The Environment

Of all the reading and research I have done since my sabbatical in 2021 to reboot myself, nothing has held my constant attention as much as the environment. And by environment I mean those elements of this planet that enable us to live such as air, water, food, etc. This has been true for many reasons given my life of global travel and seeing places as they change over time. What started as an interest in learning more has quietly but quickly turned into fear that is now slowly becoming hopelessness. There are many, many reasons for this as I will explore in this blog, but one thing is for certain, we as a species are headed for disaster based on our current trajectories and the utterly abusive relationship we have with nature. What I ignorantly perceived as a single problem that could be solved led me to discover that we are in a polycrisis, a collection of individual crises that are growing and reinforcing each other. And our way of living (eating, driving, working, sleeping, kids, etc.) is the very thing that is feeding these and we have crossed the point of no return some time back. And by ‘we’ I mean collective humanity as every one of us is part of the root-cause simply by living the lives as we do. I will show how things like recycling and conservation are hopeless endeavors, much like pouring a jar of sugar into a lake in hopes of sweetening it. And as you may have guessed, this is a depressing read given that there is no way out of the path we have created and locked onto. So, if you easily get sad or worry about the future, you may want to give this a miss. 😊 Instead, maybe watch David Attenborough’s excellent documentary called ‘A Life on our Planet’ which shows what we are doing to our planet and its impact. He tries to end on a positive note saying we have hope and offers some ways forward. But I have no such hope because I know and have seen how humans are globally.

It all began with a 1972 report called The Limits to Growth (LTG) that was commissioned by the Club of Rome whose members produce and share research. This report suggested that in the absence of significant reduction in resource utilization and environmental destruction, it was highly likely that there would be a sudden and unstoppable drop in human population and industrial capacity. While the report was ignored or ridiculed for a few decades by the mainstream, many began to do their own research into the details and arrived at similar conclusions. But then sometime in the late 90s, politicians began to talk about the environment and global warming became a household term. The posterchild for this movement was Al Gore who led with environmental advocacy while living in a 10,000 square foot home and leading a global, jetset lifestyle. But things really took off in the 2000s with increased focus on climate change (morphed from global warming) and the use of credits to offload one’s footprint. When big finance realized they could make billions by selling carbon credits, they offered all manner of products to buyers, usually the rich or corporations. But, like most things, it was a scheme for the former to offload their guilt by paying some money and the latter to appear to care about the environment while consuming ever more energy to increase profits. But it has done nothing to help the environment. Perversely, it’s probably done more harm than doing nothing as the rich pay to offload their guilt and consume away.

It does not matter anyway as the polycrisis rages on based on one single driver that spawns the individual “bombs” of the coming collapse: human overshoot. Overshoot occurs when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds the earth’s capacity to regenerate resources and absorb waste. Each year, we humans consume more food, water, energy, and materials than the earth can replace in the same period and spew out waste that is greater than its ability to absorb. According to the Global Footprint Network, we now use about 1.7 earths' worth of resources each year. And countries like the US are the worst offenders using up their annual budget in just 3 months. The graph below shows this breakdown by country.

Image 1: Country Overshoot Days [Source]

It would take nearly 2 years to replace what we use in 1. This is the foundation of the polycrisis and is accelerating as our consumption continues to increase. The two biggest drivers of consumption are population growth and affluence, the latter enabling existing humans to consume more. I refer to the resulting impacts of overshoot as bombs given each one explodes onto the earth and causes its unique damage to one or more of the systems that sustain human life. Human overshoot links all the bombs of the polycrisis together and turns all our life actions into perpetual destruction of all that is needed to allow us to live.

Targets Locked, Impact Obvious

The effects of the polycrisis are simple to list and explain. The most obvious one is resource depletion followed by climate change, biodiversity destruction, air/water pollution, social instability, and financial wizardry. Each one of these empowers one or more of the others and have many second-order effects that also harm us directly and indirectly. While it may not be obvious, humans can only live in a narrow band within planetary systems that keep our planet stable and able to support life. One example is temperature, where any extreme either outright kills us or makes it impossible to grow or raise food which also kills us. Researchers developed the benchmarks for the Planetary Health Check in 2009 and identified nine system limits that, if exceeded, could endanger the earth’s life support systems, the basis for human survival. Think of these as body systems whose levels we measure such as inflammation, cholesterol, liver function, or lung capacity. Having one fail can be catastrophic but multiple failures almost certainly lead to death. All these systems have tipping points that, once crossed, cannot be easily reversed and lead to new problems or reinforce the others. The dismal status of these systems is as follows.

