first posted Jul. 2017; updated Dec. 2018.
Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without leading to a serious failure of our civilization’s ability to maintain itself. Taken together, these metastasizing problems suggest we are headed toward some kind of historic discontinuity.
Serious discontinuities tend to disrupt the timelines of all complex societies (another name for civilizations—that is, societies with cities, writing, money, and full-time division of labor). The ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations all collapsed. Archaeologists, historians, and systems thinkers have spent decades seeking an explanation for this pattern of failure—a general unified theory of civilizational collapse, if you will. One of the most promising concepts that could serve as the basis for such a theory comes from resilience science, a branch of ecology(the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments).
In order to answer the question, we must first inquire why modern civilization has been so successful. The rise of technology, including advances in metallurgy and engineering, certainly played a part. These provided better ways of obtaining and harnessing energy. But it’s the rapid shift in qualities and quantities of energy available to us that really made the difference.
Previously, people derived their energy from annual plant growth (food and firewood), and manipulated their environment using human and animal muscle power. These energy sources were inherently limited. But, starting in the 19th century, new technologies enabled us to access and harness the energy of fossil fuels. And fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—were able to provide energy in amounts far surpassing previous energy sources.
Energy is everything. All terrestrial ecosystems and all human societies are essentially machines for using (and dissipating) solar energy that has been collected and concentrated through photosynthesis. We like to think that money makes the world go ’round, but it is actually energy that enables us to do anything at all—from merely getting up in the morning to launching a space station. And having lots of energy available cheaply can enable us to do a great deal.
Fossil fuels represent tens of millions of years’ worth of stored ancient sunlight. They are energy-dense, portable, and storable sources of power. Accessing them changed nearly everything about human existence. They were uniquely transformative in that they enabled higher rates of harvesting and using all other resources—via tractors, bulldozers, powered mining equipment, chainsaws, motorized fishing trawlers, and more.
Take just one example. In all previous agrarian civilizations, roughly three-quarters of the population had to farm in order to supply a food surplus to support the other 25 percent—who lived as aristocrats, traders, soldiers, artisans, and so on. Fossil fuels enabled the industrialization and automation of agriculture, as well as longer-distance distribution chains.
Harvesting corn by hand (left) versus harvesting by machine (right). Image sources: The Harvest Cradle by John Linnell, Public Domain (left). Deer Harvester by Wesley Hetrick, Creative Commons Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic License (right).
Today only one or two percent of the U.S. population need to farm full-time in order to supply everyone else with food. The industrialization of food systems has freed up nearly all of the former peasant class to move to cities and take up jobs in manufacturing, marketing, finance, advertising, management, sales, and so on. Thus urbanization and the dramatic expansion of the middle class during the 20th century were almost entirely attributable to fossil fuels.
But fossil fuels have been a bargain with the devil: these are depleting, non-renewable resources, and burning them produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, changing the climate and the chemistry of the world’s oceans. These are not small problems. Climate change by itself is far and away the most serious pollution dilemma any human society has ever faced, and could lead to crashing ecosystems, failing food systems, and widespread forced human migration.
Replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources is possible in principle, but doing so fully would require massive investment, not just for building solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear reactors (there are some other serious problems with this latter option), but also for the retooling of manufacturing, transportation, buildings, and food systems to run on electricity instead of solid, liquid, or gaseous fuels. An energy transition is needed, but it’s not happening at even nearly the pace that would be required in order to forestall catastrophic climate change or to prevent economic decline resulting from the depletion of the world’s highest quality oil, coal, and gas resources. Industrial society’s failure to make this energy transition is no doubt due not just to well-funded opposition by the fossil fuel industry, but also to the enormous technical challenge posed, and to the failure of policy makers to champion and implement the carbon taxes and alternative energy subsidies that would be needed.
And so we accelerate toward ecological and economic ruin.
”Desolation” by Thomas Cole (1836), the fourth of a five-part series called The Course of Empire. Public Domain.
Many of the things we could do toward this end are already being done in order to avert climate change and other converging crises. Again, people who voluntarily reduce energy usage, eat locally grown organic food, make the effort to get to know their neighbors, get off the consumer treadmill, reduce their debt, help protect local biodiversity by planting species that feed or shelter native pollinators, use biochar in their gardens, support political candidates who prioritize addressing the sustainability crisis, and contribute to environmental, population, and human rights organizations are all helping moderate the impending collapse and ensure that there will be more survivors. We could do more. Acting together, we could start to re-green the planet; begin to incorporate captured carbon not only in soils, but in nearly everything we make, including concrete, paper, and plastics; and design a new economic system based on mutual aid rather than competition, debt, and perpetual growth. All of these efforts make sense with or without the knowledge that civilization is nearing its sell-by date. How we describe the goals of these efforts—whether as ways of improving people’s lives, as ways to save the planet, as fulfilling the evolutionary potential of our species, as contributing to a general spiritual awakening, or as ways of moderating an inevitable civilizational crash—is relatively unimportant.
However, the Big Picture (an understanding of the adaptive cycle, the role of energy, and our overshoot predicament) adds both a sense of urgency, and also a new set of priorities that are currently being neglected. For example, when civilizations collapse, culturally significant knowledge is typically lost. It’s probably inevitable that we will lose a great deal of our shared knowledge during the coming centuries. Much of this information is trivial anyway (will our distant descendants really suffer from not having the ability to watch archived episodes of Let’s Make a Deal or Storage Wars?). Yet people across the globe now use fragile storage media—computer and server hard drives—to store everything from music to books to instruction manuals. In the event that the world’s electricity grids could no longer be maintained, we would miss more than comfort and convenience; we could lose science, higher mathematics, and history.
It’s not only the dominant industrial culture that is vulnerable to information loss. Indigenous cultures that have survived for millennia are being rapidly eroded by the forces of globalization, resulting in the extinction of region-specific knowledge that could help future humans live sustainably.
Upon whom does the responsibility fall to curate, safeguard, and reproduce all this knowledge, if not those who understand its peril?
It’s been ten years since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Print, online, and broadcast news media have dutifully featured articles and programs commemorating the crisis, wherein commentators mull why it happened, what we learned from it, and what we failed to learn. Nearly all of these articles and programs have adopted the perspective of conventional economic theory, in which the global economy is seen as an inherently stable system that experiences an occasional market crash as a result of greed, bad policies, or “irrational exuberance” (to use Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase). From this perspective, recovery from the GFC was certainly to be expected, even though it could have been impeded by poor decisions.
Some of us have a different view. From our minority perspective, the global economy as currently configured is inherently not just unstable, but unsustainable. The economy depends on perpetual growth of GDP, whereas we live upon a finite planet on which the compounded growth of any material process or quantity inevitably leads to a crash. The economy requires ever-increasing energy supplies, mostly from fossil fuels, whereas coal, oil, and natural gas are nonrenewable, depleting, and climate-changing resources. And the economy, rather than being circular, like ecosystems (where waste from one component is food for another, so all elements are continually recycled), is instead linear (proceeding from resource extraction to waste disposal), even though our planet has limited resources and finite waste sinks.
In the minority view of those who understand that there are limits to growth, the GFC (or something like it) was entirely to be expected, since whatever cannot be sustained must, by definition, eventually stop. Indeed, the crash requires less of an explanation than the recovery that followed. Instead of skidding into a prolonged and deepening depression, the global economy—at least as measured conventionally—has, in the past years, scaled new heights. In the US, the stock market is up, unemployment is down, and GDP is humming along nicely. Most other nations have also seen a recovery, after a fashion at least. We have enjoyed ten years of reprieve from crisis and decline. How was this achieved? What does it mean?
Let’s take a look back, through the lens of the minority view, at this most unusual decade.
However, some peak oilers were ecologists (I was among this group). Informed by the 1972 computer scenario study The Limits to Growth (LTG), these observers and commentators understood that many of Earth’s resources (not just fossil fuels) are being used at unsustainable rates. The “standard run” LTG scenario featured peaks and declines in world industrial output, food production, and population, all in the first half of the twenty-first century. The peak oil ecologists therefore saw the imminent decline in world petroleum output as a likely trigger event in the larger process of society’s environmental overshoot and collapse.
The two groups shared an understanding that oil is the lifeblood of modern industrial civilization. Petroleum is central to transport and agriculture; without it, supply chains and most food production would quickly grind to a halt. Moreover, there is a close historic relationship between oil consumption and GDP growth. Thus, peakists reasoned, when world oil production starts its inevitable down-glide, the growth phase of industrial civilization will be over.
In the years leading up to 2005, the rate of increase in world conventional crude oil production slowed; then output growth stopped altogether and oil prices started rising. By July 2008 the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude benchmark oil price briefly hit an all-time, inflation-adjusted high of $147 per barrel. High oil prices starve the economy of consumer spending. And, due to subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and other factors, the economy was set for a spill in any case. Within weeks, the foundations of the financial industry were giving way. Stock prices were tumbling and companies were going bankrupt by the dozen. Most of the US auto industry teetered on the brink of insolvency. The news media were filled with commentary about the possible demise of capitalism itself.
In sum, the financial crash of 2008 looked to some of us like not just another stock market “correction,” but the end of a brief and blisteringly manic phase of civilized human existence. It was confirmation that our diagnosis (that fossil-fueled industrialism was unsustainable even over the short term) and prognosis (that the peak in world oil production would trigger the inevitable collapse of oil-based civilization) were both correct.
Our expectation at that point was that oil production would decline, energy prices would rise, and the economy would shrink in fits and starts. Living standards would crumble. It would then be up to world leaders to decide how to respond—either with resource wars, or with a near-complete redesign of systems and institutions to minimize reliance on fossil fuels and growth.
But we were wrong.
It turned out that most peakists had been unaware of a so-called revolution waiting to be unleashed in the American oil and gas industry. Although world conventional crude oil production (subtracting natural gas liquids and bitumen) remained flatlined roughly at the 2005 level, new sources of unconventional oil began opening up in the United States, especially in North Dakota and south Texas. Small-to-medium-sized companies began drilling tens of thousands of twisty wells deep into source rock, fracturing that rock with millions of gallons of water and chemicals, and then propping open newly formed cracks with tons of fine sand. These techniques released oil trapped in the “tight” rocks. It was an expensive process that came with significant environmental, health, and social costs; but, by 2015, five million barrels per day of “light tight oil” (LTO) were supplementing world liquid fuel supplies.
Moreover, while fracking was revolutionizing the oil and gas industry, debt was resuscitating the financial system. Viewing the deflationary GFC as a mortal threat, central banks in late 2008 began deploying extraordinary measures that included quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates. At the same time, governments dramatically increased their rates of deficit spending. The hope of both central bankers and government policy makers was to use the infusion of debt to revive an economy that was otherwise on the brink of dissolution. The gambit worked: by 2010, US and world GDP were once again growing.
In 2013, we at Post Carbon Institute (PCI) began publishing a series of reports about shale gas and tight oil (authored by geoscientist David Hughes), based on proprietary well-level drilling information. These reports documented the high geographic variability of drilling prospects (with only relatively small “sweet spots” offering the possibility of profit); and rapid per-well production declines, necessitating very high rates of drilling in order to grow or even maintain overall production levels. Given the speed at which sweet spots were becoming crowded with wells, it appeared to us that the time window during which shale gas and tight oil could provide such high rates of fuel production would be relatively brief, and that an overall decline in US oil and gas production would likely resume with a vengeance in the decade starting in 2020. These conclusions flew in the face of official forecasts showing high rates of production through 2050. However, our confidence in our methodology was bolstered as individual shale gas and tight oil producing regions began, one by one, to tip over into decline.
In sum, without low-interest Federal Reserve policies the fracking boom might never have been possible. For the world as a whole, a steady decline in energy resource quality has been hidden by massive borrowing. Indeed, since the GFC, overall global debt has grown at over twice the rate of GDP growth. Humanity consumes now, with the promise of paying later. But in this instance “later” will likely never come: the massive public and private debt that has been run up over the past few decades, and especially since the GFC, is too vast ever to be repaid (it’s being called “the everything bubble”). Instead, as repayments fall behind, banks will eventually be forced to cease further lending, triggering a deflationary spiral of defaults. If the fracking bubble hasn’t burst by that time for purely geological reasons, lack of further low-interest financing will provide the coup-de-grace.
While low-interest debt managed to fund a brief energy reprieve and to forestall overall financial collapse, it couldn’t paper over a deepening sense of malaise among much of the public. Income growth for US wage earners had been stagnant since the early 1980s; then, during the 2008-2018 decade, wage earners in the lowest percentiles continued to coast or even lost ground while high-income households saw dramatic improvements. This was partly a result of the way governments and central banks had structured their bailouts, with most of the freshly minted cash going to investors and financial institutions. This lopsidedness in the economic rebound was mirrored in many other countries. A recent US tax cut that was targeted almost exclusively at high-income households (with another similar cut apparently on the way) is only exacerbating the trend toward higher inequality. And economic inequality is fomenting widespread dissatisfaction with both the economic system and the political system. None of the bankers who contributed to the GFC via shady investment schemes went to jail, and a lot of people are unhappy about that, too.
Further, there was no “recovery” at all for the global climate during the past decade; quite the opposite. As humanity burned more fossil fuels and spewed more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the scale of climate impacts grew. Hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, and wildfires fed deepening poverty and, in some instances (e.g., Syria), simmering conflicts. Growing tides of refugees began migrating away from areas of crisis and toward regions of relative safety.
At the same time, technological trends drove further wedges among social groups: while automation helped tamp down wage growth, the pervasive use of social media inflamed political polarization. An expanding far-right political fringe in turn fed anti-immigrant and anti-refugee populism, and sought to exploit the disgruntlement of left-behind wage earners. All of this culminated in the ascendancy of Donald Trump as US president, joining fellow authoritarians in Russia, China, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere. Globally, political systems have been destabilized to a degree not seen in decades.
Altogether, this was a deceptive, uneven, and unsettling “recovery.”
Here’s a thought experiment: If there had been no recovery (that is, if GDP had continued to plummet as it was doing in 2009), and if, as a result, demand for fossil fuels had cratered, there would no doubt have been a lot of human misery (which there may be anyway ultimately, just delayed), but there also would have been less long-term impact on the global climate and on ecosystems. As it was, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations rose, as did the average global temperature, with devastating effect on oceans, forests, and biodiversity.
At PCI, we spent the past decade adapting our message to shifting realities. We gave a lot of thought to the transition to a post-growth economic regime, resulting in my book, The End of Growth. We also spent many hours pondering societal strategies for surviving overshoot, and came to much the same conclusion as some of our colleagues who’ve been working on these issues for decades (including Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth): that is, with impacts on the way, building societal resilience has to be a top priority. We determined that it’s at the community scale that resilience-building efforts are likely to be most successful and most readily undertaken. Determined to help build community resilience, we co-published a three-book series of Community Resilience Guides, as well as the Community Resilience Reader;we also produced the “Think Resilience” video series.
We analyzed the prospects for US shale gas and tight oil production via David Hughes’s series of reports mentioned above (also in my book Snake Oil), and we assessed the prospects for a transition to renewable energy in a book, Our Renewable Future, I coauthored with PCI Fellow David Fridley. In that book, we concluded that while an energy transition is necessary and inevitable, transformations in virtual every aspect of modern society will need to be undertaken and economic growth has to be curtailed in order for it to happen. We at PCI did other things as well (including producing additional videos, books, and reports), but these are some of the highlights.
