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Death by Hockey Sticks

September 14, 2022

Death by Hockey Sticks

hockey sticks

Courtesy Pixabay (PhotoMIX-Company)

You may be familiar with the term “hockey stick curve,” used describe a trend that has been flat/stable for a very long time, but shoots up at the end of the series in dramatic fashion, resembling the shape of a hockey stick. Hockey can be a violent sport, and it’s easy to get hurt by even one well-aimed swing. Today’s world is being battered from all sides by countless hockey sticks. Mostly, they seem to be targeting Earth’s critters, who are getting bludgeoned unsparingly. But in the end, we’re only harming ourselves.

This post is structured as a gauntlet of hockey stick curves that may leave the reader feeling a bit bruised. Depending on what’s being plotted, many of the graphs shoot up like an exponential, but a few are careening downwards. A theme emerges: the “bads” go up, and the “goods” go down—and not by coincidence.

 

People and Money

We’ll start simply. Human population looks like a hockey stick curve. This is not a surprise to anyone. The fact is greeted with a range of reactions from joy to despair, but mostly simple acceptance. Whatever your disposition, here’s what it looks like.

Human Population

All the plots in this post will share the same time axis, from the year 1000 to 2200—even for those lacking information across the whole span. The point will be to emphasize the anomalous nature of recent history: what I call the fireworks show.   Maybe it would be more fair to use a 10,000 year span (civilization), or 200,000 for modern homo sapiens, or even 3 million years for the entire human saga.  On such scales, the present era loses its graceful curve and looks rather more like a sudden brick wall.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

James Howard Kunstler: It’s All Going to Have to Get Smaller

July 13, 2022

James Howard Kunstler: It’s All Going to Have to Get Smaller

“I’m not a techno-narcissist. I don’t think there are technological rescue remedies that will allow us to keep doing what we’re doing…”

— James Howard Kunstler

There is a prevailing fallacy, despite warning signs to the contrary (looming peak oil, fragile markets, and climate weirdness, among others), that we can continue in perpetuity the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. All we need to do is to pump into The System more debt or more political insanity, or hope that alternative energies or some new techno-solution will bail us out.

But, at best, all debt-fueled growth, shale oil “miracles” and green fuels can do by themselves is to make the Long Emergency just “a little bit longer.”

“The Long Emergency” is a phrase coined by James Howard Kunstler to describe the economic, political and social upheavals that will dominate the first decades of the 21st-century as the honeymoon of affordable energy comes to a close. It is also the name of Kunstler’s seminal book on the topic. (The Long Emergency is one of fifteen books on our “Essential Reading List for the Strong Towns Thinker.”)

James Howard Kunstler is our very special guest on today’s episode of the Strong Towns podcast. He is the author of more than 20 books, including The Geography of Nowhere, Too Much Magic, and the World Made By Hand novel series.

In this episode, Strong Towns president Charles Marohn talks with Kunstler about what has changed—or perhaps what hasn’t changed—since The Long Emergency was first published in 2005. Kunstler explains why the “psychology of previous investment” (4:45) makes it so hard for most people to imagine living differently. Marohn and Kunstler also discuss (17:00) what’s wrong with the Green Revolution narrative that we can keep doing everything we’re doing now, if just “do it green”:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Economy In a Nutshell

June 20, 2022

Our Economy In a Nutshell

The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling.

Our economy is in a crisis that’s been brewing for decades. The Chinese characters for the English word crisis are famously–and incorrectly–translated as danger and opportunity. The more accurate translation is precarious plus critical juncture or inflection point.

Beneath its surface stability, our economy is precarious because the foundation of the global economy– cheap energy–has reached an inflection point: from now on, energy will become more expensive.

The cost will be too low for energy producers to make enough money to invest in future energy production, and too high for consumers to have enough money left after paying for the essentials of energy, food, shelter, etc., to spend freely.

For the hundred years that resources were cheap and abundant, we could waste everything and call it growth: when an appliance went to the landfill because it was designed to fail (planned obsolescence) so a new one would have to be purchased, that waste was called growth because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up when the replacement was purchased.

A million vehicles idling in a traffic jam was also called growth because more gasoline was consumed, even though the gasoline was wasted.

