THURSDAY, AUG 22, 2019: NOTE TO FILE
Failing States, Collapsing Systems
BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (2017)
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
TOPICS: WHOLE SYSTEMS KNOWLEDGE DEFICIT, FROM THE WIRES, THINKING IN SYSTEMS
Abstract: This book is part of a series of SpringerBriefs in Energy, Energy Analysis, edited by Charles Hall. The focus is on the biophysical systems that underlie the social, political-economic systems we live in and depend on that cannot be understood apart from the biophysical systems we also depend on. The biosphere as viewed through the macroscope of systems ecology contains the social, political, educational, legal, and economic subsystems. And thank you Sue Lee for transcribing this introduction, chapter intros and conclusion to help save the world (yes, content merits consideration, a careful hearing). For a more recent look at a failing state, a view of things to come elsewhere, Ahmed looks at Venezuela's collapse. Elites will put family and short-term self interest before serving the public as usual. No one serves the environment, elites or commoners, unless paid to.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Charles Hall highly recommends this work. Read the introduction, etc. now, then read the book. Understanding current events and the future of humanity (which will be a continued unfolding of current events, aka the present we will all die in) and the biosphere may depend on it. The human predicament is best viewed as a 'Crisis of Civilization', of complex society and the biosphere, and not as a 'Clash of Civilizations' where the challenge is to make sure 'my' civilization wins, as that view will ensure the dissolution of all. Continued politics as usual may have global collapse of complex society/economy as outcome, as usual, for reasons other than exceeding biophysical limits, as usual. We need to tell better (systems science based) stories. If 'saving the world' seems futile, perhaps seeking a global solution is futile, but creating pockets of sustainability, of functional society, is not and long-term will be enough. Dysfunctional systems will pass away, and billions with them. If replaced by functional, evolving ones where the people understand the world system and live with it properly, then that is the solution, though the transition will seem lamentable to those living through it.
When a 'teachable moment' comes, enough storytelling intelligentsia types will have to remember that some few (thank you Ahmed, Hall, et al.) 'had told us so' and then actually listen to those who listen to Nature instead of the collective prattle of the merely eloquent (themselves). The fundamental failure of media (especially social) and the educational system (formal and informal) to mitigate the 'whole systems knowledge deficit' that is pervasive (our collective inability to think in systems, and our failure to question epistemological assumptions, e.g. our belief in belief), is our existential threat that enables BAU (Business-As-Usual).
Introduction:
Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has experienced an unprecedented outbreak of social protest in every major continent. Beginning with the Occupy Movement in the US and Western Europe, and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil unrest has continued to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. In some regions, civil unrest has coalesced into the collapse of incumbent governments or even the eruption of a prolonged state of internecine warfare, as is happening in Iraq-Syria and Ukraine-Crimea. To what extent is this apparent heightening of geopolitical instability new?
Increasing public dissatisfaction with government is correlated with continuing government difficulties in meeting public expectations. Yet while policymakers and media observers have raced to keep up with events, they have largely missed the deeper cause of this new age of unrest—the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and the multiplying consequences for economic growth, industrial food production, and the Earth’s climate stability.
Contrary to widely reported claims across mainstream media of a new era of prosperity heralded by the US-led shale oil and gas boom, the proliferation of contemporary climate, food and economic crises have at their root a single common denominator: the fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization.
This inevitable energy transition away from high quality fossil fuels, to lower quality, more expensive energy forms—which will be completed well before the close of the century, and quite possibly much earlier—will force a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. The twenty-first century, in this context, is a pivotal one for humanity as industrial civilization pivots through a process of systemic transition, driven by the complex interplay between human societies and biophysical realities.
Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. This, in return, cannot be achieved without breaking the stranglehold of conventional models achieved through the hegemony of establishment narratives—dominated by fossil fuel interests and the banality of the mainstream media news cycle. [Naturocracy for the 21st century, as something like technocracy circa early 1930s, but based on systems science, is alternative to establishment narratives.]
The central thesis of this study is that the escalation of social protest and political instability around the world is causally related to the unstoppable thermodynamics of global hydrocarbon energy decline and its interconnected and economic consequences. It offers, in this sense, a biophysical approach to international relations, and argues that geopolitics remains fundamentally embedded in biophysical processes. This is not to reduce geopolitics to the biophysical—far from it—but to recognize that the dynamics of the geopolitical cannot be dislocated from the dynamics of the biophysical, and that biophysical processes are increasingly driving geopolitical instability to a degree unrecognized by policymakers, the media, as well as social and natural scientists [not to mention 99+% of the public].
Hydrocarbon energy decline can be understood as consisting of the following two intertwined processes: the inexorable reduction in industrial civilization’s production of net energy from hydrocarbon sources (fossil fuels) over the last decades; the acceleration of hydrocarbon energy production to attempt to make-up for this decline and sustain economic growth.
This process has in turn had two major consequences, namely: climate change and the corresponding destabilization of the Earth System due to the increasing quantity of greenhouse gas emissions due to hydrocarbon energy dependence; and the permanent slowdown of global economic growth due to the increasing costs of energy production relative to GDP. Climate and economic crises are, in turn, acting as amplifying feedbacks on the process of hydrocarbon energy decline, and in themselves, acting synergistically to undermine global industrial food production while simultaneously impinging on socio-political stability and human well-being.