I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish with the participation of our followers, fellows, staff, and funders. But, I’m sorry to say, our efforts had limited reach. Our books and reports got little mainstream media attention. And while some communities have adopted resilience as a planning goal, and Transition and other initiatives have promoted resilience thinking through grassroots citizen networks, most towns and cities are still woefully ill-prepared for what’s coming.
I’ve titled this essay “Our Bonus Decade” because the past ten years were an unexpected (by us peakists, anyway) extra—like a bonus added to a paycheck. But bonus is a borrowed Latin word meaning “good.” In retrospect, whatever good we humans derived from the last ten years of reprieve may ultimately be outweighed by the bad effects of our collective failure to change course. During those ten years we emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than in any previous decade. We depleted more of Earth’s resources than in any previous decade. And humanity did next-to-nothing to reconfigure its dominant economic and financial systems. In short, we (that is, the big We—though not all equally) used our extra time about as foolishly as could be imagined.
At the same time, the burden of debt that was shouldered during the past decade is becoming unbearable. US federal government borrowing has soared despite “robust” economic conditions, and interest payments on debt will soon exceed military spending. China’s debts have quadrupled during the decade, its annual GDP growth rate is quickly slowing, its oil production rate is peaking, and the energy profitability of its energy sector as a whole is declining fast.
But that’s not all that’s happening. Let’s step back and summarize:
(1) We peak oil analysts had assumed that energy resource depletion would be the immediate trigger for societal collapse.
(2) However, climate change is turning out to be a far greater threat than we depletionists had thought fifteen or twenty years ago, when the peak oil discussion was just getting underway. The impacts of warming atmosphere and oceans are appearing at a frightening and furious pace, and climate feedbacks could make future warming non-linear and perhaps even unsurvivable. At this point one has to wonder whether the mythic image of hell is a collective-unconscious premonition of global climate change.
(3) Ten years ago we learned that debt cycles and debt bubbles are a significant related factor potentially leading to, or hastening, civilizational collapse.
(4) Now we are all getting a rapid education in the ways inequality can lead to political polarization and social instability.
As a shorthand way of speaking about these four related factors, we at PCI have begun speaking of the “E4 crisis” (energy, environment, economy, and equity). It’s no longer helpful to focus on one factor to the exclusion of the others; it’s far more informative to look for ways in which all four are interacting in real time.
Our bonus round of economic growth and relative normalcy will assuredly end at some point due to the combined action of these factors. I don’t know when the dam will burst. Nor do I know for certain whether there will be yet another fake “recovery” afterward—the next one perhaps being even weaker and more unequally experienced than the current one. And I’m not about to offer a definitive forecast for the timing of the global oil peak: one can imagine a scenario in which governments and central banks again print immense amounts of money in order to keep drillers and frackers busy. Only two things can I say with confidence: the big trends all add up to overshoot, crisis, and decline; and building personal and community resilience remains the best strategy in response.
In the years I’ve spent investigating these predicaments, I’ve been fortunate to meet experts who have delved deeply into specific issues—the biodiversity crisis, the population crisis, the climate crisis, the resource depletion crisis, the debt crisis, the plastic waste crisis, and on and on. In my admittedly partial judgment, some of the smartest people I’ve met happen also to be among the more pessimistic. (One apparently smart expert I haven’t had opportunity to meet yet is 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman, the subject of this recent article in The Guardian.)
In discussing climate change and all our other eco-social predicaments, how does one distinguish accurate information from statements intended to elicit either false hope or needless capitulation to immediate and utter doom? And, in cases where pessimistic outlooks do seem securely rooted in evidence, how does one psychologically come to terms with the information?
Systems Thinking
First, if you want to have an accurate picture of the world, it’s vital to pay attention to the connections between things. That means thinking in systems. Evidence of failure to think in systems is all around us, and there is no better example than the field of economics, which treats the environment as simply a pile of resources to be plundered rather than as the living and necessary context in which the economy is grounded. No healthy ecosystems, no economy. This single crucial failure of economic theory has made it far more difficult for most people, and especially businesspeople and policy makers, to understand our sustainability dilemma or do much about it.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the field in which systems thinking is most highly developed is ecology—the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments. Since it is a study of relationships rather than things in isolation, ecology is inherently systems-oriented.
Systems thinking has a pre-history in indigenous thought (Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, or “All are related,” is a common phrase in the Lakota language). But as a formal scientific pursuit it emerged only during the latter part of the twentieth century. Previously, Western scientists often assumed that they could understand systems just by analyzing their parts; however, it gradually became clear—in practical fields from medicine to wildlife management to business management—that this often led to unintended consequences.
In medicine, it is understood that treating diseases by managing symptoms is not as desirable as treating the disease itself; that’s partly because symptomatic treatment with pharmaceuticals can produce side effects that can be as distressing as the original disease symptoms. Take a pill and you may feel better for a while, but you may soon have to deal with a whole new slew of aches, rashes, sleep problems, mood swings, or digestive ailments. Further, truly curing a disease often involves addressing exposure to environmental toxins; or lifestyle choices including poor nutrition, smoking, lack of exercise, or job-related repetitive stress injuries—all of which are systemic issues that require treating the whole person and their environment, not just the symptoms, or even just the disease in isolation.
In order to address systemic problems we need to understand what systems are, and how to intervene in them most effectively.
All systems have:
The global climate is a system, and climate change is therefore a systemic problem. Some non-systems thinkers have proposed solving climate change by putting chemicals in the Earth’s atmosphere to manage solar radiation. Because this solution addresses only part of the systemic problem, it is likely to have many unintended consequences. Systems thinking would suggest very different approaches—such as reducing fossil fuel consumption while capturing and storing atmospheric carbon in replanted forests and regenerated topsoil. These approaches recognize the role of inputs (such as fossil fuels), outputs (like carbon dioxide), and feedbacks (including the balancing feedback provided by soil carbon flows).
In some cases, a systemic approach to addressing climate change could have dramatic side benefits: regenerative agriculture would not just sequester carbon in the soil, it would also make our food system more sustainable while preserving biodiversity. Interventions based in systems thinking often tend to solve many problems at once.
Donella Meadows, who was one of the great systems thinkers of the past few decades, left us a brilliant essay titled “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” There are places within every complex system where “a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.” Meadows suggested that these leverage points have a hierarchy of effectiveness. She said that the most powerful interventions in a system address its goals, rules, and mindsets, rather than parameters and numbers—things like subsidies and taxes. This has powerful implications for addressing climate change, because it suggests that subsidizing renewable energy or taxing carbon is a fairly weak way of inducing systemic change. If we really want to address a deeply rooted, systemic problem like climate change, we may need to look at our society’s most fundamental paradigms—like, for example, the assumption that we must have continual economic growth.
We intuitively know that systems are more than the sum of their parts. But digging deeper into the insights of systems theory—going beyond the basics—can pay great dividends both in our understanding of the world, and in our strategic effectiveness at making positive change happen. A terrific resource in this regard is Meadows’s book Thinking in Systems.
Systems thinking often tends to lead to a more pessimistic view of our ecological crisis than thinking that focuses on one thing at a time, because it reveals the shortcomings of widely touted techno-fixes. But if there are truly useful strategies to be found, systems thinking will reveal them.
Critical Thinking
Human thought is rooted partly in words, partly in emotions, and partly in the body states (whether you feel alert, sleepy, hungry, agitated, etc.) that may accompany or give rise to emotions; another way of saying this is that our thought processes are partly conscious but mostly unconscious. In our conscious lives we are immersed in a soup of language, which often simply expresses judgments, intuitions, and observations that emerge from unconscious thought. But thought that’s expressed in language has great potential. Using language (including mathematics), we can assess the validity of statements about the world, then build upon proven statements until we ultimately achieve comprehensive scientific understandings and the capacity to manipulate reality in new ways (to build a bridge, for example, or land a probe on a distant asteroid, or update an app).
Of course, language can be powerful in another way. Some of us use language to persuade, confuse, or mislead others so as to gain social or economic power. Appeals to unconscious prejudices, including peer group-think, are frequently employed to sway the masses. The best protection against being the subject of verbal manipulation is the ability to use language to distinguish logic from illogic, truth from untruth. Critical thinking helps us separate information from propaganda. It can help us think more clearly and productively.
One way to approach critical thinking is through the study of logic—including formal logic (which builds conclusions almost mathematically, using syllogisms), informal logic (which also considers content, context, and delivery), and fuzzy logic (which recognizes that many qualities are subjective or matters of degree). Most of our daily thinking consists of informal and fuzzy logic.
The study of formal logic starts with learning the difference between deductive reasoning (which proceeds from a general principle to a special case, sometimes referred to as “top-down reasoning”) and inductive reasoning (which makes broad generalizations from specific observations, also called “bottom-up reasoning”).
Both deductive and inductive forms of reasoning can be misapplied. One might deduce from the general rule “human history is a grand narrative of progress” that therefore humanity will successfully deal with the ecological challenges of the 21st century and emerge smarter, wealthier, and more virtuous than ever. Here the problem is that the general rule is laden with value judgments and subject to many exceptions (such as the collapse of various historical civilizations). Inductive reasoning is even more perilous, because there is always the danger that specific observations, from which one is drawing general conclusions, are incomplete or even misleading (economic growth has occurred in most years since World War II; therefore, economic growth is normal and can be expected to continue, with occasional brief setbacks, forever).
Even if we do all we can, there is no guarantee that problems will be solved, extinctions prevented, collapse forestalled. But paralysis only guarantees the very worst outcome. In the words of the Bhagavad Gita, “The wise should work, without attachment to results, for the welfare of the world.” Act from love with the best understanding you have, and always seek to improve your understanding. It’s all that any of us can do.
My piece happened to be published right around the same time New York Magazine released a controversial article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth,” in which author David Wallace Wells portrayed a dire future if the most pessimistic climate change models turn to reality. “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” wrote Wells. “If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” Wells’s article drew rebukes from—of all people—climate scientists, who pointed out a few factual errors, but also insisted that scaring the public just doesn’t help. “Importantly, fear does not motivate,” responded Michael Mann with Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles, “and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.”
It’s true: apocalyptic warnings don’t move most people. Or, rather, they move most people away from the source of discomfort, so they simply tune out. But it’s also true that people feel a sense of deep, unacknowledged unease when they are fed “solutions” that they instinctively know are false or insufficient.
Others came to Wells’s defense. Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of the climate action group The Climate Mobilization, which advocates for starting a “World War II-scale” emergency mobilization to convert from fossil fuels, writes, “it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. . . . [I]t’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings—not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.”
So: Are we doomed if we can’t maintain current and growing energy levels? And are we doomed anyway due to now-inevitable impacts of climate change?
First, the good news. With regard to energy, we should keep in mind the fact that today’s Americans use roughly twice as much per capita as their great-grandparents did in 1925. While people in that era enjoyed less mobility and fewer options for entertainment and communication than we do today, they nevertheless managed to survive and even thrive. And we now have the ability to provide many services (such as lighting) far more efficiently, so it should be possible to reduce per-capita energy usage dramatically while still maintaining a lifestyle that would be considered more than satisfactory by members of previous generations and by people in many parts of the world today. And reducing energy usage would make a whole raft of problems—climate change, resource depletion, the challenge of transitioning to renewable energy sources—much easier to solve.
The main good news with regard to climate change that I can point to (as I did in an essay posted in June) is that economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves are consistent only with lower-emissions climate change scenarios. As BP and other credible sources for coal, oil, and natural gas reserves figures show, and as more and more researchers are pointing out, the worst-case climate scenarios associated with “business as usual” levels of carbon emissions are in fact unrealistic.
Now, the bad news. While we could live perfectly well with less energy, that’s not what the managers of our economy want. They want growth. Our entire economy is structured to require constant, compounded growth of GDP, and for all practical purposes raising the GDP means using more energy. While fringe economists and environmentalists have for years been proposing ways to back away from our growth addiction (for example, by using alternative economic indices such as Gross National Happiness), none of these proposals has been put into widespread effect. As things now stand, if growth falters the economy crashes.
There’s bad climate news as well: even with current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, we’re seeing unacceptable and worsening impacts—raging fires, soaring heat levels, and melting icecaps. And there are hints that self-reinforcing feedbacks may be kicking in: an example is the release of large amounts of methane from thawing tundra and oceanic hydrates, which could lead to a short-term but steep spike in warming. Also, no one is sure if current metrics of climate sensitivity (used to estimate the response of the global climate system to a given level of forcing) are accurate, or whether the climate is actually more sensitive than we have assumed. There’s some worrisome evidence the latter is case.
But let’s step back a bit. If we’re interested in signs of impending global crisis, there’s no need to stop with just these two global challenges. The world is losing 25 billion tons of topsoil a year due to current industrial agricultural practices; if we don’t deal with that issue, civilization will still crash even if we do manage to ace our energy and climate test. Humanity is also over-using fresh water: ancient aquifers are depleting, while other water sources are being polluted. If we don’t deal with our water crisis, we still crash. Species are going extinct at a thousand times the pre-industrial rate; if we don’t deal with the biodiversity dilemma, we still crash. Then there are social and economic problems that could cause nations to crumble even if we manage to protect the environment; this threat category includes the menaces of over-reliance on debt and increasing economic inequality.
If we attack each of these problems piecemeal with technological fixes (for example, with desalination technology to solve the water crisis or geo-engineering to stabilize the climate) we may still crash because our techno-fixes are likely to have unintended consequences, as all technological interventions do. Anyway, the likelihood of successfully identifying and deploying all the needed fixes in time is vanishingly small.
Many problems are converging at once because society is a complex system, and the challenges we have been discussing are aspects of a systemic crisis. A useful way to frame an integrated understanding of the 21st century survival challenge is this: we humans have overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for our species. We’ve been able to do this due to a temporary subsidy of cheap, bountiful energy from fossil fuels, which enabled us to stretch nature’s limits and to support a far larger overall population than would otherwise be possible. But now we are starting to see supply constraints for those fuels, just as the side effects of burning enormous amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas are also coming into view. Meanwhile, using cheap energy to expand resource-extractive and waste-generating economic processes is leading to biodiversity loss; the depletion of soil, water, and minerals; and environmental pollution of many kinds. Just decarbonizing energy, while necessary, doesn’t adequately deal with systemic overshoot. Only a reduction of population and overall resource consumption, along with a rapid reduction in our reliance on fossil fuels and a redesign of industrial systems, can do that.
Economic inequality is a systemic problem too. As we’ve grown our economy, those who were in position to invest in industrial expansion or to loan money to others have reaped the majority of the rewards, while those who got by through selling their time and labor (or whose common cultural heritage was simply appropriated by industrialists) have fallen behind. There’s no technological fix for inequality; dealing with it will require redesigning our economic system and redistributing wealth. Those in wealthy nations would, on average, have to adjust their living standards downward.
Now, can we do all of this without a crash? Probably not. Indeed, many economists would regard the medicine (population reduction, a decline in per-capita energy use, and economic redistribution) as worse than whatever aspects of the disease they are willing to acknowledge. Environmentalists and human rights advocates would disagree. Which is to say, there’s really no way out. Whether we stick with business as usual, or attempt a dramatic multi-pronged intervention, our current “normal” way of life is toast.
Accepting that a crash is more or less inevitable is a big step, psychologically speaking. I call this toxic knowledge: one cannot “un-know” that the current world system hangs by a thread, and this understanding can lead to depression.
The Big Picture, Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute. Dec. 19, 2018.
Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without leading to a serious failure of our civilization’s ability to maintain itself. Taken together, these metastasizing problems suggest we are headed toward some kind of historic discontinuity.
