The good things I observe are consistent mispredictions about e.g. solar power and a rather obvious lack of impact of AI robotics, this was hard sci-fi even 10 years ago and it’s a kinda unnoticed trend brewing around the world. The model designers would be considered clowns if they added humanoid robots to the population at any point in the timeline and now I think we can say in the next few years we’ll have to start doing exactly that.
Where does that leave humanity in 2050 is anyone’s guess. Looks like a race towards singularity, because if we don’t get there, we collapse.
We may get either; at this point the singularity outcome is slightly more probable. The problem is that it won't be a singularity good for (most) people, so from our point of view that outcome also looks like a collapse. The most "regular" collapse on the other hand could let us be and could turn into a good lesson and opportunity; though how so is purely speculative fiction (which I write).
Right before the fracking revolution happened.
If you look at earlier estimates, we were supposed to have 20 billion people on Earth now.
> also seems to be peaking right about now indicating that despite continuous growth in the global population, we are experiencing declining global food production.
The per-capita caloric supply is growing: https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply
But the growth doesn't automatically mean that it happens because of the resource use increase. Growth often results in technologies that use _less_ resources: cars and lighting are prime examples.
> Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?
I'm arguing that predicting the exact point where the growth limits are reached is impossible. Especially when it's not due to something fundamental like the Sun's total energy output multiplied by the lowest possible entropy increase quantum.
Yes, resources are technically finite, but we are a long way away from that mattering.
Until then, there's a limit on how cheap we can get our resources---and human ingenuity is chipping away on that. But scarcely a limit on the absolute amount of resources.
> Are you arguing that the model didn’t predict fracking correctly or what’s your point exactly?
The model didn't predict anything correctly. Fracking is just something on top of people's minds now, but the model didn't take the green revolution into account, when that was already underway when they formulated it.
At risk of speaking for the parent, I think that sentence sums it up. Specious is the fancier word for it.
These 'analyses' take a myopic view of a complex buffered system and well beyond the predictive power of the analysis.
Kind of like saying $MSFT went up 1pct today, so by this time next year it will be up 365% and in a decade its exponential growth will collapse the economy.
For a recent non-contrived example, projections of electric vehicle ownership haven't exactly followed expectations.
We should be treating our accessible resources as finite, and improve the efficiency of using them, just to make sure we can keep enough until all the breakthroughs we need to explore resources outside of Earth exist.
It's like the propaganda from the oil industry, talking about how plastics are so damn important for modern life and we couldn't live without the oil industry. It's absolutely true, but it also gives a very clear argument on why we shouldn't be wasting fossil resources to be burnt for energy if we can find other ways to access energy, we should be keeping as much as possible of this finite resource (which very likely doesn't even exist in any close proximity to Earth) for its more useful material products like plastics.
and before that the same thing happened. you can find books in the library from the 70's saying the same thing about oil by the year 2000
all that's happened is that commodity economics kick in. the scarcity of oil prompts people to pay more for the oil. the higher price of oil makes investors realize they can write larger checks to people aiming to explore for oil in harder to reach places with expensive machinery, to make enough to pay back the investors.
which is why deep sea expeditions took off, which is why fracking took off
the trend is likely to continue
this is what occurs in some other commodity markets as well
- We are collapsing but it is not the dramatic collapse everyone is expecting it to be. If population "slowly" declines consistently, eventually, there will be too few people. If you have a 2 million year graph, this era will look like a sharp spike for a very short time.
- We are adapting but fracking prevented that from happening in the West and other places. Because China didn't have that luxury, they had to push through solar energy. This provides hope that the exponential growth will continue as energy is abundant around us.
So there you have it. I can see arguments to each side of the coin and am not sure which way it'll play.
It is naïve to think that this can't happen again.
The assessment should change with the industrial revolution, specialization to allow understanding, and great increase of power availability. This isn't even like the Bronze Age collapse.
The problem with economic growth into negative sum gold mines, is not only the immediate and cumulative damage so far, but that all that damage is what funds and incentivizes existing and new actors to compound the damage.
