We are Trashing the Planet.

Too many people are causing too much damage.

In all the cold vast darkness of the universe, one planet stands out as a home for humanity. And we are trashing that planet.

In all the time that elapsed on that planet, one epoch, the Holocene, has been especially well suited to Homo sapiens for the last 11,000 years. And we have put that epoch in jeopardy (Steffan, 2018).

The Earth is huge and able to withstand our punches. But, if we stress Earth beyond certain limits, it will have permanent scars. Scientists have established 9 boundaries that they say we cannot cross if we expect to maintain that stable Holocene environment. Katherine Richardson et. al. have made the case that we have already crossed six of those critical boundaries, beyond which “Earth system stability and life-support systems conducive to the human welfare and societal development experienced during the Holocene” are at risk (Richardson, 2023). These boundaries we have already crossed include loss of animal species and their biological function, climate change, freshwater resource change, synthetic chemical pollution, fertilizer runoff, and loss of natural lands. This is cause for concern (Wiedmann, 2020).

How serious is this? William Rees argues that “the global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population correction in this century,” (Rees, 2023). “The climate crisis may wipe out six billion people” (Rees, 2019). Milton Saier wrote, “It seems that only with a very substantial reduction in the size of the human population can we hope for a stable order for Earth’s biosphere and its human inhabitants” (Saier, 2023).  Martin Desvaux agrees: “It is the sheer weight of human numbers that is causing the overdraft on natural resources. If this continues uncorrected, a population crash will be inevitable” (Desvaux, 2007). As William Ripple put it, our actions could be critical to “the very future of humanity” (Ripple, 2022).

When would this crash happen? Multiple scientists have warned that climate change could possibly be leading to global societal collapse this century (Weyhenmeyer, 2020). Megan Seibert and William Rees argue that, “to achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two” (Seibert, 2021). Other people say we have much longer. We don’t know. Perhaps we should at least pay attention.

15,000 scientists have signed this appeal to humanity:

We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats (Crist et al. 2017). By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled [sic] biosphere…

Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home. (Ripple, 2017)

Unfortunately, all these warnings are often ignored (Washington, 2020; Washington, 2022).

Nobody really knows how much time we have left, and what will happen if we fail to react in time. After all, there are no spare planets out there that we could experiment with to see what happens. But I echo the concern that we are dealing with a very serious situation.

In this post I will explore improvements in technology and limits on affluence, and explain why I think these will not be adequate to prevent future collapse. I think the future would be best with a reduction in births through humane, peaceful, voluntary means, which is the only way we should consider a population reduction. It could take a hundred years or more for such policies to have the desired effect. We might not have that long to react. That is our predicament. And people should be talking about that.

Exponential Growth

How did we get into this situation? After all, the Earth is huge and has survived centuries of abuse. It is still teeming with a great variety of healthy life. So why worry? Because we have a problem. Stated concisely, that problem is a result of the exponential function. If you do not understand why that is a problem, you are in good company. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race,” said professor Al Bartlett, “is our inability to understand the exponential function” (Bartlett website). The exponential function is a simple concept which has profound implications but is hard for us to grasp. Let’s review it.

Exponential growth means that the rate at which something is changing is proportional to its current size. A well-known example is a savings account. It can start out small, but if it continues to collect interest at a rate proportional to its current size, it can grow significantly. If, for instance, you invest one dollar at a 7.2% annual interest rate, you will have two dollars in ten years. You will have $1000 in 100 years, $1 million in 200 years, and $1 billion in 300 years. Not bad. Of course, 300 years from now, it might cost $10 billion for a hamburger, but that’s another issue. The important thing to grasp is the immense power of exponential growth. If your money really grew that fast over and above the rate of inflation, a small savings would become huge given enough of time.

Exponential growth can also be scary. Let’s say you start with a drop of water a mere 0.01″ in diameter, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Now let’s say you are sitting in Yankee stadium watching that little dot of water on the pitcher’s mound through your binoculars as it doubles in volume every minute. After 1 minute there are two tiny drops. In 2 minutes there are 4 (looking like this ::). After watching for 22 long minutes, that first drop has finally grown to the volume of a golf ball. You are bored. Nothing to see here. In 38 minutes, there is a puddle of water that covers the infield 1/8″ deep. In 45 minutes, the water covers the entire field, and in 54 minutes it is flowing into the stands 15′ high. If it took 54 minutes to get to 15′, do you have plenty of time to get out? No. In just 4 more minutes, the water is flowing out over the top of Yankee Stadium. That is the power of the exponential function. 54 minutes to reach 15′. 4 more minutes to drown everybody in the stands.

Rates of increase that looked small 5 minutes earlier, are later rising at alarming rates (Martenson, 2021). And, even if you did get out of the stadium at the 57-minute mark, the Earth itself would be flooded 3 miles deep at the 100-minute mark, so your odds are still quite slim. You cannot outpace the exponential function forever. For centuries we have seen exponential growth in population, the economy, fossil fuel usage, carbon emissions, etc. Hence, what seemed like a small impact 100 years ago is now a major concern.

Like the water in that illustration, many parameters have been seeing a similar exponential rise as a result of human impact, including loss of species (Cafaro, 2022; Ceballos, 2015; Shragg, 2022a), global warming, and ocean acidification. If you chart any one of these, you will see a curve that is shaped like a hockey stick. And that is a big concern. As Thomas Murphy put it, we are experiencing a death by hockey sticks (Murphy, 2013).

In biology, exponential growth eventually reaches a limit. When a few rabbits were introduced to Australia, for instance, the population grew like–you guessed it–rabbits (Alves, 2022). But over time, the available space for rabbits was filled up, and growth slowed. There is only so much ecological space for a species to inhabit. There are consequences to being on a finite Earth (Tverberg, 2014; Murphy,2022a). As a species fills its available habitat, the exponential growth rate tends to change to a straight-line growth instead of exponential and then eventually levels off as it reaches a limit. The curve that traces this function is known as a logistic curve and looks like this:

It appears that human growth has ended its exponential expansion phase. Human population, for instance, has now been growing at about 83 million people per year for the last 40 years. That is no longer exponential growth. But it is very rapid straight-line growth. This can be seen by looking at the annual rate of change in population as shown in the blue line below. If our growth was still exponential, the rate of growth would also be rising exponentially. Instead, the rate of growth of the population has held nearly steady (with a downturn in 2020, most likely related to COVID 19). That indicates population is rising at close to a constant rate.

We could interpret the logistics curve as representing human population, the size of the world economy, or the total impact on the planet.

Some have suggested that we are following a logistics curve, as shown above, and that therefore we do not need to worry about the runaway results of human expansion. But even if true, the leveling-off phase at the right of the logistics curve, unfortunately, is normally not that pleasant for a species that reaches that point. There, members of the species are heavily competing for the remaining resources, and many are dying of starvation or deprivation of their basic needs. Of course, we as humans might see this coming and could throttle back our expansion by cooperative means. This is what many hope for, that we are simply reaching the end of the expansion phase and will find a way to level off at steady state. Perhaps.

