Question Everything

Happy (sic) New Year

Heading into the New Year - 2019

As we prepare to welcome a new year, some of us with hope that things will improve compared to 2018, I'm afraid I have some sobering news to share. I've been tracking the major world trends, the dynamics of our social systems as well as the conditions of the natural world, for more than three decades. Ever since I became aware of the threat of carbon emissions on the atmosphere (and oceans) and the rapidly accelerating depletion of fossil fuels with commensurate increases in the cost of extraction, I have continued to ask what is going on here? What are we humans doing wrong that is causing these major potential catastrophes? And why are all of our institutions seeming to fail? I devoted this blog to these questions. The mainstream media and politicians and the like have tried to paint a rosy picture of the situations. They have projected that in spite of one problem after another, in the long run life would return to "normal", whatever that is. The standard pablum is that once we get economic growth back on track all will be fine again.

But what is the reality? Growth in the economy, year-over-year increases in the GDP, has not really materialized, though the official government reports do their best to make it seem so. The middle class in many countries has been shrinking as families at the bottom end fall into poverty and those at the top end fall toward the middle. The actual statistics of income and wealth distribution in the US make it clear that this kind of economy, the neoliberal capitalist-free market economy, is failing to live up to its promises. The rich are getting (supposedly) richer while the rest of us are getting poorer.

If you thought 2018 was a bad year all around (weather extremes, politics, economy, etc.) I'm afraid you will find 2019 to be even more terrible. We have finally reached an inflection point in the trajectory of decline. Throughout the previous 20-30 years (since the start of the decline in free energy per capita) the decay and collapse of society had been marginal and slow to progress. Only if you were sensitive to the trends and understood the systemic nature of them would you have realized that we had entered a whole new regime of social dynamics. For example, up until about five years ago, climatologists were unwilling to attribute any one storm (huricanes, floods, tornadoes, etc.) to climate change because the statistical variances fell within a range that they considered "normal". But the trends were already taking shape. The record highs and lows were already beginning to show. Each year new extremes were being experienced and so the reality of climate disruption was already evident. Only scientific conservatism prevented calling the kettle black.

By 2012 or 2015 more evidence that things had permanently changed in terms of climate had developed to a point that many climate scientists had started to rethink their approaches to attribution. By 2018, with coral reefs dying, forest fires taking maximum tolls in lives, acreage, and properties, with major hurricanes and typhoons decimating population centers around the world, with droughts and floods reaching unprecedented levels it has become clear to nearly everyone that something fundamental has changed. Now those same climate scientists are becoming very vocal about how climate change is contributing to record weather variances. Scientific conservatism is cast aside.

On the economic front, too, people are finally recognizing that something is amiss with the standard narrative of neoclassical capitalism. The past ten years has seen an increasing number of texts by recognized authorities on matters economic that are calling capitalism as practiced in the western "democracies" into question. Even die-hard free marketers are starting to acknowledge that something fundamental is wrong with the standard model (e.g. Alan Greespan's admission to congress that his faith in capitalism had been diminished!) Greed and personal self-interests cannot long be the basis for an economy that serves the whole population. We are now starting to see the consequences of holding such a belief. Coupled with the depletion of free energy per capita, the basis for producing goods and services, we are witnessing the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of the western economies.

Basically, 2017 and 2018 marked years in which the previously slow and imperceptible declines in institutions and economic activities started to accelerate to the point of notice by even the generally ignorant masses. The political fallout, the trend toward nationalism and xenophobia has become all too obvious. People are scared and confused. They will resort to protectionist thinking in an attempt to restore what they consider the normal order. But it is a futile effort. From this point forward the rate of decline and collapse will just increase. If we think the last several years were bad, say in the nature of mass migrations, just wait. As droughts and floods continue to make life unlivable in regions near the Equator (Middle East, Northern Africa, Central and upper South America) the violence will escalate beyond imagining. The mass exoduses from these regions into the US and Europe will intensify beyond reckoning. If we thought the tensions these migrations had stirred up already was bad, just wait.

