Collapse You Say, Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization

Sunset Over Lake Huron

In my last post I looked at some of the factors that made industrialization possible, and with it the huge growth in consumption that now threatens the continued survival of our civilization.

During the industrial age all those factors interacted in complex and unpredictable ways, producing not just the intended results (more wealth and power for the already rich and powerful), but also a variety of unintended, and in many cases unwelcome, consequences. So much so that at this point the switchover to fossil fuels as an energy source, and the industrialization that it enabled, is starting to seem like a mistake for all but the small number who have profited the most from it. Unfortunately, while many people are beginning to have an inkling that something isn't right, very few have any idea what it might be.

Some of these unintended consequences are contributing to collapse in general, others are specifically related to the issue of overconsumption. So as not to lose sight of the big picture, I am going to talk about both.

Resource Depletion, declining surplus energy

When it came to fossil fuels and various other mineral resources, we used the low hanging fruit first. That is, the highest quality and easiest to access resources.

Those days are over and, while there are still large quantities of hydrocarbons in the earth's crust, they are, for the most part, in forms and locations that are much more difficult to access and which provide less surplus energy. Starting in the 1970s our economy has been confronted, for the first time since we started using fossil fuels, with reduced availability of surplus energy. Despite everything governments and central banks have been able to do, real growth has slowed. This has caused problems for our financial system, as we'll see in more detail in a moment.

Fossil fuels were a one-time windfall of abundant surplus energy. That is now gone and there's no going back to the way things were. We used that windfall in such a way as to leave relatively little in the way of a positive legacy. All the available alternative, renewable energy sources have a significantly lower EROEI, providing much less surplus energy. Not enough to sustain economic growth of the sort we have become accustomed to. Probably not even enough to maintain our high tech civilization.

Depleted reserves of many important minerals are also going to make it difficult to maintain that civilization.

Depletion of non-renewable resources is a very serious problem which we hardly take seriously at all. Economists assure us that we can always find substitutes for anything that is becoming depleted, but they are flat out wrong. There are many things for which there just aren't any practical substitutes—fossil fuels, copper, and phosphorous being high on the list.

There are many things we can do to reduce the rate at which such resources are being depleted, but eventually we will still run out. It seems to me that this will necessitate significant changes to our supposedly non-negotiable lifestyles.

Resource depletion is, of course, a result of overconsumption, rather than a cause.

Climate Change, Ocean Acidifcation

When fossil fuels are burned, carbon that was trapped underground million of years ago is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increased amounts of it in the atmosphere are leading to a variety of changes in our climate—mainly heating, but also shifting of rainfall patterns and more and heavier storms. CO2 is also strongly absorbed by the oceans, resulting in ocean acidification, with negative effects on many of the oceans' ecosystems.

Methane (CH4, natural gas) is also a significant greenhouse gas. Quite a lot of it leaks into the atmosphere between the well head and where it is finally used. And higher temperatures release methane from where it is currently trapped in permafrost and undersea deposits of methane clathrates.

The effects of climate change, such as rising seas destroying shoreline properties and agriculture suffering from heat and drought are going to be very hard to cope with in the years to come, and will be a major factor in the continuing collapse of our civilization.

Climate change is also a result of overconsumption, rather than a cause. Many of the negatives effects of overconsumption actually show up as climate change.

Pollution, Habitiat Destruction, Ecosphere Damage

Of course greenhouse gases are a form of pollution, but there are many other types of pollution resulting from industrial activities, which have had negative effects on the planets ecosystems and will continue to do so for a long time yet.

The spread of mankind across the globe and more recently the spread of the large scale agriculture and forestry needed by our population, has resulted in the destruction of habitats for many species, and a decrease in biodiversity.

Elsewhere in this series I have said quite a bit about the carrying capacity of the planet and how growth of human population and consumption has resulted in our overshooting that capacity. The important thing to understand is that when we overuse the services provided to us by the biosphere, the biosphere suffers and it's carrying capacity decreases, making the overshoot even worse.

Pollution, habitat destruction and biosphere damage from overuse are all effects of overconsumption.

The "New" World

The so-called "new" world was, of course, not empty. The history of the European colonization is largely a story of the oppression, and in some cases outright genocide, of indigenous people by Europeans. While it is convenient to pretend otherwise, this is still going on and has a destructive effect on societies that continue to let it happen. This too is an effect of overconsumption, albeit somewhat indirectly.

The Financial System

The financial sector of the economy provides services to do with managing money. But what is money, anyway? If you've studied economics, you were told that money is used as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. That's more or less true, but the most important thing about money is that it can be used to make more money. That's how businesses operating in the financial sector make their profits. It's also what drives growth, or perhaps "necessitates growth" would be a better way of putting it.

In a rapidly growing economy there is a great demand for money to build new infrastructure. Existing money is insufficient, so that demand can only be provided using credit, and "fractional reserve banking" is the solution. This simply means that banks are allowed to lend out more money than they have on deposit, usually by a factor of ten. Money is created (out of thin air, basically) when a bank makes a loan. So, in one very important sense, money is debt. Today that is the only way that new money enters the economy. In order to make a profit, banks require debts to be paid back with interest, using money to make money. And by the way, when a loan is paid off, the money essentially disappears, back where it came from.

Where does the money to pay the interest come from? Well, you might say, if a business is profitable, it will be earning more than enough money to pay the interest. True, but where does the money it earns come from? From other businesses and people, who have taken out loans which also have to be paid back with interest. And of course, the money for that interest comes from yet more loans.

As long as the economy is growing, this works just fine. But if growth slows a point is reached where profits fall off and businesses struggle to make loan/interest payments. They are understandably hesitant to take out new loans and banks are reluctant to issue them. If this goes on, eventually businesses can't get credit to finance their day to day operations, and with no new money entering the system they can't pay the interest on their loans. Businesses start to default on their loans and if enough loans are in default, banks themselves start failing.

Banks can reduce their interest rates to allow for lower rates of economic growth, offering cheap credit to stimulate growth, but when interest rates have been reduced close to zero, little more can be done. Over the last few decades the robust economic growth we had previously experienced was replaced by market bubbles (fake growth) and the crashes that happen when those bubbles burst.

All this is why financiers, business men, politicians and even many working class people are so concerned about maintaining economic growth. But economic growth means growth in consumption, and has lead to our current overconsumption problems. It seems that in order to address those problems we will have to stop economic growth and actually experience "degrowth", until our consumption reaches a level that the planet can support on a sustainable basis. In order to do this, we need a financial system that doesn't break when growth stops.

It is important to understand that, despite all this talk of money, what really drives the economy is surplus energy. It seems ironic to me that, after forcing growth in the economy for the last few centuries, the financial system is now struggling because of reduced surplus energy, a situation brought about by overconsumption caused by growth. So, clearly, the financial system is one of the causes of overconsumption.

Throughout the history of the blog I have been talking about these three factors: resource depletion (including Peak Oil), environmental degradation (including Climate Change), and a financial system that drives growth, and can't cope with degrowth, as being the main causes of collapse. I could stop here, but it has become clear to me that overconsumption is also contributing to collapse and there are a number of other factors that cause overconsumption. We need to have a closer look those factors if we are going to figure out how to get them under control.

Capitalism and Industrialization

Industrialization was achieved largely using a system called capitalism. It consists of an upper class who own the means of production and a working class who do the work involved in the production.

Based on their ownership of the means of production, the upper class claims the right to the majority of the profit from that production, even though they do very little of the work involved. The working classes are paid either a wage based on the time they spend working or a piece rate based on the quantity of production they do. In either case, the owners try to pay as little as possible in order to maximize their profits, and since the working class has no other way of making a living, they can co-operate or starve.

Capitalism and Industrialism as a cause of over consumption

The main goal of capitalism is to facilitate the accumulation of further wealth by the upper class. Unfortunately, "enough" is not a concept that enters into it, as capitalists are always looking to grow their enterprises and increase their wealth. Indeed, in modern public corporations, stockholders are liable to object if growth is not speedy enough. And, of course, as I said in the last section, the way our financial sector is organized forces capitalists keep to growing their enterprises.

Industrialization has allowed us to produce ever more goods ready to be consumed. As long as there is a demand for those goods, the economy will grow. I suspect that at the start of the industrial age, when most manufactured goods were still made slowly and laboriously by human muscle power, there was a good deal of pent up demand for those goods. As we industrialized, factories were able to make goods more cheaply and in great quantities. It wasn't long before there was a problem of over production, or under consumption, depending on how you look at it.

In addition to that, the nature a factory is to produce large amounts of one particular thing, and once you've invested in a factory, there had better be a market for that thing, whether anyone really needs it or not. This results in the "supply push" model of business, driven by the need to pay off investments in production equipment, and of course, to accumulate more wealth.

Many strategies have been devised to increase consumption, so as to keep up with production, and ensure the flow of wealth into the capitalists pockets. Today these include, but aren't limited to, the following:

• consumerism, where people are encouraged to see themselves defined in terms of what they buy, and to justify their existence by buying more
• marketing, or the manufacturing of demand, especially for new and supposedly better goods
• fads, fashion, collecting
• planned obsolescence
• frequent technological upgrades
• deliberate waste
• greed seen as a good thing

All these strategies to drive consumption have messed with our heads to the point where most of us consumers have a very strange world view. For example, when discussing how to consume less, many of us are liable to start by asking what we need to buy in order to do that. I mean, how else would you solve a problem than by buying something?

Initially, working class people were underpaid and weren't a major force of consumption. It took a long time and a great many strikes to stop the upper classes from thinking of the working class as anything but workers. Sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, working people, at least in the developed world, finally came to be seen as consumers as well as workers, and in some cases were even paid enough to consume effectively. Of course, this only increased our overconsumption.

But even so, capitalists are still their own best customers, the champions of consumption. Globally speaking, the upper classes, the top 10% by income, do about 60% of the consuming. The bottom 50% of people by income only do a little over 7% of the consuming. So it is clear where any attempts to curb overconsumption must focus. Lest we get too smug, though, it is sobering to remember that the top 10% includes about 800 million people—most of the people in the developing world, including most middle class people and even many working class people.

This is also why it would do no good to get rid of poor people, even those whose population is growing quickly. They consume so little that they simply aren't a factor in our overshoot problem.

In any case, we all must do our part to stop goods piling up at the output of factories, and to keep service providers busy. The way the system is set up, failure to do this leads to the shutdown of factories, layoffs, unemployment and, worst of all, reduced profits for the owners. (Sarcasm, yes, but also factual.)

So, capitalism is the driving force behind overconsumption, and as such is causing the slow collapse we've experienced over the last 50 years or so. But capitalism has other negative effects on society as well.

Negative Effects of Capitalism on Society

Under feudalism there was a web of obligations flowing in both directions. Yes, serfs had to work for their lords. But since there was no other way of getting the work done, the lords had to provide the serfs with a way to feed, clothe and house themselves. This mainly consisted of providing access to a "commons", where serfs could grow crops and graze livestock for their own use, gather firewood and so forth. The level of use of the commons was closely regulated, either by the feudal lord or the community that relied on that commons, so there was no "tragedy of the commons".

Under capitalism there is no such web of obligations. The commons was soon enclosed by capitalists who saw it as an under used resource, and proceeded to over use it (a real tragedy). The only way remaining for working class people to satisfy their needs was to buy them from the capitalists using money they earned working for the capitalists. If the capitalists overproduced and the demand for labour went down, workers got laid off and the owners had no obligation whatever to support them.

Capitalism can't even attempt to solve problems where the solution doesn't involve making a profit. Such issues are ignored or, at best, left for government to solve. Even providing what is needed by the populace is only an indirect result of capitalistic production, and if it becomes unprofitable, capitalists stop doing it.

Capitalists feel entitled to an ever growing slice of the economic pie. As long as the economy was growing fast enough, they could have that and everyone else could see some improvement in conditions as well, since the whole pie was growing. But for the last few decades while economic growth has slowed and capitalists have still insisted on taking a growing slice of it, what remains for the rest of us has continually decreased, and economic inequality has increased significantly.

To be clear, all of us in the developed world are going to be consuming a lot less, either deliberately in an attempt to get overconsumption under control, or unintentionally because we've refused to recognize the reality of collapse and it has continued whether we like it or not.

But with the capitalist fixation on economic growth it is certainly a lot harder to do anything effective about over consumption.

Government

During the industrial era many countries switched from aristocracies to some form of representative democracy. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. But this did not make as big a change as one might think.

Because of the need to fund election campaigns politicians find themselves very much beholden to the rich (mainly capitalists). Not only are capitalists incapable of addressing any problem who's solution would stop them from making a profit, but they make sure that government doesn't try to implement any such solution. These plutarchs, hidden behind representative democracies, are short sighted enough that they are unwilling to do anything to slow growth or reduce consumption. The difficultly we are having in implementing any real solutions to climate change is just the most obvious example of this.

Other countries have ended up under totalitarian dictatorships, which tend to be poor and in need of financial support. So the same thing happens, with those who lend them money actually in charge.

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To sum up what I've been saying today about overconsumption—it is not a result of innate greed, not a failing of the human race as a whole, but rather caused by a capitalistic upper class bent on maintaining economic growth and the accumulation of wealth at all costs, with no thought of the negative consequences that await us down the road. They have convinced most of us, and themselves as well, that growth and consumption can go on forever on a finite planet.

There are still a few loose ends from the sections on finance and government, but we'll deal with those next time. That discussion will lead us into the main thrust of my next post—what to do about overconsumption.

Links to the rest of this series of posts: Collapse, you say?

• Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
• Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
• Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020
• Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021
• Collapse You Say? Part 10 / Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022
• Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022
• Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022
• Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022

Collapse you say? Part 8, Factors which made industrialization possible

Half of next winter's firewood,
still to be hauled to the back yard and stacked neatly.

In my last post I discussed a number of issues (needs and wants, human nature and politics) that I felt we needed a grasp of before I could go on with the rest of this series. If you haven't read that post yet, it might be a good idea to read it before going on.

Earlier in this series, I identified ecological overshoot leading to the dieoff of much of the human race as a serious problem looming ahead of us. A problem that we are failing to address. Both overpopulation and overconsumption are major contributors to this situation, but overconsumption is the issue which we have the most chance of addressing in time to make a difference—to get us through the bottleneck we are facing. It will, however, require a fairly major change in attitude for many, if not most, people. I think we need to understand why we are overconsuming before we tackle this problem, and that is going to be the subject of my next few posts.

Our economy has grown significantly over the last few hundred years, since 1700 or so, during what might be called the "industrial age". With it affluence and consumption have increased as well, at least in the developed world, to the point where this is no longer a blessing, but a serious problem. The confluence of a number of factors have made this possible, and I'll be spending today's post discussing those factors. In subsequent posts we'll look at the consequences of industrialization, how this has led to overconsumption, and what we might do about the problem.

Surplus Energy

I must give a nod to my Peak Oil friends and acknowledge that fossil fuels have played a key role in enabling economic growth during the last few hundred years of our history.

For any particular energy source, it takes a certain amount of energy to access that energy. Surplus energy is what's left over to be used, and it's what makes an economy work. The more surplus energy, the greater the potential for economic growth.

In pre-industrial economies, mechanical energy comes primarily from muscles (human or animal) and to a lesser degree from wind and falling water. Heat energy comes mainly from burning biomass (firewood, peat, dung, straw, etc.) and to a lesser degree from the heat of the sun. None of these energy sources provided enough surplus energy to drive strong economic growth.

At the start of the industrial age the demand for firewood was getting ahead of the forests of Europe, and those in need of heat were forced to turn to coal. This was fairly easy to do since there were deposits of coal on or near the surface of the land, and it got the industrial revolution off to a good start.

Coal was followed in the latter half of the late 19th century by oil and in the twentieth century by natural gas. All are still being used in large quantities. The high level of surplus energy from these fossil fuels enabled the building of our industrial civilization.

Technology

Soon enough after the start of the coal age colliers were forced to dig deeper to satisfy demand, and when they went below the level of the local water table, it was necessary to pump the water out of the mines before they could be worked. This unprecedented demand for mechanical energy soon resulted in the development of heat engines that could convert the energy of burning fuel into mechanical energy. Once that energy was available, we found a great many other things to do with it beyond just pumping water out of coal mines. This included railways and various sorts of factories where steam engines and eventually electric motors replaced muscle power.

Before industrialization, most goods had been made in small shops employing only a few people, or in peoples' homes, using almost entirely muscle power. The availability of manufactured goods was limited by this and there was significant pent up demand. So the new factories found strong demand for their products.

The "New" World

In the late Renaissance and early industrial periods Europeans "discovered" several new continents that they had not previously know about. They ruthlessly moved in to exploit the wealth of these "new" areas. This gave industrialism a boost in terms of lands that it could treat as empty and natural resources waiting to be developed.

Social Structure

It seems to me that any egalitarian society, faced with the prospect of industrialization, would probably have decided it wasn't worth the trouble—the great possibilities for amassing wealth just wouldn't have held that large an attraction, given the amount of work involved for the majority of the people to benefit just a few. And indeed such societies were colonized and still haven't been successfully industrialized.

At the other end of the political spectrum, totalitarian societies may well have been too inflexible and at least initially rejected industrialization because of the amount of change it entailed, the unwelcome challenge to the existing order of things. And indeed, during the process of industrialization, inflexible aristocracies were eventually overthrown or reduced to mere figureheads and replaced with ruling classes friendlier to industrialization.

Europe seems to have had just the right combination of an upper class at least some of whom (particularly rich merchants) saw change as an opportunity to amass great wealth and hungry lower classes with no choice but to work for the upper classes. Especially after the enclosure of the commons left them with no way to be self sufficient.

Preindustrial wealth mainly took the form of productive land, and there was only so much land available. Industrialization offered many new sources of wealth—things like mines, factories, railroads, banks, etc.

Capitalism

The new upper classes soon became what we now know as "capitalists". Capitalism is an economic and political system which exploits the labour of the working class and facilitates the accumulation of wealth by rich capitalists. It had existed in a nascent form before but really blossomed during industrialization. Indeed capitalism and industrialization went hand in hand and reinforced each other.

The Financial System

The financial sector of the economy provides services to do with managing money. It had already existed for some time, but what it really needed was a rapidly growing economy to enable it to use money to make more money in a really effective way. The high surplus energy of fossil fuels made such growth possible. As with capitalism, finance and industrialization went hand in hand.

Government

The state, with legal systems and police to enforce the concepts of possession and property and to enforce claims, in the form of debt, on others' productivity, was, as always, primarily the servant of the upper classes. Practically every government in the world was eager to support the capitalists and financiers in their effort to industrialize.

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Unintended Consequences

During the industrial age all these factors (and many others) interacted in complex and unpredictable ways, producing not just the intended results (more wealth for the rich and powerful), but also a variety of unintended, and in many cases unwelcome, consequences. So much so that at this point the switchover to fossil fuels as an energy source, and the industrialization that it enabled, is starting to seem like a mistake to all but the small number who have profited most from it. Some of these unintended consequences are contributing to collapse in general, others are specifically related to the issue of overconsumption.

I'll be going into detail on that in my next post.

I expect many will find this a short and unsatisfying post (I certainly do), but the alternative was making this the first section of a very long post, so I decided to stop here and continue next time with what I hope will be the more interesting part and not discouragingly long.

Links to the rest of this series of posts: Collapse, you say?

• Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
• Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
• Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020
• Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021
• Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021
• Collapse You Say? Part 10 / Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022
• Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022
• Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022
• Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022

The Biggest Lie

Lake Huron Shore
at Kincardine, Feb 16, 2017

For quite a while now I've been promising that I'd get around to talking about collapse: why I believe it's what lies ahead or, more accurately, what's already happening; the sort of collapse I'm expecting; the way it's going to unfold; and what we can do about coping with it.

Now, finally, I am going to get started on this, with a discussion about "Business As Usual" (BAU) and why I think a continuation of things as they are is among our least likely futures. If you try to discuss this with people who aren't already kollapsniks, you'll find it is not a popular subject. I can see a couple of reasons for this.

First, thanks to the media, collapse has come to mean apocalypse—the sort of rapid and disastrous change that results in a world like that portrayed in movies like Mad Max, The Road or Terminator. If you've been convinced that collapse is a swift, sure and final disaster, there's little wonder that you wouldn't want to dwell on the idea and would prefer to keep BAU going for as long as possible.

Second, many people see themselves as benefitting from BAU. In the short run they are probably right. These are the kind of people who have a certain amount (in some cases rather a lot) of power and influence. They don't want to consider anything that might "upset the apple cart", so to speak.

Of course, many other people aren't doing quite so well. Rob Mielcarski*, in a blog post titled It’s Time to Get Real: Trump’s a Symptom, Not the Problem comments that lower and middle class citizens around the world are angry for good reasons:

• Their incomes have been stagnant or falling despite governments telling them the economy is strong.
• Their cost of living for things that matter has been rising despite governments telling them inflation is low.
• They see the upper class getting richer and not being punished for crimes.
• They carry a high debt load and see that interest rates have nowhere to go but up.
• For the first time in a long time they worry that the future may be worse than the present.
• They sense that something is broken and that leaders are not speaking the truth.

But even these people don't want to want to talk about the demise of BAU—they just want it fixed so that it works for them as well as for the rich and powerful. Politicians are clever enough to realize that by promising to make such fixes they can win the support and votes of these folks. The pitch is that with just a few changes to the system—just some fine tuning, really—BAU can be made to work for everyone and as well as it "used to" in some mythical time a few decades ago when everything was good. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of right wing populist parties in many countries is proof that this is a winning political strategy. At least in the short run.

I'll go into much more detail in an upcoming post, but it seems to me that the changes promised by Trump et al, for instance, aren't likely to fix what's wrong with the world. Details aside, there is a simple reason for this—their strategy is based on a lie.

Richard Heinberg** recently put it this way:

Nevertheless, even as political events spiral toward (perhaps intended) chaos, I wish once again, as I’ve done countless times before, to point to a lie even bigger than the ones being served up by the new administration—one that predates the new presidency, but whose deconstruction is essential for understanding the dawning Trumpocene era. I’m referring to a lie that is leading us toward not just political violence but, potentially, much worse. It is an untruth that’s both durable and bipartisan; one that the business community, nearly all professional economists, and politicians around the globe reiterate ceaselessly. It is the lie that human society can continue growing its population and consumption levels indefinitely on our finite planet, and never suffer consequences.

Yes, this lie has been debunked periodically, starting decades ago. A discussion about planetary limits erupted into prominence in the 1970s and faded, yet has never really gone away. But now those limits are becoming less and less theoretical, more and more real. I would argue that the emergence of the Trump administration is a symptom of that shift from forecast to actuality.

There are some unstated assumptions built into BAU, assumptions that are seriously flawed. As David Holmgren*** points out:

At a more pragmatic and immediate scale, the reasons for the faith in future growth are rarely articulated but can be summarized by a few common assumptions that seem to lie behind most public documents and discussions of the future. These do not represent specific or even recognized views of particular academics, corporate leaders or politicians but more society wide assumptions that are generally left unstated.

• Global extraction rates of important non-renewable commodities will continue to rise.
• There will be no peaks and declines other than through high energy substitution such as the historical transitions from wood to coal and from coal to oil.
• Economic activity, globalization and increases in technological complexity will continue to grow.
• The geopolitical order that established the USA as the dominant superpower may evolve and change but will not be subject to any precipitous collapse such as happened to the Soviet Union.
• Climate change will be marginal or slow in its impacts on human systems, such that adaption will not necessitate changes in the basic organization of society.
• Household and community economies and social capacity will continue to shrink in both their scope and importance to society.

If you have faith in BAU, this is what you believe in—probably without even realizing it. Holmgren intends this to be a list of improbabilities so extreme that the reader will see there is simply no chance that BAU can continue for much longer. I agree. But we have grown so far out of touch with reality that I fear many will look at that list and say, "So what's the problem?" And for those of us who do see a problem with some of these ideas, there are a couple more ideas that are often stated as reassurances to anyone expressing doubts:

The first is "infinite substitutability", the idea put forth by main stream economists that as resources become depleted they become more expensive and this creates the incentive to develop substitutes. They think this is the answer to resource depletion and that it has no limits.

The second is "decoupling", the idea that we can develop technology that will allow a continually growing economy (sustainable development) which does not place an ever increasing burden on the environment, allowing BAU to continue on without limits.

But these two ideas are at least as unrealistic as the ones that Holmgren lists. They stem from some serious misconceptions:

First, the view of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, ignoring its vital inputs (energy and materials) and outputs (waste heat and pollution). Because supplies of energy and materials, and sinks to absorb waste heat and pollution are all finite, there are real, concrete limits to how long BAU can go on.

And second, the idea that technology can continue to advance at an ever increasing pace—the supposed "law of accelerating returns". This comes from mistaking an "S" or logistical curve that levels off after a period of rapid increase for one that continues rising toward a singularity. It is true that technology has enabled us to inch up closer to those planetary limits over the last century or so—"kicking the can" down the road every time trouble looms ahead of us (excuse the mixed metaphors). But think back to my recent posts (1, 2) on Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies—we have done this by adding complexity to our global industrial society. Complexity comes with ever decreasing marginal returns on our investments in it. And it is powered by energy, of which there is a limited supply.

Already we have picked the low hanging fruit of energy and mineral resources, supplies of fresh water and arable land. There is good reason to think that the same thing is happening with technological innovation—we've done the easy parts, which have given us unwarranted confidence in what remains to be achieved with technology. But further advances will be much harder to develop, cost more, and bear diminishing returns.

Substitutability is running into limits as resources become more depleted—we are finding that there simply are no substitutes for many resources. And there is no evidence that decoupling is happening to any significant extent, or ever was.

So, BAU is based on growth, and a lie about the long term viability of growth. If growth is the problem, then why do we need growth? What if we stopped growing? A close look at the underlying structure of BAU reveals it is not structured to work without continued growth.

Economic growth is necessary in BAU because our financial system is based on credit. It creates money by issuing debt, which must be paid back with interest. If businesses are to pay that interest as well as the principle, they must grow. Likewise, individuals who borrow to finance education or housing early in their lives must make more money later in their lives to pay off those loans with interest. Population growth is also necessary since it supports economic growth. And since the younger generation supports the older generation in their old age (either directly or via taxes), the younger generation must be larger if this is not to be an onerous burden.

Last fall I wrote a series of posts about the book The Limits to Growth which examines in detail the consequences of growth using system dynamic computer simulations. This is the "discussion about planetary limits" that Heinberg was referring to. If you haven't read those posts, it's worth having a quick look.

• The Club of Rome and a System Dynamics Model of the World
• The Limits to Growth, Part 1: the nature of exponential growth, the limits to exponential growth
• The Limits to Growth, Part 2: Growth in the World System, Technology and the Limits to Growth
• The Limits to Growth, Part 3: More on Technology and the Limits to Growth
• The Limits to Growth, Part 4: The State of Global Equilibrium
• The Limits to Growth, Part 5: Commentary, My Thoughts and The Boundaries of Solution Space

The Limits to Growth study makes it clear that there really are limits to growth and if we try to exceed those limits, instead of accepting and living within them, the consequences will be severe. The standard run of the LTG world model, which assumes things just continue on as usual, ends with a drastic drop off of human population in the latter half of this century. Resource depletion and pollution result in a failure to produce adequate food supplies and essential services. Indeed every run of the model that tried to find a way around the limits ended in similar results. Those results were avoided only in the runs where a way was found to control our population and live within our limits.

Of course, that study was done in the early 1970s. In 2017 resource depletion and pollution (especially climate change) have progressed much farther and our population has more than doubled. I'd say there is every reason to doubt that a collapse can be avoided, regardless of what we do.

In the light of all this, then, is there anything at all that can be done to mitigate the situation?

Well yes, actually. While BAU is fundamentally, structurally flawed and trying to keep it working will only make the situation worse, there is much that could be done to slow its demise, make sure that collapse doesn't take us as far down as is otherwise might, and to make the crash when we hit bottom as gentle as possible.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts entitled A Political Fantasy, exploring what enlightened governments could do to achieve this, if they weren't saddled with political realities.

• The Great Contraction: economics in the age of scarcity
• Technology Isn't the Answer, depending on what question you're asking...
• A Political Fantasy, Part 1: Conservation, Decentralization, Rehumanization
• A Political Fanatsy, Part 2: Money and the Financial System
• A Political Fantasy, Part 3: Energy, EROEI and Non-renewable Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 4: Renewable Energy Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 5: using energy wisely when we don't have much
• A Political Fantasy, Part 6, Agriculture: an Overview
• A Political Fantasy, Part 7, Agriculture: Details
• A Political Fantasy, Part 8, Agriculture: What Lies Ahead

If, like me, you have little faith in governments doing the right thing to any significant extent, the good news is that there are also a great many things that can be done to mitigate collapse at the individual, family and local community level. And that is why I want to discuss collapse with people.

In my next few posts I'll be talking about the course that I expect collapse to take, the political realities that will contribute to this and what we can do to cope.

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* Rob Mielcarski is a fellow blogger, who I met when he commented on one of my blog posts. He is very concerned about human overshoot and the damage we are doing to a very rare and precious planet, and deeply fascinated by the depth and breadth of our denial of the situation.

** Richard Heinberg is an American journalist and educator who has written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion. He is the author of thirteen books, and presently serves as the senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

*** David Holmgren is an Australian environmental designer, ecological educator and writer. He is best known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison. His website Future Scenarios looks at Four Energy Descent and Climate Scenarios.

The Art of Not Being Governed

This time we'll be taking a quick look at a book by James C. Scott's book The Art of Not Being Governed, an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. This is a scholarly work and heavy going to read, but I think I can, for a change, distill the ideas that are relevant to our discussion here down to fit into a single blog post.

Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is currently teaching Agrarian Studies and Rebellion, Resistance and Repression.

I am writing this post with my fellow Canadians in mind. States have to work at retaining their citizens, either by coercion or by providing sufficient benefits to balance the cost of maintaining the state, a burden which is borne by the populace. Traditionally there has been a striking degree of inequality between the upper classes who operate the state and the rest of the people. This is simply because those who are running things take advantage of their power to make sure that the surpluses created by economic activity are allocated to them and not to the people doing the work.

Here in Canada, we have been very fortunate in the 150 year history of our country to have had legitimate governments, with a minimum of corruption and a pretty steady effort to rule for the good of the country and its people. We do have party politics so of course there are disagreements as to exactly what that good might be. And we do have some inequality, with the rich having a disproportionate share of political power, though less so than in many countries. But I think there is broad agreement that while our system might benefit from minor tweaks in one direction or another, the idea behind it is basically solid.

And to a certain extent I can agree with this. It is an essential element of the human condition that we work together in groups for our mutual benefit. And this can work very well, but when the group gets larger than Dunbar's number (around 150) there are costs associated with organizing and administration, costs which increase disproportionally as the group gets larger.

Those costs are paid mainly in terms of energy and only the onetime windfall of fossil fuels has made possible an organization as large as our modern global civilization. But as fossil fuel depletion progresses, states are finding themselves less able to provide the benefits that they rely on to maintain their legitimacy. More and more of their citizens are beginning to wonder if the social contract is such a good deal.

Canada is no exception, although we are not quite as far along this curve as many other countries. Most Canadians don't realize that the good times we've had here have been made possible by generous amounts of energy from our huge forests, large amounts of falling water and, of course, generous reserves of fossil fuels. We certainly don't want to admit that we face the depletion of our energy resources, even though we certainly do—just like other countries.

Anyway, my intention here is not to dwell on energy issues, but rather to introduce the idea that having a government and being governed may not always be such a fine proposition. That's why I'm reviewing The Art of Not Being Governed. It talks specifically about "the anarchist history of upland southeast Asia", and more generally the ongoing conflict between the expansionary state and its agents on the one hand and the zones of relative autonomy and their inhabitants on the other. Historically speaking, those zones have been able to maintain some degree of autonomy because their geography made them difficult to subdue. Only in the most recent era have states gained sufficient power (fossil fuels again) to make subduing those zones an achievable project.

When Europeans reached Southeast Asia we found it populated by "civilized" valley people and "wild" hill people. The initial assumption was that the hill people were the remnants of the original inhabitants, who had never yet been "civilized". It turns out that this was wrong—but we'll get to that in a bit....

The area was settled not more that 60,000 years ago, and...

the region's first small concentrations of sedentary people appeared not earlier than one millenium before the common era (CE) and represent a mere smudge in the historical landscape—localized, tenuous and evanescent. Up until shortly before the common era, the very last 1 percent of human history, the social landscape consisted of elementary, self governing kinship units that might, occasionally, cooperate in hunting, feasting, skirmishing, trading, and peacemaking. It did not contain anything one could call a state. In other words, living in the absence of state structures has been a standard human condition.

The founding of agrarian states, then, was the contingent event that created a distinction between a settled, state-governed population and a frontier penumbra of less governed or virtually autonomous peoples. Until at least the early nineteenth century, the difficulties of transportation, the state of military technology, and, above all, demographic realities placed a sharp limit on the reach of even the most ambitious states. Operating at a population density of 5.5 persons per square kilometer in 1600 (compared with 35 for India and China), a ruler's subjects in Southeast Asia had relatively easy access to a vast, land rich frontier. That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device—the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom. Richard O'Connor captures this dialectic nicely:"Once states appeared, adaptive conditions changed yet again—at least for farmers. At that moment mobility allowed farmers to escape the impositions of states and their wars. I call this tertiary dispersion. The other two revolutions—agriculture and complex society—were secure but the state's domination of its peasantry was not, and so we find a strategy of 'collecting people... and establishing villages.'"

So people were rounded up and put to work at rice paddy agriculture. This yields a high productivity in terms of the amount of food produced per land area, though it is quite labour intensive. Still, there were some advantages to such a settled existence, enough to keep the peasants around as long as the demands of the state did not grow too onerous.

There were always taxes in the form of a share of the rice crop and a certain number of days of labour on state projects or service in the army. If the ruler decided to build a new temple or palace, or wage yet another war against a neighbouring state and those taxes became too high, it was not too difficult for the peasants to head for the hills where it would be hard for the agents of the state to track you down. There they could take up a life of nomadic slash and burn agriculture, growing mainly root vegetables which are harder for state officials to find and take. And of course the forest itself provided much in the way of food and other useful materials, some of which were luxuries not available in the valleys that could be traded for goods that couldn't be produced in the hills.

So it turns out that, by the time Europeans arrived, the population of hill people was made up almost entirely of escaped peasants from the valleys and their descendants. Scott goes into a great deal of detail about the societies of the hill people in highland Southeast Asia (what he calls "Zomia"), but I think the idea is clear: that living in a state was often a chancy proposition and many people did just fine on their own.

As Scott says:

Any effort to examine history as part of a deliberate political choice runs smack against a powerful civilizational narrative. That narrative consists of a historical series arranged as an account of economic, social and cultural progress. With respect to livelihood strategies, the series, from most primitive to most advanced, might be: foraging/hunting gathering, pastoral nomadism, horticulture/shifting cultivation, sedentary fixed field agriculture, irrigated plow agriculture, industrial agriculture. With respect to social structure. again from most primitive to most advanced, the series might read: small bands in the forest or savannah, hamlets, villages, towns, cities, metropolises. These two series are, of course, essentially the same; they chart a growing concentration of agricultural production (yield per unit land) and a growing concentration of population in larger agglomerations. First elaborated by Giovani Battista Vico in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the narrative derives it hegemonic status not only from its affinity with social Darwinism but from the fact that it maps nicely on the stories most states and civilizations tell about themselves. The schema assumes movement in a single direction toward concentrated populations and intensive grain production, no backsliding is envisioned; each step is irreversible progress.

As an empirical description of demographic and agricultural trends in the now-industrialized world for the past two centuries (and the past half-century in poorer nations) this schema has much to be said for it . Europe's nonstate ("tribal") populations had, for all practical purposes, disappeared by the eighteenth century, and the non-state population of poorer countries is diminished and beleaguered.

My readers will no doubt recognize this story as the same one told by the religion of progress, missing only the conclusion where we shake off the chains of gravity and head for the stars. But is this the only story that history has to tell us? Scott thinks not:

As an empirical description of premodern Europe or of most poor nations until the twentieth century, and as an empirical description of the hilly areas of Southeast Asia (Zomia), this narrative is profoundly misleading. What the schema portrays is not simply a self-satisfied normative account of progress but a gradient of successive stages of incorporation into state structures. Its stages of civilization are, at the same time, an index of diminishing autonomy and freedom. Until quite recently, many societies and groups have abandoned fixed cultivation to take up shifting agriculture and foraging. They have, by the same token, altered their kinship systems and social structure and dispersed into smaller and smaller settlements. The actual archeological record in peninsular Southeast Asia reveals a long term oscillation between foraging and farming depending, it would seem, on the conditions. What to Vico would have seemed to be lamentable backsliding and decay was for them a strategic option to circumvent the many inconveniences of state power.

He goes on to look at several historical examples of this sort of "escape agriculture" in Europe and the Americas. I am reminded of what we covered in my last post on Joseph Tainter's book about the Collapse of Complex Societies: collapse may not be such a disaster if the populace has access to land and can grow their own food. "Escape agriculture" would seem to fit the bill and indeed seems to be pretty much what did happen with many collapsing societies—the peasants voted with their feet and left the state and the upper classes to fend for themselves.

Of course, in the modern world, things are a little different.

The level of comfort and convenience experienced by the populace in modern high energy societies is unprecedented. Royalty in the past did not live so well as our middle class. People are understandably unwilling to give this up. Modern medicine, especially when provided free of charge by the state, provides a huge opportunity for a state to legitimize itself and a wonderful argument for its citizen to stay put, even if the taxes are high.

Despite all this, there are still people who dream of going off grid and practicing "escape agriculture". But those who actually succeed in doing so are a very small percentage of the population. And having decided to escape, where can one go? The options are limited—the world is very full and the hinterlands have shrunk in size and remain in only the least desirable areas.

Furthermore, escape is now much harder to do. Aerial and satellite photography, the global positioning systems, and motorized vehicles, especially aircraft, have rendered the most rugged terrain much more accessible than it was even a century ago. If they really want to catch you, they likely can.

I've been observing a trend, though, that may set all this on its head.

Modern states are now beginning to feel the pinch of resource depletion and economic contraction. Their tax base is shrinking while at the same time (due to unemployment and the demographic bulge of the baby boom) the social safety net is growing more expensive to maintain.

A few countries have raised taxes, redistributing a shrinking pool of wealth to reduce economic inequality. This seems to actually make the economy work better and slow the downhill slide. It will be interesting to see how they cope as things get worse.

Most countries are loath to raise taxes, and have borrowed and accumulated large debts on the assumption that things will get better down the road. This makes their economies even worse and increases inequality. The next step, already underway, is to cut social spending, basically abandoning those at the bottom end of the economic spectrum. Many of these people end up homeless and starving. Tent cities have sprung up in or just outside a great many North American cities. Sadly, in response to this, many communities (if they can really be called that) have responded by essentially making homelessness illegal, bulldozing tent cities and driving the inhabitants away.

It would seem that people abandoned by the state should find escape agriculture a good alternative. There are even examples of such folks starting gardens, only to have them plowed under by the authorities. These days, all the land is owned by someone and even if it is not being farmed, it is unlikely to be made available to the homeless. At some point, though, the state may not have the resources to harass the poor or to protect land that is not being used. Perhaps the state could just come to the realization that unused land and abandoned people are a good fit, and simply stand back and let those people do what they want.

Some will say that we need every square inch of land to grow food for the growing human population. I have two comments about how that is likely to go as collapse progresses: first, at some point population will quit growing and start to decline; and second, as the rich countries become poorer and less capable, they will be less able and less inclined to help poorer nations and even the poor within their own borders.

I'll be considering the possibilities that lie in that direction a few posts down the road.

Next time I'll be looking at another book by James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. In the meantime, check out YouTube for some videos featuring James C. Scott.