The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Just Stop Oil !? Part 3 - 10 Pathways to Post-Growth | Frankly #40

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

In Part 3 of this Frankly Series, Nate (just after watching the movie Oppenheimer!) breaks down the logic of how we COULD arrive at a post-growth future. Our global situation is complex and not static - IF we somehow are able to shrink the global economic output (which would imply significantly less oil use) we first have to navigate 'the 4 Horsemen of the 2020s'. Nate outlines 10 possible avenues for how this could happen, not as a prescription but as a description of various possible scenarios. The implications of the complexity of our global systems means a path to a world without our current dependence on growth will not be an easy one. Yet understanding these hurdles between our current situation and an eventual post-growth future is essential to shifting the initial conditions of such a global transformation towards 'better-than-the-default' outcomes. How do impending and converging risks narrow our options for ways to move towards a different global system - and can we manage to protect the things that make life worth living?    Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/EhOhfRrvYI0 For Show Notes and More: For Show Notes and more: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/40-just-stop-oil-part-3-10-pathways-to-post-growth

Greetings. I am just back a couple hours ago from the movie Oppenheimer. So maybe shouldn't record this episode now, or maybe I should. It's a great, great movie. I saw it in one of those real theaters with the surround sound. Pretty impactful message and relevant to our world today. Okay, this is part three in a four-part series on Just Stop Oil. Today I'm going to talk about the 10 pathways to post growth or using less fossil fuels, less emissions, because I think they're largely synonymous. Again, this episode is going to be describing our situation. In part four, I'll advocate or at least suggest some

pathways for us who are aware and care about these things. First of all, some admin. This will come out Friday morning at 7 Central. Forty-eight hours from now, I highly recommend that everyone watched Reality Roundtable number three, which is one of our best reality roundtables ever. Of course, there's only three, with John Erickson, Josh Farley, Kate Rayworth, and Steve Keene, talking about what the 240 million college students in the world are learning in their Econ 101 class that is divorced from the reality we face. I highly recommend people watch it. Okay, getting to this episode, I'm going to talk about the economy and missions and post-growth,

let me just first state that there are four general scenarios of the future. You could do a two-by-two grid, and the top two would be growth of some sort. Green growth, which is we're rich enough as a culture, as a nation, as a world, to pay for the environmental damages that we're creating. or brown growth, which is we continue to grow and pollute. Underneath on the bottom axis is not growth, but descent, whereas we hit a peak and have post-growth economy. And this also can be green or brown or black or bad.

I have labeled these four scenarios, green growth, Mordor, which is we continue to grow. the economy, but the portion of our economy dedicated to environmental remediation, energy, and materials continues to increase. The Great Simplification, the name of this podcast, the name of our movie, the name of the effort that I'm trying to influence, and Mad Max, which doesn't need any introduction. And let me say that with respect to these scenarios, I think we're in the Mordor economy trajectory right now, and I dearly hope that we somehow get off of that trajectory before there's nothing left of the natural world and ultimately propelling things of value

through the bottlenecks of the 21st century, species, ethics, cultures, knowledge, productive ecosystems, this is the work. And it is with that objective that I'm trying to share. this synthesis more widely. Okay, let's get into it. As many people who have followed this podcast know I like to take a bird's eye view. The situation that many siloed individual experts in the world are looking at changes when you look at an aerial view of how everything fits together. We need to look at our situation with a system's perspective. And it And if we do, we realize that we can't solve climate change or social justice or poverty or any of these issues without looking at the other risks that are extant in our system.

And I've come up with a silly but apt term to refer to these core risks as the four horsemen of the next decade. And the four horsemen are interrelated and so they are not independent. They are a financial bend-break situation, geopolitics and war, complexity in the sixth continent supply chain and the social contract. I'm going to briefly talk about each of these. So for the longest time, hundreds of thousands of years actually, we lived in concert with the biogeochemical flows of sunlight and rain and soil. And there was a maximum that we could live on the scale of renewable resources on the planet, represented by the green line in this graph.