While conventional policy and media approaches to socio-political instability tend to focus almost purely on ‘surface’ social systems—geopolitical competition, political corruption, economic mismanagement, ideological extremism, and so on—the deeper biophysical systemic drivers of instability are largely ignored or misunderstood. As such, missing from the vast bulk of conventional wisdom on escalating socio-political instability around the world is the crucial recognition of its central cause in a systemic process of hydrocarbon energy decline and concomitant civilizational transition toward an inevitable post-carbon future.
Currently, climate change is rightly and consensually recognized by the scientific community, and has been accepted at least in principle by policymakers as a reality requiring an urgent collective response from human societies. However, despite growing recognition of the interconnected nature of these crises—illustrated through concepts such as the food-water-energy nexus—there remains a fundamental failure in the conceptualization of their interconnected nature in terms of the relationship between human science and the biophysical environment, and relatedly, the relationship between human politics and the biophysical environment [emphasis added].
This root failure of conceptualization is perhaps the most significant factor focusing on the role of human agency in driving the current convergence of global crises. The failure is compounded by the necessarily compartmentalized nature of scientific speculation, which has produced a vast volume of information, but little in the way of epistemological mechanisms to integrate that into knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. It is further compounded by the transmission of incorrect conceptual diagnoses of global crises through the global mainstream media. The perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamic of global crises has created a situation in which as such crises accelerate, the human species as a whole is disempowered from being able to correctly understand these crises and their symptoms, and thus unable to solve them [added].
Yet to diagnose the intensifying perfect storm of climate, energy, and economic crises requires a fundamental reconceptualization of their true nature as symptoms of an overall civilizational system which, increasingly, cannot be sustained by the biophysical environment.
This study offers an empirically-grounded social scientific theoretical framework for developing a holistic approach to this perfect storm through the lens of what this author has called the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ (as opposed to a ‘clash of civilizations’ [post-globalization we live in a global empire, aka civilization]). My approach is not to create yet another new statistical model to add to the plethora of models that exist, but to strike at a deeper lacuna within the discipline of international relations—to create the beginnings of an accurate, integrated transdisciplinary theoretical basis for such modeling, derived from a holistic analysis of the relevant empirical data.
The study is divided into two main sections. The first consists of a general framework of the broad crisis that this author considers to be integral to the biophysical processes driving geopolitical instability today. The second consists of a series of case studies which provide specific empirical data supporting and building on this general framework to test how and whether they are indeed acting out on local, national and regional levels as in my hypothesis. This opening section begins by building on this author’s previous work on the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ as an overarching analytical framework for the integrated examination of global climate, energy, food, economic and socio-political crises (Ahmed 2010, 2011). This is achieved by establishing the inherent systemic interconnections between these crises on a global macro-level scale. This monograph then proceeds to explore how the general framework of biophysical factors aka the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ plays out at a micro-level within specific countries in key regions—the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South Asia and North America. This examination takes us to the crux of my argument and provides specific evidence that the biophysical processes discussed more generally in the opening are, in fact, already having concrete geopolitical impacts accelerating the destabilization of human societies across the world, in a manner that can now be detected through a holistic and interdisciplinary empirical analysis. This not only provides surprising empirical vindication for our hypothesis that biophysical processes are playing an integral causal role in the intensification of political and geopolitical disruption on a global scale, it also provides us a basis to explore some tentative business-as-usual (BAU) forecasts.
This permits further exploration of the intersection between the thermodynamics of escalating hydrocarbon energy decline and the accelerating disruption of global industrial civilization. As prevailing social, political and economic structures become increasingly dysfunctional against the strain of hydrocarbon energy decline, the resulting rupture manifests in an increasing frequency of social protest and violent conflict.
Part of this study, then, identifies how conventional governmental, industry and media narratives of these crises for the most part fail to accurately understand them, not just due to a lack of holistic-systemic frameworks for examining these crises as independent—but due to a fundamental epistemological failure that has allowed mythological ‘theories’ of human progress in the form of neoclassical and neoliberal economics to become entrenched as the dominant cognitive paradigm.
The most powerful hegemonic component of this ideological capture of human collective cognition occurs through the global institutions associated with the mainstream media. The principle problem here is a highly compromised ownership and editorial structure that ties media outlets to the very prevailing structures of fossil fuel-centric power complicit in global crisis acceleration. The preponderance of fossil fuel-centric interests in conventional media ownership has led to consistently inaccurate reporting on energy issues, and their relationships with economic, food and climate crises, as well as specific conflicts.
Yet to some extent, and compounding the insular ideological approach of powerful government, industry and media institutions, there has been a similar failure from amongst experts in different fields of these crises, who have been unable to develop theoretical, conceptual and empirical frameworks to view their specialized data in its inherent interconnections with data from other fields. In other words, a lack of generalized systems training in our schools [added]. Due to this problem, we are beginning to grasp only recently the extent to which geopolitical ruptures that overwhelm the news of the day exacerbated by a convergence of crises studied largely separately in these disparate fields. There is, therefore, little understanding of how energy and resource depletion tangibly impact the political economies of different societies, and how these processes interact with the local impacts of global processes like climate change.
