Rees: On Being a Snowflake in an Avalanche

On Being a Snowflake in an Avalanche: The Catastrophe of Overshoot and How to Cope. William E. Rees, Resilience. July 11, 2024.

This article is divided into three parts. Part 1 is the scene-setter, a rundown of humanity’s overshoot predicament and how we got into it. Part 2 chronicles my career-long response to understanding overshoot from an ecological perspective. If you’re still with me for Part 3, I share a few lessons learned and offer some advice for coping with the challenges of both knowing about and experiencing the consequences of overshoot.

Part 1. Some History of Humanity’s Overshoot Predicament 

Over a decade ago, one of the most comprehensive assessments of global climate to date showed that the mean global temperature for the first decade of this century was approaching the highest levels in the past 11,000 years. A more recent article suggests that temperatures in the early 2020s are actually unprecedented in the past 24,000 years, and that the magnitude and rate of heating over the last 150 years far exceeds the magnitude and rates Earth has experienced over the entire 24-millennia period. It is no surprise, then, that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently declared 2023 to be the warmest year in the instrumental record and that Antarctic sea ice coverage had dropped to a record low. 

The beat goes on—the most recent data available show January, February and March 2024 to be the hottest January, February and March on record (just the latest in a series of ten). Looking ahead, our current policy track would result in ~2.7C mean global warming by century’s end, and one credible study argues that, with fast and slow feedbacks, even current atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are sufficient to generate 10C heating. But even 2.7 degrees warming is sufficient to flatten agriculture in many areas and render large areas of Earth uninhabitable. Analysis shows under a range of warming scenarios, that the projected geographical shift in the normal human temperature niche by 2100 would force the unprecedented migration of one to three billion people to thermally safer parts of the planet. Picture the abandonment of major cities and megacities, the invasion of rural areas by desperate millions and an ungovernable world in geopolitical turmoil. 

And that’s just global heating. Alarming as these data are, global heating is only the most palpable symptom of climate change which is, itself, only one co-symptom of a much greater meta-problem, ecological overshoot. Overshoot means that: 

Humans are consuming even self-producing resources (e.g., fish stocks, forests) and replenishable resources (e.g., fresh-water aquifers, arable soils) faster than they can regenerate and producing (often toxic) waste in excess of nature’s assimilation capacity. 

Think about that for a moment. You should soon realize that virtually all so-called “environmental” problems are actually caused by overshoot. Even anthropogenic climate change is an excess waste problem. (Carbon dioxide is the greatest waste product by weight of industrial activity.) The numerous other co-symptoms of overshoot include plunging biodiversity, fisheries collapses, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, groundwater depletion, rising cancer rates, falling sperm counts, contaminated food chains, the pollution of everything, etc., etc., most of which are worsening with each new assessment. 

It should be clear from this dismal accounting that, left unattended, overshoot is a terminal condition. The depletion and pollution of the ecosphere is a genuine existential threat, not only to human “civilization” but also to the existence of thousands of other species with whom we share the planet. It is therefore a supreme irony that everything the world community is doing to address global heating—switching to wind and solar electricity, promoting dubious CO2 extraction technologies, subsidizing electric vehicles, etc.—is not only not fixing the climate but is actually worsening overshoot. Fossil fuel use is still increasing, and carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rise to new records annually. Yet we remain in effective policy paralysis.

How stupid is that?

This is not just a facetious question. Homo sapiens is actually a much duller blade that most people can imagine. The ecological crisis is hardly breaking news; the road to overshoot is potholed with cogent warnings. Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, sometimes credited with catalyzing the environmental movement and an unprecedented raft of environmental legislation, was published in 1962. A decade later (and over half a century ago) the Club of Rome’s (in)famous Limits to Growth (LtG) projected already existing trends to show that pollution and resource scarcity could lead to global economic and population collapse in the mid-21st century. William Catton’s unsurpassed classic, Overshoot, appeared in 1982. The Union of Concerned Scientists published the first of many World Scientists’ Warnings to Humanity in 1992, arguing that humans are so altering the living world that it may soon be unable to sustain life as we know it. 

Significantly, 1992 is also the year in which The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted; it came into effect two years later with 165 signatories and 198 parties. (In addition, corporate interests and environmental organizations participate as advisors and observers.) Nation-states agreed to return their GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Toward this end, the convention’s decision-making body, The Conference of the Parties (COP), has held 28 so-called COP Conferences—the most recent in Dubai, in 2023—on measures to reduce emissions and reverse climate change through decisive action. The first more or less universal “legally binding” global climate agreement was adopted at COP 21 in Paris in 2015, with the parties committing to limit global heating to 2 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels, while striving to keep the increase to 1.5 degrees or less. 

