I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot of modern democratic republics are about 200 years old, or less, but we keep thinking to ourselves, "this civilization will be different".
I'd put money on BAU2 over CT any day of the week.
The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability. There is much we currently discard or do not cultivate because it not what we traditionally see as food and because there is no cost incentive to encourage a change in culture. Changes can however occur given the right triggers, like how large portion of Europe went over to potatoes during the European 19th century population boom. We could see a similar change in food culture towards seaweed if topsoil issues became widespread, and there is plenty of space for technological improvements in aquaculture.
Similar, fresh water is primarily a cost issue. Right now the only economical method to provide water at the lowest cost is to take naturally occurring fresh water. There are alternatives. It does not take a lot of solar, wind or nuclear power plants to supply a large city population with fresh water extracted from the ocean. The construction and operational costs would however be need to be taken from something else, reducing welfare and industrial output.
My point is primarily that we are not going to run out of edible food. I have no intention to try force anyone to change their culture.
Here in Sweden we eat fermented fish. Other countries eat ferment cabbage, beans, goat stomachs, or other fermented things which in my culture we would be weird to eat. I think fermented seaweed is also a thing somewhere.
There are things that could force a culture change, such as famine, war, social status signals, media, and religion to mention a few examples. Humans are social creatures, and culture is a social phenomenon, so the cause for a cultural change would likely be social in nature. I guess a societal collapse could also trigger a change in culture, or a cultural change could prevent a societal collapse. I guess it depend on how one want to perceive it, and what meaning people put into the word "societal collapse".
I don’t see that convincing, a huge part of what we eat currently is the result of marketing (sugar, meat, dairy…), very anecdotical for defining oneself and the future of human society.
"Net exporter" in terms of calories and protein or "net exporter" in terms of currency? The Netherlands ag economy is focused on high value crops. But you can't eat tulips.
One-third of the world's exports of chilis, tomatoes, and cucumbers goes through the country. The Netherlands also exports one-fifteenth of the world's apples.
Aside from that, a significant portion of Dutch agricultural exports consists of fresh-cut plants, flowers, and flower bulbs, with the Netherlands exporting two-thirds of the world's total.
I do not believe that everyone deciding to eat something different is "fixing" the food scarcity problem in the same way that desalinization (ignoring all other issues with it as we assumed technology improved to solve them also) "fixes" water scarcity: if everyone is told tomorrow "all water will safely come from desal" we might breath a collective sigh of relief... "starting tomorrow, all food will be replaced by seaweed" a lot of people are going to be super super pissed, right? Maybe even more basic: making enough potatoes to technically satisfy everyone's calorie requirements (ignoring nutrition) might be a technological problem, but the "similar change in food culture" is kind of begging the question, as if we could just cause that change before all the food was gone maybe we could still enjoy the occasional potato (a luxury in our new era of food molded out of seaweed), and if we could get equivalent cultural shifts in how people use transportation (along with food changes, such as not eating meat) maybe we could stave off climate change without technological fixes: if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix, and if the way the cultural change will happen is because no one will have a choice... well, then you didn't fix anything in the first place!
Imagine the uproar if you tried to build a nuclear powered desalination plant on Long Island.
That's basically what you're alluding to with the seaweed and food thing.
Cultural and ideological hangups will go right out the window in a hurry when there's a real crisis and a culturally incompatible solution. People aren't gonna let things truly go to shit over something as trivial as what they eat or where their water comes from.
The primary danger in the first world as I see it is from the moneyed and empowered people F-ing it over for large enough other groups to cause probems. Doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine how climate change might F-over downstate Illinois (because farms) but Chicago won't let them do anything about it because they hold all the cards and they make their money a different way. They'd probably figure it out eventually but with how unequal our society is I'm not gonna bet money on eventually happening before the shooting starts.
"Doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine how climate change might F-over downstate Illinois (because farms) but Chicago won't let them do anything about it because they hold all the cards and they make their money a different way."
I actually can't envision what you mean by "Chicago won't let them do anything about it". Isn't Chicago the more liberal area that wants to fight climate change?
I just picked some random state that has a farming economy (very sensitive to slight environmental changes) at one end and a city economy (not so directly tied to the environment as long as energy is cheap and it isn't flooded) at the other that runs the show so forgive me if the example isn't bulletproof.
>Isn't Chicago the more liberal area that wants to fight climate change?
Right up until you have to take some other controversial step in order to do it.
I'm sure you can imagine how things would go if downstate farmers wanted to all apply some sort of fertilizer that would make their farming economically viable but the beta and the v1 versions of the chemical also killed some sort of visible wildlife.
> the beta and the v1 versions of the chemical also killed some sort of visible wildlife
It sounds like you're referring to herbicides and pesticides that kill bees and other pollinators. People have an obvious problem with pesticides that kill bees. It's not an acceptable level of collateral damage for dirt cheap corn and soybeans.
A combination of aqueducts, reservoirs, and tunnels supply fresh water to New York City. With three major water systems (Croton, Catskill, and Delaware) stretching up to 125 miles (201 km) away from the city, its water supply system is one of the most extensive municipal water systems in the world.
The water system has a storage capacity of 550 billion US gallons (2.1×109 m3) and provides over 1.2 billion US gallons (4,500,000 m3) per day of drinking water to more than eight million city residents, and another one million users in four upstate counties bordering on the system. Three separate sub-systems, each consisting of aqueducts and reservoirs, bring water from Upstate New York to New York City.
I agree fully that it is not a permanent solution, nor a possibility to replace all food with a single different one be that seaweed, insects farming, hydroponics, or other non-traditional forms. I do however want to highlight that food is cultural thus peacefully changeable. We can extend the window much further than just what currently exploitation of farm land do. Aquaculture is just one of the more likely approaches since it is already part of some cultures, although quite small ones in term of populations.
It is an interesting question if a new world war is more likely than a major cultural change in our diet.
>if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix
If traditional food sources go away and technology provides an alternative food source, that is what people will eat. Culture will follow technology, if that's what people have to do to survive.
EDIT:That mostly applies to the population in the developed world with access to capital, technology and industrial resources that we can use to adapt our food supply. Not everywhere in the world has those resources to fall back on though.
In general, that would be prevented by the fact that the developed world is militarily stronger than the developing world. If some resources are not enough for India or Brazil, they can't take them from the developed world in the style of the earlier resource wars for e.g. oil.
It is not as if the countries lack resources. Their fast growing population does [0]. So far, Europe does not seem to be willing to repudiate the asylum treaties it signed, so the young men always have the option to try and reach Europe(an resources) under the guise of seeking protection. And once they are in, their forced removal is unlikely [1], so they cease to be a resource problem for their country of origin and start to be a resource problem for the new host society.
The military does not even play a role here. All the poorer countries need to do is a) not prevent their own young people from leaving, b) not prevent activity of smuggler gangs, c) complicate deportations by refusing to issue passports to their citizens who destroyed their papers underway. None of those actions need guns, much less superior guns.
[0] ... India and Brazil aren't really in the "top population growth" league. Look up population pyramids of Niger, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Yemen. Those graphs promise future mass migration streams. (https://www.populationpyramid.net)
Military might is not very helpful in the modern world. The NATO coalition could not hold their ground in a country such as Afghanistan nor could all of Europe prevent that the collapse of order in Syria (a country of 20m) caused a spill of 2m migrants into Europe.
Your parent was suggesting that the developed world could not deal with a collapse of India or Brazil or several populous African countries.
I would like to see more effort towards making alternative foods acceptable to people. For example, I think that there could be a big difference between trying to get people to eat a plate of raw grubs versus a tofu like food produced from grub protein.
Perhaps seaweed could be used to produce something equivalent to tortillas or bread?
To add to that there is the obvious low hanging fruit of meat as the main source of proteins. Feeding animals perfectly good proteins and using the majority of agricultural land (more than 70% if I remember correctly) and a lot water to finally to eat them after so much waste makes no sense as a main source of feeding a population, it’s not political or philosophical question just a practical one (I’m not vegetarian but eat meat only on rare occasions).
Refine the "impossible burger" technology to the point where it's cost-competitive with beef burgers (or maybe see the beef prices rise a lot), and I suppose many people would switch without noticing much.
And if we suggested ten years ago that your burgers would be plant-based I am sure you would tell us how much Americans hate tofu and that this was just another ugly band-aid. Food is trivial to fix and is barely a small step below clothing choices when it comes to things that are driven almost entirely by culture and fashion. My children regularly request food like sushi and spring rolls that I was ridiculed for eating the the 1980s in the US midwest. Adding insect or algae-based supplements to processed food is already happening.
It's easy. It will happen. The only question is if it will take ten years or twenty.
That's all fine if you want a 100% processed food diet. Some of us want to eat less-processed food than that, and save the "treat" foods for treat times.
In Toronto there is a decades-long established vegan restaurant called Buddha's Vegetarian Restaurant. They make a lot of mock meat products that are as realistic as the Impossible Burger, by layering and preparing things in such a way that they end up resembling meat fiber. You can easily fool yourself into thinking you are eating pulled pork there, for example.
So realistic vegetarian/vegan meat products have actually been around quite a while. Just not in the mainstream.
>That's all fine if you want a 100% processed food diet. Some of us want to eat less-processed food than that, and save the "treat" foods for treat times.
Where I'm at, I do the mediterranean diet, like most people (with a little more meat and BS snacks thrown in following the cultural example of the US, but still, nothing like the S.A.D.).
I'll also mention that most staple plants, legumes, etc. on that diet is cheaper in the US than here, where wages are double and more in the US. So price is not an excuse for Americans not to eat similarly.
People who want to eat "less processed food" can start eating less processed food. Highly processed, lab grown "meat" is hardly the way to eat "less processed food".
One of the great things about this restaurant is that it was super cheap. $5 could easily get lunch for two, which would consist of noodles, vegetables, some type of imitated meat chunks or cubes with sauce, and tea back when I used to go there. And it tasted really quite good. According to their current menu, you can still eat well there for less than $10 per person, and they have a whole lot more items than they did back then.
Just yesterday my partner brought home some seaweed so we could have sushi this weekend.
But I do agree with you on this "ah well, we'll just..." sunshiny outlook we keep hearing.
This year they've really been pushing edible "tree shrimp" cicadas. This is the first time I've heard that they were edible, and suddenly I'm hearing about it several times a week.
Food scarcity IS fixed/ is literally impossible to fix. Human population grew like five times in the living memory and people ignorant of this (willfully or not) are still trying to fix "food scarcity".
It's not that silly to model as historically that has also happened. To use the "peak oil" example this work also influenced, the technology of fossil oil reserves was a response in part to "peak whale" (not a joke). The main source much commercial 'oil' for things like Street lamps in the 1800s was whale blubber. As whales got overfished fossilised oil reserves were developed and not only took over those markets but created many many new ones.
You can of course make the point fossilised oil is worse for global warming etc but from the point of view of the economy and population growth fossilised oil was much better than whale.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but "peak whale" and "peak oil" are naturally self-correcting in a free-market, because as the resources become scarce their prices goes up hence leading to technological incentives to find alternative sources.
This would also apply to topsoil erosion. However this isn't the case with carbon emissions for example, unless we had some financial feedback loop (e.g. some carbon tax).
> [Limited resources are] naturally self-correcting in a free-market, because as the resources become scarce their prices goes up hence leading to technological incentives to find alternative sources.
You say that as though it's a theorem. It's not. It's perhaps reasonable when discussing small perturbations of resources, but it's not a magical phenomena that will "just work" in a free market (assuming one even exists) at any scale.
The globe itself is finite and we have only finite time to make corrections to diminishing resources like oil. No one knows how long it will take to adapt, or what the human cost will be on the way to arriving at that adaptation. To make matters far worse, we have global warming to contend with and that's still subject to political whims and not even a concern yet for the "free market".
If you must take "the free market" as axiomatic truth, then consider also that the free market may "decide" that human extinction is the "optimal" outcome regardless of what monopolists and oligarchs say.
The best way to understand global warming is that the market doesn't account for the true cost of carbon emissions. That's because the atmosphere is an unregulated commons, lacking property rights or other legal mechanisms to assign the costs of carbon emissions. A carbon tax or some other way to assign a "price" to carbon twill begin to assign that cost, and the market system will naturally, in a million small ways, reduce the emission of carbon. The result will be dramatic, unforeseen levels of reductions.
> ...the market system will naturally, in a million small ways...
You place a lot of faith in it but "the free market" is not a construct that functions according to immutable natural laws. It's a man-made and very much corruptible system.
Nature does not comply with property rights, legal mechanisms, nor quarterly results. People have to force ecological concerns into their markets. That's a tall order and it won't just happen without a serious taste of what is to come, sadly.
Well, in a free market supply and demand will match. But the free market is totally capable of throwing up "most humans die" as a path to equilibrium, if all the available energy disappears.
Even small hikes in food price cause massive local upheavals around the globe. Lots of people who cannot afford to pay more for food than they do now...
Don't think that's relevant since whale and mineral oil are finite natural resources. Governments can't distort them into existence like farm products.
Top soil can be regenerated so it is literally not finite. Yes it takes long to regenerate and systems with latency are harder to control but it's decidely an regeneratable resource.
You'd hope so, wouldn't you? However our markets aren't free. I can highly recommend Clive Ponting's "A New Green History of the World". The weight of historical evidence is against us finding a fix. We have tended to over-exploit every resource until it's depleted. For instance, we switched to coal because the wood and whales were running out, not because coal was a better source of energy.
(My main concern with the book is the lack of references; for each chapter he provides " further reading", but I'd have preferred to see a source for each claim.)
Parent's point was that "whale oil scarcity" had a natural mechanism to get people invested in alternatives because as whale populations dwindle and it becomes expensive. That was the problem and it was solved to our satisfaction.
It also helped the whales, but that was purely incidental. Without fossil energy, the whales would be gone.
Today, there is unfortunately too much oil and coal to force the search for alternatives. And the "whales" are the the climate and, again, that problem doesn't have the feedback loop because the atmosphere, like the high seas, does the tragedy-of-the-commons thing.
The catastrophic results come from overshoot; peak whale didn't have an overshoot where the folks exploiting whale oil then got into trouble because of fossil oil. Topsoil erosion will have overshoot because it's caused by people trying to get fed. When the topsoil goes those people are in trouble. For carbon the same is true - when it passes a certain point catastrophes occur - stopping the exploitation is not an option as it's toooooo late!
I would generally agree, but i guess the point is, extrapolating about production/growth/pollution when fossil oil was introduced probably failed to account for technological change driving economic and industrial change.
We can measure global warming, it is happening, and we know what drives it right now. We should at least try to model what kind of change would fix it. Including new technologies.
Fossil fuel prices are highly political and a mechanism to sanction economies right now. So it is only partially a free market at best. Especially if many players try to keep the price that low...
Today the problem is less the lack of ressources, but that we destroy the eco-system with our current technology. We can not just use another technologie to exploit a different kind of ressource. Instead we need a technology that has less consequences or even one that undoes the damage we already made.
Fossile oil reserves where not developed around 1800. They developed over millions of years. And actually they were already used in the middle east, china and myanmar way before europeans&americans started to use them to replace the shrinking and therefore more expensive supply of whale oil.
IMO the usage of petroleum was fueled(no pun intended) by the market and the rising price of whale blubber. It could have been used way earlier but was not lucrative.
Sadly the technologies that destroy our environment are still more lucrative then existing solutions that could solve our problem. That is especially if you look at the investments that are still made in this sector. We have the technologies to solve our problems, they are called renewable energies.
The problem is that we need a technology that takes over the market share that is currently taken by technologies that damage the environment. But that is very hard, as it would need to be more lucrative.
Just having the technology does not help, if people still use the damaging technologys. Cause they alone are enough to reach certain tipping points. And after those, no technology can save us even if it would undo damage that we caused earlier.
