Graphic from Post Carbon Institute

Interviewer’s note: I’m adding this new introduction two years and some change after I originally interviewed Richard Heinberg in response to our March 2024 cover feature on the polycrisis. I had been a reader and admirer of his writing on energy, the environment, the climate, and a range of other topics for several years, and this interview was a powerful experience for me chatting with him screen-to-screen on these topics for an hour.

Richard Heinberg died in mid-July of 2026.

Rob Vollmar: Greetings, I am Rob Vollmar, book review and online editor for World Literature Today. The brand-new issue of WLT should be in mailboxes and on newsstands by the time you see this, and it features a special section on writing the polycrisis: “Dispatches from a Calamitous Planet.” That section has essays, poetry, and fiction from the United States, Lebanon, the Philippines, Venezuela, Ghana, and the southern cone of South America, as well as offering a snapshot of how the polycrisis is unfolding globally.

The section is anchored by an essay from Richard Heinberg titled “From Climate Crisis to Polycrisis.” Richard is here with us today to talk about it. He is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of many books, including The End of Growth, Peak Everything, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, and, most recently, a report called Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown, with Asher Miller.

Richard, thank you so much for your time and visiting with us today. For the benefit of our viewers who may not be as familiar with your work, could you tell us about the Post Carbon Institute and the work that you do with them? 

Richard Heinberg: Sure. Post Carbon Institute is a small nonprofit think tank that’s been around since 2003, and as the name suggests, our main work is in researching and communicating about the end of the fossil fuel era—how that’s going, how it’s likely to go, what the implications are likely to be, and how we can get through this as best we can. 

What Is the Polycrisis?

Vollmar: You penned an essay entitled “From Climate Crisis to Polycrisis” that anchors the special section in our March 2024 issue. What is the polycrisis, and what are the components that find confluence in it? 

Heinberg: Well, human society has always had problems, but sometimes the problems tend to sort of gang up on each other. What’s happening right now really doesn’t have much of a precedent in human history because, even though problems sometimes gang up on each other, it’s the sheer scale of the problems that we’re facing today that really makes the situation unique. 

We’re talking about existential-level crises: 

• Global Climate Change: Weather is always changing, and climate changes sometimes gradually, but the scale of climate change occurring now and in the pipeline over the next few decades is kind of off the charts in comparison with anything in history. 
• Resource Depletion: Humans have been depleting resources as long as we’ve used them, but the scale of resource depletion in the modern world is off the charts. Everything from fossil fuels themselves to soil, water that we extract from the ground and use up, minerals—those are mostly nonrenewable resources—and also renewable resources like fish and forests. We’re using them faster than they can regrow. Resource depletion is a serious problem now, but if current trends continue, it’s likely to be a much more serious problem as the century wears on. 
• Toxic Chemicals in the Environment: Again, this goes back in history, but it’s a matter of scale. We’ve introduced tens of thousands of new chemicals as a result of industrial processes into the environment, and in many cases in very large quantities. We’re seeing the impact not only on other species but also on humans themselves. Some of these chemicals are hormone-mimicking chemicals that actually impact human reproduction; male sperm counts have declined by about 50 percent in the last seventy years, and the rate of decline is increasing. Toxics are a much more serious problem than most people realize. 

The Financial Crisis

Heinberg: Then there’s the financial crisis. It erupts from time to time—like in 2008—and everyone gets really nervous, but overall, underneath the surface variations is the fact that we’re building up a bigger and bigger mountain of debt of historically mammoth proportions. This is happening because as the economy grows, people’s expectations of future investment returns and profits also grow, which justifies taking on more and more debt. I’m not just talking about government debt, which many people get very frustrated about, but household debt, corporate debt—all these categories of debt are increasing dramatically. If the economy stops growing for any reason, then suddenly a lot of debt comes due, and there’s the possibility of a cascading debt crisis which would wipe out many trillions of dollars of wealth very quickly. 

Then there is political polarization. Again, it’s nothing entirely new in human history, but it’s happening at a time when we need to solve all these other problems. If you don’t have a functioning political system, how do you deal with a problem like climate change, where everybody has to come together and make some sacrifices and agree on strategies? 

