Not only are we picking the low-hanging fruit in energy production, but we're picking it at a temporarily discounted cost (with carbon emissions not being priced in) at the expense of our future selves and future generations.
To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based on pure thermodynamics is somewhere around 1 trillion people.
> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.
This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
> This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
I don’t agree with all of the article’s premises but this is not wrong. Population is still increasing, even if population _growth_ (first derivative) is declining. And energy usage is skyrocketing, according to the EIA (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/).
The long term problem will be population decline as the total fertility rate drops well below replacement.
Energy use is going up, because lesser developed countries are heading toward first world rates of energy use. But that plateaus or even starts to decline (due to efficiency) also.
If doomsday predictions about population growth are to be dismissed because technology has always kept up with the increasing needs of humanity, what is the argument against technology keeping up with the needs of a demographically shifted smaller population?
Is there not an aggregate level of people required to sustain the complexity of the technology required to keep all of it functioning below which critical links in the chain begin failing causing a chain reaction where it all completely breaks down?
Am I alone in thinking that? It's mildly obvious if you do a thought experiment where you reduce the population down to a ridiculously small number you can see such a scenario is indeed possible. The question is where exactly is that threshold?
I live in New Zealand and a good example of a weak link in the chain that got exposed by Covid when we completely shut our borders was that we couldn't get the seasonal workers required to operate some of the high tech farm equipment required for harvesting. I recall seeing on the news members of industry and government saying "it's not simply a case of just trying to hire more people locally as these machines are not simple to operate and require specific skills that take a non-trivial amount of time to train up on" etc. So, as we increase the complexity of the technology in order to boost productivity outputs it makes the system more and more fragile to such shocks. So, if we're relying on future technology we're by definition relying on even greater complexity meaning that critical threshold of people needed to maintain it goes up, which is a problem if the population is going down.
I don't want to say "this time is different" (because I don't know that).
But we do find our self in a situation where technology hasn't peaked, but we aren't using the new tech we have
I think there is a big focus on "fossil fuels" but they are not the only resources we're using in an unsustainable way.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2nGHq40Xc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMHR6Mc4Bk
If we want to get serious right now about eliminating fossil fuels, the fact is the answer is a mix of renewables and nuclear.
At this point it's a race against the clock and we're losing it badly. If we can't transition to it before it's too late, then that we could do it in theory isn't worth a whole lot.
This is a straw man. The arguments against humanity’s survival are not technological, but economic: we will not survive because our economic systems continue to poison the environment, to the detriment of all. Solutions exist, but because it is taken as a matter of faith that economics is more important than environmental impact, no technological solutions are implemented. Capitalists fight almost literally to the death to maintain the status quo of a fossil fuel driven society, and has shown no ability to change in ways needed to stave of doom.
It is difficult not to blame industry because they profit off continued pollution & resource exploitation. The markets have a larger short term incentive to maintain the status quo
This is happening now. Everyone is focused on getting to "net-zero" and switching to natural gas as a "transition" to cleaner, more sustainable energy sources. This has resulted in nuclear/coal going offline and being switched out for natural gas and natural gas prices shooting up like crazy, then war breaks out and natural gas imports are at risk and people still need power, so policy makers turn to "well maybe its time to switch the nuclear power plant back on?".
When things shift such that the short-term incentives shift away from the push towards the sustainable, renewable direction then it goes back the other way and it can and will happen.
Beyond climate change, the consequences of pollution are very real. Many water sources can't be drunk anymore, and the agro industry is killing bees/insects (necessary for vegetal life) on a wide scale and depleting the soil of its water/nutrients turning it slowly into a desert.
Extinction is far off, but "doom" is a very likely outcome at this point given that no government is doing anything, besides advocating for "green growth" which is the opposite of what ecologists have been preaching for decades (green degrowth).
I couldn't find any data that proves this. Maybe you could share?
Sure, it's not your Hollywood catastrophe, but the burden will become heavier on all of us. And if the rich (which I'm part of, sort of) can get out of it, they'll have to live with more social unrest...
It's clear that we can't, as the author suggests, "begin to run low of coal in the centuries to come".
Are we already in one?
