On Preempting Collapse

Why is that the great unraveling can only be accelerated and never stopped?

It will take an awful long time to get there. Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

High-tech modernity is already on the decline for quite some time now. Collapse, uneven as it may seem to many, is not only already well underway but it’s also accelerating. However, as much as Hollywood wanted to sell you on the idea, the collapse of modernity will definitely look nothing like the movies. And as much as politicians wanted to make you believe: no one will be able to stop the ongoing decline — let alone reverse it.

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Far from being an instant death event for societies, disintegration is a long time period marking the end of each civilization. Ours is no exception to this rule. Fortunately or not, none of us will be here to compare our present state of affairs with a world where 99% of our current technology is lost and where population is reduced to a mere fraction of today’s numbers. The term collapse thus does not refer to a single event but an awful long period of time, during which prior growth in industrial and agricultural output, trade, social complexity, population, living standards and life-expectancy (among many other things) halts, then reverses into a seemingly never ending contraction lasting many decades. Or as much as a century.

But why is that so? The answer lies in the deep understanding of the primary root cause behind civilizational collapse — which is not at all different to ecological collapse — overshoot. Simply put, each year we are consuming and polluting much more than which could be regenerated or safely absorbed by Nature. Land use, minerals extraction, energy consumption are all past their sustainable levels, leading to a loss of natural habitats and species, affordable resources and a stable climate. Since we have built our entire civilization on the assumption that these resources and nature services will never run out — in fact we hoped they can only get cheaper and more abundant with time — hitting natural limits to growth then going through collapse was pretty much baked in the cake.

Overshoot occurs on an economic and political level, too. Overshooting the tax base has led to budget deficits and ballooning debt levels. The financialization of the economy has not only led to a loss of manufacturing jobs, but has also created financial claims well beyond the economy’s ability to honor. Growth also came with the concentration of wealth and the immiseration of the masses, who can no longer buy the products they make, nor bear the burden of ever increasing taxes. Surges in societal complexity (the number of non-productive roles and people employed outside the production of food and other necessities), however, is the ultimate sign of a society in absolute overshoot.

While overshooting the natural resource base has led to a steady deterioration of said resources and nature over time, societal overshoot has pushed everything into overdrive. Maintaining a ballooning class of non-productive, non-essential workers (usually consuming multiples more than the essential workers making their life possible) has led to the drawdown of other nations’ resources and labor in the form of colonization, and more recently: neoliberalism. And while wealthy, so-called “post-industrial” nations managed to export ecological overshoot and maintain high living standards through automation, this process has also made them extremely vulnerable to energy outages, raw material shortages and as of recent: trade barriers.

As you can see, our present day overshoot situation was centuries in the making. It’s side-effects and negative consequences were quietly building up in the background from at least the discovery of the Americas. However, consumption growth, driving it all, was not linear during the past few centuries. It was exponential: barely noticeable for hundreds of years, only to virtually explode in the second half of the twentieth century. All the threats arising from human activity grew in a similar fashion: during the last few years we depleted resources and destroyed habitats twice as fast as a few decades ago, or four times as much compared to the rate of drawdown half a century ago. This constant doubling cannot continue for much too long. So, while many believe that it will be climate change which will bring modern societies to their knees, resource depletion due to overshoot — combined with a classic societal implosion — looks like to be a far more likely culprit.

As a result of this plundering all the cheap, easy-to-get resources from timber to coal, from oil to copper have been already harvested, and what remains takes and extraordinary effort to obtain; taking away energy and raw materials from other economically important activities. As opposed to popular myth, resource depletion is not a hard limit you hit one day, then run out of everything the day after. It’s a process ultimately driven by the drawdown of large, easy-to-get deposits and their subsequent replacement with ever smaller, ever poorer quality, ever harder-to-get ones. It means ever increasing exploration and extraction costs. More processing needed. More mines opened. More wells drilled. And ultimately: more and more energy used just to get the same amount of stuff from underground. At the same time pollution and ecological destruction increases in a similar fashion: slowly making even basic economic activities (such as agriculture) ever harder to continue with.

The process of depletion slows down then reverses prior economic growth, eventually leading to the cannibalization of the entire economy. And since extraction costs (and energy demand) of just about everything went up (and will continue to go up) in an exponential fashion, there can be no steady state at the end of growth. Only an ever accelerating decline as we run out of economically viable resources one after the other. This process, however, takes decades if not centuries to fully unfold: putting an increasing burden on all societies on this planet, and increasing tensions on all levels. Since our societies, financial systems and economies are much more fragile than they might seem, this breakdown induced by overshoot will come in fits and starts: collapse-rebuild, collapse-rebuild, collapse-rebuild at a higher and higher frequency and at an ever increasing amplitude. Sounds familiar?

The ongoing collapse of modernity is driven by agents much bigger and complex than any of us could comprehend. Yet, I foolishly tried to assemble a list of vectors arising from the concept of overshoot described above to illustrate how or why it’s beyond any of our leader’s and organization’s capacity to deal with this predicament. My goal was not to write a detailed autopsy report, but to provide a stepping stone towards radical acceptance. To help you embrace the fact that our way of life is coming to an end, and that it will evolve into something entirely different. I sincerely believe that accepting the fact that our high tech civilization is going down and cannot be saved no matter what, can help you through bargaining, anger and depression. These feelings were never meant to be permanent. Only acceptance allows one to move forward with meaningful action: be it education, acquiring new skills, starting something entirely new, or just sitting back and enjoying what’s left to be enjoyed. Once you understand this, you begin to see that no response is wrong, or invalid. Every person is different and there are no universal solutions. All I can offer is a map, a possible explanation of what takes place and where things might lead us. The rest, however, is up to you. So, without further ado, here is a list of ideas, explaining why there can’t be any central fix to our predicament and why collapse is rapidly going to overcome every of our institutions capability to manage in due course.

1. Complexity

No one can really understand how the human ecosystem works in its every detail. Such complex systems are inherently non-linear: thinking that doing “A” causes “B” which will lead to “C” is a dangerous simplification. In such a complex web of interrelations doing “A” might easily cause “E”, which then will accelerate “D” to a point where it tips “B” into an entirely different state, while steering “C” into a new direction. All at the same time, or within a couple of milliseconds. As an added bonus, all this might result in the emergence of “X” a decade later — something which no one ever thought possible. Again, doing something radical in a such a chaotic system can only increase chaos and is guaranteed to come with unexpected side effects.

2. Inertia

Technology, science, culture, politics etc. resist drastic shifts in direction. Vested interests, desperately trying to keep the status quo, will do everything in their power to defer major changes. And it’s not only about powerful people. Let’s face it: most of us are conservative in how we do things. Why change something that worked well so far? Even if the benefits are obvious, giving up a well-trodden path for a new one is not something most of us frequently do (1). Loss aversion for the vast majority will thus always outweigh (promised) benefits. And while incremental change is still certainly possible, this resistance to major reform and incrementalism has led us to a precipice, where a sudden acceleration of collapse can no longer be ruled out. Damned if you change, damned if you don’t. Ever wondered why the leadership class looks like a bunch of rabbits caught in the headlights?

3. MPP

The maximum power principle: if you don’t use all your power, others will. If you do decide to give up driving a gasoline car, for example, that will only make gas cheaper elsewhere, leading to higher consumption on the long run. Complex systems (such as the global economy) evolve in ways that maximize their power intake or energy throughput. This means, that as long as it has a viable energy source out there, it won’t stop using it: the energy source has to run out first, or has to become otherwise unavailable. As a result, the overall energy use of the system will keep increasing, adding one energy source on top of another, until this is no longer possible. At this point catabolic collapse — a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction
converting capital to waste — kicks in, resulting in an accelerating collapse. (Again, acceleration means: slowly picking up speed over years if not decades, only to reach its logical conclusion in about a century’s time. Remember: while the middle phase of collapse might seem to be happening in an “instant”, it’s tail-end leading us back to a pre-industrial lifestyle can last very-very long.)

