were beginning to discover: mass
consumption. A brilliant, Yale-educated economist, Rostow helped design the
Marshall Plan before being hired in 1955 by Nelson Rockefeller, then President
Eisenhower’s special assistant, to oversee strategic research on the USSR. In
1966, he became national security advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, play-
ing a key role in the intensification of the Vietnam War.
According to Rostow, the desire to invest freely fuels the takeoff of the
growth economy. And capital can be released only when the company and
state adopt the ideal of progress, an ideal that cannot be dissociated from a
desire for wealth. In Rostow’s formulation, the preconditions for the growth
of the industrial economy were strictly of a social and political nature: Only
the human dimension counted in the model Rostow supplied.
Why not consider the literal nature of the fuel that facilitated the deafening
takeoff of the post–Second World War growth economy? Such an iconoclas-
tic, pragmatic vision began to emerge at the end of the 1960s, precisely as the
golden age of the growth economy drew to a close, particularly in the works
of three American authors: economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, physicist
Robert Ayres, and ecologist Howard Odum. The approaches to the economy
that each developed independently converged into a new school of thought
sometimes called biophysical economics. Biophysical economists emphasized
the condition they believed necessary for economic growth to takeoff: the
concrete possibility of radically increasing the amount of energy that flowed
into the economic machine.
Since the Industrial Revolution, in every country, the correlation between
energy consumption and economic growth has been extremely tight. Is it
growth, driven by a desire to invest and get rich, that provoked an increase
in energy demand, among other consequences? Or are growth and energy
consumption reciprocally linked, moving in concert like the frigate and its sup-
ply ship? According to the fathers of biophysical economics, the correlation
between the quantity of energy available to an economy and the intensity of
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its activity allows us to understand the metabolism of the industrial economy.

For these economists, energy consumption and economic growth align and
result in a kind of mutual spiral: If growth leads to an increase in energy needs,
then available energy, depending on the degree of efficiency with which it can
be used, may determine the limits for potential economic development.*
Robert Ayres eventually concluded that merely increasing oil produc-
tion “due to discoveries [will] enable goods and services to be produced and
delivered at lower cost. This is another way of saying that energy flows are
‘productive.’ Lower cost, in competitive markets, translates into lower prices
which—thanks to price elasticity—encourages higher demand.” More energy
thus breeds more consumption, which creates more profit to finance the
extraction of more energy: A spiral emerges, which leads to the depletion of
energy sources.2 Energy (and petroleum, primarily) is the liquid matrix of the
industrial economy’s entire growth phenomenon: Again, as in modern war,
it is the great enabler. Without an abundance of available energy, no growth
is possible. Western postwar powers spontaneously placed this parameter,
overlooked by classic economic science, at the heart of their political and
geopolitical strategies. And it turned out that the pace of economic growth
in the 1950s and 1960s (for which the governments of the rich countries
continued to sigh nostalgically) coincided with an unequalled period of oil
production growth.
Energy abundance became the vital basis for the prodigious material
abundance that spread through the United States, Western Europe, and Japan
starting in 1945. West of Europe’s Iron Curtain, between the end of the Second
World War and the petroleum crisis of 1973 (the years France came to call the
Thirty Glorious Years), countries did not experience a takeoff of exponential
growth until Europe received a source of energy as tremendous as the one
Americans celebrated during the Roaring Twenties. Europe’s source turned
out to be Arab and Persian oil, routed according to the strategy drawn up in
1945 by the US Navy and implemented, beginning in 1948, with the Marshall
Plan. That oil restarted Europe’s economic engine by increasing the flow of
gasoline in its carburetor. Simultaneously, a similar scenario played out in
Japan, where economic aid resulting from an agreement with the Americans,
in a policy framework known as Reverse Course, helped the Nippon archi-
pelago escape a permanent shortage of raw materials, primarily oil.
* This idea connected with the hard sciences, in particular the reflections on thermodynamics by
physicist Ilya Prigogine (see infra, chapter 30), and subsequently was developed by many unorthodox
social science authors, including American anthropologist Joseph Tainter, who had studied the “spiral
energy-complexity” concept discussed in chapter 2. We will return to this decisive point in chapters
29 and 30.
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The quantities of crude oil discovered on all continents were so great

