You have to continually grow the economy to offset diminishing returns
Yep. Joseph Tainter & the ideas he lays out in "Collapse of Complex Societies" come to mind here. That is, the need for growth arises from people trying to solve problems. These problems are not solved by more sustainability or more common sense, but always by more growth. An introduction of new unsustainable methods, establishing more organization, harvesting more resources, (etc.), all of which increase complexity, which in turn causes new problems of its own. Size is one of such problems, because it requires more overarching organizational structures to keep all interacting parts of the system connected with each other. Not to mention, that the EROEI on a barrel of oil is practically 1:1 these days, whereas in the heady days of civilization's rapacious & self-destructive quest for more growth to try and solve the problems that more growth brings, the EROEI was more like 1000:1 (such as at the infamously rich oil fields of Spindletop in Texas in the early 20th century, for instance). Also, the energy density of renewables, when taken altogether, account for less than 2-5% the energy density of fossil fuels/petroleum. Try running modern civilization, accounting also for its projected growth, on that. Ain't gonna happen. At the right scale, renewables are a beautiful fusion of function & form, but that's the key word here.
SCALE. The only thing that has ever come close to meeting civilizations grotesque needs, has been nuclear which has, I believe, 30-40% the energy density of fossil fuels/petroleum. Here we have the cheerleading for nuclear power by the likes of James Hansen and such, but can you blame them? It's the only substitute for fossil fuels, bar none. From their mind, they want to keep civilization afloat for as long as possible so, therefore, it simply must be done. Granted civilization collapsing would cause mass death & suffering, but that's simply unavoidable at this point. Nuclear won't solve anything, but you can still certainly understand their reasoning on the matter. It's all bullshit though because at the end of the day, you're never going to have jumbo jets, CAT construction equipment, or cargo ships be run on nuclear. Fossil fuels have a portability, malleability & ease of use that no other energy source can match (even outside of energy density). That's not even getting into how much is synthesized with fossil fuels that ends up in so many key areas of society that we couldn't get by without (petrochemicals, asphalt, petroleum coke, and many other items which range from refrigerators to replacement heart valves etc.) It's all a complex web of madness and we're thoroughly caught in it.
Technology of any sort is reliant on cheap-to-extract resources, especially highly dense energy.
Yes, you're 100% correct. All the low hanging energy dense fruit on this planet has already, long ago, been picked & squandered. Short of constructing a Dyson Sphere around the Sun (the kind spawned from the crack addled visions of hopium addicts like Neil DeGrasse Tyson), this solar system is a graveyard of energy resources. With the sole exception of Titan, I suppose (a moon around Saturn, which has entire oceans of petroleum). We'd probably drink it all up in less than a year anyway, due to, again, the cold mathematical reality of the exponential function, as it relates to our unending pursuit of continued growth. As far as technology is concerned, anything of the modern variety is, indeed, utterly dependent on cheap energy. That's why I have my doubts about automation/AI. We simply don't have the energy for it. If we were only 100 million globally and, as a result, had a much larger reservoir of remaining cheap energy, then yes. It'd absolutely be a concern. In the world we actually live in though? The 7.6 billion and rising one? Not a chance. Now don't get me wrong. Millions of jobs have been, and will continue to be, eaten up by automation, causing more social unrest/strains on the economy, but this cockamamie notion that the rich will eventually just kick back and let robots do literally everything, while the 99% of the rest of us starve in the gutter, is pure dystopic fantasy of the Bladerunner variety. As is any hope of AI coming into being within the time we have left, but that's neither here nor there.
There are around 4000 spent nuclear fuel ponds and 400 nuclear power plants dotted around the world that require industrial civilization to function
Bingo. This right here is what utterly seals our fate. You ever seen the movie "Speed" with Keanu Reeves & Dennis Hopper? Because this is most certainly a "Speed" situation. Civilization is the bus & nuclear power plants are the bomb. It takes decades of time, money and, most importantly, CHEAP ENERGY to fully decommission a nuclear power plant. And yet the world keeps building more and more of them to sustain its own growth and to not let the bus slow down, thus ensuring that the inevitable collapse is even more terminal. The fallout & damages from Fukushima alone is enough to drain the blood from any sane person's face, what with the hundreds of thousands of gallons of Tritium tainted heavy water (nuclear waste) that has been, and is still being, dumped continuously into the pacific ocean. Even Chernobyl's "concrete sarcophagus" still requires constant maintenance, and was originally built at the cost of workers literally having to go to their death just to make it. With rising seas and a more unstable climate, any nuclear power plants near the coast (which many of them are, since it's more expensive to have water pumped further inland) are completely fucked. There's no time or money to move them, so there's guaranteed to be more Fukushima's in the future, I'm afraid to say. Which, naturally, in turn, will contribute to the inevitable collapse and total disintegration of the biosphere.
Almost all the soil being used for farming has been farmed using various chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have rendered the soil dead and thus useless for more primitive humans for many years to come.
The firsthand knowledge/experience/skills for living as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers is almost completely lost.
Again, bingo. The below clip from James Burke and his concept of the "Technology Trap" immediately came to mind. This is not the same world of 1000 years ago. The entire planet has been laid barren and, even without the threat of nuclear devastation, the entire climate will be, and currently is, so unpredictable and erratic that even IF people could recover the knowledge/experience of our barbaric, yet hardy ancestors, they'd, in all likelihood, still die. As you said yourself, even traditionalist groups like the Amish can hardly accomplish by hand what their forefathers were able to with vastly inferior technology. Factor in a more unstable/uncertain climate and yeah. Doesn't leave much hope for the rest of us, now does it? I don't care how much "permaculture" you engage in. You're still fucked. Don't do it because you hope that it'll ensure you're survival. Do it because these are the end times, and it's what you love to do.
Given the dead soils and nuclear radiation that would inevitably be released from unmaintained nuclear facilities very little (possibly even zero) percentage of the Earth's surface will be habitable by humans.
Knocking it out of the park here, I must say. Again, I agree completely and have posted about this sort of thing before on this site here (https://sanctioned-suicide.net/thre...r-days-i-am-terrified-of-death.631/#post-7707) & here (https://sanctioned-suicide.net/threads/is-intelligence-a-curse.1315/#post-15850). I really find it hard to believe much of anything will survive. Perhaps a few scattered microbes. That's about it. Certainly not any humans, that's for damn sure. Some rich cunts might go and entomb themselves in a fancy hole in the ground, but that's all it will really be. A hole in the ground. A hole which, before they'd know it, would end up being their grave.
It might have been possible
And that's what pisses me off the most. Of course it was possible. More than possible, even. If we had the time & energy. Now I realize that even at a restricted global population of 100 million, resources would've still been finite and fossil fuels/petroleum would still have had a deleterious effect on the biosphere, but we would've had so much more time & energy to spare and our vastly tinier numbers would've left an enormously smaller mark on the planet's support systems. That extra time & energy could've allowed us to do even more amazing things. To evolve and grow as a species. Maybe even to accomplish some semblance of a utopia. Instead we pissed it all away on the retarded, dead end experiment of capitalism, which main function is to WASTE energy, to WASTE resources, to WASTE time, to WASTE human potential & ingenuity (etc.). Combine this with the ballooning of our population like some out of control yeast in a test tube and you have perhaps the worst/dumbest combination you could ever have the foolishness to make. I don't know. I just find it so frustrating. It just didn't have to be this way and, as much as I'd like to say I don't care and that humans are just like any animal who discovers a new energy source (multiply then crash), it still bothers me. We could've, and should've, done better, but oh well. Coulda, shoulda, woulda, as they say.
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death.
Dead Flag Blues Lyric
