I called several financial advisors asking how I should invest $1m for 40 years (hypothetically, but they didn't know that). I verbally explained the trends for the future, based on your excellent articles, and asked them to advise me a suitable investment portfolio that will deliver returns. Every single one of them laughed me off the phone and told me I was delusional. I am in no way surprised that 99% of the Global North assumes the trajectory of the last 75 years will continue for the next 75 years. And quite frankly, at this point, we deserve everything coming for us.
I have known we are on this road for my entire adult life (I turned 18 in 1986). We stumble significantly about once every 10-15 years and then pick ourselves up, although each time a little weaker than before. Artificially low interest rates between 2001 and 2022 grossly inflated real assets even while accounting for the 2007-2010 financial crisis. That crisis of 2007-2010 fueled deficit spending which continued during the COVID lockdown. The debt spiral is truly out of control and may yet tear our economy apart. Although I agree with the idea that growth cannot continue forever, I expect that the unexpected tipping points will reveal themselves slowly then all at once, at a moment we cannot predict.
Great article. All the high school kids everywhere should be given time to read and discuss it in class… it would freak out the teachers.
The ecologist in me has one point. Population growth was a consequence of the exogenous energy powering food production. If we had not found fossils, agriculture would have produced enough food for roughly 2 billion by today. Agree that population is a huge driver of economies but knowing its origins are about food production and not economics would be a core message for the high school kids.
It might even get them thinking where the first solutions will be found… protecting the soil.
What are concrete steps to "an ecological awakening at a global scale"? What about 30 by 30? What about green hydrogen from solar or wind? ... and what about your retirement plans?
I don't believe there are any easy solutions at this point. And possible solutions depends on what you are referring to. A solution to save our current high-consumption way of life? Or solutions that give us the best possible chance at long-term survival living within planetary boundaries? It seems modern civilization is not compatible with the planet, so the first step is for the majority of people to realize that and understand the bigger picture of what we are doing. This is what I mean by ecological awakening. 30 by 30 sounds like a step in the right direction.
Hydrogen would be useful (and free of emissions) for many things within transportation, but as you said it would need to be from solar or wind, not natural gas is it currently is for the most part. It's an energy-conversion (there is some 20-30% energy loss) so we shouldn't go all-in on it for things that could work just as well directly with solar and wind – that would be wasting energy. My understanding is that hydrogen is a challenging fuel in terms of storage and transportation, because it leaks easily and it's very flammable.
I don't think in terms of a typical retirement, but I have tried to diversify as much as possible between different asset classes and try to be self-sufficient where possible. We don't know what the future brings.
We either expand to mars and somehow maintain growth for another couple centuries. (Highly unlikely in my opinion) Or we face a couple centuries of population and economic collapse and hope whatever is left of humanity has enough info to create a better system so they don’t just repeat.
The bottom line according to systems scientists is that we need to reduce energy and resource throughputs by at least 50% to stabilise the global system. Due to current consumption inequalities, for the richest countries in the global north this would mean something closer to 80% reduction in consumption. Try selling that to the public! All of that requires massive changes to how we produce and consume energy and goods. And all of these changes needed to be implemented 20 years ago. How do you wake people up to this reality? I have no idea. The current inertia of exponential growth is far too strong, and political power far too concentrated, and to overcome this will require nothing short of a social revolution.
No vital resources are running out. Dematerialization is ongoing in almost every field, using less resources per unit of product. We can handle the modest global warming projection of 3.1 Celsius by 2100 without much problem at all. Not with the adolescent dream of wind and solar, but as grown-ups using cleaner burning, fossil fuels, nuclear, and future tech. Productivity will rise due to AI, robots and other technological advances. Biotech will improve our health. Basically everything is going to get better. I hate to break that bad news to you.
Source? I’m pretty sure 3.1 degree warming would change the weather patterns to a point where our global food supply chain would collapse. Considering the global temperature changes that have occurred already at our 1.5. Also are you aware of the energy cost of AI? If not you should look into how high and therefore unsustainable it is. Less materials per unit of product does not take into account the increase in total products sold therefore still increasing overall materials consumed. I desperately wish what you said could be true but unfortunately I don’t think we’re getting out of this mess.
Just read the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Not the summary, constructed by zealots, but the actual analyses and projections. No cataclysm projected there. Growth, instead.
