We’re not doomed because of climate change, resource depletion, or biodiversity loss. We’re doomed because human nature made those things inevitable.
There are many reasons I became a doomer.
Climate change is accelerating and governments aren’t taking it seriously. The sixth mass extinction event is well underway and most people don’t care. Fossil fuels and other crucial resources are running out and most people don’t even know. Pollution in the form of microplastics and forever chemicals are rapidly accumulating in our bodies, lowering sperm counts and causing all sorts of health problems.
And all that is because of overshoot. We’ve already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, so it’s only a matter of time before the global population comes crashing down. But overshoot isn’t the main reason I became a doomer. In fact, I became a doomer about a year before I knew what overshoot means.
The main reason I became a doomer is because I realized that the challenge we’re facing is so monumentally large and complicated that humans are incapable of overcoming it.
This idea upsets some people. They say things like, “What about World War II? Look at how the U.S. mobilized the entire nation to help defeat the Axis powers.”
Yea, after they were attacked and only because they had a clear enemy. This time, we can’t simply declare fossil fuels the enemy and stop using them overnight. Doing that would cause civilization to collapse, anyway.
Besides, fossil fuels aren’t the only problem. As I’ve explained before, we would still be headed for collapse even if there were no climate change or pollution because we’re completely dependent on finite resources (forests, aquifers, fossil fuels, rare-earth minerals, etc.) that will mostly be gone in a matter of decades.
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong? Part Two
This is Part Two of a contemplation regarding what humanity’s future path ‘may’ look like. Part One can be found here.
Based on the evidence found in our pre/history and our biological proclivities (both of which I touched upon in Part One), it would appear we are likely to experience a variety of crises as we increasingly encounter diminishing returns on our investments in complexity and go through the withdrawal of surplus energy[1] that has fed our ‘growth’ and supported our organisational ‘problem solving’ abilities, but also because we have created and come to rely significantly upon systems that require such growth to keep from collapsing (for example, our increasingly debt-based financial/economic/monetary systems that, in turn, support our expanding energy-averaging systems and ensuring overexploited regions can be ‘maintained’ — i.e. globalised trade).
Throw on top of this the overshoot predicament and one should realise that the future is sure to not be the one painted by the techno-cornucopians who optimistically envision more of a Star Trek future than a Mad Max or The Road one.
I, personally, am of the opinion that ‘collapse’ of some type is imminent[2] primarily due to our overwhelming reliance upon important finite resources (especially fossil fuels) that we are now experiencing significant diminishing returns upon (and, yes, it’s an opinion; as is every other view of the future no matter how much ‘science’ is behind it or how sophisticated the model used to project the trends going forward — some are better than others but only the passage of time can ultimately decide which, in retrospect, were accurate).
At the same time we are going to be increasingly impacted by environmental/ecological crises brought about by our ecological overshoot and its concomitant overwhelming of the planetary sinks that previously helped cleanse the waste products of our expansion and technological creations[3] — to say little regarding the impacts that are going to be experienced around diminishing returns on food production and its very real reliance upon fossil fuels. Whether it be increasing frequency of extreme weather events and/or toxic environments leading to physical/physiological consequences for its inhabitants, including humans, the repercussions of our expansion appear to be growing in nature and impact.
How we view ‘collapse’ depends very much on our interpretation of it. It may be ‘the end of the world as we know it’ but that does not mean it will be dark and dreary. That perspective may be one that has been widely propagated in order to ‘scare’ people into believing the status quo economic and power structures need to continue and be supported at all costs. They do not.
‘Collapse’ seems scary because it is mostly about uncertainty, something humans abhor. We don’t know what the future holds and it reduces our cognitive dissonance greatly to cling to some certain future, even if completely and utterly wrong.
I’ve shared before what Tainter says about ‘collapse’ and it’s not all that bad depending upon one’s point of view:
“Collapse…is a political process. It may, and often does, have consequences in such areas as economics, art, and literature, but it is fundamentally a matter of the sociopolitical sphere. A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity…[It manifests itself] as:
· a lower degree of stratification and social differentiation;
· less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories;
· less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites;
· less behavioural control and regimentation; less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of ‘civilization’: monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like;
· less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery;
· less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources;
· less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups;
· a smaller territory within a single political unit.”[4]
Some (most?) of these consequences may actually be welcomed by some, especially those who rail against what appears to be a growing tyranny of the ruling elite as we creep further into the banquet of consequences of our overshoot and diminishing returns on investments in complexity.
However, the ‘collapse’ that may accompany overshoot — a massive ‘die-off’ — seems a tad bit more cataclysmic depending upon how quickly such population reduction occurs. A relatively short recalibration of our population would, for all intents and purposes, appear truly calamitous to those experiencing it and most certainly would create a chaotic disintegration of the complexities we have come to rely upon for our survival. We have recently experienced the knock-on effects of shutting down world trade/economies over the fears associated with a relatively mild novel coronavirus[5]; the disruption of something far more impactful would make this seem very tame in comparison.
It seems clear to me that we have predicaments creating a vice on our continuation of any type of complex society. And my thinking about how this might all unfold has led me to review more closely John Michael Greer’s thesis that attempts to develop an ecological model of ‘collapse’. This ‘catabolic collapse’ suggests, at least in my interpretation, that we will see ‘crises’ that lead to more ‘simplified’ levels of society that then later experience more ‘crises’ resulting in another step down to an even simpler state and so on due to the fact that “production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital…[and as a result get caught up in] a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction converting most capital to waste.”[6]
Given the increasing likelihood of ‘collapse’, it would seem we have two stark choices/strategies (very similar to what Greer argues regarding Catabolic Collapse). Continue on attempting to sustain unsustainable systems, virtually guaranteeing an overshoot die-off of gargantuan proportions. Or, attempt to ‘manage’ our ‘collapse’ as it unfolds by being pre-emptive via purposeful downsizing[7], degrowing[8], and simplifying[9].
What this second option looks like depends almost entirely on those agreeing with this approach. In fact, I sense a growing bifurcation of opinions even within the ‘degrowth’ movement with some arguing for a very slow transition and movement towards ‘green/clean’ technologies and others countering that such an approach is far too late and much more radical shifts need to be made if we are to have any ‘hope’ of making it thru the bottleneck we have created for our species (and others).
Unfortunately, given the lack of consensus, the psychological processes that lead to significant denial and bargaining (to reduce cognitive dissonance)[10], and the fact that the ruling elite will likely fight with all their ‘tools’ to avoid the elimination of their control/expansion of the wealth-generation/extraction systems that provide their revenue streams (their primary motivation), it is most probable we will go with the first option above: attempt to sustain the unsustainable (probably via ‘green’ technology), which will then lead to mother nature choosing how the planet is rebalanced — and our wishes and concerns will be null and void in this scenario.
In addition, given our current geopolitics and the frequency at which a society’s ruling elite choose war during times of stress, rather than diplomacy, I very much see the possibility of a global conflagration of conflict occurring — that could, of course, go nuclear.
As a result of all the above, I am increasingly leaning towards our future being far more dystopian in nature than utopian. The version of dystopia is still very much up to us I believe depending on what we do from this point onwards (my hope is that we make ‘good’ choices but my fear, as I admit above, is that doing so is beyond our capability because of the nature of our society’s power structures and protection of them by those who leverage crises to their benefit; along with the human tendencies to defer to authority and the need to ‘belong’).
Is there a way out of this conundrum? I personally waffle between ‘hope’ (something I wish for but really have no agency in) and despair (see image below).
My ‘hope’ is that we will come to realise that our pursuit of the perpetual growth chalice is taking us to a dark place where few of us survive (and that would be many species, not just homo sapiens) and reverse our trajectory; what can referred to as ‘degrowth’: a purposeful cessation of our current path and ‘deconstruction’ of almost all our socioeconomic and sociopolitical excesses until we reach a standard of living and population level that is ‘sustainable’.
My despair is that we will refuse to do this for a variety of reasons both psychological and biological in nature, but especially because if it is to have any positive impact we likely need to do it deeply and quickly. Instead, we will likely do everything we can to kick-the-growth-can-down-the-road to delay the inevitable and ultimately make the ‘correction’ all the more colossal in its size and scope; especially if, as Catton argues, we will have to undershoot our ‘natural’ carrying capacity by quite a bit given that everything we have done has reduced it significantly[11].
So, basically I believe that if we continue to hold that more technology[12] and money will address our issues, then I tend to think we will drift towards the darker dystopian path. If, however, we begin to ‘collapse’ on our own terms by degrowing, downsizing, and simplifying our societies we might be able to steer our future towards the lighter dystopian future where relatively small, local communities live within their region’s carrying capacity and are in ‘sync’ with the ecological systems within which they live and depend upon. We cannot and should not continue to believe that humans exist above and beyond these systems. Frankly, without them we are destined to disappear as well.
This ‘light dystopian’ vision, if you will, may appear calamitous to many because it is void of most of the technological ‘conveniences’ (what some have termed ‘energy slaves’) we currently embrace and is sure to involve much more manual labour and expose us to many of nature’s uncertainties that we have come to believe we can tame and avoid. But as nature so often reminds us, although we are reluctant to admit it, it always bats last and has the final say.
Given the evidence and my personal inclinations, more and more I’m leaning towards the realisation that it is the ‘scarier’ dystopian future that we, or at least future generations, will experience.
Of course only time will tell since making predictions is difficult, particularly if they’re about the future…
The following image was posted recently by someone on Facebook and I find it is frighteningly apropos to my personal reflections about our predicament:
[4] Tainter, J. The Collapse of Complex Societies. P. 4.
[5] Regardless of one’s perspective on Covid-19 and its political roots and/or implications, the millions of deaths attributed to it are but a fraction of several historical pandemics. The mortality rate for Covid has been relatively low compared to other ‘plagues’ that have spread through human populations and resulted in much more significant ‘die-offs’, such as the Black Death (1347–1351), Spanish Flu (1918–1919), Plague of Justinian (541–542), Third Plague Pandemic (1855–1960). https://www.publichealthonline.org/worst-global-pandemics-in-history/
[10] My second university degree was focused on psychology and anthropology (Honours Diploma, 1987, Western University). An Honours Diploma is equivalent to a Bachelor’s Degree but Canadian universities do not give out second B.A.s to the same student and instead give these. At least that was the case during my 1980s post-secondary years. I also have a Bachelor of Education which is the field in which I spent my formal employment (Brock University, 1989, St. Catharines, Ontario); 10 years as a classroom teacher, 15 as an administrator.
[11] Catton, Jr., W.R.. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois Press, 1980. (ISBN 978–0–252–00988–4)
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong? Part One
Today’s contemplation (a two-parter) was begun a few months ago but I’m just now getting around to completing and posting it. As often happens with me and my ADHD, I get thinking about/reflecting upon a topic or idea, record some thoughts while having my morning coffee and the ideas are flowing, and then move on to something else before finishing the task completely (this habit, unfortunately, also impacts my various house ‘projects’ and drives my wife crazy…but after 36 years together she’s aware I just need the ‘occasional’ reminder about the unfinished work — I had forgotten about this writing until coming across it as I was cleaning up some computer files due to ‘extra’ time on my hands given the loss of Internet with the several-day shut-down of one of Canada’s largest providers recently; a blessing, really, as it reduced my screen-time).
A question posed to me recently was: “What does the path forward look like when we say we have to live within our means on a finite planet?”
The answer to such a question is as varied as the people answering it[1]. I am hesitant to provide a definitive answer about what the transition to ‘sustainable’ circumstances might look like given the uncertainty that abounds. I am inclined to believe that any ‘guess’ about the future[2], regardless of the amount of data/evidence one has or the sophistication of the model or the computing power used, is probably about as accurate as reading tea leaves or a bird’s entrails. Not one of us has a clear picture as to what will unfold in the future, for as a few people have been credited with stating (including physicist Niels Bohr, writer Mark Twain, and baseballer Yogi Berra): “Prediction is hard, especially if it’s about the future.”
I’ve long held that complex systems can neither be controlled nor predicted with their non-linear feedback loops and emergent phenomena[3], so predicting complex systems with any degree of ‘certainty’ is a fools’ errand — especially once human actions/behaviours are involved. On top of this, no matter how sincere our attempts at objectivity in such prognostications, personal biases always impact our processing of information as does the paradigm[4] through which we interpret events and project into the future (and we tend to do so linearly since non-linear systems befuddle our primate brains); and, then, of course there are the Black Swans[5] that are persistently circling overhead — those unknown, unknowns that we can’t even contemplate because they’re outside of our personally-confining and -blinding worldview.
When we read about the future we are confronted with a potpourri of thoughts about how it might unfold — most of them, of course, presented with ‘certitude’. We tend to cling to some over others even if the one we tend to gravitate towards holds little in common with observed reality or experience. For as Dan Gardner argues in Future Babble[6], humans do not like uncertainty and despite so-called ‘experts’ being horrible at predicting the future, human psychology compels us to listen and take them seriously — even if we know the prognosticator to have been wrong on countless occasions (I still look at the long-range weather forecasts even though I know quite well that any outside of about 12–24 hours are bound to be incorrect, some drastically so — something that drives me ‘mad’ when my food gardens are in desperate need of rain and the weather forecasters are calling for rain right up until that actual day/hour it is supposed to rain and then change the prediction to no rain, and I am forced to spend a few hours watering my beds — a tendency that seems to be increasing in frequency the past couple of growing seasons; this year, April and May were great for precipitation in my area north of Toronto but as has been happening, it seems, June and so far in July has been way too dry and the 4000 litres of rainwater I have collected in my 20 rain barrels was getting precariously low up until a very recent overnight rain).
I like what Gardner states near the end of his book about discussing the future:
It is informed by the past, it is revealing about the present, and it surveys a wide array of futures. It is infused with metacognition…It offers hopeful visions of what could be; it warns against dangers that also could be. It explores our values by asking us what we want to happen and what we don’t. And it goes no further. It raises issues, questions, and choices, and it suggests possibilities and probabilities. But it does not peddle certainties, and it does not predict.[7]
Where are we on our path into the future given such uncertainty? Well, we have our choice of competing narratives to believe in.
There are some who argue that it matters little or not at all what we do with respect to the existential predicaments we face, for the future is one where we are all FUBAR. For example, 5–10 degrees of average global temperature increase is quite certainly baked into the cake and will in all likelihood lead to the extinction of most species on the planet, perhaps all with the end result being a ‘hothouse’ Earth with an environment similar to Venus. Responses to this eventuality then also range, mostly dependent on whether one holds that the impact will be sudden or drag itself out over millennia. Dystopia, even widespread extinction, is on the horizon and there is no avoiding it.
Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who believe strongly that we can transition somewhat seamlessly to ‘alternative’ forms of energy (or just continue extracting fossil fuels whose ‘scarcity’ is a concerted psy-ops by the ‘powers-that-be’) to keep-on-keeping-on with our status quo complexities and energy-intensive living standards. For most ‘clean/green’ energy aficionados, nuclear fusion or some other as-yet-to-be-discovered technology will provide us with cheap, safe energy; and/or we can mine passing asteroids for any needed finite resources we’ve exhausted, including water. In fact, one day we are bound to leave this over-used rock and colonise other worlds. Perhaps a little bit of tweaking here or there might be needed but given human ingenuity and technological prowess we will solve any and everything thrown our way so there is no need to worry about any ecological system breakdown or resource scarcity ‘problems’ for very long at all. The future is one of unlimited possibilities and utopian dreams, especially if we also redistribute all the wealth tied up in the off-shore bank accounts of the world’s billionaires and slay that evil monster capitalism; then, without a doubt, all eight billion (or much more) of us can live happily-ever-after, holding hands, and singing Kumbayah around the ‘carbon-free’ campfire.
