Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So far, we are on course for full-force collision. The fundamental problems with our monetary and financial systems have not been addressed, but only papered over. The latest excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’.
Clive Hamilton has been researching energy and its problems for years. But judging by his book on why the world’s governments have failed to slow industrial society’s slide towards climate disaster, Hamilton is either willfully ignorant of peak oil, or too scared to talk about it. But like too many people who care about climate change, he’s only getting half the story — and helping to handicap the climate movement in the process.
For many years the thesis of this blog has been: Our civilization is in its final century, and there is nothing we can do to prevent its collapse. When I began writing this, I was largely dismissed as a defeatist and a depressed “doomer” (or worse). As awareness has grown about the now-inevitable end of (a) cheap energy, (b) stable climate and (c) the growth economy, there is a growing acknowledgement that the collapse scenario I have written about is at least conceivable.
Because growth has been with us for “countless” generations—meaning that everyone we ever met or our grandparents ever met has experienced it—growth is central to our narrative of who we are and what we do. We therefore have a difficult time imagining a different trajectory. This post provides a striking example of the impossibility of continued growth at current rates—even within familiar timescales…We will begin with semi-practical assessments, and then in stages let our imaginations run wild—even then finding that we hit limits sooner than we might think. I will admit from the start that the assumptions underlying this analysis are deeply flawed. But that becomes the whole point, in the end.
Writing this book has been a fascinating work. Re-examining the story of “The Limits to Growth” opens up a whole new world that urban legends and propaganda had tried to bury under a layer of lies and misinterpretations. We all have heard of the “mistakes” that the authors of LTG, or their sponsors, the Club of Rome, are said to have made. But LTG was not “wrong”: nowhere in the 1972 book you find the mistakes that are commonly attributed to it.
As nations compete for currency advantages, they are also eyeing the world’s diminishing resources—fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water. Resource wars have been fought since the dawn of history, but today the competition is entering a new phase. From Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’.
One of China’s leaders’ biggest fears, expressed repeatedly in public pronouncements, is that the nation will grow old before it grows rich (Japan, in contrast, got rich before it grew old).
Our planet’s ability to provide an accommodating environment for humanity is being challenged by our own activities. The environment—our life-support system—is changing rapidly from the stable Holocene state of the last 12,000 years, during which we developed agriculture, villages, cities, and contemporary civilizations, to an unknown future state of significantly different conditions. One way to address this challenge is to determine “safe boundaries” based on fundamental characteristics of our planet and to operate within them.
Marcus Aurelius didn’t know about entropy, but he had very clear how the universe is in continuous flow. Things change and this is the only unchangeable truth. I think this is our destiny and what we have to do. Likely, we won’t be able to save the world we know. Probably, we won’t be able to avoid immense human suffering for the years to come. Yet, we must do our best to try and – who knows – what we’ll be able to do might make a difference. I think this is the lesson that Marcus is telling to us, even from a gulf of time that spans almost two millennia.
– Happiness theory at center stage in Soros economic conference
– The ‘I’m-happy-I’m-green’ consensus won’t placate our lust for novelty
– Simplicity Institute report shows that less can be more
– Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse
– Venezuela Comes Sixth in Gallup “Wellbeing” Survey
‘Zeitgeist: Moving Forward,’ makes a strong critique of party politics, market economics and overshoot. The film even explores peak oil. But its solution is an unconvincing techno-utopian fantasy straight out of science fiction complete with pod-cities of the future. Why would such a schizophrenic film boast so many rabid fans?
Joseph Tainter’s interpretation of the cause of the collapse of civilisations is that social structures generate negative returns when they become too complex (see graph). We could call this relationship as “Tainter’s law”. But what is it exactly that generates this behavior? In this post, I’ll try to make a simple model that explains the law.
