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A landmark report by the United Nations concludes that ‘global collapse’ is becoming more likely. But was it watered-down before being published?

When the United Nations published its 2022 ‘Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction’ (GAR2022) in May, the world’s attention was on its grim verdict that the world was experiencing an accelerating trend of natural disasters and economic crises. But not a single media outlet picked up the biggest issue: the increasing probability of civilisational collapse.

Buried in the report, which was endorsed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, is the finding that escalating synergies between disasters, economic vulnerabilities and ecosystem failures are escalating the risk of a “global collapse” scenario.

This stark conclusion appears to be the first time that the UN has issued a flagship global report finding that existing global policies are accelerating toward the collapse of human civilisation. Yet somehow this urgent warning has remained unreported until now.

The report does not suggest that this outcome is inevitable or specify how close to this possibility we are. But it does confirm that, without radical change, that’s where the world is heading.

Planetary Boundaries

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework are a set of social, economic, legal, political and institutional measures to reduce “disaster risk and losses” – both involve targets to 2030 which the world is in danger of failing to meet.

That failure, however, is directly linked to the rate at which human activities are interfering with natural systems, in particular, ‘planetary boundaries’.

The planetary boundaries framework was developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009 to provide what it calls a “science-based analysis of the risk that human perturbations will destabilise the Earth system at the planetary scale”…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

UN Warns of ‘Total Societal Collapse’Due to Breaching of Planetary Boundaries

June 2, 2022

UN Warns of ‘Total Societal Collapse’Due to Breaching of Planetary Boundaries

A landmark report by the United Nations concludes that ‘global collapse’ is becoming more likely. But was it watered-down before being published?

The report does not suggest that this outcome is inevitable or specify how close to this possibility we are. But it does confirm that, without radical change, that’s where the world is heading.

Planetary Boundaries

That failure, however, is directly linked to the rate at which human activities are interfering with natural systems, in particular, ‘planetary boundaries’.

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

GLOBAL BANKS PRIVATELY PREPARE FOR‘Dangerous Levels’ of Imminent Civil Unrest in Western Homelands

May 31, 2022

GLOBAL BANKS PRIVATELY PREPARE FOR‘Dangerous Levels’ of Imminent Civil Unrest in Western Homelands

Nafeez Ahmed reports on financial institutions preparing for social breakdown as a result of energy and food shocks

Global banks and investment firms are bracing themselves for an “unprecedented” upsurge in civil unrest in the US, UK and Europe as energy and food price spikes are set to drive costs of living to astronomical levels, Byline Times can exclusively reveal.

The information comes from the head of a ‘financial institutions group’ – which provides expertise and advisory services to other banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions – at one of the largest investment firms in the US.

The senior investment executive, who spoke to Byline Times on condition of anonymity because the information he revealed is considered highly sensitive, said that contingency planners at top financial institutions believe “dangerous levels” of social breakdown in the West are now all but inevitable, and imminent. An outbreak of civil unrest is expected to occur anytime this year, but most likely in the coming months as the impact of the cost of living crisis begins to saturate the lives of “everyone”.

Well-to-do middle classes will find it hard to afford staple foods and pay bills. So we are anticipating dangerous levels of civil unrest that could spiral into an unprecedented social crisis

The executive works at a leading Wall Street firm which is considered a systemically important financial institution by the US Financial Stability Board. These are institutions whose functioning is considered critical to the US economy, and whose failure could trigger a financial crisis.

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

JP Morgan’s misinformation on the clean energy disruption – a handy guide

February 1, 2022

JP Morgan’s misinformation on the clean energy disruption – a handy guide

The JP Morgan Asset and Wealth Management Annual Energy Paper is one of the most influential publications among global investment and business leaders in the energy sector.

But JP Morgan Chase’s 2021 Annual Energy Paper is a deeply flawed piece of work that promotes some serious misinformation about the clean energy transformation, reinforcing the mistaken belief – often promulgated by fossil fuel companies – that it will be slow, expensive and require onerous state intervention.