"Dematerialization is ongoing in almost every field, using less resources per unit of product." Isn't this just called "shrinkflation"? Also the Jevons Paradox suggests that efficiency gains don't lead to reduced consumption overall. Fossil fuels are pretty much done. Their cost will only increase exponentially until they are unaffordable and most sources will be economically unviable. Nuclear can never be scaled up enough for global energy demand, and anyway its economic viability is dependent on cheap fossil fuels. Nuclear I believe is supplemental and not a primary source. There is no such thing as "clean burning" this is just propaganda. Technology is dependent on and a product of cheap fossil fuel energy as everything else is. The electricity demands of increasing server farms and AI technology will also increase exponentially, "Integrating AI into existing tools like internet search engines may result in a tenfold increase in electricity demand", "AI model efficiency improvements could lead to a surge in computational power demand by up to 10,000 times", " Power demand from generative AI is expected to increase at an annual average of 70% through 2027". All unsustainable in the long-term. Technology isn't a magic elixir, and there is no hidden technological miracle waiting around the corner that can sustain exponential growth forever, no matter what the cornucopians tell you. You're ignoring basic physics. We're already consuming nearly 2x the worlds resources, and due to the way exponential growth functions, even adding another 2 planets worth of resources would only delay the peak by a few decades and lead to an even sharper decline. Go back to the drawing board, lol.
Thanks again for some really excellent work. Interested in your thoughts regarding a long-tailed collapse taking place over centuries. My conception is that this is not possible due to many issues you've already raised and some more also. Leibig's Law suggests that, like the game Jenga I play with my nephews, collapse of one vital element changes the state of the whole, and this seems to be borne out in physics, chemistry, biology and ecology and sometimes also in the social sciences.
I am not a scientist nor a financial expert, so my questions may seem too elemental. Regarding all the graphs and projections here, do they mean that we are experiencing exponential growth, in consumption, industrial output, and population, which are needed to sustain our current industrialized lives; but continuing that growth will collapse our economy, and thus viability to survive? Considering population growth and less resources, should civilization return to more basic, sustainable agricultural practices, without industrialized machines? Should there be less automation and machines in general, meaning no more ubiquitous cell phones, screens, motorized vehicles, airplanes, computers, etc.? I am reading Kim Stanley Robinson's book The Ministry for the Future, which began with a horrific description of a Hot House heat wave so severe, people were dying of heat stroke by the thousands, in a very short time period. That appears to be our future. Is there any possible way to avoid a catastrophic end to human life, or will humans, and other living creatures, experience a mass extinction?
Uncheck (physical) growth, based on extraction, is the problem. Symptoms of overshoot are everywhere and we’ve already done irreversible damage. We’re at the peak and only way is down, one way or another. Not collapse necessarily, but big change and decline is coming.
This is a very good and concise breakdown of a very complex, multifaceted problem that so many people are unaware of or wilfully ignore. I especially liked the peak-oil graph, it is an excellent visual representation of what peak-oil experts long predicted as the "bumpy plateau". I never managed to pick up an original copy of Limits to Growth, but Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is an invaluable read for anyone who is interested in this. Dana Meadows work on system dynamics is phenomenal, and people can find some of her lectures on overshoot and collapse, and sustainability on youtube.
I’m not sure for what you’re advocating. Society to dedicate resources before it’s financially feasible? Look, we solve problems when society decides they’re important enough to solve. I agree with you philosophically, but the beauty of e. capitalism is that it works because it’s about our basic instinct. And the projections of 70 years from now are gonna be wrong. Might be better. Might be worse.
Ignore my remark if you like, because I haven’t yet read your post. Saying that, I have saved it ready for reading later, although I suspect anyone who needs 100,000.00 per year is the reason we’re heading for disaster in the first place.
We humans are challenged simply for having everything, in fact we’re not supposed to have everything, and there’s much to say about how learning to live without “things” and comfort, how alone that can and does humble, saving each from inherent fears.
