kali
so i am going to post a thread of some graphs about the human situation on the planet. some show data, some show concepts. all of them are going to be pretty depressing, so buckle up.
#systems #complexity #emergence #complexsystems #systemsthinking #systemstheory #systemsengineering #systemsinnovation #systemsdynamics #systemsecology #limitstogrowth #overshoot #climatechange #peakoil #collapse #collapseology #sustainability #resilience #postdoom
kali
first of all there is the fact of energy density. the thermodynamics say energy that is dissipated, heat, moving molecules distributed over a large area, cannot be used. i think this is sort of a stretch, but for now it really helps to envision the concept, bc the reason why industrial civilization exists is that dense, low entropy, if you will, energy from fossil fuels, that set off its explosion.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
this observation can also be made in nature. organisms & species, which for whatever reason tap into a large source of energy, grow exponentially until reaching other constraints to the environment. and we know why that happens, it is aaall systems dynamics, which i will be talking A LOT about on this feed, but for now that would be too much for this thread. think of an algae bloom in a lake.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
ecosystems are very resilient & constantly regenerate. if a species is not taking too much from its environment this results in a sustainable flow, which is rare, even in nature. species overshoot the carrying capacity of their ecosystem temporarily, all the time. a fluctuation in population will occur, but no lasting damage to the ecosystem itself.
that is however NOT what humans have been doing.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
of course we can debate in how far this is also driven by financialization, wealth inequality, all that kinda stuff, but the fact remains that energy and the economy are intrinsically intertwined.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
in examining this correlation more closely, plotting it on a normal, not a logarithmic scale, we can see the effects of monetary policy i mentioned. countries with more pro-social fiscal policy correlate less, probably because they enable more of their citizens to use less energy.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
another way to look at it, but basically the same relationship: oil prices and prices for consumer goods:
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
so energy and the economy are intrinsically linked, and so are, currently, CO2 emissions.
when the economy grows so do emissions. when the economy is doing badly emissions plateau or even decline.
that is why we are talking about "#decoupling" GDP from emissions by using low-emission technology.
some people say there is a problem with this line of thinking, which i'll explain in a second.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
so with all of this being said, there are some people, i am not one of them, but some say that all the effort necessary, which requires energy to extract energy, as we used up the easy, cheap stuff first, will become so massive that it is not worth anymore to do it and that this will ultimately lead to civilizational collapse.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#peakoil
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
the idea behind this is another concept from systems dynamics, the seneca cliff. it postulates that complexity, which requires energy to maintain, but which dissipates energy constantly, builds up slowly over time, but collapses rapidly.
this has little actual examples in nature but most of them were a result of human activity. also industrial output sort of does this in the LTG world3 standard run.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
so with all of that being said now it bears the question: why didn't we already collapse? how are we making the effort to get ever-harder-to-get resources? some say: debt. the old paradigm is: finance has somehow to be backed by resources. the "new" paradigm: we just pull money from the future to get resources today. and we have no idea how long this can go on.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
in 1974 marion king hubbert, a shell geologist and geophysicist, for the first time in human history started to study the decline of oil reservoirs. his hypothesis: if single wells production follows a certain curve, then single oil fields, countries, and ultimately the world must behave the same. based on this line of thinking he predicted that world oil supply would peak in 1995.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#peakoil
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
well, obviously this didn't happen. not bc hubberts math was wrong, but bc of 3 technological advancements in exploration technology, which allowed humans to access previously uneconomic hydrocarbon reservoir types, also known as tight formations. you can see how this plays out looking at US production. non-tight formations, so called "conventional oil" in the US have peaked in the 70s.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#peakoil
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
so what is going on with these tight formations? in conventional reservoirs the oil is held in large areas of high-permeability, high porosity rock by close to impermeable cap rock. tight formations are different from that. they trap the hydrocarbons in tiny spaces and they are not going anywhere unless the required permeability is artificially created, meaning #fracking
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#peakoil
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
permeability is not the only problem with getting oil and gas out of the ground. there are many other mining technologies witch have only come up relatively recently, all of them are expensive & extremely invasive to the environment. the overall scheme is that we always seem to exploit the easy-to-access resources first. and that is a precautionary tale for all other finite resources.
#limitstogrowth
#overshoot
#climatechange
#peakoil
#collapse
#collapseology
#sustainability
#resilience
kali
this is more of a concept than data, a thought experiment in order to envision humanities situation in deep time. we call it the #carbonpulse, the discovery of cheap, abundant and especially dense energy, probably the most traumatizing thing that ever happened to humanity. and it is for all practical means finite. maybe you don't have to worry about this today, but coming generations will.
#limitstogrowth #overshoot #climatechange #peakoil #collapse #collapseology #sustainability #resilience
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