Our modern complex industrial society, driven by capitalism — with its dubious reliance on short-term profits and externalized costs — was always fated for collapse. And that collapse is already underway, though seemingly in slow-motion, felt and seen in some places more than in others. But it's gathering speed and is inexorable.
This collapse cannot be stopped. The only question now is whether we'll have a hard landing or somehow manage a soft landing.
Here's an excellent article about the process that's taking place...
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In order to answer how complex systems collapse, we have to understand the incentives of the system in question. The world economy is primarily driven by profit as its primary incentive. But what is profit in reality? It is the part of the deal you don’t have to pay for, and thus can keep it for yourself.
Take oil, for example, the most profitable “product” humanity has ever encountered. Did anyone have to pay for the growth of algae hundreds of millions of years ago in terms of labor, land, or water use? No. Did anyone have to pay for the heat and pressure provided by Earth’s crust (i.e. the energy bill)? No.
What oil companies are paying for is finding and extracting the resource — and recently they've had a problem paying for these two activities as well. Explorations fell nearly to zero in order to save money for maintaining ever costlier production. At this late stage it becomes necessary to ask who will pay for the cost of removing the pollution they caused: uncapped oil wells poisoning the groundwater, dangerous chemicals used in extraction now lying around uncovered, and most prominently the CO2 released by burning the “product”… You bet: all of us will pay.
Everything above is considered an externality and thus not calculated into profit. Should you want to honestly calculate all externalities, making sure you have a truly sustainable business, your profits would quickly turn into losses. You want biodiesel? Go ahead, pay for the labor, land, and energy costs, and let’s see how profitable your business will be (without the free money provided by governments in the form of subsidies, of course).
In a nutshell, our economic system’s primary incentive is to extract as much wealth as possible from Earth at the smallest cost possible, turn it into monetary profit, then reinvest it into further productive activities resulting in further profit. What we call capitalism has become a perfect positive feedback loop with only one possible outcome: expand until it is no longer possible.
Capitalism is self-organized to find more and more sources of profit and thus use more and more materials and energy. Since its basis (contrary to modern belief) remains physical material extraction from Earth’s crust, as the energy and material resources start to wane, the system will run into more and more problems.
Our existing infrastructure (roads, trains, bridges, buildings, electrical grids, etc.), installed at an exponential rate in the previous decades will soon require an exponential increase in physical repairs.
This is how a growth-optimized system meets its inevitable demise: exponentially growing maintenance and repair costs will intersect the exponentially decreasing energy availability. Add in the extra damage caused by climate change — floods, hurricanes, sea level rise — and your maintenance curve also goes from exponential to super-exponential.
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...until finally we reach total collapse, as the article explains.
There's a lot more included than the small part I've excerpted above. And it's certainly worth reading the whole thing to understand how we got to where we are, and where we can expect to go from here.
But be prepared, because the inevitable end result is not pretty.
FULL ARTICLE -- https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/the-great-unraveling-part-1-665866676550
#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism
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