We’re not done yet. There are new technologies coming into play. At the forefront is artificial intelligence, which has the capacity to speed up all of these other trends. Now, there are those who say that AI will be able to help us solve climate change with sophisticated mathematics, identifying the most effective pathways and technological interventions to head off climate change. But AI itself uses massive amounts of energy. In just another two, three, or four years, it’s going to be using more energy than many whole countries. Where is all that energy going to come from? In the immediate phase, it’s going to come mostly from fossil fuels, because that’s what’s supplying 85 percent of current world energy. 

The Weapons Crisis

Heinberg: And that’s just one of the threats of AI. AI is also interacting with another polycrisis threat: the weapons we have been developing over the last eighty years or so that are potentially civilization-ending. 

Obviously, there are nuclear weapons. Sometimes we take them for granted because they’ve been around so long, but governments are developing new ones all the time—including the US government—and new countries are gaining access to nuclear weapons, including North Korea. 

Beyond that, we have AI-driven autonomous weapons that take the human element out of warfare, meaning any sense of compassion or self-limitation is just out the window. Chemical and biological weapons are another concern. AI will help with the development of more effective chemical and especially biological weapons. Everybody knows ChatGPT can string together words to make meaning; well, AI is also very good at stringing together genetic sequences. The letters of the DNA alphabet can be interpreted, reinterpreted, and rearranged very effectively. Nvidia, one of the foremost companies developing AI, is hard at work on a chatbot that instead of using language is using the DNA alphabet. 

Right now with ChatGPT, you can say, “I want an essay on the French Revolution,” and it’ll spit out a comprehensible essay. With a biological chatbot, you might say, “I want an organism that will have these particular characteristics,” and there you go. 

So, I’ve just given you seven of these crises. It’s the confluence of all these threats and the fact that they’re mutually interacting. It’s not as though we can just play whack-a-mole—addressing climate change over here and nuclear weapons over there—and stay on top of these problems. The way we’re trying to solve climate change right now is to replace energy usage with renewable-energy sources like solar and wind, which requires a lot more resource depletion and will produce more toxic chemicals. 

The way we’re trying to solve climate change right now is to replace energy usage with renewable-energy sources like solar and wind, which requires a lot more resource depletion and will produce more toxic chemicals. 

Until we get a handle on the process that’s driving the polycrisis, we’re just going to be trying to deal with individual problems in ways that are completely inadequate, because new problems will keep arising. 

Vollmar: I ran into that interactivity when I was putting together the questions for today. I was particularly concerned taking a look at ammonia fertilizer production and trying to think through, “Well, how does this work without hydrocarbons?” 

I actually used Gemini, which is Google’s AI tool, to ask: “Explain to me how it is that we’re going to make ammonium fertilizer without hydrocarbons.” It spit out a few answers, including an interesting new plant that opened in Finland where they’re using renewable energy and electricity to make hydrogen as the driving agent. 

As I dug down into the particulars of how they make this happen, I realized: Where did the energy come from to build the plant? Where does the energy come from to power this function and that function? It’s kind of like trying to build a pyramid starting from the top and working your way down, because there’s nothing underpinning all of those things. 

Heinberg: When I have conversations with people about so-called renewable technologies, I point out that right now all of that activity is subsidized by fossil fuels. We need fossil fuels to make solar panels; we need fossil fuels to make wind turbines. People say, “Well, you could make them with other forms of energy.” I reply, “Yeah, but who is actually doing that?” It’s one thing to say it’s physically possible, but we all know that there’s an intersection between what is possible and what is profitable. Just because you can use an alternative energy source to make a solar panel doesn’t mean that anyone is going to, or that the product you would make through that process would be inexpensive enough to roll out at the scale and speed that people are talking about for the renewable transition. 

Vollmar: It becomes almost like a tautological argument: “We could get off fossil fuels if we could just have fossil fuels to get off of fossil fuels.” I’ve heard this conversation from a lot of addicts in my life. 

Are Carbon Emissions Declining?

Vollmar: Most people are familiar with and concerned about the climate crisis. Given that we’ve been holding climate conferences and meetings since the early 1990s, how would you characterize our collective response thus far? And most importantly, are we winning? 

Heinberg: Well, there’s an easy answer for that question, and it’s no. It comes from simple observation of the data: Are carbon emissions declining on a global basis? That’s the key question to ask and to answer. So far, the answer to that question is no; carbon emissions are still increasing on an annual basis. 

That’s despite all these meetings, as you mentioned, and also the installation of massive amounts of renewable-energy infrastructure. Last year in 2023, the world installed a record number of solar panels and wind turbines, and yet emissions still increased. How can that be? 

Well, that’s because so far, renewable energy is just adding to the energy of fossil fuels; it’s not actually displacing it. A big part of the conundrum is economic growth. Everybody wants the economy constantly to grow, so we’re using more energy. If you want to get more stuff done—which is what makes the economy grow—then you need more energy to do all those things, and the easy answer to that is just to burn more fossil fuels. 

Meanwhile, the energy transition itself requires more fossil fuels, as you mentioned—building all those solar panels, wind turbines, and all the other stuff we’re going to need. Solar panels and wind turbines produce electricity, and electricity is a very versatile energy carrier, but we only use 20 percent of our energy in the form of electricity currently. The other 80 percent of the energy that we use we get from liquid, gaseous, and solid fossil fuels. 

That 80 percent of energy usage needs to be electrified, but the technologies that we currently have are technologies that are based around burning these fuels. That means shifting out most of our industrial infrastructure. The only way around that is to use electricity from solar and wind to make synthetic fuels—making hydrogen, as you were mentioning earlier, and then maybe combining the hydrogen with carbon taken from the atmosphere to make methanol or some other synthetic fuel. 

It certainly can be done; the chemistry is there. But would it be profitable? It would be very energy-inefficient and would also require building a whole new industry. We couldn’t just repurpose all of our fossil fuel infrastructure—the refineries and so on—to make these synthetic fuels. No, it takes a whole new technological system on the scale of the global fossil fuel industry. 

Imagine having to rebuild our whole fossil fuel energy industry over the next fifteen or twenty years, which is what we’re talking about in order to get to net zero, plus building massive amounts of solar panels and wind turbines. It’s going to take a huge amount of energy, and most of that energy is actually going to produce more carbon emissions in the short term. As we approach the goal of reducing carbon emissions, we’re actually having to produce more carbon emissions to achieve that end result. 

If you lay this out over the course of decades and decades, eventually you get there. If you make the investments in low-carbon technology, by the end of the century, yes, emissions are down. But the process that we’re going through now to try to get there is one that’s actually making the problem worse over the short term. 

Resources

Vollmar: You mentioned the impulse toward electrifying everything, which has become kind of the “drill, baby, drill” of our current milieu. I’ve read some resource analysts like Simon Michaux who say that there is nowhere near the actual mineral wealth necessary to facilitate a transition to a renewable electric system. Then other people say that there is a superabundance of these materials. 

Because I want to believe in the inherent goodness of people, I approach that by saying these different groups of people are all doing a systemic analysis, and the key to any system model is what your start conditions are and what the size of your system is. The differences in their answers aren’t because one group is being intentionally disingenuous, but because they have different ways of describing that system as they set it up. As someone who has studied these issues in-depth, where do you think the truth is here? 

Heinberg: Of course, the temptation is to say it’s somewhere in between, but that’s a facile answer because this is a very complex problem. Simon Michaux has been raked over the coals in recent literature. He’s a mining guy who works for the Geological Survey of Finland, so mining is his forte, and he should know a thing or two about mineral resources. Nevertheless, he has been rebutted very effectively in print by a number of analysts who say, “No, in reality, there’s lots of copper, lithium, neodymium, and all these minerals that we’re going to need for the renewable-energy revolution; we just need to open new mines.” 

I have written a few books on resource depletion, mostly relating to fossil fuels, but spending years on this subject has taught me one thing: you need to understand the resource-quality pyramid if you’re going to understand the future availability of any nonrenewable resource. 

The resource-availability pyramid puts the easy stuff at the top. As you drill down through that pyramid to get the harder stuff, the total extent of the resources increases, but the amount of effort required to get those resources increases exponentially. 