This has led to a knowledge deficit—specifically, a whole systems knowledge deficit [emphasis not added] comprising a paucity of reliable, actionable knowledge in the mainstream, exacerbating a sense of public apathy and confusion, and cementing a policy making impasse among political leaders who remain subject to a fatal combination of intensive fossil fuel lobbying and media misinformation.
Among the most critical solutions to the ‘Crisis of Civilization’, then, is a concerted grassroots mobilization to rectify the whole systems knowledge deficit. This could be achieved in many different ways—whether through responsible journalism or more informed policy formulation based on the effective communication of interdisciplinary scientific research—but the end goal is the same: mass public education with a view to catalyze social action that is systematically transformative [assuming political solutions are possible]. Without addressing the knowledge deficit [among the intelligentsia or public?], the self-reinforcing cycle of amplifying crisis feedbacks cannot be overturned.
It is hoped that this study can begin contributing to addressing the whole systems knowledge deficit by firstly, establishing a scientifically-grounded systems theory framework for integrating data from different fields for the study of international politics; secondly, beginning the process of recognizing major geopolitical ruptures in the context of systemic crises driven by biophysical processes; thirdly, outlining the basis for a major, urgent new transdisciplinary research program bringing together the natural and social sciences to develop a holistic theoretical-empirical model of global crisis convergence; which in turn can pave the way for a fourth major, urgent new transdisciplinary action-research program on mitigating the impact of global crisis convergence, while transitioning human civilization to new more viable political economic structures that subsist in parity with their biophysical contexts [i.e. naturocracy].
Contents
1. Introduction
See above.
2. The Crisis of Civilization as an Analytical Framework
2.1 The Human-Environment System as a Complex Adaptive System
The idea of a 'Crisis of Civilization' pivots around the goal of understanding human activity as a whole. It is premised on the fact that as a single biological species, human beings share common individual and social characteristics through which they interact with each other, with other species, and with the biophysical environment.
Global civilization constitutes the full mechanism of social organization by which this nexus of activities and interactions operates.
I use a 'Crisis of Civilization' framework to examine multiple, seemingly disparate global and local crises. This does not obviate the specific and distinctive dynamics of those crises, but permits examination of how these crises interrelate with one another in the context of the overarching global system of which they are a part.
The theorization of human civilization as a 'complex adaptive system' derives from the application of complex systems theory as developed in relation to biophysical systems and ecosystems. A rich and dense literature demonstrates that complex systems are found across the natural sciences in physics, chemistry, and biology....
A systems approach thus views particular crises and associated huan activities as discrete subsystems, which are, nevertheless, inherently interconnected as subsystems in an emergent human-environment system, captured through the concept of a world-scale human civilization.... [that] permits discernment of a bird's-eye perspective of overall civilizational structures and their emergent direction.... In particular, this allows analysis of human civilization to return to a scientific framework defined by the thermodynamics of the fossil fuel system, and the evolution and adaptation of species, bringing in critical insights from the physical and natural sciences that can inform the development of robust historical and sociological theories.2.2 The Energy Metabolism of Human Civilization
Applications of complex systems approaches to social, environmental and economic phenomena have largely neglected the most fundamental factor in the evolution and adaptation of complex systems: energy metabolism....
2.3 The Physics of System Failure
Today, human civilization under late capitalism maintains its increasing distance from thermodynamic equilibrium via the throughput of vast quantities of increasingly depleted fossil fuel reserves, along with other finite and increasingly scarce resources such as metal ores, radionucleotides, rare-earth elements, phosphate fertilizer, arable land, and freshwater....
3. Net Energy Decline
The rate of growth of human civilization's global net energy production for the first time in history began to slow down since the end of the twentieth century..... Global net energy production may have already reached, or else is rapidly approaching, a peak as the rate of growth in energy production declines, and as the quality of traditional mineral sources of energy also declines....
4. Permanent Secular Stagnation
Over the last few centuries, the 'progressive' trajectory of human civilization can be encapsulated in data for energy consumption and GDP.... Thus, the direct correlation between economic growth and the growth of energy consumption is because the former is fundamentally dependent on and enabled by the later....
5. Earth System Disruption
It is sometimes assumed that due to the trajectory of fossil fuel depletion, the world will be able to avoid dangerous climate change simply because we will 'run out' of oil before carbon dioxide emissions reach a tipping point. This, however, is based on an incomplete understanding of the vulnerability of the Earth System to climate disruption....
6. Human System Destabilization
The concept of a 'triple crunch' was first popularized by the New Economics Foundation, focusing on high oil prices, the debt-induced credit crunch, and climate change—however, the analysis centered on the interconnected dynamic of what were ultimately symptoms of crisis, rather than identifying their core causal dynamics. The idea of a 'triple crunch' encompassing energy, climate and food crises must therefore be extended in the recognition, highlighted by the work of New Economics Foundation, of the role of credit—debt-money (the creation of money through the expansion of debt) as a key instrument used to sustain economic growth through the extension of the 'financial system'. While the abundance of cheap fossil fuels played the key role in permitting the expansion of the monetary and financial system—enabling exponential economic growth—from the 1950s onwards, the accelerating reduction in EROI has accompanied an increasing reliance on financialization: the shift from the expansion of money, to the expansion of credit (debt-money). Beginning concertedly in the 1970s, this has been most exemplified in the US Federal Reserve's post-2008 rubber-stamping of quantitative mechanism to offset economic crises and bailout insolvent banks enangered by state expenditures in the form of public spending on infrastructure, education, health care and other forms of critical social investments and public services, while using state power to protect ongoing debt-based profiteering in the corporate-financial sectors....
