The Long Emergency: Some Basics

Most people, I think, take for granted the basic character of human civilization in the present era. It is, as I'm sure you know, radically different from everything that has gone before. Here is the history of human population in the past 2,000 years:









As you can see, the population grew very slowly until something happened around the mid 1700s. There were several notable developments at that time, including the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that followed the rise of scientific reasoning. The Scientific Revolution also produced a technological revolution, of which a key event in the mid-1700s was the development of commercially successful steam engines, powered by coal. This enabled humanity to escape the Malthusian trap. Previously, the  population was limited by the carrying capacity of land plowed by animals, who also had to be fed from the same agricultural production. Any additional production of goods or services required human labor to be removed from the fields, from which few hands could be spared. This limited technological progress and the production of fixed capital.

The nearly vertical rise in the human population since then has been fueled nearly entirely by burning the remains of ancient organisms that decomposed under anaerobic conditions and were ultimately buried by geological processes. These are called fossil fuels. The supply is finite, but still quite vast. If we keep burning fossil fuels at the present rate, we will face global catastrophe long before they are gone.  The image below is complicated; over the coming weeks and months we will unpack it. (If you right click on it and choose "view image" it will be big enough to be legible.)

It's from The Lancet DOI: (10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32594-7). In addition to climate change, we face limits on many other resources. 

 

These problems are all mutually entangled. I'll try to take them on systematically, but events may also demand immediate attention.  Meanwhile, here are some resources (which I will also add to the sidebar).

Our World in Data will reward endless exploration.

The Fourth National Climate Assessment, published by the United States government even though our president thinks it's fake news.

The Worldwatch Institute, that had all this figured out when I was a teenager.

The World Resources Institute, which gave us the above slide.

There are more, but that should be enough for now.