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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXCI–The Nexus of Population, Energy, Innovation, and Complexity
Tulum, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.
This Contemplation comments upon and summarises a paper that discusses the impact of a sudden and significant energy surplus upon human population growth and the complexity that arises as denser populations struggle to meet the stresses they subsequently encounter. It also challenges the belief that human ingenuity via innovation and technology can offset finite resource constraints, especially energy, for any prolonged period of time due to the Law of Diminishing Returns.
It seems self-evident that our fundamental predicament of ecological overshoot is a direct result of humanity’s growth with too many people consuming too many resources and producing too many waste products for a finite planet dependent upon healthy ecological systems. And while this doesn’t require much explanation for those who acknowledge that we live upon a world with finite resources and limited capacity to compensate for our waste production, there are still many who believe that Homo sapiens’ rather unique cognitive abilities and technological prowess can and will ‘solve’ the many challenges we appear to be encountering as we reach and surpass the planetary limits of our relatively recent explosive growth, global expansion, and industrialisation.
In a somewhat reductionist formulation of our predicaments one refrain from some is that ‘If only we could reduce the number of people, then our complex, industrial societies and the living standards they provide could become ‘sustainable’ with our ecological systems remaining viable and healthy’-–there exist similar arguments focusing upon singular elements, such as ‘capitalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’. This is obviously an oversimplification of an exceedingly complex issue, but there are many that hold onto this fraying rope of hope and thus call for compassionate population reduction (an approach that would certainly be much less ‘disruptive’ than what we are more than likely to experience in the not-too-distant future with our current business-as-usual trajectory).
Understanding complex systems, however, requires not only a consideration of a nexus of variables but a recognition that they interact with each other in a variety of ways, including in a nonlinear manner and sometimes in a totally unpredictable fashion giving rise to emergent phenomena that cannot be explained via an analysis of the individual components making up the system in question.
What more simplistic approaches fail to overlook, then, is the vast complexity of interconnected variables and their various feedback loops. The paper by environmentalist Temis Taylor and archaeologist Joseph Tainter argue that our understanding of human population growth and the issue of ‘sustainability’ is increased greatly once one includes the all-important variables of energy, innovation, and complexity.
Human population growth, the consequences of this, and the resulting complexity are important topics to bring to the table regarding our various predicaments. Growth of the human species is one of the keystone issues when venturing into the rabbit holes of ecological overshoot, planetary boundaries, peak resources, etc.. The sustainability of humans on our planet, along with the impacts we have upon the fragile natural systems that we depend upon, cannot help but consider–among other things–the number of people that exist along with their affluence, consumption, and technology use.
I found the paper’s argument very interesting in how it addresses the belief that technology and innovation can offset declining material and energy resources. It argues that most advocates of innovation and technology ignore the fact that this predominant problem-solving strategy of our species is also subject to diminishing returns on investments–the most effective technologies and innovations are typically arrived at and put into practice early on with the subsequent ones costing dramatically more, demonstrating a decreasing rate of efficiency growth, and experiencing an ever-increasing time between ‘breakthroughs’.
The message that diminishing returns is as impactful on knowledge production and thus innovation should be noted and appreciated by all those swayed by the idea/narrative that human ingenuity and technology can ‘solve/address’ our predicaments that involve energy, population, consumption, material resource limits, etc.. Holding on to this belief contributes to/exacerbates our dilemmas for a variety of reasons, not least of which is its tendency to increase resource drawdown and compensatory sink overloading. In essence, it contributes to pushing on a string that is gathering potential energy for a subsequent snapback that will leave an indelible, negative impact upon our societies and species.
Our leveraging of a one-time cache of dense and easy-to-exploit energy has buffered us to date from the consequences of expanding too much, too quickly, and subsequently overloading our various planetary sinks. But as diminishing returns on our investments in that problem-solving strategy of increased complexity begin to bite into the net surplus energy required to sustain us, we will experience expanding negative kickback, especially for that significant majority that exist outside the somewhat insulated ruling caste that sit atop societal power and wealth structures.
