A renowned Australian research scientist says a study from researchers at MIT claiming the world could suffer from a "global economic collapse" and "precipitous population decline" if people continue to consume the world's resources at the current pace is still on track, nearly 40 years after it was first produced.
I wonder if this is what is making most of the Republicans in this country (US) crazy.
The Free Market isn't free. Mother Nature has been subsidizing it since the beginning. She's worn out, and in the next few decades civilization is going to pay the price
We who follow climate change and the depletion of Earth's resources often decry the fact that the general population of the planet appears to be blithely ignorant of the pending catastrophe.
If we continue BAU we're headed for as much as 7C warming in the next 90 years. That level of warming threatens civilization as we know it. It is as scary as things get.
We think a black swan event will wake them up. But then it occurred to me we might go from an ignorant population to a panicked one. That could be dangerous!
It also occurred to me that if scientists really think we are on the path of destruction of Earth as we know her they would do something more than they are doing. Like taking our full page ads in all the major papers all over the globe:
Get off fossil fuels or else millions will die!
I think in the next two or three decades we'll see farms abandon because of monsoonal rains and subsequent floods happening every year instead of every 100. Here. In the US.
Here's one of the reasons I started this blog. How are we going to pay for this stuff and still pay for other essentials?
Where will jobs for young people come from? Certainly not from pie-in-the-sky hopes for renewable energy and sustainables, says John de Bueger.
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It is a truly intractable problem. For those of us on record as having predicted nearly three years ago that the Global financial crisis was unlikely to ever end, one wishes somehow that one had been wrong - or if not wrong, then unduly pessimistic.
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The 7th billion human arrived last week, but it will be a miracle if even half this number exist at the end of this century.
Sounds like it won't be long before youth unemployment isn't the only thing we need worry about
Some analysts, ranging from scientists David Pimentel of Cornell University to financial advisor and philanthropist Jeremy Grantham, dare to underline the possibility of a darker alternative future. Defying the optimistic majority, they suggest that humanity long ago overshot a truly sustainable world population, implying that apocalyptic horsemen old and new could cause widespread death as the environment unravels. Most writers on environment and population are loathe to touch such predictions. But we should be asking, at least, whether such possibilities are real enough to temper the usual demographic confidence about future population projections.
The United States and the rest of the world will face more daunting challenges than just finding cheap gas for our cars, according to geologist Vince Matthews.
Oil is just one of many natural resources the world is depleting in what has become a mad scramble not just for energy sources, but many critical minerals and metals, said Matthews, a UGA graduate who is now Colorado's state geologist.
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The global scramble for resources is even pushing up food prices as the price of fertilizer goes through the roof, he said.
Combined with the United States' massive debt problems, the intensifying competition for resources spell an uncertain future for Americans in the next few years, Matthews said.
"If you think we're going to convert from fossil fuel to renewables in a short period of time -- it's just not going to happen," he said.
"I'm not really worried about 20 or 30 years from now, because we'll muddle through things. But for the next decade, we're not prepared," he said
Interesting! I never looked at it that way... that we'd suffer for a few years but then muddle through... and things would get better. We've been muddling through, though, for some time, and things are not getting better in my opinion.
The thing about peak oil is that the downward slope is gentle... we'll have time to adapt.
But climate change is occurring in a very abrupt manner if the last 5 years is any indication. We will be scrambling to protect infrastructure from extreme weather and sea level rise.
And we will need to adapt to both of these, along with dozens of other resource peaks at the same time. A lot of balls in the air.
Add a stubborn global recession to the mix, a recession that may be a permanent condition because there is nothing to fuel economic growth, and we've got all the ingredients that could lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
We've got a decade or two at most, in my opinion... but when voters nominate and elect people who are hostile to science, the chances that the government (US) will address these issues is nil.
But our current system of managing our environmental household is all about designing bad loan schemes to defraud nature’s central bank and passing on the debt to future generations. In order to exploit the natural world, we have rigged accounting rules and ignored the financial and ecological value of intact ecosystems, biological diversity, clean water, and many other forms of the planet’s natural capital. This has actually worked for some decades and created Western wealth as we know it.
But the Ponzi scheme of hyper-consumerism is approaching the equivalent of the Lehman collapse in 2008. Ecologists tell us that humans are consuming natural resources at a scale and speed that 1.3 planet Earths would be needed to sustain it, and that it would take four to five planets if all the Earth’s 7 billion people wanted to live like the West. With more ecological problems building up, it’s time to pay the bills ourselves, rather than fobbing them off on children.
As it stands, economic growth is largely dependent on resource consumption. As a country grows, so does its use of natural--and limited--high-quality resources like oil, gold, and copper. But this is untenable in the long run, especially as growing countries like India and China model themselves increasingly on American habits of consumption (a car, two cell phones, and 30 pounds of meat for all!). The seemingly impossible solution: separating resource use and environmental impact from economic growth--a process with the unfortunate moniker "decoupling."
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The bottom line: This decoupling needs to begin on a large scale, and fast. The report notes that we're already having a hard time finding high-quality copper and gold, and peak oil is coming--if it hasn't already. We've seen the beginnings of this in the energy industry (giant solar installations in the desert, large-scale offshore wind turbine projects, etc.) and in the vehicle industry, but it's not enough. Without major changes, today's economic woes are going to seem like a joke. But not a very funny one.
The conflict between increasing demand for fish and failing fisheries has enormous implications for world food security and the state of our oceans, lakes and rivers, stated the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
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And those supplies aren’t keeping pace. Conventional oil production has been flat for four years; in that sense, at least, peak oil has arrived. True, alternative sources, like oil from Canada’s tar sands, have continued to grow. But these alternative sources come at relatively high cost, both monetary and environmental.
Also, over the past year, extreme weather — especially severe heat and drought in some important agricultural regions — played an important role in driving up food prices. And, yes, there’s every reason to believe that climate change is making such weather episodes more common.
So what are the implications of the recent rise in commodity prices? It is, as I said, a sign that we’re living in a finite world, one in which resource constraints are becoming increasingly binding. This won’t bring an end to economic growth, let alone a descent into Mad Max-style collapse. It will require that we gradually change the way we live, adapting our economy and our lifestyles to the reality of more expensive resources
I have huge respect for Krugman... but I think he needs to show his work when he claims that our economy can continue to grow in a finite world.
Paul's rosy prediction can happen. There are two ways to grow: by getting bigger or through development. Climate change will force us to stop getting bigger. If we respond correctly, climate change will also force us to develop more efficient and environmentally friendly sources of energy, and encourage people to live more ecofriendly lifestyles.
But throughout history civilizations have collapsed because they ignored the warnings and continued their economic and lifestyle practices even though their resources or economic model could no longer support it.
I love Wikipedia:
It may be that economic growth improves the quality of life up to a point, after which it doesn't improve the quality of life, but rather obstructs sustainable living.[27] Historically, sustained growth has reached its limits (and turned to catastrophic decline) when perturbations to the environmental system last long enough to destabilise the bases of a culture.[27]
And the convergence of climate change with peak everything is going to put enormous strains on everything and everybody.
What's going to happen when gas is routinely $4/gal? For starters, suburban home values will stagnate, or even go down. Imports will get expensive, and people will have less money to buy stuff. That's a recipe for recession.
I think the Locavore movement has great value. As does the self provisioning community. By being early adopters of this lifestyle we'll be somewhat insulated from some of the worst parts of hitting the walls of our finite world.
