According to witness survivors, even as the Titanic wallowed ever-lower and began its final list to Port, some passengers refused to get into half-empty life-boats – after all, they protested, the White Star Line brochure stated quite clearly that the vessel was “designed to be unsinkable”. And besides, the band still played on.Let’s leap forward a century or so and increase the spatial scale a bit. Modern techno industrial (MTI) culture is wallowing and listing seriously, yet the majority of people – even policy-makers who should know better – refuse to contemplate even the need for life-boats. If there were a brochure, it would describe the MTI vessel as “designed to be invincible.” And, of course, bands everywhere are still playing on.
To a rational person, none of this makes sense. Our best science shows clearly that the great ship MTI has steamed headlong into the iceberg of overshoot. The hull is fatally breached yet most of the crew and passengers cannot imagine, much less see clearly, that the MTI ship is going down. Instead, our political captains and senior officers remain high on the bridge seeming oblivious to reality and shouting “full speed ahead!”
In part one, this note details modern humanity’s typically ineffective or non-response to negative knowledge that should actually catalyse major cultural restructuring and, in part two, outlines briefly twenty-four aspects of human cognition and behaviour that help explain the paradox of inaction. On the surface, our MTI world seems cursed by either collective ignorance or universal stupidity – but I suspect there is also something else afoot.
Part 1: Exploring the Paradox
The world’s response to just the most palpable symptom of overshoot, global heating, serves to illustrate the general syndrome. First, let’s be clear that climate change/global heating is a real thing. There are reams of data and volumes of analysis describing historic trends and present circumstances; denialist counter-narratives have been thoroughly discredited. Credible science shows that temperatures in the early 2020s are unprecedented in the past 24,000 years and that the magnitude and rate of heating over the last 150 years exceeds the magnitudes and rates Earth has experienced over the entire 24 millennia period. August 2024’s global surface temperature was 1.27 C° (2.29 F°) above the 20th-century average of 15.6 °C (60.1 °F), making it the warmest August on record and the 15th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures. 2024 was the warmest year in the instrumental record, averaging 1.55 C° above preindustrial levels. 2025 will not be far behind. ‘Extreme’ climate events from massive heat-domes and deadly flooding to glacial cold snaps and unrelenting drought are becoming commonplace; almost everyone is affected. The world community can hardly claim to be plagued by collective ignorance.
Climate models suggest things can only get worse: our current policy track would result in ~2.7 Co mean global warming by century’s end; one prominent study argues that, with fast and slower feedbacks, even current atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are sufficient to generate 10 Co heating. But even 2.7 degrees warming is sufficient to flatten agriculture in many areas, trigger widespread famine and render large areas of Earth uninhabitable. Analysis shows that, “in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a mean annual temperature greater than 29o C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.” The projected geographical shift in the normal human temperature niche by 2100 could force the unprecedented migration of one to three billion people to thermally safer parts of the planet. It is delusional to believe that the global community could humanely manage forced ‘migration’ on this scale. (Where are the welcoming safe havens?) Picture the abandonment of major cities and megacities, the invasion of rural areas by desperate millions and an ungovernable world in geopolitical turmoil.
So, what might be a rational global response to the looming climate emergency? How about:
a) collectively acknowledging the cultural roots of the crisis. Overshoot is the inevitable result of the excessive scale of still-expanding growth-dependent industrial culture on a finite planet (i.e., global heating and other co-symptoms of overshoot are not mere technological problems).
b) unprecedented international cooperation: (i) to address the immediate crisis including ways to share the economic pain induced by measures that actually reduce GHG emissions; (ii) to design and launch the fleet of policy lifeboats that will still be required to save millions of potentially panicking passengers later in this century.
c) similar international collaboration to design and implement the structural adjustments to the global economy required for longer-term stability (e.g., we need a plan to abandon the growth ethic and evolve a smaller, more equal, steady-state economy operating within the biophysical means of nature).
And what has been the actual response? Decades of tedious self-delusion punctuated by false starts and failed agreements.
