Getting Honest About the Human Predicament
[June 2024, Art has offered this in the form of a blog post: Metacrisis]
I saw a presentation by Art Berman given to the Biophysical Economics Institute using the above title. That presentation isn’t yet available to share, but Berman gave much the same presentation to the Energy Institute, University of Texas at Austin. The original title: Substituting Renewable Energy for Fossil Fuels is a Doomsday Stratagem. The above title are his final words summarizing his message, so I will consider it the better title.
And why should you have some grasp of reality? No reason. Art Berman doesn’t think humans are at any significant risk of extinction. He does listen to Nature. The still small voice of Nature is speaking to us. To those who hold “communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language” due to human cognitive limitations.
When not listening to Nature, consider listening to those who endeavor to listen to Nature. Art easily makes the top 10 list of humans those who world rather know than believe should listen to. Is what is implied clear enough?
So some can watch the video presentation while eating pizza, before moving on to Netflix or a video game. Or read the transcript with slides and “think about it.” Maybe not celebrate one’s techno-slavery.
But loving our oppressors is so much easier.
The Transcript:
Carey King 0:06; Art Berman at 3:51
All right. Thank you everyone for joining us for today’s University of Texas energy symposium. I’m Carey King, assistant director and research scientist at the Energy Institute here at the University of Texas at Austin.
Carey King 0:18
And before I introduce today’s speaker, I will let you know what’s coming up. What’s coming up next week might be something that might be a slight counter, or at least in additional discussion of today’s discussion by Julia Steinberger, she is a professor at University of Lausanne, and she studies how we can have nice lifestyles by consuming less and specifically consuming less energy. So she will give us a discussion about that her studies about how we can have good livelihoods with less energy consumption. The following week after that September 26, will be local business person Mike Leggett. He’s the CEO and founder of resilient grid that kind of study how people interact with machines and make decisions. And so he’s going to discuss when situational situational awareness, mental models and adaptive capacity meet control room surprises. So if you think what were the people in the control room at ERCOT doing when winter storm Yuri hit and 2021 That’s the kind of thing he helps work on is to help people manage those situations from a human factors standpoint. So that’s what we have coming up.
Carey King 1:28
But today, we have Arthur or Art Berman, so it’s my pleasure to have him So a little background on Art. He’s a petroleum geologist when working for 45 years in the energy industry of both fossil and non fossil energy sources, and he routinely gives keynote addresses for energy conferences, boards of directors and professional societies. Published more than 100 articles on energy and their effect on earth systems including climate, and he has 38,000 followers on Twitter, so follow him at @AEBerman12, or X are calling it this day. So he certainly beats me on the followers.
Carey King 2:05
Today’s talk, I think he’s attempting to be a little provocative, so he’s hoping for a bit of engagement with the audience here. So it’s a statement there is no energy transition, no paradigm shift or Green Revolution, the popular idea that fossil fuels can be and are being replaced by renewable energy is false. New energy sources have always been additive, with no empirical evidence for the replacement of one energy source by another renewable energy requires materials use fossil energy resources for the extraction and transport, manufacture, distribution, construction, etc. Four essential pillars of modern civilization are steel, concrete, plastic, and ammonia. None of these are possible without fossil energy.
Carey King 2:47
Energy substitution is a doomsday stratagem. Sure, he’ll probably explain this title to us that condemned civilization to its status quo, half of growth and biophysical destruction, no amount of non fossil energy will make a difference unless we lower total energy consumption and accept its consequences of no growth.
Carey King 3:08
Climate change is a big problem. But it’s a subset of the larger problem of biophysical overshoot, we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, continued economic and material growth, based on renewable energy does not begin to resolve that fundamental reality. So it’s time to get honest, growth as the core of the human predicament. anybody is interested in other overshoot discussions, you can look up the discussion with Bill Rees that was one or two semesters ago on this UT energy symposium, and also discussions by Nate Hagens, that’s also been part of this series. So with that lengthy introduction, I will now bring up here, Arthur, or Art, Berman, thank you very much.
Art Berman 3:51
Thank you for that introduction, Carey. So, yeah, as far as your next speaker, I’m sure that she and I agree that we can all have nice lives consuming less. I’m not. I don’t, I mean, I know, I know of her work, I’m not sure that that will have the same level of prosperity or standard of living that we do right now. But that doesn’t mean we we can’t have good lives.
Art Berman 4:24
So I, as Carey said, I intentionally designed this talk to be a little bit provocative or out of the mainstream. That in no way means that I’m negative or having a doomy kind of view of the future. I’m a scientist. I’ve spent my entire life professional life in the energy business. And therefore I’m trying to be objective. Not trying, I am being objective at least as far as, as the data allows me to, and I’ll tell you,
Art Berman 5:05
I’ll tell you what I know. And I’ll tell you what is interpretive or opinion, but most of what I’ll show here is what we know right now. So, substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels is a doomsday strategy. And that is, that is my unfortunate conclusion. And I base that, you know, it’s Carey said, I, I spent a lot of my career in looking for oil and gas and working for oil and gas companies and clients in that that sector. I do not have any bias toward fossil fuels whatsoever. I don’t have a negative bias either.
Art Berman 5:52
I fully accept embrace the fact that most of our carbon emissions come from fossil energy of one sort or another, there’s there’s no, there’s just no getting around that. Having said that, without fossil energy, we’re kind of screwed. And as Carey mentioned, a couple of my my friends and colleagues, Bill Rees and Nate Hagens, and since he already introduced them, one of Nate’s favorite comments is that renewable energy is a perfectly fine way to power a civilization, just not this one.
Art Berman 6:36
And as Bill , whose’s a little drier than the Nate, as Bill likes to say, the only thing worse than the Green Revolution not working is… what if it does? And of course, Bill’s coming from well, I say, of course, maybe you don’t know, but Bill was an ecologist and, and he’s thinking about what will happen to the earth and natural systems if we manage to figure out how to continue using just as much energy as we are right now.
Art Berman 7:10
So I’m 100% in favor of renewable energy. I don’t have solutions for you, I’m trying to be the best scientist, I know how, which is, to describe the current situation, to explain it as best I can, to base it on information that I have. And we all have, everything I’m showing you is public data, you know, it’s a pain in the ass to find it all. But anybody in this room can and if you need help, let me know. But I’m basing it on history up to this point, what we have today and what’s likely to change. Because if you don’t know where you are, and how you got here, it’s kind of difficult to do the very difficult job of predicting the future.
Art Berman 7:56
So with that, my view based on all of this analysis that I’ve done, decade’s worth really, is that climate change is kind of a narrow view of the human predicament. And so we’ve got this… figured out how to use the point or maybe it doesn’t matter. Oh, here we go….
Art Berman 8:21
Yeah, so you know, here’s this guy. And and I’d say or woman, I don’t know what it is unisex, non binary, probably. This is Barry are looking really, really hard at at carbon emissions, because that is what we’re told, or we believe that climate change is all about but, but there’s all these other factors, you know, and you can read them yourself. But, you know, one that I’ll point to right away is down in, in the bottom here, I guess this really doesn’t work so well on white over consumption.
Art Berman 9:04
And by overconsumption I mean overconsumption of energy. Air Pollutants, well, you know, co2 is an air pollutant, I mean, not to minimize its effect, but when you buy energy when you use energy, there’s a waste product and one of the main waste products, other than heat, is carbon dioxide, and you know, when we have politicians talk about clean energy,
Art Berman 9:04
Well, geez, I mean, all energy is clean. It’s when we use it, when you turn it into work that you have problems, then all converted energy is dirty, some is more dirty than others, but you know, there’s, there’s no, there’s no free ride here. I mean, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna do work, and you have to do work to live, then what’s going to be bad products.
