This interview brings together Dave Murphy, an energy transition scholar, and physicist Tom Murphy, both founders of the Planetary Limits Academic Network (PLAN).
Across this series of discussions conducted by fellow founder Ben McCall, they explore a range of themes on the converging crises reshaping our world, including the polycrisis, ecological overshoot and the strengths and limits of modernity.
Ben McCall: I don’t believe that Tom is advocating for a loss of the beneficial elements of modernity, but rather inferring from available data that planetary limits simply won’t allow modernity to continue. It does sound like Tom thinks that such advances likely cannot be sustained (not that they would be intentionally abandoned), so what might you say to that? How confident are you that we get to choose?
Dave Murphy: At its core, our differences seem to be about choice, that is, whether there is a choice. If I may summarize your argument, it is that humanity may deceive itself into thinking they have agency over its fate, but the ecological reality is already written in stone. There is some sort of catastrophe ahead, as modernity is careening past planetary limits, and our current efforts at sustainability, e.g., global biodiversity policy, the Sustainable Development Goals, or whatever, amount to playing music on the Titanic.
Ok, I’ll bite.
How is your argument any different than the Malthusian argument of the 19th Century? Thomas Malthus was convinced that society was going to collapse as food supply would be outstripped by population, which would lead to massive starvation and death. That did not come to pass.
Then came the Limits to Growth paper in 1972, claiming that a combination of factors indicates that the world is heading towards overshoot and that collapse will follow. That has not yet come to pass either.
More recently, the peak oil advocates, of which I was one for a time, claimed that peak oil occurred in 2007 and that massive price spikes were inevitable. Oil shortages and recessions were soon to come, and for some, this meant the world was once again on the edge of collapse. Indeed, many saw this as validation of the Limits to Growth model. Yet, here we are 16 years later, and oil shortages are not a reality. Quite the opposite happened, in fact. Despite all the data and scientific analyses predicting imminent oil depletion, oil production in the U.S. boomed, largely due to technological innovation.
The message then shifted ever so slightly. It wasn’t the peak of “oil” but the peak of “cheap oil.” Peak conventional oil is indeed here, we were told, and what we see now is expensive, low-EROI oil that will work for a bit but, in the end, will fail. (Read: we aren’t wrong…just delaying, again, our call for the future collapse of the world due to oil depletion). But my most recent research indicates that oil’s EROI was never that high, and that renewable energy has a higher EROI than fossil fuels.
But before you think I am a complete techno-utopian (I am playing a bit of devil’s advocate), I would like to say that I think I understand the doomer response to these arguments as well. “We haven’t collapsed yet, but we have made the collapse possibly far worse by further extending the footprint of modern society.” I do think we are still abusing what Schumacher called the Earth’s “tolerance margins,” which are indeed finite. The Earth’s ecosystem isn’t infinitely resilient. Every additional environmental degradation in the name of economic growth will make the inevitable collapse and recovery harder. The trajectory of the planet’s ecological health has not changed over the past decade, and that is what matters in the end.
Yet I am mostly struck by the confidence in the doomer argument that the future must entail a broad, full-scale collapse, and I think it is important to consider what we mean by “collapse.” What does collapse look like? The logic presented is so simple: overshoot is here, so correction must follow.
Isn’t the most likely outcome some sort of long, muddling-through period by which economic growth reverberates between periods of growth and stagnation while the energy system is slowly transformed? Not necessarily the boom times people are used to, far from the last 150 years of grow-grow-grow, but also not a complete collapse of modern society.
Unfortunately, I see war as another possible form of collapse. The Global West, led by the USA and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) seem to be on a crash course with the Global East, led by Russia, China and Iran. If this does come to pass, ecological health will be the last thing on anyone’s mind, and, though some of the foundational reasons for the conflict could be related to resource use, the war would not be solely, or even largely, about ecology or ecological overshoot in general.
So there is so much we don’t know about the future, which brings me to my next question: if we don’t know the precise direction of the correction (i.e. collapse, muddling through, etc), what is our ethical responsibility today? What is our responsibility to ourselves, to our local community, or to the global community?
It is my contention that most of the people in the world are, as you describe, “innocents.” I am from the U.S.A. Does that mean I am responsible for Trumpian foreign policy? I didn’t vote for him. Are people in corrupt areas of the world lumped in with whichever despot is in charge? Are all people on the planet today responsible for the trajectory of modernity? There are two billion people on this planet in poverty. What are they responsible for? The point is this: the vast majority of people on Earth are not willfully driving Spaceship Earth as it careens out of control, but they are on the Spaceship nonetheless.