It's worth noting that by the time "peak oil" became a talking point on cable networks, operators had figured out that the time of barn-burner "easy oil" was over, and were starting to optimize their fracking operations, which targets mud rock instead of traditional reservoirs.
Now industry leaders are talking about "peak oil demand", the idea that demand for petrochemicals will crash over the next decade or so.
I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow.
Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually results in negative outcomes for a lot of people.
It feels like when I want more stuff per unit time/effort, I’m just “trying to support my family and build a better life for my children”. But when other people do the same, it’s “greedy”.
Is there any definition of “greedy” we could use for the purposes of this discussion that would apply yo all humans equally?
I think those are good ones because they're definable in ways that we can probably come to a consensus on.
The problem is the term greed is often used in a pejorative way as a proxy for success. If you work hard and achieve a lot and that comes with financial rewards, you are greedy by definition. Add in some snark about how the work hard part doesn't count somehow, and that's the modern critique of capitalism.
Oh, and rent seeking and corruption are because capitalism too and not at all human flaws seen to an even greater degree in every other economic system ever devised.
I think that the issue is when the financial rewards are dramatically greater than how much harder someone could conceivably be working.
A billionaire could conceivably work much harder than the median person. However, they don't work 8000 times harder ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122k).
Why is the "hardness" of the work the key criteria? If you compare "value to society based on peoples willingness to pay", then the ratio of that between a billionaire and the median person probably is 8000x - the founders that become billionaires usually capture only a tiny fraction of the value they create, but we tend to take that value for granted and it's hard to measure. So we only see the billions of dollars they have, not the 10s or 100's of billions of dollars of value they create.
The thing is nobody gets to build a fortune in the billions from saving up their salary. The principal way to do it is through ownership and control of a company. So what's the alternative to private individuals founding companies, finding ways to provide valuable goods and services, employ lots of people and grow successful businesses. Is that something we want to discourage? I think we all benefit from having hard working, innovative people creating, leading and running big companies. Or even from investors deploying capital so that it grows companies and expands beneficial economic activities.
part from my first job working for the government here in the UK all my other jobs have been for companies founded and run by private individuals. They've helped me put food on my table and clothes on my children.
On the other hand I do agree that when it comes to inheritance, rent seeking, financial manipulation, etc there's a lot to do to close loopholes and create a more equitable system. There is a good argument to be made that the main reasons inequality has risen are not good ones. I do not see those as fundamentally flaws in capitalism, they're certainly flaws but you get abuses in any economic system. They're not fundamental. The Netherlands is definitely a capitalist society, but they also have a wealth tax for example. There are good arguments for land value taxes, which some countries use to good effect. There are plenty of tools available to us.
I don't think it's black and white. I have no issue with someone starting a business and becoming hundreds of times more wealthy than the median American. However, I think that's a lot different than becoming thousands of times more wealthy.
Opposition to addressing inequality in the US tends to take the form of arguing that the rich worked harder, earned their wealth, are more valuable, etc.; therefore, it is immoral to redistribute that wealth. The argument that I am attempting to make is that the differences in wealth are so dramatic that it isn't realistic that they earned it in the sense that free market advocates are implying.
I think if you're opposed to people obtaining that much wealth is, how do you stop them? How do you prevent Elon Musk from investing heavily in Tesla, growing the company and ending up owning billions of dollars worth of it's shares?
That's certainly possible, but the argument that usually gets made is that they worked harder and therefore earned being a billionaire.
That being said, I think it's also unlikely that they brought a skill to the table that's 8000 times more valuable. My understanding is that people who become billionaires do so by leveraging capital.
They both seem fine to me. Rent seeking keeps system stable. It keeps a balance between crash-and-burn vs absolute no risk types by taking little risks to collect rent and providing some useful service.
As a third world native I find corruption works better than everyone mindlessly following law under one self-righteous government becomes illegal under the next one, thereby making citizens life hell.
One approach might be to compare how much wealth someone is attempting to attain with how much they could conceivably be outperforming the average person.
For example, if we make a back of the envelope estimate that an elite person has skills that are 10 times those of an average person (10 times smarter, stronger, more charismatic, better educated, etc.) and works 3 times longer then they could conceivably be 30 times more productive. If, to be conservative, we doubled that, then we could define greed as attempting to amass more than 60 times more wealth than the average person.
What if our elite 30x productivity person takes a significant risk? If he flips a coin and wins he should rightfully expect 60x
And you can be much more than 10x more productive than your average person without being 10x smarter. You can just have skills or have an idea that allows you to scale your contributions much more than an average person.
For instance, if we can teach cars to drive themselves, we have the capacity to save hundreds of millions, if not billions, of man hours a day.
The people who made significant contributions to that effort will have contributed thousands of times more to society than an average person.
If a surgeon saves 50 lives a year, I'd say that's a lot more than 10x what I'm doing.
I agree, it's perfectly reasonable for someone who takes a risk to receive more than I do. I could even see them receiving hundreds of times more than I do. That's a lot different than them receiving 8000 times more ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122 thousand).
Yeah, especially when there's occasional extremists that refuse to acknowledge that putting one's own first isn't the natural state of things.
I guess the way forward is to build a sustainable future for everyone and their families. And to get everyone to agree it's the best way to go about things.
Let's imagine a hypothetical crisis, say a building on fire. You can save your own child/spouse/relative or you can save a complete stranger. You will succeed in saving any of them, but not both.
Most people will chose child/spouse/relative without thinking twice and doing so is quite natural. Not everyone agree on that though, and would argue that the potential benefit the stranger could be to society should be taken into the equation.
Luckily, reality isn't that black and white in most cases, but most people will prioritize their in-group. That's just the way people work.
Clearly, people will prefer their own in-group. I think, however, you just made the parent poster's point.
People will often prefer their own in-group to themselves.
Thus, it depends on how one defines the in-group, and one's own interests.
Looking at Coldtea's earlier comment:
>It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.
showing how the 'in-group' has shrunk. Used to be a larger tribe, now you could be lucky to consider it an atomic family.
Definitely. I was agreeing with the parent post, while adding a semi-sarcastic reply about everyone having to agree before things start moving.
Community-building might be a possible solution, but how do you pull people away from their screens and get them out on the streets to make new connections and then turn that into a positive force that actually makes a different?
I have a trick to define greed: pauses. A bad greed impulse based system won't survive a stop, it's a hog, a leak .. it needs to keep going to survive.
Absolutely, most problems are caused by either of:
- stupidity
-fear
-greed
The problem is figuring out which instances of these are induced by society and civilization and which are inherent to human behavior in general. While we can try to address the former, the latter probably can't be fixed without significantly changing our definition/perception of what humans are.
History shows us that greedy people end up with their heads on sticks. Even when they have armies to protect them. It doesn’t take a lot to regress to that again.
One of the main properties of many of the communist revolutions of the 20th centuries was the mass killing or removal of property of the landed gentry in those countries - sometimes more directly violent than others. Cambodia, China, Vietnam, N Korea, etc.
I think recent history has shown that simply killing the Bourgeoisie tends to just eventually create another in the form of whoever had the power to do the other killings, and not always to better ends for the people. That form of communism has been shown to not really work. Democratic socialism though seems to work out pretty well for people.
There’s still plenty of money sloshing around the coffers of European royalty, even in modern republics. If you’re good at the greed thing I think the head-on-stick risk is pretty small.
I dont really think history shows that. The "greedy people" can keep power for very long and it takes special circumstances for the overthrow - and overthrow usually means instability with a lot of death, torture and pain for everyone.
>I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow.
That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed.
Much of technology we don't really need, and even more so for most technology we consume (of course, you can't convince tech workers for that, as their salary, and hobbies, are based on the stuff).
It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.
> That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed.
I am not sure if by technology you mean products or ideas. In case of the latter, that does not sound right. Smart driven persons do not have to be greedy in order to devote their live to something.
However personal interest (i.e. greed) is a big factor that motivates them to devote their lives not to something that's simply very interesting to them personally, but rather something that just happens to be practically useful for large numbers of people very unlike themselves.
Smart people who have the ability and resources to change things don't really share the same problems as the target audience of mass market tech (I mean, hackernews is full of product reports illustrating this) - greed motivates them to solve problems of their "outgroup", filling the needs of all the people they don't really care about much.
I was talking to a friend yesterday and he put forth the idea that the only reason humans even have civilization is because of sociopaths. We're apparently wired to function in a community of 30-50 where everyone depends on everyone else for survival so, he reasons, larger groups of people require perverse systems control. Sociopaths, having no empathy and seeking to use people for their own gain, seized power and conquered other tribes and imposed such perverse systems in order to exert their influence over a larger populace and land area. Only now, having lived for many many generations in one kind of civilization or another, people know nothing but the perverse system and think of it as natural and even good.
There was a lot more to it than that, and largely speculative, but it was interesting. What if the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over our sky is that sociopathy in social animals is actually really rare or is always otherwise controlled for?
also, scientists, doctors, researchers, even maybe the military?, progress has been defined by a lot of different motivators than just greed i would think… (was einstein full of greed when he made his breakthroughs?)
> It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means.
Individuals aren't really responsible for the mass amounts of pollutants put into the atmosphere the same way corporations are. In order for the human population to "live within it's means" at an impactful scale it would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.
Kicking the can down the road 30 years is by far the best option we have available to us at this point (not that it will happen in my lifetime).
In order for the human population to "live within it's means" at an impactful scale it would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.
It would not solve climate change, but really, what's horrible about it?
We live in a world of finite resources. If we, as a species, overpopulate to the point where these finite resources run dry, what are the best options?
Because climate change is the only reason to do something like that - we need to solve the short term issue of pollution, because in the long run (e.g. a few centuries) overpopulation is not a problem as we're going to get a population stabilization and decrease just with current trends without a need to sacrifice anything for it; and we are getting more resource efficient over time, GDP growth has now finally (unlike all history) decoupled from growth in energy use and mineral use, etc.
Climate change is a problem that makes us need a rapid solution right now even if its costly and painful, general depletion of resources really isn't; if it wasn't for climate change then we could just let the replacement of oil to renewables happen "naturally" as oil prices slowly increase as the supply decreases, the usual market incentives would be enough to manage the resource allocation.
Finiteness of resources is not as big of an issue as it looked in 1970s (when the original Limits to Growth study was made) - with a stable or shrinking population (current situation in developed world, soon-to-arrive globally) each person's share of physical resources is the same all the while as each person's need for physical resources (except energy) is not growing now (unlike 1970s), with advances in tech meeting the same needs now requires less resources so we can continue to grow our economy within the limits of the same finite resources.
We could decrease our rate of consumption/production, for one. The rate at which we're consuming is what's unsustainable. We have enough resources today to cover everyone's needs. The problem is we are producing well past that, and even still not everyone is getting what they need. Just look at how much food is thrown into dumpsters every day. Or all the energy locked up in landfills in the form of deteriorating plastics and electronics. All the junkyards filled with cars. Look at the thousands of acres of almond farms in CA's central valley. It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond, yet the central valley is in perpetual drought. A better allocation of resources is what's needed.
We live in a society where everything is disposable, and that has a huge energy cost that we don't factor in because energy is so cheap right now. When energy is more expensive, repairing, conserving, and reusing a thing will be a better choice instead of throwing it out and buying a new one.
But you're taking the already discovered "magic bullets" for granted...and are essentially acting like the next one is impossible even though they happen on a semi-regular basis. Science is simply an on-going collection of realizations where the latest realization is considered the end-all-be-all...until it isn't.
The reason they are considered "magic bullets" is because they involve game-changing shifts in technology that couldn't easily be conceived beforehand. Just look at the traveling salesman problem for a sample as to how a handful of input options could output a massive amount of output combinations. Every so often, one of those output combinations turns into a game-changer...then we have people spewing a new version of the rhetoric stated here.
It’s reasonable to assume there will be various kinds of game-changing new technologies, but it’s not a given that it will provide usable solutions to the specific problems we need to solve.
At the time these studies were being created the idea that PV solar would be cost-effective and that battery tech would progress to the point where it provided a viable path to grid-scale energy storage was deep into 'magic bullet' territory. There are a long list of technologies that have already started to bend the curve on several of those trend lines and the idea that we are simply done creating solutions seems unfathomably short-sighted.
PV solar and battery technology are approaching the "diminishing returns" territory, if they're not already there. Battery energy density had been improving at about 5-8% over the last 100 years, but I don't think anyone seriously expects that to continue.
IMHO, unfathomably short sighted is expecting the rate of technological progress over the last hundred years to be matched by the next 100 years. We went from the Wright Brothers in 1903, to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969, but by 2035 we'll still be using rockets similar to those we used in 1969.
The 20th C was a very unique time in history, I don't think humanity will experience something like that again for... many centuries.
People have been saying we are reaching the end of improvements to battery chemistry for decades, and yet every year we keep pumping out small improvements and we double production capacity. PV solar continues to get cheaper as we increase capacity and apply the previous generation of chip technology to the production process. None of this is 'breakthrough' technology, just the slow and constant grind of iterative improvement.
The technological progress of the next hundred years will make the previous hundred look like we were all standing still. In the 20th century GPS was a bulky device, wireless comm was power hungry and slow, and any sort of real computing required an expensive lump at least the size of a small book -- two decades into the 21st century and I have a device in my pocket that is magic and for $10 I can put a SoC into an existing device (or something new) that has good GPS, fast cellular data, and sips power to give it “smarts” that would have been unprecedented in the late 20th.
The 20th century may have seen big changes in aerospace as we first learned how to master the field, but it was the dark ages when it comes to computing, materials sciences, biology, and solid-state physics -- every one of those fields will deliver results over the next 50 years that will make the 20th century look like the 18th century in terms of technological advancement.
It's not counting on a magic bullet that concerning, it's the overconfidence we understand all the variables in the system(s). That is, we act as if there are no significant unknowns. Unprecedented, global scale, and unknowns all go hand in hand.
Even in a Covid 19 aware world there's still a fair amount of denial about the complexity of the global economy. What happens if dissent - not co-operation - increases? It can certainly be argued that both invasions of Afghanistan were for resources. Suddened the gears will shift and world leaders are going to stick to peaceful cooperation?
Put another way, as stress in the systems begin to surface it seems unlikely humans will remain rational and broadly organized. The social fabric will likely breakdown before anything else. Trying to predict the future is difficult enough. Add to that, human emotional / psychological response to extremes - real as well as perceived - and all the models / scenarios mentioned in the article could end badly.
it's fundamentally confounding to me that more people don't seem to come to this conclusion. I would love to hear a reasonable argument from someone in this cohort, because I'm willing to accept that my intuition is flawed, and I just can't see how.
To put it brutally it's because on Hacker News and probably your social circle, there are too many people whose social status and income depends on being clever, or at least the perception of being clever. This leads us to seriously over-index on things that look like science or data analysis, without even being able to see alternatives that in my experience easily occur to the less (over?) educated.
Consider this article. It's actually a good case in point. The article can be summarized like this:
1. In the 1970s there were these modellers who predicted disaster. Lots of very influential and educated people took them uber-seriously and thought the Limits To Growth was proof positive that everything needed to change.
2. The model turned out to be useless and the disaster it predicted never happened, because the numbers it used for natural resource availability were garbage.
3. This major error did not reduce the modellers confidence in what they were doing (this seems to be a common theme with modellers). Instead they just doubled the number of natural resources and kept on going. That sounds rather arbitrary and not like a real fix to me, but alright. The new models indicated that nothing makes much of a difference for decades (until 2020), conveniently making the predictions unfalsifiable on any timeline that the original authors may have cared about.
4. Now a new researcher has published a new paper on these models, which also says nothing useful. We read that the models "aren't terribly enlightening" because we don't have any data past 2020 yet so which scenario we're supposedly in cannot be determined.
5. Despite all the above, the author concludes that "the most important takeaway from these models is that we need to take definitive action".