Overshoot

But unfortunately, it appears we have gotten ourselves into a predicament far worse than the logistics curve would suggest. Instead of being at the point where we are now leveling off to the limit, we may have already driven our impact far above the limits that the planet can withstand. How could we do that? We had a little help. The discovery of fossil fuels and modern technologies has boosted our population and affluence levels to rise much faster than the rates seen in the 1700’s. Almost as though we had strapped a rocket engine onto the economy, we soared far above anything that would have been possible without this boost from fossil fuels (Murphy, 2022).

Human civilization has an impact on the planet, but there is often a time delay from the time the action takes place and the time when the planet experiences the full effect. For instance, we have been pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which acts to warm the planet. But that increase in carbon dioxide does not immediately cause the Earth to warm. There is a delay before we see the full effect (Hansen, 2016, Hansen, 2023, Hood, 2020, Samset, 2020). If some parameter is increasing rapidly, due to exponential growth, then a delayed effect of even 20 years can allow that parameter to push far above the sustainable limit before the effect catches up.

This overshoot is what many scientists warn about when they say we have driven our impact beyond acceptable boundaries (Rockström, 2009). They are not talking about merely doing things that put stress on the environment. They are talking about having continuously pushed above the planet’s limit at ever increasing levels of damage. This results in a condition known as overshoot (Rees, 2020; Rees, 2022; Rees, 2023; Berman, 2023). In overshoot, we are not merely following a logistics curve to a limit. The curve for an economy with overshoot might look more like this, with us humans, having overshot the limit, facing an inevitable correction:

In this curve, and in the curves to follow, I am tracking a variable that I will define as total affluence. I define this as the total population times the average level of affluence per person. It is roughly equivalent to the global gross national product (GNP) but not exactly, since affluence can consist of more than just the product produced.

The Global Footprint Network has been actively monitoring our impact on this planet for decades, using a method that calculates the Ecological Footprint in global hectares (about 2.5 acres) that each nation needs to support its lifestyle. We can add it all up to see the total impact on the planet as a whole (Wackernagel, 2002; Lin, 2018). We can then compare this to the productive land in the nations and the planet. The Global Footprint Network concluded that, in 1970, we went into overshoot, that it then required more than one Earth-sized planet to support us all. But the effects were not immediate. And so, we could continue to grow. And now, 53 years later, the Global Footprint Network concludes that it would take 1.72 Earths to support humanity without overshoot. That delay in reckoning has allowed us to soar high above the limit. If we wanted to get back to the place where we had first stressed the planet as much as it could withstand, we must either have the population drop to 58% of today’s population at today’s lifestyle or reduce our impact per person such that we average 58% of the impact per person that we have today.

The Ecological Footprint calculation deals mainly with the amount of land to provide food, housing, infrastructure and carbon sinks to support our lifestyle. Almost half of the total represents the land required to absorb our carbon wastes. One could argue that we are simply going to fix the carbon problem–and end global warming–by throwing in some green technology and carbon capture, and thus we will no longer have the carbon portion of the problem. Others will simply deny global warming. Either way, if we made the carbon problem go away, we would have no more overshoot per this calculation. But as we will discuss, our odds of solving the climate problem are very slim.

Even if we did completely solve our global warming problem, there are many other ways that we have entered overshoot. The full calculation of overshoot would need to directly account for species loss, fertilizer runoff, ocean acidification, etc. When all that is considered, one could argue that we are actually far above the 72% overshoot the Global Footprint Network calculates.

Overshoot can lead to collapse, as shown in the graph above. And it’s anybody’s guess what would happen after such a collapse. Perhaps we would experience a global level of cooperation to pick up the pieces and return society to the best state possible. On the other extreme, we could end up in continuous wars and social disruptions that push us back to the stone age. We don’t know.

Of course, we could postulate that science will come to the rescue. We have seen an explosion in technology in the last few centuries, some of which have reduced the impact of total human affluence on the planet. But unfortunately, these gains have done little to reduce the overshoot impact we are having on the planet. Despite the gains in science in the last 53 years, we went from needing 1.0 Earths to needing 1.72. Even with technology to help us, we are losing out.

So, yes, let’s pursue science, and utilize technologies and conservation measures that will protect the planet, but we need to be realistic in what we expect. We will discuss this later. For now, I will show another graph of our future total affluence, one that rises endlessly upwards due to the marvels of technology.

That is a pretty picture. The upward slope would certainly be nice, if only it was possible. But we also need to be concerned that the limit might be going downward, not upward. That is because, as our impact on the planet increases, we might be making permanent scars. This is what scientists are concerned about when they fear our impact may be ending the Holocene Epoch on Earth. The damage may be permanent to the Earth. It could lead to things like a runaway hothouse Earth, which will damage the Earth for hundreds of generations (Schröder, 2020). So, let’s show another curve, one that begins to see permanent degradation of the environment when we exceed the limit. Of course, if something like an extreme hothouse Earth were to result, the Earth’s capacity would dip much more than the gray line shows.

If we ever had a massive loss in affluence and population, as shown above, it could lead to collapse of society. Such collapses have happened in the past (Diamond, 2011). After such a collapse, we would certainly hope that people would come together to help the economy recover and restore a best level of remaining society, but such an end is not inevitable. It would then be up to us as humans to somehow pull things back together.

How far are we in overshoot? How much do we need to reduce to get to the point where things are sustainable? I think the 72% overshoot figure of the Global Footprint Network is a good place to start. But we would need to add the fact that we have damaged the Earth in many ways that they do not account for. And we really should be concerned about animal and plant life also, not just about having room for ourselves. And then we need to figure that there will be additional damage to the planet while we are bringing the impact down to a sustainable level. Overall, I think the tentative goal of cutting our impact in half to be a good target for mankind.

But first, let me throw in one more issue. Not only are we damaging the planet, but we are consuming nonrenewable resources at a breathtaking pace, especially fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) (Murphy, 2011a). There is only so much oil down there, for instance, and it would take the Earth 100,000 years to replace what we consume in a year (Murphy, 2021). Yes, we keep discovering more, but since 1981 we have been using it significantly faster than we discover new reserves (Michaux, 2019). Eventually that will catch up to us. Already, the critical middle distillates that supply our diesel fuel and jet fuel appear to be in terminal decline (Tverberg, 2023a). We are running out of gas (Maggio, 2012).

