I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot of modern democratic republics are about 200 years old, or less, but we keep thinking to ourselves, "this civilization will be different".
I'd put money on BAU2 over CT any day of the week.
The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability. There is much we currently discard or do not cultivate because it not what we traditionally see as food and because there is no cost incentive to encourage a change in culture. Changes can however occur given the right triggers, like how large portion of Europe went over to potatoes during the European 19th century population boom. We could see a similar change in food culture towards seaweed if topsoil issues became widespread, and there is plenty of space for technological improvements in aquaculture.
Similar, fresh water is primarily a cost issue. Right now the only economical method to provide water at the lowest cost is to take naturally occurring fresh water. There are alternatives. It does not take a lot of solar, wind or nuclear power plants to supply a large city population with fresh water extracted from the ocean. The construction and operational costs would however be need to be taken from something else, reducing welfare and industrial output.
It's not that silly to model as historically that has also happened. To use the "peak oil" example this work also influenced, the technology of fossil oil reserves was a response in part to "peak whale" (not a joke). The main source much commercial 'oil' for things like Street lamps in the 1800s was whale blubber. As whales got overfished fossilised oil reserves were developed and not only took over those markets but created many many new ones.
You can of course make the point fossilised oil is worse for global warming etc but from the point of view of the economy and population growth fossilised oil was much better than whale.
I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow.
Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually results in negative outcomes for a lot of people.
But you're taking the already discovered "magic bullets" for granted...and are essentially acting like the next one is impossible even though they happen on a semi-regular basis. Science is simply an on-going collection of realizations where the latest realization is considered the end-all-be-all...until it isn't.
The reason they are considered "magic bullets" is because they involve game-changing shifts in technology that couldn't easily be conceived beforehand. Just look at the traveling salesman problem for a sample as to how a handful of input options could output a massive amount of output combinations. Every so often, one of those output combinations turns into a game-changer...then we have people spewing a new version of the rhetoric stated here.
It's not counting on a magic bullet that concerning, it's the overconfidence we understand all the variables in the system(s). That is, we act as if there are no significant unknowns. Unprecedented, global scale, and unknowns all go hand in hand.
Even in a Covid 19 aware world there's still a fair amount of denial about the complexity of the global economy. What happens if dissent - not co-operation - increases? It can certainly be argued that both invasions of Afghanistan were for resources. Suddened the gears will shift and world leaders are going to stick to peaceful cooperation?
Put another way, as stress in the systems begin to surface it seems unlikely humans will remain rational and broadly organized. The social fabric will likely breakdown before anything else. Trying to predict the future is difficult enough. Add to that, human emotional / psychological response to extremes - real as well as perceived - and all the models / scenarios mentioned in the article could end badly.
it's fundamentally confounding to me that more people don't seem to come to this conclusion. I would love to hear a reasonable argument from someone in this cohort, because I'm willing to accept that my intuition is flawed, and I just can't see how.
> This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change.
Who says we haven't thought of it? There are plenty of candidates technologies, like moving food production into cities via vertical farms so top soil erosion is irrelevant. Lab grown is on the short-term horizon as well (5-10 years).
Water shortages are a non-issue, as we have an abundance of water. Certainly desalinated water is more expensive than water from fresh lakes and rivers, but it's becoming more cost effective, and if water increases in price, they'll meet somewhere and level off.
Climate change might be a challenge, but people will simply move away from the areas where it's no longer cost effective to live, at the very least because it's no longer cost effective to run businesses there due to insurance premiums.
The "Comprehensive Tech" model isn't too far fetched. It requires some disruptive changes, but not too drastic. Errors bars are wide due to climate change though, since it's effects are still unpredictable.
> we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of
Surely there are in fact, many technologies that we have thought of, that could help in a number of ways, if only we could realize them as practical and/or get them adopted in terms of politics and the economy.
There's a number of technologies and traits that, if adopted en-masse, would definitely reduce our energy and material consumption and extend the sustainability of our planet.
Stop eating meat, extended warranties in home products and designing goods in a way they can be easily repaired, led bulbs, better insulation for buildings, solar water heaters, heat pumps, bicycles...
We could easily consume a fifth of the resources we use now and be as happy if twenty selected things were banned in the world. But we live in a capitalist world, there's only hope in people taking the initiative.