These are perhaps the two extremes of the gamut of possibilities for our future. Where each of us ends up on this continuum of beliefs depends on the worldview we hold and how we process information through that narrow keyhole we necessarily each peer through. And I would argue that what we believe also very much relies upon our personal biases and what we wish to happen, not necessarily upon any ‘factual’ evidence. We are constantly seeking out confirmatory evidence for our beliefs and ignoring or denying counterfactual data or rationalising it to fit into our preconceived notions. There exist very strong psychological mechanisms to ensure ‘facts’ seldom, if ever, alter firmly held beliefs.
So, before I lay out my personal thoughts on what our future may or may not look like (and I am in no way ‘certain’ about any of this, although I do lean towards the more ‘dystopian’ possibilities), let me provide some cognitive context for why I believe what I believe. The paradigm through which I view the world, as it were, and necessarily impacts my perception of this crazy and totally unpredictable world.
I find that pre/history demonstrates pretty clearly that every complex sociopolitical organisation (i.e., complex society) before us has eventually ‘declined’ to a point that it can no longer be considered a ‘society’[8]. The social fabric that held the population together became frayed and people opted out, leading to its eventual ‘collapse’.
In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies[9] archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues that a human society is a problem-solving organisation. This organisation requires energy inputs for its maintenance with increasing complexity necessitating increased energy inputs. These inputs eventually encounter the law of marginal utility or diminishing returns because the solutions we adopt in dealing with problems that arise tend to be the easiest-to-implement and cheapest-to-maintain, but eventually more difficult and costly approaches must be pursued as the ‘easy’ ones have been exhausted. People are attracted to participating in a sociopolitical organisation (i.e., society) so long as the benefits accrued are at least — but preferably better — than the costs incurred. Once the costs exceed the perceived benefits, people choose to withdraw their participation. When a tipping point of participants have opted out, the organisational structures that have held complexities in place ‘collapses’.
It’s obviously much more difficult to abandon the sociopolitical sphere and organisational structures one is born into today than it was in the past. There is not only limited to no space left to flee to as every portion of the planet has been claimed by some nation state or another, but the vast majority of people lack the skills/knowledge to survive without their society’s supports. Self-sufficiency has been ‘bred’ out of us in just a few generations as we have embraced a future based upon different imperatives but especially complex centralised-systems and technology.
This shift has been afforded us by our leveraging of a one-time, finite cache of fossil fuel energy; a cache that has encountered significant and world-altering diminishing returns.
On top of this leveraging of fossil fuel energy and the paradigm shift it has led to in how we perceive the world — and create organisational structures and knowledge within in — we have the very real prospect that we are in the midst of ecological overshoot because we have significantly surpassed the planet’s human carrying capacity[10].
In the past we could overcome carrying capacity limits by migrating to a region as yet unexploited or underexploited by others (wars and colonisation are pretty well always about resources/economics; see U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler’s essay War is a Racket[11] for more on this perspective). When we pushed up against or exceeded the biophysical limits imposed by our environment in the past, this ‘takeover method’ (taking over from other species and eventually other humans) allowed us to expand for many millennia. We spread into virtually every niche across the globe.
More recently, however, we have depended upon a different means of procuring our needed resources termed the ‘drawdown method’, where we have extracted finite resources to supplement our existence. We have pushed human carrying capacity well past its natural limit by relying upon various resources drawn from our environment. The past couple of centuries has seen this approach focused primarily upon limited resources that have been extracted far, far faster than their renewal rate. Such use could only be limited in scope and temporary in time.
As William Catton argues in Overshoot[12], any species that overshoots its carrying capacity experiences a ‘rebalancing’ of its population eventually. Where the takeover method is precluded, a loss of necessary resources (usually food) results in a massive die-off to bring population numbers down to a level where the environment can recover. Sometimes a species experiences physiological changes that reduces fertility. Either way, population is reduced dramatically from its peak and often to a level far below the natural upper limit of ‘sustainability’ because of the damage to the environment that overshoot has caused.
Given our reliance upon fossil fuels, their finite nature, and the diminishing returns we have encountered because of this — and the way in which their use and the industrial processes they have ‘powered’ have overwhelmed the various planetary sinks that normally help to filter and purify the waste products we produce — it is increasingly clear that we have overshot our carrying capacity and have but the negative consequence of that to experience (or as many argue, are already experiencing).
In Part Two of this ‘essay’ I will paint a somewhat blurry picture of our possible future…
[1] Here I am reminded of a statement by a visiting psychology professor at a lecture on human ‘intelligence’ I attended at Western University when I was an undergrad. During his introductory remarks, with a goal of defining what we would be discussing, he stated (and I am paraphrasing given it’s been about 40 years): “Ask a hundred psychologists the definition of intelligence and you are bound to get a hundred different answers, perhaps more.”
[3] I highly recommend some reading on complexity and complex systems. A good beginning text is Donella Meadows’s Thinking In Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. (ISBN 978–1–60358–055–7).
[4] For an introduction to the concept of paradigms see Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962. (ISBN 978–0–22645–811–3)
[5] See Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Improbable. Random House, 2010/2007. (ISBN 978–0–8129–7381–5)
[6] Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail–And Why We Believe Them Anyway. McClelland & Stewart, 2010. (ISBN 978–0–7710–3513–5)
[8] My graduate degree was concentrated in archaeology (Master of Arts, 1988, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario).
[9] The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988. (ISBN 978–0–521–38673–9)
[10] Note that my first university degree was primarily concentrated in biology/physiology (Bachelor of Arts, 1984, Western University, London, Ontario).
Energy and Its Interconnections With Our Financialised Economic System
Petroleum geologist Art Berman recently posted an article discussing an issue regarding the mainstream energy transition narrative that I wanted to highlight. This is the connection between our monetary/financial/economic systems and energy, something that as Art argues is apparently not understood by most (all?) of the cheerleaders of this energy transition.
Or, perhaps it’s not that most don’t understand it, but that the complexities and interconnections are (conveniently?) ignored/dismissed/denied/overlooked/simplified as part of the bargaining/magical thinking/avoidance of anxiety-provoking thoughts that takes place in attempts to provide a ‘solution’ for what is for all intents and purposes a ‘predicament’ that at best might be mitigated at the margins — I’m referring to human ecological overshoot here, but also the recurring ‘collapse’ processes that complex human societies have been experiencing since our first experiments with them many millennia ago.
As Art concludes in his article: “Most of the world’s leaders and the public accept that we are in the early stage of an energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Few of them understand what that means for our financial system because renewable energy — for all of its progress and benefits — cannot replace our 383 billion fossil energy slaves.
Money creation is nothing but debt. Debt is an IOU on future energy. If future energy can’t provide the same returns as present energy, money supply and credit will radically contract. A future based on renewable energy will collapse the money supply and the financial system.”
The importance of this connection cannot perhaps be overstated given the degree to which our many complexities have grown to be dependent upon our monetary/financial/economic systems. The impending implosion of these systems places the hopes/dreams of a ‘smooth’ energy transition in great peril; in fact, I would argue it’s an impediment that cannot be avoided and may be as or more significant than the hard geophysical limits of Peak Resources. I also believe this aspect helps to connect the dots between a number of themes that I have written about over the past handful of years as I reflect upon and attempt to come to a better understanding of the immense complexities involved in our predicament of human ecological overshoot and the recurring collapse processes that impact our societies.
I’ve written about fiat currency’s role and our economic/financial systems in our predicament and recurring societal collapse a number of times and from a variety of angles[1]. In particular, I’ve highlighted the debt-/credit-based nature of our relatively recent economic growth dynamics and how this is not sustainable since it pulls potential future growth and, more importantly, all the concomitant resources (especially energy) into the present leaving less and less resources to access and use in supporting our complexities down the road — and on a finite planet this self-evidently means the practice is not sustainable, not even close. And, due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, we need to do this resource drawdown more and more quickly just to maintain status quo complexities — to say little about efforts to pursue continuing growth expansion, the biogeophysical limits to this, and the speed at which it adds to already overloaded planetary sinks and degrades our ecological systems.
While many go to great lengths to deny/bargain with/rationalise away this perspective (including the notion of hard biogeophysical limits), it seems these systems have become little more than a Ponzi Scheme as a result of the approach that has been taken — especially their financialisation. We have, for better or worse, been inclined to pursue perpetual, exponential growth to now keep them from collapsing and having to face the consequences of such an implosion. And these consequences will be significant, especially for so-called ‘advanced’ economies who are the main beneficiaries of this arrangement.
Perhaps the most salient and problematic consequence of a monetary/financial/economic systems ‘collapse’ for our complex societies would be a cessation of global energy averaging systems; that is, trade of goods. For families/communities/regions/nations dependent upon import of goods (especially food, potable water, shelter needs, and the energy that underpins virtually everything), this could be disastrous if local circumstances/resources cannot support population needs. And, given the way and amount that humans have expanded across the globe — particularly the last couple of centuries — most localities cannot support their populations with locally-derived resources; again, not even close.
For example, in considering my home province of Ontario, Canada, the 15+ million (and growing) population imports well over 80% of its food needs and a very significant portion of other important goods. Very little of our basic needs are met with local resources indicating our population is well beyond the natural carrying capacity of our immediate environment and almost wholly dependent upon international trade — and the situation is made worse each passing year as more and more of the limited arable lands get ‘paved over’ in the pursuit of human expansion. In no uncertain terms, should trade-based supply chains breakdown for any reason our population will be in a very dire situation. The ‘inconvenience’ of Covid19 lockdown supply chain issues that was recently experienced by many regions was just a drop-in-the-bucket compared to what may arise in the wake of credit-based, supply chain ‘disruptions’ — to say little about geopolitical-based disruptions that are beginning to expand and can be argued to have a base in resource access/control.
I’ve also repeatedly touched upon the ruling class’s abuse/leveraging/manipulation of these systems to meet their primary motivation — the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams[2]. In order to maintain their privileged positions atop the power/wealth structures inherent in complex societies, the ruling class have taken control of virtually all of society’s interconnected systems (e.g., government, media, academia, security, etc.), but especially the monetary/financial/economic ones. This provides this relatively small group of individuals/families with, at least for the time being, perpetual income/wealth to sustain their living standards and privileges — particularly because of the very significant dependencies on the various systems by the masses that have been established, especially over the past century+ (i.e,. a loss of skills/knowledge to be self-sufficient breeds total dependency upon those providing basic goods such as food, potable water, shelter needs, and energy).
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
-Edward Bernays
Given these organisational tendencies in large, complex societies it should be no surprise, that at the behest of those that stand to profit significantly from their pursuit (i.e., accumulation of wealth and the power/influence that flows from this), we have been guided towards maladaptive strategies via legislation but also very much by way of narrative management/control[3]. In order to sustain/expand the various wealth-generation/-extraction rackets, the ruling class has created broad-based narratives/stories to not only legitimise their positions atop our sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems but also to dissuade the masses from questioning the pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
-Edward Bernays
The world’s ruling class and profiteers are motivated to pursue the infinite growth chalice at every opportunity (making a bad situation worse) and in order to keep the various rackets going/expanding (that they control and profit from) they spin/market this as both inevitable and necessary despite it being the exact opposite path for ‘sustainability’, long-term survival of our species, and health of our planet and its various ecological systems. They insist that growth is ‘progress’, only beneficial, has no limits, and can be accomplished in an ‘environmentally-friendly’ (aka ‘green/clean’) manner. Anyone who challenges this zeitgeist is a tinfoil hat-wearing, doom-loving conspiracy theorist and must be excised from spreading their mis-/dis-/mal-information.
In particular, it is completely against the interests of the ruling class for the masses to be independent and/or self-sufficient as this challenges their wealth-extraction/-generation systems and thus positions of power and privilege (see the most recent denigration of home food gardening as being bad for the environment[4]). Rather than risk a loss of their revenue streams and the influence it brings, they steer beliefs towards the support of actions/policies that in the end create greater and greater dependency upon the complex systems they own and control.
It is because of these interconnections between our energy/resource needs/wants and the ruling class’s control/influence upon these various systems that I have personally come to the conclusion that probably one of the last places we should look to/depend upon for a ‘rational’ approach to our ecological overshoot predicament and pending societal collapse is our sociopolitical systems — a ‘rational’ approach being to pursue degrowth and self-sufficiency policies[5], not continue chasing the perpetual growth chalice and sociopolitical dependencies.
While our sociopolitical systems are marketed/trumpeted as ‘representative’ and ‘for society/the people’, when one wipes away this surface narrative they are anything but[6]. They have been created by and remain controlled by society’s ‘elite’ in order to benefit a relatively small number of our species at the expense of the rest of us, as well as the entire planet and its other species. This group’s motivations are, despite narratives to the contrary, diametrically opposed to human ecological ‘sustainability’.
Not wishing to believe or acknowledge the predicaments/insoluble problems we are mired within and believe that we have agency in our lives and society, we story-telling apes have crafted a variety of soothing, cognitive dissonance-reducing narratives to help minimise our anxiety and avoid reality[7]. It seems it is in our uniquely human nature to avoid anxiety-provoking thoughts by telling and believing in stories that are disconnected from physical realities and also overlooks our ecological systems dependencies. We have tales that put us above and beyond the vagaries of the natural world and capable of overcoming biogeochemical limits at the wave of a wand called human ingenuity and technology. And, not surprisingly, our ruling class have dominated the storytelling and leveraged them to their advantage, creating a number of rackets from which they benefit significantly[8].
In particular, tales have been weaved about smoothly transitioning away from the fundamental resource that has underpinned our significant exponential growth in technology (i.e., hydrocarbons), allowing us to — for the moment — ignore the hard, physical constraints of living on a finite planet and believe we stand outside/above Nature and, as a result, created ‘solutions’ that are exacerbating our dilemma by leading us further into ecological overshoot[9]. They are exacerbating our predicament through the continuing expansion of our global, industrial societies, our population numbers, and the prolonged avoidance/denial of it.
Rather than face the anxiety-provoking thoughts that arise from the realisation/awareness that our most adaptive ability — tool innovation and use to enhance the extractive exploitation of our environment and leverage it to our needs/wants — is, in actuality, facilitating our demise (and perhaps that of most other life on the planet), we have employed protective psychological mechanisms to convince ourselves that our eyes are lying to us[10]; that our tools and the human ingenuity from which they arise are not only our greatest asset but will, regardless of impediments or even physical laws, ‘solve’ all potential difficulties/problems we encounter.
The leveraging of hydrocarbons through our tool innovation/use (along with some other ‘innovative’ catalysts, such as credit-/debt-based fiat currency) and subsequent exponential expansion has helped to put us in the predicament of ecological overshoot with all the associated symptom predicaments a result (e.g., biodiversity loss, sink overloading, resource depletion, etc.)[11]. But rather than recognise and acknowledge the one-time cache of easy-to-access and easy-to-transport dense energy resource as a main reason for our ‘progress’, we have woven narcissistic narratives that place the reasons upon our unparalleled ingenuity and tool-based innovations.
