Thanks. I appreciate your comments.
As you can see from the thread header, it's been a long time without posts. The ideas predate 2012 ... on mass behaviour, some even go back to 1955, and Isaac Asimov.
From 2008 —
'In our lifetime, we've witnessed an explosion of historically unprecedented abundance. Many still don't understand that this was a short "blip" in time, and view many aspects of their existence, including the availability of personal transport as an entitlement. However we can now foresee reversion to previous norms.
Technology will provide some answers, but the underlying fundamental is the cost of energy, which will continue to rise. As it does, increasingly large portions of society will be marginalized: forced to adapt, as the cost of energy consumes increasing portions of their income for heat, light, transportation, food, water, infrastructure, education, raw materials: indeed, for every aspect of their existence.
Transition to a new equilibrium will take a century of wrenching change. It won't be easy.'
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Now, I realize that depending on the extent of climate change, it could take millennia. 21 thousand years ago, we were all under ice, miles deep. With climate we just don't know what's been triggered, and where the tipping points are.
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Then there's the work by Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Erwin Schrodinger and others. What it boils down to is this: the economics we live by, today, is bunk -- especially with its unaccounted-for "externalities". True economics is the exchange of energy.
But as we move further into climate change, mankind will be faced with two choices: keep using fossil fuels and destroy our existence, or abandon fossil fuel, and save it. Save it, and there's not enough energy to support our current demands.
How long will it take until finally, everyone realizes that anthropogenic climate change IS happening, and that we MUST do something? I don't know. But climate change is happening a LOT faster than I guessed 25 years ago. What's more, there's growing evidence that it's accelerating -- going non-linear and hyperbolic.
Back in the aughts, I used the term New Equilibrium to describe a time when mankind emerges from the coming dark age. In the New Equilibrium, man has learned to live with the planet, and with other men. That story is the genesis of a novel-in-writing.
Jim |