Compound. Compound. That doesn't stop easily.
Whether that is fossil fuel, plastic or surveillance/manipulation media. (None of which I have an ideological issue with, if they are taxed or pay for the harm they do, each market would quickly find N new and clever ways to substitute, avoid or mitigate the damage.)
Once large corporations start making money where there is a negative sum conflict of interest, growth by definition is very very bad.
But the problem isn't "growth".
That's a good start, but it's a bit more complicated.
Reasonable people can disagree what counts as a positive vs negative externality. Eg if you like to be warm, perhaps you see global warming as positive externality. (Really silly example, but you can come up with better ones.)
Also reasonable people can disagree about discounting rates. If current interest rates are very high, it can be economically rational to cut down a forest completely to get lots of lumber now, but severely damage long running production. If discounting rates are very low, then you'd leave the forest standing.
If you internalise externalities, the problem becomes less extreme, but sufficiently large differences in discounting rates will still make it surface.
> Once large corporations start making money where there is a negative sum conflict of interest, growth by definition very very bad.
Why single out large corporations? If anything, large multinationals are about the best run businesses on the planet.
Having been in consulting for a long time, for many of these companies, let’s just say reasonable people can disagree with this.
Have a look at what used to be the Aral Sea for an example.
Yes large multinationals have never adversely affected the environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_disaster... Like on this list, the vast majority are done by corporations.
You'd probably want to normalise the industrial disaster score per capita (or even per dollar-equivalent of GDP).
Would be an interesting research project. Look for cost of QALY-lost per capita or so from environmental damage.
This is enough that excavation or otherwise disturbing the earth would be unwise.
The flip side of that 24,000 year half life is Pu-239 isn’t that hot. 5% of what little Pu-239 is there isn’t that spicy compared to many places people live without significant worry about the natural radiation dose.
There’s just not enough Pu-242 to be a significant concern on its own outside of the reactor building which is unlikely to be left alone.
It's not the sort of place you want to spend any appreciable time at. Plenty of documented death and mutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_exclusion_zone#Radio...
> what little Pu-239 is there isn’t that spicy compared to many places people live without significant worry about the natural radiation dose.
Walking around most of the 30km exclusion zone 100,000 years from now will be comparable to walking around a granite quary in terms of gamma dose. Which is still elevated compared to most of the planet, but usually not a worry. However, granite does an excellent job of sequestering the radioactive elements whereas I explicitly called out disturbing the earth as a risk due to inhalation and the compounded effect of internalized isotopes which is much greater at the Chernobyl site than elsewhere. Hence the need for a $2.1 Billion confinement structure which is only designed to last 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement
No amount of inhaled Pu-239 is going to be fun for anyone.
> death and mutation
Even fairly recent studies are showing the legacy of past exposure in animal populations who lived through higher than current radiation levels and often carry that legacy through genetic damage across generations. Thus they overstate the exposure risk today.
Obviously even 1/1,000th of the current risk isn’t zero but it’s swamped by other considerations.
> No amount of inhaled Pu-239 is going to be fun for anyone.
There’s no benefit, but start talking individual atoms and you’ll have trouble detecting it.
I can’t find a paper on the topic but for a rough estimate, ~5-30% of the fuel was released, but not all of that remained local and some was removed etc. If something like 1/3 the fuel was nuclear waste and 0.8% of that was Pu-239 and 5% of that remains in 10k years. We’re talking well under 1kg Pu-239 across 2600 km^2. So your digger in 100k years is only inhaling and coughing up incredibly dilute material, we’re talking 10^-15 to 10^-20 kg Pu-239 in someone’s lungs depending on assumptions but even the high end is going to be swamped by normal background radiation.
I think that's a big assumption. Historically, humans are interested in exploring abandoned and forbidden sites and go out of their way to do so.
> part of the new safe confinement project is to “facilitate the disassembly and decommissioning of the reactor.”