during the Thirty Glorious Years that they drove the Seven Sisters to maintain
their secret pact, put in place during the Great Depression, so they continued
to protect against overproduction woes and preserve their profit margins.
However, these margins were scarcely noticed by consumers: black gold was
so abundant that everyone could afford it during the spring of the consumer
society. Gas even seemed like “a gift,” in view of the glowing opportunities it
provided to peasants (transformed into farmers by rototillers), motorists (now
commonplace), industrialists, and bankers.
At that time, oil appeared so readily accessible that it became easy to
overlook how indispensable it had become to every technical activity. Since
oil was omnipresent and made the impossible possible, it was erased from
daily concerns: It became sublimated, an almost virtual source of concrete
positivity. Beginning in the 1950s, gasoline was available to almost everyone in
the Northern Hemisphere (yet still only the military and the wealthy in some
other parts of the world) a formidable number of “energy slaves”: soon, on
a daily basis, even the rich countries’ most humble workers had access to a
physical power equivalent to dozens of tireless men, for leisure as well as for
work. Longed for since the dawn of the industrial era, the democratization of
abundance was realized with the triumph of the petroleum industry. The era
of the oil-made man was fully launched.3
1950 was the year of the great change. From this pivotal time, the
economy almost tripled its growth rate. For a century, world production
had grown at a nearly static rate of less than 2 percent per year. Five years
after the Second World War ended, the economy shifted gears. Global
growth became incandescent, with an unprecedented annual rate of around
5 percent per year, which did not decline until the crises of the 1970s. The
value of world production and industrial production, in particular, nearly
tripled between 1950 and 1970!4 US growth accelerated, but it was especially
the European economy, bloodless after the war and revived by the Marshall
Plan, that enjoyed the greatest boost, with annual growth rates sometimes
exceeding 10 percent per year. This was a time of full employment and a
flourishing “welfare state.”
As far as oil was concerned, the takeoff was still more spectacular. World
production accelerated steadily after Pearl Harbor. World consumption more
than quadrupled between 1950 and 1970, rising from 11 to nearly 48 Mb/d
(approximately 43 Mb/d outside of the USSR)! World production of concrete,
in which fuel oil plays a key role, also quadrupled during the same period.
Buildings were cheap, and water tower and other structures characteristic of
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the modern world were springing up everywhere, on both sides of the Iron
Curtain and in the most populated contact zones of the developing world.
Each city surrounded itself with branching roads of cement and asphalt.
Another irrefutable change marked the 1950s, although at the time it was
ignored: the curving trajectory of concentrated carbon dioxide rising in the
atmosphere, which was systematically measured from Hawai’i’s Mauna Loa
volcano observatory beginning in 1958.
Western Europe’s crude oil consumption multiplied tenfold in the space
of twenty years, reaching 12 Mb/d in 1970. However, it did not catch up with
the US consumption rate, which doubled in that same period, reaching 14.7
Mb/d in 1970.* But from 1950, American thirst for more and more oil clearly
exceeded Uncle Sam’s production capacity, although America was still increas-
ing its output: In 1970, more than ever the world’s premier producer, the
United States still had to import 3.4 Mb/d, almost double French consump-
tion at the time.5 Until 1940, in the United States, oil’s main function was still
industrial and domestic heating. After the war, motor power rose to the top, as
the number of cars, planes, ships, locomotives, construction equipment, and
combines exploded.6
Everywhere in the industrial world, the lightning-fast rise of petroleum
needs overshadowed the continued development of other fossil fuels. After
the war, coal still supplied the world economy with twice as much energy as
oil did. By 1970, however, the situation had fully reversed.7 Oil use had begun
to outpace coal use in 1960.8 In 1951, the number of diesel locomotives in the
United States for the first time exceeded those powered by steam.9 Elsewhere,
the transition was encouraged when, half a century after the great British
precursor, several major industrial nations saw the coal mines that allowed the
initial boom begin to decline, lacking intact deposits that could be extracted
economically. This decline began in 1957 for France and Belgium, in 1958 for
Germany (only for anthracite, the most sought-after form of coal energy), and
in 1966 for Japan and South Korea.10 In France, the production decline was
quite rapid: Industrial authorities planned to close mines they were forced to
subsidize when coal extractions, increasingly difficult, became too expensive.11
What would have become of these industrial nations if they had lacked the
disposable capital and strategic recourse necessary to obtain their share of
energy sources from afar?
Not only was oil more effective than coal, but it was becoming less
expensive. And less polluting. The coal used for heating was responsible
for many fires and the famous “killer smogs” that for a century had stifled
* The United States became crude oil importers beginning in the 1920s.
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poorer neighborhoods. In December 1952, for example, a dreadful cloud of

pollution killed thousands of Londoners. Starting in early 1950, London,
New York, and many other large industrial cities began, little by little, to ban
coal. On cargo ships, heavy fuel systematically started to replace coal: The
branching of the world’s global cargo network continued to evolve, thanks
to oil. Yet, oil no more fully replaced coal than television replaced the radio.
Dethroned as technological society’s first energy source, the old king of
energy nevertheless continued to advance, although it advanced much more
slowly than black gold. More and more, coal was used to turn the turbines of
the electric power plants in major industrial centers and urban areas. Natural
gas, a form of light hydrocarbon that was previously little-used except in
the United States and often simply burned as flares in oil refineries, began
to displace coal for heating. Starting in 1950, methane developed almost as
quickly as did its elder brother, oil. In total, the fossil fuels consumed in
1970 (oil, coal, and natural gas) weighed three times as much as in 1950:
Consumption of energy and global economic output had increased by the
same order of magnitude.12 The growth of each reached the same expo-
nential rate. In 1970, the first nuclear plants had hardly broken ground in
the United States, hydroelectric dams occupied a secondary role, and other
renewable energy sources were nonexistent. Coal, oil, and gas: The sediment
of organic materials decomposed over hundreds of millions of years was the
almost exclusive energy source fueling the takeoff of mass consumption and
capitalist society.

Exponential Growth and Asymptotic Experience

Nuclear energy was perceived as the logical and even necessary successor to
coal and hydrocarbons. Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the US nuclear
fleet and a central figure in the development of the first atomic power plants,
declared on 1957: “For more than one hundred years we have stoked ever
growing numbers of machines with coal; for fifty years we have pumped
gas and oil into our factories, cars, trucks, tractors, ships, planes, and homes
without giving a thought to the future. Occasionally the voice of a Cassandra
has been raised only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery revised
estimates of our oil reserves upward, or a new coalfield was found in some
remote spot. . . . Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. . . . A prudent and
responsible parent will use his capital sparingly . . . in order to pass on to his
children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible