Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability(royalsocietypublishing.org)
royalsocietypublishing.org
Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0261
31 comments
Hypothesizing doom is always easy, no need to feel too bad about it.
Measuring doom is hard, and there are an awful lot of people trying to work out exactly how bad things are and if they can be salvaged. No need to be too flippant about it.
I have been through so many doom cycles that by now I put far more value into solutions than worry. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, but not often enough.
Where climate change is concerned, there's not a cycle, just a massive decline. The problems and solutions have been known since the 1970s.
Here's an example: a 1977 report detailing how the UK could satisfy its energy needs with no (or considerably less) oil[0]. That's the kind of solution (wind, solar, insulation, heat pumps) which would've solved the crisis we're facing now _years_ ago and robbed the petrostates of their power. Again, this is not a cycle: it is a trajectory. We know the solutions, as well as the problems.
[0] https://cat.org.uk/download/26058/
Here's an example: a 1977 report detailing how the UK could satisfy its energy needs with no (or considerably less) oil[0]. That's the kind of solution (wind, solar, insulation, heat pumps) which would've solved the crisis we're facing now _years_ ago and robbed the petrostates of their power. Again, this is not a cycle: it is a trajectory. We know the solutions, as well as the problems.
[0] https://cat.org.uk/download/26058/
I'd say we are coming off peak doom there currently. We even had weird doom by ice age in between, so not at all a constant set of doom.
The idea is that the effects of climate change were much stronger than the effects that were causing the potential ice age. Kind of like a small car on a train track, it may have slowed the advance but did not stop the momentum.
Sorry, I just meant to point at the short-lived and somewhat hilarious doom news cycle of an impending ice age some decades back.
That only existed in popsci, there was never a majority consensus about a coming ice age among climate scientists.
They seem to define Trap as "situation with high risk of hard-to-reverse lock-ins and growing risks of negative impacts on human well-being"
Here's the list:
global traps
1. simplification - increasing specialization produces simplified sub-systems that are vulnerable to shocks
2. growth-for-growth - institutional lock-ins drive pursuit of growth at the cost of well-being
3. overshoot - continued material growth leads to overshoot of Earth system tipping points
4. division - unstable selection for global human cooperation increases risk of international conflict
5. contagion - global connectivity increases the risk of large-scale contagion, e.g. of infectious diseases
technology traps
6. infrastructure lock-in - complex material infrastructure becomes maladaptive, e.g. owing to sunk costs
7. chemical pollution - capacity to produce complex or persistent compounds that can cause long-term harm to humans and ecosystems
8. existential technology - technological arms-races drive the evolution of existential technology, such as weapons of mass destruction
9. technological autonomy - reliance on automation can backfire if systems become misaligned to human needs
10. dis- and misinformation - digitalization can amplify spread of mis- and disinformation e.g. destabilizing democracies
structural traps
11. short-termism - favour of short-term over long-term benefits reinforces other traps and promotes conflict
12. overconsumption - separation of production and consumption facilitates overconsumption
13. biosphere disconnect - separation of human settlements and ecosystems reduces awareness about their benefits
14. local social capital loss - digitalization can lead to loss of local social capital through reduced interaction and echo chambers
Here's the list:
global traps
1. simplification - increasing specialization produces simplified sub-systems that are vulnerable to shocks
2. growth-for-growth - institutional lock-ins drive pursuit of growth at the cost of well-being
3. overshoot - continued material growth leads to overshoot of Earth system tipping points
4. division - unstable selection for global human cooperation increases risk of international conflict
5. contagion - global connectivity increases the risk of large-scale contagion, e.g. of infectious diseases
technology traps
6. infrastructure lock-in - complex material infrastructure becomes maladaptive, e.g. owing to sunk costs
7. chemical pollution - capacity to produce complex or persistent compounds that can cause long-term harm to humans and ecosystems
8. existential technology - technological arms-races drive the evolution of existential technology, such as weapons of mass destruction
9. technological autonomy - reliance on automation can backfire if systems become misaligned to human needs
10. dis- and misinformation - digitalization can amplify spread of mis- and disinformation e.g. destabilizing democracies
structural traps
11. short-termism - favour of short-term over long-term benefits reinforces other traps and promotes conflict
12. overconsumption - separation of production and consumption facilitates overconsumption
13. biosphere disconnect - separation of human settlements and ecosystems reduces awareness about their benefits
14. local social capital loss - digitalization can lead to loss of local social capital through reduced interaction and echo chambers
> 9. technological autonomy - reliance on automation can backfire if systems become misaligned to human needs
Our economical system is already by and large autonomous and misaligned to our needs, there are humans in the loop but they view the world through symbols. I'm not sure a radically more autonomous technological agent would make any difference...
Our economical system is already by and large autonomous and misaligned to our needs, there are humans in the loop but they view the world through symbols. I'm not sure a radically more autonomous technological agent would make any difference...