I must admit to being surprised with the rapidity with which these events are taking place. I thought that I would be long gone before the more serious consequences of our social and physical failures would come to pass. I think now I was very wrong. The causal mechanics of these phenomena are clearly (now) non-linear and amplified by positive feedback loops that have become more visible in the last ten years. I will yet witness the implosion of the human societies, it seems.

Watch 2019 and see for yourselves.

Winter Solstice 2018

Happy Solstice everybody.

I don't know what else to say. I had started a piece taking an inventory of beliefs and ideologies that underlie the major pathologies in our socioeconomic system, things like belief in free markets. But it was getting way too long even without explanations of why they were pathological. However, I have written at length about all of them in the past so you will find blogs about subjects like "profits" and "human rights" and read the discussions there.

What I had thought to do was to remind everyone why our societies, western and eastern, northern and southern alike are failing in providing a meaningful life for all humans without destroying the ecosystem. We are in a no-win scenario. Most people on the planet are either already in poverty or many are headed in that direction with the pace accelerating. I have mentioned before the fact that I am seeing more homeless people in the neighborhood where I work as time goes on.

There are too many of us. Our access to free energy is being strangled. The pollution from our prior use of energy is converting our climate into a nightmare. Water is becoming a serious issue in many places. Climate-forced conflict and migration has become plainly visible. And on and on.

Over the last three decades I developed a true systems analysis process (which I will publish in my next book) and applied it to the human social system and its subsystems. And I applied it to humanity itself. What I have found is a species embedded in a cultural cocoon that has broken free of the normal bounds for living systems in ecosystems. But also, a species that has just recently undergone a transition to what I think is the next stage of evolution - from the great apes to a sapient (or perhaps pre-sapient) but clever one capable of creating and developing more powerful ways to extract material goods from the environment. We are an evolutionary experiment that could go either way.

One thing I am sure of. The socioeconomic system we currently have is completely unsustainable. But there will have to be some further development in the human brain in order for a species of humans to regroup and have any kind of society at all.

Meanwhile I have a book recommendation. Tyler Volk's "Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be" is one of the best systems books I have ever read. He describes the process of becoming systems (emergence) he calls combogenesis which is essentially the same as my ontogenesis (generation of ontological elements from chapter 10 in my Principles book) and the grand sequence of levels of organization (from quarks all the way up to cultures of human societies). Enjoy.

Longer days are coming.

Finally people are waking up to how bad it is!

 

As hurricane Michael bears down on the Florida pan handle as a Cat 4 storm, I wonder how many people who are going to be directly affected by its devastation are thinking about anthropogenic climate change. This week a new report (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/) from the IPCC finally paints a bleak picture and calls for radical reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in order to avoid a worst-case scenario.

For a number of years now I have been predicting a dooms-day scenario due to the twin impacts of climate change and peak fossil fuels. The former represents significant costs to societies. The latter represents significant decline in generating the income needed to pay the costs. In other words, for example, just when we will need to address things like moving whole cities inland (costs) our ability to generate the needed income will have vanished. No fuel, no work, no product, no income. It's actually pretty simple.

And for years I called out the primary causes of this predicament. First and foremost is the incredible lack of wisdom in human beings' cognition. No forethought. No caution. Just barge ahead with any technology that provides individuals with more convenience. All humans share in this deficit. All humans, given whatever chances they had, have consumed and wasted resources unmindfully. But our so-called leaders are especially to blame for their inability to tell the truth (and in many cases even understand the truth). Even Obama really blew it. He had a bully pulpit even if he didn't have a Congress that would help him out. Now we get Trump who outright denies climate change (calls it a hoax) and is attempting to ease even the weak restrictions Obama put on the fossil fuel industry, which could have the effect of raising the US emissions even more.

So human foolishness and stupidity, which seem to apply to a majority of the population in the US anyway, is at the root of our problem and that isn't going to go away on its own any time soon. The rest of the world seems to have many more people who are more thoughtful about the situation and are able to accept the scientific consensus about climate change (though many of them are not as up to speed on the problems with peak energy). But even so they are still not understanding that the proximal cause of our situation is the whole neoliberal capitalistic socio-economic system with its emphasis on profit maximization and growth. These things, this philosophy and world view, are just plain wrong. Speed, convenience, private wealth, novelty, these are the habits of thought that now infest a world of 7+ billion people. Every country in the world harbors a population of people who see what the developed world's people have and they want it too. So, for example, even though China's leadership position is to fight climate change, it still maintains a desire to grow its economy. These two objectives are diametrically opposed (see Naomi Klein's book: This Changes Everything).

