SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
limits to growth
A Make-or-Break Moment in Humanity's Perilous Journey
The polycrisis marks a historic inflection point in the story of civilization. Once we’re past a rapidly approaching moment, society won’t be able to maintain business as usual, even with significant reforms. The only real solution will be for humanity to inhabit the planet differently.
May 14, 2024
I’ve been watching global trends for a few decades, and have never before seen so many warning lights flash at once. That’s just one reason I’ve concluded that, as of 2024, humanity is at a make-or-break crossroads in its economic, social, and environmental history.
Let’s take a quick look at those warning lights, and see if we can grasp why so many risks are converging at once.
Things Are Deteriorating Fast
Nearly everyone knows that the climate is heating up. But a flurry of alarming recent studies about rapidly warming oceans, climate feedbacks, and tipping points suggest that the rate of warming is suddenly accelerating. Last year was the warmest on record “by far” according to NASA, with the global average temperature leaping above the next-warmest year, 2016, by an unprecedented 0.27 degree F (0.15 degree C). And it’s been revealed that the international community of climate experts, rather than fear-mongering, has actually downplayed the severity of the crisis.
Democracy globally is on life support, most notably in the U.S., but also Britain, Europe, and India.
For years the oceans have been devastated by plastics pollution, overfishing, and the expansion of “dead zones” resulting from fertilizer runoff. But oceans also absorb most of the energy from global warming. Just within the past few months, ocean heating has accelerated dramatically, with temperature records being shattered literally every day.
At the same time, armed conflicts have erupted in Europe and the Middle East. Far from showing signs of resolving themselves, these wars now threaten to intensify, drawing in more countries and combatants. Old alliances are fraying and shifting, make this one of the most perilous moments for global geopolitics in decades.
The global economy is also on a precipice. It’s always volatile, because it rests on an inherently unsteady foundation of shifting relations between natural resource extraction, energy, technology, investment, and labor. The modern economy has come to depend on perpetual growth in order to repay debt, and growth has been enabled primarily by the use of fossil fuels. Those fuels now typically require more extraction effort, due to the ongoing depletion of high-quality conventional resources. The economy has made up for the declining efficiency of its main energy sources by increasingly using debt to fund growth. Recently, total global debt, public and private, has hit a new record, both in terms of dollar amount and (for less industrialized nations) as a percentage of GDP. Meanwhile, the economy faces extraordinary headwinds, including climate impacts, energy challenges inherent in efforts to decarbonize industries, and a new tech revolution centered on artificial intelligence (AI). Technology revolutions are always transformative, but AI is potentially a wrecking ball for both industries and jobs. Tech entrepreneurs love the word “disrupt”; however, disruption on this scale and speed is treacherous.
One of the likely impacts of both AI and climate change is increasing economic Inequality. Over the past few decades, income inequality has risen in wealthy economies and rapidly industrializing economies, which together account for about two-thirds of the world’s population and 85 percent of global GDP. This increase in wealth disparity has been particularly acute in the United States, China, India, and Russia.
A typical macrosocial effect of rising inequality is the destabilization of governance institutions. In democratic societies, extreme inequality erodes trust in leadership and paves the way for takeovers by authoritarian regimes. Political polarization is also driven by conspiracy theories and lack of consensus among major news outlets about basic facts such as election results. As AI begins to ramp up the volume and sophistication of fake news, public consensus may become ever harder to achieve or maintain. Altogether, democracy globally is on life support, most notably in the U.S., but also Britain, Europe, and India. Even in already authoritarian countries like Russia and China, rulers face new challenges from persecuted ethnic minorities, popular dissent, and rival political factions.
We’re also seeing a sea change in the relatively slow-moving realm of demographics. For decades, world population has increased. The percentage rate of growth peaked in the 1970s, but the absolute number of people added per year has continued to hover at around 80 million. The number of humans alive is probably still increasing. But fertility rates are now falling rapidly nearly everywhere—not because everyone has suddenly realized that the world is overpopulated, or because most people have gotten rich (the “demographic transition”), but increasingly because young would-be parents around the world fear for the future and don’t expect to be able to afford to raise children.
