Overshoot

Five bummer problems that make societies collapse

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“If anyone tells you that there’s a single-factor explanation for societal collapse,” says collapse guru Jared Diamond, “you know right away that they’re an idiot. This is a complex subject.” So, forget about peak debt, peak oil, peak climate, peak Harry Potter or even peak everything as the single most important problem that could bring today’s whole pulsing, beaming and txt-mssgng mess down into a lifeless pile of shorted-out microchips, rusted carburetors and busted sporks from Taco Bell. Diamond gives the Five Fatals that could do us in, using the example of the unlucky Greenland Norse.

The most dangerous machine ever built

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I could never understand why activists picked on the personal automobile so much. Sure, people die in accidents. The car also uses a lot of oil and spews a lot of pollution. But so do planes, ships and lots of other machines. And won’t gasoline cars soon be replaced by cleaner hybrids or even 100% clean electric vehicles? Now, after reading “Stop Signs,” I can see the problem — as the main gateway drug to excessive consumption of everything from suburban homes and appliances to self-storage, more than anything else, the auto literally drives climate change and peak oil.

Smashing the melon of American complacency with the mallet of Russian grit

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Dmitry Orlov scares me. But it would be a shame if his fearsome reputation as a relentless doomer scared others off from reading the revised edition of his book that came out this year, Reinventing Collapse: the Soviet Experience and American Prospects. As a foreign-born analyst of the American scene, Orlov is as prescient as Alexis de Tocqueville. But Orlov, of course, is edgier, just like that other analyst of the American character: Gallagher. Yes, that Gallagher, the prop comic we loved in the 1980s for smashing watermelons on stage.

Why you can’t fight climate change without peak oil

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Clive Hamilton has been researching energy and its problems for years. But judging by his book on why the world’s governments have failed to slow industrial society’s slide towards climate disaster, Hamilton is either willfully ignorant of peak oil, or too scared to talk about it. But like too many people who care about climate change, he’s only getting half the story — and helping to handicap the climate movement in the process.

Liberation from civilization!

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For many years the thesis of this blog has been: Our civilization is in its final century, and there is nothing we can do to prevent its collapse. When I began writing this, I was largely dismissed as a defeatist and a depressed “doomer” (or worse). As awareness has grown about the now-inevitable end of (a) cheap energy, (b) stable climate and (c) the growth economy, there is a growing acknowledgement that the collapse scenario I have written about is at least conceivable.

Galactic-scale energy

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Because growth has been with us for “countless” generations—meaning that everyone we ever met or our grandparents ever met has experienced it—growth is central to our narrative of who we are and what we do. We therefore have a difficult time imagining a different trajectory. This post provides a striking example of the impossibility of continued growth at current rates—even within familiar timescales…We will begin with semi-practical assessments, and then in stages let our imaginations run wild—even then finding that we hit limits sooner than we might think. I will admit from the start that the assumptions underlying this analysis are deeply flawed. But that becomes the whole point, in the end.

New book: “The Limits to Growth Revisited”

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Writing this book has been a fascinating work. Re-examining the story of “The Limits to Growth” opens up a whole new world that urban legends and propaganda had tried to bury under a layer of lies and misinterpretations. We all have heard of the “mistakes” that the authors of LTG, or their sponsors, the Club of Rome, are said to have made. But LTG was not “wrong”: nowhere in the 1972 book you find the mistakes that are commonly attributed to it.

The Shrinking Pie: Post-Growth Geopolitics

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As nations compete for currency advantages, they are also eyeing the world’s diminishing resources—fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water. Resource wars have been fought since the dawn of history, but today the competition is entering a new phase. From Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’.

How defining planetary boundaries can transform our approach to growth

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Our planet’s ability to provide an accommodating environment for humanity is being challenged by our own activities. The environment—our life-support system—is changing rapidly from the stable Holocene state of the last 12,000 years, during which we developed agriculture, villages, cities, and contemporary civilizations, to an unknown future state of significantly different conditions. One way to address this challenge is to determine “safe boundaries” based on fundamental characteristics of our planet and to operate within them.

Entropy, peak oil, and Stoic philosophy

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Marcus Aurelius didn’t know about entropy, but he had very clear how the universe is in continuous flow. Things change and this is the only unchangeable truth. I think this is our destiny and what we have to do. Likely, we won’t be able to save the world we know. Probably, we won’t be able to avoid immense human suffering for the years to come. Yet, we must do our best to try and – who knows – what we’ll be able to do might make a difference. I think this is the lesson that Marcus is telling to us, even from a gulf of time that spans almost two millennia.