In 2015, S. H. Mohr et. al., did a thorough research study on fossil fuel reserves. They published a best guess estimate that the total energy from fossil fuels per year would peak at about 600 EJ around 2025, and then begin a precipitous decline to 200 EJ over a century-long period. Although that is their most likely conclusion from the data, there are a lot of unknowns. If we take it that Murphy’s Law will work in reverse, and that everything that can go right will, they estimate fossil fuels will stay at or above the current 600 EJ level until 2100, when they will then begin a similar century-long plunge to 200 EJ. Either way, a century-long plunge in which fossil fuel usage drops to 1/3 of current levels is coming (Mohr, 2015).

So much depends on fossil fuels. Obviously, we use them heavily for transportation. But they are also key to the production of fertilizer, plastics, pesticides, medicines, concrete, asphalt, and many other things we use. Without fossil fuels, life will be much different (Tverberg, 2023b).

The rise of modern civilization has been fueled by fossil fuels. In particular, the green revolution in agriculture requires huge quantities of fossil fuels to make fertilizers and pesticides and to power the needed equipment and trucks. We are, in effect, eating fossil fuels, since we rely on 10 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food on the table (Pfeiffer, 2006). When that fossil fuel supply is reduced to a fraction of the current supply, then what do we eat? (B, 2023)

Let’s look at one more curve, one that has an initial cutback due to overshoot, and a later cutback due to decreased fossil fuel availability.

Of course, you may argue that alternative energy will keep things moving when fossil fuel reserves decline. If that worked well, that would shift the second decline to the right or even eliminate it altogether. We will look at that later.

Without fossil fuels, where are we? World gross domestic product (GDP) has always been closely tied to oil (Martenson, 2023) and to global energy (Michaux, 2021) . If we do not have adequate alternatives for energy when fossil fuels decline, GDP decline will likely follow (Haberl, 2020).

What population will the future world hold? In 1900, before oil and gas were widely used, the world population was 1.6 billion. One could make the case that we could not reasonably sustain human existence far above that level without the benefits of oil and gas. Are we limited to 2 billion people in the long term instead of the current 8 billion? Christopher Tucker suggests we should limit population to 3 billion (Götmark, 2020; Tucker, 2019). Aisha and Partha Dasgupta say the population should be between 0.5 and 5 billion (Cafaro, 2021; Dasgupta, 2017). An argument based on Ecological Footprint by Martin Desvaux says we need to get down below 3 billion people. (Desvaux, 2007). A number of people have estimates under 4 billion (Samways, 2022; Crist, 2022). Others, such as the Earth4All People and Planet Report (Callegari, 2023) say we could reach 14 billion with redistribution of wealth and huge technology improvements. Estimates vary widely (Dérer, 2018 ; Pengra, 2012).

All of this depends on our lifestyle and technology we come to use. With reduced affluence and better use of technology, we could have more people on this planet. Paul Ehrlich famously proposed a formula for our impact on the planet: I=PAT. This equation says that our impact is equal to the population times the level of affluence times a factor based on the technology in use (Desvaux, 2007; Ward, 2016). This gives us three levers that we could use to limit our impact: population, affluence, and technology. We will look at each of these in the sections below. If the total impact caused by this combination of population, affluence and technology-in-use is such that serious overshoot continues, then we risk a ghastly future (Bradshaw, 2021).

For now, I will show a simple curve that summarizes where the capacity limits of global population might be if technology improvements or affluence reduction levers did not save us. The curve is illustrative of Earth’s instantaneous carrying capacity as it could vary in time. We don’t know where the actual limits are.

The curve begins at some level above our current population, beyond which we cannot exceed without risk of imminent collapse. As time goes on the planet will degrade further due to overshoot, and that will lower the instantaneous carrying capacity. This also could trigger a collapse. I show this as a downturn in the blue carrying capacity line. This could possibly happen by the end of this century based on estimates listed earlier. Of course, better use of technology or lowering the average affluence could move this curve higher or shift it right. We will explore those options later.

The second downturn in the graph below represents a further decrease due to depletion of fossil fuels and mineral deposits. At that point we may find the instantaneous carrying capacity of the Earth drops still further. I show this possibly occurring by 2250, when even Mohr’s best-case estimate for future fossil fuels shows most fossil fuels will have been used up (Mohr, 2015). As we will see later, the available alternative energy sources might not rescue us from an energy crash at that point. Of course, we might find that substitutes really do work out for us and move that blue line upward and to the right. But for now, consider there is some limit to the carrying capacity of the Earth in the future, and that this will be decreasing with time as the planet is trashed and resources are consumed.

Wherever the blue curve lies, if our population curve exceeds the limit, we risk nature itself forcing our population to drop below the line.

How can we reduce our impact?

Let’s explore what we can do about our predicament.

1. Live Smarter?

We will begin with an option we all consider better than reducing population: improved technology. We hold an everlasting hope that, despite overshoot getting far ahead of science, someday science will catch up. Somehow, we will just find ways to stop the extinction of species, the acidification of the oceans, the growing dead zones in the ocean due to fertilizer runoff, water shortages, and global warming. Perhaps. But there are limitations to what we can do.

In particular, global warming and the eventual depletion of fossil fuels are a big concern. You will find endless writings on how alternative energies will save us. But these writings often do not fully consider the limitations of such technologies (Floyd, 2020; Nikiforuk, 2023; Trainer, 2011; Tverberg, 2023; Murphy, 2012; Siebert, 2021; Clack, 2017; Ketcham, 2023; Gibbs, 2019, Michaux, 2021b, Slav, 2023) .

Wind and Solar

Windmills can be a good source of energy, but they will never provide all our energy. If we were to cover the entire United States with windmills at their typical installed density, in which nobody would ever be further than a few rotor diameters from the nearest windmill, windmills would still only provide about 20% of our total current energy needs (Murphy, 2021, p. 193). But, of course, we would never do that. Nobody wants a windmill in her backyard (Hurdle, 2022, Oglesby, 2022).

Wind and solar power require large quantities of fossil fuels to manufacture and install. By one estimate, a solar panel gets about 6 times the energy out of the panel that we invested to build it, and a windmill gets about 20 (Murphy, 2021, p232). Almost all of that energy comes from fossil fuels. So, in essence, a solar panel is just a device to amplify our fossil fuel supply so it lasts longer. That may have a purpose–to make our oil last longer–but in the end, there is only so much water you can add to the soup to extend your meal, and only so much solar you can add to your fossil fuel addiction to extend your fossil fuel supply.

What happens when fossil fuels are gone? We might not even be able to make solar panels after that. For electric ovens don’t currently exist that can make all the components of wind and solar energy (B, 2023). Currently, we use fossil fuels. There are huge hurdles to doing this without fossil fuels (Sandalow, 2019, Friedman, 2019). Assuming that, in the future, we could somehow make all the materials for future solar and wind power using the electricity that wind and solar units make, the price tag would be much higher.