As I shared on a Facebook post last week of Elon Musk asserting that humanity should be optimistic about the future because we WILL ‘solve’ the ‘sustainable’ energy dilemma: “What’s interesting and almost always ignored about knowledge production and innovation is that it, like other systems that depend upon finite resources, encounter diminishing returns on investment as time passes. The most obvious, easiest-to-apply, and least-costly ‘solutions’ are always used first and then as time goes on, the technologies and innovations become far more expensive, difficult-to-scale up, and take more and more time between them to ‘evolve’. And, what is also conveniently overlooked is that because we rarely if ever consider all the complexities of an issue (if we even can, given the nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena), our ‘solutions’ are typically only tangentially connected with the issue-at-hand leading to further problems that need to be addressed. We eventually reach a point where our ingenuity and innovations are creating a situation where they are leading to more problems than they are solving. That seems to be where we are now.”
Hydrocarbons have been a significant contributor to subsidising growth through net energy gains and buffering humanity from the consequences of its perpetual growth. In our modern societies it would appear that we have been increasingly using the monetization of debt via credit/currency expansion to aid in this as we bump up against the headwinds of Peak Resources. This additional approach, however, seems more akin to a shell game that is hiding the risk behind an opaque curtain. The Law of Diminishing Returns and biogeophysical reality of resource finiteness can only be ‘avoided’ for so long. As the saying goes, sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences and the banquet being laid out before us appears to be growing ever larger.
Below is a summary of the article. More detailed summary notes can be found here.
PS
There’s a running joke on one of the Facebook groups I am a member of (Peak Oil: Twilight of the Oil Age) where a member will post a link to the ‘latest and greatest’ technological innovation/breakthrough announcement with the intro, ‘We’re saved!’. The irony of these posts (many viewed as public-relations/investing-seeking announcements) is not lost on many of us; although, as is typical of the population at large, there are some who continue to believe the propaganda for whatever reason and cling to the belief that high-tech is our saviour and only way out of the bottleneck we have led ourselves into–I, certainly, am not of these.
The Nexus of Population, Energy, Innovation, and Complexity
Temis G. Taylor and Joseph A. Tainter
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 4
September, 2016, pp. 1005-1043
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129328
Traditional research around the issue of sustainable population size has tended to focus upon food supply and population pressure leading to the argument that the impact of population size and the resulting consumption and technology greatly impact the environment. This article extends this research by positing that human population issues are the result of the nexus of energy, energy gain, societal complexity, and innovation.
Increasing population densities lead to societal challenges (e.g., social order and security, supply provisioning, etc.) that tend to be addressed via the problem-solving strategy of adding complexity. Complexity requires additional resources, especially energy, and can only support additional complexity with increased net energy. Our proclivity to use the easiest-/cheapest-to-access resources first and more difficult-/expensive-to-access ones later leads to declining net energy over time. Innovations and technology can offset this to a certain extent, but not forever. So, while complexity can provide benefits, especially early on during growth phases, it also carries costs that increase as time passes.
Today’s population and societal complexities have come about because of and continue to be supported by our extraction and use of hydrocarbons. In the time of Malthus, it was held that food was the limiting factor to human population growth. And while food supply is still central to societal stability, the impending crisis Malthus foresaw has yet to materialise. The authors suggest that the tension that exists between Malthus’s view and those who hold that technology and innovation allow us to forever overcome resource constraints can be resolved by viewing the issue through the nexus of energy, complexity, population, and innovation.
The Maximum Power Principle posits that ecological systems that capture and use the most energy have an evolutionary advantage. This helps to explain why systems quickly use surplus energy and tend to expand as a result.
Human societal growth has been a slow process for millennia because energy surpluses are rare occurrences. When they have arisen, significant societal shifts have occurred. Homo erectus’s harnessing of fire may be our hominid species’ first example, with this control of an exogenous energy source leading to major evolutionary changes. Another may be the adoption of sedentary agriculture, then the use of draught animals, and then possibly the global adoption of high-caloric New World foods alongside several food production innovations (e.g., crop rotation, ploughs, landscape engineering).
Another revolutionary shift has been brought about by our use of coal, and later oil and gas, that has subsidised net energy-gain over the last couple of centuries. The labour savings that resulted have led to significant affluence and prosperity but has also resulted in a positive feedback loop where energy and population are reinforcing growth in each other.