I kinda believe about a few tech based `deii-ex machina` but to me the most potent tool for solving this is just stop following consumerism. If all urban dwellers stopped using cars, and spent more times doing simpler activities, you'd have less importations, less consumption.. maybe this time can be used on fixing house energy expenditures, renewing biosphere a bit. We're sitting on a 8Billions man hour bucket.
Which is why we should push for the stable world (SW) scenario, rather than gambling with our collective future on something that is not a sure bet.
Why do all climate policies currently being adopted allow increased carbon emissions and assume we will have carbon capture technologies to negate them right in the nick of time? This is the kind of irresponsible behaviour that we usually see only in addicts or psychopaths. How are we allowing this?
It's probably a horizon thing. Over millenia BAU would have been totally off, 50 or 100 years - not clear to me. Should be historically testable, i.e. mean and median time between larger changes. I suspect that in the last 300 years it accelerated a lot on the tech AND social side.
I disagree with this take on why this model was there. I understood it as it being there to illustrate what it _would_ take to avoid a societal catastrophe. This is helpful, because it shows that we won’t avoid it!
I don’t know man, the human race makes great technological leaps, or rather leaps in understanding that allow new technology. And nobody can really predict that. It’s almost like your Einsteins, Newtons, Boltzmanns, Maxwells Paulis and Plancks had some kind 2-way channel with divinity. Even though we all stand on the shoulders of giants, sometimes a new giant appears out of the ether. And there’s no doubt we’re done. I saw a 60minutes where an air force pilot dead ass states that they saw a tic-tac lookin ufo churn water in the Pacific Ocean before basically teleporting away, only to be relocated 60 miles later. There’s more for us to know,
even if that air force crew (there were more than 1 witnesses) were all just tripping on peyote.
When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me.
I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting discussions about what we thought we knew.
Now I’m in my 30s and my thought has changed drastically. I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.
> The study of complex systems regards collective, or system-wide, behaviors as the fundamental object of study; for this reason, complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradigm to reductionism, which attempts to explain systems in terms of their constituent parts and the individual interactions between them.
> I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.
That sounds very much like what FA Hayek called “the presence of knowledge” and warned us of in his 1974 Nobel acceptance speech [1]. Maybe you are an Austrian after all. ;)
One thing that people underestimate with Malthusian thinking is that we live in a dynamic system. The amount of oil that is "out there" is connected to the oil price. Sometimes that supply effect of higher prices is limited (we are, potentially, seeing this with copper) but if you are projecting linear trends, you don't understand economics (and btw, this was the issue with the original Limits to Growth and almost all of these studies...for some reason, people who are attracted to this problem spend more time fooling around with their toy models rather than just talking to someone in mining or O&G).
That being said, it is equally true that very few people who study economics actually ask basic questions about how and why economic growth occurs. Economic growth is just energy consumption. That is it (whether humans burning food or oil or gas or whatever, the industrial revolution was about unlocking energy for production...note, this plays no role in Solow growth). And if you build a system which is unable to improve efficiency than that process is logically finite (but, as in paragraph one, no-one knows how finite...you can do all the computer simulations you want, no-one knows...a good example of this is shale oil, Russia has unfathomably large resources of shale oil...everyone knew it was there but it didn't matter until fracking, peak oil was a mania).
So I don't think anyone is really asking the right questions. It is really simple: do we want free energy? Do we want to improve the efficiency of our energy use? Even if climate change wasn't happening, we would need to look at solar/wind/whatever (and, hopefully, this will lead to a new industrial revolution). Imo, population control is also important. We can improve energy use but population will just grow to fill the space (and part of the problem is here actually poor quality elder care and weak pension systems caused by low savings rates). Obv, population control isn't popular anymore but...it makes sense once you understand economic growth.
> There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action.
Individually humans are hard to predict... but a flock of humans might not be so hard to predict :)
That said: it's easy to underestimate the power of economics. Once natural resources becomes expensive, we'll find ways to minimize, recycle and migrate to renewable resources.
The Austrian view of economics (and of human philosophy), when I finally sat down and read through the material, made so much sense to me and deeply affected me. It clarified several things I had been feeling about the world that I couldn’t fully comprehend, and made me feel much less stressed and more content.
The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end of the world” views that are prevalent everywhere.