Coming from JP Morgan Chase – the world’s fifth largest bank, and the largest lender to fossil fuel industries – the paper informs the policy, investment and business decisions of many influential companies, organisations and governments around the world. Which is why it is important to understand that the world’s largest fossil fuel lender appears largely oblivious to the dynamics of technology disruptions and energy transitions.

Myth 1: Renewable energy forecasts are too optimistic

The Annual Energy Paper, authored by chairman of JP Morgan Asset Management’s chairman of market and investment strategy Michael Cembalest, was overseen by its technical advisor, influential academic Vaclav Smil.

Its tone is set by a graph on the first page depicting alleged failed ‘renewable energy forecasts’. The graph seems to show that these forecasts were overly optimistic, and then repeatedly turned out to be false.

Yet according to Ketan Joshi, who previously worked in science communications for Australia’s national science agency, the sources for the alleged forecasts are impossible to trace.

For instance, he writes: “Danish physicist Bent Sørensen, for instance, seems to have published the figure between 1978 and 1980, and it isn’t easy to figure out where the prediction of 50% by 2000 was made. There was never any ‘Clinton Presidential Advisory Panel’ – the phrase can only be found in republications of this very chart; so that’s a mystery.”

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

OIL SYSTEM COLLAPSING SO FAST It May Derail Renewables Warn French Government Scientists

October 20, 2021

OIL SYSTEM COLLAPSING SO FAST It May Derail Renewables Warn French Government Scientists

A Gas/Oil Power Station. Photo: Victor Lucas/Alamy

Forget ‘peak oil’. Nafeez Ahmed reveals how the oil and gas industries are cannibalising themselves as the costs of fossil fuel extraction mount

A team of French government energy scientists are warning that the collapse of the global oil system is coming so rapidly it could derail the transition to a renewable energy system if it doesn’t happen fast enough. In just 13 years, global oil production could enter into a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades.

But this is not because the earth is running out of oil and gas. Rather, it’s because they are increasingly eating themselves to stay alive. The oil and gas industries are consuming exponentially more and more energy just to keep extracting oil and gas. That’s why they’ve entered a downwards spiral of increasing costs of production, diminishing profits, rising debt and irreversible economic decline.

Hanging on for dear life to the old, dying fossil fuel paradigm is a recipe for civilisational suicide.

The implication is that global energy shortages and price spikes will be a taste of things to come if we stay dependent on fossil fuels. Yet a growing narrative has instead wrongly pinpointed the ‘clean energy transition’ as the culprit.

The Economist, for instance, describes the global gas price spikes as “the first big energy shock of the green era”, blaming inadequate investment in renewables and “some transition fossil fuels” (like gas). This could lead to “a popular revolt against climate policies.”

This implies that the fundamental driver of global energy volatility is the transition away from fossil fuels: but this flawed narrative has it exactly backwards.

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

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

October 15, 2021

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

We can make it: the latest results of the analysis of the performance of renewable energy, photovoltaic and wind, show that their efficiency in terms of energy return on investment (EROI) is considerably larger than that of fossil fuels. It is becoming clear, too, that renewables don’t need rare and disappearing mineral resources: the infrastructure to build them and maintain them needs only abundant and recyclable minerals: silicon, aluminum, and a few more that can be efficiently recycled (rare earths and lithium).

In other words, renewables can’t be considered anymore as an emergency replacement for the depleting and polluting fossil fuels, but as a true step forward. They are the new, “disruptive” technology that people expected nuclear energy to be, but that never was.

Tony Seba — sharp as always — has diffused the idea of renewables as the new energy revolution. Seba’s ideas have been popularized by Nafeez Ahmed in a two parts series, (Part 1 and Part2). These assessments may be too optimistic in some regards, but they do note how things are changing. We have a chance, a fighting chance, to falsify the scenarios that saw an irreversible decline — actually a collapse — of the industrial civilization during the next few decades.

