Civilisational collapse...as a Dr Suess illustration
Voila, the next instalment from my book about how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning or go and check out the rest of the book using this Table of Contents.
Quick recap: A massive truth we have to get real about is that there are a bunch of systems in collapse…and climate collapse is only one such. This section concludes what has been a three-parter on how collapse works. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.
The audio version is at the bottom!
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Collapse (part 3)
When I’m trying to fathom the holy-fuckness of the everything going on, in my mind’s eye I see our civilisation as one of those totally whack illustrations from a Dr Suess book, a mash-up of mini-universes from Thidwick the Big Hearted Moose, Lorax and Hooper Humperdink Not Him. There are houses and carnivals and factories and MC Escher-like staircases that domino trippily like a Rube Goldberg machine. There are turrets and rollercoasters and shopping mall carparks all piled up on top of each other; tree roots and internet cabling that loop in and around the worlds within worlds. There are whole galaxies of tax payers and AI gremlins crawling between the layers. I can see that every element of this knotted scene is connected, throbbing, expanding, consuming, extracting and leveraging off everything else in every possible direction.
And then I imagine that this heaving, expanding behemoth is balanced precariously atop a tiny little engine with spinning cogs and pistons. (In a Dr Seuss drawing the madness tends to sit atop stilts or a spindly tree trunk.) This little engine huffs and puffs to keep the unwieldly, mad lot …going. We might call this little engine, the “growth imperative”.
So, as you might imagine, this little engine is powered by fossil fuels (and other finite resources). And I’m going to really push the analogy here, which is only aiming to provide a conceptual picture...the cords that connect the engine to the behemoth above, and to the fossil fuel supplies below, and tie it all together in a system of systems, is global money supply.
OK, so all of this – the consumption, the movement of cash, the fossil fuel extraction, the population of tax-paying humans - must keep expanding and growing to keep… it all going.
Specifically, it mostly has to keep expanding and growing exponentially.
Nations and societies within the civilisation become prosperous by consuming stuff at an exponential rate, using exponential amounts of fossil-fueled energy and resources. And to do this they borrow exponential amounts of money that comes with exponential interest. The banks lend that money by borrowing from elsewhere in the pile-up. This interest compounds - exponentially - and must be serviced by more – and exponential – growth and resources and energy1.
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But, and let’s pause here for a tick, what if this little engine were to run out of puff for some reason, if it reached a limit?
(Yes? Thought about it? Visualised it? OK, on we go…)
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The thing with exponential growth in a finite vessel, such as an ecosphere, is that it’s difficult to spot when the game’s up.
Let’s imagine: You drop a 1 ml drop of water into a football stadium and then double the number of drops once every minute. How long do you think it will take to fill out the limits of the stadium? The answer: about 44 minutes. For the first 40 minutes the stadium is mostly looking a bit soggy, then mildly flooded. No one pays too much attention. Even at the 43-minute mark the stadium is only half full. And so you might start moving everyone up to the top rows of seats at this stage. But, and you can follow the maths here, 60 seconds later the stadium is completely filled with water. Game up.
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In an interconnected, precariously piled-up system of systems, it really only takes one of these systems to stop growing exponentially for the whole lot to come down like the Ponsi scheme you could say it actually is.
The latest modelling clearly suggests the imminent end of the exponential growth curve. The excessive consumption of resources by industry and industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable”. As we touched on earlier, it’s not so much that we will run out of fossil fuels and those minerals we rely on for, well, everything (including to construct the solar panels and wind turbines, and to power that technology and the AI that many are “hoping” will save us). No, the issue is that we won’t be able to afford them. The extraction of these resources has become more and more costly as we use more energy to dig deeper to extract them. So the energy return on the energy investment (EROEI) blows out2. The Journal of Petroleum Technology published an article in 2023 confirming net-energy peak is expected to occur in 2025 with what they call “energy cannibalism” to follow around 20253.
To make matters worse, energy futurist Nate Hagens explains that embedded into the heaving Dr Seuss set-up is a profound accounting error [my jargon] something someone really should have thought about before we built that monstrosity atop the premise of unlimited fossil-fueled power and an economy handcuffed to compounding interest and returns. It’s this: Fossil fuels have never been properly priced. Our civilisation has only ever paid for the cost of extraction, per the price when the stuff was simple to extract, and not for what are called “externalities”, such as the cost to nature, the cost of climate disasters and the price of destroying the commons. And the rest4.
It's now dawning that our civilisation has been held together for the past 270-odd years not only by a finite and non-renewable resource but also on a metric the system can’t sustain.
This “accounting error” is now catching up with us as the cost of extraction dials up, geo-political threats threaten supply and the emissions bills are rolling in. Estimates by senior economists around the world suggest if oil, currently $US85 a barrel goes over $US150 a barrel, the whole exponentially charged Dr Suess mega-structure tips.
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“We will run out of energy on Earth. This is just arithmetic; it’s going to happen.”
– Jeff Bezos, explaining why we need to go the moon.
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I’ve gone on for a bit here. But if you can hang in a bit longer, I think it’s important to absorb a couple of extra layers, even if they just serve to anchor this swirling picture.
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Joseph Tainter argues in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies that collapse happens when societies become too complex to fix the problems that the complexity creates. Or more specifically when it becomes too complex to be able to pay for the fixes. Complex societies tend to have all their resources tied up trying to keep the behemoth propelling forward. So whether the tipping factor is a flood or famine, a war, a supply chain hiccup, an election rigged by fake news, population drop-off or some AI-generated chaos, the ultimate blow will be that there is no financial fat left to fix things.
Reader’s: I’m iv’ing Joseph on my podcast in a few months and will personalise the above a touch more.
And so I find this so brain-explodingly ironic and perhaps even perfect: In our civilisation’s case, our energy and resources problem is what is ultimately too expensive to fix. We literally can’t afford the fossil fuels to make the renewable energy transition happen in time. And so, in much of the Western world we will likely be hit by an economic collapse first, caused by trying to fix this energy problem. And this will likely happen before the climate collapse that we were always told could not be attended to (back when there was a chance of righting the ship) because to do so would…ruin the economy.
My oh my.
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Now, we are very, very almost there. But feel free to get up and stretch your legs in the knowledge that while I’ve been spiralling in all this, I’ve also been spotting cracks.
You know, where the light might possibly get in…