For starters, the world sees the problem in simplistic single-issue terms (climate change, not overshoot – and certainly not cultural dysfunction) and assumes there are technical solutions that will enable us to maintain the status quo. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was shaped in 1992 and came into effect two years later with 165 signatories and 198 parties. The framework was ambitious. Nation states agreed to return their GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Toward this end, the convention’s decision-making body, The Conference of the Parties (COP), has held 29 so-called COP Conferences – the most recent in Azerbaijan, in 2024 – on measures to reduce emissions and reverse climate change. The first more or less universal legally binding emissions reductions agreement was adopted at COP 21 in Paris in 2015. The Paris Agreement committed the parties to limit the increase in mean global heating to two Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels while striving to keep the increase to 1.5 degrees or less.
Simultaneously, the rising social costs of using fossil fuels (FFs) and massive subsidies from governments, catalyzed the emergence of a whole new “clean” energy sector. One seminal review concluded that 100% renewable energy “is feasible worldwide at low cost;” in short, we can enjoy business-as-usual-by-alternative-means. Accordingly, investment in wind turbines, solar panel installations, nuclear plants (clean?), grid improvements, electric vehicles and related infrastructure reached $1.7 trillion in 2023 surpassing new investment in FF.
[1]
“Well,” you might ask, “isn’t that encouraging?” Could be, but look again; there are a couple of ugly flies in the climate change ointment.
During this 32-year period of solemn pledges, binding agreements and policy actions to reduce GHGs, the world has actually seen carbon dioxide emissions balloon from 22.5 billion tonnes (Gt) in 1992 to a record 37.4 Gt in 2024. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have now increased from 360 to 430 parts per million, 50% above pre-industrial levels. Most remarkably, in 1992, FFs provided about 81% of the world’s primary energy; 32 years of ‘progress’ later, FFs still accounted for over 81% of the world’s primary energy consumption – but the latter had increased by ~73% so fossil fuel use is correspondingly greater. It may strain belief, but half the FFs ever consumed by humanity have been burned since the early 1990s, during the period of commitment to wean ourselves from FFs! Such is the power of exponential growth – and the failure of climate policy.
“But what about that massive investment in clean electricity?” Another good question, but the fact is that any positive effect on emissions has largely been neutered by growth in global demand for energy. Wind and solar power (W&S), which attract the most ‘green’ investment, accounted for only 15% of global electricity generation in 2024 (compared to ~60% by fossil fuels). This was only ~3 % of the world’s final (consumer level) energy consumption last year. Meanwhile, global demand for electricity alone is growing twice as fast as growth in renewable supply with most of the difference being made up by increases in fossil fuel use. Investor hype aside, real-world data suggest that the clean energy transition is barely underway. And remember, the global community has yet seriously to address the non-electric and hard-to-electrify uses of energy—fossil fuels are holding steady at over 80%
[2]
of the global primary energy mix.
Bottom line? There is no possibility that the world will achieve quantitatively equivalent “100% renewable energy by 2050.”
[3]
Trying to electrify the Titanic in a sea of icebergs is a futile exercise. Based on historical and trend analysis, top climate scientist James Hansen claims that the stricter Paris goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 Co is “deader than a doornail”. No one really knows what meteorological hazards lie ahead.
Most importantly, climate change is only one obvious symptom of ecological overshoot. Numerous co-symptoms (e.g., plunging biodiversity, fisheries collapses, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, groundwater depletion, rising cancer rates, falling sperm counts, contaminated food chains, the pollution of everything, etc., etc.) are also worsening with each new assessment. Bottom line? Modern humanity is depleting essential self-producing resources (e.g., fish stocks, forests) and replenishable resources (e.g., aquifers, arable soils) faster than they can regenerate and dumping (often toxic) wastes faster than the ecosphere can assimilate; we are destroying the biophysical basis of our own existence. The great ship MTI is sinking and there is a dearth of half-empty life-boats—on our current tack, overshoot is a terminal affliction. Humanity will be much reduced.
Part 2: On Being Hooped [4]
On one level this predicament is inexplicable. There is no brochure asserting H. sapiens is invincible. Existing evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and the condemning data keep pouring in, all to no avail.
