Limits to Growth was right about collapse

Have a look at what used to be the Aral Sea for an example.

However, there are two more hurdles:

- First, you need to define what counts as the status quo, ie what do you measure externalities against? (But this is more of a problem in theory than in practice, I suspect.)

- Second, you need to explain why Coasian bargaining isn't enough. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

Last time I checked, oil consumption is still raising year after year except for the covid years. Same for CO2 emissions we entered the era of irreversible natural disasters but we are still emitting more and more tears after years.

I may be too optimistic, I can _feel_ the trend will change. But even being optimistic, the data isn’t there to show anything positive and even if we started decreasing oil production / consumption today, we are so late that even the declining trend would have to be pretty strong.

I also think (and that’s just an opinion) that making the needed transition requires huge reform of the global economy and that the powerful know it very well. We are not getting fascism return for no reasons.

It however changes nothing of the fact that exponential growth in a finite system will eventually run into saturation. If you want to grow your corps revenue by X% each year you will have to sell more. Selling more means making more, making more means using more resources. Now you can reduce the resource use per part with clever designs, different materials or by seeing planned obsolescence as a feature (which will mean customers have to buy a replacement earlier and thus the actual resource use of the product over its lifecycle gets in fact worse). So you optimize and optimize and then you have reached the moment where there is nothing left to remove, but you still need to grow, so you just keep using more resources.

Or if you are lucky eventually a new material or design innovation comes around, that again allows you to improve resource use. But your resource use is not going to be zero and you deplete something else on the finite planet. And you need to grow and use more of it each year.

If you're lost on a raft in the ocean and first eat the bread and once the bread is gone switch to cookies that does not mean you won't eventually run out of stuff to eat.

The solution is to tap into resources that regrow and not use more than is regrowing, but that doesn't jive well with infinite growth. I am an electical engineer and I know pretty well how exponential resource use works in complex systems. If a part of my system would like to exponentially grow its resource use infinitly I'd either consider it defective or use the fact that it can't grow infinitly by bounds I set on purpose.

The majority of the universe is hydrogen and helium; most of what we see is now inaccessible due to the expansion of the universe and the speed of light; and even the stuff we can reach, because of the speed of light, requires a slow down to cubic growth at best (closer than galactic disk thickness or further than galactic isotropy); and even then that's for the species as a whole, as the speed of light eventually stops and single thing from growing at all.

Exponential growth has a way of reaching big numbers quickly. Now sure, it's still a while for the stuff we can access — I don't know if your percentage is correct, but looks about right, and at 2% annual growth (so: no VN replication ever) that's 1163 years for the crust, then another 233 for the rest of the planet — but that assumes we can use the whole thing and aren't reliant on some trace elements, e.g. carbon (which is 200ppm) or tin (2.3ppm) or selenium (0.05ppm of the crust, and if Wikipedia is right about five times higher, 0.25ppm, in a human body).

My argument wasn't about how long it takes to deplete our resources, my argument was that eventually they will be deleted. And we are in a small emergeny raft on a wide ocean. Right now everybody is eating as if we are on vaction. We are not.

Or you continue to hope that you’ll be able to clean the environment while still using the resources but as of today, that’s still a big gamble on everyone’s lives.

  resource = 1000
  resource_use = 0.1 # per year
  resource_use_growth_factor = 1.01 # per year
  resource_regrowth = 0.0001 # per year
  
  loop {
    resource += resource_regrowth
    resource -= resource_use
    resource_use *= resource_use_growth_factor 
    
    if (resource <= 0) {
      print("Resources depleted")
      exit(1)
    }
 } 

The timeline could be 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, but humanity needs to

1. Know when that resource is likely going to be depleted, ideally decades or longer before it happens

2. Develope workarounds, alternative resources etc. to eventually just use the regrowth rate

3. Use resources that have higher regrow rates (aka "sustainable" ones) and stay within the limits

4. Don't forget to price in the externalities into resource use during its whole life cycle (this can be many millenia for some materials)

Right now the level is that some people even seem to grok the extremely simple reality of growing resource use with a limited resource eventually hitting a cutoff point. Granted my model here is extremely simplistic, but even if you factor in stuff like undiscovered resource sources and a rate of new discoveres, eventually on a planet with finite resources you will run out of them unless you just use the amount you can sustainably use.

We should be treating our accessible resources as finite, and improve the efficiency of using them, just to make sure we can keep enough until all the breakthroughs we need to explore resources outside of Earth exist.

It's like the propaganda from the oil industry, talking about how plastics are so damn important for modern life and we couldn't live without the oil industry. It's absolutely true, but it also gives a very clear argument on why we shouldn't be wasting fossil resources to be burnt for energy if we can find other ways to access energy, we should be keeping as much as possible of this finite resource (which very likely doesn't even exist in any close proximity to Earth) for its more useful material products like plastics.

Huh? I defended communism as also producing some science. (There was also quite a bit of science in pre-capitalist societies.)

Sorry, I don't know who Mark Fisher is nor what stage he acted on.

> Thanks for the link.

I hope you enjoy the read as much as I did.