Interesting that the "Limits to growth" put pollutants at the top of the list of probabilitys a half century ago in the BAU scenario. As you appear to do now.
Maybe the old, very crude and generalized computer models were a better guide that the new AIs that try to account for a multitude of details and probabilitys.
Yes positive feedback and complex non-linear responses; just a thought, pollution applies to plants and the animal kingdom, and even to the more adaptable microflora.
Meanwhile, the timing and speed of the end of the so-called American empire? Rome went through stages. It feels to me that industrial civilisation with something a little over half of the world urbanised / suburbanised is one globalized 'Rome', with 'the barbarians' essentially in charge (Cavafy).
Our mainstream climatologists now predict a warming of 2,7 degrees by 2100. After their disastrous failure to predict the development until now I cannot understand how one can still believe them.
Hansen (who was always right until now) however predicts over 4, this means nearly 9 degrees over land. It is guaranteed that civilisation cannot survive this, and according to Rockström half the humanity will then starve. The climate feedbacks will look to it that it goes on unabatedly after 2100. In the next century, and perhaps even in our century, the world will become uninhabitable for trees or higher organisms. As to who could survive I would bet on the rats and everything below.
10. As for artificial intelligence: I am not really afraid of this. It depends on electricity, electronics, cooling and stable environmental conditions. Sure, it will create some perversions of surveillance and distortions of reality but ultimately not worse than under fascism. And it will be ultimately doomed even before us.
Hi Ugo, I enjoy reading your thoughts enormously. As a simple physician I was confronted daily with patients with a multitude of limiting pathologies where one had to decide what mattered most (e.g. diabetes, gallstones, heart disease, hypertension, glaucoma etc.).
Now your points 1-4 (Energy, Resources, Food production, Governance) seem to me biologically irrelevant, because they are self-healing: population will just adapt at what is there and can also function on a stone-age level.
6. Economic collapse. This is almost guaranteed and will hit complex sytems first. (Trump already axes globalisation). But also irrelevant, we can live at medieval or subsistence levels.
5. Keystone Species Collapse, seems to me more than a medium risk: Exactly like sperm insects are vanishing by 1-2 percent per year, so will many pollination dependent plants and many birds. But perhaps we can also survive on a stone-age level without insects.
7. Pollution-generated collapse. Pollution will limit also human procreation and a recent Lancet review predicted that almost all countries of the world will fall below replacement level by 2100, but this does not matter in view of 9 (below).
8. War-generated collapse. Overall risk: high. Agreed, the doomsday-clock seems nearer to 24:00 than ever.
9. Global collapse (the uninhabitable earth): Now, until 2017 all our mainsteam climatologists told us how we will limit global warming to 1,5 degrees in 2100. The only man who cried "fake" was James Hansen. In fact we have the 1,5 degrees now, about ten times faster as prognosticated.
According to James Hansen the warming is accelerating, which is obvious from inspecting the curves and must be true according to the steadily rising greenhouse gases (continued in next post).
I think economic collapse is a bit more than irrelevant. Think of your average modern megacity. Millions of people, all dependent on the supermarket, on electricity, on running water. Take out the banks (cash machines, credit cards, debit cards, electronic transfers all down), and you can be pretty certain that logistics will immediately follow. None of the technosphere can function without those ones and zeros called money.
A large scale failure in the banking system will collapse the whole Jenga tower. I wrote about exactly that, using the same metaphor, on Medium around a year ago.
As for surviving at a medieval level? With our current population and agricultural systems? You can forget that. Subsistence requires an infrastructure all of its own. One that would take decades to create. The knowledge for it in almost the entire human population has gone, except, perhaps, for a few pockets here and there. Any such pockets would be utterly erased by desperate people trying to survive from places where they are utterly dependent on that now collapsed technosphere.
A human being can survive a few days without water, about three months without food. You can't create a new medieval society within three months.
I'm pretty sure that economic collapse is exactly how this will unfold, and what will kill off the vast majority of the people of Earth. Because it won't stop in one region or country. The whole world is bound up in a tightly interconnected system of systems. And when cascading systems failure hits such a system of systems, it doesn't stop until all of it has failed.
By biologically insignificant I meant that it will not put survival as a species into jeopardy. Economic collapse will hit almost everybody but not all of us. There are still individuals and cultures able to survive at an mediaeval or pre-medieval level, in the Swiss and Austrian alps, the Himalaya, in the Amazon, in the African bush, some indigenous Australians, some Pigmyes, some sheperds and even some hippies who know how to survive without technology and economy, which in a way are only materialized paranoic systems parasiting us. I do not think that an economic collpase can wipe them all out.