Can we really make it? It is a chance, but not a certainty. The quantitative calculations made by Sgouridis, Csala, and myself indicate that we can only succeed if we invest in renewables much more than what we are investing nowadays. If we maintain the current trends, renewables will be able to slow down the decline, but not avoid a “dip” in the civilization curve. Then, we will re-emerge on the other side in a new and cleaner world…

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

Gas Crisis Reveals Imminent End of Europe’s Fossil Fuel Age

September 25, 2021

Gas Crisis Reveals Imminent End of Europe’s Fossil Fuel Age

Coal is transported by barge on the Rybinsk Reservoir in Russia. Photo: pbpvision/Alamy

Nafeez Ahmed sees the current energy crisis as a symptom of a deeper malaise – reliance on Russia and fossil fuels – which could lead to spiralling inflation and a perfect global economic storm

Britain and Europe are in the midst of a gas crisis that signals an approaching turning point in the global energy system which markets in their current form will be unable to resolve. The Government’s prevailing approach was exemplified in the Prime Minister’s simplistic refrain that:

“… the problems we are seeing are temporary. We’re experiencing bottlenecks in all kinds of things – huge stresses – as the world wakes up from COVID. It’s like everybody going to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme.”

But Boris Johnson is wrong.

The current price hikes are a warning sign of a deeper shift: a turning point of global proportions that requires a very different approach from business-as-usual. Though no longer rich in fossil fuel resources, consistently poor policy choices mean that the UK and Europe as a whole remain dependent on them. The failure to recognise the implications has set us up for increased geopolitical dependence on Russia, and a future of intensifying, intertwined cyclical climate and energy crises that will amplify the chance of triggering a series of shocks that could devastate the global economy.

To understand what’s happening, we need to go beyond banal headlines and simplistic reductions of the crisis to one or the other factor, and instead attempt to understand the crisis through a whole systems lens.

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

How the Economy Has to Radically Transform to End Fossil Fuels in 20 Years

August 19, 2021

How the Economy Has to Radically Transform to End Fossil Fuels in 20 Years

Coming disruptions will eventually lay waste to conventional jobs in incumbent fossil fuel, combustion engine, and livestock farming industries.

IMAGE: MARCEL KUSCH/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES

To avoid the worst of climate change’s disastrous effects, humanity needs to slash carbon emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere at a pace and scale often said to be eye-wateringly difficult, expensive, and even unlikely given the continued failure of political will. That’s the implication of the IPCC’s report, published this week, which concludes that a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures is now inevitable in 20 years.

The IPCC’s “best-case” scenario concludes that if we act fast, we might be able to gradually reduce temperatures back down to 1.4C by 2100. Yet this would keep us in the 1.5C climate danger zone for decades, which could risk triggering tipping points that could lead to irreversible and even more dangerous shifts in the climate system. Against this background, the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill has offered a watered down set of policies that simply won’t contribute to the scale of change required.

But a new report by technology forecasting think-tank RethinkX finds that the scope for change could be far larger and faster than either the IPCC or powerful governments like the United States realise: because the most powerful fossil fuel-based industries in the world—oil, gas, and coal; livestock farming; and combustion engines—are going to become obsolete purely due to extant economic factors well within the next 20 years. According to RethinkX, they are being increasingly disrupted by a cluster of clean technologies in the energy, transport and food sectors, which are rapidly becoming cheaper, more efficient, and as a result, more ubiquitous.

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

How to Save the World in 15 YearsPart One

August 12, 2021

How to Save the World in 15 Years Part One

Smoke spumes out of a power station chimney. Photo: Stephen Foster/Alamy

As the IPCC issues its direst warnings yet about an inevitable rise in global warming into the 1.5C danger zone, Nafeez Ahmed proposes a better way out of its dystopian vision

All five scenarios in the new report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published this month, show the planet on track to breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius ‘safe limit’ for global warming within the next 20 years. Only one scenario, involving ambitious reductions of carbon emissions to net zero as well as a further withdrawal of the carbon already in the atmosphere, would see global average temperatures eventually dropping back down to 1.4C by the end of the century.

This is the direst warning ever received from an IPCC report, agreed by 195 countries, and it suggests that, on our current course, the climate danger zone is now unavoidable.

Even with the most dramatic emissions reductions possible, the Earth is about to enter a 1.5C world and set to stay within a 1.5-1.4C range for much of the century. Our best hope, in this scenario, is to be in a position to cool the planet while we are in the danger zone.

