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.

Economic growth as people know it, in terms of GDP, has stagnated and started to turn negative. Most reactions to the absence of growth have consisted in trying to get it back again as fast as possible, whatever the cost, further degrading the biosphere at an accelerated rate. We have seen low interest rates, debt expansion, bank bailouts, government stimulus, land-grabs, tax havens, fiscal austerity, and stock buybacks etc. Most of these things did nothing to increase the wellbeing of ordinary people but greatly profited the richest in society. The massive debt overhang from such policies have now become a burden on the real economy. All it did was to divert people's attention from the inconvenient truth that there will be less material goods and energy flows in the future, not more.

This massive wastefulness of resources comes at a time when we could have used those means to invest in benefitting projects like affordable housing, a basic income, low carbon infrastructure, ecologically sound agriculture, adaptation to climate change etc. Instead we have chosen to let the oceans contain more plastic than fish and species go extinct a thousand times faster than any time in the last 65 million years. The central bank and governments desperate policies after the 2008 financial crisis is the biggest failure in our time. When the next crisis hits, which could be very soon, there will be neither fiscal nor monetary room for manoeuvre.

In his latest paper Tim Jackson show how declining growth in the real economy caused by resource limitations has led to increasing economic inequality. A factor that greatly increases the instability of a society. The rising inequality that has haunted advanced economies over the last decade is a direct consequence of policy decisions trying to promote growth in a dying capitalistic society that cannot be supported by underlying fundamentals. All it has done is to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top. The growth fetish has hindered ecological investments, reinforced inequality and exacerbated financial instability. The social and ecological prosperity that once was is being undone by this allegiance to growth at all costs. 

As shown in the HANDY-model (2014), overexploitation of both nature and labour leads to a fast total collapse of society. Economic stratification is a symptom often found in many past collapsed societies and is an outcome of elite overconsumption in a society overshooting its ecological carrying capacity. Such a collapse often lead to inequality-induced famine, due to widespread poverty, that causes the loss of workers rather than a collapse of the ecological base itself. Elites consumption keeps growing until the society collapses.

This is a very ugly possibility. And it shows just how important issues of ecological degradation and inequality are for social stability. The fact that we see widespread resource/economic inequality indicate that we, some societies more than other but talking globally, are far gone in the process towards collapse.

However, in another paper by Jackson, there are post-growth scenarios that dont necessarily lead to increasing inequality. Jackson claims that it depends on three structural features of the economy: elasticity of substitution between labour and capital, the dynamics of the capital-to output ratio, and the behaviour of the savings rate. Under conditions more favourable to wage labour (than capital) measures like a tax on capital and a universal basic income can decrease inequality even as growth decline. However, these measures are insufficient to reduce inequality when institutions aggressively favour capital over labour.  

I must say that I'm amazed over the fact that the international monetary system is still intact. It's now eight years since the global financial crisis first broke out. Irresponsible lax monetary policy in the belief of a "perpetual money machine", i.e lowering interest rates and expanding monetary supply, has lead to several bubbles and bursts. A process that started in the 1980s when industrial economies stopped generating GDP growth from productivity increases. And eight years is about the interval between every bubble bursting since then. 2017 could be the year when people finally lose faith in the system.

Of course there's a much deeper story to all this. The massive debt explosion that started in the 1980s has to do with diminishing returns on resource extraction. As real GDP growth slowed down, and wages stagnated, the cost of basic goods and living increased. People and governments started taking on huge loans to cover their continued consumption. An act of postponing the harsh consequences of going broke into the future, on to the next generation, while enjoying the present. By now we all know that most nations, and its peoples, are basically bankrupt since global GDP growth has come to a standstill while debts, not even including liabilities, have increased and are now impossible to pay back.

Instead of dealing with the real underlying issue, most nations have decided to double down on a failing policy of ever lower interest rates that keeps inflating markets and creating massive bubbles in stocks, bonds and housing. Sweden is a prime example of a country that never deleveraged during the last crisis and thus runs a much higher risk of having to face a major financial crisis soon. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that with its negative interest rates and  massive housing bubble Swedes are living way beyond their means. A small 40 m2 flat in central Stockholm cost at least 2-3 million SEK which makes it the third most overvalued housing market in the world, after Vancouver and London.

  

Mainstream media is still mostly blind to all this, claiming rising prosperity and a bright future ahead. And the few people who do stick their neck out are ridiculed based on silly arguments like "if it's a bubble why hasn't it popped yet?" as if that proves anything but faulty linear thinking of complex systems. It takes time for instabilities to build up. At a certain point, incremental change is suddenly replaced by abrupt change that can collapse the entire system. This is well-known within systems theory. To bad most economist never even study this and thus understands nothing about how the financial system or economy actually works as a whole.

