> Sustainability or collapse follow from the success or failure of problem-solving institutions. The factors that lead to long-term success or failure in problem solving have received little attention, so that this fundamental activity is poorly understood. The capacity of institutions to solve problems changes over time, suggesting that a science of problem solving, and thus a science of sustainability, must be historical. Complexity is a primary problem-solving strategy, which is often successful in the short-term, but cumulatively may become detrimental to sustainability. Historical case studies illustrate different outcomes to long-term development of complexity in problem solving. These cases clarify future options for contemporary societies: collapse, simplification, or increasing complexity based on increasing energy subsidies. DOI 10.2307/27503730 DOI:10.1023/A:1006632214612 Tainter discusses the declining productivity of resource production relative to levels of investment as complexity increases, and uses some historical comparisons to differentiate between three different scenarios in this framework: Western Roman Empire - Collapse Early Byzantine Recovery Period - Simplification The Development of Modern Europe - Increasing Complexity Our current global system is undergoing a period of energy subsidy plateau, and several of the most likely scenarios indicate a decline in total global energy subsidy in the near term. How we deal with declining total energy near term may dictate which pathway we are most likely to follow. The brief comparison of the West Roman and the Byzantine cases here is critical reading in my opinion to develop a foundational basis of basic understanding from a well-levied historical perspective.
www.iea.org
Oil 2023 - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency. The global energy crisis has moved energy security to the fore of the international policy agenda and boosted the momentum behind the deployment of clean energy technologies. Investment in clean energy is accelerating at a faster rate than for fossil fuels, helping bring peak oil demand into view. Oil 2023, the IEA’s medium‑term outlook, provides a comprehensive overview of evolving oil supply and demand dynamics through to 2028. The report examines how a stronger drive by governments towards a low-emissions future and changes in behaviour will impact oil market fundamentals in the coming years. Oil 2023 explores some of the challenges and uncertainties that lie ahead, including upstream investment, sources of new supply growth, spare capacity and shifting patterns of oil demand. It also provides insights as to how these changing dynamics will affect refining and trade flows.
### Defining Collapse There are competing understandings and frameworks for what we call 'collapse' in this context. Here, I often prefer to draw from *[Tainter, 1988](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21234427M/The_collapse_of_complex_societies.)*: > Collapse, as viewed in the present work, is a political process. It may, and often does, have consequences in such areas as economics, art, and literature, but it is fundamentally a matter of the sociopolitical sphere. A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity. The term 'established level' is important. To qualify as an instance of collapse a society must have been at, or developing toward, a level of complexity for more than one or two generations. ### Why Study It? Another well phrased fragment from the same source: > ... *'It goes without saying that the collapse of ancient civilization is the most outstanding event in its history. . .'* Yet beyond scientific interest there is an additional reason: collapse is a topic of the most widespread concern and the highest social significance. The reason why complex societies disintegrate is of vital importance to every member of one, and today that includes nearly the entire world population. Whether or not collapse was the most outstanding event of ancient history, few would care for it to become the most significant event of the present era. Even if one believes that modern societies are less vulnerable to collapse than ancient ones, the possibility that they may not be so remains troubling. In the absence of a systematic, scientific treatment of collapse such concerns range un-tethered to any firm, reliable base. ### Complexity > *. . .rapid, significant loss of an established level of **sociopolitical complexity** . . .* > Complexity is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. Augmenting any of these dimensions increases the complexity of a society. Hunter-gatherer societies (by way of illustrating one contrast in complexity) contain no more than a few dozen distinct social personalities, while modern European censuses recognize 10,000 to 20,000 unique occupational roles, and industrial societies may contain overall more than 1,000,000 different kinds of social personalities (McGuire 1983: 115 ). Tainter explores the topic from a western social science, anthropology point of view. Complexity is studied in an interdisciplinary fashion and social systems are sometimes called a [complex adaptive system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system). ### Maximum Power Principle Complex societies historically tend to dominate simpler societies. There may be a compelling case to be made to similarities in other biological systems pointing toward the reasons for this: > The [maximum power principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle) or Lotka's principle has been proposed as the fourth principle of energetics in open system thermodynamics, where an example of an open system is a biological cell. According to Howard T. Odum, "The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."  ### Energy Our rising complexity has given us an incredible energy subsidy, primarily and most recently in the form of fossil fuels, that we use to fuel our own growth. This extraction and exploitation feeds a relative social comparative advantage, at a steep and rising cost of unaccounted externalities. Several common examples of these external factors being anthropogenic forcing in climate change dynamics, resource depletion, and ecological destruction from continued and unrelenting human system development. Energy is at the root of my own personal framework of understanding these systems as a layperson. This is one lens of many we can use to explore an incredibly diverse topic together.
www.thegreatsimplification.com
A new podcast format for Mr. Hagens show called "Reality Roundtable". I consider Hagens, Michaux and Berman to have a little of what they themselves term *energy blindness,* but skewed towards the unrealistic pessimistic, but I prefer it to the alternative! First show I've personally seen with Pedro Prieto.
A often referenced pinned topic from the OG #collapse Discord in #fuel-depletion