Serious discontinuities tend to disrupt the timelines of all complex societies (another name for civilizations—that is, societies with cities, writing, money, and full-time division of labor). The ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations all collapsed. Archaeologists, historians, and systems thinkers have spent decades seeking an explanation for this pattern of failure—a general unified theory of civilizational collapse, if you will. One of the most promising concepts that could serve as the basis for such a theory comes from resilience science, a branch of ecology(the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments).
Why Civilizations Collapse: The Adaptive Cycle
Ecosystems have been observed almost universally to repeatedly pass through four phases of the adaptive cycle: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. Imagine, for example, a Ponderosa pine forest. Following a disturbance such as a fire (in which stored carbon is released into the environment), hardy and adaptable “pioneer” species of plants and small animals fill in open niches and reproduce rapidly.
This reorganization phase of the cycle soon transitions to an exploitation phase, in which those species that can take advantage of relationships with other species start to dominate. These relationships make the system more stable, but at the expense of diversity.
During the conservation phase, resources like nutrients, water, and sunlight are so taken up by the dominant species that the system as a whole eventually loses its flexibility to deal with changing conditions. These trends lead to a point where the system is susceptible to a crash—a release phase. Many trees die, dispersing their nutrients, opening the forest canopy to let more light in, and providing habitat for shrubs and small animals. The cycle starts over.
Civilizations do roughly the same thing. In their early days, complex societies are populated with generalist pioneers (people who do lots of things reasonably well) living in an environment with abundant resources ready to be exploited. These people develop tools to enable them to exploit their resources more effectively. Division of labor and trade with increasingly distant regions also aids in more thorough resource exploitation. Trading and administrative centers, i.e., cities, appear and grow. Money is increasingly used to facilitate trade, while debt enables a transfer of consumption from the future to the present. Specialists in violence, armed with improved weaponry, conquer surrounding peoples.
Complexity (more kinds of tools, more social classes, more specialization) solves problems and enables accumulation of wealth, leading to a conservation phase during which an empire is built and great achievements are made in the arts and sciences. However, as time goes on, the costs of complexity accumulate and the resilience of the society declines. Tax burdens become unbearable, natural resources become depleted, environments become polluted, and conquered peoples become restless. At its height, each civilization appears stable and invincible. Yet it is just at this moment of triumph that it is vulnerable to external enemies and internal discord. Debt can no longer be repaid. Conquered peoples revolt. A natural disaster breaks open the façade of stability and control.
Collapse often comes swiftly, leaving ruin in its wake. But at least some of the components that made the civilization great (including tools and elements of practical knowledge) persist, and the natural environment has opportunity to regenerate and recover, eventually enabling reorganization and a new exploitation phase—that is, the rise of yet another civilization.
Ecosystems have been observed almost universally to repeatedly pass through four phases of the adaptive cycle: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. Imagine, for example, a Ponderosa pine forest. Following a disturbance such as a fire (in which stored carbon is released into the environment), hardy and adaptable “pioneer” species of plants and small animals fill in open niches and reproduce rapidly.
This reorganization phase of the cycle soon transitions to an exploitation phase, in which those species that can take advantage of relationships with other species start to dominate. These relationships make the system more stable, but at the expense of diversity.
During the conservation phase, resources like nutrients, water, and sunlight are so taken up by the dominant species that the system as a whole eventually loses its flexibility to deal with changing conditions. These trends lead to a point where the system is susceptible to a crash—a release phase. Many trees die, dispersing their nutrients, opening the forest canopy to let more light in, and providing habitat for shrubs and small animals. The cycle starts over.
Civilizations do roughly the same thing. In their early days, complex societies are populated with generalist pioneers (people who do lots of things reasonably well) living in an environment with abundant resources ready to be exploited. These people develop tools to enable them to exploit their resources more effectively. Division of labor and trade with increasingly distant regions also aids in more thorough resource exploitation. Trading and administrative centers, i.e., cities, appear and grow. Money is increasingly used to facilitate trade, while debt enables a transfer of consumption from the future to the present. Specialists in violence, armed with improved weaponry, conquer surrounding peoples.
Complexity (more kinds of tools, more social classes, more specialization) solves problems and enables accumulation of wealth, leading to a conservation phase during which an empire is built and great achievements are made in the arts and sciences. However, as time goes on, the costs of complexity accumulate and the resilience of the society declines. Tax burdens become unbearable, natural resources become depleted, environments become polluted, and conquered peoples become restless. At its height, each civilization appears stable and invincible. Yet it is just at this moment of triumph that it is vulnerable to external enemies and internal discord. Debt can no longer be repaid. Conquered peoples revolt. A natural disaster breaks open the façade of stability and control.
Collapse often comes swiftly, leaving ruin in its wake. But at least some of the components that made the civilization great (including tools and elements of practical knowledge) persist, and the natural environment has opportunity to regenerate and recover, eventually enabling reorganization and a new exploitation phase—that is, the rise of yet another civilization.
Energy Is Everything
Global industrial civilization shows significant signs of being in its conservation phase. Our accomplishments are mind-boggling, but our systems are overstretched, and problems (including climate change, inequality, and political dysfunction) are accumulating and worsening. However, our civilization is different from any of its predecessors. Unlike the ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Shang Dynasty Chinese, Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans, we have built a civilization that is global in scope. We have invented modes of transportation and communication previously unimaginable. Thanks to advances in public health and agriculture, the total human population has grown to many times its size when Roman armies marched across North Africa, Europe, and Britain. Have we perhaps outgrown the adaptive cycle and escaped natural checks to perpetual expansion?
Global industrial civilization shows significant signs of being in its conservation phase. Our accomplishments are mind-boggling, but our systems are overstretched, and problems (including climate change, inequality, and political dysfunction) are accumulating and worsening. However, our civilization is different from any of its predecessors. Unlike the ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Shang Dynasty Chinese, Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans, we have built a civilization that is global in scope. We have invented modes of transportation and communication previously unimaginable. Thanks to advances in public health and agriculture, the total human population has grown to many times its size when Roman armies marched across North Africa, Europe, and Britain. Have we perhaps outgrown the adaptive cycle and escaped natural checks to perpetual expansion?
In order to answer the question, we must first inquire why modern civilization has been so successful. The rise of technology, including advances in metallurgy and engineering, certainly played a part. These provided better ways of obtaining and harnessing energy. But it’s the rapid shift in qualities and quantities of energy available to us that really made the difference.
Previously, people derived their energy from annual plant growth (food and firewood), and manipulated their environment using human and animal muscle power. These energy sources were inherently limited. But, starting in the 19th century, new technologies enabled us to access and harness the energy of fossil fuels. And fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—were able to provide energy in amounts far surpassing previous energy sources.
Energy is everything. All terrestrial ecosystems and all human societies are essentially machines for using (and dissipating) solar energy that has been collected and concentrated through photosynthesis. We like to think that money makes the world go ’round, but it is actually energy that enables us to do anything at all—from merely getting up in the morning to launching a space station. And having lots of energy available cheaply can enable us to do a great deal.
Fossil fuels represent tens of millions of years’ worth of stored ancient sunlight. They are energy-dense, portable, and storable sources of power. Accessing them changed nearly everything about human existence. They were uniquely transformative in that they enabled higher rates of harvesting and using all other resources—via tractors, bulldozers, powered mining equipment, chainsaws, motorized fishing trawlers, and more.
Take just one example. In all previous agrarian civilizations, roughly three-quarters of the population had to farm in order to supply a food surplus to support the other 25 percent—who lived as aristocrats, traders, soldiers, artisans, and so on. Fossil fuels enabled the industrialization and automation of agriculture, as well as longer-distance distribution chains.
Today only one or two percent of the U.S. population need to farm full-time in order to supply everyone else with food. The industrialization of food systems has freed up nearly all of the former peasant class to move to cities and take up jobs in manufacturing, marketing, finance, advertising, management, sales, and so on. Thus urbanization and the dramatic expansion of the middle class during the 20th century were almost entirely attributable to fossil fuels.
But fossil fuels have been a bargain with the devil: these are depleting, non-renewable resources, and burning them produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, changing the climate and the chemistry of the world’s oceans. These are not small problems. Climate change by itself is far and away the most serious pollution dilemma any human society has ever faced, and could lead to crashing ecosystems, failing food systems, and widespread forced human migration.
Replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources is possible in principle, but doing so fully would require massive investment, not just for building solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear reactors (there are some other serious problems with this latter option), but also for the retooling of manufacturing, transportation, buildings, and food systems to run on electricity instead of solid, liquid, or gaseous fuels. An energy transition is needed, but it’s not happening at even nearly the pace that would be required in order to forestall catastrophic climate change or to prevent economic decline resulting from the depletion of the world’s highest quality oil, coal, and gas resources. Industrial society’s failure to make this energy transition is no doubt due not just to well-funded opposition by the fossil fuel industry, but also to the enormous technical challenge posed, and to the failure of policy makers to champion and implement the carbon taxes and alternative energy subsidies that would be needed.
And so we accelerate toward ecological and economic ruin.
Why It’s So Hard to See that We’re Headed for the Biggest Crash Ever
This is fairly typical of what happens toward the end of the conservation phase of every civilization’s adaptive cycle. Each problem that arises, taken by itself, is usually solvable—at least in principle. But, as problems accumulate, leaders who are accustomed to (and benefit from) the status quo grow increasingly reluctant to undertake the changes to systems and procedures that would be required in order to address worrisome trends. And as those trends are ignored, the level of effort and discomfort needed to reverse them soars. Once solving problems requires too much perceived sacrifice, the only realistic ways to deal with them are to deny their existence or to blame others for them. Blame has the advantages of enabling leaders to look as though they’re actually doing something, and of winning loyalty from their followers. But it does nothing to actually stave off snowballing crises.
It’s easy enough to see how elites could lose touch with reality and miss signals of impending collapse. But why would everyone else follow suit? Recent discoveries in neuroscience help explain why it’s hard for most of us to grasp that we’re on an unsustainable path.
We humans have an understandable innate tendency, when making decisions, to give more weight to present threats and opportunities than to future ones. This is called discounting the future—and it makes it hard to sacrifice now to overcome an enormous future risk such as climate change. The immediate reward of vacationing in another country, for example, is likely to overwhelm our concern about the greenhouse gas footprint of our airline flight. Multiply that future-discounting tendency in one instance by the billions of individual decisions with climate repercussions and you can see why it’s difficult to actually reduce our total greenhouse gas emissions.
We humans are also wired to respond to novelty—to notice anything in our environment that is out of place or unexpected and that might signal a potential threat or reward. Most types of reward increase the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine within the brain. Experiments have found that if an animal’s dopamine receptor genes are removed, it explores less and takes fewer risks—and without some exploration and risk taking, individuals have reduced chances of survival. But the human brain’s dopamine reward system, which evolved to serve this practical function, can be hijacked by addictive substances and behaviors. This is especially problematic in a culture full of novel stimuli specifically designed to attract our interest—such as the hundreds of advertising messages the average child sees each day. We have become addicted to stimuli that our culture has multiplied and refined specifically for the purpose of grabbing our attention (for fun and profit) to such a degree that we barely notice long-term trends that are as threatening as a charging rhino.
The power holders in society incentivize smart people below them in rank and wealth to normalize the unsustainable, deny impending consequences, and distract one and all from worsening contradictions. Economists who claim that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet win Nobel Prizes. Politicians who argue that climate change is a hoax attract big campaign contributions. Pundits and entrepreneurs advance along their career paths by asserting that society can grow its way out of climate change and resource depletion traps through “decoupling” (service economies, it is claimed, can expand in perpetuity without requiring additional energy or physical resources). Technology mavens win fame and glory by informing us that artificial intelligence, 3D printing, or Blockchain will usher in the “singularity,” at which point no one will have to work and all human needs and desires can be satisfied by self-reproducing machines.
Denial comes in shades, some of them quite benign. Many thoughtful and informed people acknowledge the threats of climate change, species extinctions, soil depletion, and so on, and insist that we can overcome these threats if we just try harder. They are often on the right track when they propose changes. Elect different, more responsible politicians. Donate to environmental nonprofit organizations. Drive an electric car. Put solar panels on our roofs. Start solar co-ops or regional non-profit utility companies that aim to source all electricity from renewable sources. Eat organic food. Shop at local farmers markets. These are all actions that move society in the right direction (that is, away from the brink of failure)—but in small increments. Perhaps people can be motivated to undertake such efforts through the belief that a smooth transition and a happy future are possible, and that renewable energy will create plentiful jobs and lead to a perpetually growing green economy. There is no point in discouraging such beliefs and their related actions; quite the contrary: they should, if anything, be encouraged. Such practical efforts, however motivated or rationalized, could help moderate collapse, even if they can’t prevent it (a point we’ll return to below). But an element of denial persists nonetheless—denial, that is, of the reality that the overall trajectory of modern industrial society is beyond our control, and that it leads inexorably toward overshoot and collapse.
This is fairly typical of what happens toward the end of the conservation phase of every civilization’s adaptive cycle. Each problem that arises, taken by itself, is usually solvable—at least in principle. But, as problems accumulate, leaders who are accustomed to (and benefit from) the status quo grow increasingly reluctant to undertake the changes to systems and procedures that would be required in order to address worrisome trends. And as those trends are ignored, the level of effort and discomfort needed to reverse them soars. Once solving problems requires too much perceived sacrifice, the only realistic ways to deal with them are to deny their existence or to blame others for them. Blame has the advantages of enabling leaders to look as though they’re actually doing something, and of winning loyalty from their followers. But it does nothing to actually stave off snowballing crises.
It’s easy enough to see how elites could lose touch with reality and miss signals of impending collapse. But why would everyone else follow suit? Recent discoveries in neuroscience help explain why it’s hard for most of us to grasp that we’re on an unsustainable path.
We humans have an understandable innate tendency, when making decisions, to give more weight to present threats and opportunities than to future ones. This is called discounting the future—and it makes it hard to sacrifice now to overcome an enormous future risk such as climate change. The immediate reward of vacationing in another country, for example, is likely to overwhelm our concern about the greenhouse gas footprint of our airline flight. Multiply that future-discounting tendency in one instance by the billions of individual decisions with climate repercussions and you can see why it’s difficult to actually reduce our total greenhouse gas emissions.
We humans are also wired to respond to novelty—to notice anything in our environment that is out of place or unexpected and that might signal a potential threat or reward. Most types of reward increase the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine within the brain. Experiments have found that if an animal’s dopamine receptor genes are removed, it explores less and takes fewer risks—and without some exploration and risk taking, individuals have reduced chances of survival. But the human brain’s dopamine reward system, which evolved to serve this practical function, can be hijacked by addictive substances and behaviors. This is especially problematic in a culture full of novel stimuli specifically designed to attract our interest—such as the hundreds of advertising messages the average child sees each day. We have become addicted to stimuli that our culture has multiplied and refined specifically for the purpose of grabbing our attention (for fun and profit) to such a degree that we barely notice long-term trends that are as threatening as a charging rhino.
The power holders in society incentivize smart people below them in rank and wealth to normalize the unsustainable, deny impending consequences, and distract one and all from worsening contradictions. Economists who claim that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet win Nobel Prizes. Politicians who argue that climate change is a hoax attract big campaign contributions. Pundits and entrepreneurs advance along their career paths by asserting that society can grow its way out of climate change and resource depletion traps through “decoupling” (service economies, it is claimed, can expand in perpetuity without requiring additional energy or physical resources). Technology mavens win fame and glory by informing us that artificial intelligence, 3D printing, or Blockchain will usher in the “singularity,” at which point no one will have to work and all human needs and desires can be satisfied by self-reproducing machines.