However, global warming will not stop at that. Positive feedbacks will drive temperatures higher and that will be the end of trees, elephants and all humanity, a sort of holocaust 2. Perhaps rats can deal with it, because they can deal with about anything.
LOL! Ok, I get what you mean. You can count me among those old hippies, but we're too close to London and without modern medicine I wouldn't last a year. It'll be a close thing, I think. We're pretty adaptable but on top of the economic collapse you have ecosystem implosion and who knows where climate's going to go. A few, a very few, might make it through the bottleneck. Add the narcissists with nukes and it becomes a tad less likely.
London, how nice. I spent many months there, last time in January. What a town. But there is a Fench collapsologist who says that to survive one should live in a mountainous, segregated agricultural region. The bigger the town the earlier it will collapse. You are near London, I am near Zürich, both bad...
Not sure but all risk except total nuclear wars feel like low risk regarding TOTAL collapse of human society, Alexander the Great was predicted at birth to be destined to "destroy the (ancient) world" and did it with some understanding of the events: during his wars he destroyed all the main empires of his age toppling kings, pharaohs and rulers ending a lot of social structures, still the weft still keep on and the destruction to ordinary people was felt but endurable.
What a lot of risk are valued against is a kind of "business as usual" on our actual norm, what any collapse will bring is a new form with new possibilities, Roman collapse effectively ended slavery, feudal collapse ended servitude and so on, any system change because must at the ending of his possibilities: any system have a finite amount of configuration in his paradigms, tried all must begin to change his paradigm to generate new ones, static societies could work in a finite amount of time if not subject to influence of evolving ones, and we could see this in the "closure" of Chinese and Japanese societies, still at some point internal inefficiencies force an adaptation, violent (China) or internal (Japan).
Standing still is not possible, any system that is stagnating is internalizing entropy and that create a threshold, passed it there is too much entropy to maintain a functioning system. The sign of this kind of collapse is an every increase in the need for maintenance work to keep things running, entropy is a form of wear and tear that is applied on anything, so there is always a point when you have to change ALL AT THE SAME TIME we could see it as a collapse or as a needed maintenance intervention. Maintenance stop are always traumatic, tho the BAU...
dear ugo i do not now if you are aware but eia just said we reached us shale peak oil and that next year us shale production will go down from 13.5 million per day today to 13.2 million per day in 2026
Just one thing: by "Pollution-generated collapse" you mean HEALTH-related collapse. That would be the appropriately abstract handle, pollution being just one of several health threats (others are bad diets, microbes, light pollution, sedentarism, etc. etc.).
Also, in that section you write that "the idea that humans soon won’t be able to reproduce is a real threat". That will not be a threat for a VERY long time, if ever. Partly because humans are so hugely successful already (8.3 billion heading for 10 billion), and partly because advanced in medical tech will extent life expectancies, possibly dramatically.
"...will extend life expectancies, possibly dramatically." --- Assuming of course that utter and complete catastrophic Armageddon-like collapse does not supervene. lol
For my catabolic collapse lenses, every one of your ten possible collapses are already in effect.
1.Peak in energy supply is slowly turning industrial nations into third world economies, with highly related inflation on every basic stuff, from food to clothes via housing. Renewable energies are living to their names, and are only interesting in a much more contracted economy. The effect of the renewables on pollution and land grabbing is already a serious issue, and wind and solar new potential reservoir are shrinking like ice on a stove. I really like the biomass solution (for little communities and families) , but it has also a lot of drawback (Gardanne biomass plant in southern France already importing wood to keep the furnaces on.) And to put a final nail in the coffin, I did try to put a huge PV plant on my farm (5 hectars of agrophotovoltaic, with a serious french company), but the grid near me is hopelessly inadequate to carry such an amount of electricity, and even 5 hectars is barely profitable for them.
2. Resource depletion: some resources are already depleted a lot, and diminishing returns are doing a great job at that! I think that its really an oversimplification to say that, as an example, photovoltaic energy only needs only Al and Si! To have a fonctionnal PV plant, you need all the electronics you can have, from converters to batteries! It reminds me of people that would say few years ago "you only need sand to build PV panels!".
3. Food prod: Four remarks
A. the crapification and programmed obsolescence of critical agricultural machinery (150-250 horsepower tractor you need to replace every two years!)
B. The hefty price and inflation of agricultural machinery that forces debt on young farmers for life. (its 1000€ for 1 horsepower now...)