Those of us who have become aware of our predicament and have attempted to speak out/raise awareness of it tend to sit on the margins. Given most people wish their beliefs confirmed as opposed to challenged, we have experienced the emotional ‘reactions’ that accompany the speaking of anxiety-provoking thoughts — particularly ad hominem attacks. I, personally, have experienced this most often when I challenge the mainstream narrative around non-renewable, renewable energy-based technologies and the notion that they can smoothly replace hydrocarbon-based energy and products[12]. I would argue, however, that there is overwhelming evidence that this approach is putting us further into overshoot and reducing the natural carrying capacity of our planet especially as a result of the various planetary boundaries we have already or are close to broaching.
On top of this human ecological overshoot predicament are the recurring processes of complex society collapse, a phenomenon that has impacted every human complex society to date and that also appear to have been sped up by our exploding growth. I’ve written extensively about such complex society collapse particularly through the lens of archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis elaborated upon in his monograph The Collapse of Complex Societies[13]. What’s important to focus upon here and gets us back to Art Berman’s point is the economic nature of ‘collapse’ within Tainter’s framework.
Fundamentally, when the ‘benefits’ of participating in and supporting the sociopolitical system one exists within have for some time been far less than the ‘costs’ associated with it (and, yes, it can take a long, long time — decades to centuries), regions/communities/families ‘abandon’ the behaviours necessary to maintain the system. In one form or another, they ‘opt out’. As more and more people make this choice, the various complex systems of society are undermined eventually resulting in societal ‘collapse’. This recurrent ‘collapse’ process appears to be occurring simultaneously with our human ecological overshoot predicament, creating a double whammy of dilemmas for our species.
Given the pre/historical tendency for the masses to abandon support for their sociopolitical system in the face of ‘costs’ exceeding ‘benefits’, it seems logical to deduce that the breakdown of energy-averaging systems due to diminishing returns on resource extraction (especially energy) will result in a similar loss of support. Maintaining support (in order to sustain privileges/revenue/etc.), even if just passive in nature, is an important consideration for the ruling class and it is increasingly likely (and I would argue we are witnessing this currently) that the ruling class will tighten their grip in order to sustain their privileges for as long as they can.
“Controlling the general population has always been a dominant concern of power and privilege…”
-Noam Chomsky
All of the above is interconnected, and these two phenomena of ecological overshoot and complex society collapse are impacting our species and planet at the same time, creating nonlinear feedback loops that appear to be speeding us towards some consequences we are ill-prepared for — to say little about emergent phenomena and Black Swan events. Uncertainty shrouds the timing and manner in which things will play out. Pre/historical precedents and bio-ecological principles, however, are strongly indicative that the future will not be one of a smooth transition to some technocornucopian-based utopia — not even close.
I have little doubt that the coming phase shift for our global, industrialised world will be transformative in nature, but probably not in a way most are hoping/wishing for; particularly for citizens of ‘advanced’ economies who have ‘benefitted’ the most from our extractive and exploitive behaviours and actions.
[1] See [NOTE: the following is a sampling of my posted Contemplations that discuss the topic/issue referenced and not all have been uploaded to my blog or Substack; it is an ongoing project at this time]:
-Feeding the Growth Monster: Fiat Currency and Technology (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Fiat Currency: Debasement and Infinite Growth (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Fiat Currency, Infinite Growth, Finite Resources: A Recipe For Collapse (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Greenwashing, Fiat Currency, Narrative Management: More On Climate Change and Elite Confabs (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Energy Future, Part 1 (Medium)
-Our Banking System: Government vs. Private Control, Part 1 (Medium)
[2] See:
-Finite Energy, ‘Renewables’, and the Ruling Elite (BlogMediumSubstack)
-’Net Zero’ Policies: Propaganda to Support Continued Economic Growth (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Climate Change And Narratives To Support Continued Economic Growth (BlogMediumSubstack)
-More Greenwashing: ‘Sustainable’ Development (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Are We Being Duped Regarding Climate Change? (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Beware the Snake Oil Salesmen: Climate Change and Elite Confabs (BlogMediumSubstack)
[3] See:
-’Renewables’ and the Overton Window That Ignores Biophysical Realities. June 1. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-On Narrative Control and ‘Fact Checking’. December 21. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Decline of ‘Rationality’. January 15. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-The Road Not Taken. Feb 19. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Primary Motivation For Society’s Elite. Mar 6. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Carbon Tunnel Vision, Externalised Pollutants, And Story-Telling Apes, April 19. (Medium)
[5] See:
-Preparing For Collapse. Apr 4. (BlogMedium)
-It’s Too Late For Managed Degrowth. November 15. (Medium)
-Local Community Resiliency And Political Systems, April 9. (Medium)
-Local Self-Reliance Is Imperative To Pursue In Light Of Ecological Overshoot May 8. (Medium)
-Only Local Leadership Can Help Communities Now, May 20. (Medium)
-Collapse Now To Avoid The Rush: Our Long Emergency, June 6. (Medium)
[6] See:
-Who Do Representative Governments Actually Represent? (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Loss in Trust of Government: A Stage of Collapse (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Ecological Overshoot and Political Responses (BlogMedium) Substack)
-Climate Change ‘Solutions’: Follow the Money (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Faith in Government: A Misplaced Belief (BlogMedium)
-Democracy: It’s Not What You Think It Is (Medium)
[7] See:
-Mythical Narratives Everywhere to Avoid Reality (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Finite Energy, Overconsumption, and Magical Thinking Through Denial (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Cognition and Belief Systems in a ‘Collapsing’ World: Part One (BlogMedium)
-Magical Thinking to Help Avoid Anxiety-Provoking Thoughts (Medium)
-Magical Thinking About the Energy Transition (Medium)
-Reality is an Inconvenience to Beliefs (BlogMedium)
-’Renewables’, Electrify Everything and Marketing Propaganda (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Degrowth, Green Growth, And The Ruling Caste of Society. (Medium)
-Leveraging Non-Renewable, Renewable Energy-Harvesting Technologies To Expand Wealth-Extraction/-Generation. (Medium)
-Ruling Caste Responses to Societal Breakdown/Decline. (Medium)
-Ruling Elite Rackets Everywhere… (BlogMedium)
-Rackets: Keeping the Curtains on Reality Drawn (BlogMedium)
[9] See:
-Electrify Everything: The Wrong ‘Solution’ (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Electrify Everything: Neither ‘Green’ Nor ‘Sustainable’ (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Growth Greenwashing: A Comforting Narrative. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Climate Emergency Action Plan: Electrification and Magical Thinking. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-The Growth Ponzi Must Be Kept Alive (Medium)
-We’re In A Predicament But Insist On Making It Worse (Medium)
[10] See:
-Grieving: There Are No ‘Solutions’ to Overshoot. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-’Clean’ Energy and the Stages of Grieving. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Sometimes People Don’t Want to Hear the Truth. (BlogMedium)
-Overshoot, Hydrocarbon Energy, and Denial: Avoiding the Pain. (BlogMedium)
-Growth and Denial: A Bad Combination. (BlogMedium)
-Avoiding ‘Collapse’ Awareness. (BlogMedium)
[11] See:
-Infinite Growth, Finite Planet; What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Fossil Fuels: Contributing to Complexity and Overshoot. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Ecological Overshoot, Hydrocarbon Energy, and Biophysical Reality. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Overlooking Ecological Overshoot. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Exponential Growth, Natural Carrying Capacity, and Ecological Overshoot. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-The ‘Predicament’ of Ecological Overshoot. (BlogMediumSubstack)
[12] See:
-Criticising ‘Renewables’ is Not a Sin. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-’Renewables’ Are The Solution: Just Ignore All That Ecological Systems Destruction Over There. (Medium)
-Enough Already You Malthusian Doomer! (Medium)
-Non-Renewable, Renewable Energy-Harvesting Technologies (NRREHTs): For and Against…Again. (Medium)
-Critiquing Renewables Is Simply A Right-Wing Conspiracy. (Medium)
[13] See:
-Energy-Averaging Systems and Complexity — A Recipe For Collapse. (BlogMediumSubstack)
-Declining Returns, Societal Surpluses, and Collapse. (Medium)
-What Do Previous Experiments In Societal Complexity Suggest About ‘Managing’ Our Future. (Medium)
-Societal ‘Collapse’: Past is Prologue. (BlogMedium)
Almost everywhere the pursuit of the infinite growth chalice (primarily by the ruling elite) and/or population growth along with a disregard for/ignorance of biophysical limits has put a community/region/nation into ecological overshoot. As a result, the people have become dependent upon fragile and complex long-distance supply chains — to say little about the creation of communities in areas that never should have been occupied by humans as they were never sustainable without such supplied resources.
There’s no ‘transitioning’ to something ‘sustainable’ in such a scenario — at least not for the significant majority of those caught up in it.
Many who are aware of the pending consequences (especially shortages of basic resources) are desperately clinging to the (false) hope that ‘clean/green/sustainable’ energy (non-renewable energy-harvesting technologies) will somehow stave off the inevitable die-off that seems to be charging our way. Although, there also seems to be a growing chorus of others who argue that all we need to do to avoid our situation is allow the expansion of fossil fuel extraction.
Denial, however, is not just a river in Egypt; it is a powerful psychological mechanism to avoid anxiety-provoking cognitions such as the predicament we’ve created for ourselves. And in our mass psychosis it seems we are championing strategies that evidence suggests will serve to exacerbate our plight (and it doesn’t help — in fact, it encourages the false beliefs — that our ruling elite are pushing specific ‘solutions’ for mostly monetary gain; a gain that serves to aid them in maintaining their privileged positions atop the power/wealth structures of our complex societies).
The longer we fail to accept and face our predicament (and abandon the false ‘solutions’), the worse we make the consequences charging our way.
I am increasingly reaching the conclusion, unfortunately, that the path we are on and will take is not towards some utopian nirvana of existence supported by ‘clean’ energy and ‘sustainable’ lifestyles as many believe. We are more likely to waste the last of our one-time cache of ancient energy stores on misguided technologies and resource wars.
This is perhaps not because we humans don’t want to attempt to address our issues but because we, in our uniquely human way, are lying to ourselves about the impediments of a finite world and its biophysical limits and thus are looking in the completely wrong direction for answers. It also doesn’t help that we have lost our realisation that we are not a unique species when it comes to ecological principles and thus can’t have our cake and eat it too.
There are some tremendously difficult decisions to make and the vast, vast majority of us don’t wish to even consider them; better to remain in ignorance or distraction.
As I have written previously:
Personally, I’d like to see our dwindling fossil fuels dedicated to decommissioning safely those significantly dangerous complexities we’ve created (e.g., nuclear power plants, biosafety labs, chemical storage, etc.) and relocalising as much potable water procurement, food production, and regional shelter needs as possible rather than attempting to sustain what is ultimately unsustainable given the fossil fuel inputs necessary. Perhaps, just perhaps. by doing these things a few pockets of humanity (and many other species) can come out the other side of the bottleneck we’ve created for ourselves.
As this is unlikely to be done for a variety of reasons, perhaps the best thing for those who have accepted our predicament to do is search for like-minded family/friends/community members and pursue relocalising strategies that might be ‘resilient’ in the face of disrupted supply chains and sociopolitical and/or socioeconomic upheaval.
It is increasingly likely that the unwritten and unknowable future is going to be messy…
Cognition and Belief Systems: Part Six — Sociopolitical ‘Collapse’ and Ecological Overshoot
This contemplation is my concluding post regarding several psychological mechanisms at play in our thinking about ecological overshoot and the accompanying societal ‘collapse’ that will eventually result.
In the initial post, I briefly summarised four psychological mechanisms I’ve been reflecting upon in the context of ecological overshoot and in particular the collapse of our global, industrialised complex societies that will (or, as some argue, has already begun to) accompany this overshoot; you can read it here. In Part Two, I began elaborating my thoughts on the first mechanism in my list: Obedience/Deference to Authority; you can find it here. Part three comprises some thoughts about the phenomenon of Groupthink and can be found here. The fourth contemplation in this series looks at the role of Cognitive Dissonance in our cognition and can be read here. In the fifth contemplation, I round out the phenomena I review with a view on The Justification Hypothesis; read it here.
One of the primary considerations in understanding how our cognitions and thus our beliefs and behaviours are going to be affected by the unfolding of the consequences of ecological overshoot and the concomitant ‘collapse’ of our societies is the anxiety/stress that such a future (and present) is going to have (is having) upon us; personally, on a familial level, and on the broader societal scale. Contemplating an unknowable future that is unlikely to provide many of the energetic conveniences most currently depend upon and/or that will challenge our complex systems to the breaking point because of extreme weather events, or supply chain disruptions/breakdowns (especially food, water, energy), etc. can be exceedingly anxiety-provoking.
Mix these (and many other) psychological mechanisms in with Edward Thorndike’s Law of Effect — that postulates all animals have an innate motivation to avoid pain/seek pleasure[1] — and you have an animal whose sense-making abilities are leveraged by its mind to deny/ignore away evidence that challenges them and can cause painful, anxiety-provoking emotions (in fact, there appears to be neuroscientific support for this[2]). In response, we appear to employ all sorts of biases/rationalisations to support our belief systems (a ‘pleasurable’ sensation) regardless of disconfirming evidence (that can lead to painful/stressful emotions).
I must begin by going back to a passage from an article I cited in the introductory ‘essay’ by Megan Siebert and William Rees: “We begin with a reminder that humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives — even scientific theories — are socially constructed “stories” that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework.”[3]
The following is my story that I’ve developed over the past 10+ years in reading relatively extensively and reflecting upon a variety of other stories about our past, present, and future. I am not SO confident in it that I would wager heavily in favour of it being the ‘truth’ — I think it’s close but I also believe that the complexities involved in attempting to understand exactly what is happening is far beyond human comprehension (and certainly mine). Plus my view changes periodically with new information/interpretations. The generality of it tends to remain but the specifics alter; and the more I learn, the more assured I am that my understanding is still quite rudimentary[4]. And then there’s the impossibility of making accurate predictions about how the future will unfold. I am relatively confident that such prognostications are completely beyond the scope of human cognition (even with the aid of computers) given the incalculable non-linear feedback loops and emergent phenomena that exist in complex systems — a single, minuscule faulty base assumption can send the trajectory of any calculation sideways in totally unexpected ways.
Anyways, here is my story beginning with a brief review of ‘collapse’ and overshoot:
Humans are susceptible not only to sociopolitical collapse[5] but collapse of its population via a massive die-off due to ecological overshoot[6]. Both seem inevitable at this point in our evolution[7]. And both are extremely anxiety-provoking regardless of whether one has moved through Kubler-Ross’s Stages of Grief[8] and reached the final stage of acceptance or not.
Let’s begin by looking at what ‘collapse’ means from the perspective of archaeologist Joseph Tainter, who summarises his perspective near the beginning of his text, The Collapse of Complex Societies, on the subject.
“Collapse…is a political process. It may, and often does, have consequences in such areas as economics, art, and literature, but it is fundamentally a matter of the sociopolitical sphere. A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity…[It manifests itself] as:
· a lower degree of stratification and social differentiation;
· less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories;
· less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites;
· less behavioural control and regimentation; less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of ‘civilization’: monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like;
· less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery;
· less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources;
· less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups;
· a smaller territory within a single political unit.”[9]
While Tainter’s analysis of sociopolitical collapse is startling, given that virtually every experiment we have attempted with complex societies over our pre/history have failed and thus our hyper-complex one is likely even more susceptible to the primary factor that leads to its eventual demise (i.e., diminishing returns on investments in complexity), the work of William Catton Jr. on the ecological overshoot of the human species is even more anxiety-provoking[10].