Who knows how long this pretend and extend game can go on for, but one thing is certain, people are starting to lose faith in the system. We see that clearly in the political arena and spread of alternative media. We also see it in the rise of ever more elaborate conspiracy theories. The status quo is breaking down.

Unfortunately there are plenty of madmen and privileged people who are ready to use the resulting polarisation and confusion for their own benefit. The "let's blame immigrants" card is already in full swing. Cutting funding for climate change research is another type of witch hunt that's not happening only in the US, for example, the Sweden Democrats want to do something similar here claiming the meteorological authority's scenarios, which are based on IPCC's research,  are too alarmist. For us who study the topic of climate change this statement is laughable as it's more like the other way around, most projections underestimate the risks. Also, the increasing flow of refugees are partly a consequence of depleting resources and climate change. Perhaps politicians fear a loss of voters if the public understood that fact properly.

Anyway, 2017 looks to me as a year of high risk of political turmoil, social unrest, and financial calamity. Drawing most attention away from the underlying issues: resource depletion, biodiversity loss, climate change and overpopulation.

Here we are, it’s 2016 and we see a rise in right wing demagogues across Europe and in the United States amidst a prolonged economic downturn. Somehow it feels eerily similar to the 1930s era of the Great Depression and trade wars leading up to World War II. In some respects we do see similar tendencies: excessive borrowing and speculation leading to bubbles and defaults, money printing and currency wars, mass unemployment and destruction of the middle class, a small ruling elite, and more aggressive nationalistic foreign policy. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that human nature has not changed much over a mere 86 years. 

There are, however, some crucial differences from the 1930s and now. In 1930 there were only 2 billion people on the planet, today the count is 7.5 billion. Back then there were still untapped resources, e.g. plenty of easily accessible fossil fuels to dig up and burn, functioning ecosystems and a relatively stable climate. Now, we have reached peak production and headed for decline in almost all natural resources while having to adapt to a changing climate and trying compensate for lost ecosystems. In other words, the situation right now is actually far worse than it was in the 1930s in terms of real world physical conditions. 

These conditions are also the underlying factors to why the global economy is tanking. Reaching a peak in energy production implies hitting a wealth peak since there cannot be any real economic growth without increased energy consumption. Since 1973, when the United States went through local peak oil, and started importing large amounts of oil from the Middle East, the world has seen what happens when peak oil is passed. The average Americans living standard has been in decline ever since and multiple wars have been waged in the interest of securing oil from the Middle East.

I understand that people are fed up with the status quo, the existing power structures, and want change. But no politician can change the fact that resources are diminishing, at most he/she can perhaps do something about the management and distribution of remaining resources. This could be done peacefully but history tells us it will most likely end up in a grab for what’s left by any means necessary. Instead of solving the problems at home many nations will probably turn outwards and try to grab other people's resources while claiming to be under attack from these “others” in form of terrorism, immigration, religious conversion etc. Well, that’s if they can afford it. 

Overall, I think that the deglobalisation trend that started in 2008 will only continue, with more protectionism, stricter border controls, capital controls and failing international cooperation. And when the next major financial crisis hits there will be very little trust left in the international monetary system. Then all hell could break lose. But who knows, we cannot predict the future based on the past.

Now that the english have voted to exit the european union one must ask if it's not about time to have a referendum here in Sweden. The results could mirror those of the brits, a slight majority preferring to leave. A divide mostly between the upper and lower class and the old and the young. Swedes already said no to join the Euro and NATO so the sentiment of wanting to keep self-determination has always been strong. 

Opinion polls show loosing confidence in established parties and a turn towards more radical left and right wing politics as people become increasingly aware of the major challenges society is facing. The conservative Sweden Democrats is thought to have gained some 20% of voters while the Social Democrats and the Liberals have lost a significant number of voters. 

Economic, environmental and energy problems keep piling up without any clear vision or united efforts to tackle them on a national scale. On top of that immigration has become a major issue that divides the country. At the same time property prices and rents are sky high in city regions leading to segregation that only intensifies conflicts between the have and have nots.

This meanwhile farmers are struggling due to unreasonable EU rules and practices. Sweden imports almost 50% of the food that is consumed despite all the fertile land and freshwater the country has. However, the trend is shifting towards more locally grown food as people become aware of the benefits and the enjoyment in knowing where their food comes from. But it's a slow process.

The danger of course, in these times of political turmoil, is for demagoguery to gain more traction as people struggle to make sense of shifting power structures and harsher socioeconomic conditions. There are no easy or quick fixes, even if Sweden leaves the EU we still have many problems that our own government is to blame for, the massive private debt burden for example. The rising economic inequality and unfunded pensions that indebted students without any sight of gaining high paying jobs will ever be able to pay for. Exiting the EU or stopping immigration won't solve these problems, we need structural change of our entire economic system. The question is if we have the courage to change our way of living before it is changed for us, whether we like it or not.

Humans need clean drinking water, food and energy to survive. These things used to be public goods but we decided, somewhere along the road, to make them private goods. This means that an individual have to make, or inherit, money so she/he can purchase these basic necessities. Those who don’t have money get “weeded out”. This is the human created system that has replaced natural selection. Nowadays it doesn't matter if you are clever, healthy, kind or cooperative as long as you have money. 

Actually money is the wrong term, what a person needs is capital. There are many types of capital but we humans have decided that financial capital is the most important, compared to e.g. social or ecological capital. Again this is because with financial capital we can get other types of capital that we need for our survival and wellbeing. So we accumulate financial capital, as much as we can get, at the cost of degrading other capital bases. We degrade and destroy ecosystems that generate a stable climate, clean water, food and fuel so that over time these resources start to deplete and the cost rises. 

The cost keep rising but the world doesn't pay attention since it’s the most vulnerable that are hit first. It is not until poverty results in death or degradation results in extinction that we start wondering “what is going on?”. We sympathize but feel safe as long as it's happening somewhere else or we have a pile of financial capital to turn to. But what happens if lots of people start deciding that it’s easier to just “move” when rivers dry up, trust breaks down or conflict over remaining resources break out? Syria being a case in point.

Or what happens if the economy takes a beating, perhaps even a sudden crash, that wipes out all your financial capital and/or source of income, what will you do? In some places people can rely on the government, receiving benefits to cover minimum expenses. But what if the crash is so bad that everyone needs benefits at the same time? A healthy government could perhaps manage it. But what if all the government gets in trouble and yours can’t fund the entitlement programs anymore? Now you don’t have a job so you can’t earn money to buy basic goods and the government can’t help you out, you will have to rely on friends and family (community). If that doesn't work perhaps you will move. Greece comes to mind.

The end conclusion is that a growing number of people will have to move as a form of adaptation to rapidly changing socioeconomic or ecological conditions. This, in turn, will create hostility between the “haves” and the “have nots” since there is a limited amount of resources left. The majority are among those who have little since the overall resource pie is shrinking but the minority have more power within the current system since resources are becoming more expensive. This situation will grow worse over time until the majority have had enough. And the a major clash is unavoidable. 

At this point, perhaps, the system that we humans created can be replaced. But some of the social and ecological damage can never be reversed. Whatever happens, we have to be prepared for some very turbulent times.

When soils become eroded, fresh water scarce, landscapes deforested, the air polluted and climate unstable, species either adapt, move or go extinct. Because the climate is changing so rapidly most species have a hard time adapting to new conditions. Evolution would have to occur 10,000 times faster than it typically does in order for most species to adapt and avoid extinction. And so they move instead, along with the shifting climatic zones. According to a 2011 study, species are now moving to higher elevations at a rate of 11.1 meters per decade and to higher latitudes at an average of 16.9 kilometres per decade. 

Life cycle events like mating, blooming and migrating that follow seasons are also changing. Mismatches in timing of births and food availability will inevitably lower population sizes of many species while pests and pathogens thrive due to warmer temperatures. Even if some species are able to migrate there are still many hinders (cities, high-ways etc.) on their way to territories where the competition for food will be tough. Highly specialised species and those who already live in the most northern regions might go extinct. For example, many Arctic species like the caribou, arctic fox and snowy owl are losing their habitat and the food they depend on at a rapid pace.

Human population mobility is not that different. For many of the poorest people of the world mobility is sometimes the only adaptive strategy available. Most sub Saharan African countries are finding it difficult to cope with existing climate stress, not to mention future climate change. Extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and storms have a direct impact on human migration patterns while long-term changes such as desertification and deforestation can lead to declining living standards that indirectly pushes people to move. Already at +0.85°C warming, since pre-industrial times, we see a drastic increase in the number of displaced people.

Furthermore, when essential resources become increasingly scarce or costly tensions rise and conflict can break out. In Syria a devastating drought forced millions of farmers to abandon their fields in search of alternative livelihoods in the city. And when food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011, along with oil prices, food riots and civil unrest broke out in a number of countries where people spend a large part of their income on food. Some of these conflicts have turned into full on wars which further reinforces migration.

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) some 26.4 million people have been displaced by disasters (geophysical and weather related events) every year since 2008. The likelihood of being displaced by disaster today is 60% higher than it was in the early 1970s. The number of displaced people from natural disasters spiked during the strong El Niño years of 1997/98 which does not bode well for this winter and next year, with a similarly strong El Niño now taking shape. Losses from natural disasters and conflict increasingly outpaces the adaptive capacity of a growing number of people around the globe who are forced to relocate permanently. According to UNHCR, one in every 122 humans are now either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum. The number of conflicts have increased during the last decade and 15 newly erupted or reignited conflicts have broken out since 2010.

Shows total people of concern (refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced, returnees, stateless, and others of concern to UNHCR) in 15 countries as of 2014. Based on UNHCR - Global Trends 2014: World At War

The conflict in Ukraine together with 502,500 people crossing the Mediterranean and the large number of Syrians in Turkey (1.59 million) has lead to a doubling of refugees in Europe between 2013-2014, according to the UN Refugee Agency. While Germany and Sweden accepted the biggest volume of asylum seekers the largest proportion of refugees are located in Turkey and the Russian Federation.

Most people in Europe, and elsewhere, are currently focused on issues of immigration with endless political debates and moral outrage in mainstream media. People think that we are experiencing a political crisis but it's much worse than that. Migration is only a symptom of the real underlying predicament - limits to growth in a finite world. As long as society tries to grow its population and economic activity we will continue to experience mounting social and ecological stresses, for example in form of: increasing inequality, disruptive climate change, mass migrations, hunger, epidemics etc. These pressures are warning signals that indicate overshoot, this is a fact, and yet we refuse to talk about limiting population growth or downsizing our economy (i.e. lowering our energy per capita consumption).

Irreversible change in carrying capacity means that a return to their homeland will be impossible for many refugees. Since ecological deficit is a global phenomenon, millions of ecorefugees will be seeking new locations. But very few places will have the biocapacity necessary to take them in without undermining their own ecological capital. Are there any lifeboats (nations) in suitable condition to accept ecorefugees on a long-term basis? 

If we have a quick look at different country's biocapacity as measured by the ecological footprint network we can see that Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, Russia, Latin America and parts of southern Africa still have (in theory) the ecological capacity to host more people. While most countries located around the equator are in serious overshoot. However, not all countries are in overshoot for the same reasons, for example, the UK is a tiny country in landmass and have to rely on imports for pure survival while the US has plenty of land and could in theory support itself but not with current per capita over consumption.

Eventually, resource depletion and biophysical stresses will grow so large that the economy and population will have to contract. This view is based on scientific evidence of population dynamics in a closed natural system. We can always hope for the best, but we better prepare for the worst, like any prudent risk manager would.

As most people probably have noticed by now, there is very little real wealth generation in today’s economy. Most of the economic activity these days consist of wealth transfers, from the poor and the middle class to the financial elite. This is why we see such huge and widening gaps between rich and poor (80 people own 50% of all global wealth). When the resource pie isn't growing anymore then one person's gains will always imply another ones loss, it's a zero-sum game.

Absent abundant, cheap energy (especially oil) the economy cannot grow and more people go broke and become excluded from the marketplace. Only the rich will be able to afford to keep on over consuming. Our society has tried to “paper over” this problem by piling up ever more debt (borrowing purchasing power from the future), but we have now reached a level when people cannot or are unwilling to take on more debt. And this is also why we see falling commodity prices, there just isn’t enough demand. Instead we have debt deflation. In time, depressed commodity prices could lead to falling supply which in turn could be devastating for food production and transportation. All the while pollution is growing and climate change becomes more severe.

Meanwhile, in Europe, social unrest and political extremism is on the rise once again. The so called “refugee crisis”, however, is neither temporary or political in nature. Ideologies like left or right-wing doesn’t matter anymore, only those who accept ecological limits and those who don't. We are simply too many people on a planet with a limited amount of natural resources and unstable climate. Now we have to share what’s left of the Earth’s riches, and people do not like it. Especially not the rich.

It's always fun to compare results among countries, especially when it concerns cultural attitudes. So when I happened to find the american version of top 10 fears, that I just published a post about on my Swedish blog Resurstoppen, I simply had to make a comparison.

Now, I am biased since I think ecosystem destruction and climate change poses much bigger threats to humanity than terrorism or cyber warfare. This is the sane position most rational individuals would take, I think. If we don't have clean drinking water or a stable climate then why bother worrying about anything else really. However, most people worry about things that are more regional or national in scale than global. That's just human nature.

Anyway, let's go through some of the topics listed in the two diagrams and assess the threats, the risk they pose, i.e. how likely and with what potential impacts (serious, medium, low). 

Threat 1. Environmental destruction/Climate Change

Human engineering has left a mark on 83 per cent of the planet. At the time of the Roman Empire Earth held about 1000 billion tonnes of carbon in living biomass (plants and animals) but since then humans have consumed about half of that, leaving only 550 billion tonnes of carbon in biomass. This probably means that we have destroyed at least 50% of terrestrial ecosystems. A limit that many scientists believe we should not pass since it could trigger a state shift in the biosphere. As for climate change, given a climate sensitivity of about 3C for doubled CO2e, atmospheric concentration of CO2 must be reduced from its current 400 to 350 ppmv, to maintain the relative Holocene climate stability within which civilization has evolved. In other words, this threat is very likely and with serious consequences.