Art Berman 10:01
You know, there’s there’s all sorts of things on here. I mean, poverty, biodiversity lost all that kind of thing. But the main thing is, is that if all you’re looking at is carbon emissions, CO2, and that’s what, I don’t know what percentage, but a very high percentage of people who are concerned about climate change are looking at, then you’re actually missing a huge part of the picture.
Art Berman 10:29
And that’s a problem, it’s not a problem for you, it’s a problem for all of us and for the planet. So I think a broader perspective is needed. That includes and these are just, you know, some of them, but absolutely, it has to include energy, it has to include economics has to include population, ecology and human behavior. Nothing in this world, happens or is understandable. And, you know, my 70 some odd years if you’re not thinking about human behavior.
Art Berman 11:05
So, as Carey read, in my view, and I based this on data, there is no energy transition. So you know, if you look at the graph over here, and I know there’s a lot of junk on it, but the, the yellow is, is population. And the, I’m sorry, total energy, and all the various components are then shown. And what you can see here is that it goes back to 1800. And we can talk about how accurate the data is, and 1800 versus today, but I think notionally, it’s reasonable. And so you want to talk about an energy transition?
Art Berman 11:55
Well, what was the main form of, of energy that was being used in 1900? Well, in 1800, it was biomass. Okay, well look at biomass. I mean, we’re actually using more biomass today, wood, and other things that we burn, then we’ll use an 1800. So the idea of a transition sort of implies that you’re getting rid of something old and replacing it with something new. Oh, you know that, that didn’t happen with biomass, we’re actually using more of it today than we were. Well, you know, even in the middle of last century.
Art Berman 12:35
Look at coal. Coal came onto the scene here, kind of in the middle of the 1800s started building. And, you know, you can argue about what’s happening up where we are right now kind of going up and down. But I mean, no doubt, we are using a whole bunch more coal today than we used in 1800 or 1900, or 1950. So, so what I’m trying to say here, and I’m trying to say what I am saying is that, you know, despite this, this rise, the sharp rise in renewables, which is this, this black thing right here, you know, it’s no sharper than, than oil, it’s a little sharper than natural gas is certainly sharper than coal, nothing is going away.
Art Berman 12:35
So we need to understand what do we mean by an energy transition? What we mean, what I mean, or what I interpret from this graph, is that renewable energy is essentially a fossil fuel extender. Okay, we’re figuring out new ways of getting more energy, but we’re not getting rid of anything. If that’s a transition in your mind, you know, we can have a talk about it later. But it’s certainly not the kind of transition that most people are thinking about.
Art Berman 13:53
So what people are talking about, or what people think they mean, has never happened in the history of man. We’ve never replaced a previous form of energy with a new one. Now you want to talk about percentages? Oh, absolutely. The percentage of biomass is a whole lot less than it was, say in 1850, or 1900. But the point is, is that we’re not we’re not making any progress at all toward using last total energy. And so percentages can change. But as long as you’re increasing total energy, you’re kind of missing the picture if you’re focused on just percentages.
Art Berman 14:41
So this cool guy here, this is a Nate Hagens creation. This is a fossil energy slave is as Nate likes to call them. And and so this is how we understand, I think we need to understand, the modern world, and that is to say that, yeah, we’ve had a tremendous amount of material progress since 1800. I mean, the standard of living of the world in general, yeah, there’s still people that are starving and having a hard time. But overall, I mean, the we we’ve managed to lift the standard of living, the average standard of living immeasurably from where we were 200 years ago.
Art Berman 15:29
And there’s a there’s a meme in certainly the United States and a lot of civilization that we’ve done that through ingenuity and technology. And to that I say nonsense, we’ve done it because of fossil fuels. Not to say that technology not to say that ingenuity are not factors, but they are stowaways, on the supertanker of fossil fuels, they think that they’re directing the voyage, and they’re completely unaware of these massive diesel engines underneath their feet that are actually directing the voyage.
Art Berman 16:15
So I’m not in any way negative or opposed to technology, I love it. Love ingenuity value it, but they are those are very much secondary factors. It’s this guy. It’s it’s the fossil fuel slave that is responsible for the prosperity such as it is that we have accomplished. So if you do the arithmetic, and you can look this up, you know, how many joules or kilowatt hours or you know, whatever you however you want to measure them? Calories? How much energy is in a barrel of oil?
Art Berman 16:52
And the answer is a lot. And if you look at how much energy or how much work really, a human being does, and divide the amount in a barrel of oil by how much work we do in a day, it works out to the fact that a barrel of oil contains about four and a half years of human labor. Okay, so when when you hear people complain about $80, oil, $90 oil, $100 oil? Wow, I mean, if it cost $1,000, and again, I’m not defending oil. But if it cost $1,000, I mean, who in this room, even as students would be willing to work for four and a half years for $1,000? I mean, you’d all turned down that job in a flash, I hope, okay, because it’s just not enough money.
Art Berman 17:48
So so this is why fossil fuels is such a powerful thing, or oil is a powerful thing. Because there’s just nothing like it, it’s magic. So much work in a barrel of oil. So this table, which, you know, you probably can’t really read, and you don’t need to, I’ve simply taken the latest information on oil, gas, and coal, and how many BTUs per whatever or you know, whatever energy measure you want, and worked it out into some kind of barrels of oil equivalent. And so the world consumes something like 380 billion barrels of oil equivalent per year. And if you multiply that by 4.5, that means that 24/7 We have 350 billion of these guys working for us slaves.
Art Berman 17:48
One of the reasons that human slavery went out of business as it couldn’t compete with this guy. So that means that if you take that number and divide by every human being on Earth, even extremely poor people, we’ve all got 44 slaves on average working for us, and you go back to the early days of this country, and I mean, a landowner who had 44 slaves, he was a rich dude, man. I mean, that was, that was a costly enterprise.
Art Berman 18:53
Well, now everybody’s got 44. And if you’re, you know, Elon Musk are one of those guys, you’ve got 10s of 1000s of them, but this is the reason that fossil energy is such a killer. And this is the reason why we live the kind of lives that we do. Like it or not.
Art Berman 19:49
Back to the theme. Climate change is not the biggest problem that we face. In the world. It’s a big problem. Okay. It scares me to death, but it is not Not the biggest problem we have certainly not in the near term. And for those of you who saw my friend, Bill Rees whenever that was a few semesters ago, this is this is his, his graph. And what he will tell you and I will agree with is that climate change is nothing more than a symptom of exceeding the planetary boundaries of the Earth that we live on.
Art Berman 20:26
We’re using so much of the earth, that it can polluting it so much, by you know, whatever CO2, chemical holes, I mean, you name it, that it can’t recover. The earth is pretty resilient, and can recover from all the damage that humans have done to it over our 300,000 year existence, at least as Homo sapiens. But today, we’re polluting and using it way faster.
Art Berman 21:00
In fact, if you do the calculation, we’re using about 1.7 Earths today. You know, if that were your savings account, you’d be broke pretty soon. That’s the problem. So what’s the main cause of overshoot? And I’m here to talking about ecological or biophysical overshoot.
Art Berman 21:22
The main reason is human population. The human population at the end of World War One was about 2 billion. And what’s it today? It’s eight. And how did we get we got here? Simply, the simplest answer is by means of ammonia, fossil fuel, made from natural gas. Until the end of World War Two, there was a there was a negative feedback in the system, which said the earth can’t feed more than about 2 billion people. And somebody a couple of somebodies in Germany figured out how to liquefy air and create a free source of nitrogen. We’ve always known how to make fertilizer, we use back guano and all but we didn’t have a good source of nitrogen, liquefy air, we got tons of nitrogen fertilizer, is what made the human population a billion. By creating that huge population, we started putting more waste into the system.
Art Berman 22:28
Climate change was one effect of that there are many more, that’s also why the economy has grown to, you know, hundreds of times more than it was just 50 or 100 years ago, more people buy more stuff, use more energy, etc. Well, one of the things and I hope this startles you, because it startles me, is this is a graph that shows the average abundance of what abundance of wild animal species everything, fish, insects, reptiles, all that kind of stuff, everything that isn’t a human or somehow a livestock or a pet of humans. And since 1970, 53 years ago, the average abundance of species on Earth has declined by 69%.
Art Berman 23:20
I mean, if this poor country, we’d all be screaming genocide, I mean, worse than any genocide that we know of in human history, there may have been some that we don’t know about, but I mean, 70% of the wild animal species of the wild and the number of wild animals are gone. 95% of marine fisheries are exhausted 95%. And this has all happened in the last 50 years.
Art Berman 23:52
So for people who say that, Oh, you know, all this kind of stuff is alarming as you know, climate change and you know, some sort of biodiversity I you know, it’s just natural. This just happens naturally. Well, this is not natural. This is because of us. Human beings, pushing out pushing ourselves into animal habitats, polluting the rivers polluting the air polluting the land polluting the oceans and either or making it impossible or nearly impossible for wild animals to live.
Art Berman 24:31
Now I’m not here I’m not you know, it’s not some sort of Lonely Hearts Club I’m not you know, saying you know, I’m not a tree hugger I’m it’s just a fact. Okay, this is a fact and you can you can find this dataset online, it’s freely available. So energy substitution, so I told you that we you know, we’ve got something like 380 I think or 50 I can’t remember the number you know, billion fossil slaves. He’s working 24/7.
Art Berman 25:01
Well, this chart shows not how much, but how much has been added every year. And it starts in 1975. And so we’ve got oil and blue natural gas and red, coal and dark grey. And then out here, since really the beginning of 2000, the yellow or whatever color that is, is wind and solar. So we are adding 5,000,000,000, 4.7 new fossil, or new energy slaves every year on top of this huge number we already have. This, my friends, is the reason for the human predicament.
Art Berman 25:48
And anyone who says that we’re making progress on climate change, I think needs to show me some evidence to that effect. Now, I wish I hope I’m wrong, but I haven’t found it. So what does this mean? This means that if we continue consuming more and more energy, we are likely to collapse. The biosphere of planet Earth will will continue will will finish the job that the last 50 years has started, there won’t be very much of a natural system. And I hate to say it, but without a biosphere in good shape. I think I didn’t read that on a previous slide, Vaclac Smil, there is no life.
Art Berman 26:38
I mean, at some point, this catches up to human flourishing, we cannot flourish if our food chain is gone, we’re dead. Okay, now, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Because there are feedback loops that are built in. And one of them is economic collapse. And that will fix the climate and a lot of other things. And it won’t, I don’t think cause human beings to become extinct. And it won’t mean that we’re all going to be living in abject poverty. But we’re not going to be living like we are now, as I said, when we started it.
Art Berman 27:11
So what we need to do is to understand that non fossil energy, the wild animals ecosystem, which is the true wealth of human beings, and all species on the planet, it doesn’t give a crap about what form of energy we’re using. As long as we’re expanding into that space. We are headed towards some doomsday scenario at some point in the not too distant future.
Art Berman 27:45
So I don’t care if we’re cutting down on emissions, I don’t care for, you know, stopping fossil fuels altogether, I’m gonna we could talk about the implications. But as long as we keep growing economically and physically and materially, we are destroying the place we live, which is not a very smart thing to do.
Art Berman 28:10
If you remember nothing more from what I’m talking about, than this graph, right here, please do. And what it shows very simply, is population in gray. It shows energy consumption in blue, it shows carbon emissions in red, and the ecological footprint of the human enterprise in green. And what all of you immediately see is you cannot separate any of those five trends. They all lay right on top of each other.
Art Berman 28:54
And so when you hear people tell you a fairy tale or lie to you, and say, Oh, we can have economic growth, when we’re consuming less energy and creating less emissions. Show me where.
Art Berman 29:12
Maybe they don’t know that they’re telling you something that’s untrue or misleading. But show me where that happens. And again, where I started, I mean, I don’t know the future. But I mean, this is 1800 to the present. And as a data guy, if there’s a trend that’s been very strongly established, for more than 200 years, you’re going to have to show me that there’s a miracle out there that’s about to happen. That’s going to change that trend. I’m not against it. You just got to show me I don’t see that happening.
Art Berman 29:46
So the idea that there is a solution, yeah, there is the solution. What is the primary factor among these five and there are more Okay, I’m not I’m not trying to oversimplify things. These are the big ones. Anything else, by the way is a secondary or tertiary problem. You can just forget about it. No, is nuclear The answer is fusion, it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s energy. Okay? So this, let’s makes life simple.
Art Berman 30:20
If you consume less energy, as Julie is going to tell you, we can do next week or the next seminar, then GDP, economic growth goes down. If economic growth goes down, that’s a good thing for carbon emissions and ecological footprint, it’s not a good thing for population, population goes down, we can’t support all those people. And I challenge any of you to find an environmental or an ecological organizations say the, you know, Greenpeace, or, you know, The Nature Conservancy and I belong to most of these organizations whose platform is we need to get rid of about four or 5 billion human beings.
Art Berman 31:09
Well, they won’t say that, because that that doesn’t sell very well. But that’s kind of where this goes. So you know, you you can’t, you can’t just pull pieces out of this thing. So we’re gonna solve this, we’re gonna we’re gonna reduce carbon emissions. Okay, that’s a great idea. How are we going to do it? Oh, well, we’re going to replace fossil energy with renewable energy. Okay, that’s great. But we’re gonna keep energy growth going, Oh, well, that’s not so good.
Art Berman 31:37
If energy growth keeps going, and our ecological footprint keeps increasing, population keeps increasing, GDP keeps increasing. And guess what, we’ve just shot ourselves in the foot for carbon emissions would do some a little bit, but not enough to make a difference, certainly not. In the window of urgency that we have over the next couple of decades, at least that’s, that’s my, my understanding or view.
Art Berman 32:04
This says that, we’re not going to get a bunch of engineers, or geologists in here to say, Okay, here’s what you need to do, you need to get a screwdriver, and you need to turn it and get a wrench and a hammer, and, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna work on this thing, and we’re gonna get it right now. We’re gonna get it right, by addressing the underlying cause of all of this, which is energy consumption.
Art Berman 32:31
That’s what has to happen, we have to use a whole lot less energy, I promise you, that won’t happen. Nobody is going to voluntarily use less energy. So something horrible, or reasonably horrible has to happen, where we don’t have any choice but to use less energy. So if that sounds dark, I’m sorry. But one way or another, I mean, the, you know, the Earth is a pretty cool system, it kind of figures stuff out, or, you know, or maybe we figure it out, probably closer to the truth. But you cannot manipulate this, you cannot engineer this into avoiding the fact that you got to consume less energy.
Art Berman 33:19
So, I spent last night with some of my family here in Austin, I’ve got two grandchildren up. You know, in Circle C, I’ve got a bunch of grandchildren elsewhere, and my grandchildren like to get me involved in playing games and Jenga is one of the games that they enjoy. And everybody loses in Django, don’t they?
Art Berman 33:42
I usually lose first because they’re better at it. And they’re more agile, and they’ve got smaller fingers. But this is what we’re trying to do with energy. And renewables. We’re trying to pull out a piece that’s called fossil fuels. And somehow insert a couple of more pieces that are called renewable energy, hold our breath and imagine that the tower isn’t going to fall down.