This is why the global economy is a “waste is growth” Landfill Economy. The faster something ends up in the landfill, the higher the growth.

Now that we’ve consumed all the easy-to-get resources, all that’s left is hard to get and expensive. For example, minerals buried in mountains hundreds of miles from paved roads and harbors require enormous investments in infrastructure just to reach the deposits, extract, process and ship them to distant mills and refineries. Oil deposits that are deep beneath the ocean floor are not cheap to get.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Impending Impasse and Sid Smith’s New Series

May 11, 2022

Our Impending Impasse and Sid Smith’s New Series

Keowee Toxaway State Park, South Carolina
I have a backlog of articles I have started but haven’t yet finished, so I’m starting with this one which has to do with our impending impasse. I think William Catton, Jr. worded that very well. It actually comes from his book, Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, in which a review is available here. For those unfamiliar with Catton, he wrote (among other books), Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, and along with other pioneering giants such as Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) and Dennis and Donella Meadows (The Limits to Growth), he brought awareness to the simple fact that society was breaching planetary limits and beginning to reach tipping points in planetary systems. 

Nowadays, it seems that everyone is getting in on some predicament; whether it is climate change, population growth, energy and resource decline (peak oil), pollution loading, or many others, these are all symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot, the master predicament. While I think it is great to have goals and to work towards those goals, I also think it is important to have goals that are not incongruent to what one is working towards. In other words, if one is working towards solving a particular issue, making the issue worse instead of better is senseless. Yet most people have little if any awareness that their favorite goal when it comes to the environment (often climate change) is getting further and further away rather than closer. As long as ecological overshoot is allowed to continue increasing, ANY environmental goal along with most other goals will continue fading into the distance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Gathering Stagflationary Storm

April 26, 2022

roubini163_STEFANI REYNOLDSAFP via Getty Images_gas pricesSTEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

The Gathering Stagflationary Storm

While recent shocks have made the current inflationary surge and growth slowdown more acute, they are hardly the global economy’s only problems. Even without them, the medium-term outlook would be darkening, owing to a broad range of economic, political, environmental, and demographic trends.

NEW YORK – The new reality with which many advanced economies and emerging markets must reckon is higher inflation and slowing economic growth. And a big reason for the current bout of stagflation is a series of negative aggregate supply shocks that have curtailed production and increased costs.

This should come as no surprise. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many sectors to lock down, disrupted global supply chains, and produced an apparently persistent reduction in labor supply, especially in the United States. Then came  of Ukraine, which has driven up the price of energy, industrial metals, food, and fertilizers. And now, China has ordered  in major economic hubs such as Shanghai, causing additional supply-chain disruptions and transport bottlenecks.

But even without these important short-term factors, the medium-term outlook would be darkening. There are many reasons to worry that today’s  will continue to characterize the global economy, producing higher inflation, lower growth, and possibly recessions in many economies.

For starters, since the global financial crisis, there has been a retreat from globalization and a return to various forms of protectionism. This reflects geopolitical factors and domestic political motivations in countries where large cohorts of the population feel “left behind.” Rising geopolitical tensions and the supply-chain trauma left by the pandemic are likely to lead to more reshoring of manufacturing from China and emerging markets to advanced economies – or at least near-shoring (or “friend-shoring”) to clusters of politically allied countries. Either way, production will be misallocated to higher-cost regions and countries.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Geopolitics and Degrowth

February 25, 2022

Geopolitics and Degrowth

The Geopolitics of Degrowth holds that real power flows not from waste, centralization and coercion but from decentralization, relocalization and the free flow of value.

Conventional geopolitics is all about more: more military power, more sanctions, more coercion, more influence.

The Geopolitics of Degrowth is all about the the power of less: wasting less, consuming less, needing less from other nations, reducing dependence on rivals, reducing coercion and centralized over-reach.

Conventional geopolitics concentrates wealth and political power in a giant dam on the biggest river. Centralized control of massed power is considered the acme of geopolitical strength. Everyone is coerced into funding and relying on the dam.

But this has it backwards: when the centralized dam bursts, the nation is in ruins. This vulnerability isn’t power, it’s weakness. The Degrowth model of strength is to make local use of every rivulet, stream and tributary, carefully shepherding its sustainability and use.

