Can We Escape Our Predicament?

Civilization is a double-bind: damned if we continue with it, damned if we don't. Is there a way out?

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

Long time readers, and those who follow the excellent blog of Erik Michaels, need not to be introduced to the idea of a predicament. Generally speaking while problems have solutions (and thus can be eliminated), predicaments only have outcomes, and by definition cannot be solved. Our double bind with civilization is a classic example. Because what is civilization? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary it is “a relatively high level of cultural and technological development”, where “technology” refers to “the practical application of knowledge”. Think: agriculture, pottery, writing, construction, metallurgy, but most importantly: the harnessing of energy flows to power all these activities. Earlier, this meant wood or food calories from grains for humans and grass for draft animals, later, fossil fuels. Take technology (as defined above) away, and what remains is culture — myths, heroes, legends, poems, music etc. — all of which is very important, but not enough to build high rise cities, or to feed millions of people. But why is civilization a classic example for a double bind — damned if you do, damned if you don’t? Two reasons: first, it is both a response and a cause to ecological overshoot, and second, it is unsustainable. I know it is a lot in one sentence, so allow me to unpack these two ideas below.

Ecological overshoot occurs when human demand exceeds the regenerative capacity of a natural ecosystem. Take our hunter gatherer ancestors for example: as soon as they hunted more animals, caught more fish, ate more plants than what could be regenerated in a given area in a given year, they entered overshoot territory. So what did they do? Did any of their shamans came forth and told the elders: according to my latest model run deer populations will plummet in 5 years and we will starve? Of course not. While some tribes realized that they have reached the carrying capacity of their tribal lands and voluntarily implemented birth control, others burned down entire forests instead to make room for grasslands; inviting an increase in bison populations and a subsequent growth in their populace. This worked fine, at least until something else had to be done to feed the increasing numbers of their kin, like growing high calorie crops on fertile riverbanks and floodplains, thereby giving birth to agriculture and the first civilizations. Take Mesopotamia, a vast reedy lowland for example, where traditional hunting and gathering techniques could sustain only a tiny fraction of the people who ended up building cities like Ur and Uruk. Had they stopped anywhere along the way and gave up civilization, due to any reason, they would immediately had to face the consequences of overshoot: malnutrition, disease, wars. History books are full of examples.

In order to gain access to such technologies, like agriculture, construction (cities), metallurgy (tools, weapons) etc. every civilization — including our super-duper hyper-modern one — needed mineral resources and energy. Problem is that every human society, sooner or later, ran out of one or both. Not in absolute terms, mind you, there is plenty of iron ore, coal, copper or what have you in Earth’s crust. No, they’ve ran out of the easy-to-access, low-cost resources, the ones which required the least amount of energy to get (be it from slave labor, charcoal, diesel fuel or electricity). As societies progressed, they developed ever more complex (and energy intensive) methods to overcome this issue, but ultimately all of them had to face diminishing returns on their efforts.

You see, resources are not evenly distributed: we have very few big, easy-to-harvest, high grade ores, forests or farming plots, and a hell-of-a-lot more lower quality / harder to get ones. As soon as we ran out of high quality resources, we were forced to use lower and lower grade stuff, till technology (read: energy) limits were hit, and the whole enterprise went bust. Trade was hence heavily relied upon to compensate the loss — or the absence — of one or more resources, and if push came to shove, wars were fought over arable land, mines or controlling slave trade. Humanity has thus found itself in what Ronald Wright called a ‘progress trap’, constantly running forward to escape the consequences of an ever worsening overshoot predicament. Steady state — beyond hunting and gathering — was never an option in a world where resources were depleted faster than they could be regenerated.

Have you noticed how almost all mementos of once great civilizations ended up surrounded by the desert? Photo by حسن on Unsplash

If you thought that we have become wiser during the process, I have to disappoint you. Quite to the contrary: instead of realizing that we have entered a one-way street and recognizing that globalizing civilization can only end in tears — after all the easy to get resources of the planet is plundered — we have doubled, then quadrupled our population, making our overshoot predicament even worse. In fact, during the past couple of centuries, we have become detritivores; a species eating the detritus — or remains of — long dead creatures. By using oil and gas we have literally learned how to turn dead organisms into food en masse. Fertilizers, pesticides and mechanized agriculture are now responsible to keep 4 billion of us alive at the cost of destroying ecosystems, depleting underground water reserves and leading to soil erosion — putting a huge question mark over the sustainability of this malpractice.

