The central assumption of the neoliberal economic model that material consumption and industrial expansion can continue without devastating political and environmental consequences is known to be false. Yet, every politician on Earth is pushing for further material growth which in a time of resource scarcity only leads to rapidly increasing income inequality. This in turn undermines the stability of society. And vulnerable societies that suffer major economic downturns are known to elect dangerous people and do some crazy stuff.

Overexploiting and degrading both ecological and social capital to gain ephemeral financial capital is the pathway to collapse of a society. Anthropological and agent-based modelling studies have shown that any society that undermines its ecological base runs into declining marginal returns from further material growth. When a threshold is passed, and net energy starts to fall, society can no longer afford to maintain its social organisation and infrastructure and starts to decay. If the ruling elite refuses to give up on trying to push the economy to grow the remaining resources will simply be swallowed up by the resource sector and benefit only a small minority of rich elites while the majority grows poorer over time. This will of course cause political turmoil as even the middle class starts to voice their dissatisfaction. And the entire process makes any democracy open to totalitarianism, a form of government in which the state has no limits in authority and does whatever it wants.

Full collapse from over-depletion and high levels of inequality. Source: Castro et al. 2014

“Democracy is first and foremost about equality: equality of power and equality of sharing in the benefits and values made possible by social cooperation” (Sheldon Wolin, 2010, p. 61).

Most societies have no mechanisms for sharing power and the benefits of cooperation in a time of involuntary degrowth, which we are currently in. Every government policy since the 1970s have only worsened the issue by promoting the enrichment of the capital owning class over the worker class through financialisation. Giving out cheap credit has masked the systemic issues and kept the middle class happy for a while, as they get to continue consuming resources in the moment, but its a giant ponzi scheme that will collapse eventually. Meanwhile, the working class has only suffered since the 70s, with falling living standards and increasing poverty, and thus started to heavily mistrust the ruling elite.

Furthemore, wealth equalizing institutions, such as income taxation, has become ineffective in a globalised world. Big corporations and rich individuals can escape national laws and continue to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else and nature. The world's richest 1 percent now owns as 82% of global wealth, while the poorest 3.7 billion people saw no increase in their wealth in 2018.

When people are desperate for change, ideology becomes a powerful weapon. If people have no way to influence the political system, no equality in control of the instruments of persuasion, other than voting every four years it cannot be called a true democracy. Private control over the media and higher education are examples of public loss of instruments of persuasion.

Rising inequality opens up a power vacuum that is easily filled by leaders of business or populistic parties in order to extract what they want from the system. The rich business elites usually claim the “trickle down” doctrine or that “government is the problem” to justify deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. While populistic parties (left and right) exploit the working class hate of elites and fuels polarisation and division in society while arguing for a centralised strong government. We see this type of development all over Europe and in the US.

The only way to combat this negative development, as I see it, is to promote decentralization of power and strengthening local economies with circular resource flows that stay within certain boundaries through for example a local currency. And promoting self-sufficiency. Also trying to even the playing field by offering alternative stories through online platforms when the mainstream media is failing. I know that many instead are calling for global governance to reign in multinational corporations but that won't be possible in a resource constrained world and it's certainly not what people are going to vote for. 

If no credible options are put forward as the old story breaks apart there is a high chance that people will turn to “strongman” governance in their desperation for change. With potentially catastrophic consequences for peace and security. It's now 100 years since the end of World War I and we are again living in very dangerous times. Europe is so fragile that it feels like any shock could trigger something major, especially if we have a major financial collapse. Unfortunately, such a financial crisis looks increasingly likely as the global debt bubble has started to unravel. I hope there is still some sanity left among people to resist another major war.

We are in a double bind. Growing the economy will cause catastrophic climate change and massive biological extinction. But not growing the economy will lead to lots of suffering under the current neoclassical economic structure. Of course, we could chose to change our entire economic system so that its in line with the biophysical reality we live in, i.e. we would have to give up on growing materially and lower our consumption radically but do so in a more orderly and just fashion. But no, we have made no such decision, instead every government on Earth is trying to push its economy to grow further while dabbling in some greenwashing on the side.

Because we, especially the ruling elites, don't like the alternatives we have to choose from in this dilemma we have tried to maintained status quo at any cost. With the consequence of rapidly rising inequalities, failing infrastructures, collapsing ecosystems, climate disruption and failing states. But now this strategy has reached its end game. The global economy which has been stagnating and on life-support by central bankers stimulus for over a decade is starting to fall apart. All the while people around the world are electing unsavory authoritarian leaders “strong men”, that promote heavy extractive practices, due to increasing mistrust of the ruling elite. The latest example being Brazil.

And nowhere in the mainstream media or from elected politicians do we hear about the underlying issues of our current predicament. About how net energy decline restricts growth and forces the economy to contract. The fact that trying to push for further material growth now costs more than it benefits society. Or that it's simply not possible to fuel our current overconsumptive, overpopulated and destructive techno-industrial society with renewable energy. Not to mention the fact that it's not desirable since it would destroy the ecosystems upon which our very survival depends.

Using total factor productivity as an indicator of returns on innovation, Bonaiuti (2018) has shown how industrial nations have gone through three industrial revolutions of which the latest is now coming to an end. After the peak in the 1930s, when global oil and gas EROI hit a peak, productivity decreased until it reached only 0.34% in the period 1973-95. When US oil production peaked and massive privatization and debt accumulation took off to fund further consumption. The third industrial revolution, known as ICT, has not been powerful enough to compensate for the declining returns of the second industrial revolution. This is evidence that advanced capitalist societies such as the US, Europe and Japan have entered a phase of declining marginal returns or involuntary degrowth with detrimental impacts on societies capacity to maintain its institutional framework.

Total Factor Productivity % of the Private Non-Farm Business Sector (1750-2014). Source: Bonaiuti (2018)

Historical estimate of the global EROI of oil. Source: Court and Fizaine (2017)

In other words, fundamental resources are becoming scarce and expensive and we are becoming poorer and cannot afford to maintain or grow our current society so it starts to crumble. This shows up in the economy in terms of increasingly expensive basic resources like food, rising levels of debt, rising income inequality, underinvestment in infrastructure (e.g. health care, education, railways), and higher unemployment etc.

People are experiencing their living standards falling while politicians are telling them everything is just fine as is, or that the issue can be solved by tweaking the system. But this is no longer enough, people are fed up with false promises and incompetent governments. And rightly so, but the thing people don't realise is the fundamental drivers of our current situation and the fact that no matter how much more they exploit and destroy nature will it improve their lives. Actually, the opposite is true, it only undermines their own wellbeing in the long run. Only investments into low-energy infrastructure and restructuring of the entire economy, focusing on increasing social and ecological capital, can lessen people's suffering. Yet people around the world are voting for violent idiots that promises economic growth by aggressive exploitation of the remaining ecosystems that sustain all biological life.

For example, if the new president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has his way the Amazon rainforest will be decimated to give way for unsustainable soy plantations. The biodiverse rich region and home to traditional peoples will be destroyed and the ecosystems capacity to oxygenate the planet and store carbon will be greatly impacted. Bolsonaro also has plans to legalise the use of weapons on a wider scale which will probably lead to further indiscriminate killings of people trying to safeguard the Amazon and promote wide scale illegal logging. This of course will only undermine Brazilians wellbeing but the majority believe the opposite to be true.

Economic decline led by net energy decline doesn't have to result in despotism, although it can. A number of other factors are likely influencing how politics in resource scarce times turns out. Weak institutions, dysfunctional media, high levels of inequality, high population growth, high levels of private debt, a powerful military, and high vulnerability to changes in environment are other generic factors likely playing a role. Other factors tied directly to energy include: high dependency on food imports, government budgets tied to fossil fuel exports, high per capita energy use, and high dependency on energy imports.

There are several measures governments and organisations can take to reduce the risk of a society falling into the hands of a dictator. For example by promoting independent media, investing in low-energy infrastructure, reducing political polarization, strengthening democratic institutions, discouraging inequality, building local food production capacity, decentralising the economic and political system, limiting population growth, and reducing financial instability. In other words, the opposite of what many governments are trying to do currently. So people need to wake up to the realities of our situation and demand change, but such change needs to be guided by the understanding of biophysical realities. Otherwise it is doomed to fail, will only promote further violence and destruction.

Wishful thinking is today so prevalent that it even has infected the brain of people who are trained not to be biased, scientists. I mean sure, economists have always been blissfully ignorant and wrong in their predictions but what I’m talking about is more widespread. It's a deep denial among the people researching our most critical issues: climate change and energy limitations. 

You see it in the media when scientists discuss oxymorons like “green growth”, or proclaim that we can “decarbonize our entire economy within 20 years”, or that “agriculture will save biodiversity”, or that “lab grown meat will solve our food problems” and so on. It's nothings but grasping at straws in a world that is on fire. Such delusional statements are more about belief systems and identities reflecting values than science. It's also because climate scientists have been told by behavioural psychologists not to scare people as it may hamper action. But isn't it odd that the profession that claims to be devoted to curiosity and truth seeking wants to restrict exploration of future possibilities and censor people due to how it might come across to others?

Our climate reality is harsh. Most scientists tend to underestimate our predicament because they are too conservative, not the other way around. But now it's becoming clear, predictions made by oversimplified climate models have underestimated the changes we're already witnessing due to climate change. Earth, the biosphere, ecosystems and human systems such as the economy are dynamic complex systems and their behaviour is nonlinear. A model that does not include critical feedbacks in the system will not be able to accurately predict results in the real world. This has now become obvious as real world observations about the sad state of our climate is pouring in. Climate change is accelerating.

Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at an alarming rate and looks to be completely gone summertime some time in the coming years (2022?), accelerating global warming further. Ice and snow reflect about 80 percent of the Sun’s energy back into space while the darker ocean and land will absorb 90 percent of that heat. The albedo effect due to vanishing sea ice is already responsible for about 25 percent of global warming (Pistone et al. 2014). Greenland shed about 280 gigatons of ice per year between 2002-2016 and the island’s lower-elevation and coastal areas experienced up to 4 meters of ice mass loss (expressed in equivalent-water-height) over a 14-year period (NASA, 2018). Accelerating rates of ice loss also implies accelerated rates of sea level rise. Certain cities will have to be abandoned. In ten years prior to 2016 the Atlantic Ocean soaked up 50 percent more carbon dioxide than it did the previous decade, speeding up the acidification of the ocean (Woosley et al. 2016). And the list goes on and on with increasingly worrisome observations.

With an increase of carbon emissions of 2% in 2017 (Carbon Brief, 2017), the so called “decoupling” of economic activity from emissions is not yet making a net dent in global emissions. Even if we start reducing emissions now it's not going to be enough to prevent dangerous climate change since there is about a decade lag between emissions and resulting warming (Ricke & Caldeira, 2014). We have already (95% probability) gone past the 2°C warming point/UN target (Raftery et al. 2017), and are  likely headed towards 4-5°C (Steffen et al. 2018). That's because the Earth system is dynamic and is more likely to continue warming until it stabilises at another point, which in the Earth's past occurred at about 4-5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. By the way, it is generally accepted that a 5 degree rise in temperature is not compatible with human civilisation as we know it. At the same time, perhaps a complete collapse of civilisation could prevent the worst climate change outcomes (Garrett, 2012). But no one is going to promote or talk about that in public. Even if diminishing returns on resources, especially oil, likely will shrink our civilisation in the near future, whether we like it or not (Turner, 2014). 

No one likes either outcomes of this predicament and that's why most experts are basically just arguing over different options of removing carbon from the atmosphere through geoengineering. Using machines to suck out carbon, however, is not feasible both in terms of cost and scale and could cause more harm than good. Current technology would have to be scaled by a factor of 2 million times within 2 years. That's just not going to happen. Biological approaches to carbon capture such as planting trees, restoring soils, holistic grazing, and growing seagrass and kelp appear far more promising. 

Anyway, the real issue for ordinary people is how to adapt to a world that is increasingly hostile while using less energy? Not wasting time listening to myths about "green tech" or believing in fantasies like "colonising Mars" or "geoengineering the entire planet"