Denial comes in shades, some of them quite benign. Many thoughtful and informed people acknowledge the threats of climate change, species extinctions, soil depletion, and so on, and insist that we can overcome these threats if we just try harder. They are often on the right track when they propose changes. Elect different, more responsible politicians. Donate to environmental nonprofit organizations. Drive an electric car. Put solar panels on our roofs. Start solar co-ops or regional non-profit utility companies that aim to source all electricity from renewable sources. Eat organic food. Shop at local farmers markets. These are all actions that move society in the right direction (that is, away from the brink of failure)—but in small increments. Perhaps people can be motivated to undertake such efforts through the belief that a smooth transition and a happy future are possible, and that renewable energy will create plentiful jobs and lead to a perpetually growing green economy. There is no point in discouraging such beliefs and their related actions; quite the contrary: they should, if anything, be encouraged. Such practical efforts, however motivated or rationalized, could help moderate collapse, even if they can’t prevent it (a point we’ll return to below). But an element of denial persists nonetheless—denial, that is, of the reality that the overall trajectory of modern industrial society is beyond our control, and that it leads inexorably toward overshoot and collapse.
What to Do?
All of the above may help us better understand why the world seems to be running off the rails. But the implications are horrific. If all this is true, then we now face more-or-less inevitable economic, social, political, and ecological calamity. And since industrial civilization is now global, and human population levels are multiples higher than in any previous century, this calamity could occur on a scale never seen before. Although no one can possibly predict at this point just how complete and awful collapse might actually be, even human extinction is conceivable (though no one can say with any confidence that it is likely, much less inevitable).
This is more than a fragile human psyche can bear. One’s own mortality is hard enough to contemplate. A school of psychology (“terror management theory”) proposes that many of our cultural institutions and practices (religion, values of national identity) exist at least in part to help us deal with the intolerable knowledge of our inevitable personal demise. How much harder must it be to acknowledge signs of the imminent passing of one’s entire way of life, and the extreme disruption of familiar ecosystems? It is therefore no wonder that so many of us opt for denial and distraction.
There’s no question that collapse is a scary word. When we hear it, we tend to think immediately of images from movies like Mad Max and The Road. We assume collapse means a sudden and complete dissolution of everything meaningful. Our reasoning shuts down. But this is just when we need it most.
In reality, there are degrees of collapse, and history shows that the process has usually taken decades and sometimes centuries to unfold, often in stair-steps punctuated by periods of partial recovery. Further, it may be possible to intervene in collapse to improve outcomes—for ourselves, our communities, our species, and thousands of other species. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, medieval Irish monks may have “saved civilization” by memorizing and transcribing ancient texts. Could we, with planning and motivation, do as much and more?
All of the above may help us better understand why the world seems to be running off the rails. But the implications are horrific. If all this is true, then we now face more-or-less inevitable economic, social, political, and ecological calamity. And since industrial civilization is now global, and human population levels are multiples higher than in any previous century, this calamity could occur on a scale never seen before. Although no one can possibly predict at this point just how complete and awful collapse might actually be, even human extinction is conceivable (though no one can say with any confidence that it is likely, much less inevitable).
This is more than a fragile human psyche can bear. One’s own mortality is hard enough to contemplate. A school of psychology (“terror management theory”) proposes that many of our cultural institutions and practices (religion, values of national identity) exist at least in part to help us deal with the intolerable knowledge of our inevitable personal demise. How much harder must it be to acknowledge signs of the imminent passing of one’s entire way of life, and the extreme disruption of familiar ecosystems? It is therefore no wonder that so many of us opt for denial and distraction.
There’s no question that collapse is a scary word. When we hear it, we tend to think immediately of images from movies like Mad Max and The Road. We assume collapse means a sudden and complete dissolution of everything meaningful. Our reasoning shuts down. But this is just when we need it most.
In reality, there are degrees of collapse, and history shows that the process has usually taken decades and sometimes centuries to unfold, often in stair-steps punctuated by periods of partial recovery. Further, it may be possible to intervene in collapse to improve outcomes—for ourselves, our communities, our species, and thousands of other species. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, medieval Irish monks may have “saved civilization” by memorizing and transcribing ancient texts. Could we, with planning and motivation, do as much and more?
Many of the things we could do toward this end are already being done in order to avert climate change and other converging crises. Again, people who voluntarily reduce energy usage, eat locally grown organic food, make the effort to get to know their neighbors, get off the consumer treadmill, reduce their debt, help protect local biodiversity by planting species that feed or shelter native pollinators, use biochar in their gardens, support political candidates who prioritize addressing the sustainability crisis, and contribute to environmental, population, and human rights organizations are all helping moderate the impending collapse and ensure that there will be more survivors. We could do more. Acting together, we could start to re-green the planet; begin to incorporate captured carbon not only in soils, but in nearly everything we make, including concrete, paper, and plastics; and design a new economic system based on mutual aid rather than competition, debt, and perpetual growth. All of these efforts make sense with or without the knowledge that civilization is nearing its sell-by date. How we describe the goals of these efforts—whether as ways of improving people’s lives, as ways to save the planet, as fulfilling the evolutionary potential of our species, as contributing to a general spiritual awakening, or as ways of moderating an inevitable civilizational crash—is relatively unimportant.
However, the Big Picture (an understanding of the adaptive cycle, the role of energy, and our overshoot predicament) adds both a sense of urgency, and also a new set of priorities that are currently being neglected. For example, when civilizations collapse, culturally significant knowledge is typically lost. It’s probably inevitable that we will lose a great deal of our shared knowledge during the coming centuries. Much of this information is trivial anyway (will our distant descendants really suffer from not having the ability to watch archived episodes of Let’s Make a Deal or Storage Wars?). Yet people across the globe now use fragile storage media—computer and server hard drives—to store everything from music to books to instruction manuals. In the event that the world’s electricity grids could no longer be maintained, we would miss more than comfort and convenience; we could lose science, higher mathematics, and history.
It’s not only the dominant industrial culture that is vulnerable to information loss. Indigenous cultures that have survived for millennia are being rapidly eroded by the forces of globalization, resulting in the extinction of region-specific knowledge that could help future humans live sustainably.
Upon whom does the responsibility fall to curate, safeguard, and reproduce all this knowledge, if not those who understand its peril?
Act Where You Are: Community Resilience
We at Post Carbon Institute (PCI) have been aware of the Big Picture since the founding of the organization 15 years ago. We’ve been privileged to meet, and draw upon the insights of, some of the pioneering ecologists of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s who laid the basis of our current understanding of resilience science, systems thinking, climate change, resource depletion, and much more. And we’ve strived to convey that understanding to a younger generation of thinkers and activists.
Throughout this time, we have continually grappled with the question, “What plan for action makes the most sense in the context of the Big Picture, given our meager organizational resources?”
After protracted discussion, we’ve hit upon a four-fold strategy.
Encourage resilience building at the community level.
Resilience is the capacity of a system to encounter disruption and still maintain its basic structure and functions. When it is in its conservation phase, a system’s resilience is typically at its lowest level throughout the entire adaptive cycle. If it is possible at this point to build resilience into the human social system, and ecological systems, then the approaching release phase of the cycle may be more moderate and less intense.
Why undertake resilience building in communities, rather than attempting to do so at the national or international level? It’s because the community is the most available and effective level of scale at which to intervene in human systems. National action is difficult these days, and not only in the United States: discussions about nearly everything quickly become politicized, polarized, and contested. It’s at the community level where we most directly interact with the people and institutions that make up our society. It’s where we’re most affected by the decisions society makes: what jobs are available to us, what infrastructure is available for our use, and what policies exist that limit or empower us. And critically, it’s where the majority of us who do not wield major political or economic power can most directly affect society, as voters, neighbors, entrepreneurs, volunteers, shoppers, activists, and elected officials.
PCI has supported Transition Initiatives since its inception as one useful, locally replicable, and adaptable model for community resilience building.
Leave good ideas lying around.
Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, quotes economist Milton Friedman, who wrote:
Friedman and other neoliberal economists have used this “shock doctrine” for decades to undermine regional economies, national governments, and indigenous cultures in order to further the project of corporate-led economic globalization. Klein’s point is that the key to taking advantage of crises is having effective system-changing plans waiting in the wings for the ripe moment. And that’s a strategy that makes sense as society as a whole teeters on the brink of an immensely disruptive shift.
What ideas and skills need to be lying around as industrial civilization crumbles? One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting adoption is permaculture—a set of design tools for living created by ecologists back in the 1970s who understood that industrial civilization would eventually reach its limits. Another set consists of consensus group decision-making skills. The list could go on at some length.
Target innovators and early adopters.
Back in the 1960s, Everett Rogers, a professor of communications, contributed the theory of the Diffusion of Innovations, which describes how, why, and at what rate new ideas, social innovations, and technology spread throughout culture. The key to the theory is his identification of different types of individuals in the population, in terms of how they relate to the development and adoption of something new: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
Innovators are important, but the success of their efforts depends on diffusion of the innovation among early adopters, who tend to be few in number but exceptionally influential in the general population.
At PCI, we have decided to focus our communications on early adopters.
Help people grasp the Big Picture.
Discussions about the vulnerability of civilization to collapse are not for everyone. Some of us are too psychologically fragile. All of us need a break occasionally, and time to feel and process the emotions that contemplating the Big Picture inevitably evokes. But for those able to take in the information and still function, the Big Picture offers helpful perspective. It confirms what many of us already intuitively know. And it provides a context for strategic action.
Pro-Social, Nonpartisan
I’m frequently asked if I have hope for the future. My usual reply is along these lines: hope is not just an expectation of better times ahead; it is an active attitude, a determination to achieve the best possible outcome regardless of the challenges one is facing. PCI Fellow David Orr summed this up best when he wrote, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
However, if that’s as far as the discussion goes, merely redefining “hope” may seem facile and unsatisfying. The questioner wants and needs reasonable grounds for believing that an outcome is possible that is something other than horrific. There is indeed evidence along these lines, and it should not be ignored.
Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that we humans are becoming more peaceful and cooperative. Now, it could be argued that any decline in violence during the past few decades can be seen as yet another indication that civilization is in a conservation phase of the adaptive cycle: we have attained a balance of power, facilitated by the wealth flowing ultimately from fossil fuels; perhaps violence is simply being held in abeyance until the dam breaks and we head into the release phase of the cycle. Nevertheless, evolution is real, and for humans it occurs more rapidly via culture than through genes. It is entirely possible, therefore, that we humans are rapidly evolving to live more peacefully in larger groups.
Earlier I explained how the findings of neuroscience help us understand why so many of us turn to denial and distraction in the face of terrible threats to civilization’s survival. Neuroscience also offers good news: it teaches us that cooperative impulses are rooted deep in our evolutionary past, just like competitive ones. Self-restraint and empathy for others are partly learned behaviors, acquired and developed in the same way as our capacity for language. We inherit both selfishness and the capacity for altruism, but culture generally nudges us more in the direction of the latter, as parents are traditionally encouraged to teach their children to share and not to be wasteful or arrogant.
Disaster research informs us that, in the early phases of crisis, people typically respond with extraordinary degrees of cooperation and self-sacrifice (I witnessed this in the immediate aftermath of wildfires in my community of Santa Rosa, California). But if privation persists, they may turn toward blame and competition for scarce resources.
All of this suggests that the one thing that is most likely to influence how our communities get through the coming meta-crisis is the quality of relationships among members. A great deal depends on whether we exhibit pro-social attitudes and responses, while discouraging blame and panic. Those of us working to build community resilience need to avoid partisan frames and loaded words, and appeal to shared values. Everyone must understand that we’re all in this together. The Big Picture can help here, if it aids people in grasping that the collapse of civilization is not any one group’s fault. It is only by pulling together that we can hope to salvage and protect what is most intrinsically valuable about our world, and perhaps even improve lives over the long term.
Hard times are in store. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. Each day of relative normalcy that remains is an occasion for thankfulness and an opportunity for action.
We at Post Carbon Institute (PCI) have been aware of the Big Picture since the founding of the organization 15 years ago. We’ve been privileged to meet, and draw upon the insights of, some of the pioneering ecologists of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s who laid the basis of our current understanding of resilience science, systems thinking, climate change, resource depletion, and much more. And we’ve strived to convey that understanding to a younger generation of thinkers and activists.
Throughout this time, we have continually grappled with the question, “What plan for action makes the most sense in the context of the Big Picture, given our meager organizational resources?”
After protracted discussion, we’ve hit upon a four-fold strategy.
Encourage resilience building at the community level.
Resilience is the capacity of a system to encounter disruption and still maintain its basic structure and functions. When it is in its conservation phase, a system’s resilience is typically at its lowest level throughout the entire adaptive cycle. If it is possible at this point to build resilience into the human social system, and ecological systems, then the approaching release phase of the cycle may be more moderate and less intense.
Why undertake resilience building in communities, rather than attempting to do so at the national or international level? It’s because the community is the most available and effective level of scale at which to intervene in human systems. National action is difficult these days, and not only in the United States: discussions about nearly everything quickly become politicized, polarized, and contested. It’s at the community level where we most directly interact with the people and institutions that make up our society. It’s where we’re most affected by the decisions society makes: what jobs are available to us, what infrastructure is available for our use, and what policies exist that limit or empower us. And critically, it’s where the majority of us who do not wield major political or economic power can most directly affect society, as voters, neighbors, entrepreneurs, volunteers, shoppers, activists, and elected officials.
PCI has supported Transition Initiatives since its inception as one useful, locally replicable, and adaptable model for community resilience building.
Leave good ideas lying around.
Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, quotes economist Milton Friedman, who wrote:
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Friedman and other neoliberal economists have used this “shock doctrine” for decades to undermine regional economies, national governments, and indigenous cultures in order to further the project of corporate-led economic globalization. Klein’s point is that the key to taking advantage of crises is having effective system-changing plans waiting in the wings for the ripe moment. And that’s a strategy that makes sense as society as a whole teeters on the brink of an immensely disruptive shift.
What ideas and skills need to be lying around as industrial civilization crumbles? One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting adoption is permaculture—a set of design tools for living created by ecologists back in the 1970s who understood that industrial civilization would eventually reach its limits. Another set consists of consensus group decision-making skills. The list could go on at some length.
Target innovators and early adopters.
Back in the 1960s, Everett Rogers, a professor of communications, contributed the theory of the Diffusion of Innovations, which describes how, why, and at what rate new ideas, social innovations, and technology spread throughout culture. The key to the theory is his identification of different types of individuals in the population, in terms of how they relate to the development and adoption of something new: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
Innovators are important, but the success of their efforts depends on diffusion of the innovation among early adopters, who tend to be few in number but exceptionally influential in the general population.
At PCI, we have decided to focus our communications on early adopters.
Help people grasp the Big Picture.
Discussions about the vulnerability of civilization to collapse are not for everyone. Some of us are too psychologically fragile. All of us need a break occasionally, and time to feel and process the emotions that contemplating the Big Picture inevitably evokes. But for those able to take in the information and still function, the Big Picture offers helpful perspective. It confirms what many of us already intuitively know. And it provides a context for strategic action.
Pro-Social, Nonpartisan
I’m frequently asked if I have hope for the future. My usual reply is along these lines: hope is not just an expectation of better times ahead; it is an active attitude, a determination to achieve the best possible outcome regardless of the challenges one is facing. PCI Fellow David Orr summed this up best when he wrote, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
However, if that’s as far as the discussion goes, merely redefining “hope” may seem facile and unsatisfying. The questioner wants and needs reasonable grounds for believing that an outcome is possible that is something other than horrific. There is indeed evidence along these lines, and it should not be ignored.
Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that we humans are becoming more peaceful and cooperative. Now, it could be argued that any decline in violence during the past few decades can be seen as yet another indication that civilization is in a conservation phase of the adaptive cycle: we have attained a balance of power, facilitated by the wealth flowing ultimately from fossil fuels; perhaps violence is simply being held in abeyance until the dam breaks and we head into the release phase of the cycle. Nevertheless, evolution is real, and for humans it occurs more rapidly via culture than through genes. It is entirely possible, therefore, that we humans are rapidly evolving to live more peacefully in larger groups.
Earlier I explained how the findings of neuroscience help us understand why so many of us turn to denial and distraction in the face of terrible threats to civilization’s survival. Neuroscience also offers good news: it teaches us that cooperative impulses are rooted deep in our evolutionary past, just like competitive ones. Self-restraint and empathy for others are partly learned behaviors, acquired and developed in the same way as our capacity for language. We inherit both selfishness and the capacity for altruism, but culture generally nudges us more in the direction of the latter, as parents are traditionally encouraged to teach their children to share and not to be wasteful or arrogant.
Disaster research informs us that, in the early phases of crisis, people typically respond with extraordinary degrees of cooperation and self-sacrifice (I witnessed this in the immediate aftermath of wildfires in my community of Santa Rosa, California). But if privation persists, they may turn toward blame and competition for scarce resources.
All of this suggests that the one thing that is most likely to influence how our communities get through the coming meta-crisis is the quality of relationships among members. A great deal depends on whether we exhibit pro-social attitudes and responses, while discouraging blame and panic. Those of us working to build community resilience need to avoid partisan frames and loaded words, and appeal to shared values. Everyone must understand that we’re all in this together. The Big Picture can help here, if it aids people in grasping that the collapse of civilization is not any one group’s fault. It is only by pulling together that we can hope to salvage and protect what is most intrinsically valuable about our world, and perhaps even improve lives over the long term.
Hard times are in store. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. Each day of relative normalcy that remains is an occasion for thankfulness and an opportunity for action.
Our Bonus Decade. Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute. Oct. 30, 2018.
“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”
–George Eliot, Silas Marner
It’s been ten years since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Print, online, and broadcast news media have dutifully featured articles and programs commemorating the crisis, wherein commentators mull why it happened, what we learned from it, and what we failed to learn. Nearly all of these articles and programs have adopted the perspective of conventional economic theory, in which the global economy is seen as an inherently stable system that experiences an occasional market crash as a result of greed, bad policies, or “irrational exuberance” (to use Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase). From this perspective, recovery from the GFC was certainly to be expected, even though it could have been impeded by poor decisions.
Some of us have a different view. From our minority perspective, the global economy as currently configured is inherently not just unstable, but unsustainable. The economy depends on perpetual growth of GDP, whereas we live upon a finite planet on which the compounded growth of any material process or quantity inevitably leads to a crash. The economy requires ever-increasing energy supplies, mostly from fossil fuels, whereas coal, oil, and natural gas are nonrenewable, depleting, and climate-changing resources. And the economy, rather than being circular, like ecosystems (where waste from one component is food for another, so all elements are continually recycled), is instead linear (proceeding from resource extraction to waste disposal), even though our planet has limited resources and finite waste sinks.
In the minority view of those who understand that there are limits to growth, the GFC (or something like it) was entirely to be expected, since whatever cannot be sustained must, by definition, eventually stop. Indeed, the crash requires less of an explanation than the recovery that followed. Instead of skidding into a prolonged and deepening depression, the global economy—at least as measured conventionally—has, in the past years, scaled new heights. In the US, the stock market is up, unemployment is down, and GDP is humming along nicely. Most other nations have also seen a recovery, after a fashion at least. We have enjoyed ten years of reprieve from crisis and decline. How was this achieved? What does it mean?
Let’s take a look back, through the lens of the minority view, at this most unusual decade.
Where We Were
The years leading up to 2008 saw (among other things, of course) soaring interest in the notion of peak oil. Many peak oil analysts were industry experts who studied depletion rates, production decline rates in existing oil wells and oilfields, and rates of oil discovery. They reached their conclusions by analyzing the available data using charts, equations, and graphs; and by extrapolating future production rates for oilfields and countries. They generally agreed that the rate of world oil production would hit a maximum sometime between 2005 and 2020, and decline thereafter.However, some peak oilers were ecologists (I was among this group). Informed by the 1972 computer scenario study The Limits to Growth (LTG), these observers and commentators understood that many of Earth’s resources (not just fossil fuels) are being used at unsustainable rates. The “standard run” LTG scenario featured peaks and declines in world industrial output, food production, and population, all in the first half of the twenty-first century. The peak oil ecologists therefore saw the imminent decline in world petroleum output as a likely trigger event in the larger process of society’s environmental overshoot and collapse.
The two groups shared an understanding that oil is the lifeblood of modern industrial civilization. Petroleum is central to transport and agriculture; without it, supply chains and most food production would quickly grind to a halt. Moreover, there is a close historic relationship between oil consumption and GDP growth. Thus, peakists reasoned, when world oil production starts its inevitable down-glide, the growth phase of industrial civilization will be over.
In the years leading up to 2005, the rate of increase in world conventional crude oil production slowed; then output growth stopped altogether and oil prices started rising. By July 2008 the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude benchmark oil price briefly hit an all-time, inflation-adjusted high of $147 per barrel. High oil prices starve the economy of consumer spending. And, due to subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and other factors, the economy was set for a spill in any case. Within weeks, the foundations of the financial industry were giving way. Stock prices were tumbling and companies were going bankrupt by the dozen. Most of the US auto industry teetered on the brink of insolvency. The news media were filled with commentary about the possible demise of capitalism itself.
In sum, the financial crash of 2008 looked to some of us like not just another stock market “correction,” but the end of a brief and blisteringly manic phase of civilized human existence. It was confirmation that our diagnosis (that fossil-fueled industrialism was unsustainable even over the short term) and prognosis (that the peak in world oil production would trigger the inevitable collapse of oil-based civilization) were both correct.
Our expectation at that point was that oil production would decline, energy prices would rise, and the economy would shrink in fits and starts. Living standards would crumble. It would then be up to world leaders to decide how to respond—either with resource wars, or with a near-complete redesign of systems and institutions to minimize reliance on fossil fuels and growth.
But we were wrong.
Back From Death’s Door
Instead there was a recovery, in both world oil output growth and in overall economic activity. How so?It turned out that most peakists had been unaware of a so-called revolution waiting to be unleashed in the American oil and gas industry. Although world conventional crude oil production (subtracting natural gas liquids and bitumen) remained flatlined roughly at the 2005 level, new sources of unconventional oil began opening up in the United States, especially in North Dakota and south Texas. Small-to-medium-sized companies began drilling tens of thousands of twisty wells deep into source rock, fracturing that rock with millions of gallons of water and chemicals, and then propping open newly formed cracks with tons of fine sand. These techniques released oil trapped in the “tight” rocks. It was an expensive process that came with significant environmental, health, and social costs; but, by 2015, five million barrels per day of “light tight oil” (LTO) were supplementing world liquid fuel supplies.
This development profoundly shifted the entire global energy narrative. Pundits began touting the prospect of US energy independence. Peak oil suddenly seemed a mistaken and antiquated idea.
Moreover, while fracking was revolutionizing the oil and gas industry, debt was resuscitating the financial system. Viewing the deflationary GFC as a mortal threat, central banks in late 2008 began deploying extraordinary measures that included quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates. At the same time, governments dramatically increased their rates of deficit spending. The hope of both central bankers and government policy makers was to use the infusion of debt to revive an economy that was otherwise on the brink of dissolution. The gambit worked: by 2010, US and world GDP were once again growing.
It turned out that the fracking revolution and the central bank debt free-for-all were closely linked. Fracking was so expensive that only wells in the best locations had any chance of making money for operators, even with high oil prices. But companies had bought leases to a lot of inferior acreage. Their only realistic paths to success were to make slick (if misleading) presentations to gullible investors, and to borrow more and more money at low interest rates to fund operations and pay dividends. In fact, the fracking business resembled a pyramid scheme, with most companies seeing negative free cash flow year after year, even as they drilled their best prospective sites.
In 2013, we at Post Carbon Institute (PCI) began publishing a series of reports about shale gas and tight oil (authored by geoscientist David Hughes), based on proprietary well-level drilling information. These reports documented the high geographic variability of drilling prospects (with only relatively small “sweet spots” offering the possibility of profit); and rapid per-well production declines, necessitating very high rates of drilling in order to grow or even maintain overall production levels. Given the speed at which sweet spots were becoming crowded with wells, it appeared to us that the time window during which shale gas and tight oil could provide such high rates of fuel production would be relatively brief, and that an overall decline in US oil and gas production would likely resume with a vengeance in the decade starting in 2020. These conclusions flew in the face of official forecasts showing high rates of production through 2050. However, our confidence in our methodology was bolstered as individual shale gas and tight oil producing regions began, one by one, to tip over into decline.
In sum, without low-interest Federal Reserve policies the fracking boom might never have been possible. For the world as a whole, a steady decline in energy resource quality has been hidden by massive borrowing. Indeed, since the GFC, overall global debt has grown at over twice the rate of GDP growth. Humanity consumes now, with the promise of paying later. But in this instance “later” will likely never come: the massive public and private debt that has been run up over the past few decades, and especially since the GFC, is too vast ever to be repaid (it’s being called “the everything bubble”). Instead, as repayments fall behind, banks will eventually be forced to cease further lending, triggering a deflationary spiral of defaults. If the fracking bubble hasn’t burst by that time for purely geological reasons, lack of further low-interest financing will provide the coup-de-grace.
While low-interest debt managed to fund a brief energy reprieve and to forestall overall financial collapse, it couldn’t paper over a deepening sense of malaise among much of the public. Income growth for US wage earners had been stagnant since the early 1980s; then, during the 2008-2018 decade, wage earners in the lowest percentiles continued to coast or even lost ground while high-income households saw dramatic improvements. This was partly a result of the way governments and central banks had structured their bailouts, with most of the freshly minted cash going to investors and financial institutions. This lopsidedness in the economic rebound was mirrored in many other countries. A recent US tax cut that was targeted almost exclusively at high-income households (with another similar cut apparently on the way) is only exacerbating the trend toward higher inequality. And economic inequality is fomenting widespread dissatisfaction with both the economic system and the political system. None of the bankers who contributed to the GFC via shady investment schemes went to jail, and a lot of people are unhappy about that, too.
Further, there was no “recovery” at all for the global climate during the past decade; quite the opposite. As humanity burned more fossil fuels and spewed more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the scale of climate impacts grew. Hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, and wildfires fed deepening poverty and, in some instances (e.g., Syria), simmering conflicts. Growing tides of refugees began migrating away from areas of crisis and toward regions of relative safety.
At the same time, technological trends drove further wedges among social groups: while automation helped tamp down wage growth, the pervasive use of social media inflamed political polarization. An expanding far-right political fringe in turn fed anti-immigrant and anti-refugee populism, and sought to exploit the disgruntlement of left-behind wage earners. All of this culminated in the ascendancy of Donald Trump as US president, joining fellow authoritarians in Russia, China, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere. Globally, political systems have been destabilized to a degree not seen in decades.
Altogether, this was a deceptive, uneven, and unsettling “recovery.”
How We Used Our Bonus Decade
As already mentioned, humanity didn’t get a bonus decade with regard to climate change. While building millions of solar panels and thousands of wind turbines, we also increased our burn rate for oil, natural gas, and coal (global coal consumption maxed out in 2014 and has fallen a little since then, though it’s still above the 2008 rate). That’s because, as George Monbiot puts it, “while economic growth continues we will never give up our fossil fuels habit.” And policy makers are not willing to give up growth.Here’s a thought experiment: If there had been no recovery (that is, if GDP had continued to plummet as it was doing in 2009), and if, as a result, demand for fossil fuels had cratered, there would no doubt have been a lot of human misery (which there may be anyway ultimately, just delayed), but there also would have been less long-term impact on the global climate and on ecosystems. As it was, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations rose, as did the average global temperature, with devastating effect on oceans, forests, and biodiversity.
At PCI, we spent the past decade adapting our message to shifting realities. We gave a lot of thought to the transition to a post-growth economic regime, resulting in my book, The End of Growth. We also spent many hours pondering societal strategies for surviving overshoot, and came to much the same conclusion as some of our colleagues who’ve been working on these issues for decades (including Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth): that is, with impacts on the way, building societal resilience has to be a top priority. We determined that it’s at the community scale that resilience-building efforts are likely to be most successful and most readily undertaken. Determined to help build community resilience, we co-published a three-book series of Community Resilience Guides, as well as the Community Resilience Reader;we also produced the “Think Resilience” video series.
We analyzed the prospects for US shale gas and tight oil production via David Hughes’s series of reports mentioned above (also in my book Snake Oil), and we assessed the prospects for a transition to renewable energy in a book, Our Renewable Future, I coauthored with PCI Fellow David Fridley. In that book, we concluded that while an energy transition is necessary and inevitable, transformations in virtual every aspect of modern society will need to be undertaken and economic growth has to be curtailed in order for it to happen. We at PCI did other things as well (including producing additional videos, books, and reports), but these are some of the highlights.
I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish with the participation of our followers, fellows, staff, and funders. But, I’m sorry to say, our efforts had limited reach. Our books and reports got little mainstream media attention. And while some communities have adopted resilience as a planning goal, and Transition and other initiatives have promoted resilience thinking through grassroots citizen networks, most towns and cities are still woefully ill-prepared for what’s coming.
I’ve titled this essay “Our Bonus Decade” because the past ten years were an unexpected (by us peakists, anyway) extra—like a bonus added to a paycheck. But bonus is a borrowed Latin word meaning “good.” In retrospect, whatever good we humans derived from the last ten years of reprieve may ultimately be outweighed by the bad effects of our collective failure to change course. During those ten years we emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than in any previous decade. We depleted more of Earth’s resources than in any previous decade. And humanity did next-to-nothing to reconfigure its dominant economic and financial systems. In short, we (that is, the big We—though not all equally) used our extra time about as foolishly as could be imagined.
Where We Stand Now
As discussed above, US tight oil and shale gas output growth can’t be expected to continue much longer. LTO production in the rest of the world never really took off and is unlikely to do so because conditions in other countries are not as conducive as they are in US (where land owners often also own rights to minerals beneath the soil). At the same time, conventional crude oil, whose global production rate has been on a plateau for the past decade, may finally be set to decline due to a paucity of new discoveries.At the same time, the burden of debt that was shouldered during the past decade is becoming unbearable. US federal government borrowing has soared despite “robust” economic conditions, and interest payments on debt will soon exceed military spending. China’s debts have quadrupled during the decade, its annual GDP growth rate is quickly slowing, its oil production rate is peaking, and the energy profitability of its energy sector as a whole is declining fast.
But that’s not all that’s happening. Let’s step back and summarize:
(1) We peak oil analysts had assumed that energy resource depletion would be the immediate trigger for societal collapse.
(2) However, climate change is turning out to be a far greater threat than we depletionists had thought fifteen or twenty years ago, when the peak oil discussion was just getting underway. The impacts of warming atmosphere and oceans are appearing at a frightening and furious pace, and climate feedbacks could make future warming non-linear and perhaps even unsurvivable. At this point one has to wonder whether the mythic image of hell is a collective-unconscious premonition of global climate change.
(3) Ten years ago we learned that debt cycles and debt bubbles are a significant related factor potentially leading to, or hastening, civilizational collapse.