Someone once said: If you are a teen and you aren't a lefty, you have no heart. And if you are in your 30'S and you are still a lefty, you have no brain.
Many travel along those lines.
And in analogy to this, I am very optimistic about the future, because the resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite.
There is no peak oil.
There is no peak food.
There is no peak climate.
There is no water.
It's all bullshit doomer porn.
> In many ways, this scenario is even gloomier than BAU, and many say that it predicts the dire outcome of allowing climate change to go unchecked.
But if they are using the same World3 model, created in 1972, with a single variable representing "pollution", then surely it's just a coincidence if the effects of climate change end up modelled correctly.
The climate is a non-linear system, and there certainly weren't good models for its influence on / from the economy back in 1972. If the model (even just the updated one) has managed to include some universal physical law that can predict the aggregate of the interactions between the global climate and economy, then that deserves much more attention than the clickbait "societal collapse" prediction.
I thought that "pollution" chart showing it dropping off sharply in all scenarios (due either to clean technology or societal collapse) were unlikely. If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should) then it's very hard to get it back out of the air, especially in a short timeframe. So in all cases the pollution line ends up in a steady state at roughly wherever society either weaned itself from fossil fuels or collapsed.
Even a sin(x) function can be approximated as a line for small values of x. Potentially the predictions will start to diverge as feedback loops come into effect?
Wow, actually slightly shocked how seriously this model seems to be taken or, at least, how sticky it is.
Coefficients, dynamics, number of entities involved, stationarity. There are so many unknowns and so many reasons to believe incomplete understanding could scupper predictions...
I know everyone likes to believe themselves to be a good Fermi estimator. But trying to model the world beyond 2050 when the weather a month from now is a hard problem. Well, let's say it's Quixotic at best.
Which makes me think the model isn't actually under discussion here, it's just all our priors about how much we fancy technology as a solution or not etc.
> One reason for this is that in Herrington’s words, “the scenarios do not significantly diverge until 2020.” After that point, the scenarios start to diverge drastically ...
This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020 or later.
I.e., the fact that these models start to diverge around "now" doesn't mean we're nearing some ominous inflection point - it's just a consequence of "hindsight is 20/20."
> But those of us who knew the DYNAMO language in which the simulation was written and those who took the model apart line-by-line quickly realized that we had to deal with an exercise in misinformation and obfustication rather than with a model delivering valuable insights. I was particularly astonished by the variables labelled Nonrenewable Resources and Pollution. Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.[7]:168
Yes, world3 is meant as a simulation exercise that is sometimes taken too seriously. But even its critics consider that the conclusions of the model are valid. Here is the continuation of your quote:
> He does however consider continuous growth in world GDP a problem:
Only the widespread scientific illiteracy and innumeracy—all you need to know in this case is how to execute the equation y=x*e^{rt} prevents most of the people from dismissing the idea of sustainable growth at healthy rates as an oxymoronic stupidity whose pursuit is, unfortunately, infinitely more tragic than comic. After all, even cancerous cells stop growing once they have destroyed the invaded tissues.[7]:338–339
Models like this are as much about understanding the dynamics as making specific predictions.
A key dynamic that impressed me from LtG is that as pollution accumulates, you spend more and more of your resources dealing with the damage, and less making the sort of investments you used to make. But things can still carry on just fine, until suddenly the bottom drops out.
Since we're already dealing with significant damage from greenhouse gases, I find that a little disturbing.
Doom scrolled about halfway down. I'm a bit flabbergasted by all the esoteric commentary when we have a real life example of this happening right now in South Africa.
Everyone: We were wrong about peak oil! Models aren't always right!
Me: Couldn't our models be wrong in the wrong direction?
Is the burden of proof to do nothing until it's scientifically definitive for societal collapse? Or is the burden to intervene until it's definitive that there is no risk of societal collapse (even if our models underestimate).
My suspicion is that skepticism has morphed into denialism in general. We’re seemingly at a point where any assertion will get attacked so many times that eventually even chimps on keyboards would come up with a reasonably credible (seeming) critique despite having no deep knowledge of the original point or underlying system.
The first thing I wondered about these comments is how often "Peak Oil" would be mentioned. There has been no peak oil related crash. I think the world's economy and markets are now resilient enough to safely say 'peak oil' will never be a cause for the collapse of civilization. Rising energy prices will just usher out the age of fossil fuels faster.
I now wonder what happens when (if?) we get to 'net 0' (which hasn't been mentioned in these comments). If we can reach a point of unlimited, renewable, clean energy that's (almost) too cheap to meter, that just upends any model because it'll zero out factors that are parts of or 'limits' in those models.
- Lack of fresh water: solved by free/clean energy (desalinization)
- Lack of adequate food supply: solved by free/clean energy (fertilizer production)
- Lack of resources: potentially solved by free/clean energy (asteroid farming? recycling?)
It's hard to imagine a problem that unlimited, clean energy won't help solve.
The cost to build and maintain powerplants is expensive - whether it's solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear. This cost needs to be amortized over the life of the plant. It's hard to imagine this getting to less than $0.05 / kWh.
Construction costs alone make Nuclear Energy cost ~$0.08 / kWh even in China where construction is relatively cheap. Even if we get Fusion energy, AFAIK it's unlikely the construction will be substantially cheaper.
Obviously if anything was free - people would abuse it. You would need to build endless powerplants (which cost money) to provide free energy for people to launch rockets and mine asteroids and produce fertilizer and desalinate water...
Each of these predict food production will decline starting soon, although the optimistic ones forecast a recovery in production. Any idea why the imminent decline in food production in all cases?
It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever.
[edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by “pollution” but seems to be positively affected by industrial output. The dip in food production is mostly dependent on the shape of the pollution curve.
I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think.
Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built.
I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject.
It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.
We thought we would hit 'peak oil' in the 1980's but then we learned to drill in deep water.
When we learned to make fuel from Oilsands, the world's reserves tripled.
When we learned to drill sideways, it grew.
When we learned how to make more efficient use of the tapping, it grew.
This notion of 'finite resources' is a very bad constraint. Obviously there are limits but we adapt quickly.
If we decided to use 1980's style Nuclear Reactors - we could power the world for 10 000 years using known reserves. And it would be clean.
Trees? We grow them. Metal? We recycle. Even soil we are starting to figure out sustainably.
There are very few hard limits we're facing on that front.
Chocolate and Cork might run in short supply but that means we kind spend our folly money on 'pure chocolate' as a delicacy instead of NFT's and we just can't have proper wine corks.
'Societal Collapse' won't come from resource extraction, it will come from warring ideologues in a population of materially satiated plebes who have too much time on their hands and so they argue over the meaning of words until someone tries and actual coup and it comes apart from there.
The article says that the various predictions are equally good fits because they don't diverge much by 2020. If in 1972 researchers came up with multiple models that all predicted pretty much the same thing over fifty years, but then wildly diverge over the subsequent fifty years, that alone is problematic.
Limits to Growth predicted we'd run out of oil by 1995, 2005, or at their most optimistic, 2022. Not peak oil -- out of oil. Similarly we were supposed to be out of gold by 2001 at the latest.
Food and services are both supposed to be peaking right now -- 2020 -- and going into rapid decline.
There was little reason to give credence to LtG even by the '80s, but by now it should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
Scanning through the book, this line jumped out at me: "If on average 5% of the population dies each year..." then the average lifespan is 20 years and humanity is doomed. That's their point, but I don't think that's how they intended to make it. That's just careless. They also happily extrapolated exponential curves for population, per capita gdp, etc.
>The original study and subsequent research was funded by the Club of Rome, a European organization focused on solving the larger problems facing humanity.
Ah yes, our benevolent overlords who have selflessly offered themselves up as our technocratic central planners. Such premises should at least inspire mild curiosity or skepticism from readers.
>The classical case against population growth was expressed in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, the British economist and country parson who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second."
...
>Or so it would appear, except for the following embarrassing fact: "Population has never increased geometrically," says Simon. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."
Is it annoying that people keep submitting "paywalled" Medium URLs to HN. This one is a re-cycled story first available from other sites that do not try to annoy readers into signing up.^1 Wonder if Dana Levine made some coin from Medium by submitting her medium.com hosted blog post URL to HN and hitting the front page.
Also this press release video (no background music) re: the report to the Club of Rome released as a paperback titled "Extracted" that is referenced in the article. The "tech" industry relies heavily on minerals extraction. It is alleged by the author that 10% of the world's energy production is consumed by minerals extraction. How much of that comes from fossil fuels.
