The official position of every government is that we can muddle through this crisis and keep the economy growing albeit at a slower pace. Ask a scientist about climate change and they will say that we need to make a radical reduction in carbon emissions or suffer serious consequences. Ask a fisheries biologist and hear that the ocean fish populations are in grave danger if we do not change. Ask an energy resource expert and they will tell you that it is highly unlikely that we can power our present lifestyle solely on renewables. Ask most economists and they will tell you that the debt, both national and private, are reaching unsustainable levels and will eventually reset with a massive string of defaults and political disruption. Yet few put it all together. Few see that the failure of each system feeds into the failure of the other.
An Overview
It is clear that we live on a finite planet with finite resources. The rate at which we have been extracting and consuming these resources is increasing exponentially as roughly defined by the product of population growth and per/capita consumption, both of which are increasing exponentially. The damage to the earth’s environmental systems is obvious and does not need to be recounted here.
In 1972, Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows and their team developed a computer program to model the world using the new concepts of system dynamics. This model, called World3 takes into account many of the factors that control the health of our system including population growth, natural resource use, debt, health, pollution and energy. In short the model shows a world that grows at an exponential rate until the cost of extracting resources such as oil and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure become so large that other things like health care cannot be paid for and the system goes into decline. The pattern is familiar in biology as a population of animals increases until the food supply is exhausted then it collapses to a very low level before starting over. This concept of overshoot and collapse results from the delay in the feedback loops that control the population. In other words the time delay between the creatures mating and the loss of food supply allows for reproduction to continue past the sustainable level leading to mass starvation.
The Role of Capitalism
Capitalism functions in a similar way. The fundamental philosophy behind capitalism is that each individual has both the right and the ability to maximize his or her quality of life by making decisions that serve them. Since we equate quality of life with the amount of money we have, that becomes and economic process of each individual maximizing the amount of financial resources they have. Wealth is created by producing a product and selling it at a profit. Since profitability depends on getting product to market or in the case of governments, pleasing voters in the present elections cycle, individuals, corporations and the government consume resources and borrow from future generations in order to meet present perceived needs. This takes many forms; extraction of non renewable resources, pollution of the commons, overharvesting of renewable s (overfishing and over harvesting forests.)
The other inevitable result of the capitalist system is the creation of debt. In our system money is created by banks making loans. That in itself leads to an unsustainable debt load, but the trend is accelerated by the government’s inability to control spending. In essence all debt is borrowing from future generations in the same way as consuming non renewable resources. Currently the total debt in the United States (national, corporate and private) is $51 trillion which comes out to $156,054 per person. Does anyone really expect that to be paid off? Eventually the system will topple and the debt will be wiped out as well as the assets it supports.
Climate Disruption
The trajectory of the world civilization was aimed at a peak for centuries, but the process has been accelerated dramatically by climate disruption. Without going into details, for there are many reports of the ongoing acceleration of climate disruption, I will point out that feedback loops similar to ones that cause populations to overshoot are at work with climate. For instance it takes over 10 years for the carbon emitted into the atmosphere to fully affect the climate. In other words even if we could stop emitting carbon tomorrow, the effect of the carbon already in the air would cause the temperature to rise for another 10 years. The 2 degree C. temperature rise that has been set as a target is already baked in the pie. We are already seeing dramatic effects of warmer temperatures and shifts in rainfall patterns. They will become more extreme even with no additional carbon releases. We know that despite all the rhetoric, the consumption of fossil fuels has been increasing every year and is projected to continue to increase in the near future; the realistic target will be far above the “safe” limit.