Simultaneously, climate concern, combined with the rising costs of fossil fuels and massive subsidies from governments, catalyzed the emergence of a whole new “clean” energy sector. In recent years, investment in wind turbines, solar panel installations, nuclear plants (clean?), grid improvements, electric vehicles and related infrastructure has been breathtaking, surpassing investment in fossil fuels and reaching $1.7 trillion in 2023. One encouraging seminal review shows that since the mid-2000s, a large and growing number of research groups have concluded that 100% renewable energy “is feasible worldwide at low cost.” The public are enthusiastic supporters, having been convinced by such studies and relentless industry promotion, that a painless and economically attractive transition from fossil fuels to “green renewable energy” is already well underway. 

What’s not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. During this 32-year period of solemn pledges, binding agreement and policy action to reduce GHGs, carbon dioxide emissions actually ballooned from 22.5 billion tonnes (Gt) in 1992 to 37.2 Gt in 2023, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased from 360 to 420 parts per million, i.e., to 50% above pre-industrial levels. In addition, a third of carbon emissions is dissolved in the seas causing ocean acidification. Perhaps most remarkably, in 1992, fossil fuels provided about 81% of the world’s primary energy; 32 years of progress later, fossil fuels still account for 82% of consumption. It may seem beyond belief, but half the fossil fuels ever consumed by humanity have been burned since 1990! Such is the power of exponential growth.

But what about that massive investment in clean electricity? The positive effect on emissions has largely been neutered by increasing global demand for energy. Wind and solar power (W&S), where most investment is going, accounted for only 14.3% of global electricity production in 2023 (compared to ~60% by fossil fuels). In short, despite the promotional hype, billions invested, and rapid capacity growth, W&S electricity contributed only ~2.7% to the world’s final (consumer level) energy consumption last year. The global community would have to install over four times the current multi-decade cumulative global stock of wind and solar infrastructure to fully displace fossil fuels from electricity generation alone—and this assumes no increase in demand. Problem solved? Not quite—we’d still have to address the non-electric and hard-to-electrify uses of energy; as noted, fossil fuels are holding steady at over 80% of the global energy mix. 

These data from the real world suggest that the clean energy transition is actually barely underway. There is no possibility that we will achieve quantitatively equivalent “100% renewable energy” by 2050. (And if we try, note that the mining, transportation, refining, manufacturing, installation, maintenance and replacement associated with W&S is powered mainly by fossil fuels and produces major collateral ecological damage.) This is why the stricter Paris goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is already in the rearview mirror, and Earth will likely experience 2.0C heating by 2050 well on the way to, well, who knows? 

Should we be surprised? Not really—after all, the renewable energy transition is being sold partly on grounds that it involves massive capital investment, promises excellent profit-making opportunities and creates thousands of jobs. The reality is that the much-vaunted green energy revolution is really an attempt to maintain the market-based capitalist status quo—at best it’s “business-as-usual-by-alternative-means”—when the growth-oriented status quo is the structural source of the problem. 

It is no coincidence then, that since the entire mythic “limit global warming” show debuted in 1992, the two signature drivers of overshoot, real gross world product and the human population have increased nearly four-fold and 45% respectively. We can safely conclude that the world community’s singular focus on climate change has served as a major distraction from the real existential threat—the worsening meta-problem of global overshoot. 

To repeat, “How stupid is that?” 

Part 2. My Response over a Career as an Academic Ecologist

I’ve reviewed these data because the half-century in question is the context for my entire academic career. I have spent five decades struggling to understand the human eco-predicament and the enigma of inaction with the “stupid” question never far from mind. In fact, it still lingers in the air like stale smoke. My work and that of thousands of other scientists has had little palpable impact on the state of the world—though I suppose things might have been worse without it—and left me only slightly less befuddled. 

And I am in a better position than most to confront eco-reality. 

It was my good fortune to spend much of my youth playing and working on my grandparent’s farm in southern Ontario. This was invaluable life experience, regrettably not often available to young people today. Even as a ten-year-old, my daily chores on the land and the simple act of eating food we had grown infused me with certain knowledge that humans are of the Earth, made from soil and rain. This juvenile epiphany permanently shaped my educational path, steering me toward becoming a PhD ecologist. 

By the early 1970s I was beginning my academic career, a still wet-behind-the-ears but enthusiastic assistant professor of human ecology. Inspired by the recently published Limits to Growth, I seized an opportunity to give an elaborate seminar to a committee of senior colleagues on the growing relevance of the ecological concept of carrying capacity as applied to humans. 

Big mistake? 