I agree, Medium is pretty annoying to use as a reader. And for some strange reason, it doesn't work with Firefox's "reader view". I don't understand why people keep using this platform.
[+] [-] hoppyhoppy2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjohnson318|4 years ago|reply
I'd put money on BAU2 over CT any day of the week.
[+] [-] belorn|4 years ago|reply
Similar, fresh water is primarily a cost issue. Right now the only economical method to provide water at the lowest cost is to take naturally occurring fresh water. There are alternatives. It does not take a lot of solar, wind or nuclear power plants to supply a large city population with fresh water extracted from the ocean. The construction and operational costs would however be need to be taken from something else, reducing welfare and industrial output.
[+] [-] tanbog4|4 years ago|reply
You can of course make the point fossilised oil is worse for global warming etc but from the point of view of the economy and population growth fossilised oil was much better than whale.
[+] [-] swman|4 years ago|reply
Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually results in negative outcomes for a lot of people.
I’m not sure how we can solve that.
[+] [-] jb775|4 years ago|reply
The reason they are considered "magic bullets" is because they involve game-changing shifts in technology that couldn't easily be conceived beforehand. Just look at the traveling salesman problem for a sample as to how a handful of input options could output a massive amount of output combinations. Every so often, one of those output combinations turns into a game-changer...then we have people spewing a new version of the rhetoric stated here.
I'd put my money on the game-changer.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|4 years ago|reply
Even in a Covid 19 aware world there's still a fair amount of denial about the complexity of the global economy. What happens if dissent - not co-operation - increases? It can certainly be argued that both invasions of Afghanistan were for resources. Suddened the gears will shift and world leaders are going to stick to peaceful cooperation?
Put another way, as stress in the systems begin to surface it seems unlikely humans will remain rational and broadly organized. The social fabric will likely breakdown before anything else. Trying to predict the future is difficult enough. Add to that, human emotional / psychological response to extremes - real as well as perceived - and all the models / scenarios mentioned in the article could end badly.
[+] [-] pksebben|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naasking|4 years ago|reply
Who says we haven't thought of it? There are plenty of candidates technologies, like moving food production into cities via vertical farms so top soil erosion is irrelevant. Lab grown is on the short-term horizon as well (5-10 years).
Water shortages are a non-issue, as we have an abundance of water. Certainly desalinated water is more expensive than water from fresh lakes and rivers, but it's becoming more cost effective, and if water increases in price, they'll meet somewhere and level off.
Climate change might be a challenge, but people will simply move away from the areas where it's no longer cost effective to live, at the very least because it's no longer cost effective to run businesses there due to insurance premiums.
The "Comprehensive Tech" model isn't too far fetched. It requires some disruptive changes, but not too drastic. Errors bars are wide due to climate change though, since it's effects are still unpredictable.
[+] [-] retrac|4 years ago|reply
Surely there are in fact, many technologies that we have thought of, that could help in a number of ways, if only we could realize them as practical and/or get them adopted in terms of politics and the economy.
[+] [-] ktzar|4 years ago|reply
Stop eating meat, extended warranties in home products and designing goods in a way they can be easily repaired, led bulbs, better insulation for buildings, solar water heaters, heat pumps, bicycles...
We could easily consume a fifth of the resources we use now and be as happy if twenty selected things were banned in the world. But we live in a capitalist world, there's only hope in people taking the initiative.
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiliantics|4 years ago|reply
Why do all climate policies currently being adopted allow increased carbon emissions and assume we will have carbon capture technologies to negate them right in the nick of time? This is the kind of irresponsible behaviour that we usually see only in addicts or psychopaths. How are we allowing this?
[+] [-] RandomLensman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jug|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adnmcq999|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chestertn|4 years ago|reply
I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting discussions about what we thought we knew.
Now I’m in my 30s and my thought has changed drastically. I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.
[+] [-] fabianhjr|4 years ago|reply
A systems theory approach is an opposite of a reductionist approach. From Wikipedia ( https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Complex_system ) :
> The study of complex systems regards collective, or system-wide, behaviors as the fundamental object of study; for this reason, complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradigm to reductionism, which attempts to explain systems in terms of their constituent parts and the individual interactions between them.