• Biosphere Integrity (Status: Red): This is the layers of the earth inhabited by living organisms, both on land and in the water. Scientists assess their health based on two indicators, productivity and ability to recover after human exploitation. Fertilizers, pesticides, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and herbicides have found their way into the soil, groundwater, and marine coastal areas causing biodiversity destruction and destabilizing entire ecosystems. Not limited to chemicals, we have also activated electromagnetic signals into a wide range of frequencies that permeate through living systems and beings on a 24/7 basis causing harm and disruption that we still don’t fully understand. The loss of species has accelerated to hundreds of times normal rate while every ecosystem like forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and grasslands continue to die under relentless assault from all sides.

• Climate Change (Status: Red): Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) before industrialization to more than 430ppm today with the safe limit being 350ppm. And the number is accelerating thanks to continued human activities such as burning fossil fuels, clearing forests, and expanding industrial agriculture and livestock farming. This has raised global temperatures over 1.2^oC leading to stronger heat waves, rising seas from melting ice, and creating feedback loops that lead to further warming. These feedback loops are self-reinforcing that intensify the very warming that caused them. Like methane escaping from thawing permafrost, Arctic sea-ice melting and exposing dark ocean, or forests dying and releasing carbon instead of storing it. Each of these feedback loops add more fuel to the literal fire and even if we cut emissions to zero, some loops will keep going.

• Land-System Change (Status: Red): More than 40% of the earth’s land surface has been converted for agriculture, logging, livestock, or human habitation. Forests and wetlands that stored carbon and supported biodiversity are being replaced by croplands, cities, and roads. This is leading to an increase and intensity of things like flooding, landslides, earthquakes (think fracking), and desertification. This is also in a feedback loop as more humans are added and more become affluent, more surface gets converted. Livestock is one of the biggest destructive forces, not only because forests are cleared to make farms raise them but also from the high amount of methane emissions from the animals.

• Biogeochemical Flows (Status: Red): Agriculture adds excessive nitrogen and phosphorous to the soil through fertilization and all manner of toxic chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides. These leech into groundwater systems or wash into rivers and seas killing life on both land and the water. The resulting algae blooms deplete oxygen in seawater and create “dead zones”, some the size of cities.

• Novel Entities (Status: Tipping point passed): In our eternal quest for more, we humans have produced and released over 350,000 substances into the environment. These infiltrate all of earth’s systems and have unpredictable effects. “Forever chemicals” (PFAS) are now found in human bodies and have contaminated almost all parts of the biosphere. We don’t know the long-term effects of most of these and even apparent ones where thousands of animals, birds, or fish are killed, are just ignored. Plastics is an obvious one where microplastics are now found in our bodies via water, air, and soil, the elements of life. These disrupt hormones, harm reproduction, and are suspected to lead to terrible diseases like cancer or dementia. They modify the genes of organisms and affect the evolutionary processes and changing the functioning of the Earth system in unknown ways.

• Freshwater Change (Status: Tipping point passed): Human consumption and impact to freshwater resources includes both blue water (rivers, oceans, etc.) and green water (soil moisture). We are using up freshwater resources far faster than they can be replenished. Major aquifers all over the world are dropping rapidly and some approaching collapse like in Cape Town or Mexico City. Dams and irrigation systems have altered water flow to destroy wetlands which feed aquifers, directly impacting water availability and food production.

• Ocean Acidification (Status: Tipping point passed): Oceans absorb approximately 25% of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. This makes the water more acidic, which harms those organisms like coral reefs and shellfish that need calcium carbonate to make their shells and skeletons. Since the marine ecosystem is hierarchical, entire marine food chains are nearing collapse. It also reduces the ability of the ocean to act as a carbon sink.

• Stratospheric Ozone Depletion (Status: Light Green): The ozone layer protects all life on earth from ultraviolet radiation. It was severely damaged in the 1980s using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigeration and aerosols. A worldwide effort via the 1987 Montreal Protocol banned the use of CFCs thus allowing the ozone layer to slowly recover back into the green. This remains the only example of man acting to save a part of the environment and succeeding. But, it only worked because it did not inconvenience anyone. As in they carried on using fridges and aerosols, but made of non-CFC chemicals.

• Atmospheric Aerosol Loading (Status: Light Green): This refers to the load of airborne particles such as soot, dust, sulfates, etc. from mankind and natural activities. These range from human transportation, industry, power generation, and cooking fuel to events like volcanic eruptions by nature. While the global average is still surprisingly in the green, many regional ones are deep in the red. Cities such as New Delhi, Mexico City, or Dhaka are crimson based on horrific pollution and really unfit for human habitation. Pollution has wide impact such as human health, affecting rains, forest biomes, and marine ecosystems.

The following graph illustrates the sad state of the 9 planetary boundaries.

Image 2: State of Planetary Boundaries [Source]

A lot of what we see such as massive glaciers melting or icebergs the size of a city falling into the sea are symptoms of impact on the above-mentioned systems. All regional effects such as the Amazon rainforest dying, coral reefs collapsing, weather changing, or ocean and air currents changing are just feedback effects from impact to the nine root-causes. These are all warning signs that the major systems have already been pushed too far and have gone past the tipping point of recovery.

Oil and Gas: The Canvas of Life

If air and water are the critical elements for our bodies to live, oil and gas are the equivalent for enabling all we think of as life. Virtually everything a person does during a 24-hour cycle is made possible only because of oil and gas used in many or all parts of their lifecycle. Toothpaste, paint, food, driving, medicines, computers, eyeglasses, clothes, TVs, showering, etc. or the things needed to produce and transport them are either composed of or made possible due to the power of oil and gas. Oil stands alone among all the materials in the world needed to sustain our way of life. Yet, oil is currently sold for about US $60 per barrel (42 gallons, 159 liters) while providing us with 1.7 megawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to four and a half years of human labor. But far more important than being equivalent, due to its incredible energy density, oil can power a 747 jet across the Atlantic or a massive container ship across the Pacific. No number of humans could peddle or row such a ship across the Pacific, let alone power a plane or launch a rocket into space. In reality, oil stands above even human ability and capacity and there is simply no match for it in terms of energy density and portability. While other sources such as nuclear fission may produce more energy than oil, they are not as dense, safe, or portable to match oil’s versatility.

The price of oil is absurdly low based on the incredible value it provides for humanity in enabling the entirety of how we live. Every economic and human activity, from building a house or a business meeting to providing medical services or going to a restaurant involves the extraction and burning of vast quantities of oil. Oil is also used to mine and extract hundreds of minerals and products and the enormous quantity of food and medicines needed to sustain our life. What we call value-added activity or work is in fact derived from this vast gap between the price of oil ($60) and the price of 4.5 years’ worth of human labor (~ $225,000) it replaces. Almost every penny earned by any member of society is financed from that gap. As of today (Nov 2025) the world uses 100 million barrels of oil per day, equivalent to 450 million years of human labor. In one day!!! Yet, little value or compensation is given to the people who work in the “low value-add” industries such as drilling, steel making, or transportation while high and sometimes absurd compensation is given to the so-called "high value-add” economic entities such as lawyers, tech workers, or bankers. The reason being is that if more was paid to those at the bottom of the inverted pyramid (like the oil worker), the entire system would collapse. Again, this is due to the immense gap between price of oil and the 4.5 years of physical labor, the same gap that is exploited for profit. You can live without Instagram, your Tesla, or even food for a few days but you cannot live without oil which provides or enables everything you need to survive.

It is important to understand that oil is recovered and not produced and thus the disconnect between its price and value. The earth gifted us with a finite amount of this amazing liquid, and we can only recover or extract what is there. Every unit of every currency in the world is really a claim against future use of resources like oil to enable the purchase of goods and services. So, what you are doing when you make money is buying the ability to gain something that was produced using resources. But, given the infinitely greedy nature of man, we have hyper-financialized the claim side of things by printing an ever-growing number of currency units. Word debt stands at $251 trillion, with the US alone shouldering an absurd $37 trillion. And every day more gets printed which makes an ever-increasing quantity of claims against current and future recovered energy. In addition, all this money has caused an absolute frenzy in consumption by making people richer via inflating assets which in turn has required even more energy and materials. And as some of this money has washed ashore into Asia and Africa, population has soared with India leading the world. Of course, more humans means even more consumption of resources and materials in an ever-accelerating loop.

But while money can be printed infinitely, oil and resources cannot. Over the last 100 years, most of the sources of easily accessible resources have been depleted and new ones are harder to find. Worse, they require far more energy input to recover, thus rapidly narrowing the once massive gap between recovery cost and sale price. The industry term for this is Energy Return on Investment (EROI) which shows a ratio of input vs. output. At the start of the modern spike in oil production in the 1970s, oil’s EROI was 25:1. This meant that it took 1 barrel of oil to get 25 out which was a great deal. Thanks to hyper production and consumption since then, EROI today stands around 15:1 on average. This is due to depletion of oil fields and having to look for oil in hard to reach places (deep underground or undersea). For methods like fracking, the EROI is barely manageable at around 4:1. And the falling EROI is true of most commodities as we have plundered and used up all the easy-to-get resources. We will never run out of oil but once we reach the 3:1 mark, most of the things and systems needed to run modern life will  no longer be possible. Yet humans continue to build and multiply as if there is an infinite amount of oil and resources or that we will find more earths to plunder.

The Green Mirage

The reason I focused so much on oil is that it is a very big polluter of the environment throughout its lifecycle, all the way from exploration and extraction to burning it for energy. Much of the same points could also be made for our other cheap source of energy, which is coal. The only difference being that coal is far more abundant but also far more polluting. Globally, 80% of primary energy for life comes from oil, gas, and coal. In the past 2 decades, green energy has come to the forefront as the rich and polluting elites of the world have been trotted out to force carbon austerity on the masses. It is carbon that has been named the poster child of our self-destruction and rightfully so. As I explained before, the more we burn to support our life the more carbon we release which the earth is unable to reabsorb. But while the headlines sound good and driving an electric car feels like you are doing something to help, the reality is far more insidious. First off, building green or renewable sources of energy such as solar panels or wind turbines require massive amounts of oil and energy to produce. The same goes for electric cars. All require huge amounts of metals such as nickel, cobalt, graphite, copper, and rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium. All these are difficult to mine and cause massive amounts of pollution which damage local environments. Then, more energy is required for manufacturing, transportation, and deployment of these systems. Finally, at the end of their useful life, most of the materials cannot be recycled and contribute to even more pollution. Electricity also has transmission and storage losses which further reduces any advantage they have over burning the oil in the car to begin with.

A bigger problem with green energy sources is that they are not reliable on a 24x7 basis. Solar is useless at night and wind turbines only function when there is enough wind to turn them. A stable electric grid requires what is called a baseload source of energy that is reliable on a constant basis. Spain found this out the hard way recently when their baseload failed to meet demand which led to a catastrophic failure of multiple grids. Globally, baseload electricity is today mostly supplied by oil, gas, and coal, with nuclear slowly growing. Of all these, only nuclear has zero carbon emissions and has an energy density that is far greater than the others combined. But it too requires massive amounts of oil to build the reactor and transport all the materials needed to get to a functioning core. The world is rapidly adding renewables to the energy mix but all that is doing is slightly slowing the rates of deforestation, mining, burning, and depletion. It is like saying we are accelerating towards a wall a bit slower than before, but the fact is we are still accelerating. The reason green energy can never help in a meaningful way is because it is chasing a demand curve that never stops climbing. More ACs, cars, buildings, planes, data centers, and humans to feed all ensure that growth in demand is infinite. We never stopped or even slowed our need for more, all we did was throw green energy into the supply side of the equation which can never be balanced anyway. And THAT is the fatal flaw in the human code that ensures its self-caused destruction in the end; You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet!

We Are All In It Together

I have lived in the US for almost half my life and have spent many years in India including my first 10. I will use these two very different countries to illustrate the state of human growth and its impact on the world. The minute a foreigner lands in any city in America for the first time and comes out of the airport, they notice one thing right away… everything is big. Hulking, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs are everywhere and the people getting in and out of them are also big. Not just large but massive. Going to one of the ubiquitous fast-food restaurants yields a massive meal for just a few $. A meal that in most countries could feed a family of four but here is meant for a single person. Go into any market and the dazzling array of packaged items on offer is staggering in terms of quantity, variety, and size. The milk section alone has 20+ variations of milk, from full-fat, low-fat, semi-fat to lactose free, Omega-3 enhanced, or grass fed. Coffee, chips, jams, pasta, rice, no matter what the item, there are many variations. And the entire place looks like a shrine to plastic with the material being present in some form in every corner of the store. A person exits these markets with their plastic bags to said large SUV or truck and drives to a (by global standards) equally massive home. These homes are marvels of modern technology and exotic conveniences such as heated toilet seats, multiple refrigerators, wall-to-wall carpeting, gadgets of every type, and a cooling/heating system that keeps every room at a constant temperature no matter how hot or cold outside. And all of it consumes vast amounts of energy. So much so that according to research conducted by the University of Michigan, the US consumes 25% of the world’s resources yet only makes up ~5% of the world’s population. This includes one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23% of the coal, 27% of the aluminum, and 19% of the copper. Americans create an estimated 30% of the world’s waste. The U.S. also consumes a disproportionate amount of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and freshwater compared to other countries. And then you have the ultra-rich like Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin who runs a yacht that requires the same energy per day as what it takes to power 580 US homes. Only to be outdone by Mark Zuckerberg of Meta who sailed TWO superyachts 5,280 miles to to Norway just so he could heliski down a mountain.

One the other side of the coin is the country that stands at the forefront of and is the flag carrier of human overshoot. Proudly surpassing 1.4 billion people recently, India is positioned to remain the most populous country well into this century. Using data from the UN’s World Population Prospects, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu visualizes it brilliantly. India is the world’s ecological experiment to see how far man can multiply and destroy every aspect of the environment before nature pushes back. On every major ecological and environmental metric, from freshwater sources and air quality to green cover and resource depletion, India sports some of the worst numbers (and getting even worse). To be fair, Pakistan and Bangladesh are worse, but they are not as big as India. If Americans are destroying their environment via obscene consumption by the few, India is doing it via below average consumption by the very many. At around 67,000 births/day, India is the undisputed leader of uncontrolled creation of humans. And the rich of India are far worse than their American counterparts, where the top 1% own 40% of the country’s wealth. From building a $2 billion monstrous home in sight of the biggest slum in Asia to hosting a $55 million wedding in Versailles in France, they display a level of opulence (and energy use) that is not often matched in the west. I visit India every year and it is the country of my birth. I love many things about India including its warm people, spirituality, and tolerance of all. But I inwardly weep at how far humans have gone to destroy all their environment with no regard given for any other life form or creature other than humans. It’s not uncommon to see very few trees or sparse greenery when flying into most major cities. For most Indians, the singular goal of life seems to be to have 2-6 kids and then enable them to do the same in an endless cycle. And, perversely, the poorer the person the more kids they have. Yes, the numbers are distorted due to the mandate of a single religion to have as many kids as possible to outbreed all others, but it is irrelevant to this discussion. What matters is the presence of all kinds of garbage everywhere, the lack of forests which have long been chopped down, streams and lakes that are polluted, and having air quality that is unfit for humans. And in many communities all across the country, water is transported by smoke-belching (and oil guzzling) trucks from far away rivers and aquifers. This is because all the local resources have been used up and there is no other option. The use of one finite resource to transport the other ensures both are depleted even faster. The only glimmer of hope for India is that the younger, Internet-born generations see the consequences of the current path and want to change it. But it is too late anyway, so I feel bad for them.

And it is the same the world over, just maybe not as obscene. Asia and Africa lead the world in population growth, environmental destruction, and resource depletion. South and central America is slightly better while Australia and the US are some of the worst on a per capita basis. Europe is one place where there is a genuine attempt to somewhat live in balance and generally supported by society. This is because until recently, countries had mostly homogenous populations with shared culture and goals where the environment was considered and population growth was low to moderate. But with the massive influx of “migrants” fleeing their overpopulated and resource-depleted countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, Europe is destined to suffer the same fate. No matter where, as soon as humans can consume more, they do so with abandon. This is a human issue and unfortunately the movie, The Matrix, seems to have gotten it right. In it, the computer representative Smith posits that humans are not like other mammals in that we don’t ever reach any equilibrium with nature. But, rather, we are like a virus upon the planet which starts in an area, multiplies uncontrollably, uses up all the resources, and then either moves to a new area or dies due to lack of resources.

Beyond all the cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships, and life engines that gulp down oil every day, there is one entity that guzzles it with abandonment. And that is the militaries of this world led, of course, by the US. Every single aspect of modern militaries relies on oil, from massive battleships cruising the oceans and tanks that guzzle fuel to blow up towns, to fighter jets that must fly every day for training, reconnaissance, or to kill. The US military is the world’s single largest consumer of oil and one of the world’s top polluters. And military vehicles have no consideration at all for fuel efficiency as the focus is all about performance and power. This requires almost 5 BILLION gallons (~19 BILLION liters) of fuel a year, making it the 34^th largest consumer in the world, ahead of many countries. And every bullet, tank, jet, missile, ship, etc. requires enormous quantities of metals and minerals, all having to be mined and transported using more oil. It is ironic that the job of the killers of the world is killing the environment which ultimately, will kill them as well.

Reflections

Of all the blogs I have researched and written to date, this was the one that has left me sad about the fate of humanity. That is because all my research led back to the same conclusion that I realized deep down but failed to accept. And that is that we are fucked and that there is no way out because the very foundation of our life is based on an utterly flawed assumption of infinite resources. Mother nature gave us a very full glass of oil and a bountiful basket of all other resources to live for eons, assuming we would live within our ecological limits and in balance with the rest of nature. Instead, we took that glass and stuck in as many straws as possible to suck out as much as we could as fast as possible. And using that short-lived gusher of abundance, we have built the entirety of our existence assuming it all will continue to increase in perpetuity. I need to look no further than the inside of my very comfortable home and car to realize the absurdity of that assumption and how unsustainable it is. I see how much energy and resources it has taken just to gather, deliver, and build the house and then fill it with everything modern life demands. Like the flat screen TV or mobile phone which create all manner of destruction to mine the rare earths needed to operate them or the global supply chain needed to deliver them to me. Or the stunning amount of plastic bags in my garbage bin every day that held vegetables, rice, or some other food. Or the energy guzzling HVAC system that keeps the house at a comfortable temperature no matter what it is outside. When I go to the nice air conditioned, plush office, I marvel at the rows of monitors and devices powered on all the time. Even at midnight, most of the lights in the office are on and screens all over the office proudly display our logo or corporate photos. And the kitchen has bananas from Peru, coconut water from Thailand, coffee from Kenya, and my favorite, an entire fridge of water in plastic bottles (in a city that has some of the best tap water in the US). Of course, almost any piece of equipment is either made and shipped from China or contains parts from there. On my drive home, stuck in miles of traffic, I look at the nicely dressed lady in the massive Ford truck beside me, the lone occupant of a vehicle that can tow the equivalent weight of the average home in Asia. Sadly, this shiny, clean truck is being used to carry some groceries and her purse around, consuming what an average household in much of the world would consume in a day. To support this lifestyle for a year, per person, requires 315 years of equivalent human labor, something that 70 barrels (what an average American uses in a year) of oil accomplishes.

If you are over 40 and reading this, thank the universe for being born at the start of what I will call the age of massive resource exploitation. The amazing lifestyle most of us enjoy, especially in the US, is only due to the fact we have been able to stick millions of straws into the cup of oil mother nature gave us. From business trips to London (45 years of equivalent human labor), driving to the coast (3 years equivalent), hosting a family get together (4 years equivalent), to just living life in the US for a year (315 years equivalent), it all is made possible by more oil. When I try to discuss these facts with friends or family, I am dismissed as a doomer or with ‘nothing I can do about it so why worry’. So, can we do something to save ourselves from the disastrous ending we are hurtling towards? Can we slow consumption to the basics, ban all non-essential-to-life stuff, massively downsize our cars and homes, have no more than 1 child, stop flying all over the world, scale down our military by 99% and shut down most tech such as AI? Can we re-establish a more nurturing, balanced, and loving attitude towards nature and all the rest of the species that call this planet home? In other words, can we as a species adopt a rapid de-growth agenda and actively work towards it as a global effort. The answer is, of course we can, as was proven on a very small-scale during Covid. But there is zero chance we will, and the vast majority will never do this voluntarily anyway. Countries like the US and China actively pursue a hyper-growth agenda and continue to massively build their militaries, both of which they consider existential. Our present cultural, political, and economic realities, dominated by institutional inertia, infighting, ambition-based lifestyle, and a general inability to comprehend the reality of civilizational decline ensures we will only accelerate, never slow or even consider it. Even if we cannot stop human ambition, we can massively slow human reproduction to have meaningful impact within 2 generations. But this has even less likelihood of happening given human and religious mandates to ‘go forth and multiply’. As can be seen with India and much of Africa, humans would rather live in utter poverty and squalor than not have kids.

So what next? Honest answer is I don’t know but some of the early signs of the long collapse are already here. Many cities around the world are in terminal decline based on lack of resources and ones like Jakarta are being actively abandoned due to climate change. As oil recovery peaks and with diesel already hitting a peak, everything will get more expensive (inflation) and stay that way. Expansion into areas that require significant amounts of oil/resources such as in deserts or islands will come to an end. Civil unrest will continue to widen and become worse as the gap between the rich (can afford resources) vs. the rest widens. Transporting goods from faraway places will become prohibitively expensive. Resource-poor countries will start experiencing significant issues such as lack of food and economic collapse, causing migration (estimated at 1.2 billion by 2050) to resource-stable areas to soar. Which, in turn, will make those areas also resource-poor given the sheer number of people. Wars, based on vague “terrorism” claims, will be used by nations like the US to seize control of resources like what is already starting in Venezuela. Technology will make even more jobs redundant causing ever more people not to be able to afford the basics of life. Schemes like Universal Basic Income will be implemented but no amount of money printing can cause more oil to be recovered. Peak oil, that point where oil recovery fails to meet ever growing demand, has already been reached and we are at the start of the long decline on that curve.

The truth of the matter is there is no clean version of the oil-soaked, industrial system that provides the foundation of our lives. There is no green utopia that comes without mining scars, ecological collapse, polluted air, and dead rivers. Even if we solved emissions from cars, planes, and ships, we would still be erasing forests, poisoning water, grinding up mountains, and destroying habitats. The entirety of our existence is built on replacing living complexity with synthetic convenience. Everything that we use to live requires more resources, machines, roads, infrastructure, factories, and more destruction. Since everything has a finite life span, it will eventually break, rust, glitch, or become obsolete. Or, the horror, we will get bored of it and throw it away. So, we will need to keep extracting, transporting, manufacturing, and replacing everything in ever larger quantities. Again. And Again. Forever! People lament about the social distortion of how the rich spend 100x more than their poor counterparts. But, for the earth, it makes zero difference whether it is Mark Zukerburg’s yacht consuming the same resources as 500 people or 500 people in India consuming the same at the yacht. Net of it is that no matter the who, the what is still the same… more destruction and depletion. I am sorry to say I have zero hope that we will change course voluntarily based on everything I have discussed. I have come to the conclusion that we as a species are just designed like this and it is in our DNA to consume with abandon. I will continue to do my part by consuming less, recycling, polluting less, etc., all the while knowing it won’t make any difference. But, above all, I choose to live a life of utter and undying gratitude for every single day I get to live this wonderful life based on a terribly flawed foundation that has already begun the process of spectacular failure. And to be kind and loving towards all creatures, especially the non-human ones. There is a great video by Steve Cutts which summarizes this entire blog beautifully. I would encourage you to watch it as it is funny and oh so true.