Today, the rich easily exploited oilfields and coalmines of the past are mostly depleted. And, while there are energy alternatives, there are no realistic replacements that can deliver the abundant net energy fossil fuels once provided. Difference 2: Unlike past civilizations, the economy of industrial society is capitalist.
Production for profit is its prime directive and driving force. The unprecedented surplus energy supplied by fossil fuels has generated exceptional growth and enormous profits over the past two centuries. But in the coming decades, these historic windfalls of abundant energy, constant growth, and rising profits will vanish. However, unless it is abolished, capitalism will not disappear when boom turns to bust.
Instead, energy-starved, growth-less capitalism will turn catabolic. Catabolism refers to the condition whereby a living thing devours itself. As profitable sources of production dry up, capitalism will be compelled to turn a profit by consuming the social assets it once created.
Catabolic capitalism will profit from scarcity, crisis, disaster, and conflict. Warfare, resource hoarding, ecological disaster, and pandemic diseases will become the big profit makers. Capital will flow toward lucrative ventures like cybercrime, predatory lending, and financial fraud; bribery, corruption, and racketeering; weapons, drugs, and human trafficking.
Once disintegration and destruction become the primary source of profit, catabolic capitalism will rampage down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another. The report's most infamous scenario — the Business as Usual BAU scenario — predicted that the world's economic growth would peak around the s, then take a sharp downturn, along with the global population, food availability and natural resources. This imminent "collapse" wouldn't be the end of the human race, but rather a societal turning point that would see standards of living drop around the world for decades, the team wrote.
Related: How much time does humanity have left? So, what's the outlook for society now, nearly half a century after the MIT researchers shared their prognostications? Gaya Herrington, a sustainability and dynamic system analysis researcher at the consulting firm KPMG, decided to find out.
In the November issue of the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology , Herrington expanded on research she began as a graduate student at Harvard University earlier that year, analyzing the "Limits to Growth" predictions alongside the most current real-world data.
Herrington found that the current state of the world — measured through 10 different variables, including population, fertility rates, pollution levels, food production and industrial output — aligned extremely closely with two of the scenarios proposed in , namely the BAU scenario and one called Comprehensive Technology CT , in which technological advancements help reduce pollution and increase food supplies, even as natural resources run out.
Some recovered or transformed, such as the Chinese and Egyptian. Other collapses were permanent, as was the case of Easter Island. Sometimes the cities at the epicentre of collapse are revived, as was the case with Rome. In other cases, such as the Mayan ruins, they are left abandoned as a mausoleum for future tourists. What can this tell us about the future of global modern civilisation? Are the lessons of agrarian empires applicable to our postth Century period of industrial capitalism?
I would argue that they are. Societies of the past and present are just complex systems composed of people and technology. So collapse may be a normal phenomenon for civilisations, regardless of their size and stage. We may be more technologically advanced now. But this gives little ground to believe that we are immune to the threats that undid our ancestors.
Our newfound technological abilities even bring new, unprecedented challenges to the mix. And while our scale may now be global, collapse appears to happen to both sprawling empires and fledgling kingdoms alike. There is no reason to believe that greater size is armour against societal dissolution. Our tightly-coupled, globalised economic system is, if anything, more likely to make crisis spread. Climatic pressures are worsening Credit: Getty Images.
If the fate of previous civilisations can be a roadmap to our future, what does it say? One method is to examine the trends that preceded historic collapses and see how they are unfolding today.
While there is no single accepted theory for why collapses happen, historians, anthropologists and others have proposed various explanations, including:. The collapse of the Anasazi, the Tiwanaku civilisation, the Akkadians, the Mayan, the Roman Empire, and many others have all coincided with abrupt climatic changes, usually droughts.
This ecological collapse theory, which has been the subject of bestselling books , points to excessive deforestation, water pollution, soil degradation and the loss of biodiversity as precipitating causes.
The field of cliodynamics models how factors such as equality and demography correlate with political violence. Statistical analysis of previous societies suggests that this happens in cycles. As population increases, the supply of labour outstrips demand, workers become cheap and society becomes top-heavy. This inequality undermines collective solidarity and political turbulence follows. Societies are problem-solving collectives that grow in complexity in order to overcome new issues.
However, the returns from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. After this point, collapse will eventually ensue. This refers to the ratio between the amount of energy produced by a resource relative to the energy needed to obtain it. Like complexity, EROI appears to have a point of diminishing returns. In his book The Upside of Down , the political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon observed that environmental degradation throughout the Roman Empire led to falling EROI from their staple energy source: crops of wheat and alfalfa.
The empire fell alongside their EROI. Tainter also blames it as a chief culprit of collapse, including for the Mayan. The Aztec Empire, for example, was brought to an end by Spanish invaders. However, Jones is keen to point out that the research is not designed to encourage people to move to one of the five survivor nations, but to point out flaws in our global systems.
A post shared by Euronews Green euronewsgreen. The researchers looked at what causes the collapse in complex systems and advocate for making things a bit simple so you can see how things are connected. The aim of the study is to find out which countries would bounce back or avoid collapse altogether.
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