Art Berman 34:11
Well, one of the things you know, when you play Jenga is the tower always falls down. You cannot mess with the tower. It always falls down. We are not going to keep the tower standing by pulling out pieces and putting in new pieces. It’s just not going to happen. Climate change and biophysical overshoot are as obvious as gravity. I mean, the only people who persist in saying that neither of them is happening are people that well I don’t I won’t say I don’t want to talk to it’s just not it’s you can’t talk to him because they they have a belief and I respect their belief. And they just they’re just psychologically incapable of looking at this kind of data?
Art Berman 34:33
Okay, it’s just, it’s just not gonna happen. Most people, including a lot of people that are very serious about climate change, and certainly the people who lead the world are energy blind, they don’t know any of this, and that’s okay. It’s not their field, they, they’re not supposed to know it. And those of you in this audience, I mean, some of you are energy blind, and some of you are less energy blind. And that’s okay, too. Not everybody’s expected to know everything.
Art Berman 35:34
But for those of us who are not energy blind, I’m here telling you that what we’re trying to do right now, has been designed by energy blind people, and they’ve created a map that is completely wrong. And if we follow it, we’re gonna get lost. That’s, that’s what happens when you’ve got a bad map.
Art Berman 35:59
You know, thankfully, Carey rescued me. You know, I wasn’t prepared for all the construction and chain link fences on the UT campus. And I was lost, I had a map, but I couldn’t go where the map told me to go because of all the damn construction. And lucky for me, you know, he found me and said, Okay, we gotta go this way. We need someone to tell us, okay, we gotta go this way. Because the way that we’re going, is going to lead us into a chain link fence, that’s a problem.
Art Berman 36:29
The idea that there are obvious fixes. I wish it were true. I just don’t see it. This idea or this belief, that somehow somebody’s going to figure out something? And that’s going to save us. Wow, you know, what’s the probability of that?
Art Berman 36:52
I hope it’s true, but I’m not going to bet anything on it. Fossil energy is the reason for, for our material success, not technology and innovation. They’re helpful, they’re important, but they’re secondary. And the only thing that I want you to remember, if you can’t remember or don’t want to any of the rest of this is that we can’t substitute one form of energy for another and hope to solve this problem. It’s complex. Like most natural systems, let’s acknowledge it. It’s complex. You know, I’ve been studying this my whole life. And I’ll tell you, there’s a ton I don’t understand or know about it.
Art Berman 37:40
The answer? The answer that I’ve found is we’re going to have to use a lot less energy. I already told you that’s not happening, not voluntarily. So somewhere out there, there’s going to be a trauma. That’s how humans change. And I think we, you know, once we see that trauma, we’ll have no choice but to change.
Art Berman 38:02
But a lot of people are not going to live. I think it’s time to get honest about the human predicament. And not everybody wants to do that. But that’s my message to you. I appreciate your attention. And I’m happy to discuss any of this, all of this with you.
Carey King 38:30
All right. Raise your hands. I’ll come I’ll start with one question that’s online. I’ll come back here at first. All right. We got to record it for the we got to speak in the mic for the recording, I can come to you or you can come to me. But so the question online, on your systems use needed you suggest or the graph suggests everyone has the same footprint, like every nation? Is there enough variation in the five critical factors you’ve shown amongst nations to warrant further investigation? The idea that we all have to have the same footprint or how do we think about that? Oh, no,
Art Berman 39:04
No, that’s that’s a fine question. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say we all had the same footprint, but that’s fine. Surely better order honor. Huge differences between nations. Absolutely. But the Earth doesn’t really you know, the Earth doesn’t see it that way. Animals don’t really care why their habitat is going away. Whether it’s the fault of India or Canada. They just know that their habitats going away. The natural systems on Earth don’t really care politically, what country is leading the charge to exhaust the Earth’s resources are polluted the most.
Art Berman 39:50
Averages don’t really make any difference to the earth and IT systems, neurosurgeon percentages nor undress per capita, and we can play our all sorts of statistical games with this and convince ourselves that, you know, the richest 1% of people are responsible for I don’t know, what percent of emissions and energy consumption it’s absolutely true. But you no big deal. It’s unfair. And I wish it weren’t the killing split again. You know, the the world, it doesn’t really care. I mean, you know, until until something changes. So this blame game. It’s just the most childish thing in the world. Whose fault is it? Oh, it’s, you know, it’s the oil companies they knew about climate change 50 years ago? Well, yeah. And we should be pissed off at them for, you know, for keeping it a secret. But seriously. You if we don’t have any energy that we need when we need it, and cheaply,
Art Berman 41:02
We’re really upset. It just doesn’t. I mean, the the fossil energy companies wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t have a market and where the market every one of us is. We need to stop trying to say who’s, who’s the worst offender? You know, are the good guys are the bad guys? No. There’s just guys are women. That’s all
Carey King 41:30
Guys and gals. All right, next week might have some detail on that particular question. But we will go to a question in the audience.
Speaker 3 41:37
Thanks so much. All right. This is awesome. And I’ll definitely be posting it, I hope all of you will, too, and share it with your students, those who are teaching. I, I do think you know, one child policy globally is something we should all be espousing. I do think, you know, maybe allowing people to take their lives after age 60. If they want to, without rolling into suicide, things like that should be absolutely on the policy list for short term adoption by as many people were willing to do it. The question about carbon footprint was really important, because the people who are going to die are going to be the low footprint people first. So it’s not really going to help us that much. So it’d be nicer if we population collapse more evenly, or let the rich people take the hit first, which would include those of us in this audience, I’m sure. But I was curious why your friend Bill, who’s an ecologist would worry about the population collapse, since I think it would probably be quite good for animal and plant life. And could you tell us a little bit more about Bill’s strategy there?
Art Berman 42:39
Yeah, sure. And let me just say, before I get to that, that. Yeah, all these things. You know, one, you know, having fewer children and, you know, leaving the world when you feel like it, those are all and doing whatever we can personally, you know, keeping the thermostat at 80 instead of 70. Those are, you know, giving up red meat. I mean, I don’t know there’s a million things we can do. None of that moves the needle. I hate to say it, but it doesn’t but mean to do it, do it for you.
Art Berman 43:21
If it makes your soul feel good, do it, allow other people to make those choices. But unfortunately, I mean, you know, Carey has written a book called the Superorganism, and we’re dealing with a superorganism here, I mean, the human enterprise is a lot like that fossil slave. I mean, it’s just, it’s just hungry, man. It’s growing. And, you know, it’s like having a, you know, a discussion with a forest fire. You can do it, but you’re going to lose, you’re gonna get burned. So Bill’s comment. He’s not partisan towards human beings one bit. His concern is, is the state of life. That’s what is at risk if our renewable energy experiment is successful, because we just keep on going. If we are successful at substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy, then the graph that I told you to never forget or try not to forget, just keeps on going. It’s the status quo that’s been going on since the Neolithic, you know, humans came onto the scene. We killed every megafauna we could find. We ran out of those and we started killing each other. And we discovered fossil energy and we started killing the planet. I mean, that’s just superorganism. That’s what it does. And again, you know, it’s a you’re not going to change it. It’s no one’s fault. We’re all part of it. I hope that answered your question.
Carey King 45:08
Your another question from the audience.
Speaker 4 45:11
So there’s a lot of talk from IPCC and using like climatological data to, you know, consider temperature like degrees temperature rises, and how that will affect population moving forward? Is there any sort of estimate and like years for that kind of collapse that you’re talking about taking into account this holistic view of climate change with, you know, eco toxicity and poverty, you know, all the different facets of it?