I've seen zero concrete plans or funding for this. And seeing as how the site is currently in the middle of a war zone, and has been hit by explosive drones[1], I think it's safe to say that things aren't going to plan.
1: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protec...
The waste is still going to be around in some form, just not in a huge lump someone can walk up to.
> zero concrete plans or funding
3,000 people where working on site, so they had funding for the process and while slow quite a bit of visible progress had occurred. “The cranes have so far removed the roof of the reactor's engine room.” https://www.rferl.org/a/inside-chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant... The final storage of all of Ukraine’s high level nuclear waste is unclear, but that’s a common issue in the industry. Getting this high level waste safely offsite and in dry cask storage is a reasonable goal at this point.
The drone strike has been repaired, but ultimately wars don’t last forever. On the scale of a 100+ year projects it’s a temporary issue. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-emerge...
I am going to guess you and I have some underlying philosophical differences. I fully believe in the power of competitive markets, however, the primary market structured around profit is not always (or even often) the best for global scale issues.
Given that we cannot appropriately price externalities nor enforce them, we often want organizations which are motivated socially or by values.
The trade off in efficiency is irrelevant. I don’t want a company seeking maximum efficiency in some areas, I want things that are driving for stability or durability. Or social good. Or other measurements.
You actually said it best:
> If anything, large multinationals are about the best run businesses on the planet.
Yes, but they’re businesses, not everything is a business problem.
Profit might not be a particularly good incentive, but the others are worse.
> Given that we cannot appropriately price externalities nor enforce them, we often want organizations which are motivated socially or by values.
Just waving your wand doesn't automagically make any organisation (government or otherwise) motivativated socially or by values. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
> The trade off in efficiency is irrelevant. I don’t want a company seeking maximum efficiency in some areas, I want things that are driving for stability or durability. Or social good. Or other measurements.
Sure, but just stating that desire that doesn't make it happen.
I know this was just an example (and you said you weren't entirely happy with it), but the thing about externalities is that yeah someone may like it warm, but just because the damage doesn't happen where you are, doesn't mean it does not happen.
E.g. I could totally argue that I like draining that old oil from my car into the river next door since the river flows by and will carry the dirt away from my house. I externalize the pollution I'd have to deal with to the environment where other people live. Just because that cost is not affecting me in regards to that individual act, does not mean I didn't produce it.
Or to stay with the climate example: Yeah someone might like it warmer, but do they also like rising sea levels, more extreme wheather events, draught, higher food prices, climate migration, the cultural changes it brings and/or the violence coming from trying to prevent it? And what when the temperature is reached that they no longer like? Climate systems have multiple decades of lag, so when they decide to stop the tanker moves on, and on, and on.
Externalities are called that because they have to be paid by someone or something eventually. And not pricing them in is how you get neighbours who start to throw their dirt onto your lawn.
However, there are two more hurdles:
- First, you need to define what counts as the status quo, ie what do you measure externalities against? (But this is more of a problem in theory than in practice, I suspect.)
- Second, you need to explain why Coasian bargaining isn't enough. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
I think the point of the book is that perpetual growth is physically impossible with bounded resources.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-paul-ehrlich-got-everythin...
What is remarkable about Limits is that anyone still takes it seriously. I struggle to think of a model that has been so thoroughly discredited as Limits to Growth has been. Jim Cramer's stock predictions, maybe.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices-vs-cumula...
Maybe I am not seeing a thing that I am seeing, but the logistical function is pretty well explored. If you want infinite growth you need infinite resources and thus an infinite world. Our world is not infinite last time I checked.
I haven't checked their precise model and whether the timelines it predicts are sound, but the general idea of a logistic function describing the general dynamics as a rough ballpark model still stands. In reality of course we will have more stepped saturation effects, until a new resource pool is found, maybe outside of planet earth etc. But the saturation region of that more complicated stepped function would still translate to untold suffering. Unless you see a different end game.