Solar panels can currently make electricity at a price that is perhaps comparable to fossil fuels–when the sun shines–but that is because 63% of the energy in fossil fuels is lost when it is used to make electricity. For large industrial heating applications, fossil fuels have a clear advantage. One estimate says it would cost $50,000 per person in the United States to make all the solar panels needed to supply all of the country’s needs including industrial heating (Murphy, 2021). And that expenditure would not be a once-and-done event. After we spent all that money, we would need to continuously make new panels and dispose the old ones.

And then we would need to mine all the raw materials to make all this green energy. If we wanted to manufacture enough materials at today’s production rates such that new windmills, solar, and sufficient energy storage would replace all existing fossil fuels, it could take 255 years to produce all the copper we would need, 532 years for all the nickel, 2,300 years for all the cobalt, and 32,000 years for all the germanium (Martenson/Michaux, 2023). That estimate is based on a 28-day supply of energy storage, which may be high, but however we calculate it, the demand on materials will be immense. If we planned to do this, one might easily conclude that we are starting far too late. And also, think about the effects that such massive mining operations would have on the Earth (Dark Mountain, 2021).

In the Michael Moore film, Planet of the Humans (Gibbs, 2019), Jeff Gibbs exposes the failure of alternate energy to fulfill its promise. In the end, the film offers little that we can do to fix this, other than a suggestion that the real problem could be overpopulation.

Nuclear Power

Nuclear power is often proposed as a way to get energy with low fossil fuel usage and with low impact on global warming. But nuclear has fallen out of favor. There are serious safety concerns, and fears that nuclear materials could fall into the wrong hands. And nobody seems to have figured out what to do with the waste materials (Zyga, 2011). Nuclear power is plagued by high construction costs. Few nuclear reactors are even being built any more, and existing plants are getting old (Schneider, 2023, Davis, 2012, Clifford, 2023). Nuclear plants often rely heavily on government subsidies to keep them running (Clifford, 2022). Also, building new nuclear reactors will require exotic materials that will be in short supply (Abbott, 2016).

If we went with the more abundant thorium fuel instead of uranium in reactors, there are serious safety concerns, as thorium is far more radioactive than uranium. And there are not even any working thorium reactors.

A long shot is fusion reactors, which have long been a dream. But fusion reactions are slow unless the fuel is extremely hot. In fact, the sun itself is not hot enough for its nuclear fusion reaction to happen rapidly. But fortunately for us, the sun is huge, so a slow, steady reaction over that vast volume heats the sun’s surface to 10,000 degrees F. If we wanted to do fusion on Earth with the limited volume of fuel that we could put in a container, it would need to be much hotter than the sun to make any substantial energy. In terms of practicality, this is clearly out of the picture.

But anyway, yes, we will certainly need more nuclear reactors to supply future energy, probably relying on conventional designs. But it is doubtful there will be much interest in taking the associated risks before we become desperate for energy, at which point it will be difficult to find the energy we need to build these new reactors. One estimate says we need 20% of the eventual energy output of a nuclear plant just to build the plant and supply the fuel (Murphy, 2021, p. 232, Michaux, Simon, 2021b, p. 151). When faced with future energy shortages, finding the energy to build such plants will be difficult.

And no, we certainly don’t get that energy we would need by borrowing it from a bank. That energy to build our alternative energy equipment needs to already be there. As we face future energy shortages, diverting scarce energy to build new wind, solar and nuclear for the future will hurt the present. We may find ourselves in a trap where future energy involves the diversion of badly needed current energy (Murphy, 2011b) to build future energy sources. So, if we are going to build these plants for the future, we should have started that long ago.

Energy Storage

Wind and solar power cannot be relied on to make electricity at the moment you need it. The wind blows where it wishes (John 3:8), and at any given time there are places where the sun doesn’t shine. Nuclear, at least, is consistent, but it takes a long time to throttle back if the grid is making too much electricity. We need the electricity supply at each minute to match the current demand. In modern electric grids, we throttle valves on natural gas, oil and hydro-electric power plants to control the supply. If the grid relies solely on alternative energy, it will be very difficult to balance the instantaneous supply to the demand. When we need to live with less fossil fuels–and later, live with none–there will be severe problems with even having a stable electrical grid (Clack, 2017).

Could we just use batteries to store the energy until we need it? If we ran the whole United States off solar and wind, and we needed batteries to keep things going for 7 days to cover slow times, one estimate says it would take 5 billion tons of lead to build the lead-acid batteries with sufficient supply. However, there is only 80 million tons of lead in all known world reserves. So, we need 60 times more than the known reserves to build the batteries we would need. And any other battery technology besides lead-acid is more expensive, and also has material limitations. Thus, powering a grid solely on alternate energy is impractical (Murphy, 2011d, Pickard, 2012).

Similarly, pumping water into mountain reservoirs so we could use it to run a turbine and make electricity when we need it later has many problems. The technology is actually used, but it is expensive, takes a long time to construct, and has serious ecological issues (Yang, 2016).

Transportation Fuel

Alternative energies produce electricity. But you can’t plug your car into an outlet and drive across town. Sure, you could buy a car with batteries. But the batteries must be 100 times as heavy as gasoline to store the same amount of energy. If we were to build a long-haul truck that ran on battery power, 85% of the cargo weight would be consumed by the battery to give that truck the same range as a diesel-powered truck (Murphy, 2021, p. 399). It’s just not practical to do over-the-road trucking with battery power. How are we going to keep goods moving?

Batteries also require destructive mining efforts for materials, have limited life, and eventually need to be discarded. So, even if we had alternative energy sources making all this power, without transportation, we would be all dressed up with no place to go.

Some have proposed that we use the electric power we make to create our own synthetic fuel (Los Alamos, 2008). That’s an interesting concept, but again something that is still far from practical (Morris, 2021).

Carbon Capture

Global warming is caused by carbon dioxide in the air from the fuels we burn (Linyan, 1996). This could lead to catastrophe. With no good plan in site to reduce that to manageable levels, people have turned to the hope that someday we can capture the carbon dioxide and bury it. But we are gambling our civilization on little more than a promise that this will work (Dyke, 2021, Foley, 2023, Babacan, 2020, Trenberth, 2022). Not only is large-scale use of this technology unproven, every step of the way the vast quantities of carbon dioxide produced–more than three pounds for every pound of fuel that we burn–are a risk of an accident happening (Zegart, 2021; Zegart,2021a, Barnard, 2024).

Even if carbon capture worked, it still wouldn’t address the problem that we are running out of fossil fuels.

Mining

We are mining the most readily accessible resources. When it is gone, we will be left with hard-to-reach materials that require extensive refining (Clugston, 2019). Yet, we will always need new sources of materials for the things we make. And no, we cannot simply rely on a circular economy in which we endlessly recycle the same materials. Eventually we reach the point where the materials can no longer be recycled (Michaux, 2021, Michaux, 2021a, Murphy, 2023, B,2024).

