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One sure way to identify a system “optimized for failure” is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is “optimized for my success”.

I often discuss optimization here because it offers an insightful window into how systems become fragile and break down. When we optimize something, we’re aiming to get the most bang for our buck: maximize our efficiency, profit, productivity, etc., while minimizing our costs.

To maximize our goal, whatever it is–profits, power, whatever– we strip away redundancy and buffers because these add costs and don’t boost our desired output. They create resilience, i.e. the ability to survive disruptions, but the logic of optimization is relentless: get rid of all extraneous costs, because resilience doesn’t boost the bottom line.

This trade-off–trading resilience for optimization–looks brilliant when everything goes according to plan. But when events veer outside the narrow parameters of the optimized system, the system breaks down: supply chains break, safety procedures fail, and so on.

Even more consequentially, optimization strips away anti-fragility, Nassim Taleb’s term for the ability to not just survive disruptions but emerge stronger and more adaptable.

What happens when inflexible, sclerotic systems optimized to benefit self-serving insiders encounter chaotic turbulence or conditions outside the expected parameters? They collapse because the system is optimized for failure. Put another way: when a system is optimized to benefit insiders at the expense of resilience and anti-fragility, it is effectively optimized to fail because life is not programmable to a steady-state, predictable stability.

2021 is already optimized for failure in key ways:

1. The mRNA vaccines have not been properly tested to answer essential questions such as: can a vaccinated individual retain enough of the virus to infect an unvaccinated individual?

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

Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic

April 13, 2020

Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic

Forty-eight years ago I led an 18-month study at MIT on the causes and consequences of growth in population and material production on the planet earth through the year 2100. “If the present growth trends … continue unchanged” we concluded, “the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.”

To illustrate this conclusion, we published a set of 13 scenarios generated by World3, the computer model built by my team. In those scenarios major global indices, such as industrial output per capita, typically stopped growing and began to decline between 2015 and 2050.

The current epidemic does not prove we were right.

When climate scientists are asked if a particular storm proves their theory of climate change, they point out that a model of long-term continuous change can not predict, nor be corroborated by a short-term discrete event. There have always been catastrophic storms. But, the climatologists point out, increasingly frequent and violent storms are consistent with the climate change thesis.

World3 is a model of continuous interactions between population, resources, and capital over the long term. In the context of 200 years, the COVID-19 pandemic is a short-term, discrete event. There have always been plagues, but increasingly frequent and violent epidemics are consistent with the limits to growth thesis.

There are two main causative links.

First, the explosive growth of humanity’s population and economy has stressed natural ecosystems, lowering their capacity to self-regulate, and making breakdowns such as epidemics more likely. In the recent past global society has been confronted with MERS, Ebola, Zika, SARS, and H1N1 plus major outbreaks of measles and cholera. And now we have COVID-19.

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

A Visit to Titusville: Building Resilient Communities

January 10, 2019

A Visit to Titusville: Building Resilient Communities

The University of Pittsburgh recently invited me to their Titusville, PA campus to speak about the Transition Towns movement.I chose the theme of creating communities that have the resiliency to withstand the inevitable challenges of this century. I met with three classes, had lunch with student leaders, made a public presentation that was well-attended and interactive, and spoke with community leaders.

Titusville, where the oil industry began, is today a small, shrinking town in search of its future. It is fairly representative of small and mid-sized communities across the country. Like many, it has the potential to become a more resilient community if it chooses.

My message is one that Transition Centre has adhered to for nearly a decade. Below you will find the core principles of that presentation.

A bit of background: Transition Centre was modeled on Transition Towns. There are a number of popular options for developing a more sustainable community, but the TT model, as found in The Transition Handbook, had some attractive features. The key ideas were: local, grassroots, and community resiliency.

In 2009, we formed Transition Centre as an unofficial Transition Towns hub. In 2010, we formed two formal local Transition Town initiatives. In partnership with other organizations, we made a number of presentations in Pennsylvania and neighboring states. What is our model?

Localization: Our problems may be on a global scale, but we embraced the motto: “Think globally, act locally.” In fact, we can only act at the level we can understand and solve our problems. That is our own community, our home place. One by one, a thousand points of light bring us out of darkness.