Art Berman 45:40
Yeah, well, that’s a, that’s a really important question. And thank you for asking it. So everything I said today is not the biggest threat that we have in the near term. And by the near term, I mean, this decade, or the decade after, that doesn’t diminish the importance of all this. But this is kind of a, you know, relative relatively slower train wreck that’s going on the things that the number one risk that I see to the system, that will potentially collapse, it is financial. I didn’t talk about money very much here, I could have, but I didn’t. I mean, we came very close to collapsing the financial system a couple of times, just in the last 20 years, certainly in 2006, 7, 8, we have the same kind of overshoot going on with our financial system, as we do with our energy and our ecosystem. And I don’t want to get into the details, I’d be glad to talk to you about them offline here. But basically, the level of debt that we all have and that society has, is ridiculous. And that credit, that debt is only available, because the people that lend us the money or loan it into existence is really what happens. I mean, that’s another conversation. Yeah, they, they don’t take money from anywhere, and we don’t print it they loan it into existence. But that’s based on the assumption that we will be productive enough to pay it back. And that productivity is based on a whole lot of data that’s founded on fossil energy. And as soon as the financial system, whoever that is, starts to realize or realizes more fully, you know, with renewable energy and all that kind of stuff, we’re not going to have the kind of productivity to pay with the money back, then the credit stops, and the credit stops and the debt takes over. And someone’s gonna lose big time. And my guess, conservatively is, I mean, you know, Biden got into a lot of trouble for wanting to forgive student loan debt, I think we’re going to be looking at like a 30%, or 40%, or a 50% situation where we just got to write it off as a wall. So the biggest threat to civilization, human civilization is financial. The second biggest is geopolitical war. Can we got a good one going on right now the world’s divided up into two camps. And I don’t need to go into the details there. That I mean, if, if, even if nothing happens with nuclear weapons, and even if there, which I suppose is better, I’m not really sure. But seemingly, it’s not as bad. I mean, you just look at the amount of energy and pollution and money that goes on with a relatively limited war, like what’s going on in Ukraine. I think let’s some nuclear stuff, which I mean, you know, and that’s, that’s the lights out, even if it doesn’t extinguish human species, even if we don’t, you know, get rid of New York or Paris or whatever. I mean, the particulates. That’s a whole nother story, complexity. I mean, ours every time we solve a problem, things get more complicated and we don’t notice it along the way, but the cumulative, the accumulation of complexity, it takes more and more energy, to maintain all those complex interactions. Civilizations collapse. Because nobody’s willing to finance the complexity anymore. I visited Angkor Wat about six months ago. And Angkor Wat was the biggest city in the world in 1100. AD, more than a million people there wasn’t a city in Europe that reached a million people until the 1400s. And the story that I was told by the tour guide was round, it was a big war with the Tais, and they ran in and you know, that was the end of it. Well, actually, that’s not true. anchor rod, several of the population collapse very slowly, and not a whole lot of people die, they dispersed. And we don’t really know why. But there’s, there’s actually, you know, core pollen records that show this would happen, you got a city of a million people, you got to bring in water, you got to bring in food, awkward dogs are necessary. Well, at some point in time, you just can’t afford to maintain the aqueducts. You can’t afford to maintain supply chains. People start leaving, they say audios. You know, my, my cousin down the Mekong River says life’s kind of better down there, I’m going and over the course of decades or centuries, and Angkor Wat collapsed, I hope we have a collapse that slow. Then there’s the biophysical collapse, the climate change.
Carey King 51:28
Okay, next question.
Speaker 5 51:31
Thank you for being here. I really appreciated this. I guess, there are a lot of really hard pills to swallow. And it’s particularly hard because No, like you said, No, one person is at fault. And no one started this, like, you know, we were all just born into this. This is the system in which we exist. And these are, this is how things grow. And I particularly struggle with a lot of these concepts. Like, for one example, would be the one child policy, like, you know, I’d like to have a family one day, and I think I’d like to have more than one kid, even though I totally recognize, that would probably be a really useful solution for some of these problems. But selfishly, I don’t want that, even though I would like a lot of these problems solved. And so a concept I’m really interested in is really just like, you know, how are we going to plant seeds who shade we’re not gonna see. And I think that the way that you present this as a really, it really speaks to me, but I’m not sure how effectively it speaks to a broader audience that still wants to see their quality of life remain the same, if not get better. And so it seems you’ve done a lot more communicating about this topic than I have. Do you see this as an effective communication method to get these points across or to make a conversation about the solution?
Art Berman 52:54
Only for people that want to know more. I cannot persuade anyone who doesn’t want to learn something that I’m right, or they’re wrong, or that somebody else is right? I can’t do it. It’s just, it doesn’t work. And so I was telling Carey, I gave a talk that was not hugely different from this. Just last Thursday, at a climate conference in San Marcos, about 300 people there and I gave the same message. And at least a third or a quarter of the people in the audience were enraged. I mean, absolutely. I mean, really mad. Because what I was telling them challenge their cherished belief that all we got to do was get rid of fossil fuels and use renewables and everything’s going to be better. You No, I didn’t. I certainly didn’t anticipate that. At least not the level. I mean, I think there were, there were a lot more people like some of you and said, Wow, I don’t like to bring that. But I see what you’re talking about. But certainly, I mean, you know, a very large percentage was was really mad. So I can’t I can’t do anything about people who are not open to looking at an information and saying, Well, we think about that. So my intent. I’m not trying to change anybody. I’d like to but I know better than that. I don’t think there is a solution. I’ve said that. People always want solutions. I wish I had them. I may have told you the solution. use less energy. Simple, right? No, there’s not an answer. Okay, that That’s just the way it works. So and you’re right, and we talk about one child, and we talk about, you know, people in much poorer countries than the United States. I mean, who have don’t think deserve to grow and prosper the way that we did? And the answer is, you know, the universe doesn’t care because it gets screwed. But yeah, of course they do. The reality. The truth is, is that, and I just and strictly a data away, the the ecological on the energy and the carbon footprint of those countries is tiny. Doesn’t really matter. I mean, the countries that matter are the United States and China and Germany and Russia. And I have a graph that I didn’t show of GDP. I mean, you know, world economic growth versus energy consumption. I mean, it is statistically crazy. It’s got an auditor scoring correlation of point nine, six. I mean, it just does that thing statistically perfect. If anybody wants to argue about that correlation, go for it. Right, that is the correlation. And I’m going to change. So answer. I certainly don’t think everybody should just do whatever the hell they want. But they’re going to anyway. Okay, that’s the way it works. And the other questions?
Speaker 6 56:35
Thank you for a wonderful presentation. I like the conciseness. And the factual base of it really appreciate that. When we talk about a multivariable problem, we try to look at the first order variables, which is more or less what you presented here. I appreciate that one variable that was not in there, though. And you gloss over it, in my opinion, a little bit, is the technology aspect. And that three quarters of the energy we use, we waste. So the three quarters of the energy we use we waste in efficiencies, and yeah, I mean, the energy that we useful energy is only one quarter 25% of what we actually consume. So there is a way in some aspects that to unlock technological advancement, that can improve that efficiency can significantly reduce our energy required or service energy versus the total amount we consume. I’m saying not because it’s enough to solve the problem. It certainly isn’t. Because it doesn’t affect the population growth and the other first order variables. But do you see any possibilities or opportunities from a technical logical approach and making us more energy lean, as in more energy efficient as one of the first order variables that you didn’t produce present that we could improve upon?
