What Should / Can / Could / Will We Do?

We’re in serious trouble. Many red lights are flashing on the dashboard.

Most people are now aware that something is seriously wrong, and each has their favorite lens through which to view the problems:

• Geopolitical: increasing nuclear war risk, trade wars, genocide.
• Political: polarized angry citizens, unstable governments, panicking/thrashing leaders.
• Economic: end of growth, declining living standards, widening wealth gap, inflation, accelerating unsustainable debt, asset bubbles.
• Environmental: accelerating climate change, species extinction, toxic forever chemicals, plastic waste, sick & dying trees from rising ground level ozone, etc.
• Health: increasing obesity, autism, and chronic diseases, declining lifespans, increasing depression and mental illness.
• Resources: peak food, peak oil, peak minerals, aquifer depletion, etc.
• Energy: reserve depletion, rising extraction costs, falling EROI, export land model, no renewable substitutes for non-renewable fossils, etc.

The common denominator to all of these problems is overshoot.

Very few people are able to see through the lens of overshoot because overshoot is a very unpleasant topic with no painless solutions and no way to avoid its consequences, and because humans evolved to deny unpleasant realities like overshoot.

Grok: Biological overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, meaning it consumes resources faster than they can be replenished, leading to ecological imbalance. This is often seen in ecosystems where a species’ population grows beyond what the available resources (e.g., food, water, habitat) can sustainably support.

Causes: Rapid reproduction, lack of predators, abundant resources (temporarily), or human intervention (e.g., removing natural checks).

Consequences: Resource depletion, habitat degradation, population crashes, or ecosystem collapse. For example, a deer population might overshoot due to abundant food, then starve when resources run out.

Quantifying Overshoot: In ecology, overshoot can be measured by comparing population size N to carrying capacity K . If N>K, the system is in overshoot, often leading to a decline until N≤K.

Helpful Responses: Addressing overshoot requires restoring balance between population and resources.

What Should We Do?

I started this un-Denial blog 13 years ago after I became aware of our overshoot predicament, and a plausible theory by Dr. Ajit Varki for why almost no one can see the most important and obvious threat we face.

After a few years of discussing our overshoot issues I got tired of being a pessimist and wrote a prescription for what we should do. I thought it was pretty good at the time and represented a path that might actually help rather than the fantasy solutions with 100% probability of failing being promoted by millions of people with good intentions working on symptoms rather than the core overshoot problem.

My prescription for what we should do was in essence to minimize total suffering for all species by humanely reducing our population as fast as possible, and by planning and managing a controlled economic contraction, rather than allowing nature to force an uncontrolled collapse.

I understood that it would not be possible to implement my prescription unless the majority somehow could be made aware of our overshoot predicament, and this in turn required some method of overriding our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities. So I then spent several years promoting Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory in the hope that experts in relevant domains would work discover a method to override MORT.

My efforts were a complete failure. Not only did I not succeed in engaging any brain or behavior experts, I was not even able to recruit any like-minded colleagues in the overshoot space who were also trying to find solutions.

I sadly concluded that it was not possible to override MORT because denial of denial is the strongest form of denial, probably because evolution, for good reasons, ensures that the Maximum Power Principal (MPP) trumps all other behaviors.

What Can We Do?

In recent years the insights of Hideaway on the role of complexity in sustaining our civilization have caused me to question the theoretical feasibility of my or any other prescription.

Hideaway explains that the use of any non-renewable resource degrades the quality of its reserves over time, and this requires increasing complexity to sustain supply of the resource, which requires growing economies and population, which consume more supply, which worsens the reserve quality, which means any civilization dependent on non-renewable resources must grow or it will collapse, which means a hard collapse is unavoidable and no mitigation paths exist.

Hideaway’s probably correct but it’s a tough pill to swallow.

I’m still struggling to accept Hideaway’s conclusion because I can imagine many things we could do to worsen our predicament, like for example starting a nuclear war, or by burning our remaining coal and gas reserves faster by using AI to create more enjoyable porn.

Given that we could do many things to increase the coming suffering, it seems reasonable to assume there must be some things we could do to reduce the coming suffering, which I believe is the only sensible goal left to us.

But what are the things we could do to reduce total suffering for all species?

I would love to see the readers of un-Denial offer their ideas in the comments below. If we get enough good ideas I will collate them into another post with a new prescription representing our collective wisdom.

What Could Someone Do?

I’m a long time follower and admirer of Jack Alpert and have posted some of his best work over the years.

For many years Alpert’s been a lone voice advocating rapid population reduction with the goals of reducing suffering and retaining some of our best accomplishments as the only species with science and advanced technology.

I very much like the goal of retaining some of our best science and technology post-collapse because I have some insight into how rare and precious our accomplishments are likely to be in the universe.

In addition, if you have any doubts about the importance of Alpert’s goal to retain some of the more valuable features of modernity, this video on what life was actually like in ancient Rome will set you straight.