Catton argues that our leveraging of fossil fuels has allowed humanity to expand well beyond the natural carrying capacity of the planet and mirrors quite clearly the type of exploitation that is observed in species that invariably ‘bloom and crash’.
And while in our denial of this inevitability we have created stories that we can avert such a future, Catton asserts that “habits of thought persist…people continue to advocate further technological breakthroughs as the supposedly sure cure for carrying capacity deficits. The very idea that technology caused overshoot, and that it made us too colossal to endure, remains alien to too many minds for ‘de-collosalization’ to be a really feasible alternative to literal die-off. There is a persistent drive to apply remedies that aggravate the problem.”[11]
In fact, he recognises that “…believing crash can’t happen to us is one reason it will. The principles of ecology apply to all living things. By supposing that our humanity exempts us, we delude ourselves…whatever the species, irruptions that overshoot carrying capacity lead inexorably to die-offs. Irruptions can happen to any species that gains access to a previously inaccessible but highly suitable habitat. All it takes is for the habitat to contain an abundance of whatever resources are needed by the invading species, and for there to be little population-checking pressure from predators and little or no competition from other species having similar niche requirements and living in the same area.”[12]
As Catton concludes, when overshoot has occurred there is no avoiding the crash.
Cutting to the chase, we have a globalised world that can be expected to experience sociopolitical collapse (or is already experiencing) and/or a massive overshoot die-off that puts everything at risk, for everyone; but especially for those who live within so-called ‘advanced economies’ that have come to depend fully and completely upon the energy-averaging systems of global trade and its complex and fragile supply chains[13].
Talk about anxiety-provoking!
I have been ‘searching’ for a few poignant thoughts on how to conclude these handful of contemplations on the psychological mechanisms I’ve outlined and how this may impact our thinking (or, at least, mine) about an unwritten and unknowable future. And I think, perhaps, the comment I left at Tom Murphy’s Do the Math site in response to an article he posted recently kind of hits the nail on the head of where my thoughts have led me (at this point in my journey). The comment is in bold with some further connective ideas added:
I’m coming to three (of many) rather ‘anxiety-provoking’ conclusions given everything. First, that our leveraging of that one-time cache of fossil energy has expedited our journey into ecological overshoot — this being our fundamental predicament that is signalling its presence in all the ‘problematic’ symptoms we are experiencing.
Our primary predicament, then, seems to be ecological overshoot. The sociopolitical collapse that Tainter attributes to diminishing returns on investments in complexity appears to resonate with a society’s tendency to overshoot its carrying capacity, be it local, regional, or global. When biophysical limits of the supportive and accessible resources (given the technology of the time) are breached, diminishing returns on investments in complexity begin to arise. Eventually, such diminishing returns hits a point where participants in the society begin to make the economic choice to abandon support for it as the previous benefits gained from living with such complexities falter and no longer make the investments worthwhile. The sociopolitical system cannot function for long without support from the masses — it eventually ‘collapses’.
The unavoidable consequence of such overshoot in our current hypercomplex, globalised society is likely a massive die-off of our species as Catton warns given the fact that the vast majority of humans no longer possess the skills and/or knowledge of basic survival skills such as the procurement of potable water, local food production, and maintenance of regional shelter needs. In fact, many of today’s communities exist in regions where such resources cannot be acquired and they depend entirely upon fragile and complex long-distance supply chains. In the past, most disenchanted people simply migrated and took up existence outside of the sociopolitical realm that was disintegrating. Such an option for the vast majority, if not all, is perhaps completely out of the question nowadays.
Second, our penchant for denial of anxiety-provoking situations is leading us to ignore our predicament and cling to optimistic narratives — even if completely false (or misleading) in nature.
Add to the significant anxiety created by our predicament the profound sense of loss involved when one’s world suddenly moves sideways, particularly in unsuspecting ways, or when a loss is ‘expected’, and we experience the grieving stages Kubler-Ross identified and described — particularly denial, anger, and bargaining.
Moreover, the research around anticipatory loss suggests that the stages of grief that one experiences can actually be much more intense when one is expecting such loss than after the actual loss. There can be greater anger, more significant loss of emotional control, and atypical grief responses[14].
Most importantly it seems that the initial stage of grief, denial (especially of death and anything unpleasant) has been argued to be the defining evolutionary trait that makes us human[15], so it tends to be the most common response by people.
Wanting to avoid/reduce the pain that accompanies the resulting anxiety we search for evidence to confirm any ‘positive/pleasurable’ beliefs we tend to hold as ‘correct’ and deny and/or rationalise away the information that is challenging our ‘faith’. And what could be more anxiety-provoking than the impending collapse of one’s complex society or a massive die-off? As crises erupt and challenges our belief systems, we will search for evidence that any decline/fall is either far off in the distant future, nonsensical, can be ‘solved’ (especially via our ingenuity and technological prowess), the fault of some ‘enemy’ or opposition group within our domestic ranks (or supernatural entity), etc..[16]. This is typical ‘bargaining’ behaviour.
Third, our ruling elite are themselves leveraging our ‘fears’ to do what they do best: seeking to maintain/expand the power/wealth structures that exist in complex societies and provide them their privileged positions; and our tendency to defer to ‘authority’ and desire to alleviate anxiety make us susceptible to the narratives they create, such as human ingenuity and technology will allow us to continue to chase the perpetual growth chalice to infinity and beyond.
It seems clear to me that ‘collapse’ puts directly in its crosshairs the power/wealth structures that support the ruling class. I’ve said a lot about this in previous articles but feel compelled to share a bit more.
I have little doubt that the ruling class will take advantage of all of these well-known psychological mechanisms in their ongoing and ever-present quest to maintain/control the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and privileged status. Narrative control, perhaps one of if not the most important mechanism for sustaining the status quo societal structures, will be ramped up continuously. ‘Threats’ will be vilified. Myths will be created and/or amplified. Means of extending and pretending will likely dominate as the elite kick-the-can-down-the-road as long as they can.
We need to not only be aware and conscious of these psychological mechanisms that influence our beliefs and thus actions, but actively engaging ‘countermeasures’ by resisting our automatic responses (e.g., ‘leaders’ and their courtiers/sycophants/bureaucrats are always correct and/or have the best interest of the people/society at the top of their motivations) and reflecting upon/challenging our beliefs/thought processes periodically. We also need to admit that much of what we believe to be true/factual may, in fact, be conditioned responses and/or ‘programmed’ ideas established by the ruling elite[17].
Cognitive framing in which the way we perceive/interpret events is established for us, perhaps through propaganda or the creation of an Overton Window. We are kept from thinking about alternatives to the established options and made to believe the offered ‘solutions’ are the only ones to consider…thinking outside the box is not allowed, especially if it challenges the status quo power/wealth structures. I expect the totalitarianism that is increasingly defining our sociopolitical systems worldwide[18] to expand significantly as we slide down the Seneca Cliff of resource contraction (especially energy).
The collapse that always accompanies overshoot seems baked in at this point with little if anything we can do about it.
Personally, I’d like to see our dwindling fossil fuels dedicated to decommissioning safely those significantly dangerous complexities we’ve created (e.g., nuclear power plants, biosafety labs, chemical storage, etc.) and relocalising as much potable water procurement, food production, and regional shelter needs as possible rather than attempting to sustain what is ultimately unsustainable given the fossil fuel inputs necessary. Perhaps, just perhaps. by doing these things a few pockets of humanity (and many other species) can come out the other side of the bottleneck we’ve created for ourselves.
In my skimming of the topic of denial I happened upon Nate Hagens’ work on this in Reality Blind. I’ll add this to my ever-expanding list of readings…
In addition, here are some useful sites/links for exploring further some of the above concepts:
[4] In my writing and reflecting upon issues/topics in this set of posts I have explored new topics that I had not previously encountered or thought extensively about.
[5] Tainter, J.. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988. (ISBN 978–0–521–38673–9).
[6] Catton, Jr., William R.. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois Press, 1980. (ISBN 0–252–00818–9).
[7] Although I am fairly confident that this is the case, I say ‘seem’ because the future is both unwritten and unknowable. And keep in mind that recognising this does not necessitate that one has ‘given up’, an accusation common amongst those who disagree with the belief.
[9] Tainter, J. The Collapse of Complex Societies. P. 4.
[10] Although, “less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources” has enormous implications for the masses of humanity that depend on such energy-averaging systems given their knowledge/skill loss in providing the necessities of life — i.e., potable water procurement, food production, regional shelter needs.
[11] [11] Catton, Jr., William R.. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. P. 174.
[13] I can’t help but ponder the chaos of my Canadian home province of Ontario with its 15 million inhabitants that imports 80+% of its food needs along complex and fragile supply chains and has pursued the ‘paving over’ of its limited arable lands to expand suburban neighbourhoods and dedicated most of its remaining ‘farming’ to industrial agriculture that produces primarily corn/soybean to feed ethanol production and livestock. We grow a very limited amount of our local food needs.
[16] Most are unlikely/unwilling to look in the mirror and see we have contributed to the situation.
[17] See Bernays, E.. Propaganda. iG Publishing, 1928. (ISBN 0–9703125–9–8).
[18] Do not be fooled by the narratives surrounding representative democracies. The notion that we have agency via the ballot box is perhaps one of the most successful scams ever perpetrated on the masses by the ruling elite — along with the control/distribution of fiat currency being done in an equitable and thoughtful manner that serves everyone.
Cognition and Belief Systems: Part Four — Cognitive Dissonance
This contemplation is the fourth part of a look at several psychological mechanisms at play in our thinking about ecological overshoot and the accompanying societal ‘collapse’ that will eventually result.
In Part One, I briefly summarised four psychological mechanisms I’ve been reflecting upon in the context of ecological overshoot and in particular the collapse of our global, industrialised complex societies that will (or, as some argue, has already begun to) accompany this overshoot; you can read it here. In Part Two, I began elaborating my thoughts on the first mechanism in my list: Obedience/Deference to Authority; you can find it here. Part three comprises some thoughts about the phenomenon of Groupthink and can be found here.
One of the primary considerations in understanding how our cognitions and thus our beliefs and behaviours are going to be affected by the unfolding of the consequences of ecological overshoot and the concomitant ‘collapse’ of our societies is the anxiety/stress that such a future (and present) is going to have (is having) upon us; personally, on a familial level, and on the broader societal scale. Contemplating an unknowable future that is unlikely to provide many of the energetic conveniences most currently depend upon and/or that will challenge our complex systems to the breaking point because of extreme weather events, or supply chain disruptions/breakdowns (especially food, water, energy), etc. can be exceedingly anxiety-provoking.
Mix these (and many other) psychological mechanisms in with Edward Thorndike’s Law of Effect — that postulates all animals have an innate motivation to avoid pain/seek pleasure[1] — and you have an animal whose sense-making abilities are leveraged by its mind to deny/ignore away evidence that challenges them and can cause painful, anxiety-provoking emotions (in fact, there appears to be neuroscientific support for this[2]). In response, we appear to employ all sorts of biases/rationalisations to support our belief systems (a ‘pleasurable’ sensation) regardless of disconfirming evidence (that can lead to painful/stressful emotions).
Hastening back to the summary I wrote on cognitive dissonance in the first part of this series, recall that it is fundamentally “…the idea that humans experience negative emotions when they hold conflicting or inconsistent cognitions[3]. The resulting state of discomfort leads us to become motivated to align our cognitive knowledge, and the more discomfort or anxiety we feel from such conflicting cognition the more we struggle to reduce the resulting tension. It is during such efforts to reduce the dissonance we are feeling that we engage in significant rationalisation that can convince us to accept knowledge that we might otherwise not agree with.”
The anxiety one may experience in holding conflicting beliefs varies since some people are not as impacted by such internal conflict as they have a higher tolerance for it. In fact, there are some who are quite comfortable with holding beliefs that conflict with each other so their dissonance-reducing efforts are not as impactful as for those who do encounter such internal stress.
For those who do suffer from anxiety-provoking emotions caused by conflicting beliefs, if the beliefs one holds are more personal or valued in nature (or the disparity between them is great), even more dissonance may be experienced than may be typical if the beliefs are not personally valued. This can bring about heightened efforts to reduce the dissonance. These efforts may also be increased if beliefs are challenged by others, leading to even further entrenchment/defense of one’s beliefs and concomitant dissonance-reducing attempts.
Further, if our behaviours do not align with our beliefs we may find that we actually alter our beliefs to become consistent with our behaviours[4]. There appears to exist a feedback loop between our beliefs and actions, with each affecting the other in ongoing attempts to minimise personal anxiety (i.e., psychological ‘pain’).
Another complexity in this entire process is that a person’s comfort with uncertainty may also critical to how much dissonance may be experienced[5].
Research on human reactions to uncertainty is, of course, important to the issue of overshoot and collapse given the nature of the predicament and what we do in attempting to understand how it will impact us and the planet. We are, for all intents and purposes, making ‘guesses’ about our future and as physicist Niels Bohr has been credited with stating (and several others): “Predictions are difficult, especially if they’re about the future”.
We can’t help but be anything but uncertain about our future and this feeling of uncertainty intensifies emotional reactions; sometimes positively but most of the time negatively because humans desire certainty (which is why we sometimes are prone to misleading narratives, especially if communicated in a convincing manner that offers assurances). And the greater the uncertainty, the stronger the affective reaction. Most people experience anxiety with uncertainty[6] and seek ways to reduce this.[7]
One of the ways our brains reduce uncertainty is to simplify our understanding of the world. We engage biases and heuristics to do this[8], and in the process we tend to see patterns that don‘t exist and treat random events as meaningful[9]. By simplifying an exceedingly complex reality we can reduce our uncertainty and thus our anxiety about the future.
So, here we are, an animal existing in an exceedingly complex world with relatively remarkable cognitive abilities attempting to understand the flood of information our senses are experiencing. We also find ourselves within a hierarchical social environment where our tendency is to defer to those ‘above’ us in social status. If they can influence or create the worldview through which we interpret the world, we tend to do this.
Then comes along some disruptive technologies such as the printing press and, more recently, the internet to allow for the dissemination of competing narratives for how we view the world. The variety of interpretive lenses that are created by this can lead to ever-growing dissonance[10]. We are exposed repeatedly to the stories that our elite are pushing[11], but we are also aware of competing ones. We tend to defer to those communicated by our authority figures (be it politicians, the media, academics, etc.), but not always. We do occasionally get exposed to conflicting messages and evidence.
How do we alleviate the resulting anxiety? We employ our mind to filter out the incoming information in a way that reduces the stress we are experiencing. It matters little what we experience with our own senses or the data we are exposed to. We simplify, alter our perspective/interpretation, and create a narrative that we can filter evidence through. We also seek out self-reinforcing echo chambers of like-minded individuals/groups. Confirming information is amplified and reinforces our story while disconfirming information is ignored, denied, or rationalised away. In essence, we believe what our minds want us to believe; ‘facts’ be damned. And if we are challenged and begin to experience dissonance, we grab a hold of our fundamental beliefs even harder.
