Five stages of accepting limits to growth
1. the river of denial has many tributaries: peak denial and plausible deniability
Climate denial is one part of refusals to acknowledge ecological overshoot embedded in the American Way of Life (AWOL). Peak denial is nearly universal.
2. pique: scapegoating and blame
anger about symptoms, not root causes
3. bargaining: techno-fixes and the promised land after oil
There are many claims that technological substitution can sustain the unsustainable. "100% renewable" supposedly can power 100% of "current" consumption. Nuclear power is safe, cheap and carbon free (all lies, of course). The government is hiding huge oil deposits that will fuel industry for centuries (never mind the pollution or the geology that refutes this). These and other fantasies make societal cohesion less likely on the downslope as they divert attention and resources needed for mitigation. The 2008 "recession" and more recently, Covid closures, cut energy use more than climate activism.
4. PTSD (President Trump Spread Disease)
The economic consequences of the end of growth are causing severe social problems, including rising levels of mental illness.
5. Earth is abundant and finite
Understanding root causes will not, by itself, solve the symptoms but it might reduce toxic levels of scapegoating and anger. Ideally it could invigorate practical and fractal responses at all levels toward societal resilience as the "polycrises" intensify. These include learning to live within what is possible, relocalizing food production, regenerative agriculture, steady state economies, "degrowth," protecting farmland so people can eat as fossils deplete.
• We are damned if we drill, because of pollution and climate chaos.
• We are damned if we stop, because concentrated finite fossil carbon runs everything, including food systems.
• We are damned as concentrated energy declines, because we are unprepared logistically and psychologically.
Fracking postponed rationing.