With a growing concern regarding inadequate food supply arising again the early 19th century, the application of hydrocarbons to aid food production (especially via fertilisers, pesticides, and mechanisation) averted a Mathusian crisis–but has been criticised for its resulting increase in soil erosion, groundwater depletion, environmental contamination, and reduced biodiversity.
The primary concern of the authors is the chaining of food production with hydrocarbons. Human food production has grown to become significantly reliant upon energy subsidies raising the risk of food supply shortages for everyone.
Growth in human societal complexity has occurred alongside population expansion as adding complexity is our primary problem-solving strategy. This approach carries costs, mostly in the form of energy and has been heavily subsidised by hydrocarbons. Modern society adds to energy subsidies via a number of proxies but particularly time and currency.
What energy can do has limits, especially due to entropy–the dissipation of usable energy. Other resources also encounter limits and while recycling can help extend such limits to a certain extent , material degradation and loss inevitably occur. There are also no known substitutes for some vital materials (e.g., phosphorus for food production).
Energy (and other resources) are necessary to extract, refine, and use resources. It is ‘net gain’ that is important to growing/sustaining human complexities. High-gain energy systems with steep thermodynamic gradients allow human complexities to grow relatively quickly and consistently; low-gain systems result in very slow growth. The easiest-/cheapest-to-access resources are used first and innovation can aid in sustaining net-energy gains initially as difficult-/expensive-to-access ones are increasingly required to be used. But as time passes, innovation gains falter and net-energy gains diminish. This is a fall in the energy return on the energy invested (EROEI).
An increase in complexity requires more energy but diminishing returns eventually occurs as the best energy resources have been used–this creates a shift from a high-gain to a low-gain system (e.g., deeper wells, offshore platforms, tar sands, etc.). “As the most efficient solutions are employed, complexity begins to yield smaller returns on investment. If complexity grows faster than the resources available to support it or to make it worthwhile, societies can no longer sustain themselves. When a society enters a phase of diminishing returns to complexity in problem solving, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse.” (p. 1023)
Societies throughout pre/history have had to confront the energy-complexity challenge. Modern society similarly is having to deal with energy resource decline and the negative consequences that accompany increased complexity, including its requirement of an increasing share of energy.
Energy returns from hydrocarbons have been falling from about 100:1 in the 1940s to around 15:1 at the time of the writing of this article. Anything below about 8:1 becomes an issue for our society and its problem-solving strategy of increasing complexity.
In their conception of the IPAT formula for helping to determine the environmental impacts of human activity (Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology), Ehrlick and Holdren believed population size was the most significant variable. The authors, however, focus upon technology arguing that the belief that successes in technological innovations over the past 100+ years can forever compensate for resource limits is a theory that depends greatly upon hydrocarbons rather than human ingenuity as cornucopians tend to hold.
In addition, knowledge production and innovation are, like resource use, susceptible to diminishing returns on investments. Despite ever-increasing investments in research and education, innovation (as measured by patenting) has been declining for decades. This seems to be due to the easiest/least-costly discoveries occurring early in a field of study with subsequent ‘breakthroughs’ being more costly and taking longer to achieve. Education has similarly encountered declining returns with more and more investments being made and returns on them decreasing.
Hydrocarbons have created a ‘levee effect’ whereby society is somewhat buffered from natural limits leading to a sense of security that removes concerns about risks and encourages continued growth. But since these are finite resources, the security can only be temporary. Biogeophysical constraints cannot be overcome because of thermodynamic laws and biological principles. “Innovation can relieve some pressure on the environment and resources, but it is also subject to diminishing returns. Even if technology could compensate for reduced energy gain and population growth, complexity and its costs would continue to rise. As the amount of energy dedicated to complexity increases, the share of energy available per person dwindles.” (p. 1033)
Sustaining humanity’s current population is impossible using natural biomass and probably very challenging with ‘renewables’. The use and allocation of our remaining resources need to become very purposeful because a future of lower energy gain is inevitable.
To get a better understanding of the varied and complex issues we face, the authors suggest that we must view them through the nexus of energy, complexity, innovation, and population. Human population has exploded over the past two centuries due to hydrocarbon subsidies and resulted in tremendous challenges that have been met through our problem-solving strategy of increased complexity.