Obviously, it’s not quite as simple as this and some are more prone to the anxiety-reducing mechanisms than others, but for the most part we are ‘guided’ to beliefs that may not align with ‘reality’ but that reduce our ‘pain’ (i.e., anxiety) while increasing our ‘pleasure’ (e.g., dopamine surges appear to be one result when we encounter the pleasurable sensation of ‘confirmation’ of our beliefs[12]). We take increasing comfort in narratives that can reduce our anxiety, often regardless of any evidence that challenges them.
Depend significantly on industrial civilisation and all the conveniences it offers? Then you can be sure to either ignore/deny the narratives and accompanying evidence that point to its probable demise[13], and/or take increasing comfort in the stories that human ingenuity and our technological prowess will ‘solve’ our predicament[14] of ecological overshoot and its accompanying collapse. It seems we create our own ‘reality’.
Finally, keep in mind the statement attributed to author Robert Heinlein: “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal”. We ‘rationalise/justify’ what we believe and do so constantly, which will be looked at in the next piece that reviews The Justification Hypothesis.
[6] This feeling appears to be context dependent as some activities with uncertainty may actually produce positive emotions, such as watching sports or a mystery movie, or gambling.
[11] As I have argued previously, we have a ruling elite who sit at the top of our power/wealth social structures and are motivated by a drive to sustain their privilege. Part of what they do to meet this imperative is that they create narratives that help to legitimise their positions — from being directly descended from God/the gods to chosen ‘freely’ by the masses as their representatives (or worked exceptionally ‘hard’ to deserve their privilege). This class of people also tend to be susceptible to the vagaries of groupthink due to their increasing isolation from the hoi polloi.
[13] I say ‘probable’ given the self-evident fact (at least, to me) that not one of us can predict the future with much accuracy. Evidence appears to be accumulating that the endgame of ‘collapse’ is unavoidable but in truth only time will tell if and how this all plays out.
[14] I am of the opinion that this is a predicament without solution; it can possibly, at best, be mitigated somewhat and in some places better than others.
Cognition and Belief Systems: Part Three — Groupthink
This contemplation is the third part of a look at several psychological mechanisms at play in our thinking about ecological overshoot and the accompanying societal ‘collapse’ that will eventually result.
In Part One, I briefly summarised four psychological mechanisms I’ve been reflecting upon in the context of ecological overshoot and in particular the collapse of our global, industrialised complex societies that will (or, as some argue, has already begun to) accompany this overshoot; you can read it here. In Part Two, I began elaborating my thoughts on the first mechanism in my list: Obedience/Deference to Authority; you can find it here.
One of the primary considerations in understanding how our cognitions and thus our beliefs and behaviours are going to be affected by the unfolding of the consequences of ecological overshoot and the concomitant ‘collapse’ of our societies is the anxiety/stress that such a future (and present) is going to have (is having) upon us; personally, on a familial level, and on the broader societal scale. Contemplating an unknowable future that is unlikely to provide many of the energetic conveniences most currently depend upon and/or that will challenge our complex systems to the breaking point because of extreme weather events, or supply chain disruptions/breakdowns (especially food, water, energy), etc. can be exceedingly anxiety-provoking.
Mix these (and many other) psychological mechanisms in with Edward Thorndike’s Law of Effect — that postulates all animals have an innate motivation to avoid pain/seek pleasure[1] — and you have an animal whose sense-making abilities are leveraged by its mind to deny/ignore away evidence that challenges them and can cause painful, anxiety-provoking emotions (in fact, there appears to be neuroscientific support for this[2]). In response, we appear to employ all sorts of biases/rationalisations to support our belief systems (a ‘pleasurable’ sensation) regardless of disconfirming evidence (that can lead to painful/stressful emotions).
A short thought about groupthink I posted on my personal Facebook Page in March, 2021:
“I’ve been reading about the phenomena of ‘groupthink’ recently. It’s amazing how much our society (and perhaps it’s every society) reflects this and the errors in judgements/decision making that result from it. The overestimation of the group’s decisions to be invulnerable and moral; the collective rationalisation and stereotyping that happens to shut out alternative perspectives/ideas; the pressures towards uniformity and to suppress dissent (e.g., self-censorship, mind guards, direct social pressure, illusion of unanimity). The mistakes that result from groupthink are avoided when a group encourages dissent and skeptical/critical thinking and the discussions that result from different perspectives, not by censoring or belittling them. We seem to be doing the exact opposite of what is needed to prevent bad decisions and judgements from being made. Many of us seem to have lost the ability to have civil discussions about matters we disagree on; to even agree to disagree. Our media (both mainstream and social) oftentimes seems more interested in controlling the narratives and stories we share than presenting the different perspectives and allowing people to decide for themselves. In our attempts to shut down others, one has to wonder if we are falling into the trap of groupthink and leading us to make faulty decisions? And even if we are, would we recognise it as such in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance that would arise as a result??”
A reminder that groupthink is summarised as “a premature concurrence-seeking tendency that interferes with collective decision-making processes and leads to poor decisions. It is characterized by deterioration in group member mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgments that result from in-group pressures to seek consensus. It is what happens when the task demands on a decision-making group are overwhelmed by the social demands to reach consensus. When experiencing groupthink, members tend to make simplistic statements about the issues and more positive in-group references than those in nongroupthink cases.”[3]
Groupthink symptoms include: an illusion of invulnerability that leads to an overly optimistic outlook; contrarian evidence being discredited or rationalised away; an illusion of morality that ignores the ethical consequences of decisions; peer pressure to conform to group thinking/decisions or risk being deemed disloyal; a tendency by members to withhold dissenting views (self-censorship); an illusion of unanimity; the development of ‘mind guards’ who take it upon themselves to protect the group from disconfirming evidence; avoidance of opposing opinions/ideas; and, a lack of impartial leadership[4].
As research has shown, while the mechanisms of groupthink and its impact on decision-making can become stronger in larger groupings, the phenomenon of unanimity is less likely[5]. And without unanimity, dissent becomes more probable opening the door to not only alternative perspectives but different ‘solutions’. This can certainly be observed in the various narratives pertaining to addressing our existential predicament of overshoot and collapse[6].
However, add Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs[7], a theory of human motivation, and we might begin to understand that there can be a tendency towards ‘herding behaviour’[8] even in large, complex populations. Maslow’s theory proposes that humans are motivated by meeting various needs. We begin with an urge to satisfy physiological needs (e.g., water, food, sleep, homeostasis). When these basic needs are met, more complex ones motivate behaviour: safety (e.g., security, protection, health, well-being); social (e.g., kin relationships, romance, non-kin relations); esteem (e.g., personal accomplishments/recognitions, sport/community/religious involvement); and, finally, self-actualisation (i.e., personal and on-going improvement). More recent iterations of this hierarchy have added the need for belongingness between safety and esteem needs, and cognitive needs after esteem[9].
Note that the need to belong to a social group of some kind is strong in humans[10]. We want to be part of a group or ‘tribe’[11]. Some psychologists argue this desire is as strong as the need for basic physiological necessities of food and water in order to ensure safety/survival; it is seen as an evolutionary adaptation[12].
“The tribal instincts hypothesis proposes that innate human predispositions to commit to their ingroups arose by coevolution with group selected cultural institutions. We are adapted to living in tribes, and the social institutions of tribes elicit strong — sometimes fanatical — commitment… The nature of the tribes that we commit to, the kinds of commitments we make, and the strength of those commitments all depend upon the cultural traditions that define the group and its institutions. Through the evolution of work-arounds in the last few thousand years, institutions have evolved that recruit the tribal subjective commitment to far larger and very different social systems than the tribe as the concept is understood by anthropologists.”[13]
While the issue for the detrimental impacts of groupthink to arise is not so significant for society at large given the array of competing voices/narratives/interpretations that can exist, it is more so a problem for governments and other elite institutions[14]; those groups that are the primary legislative-/decision-/policy-makers for society and have significant influence over the stories most people cling to.
I would add that governments and large businesses/corporations tend to be prone to groupthink due to the ‘isolation’ that exists for these decision-making bodies. Many (most?) tend to be part of a ‘class’ of people that exclusively interact with like-minded individuals and additionally receive reinforcing feedback from their ‘courtiers/sycophants’. They do not tend to interact with the masses of people who do not view the world from the same privileged perspective; they have their own ‘in-groups’.
Given the previously discussed tendency of humans to defer to ‘authority’ figures and the proclivity for these ‘leaders’ to develop ideas/policies in isolation from a wide variety of inputs/perspectives, we can imagine how maladaptive strategies created by the elite — which are driven by a primary motivation of control/expansion of their power/wealth — can ensure we, as a collective, take a misguided trajectory into the future: the elite encourage a faulty strategy (that serves their purposes) and the hoi polloi defer to it, accepting it as the righteous path to follow and support.
To understand why this tendency towards the need to belong to a social group and groupthink is relevant to overshoot and collapse, I believe we need to revisit archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis regarding a complex society’s collapse due to declining marginal returns. Here we find that as these returns on investments in complexity decline the elite may, and invariably do, respond through greater legitimisation activities and/or control, imposing strict behavioural controls — particularly absent the ability to address such issues via territorial expansion [15]. And, in the end, these actions tend to expedite resource drawdown causing the impending ‘collapse’ due to diminishing returns on investments in complexity to arrive more quickly than might otherwise.
These attempts by the elite to ‘kick-the-can-down-the-road’ seems ample reason to believe we are ‘pushed’ into groupthink tendencies by those who ‘profit’ from the denial of overshoot/collapse, or, perhaps, from raising the prospects of it[16]. Propaganda’s fundamental purpose is narrative control in order to align group thinking so as to interpret events/observations/stories along specific lines. It is the interpretive lens through which we view the world that impacts our beliefs and thus actions/behaviour. If a nation state, for example, can predetermine how most citizens will ‘understand’ what is happening around them, they ease the manner in which they direct society at large. Beliefs impact behaviour and it is behavioural ‘control’ of the masses that is paramount to sustaining status quo power/wealth structures and avoiding — or, at least, deferring — ‘revolution /pushback’.
Consider here the research on Social Cognition, especially Context Effect[17]. What humans ‘perceive’ in their environment is impacted significantly by the context in which it is observed/understood/interpreted. Visual stimuli can actually appear differently to different observers for a variety of reasons but mostly because our brains take shortcuts to reduce the myriad of details, relying upon the context in which we observe to filter and simplify complexities for us. This is also true of our understanding of events. If the context is provided, even if it is faulty/fake, we understand events through it.
The ‘context’ through which we view/interpret information has been given a number of different terms: schema[18], paradigm[19], worldview[20], interpretive lens, etc.. Being able to establish/influence the context through which a person or group views the world is very much the role of propaganda/narrative control.
So, it would appear that humans can be ‘herded’ into believing particular stories by way of the higher status amongst us establishing the context through which we interpret and understand issues and events. This doesn’t necessarily necessitate some grand ‘conspiracy’ but simply a small number of decision-makers to set the stage through policies, actions, and/or even just repetitive ‘marketing’ via speeches, media releases, etc. that are invariably wrapped in verbiage that highlights supposed benefits for the masses. Once a majority of people come to accept the narrative being shared, our strong tendency to want to belong[21] and meet the ‘norms’ of the social group in which we find ourselves leads us to accept the group’s ideas and behaviours — primarily to avoid the negative social pressures that accompany non-conformity. We may not necessarily agree with certain things, but we tend to go along for better or worse.
And while research has expanded and clarified the mechanisms at work in all this, pre/history shows the manipulation of behaviour by the ruling elite over and over again, be it to support status quo power/wealth structures and/or to engage in geopolitical struggles. Throw in Bernays’s work, the need to belong, and tendencies towards group conformity and deference to authority, and we can see how influence of the masses by a small, elite group can occur rather easily.
This is where most of society currently appears to stand. There may be some growing gaps with ‘break-away’ groups challenging mainstream narratives but for the most part the significant majority of society holds onto the stories being weaved by our ruling elite. I see this very clearly in the marketing narratives pertaining to an energy transition from fossil fuels to ‘clean/green’ energy alternatives.
I end with a quote attributed to U.S. General George S. Patton: “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
[5] Solomon Asch’s research into social conformity due to majority peer pressure are important here as well (https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html). People tend to go along with the majority in a group — even when they don’t necessarily agree — for fear of being ridiculed by others in the group and/or believe that the assessment of a majority is more informed than their individual assessment. In the absence of group unanimity, however, overall conformity drops as people are less concerned about social approval in such situations.
[6] There exist stories along a continuum from the idea that concerns are overblown and being leveraged by the ruling elite solely for the purpose of profiteering and/or social engineering/control to the assertion that this is a predicament that has no solutions, cannot be avoided, and total human extinction is at hand.
[10] In the absence of less complex and smaller human communities that are more amenable to a sense of belonging, there is still a need for this ‘urge’ to be met. Sometimes this is achieved through community organisations or institutions, such as a religious-based one.
[11] This can be observed in the self-reinforcing echo chambers that have arisen with the widespread use of social media. It appears that in their desire to confirm/reinforce beliefs, individuals orient their online browsing and communications towards like-minded individuals/groups. See this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7936330/
[16] There seems to be, on some level, an increase in the mainstream recognition of possible ‘collapse’, be it economic or some other iteration. Perhaps some see the prospects of it as ‘profitable’ in the sense of leveraging the issue in one way or another. There is, for example, much in the way of ‘commercialisation’ of products to alleviate the anxiety of possible ‘collapse’ and prepare for it. And then there is Joseph Tainter’s observation that
Today’s very short contemplation was in response to a post I was asked to comment upon that calls for sociopolitical ‘leadership’ to ‘tackle’ natural disasters that have been linked to the climate crisis.
I believe that most still don’t understand that the existential predicaments we are experiencing are but symptoms of the over-arching predicament of ecological overshoot[1]. Until and unless we acknowledge our overshoot we seem to be chasing maladaptive strategies in attempts to deal with its catastrophic symptoms and, in my opinion, asking the wrong people to address the situation.
For example, most people, in their well-intentioned desire to confront the effects of climate change, believe that if we abandon fossil fuel use and transition to some alternative (that has been mislabeled ‘green/clean’ and ‘sustainable’), we can maintain our energy-intensive complexities. Understanding that energy-harvesting technologies (e.g., solar, wind, wave, nuclear) not only depend upon the fossil fuel platform but upon finite resources that require a continuation of environmentally-/ecologically-destructive processes to retrieve and refine radically alters how one should perceive our path forward.
We need to be pursuing radical degrowth in all its iterations, from population to economics. Modern living standards of advanced economies (even of ‘emerging’ economies) are not in any way shape or form sustainable on a finite planet. If we cannot accept this and acknowledge that this needs to guide our responses and actions, then we are in all likelihood destined (some argue it is all but guaranteed) to experience the collapse that always accompanies overshoot. And such collapse will only increase in severity when it eventually occurs if we continue to chase misguided ‘solutions’ that further reduce the natural carrying capacity of the planet.
Given that our sociopolitical systems are built on power/wealth structures that for some time now have come to rely almost exclusively upon chasing the perpetual growth chalice, it seems to me that looking to them to correct our path is completely misplaced and increasingly more destructive in the end. Their tendency is to talk a good talk about addressing issues but when push comes to shove they almost always leverage such crises to their own advantage in one way or another to expand upon and prolong the Ponzi schemes they preside over[2].
