Fundamental change
Resource depletion, climate change, economic collapse
I proposed to Psyche to create a new sub-forum on fundamental changes to our society. She replied that I should create a thread under Polls explaining what I have in mind. This is what I am doing now.
Once in a while, humanity is undergoing a major pradigm shift. It happened around the year 1500, when the renaissance replaced an age focused on religion by one centered on scientific discovery. It happened again in the early years of the 19th century with the beginning of industrialization. Manpower was replaced by machine power, enabled by ample cheap energy, and the world became a much richer place. You and I are living better than the kings of the past.
I am convinced that such a paradigm shift is once again taking place as we speak. It is triggered by the
. Every biological species is subjected to exponential growth. This growth pattern is woven into the fabric of everything that characterizes also our human society and powers our economy. Without continued exponential growth, the society as we know it will fall apart, and new societal rules will need to be defined.
Yet exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely in a finite world. Eventually, exponential growth must end, as we reach the capacity limits of our planet. This is happening right now. We already see several seemingly independent but in fact interrelated manifestations of the limits to growth.
We already recognize that we’ll eventually run out of oil, or rather, the little remaining oil will be so expensive that no one will be able to afford it. I am currently staring into a flat screen monitor that is built using a rare metal called
indium. Without indium, we wouldn’t have any flat-screen monitors and TV sets. Yet, the world is expected to
run out of indium in approximately 10 years.
Another aspect of the world reaching its limits are the effects of anthropogenic change on the climate. We have become so many and we have been able to enhance our per capita industrial output so much that our efforts start influencing the planetary climate.
A third facet that we observe is increasing stress on the economy. Our entire economy is one big ponzi scheme. We expect to be able to bring our money to the bank and draw income from it proportional to our savings. If we reinvest that income in the bank, our savings are supposed to grow exponentially. As we reach the limits to growth, exponential growth, also of the markets, cannot continue. There are no more new markets to be conquered, and there are no more new customers for our products. Thus, also the real economic growth must stagnate.
The three facets of limits to growth are tightly linked to each other. As resources become more scarce, they will invariably become more expensive. In particular, fossil fuels will cost more, and also, more energy will be needed to get the remaining fossil fuels out of the ground. As we spend more money on acquiring energy, less money remains to buy other stuff with it. At a price of
$600 per barrel of crude oil, we are spending 100% of our GDP on just acquiring energy. Our economy falls apart long before then.
In my view, the limits to growth will become the defining factor of the 21st century, as fundamental in causing societal changes as the industrial revolution was 200 years ago. For this reason, the consequences of the limits to growth deserve to be captured in a sub-forum of its own, where articles covering aspects of this change can be archived and discussed.
On P&CA, we have such a forum, mostly due to the initiatives of FredFredson and myself, and according to Dave, our “Peak Oil” forum has been the one forum that over the years drew the largest number of lurkers to P&CA. I propose that we create a corresponding forum also here at TNT and I’ll do my best to populate that sub-forum with interesting contents.
Fundamental change
Linear Mode