We need to be absolutely clear on one thing regarding what can be done to solve the immediacy of the climate catastrophe (according to the IPCC report) and that is that market-based mechanisms will simply not work to reduce carbon emissions in any meaningful way. Even a very steep tax on carbon, a policy measure rather than a strictly free market approach, probably won't do the job either, especially if the scheme involves rebating the money to the consumers. Any cost of carbon scheme needs to hurt both consumers and producers equally and sufficiently to force them to change their behaviors. Taking money out of my wallet and putting it into my pocket is not going to accomplish anything.

Only one thing will give us a chance to survive - and then only some of us. We have to stop burning fossil fuels period and that is going to make us extremely poor. We have to abandon capitalism, for profit (and especially profit maximization), growth oriented firms and relocalize, i.e. reform local communities able to collectively meet their basic needs. We have to abandon cars and trucks and airplanes and probably even trains.

We probably won't take the initiative and there are no leaders on the world stage that would risk being booted off of that stage by telling people that they will have to give up most of the trappings of civilization. So what is most likely to happen, as I have predicted before, is that we will continue to cling to our old ways until it is obviously too late (which may already be the case) and the loss of fossil fuel energies (they will be too expensive to extract and refine) and the damage to our social fabric done by climate catastrophes force us to do these things.

I've not been blogging much these days. At some point I realized that I was basically preaching to the choir for the most part and getting repetitive. What prompted me to write this was the issuing of the IPCC report and especially Trump's and other Republicans' responses to it. The report suggests that a solution is feasible but also some of the committee members admit that it is highly unlikely that any of its recommendations will be taken up in time precisely because of the postures and attitudes of the far right ideologies. The US's best hope for any kind of change in policies and taking real leadership is to vote the Republicans out of Congress in November. And then follow through in 2020 with a real change in the presidency. Personally I would prefer to see a Social Democrat (maybe not Bernie per se) run. But at least we should try to find someone with those leanings in the Democratic party and I completely support that person being a woman (just not Hillary!) The rumors about Elizabeth Warren are interesting.I honestly do feel that men have made a mess of everything in governance and that it would be really great to give women a shot at doing better. I'm betting they can. And the current climate of the #meToo movement and the energy pumped into the women electorate (and many of us males who sympathize) may just be right to propel a larger proportion of the government to be controlled by women.

To be clear, though, a change in the political landscape of the US is not a solution. At best it can only serve to possibly slow down the acceleration toward destruction. Whether that would be a good thing or not I cannot say. But like clinging to life in a desperate situation gives a chance that a miracle might happen, slowing down the destruction might offer some last minute help.

The IPCC only deals with the global temperature issue; recommending using non-fossil fuel sources is meant as a way to reduce emissions. It does not provide a complete model of the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change with respect to other dynamics vis-a-vis EROI impacts on our ability to mitigate or adapt. It does not factor in the decline in fossil fuels from excessive extraction and the fact that as of this moment it is the consumption of fossil fuels that subsidize the solar and wind industries. We are already getting poorer due to the declining return on energy invested and climate change will make everything more expensive - a positive feedback loop ensues that will shortly blow up the financial system and with it, civilization.

I continue to advise people to consider less what they can do as individuals to combat climate change (but do that also) and begin laying plans for how to survive in a totally chaotic world of 2-3 degrees C and no oil.

Autumnal Equinox - 2018: On the way down

To be completely honest I am not sure what more I can say; certainly nothing that would really help our situation. Here we are at the autumnal equinox, heading for the darkness of winter, and, frankly, it seems appropriate.

The collapse of our neoliberal, capitalistic, technological Western culture is well under way in my view. And, in truth, not just my view. I have been seeing more and more commentaries on the failures of our institutions and noting the fear that our financial system is about to collapse at the very least. Moreover, the pessimistic view is leaking into the otherwise mainstream thinking. Even writers for such venues as The New York Times and The Economist have begun to raise the red flags on a number of fronts.

