{"id":62728,"date":"2022-05-24T14:54:40","date_gmt":"2022-05-24T19:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62728"},"modified":"2022-05-24T14:54:40","modified_gmt":"2022-05-24T19:54:40","slug":"we-have-a-scalability-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62728","title":{"rendered":"We Have A Scalability Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We Have A Scalability Issue<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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When the sea refuses to scale up to accommodate your shipwreck. Image credit Timur M via\u00a0Unsplash<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At <\/span>the dawn of the industrial revolution less than 1 billion humans inhabited this earth. We\u2019ve consumed only a small proportion of the easy to access ores of iron, copper and coal. With the power of coal we\u2019ve became capable to tap a vast amount of new resources. Everything we did seemed miniature in scale compared to the vast resources and pollution sinks (the ocean and the atmosphere) of this planet. It was very easy to believe, that this is really an infinite world\u2026 An empty world \u2014 at least in economic terms \u2014 all there for the taking.<\/p>\n

Back in 1950’s, when the great acceleration has really kicked into gear neoclassical economists started to believe that there are really no limits to growth. Needless to say, this observation was completely blindsided to the fact that this growth was due exclusively to a one-time boom in non-renewable resource extraction of both fossil fuels AND minerals.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0energy and material blindness<\/strong>\u00a0was combined with a good deal of disregard for those who cared to do the math and begged to differ \u2014 an act of hubris lasting this very day. As a result, this \u2018great acceleration\u2019 has came at the cost of tipping the only habitable ecosystem (at least in a 4 light-year radius) into an irreversible decline.<\/p>\n

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If you have only 42 minutes to understand what is really going on our planet besides climate change, and would like to know what is this \u2018great acceleration\u2019 I\u2019m blathering about, watch this\u00a0very informative presentation<\/a>\u00a0from Will Steffen, emeritus professor of the Australian National University.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We Have A Scalability Issue When the sea refuses to scale up to accommodate your shipwreck. Image credit Timur M via\u00a0Unsplash At the dawn of the industrial revolution less than 1 billion humans inhabited this earth. We\u2019ve consumed only a small proportion of the easy to access ores of iron, copper and coal. With the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[6036,328,32915],"class_list":["post-62728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-b","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-scalability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62729,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62728\/revisions\/62729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}