Some surveys say, “Well, we have thousands of years’ worth of coal in the world,” and theoretically that’s right. But if you start looking at where that coal is—a lot of it under seabeds where it would be very costly to extract, in coal seams that are very thin, chemically bonded with very toxic chemicals, or deeply buried—the quantity actually economical to extract is much smaller. 

The same basic principle is going to be true with all of these minerals. Yes, there is potentially enough to build out the first generation, or maybe even the second generation, of wind turbines and solar panels and all the industrial equipment that we’re going to need for an all-renewable energy system. But as time goes on, it’s going to get harder, more expensive, and more energy-intensive to get those minerals. 

The answer being proposed, of course, is the circular economy: just recycling everything. We get some lithium out of the ground and then we just continue recycling it forever and ever. But there are practical limits to recycling; many materials degrade as they’re recycled. One very interesting study by a French researcher looked at the limits to recycling: supposing we get the first generation of all these materials in sufficient quantity to build the systems, how long could we continue to recycle them? How long would industrial civilization last on that basis if we continue at the current scale? His answer was two hundred years. 

That means you and I can go to bed tonight and sleep soundly because we’re not going to be around two hundred years from now. But if we’re thinking about civilization’s longevity, two hundred years is an eyeblink in time. Nobody knows the exact answer to these questions, but what’s important to understand is the basic trends, the trade-offs, the resource pyramid, and the increase in cost, difficulty, and energy input required as minerals deplete.

Nobody knows the exact answer to these questions, but what’s important to understand is the basic trends, the trade-offs, the resource pyramid, and the increase in cost, difficulty, and energy input required as minerals deplete.

Vollmar: You touched on something that I think people miss when talking about renewable energy: all of the infrastructure is not renewable. If you build a solar panel, that product has a life to it. Even if you calculate, “Oh, we have enough resources to build this infrastructure, assuming some kind of fossil fuel subsidy providing the electricity to do that,” that’s not renewable energy itself. You have to do it again in twenty years, and then again in twenty years. 

Heinberg: I’ve read some things that say the infrastructure we’re using for electricity right now has really been around since the 1950s—it’s nearing the end of its lifespan. But the turnover on wind turbines and solar panels is much faster. So we’re talking about building the infrastructure, and then building it again, and then building it again, without even talking about what’s happening to all these pieces of the infrastructure as they’re decommissioned. 

The chemicals involved with solar panels, for instance—first of all, it’s a very dirty object to make, but it’s also a difficult object to decommission because there’s nowhere you can put it that’s not going to cause more harm to the environment that it was created supposedly to save. There are intended consequences and then unintended consequences that come from that. 

Economy

Vollmar: A lot of people may have concerns for the environment in a broad way, but when you drill down into it, what they’re mostly concerned about is the security of their way of life. In 2020 the Congressional Budget Office projected that climate change would, on net, reduce average annual real GDP growth by 1 percent from 2020 to 2050, relative to growth that would have occurred under the climatic conditions that prevailed up to the end of the twentieth century. Do you think that the CBO is pricing in all the impacts of the climate crisis adequately in making an assessment like that? 

Heinberg: No. Economists speak a very narrow language and take a very narrow view of how things really work. To them, it’s all labor and capital; that’s basically all there is in the economy.

I have a little slide I include in my presentations that I grabbed from Investopedia—a picture of the economy with producers and consumers, mediated by dollar signs. To economists, that is the economy. But where does all the stuff come from that enables the economy to work? The energy and the materials come from the Earth and the Sun. Those just don’t factor into the economic equations; they’re taken for granted.

So when the CBO does this kind of econometric analysis, it takes all the things that really matter for granted and just works the numbers. What is climate change going to do to global food production? That’s kind of important—food is what enables human beings to survive. The climatologists and scientists who are looking at this are extremely worried; they see famine, floods, storms, and droughts dramatically impacting world food production. 

In the econometric analysis, that only shows up in terms of the GDP of agriculture—how much profit is being made. The actual food is just taken for granted: “Well, there will be food, it just might be a little more expensive.” But what if there isn’t food? People die. 

