Overshoot is the Disease
Climate change is just a symptom.
It is a dicey prospect to write an article about an episode of the podcast, so I’m not going to do that. I do encourage you to listen to a recent episode of the Planet: Critical Podcast. Host Rachel Donald interviews Art Berman, one of the top energy consultants in the world.
I also got all excited about a quote from Art, that wasn’t even his. I saw the quote from the preview of the podcast (which Rachel put up on Linkedin) in which Art said:
“Renewable Energy Can Run Civilization, Just Not This One.”
At the time I didn’t realize that Art prefaced this with: “As my friend Nate Hagans and his colleague DJ White like to say, renewable energy can run civilization, just not this one.”
Sorry, Art, I was ready to write a glowing tribute to you, but now I can’t. 😊 Nate and DJ, thanks for the great quote. Art, thanks for having cool friends.
I will steal one thing from Art.
I will take one big idea from the conversation between Rachel and Art, and write about that. I wanted to write about it for a while, so now is a good time.
Before we can do something, as Art says we have to recognize the problem.
I write a lot about climate change, but the problem isn’t climate change. It is bigger than that.
Climate change is just a symptom of the bigger problem of overshoot.
Overshoot is the problem. Overshoot means that we have overconsumed our resources, and have overshot the carrying capacity of earth. Overshoot is reflected in 6 of 9 planetary boundaries already breached. Overshoot is reflected in an Earth Overshoot day that creeps closer to the beginning of the calendar each year. overconsumed our energy, and as a result are destroying the biosphere. This is a problem because that is where we live.
We are destroying our home for fleeting comforts and fantasies of the “progress” we are making.
What is progress anyway?
Overshoot is linked to energy use of course. But is also linked to our mindset as a civilization. That mindset values growth and calls this progress. We have been trained to believe that growth is progress, and a lack of growth is failure.
It also doesn’t help that our economic system has us trapped on a growth treadmill. Most people have mortgages to pay, children to raise, career goals, and personal goals to strive for. We have learned that the answer to all of these things is growth. If we don’t grow, people get laid off and might have a harder time paying the mortgage, feeding their children, climbing the corporate ladder, buying that new car or that bigger house.
But that isn’t progress. That is consumption.
We are stuck with a mindset that progress must manifest in something physical, owning more, new technology, or having more money.
The progress we need is the realization that overshoot is the problem.
Progress would be recognizing the problem and dealing with it.
Substituting one form of energy for another isn’t going to solve the problem. Yes, let’s have renewable energy run everything. But if our goal is to have renewable energy run everything at the same rate we are doing now with fossil fuels, we are just trading one problem for another.
That our energy isn’t clean is a problem. But it isn’t the problem. Overshoot is the problem. If we gradually swap out fossil fuels for clean energy but continue our obsession with growth, we will still destroy our home. It will just be a destroyed home with slightly cleaner water, and a few more forests, and we will have saved a little bit of biodiversity, but we will have destroyed our home nonetheless.
Degrowth is the answer.
Putting all of our focus on climate change and just focusing on clean energy is a myopic perspective that misses the point.
We are fundamentally dependent on nature. We need a healthy biosphere. If we only make all our energy green, we will still destroy the biosphere.
We need to use less. We need to meet our needs as a society, not our wants. They are different things. We need to realize that the problem isn’t just climate change. Climate change is just a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.
The disease is us. More specifically, the way we live our lives.
The problem is overshoot.
Start there.
You can’t solve everything. It is too late to solve all the environmental challenges we face.
But first, understand what the problem is. Once you know that, do what you can.
spot on Matt, ecological overshoot is the problem - too many people consuming too many natural sources and sinks. Every environmental problem you can think of is caused by overshoot - its either over consuming a source (and depleting it or forcing it extinct, or disrupting the natural dynamics of an ecosystem), or its a sink problem (too much pollution doing the damage). Once you understand that overshoot is the issue, you can then come to appreciate the magnitude of the problem - we are currently overconsuming sources and sinks at almost twice the rate that nature can regenerate. This presents a huge task - to learn to live well with only a small fraction of our current material throughput.
Yup absolutely. Excellent planet critical episode I agree. If we try to replace our current materials and energy use (even if we stop the growth trajectory) with alternatives, it will destroy the habitability of the planet just as readily.
As the saying goes ‘There ‘ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!’
Even renewable systems need building and replacing, which all takes energy and materials (ie mining) The challenge of our age is going to be how to use the little remaining time and fuel we have to do a SYSTEM and infrastructure transition to something that moves in the right direction, gradually back towards planetary limits, with lower consumption, lower populations, lower overall ecological footprint - LESS ENERGY.
We need to relearn ancient ways of being human and being with land, and somehow splice that into a carefully curated modern world where we somehow manage to keep the good bits (yes: medicine and communications, no: speedboats and instagram, etc...)
Alternatively crop and civilisational collapse will leave us all subsistent farmers again anyway.
Time to reduce our demands on the world to meet insane expectations, learn to be happy in community again and it’s Time get our hands dirty. Time to garden, to love, to be stewards, to be pupils of Mother Earth.
Good luck everyone!
PS: also highly recommend Rachel’s recent episode on regenerative agriculture re global cooling - very positive! :)