Impacts

My latest simulation of the future, which integrates personal priority-setting like that discussed in "Groups, Goals, and Actions" with the potential futures described in "Shutdown Scenarios," indicates that the best way to reduce major casualties over the next few years is to have everyone in the world immediately stop increasing both population and consumption of ecological resources (ecological footprint).

The urgency is a consequence of the possibility that humanity will breach a critical environmental limit in less than a year, killing off species needed to sustain those species we directly depend upon for our own survival. With global warming getting worse and threatening to push us over the limit anyway, we need to also work on decreasing our footprint with an emphasis on greenhouse gas emissions. This is the equivalent of slamming on a car's brakes before it flies into a ditch, and then backing up to escape collapse of the eroding ground under it.

Changes to personal behavior have an effect on the global whole that is inversely proportional to the size of the population and therefore extremely small (currently one in 7.26 billion). The best way to have a significant effect is to therefore convince many other people to make the same changes. For the expected ("combined case") scenario, I estimate that about nine times as many people can be saved as are convinced per year to stop growth in population and consumption, with the potential for billions of lives to be saved over the next 16 years.

In the worst case, higher population growth is projected before we make changes, and this results in higher speed toward the limit. To avoid hitting the limit and to minimize casualties we would have to now be decreasing our personal consumption by twice the rate we increased it last year, and stop at no more than 88% (and no less than 60%) of the current global average by the end of the century. Ideally, we should be following this approach anyway, following the sound advice of preparing for the worst case and hoping for the best case.

That "best case" is not, of course, my best case – it is the "limitless case" that seems to be the main planning scenario for the world. For that, there is no need to consider changing anyone's way of life, except to convince them to help increase our own happiness, population, and longevity. Given that our influence over our lives and those of our friends and family is much greater than any influence we might have over the rest of the population, it makes sense under this scenario to focus only on these groups. Doing so inevitably results in more consumption and a growing population, which a lack of limits allows so long as the corresponding complexity can be managed.

If I am wrong about the nearby limit my models indicate we are about to hit, there is another limit behind that: the effective depopulation of other species that includes those we directly depend upon. If we can proceed along the trajectory of the limitless case, I estimate we will hit that final limit by 2029 with a population of 8.5 billion people. If growth continues after that, then we are indeed on a world without limits, and I will stand corrected. There is, however, the very real threat of climate change that is expected by scientists to get much worse in the near future, as well as verifiable increases in pollution and species extinction that are a source of justifiable worry for the foreseeable future. 

We already know, or should know, that as biological entities our fates are intricately tied to the fates of our fellow creatures, and that we are collectively responsible for their fates taking a catastrophic turn for the worst. If our species follows them, then our personal and familial priorities will be forced to include the "others," and it may be too late to stop the worst from happening to us.

Shutdown Scenarios

The first major test of my Half-Earth Hypothesis is in progress. Analysis of new data indicates that, if the hypothesis is correct, within a year humanity will begin consuming the ecological producers that maintain those ecological supporters that enable our basic survival. This will likely result in several hundred million casualties in the next decade, followed by several billion in the first half of the following decade, potentially leading to our effective extinction soon after.

This "hard shutdown" is a consequence of our historical behavior, but we may still have a chance of converting it into a "safe" shutdown by controlling both our population size and the amount of resources lost by our excess consumption. If competition for resources is the main cause of the initial casualties, we might in the best case be able to eliminate it and keep our population constant while reducing our individual consumption to a sustainable level and maintaining it there. This assumes that the lost producers can be recovered, and that their loss hasn't triggered a cascade of further environmental degradation.

If we can't control the population loss, then it may be kept from growing back as individual consumption continues to fall. In this case, protective policies might also prevent further casualties, and the drop in individual consumption may be stopped before it jeopardizes the maintenance of a civil society.

In my opinion, the best case future is about as improbable as the one most governments and businesses appear to expect, which is predicated on limitless growth. Based on that expectation, the other possibilities represent risks that merit little attention in the form of tweaks to their plans that may account for only a few-percent of additional costs in the distant future ("distant" being more than five years out).

Combining the scenarios discussed here and using my own estimates of their probabilities, I anticipate that the world will experience a serious food crisis just as the U.S. presidential race reaches its peak. During the new president's first term, the death toll will mount into the millions and people will attempt to grow much more food, exacerbating the problem. The next election will occur just as the population begins to recover, but consumption will have already begun falling. How far it falls, and whether we will suffer a much more massive loss of life, will be determined during the following decade.