Wrong! A rational person can conclude nothing from the evidence in the article. Given that we can only judge the models by prior performance, we should anticipate that the models are probably wrong again. Moreover, the model scenarios don't have any probabilities attached to them and are described in sufficiently vague terms that nobody would ever be able to conclude which scenario we actually followed, again, making it an exercise in stargazing, not science.
Therefore, we cannot actually say we've "known for at least 50 years that our current pattern of consumption is not sustainable". We've known no such thing. The conclusions of the article and many of the commenters here seem like motivated reasoning as a consequence - or at least, it's certainly not Bayesian reasoning!
Things always seem fine until they aren't, and then they're real bad.
Invariably, the nature of a difficult situation is that they're difficult to get out of, so we tend to be very interested in avoiding difficult situations. This is why people are so interested in avoiding climate change, rather than waiting for more real-time data about how much climate change actually sucks so they can update their Bayesian priors and "avoid climate change when it happens again."
This is specifically what I'm referring to. Temperatures are already getting lethally hot and we're not really doing all that much about it. It's not resource scarcity that seems like the killer, here.
It's worth noting that the Limits to Growth didn't talk about climate change, just generalized 'pollution'.
One now obscure reason for this is that back in the 1970s people didn't believe in global warming and the term "climate change" didn't exist as we know it today. Climatologists were worried about global cooling instead. At that point their records showed a generalized decline in temperature from the 1940s onwards and they believed it might continue indefinitely, leading to a new ice age. This was taken quite seriously, as newspaper records from the time show.
These days it can be hard to understand why they thought that, because if you get a modern graph of the long term temperature record it doesn't show this cooling effect. The reason is that climatologists have repeatedly issued new versions of the historical time series, each time reducing the extent to which this cooling period can be seen. The differences between versions are the extent to which models are allowed to modify the raw data. The climatologists do this because they are very certain in their theories, but a long period of cooling in the 20th century is not compatible with them, and thus they look for reasons why the data must be wrong. When they come up with such a reason it gets merged into the model and the next version "corrects" for it.
Modern graphs show basically no cooling, leading to some people concluding that the belief in global cooling was some sort of fringe belief, or even an urban legend, because obviously, how could they have thought that when no such cooling is visible.
Given the long track record of educated people having near unshakeable confidence in models even in the face of failed predictions (of which World3 is a salient example), this progressive replacement of measured historical data with synthetic data is well worth pondering deeply.
Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage.
The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find?
And the fact that we'll be doing that...during increasing droughts and extreme weather...water shortages...crop shortages or even widespread failures...the associated political instability...refugee crises far beyond what we've experienced in recent years...all while the population grows...
And that doesn't even mention the fact that, just as when a privileged group of people lose that privilege and call it persecution, those of us in the developed world will see any drop in the standard of living as more extreme than it necessarily actually is. I fully expect right wing terrorism to increase; even now they're running around screaming about "Jews replacing them" -- what happens when their lives get very clearly worse? Who do you think they'll blame and how will they respond?
I could go on.
That's just, like, 1% of the different angles and interplaying variables involved. It's enormously complex, but all paths lead to serious instability, perhaps societal collapse.
We would need to build thousands of nuclear plants, adapting each plant for its location (so you can’t mass-produce a single design), and we don’t have the skilled people to do that. In addition, they will take decades to build, we lack enough fuel for those plants, and we still haven’t solved the disposal problem.
Solar panels, batteries, and wind mills are comparatively easy to produce at ridiculous volumes. They’re a cheaper, faster and cleaner solution.
Why do you have to adapt each plant for its location? or just find a suitable location and build a bunch of such plants and transmit the power to where it’s used.
Buildings are also “adapted for each location”, but there is still an entire corpus of standardized techniques to do that that massively reduces costs compared to literally solving the problem from scratch at each site.
And why is it the case that “we don’t have the skilled people to do that”? If people value it, they’ll pay for it- and people can learn new skills in response to market need / pay - there is no predetermined number of “ad-tech software engineers” for example, they were “created” by the people themselves responding to market forces (pay)
From what I’ve read it has to do with the way the plant has to cope with water. Water needs to flow through the plant, which means you cannot put it just anywhere. At the same time the plant cannot be prone to flooding and its design must be such that even with a meltdown the radioactive material will not reach the water table. Both of those are not straightforward near abundant supplies of water.
Maybe you could have a universally implantable design, and maybe you could train people with the relevant skillset. The point is: we haven’t, and we aren’t, so other ways of generating green power are easier and cheaper. Nuclear will play a role for sure (the climate crisis is such that we need to do all the things) but it won’t cover more than 10% of our energy needs. I would be glad to get a rosier outlook on nuclear though.
One aspect of customization is regarding cooling - large nuclear plants can't be self-sufficient, they need to integrate some large natural supply of water. Rivers are different than lakes which are different than seaside; each river is different, etc.
The dream was "power too cheap to meter". Didn't come true back then, and it turns out after you account for safety systems like a containment building and backup cooling, it's far more expensive than alternatives.
To make things worse, making nuclear remotely profitable relies on running it as close to 24/7 as possible. Given that renewables exist and produce cheaper power, nuclear only gets to offer anything when renewables aren't working, which makes it even more expensive.
Economically, it's extremely risky. Why risk billions on a plant that might profit 20 years down the line, when you could build solar or wind faster, and profit faster?
Politically, it's not great because construction times are very long, so any politician that starts building them probably won't be there to see the benefit, and may have their work stopped by a successor.
Practically, we can't build it fast enough. It's a big, complex, specialized tasks that few people do because there's not much market.
Because nuclear depends on a lot of cultural and societal factors to be safe. As Asimov once said:
> The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Nuclear can be safe but look at the failures of the USSR on Chernobyl to see how it depends completely on a country's culture and willingness to pay for this safety. Or even Fukushima, in a country very risk-averse and rich, corners were still cut even with the responsible engineer calling out that the sea walls were too low.
Should we trust governments around the world that each single one of them will keep their nuclear power plants safe for the foreseeable future until we can move away from it (let's say 50-100 years)?
It is definitely a step in the right direction, but given the current demand the development is too slow.
Just look at China, with ~50 nuclear plants (just 5% of energy production), while they have thousands of coal plants. It's practically impossible that they can shift to a reusable carbon-neutral energy production methods.
Also, China can build a hundred coal plants in a year, but there's no way it can do that with nuclear.
The realistic picture is that growth cannot be sustained and there will be dire consequences due to other factors too.
(climate change, migration, wet bulb temperatures, crop failures, people being too good at capitalism, etc.)
> This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change.
Who says we haven't thought of it? There are plenty of candidates technologies, like moving food production into cities via vertical farms so top soil erosion is irrelevant. Lab grown is on the short-term horizon as well (5-10 years).
Water shortages are a non-issue, as we have an abundance of water. Certainly desalinated water is more expensive than water from fresh lakes and rivers, but it's becoming more cost effective, and if water increases in price, they'll meet somewhere and level off.
Climate change might be a challenge, but people will simply move away from the areas where it's no longer cost effective to live, at the very least because it's no longer cost effective to run businesses there due to insurance premiums.
The "Comprehensive Tech" model isn't too far fetched. It requires some disruptive changes, but not too drastic. Errors bars are wide due to climate change though, since it's effects are still unpredictable.
Regarding vertical farms in cities. You generally need about 1 acre of farm land per (American) person per year. A vertical farm can squeeze about 5 acres of horizontal farm land into one acre of vertical farm land. If NYC (proper) has 8.4M residents, then you need about 1.7M acres of vertical farms. For reference, NYC (proper) is about 200K acres right now. (The NYC metro area has 20M residents over 8.5M acres.) It's doable, but it will require an enormous expenditure in infrastructure, so good luck.
Water shortage is totally an issue in the American West. When you build a development you need to prove that there is enough water for your development for the next 100 years before the city will authorize you for tap. This is becoming a real challenge for developers in Phoenix and other areas.
Climate change is already effecting where people live, and it will likely get worse. Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there.
The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.
> It's doable, but it will require an enormous expenditure in infrastructure, so good luck.
It's simply one among many possible resolutions to soil erosion. There need not be a single solution. Soil erosion won't kill all traditional farming practices, and vertical farms can simply make up part of the difference (and progressively more if soil erosion isn't tackled directly).
> Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there.
We may or may not have refugee crises driven by climate change. There is simply no way to estimate these likelihoods.
> The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.
You just described that regulations require demonstration of any new development's water access for 100 years, which is exactly the kind of planning, cooperation, and commitment you said we need. Clearly we are capable of it when necessary.
Regulations have certainly gotten a bad rap over the past few decades with the push for deregulation, but the worse the situation gets due to lax regulations, the more this will change.
Your conclusion is based on the naive assumption that circumstances don't change people's behaviour and so the past couple of decades will predict the next century, but history doesn't support this argument. Cultural views on nearly every issue have changed dramatically in each generation.
> It's simply one among many possible resolutions to soil erosion. There need not be a single solution. Soil erosion won't kill all traditional farming practices, and vertical farms can simply make up part of the difference (and progressively more if soil erosion isn't tackled directly).
I think vertical farming is a great idea, and I think crop rotation and planting native species are great ideas. I just think all the sustainable long term solutions are a hard sell in the short term, and people tend to think and invest on the short term. Theoretically, a government could used sticks and carrots to get these things done, but I don't see the American government pulling that off effectively.
> You just described that regulations require demonstration of any new development's water access for 100 years, which is exactly the kind of planning, cooperation, and commitment you said we need. Clearly we are capable of it when necessary.
You got me. I think that resolution is an exception, not the rule. In any case, water shortages are a real thing.
> Cultural views on nearly every issue have changed dramatically in each generation.
I don't see that from my perspective. I see a lot of the same taboos and biases perpetuated from generation to generation, across all cultures. Young people lean progressive, and then they lean conservative twenty years later.
I don't think circumstances effect people's behavior until it they affects them personally, but then it's too late.
Obviously this isn't true for everyone. Some people will not change their behavior under any circumstances, e.g., Representative Steve Scalise fighting gun control after getting shot in a mass shooting.
> we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of
Surely there are in fact, many technologies that we have thought of, that could help in a number of ways, if only we could realize them as practical and/or get them adopted in terms of politics and the economy.
If you count the externalities of nuclear (eventually having to abandon a city every hundred years or so), gas (some pollution, catastrophic climate change), and coal (pollution, catastrophic climate change), wind and solar look really cheap. Hydro can also be useful by creating reservoirs of fresh water for managing drought cycles.
The biggest issue is that we don’t monetize the externalities in the current state.
There's a number of technologies and traits that, if adopted en-masse, would definitely reduce our energy and material consumption and extend the sustainability of our planet.
Stop eating meat, extended warranties in home products and designing goods in a way they can be easily repaired, led bulbs, better insulation for buildings, solar water heaters, heat pumps, bicycles...
We could easily consume a fifth of the resources we use now and be as happy if twenty selected things were banned in the world. But we live in a capitalist world, there's only hope in people taking the initiative.
I kinda believe about a few tech based `deii-ex machina` but to me the most potent tool for solving this is just stop following consumerism. If all urban dwellers stopped using cars, and spent more times doing simpler activities, you'd have less importations, less consumption.. maybe this time can be used on fixing house energy expenditures, renewing biosphere a bit. We're sitting on a 8Billions man hour bucket.
Which is why we should push for the stable world (SW) scenario, rather than gambling with our collective future on something that is not a sure bet.
Why do all climate policies currently being adopted allow increased carbon emissions and assume we will have carbon capture technologies to negate them right in the nick of time? This is the kind of irresponsible behaviour that we usually see only in addicts or psychopaths. How are we allowing this?
> why we should push for the stable world (SW) scenario
Alternatively, a push for antifragility acknowledges human's scale of environmental control and the tendency for unexpected things to happen simply because they are possible.
Ergodicity expresses the idea that a point of a moving system, either a dynamical system or a stochastic process, will eventually visit all parts of the space that the system moves in, in a uniform and random sense. [0]
Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. [1]
The most antifragile system we know is the earth's biosphere and its component ecosystems. By reorganising it for our industrial processes, we have made it pretty fragile and we will be experiencing the results of that (in the form of more droughts, storms, temperature swings etc.) increasingly if we keep it up.
Adopting the stable world scenario would be accepting that we need to limit our use of the world's resources and give back a lot of land and ocean use to the natural ecosystems that gave us those resources in the first place -- rewilding large portions of the earth. This is about the only reasonable suggesting for antifragility I could conceive of, making it basically the same thing as the SW option.
It's probably a horizon thing. Over millenia BAU would have been totally off, 50 or 100 years - not clear to me. Should be historically testable, i.e. mean and median time between larger changes. I suspect that in the last 300 years it accelerated a lot on the tech AND social side.
I disagree with this take on why this model was there. I understood it as it being there to illustrate what it _would_ take to avoid a societal catastrophe. This is helpful, because it shows that we won’t avoid it!
I don’t know man, the human race makes great technological leaps, or rather leaps in understanding that allow new technology. And nobody can really predict that. It’s almost like your Einsteins, Newtons, Boltzmanns, Maxwells Paulis and Plancks had some kind 2-way channel with divinity. Even though we all stand on the shoulders of giants, sometimes a new giant appears out of the ether. And there’s no doubt we’re done. I saw a 60minutes where an air force pilot dead ass states that they saw a tic-tac lookin ufo churn water in the Pacific Ocean before basically teleporting away, only to be relocated 60 miles later. There’s more for us to know,
even if that air force crew (there were more than 1 witnesses) were all just tripping on peyote.
I don't know either. We made giant steps in the 20th C, but I feel like we're seeing diminishing returns now. From 1950 to 1970 cars advanced a lot, but from 2000 to 2020, they're still largely the same. (Sure, there's Teslas with highway autonomy, and some systems can handle an on-ramp, but "Mexico City" autonomy seems really far off.) Unless someone breaks Moore's Law, figures out general quantum computing or general AI, I think the next 30 years are going to look a lot like the last 10, but with more hurricanes and global migration.
It’s also not true. Cars are currently undergoing the single largest revolution since they were invented: electrification. Designs that people have been optimizing over a century are suddenly obviated and new challenges are taking their place.
True but the usage of cars themselves is the main problem. Electrification of cars helps, certainly, but we should be walking and biking, not driving. They’re more efficient, but we are still just using expensive energy to power them when we could just build better and not need them. Calories are cheaper than watts.
There are massive advances in subjects like materials and biotechnology happening now, they're just not big and flashy despite being at least as game-changing as any other major advance over the last century.
Huh? Solar power generation at scale is exactly such a thing. Wind power, too. Also hydroponics are a thing at the industrial scale now as is desalination of seawater. These are not magic bullets but they do fix a lot of things.
because we know how solar, wind works and that is "reality".
Basing a model on some imaginary future technology that we don't know is possible or not shouldn't happen in my opinion. It is one thing to think or create different models with possible future technologies taken into it and other to be certain about that happening based on that imaginary technology.
How does new technology help these things exactly? Isn't technology, along with the discovery of coal and oil, a major contributor to the scaling of the human population and the effects of that? The vast industrialization over the past 150 has not been good for humanity or the planet.
They specifically mentioned technological leaps, so that's what I went on, for better or worse.
I think clean energy will not by itself solve much. We need to reduce and reorganize at the same time as bringing on clean energy production, but that won't happen. Look at China, who is the world leader in clean energy production. I worry if fusion ever happens, people will just be like "great, electrical energy is free now", which won't be good.
I agree we need leaders thinking more than a few years ahead.
I agree with you and made a similar comment when the article talking about the report was posted here.