Or you continue to hope that you’ll be able to clean the environment while still using the resources but as of today, that’s still a big gamble on everyone’s lives.
resource = 1000
resource_use = 0.1 # per year
resource_use_growth_factor = 1.01 # per year
resource_regrowth = 0.0001 # per year
loop {
resource += resource_regrowth
resource -= resource_use
resource_use *= resource_use_growth_factor
if (resource <= 0) {
print("Resources depleted")
exit(1)
}
}
The timeline could be 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, but humanity needs to
1. Know when that resource is likely going to be depleted, ideally decades or longer before it happens
2. Develope workarounds, alternative resources etc. to eventually just use the regrowth rate
3. Use resources that have higher regrow rates (aka "sustainable" ones) and stay within the limits
4. Don't forget to price in the externalities into resource use during its whole life cycle (this can be many millenia for some materials)
Right now the level is that some people even seem to grok the extremely simple reality of growing resource use with a limited resource eventually hitting a cutoff point. Granted my model here is extremely simplistic, but even if you factor in stuff like undiscovered resource sources and a rate of new discoveres, eventually on a planet with finite resources you will run out of them unless you just use the amount you can sustainably use.
The majority of the universe is hydrogen and helium; most of what we see is now inaccessible due to the expansion of the universe and the speed of light; and even the stuff we can reach, because of the speed of light, requires a slow down to cubic growth at best (closer than galactic disk thickness or further than galactic isotropy); and even then that's for the species as a whole, as the speed of light eventually stops and single thing from growing at all.
Exponential growth has a way of reaching big numbers quickly. Now sure, it's still a while for the stuff we can access — I don't know if your percentage is correct, but looks about right, and at 2% annual growth (so: no VN replication ever) that's 1163 years for the crust, then another 233 for the rest of the planet — but that assumes we can use the whole thing and aren't reliant on some trace elements, e.g. carbon (which is 200ppm) or tin (2.3ppm) or selenium (0.05ppm of the crust, and if Wikipedia is right about five times higher, 0.25ppm, in a human body).
My argument wasn't about how long it takes to deplete our resources, my argument was that eventually they will be deleted. And we are in a small emergeny raft on a wide ocean. Right now everybody is eating as if we are on vaction. We are not.
Our use of resources changes. We used to care about coal production - it is now niche and in no way a choke point. We're on our way off oil, in fact if you believe green transformation maximalists, we may soon have a abundance of energy. Alongside population growth, we had a huge increase in farm yields, so that eg in Europe the use of agricultural land is actually decreasing.
In 1890s, IIRC, it was predicted that Paris' growth will inevitably stagnate around 1920s as the capacity to remove horse dung (from carriages etc) will reach a critical point. Turns out we just obsoleted horses instead.
Last time I checked, oil consumption is still raising year after year except for the covid years. Same for CO2 emissions we entered the era of irreversible natural disasters but we are still emitting more and more tears after years.
I may be too optimistic, I can _feel_ the trend will change. But even being optimistic, the data isn’t there to show anything positive and even if we started decreasing oil production / consumption today, we are so late that even the declining trend would have to be pretty strong.
I also think (and that’s just an opinion) that making the needed transition requires huge reform of the global economy and that the powerful know it very well. We are not getting fascism return for no reasons.
It however changes nothing of the fact that exponential growth in a finite system will eventually run into saturation. If you want to grow your corps revenue by X% each year you will have to sell more. Selling more means making more, making more means using more resources. Now you can reduce the resource use per part with clever designs, different materials or by seeing planned obsolescence as a feature (which will mean customers have to buy a replacement earlier and thus the actual resource use of the product over its lifecycle gets in fact worse). So you optimize and optimize and then you have reached the moment where there is nothing left to remove, but you still need to grow, so you just keep using more resources.
Or if you are lucky eventually a new material or design innovation comes around, that again allows you to improve resource use. But your resource use is not going to be zero and you deplete something else on the finite planet. And you need to grow and use more of it each year.
If you're lost on a raft in the ocean and first eat the bread and once the bread is gone switch to cookies that does not mean you won't eventually run out of stuff to eat.
