We're collectively growing at an extraordinary pace of about 2.4% per year, fast enough to add as much to our daily resource demands in the next 30 years as we have since the dawn of civilization. If you feel it's hard to keep up, there's a reason... 🧵 But why is growth happening in the first place? Why does growth happen for anything? It's always a question of there being a resource surplus, and an interesting feedback between the use of energy and having a surplus to convert our environment to the stuff of us

In a world sustained by combustion, even just maintaining the GDP at current levels accelerates CO2 emissions and the rise in concentrations. To stop this either:

1. We proactively collapse the economy now, or
2. Wait for climate change to do it for us later🧵 Many would think that 0% GDP growth means no acceleration, that emissions stabilize. No. The GDP is linearly coupled to conversions of Earth's crust to the stuff of us. If the GDP continues, we continue to grow...

It's pretty astonishing what passes in the widely accepted DICE model for modeling interactions between the economy and climate. In the 2023 version we see the following equations for economic output. A thread on what I see as problems: nber.org/system/files/w…
First, it's dimensionally nonsense. Q (output), K (capital) and A (fudge factor for tech) have units of $. L (labor) is people. As written, the equation for output has units of $^1.3 people^0.7 where it should just be $ or (better) $/year.

"Staggering declines in wildlife". While I'm sure this isn't on the table, the way to stop this is to halt the global economy 🧵
nytimes.com/2022/12/16/cli… Why? 50-years' now of evidence points to global energy consumption scaling with historically cumulative inflation-adjusted world GDP, a very general representation of civilization that might be termed its "wealth"
esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/10…

We just passed a world population of 8 billion. This, of course, is a lot.

It was only 2 billion just a century ago.

We should blame baby-making for our environmental woes like climate change and habitat destruction. Right? Well, no, not quite 🧵

worldometers.info/world-populati… It's well known that the environmental impacts of humanity are determined not just by population but by our affluence. The planet can sustain fewer people if we are all wealthy. The problem is not just making babies but making affluent babies. Right?

This too misses the mark

It seems a taboo to argue that the development of renewables is accelerating climate change. I don't get it. To me it seems pretty obvious they are. First, does renewable energy help the economy? Well, yeah... otherwise we wouldn't do it. Does a larger economy consume natural resources? Yeah...that's kind of how production works. Need stuff.

Why are we seeing so much economic inflation? Why can we anticipate climate damages and decreased resource access will lead to long-term hyperinflation. Why is it traditional economic models struggle to explain inflation? 1/n
nytimes.com/live/2022/07/1… It starts with traditional economic accounting. Traditional econ. models state that the economic production in a given year - the GDP Y - adds to physical capital K after subtracting consumption C of goods and services and capital depreciation at rate d, that is d x K.

When will civilization collapse? Here's my case for about 2050: thread
1. Systems that grow fastest collapse fastest
2. In 1950 the energy demand growth rate was 0.7%/yr
3. In 1970 the energy demand growth rate was three times faster at 2.4%/yr 4. Taking the inverse of rates gives a time: 142 years in 1950, 69 years in 1970, 49 years in 1990, 41 years in 2019
5. It's almost like we're counting down, but to what?
6. Adding the year to the inverse growth rate converges on about 2050, holding pretty steady since 1970.

Thread: New paper in @EGU_ESD with @ProfSteveKeen and @prof_grasselli shows a 50-year fixed relationship between world economic "wealth" - not the GDP - and global primary energy consumption. Implication? Our future is tied to even our quite distant past

esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/10… A summation of world *inflation-adjusted* GDP over all of human history W ("wealth") was shown to have a 50-year fixed link to energy consumption E of w = 5.50 +/- 0.21 trillions of 2019 USD of cumulative production per exajoule of world energy consumed each year.

The latest IPCC report continues to ignore thermodynamics, insisting a pathway to net zero dominated by energy and material efficiency. This is utterly wrongheaded. It will do the opposite, as it always has for us or any system. 1/5 Here we are in 2022, facing calamity. Isn't it time we get the physics right? Even if counter-intuitive, it's not that hard, and in front of our faces. A healthy materially and energy efficient child rapidly converts food to flesh to grow and consume more later. 2/5

Here we are in the 2020s, climate change largely out of control and getting worse, with a great many still advocating that "we know the solutions, all we need is the political will".

Here's where I think we screwed up, by not acknowledging the "counterintuitive" 1/ The obvious solutions are
1. Population control
2. Reducing consumption by the rich
3. Increasing efficiency
4. Switching to renewables

Easy, right? But what if the obvious solutions are entirely the wrong solutions? 2/

Thanks to @ProfSteveKeen and Karl Marx:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.