I agree with alot of your premise, although I disagree on the room for debate on (anthropogenic) climate change. We are at least now greening the planet and allowing for harvest yields to increase as a result of the increase in CO2. It is not a pollutant as claimed--it is a vital necessity to life on this planet. It should be treated as such. We are all a product of and consumer of carbon
This is not right. Not sure what you mean about "greening the planet", but it takes hundreds of years to generate an inch of topsoil, and we are depleting it faster than it can regenerate, leading to soil degradation and loss of arable land. Which is why we have to increasingly rely on artificial fertilisers produced from fossil fuels like natural gas just to inject nutrients into the soil. Global agriculture is responsible for up to 29% of all CO2 emissions, and a study in the US showed that it takes on average 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy just to produce 1 calorie of food. Without fossil fuels, food production declines. Oil price shocks for instance led to a world food crisis in 2008.
Contrary to what you said, some studies have shown that global crop yields decline by between 10-15% for every degree of planetary warming. On top of that, higher CO2 concentration also severely reduces the nutritional value of food...
"in tests, crops grown at 550ppm (the level expected by around the middle of this century), staple foods such as rice, wheat, maize, and soy had significantly reduced levels of iron, zinc and protein compared to crops grown at todays levels...
several varieties of rice also experience large reductions in B vitamins such as folate and thiamine...
these nutrient shifts would likely push 150-200 million people into having deficiencies of zinc and protein, while exacerbating the existing deficiencies of 1 billion people...
zinc deficiency leads to increased mortality to infectious diseases in children, and protein deficiency leads to increased child mortality as well...
reductions in B vitamins in rice alone, assuming no other reductions in other crops, would lead to an increase of 132 million suffering from folate deficiency which causes anaemia and neural tube defects in infants.
67 million more people would suffer from thiamine deficiency which causes nerve, heart and brain damage
for iron we found that in countries with anaemia rates that are higher than 20%, the most vulnerable populations - 1.4 billion women and children under 5 - would lose at least 4% of their dietary iron because of the co2 effect on crop nutrients. iron deficiency leads to anaemia maternal mortality, increased infant and child mortality, and reduced work capacity."
I called several financial advisors asking how I should invest $1m for 40 years (hypothetically, but they didn't know that). I verbally explained the trends for the future, based on your excellent articles, and asked them to advise me a suitable investment portfolio that will deliver returns. Every single one of them laughed me off the phone and told me I was delusional. I am in no way surprised that 99% of the Global North assumes the trajectory of the last 75 years will continue for the next 75 years. And quite frankly, at this point, we deserve everything coming for us.
All my financial advisers don’t want to hear this either. I don’t know where to invest my money. I’m trying to diversify, but no where seems safe.
Keep it diversified and invest in some hard assets. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time.
"Renewables are an attempt to save our current way of life, not the environment or nature." This should be on billboards everywhere.
I have known we are on this road for my entire adult life (I turned 18 in 1986). We stumble significantly about once every 10-15 years and then pick ourselves up, although each time a little weaker than before. Artificially low interest rates between 2001 and 2022 grossly inflated real assets even while accounting for the 2007-2010 financial crisis. That crisis of 2007-2010 fueled deficit spending which continued during the COVID lockdown. The debt spiral is truly out of control and may yet tear our economy apart. Although I agree with the idea that growth cannot continue forever, I expect that the unexpected tipping points will reveal themselves slowly then all at once, at a moment we cannot predict.
Great article. All the high school kids everywhere should be given time to read and discuss it in class… it would freak out the teachers.
The ecologist in me has one point. Population growth was a consequence of the exogenous energy powering food production. If we had not found fossils, agriculture would have produced enough food for roughly 2 billion by today. Agree that population is a huge driver of economies but knowing its origins are about food production and not economics would be a core message for the high school kids.
It might even get them thinking where the first solutions will be found… protecting the soil.
Now I must restack
So what's a solution? 🤔
What are concrete steps to "an ecological awakening at a global scale"? What about 30 by 30? What about green hydrogen from solar or wind? ... and what about your retirement plans?
Hi Olaf,
I don't believe there are any easy solutions at this point. And possible solutions depends on what you are referring to. A solution to save our current high-consumption way of life? Or solutions that give us the best possible chance at long-term survival living within planetary boundaries? It seems modern civilization is not compatible with the planet, so the first step is for the majority of people to realize that and understand the bigger picture of what we are doing. This is what I mean by ecological awakening. 30 by 30 sounds like a step in the right direction.
Hydrogen would be useful (and free of emissions) for many things within transportation, but as you said it would need to be from solar or wind, not natural gas is it currently is for the most part. It's an energy-conversion (there is some 20-30% energy loss) so we shouldn't go all-in on it for things that could work just as well directly with solar and wind – that would be wasting energy. My understanding is that hydrogen is a challenging fuel in terms of storage and transportation, because it leaks easily and it's very flammable.