(4) Now we are all getting a rapid education in the ways inequality can lead to political polarization and social instability.
As a shorthand way of speaking about these four related factors, we at PCI have begun speaking of the “E4 crisis” (energy, environment, economy, and equity). It’s no longer helpful to focus on one factor to the exclusion of the others; it’s far more informative to look for ways in which all four are interacting in real time.
Our bonus round of economic growth and relative normalcy will assuredly end at some point due to the combined action of these factors. I don’t know when the dam will burst. Nor do I know for certain whether there will be yet another fake “recovery” afterward—the next one perhaps being even weaker and more unequally experienced than the current one. And I’m not about to offer a definitive forecast for the timing of the global oil peak: one can imagine a scenario in which governments and central banks again print immense amounts of money in order to keep drillers and frackers busy. Only two things can I say with confidence: the big trends all add up to overshoot, crisis, and decline; and building personal and community resilience remains the best strategy in response.
Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience. Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute. May 24, 2018.
As a writer focused on the global sustainability crisis, I’m often asked how to deal with the stress of knowing—knowing, that is, that we humans have severely overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity, making a collapse of both civilization and Earth’s ecological systems likely; knowing that we are depleting Earth’s resources (including fossil fuels and minerals) and clogging its waste sinks (like the atmosphere’s and oceans’ ability to absorb CO2); knowing that the decades of rapid economic growth that characterized the late 20th and early 21st centuries are ending, and that further massive interventions by central banks and governments can’t do more than buy us a little bit more time of relative stability; knowing that technology (even renewable energy technology) won’t save our fundamentally unsustainable way of life.
In the years I’ve spent investigating these predicaments, I’ve been fortunate to meet experts who have delved deeply into specific issues—the biodiversity crisis, the population crisis, the climate crisis, the resource depletion crisis, the debt crisis, the plastic waste crisis, and on and on. In my admittedly partial judgment, some of the smartest people I’ve met happen also to be among the more pessimistic. (One apparently smart expert I haven’t had opportunity to meet yet is 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman, the subject of this recent article in The Guardian.)
In discussing climate change and all our other eco-social predicaments, how does one distinguish accurate information from statements intended to elicit either false hope or needless capitulation to immediate and utter doom? And, in cases where pessimistic outlooks do seem securely rooted in evidence, how does one psychologically come to terms with the information?
Systems Thinking
First, if you want to have an accurate picture of the world, it’s vital to pay attention to the connections between things. That means thinking in systems. Evidence of failure to think in systems is all around us, and there is no better example than the field of economics, which treats the environment as simply a pile of resources to be plundered rather than as the living and necessary context in which the economy is grounded. No healthy ecosystems, no economy. This single crucial failure of economic theory has made it far more difficult for most people, and especially businesspeople and policy makers, to understand our sustainability dilemma or do much about it.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the field in which systems thinking is most highly developed is ecology—the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments. Since it is a study of relationships rather than things in isolation, ecology is inherently systems-oriented.
Systems thinking has a pre-history in indigenous thought (Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, or “All are related,” is a common phrase in the Lakota language). But as a formal scientific pursuit it emerged only during the latter part of the twentieth century. Previously, Western scientists often assumed that they could understand systems just by analyzing their parts; however, it gradually became clear—in practical fields from medicine to wildlife management to business management—that this often led to unintended consequences.
In medicine, it is understood that treating diseases by managing symptoms is not as desirable as treating the disease itself; that’s partly because symptomatic treatment with pharmaceuticals can produce side effects that can be as distressing as the original disease symptoms. Take a pill and you may feel better for a while, but you may soon have to deal with a whole new slew of aches, rashes, sleep problems, mood swings, or digestive ailments. Further, truly curing a disease often involves addressing exposure to environmental toxins; or lifestyle choices including poor nutrition, smoking, lack of exercise, or job-related repetitive stress injuries—all of which are systemic issues that require treating the whole person and their environment, not just the symptoms, or even just the disease in isolation.
In order to address systemic problems we need to understand what systems are, and how to intervene in them most effectively.
All systems have:
- Boundaries, which are semi-permeable separations between the inside and outside of systems;
- Inputs of energy, information, and materials;
- Outputs, including work of various kinds, as well as waste heat and waste materials;
- Flows to and from the environment;
- Stocks of useful nutrients, resources, and other materials; and
- Feedbacks, of which there are two kinds: balancing or negative, like a thermostat; and self-reinforcing or positive, which is the proverbial vicious circle. Systems need balancing feedback loops to remain stable and can be destabilized or even destroyed by self-reinforcing feedback loops.
The global climate is a system, and climate change is therefore a systemic problem. Some non-systems thinkers have proposed solving climate change by putting chemicals in the Earth’s atmosphere to manage solar radiation. Because this solution addresses only part of the systemic problem, it is likely to have many unintended consequences. Systems thinking would suggest very different approaches—such as reducing fossil fuel consumption while capturing and storing atmospheric carbon in replanted forests and regenerated topsoil. These approaches recognize the role of inputs (such as fossil fuels), outputs (like carbon dioxide), and feedbacks (including the balancing feedback provided by soil carbon flows).
In some cases, a systemic approach to addressing climate change could have dramatic side benefits: regenerative agriculture would not just sequester carbon in the soil, it would also make our food system more sustainable while preserving biodiversity. Interventions based in systems thinking often tend to solve many problems at once.
Donella Meadows, who was one of the great systems thinkers of the past few decades, left us a brilliant essay titled “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” There are places within every complex system where “a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.” Meadows suggested that these leverage points have a hierarchy of effectiveness. She said that the most powerful interventions in a system address its goals, rules, and mindsets, rather than parameters and numbers—things like subsidies and taxes. This has powerful implications for addressing climate change, because it suggests that subsidizing renewable energy or taxing carbon is a fairly weak way of inducing systemic change. If we really want to address a deeply rooted, systemic problem like climate change, we may need to look at our society’s most fundamental paradigms—like, for example, the assumption that we must have continual economic growth.
We intuitively know that systems are more than the sum of their parts. But digging deeper into the insights of systems theory—going beyond the basics—can pay great dividends both in our understanding of the world, and in our strategic effectiveness at making positive change happen. A terrific resource in this regard is Meadows’s book Thinking in Systems.
In addition to imparting general understanding about the nature of systems, the book teaches readers how to interpret and make system dynamics diagrams—to which I was first exposed in 1972 in that cornerstone of systems literature, The Limits to Growth. One of the virtues of system dynamics diagrams is that they can aid in the creation of computerized system models— several extremely useful examples of which appear on the website www.ClimateInteractive.org. It features two tools: C-ROADS and En-ROADS, system dynamics models that enable the user to see the potential impact of various climate and energy policies. Tweak the variables and watch the outcomes.
Systems thinking often tends to lead to a more pessimistic view of our ecological crisis than thinking that focuses on one thing at a time, because it reveals the shortcomings of widely touted techno-fixes. But if there are truly useful strategies to be found, systems thinking will reveal them.
Critical Thinking
Human thought is rooted partly in words, partly in emotions, and partly in the body states (whether you feel alert, sleepy, hungry, agitated, etc.) that may accompany or give rise to emotions; another way of saying this is that our thought processes are partly conscious but mostly unconscious. In our conscious lives we are immersed in a soup of language, which often simply expresses judgments, intuitions, and observations that emerge from unconscious thought. But thought that’s expressed in language has great potential. Using language (including mathematics), we can assess the validity of statements about the world, then build upon proven statements until we ultimately achieve comprehensive scientific understandings and the capacity to manipulate reality in new ways (to build a bridge, for example, or land a probe on a distant asteroid, or update an app).
Of course, language can be powerful in another way. Some of us use language to persuade, confuse, or mislead others so as to gain social or economic power. Appeals to unconscious prejudices, including peer group-think, are frequently employed to sway the masses. The best protection against being the subject of verbal manipulation is the ability to use language to distinguish logic from illogic, truth from untruth. Critical thinking helps us separate information from propaganda. It can help us think more clearly and productively.
One way to approach critical thinking is through the study of logic—including formal logic (which builds conclusions almost mathematically, using syllogisms), informal logic (which also considers content, context, and delivery), and fuzzy logic (which recognizes that many qualities are subjective or matters of degree). Most of our daily thinking consists of informal and fuzzy logic.
The study of formal logic starts with learning the difference between deductive reasoning (which proceeds from a general principle to a special case, sometimes referred to as “top-down reasoning”) and inductive reasoning (which makes broad generalizations from specific observations, also called “bottom-up reasoning”).
Both deductive and inductive forms of reasoning can be misapplied. One might deduce from the general rule “human history is a grand narrative of progress” that therefore humanity will successfully deal with the ecological challenges of the 21st century and emerge smarter, wealthier, and more virtuous than ever. Here the problem is that the general rule is laden with value judgments and subject to many exceptions (such as the collapse of various historical civilizations). Inductive reasoning is even more perilous, because there is always the danger that specific observations, from which one is drawing general conclusions, are incomplete or even misleading (economic growth has occurred in most years since World War II; therefore, economic growth is normal and can be expected to continue, with occasional brief setbacks, forever).
While learning the rules of formal logic can help in honing one’s critical thinking, it’s just as useful to familiarize oneself with logical fallacies—which include circular reasoning, name-calling, hasty generalization, stereotyping, the either-or fallacy, and appeal to the bandwagon. These days, that’s a fair description of much of the content on social media. Learn to spot these fallacies in political discourse; but, better yet, learn to catch yourself using them.
My favorite book on logic and its fallacies is Lean Logic by the late David Fleming, a British economist-philosopher who cofounded what eventually became the Green Party in the UK, and who originated the idea of Tradable Energy Quotas. There’s no simple way to sum up Fleming’s book, which is organized as a dictionary. Among many other things, it explores a wide range of logical fallacies—especially as they relate to our sustainability crises—and does so in a way that’s playful, artful, and insightful.
One of my favorite sections of the book is a four-page collection of ways to cheat at an argument. Here are just a few of the entries, chosen mostly at random:
As politics becomes more tribal, critical thinking skills become ever more important if you want to understand what’s really going on and prevent yourself from becoming collateral damage in the war of words.
Personal Resilience
Let’s return to the premise of this essay. Suppose you’ve applied systems thinking and critical thinking to the information available to you about the status of the global ecosystem and have come to the conclusion that we are—to use a technical phrase—in deep shit. You want to be effective at helping minimize risk and damage to ecosystems, humanity, yourself, and those close to you. To achieve this, one of the first things you will need to do is learn to maintain and use your newfound knowledge without becoming paralyzed or psychologically injured by it.
Knowledge of impending global crisis can cause what’s been called “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” As with other disorders, success in coping or recovery can be enhanced through developing personal or psychological resilience. Fortunately, psychological resilience is a subject that is increasingly the subject of research.
Some people bounce back from adversity relatively easily, while others seem to fall apart. The reason doesn’t seem to have much to do with being more of an optimist than a pessimist. Research has shown that resilient people realistically assess risks and threats; studies suggest that in some ways pessimists can have the advantage. What seems to distinguish resilient people is their use of successful coping techniques to balance negative emotions with positive ones, and to maintain an underlying sense of competence and assurance.
Researchers have isolated four factors that appear critical to personal psychological resilience:
Nevertheless, research suggests that, regardless of your baseline temperament, you can make yourself more psychologically resilient through practice. The American Psychological Association suggests “10 Ways to Build Resilience,” which are:
Psychological resilience may also entail learning to deal with grief. Awareness of species extinctions, habitat destruction, and the peril to human beings from climate change naturally evokes grief, and unexpressed grief can make us numb, depressed, and ineffective. It’s helpful therefore to find a safe and supportive environment in which to acknowledge and express our grief. Joanna Macy, in her “work that reconnects,” has for many years been hosting events that provide a safe and supportive environment for grief work.
Personal resilience extends beyond the psychological realm; developing it should also include identifying and learning practical skills (such as gardening, small engine maintenance, plumbing, cooking, natural building, primitive technology, and wilderness survival skills). Knowing practically how to take care of yourself improves your psychological state, as well as making you more resilient in physical terms.
Further, your personal resilience will be greatly enhanced as you work with others who are also blessed (or burdened) with knowledge of our collective overshoot predicament. For many years we at PCI have been assisting in the formation of ongoing communities of reflection and practice such as Transition Initiatives. If that strategy makes sense to you, but you don’t have a Transition group close by, you might take the Think Resilience course and then host a discussion group in your school, home, or public library.
Systems thinking, critical thinking, and personal resilience building don’t, by themselves, directly change the world. However, they can support our ability and efforts to make change. The key, of course, is to apply whatever abilities we have—in community resilience building, ecological restoration, or efforts to resist the destruction of nature and the exploitation of human beings. As we remain open to learning, action presents opportunities for still more learning, in the form of what systems thinkers would call balancing feedback. We test what we think we know, and discover new things about the world and ourselves. It’s a life-long process.
One of my favorite sections of the book is a four-page collection of ways to cheat at an argument. Here are just a few of the entries, chosen mostly at random:
Absence. Stop listening.Critical thinking should not necessarily elevate reason above intuition. Remember: most thought is unconscious and emotion-driven—and will continue to be, no matter how rigorously we analyze our verbal and mathematical expressions of thought. Just as we seek coherence and consistency in our conscious logic, we should seek to develop emotional intelligence if we hope to contribute to a society based on truth and conviviality. Lean Logic reveals on almost every page its author’s commitment to this deeper concept of critical thinking. Here’s one illustrative entry:
Abstraction. Keep the discussion at the level of high-flown generality.
Anger. Present it as proof of how right you are.
Blame. Assume that the problem is solved when you have found someone to blame.
Bullshit. Talk at length about nothing.
Causes. Assume that an event which follows another event was therefore caused by it.
Evil motive. Explain away the other side’s argument by the brilliance of your insight about their real intentions.
False premise. Start with nonsense. Build on it with meticulous accuracy and brilliance.
Old hat. Dismiss an argument on the grounds that you have disregarded it before.
Reasons, The Fallacy of. The fallacy that, because a person can give no reasons, or only apparently poor reasons, her conclusion can be dismissed as wrong. But, on the contrary, it may be right: her thinking may have the distinction of being complex, intelligent and systems-literate, but she may not yet have worked out how to make it sufficiently clear and robust to objections to survive in an argument.
As politics becomes more tribal, critical thinking skills become ever more important if you want to understand what’s really going on and prevent yourself from becoming collateral damage in the war of words.
Personal Resilience
Let’s return to the premise of this essay. Suppose you’ve applied systems thinking and critical thinking to the information available to you about the status of the global ecosystem and have come to the conclusion that we are—to use a technical phrase—in deep shit. You want to be effective at helping minimize risk and damage to ecosystems, humanity, yourself, and those close to you. To achieve this, one of the first things you will need to do is learn to maintain and use your newfound knowledge without becoming paralyzed or psychologically injured by it.
Knowledge of impending global crisis can cause what’s been called “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” As with other disorders, success in coping or recovery can be enhanced through developing personal or psychological resilience. Fortunately, psychological resilience is a subject that is increasingly the subject of research.
Some people bounce back from adversity relatively easily, while others seem to fall apart. The reason doesn’t seem to have much to do with being more of an optimist than a pessimist. Research has shown that resilient people realistically assess risks and threats; studies suggest that in some ways pessimists can have the advantage. What seems to distinguish resilient people is their use of successful coping techniques to balance negative emotions with positive ones, and to maintain an underlying sense of competence and assurance.
Researchers have isolated four factors that appear critical to personal psychological resilience:
- The ability to make realistic plans and to take the steps necessary to follow through with them;
- A positive self-concept and confidence in one’s strengths and abilities;
- Communication and problem-solving skills; and
- The ability to manage strong impulses and feelings.