Whether or not these scenarios are accurate, they provide a useful context for discussing how carbon emissions may decrease, voluntarily and involuntarily. The obvious preference should be for the best case; and we should put the mechanisms for creating it in place, regardless of motivation. We can similarly study the mechanisms involved in creating the disastrous alternatives so we can reduce their probability of becoming reality.

Shutdown Time

With evidence continuing to mount that our ability to survive on this planet depends on stopping the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, it's time to start holding all governments and corporations responsible for the planning and implementation of a swift and safe reduction of the global ecological footprint to no more than half what it was in 2013, beginning with the total elimination of operations involving the use of fossil fuels. In short, it is now time for what I referred to in an earlier blog post as a "graceful shutdown" and bringing safe alternatives online that provide the basic physical and social needs of everyone alive today.

Reducing our footprint involves both lowering our consumption of ecological resources and rendering harmless the pollution we've dumped into places that harm the world's ecosystems, including the atmosphere. We also need to secure or render harmless substances like nuclear fuel that could potentially become harmful pollution.

Individuals and communities can do some of this on their own, perhaps best by using the concepts and techniques collectively known as "permaculture" and explored in test cases by the international Transition movement. By changing what they buy, who they vote for, and who they work for, as well as advocating for shutdown by the organizations they are part of, people can have a considerable impact on the probability of success.

Much of my recent writing has been devoted to exploring how long it takes to perform tasks, as well as the complexity of events and activities. This may have seemed tangential to my main focus of studying our potential future and how to avoid its negative trajectories. In fact, I have been using this immediately practical knowledge to start laying groundwork for how to plan humanity's next moves (and personally determine how I can maximize my contribution to creating a healthier world). Understanding learning curves helps us as individuals to judge the honesty and competence of organizations who we support or might potentially support, as well as the quality of what we do and what we get from others based on complexity. More than this, we have a useful tool for deciding between alternative actions that could get us to a goal or set of goals. My discussions of values, competition, and cooperation were intended to explore another, critical dimension to making plans: that of amplifying collective effort to accelerate progress instead of reduce it – or worse.

I spent a lot of time determining the likely trajectories of population and consumption, largely to assess the large-scale context for making responsible decisions. I focused particularly on the timing of the crisis revealed by the variables I analyzed, which has closely followed the projections made by many real experts in the social and environmental sciences and therefore gives me more confidence in what they are saying. It seems that no matter what angle is used for examining our immediate future, the conclusions are the same, and they are at odds with the technologically and economically optimistic orientation of most businesses I have studied in my attempt to meet personal financial responsibilities in the short term. From within a socio-economic system fixated on eternal growth in physical consumption and consolidation of power, the very concept of voluntary shutdown is akin to the worst form of heresy in the most conservative of religions, and I understand the potential costs of even suggesting it; yet the costs of not doing so and going further are likely to be much, much higher.

In future writing, I intend to explore what shutdown plans might need to include, and what they may look like in some detail. I also expect to discuss what "holding responsible" means, especially as means of assessing the legitimacy of organizations and their operating principles.

Complexity and Hubris

In the book "Immoderate Greatness," author William Ophuls describes how an organization like a civilization grows complex by creating chaos and degradation in its environment, eventually using up or rendering useless one or more resources that is critical to its survival. Ironically, the complexity works against it, because the people in the civilization are inherently unable to understand it well enough to predict its effects, and can't recognize the symptoms of impending decline. When the decline starts, chaos grows and overwhelms them. They then react inappropriately, and the civilization rapidly collapses. This concurs with other things I've read, along with observations of how governments and businesses tend to develop.

There are, of course, some people who recognize the symptoms and what they mean. Unfortunately, they're not in the majority, and certainly not in the majority of leadership positions. As our worldwide civilization rapidly approaches the threshold where nothing can save it, in part due to the consequences of global warming, the majority of those who know what's coming hold out hope that somehow enlightenment will spread or technology will triumph, just in time. The rest have already given up, and are focused on explaining what's happening while salvaging what will be left by developing alternative values and ways of living like what I suggested in Beyond Hope.

In Efficiency and Completion Time, I described how progress on "tasks" evolves over time and depends upon preparation, action, and luck. As a test engineer, it's been my job to help designers and manufacturers to determine how much of a task remains, where the task is the creation and deployment of a technological system that meets a set of expectations called "requirements." This part of the preparation phase can only be done after the first attempt at completing the task, and real-world conditions (including how people will use the system) can be applied to demonstrate what the system will actually do, along with what affects it. Requirements, more often than not, are very simplistic guesses which should be modified or supplemented based on experience that checks assumptions they were based on and reveals unintended consequences of their application. I say "should be," because my specialty is finding these oversights, which tend to comprise most of problems discovered after the second attempt at completing the task, which can be up to 25% of the total task. Unfortunately, managers and those who pay them typically only plan for no more than two attempts, using their best guess as to how much time and resources are needed, and compensating for luck by hiring the most experienced and capable people they can find.