Among the audience was a prominent resource economist who took me aside after my presentation and opined that, while I appeared to be intelligent enough, I was apparently ignorant that economists had thoroughly trashed LtG and essentially abolished the notion of human carrying capacity. Hadn’t I heard of the law of supply and demand? Was I unaware of human ingenuity and technological prowess? Local scarcities? No problem—that’s why we have globalization and international trade in scarce resources. He explicitly warned that should I continue down the obviously sterile path to resource limits and carrying capacity, my academic career at the University of British Columbia would be “nasty, brutish and short.” To help me avoid the inevitable, he kindly provided a list of corrective readings.

These readings served only to prove that economists were utterly ecologically blind. (How stupid is that?) Contrary to received wisdom, technology doesn’t actually increase carrying capacity—it merely accelerates the rate of resource exploitation and drawdown; global trade doesn’t increase domestic carrying capacity—it merely shuffles productivity (biocapacity) around, temporarily relieving local limits while depleting distant surpluses. And how about the absurd assumption underlying economists’ basic models that the economy is essentially separate from, and independent of, “the environment?” 

These trivial—but apparently novel—insights actually reignited my interest in carrying capacity and led me (with my graduate students) to develop ecological footprint analysis (EFA) and accounts. Eco-footprinting uses quantifiable material flows to compare any human population’s demand on productive ecosystems (its eco-footprint) with nature’s supply (biocapacity). EFA confirms unambiguously that many countries are running ecological deficits (consuming more bioresources than domestic ecosystems can supply) and that the total human population even at average material standards, greatly exceeds long-term global carrying capacity—i.e., humanity is well into overshoot. 

Three decades after the first formal publication on EFA, the human eco-footprint (EF) remains one of the world’s best-known (un)sustainability indicators, has generated an industry of EF analysts and has inspired a number of spinoffs (e.g., carbon footprint, water footprint, material footprint). That’s the good news. The bad news is that its success has served also to intensify condemnation of the EF concept and methods as “so misleading as to preclude their use in any serious science or policy context.” Our point-by-point rebuttals of such critiques ricochet harmlessly off the ideological armor of neoliberal economists and techno-optimists. 

The intellectual slagging gets worse. In fact, anyone who attempts to associate the contribution of growing populations to the human eco-predicament (a major strength of EFA), will need to develop a certain intellectual insouciance to direct ad hominem attacks. For frequent repetition of this sin, I have repeatedly been characterized in social media as anti-human, eco-fascist and racist. 

“Neo-Malthusian” is perhaps the mildest of such negative epithets (though one I am happy to accept). In a recent widely read paper, my co-author and I used the context of global overshoot to critique the so-called energy transition and Green New Deal thinking. The reaction from renewable energy proponents was swift and intemperate. The journal’s editor was so cowed that he published an apology for allowing the paper through the peer review process (we were actually well-reviewed). Said editor seemed particularly exercised because we had argued that the world community should consider a controlled downsizing, and we had the temerity to suggest setting “…a limit to the world population so as to avoid overshoot… an unfortunate echo of Malthusianism that is surely not even conceivable today”. 

What I find “not conceivable today” is that any even half-informed person cannot recognize limits, the reality of overshoot and the possible implosion of the ecosphere. It should also be clear that the only effective solutions will entail planned absolute reductions in economic throughput (energy/material consumption and waste production) and smaller populations. In short, overshoot and its various symptoms cannot be resolved without major economic restructuring, significant changes to high-income lifestyles, and global population planning. 

Perhaps, for some, fear of the inevitable is negated by belief that humans are destined to abandon a shriveled Earth and populate the galaxy. Or perhaps we will upload our minds and consciousness to some universal computer, digital immortality forever freeing us from the messiness of corporeal existence. Others take comfort in—or even welcome—the prophesized biblical end times and their ascent into heaven. (Good luck with that.)

On one hand I sympathize; there is good reason to fear. The modern human enterprise is utterly dependent on abundant energy (Fig. 1) and this creates a double-barreled dilemma. Simply “stopping fossil fuel” without an adequate substitute would collapse the economy (i.e., modern civilization). On the other hand, continuing our use of fossil fuels risks the wrath of climate change, worsens overshoot, and will likely collapse both the ecosphere and the economy (i.e., modern civilization). 

click through to Rees' article at resilience+ for:

Figure 1. Chart of energy consumption vs GDP 

Sometimes when contemplating this dilemma, I see the human enterprise as a monster avalanche and each of us little more than incorporated—even willfully participating—snowflakes. We are simply swept along in the furious deluge, our best efforts useless in slowing its gathering momentum. Frankly, it is increasingly evident, to me at least, that we are innately incapable of comprehending the full scope of our predicament let alone controlling how things unravel. 