If the world community cannot claim collective ignorance, are we left with mass stupidity? Stupidity, meaning everything from ‘exhibiting poor judgement’ (or ‘intelligence’) to being ‘wildly irrational’ in the face of the evidence, does offer excellent explanatory power. But what if at least part of the problem is deeper? What if we are dealing with fundamental human nature, i.e., heritable behavioural predispositions and emotional states that operate beneath consciousness. We may also be faced with insurmountable cognitive limitations. The latter leave us incapable of acting to save ourselves; lacking fundamental capacity may be acknowledged but cannot be remedied. A bird without wings cannot fly.
I can think off-hand of at least twenty-four innate behaviours and several forms of collective paralysis that are significantly influenced by heritable qualities that have become maladaptive. Here in plain English without the behavioural/psychological jargon is why I think we are hooped:
1) Humans have evolved effective survival strategies that help drive the crisis. Like all other species H. sapiens: is capable of exponential population growth in favourable circumstances; tends to use all available resources and; will expand into all accessible suitable habitats. Note that in the case of humans, ‘available’ and ‘accessible’ can be upgraded by technological advances – we’re just better at the (short-term) survival game than other species. It is not by accident that the human population has (unsustainably) blown past global carrying capacity, has the largest geographic range of any vertebrate species, and is depleting even renewable resources as well as all economically viable petroleum, metal and rare-earth deposits.
2) Humans are temporal, spatial and social discounters. We naturally prefer the familiar here and now, and close relatives and friends, over sketchy futures and unknown people in foreign lands. Decision-makers therefore invariably risk imposing only possible future damage on total strangers in distant countries rather than inconveniencing their own family, friends and constituents with certain economic hardship today. This trait alone dooms many effective climate/overshoot) policies.
3) As if designed to exacerbate discounting, the world is urbanizing; urbanization isolates city-dwellers spatially and psychologically from both the ecosystems and other people who support them. Absent experiential or emotional connections, urbanites are blind to the distant negative effects of their unsustainable consuming and polluting lifestyles. Out of sight, out of mind! What, me worry?
4) As societies complexify, people naturally compete for socio-economic status and political power; the resultant social structure is invariably strongly hierarchical. Elites become preoccupied with consolidating their wealth and power and unresponsive to the accompanying social inequality. This imposes enormous stresses on ‘society’: corruption is rampant; government programs/services experience diminishing returns; poverty and homelessness increase, local ecosystems (arable lands and forests) succumb to abuse, triggering the need for territorial expansion. Ordinary people, suffering from generally deteriorating conditions – wage exploitation, over-taxation, growing scarcity and possible war – lose confidence in their leaders. Historically, such systemic conditions precede societal collapse.
5) In urban mass societies, disproportionate numbers of sociopaths and psychopaths rise to positions of leadership in government and the private sector. Afflicted leaders tend to focus on narcissistic self-aggrandizement and the means of retaining or acquiring more power, sometimes illegally or ruthlessly, rather than on tackling crucial problems or on other service to the long-term public interest. (Readers can probably name several notable current examples.)
6) Hierarchy means that, even in many so-called democratic countries, politics is dominated by big money (the corporate sector). Business oligarchs effectively 'purchase' politicians who need millions to get elected but are then expected to reward their benefactors with friendly policies, i.e., policies that protect the status quo (including deregulation, green energy and other forms of 'business-as-usual-by-alternative-means'). This dooms effective structural change.
7) Symptomatic of the big money problem is regulatory capture exacerbated by the revolving door syndrome. Corporate lobbying, friendly politicians and the exchange of personnel between corporations and government agencies produces a regulatory environment that aligns itself more with corporate values than to the public interest it is supposed to protect. These trends mean that the views and values of ordinary voters carry little weight in major policy decisions. Result? More loss of popular confidence and faith in ‘the system’.
8) Rather than rattle voters who routinely assign blame for society’s problems to those currently in office, even decent politicians tend to delay tough decisions until someone else inherits the problem. Such procrastination also creates an incentive for officials to cave to corporate pressures – it's the easy way out.