The solution is to tap into resources that regrow and not use more than is regrowing, but that doesn't jive well with infinite growth. I am an electical engineer and I know pretty well how exponential resource use works in complex systems. If a part of my system would like to exponentially grow its resource use infinitly I'd either consider it defective or use the fact that it can't grow infinitly by bounds I set on purpose.
We are not talking about "could things grow a bit more during my lifetime", we are talking about our systemic demand for infinite growth. In a capitalist system a society that manages its resources perfectly in a sustainable way has less potential for short term growth than one that just thinks about the next quarter.
So yes, the energy/climate crisis should be taken seriously, but proposing a utopia that ditches one of the major constraints on our way of life is no solution.
I however have hopes for the future. Our society is still locked in and "end of history" mentality that makes most of us believe that economically and socially we have reached the end of the road and that all that is left are minor tunings. The next "collapse" or "big" crisis, that can come from anywhere (not necessarily be a purely economic thing), may shake that belief from us.
I don't think we should be digging everything out of the ground we can, but I don't here anybody saying we are about to run out of anything.
Every few years a functional illiterate with disproportionate reach in media thinks that "current reserves of X" is a value describing the total amount of X available on the planet and that this can only ever shrink and will hit zero in our lifetime. The doomers scream and have a tantrum over our impending apocalypse for a year or two, then it fades into an embarrassing silence before repeating with theme Y instead.
Eventually we've rotated through the entire doomer alphabet and we're back at screaming about X again, as is the case with the OP article which I didn't read and never will but can reject in its entirety based on having seen the Doomer pattern a hundred times before.
We are still getting a lot of helium as a by-product of natural gas extraction. If helium gets more expensive, people will make a bigger effort to capture it.
Obviously that hasn't happened.
Your "we can’t change" logic gives us only one future, that of bacteries caught in the great oxidation event.
Not true, it was technology what civilized us (and jury is still out), not growth. Yes, if people are not hungry or sick, spend time doing meaningful work, can talk to others and generally enjoy life, they're less likely to be violent.
But you don't need growth (use more resources and produce more material goods) for that. We can already technologically attain that state for everyone on the planet.
Despite these technological marvels, there are still people who pronounce BS about how we have to compete for resources in order to survive. But (thanks to technology) it hasn't been true since at least 1960s.
> If Not Malthusian, Then Why?
> This paper shows that merely the Malthusian mechanism cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation of living standards. Technological improvement in luxury production, if faster than improvement in subsistence production, would have kept living standards growing. The Malthusian trap is essentially a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector. The author argues that the balanced growth is caused by group selection in the form of biased migration. A tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong tendency of growth. The theory reexplains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient market economies such as Rome and Song. It also suggests a new perspective on the Industrial Revolution.
The paper I linked to is just the opposite of Malthusianism.
The original submitted article is dressed up Malthusianism.
However - don't let it drag you down. Think about what you can do, personally, as a person that has agency, to mitigate the potential effects for you, for your family, for your community.
And the answer for me, personally, is the same as for many other of these issues - stay in good health both physically and mentally, keep in touch with the people around you, have a buffer (financially, resources, time), raise awareness of the potential impact. And don't be a doomer, acknowledge that you might be wrong - because you would have been (up to now).
The fact is there are things people are not capable of doing anything about. See Theory of Bounded Rationality - you cant push school kids to solve quantum field equations. There is a limit and a cost to over loading people with complexity.
I'd add to the "mental health" recommendation to go low on such information, as it is mostly noise and non-actionable.
Awareness that in the long term, the tides might change, doesn't fall for me into this category. It's just a basic fact of life that it easily forgotten in the busyness of day.
As I understand the article:
1. There was a model in 1972.
2. That model predicts collapse in the mid 2020s.
3. A new group has recalibrated the model with modern data.
4. The model still predicts collapse.
How does that support the title that the model is right about collapse? To support that you need verification against the real world or against a trusted model.