4. The Failure of Technology: Oil

Our fossil fuel based economy has begun to fail, as the extraction of oil (the lifeblood of this civilization) has become more and more energy intensive to get over time. While half a century ago less than 5% of the energy of a barrel of oil had to be reinvested into exploration and drilling, this figure now stands over 15% today, and expected to increase to as high as 50% by the middle of this century. Exponential increases in the energy demand of drilling and pumping will lead to a similar increase in the amount of energy cannibalized, hurting the rest of the economy badly. This relentless rise in energy expenditure, together with the depletion of once rich oil reserves has already made extraction uneconomic to continue in many places. World crude oil production (2) as a result has already peaked in November, 2018 at 85.5 million barrels pumped daily, and has failed to return to that level ever since. In fact, we only managed to get back to 2015–2016 levels of production (around 82 million barrels lifted a day, globally). With the rise of trade barriers and with a looming prospect of an economic crisis we cannot expect a return to peak production anytime soon. In fact, with the natural depletion of the Permian, we might be witnessing the onset of a long but steady decline in oil production during the decades ahead.

5. The Failure of Technology: Electricity

The success of electrification, the purported savior of the climate (ahem, modernity), proved to be rather limited. The mining and processing of necessary raw materials needed to upgrade and maintain the grid still requires vast amounts of fossil fuels and a healthy economy to pay for it. As the case of Spain exemplified, it was not enough to pop-up a few wind farms and solar panels: without inertia coming from spinning turbines, the grid collapsed within a couple of milliseconds. Hence the need to install large and expensive flywheels, batteries and interconnectors to smooth out intermittencies; an upgrade costing trillions of dollars and euros. Besides that, many strictly necessary processes needed to maintain a high-tech society, simply could not be electrified in an economically viable and scalable manner — if at all. Electric grids, batteries, hydrogen, ammonia, are not independent energy carriers, capable of reproducing themselves by their own power. They are as much dependent on a now failing oil infrastructure than anything else we do in this civilization. With oil extraction and forwarding becoming ever more dependent on electricity, and as it increasingly competes for power with other uses as the energy demand of extraction goes up, the electric grid and fossil fuel extraction can be expected to go down hand in hand. Expect ever more frequent blackouts and all sorts of shortages.

6. The Rate of Change

Our current economic model handles shortages with price increases. This method of managing the economy, on the other hand, leaves less and less room for people in the middle class: no matter how much they work, they are forced to give up more and more of their consumption. Especially, if the rate of price changes — mistakenly called inflation — is getting higher and higher. What the economy does with these price increases in fact, is adapting to a lower per capita (3) availability of oil and the products made with it. As a direct consequence of the series of shocks following 2020, and the failure of technology to keep up with a growing energy demand of oil extraction, people became less and less able to afford the many products made with oil, and thus began to consume less and less on a per capita level — and not only in the poorer regions of the world but in the US and Europe as well. Adaptive measures include many things — depending on the rate of change — starting with giving up on strictly non-necessary items (flying, consuming things imported from far abroad), to lower birthrates as a response to a steep fall in living standards and an inability to afford a home. Our society and economics are no exemption to the evolutionary principle: once circumstances change adaption becomes a must. Once the rate of change exceeds the system’s ability to adapt, however, then the unraveling begins.

7. Vicious Cycle: Energy Production

Each of the adaption measures, be them societal, economic, technological, or as of recent political (cutting back on international trade and trying to devaluate the dollar), reduces oil demand. This can make oil look cheap, and while consumers rejoice, as the energy cost of extracting petroleum just keeps increasing, many producers lose their ability to pump it at a profit — and thus stop doing so. As a result and despite a seeming supply glut, oil silently becomes less and less available, forcing further rounds of adaption measures, sometimes even before prices begin to rise again. And just as less and less oil is produced, shortages begin to arise: leading to crops not being harvested and mines closed just to name a few reasons. This on the other hand will lead to raw material deficiencies in many other areas, leading to production plant shutdowns, further reducing the demand for transportation and therefore: oil. Then as these shortages cycle through the entire system in waves, eventually they will hit the production of vital components to the electric grid, new reactors and power plants… Endangering the expansion of the grid. Not to worry, though, the price fairy will solve these scarcities in no time! Equipment cost increases will lead to still higher electricity prices, with more and more consumers becoming unable to pay their bills and self-disconnecting from the grid (or taking out pre-paid plans, where the meter shuts off once all credit is used up). Voila, shortages — puff — disappear, until one day 90% of the inhabitants of once highly industrialized nations find themselves using electricity only 1–2 hours a day, while musing the question: how did we get here?