Outer Space

It is surprising how many people assume that we can simply move to outer space. It is as though Europeans had a manifest destiny to first fill Europe, then North America, then space platforms, and then Mars. But space platforms and Mars are far less hospitable compared to what we found in America. It would be far more practical to build homes under the ocean or on Antarctica. Such remote places on Earth would give a far better quality of life more safely and economically than going to distant planets. It would be a huge waste of valuable resources to build a permanent space colony. Outer space is not going to save the human race (Murphy, 2011c ; Murphy, 2021).

Dikes, etc.

When I once pointed out the problems with runoff fertilizer causing dead zones in oceans, a person suggested that we just build dikes around all the farms to keep the fertilizer from running off. Uh, no, that’s not a good idea. I doubt if he was serious. His point was that, if we just try hard enough, we will find technological solutions to all our problems. But solutions can be worse than the problem. Or they can be prohibitively expensive. The challenges are huge.

And we must deal with all the boundaries that we humans have crossed. It is not sufficient to just address one issue and claim victory.

Cooperation

We have been working on this problem for years. We continue to rely on fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide levels still soar. Even if we have the solutions, if they are expensive, how would we ever get people to actually follow through? How would we get the level of cooperation where everybody contributes to the solution?

International cooperation on climate change is needed (McClean, 2018), but it is a huge challenge to get nations with conflicting interests to cooperate to the extent needed (Beeson, 2021). Why would anybody or any country want to spend billions when other countries do nothing? In the end, agreements like the Paris Accord to confront climate change were mere talk and did nothing of significance (Spash, 2016).

New Inventions

In contrast to the view of ever-expanding science, my grandfather loved to tell this story about his uncle who came for dinner in 1940:

Uncle Ben declared the changes he had seen in his lifetime had been great and many. “In fact,” he stated, “everything has now been invented that can ever be invented. We have the radio, cars, airplanes, the telephone, and combines to harvest grain.” He went on with a long list of things that had been invented during his lifetime. His conclusion was, “There is nothing left to invent!” (Hertzler, 1999)

Uncle Ben never expected that you could be reading about him on the World Wide Web on a cellphone you carry in your pocket anywhere in the world. Uncle Ben was mistaken.

But then again maybe he was not that far off. Consider the things that had been invented in the 65 years prior to 1950: cars, airplanes, helicopters, rockets, radio, television, toasters, and nuclear bombs, for example. Then think of what was invented after 1950. Sure, computer technology and miniaturization have come a long way, but the inhabitants of 1950 would have seen those things as little more than enhancements of the telephone and television they already knew. Compare how different the world would have been had an inhabitant of 1885 suddenly saw what life was to be like in 1950. Those inventions would have seemed as nothing short of magic to him (Murphy, 2015). Our march forward into new technology has in many ways actually slowed down (Strumsky, 2010).

We have known about windmills, solar energy and batteries for a long time. And we have long been warned that fossil fuels would one day run out and that our climate was being adversely affected by greenhouse gasses (Gibbs, 2019). And yet, as we look at the world today, we still rely heavily on fossil fuels, and greenhouse gasses rise rapidly. Despite all the hype on alternatives, solar panels are still only a minor fraction of our energy supply.

Nobody is even trying to make wind and solar totally take over the entire electrical grid. Rather, they are aiming for something much simpler, to use solar and wind on those occasions where these can make significant power to supplement traditional power plants. As such, solar and wind could help to make our fossil fuels last longer. But don’t confuse this with running the whole grid 24/7 off of alternative energies, and definitely don’t confuse this with supplying all our power from alternative energy. Those are much harder tasks. Yet even when we have asked wind and solar to just supplement the workhorse fossil fuel plants, alternative energies have “posted dismal financial results and were forced to halt projects due to relentless cost increases and ever higher interest rates. All this despite generous state subsidies and now bailouts.”(B, 2023c) .

We had operating solar cells 66 years ago and have been working on them ever since. And yet we still struggle to make them useful in anything more than a minor fraction of the electrical grid. By contrast, 66 years after the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane we had landed on the moon and were building 747s to fly across the ocean. We have not seen the same rapid, overwhelming change in alternate energies in the last 66 years. We had the time and the incentive to make these alternative energy technologies relieve our dependency on fossil fuels. If we could not do it after 66 years of trying, are we sure we can ever do it?

We face serious future energy shortages. I expect many will strongly disagree. From the right, I expect to hear a three-word response, “Drill, baby, drill”. From the left, I expect three different words, “Green New Deal.” To both, I have already prepared my three-word rejoinder: “Show me evidence.” (See also B,2022a.)

We simply have not found good solutions to eliminate fossil fuel depletion, greenhouse gasses, and other ecological damage. If we had to cut our impact in half, we cannot rely on technology alone doing that for us. That does not mean we stop trying. Let’s have our brightest minds figure out better ways to address this. But also, let’s be realistic. The chances that technology will allow more people on our planet at ever rising levels of affluence are not very good.

2. Limit Affluence?

So, let’s consider a second option: limiting human affluence.

“The strongest pillar of the necessary transformation,” says one warning, “is to avoid or to reduce consumption until the remaining consumption level falls within planetary boundaries, while fulfilling human needs” (Wiedmann, 2020). That sounds good, but is it even possible to limit our consumption to the required levels without reducing population?

If we needed to reduce our impact in half, one possibility would be to cut our individual footprint in half, from the current 2.6 global hectares (gha) average to the 1.3 gha standard in much of Africa today. Then 8 billion people could live on Earth with the same footprint as 4 billion at the current global average. If science has not been winning the fight against overshoot, could we win by reducing affluence? Sure, reducing affluence will reduce our footprint, but nobody wants to push our affluence backwards.

It is no secret that Europeans have enjoyed a very high level of affluence in the last two centuries. They did this, not because they had a superior race or religion, but because they had guns, germs and steel. And they got guns, germs, and steel, not by intellectual superiority, but by immensely fortunate circumstances that led to the amplification of the agricultural revolution followed by the industrial revolution in Europe (Diamond, 1999).

Circumstances have left other countries far behind in economic development. Many such countries would like to see the same economic prosperity as what they see in the West. The UN projects an economic growth target in the least-developed countries of 7% annually (UNCTAD, 2023). And obviously, yes, we wish them to have such economic success. A 7% increase annually means their economy would double every 10 years. A doubling per decade would be great, but look what happens as affluence rises:

As affluence rises above minimum levels, the Ecological Footprint also rises. So, if we are trying to reduce overall footprint by using the lever of reducing affluence, and the poorest countries are getting more affluent, how is that accomplishing this goal?

In the extreme, let’s say that, instead of cutting the average footprint in half, we allow it to go up to the point where the average footprint is now equal to the average in the United States, 7.5 gha. Now, instead of the option of getting half the impact by reducing to 4 billion people with an average impact of 2.6 gha each, we would be limited to about 1.4 billion people at 7.5 gha each. If you had the choice, which would you prefer? 8 billion people on Earth at the Environmental Footprint of modern Africa, or 1.4 billion people living at American standards? The choice seems obvious to me. If we had to make that choice, then, finding ways to humanely control births until we reach 1.4 billion people at higher affluence seems like a better option. If only we had the time.