COVID-19 is a perfect example of the folly in believing "technology will always save us". In the U.S., the general sentiment was that technology in the form of vaccines and entrepreneurship will rise to the occasion, so let's just ride it out until then. Well after more than a year of shit show after shit show and 600,000+ deaths in the U.S. alone along with countless reverberations in society (businesses failing, long term health effects of COVID-19, basically a year wasted of schooling across all ages, unemployment, shortages, etc.), people are still like "we got the vaccine, we did it everyone!" I still hear people saying they got COVID-19 like it was an inevitability and no big deal and also now that the vaccine is here no worries. I honestly doubt that climate change, agricultural exhaustion, ecosystem destruction, over population, etc. are anywhere near the public's or even government's serious thoughts. If they are, they're likely to be wholly short term.
We can't even solve simple problems like destroying the dams and decreasing salmon farms in the Pacific northwest that are decimating wild salmon populations which has side effects like starving the resident orcas.
I have zero hope humanity will solve these upcoming problems in any way shape or form. We'll end up just dealing with them and reacting to them once they're here, like we do with everything else (at best).
>COVID-19 is a perfect example of the folly in believing "technology will always save us".
From a purely collectivist point of view, unchecked Covid only kills around 1% of the population and the vast majority are retired people, so it's not something society needed saving from as it has pretty much zero effect on humanity's long-term economic/technological progress.
I think the serious issue is more around long COVID and the associated symptoms with something that could perhaps become a chronic issue down the line.
Yeah, COVID is pretty bad. If possible, nobody wants to catch it.
But COVID to human civilisation is like a badly stubbed toe to a human. Painful. To be avoided. Maybe quite a bit of damage. Not really a threat if responded to in a rational way & with some whimpering.
Oh man, COVID-19 was a huge wake up call. I thought the response to Hurricane Katrina was bad, but the response to COVID-19 has been much worse. Scientists did a great job with rolling a vaccine out, but now every family's weird uncle refuses to get a vaccine. It just blows my mind.
> every family's weird uncle refuses to get a vaccine
Suppose I thought you should get some injections, and you researched it and concluded they almost certainly wouldn't benefit you, and might harm you. Would you be OK with being characterized as a weird uncle who refused to get a treatment?
Not in any magical way just simply in the fact that we are the first who through our combination of wealth and knowledge-creation and with the help of technology and science have the potential of solving the problems we encounter.
It's not a guarantee but it's very different than previous civilizations (just as the challenges are).
In general humans and our ansestors have gradually been turning an environment that was sheer hell in its inception, into a much more habitable environment.
It really isn't. History is littered with civilizations that were on top, got complacent, and were swallowed by up to that point irrelevant tiny neighbours.
They all had the wealth, the power, the tech. They didn't have the tolerance for short term pain for greater future gains anymore. So they stood there watching how they went down, slowly but surely . And talking a lot.
I would not be surprised if future historians mark the 1990’s as the peak of the US empire
All civilizations are very different than others before. I am not convinced that universal computation is enough of a game changer to make us different enough. Older civs each had access to tech the ones before hadn't. The one constant is human behaviour.
the difference is that with computers we have ai and with modern forms of energy we have machines and knowledge previous generations couldnt even think about.
You're so far away from the original point, that computation etc is available to any up and coming competitive country, and thus this computation is not the most the previous commenter was implying it was.
When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me.
I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting discussions about what we thought we knew.
Now I’m in my 30s and my thought has changed drastically. I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.
> The study of complex systems regards collective, or system-wide, behaviors as the fundamental object of study; for this reason, complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradigm to reductionism, which attempts to explain systems in terms of their constituent parts and the individual interactions between them.
I think that statement about "complex systems" being an alternative paradigm to reductionism is a bit unfortunate (articles in Wikipedia have varying quality). I believe they refer to emergence, a concept which they include in "complex systems", because reductionism in its simplest form means that the whole is composed by the parts and emergence says that there are phenomena which emerge from the combination of individual parts and distinct to these. But these two concepts are not orthogonal, see:
The World3 model of the MIT study is just a set of 149 differential-algebraic equations [1]. The output of the model (population, industrial output, etc.) is mathematically a composition of simpler parts. They are saying that the earth is a very complex system but these four or five variables can be explained by these bunch of equations that represent basic processes. To me, that is reductionism.
> I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.
That sounds very much like what FA Hayek called “the presence of knowledge” and warned us of in his 1974 Nobel acceptance speech [1]. Maybe you are an Austrian after all. ;)
One thing that people underestimate with Malthusian thinking is that we live in a dynamic system. The amount of oil that is "out there" is connected to the oil price. Sometimes that supply effect of higher prices is limited (we are, potentially, seeing this with copper) but if you are projecting linear trends, you don't understand economics (and btw, this was the issue with the original Limits to Growth and almost all of these studies...for some reason, people who are attracted to this problem spend more time fooling around with their toy models rather than just talking to someone in mining or O&G).
That being said, it is equally true that very few people who study economics actually ask basic questions about how and why economic growth occurs. Economic growth is just energy consumption. That is it (whether humans burning food or oil or gas or whatever, the industrial revolution was about unlocking energy for production...note, this plays no role in Solow growth). And if you build a system which is unable to improve efficiency than that process is logically finite (but, as in paragraph one, no-one knows how finite...you can do all the computer simulations you want, no-one knows...a good example of this is shale oil, Russia has unfathomably large resources of shale oil...everyone knew it was there but it didn't matter until fracking, peak oil was a mania).
So I don't think anyone is really asking the right questions. It is really simple: do we want free energy? Do we want to improve the efficiency of our energy use? Even if climate change wasn't happening, we would need to look at solar/wind/whatever (and, hopefully, this will lead to a new industrial revolution). Imo, population control is also important. We can improve energy use but population will just grow to fill the space (and part of the problem is here actually poor quality elder care and weak pension systems caused by low savings rates). Obv, population control isn't popular anymore but...it makes sense once you understand economic growth.
Economic growth is not just energy consumption. We measure it in dollars, not watts, because energy is just an input. We have ways of optimizing to use less or do more valuable things with it.
Yes, there are ofc different byproducts (knowledge, health, leisure, fulfillment of needs, …) but, at the end of the chain, a dollar spent is ultimately converted into energy/resource consumption, no?
I've always seen it more as a measure of human attention. A dollar gives you acces to someone else's time.
Energy and resources are force multipliers for that human, so making more energy available increases what someone can do.
There is also an organisational aspect in there: A better organized group can do more with resources and reach more resources for the same amount of human time. A human's time is more valuable if the human has a more centralized location an an organisation.
I look at psychologists, hookers, priests as people who sell basically their attention for emotional needs. Not much energy or resources in those transactions, but very lucrative. At the other end of the spectrum is the sun, dumping tons of energy on us, mostly worthless until humans organize the power.
Not really. It used to be that economic growth is strongly coupled to energy and resource consumption, that meeting more needs was done through people getting more stuff. But this has decoupled now for some decades already (in the developed world - in the developing world there's still a hug lag of "stuff backlog") as consumption and its growth shifts towards various intangible goods and services where people get increasingly more desires met in better ways (i.e. economic growth) without an increase in electricity and metal and plastics required for that.
More people than before getting a car inherently requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources as car manufacturing needs to grow; but more people getting access to a Netflix series does not; if people use larger cars then it requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources, but iPhone 12 mini is much better than the original first iPhone and meets more needs while requiring about the same energy and resources.
Right, that is the confusion that I was trying to highlight (although the general point about greater efficiency is quite correct).
With a product like Netflix, is that the result of greater productivity? Did Netflix invent some kind of new food that meant humans who made the films or created the website could work twenty hour days for the same wage? The innovation was cutting out other parts of the distribution chain, not more efficient energy usage.
It isn't about more stuff either but more inputs. And there has been a significant increase in energy capture (I was talking about a far larger timescale, but this is over the 20th century) but there has been a larger increase in inputs (and a small increase in efficiency, although one that continues to compound), that is why climate change is occurring. Intangibles are neither here nor there because humans still expend calories (real solar energy) to produce those intangibles.
To say this another way, the value of an intangible product is (usually) closely related to the productivity of other parts of the economy. A film in Mauritanian street market is not worth as much a film on the Apple Store in the US. That elides the point that growth either comes from growth in inputs, or growth in efficiency of input usage (the increase in energy capture is, I think, efficiency...but it is usually not what people are thinking of when they think about efficiency).
You're right that energy ultimately dissipates as heat, but the important thing is what the energy achieves in between hitting the earth as sunlight and then heading off into space as infrared. If you put a solar panel in place to turn the light into electricity and then use that electricity to write a Python plugin for Flake8 https://github.com/tlocke/flake8-alphabetize then maybe you've contributed something to the economy :-)
> There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action.
Individually humans are hard to predict... but a flock of humans might not be so hard to predict :)
That said: it's easy to underestimate the power of economics. Once natural resources becomes expensive, we'll find ways to minimize, recycle and migrate to renewable resources.
When a ressource gets rares, prices go up. This drives big incentives to work on substitutes, recycling, higher efficiency, etc.
Ex: People were predicting Peak Oil is the end of our civilisation. Turns out there is plenty of oil deep in the seabed if you are willing to pay $100 per barrel. In turn, $100 barrel push hard on consumers to use more efficient vehicles.
Market prices are a powerful signal that causes everyone to adapt.
The Austrian view of economics (and of human philosophy), when I finally sat down and read through the material, made so much sense to me and deeply affected me. It clarified several things I had been feeling about the world that I couldn’t fully comprehend, and made me feel much less stressed and more content.
The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end of the world” views that are prevalent everywhere.
What part or version of the Austrian school? Mostly I hear of people who subscribe to anarcho-capitalism, which I think is a pretty terrifying view, and I've never understood how people get there.
It reminds me of a lot of theory papers you see in the likes of the Journal of Finance where they start by saying, "This is how x works (given this large list of constraints or ignoring this large list of variables)" which makes it completely unrealistic.
There are two general approaches that lead me there: the utilitarian and the ethical.
The utilitarian approach: I see lots of government interventions that, while allegedly well-meant, end up causing more harm than good. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff for a couple of examples of clearly economically counterproductive policies that governments nevertheless engage in again and again; lots more are less clear but just as bad. Some of these are due to special interests somehow convincing the government, or voters, that the policy is net beneficial or virtuous or something, when it actually enriches the special interests at the expense of others. Some terrible policies are just due to naivete or lack of caring—and those who suffer from the policies not being a sufficiently well-organized political force to stop it. Others have more complicated explanations.
The common thread I see is, these are policies imposed by force on nonconsenting people. (The "social contract" theory is a rationalization that doesn't pass basic scrutiny. When a person opposes a policy and votes against it, and then 60% of the other inhabitants vote in favor of it, you can't meaningfully claim that the person has "consented" to the policy; that's not how contracts work. It's even less tenable when the votes are for politicians, who make decisions years later on issues that didn't exist at the time the votes were cast.) When those policies cause suffering to some people, it doesn't matter—they can't do anything about it, so the policy remains. Well, occasionally the suffering group is better at politics than whoever created the policy, but often they're not.
A question is, if these policies are so good, why do they have to be imposed by force? After all, if, for example, a policy would benefit three people by $100 worth and harm someone else for $50 worth, one could arrange for the three to each give, say, $30 to the fourth person, and then it would be +$70 for each of the three and +$40 for the fourth—i.e. it's net positive to everyone, and then it could be done voluntarily. (It might not happen in practice due to transaction costs, or if someone else holds out for a better deal, but one would expect something like it to happen eventually.) Every net-positive policy could be implemented voluntarily. The only policies that absolutely require force are those that are net-negative. Sounds like an excellent heuristic for policies to forbid. Only allow policies that are voluntarily agreed to by everyone involved.
Transaction costs are not zero (although technology tends to reduce them), and there are some things where a force-based approach looks simpler and more workable. And there are certainly hard problems—how to fund public goods and what to do when someone doesn't want to pay, how to have a stable society with multiple competing private police forces. Various people have proposed solutions; I suspect that at least some of them could be made to work tolerably well, and I think experimentation plus further technological development will make some of them clearly better than state-based alternatives.
I wouldn't advocate tearing down every government in the world today to switch to anarcho-capitalism. I do think it's a goal they should all approach, and that many of the paths in that direction (i.e. reducing government interventions) are obviously net-positive. (There do exist some policy kludges to make other policies less harmful, and if you canceled the kludges but kept the original harmful policies, you could be net-negative; you do have to be somewhat intelligent about it.) Some problems might not have anarcho-capitalist solutions that could be implemented today; some might never have them, I can't rule out the possibility. But I suspect it can be done; and anyway, if we only manage to cancel 95% of harmful government interventions and conclude we can't remove the last 5%, that'll still be a great achievement.
The ethical approach is this: The non-aggression principle. Physical force is immoral unless it is used to defend against or punish the aggressive use of force. You do need a concept of property and a notion of what counts as "force", but that's basically it; I think an ethical system has to be a Schelling point, which everyone might agree to without needing to communicate let alone negotiate, and I haven't encountered anything else nearly as good as this one. Anyway, it follows that all government interventions either involve aggressive force, and are thus immoral, or else they could be implemented by private parties.
Now, ethics aren't necessarily to be obeyed absolutely. Pretty much any ethical system will tell you that murder is wrong. But you can imagine scenarios where, say, someone with godlike foresight perceiving what Hitler was going to turn into when Hitler was still a child, and deciding to kill him first. (Somewhat more realistic are trolley problems and organ donor problems. Also genuinely realistic is a whistleblower engaging in stealing, lying, and possibly worse behaviors to exfiltrate the data. If the data is important enough, how far do you go?) My take is, the law must forbid such things—the law must be ethical—but individuals might rationally decide to step outside the law in extreme circumstances. When they do, they should bear in mind that (a) they now have no right to complain when good people use force to stop or punish them, and (b) ethical violations generally have bad second-order effects ("So, does that mean the guy with five healthy organs should expect the doctor to try to murder him, and therefore he should incapacitate the doctor first and skip town?"); but it's not impossible to conclude that breaking the law is still the best approach.
So, it's possible that a grossly unethical legal system—one which routinely violates the non-aggression principle—is the best choice in a tough situation. (Earth is a tough situation.) But there'd better be a damn good reason for each violation—which I expect there usually isn't. The violations should be scrutinized, and unjustified ones should be eliminated, as quickly as possible. We probably won't eliminate everything—any more than we can bring the murder rate to zero (and the most salient proposed societies with zero crime are dystopias)—but, again, every step in that direction is a good one, so let's go as far as possible.
The term "Austrian School" reads innocuous yet it really is about the fundamentals of neo-capitalism driven by greed.
I do not feel easy about your comment. Sure the Austrian School describes a comprehensive model which might give you feelings of being able to describe the world, yet it might be a model towards self-destruction?
The term doesn't make much sense, it was likely coined by people who do not understand our economic system. Capitalism never went away, it's the dominant system we live in now and have for centuries. There isn't anything "neo" about today's capitalists.
As for some of the promoters of Austrian school teachings I agree with you they aren't the most charitable types, however the theory itself just looks at the economic system the way it works - there's actually less social judgement in Austrian school thought than other economic schools. Which is why it's less popular. A rational and neutral approach when it comes to macroeconomics does not have mass appeal.
No idea what your comment means. The Austrians begin by looking at the individual. Only individuals can ascribe value to things. Nature does not know that an apple or a house has value - only people do. Individuals thus are the drivers of the economy. Furthermore trying to model the economy and predict the future is a fool's errand - the amount of variables are too complex, and macroeconomics as a discipline is no better than guessing.
Individuals are motivated primarily by self-interest. Within a family people are strongly charitable, within a neighborhood (tribe) somewhat helpful, and beyond that altruism cannot be relied on to power the system forwards. Any system that relies on people to be altruistic to strangers is doomed to failure. Instead, you should create systems where people, by acting in their own self interest, help the larger society.
Capitalism is emergent phenomena - where you ban markets, they spring up organically. This occurs even in the most socialist / communist systems such as Cuba and North Korea. Markets allow people to agree voluntarily to prices based on their own subjective opinions of value.