7. Biophysical Triggers of Crisis Convergence in the Middle East
The conventional narrative of the causes and consequences of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ tends to focus on the idea of a democratic deficit in the region as the primary trigger, but fails to integrate this with a wider vision of the range of factors involved.
It is increasingly recognized that climate change played a major role in establishing conditions of societal vulnerability for the conflicts that followed the Arab Spring. Others argue correctly that the uprisings of the Arab Spring itself were triggered by unprecedented global food price spikes, while still others show that peak oil occurred in Egypt and Syria prior to the uprisings. However, these studies neglect the systemic interconnections across these different factors. They thus fail to offer a truly systemic understanding of these phenomena.
In reality, the string of state failures across the region, and the inexorable swing toward multiple conflicts spurred on by the rise of various Isalmist militant groups, can be traced directly to ESD (Earth System Disruption) phenomena unveiling the local subsystems underpinning state integrity. In short, HSD (Human System Destabilization) in the form of the escalation of political violence has been fueled by ESD driven by interconnected biophysical processes of climate change, energy depletion and food crises....
8. Biophysical Triggers of Crisis Convergence in Africa
The same fundamental ESD processes unfolding in the Middle East are also happening in Africa, with similar deleterious consequences in aggravating the societal potential for violent conflict. Here we examine two distinctive cases; Nigeria in West Africa, and Egypt in North Africa. In both cases, HSD is occurring in the form of the increasing destabilization of the state. This destabilization is being driven by ESD phenomena comprising interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises.
Conventional policy and media narratives focus on short-sighted counter-terrorism responses and other measures to shore-up state power in these countries—essentially a combination of military and financial empowerment designed to expand state-national territorial integrity, by increasing its monopoly in the areas of violence, and advancing its capacity to deliver public goods and services using cheap debt-money via low interest financing.
Yet neither of these responses are capable of enhancing the state’s resilience to ESD—only of enhancing the state’s capacity to react to escalating symptoms of HSD. In doing so, an increasingly militarized response to HSD is incapable of ameliorating HSD—because such radicalized, militarized state responses are themselves forms of political violence that contribute to the escalation of HSD, and tend to elicit further forms of reactionary violence from local publics. Meanwhile, as the fundamental structural causes of escalating ESD remain unchecked, this paves the way for crisis convergence to occur yet again in the near future as ESD processes continue to accelerate with little amelioration....
9. Biophysical Triggers of Crisis Convergence in Asia
Amidst the breakdown of the postwar geopolitical order in the Middle East and Africa, it is often presumed that the future for the ‘Far East’ is rosier. India and China are widely believed to be destined to become the economic powerhouses of the future, and the focus of global economic shift to the East.
Whether or not such a shift takes place in any form, missing from this picture painted by pundits and politicians alike are the impacts of biophysical ESD processes which are already unraveling the Indian and Chinese development trajectories. The combination of energy depletion and climate crises, especially when seen in a global systemic context, have unavoidable ramifications that will within the next two decades bring these economic juggernauts to the brink of systemic state-failure, without a dramatic transformation of the political economies of their energy production and consumption.
While neither India nor China are currently engaged in major internal conflicts that threaten to undermine national state integrity, the backdrop of crisis convergence in the Middle East and Africa suggests that this is likely to be in store in coming decades on a business-as-usual trajectory—although the pathway toward system threshold effects triggering prolonged state-failure in economics that import energy will necessarily be quite different....
10. Biophysical Triggers of Crisis Convergence in the Euro-Atlantic Core
The uncertain fates of India and China raise award questions about developments from Russia, to Europe, to America where energy depletion is either rapidly underway, or imminent within the next decade.
Within Europe, resource depletion has meant that the European Union as a whole has become increasingly dependent on energy imports from Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. Yet exports from these regions will become tighter as major oil producers approach production limits.
Further, geopolitical turmoil that has unfolded in Ukraine provides a compelling indication that such HSD processes are rapidly moving from the periphery of the global system into the core. For the most part, the Euro-Atlantic core—traditionally representing the most powerful sections of the world system—has insulated itself from global crisis convergence impacts by diversifying energy supply sources. However, there is only so much that diversification can achieve when the total energetic and economic quality of global hydrocarbon resource production is declining. In the next decade, the Euro-Atlantic core will be forced to contend with this reality as oil exporters in the periphery of the world system breach their production limits and see their net exports begin to plateau and decline....
11. Conclusions: From Systemic State-Failure to Civilizational Transition
11.1 Global Phase-Shift
The cases of crisis convergence already occurring and examined here provide concrete empirical evidence on the impacts of Earth System Disruption (ESD) in terms of the breakdown of human societies, or Human System Destabilization (HSD). While much of the West has so far avoided the most important aspects of such disruptions, the writing is on the wall that no country can feel completely safe from its potential impacts. Rather than ESD eventually unfolding in some far-flung, catastrophic imaginary future to be pondered purely through abstract models, it is destabilizing the local state-level subsystems of key regions here and now.
