129 comments on Our World Is Finite: The Implications of Resource Limitations
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Ditto, airdale!
I keep saying that if we want to avoid outright extinction, then we WILL be ending up with a zero-growth sustainable economy built on a 100% renewable resource base. There simply is no other alternative, whether we like it or not.
Knowing where we are heading, the only useful questions worth discussing involve: how to get to there from here? Or, since we WILL be getting there one way or another, more specifically: how to get there in the least painful and distressing way possible?
Growth might have been fun, for those who benefited from it, while it lasted. It's had a good run, but the fat lady is singing now, and it's time to go home.
and Ditto WNC!
Might be interesting to graph the increase in disparity of incomes in the world against the growth of things like population, CO2 etc or against the decrease in things like general personal satisfaction with life.
Vancouver in the 50's and 60's was a pretty slow growth place and the greatest city in the world to live in IMO. After Expo in the 80's it turned into a great investment area and just another city to get out of.
WNC Observer,
I agree we need to get to a zero-growth sustainable economy. For now we can use non-renewable resources, but these will deplete over time.
I wish we didn't have so many problems to deal with simultaneously, including:
- Soon to be declining fossil fuels
- A monetary system that needs growth to continue
- Global warming
- Fresh water shortages
- Soil problems
- Serious balance of payment problems (import more than we export)
- A debt system that is out of control
- Population overshoot
- Elected officials who are unwilling to deal with the situation
If we only had one problem, the task of trying to fix it might be reasonable. As we discover more and more problems, it is harder to see how one might find a solution and implement it on a broad scale. Relocalization would work much better as a solution if we had a stable climate, higher water tables, and fewer people.
Yes, we need to get to zero growth sustainability but I now think this is unlikely. Just reading many of the comments in this and other TOD posts, it is clear that even those who understand the threat posed by resource depletion still hope for some technological solution to just the energy problem, without regard for what continued growth has done to our world. The latest GEO report from the UN (actually from 390 scientists, reviewed by a thousand others) shows continued degradation of our planet in the face of continued economic prosperity and population growth. Everyone wants to find a solution but no-one wants to do anything about it.
So long as we continue to use resources beyond their renewal rates and continue to emit waste materials faster than the rest of nature can deal with them, there is no way we can head for a soft landing, no matter how many substitutions we make for the resources that are already running out.
WNC, you have expressed the exact same points Hubbert did in his 1976 paper "Exponential growth as a transient phenomenon in human history" at http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/wwf1976/
"we are now in a period of transition between a past ... and a future also characterized by slow rates of change, but by means of utilization of the world's largest source of energy, that of inexhaustible sunshine," (by which Hubbert was referring to both direct and indirect utilization of sunshine, i.e. including hydro, wind and bio.)
"It appears therefore that one of the foremost problems confronting humanity today is how to make the transition from the precarious state that we are now in to this optimum future state by a least catastrophic progression. Our principal impediments at present ... are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of nongrowth."
I also suggest reading his 1949 work "Energy from fossil fuels" at
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/science1949/
Notably, on page 108 he repeatedly raises the possibility of future "cultural degeneration" (predicting a Mad Max scenario in 1949!) whereby the final steady state could end up being roughly the pre-industrial one.