But we are jumping ahead. The purpose of this section is to explore limiting affluence instead of reducing population. There really is not much need to explore it further. Massive reductions in affluence don’t sound inviting at all.

The extreme wealth of wealthy countries not only puts a high stress on the environment (Cox, 2023; Wiedmann, 2020), but the difference in wealth is itself destabilizing (Motesharrei, 2014; Motesharrei, 2016). So, if one is looking for a peaceful, sustainable Earth, asking the rich to voluntarily reduce affluence would not only reduce overall impact, but the greater equality would also stabilize the world. But I do not hold much hope that this will happen. Among individuals, yes, but as a whole, no.

Suppose, out of compassion, we allowed the poor countries to advance, while the rich countries reduced affluence, such that everybody reached the same average level of affluence. I cannot even imagine that working. Rich countries would surely oppose it and would not give up their wealth unless it was forced upon them. If such policies were tried, it would eventually lead to such a massive upheaval of the global economy, that it would take the whole world economy down. Affluent suburbs spread across the countryside simply could not survive without a constant input of energy and money (Kunstler, 2016). And without the contributions that the affluent make to the world economy, everything would fail.

We could propose a compromise where poor countries increased from their current footprint to a level halfway between their current average and the global average, and rich countries dropped to halfway between their current level and the global average. It’s an interesting concept, but it is never going to happen, so it is only an interesting thought experiment. Even if we could, it does nothing to help us reach the goal of reducing footprint in half.

And we are looking for a way to keep our total human footprint below sustainable limits and thus avoid collapse. And we can’t seem to get beyond the issues of trying to limit overall average affluence minimally while allowing poor countries to advance. We are nowhere close to using affluence reduction to reduce the global impact in half. Reducing affluence is not going to solve the problem.

3. Reduce Population?

Could we perhaps reach the goal of reducing our impact in half by instead reducing population? That is an intriguing possibility. After all, if there were half as many people making their footprints on Earth, then we get half the footprints. If we decided that we needed 50% less impact on the Earth, as is being considered here, then we could possibly do that by each driving 50% fewer miles, by each asking for food that requires 50% less fertilizer, by each using 50% less plastic, and so on, for every single way that we affect the planet. Or we could live in a world with 50% fewer people. Both accomplish the same thing. For every factor that affects the environment, we could reduce that impact if there are fewer people. Population is the common multiplier (Dodson, 2020; Ryerson, 2010 ; Samways, 2022; Tamburino, 2023).

But first, let’s be clear. This is not a suggestion that we reduce population by forced birth control, and it is certainly not a suggestion that we do it by killing people. There are obvious moral issues with such policies (DAF, 2022). No, the suggestion is that we find ways to humanely encourage people to have fewer children. This might include teaching people about the value of a smaller population, educating and empowering women to make their own decisions about childbearing, giving people ways of assuring security in their senior years without relying on large families, providing easy access to birth control and abortions, and making tax incentives for smaller families.

Jared Diamond tells of an island in the Pacific where the people knew that only a certain number of people could live comfortably on their island. And so, the society had unwritten rules limiting births when the island got too full. Some people were even expected to basically commit suicide in risky sea voyages if the island was too full and it was their time to go (Diamond, 2011). They were able to maintain a sustainable population on their island for centuries. I cannot fault them for that. What they did was better than continuous mass starvation. I understand it was voluntarily enforced, but social pressures were such that, when it was your turn to set out in a boat in a mission that would probably end your life for the good of the society, people did it.

I certainly do not suggest enforcing such a solution in our world. There are obvious moral issues with such a policy on a global scale. Even if we could justify doing it, effective enforcement of population control in various cultures and religions would be impossible. And in today’s world, any such policy without some kind of totalitarian world government to enforce such a solution would be impossible. Such power would surely be misused. Powerful people would find ways to make such a system benefit themselves, their nation, or their race. So, any suggestion of a worldwide, or even nationwide, enforced population control is out.

Although I certainly do not recommend enforcing measures to limit population, there are ways to humanely reduce population voluntarily, and that we should consider.

Reducing impact by reducing population would take a long time (Bradshaw, 2014). Consider that half of the people alive today are under 30. Since the average lifespan is 71 years, then it is safe to say that, barring a catastrophe, half the people alive today will still be alive 40 years from now. So, even if there were no births in the next 40 years, we would still only reduce the population in half during that time. And that no-child policy would be far too extreme. Suppose instead we limited births to an average of one birth per woman that is under 30 years of age. This would reduce the current 8 billion down to 6 billion in 40 years. Even extreme birth control measures are not likely to sufficiently reduce the impact on our planet in my lifetime.

But let’s say we have a lot longer than 40 years. Suppose we then adopted policies that brought the average fertility rate per woman (TFR) down from the current 2.3 to 1.5, 1.3 or even 1.0? The graph below shows what would happen. If we were to bring the fertility rate down to a 1.3 global average, we could get population below 4 billion in 75 years. But during those 75 years, the planet would continue in overshoot, which might be too much to ask of this planet. But given enough of time, the population level could be reduced (Cafaro, 2023; Götmark, 2023). If the Earth will wait that long, it just might work to save the planet.

Christopher Tucker argues that we could use non-coercive means to obtain a global birthrate of 1.5 by 2030 (Tucker, 2022). That is a significant change from the current 2.3 average. But Europe and North America already have a TFR of 1.54. And Japan, Italy, and Spain are already at 1.3. Perhaps nations that already have a low TFR could lower it even further, while nations with a high TFR could seek to bring it down to the current global average or even lower. If we worked toward that goal, we might get the overall average down to 1.5 or even 1.3.

What happens if your nation brought its TFR down way below 1.3? Some fear they would then not have enough workers in the next generation to keep things running. If your nation is a prosperous nation, there is no shortage of people that would like to join your country, as long as you are willing to accept immigrants.

Some people suggest we can and should be even more aggressive in reducing population size than I have suggested. Megan Seibert and William Rees write:

The second front in a one-Earth living strategy is a global one-child fertility standard. This is needed to reduce the global population to the one billion or so people that can thrive sustainably in reasonable material comfort within the constraints of a non-fossil energy future and already much damaged Earth. Even a step as seemingly bold as this may be insufficient to avoid widespread suffering, as such a policy implemented within a decade or two would still leave us with about three billion souls by the end of the century. Failure to implement a planned, relatively painless population reduction strategy would guarantee a traumatic population crash imposed by Nature in a climate-ravaged, fossil-energy-devoid world.

(Seibert, 2021)

That might be closer to what we need, but it doesn’t sound possible. We should at least commit to doing what we can.