Each case study explored here represents the reality of emerging ESD-HSD along with local amplifying feedback processes, where the convergence of energy and environmental crises feeds into, and in turn is fueled by, political and economic crises. Poorer, less developed countries on the periphery of the world system find themselves more politically and economically weaker, and thus more vulnerable to ESD processes which happen to be more pronounced in these regions. As such, biophysical ESD processes have triggered interlinked social, political and economic crises leading to the breakdown of traditional order (HSD). In turn, HSD rapidly breaks down the capacity of local states to respond effectively to the ESD processes triggering HSD in the first place, allowing ESD to continue accelerating. The acceleration of ESD, in turn, establishes a biophysical groundwork for the continued triggering of HSD. This overarching process, in effect, amounts to a local ESD-HSD amplifying feedback loop, in which the intertwined nature of ESD and HSD processes becomes self-reinforcing. Within the last decade, local ESD-HSD amplifying feedback loops have broken out in major countries in every key continent.
Taking a holistic, planetary perspective suggests that local ESD-HSD amplifying feedbacks have already reached a global pandemic scale, even though this pandemic still remains in a nascent state. As crisis convergence accelerates, these ESD-HSD processes, which are already interconnected across the global system in complex ways, will intensify and interlock further. They are, ultimately, symptoms of a wider systemic process: an accelerating phase-shift toward a systemic configuration that is being driven by the global system’s increasing collision with its own biophysical basis.
The intensification of political violence can be seen as a symptom and direct result of this overarching global systemic crisis. The rise in capital in Western militarism as well as Islamist militancy are ‘securitized’ HSD responses to ESD processes that are unraveling the very basis of order as we know it. To be more precise, the intensification of HSD appears, in effect, to be a direct result of the thermodynamics of accelerating energy consumption, depletion and dissipation—which is trending rapidly toward a threshold effect.
The time-scale to reach this global system threshold effect cannot be pinned down, but an important finding of this study is that given the hindsight provided by the cases in the Middle East, it takes about 15 years before a government experiences systemic state-failure from the point at which its energy and economic base begins to decline, relative to climate-induced water and food crises. This in turn suggests that after 2030, both the Euro-Atlantic core, as well as the fast-rising Indo-Chinese periphery, will begin to experience their own symptoms of systemic state-failure.
The cases examined here thus point to a global process of civilizational transition. As a complex adaptive system, human civilization in the twenty-first century finds itself at the early stages of a systemic phase-shift which is already manifesting in local sub-system failures in every major region of the periphery of the global system. As these sub-system failures driven by local ESD-HSD amplifying feedbacks accelerate and converge in turn, they will coalesce and transmit ever more powerfully to the core of the global system. As this occurs and re-occurs, it will reach a system-wide threshold effect resulting in eventual maladaptive global system failure; or it will compel an adaptive response in the form of fundamental systemic transformation.
In this context, it is precisely the acceleration of global system failure that paves the way for the possibility of fundamental systemic transformation, and the emergence of a new phase-shift in the global system [e.g. Federation/naturocracy]. Far from representing the end of the human species, these processes represent the inevitable demise of the historically-specific global systemic configuration in the form of neoliberal finance capitalism as it transitions into a new era dominated by information technologies. Well before 2050, this study suggests, systemic state-failure will have given way to the irreversible demise of neoliberal finance capitalism as we know it.
Human civilization is in the midst of a global transition to a completely new system which is being forged from the ashes of the old. Yet the contours of this new system remain very much subject to our choices today. If the forces of systemic failure overwhelm us, then the new systemic configuration is likely to represent a maladaptive collapse in civilizational complexity. Yet even within such a maladaptive response—which arguably is well-underway as these cases show—there remains a capacity for agents within the global system to generate adaptive responses that, through the power of transformational information flows, hold the potential to enhance collective consciousness. The very breakdown of the prevailing system heralds the potential for long-term post-breakdown systemic transformation.11.2 Clean Energy and Environmental Restoration
Due to the centrality of fossil fuels to the dysfunctional nature of our global systemic predicament, it is obvious that an integral component of a successful transition to a new, healthier and more sustainable civilizational phase-shift must involve a concerted shift away from fossil fuels. This requires on the one hand an accelerating investment in cleaner, alternative energy technologies that are renewable. But it also requires a reduction in energy consumption that recognizes that the neoclassical ideology of endless growth that animates conventional economic thinking must be rejected.
That further requires a level of environmental consciousness that looks to the long-term in a serious way. It is quite possible that a worst-case business-as-usual scenario for climate change, for instance, does indeed transpire. Yet this is no reason to resort to a fatalistic response. On the contrary, it requires pushing forward the vision for systemic transformation of the human species many centuries into the future, to a point when the planet is able to return to some form of equilibrium. Whatever that future equilibrium looks like, whatever levels of existence are possible in such a context, human societies will require principles and modes of organization very different to what is taken for granted today. The thinking and technologies for the future will still need to be planted.