[deleted]
I find that humans struggle to stack more than some limit of abstractions around those symbols through which they view the world. This necessarily limits the breadth of their understanding. I hope that automated systems can be engineered to better handle deep dependency chains of abstractions to better sort out complicated topics.
The elephant in the room is that people do not care about the continued survival of humanity
Can we summarize by saying the human animal also has a boom-bust cycle in growth, overpopulating an area, running out of resources, and dying off?
Maybe a big difference with other species is that we know about it, we have been talking about it for decades, we know what we need to do to minimize the casualties (use less energy, do less with less), and instead of working on improving the situation, we actively work on making it worse.
We read about those issues in the morning, complain about them making us anxious, and proceed to get excited about 5G, AI and SpaceX in the afternoon.
We read about those issues in the morning, complain about them making us anxious, and proceed to get excited about 5G, AI and SpaceX in the afternoon.
If there's 1 thing I've learned from browsing through papers such as this one over the last few years:
It's the social / political aspects that are THE stumbling block for effective action. Not technical, logistical or even economic ones.
Read: technology won't get us out of this "polycrisis". Nor is it the #1 cause or enabler.
It's people. Their priorities, ethics, behaviour & how groups of people interact. Given the history of that, it's kinda hard to be optimistic about humanity's future imho.
It's the social / political aspects that are THE stumbling block for effective action. Not technical, logistical or even economic ones.
Read: technology won't get us out of this "polycrisis". Nor is it the #1 cause or enabler.
It's people. Their priorities, ethics, behaviour & how groups of people interact. Given the history of that, it's kinda hard to be optimistic about humanity's future imho.
Actually, technology is the thing that gets us out of crises.
Everybody was talking about starvation and lack of food. However, the green revolution in agriculture ended up being able to produce massive amounts of food.
People have been talking about the population explosion. However, reliable birth control emerged as a technology that has pretty much solved the problem as more and more women have access to it.
If we mitigate climate change, it won’t be from people decided to conserve and use less, but due to the masssive scaling of mostly solar energy that can produce carbon free energy cheaply.
I would argue that technology is the driver and not social factors. Human nature probably hasn’t changed very much. Human environment, due to technology has changed massively.
Everybody was talking about starvation and lack of food. However, the green revolution in agriculture ended up being able to produce massive amounts of food.
People have been talking about the population explosion. However, reliable birth control emerged as a technology that has pretty much solved the problem as more and more women have access to it.
If we mitigate climate change, it won’t be from people decided to conserve and use less, but due to the masssive scaling of mostly solar energy that can produce carbon free energy cheaply.
I would argue that technology is the driver and not social factors. Human nature probably hasn’t changed very much. Human environment, due to technology has changed massively.
> Everybody was talking about starvation and lack of food.
Source? My understanding is that foragers did not have more starvation than that.
> People have been talking about the population explosion.
Which is a direct cause of the technological improvements that allow us to grow our population by pushing the limits of our environment. Foragers did not grow that much because it was not possible. Turns out they were not destroying their environment, we are.
> If we mitigate climate change, it won’t be from people decided to conserve and use less, but due to the masssive scaling of mostly solar energy that can produce carbon free energy cheaply.
That's a common misconception. Turns out electricity makes for ~20% of our energy consumption, and solar energy is very, very far from being a viable solution for those 20%. People who love solar energy tend to extrapolate from its current grow, though it is completely marginal and backed by fossil fuels: try to produce solar energy "from scratch" (including mining the material you need to build them, transporting them, etc) without fossil fuels: we don't know how to do that today. Not even mentioning that we can't store the solar energy produced during the winter to be used during the summer, and we can't control the amount of sun we get. Take Germany as an example: the developed wind and solar energy a ton, and to compensate for when there is no wind and no sun... they expended their coal mines.
Solar energy is a nice marginal tool to use where it makes sense, but it does not scale, and therefore it is not a solution. We need nuclear plants, because we know how to do it (again: we don't know how to make solar energy work at that scale). Now that's the "easy" part (assuming you manage to convince people about nuclear fission).
The hard part is the 80% that currently relies on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have to go away (because climate change) and will go away (because they are not unlimited and we are reaching the production peaks). How do you replace them? How do you power your supertankers that carry your solar cells from China to wherever you are? With wind and solar? Etc. Everything we have today relies on fossil fuels, and it's not easy to replace with electricity (you can't make clothes out of electricity).
Let's summarise: we do not remotely have the technology today to replace fossil fuels, and we are reaching the peak of production. Therefore we will have less fossil energy, and therefore we will have less energy. Which means that we will have less to use. It's not a choice: we don't get to choose degrowth, it will just happen. It doesn't mean that there are no technical challenges: organising our society to live with less energy is a huge technical challenge. We need to make smarter technology that is actually meaningful. 5G for TikTok, sending billionaires for breakfast in space with SpaceX (or commuting through space) or driving heavy Teslas should not be part of that plan, because they all waste energy, and we won't be able to afford it.