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By globalizing manufacturing, agriculture, trade and resource extraction we thought — once again — that we have “solved” the “problem”. ‘Who cares if one area runs out of arable land, minerals, or labor when we can colonize entire continents?’ Instead of finding a way out of our predicament, however, all what we have achieved was an explosive growth in the draw-down of even more resources — including the very energy which gave the biggest boost to it all — fossil fuels. Now, we not only face climate change as a result, but species extinction, chemical pollution, desertification, and a potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation initiating a cascade of tipping points, making agriculture all but impossible in many places around the world. The party fueled by petroleum, however, could enter its terminal phase much sooner than the main courses on the banquet of consequences could be served.

Forget the term the “energy transition”; it was never meant to be more than a marketing catchphrase. All the minerals going into “renewables” and nuclear are mined and transported by diesel powered machinery. Steel — required to build the heaviest component of wind towers and nuclear power plants — is also made with coal. Metallurgical grade silicon in solar panels is obtained via carbothermal reduction, resulting in at least two CO2 molecules circulating the atmosphere for every single silicone atom finding its way into a panel. Cement, a crucial material for construction globally, is also heavily dependent on coal for both energy and as a source of fly ash. Fertilizer and plastics are made from natural gas, and natural gas liquids. Hydrogen and batteries provide no solution to this problem — not only because they are no sources of energy only drains to the entire system — but because they lack the energy density and chemical properties of hydrocarbons needed to build and maintain this level of complexity. Sorry, industrial civilization has an intimate relationship with fossil fuels, with no real replacement in sight.

We are dangerously close to a tipping point in fossil energy extraction, though. As rich, easy-to-get, high quality resources deplete and get increasingly replaced with lower grade ones, energy return on investment begins to plummet. As a result, roughly around 2025, we will hit an invisible wall in the form of how much net energy we can obtain by drilling for and using petroleum. The Recalibration23 study, EROEI calculations (Delannoy et al. 2021), investment patterns, not to mention estimates of a peak and fall in shale oil output, all indicate that we are just a year away from a brief plateau, followed by an ever accelerating decline in net energy output when it comes to liquid hydrocarbons. 

In order to drill for more oil, maintain and extend infrastructure, build more “renewables”, hydro, nuclear etc. we would need more steel and concrete (plus a range of other minerals) than ever. To enable all that mining, transportation and material transformation, however, we would need a significant increase in oil and coal production. Geology (not to mention ecology) is not on our side, though. Newer oil wells deplete faster, and need more resources per barrel (think: huge floating deep sea drilling platforms). In other words, an ever increasing amount of energy is needed just to keep oil output at current levels. Exponentially rising energy demand and a plateauing physical output, however, is not a recipe for success, if you know what I mean.

Oil rigs. Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

Every civilization — ours included — is unsustainable. They all rely on a steady flow of energy and mineral resources to build technologies, with an ultimate goal of preventing their constituents from experiencing the consequences of ecological overshoot. Societies “achieve” this goal by tapping into non-renewable (or slow to renew) stocks of fertile topsoil, wood, and as of late: fossil fuels. With resource extraction and agriculture, however, comes environmental destruction: desertification, pollution, climate change — just to name a few.

As of late — at least since the 1970’s — both western corporate-oligarchic elites and communists regimes made every effort to hide the fragility and utter unsustainability of our civilization, and prevented any talks of shrinking our planetary footprint taking place. Discussions of moderation, population, climate change, ecological collapse, peak oil etc. were all swept under the carpet, and were often ridiculed. The symptoms of human overshoot, however, are everywhere now, making it all but impossible to deny. Humans, on the other hand, as Christopher Bystroff explains, intuitively sense these environmental pressures. As food prices and the cost of living rise, together with geopolitical tensions and a risk of economic collapse, a sense of frugality and moderation kicks in. The purchasing of big ticket items get postponed — together with decisions related to starting a family or having another kid. 

A peak in human population, followed by a decline is much closer than we think. While many were conditioned to believe that a decline in human populace is the horror of horrors (even if its perfectly peaceful due to collapsing birth rates, endocrine disrupting chemicals and ageing), it is in fact our only hope for escaping our predicament; or at least softening the blow somewhat. According to Bystroff’s study of Thomas Malthus’s greatly misunderstood work, famine is actually the “last resort” of Nature, when it comes to correcting overshoot. Yes, in a remote island, where everyone is crammed together, or after a major climate disaster it does happen — and unfortunately will happen — but it is not the major factor behind the decline in human numbers. With rising resource scarcity (starting with affordable oil) and the acceleration of climate change we don’t have to wait for long to see his theories put to the test.

Until next time,

B

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