Humanity has seen dramatic changes in the past century—world wars, pandemics, the introduction of new technologies, and the growth of new industries. Human population more than doubled, and the world’s geopolitical map was redrawn several times. However, the developments described above, taken together, suggest that the pace of change is about to explode; that change will, in many instances, be destructive to bedrock human institutions; and that change will increasingly elude human efforts to direct or control it. Longstanding growth trends will reverse themselves, making past experience a poor guide for adaptation to unexpected and often frightening ecological, political, and economic events.
And it’s all coming to a head now—i.e., roughly in the period from 2024 through 2030.
We’re Not the Only Ones Who See It This Way
The word “polycrisis” became a buzzword in 2023, and, during the last couple of years, a network of think tanks has sprung up to study the confluence of worrisome global trends. Post Carbon Institute is part of that network, and we’ve contributed to the literature on the polycrisis (in a long-form report and a shorter summary article, as well as other articles and podcasts).
However, we do see things a little differently from some who use the term. Many seem to think the polycrisis is just a rough patch in the inevitable evolution of larger, more powerful, and more technologically sophisticated societies. Human groups have always had problems, say these macro-optimists, but eventually challenges are overcome. In this view, the source of the polycrisis has a lot to do with increasing human connectivity: old problems (geopolitical rivalries, financial panics, and ecological issues) are rebounding on each other faster than before. Humanity just needs to find ways to speed up its responses.
I try to maintain both a systems-oriented view and a deep historical view of the world situation. From these perspectives, the growth trends of the past century are inherently unsustainable. They arose from a series of prior developments (innovations in metallurgy and finance, the introduction of fuel-burning technologies like heat engines, and European colonialism)—but especially the increasing use of fossil fuels. The early results of growth, in the forms of increased wealth and mobility, expanding food production, and rising population numbers, appeared miraculous. However, fuel-based growth is intrinsically self-limiting because of the finite size of nature’s resource base and waste sinks. Increasing consumption and population merely accelerates our overshoot of Earth’s long-term environmental carrying capacity for humans.
I try to maintain both a systems-oriented view and a deep historical view of the world situation. From these perspectives, the growth trends of the past century are inherently unsustainable.
The most important pioneering work in global systems analysis was the “Limits to Growth” computer-based system dynamics project undertaken at MIT in the early 1970s and updated several times since (most recently in 2023). The goal of the project was not to produce a forecast of future events, but to provide a set of scenarios showing likely interactions between resource depletion, pollution, industrial output, food production, and population. The actual evolution of these societal growth drivers, inputs, and outputs has generally followed the “standard run” scenario, in which growth trends continue until the early-to-middle decades of 21st century, but then reverse themselves, initiating decades of decline.
From my perspective, the polycrisis can be seen as an expected foreshock of peaks in resource availability, industrial output, population, and food production. As growth sputters, economic, ecological, and political events will present disturbing surprises on a nearly daily basis.
One of the defining characteristics of a polycrisis, by all accounts, and one of the sources of its surprises, is the increasingly chaotic interactions between system drivers and outputs. For example, as the climate heats up and triggers worsening droughts, heat waves, and storms, resulting waves of refugees will seek to move to places less affected. But rising immigration sometimes leads to more political polarization in host nations, which in turn makes consensus on climate action harder to achieve.
Another example: many efforts to reduce the severity of climate change involve building more renewable energy generation capacity while electrifying industries. The amount of new infrastructure that would be needed in order to phase out fossil fuels altogether, while providing the same energy services as today, would be vast. Building that infrastructure will take energy and raw materials, which will in turn entail mining and transport. So, ironically, efforts to solve one environmental problem (climate change) will likely worsen others (resource depletion and habitat destruction).
These sorts of complex interactions make for wicked problems—i.e., ones whose solution requires sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, or ones that generate still more problems.
The polycrisis marks a historic inflection point in the story of civilization. Once we’re past a rapidly approaching moment, society won’t be able to maintain business as usual, even with significant reforms. The economy will behave according to new rules. Solutions will backfire. And few people will understand why all of this is happening.
New Context, New Strategies
Understanding is vital if we are to avert the worst likely outcomes and lay the groundwork for sustainable societies in the future. Preventing harm requires us to anticipate coming shocks to our communities as much as we can, both so that we can protect ourselves and our loved ones, and so we can promote and model more sustainable ways of living.
