Collapse

Politics and religion
1

This is an offshoot of the climate change thread. It’s lengthy, and I expect no one cares what I think or will read the links, but posting it nonetheless in the event anyone has a hankering for sinking into a pit of despair.

It’s not particularly revelatory and I’m late to the party, but I’ve clung to the belief that unlike the laws of physics, human behavior is not immutable. Meaning that human consumption patterns can change, and that collectively we have a choice to mitigate the worse aspects of climate change and curtailing catastrophic biodiversity loss (that is, in addition to that caused by climate change).

Despite an initial surge of hope after the 2020 election, political events in the US have disabused me of that notion. By 2100, I believe we’re looking at a 4°C rise in temperature, and likely higher. Large swathes of the planet are going to be uninhabitable - coincidentally home to hundreds of millions of people. It does not take much imagination to know how that’s going to turn out (large vertebrates by then will already have gone extinct in the wild, not that there will be any wild left - the last remaining remnants of richly biodiverse regions are being destroyed right now and nothing is stopping it. )

Recently, I read this 2009 exchange between English author Paul Kingsnorth and British environmentalist George Monbiot and this observation from Kingsnorth finally brought it home:

Civilizations live and die by their founding myths. Our myths tell us that humanity is separate from something called “nature”, which is a “resource” for our use. They tell us there are no limits to human abilities, and that technology, science and our ineffable wisdom can fix everything. Above all, they tell us that we are in control. This craving for control underpins your approach. If we can just persuade the politicians to do A, B and C swiftly enough, then we will be saved. But what climate change shows us is that we are not in control, either of the biosphere or of the machine which is destroying it. Accepting that fact is our biggest challenge.

As it happens, at the same time I ran across the work of Tim Garret, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. He extends the laws of thermodynamics to describe and predict economic behavior, and concludes collapse is inevitable. Nothing is certain, of course, and perhaps some unforeseen technological innovation will come along and save us all (fusion, geoengineering, maybe even aliens.) I do not share that technological optimism however nor do I believe humans are without limits. I’ll be long dead before the story is told, and that, really, is the only comfort.

The global economy is just a natural extension of these thermodynamic concepts, what has been termed by some a “superorganism”. Collectively, we bootstrap ourselves to greater heights by extracting energy and material resources from our environment in order to sustain interactions among the accumulated fruits of our prior labours. Growth happens only when there is a remainder of raw resources available to make more people and new stuff.

All these activities that form our judgments require a continual consumption of food and fuel. Going a step further, we could hypothesize that there is some connection between total market value and energy. Indeed, quantitative analysis reveals that in any given year, the historical accumulation of past global economic production has had a fixed ratio to the current rate of global energy consumption, give or take a couple of percent. In each year between 1970 and 2016, each additional one thousand U.S. dollars of net worth that we collectively added to civilization through the global inflation-adjusted GDP has required an additional 5.6 Watts of continuous power production capacity.

This existence of a mathematical “constant” tying society to physics offers a critical piece of the human puzzle: economic wealth is inseparable from energy consumption; any diminished capacity to recover the energy necessary to maintain the steady hive of civilization must lead to economic collapse. If for whatever reason we fail to adequately fuel ourselves, we can expect the cyclic motions of our machines and ourselves to slowly grind to a halt. Our interest in crypto-currency or the auction price of a self-destructing Banksy will be replaced by more primal values like having a tool for opening a can of Spam. In the logical extreme, with an absence of food, we will wither and die, with all our perceptions of economic worth buried along with us.

From where comes the statement that we would need to build approximately 1 nuclear power plant (1 GW?) every day in order to (just) stabilize CO2 emissions?
The current annual rate of growth of global energy consumption is 2.3%, or a few hundred GW. In a fossil fuel economy, CO2 emissions rise with energy consumption. It is often advocated that increasing energy efficiency can stall energy consumption growth. What I have shown is that this is only true locally. Globally increasing energy efficiency accelerates growth through a generalized version of Jevon’s Paradox. This leaves switching to non-carbon fuel sources as the only option for meeting the goal of stabilizing emissions while growing the economy. Divide a few hundred GW annual growth by the number of days in a year and one obtains the figure of 1GW of non-carbon energy per day. That’s roughly one nuclear power plant per day

Interestingly, his model counter-intuitively describes that increasing energy efficiency increases more demand for it. Turns out this is known as Jevons paradox, first described in 1865.

