Part of me can see how much nicer our world might be without any humans in it. Ecosystems could find their own equilibrium, unhindered by industrial pollution. Species could expand again and diversify, free of competition from the endless growth of factory farms, freeways, and parking lots.
It would take much time, centuries or even millennia, for the sky to regain its natural clarity, the forests to regrow, and the rivers to run clean. Even longer than that, probably, for all of the plastic eventually to degrade and disappear.
But someday, someday… the Earth would once again be a beautiful place.
It’s a lovely vision, and yet I’m torn. Because to get there means the suffering and death of billions of people. I wish there was a way to prevent that.
I doubt there can be a "properly modeled" sense of human psychology in the face of mass famine in parts of the world unused to that.
I have to believe this will follow lines like climate science did where researchers/modelers are of the opinion that "conservative" means you don't model anything you just have a hunch about and you only include effects you can prove.
Consistently for climate scientists this kind of conservatism has favored preserving individual careers at the expense of saying just how badly these things can go, and I expect the same in these other fields.
So pardon me if I don't rely on proper modeling and rely instead on my own sense of how ugly things can quickly get with the wrong set of circumstances, as is happening with the fall of democracy. What we imagine to be stable systems have fewer safeguards than we imagine and perform very badly when ideal conditions are not met.
This is partly a direct consequence of the fact that capitalism cannot see beyond the end of its nose. I have many times observed in recent years that many celebrated gains use simplistic metrics to trade away safety, robustness, redundancy, environment/ecology, and social justice on a theory that price optimization is the only goal.
In effect, the system rewards fragility and cruelty and other ills if it yields short term gains because it assumes one can always cash out and move on to other things if that strategy fails, and there is no accountability for system-wide fragility such as we saw in covid, where masks, lysol, toilet paper, vaccines, etc. were in short supply when capitalism promises to do so much better than socialism by closing its eyes to obvious issues and assuming profit will win out.
Capitalism not only doesn't value safety and robustness, seeing any robustness against issues that haven't occurred recently as economic inefficiencies to remove, but it also does not value completeness. Profit is maximized by figuring out who it's economical to serve and knowing who is too expensive to serve.
I expect this will be a bad model for food shortage during famine. I see us shrugging off such issues from a government planning point if view, preferring to "leave it to markets". And I don't see how markets will do more than focus on price gouging, shich will lead to civil unrest if the missing item is an essential like food or water.
Once the public realizes that capitalism has no plan for regular people, a tipping point is reached where panic sets in and all processes start to be chaotic. Even small perturbations in normal will upset supply chains, which are ridiculously full of single point of failure and reliance on supplies from distant locations as if transport was free and nations don't ever shut borders out if either paranoia or spite or trade imbalance leverage or other factors.
When something like wheat fails, will meager yields be merrily shipped to foreign lands or held for domestic use? Will multinats be able to continue to assert dominance or remote ownership across national borders? Will militaries be invoked? By whom against whom? How does one "model" these questions?
I didn't read the reports you cite but unless you tell me what is modeled is a very stark and honest view of what capitalism, selfishness, and nationalism really does from a qualitative modeling standpoint, not from an extrapolation of past effects in questionably similar situations, I don't see how to trust it. I expect someone would lose their job or peer review respect if they modeled these things as likely or even possible. Better to rely on things for which there is data. But that will not model "black swan" events.
I've also not fully read all of Taleb's efforts in the antifragile space, but my impression is he says don't bother modeling rare events you don't know the probability of, and instead build structures robust against chaos. We've not done that.
We're entering a new space we have not experienced where externalities aren't being tracked but do finally matter in ways i personally doubt any formal modeling will get right. They'll expect "getting it right" to be a conversation that can gradually converge over time in academic timescales we no longer have.
It matters to see potential severity more than it matters to be right on detail, like you'd model a war. Capitalism hates such planning because they think it overspends and cuts into quarterly profit.