At the rate we're going, collapse of our modern industrial society appears all but inevitable. But what might that look like? How soon will it happen, and how will it affect you and me?
Modern overdeveloped societies in the West are already in a severe crisis, something that will eventually turn into a long global emergency in the years and decades ahead.
A five centuries long era of economic growth — ushered in by colonization and leading to the plundering of natural, mineral, and most of all fossil fuel resources — is about to come to its logical endpoint. And while it’s impossible to tell precisely how and according to what timetable the decline of modern civilization will unfold, one thing is for sure: it will look nothing like what you see in Hollywood movies.
Although we are highly resourceful, especially when it comes to increasing profits, we have foolishly sacrificed long-term results for short-term gains. We ended up overplaying our hand, despite strong evidence that this could not possibly end well.
If you don’t belong to the top 0.1%, you can kiss goodbye to holidays abroad, a new computer, or even a new toaster. Electricity will become intermittent, and rolling blackouts will become the standard measure to cope with shortfalls in generation and maintenance. Healthcare services and medicine might also become unavailable to the rank and file public, leading to a fall in life expectancy and an increase in mortality across all age groups (except for the well to do with their private healthcare facilities).
Beset by an ever worsening economic outlook, an ageing population, shortages and wars, a fall in birth-rates (due to soaring costs of living and to infertility attributable to chemical pollution), ageing, wars, a rise in infectious diseases and ‘deaths of despair’, world population could easily decline by as much as 2–5% per year. At such a rate our numbers would be halved every two to three decades, reducing world population to well under a billion by the end of this century. No novel viruses, mass starvation, or global wars required. Just good old civilizational decline, and a corresponding rise in excess deaths.
This decline is perfectly normal, a logical conclusion to billions of people living well beyond their environment’s — and ultimately the planet’s — carrying capacity for centuries.
"Don’t expect that someone somewhere will come up with something either. Collapse once started is irreversible. And newsflash: it’s already well underway… Increasing and maintaining complexity (including devising ever more sophisticated technologies, requiring ever more electricity and mining) would take an exponential increase in energy uptake, hence the term energy cannibalization. Slurping ever more oil from underneath our feet, or building ever more elaborate “renewable” devices on the back of rapidly degrading mineral reserves, will soon take more energy than it can give back to society. This is a process which can only get worse with more technology use. You see, it is technology itself which is unsustainable, not fossil fuel use alone."
@breadandcircuses This reads like the writing from several years ago, when oil depletion rather than climate change was the Big Scary Thing we all had to panic about. EROEI. It would cost more energy to get the oil out of the ground than the oil contained. Then fracking came along.
This whole resource depletion thing could be solved in a few years with nuclear power. We just have to get over the fear of it.
Then you start mining the garbage dumps into electric arc furnaces.
@breadandcircuses Hmmm... Usual reminder that the climate crisis has its roots in slavery. Good.
Discussion of fiction moved to another post.
On a more serious note, there was a recent paper arguing that the risk of simultaneous food system failures due to climate impacts is much higher than is generally assumed. And for electricity, places like South Africa have regular scheduled blackouts; if we build air conditioning faster than we build solar, this is quite plausible and combined with a heat wave might lead to fatalities. But sure, instant, permanent failure of the electricity grid is highly unlikely.
Fossil fuel depletion won't be a serious problem. Mineral depletion is more worrying, especially regarding slowing down the transition; the other link talked about issues with steel.
Totally agree that we're already seeing evidence of major problems, escalating crises, most of them ultimately mixed up with the climate crisis one way or another. I'd extend that to politics too. And economics.
Once again, I don't see peak oil as a serious concern. But whether we can get through the transition without running into any serious resource issues remains to be seen. Which is one of the reasons for planned degrowth. A slow decline will not be fair, and will be unnecessarily chaotic, and there will be times when it's particularly bad. Also, major wars are IMHO a plausible outcome, certainly made more likely by climate change.
I personally believe inflation can be managed, that the ways it is being managed at the moment are pretty awful, that there are better options, and that more inflation is inevitable. Most of that goes back to Richard Murphy though; some of his assumptions may be wrong. Regardless, more inflation is inevitable. For food and probably material goods too.
He does draw politics in at this point (agricultural crises, land grabs, etc).
Unfortunately, what he paints is arguably the best case scenario. Novel viruses and wars are inevitable. So are occasional mass casualty events. Worst case, global wars remain possible. The worse things get, the more likely they are. One possible trigger is geoengineering.