Source? My understanding is that foragers did not have more starvation than that.
> People have been talking about the population explosion.
Which is a direct cause of the technological improvements that allow us to grow our population by pushing the limits of our environment. Foragers did not grow that much because it was not possible. Turns out they were not destroying their environment, we are.
> If we mitigate climate change, it won’t be from people decided to conserve and use less, but due to the masssive scaling of mostly solar energy that can produce carbon free energy cheaply.
That's a common misconception. Turns out electricity makes for ~20% of our energy consumption, and solar energy is very, very far from being a viable solution for those 20%. People who love solar energy tend to extrapolate from its current grow, though it is completely marginal and backed by fossil fuels: try to produce solar energy "from scratch" (including mining the material you need to build them, transporting them, etc) without fossil fuels: we don't know how to do that today. Not even mentioning that we can't store the solar energy produced during the winter to be used during the summer, and we can't control the amount of sun we get. Take Germany as an example: the developed wind and solar energy a ton, and to compensate for when there is no wind and no sun... they expended their coal mines.
Solar energy is a nice marginal tool to use where it makes sense, but it does not scale, and therefore it is not a solution. We need nuclear plants, because we know how to do it (again: we don't know how to make solar energy work at that scale). Now that's the "easy" part (assuming you manage to convince people about nuclear fission).
The hard part is the 80% that currently relies on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have to go away (because climate change) and will go away (because they are not unlimited and we are reaching the production peaks). How do you replace them? How do you power your supertankers that carry your solar cells from China to wherever you are? With wind and solar? Etc. Everything we have today relies on fossil fuels, and it's not easy to replace with electricity (you can't make clothes out of electricity).
Let's summarise: we do not remotely have the technology today to replace fossil fuels, and we are reaching the peak of production. Therefore we will have less fossil energy, and therefore we will have less energy. Which means that we will have less to use. It's not a choice: we don't get to choose degrowth, it will just happen. It doesn't mean that there are no technical challenges: organising our society to live with less energy is a huge technical challenge. We need to make smarter technology that is actually meaningful. 5G for TikTok, sending billionaires for breakfast in space with SpaceX (or commuting through space) or driving heavy Teslas should not be part of that plan, because they all waste energy, and we won't be able to afford it.
That is the problem, sure, each individual can 'see' the problem, but as groups, as a species, we are captured by our circumstances, and continue to overconsume, pollute, etc...
It becomes "Moloch" again, everyone has budgets, deadlines, need to eat, need to sex.
As a group we don't seem able to change course.
We are "on a world ruled by 195 mutually-hostile and frequently-shifting coalitions of over-evolved murder-monkeys, many of whom have nuclear weapons. "
Hence, evolutionary dead end.
It becomes "Moloch" again, everyone has budgets, deadlines, need to eat, need to sex.
As a group we don't seem able to change course.
We are "on a world ruled by 195 mutually-hostile and frequently-shifting coalitions of over-evolved murder-monkeys, many of whom have nuclear weapons. "
Hence, evolutionary dead end.
I fully agree, we even know the reasons why we're not acting, but then...
No, because this is unprecedented and within our means to control if we have the will to do so. One hopes we're slightly more forward thinking than other species, although hope is a double edged sword.
<insert Agent Smith's virus speech here>
"It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."
Cute. But nowhere near true. Rabbits? Bison? any number of identical behaviors in other mammals. </pedant>
Population cycles are literally a 3rd grade science class topic, but americans cry "wah wah when will I ever need this", tell their kids education is just liberal indoctrination, and then they go to the movies and hear this slop and have no problem believing it because humans are god awful and evaluating trite statements.
Other animals have natural curbs on population. Predator's, diseases. And reach some equilibrium.
Humans have been very good at overcoming any natural limit on population.
But think that is the point of the article? That humans have continued to expand, on the boom-bust curve, -> humans are on an every increasing upward curve, and thus heading fast into some inevitable limit that will cause a crash.
So kind of like a virus that grows un-abated until it kills the host.
There is no equilibrium point reached.
Yes, like some other animals, just more dramatic.
The host is the entire planet.
Humans have been very good at overcoming any natural limit on population.
But think that is the point of the article? That humans have continued to expand, on the boom-bust curve, -> humans are on an every increasing upward curve, and thus heading fast into some inevitable limit that will cause a crash.
So kind of like a virus that grows un-abated until it kills the host.
There is no equilibrium point reached.
Yes, like some other animals, just more dramatic.
The host is the entire planet.
All true.
But still, entire ecosystems have been brought down by rabbits etc. Not as different as we might want to pretend.
But still, entire ecosystems have been brought down by rabbits etc. Not as different as we might want to pretend.
It's the smell.
I must get out.
I must get out.
Well, frankly, no, that’s not a summary of the article at all.
[deleted]
Good, I was feeling a bit too positive today.