I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade, and for carbon capture to become a practical thing on the next one. But depending on what you want, even this isn't enough.
> I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade
That's really good news ! I mean it's so far away from what I know that I sure have missed something. Could you give a few pointers that illustrate your expectation ? (honest question)
But I do expect electrification to increase a lot this decade, and for renewables to take over the electricity generation so completely that other sources will only be able to compete with batteries, not with original renewable electricity.
If you extend our current trends, you will get into more than half of the energy being non-polluting. But most of it being new consumption, instead of replacing older sources.
Most sources on electricity agree to an unsettling level, so they are probably repeating each other. Here's one as good as any:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electricity-g...
For vehicle electrification, it's harder to find data, but everything has a huge rate of growth that will probably saturate on this decade:
https://www.iea.org/articles/global-ev-data-explorer
What will change on this decade that people usually don't take into account on their conclusions is that wind to a small extent and PV for a huge extent are already cheaper than most electricity sources, and getting cheaper by the day. The limits on PV price are so low we probably won't even be reach them this decade.
That places a real force on every process that heavily uses energy to take advantage of that cheap PV energy, or get outcompeted. Or in other words, the economic reality that have always got in the ways of renewables are now getting in the way of fossil fuels. So I expect the fossil fuel infrastructure to become obsolete and that new renewable energy that we will get to replace it instead of adding to it.
Notice that this is already happening on that data above. On a linear trend it's not fast enough to replace half of our emissions this decade, but on an exponential trend, it's more than fast enough. Well, the change into renewables has been exponential for decades already, that's how immature technologies work. Given that the limits on PV price are so low, I still don't expect it to change this decade.
Sure without regards to any other than food organisms and pulling a "puppeteer" world (Ala Larry Niven) I don't see it. And I won't either way.
(I think it's referenced in J. E. Cohen's 1996 book "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" but I don't have a copy of that in front of me.)
This is not at all to say that this would be a desirable situation, or that human population is a metric that should be maximized at the expense of any other metric.
I think it causes cognitive dissonance in that people want the current world and lifestyle to be sustainable because they like it due to it having a lot of fun and comfortable things, and don't wish to consider the idea that it may just may be fatally flawed.
It's an uncomfortable feeling realizing we're basically doing it wrong.
Rich/knowledgeable people can benefit from fission but poorer people are still dependant on simpler resources such as rain fall and fertile soil. We're he correct, we wouldn't see increased poverty right now. But we do. Knowledge itself is not equally distributed, just as resources aren't. Be good if countries relied on their own resources, protected shared resources, and shared knowledge. It's impirically incorrect to presume that some people having knowledge of how to effectively use resources is sufficient to end poverty for others.
People are still looking after themselves at the expense of shared (or imported) resources.
We see basic resources depleted.
We are in a boom of misinformation vs knowledge expansion.
It's odd that people think "we understand/we have the knowledge" when they themselves don't.
This is the line I'm straddling at the moment. If you're not realistic about our ability to take a catastrophic step backwards you'll always just see things as "business as usual" until "business as very unusual" hits.
I find it interesting to research technologies and methods that are potentials for replacing our unsustainable practices and some of what I learn gives me hope, but it's super naive to pin your hopes on "business as usual" continuing based on all of that panning out before the current system is pushed outside its safe operating envelope for too long and non-linear behavior kicks in.
People believe what's convenient. It's inconvenient to be realistic and accept that we're heading in a bad direction (because then we all have to sacrifice comforts). Rome and its way of life fell, the British Empire and its way of life fell, and one day our global consumerist society and its way of life will fall too
I initially liked this book. But I eventually came to the conclusion that it didn't really explain anything and concocted an overly elaborate framework that did more to obscure what happened than to clarify. It felt like that old joke about philosophy, the field where "one kicks up a lot of dust then complains one can't see anything." It ended up being so complex that it's not falsifiable.
I was much happier with the narrative in another book, "The End of the Bronze Age", by Robert Drews. Drews presents the military-technological explanation. It's simpler and it just seems to fit better. It also explains why social organization in the Iron Age was so different from the Bronze Age.