Given the momentum of events, it’s easy to become fatalistic, and to conclude that nothing we do matters. But, in fact, there’s much we can do to adapt positively to the polycrisis. More than ever before, it’s important to undertake strategic efforts to save nature and culture. We can do that by identifying and pursuing “no regrets” (or “multisolving”) strategies such as restoring nature as a way to capture and store carbon.
Given the momentum of events, it’s easy to become fatalistic, and to conclude that nothing we do matters. But, in fact, there’s much we can do to adapt positively to the polycrisis.
At the core personal level, we all yearn to find meaning in what’s happening, and to make our lives a contribution to others, rather than a burden. That requires finding our place within the networks of restorative thinkers and activists around the world, and finding our unique voice.
Sometimes it means learning more about what’s going wrong, without jumping immediately to the first “solution” that presents itself. As Donna Haraway puts it, we must “stay with the trouble.” That’s often uncomfortable, and it’s why many people merely seek escape—which usually takes the form of either fatalism or techno-optimism.
Fatalism is certainly no help. It just leads to depression and irrelevance.
More people take the route of techno-optimism, but that’s typically just a path to delusion, since it rests on a mis-diagnosis of the polycrisis. Our essential human problem is not that we’ve somehow chosen the wrong (i.e., fossil-fuel based) set of technologies, while another set (that’s renewable-energy based) will fix everything. Our problem is that a momentary energy bonanza has enabled humanity to grow its population and consumption levels far beyond what’s sustainable long-term. The only real solution will be for humanity to inhabit the planet differently. That will require vision, persuasion, and time; and the adaptation process will have to proceed in the context of societal and ecological breakdown.
We’re here for the journey, like it or not, so let’s stay with the trouble, understand as much of the situation and its possible remedies as we can, and do what we can to minimize the suffering of humanity and other species now and throughout the period of polycrisis and adaptation.
Keep ReadingShow Less
We've Been Warned: Infinite Growth Can't Continue on This Finite Planet
There’s big trouble ahead and we won’t be able to say that no one saw it coming.
Apr 29, 2024
Something must be up. Otherwise, why would scientists keep sending us those scary warnings? There has been a steady stream of them in the past few years, including “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” (signed by 15,000 of them), “Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of Waste,” “Scientists’ Warning of an Imperiled Ocean,” “Scientists’ Warning on Technology,” “Scientists’ Warning on Affluence,” “Climate Change and the Threat to Civilization,” and even “The Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”
Clearly, there’s big trouble ahead and we won’t be able to say that no one saw it coming. In fact, a warning of ecological calamity that made headlines more than 50 years ago is looking all too frighteningly prescient right now.
In 1972, a group of MIT scientists published a book, The Limits to Growth, based on computer simulations of the world economy from 1900 to 2100. It plotted out trajectories for the Earth’s and humanity’s vital signs, based on several scenarios. Even so long ago, those researchers were already searching for policy paths that might circumvent the planet’s ecological limits and so avoid economic or even civilizational collapse. In every scenario, though, their simulated future world economies eventually ran into limits — resource depletion, pollution, crop failures — that triggered declines in industrial output, food production, and population.
In what they called “business-as-usual” scenarios, the level of human activity grew for decades, only to peak and eventually plummet toward collapse (even in ones that included rapid efficiency improvements). In contrast, when they used a no-growth scenario, the global economy and population declined but didn’t collapse. Instead, industrial and food production both leveled off on lower but steady-state paths.
Growth and Its Limits
Why should we even be interested in half-century-old simulations carried out on clunky, ancient mainframe computers? The answer: because we’re now living out those very simulations. The Limits to Growth analysis forecast that, with business-as-usual, production would grow for five decades before hitting its peak sometime in the last half of the 2020s (here we come!). Then decline would set in. And sure enough, we now have scientists across a range of disciplines issuing warnings that we’re perilously close to exactly that turnaround point.
This year, a simulation using an updated version of The Limits to Growth model showed industrial production peaking just about now, while food production, too, could hit a peak soon. Like the 1972 original, this updated analysis foresees distinct declines on the other side of those peaks. As the authors caution, although the precise trajectory of decline remains unpredictable, they are confident that “the excessive consumption of resources… is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.” Their concluding remarks are even more chilling:
“As a society, we have to admit that, despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society.”