This a good example from my experience of the linear thinking that Ophuls attributes to system failure. I've heard it explained away as "realistic," and "pragmatic" by people who swear they would do more "in a perfect world." Yet they are also typically people who don't have the "bandwidth" (read "limit to the rate they can process information") to handle explanations that can't be captured in single pages of bullet points. To be fair, all of us can keep only a handful of ideas in our head at a time (I've heard between 3 and 7); and the people who have the power to decide what others should do often have more than a handful of complex tasks of their own that they are expected to work on simultaneously. The more power they have, the less time they have to do any part of it, even if they're highly efficient and work every waking hour, so it's no wonder that more than two attempts at a task is considered a luxury, and that 80% completion is considered acceptable, with the rest – hopefully – undetected, explained away, or blamed on someone else (such as bad luck as "acts of God").

Given enough time, we will experience the consequences of ignoring details that we missed. These consequences pile up, especially since we're driven to accomplish more and more, and the consequences interact to create amplifying feedback loops. Eventually they can't be ignored; but as Ophuls points out, by that point it may be too late to fix the underlying problems before we're overwhelmed. To the extent that people recognize this as a valid threat, they might be inclined to limit what they do to the consequences they can adequately foresee (matching power to acceptable responsibility), but our culture – and arguably human nature – makes their taking action on it highly unlikely. Most likely, people like me who are good at identifying the problems that aren't obvious, and yet potentially the most destructive in the long term, will be vilified, shunned, or merely tolerated, especially if we're vocal about what we find and what needs to be done to fix it.

Ophuls considers what I call "graceful shutdown" all but impossible without an extremely unlikely shift in values to ones like those I've promoted. I'm obviously inclined to agree; but I've grown even less optimistic than he is that it will happen, given the forces we have collectively unleashed with the prime focus of accelerating global extinction rates. In short, having already lost hope for civilization, I'm now a hair's-breadth away from searching for the planetary equivalent of hospice.

Graceful Shutdown

As our global civilization self-terminates due to its unwillingness to reduce the damage it is doing to the biosphere, especially from habitat destruction and carbon pollution-induced climate change, there is the potential for a lot more damage to be done. When a complex technological system goes through something similar, engineers call it "hard shutdown," with unpredictable, and often negative, consequences for both the system and whatever is connected to it. Engineers have learned to design systems with the ability to maintain some reserve power in the event that main power is lost, and use that power to control interactions between its components before turning them off so that damage doesn't occur; this approach is called a "graceful shutdown." I've mentioned this before, in the context of avoiding disaster; I'm arguing now that we should pursue it even though disaster is now likely.

In my novel "Lights Out," I explored what a hard shutdown of civilization might involve on a small scale, and how some people could survive it. Violence and death are virtually assured, particularly if people don't know what's happening and why. The powerful sociopaths who promote misinformation about climate change and the negative effects of unrestricted capitalism are working toward this outcome. If even a quarter of the population goes along with it (an approximation of the number of unquestioning followers of authoritarian leaders), and the technology of war and violence with its huge threat-multiplying capability remains readily available, the collapse of global civilization may take down all of humanity instead of just a majority, even before climate change has its full impact.

A graceful shutdown scenario would involve a growing number of people meeting their needs without using non-renewable and ecologically damaging resources, while respecting and preserving each other's right to meet the basic needs of survival. Relationships between people would become less about property and more about valuing life for its own sake. Money, such as it exists in the future, would be used for its most fundamental purpose, accounting, rather than as a means for concentrating personal power. Critical to this scenario would be the promotion and dissemination of accurate knowledge and understanding, and the development of a value system that outright rejects as evil the promotion of self-serving distortion of reality.

In technology, hard shutdowns are typically the default, with thoughtful design being necessary to enable graceful shutdowns. Considering that our global civilization has evolved with the built-in assumption of perpetual operation and growth, hard shutdown looks like the most probable outcome. With the time we have left, more of us can work to redesign parts of it, to limit the negative consequences. The Transition movement is one example of one of the more radical redesigns in progress, while renewable energy technologies are being pursued by people who expect civilization to require mere tweaking to avoid the worst of potential futures. I hesitate to brand these attempts as futile, since they are moving in the right direction; but they must be accelerated to a pace even greater than the exploitation of the fossil fuels that now threaten us, and it remains to be seen whether this can be done in time to have a measurable impact on the nature of the shutdown that is nearly upon us.