Even the most optimistic projections put the world population peaking well before 2100. Growth has slowed considerably and will likely continue to slow even more as worldwide economic malaise puts further pressure on birth rates (especially since the developing world is urbanizing and urbanization is correlated with a decline in births per woman).
Is it projected to level out or to decline? Because birth rates below replacement indicate decline, not leveling out.
We'll heat ourselves to death before we'll run out of resources and energy, because humans are 100 watts space heater. The problem is not about the amount of energy but the side effect of pollution.
We about to get some new entries
Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit.
It wouldn't be that difficult, it would leave everyone with plenty of wealth, and is a simple answer.
PS - I don't think this is the right answer. But then how can the answer to the environmental issues be to socialise the risks and expenses across all the population, while allowing the owners of the corporations that have exploited the world's resources for profit get keep and hide their immorally-gained wealth?
In particular, I look at suburban areas with no stores or workplaces for miles, where the only transport option is the car, and I struggle to see how they won't become blighted slums (like what Detroit's became as it shrank) when gas and cars are too expensive for the average person to afford.
ahem bus rapid transit
A middle ground are light rail and tram, but those tend to be slower than a bus based-BRT system as the cheap rails don't support speeds as fast as a metro or railway.
no no no no NO. The whole point of it being Bus Rapid Transit (as opposed to just a series of buses) is that it ISN'T just using the same roads that cars are on.
Those two problems must be solved but solving one will probably amplify the other.
The industrial revolution was arguably a by-product of huge amounts of wealth in the hands of a few. Efficiencies of scale may exist, but are not dependant on equal or inequal distribution of benefit. Seems to me historically rich people/nations have consumed more natural resources, often taking them from other people/nations, focusing not on global wealth creation but on moving resources in, at the expense of global wealth. On a global scale, inequality seems to have led to more consumption and destruction of someone else's long term resources. Equality seems to lead to more resource preservation, thus better utilización.
Inequality is the result of thinking about yourself at the expense of others, equality is the result of thinking about others, and those targeting equality are likely to include future generations in their definition of "others" and thus more efficient/conservation use of long term resources.
Interested to see any stats to back up the assertion that "reducing inequalities typically means more consumption" on a global scale.
Even for the conventionally wealthy, much of their wealth is in investments, so all those bonds and shares get taken and go where? Who manages them? Who makes investment decisions down the line? The current entire investment community can't, they've just had most of their assets taken away. So what you're talking about is the dismantlement of the ownership and management structures of huge swathes of the economy and what? Handing it over to who, civil servants?
It would of course also make it impossible for anyone to start a company and grow it to becoming large and successful, because as soon as it became significant, the founders would have ownership and therefore control taken away from them.
Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets.
The point I'm making is that it if we are trying to find a solution to these problems, the easiest one would be to take the billions in wealth - more wealth that can be spent in hundreds of lifetimes - away from the people who hold it and redistribute it to those who don't. This doesn't seem to be under consideration, but this is because it doesn't suit those that run corporations and governments - the elite aren't planning to shoot themselves in the foot.
As I said elsewhere, I don't think this is actually a valid solution. I only mention this as an equally invalid solution - putting the cost onto the population in general, ie the comparatively poor - is actively being implemented. Despite the obvious unfairness and greater complexity - the implementation of a technocratic system that allocates energy and resources.
So the new system is also insane and will be harder 99.9999% of the world's population, but does allow the billionaires to keep their comfort.
Which of these 2 insane options is better in your opinion?
These billioniares and many more millioniares worth more than 10 million dollars by and large create their fortunes through certain lucky or careful investments and in the case of many of them, their wealth is locked up directly in stock that the public values highly enough for them to be worth that much. As many here have pointed out better than I will now, creating confiscatory policies on this would lead to the wealth itself mostly evaporating as if it never were. What you propose is in this sense a tired, economically irrational and self-defeating idea that tries to be the real world equivalent of the proverbial farmer and his golden goose.
Also worth mentioning that the total wealth of all the world's billioniares today amounts to 13.1 trillion dollars, give or take. The U.S. government alone spend 8 trillion just on its wars in the middle east and Asia between 2001 and and now.