Then we puzzled out how to mine under the Earth's surface to get things that were non-renewable on human time scales. These things like copper or oil form a Gaussian. curve that increase and hit a peak and then there's a decline. And that can come in many different shapes depending on the technology and how we access it. These things are finite on human timescales. We are living through a big Gaussian curve, which is the carbon pulse. On top of this, we overlay a social construct, which is money. Money powers the world, at least in our transactions.

but every monetary claim has energy underpinning it. When commercial banks create money, they do not create energy or copper or dolphins or trees or the interest on the money. So our monetary supply keeps going up and up and up. So even though the money creation and the money existence is an abstract concept, when it's printed or generated as digits in a bank account,

it is then spent on real physical things in service of the superorganism, building real infrastructure and connections around the planet that in the not too distant future are going to require energy and materials to maintain. So if this magic wand of credit can no longer function, there will be a very non-abstract physical shrinkage of economic activity in the form of defaults and unemployment and out of business signs and empty office buildings, etc. Since I've been alive on this planet, the United States and the global economy have increased

our debt more than we've increased our GDP every single year. This is not sustainable. We are between 350 and 400 percent debt to GDP as a global culture. And that, just to put it in individual terms, it's as if you made $100,000 a year and you owe the bank's $350,000. By the way, you're spending more than $100,000 and you're potentially going to get laid off or not have a raise. This is the situation with respect to resources that our global economic system is in. So what's happening, and this is really critical, is we're creating more monitoring,

more monetary claims on reality when our underlying reality is flat or increasing very little, and eventually, once oil starts to decline and other things going to be declining. This gap is what I call the biophysical rubber band, and at issue is whether this bends or breaks, because some threshold is going to be reached in the next decade on this situation, and this impacts the rest of all of our plans and the issues that we care about. So that's number one, financial bend and break. Number two is geopolitics. I've talked about this before. We have much of the world has been victim of colonialism the last century. We have the major powers, Russia, Europe, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, vying for a finite resource pool. And we basically swam

in geopolitical, peaceful waters for the last generation or so because economic growth lifted all boats. And now we're seeing the undercurrents between China, Russia, the United States, and other places. This is something that we take for granted and is going to become a major issue in the next decade. The third of the four horsemen is complexity. We live in a six-continent supply chain just in time fueled by cheap energy, credit, and international trust. The average supermarket has 100,000 SKU products in it, developed and shipped all around the world. In effect, the last 50 years, what we've done is expanded the economic theory of comparative advantage, where one country can make semiconductors and bananas better than another

country, but if that second country is less bad at making bananas, they devote all their resources to bananas, and the other country devotes all their resources to semiconductors. And the whole world gets more semiconductors and bananas at a cheaper price. We've done that times orders of magnitude. And this is responsible for much of our wealth and goods and services, but it's very tenuous if some of these countries, for whatever reason, start to not be able to produce or are not willing to trade the active pharmaceutical ingredients for 85% of United States medicine, for example. So this complexity to our global commerce and intricate just-in-time situation is also a risk.

Last but not least is the social contract. We see polarization and the dissipating of trust of one's fellow country, men, and women all around the world. There's a rightward shift in politics. because people are afraid of things they don't know and tighter austerity, financial belts, et cetera. We have to have the ability to have a discourse. My friend Dick Gephardt often says that politics is a substitute for violence. The social contract, keeping people talking to each other about the issues that matter, is also something we've taken for granted.