Art Berman 57:51
Excellent question. For those of you that don’t know, any geologists, if you ask a geologist a question, doesn’t matter what it is, the answer will be it depends. And the answer to your question is it depends. My, my first reaction, the simple answer, and I, you know, I hate reduction as dancers is no, it won’t help. Yeah, it’s absolutely true that we know that we waste a lot of energy. It’s absolutely true that you know, that 50, 60, 70% of the oil that’s in the ground, we don’t know how to we haven’t, we’re unable to get out. And for as long as I’ve been in this business of oil, which I’m really not in anymore, but or the business of science, it’s tantalizing. Yeah, if we could just figure that out, then it’d be great. But we never figure that out, is the problem. I mean, there’s a there’s an inherent level of waste. I mean, you’re using energy, there’s going to be, I mean, an awful lot of waste. But I have looked into and if any of you somebody mentioned IPCC and you know, a big piece of these, you know, suppose that net zero policies and etc, is efficiency. And so I’ve looked very carefully, painfully into the, what’s called the decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption. And if you don’t know about this, I kind of encourage you not to bother, but some of you will, so you know, look at decoupling, and you will see that built into the net zero plan, if you like that or don’t, you know, we’re going to somehow figure out how to go, how to have us how to increase efficiency by 4% a year beyond what it is to others. You know, there’s no historical precedent for that. We’ve never done that. So what is the right Number I’ve worked it out. It’s about 1.2%. So we we do things better over time. We always do. I hope so. I mean, I think I do I, I have a different system for putting away the dishes every time and my wife still tells them, why do you always put it here? Wow, I learned slowly but but I do it better. And so we do get better. And but the but the better is a pretty small number. And if anybody wants to take a look at those, and, you know, and challenge me, I’m I’m glad to show but but that is the and it’s getting worse, okay. It’s just like, you know, the the economy of China grow at 10% a year forever. I mean, we have these S curves, and, you know, in all physical systems and, and we’ve achieved a lot of efficiency over over time, and we’re getting to the point of, of going sort of tangential, so we ought to be happy, just like, we ought to be happy if we can grow the economy 1.2% A year instead of you know, angry about it. But so, reduction is the answer is, if we can, it’s going to be a miracle that we haven’t solved. And I don’t think it’s gonna it’s likely to happen within the window of urgency for either climate change or for the ecosystem. Which doesn’t mean we should stop working on it, we absolutely should. It’s important. I just I see it, as you, you know, as you eloquently said in the beginning, I mean, you know, there are first order and second order and third order things. And back when I used to be a manager in a big oil company, the the management training classes were always well, you need to categorize your tasks, you know, you take the really important things and we call those A tasks, you know, and you put those in one stack, and the less important is B and C and etc. And, and what they told us was what most of you guys are going to do, you’re going to work on the C’s, because they’re easier to solve. By the time you’re done doing them all, you haven’t changed anything because you’re still you’re avoiding doing the hard work. Okay, so efficiency. It’s the C, somebody audit has to be done. But it isn’t going to change the state of the system. Anything else?
Carey King 1:02:25
Yeah, we got one more question I add to your efficiency. Yeah. So you can potentially put this on your systems chart. So yeah, changing efficiency is a C, making sure you don’t invest the proceeds of efficiency into more growth is….
Art Berman 1:02:36
Good. Jevons paradox, right.
Carey King 1:02:38
There we go. There we go. All right. Well, in the talk on this question.
Art Berman 1:02:42
Thank you.
Speaker 7 1:02:45
Great talk. And you know, this a very good food for thought. So in relation to fossil fuel as energy consumption, at least from what I’ve seen recently, you know, there is a big chunk of electrification movement, whether in the power industry, you are in the transportation industry that actually take a big chunk of, you know, fossil fuel consumption. I’ve seen the the charts that you’ve seen, that you’ve showed just now, I was wondering how you, like, how do you see this, you know, has prediction moving forward about changes in trends like this? And, you know, we predict a lot of things in the past. And, you know, we might not be the best predictor and that so I was wondering on that. That’s, that’s the first part. The second part is I’m I look at the answers is to use less energy of this holy scores. You know, I’m one of your followers on social media. And I’ve seen a lot of talk about degrowth. And this I was wondering, is that same thing? Or, you know, who who’s going to give up the quality of life that we have right now? Is Global North global.
Carey King 1:03:49
Okay, got so for come next week, because Julio Steinberger is a big degrowth project based in Europe. So can ask that question again. Go ahead. Yeah.
Art Berman 1:03:58
So I mean, I love the degrowth people. Because we’re, we’re kind of in spirits in a way. But I think it’s as unlikely that that the, that the superorganism is going to voluntarily de grow, as it is unlikely that it’s going to, you know, chop off its arm or stop eating. I mean, it’s just, it’s not what the superorganism does, we recognize the same thing. You know, that’s why I say we’re kind of, you know, Soul brothers and sisters. I just think it’s, I just think it’s naive. It ignores human behavior. The first part of your question, I’m not totally sure I understand it. But let me let me make a stab and stop me if I’m wrong. The idea that big chunks of fossil fuel use are going away. Is that kind of what you were.
Art Berman 1:04:54
Yeah, well, you know, most of the most of that is on the electric Power Generation side of things. Okay, and if you look at so we have renewables, coal and natural gas are the, you know, the main components of a nuclear, of course, of electric power generation. And, and it’s true that I mean, coal has been going down, and nuclear is not going very much of anywhere, but renewables are going way up. And, and if you look at forecasts projections, and I do it all the time, to my detriment, probably, you know, actually, we’re, we’re, we are actually replacing a lot of coal with renewables, we’re not making any progress on natural gas or anything else. And eventually, given enough time, we may, let’s just say, for fun, we get to 100% renewable energy for electric power generation. Let’s just say we can do let’s see if we could do it tomorrow. That’d be cool. Electric power generation is less than 20% of our energy consumption. It’s a C. We’re working real hard on the C. What about the other 83%, which is transportation and steel and plastic and fertilizer and cement and all the kinds of stuff that we absolutely, our civilization falls apart without it, that those are the A’s and the B’s, and we’re not working on it, because they’re really tough. And so the answer is, go for it. Let’s do it. And when we’re 100% successful, we’re still screwed. Because we’re working on the C’s, which is what human beings do. I mean, I’m not criticizing it. Not saying we’re dumb, but we’re working. We it’s the low hanging fruit. That’s what we’re doing. Last question, right, Carey?
Carey King 1:06:55
Yeah. Well, thanks. I was student here at UT Austin is still work here. And I got a lot of A’s and I’m still trying to work on a problem right now. So
Art Berman 1:07:04
hopefully the others and you’re gonna hit me up to help you on it after we’re done. Right?
Carey King 1:07:07
Actually, I am. Yeah. So let’s thank art for a great talk. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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At the Biophysical Economics Institute presentation Art added mention of the Maximum Power Principle (MPP) and this slide:
And other slides:
The End
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I don’t have solutions for you, I’m trying to be the best scientist I know how, which is, to describe the current situation, to explain it as best I can, to base it on information that I have.
This is the trap experts find themselves. They see themselves as _______, and their job is to inform/explain. Solving predicaments is outside their job description, above their paygrade. Its the job of ‘leaders’. They may see with 20/20 clarity that “certainly the people who lead the world are energy blind, they don’t know any of this, and that’s okay.”
Actually, if our children, grandchildren, and their children (if any) will mostly die a ghastly death (if not all), then to those who are not posterity blind (and human extinction blind), it is not okay.
So the experts can tell themself they did their job and if putative leaders don’t do their job…, the expert can die uttering final words like, ‘I did what I could’, even knowing that 5 to 14 billion people will die a Malthusian death (i.e. not by old age) when our expansionist form of civilization runs out of gas likely this century.
