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Steven B Kurtz's avatar

Hi Tony,

First communication from me. In the views of some old timers like me who have been at the unsustainability game for many decades, shrinkage is coming due to bottlenecks in energy and materials, along with negative feedback from things like pollution, overcrowding, pandemics, and Han's Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome. (GAS)

Have a look at: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/gambler.pdf

Around 80% down is a bit on GAS.

Reg Morrison's ('99)book _The Spirit in the Gene_ has a Foreword by Lynn Margulis, microbiologist, and co-developer of gaia theory. (reissued in Australia a few years later in paper as _The Plague Species_) I reviewed it here:

https://innovation.cc/document/2000-05-2-9-the-spirit-in-the-gene-humanitys-proud-illusion-and-the-laws-of-nature-by-reg-morrison/

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Tony Povilitis's avatar

Thank you, Steven, for your comments and the engaging works of Reg Morrison (I've downloaded them for a more thorough read later). if we are around long enough, it will be interesting to see how things unfold. Hope it's not too painful!

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Vero's avatar

Thanks, Tony. I agree we are being gaslit about all the good things technology will bring. Definitely better to be a scale down realist.

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Tony Povilitis's avatar

The faith in technology seems at least as strong as that in religion. The two in combination seem insurmountable.

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Dusti Becker's avatar

Not a pretty picture. I have to remain hopeful to keep going, not that I'll be around much longer. Many women and couples will cut back on numbers of children due to costs to have them. It doesn't help when governments subsidize having more children. Of course that's not all. Impact = population x affluence x technology, so lots of ways to reduce impacts. Humans will muddle through this and other species will pay the price.

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Tony Povilitis's avatar

I too think that humans will muddle through. However, as Reg Morrison warned in the piece provided above by Steven Kurtz, "Polyglot populations will splinter into tribal groups characterised by tribalistic aggression, and cooperation will become impossible, thanks to this delusory bet." The "bet" is the pollyannas'.

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Kurt Klingbeil's avatar

I listened to a bunch of nauseatingly Pollyanna-ish tripe from Kingsmill Bond... He is sort of a Steven Pinker with a CFA and limey accent pontificating pretentiously about how all previous energy projections were wrong and therefore all his projections are uniquely infallibly correct and that creativity and entrepreneurism and cost curves will enable the economy to expand forever

I looked for any critique at all.

He was/is aligned with Carbon Tracker and other (Bright Green Lies) Greenies

One man high-end denialism roadshow with connections into upper echelons of corporate and governance structures

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Tony Povilitis's avatar

Thanks for introducing me to Kingsmill Bond. I'll check out his stuff when I need a good laugh!

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Jan Steinman's avatar

I'm sticking to the WORLD3 model. It's tracked pretty good over the years. A recent "recalibration" that fine-tunes it predicts a steeper decline than Graham Turner showed in 2014.

Guess you can't post images here. But you can look at Turner's graph, as published in Smithsonian magazine: https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/Futurism-Got-Corn-graph-1.jpg

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