What is America doing today to break out of such a doomed trajectory and into a more sustainable one? The answer, sadly, is nothing, or rather, worse than nothing. On climate, for example, the most important immediate need is to end the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, something not even being considered by Washington policymakers in the country that hit record oil production and record natural gas exports in 2023. Even a quarter-century from now, wind and solar energy sources together are forecast to account for only about one-third of U.S. electricity generation, with 56% of it still being supplied by gas, coal, and nuclear power.
Now, it appears that rising electrical demand will delay the transition away from gas and coal even further. According to a recent report by the Washington Post’s Evan Halper, power utilities in Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and a host of other states are feeling the proverbial heat from exploding electricity consumption. Analysts in Georgia have, for instance, increased by 17-fold their estimate of the generation capacity that the state will require 10 years from now.
Such an imbalance between energy demand and supply is anything but unprecedented and the source of the problem is obvious. As successful as American industry has been in developing new technologies for generating energy, it has been even more successful at developing new products that consume energy. Much of the current rise in demand, for instance, can be attributed to companies working on artificial intelligence (AI) and other power-hungry computational activities. The usual suspects — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — have been on data-center building sprees, as have many other outfits, especially cryptocurrency-mining operations.
Northern Virginia is currently home to 300 football-field-sized data centers, with more on the way, and there’s already a shortage of locally generated electricity. To keep those servers humming, electric utilities will be crisscrossing the state with hundreds of miles of new transmission lines plugged into four coal-fired power stations in West Virginia and Maryland. Plans were once in the works to shutter those plants. Now, they’ll be kept operating indefinitely. The result: millions more tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrous oxides released into the atmosphere annually.
And the digital world’s energy appetite will only grow. The research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that if Google were to deploy generative AI in response to every Internet search request, a half-million advanced data servers consuming 30 billion kilowatt hours annually — the equivalent of Ireland’s national electricity consumption — would be required. (For comparison, Google’s total electricity consumption now is “only” about 18 billion kilowatt hours.)
How are Google and Microsoft planning to weather an energy crisis significantly of their own making? They certainly won’t back off their plans to provide ever more new services that hardly anyone asked for (one of which, AI, according to its own top developers, could even bring about the collapse of civilization before climate change gets the chance). Rather, reports Halper, those tech giants are “hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site.” Oh, great.
It’s the Wealth, Stupid
The problem doesn’t lie solely with data servers. During 2021–2022, companies announced plans to construct 155 new factories in the United States, many of them to produce electric vehicles, data-processing equipment, and other products guaranteed to suck from the electrical grid for years to come. The broader trend toward the “electrification of everything” will keep lots more fossil-fueled power plants running long past their expiration dates. In December 2023, the firm GridStrategies reported that planners have almost doubled their forecast for the expansion of the national grid — probably an underestimate, they noted, given the rise in demand for charging electric vehicles, producing fuel for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and running heat pumps and induction stoves in millions more American homes. Meanwhile, increasingly hot summers could trigger a 30%-60% increase in power use for air-conditioning.
In short, this sort of indefinite expansion of the U.S. and global economy into the distant future is doomed to fail, but not before it’s crippled our ecological and social systems. In its 2024 Global Resources Outlook, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that humanity’s annual consumption of physical resources had grown more than threefold in the half-century since The Limits to Growth was published. Indeed, resource extraction is now rising faster than the Human Development Index, a standard measure of well-being. In other words, overextraction and overproduction while producing staggering wealth aren’t benefiting the rest of us.
UNEP stressed that the need to deeply curtail extraction and consumption applies mainly to wealthy nations and the affluent classes globally. It noted that high-income countries, the United States among them, consume six times the mass of material resources per person as low-income ones. The disparity in per-person climate impacts is even greater, a tenfold difference between rich and poor. In other words, wealth and climate impact are inextricably linked. The share of recent global growth in gross domestic product captured by the most affluent 1% of households was nearly twice as large as the share that trickled down to the other 99%. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 1% also produced wildly disproportionate quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition, societies with a wide rich-poor divide have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy, according to British epidemiology professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In a March commentary for Nature, they wrote, “Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.” In addition, their research shows that more egalitarian societies have significantly less severe impacts on nature. The higher the degree of inequality, the poorer the performance when it comes to air pollution, waste recycling, and carbon emissions.