9) Politicians and their advisors know – or should know – that, in the absence of a collaborative ‘Plan-B’ for controlled contraction, rapid abandonment of fossil fuels (FF), would crash today’s national and global economies. Renewable green energy hype notwithstanding, modern renewables are not yet close to substituting quantitatively for FF (and may never be). But ‘degrowth’ is not a plank in any political platform; no major nation is developing a ‘Plan-B’. Thus, even as the MTI world blows past crucial planetary boundaries, global heating accelerates beyond model projections, and scientists warn of irreversible tipping points, political and industrial leaders encourage investment in fossil fuels to ensure the continued growth of the human enterprise. (Hmm, that does seem more than a bit stupid!)
10) Humans are optimistic by nature. MTI peoples in particular thrive on unwarranted ‘hopium’. Citizens have been coached to believe that technology will spare them any sacrifice; that they won’t have to abandon their material life-styles in the face of eco-crisis. They enthusiastically embrace the green renewable energy myth that we can maintain MTI culture through 'business-as-usual-by-alternative-means' (wind power, solar 'farms', nuclear fusion, EVs, non-existent carbon capture technologies, etc.).
11) Related to the above, all human groups socially construct what they subsequently assume to be ‘reality’. Individuals unconsciously acquire their tribe’s pre-set world-view – dominant beliefs, values, assumptions and social norms – simply by growing up in a particular cultural milieux.
[5]
Every culture believes that its particular social/economic/religious/political/ scientific/technological constructs accurately reflect objective reality. People also tend, at best, merely to tolerate significantly differing versions of ‘truth’; at worst they ignore, reject or even go to war over their constructed perceptual differences. Hence everything from climate change denial to the tragedy of Gaza.
12) H. sapiens are thus actually creatures of custom and habit (good or bad) by nature. Neuro-science reveals that the frequent repetition of ideas, experiences, and behaviours produces dedicated synaptic circuits in the developing brain. Once engrained, these synaptic pre-sets are difficult to overcome. In unreflexive MTI culture, such concepts as ‘perpetual economic growth’ and ‘continuous technological progress’ are proving almost impossible to dislodge.
13) Widely-shared social constructs often fail accurately to reflect crucial dimensions of the de facto biophysical and social realities they purport to represent. People are often seduced by comforting shared delusions. MTI societies, for example, thrive on the ‘exceptionalist’ belief that humans and their economies not part of nature and not subject to natural laws. In this framing, there are no serious biophysical constraints on human economic activities. So, again, it’s “full steam ahead!”
14) Consistent with the above, MTI societies have, for the past several decades, purposefully constructed a mythic cult of unlimited economic growth facilitated by continuous techno-progress. This culture-wide narrative is an exemplar of human hubris and eco-ignorance. The growthist mantra is inescapable, being reflected in government policies, our schools and universities, the daily news, business- and stock-market reports (where are the daily state-of-the-ecosphere summaries?) and even dinner conversation.
15) Consumers in rich countries are have become addicted to the material 'good-life' provided through growth and technology and the citizens of developing countries are anxious to try the drug. The globalization of materialist consumerism has thus generated a global behavioural crisis that helps to undermine the functional integrity of the ecosphere.
16) We are learning that social media further fragments human communities. Abetted by AI systems and deep fakery, social media have vastly multiplied the number of self-referencing silos of belief (and disbelief). The resultant global ‘Tower of Babel’ makes even local agreement hard to achieve; cooperative action among members of an already disparate world community becomes ever more difficult.
17) It doesn't help that the majority of ordinary citizens are ecologically illiterate; students in most disciplines remain ignorant of natural laws and de facto biophysical constraints on human activity, including the simple reality that we must protect the structural integrity of major ecosystems to maintain the life-support functions of the ecosphere.
18) Our education systems have not only failed to enlighten, but actively operate to reproduce the beliefs, values, assumptions and cultural norms that have created the very eco-crisis they should be focused on reversing.