The socio-political front, of course, is a complete mess on every continent. Pockets of semi-sanity can be found, for example in Scandinavian countries. But even there we see breakouts of far rightest tendencies that are likely a response to the severe refugee migrations that are flooding Europe and straining the ties that bind the EU in general. Brexit was possibly just the first action in this regard. The situation in the US is absolutely abysmal. The specter of fascism looms over the government in a way most of us of my demographic would not have thought conceivable thirty years ago. Now it seems imminent.

With the revelations of the extent of the sexual abuses carried on by Catholic priests and the coverups by church officials it is clear that many (maybe most) of our moral institutions have failed us. This does not surprise me particularly. Religion is an antiquated notion but the less-than-fully sapient population clutches onto faith even when there is so much evidence that the stories told in the holy books are at best fantasies.

But that is the point, really. Our species is facing this cataclysm precisely because we are really not deserving of the species name we bear. We, a substantial proportion of we, are not sapient (wise) and so cannot truly learn from past mistakes. In fact most people don't even recognize prior behaviors as mistakes from which they should learn.

In my view the pace of decline is increasing. In part this comes from realizing that the rate of climate change and impacts such as sea rise and extreme weather events are much greater at this point in time than were expected based on the climate models used by the IPCC. Or, in some cases, are following the worst-case scenarios instead of the expected-case ones. Moreover, the rate of CO2 emissions of many countries parties to the Paris Climate Agreement have not gone down, indeed many have increased since they signed on. The likelihood of us achieving reductions necessary to keep under the 2 degree C target is growing smaller with each passing year.

The energy situation is not greatly improved either. I do note a lot of propaganda being put out about how the price of electricity from wind and solar could actually be less than that from fossil fuels. But let me remind you that prices are not really any indication of true value. The key question is: how many joules were needed to build, install, and maintain these systems compared with the number of joules being generated over time (power). EROI is still the main test of viability. And to date, no one has demonstrated a believable EROI for solar, for example. The only pathway toward lowering emissions is by cutting way back on our energy usage. Unfortunately this goes completely against the grain of the dominant socio-economic model of neoliberal capitalism. I've said it many times in these blog pages: You cannot make profits in the long run. All of the rest of nature is based on a circular, steady-state economic model. Everything gets recycled and is driven by the power of the sun and some from geothermal processes.

The human socio-economic-political system is so far from the stability and sustainability of natural complex systems that I'm amazed we are still here now. But the signs of decline are all around and becoming increasingly visible even to those who just five years ago refused to believe that business as usual wouldn't just keep going.

We're heading into winter now. The season and the society.

 

 

Winter Solstice 2017 - Cycles

The occasion of the Winter Solstice has me thinking about a major fundamental aspect of all system processes. They all involve cycles (which include quasi-cycles or quasiperiodicity, hypercycles, and other variations on the theme of cyclic or almost cyclic behavior). In nature as well as human-designed systems cycling between multiple states is the rule without exceptions. Mountains are built up only to be weathered away into sand that then turns eventually into sedimentary rock in preparation for the next round of mountain building. Living organisms are propagated, develop, reproduce, go into senescence and die. Economies emerge, grow, develop, run out of adequate resources, and collapse. Out of the left-overs of prior societies, new ones emerge, generally because of newer technologies that allow extraction of previously unexploited resources. And the cycle starts over. Most cyclic behaviors in nature are non-periodic, not like a sinusoidal. But the systems pass through states that resemble one another again and again. Another kind of cycle that is often found in systems where energy is gradually declining is the spiral. Each time around the cycle the states come closer and closer to maximum entropy.