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

Feeling Resilient in Tumultuous Times

December 1, 2018

Feeling Resilient in Tumultuous Times

As I read the thoughtful blogs on this site, I feel grateful for the vision, practical wisdom, and creative thinking that I see so often expressed here. In a time when the very foundation of our way of life is breaking down, it is inspiring to hear from so many who are willing to roll up their sleeves and prepare to do the more conscious work of growing good food, providing shelter, and strengthening their local communities for whatever may come.

And of course there is good reason to believe that we may be facing a great deal more challenge in the future. Global climate change, species decline, and the growing political and economic polarization all hint at a “perfect storm” of events that call into question our very survival. Curiously, all of this seems to be happening at the same time that our political leaders are increasingly parochial and less capable. For the next few decades, and probably for the next few generations, it looks like we are in for a very wild ride indeed!

Food, clothing, and shelter are basic needs. Most of us also acknowledge the importance of healthy communities to help provide these basic necessities. There is however a whole other realm of experience that is critical to our survival; indeed, it begins to become more apparent when people come together on common projects and seek to live in community. This is the realm of emotions.

Without emotional resilience, people will not survive. Not only do we need to ‘think through’ this process of breakdown, we need to feel our way through it. In fact, our proclivity for thinking first and perhaps allowing a bit of emotional expression later on is a pattern that has helped get us into this dire predicament. More about that at another time perhaps.

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

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 5

December 10, 2017

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 5

Gustave Courbet Sunset on Lake Geneva 1876

Chapter 1 of this five-part series by Dr. D is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1

Chapter 2 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 2

Chapter 3 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 3

Chapter 4 is here: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 4

Next up: all 5 chapters combined in one big essay.

Dr. D: Bitcoin can be stolen. Although “Bitcoin” can’t be hacked, it’s only software and has many vulnerabilities. If held on an exchange, you have legal and financial risk. If held at home, you could have a hard drive fail and lose your passwords. If it’s on a hardware fob like a Trezor, the circuits could fail. For a robust system, computers themselves are pretty fragile. You could write down your passwords on paper, and have a house fire. You could print out several copies, but if any of the copies are found, they have full access to your account and stolen without you knowing. You could have your passwords stolen by your family, or have a trojan take a screen or keystroke capture.

Hackers could find a vulnerability not in Bitcoin, but in Android or AppleOS, slowly load the virus on 10,000 devices, then steal 10,000 passwords and clear 10,000 accounts in an hour. There are so many things that can go wrong, not because of the software, but at the point where you interface with the software. Every vault has a door. The door is what makes a vault useful, but is also the vault’s weakness. This is no different than leaving blank checks around, losing your debit card, or leaving cash on your dashboard, but it’s not true that there are no drawbacks. However the risks are less obvious and more unfamiliar.

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

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1

December 5, 2017

Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1

Gustave Courbet The wave 1869

A while ago, I asked a regular commenter at the Automatic Earth, who goes by the moniker Dr. D, to try and write an article for us. Not long after, I received no less than 31 pages, and an even 12345 words. Way too long for today’s digital attention spans. We decided to split it into 5 chapters. After we work through those 5, we’ll post it as one piece as well. Dr. D, who insists on sticking with his nom de plume, picked his own topic, and it’s -fittingly- bitcoin. A topic about which one can cover a lot of ground in 12345 words.

Now, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t throw in my own two Satoshis: Dr. D claims that “..everyone has an equal opportunity to solve the next calculation..”, but while that may perhaps have been sort of true at the very start, it isn’t now. It’s not true for the computerless or computer-illiterate, for those too poor to afford the electricity required by bitcoin mining, and for various other -very large- groups of people.

The equal opportunity idea sounds nice, but I think bitcoin runs the risk of creating just another set of elites, while reinforcing existing elites, who can afford to either buy bitcoin at whatever price at some point in time, or spend large sums to build mining ‘installations’ in locations where electricity is cheap. And sure, there will be losers among elites too, but inequality itself will not change; only the faces of winners and losers will, while the world’s real losers will remain just that.

It’s nothing new of course, inequality is our society’s middle name, but maybe that is precisely the problem. Maybe bitcoin should have come with an inbuilt way to spread wealth, not just shift it around.

Then again, it may all just be a giant bubble. Or a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble.