Nevertheless, research suggests that, regardless of your baseline temperament, you can make yourself more psychologically resilient through practice. The American Psychological Association suggests “10 Ways to Build Resilience,” which are:
- Maintain good relationships with close family members, friends and others.
- Avoid seeing crises or stressful events as unbearable problems.
- Accept circumstances that cannot be changed.
- Develop realistic goals and move towards them.
- Take decisive actions in adverse situations.
- Look for opportunities of self-discovery after a struggle with loss.
- Develop self-confidence.
- Keep a long-term perspective and consider the stressful event in a broader context.
- Maintain a hopeful outlook, expecting good things and visualizing what is wished.
- Take care of your mind and body, exercise regularly, and pay attention to your needs and feelings.
Psychological resilience may also entail learning to deal with grief. Awareness of species extinctions, habitat destruction, and the peril to human beings from climate change naturally evokes grief, and unexpressed grief can make us numb, depressed, and ineffective. It’s helpful therefore to find a safe and supportive environment in which to acknowledge and express our grief. Joanna Macy, in her “work that reconnects,” has for many years been hosting events that provide a safe and supportive environment for grief work.
Personal resilience extends beyond the psychological realm; developing it should also include identifying and learning practical skills (such as gardening, small engine maintenance, plumbing, cooking, natural building, primitive technology, and wilderness survival skills). Knowing practically how to take care of yourself improves your psychological state, as well as making you more resilient in physical terms.
Further, your personal resilience will be greatly enhanced as you work with others who are also blessed (or burdened) with knowledge of our collective overshoot predicament. For many years we at PCI have been assisting in the formation of ongoing communities of reflection and practice such as Transition Initiatives. If that strategy makes sense to you, but you don’t have a Transition group close by, you might take the Think Resilience course and then host a discussion group in your school, home, or public library.
Systems thinking, critical thinking, and personal resilience building don’t, by themselves, directly change the world. However, they can support our ability and efforts to make change. The key, of course, is to apply whatever abilities we have—in community resilience building, ecological restoration, or efforts to resist the destruction of nature and the exploitation of human beings. As we remain open to learning, action presents opportunities for still more learning, in the form of what systems thinkers would call balancing feedback. We test what we think we know, and discover new things about the world and ourselves. It’s a life-long process.
Even if we do all we can, there is no guarantee that problems will be solved, extinctions prevented, collapse forestalled. But paralysis only guarantees the very worst outcome. In the words of the Bhagavad Gita, “The wise should work, without attachment to results, for the welfare of the world.” Act from love with the best understanding you have, and always seek to improve your understanding. It’s all that any of us can do.
Are we doomed? Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute. July 27, 2017.
My most recent essay, in which I discussed a highly publicized controversy over the efficacy of plans for a comprehensive transition to an all-renewable energy future, garnered some strong responses. “If you are right,” one Facebook commenter opined, “we are doomed. Fortunately you are not right.” (The commenter didn’t explain why.) What had I said to provoke an expectation of cataclysmic oblivion? Simply that there is probably no technically and financially feasible energy pathway to enable those of us in highly industrialized countries to maintain current levels of energy usage very far into the future.
My piece happened to be published right around the same time New York Magazine released a controversial article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth,” in which author David Wallace Wells portrayed a dire future if the most pessimistic climate change models turn to reality. “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” wrote Wells. “If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” Wells’s article drew rebukes from—of all people—climate scientists, who pointed out a few factual errors, but also insisted that scaring the public just doesn’t help. “Importantly, fear does not motivate,” responded Michael Mann with Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles, “and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.”
It’s true: apocalyptic warnings don’t move most people. Or, rather, they move most people away from the source of discomfort, so they simply tune out. But it’s also true that people feel a sense of deep, unacknowledged unease when they are fed “solutions” that they instinctively know are false or insufficient.
Others came to Wells’s defense. Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of the climate action group The Climate Mobilization, which advocates for starting a “World War II-scale” emergency mobilization to convert from fossil fuels, writes, “it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. . . . [I]t’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings—not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.”
So: Are we doomed if we can’t maintain current and growing energy levels? And are we doomed anyway due to now-inevitable impacts of climate change?
First, the good news. With regard to energy, we should keep in mind the fact that today’s Americans use roughly twice as much per capita as their great-grandparents did in 1925. While people in that era enjoyed less mobility and fewer options for entertainment and communication than we do today, they nevertheless managed to survive and even thrive. And we now have the ability to provide many services (such as lighting) far more efficiently, so it should be possible to reduce per-capita energy usage dramatically while still maintaining a lifestyle that would be considered more than satisfactory by members of previous generations and by people in many parts of the world today. And reducing energy usage would make a whole raft of problems—climate change, resource depletion, the challenge of transitioning to renewable energy sources—much easier to solve.
The main good news with regard to climate change that I can point to (as I did in an essay posted in June) is that economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves are consistent only with lower-emissions climate change scenarios. As BP and other credible sources for coal, oil, and natural gas reserves figures show, and as more and more researchers are pointing out, the worst-case climate scenarios associated with “business as usual” levels of carbon emissions are in fact unrealistic.
Now, the bad news. While we could live perfectly well with less energy, that’s not what the managers of our economy want. They want growth. Our entire economy is structured to require constant, compounded growth of GDP, and for all practical purposes raising the GDP means using more energy. While fringe economists and environmentalists have for years been proposing ways to back away from our growth addiction (for example, by using alternative economic indices such as Gross National Happiness), none of these proposals has been put into widespread effect. As things now stand, if growth falters the economy crashes.
There’s bad climate news as well: even with current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, we’re seeing unacceptable and worsening impacts—raging fires, soaring heat levels, and melting icecaps. And there are hints that self-reinforcing feedbacks may be kicking in: an example is the release of large amounts of methane from thawing tundra and oceanic hydrates, which could lead to a short-term but steep spike in warming. Also, no one is sure if current metrics of climate sensitivity (used to estimate the response of the global climate system to a given level of forcing) are accurate, or whether the climate is actually more sensitive than we have assumed. There’s some worrisome evidence the latter is case.
But let’s step back a bit. If we’re interested in signs of impending global crisis, there’s no need to stop with just these two global challenges. The world is losing 25 billion tons of topsoil a year due to current industrial agricultural practices; if we don’t deal with that issue, civilization will still crash even if we do manage to ace our energy and climate test. Humanity is also over-using fresh water: ancient aquifers are depleting, while other water sources are being polluted. If we don’t deal with our water crisis, we still crash. Species are going extinct at a thousand times the pre-industrial rate; if we don’t deal with the biodiversity dilemma, we still crash. Then there are social and economic problems that could cause nations to crumble even if we manage to protect the environment; this threat category includes the menaces of over-reliance on debt and increasing economic inequality.
If we attack each of these problems piecemeal with technological fixes (for example, with desalination technology to solve the water crisis or geo-engineering to stabilize the climate) we may still crash because our techno-fixes are likely to have unintended consequences, as all technological interventions do. Anyway, the likelihood of successfully identifying and deploying all the needed fixes in time is vanishingly small.
Many problems are converging at once because society is a complex system, and the challenges we have been discussing are aspects of a systemic crisis. A useful way to frame an integrated understanding of the 21st century survival challenge is this: we humans have overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for our species. We’ve been able to do this due to a temporary subsidy of cheap, bountiful energy from fossil fuels, which enabled us to stretch nature’s limits and to support a far larger overall population than would otherwise be possible. But now we are starting to see supply constraints for those fuels, just as the side effects of burning enormous amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas are also coming into view. Meanwhile, using cheap energy to expand resource-extractive and waste-generating economic processes is leading to biodiversity loss; the depletion of soil, water, and minerals; and environmental pollution of many kinds. Just decarbonizing energy, while necessary, doesn’t adequately deal with systemic overshoot. Only a reduction of population and overall resource consumption, along with a rapid reduction in our reliance on fossil fuels and a redesign of industrial systems, can do that.
Economic inequality is a systemic problem too. As we’ve grown our economy, those who were in position to invest in industrial expansion or to loan money to others have reaped the majority of the rewards, while those who got by through selling their time and labor (or whose common cultural heritage was simply appropriated by industrialists) have fallen behind. There’s no technological fix for inequality; dealing with it will require redesigning our economic system and redistributing wealth. Those in wealthy nations would, on average, have to adjust their living standards downward.
Now, can we do all of this without a crash? Probably not. Indeed, many economists would regard the medicine (population reduction, a decline in per-capita energy use, and economic redistribution) as worse than whatever aspects of the disease they are willing to acknowledge. Environmentalists and human rights advocates would disagree. Which is to say, there’s really no way out. Whether we stick with business as usual, or attempt a dramatic multi-pronged intervention, our current “normal” way of life is toast.
Accepting that a crash is more or less inevitable is a big step, psychologically speaking. I call this toxic knowledge: one cannot “un-know” that the current world system hangs by a thread, and this understanding can lead to depression.
In some ways, the systemic crisis we face is analogous to the individual existential crisis of life and death, which we each have to confront eventually. Some willfully ignore their own mortality for as long as possible; others grasp at a belief in the afterlife. Still others seek to create meaning and purpose by making a positive difference in the lives of those around them with whatever time they have. Such efforts don’t alter the inevitability of death; however, contributing to one’s community appears to enhance well-being in many ways beyond that of merely prolonging life.
But is a crash the same as doom?
Not necessarily. Our best hope at this point would seem to be a controlled crash that enables partial recovery at a lower level of population and resource use, and that therefore doesn’t lead to complete and utter oblivion (human extinction or close to it). Among those who understand the systemic nature of our problems, the controlled crash option is the subject of what may be the most interesting and important conversation that’s taking place on the planet just now. But only informed people who have gotten over denial and self-delusion are part of it.
This discussion started in the 1970s, though I wasn’t part of it then; I joined a couple of decades later. There is no formal membership; the conversation takes place through and among a patchwork of small organizations and scattered individuals. They don’t all know each other and there is no secret handshake. Some have publicly adopted the stance that a global crash is inevitable; most soft-pedal that message on their organizational websites but are privately plenty worried. During the course of the conversation so far, two (not mutually exclusive) strategies have emerged.
The first strategy envisions convincing the managers and power holders of the world to invest in a no-regrets insurance plan. Some systems thinkers who understand our linked global crises are offering to come up with a back-pocket checklist for policy makers, for moments when financial or environmental crisis hits: how, under such circumstances, might the managerial elite be able to prevent, say, a stock market crash from triggering food, energy, and social crises as well? A set of back-up plans wouldn’t require detailed knowledge of when or how crisis will erupt. It wouldn’t even require much of a systemic understanding of global overshoot. It would simply require willingness on the part of societal power holders to agree that there are real or potential threats to global order, and to accept the offer of help. At the moment, those pursuing this strategy are working mostly covertly, for reasons that are not hard to discern. [MW: anticipating the benevolence of TPTB (the powers that be) who screwed things up, once the time comes, to do the right thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing, would be to anticipate a zebra to change its stripes, a leopard to change its spots, AND that the leopard won't try to eat the zebra; fat chance. TPTB will be busy trying to save their own asses, and only their own asses.]
The second strategy consists of working within communities to build more societal resilience from the ground up. It is easier to get traction with friends and neighbors than with global power holders, and it’s within communities that political decisions are made closest to where the impact is felt. My own organization, Post Carbon Institute, has chosen to pursue this strategy via a series of books, the Community Resilience Guides; the “Think Resilience” video series; and our forthcoming compendium, The Community Resilience Reader. Rob Hopkins, who originated the Transition Towns movement, has been perhaps the most public, eloquent, and upbeat proponent of the local resilience strategy, but there are countless others scattered across the globe.
Somehow, the work of resilience building (whether top-down or bottom-up) must focus not just on maintaining supplies of food, water, energy, and other basic necessities, but also on sustaining social cohesion—a culture of understanding, tolerance, and inquiry—during times of great stress. While it’s true that people tend to pull together in remarkable ways during wars and natural disasters, sustained hard times can lead to scapegoating and worse.
Most people are not party to the conversation, not aware that it is happening, and unaware even that such a conversation is warranted. Among those who are worried about the state of the world, most are content to pursue or support efforts to keep crises from occurring by working via political parties, religious organizations, or non-profit advocacy orgs on issues such as climate change, food security, and economic inequality. There is also a small but rapidly growing segment of society that feels disempowered as the era of economic growth wanes, and that views society’s power holders as evil and corrupt. [MW: well, duh! Tobacco companies knew for decades that their product was addictive and life-threatening, but did all they could to lie lie lie and sell sell sell. Energy companies knew for decades that CO2 in the atmosphere would act as a greenhouse gas and cook the climate, but they too did all they could to lie lie lie and dig dig dig and drill drill drill and sell sell sell. Were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz not evil and corrupt? How about Madeline Albright? Hilary Clinton? Victoria Nuland? Samantha Power? Barrack Obama? How many governments need to get toppled by US interventionism and how many countries bombed to smithereens before its safe to acknowledge that power holders truly are evil and corrupt?!] These dispossessed—whether followers of ISIS or Infowars—would prefer to “shake things up,” even to the point of bringing society to destruction, rather than suffer the continuation of the status quo. Unfortunately, this last group may have the easiest path of all.
By comparison, the number of those involved in the conversation is exceedingly small, countable probably in the hundreds of thousands, certainly not millions. Can we succeed? It depends on how one defines “success”—as the ability to maintain, for a little longer, an inherently unsustainable global industrial system? Or as the practical reduction in likely suffering on the part of the survivors of the eventual crash? A related query one often hears after environmental lectures is, Are we doing enough? If “Enough” means “enough to avert a system crash,” then the answer is no: it’s unlikely that anyone can deliver that outcome now. The question should be, What can we do—not to save a way of life that is unsalvageable, but to make a difference to the people and other species in harm’s way?
This is not a conversation about the long-term trajectory of human cultural evolution, though that’s an interesting subject for speculation. Assuming there are survivors, what will human society look like following the crises ensuing from climate change and the end of fossil fuels and capitalism? David Fleming’s Surviving the Future and John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future offer useful thoughts in this regard. My own view is that it’s hard for us to envision what comes next because our imaginations are bounded by the reality we have known. What awaits will likely be as far removed from from modern industrial urban life as Iron-Age agrarian empires were from hunting-and-gathering bands. We are approaching one of history’s great discontinuities. The best we can do under the circumstances is to get our priorities and values straight (protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of what we have collectively achieved, and live a life that’s worthy) and put one foot in front of the other.
The conversation I’m pointing to here is about fairly short-term actions. And it doesn’t lend itself to building a big movement. For that, you need villains to blame and promises of revived national or tribal glory. For those engaged in the conversation, there’s only hard work and the satisfaction of honestly facing our predicament with an attitude of curiosity, engagement, and compassion. For us, threats of doom or promises of utopia are distractions or cop-outs.
Only those drawn to the conversation by temperament and education are likely to take it up. Advertising may not work. But having a few more hands on deck, and a few more resources to work with, can only help.
Controversy explodes overvrenewabke energy.
A heated debate in the pages of one of the country’s most renowned scientific journals has gained national attention. The debate is over whether a combination of wind, solar, and hydroelectricity could fully power the U.S. But both sides of the debate are completely missing half of the equation.