Some are tempted to think that the current world civilization will not run out of resources because the emergence of new technologies has seemingly always allowed a new spurt of economic growth and development. But writers like Robert J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)), and James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency), have identified trends in the invention and development of new technologies suggesting that the economic impacts of the most modern ones are relatively small. Gordon analyzed the phenomenal growth in American productivity and growth of the national wealth and income during the period post-WWII through the 1980s (his total analysis went from the end of the Civil War to the present) and found a strong argument that that growth was anomalous in the long-run, and largely due to the introduction, starting in pre-WWI years, of the most impactful technologies, i.e. communications, air transport, trains, etc. Even the Internet does not have as strong an influence on growth as did these 'seminal' technologies. Similarly, and deeply connected the advent of the age of oil was responsible for tremendous growth once the infrastructure for massive extraction and refining was in place, stimulated mainly by the needs of fuels for WWII. Now that the cost of extraction and refining are climbing relative to the energy supplied to society, the net access to high-power energy is declining at an accelerating pace. That trend does not bode well for our civilization. [Those still insisting that alternative energy sources will permit continuing business as usual should really try to wake up from your dream. A society that might be powered by alternatives would have to necessarily be a much-reduced version of today in the developed world.

The current news about how the economy (of the US anyway) is improving and growing at an increasingly "healthy" pace is based on faulty analysis and deeply flawed theory. It is propelled into the discourse by wishful thinking more than carefully reasoned arguments based on facts and sound theory. The situation is not dissimilar to conditions in 1929.

But just on the principle of cycling in systems dynamics we can confidently predict that the current world economy will collapse. We don't know when precisely, though some trends are starting to emerge that imply it won't be long. This is the way the Universe works. Whether or not a new, very different kind of society will emerge from the ashes is impossible to predict except to suggest that it is a reasonable expectation. This is the way evolution seems to work. The collapse of global civilization may provide a powerful selection pressure on survivors that favor the wise over the foolish (which I suspect represent the vast majority of the population at present). I suspect (and hope) that severe climate change will require extreme wisdom in order to survive and procreate. For better or worse, the core theme of human evolution has been based on cooperation (group selection) and that seems like the path that will most likely succeed for future generations.

Of course, systems do go extinct. Stars may explode sending their elemental components into space for recycling. Planets can enter runaway feedbacks that lead to unlivable conditions (like Venus, perhaps). Dinosaurs (except Aves) no longer roam the planet. Runaway positive feedback in cycles lead to total disruption of the system. In a few of these cases the systems simply disintegrate into simple component parts that might get recycled in new systems (a meta-cycle). In others the parts are just randomly distributed through maximizing entropy. What will the fate of humanity and societies be is anybody's guess. I'd like to believe there is a future for our distant future progeny. But who knows?

The current political situation in the US is a portend of what is to come. But it is also a measure of what processes are playing out. It gives us insight into what happens when a system runs out of energy and internal regulation. Our political process is so completely and unrecoverably broken that it is hard to imagine anything other than some kind of revolution (possibly preceded by another civil war) tearing down the last remnants of a government. None of the branches of government in the US are functional anymore, except of course to serve the interests of the super-rich.

For the Northern Hemisphere the days are going to start getting longer. We will have more light by which to witness the continuing degradation of societies. I don't think the drive toward Spring will bring renewal of the social system. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this Spring Equinox shows us the cycle of despair.

Nevertheless, rejoice in the change of seasons.

Anticipating the End

A democracy works only if the electorate are 1) intelligent¹, 2) knowledgeable², and 3) informed³. None of these criteria are true of the United States of America today (or actually of any country). It should be no surprise that the governance of the country is in such a shambles. We have low intelligence, are ignorant of how reality works, and are poorly informed people both in terms of electing officials and those elected and running the country. For the most part we are motivated by personal greed, senses of entitlement, and inability to grasp the big picture of how we are suffering a diminishing capacity to do work and produce (what they think of as) wealth; a physical fact of reality. We are running on emotional charges. We believe that we are entitled to increasing material wealth and do not realize that the growth in material wealth was a fluke of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s due to a huge influx of free energy. That concept is totally beyond our capacity. All we know is that once we had it, now we don't. And we were promised, by unbelievably stupid politicians and economists, that we would have it into the future.

The implosion of the human social system is near at hand. It is beginning to look to me like the blow up of the Trump administration will likely be the trigger event, though only GOD knows how it will cascade. Which, of course, means no one can predict what is going to happen. Nevertheless, I predict that a major cataclysm is imminent.

I hope the eusapient individuals out there are ready for the challenge.