That’s just one example. The analysis is fundamentally flawed. What needs to be done is an ecological analysis that takes these things into account: soil, water, food, biodiversity, human health. Then you get a much more realistic estimate of the real cost of climate change—which, of course, is much, much higher.

What needs to be done is an ecological analysis that takes these things into account: soil, water, food, biodiversity, human health.

Existential Risks

Vollmar: Similarly, while people may have a broad concern about the environment, animals, the ocean, or whatever it is, a lot of the time when you really drill down into it, they’re like, “Yes, but how is this going to impact me as a human being?” If we set aside for a minute the deep-ecology argument that other forms of life have a right to exist, what are the existential risks for humans associated with the disappearance of wild nature, both on the land and in the oceans? 

Heinberg: Ecosystems are mutually supportive networks with lots of nodes. You can take out a node here and take out a node there, and the network still has a fair amount of resilience. But beyond a certain point, that resilience declines to the stage where you take out one more node and the whole thing collapses. 

When ecosystems collapse, human beings do not do well. We’ve seen this in instances throughout human history. Other species disappear as a result of ecosystem collapse, too, but we are a species—we are living organisms that require food and oxygen. Where does that oxygen come from? A lot of it comes from oceans and forests. 

Ocean ecosystems are highly imperiled, not just as a result of overfishing, but also toxics, plastics, and other chemicals. The oxygen dissolved in the ocean is declining, the temperature is increasing, and ocean currents are changing. People who study the ocean closely are concerned that, over the course of this century, we could in effect cause the death of oceans as ecosystems. That’s pretty huge. There’s no way humanity does that and goes on unscathed; most living things on Earth would perish as a result. 

On land, we rely on ecosystem services that we don’t pay for because nature is doing it for us. Once again, we just assume—like the economists I was talking about earlier—that that’s going to go on. But if we imperil the ecosystems, those ecosystem services go away, whether it’s the pollination of plants, including human food crops, or the production of oxygen in forests and oceans. It’s absolutely key to the survival of not just a rare hummingbird somewhere but us, our children, and our grandchildren. 

Power

Vollmar: I’m going to pivot just a little bit from that cheery note. In your book Power, you discuss at great length the intimate relationship between the complexity of a civilization and the available power to run it. Could you share just a little bit on that for those who have yet to read the book—about why hydrocarbons have been so fundamental to industrial modernity? 

Heinberg: The emergence of state society—what we often call civilization—occurred 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 years ago as a result of energy surplus in the form of storable grains. Once we had storable grains, there was the possibility of building sedentary societies that stayed in one place, accumulated wealth, and created a full-time division of labor. You had some people who were full-time farmers, others full-time soldiers, inventors, tax collectors, and so on. 

That civilization depends upon an energy surplus. From the beginning of civilization up until a couple of hundred years ago, that energy surplus came from grain agriculture and was applied via muscle power—either human muscles (and most of these societies were slave societies) or animal muscle like horses and oxen. 

Then we get to the last couple of hundred years, we get fossil fuels, and suddenly everything goes crazy. All the graphs go off the charts in terms of economic growth and economic productivity. The human population goes from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion today—a rate of population growth never seen anywhere before in human history. Just about every graph describing any important trend going on in the world is a hockey stick graph where everything has skyrocketed just in the last two hundred years, and especially in the last seventy years, because starting in 1950, petroleum really came on big-time. 

That energy subsidy enabled social complexity—not just more disparity in incomes and different occupations, but also the development of new technologies to use this energy: automobiles, airplanes, computers, the whole works. 

Vollmar: If you look at what agriculture looked like in 1800, 90 percent of the population had to work in agriculture in order to provide enough surplus for 10 percent to be full-time accountants and so on. Today, it takes 1 to 2 percent of the population to produce enough food because of fossil-fueled agriculture—the tractors, combines, and so on. Almost 90 percent of the population has been freed to do other things, and we found jobs for them. The whole modern way of life where you have a job—the very idea of everybody being employed by a company or somebody else—hardly existed in 1800.

