Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXV
Hydrocarbons And The Maximum Power Principle: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Today’s Contemplation is a sharing of the response by a Facebook Friend, Schuyler Hupp, whose occasional commentary on posts in our mutual Facebook Group, Peak Oil, I have come to appreciate for their insightfulness and conciseness regarding humanity’s predicament. I could share a number of these going back for some time but felt this latest one was particularly good.
Question.
[Global Warming] You have a substance that when burnt releases a gas that makes it warmer, you burn as much as you can to make your car go broom broom and feed 8 billion people. Would it get warmer?
In response to the above question posed by a mutual FB Friend, Schuyler had the following to say:
Burning hydrocarbons on a massive scale, and for a century or more… That’s exactly what an army of engineers would propose if you actually wanted to warm the climate… Though they would warn that the long term outcome would be difficult if not impossible to predict or control, due to the complexity and the number of variables, both known and unknown… However, they would also warn that there would be a very real possibility for the climate being forced into a new steady state equilibrium that might not be compatible with human life. They would also be the first to point out that fossil hydrocarbons, i.e. ancient sunlight, are a finite mineral resource, and that their quality and the net energy return would become uneconomical after about 150 years or so, and thus it would not represent a sustainable energy paradigm, not to mention all of the damage to ecosystems that would result from the pollution, or the population growth that would result from their introduction, with humans essentially being slaves to their innate Maximum Power Principle behavioral instincts… and that population Overshoot would ensue, thus condemning the entire planet to a future of ecological collapse…
I have little to add to Schuyler’s response, except to stress that we appear to be in a predicament of ecological overshoot that has only an outcome, not a possible ‘solution’ — something almost everyone wishes to have laid out before them, seemingly to help them in their denial of reality to abolish the stress such an inevitable trajectory brings. This is usually accomplished through a kind of magical thinking that humans stand above and beyond nature, and can thus control it — usually via our technology — and then demand that the dominant, story-telling apes within our sociopolitical systems act to save us.
[NOTE: the links in the above paragraph will take you to articles by another FB Friend, Erik Michaels, who has been doing deep dives into these subjects for a number of years and posts at Problems, Predicaments, and Technology — a site I highly recommend.]
I’m pretty certain that there is no Plan B possible; in fact, I’m not even sure there was ever a Plan A…except, perhaps, to pursue our reproductive ‘success’ in adapting to our immediate environment of the moment for as long as possible (and this does not imply there is a predetermined evolutionary ‘goal’ involved aside from successful gene duplication).
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers). Encouraging others to read my work is also much appreciated.