Collapse: Earth Overshoot Day

[grarpamp]

Whether Eco-Doom or not,
today's planet stripping still = overpopulated...


The Club Of Rome At 50 Years Old

by Dalwhinnie

https://www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CoR-TheMessageOfLtG.pdf
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07831GCLL
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B005O2PMYI

I used to believe the following tenets of the Club of Rome. I did so
for about four years (from the age of 22 to 26) until I woke up from
ecodoomism. It is apparent that millions have been sucked into this
cult and have never found a way out. Yet. Indeed, eco-doomism is the
world’s leading cause of depression, suicide, sexual ambiguity,
non-replacement and cultural anomie. It is immediately the cause of
policies designed to immiserate the population (viz. Dutch government
putting farms out of business to control world atmospheric nitrogen
levels).

Here are the doctrines of the Club of Rome, circa 1972. Look familiar?
“The Limits to Growth” contains six main messages:

    Firstly, that the environmental impact of human society had become
heavier between 1900 and 1972 due to both an increase in the number of
humans and the amount of resources consumed and pollution generated
per person per year.

    That our planet is physically limited, and that humanity cannot
continue to use more physical resources and generate more emissions
than nature is capable of supplying in a sustainable manner. In
addition, it will not be possible to rely on technology alone to solve
the problem as this would only delay reaching the carrying capacity of
the planet by a few years.

    The authors cautioned that it is possible, and even likely, that
the human ecological footprint will overshoot the carrying capacity of
the planet, further explaining that this would likely occur due to
significant delays in global decision making while growth continued,
bringing the human footprint into unsustainable territory.

    Once humanity has entered this unsustainable territory, we will
have to move back into sustainable territory, either through “managed
decline” of activity, or we will be forced to move back through
“collapse” caused by the brutal inherent processes of nature or the
market.

    The fifth message is one of hope. The authors state that: “The
challenge of overshoot from decision delay is real, but easily
solvable if human society decided to “act”, meaning that forward
looking policy could prevent humanity from overshooting the
aforementioned planetary limits.

    Lastly, the authors advocated for an early start – in 1972 that
was 1975 – to achieve a smooth transition to a sustainable world
without needing to pass through the overshoot and contraction phases.

The World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have followed as night follows day.

The key assumptions are that the current population/resource
consumption mix is unsustainable, and the second is that a process of
managed decline can smooth the transition to sustainability. I am
about to say something at once paradoxical and true:

Humans have more to fear from the managers of population reduction
than we do of civilizational collapse.

Because the population reduction is being planned by people who think
they are doing good  and the old adage of C. S. Lewis applies, that
the robber barons might have their greed satiated, and stop, but the
person who tortures for you own good does so with a clean conscience
and will not stop. Hence Stalin. Hence Klaus Schwab, and his minions
and acolytes.

Collapses are random and bring their own correctives. They are
chaotic. If the Roman Empire has to fall, it is better that it occur
without central planning, administered by mad tyrants. I realize this
is offensive to those who believe that civilizational change can be
planned, but it cannot.

The  assumption that needs to be challenged the most is that collapse
is somehow inevitable because we have gone beyond limits set by Gaia,
that this unsustainability is somehow new, and that we can plan our
way out of it.

We went beyond the limits set by Gaia since we domesticated animals,
invented agriculture and mined metals. I would not wish to say there
are no limits, but I would say that the collective intelligence of
mankind has continually found solutions to the problems we have
ourselves created. We went into the realm of the “unsustainable” tens
of thousands of years ago. We are still in “unsustainablity”. There is
no stable state.

The Club of Rome published its manifesto in 1972. It had a tremendous
negative effect over time. It resuscitated the idea of a centrally
planned economy when the central conceit of Marxism had collapsed:
that a planned economy could prevail over the chaotic forces of the
market, or of nature.

The close relationship between the idea of sustainability and the
tyranny of all-wise central planners needs to be made clear.
The population bomb is diffusing itself anyway…

Regarding solutions that appear without planning, population growth is
collapsing through the very process of wealth generation that has come
from burning fossil fuels. Women reach a level of prosperity where
their kids will survive until adulthood, and – bingo! – they produce
at most two children. It is enough to make the most hardened
eco-doomist pause and reconsider.

See Bricker and Ibbetson’s Empty Planet: The Shock of Global
Population Decline, or more brutal yet, try David Goldman’s (known as
Spengler) How Civilizations Die.