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1.4 KiB
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7 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
Figure 1. A Xuban sunset silhouetting powerlines and an oil-fired power-station smokestack. Cuba is still recovering from the fuel and electricity shortages that crippled the economy and food supply in the 1990s. The Cuban experience is emblematic of the current global energy crisis. Photo by Oliver Holmgren.
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lence war, and death) are more vocal than before despite being labeled Malthusian or just "doomer".
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The evidence that global industrial civilization is in the early stages of energy transition as fundamental as the one from renewable resources to fossil fuels is overwhelming. Using the ecological history of past civilizations as a base, I review the evidence about the future in terms of four possible long term scenarios: techno-explosion, techno-stability, energy descent, and collapse. While faith in techno-explosion as the default scenario is now waning, the hope of more environmentally aware citizens and organizations depends on techno-stability, characterized by novel renewable energy sources, while the fears of total collapse of human civilization are continually fed by evidence about climate change and resource depletion, among a range of related emerging crises. Energy descent, where available energy and resulting organizational complexity progressively decline over many generations, is the most ignored of the four possible long-term futures, but I think the
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