C. Precision fermentation is particularly energy and resource inefficient to produce real food, compared to agroecological farming, and reminds me of boxed "urban vertical farms", that sold 24€/kg strawberries to Parisian yuppies. The "Agricool" company, a 5 million € startup, crashed not long ago, and the other vertical farms are not in a good shape.
D. Dining on algae and insects is already a mark of infamy in a lot of political fringe groups, and is considered a mark of WEF propaganda at best. Moreover, algae and insects for human food are highly reliant on a huge industrial network (like precision fermentation) and will not fare well in a deindustrialised society.
>I would recommand, as a agronomy teacher, for a really resilient food system in a changing climate, the use of keyline systems (in experimentation on my farm) and animal based cultural rotation, with pollarded trees as system keystones (wood chips for soil improvement, biochar production, fruits, complement fodder for cattle, shading of the meadows for more hay production, etc).
ref: Regeneration agriculture, Mark Shepard
Water for every farm, Percival Yeoman
>Moreover, instead of putting microbes on inox tanks, you should use them were they are really useful and adapted: using endomycorhized tree species in a diversified landscape would strenghten a fruit related food system a lot better than mealworms gigafactories...
4-5: Not an expert, but sounds realistic
6. Globally on your side of the question, you may just want to avoid the "return to the caves" meme, which is a thought stopper and therefore not useful here. You would be interested to know that a fair share of a deindustrialised economy population are already out of reach of a lot of globalization amenities, and therefore are already scrambling to reinvent the domestic economies of the XIXth century.
As an example, there is a huge scythe mowing revival in Great Britain, with offsprings in France and Germany! I participated in a scythe battering workshop just near me, and the skills are being passed!
And we have a reseller of excellent Italian tools just near us too! Glad Italy kept some of its ironsmiths! https://la-frontiere.fr/
7-8-9: seems relevant to me, linked to the other ways that will bring down industrial systems with them.
10. AI is also linked to a functionnal industrial system and will dissappear with it. To me, the worst risk with AI is that young people won't have the neural webs fitted to digest and remember the huge flow of coherent informations, craftmanship and skills needed to run a non-industrial/deindustrial economy. As always, we will be there to teach them reclaim some of these skills on the farm!
I'm very disappointed. Separating elements of collapse and rating them individually is missing the point entirely.
The permanent collapse in industrial output, consumer demand, is a result of real term prices rising via increasing demand and diminishing returns.
I recommend that everyone view nate Hagen's first interview with Jeremy Grantham and take note of his historical price index of the 30 odd critical commodities.
To sum it up, the index fell throughout the 20th century but turned in the year 2002. Real prices of all essential commodities are now rising rapidly.
If the fact that real term prices of essential commodities is rising rapidly does not wake you up to the predicament we are now facing then nothing will.
Industrial output will fall and at some point in the future it will be permanent.
How do increases in real term prices of essential commodities cause collapse in industrial output? Seems like a huge assumption with no evidence. Those cost increases would have to lead to higher prices of finished goods, of course, but why "collapse" in output?
An interesting summary, Ugo, but I'm amazed the word climate doesn't show up in your essay. We hit 430 ppm CO2 in May: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
I think humans have a very strong "immediacy bias".
We are predisposed to take care of things that are imminent, and leave the others. "Someone will do something about that someday." The attacking top predator gets dealt with. The mountain with some smoke coming out of it? "Someday."
So I think the immediate things on your list will not happen because we'll do whatever we can about it. We've resister nuclear war for three-quarters of a century.
But we've been steadily dispersing non-renewable resources and putting carbon in the air for about three times as long, and nothing is really changing.
So my vote is for a long "slow emergency" eventually getting us, while we barely notice, with each day being slightly "less good" than the day before.
Interesting that the "Limits to growth" put pollutants at the top of the list of probabilitys a half century ago in the BAU scenario. As you appear to do now.
Maybe the old, very crude and generalized computer models were a better guide that the new AIs that try to account for a multitude of details and probabilitys.
Yes positive feedback and complex non-linear responses; just a thought, pollution applies to plants and the animal kingdom, and even to the more adaptable microflora.
Meanwhile, the timing and speed of the end of the so-called American empire? Rome went through stages. It feels to me that industrial civilisation with something a little over half of the world urbanised / suburbanised is one globalized 'Rome', with 'the barbarians' essentially in charge (Cavafy).
Interesting to read your list and assessment.
I think war, technofascism and deliberate depopulation are the greatest threats.