Perhaps the climate will get a bit warmer and that will be expensive to deal with and there will be some human and natural tragedies. But by and large people will deal and there won't be any collapse.
Say that IA allow us to squeeze the additional juice from the torn lemon for five more decades, given the toll that it may have on our ability to think by ourselves, the bulk of people may have troubles coming up with 19th century tech and rely on good ol' donkeys for producing food and materials instead of what we would currently see as low tech solutions, when the shit will hit the proverbial fan
-
This is the key insight, I think.
I was an interested follower of the Peak Oil stuff 20 years ago. Everything they said was true. But everything they predicted was wrong. As the economics of the oil business shifted, new forms of production became profitable and came online. The economy didn't collapse, life went on more or less normally.
Economies work on curves and trade-offs. As one thing declines, another ascends. As one solution to a given problem stops working, another one becomes viable. The whole continues more or less undisturbed.
It's notable that ecologists are discovering this; there are novel ecosystems [0] arising as the environment changes. The new arises as the old declines, and there's never a point at which anything "collapses" as such.
[0] https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/content/novel-ecosy...
We also have loads of cards left to play like fully deploying nuclear energy, GMOs etc. that would ease the environmental impact but are not used due to political reasons.
How does the model react to small changes in the starting values? Is collapse an attractor of the model that cannot be avoided independent of the starting values? Then the question would be, how realistic is a model that predicts collapse independent of starting values?
camillomiller•1d ago
That said, it seems to check out. Everything we do, every technological step forward, is always inevitably configured within the frame of a capitalistic belief system, with the myth of growth locked in place as its central device.
My existential angst definitely didn’t need this read today.
baq•1d ago
camillomiller•1d ago
baq•18h ago
yieldcrv•1d ago
tbrownaw•1d ago
How is this relevant, and what does is even mean?
> Everything we do, every technological step forward, is always inevitably configured within the frame of a capitalistic belief system, with the myth of growth locked in place as its central device.
Tech advancements and growth are kinda the same things tho. Being static - not growing - implies a lack of change. Tech advancements only spread if your can do cool new things with them.
camillomiller•1d ago
It is relevant to anything that is remotely "economic". We consider capitalism like fish consider water. I'm only just pointing out that we're all constantly wet, but unlike fish, that's not a condition we depend upon for life.
Qwertious•1d ago
Some of the most productive research we could possibly do is basic research. But because basic research doesn't directly produce monetizable practical improvements, it doesn't get private funding (besides Bell Labs analogs) and is in practice woefully underfunded.
This is a failure of resource allocation that is attributable directly to capitalism.
I'm not advocating a communist revolution here, just pointing out a downside to capitalism.
tbrownaw•15h ago
How do we know this? What's about to be found if we look for it, and how do we know where to look?
> and is in practice woefully underfunded.
What determines the proper level of funding? How is it measured?
eru•1d ago
The communists in the Soviet Union and mainland China also did some science. We also have plenty of folks in research today who are less than favourably disposed to capitalism (and growth).
> Do we have references for how correct these type of predictions were in the past about similar claims?
They have always been wrong since before Malthus.
You might like https://fass.nus.edu.sg/ecs/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/...
camillomiller•1d ago
I am NOT anti-capitalistic per se, but I am certainly critical of any view that takes capitalism (any form of it, even the best ones like the Scandinavian versions) and unbridled growth as an unshakable tenet of our present and our future.
In other words, I am luckily not at a Mark Fisher stage.
Thanks for the link.
eru•1d ago
Huh? I defended communism as also producing some science. (There was also quite a bit of science in pre-capitalist societies.)
Sorry, I don't know who Mark Fisher is nor what stage he acted on.
> Thanks for the link.
I hope you enjoy the read as much as I did.
em500•1d ago
It's not overtly technical or inaccessible, if you're a quick reader it only takes a few hours (probably less than what many people spend on Youtube or other internet feeds daily).
Don't wait for some second hand opinion/summary/rephrasing/interpretation, everyone will have their own bias.
camillomiller•1d ago