Heinberg: Yes, of course employment existed in cities, but again, only 10 percent of people lived that way. Most people were small landholders or slaves working on plantations. That’s all shifted, and it’s all because of fossil fuels. So as fossil fuels go away—which they inevitably will, whether as a result of fighting climate change or simply as a result of the depletion of oil, coal, and natural gas—society is going to change in profound ways. Are we up to the task of redesigning society in a way that is commensurate with the available energy and materials that will also minimize the conflict and suffering that human beings are going to otherwise face as we go through this period of labor change? 

Vollmar: In talking with people specifically about agriculture, even though that number of actual human bodies is now down to 2–3 percent of the population involved in some kind of agrarian activity, I said it’s very interesting to me that in the United States specifically, we keep two pools of labor who are profoundly marginalized in comparison to the rest of the population: incarcerated people and undocumented immigrants. When it’s politically not tenable to use your incarcerated people, then we get more undocumented workers. When the proliferation of undocumented workers becomes politically untenable, here comes the incarcerated population of farmworkers. So my question is, in fifty years, when there will inarguably be less net energy available by any reasonable metric, where do you think that labor is going to come from?

Heinberg: That’s a good question, because it has to be skilled labor. Anybody who actually grows food knows that it takes skill to do it. You can’t just go out and decide to become a farmer and make a profit and produce good crops the first year. First of all, of course, it takes good soil and a stable climate and so on, but you have to understand a lot. You have to be, in effect, a good scientist in order to be a good farmer.

Right now, the average age of an American farmer is well over fifty. The last time I looked at the statistic, it was about fifty-six or fifty-eight. Those people are aging out. Who’s going to be growing our food for us? I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation fifteen or twenty years ago that we would need about fifty million extra farmers in order to guarantee our food security just for this country over the next few decades. Who’s training those farmers? Who’s making it profitable for them to want to become a farmer? A lot of farmers don’t want their kids to be farmers because they know how hard it is, and they figure, “Maybe if I could give my kid a good education, he or she could become an IT developer or something like that and have a much easier life.” So, yeah, that’s a huge problem.

Vollmar: I met a farmer recently and asked him what his cash crop was, and he said, “Debt,” and gave me that look like, “I get asked that question a lot.”

In your essay, you cite political polarization as one of the key obstacles to mounting a cohesive social response to the polycrisis. In Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies, he underscores that progressive social incoherence is a byproduct of the decline in energy availability. Can political polarization and other degradations in our social fabric perhaps be better understood as a component of energy decline? 

Heinberg: That’s one component, but political polarization is a very complex phenomenon. It’s not just a result of declining energy availability; it’s better understood as a decline in personal expectations of the majority of the population. If people feel as though their lot in life is diminishing, they get pretty critical of the people who are running things.

There’s another feed-in to political polarization, which is economic inequality. Take economic inequality and add time, and you get political polarization, because extreme economic inequality makes people frustrated, and they want somebody to blame.

Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist who has studied this problem very thoroughly over the last twenty years or so, has done so through big data. He and his colleagues have gathered statistical data on hundreds of societies over the last several thousand years and looked for patterns in the data. The biggest pattern that leaps out is that societies tend to increase in complexity and then decrease in complexity rapidly—which we call collapse—on a regular basis, and it follows very closely the cycle of increasing economic inequality.

Societies tend to increase in complexity and then decrease in complexity rapidly—which we call collapse—on a regular basis, and it follows very closely the cycle of increasing economic inequality.

Earlier we talked about civilization being due to a storable energy surplus. Well, that tends to result in more economic inequality. Now, it doesn’t have to; there are strategies that some societies use to at least temporarily manage or reduce economic inequality even as surpluses continue to accrue—taxation of wealth, redistribution, government welfare programs, and so on. All of those are strategies that have been used, but they’re bucking the tide. In a capitalist system with an energy surplus, the tendency will be for economic inequality to increase and increase and increase unless these kinds of strategies are applied ever more vigorously.

Of course, the people at the top of the economic pyramid don’t like those strategies—taxation and redistribution—because they feel like, “Hey, I’m getting wealthy, and I deserve this wealth because I’m smart. Somehow I got to the top of the pyramid and I deserve to be here, so I don’t want any government leaders telling me that I have to be taxed at a higher rate.”