19) Even ecologically concerned MTI citizens/nations are caught up in the public good/free rider conundrum. If person or country 'a' acts decisively to end overshoot (acting for the public good), then that individual/country bears the full short-term costs of that action but receives an infinitesimal share of any benefits. Meanwhile, everybody else gets a free ride on 'a's sacrifice. There is little incentive in a me-centred society to act constructively first or alone.
20) As a further impediment to change, it is psychologically harder to give something up than it is to be denied something we never had. Why, then, would scientifically illiterate, eco-ignorant but well-off and well-insulated MTI peoples want to change in ways that they would see as sacrifice?
21) The earth is overpopulated (a key driver of overshoot) but advocating for population planning exposes the analyst to socially-constructed politically correct charges of neo-Malthusianism at best, or eco-fascism and environmental racism at worst. Meanwhile, the MTI mainstream laments ‘peak population’ in high-income countries as a threat to economic growth and implements pro-natalist policies to encourage larger families.
22) MTI societies do not acknowledge complex systems dynamics, particularly pertaining to living systems. We simply don't 'get' complexity; we mostly think in simplistic, reductionist ways; the MTI world tends to focus on one issue at a time in simple cause-effect terms (think ‘climate change’ or ‘the pandemic’ ‘micro-plastic pollution’); we fail to connect the dots or see all such eco-problems as symptoms of their common cause, overshoot (and its cause, overblown growth-bound industrial capitalism).
23) Cultural evolution (i.e., technological and economic development) and the resultant pace of climate-ecological change have outpaced bio-evolution. Our brains have become obsolete. There can be no return to ‘normal’; the MTI version of H. sapiens is no longer adapted to the hyper-complex socio-cultural-eco-environment of our own making and is in danger of being selected out. This evolutionary gap cannot be bridged or remedied. (Darwin wins again.)
24) Given all the above, a significant fraction of the eligible voting public no longer has the energy or the confidence in the integrity of their own culture to try to make a difference. Some simply don’t give a damn. People who are cynical about prospects for change don’t act to save themselves. The result will be truly tragic.
In a Nutshell — The Essence of Being Hooped
The promotion of unconstrained growth abetted by continuous techno-development is MTI culture’s core narrative and has become its entrenched default position, contrary data-based scientific analyses be damned. On its face, this is merely collective stupidity expressed through radically bad judgement and unwarranted techno-hubris. However, contemporary evidence and a millennia-long history of societal collapses suggests that certain universal, innate behavioural predispositions and insurmountable cognitive limitations also play a crucial role. Human societies are partially hard- and partially soft-wired to maintain long-established and seemingly successful cultural narratives, whatever the consequences. In effect, human behavioural dynamics condemn MTI culture to repeat the historical cycle of collapse. Whatever the exact combination of causal factors, it is increasingly clear that our ‘default position’ has driven the great ship MTI inexorably into a biophysical iceberg floating in plain sight on the ocean of reality.
Make sure to clamber abord any available lifeboat.
Notes
[1] Climate change is frequently ‘sold’ on the basis of its profit-making potential, job-creation and contribution to material growth, i.e., MTI governments and corporations exploit climate catastrophe as economic opportunity.
[2] 87% in 2024, using an updated accounting method.
[3] And, if we did it, would propel the world even further into overshoot compounding our eco-predicament.
[4] ‘Hooped’ = western Canadian slang for ‘screwed’.
[5] This was once a highly adaptive trait when humans lived in small tribal groups in simpler, relatively stable environments. Automatically acquiring one’s tribal narratives both confers a sense of personal identity and contributes to social cohesion.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William E. Rees is a population ecologist and ecological economist. He is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning; a founding member and former President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; a founding Director of the One Earth Initiative; and a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute. Professor Rees' research focuses on the biophysical requirements for sustainability and the policy implications of global ecological trends. He is perhaps best known as the originator, and co-developer with his graduate students, of Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA). EFA shows that the human enterprise is already in ecological 'overshoot' and that we would need 4.4 Earth-like planets to support just the present world population at Canadian material standards. Such findings led to a special focus on cities as particularly vulnerable components of the human ecosystem and on psycho-cognitive barriers to ecologically rational behaviour and policy. Professor Rees has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed and popular articles on these and related topics.
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