Again, the more detailed summary notes can be found here.
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.
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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.
Released September 30, 2024
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 2
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword by Erik Michaels and Afterword by Dr. Guy McPherson, authors include: Dr. Peter A Victor, George Tsakraklides, Charles Hugh Smith, Dr. Tony Povilitis, Jordan Perry, Matt Orsagh, Justin McAffee, Jack Lowe, The Honest Sorcerer, Fast Eddy, Will Falk, Dr. Ugo Bardi, 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.
December 29, 2022 (original posting date)
Limitless, ‘Clean’ Energy: More Magical Thinking
A brief contemplation that shares my comment on the latest post by The Honest Sorcerer regarding the recent fusion energy ‘breakthrough’ that has been making the rounds on many media sites. My current ‘bias’, given my last post, has me viewing this particular topic in a focused way that I outline below.
You’ve hit the nail on the head of the dominant narrative and mass magical thinking that goes on in our world around notions of limitless and ‘clean’ energy: given time (and funding/resources), our human ingenuity and technological prowess can ‘solve’ any problem thrown our way. Limits imposed by our existence on a finite planet are minuscule compared to our unfettered imaginations and abilities provided by our opposable thumbs. Finite limits? Meh. Ecological destruction? Who cares. Global collapse? Nothing to see, look over here…
And you ask a pertinent question: “Who in their sane minds approved the budget for all this?!”
I think energy analyst Art Berman highlights the nefarious actors that have done just this (see here). As he argues, not only are the claims about the ‘breakthrough’ a big nothing burger (since the energy-return-on-investment is about 0.005, or basically zero) but the announcement just happened to coincide with an announcement by the U.S. Congress to fund to the tune of $624 million this type of research.
Given the ties to the military that lay in the shadows of the event and the media propaganda about this fusion energy ‘miracle’ that ignores this connection, we should all be asking some hard, critical questions. Like: is this all just a form of ‘money laundering’ by the government to divert funding in a roundabout way to its military while marketing it as ‘energy research’; and, is this just a funnelling of wealth to the elite that own/control the industries necessary to carry out the work? (Questions that should also be asked about the billions (if not trillions) of dollars heading to Ukraine, NATO, various military and quasi-military establishments around the globe; as well as all the other ‘clean/green’ energy research and industries.)
This certainly plays into one of the themes I’ve been writing about: the actions of our ruling caste is driven by the primary goal of controlling/expanding the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. Having control (or at minimum overriding influence) of the politicians/government aids this immensely.
Mix this up with the competition between polities that occurs (and is discussed by archaeologist Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies; and that I have just written about here) and one can well imagine the shenanigans that goes on amongst politicians (i.e., those allocating a society’s resources in the name of ‘citizen prosperity’), industrialists (i.e., those that ‘own’ the needed industries and resources), and the media (i.e., those that own the propaganda machinery and guide/influence societal narratives) to fund ‘research’ (especially military-oriented) and other wealth-extraction/-generation systems in the name of citizen welfare.
But let’s be frank, the ruling caste cares not one iota for the hoi polloi or the ecological systems destruction this pursuit is causing. Their concern is to maintain the rigged game with them at the apex of the pyramid (an apt description given the entire scheme is little more than a gargantuan Ponzi-like structure predicated upon infinite growth on a finite planet). And as Tainter concludes regarding the peer polity competition that arises as an epiphenomenon of this:
“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.”
November 9, 2022 (original posting date)
Decoupling Energy Use From Growth: More Bargaining
Today’s short piece is a comment I shared on an article by Nathan Surendran that highlights a debunking of the idea that energy can be decoupled from growth and thus reduce carbon emissions whilst supporting continued economic expansion. Nathan has a number of great articles to read on our energy conundrum and related topics; if you’re not familiar with his writing, I recommend it.
Great piece, Nathan.
I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that all such narratives (those that argue for the continuation of ‘growth’) are readily accepted by most since they are part and parcel of our denial/bargaining of the bio- and geo-physical limits of existence on a finite planet.