As I argued in a recent article[3], people: “are encouraged to focus on relocalising the basic aspects of living (i.e., potable water procurement, food production, and regional shelter needs) as much as possible and reconnect with community members who will be your primary supports as things go increasingly sideways. Do not put your faith in our so-called political ‘leaders’. Despite their propaganda, they do not have your best interests at the top of their agendas; if such an incentive even makes the agenda except perhaps around election time when the marketing of more, more, more really blossoms. Because, you know, more is in your best interest…only it’s not.”
Yes, we need to shut down our fossil fuel industry but we also need to realise there is no ‘replacement’ for the significant energy it supplies society. The post-carbon world will be radically, and I mean radically, different than today. The illusion of a modern utopia with electric vehicles and all the accoutrements painted by the techno-cornucopian snake oil salesmen (that are little more than grifters lining their pockets) must be abandoned if we are to have any hope of getting through the bottleneck we have created for our species and most others on this planet.
Please consider visiting my website and helping to support its continuation through the purchase of my ‘fictional’ collapse trilogy: Olduvai.
[1] If you have yet to read William Catton Jr.’s Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, I highly recommend it. It is fundamental to understanding overshoot. You can find my personal summary notes here.
[2] I use the term Ponzi scheme intentionally given the fact that such contrivances require continual growth to keep from collapsing and that they are, for all intents and purposes, rackets that benefit a few at the expense of the many participants.
Today’s contemplation has been generated in response to some comments on a Chris Hedges’ article I shared in the Peak Oil Facebook group I am a member of. Hedges’ article suggests our civilisation has not been the first to collapse but it will be the last. Two members suggested this is likely not to be the case and that another will arise — I have my doubts.
Will another civilisation rise after ours collapses?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Circumstances are always different and most certainly are today with our globalised, industrial civilisation that is, for all intents and purposes, completely reliant upon the dense and highly-transportable energy of fossil fuels — a finite resource that has encountered significant diminishing returns.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three significant impediments to a global, complex society again rising from the ashes of our destined-to-collapse one.
First, our environment (globally) has been degraded to a significant degree. Little fertile soil remains with most of the arable lands having to depend upon fossil fuel supplements to boost food production to feed all of us[1]. Toxic chemicals have spread across the planet, some of which have had devastating impacts upon ecological systems and other species (especially very important pollinators)[2]. It will take significant time, perhaps millennia, for our planet to recover and allow the over-exploitation that is necessary for a widespread, complex society to once again flourish[3]. And then there are those who contend that our burning of fossil fuels have created an irreversible greenhouse effect that is leading to feedback loops that will ensure inhospitable environmental conditions and precluding many, if any, species to survive long on this planet[4].
Second, today’s complex societies (but especially so-called ‘advanced’ economies) have resulted in a situation — because of our leveraging of fossil fuels — where almost no one has the skills/knowledge to be self-sufficient. In the past, most of a population was still heavily involved in food production and fundamental self-sufficiency skills, and so when a society ‘collapsed’ most people dispersed into the countryside and were able to fend for themselves[5]. That is certainly not the case today. The ability to procure potable water, grow one’s own food and/or hunt and gather, and construct shelter needs for the regional climate has been mostly lost. Few of an advanced economy’s populace would survive for much more than a few weeks/months without the ‘conveniences’ of our many energy slaves due to this loss of knowledge/skills — to say little of the chaos that would ensue and probably wipeout many of those who might possess the wherewithal to get to the other side of the ecological bottleneck we seem to be in[6].
Finally, there are those very dangerous complexities that we have created that could put an exclamation mark upon our industrialised society’s impending collapse, any peoples remaining, and the ability to establish a future complex society. Nuclear power plants. Biosafety labs. Chemical production/storage facilities. We have a potpourri of potential environmental catastrophes once the ability to contain/manage these facilities and their waste products disappears — to say little of the damage that has already been done to our ecological systems from them. 437+ nuclear power reactors[7]. 59 biosafety labs[8]. Countless chemical production and storage facilities[9]. I can only imagine the local/regional/global impact of a loss of ‘containment’.
I’d argue the chips are stacked firmly against another complex society, certainly global-spanning one, developing again in the future. Of course, as several notable personalities have been credited with stating: It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future[10].
Only time will tell…
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[1] I won’t even touch upon the overshoot predicament here. See: Catton, Jr., W.R.. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois Press, 1980. (ISBN 978–0–252–00988–4).
The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost, 1915
While reportedly written as a joke by Frost for his hiking companion, Edward Thomas, who often struggled to pick a path among diverging ones when they were out on walks together, this poem has been commonly interpreted as a narrative about our choices and how these shape our future. The decision to take the road ‘less traveled’ versus the one ‘not taken’ speaks to the meaningful impact this seemingly innocuous choice can have upon subsequent events[1].
I was reminded of Frost’s poem and the general interpretation of it as I contemplated the request to post for a wider audience a comment I had made regarding an article someone added to a Facebook group I am a member of. In composing this ‘contemplation’ I reflected upon this request, my thoughts regarding humanity’s choices as we consider how best to deal with our existential predicament of ecological overshoot, and some of the conversations I’ve engaged in with others over the past week or so.
Given my belief that we are well into ecological overshoot having surpassed safe limits in a number of planetary boundaries[2] there are, similar to the hiker in Frost’s poem, several paths from which to choose — with slight variations to each. While the decision tree ahead of us is not entirely binary in nature, I will paint it as such for the purposes of this contemplation.
We can continue, for the most part, with business as usual: expanding our footprint on the planet with ever greater numbers and complexities. Alternatively, we can abandon this path and take a significantly different one: purposeful contraction of humanity and its complex systems.
I see the first ‘choice’ as the one we have been upon for some millennia, and one that took a dramatic shift towards a significantly greater global population and associated complex social arrangements with our leveraging of a one-time cache of finite, ancient fossil energy. When viewed over the past 12,000 years, the increase in population[3] has been nothing short of vertiginous in nature since we began employing fossil fuels, especially oil, to ‘fuel’ our growth[4]. Concomitant with this population growth has been a huge expansion of complexities to support humanity: agricultural, sociopolitical, technological, socioeconomic, scientific, etc..
It is increasingly obvious (at least to many but not all, since there are still some that completely deny the following self-evident reality) that this path is ‘problematic’ in the sense that infinite growth cannot continue for long on a finite planet, be it in the number of humans and/or the complex systems that require physical resources to support them. Call me a ‘doomer’, but I’m not buying the argument by some I’ve discussed this predicament with that we’ll just mine passing asteroids for their resources[5], including ice for water, or leave this planet to ‘colonise’ some distant ‘goldilocks’ planet just waiting for this walking, talking primate to bring ‘sustainable development/progress’ to it[6]. The ‘bargaining’ inherent is these views is simply staggering to me. Of course, I cannot predict the future any better than the next person but such beliefs leave me shaking my head at times primarily because of the magical thinking that must be employed to believe in them.
I also see this first path as the one being marketed and cheerlead by the ruling class[7], but with a slight twist: continue to pursue our current lifestyles and complexities but support them by way of a ‘new’ energy source — non-renewable renewables that are not only ‘clean/green’ but fully sustainable (while the natural phenomena that contain the energy we want to harvest are renewable — wind, solar, wave — the technologies needed to harness this energy are non-renewable since they rely upon finite resources — especially fossil fuels — for every step of their production, maintenance, and after-life disposal/reclamation).
I believe this is being sold as the best choice for a few reasons not least of which is the very real fact that it is in the best interests of those who tend to sit atop our power and wealth structures to keep the current systems in place. Because, after all, they tend to own/control/have financial stakes in the industries that stand to profit from this path. To say little about the increasing Ponzi-like structure of our economic/financial/monetary systems that require this ‘growth’ to keep from collapsing.
So, the option that increasingly appears to be being pushed by the ruling class and their narrative control managers (especially governments and mainstream media) is this ‘green/clean’ energy transition one. This is not because it actually will do what the overhyped marketing bellows constantly, but because it is the ruling class that stands to profit handsomely from the endeavour. As they always do, they are leveraging a situation to their advantage while selling a story that it is in the best interests of the masses; because, after all, the ruling class cares deeply for the people and their welfare (#sarcasm).
That many in the environmental movement have embraced such a narrative speaks to both the power of the propaganda/greenwashing/bright green lies of the ‘green/clean’ storyline but also the well-intended desire of people to act in the face of a ‘problem’. The issue I see is choosing, regardless of the best intentions, the wrong path to travel down. Yes, this is the path of least resistance as it, for the most part, supports the notion that we can transition seamlessly to a world not unlike our current one with all its energy-intensive technologies and conveniences, but with environmental ‘awareness’ and ‘cleanliness’. We’re having our energy cake and saving the planet at the same time (#sarcasm, again).
I have to call bullshit on that narrative. There are no ‘sustainable’ technologies (at least none that could support anywhere near the current world population) and there are certainly no ‘clean/green’ energy technologies[8].
For me at least, the choice of which path we need to follow is obvious: purposeful contraction of humanity and its complex systems. It needs to be purposeful if we are to have any say in how it proceeds. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion, however, given everything I have discussed above, that the path I advocate will be ‘The Road Not Taken’; at least not until nature forces us upon it and then we won’t have any say in how it unfolds.
Anyways, without further ado, here is the comment that prompted this contemplation based upon the linked article:
This author begins with a premise that indeed many still fail to grasp: climate change is but one of the existential issues the planet faces (and I would add probably not even the most pressing, with biodiversity loss and pollution loading having far surpassed safe ‘limits’ some time ago). Unfortunately, I believe the author then misses the fundamental ‘cause’ of these predicaments; rather than seeing them as symptoms of humanity overshooting the natural carrying capacity of the planet, economic and political systems are fingered as the ultimate culprit.
This misattribution then leads him to the conclusion that with the abandonment or tweaking of these systems, our various issues can be resolved. But if the real cause has been overlooked, then the shift in human systems he suggests will not resolve the issues he seeks to address.
In fact, many of those who argue along a similar line actually end up cheerleading the pursuit of changes that actually exacerbate our overshoot. They ignore the pre/historical evidence that complexity in the form of large social units (e.g., civilisations, empires, nation states, city states, etc.) and their energy and resource demands are unsustainable regardless of the economic and/or political systems employed; that all of our previous experiments with complex societies have failed because they expand and overexploit their environments, requiring them to disband or takeover un- or under-exploited regions to sustain themselves.
With the human expansion and exploitation experiment we are now entrapped within and having reached its zenith (significantly intensified by our extraction and leveraging of ancient fossil fuel energy), there is but one viable path: a dismantling of our expansion and the complexities that support it through radical degrowth. We cannot even begin to mitigate our predicament if we have identified the wrong culprits. In our motivation to ‘do something’ we are simply making the hole we are in ever deeper.
Conversations I’ve had and comments I’ve made over the past few days that demonstrate the differing perspectives on which path to trod:
[7] To clarify, I use the catch-all ‘ruling class’ to help define a loose grouping of individuals/families/institutions that sit atop the power/wealth structures that have existed in every complex society throughout pre/history. With the division of labour and need for organisational structures to help coordinate them in complex societies, differences in access to power/wealth/influence developed. As our societies grew larger and more complex, so did these structures and the ‘power’ of those that occupied the upper tiers. I believe that the primary motivation of those that reside atop these structures grew to be (or perhaps always was) the continued control and/or expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and power/prestige. Everything they do is in service of this. Everything. Whether this ‘class’ of people actually plans anything in concert with one another is certainly open for debate and interpretation, but they are certainly driven to maintain their privileged positions and all that entails.
Another contemplation prompted by an email my mum sent me. This is a lengthier article than usual (and intended) since I added further points each time I proofread it…
“This was sent to us from a college friend of XXX’s but I think he has a valid point!
___
I’ve always doubted mankind’s impact on the issue of climate change. After all, earth has had two ice ages that were followed by two warming cycles, all before humans left their caves. So, to me, the debate is whether there is a new natural, million year warming or cooling trend. If there is, there is nothing we can do about it. The following is a mixture of pictures and political comment on the matter [not included]. I am disappointed no one has followed the money and identified all those who gained notoriety, wealth, and power over the past 20 years of fear mongering.
I will begin by stating there are a growing number of people who have (and for some time) been following the ‘money’ and have uncovered growing manipulation by the ‘elite’ in a variety of areas and ways (it goes far beyond global warming/climate change). G. Edward Griffin, for example, talks about this entire situation of environmental concerns being leveraged by the ‘ruling class’ to profit from in some detail at the end of his in-depth and biting critique of the U.S.’s central banking system, the Federal Reserve, in The Creature From Jekyll Island (1994) — given the world reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar, the Fed is perhaps the most pernicious institution currently on our planet, for it those who control the creation and distribution of ‘money’ that are amongst the most powerful on the planet.
Most of those who have done this type of research, however, do not have the platform or finances for disseminating their ideas in the way that the mainstream media and/or politicians do, and for the most part their concerns have been overwhelmed by the constant propaganda of the ruling class and suppressed (and increasingly so given the expanding calls for censorship amid accusations of ‘fake news/misinformation’ by ‘the-powers-that-be’). I believe that’s changing but the impediments to revealing those manipulating the dials behind the curtain are huge; and when one does throw light upon the dark corners of our elite, more often than not if the challengers of mainstream narratives cannot be ostracised or marginalised, they are increasingly ending up like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.
Regardless, here’s my spin on things ‘environmental’ and the connection with those who would use them for profit.
Global warming/climate change is real. There is simply too much documented evidence that it is happening to deny it. It is quite possible to cherry pick evidence/data to support diametrically-opposed perspectives on its implications, but this is true for almost all ‘science’ — it is in the ‘interpretation’ of observable data and their meaning where we get most ‘disagreements’. The overwhelming majority of evidence, however, shows that it is occurring and trending in the wrong direction as far as human society is concerned (let alone all the other species impacted by such environmental shifts; human exacerbated or not). In fact, given how fragile and vulnerable our increasingly complex systems are (especially food production), a move of the climate even marginally in any direction will be catastrophic for humanity — particularly for regions that do not or cannot produce their own food.
How global warming/climate change will unfold in the future is even more controversial as complex systems with their non-linear feedback loops and emergent phenomena make them virtually impossible to model accurately; even very minuscule input errors can have oversized impacts on future states within predictive models. So, the ‘hothouse Earth’ extreme being predicted by some may or may not turn out to be accurate; only time can be the ultimate arbiter. As physicist Niels Bohr is credited with stating: It’s hard to make predictions, especially if they’re about the future. For better or for worse, that’s science modelling (and, naturally, this opens the door to those who wish to steer the narrative in particular directions).
This being said, there is far more and increasing evidence that human expansion is having a significant negative impact on the planet and its various sinks (processes/systems that absorb and cleanse pollutants/toxins), not just atmospheric overloading of greenhouse gases; how can the processes of resource extraction and industrial production, along with basic living requirements of almost 8 billion apex predatory humans, not? We have expanded into virtually every available ecological niche on the globe, displacing and exterminating countless others species in the process (biodiversity loss being an even more cataclysmic predicament than climate change) and using increasingly complex technology to extract dwindling and progressively marginal resources to support this — resources that are finite in nature.
On top of this obvious impact humanity is having on the planet are the sociocultural structures human societies have developed to organise themselves and their increasingly complex existence. Primary among these are the ‘power’ structures of politics and wealth (monetary/financial). Every large, complex society develops a ruling class of some type that tends to sit at the top of such structures.
