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RESOURCE CRISIS: Seneca cliffs of the third kind: how technological progress can generate a faster collapse
The collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery industry gives us a good example of the abrupt collapse in the production of resources – even resources which are theoretically renewable. The shape of the production curve landings shows some similarity with the “Seneca curve“, a general term that I proposed to apply to all cases in which we observe a rapid decline of the production of a non renewable, or slowly renewable, resource. Here is the typical shape of the Seneca Curve:
The similarity with the cod landings curve is only approximate, but clearly, in both cases we have a very rapid decline after a slow growth that, for the cod fishery, had lasted for more than a century. What caused this behavior?
RESOURCE CRISIS: Fossil fuels: are we on the edge of the Seneca cliff?
RESOURCE CRISIS: Fossil fuels: are we on the edge of the Seneca cliff?.
This observation by Seneca seems to be valid for many modern cases, including the production of a nonrenewable resource such as crude oil. Are we on the edge of the “Seneca cliff?“
It is a well known tenet of people working in system dynamics that there exist plenty of cases of solutions worsening the problem. Often, people appear to be perfectly able to understand what the problem is, but, just as often, they tend to act on it in the wrong way. It is a concept also expressed as “pushing the lever in the wrong direction.”
With fossil fuels, we all understand that we have a depletion problem, but the solution, so far, has been to drill more, to drill deeper, and to keep drilling. Squeezing out some fuel by all possible sources, no matter how difficult and expensive, could offset the decline of conventional fields and keep production growing for the past few years. But is it a real solution? That is, won’t we pay the present growth with a faster decline in the future?
This question can be described in terms of the “Seneca Cliff“, a concept that I proposed a few years ago to describe how the production of a non renewable resource may show a rapid decline after passing its production peak. A behavior that can be shown graphically as follows:
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