Modern Civilization headed for Nearly-irreversible Collapse By Nafeez Ahmed The Guardian March 21, 2014 UK @bit.ly/1giZuHG theguardian/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists IMPENDING INEVITABLE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN IN THE WORKS. A NASA funded study reveals that modern civilization headed for Irreversible Collapse due to extreme and widening wealth inequality and economic exploitation. Natural and social scientists develop new model of how perfect storm of crises could unravel global system. They found compelling historical data showing that the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history. Cases of severe civilizational disruption due to precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common. Have happened along the recorded history. A new study sponsored by NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution, what is widely known as poverty which all politicians promise to curb but end up only worsening it in both the industrialized and the third world nations. The operation of the civilization based on ever rising consumption is not conducive to it. Noting that warnings of collapse are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history. Cases of severe civilizational disruption due to precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common. The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary Human And Nature DYnamical (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, [sesync.org/] in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, projecting a serious unsustainability of modern civilisation: The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent. By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely: 1) Exploding Human Population, 2) Climate Crisis, 3)Water Shortage, 4) Agricultural collapse producing widespread (global) starvation epidemic, and 5) Energy demands far exceeding the supply leading to the collapse of the industries and agriculture. The situation is akin to a business or a corporation going bankrupt when the debts far exceed income. These factors in the civilizational unsustainability produce to ultimate collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: 1) the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity; and 2) the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or Commoners) [poor] These social phenomena have played a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse, in all such cases over the last five thousand years. This ultra-short five thousand years of history of humans on the planet is all that is available for study because remanents of only this period are accessible for interpretation. But this short span is sufficient. Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, by the Elites is based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both of these elements that produce civilizational unsustainability: ... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels. The social injustice lies in the fact that those producing the wealth actually never see it. That is very much akin to the Ponzi scheme or Pyramid fraud system which is the proper characterization of industrialized society which permits this to proceed in a legally condoned manner. At the heart of it lies the combustion of fossil fuels which drives machines that escalate efficiency of consumption of resources to a level that is incompatible with ecosystem sustainability and that leads to civilizational unsustainability.The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency: Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use. Extreme productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the past 200 years has come from increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput, despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period. Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri et al conclude that under conditions closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid. The right phrase is impossible however not difficult, in other words global economic meltdown (GEM) is inevitable and only a matter of when and the predictions around 2100 will prove to be highly accurate. It can appear as soon as 2035 or 2050 however. In the first of these scenarios, civilisation: .... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature. Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites. In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners, allowing them to continue business as usual despite the impending catastrophe. The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases). There is a strong need for the super-wealthy Elite to deny the climate crisis and the resource hyper-exploitation and remain oblivious to the impending catastrophe and they find the allocation of any of their time to ponder about it extremely unpleasant experience and an undesirable intrusion into their pleasure laden lifestyle. Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that: While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory so far in support of doing nothing. There is a shallow validity of this argument of couple of hundred or even some 2000 years of sustained growth with ever escalating resource consumption as evidence of the sustainability of the irrational system of expecting an infinite output out of a finite system which is being mismanaged by humans and at the same time being devasted by the climate change or global warming. However, the scientists do point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation. The inevitability however is built in the fact of intense resistance to the implementation of these policy changes to steer the ecosystems of the planet thus civilization towards sustainability. Neither is there any interest in narrowing of the ever widening wealth gap which would require a lot fairer wealth distribution which the super-wealthy Elite would never permit to happen nor is there any propensity to curb consumption or adopt renewability based sustainable lifestyle. The sustainable lifestyle is seen as a threat to their wealth by the super-wealthy Elite. The wealth flow towards super-wealthy requires a high population or a huge market size and high consumption of goods which must be designed to have only a short life such that there is a need to buy more in short time to keep the sales or the profits (“the bottomline”) high. The two key solutions are to 1) reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to 2) dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and curb population explosion: Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion. The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that business as usual cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately. There is no realistic hope that either of the two key recommendations of narrowing of the wealth gap which is intricately linked to the consumption reduction with population shrinkage as one of its dimension would ever enter into policy considerations of the governments, corporate or even the consumers, who are too thoroughly brainwashed into keep up a high consumption pattern and feel distress about curbing consumption and even curbing population although the growing population size can be readily viewed by them as a signal of impending impoverishment. Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a perfect storm within about fifteen (15) years. But these business as usual forecasts could be very conservative. [ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-the-rise-of-the-post-carbon-era/] [kpmg/global/en/issuesandinsights/articlespublications/future-state-government/pages/resource-stress.aspx]
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 16:19:51 +0000
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