Within any society that isn't forcing everyone to be perfectly equal by threat of death, differences in wealth naturally emerge. Over time they become pronounced. It is impossible to end inequality without coercion - some people naturally value their leisure time over being productive, and it is unfair to coerce someone to artificially reduce their productivity. There is no such thing as economic equality in any meaningful sense, only equality under the law.
It would also help to read Marx's Das Kapital at the same time, that way you can plough through two equally discredited economic theories and get them out of the way before you move on to actually reading something worthwhile.
Someone once said: If you are a teen and you aren't a lefty, you have no heart. And if you are in your 30'S and you are still a lefty, you have no brain.
Many travel along those lines.
And in analogy to this, I am very optimistic about the future, because the resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite.
There is no peak oil.
There is no peak food.
There is no peak climate.
There is no water.
It's all bullshit doomer porn.
If you're in your 30s and are still thinking in political binaries of "right" and "left" or believe in infinite growth theory you are indeed doing something rather silly
Human ingenuity might be infinite, but we also do really bad shit all the time that causes horrible suffering and death.
We had a world war less than a century ago that killed around 80 million people. Did it end the world? No, but it ended the world for 80 million people.
So yes, you might be right that the world won't end from any of these scenarios.... but a lot of people might die horrible deaths, and I don't want me or my loved ones to be among them.
The world doesn't have to end for climate change to be bad. It could simply immerse hundreds of millions in absolute misery, for reasons they had no control over. For example, by causing large-scale sea-level rises in Bangladesh or widespread drought in the Indian subcontinent.
The follow-on effects of the resulting refugee crisis are hard to predict, but likely won't be pretty.
> resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite
Human ingenuity is impressive, but not infinite. I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's a long read, but every single society he examines thought they were doing great but ended up eating each other (literally) within a couple of generations once some vital resource dried up. Human ingenuity failed all of them.
I'll give you peak oil: our ingenuity is already finding viable alternative energy solutions. But climate change is going to destabilise so much more - food, water, land, security - that I'm pessimistic that our civilisation will last more than a few generations.
So far we've only discovered more positive feedback (e.g. methane from melting Siberia), when we desperately need strong negative feedback. A bit like Covid, where everyone assumed the ingenious new vaccines would get us back to normal in a couple of months, but mutations, politics and social dynamics mean we're still very much on the back foot.
But hey, I'm 60 and still a lefty so obviously no brain and just a bullshit doomer :) But do grab a copy of Collapse, there are a lot of "whoa!" insights and it's a fascinating read.
I never accepted the premise of that book as being universally true.
Societies have collapsed for reasons other then resource scarcity. In fact I'd say more often they collapse for reasons other then resource scarcity.
I don't think the Mayans ran out of anything. Neither do I believe the Romans ran out of anything.
My guess? The professional political/priestly/mid-level manager class gaining self serving control and cannibalizing productive (and competitive) capacity is a very common cause of collapse.
We see it on a smaller scale in companies real time.
> I don't think the Mayans ran out of anything. Neither do I believe the Romans ran out of anything.
Is this true? I thought it was drought and deforestation and over-farming that sped up the Mayan decline and that soil erosion and exhaustion and agricultural decline aided in the fall of Rome.
One suggestion I heard was that the Mayans were a bunch of imperialist tax collectors and their "empire" simply started refusing to pay tax when the military advantages were no longer so important.
You could probably say the same about Rome. Once everyone in the empire could out-Legionary the Romans (the provinces were the main source of military might anyway at this point), sending tribute suddenly became a bit of a waste of time. Any disruption can trigger a chain of revolts. A revolt could be armed, or a soft revolt where the locals start acting like feudal lords and claim it's necessary to keep the peace.
Rome got much (most?) of their grain from Egypt (which renews fertility due to annual flooding) and the cause of the Mayan collapse is unknown but I highly doubt it was primarily scarcity driven.
Societies collapse from social factors, not just resource scarcity and social factors are in my opinion a more common cause. War, internal conflict, and political instability.
And my favorite theory, the rise of parasitic and short sighted bureaucracies which snuff out the creative and competitive impulse of a culture.
That link appears to disagree with you regarding the Mayans and even points out that ecological issues can fuel and exacerbate social, political, and cultural problems. Of course these things are multifaceted but it seems obvious that a multidimensional domino effect can occur when kick started by ecological issues. Look at what happened with COVID. Gun and ammunition purchases were off the charts, increases of homicidal crime, civil unrest, unemployment, etc. Such a "simple" thing as a virus destabilized society in multiple ways. Just imagine if it was food and resource scarcity.
> Societies have collapsed for reasons other than resource scarcity. In fact I'd say more often they collapse for reasons other than resource scarcity.
This is a bit moot, considering that resource scarcity is a very, very good reason for societal collapse, as well as potential a root cause of other reasons you cite for societal collapse, and resource scarcity is exactly what we are beginning to experience.
Check out Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. He looks at a large number of historical complex societies that collapsed and suggests that they collapsed when the cost of the complexity exceeded its utility. A very appealing concept. His arguments about why our society is not at risk were not convincing.
I think that big diverse countries like the USA will be able to cope better than small countries. So places like Fiji are probably more exposed than many imagine.
Multiple countries have already began to buy foreign land because they know their entire country will wither because it will be underwater.
Perhaps you should... fuck, I don't even know. All of this information is completely free and accessible and nobody gives a single fuck because they think they're smarter.
as people have children they become less interested in political theory (and theater) and more self-interested. These days voting preferences are almost entirely along generational lines in many countries.
> In many ways, this scenario is even gloomier than BAU, and many say that it predicts the dire outcome of allowing climate change to go unchecked.
But if they are using the same World3 model, created in 1972, with a single variable representing "pollution", then surely it's just a coincidence if the effects of climate change end up modelled correctly.
The climate is a non-linear system, and there certainly weren't good models for its influence on / from the economy back in 1972. If the model (even just the updated one) has managed to include some universal physical law that can predict the aggregate of the interactions between the global climate and economy, then that deserves much more attention than the clickbait "societal collapse" prediction.
I thought that "pollution" chart showing it dropping off sharply in all scenarios (due either to clean technology or societal collapse) were unlikely. If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should) then it's very hard to get it back out of the air, especially in a short timeframe. So in all cases the pollution line ends up in a steady state at roughly wherever society either weaned itself from fossil fuels or collapsed.
"If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should)"
There is a caveat. They only consider CO2 from specific sources to be pollution, so we can't just blanket call it pollution. For example, the CO2 I exhale would not be considered pollution, but if it's coming from fossil fuels or even burning trees, then it is. I'm not sure how they handle the natural burning of tree, like wildfires though.
I am absolutely not a climate scientist but my understanding is c02 from the likes of us isn't a problem as we are naturally part of a cyclical process. Same goes for forest fires which is burning trees that had been absorbing carbon.
However we are releasing an excess amount that had been trapped and removed from that cyclical process, adding more energy into the system than its natural equilibrium usually takes.
"Same goes for forest fires which is burning trees that had been absorbing carbon."
This actually isn't true. They say they burning of trees requires such a long cycle time that the release of CO2 does contribute to global warming.
My main point was that this distinction isn't something that people commonly think about. Usually think mercury, sulfur, etc, which are not things we naturally emit.
Rather than burn coal to smelt steel beams, we could start opting for more timber frame construction and growing more trees, capturing carbon out of the air and turning it into housing.
A very rough ballpark estimate is that you'd need to use at least as much timber as we've mined coal. Probably a lot more since coal has a higher carbon content than timber and we've also burned plenty of oil and gas. That's a mind boggling amount of timber.
Even a sin(x) function can be approximated as a line for small values of x. Potentially the predictions will start to diverge as feedback loops come into effect?
Wow, actually slightly shocked how seriously this model seems to be taken or, at least, how sticky it is.
Coefficients, dynamics, number of entities involved, stationarity. There are so many unknowns and so many reasons to believe incomplete understanding could scupper predictions...
I know everyone likes to believe themselves to be a good Fermi estimator. But trying to model the world beyond 2050 when the weather a month from now is a hard problem. Well, let's say it's Quixotic at best.
Which makes me think the model isn't actually under discussion here, it's just all our priors about how much we fancy technology as a solution or not etc.
> One reason for this is that in Herrington’s words, “the scenarios do not significantly diverge until 2020.” After that point, the scenarios start to diverge drastically ...
This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020 or later.
I.e., the fact that these models start to diverge around "now" doesn't mean we're nearing some ominous inflection point - it's just a consequence of "hindsight is 20/20."
Having dabbled with chaotic heavily dynamic systems in college I actually disagree. It may be that our system was in a relatively stable highly linear regime and we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region that we can't escape even if we cut emissions entirely.
Chaotic systems do some scary unpredictable things, I wish I shared your confidence.
Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.
Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether.
Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?
I think you are right. I guess it depends on specificity of predictions. In one white paper I called some of the current trends of 2021 ( granted, I personally believed they were relatively apparent, but I did have some arguments over my assumptions ).
This is just the Mayan calendar phenomena. Just because something is old and accurate up until today doesn't meant that it actually predicts the end of the world.
There is just one inscription predicting that a particular god would do something (that's not clearly understood) at that time. Charles Mann suggested that it could be just as plausible to interpret the "investiture" when this god comes to Earth as a kind of party or celebration, and not a cataclysm.
Luckily there are many models that show divergence from the norm many years ago and continue to show stable and accurate predictions. Like the IPCC reports, and well, most climate CO2 models.
Now it's less about determining if divergence is occuring and more about the slope of the divergence.
Will we have societal collapse at 2 degrees or 3 degrees warming seems speculative but the general consensus is that it'll be in range of bad to terrible to apocalypse.
All eyes on those slope lines!
And yeh, phone your representatives and demand faster and more consequntial action!!
Yeah I watched a cspan question and answer session and one dinosaur-aged Republican representative from West Palm Beach Florida sounded so backwards. He was saying that we shouldn’t transition to green energy because of all the coal miner jobs that will be displaced by green energy jobs. It seemed like he was just being difficult or corrupt because Florida doesn’t even have any coal mines or coal mining jobs! Also, it’s not like people can’t go get new income sources or start new businesses.. I think the issue is that many of these retirement-age folks don’t care because they aren’t expecting repercussions or negative externalities in their remaining short lifespan.
The situation around global warming would be a lot different if the environmentalist Al Gore hadn’t lost to conservative George Bush. The election hinged on a narrow Florida Supreme Court decision of 5-4 over the votes and controversial butterfly ballots. Based on that decision, Bush won the USA presidential election by only 537 votes. The 3rd party spoiler effect from the Green Party was also to blame since Florida isn’t yet advanced enough to have ranked-choice voting.
And there's a very good chance the entire world look different if Gore won. There may have not been a 9/11, for one. There would have certainly not been an Iraq war.
We’ll never know for sure, but this seems like revisionist history and motivated reasoning. Gore and his advisors supported regime change in Iraq when he was in office and intelligence failures didn’t suddenly start in early 2001, nor were they restricted to the United States.[0]
It’s possible that the tone around climate change would have been different under a Gore administration, but the entire composition of Congress would also have looked different after the mid-terms in response to a Democratic president making sweeping changes to the economy (as it was republicans already controlled the Senate for half of Bush’s time in office, and the house for three quarters). The fiscal conservatism of 90s republicans may have stayed intact instead of accepting large deficits as they did under Bush.
The feature and bug of the US system of democracy is that radical change is hard to do and disagreements can’t be steamrolled over. Sometimes the right person can have an enormous effect on the course of history (Washington, Lincoln, FDR), but it’s unlikely Gore was one of those people.
It was not intelligence failures that got us into Iraq. The politicians lied us into the war on purpose and hid, obstructed, and made up the intelligence as they saw fit. One of the biggest crimes in American history should be remembered correctly.
It was exactly what is stated in the article: shortage of energy. US consumes several times more energy per capita than even Europe. At the same time industrial output of US is small and diminishing with every year.
US needs more oil. Hence all the wars. Iraq - oil. Libya - oil. Syria - oil (US occupied all oil deposits in Syria where and extracts it without giving anything back to the people of Syria).
Afghanistan - I'm not sure, but considering that during US occupation, production of heroine in Afghanistan went up orders of magnitude, and many visitors to Afghanistan reported that US guarded poppy fields, probably it was due to drugs. Kill two birds with one stone: get rich from selling drugs, finance other wars and coups with drug money, and flood geopolitical enemies that happen to be located next to Afghanistan borders with the most powerful drug.
The next target will be also rich in oil, although it would be definitely said that it's only because of lack of democracy in the said country.
In two decades of reading about it I've seen this oil theory many times but I haven't seen anything that convinces me that it was the real motivation. The closest strategic explanation was the neocons' PNAC letters which were basically just bravado about America throwing its weight around to maintain their global dominance. Reprehensible stuff.
If it wasn't the real explanation then nothing America does makes any sense. There have been a notable lack of invasions of African, Asian, European or South American countries. The Middle Easterners aren't that different from everywhere else - except they have lots of oil.
Military industrial complex?
“Alleged” weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Islamic extremists?
Politicians wanting to appear tough on crime?
Avoiding another 1970s energy crisis?
Islamic suicide bombers / terrorists?
The next victim of US military incursion will be oil rich country. There's no reason for incursion if it is not going to be profitable for the US.
If there's "no democracy" in some country but also no valuable natural resources, it's not worth spending expensive missiles and bombs. E.g. dictatorship in Cambodia would be always safe as there're little gains in occupying Cambodia.
Same for Haiti. It doesn't mean that US won't intervene with cheaper methods like assassinations and/or propaganda.
US literally prints money, it's very easy for them to set up media outlets publishing propaganda non-stop 24/7 in almost every country on Earth.
FAANG monopolies are also a big part of this picture. They all censor all anti-american views and push propaganda. E.g., if you're from Russia, and you register on YouTube, you'll see Navalny channel in recommendations for months, even if you explicitly block his channel and channels of his associates. Facebook regularly blocks pro-Russian persons, groups and posts (including published in Russian in Russia). Many Netflix series (and Hollywood movies) continue to picture US as the exceptional country with exceptional people ("chosen by God") while all the rest are third-world worthless thrash (see Narcos, for example). Also, almost all the villains in Hollywood movies are Russian (Tenet is the recent example).
It takes a while to plan and execute something like 9/11. This is not one guy with an IED in Kabul. The pilots got their licences for that specific purpose. That alone takes months.
Bush became president in January 2001. You think Al Qaeda was like "oh no, Gore lost? Let's proceed with that airplane plan" right there and then? Like they even remotely care if it's a dem or Rep.
But US intelligences services might have caught it, by sheet chance if history was to replay with slightly different variables. Just saying, they got lucky.
Consequences of 9/11 certainly could have looked different, if the US was less focus on oil and less concerned about confronting the Saudis.
For sure. Obama played kindly with Putin, no worries about Ukraine invasion in Europe. He prevented a global conflict for sure, thanks to his kindness and openness /s
And not just the hanging chads, right? I don't think it's controversial, in hindsight, to say that Jeb Bush conspired with GW to steal the election. [1]
I’m not so sure. A lot of people don’t remember this, but GW Bush ran to the left of Al Gore on climate policy in 2000. Bush proposed using the clean air act to reduce the CO2 output of power plants to voters in September 2000 [1].
Christine Todd Whitman was nominated as administrator of the EPA to enact the policy. Lobbying by the fossil fuel industry changed the direction of this policy and because of push back, Bush took the opposite direction of the policy he campaigned on.
If Gore won there would be no global warming movie and the movement might not have taken off. Gore would have been to entangled in 911 make global warming a priority.
The green party not winning is the shame. Never blame a third party for a majority party not winning. If they caused Gore to lose hopefully he tries harder to win over 537 people next cycle.
Then you are participating in a self fulfilling prophecy. The oil and gas lobby won't stop calling. Nor will the car industry lobby and all the other industry groups. So if you don't call (or vote, for that matter) the cause is lost and what you think about politics. But you contributed to it by inaction, so don't blame others.