I am no longer sure about the C02 Climate Crisis situation.
There is so much propaganda and lies it’s difficult to know the truth.
I did start my “ Collapse “ journey with Peak Oil & climate change 😎
Thanks Ugo. I'd rate the food-system collapse risk higher. I think there are some mostly-unknown unknowns we'll find out more about.
Our devious overlords are working on thinning us, the herds, without spooking us.
Who knows what clever tricks they may pull out of their hats next?
The whole-enviornment collapsing does imply food production collapsing before that.
God bless Diesel...
Seems I have used my space, but to conclude:
Our mainstream climatologists now predict a warming of 2,7 degrees by 2100. After their disastrous failure to predict the development until now I cannot understand how one can still believe them.
Hansen (who was always right until now) however predicts over 4, this means nearly 9 degrees over land. It is guaranteed that civilisation cannot survive this, and according to Rockström half the humanity will then starve. The climate feedbacks will look to it that it goes on unabatedly after 2100. In the next century, and perhaps even in our century, the world will become uninhabitable for trees or higher organisms. As to who could survive I would bet on the rats and everything below.
10. As for artificial intelligence: I am not really afraid of this. It depends on electricity, electronics, cooling and stable environmental conditions. Sure, it will create some perversions of surveillance and distortions of reality but ultimately not worse than under fascism. And it will be ultimately doomed even before us.
Hi Ugo, I enjoy reading your thoughts enormously. As a simple physician I was confronted daily with patients with a multitude of limiting pathologies where one had to decide what mattered most (e.g. diabetes, gallstones, heart disease, hypertension, glaucoma etc.).
Now your points 1-4 (Energy, Resources, Food production, Governance) seem to me biologically irrelevant, because they are self-healing: population will just adapt at what is there and can also function on a stone-age level.
6. Economic collapse. This is almost guaranteed and will hit complex sytems first. (Trump already axes globalisation). But also irrelevant, we can live at medieval or subsistence levels.
5. Keystone Species Collapse, seems to me more than a medium risk: Exactly like sperm insects are vanishing by 1-2 percent per year, so will many pollination dependent plants and many birds. But perhaps we can also survive on a stone-age level without insects.
7. Pollution-generated collapse. Pollution will limit also human procreation and a recent Lancet review predicted that almost all countries of the world will fall below replacement level by 2100, but this does not matter in view of 9 (below).
8. War-generated collapse. Overall risk: high. Agreed, the doomsday-clock seems nearer to 24:00 than ever.
9. Global collapse (the uninhabitable earth): Now, until 2017 all our mainsteam climatologists told us how we will limit global warming to 1,5 degrees in 2100. The only man who cried "fake" was James Hansen. In fact we have the 1,5 degrees now, about ten times faster as prognosticated.
According to James Hansen the warming is accelerating, which is obvious from inspecting the curves and must be true according to the steadily rising greenhouse gases (continued in next post).
I think economic collapse is a bit more than irrelevant. Think of your average modern megacity. Millions of people, all dependent on the supermarket, on electricity, on running water. Take out the banks (cash machines, credit cards, debit cards, electronic transfers all down), and you can be pretty certain that logistics will immediately follow. None of the technosphere can function without those ones and zeros called money.
A large scale failure in the banking system will collapse the whole Jenga tower. I wrote about exactly that, using the same metaphor, on Medium around a year ago.
As for surviving at a medieval level? With our current population and agricultural systems? You can forget that. Subsistence requires an infrastructure all of its own. One that would take decades to create. The knowledge for it in almost the entire human population has gone, except, perhaps, for a few pockets here and there. Any such pockets would be utterly erased by desperate people trying to survive from places where they are utterly dependent on that now collapsed technosphere.
A human being can survive a few days without water, about three months without food. You can't create a new medieval society within three months.
I'm pretty sure that economic collapse is exactly how this will unfold, and what will kill off the vast majority of the people of Earth. Because it won't stop in one region or country. The whole world is bound up in a tightly interconnected system of systems. And when cascading systems failure hits such a system of systems, it doesn't stop until all of it has failed.
Joe
By biologically insignificant I meant that it will not put survival as a species into jeopardy. Economic collapse will hit almost everybody but not all of us. There are still individuals and cultures able to survive at an mediaeval or pre-medieval level, in the Swiss and Austrian alps, the Himalaya, in the Amazon, in the African bush, some indigenous Australians, some Pigmyes, some sheperds and even some hippies who know how to survive without technology and economy, which in a way are only materialized paranoic systems parasiting us. I do not think that an economic collpase can wipe them all out.