This is only one example out of many of government funds being spent rampantly, in amounts that dwarf the wealth or annual income of the world's billionaires but with little or sometimes even negative productive results. And you'd like to confiscate these very often useful private sources of productive wealth to government bureaucrats that already receive trillions in tax revenues annually but somehow can't seem to make them definitively improve the world?
After you take that stock, who do you sell it to? (Simply confiscating it doesn't move resources around.) What are they not buying so they can buy this stock? More to the point, why are they going to buy that stock if they're not buying it today.
I could buy Amazon, SpaceX, Facebook, Google, stock but don't. Under this system, AWS will be less expensive but what are the odds that it will appreciate significantly? I ask because I buy stock to make money.
Who is better off if I buy SpaceX instead of living on that money while I work on my startup? (If I buy said stock, I'll need to get a job to cover living expenses. Maybe that stock will go up in value so I can live off it later, but I'm eating this week.)
And do what with it? A value is just a number. What would you do with the assets and the value?
I'm not being facetious, I'm really curious how you imagine this working and right now I honestly don't have any idea. Who would control these companies now that they're not owned by their founders and current owners? How would ownership and control work? Who would run the economy and how? I'm imagining millions (a $10m company isn't actually all that big) of founders, investors and CEOs retiring to the country with $10m retirement funds. Viva la Revolution! Who takes over?
What are the world's poor going to do with a handful of shares in e.g. Microsoft, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway each? probably you don't imagine it working that way, but you won't say how you do imagine it working.
You say 2 options, but I'm not clear what you think the other one is. We have many possible options.
I hope you accept that is a fair if broad formulation of the problem.
If you are neutral in approaching this, and trying to find an answer, which of the following would be easier: a/ to find a way to take wealth from the rich (still leaving more than they can spend in a lifetime) or b/ to micro manage everyone, decreasing population and options for 99.999% of the population?
As a problem, any neutral solution would say it is far more equitable and simpler to tackle the smaller billionaire group. Even though the billionaire class could lose lots of their wealth, they would have plenty to live. Trying to micromanage the world's population is much harder. Do you agree?
Apparently though, taking the wealth from billionaires cannot a conceivable answer. Yes their corporations have ravaged the natural world, yes they are geared to manipulate us via psychology, indoctrination, PR, etc to separate us from our monetary tokens, but somehow it is right that the population as a whole should foot the bill. Why?
But, even the question of what would be the best (fairest, equitable) allocation of resources is moot. The answer is b/ and the planned, controlled implementation has been underway for decades, and is finally materialising. Banking, the governance structure, education, technology, media, corporations, NGOs, etc are already managed by billionaires, and they do not want to give up their wealth or power. The institutions they manage have been bent in order to help them achieve their goals, in the name of serving us and the planet. What we are presently experiencing is a long planned move to greater power - it is not history unfolding naturally.
We are implementing technocracy, and we will be micro-managed. We will come to see it as neo-feudalism. To the 99.999% it will feel like hard slavery. But even this has been negative outlook had been planned and managed - they want us to choose the micromanagement. If the turkeys vote for Christmas, they want to be eaten, right? We are voting to get rid of cars, constrain our use of energy, move to UBI, etc - our lack of understanding and imagination means we vote for slavery.
There just isn’t that much wealth to be expropriated. It wouldn’t go very far.
So no, I don’t think you’ll get broad agreement that confiscating wealth from the very rich is even numerically a viable strategy.
Not to mention the fact that historically expropriation isn’t exactly associated with the generation of social welfare.
Now, as it happens, I’m in favor of higher progressive taxes!
But we can’t pretend we can create a social welfare state just by picking on billionaires. The middle class would need to be taxed generously for that to pencil out.
I don't think you are right about how much wealth the rich hold. The middle class would not need to be taxed. The illegitimate ruling class should just have the bulk of their wealth confiscated (at least according to the proposal I am trying to air here). The billionaires would still live well, but the rest of would have a chance to utilise all the assets that are currently being sequestrated away from us.
We see articles such as, 'World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam':
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...
