A Simulation of Evolving Sustainable Technology Through Social Pressure

In this paper we develop a model to simulate the evolution of a pollution-free resource gathering technology that is initially less efficient but ultimately reaches parity with polluting technology. We find that for low levels of pollution, pressure exerted by society can indeed encourage the development and use of non-polluting technology, with greater pressure being associated with faster achievement of efficiency parity and lower overall pollution. However, greater pressure is also associated with lower populations and at the highest levels of pressure there are significant risks of population crashes. We find that these results hold for both localized pollution and globalized pollution, with globalized pollution encouraging faster achievement of efficiency parity. For high levels of pollution we find that introducing societal pressure significantly increases the occurrence of population crashes, and thus the strategy is only effective under certain conditions.