Unbeknownst to the mainstream, the world has entered an era of scarcity. The current abundance is a temporary flush of the last of the cheap-to-extract resources. Once this illusory abundance has been consumed, all that’s left is hard-to-extract, costly resources.

In an era of scarcity, power flows not from coercion but from needing less by consuming less by eliminating the tremendous waste and friction that consumes resources, capital and time without generating any positive returns.

The conventional mindset is deadset on maintaining this waste and friction, as if it was positive rather than negative. By focusing on “growth” in GDP, our system optimizes waste, fraud, friction and a throwaway mentality. The reality that 40% of everything we consume is wasted is not even recognized. In the conventional mindset, the goal is to waste more by accelerating The Landfill Economy of buying some product that fails or is obsoleted even faster than the previous generation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beyond the clash of empires

February 25, 2022

Beyond the clash of empires

A world of living places

Empire’s law – The unbridled pursuit of power

I’ve seen this movie before.

A large and powerful nation attacks a small and weaker nation. Fiery explosions light up the night. Their thunder roars across the landscape while armored columns roll over the border. Shock and awe. Kyiv 2022. Bagdad 2003. It all looks much the same.

Empires press against each other. People are caught in the middle. In Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, to name a few of the recent battlegrounds. Roadkill in the imperial struggle for power. Leave aside the justifications and charges each side will throw against one another. The problem is as old as civilization itself. The problem is empire.

Empire has one law, one imperative. It is the unbridled pursuit of power and expansion, always ruled by an imperial class that concentrates power in its own hands. The nature of empire is to centralize as much power as possible until it sucks the life out of its vassals, its conquests, its lands, its slaves. Empires are parasites.

Empires knows no limits. Until they find them. In barbarian tribes. In other empires. In their own internal decay. They exhaust their own resources until they crumble under challenges they can no longer handle. It’s a story as old as the Akkadian empire, history’s first, beginning around 4,300 years ago, continuing through successor empires, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, and many others down to the present day.

That is what is happening in our time. Only the stakes are unprecedently high. Mesopotamian empires could fall and pass on a legacy of deserts, their formerly fertile soils salted by irrigation works. Rome could collapse and leave a time of breakdown and urban collapse in its wake. But yesterday’s empires were of limited scope…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Has the World Gone Mad?

February 25, 2022

Understanding the crisis in Ukraine from a peak resource perspective

No, this war is not (just) about getting Ukraine’s resources. Other political ambitions aside, this one is more about the rest of Europe loosing its energy carriers, together with its political power — and stability.

It is no wonder that we use the same word — power — to describe both the use of political force and the rate of energy transfer. It’s almost an axiom, that the more energy (and other mineral resources) a nation has, the more political power it possesses over its neighbors. It is also important note, that power is relative: you don’t need to have all the energy of the galaxy at your fingertips — it’s enough to have a little more than the next country in the row.

In an abundant and growing world (i.e. between 1950 and 1970) this was of little concern. Each and every country had enough —i.e.: enough to generate as much energy and turn up as much minerals and food they need, with headroom to grow — so no one was really bothered to run down their neighbors. Of course this was rarely the case and thus the post WWII years can now be safely considered the biggest anomaly in human history. In ages of discontinuity however, like the one we live through these years, the role of energy is hard to underrate.

Yet, our political leaders and economic pundits would still like to believe that we are in the 80’s and 90’s, the roaring decades of globalization with an ever increasing number of cargo ships criss-crossing the planet’s oceans… Where every international issue and local shortage could be resolved by trade deals or embargoes. What we are witnessing at the moment however, is a dissolution of this idea — together with the myth of infinite replaceability and the effectiveness of sanctions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The devil is in the detail

February 20, 2022

The devil is in the detail

Voiced by Amazon Polly

If you get your news from the BBC, you might be forgiven for thinking that the economic hit from the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions has come to an end.  Indeed, if you merely skim through the headlines in your social media feed, you might believe that the UK is poised for an explosion of growth, the like of which we haven’t witnessed since the late 1960s.  “Retail sales,” we are told, “rebound in January as Omicron eases.”  The “UK economy rebounds,” they say, “with fastest growth since WW2.”  Chancellor Sunak – who wants to be seen as a prime-minister-in-waiting – announced that:

“Today’s figures show that despite Omicron the economy was remarkably resilient. We were the fastest growing economy in the G7 last year and are forecast to continue being the fastest growing economy this year.”