[Jack Alpert video goes here. A preview is on YouTube. I’ll try to remember to update.]
I’m not trying to change anybody. I’d like to but I know better than that. I don’t think there is a solution. I’ve said that. People always want solutions. I wish I had them. I may have told you the solution. use less energy. Simple, right? No, there’s not an answer.
Okay, let’s agree not to change anybody and that what I think (or any other pug-nosed primate thinks) is a solution doesn’t matter. People want solutions, but only those they can want, ones that serve the short-term self interests of their modern form of expansionist metastatic human.
So we are in a Wittgensteinian fly bottle, and 99.999% of flies agree that there is no way out. But 0.001% don’t know because they can’t know… and then what? They are able to consider the possibility that 99.999% of humans have a non viable future. At some point their wabbling minds will be clarified wonderfully perhaps a fortnight before, maybe sooner, when our our ghastly future is apparent (actual, not as believed in). If there is a road less traveled by, they will have no choice but to take it. That’s all.
The future envisioned may be a Great Simplification. It will also be a Great Selection. Getting off the Modernity Hegemon could select for an alternative, perhaps even viable future. Those who can foresee that the ants on a log heading over the falls have no viable future will get off — don’t know to where or to what future. That all the ants (100%) go over the falls is a likely future, but not a certain or given future.
That some of the 0.001% somehow sidestep the non viable is a possible future. The Great Selection, if some who get off find a pathway to a viable future, could iterate towards a viable form of human and complex society (civilization). Only those humans who can get off can ask the ecolate question that leads to a potentially viable future (i.e. one that could potentially be selected for).
The question is, “and then what?” No one makes a belief-based call to action that other believing minds respond to. Getting off the pathway to modernity (that normalizes belief-based cognition) will have to be choicelessly idiosyncratic. The conjecture is that some humans will be compelled to depart from the shared delusion. Considering the next question is to do now, before one is on the downslope of no return.
To each proposed answer (solution), the next question is always the same, “and then what?” This iterative condition leads to an apparent best-guess pathway to a best-guess viable future. The next step, after guessing what a viable pathway might be, is to test. Guess, then test. With enough guesses, some may prove viable.
So 0.001% guess then test. Assume that when they do the human population has climaxed and has declined to 8 billion. So do the math (8,000,000,000 x 0.00001 = 80,000). Some people have dependents who will come with them, so assume there are 40k decision makers (the 0.0005%) who get off the log of modern techno-industrial (MTI) society without any belief in a promised land.
All agree to live within limits. Those who do not don’t get off the log. One limit is the size of a decision making group per what works. No one gets a vote. All may ask how many? Ask whom? Ask Nature (the nature of things).
The greatest viable number of adult decision makers is 13 per the University of Hardknocks (UofH) alumni over the last 5k years. Larger groups form hierarchies and form factions. There are too few interactions to select for trust, for love and understanding. Contrary to 50k years of assurances of the omniscient ones, more is not better.
The 40k consider the evidence and agree to a 13 maximum. There need be no formal law nor law enforcement. Larger groups that believe that 50 people can met at a round table — you just need a big table… who fail can expect no support if they try to make their overcomplex social group work.
Going against what has worked for millions of years of hominin evolution is what we moderns do. How’s that been working for us? Maybe we don’t get to decide that there are no limits (that apply to us) or what they, if any, are (because we are free not to).
Any group that self-organizes, that has more than 13 members, will first decide how to split off members or form two groups just because they have a life-driven purpose to not fail and they have considered information about group size limits.
The condition of having too few members, one of lack of diversity, is of concern and a consensus emerges that a viable group size would likely be 8 or more, so the average group size might be 10. On average, if each has one dependent (e.g. 5 individuals plus 5 with 2 dependents each = 20). So average initial group size is 20.
For over a million years humans lived in groups of 20 to 50 (range 5 to 85, average of 28) per alumni of UofH. The 40k agree that as they are all denormalized humans who have far to go before pushing limits of social group size, that no communities will consist of more than 50 community members (13 decision makers, 37 dependents, 3–4 per family group).
This would be a maximum for renormalizing humans and any group larger than 28 (ancestorial average) would have to be viewed as pushing natural limits of what could maybe eventually work.
So initially, ‘20… maybe 28’ would be considered by the would-be sapient, those who value the 100th generation to come (all would as those who didn’t would/could not get off modernity’s log). Consensus narratives will arise among those who would rather know than believe (those who would rather believe should stay on the log and encouraged to go back if they believe that getting off has some self interest payoff).
The two limits imply that more than 13 frequently interacting communities of 20–30 people would make for too many if a representative of each met to decide upon an issue of common concern. So 13 communities would be a limit for the number of interacting communities that would not exceed viable limits of what works per human biology. To understand is to be obedient to the nature of things.
The range might be 7 to 13, with 10 as average. Such groups of communities could be called a management district of communities having on average a population of about 250. This may be the population of North Sentinel Island where about 10 groups of people have been living in isolation for centuries (no one leaves and visitors are at best briefly tolerated and killed if they overstay the resident’s tolerance). One district is, per evidence, a viable size, the minimum size of a human society of largely self-sufficient humans. Exogamy is a need, not a just a want.
An optimal size for a potentially viable society would likely be in a range of 1 to 13 districts in size to allow one or more representatives of each to met and make decisions relating to the management of humans within an area, e.g. a watershed management area defined by ridge/trough topographic (not disputable political boundaries).
Three districts could share a bit of common ground between them, such as three circles form a bounded area between them. This is a geometric limit. On a small island, two districts would share one boundary and two coastal areas in common. With three, one point mid-island could be shared. Four could share a common meet up area, and on a plain, up to six, rarely more.
These are limits to duly note. If 3–6 water shed management units (WMUs) share a meet up area (a non-permanently inhabited city), with perhaps a shared library, the materials it was built from and size would not be a matter of preference. Citizens would not be asked to vote other than on matters of preference, e.g. color, style, and ornaments.
There are spatial limits. Two to six districts could share a common area accessible to each. More may be possible, 13 would push decision making limits, but the would-be sapient may never try to make overcomplexity work.
Three-district WMUs would likely be common, due to spatially defined limits, so guess that viable humans will live in watershed management units (WMUs) of 1 to 6 districts, whose members, about 750 average (range 250–1500), could meet up in a central city, where each family unit has a city home. When the food brought to the city runs low, all would return to their community home within one of the 1-6 districts. In a low energy future, no one will drive their EV to the city. Bicycles may not be supported, or used only by the handicapped.
Imagining this working is not that hard. It is what has worked. Over 99.999% of humans do not live in viable (per evidence not opinion) societies.
On average, a tri-district would be able to share a common ground to meet upon and may form an optimally viable social group size (a WMU or watershed management unit), assuming 3–4 representatives of 3 districts can be selected to met to make pressing WMU decisions.
An initial 80k pioneers that self-organized into 3,200 communities forming 320 WMUs/districts (1 district WMUs) would allow for 320 baskets (initially small WMUs) with 250 eggs (10 communities of 25 members) in each. Each family would guess at what might work based on information about what has worked.
Each community would do likewise and each family would help one another figure out what works to make mamma happy (and if grandma ain’t happy, a team of Mothers would self-organize to intervene). Families would become more functional as the decades go by. Frequent interactions, possible only in small groups, selects for trust and against short-term self interests.
Community decision makers would work to make their community work, and representatives would work to make their district work right and well. If more than one district in a WMU, representatives would meet as needed, likely during a central city gathering, to deal with WMU-wide issues.