More ‘nefariously’ these stories are simply marketing/propaganda by the ruling caste and its sycophants to support their primary motivation: the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. Everything, and I mean everything, is leveraged to meet this overarching goal.
For example, the idea that a massive transition to ‘green/clean’ energy and related industrial products and processes — that are marketed as ‘net zero/carbon-free’ — can alter our climate trajectory completely overlooks the significant environmental/ecological damages that such a shift would entail.
That the ruling elite has created an Overton Window such that most people buy into this tale and cannot think outside the box created is not surprising. Carbon is our enemy and can be overcome via ‘carbon-free’ thinking and products; anyone who points out the flaws in this narrative are climate change deniers or shills for the fossil fuel energy.
Nowhere in the discussion is a realisation that the knock-on effects of the significant industrial processes that are involved or necessary to transition away from fossil fuels are problematic — in the extreme. Or, that land system changes[1] created because of our constant expansion are detrimental to our hydrological systems and thus creating the extreme weather events we are experiencing — perhaps even more so than ‘climate change’[2].
That land system changes are having a significant impact on our weather patterns cannot be considered at all since the idea that we need to stop altering the landscape of our world runs in a diametrically-opposed way from the expansion and growth of our human experiment. And this, of course, undermines the ruling caste’s power base. Better to leverage crises in a way that allows status quo power/wealth structures to be maintained and/or expanded, just as the idea of decoupling does.
The growth imperative must be maintained at all costs and perhaps as importantly the idea/belief that it can be must be adhered to by the significant majority of the population (or, at least, passively accepted) so that there is little to no rejection and thus counter-narratives to it.
For despite the seeming strength of the concept that infinite growth on a finite planet is entirely possible (because of technology and human ingenuity), if a tipping point of the populace comes to understand that our pursuit of growth is what has destroyed vast portions of our planet and other species leading us deeply into ecological overshoot — and subsequently rejects its pursuit — then the entire foundation of the ruling elite crumbles. And we can’t have that!
Better to double or triple down on the propaganda and censor/ostracise counter-narratives, thus allowing the game to go on just a bit longer…
Carbon Tunnel Vision and Resource/Energy & Ecological Blindness, Part 3
As ecologist Howard T. Odum argues in the quote above, human ‘progress’ has been the result of our species’ leveraging of available ‘power’[1].
Humans are not unique in this but for a variety of evolutionary reasons, our species has taken this principle to a new (and extremely dangerous) level. In the case of our modern industrial societies and their many complexities, this power has been derived primarily from a finite cache of easily-accessible, -transportable, and -storable hydrocarbon deposits — and continues to rely significantly upon these non-renewable resources.
Rather than attribute much (most? all?) of our modern and very complex society’s ‘progress’ to the fortuitous biogeophysical circumstance of these energy deposits — particularly as it pertains to the commercial exploitation of petroleum that began in the 18th century — humans have created a mythos that it is our ingenuity and technological prowess that has led to all of the ‘advancements’ we consider as modern human progress[2].
And while there is a partial truth to this belief (as Odum points out, since we had to develop/innovate means of extracting and refining these deposits to ‘power’ our industries and various technologies) it is not the entire truth since we have come to discount/deny the importance of these hydrocarbon deposits to our ‘progress’ and the fortuitous biogeophysical circumstances that were required to create them — to say little about the importance of the planet’s ecological systems to all of this as well.
We have, instead, looked in the mirror and declared what a remarkably wise and intelligent ape we are; in fact, truth be told, we’re meant to rule and lord over the entire planet — including the lesser of our own species. A result of collective narcissism? It would seem partially so.
As I stated at the close of Part 2 of this multi-part contemplation (Part 1):
“Blindness to the importance of hydrocarbon energy to almost all of our complex systems is leading us to offer narratives that most assuredly are making our predicament of ecological overshoot worse. They mostly depend upon tales that highlight human ingenuity, especially with respect to technology, and offer ‘solutions’ to maintain for the most part our status quo systems and complexities…
Why do we do this? Why do we construct stories that, depending upon one’s perspective, could be considered suicidal in nature?”
Let’s now unpack some of the psychology behind this phenomenon.