I don't think in terms of a typical retirement, but I have tried to diversify as much as possible between different asset classes and try to be self-sufficient where possible. We don't know what the future brings.
There is no solution. We are fucked.
We either expand to mars and somehow maintain growth for another couple centuries. (Highly unlikely in my opinion) Or we face a couple centuries of population and economic collapse and hope whatever is left of humanity has enough info to create a better system so they don’t just repeat.
The bottom line according to systems scientists is that we need to reduce energy and resource throughputs by at least 50% to stabilise the global system. Due to current consumption inequalities, for the richest countries in the global north this would mean something closer to 80% reduction in consumption. Try selling that to the public! All of that requires massive changes to how we produce and consume energy and goods. And all of these changes needed to be implemented 20 years ago. How do you wake people up to this reality? I have no idea. The current inertia of exponential growth is far too strong, and political power far too concentrated, and to overcome this will require nothing short of a social revolution.
Regenerative agriculture on a global scale for a start.
The Great Filter awaits... unless benevolent AGI becomes real. Strange times indeed.
No vital resources are running out. Dematerialization is ongoing in almost every field, using less resources per unit of product. We can handle the modest global warming projection of 3.1 Celsius by 2100 without much problem at all. Not with the adolescent dream of wind and solar, but as grown-ups using cleaner burning, fossil fuels, nuclear, and future tech. Productivity will rise due to AI, robots and other technological advances. Biotech will improve our health. Basically everything is going to get better. I hate to break that bad news to you.
Source? I’m pretty sure 3.1 degree warming would change the weather patterns to a point where our global food supply chain would collapse. Considering the global temperature changes that have occurred already at our 1.5. Also are you aware of the energy cost of AI? If not you should look into how high and therefore unsustainable it is. Less materials per unit of product does not take into account the increase in total products sold therefore still increasing overall materials consumed. I desperately wish what you said could be true but unfortunately I don’t think we’re getting out of this mess.
Just read the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Not the summary, constructed by zealots, but the actual analyses and projections. No cataclysm projected there. Growth, instead.
Read Bjørn Lomberg
"Dematerialization is ongoing in almost every field, using less resources per unit of product." Isn't this just called "shrinkflation"? Also the Jevons Paradox suggests that efficiency gains don't lead to reduced consumption overall. Fossil fuels are pretty much done. Their cost will only increase exponentially until they are unaffordable and most sources will be economically unviable. Nuclear can never be scaled up enough for global energy demand, and anyway its economic viability is dependent on cheap fossil fuels. Nuclear I believe is supplemental and not a primary source. There is no such thing as "clean burning" this is just propaganda. Technology is dependent on and a product of cheap fossil fuel energy as everything else is. The electricity demands of increasing server farms and AI technology will also increase exponentially, "Integrating AI into existing tools like internet search engines may result in a tenfold increase in electricity demand", "AI model efficiency improvements could lead to a surge in computational power demand by up to 10,000 times", " Power demand from generative AI is expected to increase at an annual average of 70% through 2027". All unsustainable in the long-term. Technology isn't a magic elixir, and there is no hidden technological miracle waiting around the corner that can sustain exponential growth forever, no matter what the cornucopians tell you. You're ignoring basic physics. We're already consuming nearly 2x the worlds resources, and due to the way exponential growth functions, even adding another 2 planets worth of resources would only delay the peak by a few decades and lead to an even sharper decline. Go back to the drawing board, lol.
Fossil fuels WRONG, your entire thesis is bass akwards
Huh?
Thanks again for some really excellent work. Interested in your thoughts regarding a long-tailed collapse taking place over centuries. My conception is that this is not possible due to many issues you've already raised and some more also. Leibig's Law suggests that, like the game Jenga I play with my nephews, collapse of one vital element changes the state of the whole, and this seems to be borne out in physics, chemistry, biology and ecology and sometimes also in the social sciences.
All important information. You may want to discuss what people may want to do in response.