[+] [-] bjornsing|4 years ago|reply
That sounds very much like what FA Hayek called “the presence of knowledge” and warned us of in his 1974 Nobel acceptance speech [1]. Maybe you are an Austrian after all. ;)
1. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hay...
[+] [-] hogFeast|4 years ago|reply
That being said, it is equally true that very few people who study economics actually ask basic questions about how and why economic growth occurs. Economic growth is just energy consumption. That is it (whether humans burning food or oil or gas or whatever, the industrial revolution was about unlocking energy for production...note, this plays no role in Solow growth). And if you build a system which is unable to improve efficiency than that process is logically finite (but, as in paragraph one, no-one knows how finite...you can do all the computer simulations you want, no-one knows...a good example of this is shale oil, Russia has unfathomably large resources of shale oil...everyone knew it was there but it didn't matter until fracking, peak oil was a mania).
So I don't think anyone is really asking the right questions. It is really simple: do we want free energy? Do we want to improve the efficiency of our energy use? Even if climate change wasn't happening, we would need to look at solar/wind/whatever (and, hopefully, this will lead to a new industrial revolution). Imo, population control is also important. We can improve energy use but population will just grow to fill the space (and part of the problem is here actually poor quality elder care and weak pension systems caused by low savings rates). Obv, population control isn't popular anymore but...it makes sense once you understand economic growth.
[+] [-] swman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jopsen|4 years ago|reply
Individually humans are hard to predict... but a flock of humans might not be so hard to predict :)
That said: it's easy to underestimate the power of economics. Once natural resources becomes expensive, we'll find ways to minimize, recycle and migrate to renewable resources.
The biggest risk is if we don't limit pollution.
[+] [-] maCDzP|4 years ago|reply
What ideas made you change your view?
[+] [-] seibelj|4 years ago|reply
The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end of the world” views that are prevalent everywhere.
[+] [-] notjes|4 years ago|reply
And in analogy to this, I am very optimistic about the future, because the resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite. There is no peak oil. There is no peak food. There is no peak climate. There is no water. It's all bullshit doomer porn.
[+] [-] dane-pgp|4 years ago|reply
But if they are using the same World3 model, created in 1972, with a single variable representing "pollution", then surely it's just a coincidence if the effects of climate change end up modelled correctly.
The climate is a non-linear system, and there certainly weren't good models for its influence on / from the economy back in 1972. If the model (even just the updated one) has managed to include some universal physical law that can predict the aggregate of the interactions between the global climate and economy, then that deserves much more attention than the clickbait "societal collapse" prediction.
[+] [-] jandrese|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brutusborn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conjectures|4 years ago|reply
Coefficients, dynamics, number of entities involved, stationarity. There are so many unknowns and so many reasons to believe incomplete understanding could scupper predictions...
I know everyone likes to believe themselves to be a good Fermi estimator. But trying to model the world beyond 2050 when the weather a month from now is a hard problem. Well, let's say it's Quixotic at best.
Which makes me think the model isn't actually under discussion here, it's just all our priors about how much we fancy technology as a solution or not etc.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] yongjik|4 years ago|reply
This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020 or later.
I.e., the fact that these models start to diverge around "now" doesn't mean we're nearing some ominous inflection point - it's just a consequence of "hindsight is 20/20."
[+] [-] omgwtfbyobbq|4 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3
> But those of us who knew the DYNAMO language in which the simulation was written and those who took the model apart line-by-line quickly realized that we had to deal with an exercise in misinformation and obfustication rather than with a model delivering valuable insights. I was particularly astonished by the variables labelled Nonrenewable Resources and Pollution. Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.[7]:168
[+] [-] mrpopo|4 years ago|reply
> He does however consider continuous growth in world GDP a problem:
[+] [-] DennisP|4 years ago|reply
A key dynamic that impressed me from LtG is that as pollution accumulates, you spend more and more of your resources dealing with the damage, and less making the sort of investments you used to make. But things can still carry on just fine, until suddenly the bottom drops out.
Since we're already dealing with significant damage from greenhouse gases, I find that a little disturbing.
[+] [-] swader999|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zug_zug|4 years ago|reply
Is the burden of proof to do nothing until it's scientifically definitive for societal collapse? Or is the burden to intervene until it's definitive that there is no risk of societal collapse (even if our models underestimate).