The GDP figures are certainly better than they might have been if more businesses had been left to go bust during lockdown.  Nevertheless, they are still well below February 2020, following the massive crash immediately after lockdown was ordered.  As the Office for National Statistics explain:

“UK gross domestic product (GDP) is estimated to have increased by 1.0% in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2021… Compared with the same quarter a year ago, GDP increased by 6.5%.

“Following the large 9.4% fall in 2020 because of the initial impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and public health restrictions, UK GDP saw an annual rise of 7.5% in 2021.”

Worse still, manufacturing GDP was negative, and continues to lag well behind its February 2020 level:

“Production output fell by 0.4% in Quarter 4 2021 and is now 3.6% below its pre-coronavirus levels. The fall in production output was because of a 3.2% fall in electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply (energy) and a 4.5% fall in mining and quarrying.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

#222. The Forecast Project

February 15, 2022

#222. The Forecast Project

PREDICTING THE ECONOMY OF THE FUTURE

In the Western world, at least, there’s an almost palpable sense of public uncertainty, anxiety and discontent which might be attributed to a variety of causes.

Some ascribe it to specific issues, some to the over-reach and incompetence (or worse) of governments, and others to widening inequality between “the elites” and everyone else.

The view taken here is that the deteriorating public mood has a more straightforward explanation, which is that prior growth in economic prosperity has gone into reverse.

In fact, we don’t need to posit conspiracy theories, or look to ‘the machinations of the mighty’, to explain worsening hardship.

The simpler reality, hidden in plain sight, is that the prosperity of the average person is eroding and so, at the same time, is his or her sense of economic security. Efforts to use financial innovation at the macroeconomic level to stave off this trend have failed, driving people ever deeper into the coils of debt and other financial commitments.

In short, the average person is getting poorer, and feeling less secure. He or she doesn’t like it, and is baffled and suspicious over official assurances that it isn’t happening at all.

Projection – the land of hazard

Forecasting involves entering territory ‘where angels fear to tread’. But the publication of projections has now become imperative, made so (a) by the rapid worsening in the public mood, and (b) by the incomprehension that continues to inform policy decisions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

#220. The human factor

January 25, 2022

#220. The human factor

CONTINUITY, CONTRACTION OR COLLAPSE

Over an extended period, but with growing intensity in recent times, there has been a discussion, here and elsewhere, about whether we can prevent economic contraction from turning into collapse.

This is part of a broader debate in which every point of view seems to begin with the letter C. The orthodox or consensus line is Continuity, meaning that the economy will continue to expand in the future as it has in the past, and is claimed still to be doing in the present. The main contrarian theme is the inevitability of Collapse. Those of us who believe even in the existence of a third possibility – Contraction – are in a tiny minority.

Of these three points of view, the only one that we can dismiss is continuity. The economic “growth” that we’re told can be extended indefinitely into the future isn’t even happening in the present.

Most – roughly two-thirds – of the reported “growth” of the past twenty years has been cosmetic. The preferred metric of gross domestic product (GDP) measures activity, not prosperity. If we inject liquidity into the system, and count the use of that liquidity as ‘activity’, we can persuade ourselves that the world economy has been growing at rates of between 3% and 3.5%.

The classic illustrative example is of a government paying one large group of workers to dig holes in the ground, and another group to fill them in again. This adds no value, of course, but it does increase activity, and therefore boosts GDP.

In this example, the obvious question is that of how the government pays for all this zero-value ‘activity’. The simple answer is to use borrowed money. Conveniently, GDP, as a measure of activity, calculates flow without reference to stock…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Vaclav Smil: We Must Leave Growth Behind

January 9, 2022

Vaclav Smil: We Must Leave Growth Behind

On September 23, the United Nations opened its Climate Action Summit here in New York, three days after the Global Climate Strike, led by Greta Thunberg, swept through thousands of cities worldwide. To mark the occasion, Intelligencer will be publishing “State of the World,” a series of in-depth interviews with climate leaders from Bill Gates to Naomi Klein and Rhiana Gunn-Wright to William Nordhaus interrogating just how they see the precarious climate future of the planet — and just how hopeful they think we should all be about avoiding catastrophic warming. (Unfortunately, very few are hopeful.)