Story-Telling Apes
Narrative psychology is that branch of psychology that focuses upon the story-telling aspect of our species. It operates “…under the assumption that human activity and experience are filled with ‘meaning’ and stories, rather than lawful formulations…[studying] how human beings construct stories to deal with experiences.”[3]
Basically, in our attempts to make sense of our exceedingly complex world and then give it meaning, humans develop stories that they then share with others[4]. Needless to say, our sensemaking via shared stories is a uniquely human behavioural attribute that is due to our communication abilities and exceedingly complex cognitions.
This storytelling to help us understand and make sense of our experiences is influenced by self-identity, retrospection, sharing, social milieu/audience, feedback (both internal and external), referential cues, and plausibility.[5]
And what is interesting about the final influence here, plausibility, is that this tends to be favoured over accuracy — what is ‘plausible’ becomes far more important than what is ‘accurate’. In other words, story-tellers tend to be more concerned with the ‘acceptability’ of their story, especially to the audience they are sharing it with, rather than with whether or not it reflects ‘reality’. Basically, we tend to be far more interested in whether the story we are telling resonates with the audience to whom we are sharing our story with than whether the story is accurate or not. Reality takes a back seat to getting our audience to accept, believe in, and react positively to our story.
The audience of a shared story also tends to put the plausibility of the narrative ahead of any evidentiary aspects. When exposed to the story from another person, we look for fit with our personal beliefs and biases. If what is being shared aligns with our preconceived expectations, we tend to believe it since we also tend to seek confirmation of our beliefs[6]. We absorb that which aligns with our preconceived view of things, reinforcing our beliefs. However, if the narrative does not corroborate our view of things, we tend to ignore/rationalise away it and its evidence.
This confirmation bias has a powerful impact upon our beliefs and our acceptance of another’s story, particularly its ‘plausibility’ and whether it is considered as reflective of ‘reality’.
Imagine, for a moment, an audience made up of financiers/economists verses one made up of ecologists/environmentalists, or of physicists. The validity or persuasiveness of a story depends greatly on the message being shared and how well it confirms or challenges beliefs.
For example, if one were discussing the finiteness of a resource to these different groups and arguing that the possibility of infinite substitutability (a mainstay of many economic viewpoints) is impossible due to certain biogeophysical constraints, the plausibility of this view would be either accepted or rejected depending upon which audience such an argument is being presented to.
Within the context of plausibility lie a number of factors that impact an audience’s acceptance of a story, confirmation bias being but one. Does the tale align with our experiences? Does it follow a stereotypical sequence of events or make use of ‘anchors’ that trigger one’s worldview? Does it use examples/precedents that appeal to the listener?
What is also important to our understanding of our story-telling nature and a significant contributing factor to our blindness to particular aspects of reality is attribution theory[7]. This theory focuses more intently upon the processes involved and suggests that humans infer causes and motivations that may or may not accurately reflect reality because of a rather large number of assumptions, heuristics, and cognitive biases that influence our interpretations.
Our tendencies are to attribute behaviours, motivations, and causes in certain ways; not always, but most of the time. And this tendency seems to play a very significant role in our blindness to the importance of energy to our sense of progress.
According to attribution theory some of the ways we tend to think about behaviours, because of cognitive biases, include:
1) Assigning the behaviour of others to internal causal factors such as personality, motive, and beliefs (i.e., fundamental attribution error, which is more common in ‘individualistic’ cultures);
2) Assigning the behaviour of ourselves to external factors such as the situation or environment (i.e., self-serving bias, which serves to protect one’s self-esteem);
3) Putting ourselves in the best possible light when telling a story to acquaintances/friends (i.e., interpersonal attribution).
Of particular importance to our stories around energy, resources, human ingenuity, and technology is the self-serving bias. This bias involves taking personal credit for successes (and blaming others when experiencing negative outcomes) and can be influenced by one’s age, motivation, culture, and locus of control.
Perhaps the most influential aspect of this bias with respect to our blindspots about energy and our ecological systems importance is the last one mentioned above: locus of control.
This aspect of our psyche or self-image deals with our beliefs about our ability to control events impacting our life. Do we believe our actions influence our experiences? Or are these events and their outcomes outside of our control?