Regardless of whether those in this class of people have come to their positions through some ‘democratic’ process or by way of hereditary tradition, they (or at least their financial supporters) tend to hold ‘ownership’ of the most influential aspects of society such as: military/security, monetary/financial, industrial, energy/resource, media/information, etc.. Their primary motivation tends to be to hold onto and/or expand the ‘power/revenue’ their privilege provides them using whatever means are available to them and are necessary, but especially war (both hot and indirect) and propaganda/narrative control (for they still require acquiescence of their ‘citizens/subjects’ even if it is just passive since they are significantly outnumbered).
It is my firm belief that the ruling class has taken the very real and increasing evidence that there are devastating environmental/ecological consequences for humanity’s expansion, chosen one in particular, and are leveraging it to create a narrative that serves their primary motivation. They have latched onto global warming/climate change/carbon emissions and are using it to increase taxes and market/sell products (e.g., ‘clean/green’ renewables, electric vehicles, etc.), while also justifying the creation and distribution (primarily to themselves) of trillions of units of fiat currency because of this ‘crisis’ (something they’ve done even more dramatically than usual during the Covid pandemic, to say little of the huge surge in this currency expansion following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis when quite a number of financial institutions were ‘bailed out’).
Simply put, they are pushing a narrative that serves to enrich themselves: we can be ‘saved’ from climate change by appropriately-assigned taxes and funneling humanity’s wealth and resources into specific industrial products (the production and distribution of which they own and profit from).
I won’t dwell on the evidence that such industrial production actually makes our situation even worse (refer to this site for more on this), but suffice it to say the fundamental predicament we find ourselves embroiled in is not global warming/climate change/carbon emissions but ecological overshoot. The overloading of sinks (including the dispersal of greenhouse gases — that is far more than just carbon dioxide) is but one of the various consequences of our overshooting the natural carrying capacity of our planet. There are simply far too many of us for the planet’s natural resources to sustain; and this is especially true for the living standards of so-called ‘advanced’ economies that are responsible for the lion’s share of resource extraction (especially but not exclusively fossil fuels) and all the negative consequences that flow from this.
We do have a very devastating predicament impacting our planet, but it’s not the one the world tends to be focused upon (and we can thank the ‘marketers’ of the ruling class for this: politicians and the mainstream media). I believe the primary reason the focus is not on our fundamental existential threat is because the means of addressing it is the exact opposite of what the ruling class needs/wants to meet their primary motivation: abandonment and reversal of the pursuit of the infinite growth chalice, especially for ‘advanced’ economies. The elite do not want to kill the golden goose (perpetual growth) that feeds their appetites for more power and wealth — they also need growth to keep the various Ponzi-like systems they’ve created from collapsing.
I have asked rhetorically over the past decade or so in one form or another the following: what could possibly go wrong with the strategy of infinite growth on a finite planet? Well, a lot actually. We can expect things to go even further sideways as the decline we are in speeds up and the-powers-that-be attempt to maintain their privileged positions in a decaying/contracting world — I expect a dramatic shift towards totalitarian/authoritarian political systems as the elite attempt to maintain and possibly expand their slice of an ever-shrinking pie amidst an increasingly disenfranchised and impoverished population.
The evidence of all this is building and has been for some time, but our tendency towards denial is making it next to impossible for most to see. A further complication is our tendency to defer to authority and ‘trust’ our various institutions. When politicians and economists speak of ‘confidence’ and needing to maintain this, it’s primarily because that’s all that keeping the blinkers on right now: our faith in and belief that the systems we increasingly depend upon will forever and always be there.
There is no ‘solving’ our predicament of overshoot, however. Biological and physical processes and the consequences that flow from them cannot be ‘solved’. Overshoot has occurred and species that experience such a phenomenon have but two paths for their future: ‘collapse’ back to a level that the environment can support or extinction.
There may be ‘hiding’ some of the consequences of human overshoot for a time. Currently this is done via debt/credit expansion in order to steal from the future, but also through narrative control and distractions that help to take the focus off the pillaging of the treasury by the elite — war being a favoured one since it helps to funnel funds/resources as well to the ruling class. There is also the additional help of a temporal lag between cause and effect as pollutants can accumulate for quite some time before the impacts are recognised or connected to our activities. We are capable of addressing some of the effects but only inconsequentially at the margins; the momentum is far too large for us to have any significant effect. This is all that can be done, however. Nature and physics always bat last no matter our belief that we exist above and beyond them.
We also have built-in psychological mechanisms that help us to reduce our stress/anxiety when confronted by conflicting information, especially that challenges our beliefs/wishes. We tend to ignore or reinterpret data that increases our cognitive dissonance so as to confirm/support our beliefs and feel less anxious. We additionally cling more forcefully and fully to our beliefs when they are challenged — it doesn’t matter whether our interpretation of the world reflects ‘reality’ or not.
We are not special in nature, however, and every complex society that has existed in pre/history has eventually succumbed to decline/collapse — the reasons vary, but they always do. Our belief that we are unique or that our technological prowess and ingenuity will somehow ‘save’ us is all part of the denial/bargaining that comes with the grieving process when loss is imminent or happened.
Coming to grips with our own and/or society’s mortality is difficult and not everyone makes it to the acceptance stage of grieving. We want to believe it won’t happen but no one, not one of us gets out of here alive. Everything and everyone comes to an end eventually.
The maddening part of all this is that there are individuals/institutions that are leveraging our fear and anxiety about all these factors and uncertainties to their own nefarious and self-serving ends. The ruling class enriching themselves as we begin the collapse that always accompanies overshoot is perhaps one of if not the most exasperating aspect of all this since they are not only benefiting (at least for the short term because they will experience the same collapse that we all will) but they are cheerleading the very aspects that have led us here.
I happened across this article a couple of days ago that does a great job of listing some of the most notable reasons our global complex societies are experiencing an apparent coalescence of crises, with the underlying issue being ecological overshoot. Here is a link to my most recent article on the coming ‘collapse’ that is similar in its messaging, and my personal summary notes for a number of books but especially William Catton, Jr.’s Overshoot.
A transition away from fossil fuels seems like a sensible approach to climate change but what are the correct ingredients? Wind, solar, hydrogen, electric vehicles, carbon capture, nuclear, geothermal, heat pumps, hydropower?
It’s like a doctor treating a patient without examining the source of his symptoms.
“If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.”
—Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Climate change is a serious threat to civilization, but it is a symptom of the larger problem of overshoot. Overshoot means that humans are using natural resources and polluting at rates beyond the planet’s capacity to recover.
The main cause of overshoot is the extraordinary growth of the human enterprise made possible by fossil energy. As that enterprise grew, more and more energy was needed to support its complexity and continued growth. The carbon emissions that underlie climate change are merely a byproduct of using all of that energy.
Humanity has been having quite a party with fossil fuels for the last century of so. Now it’s time to survey the mess we’ve made. Everyone wants solutions but first we must understand the present state of things and how we got here. Without a map of the territory, we are lost. Choosing a destination without a route will probably get us more lost. Yet, that is society’s current approach.
Ecology and economics come from the same Greek word oikos which means home or household. Ecology means what we know and say about our home. Economics means how we measure and manage our household. It seems strange to me that economics largely excludes ecology and the natural world that we consider to be our home.
We are witnessing the end of an era in history spanning half a millennium; the end of Western dominance in geopolitics. For those who understand the role of resources and energy in economics, culture and politics, it comes as no surprise that this shift in global power has an awful lot to do with resource depletion in particular, and overshoot in general — not unlike the many major shifts in human history. What we are facing here is something akin to the fall of the Soviet Union, but this time on steroids, and with global consequences affecting every nation on the planet to boot.
We live in truly remarkable times. Most people born into a middle of an era expect things to continue smoothly, with the past being a reliable guide for the future. Those who have the “fortune” to born into the very last decades of an age tend to think similarly, and fail to recognize that they are witnessing something which future historians (if there will be any) will commemorate as an end to a period, and a beginning of a new era. Perhaps its no exaggeration to say, that what we see here is the collapse of modernity in two acts, the first being the fall of the West.
To EV Or Not To EV? One Of Many Questions Regarding Our ‘Clean/Green’ Utopian Future, Part 2.
In Part 1 of this two-part Contemplation I argue that the recent trumpeting of electric vehicle (EV) car sales as a prologue to their imminent mass adoption and possibly ‘saving of the world’ from our errant carbon emission ways is more a projection of hope than reflective of realities behind some rather opaque curtains. This growth may continue as cheerleaders hope — at least for a bit longer, and thus appearing to support their assertions — but there exist some relatively strong headwinds suggesting it will not. Time of course will tell…
In attempting to peer behind or through the curtains one must consider: the pattern of previous technology bubbles created by intense mass marketing and purchases by early adopters; the evidence for the manipulation of sales growth statistics feeding into the narrative of widespread and growing adoption; and, the need for current growth to continue in light of resource constraints, a lack of infrastructure supports, government subsidy withdrawals, inflation impacts, and the cost concerns of purchasers (see this recent Bloomberg news article that highlights the international car rental agency Hertz Global Holdings unloading 20,000 EVs (about 1/3 of its U.S. EV fleet) due to higher repair costs, low demand, and reinvesting some of the sales dollars into ICE vehicles).
There is also growing skepticism towards the most marketed aspect of EVs: they are significantly better for the planet’s environment and ecological systems[1]. One needs to step well outside the Overton Window created by the marketing propaganda of retailers (and regurgitated by much mainstream media and most politicians) to gain a more balanced view of this widespread assertion. And this is where I begin this Contemplation…
Carbon tunnel vision has created a widely-accepted narrative where the most dominant and for many the only impact of concern surrounding transportation vehicles seems to be what exits the tailpipe of an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle and does not for an EV. This creates a very narrow, keyhole perspective that ignores the embodied energy and a wide variety of ecologically-destructive, hydrocarbon-based industrial processes that are necessary for the production, maintenance, and eventual reclamation/disposal of both types of vehicles.
As I point out in Part 1 of my series of Contemplations on carbon tunnel vision and energy blindness: “…the following graphic demonstrates (with respect to particular aspects of the issue of ‘sustainability’) this tendency to narrow our perspective can prevent the acknowledgement of so many other aspects of our world — and the graphic only includes some of the many others that could be considered, such as land-system change and biogeochemical flows. Perhaps most relevant is that this tunnel vision keeps many from recognising that humans exist within a world of complex systems that are intertwined and connected in nonlinear ways that the human brain cannot fathom easily, if at all.
[See an expanded version that includes more variables we’re mostly blind to below]
My own bias leads me to the belief that this hyper-focus on carbon emissions is leading many well-intentioned people to overlook the argument that atmospheric overloading is but one symptom predicament of our overarching predicament of ecological overshoot. As a result, they miss all the other symptom predicaments (e.g., biodiversity loss, resource depletion, soil degradation, geopolitical conflicts, etc.) of this overshoot and consequently advocate for ‘solutions’ that are, in fact, exacerbating our situation.
This rather narrowed perspective tends to be along the lines that if we can curtail/eliminate carbon emissions — usually through a shift in our technology to supposed ‘carbon-free’ ones — then we can avoid the negative repercussions that accompany the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, most prominently climate change. For many this is the only (or, at least, the most prominent) issue that needs to be addressed to ensure our species’ transition to a ‘sustainable’ way of living.
So, let’s try for a moment to open up this rather narrow keyhole and take in a wider perspective. Let’s look at how some of the other significant planetary boundaries are being broached.
When one opens the keyhole wider, the concern with carbon emissions/climate change may be seen as an outsized one in comparison to boundaries that appear to have been more significantly broached, such as: novel entities, biosphere integrity, land-system change, biogeochemical flows, and fresh water change.
This is not to say that the boundary of climate change is not important, it’s to try to better understand why a hyper-focus on carbon emissions is problematic: it’s one of several tipping points that need our attention, and not even the worst. The most pressing areas that we appear to have overshot beyond climate change include:
· Biogeochemical flows: agriculture and industry have increased significantly the flow of phosphorous and nitrogen into ecological systems and overloaded natural sinks (e.g., atmosphere and oceans)
· Novel entities: geologically-novel (i.e., human-made) substances that can have large-scale impacts upon Earth system processes (e.g., chemicals, plastics, etc.) have grown exponentially, even to the point of some existing in all global water supplies
· Biosphere integrity: human demand for food, water, and natural resources are decimating ecosystems (clearing land for mining and agriculture, for example, may have the worst impacts)
· Freshwater change: global groundwater levels in particular have been significantly altered by human activity and expansion (especially our drawdown of aquifers that exceed significantly their replenishment)
· Land-system change: human conversion of land systems (e.g., solar farms, agriculture, etc.) has impacts upon several of the other boundaries (i.e., biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows, freshwater change) and the significantly important hydrological cycle
Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Wang-Erlandsson et al 2022.
Carbon tunnel vision tends to help minimise, or at worst, ignore these other predicaments of our ecological overshoot. In fact, what I sense and what some of my conversations did suggest is that the issue of ecological overshoot itself is completely off the radar for these commenters. One, in fact, admitted he had never read Catton’s book on the subject but in ‘skimming over’ the summary notes I sent a link for he simply saw “a bunch of vague assertions…didn’t learn anything…probably heading towards a hard wall…”. He then added for effect: “I don’t see any solutions from you. I do see almost entirely your focus on smearing renewables with the exact same material the Deniers and carbon pollution people do. Exactly the same.””
Leaving aside the competing narratives regarding whether or not carbon emissions are in reality greatly reduced through the production and use of EVs[2] — perhaps mostly due to the source fuel for creating much of the world’s electricity that is necessary for powering EVs (hint: it’s hydrocarbons[3]) — for most critics of EVs the dominant issue is the massive mining that is required for the materials to construct the battery components for the storage of energy to run EVs[4].
Proponents of EVs tend to ignore the significantly destructive mining that is necessary and/or rationalise it away by arguing that mining can be carried out in a more environmentally-friendly manner[5], can be avoided through recycling[6], and/or future technological breakthroughs will drastically reduce its impact[7]. An example of this type of thinking is shared in a discussion at the end of this Contemplation.
Regardless of such hopefulness about future possibilities, mining is currently one of the most ecologically-destructive industrial processes performed by humans[8], and a lot must be carried out for the finite battery minerals necessary to store the electrical power required to run EVs[9] — to say little regarding all of the finite hydrocarbon inputs needed to carry this out[10] and the negative societal impacts that arise in areas where much of this mining takes place[11]. All of this potential additional mining has raised growing concerns about the ecological systems impacts of supposed ‘clean-energy’ vehicles[12], and in fact this is true for all non-renewable, renewable energy-based technologies (NRREBTs) that have been marketed as ‘green’ and ‘clean’.
Then there’s also how EVs will worsen plastic pollution in our ecological systems[13]. For a variety of reasons, but especially because they are heavier due to the weight of battery packs, the industry has increased significantly the use of plastic components in EVs[14]. Plastics, of course, are derived from petrochemicals. This graphic depicts the vast array of plastic components that help to create an EV. It is estimated that close to 50% of an EV’s volume is composed of plastic.
These hydrocarbon-based components are integral to the production of EVs and the industry argues that it is through the continued and expanded use of these hydrocarbon-based products that EVs will become even more efficient. (Note that the plasticisation of ICE vehicles has also been occurring[15] in an effort to reduce vehicle weight, avoid corrosion, and reduce costs).