Vaclav Smil cuts an unusual figure in the climate world — an iconoclastic Czech-Canadian scientist, he is often called the person who understands energy transitions better than anyone else in the world. (Bill Gates is a particular fan.) But his view of energy transitions is, famously, dour — that it will take, at least, many more decades to produce a transition to renewable energy than most analysts and advocates predict and that a total transition may prove tremendously difficult.

In his new book, Growth — a dense, 500-page treatise that covers everything from “microorganisms to megacities,” whose afterword we’re excerpting here — Smil makes perhaps an even-more-off-putting proposition: that in order to “ensure the habitability of the biosphere,” we must at the very least move away from prioritizing growth and perhaps abandon it entirely.

Let me start by asking you about the very end of the book. I know so much of this was written in a spirit of caution and care and wanting to avoid drawing long-term, large-scale conclusions from the material. But from my read, at least, it ends on a quite definitive note…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’

December 30, 2021

Vaclav Smil

The scientist and author on his latest book – an epic, multidisciplinary analysis of growth – and why humanity’s endless expansion must stop.

Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Over more than 40 years, his books on the environment, population, food and energy have steadily grown in influence. He is now seen as one of the world’s foremost thinkers on development history and a master of statistical analysis. Bill Gates says he waits for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie. The latest is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.

You are the nerd’s nerd. There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like you. You dug up the astonishing statistic that China has poured more cement every three years since 2003 than the US managed in the entire 20th century. You calculated that in 2000, the dry mass of all the humans in the world was 125m metric tonnes compared with just 10m tonnes for all wild vertebrates. And now you explore patterns of growth, from the healthy development of forests and brains to the unhealthy increase in obesity and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Before we get into those deeper issues, can I ask if you see yourself as a nerd?
Not at all. I’m just an old-fashioned scientist describing the world and the lay of the land as it is. That’s all there is to it. It’s not good enough just to say life is better or the trains are faster. You have to bring in the numbers. This book is an exercise in buttressing what I have to say with numbers so people see these are the facts and they are difficult to dispute.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Putting Post Growth Theory Into Practice

December 24, 2021

The Post Growth Entrepreneurship Incubator helps founders break free from traditional business models and implement sustainable non-extractive practices.

Annie Spratt via Unsplash

How do you define Post Growth Entrepreneurship?

A three-minute Post Growth Entrepreneurship primer

What brought you to post growth thinking and approaches?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Prepare developed democracies for long-run economic slowdowns

November 26, 2021

Prepare developed democracies for long-run economic slowdowns

Developed democracies proliferated over the past two centuries during an unprecedented era of economic growth, which may be ending. Macroeconomic forecasts predict slowing growth throughout the twenty-first century for structural reasons such as ageing populations, shifts from goods to services, slowing innovation, and debt. Long-run effects of COVID-19 and climate change could further slow growth. Some sustainability scientists assert that slower growth, stagnation or de-growth is an envi-ronmental imperative, especially in developed countries. Whether slow growth is inevitable or planned, we argue that devel-oped democracies should prepare for additional fiscal and social stress, some of which is already apparent. We call for a ‘guided civic revival’, including government and civic efforts aimed at reducing inequality, socially integrating diverse populations and building shared identities, increasing economic opportunity for youth, improving return on investment in taxation and public spending, strengthening formal democratic institutions and investing to improve non-economic drivers of subjective well-being.

Modern liberal democracies—with broad economic and political freedom and stability—predominate in today’s developed world, but they are a historical anomaly. Before the Industrial Revolutions, there was both little per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth and little democracy (Fig. 1a). Since the Industrial Revolutions, most countries have escaped the ‘Malthusian trap’—where land productivity growth led to growth in population but not affluence1—and global affluence has increased by more than a factor of ten1,2. This unprecedented global growth has temporally coincided with the global proliferation of democracy (Fig. 1a). In the early nineteenth century, less than 1% of the world’s population lived in a democracy, compared with about 55% today3. There is some evidence of bidirectional causality: on average (with some exceptions), open, democratic institutions promote growth4–6, and long-run growth and affluence promote the formation of democratic institutions7,8…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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