The end of the world?

Noted Author Jared Diamond Predicts 49 Percent Chance of Civilization Collapse

Jared Diamond is no doom-and-gloomer; he’s a Pulitzer Prize winning author of thoughtful, carefully researched books about the rise and fall of societies. Diamond is best known for Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, both of which are among my top-recommended books of all time.

When you read these books, you’ll quickly realize that Diamond is perhaps the world’s top expert on what might be called the “holistic, interdependent nature of complex societies.” Rather than limiting his perspective to immediate, short-term actions and consequences (as most national leaders and corporations do), Diamond intelligently examines the long-term, interdependent factors that lead to any society’s success or failure.


…Peak Oil and other threats to human civilization

This is no casual number-tossing game from a newbie. Jared Diamond has studied the success and failure of world societies more closely than anyone living today. He describes himself as “cautiously optimistic” but worries that the outlandish financial decisions being made by the world’s leaders have put us all in a precarious position from which western civilization may not emerge intact.

In my own view, the financial challenges facing our world are, indeed, quite severe. And they may yet bring down the entire global banking system. But in the medium term, I see Peak Oil as being the far greater threat to the continuation of human civilization as we know it. Cheap, plentiful fossil fuels discovered in the last hundred years (or so) spurred a food bubble, which led to a population bubble. Cheap oil, in other words, created the temporary conditions necessary to support a runaway population explosion that is, without question, unsustainable without cheap energy.

But cheap oil is finite. And based on all reasonable accounting, world oil production is already in a state of substantial decline. That means oil will become increasingly scarce and expensive with each passing year, precisely as the world’s hunger for oil reaches unprecedented heights (cars in China, India, etc.).

When the era of cheap oil ends, the food bubble made possible by mechanized agriculture will also end. And that will usher in an era of rapid human depopulation. Long-term, in a post-Peak Oil scenario, most experts expect the planet to only be able to support about one billion people.

Westender