He more or less agrees with my central point that building networks to stop the climate crisis will help us to adapt to an increasingly difficult future.
I strongly disagree with the implication that renewables are just postponing the inevitable and inevitably use unsustainable amounts of minerals and energy, or that that energy is inevitably fossil fueled. There is already evidence of the embodied energy in solar coming down fast, and we have lifecycle numbers including mining. Although energy efficiency and demand reduction lead to both a faster transition and a much softer landing; lithium should be used in buses and power grids, not cars.
My main objective is to move towards a sustainable future society. That must necessarily still include technology, since abandoning modern medicine would be catastrophic for millions of people who depend on it. However that won't happen unless we fight for it.
The claim that governments and corporations only know how to grow is half true. Building a degrowth economy is vital. However, there have been many times in the past when governments have faced existential threats and taken the necessary action in response.
But he's absolutely right that politicians taking advantage of crises and then failing to manage them is a key strategic risk. That's why politics and particularly the rise of fascism in many (mostly richer) countries is part and parcel of the climate crisis.
Overall an interesting contribution. More hopeful in some ways and more pessimistic in other ways than where I'm at.
Mitigation and adaptation are almost the same thing, in social and political terms. We need to organise, and the networks we create in doing so will help us to survive and adapt. Surviving alone with a pile of ammunition is an unsustainable ableist nightmare. And ultimately I have no time for primitivism. Worst case we may yet need geoengineering, though cutting emissions fast is the priority.
@breadandcircuses This article discusses his claims about resource issues ("resource cannibalism") in more detail. I haven't looked at his claims on energy cannibalism yet.
One good thing about it is it has the ore ratios; we could use this to compute the ore cost of the transition, as opposed to the raw product. Comparing the raw product requirements for the transition to that of fossil fuels, renewables require vastly more materials; but this may be less true taking into account the scarcity of ores.
Also I would point out that by the time equipment is retired, batteries are replaced, we will likely be able to recycle them. Lithium batteries can be reused in various forms and then recycled. 95% of a solar panel can be recycled. Declining ore quality will make recycling increasingly important and cost effective; LiFePO4 batteries aren't recycled at the moment partly because they don't have the more valuable (and damaging) elements nickel and cobalt, for instance.
Obviously reducing demand, by, for example, not replacing every car with an EV, but boosting public transport instead, and other degrowth measures, is crucial. He seems to go beyond this to argue for full blown primitivism, at least in the previous post.
He talks about electrifying mining equipment; this appears more feasible once a mine is connected to power, which it will need to be after the initial construction work; prior to that, heavy long-range equipment might have to run on hydrogen, or may not be decarbonised until we have better batteries.
Claims that electrified mining equipment, once it has power, would need to spend half its time charging are not obviously valid; charging times vary enormously depending on battery technology.
One obvious criticism is that we already have lifecycle analyses for renewables, including the impact of mining. The diesel used in digging up the rare earths in a solar cell is not a significant fraction of the total emissions (and therefore energy) at present. Most of the carbon appears to come from the factories rather than from mining. See:
The second link shows a breakdown of solar's embodied carbon - maybe 1/3rd from liquid fuels, with gas presumably used for electricity, so lets say 40% comes from mining (worth digging into the papers). In any case it gives an EROI of 26:1 for solar and 44:1 for wind.
As he says, mineral scarcity may mean that this gets worse over time. But it's pretty good at the moment. Doubling "every few decades" only means a couple of doublings (at which point the above EROI remain perfectly reasonable); resource usage cannot expand forever, the problem is the finite needs of the transition, not the infinite needs of capitalism.
And while mining gets harder over time, an increasing proportion of renewables makes industry (including mining) cleaner over time.
I am not convinced by his doomism regarding the mostly one-off resources required for the transition, though obviously we need to minimise that. There have been numerical studies but they are disputed; I need to dig more into the whole resources needed for the transition question, but the general impression was that the key studies are dubious and it's basically anti-renewables propaganda.
Above all, politically, I will not seriously entertain any argument that leads to 1) arguing AGAINST renewables and 2) primitivism i.e. dumping disabled people on the scrap heap, which I consider to be tantamount to eugenics.
Granted that's a political argument. But politics is very much relevant. At the very least it means I am not convinced and should look further.
"The main message here is that it looks increasingly certain that we will run out of resources sooner than the coming deterioration of the climate could put an end to our lifestyle. "
That has to be a fringe view, at least!