Okay, with those four risks, let's talk about in respect to the first two videos in this series, just stop oil. How would we stop oil or use considerably less oil or as the degrowth movement is lobbying for get to a post growth future? Well, let me first start with some things that won't work. Renewables, scaling renewable energy. as a way to less emissions or post-growth economies will not work unless accompanied by some sort of change in governance, aspirations, prices, policies, etc. China is expanding their coal plants at a massive

pace. If you look at global consumption of coal, we are now hitting an all-time high, powered by the beating heart of the superorganism and the energy dissipating structure that is the global society. So, yes, renewables are scaling rapidly, but we're also growing the entire energy pie. And if we only focus on carbon, yes, we can get lower emissions if we grow renewable energy faster than we're growing the economy, lower than they otherwise would have been, but not lower emissions or even zero emissions, which is a different thing. So renewable scaling, Ceteris paribus is not going to change our emissions. And by the way, important to point out that only two thirds of our emissions from fossil fuels, one third are from land use, changes and agriculture and

other things. So that's also important. What else won't work? Well, hundreds of thousands or let's say a million scientists getting on TV, signing petitions saying that we are facing an existential threat for our cultures in coming decades unless we dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels. Shrug, it's happened. Look at all of the IPCC meetings. Look at all of the convening of parties over the since the mid-1990s and look at CO2 emissions. The same. scientists are amongst themselves, amongst ourselves, freaked out what's happening to oceans, what's happening to temperature, what's happening to insects, what's happening to plastics, everything. But it seems not to have reached the point of action. I mean, get to that in a second.

The other thing that won't work is technology. Technology is going to be necessary in a post-growth future, technology is going to be necessary and critically important to reduce our emissions in coming decades. But newer technology, the greater technology today in this economic system is just going to increase our productivity, which via Jevin's paradox, the rebound effect, and people's demand for more and the energy-hungry superorganism is not going to reduce emissions or scale. So with that backdrop, let me briefly outline 10 possible pathways to post-growth futures, which mean significantly lower emission futures. Okay, number 10, in no particular order, this is just how I've written them down on my one

page of notes here. Number 10, I've already discussed, is this biophysical snapping back of a rubber band where we get too many claims around the world. This is already happening in places like Japan, where the government of Japan is buying 50% of their own government bonds and stocks. That works until people realize that it's all based on energy and materials in the future to pay it back. And so at some point, this debt at 300 some percent of GDP, maybe it goes to 400%, maybe it goes to 500%, but at some point, the bond markets, the currency markets of the world will no longer believe that governments have the ability to service this.

And at that moment, we do face a bend or break situation. But if we bend and not head to mad max, we will have a significantly smaller economy, very low resource prices because our decline in affordability, far outpaced our decline in oil availability. And this will be a post-growth economy, something like a Great Depression on steroids. I actually think that's of all the 10 things I'm about to say is probably the most likely path. Number nine, putting real prices on the goods and services that we pay in the world. I think if we did full cost externalities were internalized, there would not be a single industry on the planet that would be profitable.

But if we, for instance, had oil be $400 a barrel and gave people signals of that, that would change people's consumption and innovation habits. and that would result eventually in a much smaller economy and lower emissions. I actually co-started an effort called untax.org. You can find it online where we wanted to research and build constituency and awareness of taxing all non-renewable resources in the world, sand, copper, coal, oil, gas, and remove taxes on humans. 95% of taxes are on humans and corporations. We remove those. So we end up paying much higher prices for things that are heavily dependent on non-renewable inputs. But things like renewables would start to scale because the biggest price input for renewables is human labor,

which is renewable. So the problem with this is this would never happen. in our current situation because it would crash the economy if suddenly things were two three times expensive. But we could that this is a way to get to post-growth futures. Number eight, some sort of a new economic system that is top down directed towards a nation or the world. We could call it authoritarianism. Authoritarianism could come from the right word spectrum of politics or the leftward spectrum of politics. There could be different flavors of it that included rationing coupons or any number of top-down rules to change consumption patterns. Next would be a change in cultural consciousness. Bucky Fuller famously said that I can't remember

remember the exact quote, but we're not going to change our existing situation unless we have something better to look forward to. What if we all meditated and changed our dopamine supernormal stimuli smorgasbore to more serotonin, oxytotocin, and we didn't need as many things? We started to retreat from, you know, intensive consumption and formed conscious communities, et cetera. This would eventually prick the financial bubble, but it would lead us to post-growth futures and less emissions. So far, if you're noticing a trend, every single one of these possible pathways would checkmark the financial bender break, geopolitics potentially war, the complexity, and the social