I think this is a joke - we don't even know who holds what as it is all in off-shore, tax free funds and trusts, shares, etc. So the true amounts of wealth are bound to be far higher. Also, if it were possible to resolve the ownership structure, you would see that everything is owned by individuals - only living people own things. People direct the trusts, own the funds, corporations etc.
What I'm trying to get across is the fact that if we were genuinely seeking solutions, releasing this stockpiled wealth would be the simplest. It would be at least deserving of some consideration. And I'm not talking about releasing it into an NGO that directs how culture is to be created.
But we have the opposite - we are moving into a complex, AI managed world, where the poor are going to be paying carbon taxes, water taxes, have more expensive electricity and be unable to ever consider owning anything for themselves. This won't mean that ownership as a concept will have gone - it will mean the billionaire class will own everything, and the rest of us will be demoted to serfs, aka overt slavery.
But as I said I don't think this is viable answer either.
And I'm not sure what the right answer could be. For a start governments are a problem - they do not act for people, they are beholden to corporate interests. The legal system is also a problem - it only works for the rich - how can it be ok for the richest to pay no tax? Let's all not pay tax! Let's pay for the services we want. But, government has become a comfort blanket for most - most people are happy to pay 40% of their income to have their bins collected.
If that paper wealth was confiscated and spent, it would lead to a significant increase in demand, so central banks would have to implement sharply contractionary policy, or see all that newly distributed wealth inflated away. How would that leave anyone better off?
Wealth is control of economic assets - companies, resources and property. Transferring wealth means transferring that control. For example it means taking Tesla away from Elon Musk and giving it to someone else. So what I'm asking is, who would that control go to and how would it be exercised to better serve the average person? If you can't answer that question, you're not making a proposal it's possible to evaluate. I may disagree with Marxists, but at least they have an answer to this question.
Rather think about money flows. How much money does e.g. Musk consume? Probably much more than the everage person. But will it be a significant boost to everyone's quality of life if Musk out only consumes as much as the average and donates the rest? Probably not.
There more interesting part is his power and what he does with his money. But that's a totally different point.
If you mean 10M assets, then you will now have to estimate the value for a lot of things, including stocks. It will also take motivation away from founders and investors - why they take a big risk if they have an upper limit of roi?
I agree that the current inequality is a big problem, but your solution is certainly not a "simple answer" unless you accept potential decline of quality of life for everyone.
Power? Influence? Popularity?
Popularity, well maybe. But I think it's only a part of what motivates people today.
In fact, it is quite amusing to see capitalists talk about free markets when the currencies they use quite literally exist to prevent free markets from forming. A precious metal currency is a tool for maintaining power with the aristocracy. Perpetual land ownership is effectively the same. Feudalism ended by giving everyone the freedom to become a feudalist, that's capitalism. It works much better but how about we stop the concentration of power for good?
When you are rich, you have the option of investing or lending. If you lend, then someone else must invest on your behalf. When you think about it, lending simply shifts all the risk of an investment onto the borrower. In an increasingly saturated economy, which the author of the original article doesn't even recognize as a thing, most investments are unable break even. The risk adjusted return of an investment is negative but you, the lender, can always pull out your money as cash to get guaranteed 0%, this threat makes banks unwilling to lower their interest rate below 0%. Banks stop lending to risky lenders. Saved money is no longer circulating in the economy. Deflation/low inflation sets in.
If the government does nothing or austerity, then you get a great depression very soon. If the government does something, then it must act as the borrower of last resort, who is creating artificial demand for capital. If I had to describe QE it is actually as if the government created a state operated investment fund for government bonds that is exclusively accessible to banks. It's not really money printing. It's a weird ass way of letting banks find a solvent borrower of last resort. When you deposit money on your bank account, the bank doesn't know when you are going to spend it. A bank reserve created by QE is just as liquid as money so it does the job. You can spend your money instantly and no bank is going to care. They can just shrug off the fact that they are lending out deposits that can be spent instantly for 30 years.
This is still better than doing nothing. For all we know, the money could be spent on climate change or whatever. However, it would be better to address the problem at its root and just tell the rich to get lost by no longer guaranteeing automatic capital accumulation and free capital preservation.
Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.