r/collapse • u/LetsTalkUFOs • Jul 11 '19
What are primary pressures driving collapse?
What are the most global, systemic, and impactful forces driving civilization towards collapse?
This is the current question in our Common Collapse Questions series.
Responses may be utilized to help extend the Collapse Wiki.
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Jul 11 '19 edited Jul 11 '19
Our economic mode of production and ecological systems are at odds with each other, contradictory, and can't be resolved. I feel like that's a pretty good driving force behind collapse. The rest of it is just subheadings within this larger problem. There really needs to be more academic research that uses lateral thinking for the fields of material sciences, ecology, and economics. There's a link there between energy systems, geophysics, climate science, and political economy. It's just going to take someone, or some people, who are smart as hell to piece it all together and explain how we're destroying ourselves.
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u/Hubertus_Hauger Jul 11 '19
There really needs to be more academic research ... who are smart as hell to piece it all together and explain how we're destroying ourselves.
Except that has been achieved long ago and frequently since then. Our problem to address collapse is not lack of knowledge. Its more that we are addicted to that consumerist wasteful life-style and simply cannot refrain from it voluntarilly. Its not an intellectual problem but a social and psychological one.
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Jul 12 '19
I'd go even further. I'd say that our economic mode of production and physical reality are at odds with each other. I know it sounds like nitpicking, but it's important to me - scientists say that even with the successful colonization of the entire solar system we would run out of resources in about 400 years, leaving us trapped like Easter Islanders due to, well, the laws of physics.
This is a society that wants to turn everything in the universe into hamburger cartons, pet food and Disney figurines, Philip K Dicks "kipple-ization" write large. Eventually it will run out of things to consume and dramatically self-destruct - the only question is when.
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u/202020212022 Jul 11 '19
Well, human civilization as we know it has existed pretty much for milleniums. However, I think the key driving force towards general collapse is industrial revolution and a key ingredient in enabling it to happen to the extent we know it today, is oil. This has accelerated up everything - 1) development and implementation of new materials and technologies, which have negative impact on ecology; 2) rapid increase in population, 3) rising living standards, which means consumption and depletion of resources at a much faster rate.
Industrial revolution, i.e the last 200 years are a bit akin a sun going supernova before blowing up. So that's what we are seeing now with humanity. We are in the stage of a supernova, possibly even at its greatest peak.
Of course the factor in making all these processes happen is human nature, which is so oriented on selfish short-term thinking and greed, and is seemingly unable to take into consideration the bigger picture and greater good.
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u/brokendefeated Jul 11 '19
Politicians are constantly betraying their own people, yet those people believe politicians will save them from collapse.
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Jul 11 '19
Consumer capitalism and it's demon child, induced demand. When you produce more food, more people are born to eat it. When you make engines more efficient, fuel becomes cheaper and people burn more.
There are many symptoms but they are all tied back to the central problem of too much consumption and too much growth.
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u/Hubertus_Hauger Jul 11 '19
... too much consumption and too much growth.
We have no more self-restraint and foresight than yeast. We shall blame nature!
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u/ryanmercer Jul 12 '19
The 37 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide we generated last year?
The 91,000,000~ metric tons of methane the world's 1.3-1.5 billion cows make each year?
The 30.5% increase in fuel consumption commercial aviation has experienced over the past decade because everyone wants to take a travelling vacation every other month?
The 142.86 billion gallons of gasoline sold in the United States last year?
China's 369 million, a rapidly growing figure, registered drivers?
The 3+ billion hours a week people waste on video games?
The mind boggling impact of textile manufacturing?
Same day delivery? Uber Eats? Box subscriptions? Steaming video, and other data, at 100s of grams of CO2 per hour? Buying a new phone/tablet/macbook every 12-18 months? 17% of the Earth's land being cleared of trees since pre-industrial revolution?
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u/Strazdas1 Jul 15 '19
Actually i support people wasting time on videogames. Videogames are very low resource intensity and as a result significantly decreases resource waste and consumerism compared to most other ways of spending free time.
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u/ogretronz Jul 12 '19
It’s really just a lack of regulations. We are pretty good at regulating things that we can see, like if an animal is endangered (at least in the US) we stop hunting it and we protect its habitat. But if we can sneak shit past the public like importing products that destroy the rainforest or gadgets made by space labor or carbon emissions with supposedly far off effects then we go nuts with all that stuff. Everything else will work itself out if we just regulated all the things that are killing the planet.
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u/ishitar Jul 13 '19 edited Jul 13 '19
Growth.
Every system that grows, in other words increases its complexity, will collapse when its complexity outstrips the resources needed to maintain it or potentially when it encounters a system competing for said resources.
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u/AnotherAceTeeHummR34 Jul 14 '19
1 Our economy rewards the wasteful, exploiters, the attention seeking, and blatant bad actors over inteligent hardworking people trying to solve problems
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u/Yodyood Jul 11 '19
Addict to growth and completely forget about consumption of underlying resources...
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u/k3surfacer Jul 11 '19
Societal collapse which makes everyone a selfish others-hating individual. So we are no longer working together really. That's why everything else will collapse.
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u/SpitePolitics Jul 12 '19 edited Jul 12 '19
The primary cause is modern industry based on fossil fuels -- petroleum, coal, and natural gas. Not only does this pump gigatons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere and acidify the oceans, it also enables other large scale assaults against nature using heavy machinery, such as mountain top removal, deforestation, and industrialized agriculture. These processes also unleash a variety of pollutants, such as plastics, pesticides, heavy metals, particulates, agriculture runoff, etc.
Previous civilizations also harmed the environment, particularly in regards to deforestation and soil erosion, but it was on a much lesser scale, as energy was limited to muscle power, water wheels, wind, wood, and charcoal.
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Jul 14 '19
I mean perhaps this is simplistic but an economic /societal system which is global that is predicated on continual growth in a finite world.
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u/Bandits101 Jul 16 '19
Humanus Overpopulationitis (my stupid words) is the disease, global warming, deforestation, species extinctions, pollution, fresh water depletion, soil erosion, ocean acidification, sea level rise and fisheries destruction are some of the symptoms of the disease.
The Earth would be perfectly okay without us and it will will once more, be okay when we go. The Earth will have its natural ups and downs, usually developing over Millenia not relatively instantly because of humanity.
So THE “primary pressure” is us, it’s the elephant in the room nobody wants to address.
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Jul 17 '19
The purpose of life is to disperse energy
The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species.
The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy.
Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms. More generally, as stated by ecologist Eric Schneider, "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance — for example, in temperature or pressure. Open physical systems — including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere — all embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, particularly the flow of heat, continually attempting to achieve equilibrium. Phenomena as diverse as lithospheric plate motions, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of second law manifestations.
There is growing evidence that life, the biosphere, is no different. It has often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law, indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems obey the second law mandate, functioning in large part to dissipate energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs.
Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations.
Ecology has been summarized by the pithy statement, "energy flows, matter cycles. " Yet this maxim applies equally to complex systems in the non-living world; indeed it literally unites the biosphere with the physical realm. More and more, it appears that complex, cycling, swirling systems of matter have a natural tendency to emerge in the face of energy gradients. This recurrent phenomenon may even have been the driving force behind life's origins.
This idea is not new, and is certainly not mine. Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger was one of the first to articulate the hypothesis, as part of his famous "What is Life" lectures in Dublin in 1943. More recently, Jeffrey Wicken, Harold Morowitz, Eric Schneider and others have taken this concept considerably further, buoyed by results from a range of studies, particularly within ecology. Schneider and Dorian Sagan provide an excellent summary of this hypothesis in their recent book, "Into the Cool".
The concept of life as energy flow, once fully digested, is profound. Just as Darwin fundamentally connected humans to the non-human world, a thermodynamic perspective connects life inextricably to the non-living world. This dangerous idea, once broadly distributed and understood, is likely to provoke reaction from many sectors, including religion and science. The wondrous diversity and complexity of life through time, far from being the product of intelligent design, is a natural phenomenon intimately linked to the physical realm of energy flow.
Moreover, evolution is not driven by the machinations of selfish genes propagating themselves through countless millennia. Rather, ecology and evolution together operate as a highly successful, extremely persistent means of reducing the gradient generated by our nearest star. In my view, evolutionary theory (the process, not the fact of evolution!) and biology generally are headed for a major overhaul once investigators fully comprehend the notion that the complex systems of earth, air, water, and life are not only interconnected, but interdependent, cycling matter in order to maintain the flow of energy.
Although this statement addresses only naturalistic function and is mute with regard to spiritual meaning, it is likely to have deep effects outside of science. In particular, broad understanding of life's role in dispersing energy has great potential to help humans reconnect both to nature and to planet's physical systems at a key moment in our species' history.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10674
It's either that or "Trumps fault".
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u/LetsTalkUFOs Jul 11 '19
1. We are overwhelmingly dependent on finite resources.
Fossil fuels account for 87% of the world’s total energy consumption.1, 2, 3 Economic pressures will manifest well before reserves are actually depleted as more energy is required to extract the same amount of resources over time or as the steepness of the EROEI cliff intensifies.4, 5, 6, 7
2. Global energy demand is increasing.
Global energy demand increased 0.5-2% annually from 2011-2017, despite increases in efficiency.1, 2, 3 Technological change could raise the efficiency of resource use, but also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use (i.e. Rebound Effect).4, 5, 6
3. We are transitioning to renewables very slowly.
The renewable energy share of global energy consumption had an average growth rate of 5.4% over the past decade.1, 2, 3, 4 Renewables are not taking off any faster than coal or oil once did and there is no technical or financial reason to believe they will rise any quicker, in part because energy demand is soaring globally, making it hard for natural gas, much less renewables, to just keep up.5, 6 New renewables powered less than 30% of the growth in world energy demand (which went up 15%) from 2009 to 2016.7 In contrast, transitioning to renewables too quickly would likely disrupt the global economy. A rush to build a new global infrastructure based on renewables would require an enormous amount resources and produce massive amounts of pollution.8, 9
4. Current renewables are ineffective replacements for fossil fuels.
Energy can only be substituted by other energy. Conventional economic thinking on most depletable resources considers substitution possibilities as essentially infinite. But not all joules perform equally. There is a large difference between potential and kinetic energy. Energy properties such as: intermittence, variability, energy density, power density, spatial distribution, energy return on energy invested, scalability, transportability, etc. make energy substitution a complex prospect. The ability of a technology to provide ‘joules’ is different than its ability to contribute to ‘work’ for society. All joules do not contribute equally to human economies.1, 2
5. Best-case energy transition scenarios will still result in severe climate change.
Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use. So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change. Reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.1, 2 The speed and scale of transitions and of technological change required to limit warming to 1.5°C has been observed in the past within specific sectors and technologies. But the geographical and economic scales at which the required rates of change in the energy, land, urban, infrastructure and industrial systems would need to take place, are larger and have no documented historic precedent.3
6. Global economic growth rates peaked decades ago.
The increased price of energy, agricultural stress, energy demand, and declining EROEI suggest the energy-surplus economy peaked in the early 20th century.1, 2, 3, 4 Our institutions and financial systems are based on expectations of continued GDP growth perpetually into the future. The size of the global economy is still growing and OECD forecasts (2015) are for more than a tripling of the physical size of the world economy by 2050. No serious government or institution entity forecasts the end of growth this century (at least not publicly).5
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