However, global warming will not stop at that. Positive feedbacks will drive temperatures higher and that will be the end of trees, elephants and all humanity, a sort of holocaust 2. Perhaps rats can deal with it, because they can deal with about anything.
LOL! Ok, I get what you mean. You can count me among those old hippies, but we're too close to London and without modern medicine I wouldn't last a year. It'll be a close thing, I think. We're pretty adaptable but on top of the economic collapse you have ecosystem implosion and who knows where climate's going to go. A few, a very few, might make it through the bottleneck. Add the narcissists with nukes and it becomes a tad less likely.
London, how nice. I spent many months there, last time in January. What a town. But there is a Fench collapsologist who says that to survive one should live in a mountainous, segregated agricultural region. The bigger the town the earlier it will collapse. You are near London, I am near Zürich, both bad...
Your Gaia picture immediately reminded me of a quote from Albert Einstein “God does not play dice”.
Similarly, Gaia does not play Jenga. She’s very angry with us, and may still yet evict us!
Not sure but all risk except total nuclear wars feel like low risk regarding TOTAL collapse of human society, Alexander the Great was predicted at birth to be destined to "destroy the (ancient) world" and did it with some understanding of the events: during his wars he destroyed all the main empires of his age toppling kings, pharaohs and rulers ending a lot of social structures, still the weft still keep on and the destruction to ordinary people was felt but endurable.
What a lot of risk are valued against is a kind of "business as usual" on our actual norm, what any collapse will bring is a new form with new possibilities, Roman collapse effectively ended slavery, feudal collapse ended servitude and so on, any system change because must at the ending of his possibilities: any system have a finite amount of configuration in his paradigms, tried all must begin to change his paradigm to generate new ones, static societies could work in a finite amount of time if not subject to influence of evolving ones, and we could see this in the "closure" of Chinese and Japanese societies, still at some point internal inefficiencies force an adaptation, violent (China) or internal (Japan).
Standing still is not possible, any system that is stagnating is internalizing entropy and that create a threshold, passed it there is too much entropy to maintain a functioning system. The sign of this kind of collapse is an every increase in the need for maintenance work to keep things running, entropy is a form of wear and tear that is applied on anything, so there is always a point when you have to change ALL AT THE SAME TIME we could see it as a collapse or as a needed maintenance intervention. Maintenance stop are always traumatic, tho the BAU...
dear ugo i do not now if you are aware but eia just said we reached us shale peak oil and that next year us shale production will go down from 13.5 million per day today to 13.2 million per day in 2026
hello professor ugo bardi i did not see your report on the club of rome website from 12 june 2025 over the end of population growth ?
Very good, Ugo. Thanks.
Just one thing: by "Pollution-generated collapse" you mean HEALTH-related collapse. That would be the appropriately abstract handle, pollution being just one of several health threats (others are bad diets, microbes, light pollution, sedentarism, etc. etc.).
Also, in that section you write that "the idea that humans soon won’t be able to reproduce is a real threat". That will not be a threat for a VERY long time, if ever. Partly because humans are so hugely successful already (8.3 billion heading for 10 billion), and partly because advanced in medical tech will extent life expectancies, possibly dramatically.
"...will extend life expectancies, possibly dramatically." --- Assuming of course that utter and complete catastrophic Armageddon-like collapse does not supervene. lol
*ADVANCES in medical tech will EXTEND life... , pardon
Dear Ugo,
As interesting as always.
For my catabolic collapse lenses, every one of your ten possible collapses are already in effect.
1.Peak in energy supply is slowly turning industrial nations into third world economies, with highly related inflation on every basic stuff, from food to clothes via housing. Renewable energies are living to their names, and are only interesting in a much more contracted economy. The effect of the renewables on pollution and land grabbing is already a serious issue, and wind and solar new potential reservoir are shrinking like ice on a stove. I really like the biomass solution (for little communities and families) , but it has also a lot of drawback (Gardanne biomass plant in southern France already importing wood to keep the furnaces on.) And to put a final nail in the coffin, I did try to put a huge PV plant on my farm (5 hectars of agrophotovoltaic, with a serious french company), but the grid near me is hopelessly inadequate to carry such an amount of electricity, and even 5 hectars is barely profitable for them.