This is referenced as his article on "energy cannibalism".
First off, as I explained above, the EROI of renewables is actually pretty good, this means that the amount of diesel needed on current technology (without electrification) for mining the minerals needed for a new solar panel is very small compared to its lifetime output. And it's reasonable to assume that at least some of the energy used in mining, and most of the energy used in processing, can be made renewable.
Also again, it is far from clear that construction equipment cannot be electrified. Sure, it's harder than EVs, but that doesn't make it impossible. For heavy long distance stuff, hydrogen may be (unfortunately) necessary.
And then he gets into the usual peak oil bullshit. The answer to the EROI of oil falling is to get energy from something else!
Mining uses about 10% of global energy use. That's equivalent to 80% of current electricity supply. A large proportion of mining is actually for fossil fuels.
The IEA gives us numbers for the energy transition. The material requirements for the transition are much smaller than status quo fossil fuel use; around 43MT in 2050 vs around 15GT annual fossil fuel extraction. And it could be less than that with demand measures.
But these numbers are for final product i.e. lithium etc, not for ore (and other materials moved to get to the ore).
Here we have the numbers translated into ore, and with graphs.
The amount of ore required is dominated by batteries for EVs (which we can reduce significantly with degrowth measures), but reductions in coal extraction easily offset everything else, even without improving recycling: total material demands fall, according to recent peer reviewed studies. And that's ignoring oil and gas.
The final graphs take into account all materials extracted, not just ore, and reduction in ore quality.
And they conclude what we already know: that we still end up with less mining in 2050 than today. Though it's IMHO still disturbingly high, given how damaging any sort of mining is.
But we can improve on that: they give some graphs showing the huge potential for demand reduction in transport reducing the need for minerals for batteries.
PS Having said all that, the peak oil doomer scenarios are still of some interest; I do believe civilisation is fragile and the current crises will continue to escalate.
@breadandcircuses Yeah now that I've had some sleep I think the main points are:
Not to take peak oil doomers entirely seriously
They don't take climate impacts seriously; IMHO a lot of the increasing system fragility relates to this
I remain convinced that there is a non-zero risk of collapse, and I am uncertain whether it will be fast or slow
Whether that happens or not, mass suffering is inevitable, and we can reduce that
That the material costs of the transition don't make it infeasible
That the transition will be a lot faster, less damaging, and less risk of a rapid collapse, if we reduce demand as well as deploying appropriate technologies
That politics includes feedback loops, but we can influence them
And my usual point about building networks to fight for the future; these will also help us to adapt to it
"Once net energy peaks and starts to contract, it will mean a permanent economic contraction. Complex systems like corporations, governments or the world economy only “know” how to grow, they really suck when it comes to shrinkage. And while the rank and file of governments and corporations will do everything they can to keep the system together, they will be fighting a losing battle. This is why large complex systems are fragile: instead of voluntarily giving up functions, and simplify to conserve energy, they do the diametric opposite. They concentrate power even more, and allow their rent seeking oligarchs to siphon off any remaining wealth, while the lower ranks fight tooth and nail to keep things together. At least until physics ultimately wins, and things inevitably fall apart."
They don't suck at shrinking. Shrinking isn't sustainable in capitalism because of how the system works.
The finance sector, a key component of capitalism, is built on money being lent with interest rates, so the debtor has to always pay back the original amount of money + interest, and that interest can only come from the debtor growing their money with the loan they invested into something.
As such a permanent economic contraction doesn't exist in capitalism as any contraction will quickly lead to banks dying which will in turn cause a collapse of the whole economy because companies need loans.
That is also the reason why #ClimateCrisis will ultimately lead to the demise of #capitalism, even if mankind doesn't remove that tumor of a system on its own accord. At some point #ClimateCrisis will become so dominating that trade or even regular economic activity won't be sustainable anymore.
"Better to prepare for that rather than trying to fight it is the message I get."
I'm a friend of taking concrete action once a logical conclusion has been reached. In that I might be an extremist, but so be it.
Given that collapse is inevitable at the current rate and seeing how solutions already exist, namely climate protection, nature-friendly life, and circular economies, I believe we all have to work towards removing capitalism as quickly as possible, no matter the means.
Why?
Because a sudden collapse of the current system will lead to millions of dead and vast destruction. It'll also lead to wars breaking out all over the place, potentially spiraling out of control into the extinction of mankind. That's nothing you can prepare for, unless you plan to live deep in the mountains or a desert. 😉