But should that stop us from developing a well-articulated “Plan B?” And how can ordinary citizens cope while contributing to a softer landing?

Part 3. Lessons Learned and Advice for Carrying On

As someone who’s been contemplating questions like these for more than fifty years, I have a few suggestions. First of all, learn not to take matters personally—neither the human dilemma nor attacks on efforts to awaken the sleepwalkers. Neither you nor the world will benefit from fits of depression or your withdrawal from the fray. Instead, revel in your knowledge and understanding even if it’s partially wrong (which it inevitably will be). There is a certain satisfaction in being able to interpret sensibly what’s going on and sharing your understanding with others. You might even learn something from the debates and likely push-back! Perhaps the most important thing is not to allow events beyond your control to prevent you from celebrating life—grab that bouquet, nettles and all! (For one thing, it’s unlikely that you’ll get a second round!) 

Of course, informed people want to “do something,” and there are dozens of books out there describing the 100 things you can do to save the world. But be cautious—offloading responsibility onto individuals and debasing the common good is part of the neoliberal agenda that has shaped public discourse and elevated corporate values, particularly in North America, since the 1970s. Drastically modifying one’s lifestyle may be a genuine response for some, but is mere virtue signaling for others. In any event, it has no detectable effect on the state of the world. Sorry.

“But wait,” you protest. “If we all just consumed less, it would make an enormous difference.” Agreed, if everyone chose poverty, for example, the environment might catch a break—but not everyone will, so the environment won’t. The simple fact is that humanity’s ecological predicament is a collective problem best addressed through collective solutions. Individuals cannot pass environmental protection legislation, implement ecological tax reform (full social cost pricing), impose resource quotas and rationing, build adequate public transit, implement population planning, replace GDP with a genuine well-being indicator, etc., etc. These are full-on, macro-level “Plan B” activities. The really heavy lifting can be done only by senior governments or other umbrella organizations in the wider public interest. Even the bottom-up activities of individuals and sustainability-oriented community groups (e.g., the degrowth, transition towns, circular economy, and similar eco-advocacy organizations) will be most effective in a supportive top-down policy environment.

But there is a catch. The political process in many countries (particularly the US) has largely been co-opted by powerful elites and the corporate sector. Those who fund politicians’ electoral campaigns expect—and receive—reciprocal favors. An ecological “Plan B” is not among them. Modern so-called democracies are plagued by regulatory capture by the corporate sector or other vested interests, which have succeeded in kneecapping the US Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and reversing many important environmental reforms passed since the 1970s. 

If we are to upend such corrosive activities and reignite democratic fervor, we may have to protest—riot even—by the thousands in the streets. In the meantime, let’s at least recognize that democracies can work only through the involvement of well-informed citizens. Write those letters criticizing government stupidity (such as subsidies to both fossil fuels and electric vehicles) and encouraging constructive policies. Repeat often. Make sure also to attend all-candidates meetings at election time armed with sharply-honed questions about proposed legislation or simply your favorite candidate’s stance on climate or biodiversity loss or gross pollution or population planning, i.e., on overshoot. In short, we have an obligation as citizens to be a public pain in the ass to errant senior politicians and wannabe leaders. 

On a more micro-“Plan B” level, citizen activists should focus attention on the necessity for relocalization in the (increasingly likely) event that “senior management” fails absolutely. Whether nation-states and the global system precipitously collapse or slowly unravel, the future of humanity will be local. As one historian astutely observed, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” 

In this light, should not local environmental and other citizens’ groups be organizing to cope with unfolding eco-political reality (as opposed to lobbying to subsidize larger families, for example). How do we reestablish a sense of mutual dependence and community? And how can committed communities best acquire the basic skills, tools, equipment and land to ensure local food sufficiency and otherwise enhance their economic self-reliance in the event of energy shortages or the breakdown of global or national supply chains? 

Indeed, as matters unfold, those best equipped for an economically smaller future may not be wealthy elites but rather Indigenous peoples and others who have acquired the skills needed to live close to the land. In any event, forward-looking communities should be planning for the downsizing and relocalization of their economies and the reintegration of human activities as much as possible with nearby supportive ecosystems. The survival of “civilization” requires that the human enterprise be reorganized into manageable, human-scale spatial and eco-economic units consistent with the necessity of one-planet living.

Let’s be honest. Preparing the present to thrive in the future sounds like a formidable task. And it is—you will likely spend a lifetime at it. But after the daily fray, go home, open a bottle of wine and enjoy dinner. Remember, we may live in uncertainty, but the bouquet of life is by no means all barbs and nettles.