In a series of papers published over the last few years, Mark Jacobson of Stanford University (along with co-authors) has offered a series of transition plans for achieving a 100 percent wind-solar-hydro energy economy. These include comprehensive blueprints for the United States, for each individual state, and for the world as a whole. His message is clear: such a transition is not only possible, it’s affordable—cheaper, in fact, than maintaining the current fossil fueled system. There is no technical or economic barrier to an all-renewable future—only a political one, resulting from the enormous influence of fossil fuel companies on Congress and the White House. Jacobson’s plans have been touted by celebrities (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) and at least one prominent politician (Bernie Sanders).
However, during the past two years a group of scientists unconvinced by Jacobson’s arguments has labored to craft a critical review of his plans, and to get it published in the same journal that printed Jacobson’s own most-cited paper. They voice a concern that the growing popularity of Jacobson’s plans could lead to critical mistakes in policy making and investment choices. The lead author, Christopher Clack, and his 20 co-authors, attack Jacobson’s assumptions and highlight what they call serious modeling errors. Much of their criticism has to do with Jacobson’s ways of getting around solar and wind power’s most notorious drawback—its intermittency. Jacobson says we can deal with cloudy and windless days by storing energy in the forms of underground heat and hydrogen. Clack et al. point out that doing so on the scale Jacobson is proposing is unprecedented (therefore, we really don’t know if it can be done), and also argue that Jacobson made crucial errors in estimating how much storage would be needed and how much it would cost.
The stakes in this controversy are high enough that the New York Times and other mainstream media have reported on it. One pro-renewables scientist friend of mine despairs not just because of bad press about solar and wind power, but also because the reputation of science itself is taking a beating. If these renowned energy experts can’t agree on whether solar and wind power are capable of powering the future, then what are the implications for the credibility of climate science?
Jacobson and colleagues have published what can only be called a take-no-prisoners rebuttal to Clack et al. In it, they declare that, “The premise and all error claims by Clack et al. . . . about Jacobson et al. . . . are demonstrably false.” In a separate article, Jacobson has dismissed Clack and his co-authors as “nuclear and fossil fuel supporters,” though it’s clear that neither side in this debate is anti-renewables.
However, Clack et al. have issued their own line-by-line response to Jacobson’s line-by-line rebuttal, and it’s fairly devastating.
This is probably a good place to point out that David Fridley, staff scientist in the energy analysis program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, and I recently published a book, Our Renewable Future, exploring a hypothetical transition to a 100 percent wind-and-solar energy economy. While we don’t say so in the book, we were compelled to write it partly because of our misgivings about Mark Jacobson’s widely publicized plans. We did not attack those plans directly, as Clack et al. have done, but sought instead to provide a more nuanced and realistic view of what a transition to all-renewable energy would involve.
Our exploration of the subject revealed that source intermittency is indeed a serious problem, and solving it becomes more expensive and technically challenging as solar-wind generation approaches 100 percent of all electricity produced. A further challenge is that solar and wind yield electricity, but 80 percent of final energy is currently used in other forms—mostly as liquid and gaseous fuels. Therefore the energy transition will entail enormous changes in the ways we use energy, and some of those changes will be technically difficult and expensive.
Our core realization was that scale is the biggest transition hurdle. This has implications that both Jacobson et al., and Clack et al. largely ignore. Jacobson’s plan, for example, envisions building 100,000 times more hydrogen production capacity than exists today. And the plan’s assumed hydro expansion would require 100 times the flow of the Mississippi River. If, instead, the United States were to aim for an energy system, say, a tenth the size of its current one, then the transition would be far easier to fund and design.
When we start our transition planning by assuming that future Americans will use as much energy as we do now (or even more of it in the case of economic growth), then we have set up conditions that are nearly impossible to design for. And crucially, that conclusion still holds if we add nuclear power (which is expensive and risky) or fossil fuels (which are rapidly depleting) to the mix. The only realistic energy future that David Fridley and I were able to envision is one in which people in currently industrialized countries use far less energy per capita, use it much more efficiently, and use it when it’s available rather than demanding 24/7/365 energy services. That would mean not doing a lot of things we are currently doing (e.g., traveling in commercial aircraft), doing them on a much smaller scale (e.g., getting used to living in smaller spaces and buying fewer consumer products—and ones built to be endlessly repaired), or doing them very differently (e.g., constructing buildings and roads with local natural materials).
If powerdown—that is, focusing at least as much on the demand side of the energy equation as on the supply side—were combined with a deliberate and humanely guided policy of population decline, there would be abundant beneficial side effects. The climate change crisis would be far easier to tackle, as would ongoing loss of biodiversity and the depletion of resources such as fresh water, topsoil, and minerals.
Jacobson has not embraced a powerdown pathway, possibly because he assumes it would not appeal to film stars and politicians. Clack et al. do not discuss it either, mostly because their task at hand is simply to demolish Jacobson. But powerdown, the pathway about which it is seemingly not permissible for serious people to speak, is what we should all be talking about. That’s because it is the most realistic way to get to a sustainable, happy future.
But is a crash the same as doom?
Not necessarily. Our best hope at this point would seem to be a controlled crash that enables partial recovery at a lower level of population and resource use, and that therefore doesn’t lead to complete and utter oblivion (human extinction or close to it). Among those who understand the systemic nature of our problems, the controlled crash option is the subject of what may be the most interesting and important conversation that’s taking place on the planet just now. But only informed people who have gotten over denial and self-delusion are part of it.
This discussion started in the 1970s, though I wasn’t part of it then; I joined a couple of decades later. There is no formal membership; the conversation takes place through and among a patchwork of small organizations and scattered individuals. They don’t all know each other and there is no secret handshake. Some have publicly adopted the stance that a global crash is inevitable; most soft-pedal that message on their organizational websites but are privately plenty worried. During the course of the conversation so far, two (not mutually exclusive) strategies have emerged.
The first strategy envisions convincing the managers and power holders of the world to invest in a no-regrets insurance plan. Some systems thinkers who understand our linked global crises are offering to come up with a back-pocket checklist for policy makers, for moments when financial or environmental crisis hits: how, under such circumstances, might the managerial elite be able to prevent, say, a stock market crash from triggering food, energy, and social crises as well? A set of back-up plans wouldn’t require detailed knowledge of when or how crisis will erupt. It wouldn’t even require much of a systemic understanding of global overshoot. It would simply require willingness on the part of societal power holders to agree that there are real or potential threats to global order, and to accept the offer of help. At the moment, those pursuing this strategy are working mostly covertly, for reasons that are not hard to discern. [MW: anticipating the benevolence of TPTB (the powers that be) who screwed things up, once the time comes, to do the right thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing, would be to anticipate a zebra to change its stripes, a leopard to change its spots, AND that the leopard won't try to eat the zebra; fat chance. TPTB will be busy trying to save their own asses, and only their own asses.]
The second strategy consists of working within communities to build more societal resilience from the ground up. It is easier to get traction with friends and neighbors than with global power holders, and it’s within communities that political decisions are made closest to where the impact is felt. My own organization, Post Carbon Institute, has chosen to pursue this strategy via a series of books, the Community Resilience Guides; the “Think Resilience” video series; and our forthcoming compendium, The Community Resilience Reader. Rob Hopkins, who originated the Transition Towns movement, has been perhaps the most public, eloquent, and upbeat proponent of the local resilience strategy, but there are countless others scattered across the globe.
Somehow, the work of resilience building (whether top-down or bottom-up) must focus not just on maintaining supplies of food, water, energy, and other basic necessities, but also on sustaining social cohesion—a culture of understanding, tolerance, and inquiry—during times of great stress. While it’s true that people tend to pull together in remarkable ways during wars and natural disasters, sustained hard times can lead to scapegoating and worse.
Most people are not party to the conversation, not aware that it is happening, and unaware even that such a conversation is warranted. Among those who are worried about the state of the world, most are content to pursue or support efforts to keep crises from occurring by working via political parties, religious organizations, or non-profit advocacy orgs on issues such as climate change, food security, and economic inequality. There is also a small but rapidly growing segment of society that feels disempowered as the era of economic growth wanes, and that views society’s power holders as evil and corrupt. [MW: well, duh! Tobacco companies knew for decades that their product was addictive and life-threatening, but did all they could to lie lie lie and sell sell sell. Energy companies knew for decades that CO2 in the atmosphere would act as a greenhouse gas and cook the climate, but they too did all they could to lie lie lie and dig dig dig and drill drill drill and sell sell sell. Were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz not evil and corrupt? How about Madeline Albright? Hilary Clinton? Victoria Nuland? Samantha Power? Barrack Obama? How many governments need to get toppled by US interventionism and how many countries bombed to smithereens before its safe to acknowledge that power holders truly are evil and corrupt?!] These dispossessed—whether followers of ISIS or Infowars—would prefer to “shake things up,” even to the point of bringing society to destruction, rather than suffer the continuation of the status quo. Unfortunately, this last group may have the easiest path of all.
By comparison, the number of those involved in the conversation is exceedingly small, countable probably in the hundreds of thousands, certainly not millions. Can we succeed? It depends on how one defines “success”—as the ability to maintain, for a little longer, an inherently unsustainable global industrial system? Or as the practical reduction in likely suffering on the part of the survivors of the eventual crash? A related query one often hears after environmental lectures is, Are we doing enough? If “Enough” means “enough to avert a system crash,” then the answer is no: it’s unlikely that anyone can deliver that outcome now. The question should be, What can we do—not to save a way of life that is unsalvageable, but to make a difference to the people and other species in harm’s way?
This is not a conversation about the long-term trajectory of human cultural evolution, though that’s an interesting subject for speculation. Assuming there are survivors, what will human society look like following the crises ensuing from climate change and the end of fossil fuels and capitalism? David Fleming’s Surviving the Future and John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future offer useful thoughts in this regard. My own view is that it’s hard for us to envision what comes next because our imaginations are bounded by the reality we have known. What awaits will likely be as far removed from from modern industrial urban life as Iron-Age agrarian empires were from hunting-and-gathering bands. We are approaching one of history’s great discontinuities. The best we can do under the circumstances is to get our priorities and values straight (protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of what we have collectively achieved, and live a life that’s worthy) and put one foot in front of the other.
The conversation I’m pointing to here is about fairly short-term actions. And it doesn’t lend itself to building a big movement. For that, you need villains to blame and promises of revived national or tribal glory. For those engaged in the conversation, there’s only hard work and the satisfaction of honestly facing our predicament with an attitude of curiosity, engagement, and compassion. For us, threats of doom or promises of utopia are distractions or cop-outs.
Only those drawn to the conversation by temperament and education are likely to take it up. Advertising may not work. But having a few more hands on deck, and a few more resources to work with, can only help.
Controversy explodes overvrenewabke energy.
A heated debate in the pages of one of the country’s most renowned scientific journals has gained national attention. The debate is over whether a combination of wind, solar, and hydroelectricity could fully power the U.S. But both sides of the debate are completely missing half of the equation.
In a series of papers published over the last few years, Mark Jacobson of Stanford University (along with co-authors) has offered a series of transition plans for achieving a 100 percent wind-solar-hydro energy economy. These include comprehensive blueprints for the United States, for each individual state, and for the world as a whole. His message is clear: such a transition is not only possible, it’s affordable—cheaper, in fact, than maintaining the current fossil fueled system. There is no technical or economic barrier to an all-renewable future—only a political one, resulting from the enormous influence of fossil fuel companies on Congress and the White House. Jacobson’s plans have been touted by celebrities (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) and at least one prominent politician (Bernie Sanders).
However, during the past two years a group of scientists unconvinced by Jacobson’s arguments has labored to craft a critical review of his plans, and to get it published in the same journal that printed Jacobson’s own most-cited paper. They voice a concern that the growing popularity of Jacobson’s plans could lead to critical mistakes in policy making and investment choices. The lead author, Christopher Clack, and his 20 co-authors, attack Jacobson’s assumptions and highlight what they call serious modeling errors. Much of their criticism has to do with Jacobson’s ways of getting around solar and wind power’s most notorious drawback—its intermittency. Jacobson says we can deal with cloudy and windless days by storing energy in the forms of underground heat and hydrogen. Clack et al. point out that doing so on the scale Jacobson is proposing is unprecedented (therefore, we really don’t know if it can be done), and also argue that Jacobson made crucial errors in estimating how much storage would be needed and how much it would cost.
The stakes in this controversy are high enough that the New York Times and other mainstream media have reported on it. One pro-renewables scientist friend of mine despairs not just because of bad press about solar and wind power, but also because the reputation of science itself is taking a beating. If these renowned energy experts can’t agree on whether solar and wind power are capable of powering the future, then what are the implications for the credibility of climate science?
Jacobson and colleagues have published what can only be called a take-no-prisoners rebuttal to Clack et al. In it, they declare that, “The premise and all error claims by Clack et al. . . . about Jacobson et al. . . . are demonstrably false.” In a separate article, Jacobson has dismissed Clack and his co-authors as “nuclear and fossil fuel supporters,” though it’s clear that neither side in this debate is anti-renewables.
However, Clack et al. have issued their own line-by-line response to Jacobson’s line-by-line rebuttal, and it’s fairly devastating.
This is probably a good place to point out that David Fridley, staff scientist in the energy analysis program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, and I recently published a book, Our Renewable Future, exploring a hypothetical transition to a 100 percent wind-and-solar energy economy. While we don’t say so in the book, we were compelled to write it partly because of our misgivings about Mark Jacobson’s widely publicized plans. We did not attack those plans directly, as Clack et al. have done, but sought instead to provide a more nuanced and realistic view of what a transition to all-renewable energy would involve.
Our exploration of the subject revealed that source intermittency is indeed a serious problem, and solving it becomes more expensive and technically challenging as solar-wind generation approaches 100 percent of all electricity produced. A further challenge is that solar and wind yield electricity, but 80 percent of final energy is currently used in other forms—mostly as liquid and gaseous fuels. Therefore the energy transition will entail enormous changes in the ways we use energy, and some of those changes will be technically difficult and expensive.
Our core realization was that scale is the biggest transition hurdle. This has implications that both Jacobson et al., and Clack et al. largely ignore. Jacobson’s plan, for example, envisions building 100,000 times more hydrogen production capacity than exists today. And the plan’s assumed hydro expansion would require 100 times the flow of the Mississippi River. If, instead, the United States were to aim for an energy system, say, a tenth the size of its current one, then the transition would be far easier to fund and design.
When we start our transition planning by assuming that future Americans will use as much energy as we do now (or even more of it in the case of economic growth), then we have set up conditions that are nearly impossible to design for. And crucially, that conclusion still holds if we add nuclear power (which is expensive and risky) or fossil fuels (which are rapidly depleting) to the mix. The only realistic energy future that David Fridley and I were able to envision is one in which people in currently industrialized countries use far less energy per capita, use it much more efficiently, and use it when it’s available rather than demanding 24/7/365 energy services. That would mean not doing a lot of things we are currently doing (e.g., traveling in commercial aircraft), doing them on a much smaller scale (e.g., getting used to living in smaller spaces and buying fewer consumer products—and ones built to be endlessly repaired), or doing them very differently (e.g., constructing buildings and roads with local natural materials).
If powerdown—that is, focusing at least as much on the demand side of the energy equation as on the supply side—were combined with a deliberate and humanely guided policy of population decline, there would be abundant beneficial side effects. The climate change crisis would be far easier to tackle, as would ongoing loss of biodiversity and the depletion of resources such as fresh water, topsoil, and minerals.
Jacobson has not embraced a powerdown pathway, possibly because he assumes it would not appeal to film stars and politicians. Clack et al. do not discuss it either, mostly because their task at hand is simply to demolish Jacobson. But powerdown, the pathway about which it is seemingly not permissible for serious people to speak, is what we should all be talking about. That’s because it is the most realistic way to get to a sustainable, happy future.
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