NASA Study: Civilization Doomed by Overconsumption, Wealth Inequality (Infographic)

[GliderGuider]

8. Both over-consumption and stratification have a common root cause

The root cause is high levels of available energy flow through the society.

High energy flows enable over-consumption by making resources of all kinds more accessible.

They also force the society into higher levels of stratification, because self-organization is driven by energy flow. Deeper hierarchies make it easier to manage high levels of energy flow, so they tend to appear naturally wherever there is a lot of energy to be managed. This effect underlies the structural difference between a forager tribe (low energy, low levels of resource use, very little hierarchy) and a modern corporation (high energy, high resource usage, high stratification). Think of the rise of the gilded age in America, concurrent with the increasing exploitation of fossil fuels.

So long as a civilization has a high level of energy flow we will not be able to get rid of either collective over-consumption or general inequality. These factors are not the result of some failure of the human socio-cultural mind. They are the natural result when our evolutionary tendency towards growth comes into contact with and high, sustained energy throughput. A positive feedback loop results, one that could be expected to drive us along exactly the path we find ourselves on.

I don't think there is any way off this path, because the system of global civilization has no central decision-making control node. As a result we are collectively at the mercy of our evolved nature and the energy flow. So long as global exergy availability (exergy is another term for "final energy use&quot continues to increase, so will resource depletion and systemic social inequality.

IMHO