I was pessimistic about the feasibility of Alpert’s plan because it required educating sufficient citizens to vote for population reduction policies and I knew from my MORT observations and failures that his education plan would most certainly fail due to our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

Nevertheless, I still like Alpert’s plan because setting aside the political feasibility of achieving a quorum, it at least was technically feasible and did not break the laws of physics or deny the reality of non-renewable resources as every other “plan” by every other “expert” does.

There is of course now a new technical feasibility question created by Hideaway’s complexity theory. It may not be possible to retain some of modernity’s most valuable technology without the 8 billion scale of our civilization. Let’s hand wave this away for now because I don’t know the specifics of what Alpert proposes to retain, and we need to think harder about the implications of Hideaway’s complexity theory in the context of a population that falls really fast, perhaps so fast that the requirement for growing complexity to maintain supply no longer applies. Suggest we continue this discussion in the comments below.

I was recently pleased to see a revised plan by Alpert that no longer requires a majority of citizens to vote for population reduction policies.

We are underestimating our predicament and underestimating the behaviors needed to unwind it.

Human civilization maybe sicker than we think. Maybe we should consider stronger medicine.

Abstract:

Consider a line that describes the delivery rate of fossil fuels to civilization. Each higher rate each year supported an ever larger global population with ever grander lifestyles.

Unfortunately, earth’s crustal limitations suggest this rate of energy delivery will decline back to its 1750’s level this century.

Unless energy deliveries from solar, wind, hydro, geo thermal, fission, and fusion can come online and replace lost fossil deliveries, human population and lifestyles will also drop back to the 1750’s levels.

Civilization will experience first scarcity; then conflict; and finally a self-reinforcing feedback loop called a scarcity conflict death spiral which will starve to death or kill in conflict most if the people who live this century.

When the behaviors that prevent this die off cause their own significant injuries the condition is called a predicament because people are injured with or without the prevention behavior. 

In the last two minutes of this video I propose a behavior that causes much pain and prevents the injuries during civilization contraction. The video helps the chooser of the potential behavior quantify the injuries on each path.

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After you view the video you may have important questions that need answers:

1. Why do we have to make the transition in the next 80 years?
   • How civilization works (video)
2. Why can the earth (without fossil fuels) support only 600 million people living like serfs.
   • Running Out of Gas Story (Video)
3. Why does a new civilization that keeps our levels of arts and science support  only 50 million people living like moderns?
   • A Non-Injury Producing Civilization (Video)

In this latest plan Alpert proposes that a single expert could engineer a contagious virus to sterilize the human population.

It seems plausible to me that a single scientist with defective denial genes could be found and recruited for this task. People who can see reality are rare but they do exist.

I do have, however, serious doubts about the technical feasibility of engineering a safe and effective sterilization virus given that it’s required to override life’s primary mission, and given that a trillion dollar pharma industry with an army of scientists was unable to engineer or manufacture a safe and effective gene therapy for a virus they created and had the blueprints for.

How is one rogue scientist going to engineer a safe and effective highly contagious virus designed to override the primary objective of DNA honed by 4 billion years of evolution?

Nevertheless, I’m an electrical engineer with limited knowledge of genetic engineering so perhaps Alpert knows something I do not.

What Will We Do?

Our most likely path is the path we are on which is to use every psychological, accounting, and technology trick we can think of to keep growing the size of our economy and the complexity it depends on until we reach the end of the runway and crash with a spectacular collapse of supply chains, complexity, food, and population.

Unfortunately there will be a lot of suffering for humans and other species. The planet and its diversity of life will no doubt recover, but it will never achieve the pinnacle of rare complexity we enjoy today.

As we accelerate down the runway stresses will increase within countries and between countries. You can see these growing stresses everywhere today. There is a high probability that our leaders will do something in desperation that reduces the length of the runway.

It is likely that our most powerful weapons will be used when citizens of a resource unlucky country become envious and angry. As one recent example, a petulant little island nation off the coast of France that is collapsing because its oil and coal reserves are depleted is trying to provoke a nuclear war with a much larger and more powerful country on the opposite side of a large continent because it has some oil and gas that might sustain the lifestyles and entitlements of the island nation a little longer.

There is another darker scenario now being publicly discussed by very competent geopolitical experts like Col. Larry Wilkerson. In this interview last week Wilkerson explained why he is very worried about the growing threat of a nuclear war and that he fears for his grandchildren.

Wilkerson also said he knows powerful people who believe the solution to overpopulation and resource depletion is to kill billions with nuclear weapons. You can listen to these comments at 42:30 but I’d start earlier at around 33:30 for important context.

In this light, Jack Alpert’s sterilization virus starts to look pretty good.

In case you are not aware of it, I recommend the 2013 TV series Utopia which was about a plot to reduce the population with an engineered virus.