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

An Energy Diet for a Healthy Planet–Part II

April 19, 2016

An Energy Diet for a Healthy Planet–Part II

How do we get to 100 kwh/person/day, and where are we now?

I’ve written before about how efficiency is not the enemy of resiliency and the benefits of going all-electric. In Part I, I mentioned a few ways to cut our energy diet from 230 kwh /person/day to 100 kwh/person/day. I also pointed out that 56 kwh/person/day of our energy consumption is lost as waste heat in thermal generation of electricity. (One of the reasons Denmark is so energy-efficient is that they use cogeneration and district energy systems to turn this waste heat into heat for homes and commercial buildings.)

This means just converting our electrical generation to solar, wind and hydro, which have no heat losses, will give us a big jump in reducing our energy consumption. Solar and wind are also not 100% efficient in turning potential energy into electricity, but the sun shines and the wind blows whether we turn it into kilowatt-hours or not, so there’s no waste. Whereas the coal, natural gas, oil and uranium that turn into unused heat are gone forever, not to mention all the polluting by-products.

These thermal energy losses in electricity generation are part of the reason Wyoming and Montana are such energy guzzlers. Both states burn coal to create electricity, far more than their state consumes. They then export this electricity to other states. However, the heat losses (2/3rds!) involved in this electricity generation are still part of their state’s consumption. This is also a factor in why energy consumption in California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island is as low as it is. These states import a lot of their electricity but aren’t apportioned the associated waste heat losses because the fuel wasn’t burned in their state. (Note: there’s no point saying you’re importing “green” energy if the state you’re importing it from is burning coal or natural gas to provide for their own electricity needs.)

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

Hottest Year Ever Recorded + Collapsing Oil Prices = Broken Fossil Fuel Economy

February 2, 2016

Hottest Year Ever Recorded + Collapsing Oil Prices = Broken Fossil Fuel Economy

“I read the news today, oh boy.” —John Lennon

Two overlapping news stories in the past few weeks must focus our attention on the need to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible and to transition our global economy to a more just and resilient system, especially for the world’s poor and vulnerable peoples.

First, it was widely reported that 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded in human history. Specifically, the global temperature was not just higher than ever, but it rose faster than ever and the 5-year period, 2011-2015, was also the hottest 5-years ever. Climate change is real, is happening right now and seems to be accelerating in speed and intensity with every passing year.

The fossil fuel economy is broken and is collapsing around us. Photo credit: Kristian Buss

Second, global oil prices continue to collapse, now below $30/barrel. This sent world stock markets down and had a number of negative impacts on human rights issues around the world. A New York Times article last month reported the devastating impact that falling oil prices are having on poor and marginalized people in Russia. Oil is Russia’s biggest export commodity, makes up more than 15 percent of the Gross Domestic Product and around 50 percent of its federal budget. As oil prices dropped, the Russian government began making cuts to social spending, focusing on cuts to the poorest people first. Retirees, teachers, factory workers—all have seen large cuts to their incomes and struggle to get by.

Near-disastrous news stories are also pouring out of other countries that export large amounts of oil. News from Nigeria, Angola, Ecuador and Brazil is describing serious economic problems, with cuts to social spending for poor people first in line to make up for government shortfalls from oil revenues.

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

For a Resilient Future, Put Community First

December 16, 2015

For a Resilient Future, Put Community First

Imagine a respite from the relentless torrent of bad news! Both The Transition Towns (Transition) and Intentional Communities movements facilitate secession, to varying degrees, from the exploitive culture that surrounds us, and build alternatives that are supported by broad networks. Now the two movements have joined together to share lessons learned about egalitarian community building.

The Transition and Intentional Communities movements offer pathways to recovery from an abusive, extractive growth-economy. Their proponents seek wholeness through cooperation. The movements embrace anyone with the gumption to self-liberate from the corrosive mainstream matrix and commit to resilient social practices that foster the unity of people and the planet.

Intentional residential communities are groups of people dedicated to figuring out how to live together cooperatively. Transition Towns, villages, and city neighborhoods are local nodes of people, connected through a global network, who are determined to wean their localities from fossil fuel dependency and move toward resilience.

Neither model is a magic bullet. But both movements can learn volumes from the other. To that end, the Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub (MATH), The Fellowship for Intentional Communities (FIC), and the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC)—networks that support Transition initiatives and intentional communities respectively—are purposefully pursuing cross pollination.