A few published papers from Garrett:
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/3/1/2012/
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/6/673/2015/
https://esd.copernicus.org/preprints/esd-2021-21/
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000171

One last link: Garrett had an AMA on the subreddit /r/Collapse:
https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/o8g06a/im_tim_garrett_an_atmospheric_scientist_i/

2

I too had a very pleasant and productive set of days from Jan 2 to Jan 6 of this year.

3

Damn, that’s depressing. But, sadly, fairly persuasive. Ok, I’m off to Rigel; who’s coming along on the space ark?

4

I guess the thread of thought starting from here is where I don’t understand his thought process. The idea seems to be that “a nuclear power plant per day” would be completely implausible, and thus this growth will inevitably come from fossil fuels, and thus we are doomed. But by his mental model, the causality is the wrong way around. The economy is growing because we’re using more energy, it’s not that we’re using more energy because there is growth. So yes, of course starting from the assumption that all the growth would need to come from absurdly expensive forms of energy will lead to absurd conclusions.

If we have a source of energy that’s cheaper than fossil fuels, we’d expect two things to happen: a) energy use and production would grow even faster than now, rapidly eclipsing the existing power generation infrastructure, b) we’d stop using fossil fuels for energy because it’s no longer efficient. (But would continue using them for other purposes).

And while 10 years ago having scalable renewable power source also be the cheapest seemed like a totally implausible pipe dream of projecting exponential curves too far into the future, it appears that we’ve crossed the threshold into renewables being the cheapest form of new energy. There’s still some work to do on getting the price of storage low enough to be competitive, but I have no doubt that it’ll happen.

(It’s possible we’re fucked due to not hitting the required timings before major population centres start turning un-inhabitable. But I don’t think this is an inevitable outcome of the laws of thermodynamics.)

5

I think the 4-5 degree climate change is going to happen, but I think we’ll survive it as a species, though not without some genocides happening. The developed world will let the developing world die off in order to save themselves.

We’ll definitely have a crapsack world, but we won’t go extinct.

I expect to have 20-30 years left, I’m no longer worrying about old age. Might as well live for the present because there won’t be a future worth living in.

6

One big question we need to ask is whether the current dominant global economic model of neo-liberal capitalism is sustainable. That depends on growth, totally. If you shift to a model less predicated on consumer consumption and the nearly uncontrolled generation of personal wealth regardless of consequences, things could change to a pattern that would not demand growth to such an extent perhaps.

I mean, what is really and truly unsustainable is replicating the consumer-centric, consumption-heavy, resource-inefficient lifestyle of affluent global elites (and “elites” in this case includes pretty much everyone on this forum, by global standards).

7

It isn’t.

I think the solution we’re going to decide on is going to be massive population reduction though rather than elites giving up their lifestyle. Soulless machines and climate change will do the work so our hands are “clean”.

I do think we’re going to see a tipping point when the current system gets rejected, but it will likely be too late to do anything other than mitigation at that point, but we’ll do a surprisingly good job of that- at least in terms of saving ourselves.

8

Science fiction always solves these sorts of problems by either postulating some technological deus ex machina, or an equally unlikely transformation of human behavior so that a world state comes into being, one that is both efficient and palatable to the majority of the world’s population. In theory, you would need a single planetary authority to manage resource production and allocation if you were to really ride herd on the problem equitably. In practice, I can’t see how that would ever occur, unless as noted the population takes a humongous nosedive.

9

Generally, that’s where science fiction ends up. Lots of people die, and the relatively small surviving population develops a new paradigm. Or, alternatively, the vast majority of the human race are abandoned to suffer while a relative few lucky ones start over somewhere else with a better paradigm.

10

What does he make of Japan, where energy use seems to have plateaued in the middle 90s and is actually declining now, while GDP has had modest growth? Of course that’s partly driven by the absence of population growth, even a small decline, but it isn’t a catastrophic crash in the population.

11

I’ve suggested a few times in these forums that the solution for final congrats change isn’t efficiency improvements, and that we need to shift to carbon neutral power. The only feasible eat to make that transition, is through building large scale nuclear infrastructure, in addition to other renewable power sources.