In the meantime, the evidence discussed here demonstrates that substantive renewable energy investments are not merely a societal and economic dividend, but constitute one of the most important long-term sources of resilience from the destabilizing potential of system failure. Yet renewables are not a panacea. They do not provide the potential for unlimited material production and consumption that is integral to capitalism as we know it, and to transition to them rapidly still requires vast levels of investment for which the political will does not presently exist. However, as production costs of renewables continue to drop even as their technological efficiency increases, so will the potential for grassroots communities to rally around such technologies. To that extent, they may also help catalyze wider necessary political and economic structural transformations.
In short, this analysis suggests that rapid sustainable development of a global 100% renewable energy system is among the most urgent issues for policy makers this century. The technical and logistical potential for this exists, even if it is incommensurate with an endless growth economic model. In fact, such a transition is possible within 20-30 years using less than 40% of proven reserves of conventional oil. (Schwartzman, David and Peter Schwartzman. 2013. A Rapid Solar Transition is not only Possible, it is Imperative! African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development 5(4): 297-303. doi:10.1080/20421338.2013.809260.)[The book's biography contains over two hundred references. I have omitted all except in this section as I find these questionable: Emergy Yield Ratios Matter.] Simultaneously, and equally urgent, is a rapid shift toward forms of food and water production and distribution which are completely independent from fossil fuels. Low intensity organic agriculture which is less water intensive and free of fertilizers and pesticides can potentially be scaled up to provide sufficient calories to feed the whole human population as it eats today (Badgley, Catherine, and Ivette Perfecto. 2007. Can Organic Agriculture Feed the World? Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22(2): 80-85.). Researchers at Washington State University have more recently found that a mix of non-conventional agricultural methods—organic, agroforestry, integrated farming, conservation agriculture, mixed crop/livestock among others—could feed the world, weaning the global food system of fossil fuel dependence, and producing food even in severe drought conditions. There is also a dire need to reduce food waste—as much as 30-40% of all food produced globally is wasted, demonstrating the potential for wasted food in overconsuming nations to be redistributed for consumption by poorer and hungrier populations. (Reganold, John P., and Jonathan M. Wachter. 2016. Organic Agriculture in the Twenty-First Century. Nature Plants 2(2): 15221. doi:10.1038/nplants.2015.221.)
[I'm an agronomist by training and will presume to comment starting with the Badgely and Perfercto question of whether organic agriculture can feed the world. Of course it can and will (after rapid depopulation) when there are no fossil fuel inputs into the agroecosystem. For example, expect corn yields to decline seven to ten fold and to not plant the same field in corn more than one to three times every decade or three. So how many hectares will be farmed and at what level of productivity/ha will global agriculture be compared to current industrial agriculture that has been figuring out how to turn fossil fuel into food for nearly a century? The current organic agriculture production system is specialized to serve a niche market of consumers who can and prefer to pay for the increased production costs. Currently only agrochemical fertilizers and biocides are excluded, which results in organic yields of individual crops that are on average 80% of conventional yields with evidence that the gap would likely increase if organic production were upscaled (a meta-data analysis of 362 studies, but another meta-analysis of 205 comparisons found only a 9 percent decrease on average; Nature found a 5 percent gap for some crops down to a 34 percent (76% of conventional or about 80% average) lower organic methods yield 'when the conventional and organic systems are most comparable'), so about 80% compared to straight out no-inputs-spared conventional agriculture that currently 'feeds the world'. Sources such as the Rodale Institute offer conclusion-driven research results that if correct do not scale up. "Energy blind" research (as the Odums note) is used to support the conclusion that organic agriculture produces as much or more than conventional poison-based agriculture. In a world without fossil fuel inputs into the agroecological food production systems will output be one fifth or one fifteenth what it is today? I don't know, but one tenth may be optimistic.]
[Apart from industrial (e.g. Haber nitrogen or mined) fertilizers and biocides, 'organic' farming allows all other direct and indirect fossil fuel inputs, which are not viewed as toxins, to be used to be turned into food. Without fossil-fuel inputs, vast areas will not be farmable and production per hectare in such dryland farming areas as allow agriculture will not be productive each year as green manure crops and fallow years ranging from 1 to 50 years will be required for sustainable production (e.g. swidden with maybe a 15-25 year fallow period, land in flood plains with annual flooding, rice paddy production with 'night soil' and animal manure inputs in water). In the past eighty years the increase in the rate of food production (of turning fossil fuel into food) has been greater than population growth, which Malthus failed to foresee. The Ehrlichs (the ag experts they consulted) failed in 1968 to foresee the Green Revolution which selected cultivars that could thrive in the environment that fossil-fueled industrial agriculture could create (for a time). Without industrial inputs, the Green Revolution crops will not be used and heirloom crops will, so in areas that currently produce over 200 bushels of corn/maize, good farmers may again get 25 bushels average yield on non-fallowed rain irrigated land, or where alternative energy is available it can be turned into food, but not anywhere near on the scale that fossil fuels allowed for a time, and electricity is of higher transformity, too high to be turned into food, as there may be too little to support information technology). To seek out the condition now that will come anyway, rapidly degrow the population via managed descent. Create pockets of sustainability within which the fertility rate is dramatically reduced initially, regions where individuals with foresight intelligence can self-select into. See Watershed Design Principles and Alternative Farming and Design for a Viable Civilization.]
