The Human Predicament: What Would Change My Mind | Frankly 158

Nate Hagens (0:00)

Good morning. One of the blessings or curses of this work is the myriad people that I encounter, that each have their own perspective on the future, which I've discovered kind of aggregate into a fractal kaleidoscope normal distribution. So I was in a dialogue with a friend of a friend last week who had never heard anything about the Meta Crisis, none of the things. But after hearing about the Great Simplification thesis for like a minute, interrupted me and said, but what would change your mind about your core thesis? And I got the sense that he asked people this a lot the way it was asked. But it did get me to thinking.

I have previously mentioned an upcoming frankly series that I'm working on, titled How Could I Be Wrong, which will be a detailed steel man for all the ways my analysis and the subcomponents of it could be incorrect about the present and thus the future, whether that's a gap in the information available to me or a misread on the relationship between the parts of the macrosystem like energy versus GDP or debt versus growth or misreading human behavior. But I'm confident about the synthesis that 20 years of research has led me to. But I do think it's important for all of us to step back and take part in that type of honest assessment. But answering the question this person asked me, just two minutes into the conversation is different. It's less about pointing out the potential errors or logical gaps and more about what sorts of trends I would need to see in the world to say, well, this doesn't align with what I thought would happen. Maybe I need to reassess. Towards that end, I'd like to point out a few of such trends today. And since this is a nonlinear platform, I will start with my general thesis laid out in a single sentence, although long-term viewers know that it's quite a bit more complex than just this. In the coming decade or so, plus or minus, human civilization will undergo a deflationary depression triggered in the bond and currency markets. When our financial claims on biophysical and ecological reality exceed our biophysical and ecological reality and this initiates a phase shift, leading to a more local and regionally integrated world. And as I thought about this, the answer to this question of what would change my mind formed like layers of an onion in my head. And my first response, the first layer, was to really list out some things that would change my mind. Among them, global fossil fuel consumption falling and renewable energy expanding, while global GDP continues to grow for at least five years in a row. And for the past century, this has only happened during recessions and depressions. The global energy intensity of GDP improving at 3% or 4% a year, instead of the historical 1.2% for a decade or so, while absolute energy and material use is flat or declining.

Wide boundary EROI of solar and wind and the like clearing something like 10 to 1 And that's not just at the source. That would include storage, transmission, mining, recycling. And most numbers today we see for EROI at the factory gate. So they're extremely narrow boundary. And also aligned with that, some then many of the mines and the ships and the factories with themselves have to run on the solar rather than on the diesel.

A large grid with 10 or 20 million people making it through a full winter at 80% wind and solar generation without fossil backup, without aggregate demand plummeting, and without significant interconnections to and from other nations.

If we would see energy per ton of refined copper falling in absolute terms despite the ore grade decline or aluminum substitution removing a large share of copper demand, that would be a big change in trend. Related to that, if we saw critical non-renewable materials like lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper being recovered at 90% at the end of life, and I mean 90% of everything that actually gets retired, not just what makes it to the recycling plan, and then that recycled material supplying most of our incremental demand, and for context today, only around 7%, 7.5% of all the materials flowing through the global economy come back around, and that number has been falling, not rising.

Global debt to GDP flat or falling for 10 years, while real GDP grows with no default cycle. On the ecological front, if emissions had a sustained 5% annual decline, and CO2 would be growing under 1 part per million a year for let's say 5 consecutive non-recession years, that would lighten my outlook a fair bit. And of course, if we retreated from exceeding 7 of 9 planetary boundaries to 3 or 4, that would also significantly change my view. So there's a lot more numbers like these, but once I started jotting these down, I realized that this thesis is not about one number or issue. It's really the collective observation, completely grounded in science, that as a species, we are deep in ecological overshoot. So how I would change my mind kind of bifurcated into two separate questions. First, what would change my mind about the diagnosis? As there is pretty overwhelming evidence from basic systems accounting, a finite carbon pulse, falling returns on the marginal barrel, credit increasing as a claim on future energy, humanity's aggregate footprint way above Earth's regenerative capacity and the like. All that evidence shows that we are in overshoot ecologically speaking.