Interchange between the two movements is happening in the zone where their missions overlap. That is, in the space where people wake up and summon the grit to live consciously, seek wholeness, and unplug from the dysfunction of the homogenized American norm.The Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) has joined the Spokescouncil of Egalitarian Resilience Networks, an “affinity circle” within the MATH Constellation, to help spark the joint work of the two movements. The Spokescouncil is working to hold both movements accountable to the basic tenets of egalitarian process.

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

What are the essential elements for successfully building community resilience?

November 18, 2015

What are the essential elements for successfully building community resilience?

Introducing Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience, PCI’s new report which describes how communities can approach the full scope of the 21st century’s challenges equitably and sustainably.

It’s all too easy to look at the news these days and find an instant reminder of how vulnerable, and in some cases broken, our communities are—whether the risks they face are due to terrorism, natural disasters, economic struggles, dilapidated infrastructure, or a dozen other disruptive forces. I could quickly provide some examples, torn from this week’s headlines, but if you’re reading this a month, a year, or decade from now it’s likely the task will be just as easy.

This is partly true, of course, because vulnerability has always been part of human communities. But in this age of global interconnectedness, those vulnerabilities are not only more complex and systemic, they’re chronic.

Since Post Carbon Institute’s formation a little over a decade ago, we’ve seen interest in building community resilience skyrocket—from the early days of the grassroots relocalization and Transition movements, in response to concerns about climate change and peak oil, to the more recent initiatives of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the United Nations to prepare cities for acute disasters.

In particular, interest in building climate resilience has grown exponentially since Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. Northeast in 2012, and as the need for climate adaptation, not just mitigation, has become more and more evident.

Having ourselves promoted community resilience for years, we’ve been pleased to see the concept of resilience being embraced by a diverse collection of grassroots groups, government agencies, politicians, and philanthropists. But we’re also eager to ensure that community resilience building isn’t simply adopted an aspirational goal divorced of concrete strategies, or as a strategy to “bounce back” from one specific set of disruptions to a normal state that no longer exists.

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

The Permaculture City: Cities as Complex Systems

September 8, 2015

The Permaculture City: Cities as Complex Systems

The following sections are excerpted with permission from Chapter 1 of Toby Hemenway’s new book The Permaculture City, published by Chelsea Green.

When a permaculturist sees words such as “function” and “synergy,” it sets off lightbulbs in his or her head. Function, for example, indicates a relationship, a connection between two or more elements. A road functions to move traffic, thus the road has a relationship with vehicles, and it mediates the movement—that is, it makes connections—between the traffic, its origin, and its destination. Knowing a function, in turn, leads us to identify the items and processes necessary to fill that function and also points to the yields created when that function is filled. Thinking in terms of functions, then, is a powerful leverage point, because it identifies needs, yields, relationships, and goals, and it helps us spot blockages, missing elements, buildup of waste, and inefficiencies in the various flows and linkages that are part of that function’s workings.

This means that when we look at cities, their residents, and the other components of urban life in terms of their functions, we can spot the factors that influence how well they are able to perform those functions. Then we can study, understand, and direct those factors and influences in ways that will create and enhance the functions and properties of cities that are beneficial, such as community-building public plazas, parks, and structures; open and supportive marketplaces; and habitat-creating green space; as well as human elements such as responsive policy processes. We can also spot and damp down the negative factors. Once we’ve done this, the next step is to evaluate, to see how well our changes have moved us toward a more livable, and life-filled, environment. That is the heart of design.

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

How to Start Prepping in 3 Easy Steps

May 15, 2015

How to Start Prepping in 3 Easy Steps

One day, you’re just moving through life with everyone else in your office or at your church, and then, for whatever reason, the reality of how tenuous our current lifestyle is, hits you squarely between the eyes. You realize that electricity and grocery stores and transportation are all things that you’ve been taking for granted and that these things could actually disappear. Maybe you’re concerned about a natural disaster. Perhaps you saw something on the evening news. It could even be a job loss that puts these things out of reach.

But whatever the reason, suddenly, you know in your heart that you need to prepare for a different type of future, just in case.

Where on earth do you even start with something like that?

Start with information

Before you start making enormous purchases or moving your family to a bunker, take some time to learn.