I am a huge fan of Nassim Taleb and his book Fooled By Randomness really impacted the way I look at a lot of doom and gloom scenarios. His notion of fat tailed events/tail risks along with survivors confirmation bias is a central theme of many of the risks he describes.
So as an example, if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at. Yet here we are. The largest hidden risk is often what is right in front of our eyes that we don’t acknowledge as a risk.
For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb.
>For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb.
At least people are retrofitting buildings in CA to prepare for the San Andreas.
On top of this, there are usually two Cascade Range eruptions a century. We've had 0 so far in the 21st. Could Rainier go?
A new virus isn't any less likely to occur tomorrow just because covid emerged. Expect another in your great-grandchild's lifetime, or sooner.
20% of USA children are obese and +75% of USA adults are overweight/obese. Expect heart disease complications (and death from diseases that take advantage of it as a comorbidity) to be more common. Yet people refuse to acknowledge what they're doing to themselves.
Expect plastic to be a collective hangover for our species in the near future.
Nothing lasts forever, and the past 100 years is just a single lifetime for some tortoises. We swirl and float in a chaotic world with the collective memory of a goldfish, and our conversations revolve around fears of interpersonal violence.
I wish we could be frank and seek an honest understanding of ourselves, our world, and its risks, but I've made my peace (I'm only a human as well). May we live in boring times, and roll with the changes!
thanks for the article, it was a great read. I wonder what new research on the cascadia subduction zone had happened since 2015 when it was published - and what changes in the forecasts might have to be made post-COVID-19, given new data on disaster preparedness.
> if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at.
Firstly, why would someone laugh? Pandemics with a 100k death toll are a fairly regular occurrence, even in modern society. OTOH if you said 1M + most of the world under some form of home quarantine, lockdown or travel restrictions for well over a year, that would have been laughed at.
Second, it's hard to attribute deaths to climate change directly. Natural disasters kill people every year. Who can say with absolute certainty that the death toll in this or that incident would have been lower if not for climate change?
Third, on a longer timescale climate change absolutely has the potential to kill more people than Covid.
Well, we see people and even political groups laughing at the idea of a virus outbreak that kills 100k even today, isn't it?
Now picture it without the benefit of hindsight.
Why did western society failed so hard at containing the virus when countries like South Korea were already leading by example at the start of Q1 2020.
A few people, sure, but for the most part what I've seen people attacking is the idea that the Covid pandemic is some kind of unique crisis that demands an aggressive response.
Also, South Korea has very much not contained Covid. They've relied on fairly strict social distancing measures to stop cases outright going exponential, but those cases are still there and all indications are that an increasing proportion of infections have been going undetected since the start of the pandemic. (There's no way of knowing the exact number because they don't seem to have any program to measure the actual infection rate, unlike some other countries, and their level of testing is frankly pretty poor compared to the western world these days.) Those measures are also no longer sufficient, with cases reaching new record highs most days for the last week or so.
It means if one was asked to bet on an event between 100k death from a virus outbreak and 100k death from climate change, one would place their bet largely on climate change. Even though we have been warned the hidden systemic risk of pandemic preparedness l.
Virus / bacteria outbreaks have been common throughout history. They come quickly and often enough. About 3 or 4 come every 100 years. So you can expect one every 30 years.
Our last 4:
"Spanish Flu" in 1918-1919
"Asian Flu" in 1957-1958
"Hong Kong Flu" in 1968-1969
"Swine Flu" (H1N1) in 2009-2010
History teaches us to bet on viruses happening at anytime. Climate change deaths will be much slowier
Source? A quick google search would suggest that around 70% of Americans agree that climate change is real. That's way too low, but still a solid majority.
According to an UN poll, 65% of Americans and 64% of the world think that climate change is a global emergency [1]. In every questioned country, a majority said it's a global emergency.
Did these UN polls consider that people holding these views might not answer to UN polls? I encourage you to try looking for how these questions were answered in polls done by local researchers. At least in Europe, the ratios are the other way around all around the eastern half. In my own country, less than 30% believe climate change is a risk, and even less believe it's caused and/or resolvable by humans - I'm surprised the UN polls say otherwise as not even the EU dares to claim these amounts of approval. Perhaps the UN asked for "any climate change whatsoever" as opposed to "human-driven climate change" - a significant difference...
> But those of us who knew the DYNAMO language in which the simulation was written and those who took the model apart line-by-line quickly realized that we had to deal with an exercise in misinformation and obfustication rather than with a model delivering valuable insights. I was particularly astonished by the variables labelled Nonrenewable Resources and Pollution. Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.[7]:168
Yes, world3 is meant as a simulation exercise that is sometimes taken too seriously. But even its critics consider that the conclusions of the model are valid. Here is the continuation of your quote:
> He does however consider continuous growth in world GDP a problem:
Only the widespread scientific illiteracy and innumeracy—all you need to know in this case is how to execute the equation y=x*e^{rt} prevents most of the people from dismissing the idea of sustainable growth at healthy rates as an oxymoronic stupidity whose pursuit is, unfortunately, infinitely more tragic than comic. After all, even cancerous cells stop growing once they have destroyed the invaded tissues.[7]:338–339
No, lots of critics of the model (like me) consider the conclusions of the model to be invalid. It's inherent in the nature of validity actually - a fraudulent model like World3 cannot be said to be "valid" even if a few of its vague prognostications end up in the right general area. Any definition of validity that allowed such a thing would also have to apply to fortune tellers, who often say things that seem directionally accurate but whose methods are of course not "valid".
Models like this are as much about understanding the dynamics as making specific predictions.
A key dynamic that impressed me from LtG is that as pollution accumulates, you spend more and more of your resources dealing with the damage, and less making the sort of investments you used to make. But things can still carry on just fine, until suddenly the bottom drops out.
Since we're already dealing with significant damage from greenhouse gases, I find that a little disturbing.
Doom scrolled about halfway down. I'm a bit flabbergasted by all the esoteric commentary when we have a real life example of this happening right now in South Africa.
Most people who've heard about what's happening in South Africa probably know that they've had major problems for pretty much their entire existence as a country which lead to this. (There's been an unfortunate tendency for the western left to pretend those problems don't exist for stupid political reasons, but that's not unusual.)
There are countless examples all around the world as we speak, but some people, mostly "occidentals", are stuck in bubbles full of assumptions and theories. Maybe it's denial, as mentioned.
Everyone: We were wrong about peak oil! Models aren't always right!
Me: Couldn't our models be wrong in the wrong direction?
Is the burden of proof to do nothing until it's scientifically definitive for societal collapse? Or is the burden to intervene until it's definitive that there is no risk of societal collapse (even if our models underestimate).
My suspicion is that skepticism has morphed into denialism in general. We’re seemingly at a point where any assertion will get attacked so many times that eventually even chimps on keyboards would come up with a reasonably credible (seeming) critique despite having no deep knowledge of the original point or underlying system.
The first thing I wondered about these comments is how often "Peak Oil" would be mentioned. There has been no peak oil related crash. I think the world's economy and markets are now resilient enough to safely say 'peak oil' will never be a cause for the collapse of civilization. Rising energy prices will just usher out the age of fossil fuels faster.
I now wonder what happens when (if?) we get to 'net 0' (which hasn't been mentioned in these comments). If we can reach a point of unlimited, renewable, clean energy that's (almost) too cheap to meter, that just upends any model because it'll zero out factors that are parts of or 'limits' in those models.
- Lack of fresh water: solved by free/clean energy (desalinization)
- Lack of adequate food supply: solved by free/clean energy (fertilizer production)
- Lack of resources: potentially solved by free/clean energy (asteroid farming? recycling?)
It's hard to imagine a problem that unlimited, clean energy won't help solve.
The cost to build and maintain powerplants is expensive - whether it's solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear. This cost needs to be amortized over the life of the plant. It's hard to imagine this getting to less than $0.05 / kWh.
Construction costs alone make Nuclear Energy cost ~$0.08 / kWh even in China where construction is relatively cheap. Even if we get Fusion energy, AFAIK it's unlikely the construction will be substantially cheaper.
Obviously if anything was free - people would abuse it. You would need to build endless powerplants (which cost money) to provide free energy for people to launch rockets and mine asteroids and produce fertilizer and desalinate water...
Each of these predict food production will decline starting soon, although the optimistic ones forecast a recovery in production. Any idea why the imminent decline in food production in all cases?
It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever.
[edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by “pollution” but seems to be positively affected by industrial output. The dip in food production is mostly dependent on the shape of the pollution curve.
I think it was heavily dependent on the administration.
To my knowledge, recent past administration quite literally made a step by step "playbook on how to manage a pandemic" and the current administration quite literally completely ignored it, or something close to this.
The unit was disbanded. Agree or disagree why it was disbanded, nothing was created to replace it. This is one of many examples of how things were/are worse than they needed to be.
I have a hard time coming up with examples of countries that handled the pandemic very well, so I would think that it's less dependent on the administration than it might appear.
I think like, Vietnam and South Korea did exceptionally well?
Think Vietnam eventually started getting hit though because of other countries lack of handling things, tourism, and the general fact that they're not by any means a rich country. So, they did surprisingly well given what they had, but eventually got dragged down by the rest of the bullshitters.
This is all off the top of my head in remembering things though, may be incorrect.
To the best of my knowledge Belorussia did absolutely nothing and didn't have a massive death wave.
And before you tell me it's a dictatorship so they have hidden the true numbers, I'm pretty sure if it had been the case it would have been at the forefront of the protests last year.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I do think COVID fear has been massively overblown.
Running an authoritarian regime in a former Soviet satellite is a decent way to ensure you don't get too many international travelers. That would be my guess for why they might have dodged the brunt of the pandemic.
Massive drought and flooding on scales that overwhelm any level of prior preparedness can mess up your food supplies pretty quick I reckon. We are starting to see these become more common with recent shifts in weather patterns.
I have heard soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough. There’s also the possibility of drought and loss of pollinators.
> soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough
It's eye-opening to realize that soil can make its own nutrients and fertilizer (unlike the common view of soil as an inert "sponge" which needs all the fertilizer added to it). Bacteria breaks down rock into minerals (including the all-important potassium and phosphorus) and also fix nitrogen. The problem is that applying synthetic fertilizers kills off this soil biology, making the farmer dependent on.... more synthetic fertilizers. It's a nice racket, until it kills the planet.
It's a huge biotech opportunity. Manufacture fertilizer biologically in-situ, vs blowing up some land, dissolving it in acid (along with tasty cadmium impurities[1]), and shipping it around the globe.
The soil itself is depleted. This leads to a positive feedback cycle, and a hockey stick growth in the amount of industrial agriculture inputs required to keep a constant yield, right up to the point the farmer goes broke.
Then someone like Gabe Brown comes along, and uses regenerative farming, capturing about a ton of carbon/year as he builds new soil, and frees up the nutrients in the ground to be available to crops. It's a positive feedback cycle that makes the farm profitable again.
It's by no means a simple system, but it is profitable, so there is long term hope.
Yeah... I think it's pretty hard to believe a model from the 70's could predict the change on any of those with any accuracy, even less that it can predict the timing. I don't think we could do it now.
I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think.
Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built.
I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject.
It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.
I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene.
It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. As the pandemic showed, social norms are flexible when they are required to be.
EDIT: I’ll listen to this presentation, maybe, but the first minute is already looking pretty bad. It’s a guy on stage telling a ghost story. He even opens up with “you’re young, so the tendency is to say ‘doesn’t scare me! Doesn’t scare me!’”
A former partner of mine is an artist, and has a different perspective on the world than most engineers, combined with an amount of melancholic clarity.
She pointed out that the central idea of Armageddon, Judgement Day or the end of everything is largely common to most societies. If you look at the core of the philosophical concept and strip away any religious parts, it doesn't normally imply the end of all humans. But for you as an individual, the distinction is moot if your village is burned down and everyone killed or sold into slavery.
I think this concept represents a fundamental fear which most humans go to great length to reduce the risk of. Lots of potential doomsday scenarios can be viewed with this lens. It doesn't mean that the risk being discussed is non-existent, but mitigating measures will most likely reduce the risk and impact dramatically.
The fear of the fall can cause the search for the solution to prevent the fall.
The fundamental logic of peak oil is sound, even though a bell curve is not appropriate when considering the global economic consequences: at some point any finite resource must run out, exponential growth always means the last half of a finite quantity is consumed in one doubling period. It’s not a law of nature that alternative tech will appear just at the right time, and in one sense we got lucky with alternative oils and renewables. To the extent that one can talk of “making our own luck”, I expect at least some of the people who developed all those solutions did so out of a fear of peak oil.
I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap.
However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy.
Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008.
It seems to me that we are stuck in an “oil price strait jacket”. Demand keeps rising until the price shoots up and then goes down hard but making a lot more oil isn’t feasible either. We could be in a long slow energy stagnation. This is evident in the amount oil imported into Europe for eg.
Shale oil has probably saved us from an outright disaster.
Your answer makes no sense. There is no peak wheat, it's not a non-renewable resource.
The difference between peak oil and shale oil is the EROI which is very bad (between 1 and 2) compared to conventional (20 to 50). This would make it absolutely useless as an energy source, except we also get free Nat. gas out of it.
Once the EROI on all our fossil energy sources gets below 1 we won't be able to use any, despite some of it still being in the ground.
A better analogy than peak wheat would be: this is like peak fish except we now have better bottom trawling fishing nets, and electric pulse fishing to be able to get the last remaining fish out there.
Except it makes total sense. There is a clear transition happening to non oil energy sources. Oil is a fungible good with alternate energies for many applications. It makes no sense to talk about peak oil if oil demand will soon greatly lessen.
As technology increases with oil extraction and alternate energy sources come into play, the peak oil scenario will likely not be realized.
> There is a clear transition happening to non oil energy sources.
No transition. Energy usage is stacking up. Globally, renewable energy sources are built in addition to fossil energy sources. See source below - compare relative vs. absolute :
Peak oil doesn't care that the relative share of oil as an energy source is decreasing (which is true) . It's the global number of oil barrels extracted out of the ground that matters.
Shale is not economically viable, regular oil is profitable at 10 dollars a barrel, shale needs 60 dollars or more. That is an extreme difference that we are not feeling because of massive amounts of credit pumped into the shale boom. Once the fake money dries up and the market prices that shale oil at its correct value you are in for a world of pain. Imagine the gas a the pump station going x6 and that affecting the rest of the economy. That is a world based on shale instead of conventional oil.
Shale is profitable because oil prices per barrel hit over 100$ in the 2000s. It's our answer to the OPEC oil cartel, and the reason they dumped all their oil for pennies on the dollar at the start of Covid - "This time we'll REALLY drive shale out of business and we can raise prices again in 5 years!!!"
Today from a cursory google, oil prices per barrel are over 70$.
Fortunately for our society we subsidized it to survive this brief period.
But we won't have 50 more years of complacent oil usage without alternatives. Oil at 75 dollars a barrel is expensive enough that renewables are profitable, so by the time supply becomes a problem and prices rise even more, renewables will be available in quantity to cover for it. Before, probably.
There are multiple, independent studies that have concluded that global human society has gone into overshoot. So much so that it is an unwritten consensus on that. There's even this site[1] that calculates the day of the year when humanity has consumed that year's entire resources and is dipping into annual overshoot.
Maybe,but i think that can go both ways - bad things really do happen, often due to causes that are easily predictable with hind sight. I feel like assuming that the world cant end is just as unrealistic as always assuming the world will definitely end due to issue of the day (i mean "end" in a metaphorical way)
> But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile.
Take the US, for instance. The constitution has been in force since 1789. That's 222 years. You don't get to 222 years by not being stable. If the Civil War and the 1960s didn't destroy the US, it's pretty stable.
