The “Business as Usual” scenario of the 1972 edition of “The Limits to Growth” was understood as a prophecy of doom and ignored, but it was much more than that.
You mentioned Elinor Ostrom and small-scale systems, and I think there is a key truth hidden there in plain sight. That key truth is that “bigness” is part of the problem, maybe even MOST of the problem.
The would-be globalists, as a group, revealed their incompetence for any who are willing to see, in the way they “managed” Covid and the way they are now struggling to control information flow and attempting to “manage” human communication by atomizing society. As a group, they have shown themselves to be both incompetent and untrustworthy, and the trust now lost will be almost impossible to regain.
Another key thing to consider about “global” governance is that it is creating the biggest “single point of failure” mechanism the planet has ever seen. With distributed small-scale systems and locally managed efforts, we avoid the "one size fits all" approach, and also can tolerate certain amount of failure without collapsing the system completely. The overall system is much more robust. This is one reason that "central planning" is tried over and over again, and continues to fail in the end.
China is the not great success story it is being advertised to be, especially from an environmental standpoint (and yes, that is partly our fault for creating the product demand that drives the despoliation). It is also on the brink of financial collapse. The globalist class is flogging it as their preferred system mostly because they believe it will give them the authoritarian control of society they seek.
I wrote a program (using PL1) back in the mid '70s that very crudely estimated when resource depletion would become a significant problem for the World...It targeted 2014 as the inflection point, and its true that the resource heavy countries started breaking away from the colonial powers of the West somewhere around then...But in general, I'm highly skeptical of models, especially models designed by those with a profit motive...Armstrong's AI, which has input all of the data for hundreds of thousands of years, can't find any climate crisis whatsoever, and simply the evidence of the last ten thousand years refutes the theory...But soil exhaustion and overpopulation have destroyed many civilizations, and energy exhaustion will surely cause havoc to industrial civilizations worldwide...But no one wants to believe that, so there's no possibility of a wise government doing something useful about it, nor are there any wise governments.
China will not become carbon neutral (I suspect they understand it's a stupid idea) in 2060 without starving a large part of their population, so it won't happen....
It's amazing how little (if ever) the concept of the world having resource limitations ever impacts on policy making and how little it is referenced in journalism or academia.
It feels like everyone is hoping the problem won't exisit it we ignore it enough.
OMG!! Have you seen the news about the oil spill in the American Gulf?
Agreed with the general points on the post. One precision, though: I think the financial system is a VERY major issue. Specifically, that the underlying assumptions of most people who think they know something about finance in the West are fundamentally wrong. I don't think we'd have disasters like the economic policy of Liz Truss or the totally failed Russian sanctions if the people who supposedly know something about finance weren't very wrong about almost everything. As far as I can judge these things (not very well, but I consider myself a good generalist), I think Rabobank are the people who understand things best right now.
I have a small blog where I'm writing some thoughts on things, and I have some food for thought on the subject of governance, should somebody be interested:
The commons has a temporal aspect and governance has a temporal aspect and your discussion omits both.
1. The commons (every kg of mass on earth) is the private property of the next 100 generations.
So part of any legitimate management behavior has to reflect them. For example, the present generation has to be treated as leasers. Like apartments the leased goods have to be turned in at the end of the lease in the same shape they were leased. And lessor have to pay the damage deposit upfront or they don't get the resource to use.
2. The problem (who gets injured and when) for the global population is much bigger and will happen much sooner than is reflected by any proposed policy change in the post. See this video to understand "What happens when civilization runs out of fossil fuels"
Civilization's: "Running out of gas" story. 10 min video
You mentioned Elinor Ostrom and small-scale systems, and I think there is a key truth hidden there in plain sight. That key truth is that “bigness” is part of the problem, maybe even MOST of the problem.
The would-be globalists, as a group, revealed their incompetence for any who are willing to see, in the way they “managed” Covid and the way they are now struggling to control information flow and attempting to “manage” human communication by atomizing society. As a group, they have shown themselves to be both incompetent and untrustworthy, and the trust now lost will be almost impossible to regain.