Information.

That is the key that unlocks the door to preparedness.

When you begin reading websites about prepping, sometimes it can be overwhelming. You see people talking about their one-year food supplies, their bug-out lodges, their ammo collection, and their homestead that is so far out in the wilderness that they have to climb a big pine tree on top of the mountain to get an internet connection (where they then boast online about their seclusion on a prepper forum).

Most preppers are just regular folks with a self-reliant mindset.

Getting started does not require a $20,000 investment or your children feverishly packing beans and rice into Ziplock bags late into the night. It requires enough information to properly assess your situation. It requires some guidance to help you develop a plan to keep your family safe, housed, and fed, regardless of what comes in the future.

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

Terms of debate: Destroying vs altering nature, the fragile vs the resilient Earth

May 11, 2015

Terms of debate: Destroying vs altering nature, the fragile vs the resilient Earth

Last week’s piece drew responses that throw into relief how much the language we use depends on our most basic assumptions about how the world works. If left unexamined, that language leads to further conclusions that go unchallenged because the underlying assumptions are never scrutinized.

I challenged the Breakthrough Institute’s notion that humans are in one category and nature in another. If one views humans as merely a part of nature or the universe or the web of existence–however one chooses to name that which includes everything–then our role becomes distinctly different.

Under my assumption humans are embedded in the natural world. They are not the sole actors or agents in it, only one of countless actors, most of which we probably know nothing about. We cannot get one up on nature. We can only cooperate with its workings.

When we put nature in one category and humans in another, we make humans an outside and preeminent force over nature. We (falsely) imbue ourselves with god-like power to “control” nature. In this case, “control” means we get what we want without self-annihilating effects. For who could say that they are in “control” of a plummeting airliner headed for a crash just because they still have the ability to move the throttle.

Now, if humans are one with nature, then the only thing they can do to it is alter it. They cannot “destroy” nature. Only if we conceive of ourselves as living on a different plane from nature can we “destroy” it. And, only if we conceive of nature as immutable can we “destroy” it. But nature is always in flux including any flux that results from human action. There is no immutable nature to “destroy” or to “restore.” We cannot run entropy in reverse and reassemble the universe into exactly a state that existed in the past, not anywhere.

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

Resilience is The New Black

May 8, 2015

Resilience is The New Black

This is another essay from our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III in New Zealand. Nelson is a certified expert in everything to do with resilience, especially how to build a home and a community designed to withstand disasters, be they natural or man-made, an earthquake or Baltimore. Aware that he may rub quite a few people the wrong way, he explains here why he has shifted from seeing what he does in the context of sustainability, to that of resilience. There’s something profoundly dark in that shift, but it’s not all bad.

Nelson Lebo III: Sustainability is so 2007. Those were the heady days before the Global Financial Crisis, before $2-plus/litre petrol here in New Zealand, before the failed Copenhagen Climate Summit, before the Christchurch earthquakes, before the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)…the list continues.

Since 2008, informed conversations on the economy, the environment, and energy have shifted from ‘sustainability’ to ‘resilience’. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this shift, but I’ll focus on just two: undeniable trends and a loss of faith. Let me explain.

Since 2008, most of the pre-existing trends in income inequality, extreme weather events and energy price volatility have ramped up. Sustainability is about halting and reversing these trends, but there is essentially no evidence of that type of progress, and in fact the data shows the opposite.

Plenty of quantitative data exists for the last seven years to document these accelerated trends, the most obvious is the continually widening gap between rich and poor everyone else. The second wave of commentary on the Baltimore riots (after the superficiality of the mainstream media) has been about the lack of economic activity and opportunity in many of the largely African-American neighbourhoods.

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

A Resilient Society

May 6, 2015

A Resilient Society

The final video in a four-part video series. Released in conjunction with Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.

Resilience is a word that’s gaining a lot of currency in recent years, as more and more people realize there are some shocks headed our way. But what would a more resilient society look like?

This video is the fourth in a four-part series by Richard Heinberg and Post Carbon Institute. The themes covered in these videos are much more thoroughly explored in Heinberg’s latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels. (View the entire series here.)

Special thanks to New Society Publishers for partnering with us on this fantastic series and to Shutterstock.com for granting image rights.

…click on the above link to view the presentation…

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