The collapse of complex systems

Everyone has some sort of idea of collapse in their heads, at least if they have given it any thought at all. Mad Max, Blade Runner, whatever. Back in the 1800s, people were ruminating over collapse with the idea of the world having too many people and not enough resources. Anyone familiar with the "doomer" movement can probably give a workable explanation of Jevon's Paradox, for example, or Malthusianism. Now, people worry with good reason about global warming and what effects it is going to have on our lives and our planet. At the root of this is the maxim of "something that can't go on forever, won't." A great deal of time and effort is spent convincing the American people otherwise - after all, no one is going to win an election or keep customers by pointing out that our current civilization is unsustainable in its present form.

Systems essentially collapse from two causes, with a caveat - either something the system depends on is no longer available in quantity or how they function causes conditions to change where the system is destroyed, and there is no progress in mitigating either condition. 

The first condition was what worried most people studying collapse up until the early 1970s, and still does to some degree. Whether or not something like peak oil is going to be a factor in the immediate future is open for discussion, but the reality is that diminishing returns on oil exploration and processing are bound to become an issue at some point. Assuming a shortage of oil - that isn't replaced by another technology - increasing fuel prices will eventually have a cascading effect. Simply put, it will be impossible for businesses to run with skyrocketing fuel prices in relation to potential outputs and a market. Replacing diesel with wood-fired steam might still allow commerce to occur, but nowhere near the present rate, and it will definitely not permit living conditions as they currently exist in the industrial world.

The second condition, where functioning systems themselves cause irreversible destruction is likely already here, in the form of global warming/climate change. The more quickly our economy grows - i.e. the more quickly we deplete resources - the more damage is done to our civilization by this growth. More energy input makes more production possible, which in turn allows for more spending, which allows more growth, etc. It is a feedback cycle in a very different direction than scarcity.

Whether or not mitigation efforts would work in either case is a reasonable question to ask. Becoming more efficient, doing away with advertising porn, making things that last fifty years, getting rid of grossly inefficient living arrangements (living thirty miles from work just so you can live in a cookie-cutter subdivision with a quarter acre of yard or living fifteen miles from the nearest megamart), etc, would require such a huge change in people's mental models that it seems unlikely to ever occur, except by events which force this change. Still, would becoming more efficient just delay the inevitable?

The other means of mitigation would be to develop new technologies that could deal with both scarcity and environmental change. Some of those touted so far are electric cars, fusion power, and hydrogen fuel cells. Electric cars seem great, but the supply chain to make them is toxic and the electricity is often still generated by burning fossil fuels. Fusion power and hydrogen cells are more promising, though each one perpetually seems to be "a few years off," and nothing else is really on the horizon at the moment.

It then becomes a race between each condition to see which one modern civilization will run into first. Right now, I think the smart money is on global warming, but the incentive to lie about oil supply is so strong that peak oil might sneak up on us anyway. Either way, imagination may not have limits, but reality does, and all the positive thinking in the world won't make the good times come back.