Another key thing to consider about “global” governance is that it is creating the biggest “single point of failure” mechanism the planet has ever seen. With distributed small-scale systems and locally managed efforts, we avoid the "one size fits all" approach, and also can tolerate certain amount of failure without collapsing the system completely. The overall system is much more robust. This is one reason that "central planning" is tried over and over again, and continues to fail in the end.
China is the not great success story it is being advertised to be, especially from an environmental standpoint (and yes, that is partly our fault for creating the product demand that drives the despoliation). It is also on the brink of financial collapse. The globalist class is flogging it as their preferred system mostly because they believe it will give them the authoritarian control of society they seek.
I wrote a program (using PL1) back in the mid '70s that very crudely estimated when resource depletion would become a significant problem for the World...It targeted 2014 as the inflection point, and its true that the resource heavy countries started breaking away from the colonial powers of the West somewhere around then...But in general, I'm highly skeptical of models, especially models designed by those with a profit motive...Armstrong's AI, which has input all of the data for hundreds of thousands of years, can't find any climate crisis whatsoever, and simply the evidence of the last ten thousand years refutes the theory...But soil exhaustion and overpopulation have destroyed many civilizations, and energy exhaustion will surely cause havoc to industrial civilizations worldwide...But no one wants to believe that, so there's no possibility of a wise government doing something useful about it, nor are there any wise governments.
China will not become carbon neutral (I suspect they understand it's a stupid idea) in 2060 without starving a large part of their population, so it won't happen....
It's amazing how little (if ever) the concept of the world having resource limitations ever impacts on policy making and how little it is referenced in journalism or academia.
It feels like everyone is hoping the problem won't exisit it we ignore it enough.
-> "Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.13442
Yea, it would be nice if Substack let us paste images in here. The 2023 "recalibration" graph is steeper and sooner than the original LTG graph.
Buckle up! Rough road ahead!
OMG!! Have you seen the news about the oil spill in the American Gulf?
Agreed with the general points on the post. One precision, though: I think the financial system is a VERY major issue. Specifically, that the underlying assumptions of most people who think they know something about finance in the West are fundamentally wrong. I don't think we'd have disasters like the economic policy of Liz Truss or the totally failed Russian sanctions if the people who supposedly know something about finance weren't very wrong about almost everything. As far as I can judge these things (not very well, but I consider myself a good generalist), I think Rabobank are the people who understand things best right now.
I have a small blog where I'm writing some thoughts on things, and I have some food for thought on the subject of governance, should somebody be interested:
https://energywatchers1.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/chapter-9-what-is-power/
The commons has a temporal aspect and governance has a temporal aspect and your discussion omits both.
1. The commons (every kg of mass on earth) is the private property of the next 100 generations.
So part of any legitimate management behavior has to reflect them. For example, the present generation has to be treated as leasers. Like apartments the leased goods have to be turned in at the end of the lease in the same shape they were leased. And lessor have to pay the damage deposit upfront or they don't get the resource to use.
2. The problem (who gets injured and when) for the global population is much bigger and will happen much sooner than is reflected by any proposed policy change in the post. See this video to understand "What happens when civilization runs out of fossil fuels"
Civilization's: "Running out of gas" story. 10 min video
youtu.be/b5z5R6xqEG0
Jack Alpert PhD Director:
Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory http://www.skil.org
(C) 913 708 2554 jackalpert@me.com
Jack's work 600 word summary
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s9/client/snv?isnewsnv=true¬eGuid=996341e2-732f-4a6c-b9ae-4696515408ed¬eKey=751dd4402fdb8441c2d8f53a3ce92a50&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs9%2Fsh%2F996341e2-732f-4a6c-b9ae-4696515408ed%2F751dd4402fdb8441c2d8f53a3ce92a50&title=Jack%2527s%2Bwork%2B600%2Bword%2Bsummary