This suggests that the Paris Agreement, premised on the goal of reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change, is too little, too late. Further underlying the IPCC’s scenarios is the assumption that 1.4C will be significantly different to 1.5C. But there is mounting evidence that, due to the complexities of the Earth’s system, 1.4C will not be meaningfully safer.

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

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.

July 15, 2021

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.

A 1972 MIT study predicted that rapid economic growth would lead to societal collapse in the mid 21st century. A new paper shows we’re unfortunately right on schedule.

IMAGE: GETTY

A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data.

As the world looks forward to a rebound in economic growth following the devastation wrought by the pandemic, the research raises urgent questions about the risks of attempting to simply return to the pre-pandemic ‘normal.’

In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.

The controversial MIT analysis generated heated debate, and was widely derided at the time by pundits who misrepresented its findings and methods. But the analysis has now received stunning vindication from a study written by a senior director at professional services giant KPMG, one of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms as measured by global revenue.

Limits to growth

The study was published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology in November 2020 and is available on the KPMG website. It concludes that the current business-as-usual trajectory of global civilization is heading toward the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade—and at worst, could trigger societal collapse by around 2040.

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

Pentagon report: collapse within 20 years from climate change

May 25, 2021

Pentagon report: collapse within 20 years from climate change

Preface. The report that the article by Ahmed below is based on is: Brosig, M., et al. 2019. Implications of climate change for the U.S. Army. United States Army War College.

It was written in 2019, before covid-19 and so quite prescient: The two most prominent risks are a collapse of the power grid and the danger of disease epidemics.

It is basically a long argument to increase the military so it can help cope with epidemics, water and food shortages, electric grid outages, flooding, and protect the (oil and gas) resources in the arctic.

Since I see energy decline as a far more immediate threat than climate change, and the military knows this, it is odd so little is written about energy in this report. But then I looked at the pages about the arctic, and though the word oil doesn’t appear, you can see that the military is very aware of the resources (oil) there and the chance of war with Russia. Therefore they propose that the military patrol this vast area with ships, aircraft, and new vehicles that can traverse the bogs and marshes of melted permafrost. They propose sending more soldiers to the arctic for training, satellites for navigation, to develop new ways of fighting, enhance batteries and other equipment to be able function in the cold arctic environment, and more.

***

Ahmed, N. 2019. U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says. vice.com

According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades.

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

Fossil Fuels Are Wildly More Expensive Than Previously Thought, Study Says

March 11, 2021

Fossil Fuels Are Wildly More Expensive Than Previously Thought, Study Says

Overinflated fossil fuel investments might be a ‘worthless’ bubble waiting to trigger the next crash, while renewables seem more appealing than ever.

IMAGE: LUKAS SCHULZE/GETTY IMAGES)

A new study finds that conventional electric power plants powered by fossil fuels and hydro are massively overvalued by the world’s leading analyst organizations. The report says they are overvalued to such a degree that the trillions of dollars of investment in these industries could amount to a “bubble” similar to the subprime mortgage housing bubble whose collapse triggered the 2008 financial crash.

The stunning findings imply not only that renewable energies such as solar, wind and battery storage are far cheaper than believed, but that they are already outcompeting coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro power. This fact, however, has been masked by distorted calculations based on a fundamentally incorrect metric: the ‘Levelized Cost of Electricity’ (LCOE).

The new report by independent technology think tank RethinkX, titled The Great Stranding: How Inaccurate Mainstream LCOE Estimates are Creating a Trillion-Dollar Bubble in Conventional Energy Assets is written by environmental social scientist Dr. Adam Dorr, a Research Fellow at RethinkX, and the think tank’s co-founder Tony Seba, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford University lecturer in technology disruption.

Their new analysis, which is likely to send shockwaves across fossil fuel industries and utilities, probes into the science around a conventional power plant’s LCOE—which basically measures the average cost of generating electricity across the entire lifetime of the plant, including its building and operating costs.

Energy hype

Dorr and Seba show that mainstream LCOE assessments for conventional coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro power plants are simply false. In reality, due to the growing inefficiencies of these forms of energy, the amount of electricity conventional power plants produce falls over time, in some cases quite dramatically…

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

Nafeez Ahmed – Taking a Step Back to Move Forward in Times of Transition

December 18, 2020

Nafeez Ahmed – Taking a Step Back to Move Forward in Times of Transition

Systems journalist Nafeez Ahmed joins us to discuss why it is so important to draw on systems thinking to understand global politics.