The message is clear: curtailing ecological breakdown while improving humanity’s quality of life requires banishing the material extravagance of the world’s richest people, especially the growing crew of global billionaires. That would, however, have to be part of a much broader effort to rid affluent societies of the systemic overextraction and overproduction that threaten to be our global undoing.
Phase Out and Degrow
Old-fashioned computer simulations and present-day realities are, it seems, speaking to us in unison, warning that civilization itself is in danger of collapse. Growth — whether expressed as more dollars accumulated, more tons of material stuff produced, more carbon burned, or more wastes emitted — is coming to an end. The only question is: Will it happen as a collapse of society, or could the reversal of material growth be undertaken rationally in ways that would avoid a descent into a Mad Max-style conflict of all against all?
Increasing numbers of advocates for the latter path are working under the banner of “degrowth.” In his 2018 book Degrowth, Giorgos Kallis described it as “a trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or well-being, improves” in a fashion both “non-exploitative and radically egalitarian.”
In the past few years, the degrowth movement has — how else to put it? — grown, and quickly, too. Once a subject for a handful of mainly European academics, it’s become a broader movement challenging the injustices of capitalism and “green growth.” It’s the subject of hundreds of articles in academic journals, including the new Degrowth Journal, and a stack of books (including the captivating Who’s Afraid of Degrowth?). A 2023 survey of 789 climate researchers found almost three-quarters of them favoring degrowth or no-growth over green growth.
In a 2022 Naturearticle, eight degrowth scholars listed policies they believe should guide affluent societies in the future. Those include reducing less-necessary material production and energy consumption, converting to workers’ ownership, shortening working hours, improving and universalizing public services, redistributing economic power, and prioritizing grassroots social and political movements.
Could such policies ever become a reality in the United States, and if so, how? Clearly, the private businesses that dominate our economy would never tolerate policies aimed at shrinking material production or their profit margins (nor would the federal government we know today). Nevertheless, if more enlightened lawmakers and policymakers ever took control (hard as that may be to imagine), they might indeed head off the societal and environmental collapses now distinctly underway. The most effective pressure points for doing so would, I suspect, be the oil and gas wells and coal mines that now power such destruction.
As a start — unbelievable as it might seem in our present world — Washington would have to nationalize the fossil-fuel industry and put a nationwide, no-matter-what cap on the number of barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, and tons of coal allowed out of the ground and into the economy, with that cap ratcheting briskly downward year by year. The buildup of wind, solar, and other non-fossil energy would, of course, be unable to keep pace with such a speedy suppression of fuel supplies. So, America would have to go on an energy diet, while the production of unnecessary, wasteful goods and services would have to be quickly reduced.
And yet the government would need to ensure that the economy continued to satisfy everyone’s most basic needs. That would require a comprehensive industrial policy directing energy and material resources ever more toward the production of essential goods and services. Such policies would rule out AI, bitcoin, and other energy gluttons that exist only to generate wealth for the few while undermining humanity’s prospects for a decent future. Meanwhile, price controls would be needed to ensure that all households had enough electricity and fuel.
My colleague Larry Edwards and I have been arguing for years that such a framework, what we’ve called “Cap and Adapt” is a necessity not for some distant future, but now. Similar federal policies for adapting to material resource limitations worked well in World War II-era America. Unfortunately, we live — to say the least — in a very different political world today. (Just ask one of this country’s 756 billionaires!) If there was ever a chance that a national industrial policy, price controls, and rationing could, as in the 1940s, be passed into law, that chance has sadly vanished — at least for the near future.
Fortunately, though, the international situation looks brighter. A burgeoning, vigorous movement is pushing for the two initial actions that would be essential to avoid the worst of climate chaos and societal collapse: the nationalization of, and a rapid phaseout of, fossil fuels in the affluent world. Those could turn out to be humanity’s first steps toward degrowth and a truly livable future. But the world would need to act fast.
And no excuses, okay? We’ve been given fair warning.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular