http://homerdixon.com/forum/index.php Thu, 17 May 2012 01:27:27 -0400 Phorum 5.2.7 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1123,1123#msg-1123 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1123,1123#msg-1123
I want to start of by saying kudos to you, Mr. Homer-Dixon, for providing this forum as a place where readers of your book can gather and explore together any potential upsides and mitigation strategies to combat the inevitable future breakdown of techno-financial complexity that the world faces in the years ahead. Having read many hundreds of books over the years, you’re the first author that I can recall who has taken the time to be available for a dialogue with readers. For a non-university-educated autodidact like me, the opportunities to engage with a distinguished member of the Academy on the most momentous issues of the day are exceedingly rare. So once again, thanks for making this possible.

I’ve noticed that the number of posts on this discussion board has died down quite a lot from when it was first opened, which is understandable, considering that The Upside of Down was first published 5 or 6 years ago. I wish I had read Mr. Homer-Dixon’s wonderful book much sooner, but unfortunately I didn’t get my hands on a copy until very recently. Through its discussion of five mutually deleterious tectonic stresses – population growth, energy depletion and declining energy return on energy invested, environmental degradation, climate change, and financial instability due, ultimately, to excessive amounts of leverage – and through its exploration of how these tectonic stresses are combining in innumerable and often unpredictable ways to bring about future societal breakdown and a likely permanent end to the West’s globalist project, the book covers many of the topics that I’ve been keenly following for almost a decade now, so it’s really odd that I hadn’t picked up a copy sooner. Anyway, hopefully my idea below on how we Canadians can attempt to temporarily mitigate – not solve! – the converging catastrophes associated with the five tectonic stresses will be read by someone and, better yet, garner a response or two.

So what’s this idea of mine? Well, to be blunt, my idea is the creation of a new Canadian political party with a platform and worldview centred on the precepts of materialism. This new political party, however, would not run in elections until after a major discontinuity has struck. The new political party would refrain from fielding candidates in pre-discontinuity elections for the simple reason that its platform would be radical enough to spark a discontinuity in Canada if it were ever to win an election, an outcome we can reasonably assume the Canadian electorate is not going to vote for. Because it would be unelectable under current conditions, the new political party wouldn’t waste time, money and effort trying to get elected now. It’s practically impossible to effectively challenge the prevailing status quo anyhow, as the vested interests that uphold politics-as-usual with vast and continuous infusions of money have no desire to see their legitimacy undermined by the successful emergence of a political movement that challenges the concepts of progress and universalism (i.e., globalization). Since these two concepts are integral to the rationalization, and therefore perpetuation, of the current status quo, it can be reasonably assumed that any political movement that attempts to question their validity will be promptly marginalized. Heck, in today’s political environment even socialists are marginalized, and they share with the market-oriented establishment a fervent faith in the verity of progress and universalism. It should therefore be expected that if the political party I’m proposing ever gets formed, it will receive a short shrift from academia, the media, the business community, and the political establishment.

But a discontinuity, as innumerable people have pointed out before me, instantaneously changes the political landscape by discrediting, and therefore ultimately forcing out of power, the upholders and benefactors of the former status quo. Thus the old verities that undergirded the former status quo can suddenly be confronted and critiqued with relative ease in the public forum, as many if not most of the vested interests that put limits on acceptable popular discourse before the discontinuity are either bankrupted or forced to drastically cut expenses in a desperate attempt to stay solvent. The onset of a discontinuity, then, would provide the ideal milieu for the new political party to spring into action, as it would enable an opening in national politics to reexamine the first principles on which we rest the foundation of our society. By constructing a set of policies and reforms before the discontinuity strikes that stand a realistic chance of working for, one would hope, at least a few decades, the new political party would find itself in an advantageous position to gain influence and maybe, with more than a little luck, win electoral victory.

The post-discontinuity political landscape is almost certainly going to be perilous. While the current political establishment will likely find itself incapacitated from the shock of the status quo that sustains it being abruptly vaporized into nothingness, a horde of messianic demagogues will no doubt come crawling out of the woodwork looking to fill the void in leadership, spewing out a populist type of politics based on fear and hatred, and attempting to win over the allegiance of the freshly pauperized masses by placing the blame for their downfall on a demonized minority. It is important to recognize, therefore, that the new political party’s triumph after a discontinuity would be far from automatic. Victory, should it be achieved at all, will not likely arise till after a long, tough slog in the political arena.

From my perspective, the two most likely candidates to trigger the next discontinuity are energy descent, caused by the peaking and decline of the oil, gas, coal and uranium deposits that make up the lion’s share (approximately 95 per cent) of the world’s “progress” fuelling energy supply, and financial collapse, caused by the inevitable defaulting on countless trillions of dollars of unpayable debts amassed during the historically unprecedented worldwide hyper-credit expansion of the past three decades. With respect to financial collapse, moreover, the eventual blowing up of hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives linked directly or indirectly to those aforementioned unpayable debts also has to be factored in.

In the race between energy descent and financial collapse for triggering the next discontinuity, I believe the latter has moved into the lead, albeit it is only a slight one. While it is true that since the 2008 crash global markets have stabilized, this stabilization has primarily occurred because of, I believe, two factors: 1) the nearly universal legalization of accounting fraud in an attempt to hide bank losses; and 2) the transformation of a global bank solvency crisis into a global sovereign debt crisis through the enactment of bailouts and stimulus programs by many of the world’s governments, resulting in the creation of massive and chronic fiscal deficits in these countries that show no signs of abating any time soon. But governments that run perpetually large fiscal deficits put themselves at the mercy of the international bond market, which will not tolerate such a state of affairs ad infinitum. In a showdown between an insistently spendthrift government and the international bond market, the international bond market will always win – unless, that is, the offending government is willing to bypass the international bond market entirely and go “nuclear” by printing all the money it needs instead of borrowing it, and by doing so ushering in an era of domestic hyperinflation.

At the moment, the Eurozone appears to be teetering on a precipice, as the bond market vigilantes have moved from the Eurozone periphery to its core by attacking Italy, a country that, by having the third largest sovereign debt in the world, is at once both too big to fail and too big to bailout. The European Central Bank has been purchasing Italian bonds of late, but it did the same earlier with Greek, Irish and Portuguese bonds, an action which didn’t prevent Greece, Ireland and Portugal from having to be bailed out when push came to shove. I’m unaware of a single historical instance in which bond market vigilantes have backed off from forcing a resolution on a country’s debt that they have put in their crosshairs. If this is accurate, it bodes ill for Italy and the Eurozone, as it means an Italian default, and therefore another credit event on par with that of the fall of 2008, is imminent. How imminent is hard to say precisely, as there seems to be a certain ebb and flow of risk on / risk off in the way the bond market vigilantes work, but suffice to say it’s coming soon enough.

After the Eurozone bites the dust, perhaps the bond market vigilantes will jump to the other side of the Atlantic and start targeting the United States, a country that’s every bit as much a fiscal basket case as the worst of Europe’s fiscal gluttons. Then again, perhaps the bond market vigilantes will never get a chance to put the United States into their telescopic sights. I say this because perhaps an Italian default, all on its own, will trigger a credit event cataclysmic enough to irrevocably destroy the superstructure of the global economy, along with both the systemic fraud and the monstrous levels of overleveraging it has become dependent on. Back in 2008, immediately after Lehman Brothers had been allowed to go belly-up, there was a period of panic where the global economy was arguably just a few hours away from total disintegration. If I remember correctly, it was rumours of the creation of a bank bailout package by American governmental authorities – what ultimately became TARP – that managed to pull global markets back from the abyss. But with the explosion of sovereign debt since 2008 to crisis levels, another round of bank bailouts (or, for that matter, stimulus packages) seems not to be in the cards. While exposure to Eurozone debt outside of Europe is minimal, exposure to its debt and economy via derivatives, especially credit default swaps, is widely believed to be immense. So if a cascade of Eurozone sovereign defaults and bank failures were to happen, it’s pretty much guaranteed to instantaneously spark a worldwide financial conflagration of epic proportions.

The idea that the global economy’s superstructure could suddenly collapse is not as farfetched a scenario as some people might think. It’s happened before, on two separate occasions. The first of these occasions was throughout the duration of World War One, and the second was when, after a brief period in the mid-to-late 1920s when the global economy had been patched back together, the Great Depression began wreaking its worldwide havoc. The non-existence of a global economy persisted from the early years of the Great Depression till the creation of the Bretton Woods system at the end of World War Two.

To be sure, trade between states did not completely dry up during these two periods of a non-functioning global economy. But the relative free flow of goods and capital that had been the norm before the commencement of these two periods did cease to exist. This was due to a combination of factors unique to each period. Some of these factors included the formation of blockades and trade embargoes, a popular desire for autarchy, the widespread enactment of capital controls, and the adoption of beggar-thy-neighbour trade policies by numerous states via the intentional depreciation of national currencies and the erection of protective tariffs.

It is important to point out that the existence of a truly global economy is a modern phenomenon. Its origins arguably began with the world system created in early Victorian Britain. This British-centric world system rested on two pillars: 1) the City of London’s success at internationalizing the gold standard and at becoming the epicentre of an international bond, insurance and commodity market; and 2) the great acceleration in the speed and volume of communication, travel and trade wrought by the technological changes made possible by the Industrial Revolution – a revolution which Britain, by being the first place where an energy dense fossil fuel (coal) was used to power automated machinery (the steam engine), was at the very forefront of pioneering. But by the end of World War Two, Britain, after being essentially bankrupted by its heavy and protracted participation in that ghastly and immensely destructive war, was forced to concede world leadership to its cousin state across the Atlantic, the United States. Likewise, with the creation of the Bretton Woods system, the centre of world financial power officially moved from the City of London to Wall Street, where it has remained ever since.

But the future prospects of the Pax Americana that has maintained the relative world peace and flourishing global trade since the end of World War Two is on increasingly shaky ground, as America’s global commercial empire seems to be hanging together at this point by only a few threads. Assuming that a cascade of sovereign defaults and bank failures in the Eurozone doesn’t completely destroy the global economy, the United States will in the short term benefit from the Eurozone’s demise. This is because global investors will flock in a knee-jerk reaction to the United States because of its long-established reputation as a safe haven, resulting in an increase in the dollar’s value and the lowering of U.S. Treasury bond yields. But this massive flight to safety will only be feeding off the last remaining residues of America’s former economic greatness. With the Eurozone in a shambles, the bond market vigilantes will then be free to start targeting America’s fiscal largesse, forcing Congress to either rapidly enact draconian levels of austerity or to default on the U.S. national debt. The ultimate consequence of either one of these measures being implemented would be an end to the American-centric global economic order that has existed throughout the world since the end of World War Two. Most importantly, the dissolution of America’s global commercial empire would mean an end to the U.S. dollar’s international reserve currency status, leaving the world without an internationally recognized unit of exchange in which to denominate commodities.

With an end to American unipolar dominance, and after a likely (and hopefully brief) period of apolar chaos, the global geopolitical landscape will revert back to the historical norm of a multipolar world due to the non-existence of a rival power capable of taking over America’s role as the defender of a liberal world order. It will become physically impossible this century, anyhow, for another nation to replicate the economic success and longevity of the globe-spanning Anglo-American commercial empires of the past two centuries. This is because the 21st century is set to witness an ever-increasing number of electric generators and combustion engines falling permanently silent due to fuel shortages from declining oil, gas, coal, and uranium extraction rates and due to diminishing rates of energy returned on energy invested. This, in turn, will result in a great de-acceleration in the global volume of communication, travel, manufacturing and trade. Entropy will start to visibly reign supreme, moreover, as endemic energy shortages, governmental bankruptcies, a loss of social cohesion, and the destruction of properly functioning credit markets combine together in a positive feedback loop to cause infrastructures to collapse. The upshot of all this will be to transform the 21st century into a century of irreversible declines, which, needless to say, bodes ill for the future of the West’s ongoing globalization project and the emergence of any new commercial empire that would seek to perpetuate its existence.

The gradual dissolution of the industrial epoch will give rise to the possibility of the 21st century being transformed into the human race’s most violent and tragic century. With industrial societies no longer able to rely on an international open market for the purchase and timely delivery of essential raw materials, such as fossil fuels, foodstuffs and mineral ores, it is far from unthinkable that at least some will succumb to the temptation, like they did during World War Two, of carving out an empire in a desperate attempt to secure access to their raw material needs. Such a scenario has the potential to create what the world hasn’t seen since the end of World War Two: the outbreak of warfare between two or more industrial powers – this time, however, in a nuclear age.

I’d now like to clarify what I meant by proposing that the new political party be based on the precepts of materialism. My categorization of what materialism encompasses is probably much narrower than most people's. Only the earth sciences, in my opinion, are based on materialism, with the earth sciences being made up of the foundational troika of physics, chemistry and biology, plus this foundational troika’s innumerable sub-disciplines, such as biochemistry, physiology, geology and so on. Every other branch of learning that purports to be materialistic I consider to be metaphysical, since, as far as I can tell, they’re all based on human-made constructs – i.e., abstractions – that don’t exist in nature.

I fully understand that the knowledge accumulated within the various earth science disciplines is by no means perfect. Innumerable scientific theories that were widely upheld as being accurate in the past have subsequently fallen out of favour, and there’s no reason to think that some scientific theories at the present time will not meet a similar fate in the future. Because of the intrinsic way the scientific method works, scientific theories can never be thought of as absolute, immutable truths, but only as provisional truths. Nevertheless, I maintain that a new political party grounded on the precepts of materialism (which is to say, the earth sciences) has a better chance than any other political party’s worldview at both identifying the real causes of our future crises and at proposing humane responses to help mitigate their most dire effects.

While mainstream economics is widely regarded to be based on materialism, on closer inspection it appears to be a virulently anti-materialistic academic discipline. This is because the doctrines that mainstream economics are based on have entirely rejected any acknowledgement of biophysical laws and any acceptance of the inherent physical limits these laws impose on the human race’s earthly ambitions. Being mired in a miasma of abstraction, mainstream economics has become something like the ethereal scholastic philosophy of medieval times, however with the novel addition of some funky mathematics that give it a glossy veneer of scientific credibility. It is ironic that the first school of economics, Physiocracy, is the closest the economics profession has ever gotten to a materialistically acceptable explanation for the origins of wealth. Given that mainstream economics provides the rationalization of the current status quo – that is, the fervent (and entirely groundless) belief in the non-existence of limits to growth because of the human race’s heroic technological conquest of nature over the past couple of centuries - it’s probably impossible to avoid a scenario in which the economics profession doesn’t become the bête noire of the new political party – assuming, of course, that the new political party ever gets formed.

To expand on the defects of mainstream economics a little further, another problem is that when its doctrines are stretched to their logical conclusion, they bequeath to humans a god-like capacity to create infinite amounts of wealth. But from a strictly materialistic point of view this idea is demonstrably false, since the 1st law of thermodynamics makes it impossible for humans to create anything. Instead, humans can merely transform finite amounts of energy stocks and flows and finite amounts of matter into abstractions that we popularly call wealth. It is thanks to the physiology and mental faculties of humans that we are able to be by far and away the most transformative species on Earth, but like other animals we possess no unique powers to make something from nothing. In other words each human is not, as mainstream economists would have it, a replica of God at the time of Genesis. Thus neither technology, nor entrepreneurialism, nor human ingenuity, nor enlightened self-interest, nor any of the other abstractions that are widely championed by mainstream economists today as a means to surmount physical limits, stand any chance whatsoever of preventing the primarily fossil fuel-powered industrial epoch, along with the highly consumptive, centralized, mobile and urbanized patterns of living it has engendered, from being anything other than an evanescent period in human societal development.

Indeed, the only thing that can keep industrialism chugging along well into the future is the appearance of a major new energy source that can replace fossil fuels. The prospects of this happening, however, are not very good. With all the technological innovations made throughout the past century only one significant new source of energy was discovered, uranium, which today makes up a relatively paltry 4 to 6 per cent of the world’s energy supply. All the other energy sources and technologies that are widely touted as our future salvation from depleting and polluting fossil fuels are either not actually sources of energy but forms of energy carriage (e.g., electricity and hydrogen), not yet in existence (e.g., nuclear fusion), or not able to be adequately scaled up (e.g., biomass, wind and solar, with the latter two also suffering from their inherent intermittency and the inability to store large quantities of electricity).

Besides its rejection of materialism, another problem with mainstream economics is the particular variant of economic thought that has come to dominate the profession over the past several decades. I’m talking about, of course, the ascendancy of neoliberal market fundamentalism, which, with the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the appearance of stagflation in the 1970s, came to replace the discredited Keynesian consensus of the immediate post-war era. Unlike Keynes and his acolytes, the neoliberals truly believe that markets, when shielded from any type of governmental interference, are perfectly efficient, rational and stable wealth creation and distribution systems. By cleansing society of all market imperfections, furthermore, the neoliberals foresee a new dawn for humankind, in which the eminently rational and scientifically sound theories contained in their economic textbooks – such as efficient markets, perfect information, perfect competition, rational expectations, rational utility maximization, and rational choice – will be finally accepted by society at large, creating an ever-lasting age of universal peace and prosperity.

Alas, the neoliberals have failed to create their earthly paradise thus far. They’d probably argue that that’s because they haven’t been successful at removing all the market imperfections imbedded in the global economy yet, which is true – except, that is, for one hugely important area where they’ve had astonishing success at fostering a state of laissez-faire anarchy: finance. The liberalization of the global financial system over the past few decades is without a doubt the crowning achievement of the neoliberal revolution. It is also the root cause of the current unstable, roiling global markets. The removal of capital controls, the chronic lowering of interest rates by central banks, the deregulation of the global banking sector, and the decision not to regulate derivatives has not led to an international economic renaissance of nearly risk-free prosperity, but instead to a worldwide rediscovery of leverage, which has produced an era of credit-fuelled pseudo-prosperity that is now on bond market-financed life support in many of the most economically important parts of the world.

Mainstream economic textbooks, whether of the neoliberal persuasion or not, contain theories that at best only vaguely resemble how economies actually work. This is not only because of their omission of any references to biophysical laws and the physical limits they impose, or because of their inability to grasp that there are inherent limits to how much debt an economy can absorb, but also because of their failure to come to grips with the vital role that central planning plays in making modern economies work. Before I go any further, it is important to point out that my use of the phrase ‘central planning’ is not meant to invoke the extreme centralized control over economies witnessed in the Soviet Union and other Marxist states. The central planning I’m talking about is the more mild, dirigiste kind that exists in all capitalist economies, in which central authorities, often at the behest of powerful moneyed interests, pre-determine certain economic objectives and then utilize various means of state intervention in the marketplace to bring about their fruition. A good example of central planning at work is the suburban sprawl economy that currently exists in both Canada and the United States:

With the hollowing out of their once mighty manufacturing bases over the past few decades as manufacturers moved their operations overseas to take advantage of cheaper labour markets, the financing, constructing, furnishing and servicing of suburban sprawl has become the primary economic activity in both Canada and the United States. But the existence of this suburban sprawl economy, at least to anything like the extent it exists today, is due to massive amounts of centrally planned market intervention. For instance, the typical 25 and 30 year amortized mortgage with a low (or no) downpayment is not a product of the spontaneous workings of the free market, but instead of mortgage market manipulation on a colossal scale by federally chartered institutions, such as the FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States, and the CMHC in Canada. In the United States, moreover, the interest on mortgages is tax deductible, giving an added economic incentive for Americans to choose homeownership over renting. Two other areas where central planning props up the North American suburban sprawl economy are (1) the existence of zoning laws that either inhibit or outlaw the construction of dual purpose – i.e., both residential and commercial – buildings and neighbourhoods, and (2) the 100 per cent public funding of roads and freeways.

Unless the true believers in a purified free market are willing to go “market bolshie”, so to speak, by violently seizing power in a coup d'état and then implementing their wildly fantastical laissez-faire doctrines in a chiliastic fury of repression and terror, and in so doing causing an amount of death and environmental devastation that is certain to rival that caused by the Soviet Union, it can be safely assumed that the future, like the past, belongs to central planning. I propose, therefore, that the new political party should enthusiastically embrace the reality and necessity of central planning. But unlike the current goals of central planning, which are to promote an ever-increasing rate of complexity and consumption, interdependence and centralization, the new political party would seek to utilize central planning to accomplish the opposite of these goals. If you’re familiar with American history, think of it as the use of Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends.

And now for some good news – I’m almost done! But before I wrap up with a conclusion, I’m going to briefly define and discuss the two concepts that I had earlier proposed that the new political party would be in opposition to: progress and universalism. Once that’s finished, I’ll then briefly suggest some policies that the new political party could adopt that, I believe, would help Canadians lessen the overall suffering they are certain to face in the years ahead as the tectonic stresses begin wreaking their worldwide havoc.

Progress can be defined as the idea that humankind, through its use of scientific rationalism and technology, is advancing in a definite and desirable direction. The idea of progress is a purely modern concept. Indeed, without a belief in progress, the popular notion that we’re living in a modern age would become utterly incoherent. The birth of the idea of progress occurred solely in the West, and can be traced back no further than to the rationalistic philosophy of the Enlightenment. Before that time, there’s no evidence of the idea of progress in either European or non-European traditions of thought.

It has been said that the idea of progress is a secularization of Christian eschatological hopes. There’s no doubt a lot of truth to this, as it would be more or less impossible for non-monotheistic thinkers who hold a cyclical view of history, in which nothing new ever happens under the Sun, to come up with the idea that history is a process of meaningful forward movement. There are some subtle differences, however, between the progressive and Christian teleological views of history. For starters, Christians tend to view history’s advancement as being caused not by the willpower of humans but by the providential workings of God. For believers in progress, on the other hand, the exact opposite is true; it is through the willpower of humans alone, via their use of Enlightenment rationalism to solve everyday problems, that history progresses towards universal betterment. Another difference is that while Christians ultimately foresee a great culmination to history in the form of God’s eventual establishment of a millenarian heaven on earth, believers in progress tend to be melioristic in their outlook, seeing human betterment as gradual and entirely reversible if visceral and anachronistic ways of interpreting the world should ever triumph over rational modes of thought. But there are a number of progressive ideologies, such as Marxism, that share Christianity’s deterministic view of history as a story that must end, after a brief pang of redemptive warfare against the forces of iniquity and injustice, in the universal salvation of humankind.

From a materialistic perspective, the idea of progress poses two problems. The first of these problems is that according to the theory of evolution, human life, like that of all other life forms, is without design or purpose. Thus beyond an innate desire to survive and reproduce that is shared with all other living organisms, human life is meaningless. Humankind in its entirety, furthermore, is going nowhere in particular, with its various hubristic attempts at trying to impose meaning on its existence producing nothing more than yawns of cosmic indifference. Finally, from a strictly evolutionary point of view, one would have to deduce that had humans remained hunter-gatherers until their time is up on this planet, having never developed civilization and the sciences, it wouldn’t have made one iota of difference in the grand scheme of things.

The second problem a materialistic worldview poses for the idea of progress is something I’ve already spent a fair amount of time talking about: namely, the seemingly ephemeral nature of the industrial epoch due, ultimately, to the existence of the laws of thermodynamics and the Earth’s spherical, and thus inherently finite, dimensions. Even though it is scientifically unsupportable, it is probably innocuous to view something like the development of civilization or the accumulation of scientific knowledge as progress, since these things can and most likely will be sustained so long as humans inhabit the Earth. What is not innocuous, however, is to view industrialism and the vast majority of the technological, institutional and demographic changes it has wrought as progress, since this action only works to thwart the development of ways to adjust to our rapidly approaching postindustrial, and thus postmodern, future.

As for universalism, I’ll define it here as the idea that it is either inevitable or desirable that the world converges on a single system of religious belief, or a single type of political and economic organization, such as global democratic capitalism or global communism. Universalism’s origins lie in the western monotheistic tradition – or, more precisely, in the Christian and Islamic theological doctrine that all of humankind, not just those currently practicing Christianity and Islam, is predestined for salvation by a single, beneficent God. With the onset of the Enlightenment in western Europe, however, the Christian doctrine of salvation was embraced, wittingly or not, by secular idealists and transformed into universalistic, humanistic and progressive political ideologies, such as liberalism, Marxism and positivism. Irrespective of whether it is of a religious or a secular ideological nature, the belief in universalism is where the West’s missionary zeal comes from.

There are two significant manifestations of secular universalism active in the world today: 1) the globalization movement, which seeks to unify the economies of the world into one giant economy through the removal of all barriers that hinder the free flow of capital and goods over national boundaries, and in so doing theoretically bringing about an era of ever-lasting peace and prosperity; and 2) the rise of neoconservatism, which is a political ideology wedded to the idea that a combination of liberal democracy and capitalism forms an endpoint to history, and whose followers have a tendency, especially those who reside in the world’s self-anointed redeemer state, the United States, to enthusiastically advocate the violent overthrow of the world’s remaining undemocratic regimes in order to speed up the human race’s entrance into an eternally radiant and harmonious future based on the supposedly millenarian attributes of democratic capitalism.

The problem with universalism, in either its religious or secular manifestations, is that it is a crackpot idea. The notion that all of humankind at some point in the future will be harmoniously united behind a single religion or political ideology is nuts, as the world is simply too big, diverse, complex and chaotic for such a scenario to ever arise. For this and other reasons already mentioned, it is safe to assume that the ongoing globalization project will fail, with its wreckage joining that of the various other attempts by the West to achieve a universally radiant civilization.

And now the time has come for a brief overview of some of my policy suggestions:

DOMESTIC ECONOMY:

In the name of improving physical efficiency via decentralization and localization, I propose the creation of a dichotomous split between industrial sector and service sector corporations, with the latter being abolished. Actually, since most service sector corporations will likely go bust during the next discontinuity, it would probably suffice to have their abolishment grandfathered in. This means that any service sector corporations that manage to survive the discontinuity would be allowed to remain in business, while the creation of any new service sector corporations after the discontinuity would be outlawed (this assumes, of course, that the new political party gets elected soon after a discontinuity strikes and can thereby enact this policy in time). Moreover, if any of the surviving service sector corporations were to choose to expand their operations any further after the discontinuity, they would be forced to surrender the perquisites of corporate personhood and limited liability.

Given that corporations are so ubiquitous and omnipotent in Canadian society, some people might shy away from the idea of abolishing their existence in certain sectors of the economy. But it is important to remember that corporations are not human beings but mere fictitious legal entities that were first created as institutional tools to help promote the common good. (At least ostensibly that is why they were created, although American wit Ambrose Bierce might have been closer to the mark when he defined corporations as ingenious devices for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.) The fact that the perquisites of corporate personhood and limited liability exist, furthermore, is not an accident, but the result of central planning. Indeed, a corporation’s right to life, liberty and property is enshrined in most modern constitutions, including Canada’s. But there’s no reason why the omnipresence of corporations in contemporary Canadian society – or indeed their existence at all – cannot be challenged in the years ahead. Constitutions can be amended. What central planning can giveth, moreover, central planning can taketh away.

While heavy industries would be allowed to remain incorporated for the foreseeable future, as a corporate structure is the only means, sans nationalization, of raising the vast amounts of capital that large-scale industrial enterprises require, the existence of corporations in the service sector is completely superfluous and can therefore be easily done away with. By outlawing service sector corporations, the hope is to recreate the large and decentralized petty-bourgeoisie of the 19th century. Being freed from corporate competition, the plethora of new small businesses would be placed on a truly level playing field, since none of them would have the wherewithal to lobby government for special privileges. But this new state of economic fairness would come at a price – the prohibition of all future incorporations and franchising. Thus great personal fortunes in the service sector would become a thing of the past.

The reestablishment of a large and decentralized petty-bourgeoisie would be promoted not only for reasons of economic fairness, but also, and much more importantly, for the large boost to overall physical efficiency it would engender. For an example of how this works, think of how much less energy is expended when meat is raised, butchered and sold locally by local farmers, butchers and merchants, as opposed to when it is sent to a huge centralized abattoir from farms covering a vast hinterland, butchered there on a mechanized assembly line by semi-skilled or unskilled labourers, and then sent off to markets far and wide, usually ending up in a large grocery chain’s display freezer where it is then sold to the public. While corporate centralization allows for the creation of economies of scale, and thus high levels of economic efficiency – i.e., low prices – through both the utilization of mass production techniques and the bulk buying of goods through long-term contracts (although often the attainment of these low prices is helped by lobbying efforts for company specific or industry-wide subsidies and tax breaks), it comes nowhere near the physical efficiency achieved by doing things locally.

The industrial sector, too, would be divided between an incorporated and centralized heavy industry sector (e.g., mining, automobile production) and a non-incorporated and decentralized light manufacturing sector (e.g., furniture making, food processing). In place of monotonous mass production, the light manufacturing sector would be based on a return to craftsmanship. The heavy industry sector, on the other hand, would continue to focus on extracting raw materials and mass producing goods such as textiles, chemicals, refined metals, electric power generation, transportation and construction equipment, machine tools and various types of appliances. Governmental regulation vis-à-vis manufactured goods would be fixed around promoting their durability, thereby putting an end to planned obsolescence. The mass production of most kinds of techno-trinkets and recreational craft (e.g., video game consoles, electric toothbrushes, dirt bikes) would be prohibited, as these things are a frivolous waste of finite natural resources.

Wherever deemed necessary, the industrial sector would be shielded from foreign competition through the reappearance of protective tariffs. In exchange for tariff protection, the industrial sector would be expected – as was the case in the past – to siphon some of its profits into the coffers of political parties that support the tariff, thereby giving these political parties access to funds to help offset their operating expenses.

Canadian zoning laws would be rewritten to encourage compactness and walkable communities over automobile-friendly sprawl, thus helping to recreate the old dichotomy that existed in Canada before WWII between rural and urban. As for the prodigiously wasteful suburbs, the fate of this neither truly rural nor urban landscape inhabitation scheme is almost certain to be a bleak one in a future of ever-diminishing techno-financial complexity. Because so many Canadians have tied up so much of their wealth in this living arrangement, it is likely to become a source for all kinds of political mischief in the years ahead. Any attempt to make the suburbs a more physically efficient living arrangement is going to be a difficult if not impossible task to achieve. In most cases, the population densities in the suburbs are too low for them to be served by any kinds of mass transportation other than buses. Nor will there be sufficient amounts of money and time available to relocate all of Canada’s suburban population to new and more compact housing developments in the inner cores of cities and towns. Thus, for the foreseeable future, it looks like we’ll just have to muddle through as best we can with the suburban sprawl fiasco.

Various modes of mass transportation would be strongly encouraged, especially the reestablishment of a vast web of railway lines that would link most if not all of Canada’s cities and towns together. These railway lines would handle both freight and passenger trains. The commercial aviation industry would be gradually shutdown, with transoceanic travel being returned to ocean liners, as they are a more physically efficient and durable means of transportation. Automobile production would be wound down inversely with increases in the construction of mass transportation networks.

The reemergence of family operated mixed farms would be promoted over the further expansion of agribusiness. To increase physical efficiency, farmers would be encouraged to provide for local markets, thus ending the importation of any foodstuffs from abroad that can be grown locally.

Thanks to the oil and natural gas bonanza of the past century, food production for the first time in history has become an energy sink, with the energy inputs in industrialized agriculture far exceeding the energy outputs (i.e., the food). If agriculture, and thus civilization, is to continue in a postindustrial future, it will have to be returned to producing energy surpluses. It would be wise, therefore, for the new political party to adopt policies that would help to gradually achieve this end, whatever those policies may be.

A huge effort would be made to guarantee each Canadian citizen’s access to basic healthcare, shelter, clothing and sufficient levels of nutritious food to survive on.

FINANCE & BANKING:

In order to (1) improve financial stability and (2) decelerate consumerism, credit cards, installment plans and other forms of consumer credit would be terminated. A short term exception to this policy, however, might have to be made for the purchasing of the biggest of big ticket items: automobiles and houses. As was the case until the early 20th century, credit would only be made available to those engaged in productive or commercial activities.

The use of fractional-reserve banking would continue. This means Canada’s economy would remain a growth economy, since fractional-reserve banking ultimately works by making a belief in tomorrow’s economic expansion the collateral for today’s debt. In other words a faith in future growth is intrinsic to the way fractional-reserve banking operates. Without this faith in future growth materializing into actual growth, moreover, a fractional-reserve banking system would collapse like a house of cards. While a growth economy is inimical to the concept of sustainability, without a smoothly functioning credit system how else can all the projects that need to be done get accomplished? Instead of trying to implement a newfangled and untested steady-state economic system, the idea is to control how and where capital can be used so that a substantially more decentralized, physically efficient and resilient society can be created over what exists today. When Canada has been de-complexified to a significant enough degree, then a non-growth type of economic system would be put into place.

Deposit insurance would be done away with; it is a bluff anyway, since the CDIC would be lucky if it has enough cash on hand to cover more than 5 per cent of Canadian bank deposits. To compensate for the added risk of depositing money in a bank, depositors would receive higher rates of interest than is currently the case. This action would encourage saving over speculation, and thus help to promote a healthy system of capital formation. Higher rates of interest on deposits would also mean that borrowing would be more costly than it is today.

It might be a good idea to break up the handful of large banks that currently exist in Canada into a plethora of smaller ones, since a more decentralized banking sector would reduce the systemic risks associated with financial panics, which are certain to be a recurrent problem. A more decentralized banking sector might also significantly reduce the lobbying power of banks. This would be beneficial, as banks have a tendency to lobby for the enactment of laws that enhance debt-fuelled profligacy over thrift, as the latter is more profitable for the banks than the former, at least in the short term.

In exchange for the profits accrued from the privilege of being able to lend money into existence, the banking sector would come under stringent regulation. For example, bank assets would be marked to market at all times, reserve ratios would be strictly enforced, and all off balance sheet shenanigans would be discontinued. Derivatives, moreover, would be either regulated, and thus transformed into legitimate forms of insurance, or abolished. Finally, capital controls would be reinstated, with the movement of capital both in and out of Canada being severely restricted.

TRADE:

In the post-discontinuity future, international trade is going to be severely hampered by factors that include: 1) the vanishing of letters of credit due to the breakdown of the global financial system; 2) the loss of an international reserve currency (the US dollar) in which to denominate both commodities and cross boarder trade; 3) the return to protectionism by many countries in an attempt to both create jobs domestically and to isolate national economies from the havoc being wreaked by a collapsing global economy; and 4) the outbreak of thinly disguised resource wars between various nations and empires in the making, leading to embargoes, blockades and the destruction of some of the world’s resource extracting and manufacturing centres. To be sure, trade will continue to exist in a post-discontinuity future, just not at anything like the levels we are currently accustomed to. In many cases, moreover, the trade that does occur will be highly erratic, and thus unreliable.

In order to shield itself from the caprices of a broken international trade and financial system, Canada would become reacquainted with its protectionist heritage. Protectionism would also be upheld because it maximizes physical efficiency, in the sense that it is more physically efficient to produce goods locally than to import them from abroad.

IMMIGRATION:

Immigration into Canada would be halted. This wouldn’t be done in one fell swoop, but over, say, a two to five year period. From then on perhaps a door could be left slightly open for a few hundred or so new arrivals per annum, but only via a parliamentary vote on each individual.

I fully understand the sensitivity of this issue. In particular, I understand that this policy is bound to elicit charges of racism and xenophobia. These charges, should they occur, would be entirely understandable, given the West’s deplorable legacy of attributing its ascendancy over the rest of the world over the past couple of centuries to its white skin. This mendacious idea achieved its climax, of course, with the rise of Nazi Germany and its uniquely barbarous ideology that maintained that the earthly salvation of so-called Aryans (i.e., white Germanic peoples) hinged on either the eternal enslavement or the extermination of much of the non-Aryan human race. In the wake of the unprecedented scale and cold-bloodedness of Nazi atrocities, the idea of white supremacy and “scientific” racism has lost any degree of academic respectability it once had in the West, although some whites, alas, still adhere to it. Moreover, it is now obvious that the West was able to lord it over the rest world for the past couple of centuries not because of something as silly as skin colour, but because of its “discovery”, settlement and exploitation of the vast resources of the New World, and, more importantly, because of its being the birthplace of the financial, industrial and scientific revolutions. But with post-war decolonization and the inevitable dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge from the West to the rest of the world, most of the advantages the West once had over other civilizations are now gone. Indeed, the country with the largest industrial output in the world today, China, is to be found in the Far East. In the near future we face not a changing of the guard, so to speak, in which a new geographic region of the world, such as East Asia, takes over the reins of global domination from a rapidly declining West, but a return to pre-19th century conditions in which no single part of the world is capable of dominating rest.

Immigration would be opposed because of a concern over Canada’s long-term carrying capacity, not because of the new political party’s adoption of a grotesque and poisonous politics of racial and ethnic sentimentalism. While Canada is a vast country, dependable agricultural land covers only approximately 5 per cent of its land surface. Its reserves of non-renewable resources, moreover, are not limitless.

To be frank, you cannot create a new political party based on the precepts of materialism without confronting the human population taboo. Just like there are limits to growth, there are limits to how many people a given area of land can sustain. These carrying capacity limits will become more apparent with the gradual but inexorable decline of fossil fuels. If Canadians are willing to accept a degree of indigence that can be found in, say, the slums of Calcutta, then by all means let Canada’s population be tripled or quadrupled from what it is today. But if Canadians have higher material aspirations for the generations to come after them, then immigration is going to have to be stopped at some point. Why not make it now?

FOREIGN POLICY:

While Canada’s foreign policy would be more subtle than mere isolationism, it would refrain from seeking monsters to destroy in foreign lands. The world is going to become a far more nasty, violent and unpredictable place, and there’s very little that either the Canadian government or the Canadian people can do about that. It should be remembered that the world has been hardly any less of a war torn and cruel place since the end of WWII than it was during the period from 1914 to 1945. In fact, the only significant difference between the two periods is that one from 1914 to 1945 involved warfare between industrial powers.

Instead of unnecessarily getting entangled in foreign intrigues, Canada would concentrate on protecting the North American continent from invasion, presumably with the help of the United States in this endeavour. This shouldn’t be all that hard to do, considering that North America is blessedly surrounded by three large oceans that make transoceanic invasion essentially impossible.

Finally, it would be of the utmost importance, as it has always been in Canada’s past (or at least it has been since Confederation), to maintain at least cordial relations with our much larger and much more militarily powerful neighbour to the south. Whatever we do, we cannot piss them off. If we somehow do, we run the risk of having them “liberate” us from the tyranny of Queen Elizabeth II (and our oil).
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In conclusion, none of my policy suggestions are written in stone. These are just some ideas off the top of my head that I believe would help Canadians persevere in a humane fashion against the tectonic stresses for, at best, a few decades.

Ultimately, only through the realm of politics will Canadians be able to mitigate the fast approaching calamities that they and the rest of the world face in the years ahead. After the next discontinuity strikes, it is likely that many individuals will attempt to resurrect the status quo ante. But this action will be nothing more than an act of futility. Industrial progress is chimera (if not the idea of progress in general), and this fact will cause the West to enter into an existential crisis, as the conventional left-wing / right-wing political spectrum that dominates its current political discourse becomes increasingly incoherent and irrelevant. If Canada, with its vast size and resource base, geographical isolation, and history of peace and civility cannot find a modus vivendi that staves off a descent into barbarism, then it is likely that no country can.]]> Michael James General Discussion Sat, 10 Dec 2011 11:27:38 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1077,1077#msg-1077 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1077,1077#msg-1077 Alileeca General Discussion Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:19:27 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1073,1073#msg-1073 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1073,1073#msg-1073 New York Times, the most influential newspaper in Dumbfuckistan, oops, I mean the United States. (Americans are not really dumb, but suffer from a dreadful lack of information due in part to the corporate media). I also read your talk on complexity, which I also found to be excellent.

However, when you mention geoengineering – injecting sulfates into the atmosphere - as a plausible antidote to global warming, I can’t help but slap myself on the forehead in astonished agony. Tad, get a grip on yourself! In [iCarbon Shift[/i] you do mitigate this mitigation by calling the prospect hubristic and appalling with likely unintended consequences.

I’m not a dogmatic Luddite or Romantic. I’m a Paleolithic Conservative with an open mind, open to appropriate use of technology, but firmly convinced that we need to live as closely as possible to how nature/evolution designed our particular animal species to live: material simplicity, natural food , exercise, joy and self-worth derived from emotional bonding and productive activity, and embedded in an ecosystem with the understanding that we do not ultimately control the system. Most of our problems stem from humankind’s arrogant efforts to manipulate nature to our perceived benefit, with disastrous, unintended consequences. Industrial civilization is a Faustian bargain gone wrong.

Spraying sulfates into the atmosphere is like tossing salt into our mother’s eyes to cure her fever, most likely a quack remedy which will cause more problems than it solves. This is an example of trying to solve a problem with the very type of thinking which created it, which Einstein cautioned against.

However, to prove that I’m not a fundamentalist Romantic, I will concede that if global warming reaches hideous proportions signaling the extinction of most life, including humans, I could support sprinkling fairy dust in God’s face, but only as an absolute last resort. In fairness, I suppose that is what you are saying.

In the meantime, I will continue to build a transition community (I think the Transition Town Movement is our best bet), educate the public about resilience, and grow food and raise bees on my 10 acres 50 miles south of Chicago. I moved out here 26 years ago because I’ve known since my counterculture days in the 1960’s that our socio-economic-political system is not only insane but headed for collapse.

Tad, thanks again for your great work. The Upside of Down is still the best book on the world crisis that I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of them!

George Ochsenfeld
ochsenfeld@aol.com
Monee, Illinois]]> ochsenfeld General Discussion Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:44:47 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1071,1071#msg-1071 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1071,1071#msg-1071
My questions and concerns are:

Given the reduced polar ice cover (and reduced glaciers over mountains) - where did all the water go? After all, we are in a closed system. Is the excess liquidity manifesting in increased floods (Pakistan, Australia) and heavy rainfalls - and possibly heavy, unprecedented snow storms around the world?

What happens when solar sunspot activity gets reduced to below average (past 70 year average) for a prolonged period, perhaps combined with increased volcanic activity (increased atmospheric ash cloud that reflects sunlight, cooling planet) and with the increased level of liquidity in our closed system? Will we continue to get increased precipitation in areas where we least expect it?

I am concerned about sudden or systemic reduction in global caloric (agricultural) output as a result of disruptive climate change (related to excess water or perhaps lack thereof due to disrupted jet stream patterns). As it is now, increased food prices in countries with very low incomes (Tunisia, Egypt, for example) are contributing to stress and instabilities.

I believe, as the Pharoah did after Joseph's interpretation of his nightmares, it would be prudent to have a global strategy to address potential need for critical food storage (similar to national stock piles or oil) to mitigate against unexpected climate-related reduction of caloric output in strategic agricultural areas.]]> goodfield19 General Discussion Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:42:48 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1070,1070#msg-1070 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1070,1070#msg-1070 murraylumley General Discussion Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:44:53 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1069,1069#msg-1069 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1069,1069#msg-1069
We need imaginative solutions. I think that a good way to start is to convene an Interdisciplinary Symposium right now, at a center such as Columbia University's Earth Institute, bringing together diverse parties to search for timely, actionable and creative solutions to the problem. Participants should be experts in widely-ranging fields such as science, engineering, economics, journalism, education, political science, psychology, public relations, business, history, foreign affairs, etc. Such a symposium could be replicated in many major international institutions. Succeeding forums should involve all stakeholders in the problem as well. I have not seen such a concerted dramatic response to this singular existential threat.

Btw I just saw the beautiful movie on the world-wide effects of climate change, "Home", by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which can be seen at: [www.youtube.com]


Ronald Kaprov, E.D., Science Education, Columbia University Teachers College
Thesis topic: Creative Problem Solving]]> ron01262 General Discussion Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:39:48 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1067,1067#msg-1067 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1067,1067#msg-1067 The Upside of Down, in January 2007. In the same month, I discovered the Transition Town movement, which comes out of Totnes, UK and was founded by Rob Hopkins. He also read your book, and gives it friendly mention in his book, The Transition Handbook (published spring/summer 2008).

There are now 300 official Transition groups around the globe, four years later. Have you heard of it? Have any of them asked you to come speak at one of their events?

http://www.transitionus.org -->> US center

http://transitionculture.org -->> Rob Hopkins' blog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns -->> wikipedia article

http://www.transitionnetwork.org/about -->> Global Transition HQ

Also, have you looked at the Great Transition Initiative, similarly named, but different?
("Visions and Pathways for a Hopeful Future")
[www.gtinitiative.org]
[en.wikipedia.org]
[www.facebook.com]

-- Jim Barton
Asheville, NC, USA]]> smithmillcreek General Discussion Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:33:17 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1064,1064#msg-1064 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1064,1064#msg-1064
Enjoy

[www.bbc.co.uk]
[en.wikipedia.org]]]> diegoami General Discussion Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:41:09 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1040,1040#msg-1040 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1040,1040#msg-1040
It's been about 15 or so years since I last sent in some forum stuff. (I think you were giving away a prize or something for an interesting future scenario...)

Anyway. Just a quick note regarding the paper you referenced in your August NYTimes column:

Responding to Threats of Climate Change Mega-Catastrophes, Carolyn Kousky, Olga Rostapshova, Michael Toman, Richard Zeckhauser, October 19, 2009

Why do most of the scenarios today assume as a baseline that we'll all be living the same lifestyle? The examples given are roughly: geoengineer the earth back to something like today, or quit hydrocarbons overnight but replace with equal alternative energies, or lastly, adapt but just move people and resources around enough that life (and business) can go on as usual? Regardless of the political issues, I have seen very few scenarios that offer a proactive plan and policies for moving us quickly to what is basically as inevitable as the laws of physics: fewer resources and less food security.

If the average citizen of North America understood exactly the restrictions, limits on consumption and other "communal" shrinking and focus of resources that occurred the last time we faced an existential crisis (I'm talking WWII with nations openly killing other nationals, as opposed to Sept 11 and "terrorists"), they would and will surely rise to the occasion. What exactly is everyone (including those who post here and yourself) waiting for?

Bottom line. You. Your influential friends and colleagues. What's the plan? To either A: fix the climate problem or more likely B: where to move and run for the non-flooding hills? (Okay. Me too... but man it just feels cathartic to rant... Never mind that the paint on the bow of the ocean liner I'm sailing on says "Titanic"...). I don't post very much very often but after the fifteen or twenty years I've spent freaking out about this topic, I still am seeing armchair quarterbacks who I believe are a serious solution alternative. We're all basically useless writing here, right? So again...If you had 200,000 people in a stadium and you could actually give them (us) marching orders for "next Friday," what's the plan? There's no one going to follow..... no plan. Even if we can document the screw-ups in real-time, with great accuracy, with feeling, even. Ain't worth a pinch in the big picture.

Thanks for the forum. I'm willing to engage.... But let's get really serious.

P.S. Just for interest's sake, note that the recent special issue of Scientific American entitled "The End" offers up some scenarios and odds for civilization-ending catastrophes. Things like a spontaneous black hole swallowing us up (like, a billion in a billion years). The odds of rapid climate change? 1 in 2. Still.... and this is my point.... the
time period in which that 50% chance occurring is given as sometime in the next 200 years. Even [iScientific American[/i] is going light on the probabilities. If you can't get a real threat from that magazine, WTF?]]> mworgan General Discussion Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:49:18 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1038,1038#msg-1038 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1038,1038#msg-1038
I am 84, and my days as a 1960s writer and social activist are long behind me, and predicting the future is truly a mug’s game, but as I look back over a lifetime of participating in the longest period of economic expansion in human history, I’m aware that many warning signs were there. Many of us sounded the alarm in one way or another, but somehow we were persuaded our moment in the sun could be extended indefinitely. Our dominant social paradigm still prevails, in spite of thirty-five years of doomsday books, articles, television documentaries and movies, and that paradigm is a method of production and distribution of capitalist origins, which in turn has generated the belief that growth of any kind, in any section of our culture. is a social norm, and probably a good thing.

With that dominant social paradigm has come a technological pre-occupation with efficiency, time, an economic value on everything as a standard measuring tool (quality and quantity), the externalizing of many social costs, and an incredible rise in living standards in purely quantitative terms. This is obviously a gross over-simplification, but is a good starting point for discussion. One of my concerns is that the paradoxes and anomalies now appearing in the paradigm I describe may bring about a rather sudden social paradigm shift, which may be too compressed for our society to cope with without serious social consequences: read violence, civil strife and disorder.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it should finally dawn on most of us that the party is over. The slow and painful process of de-industrialization will be underway, hastened by dwindling non-renewable resources and world-wide conflicts over land, water, food and over-population. This, coupled with the environmental effects of global warming and climate change, make the perfect storm an apt cliche.

None of this will happen overnight in some cataclysmic burst of violence neatly captured by CNN in prime time, but will proceed slowly over several decades as the anomalies in our dominant social paradigm become impossible to resolve. Global trade, with its fragile lines of transportation wrecked by $150+ barrel oil, will give way to de-centralization. Our industrial society is built on the production of goods and services using cheap and abundant resources, mostly fossil fuels, and will be unrecognizable in another 30 years.

Our descendants will look back on us as they read archival copies of newspapers, magazines and television programs and ask: “What was wrong with those people? Couldn’t they see what was happening? Why didn’t they do something?”.

Why indeed. Unfortunately there is little we can do individually. These are collective problems requiring collective solutions, and our culture encourages only individual solutions to collective problems. Before we can proceed to bring about change, we must first define the problems. The Rob Fords of our society simply cannot define these problems and I'm not sure we'd listen even if they could.

My greatest fear is the rise of authoritarian forms of government enthusiastically supported by developed nations eagerly trying to ward off the inevitable. The disintegrating American empire may well lead the way as it seeks to impose its will. A carbon tax is a dead issue, it appears. We are required to destroy ourselves environmentally in order to save ourselves economically. I wish I could be as optimistic as Homer-Dixon, and I hope his faith in the younger generation is justified.

John Fisher]]> Watercolourlover26 General Discussion Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:29:45 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1032,1032#msg-1032 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1032,1032#msg-1032 andrew General Discussion Wed, 02 May 2012 15:34:40 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1031,1031#msg-1031 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1031,1031#msg-1031
The source of tidal energy is the movement of tides. Wave turbines, which have a role similar to wind turbines, are placed under the sea water. The water movement results in the movement of turbines and thereby results in the production of electricity.

As the world is looking for renewable energy resources, tidal energy is getting more attention day by day. Tidal energy extraction works in two ways: it creates electric power from the horizontal movement of sea water and from the rise and drop of sea water levels.

Tidal energy is highly dependable and predictable. As tides do not depend on weather, their motion can be predicted. Tidal energy works in a similar way to hydroelectric energy. Tidal energy is one of the clean and cost-effective forms of alternative energy. The rise and ebb of the tides can be effectively used as an alternative energy resource.

More information about tidal energy and the methods of extraction can be obtained from the recent Energy Industry News reports [www.worldenergymedia.com].]]> FRIEDT21 General Discussion Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:39:13 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1026,1026#msg-1026 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1026,1026#msg-1026 The Upside of Down, I was disappointed by the absence of any substantial solution to the fundamental issues raised by the book. Indeed, I felt like we are all unable to have any positive impact on the ultimately doomed world -- 10 chapters of down with not much up.

Toward the end, you suggest that moderate people have a "collective action problem" vs. extremists in those moments of contingency. Your solution: an online community. My initial reaction was that this was trivial. It certainly didn't leave me feeling that I have a great deal of power over the various extremist forces, I must confess.

So, tonight I came to the online community to see what it offered. Forgive me if I'm missing something deeper here, but what I see at first blush is a discussion-board kind of book club. If you hoped for a real and vital community that would be working online toward solutions to the five tectonic stresses or the multipliers you identify in the book, I think you must be very disappointed. Is such a thing even possible in a public forum? Or am I looking in the wrong place?

In the three years since the book, have you done any re-thinking about where we go from here, and whether we can get there from here?

I'd be interested to know of any real movements that are happening in the direction of preparing for catagenesis.]]> Robert Irish General Discussion Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:37:56 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1024,1024#msg-1024 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1024,1024#msg-1024
Your analysis of the fall of the Western Roman Empire based around declining EROI and increasing complexity is extremely thought-provoking. Many thinkers and commentators have argued that the modern western world is going the way of Rome, but your analysis provides more technical grounding for this hypothesis than any other that I am aware of.

But still, I wonder how the EROI/complexity paradigm holds up when applied to the fall of other long-lived empires. Would it be relevant to the Eastern Roman Empire, i.e. Byzantium, which began a long, mostly gradual contraction in the seventh century (but held out until the fifteenth century)? Did the east not experience the same EROI crisis due to warmer, sunnier climes and access to alternate food sources, from the sea for example (given that most of Byzantium was close to water)?

As to complexity, I do find it interesting that Byzantium, which certainly had its complexities (thus the term we use today for unnecessary complexity, i.e. "byzantine" ), was ultimately defeated by the Islamic Turks, who held to a much simpler religious and theological structure versus Eastern Christianity. So is the slow fall of the east more a question of accumulated complexity which fails to adapt to changing conditions? (Recall that the Turks and not the Byzantines used a new military innovation, gunpowder canons, in the final battles.)

So, at some point, do increasing levels of organizational, social and economic complexity cross a threshold that inhibits positive innovation? For example, when things get "too bureaucratic"? See, perhaps, the 2008 financial crisis, where government financial oversight mechanisms (complex arrangements across multiple agencies) couldn't respond quickly enough to increasingly complex financial instruments (despite documented awareness of the danger by people within those oversight agencies)?

Just wondered what your thoughts on this might be.

Thanks.
Jim Gerofsky]]> jimg404 General Discussion Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:46:51 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1021,1021#msg-1021 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1021,1021#msg-1021
You wrote, "Our innate capacity for fear clashes with another deep human characteristic - a tendency toward optimism.Contrary to Mr. Brown’s claims, people aren’t naturally pessimistic. Psychological research has shown that we have, on average, a bias toward hopefulness."

This is not actually true in any research I have read. I tried to see your source/reference list to see where you had determined this conclusion, but you did not list it? Don't take this the wrong way: but if you're a researcher and teacher, should not you list your sources on your articles?

I have been doing extensive research on the Positive Psychology movement by Dr. Seligman at Penn State, and he would actually disagree with you here. There are natural optimists, and there are natural pessimists. We are naturally born as one or the other, and while we can work to adjust our natural 'outlook' buffer-range, we cannot fully change it.

I agree that people are not all naturally pessimistic...but nor are they all naturally optimistic. There is a variance among humans, as both optimism and pessimism served a natural purpose (different ones) in the human evolutionary process. Both have their benefits and drawbacks to society. Not one or the other is better or worse. Instead, what matters is how, when and why each is applied.

Optimism vs pessimism

M
----
Michelle Estable
www.michelleestable.com

Sources:

Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. NY: Free Press.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life. NY: Vintage Books.

Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist. v55. no.1. Jan. pp 5-14.

Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., & Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist. v60. no.5. Jul/Aug. pp 410-421.

Seligman, M. E. P., Rashid, T., & Parks, A. C. (2006). Positive psychotherapy. American Psychologist. v61. no.8. Nov. pp 774-788.]]> mestable37 General Discussion Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:39:37 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1020,1020#msg-1020 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1020,1020#msg-1020 The Ingenuity Gap is about cars. How they (Oldsmobiles) were built in the '50s and how Thomas was able to rebuild one of them (p.107). "Dismantling that machine taught me that it was possible to analyse machines and the things in our world, to break them apart and grasp their inner workings" (p.108).

Quote from p.111 reads: "A 1999 Oldsmobile engine with its computerized control...has far more parts, and is therefore far more COMPLEX." That means more difficult to fix of course.

And indeed, things are as predicted by the author. Today we read in the news: "Consumers to see more recalls as auto technology becomes more complex. Vehicle recalls (Toyota) could become broader and more frequent as automakers use increasingly complex technology.., analysts say."]]> Wojt General Discussion Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:23:15 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1019,1019#msg-1019 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1019,1019#msg-1019 The Wealth of Planets

The Wealth of Nations brought to the Western world germinal insights into the fundamental drivers of production efficiencies and the power of supply chain feedback loops to effectively allocate resources and distribute goods.

Over the intervening 230 years, a complex set of mathematical formulations has evolved which govern most of the economically related regulation globally. Neo-Classical economic theory is currently the central framework guiding a significant portion of the economic, political and indeed social decision making in the West and increasingly throughout the rest of the world.

Its mathematical basis, the application of Helmholtz’s equations for energy dynamics (subsequently superseded by more robust theories of electromagnetism and thermodynamics) exchanging utility for energy, etc., has built into the entire edifice (built atop the basic paradigm) the fundamental assumption that equilibrium is the natural state of economic markets. Although this fundamental flaw certainly drives much of the inability to create market systems that avoid the asynchronous boom and bust behavior characteristic of global capitalism, I believe an even more serious outage exists.

Wholly aside from this question of whether the embedded mathematical assumptions and relationships are even vaguely suited to the physical behavior being modeled, there exists a more fundamental question of great importance. That question is whether the approach of Neo-classical economics - handling all factors beyond the limited set explicitly modeled within the framework as “externalities” - has any hope of leading to a model that can guide us to an ecologically, politically and socially stable global state.

Adam Smith’s Semi-Global Village

It is 1786 in a small town in Scotland. Adam Smith’s nephew Able has moved there 5 years after the publishing of The Wealth of Nations. He has purchased a tin flatware and cutlery factory where he intends to apply the power of the division of labor to make his fortune. He quickly transforms the group of individual craftsmen into an efficient factory process which produces 3 times as much product at half the cost.

Within one year he has increased his output fivefold, dominating the market within 20 leagues and has purchased the largest manor in the county. He has raised the wage of his craftsmen by 25% while expanding his workforce by twofold. His only problem seems to be that he can’t get sufficient tin and the cost has increased by half.

The local sheriff, a distant relation of the Sheriff of Nottingham, approaches Able and offers an exclusive supply relationship, promising to meet all requirements and maintain the current price for 3 years, which Able gladly accepts. The Sheriff immediately commandeers the local tin mine for lateness in paying retroactively defined taxes. He rounds up 100 men, women and children from surrounding villages to work in his newly acquired mine in order to pay off the same retroactive taxes.

Five years later, runoff from the mine has ruined the creek and much of the groundwater that supplied the town, rendering many small farms incapable of sustaining themselves. Most of the town’s men spend half their time in the militia trying to defend their families and crops from raids by the surrounding villages enraged over the enslavement of their relatives. As the decreasing supply of water and food increases the pressure on the townspeople, Able needs more and more private guards to protect his manor, grounds and factory. Finally, spreading consumption and an explosion of vermin in the growing squatters’ camp in the adjoining forest lead him to acquiesce to his young wife’s requests. He buys a castle on the south coast of France where he relocates permanently.

While writing to his uncle Adam to thank him for the profound insights into the division of labor, the natural and market price of commodities, and all the other subjects in The Wealth of Nations, and bemoaning the wretched state of his home village and the utter lack of industry and morals of the peasant population, Able falls into a dream. In this dream, he meets a visitor from the future. This visitor is a strange and profoundly annoying man holding a violin, upon which he occasionally produces horrible screeching noises. The visitor introduces himself as one Henny Youngman and proceeds to relate a strange tale. “There once was a man buying a suit. While trying on the suit the man tells the tailor that the pants are too long. The tailor says not to worry, pulls up the waist of the pants in the front to the man’s chest, places the man’s left arm across his chest to hold the pants in place and says, “There, just right”. The man looks in the mirror and says that the right sleeve is 4 inches too long. The tailor bunches up the right sleeve, places the man’s right arm on top of his head and says “There just right”. The man looks in the mirror, and says that the left lapel is longer than the right. The tailor pulls up the left lapel, places the man’s chin down on it to hold it in place and again states “There, just right”. The man takes one more look in the mirror, pays for the suit and proceeds down the sidewalk. Grossly contorted and walking as if seriously crippled, the man passes two little old ladies. After passing the man, the first woman says to the second, “Oh, did you see that poor man?” The second replies, “Yes, but didn’t the suit fit nice”… Mr. Youngman concluded before disappearing, “Great economic theory, how’d that work out for you?”

Life, Entropy, Perpetual Motion and Utility

Perpetual motion schemes, above unity motor plans and early proponents of life as anti-entropic all have one characteristic in common. They fail to comprehend all salient factors and mistakenly treat open systems as closed, therefore creating flawed models of physical systems’ behavior.

The fundamental variable in all flavors of economics is utility. Utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of goods. Upon this extremely limited basic definition, the very weak analogy of utility to energy and the use of Helmholtz’s “energetics”, the entire complex edifice of neo-classical economics is built.

If Able’s next dream introduced him to the most brilliant neoclassical economists of today, they could not employ the best current economic models to inform him how to create an economy in his new French community that would be much more stably sustainable than the destruction he just unintentionally wrought in his home town.

The entire concept of utility is so limited that it undercuts the ability of economics to usefully comprehend the interconnected complexity of the world’s dynamics. It has led to top decision makers forming globally impacting policy based on flawed beliefs that our economic models are optimizing what is important to our nation and the world.

Neo-classical economics addresses all factors not readily described by utility functions as “externalities”. Thus they model them as phenomena separate from the basic economic model. Any model that can’t quantify and process the value associated with incremental pollution, global warming, risks of political destabilization, terrorism, war, pandemics, etc. is so fundamentally flawed as to be dangerous. Global economic policy is a major factor in all such risks. Political beliefs governing social, currency, trade, medical and military policies impact the world in profound ways. Belief in the accuracy and efficacy of neo-classical free market capitalism has guided much of US domestic and foreign policy for decades. Critical government policy decisions in areas of healthcare, child welfare, education, trade policy, environmental protection and foreign aid hinge on the beliefs of policy makers regarding the ability of “the free market” to remediate large-scale social, environmental and political problems.

Behavior interacting in complex ways governs the variable risks of such critical “external” factors as those above in concert with macroscopic economic decision making, such as tax policies affecting energy and transportation industries, funding levels for education and welfare, tax and regulation policies for environment-impacting industries and activities, etc. Current economic theory is incapable of meaningfully assessing the risks and probabilities and appropriately modulating the investment or pricing decisions associated with such critical questions as:

• What cost to the world economy is represented by the following risks, and what level of investment in peace-keeping forces, medical and educational aid, and agricultural assistance to Africa would reduce these risks to levels acceptable to the developed world?
- A global pandemic of multiply resistant TB
- Exploding global terror attacks from the merging of middle eastern jihadism with the extreme social dislocation manifested in the Rwanda genocide as it spreads with the growing food shortage crisis

The potential costs are certainly in the trillions of dollars. In fact, a global pandemic with global mortality on the order of the Black Plague (30% on the low estimate) could conceivably reduce global GDP (US $65 trillion estimated in 2006) proportionately (>US $20 trillion). Similarly, a series of successful WMD strikes, such as 4 x 5 Kiloton “suitcase nukes” or 3 x 20 Kiloton theater nukes against major global cities would certainly cause trillions of dollars in cost from damage remediation, trade/economic disruption and military response expenditures.

• How much family services, educational and substance abuse treatment investment would lower the current incarceration rate and its total societal costs to the point of positive ROI?

• How much investment (including the value of a reduction in the gross product of specific industries) in regulation and enforcement, incentives and direct government investment would reduce the long term costs of environmental damage to a positive ROI?

The entire set of market mechanisms that result in pricing goods and services is decoupled from global costs/risks associated with their creation and delivery such as environmental, social and political risks/impacts.
There exists a large pool of individuals conversant in extremely sophisticated modeling of highly complex systems in various physical sciences, including physics and mathematics. It would serve us well to enlist these capabilities to build a new economic theory that encompasses all the critically relevant relationships that are day by day determining the ultimate livability of our planet. It could be that the current edifice of neo-classical economics can be fundamentally expanded to encompass the needed scope of global decision making or it could well be that its Helmholtzian foundation may need to be replaced with more powerfully appropriate tools developed over the last two hundred years. Either way, this task needs to be recognized as more critical than the moon landing and elevated accordingly in the national scientific psyche.

The Wealth of Planets is waiting to be written. Please help.]]> wealthofplanets General Discussion Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:17:46 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1018,1018#msg-1018 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1018,1018#msg-1018
Helmholtzian Regrets
(with apologies to Longfellow, Poe and Suess)


By the shores of Michi-Gami
By the shining global market
Bringer of all things the market
Raiser of all boats the market
Stood the office of the Friedman
Father of the boon the Friedman
Arbiter of rates the Friedman
Stopping global scares the Friedman
Priest of Laissez Faire the Friedman

No?... OK…

Once upon a downturn dreary, global markets weak and weary
Over a quaint volume of forgotten economic lore
While I quaffed my fear a numbing, in my brain I felt a drumming
As a memory gently humming, strumming on my forebrain’s door
“Tis just a ghost of ancient physics“ strumming on my forebrain’s door
Only this and nothing more

Ah distinctly I remember, it was in a bleak September
Began liquidity dismember, signaling what was in store
Gnashed our teeth in pain and sorrow, as we vainly tried to borrow
“Not today, perhaps tomorrow” said the crack head banking whore
“No loans today from in my Caddy, try tomorrow, pay my Daddy”
“Then just post my bail once more”

Still No?...OK…Probably really a Seuss story anyway…

Neoclass Sneeches see invisible hands
Allocating resources across all lands
Removing barriers to equilibrate
Failing economies to set them straight
The ghost of Helmholtz spins in his grave
Vainly wishing his rep he could save
“I thought that ectoplasm made me look pretty bad”
“But using my Dynamics they made me look mad”
“Equating energy to utility was wholly misguided”
“And up here in heaven I’m constantly chided”
“For letting them do it, I look like a chump”
That basic mistake leads to bump after bump

My Energy Dynamics hidden deep inside
The neoclassic structures they built with such pride
You see, cried Schumpeter, we’re scientists too
Our bold intellectual prowess is just like you
What Mirowski calls emulation misbegotten
Recalls the theft I wish was forgotten
I take enough guff about mediums’ tappings
Without the heat for neoclass’ fake physics trappings

Closed energy systems do equilibrate
And if utility was conserved it just might work great
To steal my stuff for an econ theory-light
But utility and energy are nothing alike
No matter the edifice built on top
The neoclass endgame always will stop
In some form of stable configuration
Solved by neoclass confabulation
Or they would, except for the basic mistake
That utility energy’s mantle can’t take
So shaking economies up in the belief
That barrier downing always brings relief
Playing business and governments’ culpable cupid
Genius or selfish, destructive and stupid?
Increasingly frequent, increasingly global
Economic crises that are frightfully mobile
More higher peaks and more lower troughs
Strain the credulity of Krugman’s froths

As we shake the economies of the weak
(If we’d done such here we’d been shot in a week)
Equilibrium’s inevitable we boldly conclude
They just need more discipline, less heat and less food
Our thumb on the scale the table's been shifted
The worthy more worthy of what we have gifted
The strong are more strong now more able to rule
With us build those condos, just knock down that school
They now have the cash to hold off that mob
Of those without shelter, food or a job
With help from us winners we know they can hold
Off the hordes in the streets till their dead hands grow cold
Till we’re long retired and rich as we should
Can you say equilibrate, I knew you could

Worshipping in the church of Uncle Milty
Cleanses our sins, ensures we’re not guilty
Of any offences the IMF may commit
Removing barriers like a Mafia hit
To save economies in dire trouble
Just make sure you’re on the right side of that bubble]]> wealthofplanets General Discussion Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:58:54 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1017,1017#msg-1017 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1017,1017#msg-1017
Here is a list of multiple problems that you are quite familiar with:

-We are destroying natural habitats at an accelerating rate.
-The great majority of valuable fisheries already either have collapsed or are in steep decline.
-A significant fraction of wild species, populations, and genetic diversity has already been lost.
-Soils of farmlands are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 - 40 times the rate of soil formation.
-The world's major energy sources will be increasingly expensive to extract or process, or will involve higher environmental costs.
-Most of the world's fresh water in rivers and lakes is already being utilized for irrigation, underground aquifers are being depleted so they will eventually dwindle. Desalinization is too expensive to solve most of the world's water shortages.
-Since 1986, it has been projected that we will utilize most of the world's terrestrial photosynthetic capacity by the middle of this century. Little will be left over to support the growth of natural plant communities (forests).
-"Alien Species" devastate populations of natural species (damages are in millions/billions of dollars).
-It all comes down to a growing human population, but what really counts is not the number alone, but the impact on the environment.
When I see reports on research leading to extended longevity of Homo sapiens, I cringe despite the fact that such attempts are totally unrealistic.

Let's take metals:

Indium, gallium (semiconductors, solar cells) are estimated at best to last 10 years, platinum 15, antimony (flame retardants) 15, silver 10, zinc 25, hafnium (computers) 7,terbium (green phosphorus in bulbs) 3 !!

Uncertainties like this pose far-reaching questions. They call into doubt dreams that the planet might one day provide ALL its citizens with the sort of lifestyle now enjoyed in the west. The planet's booming POPULATION is set to put demand on the materials that only Earth can provide. And some technologies are not worth pursuing long-term. (Solar panel technology may not be available soon. Uranium for nuclear plants: if the world continues to consume it at today's rate, it is estimated that uranium will be gone in 50 years.)

If the oil peak is true, it is not an energy issue (this can be substituted with natural gas utilization), it is a matter of saying good-bye to PLASTICS and many types of fertilizers (cosmetics as well, but one can live without them).

On top of all this, we hear the mantra of GDP growth. This variable is very valid and meaningful. Societies cannot accept zero growth. And then we have the parasitic new technologies like flat TVs. Just recently, it has been announced they "eat" energy at double rate of old tube units. All this contributes to CO2 emissions.

After 1950, precise instrumental records began with respect to CO2 ppm, global temperature, GDP/capita and population. Therefore "hockey stick" graphs are not a hoax; all curves represent remarkable correlations with population growth!!

I selfishly have to state that I am lucky to be getting older and probably will not last long enough to see any dramatic events such as social upheavals, conflicts and large-scale wars, but we are moving towards them with increased speed. I am lucky to live my life without experiencing and suffering the consequences of any global wars (like civilians did in WWI and WWII, for example).

In summary: we can forget about the "Doomsday Argument" that says there is a 5% chance that some humans will still be alive in about the year 11125. No one will be alive by then.]]> Wojt General Discussion Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:11:12 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1005,1005#msg-1005 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,1005,1005#msg-1005
I have been reading climate science intensively for about a year and I have come across a lot of good "science" that runs counter to the IPCC's AGW hypothesis - AND - I have encountered considerable "ideology" from supporters of the IPCC / Kyoto / Al Gore / Michael Mann 'hockey stick graph' view that human activity is the main driver of the global climate.

I recommend reading Dr. Petr Chylek's December 5, 2009, very balanced, and charitable 'Open Letter to the Climate Research Community' for a summary of some of the egregious advocacy on the part of the leading proponents of the AGW hypothesis - AND - Chylek's take on the difference between "science and ideology" -- see:

[www.thegwpf.org]]]> Peter Salonius General Discussion Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:31:31 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,994,994#msg-994 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,994,994#msg-994
Thanks,

Dave]]> Dave General Discussion Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:20:02 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,993,993#msg-993 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,993,993#msg-993
It’s clear to most progressive minds that the planet is in deep trouble, at least with respect to human and non-human habitats. In my view the root cause is humankind’s largely unconstrained biological drives. These drives, which are today expressed predominantly through capitalism, have caused us to overshoot our planetary niche. Overshoot manifests itself as ecosystem degradation, species decline, and rapid resource depletion.

I believe the correct strategy is to replace the logic of capitalism, modify its institutions, and shift from the biological to the conscious era of our history. (All this is explained in detail in the videos previously cited.) In medical terms, the disease is humankind’s expansionist nature; the symptoms are the various environmental disasters we’re now witnessing.

H-D’s new book, Carbon Shift,notes that two serious symptoms, oil depletion and climate change, are two sides of the same coin - the excessive use of fossil fuels (carbon) in our economies. The indicated strategy is therefore to address this common element by moving swiftly to clean (low-carbon) energy systems.

What H-D says is obviously true with regard to symptoms. Tying oil depletion to climate change is useful in reducing both, as has been suggested previously by Bill McKibben, Richard Heinberg, and others. The problem is that the underlying disease is ignored: why are we using fossil fuels excessively in the first place? Without making this crucial diagnosis, H-D and the other carbon-shifters will find that they’re simply removing a limit to growth. Other symptoms will soon become equally or more serious, and the original symptoms will eventually return - possibly with greater force than before.

The tragic aspect of Carbon Shift is what it implies about H-D’s role in shaping humankind’s strategic ideas. His previous books included some keen insights into our predicament and criticized the prevailing order in scathing fashion. After reading The Upside of Down (2007), I felt that H-D might move towards the consideration of root causes, thereby lending some weight to my feeble efforts in this sphere. If Carbon Shift is an accurate indicator, this possibility has evaporated.

This matters greatly because H-D is among the few intellectuals with the capacity and orientation to assume the role of planetary doctor. There are plenty of activists, scientists, writers, energy analysts, and talking heads out there, but only a handful of deep, critical thinkers. The world needs such people to probe the necessary civilizational transition, to analyze the prickly issues surrounding capitalism, and to formulate a new economic basis for human life on this planet. I find it lamentable that H-D has abandoned this central task in order to address the symptoms of our expansionist folly.

Of course, if I have misconstrued either Carbon Shift or H-D’s trajectory, I would welcome his corrective comments.]]> Frank Rotering General Discussion Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:22:08 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,992,992#msg-992 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,992,992#msg-992 Ingenuity Gap, Upside of Down, articles, etc. - I'm jumping ship and will not be reading Carbon Shift. Essentially, I'm disappointed by his own shift - from a critical attitude towards capitalism to a lusty embrace* - and by his failure to address the fundamental issues facing our species. For my take on the latter, see the following two-part video:

Redirecting our Civilization - Part 1: From the biological to the conscious era
[www.youtube.com]

Redirecting our Civilization - Part 2: From capitalism to a new economy
[www.youtube.com]

Readers of Carbon Shift should note that two of its six essays are by conventional economists (Jeff Rubin, Mark Jaccard), and that a third is by a reporter who firmly supports conventional economics (Jeffrey Simpson). In Upside of Down, Homer-Dixon said that:

"Conventional economics is the dominant intellectual rationalization of today's world order." (p. 293)

My interpretation is that, despite his earlier pretentions, Homer-Dixon has fully succumbed to this world order, and now only supports modifications that fail to seriously threaten it.

Frank Rotering
(needsandlimits.org)


* Upside of Down (2007) contains some sharply critical statements about the language, logic, worldview, and ideology of capitalism (pp 216-218). A year later, in a Globe & Mail article ("The underground road to getting rid of carbon and saving us all," March 8, 2008, with David W. Keith), the capitalist system is characterized as "dynamic, innovative and adaptive," and as being indispensable for cutting the emissions it has produced.]]> Frank Rotering General Discussion Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:57:13 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,969,969#msg-969 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,969,969#msg-969
Here is a link that might be useful: [www.lincenergy.us] How Does Clean Coal Work?]]> damienian General Discussion Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:10:20 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,965,965#msg-965 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,965,965#msg-965 Managing without growth: slower by design, not disaster. If you Google the name and title, you can learn a little about this work (including a limited-publishing price of $80 in paperback, although I trust this will change and the book will become more accessible). But what of envisioning an economic model not predicated entirely on unchecked growth? If you'll remember, the sixties gave us Limits to Growth, and later, Beyond the Limits (both important books, but controversial), but can we live in a world "without" economic growth? I'd like to hear what others have to say on the subject, including any related resources they know of. Don]]> workwise General Discussion Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:57:11 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,964,964#msg-964 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,964,964#msg-964
I am writing a thesis in which I am stressing the need to reduce waste as the first step to mitigating our current global problems (pollution, resource depletion, ghg, economic meltdown, health problems from toxic infiltration into the ecosystem, etc.), which I believe should take precedence over efforts in technological development aimed at increasing production, making things bigger, faster, stronger, etc. It is very much rooted in the philosophy of Amory Lovins and William McDonough, if you are familiar with them.

I believe too many people place an inordinate amount of faith in technological development - believing that just because we have come so far so fast, the momentum is something we can count on to fix all our problems. This is probably influenced by iconic axioms like Moore's law, which uses the past to predict the future of integrated circuit development; it is now deemed a self-fulfilling prophecy (integrated circuits have increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, and are expected to continue to do so).

What this means is that many people not involved in science have effectively let their guard down, believing that innovation will come just by waiting for it. This is not how innovation works!

I'm not preaching to the choir - I know you all know this. I say this as a personal observation, having a gut sense, if you will. This might just be the trend towards specialization that I'm seeing - smart people get smarter and apathetic people get more apathetic. Either way, I am trying to find peer-reviewed studies which look into this, or a book, or a website, or anything at all which examines this phenomenon. I also invite people to argue against me, as long as they back up their arguments.]]> yoshhash General Discussion Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:02:09 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,961,961#msg-961 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,961,961#msg-961
"It seems to me that every society has some kind of an organizing myth; traditional societies had one, medieval society had one, we have one. Very central to our modern myth is the idea that it's perfectly reasonable that the economy should be the paramount institution around which everything else revolves, and that economic logic and economic values should guide our decisions. This all seems so natural that we never think to question it, and yet there are profound reasons why we should question it.

The domination by the economy rests on these basic assumptions:
- any organization must grow or die
- the economy as a whole must grow exponentially
- labor productivity must continue to increase
- owners have the right to receive maximum return on their investments
- unbridled competition is a good thing with a few minor exceptions.

But if you were to look at the goals that not only this society but any human society seems to aim toward, you would come up with a very different set:
- we want a wholesome environment in which to raise our children
- we want a good relationship with nature
- we want to feel safe
- we hold dear certain values like democracy, liberty, the rule of law, equity and justice and so on.

It turns out that if you look at the assumptions underlying our economic system - especially the ones regarding the prerogatives of ownership - and then you look at the goals we humans have about how we want to live our lives, there is no compatibility. The assumptions can never lead to the goals.

And yet this incompatibility passes unnoticed. I think that's because the assumptions about economic progress seemed to work rather well during the time when you could equate material progress with general benefit. But that equation doesn't work anymore. We now have a system that works to the benefit of the few and penalizes masses of people today and in the future."

Source: Willis Harman, Transformation of Business, [www.context.org]

When it comes time to seriously reassess our global social values, those deeper ones, it will be prudent to consider this incompatibility of assumptions and goals that Harman alludes to.]]> workwise General Discussion Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:58:05 -0500 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,956,956#msg-956 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,956,956#msg-956 The Upside of Down with the image of the huge foundation stone lying useless in the quarry at Baalbek. Yes, a powerful symbol of the demise of the Roman empire and the end of a civilisation. Located within a stronghold of Hezbollah, and in a previously fertile region supposedly laid waste by over-exploitation in ancient times, it also resonates with the conflict between the cultures in the subject line. That conflict clearly troubles THD a great deal.

The question I want to explore is whether there is any scope for resolving this conflict. I live in England. I'm white, middle-class, and have this peculiar desire to visit one of the hotspots in my country (for example, Blackburn in the North West, which seems to have become a segregated society of white and Asian communities, a scene of race-riots in the recent past, and a place where no-go areas for both "sides" have been described in the media) to visit and try to get some understanding of what is driving Islamic extremists. Did the author engage in any way with members of Hezbollah while visiting Lebanon?

I hope this discussion is not out of place on this forum.]]> njwatts General Discussion Sat, 30 May 2009 05:12:23 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,949,949#msg-949 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,949,949#msg-949 The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon

A much-needed book. I am very glad that it has been written. I feel affirmed in my world-view. I am highly impressed by Tad's achievements. His analysis is brilliant and he points towards the opportunity that is in crisis. The opportunity, in my opinion is less technological, more spiritual and cultural. It is less about windmills and solar cells, though they are very important, and more about quitting consumerism and the growth imperative. I have high hopes that Barack Obama is a manifestation of this cultural change. He is a citizen of the world, beyond the narrow interests of race or nation and is where he is because of the enthusiasm and hard work of many conscious people.

My achievements have been much humbler but, I believe, are nonetheless worth mention. I became an environmental activist in 1980 after twice travelling round the world, then quitting my career as a professional engineer. I visited Baalbek in 1972. On the same visit, I saw the last remaining grove of original Cedars of Lebanon surrounded by bare mountains denuded by the Phoenicians to build their ships before the Romans arrived.

I grew up in Yorkshire, England and it was only after returning from my travels that I realized that the moors that were the backdrop of my childhood must once have been forested. Like everyone else, I had assumed they were natural. I saw other things differently too. After five months immersed in Asian cultures and five months immersed in Latin America, everything was culturally relative. I had gained a critical perspective on my own culture (and on my own behavior) as a result.

I learned a lot as an environmentalist and peace activist but eventually felt frustrated, unable to make a difference. I read a lot and initiated a dialogue group which met twice a month for several years. I taught a course at a community centre in Vancouver, BC called Personal and Social Ecology. Its premise was this:-

Ecology is the study of natural systems.
Social ecology is when we include human activity in such studies,
finding it is almost always destructive.
Personal ecology is when we learn the lessons of social ecology
and act in accordance with our new understanding.

On completion of the course I moved to the country with my new family, intent on walking my talk and creating an ecological lifestyle. I did well with the ecology part, learning organic gardening and building a house out of recycled materials, but my economy was unsustainable. I learned that a peasant's life affords no such luxuries as a car or travel.

A major part of my project was to reconnect with the natural world by immersing myself in natural beauty, reconciling the inner and outer landscapes of my heart. This combined perfectly with taking care of three young children.

Having railed about ecological crisis, I now arrived at my own personal crisis, losing everything that I held dear when, as my savings ran dry, my marriage fell apart. I was, in some small ways, forearmed. I had good support in my men's group. I was aware of the two characters in the Chinese word for crisis: danger and opportunity. I saw the opportunity to learn more self-awareness. While I grieved for the loss of ideals, of home and family life, I realized I was also grieving for the degradation of my world and my powerlessness to stop it.

I boiled the situation down to this. We have a dysfunctional relationship with nature and dysfunctional relationships with one another. Those dysfunctions are the same: we exploit nature and exploit one another. I believe that this is only because we have the illusion of being separate. When I hurt nature or others, I am hurting myself. (From working with prisoners, I am convinced that the perpetrators of violent crimes are as traumatized as their victims in the process.)

I moved back to the city, trained to teach communication skills, couldn't make a living doing it and fell back on free-lance carpentry, part time. I lead a life of voluntary simplicity, consuming very little, hiking wilderness a lot, participating in dialogue groups and leading “Alternatives to Violence” workshops.

Of necessity, I believe in the Ripple Effect. Tad's book could feel very disempowering as most of his suggestions can only be applied by people with power. I believe that my actions affect others, that, overall, I can affect the well-being of humanity by adding positive energy and putting my own house in order. I am paying attention to the means and letting the end take care of itself. This allows me to be present rather than fretting about an imagined future, just as grieving my losses allows me to let go of the past.

What I am saying here is that, while I appreciate the suggestions for practical steps to be taken by those in a position to do so, there is much work to be done by all of us. The external crisis that looms is preceded by an internal, psychological crisis that plays out in all of us. As Thackeray wrote, “Sow a thought, reap an act. Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap character. Sow character, reap destiny.”

As Tad points out, our thoughts have been conditioned by the culture that engulfs us. Consumerism and growth are but recent arrivals. Dehumanization and exploitation have much deeper roots. Now is humanity's opportunity to shake off both.

In Bergson's philosophy, evolution is driven by adaptation. When the environment changes, the organism becomes stressed, experiences a crisis. It either adapts (evolves) or succumbs. To me, this means that the ancient Chinese who created picture-writing understood the role of crisis in personal evolution. They also created Taoism, which suggests a way of living in harmony with natural order, ie. sustainably. For human beings, evolution is personal and social rather than physical, ie. changing our habits. A thing is only truly learned when it is put into practice. As Leonardo da Vinci said, theory without practice is the greatest tragedy. This is the tragedy of academia, which Jane Jacobs, in her book The Coming Dark Age, calls 'credentialling'!

The wave of cultural change is now. It has been building for decades. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” The paradigm shift happens inside each person one-by-one and gains momentum as we support one another. The hegemony of the established order will crumble because it is out of touch with reality, is unsustainable. We are already at the turning point of the psychological crisis. Some are evolving, thriving and some are succumbing to stress.]]> Edward Butterworth General Discussion Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:07:08 -0400 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,947,947#msg-947 http://homerdixon.com/forum/read.php?1,947,947#msg-947
After extensive lobbying from the business sector, our Prime Minister announced that Australia will aim to reduce emissions of climate change causing pollutants by 5% before 2020. Just in case you are unsure, that figure was FIVE PERCENT! This alleged target may rise to a total of 15%, dependent upon the stance taken by countries of influence on Australia (presumably the United States, China, and Japan). This despite the overwhelming majority of scientific experts in the field clearly modeling the need for a minimum 20 - 25% reduction! This, despite the fact that Australia has just come through the longest and most severe drought in recorded history. This, despite overwhelming evidence that one of the natural wonders of the world, Australia's Great Barrier Reef, will be 'dead' within 10 years without drastic change.

The reasoning, very unsurprisingly, is presented as being due to the 'Global Economic Crisis' and the need to preserve jobs for the future. Forget developing a creative economy, forget realising potential economic benefits from sustainable change and sustainable development - Australia will remain a resource-based economy forever, providing the potential planetary pollutants to the globe (coal, gas, oil, uranium - we do it all!). Obviously the reaction from future-thinking Australians has been outrage (unfortunately, this is a declining set of just a few Australians - political dissent is very unpopular), and interestingly, some parts of the business sector have complained of the harshness of this 5% target... what guile!

When this government was elected just over one year ago, it promoted real change for the future. Since taking office, it has shown itself to be almost as conservative as its predecessor, continuing and embellishing the policy of the previous government, across sectors. This is happening despite posturing and people-pleasing gestures, such as the Australia 2020 Summit, held in April. This 'summit' was promoted as something that would look at Australia's future in a changing world, developing innovation and informed directions. A thousand representatives, publicly labelled "Australia's best and brightest," were invited (including Cate Blanchette, Hugh Jackman, pop stars, journalists, sporting stars - oh, and a few academics). And they came up with..... um.... well.... enough said. Individuals were also invited to write submissions for consideration - between 6000 - 8000 of us did this - and some decent proposals were put forward, such as arguing for the need for a change in future economic direction from a resource-based economy (almost wholly) to a creative, knowledge-based economy (perhaps like Singapore). There was much more proposed, but the point is that it was a futile exercise put forward by a neo-conservative government aiming to present nothing more than a people-pleasing front for those who desire a voice in future direction.

I have included some links below, outlining this target and some reaction.

Please share your thoughts on this thread, and let others know of Australia's apparent future directions and leadership!

Quite clearly, I am embarrassed and appalled.



From the speech itself...

"And the time has come for Australia to embrace this future. The Government was elected with a long-term commitment to reducing Australia’s carbon pollution by 60 per cent from 2000 levels by 2050. The Government reaffirms that commitment.

Today I announce the Government’s medium-term target range: in other words, our 2020 target to reduce carbon pollution. These targets are appropriate and responsible. They deliver necessary reform to tackle the long term challenge of climate change, while supporting our economy and securing jobs during this global recession.

By the end of 2020, we will reduce Australia’s carbon pollution by between 5 per cent and 15 per cent below 2000 levels. 5 per cent below 2000 levels is our minimum, unconditional commitment to reduce emissions by 2020, irrespective of the actions of other nations.

15 per cent below 2000 levels is our commitment to reduce emissions further, if there is a global agreement where all major economies commit to substantially restrain emissions and advanced economies take on comparable reductions to that of Australia."

Prime Minister's full speech...

[www.alp.org.au]

Professor Garnaut's reaction...

The Federal Government's chief climate change adviser has strongly criticised the carbon emissions policy announced this week.

Writing in Fairfax newspapers this morning, Professor Ross Garnaut says this week's white paper on carbon emissions does not set a high enough emissions reduction target and it threatens the Australian economy.

The white paper set a target of an unconditional 5 per cent cut in emissions by 2020.

Professor Garnaut writes that although a larger unconditional cut would be expensive to the Australian economy, the 5 per cent target set by the Government will not encourage the global community to set strong targets.

He has urged the Federal Government to keep a higher emissions cut as an option.

Professor Garnaut has also criticised the $3.9 billion worth of compensation for electricity generators outlined in the plan.

He says the funding lacks a public policy purpose and the cost is likely to blow out in future and create a "large risk to public finances."

He also writes that the plan to provide polluters with free carbon permits is a form of protection that will prompt other countries to follow suit and threaten the international economy.]]> lee General Discussion Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:19:15 -0500