The result is a conflict among elites—what Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” As there’s more wealth, more and more people want to get to the top of that economic pyramid, so they’re doing whatever is necessary to invest in getting there, whether it’s investing in new technology or investing in education. In the US, the number of people with law degrees—being a lawyer is a ticket to elite status, right?—has absolutely exploded in the last fifty years. But once you have lots of people who want that elite status, then there’s more and more conflict over a finite supply of elite positions within government, industry, and so on. The result is more conflict among elites, and that feeds into political polarization. It’s not something that shows up in the headlines. I mean, who, other than Peter Turchin, is writing about the number of law degrees as a cause of our political problems in the US? It’s not obvious. You have to study systems in a systemic way in order to uncover these kinds of hidden drivers.

When we look at the US political situation today, which is highly polarized, very dangerous, and extremely precarious, it’s as big a problem in its own way as any of the other things we’ve been talking about. Unless we have political solidarity and social solidarity where we all feel like we’re in this together and we’re willing to make mutual sacrifices in order to get the best possible outcome, we can’t really deal with any of these problems.

Unless we have political solidarity and social solidarity where we all feel like we’re in this together and we’re willing to make mutual sacrifices in order to get the best possible outcome, we can’t really deal with any of these problems.

Vollmar: Viewers, I just want to let you know that we had a review of Peter Turchin’s book End Times in the January issue of WLT, so if you’re interested, go to the website and check that out.

In the conclusion to your essay, you say that the path forward will require a significant sacrifice of wealth, dominance, or comfort, met with a sober assessment of the full array of our actual problems. Do you see signs that governments, as we have formulated them since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, can play a productive role in that process? 

Heinberg: In theory, yes. I think everyone who engages in politics or political theory seriously, who has a systemic understanding of economics and politics, understands that one of the purposes of government is to limit and redistribute power. Power is a good thing, in that without power we can’t do anything. We talk about the power of flight or the power of speech; power is using energy to do things. So we need power, but it’s always possible to have too much of a good thing. We need rainfall, but if you get too much rainfall, you get a flood.

It is the same thing with power. If you have too much power in societies and it gets too concentrated, then things go very bad. Even on a big scale, can humanity have too much power over the natural world? I would argue yes. Climate change, species extinctions, global toxification—these are symptoms of one species, ours, having temporarily too much power, more power than it can use for its own good.

Government theoretically has the role of reining in the overuse of power, whether it’s too much economic inequality, regulating toxic chemicals, or regulating greenhouse gas emissions. A competent government in our situation would be doing all these things on a much greater scale than is currently happening. But because fossil fuels have given us so much power so fast, we’ve been able to increase the scale of human energy usage, the scale of our societies, the size of our population, and the size of our economy so far and so fast that if we were going to avert the polycrisis, we would actually have to change direction. We would have to reduce our reliance on chemicals and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by reducing energy usage.

We have a profit-driven society with a debt overhang, so if we try to make that course correction, it will actually create short-term problems that will seem as serious as climate change and all the rest, and nobody wants to do that. Realistically, I don’t think governments have the power to, because we’ve just gone too far. There’s going to be a correction, but it’s not going to be driven by policy; it’s going to be driven by events essentially out of policymakers’ control.

Does that mean policymakers have no usefulness anymore and can’t influence things at all? Of course they can. The direction of change is going to shift, not as a result of policy, but as a result of a breakdown in natural systems and human systems. How that breakdown is managed still matters a lot. If societies simplify over the course of the next few decades in a chaotic and completely uncontrolled way, things could get very, very bad—global war over what’s left, collapsing ecosystems, massive human mortality and suffering.

It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s still possible to manage this change of direction in a way that minimizes human suffering and the destruction of the natural world, but it will require policymakers to exercise a lot of courage and judgment that so far they’ve been unwilling to bring to the table. I know this is a challenging conclusion to come to, and folks who just want to have hope for the future—hope that we can continue living the way we are now or that things will even be better—hear a talk like this and go running for the exits. But there have to be some adults in the room who see that this is where we’ve come to and where we’re going, and if we’re going to avert the worst, it’s going to take some courage, compassion, realism, and a willingness to face some unpleasant truths.

Vollmar: Thank you so much.

February 2024