Reducing from 8 billion to 4 billion people is a daunting task. And yet, it was not that long ago, in 1975, when the population was at 4 billion. If only we had stayed there. After all, we had already been warned in 1972 in the book, The Limits to Growth (Meadows, 1972) that our growth would reach a limit. The base scenario in that book has been shown to be uncannily accurate in its projection of the world to date (Herrington, 2022). If only we had listened.

If a future generation finds itself without the benefit of fossil fuels in a decimated Earth, they will find it much easier to pull things together with the limited resources left if there are 2 billion people instead of 8 billion or 10 billion. And if we kept the TFR at 1.5, we would reach 2 billion people by the year 2200. That might not be far enough fast enough, but it is better than doing nothing. At least it gives future people a chance.

Some people will say it does not matter what happens in 2200. People alive today will not be here. If we leave the planet devastated, we can let future generations worry about that. That sounds so selfish. Can we feel good about ourselves if we knowingly trash the planet, not caring about what this means to those who are to follow? We might want to think about the mess we are leaving on this planet for others.

2200 is not all that far away. If a person born this year becomes a father in his 70s, and that child lived to be over 100, then a person living today could have a child who is alive in 2200. Many people living in 2200 could be a friend of a friend of a friend of somebody you know. Many of them could be six degrees from Kevin Bacon. Perhaps we should care about what happens to them.

An average birthrate of 1.5 per woman might not be enough to prevent catastrophe. But it is better than doing nothing. If enough of people knew about the problem, if women were encouraged to refrain from childbearing, and if birth control was readily available, we might be able to reach a TFR of 1.5 or lower. That would certainly help. (Götmark, 2020)

Some countries have a TFR above 6. Perhaps they too could have much lower birth rates if women had the same control of their lives, the same access to birth control, and other factors available in countries with lower birth rates.

When we say it would be good for those countries to have lower birth rates, we are not simply saying they should do it for the sake of the planet. They should be doing it for the sake of their own country, for simple humanitarian reasons. Skyrocketing populations in a country that is not able to support the existing population does not work. Lower birth rates would be good for their countries and would give a better life to the mothers. To be in favor of lower birth rates is to be pro-humanity. Those who are concerned about population are pro-human (Shragg, 2022; Craig, 2009).

Unfortunately, many of the people in these countries with high birth rates rely on large families as their retirement plan. If people there expect to live a long, healthy life, then many figure that they need a large family to support them in their later years. However, if every person plans like this, then what we have is a pyramid scheme, in which each person needs an ever-expanding chain of descendants to support him or her. It is better when countries have a common support system, such as Social Security and Medicare, which supports all people in their senior years that have done their fair share of work during their strong years. Then folks do not need to rely on a large family to survive their senior years.

Some people charge that suggesting these countries take steps to voluntarily reduce birth rates is racial prejudice. They are wrong. This has nothing to do with the color of the skin of people that are having the most children. It has everything to do with what is best for the people in those countries, and what is best for the planet as a whole.

Some in the past may have used population control as a justification for eugenics or racial discrimination. Such actions are wrong. Genuine population concerns have nothing to do with such atrocities. Those who have a legitimate concern about global population should be able to speak that concern without being falsely accused of racial prejudice (Craig, 2009).

The case can be made that births to American women, whose children are likely to have a large Ecological Footprint, can be causing more impact on the planet than the many births of a woman in a poor country. Americans average 1.66 births per woman, each having an average ecological footprint of 7.5 gha, for a total of 12.5 per woman from her direct offspring. The average woman in Somalia has 6.3 births per woman, each having an Ecological Footprint of 0.9 global hectares, for a total of 5.7 (FODAF, 2022). So, arguably it is much more important for American women to further decrease their birth rates.

This assumes that the poor will be kept in poverty, and Americans, by virtue of birth, will be kept rich. Poor countries are going to at least be striving to increase their affluence, and many in poor countries will be migrating to more affluent countries. So, one cannot say that, just because a country is poor, it does not matter that their birth rate is high. Births in rich countries make a greater impact on the environment, but it all makes a difference.

Some people say this would make a larger toll on the smaller population of working-age people who must support all of the retired people. True, but as Christopher Tucker points out, workers would also be supporting fewer children. So, it all tends to work out so the number of dependent children plus elderly per working age person doesn’t change much (Tucker, 2022). It is something that such workers should be wanting to do for their own future.

To people starting out as a family today, think about your options and where you will be 25 years from now. If you want you and your children to have the same impact on the Earth’s resources that you have today, then you have options such as remaining as two people at current affluence or having two children with all four of you living at half of your current affluence. For every child born into your family, it is a virtual certainty that this means your overall family will have a bigger impact on the planet’s resources 25 years from now, regardless of how much you try to conserve. There is little you can do that comes close to the environmental savings of having one less child (Wynes, 2017).

Some would say that it is selfish for young couples to remain childless, when they could be sharing their lives with their children. Understood. I would never want to have missed the years I have had raising two boys. But one can share his life with other people without needing to create those people with whom he will share his life.

I wish it was different. I love children. I wish we could encourage everybody to have large families. But the planet is finite. We need to remember that.

So, it seems to me, that we should have smaller families and encourage others to do the same. By saying this, I am not condemning those who have had large families. What has been done has been done. What is needed is an awareness that the continued presence of large families leads to increased ecological overshoot. At this point there is enough evidence that everybody should consider the ecological impact before having children.

By no means should we regret that people alive today are in existence. We are alive, and each is entitled to all the dignity and respect that humans deserve. But we do have the opportunity to consider how rapidly we want births of new people to be happening in a future world.

I am not telling people they cannot have children. That is a private choice. We still need children. But in general, I would encourage people to think about it, and consider the benefits to the planet when we decide not to have another child.

If you have religious objections to using birth control or limiting your family size, I will not force you to change, any more than I would force a person who abstains from alcohol for religious reasons to drink beer at my party. But I will remind you that most religions teach us to love our neighbors in addition to following a preset list of rules. Many religious people today find that, where there is a conflict between loving your neighbor and legalistically following prescribed religious rules, mature adults can put more emphasis on loving your neighbor. What action is the most loving thing to do? What action will cause you to most like the person you see when you look in the mirror? Consider those questions when making your moral decisions.

The population of this planet should be a concern to all of us (Crist, 2017; Flynn, 2021; Younquist, 2014). It is difficult to see any solution to our overshoot predicament that does not include population reduction (Lowe, 2019).

Let’s get back to the formula we talked about earlier, I=PAT, which means Impact = (Population) * (Affluence) * (a factor based on the Technology in use).