11.3 Circular Economy and Post-Capitalism
Concepts of the ‘circular economy’--involving a fundamental reorganization of the way societies produce, manage and consume resources through wide-scale practices of recycling across production and consumption chains—bear considerable importance to this sort of vision. The circular economy brings to the fore the necessity of reusing and recycling raw materials to the most efficient extent possible to support the sustainability of production and consumption chains relative to increasingly depleted mineral ores and higher energy costs for their extraction, refining and input into manufacturing. Numerous companies are taking the concept seriously in the recognition of current and looming environmental risks to their supply chains, but human civilization must begin to do so in the wider context of a recognition that the animating ideology of the current phase-shift of civilization is deeply misguided.
A major report to the Club of Rome tracking the depletion of the planet’s mineral ores finds that by the end of this century, higher quality ores critical to the growth of industrial civilization as we know it will be largely depleted. But the report shows that a ‘circular economy’ approach has strong potential to allow existing minerals to be recycled with minimum losses and a high degree of efficiency sufficient to maintain a high technological society in, however, a new post-capitalist economic context.
The ESD-HSD amplifying feedbacks discussed in this study demonstrate that the twenty-first century is rapidly transitioning to a crisis convergence threshold heralding the inevitable demise of the endless growth model of neoliberal finance capitalism that currently animates industrial civilization as we know it. This points to the urgency of adaptation to prepare for the emergence of a new evolutionary phase-shift in the form of post-capitalism—a concept whose unspecified nature is important precisely because it opens up new possibilities for economic organization which are not limited by failures of prevailing economic orthodoxy. The rejection of that orthodoxy as limited springs from the recognition that the doctrine of unlimited economic growth is nothing less than a fundamental violation of the laws of physics. In short, is the stuff of cranks—yet it is nevertheless the ideology that informs policy makers and pundits alike. Post-capitalism, on the other hand, seeks to ground itself in harmony with the biophysical environment, not by rejecting the ideals of human prosperity and well-being, but by decoupling them from the fetish for endless material growth.
That in turn paves the way, potentially, for a renewed sense of human value and purpose beyond the confines of material production and consumption, rejuvenated by a consciousness of humanity’s embeddedness in its environment. The magical thinking of endless growth must make way for a post-materialist ethic of human interconnectedness with itself and its biophysical context.
Groundbreaking economic work on this theme of ‘prosperity without growth’ has been forthcoming from several quarters, and provides mounting evidence that the endless growth model of economics has not just failed to deliver meaningful prosperity to the world’s poorest, but is incapable of doing so as it continues to generate inequality, environmental destruction, and to eventually undermine its very own basis. This body of work also demonstrates that meaningful prosperity in the sense of providing for human needs and well-being in high technology societies remains possible in a fundamentally re-organized post-capitalist economy. In this framework, human progress can continue but within a new paradigm in which limited material development is mobilized to meet fundamental human needs through extension relations instead of market relations, a deepening of democracy, enhancing ecosystems, and more equal distribution of wealth. Inevitably, therefore, post-capitalism will be incommensurate with the features of endless growth associated with industrial forms of capitalism: namely continuously growing material throughput driven by evergrowing consumption by unrestrained population growth.
Instead, the unsustainable nature of contemporary capitalism opens up the urgency of working toward a new post-capitalist era built on the following components: regulation of market mechanisms and corporate activities; support for social enterprises organized as community cooperatives; democratic money creation processes, including community currencies in place of debt-based fractional reserve banking; communities reclaiming the commons, especially in the sense of communal land stewardship systems; redistribution of income and capital assets; a diversity of production scales and modes, including small-scale, subsistence and self-employment to widen economic democracy.
Such a vision may, in the current context, appear impossibly utopian. By 2030, and even more so by 2050—as the manifestations of global capitalism’s self-catabolic trajectory become more obvious—it will appear increasingly realistic.11.4 Information Revolution and Social Liberation
The political will for an emergency effort to effect such a transition to post-carbon, post-capitalist civilizational forms does not yet exist. Part of the reason for this is the whole systems knowledge deficit. Despite an abundance of information, there is a paucity of actionable knowledge which translates this information into a holistic understanding of the nature of the current global phase-shift and its terminal crisis trajectory for all relevant stakeholders. While much of the human population has been denied access to such information, and thus actionable knowledge, vested interests in the global fossil fuel and agribusiness system are actively attempting to control information flows to continue to deny full understanding in order to perpetuate their own power and privilege. The only conceivable pathway out of this impasse, however difficult or unlikely it may appear, is to break the stranglehold of information control by disseminating knowledge on both the causes and potential solutions to global crises.
In the absence of accurate interpretations of the information we have—actionable knowledge—human civilization collectively is bound to pursue a dysfunctional maladaptive path toward protracted global system failure. Yet the current phase-shift of neoliberal finance capitalism has also, for the first time in human history, generated an opportunity through the information technology revolution for vast numbers of people from all around the world to become connected and informed through the internet [and misinformed/disinformed]. The impacts of this are already palpable [the post-truth media/narrative], in the sense that larger numbers of educated citizens than ever before around the world are aware of the risks of various global crises from climate change to economic inequality. However, there is very little in the way of a holistic understanding of the biophysical triggers from these crises, their fundamental interconnections, as well as their aggravating causes in the present structure of human civilization—a matter in which the vast majority of the global population remains in deep denial.