1. We have accumulated a lot of evidence that human beings are far from rational creatures. See: "The Enigma of Reason", https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Reason-Hugo-Mercier/dp/0674368304/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501286635&sr=1-1&keywords=the+reason+enigma
2. Most humans have an incredibly tiny understanding of how the world works. See: "The Knowledge Illusion: Why we never think alone", https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Illusion-Never-Think-Alone/dp/039918435X/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501286364&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=the+llusion+of+knowledge
3. Fox News - need I say more?

Watching the World Fall Apart II

First the MENA collapse. Now the EU collapse. What is next? The Trump administration provides clues.

Depletion of fossil fuels. Climate chaos. Leadership failures. You are witnessing the end.

Watching the world fall apart I

Hamburg Germany is just a taste. The G-20 is the remnant of a failed economic ideology that more people are recognizing as the destruction of our world. You can hardly call them leaders.

Its all downhill from here - Happy Summer Solstice

I'm at the 8th almost annual Biophysical Economics meeting, this year in Montana (Flathead Lake Bio Station). The subject of discussions continues to be the energy issues that are an ever growing threat to humanity. There is such an incredible disconnect between the scientific data being discussed here versus the stories told in the media regarding energy availability. The ordinary citizen thinks that because gasoline prices are relatively low (but they do seem to be creeping up) and they hear so much about fracked oil and gas, that we must be swimming in energy resources. Nothing could be further from the truth. And the reasons for low gas prices are counter intuitive so I doubt that the average consumer would be able to understand.

Many of us who have been following the twin problems of peak oil and falling energy return on energy availability were caught off guard by the sudden fall in oil prices. Of course they are still high by historical standards and since most of the new oil is coming from unconventional sources with costs higher than the market value of the oil, the oil and gas companies are losing money like crazy. The smaller ones are going bankrupt, the bigger ones are borrowing like crazy to stay in business and preserve their market shares. Things are really going crazy.

I have nothing to say about the political circus or the financial bubble(s) that are hanging over our collective head right now. I've said it all before. You know the story.

For me, I will just enjoy summer and keep working on my new book and hope something good eventually will come to pass.

University of Washington Scientist: Fake News is Real News, Somewhere

AP, Dateline: Saturday, April 1. Seattle Washington

Computer Scientists Discover a New Realm of Information, An Alternate Reality

In a news release today from the University of Washington, the Institute of Technology located on the Tacoma, Wa. campus, announced the discovery of a previously unknown realm of reality, as described in the release, in which the laws of physics and psychology do not work exactly the same as they do in the realm we generally experience. Computer scientists at the Institute were working on a new method for creating virtual reality experiences when they discovered things going on in the computer that they had not programmed in. They immediately started analyzing the 'reality' to find out what was happening.

Almost immediately they ran across news articles from organizations that resembled real ones, like the New York Times (but named the New Wark Times). One particularly interesting article carried the story about how the FBI had determined that president Donald Drumpf's phones in Drumpf Towers were, indeed tapped by the prior administration.

Graduate student, Hugo Sewing, told the AP that he was assigned to go into this non-virtual, but different reality using the new interface that had been developed there at the UWT Institute. Once inside he discovered a world completely similar to the Matrix (of movie fame) where things in general seemed fairly normal but the news stories that had been deemed fake news in the real world (our world) were being reported as facts by the media in this alternate reality.

Lead researcher on the project, Professor Carry-Ann Lichen, explained that they found this alternate reality had been encountered through the new virtual reality equipment opening a portal into another dimension. She did not explain how. But a part of her description included a device that resembled a cell phone. Mr. Sewing, while inside this alternate 'matrix' had arranged to have news feeds from inside tweeted to our reality so that he and others on the research team could monitor the news going on there.

Some scientists are now speculating that some of those tweets may have gotten to a wider audience. In particular there is now speculation that somehow president Donald Trump's Twitter account became a recipient which might explain where he is getting his information. It would help explain why it seems like he exists in an alternate reality.

The research team at UWT did not comment on that possibility. However one member of the team, who asked not to be identified by name, suggested that president Trump's account might have already been tapped into the alternate reality where what we in this world call fake news is real news. More research will be needed to fully understand this phenomenon. Meanwhile the White House declined to comment on the story.