Nafeez Ahmed guides us through the intricacies of systems thinking from within and outside the IR Academy, throwing light on the scale of the governance challenge which complex global problems such as the climate crisis pose, the inevitable demise of current systems, and what a new emerging paradigm might look like, one in which we find ways to live together in our diversity and thrive within planetary boundaries.

Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, founding editor and chief writer for INSURGE intelligence, and ‘System Shift’ columnist at VICE’s science magazine Motherboard. He is developing a unique form of what he calls “systems journalism” and in the conversation also explore what it means to be a journalists in an age of media hyper-partisanship. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Sussex and is the author of a number of books, including Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence and A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, which has also been turned into a documentary.

COVID-19 Is a Symptom of a Planet That’s Been Pushed Past a Tipping Point

November 26, 2020

COVID-19 Is a Symptom of a Planet That’s Been Pushed Past a Tipping Point

The pandemic could signal that we’ve passed a series of civilizational tipping points that will usher in a new era of ecological emergencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic signals that civilization has breached a major ‘tipping point’ that could pave the way for a dangerous new era of interacting ecological emergencies.

Scientific evidence accumulated over the last five years suggests that the pandemic didn’t come out of the blue, but is a direct consequence of industrial civilization’s breaching of key ‘planetary boundaries’—these are important natural ecosystems needed to maintain what scientists describe as the ‘safe operating space’ for human survival on the planet.

The more we destabilize those boundaries, the more this safe space for human habitation shrinks—and COVID-19 suggests that the world economy is now entering a volatile new phase of chronic instability due to not just one crisis, but the interaction of many crises including climate change, resource bottlenecks, food system failures and civil unrest. It is the escalating synergy between these crises, each of which is experiencing its own tipping points, which points to the risk we are crossing a planetary threshold in the global system.

This verdict doesn’t come from new data, but from applying a systems lens to understand the massive amount of data we already have. I assessed the evidence in a major report for the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, a British think-tank which has led on the European Commission’s CONVERGE project, among other things.

Pandemic: a symptom of civilization itself

Prior to 2020, warnings from public health experts of an incoming global pandemic had accumulated over the last few decades. All of them have based their diagnosis on examining the risks posed by the relentless expansion of industrial civilization.

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

Capitalism Will Ruin the Earth By 2050, Scientists Say

October 29, 2020

Capitalism Will Ruin the Earth By 2050, Scientists Say

The good news is, by cutting our consumption, there’s another way.

IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

A spate of new scientific research starkly lays out the choice humankind faces in coming decades:

By 2050, we could retain high levels of GDP, at the price of a world wracked by minerals and materials shortages, catastrophic climate change, and a stuttering clean energy transition —paving the way for a slowly crumbling civilization.

Or, we could ditch the GDP fetish and enter a world of abundance, with energy consumption safely contained within planetary boundaries, and high-tech economies that support jobs, health and education for everyone without costing the earth.

On the first option, scientists backed by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program have concluded that capitalism-as-we-know-it cannot support a successful clean energy transition.

Not only that, but capitalism is on track to lead the world into mineral shortages and supply bottlenecks that could cut short efforts to decarbonize transport systems, guaranteeing dangerous climate change.

The new study published in the journal Energy Strategy Reviews finds that electrifying our cars, trucks and trains so that they run on renewable energy is only viable if we reduce the endlessly growing levels of consumption in industrial societies. That, effectively, means fundamentally transforming the very sinews of capitalism.

The good news is that separate research published in September proves that such an economic transformation is perfectly feasible while still maintaining a good quality of life for people all over the world.

Modeling the world

The transportation study is based on a highly sophisticated ‘integrated assessment model’ (IAM) that brings together a vast amount of empirical data. Known as the MEDEAS-World model, it incorporates feedback relations between global and regional economies; renewable, fossil fuel energy flows and energy infrastructure; technology developments and costs; minerals and land requirements; climate change and water; and many other sectors.

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

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