Meanwhile, the opportunity of the internet is being rapidly co-opted by Global Media-Industrial Complex (GMIC). Despite this, the inherently decentralized dynamic of the internet means that with every effort of top-down cooptation, the potential for bottom-up innovation increases [naturocracy]. This means that perhaps the most important imperative is to use the information revolution to intervene in and compete with the inaccurate information flows of the GMIC, by generating new more accurate networks of communication based on transdisciplinary knowledge which is, most importantly, translated into user-friendly multimedia information widely disseminated and accessible by the general public in every continent [e.g. isbpe.org though no longer online]. This actionable knowledge must, in holistic fashion, encompass both the diagnosis of the global problem, as well as the prognosis in the form of exploratory visions and practical actions for active participation in civilizational transition to an inevitable post-carbon future.
The systemic target for such counter-information dissemination, moreover, is eminently achievable. Social science research has demonstrated that the tipping point for minority opinions to become mainstream, majority opinion is 10% of the given population. The challenge in the context of global system change is that this requires not simply 10% of a given population being actionably convinced of only one component of the crisis—such as climate change: that 10% must be convinced of the reality and solution to all these components, simultaneously, and systemically.
This is, of course, a major challenge, but underscores that any meaningful strategy to generate widespread social action in support of a phase-shift toward systemic transformation must reach 10% of a given population, and be grounded in holistic-systemic diagnosis and prognosis.
By coupling an information strategy targeting 10% of a given population with concrete actions to generate forms of change that are meaningful for individuals and communities, tackling the knowledge deficit can simultaneously contribute to establishing the local groundwork for an adaptive systemic response. This can help build local resilience to local sub-system failures, while also pushing back against the growing global ESD-HSD pandemic, and potentially even facilitating the pandemic to pave the way for renewed adaptive responses.11.5 A New Action-Research Agenda
These findings establish the urgency of a transdisciplinary action-research agenda across the natural and social sciences. Such a new program must focus on excavating and integrating the dynamics of sub-system failure across multiple domains from climate, to energy, to economies, to explore the tangible, real-world actualities of how such processes are playing out today.
However, this call for a new action-research agenda comes with caveats. This study highlights the pitfalls of predictive modeling as the prime focus of scientific research on global crises and their potential to generate political violence. For the most part, not a single one of the cases discussed here was ever modeled or predicted by any scientist or scholar. Due to the sheer complexity of the phenomena under examination, it is unlikely that any single model alone would be capable of realistically capturing all their features in a way that would produce a meaningful model-run of their crisis-trajectories. This is particularly important to understand because of the one critical factor that no model can fully capture—human agency. A full and accurate model of the scope for human agency’s input into various crisis-trajectories would require a vast amount of historical, sociological, geopolitical, economic and cultural data, most of which could never be quantified. It is for this reason that a renewed effort must be made for modelers and theoreticians to come together in integrating their work to create more robust paradigms by which to understand human societies.
The most obvious port of call for funding for this new action-research agenda includes national governments, local authorities, and intergovernmental institutions, many of which have departments with some interests in funding such issues. Military, intelligence, and security agencies with a direct interest in developing intelligence to assess contemporary challenges and forecast future events and scenarios should be at the forefront of such funding in order to augment and rapidly rectify their existing analytical capabilities. Given the scale and complexity of the issues, these crises have already overwhelmed their abilities to make sense of them enough to properly inform viable national and international security policies. Emerging post-carbon, post-capitalist industries, such as the renewable energy sector may also be quick to recognize the importance of such an action-research program.
This study has focused on elaborating and empirically-formed theoretical framework for such research, which suggests several avenues for further work and scholarly-practitioner collaboration. My focus here has been on demonstrating the biophysical basis of contemporary geopolitical chaos in every major region of the world. This is not to reduce geopolitical conflict purely to biophysical triggers, but to recognize that the geopolitical—like the social and economic—remains indelibly embedded in the biophysical. The failure to understand this, in turn, remains chiefly responsible for the impotence with which policymakers approach accelerating geopolitical crises. Further research is required to draw on multiple political, social science and economic theories to develop the theoretical contours of their framework. Equally, we have identified a theoretical basis for more integrated transdisciplinary statistical modeling that integrates data across traditionally separate domains. However, neither of these avenues can succeed if they proceed separately. For models to be useful and generate real predictive and/or explanatory value, they must be grounded in rigorous conceptual and theoretical architectures that are reflective of the real world. And for theories to actually reflect the real world, they must draw on valid empirical data.
This new approach must also be tied to practical actions aimed at generating system change: whether that means creating new cultures of collaboration to disseminate research to a wider audience, or tying scholarship to real world initiatives involving communities engaged in various forms of system change, or seeking to influence policy by engaging with relevant institutions—research must be action-oriented.
Or (https://www.academia.edu/34816514/Failing_States_Collapsing_Systems_BioPhysical_Triggers_of_Political_Violence_SPRINGER_BRIEFS_IN_ENERGY_ - read it here in full for free)
SUBNOTE TO FILE 5/18/23
In 2019 Ahmed seemed to be a journalist of interest as he seemed systems literate, able to think in systems. For a year or so I was a paying supporter at the Jedi level. His offerings became increasingly biased as he became a public intellectual. He has since transitioned to serving special interest social narratives and I no longer read his offerings.