8. Debt & Finances

Tying back to complexity and the rise of shadow banking, asset and stock market bubbles: a financial system designed to grow does not work well in an era of contraction. In fact, it can easily act as an igniter and accelerator of a major meltdown. Here are some really good explanations as to what is going on behind the scenes: #302: At the end of modernity, part one; The Unravelling — Part 1: Economic & Financial Furies; and The Unravelling — Part 2: Contagion & Containment. Due to the reasons described above a major reform — needed to avoid the next big crash — is highly unlikely.

9. Diminishing Returns

As Joseph Tainter has explained in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies “in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.” In plain English this means that adding more non-essential jobs, more highly educated people, more complex institutions etc. stops yielding positive returns to society beyond a certain point. The same goes to science: despite an ever increasing number of scientists and research engineers the number of scientific breakthroughs achieved and patents filed per capita just keeps decreasing. (I explained the process in detail here.) Science, and not just technology, seems to abandon us when we needed it the most to “avert” collapse.

10. Lack of Trust

An erosion of trust can be observed on all levels: in science, in politics, in institutions, in trading partners. People no longer believe that the system works for them: instead, they feel mentally abused and ultimately abandoned by it. The same goes for international trade: even as trust is being built up between BRICS nations, trust in the U.S. and its allies are at an all time low. Trade barriers come and go. Financial assets get confiscated, and businesses get sold by force. Once the floodgates burst open and capital begins to flee these nations en masse, a major acceleration in their decline is all but certain.

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair.” — Dhar Mann

+1: Denial

If you are a world leader and behave as if societal collapse was impossible, or none of the above applies to your nation, you’re guaranteed to make a fatal mistake. Given the exponential acceleration of resource depletion, the erosion of trust in societal norms and political systems, the fragility of supply chains and financial systems, a small mistake can — and eventually will — lead to grave consequences. If not, increased costs, lower efficiency and a further deepening of collapse is all but guaranteed. Denial, combined with soaring rates of incompetence, magical thinking and narcissism makes one wonder: what could possibly go wrong…? I guess we don’t have to wait for much too long to see it.

Until next time,

B

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Notes:

(1) We — our bodies, our behavior, our culture, our technology, our political systems etc. — are all products of and subject to evolutionary processes. This means that we change only when that change brings us benefits in attracting a mate and reproducing ourselves (or our culture, our technologies, our products etc.). As long as holding onto the current paradigm brings better results, change will not happen en masse. No one will give up their high social status — paired with high levels of consumption and therefore the ability to attract mates — in favor of averting collapse. Hence the denial that collapse from over-consumption is possible in the first place: one cannot hold two such fundamentally conflicting beliefs at the same time, so one of them must be denied.

(2) The traditional definition of oil is crude plus condensate. Including natural gas liquids, refinery gains and bio-fuels (a net energy drain on the system) helped to mask the peaking of conventional crude extraction, but it did not provide adequate alternatives to diesel fuel production. Since the vast majority of the world’s heavy machinery used in mining, agriculture, construction and long distance transport still burns diesel, I will continue to use the crude plus condensate values, instead of total liquids produced (which by the way, has also begin to stagnate).

(3) Even though oil production effectively hit a high plateau, and failed to rise meaningfully since at least a decade now, world population grew by 10% over the same time period. This has led to a similar decrease in the per capita availability of oil. Considering the rise in the energy demand of extraction over the past decade, the net loss per capita could be higher still.