And yet... we have historical examples of civilizations collapsing. When it happens, it often happens fast (or at least slowly, and then fast). It seems unwise to say that it can't happen to us.
And, sure, social norms can be flexible. Not all problems can be fixed by changing social norms, though. Like, say, drought causing food shortages. Flexible social norms aren't going to solve that; they're just going to lead to looting becoming acceptable.
Oh, to be clear, I think it will happen. I just don’t think it’s going to be something so predictable. Almost by definition, a civilization collapses due to a surprise — some belief was wrong.
And there’s value in questioning our (often unexamined) beliefs. But taking it too seriously, thinking that you’ve got it figured out and that others are fools for not listening to you — well… Maybe you would have predicted the meteor to the dinosaurs, and maybe they would’ve been fools for not listening, but there was also very little any of them could have done to change the outcome.
Pick your favorite civilization collapse story. What would you have done, at that time, to change it?
One could argue “at least I would’ve seen it coming.” That’s true; be informed. But I object to the idea that everyone is generally foolish for not taking these concerns seriously. The concerns are mistaken far more than they’re correct.
Rome didn’t really collapse but rather wither away slowly over hundreds of years. Even still the most useful parts lived on five without the empire aspect which didn’t matter for most people.
In the end I think we overestimate the effects collapse. Look at much of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. Unbelievable levels of suffering and many millions needlessly died over those 200 years. But for most life just went on.
A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly.
It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this.
As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't a problem.
It’s probably better for the thread to avoid any specific modern political collapse theory. For example, I think it’s nutty to say that the attempted coup in the US had any chance of collapsing civilization. But I can’t really say that without sounding insulting, so my “flamewar territory” alarms are starting to go off. And that makes me a sad panda HN user.
Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
> It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
Now your argument is fundamentally different, and more reasonable.
> Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
There has been doomsday climate hysteria, but usually not in the scientific community, and in my experience it is most often found in derisive and mocking tabloid headlines, somewhat similar to your original argument.
Yet here we are. Our current trials and tribulations are nothing compared to the Black Plague, the Hundred Years‘ War, WW2, even the stress of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?
Sure, of course. But suppose you're standing on the precipice of WW2 or the Black Plague and you can clearly see them coming, even if there's some uncertainty about when, and what exactly will happen. Wouldn't you try to prevent them?
Historically, people always have, and sometimes they've succeeded. The Cuban Missile Crisis is maybe a good example of this. During that era, there was a widespread feeling that we were dangerously close to nuclear war. Surely that sense of danger was a critical part of the reason cooler heads prevailed in the end.
Apply the criteria for criminal attempted crimes. You have to do more than just attempt it, you have to have a realistic possibility of succeeding.
Sticking pins in a voodoo doll isn't attempted murder, no matter how seriously you believe it will kill the person.
So how would that event in the US have succeeded in overthrowing the government? What would the next steps have been? Even if they killed everyone in the building, would the rest of the government/military/courts/etc. agree to follow orders from the new kings? Why?
By the way, they didn't kill that police officer. It turned out later that he died of natural causes. Be careful of fake embellishments of real news.
The boundary between what is factually impossible and legally impossible with regard to “attempted $crime” is not one that I, a non-lawyer, would be comfortable asserting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossibility_defense
> So how would that event in the US have succeeded in overthrowing the government? What would the next steps have been? Even if they killed everyone in the building, would the rest of the government/military/courts/etc. agree to follow orders from the new kings? Why?
Here's how it would work:
The process for electing the president is that states certify their electoral college votes in what's known as the Certificate of the Vote. On 1/6 the certificates are counted and objections are raised. It takes one Senator and one Representative to raise an objection in writing, and Republicans had planned on objecting to Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan at least. Objections are settled by voting in the House and Senate. Each chamber gets a vote, and if they agree the objection is sustained and the votes discarded. If they are split or disagree, the objection is overturned. Democrats had a majority in the House while Republicans had a majority in the Senate, so this would have went in favor of Joe Biden.
To succeed then, the Republicans needed to get outside of the regular Constitutional order. Their main objective on 1/6 was to delay the certification past that day. There is no precedent for this. At first Trump wanted Pence to simply refuse to certify the vote and then force the GOP friendly states to "recertify" their results. Trump only needed a few states to recertify to win. But Pence refused to do this, hence the chants of "Hang Mike Pence".
However, the invasion of the Capitol gave new life to this idea of recertification. The hope here was that if the proceedings were disrupted, we were in uncharted Constitutional territory. This would have given additional time for Trump to try and twist the arm of the various states, as he had been doing before 1/6 to the states of Arizona and Georgia (at least).
Once the states recertified their votes, they would have reconvened the Congress and VP to certify the election. This puts the Democrats in a tough spot. They could have let the "recertified" results stand, in which case Trump would win. Or they could object. If they did, then the Republicans could also object. This would throw the recertified votes out.
But here's the catch. If no candidate has 270 electoral college votes after the counting, then the matter is put before the House, but not in the normal way. Instead, each state delegation gets 1 vote, for a total of 50, with 26 to win. State delegations are decided by the states, and Republicans would have a 26-23 majority in this scenario (PA would have tied, if they don't agree their vote doesn't count). The House would then vote for Trump, and he could have been President despite losing the popular vote and the electoral college.
There's a lot that needed to go right for Trump for this to work, and that's why it didn't. But it went a lot further than it should have, and definitely broke a 240 year streak of peaceful transitions of power in the US. In fact, it seems like the only reason the vote was able to be certified on 1/6 is because Mike Pence refused to leave the Capitol with the Secret Service. Had he left with them when they wanted him to, the proceedings would have been delayed indefinitely.
All of that is just using the existing legal systems, isn't it? If it succeeded that way, it would have been a clever legal trick and not a coup. If it was illegal, then it wouldn't have been recognized by anyone else any more than a random person declaring himself to be president, would it?
The voodoo doll seems like a weird example to use, these people weren't sitting in their houses imagining it. They literally broke into congress in search of congresspeople, you can watch videos and hear people say "where are they"... they went to their offices and congressional chambers to find them...
Analogies aside, if you don't think it was an attempted coup... what would it have made it one? I'm legitimately curious (I don't think incompetence is an excuse, and courts usually don't either).
Thanks for pointing out the disparity about Sicknick. To anyone else who isn't aware... the autopsy determined he died from a stroke the day after. These people still assaulted police officers to gain access to the Capitol.
It's funny considering how USA intensely finance and prepare coups and revolutions all over the world. I'm from one ex-USSR country and living in another ex-USSR country. It happened several times right in front of my eyes.
USA funds several media outlets so that they publish a precisely mixed mash of truth and lies. People mindlessly consume the mash and start to get a feeling they live in an imperfect society that can be very easily improved ("just get rid of your current president and you'll start living awesome life the same moment! it's so easy, folks! no other effort required").
Then they start publishing a real recipes for starting a turmoil (via figures like notoriously known Navalny).
Then, when the coup fails, USA start pressuring: "It's an agression against democracy! It was a peaceful protest! Sanctions! Sanctions! Sanctions!" (if the coup succeeds, the only result is that people start living in worse conditions - check Arab Spring countries or any other country where color revolution succeeded - they're doing much worse economically and in all other areas of life, including "democracy").
When the protest which was much milder happened in the US itself, it's suddenly "totally different thing".
BTW, just this week mercenaries from USA trained in USA killed president of Haiti.
It's technically a different thing because this attempted coup was domestic, and I don't think the whattaboutism accomplishes much... there's no hypocritical rhetoric in the thread you're replying to.
The US has certainly inflicted coups abroad, and I also disagree with those... but I suspect you weren't commenting to get my opinion on the matter.
The only ones creating trouble were the fbi informants that were there as agitators. Why haven't these people been charged yet? The rest were let and even motioned in. They took a tour and left peacefully when asked.
You made one true claim and two ridiculous claims. Then you give evidence for only the one that has been established. Was it FBI informants crushing capitol police against doors and beating them on the ground?
Peak Oil, in the very narrow sense of there being a point of maximum oil production before it starts declining as what remains becomes harder and thereby more expensive to extract, will probably happen eventually.
The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries.
And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.
> Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).
That's true only if you define Peak Oil so unusually as to make it true. The concept behind Peak Oil is that in the (near [1]) future, the available supply of oil will fail to meet the total demand for it, and then we'll be stuck in a world where there is forever an inability to get the necessary oil. In this model, it's great to be an oil supermajor holding one of the last great reserves of oil--you can basically charge what you want for it, and so it's worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get it.
An alternative model for the future is that the demand for oil peaks before the supply is. In this model, that same oil supermajor is now in a terrible position, and shelling out hundred of billions of dollars for new reserves is a stupid idea. In essence, from a planning perspective, this is the exact opposite of what Peak Oil predicts.
The current trends seem to indicate that it's the second scenario that is going to come true, not the former situation. Combined with the fact that more specific predictions about when it will happen have continuously failed to come true, it's hard to find much about Peak Oil thati sactually correct.
[1] The imminence of the catastrophe of peak oil is usually highlighted by its prophets, but it has been generally less assumed by planners working under its assumption, so it's debatable to what degree the imminence is a critical prediction of the theory. Whatever the case, nearly every single prediction of when the peak would occur has already been passed without that peak having happened.
AIUI US oil production actually did peak at more or less the originally predicted time, and the 1970s oil crisis was a reflection of that. Obviously it didn't result in the total collapse of civilisation, but it wasn't totally insignificant either.
The problem with most these malthusian style analyses is a presumption of a first-order system within their models. Human society is more able to adapt than deer herds, between both social changes and technology with second and third order effects.
Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.
To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February:
> In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes.
Yes, but the term 'Peak Oil' implies the catastrophic and sudden crash in the availability of oil, not in the slow decrease in production due to alternatives. (Don't get me wrong, I'd like production to decline much faster for climate reasons!)
The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, not necessarily for better, humans figured out more technologically advanced ways to extract oil to avoid this outcome (fracking and tar sands).
> The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives
This was literally never it. Peak Oil never had anything to say about the pumping capacity of oil, it was about the expansion of supply relative to demand.
That "preppers" decided this meant immediate societal collapse is there and your problem with comprehension.
I hear you, and I regret that the Environmental movement feels the need to ratchet everything up to a catastrophe. But surely if “peak” means anything it means that we used to grow, now we contract, and therefore peak oil has already occurred.
> “peak oil” ... It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
Are you suggesting that oil is not finite??? Or that we have an easy replacement at hand contrary to the people that says otherwise such as in the "Planet of The humans" documentary?
"Adapt" doesn't mean things will be better. Or even "okay".
Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.
And yet, we are here, with oil priced around 100x what it was when the book was published, so that it is being outcompeted by alternatives for several uses. It's not great, but people are adapting just fine.
And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse.
Anyway, the conclusion is that we should focus on adapting faster and better. I'm not sure if playing doom is helpful.
It's not the house price: it's your house is destroyed and the land is no longer viable. What do you do?
Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do?
Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do?
"Adapt" means quite different things at different scales, and you currently live in the "oh, yeah its a big more expensive" part of that. But no middle class person can afford to straight lose the value of their house if they own it.
In all these cases you're alive, you probably have running water, food and power. But you're poorer - by a lot, and your quality of life is reduced. You "adapted".
Essentially no one can afford to lose the value of their house. That's the point: you're going to take a 100% loss on the value of the land and building.
I was an infantry soldier and learnt very fast how fragile the logistics of necessities can be in the modern world.
I don't believe that world civilisation will collapse (at least not in any way that can be prepared for), but I have moved out of the city, begun to farm organically, and have a plan to cook and live without mains power or fuel for months on end. I know people think I'm a nutjob, but I've also seen first-hand whole cities who thought that progress was a one-way street end up in terrible circumstances.
That said, I'm not an alarmist. I am a founder, put a sizeable amount of my wealth into the global stock market, drive cars, fly (outside of COVID-19) to various places, and - most riskily of all, IMO - live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.
> live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.
Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. Otherwise your life sounds pretty desirable. I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
> Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear.
It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future).
> I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways).
I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve).
> I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most.
I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.
> I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe.
For what it’s worth, the fact that you’re denying being self-sufficient, tells me that you’re not a nutjob, no matter what other people say.
A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years.
Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions.
Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.
Yes there was a brief TP shortage. I think the bigger takeaway was that a large portion of the workforce just stopped and there wasn’t a material reduction in the standard of living.
I’ve come to believe fraction of of the workforce could keep the economy going at current levels and much employment is only marginally productive and exists only to distribute the wealth of society.
That's a sort of tempting thought and it's mostly right IMO. My suspicion is that it doesn't take that many people to keep the factories running but it does take a lot of people to make new factories and improve efficiency at existing ones. And modern society is so predicated on growth that you literally need these efficiency improvers or the wheels fall off. On any give day or week or perhaps even year they don't matter. But over a decade they probably do.
There wasn't just a TP shortage, there was a sudden shortage in prescription medications as supply chains were interrupted. The FDA had a list of medications that were impacted and were in short supply, and many of them were on the WHO list of essential medicines.
That tracks with my gut feeling: many jobs (possibly a majority, but I’m not confident that it’s that many) exist as a fig leaf for the government to say “see, these people aren’t on the dole. Look how close we are to full employment.”
There wasn't really much of a shortage though - at any given time there were warehouses full of residential toilet paper, what their wasn't was capacity to keep supermarket shelves stocked when regular customers all suddenly doubled their purchasing pattern.
A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves.
This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive.
The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.
Another thing that happens is that when Costco is the only place in town with TP in stock, then you end up buying 48 rolls or whatever because that's the minimum purchase size.
The part that I don't get about this is it rests on the narrative that such drastic societal collapse has happened on a grand scale. While small civilizations here and there have collapsed and political orders have gone away and been replaced by others at no point do we see humans descend into mass anarchy only to have to rebuild civilization.
Many doomsayers point to the fall of Rome as a supposed example of a major power falling and descending people into some kind of 'dark age'. There are two problems with this.
Firstly, the Romans didn't feel like they had actually fallen. As far as the people of the empire were concerned they were Roman even after the old roman imperial system went away. Instead of one exact 'date' of the fall of the empire, the empire slowly faded, and didn't really completely end until 1354 AD. By some people's imaginings, it still hasn't ended (namely the Hapsburgs who still claim to be the Holy Roman Emperor).
Secondly, the dark ages as we imagine it didn't exist. The dark ages were not a time of sudden societal collapse. Rather they were a time of major growth. Lots of things happened during the 'dark ages'. Lots of discoveries made. Lots of voyages undertaken. Lots of empires arose and fell (but the people didn't really notice much).
The idea that suddenly everything we know is going to go away and we're all going to have to huddle inside is, in my opinion, not founded in reality. It's sure fun to LARP though.
The key word is 'pretty close'. Firstly, if what I read is correct, it only impacted the mediterranean basin, whereas bronze age civilizations existed in China, India, and the Americas as well.
As the article you linked points out, Egyptian and Greek civilizations were affected, but apparently there were other strong civilizations that were doing exceedingly well at the time at the expense of Egypt and Greece.
That's my point. Certainly, from any one perspective, societies can collapse, but that's just a localized problem. Never have we seen humanity suddenly thrust wholesale into some fantastical dark age.
Globally today we are much more connected than the Mediterranean basin was back then. We are so interdependent on global stability now that any major local crisis has impacts everywhere.
Along with environmental and economic collapse, I'm worried about political collapse. Basically, I worry that democracies will either cease being democracies, or become so mired in their own bureaucratic processes that it's impossible to decisively act when an emergency arises.
We can say that the latter has already happened in the U.S., but it could always be worse and the emergencies we have to deal with can get worse too. We need to be able to deal the problems facing the next few generations by making rational decisions based on long-range planning. It doesn't seem to be happening, and when people get frustrated with the political process they don't just give up on their leaders, they give up on the whole democratic system and turn to strong-man leaders who can "get things done". The decline in public regard for democracy has been going on world-wide for awhile now.
