> They also have an interesting caveat. This is that the way the World3 model works is a through a set of connections that exist within an environment of growth. In an environment of decline, they are likely to reconfigure themselves in different ways.
This is the key insight, I think.
I was an interested follower of the Peak Oil stuff 20 years ago. Everything they said was true. But everything they predicted was wrong. As the economics of the oil business shifted, new forms of production became profitable and came online. The economy didn't collapse, life went on more or less normally.
Economies work on curves and trade-offs. As one thing declines, another ascends. As one solution to a given problem stops working, another one becomes viable. The whole continues more or less undisturbed.
It's notable that ecologists are discovering this; there are novel ecosystems [0] arising as the environment changes. The new arises as the old declines, and there's never a point at which anything "collapses" as such.
I feel even some of the premises were wrong: The root idea is obviously correct: "finite reservoir means finite oil, means peaky exploitation curve" - nothing earth-shattering there. But it seems to be there was an assumption that the next oil is technically more difficult to reach than the previous oil. And that's not even true. In the case of fracking, once understood, fracking was not exactly difficult or expensive.
"Next oil is more difficult than previous oil" was, still is, an incorrect assumption. It feels obvious for current production simply because economically it makes sense to exploit cheaper oil first. But even that is not true because politically it makes sense to reserve safer oil for later. And longer term, unknown oil may be simpler: probably unknown-tech oil but maybe simply undiscovered oil.
Yeah, as it turns out fracking wasn't that difficult. But it took the industry some effort to find that out, effort that it didn't want to spend until it had to.
The same may be true for a whole bunch of things - we don't do them now because that's not how we do things, and it'll take some effort and risk to try a new way. We have a local optimum that we're happy with until the environment changes and we have to discover another one.
So possibly the assumption wasn't even "next oil is more difficult" but just "current oil is good enough". If you're making vast bank with the current process, why change?
Which is the thing with growth collapsing. What works now won't work in the future, but that doesn't mean that nothing works in the future. There might be better ways of running an economy as we stop relying on growth to make everything work.
This is the key insight, I think.
I was an interested follower of the Peak Oil stuff 20 years ago. Everything they said was true. But everything they predicted was wrong. As the economics of the oil business shifted, new forms of production became profitable and came online. The economy didn't collapse, life went on more or less normally.
Economies work on curves and trade-offs. As one thing declines, another ascends. As one solution to a given problem stops working, another one becomes viable. The whole continues more or less undisturbed.
It's notable that ecologists are discovering this; there are novel ecosystems [0] arising as the environment changes. The new arises as the old declines, and there's never a point at which anything "collapses" as such.
[0] https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/content/novel-ecosy...