{"id":67190,"date":"2024-04-04T16:33:59","date_gmt":"2024-04-04T21:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67190"},"modified":"2024-04-04T16:33:59","modified_gmt":"2024-04-04T21:33:59","slug":"distilled-disintegration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67190","title":{"rendered":"Distilled Disintegration"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Distilled Disintegration<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Photo by Nigel Brown; licensed under Creative Commons<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

My adult life has run on two diverging tracks. On one, I\u00a0played science<\/a>. The other track branched off at age 34\u2014twenty years ago this month\u2014when I started teaching a class on Energy and the Environment. I was eager to piece together our likely energy future: how we would beat climate change and leave fossil fuels in the dust. Against my wishes, this fork presented unexpected turns that took a long time to sink in. The two tracks eventually became too divergent to keep a foot on each. At this stage, I can\u2019t seem to muster the denial it would take to disregard what I have learned so that I might return to the more blissful play-time track.<\/p>\n

Much of my writing in the last few years has tried to capture why I have become convinced that\u00a0modernity can\u2019t last<\/a>, likely to begin disintegrating in the near-term. In this post, I attempt to distill core elements informing this sense. My apologies if this seems like a rehash. For what it\u2019s worth, the packaging exercise is something that helps me address the question I constantly ask myself: what part of this might I have wrong? It\u2019s a way to take stock.<\/p>\n

Growth<\/strong><\/p>\n

I began the Do the Math blog with a\u00a0pair<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0posts<\/a>\u00a0about why growth can\u2019t last\u2014hitting limits in a historically short time. I also dedicate the first chapters of\u00a0my textbook<\/a>\u00a0to the same topic. In 2022, I synthesized the arguments in an\u00a0academic paper<\/a>. This thread should be very familiar by now to my readers, and in fact really ought to be common knowledge. Yet, modernity still operates in a market economy and political system built around a growth expectation. Pension plans and social safety nets (like Social Security and Medicare) become Ponzi schemes unquestionably destined to fail at some point as growth falters.<\/p>\n

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

Distilled Disintegration Photo by Nigel Brown; licensed under Creative Commons My adult life has run on two diverging tracks. On one, I\u00a0played science. The other track branched off at age 34\u2014twenty years ago this month\u2014when I started teaching a class on Energy and the Environment. I was eager to piece together our likely energy future: […]<\/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":[150,271,391,3666,617,31103],"class_list":["post-67190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-collapse","tag-environment-2","tag-growth","tag-modernity","tag-peak-oil","tag-tom-murphy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67190","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=67190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67191,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67190\/revisions\/67191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}