[+] [-] ivalm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melomal|4 years ago|reply
2. Tech predictions live and die by hype cycles (which gets a nice little write up in this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-... where the author reviews 20 years of hype cycles, what has come of them etc)
[+] [-] dgdosen|4 years ago|reply
I now wonder what happens when (if?) we get to 'net 0' (which hasn't been mentioned in these comments). If we can reach a point of unlimited, renewable, clean energy that's (almost) too cheap to meter, that just upends any model because it'll zero out factors that are parts of or 'limits' in those models.
- Lack of fresh water: solved by free/clean energy (desalinization)
- Lack of adequate food supply: solved by free/clean energy (fertilizer production)
- Lack of resources: potentially solved by free/clean energy (asteroid farming? recycling?)
It's hard to imagine a problem that unlimited, clean energy won't help solve.
The question is, can we get to net zero?
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago|reply
The cost to build and maintain powerplants is expensive - whether it's solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear. This cost needs to be amortized over the life of the plant. It's hard to imagine this getting to less than $0.05 / kWh.
Construction costs alone make Nuclear Energy cost ~$0.08 / kWh even in China where construction is relatively cheap. Even if we get Fusion energy, AFAIK it's unlikely the construction will be substantially cheaper.
Obviously if anything was free - people would abuse it. You would need to build endless powerplants (which cost money) to provide free energy for people to launch rockets and mine asteroids and produce fertilizer and desalinate water...
[+] [-] dd36|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Isamu|4 years ago|reply
It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever.
[edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by “pollution” but seems to be positively affected by industrial output. The dip in food production is mostly dependent on the shape of the pollution curve.
[+] [-] thewarrior|4 years ago|reply
Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built.
I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject.
Here’s an interesting presentation from Marc Jancovici https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0
It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
When we learned to make fuel from Oilsands, the world's reserves tripled.
When we learned to drill sideways, it grew.
When we learned how to make more efficient use of the tapping, it grew.
This notion of 'finite resources' is a very bad constraint. Obviously there are limits but we adapt quickly.
If we decided to use 1980's style Nuclear Reactors - we could power the world for 10 000 years using known reserves. And it would be clean.
Trees? We grow them. Metal? We recycle. Even soil we are starting to figure out sustainably.
There are very few hard limits we're facing on that front.
Chocolate and Cork might run in short supply but that means we kind spend our folly money on 'pure chocolate' as a delicacy instead of NFT's and we just can't have proper wine corks.
'Societal Collapse' won't come from resource extraction, it will come from warring ideologues in a population of materially satiated plebes who have too much time on their hands and so they argue over the meaning of words until someone tries and actual coup and it comes apart from there.
[+] [-] gcanyon|4 years ago|reply
Limits to Growth predicted we'd run out of oil by 1995, 2005, or at their most optimistic, 2022. Not peak oil -- out of oil. Similarly we were supposed to be out of gold by 2001 at the latest.
Food and services are both supposed to be peaking right now -- 2020 -- and going into rapid decline.
There was little reason to give credence to LtG even by the '80s, but by now it should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
Scanning through the book, this line jumped out at me: "If on average 5% of the population dies each year..." then the average lifespan is 20 years and humanity is doomed. That's their point, but I don't think that's how they intended to make it. That's just careless. They also happily extrapolated exponential curves for population, per capita gdp, etc.
[+] [-] scottfr|4 years ago|reply
https://insightmaker.com/insight/1954/The-World3-Model-Class...
[+] [-] aww_dang|4 years ago|reply
Ah yes, our benevolent overlords who have selflessly offered themselves up as our technocratic central planners. Such premises should at least inspire mild curiosity or skepticism from readers.
Counter point: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/
>The classical case against population growth was expressed in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, the British economist and country parson who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second."
...
>Or so it would appear, except for the following embarrassing fact: "Population has never increased geometrically," says Simon. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicat...
Here is Herrington's analysis:
https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/y...
Further reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j...
Also this press release video (no background music) re: the report to the Club of Rome released as a paperback titled "Extracted" that is referenced in the article. The "tech" industry relies heavily on minerals extraction. It is alleged by the author that 10% of the world's energy production is consumed by minerals extraction. How much of that comes from fossil fuels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avCD5JVekE
[+] [-] AYBABTME|4 years ago|reply