contract situations. The next one I'll just call systems blind planning, which is that people choose one problem with our society. Right now, carbon is a big one. And they decide to optimize for that while keeping the rest of the system the same. And if you extrapolate some of these things like carbon is bad, let's build 100% renewables. Ironically, places that would do that would actually crash the system because the system can't handle that sort of a non-systemic change, keeping everything else constant. It's why I do not like the just stop oil name or movement because it doesn't make sense. and I think it's counterproductive to what we really face. But I do think that the systemic view that I've tried to articulate on this website

is hard to understand, even harder to acknowledge, and even harder to manifest in policy. So I do think the systems blind planning is a possibility that could actually run into the four horsemen. Next, actually, one of the horsemen itself would be war. If there's any nuclear device or major troop, hot war, kinetic war between the major powers, that also would lead us to a post-growth future, which would result in less emissions.

Another possible pathway to a post-growth future is what I'll label here a spite revolution. This has happened many times in history. Let's say 10 units is a good life. People at an eight see someone that has 800 and they want to take them down. And they do actions and behaviors and a revolution, pitchforks, etc. That breaks the system and that it sure enough, that person that had 800 now has 50. But the person that had eight now has five. So there is a lot more wealth and income equality, but everyone is poor. And this too has to run the gamut of the four horsemen.

Another possible pathway to post-growth futures is non-systemic activism. For instance, if people really understood our system and they cared about climate change and really want to degrowth, we could do some sort of a carbon hunger strike where 5%, 8%, 10% of the population stopped consuming. It would not take too long for that to prick the bender break biophysical rubber band. I don't think that's likely to happen, but something like that could happen. to extrapolate that, that we could stop having babies after five or seven years of no more babies, then no more diapers, no more toys, no more school teachers, that too would trigger many or all

of the four horsemen. So this is the type of thing that could result in post-growth future. Second to last idea I wanted to share, I'll call it here Bard and the Bowmen and Bowmen. Bard the Bowman was the archer in the Hobbit that slayed Smog, because Smog had a little chink in his chest that was a weak point. It is possible that some very clever activists could get the clink in the superorganism. chest, and there could be a cascading response to that. I think the superorganism is incredibly strong, incredibly robust. We've made it through two near financial collapses, and now we're consuming all-time highs in coal, et cetera. Ninety-nine percent of people by their day jobs are supporting the continued evolution of the superorganism. I think this is unlikely.

Lastly, any number of black swans could influence the four horsemen. There could be an EMP pulse or Yellowstone Caldera could explode or an asteroid or volcanoes. Our system is so fragile right now that any number of things could upset the apple cart in terms of the things I've laid out. So in summary, we have lived beyond our means for at least 50 years. We are inexorably impacting the biosphere in our home and the natural systems that are part of this world. There is a road close sign ahead of us in the not too distant future. And all of my work is to inform that moment on how humans respond to these coming events.

And could you imagine at that moment if we had a time capsule and what are the things we would put into that time capsule? What are the plans, the break glass in case of emergency plans for your own life, for your community, for our nation, for our global world, for governance? And if we're putting in those ideas into that time capsule, can we get a head start? on those ideas before we're forced to open it. On that note, in part four of this longish video series, next week or maybe two weeks from now

because I want to go visit my family, I will have a layout some suggestions for that trajectory. I hope this makes sense. I'm not advocating for anything I said. I'm advocating for a better future than the default, And I think we have to be realistic about what would actually bring about significantly lower CO2 emissions and or a post-growth economy. And it's not an easy thing. It's not going to happen by scaling renewables or technology or some scientists speaking out.

It is going to take a incredibly paradigmatic shift in our society. And my wish is to pass the baton of this understanding and pro-social effort to many more humans. Talk to you soon. Thank you.