Add on top of this aspect that it has been determined that car tire and brake wear of all types of transportation vehicles are the primary cause of microplastic pollution[16]. Since EVs tend to be much heavier than ICE vehicles (due to their battery packs), the wear on these components is increased[17] leading to substantially increased microplastic pollution with EVs compared to ICE vehicles.
This particular petrochemical-based, plastic-pollution aspect is one that is rarely discussed and awareness of it needs to be raised since it appears our broaching of this specific planetary boundary (novel entities) is one of our most problematic (see graphic above), yet greatly ignored[18] — particularly when it comes to evaluating the ecological impact of EVs. EV advocates are quick to counter such issues with a reminder that it’s carbon emissions that is the most significant and/or only problem to be dealt with (e.g., don’t condemn the good looking for the perfect), minimising the harm caused by other aspects — a clear reflection of the carbon tunnel vision problem summarised above.
Further, as the curtain gets drawn aside with regard to the recycling industry and the myths that have surrounded it[19], it has become apparent that: only a portion of products actually get recycled, with a lot impossible to recycle and ending up in landfills; it requires large amounts of energy, perhaps not as much as the original product production but certainly not zero and in some cases more (and then there’s Jevon’s Paradox regarding how ‘efficiency’ savings are negated via increased demands); and, depending on what is being recycled and the processing necessary, there is much in the way of toxic pollutants created.
So, the argument that EVs and all or most of their components can be recycled and thus mining for its production can be significantly minimised falls far, far short of reality — to say little about the second law of thermodynamics and the related concept of entropy. And this is as true for ICE vehicles as it is for EVs; some of the components can be recycled (with associated ‘costs’) but much cannot — and this is particularly true for the hydrocarbon-derived, plastic components[20].
Despite narratives to the contrary, replacing billions of ICE vehicles with EVs will require significant quantities of hydrocarbon extraction, processing, and burning; the opposite of what EV cheerleaders argue is the primary reason for transitioning to them — to say little about all the hydrocarbons necessary to build and maintain/resurface the roadways these vehicles tend to travel upon, be they asphalt or gravel. Often, EV enthusiasts will counter this reality with arguments that the goal is to reduce the number of vehicles (particularly if they are ICE-based) on the road at the same time, thus mitigating the replacement problem.
This is not happening, however. The world is adding more and more vehicles every year[21], and the vast majority are ICE vehicles. EVs are, despite the ‘replacement-theory marketing hype’, becoming additive to our globe’s vehicles, not replacing the ICE fleet. Not surprisingly, this is exactly the same pattern with non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) such as solar panels and wind turbines — they are adding to our energy production, not replacing any of the hydrocarbon-based energy production they are supposedly meant to supplant[22].
In fact, as energy analyst/petroleum geologist Art Berman argues in this article localities that have taken up large number of EVs (e.g., Norway, where 23% of their fleet was composed of EVs in 2022) have witnessed little to no impact on their overall hydrocarbon consumption. Despite repeated assertions that hydrocarbon demand will drop with the adoption of EVs, the data indicates this is simply false. Berman’s conclusion: “If you like EVs, you should buy one but the data don’t support that driving one will do anything to save the planet.”
It’s perhaps important at this juncture to recall the opening passage from an article authored by Dr. Bill Rees and Meigan Siebert critical of the entire mainstream energy transition narrative:
“We begin with a reminder that humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives — even scientific theories — are socially constructed “stories” that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework.”
The construct that EVs are ‘green/clean’ and an important component of a global energy transition has been with us for the past couple of decades. It took a strong foothold as earlier emissions standards for an array of pollutants from vehicles and industry, as well as greater fuel efficiency, drove research[23] and subsequent narratives. With the realisation that there were technological limits to fuel efficiency improvements, it was suggested that the most ‘efficient’ engine would be the one that didn’t require traditional hydrocarbon fuel due to energy storage batteries as the ‘fuel’. An added ‘benefit’ would be the elimination of exhaust emissions (ignoring, of course, all the emissions created in the manufacture of the batteries, and/or the electricity to charge them). Thus, through the magic of mass marketing, was born the story that EVs were ‘clean’ and ‘green’.
There has been a concerted effort to spread this notion of EV ‘cleanliness’ far and wide, especially trumpeting the lack of tailpipe emissions. A majority of the ‘positive-outlook’ articles that arose in the wake of this have been from publications that are heavily slanted towards encouraging NRREBTs and/or the financing of/investing in them. These are, for the most part, individuals/businesses significantly ‘invested’ in seeing the rapid and widespread adoption of EVs and other ‘green/clean’ technologies. Their rhetoric is purposely slanted towards placing EVs in a positive light and then leveraging that perspective towards purchasers who may wish to ‘do the right thing’ where ‘the right thing’ is buying an NRREBT such as an EV.
This is Marketing 101: grow business revenue through the expansion of market share by getting the product front and centre for potential customers, particularly via the highlighting of features and/or benefits[24]. And when multiple billions (perhaps trillions) of dollars are up for grabs, multiple millions (perhaps billions) will be ‘invested’ in managing/guiding the narrative via all sorts of avenues — to say little about the mainstream media’s dependence upon funding in the way of advertising dollars, regardless of the ‘accuracy’ of what is being marketed via their product.
The massive and significant marketing propaganda we are constantly exposed to[25] about EVs and their ‘great-for-the-planet’ attributes have convinced a lot of people. The majority of these accept without question the positive aspects highlighted in commercial advertising or preached by EV cheerleaders. The illusory truth effect explains a lot of the power of this propaganda/advertising on beliefs: repeated exposure to information regardless of its validity/reliability comes to be perceived as truthful, primarily because familiarity overpowers rationality. This is why many hundreds of billions (perhaps trillions when one includes ‘public relations’ work/agencies/departments for corporations and governments) of dollars are ‘invested’ annually in advertising and narrative management — it works to impact belief systems and thus behaviour[26].
I would argue that consumers are additionally more prone to such narratives to help alleviate and/or reduce the cognitive dissonance that arises from a growing awareness that industrial civilisation is unsustainable and destructive to ecological systems (i.e., infinite growth — that we are continuing to pursue/experience — is impossible on a finite planet and has significant negative repercussions) yet wishing to also believe that human ingenuity and our technological prowess can overcome and ‘solve’ the predicament of human ecological overshoot and/or its symptom predicaments (e.g., biodiversity loss, resource depletion/scarcity, etc.)[27].
A part of me additionally believes that the narrative that EVs can be part of some grand ‘solution’ to our ecological overshoot predicament and its various symptom predicaments is the mind’s attempt to not only reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts but cling to the notion that we all have agency in/control over a very uncertain future[28]. We story-telling apes are creating tales to support such belief systems and reduce our anxiety. Perhaps buying an EV is subsequently not really about addressing environmental concerns; it’s about telling ourselves a comforting tale and engaging in some virtue-signalling to others to help us maintain our self-image as thoughtful, caring beings with agency over our future[29].
Personally, I view technocornucopian perspectives as delusional in a world of significant human ecological overshoot where the surplus energy to continue pursuing growth and such complex technologies is quickly disappearing[30] (if not already exhausted). We have for some time been pulling growth from the future via financial/monetary machinations and supported by geo/political gamesmanship (i.e., wars over resources and market control)[31].
That governments are not only complicit but encouraging the deception about EVs and NRREBTs being ‘green’ perhaps says a lot about their stake in the narrative. And what is a government’s incentive? Aside from the need in a debt-/credit-based economic system to chase perpetual growth to avoid ‘collapse’, this may be just another racket being perpetrated on the masses as U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler suggested war is.
For myself, I tend to gravitate towards the entire energy transition narrative (of which EVs are but one component) being another in a wide array of profiteering rackets, leveraging the growing evidence and recognition that Homo sapiens are having a profoundly negative impact on the planet’s ecological systems. And those that are benefitting from this story will disseminate and protect it vociferously. Others, well, they’re caught up in the narrative/propaganda.
Given the Ponzi-type nature of our monetary/financial/economic systems, geopolitical stressors, resource constraints, and ecological concerns, one has to wonder just how far and how long the uptake of these NRREBTs can or will continue. In fact, some are arguing that the wheels have already fallen off with increasing numbers of planned projects being paused/cancelled[32]. And despite all the marketing and shouting from rooftops that the EV market is exploding, the sheen appears to be coming off the EV narrative.
Michael Shedlock begins this article with: “The market for used EVs is plummeting. What will car rental companies do with the used ones? Problems started in China but have spread to Europe and the US.” Citing a Bloomberg article, he highlights that “A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.”
In this article economist Stephen Moore is quoted as stating: “The Edsel was one of the great flops of all time. I’m here to tell you, if these trends continue, we’re going to see the EV market become the next big flop because car buyers don’t want them.”
Let’s dispense with the binary narrative that is often on display and be perfectly clear and honest for a moment. Both EVs and ICE vehicles — along with all the infrastructure supports necessary for their production and use — are detrimental to our significantly important ecological systems. The continuing production and use of one, the other, or both simply exacerbates the human ecological overshoot predicament.
Once again, while the future cannot be predicted with much accuracy, the current reality is much, much different than the bargaining being carried out by those wishing to see a shift from ICE vehicles to EVs — particularly given that the environmental advantages cheerleaders crow on about are mostly founded upon as-yet-to-be-hatched-technologically-improved-and-massively-scaled-up chickens. These potential breakthroughs/improvements may or may not come to fruition. Most likely they will not make it much beyond a research lab or marginal prototype use, and believing otherwise is akin to faith/hope/wishful thinking; it is certainly not reflective of current realities.
We are being convinced by growth profiteers and their narrative managers that ‘smart’ or ‘green’ or the ridiculously oxymoronic notion of ‘sustainable’ growth is the way to maintain ‘progress’ and that human ingenuity, especially where technology is concerned, will extricate us from any and all issues we encounter along this inevitable path. We are not abiding by the precautionary principle and erring on the side of caution, however; not even close. We are travelling full-steam ahead and creating rationalisations/justifications in our story-telling manner to make us feel good about our suicidal behaviour and actions, thereby reducing our cognitive dissonance.
Without a significant, and likely expedient, reduction of both types of vehicles (that we are very unlikely to do voluntarily), there is little point in bargaining ploys to keep the status quo from continuing for as long as possible which seems to be what the narrative around an energy ‘transition’ and the adoption of NRREBTs is.
I had written a suggestive path forward on this issue that might provide some mitigation by avoiding the exacerbation of our destructive tendencies but in reflection see little point in sharing it. Given the human proclivity to pursue the business-as-usual scenario painted by Meadow’s et al. in The Limits to Growth over the past handful of decades[33], I’m certain any guideline would not be pursued and it would simply be cathartic for me.
While most want ‘solutions’ to our overshoot predicament, this demonstrates a weak understanding of not only what a predicament is (it has no ‘solution’) but also displays energy/resource blindness and denial of the ongoing ecological systems destruction that accompanies all complex technological ‘solutions’. The best mitigation any of us can pursue is a dramatic reduction in our consumptive and excessive tendencies.
The best vehicle in terms of reducing damage to our planet is the one not produced, regardless of type. If reducing one’s dependency upon and/or use of a well-maintained ICE vehicle can help to prevent the production of a new vehicle (of either type), then the negative ecological systems damage that accompanies the creation of transportation vehicles is reduced dramatically. Reducing dependence upon and/or use of an ICE vehicle (to zero if at all possible) will likely go much further than purchasing an EV.
You are not a progressive steward of the environment with your purchase or heralding of an EV (or related NRREBTs). That is a narrative we story-telling apes have weaved in order to avoid reality and reduce our anxieties, engaging in denial and massive magical thinking/bargaining along the way. As I’ve said numerous times, we are an intelligent species just not very wise.
The bottom line is as I commented on a recent FB post regarding supposed misinformation about EV battery ‘facts’: Substituting one resource-intensive and complex (and thus environmentally destructive) technology for another fully and completely overlooks humanity’s fundamental predicament of ecological overshoot, and is more about reducing one’s cognitive dissonance than anything else.
[H/T Schuyler Hupp]
A handful of other ecological variables that could be added: land system changes, resource depletion, food scarcity, biosphere integrity, climate change, novel entities, stratospheric ozone depletion. Then add on top of this massive ecological complexity all the socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems that Homo sapiens have created that exacerbate our ecological overshoot.
Here is the discussion that I referred to above that demonstrates the magical thinking some engage in regarding the energy transition being touted by many. It was in response to this posted article.
Me: It would seem we need to destroy our ecological systems to save them…hmmmmmm.
UB: I am always in favor of creative disruption. It is the very concept of “Seneca Cliff,” normally followed by a “Seneca Rebound”
D: With a sad caveat the Good Doctor has pointed at: it must be not that much fun to be creatively disrupted ?
Me: The one aspect of this energy ‘transition’ that seems to be invariably left out of the equation is the massive and significant destruction that would and is being wrought on the planet (and a planet with already very overloaded sinks). The scale of the mining and processing that is being considered (and requiring a gargantuan pulse of fossil fuel extraction and burning) would surely put us over (if it hasn’t already) any tipping point from which our planet could recover from (let alone Homo sapiens survive, or many other species for that matter). I’ve not seen anywhere a detailed consideration or analysis of this particular perspective; except to mostly dismiss it via omission of the issue.
E: Sorry Steve Bull — but mining for the energy transition will NOT destroy the biosphere. The “Energy Transitions Commission” is a huge global think tank. They estimated the entire energy cost to mine and build the entire Energy Transition over the next decades. The total thing will release about 4.5 to 9 months of today’s global annual emissions. Once. Fossil fuel emissions will have stopped forever. (Figures here — but I converted to months equivalent CO2 emissions for ease of comparison.)
From the link above: “Between 2022–2050, the energy transition could require the production of 6.5 billion tonnes of end-use materials, 95% of which would be steel, copper and aluminium which the energy transition will require,”
Again — fossil fuels are 14 billion tons EVERY year.
Sure, a ‘think tank’ composed of people with very vested (financial) interests and focused on economic growth is guaranteed to be providing objective opinions based on very sound research and models.
It’s a great (cognitive dissonance-reducing) narrative but given how far into ecological overshoot the human species has travelled, whether it is death by a 1000 cuts or 999 or even 900 is truly moot. Both are ultimately suicidal when sustaining ‘growth’ is the fundamental driver (even if it’s not, maintaining the status quo is equally problematic given the amount of resource drawdown it requires).
The most appropriate path would be to attempt to reduce (significantly) all our complex technologies (along with other things like population) rather than attempt to carry on with business as usual via non-renewable, renewable energy-based industrial products.
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars):
Book 1: $2.99
Book 2: $3.89
Book 3: $3.89
Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword and Afterword by Michael Dowd, authors include: Max Wilbert; Tim Watkins; Mike Stasse; Dr. Bill Rees; Dr. Tim Morgan; Rob Mielcarski; Dr. Simon Michaux; Erik Michaels; Just Collapse’s Tristan Sykes & Dr. Kate Booth; Kevin Hester; Alice Friedemann; David Casey; and, Steve Bull.
The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.
Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.
[25] It’s hilarious, in a very sad way, that the advertisements that flood my Facebook feed are almost entirely focused upon non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies (e.g., wind turbines, solar panels) and electric vehicles. This is perhaps because I occasionally comment on these posts. What the FB algorithms seem to be missing, however, is that my comments are quite critical of the assertions being made in the ads.