Deep Adaptation is an approach.
https://medium.com/@jylterps/joining-together-as-imperial-modernity-breaks-book-review-and-essay-with-excerpts-75599918206a
I am not a scientist nor a financial expert, so my questions may seem too elemental. Regarding all the graphs and projections here, do they mean that we are experiencing exponential growth, in consumption, industrial output, and population, which are needed to sustain our current industrialized lives; but continuing that growth will collapse our economy, and thus viability to survive? Considering population growth and less resources, should civilization return to more basic, sustainable agricultural practices, without industrialized machines? Should there be less automation and machines in general, meaning no more ubiquitous cell phones, screens, motorized vehicles, airplanes, computers, etc.? I am reading Kim Stanley Robinson's book The Ministry for the Future, which began with a horrific description of a Hot House heat wave so severe, people were dying of heat stroke by the thousands, in a very short time period. That appears to be our future. Is there any possible way to avoid a catastrophic end to human life, or will humans, and other living creatures, experience a mass extinction?
Uncheck (physical) growth, based on extraction, is the problem. Symptoms of overshoot are everywhere and we’ve already done irreversible damage. We’re at the peak and only way is down, one way or another. Not collapse necessarily, but big change and decline is coming.
This is a very good and concise breakdown of a very complex, multifaceted problem that so many people are unaware of or wilfully ignore. I especially liked the peak-oil graph, it is an excellent visual representation of what peak-oil experts long predicted as the "bumpy plateau". I never managed to pick up an original copy of Limits to Growth, but Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is an invaluable read for anyone who is interested in this. Dana Meadows work on system dynamics is phenomenal, and people can find some of her lectures on overshoot and collapse, and sustainability on youtube.
I’m not sure for what you’re advocating. Society to dedicate resources before it’s financially feasible? Look, we solve problems when society decides they’re important enough to solve. I agree with you philosophically, but the beauty of e. capitalism is that it works because it’s about our basic instinct. And the projections of 70 years from now are gonna be wrong. Might be better. Might be worse.
Ignore my remark if you like, because I haven’t yet read your post. Saying that, I have saved it ready for reading later, although I suspect anyone who needs 100,000.00 per year is the reason we’re heading for disaster in the first place.
We humans are challenged simply for having everything, in fact we’re not supposed to have everything, and there’s much to say about how learning to live without “things” and comfort, how alone that can and does humble, saving each from inherent fears.
Anything else only produce’s entitlement.
I agree with alot of your premise, although I disagree on the room for debate on (anthropogenic) climate change. We are at least now greening the planet and allowing for harvest yields to increase as a result of the increase in CO2. It is not a pollutant as claimed--it is a vital necessity to life on this planet. It should be treated as such. We are all a product of and consumer of carbon
......
This is not right. Not sure what you mean about "greening the planet", but it takes hundreds of years to generate an inch of topsoil, and we are depleting it faster than it can regenerate, leading to soil degradation and loss of arable land. Which is why we have to increasingly rely on artificial fertilisers produced from fossil fuels like natural gas just to inject nutrients into the soil. Global agriculture is responsible for up to 29% of all CO2 emissions, and a study in the US showed that it takes on average 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy just to produce 1 calorie of food. Without fossil fuels, food production declines. Oil price shocks for instance led to a world food crisis in 2008.
Contrary to what you said, some studies have shown that global crop yields decline by between 10-15% for every degree of planetary warming. On top of that, higher CO2 concentration also severely reduces the nutritional value of food...
"in tests, crops grown at 550ppm (the level expected by around the middle of this century), staple foods such as rice, wheat, maize, and soy had significantly reduced levels of iron, zinc and protein compared to crops grown at todays levels...
several varieties of rice also experience large reductions in B vitamins such as folate and thiamine...
these nutrient shifts would likely push 150-200 million people into having deficiencies of zinc and protein, while exacerbating the existing deficiencies of 1 billion people...
zinc deficiency leads to increased mortality to infectious diseases in children, and protein deficiency leads to increased child mortality as well...
reductions in B vitamins in rice alone, assuming no other reductions in other crops, would lead to an increase of 132 million suffering from folate deficiency which causes anaemia and neural tube defects in infants.
67 million more people would suffer from thiamine deficiency which causes nerve, heart and brain damage
for iron we found that in countries with anaemia rates that are higher than 20%, the most vulnerable populations - 1.4 billion women and children under 5 - would lose at least 4% of their dietary iron because of the co2 effect on crop nutrients. iron deficiency leads to anaemia maternal mortality, increased infant and child mortality, and reduced work capacity."
Like rabbits but much worse.