Such beliefs exist within a continuum from no control to complete control, with people tending towards one end of the scale or the other but also shifting their beliefs based upon the context/circumstances. Add this to the tendency to want to put oneself in the best possible light, and we can begin to see why humans orient towards stories that elevate the importance of our ingenuity and technological prowess when viewing the world in terms of ‘progress’.
We not only want to take credit for perceived ‘advances’ as it builds our self-esteem, but we want to believe we have such control and influence upon the sociocultural ‘evolution’ of our species.
My next post will continue to look at some additional psychological mechanisms as well as belief system development and the role of marketing propaganda to influence our beliefs about energy and what is or is not possible for a species bumping up against (or, should I say, having surpassed) biogeophysical limits on a finite planet.
NOTE: Beginning to post these thoughts of mine also on my website. I began a couple of years ago posting them on Medium exclusively but have found that their subscription practices are somewhat restrictive. I will attempt to post one of my previous Contemplations per day on my website until I am caught up…in the meantime, I will be posting all new Contemplations in both locations.
Recently released:
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.
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 — 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).
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.
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[1] See this recent article for a summary of the Maximum Power Principle that is behind this assertion. Also see this one by Erik Michaels.
[2] Let’s keep in mind that the word ‘progress’ is extremely loaded in its meaning. Depending upon one’s perspective and/or focus, what might be considered ‘progress’ to one person may be quite different to another — for example, an economist’s interpretation verses an ecologist’s.
[4] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.
August 8, 2020
My response to an ongoing discussion regarding debt-/credit-based fiat currency and it’s impact on our pursuing the infinite growth chalice.
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Yes, credit-/debt-based fiat is certainly one of the most significant causes of our pursuing the infinite growth chalice. Not the only one, but one of the main ones, certainly. And having ‘sound’ money that was not created and distributed by private interests may help, but there are no guarantees especially if it were in the hands of the political class who, much as they do now, would very likely use such ‘power’ to ‘buy’ votes, ‘pay off’ supporters, and fund boondoggles.
I honestly don’t know if there is any ‘solution’ to this monetary conundrum. In the words of Men Without Hats in their song ‘Unsatisfaction’: I’m never satisfied when the answers could be real. I may not know what’s right but I know this can’t be it.
Regardless of what change occurs with our monetary system, I’ve reached the conclusion that if we don’t begin pursuing degrowth strategies as of, like yesterday, we are destined to experience the collapse that always accompanies overshoot.
We are well into the diminishing returns fiasco that archaeologist Joseph Tainter outlines in his monograph Collapse of Complex Societies, and sets the stage for sociopolitical (and economic) collapse; and it is likely no amount of ‘tinkering’ in our business-as-usual trajectory is going to prevent collapse/decline at this point.
All of our debates are probably quite academic and moot at this point. Making one’s local community/neighbourhood/family as self-sufficient/-reliant as possible may be the only way to ensure some of us make it through the other side of the inevitable transition since our society’s collapse will be unlike every other one in pre/history as virtually none of us have the skills/knowledge to survive without modern society’s energy-intensive technology and long-distance supply chains.
This is one of the main motivations for me to transition our yard towards food production rather than monoculture grass and begun helping family and neighbours do the same.
We have painted ourselves into a corner from which there is unlikely any escape route and we are beginning, quite vociferously and violently in some cases, to fight over a shrinking economic pie.
Arguments over how to ‘fix’ things abound (the ruling class has latched onto infinite money printing to ‘paper’ over things, much like the Romans did when they began clipping coins during their decline) but most of these are not ‘fixes’ to our unsustainable trajectory but part and parcel of our attempts to reduce the cognitive dissonance that arises from realising we cannot continue business as usual but the path we need to follow is ‘unthinkable’ for it would mean sacrificing almost everything we hold dear in ‘modern’ society.
Most of us want to believe that technology and human ingenuity will ‘save’ us (thus arguments from academics/educators about focusing more resources into education, not realising that there isn’t the time nor agreement over ‘solutions’ for education to play a role) but it is most likely that our efforts at greater and greater technological ‘solutions’ are just expediting our journey over the cliff since technology speeds the exploitation of finite resources, much as money printing does, and creates a host of negative consequences we conveniently ignore.
If people believe the world is in chaos now, just wait a few years…
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