Do we have an ethical obligation to other members of that Spaceship, i.e. society? Does each of us have an obligation to “love thy neighbor?” If so, what does it mean to love thy neighbor in this context?
Perhaps our differences, at their core, come down to this question: what are we to do now?
Reading your response, one would understandably conclude that it’s “bunker-building” time. Abandon ship, everyone! It seems that individual efforts are meaningless given the planet’s overall trajectory. But isn’t that overall trajectory simply the sum of individual decisions? If we can change one individual from overconsuming to sustainable consumption, doesn’t that help? Scale that to a society, and then perhaps the world? Perhaps that is naive, but perhaps it is exactly what is needed. Think global, act local, right?
It is not for us to judge whether the Earth can or cannot sustain the current trajectory of modernity; that is simply a function of the ecology, but it is for us to judge what we do about that ecology right now. Choosing to do nothing, to fiddle while Rome burns, is in fact a choice, and one that carries consequences for all around us. Our actions today influence Earth’s ecology and, therefore, its sustainability, so why not try to improve? The reality is that the vast majority of the people on this planet are innocent, have very few resources, and therefore don’t have the luxury to ponder such concerns, let alone do anything about them. These conversations exist only for the privileged (of which I am one as well).
We do not know what the future looks like, and if there is a possibility that insulin production and clean water and other features of modernity can be saved, and therefore more of our neighbors can survive, then we – those that have the capacity to ponder such things – are ethically obligated to do our best to achieve that future.
Ben: It’s delightful that we have forged an agreement that there will be some sort of correction, or collapse, or muddling, that is, that modernity, as we know it, cannot last indefinitely. There seem to be two major points of contention remaining: what this correction/collapse/muddling is likely to look like, and what ethical principles should guide our actions in light of the knowledge that such a transition is coming.
Dave proposes that the most likely outcome is a “long, muddling-through period by which economic growth reverberates between periods of growth and stagnation while the energy system is slowly transformed.” Tom, I sense you have a different view of the likely outcome: could you share your perspective on the likelihood of Dave’s proposed outcome, and perhaps other potential outcomes?
Tom Murphy: Predictions are hard—especially about the future. That said, the physicist in me looks for encompassing principles to help at least differentiate the possible from what is likely impossible, independent of what’s familiar or appealing. In doing so, I tend to step back from a messy decades-scale view, thinking instead on timescales of centuries or millennia. These are civilization-relevant timescales, and can help us avoid pursuing decade-scale efforts that are likely to fall into the same traps by delayed, alternate routes—while accumulating further, often irreversible, ecological harm in the process.
For instance, it is easy to see that growth—which has been a bedrock companion of modernity—cannot continue for much longer. So, why try? Fossil fuel use will necessarily decline, forming a pulse in time. Human population—temporarily inflated by agriculture’s heavy dependence on fossil fuels and other rapidly depleting gifts like aquifers and soils—will likely follow suit, exacerbated by climate change. A look at ore quality over time confirms that the low-hanging fruit is long gone, so that it becomes increasingly harder and more ecologically destructive to maintain the past century’s sprint in materials extraction—necessary for renewable energy technology. Recycling also has quantitative limits: only a few dozen cycles are practical before the recovered resource dwindles to insignificance. A forward, literal extrapolation of global ecological trends of the last century would leave us with no forests, wild land mammals or insects within a few human lifetimes—especially as firewood and hunting might offset faltering energy and agricultural outputs.
The celebrated hockey stick curves in GDP, energy, materials, population, etc., are direct manifestations of the rapid and temporary drawdown of a non-renewable inheritance. These curves will have to come back down, likely by an order of magnitude or more—perhaps through self-destabilizing feedback. I don’t see them “defying gravity” and hovering at some high level, given biophysical and ecological constraints. Not only is this moment we call modernity ludicrously atypical, but it is fundamentally unsustainable—meaning its failure is basically guaranteed (not a choice). Don’t get too attached. If my prognosis seems extreme, it is only because the present condition to which we have become inured—atop our hockey sticks—is itself extremely precarious.
Again, the failure of modernity is not the same as the failure of humanity. We have other options. Whatever much-reduced flow comes out the other side, it can have some very positive features. The bottleneck in getting from here to there is very hard to think about and likely to be turbulent. But we can think about what long-term sustainability could look like, and start calmly sloughing off the deleterious trappings of modernity—rather than engaging in what is likely a futile attempt to continue some familiar, comfortable version of modernity by alternate means, only to make the ultimate transition costlier. I believe that a successful result would be unrecognizable to our modernity-acclimated eyes, involving values foreign to most of us today.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length. This interview is part of a series that features conversations between Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy on the polycrisis and planetary limits.
Catch up with Part One here.
