A very good summary of the reality of Progress/the industrial revolution/the 21st century. I am going to chase up the book by Robert Gordon, he seems interesting.
Also, it confuses me that you get so little audience compared to other writers who cover the same themes, such as John Michael Greer and Tom Murphy. It is something of an injustice.
"Even if humans are 2.5x more efficient at converting energy to work"
I think that this statement hides a ton of complexity. You can't just consider it on a purely mechanical level of energy use, you also have to consider the actual structural necessity of the energy use.
To take cars as an example: only a tiny fraction of the energy used to move a vehicle is actually used to move the people inside, over distances that only have to be routinely traveled because of society's total embrace of them as the default form of transport, using infrastructure that requires energy use to build and maintain, on land that could be used for other productive purposes, etc.
The real challenge is understanding just how much of our energy use is just the system scratching it's own back.
You don’t get many examples of big picture perspective like this. Thank you. My observation is that our use of such vast reserves of fossil fuel energy sadly perpetuates the idea that we are separate from our natural, “sun-powered” world. I wonder if, by liberating all this fossil fuel energy we have set something in motion that we can never control. This seems to be your point?
Well, I did copy that, but I don't think I buy it. three to five years until what, exactly? It doesn't say. I assume this person means until population, energy and resources go into permanent decline. But these kinds of predictions never pan out exactly. They fail to take into account how the system will react, along with Black Swan-type events.
What I expect we'll see is what we've already been seeing: stagnation, slow growth, increasing inequality, inflation, and a cost of living crisis leading to wars and a recrudescence of authoritarianism and fascism worldwide. Not exactly great, but not imminent collapse, either.
I wonder what potentially countervailing effect, if any, may result from the worldwide decline in fertility (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/world/fertility-rate). It seems like as soon as women fight their way free of the patriarchal demand for them to be baby-making machines, fertility goes down and it tends to fall below replacement level. Maybe that will level off at some point before we make ourselves extinct, but (1) at what level, and (2) with what effects on energy consumption?
Tangential to that: what kind of second-order effects will there be if populations migrate from highly-populated zones to sparsely-populated ones? Living in Japan, which is in a populational death-spiral, I see this close-up and wonder who will be here in a hundred years? Nobody? My wife, a sociologist who studies the matter, thinks it's hopeless because the power structure here is so introverted.
Fwiw Corey Bradshaw, who seems sensible, postulated on a recent The Great Simplification that fertility rates depend first and foremost on child mortality rates, and that it’s only after that all the usual factors become remotely relevant. It’s a good episode, check it out.
"Sir, an economist's analysis of history is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."
A very good summary of the reality of Progress/the industrial revolution/the 21st century. I am going to chase up the book by Robert Gordon, he seems interesting.
Also, it confuses me that you get so little audience compared to other writers who cover the same themes, such as John Michael Greer and Tom Murphy. It is something of an injustice.
"Even if humans are 2.5x more efficient at converting energy to work"
I think that this statement hides a ton of complexity. You can't just consider it on a purely mechanical level of energy use, you also have to consider the actual structural necessity of the energy use.
To take cars as an example: only a tiny fraction of the energy used to move a vehicle is actually used to move the people inside, over distances that only have to be routinely traveled because of society's total embrace of them as the default form of transport, using infrastructure that requires energy use to build and maintain, on land that could be used for other productive purposes, etc.
The real challenge is understanding just how much of our energy use is just the system scratching it's own back.
"The long twentieth century" sounds an awfull lot like "The long summer". Perhaps, humanity is about to step out of another garden.
Are we to become gods or simply yet to find greater forms of misery, perhaps in virtual worlds?
Is nuclear energy more likely to prolong the long twentieth century or to end it abruptly?
Civilization suddenly seems like an intermediate stage of humanity (which is probably already obvious but definitely will be in hindsight).
Sorry if my thoughts are eons behind
Ironically, The Long Summer is the title of a book by Brian Fagan about the Holocene era and the development of human civilization: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-fagan/the-long-summer/9780465022823/?lens=basic-books
You don’t get many examples of big picture perspective like this. Thank you. My observation is that our use of such vast reserves of fossil fuel energy sadly perpetuates the idea that we are separate from our natural, “sun-powered” world. I wonder if, by liberating all this fossil fuel energy we have set something in motion that we can never control. This seems to be your point?
more than 3-5 years left? DAMN. How do you see playing out?
Well, I did copy that, but I don't think I buy it. three to five years until what, exactly? It doesn't say. I assume this person means until population, energy and resources go into permanent decline. But these kinds of predictions never pan out exactly. They fail to take into account how the system will react, along with Black Swan-type events.
What I expect we'll see is what we've already been seeing: stagnation, slow growth, increasing inequality, inflation, and a cost of living crisis leading to wars and a recrudescence of authoritarianism and fascism worldwide. Not exactly great, but not imminent collapse, either.
I wonder what potentially countervailing effect, if any, may result from the worldwide decline in fertility (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/world/fertility-rate). It seems like as soon as women fight their way free of the patriarchal demand for them to be baby-making machines, fertility goes down and it tends to fall below replacement level. Maybe that will level off at some point before we make ourselves extinct, but (1) at what level, and (2) with what effects on energy consumption?
Tangential to that: what kind of second-order effects will there be if populations migrate from highly-populated zones to sparsely-populated ones? Living in Japan, which is in a populational death-spiral, I see this close-up and wonder who will be here in a hundred years? Nobody? My wife, a sociologist who studies the matter, thinks it's hopeless because the power structure here is so introverted.
Fwiw Corey Bradshaw, who seems sensible, postulated on a recent The Great Simplification that fertility rates depend first and foremost on child mortality rates, and that it’s only after that all the usual factors become remotely relevant. It’s a good episode, check it out.