2. Resource depletion: some resources are already depleted a lot, and diminishing returns are doing a great job at that! I think that its really an oversimplification to say that, as an example, photovoltaic energy only needs only Al and Si! To have a fonctionnal PV plant, you need all the electronics you can have, from converters to batteries! It reminds me of people that would say few years ago "you only need sand to build PV panels!".
3. Food prod: Four remarks
A. the crapification and programmed obsolescence of critical agricultural machinery (150-250 horsepower tractor you need to replace every two years!)
B. The hefty price and inflation of agricultural machinery that forces debt on young farmers for life. (its 1000€ for 1 horsepower now...)
C. Precision fermentation is particularly energy and resource inefficient to produce real food, compared to agroecological farming, and reminds me of boxed "urban vertical farms", that sold 24€/kg strawberries to Parisian yuppies. The "Agricool" company, a 5 million € startup, crashed not long ago, and the other vertical farms are not in a good shape.
D. Dining on algae and insects is already a mark of infamy in a lot of political fringe groups, and is considered a mark of WEF propaganda at best. Moreover, algae and insects for human food are highly reliant on a huge industrial network (like precision fermentation) and will not fare well in a deindustrialised society.
>I would recommand, as a agronomy teacher, for a really resilient food system in a changing climate, the use of keyline systems (in experimentation on my farm) and animal based cultural rotation, with pollarded trees as system keystones (wood chips for soil improvement, biochar production, fruits, complement fodder for cattle, shading of the meadows for more hay production, etc).
ref: Regeneration agriculture, Mark Shepard
Water for every farm, Percival Yeoman
>Moreover, instead of putting microbes on inox tanks, you should use them were they are really useful and adapted: using endomycorhized tree species in a diversified landscape would strenghten a fruit related food system a lot better than mealworms gigafactories...
4-5: Not an expert, but sounds realistic
6. Globally on your side of the question, you may just want to avoid the "return to the caves" meme, which is a thought stopper and therefore not useful here. You would be interested to know that a fair share of a deindustrialised economy population are already out of reach of a lot of globalization amenities, and therefore are already scrambling to reinvent the domestic economies of the XIXth century.
As an example, there is a huge scythe mowing revival in Great Britain, with offsprings in France and Germany! I participated in a scythe battering workshop just near me, and the skills are being passed!
And we have a reseller of excellent Italian tools just near us too! Glad Italy kept some of its ironsmiths! https://la-frontiere.fr/
7-8-9: seems relevant to me, linked to the other ways that will bring down industrial systems with them.
10. AI is also linked to a functionnal industrial system and will dissappear with it. To me, the worst risk with AI is that young people won't have the neural webs fitted to digest and remember the huge flow of coherent informations, craftmanship and skills needed to run a non-industrial/deindustrial economy. As always, we will be there to teach them reclaim some of these skills on the farm!
I'm very disappointed. Separating elements of collapse and rating them individually is missing the point entirely.
The permanent collapse in industrial output, consumer demand, is a result of real term prices rising via increasing demand and diminishing returns.
I recommend that everyone view nate Hagen's first interview with Jeremy Grantham and take note of his historical price index of the 30 odd critical commodities.
To sum it up, the index fell throughout the 20th century but turned in the year 2002. Real prices of all essential commodities are now rising rapidly.
If the fact that real term prices of essential commodities is rising rapidly does not wake you up to the predicament we are now facing then nothing will.
Industrial output will fall and at some point in the future it will be permanent.
How do increases in real term prices of essential commodities cause collapse in industrial output? Seems like a huge assumption with no evidence. Those cost increases would have to lead to higher prices of finished goods, of course, but why "collapse" in output?
Also, search Jeremy Grantham GMO Time to wake up.
Download the report and read it.
A huge assumption with no evidence? I suggest you read Limits to growth.
An interesting summary, Ugo, but I'm amazed the word climate doesn't show up in your essay. We hit 430 ppm CO2 in May: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
It is a major element of the ecosistemic collapse!
I think humans have a very strong "immediacy bias".
We are predisposed to take care of things that are imminent, and leave the others. "Someone will do something about that someday." The attacking top predator gets dealt with. The mountain with some smoke coming out of it? "Someday."
So I think the immediate things on your list will not happen because we'll do whatever we can about it. We've resister nuclear war for three-quarters of a century.
But we've been steadily dispersing non-renewable resources and putting carbon in the air for about three times as long, and nothing is really changing.
So my vote is for a long "slow emergency" eventually getting us, while we barely notice, with each day being slightly "less good" than the day before.
Gracias Sr. Bardi. Es un placer leerle.
Gracias Sr. Bardi. Es un placer leerle.