If you tell me we have 100 years to cut our impact in half, then we either need to reduce the population in half, reduce the affluence level per person in half, or use technology to reduce our impact per unit of affluence in half, or some combination of the three. I cannot imagine we would voluntarily reduce affluence in half. I expect it to increase unless physical limits dictate otherwise. And I cannot see that future technology improvements are doing anything better than, at best, limiting our impact per unit of affluence to the extent that affluence increases. So, I think we will do no better than breaking even when we look at the combined affluence and technology factors. That leaves us only with population. An aggressive program to encourage and empower women to voluntarily have fewer births at least has the chance to bring the population down to half the current size in 100 years. That requires widespread agreement to the need to reduce future population. That is how I would deal with the problem if we had 100 years.

But if you tell me that we have only 20 years left to respond, then I have no solutions that I think would work. All I could say was that we should have addressed this 50 years ago, when population was half of what it is now. We could have maintained our population at that level, and limited affluence increases to no more than our technology in use allowed at the same overall impact. The planet could have sustained itself for a long time at that level. But it is too late to do that now.

To some people, everything I said here was obvious: We are in overshoot. Science alone is unlikely to ever stop the overshoot. We are unlikely to reduce our affluence enough to relieve the stress on the planet. That leaves us with voluntary population reduction, which would certainly help, provided we aren’t too late.

On the other extreme, some people condemn all who are concerned about population. They simply cannot understand how a person could have that concern with good motives.

You might be one that is willing to listen in order to understand this view. If so, then, if this has helped you understand why people are so concerned, this effort will have been worth it.

Path Forward

We could well be too late to do anything about overshoot. Are we doomed?

Despite it all, we should always keep up hope. We can always tell ourselves things will work out.

Hope is good but hope that refuses to acknowledge the facts is known by another name: denial. And denial can lead to a life that is out of sync with the facts.

Denial often leads to despair. You can try to suppress your unwanted thoughts of the future, but there is only so much that a person can do to suppress unwanted thoughts of despair. They always seem to find a way out (Hertzler, 2023). Eventually denial loses out, and the unwanted thought rears its head. When we think that nothing we do will make any difference (Beeson, 2022; Hedges, 2019), that can lead to despair.

And then, beyond despair, there is often acceptance.

When faced with the loss of a loved one, one often goes through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Burns, 2020). Many have gone through those stages of grief when looking at our old friend, Earth. We deny the facts, get angry at what has happened, hang unto any hope of a fix, fall into despair, and eventually accept where we are at. In the end, that is all anyone can do. Whatever happens, we must accept it.

Prof Jem Bendell popularly leads a movement to quietly accept that we are headed for collapse (Bendell, 2020, Bendell, 2023, Bendell, 2023a, Bendell, 2023b). He promotes neither denial nor total despair. Instead, he encourages people to recognize the situation is bad (Bendell, 2022) and, accepting that, to work together to reach the best results.

All this depends on what we are called to accept. If we are going back to the Wild West, perhaps with the benefit of continued telecommunications, maybe we could accept it. Being a cowboy with a cellphone can’t be all that bad. But what are 300 million cowboys in America going to eat if they do not have a ready source of fertilizer to grow their food? If we need to go back to an 1800’s era agriculture with 8 times the population, we might face starvation. Can we accept that?

We can seek the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. But those who ask for that serenity also often ask for the wisdom to know what they can change, and the courage to change what they can. Perhaps this post can help you have more wisdom into what you can change.

What do you want to tell future generations? Do you want to tell them that, when everything was collapsing, you had the serenity to accept the things you could not change? That’s good. But wouldn’t they also be interested to know if you sought the wisdom to know what you could change, and sought the courage to then change the things you could? If, for instance, promoting a reduction in family size, especially in rich countries, is a significant step forward, shouldn’t we have the courage to promote it?

Seeing our predicament, others have turned to doomsday prepping. They will be sure to survive in their bunkers, perhaps for a few months more than you, if the whole world falls apart. One wonders how such a life would be worth living.

And then there are those such as Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity, and the people at the Deep Adaption Forum, who are preparing for the worst, but they want the preparations to be that of a community, not isolated individuals (Martenson, 2017). We are headed for tough times. Those who prepare in such ways will certainly have a better chance if times really get hard.

So, what do we do? Most of the above. First, we need to accept that whatever comes, it is what it is, and make the most of it. And we must always make room for hope, to always hold out that we will make the most of what comes. But that hope should not include denial and should not come at the expense of a realistic preparation for what may come. And yes, societies need to include nuclear reactors, windmills, solar panels, batteries, and hopefully many other innovative technologies that are around the corner. And we could tell people that, for each decision not to have another child, that is one less person that needs to be supported on this overfilled lifeboat, Earth. We could actively ask for people to reduce birthrates, especially in rich countries. And of course, where we can individually or collectively cut back our impact to preserve the planet, let’s do so.

Nobody knows what is going to happen. There needs to be a concentrated effort to understand it better. We need accurate models and predictions of the future based on the best available science. And we need to inform people of what scientists find. We need to be working to develop technical solutions. There are plenty of challenging areas in which people can apply their thoughts to make things better.

Some will tell me there is no overshoot, that people have made a big deal over nothing. Others will tell me that science will come to the rescue, it always does. Still others will tell me we can scale back our affluence sufficiently while maintaining a stable or slowly increasing population. Others will say all those steps would fail, but there is still time to save the planet if we humanely limit births. Others, perhaps, will tell me the Second Coming will fix things before they get too bad (Hertzler, 2023a). Still others will say that collapse is inevitable, and they will live in either despair, preparations, or quiet acceptance, take your pick.

Through it all, let us never forget that we as humans possess what must surely be the greatest thing we know of in the universe, the human brain. We have together used our minds to build a world with many wonderful people working together to build a great human society. We should be proud of what we have done.

But sadly, we may have built too big. We may have pushed the limits. What a pity it is that we did not consider that we could go beyond the limits of what the Earth could bear. And that may simply just be a fact of evolution. Evolution builds living things to succeed in the moment. It is only after a sentient species’ knowledge later expands that a species learns about the exponential function and what continuous growth can mean. And that is not our fault. It may simply be the way our species was programmed. We were not innately programmed to understand exponential equations. Your genes were never designed for calculus.

Consider also that we have never seen space aliens in the universe trying to contact us. Could it be that, in the past, there were other species in distant planets that built great civilizations, but they hastily burnt through the available resources and filled the planet with garbage, thus ending any hope that they would be able to contact us? Perhaps this is just the universal way that things go. The first creatures that are able to exploit an environment do, leaving little for their descendants.

We are all in this together. The coming years may be rough. We don’t know where they lead. But let us always hold a sense of awe at where we are. We built human civilization in all its greatness. What a thrill it has been to be a part of that. We perhaps did not think through all the consequences of going beyond the limit. But that is in the past. We can work together to chart the best path forward through some hard times. We can hold our heads up high. We are humans that are gifted with the ability to comprehend and enjoy this marvelous world. Let us apply all that we are to our situation, together facing whatever may be in store.

© 2023 Merle Hertzler, P. E., Dec 27, 2023, Revised Apr 20, 2024.

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