The new millennium

This global collapse is seen as the result of the sub-prime financial fiasco. It is often overlooked that the incredibly high prices of energy, driven by the peaking in global production of oil, forced up, among others, food prices, and caused eventually the destruction of demand for energy, i.e. a departure from economic growth as we knew it. Current fluctuations in oil and gas prices are random, and are related to the uncertainty in the reconstruction of the global economies.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, for the All Party Parliamentary Group of the UK Parliament on Peak Oil (APPGOPO), addressed the evolving complexity of our contemporary world which he characterised as: Multiple stresses, macro perturbations of natural systems, impending energy transition from fossil fuels, increasing connectivity and complexity of our systems.

The major problem is the growing stresses in our society and its ability to cope. If the latter fails then systems can overload, governance collapses.

The integrated stresses are population growth, environmental damage, climate change, crime, economic instability and inequality. The butterfly phenomenon with respect to the weather shows society’s non-linear impact on nature, i.e. small actions can trigger inordinately large reactions in nature which are out of proportion to these actions.

Hence the world is not operating with individual and disconnected systems, such that one can be “fixed” without reference to the others. We are living in a world of complex and integrated systems, with often unpredictable behaviours.

According to Homer-Dixon we are moving from a world where risk was the major problem to one in which uncertainty is the underlying characteristic. Therefore, it is insufficient to manage the individual parts (the solution to crime is not circumscribed by the criminal process).

Trinidad Express