Even for those who fear potential contamination by nuclear sources (that I perhaps feel are dramatically overblown), the risk assessment needs to take place and recognize that no matter how bad a nuclear accident could be, it would still be relatively trivial compared to the global impacts of the alternative which is covered fossil fuel use.

12

this sounds unusually sinister

13

Google’s autocorrect really is getting worse. I
should go a day and not even try to catch its errors, so you can see what Google wants to post.

14

What is the use of accepting that challenge? Having created a machine which is destroying the biosphere, what are we supposed to do but exert control wherever we can to try to dismantle that machine?

I guess the other guy also makes that point.

Despair is all well and good, and may even be correct, but I’m not sure there’s much value in embracing it. I guess you could just go full prepper and do all you can for yourself and your family to ride out the coming storm: that at least has some element of pragmatism.

A sort of Olympian remove - like Professor Falken casually stating that the humans are done and maybe the bees will be next - also has an intellectual appeal but, again, isn’t much help to anyone. Personally I feel compelled to reject despair for the same reason I feel compelled to breathe. I don’t know if there is any point to my breathing, but I can’t really opt out. (Oh dear, now I’m channeling Victor Lazslo.)

15

That’s my current worst case scenario, but I’m always open to adjusting it upward or downward. Science is hard, and harder when mingled with sociology/politics.

16

Carousel!

17

It isn’t even internally consistent, since even IMF economists keep finding faults and changing recommendations; at some point, it’ll just be considered dead as students keep having to unlearn it.
OTOH, if what is to replace it is some sort of bloc powered mercantilism, it won’t be much of an improvement.

As to the topic, we need, at the very least, a mix of conservationism (ban fucking wasteful cruises for a start), efficiency, replacing cars and new power sources. And a tech miracle or two. And a socioeconomic shift, while we’re at it. One, or even a few, of them alone can’t possibly scale fast enough, and runs the near certainty of passing the buck downwards.
We won’t go extinct, but we might not have a recognizable society at the end of it.

18

And this is how starfleet gets its start.

19

Those are reasonable and rational ideas. Humans, though, tend to be neither, and it is hard to envision anything effective happening unless there is a unified, world-government type of planetary administration. Which might actually be possible, if there was some entity above and beyond Earth out there to contextualize us. Human social organizations tend to work as subsets of something else. With nothing beyond our own planet, there is nothing for a world government to be a subset of. And we’ve not shown ourselves very good at doing the intelligent thing if it requires voluntarily giving up stuff we like in the near term.

Sadly, I’m pretty sure we’re not going to suddenly become part of a galactic civilization that would make a world Earth government work.

20

Strangely, my wife and I quote this often to each other in reference to things happening now. And truthfully, we’ll all probably live longer than our parents, so that relief of not having to deal with it isn’t really something we should count on.

But as my wife and I discuss back and forth over things like global warming, droughts, the widening of the gap in pay, the struggles of all nations with every increasing power, the alarming growth of bad actors that sway people with social media and conspiracy theories … we both stand by our theories on why things are bad and what the true root cause of the situation is.

And since my wife isn’t on this forum to discuss her own theory, here’s mine:

Of all the issues you stated and I hinted at as well, there is one underlying cause that is NOT addressed and will eventually cause the fall of mankind. That cause is there is no check on the growth of mankind. Assuming you’re close to me in age, during our lifetimes, the population of humans on EARTH has doubled. Think of that. We’ve doubled in size, in what … 50-100 years? It’s still growing. If you take a small village and double the population, what happens? You need more food, more energy, more housing, more jobs, more water, more farming, more manufacturing, more vehicles, the list goes on and on.

Rarely, when people discuss global warming, water and energy issues and whatnot is the human factor mentioned. We have religions that push for no birth control and others that push for large families. We have nations that provide assistance for larger families, tax breaks, help with childcare, etc. There are very little checks on the human population of this planet. And yet, we take the most from it of any other life on this planet. That is the number one issue. It’s not the emissions or the energy use or the types of food we eat or the lack of recycling we do or the vehicles we use … it’s us. We are the problem. And we continue to add more of us to the problem.

When you talk of collapse, I think of it as the human population. One that couldn’t check itself to a point where it should have stopped.

Literally what Wombat said. I don’t even think we need to include some worldwide legal body but that is an underlying issue with how to solve things. But it won’t change until there are less of us, one way or another.