To make the case for the imminent collapse of global industrial civi-
lization, it is necessary to prove two things. The first is to account for
the Earth’s finite endowment of fossil fuels, metal ores, other industrial
and agricultural inputs, fresh water and fertile soil, and to demonstrate
that many of these resources are either past their all-time peak of pro-
duction or will soon achieve it. The second is to prove that, as these
resources become too scarce to allow the global industrial economy to
grow, the result will be collapse rather than a slow and steady deteriora-
tion that could continue for centuries without reaching any conclusive,
historical endpoint.
The first task has been carried out by a number of people, but a
particularly good book on the subject is Richard Heinberg’s Peak Every-
thing, which calmly lays out the facts for why the twenty-first century
is a century of declines in energy, agricultural output, stable climate and
population. While Heinberg weaves together a convincing story, Chris
Clugston, in his 2011 self-published book Scarcity, takes a more direct
approach. Clugston undertook a thorough study of US government
data on nonrenewable natural resources, focusing on the raw materials
needs and primary energy sources of industrialized economies. In his
2012 update, Clugston shows that only one essential industrial input —
bauxite for aluminum smelting —now remains sufficiently abundant
to provide for continued economic growth. Consequently, the rate of
improvement in the global material living standard (measured as per
capita GDP) has slowed from around 2 percent per year during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century to just 0.4 percent this decade, and is
poised to turn negative. Based on Clugston’s projections, the increasing
scarcity of the nonrenewable resources required to maintain industrial
civilization will most certainly trigger a global societal collapse by mid-
century.
While the first task is a relatively simple matter of laying out the
numbers, which are available from reputable sources that are difficult
to argue against and can be grasped by anyone with a head for numbers
and a general understanding of the functioning of industrial economies,
the second task is much harder, because the only way to address it is
through mathematical models. The first of these models is the World3
model used in the 1972 book Limits to Growth. World3 is a relatively
simple model that ran on a computer less powerful than a smartphone
and included just five variables: world population, industrialization,
pollution, food production and resource depletion. This model pre-
dicted economic and societal collapse by mid-twenty-first century.
The 2004 Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update confirmed that, thirty
years later, the initial predictions are still in excellent agreement with
reality. Though your instinct may be to mistrust the predictive abilities
of mathematical models in general, this wariness should be tempered
somewhat when the model in question is shown to have been correct
decades later.
Mathematical models can be fearsomely complex, requiring many
hours of supercomputer time for a single run and able to defy anyone’s
attempt to understand them at a sitting. Such models inspire skepti-
cism by their sheer complexity: with so many formulas and parame-
ters, there has to be a mistake in there somewhere! Luckily, modeling
collapse, at the simplest and most intuitive level, does not require such
complexity, thanks to the Seneca Cliff model proposed by Professor
Ugo Bardi of the University of Florence in Italy. Bardi’s goal was to
create a “mind-sized” model that could be easily understood at a glance
by someone even slightly conversant with mathematical modeling.
Bardi got the inspiration for the name of his model from a quote by
the Roman philosopher Seneca: “It would be some consolation for the
feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as
slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish
growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
Bardi started with a very simple model of resource use and deple-
tion with just two variables: resources and capital. Resources are trans-
formed into capital at a rate that is proportional to both the amount
of remaining resources and the amount of capital. Also, capital decays
over time. This model can be run via a simple spreadsheet or by using
a very short and simple computer program, and the result is a sym-
metrical bell curve: the amount of capital, representing the size of the
economy, grows gradually, reaches a peak, and then declines just as
gradually, as the resource base is depleted. (The bell curve is ubiquitous,
serves as the basis of probability and statistics, and is also known as
the Hubbert Curve, which is used to model oil depletion.) Bardi then
added a third variable to the model, which he labeled “pollution,” and
which represents the overhead of running an industrial civilization:
not just pollution but also its infrastructure, its bureaucracy and so on.
Pollution represents all that has to exist for an industrial economy to
function but does not contribute to its productive capacity. A fraction
of capital, proportional to both the amount of capital and the size of
this third variable, is diverted to it. Just like capital, it also decays over
time. This model produces an asymmetric, lopsided curve, in which the
upward slope is gradual but the downward slope is steep and cliff-like.
In this model, capital does not gradually decay as resources run short;
it collapses.
To appreciate why this is so at an intuitive level think of the infra-
structure of industrial civilization: its highways and bridges, its oil ter-
minals, refineries and pipelines, its airports, seaports, electrical grid and
so on. As the economy expands, all of these have to expand alongside
it, and maintain reserve capacity to avoid bottlenecks, shortages, traffic
jams and blackouts. But when resource scarcity forces the economy to
start contracting, they cannot contract with it, because they have all
been built at a certain scale that cannot be reduced retroactively, and
have been designed to be efficient and realize economies of scale only
when utilized at close to full capacity. Even as they are used less, their
maintenance costs remain the same, swallowing up an ever-larger por-
tion of the economy. At some point maintenance costs become un-
bearable and maintenance is foregone. Shortly thereafter they become
nonfunctional, and with them the rest of the industrial economy.
Further insight into the mechanics of collapse can be gained by
looking at the role of finance in the day-to-day functioning of the
global economy, because it expands by systematically betting on future
growth —borrowing from the future, which is assumed to be more
prosperous than the present except for minor, temporary setbacks. This
borrowing is used not just to finance expansion but to finance all of
the shipments that make up global trade: every international shipment
starts with a letter of credit issued by a commercial bank in one country
and honored by another commercial bank in another country. If the
economy stops growing for an extended period of time, these bets on
future growth no longer pay off, a large number of loans turn into bad,
nonperforming loans and many banks become insolvent and are no
longer able to issue letters of credit, while other banks, though still sol-
vent, no longer want to take the risk of honoring their letters of credit.
Global trade stops, which in turn disrupts global supply chains, causing
shortages of components and other industrial inputs, which then halt
manufacturing processes. Before too long, the global economy passes a
point of no return beyond which there can be no recovery, because the
supply networks and trading relationships that held it together have
broken down.
This excerpt is well done and a good summary. I haven't read the two books he mentions (Heinberg and Clugston). Also hadn't read this excerpt until tonight.