As always, the Mothers would have to approve any WMU-wide proposed changes, and so would have defacto veto power. If mamma ain’t happy… is a law of human biology. The Mothers are those who are best able to listen to Mother (are least posterity blind). Matrifocal society is what works for cooperative, trusting hominins that manage to persist as the millennia pass.
If initially 90% of families, communities, districts, WMUs fail, they might be able to learn from the 10% that didn’t. They would have, as all normal animals have, a life-driven purpose to do so as did our hominin ancestors over the last six million years.
None would have, as all who serve the monetary culture have, a purpose-driven life to make money to grow the economy, whether as a bushmeat hunter wanting to buy shoes for his wife or the CEO of Apple who wants a bigger megayacht his jet can land on.
Solutions? There are none. There are potentially evolvable systems. You don’t get a vote as to what works. Humans who self-select into a subsystem that may (or not) persist within limits is the solution. No one can design solutions (designers can guess then test evolvable systems).
Systemic design would be to design a system (e.g. the above) that had the potential for selecting for what might work to allow groups of humans to persist long term.
There are no solutions. Evolvable systems (e.g. Gaia) can select for subsystems that work, aka ‘real solutions’ not based on human for and against preferences.
“Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.”
— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
There are no solutions. Evolvable systems select for solutions. Evolvable systems can be designed and redesigned per best-guess and test endeavor. Get off the log and endeavor. I’m not asking you to. If you can choose not to get off, you won’t. The coming bottleneck will select for foresight intelligence. If you get off the log, you won’t be the first.
Could 0.001% get off the MTI (modern techno-industrial) log to form 320 WMUs? Could more than 0.001% get off the log? Could the above pathway to select for a viable form of human/society scale up to include 99.999% of 8 billion humans? Yes. Will 99.999% choicelessly get off the only log their ancestors have ever known for 8 to 2,000 generations? I don’t know. As expansionist humans, foresight intelligence may have been selected against for over 50k years.
Could 0.0001% get off the MTI Train to Nowhere? Maybe 3k to 4k could and bring 4k to 5k dependents with them. They could initially form 32 WMUs within one region, willing and to some degree able to support one another. They could call themselves the United Federation of Watersheds (UFW). In a central area, each WMU would build a Federation Embassy. Three neighboring WMUs sharing a common meet up site could send a representative to make UFW decisions. They could write a UFW Constitution.
Assume the first 8k are above average in education and means, and “make it so.” On what continent? That would be a detail deciders would consider and present to the Mothers (some men might be considered ‘honorary Mothers’ if they were judged posterity sighted and their views would be considered by the Mothers, as the condition of not being posterity blind would rule).
Other humans could become aware and be amazed that there are such heathens on the planet who had somehow for some “reason” walked away from Modernity and its Prosperity and Freedom for All.
The design for the 32 WMUs would include the potential to take in voluntary MTI refugees (provided they agreed that only the Mothers of their community, should the birth of a baby be a WMU need to maintain a viable population, decide who can be with child).
All would realize that initially, given the vast population overshoot of the WMU’s carrying capacity, few women could ever “be with child” (but that in 50 years, the average potentially fertile women would need to mother 2.1 children or more if the death rate increased).
A WMU that could support 300 people long term could, having enough dry goods in long-term storage (e.g. food, fabric) to support all refugees, e.g. 3,000, until all had died a natural death insofar as possible — none having died a Malthusian death. Some, enough, would have had enough children to maintain the WMU’s finial planned upon population well below carrying capacity after the Great Transition Birth-off that began to renormalize humans.
Could 800 people having some foresight intelligence form five WMUs (1 district, 8 communities of 20 residents) that could take in 8k refugees? Could their example enable 800k to form 3,200 WMUs able to take in 8 million refugees? Yes. No body knows that it is too late.
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Summary
A small WMU, e.g. 1 district of 7 communities of on average 23 people each, total 161 people or carrying capacity of WMU as assessed by human ecologists/population biologists).
All WMUs designed to take in 10x more refugees supported by long-term stored dry goods (mostly grains diverted from animal feed, beer… production) than can be supported by environmental carrying capacity.
Average WMU, e.g. 3 districts of 10 communities of 28people, or 840 population able to take in 8,400 (9,240 total, declining to 840 as aging population dies, insofar as possible, by old age).
Large WMU, e.g. 6 districts of 12 communities each with average population of 35, or 2,520 able to take in 25,200 refugees (27,720 total)
The communities (5–13) of a district would have a shared meet up place. All WMU districts (1–13) would have a meet up place that could take 1 day or so of walking to reach and so would be temporarily inhabited, duration limited to amount of food brought in.
Non-childrearing WMUs could form around ports, trade hubs, high energy sources, and academies of advanced inquiry. All would export services/products and import food and needed materials (e.g. fiber, biomass, salt). Because no children would reside there, apart from short-term visits (residents would be post childrearing or non-parents by preference), the psycho-social pathologies that high density populations select for would not be transmitted to the next generation (adults who self-select to be urban dwellers delay for forfeit being reproductive).
For example, a bioregional Academic WMU (AWMU) could be organized into 18 districts around a central campus. The more elderly/senior inquirers would live in the six districts surrounding the campus located in a mostly flat expanse of rain-fed agricultural land (to maximize food production, and minimize transportation costs of any imported food/resources).
Those in the outer districts would travel further but a two hour walk each way would not be taxing on average young inquirers. Community size may be towards the 50 limit as few would ever be long-term residents and relative newcomers would not presume to be decision makers. Subgroups of 8–12 may form with one being defacto leader/representative.
With a focus on learning/inquiry, the AWMU social system would be simpler than a community/district of higher diversity residents doing more complex endeavors. So 18 districts of 12 communities could have a total learner population of 216 communities of 46 learners, a university of 10k inquirers (no students as all would be assumed to have something to teach and much to learn as autodidacts listening to Nature who has all the answers). The Academy and the culture (and form of civilization) would be nature centric to sidestep the human centric temptation (and maybe extinction).
So somewhere out there, there’s going to be a trauma. That’s how humans change. And I think we, you know, once we see that trauma, we’ll have no choice but to change.
Some humans were sufficiently traumatized by WWI to get the wake up call of “Houston, we have a problem.” We have a predicament with extinction as a possible to likely outcome, even though Art and many others I know do not agree. H.G. Wells noted in 1920 that we were “in a race between education and catastrophe” and by the 1930’s that that race was about over. His book, The Shape of Things to Come 1933 was a last ditch effort to get humanity to “see the trauma” he and a few others saw, e.g. Aldous Huxley, and he still hoped in 1933 that humans still could win the race.
Didn’t happen. Too few read the book… or saw the trauma in front of their pug-nosed face, and making a movie of it failed to change humans. The race was lost, and we are the result. The Shape of Things to Come
A future with a little hope.
Pearl Harbor is a classic example of a trauma changing behavior, but that was a response to a very brief attack, such as Israel’s current one. The required change to address our predicament of one-off plague-phase overshoot is one only a very few humans can respond to, or so it seems.
I would agree with Berman if a couple of qualifiers were added,
“There’s going to be a trauma. That’s how humans [are sometimes able to] change. And I think we, you know, once we see that trauma, [if we actually see our condition without any possibility of denial or obfuscation, then] we’ll have no choice but to change.”
The condition of choiceless obedience to the nature of things, perhaps possible when humans fall from their hubris heights, would be the “no choice but to change” condition needed to change a paradigm, worldview, mindset by replacing it.
If humanity has a “teachable moment,” people like Art need to envision now what a viable paradigm change to a viable form of civilization might look like before humanity has its “so now what?” moment. Otherwise a demagogue as usual will offer their plan to make empire great again.