We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization".
But it's not that bad!
Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall.
Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing?
I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over.
Well rome didnt see a meteoric rise of technology in 100 or so years before collapse. also modern weaponry could make collapse a lot more interesting than we imagine. I dont agree with a lot of r/collapse but have to accommodate that post ww2 prosperity has brought in a lot of 'global optimizations'. take that away and access to cheap plentiful energy & things could get bad fast.
Rome didn't collapse overnight, it took literally hundreds of years. It was a "collapse" in the sense that the standard of living and technology fell from the previous peak in some regions, but even then, not much of one because Constantinople endured and other empires were untouched (e.g. China).
The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s.
A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.
Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?
> we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2
We grow more in a few days than the world did at the height of Rome's power. We're also richer almost everywhere on the planet than we were at the peak of the post-WWII boom.
These ghost stories are a cheap way of defending complacency. If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world?
It seems to me that a certain amount of growth comes from further specialization. At one end of the scale, you have a few people in the clan or tribe specialize in turning rocks into spear points, and others specialize in hunting, and the whole group eats better. At the other end of the scale, you have a globally-integrated supply chain.
At the other end of the scale. That is, there's no further to go. All the benefits that can be reaped from this process, we've already reaped. There is no further growth to gain from this approach.
(Or not much. It is possible for the supply chain to further globalize and specialize, but not orders of magnitude more. And, as we regard China as an enemy, and look at what happened with Covid, we may even pull back from the amount that we already have.)
That is supposedly what happened with Rome. A very modern society (by our standards) was replaced by barbarians (by our standards). Those barbarians eventually developed a lot of the same social and political structures as Rome.
It was a regression from a unified pan-continent society to isolated tribes. How advanced those tribes were is hard to say because most didn’t write things down.
As far as I know what followed Rome was a period of unrest and lessened commerce. From that aspect at least it was “worse”.
And it took over a thousand years for a city larger than Rome to appear again anywhere in the world. Sometimes things just crash and nothing replaces it.
I've followed r/collapse for at least 4 years. In the beginning, it all sounded completely crazy. There were a lot of different theories about how it would all come apart, most of them nutty, some legit. The more legit theories have been sifted to the top as world events like COVID, massive recessions, shortages, local natural disasters, and global climate change have come to the fore. Couple that with the political instability over the Trump years and that insane media atmosphere, and collapse has basically gone mainstream.
At first it was articles that would be on r/collapse starting to show up on r/worldnews and r/politics. Then they started showing up on hackernews and now on the New York Times.
Collapse is happening. But it's not showy or sudden, but more like watching a corpse rot. Big systems fail slowly, grinding down their parts. A giant spaceship in freefall is pretty slow due to the scale. We're not in freefall yet, but all the moorings of modern life are coming undone.
But surely this is precisely how people begin to believe in any conspiracy theory? How many flat earthers would tell exactly the same story? How many anti-vax? Clearly humans begin to believe the evidence for something when they are exposed to it a lot. And this is what the Internet provides for every conceivable theory from Pizza Gate to Global Warming. “I found the evidence compelling” isn’t sufficient for finding the truth, unfortunately. This is The genius of the scientific method is that it automatically does not trust itself.
But in the case of systems collapsing due to climate change, it's the scientific community with mountains of evidence saying our topsoil is disappearing, coastal cities will start to flood, typhoons and droughts will become more frequent, and food supplies are at risk.
We thought we would hit 'peak oil' in the 1980's but then we learned to drill in deep water.
When we learned to make fuel from Oilsands, the world's reserves tripled.
When we learned to drill sideways, it grew.
When we learned how to make more efficient use of the tapping, it grew.
This notion of 'finite resources' is a very bad constraint. Obviously there are limits but we adapt quickly.
If we decided to use 1980's style Nuclear Reactors - we could power the world for 10 000 years using known reserves. And it would be clean.
Trees? We grow them. Metal? We recycle. Even soil we are starting to figure out sustainably.
There are very few hard limits we're facing on that front.
Chocolate and Cork might run in short supply but that means we kind spend our folly money on 'pure chocolate' as a delicacy instead of NFT's and we just can't have proper wine corks.
'Societal Collapse' won't come from resource extraction, it will come from warring ideologues in a population of materially satiated plebes who have too much time on their hands and so they argue over the meaning of words until someone tries and actual coup and it comes apart from there.
The article says that the various predictions are equally good fits because they don't diverge much by 2020. If in 1972 researchers came up with multiple models that all predicted pretty much the same thing over fifty years, but then wildly diverge over the subsequent fifty years, that alone is problematic.
Limits to Growth predicted we'd run out of oil by 1995, 2005, or at their most optimistic, 2022. Not peak oil -- out of oil. Similarly we were supposed to be out of gold by 2001 at the latest.
Food and services are both supposed to be peaking right now -- 2020 -- and going into rapid decline.
There was little reason to give credence to LtG even by the '80s, but by now it should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
Scanning through the book, this line jumped out at me: "If on average 5% of the population dies each year..." then the average lifespan is 20 years and humanity is doomed. That's their point, but I don't think that's how they intended to make it. That's just careless. They also happily extrapolated exponential curves for population, per capita gdp, etc.
>The original study and subsequent research was funded by the Club of Rome, a European organization focused on solving the larger problems facing humanity.
Ah yes, our benevolent overlords who have selflessly offered themselves up as our technocratic central planners. Such premises should at least inspire mild curiosity or skepticism from readers.
>The classical case against population growth was expressed in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, the British economist and country parson who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second."
...
>Or so it would appear, except for the following embarrassing fact: "Population has never increased geometrically," says Simon. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."
Is it annoying that people keep submitting "paywalled" Medium URLs to HN. This one is a re-cycled story first available from other sites that do not try to annoy readers into signing up.^1 Wonder if Dana Levine made some coin from Medium by submitting her medium.com hosted blog post URL to HN and hitting the front page.
Also this press release video (no background music) re: the report to the Club of Rome released as a paperback titled "Extracted" that is referenced in the article. The "tech" industry relies heavily on minerals extraction. It is alleged by the author that 10% of the world's energy production is consumed by minerals extraction. How much of that comes from fossil fuels.
I agree, Medium is pretty annoying to use as a reader. And for some strange reason, it doesn't work with Firefox's "reader view". I don't understand why people keep using this platform.
Not giving an opinion on the model itself, I do find it interesting how many of these cultural narratives of collapse and Armageddon are almost directly from older religious traditions. Specifically, Christianity in the Western World. The parallels become increasingly obvious if you dig deeper into the theology; everything is present, from climate “sinners” to apocalyptic scenarios in which everything collapses into a ball of fire, unless we repent and change our ways.
Again, not saying that these predictions are wrong or overly inaccurate. But even if many people in the Western world are not “religious” today, they inevitably seem to fall into these same thought patterns. I have noticed that this approach is not shared by many other non-Western countries, who absolutely recognize the dangers facing global society from climate, political polarization, etc. yet lack the “apocalypse” culture points. I worry if Western culture has a self-reinforcing obsession with the collapse narrative, to its own detriment.
The collapse of civilization happened in various ways many times already, no wonder it's present globally in the unconscious. Doubt it's a specialty of West.
I think you're right but it's not exclusively a religious issue. Karl Marx was famously obsessed with an apocalyptic end-of-days style vision in which the sinners would be punished and the pure elevated above. At the same time he wasn't a big fan of (other) religions.
True, but Nietzsche would say that socialism and subsequently Marx are consequences of Christianity. So it’s still operating in the same worldview, if unconsciously.
I remember someone took one of those global models and noticed all the equations were time reversible. So they asked "what does the model 'predict' the past looked like?"
And it turned out the model predicted the world population was infinite sometime in the 1800s. :)
Plenty of ODEs are stable in forward time, but unstable in reverse time. Just because you can run some equations in reverse doesn't mean that the result is relevant.
If many different initial conditions can evolve to almost the same state, then reversing time must necessarily blow up small errors/perturbations. It's the same reason why driving with a trailer backwards is more difficult than forward, even though Newtonian mechanics are time reversible.
Any sources for that? Right now it's just "I have very little faith in these models because I remember someone trying to reverse them and coming up with nonsensical results", probably coupled with "and that is so much more comforting".
Dynamic models are useful ways to explore complex systems. For example:
Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies
S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay
Ecological Economics 101, 90--102
Modeling Sustainability: Population, Inequality, Consumption, and Bidirectional Coupling of the Earth and Human Systems
S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay, GR Asrar, AJ Busalacchi, RF Cahalan, ...
National Science Review 3 (4), 470--494
With information injected into a system, you can do more with less materially. This is a known fact and the internet is a huge injection of information into the world that is accessible to most people to some degree, making knowledge no longer a privilege of the elites.
It is game changing and provides hope for better answers than historical models suggest. Though we do need to work on keeping the quality of info high and on keeping information free as much as possible and that's a constant ongoing battle.
Let me guess the take: either (a) it will all be fixed at the last minute (even if we're beyond that), by some advanced alien tech we've yet to discover (because humans are so ingenius and nothing can halt progress), (b) it's not an issue, la-la-la hands in the ears.
CO2 pollution would be exponential if it were proportional to energy usage and if energy usage increased linearly with economic development and if economic development were exponential. Fortunately neither of the first two conditions are true.
Consider the buried lede in this 2019 article[0] from the Guardian:
> But in a positive signal for the future, the [UK's Office for National Statistics ] said both domestic and consumption-based emissions had fallen since the 2008 financial crisis.
Because, once electricity is no longer available, and you can't get coal from long distance, people burn wood or trash or dried grass or whatever they can get their hands on. If the alternative is freezing, you don't care about the pollution you're generating.
MIT should create a galactic encyclopedia to preserve human knowledge for future generations after the collapse and perhaps a group or "Foundation" to maintain it.
Have there been many economic models that predicted macro things like food production and industrial output 70+ years into the future that have proven to be reliable?
So two things spring to mind with this and any doom scenario or predictions:
1. People tend to exaggerate such doom. The reasons for this vary. A lot of the time it's unknowing. It could be as simple as assuming a constant function will remain constant beyond normal boundaries. Or that a dynamic function will continue forever. Or it's sometimes disingenuous (eg to promote a particular agenda or simply to gain more attention through alarmism). Whatever the case, I've found it to be a good policy to ignore doom scenarios; and
2. There's a concept I like that I've heard described as "betting with the Mayans". The Mayan calendar "predicted" the end of the world in 2012. There are two approaches you can take with this: you can bet they're right or bet they're wrong. But simple game theory tells you that you should bet that they're wrong. Why? Because if they're right. It doesn't matter. The only thing you "win" is a brief sense of smug superiority as you suffer the same fate as everyone else. So why bother betting on that outcome?
So let's take this lens to a polarizing issue like climate change. I personally hold all of the following to be true:
1. Man has clearly had an impact on climate, as in a relatively rapid rise in global temperatures, due to CO2 emissions;
2. It's not clear to me that this is entirely man-made (eg higher Solar output). Of course, this may not even matter one way or the other as we still have to deal with the results;
3. Abrupt climate change isn't as rare as people make out. It's happened a ton of times in the last 100,000 years. They're called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles [1]. This isn't some crackpot fringe publication. This is Nature.
4. At different points in the Earth's history it has been both substantially hotter and colder than it is now;
5. It's likely that climate change is a major contributing factor to what is essentially a mass extinction event that we're undergoing now (most of the rest being human activity and ecosystem destruction).
6. Altruism won't solve carbon emissions. Economics will. Humans are unwilling and incapable of making long term sacrifices for the planet that inconveniences them in any way.
7. I know some reading the above will have an immediate reaction to label me a "denier". That attitude really has no place in scientific discourse.
So I just don't believe we'll have runaway heating as some argue. Why? Because the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and despite higher temperatures that hasn't happened. I don't think we can definitively describe all the self-correcting processes that have kept Earth within a habitable band for literally billions of years.
But even if I'm wrong, we're screwed anyway because global population won't change and deviate from the current course.
So yeah, worrying about a global collapse in 20 years? That's a hard pass.
> 2. It's not clear to me that this is entirely man-made (eg higher Solar output). Of course, this may not even matter one way or the other as we still have to deal with the results;
Then you should read more widely, because we have been in a sustained period of decreasing solar activity for the last decade[1]. This trend will actually end and become a contributor again some time around 2030. This will be bad, because warming has continued unabated in the mean time and the increased contribution will last for decades.
1. This is true
2. Solar output is at one of its minimums
3. "abrupt" in that case means over the course of decades or centuries, not a few years. Re-read that Nature article, it doesn't say what you think it says.
4. Definitely, Earth will be fine, humans not so much. There are plenty of times in the past few hundred million years where humans would have a rough, or impossible, time surviving.
5. Yes
6. Yes
7. Denier or not, you need to read more, starting with the article you linked.
> 4. At different points in the Earth's history it has been both substantially hotter and colder than it is now;
The atoms in your house were much hotter when they were being formed by fusion inside a star, but that doesn't mean you'd be happy about someone committing arson.
I'm saying it's not really relevant whether Earth has experienced higher temperatures before, what matters is how long it will be able to support 8 billion humans for.
My takeaway was that Earth as a system has operated outside of these temperatures and did not result in a runaway effect.
This means that there are self correcting systems that allow Earth to be relatively stable and life bearing for billions of years.
My first thought is that with increase in temperature, you get an increase in plant life which reduces CO2 levels resulting in lower temperatures and less plant life.
Great charts. The fact that “Business as Usual” aka the default has industrial production falling 75% in 20 years tells you all you need to know about this amazing paragon of machine learning and economics
Just read the original paper. This synopsis mostly just reiterates what the original paper says and concurs.
I personally don't think we're going to see any collapse as drastic as the models predict. People have been predicting collapse forever, but either way, this article doesn't add much to the paper itself.
I doubt the strength of arguments that go like “people have been saying X forever, but X hasn't happened yet - therefore not X” because it completely ignores evidence for X over time.
There are some things that look like X. There are also things that look like "not X". Taking it all in, should your estimation of the probability of X be going up, or down?
The problem is, whichever way you answer, someone from the other side can say "You're not taking into account all the evidence". And you can say, "Yes, I am - you aren't!" And things from there go in completely unproductive directions.
But people have been right many, many times about other societies collapsing. All groups collapse, it's just a matter of time.
Our ability to create existential threats is extremely new in historical terms. We have very little evidence for how they will be managed, but so far the indications are mostly terrible.
There are always people predicting the end of society just as there are always people predicting a stock market crash. I suspect they have similar levels of success.
The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth:
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."
As a human, I have a hard time finding common cause with people who consider humanity to be the enemy.
I mean, even if you say human nature is a problem, I might agree, depending on the specifics. But humanity itself? Well, if you think I'm your enemy, then maybe I'm your enemy.
The problem is people are expecting the asteroid impact, or the single point where "civilization is collapsed."
These aren't helpful and aren't realistic. Even historical societal collapses happen over periods of centuries, often.
It's foolish to simply dismiss threats because people make bad predictions. We can already see increases in rare weather events right now, and these have already had significant geopolitical consequences (e.g. Syria).
Or it's an ongoing cautionary narrative that we shouldn't take our civilizational accomplishments forgranted, and that government and civic works are ultimately a long chain of development and stewardship which depended on those before to keep going.
If you thought the world could only survive with a much smaller population, and you had enough money to buy out all decision makers and media, what would you do? Sit around and wait for the world to end, or take matters into your own hands?
I remember reading that Peter Thiel bought land in New Zealand as a huge against a societal collapse that he predicted and/or was attempting to hasten.
The scary thing is that many billionaires are wealthy enough to pull it off.
If Alex is right, some of these guys are in a death cult. After confirmation of Epstein Island and video of them literally burning OWL effigies in the forest at their secret meetings. Who knows anymore what is going on.
